ABOLITION AND REPUBLICAN THOUGHT: HISTORY, RELIGION, POLITICS
Abstract
My work addresses the ideas of the nineteenth-century abolition argument, examining the ways in which reformers articulated the logic and legitimacy of the anti-slavery campaign. I show how abolitionists ordered their language, their categories of discourse, and their historical, religious, and political commitments around the principles of late eighteenth-century republicanism. This body of thought, which historians have come to understand as a complex and dynamic ideology rather than a form of government alone, helped provide abolitionists with the terms in which they described their world and the conceptual scheme which gave their project both meaning and urgency. In this way advocates fashioned a reform movement best understood as post-Revolutionary rather than anti bellum, concerned not simply with slavery but with slavery-in-a-republic. To abolitionists, the chattel system posed a danger for a particular set of reasons: it raised the very threats to political and social order outlined in republican ideology. Slavery embodied the frightening force of expansive, conspiratorial arbitrary Power, envisioned as the chief (and recurring) menace to human Liberty. The system of bondage corroded the values and practice of civic virtue, undermining the crucial link thought to exist between moral character and political stability. Slavery endangered freedom by corrupting a people's institutional structures, their codes of behavior, and even the language of politics and society through which they arranged and expressed their beliefs. After reviewing the abolitionists' reading of "authentic" republican principles (Chapter 1), I focus on three areas of reform activity and reflection in which these ideological interests were manifested. Chapters 2 and 3 discuss reformers' ideas on the functions of memory in a republic and examine the particular elements present in their historical writings. Chapter 4 deals with the abolitionists' "political gospel," a body of religious beliefs in which the struggle between liberty and tryanny figured as a central concern. Chapters 5, 6, and 7 examine the reformers' understanding of political experience: their assumptions about the sources and consequences of power; their intended role in American politics; and the implementation of their political beliefs.
Degree
Ph.D.
Subject Area
American history
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