W. Caleb McDaniel

The Fourth and the First: Abolitionist Holidays, Respectability, and Radical Interracial Reform

Copyright

His Brothers' Keeper: John Brown, Moral Stewardship and Interracial Abolitionism

Recent biographies of abolitionist John Brown emphasise his uniqueness and cast him as an anomalous figure in the anti-slavery movement. This article, however, makes the case for Browns representativeness by connecting his career to his formative years in north-eastern Ohio, a geographical and cultural context that shaped Browns lifelong image of himself as an adviser and manager of wilderness communities. That self-image made Brown similar to white ‘moral stewards’ in many reform movements. Even Browns interracial relationships, though difficult to interpret because of sparse documentary evidence, were shaped partly by the culture of moral stewardship in which Browns career began.

John Brown, Quietist

In common usage, quietism is often conflated with passivity, and pacifism is often equated with quietism. As a result, pacifism has often been confused with passivity. In the antebellum United States, John Brown and other militant abolitionists who endorsed the use of violent antislavery tactics criticized nonviolent reformers like William Lloyd Garrison as men of words instead of men of action. Garrison and his allies rejected the equation of their pacifism with quietism, but the charge that Garrisonian abolitionists were more passive than Brown still survives. In fact, the most recent scholarship on John Brown has tended to reinforce Browns own division of the movement into active reformers like himself and less radical pacifists like Garrison. In this article, McDaniel challenges this polarized view of the abolitionist movement, which is partly the product of the common polarization of quietism and activism. He shows that both Garrison and Brown were complex icons, neither of whom can be easily categorized as a quietist or activist. A careful look at the antislavery movement suggests, therefore, that pacifism and quietism are not synonymous. Moreover, a careful look at Brown suggests that quietism and activism are not antonyms. On some definitions of quietism, McDaniel argues, even a violent activist like Brown can exhibit quietistic aspects. This article therefore challenges, as well, the common connotation of quietism as inaction.

The Case of John L. Brown: Sex, Slavery, and the Trials of a Transatlantic Abolitionist Campaign

Abstract Nineteenth-century abolitionists viewed their transatlantic activism as a simple strategy in which the circulation of facts about slavery in Great Britain could place effective pressure on slaveholders in the United States. But the 1844 case of John L. Brown, a South Carolina man sentenced to death for helping a runaway slave to escape, reveals that transatlantic abolitionist campaigns could still be hampered by lag times in communication, by the difficulty of confirming reports from the South, and, most of all, by damaging rumors about interracial sex spread by anti-abolitionist opponents. This article uses the Brown case, which prompted important changes in the strategies of proslavery southerners, to suggest the importance of studying not only those transatlantic abolitionist campaigns that succeeded but also those that produced outcomes other than those intended by abolitionists themselves.

Saltwater anti-slavery: American abolitionists on the Atlantic Ocean in the Age of Steam

Abstract Despite the explosion of interdisciplinary interest in the Atlantic world, the Atlantic Ocean itself is often quickly passed over in studies of transatlantic abolitionism. However, this essay briefly considers what we might learn about abolitionists from a perspective that treats the ocean as a “place” in its own right. American abolitionists in the mid-nineteenth century made numerous Atlantic crossings, and the crossings themselves – often aboard transatlantic steamships – offered significant and unique opportunities for abolitionist activism and self-fashioning. The architecture of the transatlantic passenger ship created a particular set of opportunities and constraints for political activism, while the experience of being on the ocean afforded abolitionist travelers unique opportunities for personal reflections on their political ideals and their self-transformation. By focusing on “saltwater anti-slavery” – defined here as the experiences of nineteenth-century American abolitionists at sea – this essay thus draws attention to the general differences that place made both to abolitionist activism and identity. It also suggests the value of treating the ocean and the transoceanic passenger ship as scenes of historical action and experience, not simply as places always en route or adjacent to settings on land.