1In the mid-1830s, Richard Hildreth, a young historian and sometime editor of the Boston Atlas, spent over a year on a Florida plantation, where he wrote what is now regarded as the first antislavery novel—a fictive first-person account of life in bondage titled The Slave; or, Memoirs of Archy Moore. Having returned to the North in 1836, Hildreth sought a publisher for his book but could not find one either in Boston or New York. “No bookseller dared to publish anything of the sort,” he later explained, “and so complete was the reign of terror, that printers were almost afraid to set up the types.”1 As Leonard L. Richards has documented, the emergence of interracial immediatism in the early 1830s sparked a wave of antiabolitionist violence that peaked in the middle of the decade, with mobs and race riots being instigated by “gentlemen of property and standing.”2 In 1836 the Liberator also warned of a “reign of terror” across the North.3 In the end, Hildreth had no choice but to have the book printed at his own expense. Only the name of John H. Eastburn, a friend of Hildreth’s, founder of the Atlas and city printer of Boston, appeared on the title page.4 Hildreth himself did not acknowledge authorship of the novel at first, thinking it unsafe to do so: The Slave came out anonymously. It was shunned by newspapers and booksellers alike. In fact the book did not circulate outside abolitionist circles. The one paper that gave it some attention in the months following its publication was the Liberator, which reprinted a number of extracts, reviews, and letters from enthusiastic readers. Copies could be purchased at the book depository of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society; most of them had been sold by mid-1837.5 A few editions were published throughout the 1840s by various antislavery societies and minor reform-oriented publishers, but even as it grew in popularity the novel failed to reach “the great reading public,” as the Liberator called it.6 Hildreth’s book would have to wait until the 1850s to find a general audience, when a Boston publisher who had previously rejected it brought out a new (enlarged) edition in the wake of the critical and commercial success of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Under its new title, The White Slave; or, Memoirs of a Fugitive (later Archy Moore, the White Slave; or, Memoirs of a Fugitive), the novel brought Hildreth his long-awaited success, not only in the United States but also in Great Britain and France, where a staggering number of editions and translations were issued in quick succession: the years 1852 and 1853 saw the publication of at least four editions in London and four French translations as L’Esclave blanc in Paris.7 In the absence of an international copyright law before 1891, European publishers were free to produce pirate editions of American novels (and vice versa). Just like Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which it predated, The White Slave eventually became an international bestseller, confirming the European predilection for American antislavery novels.8

2 What the publication history of Hildreth’s novel reveals is that before the 1850s abolitionists could hardly rely on the commercial publishing industry to get their ideas into print. In the first part of this essay I document more fully the extent of the censorship of abolitionist writings by book trade professionals in the antebellum era—a period when the American publishing industry grew dramatically. Going back in time in the second part, I study the various strategies developed by black and white campaigners against slavery over the first half of the nineteenth century to publish and disseminate their views to as wide an audience as possible.

“The servile publishers of that day”: abolition, publishing, and censorship

3As Claire Parfait has emphasized, “American publishers [in the antebellum period] generally approached anti-slavery literature with extreme caution,” turning down manuscripts or excising sections which they deemed too subversive.9 Harper & Brothers, for instance, went out of their way to conciliate their Southern readership. In 1835, a South Carolina newspaper objected to a book just published by the New York firm, Andrew Reed and James Matheson’s A Narrative of the Visit to the American Churches, by the Deputation from the Congregational Union of England and Wales, because it contained “incendiary” matter.10 Indeed, Reed and Matheson, two British Congregationalist ministers who had recently toured the United States, expressed strong antislavery sentiments in the second volume of the book:

Yes, the slave must go free! Slavery now has a legal existence only in America. But America is the very place, of all others, where it cannot, must not be tolerated. […] Much evil may be; but this cannot be! What, slavery, in the last home of liberty! The vilest despotism in the presence of boasted equality! The deepest oppression of man, where the rights of man are professedly most honoured! No, this cannot continue. Slavery and Liberty cannot exist together; either slavery must die, or liberty must die.11

