Description: 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.
Brief description: Ethan J. Kytle is Associate Professor of History at California State University, Fresno. He was a postdoctoral fellow at the Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture in Charleston, South Carolina, and has been awarded the Mary Kelley Prize by the New England American Studies Association.
Review Quotes: 'For the lay student of the American history, abolitionism begins with the tepid gradualism of the founding generation, is followed by the emigrationism of the American Colonization Society, and culminates in either the radical, though effectively pacifist immediatism of William Lloyd Garrison or the violence of John Brown. Ethan J. Kytle lends nuance to this narrative with his exploration of the ideological background and the moral impetus of the generation of abolitionist who came of age in the 1840s and 1850s and drew on romantic ideals ... In this regard, Kytle adds significantly to our understanding of American abolitionism on the eve of the Civil War.' Jason Stacy, The Journal of Southern History