Voyeuristic abolitionism: Sex, gender, and the transformation of antislavery rhetoric

Journal of the Early Republic

Volumn 28, Issue 1, 2008, Pages 83-114

  Lasser, Carol ^a  

^a OBERLIN COLLEGE   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 70449866768     PISSN: 02751275     EISSN: 15530620     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/jer.2008.0014     Document Type: Article

References (48)

1. George Bourne, Picture of Slavery in the United States of America (Middle-town, CT, 1834), 98, 36, 92
2. David Brion Davis discusses Bourne in The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution 1770-1823 (Ithaca, NY, 1975), 200-201, 331-32
3. Bourne, Picture, 88, 93-94, 124, 122
4. George Bourne, Slavery Illustrated in its Effects Upon Woman and Domestic Society (Boston, MA, 1837), vii, 27, 49, 62, 97-98
5. Theodore Dwight Weld, American Slavery as It Is: Testimony of Thousand Witnesses (New York, 1839), 11 and 15
6. William Ellery Charming, "Slavery," in Works of William E. Channing, D.D., Second Complete Edition (2 vols., Cambridge, MA, 1843), 2: 81
7. "A Puritan," [George Bourne], The Abrogation of the Seventh Commandment in the American Churches (New York, 1835), 3-4; emphasis in original
8. Lydia Maria Child, An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans (Boston, MA, 1836), 22-23
9. Angelina Grimké, Appeal to the Christian Women of the South (New York, 1836), 26
10. "Preamble & Constitution of the Canton [Ohio] Ladies Anti-Slavery Society," Canton Ladies Anti-Slavery Society, Records, Ms. 26, Western Reserve Historical Society. My special thanks to Stacey Robertson for this quotation
11. Julie Roy Jeffrey, The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism: Ordinary Women in the Antislavery Movement (Chapel Hill, NC, 1998), especially ch. 1, brilliantly documents the role of dramatic rhetoric in recruitment strategies
12. The literature on women in the antislavery movement continues to expand, making important contributions to our understanding of the emergence of a vibrant women's antislavery culture in the 1830s. In addition to Jeffrey, important works include Jean Fagan Yellin, Women and Sisters: The Antislavery Feminists in American Culture (New Haven, CT, 1989)
13. Jean Fagan Yellin and John C. Van Home, eds., The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women's Political Culture in Antebellum America (Ithaca, NY, 1994)
14. Deborah Bingham Van Broekhoven, The Devotion of these Women: Rhode Island in the Antislavery Network (Amherst, MA, 2002)
15. Susan Zaeske, Signatures of Citizenship: Petitioning, Antislavery and Women's Political Identity (Chapel Hill, NC, 2003)
16. See especially Ronald Walters, "The Erotic South: Civilization and Sexuality in American Abolitionism," American Quarterly 25 (May 1973), 177-201
17. More recently, William Freehling, The Road to Disunion, Volume Two: Secessionists Triumphant, 1854-1861 (Oxford, UK, 2007), 27-28 notes the "sexual slurs" that abolitionists "wielded ... so self-righteously, so scornfully, and so pornographically." Much of the new literary and cultural studies scholarship also discusses the explicit focus on the body that characterized an emergent rhetoric in antebellum writings, especially fiction, linking it to the rise of sentimentality, which itself participated in the recreation of boundaries between public and private, thereby shaping political discourses
18. Interesting studies in this vein include Stephen Browne, " 'Like Gory Spectres': Representing Evil in Theodore Weld's American Slavery as It Is," Quarterly Journal of Speech 80 (1994), 277-92, where sentimentality is said to result in "the satisfactions of moral exhaustion" (279) rather than political action
19. For a view of the ability of sentimentalism to divert moral responses away from political action, see also Bruce Brugett, Sentimental Bodies: Sex, Gender and Citizenship in the Early Republic (Princeton, NJ, 1998)
20. and Lauren Berlant, "Poor Eliza," in No More Separate Spheres! A Next Wave American Studies Reader, ed. Cathy N. Davidson and Jessamyn Hatcher (Durham, NC, 2002), 291-323. While recognizing the significance of this approach, this essay takes a different approach, locating the rhetoric identified as "voyeuristic abolition" within the history and historiography of the American antislavery movement
21. Interestingly, two of the three American images of the flogging of female slaves that Wood includes are dated to 1835, with the third dated 1843. These appear on page 125 of Wood, Blind Memory. On the rise of humanitarian sentiments, see Elizabeth B. Clark, " 'The Sacred Rights of the Weak': Pain, Sympathy, and the Culture of Individual Rights in Antebellum America," Journal of American History 82 (Sept. 1995), 476
22. and Karen Halttu-nen, "Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain in Anglo-American Culture," American Historical Review 100 (Apr. 1995), 303-334
23. Michael D. Pierson, "'All Southern Society Is Assailed by the Foulest Charges': Charles Sumner's 'The Crime Against Kansas' and the Escalation of Republican Anti-Slavery Rhetoric," New England Quarterly 68 (Dec. 1995), 533
