For Conscience' Sake: Dissent and the Divine in Early American Literature

Drawing together an archive of early American figures who have theorized or mobilized the notion of the conscience in a significant and representative way, this book argues that the conscience played a pivotal role in discourses surrounding religious freedom, civil disobedience, and individual rights. Puritan dissenters such as Anne Hutchinson and Roger Williams, Quaker ministers like John Woolman and Elias Hicks, and antislavery orators including Frederick Douglass and Theodore Parker all ...