The Radical Promise of the American Revolution

On July 4, 1826, Americans woke before dawn. Some squeezed into blue coats that had been folded in trunks for decades and covered what was left of their hair with tricornered hats, long out of fashion. At sunrise, cannons boomed, church bells pealed, and across the nation’s scattered villages and modest cities, aged “heroes of ’76” fired salutes from flintlock muskets, marching down dirt thoroughfares to drum and fife and the cheers of the crowd. Most parades then proceeded to a grove or a town square for a reading of the Declaration of Independence, followed by high-flown speeches honoring this momentous day: the semicentennial, or “Jubilee,” as they called it. Some addresses spun wild visions in which the twenty-four states dotted with family farms and the vast forested territories beyond would one day become a powerful empire. The listeners adjourned to eat barbecue and then headed to the taverns for rounds of toasts—to George Washington, to the flag, to the eagle, to the first half century of American life.

As orators waxed poetic on “the imperishable names of the founders” who had risked execution as traitors to the Crown in order to bequeath the everlasting legacy of freedom, Thomas Jefferson died in his bed in Virginia. Hours later, sitting in a chair at home in Massachusetts, John Adams followed him. It was exactly fifty years after the Declaration they had drafted together was approved, founding the United States of America. Many regarded this strange historical coincidence as a divine message, God’s seal of approval on the American Revolution and a promise of perpetuity for its outcomes. Unmistakably, it was the threshold of a new era, the end of the beginning. The young nation had outlived the men who made it. What was next?

One man in Indiana claimed to know. Robert Owen was a rich industrialist, renowned in this country and in Europe for running philanthropic experiments in a cotton mill he owned in New Lanark, Scotland. As the nation celebrated its Jubilee, he mounted the stage at New Harmony Hall, a former church that he had purchased, along with the twenty thousand acres surrounding it. Intrigued by communal groups like the Shakers and emboldened by his experience applying his social theories to the factory workers he employed, Owen had sailed for the United States to propose a project on a far grander scale. His fame had spread after he addressed the assembled leaders of the federal government the previous year in Washington, DC, pitching a wholesale reorganization of American life that was surprisingly well received. It was pouring rain on the Wabash River that Fourth of July, but a thousand people packed the building, traveling to this rural outpost from all over the country to hear what this slight Welsh gentleman had to say.

While orators in other cities and towns sang the praises of the American founders, Owen focused instead on the limits of their achievement. They had been forced to settle for mere “political independence,” he claimed, hemmed in by the old-world prejudices that still dominated their era. But they could glimpse “a stronger and clearer light at the distance,” he explained, and the founders trusted that their descendants would pick up where they left off, completing the transformation they had only begun. Indeed, a second revolution was required, a new battle for freedom “superior in benefit and importance to the first revolution.” He asked the crowd, “Are you prepared to imitate the example of your ancestors? Are you willing to run the risks they encountered? Are you ready, like them, to meet the prejudices of past times, and determined to overcome them at all hazards, for the benefit of your country and for the emancipation of the human race?” To launch this revolution, Owen presented his Declaration of Mental Independence to supplant the founding document adopted fifty years before that day. Its object was to slay a “Hydra of Evils” enslaving mankind the world over: specifically, the “threefold horrid monster” of private property, religion, and marriage.

From our vantage point, almost two hundred years later, Owen’s social revolution seems destined to fail, his interpretation of the founders as heralds of secular communism laughable at best. Capitalism, evangelical Protestantism, and the nuclear family would ultimately win the day, becoming far more deeply entrenched in American culture during Owen’s lifetime. But from where he stood, the future of the United States was wide open, rolling out like a screen on which marvelous utopian visions could be projected.

European visitors like Owen were astounded by the simple, direct dealings of the people carrying out the experiment that was early America: their free and easy manners, the “extreme equality” across classes, and their universal, near-fanatical engagement in politics as a form of social engineering. They seized every local election or civic debate as a new opportunity to invent the country of the future. Railroads and the telegraph would soon join steamships and canals in the network of new technology connecting the expanding country for trade, the exchange of ideas, the development of new towns, new states, new industries. This restless mobility and ambition turned away from the past, pushing further into the vast and magnificent West. The booming agriculture of the South fed the beginning of the Industrial Revolution in the North, where new systems of integrated manufacturing processed these abundant raw materials for global commerce, auguring the great wealth that would one day drive a great nation.