24. This excellent article argues that Sumner took an unprecedented step in addressing the sexual exploitation of slave women from the floor of the Senate; but, as my article here makes clear, I am not persuaded that Sumner's primary motive for doing so was his need to win over Know Nothing votes. Also relevant is Pierson's " 'Slavery Cannot Be Covered Up with Broadcloth or a Bandanna': The Evolution of White Abolitionist Attacks on the 'Patriarchal Institution'," Journal of the Early Republic 25 (Fall 2005), 383-415
25. In this excellent piece, Pierson identifies some of the same material I explore here, but he is interested in how the change from early abolitionist "pornography" to later discussions of the corruptions of slavery reflect a change in abolitionist understandings of the family. On minstrelsy, among the now voluminous literature, see Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York, 1993)
26. See, for example, Richard S. Newman, The Transformation of American Abolitionism: Fighting Slavery in the Early Republic (Chapel Hill, NC, 2002), especially ch, 1
27. David Brion Davis, "Some Themes of Counter-Subversion: An Analysis of Anti-Masonic, Anti-Catholic and Anti-Mormon Literature," Mississippi Valley Historical Review 47 (Sept. 1960), 205-224; the particular quotation is found on 219
28. Helen Horowitz, Rereading Sex: Battles over Sexual Knowledge and Suppression in Nineteenth-Century America (New York, 2002)
29. Marc Arkin, "The Federalist Trope: Power and Passion in Abolitionist Rhetoric," Journal of American History 88 (June 2001), 75-98 identifies the connections between power, passion and sex as continuities between the writings of Federalist Fisher Ames and abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison. His work draws attention to the particular quotation from Garrison I use to illustrate sexual imagery here. As Arkin notes, it was left to Garrison to take a generalized discourse and apply it to exploitation of real human beings, not simply metaphorical constructions
30. For the findings reported here, I chose a subset of twenty of its periodicals identified for antislavery content by Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines, 1741-1930 (5 vols., Cambridge, MA, 1958-1968)
31. Horowitz, Rereading Sex, ch. 2 in particular
32. I thank William Freehling for pointing out the strength of Hammond's sexual drives, particularly in his lecture, "Did Personality Defects Help Cause the Civil War? Alexander Stephens, James Henry Hammond, and the Triumph of Southern Disunion," paper presented in Oberlin, Ohio, Mar. 2, 2006
33. nd Sess., Feb. 9, 1837, 1670-1676
34. On Thomas Morris, see Jonathan Earle, Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of Free Soil, 1824-1854 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2004), ch. 1
35. Pierson, "All Southern Society," makes a similar observation. Manisha Sinha, "The Caning of Charles Sumner: Slavery, Race, and Ideology in the Age of the Civil War," Journal of the Early Republic 23 (Summer 2003), 231-62, and especially 242-43, argues that sexually charged discussions of slavery were more common than previously thought. She focuses on the rhetoric of the defenders of slavery baiting Charles Sumner with especially inflammatory racist terms that included, in at least one speech by Senator Andrew Pickens Butler, sexually charged language. My own research did not locate a consistent pattern of sexually explicit discourse among antislavery senators and congressional representatives, nor did it find sustained levels of sexually explicit debate between northern and southern members of Congress on the issue of slavery
36. Joshua R. Giddings, On the Annexation of Texas, Delivered in the House of Representatives, U.S. in Committee of the Whole on the State of the Union, January 22, 1845, (Washington, DC, 1845), 12
37. Horace Mann, The Fugitive Slave Law. A Speech Delivered in the House of Representatives in Committee of the Whole on the State of the Union, Friday, February 28, 1851 (Washington, DC, 18,51), 21
38. Horace Mann, Speech on the Institution of Slavery; Delivered in the House of Representatives, August 17, 1852 (Washington, DC, 1852), 5
39. Caroline Healy Dall, "Amy: A Tale," Liberty Bell 10 (1849), 4-22; see esp. 8. 14-15
40. Dall, "The Unalienable Love," Liberty Bell 15 (1858), 88 ff
41. See, for example, DeBow's Review of Southern and Western States 2 (Jan. 1851), 47
42. Southern Quarterly Review 5 (Jan. 1852), 536
43. Southern Literary Messenger 20 (Apr. 1854), 193
44. The encounter with Philadelphia clergyman Jeremiah Durham is chronicled in ch. 31 of Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, ed. Jean Fagan Yellin (Cambridge, MA, 1978)
45. Brown is quoted by Jean Fagan Yellin, Harriet Jacobs: A Life (New York, 2004), 131
46. William Wells Brown, Narrative of William Wells Brown: A Fugitive Slave Written By Himself (Boston, MA, 1847), 46-48
47. Solomon Northrup, Twelve Years a Slave: Narrative of Solomon Northup, A Citizen of New York Kidnapped in Washington City in 1841, and Rescued in 1853 (Auburn, NY, 1853), 188-89, 52-53
48. Henry Bibb, Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, An American Slave, Written by Himself (New York, 1849), 42