The end of virtue: Public morality and individual autonomy in America, 1865-1880.

The dissertation is a study of the fragmentation of the idea of public virtue in the Northern United States during the fifteen years following the American Civil War. It examines how a continuing ideal of individual autonomy was increasingly applied to the area of personal morality, how this privatization of virtue implied the end of popular consensus about the meaning and extent of public morality, and how this transformation accompanied the development of liberal political ideology. The privatization of virtue engendered ideological confusion in the United States because the understanding of politics extant in 1865 still posited that republican self-government was dependent on public morality. Throughout the 1870s it became increasingly apparent to northern intellectuals that this conception of American politics was no longer tenable. The dissertation examines this critique in light of the situation of the 1870s, then considers how the shift toward moral uncertainty contributed to transforming intellectuals' understanding not only of American politics but of social cohesion. It argues that current attitudes about moral autonomy are rooted in this transformation. The sources for this examination are found in newspapers, periodicals, letters, essays and fiction of the period as well as a number of orations concerning the 1876 Centennial of the United States. Its participants include such political theorists and public moralists as Henry Adams, E. L. Godkin, Theodore Dwight Woolsey, Joseph Henry Allen, and Walt Whitman. Their works and the works of other writers and speakers are used to reconstruct the postbellum discourse on morality and political theory.Ph.D.American historyPolitical scienceSocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/129903/2/9635627.pd