Banks, Russell | Joyce Appleby (review date 22 May 1998)
Joyce Appleby (review date 22 May 1998)
SOURCE: Appleby, Joyce. “After Harpers Ferry.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4964 (22 May 1998): 7.
[In the following review, Appleby derides the character of Owen, the narrator of Cloudsplitter, contending that Banks asks the character to do too much within the novel.]
Slavery and its legacies have never been far from the American political consciousness. The Boston town meeting called to protest against the British Stamp Act in 1765 passed a resolution calling for an end to slavery, so keenly did the protesters feel the contradiction between the much-talked-of rights of Englishmen and the colonists' enslavement of Africans. Once independence had been won, anti-slavery societies popped up everywhere—North and South. Taking seriously the natural-rights philosophy articulated in the Declaration of Independence, Northern reformers began agitating for the repeal of the state laws that had...
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