Humanitarian Reform Research Articles

The Standing Bear Controversy: Prelude to Indian Reform

The first full length study of the Standing Bear trial and its concequences on the larger American and Native American societies: the rise of the organized humanitarian reform movement, changes in the administration of Indian affairs, and the passage of the General Allotment Act of 1887.

Slavery and Antislavery in Mauritius, 1810-1833: The Conflict between Economic Expansion and Humanitarian Reform under British Rule

Slavery and Antislavery in Mauritius, 1810-1833: The Conflict between Economic Expansion and Humanitarian Reform under British Rule

The Salmon P. Chase Papers: A Review Essay

The Salmon R Chase Papers: A Review Essay Fred Blue The publication of The Salmon P. Chase Papers, volume 5, Correspondence, 1865-1873 by the Kent State University Press brings to a conclusion a project begun more than ten years ago. It also coincides with the untimely passing of John Niven, the project's editor. The Chase Papers has already become of immense value to scholars and students of nineteenth-century American politics. Needless to say, its editor will be sorely missed by friends and colleagues. Salmon P. Chase was an enigma both to his contemporaries and to twentiethcentury historians. Both groups have pictured him as being caught between antislavery and egalitarian principle on the one hand and a relentless political ambition on the other. Not surprisingly, today there is no more consensus on which motivation was dominant than there was during Chase's lifetime. In 1 830, at the age of twenty-two, he settled in Cincinnati and sought his place in society as a rising young attorney. He quickly revealed both his desire for material gain and a sincere interest in humanitarian reform. As his law career blossomed, so did his concern for fugitive slaves; in fact, he was soon known to friends and foes alike as "the Attorney General for Runaway Negroes ." His genuine interest in the plight of fugitives also led him into politics, first on the third-party level as a Liberty and Free Soil leader; the latter party's bargaining power in the Ohio legislature gave him an opening to win a controversial election to the U.S. Senate in 1 849. Yet to critics, he had placed his own electoral success above Free Soil principle and had sacrificed the party's independence for his own selfish ambition. Helping to found the Republican party, he immediately became an aspiring presidential contender. Election as Ohio's first Republican governor in 1 855 was for Chase little more than what he hoped would be a stepping stone to the White House. ' The Salmon P. Chase Papers, volumes 1 through 4, edited by John Niven and published by the Kent State University Press (1993-97), include: Journals: 1829-1872, Correspondence: 18231857 , Correspondence: 1858-March 1863, and Correspondence: 1863-1864. 1 Chase's motivation has long intrigued historians. The most recent effort to deal with his sometimes contradictory and sometimes consistent motives is that of Stephen E. Maizlish in "Salmon P. Civil War History, Vol. xliv No. 4 © 1998 by The Kent State University Press 286CIVIL WAR HISTORY The rest of Chase's career is better known to students of the Civil War era. As presidential contender, Abraham Lincoln's secretary of the Treasury, and chief justice during the Reconstruction era he continued to display the conflicting goals of reform and personal political power. Yet for Chase the two concepts were thoroughly compatible and in fact could be achieved simultaneously. Due to his cold and aloof personality and his unremitting ambition to be president, Chase developed few close personal friendships. Yet no one, critic or defender alike, could deny his achievements. Never winning the office he most desired, he nevertheless helped push a cautiousAbraham Lincoln toward emancipation and a measure ofracial equality forAfricanAmericans. Earlier in Ohio he had used his election to the Senate as a way to bring a partial repeal of the state's infamous black laws. Despite his determined drive for the White House, as secretary oftheTreasury he was responsible for significant reform in the nation's financial affairs, and as chiefjustice he helped restore prestige to the Supreme Court and personally created ajudicial record ofindependence and impartiality. Chase's life was thus one of achievement as well as political ambition. Because of the multifaceted aspects of Chase's forty years in politics and reform his career provides an important window on the events of the critical middle decades of the nineteenth century. Thus the publication of his papers allows scholars in the field as well as those with a more casual interest in these years to watch politics unfold through the eyes of one of its most important players and his many correspondents. Niven and his editorial staff sorted through thousands of Chase letters...