4Having been alerted to these controversial statements, Harper & Brothers immediately wrote to the editor of the newspaper, claiming that they had not suspected anything “improper” and had agreed to publish the work without examining it carefully. To prove their good faith, they added that on several occasions they had rejected potentially profitable manuscripts precisely on account of their “objectionable” politics with respect to slavery. They had just decided against bringing out an American edition of a book of travels first published in London by social reformer Edward S. Abdy— “we were told […] that Mr. Abdy was an abolitionist,” they wrote, “and we would have nothing to do with him.”12 Reflecting on this episode a decade later, a member of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society stated that Abdy’s Journal of a Residence and Tour in the United States of North America “was tabooed in consequence of [the author’s] anti-slavery fidelity, and put under the ban of the servile publishers of that day.”13 Again, in 1836, Harper & Brothers inadvertently republished Tales of the Woods and Fields by British popular writer Anne Marsh-Caldwell, a work that referred in a footnote to the “dreadful cruelties” inflicted on slaves in the “abominable regions” of the American South.14 Harper & Brothers apologized to the Charleston bookseller who had pointed out the passage and made clear that “we uniformly decline publishing works calculated to interfere in any way with southern rights and southern institutions.”15 A new expurgated edition of Tales of the Woods and Fields was soon printed.

5Of course the most famous example of a literary work being rejected by a publisher on account of its antislavery politics is Uncle Tom’s Cabin. First serialized in 1851-1852 in the National Era, a Washington, DC-based antislavery newspaper edited by Gamaliel Bailey, Uncle Tom’s Cabin may have been submitted for publication in book form to Harper & Brothers, who had already published Stowe’s The Mayflower (1843) as well as several of her sister Catharine’s works. It is easy to imagine how the firm might have reacted to such a proposal if it was ever made.16 Boston publishers Phillips, Sampson briefly considered issuing the book, but one of the partners felt that “an anti-slavery novel published in an anti-slavery newspaper” was likely to sell poorly and disturb the firm’s relations with the South.17 Politics, he added, should not interfere with business—as if declining Uncle Tom was not a politically motivated decision. In the end, Stowe’s novel appeared under the imprint of John P. Jewett, bringing him instant success.18 Unsurprisingly, Jewett called Phillips, Sampson “a pro slavery concern.”19 Probably trying to make up for their past error of judgment, the partners in Phillips, Sampson later turned to antislavery literature, publishing novels such as Mary Hayden Green Pike’s Ida May: A Story of Things Actual and Possible (1854) and John Townsend Trowbridge’s Neighbor Jackwood (1857)—the former the story of a white girl kidnapped into slavery, the latter an indictment of the Fugitive Slave Act—and, crucially, Stowe’s second antislavery novel, Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856).

6Based in Boston, Jewett was one of the rare commercial publishers who in the 1850s showed a consistent (and not entirely profit-driven) interest in abolitionist literature of all kinds. Besides Uncle Tom’s Cabin, his list included editions of three speeches by antislavery politician Charles Sumner, a book by Garrisonian abolitionist Giles B. Stebbins denouncing colonization as “a scheme of wholesale expatriation unparalleled in its atrocity and wickedness,” the first volume of the abolitionist gift book Autographs for Freedom, an edition of the autobiographical narrative of former slave Josiah Henson, and the “Juvenile Anti-Slavery Toy Books” series designed specifically for children—among other titles by Hildreth, William Jay, and William Wells Brown.20 That a thriving commercial publisher was actively involved in the production of such books allowed for their extensive distribution in the North and Northwest (the company had a branch in Cleveland, Ohio) but also legitimized a literature otherwise decried as “inflammatory.” Writing to Sumner concerning the speech against the Kansas-Nebraska Act the senator had delivered in Congress on February 21, 1854, Jewett asked: “How would it do for me to print an elegant edition of it on choice paper large type, & gilt edges?” Barely a week later, Jewett sent Sumner copies of the work titled The Landmark of Freedom. “I hope you will consider the garb worthy of the contents,” he wrote. “I want Southern Senators to see it, & to […] know from them if a speech can be printed in that style in slavery [’] s dominions?”21 Printed on fine paper with gilt edges, Sumner’s words gained an authority and prestige that they did not have in Congress, where Sumner was regularly booed—if not prevented from speaking—by proslavery opponents.22 Jewett was willing to lose money in the process: “we got it up for other reasons than to make money,” he wrote about the pamphlet.23

