American “free-produce” advocates insisted that purchasers of goods made from slave cotton shared fully in the enslaver’s criminality. In fact, they emphasized that this crime-tainted cotton, moving from field to fabric, damned every commercial agent along the transatlantic chain connecting the enslaver to the consumer. The first half of the chapter examines these advocates’ vision of market complicity and their conviction that slave cotton remained morally toxic across its market life. The second half focuses on the rejection of this vision by William Lloyd Garrison, once a supporter of the Free Produce movement. Garrison came to view cotton abstinence as impracticable and marginal to the work of abolition. Remarkably, he argued that free markets and commercial transactions scrubbed slave cotton of moral contamination. Because they were commodities, slave-cotton goods were morally benign and thus “perfectly innocent” to consume.

In a time of great contest and confusion over the future of democracy as a governing principle, the example of Abraham Lincoln continues to provide encouragement and direction about democracy’s viability in the face of immense challenges. In The Political Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Allen Guelzo brings into one volume Lincoln’s most famous political documents and speeches from his earliest days as a political candidate under the banner of the Whig Party, to his election and service as the first anti-slavery Republican president, from 1861 to 1865, and the nation’s leader in the fiery trial of civil war. While many anthologies of Lincoln’s political documents routinely concentrate on his presidential years or only on his anti-slavery writings, Guelzo concentrates on documents from Lincoln’s earliest political activity as an Illinois state legislator in the 1830s up through his presidency. The result is an accessible resource for students, researchers, and general readers.

In a time of great contest and confusion over the future of democracy as a governing principle, the example of Abraham Lincoln continues to provide encouragement and direction about democracy’s viability in the face of immense challenges. In The Political Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Allen Guelzo brings into one volume Lincoln’s most famous political documents and speeches from his earliest days as a political candidate under the banner of the Whig Party, to his election and service as the first anti-slavery Republican president, from 1861 to 1865, and the nation’s leader in the fiery trial of civil war. While many anthologies of Lincoln’s political documents routinely concentrate on his presidential years or only on his anti-slavery writings, Guelzo concentrates on documents from Lincoln’s earliest political activity as an Illinois state legislator in the 1830s up through his presidency. The result is an accessible resource for students, researchers, and general readers.

In a time of great contest and confusion over the future of democracy as a governing principle, the example of Abraham Lincoln continues to provide encouragement and direction about democracy’s viability in the face of immense challenges. In The Political Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Allen Guelzo brings into one volume Lincoln’s most famous political documents and speeches from his earliest days as a political candidate under the banner of the Whig Party, to his election and service as the first anti-slavery Republican president, from 1861 to 1865, and the nation’s leader in the fiery trial of civil war. While many anthologies of Lincoln’s political documents routinely concentrate on his presidential years or only on his anti-slavery writings, Guelzo concentrates on documents from Lincoln’s earliest political activity as an Illinois state legislator in the 1830s up through his presidency. The result is an accessible resource for students, researchers, and general readers.

In a time of great contest and confusion over the future of democracy as a governing principle, the example of Abraham Lincoln continues to provide encouragement and direction about democracy’s viability in the face of immense challenges. In The Political Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Allen Guelzo brings into one volume Lincoln’s most famous political documents and speeches from his earliest days as a political candidate under the banner of the Whig Party, to his election and service as the first anti-slavery Republican president, from 1861 to 1865, and the nation’s leader in the fiery trial of civil war. While many anthologies of Lincoln’s political documents routinely concentrate on his presidential years or only on his anti-slavery writings, Guelzo concentrates on documents from Lincoln’s earliest political activity as an Illinois state legislator in the 1830s up through his presidency. The result is an accessible resource for students, researchers, and general readers.

In a time of great contest and confusion over the future of democracy as a governing principle, the example of Abraham Lincoln continues to provide encouragement and direction about democracy’s viability in the face of immense challenges. In The Political Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Allen Guelzo brings into one volume Lincoln’s most famous political documents and speeches from his earliest days as a political candidate under the banner of the Whig Party, to his election and service as the first anti-slavery Republican president, from 1861 to 1865, and the nation’s leader in the fiery trial of civil war. While many anthologies of Lincoln’s political documents routinely concentrate on his presidential years or only on his anti-slavery writings, Guelzo concentrates on documents from Lincoln’s earliest political activity as an Illinois state legislator in the 1830s up through his presidency. The result is an accessible resource for students, researchers, and general readers.

In a time of great contest and confusion over the future of democracy as a governing principle, the example of Abraham Lincoln continues to provide encouragement and direction about democracy’s viability in the face of immense challenges. In The Political Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Allen Guelzo brings into one volume Lincoln’s most famous political documents and speeches from his earliest days as a political candidate under the banner of the Whig Party, to his election and service as the first anti-slavery Republican president, from 1861 to 1865, and the nation’s leader in the fiery trial of civil war. While many anthologies of Lincoln’s political documents routinely concentrate on his presidential years or only on his anti-slavery writings, Guelzo concentrates on documents from Lincoln’s earliest political activity as an Illinois state legislator in the 1830s up through his presidency. The result is an accessible resource for students, researchers, and general readers.

