'Life is a solemn trust': Ann R. Page and the antislavery movement in the upper South (William Meade, Mary Lee Custis, Virginia).

摘要

Ann Randolph [Meade] Page (1781–1838) was an evangelical Christian slavery reformer in Frederick County, Virginia who worked to launch and support the American Colonization Society as means to end slavery in the United States. After her husband's death she emancipated most of her slaves and helped them emigrate to Liberia. In order to better understand historical agency and women's role in progressive social change, this case study examines the activism of Ann Page, her brother, William Meade, and their cousin, Mary Lee [Fitzhugh] Custis of Arlington, using cultural or constructionist social movement theory.; In the early nineteenth century, the antislavery movement stalled as politicians were unable or unwilling to resolve the structural contradiction between slavery and freedom in the southern states and, hence, the nation. Coinciding with the Second Great Awakening, white women in the upper South, in tacit alliance with African Americans, translated the problem from a philosophical and political one to a moral and religious one. White women, in the private sphere, used their avowed moral superiority and interpersonal communication skills to seize leadership on this issue. They found a synthesis or solution in African colonization and, together with men, built and sustained a movement to promote and enact it.; The colonization movement contained its own contradiction between deportation and equality, but elite southern women were unable or unwilling to detach from scheme. By reinvigorating African American protest in the North, however, it served as a catalyst for the second wave of abolitionism. As the Second Great Awakening moved North in the space of a generation, younger white women exercised similar leadership roles and joined with African Americans in the antislavery movement there, and together with white abolitionist men, they pushed and pulled the nation to embrace the movement's logical conclusion of immediate, unconditional emancipation.