“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but names shall never
hurt me.” It seems trite and silly to start this review of American
Experience’s new documentary, “The Abolitionists” with a schoolyard chant, but
it is somewhat appropriate to the task at hand. Abolitionists not
only had sticks and stones and bricks hurled at them, but were also called many
names: radicals, agitators, trouble-makers, and nigger-lovers to name but a
few. So publicly reviled they were, that the word “abolitionist”
itself became an epithet. By standing up for the men and women in
bondage who could not stand up for themselves, and sticking to the principal
“that all men are born equal,” regardless of the risk to their lives and their
personal reputations, the abolitionists lit the fuse which would smolder for
thirty years and then explode into a war that would eventually set
approximately four million American slaves free.
The three part documentary about the American abolitionist
movement, “The Abolitionists,” follows the intertwining lives of a
veritable who’s who of the abolitionist movement and features, among others:
Angelina Grimké, Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Harriet Beecher
Stowe, and John Brown.
Using dramatic recreations of events, still photographs, and
interviews with historians Carol Berkin, David W. Blight, Lois Brown, Erica
Armstrong Dunbar, R. Blakeslee Gilpin, Joan D. Hedrick, Tony Horwitz, Julie Roy
Jeffrey, W. Caleb McDaniel, Manisha Sinha, John Stauffer and James Brewer
Stewart, American Experience’s “The Abolitionists” vividly recreates and
recounts the interwoven lives of its subjects, beginning in the 1820’s until
the end of the Civil War, and details how they worked with and against each
other to secure the eradication of slavery as an institution in the United
States.
The film begins with Angelina Grimké, the South
Carolinia socialite from a slave holding family, who viewed the evil of slavery
not as a moral wrong perpetrated against the negro race, but as an offence
against God. Unable to make her voice heard, she moved to the
north. After her letter to William Lloyd Garrison was published in The Liberator
she joined the abolitionist movement and became a passionate and persuasive
public speaker against slavery.
The founder of the American Anti-slavery Society, William
Lloyd Garrison, who was the lone voice behind the abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator,
is most prominently featured in the documentary. Published in
Boston, Massachusetts, from January 1, 1831 until December 29, 1865, The
Liberator was for many of its early years the sole beacon of the
abolitionist movement. In its first issue Garrison proclaimed in a
column entitled To The Public, “I am in earnest – I will not equivocate
– I will not excuse – I will not retreat a single inch – AND I WILL BE HEARD.”
Frederick Douglass escaped slavery and was convinced by
Garrison to join the anti-slavery movement. Rising from the chains
of bondage he became a powerful abolitionist orator. Following the
publication of his autobiography, A Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, he
became the most prominent black man in America. To evade capture by
his former owner, Douglass fled to England and experienced for the first time
life as a free man. When his manumission was secured Douglass returned to
the United States and in 1847 founded his own anti-slavery newspaper, The
North Star, causing a rift in his relationship with his mentor.
The title of the most influential book of the nineteenth
century goes to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s “Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Moved to write the book by
the tragic death of her young son, and the plight of slave families being torn
apart, Stowe’s novel became a huge best seller which together with the many
stage adaptations it inspired changed the hearts of many American’s be allowing
them to vicariously see the evils of slavery through the eyes of its victims.
When pacifism failed to free the slaves, John Brown turned
to violence, first in Kansas, where “Popular Sovereignty” erupted into a war
between the pro and anti-slavery advocates who rushed into the state to
guarantee its rightful place in the Union as either a Free or a Slave
State. And second in Brown’s failed raid on the U.S. Arsenal at
Harper’s Ferry, Virginia. Having been captured and hung, John Brown became
a martyr for the Abolitionist cause.
Much of “The Abolitionists” uses dramatic recreations as
part of its narrative story-telling, so I must recognize the five actors who
breathed life into their historical counter parts: Richard Brooks (from the
long-running NBC drama Law & Order) portrays Frederick
Douglass; Neal Huff as William Lloyd Garrison, probably has the most screen in
the film; Jeanine Serralles plays Angelina Grimké; Kate Lyn Sheil as Harriet
Beecher Stowe; and T. Ryder Smith as John Brown.
Grimké, Garrison, Douglass, Stowe and Brown in their passion
and their principals, with disregard for personal gain, and their lives in
peril, proved that “right makes might,” and to that end they dared to do their
duty as they understood it, and we are the better for it.
DVD, 1 Disk, Region 1, PBS, Not Rated. $24.99. To purchase click HERE.
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