Legacy Theses and Dissertations (1940-2009)
Permanent URI for this collectionhttps://hdl.handle.net/10657/6771
This collection gathers digitized University of Houston theses and dissertations dating from 1940.
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Browsing Legacy Theses and Dissertations (1940-2009) by Subject "Abolitionists--United States--History"
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Item "An honest fanatic," the images of the abolitionist in the antebellum and historical minds(1984) Vogt, Allen Roy; Miles, Edwin A.; Younger, Richard D.; Stone, Bailey S.; Pickering, James H.This is not a study of the history the abolitionists made but rather a study of what history has made of the abolitionists. They swiftly became images, and it is therefore the principal purpose of this study to investigate the nature, status, rationale, and significance of the antebellum imagery associated with the abolitionists. To this end, antebellum sources and later historical works, generally of the prewar era and specifically of abolitionism, are consulted. An initial consideration of imagery connected to the two abolitionists with the greatest name recognition—William Lloyd Garrison and John Brown— yields highly meaningful clues to overall abolitionist imagery. Garrison was either the Reformer Incarnate or the Extremist Extraordinaire. John Brown, faring no differently, was a noble martyr or an ignoble criminal. Investigating the abolitionists as a whole confirms at least nine major images, three positive and six negative. The abolitionists and their sympathizers imagined abolitionists as humanitarians, crusading reformers, and courageous martyrs. The revilers of the abolitionists perceived seditious fanatics, abstract visionaries, hypocrites, meddling outsiders, neurotics, and Evil Incarnate. As to which images were daninant in the antebellun American mind and why, antebellum Americans offered their own tentative answers in the postal controversy of 1835-1836 involving the circulation of abolitionist literature. The result was that, amidst occasional positive allusions, the abolitionists were buried under an avalanche of odious appellations. When other examples of antiabolitionisn also manifested themselves, the dominant imagery of abolitionists appeared clearly negative, and the initial explanations centered on an imagined threat to the entire ethos of southern and northern societies. Postbellum perspectives on the nature of abolitionist imagery by historians of southern and northern history have included judgments virtually copied from their antebellum forebears. And what is the overall inportance of abolitionist imagery? Such imagery provides sone additional historical understanding of at least three matters: first, the word "abolitionist," which included identifiable intangibles; second, the "irrational perception" which culminated in the Civil War, a perception which involved a negatively-charged association of Lincoln and Republicanism with abolitionisn; and, third, the interpretive framework used by the historians of abolitionism, wherein the abolitionist imagery became historiographical as well as historical.