Slavery, capitalism, and the middling sorts: the rank and file of political abolitionism
Titel:
Slavery, capitalism, and the middling sorts: the rank and file of political abolitionism
Auteur:
Voss-Hubbard, Mark
Verschenen in:
American nineteenth century history
Paginering:
Jaargang 4 (2003) nr. 2 pagina's 53-76
Jaar:
2003-06
Inhoud:
This article analyses the Liberty Party rank and file in two industrializing Massachusetts communities to emphasize the ambiguity of antislavery's social context, social profile, and ideological orientation toward capitalism. It suggests that the activist base of abolitionist politics was precariously middling, instead of solidly middle classitalist political economy. The apparent unwillingness of political abolitionis; a social grouplet, moreover, that hewed to complex and contradictory views of capts to mount a systematic campaign for 'equal rights' in the name of the American slave and the American worker, this essay tentatively concludes, likely grew from strategic considerations in the context of the antebellum polity, rather than from ideological impulses derived from American capitalism.
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