In a time of great contest and confusion over the future of democracy as a governing principle, the example of Abraham Lincoln continues to provide encouragement and direction about democracy’s viability in the face of immense challenges. In The Political Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Allen Guelzo brings into one volume Lincoln’s most famous political documents and speeches from his earliest days as a political candidate under the banner of the Whig Party, to his election and service as the first anti-slavery Republican president, from 1861 to 1865, and the nation’s leader in the fiery trial of civil war. While many anthologies of Lincoln’s political documents routinely concentrate on his presidential years or only on his anti-slavery writings, Guelzo concentrates on documents from Lincoln’s earliest political activity as an Illinois state legislator in the 1830s up through his presidency. The result is an accessible resource for students, researchers, and general readers.

In a time of great contest and confusion over the future of democracy as a governing principle, the example of Abraham Lincoln continues to provide encouragement and direction about democracy’s viability in the face of immense challenges. In The Political Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Allen Guelzo brings into one volume Lincoln’s most famous political documents and speeches from his earliest days as a political candidate under the banner of the Whig Party, to his election and service as the first anti-slavery Republican president, from 1861 to 1865, and the nation’s leader in the fiery trial of civil war. While many anthologies of Lincoln’s political documents routinely concentrate on his presidential years or only on his anti-slavery writings, Guelzo concentrates on documents from Lincoln’s earliest political activity as an Illinois state legislator in the 1830s up through his presidency. The result is an accessible resource for students, researchers, and general readers.

In a time of great contest and confusion over the future of democracy as a governing principle, the example of Abraham Lincoln continues to provide encouragement and direction about democracy’s viability in the face of immense challenges. In The Political Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Allen Guelzo brings into one volume Lincoln’s most famous political documents and speeches from his earliest days as a political candidate under the banner of the Whig Party, to his election and service as the first anti-slavery Republican president, from 1861 to 1865, and the nation’s leader in the fiery trial of civil war. While many anthologies of Lincoln’s political documents routinely concentrate on his presidential years or only on his anti-slavery writings, Guelzo concentrates on documents from Lincoln’s earliest political activity as an Illinois state legislator in the 1830s up through his presidency. The result is an accessible resource for students, researchers, and general readers.

In a time of great contest and confusion over the future of democracy as a governing principle, the example of Abraham Lincoln continues to provide encouragement and direction about democracy’s viability in the face of immense challenges. In The Political Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Allen Guelzo brings into one volume Lincoln’s most famous political documents and speeches from his earliest days as a political candidate under the banner of the Whig Party, to his election and service as the first anti-slavery Republican president, from 1861 to 1865, and the nation’s leader in the fiery trial of civil war. While many anthologies of Lincoln’s political documents routinely concentrate on his presidential years or only on his anti-slavery writings, Guelzo concentrates on documents from Lincoln’s earliest political activity as an Illinois state legislator in the 1830s up through his presidency. The result is an accessible resource for students, researchers, and general readers.

Between 1830 and 1850, anti-Catholics in the United States fixated on the ritual of Catholic confession and priests’ alleged sexual interrogation of young women, especially Protestant teenagers in convent schools. Protestant propagandists tied the moral and sexual contamination of confession to Rome’s supposed political and religious designs in the United States. This chapter examines how female sexual speech, public testimony, and the Protestant press were seen to abet this conspiracy. The first half of the chapter centers on Maria Monk’s blockbuster convent exposé, Awful Disclosures of the Hotel Dieu Nunnery of Montreal (1836), and its sensational delineation of young women’s subjection to and participation in confessional sex talk and systemic convent turpitude. The second half studies the dilemma that preoccupied every Protestant publisher who sought to expose the purported sexual dangers of Catholicism and confession: How could one contain Rome’s defiling designs if by exposing Catholicism’s contagious carnality one risked infecting readers and adding them to the conspiracy’s ranks? The chapter’s final section examines the media storm around the Protestant publication of Catholic confession manuals.

In a time of great contest and confusion over the future of democracy as a governing principle, the example of Abraham Lincoln continues to provide encouragement and direction about democracy’s viability in the face of immense challenges. In The Political Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Allen Guelzo brings into one volume Lincoln’s most famous political documents and speeches from his earliest days as a political candidate under the banner of the Whig Party, to his election and service as the first anti-slavery Republican president, from 1861 to 1865, and the nation’s leader in the fiery trial of civil war. While many anthologies of Lincoln’s political documents routinely concentrate on his presidential years or only on his anti-slavery writings, Guelzo concentrates on documents from Lincoln’s earliest political activity as an Illinois state legislator in the 1830s up through his presidency. The result is an accessible resource for students, researchers, and general readers.