Viewed in another light, of course, this scene was not so utopian. The workers in these new factories might labor sixteen hours a day, six days a week. Married women were relegated to the status of dependent children, unable to control property, vote, attend college, or sue in a court of law. The land, of course, was far from vacant; it was inhabited by long-established nations battling against extermination at the hands of white settlers. And the economic dynamo driving the young nation to prominence on the world stage was the forced labor of a million and a half people of African descent enslaved in this land of radical freedom, a number that would more than double in the coming decades. The conditions under which they lived were unspeakably brutal, and American law unambiguously doomed their children and their children’s children to the same outrages.

Owen was right: a Hydra of Evils threatened the most profound ideals of the American project, and the recently departed founding generation would not be the ones to slay it. As his overflow audience suggests, many were ready to take up the mantle of a social revolution to right the many wrongs created or left unaddressed by the political revolution of their grandfathers. In the next half a century, hundreds of thousands of Americans pledged themselves to a vision of the nation based on collectivity, equality, and freedom. Before Owen arrived with his plan to make America more radically free, African American activists across the North were organizing to protest slavery and racial inequality, establishing community institutions to support those whose very lives were a form of resistance. As their struggle mounted in the 1820s for emancipation and citizenship, the first major wave of socialism and workingmen’s organizations raised their voices in protest, further revealing American social equality to be a myth. Around 1830, a radical turn in antislavery activism led to the first national social movement to bring together Americans across race, class, and gender, aiming not only to free enslaved people but to rout out tyranny wherever it remained.

This intensifying culture of dissent met a violent backlash from the American mainstream. But even as protesters were mobbed, assaulted, and prosecuted, their printing presses smashed, their lecture halls burned to the ground, even as they were murdered, the field of activism expanded. The country’s first philosophical movement called for the end of all external authority and inherited institutions at this time, feeding an increasing embrace of civil disobedience. Many came out of the churches, leading some to “come out from the world” as a new wave of utopian socialism flowered in communes and a growing labor movement. From the beginning, this tradition of protest took aim at private life just as much as traditional politics; marriage was a lightning-rod issue for socialists, women’s rights activists, and Free Lovers who would liberate women from the bonds of maternity and domestic servitude. But in the midst of debates about the abolition of “wage slavery” and “marriage slavery,” westward expansion triggered a national crisis over the fate of millions literally held captive.

As the founding compromise between the North and the South wore thin, antislavery activism took a militant turn around 1850. White activists began calling for the end of the Union. Black activists renewed their deliberations about a walkout on a national scale, abandoning the United States in search of a more promising land. Blood spilled on city streets, across the prairie, and in the halls of Congress. Genteel reformers embraced violence and treason, speeding a civil war waged not against slavery but against abolitionists. After four years of bloody internecine warfare, activists celebrated the victory of emancipation and an unprecedented opportunity to right the wrongs of the country’s first revolution. With Reconstruction, ideas that had once seemed fringe were now squarely on the national agenda. But as former fanatics turned to politics, they found their values and their movements tested. By the time the nation rang in its one hundredth anniversary in 1876, patriotic fervor could not mask its tailspin into lawless violence. In the following year, the federal government would permit a white supremacist counterrevolution in the South but crack down brutally on aggrieved workers across the North, watershed reinforcements of inequality that threatened to undo the advances of the preceding half century.

Robert Owen’s choice of the Fourth of July to launch his attack on American society, and his revision of the nation’s founding document into a radical manifesto, were common tactics among the agitators of his century. While most Americans saw the Fourth as a day of celebration, activists remembered that it commemorated a protest and kept up that tradition by forcing the nation to reckon with its own ostensible values. Native Americans, industrial workers, women’s rights advocates, Free Lovers, insurgent militias, and many others seized the symbolic richness of Independence Day and the language of the Declaration to raise their own calls for freedom and equality. After all, that initial manifesto was a reminder that the United States of America had only recently been no more than an idea for a radical utopian community—a set of principles and practices that a group of men made up together. Perhaps it could be done again, but better.

Thus, even as they aimed to “disorganize” society at its roots, these radicals saw themselves as the true inheritors of the American project who would keep its ideals alive. Nineteenth-century radicals’ battle for social justice, freedom, and equality was defined by their struggle with the nation and its meaning: They refused to vote, demanded to vote, served in the government, and plotted armed coups to overthrow it. They burned the Constitution, hung the flag upside down, and yet returned to the specific form and language of the founding documents again and again to articulate the new versions of America they hoped to bring about. They spearheaded schemes to leave the country en masse, then signed up for military service, ready to die for it. In relation to the founders, they heeded both Owen’s injunction to “imitate the example of your ancestors” and the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison’s call to “blush for their self-evident injustice, to shun the evil example they set.” They revered Thomas Paine but denounced George Washington as a “man stealer.” Even those whose solutions involved abandoning the United States altogether, aligning with international networks and denouncing the violent chauvinism of national identity, often declared that they acted in the “spirit of ’76.” Despite its galling and destructive hypocrisy, the nation never seemed to exhaust itself as a source of radical promise.