Slavery and Antislavery in Mauritius, 1810-33: The Conflict between Economic Expansion and Humanitarian Reform under British Rule

Preface - Abbreviations in the Notes - Map of Administrative Districts of Mauritius - Introduction: History and Historiography - The Abolitionists Discover the Mauritius Question - Corruption Concealed: The Farquhar Era 1810-1822 - Reform Pretended: Cole and Telfair - Slavery in 1826: A Demographic Survey - Upheaval and the Failure of Protection - The Trauma of Slavery - Resistance and Other Responses to Slavery - Slavery and Freedom in Port Louis - Slaves as Antislavery Property - Conclusion - Appendices - Endnotes - Bibliography - Index

Literature and Humanitarian Reform in the Civil War Era

Literature and Humanitarian Reform in the Civil War Era

Objectivity is not neutrality: explanatory schemes in history

In Objectivity Is Not Neutrality, Thomas L. Haskell argues for a moderate historicism that acknowledges the force of perspective and reaffirms the pluralistic practices of a liberal democratic society-even while upholding time-honored distinctions between fact and fiction, scholarship and propaganda, right and might. Haskell addresses questions that will interest philosophers and literary theorists no less than historians, exploring topics ranging from the productivity of slave labor to the cultural concomitants of capitalism, from John Stuart Mill's youthful mental crisis to the cognitive preconditions that set the stage for antislavery and other humanitarian reforms after 1750. He traces the surprisingly short history of the word responsibility, which turns out to be no older than the United States. He examines the reasons for the rising authority of professional experts in nineteenth-century America. And he wonders whether the epistemological radicalism of recent years leaves us with any adequate basis for justifying human rights-rights of academic freedom, for example, or the right not to be tortured. Written by a thoughtful critic of the historical profession, Objectivity Is Not Neutrality calls upon historians to think deeply about the nature of historical explanation and to acknowledge more fully than ever before the theoretical dimension of their work.

In the Master's Eye: Representations of Women, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Antebellum Southern Literature , and: Literature and Humanitarian Reform in the Civil War Era (review)

150CIVIL WAR HISTORY In the Master's Eye: Representations of Women, Blacks, and Poor Whites in Antebellum Southern Literature. By Susan J. Tracy. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1995. Pp. ix, 307. $42.50.) Literature andHumanitarian Reform in the Civil War Era. By Gregory Eiselein. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996. Pp. xi, 215. $29.95.) The two works under review here arejoined by their authors' common desire to extract from literature (novels, poems, essays, personal accounts) a picture, in the first instance, of the slave holders' worldview on the eve of the Civil War, and in the second case, a description of the crippling, suffocating attitudes that marred the efforts of well-meaning humanitarians in all but a few cases. Both authors also follow guidelines ofcultural studies to describe not only what ideas reigned during the period of study, but how and why the ideas were produced. Susan J. Tracy studies five male novelists often associated with the defense of slavery and Southern culture: John Pendleton Kennedy, William Alexander Caruthers, Nathaniel BeverleyTucker, William Gilmore Simms, andJames Ewell Heath, whom Tracy identifies as "the only true liberal ofthe group" (1). Tracey considers her work to be a "Marxist feminist project ... to consider the parts of a literary text in relation to the whole" (2). Sure enough, she rounds up the usual savants—Karl Marx,Antonio Gramsci, RaymondWilliams, Eugene Genovese— and with their methodological help argues that the proslavery argument "was as much about gender and class as it was about race relations" (4). Various chapters explore the novelists' characterizations ofthe place for poor whites, blacks, daughters, mothers, spinsters, fallen women, belles, "spirited" women, and slaves. Not surprisingly, she finds that the novelists reflected the ideas of the South's ruling "class," which exercised patriarchal powerwith "terror and violence" (224). Anyone familiar with the novelists studied or with the writings of George Fitzhugh knows that a wide range of national and especially Northern developments came under the condemning gaze of these writers. Especially during the Jackson period, the land was ablaze with proposals from crackpot schemers who wished to redesign the social order with blueprints of their own manufacture . If Tracy is correct, that the novelists' characters reflect concerns about class and gender more than race, and that they in turn represent the social vision ofthe South's leaders, then it is no surprise that gender and class figured prominently in the worries ofthe elite. In the "Age ofthe Common Man" and uncommon women like Sarah and Angelina Grimké, or striking Lowell mill girls, threats to social order were ubiquitous and varied. The dates of Tracy's main texts may offer an explanation for her discovery. The appendix which lists the novels examined reveals the median date of publication to be 1838. One wonders if a description of a "worldview" extracted from a literary analysis of many novels written during or before the Jackson period can suffice to describe the notions of a generation living a quarter century later. Gregory Eiselein, assistant professor of English at Kansas State University, has authored Literature and Humanitarian Reform in the Civil War Era, which BOOK REVIEWSI5I joins seven other titles in the series Philanthropic Studies, edited by Robert Payton and Dwight Burlingame. The subject of the study is the writing and philanthropic practices of John Brown, Louisa May Alcott, Lydia Maria Child, Henry Thoreau, former slave Harriet Jacobs, and especiallyWaltWhitman, who emerges as the most successful practitioner of "eccentric philanthropy." Normal philanthropy, Eiselein asserts, is marred by authoritarianism, control, efforts to stabiUze society, efficiency, social distance between the giver and receiver of the act, and—after the Civil War—the presence and misguided efforts of the national government. In his work the author hopes to defend benevolence from defamation by writers who either praise it uncritically for its pure selflessness, or from "social control" historians who see in benevolence only aggressive efforts to exact obligations "and control the thinking, values, and activities of certain groups" ( 1 1 ). Neither ofthese interpretations "can explain the complexity , diversity, or idiosyncracy of benevolent work" ( 1 2). Benevolence could be made acceptable only if "eccentric" care-giving, by which Eiselein means care that is noncoercive and patient centered, were the...