In a time of great contest and confusion over the future of democracy as a governing principle, the example of Abraham Lincoln continues to provide encouragement and direction about democracy’s viability in the face of immense challenges. In The Political Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Allen Guelzo brings into one volume Lincoln’s most famous political documents and speeches from his earliest days as a political candidate under the banner of the Whig Party, to his election and service as the first anti-slavery Republican president, from 1861 to 1865, and the nation’s leader in the fiery trial of civil war. While many anthologies of Lincoln’s political documents routinely concentrate on his presidential years or only on his anti-slavery writings, Guelzo concentrates on documents from Lincoln’s earliest political activity as an Illinois state legislator in the 1830s up through his presidency. The result is an accessible resource for students, researchers, and general readers.

In a time of great contest and confusion over the future of democracy as a governing principle, the example of Abraham Lincoln continues to provide encouragement and direction about democracy’s viability in the face of immense challenges. In The Political Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Allen Guelzo brings into one volume Lincoln’s most famous political documents and speeches from his earliest days as a political candidate under the banner of the Whig Party, to his election and service as the first anti-slavery Republican president, from 1861 to 1865, and the nation’s leader in the fiery trial of civil war. While many anthologies of Lincoln’s political documents routinely concentrate on his presidential years or only on his anti-slavery writings, Guelzo concentrates on documents from Lincoln’s earliest political activity as an Illinois state legislator in the 1830s up through his presidency. The result is an accessible resource for students, researchers, and general readers.

In a time of great contest and confusion over the future of democracy as a governing principle, the example of Abraham Lincoln continues to provide encouragement and direction about democracy’s viability in the face of immense challenges. In The Political Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Allen Guelzo brings into one volume Lincoln’s most famous political documents and speeches from his earliest days as a political candidate under the banner of the Whig Party, to his election and service as the first anti-slavery Republican president, from 1861 to 1865, and the nation’s leader in the fiery trial of civil war. While many anthologies of Lincoln’s political documents routinely concentrate on his presidential years or only on his anti-slavery writings, Guelzo concentrates on documents from Lincoln’s earliest political activity as an Illinois state legislator in the 1830s up through his presidency. The result is an accessible resource for students, researchers, and general readers.

Edward Beecher and Harriet Beecher Stowe developed accounts of participatory sin and moral complicity that wed the moral critique of the slave system to the religious and moral assessment of individuals occupying diverse roles in the system. In different ways, the siblings insisted that personal sin and responsibility must be rethought from a system perspective. The first half of the chapter examines Beecher’s controversial notion of organic sin and how it staked a middle ground between antislavery conservatives and radicals. The second half of the chapter discusses how Stowe, like her brother, battled rigid moral individualists who dismissed system thinking as methodologically and morally misguided. Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), broadening moral realism to include system analysis, figures the slave system as a moral object that demands examination and critique. Moving beyond the capacities of the sermon and debate essay, the literary allowed Stowe to perform this exposure and critique.

In a time of great contest and confusion over the future of democracy as a governing principle, the example of Abraham Lincoln continues to provide encouragement and direction about democracy’s viability in the face of immense challenges. In The Political Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Allen Guelzo brings into one volume Lincoln’s most famous political documents and speeches from his earliest days as a political candidate under the banner of the Whig Party, to his election and service as the first anti-slavery Republican president, from 1861 to 1865, and the nation’s leader in the fiery trial of civil war. While many anthologies of Lincoln’s political documents routinely concentrate on his presidential years or only on his anti-slavery writings, Guelzo concentrates on documents from Lincoln’s earliest political activity as an Illinois state legislator in the 1830s up through his presidency. The result is an accessible resource for students, researchers, and general readers.

In a time of great contest and confusion over the future of democracy as a governing principle, the example of Abraham Lincoln continues to provide encouragement and direction about democracy’s viability in the face of immense challenges. In The Political Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Allen Guelzo brings into one volume Lincoln’s most famous political documents and speeches from his earliest days as a political candidate under the banner of the Whig Party, to his election and service as the first anti-slavery Republican president, from 1861 to 1865, and the nation’s leader in the fiery trial of civil war. While many anthologies of Lincoln’s political documents routinely concentrate on his presidential years or only on his anti-slavery writings, Guelzo concentrates on documents from Lincoln’s earliest political activity as an Illinois state legislator in the 1830s up through his presidency. The result is an accessible resource for students, researchers, and general readers.

In a time of great contest and confusion over the future of democracy as a governing principle, the example of Abraham Lincoln continues to provide encouragement and direction about democracy’s viability in the face of immense challenges. In The Political Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Allen Guelzo brings into one volume Lincoln’s most famous political documents and speeches from his earliest days as a political candidate under the banner of the Whig Party, to his election and service as the first anti-slavery Republican president, from 1861 to 1865, and the nation’s leader in the fiery trial of civil war. While many anthologies of Lincoln’s political documents routinely concentrate on his presidential years or only on his anti-slavery writings, Guelzo concentrates on documents from Lincoln’s earliest political activity as an Illinois state legislator in the 1830s up through his presidency. The result is an accessible resource for students, researchers, and general readers.