The Federalist Trope: Power and Passion in Abolitionist Rhetoric

Marc M. Arkin

On New Year's Day 1831, William Lloyd Garrison launched the Liberator. With that first edition—four hundred copies printed in the middle of the night using borrowed type—Garrison promised a new era in the American antislavery movement. In now familiar words, Garrison proclaimed, "I am aware that many object to the severity of my language, but is there not cause for severity?" Continuing, he announced a new abolitionist strategy:	1
I will be harsh as truth, and uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation. No! no! Tell a man whose house is on fire to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen;—but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest—I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—AND I WILL BE HEARD.1
And, indeed, 1831 did mark a watershed in the American antislavery movement. Before 1831, American antislavery was characterized by gradualist measures and a colonizationist program intended to transport all freed black people out of the country. After 1831, suddenly energized abolitionists insisted on immediate emancipation and committed themselves to creation of a society in which blacks would enjoy at least civil equality with whites. The temperate—and temporizing—antislavery measures of the early republic were swept away by radical views, radical actions, and radical language, espoused by men and women committed to lifelong careers of social reform.2	2
Whether or not William Lloyd Garrison and the Liberator actually precipitated this "new antislavery era," historians agree that Garrison crystallized a new antislavery rhetoric: vivid, sentimental, aggressive, graphic, and, at times, overwhelmingly physical. Following Garrison's lead, after 1830 abolitionist literature demonstrated a major thematic shift. The dangers presented by power, luxury, and the unchecked will to dominate, always a staple of antislavery writing, became increasingly intertwined with images of sexual exploitation and actual physical suffering on the part of the slave.3	3
In attempting to account for both this change and the persuasive force of the Garrisonian polemic, historians have suggested that the threat to social order posed by unrestrained power attained new cultural resonance during the age of Jackson. They trace this heightened sensitivity to factors ranging from the social dislocation caused by the development of a market economy and the spread of romantic individualism to changing cultural attitudes toward sex, the family, and gender roles. All seem to agree, however, that power became inextricably associated with sexual hierarchy in the early Victorian mind; as a result, northern abolitionists such as Garrison became fixated, in Ronald Walters's fine thirty-year-old phrase, on "the erotic south," a place where sexual license was rampant, restraint was absent, and that defined—by negation—what the proper ordering of society should be.4	. . .