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Chapter 3 - 1860 or 1865? Amending the National Body

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  13 June 2024

Sarah E. Chinn
Affiliation:
Hunter College, City University of New York
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Summary

Chapter 3 focuses on Anna E. Dickinson, a little-read but in her time central abolitionist and antiracist activist, lecturer, and novelist. A riveting speaker who was a major voice for Radical Republicans, Dickinson toured the country addressing mixed-gender audiences on abolition, women’s suffrage, the right for unions to organize, and antiracism. Dickinson’s first novel, What Answer? (1868), follows an interracial couple, William Surrey and Francesca Ercildoune, from their first meeting in 1861 to their deaths in 1863 at the hands of a New York Draft Riot mob. It ends with a climactic scene in which Francesca’s brother, Robert Ercildoune, accompanied by a white friend. attempts to vote in a local 1865 election and is barred by racist poll-goers. The novel takes on issues raised by the debates around the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment that were raging while Dickinson was writing What Answer? Both the Amendment and the novel take as their central theme Black citizenship, without which the losses of the Civil War, represented by the many amputee characters in the book, would have been in vain.

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  • 1860 or 1865? Amending the National Body
  • Sarah E. Chinn, Hunter College, City University of New York
  • Book: Disability, the Body, and Radical Intellectuals in the Literature of the Civil War and Reconstruction
  • Online publication: 13 June 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009442657.004
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  • 1860 or 1865? Amending the National Body
  • Sarah E. Chinn, Hunter College, City University of New York
  • Book: Disability, the Body, and Radical Intellectuals in the Literature of the Civil War and Reconstruction
  • Online publication: 13 June 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009442657.004
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • 1860 or 1865? Amending the National Body
  • Sarah E. Chinn, Hunter College, City University of New York
  • Book: Disability, the Body, and Radical Intellectuals in the Literature of the Civil War and Reconstruction
  • Online publication: 13 June 2024
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009442657.004
Available formats
×