Reviewed by:

• Puritan Spirits in the Abolitionist Imagination by Kenyon Gradert
• Elisabeth Ceppi (bio)

Kenyon Gradert's Puritan Spirits in the Abolitionist Imagination offers a fresh look at "Puritan origins" narratives that took hold during the antebellum period by examining how and why abolitionist writers invoked the Puritan past. The Mayflower's mythic landing at Plymouth Rock launched enduring narratives of American exceptionalism, promoted in generations of scholarship and renewed in cultural memory in solemn intonations of "Pilgrim's pride" and millions of construction paper hand-turkeys. Boosters and critics of this narrative agree that it enshrines "traditional" values. But, as Gradert asserts, origin stories can "bolster a revolutionary vanguard as much as a reactionary rearguard" (6). The 1619 Project bears out that claim, with its call to "reframe American history" around the powerful image of a ship arriving at Jamestown "bearing a cargo of 20–30 enslaved Africans" as "the country's very origin"; so does the backlash against it, including the effort launched by the National Association of Scholars to "refute" its account of American origins and "provide broader pictures of American history," called—what else?—the 1620 Project. In turn, as the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe's "Our" Story: 400 Years of Wampanoag History exhibit exemplifies, the memory of Plymouth Rock need not enforce patriotic consensus. In Gradert's vivid account, abolitionists hailed "the Puritan spirit" as a discourse of spiritual liberty that not only legitimated dissent but also mandated revolt against tyranny and willingness (even zeal) to kill and die for a righteous cause. Puritan Spirits argues that this revolutionary abolitionist discourse of Puritanism has "bolstered a progressive politics of memory" (10), a counterpoint to "our usual memories of Puritanism as a conservative force for capitalism, prudery, exceptionalism, and empire" (6). [End Page 281]

In the introduction, Gradert clarifies that Puritan Spirits is "not a study of 'the Puritan origins of abolition' but of the resonance of the Puritan past within the abolitionist imagination" (10). He curates a rich archive of antebellum writing about Puritans, but writings by Puritans and eighteenth-century post-Puritans mostly provide epigraph material; this is not a long history of Puritan or New England abolitionist rhetoric. Each of the six main chapters is a case study that clusters multiple figures together around a particular Puritan trope or aesthetic of "the abolitionist imagination" or a particular institutional site (the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society; the poetry column of the Liberator). Certain themes and images cross chapters, including the use of Cromwell and Milton as heroic types; the tensions between "imagined" or spiritual warfare and actual violence; the different invocations of Puritans by gradualists and immediatists, pacificists and militants (and how the same figures tacked between these positions); the vitality of abolitionist print culture; the reckoning with white writers' "Saxonism, New England chauvinism, and (by today's standards) retrograde conceptions of race, gender, and religion" (42). The book coheres less as an argument than as thick description of an "episode in a long battle over our memory of the Puritans" (5). Gradert's archive provides early Americanists with material that can enhance our approaches to the antebellum period and provide context for the stories we tell about Puritans and their influence in our scholarship and our classrooms.

Chapter 1 examines how Ralph Waldo Emerson, Theodore Parker, and Wendell Phillips invoked the Puritan past as a model of "spiritual heroism," casting radical abolition as redeemer in a providential narrative of American democracy in which "progress was inevitable yet revolutionary" (32). Gradert opens with the figure of John Brown, noting how frequently abolitionists used the word Puritan to praise him (17). As antislavery advocacy radicalized into "millennial zeal for America's bloodiest war," both Brown and Toussaint Louverture were hailed as "Cromwells"; Phillips deemed Louverture "a black Cromwell" (35). Claiming a revolutionary nonconformist heritage from their ancestors legitimated "a spiritual revolution that would salvage the heroic soul of democracy" (23). The chapter concludes with an intriguing reading of Emerson's "Voluntaries" as celebrating the leadership of the Black soldiers of the Massachusetts Fifty-Fourth, not just Colonel Shaw.

Chapter 2 discusses...

