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The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race

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This collective biography of abolitionists Frederick Douglass, James McCune Smith, Gerrit Smith, and John Brown presents an elegant portrait of the varieties of antislavery sentiment in the United States prior to the Civil War. The four men, two black and two white, formed a de facto alliance--although they would not have recognized it as such--to end slavery and were willing to use violence to do so. In a scintillating narrative that provides both enjoyable reading and penetrating analysis, John Stauffer links the four together as opponents of slavery seeking to overcome the "black hearts of men" but also partaking of the "black hearts of murder."

Organized into topics, rather than chronologically, Stauffer pursues the "literary turn" to analyze the four abolitionists, their writings, and their changes over time. His chapters relate to how these individuals perceived images of race, religion, economics, politics, identity, and women. At some level the most interesting figure presented in this book, perhaps because I knew the least about him, was Gerrit Smith. Although virtually every history of abolitionism mentions him, Stauffer goes deeper to explain Smith's patrician background, his adoption of antislavery, and his vigorous campaign to end it that sometimes resulted in violence. He notes how Smith attempted to found a multiracial community in New York state, an endeavor clearly tied to the utopian experiments of the era. He participated in an 1851 effort to rescue slaves and supported John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry. Shocked by the outcome of that raid, however, Smith then adopted white supremacism.

One of the central tenets of this book, and it is boldly stated, is that radical abolititionism led to the transformation of race as a concept in American history. This is an intriguing idea, but Stauffer does not pursue it with the diligence that might have been expected from an idea raised in the book's subtitle. What he does, again, is use Gerrit Smith's career as the bellwether for transformation. This includes a fascinating analysis of Smith's 1851 short story, "The Ruinous Visit to Monkeyville," in which Stauffer finds that Smith was somewhat ambivalent about the status of African Americans. This perspective fits well with another conception--this one of considerable durability--that such abolititionists as William Lloyd Garrison were not committed to equal rights for freed slaves. The abolitionists' racial paternalism was palpable, according to Stauffer. Some historians have sought to overturn this conception as not representative of the abolitionist cause, but clearly Stauffer still accepts the older idea.

Most interesting--and certainly worth serious but skeptical consideration--is Stauffer's assertion that the failure of abolitionists "to emphasize with blacks after Harper's Ferry foreshadowed the North's abandonment of freedman and women after Reconstruction" (p. 281). He bases this conclusion on his reading of Gerrit Smith, but there is a tenuous relationship at best and the author fails to make a convincing argument for this position. I find it a captivating idea, for it would explain much about the retreat from Reconstruction; I only wish the evidence supporting it were more thoroughly presented.

"The Black Hearts of Men" is a compelling book, elegantly written and boldly argued. It is appropriate to question some of the author's conceptions, but it is a very worthwhile book that requires serious consideration.

The Black Hearts of Men is a well-written and thoughtful study of four closely-associated anti-slavery figures. John Stauffer is an excellent writer, and he should be credited for taking a fair approach to Brown, free of the usual bias and thinly-veiled racial-political scorn that motivates so many white male writers on the subject.

Stauffer must also be credited for overcoming the difficulties of reading Gerrit Smith's (one of the four figures in the study) handwriting. He has also brought four men--two black and two white--together in an engaging study, something apropos of this age of diversity awareness, and something long overdue from the academy. The author introduces and reintroduces Frederick Douglass, James McCune Smith, Gerrit Smith, and John Brown in the context of partnered (or at least overlapping) struggle. He seeks to flesh out various aspects of their worldviews and interests, including their self-presentation (via daugerreotypes, a new photographic technology in the mid-19th century), their sympathy for women's and native rights, and other aspects.

Yet Stauffer's study is deeply flawed insofar as he attempts to yoke the four men in a similar style of religious belief---particularly insofar as John Brown is concerned. In fact, Stauffer's analysis of Brown as a religious figure is thin, generalized, and largely self-serving in its speculation.

In essence, Stauffer contends that John Brown, like his three friends, moved away from conventional religion. The author would have us believe that Brown repudiated his Puritan theology for some Perfectionist form of millennnialism. The problem with this thesis is that its author has ignored millennialism in its orthodox forms in Puritanism, and the fact that Brown was immersed in millennial belief from his childhood. The issue is not millennialism, as Stauffer would suggest, but the type of millennial viewpoint that Brown had. In fact, Brown's millennialism was Puritan and orthodox. Clever terms like "sacred self-sovereignty" notwithstanding, the author's soup is very watery and highly problematic. Unlike Gerrit Smith, John Brown in fact remained firmly based in his Puritan Calvinist theology, as his associates (like T. W. Higginson) recognized, even until the last.

There are other dangerous speculations that Stauffer employs to extend the religious portrait of Brown---sort of like painting with a broad brush, too broad to do justice to Brown's religious life. Certainly, Stauffer needs to look more closely at his sources, which he sometimes fudges on to make a point. He clearly does this in his strong suggestion that Brown was involved in a series of seances in Kansas in late 1857. If he had done his work more carefully, Stauffer would have seen that Brown was not at those occult practices. And if he understood Brown's religious life, he would not even have tried to put him there in the first place.

The Black Hearts of Men is welcomed as a study, much as thirsty man may receive a glass of water with gratitude. We need more works like this, and less like the typically biased narratives that have come from academia about John Brown. Yet this glass is only half full--or is that half-empty?

John Stuaffer has one of the finest minds and finest prose styles of any contemporary historian. This book is both brilliant and a wonderful read. It won the prestigious Frederick Douglass Prize "for the year's best non-fiction book on slavery, resistance and/or abolition, the most generous history prize in the field, and the most respected and coveted of the major awards for the study of the black experience" ... That fact alone should answer any comments of the book being deeply flawed by any less respected historian with his own religious ax to grind about John Brown. No one who buys and reads this book will be disappointed.