From the book American Radicals: How Nineteenth-Century Protest Shaped the Nation by Holly Jackson. Published by Crown, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC.

What’s Next?  Expanding the radical promise of the American Revolution. By Holly Jackson.

Lapham’s Quarterly , October 10, 2019.

Penguin Random House

In the 1800s, a woman named Fanny Wright tried to start a utopian commune where people could live freely from the confines of slavery; Boston activists tried to fight the Fugitive Slave Law with massive protests against the rendition of escaped slave Anthony Burns; Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton held their convention at Seneca Falls, only to be told women's rights weren't politically viable until slavery was abolished, and even for some time after.

Holly Jackson, associate professor at University of Massachusetts Boston, details in her new book, "American Radicals: How Nineteenth-Century Protest Shaped the Nation," how the social justice movements in the 1800s did more than historians give them credit for.

"These were stories we need now. We needed to understand how central this history was to this moment in American history that really shaped the modern world," she told Boston Public Radio Tuesday. "So I was doing this work, then after the presidential election of 2016, we saw a huge mobilization of Americans, and a lot of Americans who didn't think of themselves as maybe particularly political were really kind of radicalized to that moment.

"All of the beginning of all of those strands of American activism are in the 19th century, and I felt like people interested in these issues should understands themselves as part of a very long tradition and a really formative tradition that didn't just respond to American culture, but made it."

Holly Jackson: The Historical Case For Radicalism.  Boston Public Radio , October  10, 2019.

Holly Jackson is an associate professor of English at the University of Massachusetts, Boston. Her writing on U.S. cultural history has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Boston Globe, as well as a number of scholarly venues. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

Dr. Jackson discussed her latest book, American Radicals: How Nineteenth-Century Protest Shaped the Nation, with the History News Network. American Radicals will be released October 8th.

Why was this a peak moment of protest in American history?

   

American Radicals focuses on the period from around 1820 through the end of Reconstruction in 1877, and I’ve tried to show that social justice movements did not simply respond to the volatile political conditions of this time, but played an important role in shaping them. In the antebellum period, the federal government brokered a string of compromises over slavery, aiming to preserve the union between the sections. A critical mass of ordinary Americans taking active measures in opposition to slavery, and this certainly included enslaved people themselves, helped to push the country to its ultimate reckoning with this issue in the Civil War and also intervened in the period of social re-engineering that followed. This was a golden age for multi-issue activists who wanted to interrogate and overturn not only slavery, but also other longstanding forms of oppression that many Americans considered natural, even divinely ordained, including women’s subordination in marriage, prisons, economic inequality, and so on. There were also two major depressions in this period that catalyzed people to think about critically about capitalism and consider alternatives.

 What were the tactics/methods of the first American protest movements?

 Protest took many forms, ranging from lifestyle choices like veganism and consumer boycotts to strikes and demonstrates, up to attempted coups d’état. Thousands of Americans lived in alternative communities at some point during this period in order to separate their daily lives from a mainstream culture they found objectionable. One subset of abolitionists called the Come-Outers sometimes crashed church services. Free Lovers risked jail time for cohabiting with their partners, or else staged protest weddings. The figures I focus on were particularly invested in the power of the written word to make social change; they published pamphlets and novels and manifestoes, edited radical newspapers and magazines.

 What can we learn from the abolitionists and women’s rights activists? How did they work together successfully? What were the limits?

 These two movements were richly intertwined and mutually sustaining before the Civil War, which is not to say that activists always worked together across issues in perfect harmony. The strain of activism usually associated with William Lloyd Garrison was controversial even within the abolitionist movement, not only for its anti-government stance, but for its advocacy of women’s equality and public leadership. When a separate women’s rights movement emerged, the personnel was largely drawn from the antislavery community. Frederick Douglass was not only present at the Seneca Falls convention, he convinced the assembly to pursue the goal of women’s suffrage even though most of the women present thought it was too radical.

