THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW 13
ON AUG. 6, 1845,Frederick Douglass set sail
on a speaking tour of England and Ireland
to promote the cause of antislavery. He had
just published “The Narrative of the Life of
Frederick Douglass,” an instant best seller
that, along with his powerful oratory, had
made him a celebrity in the growing aboli-
tion movement. No sooner had he arrived
in Britain, however, than Douglass began
to realize that white abolitionists in Boston
had been working to undermine him: Be-
fore he’d even left American shores, they
had privately written his British hosts and
impugned his motives and character.
The author of these “sneaky,” conde-
scending missives, Douglass soon discov-
ered, was Maria Weston Chapman, a
wealthy, well-connected and dedicated ac-
tivist whose scornful nickname, “the Con-
tessa,” stemmed from her imperious be-
hind-the-scenes work with the leading abo-
litionist William Lloyd Garrison.
In Linda Hirshman’s fresh, provocative
and engrossing account of the abolition
movement, Chapman was “the prime
mover” in driving Douglass away from the
avowedly nonpolitical Garrisonians and
toward the overtly political wing of aboli-
tionism led by Gerrit Smith, a wealthy
white businessman in upstate New York.
With brisk, elegant prose Hirshman lays
bare “the casual racism of the privileged
class” within Garrison’s abolitionist circle.
Setting out on her research, Hirshman
initially considered Chapman a feminist
hero whose significant role in the move-
ment had long been overlooked. After all,
Chapman raised enormous funds for aboli-
tion societies, edited Garrison’s newspa-
per, The Liberator, for years in his long ab-
sences, and carried on a massive petition
campaign to end slavery. But when she
read Chapman’s voluminous correspon-
dence, Hirshman encountered the ugly
personal rivalries and private politics at
the center of a shaky alliance between the
uncompromising Garrison and the ambi-
tious and self-possessed Douglass.
Behind Douglass’s back, Chapman de-
picted him as untrustworthy, arrogant,
selfish and in need of white supervision.
Ostensibly to protect the ideological purity
of Garrison’s brand of abolitionism, she
warned her British friends that Douglass
had “the wisdom of a serpent” and would
be “tempted” by the London faction allied
with Smith’s New Yorkers. Chapman’s cor-
respondents in England wrote her back in
similarly disparaging terms, describing
Douglass as “injudicious and jealous.”
Douglass’s unflinching responses to
these insults reveal his immense forbear-
ance. After learning of Chapman’s duplici-
ty, he confronted her directly, writing that
her comments were “very embarrassing”
and did him a “great injustice.” The self-
righteous Chapman proceeded to quickly
inform her many friends that Douglass
was oversensitive, “selfish” and quick to
take offense.
Racial prejudice, Hirshman writes, per-
meated abolitionism. So much so that
when Douglass returned from his im-
mensely successful British tour and
wanted to raise the fees for his columns,
Edmund Quincy, editor of The National
Anti-Slavery Standard, privately referredto Douglass by the most offensive racist
slur. In fact, he did so more than once.
The alliance between the Garrisonians
and Douglass foundered on shoals both
private and public, personal and political.
Chapman and her allies greeted Doug-
lass’s every suggestion with distrust. Ea-
ger to manipulate him into becoming an
unquestioning spokesman for nonpolitical
abolitionism, they repeatedly repri-
manded Douglass. Unmoved, and unwill-
ing to limit the scope of his activities,
Douglass responded, “I may do anything
toward exposing the bloody system of
slavery.”
What Douglass ultimately did, of course,
was desert the Garrisonians, join the Ger-
rit Smith faction of abolitionism, and adopt
its antislavery reading of the Constitution.
He was influenced not just by the Garriso-
nians’ private treatment, but also because
the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act had changed
the terms of resistance. As slaveholders
were given permission to hunt fugitives
across the North and bring them before
federal courts for rendition, the law
stripped Black defendants of all rights, in-
cluding habeas corpus. By federal author-
ity the act also forced Northerners to par-
ticipate in the capture of fugitive slaves.
Was it constitutional? If so, then, was slav-
ery itself sanctioned by the Constitution?
