Reconsidering the abolitionists in an age of fundamentalist politics

Journal of the Early Republic

Volumn 26, Issue 1, 2006, Pages 1-23

  Stewart, James Brewer ^a  

^a MACALESTER COLLEGE   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 63749103033     PISSN: 02751275     EISSN: 15530620     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/jer.2006.0019     Document Type: Article

References (79)

1. On relationships between political issues and Yankee evangelical piety, see Bertram Wyatt-Brown, "Prelude to Abolitionism: Sabbatarian Politics and the Rise of the Second Party System," Journal of American History, 58 (Sept. 1971), 316-41
2. Paul Johnson, A Shopkeeper's Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815-1837 (New York, 1978)
3. Paul Goodman, Towards a Christian Republic: Antimasonry and the Great Transition in New England, 1826-1836 (New York, 1988)
4. Harry Watson, Liberty and Power: The Politics of Jacksonian America (New York, 1990), 55-57, 178-79, 180-82, 222-23
5. Robert H. Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination (New York, 1994), 30-128
6. Michael F. Holt, The Political Crisis of the 1850s (New York, 1978)
7. John Ashworth, Slavery, Capitalism and Politics in the Antebellum Republic: Volume 1, Commerce and Compromise, 1820-1850 (Cambridge, UK, 1995)
8. David Potter, The Impending Crisis, 1848-1861 (New York, 1976)
9. Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York, 1970)
10. Nicole Etcheson, Bleeding Kansas: Contested Liberty in the Civil War Era (Lawrence, KS, 2004)
11. Lary Gara, "Slavery and the 'Slave Power': A Crucial Distinction," Civil War History, 15 (Mar. 1969), 4-18
12. Gilbert Hobbs Barnes, The Antislavery Impulse, 1830-1844 (New York, 1936), 191-97
13. Merton Dillon, The Abolitionists: The Growth of a Dissenting Minority (DeKalb, IL, 1974)
14. Richard H. Sewell, Ballots for Freedom: Antislavery Politics in the United States, 1837-1860 (New York, 1976)
15. Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: From Jefferson to Lincoln (New York, 2005), 548-59, 594-601, 645-47, 677-88
16. Julie Roy Jeffrey, The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism: Ordinary Women in the Antislavery Movement (Chapel Hill, NC, 1998)
17. James and Lois Horton, In Hope of Liberty: Culture, Community and Protest among Northern Free Blacks, 1700-1860 (New York, 1997)
18. Richard S. Newman, The Transformation of American Abolitionism: Fighting Slavery in the Early Republic (Chapel Hill, NC, 2002)
19. Lawrence J. Friedman, Gregarious Saints: Self and Community in Abolitionism, 1830-1870 (Cambridge, UK, 1982)
20. Jean Fagan-Yellin, Women and Sisters: The Abolitionist Feminists and American Culture (New Haven, CT, 1989)
21. Michael A. Morrison, Slavery and the American West: The Eclipse of Manifest Destiny and the Coming of the Civil War (Chapel Hill, NC, 1997)
22. William Gienapp, The Origins of the Republican Party, 1852-1856 (New York, 1987)
23. Michael F. Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War (New York, 1999), 1203
24. Wilentz, Rise of American Democracy, nicely summarizes abolitionist political activity and effectively explains the northern Whig proclivity for "Bible politics," but does not consider abolitionist political agency with reference to the two-party system in the North after 1840
25. Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling, 11-56
26. David Brion Davis, Slavery and Human Progress (New York, 1984), 107-53, 231-59
27. Ernest Sandeen, The Roots of Fundamentalism: British and American Millenarianism, 1800-1930 (Chicago, IL, 1970), 103-269
28. Bruce David Forbes and Jeanne Halgren Kilde, Rapture, Revelation, and the End Times: Exploring the "Left Behind" Series (New York, 2004) documents and analyzes the pervasive influence of premillenialism in contemporary religious culture
29. Sandeen, Roots of Fundamentalism, 233-69
30. Stephanie McCurry, Masters of Small Worlds: Yeoman Households, Gender Relations and the Political Culture of the Antebellum South Carolina Low Country (New York, 1995)
31. Christine Leigh Heyrman, Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt (New York, 1997), 117-261
32. Richard J. Carwardine, Evangelicals and Politics in Antebellum America (Knoxville, TN, 1997)
33. Daniel Walker Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs (Chicago, IL, 1979)
34. Daniel Walker Howe, "The Evangelical Movement and Political Culture in the North during the Second Party System," Journal of American History, 77 (Mar. 1991), 1216-39
35. See also George M. Marsden, The Evangelical Mind and the New School Presbyterian Experience: A Case Study of Thought and Theology in Nineteenth Century America (New Haven, CT, 1970)
36. and Howe, Political Culture, 1-42, 69-122
37. For a broad overview of these developments see James Brewer Stewart, Holy Warriors: The Abolitionists and American Slavery (New York, 1996), 75-96
38. John Stauffer, Black Hearts of Men: The Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race (Cambridge, MA, 2002), 15-16, 69-70, 96-97
