The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery Quotes

“The primary experience that Garrison, Mill, and Mazzini had in common was that of being antislavery in an age of slavery. But they also defended democracy in an age of aristocracy, monarchy, and doubt about democracy’s future.”
― W. Caleb McDaniel, The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery: Garrisonian Abolitionists and Transatlantic Reform

“Garrison had spent decades defending the agitation of public opinion both as a necessary, permanent feature of democracy and as an effective way to change politics in a democracy from the outside.”
― W. Caleb McDaniel, The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery: Garrisonian Abolitionists and Transatlantic Reform

“In his famous entry into the “travel wars,” for example, Charles Dickens scoffed at southerners who told him that public opinion curtailed the mistreatment of slaves. “Public opinion!” Dickens jeered in his American Notes. “Why, public opinion in the slave States is slavery, is it not? … Public opinion has made the laws,” while at the same time “public opinion threatens the abolitionist with death, if he ventures to the South; and drags him with a rope about his middle, in broad unblushing noon, through the first city in the East”—an allusion to the Boston mob of 1835.6”
― W. Caleb McDaniel, The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery: Garrisonian Abolitionists and Transatlantic Reform

“Because they knew these arguments and appreciated their force, Garrisonians faced the task of showing why slavery was wrong, while simultaneously maintaining that rule by public opinion was right.”
― W. Caleb McDaniel, The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery: Garrisonian Abolitionists and Transatlantic Reform

“Allan Nevins, ed., America Through British Eyes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1948),”
― W. Caleb McDaniel, The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery: Garrisonian Abolitionists and Transatlantic Reform

“George Thompson concluded that in America “the minority [was] prostrate before the majority,” which was free to “perpetrate every enormity in the name of ‘public opinion.’ ‘public opinion,’” he bemoaned, “is at this hour the demon of oppression.”4”
― W. Caleb McDaniel, The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery: Garrisonian Abolitionists and Transatlantic Reform

“Giddings qtd. in Jonathan H. Earle, Jacksonian Antislavery and the Politics of Free Soil, 1824– 1854 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 183. See also Daniel Walker Howe, The Political Culture of the American Whigs (rpt., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 173; Corey Brooks, “Building an Antislavery House: Political Abolitionists and the U.S. Congress,” Ph.D. diss., University of California–Berkeley, 2010.”
― W. Caleb McDaniel, The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery: Garrisonian Abolitionists and Transatlantic Reform

“Much of the Garrisonians’ strategic thinking rested on their faith in the power of public opinion. Both Garrison and Douglass had, at different times, called public opinion “omnipotent” and rejoiced in its rule. That faith even served as a slender piece”
― W. Caleb McDaniel, The Problem of Democracy in the Age of Slavery: Garrisonian Abolitionists and Transatlantic Reform