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The Rhetoric of Black Abolitionism: An Exploratory Analysis of Antislavery
Newspapers in New York State

Author(s): Timothy Shortell

Source: Social Science History , Spring, 2004, Vol. 28, No. 1 (Spring, 2004), pp. 75-109

Published by: Cambridge University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40267834

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https://www.jstor.org/stable/40267834

Timothy Shortell

The Rhetoric of Black Abolitionism

An Exploratory Analysis of Antislavery Newspapers

in New York State

In a span of thirty years, from 1832 to 1862, American abolitionists were able to

reverse public opinion in the North on the question of slavery. Despite the dramatic

political shift, the emergent hostility to “slave power” did not lead to an embrace of

racial equality. Abolitionists, in the face of America’s long history of racism, sought

to link opposition to slavery with a call for civil rights. For black abolitionists, this

was not only a strategic problem, it was a matter of self-definition. In the middle

of the nineteenth century, the meanings of liberty, labor, and independence were the

basis of

contentious republican politics. Black abolitionists used this rhetorical raw

material to fashion “fighting words” with which to generate solidarity and deliver

their moral claims to the nation. This research employs an innovative strategy for

the analysis of the discursive field, in an exploratory content analysis of five black

newspapers in antebellum New York State. Computerized content analysis coded for

themes, rhetoric, and ideology in a sample of more than 36,000 words of newspaper

text. Although the discourse of black abolitionism is a social critique, it also contains

a positive assertion of what free blacks would become. As important as the theme of

“slavery” was to the discourse, so too were “colored” and “brotherhood” This analy-

sis consistently showed the key features of political antislavery argumentation to be

most common in the Douglass newspapers (the North Star and Frederick Douglass’

Paper;.

In a span of thirty years, from 1832 to 1862, American abolitionists were

able to reverse public opinion in the North on the question of slavery. How

did this remarkable change occur? What role did abolitionism play in the

Social Science History 28:1 (spring 2004), 75-109

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76 Social Science History

political developments that led to the Civil War and emancipation? While the

main cause of death for American slavery may have been economic, ideology

certainly played a part (Foner 1970, 1980). Abolitionism deserves credit for

having continually pressed the question and for having demanded that north-

erners-particularly politicians and partisans- decide where they stood on
the issue.

Despite the dramatic political shift, the emergent hostility of northern-

ers to “slave power” did not lead to an embrace of racial equality. The pre-

dicament for abolitionists was to figure out how to link opposition to slavery

with a call for civil rights, in the face of America’s long history of racism. For

black abolitionists, this was not only a strategic problem, it was a matter of

self-definition. The goal of the movement, of course, was the eradication of

slavery in the United States, but the process through which this would be

accomplished involved the articulation of a free black American identity.

For free blacks, the matter of identity could not be left unresolved. It was,

after all, their future to be dreamed of and planned for. Black abolitionists,

in the day-to-day business of challenging slavery in a racist society, worked

out the details of their desideratum. They demanded liberty and equality and

justified their claims in the terms of America’s political and cultural heri-

tage. In doing so, they realized that it was necessary to articulate what their

community would become when granted these rights. Their assertion that

“we are just like you” was not merely a pragmatic strategy to undermine

the validation of chattel slavery based on race, it was a sincere expression of
their sense of what it meant to be American. In the middle of the nineteenth

century, the meanings of liberty, labor, and independence were the basis of

contentious republican politics. Black abolitionists used this rhetorical raw

material to fashion “fighting words” with which to generate solidarity and
deliver their moral claims to the nation.1

George A. Levesque (1970) noted that the large and impressive litera-

ture on American abolitionism had all but ignored the contributions of blacks.

Thirty years later, the neglect continues. Except for recent work by Frankie

Hutton (1992, 1993) and Bernell Tripp (1992, 1995) on the antebellum black

press, and John L. Lucaites (1997) on black rhetoric, there has been little

attention given to the role black leaders had in shaping antislavery activ-

ism, antebellum political discourse, or American reform. A complete under-

standing of abolitionism as a social movement is not possible without such

scholarship.

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Rhetoric of Black Abolitionism: Antislavery Newspapers in New York State 77

The social movements literature includes a thorough and engaging

debate of theoretical perspectives on the symbolic dimension of movements,

and in particular, on the role of discourse. Framing theory remains the most

common theoretical perspective (see Tarrow 1998; Snow and Benford 1992).

Marc W. Steinberg (1998) has argued for a new analytical metaphor that cap-

tures the dynamic quality of meaning in social movements. His use of the

“discursive field” is an intriguing approach, which has already yielded sig-

nificant results (Steinberg 1999).

The present study suggests a somewhat different method for describing

the circulation of ideas and arguments in social movement discourse. This

study proposes that movement discourse be viewed as a networked field of

concepts from which arguments are fashioned. This approach requires an

examination of the sociocognitive structure of a discourse, as well as an analy-

sis of its rhetoric. Through the circulation of meanings in their discursive

field, the black abolitionists discovered the arguments they needed to articu-

late their moral claims, and at the same time, found a way to express their

shared identity.

Because the “field” is a collective construction, it contains contradic-

tions and unresolved tensions. Even as arguments come to be expressed in

paradigmatic ways, alternative expressions are available and options are con-

tinually tried out; consensus is a tenuous achievement and never fully does

away with the multivocality of meanings. Moreover, because the discursive

field is never independent of hierarchical social relations, the construction

of meanings in movement discourse cannot be isolated from the process of

domination. Arguments contest particular arrangements, implicitly consent-

ing to others.

The present research employs an innovative strategy for the analysis of

the discursive field. The primary characteristic of this method is an attempt

to capture the processes of moral claims-making and collective identity con-

struction through the description of empirical patterns. Rather than setting

the elements of the field into fixed, static relations, this work uses quantita-

tive tools to express the probabilistic nature of various combinations. This

project combines the insights of Steinberg’s dialogic model (1994, 1998, 1999)

with the tools of network analysis (Carley 1997; Carley and Palmquist 1992;

Palmquist et al. 1997) in an exploratory content analysis of five black news-

papers in antebellum New York State.

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78 Social Science History

The Historical Context

Northern states began the process of emancipation in the last decades of the

eighteenth century. New York lagged behind New England and Pennsylva-

nia, in part, because slavery was more vital to the Empire State economy.

New York passed a conservative gradual emancipation law in 1799 and then

revised it in 1817 to end slavery in the state by 1827 ?

Slavery in New York was a small-scale affair, with more than 80% of

slaves held by masters who owned five or fewer. In the Hudson Valley, many

slaves were regularly hired out for wages, and some disposed of their labor at

their own discretion. In the first quarter of the nineteenth century, runaway

slaves were common in New York City and not unknown in upstate areas.

Both free blacks and sympathetic whites assisted slaves seeking their own

freedom before it was to be granted by the state (Groth 1994). By the time

that abolitionist organizations such as the American Anti-Slavery Society

formed, in 1833, slavery had been abolished, but the memory of slaveholding

was still fresh.

New York had the largest black population in the antebellum North. At

the time that emancipation laws were being passed, the state was home to

more than 40,000 blacks, including more than 15,000 slaves (Berlin 1998).

Almost as soon as northern states decided on emancipation, in defining the

meaning of the rights conferred by the Constitution, lawmakers repeatedly

confirmed the widely held belief that the two populations, black and white,

should not mix. Blacks were prohibited from serving on juries or testifying

in courts, from owning guns, from serving in the military, and, in most states,

from voting. States feared that unless they restricted the rights of blacks, they

would attract a large population of freemen and fugitive slaves from neigh-

boring areas. This fear led to a kind of competition to deprive blacks of civil

rights (Tocqueville 1981). Legal restrictions and white prejudice ensured that

the economic prospects of northern blacks were as limited as their political

status

(Litwack 1961).

Race prejudice was so common in nineteenth-century America that it

was almost always assumed. Where laws neglected to make explicit the differ-

ent status of whites and blacks, social norms ensured that the difference was

respected. During his tour of America in 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville (1981:

343) noted:

Race prejudice seems stronger in those states that have abolished slavery

than in those where is still exists, and nowhere is it more intolerant than

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Rhetoric of Black Abolitionism: Antislavery Newspapers in New York State 79

in those states where slavery was never known. … In the North the

white man no longer clearly sees the barrier that separates him from the

degraded race, and he keeps the Negro at a distance all the more carefully

because he fears lest one day they be confounded together.

Because American slavery conflated race and servitude, whites could not see

blacks apart from this perceived sign of inferiority. White prejudice went a

long way to ensure that blacks would never escape this condition.

In the early national period through the first quarter of the nineteenth

century, the meaning of liberty was explicitly linked to an expanding notion

of citizenship. In the decades after the Revolution, citizenship tended to be

defined as a right of property holders. By the beginning of abolitionism, citi-

zenship was generally understood to be based on a community of shared iden-

tity. Equality before the law was to be guaranteed by the republican form of

government. As a result, citizenship was inevitably racial. Most whites could

not conceive of sharing their community with anyone who was not of Euro-

pean, Protestant heritage. From the debate over Missouri in the 1820s, to

the Dred Scott decision in 1857, northern politics validated the prevailing

view that the rights and privileges of citizenship were limited to whites. The

popularity of colonization, as a way to protect American liberty for whites,

is easily understood in this context. Blacks would never be accepted into the

American mainstream; if they were to be freemen, they would have to live

elsewhere (Condit and Lucaites 1991; Litwack 1961).

Blacks recognized the persistence and virulence of American race preju-

dice but rejected the idea of colonization. Instead, they sought to be admitted

as equals into the American polity. New York remained a popular place for

free blacks to get on with the business of living. There were modest oppor-

tunities for earning a livelihood, and a large enough population in many

places to form the bonds of community. Black culture thrived in New York

City, as well as the other large population centers in the state (Franklin and

Moss 1994).

Black leaders disputed the “self-evident truths” of nineteenth-century

racial ideology, demanding that the nation live up to its republican identity.

They consented to the basic terms of American civic culture by seeking to be

included in it. Blacks in New York refused to be excluded from the American

experience. At the same time, they reflected critically on their own communi-

ties for failing to achieve, despite onerous circumstances, a status that would

prove their worth to the majority.

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80 Social Science History

Black Abolitionism in New York

New York City was a hub of black abolitionism. Beginning in the 1830s,

blacks held a series of conventions at which both slavery and racism were

passionately denounced. A network of safe houses and vigilance committees

protected the large fugitive slave population and the city’s black churches

were an eager audience for antislavery literature (Foote 1995). Ministers in

the city, such as Henry Highland Garnet, Alexander Crummell, and Samuel

Cornish, were among the leaders of the free black community in the North.

Several other cities and towns in the state played host to significant black

abolitionist efforts. Conventions were held in Buffalo (1843), Troy (1847), and

Rochester (1853). The antislavery lecture circuit spanned from Rochester to

Brooklyn, from Saratoga to Buffalo, with stops in Geneva, Ithaca, Corning,

Bath, and a dozen other towns in the Finger Lakes region. Lecturers visited

the towns of the Hudson Valley and along the canal routes. The antislavery

message reached all corners of the state.

Black abolitionists sustained a more radical critique of American society

than their white colleagues. The same forces that generated a conservative

outlook, with regard to reform, among northern whites produced militancy

among blacks. Protestant revivalism has been identified as a source of the

emergence of immediatism in American antislavery agitation (Barnes 1964).

Black churches were steeped in millennial perfectionism. Whites were more

likely to have faith in the inevitability of progress; blacks had little reason
to believe that American racism would end of its own accord. Whites wor-

ried that abolition would invite a more general attack on the institution of

private property, but blacks, who owned little capital and did not expect to

own any in the future, would not have feared such an attack as an outcome

of antislavery activism. Because nineteenth-century black institutions were

not invested in the status quo, they were more likely to breed radicalization

(Levesque 1970).

Perhaps the most extreme note sounded by the black abolitionists was

a call to self-defense by any means necessary. The early years of the move-

ment were dominated by William Lloyd Garrison’s philosophy of nonvio-

lence, and both white and black leaders were far more likely to favor “moral

suasion.” But, beginning in the middle of the 1840s, some black leaders

began to develop a rhetorical strategy for framing the call to violent resis-

tance (Ripley 1991). When Henry Highland Garnet delivered his eloquent
“Address to the Slaves of the United States of America” at the National Con-

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Rhetoric of Black Abolitionism: Antislavery Newspapers in New York State 81

vention of Colored Citizens in 1843, his resolution was twice rejected by the

convention, but it was clear that blacks in the North were growing impa-

tient with the Garrisonian approach. Garnet’s argument expressed the right

to self-defense in the fiery rhetoric of the American revolutionaries. Echo-

ing Patrick Henry, Garnet reminded the convention that men have the right

to resist oppression. Even if the call to violence led to a disastrous confron-

tation, Garnet reasoned, some conditions are so awful that death would be

preferable. Slavery, he proposed, was such a condition. As the situation of

slaves and free blacks worsened, Garnet’s speech became increasingly popu-

lar (Shiffrin 1971). By 1854, black conventions went so far as to endorse the

principle of “Liberty or Death!” (Franklin and Moss 1994).

The argument connecting antislavery and racial equality was not well

received in New York or anywhere else in the North. Jacksonian populism,

the dominant political discourse of the first half of the nineteenth century,

was constructed on the basis of a partisan appeal to white working men. The

foundations of this appeal were racial superiority, male egalitarianism, and

expansionism (Saxton 1998); white workers were all too willing to believe

that their status depended on keeping blacks, Indians, and women in their

place- at the bottom of the status hierarchy. If artisans, yeomen, and laborers

realized that they would never achieve equality with Yankee aristocrats or

entrepreneurs, they took comfort in their assumed superiority to blacks, slave

and free.

