Selling Antislavery: Abolition and Mass Media in Antebellum America 9780812296969

Citation preview

Selling Antislavery

MATERIAL TEXTS Series Editors Roger Chartier Joseph Farrell Anthony Grafton

Leah Price Peter Stallybrass Michael F. Suarez, S. J.

A complete list of books in the series is available from the publisher.

SELLING ANTISLAVERY Abolition and Mass Media in Antebellum America

Teresa A. Goddu

Universit y of Pennsylvania Press Phil adelphia

Copyright © 2020 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 www​.­upenn​.­edu​/­pennpress Printed in the United States of Amer­i­ca on acid-­free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 A Cataloging-­in-­Publication record is available from the Library of Congress ISBN 978-0-8122-5199-9

For Yoshi, Maya, and Kaita

C ontents

Introduction 1 Chapter 1. Antislavery Inc.

10

Part I. Antislavery Print Culture Chapter 2. Summing Up Slavery: The Antislavery Almanac and the Production of Fact

31

Chapter 3. The African American Slave Narrative as Factual Compendium 55 Part II. Antislavery Material Culture Chapter 4. Speaking Objects: Antislavery Fairs and Sentimental Consumerism Chapter 5. Antislavery Fairs and the Culture of Class

85

108

Part III. Antislavery Visual Culture Chapter 6. Antislavery’s Panoramic Perspective

141

Chapter 7. Fugitive Sight: African American Pa­noramas of Slavery and Freedom

175

Conclusion. The American Anti-­Slavery Society Celebrates Its Third De­cade

219

viii Contents

Notes 227 Index 285 Acknowl­edgments

297

Intro du c ti on A coin box (Figure 1), commissioned by the Mas­sa­chu­setts Anti-­Slavery Society (MASS) in 1839 as part of a fund­rais­ing plan, embodies the central tenets of this book: first, antislavery media emerged from specific institutional settings, and, second, they w ­ ere multimodal, encompassing print, material, and visual forms. Although we are familiar with the robust media culture (songs, plays, pictures, games, dolls, plates, wall­paper) spawned by the success of antislavery’s most iconic text, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), we know much less about the media artifacts produced by the American Anti-­Slavery Society (AASS) and its auxiliaries from the society’s founding in 1833 to its dissolution in 1870.1 Selling Antislavery maps the vast media archive generated by institutional antislavery in the antebellum era. By paying par­tic­u­lar attention to the movement’s foundational phase in the 1830s—­when the society was at the height of its orga­nizational powers and before it splintered into warring factions in 1840—­Selling Antislavery locates the emergence of abolitionist mass media in an e­ arlier era and traces that period’s influence on subsequent de­cades. In providing the prehistory of U ­ ncle Tom’s Cabin, it shows how Stowe’s novel and related products mark the apex rather than the birth of antislavery mass media. Created to accompany the MASS’s Weekly Contribution Plan, which raised money for the cause by collecting small donations at regular weekly intervals, the coin box exemplifies many aspects of abolitionist media culture. It functioned as a trea­sury, an illustrated tract, and a domestic material object.2 As a depository, it fulfilled an impor­tant institutional role, providing funds for the MASS when the economic depression of the late 1830s forced large contributors to withhold their donations. Paying, according to their ability, one, two, or six cents a week, the movement’s grassroots members raised substantial amounts without undue ­labor or sacrifice. By distributing across all abolitionists the responsibility of keeping the state society’s trea­sury “constantly supplied” with funds to support lecturers and produce printed material, the plan’s penny capitalism weathered market fluctuations and increased its members’ personal investment in the cause.3 A miniature of the trea­sury to which it is dedicated—­“ TO THE MASS. A. S. SOCIETY”—­t he box served as a sign of the society’s orga­nizational strength and transformed its contributors into stakeholders ­every time they deposited a coin into its slot. The box compounded its cents, producing money for the cause as well as interest in it.

2 Introduction

Figure 1. Mas­sa­chu­setts Anti-­Slavery Society’s Weekly Contribution Box (1839). Cardboard collection box, 8 × 6 × 4.5 cm. Courtesy of the Boston Public Library, Rare Books and Manuscripts Department.

As a tract, the box solidified support for the society’s aims by stimulating sympathy for enslaved ­people and converting that feeling into economic capital. Issued as an “edition” for six and a quarter cents or seventy-­five cents for a dozen, the box was, according to The Liberator, “as useful as a tract, as it is con­ ve­nient as a trea­sury.”4 “Appropriate devices and inscriptions” cover ­every side as well as the top.5 The front features an image of a kneeling slave framed by rays of light, which melt the chains on the Corinthian columns in the foreground, promising her release. Emanating from an arc with the words “Remember Your Weekly Pledge,” the light derives its power from contributors’

Introduction 3

steadfast donations. Contributors answer the kneeling w ­ oman’s prayer when they drop a coin into the top of the box, directly above her imploring eyes. Located in the heavens and sanctified by the biblical injunctions that frame the deposit slot and speak of transforming faith into good works, the donations assume God’s moral authority and power to lift the oppressed. Maria Weston Chapman’s poem, “A Sabbath Morning Hymn,” printed on one side of the box, further consecrates each contribution as a gift to freedom; the biblical injunctions on the other side remind readers of their duty to deliver the slave and show her mercy and compassion. The back, which lays out the objectives of the Weekly Contribution Plan along with step-­by-­step directions for conducting it, ties this sympathy for the slave to antislavery organ­ization. Like many antislavery artifacts, the coin box speaks in several registers: sentimental and religious, orga­ nizational and instructional. The front image generates sympathy for the oppressed; the poetic hymn and quotations from scripture increase that sympathy and tie it explic­itly to religious duty; and the back explains how good works for the slave are best performed through systematic donations to the antislavery cause. The box’s coordinated message teaches contributors to turn their sympathy into cents. By gathering coins, abstract feeling is turned into concrete action and sympathy is made to speak. The alchemy by which this artifact transformed feeling into money was augmented by its companion tract, the Monthly Offering (Figure 2), which converted the box’s cents back into sentiment through the mediation of print. Edited by J. A. Collins, the MASS’s general agent, and published monthly (with some irregularity) from July 1840 u ­ ntil November/December 1842, the Monthly Offering was the official organ of the Weekly Contribution Plan.6 Contributors ­were asked to buy the box as well as subscribe to the tract for thirty-­seven and a half cents a year. The synergy between the box and its companion text is evident in the tract’s title, which transforms contributions into a religious offering and reinforces the plan’s monthly collection schedule (agents visited once a month to gather the weekly contributions). The tract is also a visual replica of the box: it not only reduplicates the box’s image on its cover but also, in framing that picture with an ornate border, depicts itself as a box. If the depository is a tract, its companion tract is also a trea­sury, packed with print instead of money. Moreover, its print calls on readers to fill their boxes. Designed to “aid and encourage” contributors in their work of “love and mercy,” the Monthly Offering worked like the box to “enlist sympathy for the cause, by holding up to view the suffering and benighted slave” (1:2) and remind contributors through its regular arrival to be punctual in their payments. Maria Weston Chapman’s tale, “Pinda,” published in the tract, also does both. Pinda, a fugitive slave, not only gains the reader’s admiration for her

Figure 2. Front cover of J. A. Collins, ed., Monthly Offering (Boston: Anti-­ Slavery Office, 1840). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

Introduction 5

loyal affection for her husband and industrious self-­sufficiency in freedom but also models how to convert sympathy into antislavery action. At the ­climax of the tale, just before Pinda flees from Boston with her fugitive ­husband, she becomes a subscriber to the Weekly Contribution Plan with such a large donation that the box must be opened, since her Mexican dollar ­w ill not fit into its small slot. “Rich in the possession of liberty,” Pinda donates her savings to extend freedom to ­others, with an “effusion of heart, so lovely and so rare” (1:28). Like Pinda, contributors could express their feelings and perform their own freedom by giving money to the enslaved w ­ oman on the coin box. The Monthly Offering supplemented the box in several key ways. As in Pinda’s story, it reinforced the box’s message that sympathy is most properly expressed through cents. Its regular monthly arrival prompted the collection of cents and aided their increase by producing more compassion for the enslaved. It also served as a concrete emblem of what ­those cents ­were meant to fund: more print. The box and its tract enacted the cir­cuit of sentiment, cents, and print that the antislavery movement more broadly propelled on a larger scale: print creating sympathy, sympathy generating cents, and cents producing more print. Fi­nally, as a decorative domestic object embedded in parlor culture, the box was a commodity that generated cultural capital for its contributors as well as the cause. Described as “beautiful” and designed to be placed on a chimney mantle or ­table in the most public room of the ­house, the box translated antislavery princi­ples into ­house­hold knowledge and attached them to middle-­class values.7 Located near (and sometimes over) the hearth, alongside the parlor’s other ornaments, the box reflected and augmented the ideals of middle-­class domesticity. Visually, its burning rays of truth extended the warming light of the domestic hearth upward, turning the parlor mantle into an altar of freedom. Discursively, it communicated the middle-­class values of piety and charity, punctuality and thrift. As a savings bank, it instilled the habit of self-­denial even as it emblematized prosperity. It taught contributors to perform “generous thrift”—to save in order to give. As a religious shrine, “a ­little trea­sury of the Lord,” whose ritual donation occurred e­ very Sabbath morning, the box sanctified its cents by transforming them into a gift for the slave.8 In following the apostolic injunctions and preparing for worship by placing a gift to freedom in the box, contributors became one of God’s disciples, a ray of his light. By displaying the power of benevolence, the box made an accounting of its contributors’ moral virtue and magnified its meaningfulness. In addition to espousing the middle-­class values of domesticity and discipline, blessings and benevolence, the box reflected its contributors’ refinement

6 Introduction

and social status. Made for display—­the Monthly Offering recommends that the box be given “a con­spic­u­ous place in the most public room” in the ­house (1:8)— it was an external sign of their sincerity and compassion, as well as their gentility. Chapman’s hymn, which tells of “swelling heart[s]” and “gracious deed[s],” links contributors’ moral sympathy to their refinement. Similarly, the Monthly Offering, containing the prose and poetry of the movement’s “best writers” (1:3) and advertised as an attractive gift book suitable for a “Christmas and New Year’s pre­sent” (1:161), represented, both discursively and materially, its readers’ antislavery sentiment as a sign of their good taste. As a conversation piece, the box encouraged both sociability and proper social affiliation; as a sign of economic capital, spiritual goodness, and cultural refinement, it compounded its contents by associating antislavery with a specific class consciousness. By packaging antislavery as a socially desirable enterprise as well as a holy cause, the box branded the movement as respectable. The coin box offers a glimpse into institutional antislavery’s larger workings: its modes of organ­ization, its production of novel media artifacts, and its creation of compelling cultural messages. It shows how antislavery leaders w ­ ere at once institution builders, media innovators, and cultural entrepreneurs. By embedding their media within systematized orga­nizational structures, they produced a mass media ahead of the mainstream. Moreover, by constructing their media as a cultural commodity, they installed antislavery at the heart of middle-­ class consciousness. Through a persuasive and per­sis­tent multimodal message, they transformed a marginalized cause into a mass social movement by the end of the 1830s. Antislavery succeeded not b ­ ecause it stood outside antebellum Amer­i­ca’s emerging mass consumer culture but ­because, like the coin box, it compounded its growth. Selling Antislavery develops ­these argumentative threads. First, it details the orga­nizational structures and publication strategies through which institutional antislavery produced some of the antebellum era’s earliest mass media. Building on the influential model of evangelicalism and developing alongside the growth of the temperance movement, the AASS provides an impor­tant case study for the role of reform movements in driving the rise of mass media in the United States. While ­there are detailed studies of evangelical mass media—­David Paul Nord on religious publishing, Peter Wosh on the Bible business, and David Morgan on the American Tract Society—­studies of the AASS’s media are lacking.9 Trish Loughran’s explication of the material practices of or­ga­nized abolition is an exception and, hence, serves as the foundation upon which this book builds.10 Selling Antislavery describes the distinctive set of business and publishing practices that the AASS developed in the 1830s to mobilize its media. Through the creation of an alternative publication system, the AASS was able

Introduction 7

to gain mass circulation for many of its products. By showing how the 1830s AASS built and ran its media machine, I make the case for antislavery’s centrality to nineteenth-­century media history. Second, this book expands our understanding of the range of popu­lar forms that the antislavery movement produced. The AASS generated a wide array of print, material, and visual media: almanacs and slave narratives, domestic objects and gift books, broadsides and pa­noramas. Although the movement’s literary forms have garnered critical attention, its ephemeral and popu­lar productions remain underexamined. Moreover, in focusing on the movement’s rhetorical appeal, critics have overlooked how the materiality of the antislavery artifact—­its physical form and modes of circulation—­helped to construct its message.11 Working at the intersections of literary criticism, book history, and media studies, I attend to the close connections between the media object’s discursive, material, distributional, and marketing modes.12 The dual meaning of “selling” in my title—­“to persuade” as well as “to vend”—­captures my focus on how the movement’s rhetorical approaches ­were consolidated by its material practices. I also foreground the dynamic intersections between print, material, and visual media. Rather than studying each in isolation, I show how they forged a larger media ecol­ogy.13 By synergizing t­ hese media forms, institutional antislavery pop­u­lar­ized its message for a mass audience. Third, this book demonstrates institutional abolition’s centrality to the formation of the northern white m ­ iddle class by explicating how antislavery media promoted specific regional, racial, and class identities. Reform has long been seen as a key architect of nineteenth-­century middle-­class culture.14 Antislavery in par­tic­u­lar became the engine that allowed the northern m ­ iddle class to construct itself as white. Along with respectability and refinement, moral virtue and market aspiration, race was an impor­tant attribute of northern middle-­ class sensibility. By espousing the liberation of black bodies by white subjects, institutional antislavery crystallized class consciousness as racial superiority.15 Operating at the forefront of a new middle-­class culture industry, abolition not only allied itself with the values and subjectivities of an emerging ­middle class but also worked to coalesce and extend them.16 Speaking its culture’s core discourses of class and consumerism and packaging its beliefs in material forms that appealed to the rising ­middle class, it both manufactured itself as a marketable commodity and married middle-­class identity to antislavery ideology. A cultural as well as a po­liti­cal proj­ect, institutional antislavery wove itself into the fabric of middle-­class culture. Selling Antislavery tracks the emergence of mass media in the antebellum United States through the lens of a specific reform movement. By providing a material account of the AASS’s media products and publishing techniques, it

8 Introduction

reveals that the conditions for mass media—­both in terms of variety and amount—­were pre­sent as early as the 1830s. It investigates antislavery’s discursive forms as well as its material and visual practices to show how the antislavery movement disseminated its appeal and propelled middle-­class culture. Although I foreground print, material, and visual media respectively, the book as a w ­ hole shows how t­ hese categories overlap and inform each other. Given the breadth of the antislavery archive, Selling Antislavery focuses on key discourses—­ facticity, consumerism, nationalism—­and genres to reveal institutional antislavery’s wider expanse and to telescope its larger arguments. I trace patterns and survey genres instead of emphasizing individual works. When I do focus on a single text, I select less well-­k nown works—­American Slavery as It Is (1839) rather than ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin, for instance, or the Narrative of James Williams (1838) rather than the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845)—in order to highlight gaps in our knowledge of the antislavery canon. For the same reason, I concentrate on the long foreground of abolitionist mass media rather than the breakthrough forms of the 1850s. ­After focusing on the AASS’s largely white-­authored works, the book concludes by attending to the cultural productions of black activists. By charting the institutional center that black abolitionists learned to work within and against, Selling Antislavery lays the groundwork for a more nuanced understanding of how ­these two media cultures overlapped and influenced each other.17 The first chapter opens with an institutional history of the 1830s AASS. It provides an overview of the AASS’s orga­nizational structures and its media products to show how each ­shaped and advanced the other. It focuses on the society’s business-­minded branch centered in New York City, rather than its more radical voices (white or black), to show how the 1830s AASS’s institutional formation was integral to the movement’s larger influence. An investigation of antislavery’s popu­lar media forms—­printed texts, material artifacts, and visual representations—­follows. Each part is anchored in the foundational period of the 1830s and then moves chronologically through the antebellum period to trace the historical development of a par­tic­u­lar medium. Part I surveys the 1830s AASS’s rationalized print system. It focuses on the discourse of fact to show how institutional antislavery used new modes of evidence to render slavery vis­i­ble and pre­sent its own knowledge system as credible. In delineating how the cause collected and diffused information through a coordinated and corroborative print system, this section foregrounds its rational appeal. It investigates two genres that lay at the core of the AASS’s knowledge and print systems: the almanac and the slave narrative. Part II deals with the material artifacts that the AASS’s female auxiliaries produced for their Christmastime fairs as well as the fairs’ business structure.

Introduction 9

­ unning from the 1830s through the late 1860s and operating as the society’s R key fundraiser, the fairs show how an army of ­women workers used consumer culture to sell antislavery as an exemplar of sociability, refinement, and good taste. The fairs marketed antislavery as ­middle class, creating cultural as well as commercial capital. “Speaking” objects sold at fairs—­domestic goods emblazoned with antislavery mottos—­formulated white liberal subjectivity while foreign and fash­ion­able items created a culture of class. This section examines the discourses of sentiment and refinement that made up antislavery’s appeal to the heart. Part III analyzes the AASS’s extensive visual culture, highlighting the mass visual medium of the pa­norama. Through panoramic landscape pictures and broadsides that resembled miniature pa­noramas, institutional antislavery detailed slavery’s cruel operations and visualized the North’s superiority over the South. For northern viewers, the antislavery pa­norama communicated a message of nationalism and po­liti­cal power. This section examines or­ga­nized antislavery’s appeal to the eye, showing how the movement’s panoramic pictures—­specifically their commanding perspective—­catalyzed new points of view. This part also brings black abolition to the foreground, attending to African American activists’ countervisual appeals. Through word and image, African American activists painted pa­noramas of slavery that also envisioned black freedom. The final chapter details their adaptations of the AASS’s visual iconography, revealing how black cultural producers looked back. Institutional antislavery expanded the field for black media even as it s­ haped—­a nd often l­imited—­t he contours of that field. The conclusion discusses the AASS’s Third De­cade cele­bration, held in 1863 ­after emancipation was proclaimed, to reflect on the end(s) of antislavery mass media and the durability of institutional antislavery’s cultural proj­ect.

C h apter 1

Antislavery Inc.

In the 1830s, the founding de­cade of the American Anti-­Slavery Society, the antislavery movement transformed itself from a small, heterogeneous, unpop­u­lar band of gradualists and radicals into an or­ga­nized mass social movement that spread across the North and the West. Between its establishment in 1833 and its fragmentation in 1840, the AASS’s grassroots membership coalesced into a national reform organ­ization. Vertically arranged, with state and local auxiliary chapters nested within a “federated structure,” and managerially directed by a centralized administration, the executive committee headquartered in New York City, the 1830s AASS resembled a modern business enterprise.1 Its goal was to open the nation’s eyes, heart, and mind to the prob­lem of slavery and the cause of freedom. Through pioneering business structures and publishing strategies, it created the infrastructure and tactics necessary for the mass communication of its message. It spread its ideology of reform by manufacturing an array of media products and circulating them widely through a coordinated distribution system. Both the number of the AASS’s auxiliaries and its media output r­ ose dramatically through the 1830s. In 1837, The Philanthropist computed the rise in antislavery socie­ties at about “one society daily” and in 1836 the AASS’s Third Annual Report counted the total number of publications as “nine times as ­great as t­ hose of last year.”2 By the end of the de­cade, the national society consisted of 1,650 auxiliaries and disseminated 725,000 copies of its publications yearly.3 Each propelled the other: the AASS’s institutional structure created mechanisms for mobilizing antislavery media on a mass scale, while its popu­lar media forms generated interest in and won converts to the cause. The AASS drove the rise of new media in the 1830s and ­t hose media in turn facilitated the spread of antislavery reform. This chapter shows how the AASS’s business model in the 1830s—­its centralized bureaucracy and alternative publishing system—­was integral to its creation of mass media. By capitalizing on innovative orga­nizational structures, new technologies of reproduction and publicity, and systematized distribution,



Antislavery Inc. 11

the AASS grew its base and pop­u­lar­ized its argument. A media power­house, the AASS manufactured abolition as a compelling brand in the 1830s. Even a­ fter the society’s dissolution in 1840, the institutional identity and distinctive set of publication practices and media types it created and consolidated in the 1830s continued to shape the antislavery argument as the movement evolved. The 1830s AASS established the foundation upon which f­ uture forms of abolition would build.

* * * The 1830s AASS patterned its media enterprise on several models: early British and U.S. antislavery movements, black abolitionism and print culture, and evangelicalism. Many of its texts and publishing tactics ­were drawn from British propaganda campaigns against the slave trade (1787–1807) and slavery (1823– 34). From 1787 forward, British antislavery established itself as a national network, with coordinated petition campaigns and “cheap promotional lit­er­a­ture that could be distributed in large quantities” through local agents.4 The AASS ­adopted British antislavery’s orga­nizational structure as well as its multimodal media, such as Josiah Wedgwood’s medallion of the kneeling slave (1787), which operated as a visual icon as well as a consumer good, and its publicity methods, such as distribution of f­ ree publications.5 Similarly, the 1830s AASS was indebted to U.S. abolition’s first wave—­less the republican strategies of the elite Pennsylvania Abolition Society (founded in 1775) than the grassroots organ­izing of the AASS’s immediate pre­de­ces­sor, the New ­England Anti-­Slavery Society (NEASS, founded in 1832). As described by Richard Newman, the NEASS “incorporated mass action strategies into its orga­nizational framework”: it “inaugurated the agency system by appointing four traveling lecturers in 1832 and 1833,” established its own “official organ,” The Abolitionist (1833), and disseminated publications.6 The AASS would employ all ­t hese tactics and more. The 1830s AASS was also indebted to black abolitionism’s organ­izing strategies and print practices. Black re­sis­tance and activism, as Manisha Sinha argues, lay at the heart of the antislavery movement.7 Black antislavery activists or­ga­nized in the 1820s through in­de­pen­dent associations, such as churches, fraternal associations, vigilance committees, and literary socie­ties. Antislavery socie­t ies like the Mas­sa­chu­setts General Colored Association (1826–32), the “first antislavery society in New E ­ ngland,” formed the institutional matrix out of which the NEASS and AASS would emerge.8 The NEASS first met in Boston at “the African Church on Joy Street,” and the AASS assembled in Philadelphia’s Adelphi Hall, which “belonged to a black benevolent society.”9 The black conventions of 1830–35, the only “national antislavery gatherings” before the AASS’s

12 Chapter 1

founding, laid the groundwork for the emergence of a national antislavery network.10 Black abolitionist print culture also s­ haped the AASS’s argument and media practices. Although black writers and activists, such as Phillis Wheatley and Olaudah Equiano, participated in transatlantic print culture as early as the eigh­ teenth c­ entury, the black response to the colonization debate of the 1820s produced a more coordinated culture of print.11 The first African American periodicals, Freedom’s Journal (1827–29) and Rights of All (1829), not only deployed a range of appeals, but also established broad distributional networks that extended “throughout the United States, Canada, Haiti, and the United Kingdom”: Freedom’s Journal, as Gordon Fraser shows, “built a network that included forty-­seven authorized agents and extended from Waterloo, Ontario, to rural North Carolina, from Port-­au-­Prince to Liverpool to Richmond, Baltimore, and New Orleans.”12 Similarly, David Walker forged a militantly discursive and “typographically radical” argument in his Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (1829), which he circulated through the mail and with the help of sympathetic black sailors traveling to the South.13 Black abolitionists’ innovative use of the press in the 1820s ­shaped the national debate over slavery and pushed the antislavery argument t­ oward immediatism. The AASS would l­ater duplicate their publishing tactics. In the 1830s, black abolitionists operated both inside and outside of the AASS’s institutional structures. They w ­ ere members and part of its leadership structure: “six black abolitionists” w ­ ere named to its board of man­ag­ers in 1833, and Theodore Wright, a Presbyterian minister, Peter Williams, an Episcopal priest, and Samuel Cornish, founder of Freedom’s Journal, all served on its executive committee.14 Yet the AASS remained “white-­dominated.”15 Although its aim, according to its constitution, was to “elevate the character and condition of the ­people of color,” its main focus was conversion to the cause.16 The dissolution of southern slavery rather than the promotion of northern equality was its central concern.17 Hence, African American activists continued to chart their own course in the 1830s, focusing on improving the condition of northern blacks, creating vigilance committees to aid and protect fugitive slaves, holding state and national conventions to form po­liti­cal co­a li­tions to demand racial equality, and establishing educational socie­ties to support literacy.18 Black cultural producers fostered the black press with new periodicals, such as the Weekly Advocate (1837), the Colored American (1837–41), the Mirror of Liberty (1838– 40), and the National Reformer (1838–39), and developed their own distributional networks, such as David Ruggles’s bookstore and reading room.19 With the dissolution of the AASS’s centralized institutional structure in 1840 and



Antislavery Inc. 13

the broadening of the movement, African Americans took on an even more vis­i­ble role. Besides the influence of ­earlier abolitionist groups, institutional antislavery developed out of and in tandem with benevolent reform movements, especially evangelicalism. As David Paul Nord asserts, the evangelical movement, institutionalized as the American Bible Society (1816), the American Sunday School Union (1824), and the American Tract Society (1825), was foundational to formulating the “orga­nizational structures and publication strategies” of ­later re­ ere the first to form movements, including abolition.20 Evangelical socie­ties w create national networks of auxiliaries directed by a centralized board of man­ ag­ers. By arranging themselves hierarchically (from executive committee through department heads and regional man­ag­ers down to grassroots volunteers), with systematized procedures that facilitated the flow of information between center and periphery (record-­ keeping forms, cards of instruction, in-­house newsletters), they operated as “large-­scale business firm[s].”21 In the 1820s, they built their own publishing h ­ ouses, taking advantage of modern industrial technologies, such as stereotyping, steam-­ powered presses, and machine-­made paper.22 Committed to the widespread circulation of Bibles and religious tracts, they not only created regional distributional networks of depositories and paid agents but also relied on local l­abor, turning ­every church into a book depository and ­every member into a tract disseminator. Through the pioneering use of bureaucratic organ­ization, centralized publishing, and coordinated distribution, the evangelical movement produced the first mass media in the United States.23 Evangelicalism strongly s­ haped abolition. Many abolitionist leaders w ­ ere drawn from the evangelical movement: Arthur Tappan bankrolled the American Tract Society before funding the AASS, and members of the AASS’s executive committee, Elizur Wright and Joshua Leavitt, worked as colporteurs for the Tract Society. The AASS ­adopted similar orga­nizational structures, publishing procedures, and distributional strategies.24 Like ­later business corporations, it was a “vertically integrated, horizontally diversified, managerially coordinated enterprise.”25 By making its “chief business” to “or­ga­nize Anti-­Slavery socie­ties, if pos­si­ble, in e­ very city, town and village, in our land,” the AASS established auxiliaries at the level of the state and county as well as the town and school district.26 While ­t hese franchises had separate memberships, they understood themselves to be part of a larger, hierarchical system: county socie­ties w ­ ere auxiliaries to their state socie­ties, which in turn w ­ ere ancillary to the AASS.27 In return for forwarding a copy of their constitution, a list of their officers, and the number of their members to the national office, auxiliaries ­were sent official

14 Chapter 1

acknowl­edgment of their incorporation into the parent society: first a letter of recognition, l­ ater an engraved diploma of membership.28 In turn, by listing socie­ ties that ­were “founded on the same princi­ples, and seek the same object in the same way” at the end of each annual report, the AASS advertised itself as the sum of its proliferating parts.29 Even as the AASS fixated on spreading—­its annual reports puffed the exponential increase of auxiliaries—it worked to connect its multiplying parts into a unified ­whole. The vertical integration required for national organ­ization occurred through the AASS’s centralized management structure. The 1830s AASS was run by an executive committee and a paid staff of professional man­ag­ers, headquartered in New York City—­the geographic center of the moral nation, according to executive committee member Henry Stanton.30 They hired and trained agents, planned national legislative action, or­ga­nized petition campaigns, raised money, and produced publications. During its period of intense organ­izing in the mid-­ to late 1830s, the leadership included prominent businessmen like Arthur and Lewis Tappan; activists trained in other reform movements like Theodore Weld, who was radicalized by the evangelist Charles Finney and who worked as a temperance lecturer and an agent in the manual l­ abor movement; newspaper publishers like James Birney, who edited The Philanthropist (1836–43); and writers, including the poet John Greenleaf Whittier.31 Each staff member had his own job: Wright was corresponding secretary and edited several of the society’s periodicals; Birney ran the agency system for lecturers; Weld was in charge of publications; Stanton supervised finances and or­ga­nized petition campaigns; and Joshua Leavitt edited the society’s official periodical, The Emancipator (1835– 41).32 This specialized division of l­abor marked the complexity of the AASS’s bureaucracy as well as its conscious coordination. Through a “tight-­handed, top-­down mode of managing,” the New York office produced a systematized structure of interlinked socie­ties in the 1830s.33 The executive committee treated its auxiliaries as subsidiary agencies rather than equal partners. It recommended plans of operation or called attention to par­ tic­u ­lar prob­lems—­such as the pressing pecuniary need to sustain agents—in order to focus its auxiliaries’ efforts ­toward similar ends.34 Believing that by working in concert “far greater results” would ensue, the New York office synchronized the AASS’s many moving parts for maximal orga­nizational efficiency.35 The ­whole organ­ization, as the executive committee of the New York ASS argued, should operate like a well-­oiled machine, each part a wheel moving in “proper order and proportion” according to the “relative position and functions of each.”36 Through strong oversight and the “efficient and ready co-­ operation of its auxiliaries,” the executive committee understood that it could “do much.”37



Antislavery Inc. 15

Effective communication was the key to this harmonious coordination. Information was funneled from the center to the periphery and back again through official periodical organs, annual reports, instructional circulars, and intelligence gathered from the field. Town socie­ties w ­ ere asked to give monthly accounts of their “condition and prospects” to their county socie­ties, which condensed this information and conveyed it quarterly to the state society, which then forwarded it to the parent.38 The AASS, in turn, related its activities, finances, and pro­gress to the membership through its annual report, which was published in large numbers for extensive distribution.39 Members ­were also invited to New York for a yearly business meeting—­the May Anniversary—to hear speeches, share ideas, and elect new leaders. Similarly, state and county socie­ ties w ­ ere encouraged to or­ga­nize conventions, and local auxiliaries w ­ ere asked to hold regular monthly meetings—­termed the Monthly Concert of Prayer for the Slave—to communicate information and build community.40 By maintaining a “constant correspondence and connection with the auxiliary state socie­ ties,” the New York office gathered its affiliates’ best practices and dispersed them back out to the field.41 Through its emphasis on communication and coordination, the AASS managed, during its rapid expansion in the mid-1830s, to connect inward even as it grew outward. By regulating its subsidiaries through centralized control and a “well digested system of mea­sures,” it consolidated a loose affiliation of auxiliaries into a single society.42 The AASS extended this systematic, coordinated approach to its paid l­abor force—­its salaried lecturers. From its outset, the AASS commissioned agents to spread its message and form socie­t ies. The executive committee not only assigned each lecturer a specific field of ­labor but also supplied a set of directives. The printed circular “Par­tic­u­lar Instructions” outlines the best mode of argumentation (the pre­sen­ta­tion of facts), a method for choosing places to visit (prominent places where the cause has friends), and procedures to follow once ­t here (visit ministers, hold a public meeting).43 It delineates how best to form auxiliaries, when to ask for money, and how to recommend and circulate publications; moreover, it insists that the agent “write frequently to the Secretary of Domestic Correspondence” to “give minute accounts of [his] proceedings and success” and to transmit any money he receives “WITHOUT DELAY.”44 ­These instructions foreground the executive committee’s managerial techniques: its delineation of precise spheres of l­abor; its dissemination of best practices; its insistence on regular and frequent communication; and its demand for money. ­These practices ­were so successful in forming socie­ties that the executive committee invested in the creation of a national agency system in 1836. Directed by Weld, who recruited an army of agents known for its biblical connotations as “the Seventy,” this system trained and deployed close to sixty lecturers.45 Brought

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together in New York City for a two-­week convention in November 1836, ­t hese agents w ­ ere educated by Weld and ­others in argumentation and organ­ization. The agency system drove the growth of auxiliary socie­t ies, which doubled in 1837. Although the panic of 1837 and the depression that followed dried up the funds used to support this program, reducing the ranks of salaried lecturers, the agency system exemplified how the AASS’s centralized management propelled rapid expansion. The AASS instituted a number of systematized fund­rais­ing plans to create a “constant and adequate” supply of capital to support its infrastructure (office rental and salaries) and sustain its operations (paying lecturers, producing publications, and funding petition drives).46 It asked members “to give, regularly, and often, to the cause of breaking the yokes and liberating the oppressed” and took up collections at the Monthly Concerts for the Slave as well as the Fourth of July and the First of August gatherings.47 It also used its official periodicals as fundraisers. U ­ nder the “Monthly Subscription Plan,” ­every abolitionist was invited to donate twelve and a half cents a month, in recognition for which they would receive a monthly copy of the Anti-­Slavery Rec­ord (1835–37), which listed contributors and their donations.48 Published in time for the Monthly Concert, it served as an acknowl­edgment of the donation, a sign of what ­t hose funds ­were meant to produce, and a prompt to contribute again. By connecting the collection of funds to the distribution of publications via a monthly meeting, the executive committee created an efficient cir­cuit whereby it extended the dissemination of its official organ while also garnering the means to produce other publications and strengthening the communal infrastructure of local socie­ties. The regularity of this system aided its punctuality. While the AASS’s fund­rais­ing plans worked better in theory than practice—­Wright complained of getting very l­ ittle from the Fourth of July collections, and the Monthly Subscription Plan moved to a quarterly collection schedule in 1836 b ­ ecause subscribers did not “find it con­ve­nient to remit their subscriptions promptly, as often as once a month”—­the AASS managed, between larger and smaller contributions, to raise enough funds to finance its rapid growth in the mid-1830s.49 The AASS also turned its rank and file into financial agents. In 1838, in response to a sharp drop in income a­ fter the 1837 panic, the executive committee endorsed the Cent-­a-­Week Plan. Established by Nathaniel Southard, the low-­ cost plan enabled new segments of the population to be targeted as contributors: the working class, c­ hildren, and t­ hose not yet fully committed to the cause.50 Based on British and evangelical models and the prototype for the MASS’s Weekly Contribution Plan, the Cent-­a-­Week Plan worked as follows: a society was formed in ­every neighborhood with six or more abolitionists; ­women ­were nominated to solicit contributors and to collect payments e­ very Saturday; t­ hese



Antislavery Inc. 17

payments ­were given to the trea­surer at the monthly meeting (held on the Monday ­after the last Saturday of each month) and then forwarded to the general agent, Southard.51 Trea­sur­ers and collectors ­were provided with a tract, Why Work for the Slave? (1838) (Figure 3), written by Southard, which laid out the system’s rules and spurred agents to action.52 Another franchise model, the Cent-­ a-­Week Plan was highly localized. A society could be formed with as few as six members, beginning with a single collector who was instructed to start with herself and then move outward in gradually expanding circles to solicit her ­family and friends and then her neighbors and acquaintances. Reporting her contributors to the trea­surer, who in turn reported her number of collectors to the general agent, the collector occupied one level in the managerial hierarchy of a centralized system. Aggregating individuals and their cents, the plan used its “­little bands of female collectors” to enact an “easy, s­ imple, and efficient mode” of fund­rais­ing.53 The model’s efficiency relied upon the plan’s systematic regularity and accurate accounting: the weekly Saturday collection and “punctual” monthly meetings as well as the official record-­keeping apparatus, the “Collector’s Card” (Figure 4).54 Provided to each collector to rec­ord contributors’ names and addresses and keep track of their donations, the card contains a column for each month. A dot recorded each cent received (four or five dots per month).55 Acting as both a calendar and account book, the card spurred the collector to circulate regularly and keep precise rec­ords. In constructing the collector as a bookkeeper, the card transformed her from an un­regu­la­ted or­ga­nizer into the man­ag­er of a small business. It emblematized her faithful and consistent work even as it served as a sign of her trea­sury’s plenitude. By visualizing how funds add up once pooled together, the card models how mere pennies (the dots on the collection card) turn into the impressive sums that appear in state socie­ties’ reports. It enacts the movement’s managerial logic—­that individual actions, coordinated and compounded, produce larger results. The card’s instructions highlight the aims of the plan. Collectors w ­ ere directed to write the contributors’ names in ink but the credits in pencil, so that they could be easily erased and the card reused ­until it wore out. Memberships, once entered, w ­ ere permanent, while contributions, if secured weekly, would continue in perpetuity. The faithful regularity of each individual’s works resulted in the system’s permanence.56 The Cent-­a-­Week Plan symbolizes many tenets of the AASS’s managerial sensibility: its regulation of local constituencies; its ability to compound interest in and money for the cause through careful coordination; its wish to invest ­every member in the cause; its use of instructional guides and rec­ord keeping; its dependence on volunteer ­labor; and its growth model of infinite multiplication. By endorsing regular, efficient,

Figure 3. Front cover of Nathaniel Southard, Why Work for the Slave? (New York: AASS, 1838). Courtesy of the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.



Antislavery Inc. 19

Figure 4. “Specimen of the Collector’s Card,” The Emancipator, 15 March 1838, 178. Courtesy of the Library Com­pany of Philadelphia.

and punctual collection methods, the AASS consolidated both h ­ uman and monetary capital.57 The society’s “vis­i­ble hand of management” was also evident in its production of media.58 Located in the “commercial metropolis” of New York City, a leading center for antebellum manufacturing and printing, the AASS embraced new technologies such as stereotyping and the steam press to produce massive amounts of cheap print.59 At the height of its print output in the mid-1830s, it reported that it had produced over a million impressions of its publications.60 Although it never operated its own press, as the American Bible Society and American Tract Society did, engaging New York and Boston printers instead, it still controlled the manufacture of its media.61 The New York office contracted with “printers, bookbinders, and ste­reo­t ypers”; purchased cuts and plates, such as the images for the Slave’s Friend (1836–39) and Patrick Reason’s engraving of a kneeling slave (1835); authorized print runs and stereotyping, including the printing of two thousand copies of a broadside called the Printers’ Picture Gallery (1838); fixed prices; and negotiated copyrights, as when it asked the Boston antislavery publisher Isaac Knapp “for the copy-­right of Phelps’ Lectures on Slavery” so that it could “have them revised and republished.”62 Its man­ag­ers also wrote or edited many works. Wright edited the Anti-­Slavery Rec­ord, ­Human Rights, and the Quarterly Anti-­Slavery Magazine (1835–37); Weld wrote and edited his own tracts, notably the influential American Slavery as It Is (1839), and

20 Chapter 1

edited o ­ thers, such as James Thome and Horace Kimball’s Emancipation in the West Indies (1838); and Whittier was commissioned to edit the society’s first slave narrative, the Narrative of James Williams (1838).63 The New York office also coordinated publication schedules, creating, for example, a serial plan for the society’s monthly periodicals. ­Human Rights (1835–39) was published in the first week of the month, the Anti-­Slavery Rec­ord in the second, and The Emancipator and Slave’s Friend in the third and fourth respectively.64 By carefully regulating the appearance of each paper, the AASS decreased self-­competition while keeping the market saturated with antislavery print. Besides supervising the manufacture and publication of its media products, the New York office consolidated them into a coherent system. The AASS regularly published a “Cata­logue of Books and Pamphlets, on the Subject of Slavery and Abolition” (Figure 5) in its periodicals, volumes, and reports that both advertised its proliferating array of printed texts, material objects (stationery, cards, handkerchiefs), and pictures, and coalesced them ­u nder its institutional imprint.65 The cata­logue highlights the vast range of rhetorical approaches and genres the AASS employed to combat slavery: apologies, inquiries, observations, testimonies, debates, sermons, reports, narratives, letters, lectures, poetry, pictures, and periodicals. It also underscores the multiple audiences the AASS intended to reach: ­there are texts addressed to ­children, Christian ­women, northern men, ­free colored Americans, slaveholders, and the southern clergy, as well as erudite periodicals for intellectuals, almanacs for working men, and gift books for parlor readers. Through its vari­ous material formats, it shows how the AASS met a variety of needs and purchasing abilities. The cata­logue notes that tracts are available not only in regular sizes but in miniature versions suitable for the vest pocket. It lists a two-­penny version of the AASS’s Declaration of Sentiments and a fifty-­cent print reproduced on satin and suitable for framing. Lydia Maria Child’s The Fountain (1836) is offered in both plain (18¾ cents) and gilt (25 cents) bindings.66 The dimensions and price of the hefty Quarterly Anti-­Slavery Magazine (two volumes bound as one sold for $1.75) bespeak the seriousness of its message to a highbrow, moneyed audience; while the small format, illustrations, and cheap price (one cent) of the Slave’s Friend, a ­children’s periodical, reflects the intended readers’ physical size, nascent literacy, and ­limited funds.67 The cata­logue delineates the AASS’s appeal to a broad, and increasingly segmented, audience through its diverse media. Yet the cata­logue also works to connect and consolidate that media. Like the AASS’s dominant generic form, the compendium, which brings together assorted appeals in one volume, the cata­logue collects its texts ­under a single ­ nder subheadings title.68 Listing them in alphabetical order and grouping them u (tracts, pamphlets, prints), it brings order to disparate works. Moreover, through

Figure 5. Detail of “Cata­logue of Books and Pamphlets, on the Subject of Slavery and Abolition,” The Emancipator, 2 November 1837, 106. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

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its duplication week ­after week in the AASS’s official organ, The Emancipator, or in other AASS-­sponsored texts, the cata­logue constructs, through reiteration, a canon of antislavery works. It shows how the 1830s AASS sought to penetrate the market through multiple messages, while its coherent character, produced in part through the standardization of print, underscores how the society fused its arguments and artifacts together. The executive committee’s dual aim—to proliferate and to consolidate—­ extended beyond advertising texts to systematizing their distribution. Utilizing the high-­volume, low-­cost model of an expanding industrial print culture, the New York office “poured out oceans of publications,” achieving an unpre­ ce­dented scale of circulation.69 Through cheap print, it saturated the nation and reached far-­flung publics. Harriet Martineau remarks in The Martyr Age of the United States (1839) that abolitionists “covered the entire surface of the nation with tracts, circulars, and papers.”70 The AASS’s 1835 postal campaign, which took advantage of low mailing costs to inundate southern post offices with antislavery pamphlets, sending “175,000 separate pieces” south that summer, targeted southern audiences.71 Antislavery books also circulated abroad.72 The cata­logue, which lists the cost of items by the single copy, the dozen, and the hundred, announces the extensive dissemination the AASS expected for its products. By designing policies that encouraged the diffusion of its publications—­ such as supplying its tracts gratuitously for circulation or offering discounts for buying in bulk—­the executive committee created the conditions for general supply.73 The executive committee centralized and consolidated its distributional networks, even as it mobilized and expanded them via an infrastructure of depositories in commercial centers like Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Utica, Boston, and Providence.74 It turned antislavery offices into bookstores and reading rooms. The cata­logue, for instance, announces that its goods are for sale at the New York office. The New York State ASS established a depository “of the principal antislavery books and publications FOR SALE” and “a large and commodious READING ROOM” at its office; the Ohio ASS’s depository was in the same building as the publishing office of The Philanthropist, and its offices h ­ oused a reading room “supplied with a large number of the latest newspapers, Journals and Periodicals,” which the general public was invited to peruse “at their con­ve­nience and without charge.”75 As the AASS’s auxiliaries grew, so too did its supply network. Besides creating regional and local supply hubs, the executive committee provided oversight of the distribution pro­cess and agents to facilitate it. It appointed a general book agent, R. G. Williams, to promote sales and increase sub-



Antislavery Inc. 23

scriptions to the society’s periodicals.76 Employing “a staff of workers to sell books and subscriptions, paying them twenty or thirty dollars a month,” Wil­ ere liams directed a band of professional colporteurs.77 Lecturers, too, w suppliers—­t hey could “obtain papers and tracts at cost on credit for resale”—­ and the society’s rank and file acted as tract agents.78 The AASS’s Declaration and manuals of l­ abor urge members to “circulate, unsparingly and extensively, anti-­slavery tracts and periodicals”; and the tracts themselves often carry the injunction “Please read and circulate.” 79 Aiming to make “­every abolitionist, male and female, feel that a personal responsibility devolve[d] upon them to circulate the publications of the society, far and wide,” the executive committee asked members to always carry a bundle of tracts to distribute gratuitously and, when traveling, to defray expenses by purchasing publications at w ­ holesale prices 80 and selling them at retail. It used monthly meetings and yearly anniversaries to supply supporters with tracts and books, requesting members to come with their “pockets full of ­orders for anti-­slavery publications.”81 It also embedded tract distribution within its vari­ous plans. For instance, Cent-­a-­Week collectors not only circulated the quarterly tract, Plea for the Slave (1838), published specifically for contributors, but also carried a supply of other tracts to sell and redistributed “from h ­ ouse to h ­ ouse the tracts and papers which had gathered 82 dust upon their shelves.” Part colporteur, part lending library, the Cent-­a-­ Week collectors dispersed print as they gathered money.83 By creating centralized nodes (depositories, offices, meetings) within widely dispersed networks of abolitionists, the executive committee promoted a “general and extensive ­circulation” for its publications.84 The executive committee coordinated distribution via a number of plans. Calling for “systematic aid in the work of disseminating the society’s publications,” it asked ­every abolitionist to read and circulate at least one weekly antislavery newspaper and local agents to “put a copy of the Anti-­Slavery Almanack into ­every ­family in the ­free states.”85 It distributed The Emancipator to “leading individuals,” arguing that “The Emancipator and ­Human Rights, ­ought to be sent regularly to all the principal officers of our National and State governments, and to e­ very member of Congress and the State Legislatures while in session.”86 It endorsed the New York State ASS’s circulating library system, begun in the fall of 1837 (Figure 6).87 The antislavery library operated as a miniature depository and mobile reading room for local chapters, first collecting and then systematically diffusing antislavery works.88 The model worked as follows: local socie­ties w ­ ere asked to raise a small sum by subscription in order to furnish their town with a library of standard antislavery publications.89 An “efficient” librarian was then chosen to h ­ ouse the books and lend them for f­ree and “in

Figure 6. “Work for Abolitionists,” in The American Anti-­Slavery Almanac for 1840 (New York: AASS, n.d.), inside back cover. Courtesy of the Library Com­pany of Philadelphia.



Antislavery Inc. 25

succession” to every­one who would “take the trou­ble to read them.”90 Abolitionists ­were to “read them themselves, and put them into the hands of their friends and neighbors . . . ​exchanging them ­every two weeks, u ­ ntil e­ very person in the 91 district” had the “opportunity to read them all.” In this way, “two or three working abolition men or ­women” would “abolitionize almost any town or village without the aid of a single lecture, and at a trifling expense.”92 Larger libraries could be “divided into several smaller ones, and circulated in the dif­fer­ent districts, successively.”93 The advantages ­were “incalculable,” converting “hundreds . . . ​in a single year.”94 By circulating publications constantly and successively, e­ ither among individuals or districts, the library system created, in princi­ple at least, an efficient system of universal distribution. The library’s material form underscored its rationalized dissemination. Promoted by Williams and directed by Whittier and Weld, the AASS’s plan bundled antislavery texts together into uniform sets that built on each other. Library No. 1 consisted of books and pamphlets ranging from Lydia Maria Child’s An Appeal in ­Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans (1833) to volumes of the Slave’s Friend.95 Library No. 2 included all the texts in Library No. 1 along with sixteen ­others. Each subsequent library contained the previous one and added to it. The sets w ­ ere numbered sequentially from 1 to 6, with the initial library costing five dollars and the most complete costing thirty. The smaller libraries, according to Williams, w ­ ere “designed for individuals and small school districts,” while the larger ones w ­ ere for counties; he urged districts to “aim to get the highest Number” in order “to have as large an assortment as pos­si­ble.”96 By providing libraries in a range of prices and sizes—­from a “se­lection of choice works” to a complete collection—­t he plan created a standardized system that could be personalized according to each district’s needs and pocket­books.97 The antislavery library was the distributional complement of the cata­logue’s discursive taxonomy. It enacted the cata­logue’s tabular thrust as it turned the cata­logue’s groupings into ­actual bundles of books.98 Sold as a unit and ­housed together, the library’s works w ­ ere set in relation to each other even as they circulated individually. The sequential ordering of this constantly expanding canon turned the library’s parts into a unified, if ever-­expanding, w ­ hole. Although Library No. 6 contained nearly a complete set of antislavery publications, the numerical series suggested that ­there would be a No. 7 as more texts ­were produced. The AASS’s use of serialization in its library and tract series (which set texts in relation to each other by virtue of their sequential numbering), created an additive connection that coalesced its parts into a single system.99 Through rationalized dissemination plans, the AASS regulated its proliferating publications. Similar to the formation of its societal structure, the AASS consolidated its texts even as it widely circulated them. Although print propelled

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its orga­nizational and distributional systems, publications often included visual images, and they always functioned as a material object. Print dominated the AASS’s cata­logue as it did the antebellum mediascape, but, as the cata­logue makes clear through its own visual organ­ization, printed works w ­ ere embedded within and advertised alongside visual and material texts. The cata­logue’s print publications are enhanced by images; its broadsides are framed by and explained through print; and its material objects are embellished with both. The 1830s witnessed the rise of the image and the commodification of the object, as well as the flood of print. In connecting ­t hese emerging media modes—­seeing them as overlapping and complementary practices—­the AASS synergized, even as it diversified, its appeals. Systematic business structures and publication strategies allowed the AASS to produce a mass media—in terms of quantity, variety, and supply—­a head of the mainstream. Through its multimodal message, the AASS produced itself as a power­ful institutional identity. Largely on the basis of the AASS’s media products, southerners perceived it as a mystifying, evil entity with extensive reach and influence. The “resources and power of the abolitionists are exhibited in the number and extent of their publications,” William Drayton declared, responding to the AASS’s postal campaign; “fiendlike” abolitionists w ­ ere spreading their 100 pamphlets like a “pestilence” over the South. ­After receiving the Cent-­a-­Week Plan’s tract Why Work for the Slave?, which was sent to members of Congress in January of 1838, Representative F. H. Elmore of South Carolina wrote to Birney to ask by “what means, and u ­ nder what power” the AASS proposed to carry out its plans—­t he number of its socie­ties and their rate of increase, the number of its printing presses and periodicals, and its modes of propagating antislavery doctrines—so that he could inform the “ four millions and half of white inhabitants in the slave States” of the “full length and breadth and depth of this storm which is gathering over their heads, before it breaks in its desolating fury.”101 As Leonard Richards argues, the “vision of a highly efficient, well-­organized propaganda machine terrified anti-­abolitionists.”102 Print made the AASS appear stronger than it actually was. “If a man sees a printed circular,” Wright observed, “he at once imagines that no less than 10,000 other copies just like it have been sent out on the same errand.”103 Thanks to the printing revolution and new managerial practices, the AASS projected itself as a formidable force in the 1830s. The AASS’s media enterprise came to an end in 1840 when the society split into two opposing factions: the American and Foreign Anti-­Slavery Society (AFASS), led by Lewis and Arthur Tappan, and the AASS, headed by William Lloyd Garrison. The schism was due to the overthrow of the executive committee by local socie­ties, a proliferation of philosophical and po­liti­cal differences, and a lack of capital to sustain operations.104 In 1839 the executive committee



Antislavery Inc. 27

began to liquidate the society’s assets, selling off books and libraries to pay its debts in advance of its official dissolution at the 1840 May Anniversary, where Garrison took over as president, a post he would keep for the next twenty-­five years.105 Many members of the original AASS executive committee continued to be involved in the antislavery movement. The Tappans, as noted, established the AFASS; Birney began the Liberty Party; and Weld went to Washington to advise antislavery members of Congress before withdrawing from antislavery work altogether. Yet the centrally coordinated orga­nizational structure and propaganda machine that t­hese men created was dismantled, and the AASS became a loose affiliation of state socie­ties. The 1840 meeting marked the end of the consolidated society and the beginning of a “broadening impulse” of a more heterogeneous movement.106 Despite its administrative collapse, the 1830s AASS had a lasting influence on the larger movement. The original name remained. Its texts and tactics w ­ ere ­adopted by the antislavery movement as it diversified over the next two de­cades. In addition, the institutional identity that the AASS manufactured through its media in the 1830s continued to signify the movement as a ­whole. Garrison’s role as the public face of abolition, in the nineteenth ­century and beyond, depended as much on his inheritance of the 1830s AASS’s institutional imprint as it did on his successful management of print’s public sphere or his longevity in the movement.107 When we read the AASS’s distinct pre-­and post-1840 orga­ nizational configurations as continuous or when we tell the history of the antislavery movement through an individual rather than its institutions, we lose sight of how instrumental the 1830s AASS was to the cause’s eventual success.108 By launching antislavery as a media enterprise and by producing antislavery as a recognizable brand, the 1830s AASS established the conditions that would motor the antislavery machine throughout the antebellum era.

C h apter 2

Summing Up Slavery: The Antislavery Almanac and the Production of Fact

From its outset, the AASS worked to establish the facts of slavery. As the members of the Philadelphia Anti-­Slavery Society stated in 1835: “If the facts connected with slavery in the United States ­were generally known and understood, the system would soon cease to exist.”1 The AASS’s dominant mode of appeal in its formative de­cade was the rational pre­sen­ta­tion of factual evidence to prove the “evils of slavery” and the “blessings of liberty.”2 The debate over slavery at the Lane Seminary in 1834 was described as “emphatically a discussion of facts, FACTS, FACTS.”3 Antislavery lecturers ­were instructed to make themselves “familiar with FACTS, for they chiefly influence reflecting minds” and to “make no random statements, prove all ­t hings.”4 The AASS’s periodicals and tracts of the 1830s advertised themselves as repositories of facts: the Quarterly Anti-­ Slavery Magazine is described as comprising original essays and reviews along with “ facts pertaining to the System of American Slavery”; the Anti-­Slavery Rec­ ord contains “the most impor­tant facts and arguments of [the] cause in as elementary and popu­lar a form” as pos­si­ble; and the American Anti-­Slavery Reporter is filled with “au­t hen­tic m ­ atters of FACT, adapted to probe American Slavery to its core.”5 Periodicals regularly offered facts or statistics about slavery: the headlines of ­Human Rights declared “Facts! Facts!! Facts!!!” and “STILL MORE FACTS” while the Quarterly Anti-­Slavery Magazine published statistics of the U.S. slave population.6 Tracts, like George Bourne’s Picture of Slavery in the United States of Amer­i­ca (1834), w ­ ere promoted as being “made up of facts.”7 By compiling and disseminating facts about slavery, the AASS sought to inform the public about the system’s workings and thereby awaken the conscience of the nation. The AASS’s production of fact in the 1830s was a complex and constant  pro­cess. As the emphatic repetition, punctuation, and typographical

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emphases of the above quotations underscore, the society’s facts ­were rhetorically c­ onstructed. The pro­cess by which it manufactured its data about slavery into factual evidence for slavery’s cruelty and sinfulness was multifaceted. First, it collected a mass of data about the system of slavery; then it assembled that information into credible evidence through the discursive techniques of aggregation and arrangement; and, fi­nally, it standardized ­t hose facts through the authoritative form of print and produced them as a coherent knowledge system through its consolidated print network. By ceaselessly creating facts and linking them together within a reinforcing print system, the AASS forged a factual foundation upon which to build its arguments. Throughout the 1830s, the AASS was an information-­gathering, knowledge-­ producing enterprise. Its most prominent genre—­the documentary compendium—­ was the principal print form through which it compiled, constructed, and dispersed facts about slavery. Lydia Maria Child’s An Appeal in ­Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans (1833) pre­sents itself as a “valuable collection of facts”; William Jay’s An Inquiry into the Character and Tendency of the American Colonization, and American Anti-­Slavery Socie­ties (1835) consists of a “well selected mass of impor­tant and invaluable information”; and La Roy Sunderland’s The Anti-­Slavery Manual, Containing a Collection of Facts and Arguments on American Slavery (1837) contains “a fund of well authenticated facts well arranged.”8 Antislavery agents ­were instructed to educate themselves on slavery by consulting t­ hese “magazines of facts.”9 By collating information and codifying knowledge, antislavery compendia w ­ ere reference books for the cause.10 Moreover, by linking an array of texts as well as data, they replicated the 1830s AASS’s integrated print network. As the movement’s most widely produced form, the compendium was the cornerstone of the society’s factual argument as well as its knowledge and print systems. This chapter focuses on how the AASS framed slavery as a social prob­lem in the 1830s by examining its most popu­lar factual compendium, the antislavery almanac (Figure 7). As cheap print, the 1830s antislavery almanac was a consistent bestseller and widely circulated. Driven by data, it deployed the genre’s modes of information analy­sis to produce antislavery knowledge in a legible and familiar form. Framing its facts through the genre’s customary conventions, it trained its audience to calculate slavery’s immorality. It was also a key node in the AASS’s consolidated print system and the primary pamphlet in many of its distributional plans. Crucial to the formulation of the society’s factual argument, it was also essential to its institutional credibility and orga­nizational growth.

Figure 7. Front cover of The American Anti-­Slavery Almanac for 1838 (Boston: Isaac Knapp, n.d.). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

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Through the almanac, the AASS established its knowledge system as sound and its movement as legitimate.

* * * The AASS’s factual appeal drew on the discourse of numeracy. As Patricia Cline Cohen argues, a cultural shift t­oward numeracy occurred in the 1820s and 1830s.11 Arising in conjunction with the market revolution and the emergence of mass society, this shift was marked by the explosion of numbers, the popularity of statistics, “a mania for quantification,” and the invention of what Mary Poovey terms “the modern fact.”12 A dominant mode of repre­sen­ta­tion in the burgeoning information age, numeracy or­ga­nized vast amounts of data into knowledge and simplified complex systems. Numeracy was a crucial tool of U.S. nation building in the nineteenth ­century. The state solidified its power through what Oz Frankel calls “print statism”—­the unpre­ce­dented production, accumulation, and diffusion of facts in and through official reports and policy documents.13 Through the authority of statistics and the uniformity of print, the federal government sought to manage a rapidly expanding nation and represent its own identity as commanding. Reform movements similarly turned to numeracy to quantify and enumerate social ills—­and thereby make them vis­i­ble and comprehensible. As “moral statisticians,” reformers relied on the power of information and “faith in numbers” to describe troubling social conditions and move the public to action.14 Like the government, they authenticated and promoted their new knowledge through the authoritative appearance and mass circulation of print. As Frankel writes, “Nineteenth-­century social inquiries w ­ ere formalized in a culture that had already been conditioned to associate print with the rendering of facts.”15 Print and the production of facts ­were inextricably intertwined in reform’s social calculus. In the 1830s the AASS deployed the authoritative language of numeracy throughout its consolidated print system to frame slavery as a social prob­lem. The society embraced a statistical notion of social change, marshalling a mass of data to support its moral argument. It a­ dopted an inductive mode of reasoning, insisting that slavery should not be discussed in the abstract: for, as the American Anti-­Slavery Reporter states, the cause is “at war not with innocent imaginations but with wicked realities.”16 Grounding its ethical princi­ples in material evidence, the AASS relied on facts to verify its contention that slavery was wrong. “Abstract reasoning no longer appears necessary,” The Philanthropist declares, “Facts, FACTS are our arguments.”17 The Anti-­Slavery Lecturer similarly asserts, “We are now inquiring a­ fter FACTS; not THEORIES.”18 Following the examples of British antislavery (Thomas Clarkson’s statistics of the



Summing Up Slavery 35

slave trade), the 1830s AASS drew its larger claims from reams of details.19 In ­doing so, it embraced the nineteenth c­ entury’s favored mode of knowledge production—­what Poovey describes as the creation of systematic theories from observed particulars.20 Moreover, in framing its argument through numbers and statistics, it accepted the po­liti­cal real­ity that the dispute over slavery’s national reach would be resolved mathematically. The Constitution’s controversial three-­ fifths clause, which provided the formula for federal repre­sen­ta­tion and taxation by counting the enslaved population at a fractional rate thereby shifting the balance of power between ­free and slave states in Congress, impacted the AASS’s understanding of numeracy’s influence.21 In the 1830s the society turned to the almanac—­the informational genre of its day—to authenticate its argument. A miscellany of diverse information, statistical t­ ables, charts, and computations, the nineteenth-­century almanac was constituted as a collection of facts. Associated with prediction and superstition in the seventeenth c­ entury, by the late eigh­teenth ­century almanacs had become more rational, serving as vehicles for Enlightenment thought. Their statistical role—­collecting, organ­izing, and analyzing data—­expanded rapidly in the nineteenth c­ entury as the genre responded to the market economy and an increased demand for useful knowledge.22 The nineteenth-­century almanac was the vernacular version of policy and government reports, making specialized information, such as census data, accessible to a general audience. For example, The American Almanac (1830–61), subtitled A Repository of Useful Knowledge, advertises itself as comprising not only typical almanac fare—­astronomical information, a calendar, and miscellaneous remarks—­but also statistics about the United States and other countries that solidified the notion of nationhood. Market-­driven rather than agrarian-­focused, the antebellum almanac delineated for its readers the shape of an emerging mass society. Through its population ­tables, lists of roads, rec­ords of military might, currency and trade information, inventories of government and judicial officials, and cata­logues of the press’s productions, the nineteenth-­century almanac offered an account of the United States’—­and the world’s—­expansive growth u ­ nder industrial capitalism. The antebellum almanac managed and made comprehensible its mass of information by presenting it in a standardized form. The almanac depicted a “regulated universe”—in terms of both the natu­ral and social world and its own systems of knowledge.23 Almanacs typically opened with a preface, followed by celestial phenomena: astronomical calculations, eclipses, phases of the moon, tide t­ ables, signs of the zodiac. Calendar pages for each month, which included sunrise and sunset, location of the planets, tide times, useful information, impor­ tant historical and religious dates, followed. Back ­matter included statistics, essays, moralistic or entertaining stories, anecdotes, and verse. Almanacs’ uniform

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and repetitive structures habituated readers in finding certain types of information in certain places. Moreover, their tabular and grid-­like form—­calendar pages, for instance, w ­ ere broken into distinct quadrants—­simplified complex data, allowing readers to see it clearly. The American Almanac explains how “the method of tabular views” pre­sents “at a single glance of the eye, a mass of information, that would be expanded over many pages if exhibited in any other form.”24 By condensing information into “as small a space pos­si­ble, and at the same time,” conveying it in “so methodical and clear a manner,” almanacs made their information available to all “classes of readers.”25 The orderly spatial layouts that made information structurally stable and easily accessible also constructed knowledge as ocular. An array of visual signs (such as planetary or zodiac symbols) and pictures initiated readers into the visual reading practices that fashioned social facts.26 To see was not simply to believe but to know and understand. Through their graphic knowledge systems, almanacs visualized the complex workings of an increasingly dynamic social world. Antebellum almanacs also taught their readers how to calculate that world. They subsumed their details within orderly structures, such as t­ ables or calendar pages, and instructed their audiences in how to read numerically—to produce knowledge from numbers as well as comprehend information systematically. Mathematical questions, time equations, t­ ables that calculated ­simple interest, and maxims on thrift taught the numerical skills and commercial concepts of the new market order.27 Keys with planetary and zodiac symbols showed readers how to decipher the intricate sign system used on the calendar pages. Headers on calendar pages gave the number of days in each month, while ­tables divided that month into days and ­those days into hours and minutes when certain events would occur, instructing readers in how to draw larger conclusions, such as weather predictions or lunar cycles, from daily data. Page by page, readers learned to connect part to whole—­t he day to the month, the month to the year, a number to its sum, a symbol to its significance. Through their compendium form, almanacs integrated their disparate parts—­t hrough standardization—­into a reliable w ­ hole teaching readers to compute general princi­ples from observed particulars. Besides inculcating the market messages and knowledge modes of mass society, antebellum almanacs transmitted specialized knowledge. The nineteenth ­century saw the proliferation of topical almanacs, produced by po­liti­cal parties, religious groups, and fraternal ­orders, that reflected the segmentation of market culture into par­tic­u­lar interest groups.28 In the 1820s and 1830s, temperance, evangelical, and other reform groups turned to the almanac as a way to pop­ u­lar­ize their princi­ples by packaging them in a culturally accessible form.29 Through the almanac’s conventional reading practices that integrated the



Summing Up Slavery 37

pamphlet into the habits and cycles of everyday life via daily consultation, as well as its inexpensive and portable form, reform movements transformed their beliefs into ­house­hold knowledge and widely disseminated them. Since every­one read—­and knew how to read—an almanac, it was an ideal vehicle for propagandizing.30 The AASS used the almanac’s conventions and popularity to produce facts about slavery’s conditions, operations, and power and to promote its own cause. “If you want to make converts,” The Emancipator advises, “circulate the Almanac.”31 The American Anti-­Slavery Almanac had two editors. The almanacs for 1836–38 w ­ ere edited by Nathaniel Southard, a Boston minister who also designed the Cent-­a-­Week plan; the editor for the 1839–41 editions was Theodore Weld, a member of the executive committee and editor of the society’s publications.32 The executive committee endorsed The AAS Almanac ­under Southard’s editorship, recommending it “to all the friends of emancipation,” and bought the copyright from him for forty dollars in 1838; it also recruited him to help prepare the almanacs for 1839 and 1840.33 Southard’s almanacs ­were more religious in nature, focusing on slavery as a sin, while Weld’s ­were more po­liti­cal, calculating slavery’s criminality, but both used the almanac’s standard format to produce and disseminate antislavery knowledge. As The Liberator puts it, the antislavery almanac was a way to “learn the ‘signs of the sky,’ but also understand the ‘signs of the times.’ ”34 A 48-­page pamphlet, The AAS Almanac included a neat, printed cover, an “elegant frontispiece on the title page,” front ­matter (a preface, astronomical calculations, tide t­ables, eclipses for the year), monthly calendar pages (­tables of planetary positions, tides, and day length as well as historical dates and engravings), and miscellaneous back ­matter (census and demographic data, essays, testimonies, and stories related to slavery).35 It was advertised in The Emancipator as “rich in statistical facts and ­tables, bearing on the subject of slavery” and in The Liberator as “crowded with fine ‘pictorials’, startling facts, valuable statistics, convincing arguments and stirring appeals to the hearts and consciences of the ­people.”36 While its antislavery knowledge was marketed as its major appeal, The AAS Almanac also actively competed for a general audience by advertising the superiority of its calculations and the authenticity of its information: The AAS Almanac for 1838 includes “chronological ­tables . . . ​ prepared by an experienced hand” as well as “appeals, facts and statistics . . . ​ gathered from the best sources,” and the The AAS Almanac for 1840 has a tide ­table “more con­ve­nient than anything of the kind ever published in any other Almanac,” with computations “founded on the formula of the French Astronomer, [Pierre Simon] Laplace.”37 The Emancipator boasts that The AAS Almanac for 1839 is the “richest production of the kind,” containing “more m ­ atter for the

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price than any other Almanack published in the United States.”38 Marketed as accurate, innovative, and full of cheap information, The AAS Almanac promoted itself—­and its cause—as the best and most reliable product on the market. Like the genre as a ­whole, The AAS Almanac used the techniques of numeracy to manufacture its data into facts. Like a conventional almanac, it taught its readers to produce knowledge from numbers, showing them, for instance, how to translate its ­tables from apparent (solar) into mean (clock) time. It also trained them in how to read statistically to decipher slavery’s growing power. The AAS Almanac for 1839 provides a t­able of “Statistics of the United States” (Figure 8)—­“carefully prepared from the best sources”—­that includes the populations for “­free whites,” “slaves,” and “­free colored” p ­ eople alongside the number of congressional representatives for dif­fer­ent time periods.39 Read horizontally, the ­table registers the nation’s population explosion. Read vertically—­t he chart groups northern and southern states separately so that their numbers can be added into sectional sums—­t he t­able encourages comparison of regional differences. A detailed analy­sis of the ­table follows. Titled “Statistics,” it tells the reader how to compare the ­table’s columns and calculate percentages and the rate of change in order “to see the comparative pro­gress” of ­free and slave states (31). It also translates the ­table’s complex numerical data into simpler takeaways,

Figure 8. “Statistics of the United States,” in The American Anti-­Slavery Almanac for 1839 (New York: S. W. Benedict, n.d.), 30. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.



Summing Up Slavery 39

such as the facts that the slave population has “increased faster since the slave trade was abolished” and that “slave states have nearly TWICE as much territory as the f­ree” (31). Moreover, by comparing columns that “contrast the pre­sent apportionment of representatives with what it would be, if the pre­sent number w ­ ere apportioned on the basis of the F ­ REE population only,” the analy­sis compels readers to “see how large a part of [their] own JUST RIGHTS in the U.S. H.R. [they] have given to slavery” (31). Drawing a connection between population numbers and po­liti­cal power, the essay explicates for its northern readers how the data affect them directly. Through the revealing power of statistics, The AAS Almanac made slavery’s influence strikingly vis­i­ble. The AAS Almanac performed a similar maneuver with antislavery statistics. The May calendar page in The AAS Almanac for 1836, for instance, lists the society’s officers and recent resolutions along with an advertisement for the AASS’s anniversary; the back ­matter supplies an overview of the AASS’s princi­ ples and its “Plan of Operation,” a t­ able of antislavery socie­ties (name, officers, date of incorporation, and number of members), and a cata­logue of antislavery publications.40 ­These data publicize the AASS’s beliefs and make its orga­ nizational strength calculable. The ­table of proliferating socie­ties—­“within a few weeks from the time when the above list was completed, we received the names of 40 new socie­ties,” it states (47)—­aggregates auxiliaries’ membership into “the w ­ hole number. . . . ​35133” (47). Similarly, The AAS Almanac for 1837 computes how mob vio­lence has propelled the AASS’s growth: “In 2½ years from that time, more than 500 A.S. Socie­ties ­were formed, in 15 States with 50,000 members, and more than 2,00,000 copies of A.S. publications ­were issued.”41 The ­table of publications on the back cover of The AAS Almanac for 1839 (Figure 9), which lists texts by number of pages as well as cost per single copy, dozen, and hundred, further visualizes the multiplication of antislavery print. Numerical accounts of new antislavery socie­ties formed or tracts circulated are signs of the movement’s pro­gress and portents of its ­future success. By adopting the authority and prestige of statistics, The AAS Almanac produces slavery as a threatening force, embedded at the heart of U.S. democracy, and portrays antislavery as power­f ul enough to eradicate it. Besides teaching its readers to calculate strength through numbers, The AAS Almanac, like the genre more generally, trained them to read systematically in order to see the full structure of slavery. The informational essays in the back ­matter ­were often or­ga­nized numerically so that each subpoint, itself verified by a list of evidence, added up to the essay’s general claim. The essay “PICTURES OF SLAVERY BY SLAVE-­HOLDERS” in the The AAS Almanac for 1838, for example, is a list of assertions: “I. The first point to be proved is that slaves are often TREATED WITH G ­ REAT CRUELTY. . . . ​II. The second point is that

Figure 9. “Cata­logue of Publications,” in The American Anti-­Slavery Almanac for 1839 (New York: S. W. Benedict, n.d.), inside back cover. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.



Summing Up Slavery 41

­ AMILY TIES ARE OFTEN BROKEN UP.”42 Each statement is substantiated F by slaveholders’ own testimony in the form of advertisements for runaway slaves, speeches, and other texts. Combined, ­t hese individual points expose slavery’s larger operations. Similarly, the essay “THE LAWS OF GOD AND THE LAWS OF SLAVERY” in The AAS Almanac for 1836 uses numerical organ­ization and visual juxtaposition to prove that “slave laws are in direct opposition to the laws of God” (35). Readers are asked to compare numbered items across the essay’s two columns where God’s law number 3, “Train up a child in the way he should go,” is contrasted to slavery’s law number 3, “recognize not the parental relations as belonging to slaves” (34). In The AAS Almanac, numbers worked to spatially or­ga­nize and differentiate complex information for readers and teach them to derive a conclusion from substantiated claims. The AAS Almanac also taught readers how to interpret the issue of slavery as a sign system much like the almanac’s other cosmologies. The back ­matter of The AAS Almanac for 1839 contains ­tables titled “ROLL OF INFAMY” (33) and “POLITICAL REGISTER—­T WENTY-­FIFTH CONGRESS” (34) that use detailed symbols to designate northern representatives’ votes on mea­sures such as the extension of slavery into Missouri or Representative Henry Pinckney’s gag resolution. Congressional positions, like planetary ones, are made intelligible through signs. By observing, thanks to a t­ able of congressional repre­ sen­ta­tion, that the “North has always had a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives” (33) and by decoding the symbols for each representative’s votes, readers deduced the North’s power to decide slavery’s fate as well as their own ability to influence the debate by electing members who would uphold liberty for all. Engravings on The AAS Almanac’s title pages, often explicated in the front ­matter, also taught audiences how to read the conflict over slavery symbolically. The frontispiece of The AAS Almanac for 1838 (see Figure 7) is described as follows: “The tree in the m ­ iddle is slavery. An abolitionist, with the axe immediatism, is laying heavy blows at the root. . . . ​On the other side a D.D., the champion and representative of a corrupt church . . . ​stands first among ­t hose who . . . ​try to hold up the tottering trunk of oppression. He is assisted by our northern civil and military office-­holders . . . ​They had better ‘stand from ­under’ the falling tree, if they would not be crushed beneath it” (3). Instructing its audience to read allegorically—to see each figure as representing a generalizable position or idea—­ the almanac’s explanation frames the fight against slavery in broad moral terms: the tree of slavery, which has snakes at its bottom, is evil whereas the antislavery advocate, who resembles William Lloyd Garrison, is both mighty and just in his effort to eradicate the tree at its root. The illustration’s caption—­“Thus saith the Lord, Execute judgment in the MORNING, and deliver him that is

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spoiled out of the hand of the oppressor” (front page)—­confirms antislavery action as proper and principled.43 With God and gravity on its side, antislavery, the picture argues, ­will inevitably succeed. By imparting symbolic meaning, The AAS Almanac taught its readers to see larger truths: northern power, slavery’s wickedness, and antislavery’s righ­teous victory. The AAS Almanac’s adaptation of the almanac’s numerical modes extended to its calendar pages. A sample calendar page—­September from The AAS Almanac for 1838 (Figure 10)—­shows how antislavery was embedded within the genre’s vari­ous knowledge systems. That edition breaks its calendar pages into four quadrants. The upper left-­hand box includes a list of historical dates; below it, an astronomical t­ able shows solar and lunar cycles, the moon’s position and phases, and the day’s length. The upper right-­hand side has a picture of slaves being punished. Below are two columns: a ­table that delineates the positions of the planets, the time of high w ­ ater, and the weather; and an essay that provides an enumerated argument against slavery, with textual extracts as  evidence. The headers—­ “SEPTEMBER begins on SATURDAY” and “SEPTEMBER—­NINTH MONTH” (22–23)—do the almanac’s typical work of connecting part to ­whole by situating the month in relation to a smaller chronological unit, the day, as well as the larger year. Read horizontally, the ­table draws broader conclusions from its astronomical data in the form of a weather prediction: “Changeable for a few days; then becomes stormy, with wind and rain” (23). The AAS Almanac for 1839, published ­under Weld’s editorship, pushes this mode of inference further by showing the weather’s impact on the enslaved and on antislavery activity. “Clear and cold” is followed by “Slaves suffer much”; “blustering weather” leads to “squalls in congress” and an “im­mense No. of petitions” (6). Weather serves as a sign of other truths: slavery’s deprivations and antislavery’s pro­gress. Moreover, this predictive function is extended to the antislavery cause as the data in the almanac verify the calendar’s assessments that “Abolitionism [is] spreading” (20) and “The jubilee is at hand” (28). By connecting antislavery to the weather, The AAS Almanac for 1839 harnesses nature to the cause and calculates a bright forecast for the movement. Besides connecting antislavery princi­ples to natu­ral systems, The AAS Almanac, as the September 1838 calendar page shows, used the genre’s conventions to insert antislavery events into national history. In some editions, the daily calendar rec­ords antislavery occasions, such as the Monthly Concert for the Slave and the May Anniversary, to establish the rhythm of the antislavery year. In ­others, the list of impor­tant dates on the upper left-­hand side of the page situates antislavery events in a national framework and asserts the movement’s inevitable pro­gress: the dates of Columbus’s landing in Amer­i­ca and the Pilgrims’ arrival at Plymouth Rock are side by side with ­t hose of William Wilberforce’s



Summing Up Slavery 43

Figure 10. Calendar page for September 1838 from The American Anti-­Slavery ­Almanac for 1838 (Boston: Isaac Knapp, n.d.), 22–23. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

birth and the publication of the AASS’s Declaration of Sentiments. Similarly, the title page identifies the year 1838 in relation to both natu­ral cycles (“Being the second a­ fter the Bissextile or Leap-­Year”) and national chronology (“and the 62nd of American In­de­pen­dence”), depicting antislavery as the rightful heir to the country’s revolutionary heritage.44 Located within the almanac’s linear form, the abolition of slavery would be the next transformation to take place in the nation’s progressive history. Moreover, juxtaposing the historical calendar to the daily calendar, which was often situated below it, underscores how everyday activism could produce noteworthy events. By integrating antislavery into historical systems, The AAS Almanac constructed its cause as significant and its success as certain.

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The AAS Almanac not only folded antislavery into the almanac’s already-­ established frameworks, but also produced its own knowledge system. Through word and image, its calendar pages assembled copious data into facts that revealed the state of slavery in the United States. The September 1838 calendar page lists an array of “proof[s]” against colonization (23). U ­ nder the general heading “Colonization,” extracts from the public documents and statements by advocates and auxiliaries of the colonization movement demonstrate how colonization supports slavery. The essay, which spills over to the next page, supplies testimony from James Thome of Kentucky, an abolitionist from a slaveholding ­family, to show how his colonization convictions weakened his opposition to slavery. His statement is followed by U.S. census figures, showing a lower rate of increase of ­free blacks in the South during the tenure of the Colonization Society, that support his point. Moving from argument to itemized proofs, the essay calls on readers to add its data together in order to arrive at its opening assertion that colonization sanctions slavery. It turns its data into facts by compiling and compressing information, visually accentuating—­through small type, absence of margins, and continuation onto the next page—­t he vast amount of data presented. Proofs are gathered—­through the connective sequence of enumeration (1., 2., 3.) and assertions of similarity (“The results as seen in the census of the U.S. are in perfect keeping with this testimony” [25])—­ into a single, well-­substantiated sum. Through the dual pro­cesses of proliferation and consolidation, the page transforms its diverse data (textual extracts, eyewitness testimony, numbers) into a discernable truth—­colonization’s complicity with slavery. The illustration for September 1838 (Figure 11) operates similarly, producing graphic knowledge of slavery’s cruelty by aggregating a series of par­tic­u­lar punishments. The slave being beaten in the center of the image is one in a long line. The picture is a compilation of separate incidents that are unified by this sequential pre­sen­ta­tion; from left to right, the image represents the past, pre­ sent, and f­ uture of beating. The three white men and four black men stand in for a larger system that produces an endless stream of violent perpetrators and anonymous slaves. The production-­line trope of the picture that links its parts into a single pro­cess, underscores slavery’s industrial operation, which dehumanizes p ­ eople by reducing them to the status of interchangeable goods. Depicted as indistinct, shadowy t­ hings (two are actually stacked on top of each other), the enslaved p ­ eople, like the goods piled in the background, are raw material in a network of global trade, signified by the palm trees vis­i­ble through the open doorway. They are manufactured—­t hrough torture—­into goods. The illustration’s multiple modes of punishment—­the paddle held in one perpetrator’s mouth, the whip used by the other—­locate this individual beating within slav-



Summing Up Slavery 45

Figure 11. Illustration for September 1838 from The American Anti-­Slavery Almanac for 1838 (Boston: Isaac Knapp, n.d.), 23. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

ery’s many acts of vio­lence. The caption focuses readers’ attention on the details of this type of beating (the individual blisters the paddle produces) and, through the signifier “Sometimes” (23), suggests other types of torture; the word works in conjunction with the image to extrapolate slavery’s general cruelty from the par­t ic­u ­lar punishments shown. By compiling such incidents and linking them to each other and to ­those outside the frame, the picture makes vis­i­ble the truth of slavery’s brutality. This linkage of word and image, each substantiating the other, enhanced The AAS Almanac’s synthetic mode of knowledge production. The editions for 1838, 1839, and 1840, all carry illustrations on their calendar pages, where texts and pictures are more closely related in each successive edition.45 In The AAS Almanac for 1838, the captions describe the illustrations and often refer the reader to another page (“See page 33” [15]) or work (“See Torrey’s Portraiture” [9]) for textual verification. Words explain the image and, through reference to other textual evidence, authenticate it. The AAS Almanac for 1840 states, “Reader, the above picture is no fancy-­sketch—if you think so, read the following testimony”

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(9). Words also tell the reader how to interpret the picture. “Consider the desolation which would be brought upon YOUR f­ amily, if the head of it should be taken away” (19) is the caption for the July 1838 calendar page, ­under the image of a slaveholder driving an enslaved man away from his ­family. Just as The AAS Almanac’s frontispieces ­were accompanied by lengthy explanations of how to calculate their symbolic meaning (much like the interpretation of astrological ­tables), the calendar page images rely on accompanying text to explicate their significance and animate their emotional impact. Slaves chained together on the August 1838 calendar page signify slavery’s cruel practices, as demonstrated by the chains, as well as enslaved ­people’s “love of liberty” and “efforts to escape,” which can be inferred from their restraints (21). The parting grief of a ­mother sold away from her child, indicated in the illustration on the May 1840 calendar page by her empty, outstretched arms, is extended by the story below into a lasting and devastating anguish: “It was more than his poor m ­ other could bear. Her reason fled, and she became a perfect maniac” (15). While the “engravings ‘talk right out, in plain English’ ”—­drawing the eye and making their points immediately comprehensible and compelling on a densely crowded page—­they also require the text to fully compute their meaning.46 Word and image are further integrated in Weld’s editions for 1839 and 1840. Each calendar page has an illustration and, beneath it, a list of data that provides information about or corroborating examples for the picture. The two are divided by a title that si­mul­ta­neously serves as a caption for the picture above, articulating its general meaning, and a heading for the text below, drawing a larger claim from the details. In joining word and image, the title shows how each discursive mode enhances the other. The title for the calendar page for August  1839 (Figure  12)—­“EMANCIPATED SLAVES CAN TAKE CARE OF THEMSELVES” (21)—­refers both to the picture, which juxtaposes a well-­ dressed, industrious, ­free black laborer in a cultivated landscape and a weak, half-­naked, poorly equipped slave trying to tame a wilderness, u ­ nder the headings “PAID” and “UNPAID” (21), and the testimonial evidence about the thrift and capabilities of emancipated black p ­ eople. The image, which echoes the columnar structure of the almanac’s many t­ ables, relies on visual comparison to show emancipated work as more productive and dignified than slave l­ abor. The vertical split within the image is replicated horizontally on the page by the way the title separates its visual data from its textual information. The page’s spatial layout—­both across the image and down the page—­asks readers to compare and contrast its vari­ous parts. Resembling each other—­textual proofs verify the picture, and the illustration represents the textual details’ core claim—­word and image operate as mutually reinforcing sign systems.

