The crusade to secure the humane treatment of animals, a product of the "demetaphorization" of certain abolitionist tropes, supplied the remedy for the historical disappointment of Reconstruction. The cumulative impact of the disasters of the late 1860s and 1870s, culminating in the withdrawal of the occupying federal army from the South in 1877, tarnished the appeal of social justice initiatives in the eyes of most activists during this period. Rather than continue to campaign against the resurgence of white supremacist power in the South, and the manifest inability of the capitalist system to provide for the Northern poor, the spiritual descendants of the abolitionists turned their backs upon the sham of emancipation and rededicated their lives to the quest for individual moral perfection--a quest which now included the duty to extend their sympathies beyond the confines of a human sphere abandoned to ceaseless conflict.   

Works Cited and Consulted

Abzug, Robert H. Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994.

ASPCA. "ASPCA--History." <http://www.aspca.org/site/PageServer?pagename=history>

Bender, Thomas, ed. The Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992.  

Buell, Lawrence. Writing For an Endangered World: Literature, Culture, and the Environment in the U.S. and Beyond. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard UP, 2001.

Capper, Charles and Conrad Edick Wright, eds. Transient and the Permanent: The Transcendentalist Movement and Its Contexts. Boston: Northwestern UP, 1999.

Cranch, Christopher Pearse. Collected Poems of Christopher Pearse Cranch. Ed. Joseph M. DeFalco. Gainesville, FL: Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints, 1971.

Emerson, Ralph Waldo. The Complete Essays and Other Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Ed. Brooks Atkinson. New York: The Modern Library, 1940.

Foner, Eric. Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party Before the Civil War. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1970.

Fox, Michael V. Returning to Eden: Animal Rights and Human Responsibility. New York: Viking Press, 1980.

Hollander, John, ed. American Poetry: The Nineteenth-Century, Volume One. New York: library of America, 1993.

Howe, Daniel Walker. The Unitarian Conscience: Harvard Moral Philosophy 1805-1861. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1970.

Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth. "The Bell of Atri." <http://www.everypoet.com/archive/poetry/Henry_Wadsworth_Longfellow/longfellow_wayside_the_bell_of_atri.htm>

MSPCA. "History of the MSPCA-ANGELL." <http://www.mspca.org/site/pp.asp?c=gtIUK4OSG&b=126765>

----. Our Dumb Animals, volume 20: 3 (1887). <http://www.animallaw.info/historical/articles/arusMSPCAODA_20_3.htm>

McShane, Clay. "Gelded Age Boston." New England Quarterly 74.2 (June, 2001): 274-302.

Miller, Perry, ed. The Transcendentalists: An Anthology. New York: MJF Books, 1978.

Paterson, David and Richard Ryder, eds. Animals' Rights: A Symposium. Bristol: Centaur Press, 1979.

Richardson, Robert D. Emerson: The Mind on Fire. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995.

Society For the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. "Founding of the SPCA." <http://www.spcadbn.org.za/founding.php>

Stoehr, Taylor. Nay-Saying in Concord: Emerson, Alcott, and Thoreau. Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1978.

Tompkins, Jane P. "Sentimental Power: Uncle Tom's Cabin and the Politics of Literary History." Uncle Tom's Cabin: Authoritative Text Backgrounds and Contexts Criticism. Ed. Elizabeth Ammons. New York: W.W. Norton, 1994. 495-522.