Slavery and Antislavery in Mauritius, 1810–33: The Conflict between Economic Expansion and Humanitarian Reform under British Rule. By Anthony J. Barker. New York: St. Martin's Press, Inc., 1996. Pp. x, 225. $65.00.

Slavery and Antislavery in Mauritius, 1810–33: The Conflict between Economic Expansion and Humanitarian Reform under British Rule. By Anthony J. Barker. New York: St. Martin's Press, Inc., 1996. Pp. x, 225. $65.00. - Volume 58 Issue 1

Literature and humanitarian reform in the Civil War era

List of Illustrations Preface 1. An Introduction to Eccentric Benevolence 2. Dangerous Philanthropy 3. Harriet Jacobs and the Subversion of Style 4. Suffering Beyond Description 5. Whitman and the Humanitarian Possibilities of Lilacs 6. Eccentric Benevolence and its Limits 7. Afterword: AIDS and Unconventional Caring Notes Index

Eiselein, Gregory. Literature and Humanitarian Reform in the Civil War Era [review

Eiselein, Gregory. Literature and Humanitarian Reform in the Civil War Era [review

Slavery and antislavery in Mauritius, 1810-33: the conflict between economic expansion and humanitarian reform under British rule

Slavery and antislavery in Mauritius, 1810-33: the conflict between economic expansion and humanitarian reform under British rule

