Chapter 9 - Antebellum Anticipations of Annihilation

Summary

“The slaveholders,” Frederick Douglass said in 1849, “are sleeping on slumbering volcanoes.” American readers in the 1850s were captivated by such apocalyptic imagery. As the crisis over slavery developed—from the Fugitive Slave Act (1850) to the Kansas–Nebraska Act (1854) to the Dred Scott decision (1857)—many became increasingly convinced that their world would, like Pompeii in the first century, come to a fiery, apocalyptic end. But debates arose about how and why the United States might come to an end and whether this end could be prevented. While abolitionist writers often described slavery as a sin, others thought of slavery as a national pathology that might be cured or, at the very least, managed. This chapter explores the apocalyptic dimensions of the period that has long been called the American Renaissance.