Figure 12. Calendar page for August 1839 from The American Anti-­Slavery Almanac for 1839 (New York: S. W. Benedict, n.d.), 21. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

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Extending this technique, The AAS Almanac for 1840 devotes the entire right-­hand page of each month’s two-­page spread to linking picture, title, and text. The April 1840 right page (Figure 13), titled “HUNTING SLAVES WITH DOGS AND GUNS” (13), features an image of a runaway slave attacked by dogs and shot at with a gun. The visually condensed data below the title consists of an account of the story the picture depicts, testimonies about how runaways are maimed by dogs and shot, and excerpts from advertisements for runaways and jailed slaves that focus on gun wounds. The image’s emotive power—­t he slave’s nakedness and raised hands signaling his vulnerability to the vicious, teeth-­ baring dogs and the ­rifle’s gunshot—is grounded in the seemingly objective information below: the impersonal details of the advertisements culled largely from southern newspapers. While the image’s graphic immediacy animates the data, the story b ­ ehind the picture, taken from the “St. Francisville [Louisiana] Chronicle” (13), also galvanizes the image. By placing the picture within a larger narrative (the runaway “made fight; and upon being shot in the shoulder, fled to a sluice where the dogs succeeded in drowning him” [13]), the text identifies the black re­sis­tance b ­ ehind the incident as well as its resolution: slavery’s victory. Joined by the title, word and image work together to verify and activate the argument of the page. In addition to unifying word and image, some editions of The ASS Almanac integrated a theme into each month’s calendar pages. The June  1838 pages, for instance, focus on the subject of “SEPARATING PARENTS FROM ­CHILDREN” (16). The image on the right-­hand page depicts a chained, kneeling m ­ other (reminiscent of the figure on the iconic Wedgwood medallion), held back by a white man as she reaches out for her stolen c­ hildren. ­Under the picture, sentimental verse speaks for the s­ ilent m ­ other of the horror of this separation. In the opposite left quadrant, a description of the picture (rather than historical dates) further articulates its meaning and, in specifically addressing ­children, ties the thematic focus of the month to a segment of the almanac’s audience. The description instructs young readers in the realities of slavery, including the fact that “­children are torn from their parents, and parents from their ­children, ­every day, at the south” (16), as well as the humanity of enslaved ­people: “The boys are crying,” the m ­ other “tries to reach them” (16). The essay on the right-­hand side below the picture also tells of a Kentucky m ­ other deprived of her c­ hildren, situating her story beside statistical evidence of “600,000 c­ hildren in the U.S. ­every moment liable to be torn from their ­mothers” (17). Depicting slavery’s cruel separations through visual, poetic, descriptive, and numerical modes, the almanac appeals to the eye, heart, and head. Moreover, by asking its young audience to identify with the victims of ­these separations, it links its rational argument to its emotional appeal. Through the month’s self-­reinforcing

Figure 13. Calendar page for April 1840 from The American Anti-­Slavery Almanac for 1840 (New York: AASS, n.d.), 13. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

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proofs, c­ hildren learn to see that slavery’s cruelty “is true” (16) and thus deduce, as the essay prompts them, that it is not “right” (17). The AAS Almanac stood out, even among other antebellum almanacs, for its ability to integrate its parts into a larger w ­ hole. In heightening the almanac’s generically reiterative and connective form, The AAS Almanac constructed its knowledge system as coherent and therefore credible. “Crowded with facts and statistics right to the point,” it utilized numeracy’s modes of accumulation and arrangement, compression and connection, to transform data about slavery into verifiable proof of its horrors.47 As Lewis Tappan said of The Almanac for 1840, “Though the book is small, the facts are weighty, and in themselves sufficient to convert a ­whole ­family.”48 By linking analogous evidence across multiple pages and a variety of forms—­word and image, numbers and testimony—­and by standardizing its argument through print and the genre’s conventional layout, The AAS Almanac solidified the horrors of slavery as a social fact. The AAS Almanac further codified its knowledge as factual by integrating it into the society’s larger print network. The internal coherence it achieved, especially in the late 1830s, was augmented by its ability to connect itself outward to other antislavery texts. By extracting and referencing other antislavery publications within its pages, The AAS Almanac served as a sign of the AASS’s expansive archive. A “collection of texts,” like many of the compendia it excerpted and promoted, The AAS Almanac reprinted or alluded to an array of antislavery works.49 The edition for 1836, for instance, provides se­lections from “Jay’s Inquiry” (18), “Dr. Follen’s Address” (16), and two “elegant engravings” (37) from Lydia Maria Child’s gift book, The Oasis. One of ­t hose images is accompanied by a brief summary of the story that the picture depicts. In leaving the tale’s outcome unresolved, the almanac refers readers to the original text: “If you can get the Oasis, you ­will ­there learn what became of Yazoo, and his ­father and ­mother,” the narrator states (39). Similarly, at the end of an essay containing extracts from the 1832 ­Virginia debates about slavery, readers are guided to La Roy Sunderland’s “Testimony of God Against Slavery” (32) for more coverage. In telling the audience in the preface that if “any further information is desired, the list of books at the end ­will direct you where to find it” (3), Southard makes vis­i­ble The AAS Almanac’s centrifugal force—­how it thrusts readers outward in search of additional evidence and other texts. Its placement within the AASS’s corroborative print system further authenticated its argument: just as its many pieces of data reinforced each other, so too did its vari­ous texts. Operating as a repository of antislavery knowledge—­ condensing and extracting evidence from the ­whole print network—­The AAS Almanac also advertised the other parts. It regularly promoted antislavery works and reprinted the society’s cata­ logue of publications on its covers.50 Materially enveloped within the AASS’s



Summing Up Slavery 51

print system, The AAS Almanac was a critical part of the movement’s self-­ verifying network of knowledge. The AAS Almanac was the society’s most widely distributed and consistently circulated text throughout the 1830s and crucial to many of its distributional plans. The Liberator calls it “one of the most valuable productions in the anti-­slavery cause.”51 It was the movement’s bestseller in the 1830s, steadily increasing its sales numbers each year.52 Its first two editions, The AAS Almanac for 1836 and 1837, sold a total of 70,000 copies; The AAS Almanac for 1839 sold 130,000.53 Ste­reo­t yped as early as the edition for 1838, it was the only text in the AASS’s cata­logue of publications advertised as available by the thousands as well as the hundreds.54 It was promoted as “the cheapest Almanac in the United States” and marketed at a low price to ensure extensive circulation.55 Selling at 6 cents per single, 50 cents per dozen, $3.50 per hundred, and $30 per thousand, it was inexpensive enough to be “purchased in large quantities for gratuitous distribution; and scattered like the leaves of the forest over the land.”56 Slated to be put in “­every h ­ ouse­hold in the ­free states,” it was also distributed in the West and carried abroad.57 The AAS Almanac’s broad dissemination depended on systematic as well as ample supply. As a renewable resource—­each year’s almanac was distributed ­until the next year’s took its place—it stayed in constant circulation.58 Readers are instructed to “be in season with [their] o ­ rders for the Anti-­Slavery Almanac,” procuring supplies and furnishing the country before other almanacs glutted the market.59 “Now is the time, the seed-­time for sowing Almanacs,” The Emancipator proclaims, “and a l­ ittle effort now w ­ ill be producing effects through the year.”60 By tying The AAS Almanac’s recurrent distribution to the genre’s traditional agrarian form, the AASS presented its almanac as having a predictable and continuous life cycle. If members work “seasonably, systematically, liberally, and resolutely” they can circulate a “million of copies” of The AAS Almanac for 1840, The Emancipator promises, underscoring the universal distribution the AASS ­imagined for this foundational form.61 The AAS Almanac’s extensive circulation depended on its primary place in the AASS’s distributional plans, especially ­after the executive committee took over The AAS Almanac with the edition for 1839. The “­whole Anti-­Slavery machinery o ­ ught to be immediately set at work” on disseminating that edition, ­Human Rights argues.62 The executive committee partnered with the New York Young Men’s ASS to circulate 50,000 copies of The AAS Almanac for 1839 in New York and Brooklyn, with “the Society bearing half the expense,” and prepared 3,000 for distribution at the May Anniversary; it offered The AAS Almanac for 1840 at w ­ holesale prices (three cents) so that it could be placed in e­ very f­ amily.63 Purchasing and distributing the almanac ­were town socie­ties’ primary duties.

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Local agents w ­ ere urged to place an almanac in e­ very h ­ ouse­hold and to supply ­ abor” it for f­ ree to t­ hose who could not afford to buy it.64 The AASS’s “Plan of L calculated that it would cost between five and eight dollars to flood a town with The Almanac given its low price.65 Claiming that “much good may be done with ­little expense,” the Walpole ASS voted to “supply e­ very f­ amily in the town, where it w ­ ill be accepted, with an Anti-­Slavery Almanac for 1839.”66 The rank and file ­were urged to supply their neighborhoods: “Abolitionists! See that e­ very f­ amily in your town has a copy,” The Emancipator implores, and “take a bundle” when traveling “out into the country.”67 The AAS Almanac was also available at bookstores and hawked on the street: The Emancipator asks “­every merchant and bookseller [to] order a large package for their ­counters” and Lewis Tappan wrote of New York newsboys, crying “Anti-­slavery Almanac,” selling “10,000 copies” in “2 days!”68 The AAS Almanac’s circulation both benefited from integration into the society’s distributional system and helped fuel that machine. The AAS Almanac promoted the AASS’s plans of operation and educated readers in their orga­ nizational roles.69 “Hints for Abolitionists” in the edition for 1839 lists the taking and reading of The Almanac as readers’ first antislavery act and then schools them in other efforts—­subscribing to an antislavery newspaper, carry­ing publications in their pockets, procuring subscribers for antislavery publications, praying for the slave, and lecturing for the cause (14). The AAS Almanac’s distribution supported the society’s growth. As agents disposed of the almanac, they propelled its other parts: they circulated the AASS constitution and its petitions, located subscribers for the Quarterly Subscription Plan and The Emancipator, and sold books.70 “Work for Abolitionists” on the inside back cover of The AAS Almanac for 1840 urges readers to plant libraries: “Reader! W ­ ill you not see that an Anti-­ Slavery Library is established and put into circulation in your district, and a copy of this Almanac put into ­every f­amily without delay?” Just as The AAS Almanac’s intertextual form publicized the society’s larger print system, its circulation served as the catalyst for the society’s other initiatives. Its discursive mode and material distribution made The AAS Almanac a “power­ful auxiliary.”71 By producing facts about slavery and the antislavery cause and disseminating that knowledge widely through the authoritative form of print and the AASS’s corroborative system of texts, it was “fitted to do won­ ders.”72 Connecting the AASS’s evidence, publications, and plans, it consolidated the society’s factual argument as well as its print and distributional networks. Yet, like the society it represented, The AAS Almanac was unable to sustain that integration. Interwoven into the AASS’s systems, it registered the organ­ization’s dissolution both materially and discursively. Marking the commencement of the new society, The AAS Almanac formally began a second



Summing Up Slavery 53

volume with its “for 1842” edition (published in 1841). Its first volume, composed of the for 1836–41 editions, was published as a bound set, underscoring the separate identity of the original AASS.73 Discursively, the AAS Almanacs of the 1840s became less cohesive, often separating calendar pages from antislavery ­matter and compressing the numerical information on twelve successive calendar pages at the front in order to gain space for antislavery articles in the back.74 The ­later almanacs also contained fewer pictures (with none on the calendar pages) and w ­ ere less spatially or­ga­nized and thematically structured. The AAS Almanac developed unevenly in the 1840s. While the editions for 1843 and 1844, edited by Lydia Maria Child and David L. Child respectively, resembled the 1830s almanacs’ format more closely, The AAS Almanac never again achieved the internal coherence of the 1830s version.75 Just as the centralizing tendencies of the 1830s AASS paradoxically led to the proliferation of particularized interests and local socie­ties, the integrated form of the 1830s AAS Almanac broke down, in the 1840s, into its miscellaneous parts. Disconnected from the regulated distribution system of the 1830s AASS, its circulation also decreased. Only 30,000 copies of The AAS Almanac for 1844 ­were issued, ­because of the “state of the trea­sury.”76 Although The AAS Almanac ended with the edition for 1847, the American and Foreign ASS’s Liberty Almanac continued through the early 1850s. The Liberty Almanac, with editions for 1844–52, was more standardized than the 1840s AAS Almanac, especially a­ fter William Harned, the AFASS publishing agent, took over its publication in 1847.77 Ste­reo­t yped and ­wholesaled at thirty dollars per thousand and twenty-­five copies for a dollar, The Liberty Almanac followed the 1830s format more faithfully.78 The edition for 1847, for instance, includes—in addition to the astronomical front ­matter and table-­like calendar pages (now calculated for Boston, New York City, Philadelphia, Washington, Charleston, and New Orleans)—­information on the goals and officers of the AFASS, a list of all the members of the “Government of the United States,” engravings depicting the slave trade and prisons in the capital as well as “Southern Scenes” of slave torture, and advertisements for the society’s “Anti-­Slavery Depository, Publication Office, and F ­ ree Reading Room.”79 Other editions included population t­ ables, statistics of the Liberty Party, and, on the back pages, the cata­logue of publications.80 But even The Liberty Almanac, starting with the 1846 edition, separated its calendar pages from its antislavery m ­ atter, loosening the connection between the genre’s numerical techniques and its antislavery argument. Like the 1840s AAS Almanac, The Liberty Almanac had a less integrated form than the almanacs of the 1830s AASS. The appearance of competing antislavery almanacs in the 1840s replicated the split within the movement, while the dissolution of the pamphlets themselves

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into miscellaneous parts reflected the loosening of numeracy’s hold over the antislavery argument. Although facts remained central to antislavery’s case throughout the antebellum period, the years ­a fter 1840 witnessed the rise of more narrative-­driven works, such as the antislavery novel and the slave narrative. Significantly, The Liberty Almanac for 1852, which marked the end of the antislavery almanac’s fifteen-­year run, was advertised side by side with ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the National Era.81 If the integrated 1830s almanac represented numeracy’s height in the antislavery argument and the bifurcated almanac of the 1840s represented its uneven decline, the end of the antislavery almanac in the early 1850s heralded the ascendancy of narrative. Paradoxically, the demise of the genre can be traced to the success of the 1830s AAS Almanac and its companion compendia. By establishing a factual foundation for antislavery’s claims and validating the cause with data, ­these authenticating compendia allowed for the advancement of other modes. The almanac ceded its primary place in the antislavery media system precisely ­because it had so effectively established that system’s legitimacy. While antislavery fiction remained beholden to fact—­­Uncle Tom’s Cabin was accompanied by a factual supplement, The Key to ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1853)—­numeracy endured most strongly in the antebellum slave narrative. Emerging in the late 1830s, at the apex of the AASS’s investment in fact, the slave narrative was forged in its crucible. It is to the role of the slave narrative in the society’s factual fight against slavery that I now turn.

C h apter 3

The African American Slave Narrative as Factual Compendium

During the 1830s the AASS admitted the slave narrative as evidence into its case against slavery and integrated it into its corroborative print network. The society recognized enslaved ­people as an impor­tant source of information: their mutilated and branded bodies offered an “ocular demonstration of what slavery is”; their eyewitness accounts supplied detailed information about the system; and their personal stories animated the statistics of slavery.1 By connecting the operation of the slave system to the life of a par­tic­u­lar individual, the slave narrative provided a compelling introduction to the AASS’s collection of facts. Just as the almanac’s pictures made slavery’s cruelties immediately and strikingly vis­ i­ble, the slave narrative engaged readers on both an observational and an emotional level. When met with “coldness, apathy and indifference,” antislavery agents ­were counseled to “lend the Narrative of Charles Ball, the Ohio Report, or some other publication, where the slave speaks for himself.”2 Slave testimony aroused emotions, generating a revulsion against slavery as well as an identification with and sympathy for the enslaved. Yet the slave narrative also presented several prob­lems for the AASS’s fact-­ based argument. Given white antebellum culture’s suspicion of the slave’s veracity—­slaves w ­ ere depicted as liars and they w ­ ere legally prohibited from testifying against whites—­t he AASS had to figure out how to incorporate a putatively unreliable narrator into its system of truth.3 An article in The AAS Almanac for 1838 states: “We are often cautioned against receiving statements from northerners respecting slavery; and as for the stories of the slaves themselves, t­ here are multitudes who never for a moment entertain the idea of giving them credit. The slave-­holder, though a party concerned, and of course inadmissible as a witness in a court of justice, is the only witness admitted by many to the court of the American Public.”4 The AASS understood that the only unimpeachable

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source of evidence against slavery was the slaveholder himself and that slave testimony would be considered by many as inherently illegitimate. The other challenge the slave narrative posed was its particularity. An enslaved person’s experience, like all antislavery evidence, was valuable insofar as it corroborated the AASS’s larger knowledge system. The antislavery argument required narrators to be representative even as they ­were individuated, and their testimony to conform to type even as it enlivened duller data. The slave narrative thus posed a conundrum. The very ­t hings that made the slave narrative a distinctive addition to the society’s case—­observed details and personal story—­ also presented a risk to the accuracy of its argument and corroborative rationale. In the AASS’s knowledge and print structures, in which each part was made to signify the larger ­whole, any invalid evidence or discredited text could jeopardize the trustworthiness of the entire system. If, once admitted into antislavery’s appeal, slave testimony was found to be erroneous or inauthentic, the factual argument that the AASS had carefully built through the 1830s would be undermined. The AASS neutralized ­t hese dangers by treating the slave narrative—­like most of its evidence—as a factual compendium. It added t­ hese accounts to its documentary compilations, such as its almanac, and produced its first book-­ length narrative, Narrative of James Williams (1838), as a compendium. In both cases the AASS used the techniques of numeracy—­accumulation and aggregation—to manufacture slave testimony into facts that supported the AASS’s larger contentions. Folded into white-­authored forms and framed by white-­authored evidence and analy­sis, the slave narrative of the 1830s never stood on its own. Rather, it was compiled and made to accord with other antislavery information, si­mul­ta­neously authenticated by and made analogous to the other proofs in the AASS’s case. The compendium form—­which regulated slave testimony through white empiricism—­was meant to solve the prob­lem of veracity posed by the slave narrative. The history of the Narrative of James Williams illuminates the place of the 1830s slave narrative within the AASS’s factual case.5 Published in 1838 at the height of the society’s orga­nizational power, the Narrative was fully incorporated into the AASS’s knowledge and publishing systems. Constructed as a compendium, ste­reo­typed for general circulation, and added to distributional plans, the Narrative became, like The AAS Almanac, an impor­tant node in the society’s argument. Through Williams’s text, the AASS invested its institutional reputation in the slave narrative. When southern detractors challenged the veracity of Williams’s account, the AASS removed it from circulation and withdrew its support from the genre as a ­whole. It did not sponsor another slave narrative for seven years—­until the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass



The African American Slave Narrative 57

(1845)—­and it omitted slave testimony from its most famous factual compendium, American Slavery as It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses (1839). Created to correct the Narrative’s perceived errors and to substitute for the discredited text within the AASS’s print system, American Slavery as It Is displaced the Narrative from the AASS’s canon. As a result, American Slavery as It Is, not the Narrative of James Williams, served as the origin text for the antebellum slave narrative. Tracking the Narrative’s rapid emergence into and abrupt withdrawal from the AASS’s print network reveals the specific institutional context in which the antebellum slave narrative arose. Rather than representing a false start for the genre, the Narrative and the controversy that surrounded it ­shaped its development. The serious, almost disastrous, challenge that the Narrative posed to the AASS’s credibility and print system also set the terms u ­ nder which the slave narrative would be readmitted to institutional antislavery’s argument. Many antebellum slave narratives—­even t­ hose produced outside the AASS—­remained constrained by the demand for factual accuracy while white-­produced compendiums of slave narratives, published in the 1850s, replicated the AASS’s numerical logic. Even as formerly enslaved narrators signified against institutional antislavery’s modes, their published accounts continued to replicate the AASS’s foundational form—­t he factual compendium. This chapter revises the literary history of the antebellum slave narrative by reading it through the generic lens of the compendium rather than as auto­ biography.6 Aggregated with other antislavery facts, the 1830s slave narrative rarely spoke of a singular self. The misdesignation of the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, which emphasizes individuality and self-­expression, rather than the Narrative of James Williams, which resembles a cata­logue of cruelties, as the first slave narrative published by the AASS has had a significant impact on critical classifications of the genre. By resurrecting Williams’s Narrative, which the AASS disavowed and dis­appeared, this chapter shows how the genre’s “white envelope” was fundamental to—­rather than merely a frame for—­t he slave narrative.7 The AASS’s empiricism, which embraced similarity over difference and subordinated formerly enslaved p ­ eople’s narratives to the imperatives of facticity, had long-­lasting effects on the genre.

* * * During the 1830s, the AASS included short slave narratives in its compendia and periodicals and incorporated book-­length narratives into its print system. The Emancipator published “Narrative of the Life of Thomas Cooper” (1834); Lydia Maria Child’s Oasis contained James Bradley’s “Brief Account of an

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Emancipated Slave: Written by Himself, at the Request of the Editor” (1834); the Anti-­Slavery Rec­ord published the “History of the Slave, James: An Au­then­tic Narrative, Communicated by a Lady” (1836) and “Narrative of David Barrett” (1837); The AAS Almanac for 1838 provided the “Story of Anthony Gayle” (1837) taken “from his lips”; the Monthly Offering included the dictated narrative “James Major Monroe—­A Fugitive Slave” (1840).8 The AASS’s cata­logue of publications advertised the narratives of Gustavus Vassa (1789), William Grimes (1825), Charles Ball (1836), Moses Roper (1837), and Peter Wheeler (1839) through the 1830s.9 The AASS also added the slave narrative to its library system: Library No. 3 contained Vassa’s account and the New York State ASS listed Ball’s narrative among the recommendations for its district library.10 Ball’s narrative was also part of the series entitled The Cabinet of Freedom, a “republication of standard anti-­slavery works.”11 By folding the slave narrative into its corroborative textual system, the AASS si­mul­ta­neously integrated the testimony of formerly enslaved p ­ eople into its argument and authorized it. When it published the Narrative of James Williams, the AASS took owner­ ship of the slave narrative. Up ­until that point, its deployment of the slave narrative was mostly ad hoc: it printed what­ever short narratives it could find and ­adopted the few full-­length ones already in circulation. With Williams’s Narrative, the AASS threw the full weight of its influence b ­ ehind the genre. It was “published ­u nder direction of ” the AASS’s “Publishing Committee.”12 John Greenleaf Whittier, a member of the executive committee and one of the architects of the library system, was employed to transcribe Williams’s narration and edit the volume, and committee members, Lewis Tappan, James Birney, and Elizur Wright authenticated the text.13 It was disseminated ­under the AASS’s imprint, ste­reo­t yped for cheap dissemination, and incorporated into the AASS’s print system, both advertised by the society and bundled with its other texts. The AASS controlled the text from start to finish. As editor, Whittier designed the Narrative as a factual compendium. It consists of a preface, which marshals an array of southern data; Williams’s story of his life in and escape from slavery; and an appendix that provides testimony from former southerners detailing slavery’s “acts of atrocious cruelty” (108). The ­whole volume is meant to prove its opening assertion that “ ‘AMERICAN SLAVERY’ . . . ​is the vilest beneath the sun!” (iii). Whittier’s preface compiles unimpeachable evidence about “American Slavery in practice” (xvi) from slaveholders’ own reports: “statute books of the American slave states” (iii), slaveholders’ statements, and advertisements for runaway slaves, taken from southern newspapers. From t­ hese he derives a list of nine facts, such as: “1. That perfect obedience is required of the slave. . . . ​3. That ‘the economy of slavery is to get all you can, from the slave, and give him in return as l­ittle as w ­ ill barely support



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him in a working condition’ ” (xv–­x vi). Whittier adds t­ hese up into a single truth—­American slavery is an “abomination” (xxiii). Without the slave’s testimony, however, the evidence against slavery remains “partial and incomplete” (xvii). “For a full revelation of the secrets of the prison-­ house,” Whittier states, “we must look to the slave himself,” whose “unvarnished story” provides an “accurate observation of the practical workings of the system” (xvii)—in Williams’s case the hidden secrets of the “dreadful economy of the cotton plantation” (xix)—­a long with an “affecting narrative” (xviii). Through the “vivid freshness” (xviii) of slave testimony, readers are able to “see” (xx) slavery: “the scenes of the planation rise . . . ​with a distinctness which approaches real­ity” (xix). Moreover, by bringing the reader “in contact with the sufferer” (xxi), the narrative generates “sympathy for the oppressed” (xxii). Acting as both an “eye” and “I-­witness” to slavery—an observer of slavery and a personal “victim” of its “avarice and lust” (xix)—­Williams both verifies the details of the despotic system and animates their emotional impact.14 The Liberator declares: “No book has been published better calculated to enlighten the minds and melt the hearts of men”; the AASS’s cata­logue of publications describes it as a “most in­ter­est­ing and affecting narrative.”15 Whittier’s preface also emphasizes the narrative’s affective appeal even as it firmly asserts that Williams’s account is “one of truth,” an “unexaggerated picture of Slavery” that pre­sents only “the facts” (xxi). Whittier authenticates Williams’s narrative by compiling it as one ele­ment in a series of evidentiary proofs. Sandwiched between the preface’s data from slaveholders and the appendix’s corroborating testimony from former southerners, Williams’s narrative is verified through its conformity to white, mostly southern, evidence. The slave’s narrative may provide a fuller, more engaging account of slavery, but its details must accord with the irreproachable data that surrounds it. As an analogous part of a larger w ­ hole, Williams’s narrative is constructed to substantiate—­even as it enhances—­t he facts of the AASS’s already established case. Situated within an AASS-­crafted compendium, Williams’s account reinforces antislavery’s institutional script. Williams’s narrative proper is not only part of a compendium but is also constructed as one. Beginning with the conventional phrase “I was born” (3) and ending with his escape into freedom, it works through the accretion of smaller stories of slave punishment and escape rather than the linear arc of a single life story. Williams is more a teller of other enslaved p ­ eople’s stories than the protagonist of his own.16 Specifically, his account reads like a cata­logue of advertisements for runaway slaves. Placed in southern newspapers by slaveholders seeking to recapture their runaways, t­hese notices consisted of physical descriptions—­clothing, complexion, identifying marks such as scars—­a nd

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suggested the direction in which the fugitive might be heading. Even as they recorded the re­sis­tance of enslaved p ­ eople, they underscored the slaveholder’s power through the signs of discipline and punishment written on slave bodies, as well as the assertions of owner­ship and surveillance inherent in the form itself. Rather than intimations of freedom, such advertisements publicized enslaved p ­ eople’s recapture and further abuse. From Thomas Clarkson’s pamphlet, Negro Slavery (1824), forward, the antislavery movement used t­ hese advertisements to incriminate slaveholders.17 The AASS regularly aggregated them into unassailable inventories of slavery’s systemic cruelty and, to a lesser extent, proof of re­sis­tance by the enslaved.18 Focused more on publicizing the slaveholder’s brutality than enslaved ­people’s self-­liberation, the AASS replicated the advertisements’ under­lying message of slavery’s supremacy even as it reprinted them for a dif­fer­ent end: to promote antislavery’s responsibility to ­free the enslaved and aid the runaway.19 The AAS Almanac for 1837 (Figure 14), for instance, reproduces notices of runaways to reveal slavery’s regime of punishment as “wicked,” “cruel,” and abhorrent, as in the case of Ned, who was “very much marked with the WHIP.”20 Whittier’s preface similarly compiles “advertisements of masters for their runaway slaves” (x) over several pages (x–xv), highlighting the brutalization of slaves’ bodies by gunshot wounds, brandings, whippings, dog bites, and irons. Through ­t hese cata­ logues of cruelty, the AASS produced the slaveholders’ vio­lence and inhumanity as fact. Williams’s narrative is modeled on and continuous with the notices cited in the preface. Once he arrives in Alabama and takes up his role as “driver of the field hands” (41), his account is constructed as a sequence of punishment scenes. Enslaved men and w ­ omen are introduced in order to exemplify their “cruel and horrid punishments” (49). Williams provides eyewitness accounts of shootings, whippings, cat haulings, salt and pepper washes, and ­water torture. ­Little John’s body is “dreadfully mangled and gashed by the teeth of dogs” (51); another runaway is “fastened down to the ground by means of forked sticks” and then “two large cats” are dragged across his back (52); Priscilla, a pregnant slave, is “whipped ­until she was delivered of a dead infant, at the foot of the tree!” (74–75). Gathered together like the AASS’s cata­logues of runaway advertisements and assembled according to the same cumulative logic, each act of cruelty builds upon the previous ones to solidify slavery as a brutal system. The narrative’s piled-up punishments corroborate the compendium’s general claim that slavery is atrocious as well as the specific facts enumerated in the preface: “6. That slaves are branded with hot irons, and very much scarred with the whip. . . . ​9. That runaway slaves are chased with dogs—­men hunted like beasts of prey” (xvi). While Williams’s first-­hand report adds variety to this list of abuses, it corresponds in

Figure 14. “$100,000 Reward,” in The American Anti-­Slavery Almanac for 1837 (Boston: Southard and Hitchcock, n.d.), 16. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

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both its cata­logue form and its numerical techniques to the AASS’s standard account of slavery’s cruelty. Yet Williams’s narrative signifies against the runaway notices and expands the AASS’s deployment of them in several impor­tant ways. First, it animates their affective meaning. The advertisements portray enslaved ­people as property rather than persons through their cash rewards; they reduce them to a ste­ reo­type through the printer’s pictorial ornament of the runaway. Williams’s narrative, in contrast, humanizes his fellow slaves by giving them colloquial nicknames (Big Harry [53], L ­ ittle John [50]) and by depicting their affective responses to torture or death: the w ­ omen shriek “aloud” at Harry’s shooting; his ­sister can “not wrestle down the awful agony of her feelings” (59). His narrative represents them not only as brutalized bodies but also as beloved ­brothers. In ­doing so, it asks readers to sympathize with the enslaved as well as their suffering and therefore work to f­ree them from slavery.21 The Emancipator predicts that the Narrative ­will take “hold of the hearts of the ­free who have not hitherto enlisted”; the Herald of Freedom argues that it ­will open “frozen hearts” that have “lost the power to feel.”22 By forging an identification with enslaved ­people, Williams’s account rewrites the slaveholder’s script and reinforces antislavery’s role as sympathetic liberator. Second, Williams’s narrative foregrounds what is merely implied in southern advertisements—­slave re­sis­tance. Besides depicting enslaved ­people as abused bodies or suffering victims, as the AASS typically did, Williams’s narrative represents runaways as determined freedom fighters. It is full of runaways: his twin ­brother is a runaway (27); hands “threatened with a whipping for not finishing their tasks” run away (49); L ­ ittle John is killed by dogs while escaping (51); another young man runs away “several times” (51); two other hands go to the woods to commit suicide (60); Thornton “twice attempt[s] to escape with his wife and child” (77); John runs away ­after being whipped three times (81); and Williams himself flees ­toward the end of his narrative (83). The narrative is as much a cata­logue of escape attempts as one of punishments. ­Running away is represented as both a cause of and a response to punishment. By constantly connecting the two, Williams’s narrative shows slaveholder vio­lence as a reaction to slave re­sis­tance: the master’s “reign of terror” (xv) is necessary to maintain a system in which the enslaved insist on their freedom. Throughout the narrative, enslaved ­people would rather die than submit to slavery. The runaway Jacob hangs himself in the woods (60–61). Harry, whose “high and proud spirit” the “crushing weight of a life of slavery had not been able to subdue” (53), must be killed ­because he refuses to be whipped: “He may shoot me, but he ­can’t whip me,” Harry states of the overseer (58). The threat of punishment does not deter the enslaved ­people in Williams’s narrative from resisting overseers or attempting



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to escape. Simon, who is shot for felling the overseer “to the ground” (79), rises up “twice on his hands and knees” (80) before ­dying; similarly, another slave, who is shot for raising “his hoe in a threatening manner” at the overseer (80), rises up twice a­ fter being beaten back down and kills the overseer with a knife before expiring himself. Thornton escapes successfully a­fter being severely whipped and imprisoned in a cistern for his first two attempts (77–78). Even though most escape attempts fail, the slaves in Williams’s stories never stop trying to gain their freedom, w ­ hether in death or by flight. Through its use of repetition both within and across its stories of defiance, Williams’s narrative uses the techniques of numeracy to forge slave re­sis­tance, and not just slaveholder cruelty, as fact. The narrative proper uses the compendium’s empiricism to reframe slaveholder vio­lence as weakness rather than power, and enslaved p ­ eople as agents, not victims. Williams’s narrative rewrites the runaway advertisement to signify unending re­sis­tance. Even as Williams’s narrative extends the AASS’s case beyond slavery’s cruelty to focus on the personhood and agency of enslaved p ­ eople, ­t hese aspects recede within the compendium’s overall argument. Williams is paradoxically stripped of his identity at the moment of escape. Tying his “shirt in a handkerchief” and r­ unning “as fast as [he] could for the woods” (83), he becomes the ste­reo­typical woodcut of a runaway rather than an individual.23 His own escape replicates runaway attempts his narrative has already recounted: he flees ­because he is about to be whipped and tortured “with a wash of salt and pepper” (81), like the runaway John; as he runs from the dogs, he remembers the fate of L ­ ittle John, “torn in pieces by the hounds” (84); when “escape seemed impossible” (85), he determines to commit suicide like Jacob. Turned into a composite figure, Williams loses his singularity. He is also denied the achievement of his own emancipation. Haunted by ­others’ failed escapes even as he enacts his own and pursued by slave catchers even a­ fter he reaches the North, he has difficulty evading slavery’s grip and must rely on the AASS, which sends him to ­England for his safety, as Whittier tells readers in a followup note, for his freedom. Rather than celebrating his self-­liberation, the ending of Williams’s narrative underscores slavery’s surveillance and antislavery’s agency. The compendium gives Williams neither the first nor the last word. As a ­whole, it plays down the runaways’ re­sis­tance and figures the slaves’ humanity only in terms of their suffering. Only one of the fifteen advertisements reprinted in Whittier’s preface highlights slave re­sis­tance (the rest focus on the runaways’ scars) and the claims he draws from them emphasize the slaveholders’ authority and ability to inspire terror rather than the slaves’ defiance (x–­x vi); moreover, he depicts enslaved ­people as the “victims of avarice and lust” (xix). The appendix reiterates Whittier’s framing by detailing slavery’s “acts of atrocious

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cruelty” (108) and by returning enslaved ­people to the role of anguished victims. Ending with more punishments rather than Williams’s freedom, the Narrative concludes as it began: detailing slavery’s cruelties and their brutal effects. Constrained by the preface and the appendix, Williams’s account adds to antislavery’s codes without significantly recasting its argument. As The Liberator insists, the Narrative is “valuable, b ­ ecause it so powerfully corroborates other evidence and facts which have been published.”24 The AASS also packaged and promoted the Narrative through the visual iconography of the runaway advertisement. Its cover (Figure 15) represents Williams with the hat, stick, bundle, and bloodhounds of the stock figure of the runaway.25 By framing the Narrative as a version of the runaway notice, the cover signals what follows: punishments, cruelty, and the constant dialectic of escape and capture, as represented by the menacing hounds in the image’s background. Although the Narrative’s cover and title page (Figure 16) somewhat individuate Williams, they deny him agency. Visually ste­reo­typed, Williams-­as-­runaway is singled out by name in the title and the dog’s recognition of him as a familiar person rather than a piece of property. The frontispiece, a portrait by the African American engraver Patrick Reason, similarly specifies Williams by name and countenance even as it ste­reo­types him, through his clothing, as a middle-­class subject.26 Made to look like, yet away from, the reader, Williams-­as-­subject is si­mul­ta­neously civilized through his dress (by contrast his upper body is naked on the cover) and safely contained through his averted gaze. On both cover and title page, agency is transferred from Williams to the reader. Williams-­as-­r unaway is strangely static. With his feet planted on the ground and his head gazing back t­oward slavery rather than forward to freedom, he is figured as suspended in place rather than on the move. Slavery—as symbolized by the menacing hand-­like cloud and the pursuing hounds—is the actor in this image. Moreover, it is the antislavery activist, as signified by the prominent “Published by the American Anti-­Slavery Society” on the cover, who ­will save the runaway from the long reach of slavery’s power.27 The title page does not list Williams as author (rather, his name is embedded in the title, while the subtitle refers to him in the third person). The page also carries a long quotation from the Irish orator Daniel O’Connell, calling the reader to “give [the slave] hope.” ­These editorial decisions deny Williams the agency of his own authorship, bestowing it instead upon the reader who w ­ ill bring the slave’s “toil” to “an end” (title page). The Narrative’s material packaging transforms the runaway’s re­sis­tance into antislavery action. The Liberator’s announcement (Figure 17) of the Narrative’s Boston edition likewise resembles the slaveholders’ runaway notices in both iconography and

Figure 15. Front cover of James Williams, Narrative of James Williams, an American Slave (New York: AASS, 1838). Rare Books, MS-­E444.W743, University of Tennessee Libraries, Knoxville, Special Collections. Courtesy of the University of Tennessee Libraries.

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Figure 16. Frontispiece and title page of James Williams, Narrative of James Williams, an American Slave (New York: AASS, 1838). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

placement: it uses the standard woodcut image of a runaway and is located at the bottom right of the newspaper’s more commercial third page (where antislavery publications rather than fugitives ­were advertised). The heading—­ “Au­then­tic Narrative of an American Slave!”—­u nderscores the Narrative’s legitimacy and representativeness while erasing Williams’s individuality by transforming him into a faceless runaway and archetypal American slave. The advertisement also subordinates his agency to the AASS, whose institutional authority sanctions his story, as figured by the Note that lists the antislavery men who stand b ­ ehind his statements.28 Williams may be individuated in the advertisement’s text, which emphasizes his intelligence, candor, and kindness, but he remains the topic “of” his narrative rather than its author: it is the AASS that brings his story to press. Located on the same page as a review of Moses Roper’s narrative, Williams’s narrative is promoted as generic. Narratives like “that of

Figure 17. “Au­t hen­tic Narrative of an American Slave!,” The Liberator, 30 March 1838, 51. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

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Charles Ball, or James Williams, or Moses Roper” that tell “tales of horror” about the “fiendish cruelty of their tyrant-­masters” are not given “to the world as an extreme case of suffering,” the review states, “but as the ordinary usage experienced by southern slaves”; “­these individuals are . . . ​the representatives of a vast multitude of victims.”29 Williams’s narrative is one of several that tell the same story of slaveholder brutality and slave suffering. In fashioning and publicizing its first slave narrative as a runaway advertisement, the AASS stabilized the emergent genre.30 By aligning the slave narrative with the slaveholders’ irrefutable evidence, it sanctioned the enslaved person’s putatively unreliable testimony within a more trustworthy knowledge system. Throughout the late 1830s, the AASS disseminated the two forms together, ensuring that the slave narrative circulated as one in a larger series. The back ­matter of The AAS Almanac for 1838 contains a compilation of advertisements titled “Pictures of Slavery by Slave-­Holders,” along with the narratives of Anthony Gayle and “A Boy Who Loved Liberty.”31 Similarly, Nathaniel Southard’s Why Work for the Slave? (1838) includes the story of “Mary Brown, of Ohio, who was stolen from her ­free parents in Washington City,” and that of Burditt Washington, whose child was sold away from him, along with a list of “facts” taken from “recent Southern papers.”32 Ball’s narrative, published in The Cabinet of Freedom, is introduced by “deeds of horror” reprinted from southern newspapers; extracted in the compendium “Liberty,” it appears u ­ nder the heading “Cases of Cruelty.”33 Framed as an extended runaway advertisement and printed alongside them, the slave narrative was presented as factual as well as representative. The 1830s slave narrative was made to accord with the antislavery argument not just through its textual production but also its dissemination, as the Narrative’s extensive circulation and integration into the AASS’s print system reveals. Convinced of the emotive power of Williams’s story—­a “few more such personal narratives as the life and experience of James Williams ­will render the boasted ‘Southern domestic institutions’ as loathsome, as they are cruelly malignant and criminal,” The Liberator argues—­and confident of its facticity, given its compendium form, the AASS mass-­produced the Narrative for general supply.34 It was produced in two formats: as a volume of 108 pages, selling for twenty-­five cents per single copy, seventeen dollars per hundred, and in cheap sheets (Figure 18), at two cents per single copy or a dollar per hundred.35 The Narrative was printed ­ iddle of March, the in an edition of five thousand copies in February.36 In the m 37 executive committee authorized a third printing. In April, plans ­were announced to adapt the Narrative for general circulation by stereotyping it in quarto form so that it could be sold “by the thousand—by the tens of thousands, by the hundreds of thousands.”38 In May, ten thousand copies ­were sold in three days, according to The Emancipator, with “several o ­ rders unsupplied.”39

Figure 18. James Williams, Narrative of James Williams, an American Slave, No. 6 of the Anti-­Slavery Examiner (1838). Courtesy of the New York State Library, Manuscripts and Special Collections, Albany, New York.

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The executive committee authorized the publication of another twenty thousand copies in both June and September.40 Calling on abolitionists to “furnish the means of publishing and circulating this season . . . ​a million copies of the Narrative, without delay,” The Emancipator claims that the Narrative had the potential for exponential circulation.41 The scale of dissemination was unpre­ce­dented. Local socie­ties reprinted and circulated the Narrative. The Ohio ASS Executive Committee resolved to publish six thousand copies, to be sold at its state convention and distributed throughout the state by its delegates; the New York State ASS Executive Committee ordered ten thousand copies in April and called for a hundred thousand copies to be “sown over Western N.Y.”; and the ASS of Utica “had the narrative of James Williams distributed throughout the city—­a copy left with e­ very f­ amily, and in ­every store and office, and two or three copies in boarding ­houses. It took 1,357 copies; cost, $13.57, and the ser­v ices of a boy a l­ ittle over two days.”42 The antislavery faithful ­were urged to “lend a hand” and “purchase a quantity for gratuitous distribution.”43 Individuals too purchased large numbers: E. C. Delavan ordered four thousand copies to canvass Albany.44 The Narrative was supplied like the almanac: The Emancipator calls for The AAS Almanac for 1839 to be placed in ­every f­ amily, and “where it can be done, let the same mea­sures be ­adopted to circulate at least 100 of James Williams . . . ​in ­every town in the state.”45 It was sold by Cent-­a-­Week socie­ties: the Plea for the Slave encourages collectors to “do g­ reat good” by buying “a dozen or a hundred” and selling them in order to “get money enough to buy more”; The Emancipator argues that if each collector in “socie­ties already formed” would “sell one dozen, it would amount to 10,000 copies.”46 The Narrative was also sent to e­ very member of Congress.47 It was available at antislavery reading rooms and depositories as far west as Cincinnati, and it circulated to Eu­rope and even reached the South.48 It gained an even wider audience when it was reprinted in periodicals: The Liberator, the Herald of Freedom, and the Slave’s Friend published extracts, while the Michigan Observer serialized the narrative and Zion’s Watchman reprinted it in its entirety.49 The Narrative likely had the highest circulation of any slave narrative in the antebellum era.50 The Narrative was well integrated into the AASS’s print network. Published just as the antislavery library was being launched and during the society’s push for mass circulation, the Narrative, like the almanac, was one of the system’s central texts. The AASS’s Fifth Annual Report highlighted it as a “publication of much interest,” along with Thome and Kimball’s Emancipation in the West Indies (1838) and Weld’s The Power of Congress over the District of Columbia (1838).51 In pamphlet form, it was published within two series: as No. 6 of the Anti-­Slavery Examiner and as No. 3 of the Abolitionist’s Library.52 Edited by one



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of the antislavery library’s creators, Whittier, the Narrative also took a prominent place in that system. In June 1838, The Emancipator lists it as among “the more impor­tant and valuable” texts to be included, in duplicate or triplicate, in an antislavery library.53 The Narrative was also bundled with other texts to form a miniature library. It was advertised for circulation in the summer of 1838 with two other newly published texts: Thome and Kimball’s Emancipation in the West Indies and James Birney’s Correspondence, between the Hon. F. H. Elmore and James G. Birney.54 In June The Emancipator and ­Human Rights announced a ten-­dollar plan that would allow a community to canvass their district with 300 copies of the Narrative (one cent each), 25 of Emancipation in the West Indies (twenty cents each), and 134 of the Elmore Correspondence (one and a half cents each).55 Together, the three texts would explicate the AASS’s full argument: the “Narrative of James Williams w ­ ill awaken the sympathies of the ­people . . . ​Emancipation in the West Indies ­will show the benefits of liberty, and the Elmore Correspondence ­will explain the princi­ples, plans and prospects of the Abolitionists in this country,” The Emancipator writes; a “community well supplied with ­t hese three publications, could not remain indifferent to the cause of abolition.”56 A five-­dollar plan, advertised at the end of June, encouraged local socie­ties to buy 100 copies of the inexpensive editions of the Narrative and 25 copies of Emancipation in the West ­ ere published serially in the Anti-­ Indies for distribution.57 The three texts w Slavery Examiner as No. 6 (Narrative of James Williams), No. 7 (Emancipation in the West Indies), and No. 8 (Elmore Correspondence). The AAS Almanac for 1839 was ­later added to this group: “To the favorite list of James Williams, Thome and Kimball, and the Elmore Correspondence, we must now add, emphatically, the 1839 ALMANAC,” The Liberator states.58 Connected to, folded within, and circulating with other key texts, the Narrative was an impor­tant part of the AASS’s corroborative print system. Hence, when southern detractors challenged Williams’s credibility, the Narrative threatened to undermine the society’s reputation and factual argument, and discredit its other texts. Almost immediately a­ fter its publication, the Narrative came ­under attack. John Ritten­house, editor of the Alabama Beacon, led the charge at the end of March, calling it a “lying abolition pamphlet.”59 ­There ­were other claims from the South that Williams had fabricated ­people and places.60 In August, the executive committee suspended sales while it performed its own investigation.61 Unable to locate evidence to ­counter the southern charges—­Williams by this time was in ­England and could not be located—­t he executive committee withdrew the Narrative at the end of October. Admitting that some of the statements contained therein ­were untrue, the executive committee concluded that it could not “with propriety ask for the

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confidence of the community in any of the statements contained in the Narrative.”62 ­Eager to contain the damage to the AASS’s reputation, the committee “struck” the text “off the docket.”63 Throughout the Narrative’s public trial in the press, the AASS focused on defending its general claims rather than Williams’s par­tic­u­lar account. While his testimony might be impeached, the executive committee argued, the other evidence accompanying his narrative could not be so easily set aside, proving “that however unworthy the witness, his testimony as a w ­ hole was true to the nature of slavery.”64 ­People should not suspend their sympathy for the slave ­u ntil “the portrait as well as the painter prove to be false.”65 Again and again, the antislavery faithful insisted that, despite “trifling inaccuracies,” Williams’s portrait of slavery remained “substantially true.”66 The Emancipator insists: “what­ever may be the truth of the par­t ic­u ­lar facts . . . ​a s a ­whole, the Narrative is a graphic delineation of slaveholding atrocities that are no unfre­ hole over the part, the quent occurrence at the South.”67 In emphasizing the w general princi­ple of slavery’s cruelty over some questionable particulars, the AASS asserted that a condemnation of the Narrative was not an acquittal of slavery. The challenges to the Narrative’s credibility and the public humiliation of its withdrawal shook the AASS to its core.68 One critic called the work an example of “the multiplied artifices by which the American Anti-­slavery Society is perpetually gulling the public”; another claimed that it was “impossible to say, what proportion of the issues of this Society are of this character” and therefore deduced “that many of their issues are purely fictitious.”69 “The doubt thrown on his narrative is ­doing incalculable mischief,” Lydia Maria Child lamented.70 The controversy exposed the inherent flaw in the AASS’s corroborative logic: if ­every part substantiated the w ­ hole, then any disgraced text could subvert its argument and taint its print system. The society took two steps to rebuild confidence in its factual case and publications. First, it s­ topped investing in slave narratives, acceding to the South’s view of slave testimony as unreliable. Besides retracting Williams’s text, the executive committee never followed up on its June 1838 inquiry into the purchase of “the copyright of Charles Ball, and the expediency of abridging it for general circulation,” even though Ball’s text, like Williams’s, was listed among ­those recommended for a district library.71 The committee had planned to widely disseminate Ball’s text, recommending that “Charles Ball . . . ​should be put into ­every circulating library, and e­ very parlor, which w ­ ill receive” it.72 The AASS would not sponsor another slave narrative for seven years, the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, and then only a­ fter Douglass had already been vetted on the antislavery lecture cir­cuit.73



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Second, the executive committee produced another text to take the Narrative’s place—­American Slavery as It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses, edited by Theodore Weld (Figure 19). Weld was a prominent member of the executive committee, its director of publications, an editor of the almanac, and originator, along with Whittier, of the antislavery library.74 The new tract was created to reestablish the veracity of the antislavery argument through another factual compendium and to fill the hole left in the AASS’s corroborative print system by the withdrawal of Williams’s text with a more authoritative publication. Written in direct response to the Narrative, American Slavery as It Is restored, through its thousands of airtight facts drawn from southern newspapers and testimonies, the truth of slavery’s cruelty that Williams’s misrepre­sen­ta­tions threatened to undermine. Made to substitute for the Narrative within the AASS’s print network, Slavery as It Is successfully supplanted it. By explic­itly reinvesting in white empiricism, Weld foreclosed the Narrative’s threat. Having withdrawn the Narrative on 18 October, the executive committee resolved on 1 November that Weld should “prepare a collection of facts to show the true character of slavery and condition of the slaves” to be “published u ­ nder the direction of the Publishing Committee.”75 The Emancipator anticipates that Weld’s tract would pre­sent “the truth, and nothing but the truth.”76 Slavery as It Is was published for the AASS’s anniversary on 7 May 1839 and quickly became a bestseller.77 Framed as a trial, with the reader empaneled as a juror asked to try a “plain case” of “fact,” the tract provides the proof that southern detractors demanded from Williams’s narrative.78 Having lost the case of James Williams that was tried in the press, the society sought to win on appeal with Slavery as It Is. Slavery as It Is reestablishes the facticity of the antislavery argument by doubling down on the Narrative’s compendium form—­with a crucial difference. The tract excises slave testimony altogether, replacing the impeached slave with a thousand white witnesses. Formerly star witnesses in the antislavery argument, enslaved p ­ eople are not even called to the stand in Slavery as It Is. Instead, Weld assem­bles his evidence from the white, mostly southern, sources of the Narrative’s preface and appendix: eyewitness testimony from slaveholders and former residents of the South, extracts from southern slave codes, and runaway notices. Amassing “proofs innumerable” (10)—­many of which ­were culled by Weld’s wife, Angelina Grimké Weld, and his sister-­in-­law, Sarah Grimké, from twenty thousand southern newspapers—­the tract pre­sents “thousands upon thousands” of unimpeachable “facts of slavery.”79 Densely packed with data—­t he text’s microscopic type and double-­column layout compiles and condenses a plenitude of evidence on ­every page (Figure 20)—­the tract produces a “mass of solid fact.”80 By assaulting readers with ever-­proliferating particulars—­Weld repeats that

Figure 19. Title page of Theodore Weld, ed., American Slavery as It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses (New York: AASS, 1839). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.



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“we might easily add to the preceding list, hundreds” (84)—it dilutes the importance of any single piece of evidence thereby transforming Williams’s undermining inaccuracies into trivial aberrations.81 Besides presenting more authoritative evidence in terms of both authorship and amount, Slavery as It Is amplifies the corroborative numerical techniques of the Narrative’s compendium form. Building on Whittier’s preface, the tract systematically aggregates hundreds of runaway notices to produce a single sum—­ slavery’s brutality. Its section “General Testimony to the Cruelties Inflicted upon Slaves” (57) includes a heading “Punishments” (62) that consists of a series of subsections listing specific abuses: “I. Floggings” (62), “II. Tortures, by Iron Collars, Chains, Fetters, Handcuffs, &c.” (72). Each type is verified by cata­ logues of advertisments authenticating that par­tic­u­lar injury. The tract’s codification of cruelty breaks down the system of slavery into its distinct and ever proliferating parts at the same time that it uses enumeration to set t­ hose parts in relation to each other and the larger ­whole. By accumulating analogous evidence in subcompendia—­creating a series of interchangeable parts where one mutilation looks like and stands in for the next—­t he tract uses elaboration to produce substantiation. “Let no one withhold his testimony ­because o ­ thers have already testified to similar facts,” says the “Note” that introduces the text. “The value of testimony is by no means to be mea­sured by the novelty of the horrors that it describes. Corroborative testimony,—­facts, similar to t­ hose established by the testimony of o ­ thers,—is highly valuable.” Through its extensive compendium form, where each part is made to reflect the o ­ thers and all are harnessed to the central argument, Slavery as It Is shows slavery to have “one uniform character of diabolical cruelty” (57). Slavery as It Is also ­counters Williams’s narrative by turning subjective testimony into objective fact. Where the Narrative’s appendix collects six testimonies from “several gentlemen, who are natives of the South” (103), Slavery as It Is compiles “hundreds” (9), most from slaveholders or former residents of the South, into three sections of “Personal Narratives.” In moving white evidence that lies on the Narrative’s margins to its center, Slavery as It Is builds its case on eyewitness testimony less vulnerable to dispute. Moreover, grouping personal narratives together into three subcompendia solves the prob­lem of the slave narrative’s singularity. Gathered together with similar testimony, each narrative becomes exemplary rather than exceptional. They all speak of slavery’s horrors. Consistency within multiplicity produces the tract’s testimonies as truth. Further, by presenting personal testimony alongside and alternately with the harder evidence of runaway advertisements, Slavery as It Is stabilizes the subjective nature of narrative by making it accord with more objective data. Fi­nally, by presenting itself as the work of a composite author—­t he “Testimony of a Thousand

Figure 20. Evidence page from Theodore Weld, ed., American Slavery as It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses (New York: AASS, 1839), 73. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.



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Witnesses” as the tract’s subtitle declares or a “cloud of witnesses” as its preface states—­t he tract locates its authority in the unassailable w ­ hole. Th ­ ere are simply too many witnesses for them all to be impeached.82 By fashioning itself as a compendium of innumerable, analogous facts—an “elaborate statistical document” as the executive committee calls it—­and by demoting the slave from witness to evidence, from speaking subject to object of cruelty, Slavery as It Is successfully c­ ounters the Narrative’s alleged fabrications.83 The Liberator praises it for its “mass of well attested and harmonious evidence . . . ​ beyond the power of ingenuity to evade, or of skepticism to question”; it is “au­ then­tic and unanswerable.”84 Slavery as It Is provides more than enough proof to offset a single, fabricated piece. “What a clamor was raised about the Narrative of James Williams!” The Liberator exclaims. “What an incredible fiction! . . . ​ Let the Narrative of James Williams go for a fiction! We are now inclined to think that it must have been. The picture was not dark enough. It melts away before the now authenticated ‘horrors’ of the prison ­house.”85 Through its mass of details, Slavery as It Is turns Williams’s challenged testimony into an understatement; the Narrative becomes an aberration in antislavery’s knowledge system, not b ­ ecause it portrays slavery too severely but b ­ ecause it does not depict it harshly enough. “Horrible—­horrible—­horrible,” writes The Emancipator, “The ‘Narrative of James Williams’ is scarcely bloody enough to compose a preface to ‘Slavery as it is.’ ”86 Displacing the Narrative, Slavery as It Is takes over its role within the antislavery argument, providing the “shocking details” and “diabolical” facts that would propel ­people to action.87 Weld’s “heart rending book,” called “thrillingly in­ter­est­ing, powerfully instructive, impulsive enough to get a piece of clay in motion,” replaced Williams’s, once seen as “destined to work a very g­ reat revolution in the feeling of community on the subject of American slavery” and to “make abolitionists by the hundreds.”88 Slavery as It Is, rather than the Narrative, came to serve as the movement’s touchstone text. Having discursively displaced the Narrative within the antislavery argument, Slavery as It Is took its place within the AASS’s print system, achieving the extensive circulation originally planned for Williams’s book. Immediately ste­reo­ typed, Slavery as It Is sold twenty-­two thousand copies in its first four months and over a hundred thousand copies in its first year.89 The committee on publications, chaired by Whittier, suggested that the society take “mea­sures to promote its circulation in all parts of the country.”90 R. G. Williams, book agent for the AASS, asked state socie­t ies to put not only the “Almanac into e­ very ­family” but also “that ‘Tremendous Book’ AMERICAN SLAVERY AS IT IS.”91 The Liberator urges that it “be scattered all over the land, and read in e­ very ­family”; The Emancipator underscores “the importance of having this book placed in ­every neighborhood, and read by ­every influential individual, in the

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f­ ree States, without delay.”92 As the presses labored to send forth the “thousands of copies of this work” needed “for supply of the f­ ree States,” the executive committee, “anxious to bring the impor­tant disclosures of Mr.  Weld’s book as speedily as pos­si­ble within the reach of the professional and most influential members of the community,” provided the tract at cost to allow state and county auxiliaries to distribute it gratuitously to ministers, ­lawyers, physicians, and magistrates.93 With this method, the “ ‘ hinges of society’ ” would be well oiled.94 This scheme, along with “what may be purchased by individuals, and circulated in Anti-­Slavery Libraries” would allow, as The Emancipator states, “the public mind . . . ​to become fully imbued with a knowledge of ‘American Slavery as it is.’ ”95 Slavery as It Is also took the place of the Narrative in the AASS’s bundling plans and serialized print systems. It was published, like the Narrative, in the Anti-­Slavery Examiner (as No. 10); it was reviewed as a counterpart to Emancipation in the West Indies and recommended, as the Narrative once had been, for circulation with it.96 It was included in Nos. 1, 4, and 6 of the antislavery library, No. 1 being the most basic collection, recommended for individuals and small school districts, No. 4 containing the most impor­tant works, and No. 6 being an almost “complete set of all the antislavery publications.”97 Circulated and advertised with The AAS Almanac for 1840, which Weld also edited, it literally filled the gap left by the withdrawal of Williams’s Narrative from the AASS print network.98 Through its discursive form and material circulation, Slavery as It Is reestablished confidence in the AASS’s argument and print system. The “facts and testimonies published in ‘American Slavery as it is’ are ­doing for the Anti Slavery cause a work of incalculable value,” Weld declared. “Facts and testimonies are troops, weapons and victory, all in one.”99 The executive committee called it a “slavery-­k illing book.”100 Comprehensive and, therefore, irrefutable—­The Emancipator calls it “the greatest ‘stumper’ to slaveholders, that was ever in­ven­ ted by man”—­Slavery as It Is shored up the AASS’s foundation of fact.101 An “encyclopaedia of facts and store­house of arguments,” it came to serve as the bible of the antislavery movement.102 It was widely reprinted, most notably in Charles Dickens’s American Notes for General Circulation (1842), and it inspired antislavery’s most influential text, Stowe’s ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852).103 Its techniques as well as its title ­were reiterated throughout the antebellum period. Compendiums, such as Wilson Armistead’s compilation of serialized tracts, Five Hundred Thousand Strokes for Freedom (1853), and his anthology of antislavery testimony, A ‘Cloud of Witnesses’ Against Slavery and Oppression (1853), copied its factual form; and “Slavery as it is” became a ubiquitous phrase in antislavery works ­after 1840.104



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Slavery as It Is also strongly influenced subsequent slave narratives. Douglass quoted frequently from it in “speeches he gave between 1841 and 1845,” and Garrison invoked the tract to authenticate Douglass’s Narrative in his preface to that work.105 Douglass’s account, Garrison asserts, “comes short of real­ity, rather than overstates a single fact in regard to SLAVERY AS IT IS”; his testimony is “sustained by a cloud of witnesses, whose veracity is unimpeachable.”106 The narratives of Sojourner Truth, Henry Box Brown, and Henry Watson in­ thers, while clude extracts of Slavery as It Is in their appendices.107 And still o not directly quoting Weld’s tract, utilize its sources and methods. Watson’s and Henry Box Brown’s narratives reprint extracts from the American slave code, as does William Wells Brown’s, along with runaway advertisements; Peter Randolph structures his narrative through categories such as hours for work, flogging, and overseers, rather than the arc of his own life; Harriet Jacobs cata­logues cruelties in her chapter “Sketches of Neighboring Slaveholders”; and James Watkins, in l­ater editions of his narrative, pre­sents “a number of proofs of the accuracy” of what he describes in his chapter “Slave Torture.”108 Nearly all antebellum slave narratives foreground punishments and cruelty and include in their appendices an array of corroborating evidence and supporting documents to verify their testimony. Integrating Weld’s tract and methods into its form, the antebellum slave narrative rebuilt its credibility on Slavery as It Is’s foundation of fact. Slavery as It Is dictated the terms ­under which the slave narrative would reenter institutional antislavery’s argument. Throughout the 1840s, the slave narrative was produced mostly outside institutional antislavery: Garrison’s AASS sponsored only Douglass’s and William Wells Brown’s (1847) narratives during that de­cade. By the end of the 1840s, t­ here w ­ ere enough narratives for Ephraim Peabody to classify them as a genre, stating in a review entitled “Narratives of Fugitive Slaves” (1849) that “Amer­i­ca has the mournful honor of adding a new department to the lit­er­a­ture of civilization,—­the autobiography of escaped ­ ere available in larger numbers, the slave narrative was slaves.”109 Once they w added to institutional antislavery’s case in the early 1850s through white transatlantic compendia modeled on Weld’s tract. Many of t­ hese w ­ ere produced to capitalize on the success of ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin or validate its fiction as fact: such as Armistead’s Five Hundred Thousand Strokes for Freedom, Stowe’s A Key to ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1853), John Passmore Edwards’s ­Uncle Tom’s Companions; Or, Facts Stranger Than Fiction, A Supplement to ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin: Being Startling Incidents in the Lives of Celebrated Fugitive Slaves (1852), and ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin Almanack or Abolitionist Memento (1853). Like Slavery as It Is, they pre­ sent themselves as factual compendia—­Stowe’s Key, for instance, is advertised as “A complete Magazine of Facts.”110 They utilize a range of evidence, from

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runaway advertisements and slave codes to statistics and l­egal opinions along with excerpts from Weld’s tract, to prove “Slavery a System of Inherent Cruelty,” as a tract in Armistead’s text states, as well as U ­ ncle Tom’s Cabin’s truth.111 Unlike Weld’s tract, however, ­t hese l­ater compendia include the slave narrative in their evidence. By gathering multiple narratives together, as exemplified by Armistead’s tract, titled “Fugitive Slaves: Douglass, Pennington, Wells Brown, Garnett, Bibb, and ­Others,” and juxtaposing them with more objective evidence, as in Armistead’s “Startling Facts Relative to Slavery at the Pre­sent Time,” “Statistics of the Coloured Race,” “Auctioneering Advertisements,” t­ hese compendia sanctioned the testimony of enslaved p ­ eople through the same tactics Weld used to verify white testimony in his tract.112 Compiled into cata­logues, slave narratives authenticate each other by telling similar stories; analogous to and connected with other antislavery evidence, they gain facticity. Furthermore, by summarizing former slaves’ book-­length narratives and recounting them in the third person, t­ hese compendia convert individual autobiographies into collective biography. Compressed and compiled, slave narratives ­were manufactured within antislavery compendia into a consistent shape. Coalescing their cloud of witnesses into a composite character—­the representative fugitive—­these compendia make former slaves speak for their class rather than themselves, thereby converting “living witnesses” into uniform evidence.113 Once standardized, the slave narrative could be made to serve antislavery’s story: to substantiate the ste­reo­t ype of the slave, as in Stowe’s Key, or to expose slavery as “unspeakably iniquitous and intolerable,” as in Armistead’s Five Hundred Thousand Strokes.114 Once sidelined from central testimony (becoming a “supplement to ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” as Edwards’s subtitle states) and turned into a type (an “average specimen,” according to Stowe’s Key), the slave narrative gained the status of truth in white antislavery compendia, at the cost of being reduced to a data point of proof.115 Ironically, the slave narrative acquired facticity in the 1850s as a means to substantiate antislavery fiction. Hence, although the slave narrative was readmitted into institutional antislavery’s case in the 1850s—­a discussion dictated by Stowe’s novel—it was still included on Weld’s terms. Even though the addition of slave testimony in 1850s white compendia forced them to expand beyond Slavery as It Is’s focus on unending punishment to recognize the humanity and desire for freedom of enslaved p ­ eople, the slave narrative remained in ser­v ice to institutional antislavery’s argument.116 Slavery as It Is, then, rather than the Narrative of James Williams was the origin text for the antebellum slave narrative. It authenticated the slave narrative and influenced its techniques; it was incorporated into the genre; and it served as the model for how the slave narrative came to be anthologized and standardized. In solving the prob­lem posed by the Narrative of James Williams,



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Slavery as It Is ­shaped the development of the slave narrative as a genre. Written in response to a specific text, it influenced the tradition as a w ­ hole. Despite being produced right before the 1830s AASS’s collapse, Slavery as It Is had lasting effects on the structure of the movement’s factual argument as well as the evolution of the antebellum slave narrative as a documentary compendium. The antebellum slave narrative was not just authorized but regulated by it. Although first-­person accounts of slavery proliferated in the 1840s and beyond, the genre remained beholden to Weld’s tract. Supplanted by Slavery as It Is, the Narrative of James Williams all but dis­appeared from the slave narrative and its canon, marking the AASS’s counterplan as complete. What does the institutional origin story of the African American slave narrative tell us about the AASS’s role in the formation of the genre as well as our own critical assessments of it? It shows how the slave narrative emerged in the 1830s as a mass media phenomenon b ­ ecause of the AASS’s systematic support (if only for a short time) of Williams’s text.117 It also foregrounds how white empiricism and print forms lay at the core of the genre not just its margins. More generally, it demonstrates how difficult the AASS found it to incorporate the testimony of enslaved p ­ eople into its argument. More comfortable with them as bodily evidence than as testifying subjects, institutional antislavery first manufactured the slave narrative as a factual compendium in accordance with the slaveholders’ runaway advertisements and then standardized it by compiling it, like the advertisements, into corroborating cata­logues. Seeing enslaved men and ­women as representative rather than as individuals and subordinating their experience to already-­established facts w ­ ere the AASS’s aims. Emerging at the height of fact’s hold on the antislavery argument, the antebellum slave narrative never fully escaped the demands of the AASS’s empiricism. Even in the 1850s, when authors like Stowe and William Wells Brown (author of the novel Clotel [1853]), began to fictionalize the slave’s story, the slave narrative remained firmly anchored in fact. In 1855 Douglass presented My Bondage and My Freedom as a work not “of ART” but “of FACTS—­Facts, terrible and almost incredible, it may be—­yet FACTS, nevertheless.”118 Individual narrators would find multiple ways to express and enlarge African American personhood in the antebellum era, and in the 1850s African American authors would begin to experiment with fictional forms, yet institutional antislavery applied a constant standardizing pressure on the genre. Even though the AASS only published a few book-­length slave narratives, it established the framework for all narratives, even ­t hose published by ­others. Understanding the institutional constraints within which the slave narrative developed and operated—­even as we enlarge our understanding of its discursive and material multiplicity—­enables us to better map modes of black re­sis­tance and to identify our own complicity in

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perpetuating institutional antislavery’s structures.119 That we have categorized Williams’s Narrative as a fiction, excising it u ­ ntil recently from the slave narrative canon, that we continue to elevate a few slave narratives as representative, and that we aggregate slave narratives within anthologies that erase their diverse material histories, all demonstrate the long afterlife of institutional antislavery’s standardizing strategies.120

C h apter 4

Speaking Objects: Antislavery Fairs and Sentimental Consumerism

Although print dominated the AASS’s cata­logue of publications and was the focus of its factual argument and distribution system, domestic material objects, created by the AASS’s female auxiliaries, animated and circulated antislavery’s sentimental appeal in the 1830s and beyond.1 Antislavery objects—­such as pincushions and sugar bowls carry­ing the image of the kneeling slave and the mottos “Remember the Slave” and “Am I not a Man and a ­Brother” (Figures  21–22)—­mobilized affective structures on behalf of enslaved ­people and embedded antislavery sentiments within domestic spaces, effectively transforming antislavery beliefs into ­house­hold knowledge.2 Word and image activated the object’s meaning, voicing or visualizing its—­and by extension its owner’s—­ sympathy. At the same time, the material object repackaged print and visual media as a domestic consumer good. By synergizing multimodal forms, the AASS’s female auxiliaries powerfully pleaded antislavery’s cause. In Maria Weston Chapman’s words: “When pincushions are periodicals, and needle-­ books are tracts, discussion can hardly be stifled or slavery perpetuated.”3 Antislavery objects w ­ ere produced for and disseminated at female-­sponsored antislavery fairs.4 Begun by female abolitionists in Boston (1834) and Philadelphia (1836), antislavery fairs w ­ ere held annually at Christmastime for nearly three de­cades.5 They flourished in both urban and rural environments along the eastern seaboard as well as in the West: Boston, Philadelphia, and Cincinnati all held fairs, as did Lowell, Mas­sa­chu­setts; Rochester, New York; Pawtucket, Rhode Island; and Salem, Ohio. Modeled on ­women’s charity bazaars, antislavery fairs sold an array of useful and fancy articles—­foodstuffs, ­house­hold goods, clothing, needlework, and the latest fashions—as well as objects, images, and print specifically designated as antislavery.6 At once local and global markets—­ places to purchase farm-­fresh pickles and poultry as well as to admire and acquire parlor decorations imported from ­England and Europe—­antislavery fairs

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Figure 21. Antislavery pincushion, ca. 1835. Courtesy of the Friends Historical Library of Swarthmore College (SW09-­A0009459).

­ ere also emporia for abolitionist media.7 Produced by a band of female volunw teers who made, solicited, or donated goods and who decorated the venues, staffed the ­tables, and publicized the events, antislavery fairs ­were largely female enterprises.8 As business organ­izations, fairs replicated the AASS’s networked and managerially coordinated structure. Each town’s fair was administered by a board of (unpaid) man­ag­ers, who issued circulars calling for goods, directed volunteers, publicized markets, and published detailed accounts of each event. Rural fairs ­were connected to urban fairs and transatlantic abolitionist networks through the flow of goods. Unsold products w ­ ere passed on to other fairs for resale, and British w ­ omen sent goods from abroad as well as ideas. Larger fairs disseminated their organ­izing tactics to smaller ones via their published reports.9 Through systematic supply networks and effective communication, fairs produced themselves as an identifiable institution even as they proliferated locally: in 1846 the MASS announced that “Anti-­Slavery Fairs seem now to have consolidated themselves into one of the ‘domestic institutions’ of the Anti-­Slavery ­ ere decentralized, the Boston fair, headed by States.”10 Although the fairs w



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Figure 22. Antislavery sugar bowl purchased at the Philadelphia antislavery fair by Josiah Quincy, ca. 1836–61. Courtesy of the Friends Historical Library of Swarthmore College (SW09-­A0009458).

Maria Weston Chapman, a prolific propagandist for the cause, was their national namesake.11 Originally the Mas­sa­chu­setts Anti-­Slavery Fair, renamed to the National Anti-­Slavery Bazaar in 1845, and transformed into the National Subscription Anniversary in 1859, the Boston fair represented the institution’s leading edge. Its organ­ization, thanks to its man­ag­ers’ transatlantic ties, was international in scope; its market, which imported luxury and specialty goods from abroad, provided products other­w ise unavailable; and its media, which

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included inventive domestic objects as well as its own specially designed gift book, packaged the antislavery message specifically for the parlor. As one of two urban hubs—­the other being Philadelphia—in an other­wise dispersed network, the Boston fair served as a model for the ­others.12 Allied with Garrison’s winning faction in the AASS split, the Boston fair did not dissolve in 1840 but rather strengthened as it evolved from a state to a national event.13 Due to their localism, fairs more generally survived the split and continued to be held throughout the antebellum era. Consequently, rather than drawing a distinction between pre-­and post-1840 eras, as I do for the print culture produced by the original AASS, I focus h ­ ere on the fairs as continuous and more gradually evolving organ­izations. As one of antislavery’s longest-­lasting institutions, antislavery fairs ­were essential to the overall success of the antislavery enterprise and the mainstream adoption of its message.14 They created interest in the cause as well as profits for it. “Many an individual, who would never have read an Anti-­Slavery publication, or entered a lecture room, has been induced by curiosity, or the demands of Christmas and New Year’s holiday, to visit this annual scene of abolition business; and has left it with a juster appreciation of the motives, and a clearer comprehension of [its] mea­sures,” states The Liberator of the Boston fair.15 Fairs ­were the largest and most consistent sources of income for antislavery socie­ties throughout the antebellum period, fully funding local auxiliaries and supplying one-­t hird to one-­half of the operating bud­get for the national society and state associations.16 They kept the machinery of institutional antislavery ­running by subsidizing agents, conventions, tracts, and periodicals.17 Simply put, ­women’s work kept male abolitionism solvent. Fairs also provided a sustained market for antislavery media. As a bounded space, they ­were focal sites for the display and purchase of antislavery products. They operated as centralized depositories for items advertised in the AASS’s publication lists as well as the fairs’ own circulars and reports, offering print works at prominently positioned book t­ ables, and domestic objects emblazoned with antislavery images and aphorisms throughout. Moreover, fairs expanded the category of antislavery media. Through puns and ingenious devices, everyday items w ­ ere made to speak for the cause: iron holders w ­ ere labeled “Anti-­Slave-­ Holders” and needle books carried the words “May the use of our n ­ eedles prick the consciences of slaveholders.”18 Even unmarked goods ­were imprinted with antislavery sentiment, since they ­were sold ­under antislavery banners that declared the cause’s larger truths (Figure 23). Through the abundance and variety of their goods—­their t­ ables “piled high with rich and beautiful articles, too numerous to mention”—­antislavery fairs, especially urban ones, ­were mass marketplaces overflowing with merchandise that voiced antislavery’s message.19



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Figure 23. A banner used by William Lloyd Garrison at Mas­sa­chu­setts antislavery fairs and festivals (1843). Courtesy of the Mas­sa­chu­setts Historical Society.

Despite their localism and handmade artifacts, fairs w ­ ere impor­tant institutions for the development and distribution of antislavery mass media. They promoted new products—­especially speaking objects—­a nd sold antislavery goods in attractive settings.20 By articulating a compelling formulation of the mass market—­consumerism as freedom—­fair organizers harnessed capitalism to the cause. Operating in tandem with the rise of the domestic object and consumer culture more generally, fairs represented the apotheosis of the market’s new mode of sentimental consumerism. By endowing objects with sentiment and subjectivity, sentimental consumerism managed capitalism—­making it palatable and inhabitable—by disguising capitalism’s forms of commodification.21

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Through sentimental consumption, capitalism’s subjects learned to identify with their possessions rather than feel alienated from them and to find satisfaction in the per­for­mance of purchase.22 By offering objects that literally spoke of antislavery sympathy and by promising that their sales produced freedom, fairs actualized the transformative capabilities and emancipatory promise of sentimental consumption. At antislavery fairs, where goods ­were signs of compassion and buying an act of liberation, consumers could easily access the market’s rewards. By appropriating as well as extending the techniques of sentimental consumerism, fairs both embraced commodity culture and consolidated it. As Lawrence Glickman argues, antislavery fairs “helped found modern consumer society.”23 This chapter focuses on antislavery fairs as complex and sometimes contradictory market sites that legitimated capitalism and celebrated consumerism, thereby increasing antislavery’s market share. In it I examine the fairs’ speaking objects, explicating the intricate identificatory pro­cess among shopper, object, and freedom for the enslaved, to delineate how antislavery w ­ omen created alluring commodities that spoke of consumers’ sympathies as well as their self-­ possession. By producing consumerism’s power and pleasures through objects that spoke of black dispossession, fairs reinforced and configured the racial subjection that propelled the formation of the market’s liberal subject.24 Through their sentimental consumerism, fairs not only installed antislavery beliefs at the heart of liberal subjectivity but also constructed that subject as white. Focusing on the long-­running urban fairs, which ­were predominantly white middle-­class institutions, I delineate white w ­ omen’s deployment of domestic consumer culture for the cause as well as antislavery’s role in antebellum racial formation.25 This chapter and the next, which details the fairs’ role in the construction of the ­middle class, underscore ­women’s organ­izations and entrepreneurial innovations as integral to institutional antislavery’s accomplishments—­and reveal their material objects, whose ephemeral nature has relegated them to obscurity, as essential to its appeal. Through their market-­based materialism, which consolidated and s­ haped their era’s racial and class formations, w ­ omen made the cause mainstream.

* * * Antislavery fairs operated at the vanguard of market culture, adopting and enlarging its practices and formulations.26 Held in market venues such as Boston’s Faneuil Hall or on Philadelphia’s Chestnut Street, they w ­ ere sophisticated com27 mercial ventures. They ­were advertised as offering their goods “at the prices of the shops”; the ­women who staffed the t­ ables w ­ ere described as “Amateur



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Commercial Assistants”; and “money-­making” was promoted as the fairs’ “primary object.”28 The Philadelphia fair’s motto was “Come, see, and buy!”29 As enterprising businesswomen, organizers w ­ ere attuned to pricing and demand. The Boston organizers consulted ­t hose with “real mercantile knowledge as to prices,” and promised: “If we cannot sell in small quantities at an advanced price, we dispose of them in larger quantities at a less profit . . . ​a ll w ­ ill be sold even to 30 the last baked apple.” The Philadelphia organizers insisted that “no pains” have been “spared to meet the wants and gratify the tastes of the community.”31 Fair reports, masterpieces of advertising and recruitment, enticed visitors by listing valuable merchandise and matched supply to demand by highlighting bestselling items. Besides offering goods at market value, they leveraged their donated items and ­labor to undercut market prices and used transatlantic connections to acquire goods that ­were other­wise unavailable.32 By providing “a variety of articles entirely new in [the] market,” a “vast proportion of which” w ­ ere “not in commerce,” the Boston fair became the “most fash­ion­able shopping resort of the holidays.”33 Fancy goods dealers opposed that fair’s location in Faneuil Hall ­because it injured their business.34 Fair organizers also used novel promotion techniques: the blazing spectacle of Boston’s Christmas tree created a pressing throng of visitors, and the strategy of removing sought-­after items from sight once they ­were sold created competition, encouraging shoppers to attend on the ­ ere caught in cycles of economic fluctuation, they first day.35 Although fairs w flourished in times of scarcity ­because of their commitment to larger princi­ples. As The Liberator reminds readers, “The anti-­slavery cause is a talisman more potent than an ordinary mercantile draft. The latter is liable to be dishonored in a time of heavy pressure: the former, never.”36 The organizers’ innovative commercial strategies enabled antislavery fairs to rival much larger mainstream markets.37 Fair organizers also produced a persuasive expression of sentimental consumerism by figuring their markets as not just moral but emancipatory. Like antebellum society generally, which accommodated capitalism by spiritualizing it, fair organizers sanctified their markets.38 Banners that decorated their halls announced their enterprise as holy and their aims as honorable. The “anti-­ slavery mottoes and scriptural injunctions”—­“I trust in God” and “I have good cause”—on the Boston fair’s banners proclaimed its transactions as sacred and in ser­v ice of a greater good.39 Besides speaking their culture’s language of God and goods, organizers portrayed their markets as shrines to freedom. The Boston fair was described as a “holy festival of Freedom”; the Philadelphia fair as “Virtue’s shrine, and Liberty’s abode, / Sacred to Freedom, and to Freedom’s God”; and the Rochester fair as a “shrine of freedom and humanity,” its goods placed on “the altar of freedom.”40 In figuring their spaces as embodying the

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transcendent truth of freedom, fair organizers characterized their markets as just as well as pious. Organizers avoided products of slave l­abor in their preparations and often featured ­free ­labor ­tables at the fairs.41 Contrasting the morality of the northern ­free l­ abor market with the immorality of the southern slave economy, they differentiated the two forms of capitalism and thereby legitimated the North’s. Sentimental consumerism, which animated objects, and market capitalism, which valorized liberalism, looked all the more virtuous in relation to an unfeeling system that reduced h ­ uman beings to commodities. By explic­ itly aligning their fairs with freedom, organizers consecrated capitalism. Fair organizers also configured consumption itself as emancipatory. First, they embraced the norms of the sentimental marketplace and sanctified their markets’ commercialism as gift-­giving. Held at Christmastime for the express purpose of providing pre­sents for the holiday season, fairs ­were constituted as gift economies, and their goods w ­ ere represented as gifts.42 Many objects contained inscriptions that personalized the giver’s sentiments—­one item was inscribed “For the slaves, with l­ ittle Arthur’s love”—­and products w ­ ere often sold by the same ­women who had made or donated them.43 Wedged between two acts of gift-­giving—­t he donation of merchandise to the cause and its pre­sen­ta­ tion as a Christmas or New Year’s gift—­buying became similarly configured. Furthermore, organizers extended the meaning of their sentimental economies by figuring their goods as gifts of freedom itself. A poem promoting the Boston fair pre­sents it as a benevolent economy in which consumers make purchases for the sake of another and profit generates the greater good of freedom: “To the Fair! To the Fair! / Come, see what is ­t here, / And buy for the sake of the slave, / By the money thus given, / Their chains ­shall be riven / And ­free banners over them wave!”44 In asking, “Who ­will bestow a Christmas gift on the slave?” and telling shoppers that they can do so by making their “accustomed purchases at this festival season,” the Philadelphia organizers stressed the dual recipients of their gifts—­t he enslaved as well as the loved one.45 By producing funds for freedom’s cause along with fond feelings, the fairs’ transactions manufactured the surplus value of liberation along with sentiment. Figuring consumption as freedom, fairs communicated consumerism’s boundless powers—­that purchasing could generate that which was priceless. Arguing that their markets had better goods (­t hose not in commerce elsewhere) and higher powers (the ability to materialize freedom), fair organizers asserted the superiority of their shops. The fairs’ speaking objects embody and enact their markets’ messages. Animated by words and images, they voice both sympathy and freedom. Although the fairs’ objects speak in many dif­fer­ent registers, they reach an expressive



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consensus in their valorization of consumerism and its liberal subject along with antislavery. By expressing their own antislavery sentiments, speaking objects liberate, through the act of their purchase, the buyers’; by calling for the slave’s freedom, they assure consumers, who buy freedom’s sign, of their own. Through their acquisition, they assert that moral capital can be increased through material owner­ship and that consumption is the most power­f ul form of freedom. The most ubiquitous speaking objects at the fairs bore the iconic image of the kneeling slave asking, “Am I Not a Man and a B ­ rother?” Th ­ ese goods exemplify the complex mediation of voice and production of subjectivity that transpire through the speaking object.46 Evacuated of humanity, which the symbolic slave asks to be restored, and of voice, which is ventriloquized via a motto written by ­others, the kneeling slave is constructed as an empty vessel to be filled by its producer’s and consumer’s sentiment and speech.47 The slave is made mute so that antislavery agents might express their sympathy; he is turned into an object so that consumers can own an emblem of their power to bestow freedom.48 Through objects carry­ing the image of the kneeling slave, whose question is answered and humanity recognized via purchase, fair organizers taught shoppers that their sentimental consumption could convert property into persons. Paradoxically, fair organizers asked shoppers to recognize enslaved p ­ eople’s ­humanity by trafficking in goods bearing their image. Slaves, however symbolic, remained pieces of property to be bought, sold, and literally consumed at the fairs. They w ­ ere commodified as collectible figurines, such as the plaster kneeling slave at the Boston fair, inscribed with the motto, “What hast thou done for this?”49 They ­were also stamped on fair tickets or goods, such as the pocket­book ­ ere even transwith the kneeling slave and the motto, “O deliver me.”50 They w formed into consumable confectionaries, such as the Simnel cake at the Boston fair that was decorated with the supplicant’s image.51 The kneeling-­slave-­as-­ object embodies the fairs’ core contradiction—­t hat the slave must be (re)commodified in order to be freed. This contradiction discloses the fairs’ central aim: the production of white identity through the purchase of black freedom. Given the fairs’ deferred procurement of the slave’s liberation—­their profits went t­ oward manufacturing antislavery media designed to convert yet more hearts—­their more immediate interest was in fashioning liberal subjectivity for their largely white consumers.52 By purchasing emblems of the slave’s hope for freedom, shoppers acquired a symbol of their own.53 A flag at the Boston fair carry­ing the motto “Stripes on the banner, none on the back” packages a call for the f­ uture emancipation of an enslaved person as a sign of the white consumer’s current citizenship.54 White sovereignty is made manifest in the flag’s message of racial difference—­unlike

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the slave’s marked body, the white consumer’s remains unsullied. Occupying the center t­able at the Salem fair, a barge—­“splendidly carved by a native of Africa, filled with dolls of vari­ous sizes, with the inscription, ‘We are ­free,’ upon its pennant’ ”—­espouses black freedom even as it reflects, through sympathetic identification, white liberty.55 The dolls’ invitation to the fair’s visitors to see the barge’s black bodies and its talented creator as ­free, like themselves, underscores the onlookers’ already-­recognized status. Moreover, the barge’s diminutiveness embodies the hierarchical relationship between white shoppers and black figures, while its haunting resemblance to a slave ship asserts the distinction between antislavery agents and commodified ­t hings.56 Investing themselves in racialized objects that reflected their own seemingly inalienable rights, the fairs’ white consumers celebrated their status as ­free subjects through the entitlement of owner­ship. Consumption’s power—­t he freedom felt in and produced through the act of buying the slave’s liberty—as well as its pleasures w ­ ere embodied in and expressed by the singing walnuts sent from ­England to the 1846 Philadelphia fair.57 Emptied of their “natu­ral contents” and filled with a piece of folded paper containing an “original poetical effusion,” the walnuts w ­ ere offered for sale at the refreshment ­table. Above the ­table hung an advertisement that “attracted the attention of purchasers, and told the story of the nuts.” The eight-­stanza “Song of the Walnuts” (Figure 24) sings of the slave’s oppression. The printed poem activates the walnut’s material form by figuring its a­ ctual dropping from tree to ground as a fall from pastoral contentment into the knowledge of oppression: “We ­were calm and happy—­Till, at length a breeze / Wafted from the South-­ land . . . ​Bearing cries of c­ hildren; / ­Woman’s deeper grief, / Till with sounds of wailing / Trembled ­every leaf.” The breeze that bears the slaves’ cries and rustles each leaf ­causes the walnuts’ physical and meta­phoric fall. The walnut in turn materializes the intangible breeze, ferrying its tales of oppression to the fair. The breeze can traverse long distances—­bringing the sounds of the South to ­England or the North—­but as pure voice it requires an object to carry and commodify its speech. In God’s commanding voice, the breeze directs the walnuts to “ ‘Leave your sylvan rest / Part with all the trea­sures / Hoarded in your breast; / Burst the sheath that binds you—­/ Go unto the Fair—­/ I with thoughts ­will fill you; / Ye s­ hall whisper t­ here.’ ” The poem positively portrays the breeze’s ventriloquism of the walnuts and the walnuts’ commodification at the fair as freedom. The hollowing out of the walnut’s base nature (its meat) and its refilling with antislavery sentiment (the breeze’s thoughts) as well as the purchase and consumption of the nut (“crack us, / Lest our mission fail,” the walnuts urge) are all figured as liberation. By having their shells broken, both when the breeze fills them with sentiment and when the consumer empties them of it, the



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walnuts enact antislavery’s central meta­phor of emancipation—­t he slaves’ broken chains. What the walnuts lose in meat, they gain in voice. They may fall into the knowledge of oppression, but they sing of freedom. They may lose their “true” nature once commodified, but, through consumption, they are able to softly express their sympathy. The walnuts’ mediated voices—­they speak as the breeze which in turn speaks for the enslaved—­obscure the a­ ctual agents: the female producers, who in­ven­ ted the breeze’s poetic expressions, and the consumers who, in liberating the walnuts’ antislavery sentiments, generated funds to further propagate them. The walnuts exemplify the power that the fairs’ organizers gained by animating objects and the plea­sure that consumers obtained through their purchase. Through the object, antislavery producers could speak, like the breeze, in the commanding voice of truth: “Even a poor nut shell / T ­ oday should not be dumb; / From its resounding chamber / The voice of truth should come,” states one of the walnuts’ messages. Moreover, they could do so without implication. The speaking object allowed its nineteenth-­century female producers the opportunity to speak in public without fear of reprisal; like the breeze, the fairs’ organizers and craftswomen remained invisible, their voices mobile. Speaking objects, as the walnuts show, also delivered ample returns to their consumers. In singing of the virtues of consumerism, the walnuts’ messages not only legitimize consumption but insist upon it. One of the walnuts’ poems reads, in part: “­You’ve bought a nut have you—­well that is all right, / But remember for this you gave only a mite. / Now open your purse, for your money is needed, / The sufferings of millions must not be unheeded.” The consumer is called, like the walnut before her, to open her purse and relieve herself of her trea­sure so that she may, by cracking open the nut and reading its message, release its antislavery sentiment and the means to scatter its seed. Moreover, the mite she gives for the walnut is not enough. She must, as another of the nuts’ poems insists, “Do your duty—­waste no time, / . . . ​Go—­act out this truth sublime,” by making further purchases at the fair. The walnuts code consumption as a duty, but shoppers’ experience of them was more likely delight. In breaking open this “rare” “curiousity,” they enjoyed the amusement of novelty along with a clever verse. Ingesting the breeze’s sweet sentiments rather than the oppressed’s unmediated tale of woe, consumers could revel in sentimental identification without being overly burdened by suffering. The walnuts provided fairgoers the good feelings associated with shopping without the attendant guilt. Through objects that spoke of sympathy for the enslaved and symbolized or, in the walnuts’ case, enacted their freedom, shoppers could indulge in the pleasures of consumption—­feeling their own freedom—­under the cover of benevolence.58



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Figure 24. “Song of the Walnuts,” Pennsylvania Freeman, 24 December 1846. Courtesy of the Library Com­pany of Philadelphia.