Economic and social competition prevented white audiences from

thoughtfully considering the issue of civil rights. For much of the time the

second party system was functioning, Democrats controlled the national gov-

ernment on the basis of the alliance between northern white workers and

southern planters. The party of Jackson made citizenship for white work-

ing men seem inescapably linked to a defense of plantation slavery. In the

decade before the Civil War, this union broke down, as workers perceived

the expansion of slavery into the territories as a direct threat to their well-

being. Territorial expansion was a promise of economic independence in the

eyes of wage laborers. The Free Soil movement was founded on the equation

“free soil = free labor = free men,” the logic of which necessitated the exclu-

sion of blacks. Representative David Wilmot, whose Wilmot Proviso was the

touchstone of political contention in the 1850s, explained the logic of his pro-

posal: “I plead the cause and the rights of white freemen. I would preserve

to free white labor a fair country, a rich inheritance, where the sons of toil, of

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82 Social Science History

my own race and color, can live without the disgrace which association with

negro slavery brings upon free labor” (quoted in Litwack 1961:47). When

they perceived that it was in their interest to do so, white workers would

oppose slavery as an un-American system of coercion but without endors-

ing the abolitionist argument that “all men are created equal” (Saxton 1998;

Roediger 1991; Wilentz 1984).

The use of the concept of free labor was increasingly common in the

antebellum period, particularly to emphasize the difference between North

and South. Free labor, through its binary opposition of slavery/freedom, dis-

guised the extent to which workers in the North were subjected to legal and

economic coercion, on the one hand, and social inequality, on the other hand.

Political expressions of this ideology (Whigs, Free Soilers, Republicans) had

to convince workers that the right to sell one’s labor promised an opportunity

for achieved equality. Both black and white abolitionists supported this inter-

pretation, whether out of enthusiasm for commercial capitalism or the belief

that the absence of this freedom was a singular social evil (Foner 1996). For

blacks, of course, the difference between slavery and wage labor was para-

mount. They had to use whatever rhetorical tools were available to oppose

slavery. If they had suggested, following some of the radical union leaders,

that the conditions of slaves and wage workers were similarly unfree, it seems

unlikely that the cause of antislavery would have benefited. A total rejec-

tion of northern society would have doomed the effort to free their southern

brethren.

It was into this complex system of interpretations of freedom, indepen-

dence, citizenship, and race that the black abolitionists interjected their moral

claims to humanity and justice. Their “fighting words” were made of the

same discursive material as other popular forms of political speech. Partisan

politics, journalism, fiction, sermons, and lectures all made use of the styles

and voices of republicanism, political economy, and evangelical revivalism.

The black abolitionists were speaking in ways that their contemporaries could

understand. It was not simply a pragmatic decision. These discursive fields

form the context in which nineteenth-century social movements diagnosed

society, planned their reforms, and motivated participants to labor, some-

times at significant personal costs. Black abolitionists used newspapers, in

particular, to achieve these goals.

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Rhetoric of Black Abolitionism: Antislavery Newspapers in New York State 83

Black Abolitionist Newspapers

Free blacks constituted a crucial audience for the antislavery press. William

Lloyd Garrison often acknowledged the importance of the black community

for his Liberator. Black editors, such as Samuel Cornish, Frederick Douglass,

and Charles B. Ray, would do the same. The writers whose words appeared

in the black abolitionist newspapers understood that they addressed, in some

sense, the wider antislavery movement, but they were more deliberate in their

attention to their black readers.

Black newspapers span the abolitionist period, beginning in the late

1820s and continuing until the Civil War. Some ran for a considerable time,

but most were short-lived (Franklin and Moss 1994; Litwack 1961). Tension

within the antislavery community sometimes arose because white leaders,

such as Garrison, felt that the black papers were diminishing the readership

of the established journals. They failed to understand why northern blacks

wanted to express their outrage and their hopes in their own voices. This is

exactly the special mission that black editors set for themselves.

The first issue of the Weekly Advocate appeared on 7 January 1837, under

the proprietorship of Phillip A. Bell (see Bell 1837). Bell’s aim for the paper

was to increase readership among northern blacks by writing about the issues

that concerned the community, such as abolitionism, temperance, univer-

sal suffrage, and education. Bell’s newspaper opposed colonization as well as

slavery. After nine issues, Bell joined forces with Cornish. The name of the

paper was changed to the Colored American for the release of the 4 March

1837 issue. The last issue of the paper appeared in 1842 (Jacobs 1976).

When Frederick Douglass returned to the United States from a lecture

tour of Great Britain and Ireland, he announced his intention to publish a

newspaper. He moved to Rochester and began publishing the North Star in

December 1847. The paper was a four-page weekly that carried on its mast-

head the motto “Right is of no sex- truth is of no color- God is the father

of us all, and we are all Brethren.” Douglass’s success as an editor estab-

lished him as the most prominent black in the United States and a towering

figure in the abolitionist movement. In 1851, Douglass changed the name of

his paper to Frederick Douglass’ Paper, under which it ran until 1860. By 1855,

the paper had 3,000 subscriptions (Douglass 1994).

The Weekly Anglo-African Magazine was a leading black newspaper in

the years immediately preceding the Civil War. Edited by Thomas Hamil-

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84 Social Science History

ton in New York City, it began publication in July 1859 and lasted until

March 1861. Through its reporting, letters, and editorials, the newspaper

aggressively championed black cultural independence and racial identity. Its

national appeal derived from its emphasis on black life and culture. Hamil-

ton’s editorials provided a platform for discussions of the key topics of the

day, including secession, slavery, and emigration.

The paper resurfaced again in August 1861. Edited by Robert Hamilton,

Thomas’s brother, the new journal assumed a broader and more active role in

the defense of black rights during the Civil War years. Its offices were often

used for the recruitment of black soldiers. The paper regularly published let-

ters from black soldiers and provided communication for families separated

during the war. The paper circulated widely among black troops in the field

and southern blacks in Union-occupied territory. Publication was suspended

in December 1865. During its final year, the Weekly Anglo-African Magazine

became the official organ of the National Equal Rights League, an aggressive

advocate of radical reconstruction (Ripley 1985).

Method

Perhaps the most common use of ideology in the social sciences is to denote

the contest of meanings accompanying social conflict in which actors with

power have a distinct advantage. John B. Thompson (1990) has enumer-

ated the main ideological dimensions of modern discourse: legitimation, dis-

simulation, unification, fragmentation, and reification. Each dimension is sub-

divided into particular modes. Reification, for example, concerns arguments

about the immutability of current arrangements. An assertion that a par-

ticular aspect of social life is natural, and for that reason should not or can-

not be changed, is an instance of the naturalization mode. Fragmentation,

in contrast, concerns assertions about differences and identity boundaries.

The differentiation mode involves assertions about group identity and social

distinctions, “characteristics which disunite” the community, and keep the

powerless “from constituting an effective challenge to existing relations”

(ibid.: 65).

A promising development is the recent “discursive turn” in social move-

ment research. Steinberg (1994, 1998, 1999) has cogently assessed the theo-

retical problems of frame analysis. Drawing on Bahktinian semiotics and

cultural psychology, he shows how the concept of discourse supplies the

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Rhetoric of Black Abolitionism: Antislavery Newspapers in New York State 85

necessary flexibility and subtlety to account for the symbolic dimension of

modern social movements. Discourse analysis begins with the notion of

speech as a form of mediated action; it is a symbolic practice that produces

the cultural codes by which people make sense of their experience (Stein-

berg 1999). Text is produced as an interaction among actors in specific set-

tings. Meaning does not adhere to words independently of their use but rather

only through social interaction within a system of hierarchical relations. As a

result, the concept of dialogue suggests contention, negotiation, and struggle

rather than merely transparent communication.

Steinberg (1998) proposes that “discursive fields” be used to describe

how meaning facilitates and constrains collective action. He notes that “such

fields contain the genres that collective actors can draw upon to construct dis-

cursively diagnosis, prognosis, and motivation. They are historically and con-

textually dependent, partially structured through hegemony, and the vocabu-

laries, symbols, and meanings within them are dialogic” (ibid.: 856). The

notion of a field in which the planning, perception, and interpretation of col-

lective action take place suggests that the ways in which meaning making

promotes and inhibits action is not fully conscious or intentional. But neither

is it entirely outside the control of the actors involved.

Network analysis is a relatively new and under-utilized approach in the

social scientific study of discourse. The goal is to construct a “mental map”

based on coding of the semantic links among concepts (Carley 1997; Carley

and Palmquist 1992). This diagram of semantic relations reflects either a cog-

nitive map of an individual’s knowledge domain or a sociocognitive map of a

group’s discourse, showing the shared worldview among members of a social
movement.

Network analysis allows the researcher to categorize the kinds of rela-

tionships between the ideas, or concepts, that comprise the building blocks

of a text. Kathleen Carley (1997) argues that concepts have meaning only in

relation to other concepts. Two concepts can be linked directly or indirectly,

resulting in local and extended networks. These relations may be measured

along several dimensions, including imageability, evokability, density, con-

ductivity, and intensity. When concepts have been categorized, a taxonomy
of the network can be constructed.

The strength of network analysis lies in its ability to uncover structural

relations between the concepts and, therefore, to provide a glimpse at how

arguments might be put together. Arguments require a raw material of sensi-

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86 Social Science History

bility, and the network is best expressed through a matrix of co-occurrences.

The process of argument construction can be detailed through an analysis

of contingencies, rather than the more familiar forms of tag-and-sort coding.

A network analysis might show how the meaning of liberty differed for free

blacks who stayed in the North and those who fled to Canada following pas-

sage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850. This would be the case, for example,

if in the discourse of the former group “liberty” tended to be used with

“equality” and “America” while in the discourse of the latter group it tended

to be deployed with “justice” and “nature.”

In the present study, computerized content coding using SemioCode

(Shortell 2002) generated frequencies and co-occurrences for a set of six-

teen themes (JUSTICE, LIBERTY, RIGHTS, UPLIFT, AMERICA,
SLAVERY, GOD, BROTHERHOOD, COLORED, PROPERTY, LABOR,
CHARACTER, SUFFERING, NATURE, POLITICS, and LAW).3 The

sociocognitive network was mapped using odds ratios to characterize proba-

bilistic relations among elements. Odds ratios are a measure of association in

contingency tables; instead of measuring the degree to which proportions of

one variable vary by the other, as in the standard Chi-square test, odds express

the likelihood that a random case is in one category of a variable rather than

any other. Odds ratios show if the odds for a category vary by values of the

other variable (Rudas 1998; Knoke and Burke 1980).

In addition, the present study used multidimensional scaling (MDS) to

illustrate the structure of the socio-cognitive network. The ALSCAL algo-

rithm was employed to calculate solutions separately for each subsample, and

for the black abolitionist discourse as a whole (see Everitt and Dunn 1992).

The strength of associations can be depicted spatially; items closer together

in the map are more highly related. Euclidian distances between points can

be interpreted as a measure of correlation between elements in the network.

The paragraph was employed as coding unit in all analyses (see Popping

2000). In written English, the paragraph is the basic syntactic container for

the argument. In this regard, as a coding unit, it falls between the “utter-

ance” and the “text” in the formal units of the Leech and Svartvik (1994)

communicative grammar. Researchers studying concepts generally use the

sentence or utterance as the coding unit, since the sentence is the basic syn-

tactic container for meaning. In this study, however, concepts are regarded

as the building blocks of arguments, and so it is necessary to use a standard

coding unit best suited for arguments rather than meanings.

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Rhetoric of Black Abolitionism: Antislavery Newspapers in New York State 87

Themes were operationalized as sets of keywords. Because the present

study is exploratory, any instance of any of the keywords for a theme triggered

the coding switch in the software- that is, the theme was coded as present in

that paragraph. Further work will need to be done to determine the optimal

level of breadth and depth for this kind of theme coding, but this algorithm

probably mimics typical human coding.4

The network of meanings thus laid out will permit the investigation

of argument construction, which is vital to understanding claims making

and collective identity construction in social movement discourse. While this

study cannot hope to fully depict the black abolitionists’ rhetoric, it identifies

some of the discourse’s central features. Rhetoric analysis consists of coding

for (1) tone, (2) mode, and (3) basis.

The codes for tone (ANGER, JOY, SADNESS, and IRONY) were

designed to capture the use of emotion. Given that the focus of the present

study is on discourse as a collective practice, the psychological state of the

author is not a target of analysis. Rather, content coding aims to capture the

use of emotion as one oratorical option among others. Abolitionist discourse

could have included very little use of emotions- if, for example, the prin-

cipal argument against slavery were that it was economically inefficient- so

that the prevalence of different tones suggests something important about the

kinds of arguments thought of as most efficacious, in terms of claims making

and collective identity.

The present study defines mode as a dimension of rhetoric loosely based

on Geoffrey Leech’s (1983) theory of pragmatics. Illocutionary action depicts

the social-relational aspect of arguments. The black abolitionists’ assertions

can be described as adhering to particular kinds of social goals: to catego-

rize, to persuade, to condemn, and so on. Because meaning is not always easy

for an author to control- as Mikhail Bahktin (1981:293) puts it, “the word

in language is half someone else’s”- the success of an illocutionary action is

not simply a matter of semantics. Arguments work, in the sociological sense,

because of the ways they are understood: as, generally speaking, (1) describ-

ing the social world, (2) explaining it, or, (3) evaluating it. For example, when

a speaker defines an incident as an instance of oppression (an evaluative illo-

cution), the communicative message is not exclusively or primarily about

the meaning of words. Rather, the message functions to create or reinforce a

shared understanding of the world, to motivate action, to make salient par-

ticular identity characteristics, and so forth.