The Lessons of a Sentimental Education: Zitkala-Ša’s Autobiographical Narratives

G e r t r u d e K A s e b i e r , “ Z i t k a l a - S a ,” c a . 1 8 9 8 P h o t o g r a p h i c H i s t o r y C o l l e c t i o n N a t i o n a l M u s e u m o f A m e r i c a n H i s t o r y , S m i t h s o n i a n I n s t i t u t i o n S U S A N B E R N A R D I N University o f Minnesota, Morris The Lessons of a Sentimental Education: Zitkala-Sa’s Autobiographical Narratives i In the post-frontier culture of the turn of the century, nationally prominent magazines such as Harper’ s and Atlantic Monthly documented and lamented the “vanishing” West even as they debated the possibilities of assimilating its original inhabitants in the future.1 Alongside a wide range of writings about Indians in both magazines—articles on federal Indian policy, western sketches, ethnographic Indian “tales”—appeared stories by Gertrude Simmons Bonnin, or Zitkala-Sa, a mixed-blood Sioux writer and activist. Zitkala-Sa used her novel status as a literary Indian woman to challenge her readers’ embrace of nationalist narratives rele­ gating Native Americans to destinies of assimilation and disappearance.2 Like the Native American women writers who preceded and followed her in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century—S. Alice Callahan, Pauline Johnson, Mourning Dove—Zitkala-Sa drew from sentimental and autobiographical genres and then strategically revised those genres for a predominantly non-Indian readership. This strategy encouraged her to claim and reshape the narrative and moral authority associated with the two literary forms. The challenges she faced in doing so appear most prominently in her three autobiographical stories, published in consecu­ tive issues of Atlantic Monthly in 1900. The first literary response to the era’s Indian education system, Zitkala-Sa’s stories selectively use the lan­ guage of domesticity to scrutinize sentimental ideology’s foundational role in compulsory Indian education as well as its related participation in national efforts to “Americanize” the Indian.3At the same time, her auto­ biographical fiction reveals how two seemingly competing discourses involving Indians, eastern-based humanitarian reform and literary 214 Western American Literature Westerns, entwined in their efforts to include the “Vanishing Indian” in a triumphant national story of progress and expansion. Zitkala-Sa was a recipient of the era’s nationwide efforts to assimi­ late Indians through schooling, efforts engineered and promoted by the self-styled “Friends of the Indian,” a small but influential group of eastern educators, ministers, and government officials. Using available print media—including magazines, pamphlets, and petitions—the Friends urged both the government and the public to “Americanize the Indian” via citizenship, Christianity, education, and private land ownership. In the Atlantic, one such reformer, Henry Dawes, argued in 1899 that “the present Indian policy of the nation [is] to fit the Indian for civilization and to absorb him into it. It is a national work” (281). To that end, the Friends of the Indian made compulsory education the cornerstone of their efforts to assimilate those who had long defied incorporation within the nation.4 Armed with vocabulary drawn from domesticity, Commissioner of Indian Affairs Thomas J. Morgan identi­ fied compulsory education as the most effective way to make the Indian youth “feel that the United States, and not some paltry reserva­ tion, is their home” (225). Like the Friends of the Indian, Zitkala-Sa was invested in the goals and methods of educating Indians. She carried this focus throughout her abbreviated period of mainstream literary production (1900-1902) and throughout her subsequent career as member and officer of the first secular pan-Indian organization, the Society of American Indians (SAI); as editor of the SAI journal; as independent lobbyist for educa­ tion reform and self-determination; and as founder of the National Council of American Indians.5 Born in 1876 to a white...

Reforming the world

FEW HISTORIANS FAMILIAR WITH THE SUBJECT WOULD ARGUE WITH Thomas Haskell's assertion that humanitarian reformers of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries were consummate interpreters of a new moral universe. They have differed greatly, however, over what compelled them to become reformers-class interest, the market, guilt? Yet despite the breadth of scholarly interest in the sources of humanitarianism a factor in early American reform movements, Robert Abzug's study, Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination, stands alone in its effort to examine the cosmology of early American reformers. Many aspects of what he defines their cosmology have been studied to one degree or another, but not a whole; not, that is, an intense, all-encompassing, even desperate, attempt by a very passionate group of young reformers to make religious sense of society, economy, race, politics, gender, and physiology (4). One reason for this neglect, Abzug points out in his finely crafted Preface, is the tendency by a fairly substantial body of scholars to assume that religion exists as a conscious or unconscious cover for

Beyond the Enlightenment Mentality: A Confucian Perspective on Ethics, Migration, and Global Stewardship

The American Heritage Dictionary(1992:611) defines the as [a] philosophical movement of the eighteenth century that emphasized the use of reason to scrutinize previously accepted doctrines and traditions and that brought about many humanitarian reforms. This definition seems, in light of recent discussions on multiculturalism, not only inadequate but simple-minded. Even Immanuel Kant's impassioned characterization of the Enlightenment spirit as dare to know! is perceived to signal conflicts of interpretation rather than a straightforward assertion of human rationality. As Martin Jay (1984:30) comments, the Enlightenment is

Dr. Thomas A. Bland, Critic of Forced Assimilation

On Valentine’s Day, 14 February 1882, former-Indian-superintendent-turned-reformer Colonel Alfred B. Meacham related a recent premonition of death to his friend Dr. Thomas A. Bland. Believing his earthly mission nearly fulfilled, Meacham implored Bland to continue publication of his monthly periodical devoted to Indian reform, The Council Fire. Two days later, Meacham died at his editorial table, and Bland became editor of the journal.’ Bland used The Council Five and the National Indian Defence Association, which he founded in 1885, as vehicles for his particular philosophy of Indian reform. Bland largely accepted the goal of Indian assimilation as outlined by humanitarian reformers of his generation. However, in his view, proponents of coercive allotment of reservation land had mistaken the end for the means. He insisted that successful assimilation demanded a gradual and voluntary conversion and not compulsion.2 Convinced that sudden change was detrimental, Bland began a crusade to protect tribal institutions and property rights. As a critic of forced assimilation, he clashed with reformers in the Women’s National Indian Association, the Indian Rights Association, the Board of Indian Commissioners, and the Lake Mohonk Conference of ”Friends of the Indians,” who campaigned vigorously to make severalty compulsory. Indeed, Bland’s outlook and struggle against rapid assimilation provides significant