Objects that did not speak as or for the enslaved person or her freedom but directly to consumers of their own sympathy and agency further increased that plea­sure. ­These domestic items allowed the fairs’ largely white producers to talk to their largely white consumers of their shared subjectivities and values. They did not first need to be evacuated of another subjectivity—­t he walnut’s or the enslaved person’s—in order to voice the producers’ own. As conduits for their buyers’ self-­expression and mirrors of their self-­regard, t­ hese objects spoke more directly. Thus, “ ‘Hearts of Oak for Abolitionists,’ ” described as “small hearts cut from a knot of white oak,” served as a synecdoche for their white purchasers’ sensitive spirits.59 Through buying them, purchasers announced their abolitionism—­t he hearts, they ­were told, ­were only “for Abolitionists”—­a nd ­were rewarded with a material emblem of their compassion. The racialized hearts embodied and expressed their white consumers’ benevolence and fine feeling. Likewise, a “ ‘Thermometer of the Heart’ ” (Figure 25), a glass tube filled with rose-­colored wine that expanded with the warmth of a hand, recorded shoppers’ antislavery beliefs as a mea­sure of their sentiment: the warmer their heart, the higher the level of liquid on a graduated scale from slavery to colonization to immediate emancipation. To be antislavery, the thermometer argued, was to have the most compassionate of hearts. “Fastened upon a pillar of white sugar,” the thermometer figured its sweet rewards—­the self-­esteem of sentimental subjectivity—as the privilege of whites. Other objects asserted their purchasers’ agency. By affixing “original and strikingly appropriate” sayings to everyday items, fair producers translated domestic objects’ use value into symbolic meaning that emblematized both

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Figure 25. “ ‘Thermometer of the Heart,’ ” The Liberator, 2 January 1837, 3. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

the artifacts’ antislavery sentiments and the buyers’ ability to produce freedom.60 The “ornamental stands for alumets, to light candles,” which bore the motto “LIGHT, ­whether material or moral, is the best of all Reformers,” transformed a nightly ritual into a sign of antislavery’s ability to shine light and act as a beacon of truth.61 The iron hammer from Scotland with the words “strike off the chain” harnessed the object’s function—­its capability to break the enslaved’s manacles—to the eradication of slavery.62 By acquiring the hammer, the buyer enacted the object’s antislavery sentiment and materialized her own: her purchase, which funded slaves’ freedom, was another blow to slavery’s chain. Brought home, the hammer was a material reminder of her commitment



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to act on her antislavery sympathy daily. Similarly, a set of quill pens labeled “ ‘Twenty-­five Weapons for Abolitionists,’ ” pen-­wipers inscribed “ ‘Wipe out the blot of slavery’ ” and “ ‘Plead the cause with thy Pen,’ ” and boxes of letter-­ sealing wafers emblazoned with “ ‘The doom of Slavery is sealed’ ” transformed writing materials into weapons against oppression and their purchasers into propagandists for the cause.63 Relying on their use as well as text to animate their symbolic meaning, ­these objects communicated the power of their ­owners’ actions. By liberating the antislavery sentiment that lay in all ­things, consumers transformed not just the object but also the world. Some objects even presented themselves as model liberal subjects, such as the “poetically described” collections of algae that included a “velvet volume from Glasgow” and a “framed group from Edinburgh,” sent by the ladies of Britain to the 1856 Boston fair.64 ­These collections ­were accompanied by a six-­ stanza poem, the “Sea-­Weed’s Address,” which tells the story of ­human history, from creation to judgment day, through the perspective of seaweed gathered “on the shores of Pinkie and Preston . . . ​in view of the Bass Prison.” The seaweed does not directly witness mankind’s history unfold but rather hears “the mournful tale of h ­ uman life” from the wind and the breeze, which come “burdened with all the groans that e’er have been.” Instead of referring directly to the slave, the poem talks of the “oppressed, and the oppressor ­every where,” urging readers to speak up, like the seaweed, against oppression so that when “the Judge unroll[s] the scroll,” their “page may then unsullied be!” By identifying with the seaweed and following its example, readers become their own perfected selves. The poem not only implores its interlocutors to become pure, but also tells them how to be sympathetic subjects, and correlates the two. Its opening lines—­ “Regard us not as strangers! Our race r­ ose / At the creative word that call’d forth thine”—­and the following stanzas, which remind readers that, as ­children, their “tiny feet” may have once played in the seaweed’s “leaflets,” call them to identify with the seaweed based on a shared creation and history. In asking shoppers to see themselves in distant and dissimilar t­hings—­race or species, the poem suggests, are of negligible importance, since all are God’s creatures—­t he verse models the sympathetic identification that the fairs sought to produce with the enslaved. However, by performing that pro­cess through a fash­ion­able parlor item—as Thad Logan shows, seaweed was part of the natu­ral motif (shells, feathers, flowers) of parlor ornamentation in the nineteenth ­century—­rather than the slave, who remains unnamed in the poem’s generalized tale of oppression, the seaweed’s address allows fairgoers to enjoy the rewards of sentimental exchange without becoming too closely identified with suffering—­a pro­cess that Lynn Festa terms “the luxury of sympathy.”65 The poem asks its readers to feel

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for but not as the oppressed, to identify with the seaweed and its sentiment rather than the sorrows of the afflicted. By displacing the object of feeling (the slave) with a feeling object (the seaweed), the poem allows readers to affectively attach themselves more directly to their own sentiment. Once taken home and viewed outside of the context of the fair and without the poem, the velvet a­ lbum or framed display speaks only of the sea—­t he space of freedom in the poem—­and its own­er’s refined taste. Besides emblematizing viewers’ compassion, the seaweed figures it as action. Floating “­free” beneath the waves, safely separate from the “blood and strife” on land, the seaweed is stirred by the breeze and its sighs of sorrow. Moved by another, the seaweed’s only action is to feel sympathy for the oppressed and pass on their “mournful tale” to arouse other pious hearts. “Meek and submissive” to God’s holy plan, the seaweed passively waits for judgment day when God’s “new creation” ­will unfold.66 Fairgoers, animated by the seaweed’s address, are likewise rendered sympathetic to oppression yet protected from it. Through their consumption—­t he material sign of their sympathy—­t hey enact the seaweed’s sentimental solution to the prob­lem of oppression: to feel for the oppressed and get o ­ thers to do the same. In figuring a sympathetic heart as evidence of a changed world, fair organizers empowered their white liberal subjects to embrace feeling good as the equivalent of d ­ oing good and self-­satisfaction as a sign of social change.67 Consumption qua sympathy was the only action required to engender liberation for the self and her possessions as well as the slave. Catalyzing while safely distancing the identificatory pro­cess between consumer and slave, the fairs’ nonslave items vocalized their consumers’ compassion and ability to eradicate oppression while eliding their connection to the enslaved’s suffering. They delivered the benefits of sympathetic identification without its burdens. Moreover, as handmade domestic, natu­ral, or decorative items rather than symbolic slaves, they disguised their commodification more readily. The seaweed, for instance, which signified nature and, once transmuted into a parlor item and presented next to other tasteful items, became “trea­sures,” dis­appeared not only the slave but his or her fungibility as well.68 Despite his sentimentalized saying and refinement as a decorative figurine, the kneeling slave, always in chains, could not evade that association. The fairs required nonslave items for two reasons. First, they w ­ ere needed to dilute the commodity status of enslaved p ­ eople: if ­every object carried the image of the kneeling slave, fairs would look less like sentimental and more like slave markets. Second, ­these items provided identificational mobility for their shoppers: the enjoyment of appreciating the seaweed or hearing the walnuts sing rather than the duty of sympathizing with the enslaved’s suffering. Nonslave speaking objects allowed white shoppers to buy purer reflections of their liberal subjectivity—to see themselves



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as compassionate and empowered as well as ­free—­and thus indulge more easily in the fairs’ fantasies of white privilege and self-­possession. By contrast, when objects spoke directly of the slave or consumption, it was harder to elide their commodity status. Th ­ ese objects whispered an unsettling secret: that shoppers might be slaves to the market rather than masters of it. The brown walnuts, for example, speak not only of consumerism’s sentiment but also of capitalism’s alienation. Divested of their natu­ral forms, “freighted” with cargo, and purchased by strangers—­“Stranger Buy, and crack us,” their song implores—­ they exemplify the violent dispossession and estrangement of commodity capitalism. Despite their emancipatory messages, commodification lies at their cores. The racialized walnuts, like other objects with the slave’s image, carry a reminder of what even the most brilliant of market spectacles could not hide: the anxiety of subjugation. Besides showing how the market could endow objects with consciousness via sentimental consumption, antislavery fairs also registered the market’s capacity to reduce h ­ uman beings to t­ hings.69 Anxiety about this pro­cess was most clearly voiced by uncanny objects that looked like ­people—­dolls—­and by ­people who resembled slaves.70 ­Here the market’s threat of dispossession was sublimated through sentiment and managed through race. The fairs w ­ ere populated by hundreds of wooden, wax, and porcelain dolls in a variety of shapes and sizes—­ from “a ­g reat waxen Victoria in royal robes” to a “­little highland ­piper, and ­ ere often named Edinburgh fish-­woman, in characteristic costume.”71 Dolls w ­after their donors or modeled on par­tic­u­lar p ­ eople. Affixed with poetic labels or accompanied by letters or appeals, many also spoke. As manufactured objects—­wax over composition construction, for example—­and displayed for sale, they presented h ­ uman beings as commodities; however, personalized by handmade clothing, a name, or a poem, they became sentimental keepsakes. The 1852 Boston fair’s most famous doll, known as “­Little Mary’s,” exemplifies this refining pro­cess.72 Embedded in the fair’s gift economy, ­Little Mary’s doll was converted from a commodity into an inalienable offering when a loving letter telling of Mary’s death, penned by Mary’s ­mother, transformed it into a relic. Originally Mary’s own Christmas pre­sent, the wax doll, dressed in clothes sewn by Mary, was regifted by Mary to the fair as a sign of her sympathy for the slave. Her ­mother’s letter, addressed to “ ‘Friends of the Slave,’ ” which explains that Mary died before this pro­cess was complete, further sacralizes her doll. As the walnut contains the breeze’s message, the doll carries Mary’s spirit to the fair and releases it in the form of the divine precept with which the letter concludes: “ ‘L ­ ittle ­children, love one another.’ ” Invoking ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which the ­mother’s letter specifically references, and the death of the child Eva, ­Little Mary’s doll, like the locks of hair that Eva gives to her f­ amily’s slaves, serves as

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a sacred sign of God’s love and redemption for all of his c­ hildren, especially the slave. Bought by a “devoted friend of the slave,” the doll is part of a gift exchange that cloaks commodification with community. Although it is merchandise, it speaks only of love. Another doll at the 1852 Boston fair, this one modeled on the “slave girl” Topsy from Stowe’s novel, could not be divested of its commodification.73 Sent in the Edinburgh box to the fair, the doll was meant “to stand in a con­spic­u­ous place in the Bazaar, and to sell copies of her ‘Appeal’ ” (Figure 26).74 Hawking her printed poem as opposed to being animated through a loving m ­ other’s handwritten letter, the Topsy doll remains a commodity. With her mass-­produced story, “the tale of e­ very slave,” she resembles a salesgirl rather than a token of love. The “Appeal,” which tells her “­simple story” of transformation from a degraded slave to a living “soul” through Eva’s love, fails to transmute her commodity status. Her tale ends: “Still I’m ignorant and careless, / ­Little do, and l­ ittle know, / But, I hope, with kinder teaching, / E ­ very day I’ll wiser grow.” Her conversion from unfeeling property to purified person remains incomplete. If ­Little Mary’s doll—­like the possessive noun in its name, which retained the presence of the dead girl—­was a spirit contained in a t­hing, the Topsy doll—­like Stowe’s depiction of the character herself—­was a ­thing that could never be made fully ­human. Race differentiated the sentimentalized white doll from the unregenerate black one, the sacred relic from the slave/salesgirl. White dolls w ­ ere singularized and spiritualized at the fair; ste­reo­typed and commodified, black dolls remained merchandise. Race also determined which ­people at the fair w ­ ere in danger of being seen as slaves. Speaking at the 1851 Boston fair, the white British abolitionist George Thompson joked that he was “the only contraband article in the hall.” To loud laughter he added: “Every­t hing e­ lse is legitimate, according to the tariff of the United States; but a foreign abolitionist is a prohibited commodity in Boston.”75 Although he described himself much like a fugitive slave, who would have been contraband property in Boston at this time, ­under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, his joke depended on his difference. Rather than mark his status as property, his illegitimacy asserted the U.S. government’s inability to tax and commodify him—to turn him into an object for sale at the fair or to return him to slavery. The audience laughed to see him play the role of property while clearly circulating outside the laws that governed it. Conversely, at the 1850 Philadelphia fair, Harriet Purvis, a leader of the Philadelphia Female Anti-­Slavery Society (PFASS) and a member of Philadelphia’s f­ ree black elite, was portrayed as property. During the fair, her husband, Robert, announced to the assembly that Harriet had been asked by a southern lady “if she w ­ ere ­free.”76 When “pressed for a reason for such inquiry,” the southern ­woman stated that “Mrs. P. strikingly resembled”



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Figure 26. “Topsy,” or the Slave Girl’s Appeal (Bolton, UK: Kenyon and Abbatt, 1852). Courtesy of the Library Com­pany of Philadelphia.

a fugitive slave for whom she was looking. The story sent “a thrill of horror through the audience” next door at the antislavery conference, forcing upon “­every mind” that Mrs. Purvis might be seized as a slave in their very midst. Their “­faces flushed or pale,” the audience responded with “falling tears and suppressed sobs.” Crying rather than laughing, the Philadelphia crowd registered the terror of commodification. Yet even this reaction remained within the realm of play—­a pleas­ur­able thrill—­since most p ­ eople in Philadelphia and at the fair knew Harriet Purvis to be ­free. Moreover, white fairgoers understood that, unlike Purvis, whose resemblance to a slave (at least in the eyes of a southern white ­woman) could make her one, they themselves ­were in no danger of being misidentified as property. By sympathizing with Purvis’s plight, yet knowing

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themselves to be separate from it, white fairgoers could register their fear of commodification and achieve a satisfying release from it—­this time in the form of tears rather than laughter. By recognizing racial difference, white fairgoers reaffirmed their status as persons. Even when white fairgoers ­were confronted with a white victim of slavery— in the person of Jonathan Walker, a white abolitionist with a branded hand, who attended the 1845 Philadelphia fair—­t hey ­were able to transform him, through the alchemy of sentiment and consumption, from a commodified object into a spiritual savior. Caught transporting seven fugitive slaves from Pensacola to Nassau on his ship, Walker was imprisoned in Florida by the U.S. Marshal’s office for eleven months, fined, and branded on the hand with the initials “S.S.” for “slave stealer.”77 Freed in July of 1845, Walker became a celebrity on the antislavery lecture cir­cuit and was advertised as the main attraction at the antislavery meeting that took place in conjunction with the 1845 Philadelphia fair: “­Those who wish to see his BRANDED HAND and to hear the tale of his wrongs and persecutions” should be in “Philadelphia at the time of the Fair,” one circular states.78 Every­body should come to the fair if “for nothing ­else than to put their fin­gers on the marks the branding-­iron made on Jonathan Walker’s hand,” the National Anti-­Slavery Standard urges.79 As a white northerner marked by slavery, Walker was an object of fascination. Walker was corporally consumed at both the Philadelphia and Boston fairs. Visitors came to see and touch his hand in Philadelphia and ­were able to buy its image at the 1845 Boston fair in the form of a daguerreotype (Figure 27) or his narrative, whose title page featured its picture (Figure 28).80 Transformed into a speaking object—­t hat “ever-­ speaking, branded hand,” as the North Star describes it—­Walker and his hand ­were ventriloquized by o ­ thers: first by slavery and then by antislavery.81 The brand was translated almost immediately by abolitionist print culture (most notably in a poem by Whittier) from “slave stealer” into “salvation to the slave” and “Soul Savior,” so that it now spoke of the slave’s freedom and Walker’s benevolence instead of his subjection.82 Resurrected from the prison of slavery, Walker was transformed by antislavery mottos into an abolitionist martyr, his hand a sacred symbol of his suffering—­like Christ’s stigmata—­for the enslaved.83 Rather than embodying his a­ ctual position as wage laborer (the white slave of the North), his hand, framed in images by a white shirt cuff, symbolized his white liberal subjectivity. Through its heroic agency and benevolent sacrifice, fairgoers could see and touch their own potential for the same. Moreover, by consuming Walker’s hand, ­either by viewing it or by acquiring it at the fair, shoppers enacted his mission: saving enslaved p ­ eople by buying their freedom. Turned into an attraction and sold as a body part, Walker spoke of white dispossession; repackaged as a relic for t­ hose with means to own and admire, he



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Figure 27. The Branded Hand of Captain Jonathan Walker, daguerreotype by Southworth and Hawes (1845). Courtesy of the Mas­sa­chu­setts Historical Society.

became a symbol of white self-­possession.84 Unlike the kneeling slave, who forever spoke of his commodification, Walker’s whiteness allowed him to be spiritualized. The line between freedom and commodification, personhood and property—­ between identifying with rather than as objects—­was constantly being drawn and transgressed at the fairs. The tensions and slippages between subjects and objects at the fairs w ­ ere masked through sentiment, or negotiated through play, and relied on race. By loving dolls or pretending to be slaves, white fairgoers transmuted their market anx­i­eties into sentiment and their fears of commodification into amusement or fascination. Through the demarcation of racial difference, they reassured themselves of their self-­possession. Whiteness promised—­even as it failed to fully deliver—­freedom from the market’s subjugation. By having slave objects carry the burdens of commodification so that white consumers could disavow them, antislavery fairs, like antebellum culture more broadly, put the slave in the ser­v ice of white identity formation.

Figure 28. Title page of Jonathan Walker, Trial and Imprisonment of Jonathan Walker (Boston: Anti-­Slavery Office, 1845). Courtesy of the Library Com­pany of Philadelphia.



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In addition to reifying whiteness, the fairs’ grammar of goods reinforced the logic of capitalism.85 Speaking objects argued that freedom could be found in consumption, that subjectivity could be located in ­t hings, and that the desire to possess was the highest duty even as they sublimated the unsettling truth that ­under capitalism the empowered liberal subject was a fantasy conjured by the market. Promoting the illusion that goods could be more than ­things, fairs transformed shoppers’ fear of commodification into a fascination with objects. Possessions functioned as consolation prizes for the agency that consumers lost ­under capitalism. Through their dazzling distractions—­t heir speaking objects that affirmed white identity, usurping, even as they claimed to bestow, the slave’s freedom—­and their projection of any unpleasant reminders of commodification onto the slave, fairs soothed consumers’ apprehensions that they too might be ­t hings. By celebrating consumption’s emancipatory powers, fairs both consolidated capitalism and shored up liberal subjectivity. Conversely, in welding antislavery to sentimental consumerism, fair organizers increased antislavery’s market share and broadened its appeal. By fashioning their markets according to northern capitalism’s ideal image of consumption as freedom, fair organizers created compelling spaces for antislavery goods. By transforming domestic consumer objects into antislavery media, they packaged the cause’s message in potent material forms that attached antislavery to liberal subjectivity. To be benevolent, empowered, and ­free, the fairs’ media objects argued, was necessarily to be antislavery. Antislavery’s female auxiliaries and their fairs, then, ­were central to the AASS’s larger media proj­ect. As Chapman asserts, antislavery fairs had “the power of a tremendous tract distribution.”86 In mobilizing sentimental consumerism for the cause, however, fair organizers advanced in­equality as well as liberty. While they harnessed consumption to antislavery’s progressive po­liti­cal proj­ect, enacting a type of commodity activism, their markets and media objects remained mired in capitalism’s unequal structures. Through their complex acts of racial subordination and appropriation, the fairs and their speaking objects reinforced in­equality even as they proclaimed freedom. The fantasy of consumption performed at the fairs—­ that purchase could produce freedom and that the acquisition of possessions could alleviate dispossession—­directed the emancipatory potential of the market ­toward the enslaved’s liberation even as it reinforced capitalism’s controlling structures, especially ­t hose of race, and, as I ­will show in the next chapter, class privilege. The slave-­as-­object was freed at the fairs, only to be boxed up and transported home as a symbol of white sovereignty.

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Antislavery Fairs and the Culture of Class

Antislavery fairs not only sold antislavery media but w ­ ere themselves media events. Aggressively promoted—­t he Boston fair was advertised in the Boston Post and the Boston Eve­ning Transcript as well as The Liberator, and fair organizers blanketed the city with a thousand circulars—­they ­were marketed as fash­ ion­able attractions.1 As the broadside for the Abington, Mas­sa­chu­setts, fair shows (Figure 29), fairs ­were refined social occasions that produced cultural as well as commercial capital for the cause. The Abington fair was a four-­day after­noon and eve­ning event that sold “useful and fancy articles” and offered, for the price of admission (ten cents), cultural events and social “amusements,” such as addresses, singing, instrumental ­music, and refreshments; for an extra fifty cents, visitors could enjoy a dance party on Friday eve­ning.2 In publicizing genteel attractions and stylish goods, the broadside underscores fairs as discriminating destinations as well as commercial marketplaces. Through their “brilliant and beautiful spectacle[s],” tasteful and exclusive articles, and per­for­mances of polite sociability, antislavery fairs traded in the symbols of social class.3 By providing visitors with access to decorous accessories and elegant experiences, they generated the surplus value of refinement as well as freedom. As Elisa Tamarkin argues of transatlantic abolitionist culture more generally, “gentility is fi­nally as central to the appeal of antislavery as emancipation.”4 As leading purveyors of bourgeois commodities and culture, antislavery fairs ­were influential sites of middle-­class acculturation and antislavery affiliation. While all sorts of p ­ eople attended them—­antislavery sympathizers and holiday shoppers, black and white, the working and m ­ iddle classes and the wealthy elite—­t he fairs w ­ ere places to procure the signs of middle-­class status and enact a cultured subjectivity.5 Within their stimulating spaces—­t heir attractive settings, festooned with evergreens, and their dazzling displays of unique, beautiful, and valuable articles whose variety and elegance ­were “elsewhere

Figure 29. Anti-­Slavery Fair! (Abington, MA: Standard Press, 1857). Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

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unattainable”—­visitors could admire rare won­ders, such as “gilt Balloons” from Paris “filled with gas, safe for drawing room use.”6 Or they could acquire the accoutrements for middle-­class self-­fashioning, such as “the latest designs for all small and elegant objects for drawing-­rooms” and “the newest patterns of all kinds of fancy works and articles of ladies’ and ­children’s dress.”7 Or they could pre­sent their refinement through the mores of mannered conduct by conversing with like-­minded fairgoers at the refreshment t­able or listening to a lecture by Garrison. As fantasy spaces rich with con­spic­u­ous consumption and sophisticated encounters, fairs nurtured the dream of class achievement through an association with antislavery. ­Every parlor purchase and polite exchange formed class consciousness as visitors learned to connect antislavery with the high moral beliefs, tasteful objects, and discerning activities that indicated social superiority.8 By buying into the cause through the fairs’ genteel as well as sentimental consumerism or by identifying as antislavery through their scenes of social belonging, fairgoers declared their antislavery affinity and acquired distinction. Through t­ hese spectacles of social emulation and aspiration, the fairs’ female man­ag­ers transformed antislavery into a status symbol. This chapter examines how fairs used culture to consolidate class and, in so ­doing, articulated antislavery as a marker of middle-­class status.9 As Richard Bushman and ­others observe, refinement, which accompanied the development of the mass market and served to stabilize the social dislocation that accompanied capitalism, was a crucial class indicator in the antebellum era.10 In selling gentility, antislavery fairs became impor­tant sites of middle-­class creation. They both catered to and developed middle-­class tastes and attached that class consciousness to antislavery. In an era when social status was based on moral beliefs, cultural characteristics, and refined sensibilities rather than wealth, antislavery fairs offered their visitors a ticket into the emerging m ­ iddle class.11 While abolition was not generally a “middle-­class affair,” fairs, especially the urban ones, ­were middle-­class phenomena.12 By reading the fairs as symbolic spaces that constructed cultured as well as consuming subjects—­first as public exhibits and then as private salons—­I show how antislavery came to be associated with the m ­ iddle class and interiorized by it.13 Through luxury objects such as gift books designed as souvenirs for specific fairs, and as social spaces that displayed high culture, offering conversations as well as concerts, fairs provided the goods and experiences necessary for the construction of middle-­class subjectivity. Moreover, by reifying refinement as white, through their reverence for Eu­ro­pean (and specifically Anglo-­Saxon) culture, fairs enabled their visitors to imagine themselves through signs of racial superiority as well as subjection.14 In showing how fairs mobilized privileged modes of subjectivity to advance the cause, this chapter delineates how female institutional antislavery propelled



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the racial hierarchies and social distinctions that undergirded class formation in the antebellum period.

* * * Urban antislavery fairs ­were part of what Tony Bennett terms the “exhibitionary complex” of the nineteenth ­century: social spaces designed for the pre­sen­ ta­tion of commodities and cultural artifacts, such as international exhibitions, museums, and department stores.15 Developed in tandem with the rise of consumption and the m ­ iddle class, they served as disciplinary structures in which the mass market was or­ga­nized through collections of objects and the emerging m ­ iddle class was regulated through social emulation. Together they formed the bourgeois public sphere: a civilized space of rational knowledge and polite gentility where rapid cap­i­tal­ist expansion could be assimilated through the codes of culture. As places where “new forms of conduct and be­hav­ior could be s­ haped and practised,” the exhibitionary complex provided spectacular stages for the emerging m ­ iddle class to perform, and thereby consolidate, its new identity and display its social status.16 Antislavery fairs w ­ ere often described as exhibitions.17 The Boston fair, for example, was labeled as “one of the most popu­lar and genteel exhibitions of the year”; its beautiful and valuable objects made it “worthy of attention, both as an exhibition and as presenting an unequaled opportunity for the se­lection of Christmas and New Year’s Gifts.”18 Part international exposition, part department store, the fairs-­as-­exhibitions w ­ ere symbolic spectacles that or­ga­nized and articulated the social meaning of commodity culture along with antislavery. They ­were ­earlier and smaller-­scale versions of the nineteenth c­ entury’s most renowned exhibition, the 1851 G ­ reat Exhibition in the Crystal Palace in London, which displayed the commodities, new manufacturing pro­cesses, and cultures of an emerging international mass market.19 Urban fairs too gathered goods from “the four quarters of the Globe” and from “­every . . . ​country ­under heaven.”20 They featured new technologies and scientific inventions, such as Whitaker’s Miniature Solar Lamp, Bliss’s Rotary Chopping Machine, machines for cutting lead pencils, microscope slides, and, in Boston, a “PRINTING PRESS in full operation, working off the NORTH STAR, the Journal of the Fair.”21 They also functioned as “perfect museums,” exhibiting exquisite works of art, such as an African woven robe that “should be placed in some Museum” and drawings “in ­every style, of the highest excellence, particularly in water-­colours, and the new style called carseotype.”22 By displaying the merchandise and machinery of capitalism’s new world order as well as its cultivation and cosmopolitanism, fairs-­as-­exhibitions did more than consolidate consumption—­they produced status for the cause and its adherents.

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Through the exhibition’s symbolic expressions of prestige, antislavery fairs broadcasted the movement’s moral, aesthetic, cultural, commercial, and social ­ ere power.23 Stunning spectacles, their imposing and tastefully adorned halls w designed for consumption along with their goods. Reports on the Boston and Philadelphia fairs underscored the rooms’ dazzling visual effects. The 1847 Boston fair, held in the “vast and venerable” Faneuil Hall, was a “splendid exhibition of anti-­slavery industry, taste, skill, elegance, and beauty.”24 It was decorated as if it ­were an “old, but beautiful Gothic cathedral” with white drapery falling from win­dows whose tops contained a cross of greenery and whose centers ­were framed by the means of “China transparencies” in “ruby, sapphire, and emerald glass.”25 With “bowers, arches, wreathes, and beautiful chains” of evergreens “displayed in all directions,” and radiantly illuminated by a “luminous gas light chandelier,” the Boston hall embodied the sacredness of a church, the veneration of the old world, the beauty of nature, and the tastefulness of a drawing room.26 The 1846 Philadelphia fair too was an “imposing spectacle.”27 Occupying the “­Grand Saloon of the Assembly Buildings,” whose rooms “in point of taste and harmony of proportion” had “no equal this side of the Atlantic,” the elegant hall was also “beautifully decorated with evergreens,” its “eight large win­dows, richly hung with crimson curtains” and opposite wall ornamented with mirrors and niches containing mottos “on pure white . . . ​encircled with wreaths of evergreen.”28 Richly furnished, gracefully ornamented, and brilliantly lit, the hall “suggested to the gazing multitude, many a pure and lofty thought”—­ indeed, the “impression of the w ­ hole scene” transformed a group of unruly “noisy youths” into “orderly, well-­behaved persons,” since “in their eyes the anti-­ slavery cause ha[d] assumed new dignity and importance.”29 By situating antislavery’s message within majestic settings—­for instance, the 1839 Boston fair’s banner with letters “a foot long” above its entrance stating, “ ‘FREEDOM AND TRUTH—­BY ­THESE WE CONQUER’ ”—­t he ­women who designed and decorated the exhibition halls magnified and elevated its meaning.30 Moreover, the fairs’ whitened décors—­Boston’s white win­dow curtains and “white flags” that carried Bible mottos, Philadelphia’s pure white mottos—­associated that message with a racialized version of refinement as well as spiritual transcendence.31 Monumental and elegant settings projected antislavery’s eminence and good taste along with its high moral truths and coded them as white. The fairs’ display of prestigious symbols further asserted antislavery’s superior standing. As Burton Benedict argues more generally of world’s fairs, exhibitions w ­ ere usually held in special spaces and displayed ritual emblems and objects.32 The Boston fair occupied the historically symbolic Faneuil Hall, known as the Cradle of Liberty.33 It was adorned with banners that featured civic devices like the Liberty Bell (Figure 30), literary mottos taken from the “noble



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Figure 30. Antislavery banner used by Garrison at antislavery fairs and festivals. Cotton, paint, silk fringe by unknown artisans (Boston, 1843). Courtesy of the Mas­sa­chu­setts Historical Society.

verses” of the British writer Edward Bulwer-­Lytton and the American antislavery poet John Greenleaf Whittier, and “valuable paintings” (notably “a capital Vandyke” and “portraits of distinguished individuals”).34 At its spatial center, the Boston fair also exhibited high art. The 1840 Boston fair (Figure 31) featured two center ­tables: on one, “a beautiful model of the Warwick vase,” an ancient Roman artifact, “in moss, standing on what seemed a white marble slab,” and

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on the other, a “fine bust of Garrison” by the American sculptor Shobal Vail Clevenger (1812–43).35 Besides presenting antislavery’s living icon, Garrison, as worthy of monumentalization, the visual symmetry of t­ hese t­ ables connected antislavery to Western civilization and culture, declaring the cause to be a worthy inheritor of this tradition. Other Boston fairs proclaimed antislavery’s British heritage by placing each town’s ­table ­under banners carry­ing the “old armorial bearings of its names” (“in commemoration of the En­glish descent of their respective found­ers”) and by situating the Glasgow t­ able ­under a flowing tent of drapery that mingled “the stripes and stars” with “the red and white cross of Scotland and ­England.”36 Si­mul­ta­neously associating antislavery with Amer­i­ca’s revolutionary tradition and Western culture’s refinement, marking it as white through Anglo-­Saxon lineage and the materiality of marble, the Boston fair asserted the cause’s cultural authority. Through the rare items and sacred relics sold at antislavery fairs, visitors acquired the “cultural accessories of power.”37 As one Boston fair report states, “No objects at the Bazaar are more highly prized than t­ hose connected with any historical or poetical association.”38 The Boston fair sold medallion heads of Napoleon and Jenny Lind; “packets of the hair of Rammohun Roy, Jeremy Bentham, and vari­ous other distinguished persons”; rare autographs of “all the Literati, Nobility, and Philanthropists of E ­ ngland, with some of the other Eu­ro­ pean countries”; chalk drawings from Lady Byron; and historical portraits of eminent men.39 Its ­tables carried artifacts sacred to U.S. and antislavery history—­“a piece of the old oak of the Constitution,” grasses from Plymouth Rock, the “SEAL OF JOHN HANCOCK,” and “relics” made from the wood of the burned Pennsylvania Hall—as well as British culture, including facsimiles of the Magna Carta, “the coronation oath of Henry 8th . . . ​autographs of En­glish sovereigns from Richard 2d to William 4th . . . ​Death Warrants of Mary Queen of Scots and Charles 1st.”40 The Philadelphia fair likewise featured “relics from places consecrated by the presence of genius and virtue, or their hallowing associations,” such as “the residence and burial-­place of Scott . . . ​immortalized by his pen,” sprays from a pear tree that George Fox spoke beneath, and grass gathered from Elizabeth Heyrick’s grave.41 By purchasing ­these sacred symbols, fairgoers associated themselves with their exceptional qualities: the repute of the old and antique, the eminence of genius, the reverence for all ­things British, and the exclusivity of the rare and expensive. Within a mass marketplace overflowing with indistinguishable goods, ­t hese consecrated objects differentiated their cultured purchasers from the larger crowd and anointed them with prestige.42 In addition to their symbolic settings and ritual objects, antislavery fairs trumpeted the cause’s status through the abundance and variety, systematic arrangement, and desirable nature of their goods. The profusion of merchandise

Figure 31. “Marlboro’ Hall, On the Days of the Mas­sa­chu­setts Anti-­ Slavery Fair, Dec. 1840,” The Liberator, 1 January 1841, 3. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

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served, as Benedict argues of nineteenth-­century world’s fairs, as a “massive dis­ ere described as being “piled with rich and play of prestige.”43 Boston’s t­ ables w beautiful articles, too numerous to mention”; man­ag­ers bemoaned their inability to cata­logue more than one tenth of the merchandise.44 The sheer quantity of goods asserted antislavery’s affluence, and the unusual “variety of beautiful articles” signaled its distinction.45 The Boston fair offered goods in e­ very category imaginable: a “vast variety of ladies’, gentlemen’s and ­children’s dress of the newest and most tasteful make and material, and all the dif­fer­ent specimens of ­every pos­si­ble kind of bead-­work, wax-­work, straw-­work, ribbon-­work, glass-­ work, paper-­work, shell-­work, knit and net-­work, embroidered and plain work, in all the recent and tasteful models of Paris and London, which it would be in vain to attempt to specify.”46 It also supplied items in a variety of types: “six dif­ fer­ent styles of ladies’ Pa­ri­sian neck-­ties for the promenade or drawing-­room, of very rich material,” “six kinds” of antislavery wafers, including “gold and silver embossed, enameled, motto, architectural, cameo and transparent,” and “­every style of reticule of ­every pos­si­ble material, from the most expensive to the cheapest and simplest.”47 By providing the diversity necessary to produce differentiation, the Boston fair materialized the hierarchies of value and modes of discrimination that undergirded middle-­class formation.48 In presenting the “largest and choicest” assortment of merchandise ever “offered in the city,” the Boston fair not only promoted the bourgeois habits of accumulation and discernment but classified its market as superior.49 Status distinctions ­were made apparent in the arrangement of goods. By grouping similar items and positioning t­ ables to signal their sponsors’ or products’ prominence, fair organizers ordered abundance into a clear taxonomy. At the Boston fair, ­tables often specialized in a single item—­Nantucket, for instance, was known for its shells—­and by 1854, they w ­ ere “systematically arranged” by type of good rather than place of origin.50 Presenting all of their merchandise as collections (not just the scientifically arranged “natu­ral and scientific curiosities” on display), the fairs, like exhibitions more generally, taught a style of classificatory thinking that fostered class distinctions.51 While a “critical regard was paid to symmetry in the placing of the ­tables” to please the eye and allow for easy inspection of the articles, the fairs’ spatial layouts also produced clear hierarchies.52 As the map of the 1840 Boston fair shows (see Figure 31), urban ­tables, such as Boston’s, which ­were sponsored by well-­known ­women like Chapman and the Weston s­isters and which often featured luxury objects, ­were given pride of place at the head of the room; smaller towns like Salem and Lynn ­were relegated to the sides. Similarly, at the 1851 Philadelphia fair, the national ­table—­meant to fill the AASS’s coffers—­occupied the southern end of the room; at the 1853 fair, the “semicircular” foreign ­table, “glittering with Bohemian glass,



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French china, and En­glish cutlery,” was situated at the upper end of the hall.53 Similar to the ranking of nations at international exhibitions, fairs elevated the urban over the rural, the national over the state, and the foreign over the domestic. The two types of goods that ­were spatially prioritized at urban antislavery fairs ­were the fash­ion­able and the foreign. The Boston fair advertised “specimens of the rare and beautiful in ­every species of manufacture, particularly ­t hose of London and Paris,” and displayed the latest trends: “elegant Fish Scale ornaments for ladies, something entirely new” or a “new style of ornamentation of walls . . . ​ a combination of autumn leaves with water-­color landscapes.”54 Goods came “from almost e­ very part of Eu­rope, Asia, and Amer­i­ca”: notepaper from Paris, bronzes from Rome, embroidered composition bags from Constantinople, a lava box set in silver from Naples, watch cases and bonework from the German baths, embroidered caps from St. Petersburg, Rus­sian leatherwork, hammocks from Santiago, shells and coral from Haiti, a sealing-­wax box from Japan, Chinese envelope boxes of lacquerware, small toys from Burma, along with a “­great variety of ­things rare, unique, new and beautiful” from London, Dublin, Glasgow, and Edinburgh.55 Through its empire of ­t hings that ­were “never before imported,” the Boston fair declared antislavery to be the authority on refined taste and signaled its stature within the international order.56 Moreover, in providing the luxury goods and exotic objects required for middle-­class self-­fashioning, the fair allowed visitors to understand themselves as genteel and cosmopolitan. “Stamped on e­ very form of genteel culture was the make of its origin in Eu­rope,” Bushman observes, while Tamarkin argues that middle-­class refinement involved “a taste for the foreign,” since “ ‘exotic’ objects confirm[ed] social exclusiveness by distinguishing ‘higher civilizations’ from ­those that [could] not move past local preferences or know the allure of difference.”57 The urban fairs’ global goods ­were conspicuously displayed, ­either at designated foreign ­tables, such as the “special ­table of Italian art” supplied by Harriet Beecher Stowe at the 1858 Boston fair, or at centrally located china and book ­tables, as indicated on the 1840 Boston map (see Figure 31).58 China, art, and books w ­ ere key symbols of refinement: the Boston fair featured “China sugar dishes, ink-­stands, cake-­plates and vases, with beautiful designs and mottos—­ from Elizabeth Pease, Darlington, ­England,” an “assortment of French porcelain,” and a “white China Gilt Tea Ser­v ice.”59 Essential to the elegant rituals of refreshment and ornamentation, and imported from Eu­rope, china radiated refinement; moreover, as a delicate, pure, white, luxury object, it joined whiteness to aesthetic, spiritual, cultural, and commercial wealth.60 Fairs also sold pictures and print at book t­ ables “consecrated to objects of taste and virtue.”61 Consistently profitable, the book ­table did a brisk business in the symbols of social

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aspiration: as Bushman states, books ­were the “purest symbol” of refinement in antebellum culture.62 Its elegant and valuable publications ranged from standard antislavery works, Burns’s poems in a Tartan binding, and the Scottish edition of ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin to a first edition of Milton’s poems, Cranmer’s “black-­letter Bible” from 1587 “in perfect preservation,” and autographed pre­sen­ta­tion copies of many works.63 The book ­table offered fine art as well: “Pencil, crayon and ­water color drawings of exquisite beauty,” lithographic sketches, oil paintings, artist’s bronzes, and stereoscope views.64 Stylish accoutrements for reading and writing included bookmarks with “mottoes in all languages,” small desks and ink stands, and “the most beautiful se­lection of elegant writing materials to be found in the w ­ hole country”: de la Rue’s “recherché note-­paper, of the choicest colors and fancy, with the newest style of envelope case,” letter paper “comprising ­castles, cathedrals, and abbeys of ­England,” Pa­ri­sian seals, “each representing one of the splendid monuments of Paris,” perfumed sealing wax, marble and bronze paper weights, and “Dillon and Rowney’s fine prepared London lead-­ pencils.”65 As one of the fairs’ “­great attraction[s],” the book ­table proclaimed antislavery’s cultural literacy.66 Moreover, by situating antislavery publications from the movement’s best-­k nown writers among its sophisticated objects, it surrounded the cause with an aura of gentility and made its message respectable. In addition to trading in the symbols and materials of middle-­class identity, fairs-­as-­exhibitions supplied a stage for the social rites of polite association. They w ­ ere impor­tant social events of the season. As the broadside, Liberty’s Song (Figure 32), which functioned as an advertisement for and invitation to the 1839 Boston fair, demonstrates, fairs w ­ ere places to procure articles “suitable for Christmas and New Year’s gifts” as well as genteel gatherings.67 Announcing the fair’s social status through the class signifier of musical notation, the broadside asks the public “to call” and promises a refreshment t­ able “furnished with all the luxuries of the season,” ­music “on the piano, day and eve­ning,” a post office “furnished with Letters from distinguished individuals,” and poetry from “Pierpont, Tappan, Whittier, and o ­ thers.”68 Fairs offered both rational recreations and social amusements. They had addresses by Garrison, Douglass, and Henry Ward Beecher; lectures on landscape gardening and phrenology; drama and poetry readings; ­music by the Hutchison singers, antislavery choirs and bands, and per­for­mances on the pianoforte. Integrating antislavery topics into the activities of middle-­class education, t­ hese cultural experiences modeled the attributes and be­hav­iors—­intellectualism, leisure, self-­improvement—of the rising ­middle class. Tea parties, dinners, soirées, and balls connected to the fairs, as well as social occasions at the fairs themselves, provided visitors with opportunities to enact the protocols of polite manners, conversing at the refreshment ­table over confectionaries or “biscuits” from the queen’s baker, or procuring elite



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associations through letters and autographs obtained at the post office.69 Merely attending a fair allowed visitors to rub shoulders with the “wealth and fashion of the place,” distinguished visitors from Eu­rope, and antislavery dignitaries like Garrison, Channing, and Pierpont.70 Edifying and entertaining, fairs offered the pleasures of polite refinement and the fantasy of social elevation. Fairs, like the

Figure 32. Liberty’s Song (Boston: Kidder and Wright, 1839). Courtesy of the Mas­sa­chu­setts Historical Society.

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­ iddle class itself, ­adopted not just the emblems of aristocratic culture but also m its mannered social rituals.71 As convivial social occasions, antislavery fairs ­were impor­tant sites of communal cohesion and respectability for the movement.72 The Boston fair was described as a “cordial spectacle” where conversation was considered the “greatest good” and visitors w ­ ere “highly respectable and, without one exception, polite 73 and friendly.” The Philadelphia fair was a “delightful social reunion.”74 Besides providing opportunities to greet old friends, perform antislavery affiliation, and show abolitionists to be “pleasant good natured folk” and “models of true politeness,” fairs displayed antislavery’s prized social connections.75 Fairgoers in Boston could see antislavery celebrities or meet British nobility: Harriet Beecher Stowe presided over the Swiss t­ able at the 1854 fair; the Earl of Carlisle and Duchess of Sutherland visited the 1841 Boston fair; Lord Morpeth, the “late Lord lieutenant of Ireland,” attended the Boston fair “frequently.”76 By featuring antislavery as well as Eu­ro­pean aristocracy, urban fairs increased antislavery’s social currency. Trafficking in the middle-­class marker of social emulation, they conferred rank on the cause as well as their visitors. Through their venues of distinction, fairs-­as-­exhibitions transformed antislavery into a status symbol. To be antislavery, t­ hese media spectacles declared, was to have a sophisticated style, a discerning sensibility, a cosmopolitan outlook, and an aristocratic manner. By associating with antislavery at fairs, visitors acquired a cultured subjectivity. Through their commodification of refinement and their packaging of the cause as prestigious, fairs both promoted bourgeois ideals and sold antislavery as a crucial indicator of middle-­class identity. They formulated that class identity in distinctively racial terms. Via their reverence for Eu­ro­pean culture, they conflated refinement with whiteness. Decorating their spaces with aristocratic symbols like ancient insignia or silver tea ser­v ices, selling elegant and rare Eu­ro­pean articles, such as scented soaps from Paris or the “hair of Coleridge,” and aping the manners of nobility in the courtly codes of their gift pre­sen­ta­tions, urban antislavery fairs sacralized white western Eu­ro­pean culture even as they commodified blackness.77 While the objects marked with the kneeling slave loudly proclaimed their racial politics, the fairs’ refined artifacts expressed their racial meaning more subtly: politely talking of taste as their whiteness often receded into the background. By naturalizing the connection between whiteness and gentility, antislavery fairs consolidated class through ideologies of racial superiority as well as subjugation.78 This is not to say that black ­people w ­ ere excluded from the fairs’ genteel culture. Africans ­were portrayed in fine art, such as the statuette in bronze of an African ­woman at a fountain by the French artist Charles Cumberworth (1811– 52) at the 1852 Boston fair.79 Black art was also displayed: the “finely executed



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pictures” by a “young colored artist” w ­ ere “tastefully exhibited” at the 1850 ­ ere North Star fair.80 Works by impor­tant black historical or literary figures w sold, including a facsimile of a letter by Toussaint L’Ouverture and a French translation of the Life of Frederick Douglass.81 African Americans lectured and performed: William Wells Brown read “one of his descriptive Anti-­Slavery Dramas” for the benefit of the Philadelphia fair, and the Colored Choir of Geneva ­ ere also presented as noble at fairs: sang at the Rochester Fair.82 Black ­people w the Boston fair exhibited a royal robe woven for the king of Dahomey as well as a “richly gilded” china plate from the Haitian emperor Henri Christophe’s breakfast ser­v ice, complete with his coat of arms and motto; a report of the 1841 Boston fair described Charles Lenox Redmond as a “New World” version of Lord Morpeth; and at the 1851 Rochester Fair, James Pennington related that he was the grand­son of an African prince.83 Black ­people, like their white counter­parts, ­were represented at fairs as refined, genteel subjects, with noble characteristics and lineages. Just as the repre­sen­ta­tions of black servitude elevated whiteness through contrast, the fairs’ black gentility mirrored, and thereby reinforced, their racialized refinement. Made to accord with and pay homage to white Eu­ro­pean mores, black gentility underscored antislavery’s civilizing influence and highlighted its paradoxical logic: the belief that equality could be achieved through eliteness. While implying that refinement transcended race and that manners alone mattered to middle-­class achievement, the fairs, like the exhibitions they resembled, reified racial hierarchies. Within their halls, where the esteemed tradition of Anglo-­Saxon culture was juxtaposed with the subjugated status of black enslavement, black gentility was a novelty. Participating in the exhibition’s ethnographic gaze and its use of racial taxonomy to signify hierarchy, fairs allowed for the possibility of black refinement even as they often figured it as dependent on white benevolence. Thus one Boston fair featured an “intelligent” and “neatly clothed” black child—­“rescued from slavery by the benevolence of Mr. E. G. Loring”—­who was learning the alphabet “instead of r­ unning wild and naked upon a Louisiana plantation”; another displayed an engraving, sent from Liverpool of “the Anglo Saxon bearing the African to higher regions.”84 In both instances, the black race is figured as degraded and reliant on white aid for its improvement. Even when not subordinated to white altruism, black refinement, like the slave’s freedom, was appropriated by white fairgoers as a symbol of their own genteel sensibilities. The Cumberworth bronze of the African ­woman at the fountain—­gifted “to the Bazaar by friends of the slave in Paris,” placed on a white marble ­table at the center of the Boston hall, and bought by the man­ag­ers for $125 to pre­sent to Stowe—­exemplifies how black refinement was materialized

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through whiteness (the marble t­ able) and traded as a sign of rank.85 The exquisite bronze statuette served as the conduit for the play of prestige that lies at the core of the ceremonial gift exchange: the Boston man­ag­ers asserted their stature by receiving it as a gift from their Pa­ri­sian supporters, displaying their ability to pay its exorbitant price, and offering it to Stowe as a token of their “regard and approbation.”86 Similarly, at the following year’s Boston fair, Wendell Phillips was presented with another Cumberworth statue (a w ­ oman of color with two white c­ hildren on her lap) by friends visiting the fair who pooled their money to buy it for $100. Serving as a “ ‘mark of their re­spect and esteem,’ ” and in appreciation of his “entire devotion to the ser­vice of that race, which Cumberworth has so charmingly idealized,” the statue represents the rituals of white admiration.87 Black gentility was often transformed within the fairs’ semiotic system into yet another symbol of white privilege.88 The fairs’ construction of class consciousness as rooted in racial superiority was materialized and memorialized in their signature souvenirs: gift books designed for each fair. Like most exhibitions, antislavery fairs sold souvenirs to commemorate their events. While all of the objects sold t­ here, especially ­t hose marked with an antislavery motto or the image of the kneeling slave, ­were a form of “fairing”—an “item made of glass or earthenware” that was sold at fairs in the eigh­teenth and nineteenth centuries as a remembrance of the experience—­ gift books ­were especially made for this purpose.89 They packaged the cause in the era’s most culturally refined form. In vogue throughout the antebellum period, gift books accompanied the rise of the ­middle class by symbolizing—­ materially through their expensive bindings and numerous engravings, and rhetorically through their select content—­that class’s investment in lit­er­a­ture as a sign of taste.90 The Boston fair produced the longest-­lived and most influential gift book, The Liberty Bell (1839–58), edited by Chapman; the Rochester fair had Autographs for Freedom (1853–54), edited by Julia Griffiths; The North Star (1840) was edited by Whittier for the Philadelphia fair; The Envoy (1840) was issued for the Pawtucket, Rhode Island, fair; Liberty Chimes (1845) was created by the Providence Ladies Anti-­Slavery Association; and Star of Emancipation (1841) was produced for the Mas­sa­chu­setts Female Emancipation Society.91 Explic­itly identified as souvenirs—­The Liberty Bell (Figure 33) was called a “beautiful Souvenir of the Fair” and Autographs for Freedom was described as “one of the best souvenirs of the season”—­antislavery gift books ­were collectible keepsakes that embodied the fairs’ central symbols and messages.92 As the permanent media trace of the fairs’ fleeting experiences, the gift book encapsulated (much as the singing walnuts did for the breeze’s message) the fairs’ spectacular semiotics in a trea­sured keepsake that could speak year round. Functioning, according to Susan Stewart’s formulation of the souvenir, as both a metonym

Figure 33. Front cover of The Liberty Bell, ed. Maria Weston Chapman (Boston: Mas­sa­chu­setts Anti-­Slavery Fair, 1846). Courtesy of the Library Com­pany of Philadelphia.

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and a miniature of the notable occasion, gift books not only encompassed their fairs’ monumental messages but also domesticated them, bringing them down to size by making their meaning more digestible and transporting them home to be interiorized.93 Gift books w ­ ere among the most revered objects at antislavery fairs. Published on the first day and located at the book t­ able, they w ­ ere featured as one of the fairs’ “­great attraction[s]” and surrounded by their highest symbols of refinement: books and art.94 They ­were also one of the fairs’ “most gainful operation[s],” often doubling their investment and meeting a “ready sale.”95 Gift books embodied the fairs’ commercial, aesthetic, cultural, and social capital as well as the events’ exclusivity: they ­were expensive (anywhere from fifty cents to two dollars, depending on their embellishments), elegantly produced (often with engravings and gilt or embossed bindings), full of choice literary content (by distinguished authors), tokens of friendship (exchanged as Christmas and New Year’s gifts), and rare (sold exclusively at the event). They symbolized—in a single item—­t he fairs’ elite status. Antislavery gift books mirrored the fairs they memorialized. They deployed the fairs’ dominant emblems. The Liberty Bell, for instance, took its name as well as its cover image (Figure 34) from the bell-­emblazoned flags that decorated Boston’s halls (see Figure 30). Autographs for Freedom included a facsimile signature of the author at the end of each article, incorporating into its title and visual appeal the signed names that decorated some halls (such as the letter from the ­women of ­England to the ­women of Amer­i­ca with “576,000 signatures” that hung on the wall at the 1853 Boston fair), as well as the rare autographs that graced book ­tables and w ­ ere vended at the fairs’ post offices.96 Both books embodied the fairs’ foremost icon—­freedom—in their titles, and The Liberty Bell was explic­itly called “a SOUVENIR OF FREEDOM.”97 In their decorous and fash­ion­able forms, they imitated the fairs’ sophisticated settings and luxury items. Outfitted with “elegance and taste,” The Liberty Bell was “splendidly bound” in gilt cloth or deluxe morocco leather bindings and embellished with an ornamental title page (Figure 35) and multiple engravings.98 Beautiful enough to “adorn any library or parlor t­ able,” Autographs for Freedom was produced on “superior white paper, and printed in clear, large type, and substantially and elegantly bound”; it contained steel-­plate, signed portraits along with its trademark autographs (Figure 36).99 Their select content—­“poetic gem[s] of sterling value” and “the highest and choicest lit­er­a­ture of humanity and freedom”—­ paralleled the fairs’ cultured objects, while their compendia formats recalled the fairs’ collections in all their abundance and variety.100 Autographs for Freedom was advertised as having “over fifty of the most popu­lar and eminent writers” in one large volume, with contributions in e­ very genre.101 Both The Liberty

Figure 34. Gilt cover of The Liberty Bell, ed. Maria Weston Chapman (Boston: National Anti-­Slavery Bazaar, 1853). Courtesy of the Library Com­pany of Philadelphia.

Figure 35. Frontispiece of The Liberty Bell, ed. Maria Weston Chapman (Boston: Mas­sa­chu­setts Anti-­Slavery Fair, 1848). Engraved by J. R. Foster. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.



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Figure 36. Frederick Douglass’s contribution to Autographs for Freedom, ed. Julia Griffiths (Auburn, NY: Alden, Beardsley, 1854), 251. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

Bell and Autographs for Freedom presented articles by famous abolitionists (L. Tappan, Birney, Douglass, Garrison) side by side with contributions from eminent nobility (the Earl of Carlisle, the Duchess of Sutherland, Lord Morpeth, the Baron de Stael-­Holstein), and esteemed writers (Elizabeth Barrett Browning, James Russell Lowell, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson). Unlike their mainstream counter­parts, whose contributors w ­ ere often anonymous, antislavery gift books advertised their authors’ names and thereby associated antislavery with the aura of celebrity. Moreover, antislavery gift books, like the fairs, promoted foreign articles. Whereas mainstream gift books ­were nationalistic in authorship, antislavery gift books, especially ­t hose from Boston and Rochester, featured many international authors: The Liberty Bell, for instance, included articles by Ivan Tourgueneff, Fredrika Bremer, Emile Souvestre, Gustave de Beaumont, and Alexis de Tocqueville. Foregrounding a cosmopolitan outlook, antislavery gift books, like the fairs they commemorated, marketed their worldliness as a sign of the movement’s refinement.

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Gift books ­were also reminders of their fairs’ rational recreations, their poetry recitations and lectures, and their genteel sociability, especially their gift ceremonies. Through their gracious gift exchanges—­the contributors’ to the volume, the fairgoers’ to their friends—­they produced social cohesion through antislavery affiliation. The Liberty Bell’s authorship—by “Friends of Freedom”—­ foregrounds its social bonds: just as the fairs brought together friends in communion to support liberty’s cause, so too does the annual, in both its production and its circulation. By purchasing and inscribing The Liberty Bell—­signing themselves and their loved ones as friends of freedom—­fairgoers linked their antislavery affinities to their personal affections and, in so ­doing, consolidated their social circle u ­ nder abolition’s signature.102 Moreover, in aligning their own sentiment and standing with that of the annual’s esteemed contributors, fairgoers advertised their status—as well as antislavery’s—to their friends; bestowed as a gift, the annual served in turn as a polite invitation to join antislavery’s elite club. Similarly, by acquiring and signing Autographs for Freedom, fairgoers added their names, and their friends’, to the list of “eminent personages” recorded on the gilt scroll on the 1854 edition’s front cover (Figure  37).103 The fairs’ souvenir gift books, like the events themselves, embedded antislavery in ceremonies of association as well as rank. Just as gift books echoed the fairs’ cultural and social messages, they also replicated their racialized refinement. Both The Liberty Bell and Autographs for Freedom figure gentility in terms of whiteness, prominently featuring the kneeling slave before a spiritually and materially refined white figure: Lady Liberty on The Liberty Bell’s gilt cover (see Figure 34), and Jesus in Autographs for Freedom’s engraved 1853 frontispiece (Figure 38). Lady Liberty and Jesus wear the long white robes of ancient civilizations, while the black figures are partly naked. The emancipated black man or a chastened white man may stand in the background of each image, but the hierarchical relation between white moral refinement and black subjection claims the foreground. The books’ content further reinforces this status differential. Through foreign contributions, they exalt the Western canon. The Liberty Bell uses a quotation from The Golden Legend, a medieval collection of saints’ lives, for its epigraph, and includes articles translated from French and German as well as homages to Eu­ro­pean culture such as Anne Warren Weston’s “The Cathedral at Arrezzo” and Howard Worcester Gilbert’s “La Notte Di Michelangiolo: Sonnets.”104 Longfellow’s poem “The Norman Baron” describes a nobleman’s deathbed “good deed”: freeing his serfs.105 Stowe’s essay in Autographs for Freedom, “A Day Spent at Playford Hall,” describes Clarkson’s residence as one of the oldest fortified ­houses in ­England, complete with moat and walls covered in ancient moss.106 Both venerate even as they critique aspects of Anglo-­Saxon history.

Figure 37. Gilt cover of Autographs for Freedom, ed. Julia Griffiths (Auburn, NY: Alden, Beardsley, 1854). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

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Figure 38. Frontispiece and title page of Autographs for Freedom, ed. Julia Griffiths (Boston: Jewett, 1853). Courtesy of Harvard University Library.

While their cosmopolitan contributions worship Western culture, their sentimental lit­er­a­ture inscribes black servitude. Filled with contributions by popu­ lar sentimental authors (Caroline Kirkland, Catharine Sedgwick, Lydia Maria Child, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Eliza Lee Follen), ­t hese annuals express the racial superiority inherent in sentimental sympathy. Harriet Martineau’s “Pity the Slave,” and Catherine Beecher’s “The Slave’s Prayer”—­which exclaims “who is poor and needy / Like the poor negro slave!”—­exemplify this benevolent hierarchy.107 Through word and image, antislavery gift books elevated white Eu­ro­ pean culture even as they lamented the slave’s lowly status. Their investment in white superiority was also evident in the race of their refined contributors. Antislavery gift books w ­ ere authored largely by white writ-



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ers. Except for a few articles by Douglass and Redmond, The Liberty Bell includes no African American authors. Instead, black voices are mediated by white writers: Maria Weston Chapman translates the Cuban revolutionary and poet Juan Placido’s prayer; Isaac T. Hopper tells the story of a fugitive; and David Lee Child describes African inventors.108 Even when African American authors are included—as they are in Autographs for Freedom, which contains contributions from William Wells Brown, James McCune Smith, William G. Allen, Charles L. Reason, William J. Wilson, and Douglass—­t hey often follow a similar script.109 Embracing antislavery’s Anglophilia, black authors pay tribute to the movement’s British leaders: Brown’s “Visit of a Fugitive Slave to the Grave of Wilberforce” exalts the statesman whose “philosophy was . . . ​moulded” in a noble “cast”; Smith’s entry memorializes John Murray, secretary of the Glasgow Emancipation Society.110 Even when black leaders are venerated, as in Allen’s sketch of Placido, they are framed in white terms: Allen lauds Placido as belonging in the same line as Shakespeare, Milton, and Burns.111 As at the fairs, African Americans ­were not excluded from the gift books’ vision of refinement but rather made to accord with its codes. The fairs’ gift books packaged the fairs’ messages of white gentility and antislavery superiority for the parlor t­ able. The Liberty Bell was meant to occupy a “con­spic­u­ous place on the t­ able of e­ very abolitionist”; Autographs for Freedom was designed to “find its way to the center of e­ very drawing room and hearth stone in the land.”112 The parlor t­able, like the fairs’ book ­table, served as a “shrine” or “minialtar” in the symbolic structure of its room, while the room itself resembled the fairs’ venues in decoration and ornamentation (its overstuffed quality, natu­ral ele­ments, and needlework maxims).113 Placed in the parlor, which amplified their origin, souvenir gift books ­were a means to remember, admire, read, and cordially discuss the fairs’ meaning over and over again. Acculturating their o ­ wners to the fairs’ elitist codes, they w ­ ere an ever-­present symbol of antislavery’s centrality to middle-­class identity. Like the conduct books of the era, which instructed the aspiring ­middle class in their adoption of genteel values, the fairs’ gift books made antislavery part of the code that middle-­class aspirants w ­ ere required to master. By embedding antislavery ideology within the parlor’s system of cultural prestige and social connections and within one of its most revered objects (the gift book), they completed the pro­ cess begun at the fairs: welding the cause to middle-­class identity. Hence, gift books w ­ ere considered an “impor­tant instrumentality” to the cause.114 By providing “circulation and permanency to the appeals and testimonies of distinguished philanthropists of all countries . . . ​in [a] form suitable to command the attention of the popu­lar heart,” The Liberty Bell became “an entering wedge where no other publication could find access”; and by embodying the work of

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t­ hose “distinguished for talent in our own and the ­mother country,” Autographs for Freedom would “sell—­it ­will be read; and the seeds of anti-­slavery truth . . . ​ scattered broadcast over the land.”115 Antislavery gift books ­were able to access interiors—­both literal and figurative—­other­wise closed to the movement. The culture of class emblematized at the fairs and in their gift books reached its apotheosis in 1859 as the Boston fair evolved into the Subscription Anniversary (1859–70).116 Relying on direct monetary donations rather than the sale of goods, the Anniversary was an explic­itly cultural and social rather than commercial affair.117 Held at ­Music Hall rather than Faneuil Hall and featuring addresses, m ­ usic, fine art, and conversation, the Anniversary displayed Eu­ro­pean salon culture in place of the fairs’ fash­ion­able and foreign objects. Having begun in Chapman’s private parlor, the Boston fair ended up as a version of her Pa­ri­sian salon.118 ­After having spent seven years abroad, Chapman returned to the U.S. in 1855 and began to take a more hands-on role in Boston’s antislavery fair. By 1858, she de­cided that it had run its course. The work was exhausting (“too much for too few”), it was difficult to get goods from Eu­rope, some feared that the fair had turned into a site of profiteering rather than moral suasion, the po­liti­cal climate was increasingly hostile (some fairs w ­ ere mobbed in the late 1850s), and ­there was a sense that the event had become passé.119 Writing to Mary Estlin in 1858, Chapman declared: “The instrumentality is no longer new;—­ like an old broom, it ­ought to be replaced, & I have in­ven­ted an instrumentality to replace it” which w ­ ill “excite a ‘revival’ ” and “awaken new action.”120 Her new conception—­t he Subscription Anniversary—­would draw on antislavery’s social capital: Id ­ on’t know w ­ hether you know it—(Amer­i­ca being a place in theory so demo­cratic, & in real­ity so equal as to social station, that I may never have thought to mention it,) but one of our advantages is that, if ­t here be ­here properly any such t­ hing as social rank & respectability . . . ​t he Boston abolitionists are that ­t hing;—­some by wealth, as Amer­i­ca counts riches,—­some by vari­ous antecedents,—­some by high intellectual gifts—­ all by the more than ordinary moral worth which is the cause of them being the abolitionists. . . . ​Now we have never thought enough of this real advantage to make the use of it we can now do.121 Abolition’s social standing, rather than its provision of sophisticated goods, would be the new attraction. Trading on the social distinction that the fairs had produced over the past twenty-­five years, Chapman created an event that sold status outright.



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She did so by reimagining Boston’s public exhibition as a private salon. “We arranged the g­ reat M ­ usic Hall to resemble a salon of reception in one’s own home,” she wrote to Estlin, with all the features of “each h ­ ouse­hold hearth—­ 122 bust, picture, memorial.” Chapman’s salon was a large-­scale prototype of this refined Eu­ro­pean institution as well as its newly pop­u­lar­ized American version. Emerging in urban centers in the 1840s and 1850s, American salons, according to Eliza Richards, w ­ ere an “extension of parlor gatherings” that “promoted interchange among a larger, more impersonal group of distinguished guests.”123 Constructed as a private domestic space where “anti-­slavery families” could greet invited guests, the Boston salon welcomed four thousand “well dressed & friendly” persons of “all classes” to enjoy intellectual entertainments and polite conversation over light refreshments.124 It was decorated with statues and displayed “upon a long white screen . . . ​portraits and busts of eminent friends, living and departed, of the anti-­slavery cause” (once again coding the cause and gentility as white); it also featured a Pa­ri­sian tea t­ able.125 During their hours of reception, from 7 to 10 in the eve­ning, each of the w ­ omen man­ag­ers presided over her own tea t­ able—­rather than a c­ ounter of goods—­and “did its honors with all grace and hospitality.”126 Guests signed their names in “subscription-­books, gayly adorned with ribbons,” which “lay invitingly open alongside the tea-­ equipage.”127 Donated money was discreetly folded within letters that expressed sympathy for the cause.128 Guests ­were treated to refined cultural events: ­music from the “silver-­t hroated pipes” of a “­great organ” and a Germania band, a per­ for­mance of a scene from Dombey and Son by Miss Ellery, remarks from Wendell Phillips, or a reading of original poems by Julia Ward Howe.129 Black refinement was also on display: ­t here ­were addresses by William Wells Brown, Redmond, and the sculptor Edmonia Lewis as well as an exhibition of singing and recitation by formerly enslaved c­ hildren “of very light complexion and in­ ter­est­ing appearance” who had been rescued “from that condition and placed in the New Orleans schools established by Maj. Gen. Banks.”130 Esteemed personages w ­ ere also pre­sent: “the writers to The Atlantic” attended; Mrs. Ralph Waldo Emerson moved “cordially about among the com­pany”; and Miss Atkins, “our California friend,” who had “been in Japan and curious Foreign parts—­ visited the King of Siam and his Christian-­named wife Harriet Beecher Stowe” as well as the “London and the Paris Exposition,” was pre­sent.131 As the ornately framed circular For the Twenty-­Fifth National Anti-­Slavery Subscription Anniversary (Figure 39) demonstrates through its verse and song, the arts w ­ ere a prominent selling point for the salon. Socializing was also highlighted. The An­ ere niversary was described as a “delightfully social occasion.”132 Guests w served elegant refreshments (cakes and ice cream) and had access to amenities like a cloak and dressing room as they promenaded the cleared floor and clustered

Figure 39. For the Twenty-­Fifth National Anti-­Slavery Subscription Anniversary (Boston: s.n., 1859). Courtesy of the Library of Congress.



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around well-­k nown friends in conversation.133 Instead of buying objects, guests made “a business of being social.”134 At the Anniversary, class status was acquired through genteel per­for­mance rather than luxury goods. Instead of admiring the “silver tea ser­vice” that graced the center ­table of the Boston fair (a gift to Garrison from the ladies of Edinburgh), salon guests w ­ ere served their tea on the “elegant china” of “the famous Boston caterer, J. B. Smith”; instead of buying eminent persons’ autographs from the fair’s post office, they signed their own to the salon’s subscription list; instead of buying a ticket to see celebrities and nobility, they took their places among the honored guests.135 The Anniversary sold the cultural and social experience of attendance as its sole commodity. The event itself was the ultimate gift. Indeed, the Anniversary’s souvenir—­a photo­graph of the busts and pictures that graced the stage—­was an image of the occasion rather than an object from it.136 The antislavery salon did not represent a change in the fairs’ investment in refinement but an extension of it. The numbering of the Anniversary, which takes up where the Boston fair leaves off—­t he Twenty-­Fourth National Anti-­ Slavery Fair is followed by the Twenty-­ Fifth Subscription Anniversary—­ exemplifies this continuity. Wiping away the fairs’ commercial taint, the salon transformed the fairs’ salesgirls into hostesses, its consumers into patrons, and its cash trades into donations enveloped in sentiment. Stripped of its mediating objects, the Anniversary spoke directly of antislavery’s refinement. Attendance at the event itself signified gentility. Transformed from a public exhibition accessible to all through the purchase of a ticket into an exclusive, invitation-­only event, the Anniversary made social capital its entrance fee.137 For the fairs’ printed advertisements, the Anniversary substituted scripted circulars (Figure  40) that resembled private social invitations, personally inscribed with each guest’s name. Available only from a man­ag­er or by inquiry at the antislavery office, the invitation restricted access to the Anniversary to ­t hose who w ­ ere already part of the antislavery network or ­were willing to publicly acknowledge their association with the cause; idle shoppers in search of a bargain or a fash­ ion­able item ­were no longer welcome. Guests had to pre­sent their invitation—­ “(without which no one is ever admitted)”—at the door and countersign their names.138 In ­doing so, they signed themselves to the cause and became members of the salon’s exclusive social circle. By admitting the “­bearer and accompanying friends,” the invitation codified the Anniversary’s role in solidifying social connections.139 Guests showed deference to the man­ag­ers who had invited them by visiting their tea ­tables; they asserted their own status, in turn, by extending a similar invitation to their friends. Operating through codes of courtesy

Figure 40. [Invitation to the 31st Subscription Anniversary] (Boston: s.n., 1865). Courtesy of the Mas­sa­chu­setts Historical Society.



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rather than gift giving, the Anniversary strengthened bonds among its members and their circles even as it confirmed antislavery’s elite status. Although the Anniversary’s organizers claimed that the event was more demo­cratic than the fair ­because it had no entrance fee, its rituals of rank made it notably more restrictive. The invitation along with the subscription donation, which was published by name in the National Anti-­Slavery Standard, made the social as well as economic price of entry high. Guests not only had to be connected to the cause to receive an invitation; they needed the financial means to contribute enough to avoid public embarrassment. Donations at the 1859 Anniversary, which ranged from Chapman’s contribution of two hundred dollars to the ­Widow Fay’s twenty-­five cents, advertised status in terms of wealth.140 At ­earlier fairs, gentility could be signified through a benevolent purchase, however small; at the Anniversary, gentility was stratified through the public accounting of each person’s donation. Hence, the Anniversary, like salons more generally, was less about extending polite society and antislavery sensibility to an ever-­widening group of p ­ eople and more about regulating access to antislavery’s inner circle and consolidating its standing.141 Described by Chapman as a “remarkable reunion,” the Anniversary, as its name suggests, sought to commemorate old ties rather than create new ones.142 If the fairs did the hard work of building a broader antislavery community, the Anniversary secured—on the eve of emancipation and in the years directly following—­antislavery’s reputation. This retreat inward was due to a fear of vio­lence as the nation headed t­ oward war; a wish to congratulate each other for de­cades of antislavery work reaching its fulfillment and to eulogize ­t hose who had dedicated their lives to the cause; and a desire to establish antislavery’s place in history. But most importantly, the Anniversary’s insularity exposed the movement’s larger embrace of social exclusivity. The salon’s elite enclave turned antislavery into what it had spent de­ cades aspiring to be—an American aristocracy. The salons, like the fairs before them, ­were a resounding success. The first two raised $6,000 and $5,500 respectively, approximately fifteen hundred dollars more than the most lucrative fairs. The Anniversary fully funded the National Anti-­Slavery Standard and the waning AASS in the 1860s: it “must continue,” the executive committee stated in 1864, or the parent society would fold.143 Status sold, as did the Anniversary’s politics of privilege. The fairs and the Anniversary worked—­financing the AASS from beginning to end and popularizing its message—­because they provided the emerging ­middle class with cover for its bad-­faith liberalism. At both, members of the aspiring ­middle class could luxuriate in social in­equality even while espousing po­liti­cal equality. Visitors and guests earned the capital of social class by benevolently donating to

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the cause of freedom. Both made clear how the ­middle class formed itself through racial hierarchy and a ­limited vision of equality. Rooted in discerning practices, the ­middle class forged long-­lasting structures of racial discrimination. Rather than disrupt this mode of consolidation, institutional antislavery exploited and reinforced it as a way to earn capital for the cause. By investing in ever-­greater forms of social in­equality as it moved ­toward the moment of emancipation and beyond, institutional antislavery foreclosed other forms of freedom.

C h apter 6

Antislavery’s Panoramic Perspective

Pictorial repre­sen­ta­tions of slavery w ­ ere, like printed texts and material goods, impor­tant components of the AASS’s media campaign. During the 1830s, the society circulated “some 40,000” images a year in the form of broadsides as well as illustrated tracts and objects.1 The array of pictorial print in its cata­logue of publications includes almanacs, slave narratives, gift books, and periodicals, as well as graphic items, such as letter paper and cards stamped with the image of the kneeling slave, and “Small Printed Handkerchiefs . . . ​ornamented with cuts, ­music, poetry, texts of scripture, extracts of the Slave’s Friend” (Figure 41).2 ­Under the subheading “PRINTS” are broadsheets such as The Slave Market of Amer­i­ca (1836), Views of Slavery (1836), and A Bird’s Eye View of American Slavery (1837); portraits of the antislavery leaders Garrison, George Thompson, James Birney, Benjamin Lundy, E. P. Lovejoy, and ­others; pictures of the kneeling slave, such as the lithograph Inna, the Booroom Slave (1838) and a woodcut of a male supplicant in chains, accompanied by Whittier’s poem “Our Countrymen in Chains” (1837); engravings of significant events, such as John Sartrain’s picture of the destruction of Pennsylvania Hall (1838) and The Emancipated ­Family (n.d.), copied from the En­g lish artist Alexander Rippingille’s depiction of emancipation in the West Indies; and po­liti­cal prints, including the lithographs Southern Ideas of Liberty (1835) and New Method of Assorting the Mail (1835), which portray the South’s violent suppression of abolition.3 The AASS’s stock of images from the 1830s formed a visual iconography that the movement would deploy and recycle throughout the antebellum period.4 Word and image w ­ ere closely connected in the AASS’s media system. Images circulated within books, tracts, and periodicals, while texts ­were named in pictorial terms or promoted as featuring visual embellishments. For example, George Bourne’s Picture of Slavery in the United States of Amer­i­ca (1834) was advertised as “illustrating the abominations in the South” and containing “10 engravings.”5 Antislavery prints often included words or repackaged impor­ tant antislavery texts as visual icons: Dr. Franklin an Abolitionist (1837–39)

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Figure 41. The Captive (Boston: Chemical Printing Com­pany for the Boston Female Anti-­Slavery Society). Printed handkerchief. Rare Books E445.M4 pf [1833] Portfolio. Courtesy of the Boston Public Library, Rare Books and Manuscripts Department.

includes a wood engraving of Faneuil Hall along with an article written by Franklin advocating an end to the slave trade, while the Declaration of the Anti-­ Slavery Convention: Assembled in Philadelphia, December 4, 1833 (1833) prints the convention’s Declaration of Sentiments beneath an image of Hercules strangling the Nemean lion. AASS broadsides both reproduced images drawn from



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antislavery texts—­Illustrations of the American Anti-­Slavery Almanac for 1840 (1840) assem­bles fourteen of the almanac’s woodcuts on a single sheet—­and ­were reprinted within them: the portrait of Lovejoy appears at the head of a column in The Emancipator; The AAS Almanac for 1840 displays The Emancipated ­Family on its cover.6 The Printers’ Picture Gallery (1838) (Figure 42), a broadside made of “cuts from the specimen-­book of a single type-­foundry” in New York City that was sold in sheets and reprinted in The Emancipator, exemplifies the AASS’s imbrication of word and image. With its images drawn from the press and then reproduced within a periodical, it highlights both the visuality of print and the printed nature of the image. Moreover, its columns, which are continuous with ­t hose of the newspaper’s that surround it, thereby aligning the broadside’s artwork with the paper’s written content, emphasize the interconnection between printed text and image in the AASS’s appeal.7 Just as word and image worked together in the antislavery argument—­t he image animating the word and the word explicating the image—so too did their material forms align. Print and prints w ­ ere also similarly manufactured and disseminated. Both came off the same press and broadsides ­were produced in large runs: the executive committee initially ordered 2,000 copies of the Printers’ Picture Gallery and 1,000 copies of Illustrations of the American Anti-­Slavery Almanac for 1840.8 Prints ­were advertised at low prices (ranging from two to twelve cents), sold in bulk (priced by the dozen and hundred as well as the single copy), made available at the AASS’s offices and depositories, and spread through its orga­nizational networks.9 Run through the same machinery—­both mechanical and institutional—as printed texts, and circulating within and alongside them, the AASS’s printed images w ­ ere designed for mass distribution.10 Emerging si­mul­ta­neously with the rise of visual culture in the United States—­Ralph Waldo Emerson states in 1837 “our age is ocular”—­institutional antislavery embraced new visual technologies as well as the picture’s persuasive power.11 As with industrial printing, the AASS was an early adopter of reproductive methods that enabled the image to be mass produced: the steam-­powered press; woodblock engravings, which w ­ ere inexpensive to make and could be set along with type; steel-­plate engravings, which created finer images and w ­ ere more durable than the copper plates they replaced; lithography, a chemical pro­ cess that e­ tched an image on stone; and stereotyping, which made a permanent and reusable metal cast of the image.12 The AASS traded on its culture’s enthusiasm for images—­t he subheading for prints in the cata­logue on the back cover of The AAS Almanac for 1837 excitedly proclaims, “THE PICTURES! THE PICTURES!!”—as well as its conviction that “seeing was believing.”13 Pictures, The Emancipator argues, could produce a sense of the real—­a “correct and

Figure 42. Printers’ Picture Gallery, reprinted in The Emancipator, 15 February 1838, 164. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.



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vivid impression of the living real­ity”—­and also “excite the mind,” “awaken and fix attention,” and arouse feeling.14 They could be “employed to enforce arguments, to illustrate facts, to give an energy to language, and life to the form of words, to bring before the ‘mind’s eye’ more vividly than the arbitrary signs of the Alphabet can, the real­ity of the t­hings of which we speak” in order to “bring home to the bosom of the reader a full conception of the wrongs and sufferings of his fellow-­men.”15 Designed to instruct the mind and appeal to the senses, the image delivered a graphical accuracy and emotional effectiveness more “power­ful and permanent, than t­hose . . . ​derived from mere description.”16 Investing in the image’s perceptual capacity and vivid immediacy, the AASS deployed pictures as “power­ful auxiliaries” that brought slavery into view and moved audiences to sympathize with the enslaved.17 Of the AASS’s array of visual modes, the one it used most often to picture slavery was the pa­norama. Through the pa­norama’s landscape vistas and bird’s-­ eye perspective, the AASS made slavery comprehensible and compelling. As Stephan Oettermann notes, the pa­norama was “the first true visual ‘mass’ medium.”18 Consisting of an enormous 360-­degree scene, painted on canvas and displayed in a specially designed circular building with viewing platforms, the pa­norama was in­ven­ted in 1787 by Robert Barker and became a Eu­ro­pean phenomenon by 1800.19 The “moving” version that came into vogue in the United States in the 1830s and peaked in the 1850s comprised large-­scale, serialized, horizontal scenes that ­were unspooled on a cylinder apparatus (Figure 43) before a stationary spectator and, hence, could be presented in any public hall.20 Part of the nineteenth c­ entury’s exhibitionary complex, the pa­norama was an optical entertainment that presented a simulacrum of a rapidly urbanizing and geo­graph­i­cally expanding imperial order so that viewers might better apprehend this new world and their place within it. City views as well as distant, peripheral places w ­ ere popu­lar pa­norama subjects. In the U.S. context, the moving pa­norama, which featured landscape (especially river) views of Amer­i­ca’s expanding empire, was central to the formation of national identity, which, as Angela Miller argues, was “grounded in the landscape” in the nineteenth ­century and symbolically consolidated through landscape art.21 Accompanied by an explanatory pamphlet, the pa­norama not only immersed audiences in a scene but also told them how to see it. Most importantly, it gave viewers an aerial perspective from which to survey the field of vision and assert their command over it.22 Taken from an elevated vantage point—­a lofty lookout, state ­house, or cathedral—­ the pa­norama’s pictures offered audiences an expansive, unobstructed view that extended to the far horizon. As all-­seeing eyes, the pa­norama’s consumer-­ observers gained both knowledge and power. Like the panoptic perspective that arose at the same time (Jeremy Bentham’s plans for his tower ­were published in

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Figure 43. Machinery employed for the moving pa­norama. “Banvard’s Pa­norama,” Scientific American, 16 December 1848, 100. QA1.A1 Sc12. Courtesy of the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Columbia University in the City of New York.

1791), the pa­norama’s all-­embracing perceptual mode and “magisterial gaze” enabled viewers to construct themselves as empowered subjects through scopic mastery.23 Established just as the pa­norama was being pop­u­lar­ized in the United States, the AASS appropriated its comprehensive pictorial form and commanding point of view to propagate antislavery’s appeal. It advertised mainstream pa­noramas, such as the “Pa­norama of Jerusalem,” in its periodicals and sold small-­scale, domestic versions, such as “Panoramic views of the streets and places of Paris,” at its fairs; it also presented many of its graphic images as pa­noramas.24 AASS images from the 1830s repeatedly portray landscape views of slavery; and its broadsides, which often assembled several of t­hese scenes on a single sheet, resemble miniature versions of the moving pa­norama’s serialized form. The AASS’s panoramic pictures depict national identity through the landscape in sectional terms. They utilize the pa­norama’s realism and comprehensiveness to produce a social knowledge of slavery, bringing the distant scene of slavery before northern eyes. Through the pa­norama’s visual authority, they



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naturalize the “Slave South” as a fallen, benighted space operating in opposition to the nation’s ideals.25 They also imaginatively associate the North with symbols of the state, conflating region and nation to argue for the North as the rightful inheritor of the national landscape—as long as it embraces antislavery’s beliefs. In ­t hese panoramic pictures, sectional strife is staged not only in spatial terms but also as a perspectival ­battle.26 By aligning the North with the pa­norama’s dominating perspective and by situating their largely northern audience within its elevated, abstracted viewpoint, the AASS’s images proj­ect the North and their own audiences as superior to the South. More than mirrors of southern slavery, the AASS’s panoramic pictures are reflections of the North’s po­liti­cal power and their viewers’ scopic sovereignty. Through the pa­norama and its perspective, institutional antislavery constructed a compelling version of northern nationalism.27 This chapter highlights institutional antislavery’s participation in the visual revolution occurring in antebellum U.S. culture—­new ocular technologies, new modes of seeing, and new viewing subjects—­and the influential role the AASS played in promoting the image’s persuasive power.28 It identifies the pa­norama and its elevated viewpoint as the AASS’s dominant visual mode. Through readings of an array of pictorial examples, ranging from the 1820s to the 1850s, it traces how institutional antislavery formulated a consistent visual vocabulary that figured its argument against southern slavery and in ­favor of northern nationalism in perspectival terms. By foregrounding the points of view the AASS’s images encode and produce, it delineates how the AASS si­mul­ta­neously painted a picture of northern supremacy and made antislavery’s perspective integral to its success. In ­doing so, it identifies how U.S. nationalism came to be associated with par­tic­u ­lar regionalized and racialized perspectives. White northern nationalism, I argue, came sharply into focus through institutional antislavery’s lens.

* * * The AASS’s panoramic views of slavery sought to make the cruelty of the southern institution perceptible to northern audiences by providing empirical evidence of sights unseen. As the Quarterly Anti-­Slavery Magazine states, the aim was to “brush away from before the eyes of the American ­people that veil which has prevented their seeing [slavery] in the full odiousness of its princi­ples and the worse horrors of its practice.”29 The AASS used the pa­norama’s graphic accuracy and expansive view to pre­sent a clear and comprehensive survey of slavery’s inner workings. A visual version of its factual compendium, the AASS’s panoramic pictures both generate optical proofs of slavery’s cruelties and

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consolidate them, through the moving form’s synthetic mode of serialization, into a certainty of the system’s horror. Created in two forms—as an individual image composed of several scenes or a broadside collating numerous images on a single sheet—­they produce an assimilative mode of knowledge. As with its factual compendia, in which each detail signifies a larger ­whole, the AASS’s panoramic pictures provide a broad overview of slavery. Views of Slavery (Figure 44) exemplifies both of the AASS’s panoramic forms: the composite picture and the compendium broadside.30 Taken on its own, the upper left image is a panoramic landscape of a sugar plantation, with a bucolic scene of slave ­labor in the foreground and a scene of torture, a slave being whipped, in the background. By allowing viewers to see to the horizon, the panoramic picture extends their sight beyond what slaveholders would have them see—­a peaceful work scene—to the truth of the southern system—­cruelty. The print’s panoramic perspective exposes what slaveholders attempt to hide when they paint an idealized picture of slave life. By situating this scene along with five o ­ thers in a grid-­like pattern, the print details vari­ous aspects of slavery—­ plantation life, modes of punishment, slave auctions, ­family separations and kidnappings, the slave trade—­a nd synthesizes this visual knowledge into a cohesive ­whole. Taken together, the scenes offer an extensive overview of slavery even as they foreground for the viewer its most shocking aspects: the naked man hanging by his wrists as he is whipped; the enslaved m ­ other, hands outstretched, begging not to be separated from her c­ hildren; and the enslaved man being sold at auction. While the print as a ­whole assimilates its parts into a single picture of slavery’s inhumanity (as the framing words instruct), each panoramic image places its particularities within a larger landscape in order to expose slavery’s systematic atrocities. The long line of coffled slaves in the distance marching t­ oward a ship, in the image in the lower right side, discloses the greater Atlantic economy of slavery that underpins the economic negotiations in the foreground; the tortured, auctioned, or separated man or w ­ oman who stands or kneels at the center of the images, often framed on ­either side by the next victim, is represented as one in an endless line of enslaved p ­ eople whom the system of slavery w ­ ill pro­cess. In emphasizing the distant horizon line and providing a wide-­angle view, t­ hese panoramic pictures promise viewers full access to the scene of slavery even as they show how slavery’s system extends far beyond the pictures’ frames. Similarly, the AASS broadside A Bird’s Eye View of American Slavery (no longer extant) provides both a visual and textual compendium of slavery’s merciless brutality and adopts the pa­norama’s holistic mode of seeing. Described as illustrated with seven “cuts of the vari­ous ‘instruments of cruelty’ which belong to [slavery’s] bloody system,” it also includes “a multitude of appropriate and

Figure 44. Views of Slavery (New York, 1836). Courtesy of the Library Com­pany of Philadelphia.