审核人：

• 废奴主义想象中的清教徒精神by Kenyon Gradert
• 伊丽莎白·塞皮（生物）

肯永·格拉德特（Kenyon Gradert）的《废奴主义想象中的清教徒精神》通过考察废奴主义作家如何以及为何援引清教徒的历史，重新审视了在战前时期举行的“清教徒起源”叙事。在五月花的神话般的登陆普利茅斯岩（Plymouth Rock）引发了对美国例外主义的不朽叙事，在几代学者中得到了推广，并在庄严地表达了“朝圣者的骄傲”和数以百万计的人造纸火鸡的文化记忆中得到了更新。这种叙述的提倡者和批评家都同意，它体现了“传统”价值。但是，正如格拉德特所断言的那样，起源故事可以“支持革命先锋队和反动后卫队一样多”（6）。1619年计划证实了这一主张，并呼吁“重新构筑美国历史”，以一艘抵达詹姆斯敦的船只“承载20至30名被奴役的非洲人的货物”的强大形象为“该国的真正来历”；对它的反对也是如此，包括美国国家学者协会（National Association of Scholars）为““我们的故事”：Wampanoag历史400年的展览证明了这一点，对普利茅斯洛克的记忆无需执行爱国共识。在格拉瑟的生动描述中，废奴主义者称赞“清教徒精神”是一种精神自由的话语，它不仅使持不同政见者合法化，而且要求反抗暴政和为正义事业杀戮和牺牲的意愿（甚至热心）。清教徒精神认为，这种革命性的废奴主义清教徒话语“加强了进步的记忆政治”（10），与“我们通常对清教主义的记忆作为对资本主义，普鲁德，例外主义和帝国的保守力量”（6）相反。[结束页281]

在引言中，Gradert阐明了清教徒的精神“不是对'清教徒的废除起源的研究'，而是对清教徒过去在废除主义想象力范围内的共鸣的研究”（10）。他副牧师丰富约清教徒战前写的档案，但作品的清教徒和十八世纪后清教徒大多提供题词材料; 这不是清教徒或新英格兰废奴主义言论的悠久历史。六个主要章节中的每一章都是一个案例研究，将多个人物聚集在一起，围绕着一个特定的清教徒或“废奴主义想象力”美学或一个特定的机构遗址（波士顿女性反奴隶制协会；解放者的诗歌专栏））。某些主题和图像贯穿章节，包括使用克伦威尔和米尔顿作为英雄类型；“想象中的”或属灵的战争与实际暴力之间的紧张关系；渐进主义者和直接主义者，和平主义者和激进分子对清教徒的不同援引（以及在这些职位之间如何运用相同的数字）；废奴主义印刷文化的生命力；白人作家的观点是“撒克逊主义，新英格兰沙文主义和（按今天的标准）种族，性别和宗教的逆行观念”（42）。这本书的论点不只是争论，而在于对“关于我们记忆的长期战斗中的情节”的详尽描述。 （5）。Gradert的档案库为早期的美国主义者提供了可以改善我们在战前时期的方法的资料，并为我们讲述清教徒及其在我们的学术和课堂中的影响的故事提供了背景。

第1章探讨了拉尔夫·沃尔多·爱默生，西奥多·帕克和温德尔·菲利普斯如何以“精神英雄主义”的模式援引清教徒的过去，在美国民主的惯常叙述中将激进废除作为救赎者，其中“进步是不可避免的，但却是革命性的”（32 ）。Gradert以约翰·布朗（John Brown）的身影开头，指出废奴主义者使用清教徒一词的频率赞美他（17）。当反奴隶制的倡导激化为“对美国最血腥的战争的千年热忱”时，布朗和图森·卢弗图图尔都被誉为“克伦威尔”（Cromwells）。菲利普斯（Phillips）认为Louverture是“黑色的克伦威尔”（35）。从他们的祖先那里宣称革命性的非传统主义遗产是合法的“一场精神革命，它将挽救民主的英勇灵魂”（23）。本章以对艾默生“自愿”的有趣解读作为对马萨诸塞州五十四分之一的黑人士兵（不仅仅是肖上校）的领导力的庆祝。

第2章讨论...