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| abolition |
| “Children are taught that ‘AB’ stands for ‘Abolition,’” fumed the mayor of Boston in 1835, who correctly grasped that abolition meant more than the end of slaveholding (“Mr. Otis’s Speech” 1835). In the popular imagination of the early nineteenth century, abolition named a utopian program of mass reeducation that would indoctrinate its white listeners and readers into a new set of moral beliefs. The fact that even children were addressed by this pedagogy means that abolitionists considered it necessary to alienate future citizens from their allegiance to their government, and to remake the nation from the ground up. The concept of abolition that shaped the antislavery struggle of the nineteenth century thus challenged nothing less than the legitimacy of the entire U.S. political system. |
This is an excerpt from Robert Fanuzzi’s entry in Keywords for American Cultural Studies (p. 7). |