To Set This World Right - by Sandra Harbert Petrulionis (Hardcover)

About the Book

In the decade before the Civil War, Concord, Massachusetts, was a center of abolitionist sentiment and activism. To Set this World Right is the first book to recover and examine the voices, events, and influence of the antebellum antislavery movement...

Book Synopsis

In the decade before the Civil War, Concord, Massachusetts, was a center of abolitionist sentiment and activism. To Set this World Right is the first book to recover and examine the voices, events, and influence of the antebellum antislavery movement in Concord. In addressing fundamental questions about the origin and nature of radical abolitionism in this most American of towns, Sandra Harbert Petrulionis frames the antislavery ideology of Henry Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson--two of Concord's most famous residents--as a product of family and community activism and presents the civic context in which their outspoken abolitionism evolved.

In this historic locale, radical abolitionism crossed racial, class, and gender lines as a confederation of neighbors fomented a radical consciousness, and Petrulionis documents how the Thoreaus, Emersons, and Alcotts worked in tandem with others in their community, including a slaveowner's daughter and a former slave. Additionally, she examines the basis on which Henry Thoreau--who cherished nothing more than solitary tramps through his beloved woods and bogs--has achieved lasting fame as a militant abolitionist.

This book marshals rich archival evidence of the diverse tactics exploited by a small coterie of committed activists, largely women, who provoked their famous neighbors to action. In Concord, the fugitive slave Shadrach Minkins was clothed and fed as he made his way to freedom. In Concord, the adolescent daughters of John Brown attended school and recovered from their emotional distress after their father's notorious public hanging. Although most residents of the town maintained a practiced detachment from the plight of the enslaved, women and men whose sole objective was the moral urgency of abolishing slavery at last prevailed on the philosophers of self-culture to accept the responsibility of their reputations.

Review Quotes

To Set This World Right is an impressive work. Demonstrating mastery of a range of primary materials and secondary literatures, Petrulionis has produced a fascinating study for scholars interested in abolitionism, American literary studies, or antebellum U.S. history. Her book makes a significant contribution to a growing literature on the critical grassroots role that women played in the most important reform effort in nineteenth-century America, while also contextualizing the emerging antislavery commitment of several of the period's most eloquent voices.

Every student of American Transcendentalism should read this book; it teaches us how ordinary people helped transform U.S. politics, as well as influenced their more famous friends and neighbors. The book also testifies to the ways these women transgressed the boundary separating their 'separate sphere' of domesticity from the public sphere of political action and conscience.

In To Set This World Right, historian Sandra Harbert Petrulionis notes that when Henry David Thoreau set out on a highly principled but very criminal mission in the early morning of Dec. 3, 1859, he could have called on any number of his neighbors to take his place. It was the morning after John Brown was hanged for his role in the failed Harpers Ferry raid, and Thoreau was undertaking to transport Francis Meriam, one of the conspirators, to the South Acton railroad station, where he would board a train, eventually escaping into Canada.

The author considers how Thoreau and others, including Ralph Waldo Emerson, helped to shape an antislavery consciousness in Concord. This New England town, according to Petrulionis, serves as a 'microcosm' of how the acceptance of abolitionism crossed race, class, and gender lines to become a formidable force in U.S. reform.

About the Author

Sandra Harbert Petrulionis is Associate Professor of English at Penn State Altoona. She is the editor of Journal 8: 1854 in The Writings of Henry D. Thoreau and coeditor of More Day to Dawn: Thoreau's Walden for the Twenty-First Century.