Product Description

At a time when slavery was spreading and the country was steeped in racism, two white men and two black men overcame social barriers and mistrust to form a unique alliance that sought nothing less than the end of all evil. Drawing on the largest extant bi-racial correspondence in the Civil War era, John Stauffer braids together these men's struggles to reconcile ideals of justice with the reality of slavery and oppression. Who could imagine that Gerrit Smith, one of the richest men in the country, would give away his wealth to the poor and ally himself with Frederick Douglass, an ex-slave? And why would James McCune Smith, the most educated black man in the country, link arms with John Brown, a bankrupt entrepreneur, along with the others? Distinguished by their interracial bonds, they shared a millennialist vision of a new world where everyone was free and equal.

As the nation headed toward armed conflict, these men waged their own war by establishing model interracial communities, forming a new political party, and embracing violence. Their revolutionary ethos bridged the divide between the sacred and the profane, black and white, masculine and feminine, and civilization and savagery that had long girded western culture. In so doing, it embraced a malleable and "black-hearted" self that was capable of violent revolt against a slaveholding nation, in order to usher in a kingdom of God on earth. In tracing the rise and fall of their prophetic vision and alliance, Stauffer reveals how radical reform helped propel the nation toward war even as it strove to vanquish slavery and preserve the peace.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #395196 in Books
• Published on: 2004-03-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 384 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Two of the four "passionate outsiders" (which would have been a better title) presented here were black: Frederick Douglass and doctor-scholar James McCune Smith. Two were white: John Brown and philanthropist-reformer Gerrit Smith. Brought together at the inaugural convention of Radical Abolitionists in June of 1855, they formed an interracial alliance of a kind that would not be seen again until the civil rights movement. Harvard history professor Stauffer offers an account of these four lives joined for a historical moment by "their vision of a sacred, sin-free, and pluralist society, as well as by their willingness to use violence to effect it." Stauffer shows how the four worked together on temperance and feminist issues, party building and other political work along with their antislavery activities, exploring the practical and ideological glue that held them together. A splendidly illustrated excursion into the American fascination with daguerreotype shows the four using that form to further their public image, an image the 1859 raid on Harper's Ferry and its federal arsenal destroyed, along with all their careful bridge-building. Brown's Harper's Ferry raid was discussed beforehand by all the men, but the actual act dimmed the revolutionary fervor of all who remained (Brown was executed) and probably made for the first, albeit unofficial, casualties of the Civil War. While the author's plain style doesn't include much imagistic amplification of events, this book offers an intense look at the mechanics of freedom. (Feb. 7)Forecast: The Unites States' violent internal conflicts over its values, via raids such as Brown's, can probably be better imagined now than at any time over the past 50 years at least. This book will have its main audience via campus libraries and syllabi, but anyone thinking historically about the U.S. road to fuller civil liberty will find it fascinating.

Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
Black abolitionists Frederick Douglass and James McCune Smith and white abolitionists John Brown and Gerrit Smith proclaimed that America would realize equality and freedom when white Americans acquired a "spiritual heart that was a black heart that shared a humanity with all people and lacked the airs of superiority of a white heart." Historian Stauffer (Harvard Univ.) examines the lives of these four radical abolitionists, who linked their personal faith and Bible politics to their public behavior and forged strong bonds of friendship based on racial equality and interracial identities, envisioning an America free of racial, gender, and class distinctions. More than an engaging history of antislavery, this volume, with its abundant use of primary sources, restores James McCune Smith and Gerrit Smith to their historical positions as preeminent radical abolitionists and pioneer fighters against racism. Highly recommended for academic and public libraries. Charles L. Lumpkins, Pennsylvania State Univ., State College
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Review
More than an engaging history of antislavery, this volume, with its abundant use of primary sources, restores James McCune Smith and Gerrit Smith to their historical positions as preeminent radical abolitionists and pioneer fighters against racism. Highly recommended for academic and public libraries.
--Charles L. Lumpkins (Library Journal 20011115)

Stauffer examines the small group of friends and colleagues who gave the abolitionist movement its focus and voice...Stauffer charts their collective efforts to convert their compatriots to the abolitionist cause, which led, he writes, to both successes and failures: the effort to emancipate slaves led eventually to war, he observes, but also in a 'century of horrible racism and racial oppression following the war [that] stemmed in part from the savage violence that brought slavery to an end'...A welcome addition to the historical literature. (Kirkus Reviews 20011112)

Stauffer offers an account of these four lives joined for a historical moment by 'their vision of a sacred, sin-free, and pluralist society, as well as by their willingness to use violence to effect it.' Stauffer shows how the four worked together on temperance and feminist issues, party building, and other political work along with their antislavery activities, exploring the practical and ideological glue that held them together. A splendidly illustrated excursion into the American fascination with daguerreotype shows the four using that form to further their public image...[Black Hearts of Men] offers an intense look at the mechanics of freedom. (Publishers Weekly 20020324)

The Black Hearts of Men is a story of politics, religion, sin, guilt, passion, murder and expiation. It begins in innocence and good intentions and ends in bloodshed and madness...Stauffer knows what he has with this remarkable story. He deftly outlines the thinking of his subjects, and is especially good at showing the links between their religious beliefs and their politics.
--Barry Gewen (New York Times Book Review 20021001)

Stauffer intertwines the antislavery activities of Frederick Douglas, James McCune Smith, John Brown, and Gerrit Smith. These four men...were deeply religious reformers who first sought to utilize peaceful means to end slavery and promote racial integration in antebellum America. Failing to achieve these objectives, they adopted a militant position by organizing the Radical Abolition Party endorsing violence, justifying their actions in the name of righteousness...The book expands our knowledge of the changing nature of antislavery and antebellum reform as the nation approached the Civil War.
--L. B. Gimelli (Choice )

The Black Hearts of Men is a richly interdisciplinary study, examining portraiture, literature, religion, intellectual biography, and the wider social and cultural context provided by antebellum America…Many avenues for further scholarship are suggested by this discussion…Stauffer does capture the potential for revolutionary change in the antebellum United States embodied in the radical abolitionists, and culminating in the state violence of the civil war. The work provides useful intellectual/political biographies of the key actors for the period of study, suggesting that their methods, motivations, and self-image were far from simple.
--Fionnghuala Sweeney (History )

Customer Reviews

A Review from a religious biographer of John Brown
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?

Collective Biography at its Best
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.

A BRILLIANT WORK
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.