Garrison had long maintained that it was,
and therefore that abolition would never
be achieved through law or politics.
Douglass refused to cede the Constitu-
tion to the slaveholders. As he wrote Gerrit
Smith, he was “sick and tired of arguing on
the slaveholders’ side of the question.” In-
stead, Douglass, Smith and a small circle of
abolitionist lawyers insisted that the Con-
stitution did notsanction slavery, that nat-
ural law and the Constitution itself assured
liberty, and that political action through
the Constitution would be necessary to de-
stroy slavery and secure freedom.
Hirshman’s incisive analysis clarifies
how the long confrontation over federallaw fortified abolitionists’ resolve. Since
the Revolution, Black people had sued for
freedom, sought the rights of citizenship
and challenged slavery in court. But Prigg
v. Pennsylvania (1842), a decision that
struck down free state laws designed to
prevent the return of fugitive slaves, sent
abolitionist lawyers probing for “weak-
nesses in the court’s constitutional barri-
cade around slavery.”
Garrison and his allies pilloried Doug-
lass as an “enemy” to the cause of abolition
even as they applauded their white oppo-
nent Gerrit Smith for taking the same posi-
tion. They published scurrilous rumors
about Douglass’s marriage and implied
that he had fallen under the spell of a “Jeze-
bel,” the British abolitionist Julia Griffiths.
As Hirshman deftly reveals, the person-
al waspolitical. The alliance between Gar-
rison and Douglass lasted long enough to
power the fractious movement through its
first decade, but broke because the Gar-
risonians had “actually never accepted the
full humanity of Frederick Douglass.” 0Blurred Lines
The uneasy alliance between Frederick Douglass and white abolitionists.
By WILLIAM G. THOMAS III
THE COLOR OF ABOLITION
How a Printer, a Prophet, and a Contessa
Moved a Nation
By Linda Hirshman
Illustrated. 314 pp. Mariner Books. $28. Frederick Douglass, 1847.
PHOTOGRAPH FROM SEPIA TIMES/UNIVERSAL IMAGES GROUP VIA GETTY IMAGES
WILLIAM G. THOMAS IIIis a professor of history
and the Angle chair in the humanities at the
University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He is the
author of “A Question of Freedom: The Fam-
ilies Who Challenged Slavery From the Na-
tion’s Founding to the Civil War.”
ed, but not before his career is left in ruins.
(Stevens, a fierce Arbuckle defender, por-
trays Keaton as a loyal friend who gives
the post-scandal Roscoe work as a gag
writer and uncredited co-director.) Keaton
is the least business-minded — terrible at
deal making, hence his never-ending gig-
ging — but the most purely creative, a
workaholic whose passion is thinking up
gags.
Stevens clearly adores her subject, de-
scribing him as a “solemn, beautiful, per-
petually airborne man.” “Camera Man” is
less a traditional biography than a series of
reported essays about the progress of the
20th century with Keaton at their center.
Sometimes Stevens ventures too far afield,
as when she devotes the better part of a
chapter to an unnecessary examination of
the Hollywood struggles of F. Scott
Fitzgerald — a man with whom Keaton
was apparently unacquainted — on the
grounds that both men were alcoholics
with marital troubles who were unhappilyemployed at MGM at the same time.
But Stevens is sharper when she focuses
on such ancillary phenomena as the emer-
gence of serious film criticism, an entirely
new writerly discipline. She flags the pre-
cise moment, in a review of Keaton’s 1923
feature “Three Ages,” when Life maga-
zine’s Robert Sherwood “pushes film criti-
cism in a new direction as he brings events
outside the theater to bear on his experi-
ence inside it” by praising Keaton’s ability
“to keep this much-molested human racein good humor, at a time when it has noth-
ing but high taxes, United States senators,
coal strikes, banana shortages, wrong
numbers and Signor Mussolini to think
about.”
Nearly a hundred years later, as we face
a nearly identical list of vexations, give or
take a surname, Keaton’s lovingly created
shorts and features still have this benefi-
cial effect. Curtis and Stevens have done
well to bring the boy with the funeral ex-
pression back from the dead. 0