Word: abolitionists
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Lincoln's Epic. Northerners filled their writings with Calvinist fervor, certain that God had willed them to stamp out slavery. "This vision of Judgment," writes Wilson, "was the myth of the North." Though not at first an abolitionist, Abraham Lincoln made this "myth" stick by the power of his words. Driven by ambition to be President, he grew more apocalyptic in his comments on slavery as war approached. "He created himself as a poetic figure," writes Wilson, "and thus imposed himself on the nation. We have, in general, accepted the epic that Lincoln directed and lived and wrote." Some...
...through the Civil War, the vicinity was one of the great centers of anti-slavery agitation. The abolitionist tracts of John Quincy Adams and Charles Summer were originally printed here; Uncle Tom's Cabin was first issued by a Cornhill publisher and was allegedly partially written in one of the buildings near...
...Lloyd Garrison published the widely-influential Liberator in another building on the block. Abolitionist meetings were held there often and much of the philosophy of emancipation emanated from the confines of the Cornhill. Tufts College was founded on the street in 1858 and the area remained a seat of education and social reform for some years...
...South as "Beast" Butler. Illinois' Senator Stephen A. Douglas, with his massive head and dwarfish body, was a man in the middle; in his efforts to please North and South, he became anathema to both. Illinois' Republican Representative Owen Lovejoy had seen his older brother, an abolitionist, killed by an Alton mob, and he knew what he thought about slavery: "It has the violence of robbery, the blood and cruelty of piracy, it has the offensive and brutal lusts of polygamy, all combined and concentrated in itself...
...Hookey. Suffragette Susan B. Anthony's father was a Quaker, an abolitionist and a temperance man who naturally took to the cause of women's rights. The hard knocks he suffered for his views swung Susan behind him and united them both in battling the world. Her first battle: boarding school, which she hated. Joseph Conrad's aristocratic Polish father was exiled to a remote part of Russia for revolutionary agitation against the Czar, made a meager living translating literature. A hungry reader from the age of five, the lonely boy was schooled largely by helping...