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Antislavery Violence: Sectional, Racial, and Cultural Conflict in Antebellum America, edited byjohn R. McKivigan and Stanley Harrold. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999. ix, 322 pp. $30.00 cloth.
THIS USEFUL ANTHOLOGY ON THE USE AND JUSTIFICATION of violence by abolitionists challenges the conventional historiographical narrative of nonviolent abolitionists converting to the deployment of violent means to end slavery in the 1850s. The editors, John R. McKivigan and Stanley Harrold, who are authors of previous books on the abolition movement, argue that abolitionists' acceptance of violence predated the conflict-ridden decade before the Civil War and crossed gender, racial, and regional lines in antebellum America. Their introduction situates the essays in abolitionist historiography and contains a brief look at the endemic nature of violence in American history and culture. They also build on Merton Dillon's insight that slaves and abolitionists were "allies" for freedom by including slave rebels in an anthology on antislavery violence, and they adopt Eugene Genovese's taxonomy of slave rebellions in the post-Haitian Revolution era as modern revolutionary struggles for freedom. Given the nature of their subject, the editors should have also included in their introductory essay a discussion on the legitimacy of revolutionary violence by such famous thinkers as Fanon and Lenin. Instead they adopt a neutral pose, despite their clear sympathy for their subjects, claiming that they neither endorse nor condemn the violent actions of slave rebels and abolitionists.
The book is divided into two sections on black liberators and white abolitionists so that, with a couple of exceptions, essays on Northern free blacks and black abolitionists appear with those on slave rebels. The essays, which are written by well-known historians of slavery and abolition such as Douglas R. Egerton and James...