39. Alan Kraut, "Partisanship and Principles: The Liberty Party in Antebellum Political Culture" in Crusaders and Compromisers, ed. Kraut, 71-100
40. Louis S. Gerteis, Morality and Utility in Antislavery Reform (Chapel Hill, NC, 1987), 86-129
41. Stephen E. Maizlish, The Triumph of Sectionalism: The Transformation of Ohio Politics, 1844-1856 (Kent, OH, 1983)
42. Joseph G. Rayback, Free Soil: The Election of 1848 (Lexington, KY, 1970), 201-59
43. Reinhard Johnson, "The Liberty Party, 1840-1848: Antislavery Third Party Politics in the United States" (unpublished manuscript), ch. 2-6
44. Fredrick Blue, The Free Soilers: Third Party Politics, 1848-1854 (Urbana, IL, 1973)
45. Stanley Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional & Intellectual Life (New York, 1963), 185-89
46. John L. Brooke, The Heart of the Commonwealth: Social and Political Culture in Worcester, Massachusetts, 1713-1861 (New York, 1989)
47. Ronald Formisano, The Transformation of Political Culture: Massachusetts Parties, 1790s-1840s (New York, 1983)
48. Johnson, Shopkeeper's Millennium
49. John W. Quist, Restless Visionaries: The Social Roots of Antebellum Reform in Alabama and Michigan (Baton Rouge, LA, 1998)
50. David M. Ludlum, Social Ferment in Vermont, 1791-1850 (New York, 1939)
51. Randolph A. Roth, The Democratic Dilemma: Religion, Reform and the Social Order in the Connecticut River Valley of Vermont, 1791-1850 (New York, 1987)
52. Patrick Riddleberger, George Washington Julian: A Study in Nineteenth Century Politics and Reform (Indianapolis, IN, 1966), 1-45
53. Donald Martin Bluestone, "Steamboats, Sewing Machines and Bibles: The Roots of Antislavery in Illinois and the Old Northwest" (Ph.D. diss., University of Wisconsin, Madison, 1973)
54. Stewart, Joshua R. Giddings
55. Deborah Bingham Van Broekhoven, The Devotion of These Women: Rhode Island in the Antislavery Network (Amherst, MA, 2002)
56. Nancy Hewitt, Women's Activism and Social Change: Rochester, New York, 1822-1872 (Ithaca, NY, 1984)
57. Stacey M. Robertson, Parker Pillsbury: Radical Abolitionists, Male Feminist (Ithaca, NY, 2000), particularly 63-91
58. Milton Sernett, North Star Country: Upstate New York and the Crusade for African American Freedom (Syracuse, NY, 2002)
59. Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Lewis Tappan and the Evangelical War Against Slavery (Cleveland, OH, 1969), 269-327
60. Bruce Laurie's Beyond Garrison: Antislavery and Social Reform (Cambridge, UK, 2005) came to my attention too late for consideration in this essay, which is unfortunate. No other study, in my opinion, more fully demonstrates the sustained and significant impact of abolitionism on local and state politics
61. For a general overview of these trends and tendencies, consult Stewart, Holy Warriors, ch. 5 and 6 and their accompanying bibliography
62. For specifics, see Jane H. and William H. Pease, They Who Would Be Free: Blacks' Search for Freedom, 1830-1861 (New York, 1974), 173-205
63. James A. Briggs to Oran Follett, July 26, 1843, Oran Follett Papers (Cincinnati Historical Society, Cincinnati, OH)
64. Jonathan H. Earle, Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of Free Soil, 1824-1854 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2004), 169-80
65. Gienapp, Origins of the Republican Party, 1-67
66. Holt, Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party, 553-801
67. David Brion Davis, The Slave Power Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style (Baton Rouge, LA, 1969)
68. Leonard L. Richards, The Slave Power: Tfie Free North and Southern Domination, 1780-1860 (Baton Rouge, LA, 2000)
69. Carwardine, Evangelicals and Politics, 199-234 gives a rich account of northern evangelicals' political alienation in the early 1850s
70. Quoted from Michael F. Holt, The Fate of Their Country: Politicians, Slavery Extension and the Coming of the Civil War (New York, 2004), 91
71. For an overview of resistance and compliance to the Fugitive Slave Law, see Stanley Campbell, The Slave Catchers: The Enforcement of the Fugitive Slave Law (New York, 1970)
72. For the selection of "fellow traveler" senators see Gerteis, Morality and Utility, 99-105, 112-13, 121-24, 126-27
73. For direct abolitionist attacks on slavery, see Stanley Harrold, Subversives: Antislavery Community in Washington, D.C., 1828-1865 (Baton Rouge, LA, 2003)
74. Nancy Isenberg, Sex and Citizenship in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill, NC, 1998)
75. Susan Zaeske, Signatures of Citizenship: Petitioning, Antislavery and Women's Political Identity (Chapel Hill, NC, 2003)
76. Michael D. Pierson, Free Hearts and Free Homes: Gender and American Antislavery Politics (Chapel Hill, NC, 2003)
77. Stauffer, Black Hearts of Men
78. Jeffrey Rossbach, Ambivalent Conspirators: John Brown, The Secret Six, and a Theory of Slave Violence (Philadelphia, PA, 1982)
79. Wendell Phillips, Speeches, Lectures and Letters, 1st series (Boston, MA, 1863), 136-37