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Article: John Brown, James Redpath, and the idea of revolution.
- Article from:
- Civil War History
- Article date:
- June 1, 2006
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 2006 Kent State University Press. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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He knew that he was being called "a madman, a fanatic, a disturber of the peace, a promoter of rebellion," and yet in 1831 William Lloyd Garrison accepted such taunts as the price of being an abolitionist, a voluntary outsider who had rejected normative American notions of racial hierarchy and privilege. Thus to put oneself into empathetic identification with the oppressed Other is at the same time to create and adopt a threatening, even revolutionary alternative self--in effect a new persona, always more or less dramatic, for the new world to come. Such a radical and profoundly imaginative personal transformation, it has been argued, lies at the "black heart" of the ...