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striking facts, mostly derived from slaveholders.”31 Compiled by Nathaniel Southard, editor of the antislavery almanac, the print is advertised in the AASS’s cata­logue as a “LARGE SHEET, GIVING a bird’s eye view of American Slavery” and promoted in a short article in The Emancipator u ­ nder the tag line “ALL AT ONE VIEW.”32 Both descriptions invoke the pa­norama’s giganticism (via the large sheet and type font) and its all-­seeing bird’s-­eye view. Through the pa­ norama’s im­mense size, which brings its subject clearly into view, and omniscient perspective, which provides a comprehensive understanding of its topic, the broadside lays claim to its perceptual power in order to make slavery’s horrors legible and establish antislavery’s view of it—­its ocular knowledge—as authoritative. The AASS’s panoramic pictures represent slavery as a scopic regime. As Nicholas Mirzoeff shows, plantation slavery was a highly visual complex: a “sovereign space” of white power produced through the slaveholders’ visual surveillance and oversight.33 The AASS’s pictures both explicate and critique the slaveholder’s power­f ul sight lines. In its landscape scenes, the overseer embodies the vertical vision of an elevated, panoptic perspective, while the enslaved person remains embedded in the landscape, with l­ imited vision.34 Through his specular dominance over the subjugated body of the slave, the slaveholder asserts his control. Depicted on h ­ orse­back leading a slave gang or aggressively poised with an instrument of torture raised high in his hand, the slaveholder is always situated above the enslaved, his superior vantage point denoting his mastery. The enslaved person’s head is often bowed down in t­ hese images, eyes focused on the ground and obscured or covered.35 When an enslaved person looks up, it is often into the face of a white master, pleading for his or her life. The slaveholder’s eyes, on the other hand, are usually trained on the black body from above. ­W hether or not he is physically positioned above the slave in the image (which he often is), the raised whip or other object of torture, as an extension of his own body, gives him access to that aerial view. The visual message is straightforward: the slaveholder’s surveillance is violently oppressive, and his command over the enslaved—­both scopic and ­actual—is absolute. The landscape scene featured in George Bourne’s Picture of Slavery in the United States of Amer­i­ca (Figure 45) depicts the enslaved man who lies tied to a tree as sightless (“lying on his face” according to the text, staring straight ahead at the tree trunk in the image) as well as helpless. The standing slaveholder, who looks down, with his whip hovering high above his head and merging into the lines of the sky, is shown as omnipotent.36 The enslaved man, represented as a naked body barely distinguishable from the tree branch, is embedded in and imprisoned by slavery’s gothic landscape; the so-­called civilized slaveholder, fully dressed, even wearing a top hat, towers over the landscape, his whip an

Figure 45. “Torturing American Citizens,” in George Bourne, Picture of Slavery in the United States of Amer­i­ca (Middletown, CT: Edwin Hunt, 1834), print facing page 129. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

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extension of his panoptic perspective and a sign of its cruelty. Ever the object of the gaze, the slave cannot escape the slaveholder’s surveillance or the torture that actualizes it. Despite the promise of the rights of citizenship extended to him in the illustration’s title—­“ Torturing American Citizens”—­t he enslaved man remains a traumatized body in the image. Slavery’s visual regime, the picture asserts, is coercive and cruel.37 Besides critiquing plantation slavery through its panoptic perspective, the AASS’s panoramic pictures provide another elevated vantage point for their viewers to identify with. While many AASS images critique their audiences’ inaction through the figure of the onlooker, who sees the suffering of the enslaved but passively stands by without intervening, its panoramic pictures do the opposite. Th ­ ese images abstract their viewers, asking them to identify with a high-­flying national symbol, such as the flag, rather than an embodied person, and underscore their ability to vanquish slavery.38 Offering an alternative aerial viewpoint—­one associated with liberty rather than oppression, sympathy rather than surveillance—­t hese pictures enabled northern audiences to visualize their dominance over southern slavery and see themselves as benevolent spectators of the slave’s suffering. By adopting antislavery’s panoramic point of view, northern viewers gained access to their moral sovereignty. The pa­norama’s bird’s-­eye perspective is pre­sent in antislavery images from the outset of the movement’s visual campaign in the eigh­teenth c­ entury. The broadside illustrating the slave ship the Brookes (1788), which provides overhead as well as cutaway side views of a slave ship to make the slave trade visibly understandable, as well as Wedgwood’s image of the kneeling slave (1787), his face upturned in prayer ­toward a superior, sympathetic figure, place their antislavery audiences in the bird’s-­eye view, constructing their perspective as elevated, all-­seeing, and godlike.39 Benjamin Lundy’s Genius of Universal Emancipation, one of U.S. antislavery’s first periodicals (semicontinuous from 1821 to 1839), published both woodblock prints and copper plate engravings that feature panoramic landscapes of slavery. ­These images established the visual vocabulary—­ the whip, the flag, the slave—­t hat the AASS would utilize throughout the 1830s and beyond.40 The 1823 woodblock print “United States’ Internal Slave Trade” (Figure 46), pictures an overseer on ­horse­back, leading a coffle of shackled slaves that extends beyond the picture’s frame through a dark landscape. The slaveholder’s whip, held high above the captives’ bowed heads, creates a cut mark through the sky that extends his sight line ­toward the sun and figures his perspective as both aerial and oppressive. The whip, associated with the sun’s power, harshly pushes the slaves’ heads down t­ oward the ground. The text that surrounds the image explains its meaning. Ironic words frame the image: “Hail Columbia, Happy Land!” and “A GLORIOUS SPECTACLE!!!” The

Figure 46. “United States’ Internal Slave Trade,” Genius of Universal Emancipation, January 1823, 97. Courtesy of Proquest American Periodical Series.

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­ escription below pronounces the illustration “a faint picture of the detestable d traffic in h ­ uman flesh, carried on . . . ​in violation of the fundamental princi­ ples of our government, and precepts of Chris­tian­ity, and the eternal rules of justice and equity.”41 Slavery is a tyrannical foe (and the picture itself but a pale repre­sen­ta­tion of its horrors) whose practices are a threat to national and Christian ideals. Against the slaveholder’s formidable whip, the picture provides another lofty vantage point: the flag. Placed at the center of the image, near the whip and at an equal height, the flag shares the slaveholder’s aerial viewpoint with a crucial difference: it promises freedom rather than oppression. A symbol of the national ideals of liberty and equality that the antislavery periodical announces as its own by placing a quotation from the Declaration of In­de­pen­dence directly beneath its masthead, the flag stands for antislavery’s views as well as its viewpoint. Held by the slave (instead of imposed over him like the whip), the flag represents liberty as a perspectival position: the free-­floating and commanding perspective of the bird’s-­eye view. As an extension of his body, the flag provides the enslaved man symbolic access to this aerial position. Positioned in the sky as a beacon like the North Star, the flag creates an open space of freedom in the dark sky above his upright head. By aligning antislavery’s aerial perspective with the slave’s freedom, the flag casts antislavery’s perspective as one of access and equality against slavery’s surveillance and subjugation. Although the flag and the whip are equally elevated in the image, the flag is its moral center. The picture’s vying viewpoints and framing words—­“­SHALL THY FAIR BANNERS O’ER OPPRESSION WAVE?”—­figure owner­ship of the national landscape as a b ­ attle between the whip and the flag over the status of the enslaved. Th ­ ose who march through the claustrophobic landscape without even a forward-­looking view remain sightless pawns in this perspectival war. Conversely, the periodical’s readers are called to action through their ability to see: “LOOK AT IT, again and again; and then say ­whether you ­will permit so disgraceful, so inhuman, and so wicked a practice to continue in our country,” the image’s caption demands.42 Located outside of the image, their eyes can fly to the flag’s aerial viewpoint whereas enslaved p ­ eople who stand beneath it cannot see it. Moreover, the newspaper’s readers can even place the slaveholder ­under their gaze: both physically, as they look down on the picture in their hands, and figuratively, as they read the scathing words that enclose it. Within the image, the slaveholder’s vantage point may be visually equal to antislavery’s (however morally inferior); within the larger page view—­where the picture is situated beneath the masthead, Genius of Universal Emancipation, and surrounded by lines of type that announce abolition’s plan for slavery’s downfall—­antislavery’s viewpoint is presented as victorious. By seeing the scene of slavery through the



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text’s antislavery frame and identifying with the flag rather than the whip, the paper’s readers are assured of their ability to eradicate slavery from the national landscape. This perspectival power dynamic is also evident in another panoramic picture from the Genius, the 1830 copperplate engraving titled “United States Slave Trade” (Figure 47).43 ­Here the foreground is dominated by the slave trader on ­horse­back, who directs the line of shackled slaves as well as the viewer’s gaze ­toward the slave ship. The slave trader’s ability to command the scene through his pointing arm (which is mirrored in his ­horse’s raised leg) depends upon the whip tucked horizontally ­under his other arm; his pent-up power is made explicit by the raised whip in the background and the unfurled whip in the foreground as well as by his elevated position, which parallels slavery’s other aerial viewpoint in this image: the ship’s mast. With his outstretched arm and whip and his hat as the apex of the triangle, the slave trader’s body resembles the shape of the ship’s mast and rigging. The horizontal lines of the image reinforce the oppression of the slaveholder’s panoptic perspective: the line of slaves in the foreground, in the background, and on the ship; the horizontal lines depicting land and ­water; the ship’s horizontal timbers; the slaveholder’s whip and arm; and the ship’s crosshatchings that mark the ship’s hold as a prison. While sails and

Figure 47. “United States Slave Trade,” Genius of Universal Emancipation, July 1830, print facing page 50. Courtesy of Oberlin College Libraries Special Collections.

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rigging press down on the captives on the deck and deny them aerial access, the slaves in the foreground remain chained within the landscape, heads bowed or raised only in supplication, ­under the watchful eye of the trader. The picture si­ mul­ta­neously visualizes the South as an imperial power, trafficking with faraway places, and critiques its trade as inhumane. In opposition to the slaveholder’s oppression, the image provides a symbol of liberty: the Capitol dome, recently completed in 1824, flying a large American flag. Dominating the right side of the image, the dome mirrors and serves as a counterweight to the slave ship with its streaming standard on the left side. Set at the same height as the slave ship’s mast and paralleling its triangular structure (the center dome is flanked by two smaller domes on e­ ither side), the Capitol dome of northern nationalism (located in the northeast quadrant of the picture) is represented as perspectivally equal to the southern ship of empire. Moreover, it is figured as superior to it—­both visually and morally. Hidden in the background, peeking out from ­behind the hills, its curved aperture hovering above the linear oppression of the rest of the image, it is the only part of the picture f­ ree from slavery’s scopic command. Located within the picture yet beyond the scene, the dome epitomizes the pa­norama’s commanding vantage point—­t he more distant the viewpoint, the more comprehensive the view—as well as its connection to state power.44 Situated on the far horizon and in the same place as the sun in the woodblock “United States’ Internal Slave Trade” (see Figure 46), the dome scopically dominates the field of vision: surveying the scene of slavery below, it places the slaveholder in the nation’s sights.45 With its flag and symbolic placement as a city on the hill, the dome is also a forceful beacon of freedom. By locating it directly above the head of the enslaved w ­ oman, and mimicking its curvature, the image aligns northern nationalism with antislavery: the flag, dome, and ­woman form a stacked, vertical column on the right side of the image. The dome hovers protectively over the enslaved m ­ other, as she hovers over her c­ hildren. “United States Slave Trade,” as its title signifies, poses slavery as a national prob­lem that northern viewers can solve by adopting an antislavery viewpoint. In actively refusing the slave trader’s forceful direction and allowing their eyes to be drawn to the dome and its benevolent power instead, viewers visually enact northern nationalism’s victory over the slave South. While the image foregrounds slavery’s threat to the country’s nascent nationalism, its background assures northern viewers of their po­liti­cal power as long as they ally with the antislavery cause. Focused more on projecting the North’s sovereignty over the South than imagining the slave’s freedom, the picture leaves the enslaved chained in the landscape: the flag and its bird’s-­eye view of freedom, which hovers over the enslaved ­woman’s head, remain a distant hope on the horizon.



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A third image from the Genius (Figure 48) portrays northern nationalism in more critical terms. A crude woodblock print (1823), it depicts a line of shackled slaves marching by the Capitol, u ­ nder the heading “behold, behold this cruel chain.” The Capitol dome flanked by flags and situated in the upper/ northern section of the image, once again figures northern nationalism as scopically commanding: the dome and flags are the highest vantage points in the picture, their height accentuated by the verticality of the Capitol’s columns and win­dows as well as the lines of its fence. The faceless slaves, situated in the lower/southern part of the picture, are again represented as sightless. The horizontal lines of the lower section and the rudimentary draftsmanship that makes the foreground look as if it is under­ground underscore the slaves’ l­ imited, earthbound perspective. Buried in the ground beneath the Capitol, they are blocked from the bird’s-­eye view of freedom. Represented as oppressive rather than liberating (the Capitol’s vertical lines make it look like a prison), northern nationalism—­which refuses to abolish slavery from its Capitol—is presented in

Figure 48. “Behold, Behold This Cruel Chain!!!,” Genius of Universal Emancipation, November 1823, 68. Courtesy of Proquest American Periodical Series.

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slavery’s panoptic terms. As the poem printed above the picture charges, “cruel tyrants remain” on the Capitol’s “sacred spot.”46 The standing enslaved man, not the flags (which point ­toward a sinister figure peeking over the Capitol fence), occupies the moral center of the image. Shaking his manacled hands ­toward “Heaven,” he protests the “impious stain” of slavery that defiles the nation’s banner; clanking his “heavy chains,” he agitates for the freedom the flags are supposed to symbolize.47 Despite the weight of slavery, he stands to gain liberty’s aerial perspective; his view, however, is blocked by a menacing man situated just above his raised hands and staring down on him. The man, who wears a black hat similar to that of the slaveholder’s in the other two images, represents, as the text states, a member of Congress. Through its visual echo and explicit text, the picture indicts the government for its inaction against slavery, given its eyewitness knowledge of it, and its complicity with that system. The viewer, however, can escape condemnation by enacting the picture’s antislavery viewpoint. In beholding the slave’s chains (as the text instructs), the viewer’s eye travels diagonally across the image up to the flag (each of the enslaved man’s arms lines up with one of the two flags), si­mul­ta­ neously escaping the Capitol’s imprisoning fence and enacting the liberty that the slave seeks. The antislavery viewer, who sees with the enslaved man and completes his sight line, enacts the national ideals that the congressman-­as-­ slaveholder contradicts. The picture not only warns of slavery’s encroachment on northern po­liti­cal power (the lower part of the image is given two-­t hirds of the space) and critiques Congress’s inaction as immoral; it insists that the nation can be redeemed through the adoption of an antislavery perspective. Moreover, it allows the slave, rather than the flag or the dome, to embody this perspective. Dominating the foreground normally occupied by the slaveholder, the standing slave, despite the coarseness of the image, has an identifiable eye. He may continue to be imprisoned in the landscape, looking up ­toward the promise of freedom on the horizon, but he has the power to disclose the nation’s complicity with slavery and to direct the viewer’s eye t­oward its higher, heavenly ideal of liberty for all. Throughout the 1830s, the AASS followed the Genius’s visual strategy and framed the debate over slavery’s place in the national landscape in perspectival terms. Garrison, who served as an associate editor of the Genius in 1829, redeployed its visual vocabulary in The Liberator’s 1831 pictorial masthead (Figure  49).48 Another composite panoramic image, it depicts a slave ­family at auction in front of the Capitol dome. In the foreground, the auctioneer, with lifted hammer, looks down on the enslaved ­family. The parents’ heads are bent down to the ground and their weeping eyes are covered, unable to witness the separation about to take place. In the background the Capitol is topped by a large



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Figure 49. Pictorial masthead of The Liberator, 13 August 1831. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

flag bearing the word “LIBERTY,” while a slave, tied to a post, is punished by a slaveholder with a raised whip in the ­middle ground. The curved dome, like the sun which peaks out from ­behind the dark storm cloud that forms ­behind the auction scene (seemingly enveloping it), serves as a ray of hope on the horizon. The picture first and foremost foregrounds slavery’s inhumanity and its encroaching threat to the national landscape. The Capitol’s flag is significantly lower than the auction sign above the enslaved ­woman’s head that reads “HORSE MARKET.” The Capitol itself recedes into the background, a symbol of the nation’s hy­poc­risy and a beacon of its values rather than a sign of its perspectival power. The enslaved parents are also figured as perspectivally helpless: their eyes are doubly shrouded, covered not just with their hands but with white cloths; the kneeling f­ather, whose head is located directly below the auction hammer and disciplined by it, looks down, not up. If not for the large block letters—­“THE LIBERATOR.”—­running across the bottom of the image, the picture would seem to announce slavery’s supremacy over both the enslaved population and the nation. The imposing block-­letter title, however, flips the visual script. The letters’ horizontal hatching, which mirrors that of the land and sky, figure the newspaper’s title as an extension of the scene’s foreground. Connecting word to image brings a dif­fer­ent argument into view. Wedged between two proclamations of liberty, the antislavery newspaper title in the near foreground and the nation’s flag in the far background, slavery’s cruel sights are surrounded by freedom on both sides. The masthead’s title extends beyond the picture’s borders, further encompassing it and acting as a visual barrier to slavery’s encroachment; the period at the end asserts the inevitability of antislavery’s aims. By subscribing to the paper’s antislavery views, which foreground the nation’s values (the title physically brings the flag’s

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distant words to the forefront), readers can supplant slavery. The masthead may not represent northern nationalism’s perspective as aerially equal to slavery’s within the image, but it declares that the antislavery reader who views the scene from the title’s wide-­angle, panoramic perspective and enacts the nation’s ideals can conquer slave power. The AASS’s panoramic prints from the 1830s also use the whip, slave, flag, Capitol dome, and another high-­flying national symbol, the ea­gle, to picture antislavery’s centrality to the success of northern nationalism.49 In the landscape scene entitled, “How Slavery Honors Our Country’s Flag” (Figure 50) from the Anti-­Slavery Rec­ord (1835), the unfurled flag and the whip b ­ attle for perspectival dominance over an unending line of downward-­gazing slaves. The large flag carried by an unseen slave in the double-­column line serves less as a symbol of the slaves’ freedom than as a symbol of slavery’s glaring assault on the nation’s ideals, as the picture’s title makes clear. Emanating from the coffle chain and hemmed in between the merciless whip on one side and the black bird, a harbinger of death, on the other (both of which are aerially elevated), the flag is imprisoned by slavery. Instead of signaling a military parade, which would showcase the flag’s might, as the eyewitness to the scene in the text’s commentary expects, the flag is part of a “march of despair”: the slaves’ doom inextricably tied to the nation’s destruction.50 By looking with the eyewitness, who gazes down on the scene from the top of an “ascent” in indignation at the flag’s treatment, the reader of the Rec­ord, who achieves the eyewitness’s panoramic perspective by being located outside of the frame, is called upon to liberate the nation along with the slave.51 The AASS’s 1836 panoramic broadside Slave Market of Amer­i­ca (Figure 51) directly implicates northern nationalism in southern slavery as it urges its readers/viewers to take antislavery action to save the nation. This factual and pictorial compendium provides textual evidence as well as ocular proofs to make vis­i­ble the District of Columbia’s slave trade: prisons and ports, as well as violations of the nation’s ideals. Enveloped by print, the broadside’s serialized cuts are meant to be read like a text: from left to right, top to bottom. While the bottom two rows provide facts and scenes of the slave trade, the top row establishes the broadside’s conceptual argument: that slavery does not belong in the nation’s capital and, hence, citizens have the “RIGHT TO INTERFERE.”52 The first and third images juxtapose a reading of the Declaration of In­de­pen­dence, ­under the heading “ ‘The Land of the ­Free,’ ” with a landscape image (very similar to the Genius’s) of a slave coffle walking by the Capitol, u ­ nder the heading “ ‘The Home of the Oppressed.’ ” The accusation that slavery is encroaching on the landscape of freedom and warping the nation’s ideals is explicit. The broadside’s title exposes the capital’s trade and c­ ounters it with “The Word of God,”



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Figure 50. “How Slavery Honors Our Country’s Flag,” Anti-­Slavery Rec­ord 1.2 (February 1835), 13. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

“The Declaration of In­de­pen­dence,” and “The Constitution of the United States.” It is up to the AASS as well as the enslaved themselves, who raise their manacled hands in the air and sing, “Hail Columbia! happy land” in protest as they pass the imposing dome flanked by flags, to show the “guilt of this ­whole nation in suffering slavery to disgrace the capital of our country.”53

Figure 51. Slave Market of Amer­i­ca (New York: AASS, 1836). Courtesy of the Library of Congress.



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The center image in the first row (Figure 52), which mediates between the nation’s ideals on the left and its realities on the right, envisions the ­battle for the heart of the nation—­its capital—­t hrough a bird’s-­eye view. A map of the Capitol district taken from above, it pre­sents “Part of Washington City” with its state ave­nues as a maze marked only by the Capitol and the district’s prisons; its title informs the viewer that the district contains 7,000 enslaved ­people. The map resembles slavery’s panoptic landscape. The runaway slave, inset in the lower right-­hand corner, stands in for the larger slave population. Pursued by a fugitive advertisement as well as instruments of punishment—­t he chain, whip, and pick elevated above him—he navigates the dark landscape of slavery that blocks not only his forward but also his aerial view: he is looking back at his pursuers while the imposing mountains he must climb to escape hover directly above his head. The Capitol dome is just on the other side of the mountains, but when the runaway reaches its beacon, he is caught in another confining terrain. Aligned with the slave coffle in the right-­hand image (the slave driver’s arm directs the viewer’s eye t­oward the runaway in the center image), the runaway

Figure 52. “Part of Washington City” from Slave Market of Amer­i­ca (New York: AASS, 1836). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

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breaks f­ ree from slavery’s chains only to be caught in the Capitol district’s labyrinth. Unable to gain an elevated position from which to view a way out, he ­will—as the diagonal line of his body suggests—­run past the Capitol and down Pennsylvania Ave­nue into “Robeys Old Prison” (the name itself blocks any forward movement). Literally boxed in by both the landscape of slavery and northern nationalism, the runaway finds no relief. The center image provides an alternative perspective in the figure of the kneeling slave. Set in the lower-­left corner of the map in proximity to the ideals that the left-­hand picture proclaims, the kneeling slave looks ­toward the Capitol in supplication. In a three-­dimensional rendering of the map, his sight line would extend to the top of the dome. The Capitol district resembles the landscape of slavery but it can still be brought back to its ideals. By responding to the kneeling slave’s call, “Am I Not a Man and a ­Brother,” whose curved letters above his head recall the shape of the Capitol dome, viewers can heal the national landscape that, as the map’s creek and canal markings suggest, has been riven by slavery. The AASS periodical ­Human Rights conveys a similar message through the side-­by-­side placement of two images from the broadside—­the Capitol and the Franklin and Armfield Slave Prison—on its front page, above a petition for the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia.54 Viewers, it argues, have the power to realign northern nationalism with its ideals by becoming antislavery activists. “Moral Map of the United States” (Figure 53), published in Julius Rubens Ames’s antislavery compendium, “Liberty” (1837), pre­sents a more expansive vision of the national landscape through the pa­norama’s all-­embracing view.55 Drawn from the perspective of the sky rather than merely an elevated overlook, the map pictures slavery’s menacing spread as well as institutional antislavery’s key panoramic effects. Located in the compendium directly ­after a speech delivered by John Quincy Adams in the House of Representatives affirming Congress’s right to limit slavery and criticizing U.S. aggression ­toward Mexico as a prelude to the expansion of slavery into the Southwest, the map represents the country’s imperial aims as closely aligned with slavery: the lines that radiate out into the ocean and westward into the Republic of Texas, Mexico, and Indian lands are more prominent than t­ hose along the northern coast.56 Territorial enlargement, the map argues, w ­ ill result in slavery’s conquest over the North as well: the “Boundary Line of Slavery,” barely vis­i­ble on the map, is easily breached, and the ea­gle’s black wing of slavery points ominously northward. Taking up more than two-­t hirds of the map, southern slavery is a clear threat to northern nationalism. By dividing the nation between North and South, freedom and slavery, top and bottom, white and black, right and wrong, the map also surfaces the

Figure 53. “Moral Map of the United States,” in Julius Rubens Ames, comp., “Liberty”: The Image and Superscription on ­Every Coin Issued by the United States of Amer­i­ca ([New York: AASS], 1837), 66. Courtesy of the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.

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po­liti­cal/spatial argument embedded in antislavery’s landscape images, especially their conflation of region and race. Throughout institutional antislavery’s black and white engravings, the blank sky of heavenly freedom is associated with the benevolent white North, whereas the dark ground of the gothic South denotes the slaveholder’s wickedness. By depicting northern liberty as white, antislavery’s panoramic pictures make it difficult to identify as both black and ­free.57 Hence, they constantly depict enslaved ­people as merged into the blackened landscape of the slave South, their only hope for an aerial view a white dome or white stars and stripes in a faraway white sky. They also omit ­free black viewpoints from their frames; instead, they foreground the perspective of white northern nationalism and assert antislavery’s viewpoint as integral to its power. The map’s two aerial figures make this linkage clear: the black and white ea­gle, perched mid-­picture on a streamer with the words “E PLURIBUS UNUM,” and the liberty cap of the f­ ree Republic of Mexico positioned high in the northern sky in the location usually occupied by the sun. With the ea­gle compromised, the map gives northern viewers the white liberty cap from Mexico’s coinage as another high-­flying symbol with which to identify.58 By following Mexico’s example and abolishing slavery (which Mexico did in 1829), the North, acting as its own nation, can take back the landscape. Located both above and outside the picture frame (and just above Lake Superior), antislavery’s panoramic viewpoint is presented once again as perspectivally and morally commanding. Spreading liberty’s heavenly white light and “diffusing its radiance universally,” it promises to expel the darkness and depravity below. The back of the coin, “FREEDOM’s Ea­gle destroying the Serpent—­Tyranny,” which is described in the text though not vis­i­ble on the page, underscores how northern nationalism (freedom’s ea­gle) depends upon the adoption of an antislavery viewpoint (the white liberty cap) to eradicate, as the Lafayette quotation beneath the picture states, the “dark spot” of slavery (the serpent) from “the face of the nation.” By appropriating a symbol of the slave’s liberty as a sign of the white North’s ultimate victory over southern slavery, the map, like so many of antislavery’s panoramic pictures, excludes the slave from freedom’s aerial view. The antislavery win­dow blinds announced in The Emancipator in 1839, and for sale at its office, further disclose how antislavery’s panoramic pictures proj­ ect white northern power and privilege. Just ­after the publication of Theodore Weld’s American Slavery as It Is, The Emancipator, along with The Liberator and the Colored American, carried an advertisement for an “elegant pair” of “Anti-­ Slavery Win­dow Blinds,” illustrated with scenes of slavery taken from descriptions from southern newspapers, like t­ hose compiled in Weld’s tract.59 The advertisement applauds the “arts of embellishment” for employing “their



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influence in f­ avor of liberty” and describes the “transparent win­dow blinds” as follows: The main picture represents the pursuit and murder of a fugitive from slavery: the hunters with their r­ ifles and broad hats, the blood-­hound on the scent, the poor trembling MAN hiding b ­ ehind a rock, make up one group; and in another are seen the planters wiping their artillery, and the hounds retiring satiated with game, while in a stream appears the wounded and ­dying victim, reddening the ­waters with his blood. . . . ​ Under­neath is the American Ea­gle, sustaining the Declaration of In­de­ pen­dence, while two kneeling slaves supplicate for the application of its sublime truths to the vindication of their rights. The ­whole is surrounded with an elegant border of the sugar cane, cotton plant, and rice grain. The article is got up with much taste, and handsomely finished; and pre­ sents the subject of negro wrongs in an impressive light. We wish ­every parlor in New York had such a remembrancer for the slave.60 Created by an “ingenious painter,” t­ hese blinds are a domestic version of the moving pa­norama in which their scenes, instead of scrolling from side to side, are drawn down or up. Thad Logan notes that con­temporary parlor win­dows ­were “generally equipped with venetian or roller blinds, set b ­ ehind the first layer of curtains, to control the amount of sunlight entering the room.”61 Deploying the parlor’s decorative technology and panoramic ornamentation (scenic wall­ paper, painted screens, landscape drawings), the blinds exhibit slavery as a visual spectacle and transform it into a tasteful middle-­class parlor entertainment (crops that depend upon the brutality of slave ­labor are transmuted into an elegant border).62 “Drawn to . . . ​life” and corroborated by a source text (the advertisement refers readers to specific pages in Weld’s tract), they enact the pa­norama’s realism by providing a win­dow onto slavery’s distant sights.63 The blinds’ visual argument is a familiar one. Their pictures depict the planters’ scopic regime—­signified by the r­ifle with which the hunters sight their ­human prey—as violent, bloody, and cruel.64 The runaway is both sightless, hidden b ­ ehind a rock or d ­ ying in the stream, and visually possessed by o ­ thers: the slaveholder as well as the northern parlor viewer.65 Occupying the pa­norama’s “armchair view,” immersed yet removed, northern viewers can survey the scene of slavery, sympathizing with the trembling fugitive (who is, the text underscores, a “MAN”) and censuring the slaveholder’s cruelty, while also flying, with the ea­gle, above it, f­ ree from implication in it.66 Cocooned in their parlors, they can identify with the emblematic ea­gle, who represents national as well as antislavery values (the slaves kneel to it), and its bird’s-­eye view. Sitting outside

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the scene, northern viewers experience their scopic and moral superiority while also remaining safely out of sight. Everywhere and nowhere, the panoramic perspective offers both omniscience and invisibility. The slave and slaveholder remain embodied—­despite their unequal sight lines—in t­ hese scenes, exposed to trauma or moral critique; the northern viewer, whose position is occluded by being abstracted into an aerial national symbol, escapes scopic subjugation.67 Through their simulated, yet seemingly transparent, spectacles of slavery, the blinds offer northern parlor viewers a reflection of their empowered subjectivity. Not all of the AASS’s panoramic pictures allow northern viewers to remain invisible or unimplicated. The cover image (Figure 54) of The AAS Almanac for 1843 (1842), edited by Lydia Maria Child, pre­sents a recognizable, yet starkly dif­f er­ent, view.68 It utilizes the same stock symbols of the Capitol dome with the flag on top, the tortured slave lying prone in the landscape, and the aerial ea­gle, but with a crucial difference: ­there is no slaveholder or congressman in this picture to take the brunt of the blame. Rather, it is the dark ea­gle, with its strong talons and aggressively pointed beak, who is the figure of cruelty and oppression. Occupying the position of the slaveholder (the runaway m ­ other looks back at the ea­gle who pursues her), the ea­gle also acts as an instrument of torture: its talons scar the enslaved ­woman’s back instead of the whip; its sharp beak is poised to stab out her eyes. Its horizontally linear head and wings further imprison her, pressing her down to the ground; its aerial viewpoint (its eye is vertically aligned with the top of the flag pole where the ornamental ea­gle often sits) scopically dominates her. Powerfully embodied, the ea­gle is no longer an abstract emblem but a bird catching prey. Having landed on the ground, it is fully implicated in the scene, no longer flying above and apart. The Capitol dome in the background, its flag, elongated and unfurled like a whip, reinforces the collusion between northern nationalism and southern slavery. Trained to identify with the ea­gle, dome, and flag, northern viewers are ­here made the object of their own critical gaze. The only innocent figure in the image is the enslaved ­mother, whose shading is the reverse of the ea­gle’s (it has a white head and a black body whereas she has a black head and a white dress). Coded as both white and benevolent (she protectively embraces her child who also lies prone on the ground), the ­mother is the image’s moral viewpoint. By sympathizing with the slave, who is figured as a racialized reflection of the white northern viewer, and hence identifying as antislavery (protecting her from the nation’s cruelty, as she protects her child), northern viewers maintain their innocence without losing their scopic power. Staring back at the commanding ea­gle, as the enslaved w ­ oman does with the fierceness of a m ­ other’s love, and confronting its complicity with slavery, antislavery viewers stand up for the slave

Figure 54. Front cover of The American Anti-­Slavery Almanac for 1843 (New York: AASS, 1842). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

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as well as the nation’s ideals. In seeing with the enslaved w ­ oman rather than the ea­gle, northern antislavery viewers gain access to a dif­fer­ent dome—­one that does not fly the whip. This smaller dome, situated above the m ­ other’s and child’s curved heads, may not yet be equal in height, and hence power, to the central dome, but it offers a more emancipatory view. The back page of The AAS Almanac for 1843 (Figure 55) underscores the nation’s complicity with slavery as well as its reliance on antislavery for its liberation. The back image features the flag as a whip (both have similar serpentine shapes) and its pole as a whipping post. Firmly planted in the ground rather than flying in the sky, and no longer held by the slave as a symbol of his access to the aerial viewpoint of freedom, this flag, like the ea­gle on the cover, is implicated in the scene of slavery. The flag now imprisons the slave, tying him to the landscape and blocking his vision of the liberty cap above. The flag’s stripes, as the accompanying poem explicates, are a metonym for the lashes the whip inflicts; its stars a sign of the “white man’s liberty” alone.69 Northern nationalism, as signified by the flag’s upper white stars, may stand above southern slavery’s black stars of “shame,” but it remains connected to, and hence complicit in, the South’s oppression.70 With the flag compromised, the viewer is asked to identify with the image’s highest vantage point and its shining symbol: antislavery’s white liberty cap. Located in the ea­gle’s usual position atop the flag pole, the antislavery emblem assumes the authority of that national symbol. Sitting outside of the flag’s frame, it promises the liberty that the slave seeks. By imaginatively placing the liberty cap on his head or seeing his body as part of the flag (his black torso and white pants continue the flag’s striped pattern), rather than separate from or beneath it, the antislavery viewer unties the knot that binds the enslaved as well as the nation to slavery, enabling both to break ­free. The AASS continued to advance its perspectival visual arguments throughout the antebellum period, critiquing both the South and the North for their role in slavery and picturing antislavery as occupying a vantage point superior to both. The engraving (Figure 56) that accompanies John Pierpont’s “Ode” in the Rochester fair’s gift book Autographs for Freedom (1853) is an example of this argument.71 The composite panoramic image consists of a series of views of slavery (the whipping post and the slave hunt) in the lower part and a set of iconic emblems of liberty (the ea­gle, the Capitol dome with flag emitting rays of liberty, and Boston’s Bunker Hill Monument) in the upper part. Clouds create a strong horizontal dividing line between the degenerate landscape of slavery and the idealized scenery of northern nationalism.72 The division asserts the North’s difference from as well as its dominance over the South: the emblems of northern nationalism are of a higher aesthetic order, symbolic rather than realistic; moreover, situated in the heavens, above the scenes of slavery, they represent a

Figure 55. Back cover of The American Anti-­Slavery Almanac for 1843 (New York: AASS, 1842). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

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Figure 56. Engraving accompanying John Pierpont, “Ode,” in Autographs for Freedom, ed. Julia Griffiths (Boston: Jewett, 1853), print facing page 82. Courtesy of Harvard University Library.

superior perspectival and principled vantage point. Meant to mitigate the poem’s fear that the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 has made the North subject to the South, this picture proj­ects the North’s ascendancy. In visualizing the North’s perspectival dominance over the landscape of slavery, however, the image once again scopically subordinates the enslaved. Crouching in the southern terrain beneath the clouds, heads bowed u ­ nder the whip, the enslaved are denied access to the North’s panoramic perspective and the freedoms it represents. Tied to a post or trapped by dogs in a tree, the image’s tortured and hunted slaves are exposed instead to the perceptual power of the whip’s lash and the r­ ifle’s scope. The enslaved p ­ eople in this image have ­limited, or no, sight lines: the w ­ oman at the whipping post hides her face; the ­mother gazes down at the child she cradles; the runaway in the tree looks down at the dogs below rather than out to the horizon. Rather than providing them with symbolic access to freedom’s perspective, as some of the images discussed above do, this one imprisons the slave as the object of the North’s gaze. The ea­gle positioned above the whipped slave’s sightless head looks less like a beacon of hope than a predator surveying his domain. The sharply vertical Bunker Hill Monument, located above the runaway’s downward-­looking head and resembling a panopticon tower, surveys not just the slaveholder but the slave as well.

Figure 57. Front cover of William Wells Brown, The Anti-­Slavery Harp: A Collection of Songs, 3rd ed. (Boston: Bela Marsh, 1851). Courtesy of Bancroft Library, University of California, Berkeley.

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In its efforts to declare its perceptual—­and hence political—­power over the spectacle of southern slavery, the North also asserts scopic dominance over the enslaved. ­Here again, antislavery’s iconography emphasizes northern nationalism’s power rather than the slave’s freedom. The AASS’s panoramic pictures—­its “moral picturesque”—­were foundational to the formation of white northern nationalism.73 Through a repetitive iconography, they consolidated the country’s nascent national identity as northern and antislavery. Projecting northern empowerment, they assured northern audiences of their own benevolence and national ascendancy as long as they aligned themselves with the antislavery cause. Central to the pro­cess of nationalization in the antebellum era, the antislavery movement visualized the conflict over slavery as a sectional one as early as the 1820s.74 Moreover, in promoting not only regionalized but also racialized codes of seeing, it configured freedom as the domain of whites.75 Envisioning liberty as a perspectival position as well as a geographic space, the AASS’s panoramic pictures drew their white northern viewers’ eyes to aerial vantage points while leaving the enslaved sightless in the landscape, building white supremacy and black subjection into their visual structures. In training their northern audiences to see themselves as superior not only to the South but also to the slave, they constructed national identity as white. Given institutional antislavery’s white-­generated and white-­directed visual field, how did African American activists picture their freedom and claim their place in the national landscape? How did they come to inhabit the perspectival position of liberty? Through both written and visual repre­sen­ta­tions of slavery and freedom, black cultural producers appropriated the AASS’s panoramic perspective to assert their “right to look.”76 As inheritors of the AASS’s visual genealogy and sometimes even its plates, black activists recast institutional antislavery’s established codes to create a countervisuality. William Wells Brown, for instance, reprinted Child’s more critical images from the antislavery almanac on the front and back cover of his 1848 songbook, The Anti-­Slavery Harp (Figure 57). It is to black activists’ appropriation, critique, and reenvisioning of the AASS’s panoramic perspective that I now turn.

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Fugitive Sight: African American Pa­noramas of Slavery and Freedom

Early in his Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave (1849), Henry Bibb runs away ­after being flogged, fleeing to “the highest hills of the forest, pressing [his] way to the North for refuge.”1 Blocked by the Ohio River—­“To [him] it was an impassable gulf”—­Bibb stands on the “lofty banks” of the river’s bluff, gazing upon the “splendid steamboats” that “wafted with all their magnificence up and down the river” and observing how the “fishes of the ­water, the fowls of the air, the wild beasts of the forest, all appeared to be ­free,” while he remained “an unhappy slave” (29–30). Even standing on this high vantage point, he is still imprisoned: “Looking over on a ­free State, and as far north as my eyes could see, I have eagerly gazed upon the blue sky of the ­free North, which at times constrained me to cry out from the depths of my soul, Oh! Canada, sweet land of rest—­Oh! when ­shall I get ­t here? Oh, that I had the wings of a dove, that I might soar away to where t­ here is no slavery” (29). H ­ ere he echoes Frederick Douglass’s famous apostrophe to the white-­sailed ships on the Chesapeake Bay—­“ freedom’s swift-­w inged angels”—­which Douglass also observes from “lofty banks” overlooking the bay.2 Bibb’s envisioning of liberty invokes the panoramic perspective. In the highest hills, Bibb finds refuge from flogging; standing aloft on the river bluff, he gains the ability to see the “blue sky of the f­ ree North” and, through his mind’s eye, beyond it to “Canada, sweet land of rest” (29). Imagining himself able to fly, he soars away from slavery by adopting the bird’s-­eye view. Yet the same panoramic perspective that allows him to imagine an escape from slavery’s imprisoning scenes of torture, and to view the landscape of liberty, also reveals the barriers to his freedom. The bluff’s lookout point marks the limit of his forward pro­gress: unable to board the steamship or fly like a bird, he cannot cross the Ohio River to freedom.3 White northern viewers of institutional antislavery’s panoramic pictures could abstract themselves from the terrain of

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slavery by visually identifying with benevolent national symbols located in the sky. Bibb cannot so easily follow his eye and fly away from the slave South; he must traverse the intervening landscape and gain his liberty on foot. Through his embodied viewpoint, he can momentarily access aerial vantage points, but the pathway to freedom remains grounded in the terrain. He can see freedom’s blue sky, whose true promise lies on the far horizon in Canada, not the so-­called ­free North, but it is up to him to make freedom a realized right. Bibb’s narrative exemplifies how African Americans ­adopted the AASS’s dominant visual mode—­the landscape pa­norama—to represent both slavery and freedom even as they underscored the difficulty of inhabiting its point of view. From the 1830s forward, African Americans, most of them formerly enslaved, used the pa­norama and its perspective to portray slavery and freedom in both narrative and visual forms. Charles Ball, Henry Bibb, and Frederick Douglass authored panoramic slave narratives; Douglass also created pictorial newspaper mastheads. Henry Box Brown, William Wells Brown, J. P. Ball, J. N. Still, and Anthony Burns ­were proprietors of large-­scale, moving pa­noramas, and William J. Wilson modeled his serialized story, “Afric-­American Picture Gallery” (1859), on the pa­norama’s form. Intent on endowing the enslaved and fugitives with sight, black cultural producers enabled their black subjects—­who ­were often themselves—to visualize their experiences and assert their points of view. Adapting the AASS’s panoramic vision to their own aims, they reclaimed the visual authority of the eyewitness observer, which institutional antislavery’s iconography often denied them, and reversed the plantation’s visual power dynamic by putting slavery u ­ nder their scopic purview. They also expanded the AASS’s visual lexicon, supplementing the suffering slave with the resistant runaway and establishing their own iconic aerial vantage point, the North Star. Most importantly, they insisted on picturing not just southern slavery but also black freedom. In black activists’ panoramic pictures, the enslaved are more than blind bodies in pain or carriers (but never possessors) of freedom’s perspective; they envision and claim their own emancipation. This chapter examines how black cultural producers—­many of them leading abolitionists—­understood the relation of vision to power in the antebellum era. They capitalized on new mass visual forms, especially the pa­norama, to claim their cultural authority.4 Appropriating, negotiating, and contesting the AASS’s visual discourse, they created panoramic pictures, in both word and image, to depict not just the landscape of slavery but their liberation from it. They both embraced the AASS’s panoramic perspective and critiqued it, creating a countermode of fugitive sight.5 Located in the landscape rather than flying over it, situated in the black body rather than abstracted into white nationalist symbols, the fugitive’s perspective was presented within antebellum black visual



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culture as partial and precarious. In opposition to the omniscient and empowering bird’s-­eye view, it was constricted and contingent. Always on the run, the fugitive embodied a disruptive vision rather than a stable perspective. While institutional antislavery’s panoramic perspective produced their white northern viewers as morally superior, sovereign subjects, black activists’ fugitive sight revealed the enslaved to be agents of their own liberation yet never fully f­ ree. Their panoramic pictures si­mul­ta­neously compelled viewers to comprehend African Americans’ freedom claims and to see how African Americans—­whether slave, fugitive, or ­free—­were excluded from the landscape of northern nationalism. As participants in antislavery’s evolving visual discourse, black activists repurposed the panoramic perspective to assert black sight and to expose the pa­norama’s vision of freedom as a fantasy of white empowerment. In constructing a dif­fer­ent, grounded perspectival position, black panoramists provided a more contingent vision of black liberation.

* * * The slave narrative was the textual equivalent of the pa­norama, employing a pictorial language to sketch slavery.6 As W. J. T. Mitchell notes, “description is the dominant rhetorical feature” of the slave narrative, whose “episodic structure” consists of an assemblage of scenes.7 Presented as detailed and accurate—­t he Quarterly Anti-­Slavery Magazine calls Charles Ball’s narrative, for instance, a “faithful portrait” of slavery—­t he slave narrative reveals slavery’s inner workings through one slave’s point of view.8 The slave’s eyewitness perspective provides access to slavery’s hidden sights, and the first-­person narration supplies a consistent viewpoint through which to assimilate them. Connected through the linear structure of the narrator’s journey from slavery to freedom, the slave narrative’s series of views, much like ­t hose that unrolled sequentially in the moving pa­norama or formed a sequence on an AASS broadside, coalesce into a composite picture of slavery’s systematic cruelty and the enslaved person’s enduring desire for freedom. Slave narratives use the authoritative visual techniques of the AASS’s panoramic landscape views and repeat their stock scenes even as they reframe them by providing the enslaved with perspective and by adding a new sight—­black freedom. Charles Ball’s Slavery in the United States (1836), one of the earliest antebellum slave narratives, exemplifies how the genre deployed the pa­norama’s form and perspective at its outset.9 Described in its subtitle as Containing an Account of the Manners and Usages of the Planters and Slaveholders of the South—­a Description of the Condition and Treatment of the Slaves, with Observations upon the State of Morals Amongst the Cotton Planters, and the Perils and Sufferings of

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a Fugitive Slave, Who Twice Escaped from the Cotton Country, Ball’s narrative announces itself in the pa­norama’s observational and empirical terms.10 Its editor, Isaac Fischer, states in the volume’s preface that it ­will introduce the reader “to a view of the cotton fields, and exhibit, not to his imagination, but to his very eyes, the mode of life to which the slaves on the southern plantations must conform” (xi). Claiming the veracity and verisimilitude of the visual, the book, over five hundred pages, offers a comprehensive account of southern slavery. Like the pa­norama, it claims objectivity. The title subordinates Ball’s personal story, his “Life and Adventures,” to its main focus: “Slavery in the United States” (title page). The text as a w ­ hole grafts lengthy descriptions from “creditable sources” (ii) of the South’s topography and flora, as well as slavery’s commodities and customs, onto Ball’s experience. Fischer omits or “carefully suppresse[s]” Ball’s “sentiments upon the subject of slavery” (xi) in order to pre­sent the text as “an unadorned detail of acts” (xii).11 He erases the slave’s par­tic­u­lar perspective and replaces it with the pa­norama’s seemingly transparent viewpoint in order to claim the account as objective. Although his narrative provides an extreme example of the genre’s conventional privileging of slavery’s workings over the interior thoughts and opinions of the enslaved, Ball inhabits a power­ful perspectival position in his role as eyewitness. From the outset, Ball declares his identity as that of an observer: “I observed” is an often-­used phrase (15). Arguing that “a man’s knowledge is to be valued . . . ​by what he has seen,” Ball asserts his scopic authority to give the “facts” about slavery as he “saw them” (284). Journeying southward through ­Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia, Ball reports on the landscape and contrasts dif­fer­ent modes of slavery and types of crops. His mobility through the landscape produces the wide-­angle vista of the pa­norama, allowing readers, as Keith Williams argues, to “remain in a fixed position, while enjoying the view.”12 Ball, however, also endows himself with the panoramic perspective. Unable to “shake off [his] chains” (38), he “beguile[s] [his] sorrows, by examining the state of the country” through which he travels, “observing the condition of [his] fellow-­slaves, on the plantations along the high-­road upon which [he] sojourned” (42). Fixing the landscape in his memory by repeating the names and order of the rivers he passes, he gains knowledge of his route for a ­f uture escape. As an observer, he separates himself from the landscape he traverses. Unlike the sightless slaves he sees in his march south, who “did not raise their heads . . . ​but kept their f­ aces steadily bent t­ owards the cotton-­plants” (82), he achieves some distance from slavery’s scopic subjugation. In contrast to the bowed figures in the AASS’s images of the coffle line, Ball holds his head high and asserts his liberty by looking. As chained slave and worldly traveler, he is imprisoned u ­ nder the slaveholder’s panoptic whip but places slavery u ­ nder his scrutiny. As an



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antislavery narrator, he exposes slavery to view. Through his panoramic perspective, derived from his movement through the landscape, Ball locates some leverage over slavery. Moreover, in detailing how he produces the panoramic perspective on foot while enchained, rather than from liberty’s elevated lookout point, he makes vis­i­ble the ­labor that undergirds the pa­norama’s seemingly effortless point of view.13 If Ball appropriates the observational authority of the panoramic perspective in his long southern journey, he relies on its bird’s-­eye view in his northern flight. His description of his first escape from slavery is one of the longest (seventy-­five pages) and most detailed in the slave narrative canon. While his narrative particularizes the system of slavery, it also provides an extensive rec­ ord of black re­sis­tance and attempts to self-­emancipate. During his escape, Ball loses his role as observer as he becomes a hunted runaway. Hiding from the patroller’s watchful eyes, he is “fearful to stand upright” and must instead creep “through the low ground,” occasionally “raising [him]self to [his] knees, for the purpose of obtaining a better view of t­ hings about [him]” (397). Submerged into the landscape ­under slavery’s watchful eye and traveling “­under cover of darkness” (423), he is deprived of sight. Caught in the landscape—he describes it as fraught with difficulty, darkness, and confusion—­Ball depends on the North Star’s aerial viewpoint to guide his way. By keeping “the north-­star over [his] left eye,” Ball adopts its perspectival position as his own (444). When he cannot locate the North Star ­because of the weather, he accesses its panoramic perspective by climbing “to the top of a pine-­tree that stood on the summit of a hill” and taking “a wide survey of the region around [him]” (445). Situated at the highest point in the landscape, Ball achieves a 360-­degree view: looking north, south, east, and west, he sees to “the farthest stretch of vision” ­until his “eye [is] lost in the blue transparent vault” (445). By occupying this aerial vantage point, he makes “observations” (445) about his location and maps his route ­toward freedom. Learning that he has gone too far west, he rights his course. Ball’s bird’s-­ eye view—­gained through the North Star or his own elevated viewpoint—­directs his trajectory ­toward freedom. Despite its liberatory potential, the panoramic perspective remains dangerous and uncertain for the runaway. To gain its vantage point, Ball must expose himself to view, making himself visibly vulnerable. His pursuers look for him “in the tops of the trees” (412). The panoramic perspective is not always available. Crossing “a thick and deep swamp” with “deep fo­liage” that “prevent[s] [him] from seeing the stars,” Ball becomes “totally lost” (430); weather-­bound, he is unable to “see the north-­star for the space of three weeks” and consequently makes “no pro­gress” in his journey (441). Moreover, the panoramic perspective is fleeting: Ball has no access to the North Star during the day, and he must

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return to the ground ­after achieving a treetop view. It is through the fugitive’s grounded sight, operating ­under cover of darkness by the light of the moon, that Ball, wrapped “in a veil of impenetrable secrecy” (403) and safe from “the glance of e­ very h ­ uman eye” (394), forges his way t­ oward freedom each night. When he forgets his “wariness and caution” in his anxiety to move forward and fails to “conceal [himself] before day” (460), he is captured. Discovered, he is mauled by dogs, shot, and surrounded by “a party of patrollers” before being taken to jail (461). Ball escapes from jail and finds his way north to his ­family, but his freedom is temporary. He is kidnapped many years ­later and “again reduced to the condition of a common field slave, on a cotton plantation in Georgia” (484). His final escape, hiding among cotton bales in a ship’s hold ­until it arrives in Philadelphia, relies on the fugitive’s restricted vision rather than the pa­norama’s expansive one. Replicating the ­middle passage and reproducing his commodity status, Ball reaches freedom by inhabiting the “total darkness” (511) of the hold rather than the panoramic view of the ship’s mast. Unlike the panoramic perspective, which asserts its viewers’ scopic power, Ball’s fugitive sight remains partial and provisional. Discovering that his wife and ­children have been kidnapped in the night and sold south, he laments that he is “without the least hope of ever again seeing” them (517, emphasis added). Advertised as a runaway, he lives the remainder of his life fearful of slavery’s surveillance. Ball’s narrative ends not in liberation but in defeat. Ball’s visual agency is further circumscribed by the AASS’s reframing of his text. Reissued in 1837 as volume four in The Cabinet of Freedom, the work has the image of the kneeling slave as its frontispiece (Figure 58). Ball’s narrative is thus introduced through the AASS’s customary image of the slave’s supplicant gaze.14 An introduction inserted in front of Fischer’s preface certifies the veracity of Ball’s narrative through white testimony and corroborating facts and confirms Ball’s “pictures” of slavery as “perfectly consistent” (iv) with the AASS’s standardized account. A lengthy review in the society’s Quarterly Anti-­Slavery Magazine, which excerpts large portions of his narrative, also elides Ball’s viewpoint by emphasizing its transparency. In analogizing the “perfect accuracy of [the narrative’s] picture of slavery” to a “mirror,” like “the very best plate glass, in which objects appear so clear and ‘natu­ral’ that the beholder is perpetually mistaking it for an open win­dow without any glass at all,” the review figures Ball’s perspective in the pa­norama’s ocular terms. He is an optical instrument—­a clear conduit to the scene of slavery or the “habits of his class”—­rather than a perceiving subject with his own vision.15 The reprinting of Ball’s narrative within AASS periodicals and compendia in the late 1830s underscores his lack of vision within institutional antislavery’s

Figure 58. Frontispiece of Charles Ball, Slavery in the United States: A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Charles Ball, a Black Man (New York: John S. Taylor, 1837). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

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print and visual culture. Many of ­t hese texts excerpt the sections that reinforce slavery’s cruelty and scopic power rather than the fugitive’s agency or vision.16 Thus The American Anti-­Slavery Almanac for 1838 (1837) features a picture of the runaway slave Paul (Figure 59), who hangs himself from a tree branch, instead of Ball’s escape from slavery or his bird’s-­eye view from the treetops. Paul looks down ­toward the ground, his head imprisoned by his master’s panoptic device: an iron collar with an arch of bells that towers over the him, blocking any upward view. In Ball’s narrative, “birds of prey, buzzards . . . ​ravens . . . ​and clouds of carrion crows” (335), as well as an ea­gle, circle Paul, tearing his flesh. The birds swarming Paul’s head in the almanac’s image represents a perversion of the emancipatory power of the panoramic perspective; ­here, deprived of sight by death and by the birds of prey that pick at his eyes, Paul remains imprisoned within slavery’s dark landscape. Ball’s narrative offers an implicit critique of the North’s complicity in Paul’s death by featuring the ea­gle as one of the predators, and it highlights the lengthy history of re­sis­tance that led up to the suicide, including multiple escape attempts and months as a maroon. The almanac’s

Figure 59. Illustration of Paul’s death from The American Anti-­Slavery Almanac for 1838 (Boston: Knapp, n.d.), 13. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.



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framing of this episode, however, foregrounds the degeneracy of the South’s gothic landscape and the slave’s surrender to it. Made to accord with the AASS’s visual script—­w ith the slave’s traumatized body unable to transcend the ground—­the almanac’s image reduces Ball’s complex repre­sen­ta­tion of black visuality to the society’s ste­reo­t ypical depiction of the slave’s sightlessness. Whereas Ball’s narrative, published at the AASS’s orga­nizational height, was reframed in its standardizing terms, Henry Bibb’s narrative, The Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave (1849), published well ­a fter the society’s splintering, remediated institutional antislavery’s visual codes by repurposing its prints as well as its panoramic perspective. The most illustrated slave narrative in the canon, Bibb’s text includes, as a frontispiece, a portrait of the author by the black engraver Patrick Reason along with a picture of Bibb as a runaway escaping his pursuers; ­t here are twenty engravings as well. Twelve of the prints are taken from AASS periodicals and compendia such as the Slave’s Friend, the Anti-­Slavery Rec­ord, The American Anti-­Slavery Almanac, and Julius Ames’s 1839 “Liberty”; four prints are signed by the white New York engravers Thomas W. Strong and John Caughey; and four o ­ thers are unattributed.17 As the publisher of his own narrative (he also held the copyright), Bibb sourced his images in several ways. He recycled AASS images, perhaps acquiring the plates when the AFASS loaned him $250 to produce his story, but he also commissioned new pictures, his frontispiece and maybe other images as well.18 Four images that are especially likely to have been commissioned portray par­tic­u­lar moments from his narrative and a f­ amily group that precisely matches Bibb’s: two of t­ hese images are signed by Strong, whose engraving studio was on the same street as the New York antislavery offices.19 Bibb, his wife, and his ­daughter are depicted similarly in ­t hese images (Figure 60): Bibb carries a hat, Malinda wears a turban, and their d ­ aughter is the same age in each.20 The AASS archive includes few repre­sen­ta­tions of f­ ather, m ­ other, and child (pictures with c­ hildren usually portray just one parent, most often the m ­ other); given Bibb’s emphasis throughout his text on his ­family, he likely had ­these pictures made for his book. How much control he had over the design of ­these additional white-­ engraved images remains unknown. It is evident, however, that even ­those prints not drawn from the AASS’s collection of cuts used iconography similar to the society’s.21 Bibb’s deployment of institutional antislavery’s visual field, then, was complex. His text circulates the AASS’s ste­reo­t ypes, both materially by reprinting from its blocks and conceptually by repeating its iconography. He includes many images of slavery’s scopic cruelty and some portraying the enslaved person’s sightlessness, recycling images in which the enslaved are tortured with panoptic instruments, such as whips and paddles raised on high, or telescopically pursued

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Figure 60. Illustration from Henry Bibb, Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave (New York: Author, 1849), 81. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

by guns, as well as t­ hose in which they have their eyes covered and their heads bowed (see Figure 60). On the other hand, Bibb’s narrative also discloses the poor fit between the AASS’s generic images and his individual experience. The work forges connections between its words and its images by pulling a quotation from the text to serve as a caption for an image or by excising a portion of an image to better accord with the text; yet ­t here are also jarring juxtapositions that, as Marcus Wood argues, reveal the l­imited ability of antislavery’s iconography to represent Bibb’s life.22 Commissioning pictures that specifically represent his f­amily, as Bibb likely did, brings into better view his own experience



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and his message that enslaved p ­ eople are devoted to their families. However, many of ­these ­family groupings reinscribe institutional antislavery’s standard sign system, such as the landscape scene of Bibb as the kneeling slave begging for mercy from a master who towers over him and his ­family with a whip (Figure 61). Such images also demonstrate the limits of his visual reimaginings. By having his f­ amily inserted into a familiar scene of slavery, Bibb personalizes the image but also traps his ­family in institutional antislavery’s frame. Two images offer more resistant readings. The frontispiece (Figure 62), engraved by Reason, asserts Bibb’s personhood in both image and word: Bibb gazes directly at the reader, and his signature lies below his picture.23 The juxtaposition of his gentlemanly portrait with the engraving below—­a shadowy image of Bibb as a runaway being pursued by a slave catcher as well as a spotlight—­ further asserts his individuality and perspective. By placing Reason’s humanizing portrait above slavery’s surveillance of the runaway, Bibb declares from

Figure 61. Illustration from Henry Bibb, Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave (New York: Author, 1849), 148. Engraved by Thomas W. Strong. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

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Figure 62. Frontispiece and title page of Henry Bibb, Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave (New York: Author, 1849). Portrait engraved by Patrick Reason. Courtesy of the Library Com­pany of Philadelphia.

the outset of his narrative his individual subjectivity and right to look. Moreover, through the runaway advertisement’s fine print, which states that “Bibb turned the corner too quick” for the slave catcher “and escaped,” and the narrative’s description of the scene, in which Bibb turns “a corner before” the slave catcher gains “sight of [him]” (74), Bibb asserts his agency in visual terms. In the image, he eludes slavery’s spotlight; in the narrative he escapes through fugitive sight. He wanders the city streets in the “dark,” as if “blindfolded” (76), his view blocked by the buildings. Using a cow’s “shining eyes” (76) to guide him out of the city’s “dark tunnel,” he travels all night guided “by the shining stars of heaven alone” (77). By concealing himself in the forest by day and following the stars at night, Bibb fi­nally reaches his ­family. Like his book, which figures



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him as constantly on the move as a runaway rather than chained to the landscape as a slave, the opening image shows Bibb not only evading slavery’s gaze but also claiming his own freedom. The second image through which Bibb asserts visual agency—­t his time by more fully inhabiting the panoramic perspective—­represents his attempt to run away with his f­amily (Figure 63). Engraved by Strong, this image shows Bibb standing at the center of the frame and towering, like the mountains above his head, over wolves that he threatens with a bowie knife stolen from his master.24 His aggressive stance, with knee forward and weapon raised in his hand, mimics that of the slaveholder with whip (see Figure 61). Instead of threatening to whip the kneeling slaves beneath him, as the slaveholder does, Bibb defends his ­family with his knife and protects them with his outstretched hand. The panoramic vista of peaked mountains replaces the oppressive landscape of slavery with beacons of freedom. Claiming the panoramic perspective—­a lofty weapon and symbolic lookout point—­Bibb asserts his manhood by fighting for his ­family’s freedom. Although he is not yet ­free, the image declares him no longer a slave. Bibb’s visual command is short-­lived in the narrative. Just a few pages ­later, another image (Figure 64), this one unsigned, shows the ­family back in slavery’s

Figure 63. Illustration from Henry Bibb, Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave (New York: Author, 1849), 125. Engraved by Thomas W. Strong. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

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Figure 64. Illustration from Henry Bibb, Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave (New York: Author, 1849), 129. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

oppressive landscape, encircled by forest briars and u ­ nder the slaveholder’s telescopic view as hunters pursue them with loaded muskets. The wolves, which ­were defeated in the previous image, return as a pack of “savage blood hounds” that force Bibb “to stop, or be torn to pieces” (128). Unable to stand (Bibb stumbles and falls down while ­running), and without a weapon (the slaveholders now have the “bowie knives” [128]), he “surrender[s] . . . ​for the sake of [his] f­ amily” (130). Bibb’s defeat is visually underscored a few pages l­ater (Figure 65) when he is pictured naked, tied prone on the ground, his “face to the earth” (132), being whipped as his wife and d ­ aughter, in the background, refuse to watch. Placed back in the slave’s traditional position within AASS iconography—­part of the landscape rather than standing over it, with l­ imited or no sight rather than a panoramic perspective—­Bibb loses agency. The only sign of re­sis­tance the image allows is his raised head: looking up rather than, as the text states, down at the ground. Although Bibb eventually claims his freedom through the panoramic perspective—he boards a steamer that takes him up the Ohio River, once an insurmountable barrier, into the “ ‘promised land,’ ” as he gazes “at the beauties of nature on e­ ither side of the river” that unroll before him (169)—­t he text never



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Figure 65. Illustration from Henry Bibb, Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave (New York: Author, 1849), 133. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

again illustrates that perspective pictorially. His narrative ends with a panoptic image of a slave auction, where the auctioneer stands high on a ­table, holding a mallet over his head with one hand and a black baby for sale in the other. The picture emblematizes Bibb’s inability to re­unite with his f­ amily ­after he reaches freedom. Like Ball’s, Bibb’s liberty is incomplete: he not only loses his f­amily but continues to face northern racism and the slaveholders’ slander. Even when he occupies the pa­norama’s emancipatory perspective, he finds l­ittle plea­sure in its power. Instead of fully enjoying the steamboat’s panoramic vista—­the “glorious prospect” of freedom it unfolds—­his “very soul [is] pained to look upon the slaves in the fields of Kentucky” where he once toiled (169). Seeing what mainstream antebellum U.S. river pa­noramas suppress—­slavery—­Bibb remains haunted by the horrors hidden within the national landscape.25 Moreover, in remembering how it was in slavery that he “received the first impulse of h ­ uman rights” and learned to “protest against the bloody institution . . . ​by r­ unning away from it” (170), he insists that emancipation begins on the ground. While Bibb countered some of the AASS’s constrictive visual codes, Frederick Douglass displayed even greater visual mastery. In the late 1840s and 1850s, Douglass asserted authority over his print and visual productions by becoming editor of his own newspaper, the North Star (­later renamed Frederick Douglass’

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Paper), and by publishing his second narrative, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), with the commercial h ­ ouse Miller, Orton, and Mulligan, rather than with the AASS, publishers of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845). A “visual theorist,” Douglass understood the importance of picture-­making for social and po­liti­cal change.26 In his 1861 lecture “Pictures and Pro­gress,” he argues that through images even the “dullest vision can see and comprehend at a glance the full effect of a point.”27 Pictures “exert a power­f ul though ­silent influence, upon the ideas and sentiment of pre­sent and f­ uture generations” (458); they “refine the taste” and “enoble the spirit” (460). Turning the subjective into the objective, pictures exert repre­sen­ta­tional power; speaking to the imagination, they “­either lift us to the highest heavens or sink us to the bottomless depths” (461). As transmitters of truth, emotion, and morality, they dictate how man, a “picture-­appreciating animal” (460), sees the world. Douglass deployed his own photographic image as well as graphic prints and pictorial rhe­toric in both his newspaper and his second autobiography. His first venture outside the AASS, the North Star, which he edited with Martin Delany, represents his right to freedom and that of his “oppressed countrymen” in the pa­norama’s perspectival terms.28 Choosing the iconic symbol of the North Star—­ the fugitive’s version of the bird’s-­eye view—­for his paper’s name (Figure 66), Douglass devoted the periodical “to the cause of Liberty, Humanity and Pro­ gress” in the hope that it would “hasten the day of FREEDOM to the THREE MILLIONS of our ENSLAVED FELLOW COUNTRYMEN.”29 By providing an overview of events related to slavery and the fight for black freedom, the North Star put the slave system ­under its readers’ scrutiny and, through its advocacy for universal emancipation, pointed the way t­oward social change. The North Star, as one contributor writes, shines, like “its original in the blue vault of the Heavens,” as a “beacon of freedom to the down trodden slave.”30 With its offices serving as a stop on the Under­ground Railroad, the paper also functioned as an a­ ctual North Star, helping runaways to freedom.31 Douglass deployed this perspectival symbol of the fugitive’s liberty in word (a typographical masthead, prose and poetry that invoked the North Star) as

Figure 66. Typographic masthead of the North Star, 7 January 1848. Courtesy of Accessible Archives, African American Newspapers Collection.



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well as an image.32 On 25 January 1850—­just ­after the Fugitive Slave Act was introduced in the Senate—he changed the paper’s masthead to include a picture of a runaway slave making his way to freedom by the light of the North Star (Figure 67).33 This image puts the fugitives’ quest for freedom front and center at a moment when their return to slavery was being debated and legislated by the Thirty-­First Congress. The masthead, as Sarah Blackwood argues, evokes but reworks the ste­reo­t ypical image used in runaway slave advertisements.34 Douglass l­ ater stated that the North Star’s office did not own the printer’s ornament, so he supplied his own.35 Although the North Star’s masthead uses the runaway’s identifying stick and bundle, it also figures him as an individually drawn h ­ uman being rather than a ste­reo­t ype (Figure 68). Looking up (­toward his raised hand, which points north) rather than down at the ground, the fugitive claims his freedom through his ability to see a panoramic viewpoint in the sky. The shining North Star, located directly above the fugitive’s head, provides him symbolic access to the panoramic perspective. Following its light, he negotiates slavery’s dark and imprisoning landscape. The mountain in the background, whose grooved lines direct him forward to its peak, provides yet another prospect point for freedom. Moreover, by having him mimic the slaveholder’s stance—­t he fugitive has a bundle rather than a whip, his hand is raised high in hope rather than brutality—­the image, like Bibb’s picture of his own escape, claims the slaveholder’s viewpoint for the fugitive even as it redirects that perspective from cruelty to liberty. The fugitive may not yet be ­free, but with access to three panoramic points—­t he North Star, the mountain, and his own raised hand—he is presented as well on his way. Besides asserting the fugitive’s right to freedom by providing him access to the panoramic perspective, the masthead’s image asks readers to identify with the fugitive by placing them in his vantage point. Located ­behind him—­looking with rather than at him—­t he reader is encouraged to relate to the fugitive and his quest. Unlike the Fugitive Slave Act, which sought to put the fugitive forever u ­ nder the slaveholders’ watchful eyes, the North Star’s image invites

Figure 67. Pictorial masthead of the North Star, 22 February 1850. Courtesy of Special Collections, Lavery Library, St. John Fisher College, Rochester, NY.

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readers to witness his humanity and re­sis­tance rather than surveil him.36 Moreover, by visually connecting the bird’s-­eye view to the fugitive’s plight, the North Star refuses its readers an abstract entry point into the panoramic perspective. The image provides versions of the flag (the star) and the Capitol dome (the hill) but insists that t­ hose points are first and foremost for the fugitive: the vertical lines on his shirt flow into t­ hose on the mountain that leads him, along with the readers’ eyes, upward; the bundle on the stick is the other part of the flag, waiting to be raised when the fugitive can claim its star in freedom. Readers access ­t hese perspectival points through—­rather than over—­the fugitive. They ­will gain their view of freedom—as symbolized by the fully formed flag—­only when the fugitive gains his own. Douglass’s complex pictorial defense of the fugitive’s freedom continued into the summer of 1850. The North Star’s masthead changed again on 13 June, ten days a­ fter Daniel Webster submitted his version of the Fugitive Slave Act to the

Figure 68. Inset image on the pictorial masthead of the North Star, 22 February 1850. Courtesy of Special Collections, Lavery Library, St. John Fisher College, Rochester, NY.



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Senate.37 In the new version, the masthead is hemmed in by type on ­either side (Figure 69). Douglass may simply have been searching for extra column space, yet the timing of the change seems significant. As the articles in the 13 June issue make clear, the debate over disunion and how to address it was coming to a head. The issue covers Webster’s submission of a Fugitive Slave “bill amendatory of the act of 1793,” reprints an article from the National Era titled “The Congress Fugitive Bill,” and provides coverage of the Nashville Convention, where the representatives of the nine slaveholding states met to discuss the possibility of secession.38 The 13 June North Star also describes Douglass’s personal experience of being attacked during a visit to New York via a letter from Gerrit Smith addressed to “FREDERICK DOUGLASS—­My outraged and afflicted B ­ rother.”39 Douglass himself, in the 30 May issue, details the assault, during which five or six men had surrounded him, assailed him with “coarse and filthy language,” and “struck [him] in the face.”40 Expressing his gratitude in being “permitted safely to occupy [his] editorial chair” ­after this attack, Douglass uses that safety to remind readers of the larger threat to the fugitive’s liberty.41 By visually contracting his masthead’s panoramic expanse, he tightens the frame around both the fugitive and the masthead’s North Star of freedom. Douglass’s most striking visual maneuver occurred in the issue for 3 October 1850, published a­ fter the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act (signed into law on 18 September 1850).42 The runaway image is replaced by the original typographic masthead, framed on ­either side by the newspaper’s columns (Figure 70). As it publishes the complete text of the act on its first page, in an article titled “Laws of the United States,” the North Star vanishes the fugitive from sight. Following the technique he used first in the Narrative and ­later in My Bondage and My Freedom, Douglass keeps the slaveholder in the “dark” about the fugitive’s flight.43 As he declares in the Narrative, “Let us render the tyrant no aid; let us

Figure 69. Masthead of the North Star, 13 June 1850. Courtesy of Accessible Archives, African American Newspapers Collection.

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not hold the light by which he can trace the footprints of our flying ­brother.”44 By removing the runaway from the North Star’s masthead, Douglass follows his own advice and hides him from the slaveholder’s surveillance even as he details the immediate effects of the Fugitive Slave Act on its victims—as well as the racism that drives it.45 In l­ater issues Douglass focuses on the black community’s self-­determination as well as his own. He per­sis­tently chronicles the black community’s decision to stand its ground and take freedom into its own hands through acts of re­sis­tance: “They are resolving to stay, and to test the question,” he writes, “and to this decision, I, for one, give my addition.”46 Having eliminated the image of the fugitive’s claim to freedom, the North Star pictures through words the black community’s refusal to give up its liberty. Douglass’s act of scopic re­sis­tance also underscores his own liberty. He adds to the 3 October masthead: “Frederick Douglass, Editor and Proprietor.” Claiming owner­ship of the paper for the first time (up ­until this point he has only named himself as editor), Douglass asserts his self-­possession in the face of a law that seeks to strip him of it.47 No longer an unlettered fugitive, he is now a proprietor and, as he would ­later ask to be called, “Mr. Editor[,] if you please!”48 His declaration of selfhood is further enacted in June 1851 when he renames the North Star: Frederick Douglass’ Paper (Figure  71).49 Substituting himself for the North Star, he becomes the inspirational exemplar for o ­ thers to follow. Moreover, he is no longer in need of the North Star’s external panoramic point

Figure 70. Masthead of the North Star, 30 January 1851. Courtesy of Special Collections, Lavery Library, St. John Fisher College, Rochester, NY.

Figure 71. Masthead of Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 27 August 1852. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.



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since he and his paper embody its freedom. Even as he continues to detail the fugitive’s ever more precarious position, Douglass, through a return to the fully expanded panoramic masthead of Frederick Douglass’ Paper, focuses readers’ attention on the freedom African Americans have already achieved and ­w ill not give up. Douglass’s visual defense of black freedom continues in his second autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom.50 The title gives freedom and slavery equal weight, while its frontispiece (Figure 72) pictures him as both a gentleman and a freedom fighter with clenched fists, foregrounding his agency and accomplishments. Although he endured slavery, both word and image argue, he has also gained his freedom.51 Two pictures by the white engraver Nathaniel Orr preface the two parts of Douglass’s text: “Life as a Slave” and “Life as a Freeman” (title page).52 Presented as symmetrical yet contrasting images, they speak both to and against each other. They represent, as Lisa Brawley points out, “generic scenes” of slavery and freedom rather than, like some of the illustrations in Bibb’s narrative, images from Douglass’s life.53 As triptychs containing landscape scenes, they resemble the AASS’s panoramic broadsides. Both images also redeploy the AASS’s stock symbols and panoramic viewpoint to critique the North as well as the South and to claim—­t hrough the text’s conversation between word and image—­t hat perspective for the fugitive. The first image (Figure 73) reiterates AASS iconography by depicting the slaveholder’s absolute power in scopic terms. The runaway at the top, trapped in the landscape and looking back at his pursuers, runs ­under a tree and into a wall of darkness (much like Bibb’s image of his runaway ­family encased by trees). He is shot at by the slave hunter with his optical instrument, a r­ ifle. In the center image, the auctioneer stands high on the block above a downward-­looking slave ­woman, a raised mallet in his hand, in front of the Capitol dome with its flag waving on top. In the bottom scene, the slave master sits high on his ­horse, his two-­story h ­ ouse b ­ ehind him and a low-­standing slave cabin before him. Taken together ­these images reiterate Douglass’s description of slavery as a “stern real­ity; glaring frightfully upon us” (282). The center image, however, also critiques the North through its panoramic viewpoint—­the flag. The flags that flank the image on ­either side like spears are not beacons of hope but signs of military might and white oppression. Like the Capitol dome in the center image, which acts as a backdrop to the auction scene, the American flag, peeking out from ­behind two blank white flags, is allied with whiteness and offers no redress to the enslaved. Subjugated in ­t hese images by both North and South, the slave is denied access to freedom’s bird’s-­eye view. In Part Two, “Life as a Freeman,” Douglass rewrites slavery’s surveillance by appropriating the bird’s-­eye view during his escape and reinforces his

Figure 72. Frontispiece of Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (New York: Miller, Orton, and Mulligan, 1855). Engraved by J. C. Buttre. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

Figure 73. Illustration for “Life as a Slave,” in Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (New York: Miller, Orton, and Mulligan, 1855), print facing page 33. Engraved by Nathaniel Orr. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

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narrative’s critique of the North by underscoring the difficulty of retaining freedom’s viewpoint once he arrives ­t here. In the chapter “Liberty Attained,” Douglass depicts his escape from slavery through the fantastical image of a balloon flight: “Disappearing from the kind reader, in a flying cloud or balloon, (­pardon the figure,) driven by the wind, and knowing not where [he] should land—­whether in slavery or in freedom,” he alights in New York “safe and sound, without loss of blood or bone” ­after his “bold and perilous” flight (335–36). Once again, freedom is associated with the perspectival position of the pa­norama.54 By taking flight in a balloon, Douglass is able to throw off, much as a balloonist would toss out his ballast, slavery’s “heavy chain, with a huge block attached to it” (336). Flight allows him—at least metaphorically—to break f­ ree of the chain as well as the frame of slavery. By taking to the sky, he escapes the oppressive landscape figured in the panoramic pictures that introduce the first part of his narrative. Appropriating the balloon’s elevated view, Douglass imagines himself rising above slavery’s surveillance to claim his liberty. He lands in New York with the “dreams of [his] childhood and the purposes of [his] manhood . . . ​ fulfilled” (336) as he feels the “­free earth ­under [his] feet” (336). Moreover, Douglass not only gains liberty’s perspective through his flight but also obscures the slaveholder’s sight. By leaving the slaveholder in the dark, ignorant of his ­actual means of escape, Douglass places the slaveholder in the slave’s visionless position: “left to feel his way in the dark” and to “imagine himself surrounded by myriads of invisible tormentors, ever ready to snatch, from his infernal grasp, his trembling prey” (324). Reversing slavery’s visual dynamic, Douglass assumes scopic authority. According to Douglass, however, the attainment of the panoramic perspective is fleeting, if not illusory, for the fugitive. First, the balloon is not a place of command or control. Douglass describes the journey as perilous and the balloon as beyond his ability to direct. Driven by the wind, the balloon might as easily carry him back to slavery as to freedom. Pictured as a “flying cloud” (335), the balloon also fails to provide an unobstructed panoramic view. By figuring his access to the bird’s-­eye view of freedom through the embodied perspective and dangerous realities of balloon flight, Douglass critiques the very premises of the panoramic perspective, questioning w ­ hether it can ever be detached, omniscient, or passively experienced.55 Second, once he arrives in New York, Douglass is quickly brought back down to earth. The joy he experiences was like a “quick blaze” that leaves b ­ ehind the “charred and desolate” (337). He soon discovers that he is “still in an ­enemy’s land” (337). The landscape of the urban North, he argues, is as hostile as that of the rural South. Populated by slave catchers and ­free blacks who would betray him, the North sits in the shadow of slavery.



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In the North, Douglass seems, at first, to attain the position of the viewing subject. Joining the hurrying throng to “gaz[e] upon the dazzling won­ders of Broadway” (336), he becomes an urban flâneur.56 He represents the urban North as providing both a new social field and subjectival perspective: “A new world burst upon my agitated vision,” he states (336). Negotiating this visual terrain is tricky. On the crowded streets of New York, removed from the landscape and power structures he understands, Douglass’s sight lines are cut off. He loses “sight” (338) of his only guide among the throng and, once alone, becomes “an easy prey to the kidnappers” (338). Only when he is introduced to David Ruggles, secretary of the New York Committee of Vigilance, who becomes to Douglass as “eyes to the blind” (341), does he feel safe. The North, like the slave South, he argues, is a hostile landscape that restricts the fugitive’s perspective and requires constant scopic navigation. Douglass’s ability to master ­t hese negotiations as author (if not as character) is made clear in the way he figures his escape for northern readers. In depicting it as a balloon flight, he refuses, as he does in the Narrative (1845), to disclose his a­ ctual mode of liberation, thereby protecting his escape route for ­others and distinguishing himself from the self-­serving white antislavery activists who publish such accounts in order to assert their victory over the slaveholder. In addition, the imagery places him above and beyond the readers’ line of sight.57 Refusing to occupy the traditional position of the runaway in the landscape, he resists being reimprisoned within institutional antislavery’s iconography or by northern readers’ voyeurism. In foregrounding for his “kind reader[s]” his use of meta­phor by asking them to “­pardon the figure” (335) of the balloon, Douglass performs the role of the lettered author and, in so d ­ oing, claims cultural authority. Moreover, as the maker of meta­phors, Douglass writes himself out of embodiment and into abstraction. Through his mastery of language, he claims the privilege of his white northern readers’ bird’s-­eye view even as he critiques it as fantastical. The image that f­aces his chapter “Liberty Attained” (Figure  74) and ­a nnounces the second part of the narrative pictures the pa­norama—­and its perspective—as the exclusive domain of whites. A mirror image of the first triptych, this illustration represents in its upper panel the North as an industrious site of technology in the form of the train and canal system along with the telegraph wire. The center image, a market square (featuring the buying of livestock rather than enslaved p ­ eople), associates the North with commerce, while the bottom image (a school) connects it with education.58 The church spires in the two lower images and the light­house on the far horizon in the top image represent the North as a moral light of freedom. Lady Liberty sits to the right of the central image in flowing white robes, with a pole topped by a liberty cap and a shield

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decorated like the flag, emblematizing the benevolence of white northern nationalism.59 The farmer to the left of the center image, who works alongside his ­horses instead of sitting on them, like the slaveholder with a whip in his hand, embodies a landscape of f­ ree l­ abor. Framed as a pa­norama and inviting that perspective, t­hese images pre­sent the North to the northern viewer as a bucolic scene of white nationalism (the sheet that hangs from the line in the center oval and breaks its frame resembles, with its stripes, the flag).60 Indeed, t­ here are no black figures in t­ hese pictures: fugitives and f­ ree blacks remain excluded from this space. Once again, black freedom cannot be represented. The only vis­i­ble figure of blackness in the image is the haunting shadow of slavery that lingers beneath the liberty cap. With her shield and liberty pole, which resembles the spears of the ­earlier image (see Figure 73), Lady Liberty defends the stars and stripes of white northern nationalism against slavery’s lurking shadow. Through its exclusion of blackness, this image critiques, as does the chapter that follows it, the North’s unwillingness to extend liberty and its perspective to blacks. Although the liberty cap represents the enslaved’s manumission, it remains symbolic rather than actualized in the picture. Through the juxtaposition of black word and white image, the narrative discloses the pa­norama’s perspective to be largely self-­reflective. Rather than providing a win­dow onto another world, the pa­norama acts as a mirror, reflecting back to its white northern viewers, in its oversized form, an inflated self-­image. In the chapter that follows this picture, Douglass punctures his white northern readers’ self-­regard with his scathing critique of northern racism and with his relegation of the northern subject to the position of scopic object. Situated in a balloon on the page facing the image, Douglass not only becomes a viewing subject but specifically looks down upon the northern landscape on the opposite page. The white northerner, rather than the slave, becomes the object of the gaze. Douglass turns his exclusion from the picture to his advantage: located outside of the frame, he gains the superior view that belonged to the white northern viewer within the AASS’s panoramic pictures. In disembodying the black perspective while also embodying the white northern subject, Douglass turns the ­tables. As a character within his story, Douglass may still be at the mercy of white northerners’ attempts to circumscribe his perspective by excluding him, as his narrative recounts, from the train’s panoramic view or by undercutting his right to stand up high on the speaker’s platform, but by transforming northern subjects into the object of his gaze and hijacking their bird’s-­eye view, the authorial Douglass claims his right to look. Moreover, by insisting that the white northerner “cannot see ­t hings in the same light with the slave”—­t hat he cannot “look from the same point from which the slave does” (339)—he asserts the viewpoint of the enslaved as autonomous and authoritative.

Figure 74. Illustration for “Life as a Freeman,” in Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (New York: Miller, Orton, and Mulligan, 1855), print facing page 335. Engraved by Nathaniel Orr. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

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Douglass’s narrative, then, discloses the racialized hegemony of the panoramic perspective and appropriates its power—­however metaphorical—­for the black viewing subject. He stresses that the panoramic perspective is never transparent or innocent, even as he insists upon the black subject’s right to its scopic power. More a projection than an ­actual position, the panoramic perspective, he argues, is both imaginary and emancipatory. By critiquing that perspective even as he adopts it, Douglass trou­bles the dominant field of vision. As the narrative’s image of northern freedom shows, ­t hese disruptions are difficult to sustain or make vis­i­ble, since they are often figured only through their haunting absence. In laying bare the scopic power inherent in white mastery, in both North and South, Douglass disrupts the visual hegemony by looking back. The panoramic perspective may be a fantasy of superiority, a projection of control, a dream of innocence, but its power to frame real­ity and construct subjectivity, as he shows, made it a compelling mode for black activists to inhabit, deploy, and resist. While the formerly enslaved used the panoramic perspective to picture their freedom-­striving in both word and image, several black activists also created full-­scale pa­noramas of slavery and the quest for liberty. Henry Box Brown, made famous for mailing himself to freedom, toured New ­England with his Mirror of Slavery in the summer of 1850; when the Fugitive Slave Act forced him to leave, he continued to exhibit his pa­norama in E ­ ngland.61 William Wells Brown displayed his Original Panoramic Views of the Scenes in the Life of an American Slave in ­England, beginning in the fall of 1850.62 James Presley Ball, a ­free black daguerreotypist, presented Ball’s Splendid Mammoth Pictorial Tour of the United States in Cincinnati in March 1855 and, beginning on 30 April of that year, at ­ rother of Peter and William Still, Armory Hall in Boston.63 John Nelson Still, b in 1855 proposed a pa­norama that included scenes from U ­ ncle Tom’s Cabin as well as “mysterious and thrilling incidents in the history of his own f­ amily.”64 In the fall of 1858, Anthony Burns toured Maine, New Hampshire, and Mas­sa­ chu­setts with The ­Great Moving Mirror of Slavery.65 Most of ­these activists served as proprietors of their pa­noramas, hiring artists—­black and white—to execute or collaborate on their design.66 Most also lectured alongside their pa­noramas and used their per­for­mances as an opportunity to sell their narratives or, in J. P. Ball’s case, promote their business.67 As visual entrepreneurs, black panoramists advanced the antislavery argument through “a novel mode,” while also sustaining themselves and the market for their life stories.68 The moving pa­norama, which reached the height of its popularity in the United States in the 1850s, appealed to black activists for a number of reasons. Pa­norama exhibitions w ­ ere open to black audiences and easily adapted to the lecture tours and narratives that black activists w ­ ere already performing and



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producing.69 The moving pa­norama was an “itinerant medium.”70 Accompanied by an explanatory lecture, ­music, and song, it was a multimedia version of the antislavery lecture.71 Given that the slave narrative read as a textual translation of the pa­norama’s descriptive views—­invoking its realism, claiming its eyewitness authority, and presenting a progressive (if not always linear) sequence of scenes advancing from bondage to freedom—­t he genre’s story of slavery was easily converted into the pa­norama’s mass visual form.72 Moreover, the pa­norama’s pamphlet often included a biographical sketch of the artist, describing the hardships and adventures involved in such a g­ rand undertaking and animating its landscapes (as the slave narrative does) through the heroism of its creator.73 The moving pa­norama’s popularity, accessibility, portability, topical subject ­matter, ocular authenticity, progressive narrative, and foregrounding of the author’s viewpoint made it a compelling form for black adaptation. Black panoramists drew their images from AASS visual culture as well as the slave narrative. Although none are extant, it is evident from print descriptions that the panoramists based their scenes on AASS prints as well as illustrations from published slave narratives; they also created pictorial translations of narratives by their proprietors (for ­t hose who had one) or ­others. Information must be pieced together about each pa­norama from newspaper accounts or advertisements—as in the cases of Henry Brown (Figure  75), Still, and Burns—or from explanations provided by printed guidebooks that accompanied them—as in the cases of William Wells Brown (Figure 76) and J. P. Ball (Figure 77).74 Henry Brown’s pa­norama, which was “designed and Painted from the best and most au­t hen­tic sources of information,” a­ dopted, as Jeffrey Ruggles has shown, the structure of Charles C. Green’s illustrated antislavery poem The Nubian Slave (1845), and likely images from it as well.75 William Wells Brown’s pa­norama drew on a number of white source texts: Whittier’s poetry, George Bourne’s Picture of Slavery, and runaway slave advertisements recycled from the antislavery broadside Slave Market of Amer­i­ca.76 J. N. Still used “the most prominent scenes and characters” from ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin as the basis for his pa­norama.77 Ball quoted liberally from white source texts in his guide (Whittier, Longfellow, Harper’s Magazine, ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin) and deployed stock images even though his pa­norama is described as having “nearly all [its] scenes . . . ​sketched from nature, expressly for this work”: No. 5 is “Slaves chained and driven to the boats; Slave Ship at anchor; Ocean in the distance” (15); No. 19 is “A Hunting party on h ­ orse­back, with Dogs and Guns, in pursuit of runaways” ­ iddle (32).78 Burns’s pa­norama, which included scenes of the “horrors of the m passage,” “southern plantation life,” and “treatment of slaves,” likely also repurposed popu­lar antislavery imagery.79

Figure 75. Newspaper announcement for Henry Box Brown’s “New and Original Pa­norama!,” The Liberator, 3 May 1850, 71. Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.

