Anti-Abolitionist and Anti-Black Violence in the Antebellum North, 1840-1849

Abstract

This thesis examines an important aspect of a previously overlooked, yet crucial, decade in American history by documenting the struggles of—and violence against—northern-based abolitionists and African Americans during the period 1840-1849. The thesis has three principal objectives. First, it argues that the consistency and qualitative similarities between Jacksonian and post-Jacksonian violence complicates historiographical narratives that racial and political violence significantly waned after 1840. Second, this thesis analyzes the causal reasons for the persistence and extent of anti-abolitionist and anti-Black violence in the context of the 1840s. This exploration will add additional complexity to traditional binaries of ‘pro-slavery’ and ‘anti-slavery’ states during the antebellum period, indicating that conventional categories such as ‘anti-abolitionist’ and ‘anti-Black’ prove similarly problematic within the context of the post-Jacksonian North. Third, the thesis examines the role of nineteenth century newspapers in the construction of sectional narratives of anti-abolitionist and anti-Black violence by partisan press reports. Doing so treats antebellum print culture not just as primary sources of information but as actors in the culmination of sectional crisis and ultimately the American Civil War (1861-1865). Finally, with a particular emphasis on the white violent instigators of New England, the Mid-Atlantic, and the Middle West, my work illustrates both the contingencies and impermanence of African American ‘freedom’ in an antebellum context, and shows how the abolitionist movement faced, at various stages, even greater threats and challenges to its advocacy and organization than previously acknowledged or understood.