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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 25 April 2006
Susan M. Ryan, The Grammar of Good Intentions: Race and the Antebellum Culture of Benevolence, Cornell University Press, 2003
Gregg D. Crane, Race, Citizenship, and Law in American Literature, Cambridge University Press, 2002
Moral sympathy does not necessarily imply condescension. Try to do something about sympathy, cross the line to benevolence, try to improve someone else's lot in life, and that can too easily change. Reform can become coercion and intolerance. The needy can come to seem permanently debased. They can also trick or manipulate the benevolent. These ambiguities pose severe problems for anyone who wants to imagine a democratic politics based on morality. Does neediness make the needy incapable of self-reliance and citizenship? Does benevolence corrupt the giver? Who gets to decide what laws are moral? According to literary scholars Mary Ryan and Gregg Crane, antebellum American literature perceived these problems and in many cases quite self-consciously tried to resolve them.