Volume 12, Number 4 · February 27, 1969
White Racism and Black "Emancipation"
By C. Vann Woodward
Means and Ends in American Abolitionism: Garrison and His Critics on Strategy and Tactics, 1834-1850
by Eileen S. Kraditor
Pantheon, 296 pp., $7.95
The Frontier Against Slavery: Western Anti-Negro Prejudice and the Slavery Extension Controversy
by Eugene H. Berwanger
Illinois, 176 pp., $5.95
Powder Keg: Northern Opposition to the Antislavery Movement, 1831-1840
by Lorman Ratner
Basic Books, 172 pp., $6.00
Free But Not Equal: The Midwest and the Negro During the Civil War
by V. Jacque Voegeli
Chicago, 215 pp., $5.95
Black Scare: The Racist Response to Emancipation and Reconstruction
by Forrest G. Wood
California, 219 pp., $6.00
Yankee Stepfather: General O. O. Howard and the Freedmen
by William S. McFeely
Yale, 351 pp., $10.00
From the opposite ends of American history has come impressive evidence of white racism, of both its antiquity and its intensity. Winthrop D. Jordan in White Over Black (1968) unearthed its origins in Elizabethan England and sixteenth-century Europe and traced its growth as the functional rationale of white supremacy and American identity down to 1812. The Kerner Report of the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (1968) spelled out the disastrous consequences in the violence and riots of contemporary America. But what of the period between? Was there not, as legend has it, an interlude of virtue in the mid-nineteenth century when white Americans, inspired by the antislavery crusade, put aside their racism, rededicated themselves to their ideals of equality, and waged a heroic war for freedom and a temporarily successful campaign for racial equality? Or was the crusade itself corrupted and frustrated by a sickness endemic among the crusaders?
Review, 5703 words
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