Abolitionists were never popular. Even among reform-minded Americans campaigning for better education or against alcohol consumption, abolitionists were a motley assemblage on the fringe of progressive politics. But because their ideas helped foment disunion in the decades leading to 1861 and formed some part of the cocktail that motivated the American Civil War, they came to share an enlarged portion of the blame for the deaths of nearly one million Americans. Southerners in particular cultivated a passionate dislike for this small group of outspoken activists, a framework that enraged writers built into the Lost Cause and advocated for as they corrupted the historical profession for more than a century. If it had not been for those damned meddling hypocrite Yankees, the story went, slavery would have ended of its own accord and no blood would have been shed.

So it was that abolitionist leaders, ideas and methods long suffered at the historian's hand. Aside from being condemned as fanatics, these reformers were derided as utopian idealists and cloistered elitists. For many years, abolitionists were not just painted with a broad brush in our historical imagination; they were also reduced to a nearly homogeneous group of northeastern rabble-rousers.

There have been periodic and piecemeal correctives to this stereotype over the years, but none have so thoroughly demonstrated the peculiarly eastern bias of our history as J. Brent Morris's terrific study Oberlin, Hotbed of Abolitionism. As Morris explains, his book “fully examines the vital significance of the Oberlin community in the fight to end slavery, a story neglected for too long” (2). But Morris does more than shed light on what is pretty widely known as an exceptionally radical small university community in Ohio. Instead, Morris vividly illustrates the ideas and personalities that populated this rugged frontier, underscoring how, in addition to bucking the traditional divisions of eastern abolitionists, the multiracial and coeducational mission of Oberlin made the West “a critical region in the abolition and antislavery movement” (4). Perhaps even more importantly, Morris deftly shows that the particular kind of abolition and anti-slavery cultivated at Oberlin helped save the western United States and the abolition movement from themselves.

In light of the deep biases against geographic and ideological diversity amongst abolitionists, one of the most important contributions of this text is showing how deeply integrated into state and national political debates Oberlin really was. Although Morris is occasionally given to overstatement, as when he credits Oberlin with “reenergiz[ing] the lagging Republican Party in Ohio and the nation” (10), he does manage to show that Oberlin deeply colored Ohio political debates far beyond abolition. More crucially, he carefully documents how this western stronghold helped prevent eastern abolitionists from succumbing to internecine struggles.

Another area where Morris must be applauded is for recognizing, researching, and showing readers how evangelical Christianity underpinned Oberlin's abolitionism. The foreignness of nineteenth-century religion to twenty-first-century readers, along with the political freight of evangelical religion in the contemporary United States, has made it difficult for us to understand the motivation behind abolitionism. But Morris shows how these professors, students, and community members cultivated faith in the demise of slavery despite the overwhelming tide of contradictory evidence they themselves were living through. Thus Morris manages to take readers through the process by which the Compromise of 1850, the Kansas–Nebraska Act and the Dred Scott decision hardly dampened Oberlinites' belief that “the Tyrant's power” (161), in the words of one Oberlin songwriter, would eventually be broken.

Perhaps the greatest contribution of this excellent study is Morris's ability to restore some sense of fluidity and contingency to the Oberlin experiment and the wider national movement to end slavery. As he states early in the book, the fever for these radical politics “waxed and waned, and the Oberlin community's place within the antebellum antislavery movement was not static” (4). Indeed, by showing us the multifaceted struggle of Oberlinites to fight the Slave Power “at every step,” Morris shows how complex, diverse, and evolving abolitionism really was (160).