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Nathaniel Hawthorne was not an abolitionist. In fact, he was openly hostile to abolitionism and an active Democrat when the Republican Party’s radical wing was abolitionist. It is, therefore, remarkable that Hawthorne’s most famous novel, The Scarlet Letter, should reveal antislavery iconography and a sympathy for the slave and the radical, both embodied by Hester Prynn. Hawthorne’s immersion in antislavery discourse as a member of New England’s intellectual elite in the 1840s and 1850s influenced his artistry and his emotional predisposition to the plight of the slave even while his party commitments, material interests, and intellectual positions resisted antislavery doctrine. Hawthorne’s identification with Hester, an identification at times seemingly involuntary, provides an index for his involuntary sympathy for radicalism, especially for the antislavery family protection campaign. The Scarlet Letter demonstrates the power of antislavery sentimentality and, in particular, the way it spoke to the anxiety-ridden lower-middle class in this period of poletarianization.

Before the Civil War, Frederick Douglass masterfully drew upon the abolitionist family protection campaign in his autobiographies, speeches, and articles. As a fugitive slave, he testified to the brutality of slavery: it had severed his bond with his mother, left him unacknowledged by his white father, and subjected his Aunt Hester to the violence of a jealous overseer. His autobiographies are peopled by the stock characters of the family protection campaign: the fatally beautiful slave woman; the lustful driver; the loving, traumatized slave mother; and the brutal slave mistress who violates the principles of true womanhood. He repeatedly inveighed against the practice of separating families in his speeches. This 1855 speech is just one example: “Every slaveholder claims the right to sell his slaves, who, having local attachments, families, wives and little ones… can be kept in submission by the threat of a sale and separation from all these” (“An Inside View of Slavery” 9). Douglass provoked his audience’s fear of loss, stoked it until he produced tears, and then used it to stimulate a loathing of slavery. He was an expert at the use of antislavery sentimentality.

Until American women took on a leadership role in antislavery activism in the 1830s, antislavery appeals had generally taken two forms: biblical interpretation and Enlightenment references to the slave’s natural rights. The Bible, the Declaration of Independence, and the Constitution were authoritative documents nonconformists could draw upon to challenge the prevailing belief that slavery was, at worst, a necessary evil. The challenge was to convince listeners that these revered documents were inherently antislavery, and powerful arguments were developed to deny this. Moreover, parsing these documents served to shift the focus away from the daily lives of slaves and the suffering that slave society imposed upon those permanently denied family, citizenship, and economic rights. Nonetheless, the shortcomings of earlier discourses serve to highlight the strengths of the family protection campaign of the feminist abolitionists.