• Admin
    UC Research Repository
    View Item 
       
    • UC Home
    • Library
    • UC Research Repository
    • College of Arts
    • Arts: Theses and Dissertations
    • View Item
       
    • UC Home
    • Library
    • UC Research Repository
    • College of Arts
    • Arts: Theses and Dissertations
    • View Item
    JavaScript is disabled for your browser. Some features of this site may not work without it.

    Browse

    All of the RepositoryCommunities & CollectionsBy Issue DateAuthorsTitlesSubjectsThis CollectionBy Issue DateAuthorsTitlesSubjects

    Statistics

    View Usage Statistics

    Certainty, crisis, compromise : the abolitionists of the liberator circle, 1860-1863.

    Thumbnail
    View/Open
    MA Thesis - Luis Paterson.pdf (1015.Kb)
    Author
    Paterson, Luis Andres
    Date
    2017
    Permanent Link
    http://hdl.handle.net/10092/13650
    Thesis Discipline
    History
    Degree Grantor
    University of Canterbury
    Degree Level
    Masters
    Degree Name
    Master of Arts

    This thesis examines the abolitionist community that corresponded through the weekly abolitionist periodical The Liberator, organised into four different circles of the Liberator Circle, over the years 1860-1863. Chief editor William Lloyd Garrison, notable agitator Wendell Phillips, editor Charles Whipple, and their coadjutors in the Liberator Circle, believed that political abolition was impossible because the entire political system was founded on the proslavery compromise of the Constitution. Furthermore, it was impossible to take an uncompromising moral stand as a politician, for achieving consensus within any given party, as well as with the opposition, required compromise, as defined by George Santayana in Character and Opinion in the United States. Garrison and his coadjutors in the Liberator Circle fervently refused to compromise over the evil of slavery, and demanded immediate abolition through the anti-political means of northern disunion. This thesis argues that from 1860 to 1863 Garrison and the majority of the Liberator Circle compromised their ideal means of anti-political abolition and accepted the political abolition of the Emancipation Proclamation. The Circle’s process of accepting political means was not immediate, as revisionist and post-revisionist historiography suggests. Rather, it occurred over three distinct periods: Certainty, from 1860 to Abraham Lincoln’s election on November Eighth, Crisis, from Lincoln’s election to the bombardment of Fort Sumter on April Fourteenth 1861, and Compromise, from Fort Sumter to the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation, January First 1863. Each of these periods align with a change in the masthead slogan of the Liberator, and represent different challenges to the identity of the Liberator Circle. This thesis analyses Garrison and his coadjutors’ path to compromise and what effect it had on the activist community of the Liberator Circle.

    Collections
    • Arts: Theses and Dissertations [1446]
    Rights
    http://library.canterbury.ac.nz/thesis/etheses_copyright.shtml

    UC Research Repository
    University Library
    University of Canterbury
    Private Bag 4800
    Christchurch 8140

    Phone
    364 2987 ext 8718

    Email
    ucresearchrepository@canterbury.ac.nz

    Follow us
    FacebookTwitterYoutube

    © University of Canterbury Library
    Send Feedback | Contact Us