Angry Abolitionists and the Rhetoric of Slavery

Moral Emotions in Social Movements

Benjamin Lamb-Books

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9783319313450
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319313467
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Politique

This book is an original application of rhetoric and moral-emotions theory to the sociology of social movements. It promotes a new interdisciplinary vision of what social movements are, why they exist, and how they succeed in attaining momentum over time. Deepening the affective dimension of cultural sociology, this work draws upon the social psychology of human emotion and interpersonal communication. Specifically, the book revolves around the topic of anger as a unique moral emotion that can be made to play crucial motivational and generative functions in protest. The chapters develop a new theory of the emotional power of protest rhetoric, including how abolitionist performances of heterodoxic racial and gender status imaginaries contributed to the escalation of the 'sectional conflict' over American slavery. 

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2016

Benjamin Lamb-BooksAngry Abolitionists and the Rhetoric of SlaveryCultural Sociology10.1007/978-3-319-31346-7_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Making It Stick

Benjamin Lamb-Books¹

(1)

Department of Sociology, University of Colorado, Boulder, Colorado, USA

End Abstract

The constellation of causes of the American civil war, by now a story well told, has been mapped out to the satisfaction of prior specialists. The primary driver of the nation’s polarization and radicalization was racial slavery as mediated by fundamental disagreements over its legitimacy and humanity, its profitability and perpetuity. Though historians will continue to write nuanced narratives of the abolition of US slavery and its passage through destructions of war, a range of acceptable macrostructural interpretations has been established. Extensively charted likewise are the antislavery ideas behind those disagreements, their historical origins and cultural logos. Seeds of antislavery thought have been traced with fine precision through millennia-deep philosophical and religious traditions.

Questions remain though concerning antislavery as process rather than outcome, as pathos rather than logos. How did the antislavery impulse spread and stir the imagination of antebellum folk? How did the grassroots movement for abolition maintain its crescive momentum? How did protest rhetoric and its rituals enflame both missionary proponents and reactionary opponents? It appears that an important strip of the story of American slavery’s abolition has yet to be told.

One remaining piece of the puzzle then is microsociological in nature, having to do with less-understood temporal and collective processes, the intriguing qualities of momentum that social movements develop. For the microsociological project, finding answers to the questions listed before you would be the very same as providing an account of what made abolitionist discourse stick in the USA, of how antislavery meanings successfully acquired their affective attachments and default status. The term ‘microsociology’ contains a double reference to both the interactional level of society and to a method of social–scientific inquiry based upon close observations of the social encounters between people. It is an analytical approach to social life that hinges our attention to the face-to-face level of interaction, both for the inherent interest of learning about social psychology and also to contribute to our explanation of social happenings on a larger scale. Microsociologists are in the business of studying situational encounters and socioemotional dynamics, the flows and patterns of communicative interactions as they unfold in time (Collins 1987, 2004; Ermakoff 2008; Jasper 1997; Summers Effler 2010).¹

With the abolition of slavery, the American abolitionists achieved a great victory. It was certainly celebrated as such, stark though the tolls of war. The present work, instead of another examination of the origins or outcomes of the antislavery movement, directs our attention to a different part of the story, another crucial piece of the long arc of the moral universe in which history bends toward justice.² I am referring to the day-to-day rhythms and ritual successes of abolitionism en route to emancipation. Just as important to the spread of antislavery thoughts and preferences—the structure of preferences and attitudes that constitutes a ‘social movement’ (McCarthy and Zald 1977)—is the process of maintaining movement momentum, sustaining and accelerating a collective moral campaign as well as achieving member commitment and persistence in protest (Summers Effler 2010). A microsociological view of the temporal processes of social movements directs our inquiry toward the affective dynamics of the contentious gatherings of which a social movement is composed (Eyerman 2005). What sort of communicative interaction is protest rhetoric? What skills of interpersonal persuasion did the abolitionists possess? What ingredients in abolitionism’s repertoires of contention were most effective? Why did they sometimes choose to provoke rather than persuade? How was such a highly unpopular movement so successful in the long run?³

The idea that antislavery abolitionism was a hugely successful social movement should not come as a surprise. If it does so, it is because in the last century of historical writing about American abolition either the abolitionists were blamed for causing a needless civil war or they were dismissed as a mostly useless crew of utopian absolutists, holding no sway over the real power politics of slavery. Until recently, the abolitionist movement was in the main considered a failure given the devolution of deliberation into a war that no one initially counted on as being necessary for emancipation.

The tide has fully turned in contemporary abolitionism studies. A less biased appraisal of the social movement now notes its immense national impact through political realignments and civil disobedience—the ‘disruptive power’ that Frances Fox Piven (2006) identifies in her brief but insightful analysis of the antebellum activists. Immediate abolition was not an impossibly ignorant demand. It merely meant that the inevitably gradual process of emancipation should be begun immediately by banning slavery in federally owned lands, the District of Columbia and the territories, and by not permitting any more slave states into the Union. Historians today recognize that early abolitionist thought of the 1830s and the later Republican politics of slavery were continuous, not discontinuous, phenomena (for a recent summary, see Oakes 2014). The illegal defiant actions of black and white northerners in hosting fugitive ‘property’—‘stealing’ under federal law southerners claimed—and in resisting slave bounty hunters—‘kidnappers’ northerners replied—utterly infuriated southern politicians, much as federal law enforcement of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Law outraged common northerners. The fugitive slave issue and the question of the criminality of harboring fugitive property tore the republic apart like no other issue (see Davis 2014 for a recent overview).

