"We Have Had Conversation in the World": The Abolitionists and Spontaneity

Abstract

Social control, a favorite theme in American sociology in the 1920s, has more recently attracted the notice of historians. This is particularly true of writings on antebellum reform. In his influential article on "Religious Benevolence as Social Control" Clifford S. Griffin observed that "between 1815 and the Civil War the United States was in a ferment of great and fundamental social, economic, and political change"; reform movements, he argued, were often instituted by Protestant evangelicals who wished to resist change and keep the nation "under control."1 Subsequent books and articles have indicated that some reformers were disgruntled Fed- eralists and ministers of newly disestablished churches - men who pre- sumably had sufficient reason to lament the decline of moral leadership in the republic. The creation of reform societies, we have also learned, enabled middle-class Americans to signify their own virtues as upright, disciplined citizens in a land thought to be losing sight of proper stan- dards. Abolitionism, plainly more controversial than most reform causes, has not been excepted from generalizations about control. Abolitionists apparently came from the same conservative backgrounds, shared the theocratic design to check the sins of people unlike themselves, and emu- lated the propaganda techniques of benevolent societies.2 One recent essay links antislavery to attitudes toward sexuality: "abolitionists were driven as much by a generalized desire to control the 'animal nature' standing between man and civilization as they were by a specific quarrel with the South."3 Their fascination with eroticism on Southern plantations and their uneasy discussions of marriage suggest that many abolitionists mis- trusted signs of impulsive, uncontrolled behavior in themselves; there- fore, they sought to identify themselves with self-discipline.