Romantic Reformers and the Antislavery Struggle in the Civil War Era

Romantic Reformers is an intellectual history of the American antislavery movement in the 1850s and early 1860s.

Ethan J. Kytle (Author)

9781107426986, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 10 March 2016

314 pages, 10 b/w illus.
23 x 15.5 x 2 cm, 0.46 kg

'For the lay student of the American history, abolitionism begins with the tepid gradualism of the founding generation, is followed by the emigrationism of the American Colonization Society, and culminates in either the radical, though effectively pacifist immediatism of William Lloyd Garrison or the violence of John Brown. Ethan J. Kytle lends nuance to this narrative with his exploration of the ideological background and the moral impetus of the generation of abolitionist who came of age in the 1840s and 1850s and drew on romantic ideals … In this regard, Kytle adds significantly to our understanding of American abolitionism on the eve of the Civil War.' Jason Stacy, The Journal of Southern History

On the cusp of the American Civil War, a new generation of reformers, including Theodore Parker, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Martin Robison Delany and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, took the lead in the antislavery struggle. Frustrated by political defeats, a more aggressive Slave Power, and the inability of early abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison to rid the nation of slavery, the New Romantics crafted fresh, often more combative, approaches to the peculiar institution. Contrary to what many scholars have argued, however, they did not reject Romantic reform in the process. Instead, the New Romantics roamed widely through Romantic modes of thought, embracing not only the immediatism and perfectionism pioneered by Garrisonians but also new motifs and doctrines, including sentimentalism, self-culture, martial heroism, Romantic racialism, and Manifest Destiny. This book tells the story of how antebellum America's most important intellectual current, Romanticism, shaped the coming and course of the nation's bloodiest - and most revolutionary - conflict.

Introduction
1. The transcendental politics of Theodore Parker
2. Frederick Douglass, perfectionist self-help, and a constitution for the ages
3. Harriet Beecher Stowe and the divided heart of Uncle Tom's Cabin
4. African dreams, American realities: Martin Robison Delany and the emigration question
5. Thomas Wentworth Higginson's war on slavery
Conclusion: Emancipation Day, 1863
Epilogue: the reconstruction of Romantic reform.

Subject Areas: History of ideas [JFCX], American Civil War [HBWJ], History of the Americas [HBJK]