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CHAPTER 2 Violence, Identity, and the Creation of Radical Community I desire to talk but little about religion, for words are empty sounds, but may my life be a living epistle known and read of all men. Angelina Grimke, Diary, 26 December 1828. The summer of 1835 burned itself deeply into the racial consciousness of America. From Nashville to New Hampshire, violence against abolitionists had taken on a scope and intensity unprecedented in the annals of the antislavery movement. Even in this, "the era of greatest urban violence America has ever experienced:' 1835 was to prove singular: abolitionists were subjected in that year alone to no less than thirty-seven mob attacks. "North and South, East and West," the New York Herald reported, people everywhere seemed to be "lashing themselves into a fury-searching for conspiracies-hunting out dangers-and manifesting the utmost spirit of alarm, at some impending dispensation of Providence:' By summer's end, abolitionists and their critics alike were forced to reconsider the future of what the English reformer George Thompson had described as "this heaven-favored, but mob-cursed land:>] Historians as well as contemporary observers have recognized how crucial was violence in shaping the world of antebellum reform. If they have not agreed on the precise meaning, origins, or implications of that role, they nevertheless offer for our purposes certain relevant conclusions. At a minimum, we can say that violence was a pervasive feature of culture, North and South, black and white, urban and rural. We have been shown, too, how certain strains ofviolence influenced the character and direction of abolitionist activity. Of particular importance in this essay is the realization that violence could be constitutive of discourse itself: it gave to the abolitionists a repertoire of images, arguments, and appeals; and it lent to their campaign a combustible mixture of urgency, risk, and reward.2 36 ANGELINA GRIMKE The interplay between the violent and the symbolic endures as a feature of public life, and critics have long sought to examine its sources, character, and effects. Certain orientations may be readily identified as relevant here. In one sense, rhetoric is taken in specific circumstances to be itself a form of violence. In this view, as Dickson Bruce suggests of southern oratory, violence can be an effective way to express certain assumptions about life and the world. A similar if less stark conception informs the standard account of Robert Scott and Donald Smith, who write of the rhetoric of confrontation, not merely of confrontation , because this action, as diverse as its manifestations might be, is inherently symbolic. Historians frequently recur to this view when describing the abolitionists; thus Donald Mathews stresses that their rhetoric was meant to expose rather than conceal, to arouse to action rather than placate, to confront their opponents and to polarize potentially antagonistic positions rather than conciliate differences.3 A closely related but distinctive perspective emphasizes not so much the violence of language as the uses to which violence can be put for inventional purposes . In this sense violence gives rise to certain interpretive possibilities, and makes possible ways of reordering collective commitments and shared meanings. Richard Leeman, for example, sees in public responses to terrorism highly strategic uses oflanguage. Counter terrorist rhetoric, he explains, works to interpret the act of terrorism and to prescribe the appropriate reaction, and he concludes that counter terrorists see their rhetoric as a response to terrorism, which is itself largely rhetorical. Taken together, the two views create a kind of ongoing dialogue , one played out for the benefit ofa public audience.4 This stress on the symbolic opportunities afforded by violence represents an important advance on preceding conceptions, and serves as a basis for the following study. I seek therein to specify how violence can serve as a medium not only for public debate, but for the creation of an identity sufficiently powerful to shape that debate. The very scope and history ofviolence, its rituals and public displays, the anxieties it bared and concealed suggest that violence was more than something to be endured. The violence to which abolitionists were subjected was also a manifestation of spirit, evidence of authentic if unwelcome desires. To the degree that such violence was publicly performed and culturally sanctioned, it took on symbolic dimensions that might in turn be construed to the abolitionists' advantage . Hence the creative function unwittingly provided by the mobs: they gave to the abolitionists a way of reading their culture and therefore a way of speaking...

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