Evan Carton
More books by Evan Carton…
“The methods and limitations of Garrisonian abolitionism reflected the movement’s reasonable public relations concerns. Still an embattled minority in the north, white antislavery activists believed that the ultimate triumph of their cause depended on the gradual conversion of their neighbors to it. For them to rail against northern prejudice and the plight of free blacks in their own communities or to encourage slave revolt would only alienate the moderate whites whose support they hoped to enlist. But it was not only strategy that wedded most white abolitionists to peaceful moral appeal and made them willing patiently to await the blessing of Providence on their efforts. Intellectually, religiously, their opposition to slavery was genuine, even fervent. Yet slavery remained for them an abstraction, an emblem of evil rather than a lived human experience. Black people remained an abstraction, too, a collective object of pity and, inevitably, of condescension. For white antislavery activists, abolitionism was a campaign to save others: to save an alien race that suffering, simplicity, or natural passivity rendered helpless, to save the souls of slaveholders from eternal corruption by greed. It was not, however, a struggle to save themselves”
― Patriotic Treason: John Brown and the Soul of America
― Patriotic Treason: John Brown and the Soul of America
“The years of the Jackson presidency, 1829 through 1837, have been said to mark the rise of the common man in America. These were also the years in which America officially established the supremacy of the white man.
Of course, racial consciousness and discrimination long predated Jackson’s election. But in this period, immigration, westward expansion, and the intensifying debate about slavery prompted more categorical definitions and defenses of who had rights in and to the land and who did not.”
― Patriotic Treason: John Brown and the Soul of America
Of course, racial consciousness and discrimination long predated Jackson’s election. But in this period, immigration, westward expansion, and the intensifying debate about slavery prompted more categorical definitions and defenses of who had rights in and to the land and who did not.”
― Patriotic Treason: John Brown and the Soul of America
“It was the shared claim of whiteness, not language or custom or heritage, that allowed Dutchmen, Irishmen, Germans, Frenchmen and Swedes to come together with Englishmen and Scots as fellow Americans. Whiteness was the basis of commonality in the formation of the American common man. It conferred entitlement to manufacturing jobs and commercial opportunities in the north and to land in the west. Practical applications of the doctrine of white supremacy went far beyond southern defenses of slavery. Northerners also drew on the doctrine in their arguments for keeping or driving blacks out of their communities.”
― Patriotic Treason: John Brown and the Soul of America
― Patriotic Treason: John Brown and the Soul of America
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