Already, women at abolitionist meetings were “unsex[ing]” themselves by pouring out “false and foul execrations against slavery and the Bible.” It was all of a piece—“slavery, marriage, religion” were the “pillars” of human society, and they were all threatened by the same liberal ideals that produced abolitionism.[18] As one mid-nineteenth-century Southern Presbyterian leader put it, “The parties in this conflict are not merely abolitionists and slaveholders—they are atheists, socialists, communists, red republicans, jacobins, on the one side, and the friends of order and regulated freedom on
...more