These collaborations were severely tested after the war. Some women’s rights leaders felt sidelined by the push for black male suffrage. Frances Harper and others advocated for what we would now call an intersectional approach, mindful of multiple social hierarchies at once, but Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony turned to racist fear-mongering in their arguments for women’s suffrage.

There are a number of other crucial relationships between the social movements of this period that are not as well known. For example, Stanton credited the utopian socialist Charles Fourier with the dawning of her feminist consciousness. The labor movement and Free Love each overlapped significantly with both antislavery and women’s rights.

What opposition did this era of activists face?

  They were regarded by most of their countrymen as dangerous troublemakers and faced virulent opposition from many directions. Mainstream newspapers went far beyond lampooning their countercultural quirks to actively fomenting violence against them. Antislavery activists were assaulted, even murdered. Mobs set fire to their lecture venues. Laws were passed to curtail their right to free speech, including gag rules in the antebellum period and anti-obscenity legislation later in the century aimed at those circulating information about birth control. The book describes two instances in which American presidents deployed military force to crush civilian protests: the first was in Boston in 1854, where 50,000 people had turned out to demand the release of Anthony Burns, a self-emancipated refugee from Virginia, and the second was in Pennsylvania in 1877, when railway workers carried out a massive strike that spread across the country; soldiers killed around a hundred civilians. Americans have always had an ambivalent relationship to protest, despite our revolutionary origins

What does this era tell us about the discrepancy between the ideals and the reality of the United States?

Even though these activists were plugged into international networks and were deeply critical of nationalism, they framed their social justice work specifically as a struggle for American values. Across movements, they called for a “second revolution” that would complete the first, so that the everyday lives of all Americans might finally reflect the ideals of equality and freedom that had never been realized. The Declaration of Independence was a key text for many who wanted to reclaim its power as a radical manifesto and hold Americans to account for their own professed beliefs. It was quoted and reworked extensively by African American activists like James Forten and David Walker, and later by John Brown, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Free Lovers like Marx Lazarus.

What do you want readers to take away from this book about the lessons for today?

I hope American Radicals makes it clear that social justice protest has been a defining force in American history. As we grapple with the deep roots and long aftermath of colonialism, slavery, capitalist exploitation, it’s important to know that there was always profound opposition to those forces as well. This period saw the rise of modern social justice movements that transformed American society, though their work is far from complete. People who care about these issues today should understand themselves as part of a long tradition.

In 1854, Henry David Thoreau said he was plagued by a “sense of having suffered a vast and indefinite loss,” and he realized “that what I had lost was a country.” Then, as now, Americans were outraged about family separation, sexual assaults on women, an economic 1% exerting outsize control on the government, the devaluation of black lives. Americans have felt this sense of personal grief and outraged patriotism before, and it has fired some of the finest moments in our history.

Holly Jackson on the History Lessons of American Radicals. By Kyla Sommers.  History News Network, October 6, 2019. 

Q&A with Holly Jackson

University of Massachusetts Professor Holly Jackson discussed her book American Radicals, on the people, inspired by the Founding Fathers, who worked to spread freedom and equality in the United States during the 19th century.

C-Span , December 3 , 2019. 

“The radicals in Holly Jackson’s informative book speak not only with truth and passion but with a vision of a different, better America.”

“Capitalism has expanded beyond reckoning, and ongoing inequalities across race, gender, and socioeconomic class are still measurably immiserating America lives,” notes Holly Jackson near the end of her impressive—and impassioned!—study, American Radicals.  She warns that the profound changes in the U.S. since the 19th century often lead people to forget or undervalue the contribution of earlier radicals. For some, “They are history’s losers.”

However, for many others, especially as an ever-growing number of Americans upset by the actions of the current president, the voices of 19th century radicals speak not only with truth and passion but with a vision of a different, better America.

Foremost, these radicals helped reshape the nation’s social order, most notably in ending state-sanctioned racial inequality through a bloody civil war. They championed and—after much struggle—succeeded in securing voting rights for African American men and, a half-century later, all women.

Their campaign for “free love” influenced not only the rise of feminism but the acceptance of divorce, the criminalization of marital rape, and adoption of birth control. Their communitarian beliefs led to not only the establishment of innumerable utopian communities but to manufacturing and retail co-ops as well as changes in American eating habits (e.g., Graham crackers, cornflakes).

Jackson, a history professor at the University of Massachusetts, Boston, brings a well-studied understanding to her new book. Her analysis extends the work she did in her earlier book, American Blood: The Ends of the Family in American Literature, 1850–1900.

