Appalled and paralyzed. Abandoned and betrayed. Cowed and bowed. Thus
did Frederick Douglass describe the North in the wake of the compromise
measures of 1850 that seemed to enshrine concessions to slavery
permanently into the American political system. This study discovers in
a feature of political anti-slavery discourse--the condemnation of an
enfeebled North--the key to a wide variety of literary works of the
1850s. Both the political discourse and the literature set out to expose
the self-chosen degradation of compromise as a threat at once to the
personal foundation of each individual Northerner and to the survival of
the people as an actor in history. The book fills a gap in literary
criticism of the period, which has primarily focused on abolitionist
discourse when relating anti-slavery thought to the literature of the
decade. Though it owed a debt to the abolitionists, political
anti-slavery discourse took on the more focused mission of offering a
challenge to the people. Would the North submit to the version of
self-discipline demanded by the Slave Power's Northern minions, or would
it tap the energy of the nation's founding until it embodied defiance in
its very constitution? Would the North remain a type for the future
slave empire it could not prevent, or would it prophesy national freedom
in the simple recovery of its own agency? Literary works in both poetry
and prose were well suited to making this political challenge bear its
full weight on the nation--fleshing out the critique through narrative
crises that brought home the personal stake each Northerner held in what
George Julian called an exodus from the bondage of compromise. By the
end of 1860 this exodus had been completed, and that accomplishment owed
much to the massive ten year cultural project to expose the
slavery-accommodating definition of nationality as a threat to the
republican selfhood of each Northerner. Stowe, Whittier, Willis, and
Whitman, among others, devoted their literary works to this project.