7Outside John P. Jewett and Company and a handful of other establishments, most commercial publishers kept well away from anything that smacked of abolitionism, even after Uncle Tom’s Cabin proved that a market existed for antislavery stories.24 Stowe might have been too optimistic when she wrote in 1856 that “now, every publisher and every press pours out anti-slavery books of every form and description, lectures, novels, tracts, biographies.”25 George R. Graham, the antiabolitionist editor of Graham’s Magazine, also claimed that “the strong, money-making side for a publisher now, is the antislavery side,” when in fact anti-Tom novels proved extremely profitable as well: Mary H. Eastman’s Aunt Phillis’s Cabin; or, Southern Life as It Is (1852) had a sale of 18,000 copies in just a month.26 According to Nina Baym, many more pro- than antislavery novels were reviewed in magazines.27 While the early 1850s did witness what Donald Liedel calls a “vogue of Uncle Tom literature”—and what contemporaries referred to as “Uncle Tomitudes” or (more deprecatingly) “Uncle Tom-Foolery”—many antislavery writers whose works bore no relation to Uncle Tom, whether in title or contents, still found it difficult to get their manuscripts into print.28 Sentimental antislavery novels sold well; abolitionist tracts much less so. Having recently relocated from Maryland to Philadelphia where he hoped his sons would be protected from “the common prejudices of slave society,” John Dixon Long, a minister of the Methodist Episcopal Church, decided to commit his views on slavery to writing. The “city of brotherly love,” however, was far from the abolitionist haven of his imaginings. “I found prevailing a vast deal of pro-slavery sentiment,” he later wrote. “When my manuscript was ready, no publisher […] that I approached would undertake its publication.” Just like Hildreth twenty years before, Long self-published Pictures of Slavery in Church and State, a book whose introduction ended with the rallying cry: “May the blessing of Christ rest on the antislavery cause!”29 At the exact same time, Hinton Rowan Helper, a native of North Carolina, failed to secure a Northern (let alone a Southern) publisher for his own book manuscript, in which he blamed slavery for hindering the economic and cultural progress of the South while limiting the opportunities of nonslaveholding whites (humanitarian concerns were absent from Helper’s criticism of slavery). The Impending Crisis of the South, as it was called, was eventually issued in 1857 by an obscure New York book agent and at the author’s risk.30

8Booksellers were generally no more daring than publishers. This was true in the South, where circulation of any kind of antislavery material was discouraged if not banned— “a bookseller who should offer [Helper’s book] openly for sale [there] would be in danger of Lynch law,” wrote one abolitionist—but also in the North.31 While most were quite willing to store copies of popular novels such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin, The White Slave and Ida May, they seemed to stop short of selling Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861), a self-published autobiographical narrative that drew particular attention to the sexual exploitation of female slaves. “The Boston booksellers are dreadfully afraid of soiling their hands with an Anti-Slavery book,” lamented white editor Lydia Maria Child, “so we have a good deal of trouble in getting the book into the market.”32 Sydney Howard Gay concurred in the National Anti-Slavery Standard: “Booksellers, like other people, are afraid of, and do not love Abolitionists.”33 Abolition always was a radical doctrine which few book trade professionals would endorse. Publishers, in particular those who published proslavery books, might well have to publically acknowledge their responsibility in promoting slavery in the not-too-distant future, as other institutions—universities and newspapers for instance—have already started doing. As two scholars have recently argued, “We need the book publishers who have been responsible for promulgating ideas of white supremacy to acknowledge their role in creating the social world of today.”34

“The general diffusion of abolition light”: abolitionist infrastructures of print

9Considering the many obstacles that stood in their way, one might wonder how abolitionists—in Hildreth’s words, a “small and […] almost proscribed sect”—got their writings into print and how they circulated them at all.35 In the second part of this essay, I suggest that black and white abolitionists alike turned to alternative infrastructures of print.36 They operated mostly outside of the publishing industry which, despite its unprecedented development in the three decades before the Civil War, was not as far advanced and organized as is sometimes thought. Drawing from the work of scholars such as Ronald J. and Mary Saracino Zboray, Leon Jackson, and David Paul Nord, I show that various (legal and illegal) networks of (more or less artisanal) publication and (more or less social) dissemination existed through which abolitionists could (more or less extensively) publicize their views.37 A large part of antislavery activism actually consisted in creating and maintaining these networks—founding publishing venues, locating sympathetic printers, raising necessary funds, arranging for distribution. Mastering the logistics of publishing proved indispensable to spreading the antislavery gospel.

