Chapter 1 - "The Sacred Rights of the Weak": Pain, Sympathy, and the Culture of Individual Rights in Antebellum America (previously published article)

Authors

Elizabeth B. Clark

Document Type

Contents

Publication Date

9-1995

Abstract

In 1835 an antislavery sympathizer leaving a lecture by Theodore Dwight Weld went home to dream that she was transported above the world; looking down at the United States, she saw "multitudes of sable figures, bending beneath a scorching sun -- their backs lacerated by the whip -- scourged, maimed, loaded with irons -- subject to every insult -- and exposed to every gust of unbridled passions." The dreamer, a Mrs. Sturges, drew from many discourses in describing her lengthy dream, but the fundamental trope of her visionary narrative was the story of the suffering slave, a trope that in the 1830s began to play a crucial role in an unfolding language of individual rights.

Comments

This chapter was originally published in 82 J. Am. Hist. 463 (1995).

Recommended Citation

Elizabeth B. Clark, "The Sacred Rights of the Weak": Pain, Sympathy, and the Culture of Individual Rights in Antebellum America, 82 J. Am. Hist. 463 (1995), reprinted in Women, Church, and State: Religion and the Culture of Individual Rights in Nineteenth-Century America (Hendrik Hartog & Thomas A. Green, eds.), https://scholarship.law.bu.edu/clark_book/2/.