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Spirit, Friendship, and the Antebellum Reform Imagination

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Spirit, Friendship, and the Antebellum Reform Imagination W&M ScholarWorks Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects Theses, Dissertations, & Master Projects 2006 Society of souls: Spirit, friendship, and the antebellum reform imagination Robert Kent Nelson College of William & Mary - Arts & Sciences Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.wm.edu/etd Part of the American Studies Commons, History of Religion Commons, and the United States History Commons Recommended Citation Nelson, Robert Kent, "Society of souls: Spirit, friendship, and the antebellum reform imagination" (2006). Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects. Paper 1539623502. https://dx.doi.org/doi:10.21220/s2-k8cw-k176 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses, Dissertations, & Master Projects at W&M ScholarWorks. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations, Theses, and Masters Projects by an authorized administrator of W&M ScholarWorks. For more information, please contact [email protected]. SOCIETY OF SOULS Spirit, Friendship, and the Antebellum Reform Imagination A Dissertation Presented to The Faculty of the American Studies Program The College of William and Mary in Virginia In Partial Fulfillment Of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Robert Kent Nelson 2006 Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. APPROVAL SHEET This dissertation is submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Robert Kent Nelson Approved by the Committee, October 2006 Robert m. Gross, Chair The University of Connecticut Maureen Fitzgerald Scott Reynolds Nelson Robert H. Abzug The University of Texas at Austin ii Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Acknowledgements iv Abstract v Introduction. The Immaterial Culture of Antebellum Reform 2 Chapter I. "The society of all true and pure souls": Soul and Sociality in the 19 Antebellum North The Contested Legacy of George Fox 21 Friend Emerson 31 Chapter II. "The forgetfulness of sex": Devotion and Desire in the Courtship 46 Letters of Angelina Grimke and Theodore Dwight Weld Chapter III. "Our friends hinder our improvement": Souls, Race, and 76 Abolitionism's Politics of Pathos Professed Friends 82 Body Politics 101 Chapter IV. "Stronger ties than those of consanguity": Elihu Burritt, Moral 114 Suasion, and the Work of International Friendship The Friendly Addresses Movement 119 The New England Village Writ Large 139 Burritt's Body Politics 147 Chapter V. "The communion of soul with soul in a moral excellence": 152 Spirituality, Spiritualism, and American Reform, 1848-1858 Spiritual and Social Progress 160 Perfection Delayed 170 Bibliography 190 Vita 200 iii Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS It is a great pleasure to be able to thank a number of people who helped and supported me as I worked on this study. First, I'd like to thank my dissertation committee: Robert A. Gross, Scott Reynolds Nelson, Maureen Fitzgerald, and Robert H. Abzug. This study has benefited from all their comments and feedback. I'd like to particularly single out Bob Gross; his comments on numerous drafts, our conversations with one another about nineteenth-century America, and the example of his scholarship have enriched my thinking and improved this study. I'd also like to thank an informal dissertation group that met for several years at William & Mary to read each other's work. While there were many friends and colleagues in that group whose support I appreciate, I specifically recall getting useful feedback from Timothy Barnard, Stephen Feeley, Brian Geiger, Amy Howard, Gretchen Schoel, Amy Speckart, and Andrea Westcot. I cannot thank Gene Roche, Director of Academic Services in IT at William & Mary, enough. His understanding and generosity in allowing me to take one work day a week to research and write this dissertation made its completion possible. I would also like to acknowledge the financial support of the American Studies Program at William and Mary and the William L. Clements Library at the University of Michigan. The American Studies Program awarded me two grants that helped me visit several archives. The Clements Library awarded me a Price Visiting Research Fellowship in 2000 that enabled me to use their collection. A previous version of the second chapter appeared under the same title in the Journal of Social History 37 (Spring 2004): 663-679. My thanks to the Journal of Social History for permission to reproduce that article here. Finally, I'd like to thank my partner Amy Howard, not so much for her help with this dissertation but for her help with everything else. iv Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. ABSTRACT This study explores the central role that a spiritualized friendship played in the thought and writings of antebellum reformers. It identifies a spiritual sensibility that was widely shared by many radical New England activists of the 1830s, 1840s, and 1850s regardless of their specific denominational beliefs, and argues that this sense of spirituality motivated them to become activists who labored to transform their society. Specifically, this dissertation analyzes the work and writings of a variety of reformers who believed that spirit or soul could serve as a mechanism for leveling some of the most dominant cultural and institutional power hierarchies of the mid-nineteenth century. Organized around three case studies—Theodore Dwight Weld's and Angelina Grimke's efforts to conceptualize an egalitarian marriage in 1838, white and black abolitionists' debates over the political efficacy of spiritualized friendships in the early 1840s, Elihu Burritt's struggle to destabilize nationalism and foster a sense of global community in the late 1840s—the dissertation explores the ideological centrality of spirit in the period's millennial, utopian struggles against racism and slavery, sexism and patriarchy, and nationalism and war. Believing these hierarchies to be rooted in physical, bodily differences—in race and sex and nation—the reformers of this study saw in the disembodied, immaterial soul a means for unmaking those hierarchies. An ever growing recognition of the primacy of the soul within each and every human being, they believed, could function as a political instrument that would transform society by leading to a correlative appreciation of the inconsequentiality of the body and bodily difference. Together these case studies demonstrate how this spiritual sensibility shaped the political ideology and practical strategies of abolitionists, feminists, and pacifists, investing their efforts to affect revolutionary social change with the zeal and conviction of religious faith. v Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. SOCIETY OF SOULS Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. 2 INTRODUCTION THE IMMATERIAL CULTURE OF ANTEBELLUM REFORM One would be hard pressed to find two public intellectuals in antebellum America whose beliefs and politics regarding race and slavery were as different as those of Josiah Clark Nott and Angelina Emily Grimke. What makes their differences remarkable was that they shared strikingly similar backgrounds. Natives of South Carolina, Nott and Grimke were bom less than 150 miles and one year apart from one another—he in Columbia in 1804, she in Charleston in 1805. Their families both belonged to South Carolina's political and economic elite. Each of their fathers was a plantation owner and slaveholder, each had held political office, each had been trained in the law, and each was an accomplished state judge. For two people who started out in such similar circumstances in the same place at the same time, Nott and Grimke were to arrive at remarkably different places. Josiah Nott was to become a physician and ethnologist of international repute who argued that blacks were biologically inferior to whites and that slavery was the institutional product of a natural racial hierarchy, while Angelina Grimke was to become a famous political activist who condemned both slavery and racial prejudice as national sins.1 1 Reginald Horsman, Josiah Nott of Mobile: Southerner. Physician, and Racial Theorist (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1987), 5-12; Gerda Lemer, The Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission. In the 1840s and 1850s, Nott emerged as one of the most aggressive advocates in antebellum America of polygenesis: the hypothesis that the races did not share a common ancestry but instead were brought into being independently of one another. Caucasians and Negros, Australians and Indians were not part of a common human race, he argued, but were in fact distinct and distinctive species, each of which possessed unique intellectual and moral capacities. Nott's investment in this argument was not exclusively or even primarily scientific in nature. Nott looked to science as a means of debunking certain radical religious and political ideals to which he objected, contending that the answer to the question of "the common origin of races" was not merely of scientific import, but would have momentous significance regarding both "certain religious dogmas" as well as "the
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