10Because they had even fewer publishing possibilities than whites, black abolitionists were very much invested in creating their own infrastructures of print. As the Zborays emphasize, “Black publishing houses and presses were relatively rare, short-lived, and had limited circulation” in the first half of the nineteenth century. “Social networks that provided entrées to publishers were less extensive for African Americans than for whites.”38 As early as the 1790s, Northern free blacks articulated their demands for abolition of slavery and racial justice in the form of pamphlets whose production they supervised without the assistance of (white) publishers.39 Richard Newman, one of the historians who has brought attention to the tradition of black pamphleteering, notes that many of these pamphlets started as oral performances delivered in the context of the new social institutions formed by Northern blacks after the American Revolution—independent black churches, mutual aid groups, benevolent societies, Masonic lodges.40 Committing a speech, sermon or oration to print served various purposes. Most importantly, it extended the audience of the original performance, carrying African American voices to physically, temporally and symbolically distant readers. At the end of his 1810 Dialogue between a Virginian and an African Minister, Baltimore Methodist minister Daniel Coker provided a list of eminent African Americans—Absalom Jones, Peter Williams Jr., William Hamilton, and Henry Johnson among others— “who have given proofs of talents” in their sermons and addresses. Although he may not have heard most of these speeches, which were delivered in New York and Philadelphia, Coker may have read them in pamphlet form after they had been published and sent to him.41 Pamphlets also demonstrated that “African Americans were not the passive, inarticulate underlings that Enlightenment taxonomy often projected.”42 They disproved claims of black inferiority by displaying their authors’ oratorical and literary skills. Giving an address to the New York African Society for Mutual Relief in 1809, Hamilton brandished a copy of Peter Williams’s own 1808 Oration on the Abolition of the Slave Trade and commented:

I hold in my hand a specimen of African genius […]. This book contains an introductory address and an oration on the abolition of the slave trade, delivered in the African Church, the first of January eighteen hundred and eight, by two young men [Peter Williams Jr. and Henry Sipkins] whom you are generally acquainted with […]. If we continue to produce specimens like these, we shall soon put our enemies to the blush; abashed and confounded they shall quit the field, and no longer urge their superiority of souls.43

11Hamilton produced the pamphlet as material, incontrovertible evidence of African Americans’ intellectual capabilities. Flimsy though it was (the pamphlet is 28 pages long), he described it as a “book,” a term that downplayed its topicality and, conversely, emphasized its literariness and sophistication. Williams’s authorship of the oration having been questioned by skeptical listeners, print publication with Williams’s name on the title page and certificates at the end of the volume further testified to its authenticity.44 Finally, as Joseph Rezek points out, Hamilton’s “striking moment of self-reflexivity” suggested that “his own oration and future orations would also be printed for distribution.”45 Indeed, black-authored orations on the abolition of the slave trade were published almost annually between 1808 and 1823.

12Pamphlets were the ideal format for quick and easy dissemination of black antislavery texts. Most of the orations on the abolition of the slave trade seem to have been available in print only a few weeks after they were first delivered on January 1 of each year— “a date of collective rejoicing” among free African Americans, Marie-Jeanne Rossignol notes, as it marked the anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade in the United States in 1808.46 Their production usually followed a similar script. The organizing committee of the January celebrations would first commend the author of a given oration for his performance and ask him for a written copy, as it did for Williams in 1808:

THE Committee of arrangements are so well satisfied with the Oration on the Abolition of the Slave Trade, that they apprehend a usefulness will arise from its publication. We therefore request a Copy may be furnished for that purpose. We were pleased with the delivery of the Oration, and we hope the orator will have the satisfaction, not only in reflecting that he has done justice to the subject, but that it may be a means of enlightening the minds of some, and of promoting the great work of emancipation, as it relates to the African race in general, who are still held in bondage in the United States, and in other parts of the world.47

