Catharine Maria Sedgwick’s “A Slave Story I Began and Abandoned”: Abolitionist Debates During the 1830s
My dissertation, “We Wish to Plead Our Own Cause”: Rhetorical Links Between Native Americans and Africans Americans during the 1820s and 1830s focuses on the rhetorical intersections between white women, African Americans, and Indigenous Americans during the Antebellum period, specifically the 1830s-1850s. When I was working on my dissertation, I came across information regarding an unpublished manuscript by Catharine Maria Sedgwick, the author of Hobomok and A New England Tale, focused on the slavery question. I didn’t have the manuscript. All I had were essay discussing it. So, I contacted the Massachussetts Historical Society, got a copy, and transcribed it. The transcription of “A Slave Story I Began and Abandoned” appeared in an issue of the the now defunct journal LEAR: Literature in the Early American Republic. I recently talked about this transcription with someone and it caused me to look back at the introduction, which did not appear in the journal, that I initially wrote. That introduction is below. I wrote this almost ten years ago, and I haven’t looked at it since that time period. However, I want to share it because I think it offers some insight into not only Sedgwick’s thinking about enslavement but also about some of the debates raging during the period over the issue. If you…
