Puritan Spirits in the Abolitionist Imagination by Kenyon Gradert, and: Selling Antislavery: Abolition and Mass Media in Antebellum Culture by Teresa A. Goddu (review)

Abstract

Helwig’s analysis of cross-racial solidarity focuses in particular on passages such as the reaction to the Fugitive Slave Act in Lippard’s last novella, Eleanor (1854): “Black Slavery is the very embodiment of all the evils of White Slavery, multiplied ad infinitum; the great Sum of all the villainies and tyrannies that ever existed beneath the Sun” (98-99). While Helwig integrates both antebellum and contemporary critiques of the reality of cross-racial solidarity in his study (84, 98, 153), his book falls on the optimistic side in its assessment of the extent of this solidarity. Helwig frames his monograph, somewhat infelicitously in methodological terms, as a revisionist project that seeks to correct the historiographic “meta-narrative” of the “white working class as a politically reactionary and racist monolith” (5), an idea that he sees as informing such scholarship as David Roediger’s seminal work on The Wages of Whiteness (1991). Helwig’s argument focuses on the fraught analogy between “Northern ‘wage slavery’ and Southern chattel slavery” (8), an analogy that Roediger discussed in detail, pointing out that the term “wage slavery” was far less common in the antebellum era than “white slavery.” Roediger offers a more nuanced examination of what W. E. B. Du Bois had identified as the “public and psychological wage” of white workers in Black Reconstruction in America, 1860-1880 (1935) than Helwig’s summative reference to the “white working class as a politically reactionary and racist monolith” suggests (5). In a context in which Black Lives Matter coexists with Trumpism, such a scholarly debate has political implications that Helwig does not address directly. The structural relationship between race and class remains undertheorized in contrast to individual moral and ethical quandaries that are discussed with great nuance. The issue of the interconnections between Southern chattel slavery and Northern wage labor forms the core of the debate over the “New History of Capitalism,” whose proponents (e.g., Sven Beckert’s Empire of Cotton, 2014; Edward Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told, 2014) argue that the production of raw cotton by enslaved African Americans in the South played a crucial role in the emergence of modern-day globalized capitalism. Within the field of antebellum American literature, Helwig’s book advances research on George Lippard’s work in particular. In analyses that should interest specialists in antebellum city mysteries, the monograph also contributes to the study of the early African American novel and the cultural relevance of reviewing to the papers edited by Frederick Douglass. For the many questions it raises, Helwig’s book thus makes an important contribution to the study of antebellum American literature and will invite much follow-up research. It poses anew the question of the role of literature in cross-racial solidarity and investigates its social limits, imaginary conditions, and political potential in antebellum America.