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88 Social Science History

The most common illocutionary action in written English is the ASSER-

TIVE. The intent of this illocution is to state the facts about the subject

matter at hand. In contrast, the EXPLANATORY illocution includes asser-

tions that are designed to educate; arguments make connections that reflect

a didactic viewpoint. These two types can be contrasted, generally speaking,

as regarding the “what” question and the “why” question of a communica-

tive message, respectively. Finally, EVALUATIVE illocutions include argu-

ments whose primary purpose is to judge, to place facts in a moral prob-

lematic. Unlike the other two types, EVALUATIVE illocutions have to do

more with value (e.g., good/bad, beautiful/ugly, right/ wrong, etc.) than with

verisimilitude.

Next, paragraphs were coded in terms of basis (SIMILARITY or DIF-

FERENCE). With this dimension of rhetoric, the goal was to capture the

kinds of comparison employed in the logic of the abolitionist arguments.

When two concepts are linked, there is always an implicit or explicit basis

for the connection. The categories used in the present study for logical basis

are by no means exhaustive, but it seemed that equality and inequality (i.e.,

that concept X is the same as concept Y, or that X is not the same as Y) were

likely to be the most common types.

Paragraphs were coded for rhetoric by four trained readers. Only para-

graphs with at least two different themes, including at least one of the main

abolitionist themes (LIBERTY, RIGHTS, AMERICA, SLAVERY, COL-

ORED, SUFFERING, and POLITICS) were coded. This coding filter was
adopted to ensure that the paragraphs examined would have a sufficient

density of antislavery content; the black abolitionist newspapers, after all,

reported on and discussed other things, including entertainment, organiza-

tions, travel, and so forth. Disagreements were resolved by discussion until

a majority agreed on the same code. If no consensus could be reached, the

paragraph was coded as neutral on that aspect.

Finally, in order to place the black abolitionist discourse along the power

dimension, the present research operationalized key modes of two of Thomp-

son’s ideological dimensions most germane to the nineteenth-century dis-

cussion of race: NATURALIZATION and DIFFERENTIATION. Coding
attempted to identify claims in the abolitionist texts that were used to dispute

the justification of racial inequality as natural and inevitable (naturalization),

and to dispute arguments in favor of the significance of racial differences

(differentiation). According to Thompson’s (1990) formulation, ideological

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Rhetoric of Black Abolitionism: Antislavery Newspapers in New York State 89

Table 1 Extant black abolitionist newspapers in New York

Newspaper Dates of publication
Freedom’s Journal 1827-29Rights of All 1829
Weekly Advocate* 1837
Colored American * 1837-41
Mirror of Liberty 1 838-40
Northern Star and Freemen ‘s Advocate 1 842Ram’s Horn 1846-48North Star* 1847-51
Frederick Douglass’ Paper* 1851-59
Douglass ‘ Monthly 1 859-60
Weekly Anglo-African Magazine* 1859-61
Sources: Hutton 1993 and Ripley 1985.

Indicates that the newspaper was included in

the sample.

communication follows relations of domination. In the present case, pro-

slavery arguments would be ideological, and therefore, antislavery arguments

counterideological. Again, four trained readers were used and disagreements

were resolved by discussion.

A sample of texts written by blacks in each of five newspapers (the Weekly

Advocate, the Colored American, the North Star, Frederick Douglass’ Paper, and

the Weekly Anglo-African Magazine) published in New York State between

1827 and 1860 was drawn from published collections (Ripley 1985; Doug-

lass 1979) and available microfilm reels at the New York Public Library’s

Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Table 1 lists extant black

abolitionist newspapers in New York State, and indicates those selected into

the sample. The authorship criterion was verified by comparison to a list of

black abolitionists compiled from the notes and commentaries presented in

Ripley 1985. Because of editorial and/or organizational continuity, texts were

pooled for the Weekly Advocate and the Colored American as well as for the

two Douglass newspapers.

In an exploratory study such as this, sampling is guided by practical con-

cerns. The sample was limited to five New York newspapers to make data

collection more manageable. Thus, some important black abolitionist peri-

odicals were not included. A full study of the rhetoric of black abolitionism

will require a more systematic sampling strategy. Moreover, since a proba-

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90 Social Science History

bility sample was not taken, some caution must be exercised when interpret-

ing the results.

Texts were not selected on the basis of content. Rather, this research

mined The Black Abolitionist Papers (Ripley 1985) and The Frederick Douglass

Papers (Douglass 1979) for texts that were presented or published in New

York. Those from the five newspapers in the sample were retained. Additional

texts were added from available microfilm reels for the Weekly Advocate, the

Colored American, and the Weekly Anglo-African Magazine. The primary con-

cern in this sampling strategy was that a sufficient amount of text could be

found for a variety of New York newspapers, in an exploratory attempt to

describe the structure of black abolitionist discourse. The present analysis

is based on 136 paragraphs (about 20,000 words) from the Colored Ameri-

can/Weekly Advocate, 79 paragraphs (about 12,000 words) from the Douglass

newspapers, and 42 paragraphs (about 4,500 words) from the Weekly Anglo-

African Magazine. In all, the present study examined 257 paragraphs (more

than 36,000 words) of black abolitionist text.

In addition, the present study used a sample of 179 paragraphs (about

14,000 words) from the Working Man’s Advocate- a nineteenth-century New

York labor newspaper- as a point of comparison in terms of the socio-

cognitive network, in order to check the validity of the theme coding. Since

the abolitionist and labor texts share an immediate historical and geographic

context, they should have some properties in common. At the same time,

they represent different social movements, and as such, each should exhibit

a thematic profile reflecting the particular worldview of its movement. A

meaningful pattern of similarity and difference should be illuminated by the

comparison. If the contrast between the abolitionist texts and the labor texts

makes sense, the computerized coding algorithms are supported. If the con-

trast seems haphazard, it suggests that the coding algorithms are not mea-

suring the expected content.

Coding Examples

In order to clarify the operation of the computerized content coding, I present

a few examples of coded paragraphs. Themes coded as present are indicated.

Codes for tone, mode, and basis are given only when not coded as neutral.

The author of the letter presented below (signed “Sidney” [1841] but

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Rhetoric of Black Abolitionism: Antislavery Newspapers in New York State 91

probably penned by Henry Highland Garnet) writes to William Whipper,

a black intellectual and moral reformer, to argue for the value of race con-

sciousness among free blacks:

Again, it is one of the most malignant features of slavery, that it leads

the oppressor to stigmatize his victim with inferiority of nature, after
he himself has almost brutalized him. This is a universal fact. Hence

the oppressed must vindicate their character. No abstract disquisitions

from sympathizing friends, can effectually do this. The oppressed them-

selves must manifest energy of character and elevation of soul. Oppres-

sion never quails until it sees that the downtrodden and outraged “know

their rights, and knowing, dare maintain.” This is a radical assurance,

a resistless evidence both of worth and manliness, and of earnest inten-

tion and deep determination. {Colored American, 6 March 1841; see

Ripley 1985, 3:356) [Themes: RIGHTS, UPLIFT, SLAVERY, CHAR-
ACTER, SUFFERING, NATURE; rhetorical tone: ANGER; rhetori-
cal mode: EVALUA

TIVE; rhetorical basis: DIFFERENCE.]

Writing from the free black community in Brooklyn, Joseph C. Holly

(1848) provides an analysis of “slave power”- the term used by abolition-

ists to refer to the domination of slave-holding interests in the federal gov-

ernment-an idea that would become common in abolitionist writing in the

1850s:

In the formation of a constitution for the government of the confed-

eracy, the North did not only mortgage every particle of its soil as a

hunting ground for the bloodhounds of slavery, biped and quadruped,

to dog the track of, and worry the panting fugitive from the worse than

deathlike vale of Southern oppression; they did not only pledge every

strong arm at the North to go to the South in case the slaves, goaded by

oppression, should imitate the “virtues of their forefathers,” and vindi-

cate their rights by subscribing to the doctrine of Algernon Sydney-

that resistance to tyrants is obedience to God- and crush them in sub-

jection to their galling yoke; but in the spirit of compromise and barter,

stipulated that the slaveholder should have additional power in propor-

tion as he became the great plunderer of human rights, the more insolent

to the great declaration of fundamental principle, the substratum of

all democratic institutions. (North Star, 12 May 1848; see Ripley 1985,

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92 Social Science History

4:18) [Themes: RIGHTS, SLAVERY, GOD, CHARACTER, SUF-
FERING, BODY; rhetorical tone: ANGER; rhetorical mode: ASSER-

TIVE; rhetorical basis: DIFFERENCE.]

Uriah Boston, a leading figure in the free black community in Pough-

keepsie, New York, writes to Frederick Douglass on the question of separa-

tion versus integration as a strategy for achieving equality with whites. Doug-

lass was one of the leading voices on the separation side of the debate; Boston

(1855) writes to argue in favor of integration:

The true policy, in my opinion, for the colored people to pursue is, lessen

the distinction between whites and colored citizens of the United States.

We are American citizens by birth, by habit, by habitation, and by lan-

guage. Why, then, wish to be considered Africans. “African churches” –

African schools will do while nothing better is to be had. These will

do very well in Africa, but not in the U.S. The presumption with most

people is that no man is a proper citizen of one certain country while he

claims at the same time to be a citizen of any other country. It therefore

seems out of place and unreasonable to claim to be Americans, and at
the same time claim to be Africans. Common sense would seem to dic-

tate that if we are American citizens, then we are in our own country of

right; but, on the other hand, if we be Africans, then surely our country

is Africa. For my part, I claim to be an American citizen, and also claim

to be a man. When I claim to be anything else, I trust I shall evince my

bravery and wisdom by taking my proper place, whether it be in Africa or

elsewhere. “Colored Americans” will do in the United States, but “Afri-

cans” never. I shall be greatly mistaken if the free colored people of this

country shall consent to be packed and labelled for the African market

by “Ethiop” and “Communipaw.” {Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 20 April

1855; see Ripley 1985, 4:323) [Themes: LIBERTY, RIGHTS, UPLIFT,
AMERICA, BROTHERHOOD, COLORED; rhetorical mode: EX-
PLANATORY; rhetorical basis: DIFFERENCE.]

Proslavery advocates often used the economic difficulties of the sugar

plantations in Jamaica after slavery was abolished on the island as evidence

that blacks were unfit for freedom. Samuel Ringgold Ward (1859), who had

emigrated to Jamaica in 1855, writes to G. W. Reynolds, editor of the Visitor

in Franklin, New York, to defend the island’s reputation:

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Rhetoric of Black Abolitionism: Antislavery Newspapers in New York State 93

The blacks were denied all education, and almost all means of moral

and intellectual enlightenment. Such are always the demands of slavery.

As a consequence, emancipation found the negroes, as a whole- there

were a few in the towns in better circumstances- as ignorant, and

almost as much heathens, as when they were first stolen from Africa.

Since emancipation, something has been done for the education of the

negroes, and more for their evangelization, but when I tell that out

of a revenue of 200,000, our sapient Legislature doles out but 3,000

a year for the education of the entire population- 400,000- you will

not be surprised to learn that the education of the masses goes on but

slowly. (Weekly Anglo-African Magazine, 27 August 1859; see Ripley

1985, 5:20) [Themes: LIBERTY, UPLIFT, SLAVERY, COLORED;
rhetorical mode: ASSERTIVE.]

It is interesting to note that the preceding passage was one of the few that was

reliably coded for IRONY. Of the tone codes, only ANGER occurred often

enough and was reliably coded for to be analyzed in the present study.

In the following editorial, Thomas Hamilton (1860) bemoans the absence

of an attitude of racial equality in Abraham Lincoln’s presidential campaign,

suggesting that the Republicans- despite their antislavery platform- were
as racist as the Democrats:

The Republican party today, though we believe in the minority, being

the most intelligent contains by far the greatest number of these two

classes of men, and hence, though with larger professions for humanity,

is by far its more dangerous enemy. Under the guise of humanity, they do

and say many things- as, for example, they oppose the reopening of the

slave trade. They would fain make the world believe it to be a movement

of humanity; and yet the world too plainly sees that it is but a stroke

of policy to check the spread, growth, and strength of the black masses

on this continent. They oppose the progress of slavery in the territo-

ries, and would cry humanity to the world; but the world has already

seen that it is but the same black masses looming up, huge, grim, and

threatening, before this Republican party, and hence their opposition.

Their opposition to slavery means opposition to the black man – nothing

else. Where it is clearly in their power to do anything for the oppressed

colored man, why then they are too nice, too conservative, to do it. They

find, too often, a way to slip round it – find a method how not to do

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94 Social Science History

it. If too hard pressed or fairly cornered by the opposite party, then it

is they go beyond said opposite party in their manifestations of hatred

and contempt for the black man and his rights. (Weekly Anglo-African

Magazine, 17 March 1860; see Ripley 1985, 5:71) [Themes: RIGHTS,

SLAVERY, COLORED, SUFFERING, POLITICS; rhetorical mode:
ASSERTIVE; rhetorical basis: DIFFERENCE.]

In addition, some examples of the ideology coding also would be useful.

Exemplars of the naturalization mode are presented below.

“Sidney” (1841) responds to William Wrapper’s call for full integration
on the basis of moral reform:

The elevation of a people is not measurably dependent upon external

relations or peculiar circumstances, as it is upon the inward rational

sentiments which enable the soul to change circumstances to its own

temper and disposition. Without these, the aids of sympathizing friends,

the whisperings of hope, the power of eternal truth, are of but little

advantage. We take the case of an individual. His ancestors have been the

objects of wrong and violence. In consequence, they become degraded.