Figure 76. Title page of William Wells Brown, A Description of William Wells Brown’s Original Panoramic Views of the Scenes in the Life of an American Slave (London: Gilpin, [1849?]). Courtesy of the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.

Figure 77. Title page of James Presley Ball, Ball’s Splendid Mammoth Pictorial Tour of the United States (Cincinnati, OH: Pugh, 1855). Courtesy of the American Antiquarian Society.



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Most black panoramists also illustrated their pictorial arguments against slavery with scenes from their own experiences or other fugitives’ lives. Henry Brown’s pa­norama features his escape and release in Philadelphia as well as the flights of Ellen Craft and Henry Bibb, whose image was likely modeled on Strong’s engraving in Bibb’s own text.80 William Wells Brown references his own illustrated Narrative of William W. Brown, an American Slave (1849) and includes three views of his escape attempts, two based on images from his narrative, as well as multiple views of other fugitives’ escapes, such as ­t hose of Bibb (likely based on Strong’s panoramic illustration) and Leander.81 Ball was never enslaved, but he does include the stories of Simms, Burns, and Peter Still. J. N. Still recounts the “flight of his parents for freedom—­t heir capture and return to slavery—­t heir second flight; a history of their lost boys, who w ­ ere stolen into slavery—­t he death of one of them, and the redemption of the other by the purchase of himself.”82 Burns’s pa­norama likely featured scenes from his trial and return to slavery, since it was designed to promote the sale of his illustrated biography, Anthony Burns: A History (1856), by Charles Emery Stevens, even though all the newspaper description offers at that point is “&c.”83 By recycling AASS imagery and remediating it through their own or another fugitive’s daring escape, black panoramists not only inserted familiar critiques of southern slavery into the pa­norama’s picturesque pastoralism but also offered views of black agency and freedom. Black pa­noramas differed from mainstream ones primarily through their foregrounding of slavery in the national landscape. Unlike the popu­lar antebellum Mississippi River pa­noramas of John Banvard and John Smith, which rarely represented slavery, black panoramists, as the titles of Henry Brown’s and Burns’s pa­noramas make clear, sought to create a corrective “Mirror of Slavery.”84 Indeed, the guidebook for William Wells Brown’s pa­norama locates its origins in a desire to rebuke the portrait of slavery in Banvard’s, which Brown visited in the autumn of 1847: “I was somewhat amazed at the very mild manner in which the ‘Peculiar Institution’ of the Southern States was t­ here represented, and it occurred to me that a painting, with as fair a repre­sen­ta­tion of American Slavery as could be given upon canvass, would do much to disseminate truth upon this subject, and hasten the downfall of the greatest evil that now stains the character of the American p ­ eople” (191). Unlike mainstream river pa­noramas that naturalized slavery—­when they represented it at all—as picturesque, black pa­noramas brought its harsh economic realities and cruel ­labor conditions into view. Ball’s pa­norama, for instance, traces the transatlantic slave trade from the Niger River to the Atlantic Ocean, and describes the landscape of domestic slavery along the Mississippi, the Ohio, and Susquehanna Rivers; it maps the connective tissue of slavery’s commerce, the cotton, sugar, and tobacco

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it produces, and the cruelties it perpetrates: the capture and sale of ­human beings, the m ­ iddle passage, the slave’s backbreaking l­abor, and the slaveholder’s barbarous practices. Ball’s “steamboat sublime” (his pa­norama pictures numerous steamers as well as views from them of the riverbank) pre­sents a geography similar to Banvard’s and Smith’s, but one that operates quite differently.85 Like Bibb, who juxtaposes the “peculiar charm” of “the beauties of nature, on ­free soil,” that he sees from the ship deck as he passes “down the river” back into slavery to the “hopeless bondage” (66) that awaits him, or like Douglass, who describes in My Bondage and My Freedom how the “rapture” he feels when “admiring” Amer­i­ca’s “bright blue sky . . . ​her beautiful rivers, her mighty lakes, and star-­crowned mountains” turns to “mourning” when he “remember[s] that with the w ­ aters of her noblest rivers, the tears of [his] brethren are borne to the ocean, disregarded and forgotten” (369), Ball insists that his viewers see the gothic underbelly of the nation’s pastoralism. Rather than reinforcing U.S. nationalism, his pa­norama exposes the white vio­lence and black trauma that undergird its landscape of imperialism.86 In addition to magnifying slavery’s place in the national landscape through their “Mammoth” images, black pa­noramas enabled their proprietors to claim ocular authority over that landscape.87 Standing outside the frame, raised pointer in hand, black panoramists a­ dopted the medium’s commanding perspective. No longer subsumed into the landscape or ­under the slaveholder’s surveillance, they enacted their visual mastery by bringing slavery, as Ball’s pamphlet states, “­under our view” (18). Asserting their eyewitness authority (“I have myself seen,” writes William Wells Brown [198]) and guiding their viewers’ gaze (“You ­will observe,” “You ­here see,” he directs [198]), black panoramists controlled the view, both authorizing and conceptually framing it for their audiences. Moreover, by emphasizing that their viewpoint is the same as their audiences’ (“We have h ­ ere before us,” Brown tells them [200]), they claimed the perspective of the leisured viewer. Seeing with their audiences (“Let us now suppose ourselves standing opposite the United States navy-­yard, and taking a view of the city of Washington,” Brown says [197]), black panoramists appropriated their audiences’ sovereign sight.88 Even as they performed their right to the pa­norama’s expansive viewpoint, however, they also repeated institutional antislavery’s conventions by portraying slavery’s surveillance. The first part of most black pa­noramas focused on bondage and hence highlighted the slaveholder’s panoptic power—­showing him high on ­horse­back over the chain gang, raising the whip in punishment, or pursuing the runaway—as well as the slave’s restricted viewpoint. Part One of Henry Brown’s pa­norama pre­sents slavery as a series of confining interiors: “Interior of a Slave Ship,” “Interior of a Slave Mart,” and “Interior View of



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Charleston Work­house, with Treadmill in full operation.”89 Yet even as they recycled stock AASS images that foregrounded the slaveholder’s visual supremacy, black pa­noramas also focused viewers’ eyes and attention on the enslaved. William Wells Brown’s “View Ninth” asks viewers to see, in the background, an enslaved ­woman being beaten, and, consider their own role in her torture: “In the distance you observe a w ­ oman being whipped at the whipping-­post, near which are the scales for weighing cotton. It should ­here be borne in mind, that a large portion of this cotton is consumed by the p ­ eople of ­Great Britain,” he writes (200). As Douglass does in the North Star masthead, Brown asks his audience to see with the slave: “You ­will observe,” he writes in “View First,” “by the way in which the Slaves before you watch the Slave-­trader, that they fear he may succeed in purchasing some of them from their pre­sent ­ nder the direction of a black lecowner” (193).90 By looking at a pa­norama u turer, often formerly enslaved, audiences w ­ ere rhetorically put into the slave’s point of view. Unlike AASS images, which repeated slavery’s scopic structures by putting the slave ­under view, black panoramists asked audiences to look both at and with the enslaved: to witness, as Garrison states of Burns’s pa­ norama, “the cruelties of that brutal system,” and thus “exert” themselves to end it.91 Having gained leverage over slavery’s scopic power through their pa­ noramas, black activists still had to witness slavery’s horrors at e­ very show. In presenting their own stories or ­t hose of other fugitives within their pa­noramas’ broader cruelties, they remained very much within slavery’s frame and closely identified with the enslaved. The frequent pronoun shifts in William Wells Brown’s guidebook provide insight into the complexities inherent in the panoramists’ role as participant-­observers.92 Tellingly, he shifts to the third person to describe his own life: “The view now before us is the first scene in which the writer is represented in this Pa­norama,” he states in “View Twelfth” (201). As writer, Brown maintains a distance from his enslaved self while reminding his audience of his privileged position as an author and lecturer. In two of the three scenes that depict his life, he refers viewers to his published narrative, underscoring his textual authority even as he depicts slavery’s visual dominance over his enslaved self. In the first, he depicts his ­earlier self as crouching in a tree and looking down at the bloodhounds that pursue him (201); in the second, that self is pictured being taken back into slavery with his m ­ other (210). By representing himself only through his escape attempts—­“View Twenty-­ first” is titled “Last Scene in the Escape of Wm. W. Brown” (211)—he negotiates his participant position by picturing himself in the act of re­sis­tance. Scenes in the Life of an American Slave, from His Birth in Slavery to His Death or His Escape to His First Home of Freedom on British Soil, the pa­norama’s subtitle,

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identifies the two trajectories of an enslaved person’s life: death within slavery or empowered escape from it. A focus on black freedom was a distinctive strategy of black pa­noramas. Although the first parts of many dealt with the slave trade and plantation slavery, their second parts, following the pa­norama’s progressive narrative form, foregrounded the slave’s flight to freedom.93 The last ten views of William Wells Brown’s twenty-­four-­v iew pa­norama feature attempts to escape, including his own and Bibb’s, most of them successful. Similarly, the second part of Henry Brown’s pa­norama depicts his own escape plus t­ hose of Bibb, Ellen Craft, and a ­family of Nubian slaves. J. N. Still’s pa­norama pre­sents his parents’ flight to freedom and his ­brother’s purchase of it: given its use of ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin, it likely shows Eliza’s dramatic escape across the Ohio River as well. Ball’s pa­norama includes a view of runaway slaves who are captured and killed midway through (No. 21) (33), a view of a “Fugitive crossing the River on a log” (No. 33) (45), and concludes with the “Arrival of Fugitives on British Soil” (No. 53) (55). They all end with images of ­actual and ­i magined freedom. Henry Brown’s pa­norama concludes with the “Promise of Freedom,” “West India Emancipation,” and the panoramic “­Grand Tableau Finale—­U NIVERSAL EMANCIPATION.”94 William Wells Brown’s ends with his own escape, through his appropriation of the panoramic viewpoint of the North Star, a fugitive ­family’s resistant “­Battle for Freedom” (211), and the fugitive’s homecoming to “True Freedom” (213) in Canada. Likewise, Ball’s pa­norama concludes in Canada and with the story of Peter Still’s purchasing his ­family. J. N. Still’s pa­norama also ends with “the final purchase for the enormous sum of five thousand dollars” of Peter Still’s f­ amily.95 Although some of t­ hese pa­noramas resolved themselves in images that fed white fantasies of gifting slaves their freedom—­William Wells Brown’s, for instance, concludes with a white En­glishman “extending his hand to his coloured friends, giving them . . . ​t he comforting assurance that, on British soil, they are safe” (213)—on the w ­ hole they focused on black resistance—­slaves fighting for and taking their own freedom—­and insisted that liberty was the inevitable endpoint of the enslaved person’s story. Th ­ ese pa­noramas provided not just a mirror of slavery but also, to borrow the name of David Ruggles’s black newspaper, the Mirror of Liberty.96 In picturing black freedom, t­ hese pa­noramas worked against the two basic modes of institutional antislavery’s visual culture: its focus on black enslavement and its cele­bration of white northern nationalism. William Wells Brown, for instance, refrains “from representing ­t hose disgusting pictures of vice and cruelty which are inseparable from Slavery” (192). Still also promises not to “confine” himself to “that deplorable and humiliating aspect of the colored man’s case” represented in his pa­norama of slavery and to prepare “at no



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distant date, a new programme of very dif­fer­ent scenes, representing . . . ​a far more hopeful aspect of the black man, than has ever been presented to the American public.”97 Refusing to represent only the “dependent and degraded” aspects of the black man’s character, Still proposes a pa­norama of “Distinguished Colored Men” that portrays the black man as “the patriot, the statesman, and the warrior.”98 Henry Brown c­ ounters the ending of Green’s Nubian Slave, a view of the Nubian ­family being “PURSUED WITH BLOODHOUNDS, OVERTAKEN AND SHOT,” by adding a series of successful escapes and concluding with multiple views of freedom.99 In addition to readjusting the focus from slavery to freedom, many black pa­noramas depicted emancipatory geographies.100 Henry Brown, Ball, and Burns begin their accounts of slavery with views of African freedom: picturing the “habits and customs of the natives at home,” as well as Africa’s sublime beauty.101 Henry Brown’s pa­norama includes a view of “Beautiful Lake and Mountain Scenery in Africa”; Ball opens his pa­norama by stating that “Africa can boast of a botany unsurpassed by any other quarter of the globe” (11).102 Both portray Africans’ innate humanity through the picturesque beauty of the African landscape. Ball concludes his pa­norama in an emancipatory space— on the “Canadian side of the Niagara river” (55)—as does William Wells Brown. By portraying the iconic natu­ral symbol Niagara Falls, they appropriate the sublime grandeur of “Nature’s Nation” to emblematize the fugitive’s freedom.103 In Ball’s and William Wells Brown’s pa­noramas, this natu­ral won­der is both a sign of the pa­noramas’ “transcendental aesthetics” and a terminus of the Under­ground Railroad.104 It is not just the fugitive who gains liberty at this prospect point of sublime beauty, but also the viewer. Freed from confining scenes of slavery, viewers are visually transported into a picturesque panoramic vista at the moment of black emancipation. Moreover, they gain access to t­hese expansive views through the fugitive’s perspective: “You must now imagine yourselves as having crossed that river [the Niagara], and as standing, with the Slave, upon the soil over which the mild sceptre of Queen Victoria extends,” William Wells Brown writes (213). By identifying not just with but as the fugitive, the audience gains the pa­norama’s emancipatory view. Ball even declares that the best view of the falls is from “­Table Rock on the Canadian side”: “ ‘We h ­ azard not too much in saying that t­ here is nothing on the globe that can compare with this view in point of sublimity’ ” (54). Both pa­ noramas insist that the black panoramic perspective can be fully accessed only outside of the United States. Instead of presenting freedom as a hope on the distant horizon, as many AASS images do, they relocate it on firm ground beyond the U.S. border. Th ­ ese black panoramists si­mul­ta­neously appropriated white northern nationalism’s magisterial view, identifying it with the freedom

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attained rather than deferred, and critiqued its limits, revealing the United States as a racially bounded republic. William J. Wilson’s “Afric-­American Picture Gallery,” a series of fictional sketches published ­under the pseudonym “Ethiop” in 1859 in the Anglo-­African Magazine, a black periodical, represents the culmination of black engagement with the pa­norama’s aesthetics in the antebellum period and exemplifies one of its most resistant formulations.105 Publishing in the black press and writing for a ­free black audience, Wilson had a wider canvas on which to paint than black panoramists, who had to work within both slavery’s and antislavery’s frames. He used this latitude to produce—­t hrough imaginative words rather than realistic (and expensive) images—an alternative archive of black art in “Afric-­ American Picture Gallery.”106 Ethiop’s “almost unknown” art gallery, which he invites the reader to enter with him, resembles the black pa­norama.107 On its walls hang an array of images that tell the story of U.S., African, and African American history through landscape views and portraits of black leaders. Ethiop guides the reader through the Gallery: “Well, ­here we are, and looking about us” (53), explaining each picture much like a black panoramist. The text itself, with its numbered descriptions of the paintings, resembles the pa­norama’s guidebook. Like the panoramists, Ethiop begins his tour by foregrounding slavery’s place within the national landscape. “PICTURE NUMBER 1.—­THE SLAVE SHIP,” located “near the entrance on the south side of the Gallery, and in rather an unfavorable light,” pre­sents a “faithful” panoramic view of a Dutch slave ship moored in Jamestown’s harbor in 1609 (53). In t­ hese “wild surroundings” and u ­ nder a “black and dismal and storm-­clad sky” are the “emaciated and death-­like ­faces” of the “first slaves that ever trod the American continent” (53). Si­mul­ta­neously revealing slavery’s panoptic power (Satan, “high and above all,” perches on the stern of the slave ship, “gloating over the w ­ hole scene”) and bearing witness to the slave trade’s “unfortunate victims,” Ethiop exposes the gothic horror that undergirds the national picturesque and foregrounds the trauma experienced by the enslaved “­human beings” within it (53).108 Ethiop does not linger on slavery’s cruelties, however, but rather focuses on black freedom. Like the black panoramists, he pre­sents the “rich, varied, beautiful” landscape of Africa in his fourth picture, “SUNSET IN ABBEOKUTA,” even as he resists being relocated ­t here: “The ­whole scene is so charming that one could almost wish to be t­ here,” he states slyly (54). He also pre­sents the fugitive’s freedom in “PICTURES 5. and 6.—­THE ­U NDER GROUND RAILROAD” (54). “Picture A, or the south view,” is “a dark road leading through a darker forest” and “some twenty pairs of fine stalwart ­human feet and legs—­ male and female—of all sizes, hurrying northward” (54). It represents the bodily



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agency required for all types of black emancipation as well as its fugitive sight: ­under cover of darkness and on a dark road in a dark forest, the fugitives locate in the “small but bright” North Star an “unfailing” and “unerring” (54) viewpoint that leads them t­oward liberation. “Picture B on the north view” “consists of some twenty bold heads and fine robust ­faces, each of which is lit up with joy no pen can portray,” as well as a “Canadian forest” with a “small rustic cottage” (54) on the other side of a lake. It signifies the emancipation of the fugitives’ minds as well as their bodies and asserts black humanity (“the ­t hing is a man” [55]), even as it critiques the North’s unwillingness to provide the fugitives with shelter (the cottage is across the lake in Canada). Instead of concluding his tour with the fugitives’ freedom, as black panoramists did, Ethiop spends most of his time presenting the accomplishments of ­free blacks. Through portraits of black editors (53–54), the revolutionaries Crispus Attucks (54) and Toussaint L’Ouverture (87), the Haitian emperor Soulouque (87–88), and writers such as Phillis Wheatley (217–18), he creates a pantheon of black men and w ­ omen that memorializes and celebrates black achievement (much like Still’s proposed pa­norama of distinguished men of color). Focusing on the face and head, t­ hese portraits underscore black intellect and, like Bibb’s and Douglass’s frontispieces, allow their subjects to look back. Ethiop portrays the “rising fortunes” (101) of the black ­people through “A NEW PICTURE” of the gallery boy, “Thomas Onward”—­“a shrewd l­ ittle rogue, a real live Young Tom, up to all conceivable mischief and equal to all emergencies” (100). ­Here he translates Stowe’s U ­ ncle Tom ste­reo­t ype of black submission (“Saintly Tom,” as the text puts it) into a trickster able to outwit the “whipping” and “toiling,” hatred and dread, that almost “robbed” him of existence (100). Moreover, Ethiop claims the boy’s “expressive likeness”—­rather than the “sorry figures” of “Washington and Jefferson, of Clay, Webster and Calhoun”—as the best repre­sen­ta­tion of the “American Nation” (101). Casting a resistant and resilient black youth in this role and pointing out that “ample room” remains on the Gallery’s “spacious” walls for illustrations of “more, and, in many instances, better paintings” (53) of heroic black p ­ eople, Ethiop imagines a thriving role for the black race in the nation’s ­f uture. Wilson appropriates the aesthetics of the moving pa­norama to proj­ect an expansive vista of black self-­determination, but he also critiques the medium’s sequential, orderly, and progressive view of history as well as its detached point of view. In figuring the gallery as an “unstudied arrangement” (53), he pre­sents black history, to borrow John Ernest’s formulation, as “chaotic.”109 While he adheres to the moving pa­norama’s serial form by sequentially numbering the paintings in the story’s first three installments, he refuses a linear narrative that evolves from slavery to freedom. Like Henry Brown’s pa­norama, which pre­sents

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a dual narrative in its second part (the enslaved Nubians are returned to slavery and horrifying scenes such as “Burning Alive” are shown, even as closely adjacent pictures portray the promise of freedom) and Bibb’s nonlinear narrative (which works recursively through a series of escapes from and returns to slavery), Wilson’s first installment moves from the landscape of slavery (“The Slave Ship” of Picture Number 1) to portraits of black freedom (“The First and Last Colored Editor” of Number 2) and then back to slavery and the road to freedom (“The ­Under Ground Railroad” in Pictures 5 and 6).110 By the fourth installment he drops the numbering sequence altogether as Ethiop leaves the Gallery to journey into the Black Forest and it is never fully restored. The third installment ends with “Picture No. XIV” (103); the fifth resumes with “Pictures Nos. XIX and XX” (216); the sixth installment begins with “Picture 26” (243) despite the fifth ending with “Picture NO. XXI” (217). The last installment, which tells the narrative of the fugitive Bill, assigns no number at all to its final portrait of this “sable hero” (324). Both the serialized installments (Papers One through Seven), which stop the story only to pick it up again, and the paintings’ partial sequencing highlight the interruptions, disruptions, and gaps inherent to black history, in contradistinction to the pa­norama’s seamless vision.111 Wilson organizes the Gallery spatially as well as sequentially: scenes of slavery are placed on the south side, portraits of f­ ree blacks on the north, Toussaint L’Ouverture and Soulouque in the southeast corner t­ oward Haiti, Wheatley in the northeast corner ­toward Boston. Having established the pa­norama’s geographic symbolism, Wilson dismantles it. Whereas the AASS’s panoramic pictures create a clear dividing line between North and South, above and below, freedom and slavery, the Gallery resists such mapping. Instead, it reveals the spaces of slavery and freedom to be intermixed: Haitian emancipation is located on the Gallery’s south wall, as is northern freedom (Picture B of the Under­ ground Railroad) while slavery penetrates the North, as signified by the portrait on the north wall of the fugitive Bill, who sees his former master just outside the Gallery. In “Afric-­American Picture Gallery,” freedom is neither an inevitable end point nor a bounded safe zone but rather a continual pro­cess of negotiation and production. Wilson critiques the pa­norama’s abstracted viewpoint even as he allows Ethiop to assume its privileged perspective. Within the Gallery’s private space, one of his “dearest retreats” (52), Ethiop enjoys the comfort of the pa­norama’s leisured armchair view—­his “Dear old arm-­chair!”—­f rom which he surveys “this extraordinary Gallery” (216). But instead of allowing Ethiop to sit back and imbibe the view through the pa­norama’s illusion of immersion, Wilson has him get up and engage it. Ethiop’s absorption in the pa­norama’s sublime scenery is



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actualized when he moves from examining “PICTURE NO. XI—­THE BLACK FOREST” and its “­g rand and beautiful scenery, dark back ground shadows and . . . ​air of profound mystery” (101) to traveling to see it in person. “­Here in all its grandeur and wild sublimity was the native landscape spread out before me, the same that I saw in beautiful miniature but a day before hanging on the walls of our Afric-­A merican Gallery” (103), Ethiop states on his arrival in the mountain forest. During this surreal interlude, which lies at the center of the serialized sketches (Paper Four of Seven) and resists codification (it is not numbered), Wilson punctures the pa­norama’s reflected realism as a fantasy even as he uses his overtly fictionalized sketch (he parodies the fairy tale, epic quest, and slave narrative in this section) to articulate art’s ability to construct and shape real­ity if actively engaged. During the Black Forest interlude, Ethiop has gone from gazing upon the beauty of the landscape painting and “meditating upon its superior excellence as a Work of Art” (101) to inhabiting its setting as well as its panoramic perspective. During his two-­day journey “by stage and by foot” (101) to see the painting’s creator, Bernice, Ethiop is figured as a fugitive. He shares a stagecoach with a slave catcher and slaveholder who wish to make him “their prey” (102); he traverses a “thick tangle” (102) of “blacker and blacker” (103) woods, which resembles the dark, forested landscape of the south view of the Under­g round Railroad painting in the Gallery.112 He arrives “cold and wet” in the “dark, gloomy night” at Bernice’s log hut, whose “solitary light” (103) and placement “at the peak of the Black Forest Mountain” (173) make it a guiding North Star.113 ­There he is greeted with a “cheerful wood fire” and made to feel “at home” (103). Echoing the Canadian cottage in the northern view of the Under­ground Railroad picture, Bernice’s hut signifies shelter for the fugitive as well as his liberation from the landscape. Located in the heart of “a dense and pathless forest” (103), almost impossible to find, it figures freedom, as Derrick Spires notes, through marronage—­the production of a fugitive space of liberation within the landscape of slavery—as well as the panoramic perspective.114 Ethiop awakens the next morning and climbs a ladder to the roof. From this lofty prospect point, an unforgettable scene of “indescribable beauty” “burst[s] upon [his] view”: the mountains touching the clouds, the ocean rolling in the distance, and a “vast green forest top” all “gilded . . . ​in an instant” by the “mighty angel,” the sun (173). Lost in a sublime “reverie” (173), Ethiop is transported by, rather than subjugated to, the landscape. Similar to Douglass’s balloon escape in its fantastical nature, Ethiop’s view of the Black Forest from Bernice’s roof is a hyperbolic version of the panoramic perspective. Unconstrained by the limits of a canvas, Ethiop gains the pa­norama’s expansive vision and commanding viewpoint: he sees into the distance through e­ very “crag on crag lay piled on e­ very hand and

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vale outstretching vale; and beyond”; he observes a “massive ship . . . ​t hough many miles distant” (173), scopically subjugating the symbol that, in the story’s opening picture, once imprisoned his race. Wilson, like the authors of slave narratives and black panoramists before him, frames the fugitive’s liberation through the pa­norama’s sovereign gaze. Like other black cultural producers, Wilson interrupts Ethiop’s panoramic vision by bringing him back down to the ground. Summoned from his reverie by Bernice’s call and led “down, down, down . . . ​[d]own, down, down” into a “deep, dark Cavern” (173) to the artist’s studio, Ethiop views what lies beneath the pa­norama’s sublime effects. As wise forefather and guide, Bernice instructs Ethiop in the black artist’s fugitive point of view. Bernice, ninety years old, calls his visitor “son” four times in this short episode, and leads the way with a lamp (174). Laboring below the mountain peaks in a room hewed from stone—­away from “the restless, busy crowd” and “far from man’s baseness and man’s vile injustice” (174)—­Bernice embodies the artist’s outsider and grounded position.115 Moreover, his daily “­labors” (174) expose the exhaustive and continual effort that undergirds the work of art. His studio contains paintings, portraits, and statues that “­will yet not only see the light, but command the just approbation of even the enemies of [the] race” (174) as well as a prophetic stone tablet that recounts U.S. history from the year AD 4,000, when the white man has gone extinct and the black race “now possess[es] the land” (174). It represents a fugitive space in which the artist actively reframes the world by representing black humanity and envisaging a black futurity.116 Situated near the “gloomy cell” (177) that imprisons the former slave owner who murdered Bernice’s son, the studio is also a place of revolutionary black re­sis­tance. Burying the slaveholder under­ ground in the dark and imagining that at his death he w ­ ill “cast his carcass forth to gorge the Vultures that sit upon the mountain peaks of the Black Forest” (177), Bernice relegates his former master to the slave’s position: embedded in the landscape and deprived of view, the slaveholder, like the slave Paul in Ball’s narrative, is destined to be picked apart by scavengers who symbolize freedom’s bird’s-­eye perspective. Through his epic journey into the black artist’s underworld, Ethiop gains a radical knowledge of black art, history, and justice, as well as a fugitive perspective—­one that sees that beneath the pa­ norama’s transcendent view lies the bedrock of embodied black ­labor and per­ sis­tent re­sis­tance. As the remainder of the story makes clear, the Gallery, which contains many of Bernice’s works and serves as a double for his studio, is meant to be a place of active engagement for the viewer/reader rather than leisured escape. When Ethiop returns to the Gallery with “eye[s] clear” (216) and resumes his armchair



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view, he directs readers’ attention to the figures in the background of Picture XX: “young, determined-­looking ­faces,” whose “look” is “so strong, so bold, so towering” that it serves as a “light . . . ​of the g­ reat deliverance of long-­‘pressed humanity” (217). They evoke figures of black re­sis­tance: the Douglasses, Browns, Nat Turners, and Margaret Garners of black history.117 Following Bernice, whose art is po­liti­cally engaged—­his studio connected to rather than cut off from the legacy of slavery and the ­f uture of the black race—­Ethiop enters into a debate with the Gallery’s visitors over the circumstances of the colored man as they together examine “Picture 26,” entitled “CONDITION” (243), featuring “a colored youth” (243). “With arm uplifted and fist clenched,” he expresses his angry opposition to the white viewers’ racial determinism and paternalism, insisting that it is the black “youth’s condition, not his nature, that demands a change” (244). The story’s final installment also depicts the Gallery as a space of radical re­ sis­tance. It tells the narrative of the fugitive Bill (another pseudonym for William Wilson), who enters the Gallery “in a towering rage,” having just “seen” his former master on the street, and startles Ethiop from his “arm-­chair in much alarm” (321). Having killed two slave catchers in a “deadly hand-­to-­hand strug­g le” in “thick darkness” (323) to gain his freedom, Bill, with “clenched fist,” “double-­barrelled pistol,” and justified anger (321), is armed and resolved to defend his liberty.118 Shouting, “I have seen him, I have seen him!” (324), Bill flips the scopic script by placing the slaveholder in his sights. Having first taken his freedom as a fugitive on the ground and in the dark, he w ­ ill continue to stand his ground and take his liberty into his own hands. Instead of a retreat from the po­liti­cal ­labor that takes place on the streets, the Gallery’s panoramic exhibition, as Bill’s disruptive entrance makes clear, is connected to it. Like Bernice’s studio, it operates as an emancipatory yet grounded space of revolutionary reimagining and rebellion. From the 1830s through the 1850s, black cultural producers deployed the pa­norama and its perspective to envision black freedom. The slave narrative, the black newspaper, the black pa­norama, and Wilson’s Gallery all show how black picture-­making—­whether in word or image—­served an impor­tant role in imagining and producing black liberation. Si­mul­ta­neously unsettling the landscapes of slavery and white northern nationalism and forcibly inserting images of black agency and achievement into the visual field, ­t hese graphic texts strategically appropriated the pa­norama’s visual authority while also disrupting its constricting codes with more expansive views of black liberty and re­sis­tance. Contesting the panoramic perspective’s triumphalism, black activists embraced instead the fugitive’s more precarious

218 Chapter 7

sight. Arguing that freedom must be taken on the ground, not just ­i magined in the air, black activists utilized a fugitive perspective to portray blacks as agents of their own emancipation. Black panoramic productions assert that it is through actively creating a view rather than passively consuming it that black liberation w ­ ill occur.

C onc lu si on

The American Anti-­Slavery Society Celebrates Its Third De­cade

In December 1863, eleven months a­ fter Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, the AASS met in Philadelphia to commemorate the thirtieth anniversary of its founding. During the two-­day cele­bration, “veterans of thirty years’ warfare” came together “to rejoice in the pro­gress of the past and to take counsel together for the f­ uture.”1 Held at Concert Hall on Chestnut Street ­under “gracious” skies and “ample” sunshine, the anniversary marked the society’s advancement.2 No longer the small band of marginalized and maligned adherents of its early years, the AASS now filled the largest assembly hall in the city to “its utmost capacity.”3 The “brilliant audience” occupied “­every square inch of sitting or standing room,” and served as a synecdoche for the “thousands and tens of thousands” who could not be pre­sent.4 The meeting received “courteous treatment and generous reports” from the Philadelphia press.5 Standing together, “vindicated in the wisdom of [their] position,” ­t hose gathered commemorated their “warfare with the terrible forces of slavery” (63), celebrated their accomplishments—­“the emancipation of THREE MILLIONS THREE HUNDRED THOUSAND SLAVES” (3)—­and renewed their “demand for the entire and speedy extinction of Slavery in e­ very part of their country” (3). Trusting, as Garrison asserted, that the “jubilee” was “very near” (5), they honored each other and their de­cades of work together as they rejoiced in the “miraculous change” (73) their l­ abor had wrought. The meeting was not just an antislavery cele­bration but also a media event. Phonographically reported (creating a verbatim transcript), the meeting received positive coverage in the New York and Philadelphia press, and its proceedings ­were published in the National Anti-­Slavery Standard and The Liberator.6 The event was also memorialized in a pamphlet, Proceedings of the American Anti-­ Slavery Society, at Its Third De­cade (1864), which was financed through subscription, sold for fifty cents, and published for the AASS’s anniversary week in

220 Conclusion

May  1864.7 One of the last publications issued ­u nder the AASS’s imprint, Proceedings was advertised as a “pamphlet of historical interest and value.”8 Like the event it commemorated, it was meant to consolidate and promote the society’s legacy. Both the event and its accompanying pamphlet epitomized the AASS’s long-­ standing orga­nizational and media tactics. Like the society’s fairs and anniversaries, the Third De­cade cele­bration was a community-­building event. Described as a “­family reunion” (95), it brought together “friends of the cause from dif­fer­ ent parts of the country” in “mutual greetings and congratulations” (4). Courteous be­hav­ior and warm hospitality governed the meeting, and past divisions, especially ­those between the Boston and New York factions, w ­ ere repaired through ritual per­for­mance (forty-­five of the original signers of the Declaration of Sentiments returned to be recognized), the exchange of congratulatory letters (Arthur Tappan’s conciliatory response to Garrison’s personal invitation was the first letter read to the assembly), and public apologies (Samuel J. May looked back “with a feeling of shame” [40] on the society’s unwillingness to allow ­women to sign the Declaration). A place for reunion and reconciliation, the cele­bration was also a site for po­liti­cal organ­izing: e­ very member of the convention signed a petition calling for a constitutional amendment abolishing slavery. Self-­ inflicted wounds ­were healed, and the groundwork for a final blow to slavery was prepared. Concert Hall, like the halls used for the antislavery fairs, was also a symbolic space. It was adorned with the Philadelphia Female ASS’s “beautiful banners,” inscribed with “appropriate mottoes” (4) from the writings of Whittier and ­others. Its platform displayed national emblems similar to ­t hose deployed in the AASS’s graphic prints: “the American flag, now at length the symbol of Liberty, hung in beautiful festoons, extending each way from an Ea­gle and National Shield in the centre, and surmounted by a white banner or band, on which w ­ ere inscribed, in con­spic­u­ous black letters the words, ‘UNION AND LIBERTY’ ” (4). “Large white cards . . . ​on which ­were inscribed appropriate sentences from WASHINGTON, JEFFERSON, MADISON, MONROE, RANDOLPH, CLAY, and other eminent men of the past” (4) ­were also held up. Embracing national symbols and civic as well as antislavery mottos, the hall’s visual and textual decorations figured the AASS as the found­ers’ rightful heir and its victorious cause as the fruition of the Revolution’s ideals. Through its association with the flag, ea­gle, shield, and “the early g­ reat men of the Republic,” and its proclamation of ­union as well as liberty, the AASS made itself one with northern nationalism.9 The hall also sacralized whiteness. Instead of an emancipated slave, it featured a “life-­like portrait of John Brown,” abolition’s white martyr, and speeches



The AASS Celebrates Its Third De­cade 221

that invoked Lincoln, the slave’s white savior.10 A “del­e­ga­tion of colored soldiers from Camp William Penn” ­were honored by being seated on the stage—­t he sitting soldier echoing the kneeling slave in the platform’s visual tableau—­but they ­were relegated to the back row, “­behind the officers of the Society” (8). Described as “intelligent auditors during the ­whole of the protracted morning session” (8), they ­were presented as interested and patient listeners, rather than standing speakers with knowledge to share. The podium was a repurposed auction block, “captured from the Alexandria slave-­prison” (28); a trophy of war, it proclaimed the AASS’s victory over the slaveholder, with no recognition of the trauma it represented for persons sold through the slave trade. Only two of the over twenty-­ five addresses ­were given by black speakers (Robert Purvis and Frederick Douglass), underscoring the society’s continued marginalization of its black members. The “invisible thousands of the redeemed,” who formed, echoing Theodore Weld’s American Slavery as It Is, a “cloud of witnesses too numerous for admission, if spirits filled points of space” (12), w ­ ere pre­sent in the hall only in the abstract, and black members called to the speaker’s stand served as supporting players. The AASS at its third de­cade foregrounded its female affiliates, featuring prominent w ­ omen, such as Susan B. Anthony, as speakers and appending a history of ­women’s antislavery socie­ties to the written report of the event, yet it still positioned its white members at the center of its stage.11 The meeting’s printed pamphlet, like the fairs’ gift books, served as a permanent memorial of the event. It not only circulated the event more widely but also established its meaning. Deploying the AASS’s foundational compendium format, the pamphlet uses elaboration as a mode of substantiation. Along with a transcript of the meeting’s speeches and tributes, it appends letters sent to commemorate the occasion, positive press coverage, Mary Grew’s “Annals of ­Women’s Anti-­Slavery Socie­ties,” a list of the original signers of the Declaration of Sentiments (with asterisks marking the deceased), Whittier’s poem “A Northern Song,” and a comprehensive “Cata­logue of Anti-­Slavery Publications in Amer­i­ca.” Th ­ ese additions underscore the meeting’s message of congratulations (by providing space for more well-­w ishers), remembrance (by including the signers’ names and memorializing ­t hose who have passed), and reconciliation (by commemorating ­women’s enterprising efforts on behalf of the cause). They also reinforce the meeting’s merging of northern nationalism with antislavery: Whittier’s poem transforms the North’s once “scoffing crowd” and “hostile cohorts” into “repentant” b ­ rothers who are welcomed into antislavery’s “toil-­worn ranks” (156). Conversely, the “Cata­logue of Anti-­Slavery Publications in Amer­i­ca” (Figure 78), compiled by Samuel May Jr. (1810–99), fills in what is missing from the event itself: the print media that enabled antislavery’s success. Or­ga­nized

Figure 78. “Cata­logue of Anti-­Slavery Publications in Amer­i­ca,” in Proceedings of the American Anti-­Slavery Society, at Its Third De­cade (New York: AASS, 1864), 157. Courtesy of the Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Cornell University Library.



The AASS Celebrates Its Third De­cade 223

chronologically, it begins by listing texts published during the long lead-up to the AASS (1750–1830) and then continues by individual year, rather than sorting by material type as the cata­logues of the 1830s do. The arrangement allows the cata­logue to visualize antislavery’s forward march t­ oward victory through the relentless proliferation of printed works. Moreover, by compiling a list of the movement’s publications (including reports, journals, and periodicals that ran over multiple years), the cata­logue creates an official archive of the AASS’s print media. In ­doing so it reflects the society’s institutional efforts during the 1860s to preserve its publications for posterity. In 1861 the executive committee formed a committee (of which May was a member) to “collect copies of all tracts, pamphlets, books, published by the vari­ous Anti Slavery Socie­ties and friends, and deposit them where they [could] be preserved for ­f uture use by the historians of the Antislavery movement.”12 In 1862 it ordered “twelve copies” of the society’s “complete publications” to be “bound up” and “duplicate copies of such publications as are now on our shelves” to be sent to the Chicago Historical Society.13 May’s 1864 cata­logue, then, serves as the index to and sign of the physical archives the AASS was assembling as its work came to a close. In producing a canon upon which the AASS’s historical legacy would rest, the cata­logue, like the commemorative report it circulated within and the archives it figures, seeks to secure antislavery’s brand by consolidating its texts. Viewed through its media, the AASS’s legacy remains complex. On the one hand, the society offers as a model for how media, institutionally mobilized, can create social change. As Garrison stated at the Third De­cade cele­bration: “That a most wonderful work has been achieved is now admitted even by our enemies” (26). Through early, innovative, and expansive use of mass media, the AASS directed a national conversation about slavery that ­shaped public opinion and enabled emancipation. It did so by broadly disseminating its message in a variety of discursive registers and material forms and through coordinated distributional networks. While antislavery print has received much of the credit for the AASS’s success (a tendency underscored by May’s cata­logue of exclusively print m ­ atter), material and visual media also played significant roles in its argument. Indeed, it was the AASS’s ability to synergize its many forms—­creating a multimodal as well as a mass message—­t hat made it so effective. Operating at the forefront of the media industry in the antebellum period, the AASS persuaded the North to enact the nation’s revolutionary ideal of liberty for all. On the other hand, the AASS’s media forms became vessels for other, less equal, agendas. In standardizing, consuming, and visually subordinating the enslaved, the AASS’s media constructed cultural messages of black subjugation even as they agitated for po­liti­cal emancipation. Moreover, in consolidating the core narratives of the emerging white northern ­middle class and declaring its regional,

224 Conclusion

racial, social, and moral superiority, they (re)produced a logic of white privilege. The AASS’s media machine both enabled black emancipation and propelled cultural formations that reinforced racial in­equality. The debate over what role the AASS should play in the fight for black equality once emancipation was achieved produced its final schism. In 1865, at the May anniversary held just ­after Lincoln’s assassination and national funeral pro­ cession, Garrison moved to dissolve the AASS on the grounds that the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment, abolishing slavery in the United States, was certain. The resolution failed. Wendell Phillips, who advocated that the society should continue in “existence u ­ ntil all civil rights of the negro [­were] secured,” assumed the presidency and led the waning organ­ization ­until its dissolution in March of 1870, when the passage of the Fifteenth Amendment extended voting rights to black men.14 The argument over w ­ hether the society’s mission should end with emancipation or continue u ­ ntil all black ­people received the rights of citizenship had threatened the harmony of the Third De­cade cele­bration as well. Th ­ ere Garrison argued, “We are or­ga­nized to abolish slavery; when slavery is abolished, of course our mission ends” (27), while Phillips boycotted the event altogether to protest Garrison’s position. At the cele­bration, Douglass spoke against the society’s dissolution, insisting that “the work of the American Anti-­Slavery Society ­will not have been completed ­until the black men of the South, and the black men of the North ­shall have been admitted, fully and completely, into the body politic in Amer­i­ca” (111). Reminding the gathering that “this Society” was or­ga­nized “for two distinct objects”—­the emancipation of the slave and the elevation of p ­ eople of color—­Douglass asserted that “a mightier work than the abolition of slavery now looms up before the Abolitionist,” for “when we have taken the chains off the slave . . . ​we s­ hall find a harder re­sis­tance to the second purpose of this g­ reat association than we have found even upon slavery itself” (111). Understanding the l­abor that remained to achieve racial equality, he cautioned his audience that “­t here is work to be done—­a good deal of work to be done” (114), and that they should temper their triumph u ­ ntil the colored man was made a “full and complete citizen” (114). Well acquainted with the nation’s “power­ful ele­ment of prejudice against color” (112), Douglass urged the AASS to protest and expose racism. ­There was applause, but Douglass voiced an unpop­u­lar position at the gathering. As the cele­bration’s composition and symbols made clear, the AASS continued to prioritize emancipation over equality. This position was evident in its media as well. Through the rest of the 1860s—as the Garrison clique retreated from its radicalism and the Phillips faction worked to secure civil rights for blacks—­t he AASS focused on preserving its media rather than developing new



The AASS Celebrates Its Third De­cade 225

forms. Instead of creating a second propaganda campaign, this time representing black ­people as citizens not slaves, the society chose to consolidate its original proj­ect. By ending its institutional history with emancipation’s triumph, the AASS secured its legacy. Its media archive, however, holds a less liberatory narrative—­one that discloses white selfhood as grounded in black subjugation, a formation that has yet to be undone.

Note s

Introduction 1.  For examples of media related to ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin, see Sarah Meer, ­Uncle Tom Mania: Slavery, Minstrelsy, and Transatlantic Culture in the 1850s (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2005); Stephen Railton’s website, ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin in American Culture, http://­utc​.­iath​.­v irginia​.­edu. Scholarship on this novel and the media culture it produced is extensive; h ­ ere I focus instead on antislavery’s e­ arlier and wider media. 2.  For the Weekly Contribution Plan, see “Appeal to the Abolitionists of Mas­sa­chu­setts in Behalf of ‘The Weekly Contribution Plan,’ ” The Liberator, 20 December 1839, 202; “Weekly Contribution Plan,” The Liberator, 27 December 1839, 207; “The Weekly Contribution Plan,” The Liberator, 31 January 1840, 19; “The Weekly Contribution Plan,” The Liberator, 7 February 1840, 22; “The Weekly Contribution Plan,” The Liberator, 6 March 1840, 39; “Remember ­Those That Are in Bonds,” The Emancipator, 1 October 1840, 2. Other documents related to this plan include two poems: Maria W. Chapman, “The Weekly Contribution,” The Liberator, 27 December 1839, 208; “Rosina,” “Lines Addressed to Rev.—on Receiving from Him a Weekly Contribution Box, to Aid the Anti-­Slavery Cause,” The Liberator, 17 July 1840, 116. The box’s companion tract, the Monthly Offering, describes the program in issue 1.1 (July 1840): 7–9. An ­earlier form of the box was sold at the Mas­sa­chu­setts Anti-­ Slavery Fair (“The Ladies Fair,” The Liberator, 2 January 1837, 3). The Slave’s Friend, 4 vols. (New York: R. G. Williams, 1836–39) describes ­earlier versions of the box with a kneeling slave on its top (1.1: 1–3; 2.10: 4; 2.11: 4). Unattributed quotations in this section come from the box. 3.  “Eighth Annual Meeting of the Mas­sa­chu­setts Anti-­Slavery Society,” The Liberator, 31 January 1840, 18. 4.  “Weekly Contribution Plan,” The Liberator, 27 December 1839, 207. Throughout the book, all italics in quotations are pre­sent in the original ­u nless other­w ise noted. 5.  “Appeal to the Abolitionists of Mas­sa­chu­setts in Behalf of ‘The Weekly Contribution Plan,’ ” The Liberator, 20 December 1839, 202. 6.  J. A. Collins, ed., Monthly Offering, 2 vols. (Boston: Dow and Jackson, 1840–42). Subsequent page references are included in the text. The periodical was suspended from March to August 1841 ­because the editor was in E ­ ngland. The Monthly Offering was designed to attract a wide audience—­ those who have “read ­little upon the subject” as well as “the more advanced” (1:2). For an overview of its aims, see “A New Periodical,” The Liberator, 7 August 1840, 127. 7.  “The Weekly Contribution Plan,” The Liberator, 31 January 1840, 19. The cost of the plan also fashioned it as m ­ iddle class. Contributors w ­ ere asked to make an up-­f ront investment in the purchase of the box and a higher monetary contribution (three to six cents a week) than similar one-­ cent-­a-­week plans (“The Weekly Contribution Plan,” The Liberator, 20 December 1839, 202; “The Weekly Contribution Plan,” The Liberator, 7 February 1840, 22). 8.  “Appeal to Abolitionists of Mas­sa­chu­setts in Behalf of ‘ The Weekly Contribution Plan,’ ” The Liberator, 20 December 1839, 202. 9.  David Paul Nord, Faith in Reading: Religious Publishing and the Birth of Mass Media in Amer­ i­ca (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); Peter J. Wosh, Spreading the Word: The Bible Business

228

Notes to Pages 6–7

in Nineteenth-­Century Amer­i­ca (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994); David P. Morgan, Protestants and Pictures: Religion, Visual Culture, and the Age of American Mass Production (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). For institutional histories of temperance, see Ian Tyrell, Sobering Up: From Temperance to Prohibition in Antebellum Amer­i­ca, 1800–1860 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1979); Jack S. Blockler Jr., American Temperance Movements: Cycles of Reform (Boston: Twayne, 1989); Thomas R. Pegram, Battling Demon Rum: The Strug­gle for a Dry Amer­i­ca, 1800–1933 (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1998). We still lack a comprehensive study of temperance’s popu­lar media. Intial studies include Michael Warner, “Whitman Drunk,” in Breaking Bounds: Whitman and American Cultural Studies, ed. Betsy Erkilla and Jay Grossman (New York: Oxford University Press, 1996), 30–43; Graham Warder, “Selling Sobriety: How Temperance Reshaped Culture in Antebellum Amer­i­c a” (PhD diss., University of Mas­sa­chu­setts, Amherst, 2000); Thomas Augst, “Temperance, Mass Culture, and the Romance of Experience,” American Literary History 19.2 (July 2007): 297–323. 10.  Trish Loughran, The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building, 1770– 1870 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 303–61. 11.  Most studies of antislavery’s appeal focus on its rhetorical features or literary expression rather than its publishing practices. See, for instance, Ronald G. Walters, The Antislavery Appeal: American Abolitionism ­After 1830 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976); Stephen John Hartnett, Demo­cratic Dissent and the Cultural Fictions of Antebellum Amer­i­ca (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002); Jacqueline Bacon, The Humblest May Stand Forth: Rhe­toric, Empowerment, and Abolition (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002); Michael Bennett, Demo­cratic Discourses: The Radical Abolition Movement and Antebellum American Lit­er­a­ture (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005); Julie Husband, Antislavery Discourse and Nineteenth-­Century American Lit­er­a­ture: Incendiary Pictures (New York: Palgrave, 2010); Martha Schoolman, Abolitionist Geographies (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2014). 12.  For a useful overview of ­t hese methodologies, see Meredith L. McGill, “Literary History, Book History, and Media Studies,” in Turns of Event: Nineteenth-­Century American Literary Studies in Motion, ed. Hester Blum (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 23–39. 13.  As Tom Mole notes in “Romantic Print in Media Ecol­ogy,” https://­mediageist​.­wordpress​.­com​ /­panelists​/­mole​/­rms​_ ­mole​_ ­m la2013, print is too often divorced from the broader media ecol­ogy in book history studies; he recommends instead a model where “we seek to understand the relations among media, the ways in which each medium is ­shaped by the ­others, and the ways in which ­t hose relations change over time.” 14.  For studies that tie reform’s benevolent empire to the formation of the m ­ iddle class, see Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian Amer­i­ca, 1815–1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); Steven Mintz, Moralists and Modernizers: Amer­i­ca’s Pre–­Civil War Reformers (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995). For works that specifically link antislavery to the rise and legitimation of the m ­ iddle class, see John Ashworth, Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); David Brion Davis, The Prob­lem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, rev. ed. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). 15.  Saidiya Hartman argues: “The slave is the object or the ground that makes pos­si­ble the existence of the bourgeois subject” (Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-­Making in Ninteenth-­ Century Amer­i­ca [New York: Oxford University Press, 1997], 62). For studies of how class was consolidated through race in the antebellum period, see Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-­Century Amer­i­ca (London: Verso, 1990); Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Theodore W. Allen, The Invention of the White Race, 2 vols. (New York: Verso, 1994); David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class, rev. ed. (London: Verso, 1999); Amy Schrager Lang, The Syntax of Class: Writing In­ equality in Nineteenth-­Century Amer­i­ca (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2003). 16.  Loughran writes that the antislavery movement “comprehended, for a time, the entire scene of antebellum cultural production, shadowing and foreshadowing the more mainstream culture industry that was developing all around it” (Republic in Print, 308).



Notes to Pages 8–11

229

17.  The mapping of the formation of early African American print and visual culture is well ­ nder way. See, for instance, C. Peter Ripley, ed., The Black Abolitionist Papers, 5 vols. (Chapel Hill: u University of North Carolina Press, 1985–92); Dickson D. Bruce Jr., The Origins of African American Lit­er­a­ture, 1680–1865 (Charlottesville: University of V ­ irginia Press, 2001); John Ernest, Liberation Historiography: African American Writers and the Challenge of History, 1794–1861 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Frances Smith Foster, “A Narrative of the In­ter­est­ing Origins and (Somewhat) Surprising Developments of African-­A merican Print Culture,” American Literary History 17.4 (December 2005): 714–40; Daphne A. Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Per­for­mances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1910 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006); Jeannine DeLombard, Slavery on Trial: Law, Abolitionism, and Print Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007); Michael A. Chaney, Fugitive Vision: Slave Image and Black Identity in Antebellum Narrative (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008); Eric Gardner, Unexpected Places: Relocating Nineteenth-­Century African American Lit­er­a­ture (Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2009); Richard S. Newman, “Liberation Technology: Black Printed Protest in the Age of Franklin,” Early American Studies 8.1 (Winter 2010): 173–98; Leon Jackson, “The Talking Book and the Talking Book Historian: African American Cultures of Print—­The State of the Discipline,” Book History 13 (2010): 251–308; Jeannine DeLombard, In the Shadow of the Gallows: Race, Crime and American Civic Identity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012); Lara Langer Cohen and Jordan Alexander Stein, eds., Early African American Print Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012); Maurice O. Wallace and Shawn Michelle Smith, eds., Pictures and Pro­ gress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012); Eric Gardner, Black Print Unbound: The Christian Recorder, African American Lit­er­a­ture, and Periodical Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015); Jasmine Nicole Cobb, Picture Freedom: Remaking Black Visuality in the Early Nineteenth C ­ entury (New York: New York University Press, 2015). My argument is informed by and in conversation with t­ hese studies.

Chapter 1 1.  Marissa D. King and Heather A. Haveman, “Antislavery in Amer­i­ca: The Press, the Pulpit, and the Rise of Antislavery Socie­t ies,” Administrative Science Quarterly 53.3 (September 2008): 495. Trish Loughran also describes the AASS orga­nizational structure as “akin to federalism” in The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building, 1770–1870 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 327. 2.  “Anti-­Slavery Socie­t ies,” The Philanthropist, 17 October 1837; Third Annual Report of the American Anti-­Slavery Society (New York: William S. Dorr, 1836), 35. 3.  Sixth Annual Report of the Executive Committee of the American Anti-­Slavery Society (New York: William S. Dorr, 1839), 51–52. 4.  J. R. Oldfield, Popu­lar Politics and British Anti-­Slavery: The Mobilisation of Public Opinion Against the Slave Trade, 1787–1807 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995), 44. Other studies of British antislavery’s production of propaganda include David Turley, The Culture of En­glish Antislavery, 1780–1860 (New York: Routledge, 1991); Judith Jennings, The Business of Abolishing the British Slave Trade, 1783–1807 (London: Frank Cass, 1997). 5.  On British antislavery’s organ­ization and its Agency Committee, see Robin Blackburn, The Overthrow of Colonial Slavery, 1776–1848 (London: Verso, 1988), 421–23, 439. On f­ ree print, see Marcus Wood, “ ‘The Abolition Blunderbuss’: ­Free Publishing and British Abolition Propaganda, 1780– 1838,” in ­Free Print and Non-­Commercial Publishing Since 1700, ed. James Raven (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 70–91. 6.  Richard S. Newman, The Transformation of American Abolitionism: Fighting Slavery in the Early Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 137, 154, 121. 7.  Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), 2.

230

Notes to Pages 11–13

8. Niglün Andalolu-­Okur, Dismantling Slavery: Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and Formation of the Abolitionist Discourse, 1841–1851 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2016), 38. See also Christopher Cameron, To Plead Our Own Cause: African Americans in Mas­sa­ chu­setts and the Making of the Antislavery Movement (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2014). 9.  Andalolu-­Okur, Dismantling Slavery, 38; Sinha, The Slave’s Cause, 225. 10. Sinha, The Slave’s Cause, 209. 11.  See Richard S. Newman, “Liberation Technology: Black Printed Protest in the Age of Franklin,” Early American Studies 8.1 (Winter 2010): 173–98; Newman, Transformation of American Abolitionism, 86–106. 12.  Gordon Fraser, “Emancipatory Cosmology: Freedom’s Journal, The Rights of All, and the Revolutionary Movements of Black Print Culture,” American Quarterly 68.2 (June 2016): 263, 264. 13.  Marcy J. Dinius, “ ‘Look!! Look!!! at This!!!!’: The Radical Typography of David Walker’s Appeal,” PMLA 126.1 (January 2011): 55. For an overview of Walker’s distributional strategies, see Peter P. Hinks, To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren: David Walker and the Prob­lem of Antebellum Slave Re­sis­tance (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), 116–72. 14. Sinha, The Slave’s Cause, 225; First Annual Report of the American Anti-­Slavery Society (New York: Dorr and Butterfield, 1834), 61. 15.  Leslie M. Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626–1863 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 176. The AASS reports that of its 527 auxiliaries in 1836 only six ­were “Colored” (“American Anti Slavery Society,” in The American Anti-­Slavery Almanac for 1837 [Boston: N. Southard and D. K. Hitchcock, n.d.], 14). 16.  The Constitution of the American Anti-­Slavery Society (New York: AASS, 1838), 4. 17. Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery, 201. 18.  On the black conventions movement, see “Colored Conventions: Bringing Nineteenth-­ Century Black Organ­izing to Digital Life,” www​.­coloredconventions​.­org. On black educational communities, see Elizabeth McHenry, Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Socie­ties (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002). 19.  On the early black press, see Frankie Hutton, The Early Black Press in Amer­i­ca, 1827–1860 (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993); Todd Vogel, ed., The Black Press: New Literary and Historical Essays (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001); Frances Smith Foster, “A Narrative of the In­ter­est­ing Origins and (Somewhat) Surprising Developments of African-­American Print Culture,” American Literary History 17.4 (Winter 2005): 714–40; Timothy Patrick McCarthy, “ ‘ To Plead Our Own Cause’: Black Print Culture and the Origins of American Abolitionism,” in Prophets of Protest: Reconsidering the History of American Abolitionism, ed. Timothy Patrick McCarthy and John Stauffer (New York: New Press, 2006), 114–44; Jacqueline Bacon, Freedom’s Journal: The First African-­ American Newspaper (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007); Benjamin Fagan, The Black Newspaper and the Chosen Nation (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2016). On Ruggles’s bookstore and editorship of the Mirror of Liberty, see Graham Russell Gao Hodges, David Ruggles: A Radical Black Abolitionist and the Under­ground Railroad in New York City (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010). 20.  David Paul Nord, Faith in Reading: Religious Publishing and the Birth of Mass Media in Amer­i­ca (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), 111. For other studies of religious publishing, see Peter J. Wosh, Spreading the Word: The Bible Business in Nineteenth-­Century Amer­i­ca (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994); Candy Gunther Brown, The Word in the World: Evangelical Writing, Publishing, and Reading in Amer­i­ca, 1789–1880 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Paul Gutjhar, “Diversification in American Religious Publishing,” in A History of the Book in Amer­i­ca, vol. 3, ed. Scott E. Casper et al. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 194–203; John Fea, The Bible Cause: A History of the American Bible Society (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). For antislavery’s emergence from evangelicalism, see Michael P. Young, Bearing Witness Against Sin: The Evangelical Birth of the American Social Movement (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 130–95. For antislavery’s relation to the evangelical and temperance movements, see David Paul Nord, “Benevolent Books: Printing, Religion, and Reform, 1790–1840,”



Notes to Pages 13–14

231

in A History of the Book in Amer­i­ca, vol. 2, An Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation, 1790–1840, ed. Robert A. Gross and Mary Kelley (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 221–46; Teresa A. Goddu, “Reform,” in The Oxford History of Popu­lar Print Culture, vol. 5, U.S. Popu­lar Print Culture to 1860, ed. Ronald J. Zboray and Mary E. Zboray (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), 597–610. 21. Nord, Faith in Reading, 90. 22.  Nord, “Benevolent Books,” 230–31. 23. Nord, Faith in Reading, 5. 24.  Nord, “Benevolent Books,” 240. 25.  Naomi R. Lamoreaux, Daniel M. G. Raff, and Peter Temin, “Beyond Markets and Hierarchies: ­Toward a New Synthesis of American Business History,” American Historical Review 108.2 (April 2003): 422. 26.  “General Plan of Anti-­Slavery Organ­ization and Effort,” Friend of Man, 25 April 1838, 173; Constitution of AASS, 8. 27.  On the network of antislavery socie­t ies, see Janet Wilson, “The Early Anti-­Slavery Propaganda,” More Books, Being the Bulletin of the Boston Public Library 20 (January 1945): 51–54. 28.  Minutes of the Executive Committee of the American Anti-­Slavery Society, 4 April 1839, 142, MS. fA.33, Anti-­Slavery Collection, Boston Public Library, Boston (hereafter cited as Minutes). The AASS Publishing Committee was asked to create a “suitable design for an engraved diploma of membership of the American Anti-­Slavery Society” in 1839 (ibid.). 29.  Second Annual Report of the American Anti-­Slavery Society (New York: William S. Dorr, 1835), 83. 30.  Stanton wrote to Birney, “The field is the nation. From N.Y. you can exert an influence over the ­whole field. . . . ​Half the moral power of the nation lies with[in] 24 hours easy ­ride (mostly steam boat) of New York City. ­There the fulcrum must be placed by which we are to overturn the nation” (Letters of James Gillespie Birney, 1831–1857, ed. Dwight L. Dumond, 2 vols. [New York: Appleton-­ Century, 1938], 1:410–11). 31.  For discussions of this professional office staff, see Janet Wilson, “The Early Anti-­Slavery Propaganda,” More Books, Being the Bulletin of the Boston Public Library 19 (November 1944): 348– 52; Loughran, Republic in Print, 328–38. For biographies of AASS leaders, see Benjamin Platt Thomas, Theodore Weld: Crusader for Freedom (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1950); Betty Fladeland, James Gillespie Birney: Slaveholder to Abolitionist (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1955); Lewis Leary, John Greenleaf Whittier (New York: Twayne, 1961); Roddey Noel Edelstein, Henry B. Stanton and His Role in the Abolitionist Movement (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1968); Bertram Wyatt-­Brown, Lewis Tappan and the Evangelical War Against Slavery (Cleveland, OH: Case Western Reserve University Press, 1969); Gerald Sorin, The New York Abolitionists: A Case Study of Po­liti­cal Radicalism (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1971); Robert H. Abzug, Passionate Liberator: Theodore Dwight Weld and the Dilemma of Reform (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980); Lawrence B. Goodheart, Abolitionist, Actuary, Atheist: Elizur Wright and the Reform Impulse (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1990); Hugh Davis, Joshua Leavitt: Evangelical Abolitionist (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1990); Owen W. Muelder, Theodore Dwight Weld and the American Anti-­Slavery Society (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2011). 32.  Weld described the division of l­abor to Birney: “The best pos­si­ble arrangement that I can think of is for Leavitt to be Editor of all the publications except the Quarterly Magazines—­Birney, Wright and Stanton Secretaries as it now stands. Wright to continue as heretofore the Editor of the Quarterly, and taking say one half of the correspondence. The other half of the correspondence to be divided between you and Stanton. Wright to be on the ground all the time—­you and Stanton spend each one half of your time in attending county and state meetings and anniversaries. . . . ​Then both of you could be absent at least half of the time in general operations. When you should be out Stanton should be in, and when you w ­ ere in he should be out, thus two secretaries would be permanently on the ground” (Letters of James Gillespie Birney, 1:390–91). 33. Loughran, Republic in Print, 333.

232

Notes to Pages 14–16

34.  “Plan of L ­ abor,” ­Human Rights, September 1838. See also “Work for Abolitionists!,” The Liberator, 15 June 1838, 95. 35.  “To the Officers and Members,” Executive Committee Circular, MS 402, Mas­sa­chu­setts Anti-­ Slavery Collection, New-­York Historical Society, New York City. 36.  “General Plan of Anti-­Slavery Organ­ization and Effort,” Friend of Man, 25 April 1838, 173. 37.  “To the Officers and Members.” 38.  “General Plan of Anti-­Slavery Organ­ization and Effort,” Friend of Man, 25 April 1838, 173. 39.  See “Address of Executive Committee,” ­Human Rights, June 1836. The AASS Executive Committee was instructed to publish 5,000 copies of the third annual report, which was “sent as far as pos­si­ble through the length and breadth of the land” (Third Annual Report of the American Anti-­ Slavery Society, 30). The AASS’s reports ­were also reprinted in The Emancipator, see “Fifth Annual Meeting of the American Anti-­Slavery Society,” 10 May 1838, 6. 40.  The Monthly Concert included lectures, songs, a monetary collection, and the sale of publications. Maria Weston Chapman’s Songs of the F ­ ree and Hymns of Christian Freedom (Boston: Knapp, 1836) was produced especially for this event. 41.  “Fourth Annual Report of the N.Y. State Anti-­Slavery Society,” Friend of Man, 2 October 1839, 62. The executive committee solicited its state representatives to “maintain a correspondence with the Executive Committee, through the Corresponding Secretaries of the Society, giving them all the impor­tant information that may come to your knowledge, and making suggestions as may lead to increased usefulness” (Executive Committee Circular, 20 September 1837, MS 402, Mas­sa­ chu­setts Anti-­Slavery Collection, New-­York Historical Society, New York City). Loughran describes the AASS’s organ­ization as “a vast super-­structure that sought to draw its energies from p ­ eople on the ground and then to control that energy by channeling it back through a fixed center” (Republic in Print, 327). 42.  “Better Organ­izations,” ­Human Rights, December 1838. 43.  “Par­t ic­u ­lar Instructions,” Arthur Tappan to Weld, in Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, Angelina Grimké Weld and Sarah Grimké, ed. Gilbert H. Barnes and Dwight L. Dumond, 2 vols. (New York: Appleton-­Century, 1934), 1:125. 44.  “Par­t ic­u­lar Instructions,” 1:128. 45.  For the agency system, see Janet Wilson, “The Early Anti-­Slavery Propaganda,” More Books, Being the Bulletin of the Boston Public Library 19 (December 1944): 393–400; Dwight Lowell Dumond, Antislavery: The Crusade for Freedom in Amer­i­ca (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961), 183–89; John L. Myers, “Organ­ization of ‘The Seventy’: To Arouse the North Against Slavery,” Mid Amer­i­ca 48.1 (January 1966): 29–46; Newman, Transformation of American Abolitionism, 152–75. In a ­later version of the agency system, the One Hundred Conventions tour, six agents, including Frederick Douglass, traveled through the West for six months in 1843. A similar tour occurred in 1844 in Mas­sa­chu­setts. See Gregory P. Lampe, Frederick Douglass: Freedom’s Voice, 1818–1845 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 1998), 171–226. 46.  “Third Annual Report of the New York State Anti-­Slavery Society,” Friend of Man, 26 September 1838, 265. For the AASS’s income, see Janet Wilson, “The Early Anti-­Slavery Propaganda,” More Books, Being the Bulletin of the Boston Public Library 19 (December 1944): 400–404; Benjamin Quarles, “Sources of Abolitionist Income,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 32.1 (June 1945): 63–76. 47.  Second Annual Report of the American Anti-­Slavery Society, 49. The Fourth Annual Report of the American Anti-­Slavery Society resolves: “That it be recommended to ­every Anti-­Slavery Society to hold a meeting on the 4th of July or 1st day of August next, to make pledges and give donations for the benefit of this cause” ([New York: William S. Dorr, 1837], 22). An e­ arlier resolution states that the Monthly Concert should be “sealed with large contributions” (“Resolutions Extracted from the Minutes of the Last Annual Meeting of the American Anti-­Slavery Society,” June 1834, Elizur Wright Papers, 1793–1935, MS 46607, Library of Congress, Washington, DC [hereafter cited as Elizur Wright Papers]).



Notes to Pages 16–19

233

48.  Second Annual Report of the American Anti-­Slavery Society, 48. The Monthly Subscription Plan began in late 1834. For a description, see Elizur Wright to Weld, in Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, 1:195–96; “Monthly Subscription Plan,” The Emancipator, 10 March 1835. 49.  Elizur Wright to Beriah Green, 8 August 1834, Elizur Wright Papers; “Monthly Subscription Plan,” ­Human Rights, January 1836. The monthly plan was superseded in 1838 by the Quarterly Subscription Plan, which operated similarly. See Fifth Annual Report of the Executive Committee of the American Anti-­Slavery Society (New York: William S. Dorr, 1838), 17. While Birney complained that the AASS had no permanent fund and was “always in debt, and always getting out of debt,” he also described a steady increase in its receipts, estimating its income, “in­de­pen­dent of what is raised by state and auxiliary socie­t ies,” to be $10,000 in 1835, $25,000 in 1836, and $38,000 in 1837 (Correspondence, Between the Hon. F. H. Elmore, One of the South Carolina Del­e­ga­tion in Congress, and James G. Birney, One of the Secretaries of the American Anti-­Slavery Society, in the Anti-­Slavery Examiner, No. 8 [New York: AASS, 1838], 47, 16). 50.  “The Cent-­a-­Week System,” The Emancipator, 20 September 1838, 85. 51.  The plan’s tract, written by Nathaniel Southard, Why Work for the Slave?, states that “similar Socie­t ies have done much for benevolent objects in ­Great Britain” ([New York: AASS, 1838], [3]). For details of the plan, see “Cent-­a-­Week Socie­t ies,” The Emancipator, 15 March 1838, 178; “Cent-­a-­ Week Socie­t ies,” The Emancipator, 5 July 1838, 37; Southard, Why Work for the Slave? For evangelical fund­rais­i ng practices, see David Paul Nord, “Benevolent Capital: Financing Evangelical Book Publishing in Early Nineteenth-­Century Amer­i­ca,” in God and Mammon: Protestants, Money, and the Market, 1790–1860, ed. Mark A. Noll (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 147–70. The penny collection was ­later resurrected in Scotland as the ­Uncle Tom Penny Offering, which sought to collect one penny from e­ very reader of ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin (“­Uncle Tom Penny Offering,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 30 June 1854). 52.  The executive committee resolved to print 5,000 copies of Southard, Why Work for the Slave? in February 1838 to support the plan (Minutes, 13 February 1838, 33). 53.  “Cent-­a-­Week Socie­t ies,” The Liberator, 13 April 1838, 59. 54.  “Cent-­a-­Week Socie­t ies,” The Emancipator, 5 July 1838, 37; “Cent-­a-­Week Socie­t ies,” The Emancipator, 15 March 1838, 178. 55.  Similarly, the trea­surer was given a “book ruled for accounts with the collectors” to help her make a “monthly report to the General Agent, stating definitely, the w ­ hole No. of collectors, and the w ­ hole No. of contributors, and the largest No. of contributions obtained by any one collector” (“Cent-­a-­Week Socie­t ies,” The Emancipator, 15 March 1838, 178; Southard, Why Work for the Slave?, [3]). 56.  Southard told the plan’s trea­sur­ers and collectors not “to estimate the importance of faithfulness and activity on your parts by the results of your individual efforts. The sight or report of your ­labors may infuse zeal and energy into the movements of hundreds, while your negligence may contribute much to the palsy of the ­whole system” (“Cent-­a-­Week Socie­ties,” The Emancipator, 5 July 1838, 37). The card resembles a page from Benjamin Franklin’s l­ittle book of virtues by which he efficiently charted his self-­improvement (The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, in The Writings of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 1, ed. Albert Henry Smyth [New York: Macmillan, 1905], 330). 57.  The executive committee resolved to continue the plan in January 1839 (Minutes, 3 January 1839, 116). John A. Collins states that “the success of the cent-­a-­week plan, partial as it has been, proves the possibility of procuring” large sums by “­simple means” (“Appeal to the Abolitionists of Mas­sa­chu­setts in Behalf of ‘The Weekly Contribution Plan,’ ” The Liberator, 20 December 1839, 202). 58.  Alfred D. Chandler, The Vis­i­ble Hand: The Managerial Revolution in American Business (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), 1. Chandler argues that it was not u ­ ntil a “basic infrastructure came into being between the 1850s and 1880s” that “modern methods of mass production and distribution and the modern business enterprises that managed them made their appearance” (207). However, as Kenneth Lipartito argues, “social reformers created institutional mechanisms that would pave the way for the managerial corporation” (“The Utopian Corporation,”

234

Notes to Pages 19–22

in Constructing Corporate Amer­i­ca: History, Politics, Culture, ed. Kenneth Lipartito and David B. Sicilia [New York: Oxford University Press, 2004], 94). Antislavery, like evangelicalism before it, created a business infrastructure and hierarchical management system that would not become routine within American organ­izations u ­ ntil l­ ater in the c­ entury. 59. Nord, Faith in Reading, 66. 60.  Third Annual Report of the American Anti-­Slavery Society, 35. 61.  On the presses of evangelical socie­t ies, see Fea, The Bible Cause, 30; Nord, “Benevolent Books,” 233. On the lack of an AASS press, see Janet Wilson, “Early Anti-­Slavery Propaganda,” More Books, Being the Bulletin of the Boston Public Library 19 (November 1944): 353. Wilson notes that even though half of the society’s income went for printing and paper, the AASS was never financially solvent enough to invest in its own press. Thus the executive committee authorized Isaac Knapp to print 2,500 copies of James Thome and Horace Kimball’s Emancipation in the West Indies (New York: AASS, 1838), plus an additional 1,000 copies for his own use, but insisted that it be “printed in the same style and published at the same price as ours” (Minutes, 21 December 1837, 15). We continue to need studies of antislavery presses such as Knapp or Dow and Jackson. 62.  Minutes, 7 June 1838, 71; 4 January 1838, 21; 15 February 1838, 33; 17 October 1839, 195; 7 March 1839, 183. 63.  Minutes, 4 January 1838, 21. Weld described his writing load to Sarah and Angelina Grimké: “When I tell you that half a dozen printers are crying ‘copy’ in my ears you ­w ill forgive a line. . . . ​I have about one hundred pages of proof sheet weekly to correct twice [and have to] prepare copy (about half of it is written) for thirty pages weekly of another work” (Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, 2:526). 64.  The American Anti-­Slavery Almanac for 1836 (Boston: Webster and Southard, n.d.), 48. 65.  “Cata­logue of Books and Pamphlets,” The Emancipator, 2 November 1837, 106. All examples in this section refer to this advertisement u ­ nless other­w ise noted. Handkerchiefs are described in “List of Anti-­Slavery Publications,” The Emancipator, 29 December 1836, 140. For reprintings of the AASS cata­logue, see The Liberator, 1 December 1837, 196; Friend of Man, 5 September 1838, 256; The American Anti-­Slavery Almanac for 1838 (Boston: D. K. Hitchcock, 1837), back cover; Julius Rubens Ames, comp., “Liberty”: The Image and Superscription on ­Every Coin Issued by the United States of Amer­i­ca (New York: AASS, 1839), 17–21 (appendix). The cata­logue was also published as a small tract (Minutes, 14 November 1838, 107). 66.  “List of Anti-­Slavery Publications,” The Emancipator, 23 March 1837, 188. 67.  “Cata­logue of Books and Pamphlets,” The Emancipator, 3 May 1838, 4; “New Works,” The Emancipator, 27 June 1839, 35. 68.  The cata­logue, for instance, describes Ames’s “Liberty” as “a compilation of the sayings of eminent Legislators, Jurists, Moralists, Phi­los­o­phers, Poets . . . ​in regard to ­human liberty” and a digest of the movement’s larger argument: the “abolitionist may find in this pamphlet what he would other­w ise have to ransack hundreds of volumes to find” (“Cata­logue of Books and Pamphlets,” The Emancipator, 2 November 1837, 106). 69.  Elizur Wright to Amos A. Phelps, 16 July 1835, Elizur Wright Papers. 70.  Harriet Martineau, The Martyr Age of the United States (Boston: Weeks, Jordan, 1839), 49. 71.  Richard R. John, Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1995), 261. The AASS understood the postal system, like the press, to be an impor­tant instrument of reform. It formatted appeals to minimize “the likelihood that postal officers would exclude them from the mail” (Spreading the News, 262); its periodicals discussed postal reforms and listed postage rates on their title pages; and its leaders championed cheap postage (Lewis Tappan was trea­surer of the New York Cheap Postage Association; Joshua Leavitt wrote articles and pamphlets on postal reform). David M. Henkin argues that the “post and the press w ­ ere deeply intertwined and mutually supportive cultural institutions” in the antebellum era (The Postal Age: The Emergence of Modern Communications in Nineteenth-­Century Amer­i­ca [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006], 43). 72.  The AASS utilized its transatlantic networks to disseminate their publications abroad. Richard D. Webb, an Irish publisher and abolitionist, ordered parcels of publications and a “select as-



Notes to Pages 22–23

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sortment” of antislavery publications ­were also “sent to London to sell on commission” (“Anti-­Slavery Books Abroad,” The Emancipator, 11 April 1839, 201). 73.  Cheap print allowed the executive committee to support such policies. Leonard Richards estimates the AASS’s printing cost in 1835 at “one and one-­half cents per publication” (“Gentlemen of Property and Standing”: Anti-­Abolition Mobs in Jacksonian Amer­i­ca [New York: Oxford University Press, 1970], 73). Quarles says that the AASS’s publications w ­ ere designed to be sold at cost (“Sources of Abolitionist Income,” 67). 74.  The executive committee wanted each state society to “have its depository,” and to establish “depositories of our most valuable work . . . ​in ­every county and large town” (Fourth Annual Report of the American Anti-­Slavery Society, 21; “An Appeal to Abolitionists,” Executive Committee Circular, 11 October 1837, Mas­sa­chu­setts Anti-­Slavery Collection, MS 402, New-­York Historical Society, New York City). The Mas­sa­chu­setts depository was so large that it was insured for $250,000 against fire (Ninth Annual Report of the Mas­sa­chu­setts Anti-­Slavery Society [Boston: Dow and Jackson, 1841], 59). 75.  “Second Annual Report of the New-­York State Anti-­Slavery Society,” Friend of Man, 27 September 1837, 57; “New Books,” The Philanthropist, 26 May 1837; “Anti-­Slavery Reading Room,” The Philanthropist, 4 August 1837. 76.  “Book Agent,” The Emancipator, 27 June 1839, 35. Announcing Williams’s appointment, the executive committee stated that he would be headquartered in New York City but would visit “dif­ fer­ent parts of the country” (ibid.); it assured depositories that he would not be in competition with them since he received no commission on book sales. 77.  Janet Wilson, “Early Anti-­Slavery Propaganda,” More Books, Being the Bulletin of the Boston Public Library 19 (November 1944): 355. As Leavitt described the system: “We allow such agents $20 or $30 a month wages, and $250 a month in use of h ­ orse and wagon. Many establish libraries, dispose of the almanacs . . . ​sell books, and get subscribers to the Emancipator” (J. Leavitt to Elias Smith, 3 July  1839, MS.  A.1.2 v. 8 no.  41, Rare Books and Manuscripts, Boston Public Library, Boston). 78.  Janet Wilson, “The Early Anti-­Slavery Propaganda,” More Books, Being the Bulletin of the Boston Public Library 19 (November 1944): 355. The executive committee told their lecturers to “drop” publications “as they go,—­e very pastor—­e very ­lawyer—­e very merchant—­e very pedlar—­e very ­human being, should have them when requested” (“An Appeal to Abolitionists”). 79.  Constitution of AASS, 9; Anti-­Slavery Rec­ord 3.1 (January 1837): title page. 80.  “Address of the Executive Committee of the American Anti-­Slavery Society,” in Third Annual Report of the American Anti-­Slavery Society, inside back cover; “Hint to Travelling Abolitionists,” The Emancipator, 4 July 1839, 38. 81.  “To Agents, Subscribers, and the Friends of the Emancipator,” The Emancipator, 6 April 1837, 194. Local socie­ties also used meetings for distribution as when the Muskingum [Ohio] Anti-­Slavery Society ordered “a considerable quantity” of publications “to supply the Delegates who may attend the Anniversary at Granville” (“Anti-­Slavery Publications,” The Philanthropist, 25 March 1836). 82.  “Cent-­a-­Week Socie­t ies,” The Emancipator, 15 March 1838, 178. The Emancipator writes of one society that circulated “more than 50 copies of James Williams, a few Emancipation in the West Indies, and several hundred copies of vari­ous other tracts” (“Cent-­a-­Week Socie­ties,” 5 July 1838, 37). 83.  The Cent-­a-­Week Plan created an efficient system of supply and demand, since contributors funded the print that they would eventually buy back. Plea for the Slave operated much like the Monthly Offering, serving as a tangible repre­sen­ta­t ion of what each cent was donated for and augmenting interest in the cause. Its punctual quarterly arrival also helped to keep the system’s cir­cuit of sympathy and cents in motion. 84.  “The American Anti-­Slavery Society Being Desirous of Extending the Circulation of Their Publications,” The Emancipator, 5 April 1838, 191. 85.  Second Annual Report of the American Anti-­Slavery Society, 49; “An Appeal to Abolitionists.” The executive committee particularly appealed to young men, ladies, and ­children “to aid in

236

Notes to Pages 23–25

the work of disseminating the Society’s publications” (Second Annual Report of the American Anti-­ Slavery Society, 49). 86.  Minutes, 5 April 1838, 50; “An Appeal to Abolitionists.” 87.  In its Fifth Annual Report, the executive committee “commends the system of Anti-­Slavery libraries originated and carried into successful operation by the New-­York State Society. ­Every village which is supplied with a well selected library of Anti-­Slavery publications may be counted as thoroughly and permanently abolitionized” (126). The New York State ASS was instrumental in starting the Quarterly Subscription and Cent-­a-­Week plans, which then gained wider adoption. In October of 1837 it hired three agents to facilitate the establishment of libraries in the state (“Circular,” Friend of Man, 25 October 1837, 75). Eight to ten libraries w ­ ere established within the first twenty days of the plan’s operation, and between one and two hundred within four months (“Third Annual Report of the New York State Anti-­Slavery Society,” Friend of Man, 26 September 1838, 265). Over ten months, $5,000 worth of books ­were circulated (ibid.). By February 1838, interest was so high that t­ here w ­ ere “not books enough to supply the calls” (“Oswego County—­Meeting at Mexico,” Friend of Man, 6 February 1838, 131). Given its local success, the New York State Society called in 1838 for the AASS to create a central depository to supply local libraries and extend the system to ­every state (“General Plan of Anti-­Slavery Organ­ization,” Friend of Man, 25 April 1838, 170). The AASS executive committee took up “a plan for the School District A.S. Library” in February 1838 (Minutes, 1 February 1838, 31). Whittier and Weld ­were appointed to prepare the library, and the executive committee recommended its establishment in June of 1838 (Minutes, 1 February 1838, 31; Minutes, 21 June 1838, 76). By July, ­Human Rights urged local agents: “As soon as a constitution is signed, let $5, $10, or $20, be raised for an anti-­slavery library” (“To Local Agents and Friends of the Slave,” ­Human Rights, July 1838). The Liberator states that hundreds of libraries w ­ ere established in the four months since the commencement of the plan (“Anti-­Slavery Libraries,” 5 October 1838, 159). The executive committee arranged “to issue a series of small volumes which ­shall embrace, within moderate size and price, the most impor­tant facts and arguments which are to be found in our numerous publications” (Fifth Annual Report of the Executive Committee of the American Anti-­Slavery Society, 126). State socie­t ies rapidly a­ dopted the system: the Vermont ASS “made considerable effort to carry into effect the Library system” (Fifth Annual Report of the Vermont Anti-­Slavery Society [Montpelier: Allen and Poland, 1839], 15) and the delegates to the New ­England Anti-­Slavery Convention ­were asked to “come prepared to purchase libraries for their towns” (“Anti-­Slavery Libraries,” The Liberator, 24 May 1839, 21). The West also utilized the library system: W. L. Chaplin wrote to Weld that “the library system is ­every ­t hing; ­t here can be no ­mistake about it. I have just returned from the West where we or­ga­nized five county Soc’ts. in five weeks, and that on new ground almost wholly uncultivated—­have made room for the demand of a thousand dollars worth of books immediately” (Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, 1:489). Library Agents ­were considered even more effective than lecturers since they could “deliver five hundred or a thousand lectures e­ very week” by establishing libraries as well as putting books, pamphlets, and tracts into circulation (“Impor­tant to State Socie­ ties,” The Emancipator, 18 July 1839). 88.  The twenty-­dollar version of the library in New York State was a replica of the state depository. J. P. Bishop, publishing agent for the New York State ASS, wrote that “by a library I mean all the anti-­slavery publications which are for sale at the depository in Utica, comprising 36 bound volumes, and between 40 and 50 pamphlets” (“Anti-­Slavery Libraries—­The Experiment Tested,” Friend of Man, 8 November 1837, 82). 89.  The executive committee encouraged its auxiliaries to raise money for a library as soon as their constitution was signed (“To Local Agents,” Human Rights, July 1838). Cent-­a-­Week Socie­t ies ­were encouraged to support libraries, so that “collectors can, at all times, refer their neighbors to books which ­w ill meet their difficulties, and cure their prejudices” (“Cent-­a-­Week Socie­t ies,” The Emancipator, 15 March 1838, 178). 90.  “Anti-­Slavery Libraries—­The Experiment Tested,” Friend of Man, 8 November 1837, 82. 91. “Work for Abolitionists. The F ­ ree Circulating Library System,” The Emancipator, 1 ­August 1839, 55.



Notes to Pages 25–27

237

92. Ibid. The Emancipator goes on to say, “Plant an anti-­slavery library in e­ very place and you have established a PERMANENT influence, which w ­ ill live, and work, long a­ fter the influence of a public lecture w ­ ill have died away.” 93.  “State Organ­ization,” The Emancipator, 21 June 1838, 31. 94.  “Anti-­Slavery Libraries,” The Emancipator, 26 December 1839, 138. 95.  “Work for Abolitionists,” in The American Anti-­Slavery Almanac for 1840 (New York: AASS, n.d.), inside back cover. 96.  “Work for Abolitionists. The F ­ ree Circulating Library System,” The Emancipator, 1 August 1839, 55. 97.  “Work for Abolitionists,” Anti-­Slavery Lecturer, February 1839. 98.  Some of the library’s individual texts ­were already bundled sets. The antislavery library included the “Declaration of Sentiments and Constitution of the American Anti Slavery Society, Wesley’s Thoughts on Slavery, Does the Bible Sanction Slavery, Address of the Synod of Kentucky, Narrative of Amos Dresser, Letters of A. A. Stone, from Natchez, and Why Work for the Slave” as “all bound in one vol.” (“Work for Abolitionists,” in The American Anti-­Slavery Almanac for 1840, inside back cover). 99.  Examples of serialized print are the AASS’s periodical, the Anti-­Slavery Examiner (1836– 45) and David Lee Child’s The Abolitionist’s Library (Boston: Boston Young Man’s Anti-­Slavery Association for the Diffusion of Truth, 1834), both of which reprinted antislavery works in a numbered series. 100.  William Drayton, The South Vindicated from the Treason and Fanat­i­cism of the Northern Abolitionists (Philadelphia: H. Manly, 1836), 195, 79, 175. 101.  Correspondence, Between the Hon. F. H. Elmore and James G. Birney, 6, 49. Another former southerner argued that in “promulgating their pestiferous doctrines” abolitionists ­were “becoming powerfully terrific” (Abolitionism Exposed Corrected. By a Physician, Formerly Resident of the South. With a Plan for Abolishing the American Anti-­Slavery Society and Its Auxiliaries. By a Tennessean [Philadelphia: J. Sharp, 1838], 4). 102.  L. Richards, “Gentlemen of Property and Standing,” 73. 103.  Wright to Phelps, 3 March 1836, Elizur Wright Papers. 104. ­There are many explanations for why the split occurred. Ronald Walters cites “localism, personality conflicts, hard times, tension between group needs and individual conscience, and differences over tactics” (The Antislavery Appeal: American Abolitionism A ­ fter 1830 [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976], 18). Newman argues that the po­liti­cal failures of mass action techniques in the 1830s brought the tactical question of the “ballot box” to the fore (Transformation of American Abolitionism, 149). Loughran contends that the AASS collapsed, like the nation itself, u ­ nder the pressures of centralization (Republic in Print, 360). Ironically, it was the success of its franchise structure that ultimately dismantled the society, as “strong and enterprising” state socie­ties vied with the executive committee for autonomy at the end of the 1830s (“Address of the Executive Committee to the Abolitionists of the United States,” The Emancipator, 30 May 1839, 18). See also Sinha, The Slave’s Cause, 256–65. 105.  The AASS’s stock of books, pamphlets, and ste­reo­type plates was assigned to Lewis Tappan and S. W. Benedict in trust in order to pay off the society’s debts (The Seventh Annual Report of the Executive Committee of the American Anti-­Slavery Society [New York: AASS, 1840], 18; see also The Liberty Almanac for 1849 [New York: AFASS, 1848], 3). Tappan placed an advertisement stating that he has “purchased all the books, pamphlets, tracts, prints e­ tc. lately belonging to the American Anti-­Slavery Society, amounting to about eight thousand dollars, at old prices, which he offers for sale by his agent in any quantity, at low prices for cash only” (“Anti-­ Slavery Publications,” Signal of Liberty, 28 November 1842; see also “Anti-­Slavery Publications,” The Philanthropist, 9 July 1842). Garrison officially took over the presidency of the AASS in 1843 when the AASS relocated from New York to Boston and held the position ­u ntil 1865 (Henry Mayer, All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery [New York: St. Martin’s, 1998], 357, 594).