13Local black churches, lodges, clubs and societies underwrote printing costs, as suggested by the phrases that often grace the title pages of these pamphlets— “Published by the Desire of the Members of said Lodge” (Prince Hall, A Charge, Delivered to the African Lodge, June 24, 1797), “Printed for the use of the congregation” (Absalom Jones, A Thanksgiving Sermon, Preached January 1, 1808 […] on Account of the Abolition of the Slave Trade), “Published by the Trustees for the benefit of said Society” (Nathaniel Paul, An Address, Delivered on the Celebration of the Abolition of Slavery, in the State of New-York, July 5, 1827)—which make visible the wider social worlds from which these documents emerged.48 Printers varied depending on the city and time of publication. Black New Yorkers seem to have found an ally in the person of John C. Totten, a Methodist printer who issued a number of black-authored pamphlets, including four orations on the abolition of the slave trade—those of Henry Sipkins in 1809, William Miller and Henry Johnson in 1810, and Adam Carman in 1811.49 It is unknown what the average print run was, although it was probably limited, if only because of scant resources: according to one source, Jones’s 1808 Thanksgiving Sermon was printed in an edition of less than 300 copies.50 Once published, these pamphlets “cost little and […] were easy to distribute or to carry about,” Dorothy Porter notes.51 How exactly and among whom they were disseminated are questions that still need investigating. Williams’s 1808 Oration, for instance, was for sale in New York (where it was printed) and New Bedford, Massachusetts, which made it available to white audiences—something that Hamilton implicitly called for when predicting that this “specimen of African genius” would “put our enemies to the blush.”52 Still, blacks themselves must have composed the primary audience. Orators, after all, directly addressed their “beloved brethren” and “much respected Friends.” What this brief discussion of early black pamphlets makes clear is that their production (and dissemination) was a collective rather than individual enterprise. As such, it was an important aspect of the community-building efforts of free African Africans throughout the urban North and upper South in the early nineteenth century.

14While it closed the doors of wary white publishers, the rise of an organized abolition movement in the 1830s opened up new opportunities for antislavery publishing. As soon as it was created in December 1833, the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS) insisted that print production and distribution was to play a major role in the fight against slavery. “We shall circulate, unsparingly and extensively, anti-slavery tracts and periodicals,” William Lloyd Garrison wrote in the society’s Declaration of Sentiments.53 Facts and arguments needed to be communicated to as many people and as rapidly as possible in both the North and South. Abolitionists, who at that time prioritized moral suasion over other antislavery strategies such as the use of violence or the ballot, strongly believed in the transformative power of print. They theorized it in their publications, writing that “Those who can be induced to read, will most assuredly be converted, and thoroughly converted” and that “a book-made convert, as a general principle, stays made.”54 At the end of the American Anti-Slavery Almanac, for 1841, Lewis Tappan asked his readers:

Have you thoroughly read this Almanac? It was not written to be run over as a common almanac. No, no. You have been presented with facts, arguments, and truths that are of the highest importance, and deserve very serious attention. Make yourself, then, master of all the thoughts contained in this little book. And this is not all. Read it to your family, and talk over its contents with them. See to it that your neighbors, your relatives, your minister, your deacon, the schoolmaster— all over whom you have influence—have a copy likewise. Keep some copies on hand to lend, to give away, or to sell. Dont be ashamed to “disperse knowledge,” especially anti-slavery knowledge.55

15When they weighed the respective merits of the spoken versus the written word, abolitionists always decided in favor of the latter. Antislavery lecturing was necessary but not sufficient: “however important the services of the travelling agent, however convincing his arguments, startling his facts, or persuasive his eloquence, there is something still wanting to secure complete success,” went the Advocate of Freedom.56 That something was an antislavery library to provide the reluctant listener with reading material. As a case in point, the Friend of Man mentioned an old man who had “long resisted the living arguments as they fell from the lips of the anti-slavery lecturer,” but had at length “read himself out an abolitionist.”57 The written word, it seemed, was irresistible.

