A More Perfect Union: Garrisonian Abolitionism in American Political Thought
Dissertation, Brandeis University (
1999)
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Abstract
Few studies have focused on the philosophical origins of William Lloyd Garrison's abolitionism to show how he and his followers employed particular moral concepts to make a philosophical argument against slavery and for racial equality. This study traces the moral ideas that arose out of the American Revolution, Transcendentalism, the Scottish Enlightenment, New England Calvinism, and the First and Second Great Awakenings to demonstrate how these disparate ideas coalesced in the abolitionist conviction that slavery was wrong. It pays particular attention to the sentimentalist ethics of Francis Hutcheson, the writings on free will and benevolence by early and influential ministers like Jonathan Edwards and Samuel Hopkins, the fiery sermons of nineteenth-century evangelist Charles Grandison Finney, and the eloquent antislavery writings of the Transcendentalists Theodore Parker, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry David Thoreau. By showing which moral concepts made the development of an abolitionist movement possible, therefore, it suggests why this period of intense and sustained reform activity occurred when it did. ;In Garrisonian speeches and articles, for example, slavery became a terrible sin rather than an inevitable accommodation to an imperfect world, true liberty meant choosing virtue rather than merely exercising license to do whatever one wished, and early notions of American citizenship became suddenly imbued with the ethos of fellowship. The Garrisonian abolitionists, while sharing many liberal principles and often using the language of liberalism, nevertheless posed a challenge to liberalism. To make that argument, this study examines the ways in which the abolitionist agitation of the antebellum years in some ways fits and in other ways falls outside of the liberal consensus theory of American politics. A brief examination of Abraham Lincoln's opposition to slavery shows the broader impact of abolitionist ideas on the antebellum period by demonstrating the similarities between Lincoln's and Garrison's arguments against slavery.