Creating the Culture of Reform in Antebellum AmericaIn 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
... Beecher Debate 74 CHAPTER THREE Garrison, Douglass, and the Problem of Politics 121 CHAPTER FOUR Emerson's Self-Reliance as a Theory of Community 161 EPILOGUE Sincerity and Pluralism in Critical Conversation 199 Notes 203 Contents.
... Douglass. I presented a version of the Grimké-Beecher chapter at a conference of the Society for the History of the Early American Republic (SHEAR) and initiated correspondences that helped me contextualize the chapter. Most important ...
... Douglass, The Frederick Douglass Papers, edited by John Blassingame and John R. McGivigan, 6 vols. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press: 1979–92. JMN Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo ...
... Douglass over relationships between race, moral authority, and political participation are central episodes in the emergence of a pluralistic sphere of reform discourse. These two debates did more than give voice to suppressed ...
... Douglass, and this dimension of their lives as reformers reveals much about the subtleties of public authority and ... Douglass's break from William Lloyd Garrison underscores the role that the intersubjective recognition of rhetorical ...
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 |