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What, ultimately, was the effect of the Hutchinsons? Gac expresses his argument with admirable clarity:

The magnitude of the Hutchinson Family Singers' success during the 1840s suggests three generalizations: 1) that antislavery, though always a highly contentious issue, was nonetheless growing more popular in the North; 2) that the Hutchinsons' medium, the parlor song, and the aesthetic of their music broke through ideology and political barriers; but at the same time, 3) that their performance (and its reception) revealed the limits of reform in song.

Those limitations already were becoming evident in Uncle Tom's Cabin, with its genuine (albeit highly sentimentalized) anti-slavery message being watered down by a colonizationist ending, leading Asa Hutchinson to surmise that "the famous antislavery statement 'Am I not a man and brother?' had changed—'Am I not a man and Uncle?'" Nonetheless, Asa celebrated the book in his melody "Little Topsy's Song," which even Frederick Douglass commended. On occasion the Hutchinsons failed to heed the distinction between "pure" and "political" anti-slavery, at one point even singing at a meeting to drum up support for Kentucky compromiser Henry Clay (drawing a harsh rebuke from Garrison and Douglass), but they soon repented from this particular instance of backsliding.

What did the Hutchinsons' music sound like? Even after reading this book, I'm not entirely sure. That could be a failing of the book; or it could be simply the difficulty of writing about music history in an era before recording. Gac writes that the family "created a new kind of 'sacred music,'" an "antiminstrelsy that hushed critics who feared the immorality of entertainment, challenged the European bias of their listeners, and attracted throngs of fans with uplifting reform messages built around familiar tunes." They took the "well-liked melodies of blackface minstrelsy and of church hymns," added their own lyrics, and "harmonized chorus refrains, the standard in today's popular music but quite new to antebellum America." One longs for a bit more of the context of the music, especially church music, from the era, and more descriptive terms for the sound that emerged from all this. That's a tall order for an author who already has accomplished much, but it's frustrating that at the end of the work, I can't hear in my mind the music of the family. Perhaps too that is because the music of the Hutchinsons gradually gave way to the sentimentalism of Stephen Foster, making it easier to imagine the sound of a kinder and gentler minstrelsy and harder to hear lyrics such as these, from the Hutchinson classic "Get Off the Track":

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