ISSN:
0021-8758
Quelle:
Cambridge Journals Digital Archives
Thema:
Anglistik, Amerikanistik
,
Geschichte
,
Politikwissenschaft
,
Sociologie
,
Wirtschaftswissenschaften
Notizen:
During the fifteen months from August 1834 to November 1835 nothing caused so much excitement in the American press, both pro-slavery and abolitionist, as the anti-slavery mission of the British reformer George Thompson. In the event, Thompson's visit ended in his escaping from a mob-ridden Boston on the New Brunswick packet. William Lloyd Garrison, no doubt secretly satisfied with the discredit reflected on his opponents by the mobs supporting them in this way, also consoled himself and the readers of the Liberator with the reflection that Thompson, ‘By his presence, and the power of his victorious eloquence, and the resistless energy of his movement...has shaken the land from side to side... At the mention of his name, republican tyrants stand aghast, and their knees smite violently against each other.’ In retrospect he appears wildly optimistic: it took another thirty years to free the Negro from ‘republican tyrants’, and even then the success was incomplete. It was achieved by methods Garrison abhorred, which certainly owed little directly to the efforts of Thompson. If his mission was of any importance it was so in the sense that it polarized opinion on slavery more sharply. He came to provide a useful focal point for the preconceived likes and dislikes of American citizens who could work themselves up to a new enthusiasm over the slavery issue by hating him as a ‘foreign incendiary’, or adulating him as the slaves' Lafayette. On the other hand, Thompson was only one of several possible focal points, and it is likely that even in 1834 it would have been easy to find some other individual to centre controversy around and produce exactly the same polarization effect if he had never set foot on American soil.
Materialart:
Digitale Medien
URL:
http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0021875800009889
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