The author segments the 19th century into four sections—1817–1840, 1836–1858, 1848–1865, and 1865–1877 – that mark out key phases of social struggle. She traces a series of core issues that that defined the century, including the role of women in society, the “free love” and utopian desire, the fate of African Americans and class struggle fueled by industrialization. More revealing, she shows how the issues evolved as the nation changed and this evolution defined the policies and practices of the many radicals profiled.

Prominent public figures like Thomas Jefferson and Marquis de Lafayette play their parts. The author focuses on such radicals as the abolitionists Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Harriet Tubman, and John Brown; utopians Robert Owen (New Harmony), George Ripley (Brook Farm) and John Humphrey Noyes (Oneida); suffragists Susan B. Anthony, Lucretia Mott, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton; and radical feminists Francis Wright and Victoria Woodhull.

Most importantly, Jackson has dug deep into the historical record to uncover the critical roles played by innumerable radicals whom history has for the most part forgotten. On nearly every page she introduces individual radicals who played an invaluable part in one or more of the ongoing social struggles of the era. American Radicals is an ambitious and invaluable undertaking that makes an original contribution in its appreciation of the roles played by traditionally anonymous individuals in the making of history.

However, like all historical studies, somethings are missing. First, Walt Whitman does not appear. He is American’s great flâneur, a stroller, an urban explorer, a connoisseur of city street life. What Paris was for Charles Baudelaire, Brooklyn and New York—which were two separate cities until 1898—were for Whitman. He invented not only the modern American poetic voice but the postmodern sensual sensibility. As he wrote in “Your Felons on Trial in Courts” in Leaves of Grass:

“Lust and wickedness are acceptable to me,

I walk with delinquents with passionate love.

I feel I am of them—I belong to those convicts and prostitutes

And henceforth I will not deny them—for how can I deny myself.”

Jackson offers an excellent consideration of Francis Wright yet fails to mention that Whitman attended her lectures and, looking back at his youth, he fondly recalled her: “I never felt so glowingly toward any other woman. . . . She possessed herself of me body and soul.”

Equally puzzling, while carefully considering Ezra Heywood, a radical proponent and publicist for social and economic reform, the author overlooks how he became embroiled in a legal controversy surrounding the 1881 publication of Leaves of Grass. Anthony Comstock, the 19th century leading anti-obscenity campaigner, advised Heywood to not publish Leaves of Grass, yet Heywood distributing through the mail two of the objectionable poems, "To a Common Prostitute" and "A Woman Waits for Me." He was arrested, convicted and went to jail to defend free speech.

Second, Jackson doesn’t bring her compelling analysis up to the current era, especially the tumultuous 1960s. The liberator spirit that drove many 19th century radicals was recalled—in word and deed—by many ’60s radicals who promoted peace, love, civil rights and the joys of LDS, marijuana, rock-and-roll and sex.

On January 14, 1967, San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park celebrated the Be-In and 30,000 partygoers showed up. Two months later, on March 26, Easter Sunday, Be-Ins were held in New York and Los Angeles, setting the stage for the “Summer of Love.”

In June, 60,000 cheering fans attended the Monterey Pop Festival that featured Jimi Hendrix, Otis Redding, Jefferson Airplane, the Mama and the Papas, and Big Brother and the Holding Company featuring by Janis Joplin. The “summer of love” culminated two years later at Woodstock (NY) in August 1969 but fizzled out in December at Altamont (CA).

The ’60s radical challenged traditional American values. They expressed the social, cultural, and political dimensions of a deepening struggle that included an increasingly more militant civil-right movement, represented by the Black Panther Party; spreading anti-Vietnam War protests, including growing dissatisfaction among soldiers; a greater expectation of sexual freedom, fostered by the introduction of the birth-control pill; alternative life styles encouraged innumerable communes; an increasingly militant gay rights movements culminated in the 1969 Stonewall riot; and the rise of second-wave feminists, following the right’s blocking the adoption of the ERA and the Roe v. Wade decision (1973), challenged patriarchy. This new radical spirit was forged in the disruption of the 1968 Chicago Democratic convention that led to Richard Nixon’s election.

The generation of the ’60s took up the campaigns initiated by the American radicals of the 19th century. Now as the 21st century takes shape one can ask how the older struggles that forged early modern America will reemerge in our postmodern world?

American Radicals: How Nineteenth-Century Protest Shaped the Nation. Reviewed by David Rosen. New York Journal of Books , October 8 , 2019.