At the season of thought and reflection he feels a desire to escape from

the degradation of his sires, and the oppressions of the many. The sympa-

thy of friends is excited, and they make active exertions. (Colored Ameri-

can, 6 March 1841; see Ripley 1985, 3:356) [

NATURALIZATION]

William J.Wilson (1853), using the pseudonym “Ethiop,” corresponded

with Frederick Douglass on the need for distinct black institutions in the

North. Writing from Brooklyn, Wilson describes the effects of racism upon

the black community in New York City:

The result of all this, upon my mind, may be summed up in a few words.

A radical change in the process of our development is here demanded. At

present, what we find around us, either in art or literature, is made so to

press upon us, that we depreciate, we despise, we almost hate ourselves,

and all that favors us. Well may we scoff at black skins and woolly heads,

since every model set before us for admiration has pallid face and flaxen

head, or emanations thereof. I speak plainly. It is useless to mince this

matter. Every one of your readers knows that a black girl would as soon

fondle an imp as a black doll- such is the force of this species of educa-

tion upon her. I remember once to have suddenly introduced one among

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Rhetoric of Black Abolitionism: Antislavery Newspapers in New York State 95

Table 2 Percentage of paragraphs containing themes

Abolitionist texts

All Douglass Anglo- Working Man’s
Theme texts3 CA/WA* papers0 African Advocate
JUSTICE 8.6 5.9 8.9 16.7 3.4
LIBERTY 26.4 20.6 39.2 21.4 19.8
RIGHTS 20.6 22.1 21.5 14.3 28.2UPLIFT 17.9 22.8 10.1 16.7 5.1
AMERICA 25.3 21.3 32.9 23.8 26.0
SLAVERY 23.7 14.7 48.1 7.1 11.3GOD 14.8 14.0 21.6 4.8 4.0
BROTHERHOOD 31.5 32.4 29.1 33.3 18.6
COLORED 24.1 20.6 22.8 38.1 2.8PROPERTY 3.5 5.2 1.3 2.4 18.6LABOR 11.7 11.0 15.2 7.1 19.2
CHARACTER 21.0 21.3 24.1 14.3 13.0
SUFFERING 21.0 17.7 30.4 14.3 10.7NATURE 5.8 8.1 1.3 7.1 8.5
POLITICS 18.7 16.9 27.9 7.1 23.2LAW 11.3 10.3 10.1 16.7 9.6
Paragraphs 257 136 79 42 179

a Includes all texts from all black abolitionist newspapers.

b Includes the Colored American and the Weekly Advocate.

c Includes the North Star and Frederick Douglass’ Paper.

a company of twenty colored girls, and if it had been a spirit the effect

could not have been more wonderful. Such scampering and screaming

can better be imagined than told. As simple as these slight incidents may

seem at first sight, they lie at the bottom of half our difficulties. {Fred-

erick Douglass Paper, 11 March 1853; see Ripley 1985, 4:130) [Theme:

NATURALIZATION]

Results

Table 2 shows the prevalence of themes in each subsample and for the dis-

course as a whole (i.e., all the black abolitionist texts taken together), with a

sample of texts from a labor newspaper for comparison. The thematic pro-

file of the Douglass newspapers corresponds to what is typically thought of

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96 Social Science History

as abolitionist discourse. The themes of LIBERTY, SLAVERY, and SUF-

FERING are all more common in the Douglass newspapers than the Colored

American /Weekly Advocate or the Weekly Anglo-African Magazine. In addi-

tion, POLITICS and AMERICA are also more common in the Douglass
newspapers.

The Colored American /Weekly Advocate shows some similarity to

the Douglass newspapers- compare RIGHTS, BROTHERHOOD, COL-
ORED, and CHARACTER- though the typical abolitionist themes are
somewhat less common. The Colored American /Weekly Advocate displays

what might be called self-help orientation, with UPLIFT one of its most

prominent themes. The Weekly Anglo-African Magazine is clearly most dis-

tinctive. The themes of JUSTICE, COLORED, and LAW are more com-

mon here than in the other black abolitionist newspapers, which is probably

a result both of its cultural bent and its publication in the years immedi-

ately preceding the Civil War. It appeared at a time when dissolution seemed

inevitable and emancipation a more realistic possibility; it was, therefore, less

concerned with undermining the validity of proslavery arguments and more

concerned with securing the full status of citizenship.

Comparing the abolitionist discourse with that from the labor news-

paper, the Working Man’s Advocate ‘, similarities and differences are evident.

Both kinds of discourse are affiliated with social movements; as a result,

RIGHTS is common in both samples. The same is true of LIBERTY and

AMERICA. But there are important differences between the two types of

discourse. The abolitionist texts are more likely to use SLAVERY, of course,

but are also more likely to employ a self-help/moral exhortation language, as

evidenced by the greater prevalence of UPLIFT, CHARACTER, and GOD.

Discussion of race, indicated by COLORED, is also more common in the

abolitionist texts than in the labor discourse. Labor themes, such as LABOR

and PROPERTY, are more common in the Working Man ys Advocate sample.
Table 3 shows the odds of various themes in combination with SLAV-

ERY in the black abolitionist texts. The table gives odds and odds ratios.
“Odds of first” and “Odds of second” indicate the odds of the first theme

and second theme in the pair being present in a paragraph. These odds are

simply another way to express prevalence. “Odds ratio” is a ratio of the cross

product of the 2 x 2 contingency table; it expresses the extent to which the

odds of one theme are contingent on the condition of the other. Values larger

than one indicate positive association. For example, the odds that a paragraph

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Rhetoric of Black Abolitionism: Antislavery Newspapers in New York State 97

Table 3 Odds of co-occurrence for SLAVERY and selected themes

Themes Newspaper Odds of first Odds of second Odds ratio

SLAVERY & CA/WA* 0.17 0.26 3.20LIBERTY (20) (28) (8)
Douglass 0.93 0.65 2.42papersb (38) (31) (19)
Anglo- 0.08 0.27 -African (3) (9)

SLAVERY & CA/WA 0.17 0.21 -POLITICS (20) (23)
Douglass 0.93 0.39 5.83papers (38) (22) (17)
Anglo- 0.08 0.08 -African (3) (3)

SLAVERY & CA/WA 0.17 0.27 5.11CHARACTER (20) (29) (10)
Douglass 0.93 0.32 0.77papers (38) (19) (8)
Anglo- 0.08 0.17 -African (3) (6)

SLAVERY & CA/WA 0.17 0.21 2.33SUFFERING (20) (24) (6)
Douglass 0.93 0.44 2.32papers (38) (24) (15)
Anglo- 0.08 0.17 -African (3) (6)

Note: Number of paragraphs given in parentheses. A dash indicates that the value could not be calculated.

a Includes the Colored American and the Weekly Advocate .

Includes the North Star and Frederick Douglass1 Paper.

selected at random from the Douglass newspapers (Table 3, row 2) would

contain the theme SLAVERY was 0.93 (present in 38 paragraphs, absent in

41: 38 -T- 41 = 0.93). The odds that a randomly selected paragraph would con-

tain LIBERTY was 0.65 (present in 31 paragraphs, absent in 48: 31 ■*■ 48 =

0.65). The odds that LIBERTY would be present, though, is contingent on

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98 Social Science History

the presence of SLAVERY. LIBERTY is 2.42 times more likely to occur in

paragraphs in which SLAVERY is also present.5

In general, the odds suggest that SLAVERY and these selected themes

tended to co-occur. In only one particular instance, SLAVERY and CHAR-

ACTER in the Douglass newspapers, was there an inverse contingency. The

depiction of probabilistic relationships demonstrates that these associations

were not absolute. It is not true, for example, that every time SLAVERY

appears, so does LIBERTY. Sometimes the combination is needed for a par-

ticular argument, and sometimes it is not. The meaning of the two themes
cannot be fixed in static relation to the other.

The arguments in black abolitionist discourse were built on strategic

combinations based on the flexible meanings of the concept “slavery” and

other symbols of American social and political life. The tactical pairing of

SLAVERY and LIBERTY, SUFFERING, POLITICS, or CHARACTER

was necessary to accomplish the specific goals of the movement. Not all pos-

sible combinations occur precisely because argument construction is inten-

tional, even if not always fully conscious to the individual authors. Insight

into the deliberate nature of contention over the meaning of slavery is possible

through the analysis of these contingencies. The fact that SLAVERY is more

likely to occur with CHARACTER than with PROPERTY, and with POLI-

TICS more than with LABOR, indicates the kinds of arguments believed to

be effective in the claims-making of black abolitionism.

Table 4 displays the odds of various themes in combination with COL-

ORED in the black abolitionist texts. This pattern of contingencies illustrates

the manner in which this discourse was a part of the construction of a col-

lective identity of black Americans in the nineteenth century. Most impor-

tant in this regard is the co-occurrence of COLORED with RIGHTS, with

SUFFERING, and with BROTHERHOOD. These combinations suggest
the outlines of the central subject position in prophetic speech, the suffering

victim on whose behalf divine justice is exercised.

Table 5 displays the partial thematic structure for SLAVERY by news-

paper group and for the black abolitionist discourse as a whole.6 In the MDS

results, smaller numbers indicate greater association between themes. Since

the solutions are not directly comparable across subsamples, the average dis-

tance between all pairs of themes is given. The MDS solution not only shows

the association between a particular pair of themes but also yields clusters of
related themes.

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Rhetoric of Black Abolitionism: Antislavery Newspapers in New York State 99

Table 4 Odds of co-occurrence for COLORED and selected themes

Themes Newspaper Odds of first Odds of second Odds ratio

COLORED & CA/WA* 0.26 0.28 2.62RIGHTS (28) (30) (11)
Douglass 0.30 0.27 1.57papersb (18) (17) (5)
Anglo- 0.62 0.17 4.00African (16) (6) (4)

COLORED & CA/WA 0.26 0.30 0.66UPLIFT (28) (31) (5)
Douglass 0.30 0.11 7.44papers (18) (8) (5)
Anglo- 0.62 0.20 –
African (16) (7)

COLORED & CA/WA 0.26 0.21 1.19SUFFERING (28) (24) (8)
Douglass 0.30 0.44 3.07papers (18) (24) (9)
Anglo- 0.62 0.17 4.00African (16) (6) (4)

COLORED & CA/WA 0.26 0.48 2.00BROTHERHOOD (28) (44) (14)
Douglass 0.30 0.41 2.45papers (18) (23) (8)
Anglo- 0.62 0.50 0.86African (16) (14) (5)

Note: Number of paragraphs given in parentheses. A dash indicates that the value could not be calculated.

a Includes the Colored American and the Weekly Advocate.

b Includes the North Star and Frederick Douglass’ Paper.

As Table 5 shows, SLAVERY appears to be more tightly integrated

in the Douglass newspapers, as indicated by the generally smaller dis-

tances between SLAVERY and other themes, than in the Colored Ameri-

can/Weekly Advocate or the Weekly Anglo-African Magazine. An impor-

tant thematic cluster is seen in the Douglass newspapers, consisting of

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100 Social Science History

Table 5 Partial thematic structure for SLAVERY

Newspaper

Douglass Anglo-
SLAVERYand All texts3 CA/WA* papers0 AfricanLIBERTY 1.4 2.0 1.0 2.3RIGHTS 0.9 1.5 1.7 4.2AMERICA 0.8 0.2 0.9 2.1COLORED 1.0 2.4 1.2 3.3SUFFERING 0.8 1.0 0.6 2.6POLITICS 1.2 2.3 0.3 3.3
Theme averaged 1.8 2.1 1.7 2.9Grand average6 2.3 2.4 2.2 2.3Stress’ 0.16 0.17 0.17 0.21
Note: Distances are calculated from ALSCAL solutions for three dimensions. Values are Euclidian distances

between elements in the subject space. Smaller distances indicate a stronger association.

a Includes all texts from all black abolitionist newspapers.

b Includes the Colored American and the Weekly Advocate.

c Includes the North Star and Frederick Douglass1 Paper.

dAverage distance for theme across its 15 pairs.

e Average distance for all 120 pairs.

*Goodness-of-fit indicator for ALSCAL solution. Lower values indicate that more of the variation in the

original co-occurrence matrix is accounted for by the coordinate solution.

SLAVERY-LIBERTY-SUFFERING-POLITICS, which might be consid-
ered the definitive constellation of abolitionist discourse. This is the intersec-

tion of political and prophetic speech. The Colored American/ Weekly Advo-

cate shows some affinity to this structure; the Weekly Anglo-African Magazine

is most distinctive in this regard.

Table 6 gives the results of the rhetoric coding.7 Coders were able to

achieve sufficient agreement only on ANGER, so only these results are

presented. Because there were too few paragraphs that contained multiple

themes, including at least one of the key themes, in the Weekly Anglo-

African Magazine, only the Colored American/ Weekly Advocate and the Doug-

lass newspapers are included separately. Both use ANGER about equally

often. The Colored American /Weekly Advocate uses the ASSERTIVE and

EXPLANATORY modes with about the same frequency, substantially more

often than it uses the EVALUATIVE mode. The Douglass newspapers, in

contrast, use the EVALUATIVE mode almost as much as the ASSERTIVE.

The extent to which a discourse is disputatious can be indicated in a simple

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Rhetoric of Black Abolitionism: Antislavery Newspapers in New York State 101

Table 6 Percentage of paragraphs containing rhetoric features

Sample a

Douglass
Rhetoric feature CA/WA* papers0ANGER 23.3 27.8ASSERTIVE 36.7 34.3EXPLANATORY 40.0 22.9EVALUATIVE 13.3 31.4SIMILARITY 23.2 14.3DIFFERENCE 50.0 48.6Paragraphs0 30 36
aThere were too few paragraphs from the Weekly Anglo-African Magazine to code, so it was omitted from

the sample.

b Includes the Colored American and the Weekly Advocate.

c Includes the North Star and Frederick Douglass’ Paper.

way by the ratio of evaluative to assertive illocutions. It appears that the

Douglass newspapers were more likely than the Colored American /Weekly

Advocate to favor this kind of discursive formulation; the index of disputation

for the former is 0.92 and for the latter is 0.36.

