What did abolitionists do in response to the slave codes?
World developments created and recreated periods of ideological crisis for the Old South. Crises of confidence in the taken-for-granted productions and reproductions of Southern life exacerbated the ideological contradictions between such concepts as freedom and slavery, setting in motion the dissolution of the dominant discourse that supported the natural order of Southern life. This crisis which detained 90 percent of blacks in bondage; then there was the racialist structure of the society, a moral and social order that privileged whites and stereotyped blacks as either subservient or subversive; and finally, there was the resurgence of the long-held Anglo-American desire for African colonization (McInerney 1994). Alongside their efforts to find their own voice and oppose colonization, free blacks sought to convert white abolitionists from gradualism to a more radical abolitionist program, the immediate end of slavery. With the 1820s social climate favoring reform, blacks had some su