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Notes to Pages 27–34

106. Gilbert Barnes, The Antislavery Impulse, 1830–1844 (Gloucester, MA.: Peter Smith, 1973), 191. 107.  See Robert Fanuzzi on Garrison’s management of print’s public sphere and modes of publicity (Abolition’s Public Sphere [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003], 43–82). Loughran views Garrison as one of “the few continuous figures against (and through) which” abolition’s splintered proj­ect can be told (Republic in Print, 306). 108.  In terms of an individual, one can best chart the development of the antislavery movement through the work of Lydia Maria Child, who edited or wrote in a wide array of antislavery genres: gift book, almanac, slave narrative, newspaper, tract, novel. Her writings span the era from the beginnings of the AASS (An Appeal in F ­ avor of That Class of Americans Called Africans [1833]) through emancipation (A Romance of the Republic [1867]). For an overview of Child’s ­c areer, see Carolyn Karcher, The First W ­ oman in the Republic: A Cultural Biography of Lydia Maria Child (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998).

Chapter 2 1.  Address of the Members of the Philadelphia Anti-­Slavery Society to Their Fellow Citizens (Philadelphia: Board of Man­ag­ers, 1835). 2.  Proceedings of the New York Anti-­Slavery Convention (Utica, NY: Standard and Demo­crat Office, 1835), 10. 3.  Debate at the Lane Seminary (Boston: Garrison and Knapp, 1834), 3. 4.  “Par­t ic­u ­lar Instructions,” Arthur Tappan to Weld, in Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, Angelina Grimké Weld and Sarah Grimké, ed. Gilbert H. Barnes and Dwight L. Dumond, 2 vols. (New York: Appleton-­Century, 1934), 1:126; “Hints to Anti-­Slavery Debaters,” in The American Anti-­Slavery Almanac for 1841 (Cincinnati: Ohio Anti-­Slavery Society, 1841), 16. 5.  Anti-­Slavery Rec­ord 2.12 (December 1836): 152; Elizur Wright to Weld, in Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, 1:195; American Anti-­Slavery Reporter 1.1 (January 1834): 1. 6.  “Facts! Facts!! Facts!!!,” ­Human Rights, March 1836; “STILL MORE FACTS,” ­Human Rights, March 1836; “Statistics of the United States’ Slave Population,” Quarterly Anti-­Slavery Magazine 1.2 (January 1836): 188–92. 7.  “List of Publications for Sale at the Office of the American Anti-­Slavery Society,” The Emancipator, 20 July 1837, 48. 8.  “Mrs. Child’s Appeal,” The Abolitionist, September 1833, 129; “New Publications,” The Liberator, 14 June 1839, 96; “Notices of New Publications,” The Emancipator, 8 June 1837, 23. 9.  “Par­tic­u ­lar Instructions,” Arthur Tappan to Weld, in Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, 1:126. 10.  Jeannine DeLombard highlights the “cumulative impulse” as “one of the most striking characteristics of the abolitionist print campaign” (Slavery on Trial: Law, Abolitionism, and Print Culture [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007], 16). 11.  Patricia Cline Cohen, A Calculating ­People: The Spread of Numeracy in Early Amer­i­ca (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). See also her “Statistics and the State: Changing Social Thought and the Emergence of a Quantitative Mentality in Amer­i­ca, 1790 to 1820,” William and Mary Quarterly 38.1 (January 1981): 35–55. 12.  Theodore Porter, Trust in Numbers: The Pursuit of Objectivity in Science and Public Life (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1995), 20; Mary Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact: Prob­lems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998). See also Theodore Porter, The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 1820–1900 (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ ton University Press, 1986). 13.  Oz Frankel, States of Inquiry: Social Investigations and Print Culture in Nineteenth-­Century Britain and the U.S. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 5. See also Silvana Patriarca, Numbers and Nationhood: Writing Statistics in Nineteenth-­Century Italy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).



Notes to Pages 34–37

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14.  T. Porter, The Rise of Statistical Thinking, 6; David Paul Nord, Faith in Reading: Religious Publishing and the Birth of Mass Media in Amer­i­ca (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 103. 15. Frankel, States of Inquiry, 11. 16.  American Anti-­Slavery Reporter 1.1 (January 1834): 1. 17. “Emancipation,” The Philanthropist, 17 July 1838. 18.  “The Facts of Slavery,” Anti-­Slavery Lecturer, 1 January 1839. 19.  As Angelina Grimké Weld wrote to Anna Frost, “We know that it was the exposure of FACTS with regard to the African Slave trade which first roused the heart of Clarkson to feel . . . ​a nd that facts, FACTS, have set in motion all that machinery in E ­ ngland which has at last worked out a peaceful and glorious deliverance for 800,000 slaves in the B. W. Indies, and so filled ­England with horror and indignation at the SYSTEM” (Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, 2:789). 20. Poovey, A History of the Modern Fact, xi–xv. 21.  On the history of slave power and the three-­fi fths clause, see Leonard L. Richards, The Slave Power: The ­Free North and Southern Domination, 1780–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2000). 22.  P. Cohen states that almanacs “began to be garnished with facts and figures in the 1810s” (A Calculating P ­ eople, 165); Maureen Perkins asserts that by the 1830s the almanac was a rational reference work full of statistical and numerical data (Visions of the ­Future: Almanacs, Time, and Cultural Change, 1775–1870 [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996], 55). For the development of the U.S. almanac, see Milton Drake, Almanacs of the United States, 2 vols. (New York: Scarecrow Press, 1962). 23.  Molly McCarthy, The Accidental Diarist: A History of the Daily Planner in Amer­i­ca (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 53. On the almanac’s standard form, see Marion de Nonie Barber McDowell, “Early American Almanacs: The History of a Neglected Literary Genre” (PhD diss., Florida State University, 1971); John S. Wenrick, “For Education and Entertainment—­A lmanacs in the Early American Republic, 1783–1815” (PhD diss., Claremont Gradu­ate School, 1974); Marion Barber Stowell, Early American Almanacs: The Colonial Weekday Bible (New York: Burt Franklin, 1977); Brian Maidment, “Re-­A rranging the Year: The Almanac, the Day Book, and the Year Book as Popu­lar Literary Forms, 1789–1860,” in Rethinking Victorian Culture, ed. Juliet John and Alice Jenkins (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), 92–114. 24.  The American Almanac and Repository of Useful Knowledge for the Year 1830 (Boston: Gray and Bowen, 1829), viii. 25. Ibid. 26.  As Georgia Barnhill notes, almanacs w ­ ere the “most widely available form of illustrated text” in colonial Amer­i­ca and the new republic (“Transformations in Pictorial Printing,” in The History of the Book, vol. 2, An Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation, 1790–1840, ed. Robert A. Gross and Mary Kelley [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015], 430). 27.  See the multiplication ­table on the back page of The Farmer’s Almanac for 1834 (Cincinnati, OH: Guilford and Farnsworth, n.d.) and the mathematical question in Samuel Burr, ed., The Freeman’s Almanack for the Year of Our Lord 1830 (Cincinnati, OH: W. M. Farnsworth, n.d.). 28.  The eighteenth-­century almanac’s special interest was agriculture, but in the nineteenth ­century “professions, po­liti­cal parties, religious groups, fraternal o ­ rders, l­ abor organ­izations, moral uplifters, and business promoters turned to this mass medium to sell their ideas and their goods” (Drake, Almanacs of the United States, preface, n.p.). 29.  For example, the American Tract Society’s Christian Almanac began in 1821 and was produced in twenty-­one dif­fer­ent geographic editions by 1830 (Nord, Faith in Reading, 94). See also David Morgan, Protestants and Pictures: Religion, Visual Culture, and the Age of American Mass Production (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 44–74. 30.  As Perkins writes, “almanacs ­were influential cultural messengers” since they introduced new concepts and revised “previously accepted knowledge” (Visions of the F ­ uture, 1, 65). 31.  “Anti-­Slavery Almanac,” The Emancipator, 30 August 1838, 73. The Emancipator also states: “­There is no species of publication so thoroughly read, so deeply impressed upon the mind, and so long remembered, as an Almanac” (“Anti-­Slavery Almanac, for 1837,” 27 November 1836, 115).

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Notes to Pages 37–51

32.  Weld is not named in periodical advertisements as the editor of the The AAS Almanac ­u ntil the editions for 1840 and 1841, but he is listed, along with Wright, as preparing the edition for 1839 in the society’s rec­ords (Minutes of the Executive Committee of the American Anti-­Slavery Society, 10 May 1838, 61, MS. fA.33, Anti-­Slavery Collection, Boston Public Library, Boston). Almanacs ­were published the year before the date in their title. The AAS Almanac for 1841 was published in the summer of 1840; hence, it was a product of the original 1830s AASS. 33.  “Annual Meeting,” The Liberator, 4 June 1836, 92; Minutes, 10 May 1838, 61; Minutes, 2 May 1839, 146. 34.  “Anti-­Slavery Almanac,” The Liberator, 13 September 1839, 147. 35.  “Anti-­Slavery Almanac for 1838,” The Liberator, 26 May 1837, 87. ­Every edition included ­these components, although individual numbers presented them slightly differently, especially in terms of the layout and content of the calendar pages. 36.  “The Anti-­Slavery Almanac,” The Emancipator, 23 September 1841, 82; “Anti-­Slavery Almanac, for 1840,” The Liberator, 2 August 1839, 123. 37.  “Anti-­Slavery Almanac for 1838,” The Emancipator, 1 June 1837, 19; The American Anti-­ Slavery Almanac for 1840 (New York: AASS, n.d.), 3. Subsequent page references are included in the text. 38.  “Anti-­Slavery Almanack for 1839,” The Emancipator, 16 August 1838, 63. According to The Liberator’s advertisement for The AAS Almanac for 1838, “No pains have been spared in producing a valuable Abolition Tract. The calculations and engravings cost $150” (“Anti-­Slavery Almanac for 1838,” 26 May 1837, 87). The Liberator also lauds The AAS Almanac’s material form: “printed on superior paper” and “unsurpassed by any published” for its “mechanical execution” (“Price Reduced!!,” 19 September 1835, 151). 39.  The American Anti-­Slavery Almanac for 1839 (New York: S. W. Benedict, n.d.), 30, 31, 30. Subsequent page references are included in the text. 40.  The American Anti-­Slavery Almanac for 1836 (Boston: Webster and Southard, n.d.), 12–13, 28–29, 44–47, 48. Subsequent page references are included in the text. 41.  The American Anti-­Slavery Almanac for 1837 (Boston: N. Southard and D. K. Hitchcock, n.d.), 27. Subsequent page references are included in the text. 42.  The American Anti-­Slavery Almanac for 1838 (Boston: D. K. Hitchcock, n.d.), 33. Subsequent page references are included in the text. ­There ­were two Boston impressions, both identical: the first by D. K. Hitchcock and the second by Isaac Knapp. 43.  The passage continues: “lest my fury go out like fire, and burn that none can quench it, ­because of the evil of your d ­ oings” (Jeremiah 21:12, King James Version). 44.  For a discussion of how the antislavery movement linked its cause more generally to the Revolution, see Robert Fanuzzi, Abolition’s Public Sphere (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), xxiii–­x xix. 45.  The editions for 1836, 1837, and 1841 do not use prints on their calendar pages, but they provide some images in their back m ­ atter. 46.  “Our Almanac for 1839,” The Emancipator, 22 November 1838, 122. 47.  “Anti-­Slavery Almanac for 1838,” The Emancipator, 27 July 1837, 51. 48.  “Debates of the Convention—­Continued,” The Emancipator, 22 August 1839, 66. 49.  The AAS Almanac for 1836, 3. 50. Conversely, The AAS Almanac was itself regularly advertised in the AASS’s cata­logue of publications (The Emancipator, 29 December 1836, 140) and alongside new publications (“Anti-­Slavery Almanac” and “New Publications,” The Emancipator, 8 June 1837, 23) and its pages ­were reprinted in the antislavery press (“Anti-­Slavery Almanac for 1838,” The Liberator, 21 July 1837, 120). 51.  “Anti-­Slavery Almanac,” The Liberator, 19 September 1835, 150. 52.  Theodore Dwight Weld, ed., American Slavery as It Is (New York: AASS, 1839) is usually named as antislavery’s bestseller in the 1830s, since it sold over a hundred thousand copies in its first year. If The AAS Almanac’s circulation figures are aggregated, however, it outsold Weld’s tract.



Notes to Pages 51–53

241

53.  The AAS Almanac for 1838, 5; “Address of the Executive Committee,” The Emancipator, 30 May 1839, 18. 54.  “Circulation of the Almanac,” The Liberator, 15 September 1837, 151; “American Anti-­Slavery Almanac for 1838,” The Emancipator, 26 October 1837, 101. 55.  “Price Reduced,” The Liberator, 19 September 1835, 151. 56.  “Our Almanac,” The Emancipator, 16 August 1838, 62. The AAS Almanac for 1837 is included on The Liberator’s “Cheap List” of publications (17 December 1836, 203). 57.  “Anti-­Slavery Almanac for 1839,” The Liberator, 31 August 1838, 140; “Almanacs,” The Emancipator, 19 September 1839, 82; “Anti-­Slavery Almanac,” The Liberator, 23 April 1836, 67. 58.  “Anti-­Slavery Funds,” The Emancipator, 17 January 1839, 152. 59.  “­Don’t Forget to Be in Season with Your O ­ rders,” ­Human Rights, August 1838. 60.  “Is Your Neighborhood Supplied with Anti-­Slavery Almanacs?,” The Emancipator, 2 November 1837, 105. 61.  “The Almanacs for 1840 Are Beginning to Go Out,” The Emancipator, 1 August 1839, 54. 62.  Reprinted in “Anti-­Slavery Almanac for 1839,” The Liberator, 31 August 1838, 140. 63.  Minutes, 18 October 1838, 97; Minutes, 2 May 1839, 148; “Debates of the Convention—­ Continued,” The Emancipator, 22 August 1839, 66. 64.  “State Organ­ization,” The Emancipator, 21 June 1838, 31. 65.  “Work for Abolitionists!!,” The Liberator, 15 June 1838, 95. 66.  “The Walpole Anti-­Slavery Society,” The Emancipator, 18 October 1838, 101. 67.  “Our Almanac,” The Emancipator, 16 August 1838, 62; “Anti-­Slavery Almanac for 1838,” The Emancipator, 27 July 1837, 51. 68.  “Anti-­Slavery Almanac for 1838,” The Emancipator, 27 July 1837, 51; Lewis Tappan to Weld, in Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, 2:835. The Philanthropist advertises the almanac for sale at “the Book-­store of Meachan and Gill, Columbus” (“The American Anti-­Slavery Almanac for 1839,” 9 October 1838); a writer “in the Ohio Atlas” calls on merchants to “supply themselves abundantly with this tract” while in New York (“The A.S. Almanac,” The Emancipator, 20 September 1838, 85). 69.  “Plan of Operation,” in The AAS Almanac for 1836, 29–30. 70.  “State Organ­ization,” The Emancipator, 21 June 1838, 31; “Plan of L ­ abor,” Friend of Man, 8 August 1838, 231. 71.  “Anti-­Slavery Almanac,” The Liberator, 20 June 1835, 100. 72. “Almanacs,” The Emancipator, 4 October 1838, 93. 73.  “Anti-­Slavery Publications,” The Philanthropist, 9 July 1842. 74.  The bifurcation began with Weld’s edition for 1841. 75.  The 1840s AAS Almanac had an array of editors besides the Childs. The edition for 1842 was prepared by Southard and Joshua Leavitt (“Anti-­Slavery Almanac,” The Emancipator, 5 August 1841, 54), and the edition for 1847 by Sydney Howard Gay, editor of the National Anti-­Slavery Standard (“The Anti-­Slavery Almanac,” The Liberator, 14 August 1846, 131). The society apparently published no editions for 1845 and 1846, but an Anti-­Slavery Almanac for 1846 was published by Finch and Weed (New York: n.d.). 76.  “The Almanac for 1844,” The Liberator, 20 October 1843, 168. This dip in circulation began with The AAS Almanac for 1841, which sold only 40,000 copies (“Address to Abolitionists,” The Emancipator, 19 November 1840, 118). 77.  The edition for 1844 was published by I. A. Hopkins of Syracuse, NY; the edition for 1845 by Tucker and Kinney, Syracuse; and the edition for 1846 by W. H. Burleigh, Hartford, CT. Editions for 1847 and afterwards w ­ ere published by William Harned in New York City. 78.  The Liberty Almanac for 1845 (Syracuse, NY: Tucker and Kinney, n.d.), front cover; “The Liberty Almanac for 1848,” National Era, 25 November 1847. 79.  The Liberty Almanac for 1847 (New York: William Harned, n.d.), n.p. 80. See The Liberty Almanac for 1848 (New York: William Harned, n.d.), n.p.; The Liberty Almanac for 1849 (New York: AFASS, n.d.), n.p.

242

Notes to Pages 54–58

81.  “­Uncle Tom’s Cabin” and “Liberty Almanac for 1852,” National Era, 17 June 1852, 99. Drake argues more generally that the period between 1850 and 1875 saw the “rapid decline of almanacs as mass utilities” due to the advent of “cheap watches, abundant newspapers, and advertising calendars” (Almanacs of the United States, preface, n.p.).

Chapter 3 1.  Fifth Annual Report of the Executive Committee of the American Anti-­Slavery Society (New York: William S. Dorr, 1838), 41. 2.  Nathaniel Southard, Why Work for the Slave? (New York: AASS, 1838), 2. 3.  On the slave as liar, see Ann Fabian, The Unvarnished Truth: Personal Narratives in Nineteenth-­ Century Amer­i­ca (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), 84. On the inadmissibility of slave evidence in the court of law, see Jeannine Marie DeLombard, Slavery on Trial: Law, Abolitionism, and Print Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007), 106. 4.  “Pictures of Slavery by Slave-­Holders,” in The American Anti-­Slavery Almanac for 1838 (Boston: D. K. Hitchcock, n.d.), 33. 5.  As Hank Trent’s groundbreaking research on James Williams shows, Williams is a print persona—­a pseudonym for Shadrack Wilkins, an enslaved man from Essex County, ­Virginia (Hank Trent, introduction to James Williams, Narrative of James Williams, an American Slave, ed. Hank Trent [Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013], xxv). For an analy­sis of Williams’s many personae, see Faith Barter, “­Human Rites: Deciphering Fictions of L ­ egal and Literary Personhood, 1830–1860” (PhD diss., Vanderbilt University, 2016), 75–119. 6.  Philip Gould argues that “the antebellum slave narrative came of age in the context of the abolitionist obsession with ‘evidence’ and the new documentary compendia meant to fill that role” (“The Rise, Development, and Circulation of the Slave Narrative,” in The Cambridge Companion to the African American Slave Narrative, ed. Audrey A. Fisch [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007], 19). For an overview of the “core challenges of understanding African American (auto)biographical writing in the nineteenth ­century” (76), see John Ernest, Chaotic Justice: Rethinking African American Literary History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 75–111. 7.  John Sekora, “Black Message/White Envelope: Genre, Authenticity, and Authority in the Antebellum Slave Narrative,” Callaloo 32 (Summer 1987): 502. For a more recent analy­sis of the white paratext that often frames the slave narrative, see Beth A. McCoy, “Race and the (Para)Textual Condition,” PMLA 121.1 (January 2006): 156–69. 8.  “Narrative of the Life of Thomas Cooper,” The Emancipator, 18 March 1834; “Brief Account of an Emancipated Slave: Written by Himself, at the Request of the Editor,” in The Oasis, ed. Lydia Maria Child (Boston: Benjamin C. Bacon, 1834), 106–12; “History of the Slave, James,” Anti-­Slavery Rec­ord 2.2 (February 1836): 1–8; “Narrative of David Barrett,” Anti-­Slavery Rec­ord 3.7 (July 1837): 2–11; “Story of Anthony Gayle,” in The American Anti-­Slavery Almanac for 1838 (Boston: Knapp, n.d.), 44; “James Major Monroe—­A Fugitive Slave,” Monthly Offering, October  1840, 51–56, and December 1840, 81–84. I have argued elsewhere that it is impor­tant to extend our study of the slave narrative “beyond the material form of the book” to understand how the genre functions when it is “folded in other forms” (Teresa A. Goddu, “The Slave Narrative as Material Text,” in The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative, ed. John Ernest [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014], 160). 9.  See “Cata­logue of Publications,” The Emancipator, 2 November 1837, 106. 10.  The American Anti-­Slavery Almanac for 1840 (New York: AASS, n.d.), back cover; “Plan of ­Labor,” Friend of Man, 11 July 1838, 217. 11.  Charles Ball, Slavery in the United States: A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Charles Ball (New York: John S. Taylor, 1837); “The Cabinet of Freedom,” ­Human Rights, April 1836. The Cabinet of Freedom was supervised by William Jay, the AASS’s Secretary for Foreign Correspondence,



Notes to Pages 58–64

243

and Gerrit Smith and was designed to collect “in a cheap but neat form, the most valuable and instructive works” on the subject of slavery (Cabinet of Freedom 1.1 [March 1836]: 5). 12.  Minutes of the Executive Committee of the American Anti-­Slavery Society, 4 January 1838, 21, MS. fA.33, Anti-­Slavery Collection, Boston Public Library, Boston. 13.  James Williams, Narrative of James Williams, an American Slave, ed. John Greenleaf Whittier (New York: AASS, 1838), xviii. Subsequent citations are given in the text. Since Williams’s narrative was dictated to and molded by Whittier, it falls into the category of white/black collaboration that Frances Smith Foster calls the “gray envelope” (“Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents and the ‘Careless ­Daughters’ (and Sons) Who Read It,” in The (Other) American Traditions: Nineteenth-­Century American W ­ omen Writers, ed. Joyce Warren [New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1993], 95). 14.  William Andrews, To Tell a ­Free Story: The First ­Century of Afro-­American Autobiography, 1760–1865 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 65. Andrews argues that 1830s slave narratives ­were “documents of empirical fact” that subordinated subjectivity to objectivity in order to gain quasi-­scientific status (65). 15.  “In­ter­est­ing Narrative,” The Liberator, 2 February 1838, 18; “Cata­logue of Publications,” The Emancipator, 5 April 1838, 192. 16.  As Andrews asserts, Williams is not “the subject of his autobiography; slavery is” (To Tell a ­Free Story, 63). 17.  For an account of how the antislavery movement deployed the iconography of the runaway, see Marcus Wood, Blind Memory: Visual Repre­sen­ta­tions of Slavery in ­England and Amer­i­ca, 1780– 1865 (New York: Routledge, 2000), 78–99. For readings of fugitive notices, see David Waldstreicher, “Reading the Runaways: Self-­Fashioning, Print Culture, and Confidence in Slavery in the Eighteenth-­ Century Mid-­Atlantic,” William and Mary Quarterly 56.2 (April 1999): 243–72; Sarah Blackwood, “Fugitive Obscura: Runaway Slave Portraiture and Early Photographic Technology,” American Lit­ er­a­ture 81.1 (March 2009): 93–125. 18.  See for instance “The Collectors to the Contributors,” Plea for the Slave 1.2 (September 1838): 13–20; “A Peep at Slavery,” in The American Anti-­Slavery Almanac for 1839 (New York: S. W. Benedict, n.d.), 31–32. 19.  M. Wood observes that the antislavery movement’s use of runaway imagery “frequently disempower[ed] the black subject” by emphasizing their “passivity and de­pen­dency” and need of “the help of a ­f ree North to succeed” (Blind Memory, 95, 99). 20.  “$100,000 Reward,” in The American Anti-­Slavery Almanac for 1837 (Boston: Southard and Hitchcock, n.d.), 16. 21.  For a fuller account of how Williams’s narrative produces sympathetic identification between reader and enslaved person, see Teresa A. Goddu, “The African American Slave Narrative and the Gothic,” in A Companion to American Gothic, ed. Charles L. Crow (West Sussex: Wiley, 2014), 77–78. 22.  “Narrative of James Williams,” The Emancipator, 15 February 1838, 163; “The Narrative of James Williams,” Herald of Freedom, 7 July 1838, 74. 23.  Williams’s narrative vastly simplifies the circuitous route that Shadrack Wilkins took to freedom, turning multiple escape attempts into a single, linear journey. For a detailed account of Wilkins’s long road to freedom, see Trent, introduction to Williams, Narrative, xxviii–­x xxviii. 24.  “Narrative of James Williams,” The Liberator, 9 March 1838, 39. For an analy­sis of the impossible “discursive terrain” former slaves had to negotiate to tell their truth about slavery and how their stories had to conform to “certain codes,” see Dwight McBride, Impossible Witnesses: Truth, Abolitionism, and Slave Testimony (New York: New York University Press, 2001), 3. For how African American autobiography works within a “white cultural theater” to open “a space—of discourse, of ideology—in which an alternate historical vision” can be represented, see John Ernest, Liberation Historiography: African American Writers and the Challenge of History, 1794–1861 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 157–58. 25.  For examples of ­t hese emblems of the runaway, see the specimen page of newspaper cuts in M. Wood, Blind Memory, 90.

244

Notes to Pages 64–68

26.  On the slave narrative’s frontispiece, see Lynn  A. Casmier-­Paz, “Slave Narratives and the Rhe­toric of Author Portraiture,” New Literary History 34.1 (Winter 2003): 91–116. For an overview of Reason’s ­c areer, see Dorothy B. Porter, “Patrick H. Reason,” in Dictionary of American Negro Biography, ed. Rayford W. Logan and Michael R. Winston (New York: Norton, 1982), 517–19. 27.  One reader’s description makes this clear: “On the cover of the l­ ittle book, you see the fugitive slave, in his extremity, standing alone on the earth, against the world . . . ​t he very living and speaking personification of helplessness and flight and utter despair of escape” (“James Williams in ­Every ­Family,” The Emancipator, 12 April 1838, 194). 28.  “Au­t hen­t ic Narrative of an American Slave!,” The Liberator, 30 March 1838, 51. The title of the Boston edition—­Au­then­tic Narrative of James Williams, an American Slave (Boston: Knapp, 1838)—­reiterates the authenticating aspects of the advertisement. 29.  “Narrative of Moses Roper,” The Liberator, 30 March 1838, 51. Williams is again transformed into the representative runaway when the Narrative’s cover image appears in the Slave’s Friend above the heading “The Fugitive Slave” (3.9 [September 1838]: 1) and in The Liberty Almanac for 1847 (New York: William Harned, n.d.) u ­ nder that nameless title (n.p.). Similarly, the Quarterly Anti-­Slavery Magazine argues that Ball’s narrative “illustrates the history of his class” (“The Life and Adventures of a Fugitive Slave,” 1.4 [July 1836]: 375). 30.  For the early slave narrative’s generic “instability” and “indeterminacy,” especially in relation to the criminal confession, see Jeannine Marie DeLombard, In the Shadow of the Gallows: Race, Crime, and American Civic Identity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 187. 31.  The American Anti-­Slavery Almanac for 1838, 33–36, 44–45. 32. Southard, Why Work for the Slave?, 2, 4. 33.  C. Ball, Slavery in the United States (1837), vi; “Cases of Cruelty,” in Julius Rubens Ames, comp., “Liberty”: The Image and Superscription on ­Every Coin Issued by the United States of Amer­i­ca ([New York: AASS], 1837), 144–45. The excerpts that introduce Ball’s narrative are not specifically runaway slave advertisements but they work similarly to expose slavery’s cruelty through the brutalized bodies of the enslaved. 34.  “Narrative of James Williams,” The Liberator, 9 March 1838, 39. 35.  “Cata­logue,” The Emancipator, 5 April 1838, 192; “Cata­logue of Publications,” in The American Anti-­Slavery Almanac for 1839, back cover. Th ­ ere ­were New York and Boston editions for both the volume version and the sheets. For a full history of the Narrative’s vari­ous editions, see Thomas Franklin Currier, A Bibliography of John Greenleaf Whittier (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1937), 37–39. Several unauthorized editions also circulated. The Emancipator warns that an edition of the Narrative “which has what purports to be a portrait, blotted from stone, and marked Moore’s Lithog. Boston, is not published by the American Anti-­Slavery Society, and therefore the placing of their imprint on the title page was wholly unauthorized” (“Caution,” 15 March 1838, 178). Another unauthorized edition was printed in the 1850s: Narrative of James Williams, ed. Simon Depp (Columbus, OH: Scott and Bascom, 1852). 36.  Minutes, 15 February 1838, 38. The composition and publication of the book occurred swiftly. According to Trent, Wilkins arrived in New York City on New Year’s Day 1838 and stayed at an abolitionist’s home where John Greenleaf Whittier also boarded (introduction to Williams, Narrative, xv). ­A fter Wilkins told his story to members of the executive committee, the AASS de­cided to publish it, in exchange for which Wilkins would receive safe passage to ­England. The executive committee authorized Whittier to prepare the text on 4 January (Minutes, 4 January 1838, 21). Whittier dated his introduction 24 January, and The Emancipator lists the Narrative as in press on the next day (“James Williams—­t he Fugitive Slave,” The Emancipator, 25 January 1838, 151). On 5 February, Weld wrote to Birney that “Whittier’s book, ‘James Williams’ w ­ ill be sent this week prob­ably day a­ fter tomorrow” (Letters of James Gillespie Birney, 1831–1857, ed. Dwight L. Dumond, 2 vols. [New York: Appleton-­Century, 1938], 1:451). On 14 February, Stanton sent Birney a copy of “Whittier’s Williams” (ibid., 452) and a day l­ ater The Emancipator announced it as “just from the press” (“Narrative of James Williams,” The Emancipator, 15 February 1838, 163).



Notes to Pages 68–71

245

37.  Minutes, 15 March 1838, 42. 38.  “James Williams in E ­ very ­Family,” The Emancipator, 12 April 1838, 194. In April, the executive committee authorized a printing of ten thousand copies (Minutes, 5 April 1838, 47). It cost ten dollars per thousand in this form (ibid.). The Emancipator writes that it hopes “at least a hundred thousand copies” of the sheets “­w ill be called for as fast as they can be printed” (“James Williams in ­Every ­Family,” 12 April 1838, 194). 39.  “The First Edition of 10,000 Copies,” The Emancipator, 3 May 1838, 2. 40.  Minutes, 21 June 1838, 76; Minutes, 20 September 1838, 94. 41.  “The First Edition of 10,000 Copies,” The Emancipator, 3 May 1838, 2. 42.  “Narrative of James Williams,” The Philanthropist, 22 May 1838; “Narrative of James Williams,” Friend of Man, 18 April 1838, 171; “A Good Example,” Friend of Man, 11 July 1838, 218. The Friend of Man states, “Let it be thrown into ­every line boat, and packet—­into ­every bar room, shop and store—to ­every counting-­room, office, parlor, and kitchen—­wherever ­t here is a tongue to speak, or a heart to feel” (“Narrative of James Williams,” 18 April 1838, 171). 43.  “James Williams in ­Every ­Family,” The Emancipator, 12 April 1838, 194; “New Books,” The Philanthropist, 28 August 1838. 44.  “In the Press,” The Emancipator, 12 April 1838, 195. Delavan hoped “that 400,000 copies” would be “published for the State of New York alone” (ibid.). 45.  “Work for Abolitionists,” The Emancipator, 21 June 1838, 31. The New York State ASS called for “the Narrative of James Williams, the Anti-­Slavery Almanac for 1839, and several other very impor­tant documents” to be “put into ­every ­family in the state” (“An Appeal to the Friends of the Slave in the State of New York,” 1 September 1838, MS 402, Mas­sa­chu­setts Anti-­Slavery Society Collection, New-­York Historical Society, New York City). 46.  “James Williams,” Plea for the Slave 1.1 (June 1838): (3); “Cent-­a-­Week Socie­ties,” The Emancipator, 5 July 1838, 37. The Emancipator mentions one society that circulated “more than 50 copies of James Williams, a few Emancipation in the West Indies, and several hundred copies of vari­ous other tracts” (ibid). 47.  “Alabama Beacon versus James Williams,” The Emancipator, 30 August 1838, 71. 48.  “Depository of the Ohio A.S. Society,” The Philanthropist, 22 May 1838; “For Sale at the Anti-­ Slavery Office, Cincinnati,” The Philanthropist, 24 July 1838; “Our Readers,” The Emancipator, 30 August 1838, 73; “Alabama Beacon versus James Williams,” The Emancipator, 30 August 1838, 71. The Emancipator states: “In the slave States it has had some, though ­limited circulation” (ibid.). For the Narrative’s southern circulation and a detailed history of its dissemination, see Michael Roy, “Cheap Editions, ­Little Books, and Handsome Duodecimos: A Book History Approach to Antebellum Slave Narratives,” MELUS 40.3 (September 2015): 71–74. 49.  “Extract from the Narrative of James Williams,” The Liberator, 16 March 1838, 44; “Narrative of James Williams,” Herald of Freedom, 17 March 1838, 9; “The Fugitive Slave,” Slave’s Friend 3.9 (September 1838): 1–13; “Narrative of James Williams,” Pennsylvania Freeman, 6 September 1838; “Narrative of James Williams,” Zion’s Watchman, 8 September 1838, 142. The Philanthropist notes that copies ­were sent “to all our exchange papers” (“James Williams,” 6 November 1838), suggesting that it could have been reprinted in other venues as well. 50.  Roy states that the Narrative “may well have been one of the most widely reproduced slave narratives in the antebellum era” and that this was the “first (and last) time that the slave narrative was singled out for such treatment” (“Cheap Editions,” 73, 72). 51.  Fifth Annual Report, 47. The Friend of Man also advertised the Narrative alongside ­t hese two publications as a “very impor­tant” new work (“Books—­Fresh Supply,” 30 May 1838, 196). 52.  Narrative of James Williams, an American Slave, No. 6 of the Anti-­Slavery Examiner (New York: AASS, 1838); Narrative of James Williams, No. 3 of The Abolitionist’s Library (Boston: MASS, 1838). 53.  “Work for Abolitionists,” The Emancipator, 21 June 1838, 31. Charles Ball’s narrative is also included on this list. 54.  “New-­England A.S. Convention,” The Liberator, 15 June 1838, 90.

246

Notes to Pages 71–72

55.  “A Plan of Distribution,” The Emancipator, 14 June 1838, 26; “A Plan of Distribution,” ­Human Rights, June 1838. 56.  “A Plan of Distribution,” The Emancipator, 14 June 1838, 26. In September the New ­England Anti-­Slavery Society also planned to distribute 1,000 copies of the Narrative along with 1,000 of the Elmore Correspondence and 500 of James Thome and Horace Kimball, Emancipation in the West Indies (Minutes of the New E ­ ngland Anti-­Slavery Society, 4 September 1838, MS. fA.31, v.2, Governing Documents and Rec­ords of the New ­England Anti-­Slavery Society, Boston Public Library, Boston). 57.  “Work for Abolitionists,” The Emancipator, 21 June 1838, 31. Like the Narrative, Emancipation in the West Indies was ste­reo­t yped “with a view to publishing a hundred thousand copies” if the funds could be obtained (Minutes, 5 April 1838, 48). 58.  “The Almanac Again,” The Liberator, 14 September 1838, 145. The New York State ASS also bundled the almanac with the other three texts. In September, the Friend of Man “urgently requested” that its auxiliaries take “immediate mea­sures to supply their respective towns with Thome and Kimball’s Journal, the Elmore Correspondence, the Narrative of James Williams, and the Anti-­Slavery Almanac for 1839” (“The Annual Meeting,” 26 September 1838, 266). 59.  “Alabama Beacon versus James Williams,” The Emancipator, 30 August 1838, 71. The Sixth Annual Report of the Executive Committee of the American Anti-­Slavery Society (New York: William  S. Dorr, 1839), 53–54, also summarizes the controversy. See also Fabian, The Unvarnished Truth, 79–102; Lara Langer Cohen, The Fabrication of American Lit­er­a­ture: Fraudulence and Antebellum Print Culture (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 112–32; Trent, introduction to Williams, Narrative, xviii–­x xiv. 60.  In providing the history of the “real James Williams,” Shadrack Wilkins, Trent shows how Wilkins falsified some aspects of his story and omitted ­others in order to protect his identity and adhere to antislavery’s expectations (introduction to Williams, Narrative, xxv, xiii). 61.  “James Williams,” The Emancipator, 16 August 1838, 62. 62.  “Narrative of James Williams,” The Emancipator, 25 October 1838, 104. 63.  “James Williams,” The Emancipator, 25 October 1838, 104. Despite the executive committee’s order to discontinue sales, the Narrative continued to be advertised in antislavery periodicals. The Philanthropist advertised it throughout the spring of 1839 (“New Books,” 29 January 1839; “New Books,” 26 March 1839; “For Sale,” 21 May 1839); the Friend of Man, as late as February 1841 (“Cata­ logue of Bound Volumes, Pamphlets, Tracts, Prints, Etc.,” Friend of Man, 9 February 1841, 60). 64.  Sixth Annual Report, 54. 65.  Sixth Annual Report, 55. 66.  “Narrative of James Williams,” The Emancipator, 26 April 1838, 203. 67.  “Alabama Beacon versus James Williams,” The Emancipator, 30 August 1838, 72. 68.  The executive committee—­many of whom had originally authenticated Williams’s text—­ walked back their support: “The Ex. Committee never authorized the supposition that they had any evidence of the truth of James’s statements, except the apparent sincerity of the narrator . . . ​t he internal marks of truth in the story itself . . . ​a nd the agreement between the picture of slavery, exhibited by him and the distinctive features of the system derived from other unimpeachable sources” (“Alabama Beacon versus James Williams,” The Emancipator, 30 August 1838, 71). 69.  “Tricks of Abolitionism,” New-­York Commercial Advertiser, 19 September 1838; Calvin Colton, Abolition a Sedition: By a Northern Man (Philadelphia: Geo. W. Donohue, 1839), 106, 107. 70.  Lydia Maria Child to Weld, in Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, Angelina Grimké Weld and Sarah Grimké, ed. Gilbert H. Barnes and Dwight L. Dumond, 2 vols. (New York: Appleton-­Century, 1934), 2:736. 71.  Minutes, 21 June 1838, 76; “Plan of L ­ abor,” Friend of Man, 8 August 1838, 231. Ball’s narrative was regularly advertised in the society’s cata­logue. Like Williams’s, it was integrated into the AASS’s publication system, serving as vol. 4 of The Cabinet of Freedom. It was reprinted in a number of antislavery publications: reviewed in the Quarterly Anti-­Slavery Magazine (“The Life and Adventures of a Fugitive Slave,” 1.4 [July 1836]: 375–93); featured in the Slave’s Friend (2.4 [1837]: 11–16; 2.6 [1837]: 10); pictured in The AAS Almanac for 1838, 13; excerpted in the Anti-­Slavery Rec­ord (2.12



Notes to Pages 72–75

247

[December 1836]: 149–50), The Liberator (“Fiendish Torture,” 2 June 1837, 89), and two editions of Ames’s compilation, “Liberty” ([(New York: AASS), 1837], 144–45; [(New York: AASS), 1839], 70–71). 72.  “An Appeal to Abolitionists,” 11 October 1837, MS 402, Mas­sa­chu­setts Anti-­Slavery Society Collection, New-­York Historical Society, New York City. 73.  Douglass, like Williams, was seen as an imposter when he stepped out of the slave’s prescribed role as evidence and into that of learned phi­los­o­pher. B ­ ecause he refused to play the role of a “brand new fact” by repeating his story night a­ fter night without moral commentary on the lecture cir­cuit, Douglass’s audience “doubted if [he] had ever been a slave” (My Bondage and My Freedom in The Frederick Douglass Papers, ser. 2, vol. 2, ed. John W. Blassingame, John R. McKivigan, and Peter H. Hinks [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003], 207, 208). The Narrative of William Wells Brown (1847), the only other slave narrative sponsored by the AASS, was also by an author who was first an antislavery agent. Both Douglass’s and Brown’s books list their publisher as “Anti-­ Slavery Office,” but neither, as Roy points out, was published “specifically in the ser­v ice of a given anti-­slavery organ­ization” or received the same institutional backing as Williams’s (“Cheap Editions,” 75). The MASS helped to get both men’s works to press, but they did not finance or distribute them (ibid.). Douglass and Brown retained owner­ship of their narratives in the form of copyright and played a significant role in disseminating them via their lecture tours. 74.  Weld edited the AASS’s almanacs for 1839, 1840, and 1841 and, with Whittier, prepared the library system (Minutes, 1 February 1838, 31). He also wrote several original tracts: The Bible Against Slavery (1836) and The Power of Congress over the District of Columbia (1838), which ­were included alongside the Narrative in the Anti-­Slavery Examiner as Nos. 4 and 5. He also edited Thome and Kimball’s massive documentary proj­ect, Emancipation in the West Indies. In the early 1840s, as antislavery statistician to Congress, he gathered facts for the speeches of antislavery congressmen, and published Slavery and the Internal Slave Trade (1841). Trained in the statistical discourse of the manual l­abor movement in the early 1830s, Weld understood the power of facts in the new information age. For his role at the center of the abolitionist enterprise, see Trish Loughran, The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building, 1770–1870 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 328–35. 75.  Minutes, 1 November 1838, 105. The committee chose Weld ­because of his “talent for thorough investigation, and former personal residence at the south, added to the fact that Mrs. Weld, and her ­sister now u ­ nder their roof, are natives of South Carolina, and have occupied a high position in southern society” (Sixth Annual Report, 54). 76.  “Cruelties of the Slave System,” The Emancipator, 14 March 1839, 185. 77.  “American Slavery as It Is,” The Emancipator, 30 May 1839, 19. The Emancipator announces the tract as “just published and for sale at this office” on 7 May (“Slavery as It Is: By a Thousand Witnesses,” 16 May 1839, 11). 78.  Theodore Dwight Weld, ed., American Slavery as It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses (New York: AASS, 1839), 7. Subsequent citations are given in the text. For a discussion of how the trial meta­phor permeated antislavery print culture, see Jeannine Marie DeLombard, Slavery on Trial: Law, Abolitionism, and Print Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007). 79.  Catherine H. Birney, The Grimké ­Sisters: Sarah and Angelina Grimké, the First American ­Women Advocates of Abolition and ­Woman’s Rights (New York: C. T. Dillingham, 1885), 258. Weld bought discarded southern newspapers from the New York Commercial Reading Room, and the Grimké ­sisters spent six hours a day for six months cutting out facts for the book. Ellen Gruber Garvey contextualizes this data-­retrieval pro­cess within nineteenth-­century print culture in Writing with Scissors: American Scrapbooks from the Civil War to the Harlem Re­nais­sance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 235. 80.  American Slavery as It Is,” The Emancipator, 13 June 1839, 26. 81.  The Philanthropist reasons, “Some of the statements may turn out to be false, some to be exaggerated; but many of the proofs are of such a nature as [to] silence at once all idea of contradiction. Whoever reads this book, and contemplates steadily the conclusions which even the one half of the

248

Notes to Pages 75–78

indisputable portion of this volume ­w ill force upon the sober reasoner, w ­ ill shudder all his life at the thought of American slavery” (“Slavery as It Is,” 18 June 1839). 82.  The tract’s composite authorship also opens up a space for converting its audience into witnesses via the act of reading and integrating them into the cloud of testimony by soliciting them (in an introductory note) to become fact-­gatherers for f­ uture volumes. By passing on the tract or any of its information, readers transform themselves into witnesses. The growing mass of witnesses, like the tracts’ neverending series of facts, ­w ill spread like a storm cloud across the land. 83.  Seventh Annual Report of the Executive Committee of the American Anti-­Slavery Society (New York: AASS, 1840), 38. 84.  “New Publications,” The Liberator, 14 June 1839, 96. 85. Ibid. 86.  “American Slavery as It Is,” The Emancipator, 1 August 1839, 54. 87.  “American Slavery and Its Apologists,” The Liberator, 23 March 1849, n.p.; Sereno and Mary Steeter to Weld, in Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, 2:733. 88.  Beriah Green to Weld, in Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, 2:946, 755; “Mr. Editor,—­The Narrative of James Williams,” Herald of Freedom, 7 July 1838, 74, 75. 89.  Sixth Annual Report, 48; Gilbert Hobbs Barnes, The Anti-­Slavery Impulse, 1830–1844 (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1973), 276. The executive committee ordered a first edition of ten thousand (Minutes, 2 May 1839, 147). At 37½ cents each or 25 dollars per thousand, the tract sold one hundred thousand copies in its first year (Dwight Lowell Dumond, Antislavery: The Crusade for Freedom in Amer­i­ca [Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1961], 256). The Pennsylvania Freeman reports that it sold “since the 7th of May, at ­wholesale, 17,239 copies” in addition to a “gratuitous distribution” of 4,957 (“Touch Up the Publishing Agent,” 26 September 1839). 90.  Sixth Annual Report, 48. 91.  “Impor­tant to State Socie­t ies,” The Emancipator, 18 July 1839, 46. 92.  “SLAVERY AS IT IS,” The Liberator, 24 May 1839, 83; “SLAVERY AS IT IS,” The Emancipator, 13 June 1839, 26. 93.  “American Slavery as It Is,” The Emancipator, 6 June 1839, 23; “American Slavery as It Is,” The Emancipator, 27 June 1839, 34; Minutes, 20 June 1839, 169; “American Slavery as It Is,” The Emancipator, 18 July 1839, 46. 94.  “American Slavery as It Is,” The Emancipator, 27 June 1839, 34. 95. Ibid. 96.  “American Slavery as It Is,” The Emancipator, 6 June 1839, 23. 97.  “Work for Abolitionists,” The Emancipator, 1 August 1839, 55. 98. “Vermont,” The Emancipator, 18 July 1839, 46; “Anti-­Slavery Almanac for 1840” and “Slavery as It Is,” The Emancipator, 2 August 1839, 123. 99.  Weld to Gerrit Smith, in Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, 2:809. 100.  “Address of the Executive Committee to the Abolitionists of the United States,” The Philanthropist, 25 June 1839. 101.  “Slavery as It Is,” The Emancipator, 10 September 1840, 78. 102.  Wendell Phillips, The Philosophy of the Abolition Movement (New York: AASS, 1860), 19. Joseph Sturge also called it an “encyclopedia of information and argument” (A Visit to the United States in 1841 [London: Hamilton, Adams, 1842], lxxxix). 103.  Angelina Grimké Weld told her ­d aughter that Stowe kept Slavery as It Is “in her work basket by day, and slept with it ­u nder her pillow by night, till its facts crystallized into ­Uncle Tom” (quoted in Barnes, The Anti-­Slavery Impulse, 231). Stowe also quotes from it extensively in A Key to ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin. For Dickens’s reprinting of Weld’s tract, see Meredith McGill, American Lit­e r­a­ture and the Culture of Reprinting (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 127–31. 104.  For example, The Liberator had a column titled “Slavery as It Is” that provided information about developments respecting slavery (“Slavery as It Is,” 14 February 1840, 28). The North Star collated facts from southern papers u ­ nder the heading “SLAVERY AS IT IS” (23 November 1849).



Notes to Pages 79–82

249

105.  John W. Blassingame, “Introduction to Volume One,” The Frederick Douglass Papers, ser. 2, vol. 1, ed. John  W. Blassingame, John  R. McKivigan, and Peter  P. Hinks (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), xxiv. For an account of a speech in which Douglass reads from Weld’s text, see Joseph Sturge, American Slavery: Report of a Public Meeting Held at Finsbury Chapel, Moorfields, to Receive Frederick Douglass, the American Slave, on Friday, May 22, 1846 (London: C. B. Christian, 1846), 10. 106.  William Lloyd Garrison, preface to Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, in Frederick Douglass Papers, ser. 2, 1:6, 9. 107.  Sojourner Truth, Narrative of Sojourner Truth, a Northern Slave (Boston: The Author, 1850), 127–43; Henry Box Brown, Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown, Written by Himself (Manchester: Lee and Glynn, 1851), iv–­v; Henry Watson, Narrative of Henry Watson, a Fugitive Slave (Boston: Bela Marsh, 1848), 42–44. 108.  Narrative of Henry Watson, 46–48; appendix, in Narrative of the Life of Henry Box Brown, iii–­v ii; William Wells Brown, Narrative of William W. Brown, a Fugitive Slave, 2nd ed. (Boston: Anti-­ Slavery Office, 1848), 121–44; Peter Randolph, Sketches of Slave Life: Or, Illustrations of the ‘Peculiar Institution’ (Boston: Published for the Author, 1855); Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, ed. Lydia Maria Child (Boston: Published for the Author, 1861), 71–81; James Watkins, Strug­ gles for Freedom; or The Life of James Watkins (Manchester: Watkins, 1860), 45. 109.  Ephraim Peabody, “Narratives of Fugitive Slaves,” Christian Examiner and Religious Miscellany 47.1 (July 1849): 61. 110.  “Key to U ­ ncle Tom’s Cabin,” The Liberator, 23 June 1854, 99. 111.  Wilson Armistead, Five Hundred Thousand Strokes for Freedom: A Series of Anti-­Slavery Tracts, of Which Half a Million Are Now First Issued by the Friends of the Negro (London: W. and F. Cash, 1853), No. 7. 112.  Ibid., Nos. 34, 3, 5, 15. An e­ arlier version of this compendium technique is Isaac T. Hopper’s column “Tales of Oppression,” serialized in the National Anti-­Slavery Standard (October 1840–­ May 1844), in which each runaway’s story (often told by Hopper in the third person) is numbered sequentially as part of a larger cata­logue of narratives of slavery. 113.  Wilson Armistead, A Tribute for the Negro: Being a Vindication of the Moral, Intellectual, and Religious Capabilities of the Colored Portion of Mankind; with Par­tic­u­lar Reference to the African Race (Manchester: William Irwin, 1848), 550. 114. Armistead, Five Hundred Thousand Strokes for Freedom, no. 34:12. 115.  Harriet Beecher Stowe, A Key to ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Boston: John P. Jewett, 1853), 19. 116.  Other compendia, such as Armistead’s Tribute for the Negro and H. G. Adams’s God’s Image in Ebony (London: Partridge and Oakey, 1854), compiled biographical sketches of former slaves and ­f ree blacks to argue for the humanity of black ­people. Harriet Jacobs refused to have her story incorporated into Stowe’s Key, stating (through an intermediary) that she “wished it to be a history of my life entirely by itself” and that it “needed no romance” (quoted in Jean Fagan Yellin, Harriet Jacobs, a Life [New York: Basic, 2004], 121). 117. The Narrative’s publication history substantiates Joanna Brooks’s claim that early African American books needed “movements” as well as “movement” to live (“The Unfortunates: What the Life Spans of Early Black Books Tell Us About Book History,” in Early African American Print Culture, ed. Lara Langer Cohen and Jordan Alexander Stein [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012], 48). She argues that “books by black authors without firm connections to social movements . . . ​had shorter life spans” (ibid., 51). 118. Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom, 5. 119.  For how a materialist approach to the genre can recover its diverse print practices, see Eric Gardner, “Slave Narratives and Archival Research,” in The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative, ed. John Ernest (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 36–53; Goddu, “The Slave Narrative as Material Text,” 149–64. 120.  Before Trent’s edition of the Narrative, many critics categorized the text as a fraud or as fiction. John W. Blassingame states that “the story of James Williams” was proved by southerners to

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Notes to Pages 82–85

be an “outright fraud” (Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies [Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977], xxiii); Augusta Rohrbach calls it a “work of fiction” (Truth Stranger Than Fiction: Race, Realism and the U.S. Literary Marketplace [New York: Palgrave, 2002], 35); Lara Langer Cohen classifies it as a “pseudo-­slave narrative,” a “persuasive fiction,” placing it alongside Richard Hildreth’s The Slave: Or Memoirs of Archy Moore (1836) (Fabrication of American Lit­er­a­ture, 102, 103).

Chapter 4 1.  For female antislavery socie­ties and w ­ omen’s roles in the antislavery movement, see Nancy A. Hewitt, ­Women’s Activism and Social Change: Rochester, N.Y., 1822–1872 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984); Shirley Yee, Black ­Women Abolitionists: A Study in Activism, 1828–60 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992); Julie Winch, Philadelphia’s Black Elite: Activism, Accommodation, and the Strug­gle for Autonomy (Philadelphia: T ­ emple University Press, 1993); Debra Gold Hansen, Strained Sisterhood: Gender and Class in the Boston Female Anti-­Slavery Society (Amherst: University of Mas­sa­chu­setts Press, 1993); Jean Fagan Yellin and John C. Van Horne, eds., The Abolitionist Sisterhood: W ­ omen’s Po­liti­cal Culture in Antebellum Amer­i­ca (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994); Julie Roy Jeffrey, The ­Great ­Silent Army of Abolitionism: Ordinary W ­ omen in the Antislavery Movement (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998); Deborah Bingham Van Broekhoven, “­Needles, Pens, and Petitions: Reading W ­ omen into Antislavery History,” in The Meaning of Slavery in the North, ed. David Roediger and Martin H. Blatt (New York: Garland, 1998), 125–55; Van Broekhoven, The Devotion of ­These ­Women: Rhode Island in the Antislavery Network (Amherst: University of Mas­sa­chu­setts Press, 2002); Beth A. Salerno, ­Sister Socie­ties: ­Women’s Antislavery Organ­izations in Antebellum Amer­i­ca (DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005); Erica Dunbar, A Fragile Freedom: African American W ­ omen and Emancipation in the Antebellum City (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008); Stacey M. Robertson, Hearts Beating for Liberty: ­Women Abolitionists in the Old Northwest (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), 266–98. 2.  Asked if the AASS propagated its doctrines other than by oral or written means, Birney answered: “Female abolitionists often unite in sewing socie­t ies,” laboring with “their own hands, to furnish the means for advancing the cause of the slave. . . . ​The articles they prepare, especially if they be of the ‘fancy’ kind, are often ornamented with handsomely executed emblems, underwritten with appropriate mottoes. . . . ​From the cheap rate at which the articles are sold, vast numbers of them are scattered far and wide over the country” (Correspondence, Between the Hon. F. H. Elmore, One of the South Carolina Del­e­ga­tion in Congress, and James G. Birney, One of the Secretaries of the American Anti-­Slavery Society, in the Anti-­Slavery Examiner, No. 8 [New York: AASS, 1838], 22, 23). For the alliance between antislavery and domestic culture, see Karen Sanchez-­Eppler, Touching Liberty: Abolition, Feminism, and the Politics of the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 1–49. 3.  “The Fair,” The Liberator, 12 January 1838, 6. For how antislavery activated objects for the cause, see Andrea M. Atkin, “ ‘When Pincushions Are Periodicals’: W ­ omen’s Work, Race, and Material Objects in Female Abolitionism,” American Transcendental Quarterly 11.2 (June 1997): 93–111. 4.  For background on antislavery fairs, see Hewitt, ­Women’s Activism, 116–81, 251–52; Hansen, Strained Sisterhood, 124–39; Lee Chambers-­Schiller, “ ‘A Good Work Among the P ­ eople’: The Po­liti­cal Culture of the Boston Antislavery Fair,” in Yellin and Van Horne, Abolitionist Sisterhood, 249–74; Deborah Bingham Van Broekhoven,“ ‘Better Than a Clay Club’: The Organ­ization of Anti-­ Slavery Fairs, 1835–60,” Slavery and Abolition 19.1 (April 1998): 24–45; Julie Roy Jeffrey, “ ‘Stranger, Buy . . . ​Lest Our Mission Fail’: The Complex Culture of W ­ omen’s Abolitionist Fairs,” American Nineteenth C ­ entury History 4.1 (2003): 1–24; Michael Bennett, Demo­cratic Discourses: The Radical Abolition Movement and Antebellum American Lit­er­a­ture (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005), 18–44; Salerno, ­Sister Socie­ties, 131–35; Robertson, Hearts Beating for Liberty, 91–126.



Notes to Pages 85–88

251

5.  Fairs w ­ ere held most often at Christmas or New Year’s, but also at the AASS’s anniversary meeting and other antislavery cele­brations, such as the First of August or the Fourth of July. 6.  On fund­rais­ing fairs, see Beverly Gordon, Bazaars and Fair Ladies: The History of the American Fund­rais­ing Fair (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1998); Anne M. Boylan, The Origins of ­Women’s Activism: New York and Boston, 1797–1840 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 24, 36, 182–86, 197; Lori D. Ginzberg, ­Women and the Work of Benevolence: Morality, Politics, and Class in the Nineteenth-­Century U.S. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 41–65. Boylan argues that antislavery fairs ­were “the lodestars for o ­ thers” (Origins, 182). 7.  Fairs in rural Ohio and upstate New York emphasized the practical nature of wares offered, whereas urban, east coast fairs focused on fash­ion­able goods. Douglass, for instance, complained that the goods being donated for the 1849 Williamson, New York, fair ­were too ornamental to meet the needs of farmers (“The Fair at Williamson,” North Star, 26 January 1849). Organizers of the fair in Salem, Ohio, insisted that “not the ornamental and fanciful merely,” but also “the substantial and useful,” would be offered (“The Salem Fair,” Anti-­Slavery Bugle, 10 December 1853). The Boston fair, on the other hand, was advertised as carry­ing “specimens of the rare and beautiful in e­ very species of manufacture, particularly ­t hose of London and Paris” (National Anti-­Slavery Bazaar Gazette 1.2 [1846]). 8.  Fairs became the central focus of most female antislavery socie­ties a­ fter 1836, when Congress passed the Gag Rule, making petitioning efforts moot. For AASS petitioning campaigns, see Deborah Bingham Van Broekhoven, “ ‘Let Your Names Be Enrolled’: Method and Ideology in ­Women’s Antislavery Petitioning,” in Yellin and Van Horne, Abolitionist Sisterhood, 179–200; William Lee Miller, Arguing About Slavery: The G ­ reat ­Battle in the United States Congress (New York: Knopf, 1996), 93–105; Susan Zaeske, Signatures of Citizenship: Petitioning, Antislavery, and W ­ omen’s Po­liti­cal Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); Salerno, ­Sister Socie­ties, 49–78. 9.  See, for instance, reports of the Boston fair in the Anti-­Slavery Bugle: “Letter from Boston,” 22 January 1847; “Boston Bazaar,” 26 January 1849; “National Bazaar,” 2 February 1850, 83. For the transatlantic networks of female abolitionists, see Clare Midgley, ­Women Against Slavery: The British Campaigns, 1780–­1870 (London: Routledge, 1992), 121–53. For the transatlantic ties of the man­ ag­ers of the Boston fair, see Clare Taylor, ­Women of the Anti-­Slavery Movement: The Weston S­ isters (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1995). For the Boston fair more generally, see Alice Taylor, “ ‘Fashion Has Extended Her Influence to the Cause of Humanity’: The Transatlantic Economy of the Boston Antislavery Bazaar,” in The Force of Fashion in Politics and Society: Global Perspectives from Early Modern to Con­temporary Times, ed. Beverly Lemire (Farnham: Ashgate, 2010), 115–42. 10.  ­Fourteenth Annual Report Presented to the Mas­sa­chu­setts Anti-­Slavery Society (Boston: Scarlett and Laing, 1846), 59. 11.  James Russell Lowell describes Chapman as follows: “­There was Maria Chapman, too, / With her swift eyes of clear steel-­blue, / The coiled-up mainspring of the fair / Originating everywhere / The expansive force, without a sound / That whirls a hundred wheels around” (“Report of the Bazaar,” The Liberator, 12 February 1858, 26). Chapman was a prolific writer for the cause, publishing the songbook Songs of the F ­ ree and Hymns of Christian Freedom (1836), penning poems for The Liberator, stories for the Monthly Offering (1840–42), and tracts such as Right and Wrong in Mas­sa­chu­ setts (1839) and How Can I Help to Abolish Slavery? (1855), editing The Liberty Bell (1839–58), and writing reports for the Boston FASS as well as the Boston fair. On her c­ areer, see Catherine Clinton, “Maria Weston Chapman,” in Portraits of American W ­ omen, ed. G. J. Barker-­Benfield and Catherine Clinton (New York: St. Martin’s, 1991), 147–67. 12.  When the Boston fair became the National Subscription Anniversary in 1859, the Philadelphia fair took over the “national” title, becoming the Pennsylvania Anti-­Slavery Fair and National Anti-­Slavery Bazaar. That city’s Quaker ethos kept the Philadelphia fair less commercial and po­liti­ cal than the Boston one, which also had stronger transatlantic connections. The Ladies’ New-­York City Anti-­Slavery Society, formed in 1835, did not host a fair, perhaps b ­ ecause of its more conservative evangelical orientation. See Amy Swerdlow, “Abolition’s Conservative S­ isters: The Ladies’ New York City Anti-­Slavery Socie­ties, 1834–1840,” in Yellin and Van Horne, Abolitionist Sisterhood, 31–44.

252

Notes to Pages 88–89

The First Annual Report of the Ladies’ New-­York City Anti-­Slavery Society (New York: William S. Dorr, 1836) states that members have begun to make “vari­ous articles of needlework” and “to enlist the taste and ingenuity of our friends in the manufacture of ­t hings, useful to the buyer,” but ­t hese items w ­ ill be “placed for sale in the Anti-­Slavery Rooms” rather than sold at a fair (16). For an advertisement, see “The Ladies’ New York Anti-­Slavery Sewing Society,” The Emancipator, 22 December 1836, 135. The New York Fair Association did not announce its first annual fair u ­ ntil 1857 (“New York Anti-­Slavery Fair,” National Anti-­Slavery Standard, 19 September 1857). 13. ­After the split within the BFASS, ­t here w ­ ere two Boston fairs for several years. See Hansen, Strained Sisterhood, 124–39. 14.  The Boston fair ran from 1834 to 1858 and then continued as the National Subscription Anniversary from 1859 to 1870; the Philadelphia fair ran from 1836 to 1861. 15.  “The Fair,” The Liberator, 12 January 1838, 6. 16. Salerno, ­Sister Socie­ties, 133. The Boston fair supported the MASS and, a­ fter the 1840 split, the AASS. Garrison wrote that the “larger proportion of the sum expended annually by this Society comes from” the Boston fair (Annual Report, Presented to the American Anti-­Slavery Society, by the Executive Committee at the Annual Meeting, Held in New York, May 7, 1856 [New York: AASS, 1856], 58). The Philadelphia fair funded the PASS but also sponsored a national ­table whose proceeds went to the AASS (“The Fair,” The Pennsylvania Freeman, 25 December 1851). C. Peter Ripley and coauthors calculate that the Boston fair collected $65,000 between 1834 and 1857 (approximately $1.9 million in t­ oday’s dollars) and that the PFASS raised a total of $32,000 by 1861 (C. Peter Ripley, ed., The Black Abolitionist Papers, 5 vols. [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985–92], 4:5, 3:201). Jean R. Soderlund states that the Philadelphia fair raised $16,500 from 1836 to 1853 and donated 85 ­percent of its profits to the PASS; from 1844 to 1849 funds “covered 17 to 22 ­percent of the state bud­get and accounted for 31 to 45 ­percent of donations” (“Priorities and Power in the Philadelphia Female Anti-­Slavery Society,” in Yellin and Van Horne, Abolitionist Sisterhood, 82–83). On the fairs’ profits, see Benjamin Quarles, “Sources of Abolitionist Income,” Mississippi Valley Historical Review 32.1 (June 1945): 63–76; Van Broekhoven, “­Needles, Pens, and Petitions,” 154–55; Van Broekhoven, “ ‘Better Than a Clay Club,’ ” 39. 17.  The Rochester fair supported Frederick Douglass’s paper and paid William Wells Brown’s wages (“An Appeal in Behalf of the Western New York Anti-­Slavery Fair,” North Star, 29 June 1849; Ripley, Black Abolitionist Papers, 4:3–6). The Cincinnati fair used its profits to hold an annual abolitionist convention (Robertson, Hearts Beating for Liberty, 98–106). The Boston fair funded tracts stating that “a slaveholder at the South received a tract of two pages, through the post office;—­read it, was convinced, and emancipated his slaves. The tract was printed with money raised AT THIS FAIR. . . . ​We might give instances to fill a volume of the beneficial effects of MONEY RAISED AT THIS FAIR” (“Cause and Effect,” National Anti-­Slavery Bazaar Gazette 1.2) Other fairs used their profits to help fugitive slaves or to educate ­f ree northern blacks: the Rochester fair, for instance, assisted fugitives to freedom and aided in the “diffusion of Anti-­Slavery knowledge by speech and by press” and helped “colored p ­ eople . . . ​who might during the winter months take a notion of traveling into Canada for the improvement of their education” (“Anti-­Slavery Festival in Rochester,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 9 September 1853; “The Anti-­Slavery Fair,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 11 December 1851). 18.  “The Ladies’ Fair,” The Liberator, 2 January 1837, 3. 19.  “The National Bazaar,” North Star, 7 January 1848. 20.  Speaking objects arose as an identifiable genre in eighteenth-­century “it” narratives—­stories told from an object’s perspective. See Aileen Douglas, “Britannia’s Rule and the It-­Narrator,” Eighteenth-­Century Fiction 6.1 (October 1993): 65–82; Christopher Flint, “Speaking Objects: The Circulation of Stories in Eighteenth-­Century Prose Fiction,” PMLA 113.2 (March 1998): 212–26; Mark Blackwell, ed., The Secret Life of ­Things: Animals, Objects, and It-­Narratives in Eigh­teenth ­Century ­England (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2007); Julie Park, The Self and It: Novel Objects and Mimetic Subjects in Eighteenth-­Century E ­ ngland (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2010); Jonathan Lamb, The Th ­ ings ­Things Say (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2011).



Notes to Pages 89–91

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21.  Lori Merish, Sentimental Materialism: Gender, Commodity Culture, and Nineteenth-­Century American Lit­er­a­ture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2000), 117. Merish addresses in detail the emergence of sentimental consumption in the antebellum era. 22.  See Lynn Festa, Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-­Century Britain and France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), who argues that early consumers found themselves in their ­t hings: they both “personaliz[ed] the properties of their t­ hings” and borrowed “personality from their possessions” (12). 23.  Lawrence Glickman, Buying Power: A History of Consumer Activism in Amer­i­ca (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 81. On antislavery’s emergence with the rise of commerce and consumerism, see Philip Gould, Barbaric Traffic: Commerce and Antislavery in the Eighteenth-­ Century Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003); Charlotte Sussman, Consuming Anx­i­eties: Consumer Protest, Gender, and British Slavery, 1713–1833 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000). 24.  On the construction of U.S. liberalism in the nineteenth c­ entury, see Christopher Newfield, The Emerson Effect: Individualism and Submission in Amer­i­ca (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 25.  Antislavery fairs embodied the complex racial politics of ­women’s antislavery organ­izations. Although many female antislavery socie­ties w ­ ere integrated, black w ­ omen rarely held leadership positions in multiracial socie­ties. Prejudice and conflicting agendas often led black ­women to form their own socie­t ies (Salerno, ­Sister Socie­ties, 139–42). Black w ­ omen produced goods and sold them at the larger fairs in Boston and Philadelphia, but they also ran their own fairs in support of their own c­ auses. Black ­women in Philadelphia, for instance, or­ga­nized a “North Star Fair” in support of Frederick Douglass’s paper (“The North Star Fair, Philadelphia,” North Star, 19 January 1849). For more on black female abolitionism, see Anne M. Boylan, “Benevolence and Antislavery Activity Among African American ­Women in New York and Boston, 1820–1840,” in Yellin and Van Horne, Abolitionist Sisterhood, 119–37; Yee, Black ­Women Abolitionists; Jacqueline Bacon, The Humblest May Stand Forth: Rhe­toric, Empowerment, and Abolition (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002), 43–50; Dunbar, Fragile Freedom. 26.  Ginzberg argues more broadly that female benevolent socie­t ies operated at the cutting edge of the market economy (­Women and the Work of Benevolence, 36–66). 27.  The Boston fair was held in several venues, including Marlborough, Armory, Assembly, and Horticulture Halls, but its most famous site was Faneuil Hall (1844–50). For Faneuil Hall as a marketplace, see Robert Fanuzzi, Abolition’s Public Sphere (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 146–53; Helen Tangires, Public Markets and Civic Culture in Nineteenth-­Century Amer­i­ca (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 40–42. The Philadelphia fair was held at a hall at Tenth and Chestnut Streets, the heart of the city’s nineteenth-­century shopping district (“Thirteenth Anti-­Slavery Fair,” Pennsylvania Freeman, 7 December 1848; Images of Amer­i­ca: Center City Philadelphia in the Nineteenth ­Century [Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2006], 7). Fairs w ­ ere also held in ­hotels, stores, and meeting halls (Van Broekhoven, “ ‘Better Than a Clay Club,’ ” 32). Rochester organizers “opened stores in eleven villages to help dispose of goods not sold at the vari­ous fairs” (Salerno, ­Sister Socie­ties, 132). 28.  “Ladies’ Fair,” The Liberator, 10 December 1836, 199; “The Anti-­Slavery Fair,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 11 December 1851; Report of the Twentieth National Anti-­Slavery Bazaar (Boston: J. B. Yerrinton and Son, 1854), 19. 29.  “The Fair,” Pennsylvania Freeman, 11 December 1851. 30.  Report of the Twenty-­Third National Anti-­Slavery Bazaar (Boston: J. B. Yerrinton and Son, 1857), 31; “Lend Us All Your Aid,” The Liberator, 15 December 1848, 198. 31.  “Thirteenth Anti-­Slavery Fair,” Pennsylvania Freeman, 7 December 1848. 32.  “The Mas­sa­chu­setts Anti-­Slavery Fair,” The Liberator, 20 December 1844, 203. 33.  “The Twentieth National Anti-­Slavery Bazaar W ­ ill Open on Wednesday, December 21st,” National Anti-­Slavery Standard, 17 December 1853, 118; “The Twenty-­Fourth National Anti-­Slavery Bazaar, ­Will Open at 15 Winter St., December 17th,” The Liberator, 11 December 1857, 198; Report

254

Notes to Pages 91–92

of the Twenty-­First National Anti-­Slavery Bazaar (Boston: J. B. Yerrinton and Son, 1855), 32. Garrison praised “the generous and unceasing efforts of our friends abroad,” who supplied fairs “with merchandise of a character sure to meet with a demand not easily satisfied in other marts” (Annual Report, Presented to the American Anti-­Slavery Society, 58). The Boston Eve­ning Transcript describes the Boston fair as carry­ing “unique” items that can be “obtained nowhere e­ lse” (“The 14th National Anti-­Slavery Bazaar,” 18 December 1847); The Liberator advertises that fair’s “se­lection of unique and elsewhere unattainable ­t hings for Christmas and New Year’s Gifts” (“Eleventh Mas­sa­chu­setts A.S. Fair,” 20 December 1844, 203). 34.  A. Taylor, “ ‘Fashion,’ ” 128. 35.  “Sketches of the Fair—­No. II. The Christmas Tree,” The Liberator, 27 January 1843, 15; the National Anti-­Slavery Bazaar Gazette (1.2) warns that “persons who do not visit the Bazaar on the opening day, early . . . ​­w ill prob­ably lose the opportunity of inspecting the most beautiful objects, as all such are eagerly sought for, and it is our rule not to retain articles on the t­ ables for exhibition, ­a fter they have been purchased.” 36.  “The Mas­sa­chu­setts Anti-­Slavery Fair,” The Liberator, 8 November 1839, 179. Boston fair reports consistently discussed receipts in the context of the larger economy, referring, for example, on the Twenty-­Fourth National Anti-­Slavery Festival’s ability to raise money even at a moment of “general bankruptcy and complete commercial prostration” (Report of the Twenty-­Fourth National Anti-­Slavery Festival [Boston: Printed for the Man­ag­ers, 1858], 2). 37.  “Thirteenth Anti-­Slavery Fair,” Pennsylvania Freeman, 7 December 1848. 38.  Charles Sellers shows how Chris­t ian­ity rationalized and fueled cap­i­tal­ist expansion in the antebellum period in The Market Revolution: Jacksonian Amer­i­ca, 1815–1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 202–36. For how antebellum Americans “reconcile[d] the imperatives of market capitalism and Christian morality through the secular catalyst of sentimentalism,” see Elizabeth White Nelson, Market Sentiments: Middle-­Class Market Culture in Nineteenth-­Century Amer­i­ca (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2004), 6. For sentiment’s role in the creation of market culture, see Joseph Fitchelberg, Critical Fictions: Sentiment and the American Market (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2003). 39.  “Marlboro’s Hall: On the Days of the Mas­sa­chu­setts Anti Slavery Fair,” The Liberator, 1 January 1841, 3; North Star (Boston: MASS, 1839). This North Star (as opposed to Douglass’s newspaper) was a journal produced especially for the Boston fair. 40.  “The ­Fourteenth National Anti-­Slavery Bazaar,” The Liberator, 14 January 1848, 6; “The Fair,” Pennsylvania Freeman, 28 December 1848; “The Sixth Rochester Anti-­Slavery Bazaar,” North Star, 12 January 1849; The Second Report of the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-­Slavery Sewing Society ([Rochester, NY]: [Rochester Ladies’ Anti-­Slavery Sewing Society?], 1853). 41.  Sixteenth Annual Report of the Philadelphia Female Anti-­Slavery Society (Philadelphia: Merrihew and Thompson, 1850), 8; “­Fourteenth National Anti-­Slavery Bazaar,” The Liberator, 14 January 1848, 6. A candy wrapper at the Boston fair reassures buyers that their consumption is virtuous by explic­itly articulating this difference: “The sweets ye see, / W ­ ere made by the l­ abor of the ­FREE; / And freely to-­day ye may, partake, / Even for the toil-­worn bondman’s sake” (“The Ladies’ Fair,” The Liberator, 2 January 1837, 3). The Boston fair refused to fly the American flag ­because it also flew over the slave market (“The Twelfth National Anti-­Slavery Bazaar,” The Liberator, 23 January 1846, 14). The Philadelphia fair valorized f­ ree over slave ­labor when it displayed a boot made by a ­free person of color alongside a clumsy wooden-­soled shoe made by a V ­ irginia slave (“The Twelfth Pennsylvania Anti-­Slavery Fair,” Pennsylvania Freeman, 23 December 1847). Although fair organizers saw their aims as complementary to t­ hose of the f­ ree produce movement, they presented an inconsistent message about the politics of production. The Boston fair offered loaves of beet sugar at its refreshment ­table even as it used cheap factory cotton table­cloths to create its beautiful effect (“The Mas­sa­ chu­setts Anti-­Slavery Fair W ­ ill Open,” The Liberator, 18 December  1840, 203; “The Fair!,” The Liberator, 21 November 1845, 187). On the f­ ree produce movement and its relationship to the antislavery fair, see Glickman, Buying Power, 81–82. Glickman states, “promoters of antislavery fairs



Notes to Pages 92–93

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advocated consumption in the ser­v ice of po­liti­cal strug­g le; ­f ree producers advocated consumption as po­liti­cal strug­g le” (ibid., 82). 42.  On the role of the gift in the development of consumer culture, see David Cheal, The Gift Economy (London: Routledge, 1988). On the reconfiguration of Christmas as a domestic gift-­g iving holiday, see Stephen Nissenbaum, The ­Battle for Christmas (New York: Knopf, 1996); Leigh Eric Schmidt, Consumer Rites: The Buying and Selling of American Holidays (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1995). 43.  Report of the Twenty-­Third National Anti-­Slavery Bazaar, 17. Letters also accompanied most boxes: the “chest of beautifully-­made dolls clothes from Belfast” sent to the 1856 Boston fair included a poem: “Please accept our gift so small, / For a l­ ittle Boston doll. / L ­ ittle hands have sewed each hem, / While ­little hearts have warmed for them—­/ The poor black ­children, born to be / Brought up and sold in slavery. / Oh! the gift is poor indeed! / But take, oh take it, we would plead, / ­Because’ tis all we have to send / To show ourselves the negro’s friend” (ibid., 18). 44.  “Go, Relieve the Sufferings of the Slave,” The Liberator, 4 January 1839, 4. 45.  “Attention! Friends of Humanity,” Pennsylvania Freeman, 22 December 1841. The Boston fair also asked visitors to contribute “a gift of the season to the cause of freedom” (“Marlboro’s Hall, on the Days of the Mas­sa­chu­setts Anti Slavery Fair, Dec. 1840,” The Liberator, 1 January 1841, 3). On the contradictions inherent in depicting freedom as a gift to the enslaved, see Marcus Wood, The Horrible Gift of Freedom: Atlantic Slavery and the Repre­sen­ta­tion of Emancipation (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010), 1–34. 46.  My readings of how objects structure subjectivity and materialize identity are informed by ­t hing theory. See Bill Brown, A Sense of ­Things: The Object ­Matter of American Lit­er­a­ture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Bill Brown, “­Thing Theory,” Critical Inquiry 28.1 (Autumn 2001): 1–22; Bill Brown, “Reification, Reanimation, and the American Uncanny,” Critical Inquiry 32.2 (Winter 2006): 175–207; Elaine Freedgood, The Ideas in ­Things: Fugitive Meaning in the Victorian Novel (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Lorraine Daston, ed., ­Things That Talk: Object Lessons from Art and Science (New York: Zone Books, 2004); Fiona Candlin and Riaford Guins, eds., The Object Reader (New York: Routledge, 2009). 47. Festa, Sentimental Figures, 164–71, offers a reading of this figure and its “redundant personification” (12)—­t he ways in which sentimental personification dehumanizes enslaved ­people by “lending to the slave the h ­ uman traits he or she ostensibly already possesses” (160). The fairs, like the movement as a ­whole, represented the enslaved as dumb or inarticulate, and hence in need of ­others to plead their cause. A motto on the wall at the Boston fair read: “ ‘Plead for t­ hose who cannot plead for themselves’ ” (“The Eighth Mas­sa­chu­setts Anti-­Slavery Fair,” The Liberator, 14 January 1842, 7). 48.  On how the “captive body” was used “as a vessel for the uses, thoughts, and feelings of ­others,” see Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-­Making in Nineteenth-­Century Amer­i­ca (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 19. She argues that the “fungibility of the commodity, specifically its abstractness and immateriality, enabled the black body . . . ​to serve as the vehicle of white self-­exploration, renunciation, and enjoyment” (ibid., 26). 49.  “Anti-­Slavery Fair,” The Liberator, 20 December 1834, 203. 50.  “The Eleventh Mas­sa­chu­setts A.S. Fair ­Will Open,” The Liberator, 20 December 1844, 203; North Star (1839). 51.  Report of the Twenty-­First National Anti-­Slavery Bazaar, 24. 52.  Fair organizers, like antislavery advocates generally, refused to use proceeds to purchase enslaved p ­ eople’s freedom, since that act would perpetuate the evil that they sought to alleviate. See Report of the Twenty-­Third National Anti-­Slavery Bazaar, 6. 53.  On how white antislavery reformers transformed black bodies into the material emblems of civic abstractions in order to reappropriate them, through sympathetic identification, as the vis­i­ ble signs of white citizenship and civic virtue, see Chris Castiglia, Interior States: Institutional Consciousness and the Inner Life of Democracy in the Antebellum United States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 130–35.

256

Notes to Pages 93–102

54.  “Anti-­Slavery Fair,” The Liberator, 20 December 1834, 203. 55.  “Salem Fair,” The Liberator, 7 May 1841, 75. 56.  Susan Ryan argues that “benevolent hierarchies and racial hierarchies ­were mutally reinforcing in antebellum culture” (The Grammar of Good Intentions: Race and the Antebellum Culture of Benevolence [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003], 67). 57.  “The Fair,” Pennsylvania Freeman, 24 December 1846. All subsequent citations to the walnuts refer to this article. 58.  On the pleasures of moral elevation through consumption, see Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 33–68. 59.  “The Ladies’ Fair,” The Liberator, 2 January 1837, 3. All references to the hearts and the thermometer below refer to this article. 60.  “The Fair,” The Liberator, 28 December 1838, 207. 61.  “The Ladies’ Fair,” The Liberator, 2 January 1837, 3. 62.  “Report: Twenty-­Fourth National Anti-­Slavery Bazaar-­Festival,” The Liberator, 21 February 1858, 26. 63.  “The Ladies’ Fair,” The Liberator, 2 January  1837, 3. Antislavery wafers (MASS, 1841) ­were sheets of antislavery quotations and aphorisms, printed on gummed paper and used to seal envelopes. For a full list of mottos, see “Mottoes for Anti-­Slavery Wafers,” The Liberator, 22 October 1841, 169. 64.  “Sea-­Weed’s Address,” Report of the Twenty-­Third National Anti-­Slavery Bazaar, 12–13. All subsequent citations in this paragraph and the next refer to this text. 65.  Thad Logan, The Victorian Parlour (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 141; Festa, Sentimental Figures, 4. Hartman describes the “consideration of the self that occurs at the expense of the slave’s suffering” as the “vio­lence of identification” (Scenes of Subjection, 20). 66.  Newfield argues that “submission to an unalterable sovereignty” lies at the heart of liberal subjectivity (The Emerson Effect, 28). 67.  For how sentimental consumption and culture began to stand in for po­liti­cal action in the antebellum era, framing social transformation as self-­realization, see Merish, Sentimental Materialism, 11; Berlant, Female Complaint, 33–67. 68.  Report of the Twenty-­Third National Anti-­Slavery Bazaar, 11. 69.  Page DuBois writes that animated objects spoke to the “­f ree of the possibility of their own enslavement” (Slaves and Other Objects [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003], xii). 70.  One doll, for instance, anxiously differentiates her status as object from the slave’s status as ­human: “Sell me, as they do ­women and ­children in your country. It ­w ill be no sin in my case,” the doll reassures (“The Tenth Mas­s a­chu­s etts Anti-­Slavery Fair,” The Liberator, 12 January 1844, 6). 71.  “The Eleventh Mas­sa­chu­setts Fair,” The Liberator, 20 December 1844, 203. For dolls as Christmas gifts, see Ellen Litwicki, “George’s Story: Dolls and the Material Culture of Christmas,” Common-­Place 12 (2012), http://­w ww​.­common​-­place​-­a rchives​.­org​/­vol​-­12​/­no​- ­03​/­lessons​/­. 72.  “Nineteenth National Anti-­Slavery Bazaar,” The Liberator, 28 January 1853, 14. All subsequent citations to L ­ ittle Mary’s doll in this paragraph refer to this article. The story also appeared as a ­children’s book, Aunt Mary [pseud.], The Edinburgh Doll and Other Tales for ­Children (Boston: Jewett, 1854). 73.  “Topsy,” or The Slave Girl’s Appeal: To the Visitors and Patrons of the Anti-­Slavery Bazaar, Held in Boston, U.S., in December, 1852 (Bolton, UK: Kenyon and Abbatt, 1852). All subsequent citations in this paragraph refer to this broadside. 74.  “The Boston Bazaar,” The Liberator, 24 December 1852, 206. 75.  “The Faneuil Hall Bazaar—­Speech of George Thompson,” The Liberator, 3 January 1851, 2. Thompson first visited the United States in September 1834 and remained ­u ntil December 1835. He was supposed to address the Boston Female Anti-­Slavery Society in the fall of 1835, but a­ fter protest meetings held by Boston businessmen in Faneuil Hall, the AASS felt that it was too dangerous to



Notes to Pages 102–107

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have him appear, and he fled the country. He returned in 1850 and again in 1864. See Alma Lutz, Crusade for Freedom: ­Women of the Antislavery Movement (Boston: Beacon, 1968), 54–58. 76.  “Report of the Anti-­Slavery Convention,” Pennsylvania Freeman, 9 January 1851. All subsequent quotations in this paragraph refer to this report. 77.  For Walker’s life and imprisonment, see his autobiography, Jonathan Walker, Trial and Imprisonment of Jonathan Walker, at Pensacola, Florida, for Aiding Slaves to Escape from Bondage: With an Appendix, Containing a Sketch of His Life (Boston: Anti-­Slavery Office, 1848); Joe M. Richardson, introduction to J. Walker, Trial and Imprisonment of Jonathan Walker (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1974), xiii–­xcvi; Alvin F. Oickle, The Man with the Branded Hand: The Life of Jonathan Walker, Abolitionist (Yardley, PA: Westholme, 2011). 78.  The Branded Hand (Philadelphia, ca. 1845), Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. 79.  “The Fairs,” National Anti-­Slavery Standard, 11 December 1845, 110. 80.  On the commodification of celebrity in the nineteenth ­century and its relation to slavery, see Michael Newbury, “Eaten Alive: Slavery and Celebrity in Antebellum Amer­i­ca,” En­glish Literary History 61.1 (Spring 1994): 159–87. 81.  “The Fair,” North Star, 4 February 1848. 82.  “The Branded Hand,” Emancipator and Weekly Chronicle, 6 August 1845, 59; “Walker Meeting in New Bedford,” The Liberator, 22 August 1845, 135. Whittier’s poem, “The Branded Hand” (accompanied by a picture of Walker’s hand and a summary of his story) was published in the Boston Morning Chronicle, 6 August 1845, and widely reprinted in antislavery venues, including the Emancipator and Weekly Chronicle, 6 August 1845, 59; The Liberator, 15 August 1845, 132; and The American Liberty Almanac for 1846 (Hartford: W. H. Burleigh, 1845), 24–26. Walker included Whittier’s poem in the second and subsequent editions of his narrative. The poem was also set to ­music by George W. Clark and sung at antislavery gatherings. Other poems—­“March! H ­ ere Comes the Branded Hand!” by T. D. P. Stone and “Jonathan Walker” by William Gove—­were published in the Emancipator and Weekly Chronicle, 27 August 1845, 70 and The Liberator, 1 August 1845, 124, respectively. Sophia ­Little turned Walker’s tale into a drama, The Branded Hand; a Dramatic Sketch, Commemorative of the Tragedies at the South in the Winter of 1844–45 (Pawtucket, RI: R. W. Potter, 1845). A short-­lived periodical begun in 1845 in Providence, Rhode Island, and devoted to the cause of anti-­slavery martyrs, was titled the Branded Hand (“The Branded Hand,” The Liberator, 10 January 1845, 7). 83.  For a fuller reading of Walker’s branded hand in terms of Western martyrology, see Marcus Wood, Blind Memory: Visual Repre­sen­ta­tions of Slavery in ­England and Amer­i­ca, 1780–1865 (New York: Routledge, 2000), 246–50. For how abolition appropriated black suffering and abstracted it into white martyrdom to produce racial difference, see Mark J. Miller, Cast Down: Abjection in Amer­i­ca, 1700–1850 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 84–117. 84.  As a subsistence farmer, a sailor, and then a prisoner who did not have the funds to liberate himself, Walker emblematized dispossession. He hawked his hand and his story on the abolitionist lecture cir­cuit in order to make a living. At a meeting a­ fter the Rochester fair, he described his f­ amily as living in a “miserable cabin in Plymouth, the only covering of which is a piece of cotton cloth”; he apologized for having to “expose his poverty before e­ very meeting which he may address” (“The Fair,” North Star, 4 February 1848). 85.  Sellers argues that antislavery became “the vanguard of cap­i­tal­ist liberalism”; the cap­i­tal­ist market “took off for global conquest by first propagating and then repudiating slavery” (Market Revolution, 405, 396). See also Amy Dru Stanley, From Bondage to Contract: Wage L ­ abor, Marriage, and the Market in the Age of Slave Emancipation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Amy Dru Stanley, “Wages, Sin, and Slavery: Some Thoughts on ­Free W ­ ill and Commodity Relations,” Journal of the Early Republic 24.2 (Summer 2004): 279–88. For antislavery’s connections to capitalism more broadly, see David Brion Davis, The Prob­l em of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975); Seymour Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery: British Mobilization in Comparative Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Thomas Bender,

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Notes to Pages 107–110

ed., The Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Prob­lem of Historical Interpretation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). For U.S. abolition’s critique of capitalism, see Sinha, The Slave’s Cause, 347–63. 86.  “The Eighth Mas­sa­chu­setts Anti-­Slavery Fair,” The Liberator, 14 January 1842, 7.