16Other abolitionists had been concerned with dispersing antislavery knowledge in print long before the 1830s. One century earlier, Quaker activist Benjamin Lay, who actively participated in the print culture of his city of Philadelphia, had published the eloquently titled All Slave-Keepers that Keep the Innocent in Bondage, Apostates (1738).58 A few decades later, fellow Quaker Anthony Benezet spent considerable time “disseminat[ing] his ideas through petitions, letters, and pamphlets,” including his influential Some Historical Account of Guinea (1771).59 The British campaign against slavery and the slave trade in the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century also relied on the publication of newspapers, essays, tracts, and slave narratives such as The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789). In the United States, free African Americans from Richard Allen and Absalom Jones to James Forten and Maria W. Stewart published numerous pamphlets, as discussed above. Some, like David Walker, managed to have them circulated in the South: with the help of black and white sailors, copies of Walker’s 1829 Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World were smuggled into the ports of Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, and Louisiana—causing these states and others to further criminalize the circulation of so-called “abolition doctrines.”60 Meanwhile, the first explicitly antislavery newspapers were being created—Elihu Embree’s Manumission Intelligencer (founded in 1819), Benjamin Lundy’s Genius of Universal Emancipation (1821), Samuel Cornish and John Russwurm’s Freedom’s Journal (1827).

17Second-wave abolitionists, however, systematized the use of print for antislavery purposes. In the 1830s, the AASS devoted a significant part of its resources to the mass production and dissemination of printed material that included books, pamphlets, tracts, circulars, newspapers, and lithographs. The society’s publications were commonly reproduced in the tens, if not in the hundreds of thousands—and could be purchased by the dozen or by the hundred. What abolitionists had in mind was a public space filled with antislavery propaganda. About one of their publications they wrote:

Let it be thrown into every line-boat, and packet—into every bar-room, shop and store—into every counting room, office, parlor, and kitchen—wherever there is a tongue to speak, or a heart to feel. A single copy of this two-penny tract will frighten a whole neighborhood out of their stupidity! Try it, if you dare !61

18In order to realize its ideal of a print propaganda that would be so widely disseminated as to be nearly inescapable, the AASS refined mass communication methods first devised by earlier evangelical associations such as the American Bible Society (founded in 1816), the American Sunday School Union (1824), and the American Tract Society (1825). These associations were pioneers in the use of new technologies of print: before commercial publishers did, they turned to stereotyping and invested in steam-powered printing to produce huge quantities of Bibles, psalm books, devotional books, and pamphlets.62 They also adopted an elaborate distribution system by which a central book and tract depository in Boston or New York supplied regional depositories with printed material. There was virtually nobody on American soil that these evangelicals could not reach through print. The AASS successfully applied these same methods all through the 1830s, scattering antislavery tracts, pamphlets, and newspapers “like rain-drops, over the land.”63 As David Paul Nord writes, “the abolitionists adopted all of the key organizational and publishing strategies of evangelical book and tract work, and they applied those strategies to a decidedly unpopular cause.”64 With the financial support of Arthur and Lewis Tappan in particular, both of whom were not just prominent white abolitionists but also successful businessmen, the AASS developed its own alternative infrastructure of print that functioned independently from the commercial publishing industry. The society became “a publisher in its own right,” although one not guided by profit—and occasionally articulating an anticommercial message.65

