We Have Had Conversation in the World
The Abolitionists and Spontaneity
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8895733 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Lewis Perry (corresponding author) |
| Year | 1975 |
| Volume | 6 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 3-26 |
| Publication date | 1975-03-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Canadian Review of American Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0007-7720 • E-ISSN: 1710-114X |
| Publisher | University of Toronto Press Inc. (UTPress) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.3138/cras-006-01-01 |
| OpenAlex | W2003400707 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 1 |
| References cited | 26 |
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
Abolitionism · Eulogy · Lament · Literature · Political science · Politics · Protestantism · Rhetoric · Sociology · Subtext · Theme (computing · American Constitutional Law and Politics · American History and Culture · Gender Studies · Law · Race, History, and American Society
Symbolic crusade
Freud, the mind of the moralist
The discovery of the asylum
The Inner Civil War
The Deveolpment of an American Culture
Radical Abolitionism
Harps in the Wind. The Story of the Singing Hutchinsons
Northern Concern for Socil Order as Cause for Rejecting Anti‐Slavery, 1831–1840
Fettered Freedom
Religious Benevolence as Social Control, 1815-1860
The Slave Power Conspiracy and the Paranoid Style
Andrew Jackson
Religious Benevolence as Social Control
The Party of Eros
Gentlemen of Property and Standing
Pedlar's Progress
The Journals of Bronson Alcott
An Errand of Mercy
The Pursuit of the Millennium
Millennial Dreams in Action
An Unsettled People
The Idea of Reform, Its Impact on Christian Thought and Action in the Age of the Fathers
The Erotic South
Pietism and the American Character
| Citations per year | 0.02 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 1981 - 1981 (1) |
| Highly cited | No |