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.
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.
