Political Antislavery Discourse and American Literature of the 1850s

Appalled and paralyzed. Abandoned and betrayed. Cowed and bowed. Thus did Frederick Douglass describe the North in the wake of the compromise measures of 1850 that seemed to enshrine concessions to slavery permanently into the American political system. This study discovers in a feature of political anti-slavery discourse—the condemnation of an enfeebled North—the key to a wide variety of literary...