Chapter 5 1.  “Receipts for advertising in the Boston Post for the Bazaar,” MS. A.4. 6A. 3, 14, Rare Books and Manuscripts, Boston Public Library, Boston; “Receipts for advertising in the Transcript,” ibid., 8, 12. A general circulation was also “given throughout the city, to the ‘North Star,’ the spirited l­ ittle journal of the Fair” (“The Mas­sa­chu­setts Anti-­Slavery Fair,” The Liberator, 8 November 1839, 179). 2.  Anti-­Slavery Fair! (Abington, MA: Standard Press, 1857), Portfolio 62, Folder 35, Printed Ephemera Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, DC. 3.  “The Fair,” Pennsylvania Freeman, 28 December 1848. 4.  Elisa Tamarkin, Anglophilia: Deference, Devotion, and Antebellum Amer­i­ca (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 227. 5.  For the varied background of fairgoers, see Deborah Bingham Van Broekhoven, “­Needles, Pens, and Petitions: Reading ­Women into Antislavery History,” in The Meaning of Slavery in the North, ed. David Roediger and Martin H. Blatt (New York: Garland, 1998), 143–44. The Liberator states that the Boston fair had an “unusually large attendance of men and w ­ omen of color” (“The Mas­sa­chu­setts Anti-­Slavery Fair,” 8 November 1839, 179), and the North Star invites “all classes” to “attend” the 1849 Rochester fair (“Ladies’ Anti-­Slavery Fair,” 12 January 1849). The Boston fair is described as having “not a few of the wives and d ­ aughters of ‘gentleman of property and standing’ . . . ​ among the purchasers” (“The Ladies’ Fair,” The Liberator, 2 January 1837, 3). 6.  “The Fair,” The Liberator, 8 October 1841, 164; “The Tenth Mas­sa­chu­setts Anti-­Slavery Fair,” The Liberator, 15 December 1843, 199. 7.  “Ninth Mas­sa­chu­setts Anti-­Slavery Fair,” The Liberator, 25 November 1842, 188. 8.  As Tamarkin observes, antislavery sentiment became analogized to “a world of high sociability and extreme politesse” and hence came to serve as “the index to a larger system of class protocols” in the antebellum period (Anglophilia, 199, 204). On how the the practice of slavery produced a culture of taste that was integral to white self-­fashioning and the formation of class in eighteenth-­ century Britain, see Simon Gikandi, Slavery and the Culture of Taste (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2011); Catherine Molineux, ­Faces of Perfect Ebony: Encountering Atlantic Slavery in Imperial Britain (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012). 9.  David Brion Davis argues more generally that antislavery reflected the ideological needs of the m ­ iddle class (The Prob­lem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, rev. ed. [New York: Oxford University Press, 1999], 361). On the conjunctions between antislavery and the ­middle class, see David Turley, The Culture of En­glish Antislavery, 1780–1860 (New York: Routledge, 1991); J.  R. Oldfield, Popu­lar Politics and British Anti-­Slavery: The Mobilisation of Public Opinion Against the Slave Trade, 1787–1807 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995); John Ashworth, Slavery, Capitalism, and Politics in the Antebellum Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). On how abolition, in reinforcing middle-­class my­thol­ogy, appealed to an upwardly mobile class, see Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian Amer­i­ca, 1815–1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 405. 10.  Richard L. Bushman, The Refinement of Amer­i­ca: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Knopf, 1992); John F. Kasson, Rudeness and Civility: Manners in Nineteenth-­Century Urban Amer­i­ca (New York: Hill and Wang, 1990); Joan Shelley Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992); C. Dallett Hemphill, Bowing to Necessities: A History of Manners in Amer­i­ca, 1620–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999); Burton J. Bledstein and Robert D. Johnston, eds., The Middling Sorts: Explorations in the History of the American ­Middle Class (New York: Routledge, 2001).



Notes to Pages 110–111

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11.  On the emergence of the ­middle class in the antebellum era, see Stuart M. Blumin, The Emergence of the ­Middle Class: Social Experience in the American City, 1760–1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Stuart M. Blumin, “The Hypothesis of Middle-­Class Formation in Nineteenth-­C entury Amer­i­c a: A Critique and Some Proposals,” American Historical Review 90.2 (April 1985): 299–338. On how “one could enter the ­middle class piecemeal, through discriminating practices,” see Bledstein and Johnston, Middling Sorts, 5; on middle-­class consciousness as based on “sensibility rather than income or occupation,” see Debby Applegate, “Henry Ward Beecher and the ‘­Great M ­ iddle Class’: Mass Marketed Intimacy and Middle-­Class Identity,” in Bledstein and Johnston, Middling Sorts, 120. 12.  Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016), 253. Blumin states that antislavery membership was drawn from a wide range of social backgrounds (Emergence of the M ­ iddle Class, 205). Bernard Mandel argues that while the abolitionist leadership was ­middle class, farmers and artisans made up the backbone of the movement (­Labor ­Free and Slave: Workingmen and the Anti-­Slavery Movement in the United States [New York: Associated Authors, 1955], 61). Edward Magdol writes that the vast number of abolitionists w ­ ere from the “lower and m ­ iddle ranks of society” and w ­ ere the “least propertied and most eco­nom­ically ex­pec­ tant in the population” (The Antislavery Rank and File: A Social Profile of the Abolitionists’ Constituency [New York: Greenwood, 1986], 151, 64). Gerald Sorin asserts that abolition drew its leadership from urban areas and from “highly educated, moderately prosperous segments of society” (The New York Abolitionists: A Case Study in Po­liti­cal Radicalism [Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1971], 119). James Brewer Stewart sees antislavery as a “broad-­based group which was gaining in status during the age of economic growth” (Holy Warriors: The Abolitionists and American Slavery [New York: Hill and Wang, 1976], 67). Fair organizers, however, tended to be ­middle or upper-­middle class. According to Debra Hansen, the Boston Female ASS was dominated by “some of the wealthiest and most socially prestigious families in Boston” (“The Boston Female Anti-­Slavery Society and the Limits of Gender Politics,” in The Abolitionist Sisterhood: ­Women’s Po­liti­cal Culture in Antebellum Amer­i­ca, ed. Jean Fagan Yellin and John C. Van Horne [Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994], 61–62). According to Jean R. Soderlund, the members of the Philadelphia Female ASS too came “from the ­middle and upper classes” (“Priorities and Power in the Philadelphia Anti-­Slavery Society,” in Yellin and Van Horne, Abolitionist Sisterhood, 74). 13.  Bushman argues that consumption and culture ­were “allies in forming the modern economy” (Refinement of Amer­i­ca, xvii). 14.  While considerable attention has been paid to the role of blackness in molding white working-­class consciousness in the antebellum period, t­ here has been less focus on the elevation of whiteness as crucial to middle-­class formation. On the former, see David R. Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1991); Eric Lott, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993); Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995). On the latter, see Tamarkin, who argues that genteel abolitionism offered an “inside out of minstrelsy,” driving white class formation not through “a racialized burlesque” but through a “drama of sensibility” (Anglophilia, 201, 202). On the allegiance between race and class more generally in the antebellum period, see Alexander Saxton, The Rise and Fall of the White Republic: Class Politics and Mass Culture in Nineteenth-­Century Amer­i­ca (London: Verso, 1990); Amy Schrager Lang, The Syntax of Class: Writing In­equality in Nineteenth-­Century Amer­i­ca (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2003). 15.  Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London: Routledge, 1995), 59–88. Bushman calls the complex of museums, concert halls, and galleries, a “genteel architectural assemblage” (Refinement of Amer­i­ca, 358). ­These spaces resembled each other. For a reading of the museum in relation to the department store, see Barbara J. Black, On Exhibit: Victorians and Their Museums (Charlottesville: University of ­Virginia Press, 2000), 9, 19; T. Bennett, Birth of the Museum, 30. For a discussion of the department store as a cultural space with similarities to the museum, see Rémy G. Saisselin, The Bourgeois and the Bibelot (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1984), 42–43. For readings of the Crystal Palace Exhibition, the nineteenth c­ entury’s first international

260

Notes to Pages 111–114

exhibition, as both a museum and a market, see Thomas Richards, The Commodity Culture of Victorian ­England: Advertising and Spectacle, 1851–1914 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1990), 19. 16.  T. Bennett, Birth of the Museum, 33. On the formulation of class hierarchies in the nineteenth c­ entury by museums and other sites of high culture, see Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in Amer­i­ca (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). 17.  The very first fair was announced as follows: “An Exhibition is shortly to be opened in this city (­under the direction of Mrs. CHILD and other ladies) for the sale of useful articles” (“Anti-­Slavery Ladies—­Attention!,” The Liberator, 22 November 1834, 187). 18.  “The National Bazaar,” North Star, 7 January 1848; “Eleventh Annual Mas­sa­chu­setts Anti-­ Slavery Fair,” MS. B.1.12 (5), Anti-­Slavery Manuscript Collection, Boston Public Library, Boston. 19.  The G ­ reat Exhibition was covered widely in the antislavery press. See, for instance, “The Opening of the G ­ reat Exhibition,” abridged from the Times (London), in the National Anti-­Slavery Standard, 22 May 1851, 208; The Liberty Bell, an official publication of the Boston fair, included M. Victor Schoelcher, “American Slavery, and the London Exhibition” ([Boston: National Anti-­Slavery Bazaar, 1852], 164–69). The Eigh­teenth National Bazaar displayed a Scotch shawl originally “sent from Edinburgh for exhibition at the Crystal Palace” (“The Eigh­teenth National Anti-­Slavery Bazaar,” National Anti-­Slavery Standard, 29 January 1852, 142). 20.  “The Fair,” National Anti-­S lavery Standard, 16 December 1847, 115; “The Twenty-­Th ird National Anti-­Slavery Bazaar,” The Liberator, 30 January 1857, 17. 21.  “The Fifteenth National Anti-­Slavery Bazaar,” The Liberator, 19 January 1849, 11 (inventions); “To Open,” The Liberator, 19 December 1856, 203 (pencils); Mary Estlin to Maria Weston Chapman, 2 November 1846, Mary Ann Estlin Letters, Boston Public Library, Boston (slides); “Mas­sa­chu­setts Anti-­Slavery Fair!!,” The Liberator, 25 October 1839, 171 (printing press). 22.  Report of the Twenty-­first National Anti-­slavery Bazaar (Boston: J. B. Yerrinton and Son, 1855), 32; “Thirteenth National Anti-­Slavery Bazaar,” The Liberator, 29 January 1847, 17 (robe); “The ­Fourteenth National Anti-­Slavery Bazaar,” The Liberator, 24 December 1847, 207 (drawings). 23.  For a reading of exhibitions and world’s fairs as “massive display[s] of prestige” that authorized “the rise of the ­middle class,” see Burton Benedict, “The Anthropology of World’s Fairs,” in The Anthropology of World’s Fairs, ed. Burton Benedict (London: Scholar Press, 1983), 7, 9. 24.  “The National Bazaar,” North Star, 7 January 1848. 25.  “The National Bazaar,” North Star, 7 January 1848; “The ­Fourteenth National Anti-­Slavery Bazaar,” The Liberator, 14 January 1848, 6. 26.  “The National Bazaar,” North Star, 7 January 1848. 27.  “The Fair,” Pennsylvania Freeman, 24 December 1846. 28.  Ibid.; “Philadelphia—­A nti-­Slavery Fair,” Pennsylvania Freeman, 1 January 1847. 29.  “The Fair,” Pennsylvania Freeman, 24 December 1846. 30.  North Star, 29 October 1839, E449.N815 1839x, Rare Books and Manuscripts, Boston Public Library, Boston. 31.  “The Twelfth National Anti-­Slavery Bazaar,” The Liberator, 23 January 1846, 14. 32.  Benedict, “Anthropology of World’s Fairs,” 5, 18. 33.  The Boston fair reports ­were often accompanied by an image of Faneuil Hall (see, for instance, “Sixteenth National Anti-­Slavery Bazaar,” The Liberator, 21 December 1849, 230). 34.  “The Fair,” The Liberator, 12 January 1838, 6; Eleventh Annual Report, Presented to the Mas­sa­chu­setts Anti-­Slavery Society (Boston: Mas­sa­chu­setts Anti-­Slavery Society, 1843), 47. A Liberty Bell flag also hung “at the head of the room, over the orchestra,” at the Philadelphia fair (“The Fair,” Pennsylvania Freeman, 24 December 1846). 35.  “Mas­sa­chu­setts Anti-­Slavery Fair of 1840,” The Liberator, 1 January 1841, 3. 36.  Ibid. (armorial bearings); “The Mass. Anti-­Slavery Fair,” The Liberator, 1 November 1839, 174 (En­glish descent); “The Eighth Mas­sa­chu­setts Anti-­Slavery Fair,” The Liberator, 14 January 1842, 7 (Glasgow ­table).



Notes to Pages 114–117

261

37.  T. Bennett, Birth of the Museum, 27. 38.  “The Sixteenth National Anti-­Slavery Bazaar,” The Liberator, 25 January 1850, 14. 39.  “The Fifteenth National Anti-­Slavery Bazaar,” The Liberator, 22 December 1848, 203 (medallion heads); “Eleventh Mas­sa­chu­setts A.S. Fair,” The Liberator, 20 December 1844, 203 (hair and autographs); “The Fifteenth National Anti-­Slavery Fair,” The Liberator, 19 January 1849, 11 (drawings); “Nineteenth National Anti-­Slavery Bazaar,” The Liberator, 28 January 1853, 14 (portraits). 40.  “The Ladies’ Fair,” The Liberator, 2 January 1837, 3 (Constitution); “The Twelfth National Anti-­Slavery Bazaar,” The Liberator, 23 January 1846, 14 (Plymouth Rock); “The Ninth Mas­sa­chu­ setts Anti-­Slavery Fair,” The Liberator, 23 December 1842, 203 (Hancock seal); “The Mass. Anti-­ Slavery Fair,” The Liberator, 1 November 1839, 174 (Pennsylvania Hall); “The Thirteenth National Anti-­Slavery Bazaar,” National Anti-­Slavery Standard, 24 December 1846, 119 (Magna Carta); “The Fifteenth National Anti-­Slavery Bazaar,” The Liberator, 22 December 1848, 203 (coronation oath). 41.  “Philadelphia Fair,” The Liberator, 25 December 1840, 208. 42.  Tamara Plakins Thornton explains the autograph’s allure in antebellum Amer­i­ca similarly: a handwritten signature operated as a sign of selfhood and selectivity in an age of mass print and circulated among an “exclusive, handpicked audience, most usually a circle of social equals with similar tastes and interests” (Handwriting in Amer­i­ca: A Cultural History [New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996], 25). 43.  Benedict, “Anthropology of World’s Fairs,” 7. 44.  “The National Bazaar,” North Star, 7 January  1848. “The Twelfth National Anti-­Slavery Bazaar” report asks, “Who is sufficient to cata­logue them all?” (The Liberator, 23 January 1846, 14). 45.  “The Fair,” Pennsylvania Freeman, 28 December 1848. 46.  “The Ninth Mas­sa­chu­setts Anti-­Slavery Fair,” The Liberator, 16 December 1842, 199. 47.  “Mas­sa­chu­setts Anti-­Slavery Fair!!,” The Liberator, 25 October 1839, 171 (neck-­t ies); “The National Anti-­Slavery Bazaar,” The Liberator, 12 December 1845 (wafers); “The Ninth Mas­sa­chu­setts Anti-­Slavery Fair,” The Liberator, 16 December 1842, 199 (reticules). 48.  Susan Stewart argues that “refinement has to do with not only the articulation of detail but also the articulation of difference, an articulation which has increasingly served the interests of class” (On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993], 28). 49.  “The Ninth Mas­sa­chu­setts Anti-­Slavery Fair,” The Liberator, 9 December 1842, 195; “The Mas­sa­chu­setts Anti-­Slavery Fair,” The Liberator, 18 December 1840, 203. 50.  Report of the Twentieth National Anti-­Slavery Bazaar (Boston: J. B. Yerrinton and Son, 1854), 17. Each town was known for a specific article: “The fine and beautiful straw work of Wrentham and Foxboro’,—­t he silk canvass-­work of New Bedford,—­t he rich bonnets of Taunton,—­t he completely finished c­ hildren’s clothing of Brookline and Abington,—­t he glass-­work of Stoneham” (“The Mas­ sa­chu­setts Anti-­Slavery Fair,” The Liberator, 8 November 1839, 179). 51.  “The Twenty-­Th ird National Anti-­Slavery Bazaar,” The Liberator, 30 January 1857, 17. 52.  “Fair in Salem,” The Liberator, 12 January 1838, 6. 53.  “The Fair,” Pennsylvania Freeman, 15 December  1851; “Eigh­teenth Pennsylvania Anti-­ Slavery Fair,” Pennsylvania Freeman, 15 December 1853. 54.  “Thirteenth National Anti-­Slavery Fair,” The Liberator, 13 November  1846, 183 (rare specimens); “The Twentieth National Anti-­Slavery Bazaar,” The Liberator, 23 December 1853, 203 (fish-­scale ornaments); “To Open Hall No. 15 Winter Street,” The Liberator, 26 December 1856, 207 (wall ornamentation). 55.  “The Eleventh Mas­sa­chu­setts A.S. Fair,” The Liberator, 20 December 1844, 203; “The Tenth Mas­sa­chu­setts Anti-­Slavery Fair,” The Liberator, 15 December 1843, 199. 56.  “Mas­sa­chu­setts Anti-­Slavery Fair,” The Liberator, 23 October 1840, 171. 57. Bushman, Refinement of Amer­i­ca, 403; Tamarkin, Anglophilia, 221. 58.  “Twenty-­Fourth National Anti-­Slavery Bazaar-­Festival,” The Liberator, 12 February 1858, 26. The map of the 1839 Boston fair also locates the book ­table near the entrance and at the center of the floor (“The Mas­sa­chu­setts Anti-­Slavery Fair,” The Liberator, 8 November 1839, 179).

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Notes to Pages 117–120

59.  North Star, 29 October 1839 (china); “Twenty-­Second National Anti-­Slavery Bazaar,” The Liberator, 14 December 1855, 198 (porcelain); “Sixteenth National Anti-­Slavery Bazaar,” The Liberator, 21 December 1849, 207 (tea ser­v ice). 60.  As Bridget Heneghan shows, the whitening of goods, especially ceramics, in the antebellum period naturalized the pairing of “whiteness” and wealth (Whitewashing Amer­i­ca: Material Culture and Race in the Antebellum Imagination [Jackson: University of Mississippi Press, 2003], xv). 61.  “The Twenty-­First National Anti-­Slavery Bazaar,” National Anti-­Slavery Standard, 27 January 1855. 62. Bushman, Refinement of Amer­i­ca, 283. “The Second Report of the Rochester Ladies’ A.S. Sewing Society” lists sales of foreign goods at the Rochester fair at $103.32 and book ­table sales at $132.62 (Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 4 February 1853). The book t­ able was also highlighted within fair reports, often u ­ nder its own subheading. 63.  “The National Anti-­Slavery Bazaar,” The Liberator, 26 December 1845, 207. 64.  “The Ninth Mas­sa­chu­setts Anti-­Slavery Fair at Armory Hall,” The Liberator, 23 December 1842, 203. 65.  Ibid. (bookmarks); “The National Anti-­Slavery Bazaar,” The Liberator, 12 December 1845, 199 (elegant writing materials); “To Open Hall No. 15 Winter Street,” The Liberator, 26 December 1856, 207 (notepaper); “Eleventh Mas­sa­chu­setts A.S. Fair,” The Liberator, 20 December 1844, 203 (letter paper); “The Ninth Mas­sa­chu­setts Anti-­Slavery Fair,” The Liberator, 16 December 1842, 199 (seals); “The National Anti-­Slavery Bazaar,” The Liberator, 26 December 1845, 207 (pencils). 66.  “Mas­sa­chu­setts Anti-­Slavery Fair of 1840,” The Liberator, 1 January 1841, 3. 67.  Liberty’s Song (Boston: Kidder and Wright, 1839). 68. Ibid. 69.  “Thirteenth National Anti-­Slavery Bazaar,” The Liberator, 25 December 1846, 207. Many social events w ­ ere held in conjunction with fairs: the Pawtucket Anti-­Slavery Association held a tea party (“Fair and Tea Party,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 12 February 1852); the Western Anti-­Slavery Society held a New Year’s cotillion (“A Confession,” The Anti-­Slavery Bugle, 11 January 1851, 66); a Christmas soirée at the 1840 Boston fair drew 250 p ­ eople (“The Mas­sa­chu­setts Anti-­Slavery Fair,” The Liberator, 8 November 1839, 179); the Weymouth fair held both a “social tea-­party” and a “social dancing party” (“The Weymouth Anti-­Slavery Fair,” The Liberator, 14 October 1859, 163). The fair’s post office supplied letters in both verse and prose “from the pens of some of the most talented abolitionists in the country” (“Lynn Anti-­Slavery Fair,” The Liberator, 27 December 1839, 207). 70.  “Anti-­Slavery Fairs,” National Anti-­Slavery Standard, 30 December 1841, 119. For dignitaries, see “The Eighth Mas­sa­chu­setts Anti-­Slavery Fair,” The Liberator, 14 January 1842, 7. 71.  As Hemphill argues, the rising ­middle class co-­opted aristocratic codes of be­hav­ior to set themselves apart from the lower ­orders (Bowing to Necessities, 68–69). 72.  On how abolitionists’ gatherings more generally produced the cause as respectable, see W. Caleb McDaniel, “The Fourth and the First: Abolitionist Holidays, Respectability, and Radical Interracial Reform,” American Quarterly 57.1 (March 2005): 129–51. 73.  “The Mas­sa­chu­setts Anti-­Slavery Fair,” The Liberator, 8 November 1839, 179; “The Thirteenth National Anti-­Slavery Bazaar,” National Anti-­Slavery Standard, 28 January 1847, 138; “Anti-­Slavery Fair,” The Liberator, 20 December 1834, 203. Isaac T. Hopper writes of the 1841 Boston fair that he was “gratified to observe that the most perfect decorum prevailed. . . . ​Every­t hing was chaste, dignified and refined” (“Mas­sa­chu­setts Fair,” National Anti-­Slavery Standard, 6 January 1842, 122). 74.  “The Fair,” Pennsylvania Freeman, 25 December 1851. 75.  “Philadelphia Fair,” The Liberator, 29 January 1847, 17; “Mas­sa­chu­setts Fair,” National Anti-­ Slavery Standard, 6 January 1842, 122. 76.  “The Twenty-­First National Anti-­Slavery Bazaar,” The Liberator, 26 January 1855, 13 (Stowe); “The Twenty-­Second National Anti-­Slavery Bazaar,” The Liberator, 25 January 1856, 1 (Carlisle); Lydia Maria Child, Isaac T. Hopper: A True Life (Boston: Jewett, 1854), 404 (Morpeth). 77.  E. Michele to Miss Weston, 3 November [1852], MS. A.9.2.6, 89, Antislavery Manuscript Collection, Boston Public Library, Boston.



Notes to Pages 120–122

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78.  For an example—in addition to the kneeling slave—of white gentility operating through black subordination, see The F ­ amily Coach (Dublin, Ireland: Printed for the Pennsylvania Anti-­ Slavery Fair, by Alfred Webb, [1845?]), a parlor game sold at the Philadelphia fair. This is a game of attention in which each player must stand and turn around when their part is mentioned in the narrative or pay a forfeit; it teaches its parlor players to formulate themselves as genteel subjects—­ proprietors of the coach—in counterdistinction to the black servants, Pompey and Caesar, who serve them. 79.  “Nineteenth National Anti-­Slavery Bazaar,” The Liberator, 17 December 1852, 203. 80.  “The North Star Fair,” North Star, 16 May 1850. 81.  “The Fifteenth National Anti-­Slavery Bazaar,” National Anti-­Slavery Standard, 21 December 1848, 198. 82.  Report of the Twenty-­Fourth and Twenty-­Fifth Years of the Philadelphia Female Anti-­Slavery Society (Philadelphia: Merrihew and Thompson, 1859), 21; “Anti-­Slavery Fair,” National Anti-­Slavery Standard, 3 December 1846, 107. 83.  “Thirteenth National Anti-­Slavery Bazaar,” The Liberator, 29 January 1847, 17 (robe); “Curious Relic,” National Anti-­Slavery Standard, 7 April 1842, 175 (china ser­v ice); “Anti-­Slavery Fairs,” National Anti-­Slavery Standard, 30 December 1841, 119 (Redmond); “Anti-­Slavery Fair,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 11 December 1851 (Pennington). 84.  “The Tenth Mas­sa­chu­setts Anti-­Slavery Fair,” The Liberator, 12 January 1844, 6; “Report: Twenty-­fourth National Anti-­Slavery Bazaar-­Festival,” The Liberator, 12 February 1858, 26. 85.  “Nineteenth National Anti-­Slavery Bazaar,” The Liberator, 28 January 1853, 14. 86.  “A Card,” The Liberator, 28 January 1853, 15. 87.  “Twentieth National Anti-­Slavery Bazaar,” The Liberator, 20 January 1854, 10. 88.  On how northern blacks wielded refinement as a mode of re­sis­tance by fashioning a discourse of racial equality from the social categories of in­equality, see Patrick Rael, Black Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum North (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Leslie M. Harris, In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626–1863 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Erica L. Ball, To Live an Antislavery Life: Personal Politics and the Antebellum Black M ­ iddle Class (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012). 89.  Thad Logan, The Victorian Parlour (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 186. 90.  For background on gift books, see Ralph Thompson, American Literary Annuals and Gift Books (New York: H. W. Wilson, 1936); Ann Renier, Friendship’s Offering (London: Private Libraries Association, 1964); Margaret Linley, “A Centre That Would Not Hold: Annuals and Cultural Democracy,” in Nineteenth-­Century Media and the Construction of Identities, ed. Laurel Brake, Bill Bell, and David Finkelstein (London: Palgrave, 2000), 54–74; Isabelle Lehuu, Carnival on the Page: Popu­lar Print Media in Antebellum Amer­i­ca (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000), 76–101; Meredith L. McGill, American Lit­er­a­ture and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834–1853 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2003), 29–39. For secondary criticism on antislavery gift books, see Ralph Thompson, “The Liberty Bell and Other Anti-­Slavery Gift-­Books,” New ­England Quarterly 7.1 (March 1934): 154–68; Karen Sanchez-­Eppler, Touching Liberty: Abolition, Feminism, and the Politics of the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 14–49; Clare Taylor, ­Women of the Antislavery Movement: The Weston ­Sisters (New York: St. Martin’s, 1995), 87–98; Valerie Levy, “The Antislavery Web of Connection: Maria Weston Chapman’s Liberty Bell (1839– 58)” (PhD diss., University of Georgia, 2002); Mary Loeffelholz, From School to Salon: Reading Nineteenth-­Century American ­Women’s Poetry (Prince­ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 2004), 67–69; Valery Levy, “Lydia Maria Child and the Abolitionist Gift-­Book Market,” in Popu­lar Nineteenth-­Century American ­Women Writers and the Literary Marketplace, ed. Earl Yarington and Mary De Jong (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars, 2007), 137–52; Meaghan M. Fritz and Frank E. Fee Jr., “To Give the Gift of Freedom: Gift Books and the War on Slavery,” American Periodicals 23.1 (2013): 60–82. 91.  The Liberty Bell ran from 1839 to 1858, with no editions in 1840, 1850, 1854, 1855, 1857 (Dwight Lowell Dumond, A Bibliography of Antislavery in Amer­i­c a [Ann Arbor: University of

264

Notes to Pages 122–130

Michigan Press], 36). The movement also produced gift books not specifically designed for a fair, such as Freedom’s Gift: Or Sentiments of the ­Free (Hartford, CT: S. S. Cowles, 1840). Other types of books ­were also prepared for fairs. Thomas Hill’s Christmas and Poems on Slavery, for Christmas, 1843 (Cambridge, MA: Author, 1843) was published for the Boston fair. Works published for the Philadelphia fair include: Hannah Townsend, The Anti-­Slavery Alphabet (Philadelphia: Merrihew and Thompson, 1846); Matilda G. Thompson, Aunt Judy’s Story: A Tale from Real Life (Philadelphia: Merrihew and Thompson, 1855); and Matilda  G. Thompson, Mark and Hasty, or Slave-­Life in Missouri (Philadelphia: Merrihew and Thompson, 1856). 92.  “The Tenth Mas­sa­chu­setts Anti-­Slavery Fair,” The Liberator, 15 December 1843, 199; “The Third Annual Report of the Festival Held by the Rochester Ladies’ Anti-­Slavery Sewing Society,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 20 January 1854. 93.  S. Stewart, On Longing, 136–37. 94.  “We are happy to learn that the publication of ‘THE AUTOGRAPHS FOR FREEDOM’ is nearly completed,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 3 December 1852. The Liberty Bell was published on the first morning of the fair (“The Eighth Mas­sa­chu­setts Anti-­Slavery Fair,” The Liberator, 17 December 1841, 203); Autographs for Freedom appeared “on the first day of the Festival” and formed the “most attractive feature of the Book ­Table” (“Anti-­Slavery Festival in Rochester,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 10 December 1852). 95.  “Thirteenth National Anti-­Slavery Fair,” The Liberator, 27 November 1846, 191; “THE LIBERTY BELL FOR 1849,” The Liberator, 12 January 1849, 6. The Liberty Bell was expected to “swell the receipts of the Fair” (“Thirteenth National Anti-­Slavery Fair,” The Liberator, 27 November 1846, 191); and Autographs for Freedom was predicted to have an “im­mense” and “unpre­ce­dented sale” (“AUTOGRAPHS FOR FREEDOM,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 16 December 1853). 96.  “Twentieth National Anti-­Slavery Bazaar,” The Liberator, 23 December 1853, 203. Described as a “capital conception,” Autographs for Freedom traded on antebellum society’s mania for autographs to increase sales (“Autographs for Freedom,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 3 February 1854). 97.  “The Liberty Bell,” The Liberator, 10 January 1851, 6. 98.  “The Liberty Bell,” The Liberator, 1 January 1841, 3; “The Eleventh Mas­sa­chu­setts A.S. Fair,” The Liberator, 20 December 1844, 203. For examples of The Liberty Bell’s binding, see Kevin MacDonnell, “American Gift Books,” Firsts: Collecting Modern First Editions 11 (December 2001): 35. An ornamental title page, engraved by J. R. Foster, first appeared in the 1848 edition of The Liberty Bell and was included in ­every edition thereafter. 99.  “Autographs for Freedom,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 31 March 1854; “A Book for the Million!,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 23 December 1853. Autographs for Freedom came in several versions: a plain muslin binding for $1.25; gilt for $1.50; and full gilt sides and edges for $2.00 (“AUTOGRAPHS FOR FREEDOM,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 7 April 1854). 100.  “­Woman’s Sympathy,” The Liberator, 10 February 1843, 23; “The Liberty Bell for 1846,” The Liberator, 16 January 1846, 11. 101.  “AUTOGRAPHS FOR FREEDOM,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 7 April 1854. 102.  On inscriptions in gift books, see Cindy Dickinson, “Creating a World of Books, Friends, and Flowers: Gift Books and Inscriptions, 1825–60,” Winterthur Portfolio 31.1 (Spring 1996): 53–66. 103.  “Autographs for Freedom,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 14 January 1853. 104.  Anne Warren Weston, “The Cathedral at Arrezzo,” in The Liberty Bell, ed. Maria Weston Chapman (Boston: National Anti-­Slavery Bazaar, 1858), 44–46; Howard Worcester Gilbert, “La Notte Di Michelangiolo: Sonnets,” ibid., 79–82. 105.  Henry W. Longfellow, “The Norman Baron,” in The Liberty Bell, ed. Maria Weston Chapman (Boston: Mas­sa­chu­setts Anti-­Slavery Fair, 1845), 35. 106.  Harriet Beecher Stowe, “A Day at Playford Hall,” in Autographs for Freedom, ed. Julia Griffiths (Auburn, NY: Alden, Beardsley, 1854), 277–303. 107.  Harriet Martineau, “Pity the Slave,” in The Liberty Bell, ed. Maria Weston Chapman (Boston: Mas­sa­chu­setts Anti-­Slavery Fair, 1844), 182–87; Catharine E. Beecher, “The Slave’s Prayer,” in Autographs for Freedom, ed. Julia Griffiths (Boston: Jewett, 1853), 76.



Notes to Pages 131–132

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108.  Maria Weston Chapman, “Prayer: From the Spanish of Placido,” in The Liberty Bell, ed. Maria Weston Chapman (Boston: Mas­sa­chu­setts Anti-­Slavery Far, 1845), 70–71; Isaac T. Hopper, “Story of a Fugitive,” in The Liberty Bell, ed. Maria Weston Chapman (Boston: Mas­sa­chu­setts Anti-­ Slavery Fair, 1843), 163–69; David Lee Child, “African Inventors,” in The Liberty Bell, ed. Maria Weston Chapman (Boston: Mas­sa­chu­setts Anti-­Slavery Fair, 1852), 22–37. 109.  Frederick Douglass, “The Heroic Slave,” appeared in Autographs for Freedom (1853), 174–239. 110.  William Wells Brown, “Visit of a Fugitive Slave to the Grave of Wilberforce,” in Autographs for Freedom (1854), 76; James McCune Smith, “John Murray (of Glasgow),” in Autographs for Freedom (1853), 62–67. 111.  William G. Allen, “Placido,” in Autographs for Freedom (1853), 256–63. 112.  “The Liberty Bell,” The Liberator, 5 January 1844, 3; “From Our Brooklyn Correspondent,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 10 February 1854. 113.  Katherine C. Grier, Culture and Comfort: Parlor Making and Middle-­Class Identity, 1850– 1930 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 1988), 98; Louise L. Stevenson, The Victorian Homefront: American Thought and Culture, 1860–1880 (New York: Twayne, 1991), 11. On the parlor’s density and decorations, see Logan, The Victorian Parlour, 36–201; on the parlor as a carefully elaborated social statement, see Kasson, Rudeness and Civility, 173–76. The fairs’ halls operated as a “model interior”—­a form of public parlor that, like the parlor car of a train or lobby of a h ­ otel, taught the parlor’s cultural ideals and packaged them for ready sale (Grier, Culture and Comfort, 23). 114.  “The Eigh­teenth National Anti-­Slavery Bazaar,” The Liberator, 30 January 1852, 17. 115.  Ibid.; “To the Members of the ‘Rochester Anti-­Slavery Sewing Society,’ ” Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 27 August 1852. 116.  The Subscription Anniversary was Chapman’s invention, but she ran it only u ­ ntil 1862, at which point Lydia Maria Child took it over. The Philadelphia fair was called “National Anti-­Slavery Fair” from 1859 to its end in 1861. Philadelphia copied Boston’s salon by creating a “Festival of the Friends of Freedom,” held in January of 1867, which featured m ­ usic, refreshments, social interaction, and distinguished guests (“Pennsylvania Festival of the Friends of Freedom,” National Anti-­ Slavery Standard, 29 December 1866). For other discussions of the Subscription Anniversary, see Lee Chambers-­Schiller, “ ‘A Good Work Among the P ­ eople’: The Po­liti­cal Culture of the Boston Antislavery Fair,” in The Abolitionist Sisterhood: W ­ omen’s Po­liti­cal Culture in Antebellum Amer­i­ca, ed. Jean Fagan Yellin and John C. Van Horne (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 270–74; Jane H. Pease and William H. Pease, Bound with Them in Chains: A Biographical History of the Antislavery Movement (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1972), 45–47, 53–56; Catherine Clinton, “Maria Weston Chapman,” in Portraits of American ­Women, ed. G. J. Barker-­Benfield and Catherine Clinton (New York: St. Martin’s, 1998), 157–59. 117.  While fairs had always accepted direct donations, the Subscription Anniversary codified the contribution as its central mode of fund­r ais­ing. The idea was first tried out in 1858, when the Boston fair report advertised a Eu­ro­p ean Subscription (“Report,” The Liberator, 12 February 1858, 25). 118.  “The Twenty-­Second National Anti-­Slavery Bazaar,” The Liberator, 25 January 1856, 13. 119.  “Cessation of the Boston Bazaar,” Anti-­Slavery Advocate, February 1858, 125. Mobs threatened antislavery fairs in the late 1850s (Beth  A. Salerno, ­Sister Socie­ties: ­Women’s Antislavery Organ­izations in Antebellum Amer­i­ca [DeKalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2005], 151), including the 1859 and 1860 Philadelphia fairs (Twenty-­Sixth Annual Report of the Philadelphia Female Anti-­Slavery Society [Philadelphia: Merrihew and Thompson, 1860], 17; Twenty-­Seventh Annual Report of the Philadelphia Female Anti-­Slavery Society [Philadelphia: Merrihew and Thompson, 1861], 11). Chapman voiced her concern about the fair’s being more about profit than ideals in a letter to Elizabeth Pease Nichol: “I now see more clearly than at first, that this Fair was about to take the place of the cause: that when ­people spoke of it in high terms . . . ​t hey ­were thinking, not of the princi­ ples—­t he cause, the American A.S. Society . . . ​but of somehow or other, crying goods” (20 September 1858, MS. A.1.2 v. 28, 133, Maria Weston Chapman Correspondence [1835–1885], Boston Public

266

Notes to Pages 132–135

Library, Boston). Samuel May wrote to Ricard D. Webb that Chapman saw the fair as “worn out, cumbrous, effete, clumsy, a clog and a fetter on the Cause rather than a help” (12 January 1858, MS. B 1.6 v. 6, 77, Samuel May Correspondence, Boston Public Library, Boston). The financial crisis of the late 1850s also rendered the fair less v­ iable (“The National Anti-­Slavery Bazaar,” National Anti-­ Slavery Standard, 17 April 1858). 120.  Maria Weston Chapman to Mary Estlin, 8 March 1858, MS. A.7.2, 78, Chapman Correspondence (1835–1885), Boston Public Library, Boston. 121. Ibid. 122.  Maria Weston Chapman to Mary Estlin, 4 January [1861], MS. A.7.2, 87, Chapman Correspondence (1835–1885). 123.  Eliza Richards, Gender and the Poetics of Reception in Poe’s Circle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 7. On the rise of the antebellum salon, see Anne Marie Dolan, “The Literary Salon in New York, 1830–1860” (PhD diss., Columbia University, 1957). For Eu­ro­pean salon culture, see Steven Kale, French Salons: High Society and Po­liti­cal Sociability from the Old Regime to the Revolution of 1848 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004); Joan B. Landes, W ­ omen and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1988). 124.  An Invitation to the Twenty-­Eighth Subscription Anniversary (1862), MS. B.1.6.9, No. 61, American Broadsides and Ephemera, Boston Public Library, Boston; Chapman to Estlin, 4 January [1861]. 125.  “The Twenty-­Ninth National Anti-­Slavery Subscription Anniversary,” National Anti-­ Slavery Standard, 21 February 1863. 126.  “From our Boston Correspondent,” National Anti-­Slavery Standard, 11 February 1860. Guests w ­ ere also welcome to call during the after­noon, when the man­ag­ers ­were preparing the hall. 127. Ibid. 128.  Letters took the place of goods in the anniversary reports. Instead of itemizing who sent which item, the anniversary accounts reprinted esteemed letters alongside a list of donations. See, for instance, “The Twenty-­Fifth National Anti-­Slavery Subscription-­A nniversary,” The Liberator, 18 February 1859, 26. 129.  “The Boston Festival,” National Anti-­Slavery Standard, 2 February 1867 (organ); “National Anti-­Slavery Subscription Anniversary,” National Anti-­Slavery Standard, 15 February 1862 (band); “The Boston Festival and Meetings,” National Anti-­Slavery Standard, 1 February 1868 (Ellery); “The Thirtieth National Anti-­Slavery Subscription Anniversary,” National Anti-­Slavery Standard, 20 February 1864 (Phillips); “Report of the Ladies’ Committee of the Thirty-­Fifth National Anti-­Slavery Subscription Festival,” National Anti-­Slavery Standard, 27 February 1869 (Howe). 130.  “The Thirty-­First National Anti-­Slavery Subscription Anniversary,” National Anti-­Slavery Standard, 4 March 1865. 131.  “The Boston Festival and Meetings,” National Anti-­Slavery Standard, 1 February 1868 (writers); “The Boston Festival,” National Anti-­Slavery Standard, 2 February 1867 (Mrs. Emerson); “The Boston Festival and Meeting,” National Anti-­Slavery Standard, 1 February 1868 (Miss Atkins). 132.  “Our Boston Correspondence,” National Anti-­Slavery Standard, 1 February 1862. 133. Ibid. 134. Ibid. 135.  “Pre­sen­ta­t ion of Plate,” The Liberator, 25 December 1846, 206; “The Boston Festival and Meetings,” National Anti-­Slavery Standard, 1 February 1868. 136.  “The Twenty-­Ninth National Anti-­Slavery Subscription Anniversary” report states that “it was thought desirable to obtain, if pos­si­ble, a photographic picture of the stage and southern end of the M ­ usic Hall—as a memorial of the occasion—­a nd a very successful repre­sen­ta­t ion has been obtained by a well-­k nown and skillful artist” (National Anti-­Slavery Standard, 21 February 1863). 137.  According to Julie Roy Jeffrey, fairs always used entry fees as a form of control and exclusion to “keep the wrong sorts of p ­ eople away” (“ ‘Stranger, Buy . . . ​Lest Our Mission Fail’: The Complex Culture of W ­ omen’s Abolitionist Fairs,” American Nineteenth C ­ entury History 4.1 [2003]: 18). Patrick Rael argues more generally that antislavery cele­brations ­were socially bifurcated: ticket



Notes to Pages 135–141

267

purchases restricted popu­lar participation in antislavery cele­brations and many “events included both mass and elite components,” such as open-­air picnics and invitation-­only dinners (“The Lion’s Painting: African-­A merican Thought in the Antebellum North” [PhD diss., University of California, Berkeley, 1995], 72–75). The entry fee for the Boston fair was, u ­ ntil 1853, 12½ cents per day or 25 cents for a season pass; then the price r­ ose to 25 cents per day, and 50 cents for a pass—­high enough to discourage idle onlookers. On the ­middle class’s gatekeeping devices, see Hemphill, Bowing to Necessities, 131. 138.  “The Twenty-­S eventh National Anti-­Slavery Subscription Anniversary,” National Anti-­ Slavery Standard, 12 January 1861. 139. [Invitation to the 31st Subscription Anniversary] (Boston: s.n., 1865). Guests w ­ ere encouraged to “make an exertion in [their] social, po­liti­cal, and religious circle, to obtain subscriptions and to extend this invitation” (Invitation to The Twenty-­Fifth National Anti-­Slavery Subscription Anniversary [1859], MS. A.9.2, No.73, American Broadsides and Ephemera, Boston Public Library, Boston). 140.  “The Twenty-­Fifth National Anti-­Slavery Subscription Anniversary,” The Liberator, 18 February 1859, 26. 141.  On the salon as a space of social control, see Kale, French Salons, 9; Landes, ­Women and the Public Sphere, 24. 142.  Chapman to Estlin, 4 January [1861]. 143.  Minutes of the Executive Committee of the American Anti-­Slavery Society, vol. 2, 25 November 1864, MS. fA.33, Anti-­Slavery Collection, Boston Public Library, Boston. The AASS’s executive committee remarked in 1864 that its trea­sury was exhausted and that it had relied for the past several years on the Subscription Anniversary for “pecuniary support”; it was “indispensable to the existence of the Parent Society” (ibid.). The Anniversary’s proceeds gradually declined from a high of $6,000 in 1859, ending in the late 1860s with receipts closer to $2,500—­likely related to the difficulty of making its cause seem urgent ­a fter emancipation.

Chapter 6 1.  Janet Wilson, “The Early Anti-­Slavery Propaganda,” More Books, Being the Bulletin of the Boston Public Library 19 (November 1944): 354. 2.  “List of Anti-­Slavery Publications,” The Emancipator, 12 January 1837, 148. For another antislavery handkerchief, see The Poor Slave: Dedicated to the Friends of Humanity, broadside on printed fabric (Boston: Boston Chemical Printing Com­pany, ca. 1836), Swatch Book Collection (c. 1700–­c. 1925), Joseph Downs Collection of Manuscripts and Printed Ephemera, Winterthur Library, Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, Winterthur, DE. 3.  See “Prints, &C.” in “Cata­logue of Books and Pamphlets, on the Subject of Slavery and Abolition,” The Emancipator, 30 June 1836, 36; 2 November 1837, 106; 5 April 1838, 192. Inna, the Booroom Slave was first published in the British gift book Forget Me Not, A Christmas and New Year’s Pre­sent for 1828 and reprinted as the frontispiece to Child’s An Appeal in ­Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans (1833); it was produced as a lithographic print by the Kellogg Com­pany in 1838 (see Nancy Finley, ed., Picturing Victorian Amer­i­ca: Prints by the Kellogg ­Brothers of Hartford, Connecticut [Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2009], cat. no. 437). 4.  On the transatlantic archive of antislavery images, see Marcus Wood, Blind Memory: Visual Repre­sen­ta­tions of Slavery in E ­ ngland and Amer­i­ca, 1780–1865 (New York: Routledge, 2000); Marcus Wood, The Horrible Gift of Freedom: Atlantic Slavery and the Repre­sen­ta­tion of Emancipation (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010); Martha Cutter, The Illustrated Slave: Empathy, Graphic Narrative, and the Visual Culture of the Transatlantic Abolition Movement, 1800–1852 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017). On the visual culture of U.S. antislavery, see Jean Fagan Yellin, ­Women and ­Sisters: The Antislavery Feminists in American Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 3–28; Bernard F. Reilly, “The Art of the Antislavery Movement,” in Courage and Conscience:

268

Notes to Pages 141–145

Black and White Abolitionists in Boston, ed. Donald M. Jacobs (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 47–73; Phillip Lapsansky, “Graphic Discord: Abolitionists and Antiabolitionist Images,” in The Abolitionist Sisterhood: W ­ omen’s Po­liti­cal Culture in Antebellum Amer­i­ca, ed. Jean Fagan Yellin and John C. Van Horne (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994), 201–30; Jennifer Juanita Harper, “In All Good Conscience: Abolitionism in Popu­lar American Imagery, 1830–1865” (PhD diss., Yale University, 2003); Radiclani Clytus, “Envisioning Slavery: American Abolitionism and the Primacy of the Visual” (PhD diss., Yale University, 2007); Radiclani Clytus, “ ‘Keep It Before the P ­ eople’: The Pictorialization of American Abolitionism,” in Early African American Print Culture, ed. Lara Langer Cohen and Jordon Alexander Stein (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 290–317; Maurie D. McInnis, Slaves Waiting for Sale: Abolitionist Art and the American Slave Trade (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 5.  “Cata­logue,” The Emancipator, 5 April 1838, 192. 6.  “Elijah P. Lovejoy,” The Emancipator, 21 December 1837, 131; The American Anti-­Slavery Almanac for 1840 (New York: AASS, n.d.), front cover. 7.  On the “power­f ul interactive effect” of word and image in the transatlantic antislavery argument, see Cutter, Illustrated Slave, xviii. 8.  Minutes of the Executive Committee of the American Anti-­Slavery Society, 15 February 1838, 33, MS. fA.33, Anti-­Slavery Collection, Boston Public Library, Boston, Mas­s a­chu­s etts; ibid., 15 August 1839, 179. 9.  For prices, see “Prints and Engravings,” The Emancipator, 6 September 1838, 77. Although fine engravings cost between fifty cents and a dollar, they too ­were promoted as cheap: The Emancipated ­Family, which sold for a dollar, was advertised as selling “for less than one half the usual price for such engravings” (“Cata­logue,” The Emancipator, 20 April 1837, 204). 10.  The ephemeral nature of broadsides makes their circulation difficult to track. Hung in taverns or on city streets, they reached dif­fer­ent publics than printed texts did. The Emancipator recommends, for instance, that an AASS broadside be “placed in e­ very shop, store, and public place, to remind us of the groans of the slave” (“All at One View,” 12 October 1837, 93). On the antebellum broadside’s public form, see David M. Henkin, City Reading: Written Words and Public Spaces in Antebellum New York (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998), 69–100. 11.  Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, vol. 5, 1835–1838, ed. Merton M. Sealts Jr. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1965), 327. On the emergence of the mass image in antebellum Amer­i­ca, see David Morgan, Protestants and Pictures: Religion, Visual Culture, and the Age of American Mass Production (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999). 12.  On the era’s technological advances, see Georgia B. Barnhill, “Transformations in Pictorial Printing,” in The History of the Book, vol. 2, An Extensive Republic: Print, Culture, and Society in the New Nation, 1790–1840, ed. Robert A. Gross and Mary Kelley (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 422–40. Barnhill argues that 1825 marked the “dividing line between old and new means of producing images in print” (ibid., 425–26). 13.  The American Anti-­Slavery Almanac for 1837 (Boston: Southard and Hitchcock, n.d.), 47; Morgan, Protestants and Pictures, 6. 14.  “The Pictorials,” The Emancipator, 5 May 1836, 3; “Pictorials,” The Emancipator, 1 February 1836. 15. “Pictorials,” The Emancipator, 1 February 1836. 16.  Ibid. The Fourth Annual Report of the Board of Man­ag­ers of the Mas­sa­chu­setts Anti-­Slavery Society similarly argues that the image has a stronger emotional impact than the word: “Pictorial repre­sen­ta­tions have ever been used with success, in making any desirable impression upon the minds of men, the bulk of whom are more immediately and thoroughly affected by a picture, than a verbal description” ([Boston: Isaac Knapp, 1836], 20). 17.  Proceedings of the Anti-­Slavery Convention of American ­Women (New York: William S. Dorr, 1837), 14. The AASS Executive Committee, for instance, states that “highly valuable ‘pictorials’ such as the ‘Slave Market in Amer­i­ca,’ o ­ ught to be thrust before the eye of e­ very man who has a particle



Notes to Pages 145–147

269

of American blood in his veins” (“An Appeal to Abolitionists,” Executive Committee Circular, 11 October 1837, MS 402, Mas­sa­chu­setts Anti-­Slavery Collection, New-­York Historical Society, New York City). 18.  Stephan Oettermann, The Pa­norama: History of a Mass Medium, trans. Deborah Lucas Schneider (New York: Zone Books, 1997), 7. 19.  For histories of the pa­norama, see Richard Altick, The Shows of London (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1978); Ralph Hyde, Panoramania! The Art and Entertainment of the ‘All-­Embracing’ View (London: Trefoil, 1988); Oettermann, Pa­norama; Bernard Comment, The Painted Pa­norama (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2000). 20.  For histories of the moving pa­norama, see John L. Marsh, “Drama and Spectacle by the Yard: The Pa­norama in Amer­i­ca,” Journal of Popu­lar Culture 10.3 (Winter 1976): 581–91; Llewellyn Hubbard Hedgbeth, “Extant American Pa­noramas: Moving Entertainments of the Nineteenth ­Century” (PhD diss., New York University, 1977); Karin Hertel McGinnis, “Moving Right Along: Nineteenth ­Century Pa­norama Painting in the United States” (PhD diss., University of Minnesota, 1983); Angela Miller, “The Pa­norama, the Cinema, and the Emergence of the Spectacular,” Wide ­Angle 18.2 (1996): 34–69; Oettermann, Pa­norama, 63–66; Alison Griffiths, Shivers Down Your Spine: Cinema, Museums, and the Immersive View (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 37–78; Erkki Huhtamo, Illusions in Motion: Media Archaeology of the Moving Pa­norama and Related Spectacles (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013); Alison Byerly, Are We Th ­ ere Yet? Virtual Travel and Victorian Realism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013), 41–47. 21.  Angela Miller, The Empire of the Eye: Landscape Repre­sen­ta­tion and American Cultural Politics, 1825–1875 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993), 18. In the 1840s, five pa­noramas of the Mississippi River ­were produced, the most famous being Banvard’s Geo­graph­i­cal Pa­norama of the Misissippi River (1847). For an overview of t­ hese, see John Francis McDermott, The Lost Pa­noramas of the Mississippi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958); Oettermann, Pa­norama, 325–40. Other popu­lar subjects included the Mexican War, scenic journeys through the West, and geo­graph­ i­cal landmarks like Niagara Falls (A. Miller, “Pa­norama,” 37–38). 22.  For formulations of the pa­norama’s perspective, see William H. Galperin, The Return of the Vis­i­ble in British Romanticism (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993), 34–61; A. Miller, “Pa­norama,” 34–69; Gillen D’Arcy Wood, The Shock of the Real: Romanticism and Visual Culture, 1760–1860 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001), 99–120; Alison Byerly, “A Prodigious Map Beneath His Feet: Virtual Travel and the Panoramic Perspective,” Nineteenth-­Century Contexts 29.2–3 (June/ September 2007): 151–68; Byerly, Are We Th ­ ere Yet?, 29–82. 23.  Albert Boime, The Magisterial Gaze: Manifest Destiny and American Landscape Painting, c. 1830–1865 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991). As a specifically American perspective, the pa­norama’s “magisterial gaze,” Boime argues, “embodied the exaltation of a cultured American elite before the illimitable horizon that they identified with the destiny of the American nation” (ibid., 38). For the simultaneous emergence of the panoramic and panoptic perspectives, see Oettermann, Pa­norama, 38–41. 24.  “Pa­norama of Jerusalem,” The Emancipator, 31 January 1839, 161; “To Open Hall No. 15 Winter Street,” The Liberator, 26 December 1856, 207. 25.  Jennifer Rae Greeson, Our South: Geographic Fantasy and the Rise of National Lit­er­a­ture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010), 14. Greeson argues that immediate abolitionism “radically re­imagined” the South as a space of “unfreedom” and “hidden depravity” (ibid.). For her full reading of abolition’s role in the antebellum construction of the South, see 115–223. 26.  On how U.S. po­liti­cal conflicts ­were “rehearsed through spatial scenarios,” see A. Miller, Empire of the Eye, 14. For readings of antislavery as a spatial practice tied to the production of nationalism, see Trish Loughran, The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building, 1770–1870 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 303–440; Martha Schoolman, Abolitionist Geographies (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014), 1–20. 27.  On antebellum discourse’s articulation of northern ideals as “national ones,” see Susan-­Mary Grant, North over South: Northern Nationalism and American Identity in the Antebellum Era

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Notes to Pages 147–155

(Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2000), 5. While Grant does not address abolition, she shows more broadly how northern ideology was rooted in opposition to the South and how the North worked to construct U.S. nationalism in its own image (ibid., 1–18). 28.  On vision’s profound reconfiguration in the antebellum era, see Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth ­Century (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 1990); Peter Brownlee, The Commerce of Vision: Optical Culture and Perception in Antebellum Amer­i­ca (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). 29. “Introduction,” Quarterly Anti-­Slavery Magazine 1.1 (October 1835): 3. 30.  Several cuts from this broadside w ­ ere copied in The American Anti-­Slavery Almanac for 1838 (Boston: D. K. Hitchcock, n.d.), 7, 17, 23. 31.  “All at One View,” The Emancipator, 12 October 1837, 93. I have been unable to locate this print. It is pos­si­ble that it reprints the seven images from the broadside Injured Humanity; Being A Repre­sen­ta­tion of What the Unhappy ­Children of Africa Endure from ­Those Who Call Themselves CHRISTIANS (New York: Samuel Wood, 1805–8), which depicts vari­ous methods of punishment. 32.  “Cata­logue,” The Emancipator, 16 January 1838, 148; “All at One View,” The Emancipator, 12 October 1837, 93. 33.  Nicholas Mirzoeff, The Right to Look: A Counterhistory of Visuality (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 52. For Mirzoeff’s full reading of the plantation complex’s visuality, see Right to Look, 48–76. For the surveillance technologies used within transatlantic slavery, see also Simone Browne, Dark ­Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 31–62. 34.  More generally, even the runaway and the kneeling slave are figured as grounded in the landscape in AASS iconography. For examples, see “The Runaway,” Anti-­Slavery Rec­ord 3.7 (July 1837): 1; “O W ­ oman! Am Not I Thy S­ ister!,” in The Oasis, ed. Lydia Maria Child (Boston: Benjamin C. Bacon, 1834), xvi; Nathaniel Southard, Why Work for the Slave? (New York: AASS, 1838), title page illustration; “Fifth Anniversary of the Mas­sa­chu­setts Anti-­Slavery Society” (1837), in Sarah  H. Southwick, Reminiscences of Early Anti-­Slavery Days (Cambridge, MA: Privately printed, 1893), print facing page 18. 35.  Examples include “A ­Woman Exchanged for a Ram and Sheep” and “Exchanging Citizens for Horses,” in George Bourne, Picture of Slavery in the United States of Amer­i­ca (Middletown, CT: Edwin Hunt, 1834), frontispiece, print facing page 109; “The Flogging of Females,” Anti-­Slavery Rec­ ord 1.10 (October 1835): 109. 36. Bourne, Picture of Slavery, 129. 37.  For other readings of Bourne’s imagery, see Teresa A. Goddu, “U.S. Antislavery Tracts and the Literary Imagination,” in The Cambridge Companion to Slavery in American Lit­er­a­ture, ed. Ezra Tawil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 37–38; Cutter, Illustrated Slave, 86–105. 38.  For images with white bystanders, see “Cruelties of Slavery,” Anti-­Slavery Rec­ord 1.5 (May 1835): 49; “Flogging American W ­ omen,” in Bourne, Picture of Slavery, print facing page 104. On the white privilege inherent in the act of watching versus witnessing the scene of slavery, see Joe Lockard, Watching Slavery: Witness Texts and Travel Reports (New York: Peter Lang, 2008), xviii–­x xii. 39.  On the deployment of the bird’s-­eye view in the Brookes, see Lynn Festa, Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-­Century Britain and France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 180–81. 40.  On Lundy’s relationship to institutional antislavery, see Loughran, Republic in Print, 310–28. 41.  “TO THE AMERICAN ­PEOPLE,” Genius of Universal Emancipation, January 1823, 97. 42.  Ibid. For the visuality of the Genius’s font as well as the radical typography of abolitionist texts more generally, see Marcy J. Dinius, “ ‘Look! Look!!! at This!!!!’: The Radical Typography of David Walker’s Appeal,” PMLA 126.1 (January 2011): 55–72. 43. The Genius describes this image as executed by “one of our ingenious Baltimore artists, from a design furnished by the editor, and drawn by a young gentleman of this city” (“The Copperplate



Notes to Pages 155–167

271

Engraving,” July 1830, 49). Prepared expressly for the Genius, it was also available “separately, on fine paper, with or without frames” (ibid.). 44.  On the panoramic perspective’s connection to the state’s po­liti­c al power, see Wendy Bellion, “ ‘Extend the Sphere’: Charles Willson Peale’s Pa­norama of Annapolis,” Art Bulletin 86.3 (September 2004): 529–49. 45. The Genius’s pictorial masthead featuring the Capitol dome (first used 4 July 1827) also figures the Capitol as a sun from which rays of truth emanate. 46.  “The Manacled Slave’s Appeal,” Genius of Universal Emancipation, November 1823, 68. 47. Ibid. 48.  The Liberator uses the flag, dome, and whip on all of its pictorial mastheads: the original panoramic masthead, first used on 23 April 1831, discussed h ­ ere, and the l­ater ones first used 2 March 1838 and 31 May 1850. For readings of The Liberator’s mastheads, see Greeson, Our South, 119–33; McInnis, Slaves Waiting for Sale, 43–44. The Liberator featured another pictorial print, Mirror of Slavery, an auction scene with the Capitol in the background, on 4 January 1834, print facing page 7. The same print was also included in The Emancipator (4 January 1834, 140) and advertised ­t here as available in “reprint sheets, at the printing office of the Emancipator . . . ​Price 6 cents” (ibid.). 49. The Genius displayed the ea­g le, as well as the Capitol, on its masthead (2 September 1829–5 March 1830). 50.  “How Slavery Honors Our Country’s Flag,” Anti-­Slavery Rec­ord 1.2 (February 1835): 14. 51.  Ibid., 13. 52.  Slave Market of Amer­i­ca (New York: AASS, 1836). Subsequent quotations in this paragraph and the next are from this broadside. 53.  “ ‘ THE SLAVE MARKET OF AMER­I­CA,’ ” ­Human Rights, March 1836. 54.  “[Form of a Petition for the Abolition of Slavery in the District of Columbia],” ­Human Rights, September 1836. 55.  “Moral Map of the United States,” in Julius Rubens Ames, comp., “Liberty”: The Image and Superscription on E ­ very Coin Issued by the United States of Amer­i­ca ([New York: AASS], 1837), 66. Subsequent quotations in this section are to this text. 56.  “John Q. Adams,” in Ames, “Liberty,” 59–65. 57.  More generally, Jasmine Cobb argues that “antislavery media culture failed to propose visual arguments against slavery that presented viewers with the means to receive Black freedom” (Picture Freedom: Remaking Black Visuality in the Early Nineteenth ­Century [New York: New York University Press, 2015], 172). For how black freedom was represented in transatlantic abolitionist iconography, see M. Wood, Horrible Gift of Freedom. 58.  On the history of the slave’s liberty cap within transatlantic iconography and how it came to serve as a symbol of white freedom, see M. Wood, Horrible Gift of Freedom, 33–89. 59.  “Anti-­Slavery Win­dow Blinds,” The Emancipator, 13 June 1839, 26; “Anti-­Slavery Win­dow Blinds,” The Liberator, 28 June 1839, 104; “Anti-­Slavery Win­dow Blinds,” Colored American, 29 June 1839. The Emancipator’s advertisement comes directly a­ fter an article discussing American Slavery as It Is; and several weeks ­later, the periodical states that “some ­orders have already been left at the office” (“Anti-­Slavery Win­dow Blinds,” 4 July 1839, 40). No examples of the blinds are extant to my knowledge. 60.  “Anti-­Slavery Win­dow Blinds,” The Emancipator, 13 June 1839, 26. 61.  Thad Logan, The Victorian Parlour (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 43. 62.  On the visual sophistication of the parlor, see Katherine C. Grier, Culture and Comfort: Parlor Making and Middle-­Class Identity, 1850–1930 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 1988), 19–162. On panoramic wall­paper, see Odile Nouvel-­Kammerer, French Scenic Wall­paper, 1795–1865 (Paris: Flammarion, 2000). For how black visuality signified in the transatlantic parlor, see Cobb, Picture Freedom, 193–220. On the pa­norama as a specifically bourgeois mode, see Oettermann, Pa­norama, 7; Angela Miller, “Everywhere and Nowhere: The Making of the National Landscape,” American Literary History 4.2 (Summer 1992): 214. On landscape scenery as tied to the emergence of the ­middle class, see Angela Miller, “Landscape Tastes as Indicator of Class Identity in Antebellum

272

Notes to Pages 167–176

Amer­i­ca,” in Art in Bourgeois Society, 1790–1850, ed. Andrew Hemingway and William Vaughan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 340–61. 63.  “Anti-­Slavery Win­dow Blinds,” The Emancipator, 13 June 1839, 26. 64.  The r­ ifle was regularly used in AASS imagery to signify slavery’s scopic power. See, for instance, “A Fact with a Short Commentary,” Anti-­Slavery Rec­ord 2.1 (January 1836): 1. 65.  The blinds are an example of what Saidiya Hartman terms an “innocent amusement”: a spectacle of slavery that performs the plea­sure of possession on the suffering body of the slave (Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-­Making in Nineteenth-­Century Amer­i­ca [New York: Oxford University Press, 1997], 17–48). 66. Griffiths, Shivers Down Your Spine, 69; “Anti-­Slavery Win­dow Blinds,” The Emancipator, 13 June 1839, 26. 67.  This dynamic is also evident in Printers’ Picture Gallery (New York: AASS, 1838), where the slave remains an embodied figure, negotiating the landscape, while the antislavery viewer is asked to identify with “Emblematic Illustrations” signifying northern nationalism’s panoramic perspective: the ea­g le and Lady Liberty. 68.  This image and the one on the back cover are sometimes attributed to Patrick Reason, a black engraver best known for his two engravings of the kneeling slave, one male (1839) and the other female (1835). I have found no evidence to substantiate this attribution. 69.  Thomas Campbell, “United States!,” in The American Anti-­Slavery Almanac for 1843, ed. Lydia Maria Child (New York: AASS, 1842), back cover. 70. Ibid. 71.  John Pierpont, “Ode,” in Autographs for Freedom, ed. Julia Griffiths (Boston: Jewett, 1853), 82–84. Other examples include the cover of The Liberty Almanac for 1847 (New York: William Harned, n.d.) and its inside image, “View of the Capitol at Washington” (n.p.), which recycle the flag and Capitol dome motifs. 72.  Boston’s Bunker Hill Monument was a 221-­foot granite obelisk completed in 1842 and dedicated in 1843. It was a precursor to the Washington Monument, which began construction in 1848 but was not completed ­u ntil 1884. 73.  A. Miller, Empire of the Eye, 10. 74.  Grant argues that northern nationalism did not fully emerge u ­ ntil the 1850s, with the formation of the Republican Party (North over South, 130–152). 75.  As W. J. T. Mitchell argues, race is “not simply something to be seen, but [is] itself a framework of seeing through or . . . ​seeing as” (Seeing Through Race [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012], 13). 76. Mirzoeff, Right to Look, 1.

Chapter 7 1.  Henry Bibb, Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave (New York: Author, 1849), 29. Subsequent page references are given in the text. 2.  Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (Boston: Anti-­Slavery Office, 1845), 64. Douglass, like Bibb a­ fter him, sees the ships—­sailboats instead of steamboats—as both a symbol of freedom and a sign of his own enslavement: “You are loosed from your moorings, and are f­ ree; I am fast in my chains, and am a slave!” Douglass writes (ibid., 64). 3.  For another reading of this passage in terms of the panoramic perspective, see Mark Simpson, Trafficking Subjects: The Politics of Mobility in Nineteenth-­Century Amer­i­ca (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 69–71. 4.  On African Americans’ deployment of the daguerreotype, see Marcy J. Dinius, The Camera and the Pen: American Visual and Print Culture in the Age of the Daguerreotype (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 154–238; Deborah Willis, J. P. Ball, Daguerrean and Studio Photographer (New York: Routledge, 1993). On their use of photography, see Sarah Blackwood,



Notes to Pages 176–179

273

“Fugitive Obscura: Runaway Slave Portraiture and Early Photographic Technology,” American Lit­ er­a­ture 8.1 (March 2009): 93–125; Maurice O. Wallace and Shawn Michelle Smith, eds., Pictures and Pro­gress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). For their use of the pa­norama, see the notes ­later in this chapter, especially 61–67. 5.  I am playing off Michael A. Chaney’s term “fugitive vision,” which he defines as an “alternative visual field” in which “a racialized seeing subject . . . ​looks back at the systemic structures that occlude it” (Fugitive Vision: Slave Image and Black Identity in Antebellum Narrative [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008], 5). For another formulation of black vision as resistant and disruptive, see Nicole Fleetwood, Troubling Vision: Per­for­mance, Visuality, and Blackness (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011). 6.  On the textual visuality of the slave narrative, see Janet Neary, Fugitive Testimony: On the Visual Logic of Slave Narratives (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017). On the slave narrative as a visual genre, see Marcus Wood, “The Slave Narrative and Visual Culture,” in The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative, ed. John Ernest (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 196–218. On how black writers employed the visual in their texts more broadly, see Sarah Blackwood, “ ‘Making Good Use of Our Eyes’: Nineteenth-­Century African Americans Write Visual Culture,” MELUS 39.2 (Summer 2014): 42–65. Several critics link the pa­norama to the slave narrative: see Daphne A. Brooks, Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Per­for­mances of Race and Freedom, 1850–1910 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 81; Chaney, Fugitive Vision, 125; Shelly Jarenski, “ ‘Delighted and Instructed’: African American Challenges to Panoramic Aesthetics in J. P. Ball, Kara Walker, and Frederick Douglass,” American Quarterly 65.1 (March 2013): 142–52. 7.  W. J. T. Mitchell, “Narrative, Memory, and Slavery,” in Cultural Artifacts and the Production of Meaning: The Page, the Image, and the Body, ed. Margaret J. M. Ezell and Katherine O’Brien O’Keeffe (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994), 201. On the pa­norama and the sketch as related genres, see Tanya Agathocleous, Urban Realism and Cosmopolitan Imagination in the Nineteenth ­Century: Vis­i­ble City, Invisible World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 69–114. 8.  “The Life and Adventures of a Fugitive Slave,” Quarterly Anti-­Slavery Magazine 1.4 (July 1836): 376. 9.  The first edition of Ball’s text was titled Slavery in the United States: A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Charles Ball, a Black Man (Lewiston, PA: John W. Shugert, 1836). It was sold by subscription for one dollar. A prospectus for this edition was advertised in The Liberator (“Prospectus of a New Work, Entitled Slavery in the United States,” 29 August 1835, 140). Six editions of the narrative w ­ ere issued between 1836 and 1859, including a British edition, The Life of a Negro Slave, ed. Mrs. Alfred Barnard (Norwich: Charles Muskett, 1846). Slavery in the United States was reprinted in an abridged version in 1858 ­u nder the title Fifty Years in Chains; or The Life of an American Slave (New York: H. Dayton, 1858) and reissued in 1859. 10.  Charles Ball, Slavery in the United States: A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Charles Ball, a Black Man (New York: John S. Taylor, 1837), title page. Subsequent page references are given in the text. 11.  As Christine Levecq argues of Ball’s text, “the narrator remains for the most part an observer,” providing “encyclopedic descriptions of the cultivation of tobacco, cotton, corn and indigo” (Slavery and Sentiment: The Politics of Feeling in Black Atlantic Antislavery Writing, 1770–1850 [Durham: University of New Hampshire Press, 2008], 206). Chaney observes that the narrative reads as if “an empiricist white sensorium” was interjected “into the body of a black slave” (Fugitive Vision, 223). 12.  Keith Alphonso Williams, “Taking Flight: Fugitive Slaves and the Literary Imagination” (PhD diss., Cornell University, 2001), 56. 13.  Given their large scale and attention to accuracy, moving pa­noramas took teams of artists years to complete, since each scene had to be sketched on the spot. For a description of the l­ abor and danger involved in creating a pa­norama, see John Banvard, “Adventures of the Artist,” in Description of Banvard’s Pa­norama of the Mississippi River (Boston: Putnam, 1847), 7–21.

274

Notes to Pages 180–185

14.  This edition was sold at the AASS’s offices in New York for $1.25 (Quarterly Anti-­Slavery Magazine 2.3 [April 1837]: 344), included in the AASS’s cata­logue (“Descriptive Cata­logue of Anti-­ Slavery Works,” The Philanthropist, 6 March 1838, 4), and recommended for its library (“Plan of ­Labor,” Friend of Man, 8 August 1838, 231). 15. “The Life and Adventures of a Fugitive Slave,” Quarterly Anti-­Slavery Magazine 1.4 (July 1836): 375. 16.  See, for instance, “A Slave Execution,” Anti-­Slavery Rec­ord 2.12 (December 1836): 149; “Cases of Cruelty,” in Julius Rubens Ames, comp., “Liberty”: The Image and Superscription on ­Every Coin Issued by the United States of Amer­i­ca ([New York: AASS], 1839), 70–71; “Fiendish Torture,” The Liberator, 2 June 1837, 89. 17.  Images on pages 19, 45, 63, 71, 100, 104, 111, 113, 115, 140 come from the AASS archive; the three images signed by Strong are on pages 125, 148, 201; the image signed by Caughey is on page 53; and the images still unattributed are on pages 22, 81, 129, 133. Wood provides a list of the sources for the antislavery images in Marcus Wood, Blind Memory: Visual Repre­sen­ta­tions of Slavery in ­England and Amer ­i­ca, 1780–1865 (New York: Routledge, 2000), 141. However, he misattributes several images to George Carleton’s The Suppressed Book About Slavery (New York: Carleton, 1864), which was published in 1864 but prepared for publication in 1857, well a­ fter Bibb’s narrative was published in 1849. That is, The Suppressed Book did not supply images that Bibb’s text reworked (M. Wood, Blind Memory, 127); rather, the reverse seems to have occurred. Thomas W. Strong was a New York publisher and engraver: see W. J. Linton, The History of Wood-­Engraving in Amer­i­ca (Boston: Estes and Lauriat, 1882), 28; George C. Groce and David H. Wallace, The New-­York Historical Society’s Dictionary of Artists in Amer­i­ca, 1564–1860 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1957), 611. John Caughey was also a New York engraver; he began his own firm, Caughey and Momberger, in 1852. 18.  Michael Roy, “Cheap Editions, L ­ ittle Books, and Handsome Duodecimos: A Book History Approach to Antebellum Slave Narratives,” MELUS 40.3 (Fall 2015): 79. The cost of original engravings in the antebellum era—­a nywhere from five to thirty dollars per drawing according to Michael Winship—­was likely a key f­ actor in Bibb’s use of so many AASS images (American Literary Publishing in the Mid-­Nineteenth C ­ entury: The Business of Ticknor and Fields [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003], 120). 19.  Strong’s studio was located at 98 Nassau Street (The Tragic Almanac, for 1848 [New York: Strong, 1847]); the AASS’s offices w ­ ere located at 142 Nassau Street in the 1840s (Eric Foner, Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of Amer­i­ca’s Fugitive Slaves [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015], xiv). 20.  The images that include Bibb with his hat are on pages 53, 81, 129, 148. Malinda wears a turban or a handkerchief around her neck in the images on pages 81, 125, 148. Bibb’s ­daughter is a baby in an early scene (81) but other­w ise is portrayed as a young child (125, 129, 133, 148). “The Sabbath Among the Slaves” (22) may be a portrait of Bibb and his wife during their courtship, before their child was born. Several of the images attribute similar facial characteristics to Bibb (22, 81, 125, 129, 148). 21.  See, for instance, the resemblance between a picture of a slaveholder wielding a whip that Bibb’s narrative reprints from the Anti-­Slavery Recorder (45) and one that was likely made for the text since it is signed by Strong (148). 22.  M. Wood, Blind Memory, 117–34. An example of Bibb’s changing an image to accord with his text occurs on page 100: in the original image the sign says “For Liberia”; in Bibb’s book, the sign is blank. This same image, which represents a slave ­r unning away, appears at a point in the narrative where Bibb has de­cided not to escape, a jarring misalignment between text and image. On his “placement, displacement, and replacement of older images” within a “graphic narrative system” (154), see Martha Cutter, The Illustrated Slave: Empathy, Graphic Narrative, and the Visual Culture of the Transatlantic Abolition Movement, 1800–1852 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017), 152–73. 23.  For author portraits in slave narratives, see Lynn A. Casmier-­Paz, “Slave Narratives and the Rhe­toric of Author Portraiture,” New Literary History 34.1 (Winter 2003): 91–116; M. Wood, “Slave



Notes to Pages 185–191

275

Narrative and Visual Culture,” 198–203. For readings of Bibb’s frontispiece, see M. Wood, Blind Memory, 130–32; Cutter, Illustrated Slave, 169–73. 24.  This image bears some resemblance to the seventh plate in George C. Green, The Nubian Slave ([Boston: Bela Marsh, 1845], 8a), which depicts a male runaway, holding his injured wife and fending off dogs with a raised stick, while his child is attacked by dogs. 25.  On slavery’s suppression within U.S. pa­noramas, see Chaney, Fugitive Vision, 117–22. 26.  Ginger Hill, “ ‘Rightly Viewed’: Theorizations of Self in Frederick Douglass’s Lectures on Pictures,” in Wallace and Smith, Pictures and Pro­gress, 41. Most of the critical work on Douglass and visuality focuses on his use of photography. See, for instance, John Stauffer, The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004), 45–56; John Stauffer, “Frederick Douglass’s Self-­Fashioning and the Making of a Representative American Man,” in The Cambridge Companion to the African American Slave Narrative, ed. Audrey Fisch (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 201–17; Scott Norris Palmer, “ ‘The Image of Democracy’: The Politics of American Race, Vision and Mobility from the Early Republic to the Daguerrean Era” (PhD diss., Tufts University, 2007), 160–215; Jessica J. Morgan-­Owens, “Black and White: Photographic Writing in the Lit­er­a­ture of Abolition” (PhD diss., New York University, 2009), 174–232; Dinius, The Camera and the Pen, 192–232; John Stauffer, Zoe Trodd, and Celeste-­Marie Bernier, Picturing Frederick Douglass: An Illustrated Biography of the Nineteenth-­Century’s Most Photographed American (New York: Liveright, 2015). 27.  Frederick Douglass, “Pictures and Pro­g ress: An Address Delivered in Boston, Mas­sa­chu­ setts, on 3 December 1861,” in The Frederick Douglass Papers, ser. 1, Speeches, Debates, and Interviews, vol. 3, ed. John W. Blassingame (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985), 456. Subsequent page references are given in the text. Douglass speaks specifically of pictures’ “impor­tant part in our politics”: “the po­liti­cal gathering begins the operation, and the picture gallery ends it” (ibid., 457). For readings of this speech, see Laura Wexler, “ ‘A More Perfect Likeness’: Frederick Douglass and the Image of the Nation,” in Wallace and Smith, Pictures and Pro­g ress, 18–40; G. Hill, “ ‘Rightly Viewed,’ ” 41–82; Dinius, The Camera and the Pen, 205–13. 28.  “To Our Oppressed Countrymen,” North Star, 3 December 1847. The North Star ran from 3 December 1847 to 17 April 1851. Delany is no longer listed as coeditor as of 6 July 1849. For a history of the paper, see William S. McFeely, Frederick Douglass (New York: Norton, 1991), 146–62; Phillip S. Foner, The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass: Early Years, 1817–1849 (New York: International Publishers, 1950), 75–83; Frances Smith Foster, “A Narrative of the In­ter­est­ing Origins and (Somewhat) Surprising Developments of African-­A merican Print Culture,” American Literary History 17.4 (Winter 2005): 732–74; Benjamin Fagan, The Black Newspaper and the Chosen Nation (Athens: University of Georgia Press), 71–79. Th ­ ere are many missing issues from 1850–51. John  R. McKivigan, proj­ect director and editor of the Frederick Douglass Papers, states that only twenty-­ two of the fifty-­t wo issues for 1850 and fourteen of the twenty-­six issues for 1851 have been recovered in their entirety (personal communication). I note t­ hese gaps below where relevant. 29.  “Our Paper and Its Prospects” and “The Object of the NORTH STAR,” North Star, 3 December 1847. 30. “FREDERICK,” North Star, 1 February 1850. 31.  P. Foner states that Douglass’s home was a station on the Under­g round Railroad as well as his office: “It was not an unusual ­t hing for him to find fugitives sitting on the office stairs early in the morning” (Frederick Douglass, 130). In the first issue of the North Star (3 December 1847), the article, “A ­Sister Rescued from Slavery,” tells of a ­woman sent from Douglass’s office on her way to freedom. 32. The North Star regularly included prose and poetry that took the North Star as its subject. See John Pierpont, “The Fugitive Slave’s Apostrophe to the North Star,” 3 December 1847; the black poet James M. Whittfield’s “The North Star,” 21 December 1849. 33.  Senator James Murray Mason of ­Virginia introduced the bill on 4 January and debate began on 22 January. For the legislative history of the Fugitive Slave Bill, see Marion Gleason McDougall, Fugitive Slaves (1619–1865) (Boston: Ginn, 1891), 110–12. Th ­ ere are no extant copies of the North

276

Notes to Pages 191–194

Star from 21 December 1849 to 25 January 1850. Hence, the pictorial masthead may have been introduced ­earlier in January (perhaps with the third volume), but still in line with the bill’s introduction. 34.  Blackwood, “Fugitive Obscura,” 105–6. 35.  “ ‘OH, LIBERTY! WHAT DEEDS ARE DONE IN THY NAME!’ ” North Star, 22 February 1850. 36. The North Star provided extensive coverage of the Thirty-­First Congress and the Fugitive Slave bill, including a “Weekly Review of Congressional Proceedings,” penned by Douglass (1 and 15 March 1850). In addition to humanizing the fugitive, Douglass also dehumanizes his pursuers. Describing a picture he wished he could make—­“Oh, for the powers of Punch!”—­Douglass imagines the “benevolent face of Henry Clay” on the “neck and shoulders of a furious bloodhound” adorned with a “collar labeled with his own motto, traced in letters of blood—­‘In pursuit of fugitive slaves, I ­will go as far as the farthest.’ ” Figured as a “beast of prey” and appearing “in the light of a moral monster,” Clay and all who support him are exposed to view through this satirical image (“Henry Clay on Kidnapping,” North Star, 1 March 1850). 37. McDougall, Fugitive Slaves, 111. The 6 June issue is not extant; hence, the masthead may have changed a week e­ arlier, right a­ fter Webster’s 3 June submission to the Senate. 38.  “[X]XXIst Congress,” North Star, 13 June 1850. 39.  “FREDERICK DOUGLASS,” North Star, 13 June 1850. 40.  “At Home Again,” North Star, 30 May 1850. 41. Ibid. 42.  Three issues are missing between 5 September and 3 October 1850, so this change may have occurred in September. 43. Douglass, Narrative, 101. 44.  Ibid., 102. 45. The North Star for 3 October 1850 includes: “Fugitive Slave Bill,” “The Fugitive Slave Law,” “First Cases ­Under the Fugitive Slave Bill,” three articles on the case of W. L. Chaplin, “The Black-­ phobia in Rochester,” and “Incivility to Colored Person in the Street” (­t hese last two w ­ ere signed by Douglass). 46.  “Letter from the Editor,” North Star, 24 October 1850. The North Star details the re­sis­tance of anonymous fugitives along with the well-­k nown. “­Great excitement prevails ­here among our colored population, on account of the passage of the Fugitive Slave Bill.—­A party of seventeen negroes, who had previously been slaves, started on Saturday, armed to the teeth with pistols and bowie-­k nives, en route to Canada. Small parties are leaving daily” (“Pittsburgh,” 3 October 1850). “Mr. Crafts is aware of” the warrant for his arrest “and refuses to leave Boston. He is armed, and resolved to stand his ground, and in less than an hour blood may flow in the streets of Boston” (“Letter from the Editor,” 31 October 1850). The paper also provides extensive coverage of meetings held by “colored citizens” to denounce the law (“Meetings of Colored Citizens of New York,” 24 October 1850). 47.  Having had his freedom purchased for him by En­g lish benefactors in 1846, Douglass was no longer a fugitive from slavery (P. Foner, Frederick Douglass, 72). However, as the attack on him in New York makes clear, he continued to be vulnerable to northern racism. He expresses this vulnerability wittily when he explains that the North Star has gone missing u ­ nder the new law. “Since the enactment of the Fugitive Slave Bill, we have received numerous complaints from our subscribers, that no ‘North Star’ reaches them,” he writes. “We have not heard of any new law being framed for the capture of anti-­slavery newspapers; or we should be disposed to believe that, in many places, the post office authorities w ­ ere rigidly resolved to enforce it” (“Since the Enactment,” North Star, 31 October 1850). 48.  “ ‘F. D.,’ ” Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 26 June 1851. 49. The North Star merged with John Thomas’s Liberty Party Paper to form Frederick Douglass’ Paper. It ran from June 1851 through July 1860; Douglass’ Monthly, a version of the paper for British subscribers, continued through August of 1863 (C. Peter Ripley, ed., The Black Abolitionist Papers, vol. 4 [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991], 91).