American Radicals establishes the truly riotous nature of nineteenth-century activism, chronicling the central role that radical social movements played in shaping U.S. life, politics, and culture. Holly Jackson’s cast of characters includes everyone from millenarian militants and agrarian anarchists to abolitionist feminists espousing Free Love. Rather than rehearsing nineteenth-century reform as a history of bourgeois abolitionists having tea and organizing anti-slavery bazaars for their friends, Jackson offers electrifying accounts of Boston freedom fighters locking down courthouses and brawling with the police. We learn of preachers concealing guns in crates of Bibles and sending them off to abolitionists battling the expansion of slavery in the Midwest. We glimpse nominally free black communities forming secret mutual aid networks and arming themselves in preparation for a coming confrontation with the state. And we find that antebellum activists were also free lovers who experimented with unconventional and queer relationships while fighting against the institution of marriage and gendered subjugation. Traversing the nineteenth-century history of countless “strikes, raids, rallies, boycotts, secret councils, [and] hidden weapons,” American Radicals is a study of highly organized attempts to bring down a racist, heteropatriarchal settler state—and of winning, for a time.

Jackson illuminates how the creative and performative qualities of nineteenth-century public protest sought to interrupt the status quo. When, in 1854, 50,000 people showed up in Boston to protest the return of fugitive slave Anthony Burns back to slavery, an act authorized by the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, protestors staged an elaborate funeral for democracy: black crepe adorned the street, a huge U.S. flag was hung upside down, and a coffin labeled “Liberty” was hung out of a building while the crowd below shouted “Shame!” at federal troops deployed to transport Burns back to the South. Then, as now, the threatening spectacle of both police and military were marshalled as a “bellicose display” intended to intimidate the massive political—and creative—energy of protestors who dared to question the nation’s daily acts of anti-democratic violence and violation of its own founding documents.

The antebellum United States was a deeply unstable formation, suffused with the symbolic and physical traces of the Revolutionary War and, government officials feared, teetering on the verge of anarchy. Reframing the nineteenth-century United States as a war society, Jackson helps us to see social movements—from abolitionism and labor to feminism and early environmental activism—as a continuation of the Revolutionary War by other means. In other words, the militancy of the American Revolution lived on in the many factions and revolts that fomented among the nation’s multitude.

The United States sought to reaffirm its sovereignty through routine celebrations of its independence from Britain. But a militaristic society always celebrating its freedom from tyranny is a powder keg: it constantly threatened to tip over into rebellion against a standing government that many deemed illegitimate. In this way, when African Americans in Boston dressed up and walked in parades celebrating the abolition of the slave trade, they weren’t participating in a quaint ritual that reaffirmed the U.S. social order: they were reminding the nation of its recent betrayal of its black citizens, who took up arms and joined the fight against the British in the name of freedom but still remained in chains. Their presence in the streets must have registered to onlookers as a haunting, insurgent body, in formation and ready to revolt, to start the nation anew or to jettison it for a completely new form of governance.

Activists across various reform movements continued to return to the country’s founding documents—notably the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence—as well as the events of the Revolutionary War as inspiration in their struggle to dismantle structures of exploitation and oppression. This was not based in some sense of idealism about the nation’s character or potential: for most nineteenth-century radicals, especially those dispossessed, displaced, and held in captivity, the nation was helpful only insofar as it was a commonplace for revolutionary rhetoric. Marxist theorist Fredric Jameson calls the Constitution “one of the most successful counterrevolutionary schemes ever devised,” but notes that, as an ur-fetish, it has often served as a site of social cohesion. American Radicals is, in many ways, a history of what was done with that founding fetish.

Jackson’s story of collective action is told, somewhat paradoxically, through a set of individual biographies. For example, she traces black intellectual and activist Martin Delany’s journey from antebellum militancy to a baffling postwar conservatism. Readers will also learn about the inspiring rise and then tragic downfall of Franny Wright, a European heiress who believed so strongly in the ideals espoused during the American Revolution that she moved to the United States to help bring about the nation’s unfulfilled promise of freedom and liberty for all. A supporter of Free Love, she agitated for the abolition of marriage, became a notorious figure in the press, and founded a utopian settlement on indigenous lands in Nashoba, Illinois, that ultimately reproduced the gravest errors of the nation’s founders.

