Robert S. Duncanson, Race, and Auguste Comte's Positivism in Cincinnati

Choosing another idyllic poetic subject ("Ellen's Isle" refers to Sir Walter Scott's poem The Lady of the Lake) suggests that he believed they shared the goal of reordering "nature" and racial categories; Sumner's postwar attack on segregation as a form of slavery had rested not on an appeal to a natural law of equality, but on the grounds that citizenship was a social concept that demanded equality regardless of physical nature or origins.63 But by spring 1872, while Duncanson's giftreceived attention in Washington, DC, Sumner had joined fellow abolitionist Horace Greeley (and Cincinnati Commercial editor Murat Halstead) in Cincinnati, to launch the Liberal Republicans, a party that claimed that with the Fifteenth Amendment Reconstruction could end. [...]it sheds light on the question of landscape and nationalism.