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 t

This study examines how the political anti-slavery challenge to the North informed American literature of the 1850s. As the works of Stowe, Whittier, Willis, an

Illuminates the political dimensions of American and British antislavery texts written by blacks

Antislavery Discourse and Nineteenth-Century American Literature examines the relationship between antislavery texts and emerging representations of "free labor

Examining the congressional debates on antislavery petitions before the Civil War. Passed by the House of Representatives at the start of the 1836 session, the