As shown in Table 6, arguments based on DIFFERENCE were more

common than arguments based on SIMILARITY. This may be a function

of the popularity of racist assertions in nineteenth-century public speech.

The black abolitionists had to argue, time and again, against assertions that

race differences were natural, were important, and were permanent. Because

proslavery arguments relied, logically, on difference, abolitionist discourse

tended to employ this basis in much of its own argumentation.

The results of the ideology coding are shown in Table 7. The Doug-

lass newspapers stand out as most likely to employ arguments challenging

NATURALIZATION and DIFFERENTIATION; the prevalence of both
modes is more than twice as common in the Douglass newspapers than

in the other newspapers. Odds ratios indicate that the two modes are con-

tingent in each subsample. The odds that DIFFERENTIATION will be
present in paragraphs where NATURALIZATION is present, compared

with paragraphs where NATURALIZATION is absent, are 9.59 for the
Colored American /Weekly Advocate, 1.90 for the Douglass newspapers, and

4.27 for the Weekly Anglo-African Magazine (not shown in Table 7). Because

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102 Social Science History

Table 7 Percentage of paragraphs and selected contingencies of ideological
dimensions

Sample

Douglass Anglo-
Ideological dimension CA/WA* papers b African
NATURALIZATION 11.8 33.3 16.7

Odds with:

LIBERTY, BROTHERHOOD, or POLITICS 0.99 1 .40 1.12SLAVERY 1.07 1.63 –
SUFFERING, BODY,C or JUSTICE 0.93 1 .67 1 .20

DIFFERENTIATION 11.8 25.0 11.9
Odds with:

LIBERTY, BROTHERHOOD, or POLITICS 1 .79 2.83 -SLAVERY 1.43 1.08 1.18
SUFFERING, BODY,C or JUSTICE 1 .02 1 .83 1 .76

Paragraphs 136 36 42
Note: A dash indicates that the value could not be calculated.

a Includes the Colored American and the Weekly Advocate.

bIncludes the North Star and Frederick Douglass’ Paper.

CBODY was one of the themes omitted from Table 2 because it occurred in fewer than 5% of all newspapers.

It is included here for theoretical interest.

the number of paragraphs in which the modes are present is quite small, these

odds are, at best, general indicators of contingency. It is impossible to make

comparisons between them.

NATURALIZATION is more likely to occur in paragraphs where re-

publican themes, such as LIBERTY, BROTHERHOOD, or POLITICS,
are present than in paragraphs in which these republican themes are absent

in the Douglass newspapers and the Weekly Anglo-African Magazine but

not in the Colored American /Weekly Advocate. DIFFERENTIATION was

contingent with these republican themes in the Douglass newspapers and

the Colored American /Weekly Advocate. NATURALIZATION is also more

likely to occur with SLAVERY than without it in both the Douglass news-

papers and the Colored American /Weekly Advocate. DIFFERENTIATION

was more likely in paragraphs containing the SLAVERY vocabulary in the

Colored American /Weekly Advocate than in the Douglass newspapers. The

odds of NATURALIZATION being present in paragraphs with such pro-

phetic themes as SUFFERING, BODY, or JUSTICE were higher in the

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Rhetoric of Black Abolitionism: Antislavery Newspapers in New York State 103

Douglass newspapers and the Weekly Anglo-African Magazine than in the

Colored American /Weekly Advocate. The same pattern obtains for DIFFER-

ENTIATION. In the Colored American /Weekly Advocate ■, both ideological

modes appear to be independent of the use of these prophetic themes.

Conclusion

Black abolitionists generated a coherent, positive identity in the process of

reporting on slavery and exhorting the nation to righteousness. In many ways,

black abolitionist texts are similar to other mid-nineteenth-century political

discourses. Like the labor texts, the discursive repertoire of black abolition-

ism was anchored by the republican field. Arguments challenging the domi-

nant racial ideology are common, indicating that assumptions about race were

being acknowledged as well as contested. Although the discourse of black

abolitionism is a social critique, it also contains a positive assertion of what

free blacks would become. As important as the theme of SLAVERY was to

the discourse, so too were COLORED and BROTHERHOOD.

The present results consistently show the key features of political anti-

slavery argumentation to be most common in the Douglass newspapers. Dis-

cussion of slavery dominates the pages of the Douglass newspapers much

more than the others (it is more than three times more frequent than in the

Colored American /Weekly Advocate and more than six times more frequent

than in the Weekly Anglo-African Magazine). Most of the republican themes,

such as JUSTICE, LIBERTY, RIGHTS, AMERICA, and POLITICS, are
more common in the Douglass newspapers. Prophetic themes, such as SUF-

FERING and JUSTICE, are also more frequent. The EVALUATIVE mode

was more likely to be used. These features lend the Douglass newspapers

their distinctive rhetorical profile.

The decision to include various concepts or rhetoric elements together

transcends the individual authorial intent. As Steinberg (1998, 1999) has

argued, the discursive field is bounded by social and cultural factors, within

which movement participants act. The present analysis shows that the argu-

ments used were selected from an available repertoire; on some occasions, for

example, SLAVERY was used with POLITICS, and on others, it was used

with CHARACTER. Although various arguments were, in a sense, always

potentially available, some were more common in particular instances of anti-

slavery argumentation. Other arguments were tried and discarded, and some

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104 Social Science History

were never employed, because they failed to resonate with the audiences (free

blacks, sympathetic whites, politicians and partisans, etc.) or were simply

unimaginable.

To the extent that the antebellum black newspapers studied here con-

stitute parts of the same discourse, the results suggest that the discourse

included a good deal of variation. The “discursive turn” in social movements

theory, as articulated by Steinberg (1994, 1998, 1999), provides a framework

for making sense of this dispersion. In contrast to a “frame,” which connotes

a static, finished entity, a “discursive field” evokes change and experimenta-

tion. Some of the key features of black abolitionist discourse were intentional.

The emphasis on such themes as COLORED and BROTHERHOOD, and

the turning of republican ideas on the basis of race, were deliberate strategies

in the effort to articulate a positive identity.

In contrast to the frames approach, the present analysis suggests the

strategic construction of arguments based on shifting meanings in the socio-

cognitive network. The contingencies presented here clearly show that argu-

ments were deliberate rather than formulaic. As the network approach

stresses, concepts are flexible, moving between poles of general use and spe-

cific deployment, and between the poles of idiosyncratic meaning and social

consensus (Carley 1997).

At the same time, black abolitionist discourse reveals its dependence on

the wider American worldview. It articulated a criticism of slavery on the

basis of normative beliefs about labor. Instead of a total rejection of Ameri-

can society, black abolitionists reassured the majority that blacks wanted to

be Americans; their complaints demanded change at the same time as they

affirmed allegiance to the emerging liberal capitalist belief system. Although

not definitively shown by the present results, the topography of the black abo-

litionist field, as described here, shows that the discourse was not completely

outside of the mainstream in nineteenth-century America.

There were many possible arguments against slavery available to the

black abolitionists. The present results, including the comparison between

abolitionist and labor discourse, show that their black abolitionist discourse

was, in a fundamental way, familiar to audiences in nineteenth-century

America. Their claims were grounded in the language of republicanism. Per-

haps the most striking manifestation of this is the frequency of moral exhor-

tation. The present analysis is in agreement with Hutton (1992) that black

newspapers were an important source of socialization. The moral claims and

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Rhetoric of Black Abolitionism: Antislavery Newspapers in New York State 105

the collective identity of American blacks rested on the condition of agree-

ment with the prevailing moral standards.

The energy spent contesting the dominant attitudes about racial differ-

ences testifies to the power of the hegemonic view. Black abolitionists asserted

that oppression, rather than nature, determined their degraded state. Their

arguments legitimated the notion that race was a biological category – that

blacks were alike, and as a group might achieve equality with whites – and

underscored its importance in structuring American society. The idea that

race was a social construction designed to perpetuate inequality was simply
outside the discursive field.

Some methodological issues need to be resolved with further research.

Additional studies will have to determine the ideal point, in terms of diversity

and intensity, at which to set the computerized coding scripts. A systematic

attempt to evaluate computerized coding compared to human judgment is

required. The present study, nonetheless, demonstrates the utility of network

analysis. This approach has the virtue of revealing discursive structure with-

out specifying a priori all the possible links between concepts. The present

analysis could be contrasted with Carley’s (1997) technique for mapping the

conceptual network. Semantic grammars (see Franzosi 1989), which were not

used here, might also illuminate substantial and rhetorical features of aboli-
tionist discourse in the same manner.

The black abolitionists’ “fighting words” challenged white America to

fulfill its promise as “the shining city on the hill.” They argued that blacks

played a critical role in the salvation drama of the American experiment;

redemption will come, they contended, only when blacks have been granted

liberty and equality. At the same time, through their discourse, black abo-

litionists constructed a positive identity for blacks in America and tried to

make this collective sense of self the basis for political solidarity. The dis-

cursive field of black abolitionism was not entirely strategic or intentional.

Antislavery arguments were built of the same discursive components used

by other antebellum reform movements. Black abolitionists did not reject

American society in toto. To do so would have meant certain defeat. Whether

deliberate or not, their criticism of slavery reinforced the emerging liberal

capitalist worldview. Black abolitionism, like every other antebellum social

movement, could not completely transcend the hegemonic discourse of the
nascent commercial elite.

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106 Social Science History

Notes

This work was supported, in part, by a grant from the City University of New York PSC-

CUNY Research Award Program. An earlier version of this article was presented as a

paper at the 2001 annual meeting of the Social Science History Association in Chicago.

Nancy Sanchez, Enrique Marin, and Zuleika Rodriguez assisted in the coding. Thanks are

due also to Mary Howard, George Cunningham, Marc Steinberg, the staff of the Schom-

burg Center for Research in Black Culture, and, especially, the reviewers and editors of

this journal.

1 I have borrowed this apt phrase from Steinberg (1999). It refers to the production of

contentious discourse by a social movement. Particularly interested in class forma-

tion, Steinberg draws out the power dimension of discourse as a symbolic practice.

He notes (ibid.: 14) that “discourse is both a mediator and source of power. Dis-

course mediates power by facilitating the social action of control and exploitation. It

is a form of power, for through it consciousness is shaped and the possibilities for

action and change are culturally constituted. Fighting words are thus both a conduit

and source of power.”

2 New York passed a gradual emancipation act in 1785, but it was rejected by the Coun-

cil of Revision, oddly enough, because it deprived freedmen of the right to vote. Such

was the effect of Revolutionary idealism. After New York slaves were freed 40 years

later, when cooler heads prevailed, they were soon after stripped of the franchise

(Litwack 1961).

3 Additional themes were coded for but are excluded from the present discussion

because they were very uncommon (appearing in fewer than 5% of the paragraphs)

in all newspapers.

4 It is beyond the scope of this article to discuss the relationship between human and

computer coding. Preliminary work in the development of SemioCode suggests that

trained student coders generally use a “first instance” algorithm. One advantage of

computerized coding tools is, perhaps, the ability to explicitly determine the coding

practice and reliably employ it.

5 The formula is foo x fn -=- f01 x f10. In the example discussed, this is equal to 29 x 19

+ 19 x 12 = 2.42. The odds that LIBERTY is present when SLAVERY is present

was 1.58 (19 + 12), and the odds that LIBERTY is absent when SLAVERY is present

was 0.65 (19 -s- 29). The ratio of the former to the latter (1.58 -s- 0.65) is 2.42.

6 The goodness of fit measure (stress) indicates that the three-dimensional solution

accounts for only a fair amount of the variation in the original distance matrix. To test

hypotheses about the structure of the discourse, more texts need to be analyzed. As

an alternative strategy, individual differences MDS solutions were calculated using

the INDSCAL algorithm. The results do not differ substantially from the ALSCAL
solutions shown.

7 Because of time constraints, a random sample of paragraphs from the Douglass

newspapers was selected for coding.

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Rhetoric of Black Abolitionism: Antislavery Newspapers in New York State 107

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Contents

p. [75]

p. 76

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p. 78

p. 79

p. 80

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p. 84

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Issue Table of Contents

Social Science History, Vol. 28, No. 1 (Spring, 2004) pp. 1-190

Front Matter

Presidential Address

Migration and the Nation: The View from Paris [pp. 1-18]

Hedging His Bets: Why Nixon Killed HUD’s Desegregation Efforts [pp. 19-52]

Polling the Opinions: A Reexamination of Mountain, Plain, and Gironde in the National Convention [pp. 53-73]

The Rhetoric of Black Abolitionism: An Exploratory Analysis of Antislavery Newspapers in New York State [pp. 75-109]

Grammars of Death: An Analysis of Nineteenth-Century Literal Causes of Death from the Age of Miasmas to Germ Theory [pp. 111-143]

Governing Labor in Modernizing Texas [pp. 145-188]

Back Matter

Anti-Slavery’s Panoramic Perspective

Author(s): Teresa A. Goddu

Source: MELUS , Summer 2014, Vol. 39, No. 2, Visual Culture and Race (Summer 2014),
pp. 12-41

Published by: Oxford University Press on behalf of Society for the Study of the Multi-
Ethnic Literature of the United States (MELUS)

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Anti-Slavery’s Panoramic Perspective

Teresa A.