That the abolition of slavery was incredibly violent in the USA is well known. Mass emancipation through military force, almost all would agree, ranks among the most significant transformative events of US history. Yet, there is a dearth of investigation into the specific microsociological processes cumulatively leading up to this monumental event. The conflict over slavery did not appear overnight. It grew, widened, and deepened by public rhetoric in town halls and on the streets, through mass-communication technologies and civil-society organizations. Strictly speaking, there was no conflict over slavery apart from the rhetoric of slavery.

By the phrase rhetoric of slavery, I mean to highlight the actual communicative processes of slavery’s problematization and what made antislavery discourse endure, or at least more sticky in American culture than proslavery ideology. Most examples of the rhetoric of slavery in this study are of formal abolitionist public address, instances of what I shall call oratorical rhetoric as a subspecies of rhetoric in general. Oratorical rhetoric in this book includes the events and actions surrounding public speaking at the sites of protest. But I have also come to identify and include even partly sub-linguistic human emotions and actions as part of the broader anthropological rhetoric of slavery for contributing to slavery’s delegitimization.⁴

Microsociologically speaking, abolitionism was the process of generating and disseminating a compelling rhetoric of slavery to discredit the institution. Abolitionism as microdynamic process was the anti-rhetoric of slavery, which is to say, creative public rhetorics against slavery are what made abolitionism ‘move.’ In the next chapter, I will argue that all social movements are rhetorics in the deeper anthropological sense of seeking to remake social reality through communicative action according to their own imaginaries. Social movement persistence and expansion involves the situational exercise of multiple modes of communication, in addition to the activities of framing and bargaining that previous social movements’ scholars have privileged. The day-to-day rhythms and successes of abolitionism occurred on the ground and in the streets through rhetorical performances aiming to persuade and provoke. Extension of the antislavery reference group, on one side, and intensification of emotional bonds among conscience constituents, on the other, were practical accomplishments temporally and emotionally achieved through the unfolding rhetoric of slavery.

A common distinction is made in rhetorical criticism, following Aristotle, between the three ‘means of persuasion’ internal to a speech: logos, ethos, and pathos. Previous historical and sociological accounts of abolition have primarily focused on the logos of antislavery thought and political debate over slavery. They prioritize the propositional argumentation about slavery and its legal justifications. These accounts emphasize the cultural, religious sources of antislavery thought and the evolution of policy proposals for abolition. But logos by itself does not take us very far in understanding what made antislavery discourse stick in situ.

Logocentric histories fall short when explaining the actual processes of social change, how movements publicly appeal to spectators, expand their conscience constituencies, and intensify their emotional hold over participants. As most social psychologists will tell you, logos by itself usually fails to persuade. Persuasive effects, if attained by a rational argument, a big if, are more likely due to what psychologists refer to as priming associations, halo effects, or affect balance. The relevant microdynamic processes are social, emotional, and performative. Reason by itself does not inspire, energize, and convert people. Emotion does that much better (Appiah 2006 has a beautiful exposition of these points). As a growing number of sociologists have found, emotion is fundamental to the social movement processes of social change (for a recent overview, see Jasper 2014; also Flam and King 2005). The better question, then, is how are specific moral emotions that are closely associated with collective problem solving and struggle aroused? And how is the emotional reframing of reality (Flam 2005b), not unlike a conversion experience, accomplished through movement culture and rhetoric?

Now we have fully entered the affective terrain of ethos and pathos, the two means of persuasion that are more useful for understanding the political and performative potency of protest rhetoric. Ethos refers to impressions of virtue or vice made by a speaker. Pathos to how rhetorical appeals stir strong emotional experiences in audiences. The Roman orator Cicero tended to associate ethos with positive affects in the presentation of self, namely, appearances of honesty and trustworthiness. Pathos he associated more with provocation, the incitement of violent negative emotions such as shame, anger, or hatred. Incorporating ethos and pathos into the sociological lexicon of social movement studies comes not without a certain bending of their classical usage though. I shall use them as dramaturgical tools for extracting the social status implicatures of protest rhetoric (loosely corresponding to ethos) and the emotional effects of these status implicatures (loosely corresponding to pathos). In a microsociological analysis of records of protest rhetoric, ethos–pathos configurations of status implicatures are what makes discourse sticky and, as was often the case, get stuck bitterly and unpleasantly in unsympathetic spectators who found ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Frontmatter
• 1. Introduction: Making It Stick
• 1. Moral Emotions in Social Movements
• 2. Emotional Inequalities of Protest
• 3. Affect Matters
• Backmatter