19One striking feature of abolitionist print culture is how diversified it was, both in terms of genre and format. Newspapers, magazines, and other periodicals were arguably the most important vehicle for “the general diffusion of abolition light.”66 They were less costly to produce than pamphlets and books; they traveled easily; when issued in the regular format, they could not be excluded from the mail by postal officers.67 In the second half of the 1830s, the AASS published five different periodicals—three monthlies (Human Rights, The Anti-Slavery Record, The Slave’s Friend), one weekly (The Emancipator), and one quarterly (The Quarterly Anti-Slavery Magazine). Many other titles were published by state societies (The Herald of Freedom in New Hampshire, The Friend of Man in New York, The Philanthropist in Ohio) or independently (The Liberator, The Colored American), in which case their editors heavily relied on subscriptions and individual donations. Following in the footsteps of early black abolitionists, the AASS also sponsored the publication of pamphlets such as Angelina Grimké’s 36-page Appeal to the Christian Women of the South (1836) as well as longer works, two of the most popular being James A. Thome and J. Horace Kimball’s Emancipation in the West Indies (1838), an account of the effects of emancipation in the British colonies of Antigua, Barbadoes, and Jamaica after the 1833 Slavery Abolition Act, and Theodore Weld and the Grimké sisters’ American Slavery as It Is (1839), a compilation of personal narratives by Southerners and excerpts from Southern newspapers that revealed the horrors of slavery. The book-length publications of the AASS also included a slave narrative, Narrative of James Williams, an American Slave (1838), in which Williams told of his treatment on a Virginia plantation, his displacement to Alabama where he was employed as a driver, and eventual escape to the North. Naturally the AASS and other antislavery societies distributed many more pamphlets and books than they published. Available at the Boston depository of the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society in 1840 were recently-published tracts by American abolitionists (Lydia Maria Child’s 1833 Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans, Angelina Grimké’s 1837 Appeal to the Women of the Nominally Free States), older titles first published in Great Britain (John Wesley’s 1774 Thoughts upon Slavery, Elizabeth Heyrick’s 1824 Immediate, Not Gradual Abolition), other slave narratives (Charles Ball’s 1836 Slavery in the United States, Peter Wheeler’s 1839 Chains and Freedom), collections of poems by Phillis Wheatley, John Greenleaf Whittier and Elizabeth Margaret Chandler, and so forth. The only novel listed in the catalogue of the depository was Hildreth’s The Slave.68

20Abolitionists did not just sell these works in their offices and depositories. They strove to place their newspapers, tracts and pamphlets in the hands of large and geographically diverse audiences. Unsurprisingly, they first targeted those whom they wanted to convince the most of the evils of slavery, namely white Southerners. Their most famous print campaign was the Great Postal Campaign of 1835, during which the AASS mailed hundreds of thousands of free antislavery publications to a number of influential community leaders in the South. As William W. Freehling writes, “Abolitionists’ notion of converting slaveholders was hardly zany in the context of the early 1830s. No intransigent slaveholding class, determined to keep slavery forever, had developed beyond South Carolina.”69 Virginians had been considering a gradual end to slavery only a few years before, in the wake of Nat Turner’s 1831 revolt. There was hope among abolitionists that the campaign would rekindle the dying embers of Southern antislavery ideology. Instead, it infuriated the white South. On the night of July 29, a group of men in Charleston broke into the post office, stole abolitionist material that was waiting to be delivered, and made a bonfire of it the next day (fig. 4). Similar episodes (though of a lesser magnitude) occurred in the following years, for instance in Richmond, Virginia, in October 1838, when copies of Human Rights, the Liberator, the Friend of Man and Narrative of James Williams were burned in the city’s main street.70 Although federal law made it a crime to interfere with the mail, Postmaster General Amos Kendall, a slaveholder himself, did nothing to prevent such actions; on the contrary, he facilitated censorship of abolition propaganda in the mails.71 The AASS may have developed a powerful infrastructure, but without the support of the federal postal system, it stopped at the doors of the South. Print was resistible after all.

Figure 4. Attack on the Post Office, Charleston, SC, political cartoon (1835), American Antiquarian Society (Worcester, MA).