Goddu

Vanderbilt University

From its outset, the US anti-slavery movement embraced new visual technologies
and modes of visual display to bring slavery into focus. Pictorial representations

of slavery were central to the campaign. In the 1830s, the American Anti-Slavery

Society (AASS) circulated some 40,000 depictions of slavery a year, ranging from
woodcuts and broadsides to engravings and portraits (J. Wilson 354). This exten-

sive iconographical system was deployed and recycled throughout the antebellum
period. Emerging simultaneously with the rise of mass visual culture in
the United States, the anti-slavery movement took full advantage of its societ/ s

interest in the image and belief in the visual’s unique ability to persuade.1
As The Emancipator argues, “Abolitionists know the influence of visual
impressions

heart and understanding.” According to The Emancipator , pictures were able
to “excite the mind,” “awaken and fix attention,” and arouse feeling. The image’s

immediacy, along with its perceptual capacities and emotive power, successfully
turns its viewer into an “eye-witness” to slavery’s cruelties as well as a “partaker”
of the slave’s woes (“Pictorials” Feb. 1836). The visual simultaneously produces
a sense of the real – a “correct and vivid impression of living reality” as The
Emancipator puts it (“Pictorials” 5 May 1836) – and arouses sympathy for the
slave, since the eye is an “avenue to the heart and the conscience of the commu-

nity,” as the Executive Committee of the AASS states (Wright). A central compo-
nent of the anti-slavery appeal, the image provided both graphical accuracy and
emotional effectiveness.

By utilizing the visual, the anti-slavery movement participated in the percep-
tual revolution under way in US culture. As Jonathan Crary and others have
argued, vision was profoundly reconfigured in the nineteenth century, producing

new types of observers, viewing practices, and forms of visual consumption
(2-3). While the anti-slavery movement utilized a complex array of visual modes

to make its appeal, this essay asserts the centrality of the panorama and its atten-

dant bird’s-eye view to the anti-slavery argument. The panorama – along with its
omniscient viewpoint – was a central visual mode in the nineteenth century.3
Responding to an emerging mass marketplace, urbanization, industrialization,
and imperial expansion, the panorama’s perceptual mode enabled the eye to

© MELUS: The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States 2014. Published by Oxford
University Press on behalf of The Society for the Study of the Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States.

1 2 MELUS • Volume 39 • Number 2 • (Summer 2014)

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Anti-Slavery’s Panoramic Perspective

organize an ever-expanding array of goods and geographies. Through its ability to

encompass this proliferating whole, the panoramic perspective, as evident not

only in the vogue for panoramas themselves but also in the popularity of prospect

painting, city views, and ballooning during the period, became dominant.4 As a

specifically bourgeois mode of seeing, the panoramic perspective provided
emerging middle-class viewers a commanding point of view from which to
assert their power and mastery over an increasingly complex social and natural
landscape.5

In adopting the panorama as its dominant visual mode, the anti-slavery
movement, I argue, not only established its perceptual power over the spectacle
of slavery but also made its message powerfully appealing to a Northern white

middle-class audience. Anti-slavery’s visual culture provided its audience access

to knowledge about slavery as well as the perspective of a privileged class posi-
tion. Through a distanced, yet seemingly all-encompassing point of view, anti-

slavery observers were encouraged to learn about and sympathize with the slave

even as they took visual possession of him. As an operation of social power, the

panoramic perspective provided the white Northern viewer access to a position of
specular dominance over the landscape of slavery as well as the body of the slave.

Again and again, anti-slavery’s iconography embeds the slave’s body within the

imprisoning landscape of slavery while drawing its viewers’ eyes to aerial posi-

tions of power. Through the scopic subjugation of the slave, white anti-slavery
viewers gained access to their own mastery. Anti-slavery visual culture, then,
reveals how fiilly the visual consolidation of class in the nineteenth century
depended upon race.6

By locating the panoramic perspective in a wide array of pictorial examples
produced by the anti-slavery movement from the 1820s to the 1850s –
broadsides, woodcuts in newspapers and almanacs, and engravings in slave
narratives – I show how the anti-slavery movement utilized this perspective
not only to reveal the truth of slavery to its Northern white viewers but also to

school them in their own social position and political power. Anti-slavery visual

culture successfully converted Northern viewers to its cause by presenting in its

mirror of slavery a reflection of their own empowered subjectivity. This domi-

nance was performed not just through the anti-slavery image’s subjugation of
the slave but also through its appropriation of the slaveholder’s commanding per-

spective. By identifying itself with national icons and presenting its panoramic
perspective as both more powerful and more benevolent than the slaveholder’s

panoptic viewpoint, anti-slavery visual culture articulated the supremacy of white

Northern nationalism. Anti-slavery visual culture, I argue, is as much about the

consolidation of white Northern power through the panoramic perspective as it is

about the extension of liberty or its perspective to the slave.7 Within anti-slavery

visual culture, freedom is represented not just as a geographical space but also as
a perspectivai position.

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In what follows, I analyze anti-slavery’s panoramic perspective as a means of

illuminating the formation of white Northern subjectivity in the nineteenth cen-

tury. In consolidating class through a racialized and regionalized visual held, the
anti-slavery movement played a crucial role in configuring vision’s relation to

power in the period. Radier than simply focusing on how anti-slavery visual cul-
ture represented the subject of slavery or the slave, I attend to the points of view

its images encode and produce. Emphasizing the process of seeing instead of the
object of the gaze makes the construction of whiteness more visible. This essay

begins by delineating the range of practices white anti-slavery activists deployed
to project the power of Northern whiteness in the visual field. It then attends to
anti-slavery images that spoke back against the consolidation of white Northern

power by foregrounding the Northerner’s complicity with the slaveholder. It ends

with an analysis of how African American anti-slavery activists contributed to this

visual discourse by creating a counter-visuality that both critiqued the North’s
unwillingness to extend liberty’s perspective to the slave and appropriated the
panoramic perspective to assert the slave’s “right to look” (Mirzoeff 1).

The predominant visual mode of the AASS’s 1830s campaign was the “view” of
slavery. These views brought the distant scene of slavery before Northern observ-

ers’ eyes and made slavery accessible and perceptible by providing evidence
of sights unseen. Equating vision with knowledge – as The Emandpator writes,
pictures can “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” (“Pictorials”
Feb. 1836) – the anti-slavery movement drew on its culture’s conviction that see-

ing was believing.8 Most often, these views represented the cruelty of slavery: the

torture, selling, and separation of slaves. Their graphic imagery documented slav-

ery’s injustices and evoked sympathy for the slave’s suffering. By placing the tor-

tured or shackled body of the slave at the center of its visual field, the anti-slavery

“view” sought to change its audience’s point of view on the subject of slavery.
Beyond asserting sight as a privileged form of social knowledge, anti-slavery’ s

“views” of slavery also instantiated a particular perspective – the “overview” of

the panorama. Arising at the end of the eighteenth century and tied to landscape
paintings and city views, the panorama became a popular optical entertainment

in the nineteenth century. Begun as a gigantic circular painting in England with an

unobstructed 360-degree view and then translated into large-scale serialized, hor-
izontal views in the United States’ moving version, the panorama was produced
from and instructed its viewer in a particular perspective – die bird’s-eye view.9

Taken from an elevated vantage point (a lofty prospect point such as a lookout, a
state house, or a cathedral), the panorama provided viewers with an expansive
view that extended to the distant horizon. Whether actually situated in this
heightened viewpoint (as the audience was in the circular version, standing on
a high platform) or more figuratively inhabiting it (as in the moving panorama,
where the vistas unrolled before the seated spectator), viewers were offered a

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Anti-Slavery’s Panoramic Perspective

commanding position from which to survey the field of vision. As an all-seeing

eye, they became, by implication, all-knowing and all-powerful. Like the panoptic

perspective that arose at the same time (Jeremy Bentham’s plans for his tower

and Robert Barker’s panorama emerged almost simultaneously in the early
1790s),10 the panorama’s aerial viewpoint and its “magisterial gaze” provided
its viewers a sense of superiority and control (Boime 38). The panorama’s all-
encompassing view produced not only a comprehensive totality but also a privi-

leged subject position of scopic mastery.

Anti-slavery used the panorama and its perspective in several ways. First, it

employed the panorama’s wide-angle view to present a comprehensive survey
of slavery’s cruelties. As small-scale panoramas, anti-slavery’s “views” drew on

the panorama’s verisimilitude to expose slavery’s inner workings and on its ency-

clopedic comprehensiveness to display anti-slavery’s knowledge of and mastery

over the subject of slavery. Second, anti-slavery identified the panoptic perspec-

tive inherent in the panorama’s form with the slaveholder’s scopic power, coding

it as coercive and cruel. Third, it provided its viewer an alternate aerial vantage
point with which to identify – one that encompassed the superiority of the slave-

holder’s perspective but that was based on sympathetic identification rather than

surveillance. Through these moves, anti-slavery’s panoramic views were able to

assert the movement’s scopic dominance over the landscape of slavery while also
producing a powerful but morally benign perspectivai position for its Northern
audience.

Anti-slavery’s panoramic views came in two forms: the individual view of slav-

ery, which often located particular scenes of slavery within a broader panoramic

landscape, and composite views, which assembled a variety of pictures on a single
sheet to produce a serialized story of slavery, much like the moving panorama

that integrated single scenes into a continuous format. For instance, prints pub-

lished by the AASS in the second half of the 1830s, such as Views of Slavery (1836),

Slave Market of America (1836), Illustrations of the American Anti-Slavery
Almanac for 1840 (1840), and A Bird’s Eye View of American Slavery (1837), 11
which consist of a series of cuts that work together to tell the larger story, resem-

ble miniature panoramas. In both the individual and serial forms, scenes of slav-

ery are aggregated to reveal slavery’s horrors to be systemic rather than singular.

Utilizing foreground and background, anti-slavery views situate their compelling

particulars, which are meant to arouse the emotions, within a wider perspective,

which provides a rational overview of slavery’s structures. By representing slavery

as a panoramic landscape, anti-slavery views provide a comprehensive ocular
knowledge of slavery that also produces sympathy for the slave’s suffering.

Views of Slavery (see Figure 1) exemplifies both the individual and serialized

panoramic forms. Taken on its own, the upper left image depicts a panoramic
landscape of a sugar plantation with the bucolic scene of slave labor in the fore-

ground and the scene of torture, a slave being whipped, in the background.

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Figure 1. Views of Slavery (1836), lithographic print. Image courtesy: Library Company of Philadelphia.

By allowing its viewers to see to the horizon, the panoramic picture extends their

sight beyond what the slaveholders would have them see – a peaceful work
scene – to the truth of the slave system – its cruelty. Anti-slavery’s panoramic

perspective exposes what slaveholders attempt to hide when they paint a pretty

picture of slave life. By situating this scene along with five others in a grid-like

pattern, the print comprehensively details the various aspects of slavery –
plantation life, modes of punishment, slave auctions, slave separations and
kidnappings, and the slave trade – and synthesizes its visual knowledge into a

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Anti-Slavery’s Panoramic Perspective

cohesive whole. Taken together, the scenes provide an extensive overview of slav-

ery even as they foreground for the viewer its most shocking aspects – the slave

hanging by his wrists being whipped, the slave mother begging not to be sepa-

rated from her children, and the slave being sold at auction. Like the print as

a whole, which works to assimilate its parts into a single picture of slavery’s inhu-

manity as the framing words instruct, each panoramic image places its particu-

larities within a larger landscape to expose slavery’s systematic cruelty. The long

line of coffled slaves marching in the distance toward a ship in the lower right
image, for instance, speaks to the greater Atlantic economy of slavery that under-

pins the economic negotiations in the foreground; the tortured, auctioned, or
separated slave that 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 that

the system of slavery will process. In emphasizing the distant horizon line and
providing a wide-angle view, these panoramic pictures promise their viewers full

access to the scene of slavery even as they show how slavery’s system extends far

beyond their frame.

Anti-slavery views use the panorama’s expansive perspective to train their
viewers to produce an assimilative knowledge. In addition to providing an over-

view of slavery’s cruelties, they teach their audience to coalesce each part into a

single whole – to see slavery as a merciless system of brutality. The Emancipator,

for instance, advertised the broadside A Bird’s Eye View of American Slavery,
illustrated with seven engravings, with the tag line: “ALL AT ONE VIEW”
(“All”). Whether literal or figurative (the print itself is not extant), the bird’s-

eye view offered by this “LARGE SHEET” (“Catalogue”) unites its particular
details, multiple “cuts of the various ‘instruments of cruelty,'” into a unified
whole, the “bloody system” of slavery (“All”). In placing its multiple scenes under

the totalizing heading “ONE VIEW,” the print instructs its audience in the pan-

oramic perspective’s holistic mode of seeing. Whether created vertically from
above through the bird’s-eye view’s aerial perspective or horizontally from below

via the sequential logic of the moving panorama’s scrolling images, the pano-
ramic perspective produces an authoritative and comprehensive “ALL.” By
appropriating this perspective, anti-slavery visual culture made slavery legible
and coherent. Moreover, through composing a singular scene of slavery, it
represented its view as the “right” view on the subject.12

Besides asserting its own perceptual power, its ability to make slavery visible

and hence knowable as a cruel system, anti-slavery’s panoramic images also chal-

lenge the slaveholder’s scopic power by depicting slavery as coercive. Anti-slavery

visual culture represents Southern plantation slavery as a visual complex where

power is produced scopically. As Nicholas Mirzoeff argues, plantation slavery is

the “foundational moment” of a modern visuality that transmits authority (6).
Slaveholders, according to Mirzoeff, employed a system of “visualized surveil-

lance” to claim and disseminate white power (10). Utilizing a panoptic

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G o d d u

perspective, overseers mapped the plantation as a “sovereign space” through
visual surveillance and oversight (50). Anti-slavery visual culture explicates
and critiques the slaveholder’s powerful sight lines. Throughout its iconography,

the “over”seer embodies the vertical vision of the elevated perspective, while the

slave occupies an oppressed position within the landscape that restricts vision.
Through his specular dominance over the subjugated body of the slave, the slave-
holder asserts his social control as well as his social status. Depicted on horseback

leading a slave gang, standing over the kneeling slave who begs for mercy, or
aggressively poised with an instrument of torture in his hand raised high above
the slave, the slaveholder is always situated above the slave, his superior vantage

point denoting his mastery. In addition, the slaveholder’s appropriation of visual

technologies, such as the rifle, signifies his visual dominance over the slave as
absolute. In one image from The Anti-Slavery Record captioned “A Fact with a

Short Commentary” (1836), the slaveholder looks down the barrel of a rifle at
a runaway slave lying horizontally on the ground, threatening to shoot him in

the eyes at close range (1). There is no escape, the image argues, from the visual

surveillance of slavery. However, the slaveholder’s raised whip or other instru-

ment of torture, which represents and extends his panoptic perspective, marks

his visual authority as highly suspect. Slavery’s panoptic perspective, anti-slavery

visual culture argues, is coercive and cruel. Its visual regime depends upon pun-

ishment, its power on oppression.

