<i>Symbols of Freedom: Slavery and Resistance Before the Civil War</i> . By Matthew J. Clavin

Matthew J. Clavin's Symbols of Freedom is a tale of two antebellum Americas: a slaveholding South, in which the founding values of the nation were perverted to justify the system of chattel slavery, and a militant North, in which Black and white abolitionists harnessed the shifting meanings of national symbols to demand freedom for all. The setup for this tale is a familiar one, yet Clavin's steady hand and clear prose guide readers through a fresh and timely retelling of the old story. The author does this by centering around two related but initially distinct arguments, which he gradually weaves together throughout the book.The first argument, which shapes the chapters in the section titled “Contesting,” centers around the notion that national symbols are open to interpretation and appropriation and that, in the period of slavery in the United States, symbols associated with freedom were particularly volatile and vulnerable. Those included, most prominently, the United States flag, the American eagle, the Fourth of July, and the Declaration of Independence, with additional attention given to the liberty cap and the national anthem (then “Hail, Columbia”). Clavin argues that, far from promoting uniform and blandly patriotic narratives, these “symbols” were sites of debate and struggle between divergent political ideologies. Rather than unconditionally positive and unifying national icons, the American flag and eagle were among many “controversial and contested” symbols and Independence Day was “a divisive and at times even dangerous” celebration (45, 44).Alongside the substantial historical research that grounds the book, Clavin provides astute and detailed analysis of images. His interpretation of visual material provides nuanced and rich readings of the ways abolitionists marshalled patriotic imagery as a form of critique. Most figures are from antislavery periodicals and broadsides, a category of communication essential to the abolitionists’ mission and disseminated among supporters on both sides of the Atlantic. Here, Clavin uses lesser-known prints to trace the evolution of visual tropes. For example, he discusses how abolitionists paired visual representations of enslaved people forced to carry the U.S. flag while chained in coffles. Textual captions stressed the situation's cruel irony: “Hail Columbia, Happy Land!” and “How Slavery Honors Our Country's Flag” (17, 20). Incisive readings of this rhetoric of these images accompanies his analysis of poems, orations, and antislavery writings.Clavin's second section, “Fighting,” is more straightforwardly historical. He seeks to reverse the notion that abolitionism was a “passive and peaceful” movement guided by intellectuals with few practical aims (10). He centers narratives of decisive, often violent, action taken by enslaved people and by white and Black abolitionists. This section moves roughly chronologically, with each chapter centering an incident of resistance to slavery and white supremacy: Nat Turner's rebellion (1831); the “Rockville rebels” insurrection in which armed runaways from Charles County, Maryland, marched through the District of Columbia (1845); resistance to the Fugitive Slave Act (post-1850); and John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry (1859). Covering some familiar ground, Clavin differentiates his telling by demonstrating how participants framed these events using the “language and symbols of American freedom” as a mandate to “[resist] captivity” (149).Here we see the convergence of the book's two main threads, as Clavin connects incidents of resistance with the promise of freedom presented earlier in national symbols. Slave revolts and escapes were often planned to coincide with the Fourth of July. Supporters of the “Rockville rebels” cited the Declaration of Independence's statement of equality, while their detractors used racist rhetoric to deny that it ensured universal freedom. Abolitionists claimed “revolutionary origins” that justified fighting for liberty against tyranny (156). Uniting his ideas, Clavin shows that the contested nature of the symbols of freedom—the promise of universal rights they hold out, and the devastating denial of that promise embodied by the system of slavery—is what eventually drove Black and white activists to fight for unequivocal freedom.Symbols of Freedom offers an extraordinarily relevant and timely reevaluation of patriotic American symbols and the sectional fight to control them, but stops short of considering whether the 19th century offers guidance for navigating similar struggles today. On the final page, Clavin notes a recent “concerted effort to undo decades of progress made in the areas of civil rights and social justice” (208). The American flag and the Declaration of Independence remain contested national icons with no fixed interpretation.6 For all its strengths, Symbols of Freedom could make it clearer that the amorphous, manipulable nature of these symbols was not unique to the 19th century.