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Manuscript of Women, Church, and State: Religion and the Culture of Individual Rights in Nineteenth-Century America
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Chapter 1 - "The Sacred Rights Of The Weak": Pain, Sympathy, And The Culture Of Individual Rights In Antebellum America (Previously Published Article), Elizabeth B. Clark
Chapter 1 - "The Sacred Rights Of The Weak": Pain, Sympathy, And The Culture Of Individual Rights In Antebellum America (Previously Published Article), Elizabeth B. Clark
Manuscript of Women, Church, and State: Religion and the Culture of Individual Rights in Nineteenth-Century America
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 …