Anti-slavery’s iconographical system relied on a consistent visual vocabulary
that articulated the slaveholder’s power as perspectivai. The movement’s most
iconic image is that of the slaveholder standing over the slave with a whip in
his hand, as in the image “Torturing American Citizens” from George Bourne’s

Picture of Slavery in the United States of America (1834) (129). This repeated
image articulates anti-slavery’s most basic message: the slave, who is often liter-

ally tied to the landscape and always embedded in it, is powerless, while the cruel

slaveholder, whose whip always hovers above the landscape, is omnipotent. Each

figure’s perspective reinforces this meaning. The slave’s head is often bowed
down in these images, his eyes focused on the ground and either obscured or cov-

ered. When he is looking up, it is often into the face of a white master, pleading for

his life. The slaveholder’s eyes, on the other hand, are usually trained on the black

body from above. Whether or not he is physically positioned above the slave in

the image (which he often is), the raised whip, as an extension of his own body,
provides him access to that aerial view. The meaning of the visual message is
straightforward: slavery’s cruelties are violently oppressive and the slaveholder’s

power, both physical and scopic, is absolute.
Despite its negative critique of the politics of the plantation’s panoptic

perspective, mainstream anti-slavery visual culture does not construct a
counter-visuality. Instead of dismantling the panoptic aspects of the slaveholder’s

perspective, it appropriates slavery’s scopic power for its own cause. From its

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Anti-Slavery’s Panoramic Perspective

Figure 2. “United States’ Internal Slave Trade” (1823), woodcut. Genius of Universal Emancipation Jan.

1823: 97. Image courtesy: ProQuest LLC.

earliest images, the US anti-slavery movement offers a critique of slavery’s
oppressive visual power even as it reproduces that perspective with a key differ-

ence: if slavery’s panoptic perspective is oppressive, anti-slavery’s panoramic per-

spective is liberating. While the anti-slavery image may promise freedom to the

slave, its principal purpose is to construct an unfettered perspective for its
Northern viewers. Anti-slavery visual culture offers white Northerners an aerial

perspective from which to assert their sovereignty and superiority over the South.

Take, for example, the woodcut print “United States’ Internal Slave Trade”
(1823), published in one of anti-slavery’s earliest newspapers, Benjamin
Lundy’s Genius of Universal Emancipation (see Figure 2).13 The picture produces

a familiar panoramic landscape of slavery. The overseer, sitting on a horse, leads
a gang of shackled slaves that extends beyond the picture’s frame, his whip held

high above their bowed heads. The slaveholder’s whip cuts through the sky,
extending its perspectivai sight line toward the sun. The whip is the oppressive

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force that frames the line of slaves, figuratively pushing their heads down toward

the ground from above. As the address “TO THE AMERICAN PEOPLE” below the

image states, this is but a “faint picture” of slavery’s power: the ” detestable traffic

in human flesh, carried on by citizens of this Republic in the open face of the day,

and in violation of the fundamental principles of our government, the maxims

and precepts of Christianity, and the eternal rules of justice and equity.” In
response to a slave power that operates in plain sight, blatantly defying the rule

of nation, God, and law, viewers are urged to “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 directive to “LOOK” insists on the view-

er’s responsibility to see the detestable nature of slaver/ s power, and in so doing,

counter it through anti-slavery action. The command, while coercive, also
empowers its Northern viewers since their responsibility to see assumes their
inherent “right” to look. Viewers are disciplined through the visuality of
type – “LOOK AT IT” – to own their scopic authority and wield it against the
slaveholder.14 Moreover, by framing the picture of slavery on all four sides with
ironic words – such as “A GLORIOUS SPECTACLE!!!” and ” Hail Columbia,

Happy Land.1″ – which mark the distance between the United States’ ideals and
slavery’s realities, the image asserts the ability of anti-slavery as well as of its
viewers to reframe the debate. The slaveholder may hold scopic power over
the slave within the picture, but in the larger page view, he is visually contained:
his vertical power is framed horizontally by the newspaper’s headings and its lines

of type that announce abolition’s plan for slavery’s downfall. Situated beneath the

anti-slavery masthead Genius of Universal Emancipation and positioned as the
object of the gaze of Northern reformers, who sit in judgment above the slave-
holder as they read the newspaper below them on their laps, the slaveholder is

positioned as being under anti-slavery’s scopic control. Anti-slavery visual culture

may portray the power of slavery’s visual regime, but its ultimate goal is to assert

anti-slavery’s dominance over the visual field.
Within the picture, anti-slavery’s visual supremacy is symbolized by the flag.

Placed near the center of the image, the flag serves as a counter to the slave-
holder’s whip and provides the viewer another high-flying vantage point with

which to identify. Cutting through the sky like the whip, the flag has a similar abil-

ity to structure the landscape below. Always at an equal, if not higher, point as the

whip in anti-slavery images, the flag offers the slaveholder’s elevated vantage
point with a crucial difference: it promises freedom rather than oppression.
A symbol of the national ideals of liberty and equality that the anti-slavery peri-
odical announces as its own when it places a quote from the Declaration of
Independence directly beneath its masthead, the flag stands for anti-slavery’ s
views as well as its viewpoint. Held by the slave rather than imposed over him

like the whip, the flag represents liberty as a perspectivai position: the free-
floating and commanding perspective of the bird’s-eye view. As an extension

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Anti-Slavery’s Panoramic Perspective

of the slave’s body, the flag provides the slave symbolic access to this aerial
position. By aligning anti-slavery’s aerial perspective with the slave’s and by asso-

ciating it with the nation’s core values of liberty and equality, the flag provides

anti-slavery a superior vantage point. While the flag and the whip are equally

elevated in the image, the flag is its moral center.
By casting anti-slavery’s panoramic perspective as one of access and equality

against slavery’s perspective of surveillance and coercion, anti-slavery visual cul-

ture pictures its elevated perspective as morally superior. Unlike the whip’s ver-

tical, hierarchical perspective, the flag’s horizontal features promise a more
inclusive, democratic viewpoint. In siding with the flag and converting to anti-

slavery, Northern viewers gain access to the panorama’s commanding perspective
under the cover of moral benevolence.15 Their power is equal to the slaveholder’s

but remains innocent because it serves the slave and upholds the nation’s ideals.

Unlike the visually compelling figure of the cruel slaveholder, who attracts
through his powerful stance both desire and dread, the flag provides a morally

just and socially respectable point of identification through which viewers can

access their own privilege. The picture, then, is more about the North’s freedom
than the slave’s. The slave may hold the promise of liberty, but he does not yet

have access to its elevated perspective. Marching through the landscape in an
anonymous, faceless line with no subjectivity or perspective, or even a for-
ward-looking view, the slave can only long for the freedom that the Northern
viewer has already attained. Positioned in the gloomy black sky as a beaconing

symbol like the North Star, the flag may create a small open space of freedom

above the head of the slave who carries it – cutting a window into the oppressive

sky that bows the head of the slave at the end of the line – but that space, like its

freedom, is figured as white. The flag simultaneously promises the slave liberty

even as it asserts a racial hierarchy similar to the whip. It creates a space of free-

dom and resembles a piece of the harsh sky; it provides the slave access to the
vertical view even as it boxes him in from above. Like the whip, it encodes white

superiority and black subordination. In identifying with the flag, Northern view-

ers reaffirm their freedom and consolidate their privileged position through racial

hierarchy.

The flag and whip imagery that dominates anti-slavery visual discourse
achieves several aims. First and foremost, it allows anti-slavery to formulate its

panoramic perspective as commanding yet benevolent. In doing so, it provides
a compelling configuration of Northern subjectivity – benign power. Anti-slavery

visual culture allows the Northern viewer to appropriate the slaveholder’s point of

view even as it delegitimizes it by painting his perspective as cruel and degener-

ate. Accessed under the cover of the flag, however, Northern power is made legit-

imate. The images encode the power struggle between North and South over the
body of the slave. The whip and the flag, which vie for perspectivai dominance

throughout these images, emblematize the fight over which side will ultimately

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Figure 3. “United States Slave Trade” (1830), copper engraving. Genius of Universal Emancipation July

1830: 50A. Image courtesy: ProQuest LLC.

control the national landscape. Anti-slavery’s images are more about the North’s

freedom from Southern power than the slave’s emancipation. Its visual system,
which identifies whiteness with power and blackness with powerlessness, is about

consolidating the power of Northern whites rather than supplying the slave with

sight.

This visual power dynamic is evident in another image from the Genius of
Universal Emancipation, “United States Slave Trade” (1830) (see Figure 3). 16
In this panoramic image of the US slave trade, the foreground is dominated by
the slaveholder’s power: he sits on a horse and directs the viewer’s gaze by point-

ing the line of shackled slaves toward the ship that will transport them farther

south. His ability to command the scene through his pointing finger depends
on the whip tucked under his arm; his pent-up power is made explicit by the
raised whip in the background and the unfurled one in the foreground and by

his elevated position, which parallels slavery’s other aerial viewpoint in this
image – the ship’s mast. With his horizontal outstretched arm and whip, the
slaveholder’s body resembles the ship’s mast – his head situated at the top of
the triangle his body forms. The horizontal lines of the image (the horizon, which

itself contains another line of slaves working under the overseer’s whip, the
masts, the ship’s hold’s crosshatchings that depict it as a prison, along with
the slaveholder’s whip and arm) reinforce the oppressive power of the slave-
holder’s panoptic perspective: like the masts that press down on the slaves on
the deck, it denies the slaves aerial access. The only part of the picture free from

slavery’s scopic command is the image of the Capitol dome (just recently com-

pleted in 1824) that peeks out from behind the hills in the far background on

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Anti-Slavery’s Panoramic Perspective

the right side. Marked by the hills’ curved aperture, it alone hovers above the lin-

ear oppression of the image. Set at the same height as the slave ship’s mast (and

mimicking its triangular structure since the central dome, which has a flag on top,

is flanked by two smaller domes on either side), it alone has the power to van-

quish slavery’s scopic power. It visually anchors the right side of the picture,
its flag drawing the viewer’s eye away from the slaveholder’s directional power.
With its flag and its symbolic placement as a city on the hill, the dome is a pow-

erful beacon of freedom. By locating the dome directly above the female slave’s

head, mimicking its curvature, the image frames the anti-slavery viewpoint as

both protective (she is a mother with two children) and liberating. By visually

planting the flag on the slave’s head, the image provides her symbolic access
to the bird’s-eye view of freedom. However, this aerial liberty remains for the
slave a dream on the far horizon. The slave’s immediate fate is to march under

the watchful eye of the overseer.

Once again, this image pictures anti-slaver/ s panoramic perspective as
commanding – equal to slavery’s power – yet benevolent – focused on liberation

rather than oppression. The dome’s strong vertical lines that extend upward
through the flag pole are softened by its curvature and the horizontal stripes of

the flag. At the center of the image, however, is not the slave and her quest for
emancipation but the powerful white slaveholder. The slave remains one in a line

of barely differentiated, blackened figures that stand either at the water’s edge,

awaiting transport, or across the hold of the ship. The slaveholder’s commanding
position on the horse at the center of the picture draws the viewer’s eye. As with

most of the whip images, it is the slaveholder, with his aggressively active stance,

not the passive black body, that compels the viewer’s attention. As the image’s
figure of whiteness, he serves as a surrogate for the Northern white viewer
who is at once asked to identify with his perspective and to censure his cruel
power. Sitting at the apex of the image’s inverted triangular spatial layout
(the dome, the ship, and the slaveholder), the slaveholder mediates between
the image’s two opposing sides, the ship of slavery and the dome of freedom.
In actively refusing the slaveholder’s direction and allowing their eyes to fly up
to the flag, taking refuge in its more benevolent power, viewers enact their alle-

giance to anti-slavery. In doing so, they gain a perspective that is not only morally

innocent but also supported by the power of the state.