American Radicals is particularly attentive to the long and storied career of William Lloyd Garrison, the abolitionist leader and staunch radical pacifist who was unrelenting in his hatred of the U.S. government. For Garrison, the United States was an unsalvageable formation. Garrison burned the Constitution before a Boston crowd; he rejoiced when the South seceded from the Union; he, like other members of the Non-Resistance movement, did not vote, pay taxes, or serve in the military. Amid the intensification of anti-black state violence and surveillance in the 1850s, along with the expansion of slavery into the Midwest, Garrison’s political commitments were pushed to the brink: at a speech in Boston after John Brown’s execution, Garrison called out to his fellow “Non-Resistants,” dwindling in number by the 1850s, but then went on to wish success to every slave rebellion in the South. This was an incredible reversal for Garrison, who had preached total pacifism since the 1830s. Garrison ultimately locked arms with abolitionists who advocated the use of force as he became increasingly aware that the United States was never going to voluntary give up its reliance on enslaved labor.

Jackson’s book highlights the degree to which nineteenth-century social movements were deeply interconnected, drawing inspiration from one another and often sharing members, even meeting space. Spanning from the beginning of organized abolition in the 1830s to the end of Reconstruction in the 1870s, American Radicals explores not just coalitional successes, but also the critical moments when alliances broke down. For example, Jackson details the splintering between anti-racism and suffrage after the war, when white suffragists sought to mainstream their struggle by disconnecting it from racial equality. At the 1869 Equal Rights Association meeting in New York, Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton showed up to face down Frederick Douglass, who had been a longstanding defender of suffrage but was critical of members of the movement who had turned their back on black Americans. When Douglass stood up to deliver his remarks at the meeting, Anthony jumped to her feet and charged down the aisle toward Douglass. Douglass, in turn, raised his hand while declaring, “No, no Susan.” Susan sat down.

Jackson’s account of the 1850s is especially energetic. The decade witnessed an intensification of anti-abolitionist and anti-black violence, growing sectionalist discord, the territorial expansion of slavery, and the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act. The shift to direct action and use of force among abolitionists in the 1850s shines through in Jackson’s meticulous, play-by-play account of John Brown’s plot to capture the national armory in Harpers Ferry, Virginia, and thus (he hoped) begin an insurrection that would end slavery and topple the U.S. government. Jackson’s account of the raid on Harpers Ferry as a highly orchestrated but also deeply collective action, involving many networks of black abolitionists, allows her to subsequently reconceptualize the beginning of the Civil War as one of Confederate insurgency. In the aftermath of the state’s violent suppression of the rebellion, Confederate insurgents captured the arsenal at Harpers Ferry for themselves. This is a helpful reminder that well before the Civil War was officially declared, violent, extralegal battles were being waged directly between abolitionists and white supremacists. In other words, by the time the Civil War was declared, it had already been underway for years.

American Radicals is perhaps most groundbreaking for how it illuminates the place of sexual freedom within the history of nineteenth-century reform. Sex radicalism, experiments in communal living, and free love were prominent within the broader terrain of anti-slavery, labor, anarchist, and feminist activism in the nineteenth century. Yet histories of abolition have long sanitized the movement, overlooking the extent to which anti-slavery activists were often also involved with movements to abolish marriage and dismantle heteropatriarchy. Indeed, abolitionists and other reformists were often discredited in the press for their fanaticism and for their reputation as “queers.”

Sex scandals plagued abolitionists such as Fanny Wright and Henry Ward Beecher. Many were committed to what was then called Free Love (disconnected in time though not in spirit from the Free Love movement of the 1960s): they denounced their marriage vows, had affairs, were polyamorous. Jackson takes political and erotic desire—and their intersection—seriously, in a way that has rarely been the case for scholars of abolition. As a result, American Radicals liberates abolitionist history from the stuffy confines of Civil War historiography, a tradition that has long leaned toward nationalism and sexual normativity. So doing, Jackson not only offers a compelling revision of abolitionist history, but offers a long-hidden genealogy for today’s queer and trans abolitionists.

Jackson notes that many reformers cross-dressed or were ostentatious in their style: they wore bloomers or dashikis, full beards, and even flowers in their hair. Describing what she dubs “reform weirdos,” Jackson draws out the countercultural dimensions of nineteenth-century reform and its clear connections to more recent iterations of U.S. counterculture, perhaps most obviously the blending of the anti–Vietnam War and hippie movements. She reminds us that in memorializing reform history and venerating individual heroes, the “weirder” elements of nineteenth-century reform have been “edited out.”

