Romantic Reformers and the Antislavery Struggle in the Civil War Era

The first study of Romantic reform to focus squarely on this period, Romantic Reformers is an intellectual history of the American antislavery movement in the 1850s and early 1860s. It focuses on the ideas and actions of five Romantic reformers who became leading figures in the final years of the struggle against slavery.

On the cusp of the American Civil War, a new generation of reformers, including Theodore Parker, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Martin Robison Delany and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, took the lead in the antislavery struggle. Frustrated by political defeats, a more aggressive Slave Power, and the inability of early abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison to rid the nation of slavery, the New Romantics crafted fresh, often more combative, approaches to the peculiar institution. Contrary to what many scholars have argued, however, they did not reject Romantic reform in the process. Instead, the New Romantics roamed widely through Romantic modes of thought, embracing not only the immediatism and perfectionism pioneered by Garrisonians but also new motifs and doctrines, including sentimentalism, self-culture, martial heroism, Romantic racialism, and Manifest Destiny. This book tells the story of how antebellum America''s most important intellectual current, Romanticism, shaped the coming and course of the nation''s bloodiest - and most revolutionary - conflict.