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"The Sacred Rights Of The Weak": Pain, Sympathy, And The Culture Of Individual Rights In Antebellum America, Elizabeth B. Clark

Publications

In 1835 an antislavery sympathizer leaving a lecture by Theodore Dwight Weld went home to dream that she was transported above the world; looking down at the United States, she saw "multitudes of sable figures, bending beneath a scorching sun -- their backs lacerated by the whip -- scourged, maimed, loaded with irons -- subject to every insult -- and exposed to every gust of unbridled passions." The dreamer, a Mrs. Sturges, drew from many discourses in describing her lengthy dream, but the fundamental trope of her visionary narrative was the story of the suffering slave, a trope that in …