Abolitionist Twilights: History, Meaning, and the Fate of Racial Egalitarianism, 1865–1909 by Raymond James Krohn (review)

Reviewed by: Abolitionist Twilights: History, Meaning, and the Fate of Racial Egalitarianism, 1865–1909 by Raymond James Krohn Andrew Diemer (bio) Abolitionist Twilights: History, Meaning, and the Fate of Racial Egalitarianism, 1865–1909. By Raymond James Krohn. (New York: Fordham University Press, 2023. Pp. 288. Cloth, 125. 00; paper, 35. 00. ) In the later decades of the nineteenth century, men and women who had spent their antebellum years as part of the abolitionist movement began to devote significant time reflecting on those critical years of the antislavery struggle. Some of their reflections took the form of public addresses or magazine articles, but a significant number of these aging abolitionists gave more extended treatment to their late-in-life reminiscences, penning book-length memoirs, sometimes in multiple volumes. In his fascinating new book, Raymond James Krohn examines an array of such publications, providing a meticulous reading of the work of a collection of mostly white abolitionists and helping us to see what this memory work meant for the continuing struggle for Black rights in postbellum America. End Page 410 Much of this recollection, of course, took place as the nation marched from the end of Reconstruction to the nadir of race relations in the Jim Crow South. As Krohn notes, much recent scholarship on abolitionism has reaffirmed the egalitarianism of the movement, and so it stands to reason that the men and women who wrote these accounts of abolitionism might have seen in them an opportunity to construct a usable past, a history that would inspire a new generation of activists to continue the fight they had started and to make sure that the promise of the Reconstruction amendments became a reality. Alas, while there are some moments when this was the case, for the most part the works detailed here show the declining commitment of aging abolitionists to the struggle against racism and their increasing attention to other causes and purposes. The book devotes individual chapters to white abolitionists: Samuel Joseph May, Oliver Johnson, Parker Pillsbury, Aaron Macy Powell, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson. A separate chapter on Black abolitionist William Wells Brown provides an important counterpoint, as does a chapter on white women, including Elizabeth Buffum Chace, Lucy Coleman, and Sarah Southwick. Consistently, what Krohn finds is that these abolitionist leaders turned their attention away from the fierce fight for racial justice of their earlier days. It is not that they abandoned the fight for Black equality entirely; from time to time the old commitment to egalitarianism resurfaced. Rather, it seems that other issues became more important, more worthy of their attention. For Pillsbury, that meant his "postbellum liberal religious allegiances and perpetual mistrust of Christian orthodoxy" (103). For Powell, it was a shift to the fight against the "white slavery" of prostitution. Higginson, a onetime radical associate of John Brown and member of the "Secret Six, " devoted his postbellum efforts more to establishing his reputation as an erudite man of letters than he did to continuing the struggle against white supremacy. In other cases, the desire to vindicate abolitionists, to defend them against criticism, led memoirists to downplay the antiracist dimensions of the movement. May's writing, for example, seems far more interested in defending abolitionist respectability than it is in finding a usable past for ongoing struggles against American racism. Unsurprisingly, Krohn finds that Black abolitionists grew increasingly frustrated with the complaisance of their white former allies. As mentioned, Brown receives the attention of a full chapter, but at various points other important Black leaders, Frederick Douglass, Martin Delany, and Charles Lenox Remond among them, emerge to challenge their white coworkers. While Black abolitionists may not have agreed on the path forward, they End Page 411 largely recognized that the fight for racial justice needed to continue to be their focus. Ultimately, Krohn argues that these late-life writings of white abolitionists, and the declining attention to antiracism that they represented, both reflected and contributed to the atrophy of the movement for Black equality and to the declining position of African Americans, especially in the South. Building on a generation of scholarship that has connected the end of Reconstruction with the construction of a culture of reconciliation, Abolitionist. . .