Abstract
The campaign of contentious performances in abolitionism heightened the conflict between competing rhetorics of slavery and hence drove forward the problematization of American slavery. Heterodoxic status imaginaries of race and gender promoted by the abolitionists were especially provocative and productive of pathos. Instigating moral panic among some southerners and stirring their overreactionary countermobilization was abolitionist status claimsmaking with regard to race, gender, region, as well as with regard to the status of slaveowners, the enslaved, and northern advocates of antislavery. Such contentious performances of race and gender by abolitionist protest rhetoric precipitated, mediated, and amplified the national conflict over slavery. The chapter sketches out how the moral emotions mattered historically for the long-term success of abolitionism in accomplishing the actual abolition of slavery.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
References
Abruzzo, Margaret. 2011. Polemical Pain: Slavery, Cruelty, and the Rise of Humanitarianism. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.
Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 2010. The Honor Code: How Moral Revolutions Happen. New York: W. W. Norton & Company.
Ashworth, John. 1992. The Relationship between Capitalism and Humanitarianism. In The Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation, ed. T. Bender, 180–199. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Benjamin, Jessica. 1988. The Bonds of Love: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and the Problem of Domination. New York: Pantheon Books.
Braude, Ann. 2001. Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America. Second Edition. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Burstein, Andrew. 1999. Sentimental Democracy: The Evolution of America’s Romantic Self-Image. New York: Hill and Wang.
Clark, Elizabeth B. 1995. ‘The Sacred Rights of the Weak’: Pain, Sympathy, and the Culture of Individual Rights in Antebellum America. Journal of American History 82(2): 463–493.
Cutter, Barbara. 2003. Domestic Devils, Battlefield Angels: The Radicalism of American Womanhood, 1830–1865. DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press.
Dafoe, Allan, Jonathan Renshon, and Paul Huth. 2014. Reputation and Status as Motives for War. Annual Review of Political Science 17: 371–393.
Davis, David Brion. 2014. The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation. New York: Alfred A. Knopf.
de Tocqueville, Alexis. 1840. Democracy in America. vol. 2, The Social Influence of Democracy. Trans. H. Reeve. New York: J. & H. G. Langley.
Faulkner, Carol. 2011. Lucretia Mott’s Heresy: Abolition and Women’s Rights in Nineteenth-Century America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Ginzberg, Lori D. 1990. Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth-Century United States. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Goodwin, Jeff. 2001. No Other Way Out: States and Revolutionary Movements, 1945–1991. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Heise, David. 1979. Understanding Events: Affect and the Construction of Social Action. New York: Cambridge University Press.
———. 2007. Expressive Order: Confirming Sentiments in Social Actions. New York: Springer.
Herdt, Gilbert. 2009. Moral panics, Sex Panics: Fear and the Fight over Sexual Rights. New York: New York University Press.
Horton, Lois E. 2013. Harriet Tubman and the Fight for Freedom: A Brief History with Documents. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s.
Jeffrey, Julie Roy. 1998. The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism: Ordinary Women in the Antislavery Movement. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Juergensmeyer, Mark. 2003. Terror in the Mind of God: the Global Rise of Religious Violence. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Kellow, Margaret M.R. 2013. Women and Abolitionism in the United States: Recent Historiography. History Compass 11: 1008–1020.
Kemper, Theodore. 2011. Status, Power and Ritual Interaction: A Relational Reading of Durkheim, Goffman and Collins. Burlington, VT: Ashgate.
Kronsell, Annica, and Erika Svedberg, eds. 2012. Making Gender, Making War: Violence, Military and Peacekeeping Practices. New York: Routledge.
Landes, Joan B. 1988. Women and the Public Sphere In the Age of the French Revolution. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.
Lasser, Carol. 2008. Voyeuristic Abolitionism: Sex, Gender, and the Transformation of Antislavery Rhetoric. Journal of the Early Republic 28(1): 83–114.
Martineau, Harriet. 1981 [1837]. Society in America, edited by S. M. Lipset. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books.
Menand, Louis. 2001. The Metaphysical Club. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.
Pierson, Michael D. 2003. Free Hearts and Free Homes: Gender and American Antislavery Politics. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.
Piven, Frances Fox. 2006. Challenging Authority: How Ordinary People Change America. Boulder, CO: Rowman & Littlefield.
Ridgeway, Cecilia L 2011. Framed By Gender: How Gender Inequality Persists in the Modern World. New York: Oxford University Press.
Rogers, Kimberly B., Tobias Schroder, and Wolfgang School. 2013. The Affective Structure of Stereotype Content: Behavior and Emotion in Intergroup Context. Social Psychology Quarterly 76(2): 125–150.
Roth, Sarah N. 2014. Gender and Race in Antebellum Popular Culture. New York: Cambridge University Press.
Ryan, Mary P. 1990. Women in Public: Between Banners and Ballots, 1825–1880. Baltimore, MD: The John Hopkins University Press.
Ryan, Mary P 1997. Civic Wars: Democracy and Public Life in the American City during the Nineteenth Century. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Varon, Elizabeth R 2008. Disunion! The Coming of the American Civil War, 1789–1859. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Waldstreicher, David. 1997. In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776–1820. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Walters, Ronald G. 1973. The Erotic South: Civilization and Sexuality in American Abolitionism. American Quarterly 25(2): 177–201.
Whites, LeeAnn. 1992. The Civil War as a Crisis in Gender. In Divided Houses: Gender and the Civil War, eds. C. Clinton and N. Silber, 3–21. New York: Oxford University Press.
———. 2005. Gender Matters: Civil War, Reconstruction, and the Making of the New South. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Wyatt-Brown, Bertram. 1985. Yankee Saints and Southern Sinners. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press.
———. 1986. Honor and Violence in the Old South. New York: Oxford University Press.
Yee, Shirely J. 1992. Black Women Abolitionists: A Study in Activism, 1828–1860. Knoxville, TN: University of Tennessee Press.
Zaeske, Susan. 2003. Signatures of Citizenship: Petitioning, Antislavery & Women’s Political Identity. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.
Zagarri, Rosemarie. 2007. Revolutionary Backlash: Women and Politics in the Early American Republic. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2016 The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Lamb-Books, B. (2016). Looking Back Ahead: When Status Conflicts Explode. In: Angry Abolitionists and the Rhetoric of Slavery. Cultural Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31346-7_8
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-31346-7_8
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-31345-0
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-31346-7
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)