The Erotic South: Civilization and Sexuality in American Abolitionism

Abstract

AMERICAN ANTISLAVERY SENTIMENT TOOK A VERY DIFFERENT TURN AFTER 1831. Where early abolitionism accepted a gradual end to slavery, after 1831 immediate emancipation became the goal and abolitionism became a passion driving men and women into lifelong reform careers. Yet slavery was not new in 1831-it had been present for nearly two centuries. And slavery did not suddenly become evil in 1831; by abolitionist logic it had been sinful all along. Still, a number of Northern whites who had little direct contact with the institution joined blacks in becoming acutely aware of it, so much so that they felt compelled to seek its instant destruction. There is a mystery here, a need to account for the rise of a particular kind of antislavery sentiment at a particular moment in time. The problem, however, is not fully to be resolved by a search for direct causes of post1830 abolitionism. There is the related, perhaps prior, task of charting antislavery's form, a need to determine why it seized upon certain issues while ignoring others, why its images were so compelling to whites who might well have ignored slavery, and why those who accepted abolitionism's call also drifted into a striking and novel variety of other reforms. Historians attempting to assess the antislavery impulse have sometimes seized upon the doctrine of disinterested benevolence, a product of 1820s