-----Original Message----- From: Yoshie Furuhashi <furuhashi.1 at osu.edu>
>>On Fri, 19 Oct 2001, Miles Jackson wrote:
>>
>>> Note: by Doug's logic here, an Abolitionist living in the South in the
>>> early 1800s would be "evading reality". We can't judge the ultimate
>>> success of a political viewpoint or strategy by how popular it is
>>> today.
>>
>>I'm not sure I follow you here. [...] Abolition in the
>>South, on the other hand, which had almost no resonance in the early 1800s
>>(when the cotton gin first got going) had even less resonance on the eve
>>of the civil war. It seems like the model of a completely impotent, tiny
>>minority that barely rates a footnote in the historical record.
It depends on who you're thinking about. How about Harriet Tubman? How about the Underground Railroad? They got 'resonance' among slaves, you bet they did. There's an active abolition movement for you.
In any case, interestingly enough, the historical record is not quite what you say - there were a couple of books on this which I extensively annotated, but I always forget authors' names. But in any case, the idea of abolition was pretty respectable in the South until rather late, the 1830's anyway and maybe later. It was generally thought by many intellectuals to be a temporary evil. Usually the Southern white abolitionists favored abolition-by-attrition plans, whereby the children of slaves would be born free. (Those are the plans which were implemented in the Northern states.) In the period 1830-1860 there was a serious sharpening of the issue, under the right-wing ideological leadership of the South Carolineans. Ideological and scientific justifications of the enslavement of Africans as a permanent and desirable condition were put forward during this period. The Dred Scott decision was the high point of resurgent and triumphant slaveholder ideology. During this period there was a real crackdown on the southern abolitionists.
Lou Paulsen