Conversion,Autobiography and Richard Baxter’s Reliquiae Baxterianae (1696)

This article juxtaposes two of Richard Baxter’s autobiographical accounts written 5 years apart but along very different lines. In the final chapter of A Holy Commonwealth (1659), Baxter confidently asserted the rightness of Parliament’s cause in the civil wars; for Baxter, it is a strikingly optimistic, triumphalist and providentialist account. In the Reliquiae Baxterianae, which he began to write in 1664, he explicitly distanced himself from any such claims about the wars and he wrote in a more chastened fashion. The former account, and the kind of autobiography it intimates, brings Baxter’s purposes in writing the Reliquiae more clearly into focus. The article advances on recent scholarship by Kathleen Lynch while investigating the nature of autobiography. The iterations of Baxter’s autobiography demonstrate that such accounts are first a story that the author tells himself or herself. If events negate that story, it is never told.     

“To Put into Complete Practice Those Hallowed Principles”: Edward Coles and the Crafting of Antislavery Nationalism in Early Nineteenth‐Century America

Edward Coles is famous for his decision to liberate his enslaved property and his political activities in Illinois during the 1820s. Few scholars, however, have recognized that this was merely the opening chapter in a life‐long struggle against slavery. His career in Illinois and his subsequent effort to promote emancipation in Virginia are arguably more significant because those struggles led him to construct an antislavery argument that united principle, prejudice, and the recognition of a shared antislavery past. Cast under the banner of antislavery nationalism, Coles’ approach to the problem of slavery was uniquely designed to appeal to Northerners and the Southerners alike.