At the same time, Jackson’s account of antebellum bohemianism drives home how a movement can simultaneously be an activist vanguard and contain within itself the ugliest of mainstream bigotry. Jackson’s exploration of experiments in communal and intentional living helps us to recognize such utopias as white utopias. In addition to reproducing bourgeois social arrangements and entertainments, they often reproduced divisions of labor that were patriarchal and racist. Jackson does not shy away from the racist underbelly of nineteenth-century communes, offering a frank account, for example, of how, when Fanny Wright left Nashoba, she put a cruel and abusive overseer-type in charge. He whipped black residents, coerced them into plantation labor, and fueled a culture of sexual terror. Here, the transformation of an idyllic agricultural paradise into a racial dystopia is a reminder of the disingenuity with which some communal experiments sought to fulfill and extend the American experiment. The sadism of Wright’s inheritor also reveals the continuity between the (white) commune and the plantation, as a space that gave free reign to white libertinism, sadism, and the exploitation of black flesh.

In Jackson’s account, Free Love at times also feels both really white and really repressed. Undergirded by eccentric theories of self-denial and bodily control, we see that nineteenth-century reform was also animated by (settler) fantasies of mastery and by anxieties about excess, contamination, and miscegenation. In these moments, Free Love’s connection to an emerging regime of eugenics become clear. What is less clear from Jackson’s work is how activists of color themselves pursued their utopian visions in ways that were inadequately documented by institutional archives. What, in other words, is the history of the black commune? Of black—and Native—free love, gendered experimentation, and sex radicalism in the nineteenth century? That book has yet to be written.

So what happened to all of this energy and organizing around radical social causes? How was the end result a Victorian U.S. society remembered, not altogether incorrectly, for its conformism? Jackson offers a highly original account of postwar Reconstruction as a strategy aimed at conscripting the activist energy and anarchic spirit of the antebellum period toward rebuilding the state. In this account, Reconstruction’s failure is already written on the wall by as early as 1866, when former free lovers, labor organizers, and abolitionists became officers in and representatives of the reunited state: “Men formerly involved with socialist communes and treasonous plots were now leaders of the federal project that would shape the American future—proof of their vindication but also their containment.”

Across the board, this was a moment when former abolitionists and reformists saw an opportunity to make strategic and practical gains at the federal level. But in the name of visibility, recognition, and concrete political gains, reformers jettisoned the coalitional politics, intersectionality, and radical imagination that had once infused the movement. A handful of figures, including Wendell Phillips, critiqued former movement leaders for selling out, while figures such as Delany decided to play what they thought of as the “long game”—in Delany’s case, ultimately becoming such an accommodationist that he supported former Confederates and segregationists for office. Even Garrison, a “hardcore Non-Resistant,” “now felt confident handing his life’s work over to the state, going so far as to declare that ‘the American army was now the American antislavery society.’”

When Jackson offers vivid descriptions of roundups and executions in the wake of racial rebellion; of draconian ID laws meant to hobble African Americans; of the raiding of queer salons and Free Love boarding houses; of national gaslighting campaigns and the emboldening of white supremacists from a white supremacist White House, it’s hard not to see connections to the suppression of U.S. protest—and social life—in the twenty-first century. As it turns out, since its founding the nation has trafficked in a language of plurality and diversity while policing and criminalizing actual acts of sexual, gendered, and racial freedom because of their insurgent potential.

Though deeply rooted in the historical record, Jackson’s book also helps illuminate the terrors of our own moment as ones related to transition rather than apocalypse. (It’s a common error: Walter Benjamin describes historical moments such as these as ones in which “the dreaming collective” mistakes “the decline of an economic era” for the “end of the world.”) To collapse a world-historical transitional phase of capitalism with the end of the world itself would indeed be a mistake. But it would also be a missed opportunity. Or as Jackson writes, “One upside to the failure of the world is that other worlds become imaginable.” In some ways, Jackson’s is a history that asks activists to persist in the face of likely failure, and even imminent doom. She reminds us that some experiments in abolition were successful precisely because they failed: the failure of Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry was a lightning rod that ignited the start of the Civil War.

In this way, American Radicals stands as a surprisingly non-instrumental history of U.S. social movements. It asks us to pay attention to political experiments whose effects can’t objectively be measured and to remember that all liberal reform now ensconced in U.S. law began as radical demands. It advocates for a slower and more thoughtful relationship to the history of radicalism. At the same time, American Radicals feels so electrifying and alive, so textured and so real, it is a book that asks to be used. A deep dive into the archives of U.S. radicalism, it doubles as a tool to be mobilized by radical actors, collectives, and dreamers today. Against the grain of our apocalyptic-feeling present, American Radicals asks us not to despair, but to organize.

The Radical Lives of Abolitionists. By Britt Rusert. Boston Review , January 20, 2020.