Narratives in Political Crisis: Slavery and the Founding in Antebellum America

• In Event: Reason, Rhetoric, and Narrative in the Formation of Community

Abstract

The American antebellum period is notably characterized by a series of debates over the relationship between slavery and the founding, serving as a case study for how the rhetoric of narrative operates in the midst of political crisis. This paper reconstructs the political narratives of John C. Calhoun, William Lloyd Garrison, Frederick Douglass, Stephen A. Douglas, and Abraham Lincoln to identify the ways in which their respective narratives legitimated their moral claims and crafted competing conceptions of national unity and identity. Narratives fulfill a vital function in structuring national self-understandings, bounding what is considered politically reasonable or not. Through the rhetoric of narrative, statesmen and public actors can thus orient the public mind toward or away from various political possibilities, altering the moral landscape of the public sphere. However, moral principles rooted in political narratives face a unique challenge in democratic societies: just as each man is equal, so too is each generation, diminishing our commitment to a shared and enduring political narrative, and thereby a shared and enduring political community. Abraham Lincoln’s response to the crisis over slavery offers two potential solutions to this problem. First, he employed religious rhetoric that assigned special reverence to the American founding in the public mind; second his narrative of rededication, in which each generation reinterprets and reapplies the principles of the past, produces a sentimental attachment for the past in the present while still allowing for novel moral reforms in the future. Lincoln’s rededicatory narrative therefore provides the moral unity needed to maintain a political community while still creating an internal space for the pluralistic deliberation so essential to democratic politics.

Author

• Ramon Edgardo Lopez, Furman University