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“A Majority of One”

“A Majority of One”. Thoreau & Other Disobedient 19 th -Century Individuals. The Militant & Moral Individualism of Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862). “On Civil Disobedience” (1849) Original title of lecture “Resistance to Civil Government” Response to Mexican War -> spread of slavery

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“A Majority of One”

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  1. “A Majority of One” Thoreau & Other Disobedient 19th-Century Individuals

  2. The Militant & Moral Individualismof Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) • “On Civil Disobedience” (1849) • Original title of lecture “Resistance to Civil Government” • Response to Mexican War -> spread of slavery • Refused to pay poll-tax, put in jail in Concord MA • “Cast your whole vote” • Response to “tyranny of majority” (de Tocqueville) • Unalienable rights? Or “mass” consciousness? • 19th c. mass marketing of religion, politics, even Ben Franklin story • Is an American first & foremost an individual, or a citizen? • Conformity as treason, patriotism as dissent & disobedience? • “majority of one” “one HONEST man” • Government as “machine” “half-witted” • Under an unjust government, “the true place for a just man is in prison”

  3. Maria W. Stewart (1803-1879) • Individualist argument against slavery • First American-born woman lecturing in public • mixed (“promiscuous”) audiences – “Afric-American Intelligence Society” • Northern racism worse? Left New England for N.Y.C. • What does it mean for a woman to speak & write? • Explicit religious & revolutionary references • Gives lie to myths of black inferiority – “worthy & interesting” • Racism a variant of sexism? • Worst harassment from black men in audience • Comparing white women & black men, condemned to life of servitude by their condition of birth, regardless of natural abilities – antithesis of “self-made” person

  4. Nat Turner’s Rebellion (1830) • Southerners’ worst fears realized • Toussaint L’Overture’s Haitian slave revolt (1791) • David Walker’s Appeal (1829) – calls for U.S. slaves to revolt • Turner’s is the last but best publicized violent revolt • Leads to more strident justification of “peculiar institution” • George Fitzhugh’s defense of slavery as “happy freedom” (1857) • Religion the only mass experience allowed to slaves • Turner’s Old Testament visions, leadership role as preacher • Prohibitions against black literacy, religious justification for slavery • Background against which Douglass spoke & wrote • Compare his education, his rebellion and justifications for it

  5. What force overthrows “King Law”? • Notice types of appeals Douglass (and Garrison) use against slavery in the Narrative (& Preface) • Which ones are conspicuously absent? • Which ones appear repeatedly? • Note Casper’s & Davies’s notes on emerging mass culture and “cult of domesticity” • Growing sense of “self-made” American • Which ones could still not be filmed in the year 2002? • Pornographic, or too sentimental?

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