The Men of the Fifties

This lecture looks at a second generation of exiles that left the South in the 1850s. Unlike the dissenters of the 1830s, who were influenced by the evangelical impulses of the Second Great Awakening, these exiles were motivated by sectional politics. Heightened tension over the expansion of slavery westward, the constitutionality of personal liberty laws, and the fate of fugitive slaves hardened divisions between the North and the South. Woodward argued in this lecture that abolitionism was no longer primarily a missionary movement to save the souls of slave owners from sin by bringing salvation through repentance. Hatred of the sin of slaveholding was transferred to hatred of the enslavers and their region. The dissenters of the Fifties exemplified this shift. Their outspoken condemnation of institutionalized slavery drew fire from their compatriots, forcing them to leave the region. With the notable exception of Moncure Daniel Conway, these dissenters typically came from more modest means rather than from the southern elite. These exiles included Hinton Rowan Helper, Benjamin Sherwood Hedrick, Daniel Reaves Goodloe, and John Gregg Fee.