From elevation to uplift: Gender, citizenship and northern black political culture on the eve of the Civil War

This dissertation examines the relationship between racial elevation ideology, and the gender ideals and practices espoused by the spokesmen and women for the northern black population in the nineteenth century. It begins by discussing the origins of racial elevation ideology and defining its place in black political culture in the 1820s and 1830s. The dissertation then investigates the radicalization of northern black political culture in the 1840s and 1850s, when calls to "elevate" the race through "redemption" moved to the forefront of black political discourse. Finally, the dissertation ends by analyzing the ways in which northern black spokesmen and women redefined the concept of elevation during the Civil War and Reconstruction. Throughout, the dissertation argues that gender ideals remained central to elite African American interpretations of morality, virtue, politics, citizenship, self-improvement and representation---all elements bound up in the concept of racial elevation.;By analyzing the ways that gender ideals and practices shaped African American political culture in the decades surrounding the Civil War, the dissertation revises the scholarship on northern black political development in two important ways. First it demonstrates that northern black support for the Civil War did not constitute a significant break with the politics of the previous decade. Rather, northern black spokesmen and women saw the war as an opportunity to act on the previous decades' discourse regarding the importance of manly virtue, citizenship, and the desire to redeem the race. Second, the dissertation revises the very terminology used by the scholars who examine black political thought and activism in the nineteenth century. Though scholars have generally conflated the phrases "racial elevation" and "racial uplift," the dissertation will demonstrate that the change in terminology corresponded with a shift in the black elite's interpretation of the principle sources of vice in the black population. While responsibility for moral elevation rested with African American men in the antebellum era, by the late nineteenth century, responsibility for the moral uplift of the race rested primarily with African American women.