Creating the Culture of Reform in Antebellum AmericaUniversity of Georgia Press, 2006 M12 1 - 280 pages In this study, T. Gregory Garvey illustrates how activists and reformers claimed the instruments of mass media to create a freestanding culture of reform that enabled voices disfranchised by church or state to speak as equals in public debates over the nation’s values. Competition among antebellum reformers in religion, women’s rights, and antislavery institutionalized a structure of ideological debate that continues to define popular reform movements. The foundations of the culture of reform lie, according to Garvey, in the reconstruction of publicity that coincided with the religious-sectarian struggles of the early nineteenth century. To counter challenges to their authority and to retain church members, both conservative and liberal religious factions developed instruments of reform propaganda (newspapers, conventions, circuit riders, revivals) that were adapted by an emerging class of professional secular reformers in the women’s rights and antislavery movements. Garvey argues that debate among the reformers created a mode of “critical conversation” through which reformers of all ideological persuasions collectively forged new conventions of public discourse as they struggled to shape public opinion. Focusing on debates between Lyman Beecher and William Ellery Channing over religious doctrine, Angelina Grimke and Catharine Beecher over women’s participation in antislavery, and William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass over the ethics of political participation, Garvey argues that “crucible-like sites of public debate” emerged as the core of the culture of reform. To emphasize the redefinition of publicity provoked by antebellum reform movements, Garvey concludes the book with a chapter that presents Emersonian self-reliance as an effort to transform the partisan nature of reform discourse into a model of sincere public speech that affirms both self and community. |
From inside the book
Results 1-5 of 90
... Slavery and Abolitionism with Reference to the Duty of American Females. Philadelphia: Henry Perkins, 1837. Frederick Douglass, The Frederick Douglass Papers, edited by John Blassingame and John R. McGivigan, 6 vols. New Haven, Conn ...
... slavery. Ironically, as Garrison concluded that the gradualist position of Lyman Beecher and the Congregationalists was not just immoral but was publicized in bad faith, he repudiated Beecherism in order to construct a voice that could ...
... slavery, Douglass saw in the Constitution a coercive power with which to both overcome slavery and instantiate equality by making the Constitution itself the subject of debate in a pluralistic public discourse. In each of these cases ...
... slavery would cause the nation to collapse. Hence, they suppressed it whenever possible and obfuscated it when discussion was unavoidable. By their reasoning, the salvation of the Union was contingent on a strategic distortion of the ...
... slavery. In the argument of Creating the Culture of Reform in Antebellum America, the liberal consensus model represents both an antagonist and a context in that, on the one hand, it tends to collapse oppositions into a single tradition ...
Contents
1 | |
Religious Pluralism and the Origins of the Culture of Reform | 31 |
Sincerity and Publicity in the GrimkéBeecher Debate | 74 |
Garrison Douglass and the Problem of Politics | 121 |
Emersons SelfReliance as a Theory of Community | 161 |
Sincerity and Pluralism in Critical Conversation | 199 |
Notes | 203 |
Bibliography | 223 |
Index | 237 |