Notes to Pages 195–200

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50.  Frederick Douglass, My Bondage and My Freedom (New York: Miller, Orton and Mulligan, 1855). Subsequent page references are given in the text. 51.  For his frontispiece, see Peter A. Dorsey, “Becoming the Other: The Mimesis of Meta­phor in Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom,” PMLA 111.3 (May 1996): 435–50; Ed Folsom, “Portrait of the Artist as a Young Slave: Douglass’s Frontispiece Engravings,” in Approaches to Teaching Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, ed. James C. Hall (New York: MLA, 1999), 55–65; Chaney, Fugitive Vision, 27–30; Palmer, “ ‘Image of Democracy,’ ” 194; John Stauffer, “Frederick Douglass and the Aesthetics of Freedom,” Raritan 25.1 (June 2005): 122–23. 52. ­Little is known about t­ hese images, since Douglass’s papers from this period burned in a ­house fire in 1872 (McFeely, Frederick Douglass, 274). Nathaniel Orr (1822–1908) was a Canadian-­ born engraver who worked in Auburn, New York, and New York City. He also did engravings for Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave (1853). For readings of t­ hese images, see Lisa Brawley, “Frederick Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom and the Fugitive Tourist Industry,” Novel 30.1 (Autumn 1996): 120–28; Chaney, Fugitive Vision, 29–35; Palmer, “ ‘Image of Democracy,’ ” 196–99. 53.  Brawley, “Fugitive Tourist Industry,” 120. 54.  On ballooning’s panoramic perspective—­its “perspectival enlargement of the self” (89) and its command of “a visually coherent and manageable ­whole” (88)—­see Elaine Freedgood, Victorian Writing About Risk: Imagining a Safe E ­ ngland in a Dangerous World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 87–98. See also Alison Byerly, Are We Th ­ ere Yet? Virtual Travel and Victorian Realism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013), 59–66. For the balloon pa­norama, see Erkki Huhtamo, Illusions in Motion: Media Archaeology of the Moving Pa­norama and Related Spectacles (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013), 112–20. Frederick Douglass’ Paper covered several balloon ascents (“Remarkable Balloon Ascension Three Hundred and Fifty Miles,” 29 June 1855; “The Missing Aeronaut” and “Balloon Ascensions,” 26 October 1855; “A Perilous Balloon Ascension,” 3 November 1854). For a ­later print imagining the slave’s emancipation in terms of balloon flight, see The American Declaration of In­de­pen­dence Illustrated (Boston: Thayer, 1861), which features a black man who is a freed slave and a white man being borne aloft in an aerial carriage by an ea­gle holding two American flags. 55.  For ballooning, see Tom D. Crouch, The Ea­gle Aloft: Two Centuries of the Balloon in Amer­ i­ca (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1983); Richard Holmes, Falling Upwards: How We Took to the Air (New York: Pantheon Books, 2013). 56.  Dana Brand argues that the flâneur saw the city as a pa­norama and that pa­noramas ­were “a figurative rendering of the flâneur’s view of the world” (The Spectator and the City in Nineteenth-­ Century American Lit­er­a­ture [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991], 7, 52). Huhtamo also states that the “flâneur was associated with pa­noramas early on” since the flâneur was the “panoramic observer descended from its vantage point” (Illusions in Motion, 340). 57.  Douglass critiques ­t hose who expose how slaves escape, stating that the “good resulting from such avowals, is of very questionable character. It may kindle an enthusiasm, very pleasant to inhale; but that is of no practical benefit to . . . ​t he slaves escaping. . . . ​In publishing such accounts, the anti-­slavery man addresses the slaveholder, not the slave” (My Bondage and My Freedom, 324). 58.  The upper image, as Palmer points out, cannily exposes Douglass’s escape route to the careful reader: the sailboat in the background invokes his apostrophe to freedom on the Chesapeake Bay and refers to his sailor disguise, and the train in the foreground displays his ­actual route of escape (“ ‘Image of Democracy,’ ” 198). 59.  Marcus Wood, in The Horrible Gift of Freedom: Atlantic Slavery and the Repre­sen­ta­tion of Emancipation (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2010), 50–58, describes how the liberty cap is taken from the slave and given to the white female abstraction of freedom within Atlantic emancipation propaganda in order to retain freedom as the “property of the dominant white society” (ibid., 51). 60.  Brawley argues that ­t hese images depict “the generic iconography of white nationalism and portray a narrative of pro­g ress from which [Douglass] is excluded” (“Fugitive Tourist Industry,” 120).

278

Notes to Page 202

61.  For black pa­noramas, see Allan  D. Austin, “More Black Pa­noramas: An Addendum,” Mas­sa­chu­setts Review 37.4 (December 1996): 636–39. For Henry Box Brown’s pa­norama, see Jeffrey Ruggles, The Unboxing of Henry Brown (Richmond: The Library of V ­ irginia, 2003), 69–159. For readings, see Cynthia Griffin Wolff, “Passing Beyond the ­M iddle Passage: Henry ‘Box’ Brown’s Translations of Slavery,” Mas­sa­chu­setts Review 37.1 (Spring 1996): 23–44; Audrey Fisch, American Slaves in Victorian E ­ ngland: Abolitionist Politics in Popu­lar Lit­er­a­ture and Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 72–83; D. Brooks, Bodies in Dissent, 66–130; Cutter, Illustrated Slave, 207–17. 62.  Ezra Greenspan states that work commenced on William Wells Brown’s pa­norama in July 1850 and was completed in October; it was shown for the first time on 31 October in Newcastle (William Wells Brown: An African American Life [New York: Norton, 2014], 243). For readings of his pa­norama, see William Edward Farrison, William Wells Brown: Author and Reformer (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969), 173–78; Greenspan, William Wells Brown, 239–49; Radiclani Clytus, “Envisioning Slavery: American Abolitionism and the Primacy of the Visual” (PhD diss., Yale University, 2007), 194–270; Chaney, Fugitive Vision, 113–47; Sergia Costola, “William Wells Brown’s Panoramic Views,” Journal of American Drama and Theater 24.2 (Spring 2012): 13–31; Judith Madera, Black Atlas: Geography and Flow in Nineteenth ­Century African American Lit­er­a­ture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 57–58. 63.  Ball’s pa­norama is described as costing over six thousand dollars and as “the largest work of the sort ever exhibited to the American public, covering more than 23,000 Square Feet of Canvas” (“Ball’s Mammoth Pa­norama of American Scenery,” Cincinnati Daily Times, 13 March 1855). According to the Cincinnati papers, it was exhibited at the Mechanics Institute for most of March 1855; it closed on March  24 (“Ball’s Pa­norama—­Close of the Exhibition,” Cincinnati Enquirer, 24 March 1855). William Nell was the local agent for the pa­norama in Boston, where it was exhibited during the spring and summer of 1855 at Armory Hall (Ripley, Black Abolitionist Papers, 4:302). Nell advertised its sale in the fall of 1856 (“Rare Chance for Investment,” The Liberator, 31 October 1856, 175). For readings of Ball’s pa­norama, see Willis, J. P. Ball, xvi; Angela Miller, “The Pa­norama, the Cinema, and the Emergence of the Spectacular,” Wide ­Angle 18.2 (April 1996): 34–69; Palmer, “ ‘Image of Democracy,’ ” 200–208; Jarenski, “ ‘Delighted and Instructed,’ ” 133–38. John Greenleaf Whittier’s poem “The Pa­norama” may have been inspired by Ball’s pa­norama, since it was composed in late 1855 and published in early 1856 (The Pa­norama, and Other Poems [Boston: Ticknor and Fields, 1856]). 64.  “Exhibitions and Lectures,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 4 May 1855. John Nelson Still was a leading black businessman in New York City (Ripley, Black Abolitionist Papers, 4:111). While I have been unable to locate specific details about his tour, he proposed to show his diorama in “the principal cities towns and villages in the Northern States and Canada” and split the proceeds with what­ ever church or society would “provide a place, secure an audience, and defray the expenses incident to the meeting” (“Exhibitions and Lectures,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 4 May 1855). Even though Still refers to his exhibition as a diorama, the terms “pa­norama” and “diorama” ­were used to describe a “wide variety of painted exhibitions” during the period (Ruggles, Unboxing, 70). ­There ­were white-­ produced pa­noramas of U ­ ncle Tom’s Cabin as well. For example, The Liberator announced in 1853 that “Mr. Hays, a talented Indiana anti-­slavery artist, has been engaged nearly a year in painting an extensive Pa­norama of Slavery, or an illustration of ‘­Uncle Tom’s Cabin.’ It w ­ ill contain some fifty scenes—­t he characters as large as life. Though one (if not more) painting of the kind is already before the public, we believe this is the first one projected” (“Pa­norama of Slavery,” 5 August 1853, 122). Frederick Douglass’ Paper also advertises “Dr. Nixon’s Pa­norama of U ­ ncle Tom’s Cabin” (15 July 1853). 65.  “The G ­ reat Moving Mirror of Slavery,” Portland Daily Advertiser, 2 September 1858, 3. Burns’s pa­norama was owned by A. Herriman, Josiah P. Longley, and Alonzo Garcelon of Lewiston, Maine (Ripley, Black Abolitionist Papers, 4:396). Burns began travelling with his pa­norama in August 1858 (“Anthony Burns—­Colorphobia,” The Liberator, 3 September 1858, 143) and showed it at Lancaster Hall in Portland, Maine, in September 1858 (“Mirror of Slavery,” The Liberator, 17 September 1858, 151). It was advertised during the first week of September in the Portland Daily Advertiser.



Notes to Pages 202–203

279

For information on Burns’s pa­norama, see Albert J. Von Frank, The ­Trials of Anthony Burns: Freedom and Slavery in Emerson’s Boston (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 302. 66.  Henry Brown’s pa­norama was a collaboration with James C. A. Smith, a ­free black man who helped Brown escape. It was painted by Josiah Wolcott, a white Boston landscape artist and sign painter who also painted the mottos for Boston’s antislavery fairs, and two other artists: Samuel Worcester Rowse and D. C. Johnston, who designed The Liberator’s second masthead (Ruggles, Unboxing, 73–77). William Wells Brown raised money from friends to create his pa­norama and oversaw the production of its images, utilizing preliminary sketches from American artists and then commissioning London artists to do the full-­scale paintings (Greenspan, William Wells Brown, 242– 43). Ball’s pa­norama is described as being “prepared u ­ nder the superintendence of Mr. Ball, a colored daguerreotypist of much repute in the West” and it was an all-­black production: “designed and executed solely by colored men” (“Ball’s Pa­norama,” Boston Daily Eve­ning Transcript, 1 May 1855). The most notable among t­ hese artists was the African American landscape painter Robert S. Duncanson, who worked in Ball’s studio at the time the pa­norama was produced. For Duncanson’s role in Ball’s pa­norama, see Joseph D. Ketner, The Emergence of the African-­American Artist: Robert S. Duncanson, 1821–1872 (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993), 104. Still’s pa­norama was painted by an “eminent French artist” (“Exhibitions and Lectures,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 4 May 1855) and Burns’s by “one of the best artists in Amer­i­ca” (“Anthony Burns—­Colorphobia,” The Liberator, 3 September 1858, 143). 67.  The black printer Benjamin Roberts delivered the commentary for Henry Brown’s pa­norama when it first opened, although Brown himself “related many incidents about the peculiar institution, and sung several pieces of sacred m ­ usic” (“Box Brown in Worcester,” The Liberator, 31 May 1850, 87). Henry Brown saw the exhibition as an opportunity to sell his narrative (Ruggles, Unboxing, 83– 84). William Wells Brown acted as “man­ag­er, showman, and vocalist all in one, organ­izing his tour, narrating his story, and providing his own ­music” (Greenspan, William Wells Brown, 243); he also sold copies of his narrative on his tours throughout E ­ ngland (ibid., 227–28). Still stated that he planned to “accompany” his pa­norama “with abundant evidence as to the truthfulness of the facts assumed by the author” (“Exhibitions and Lectures,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 4 May 1855). Burns was described as presenting to “the audience a r­ unning commentary on the vari­ous scenes brought before them” (“The ­Great Moving Mirror,” Portland Daily Advertiser, 2 September 1858, 2). Charles Lenox Redmond, a black abolitionist, delineated the “magnificent scenery” of Ball’s pa­norama during its exhibition in Boston (“Ball’s Pictorial Tour,” Boston Daily Eve­ning Transcript, 26 April 1855). Ball used his pa­norama to advertise his daguerreotype business: the guidebook to the pa­norama opens with a description of his studio, and the guidebook’s view No. 35 of Cincinnati tells viewers: “On the most fash­ion­able street of the city, Mr. J. P. Ball, the proprietor of our Pa­norama, has had in successful operation for several years the largest and most splendidly furnished Daguerrean Gallery, in the west” (“Our Pa­norama and Its Proprietor,” in James Presley Ball, Ball’s Splendid Mammoth Pictorial Tour of the United States [Cincinnati: Pugh, 1855], 7–10, 47). Burns traveled with his pa­norama for the purpose of “selling his Book, ‘Life of Anthony Burns’ ” and raising “funds to continue his studies for the ministry” (“Anthony Burns—­Colorphobia,” The Liberator, 3 September 1858, 143). 68.  “Pa­norama Exhibition of the Slave System,” The Liberator, 19 April 1850, 62. 69.  Black newspapers regularly advertised pa­noramas. The Colored American states that “the Pa­norama is not like most of the fash­ion­able places of resort in our city, closed against the colored ­people, but admits them as it does other citizens” (“Visit to the Pa­norama,” Colored American, 3 April 1841). For advertisements of pa­noramas within the black press, see “Pa­norama of Jerusalem,” Colored American, 26 January 1839; “Williams’s Pa­norama of the Bible,” North Star, 21 September 1849; and “Barnum’s Pa­norama of the Crystal Palace,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 30 July 1852. 70. Huhtamo, Illusions in Motion, 8. 71.  Henry Brown’s pa­norama was accompanied by “Vocal and Instrumental ­Music” (“Henry Box Brown’s Mirror of Slavery,” Springfield Republican, 22 May 1850). Huhtamo argues that “circular pa­noramas emphasized immersion into a place or event, while moving pa­noramas relied more on narration and combinations of dif­fer­ent means of expression” (Illusions in Motion, 8).

280

Notes to Pages 203–207

72.  See, for instance, Peter Randolph, Sketches of Slave Life: Or, Illustrations of the ‘Peculiar Institution’ (Boston: Author, 1855), which pre­sents a series of descriptions of slavery—­“Slaves on the Auction-­Block” (7), “Slaves on the Plantation. Colored ­Drivers” (12)—as well as “[His] Own History” (25). 73.  See Banvard’s “Adventures of the Artist,” 7–21. Banvard’s Mississippi pa­norama was one of the most popu­lar of the antebellum era. His biographical sketch, which introduces the pa­norama, pre­sents his prodigious talent and successful completion of the Herculean task of creating the pa­ norama as a synecdoche for national character. Ball follows suit, introducing his pa­norama with an article titled, “Our Pa­norama and Its Proprietor,” which provides his biography and a description of his daguerreotype gallery (Pictorial Tour, 7–10). 74.  For descriptive guidebooks, see Ball, Pictorial Tour; William Wells Brown, A Description of William Wells Brown’s Original Panoramic Views of the Scenes in the Life of an American Slave, from his Birth in Slavery to His Death or His Escape to His First Home of Freedom on British Soil (London: Gilpin, [1849?]) reprinted in C. Peter Ripley, ed., The Black Abolitionist Papers, vol. 1 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 190–216. Subsequent page references for t­ hese pamphlets are included in the text. ­There is no extant guide for Henry Brown’s pa­norama, but an advertisement for the pa­norama provides a list of scenes (“New and Original Pa­norama!,” The Liberator, 3 May 1850, 71). The most complete list of Henry Brown’s views is “Henry Box Brown’s Mirror of Slavery,” Springfield Republican, 22 May 1850 (reprinted in Ruggles, Unboxing, 89). The only description of Still’s pa­norama is in the article “Exhibitions and Lectures,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 4 May 1855. The fullest description of Burns’s pa­norama is as follows: “It first exhibits to us the habits and customs of the natives at home—­t heir b ­ attles, capture, their journeys to the seacoast; we then have the interior of the slaveship—­t he horrors of the m ­ iddle passage—­t he arrival in New Orleans, &c. &c. We then have exhibited southern plantation life and scenes, and treatment of slaves, scenes in the dismal swamp, &c.” (“The G ­ reat Moving Mirror,” Portland Daily Advertiser, 2 September 1858, 2). 75.  “Henry Box Brown’s Mirror of Slavery,” Springfield Republican, 22 May 1850; Ruggles, Unboxing, 77–80. The Liberator, 14 March 1845, 43 has a “Prospectus” for The Nubian Slave. See Ruggles, Unboxing, 93–109, for other images that Henry Brown likely used, including one from the Glasgow Ladies Emancipation Society and the engraving of West Indian Emancipation regularly advertised in the AASS cata­logue. 76.  For William Wells Brown’s use of images from the AASS’s Slave Market of Amer­i­ca, see Clytus, “Envisioning Slavery,” 251–57. Farrison lists source texts for Brown’s views as Marryat’s A Diary in Amer­i­ca, Child’s “The Quadroons,” and newspaper reports (William Wells Brown, 173–78). As a subscriber to the Genius of Universal Emancipation and The Liberator, Brown was familiar with institutional antislavery’s panoramic pictures. He states in his guidebook, “Many of the scenes I have myself witnessed, and the truthfulness of all of them is well known to t­ hose who are familiar with the Anti-­Slavery lit­er­a­ture of Amer­i­ca” (Original Panoramic Views, 192). 77.  “Exhibitions and Lectures,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 4 May 1855. 78.  “Ball’s Mammoth Pictorial Tour of the United States,” Boston Daily Eve­ning Transcript, 30 April 1855. 79.  “The G ­ reat Moving Mirror,” Portland Daily Advertiser, 2 September 1858, 2. The reverse occurred as well, with white antislavery pa­noramas adopting the structure of black ones. In 1860, The Liberator advertises a “Pa­norama of Slavery” that takes its opening section from the black pa­norama—­ its “pictorial repre­sen­ta­t ion of the Slave Trade and Slavery”—­a nd adds to it two sections on the life of John Brown: his “war for liberty in Kansas” and his “enterprise at Harper’s Ferry” (“Pa­norama of Slavery,” The Liberator, 10 August 1860, 127). 80. Cutter, Illustrated Slave, 210. 81.  For the images that correspond to “View Twelfth” and “View Nineteenth” of William Wells Brown’s pa­norama, see his Narrative of William Wells Brown, an American Slave (London: Gilpin, 1849), 12, 72. Brown quotes from Bibb’s text in “View F ­ ourteenth,” and its description—­“An Attempt of a Slave to Escape with His Wife and Child—­They Are Attacked by Wolves” (204)—­matches Strong’s image. For readings of t­ hese images, see Chaney, Fugitive Vision, 132–39.



Notes to Pages 207–210

281

82.  “Exhibitions and Lectures,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 4 May 1855. 83.  “The G ­ reat Moving Mirror,” Portland Daily Advertiser, 2 September 1858, 2. Burns’s biography features three prints including a frontispiece captioned “Marshal’s Posse with Burns Moving Down State Street,” that echoes the AASS’s images of the slave coffle passing by the Capitol. In replacing the Capitol with the State House and the slave coffle with the marshal’s posse, the image, like Burns’s story, shows how slavery has conquered the landscape and government of the North through the Fugitive Slave Act. 84. Banvard, Description; John R. Smith, Descriptive Pamphlet of Smith’s Leviathan Pa­norama of the Mississippi River! (Philadelphia: s.n., 1848). Banvard mentions enslaved ­people only once: “BAYOU SARA, By moonlight. A short distance above the town stands an old dead tree scathed by the fire, where three negroes ­were burnt alive. Each of them had committed murder. . . . ​­A fter passing Bayou Sara, the traveller ­w ill see some very beautiful cliffs” (35). ­Here, Banvard justifies the murder of three black men even as he transmutes their burning alive into a romantic moonlit scene that merges seamlessly into the next sublime image. Smith includes only one view of slaves: a field of sugar cane with “slaves at work; overseer on ­horse­back” (23). For ­t hese and other Mississippi River pa­ noramas, see John Francis McDermott, The Lost Pa­noramas of the Mississippi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press 1958). For readings of Henry Brown’s, William Wells Brown’s, and Ball’s pa­noramas in relation to mainstream river pa­noramas, see D. Brooks, Bodies in Dissent, 77–112; Chaney, Fugitive Vision, 117–22; Jarenski, “ ‘Delighted and Instructed,’ ” 123–33. Ball’s pa­norama and Banvard’s ­were shown si­mul­ta­neously in Boston, Ball’s in Armory Hall, “Banvard’s Pilgrimage to the Holy Land and Jerusalem” in Horticultural Hall (“Amusements This Day and Eve­ning,” Boston Daily Eve­ning Transcript, 4 May 1855). The antislavery press advertised Banvard’s pa­norama as well as other river pa­noramas (“Banvard’s Mammoth Pa­norama,” The Liberator, 15 January 1847, 10; “Hudson’s G ­ rand National Painting of the Mississippi and Ohio Rivers!,” The Liberator, 10 November 1848, 179). 85.  Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013), 74. A famous abolitionist example of the steamboat sublime is Tom’s view from the ship’s deck as he travels down the Mississippi in the chapter entitled “Evangeline” in Stowe’s ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin. 86.  In juxtaposing sublime scenery to the horrors of slavery, Brown similarly critiques the pa­ norama’s picturesque mode: “Beautiful Lake and Mountain Scenery in Africa” is followed by “March to the Coast,” and “View of the Cape of Good Hope” by “Interior of a Slave Ship”; similarly, “Gorgeous Scenery of the West India Islands” and “View of Charleston, South Carolina,” are followed by pictures of a slave auction, the march of a chain gang, and modes of confinement and punishment (“New and Original Pa­norama!,” The Liberator, 3 May 1850, 71). 87. Ball, Pictorial Tour, title page. 88.  As part of the spectacle that they directed and exhibited, black panoramists also remained objects of observation even as they became seeing subjects. Henry Brown, as Brooks and Ruggles show, embraced this dilemma by becoming a showman (D. Brooks, Bodies in Dissent, 112–30; Ruggles, Unboxing, 139–74), whereas Burns, who was offered five hundred dollars by P. T. Barnum to stand in his museum and “repeat his story for visitors for five weeks,” refused to be “show[n] like a monkey!” (Charles Emery Stevens, Anthony Burns: A History [Boston: Jewett, 1856], 216). On the politics of William Wells Brown’s exhibitionism, see Geoffrey Sanborn, Plagiarama! William Wells Brown and the Aesthetic of Attractions (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016). 89.  “New and Original Pa­norama!,” The Liberator, 3 May 1850, 71. 90.  See D. Brooks, Bodies in Dissent, for how Henry Brown “redirects the spectator’s strategy of looking (at the scene of slavery)” (109). 91.  “Speech of Parker Pillsbury,” The Liberator, 13 August 1858, 1. 92.  See Chaney, Fugitive Vision, 128–32, for a detailed reading of William Wells Brown’s pronominal shifts. 93.  Burns’s pa­norama is likely the exception to this rule, since his trajectory operates in reverse: while he escaped from slavery and fi­nally returned a f­ ree man, his spectacular return to slavery, rather than his escape, is the basis of his notoriety.

282

Notes to Pages 210–212

94.  “New and Original Pa­norama!,” The Liberator, 3 May 1850, 71. 95.  “Exhibitions and Lectures,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 4 May 1855. 96. The Mirror of Liberty, edited and published by David Ruggles, had four issues (July 1838, January 1839, August 1840, May 1841). 97.  “Exhibitions and Lectures,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 4 May 1855. 98. Ibid. 99.  “Prospectus. The Nubian Slave,” The Liberator, 14 March 1845, 43. 100.  See Madera, Black Atlas, for an examination of the “black territorial imagination” (11) and its “counter-­d iscourse of place” (5). 101.  “The G ­ reat Moving Mirror,” Portland Daily Advertiser, 2 September 1858, 2. 102.  “New and Original Pa­norama!,” The Liberator, 3 May 1850, 71. 103.  Perry Miller, Nature’s Nation (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967). Russ Castronovo argues that Niagara Falls and ­Virginia’s Natu­ral Bridge “provided the antebellum public with g­ rand, power­f ul images of their country” (“Racial Configurations of History in the Era of American Slavery,” American Lit­er­a­ture 65.3 [September 1993]: 525). Ball pre­sents four pictures of Niagara at the end of his pa­norama: “Rapids of the Niagara Falls” (No. 50), “­Grand Falls, from Point View” (No. 51), “Suspension Bridge and Whirl­pool” (No. 52), and “Queenston; Arrival of Fugitives on British Soil” (No. 53) (Pictorial Tour, 53–56). The Cincinnati Enquirer says that Ball’s “painting of Niagara Falls is certainly the finest we have seen” (“Ball’s Pa­norama,” 13 March 1855). Ball’s daguerreotype studio also had “five or six splendid views of Niagara Falls” (Pictorial Tour, 10) in its collection. Henry Brown’s pa­norama depicts Jefferson’s Natu­ral Bridge. 104.  Jarenski, “ ‘Delighted and Instructed,’ ” 137. Niagara was an iconic image—­like the North Star—of slave freedom. See, for instance, “The Fugitive Slave’s Apostrophe to Niagara,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 11 December 1851; “To Niagara,” North Star, 3 December 1847. 105.  William J. Wilson was an educator in New York City, a regular correspondent for Frederick Douglass’ Paper, and a leader in the black suffrage movement (Ripley, Black Abolitionist Papers, 4:144–45). The Anglo-­African Magazine ran from January 1859 through March 1860 u ­ nder the editorship of Thomas Hamilton, a black printer and bookseller. For histories of the Anglo-­African Magazine, see John Ernest, Liberation Historiography: African American Writers and the Challenge of History, 1794–1861 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 305–21; Ivy G. Wilson, “The Brief Wondrous Life of the Anglo-­African Magazine: Or, Antebellum African American Editorial Practice and Its Afterlives,” in Publishing Blackness: Textual Constructions of Race Since 1850, ed. George Hutchinson and John K. Young (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013), 18–38. W. Wilson’s “Afric-­American Picture Gallery” was published in seven installments over nine months. It began serialization in February 1859 and continued in the March, April, June, July, August, and October issues. For readings of “Afric-­A merican Picture Gallery,” see Ernest, Liberation Historiography, 321–28; Ivy G. Wilson, Specters of Democracy: Blackness and the Aesthetic of Politics in the Antebellum U.S. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011),145–68; Erica L. Ball, To Live an Antislavery Life: Personal Politics and the Antebellum Black ­Middle Class (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2012), 124–27; Leif Eckstrom and Britt Rusert, introduction to “Afric-­American Picture Gallery,” Just Teach One: Early African American Print No. 2 in Common-­Place (Fall 2015), http://­jtoaa​.­common​ -­place​.­org ​/­welcome​-­to​-­just​-­t each​-­one​-­a frican​-­a merican​/­i ntroduction​-­a fric​-­a merican​-­picture​ -­gallery​/­; Derrick R. Spires, The Practice of Citizenship: Black Politics and Print Culture in the Early United States (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018), 179–205. 106.  Writing in Frederick Douglass’ Paper as “Ethiop” in 1853, W. Wilson argues that art is an “utter necessity to our ultimate successful elevation” and calls for a “room for readings, or drawing, paintings, or sculpturings, or m ­ usic, rare collections or inventions, or all of t­ hese, [to] be opened in the heart of Gotham” (“From Our Brooklyn Correspondent,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 11 March 1853; 25 March 1853). Receiving no response to this call, Wilson imaginatively constructs a room full of black art in his story. He may have modeled his Gallery on J. P. Ball’s daguerreotype studio in Cincinnati, which featured landscape paintings by Duncanson, daguerreotypes by Ball,



Notes to Pages 212–217

283

and statuary representing the vari­ous arts. A picture of Ball’s studio was featured on the front page of Frederick Douglass’ Paper on 5 May 1854, along with an article, reprinted from Gleason’s Pictorial, that describes it in detail. This description was also reprinted in the introduction to Ball’s guidebook. In the serialized story, Ethiop, who describes himself as having a “penchant for pictures” (52), resists the racism of both the “American prejudice Market” (88), which sells denigrating images of blacks, as well as that of “anti-­slavery journals” and white literary magazines, which seek to appropriate his writing in the name of equality (89). 107.  William J. Wilson, “Afric-­A merican Picture Gallery,” Anglo-­African Magazine 1 (1859): 53. Subsequent page references are given in the text. Italics and punctuation follow the original. Douglass also portrays the picture gallery as a form of pa­norama. In “Pictures and Pro­g ress,” he states: “Rightly viewed, the ­w hole soul of man is a sort of picture gallery[,] a ­g rand pa­norama, in which all the g­ reat facts of the universe, in tracing ­things of time and ­things of eternity are painted” (459). 108.  Ethiop makes a similar move in “PICTURE IX.—­MOUNT VERNON” where he depicts the national icons of Washington’s ­house and tomb as haunted by the ghosts of slavery. For a detailed reading of this picture, see Spires, Practice of Citizenship, 186–89. 109.  John Ernest, Chaotic Justice: Rethinking African American Literary History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). Ernest discusses the “ ‘ fractal dimensions’ of nineteenth-­ century African American approaches to narrative,” which attempt to capture—­w ithout simplifying or resolving—­t he complex dynamics of racial history (ibid., 27). 110.  “New and Original Pa­norama!,” The Liberator, 3 May 1850, 71. 111.  The fourth installment is mistitled “Third Paper”—­either a printing ­mistake or a purposeful repetition to disrupt the numbered sequence. 112.  In order to gain a fugitive perspective, Ethiop must take up the fugitive’s position. However, by foregrounding his character’s role as author/artist (Ethiop creates caricatures of the slaveholder and slave catcher to be hung in the Gallery) even as he figures him as a fugitive, Wilson allows Ethiop to evade slavery’s surveillance and place the slaveholder u ­ nder his visual control. 113.  Besides figuring the artist’s abode more generally as African Americans’ North Star, the hut also symbolizes the panoramic perspective that Wilson inhabited as an artist. He describes himself as able to “take a better survey of m ­ atters” from his “hut on Brooklyn heights” (“From Our Brooklyn Correspondent,” Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 22 January 1852). On Wilson’s invocation of the pa­norama’s elevated perspective, see Radiclani Clytus, “Visualizing in Black Print: The Brooklyn Correspondence of William J. Wilson aka ‘Ethiop,’ ” J19 6.1 (Spring 2018): 29–66. 114. Spires, Practice of Citizenship, 191. 115.  Writing in Frederick Douglass’ Paper, Wilson argues that African Americans’ outsider status in society pre­sents the perfect opportunity for making art: “Our pre­sent quiet and retired habits of life, induced, perhaps, by reason of the pent-up and prison-­like position we sustain to the rest of the community, if nothing ­else, should drive us to t­ hese pursuits. This condition, while I do not justify it, I speak rather of our contentment of it, ­ought to resolve our youth of taste and genius, to become the true masters of the arts in this republic” (“From Our Brooklyn Correspondent,” 25 March 1853). 116.  A satire of Moses’s stone tablets and Joseph Smith’s golden plates, which ­were found on a mountain and a hill respectively, Bernice’s tablet not only envisions black liberation but also readies readers for a lengthy fight for freedom. 117.  Young Tom, who represents, according to Spires, a model of engaged critical citizenship, is also more prominently featured a­ fter Ethiop’s return (Spires, Practice of Citizenship, 198–205). 118.  Given that the last installment of “Afric-­A merican Picture Gallery” was published in the same month as John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry (October 1859), Wilson’s sketch participates in a broader tactical shift within abolition that underscored the centrality of vio­lence to the strug­g le for freedom. The Anglo-­African Magazine covered Brown’s raid in the next issue (“The Outbreak in ­Virginia,” November 1859, 347–60). ­Earlier installments of Wilson’s story ran in the same issues as

284

Notes to Pages 217–224

Martin Delany’s novel of revolution, Blake; or, The Huts of Amer­i­ca (1859–62), serialized t­ here from January through July 1859.

Conclusion 1.  “The Third De­cade Meeting,” The Liberator, 11 December 1863, 198. The AASS held similar anniversary meetings a­ fter its first and second de­cades. On antislavery’s culture of commemoration, see Julie Roy Jeffrey, Abolitionists Remember: Antislavery Autobiographies and the Unfinished Work of Emancipation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008). 2.  “Commemoration of the Third De­cade,” National Anti-­Slavery Standard, 12 December 1863. 3. Ibid. 4.  “The American Anti-­Slavery Society. Cele­bration of Its Third De­cade,” The Liberator, 25 December 1863, 205; Proceedings of the American Anti-­Slavery Society, at Its Third De­cade (New York: AASS, 1864), 5. Subsequent page references are given in the text. 5.  “The Third De­cade Meeting,” The Liberator, 11 December 1863, 198. 6.  See, for instance, the New York Herald’s coverage, reprinted in The Liberator (“The Anti-­ Slavery Anniversary at Philadelphia,” 18 December  1863, 201); “Third De­cade of the American Anti-­Slavery Society,” National Anti-­Slavery Standard, 19 December 1863; “Third De­c ade of the American Anti-­Slavery Society,” The Liberator, 18 December 1863, 202–3. 7.  “Two Valuable Pamphlets,” The Liberator, 3 June 1864, 91. In January 1864, the executive committee voted to print 750 copies of the pamphlet (Minutes of the Executive Committee of the American Anti-­Slavery Society, vol. 2, 12 January 1864, MS. fA.33, Anti-­Slavery Collection, Boston Public Library, Boston). The Pennsylvania ASS ordered 250 copies (“Third De­cade Pamphlet,” The Liberator, 15 January 1864, 10). 8.  “Third De­cade Pamphlet,” The Liberator, 29 January 1864, 18. 9.  “The American Anti-­Slavery Society. Cele­bration of Its Third De­cade,” The Liberator, 25 December 1863, 205. 10. Ibid. 11.  Anthony, Lucretia Mott, Abby Kelly Foster, Lucy Stone, and Frances Gage gave speeches; the Grimké ­sisters sent a letter, which was read to the gathering. 12.  Minutes, 14 March 1861. 13.  Ibid., 23 October 1862; 2 June 1862. The executive committee also voted to send copies of Richard D. Webb’s The Life of John Brown to the Harvard College library, the Mas­sa­chu­setts Historical Society, the Boston Athenaeum, the Boston Public Library, and the American Antiquarian Society (ibid., 19 March 1863). Samuel J. May (1797–1871) donated his collection of abolitionist texts to Cornell University in 1870. 14. “Meeting of the American Anti-­Slavery Society,” National Anti-­Slavery Standard, 6 June 1865. For accounts of the AASS’s 1860s schism and dissolution, see James M. McPherson, The Strug­gle for Equality: Abolitionists and the Negro in the Civil War and Reconstruction, 2nd ed. (Prince­ ton, NJ: Prince­ton University Press, 1995), 287–307; Lawrence J. Friedman, Gregarious Saints: Self and Community in American Abolitionism, 1830–1870 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 255–80; James Brewer Stewart, Wendell Phillips: Liberty’s Hero (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1986), 243–69; Jeffrey, Abolitionists Remember, 11–23.

In d ex

Figures are indicated by page numbers followed by fig. The AAS Almanac. See The American Anti-­Slavery Almanac AASS. See American Anti-­Slavery Society AASS executive committee: almanacs and, 37; American Slavery as It Is and, 73, 77–78; antislavery libraries and, 236n87, 236n89; black abolitionists and, 12; cata­logue of publications and, 223; Cent-­a-­Week Plan and, 16, 37, 233n57; distribution of publications, 22–23, 51, 143, 232n39, 235n85; evangelicalism and, 13; fund­rais­ing systems of, 16, 137; lecturers and, 15, 235n78; management of, 10, 14; Narrative of James Williams and, 58, 68, 70–73, 244n36, 245n38, 246n68; overthrow of, 26–27; printing of publications, 234n61, 235n73; state socie­t ies and, 232n41, 235n74; Subscription Anniversary and, 267n143 abolition. See antislavery movement The Abolitionist, 11 Abolitionist’s Library, 70, 245n52 Adams, John Quincy, 164 advertisements. See runaway slave advertisements AFASS. See American and Foreign Anti-­ Slavery Society “Afric-­A merican Picture Gallery” (Wilson), 176, 212–17, 282n105 African American pa­noramas: announcement for, 204fig.; antislavery visual culture and, 174, 203, 209–10; black art in, 212–13, 216–17; black audiences and, 202, 279n69; black point of view in, 208–9, 214–15; black re­sis­tance in, 178–79, 182, 185–87, 192, 194, 209–10, 216–17; cruelty of slavery in, 177, 182–83, 191, 207–10, 212; ea­g le image and, 182; emancipatory geographies in, 211–12, 215–17; freedom in, 175–77, 180, 189–192,

194–95, 200, 202, 210–14, 217–18; fugitive sight in, 176–77, 180, 186, 190, 213, 217–18; geographic symbolism in, 214; images in, 183–88, 190–92, 200, 203, 207; landscape in, 175–76, 189, 208, 211, 215; mainstream pa­noramas and, 207–9; moving, 176, 202–3, 213; painting of, 279n66; panoramic perspective in, 178–180, 191–92, 195, 215–16; portrayals of slavery in, 176, 202, 207–9; pre­sen­ta­t ion of, 208, 281n88; reader identification with fugitives, 191–92; slave narratives and, 177–80, 182–89, 203; visual authority of, 176–77, 180, 183–84, 186–87, 202; visual entrepreneurship and, 202, 279n67. See also antislavery visual culture African Americans: activism and, 8, 11, 174, 176–77, 202, 209, 217; antislavery fairs and, 120–21; art and, 120, 212–13, 216–17, 282n106, 283n115; countervisuality of, 174, 176; refinement and, 120–22, 133, 263n88. See also black abolitionism Allen, William G., 131 almanacs: factual evidence in, 32, 35–39, 44; numeracy and, 36, 38–39, 50, 54; specialized knowledge in, 36; standardized form of, 35–36, 44, 53. See also The American Anti-­Slavery Almanac The American Almanac, 35–36 American and Foreign Anti-­Slavery Society (AFASS), 26–27, 53, 183 The American Anti-­Slavery Almanac, 33fig., 169fig., 171fig.; antislavery libraries in, 24fig.; antislavery occasions in, 42; calendar pages in, 42–43, 43fig., 44, 46, 47fig., 49fig.; cata­logue of publications in, 40fig.; circulation of, 23, 51–53, 77; cruelty of slavery in, 39, 41, 44–45, 45fig., 46, 48, 50, 55; illustrations in, 44–45, 45fig., 47fig., 48,

286 Index The American Anti-­Slavery Almanac (continued) 49fig., 143, 168, 170, 171fig., 182, 182fig., 183; informational essays in, 39, 41; knowledge system in, 44–46, 48, 50–51; promotion of antislavery publications in, 50–51; runaway slave advertisements in, 60, 61fig., 68; slave narratives and, 58; statistical facts in, 37–38, 38fig., 39, 50, 54; symbolism in, 41–42, 46. See also compendia American Anti-­Slavery Society (AASS): auxiliaries in, 13–16, 85; black abolitionists in, 12–13, 221; “Cata­logue of Books and Pamphlets,” 20, 21fig., 22; circulating library system of, 23, 24fig., 25; distribution of publications by, 22–23, 25, 68, 234n72; factual evidence use by, 31–32, 34–35, 37, 52, 55–57, 73, 78; fund­rais­ing by, 16–17, 19, 23; impact of, 27; lecturers for, 1, 14–16, 23, 31; mass media and, 1, 6–8, 10–12, 19, 219–20, 223–25; May Anniversary, 15, 27, 42, 51, 224; numeracy and, 34–35, 39, 56; orga­nizational structure of, 10–17, 19, 22, 26, 231n32, 233n58; pa­noramas and, 145–48, 150, 152, 158, 160, 170, 174; pictorial prints of, 141–43, 145; Plan of ­Labor, 52; postal campaign and, 22, 26, 234n71; print media by, 19–20, 22–23, 25–27, 31, 50–53, 56–57, 71, 77–78, 143, 221, 223, 237n105; runaway slave advertisements and, 60, 62, 68; schism in, 26–27, 237n104; slave narratives and, 55–60, 62–64, 66, 68, 70–73, 81; Third De­cade cele­bration, 219–21, 223–24; visual iconography of, 183–85, 188, 195; white northern nationalism and, 220. See also AASS executive committee; antislavery movement; female auxiliaries; institutional antislavery American Bible Society, 13, 19 American Notes for General Circulation (Dickens), 78 American Slavery as It Is, 74fig.; AASS publication of, 19, 73; antislavery libraries and, 78; bundling of, 78; circulation of, 77–78, 240n52; evidence pages in, 76fig.; as factual compendium, 57, 73, 81; influence on slave narratives, 57, 78–81; numeracy and, 75; punishment and cruelty in, 80; readers as witnesses, 221, 248n82; Stowe and, 248n103; visual repre­sen­ta­t ions of, 166; white witnesses and, 75, 77. See also compendia American Sunday School Union, 13 American Tract Society, 6, 13, 19, 239n29 Ames, Julius Rubens, 164, 165fig., 183

Anglo-­African Magazine, 212, 282n105 “Annals of W ­ omen’s Anti-­Slavery Socie­t ies” (Grew), 221 Anthony, Susan B., 221 Anthony Burns: A History (Stevens), 207 Anti-­Slavery Examiner, 69fig., 70–71, 78, 237n99 Anti-­Slavery Fair!, 109fig. antislavery fairs: banner used in, 89fig., 113fig.; black refinement and, 120–21; capitalism and, 88–90, 92, 107; commodification and, 105, 107, 111; consumption and, 111–12, 116; cultured subjectivity and, 108, 114, 116–17, 120; dolls and, 101–2; emancipatory characterization of, 91–92; entry fees and, 266n137; as exhibitions, 111–14, 116–18; fash­ion­able goods in, 117; female auxiliaries and, 85–88, 90–91, 97, 107, 221; foreign goods in, 117–18; fund­rais­ing by, 88; gift books and, 122, 124, 127–28, 130–32; hierarchies of merchandise in, 116–17; layout of, 115; liberal subjectivity and, 107; Marlboro Hall, 115fig.; mass media and, 88–89, 93, 107; as media events, 108, 120; ­middle class and, 108, 110–11, 116–18, 120, 137; orga­nizational structure of, 86–87; prestigious symbols in, 112–14; promotion techniques for, 91, 108, 109fig.; racial hierarchies and, 102–4, 107, 110, 121–22, 138, 253n25; refinement and, 110–11, 118–22, 128, 131; ritual objects in, 114; as salons, 110; sentimental consumerism and, 89–93, 100–101, 107; social class and, 111, 128, 132; as social events, 118–20; white identity and, 93–94, 100–101, 107. See also antislavery objects; Subscription Anniversary antislavery fiction, 54, 80 The Anti-­Slavery Harp (W. W. Brown), 173fig., 174 antislavery libraries, 23, 24fig., 25, 52, 58, 70–71, 73, 78, 236n87 The Anti-­Slavery Manual, Containing a Collection of Facts and Arguments on American Slavery (Sunderland), 32 antislavery movement: agency and, 64, 66; black activism and, 11–12; cultural authority of, 114; development of, 238n108; emancipation over equality in, 224–25; evangelicalism and, 13; factual evidence and, 39, 73; G ­ reat Britain, 11; mass media and, 6–8, 10–11, 19–20, 22, 223; ­middle class and, 110, 120, 131; numeracy and, 54; organ­ization of, 10; propaganda campaigns, 11, 225; racism in,

Index 287 137–38; refinement and, 114, 117, 128, 135, 137; social status and, 6, 132, 258n8, 259n12; southern suppression of, 141. See also American Anti-­Slavery Society (AASS); black abolitionism; institutional antislavery antislavery objects: abolitionist hearts and, 97; barges, 94; boots, 254n41; candy wrappers, 254n41; commodification and, 100–103, 105, 107; compassion and, 99–100; dolls, 101–2; domestic, 85–86, 88, 97; female auxiliaries and, 85, 250n2; flags, 93, 254n41; iron hammers, 98; iron holders, 88; kneeling slave icon and, 93; as model liberal subjects, 99; nature of, 251n7, 261n50; needle books, 88; pincushions, 85, 86fig.; purchaser agency and, 97–99; quill pens, 99; seaweed, 99–100; singing walnuts, 94–95, 101; sugar bowls, 85, 87fig.; thermometers, 97, 98fig.; valorization of consumerism and, 93; wafers, 99, 116, 256n63. See also antislavery fairs; speaking objects antislavery publications: antislavery fairs and, 88; bundling of, 25, 58, 71, 78, 237n98, 246n58; cata­logue for, 21fig., 22, 25, 40fig., 221, 221fig., 223; circulating library system for, 23, 24fig., 25; cruelty of slavery in, 39, 41, 44–46, 48, 50, 55, 177, 182–83, 191; distribution of, 16, 22–23, 25; factual evidence in, 31–32, 34–35, 52; images in, 26, 141–43, 145; manufacture of, 19–20; materiality of, 7, 26; middle-­class and, 7; southern response to, 26; white northern nationalism and, 7. See also The American Anti-­Slavery Almanac; American Anti-­ Slavery Society (AASS); American Slavery as It Is; compendia; slave narratives The Anti-­Slavery Rec­ord, 16, 19–20, 31, 58, 160, 161fig., 183 Anti-­Slavery Society of Utica, 70 antislavery visual culture: American Anti-­ Slavery Society (AASS) and, 141; prints, 20, 141, 143, 160, 183, 203, 220; broadsides, 141–43, 146, 195, 268n10; mass production and, 143; power of pictures in, 143–45; printed handkerchiefs, 141, 142fig., 267n2; reading practices and, 36; symbolic spaces and, 220–21. See also African American pa­noramas; gift books; pa­noramas antislavery win­dow blinds, 166–68, 272n65 An Appeal in F ­ avor of That Class of Americans Called Africans (L. Child), 25, 32 Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (D. Walker), 12

Armistead, Wilson, 78–80 Attucks, Crispus, 213 Autographs for Freedom (Griffiths), 122, 124, 127, 127fig., 128, 129fig., 130fig., 131–32, 170, 172fig. Ball, Charles, 55, 58, 68, 72, 176–80, 181fig., 182–83, 189, 246n71 Ball, James Presley, 176, 202–3, 206fig., 208, 211, 279n66, 279n67 ballooning, 198–200, 215, 277n54 Ball’s Splendid Mammoth Pictorial Tour of the United States (J. P. Ball), 202, 206fig. Banvard, John, 207–8 “Banvard’s Pa­norama,” 146fig. Barker, Robert, 145 Barrett, David, 58 Beaumont, Gustave de, 127 Beecher, Catherine, 130 “Behold, Behold This Cruel Chain!!!,” 157fig. Benedict, Burton, 112, 116 Bennett, Tony, 111 Bentham, Jeremy, 114, 145 Bibb, Henry: images and, 207, 274n20, 274n22; landscape and, 188, 208; pa­ noramas and, 210, 213–14; panoramic perspective of, 175–76; visual agency of, 186–87, 189; visual iconography and, 183–85, 188. See also Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave Bibb, Malinda, 183 A Bird’s Eye View of American Slavery, 141, 148, 150 Birney, James, 14, 27, 58, 71, 127, 141, 231n32, 250n2 black abolitionism: AASS marginalization of, 12–13, 221; antislavery movement and, 11; countervisuality of, 174; pa­noramas and, 176–77, 202, 209, 217–18; panoramic perspective and, 202, 218; print culture of, 12; ­women’s organ­izations and, 253n25. See also African American pa­noramas; African Americans black art. See African American pa­noramas; African Americans black conventions, 11 black newspapers, 279n69 black re­sis­tance: African American pa­noramas and, 178–79, 182, 185–87, 192, 194, 209–10, 216–17; to antislavery, 81; ­f ree blacks and, 194; runaways and, 48, 192; in runaway slave

288 Index black re­sis­tance (continued) advertisements, 60, 63; slave narratives and, 62–64, 179, 182, 188 black subjection, 128, 130, 154, 168, 174, 178, 223, 225, 263n78 Blackwood, Sarah, 191 Boston antislavery fairs: black refinement and, 120–22; book ­table at, 117–18; consumerism and, 91–93, 118; dolls and, 101–2; as exhibition, 111–14, 253n27; institutional antislavery and, 88; international nature of, 87, 99, 251n12; journal of, 111, 258n1; J. Walker’s hand and, 104; Mas­sa­chu­setts Anti-­Slavery Society (MASS) and, 86–87, 252n16; as national fair, 87–88; promotion of, 108; race and, 102; rare and sacred objects at, 114, 116–18; as salons, 132–33, 135, 137; as social events, 120 Bourne, George, 31, 141, 150, 151fig., 203 “A Boy Who Loved Liberty,” 68 Bradley, James, 57 The Branded Hand of Captain Jonathan Walker, 105fig. Brawley, Lisa, 195 Bremer, Fredrika, 127 “Brief Account of an Emancipated Slave” (Bradley), 57 British antislavery, 11, 16, 34 Brookes, 152 Brown, Henry: Mirror of Slavery, 202, 204fig., 207; narrative of, 79; pa­norama announcement, 204fig.; pa­norama of, 176, 203, 207–8, 210–11, 213–14, 279n66, 279n67 Brown, John, 220 Brown, Mary, 68 Brown, William Wells: antislavery gift books and, 131; Clotel, 81; eyewitness authority of, 208–9; focus on black freedom by, 210–11; lecturing by, 121, 133; pa­norama of, 176, 202–3, 208–10, 279n66, 279n67. See also The Anti-­Slavery Harp; Narrative of William W. Brown, an American Slave; Original Panoramic Views of the Scenes in the Life of an American Slave Bulwer-­Lytton, Edward, 113 Burns, Anthony, 176, 202–3, 207, 209, 211, 279n67, 281n93 Bushman, Richard, 110, 117–18 The Cabinet of Freedom, 58, 68, 180, 242n11 capitalism: antislavery fairs and, 89–90, 92, 107; codes of culture and, 111; liberalism

and, 92–93; race and, 107; sentimental consumerism and, 89–91; slave economy and, 92 Capitol dome image, 155fig., 157fig., 159fig., 162fig., 169fig., 172fig., 192fig., 197fig.; northern nationalism and, 157–61, 163–64, 166, 168, 195; as symbol of liberty, 156, 170, 192 The Captive, 142fig. “Cata­logue of Anti-­Slavery Publications in Amer­i­ca” (May, Jr.), 221, 222fig., 223 “Cata­logue of Books and Pamphlets, on the Subject of Slavery and Abolition,” 20, 21fig., 22 “The Cathedral at Arrezzo” (Weston), 128 Caughey, John, 183, 274n17 Cent-­a-­Week Plan, 16–17, 23, 26, 70, 236n87 Chapman, Maria Weston: antislavery fairs and, 86–87, 107, 116, 132; antislavery writings, 3, 5–6, 85, 232n40; gift books and, 122, 131; The Liberty Bell, 123fig., 125fig., 126fig.; Subscription Anniversary and, 132–33, 137 Child, David L., 53, 131 Child, Lydia Maria: The AAS Almanac editorship, 53, 168, 174; antislavery writings, 238n108; An Appeal in F ­ avor of That Class of Americans Called Africans, 25, 32; fair and, 260n17; The Fountain, 20; gift books and, 130; on Narrative of James Williams, 72; The Oasis, 50, 57 ­children, 20, 48, 50, 148, 156, 180 Christophe, Henri, 121 Clarkson, Thomas, 34, 60 Clevenger, Shobal Vail, 114 Clotel (W. W. Brown), 81 A ‘Cloud of Witnesses’ Against Slavery and Oppression (Armistead), 78 Cohen, Patricia Cline, 34 coin box, 1–2, 2fig., 3, 5–6 Collector’s Card, 17, 19fig. Collins, J. A., 3, 4fig. colonization, 12, 44, 97 Colored American, 12, 166 commodification, 93, 100–105, 107, 111 compendia: American Slavery as It Is as, 57, 73, 75, 77; antislavery almanacs as, 36, 50, 54; Armistead’s works as, 78; Ball’s narrative within, 180; A Bird’s Eye View of American Slavery as, 148; broadsides as, 146, 148, 160, 164; cata­logues as, 20; composite pictures, 148, 158, 170; as dominant publication form,

Index 289 20, 32, 221; gift books as, 124; Hopper’s “Tales of Oppression” as, 249n112; “Liberty” as, 68, 164; Narrative of James Williams as, 56, 58–60, 63, 68, 73, 75; panoramic pictures as, 147; Slave Market of Amer­i­ca as, 160; transatlantic, 79–80; Views of Slavery as, 148. See also factual compendia consumerism: antislavery fairs and, 89–91; emancipatory characterization of, 92–95, 97–98, 100, 104–5, 107, 138; sentimental, 89–93, 100–101, 107; virtues of, 95, 97; white ­women and, 90 Cooper, Thomas, 57 Cornish, Samuel, 12 Correspondence, between the Hon. F. H. Elmore and James G. Birney (Birney), 71 Craft, Ellen, 207, 210 Cumberworth, Charles, 120–22 Declaration of Sentiments (AASS), 20, 23, 43, 142, 220–21 Declaration of the Anti-­Slavery Convention, 142 Delany, Martin, 190, 283n118 Delavan, E. C., 70 Dickens, Charles, 78 dolls, 101–2 Douglass, Frederick: AASS sponsorship of, 72, 79; antislavery lectures and, 72, 79, 118, 247n73; attack on, 193; Autographs for Freedom, 127, 127fig., 131; on exposure of escape methods, 277n57; flag image and, 192, 195, 200; Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 194–95; “Life as a Freeman,” 195, 198, 201fig.; “Life as a Slave,” 195, 197fig.; North Star editorship, 189–94, 209; panoramic perspective of, 176, 190, 198–200, 202; on racial equality, 224, 276n47; ship symbolism and, 175, 272n2; at Third De­cade cele­ bration, 221, 224; Under­g round Railroad and, 275n31; visual mastery of, 189–94, 199–200, 202. See also My Bondage and My Freedom; Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass Drayton, William, 26 Dr. Follen’s Address, 50 Dr. Franklin an Abolitionist, 141 ea­g le image, 144fig., 165fig., 169fig., 172fig.; antislavery publications and, 271n49; antislavery values and, 166–67, 170; as national symbol, 160, 166–68, 170, 220, 272n67, 277n54; northern gaze and, 168,

170; as predators, 168, 172, 182; repre­s en­t a­ tions of slavery and, 164 Edward, John Passmore, 79 Elmore, F. H., 26 The Emancipated F ­ amily, 141 emancipation: AASS media and, 219, 223–24; African American pa­noramas and, 211, 213–14; blacks as agents of, 176, 189, 218; consumerism as, 92–95, 97–98, 100, 104–5, 107, 138; white identity through, 93–94. See also freedom Emancipation in the West Indies (Thome and Kimball), 20, 70–71, 78 The Emancipator: AASS publication of, 14, 20, 22; advertisements in, 166, 271n59; on almanacs, 37, 51–52, 70, 239n31; on American Slavery as It Is, 73, 77–78; on antislavery libraries, 237n92; on broadsides, 268n10; on Cent-­a-­Week socie­ties, 235n82; Cooper narrative and, 57; government distribution of, 23; images in, 143, 144fig., 150, 271n48; on Williams narrative, 62, 68, 70–72, 244n35, 244n36, 245n38, 245n46, 245n48 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 127, 143 Equiano, Olaudah, 12 Ernest, John, 213, 283n109 Estlin, Mary, 132–33 Ethiop. See Wilson, William J. evangelicalism, 6, 11, 13, 16, 36 exhibitions, 111–14, 116–18. See also antislavery fairs factual compendia: runaway slave advertisements in, 59–60, 61fig.; slave narratives as, 56–60, 62–63, 79–81; white empiricism and, 56–57, 73; white witnesses and, 73, 75, 77. See also compendia factual evidence: abolitionist publications and, 31–32, 34–35, 52, 73, 78–79; almanacs and, 32, 35–38, 44, 50, 52, 54; as key antislavery argument, 8, 15–16, 22, 31–32, 34, 52–56; numeracy and, 34–35; slave narratives and, 55–57, 68, 73, 81 Faneuil Hall, 90–91, 112 female auxiliaries, 85–88, 90–91, 97, 107, 221, 250n2. See also American Anti-­Slavery Society (AASS); antislavery fairs Festa, Lynn, 99 Finney, Charles, 14 Fischer, Isaac, 178, 180 Five Hundred Thousand Strokes for Freedom (Armistead), 78–80

290 Index flag image, 153fig., 155fig., 157fig., 159fig., 161fig., 169fig., 171fig., 172fig.; Douglass’s use of, 192, 195, 200; freedom and, 154–56, 160, 170, 190; nationalism and, 160, 170; oppression and, 170, 195; pa­noramas and, 152, 154–56, 159–60, 170; racial difference and, 93–94 flâneur, 199, 277n56 The Fountain (L. Child), 20 Frankel, Oz, 34 Fraser, Gordon, 12 Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 189, 194, 194fig., 195, 282n106, 283n115 freedom: African American pa­noramas and, 175–77, 180, 189–92, 194–95, 200, 202, 210, 212–14, 217–18; antislavery fair consumerism as, 89–94, 97–98, 104–5, 107, 138; as domain of whites, 174; ea­g le image and, 166; flag image and, 154–56, 160, 170; gift books and, 124, 127–28, 131–32; panoramic perspective and, 175; slave narratives and, 59, 62–64, 80. See also emancipation Freedom’s Journal, 12 Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, 102, 172, 191–94, 202, 276n46 fund­rais­ing: antislavery fairs, 88, 132, 137; coin boxes, 1–3, 5–6; Collector’s Card in, 17, 19, 19fig.; donation plans for, 1, 16–17, 23; Mas­sa­chu­setts Anti-­Slavery Society (MASS), 1–2, 2fig., 3, 5–6, 16; Monthly Subscription Plan, 16; periodicals in, 16. See also Cent-­a-­Week Plan; Quarterly Subscription Plan; Weekly Contribution Plan Garrison, William Lloyd: AASS and, 88, 219–20, 223–24; AASS leadership by, 26–27, 141, 237n105; antislavery almanacs and, 41; antislavery banner, 89fig., 113fig.; antislavery fairs and, 110, 114, 118–19; on black pa­noramas, 209; Genius editorship, 158; gift books and, 127; monumentalization of, 114; slave narratives and, 79 Gayle, Anthony, 58, 68 Genius of Universal Emancipation, 152, 153fig., 154–55, 155fig., 157, 157fig., 158, 160 gift books: antislavery fairs and, 122, 124; cosmopolitan outlook of, 127; as fair souvenirs, 110, 122, 124; Garrison and, 127; middle-­class identity and, 131–32; racial hierarchies and, 128, 130–31; refinement and, 127–28, 130–31; social class and, 122, 128; Western canon in, 128, 130; white writers of, 130–31

Gilbert, Howard Worcester, 128 Glickman, Lawrence, 90 The ­Great Moving Mirror of Slavery (Burns), 202 Green, Charles C., 203, 211 Grew, Mary, 221 Griffiths, Julia, 122, 127fig., 129fig., 130fig., 172fig. Grimes, William, 58 Grimké, Sarah, 73 Harned, William, 53 “Hearts of Oak for Abolitionists,” 97 Herald of Freedom, 62, 70 “History of the Slave, James,” 58 Hopper, Isaac T., 131, 249n112, 265n108 Howe, Julia Ward, 133 “How Slavery Honors Our Country’s Flag,” 161fig. ­Human Rights, 19–20, 23, 31, 51, 71, 164 Illustrations of the American Anti-­Slavery Almanac for 1840, 143 Inna, the Booroom Slave, 141 An Inquiry into the Character and Tendency of the American Colonization, and American Anti-­Slavery Socie­ties (Jay), 32, 50 institutional antislavery: black media and, 9; evangelicalism and, 13; mass media and, 1, 6–7, 26; racial hierarchies and, 7, 110–11, 138; slave narratives and, 79–82; social class and, 110–11; visual field of, 174, 183–85, 188, 208–9; visual technologies and, 143, 145; white northern nationalism and, 7, 147, 165–66, 174, 200. See also American Anti-­Slavery Society (AASS); antislavery movement Jacobs, Harriet, 79 “James Major Monroe–­A Fugitive Slave,” 58 Jay, William, 32, 50 A Key to ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), 54, 79–80, 248n103 Kimball, Horace, 20, 70–71 Knapp, Isaac, 19, 33fig., 43fig., 45fig., 182fig. kneeling slave icon, 4fig., 86fig., 87fig., 130fig., 163fig., 181fig., 205fig.; antislavery objects and, 85, 93, 100, 120, 122, 263n78; antislavery publications and, 180, 270n34; commodification and, 105; gift books and, 128; pictorial repre­sen­ta­t ions of, 141, 164, 167, 187, 221; Reason’s engraving of, 19, 272n68; Wedgwood medallion of, 11, 152; Weekly Contribution Box, 2, 2fig., 227n2

Index 291 “La Notte Di Michelangiolo” (Gilbert), 128 Lectures on Slavery, and its Remedy (Phelps), 19 Leavitt, Joshua, 13–14, 234n71 Lewis, Edmonia, 133 liberalism, 92–93 liberal subjectivity, 90, 93, 100–101, 104, 107 The Liberator: advertisements in, 166; on American Slavery as It Is, 77; on antislavery almanacs, 37, 51, 71, 240n38; on antislavery fairs, 88, 91, 108, 115fig., 258n5; on antislavery libraries, 236n87; Chapman and, 251n11; factual evidence in, 248n104; masthead of, 158–59, 159fig., 271n48, 279n66; “New and Original Pa­norama!” announcement in, 204fig.; “Thermometer of the Heart,” 98fig.; Third De­c ade cele­bration and, 219; on Weekly Contribution Box, 2; on Williams narrative, 59, 64, 67fig., 68, 70–71 liberty. See freedom “Liberty” (Ames), 164, 165fig., 183 The Liberty Almanac, 53–54 The Liberty Bell, 122, 123fig., 124, 125fig., 126fig., 127–28, 131 Liberty Chimes, 122 Liberty Party, 27, 53 Liberty’s Song, 118, 119fig. “Life as a Freeman” (Douglass), 195, 198, 201fig. “Life as a Slave” (Douglass), 195, 197fig. Lincoln, Abraham, 219, 221, 224 ­Little Mary’s doll, 101–2 Logan, Thad, 99, 167 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 127, 128 Loughran, Trish, 6, 228n16, 229n1, 232n41, 237n104, 238n107 L’Ouverture, Toussaint, 121, 213–14 Lovejoy, E. P., 141, 143 Lundy, Benjamin, 141, 152 Marlboro Hall, 115fig. Martineau, Harriet, 22, 130 The Martyr Age of the United States (Martineau), 22 Mas­sa­chu­setts Anti-­Slavery Fair, 87, 115fig., 123fig., 126fig. See also Boston antislavery fairs Mas­sa­chu­setts Anti-­Slavery Society (MASS), 1–2, 2fig., 3, 4fig., 5–6, 16, 86, 247n73 Mas­sa­chu­setts Female Emancipation Society, 122 Mas­sa­chu­setts General Colored Association, 11

mass media: abolitionist publications, 19–20, 21fig., 22–23; antislavery fairs and, 88–89, 93, 107; antislavery movement and, 6–8, 10–11, 19–20, 22, 223; black abolitionism and, 12; distribution of publications, 22–23; evangelical, 6, 13. See also African American pa­noramas; antislavery publications; pa ­noramas May, Samuel J., 220 May, Samuel, Jr., 221, 223 Michigan Observer, 70 ­middle class: antislavery fairs and, 9, 90, 108, 110–11, 116–18, 120, 137; antislavery media and, 5–6, 223; antislavery sentiment and, 258n9; foreign goods and, 117–18; institutional antislavery and, 7–8, 131; racial hierarchies and, 138; refinement and, 110, 117–18, 120, 131; social rituals and, 120; Subscription Anniversary and, 137; whiteness and, 138, 259n14 Miller, Angela, 145 Mirror of Liberty, 12, 210, 282n96 Mirror of Slavery (H. Brown), 202, 204fig., 207 Mirzoeff, Nicholas, 150 Mitchell, W. J. T., 177, 272n75 Monroe, James Major, 58 Monthly Concert of Prayer for the Slave, 15–16, 42 Monthly Offering (Collins), 3, 4fig., 5–6, 58 Monthly Subscription Plan, 16 “Moral Map of the United States,” 164, 165fig. Morgan, David, 6 My Bondage and My Freedom (Douglass), 81, 190, 193, 195, 196fig., 197fig., 198–200, 201fig., 202, 208 “Narrative of David Barrett,” 58 Narrative of James Williams, 65fig., 66fig., 67fig., 69fig.; AASS authentication of, 20, 56–59, 64, 66, 68; affective meaning in, 62; agency in, 64, 66; antislavery libraries and, 70–71; credibility of, 71–72, 75, 77, 82; dissemination of, 68, 70–71, 245n50, 246n56; as factual compendium, 56, 58–60, 63; publication history, 68, 244n36; as runaway advertisement, 59, 61–64, 68; slaveholder cruelty in, 60, 62, 64, 68; slave re­sis­tance in, 62–63; southern detractor challenges to, 56, 71–72, 249n120; subjective testimony in, 75; Whittier and, 20, 58–60, 63–64, 71, 73, 75, 77, 243n13; withdrawal of support for, 56, 71–73, 77–78, 81, 246n68

292 Index Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb, an American Slave, 175–76, 183, 184fig., 185fig., 186fig., 187fig., 188fig., 189fig. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, 8, 56–57, 72, 79–80, 121, 190, 193, 199, 247n73 “Narrative of the Life of Thomas Cooper,” 57 Narrative of William W. Brown, an American Slave, 79, 81, 207, 247n73 National Anti-­Slavery Bazaar, 87, 125fig. National Anti-­Slavery Standard, 104, 137, 219 National Era, 54, 193 nationalism, 147, 156–57, 160–61, 163–64, 166, 170, 174. See also white northern nationalism Negro Slavery (Clarkson), 60 New ­England Anti-­Slavery Society (NEASS), 11 Newman, Richard, 11, 237n104 New Method of Assorting the Mail, 141 New York Committee of Vigilance, 199 New York State Anti-­Slavery Society, 22–23, 58, 70, 236n87, 245n45, 246n58 New York Young Men’s Anti-­Slavery Society, 51 Nord, David Paul, 6, 13 “The Norman Baron” (Longfellow), 128 North: antislavery publications, 41; capitalism and, 92, 107; complicity in slavery by, 170; critique of, 198–200; nationalism and, 147, 156–57, 160, 164, 170, 174; racism in, 200; superiority over South, 9, 147, 156, 170, 172, 174; whiteness and, 195, 199 “A Northern Song” (Whittier), 221 The North Star, 104, 122, 189–90, 190fig., 191, 191fig., 192, 192fig., 193, 193fig., 194, 194fig., 209 North Star, 154, 176, 179, 190–91, 194, 210, 213, 215 The Nubian Slave (Green), 203, 211 numeracy, 34–36, 38–39, 50, 54, 56 The Oasis (L. Child), 50, 57 O’Connell, Daniel, 64 “Ode” (Pierpont), 170, 172, 172fig. Oettermann, Stephan, 145 Ohio Anti-­Slavery Society, 22, 70 Original Panoramic Views of the Scenes in the Life of an American Slave (W. W. Brown), 202, 205fig., 209–10 Orr, Nathaniel, 195, 197fig., 201fig. “Our Countrymen in Chains” (Whittier), 141 panoptical perspective: critique of slavery through, 152; development of, 145; devices for, 178, 182–83; North and, 172, 172fig., 174;

overseers and, 150, 152, 155; slavery and, 158, 163, 189, 208, 212 pa­noramas: aerial perspectives in, 145, 152, 154–58, 163–64, 166, 174; African American appropriation of, 174, 176–77, 202–3, 211–13; antislavery promotion through, 145–48, 150, 152, 158–61, 163–68, 170, 172, 174; compendium broadsides, 148, 160, 164; composite pictures, 148, 158, 170; cruelty of slavery in, 147–48, 152, 157–59, 167–68; landscape, 176; machinery for moving, 146fig.; moving, 145, 176, 213, 273n13; national identity in, 146–47; slavery repre­sen­ta­t ions in, 148, 150, 152, 154–59, 163–64, 166–68, 172, 174; white northern nationalism and, 147, 156–57, 160, 164–68, 170, 174, 177, 211; win­dow blinds as, 166–68. See also African American pa­noramas panoramic perspective: African American pa­noramas and, 178–80, 191–92, 195, 202, 215–16; ballooning, 198–200, 215, 277n54; flâneur and, 199, 277n56; Frederick Douglass and, 198–200, 202; racialized hegemony of, 202; slave narratives and, 177–80, 187–89, 191, 203 “Part of Washington City,” 163fig. Peabody, Ephraim, 79 Pease, Elizabeth, 117 Pennington, James, 80, 121 Pennsylvania Abolition Society, 11 Pennsylvania Anti-­Slavery Fair and National Anti-­Slavery Bazaar, 251n12 Phelps, Amos, 19 Philadelphia antislavery fairs: black refinement and, 121; commodification fear and, 102–4; consumerism and, 90–92, 94; as exhibitions, 112; gift books and, 122; J. Walker at, 104; as national fair, 251n12; rare and sacred objects at, 114, 116; as salon, 265n116; as social events, 120; white refinement and, 112, 121; works published for, 263n91 Philadelphia Anti-­Slavery Society, 31 Philadelphia Female Anti-­Slavery Society (PFASS), 102, 220 The Philanthropist, 14, 22 Phillips, Wendell, 122, 133, 224 Picture of Slavery in the United States of Amer­i­ca (Bourne), 31, 141, 150, 151fig., 203 “Pictures and Pro­g ress” (Douglass), 190, 283n107 “Pictures of Slavery by Slave-­Holders,” 39, 68 Pierpont, John, 118–19, 170, 172, 172fig., 275n32

Index 293 pincushions, 85, 86fig. “Pinda” (Chapman), 3, 5 Placido, Juan, 131 Plea for the Slave, 23, 70, 235n83 Poovey, Mary, 34–35 The Power of Congress over the District of Columbia (T. Weld), 70 Printers’ Picture Gallery, 19, 143, 144fig. print statism, 34 Proceedings of the American Anti-­Slavery Society, at Its Third De­cade, 219–20, 222fig. propaganda campaigns, 11, 225 Providence Ladies Anti-­Slavery Association, 122 public sphere, 27, 111 Purvis, Harriet, 102–3 Quarterly Anti-­Slavery Magazine, 19–20, 31, 147, 177, 180 Quarterly Subscription Plan, 52, 233n49, 236n87 race, 7, 102–5, 107, 110, 130, 166, 224. See also African Americans; whiteness racial hierarchies, 110–11, 120–22, 128, 130–31, 138 Randolph, Peter, 79 Reason, Charles L., 131 Reason, Patrick, 19, 64, 183, 185, 186fig., 272n68 Redmond, Charles Lenox, 121, 131, 133, 279n67 refinement: antislavery and, 7, 114, 117, 135, 137; antislavery fairs and, 9, 108, 110–11, 118–21, 131; art and, 117, 124; black, 120–22, 133, 263n88; black subjection and, 263n78; books and, 117–18, 124, 127; coin box and, 6–7; foreign goods and, 117; gift books and, 127–28, 130–31; social class and, 110, 117–18, 120, 131; Subscription Anniversary and, 135, 137; whiteness and, 110, 112, 117, 120, 128, 131, 133, 263n78 Richards, Eliza, 133 Richards, Leonard, 26 Rights of All, 12 Rippingille, Alexander, 141 Ritten­house, John, 71 Rochester antislavery fair, 91, 121–22, 127, 170, 252n17 Roper, Moses, 58, 66, 68 Ruggles, David, 12, 199, 210, 282n96 Ruggles, Jeffrey, 203 runaway slave advertisements: affective meaning of, 62; aggregation of, 75, 76fig.;

black re­sis­tance in, 60, 63; slaveholder cruelty in, 60, 61fig., 62, 75; slave narratives and, 59–60, 62–64, 66, 68; visual iconography of, 60, 64, 243n19; whip image and, 60 “A Sabbath Morning Hymn” (Chapman), 3 salons, 110, 132–33, 265n116. See also Subscription Anniversary Sartrain, John, 141 “Sea-­Weed’s Address,” 99–100 sentimental consumerism, 89–93, 100–101, 107 Sinha, Manisha, 11 slaveholders: advertisements by, 59–60, 61fig., 62; black re­sis­tance to, 62–63; cruelty of, 39, 41, 44–45, 45fig., 46, 48, 50, 55, 60, 62–64, 75, 152, 167; l­egal testimony of, 55–56; separation of ­children from parents, 48, 148, 156, 180; visual surveillance of, 150, 154, 178, 188, 194–95, 208 The Slave Market of Amer­i­ca, 141, 160, 162fig., 163fig., 203 slave narratives: AASS authentication of, 58–60, 66, 68; AASS reframing of, 180, 182–83; AASS withdrawal of support, 72–73; antislavery fiction and, 80; black re­sis­tance in, 62–64, 179, 182, 188; black/white collaboration in, 58–59, 243n13; dissemination of, 68, 70–71; episodic structure of, 177; as factual compendia, 55–60, 62–63, 68, 79–80, 242n6; influence of American Slavery as It Is, 78–81; institutional antislavery and, 79–82; numeracy and, 54, 56; panoramic perspective in, 177–80, 187–89, 191, 203; punishment and cruelty in, 58–60, 62–64, 73, 75, 77, 79; as runaway advertisement, 59, 61–64, 68; standardized form of, 80; sympathetic role of, 62; testimony in, 55–59, 73, 75, 80–81, 177–79; white empiricism and, 73, 81. See also individual narratives slavery: black re­sis­tance to, 62–63; commodification of, 93, 100–103; landscape and, 175–76, 189, 208; modes of escape from, 199, 277n57, 277n58; moral argument against, 32, 34, 60; pa­noramas picturing, 148, 150, 152, 154–59, 172, 174, 176; pictorial repre­sen­ta­ tions of, 141–43, 145, 151fig., 152, 154, 268n16; scopic regime of, 150, 152, 168, 172, 174, 195, 208–9; threat to national ideals by, 160–61, 164, 166, 174 Slavery in the United States (C. Ball), 177–78, 181fig., 182–83, 273n9 Slave’s Friend, 19–20, 25, 70, 141, 183

294 Index “The Slave’s Prayer” (Beecher), 130 Smith, Gerrit, 193 Smith, James McCune, 131 Smith, John, 207–8 social class: antislavery fairs and, 108, 110, 120, 132; antislavery sentiment and, 258n8, 259n12; culture and, 110; racial hierarchies and, 120; refinement and, 110, 117–18, 120, 131; Subscription Anniversary and, 132–33, 135, 137. See also ­middle class “Song of the Walnuts,” 94–95, 96fig., 97fig. Soulouque, 213–14 South: anti-­abolitionism in, 26, 56, 71, 141; antislavery publications in, 12, 22, 70; gothic landscape of, 150, 166, 183, 212, 215; as imperial power, 156; slavery evidence from, 58–59, 62, 68, 72–73, 75 Southard, Nathaniel, 16–17, 18fig., 37, 50, 61fig., 68, 150 Southern Ideas of Liberty, 141 Souvestre, Emile, 127 speaking objects: antislavery fairs and, 89–90; consumerism and, 95, 107; hearts of oak as, 97; “it” narratives and, 252n20; J. Walker’s hand as, 104; kneeling slave icon and, 93; seaweed as, 99–100; singing walnuts as, 95; sympathy and freedom through, 92–93, 100; white identity and, 107 Spires, Derrick, 215, 283n117 Stanton, Henry, 14, 231n32 Star of Emancipation, 122 Stevens, Charles Emery, 207 Stewart, Susan, 122 Still, John Nelson, 176, 202–3, 207, 210–11, 213 Still, Peter, 202, 207, 210 Still, William, 202 “Story of Anthony Gayle,” 58 Stowe, Harriet Beecher: American Slavery as It Is and, 248n103; antislavery fairs and, 117, 120–22; antislavery fiction and, 81; Autographs for Freedom, 128, 130; gift books and, 130; A Key to U ­ ncle Tom’s Cabin, 54, 79–80, 248n103; Subscription Anniversary and, 133; ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 1, 8, 54, 78–80, 101–2, 118, 213 Strong, Thomas W., 183, 185fig., 187, 187fig., 207 Subscription Anniversary, 134fig., 136fig.; antislavery guests and, 133, 135, 137; as fundraiser, 137; refinement and, 135, 137; as salon, 132–33, 135, 137, 265n116; social status and, 132–33, 135, 137

sugar bowls, 85, 87fig. Sunderland, La Roy, 32, 50 “Tales of Oppression” (Hopper), 249n112 Tamarkin, Elisa, 108, 117, 258n8, 259n14 Tappan, Arthur, 13–14, 26–27, 50, 127, 220 Tappan, Lewis, 14, 26–27, 50, 52, 58, 127, 234n71, 237n105 temperance, 6, 14, 36 Testimony of God Against Slavery (Sunderland), 50 “Thermometer of the Heart,” 97, 98fig. Thome, James, 20, 44, 70–71 Thompson, George, 102, 141 Tocqueville, Alexis de, 127 Topsy doll, 102, 103fig. “Torturing American Citizens,” 151fig. Tourgueneff, Ivan, 127 Trial and Imprisonment of Jonathan Walker (J. Walker), 106fig. Truth, Sojourner, 79 ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), 8, 54, 78–80, 101–2, 118, 213 ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin Almanack or Abolitionist Memento, 79 ­Uncle Tom’s Cabin pa­norama, 202–3, 210, 278n64 ­Uncle Tom’s Companions (Edward), 79 Under­g round Railroad, 190, 211, 214–15, 275n31 “United States’ Internal Slave Trade,” 152, 153fig., 156 “United States Slave Trade,” 155, 155fig., 156 Vassa, Gustavus, 58 Views of Slavery, 141, 148, 149fig. Walker, David, 12 Walker, Jonathan, 104–5, 105fig., 106fig., 257n84 Washington, Burditt, 68 Watkins, James, 79 Watson, Henry, 79 Webster, Daniel, 192 Wedgwood, Josiah, 11, 48, 152 Weekly Advocate, 12 Weekly Contribution Plan, 1–2, 2fig., 3, 5, 16–17, 227n2, 227n7 Weld, Angelina Grimké, 73, 239n19, 248n103 Weld, Theodore: advice to Congress by, 27; almanacs and, 37, 42, 46, 78, 240n32, 247n74;

Index 295 American Slavery as It Is, 19, 73, 74fig., 76fig., 77–81, 166–67, 221; antislavery agents and, 15–16; antislavery libraries and, 25, 236n87; antislavery writings, 80, 247n74; as executive committee member, 14, 73, 234n63; The Power of Congress over the District of Columbia, 70 Weston, Anne Warren, 128 Wheatley, Phillis, 12, 213–14 Wheeler, Peter, 58 whip image, 151fig., 153fig., 159fig., 161fig., 163fig.; African American pa­noramas and, 178, 183, 185, 185fig., 187–88, 189fig., 191, 200, 208–9; The Liberator and, 271n48; as panoptic instrument, 172, 178, 183; pa­noramas and, 148, 150, 152, 154–55, 155fig., 159–60, 163, 168, 170, 172, 172fig.; runaway slave advertisements and, 60; slaveholder cruelty and, 44, 45fig., 154–55, 185, 185fig., 187, 191, 208–9, 274n21 white empiricism, 56–57, 73, 81 whiteness: AASS and, 220–21; antislavery fairs and, 93–94, 100, 107, 117; antislavery objects and, 107; black refinement and, 121–22; commodification fear and, 103–5; freedom from subjugation and, 105, 120; liberal subjectivity and, 90, 93, 100–101, 104; ­m iddle class and, 138, 259n14; refinement and, 110, 112, 117, 120, 128, 131, 133, 263n78; speaking objects and, 107; sympathy and, 100 white northern nationalism: AASS and, 220–21; African Americans and, 177, 200, 211, 217; flag image and, 195; institutional antislavery and, 7, 147, 165–66, 174, 200, 210;

pa­noramas and, 147, 156–57, 160, 164–68, 170, 174, 199 white w ­ omen: AASS and, 221; antislavery fairs and, 85–88, 90–91; antislavery movement leadership and, 253n25; consumerism and, 90–91 Whittier, John Greenleaf: antislavery fairs and, 118, 122; antislavery libraries and, 25, 71, 73, 236n87; antislavery writings, 60, 113, 141, 203, 220; as executive committee member, 14, 58; J. Walker and, 104; “A Northern Song,” 221; slave narratives and, 59; Williams narrative and, 20, 58–60, 63–64, 71, 73, 75, 77, 243n13 Why Work for the Slave? (Southard), 17, 18fig., 26, 68 Wilberforce, William, 42, 131 Wilkins, Shadrack. See Williams, James Williams, James, 65fig., 66fig., 69fig.; AASS and, 57–59, 71–73, 77–78, 81; as print persona, 242n5; southern attacks on credibility of, 71–72, 77, 249n120; Whittier authentication of, 59. See also Narrative of James Williams Williams, Keith, 178 Williams, Peter, 12 Williams, R. G., 22–23, 25, 77 Wilson, William J., 131, 176, 212–17, 282n106, 283n112, 283n115 Wood, Marcus, 184, 243n19 “Work for Abolitionists,” 24fig. Wosh, Peter, 6 Wright, Elizur, 13, 19, 58 Wright, Theodore, 12 Zion’s Watchman, 70

Ac k now l­e d g ment s

This book began in the archive. I am grateful to the librarians and staffs of the following institutions for sharing their expertise and guiding me through their collections: the Boston Athenaeum, the Boston Public Library, the Mas­sa­chu­ setts Historical Society, the American Antiquarian Society, Houghton Library of Harvard University, the Library Com­pany of Philadelphia, the Historical Society of Pennsylvania, Friends Historical Library of Swarthmore College, the New-­York Historical Society, the New York Public Library, the Newberry Library, Oberlin College Special Collections, the Western Reserve Historical Society, the Cincinnati History Library and Archives, and the Samuel J. May Anti-­Slavery Collection of Cornell University Library. I am especially indebted to Phillip Lapsansky and James Green of the Library Com­pany who supported this proj­ect at its earliest stage and Marie Lamoureux of the American Anti­ quarian Society who provided so many of its images. Closer to home, my re­ search was supported by Vanderbilt University’s incredible interlibrary loan staff, especially Jim Toplon, Rachel Adams, and Marilyn Pilley, and a group of stellar research assistants: Maya Socolovsky, Karissa McCoy, Elizabeth Festa, Katie Gordon, Nicole Seymour, Derrick Spires, and RJ Boutelle. Many thanks as well to Natalie Baggett, Faith Barter, and Jane Barry for their help in copy­ editing the manuscript; Jamie Adams for her assistance with the images; and Janis May for her encouragement. This book was generously funded by two grants from the National Endow­ ment for the Humanities: a summer stipend, which enabled early archival research, and a “We the ­People” University Fellowship, which enabled a year of writing. A short-­term fellowship from the Library Com­pany of Philadelphia and a Vanderbilt University Research Scholar’s Grant also provided instru­ mental support. I am grateful to the Poindexter Fund of the Vanderbilt En­glish Department for underwriting the purchase and production of the book’s illus­ trations. Colleagues both near and far w ­ ere instrumental to the proj­ect’s develop­ ment. At Vanderbilt I have the honor of working within a vibrant community of Americanists who inspire me daily: Cecelia Tichi, Dana Nelson, Houston

298

Acknowl­edgments

Baker, Colin Dayan, Hortense Spillers, Ifeoma Nwankwo, Michael Kreyling, and Vera Kutzinski. Special thanks go to Cecelia Tichi, whose mentorship has been a constant throughout my c­ areer, and Dana Nelson, who read e­ very word of the manuscript, sharpening its arguments and interventions, and provided unwavering support. Other Vanderbilt colleagues, who offered guidance and encouragement, include Jen Fay, Scott Juengel, Kathryn Schwarz, Nancy Reis­ man, Lorraine Lopez, Mark Wollaeger, Lynn Enterline, Bridget Orr, Jonathan Lamb, Jay Clayton, Amanda L ­ ittle, Vanessa Beasley, Joe Bandy, Kathy Gould, and Jefferson Cowie. I am especially grateful to Mark Schoenfield whose intel­ lectual generosity and critical acumen are matched only by the gift of his friendship. The proj­ect took its final shape during an Andrew W. Mellon Foun­ dation Sawyer Seminar on “The Age of Emancipation: Black Freedom in the Atlantic World.” My thanks to the seminar participants—­R ichard Blackett, Jane Landers, Catherine Molineux, Celso Castilho, Daniel Sharfstein, Herbert Marbury, Emily August, Caree Banton, Nihad Farooq—as well as Mona Frederick, Executive Director of the Robert Penn Warren Center for the Humanities, for a productive year. Many C19 colleagues served as key interlocutors for this proj­ect—­reading drafts, sharing resources and insights, asking crucial questions, and providing occasions to share early versions. I am grateful to Mary Chapman, Susan Ryan, Meredith McGill, Elisa Tamarkin, Trish Loughran, Julia Stern, Shawn Michelle Smith, Martha Cutter, Ezra Greenspan, Benjamin Fagan, Jay Grossman, Betsy Erkkila, Sean Goudie, Sarah Blackwood, Chris Castiglia, Ellen Weinauer, Mar­ cus Wood, David Anthony, Bob Levine, Jack McKigivan, Eric Gardner, John Ernest, Xiomara Santamarina, Caroline Levander, Leon Jackson, Radiclani Clytus, Benjamin Reiss, Martha Schoolman, Lloyd Pratt, Cindy Weinstein, Bill Gleason, Elizabeth Young, Alyssa MacLean, Nancy Bentley, Glenn Hen­ dler, Thadious Davis, Lara Cohen, Theresa Leininger-­Miller, David Morgan, David Paul Nord, and Janet Neary. At the University of Pennsylvania Press, I am deeply appreciative to Jerry Singerman who saw this proj­ect’s potential from its outset and expertly guided it to completion. My thanks as well to Hannah Blake and Zoe Kovacs for their editorial assistance and Lily Palladino for shepherding the manuscript through the editorial pro­cess. I am indebted to the press’s two readers—­Jeannine De­ Lombard and Marcy Dinius—­for their detailed, constructive, and generous responses. They helped me find the argument’s best shape and provided invalu­ able advice in the proj­ect’s final stages. ­Earlier versions of Chapters 2 and 6 and sections of the Introduction and Chapter 3 appeared in Book History 12 (2009): 129–155; MELUS 39 (2014): 12–41; Common-­Place; and The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative, ed. John Ernest (New York: Oxford



Acknowl­edgments 299

University Press, 2014), 157–59, respectively. I thank Johns Hopkins and Oxford University Presses for their permission to reprint. Fi­nally, I am grateful to friends who supported me—­body and soul—as I wrote this book: Beverly Ballaro and Paula Sampson, Craig Smith and Michèle Frank, Raima Evan, Beth Harrington, Diana Schneider, Carmen Dawson, and Michelle Sharp. My greatest thanks go to my ­family. I am grateful to my ­mother who has always expressed pride in my accomplishments. I am appreciative to Caroline, Chris, Lisa, Nate, and Charlotte for listening to my ideas and ap­ plauding my pro­gress. My husband, Yoshikuni, and our c­ hildren, Maya and Kaita, supported me each and e­ very day—­providing joy, comfort, and laughter along the way. I am fortunate to dwell in their embrace. I dedicate this book to them with love.