Nineteenth Century Women and Reform: The Women's National Indian Association

N A CRISP NOVEMBER DAY in 1888, Mrs. E H. Taylor welcomed seventy-five delegates from fourteen different states to the Methodist Episcopal Church in Philadelphia. Not long ago, women felt they could do almost nothing to reform public abuses, and to redress public wrongs, she informed her audience. Now we know that with united hearts, and God on our side, we can do effective work everywhere for the cause of righteousness ....' In her address, Mrs. Taylor eloquently summed up women's role in humanitarian reform to the middle and upper class women gathered before her. They were members of the Women's National Indian Association (WNIA) which had already actively labored in behalf of numerous Indian tribes for almost ten years and would continue for another six decades. The organization began in April, 1879 when Mary Lucinda Bonney stood before the monthly meeting of the Women's Home Mission Circle of the First Baptist Church in Philadelphia and reported the disturbing news that railroads and settlers were clamoring to enter Indian Territory in direct violation of federal treaties. Bonney believed that such a wrong..,. would greatly hinder the work of Christianizing the Indians, and would also be a vast moral evil to [the] nation.2 She sucessfully recruited friends and the WNIA was launched.

Corporate power and employee relations

Corporations have not sufficiently yielded to social pressures for humanitarian reforms. To make such reforms requires that management give up some control. Giving up control contradicts traditional managerial philosophy. The bureaucratic structure of corporations gives management the power to virtually eliminate most social influences. An alternative to the bureaucratic corporation is a shared ownership corporation where investors, management, and low ranking employees all own the corporation. This alternative balances the power by giving all participants in the corporation power to influence policy. Without this redistribution of power, or something like it, any hope for significant humanitarian reforms is vain.

Economics and the social reality of prisons

On both sides of the Atlantic penal history is the object of a resurgent and revisionist interest. American historical scholarship conceptualized the prison as a natural result of humanitarian reforms in a society characterized by social and political consensus. European scholars and the radical or new criminologists in America, however, challenged this traditional view by linking the prison to the clash between social and economic classes in a society characterized by conflict. In spite of the existence of some theoretical literature that emphasizes a general economic relationship to law creation and criminality, American penal historians have ignored the possible importance of this theoretical perspective to an explanation of the origin and development of prisons. This study is an attempt to evaluate the importance of economic forces to the creation and development of the prison in America.

The house of refuge movement: Humanitarian gesture or simple exploitation?

The 1800s marked the early development of a new approach to child welfare in the United States. Beginning with the house of refuge movement (1820s) and culminating with the creation of the juvenile court (1899), this developmental period has been traditionally praised as an age of humanitarian reform. Sociological research has suggested, however, that the creation of the juvenile court served mainly as a new form of social control designed to protect the power and privilege of the middle and upper classes while furthering the exploitation of the lower class. Unfortunately this research has treated only the reforms of the middle to late 1800s. The present study seeks to contribute to this literature by illuminating the early reforms. More specifically, an examination of the New York, Boston, and Philadelphia houses of refuge reveals that the exploitation thesis provides a more complete explanation of the emergence of these houses than does the humanitarian position.

State, Civil Society, and Total Institutions: A Critique of Recent Social Histories of Punishment

Three books published during the seventies, by Michel Foucault, Michael Ignatieff, and David Rothman, greatly revised the history of the penitentiary. Contrary to the received wisdom which located the penitentiary's origin in the altruism of Quakers and other humanitarian reformers, and portrayed it as a humane advance from the squalid jails and workhouses, corporal and capital punishment, and transportation that preceded it, the revisionist accounts characterized the penitentiary, and other nineteenth-century "asylums" as weapons of class conflict or instruments of "social control." Social theories on a grand scale, such as Marxism or structural-functionalism, however, claim too much. The revisionist historiography of the prison followed these theories into three major misconceptions: that the state controls a monopoly over punitive regulation of behavior, that the state's moral authority and practical power are the major sources of social order, and that all social relations can be described in terms of power and subordination. The next generation of historical writing on crime and punishment must subject these distorting misconceptions to empirical examination.