![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Through an analysis of correspondence, political pamphlets, and newspaper coverage of mass meetings, this paper explores the centrality of suicide to the politics of emancipation and illuminates key intersections between sovereignty, medico-legal discourse, and national belonging. Indeed, this paper argues that drawing on the language of emancipation as punishment for criminal suicide allowed northern abolitionists to transform the emancipatory project from a dubious act of federal aggression to a necessary war measure authorized by the Union public. ![]() While Reconstruction historians dismiss Sumner’s theory as too radical to have been influential, the theory’s popular circulation suggests its widespread import for legitimizing the northern war effort. Read 2 reviews from the worlds largest community for readers. Its implications for the racial order were extreme: if enacted, it promised both the dissolution of slavery and the universal disenfranchisement of white southerners. Charles Sumner and the Rights of Man by David Herbert Donald Charles Sumner and the Rights of Man book. On a February morning of 1862, Republican Senator Charles Sumner (MA) accused the South of suicide “wickedly undertaken.” In a series of congressional resolutions that would become known as the State Suicide Theory, Sumner equated secession with a violent act of felo de se committed by the southern body politic. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |