To Set This World Right: The Antislavery Movement in Thoreau’s Concord

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In the decade before the Civil War, Concord, Massachusetts, was once a center of abolitionist sentiment and activism. To Set this World Right is the first book to get well and examine the voices, events, and influence of the antebellum antislavery movement in Concord. In addressing fundamental questions about the origin and nature of radical abolitionism On this most American of towns, Sandra Harbert Petrulionis frames the antislavery ideology of Henry Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson―two of Concord’s most famous residents―as a product of circle of relatives and community activism and presents the civic context through which their outspoken abolitionism evolved.On this historic locale, radical abolitionism crossed racial, class, and gender lines as a confederation of neighbors fomented a radical consciousness, and Petrulionis documents how the Thoreaus, Emersons, and Alcotts worked in tandem with others in their community, including a slaveowner’s daughter and a former slave. Additionally, she examines the basis on which Henry Thoreau―who cherished nothing more than solitary tramps through his beloved woods and bogs―has achieved lasting fame as a militant abolitionist.This book marshals wealthy archival evidence of the diverse tactics exploited by a small coterie of committed activists, in large part women, who provoked their famous neighbors to action. In Concord, the fugitive slave Shadrach Minkins was once clothed and fed as he made his way to freedom. In Concord, the adolescent daughters of John Brown attended school and recovered from their emotional distress after their father’s notorious public hanging. Even if most residents of the town maintained a practiced detachment from the plight of the enslaved, men and women whose sole objective was once the moral urgency of abolishing slavery at last prevailed at the philosophers of self-culture to accept the responsibility of their reputations.

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