21Although it never repeated the experiment of the Great Postal Campaign, the AASS did its best to reach a Northern reading audience that would hope-fully be more receptive to calls for antislavery action. There was one title in particular that Lewis Tappan, James Birney and others intensively promoted in 1838: Narrative of James Williams, an American Slave. Former slaves such as William Grimes (Life of William Grimes, the Runaway Slave, 1825), Solomon Bayley (A Narrative of Some Remarkable Incidents, in the Life of Solomon Bayley, Formerly a Slave, 1825) and Charles Ball had already published their narratives at the time. Yet none had been able to garner much attention. Abolitionists were convinced that a first-hand account of life in slavery, should it be widely advertised, would touch the consciences of Northern men, women, and children. Once again, they took their cue from evangelicals, who had already underlined the positive effects of the narrative form: “Where narrative can be made the medium of conveying truth, it is eagerly to be embraced,” a leader in the New England Tract Society asserted, “as it not only engages the attention, but also assists the memory, and makes a deeper impression on the heart.”72 Accordingly, abolitionists decided to publicize the story of a fugitive slave recently arrived in New York, James Williams. Quaker poet John Greenleaf Whittier acted as Williams’s amanuensis, trying to adhere as closely as possible to the language of the illiterate slave. “The slave has spoken for himself,” Whittier announced in his preface to the narrative.73 The AASS then launched a massive media campaign: “we have no doubt it is perfectly practicable, during the present year, to put A MILLION of copies of James Williams into as many families in the free states,” proclaimed the editor of the Emancipator.74 First published as a bound volume, Narrative of James Williams was soon reissued in a cheap edition that took the form of an eight-page pamphlet and cost only one dollar per hundred copies, which made it easier to disseminate. While “4,000 copies of James Williams’ Narrative, designed to supply every family in the country” were being circulated in Litchfield County, Connecticut, the antislavery society of Utica, New York, was having it scattered “throughout the city—a copy left with every family, and in every store and office, and two or three copies in boarding houses.”75 State, county and town auxiliaries purchased copies of the narrative in bulk from the AASS in New York and then distributed them gratuitously to local communities. Abolitionists understood that “books need movement and movements,” to quote from Joanna Brooks’s recent discussion of early black material texts. “Books must move to live. They need constituencies, or dynamic social contexts. […] Highly motile, easily reprintable cheap print and pamphlets are better adapted and thus have better chances at reaching more readers and staying in print longer.”76

22As historians of the abolition movement have shown, the schism that shattered organized abolitionism in 1840 left the AASS financially weakened. In the 1840s and 1850s the society was no longer able to mount large-scale operations such as the publication of Narrative of James Williams. Both the AASS, now led by Garrison, and Tappan’s newly created American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society (AFASS) functioned with reduced means,77 to the extent that even prominent abolitionists—Wendell Phillips, Parker Pillsbury, William Wells Brown, Henry Bibb—had to pay out of pocket for the printing of their works.78 Still, abolitionism continued to provide a “dynamic social context” in which black and white indictments of slavery could circulate in print form with relative ease, as long as their authors were closely associated with the movement. The almost professionalized publishing infrastructure of the 1830s–what Trish Loughran terms a “corporate model”79—gave way to forms of dissemination that were more artisanal but also more embodied—and not necessarily less efficient. The narrative of Frederick Douglass is a case in point. While no plan of systematic distribution was adopted for Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), abolitionists activated their formal and informal networks to circulate the book. Copies were often mailed, sold, lent, or given among fellow activists such as an anonymous “friend to liberty,” who claimed in the Liberator that he had “purchased one dozen copies […] to spread abroad in the community.”80 Many other antislavery advocates—in the United States as well as in the British Isles—took it upon themselves to buy copies that they would then sell among their family, friends, and neighbors. Perhaps the most active promoter of the narrative was Douglass himself. In the summer of 1845, Douglass gave daily lectures in Massachusetts and New York, at the end of which he sold copies of the Narrative. The women and men who had listened to him, applauded him, and laughed at his ironic remarks against his former master could purchase the book from the hands of its author once the lecture was over. Whether they were circulated by Douglass or by black and white abolitionists on both sides of the Atlantic, copies of the Narrative “functioned to create and sustain powerful social bonds” between Douglass and his audiences on the one hand and between supporters of abolition on the other.81 The Narrative served as the cement that held the transatlantic abolitionist world together in the mid-1840s.

23In an environment that was generally hostile to the publication and circulation of antislavery literature, abolitionists found creative ways of putting “facts, arguments, and truths” into print and having them reach potential recruits to the cause. Self-publication, clandestine or gratuitous distribution, hand-selling, dissemination through the postal system were some of the means that were used by Hildreth, Hamilton, Walker, Tappan and Douglass to circulate their (and others’) books, pamphlets, and newspapers. Abolitionists may not have been able to realize their “fantasies of universal circulation”: the one title that came close to being “universally circulated” was Stowe’s (commercially published) Uncle Tom’s Cabin, a work whose politics did not exactly coincide with those of radical abolitionists.82 Yet they managed to produce a rich and varied print culture which, in conjunction with antislavery lectures, petitions, and other forms of mobilization, transformed the antebellum political and literary landscape.