“Like gory spectres”: Representing evil in Theodore weld'sAmerican slavery as it is

Jurisprudence as performance: John Brown's enactment of natural law at Harper's Ferry

“…It simply accepted Virginia's right to be let alone in deciding this delicate issue. These moderate interpretations of natural law fit within what Browne (1994) has characterized as the "sentimental style" (p. 278), where audiences responses are limited to emotions like sorrow, pity, sympathy, or nostalgia. From within this perspective, Brown's radicalism and extremism could not be aesthetically appealing until it had been sanitized, cleansed of its anarchism before it could be considered to be a legitimate part of any reforms.…”

“…As Browne (1994) has recently remarked, we need new paradigms for understanding the "strategies of representation by which antislavery sought to effect its ends" (p. 277). Following Browne's suggestion, this investigation has the heuristic value of potentially helping alter the way rhetoricians view the events that took place at Harper's Ferry.…”

Signatures of citizenship: The rhetoric of women's antislavery petitions

“…Noting that historians have been careful to avoid reducing reform motives to sheer altruism or to crude self-interest, Browne demonstrates that Weld used the slave's body as a site to resolve tensions between the simultaneous claims of humanitarian reform and class allegiance. 62 When we also consider gender as a force in the confluence of class, race, and morality that shaped abolitionist rhetoric, as I have here, we gain the further insight that women discursively appropriated the body of the slave woman as a site to negotiate not only tensions between moral commitments and class allegiance, but also the related issue of respectable gender behavior in the public sphere. This issue figured significantly in northern (mostly white) middle-class women's claims to political power.…”