By utilizing national icons of liberty – the flag, the Capitol, and the eagle – as

emblems of its cause, anti-slavery appropriated the state’s aerial perspective and

its political authority. The Genius of Universal Emancipation, for instance, utilized

the Capitol dome and the eagle on its masthead in the late 1820s.17 Both are icons

of federal power (the eagle carries e pluribus unum in its talons). By suturing
anti-slavery authority to centralized power, these images accrue influence for

anti-slavery and directly align Northern interests with this cause. The Genius of
Universal Emancipation’s panoramic image of the slave trade pits Southern

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imperial economic power (the slave ship) against Northern nationalism (the
dome).18 Meant to impress upon the viewer the threat of Southern imperialism

to the country’s nascent nationalism, the image argues that Northern interests

can only be upheld through the adoption of anti-slavery views. By associating
those views with a particular viewpoint – the bird’s-eye perspective of the eagle

or the panoramic view of the seat of power – anti-slavery provides its Northern

viewers a superior position from which to assert their dominance. The rays ema-

nating from the Capitol dome in the Genius of Universal Emancipation’s masthead

project anti-slavery and the nation as frilly consolidated projects (still nascent
formations in the late 1820s) by associating them with two power centers: the

sun (the curved dome with its rays looks like the sun emerging on the horizon)

as well as the omniscient eye of God (curved with lashes, it emanates the light of
truth). The slaveholder may be in the center of the picture, directing the viewer’s

gaze to follow his own toward the ship, but the ultimate eye of power lies hidden

behind the hills, occupying the place of the sun.
By placing anti-slavery’s power in the background rather than the foreground,

the image would seem to cede the center of the visual field to slavery. However,
locating the anti-slavery perspective on the far horizon provides anti-slavery the

superior panoramic viewpoint: the more distance viewers have on the scene,
the greater their comprehension and command. Situated high above in the hills,
the dome provides an elevated yet far away vantage point from which Northern

viewers can look down upon the scene of slavery – casting aspersions on its lack

of liberty and offering sympathy to the suffering slave – and assert their powerful

benevolence. Separated by the hills, this panoramic viewpoint also keeps the
viewer safely divided from the scene. Between its physical placement and its
moral cover, the dome offers a protected perspective, free from implication in

the corrupt activities below. This vantage point reiterates Northern viewers’
actual position: unlike the slaveholder who occupies the center of the picture,
Northern viewers stand outside of its frame, looking at it. They may witness
the scene of slavery, but they play no part in it except through their benevolent
actions to end it.

This position of unimplicated power is further produced through the abstrac-

tion of anti-slavery’s perspective into iconic symbols. Associated with national

emblems rather than specific figures, anti-slavery’s panoramic perspective liber-

ates its viewers from their bodies, enabling their vision to fly free. Unlike the slave

who is fully embodied in the landscape or the slaveholder who remains embodied
despite his access to an elevated point of view through his whip, the anti-slavery

viewers’ eyes float powerfully over the landscape rather than being subjected to it.

Liberated from the body, anti-slavery viewers can adopt an omniscient yet inno-

cent perspective. Ungrounded, their perspective is both everywhere and nowhere.

Emancipated from the land – they are above it, not located in it as the slaveholder

is or pictured as working it like the slave – anti-slavery viewers also consolidate

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Anti-Slavery’s Panoramic Perspective

their class status. Like Ralph Waldo Emerson’s transparent eyeball, which con-
ceptualized the middle-class subject as a disembodied, aerial observer (39),
anti-slavery’s panoramic perspective provides Northerners an abstracted view-

point from which to observe other people being subjugated to the land, and in

so doing, to affirm their own freedom from it. Moreover, by transforming the

landscape from a utilitarian space into an aesthetic object and by teaching its
viewers to read the landscape symbolically, anti-slavery’s panoramic views also

constructed their audience as the cultural elite. For, as Angela Miller argues,
the “ability to appreciate the landscape as an aesthetic commodity emerged
as a defining attribute of an urban middle-class market-oriented public”
(“Landscape” 342). The slaveholder may wear the top hat in the image, but it
is the middle-class Northern viewer with his limitless view and untainted perspec-

tive, his association with centralized power and acts of moral benevolence, who
gains the superior social position.

The image, however, works to occlude Northern power. By abstracting anti-
slavery’s viewpoint, it also naturalizes it as transparent. The image, which seems

to be first and foremost about slavery and the unveiling of its cruel practices, actu-

ally covers for another agenda: the identification of anti-slavery with Northern

nationalism and the consolidation of the white, Northern, middle-class subject

as all-powerful. By providing Northerners a perspective through which to consol-

idate their class status as well as their economic and political interests, anti-
slavery installs itself as a driving force of middle-class culture. Moreover, by
eliding the ways in which Northern identity is also constructed through race,

anti-slavery provides moral cover for this constitution of power. Anti-slavery is
successful precisely because it makes the construction of Northern whiteness

invisible. Rather than undoing slavery’s visual complex, then, anti-slavery appro-
priates its structures to secure white Northern power and privilege.

Not all anti-slavery images, however, allow the North’s power to remain invis-

ible or its viewers to evade implication. The cover image for The American Anti-

Slavery Almanac for 1843 (1842), edited by Lydia Maria Child, presents a familiar,

yet starkly different panoramic picture (see Figure 4). It utilizes the same stock

figures – the Capitol dome with the flag on top, the tortured slave lying prone
in the landscape, and the eagle of power – but with a crucial difference: there

is no slaveholder in this picture to take the brunt of the blame. Rather, it is
the eagle, with its strong talons and aggressively pointed beak, who is the figure

of cruelty and oppression. The eagle is no longer the benevolent figure of protec-

tion (the slave mother plays that role to her child) but the instrument of torture,

creating the scars on the slave’s back instead of the whip. Its horizontally linear

head and wings visually press the slave down, holding her to the ground.
Powerfully embodied, the eagle is not an abstracted emblem in this image but

a bird catching its prey. Having landed on the ground, it no longer flies above
and apart but is fully engaged in the scene. The viewer may still have access to

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Figure 4. Front Cover of The American Anti-Slavery Almanac for ¡843 (1842). Image courtesy:
American

Antiquarian Society.

the .flag’s more innocent and elevated bird’s-eye view in the distance, but it
remains an ideal perspective yet to be achieved. The Capitol dome in the back-

ground, like the ironic poem below the image, which states, “Oh, hail
Columbia! Happy land! The cradle land of Liberty!” marks the distance between

the nation’s realities and its ideals. The flag, situated above the eagle’s head rather

than the slave’s, beckons the eagle upward, perhaps urging it to carry the slave
and her child to freedom. While the background image may promise Northern

viewers a panoramic perspective through their adoption of anti-slavery views
and actions, it resists providing that perspective’s innocent position by fore-
grounding Northerners’ complicity with the slaveholder’s powerful sight lines.
Moreover, unlike most anti-slavery images, it provides the slave with the ability

to look back. Pictured as reverse images of each other – the eagle has a white
head and black body, whereas the slave has a black head and white dress – the

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Anti-Slavery’s Panoramic Perspective

Figure 5. Back Cover of The American Anti-Slavery Almanac for 1843 (1842). Image courtesy; American

Antiquarian Society.

slave and eagle meet each other’s eyes at similar heights. The eagle may be on top,

but the slave is looking back, not down. Rather than passively waiting for the
North to emancipate her, she stares at the eagle, exposing the contradiction
between the North’s action (or inaction) and its ideals. If the power struggle
between North and South, flag and whip, occurs in the realm of abstraction above

the head of the black body in previous images, here Northern power is staged

on the black body. Trained throughout anti-slavery iconography to identify
with the eagle, viewers here become the object of their own gaze. In refusing view-

ers the protection of the eagle eye’s panoptic position – to see without being
seen – the image implicates its viewers in the scene of slavery, unmasking their

sympathy as voyeurism.
The back cover of The American Anti-Slavery Almanac heightens this visual

critique by figuring the flag as a whipping post (see Figure 5).19 Here the flag

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is firmly planted in the ground rather than located above. The flag takes the
position of the whip in this image. Its stripes, as the poem below makes clear,

are a metonymy for the scars the whip inflicts; its unfurling in the wind is similar

in shape to the serpentine outline of the raised whip. The flag, with its horizontal

stripes and its tied rope, also oppresses and imprisons the slave. Northern liberty,

as symbolized by the flag’s white stars, exists not only above but also alongside

Southern slavery, as signified by the black stars of “shame.” Unlike the flag-
versus-whip images, which present an opposition between North and South, free-
dom and oppression, this image of the flag-as-whip (or liberty pole as whipping

post) internalizes that conflict within the flag itself – the stars of the white man’s

liberty are connected to the stripes of the slave’s servitude. The only way to access

the bird’s-eye view in this image is through the liberty cap located at the top of the

flag/liberty pole. This cap, which hovers high above the slave’s upturned head

ratifier than sitting squarely on it, symbolizes the promise of emancipation.
However, rather than emblematize or enable his liberty, the flag visually blocks

the slave’s view of it. The flag-as-whip, covered in stripes (or lashes) and stars

of shame, actively impedes the slave’s access to the aerial viewpoint of freedom

by tying him down. In claiming the cap’s vantage point, not only will the slave
become free but the flag, no longer hovering oppressively over the slave in bond-

age, will also reclaim its symbolic status. Rather than constructing white freedom

through the oppression of blackness, this image argues that Northern whites can

only fully embrace their liberty when blacks do so as well.
As The American Anti-Slavery Almanac’s more radical imagery makes clear,

the whip and the flag are not so different. Their visual resemblance (both wave
in the wind) underscores the similarity between the specifically white panoramic

perspectives they produce. Each image frames the slave horizontally from above,

forcing his gaze down and trapping him within the landscape. Each subjugates the

slave in order to assert its own power. Cruelty and benevolence encode a similar

power dynamic. In both cases, the black body becomes a vessel for white privi-

lege. The slave who bows under the whip and the slave who bends under the
domed curvature of the Genius of Universal Emancipation’s kneeling slave mast-

head are refused access to an aerial perspective.2 Anti-slaver/ s curvature of
power, its arched perspective of liberty, is simply a softer version of slavery’s

harsh horizontal lines of oppression. Whether through scopic surveillance or
spectatorial sympathy, the slave remains the object of the gaze.

How, then, did black subjects gain access to the visual field and look back?
How did they also inhabit the powerful panoramic perspective? The answer is,
of course, not a simple one.21 As slave narratives, from Moses Roper’s with its

spectacular images of torture to Harriet A. Jacobs’s with its garret panopticon,22

make clear, gaining a panoramic perspective was difficult for the slave under the

scopic regime of slavery. Moreover, once free, former slaves also had to negotiate

a vexed visual field that frequently sought to limit their liberty. Often dependent

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Anti-Slavery’s Panoramic Perspective

upon images already in circulation for their texts, former slaves such as Henry

Bibb, who reproduced a variety of earlier abolitionist images in his slave narra-

tive, or William Wells Brown, who reprinted more critical images from Child’s

The American Anti-Slavery Almanac on the front and back cover of his songbook

The Anti-Slavery Harp (1848), worked to “recast … the established illustrational

and graphic codes which permeate white abolition publication” (M. Wood, Blind

118). Like their white counterparts, black anti-slavery activists both critiqued the

panoramic perspective and appropriated it.

African American use of the panoramic perspective is particularly evident in

the slave narrative, which, like the moving panorama, often consists of a series

of sketches of the landscape and makes a strong claim for verisimilitude. The

preface to Charles Ball’s Slavery in the United States: A Narrative of the Life
and Adventures of Charles Ball, a Black Man (1837), for instance, states that
the narrative 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” (12). Ball’s narrative also

depicts his freedom as dependent upon achieving a panoramic perspective: he
negotiates the landscape that seeks to imprison him (he describes it as fraught

with difficulty, darkness, and confusion) by climbing trees to gain knowledge of

and hence mastery over the topography. That perspective, however, is danger-
ous and contingent. His pursuers not only look for him in trees, but he must
always return to the ground to continue his journey North under the cover of

darkness. In order to gain a view, he must expose himself to filli view.
Moreover, his view, like his freedom, is fleeting: he is constantly recaptured
and placed back under the watchful eyes of jailers and overseers. When he does

make his final escape, it is in the hold of a ship where he must lie next to cotton

bales in full darkness until he arrives in Philadelphia. Replicating the middle
passage and its curtailment of vision, Ball’s liberation ends not with a celebra-

tion of his freedom but with the recognition of his scopic powerlessness: he
laments that he is “without the least hope of ever again seeing [his] wife and
children” (517, emphasis added). During his escape, Ball may gain momentary
access to panoramic views that help to liberate him from the landscape of slav-
ery, but finally, he is unable to escape slavery’s scopic power or abstract himself

into freedom like the white anti-slavery viewer. His view is still grounded in his

body. Despite its achievement of a bird’s-eye view, the slave’s perspective
remains embodied. As both object and subject of the narrative, even after attain-

ing freedom, the former slave continues to be a participant observer. He may be
able, as a wide range of black panoramists did in the late 1840s and 1850s,23 to

adopt the panoramic perspective by depicting the landscape of slavery for others
to see, but he remains securely within the picture’s frame. As activist and slave,
authoritative eyewitness and runaway, the slave narrator exhibits a double
vision.

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While the slave’s embodied position is one obstacle to the attainment of the

bird’s-eye view, the Northern white power structure’s unwillingness to allow
blacks full access to that perspective is another. As Frederick Douglass makes
clear in his narrative, My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), the panoramic per-
spective remains the purview of the white subject in the North, just as it was in the

South. In the chapter “Liberty Attained,” Douglass depicts his escape from slavery

through the fantastical image of balloon flight: “Disappearing from the kind
reader, in a flying cloud or balloon, (pardon the figure,) driven by the wind,
and knowing not where I should land – whether in slavery or in freedom”
(335-36), he alights in New York “safe and sound, without loss of blood or bone”

after his “bold and perilous” flight. Once again, freedom is associated with the

perspectivai position of the panorama. By taking flight in a balloon, Douglass
is able to throw off, much as a balloonist would his ballast, slavery’s “heavy chain,

with a huge block attached to it” (336) that had dragged him down for so long.

Flight allows him to break free 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, “Life as a Slave” (1855) (see

Figure 6). This triptych depicts the slaveholder’s absolute power in scopic terms:

the runaway slave at the top, who is trapped in the landscape as he runs through

foliage into a wall of darkness, is pursued by dogs and shot at by the scopic power

of the slave hunter’s rifle; in the center image, the auctioneer stands high on the

block above the downward-looking slave, a raised mallet in his hand, in front of

the Capitol dome with its flag waving on top; and in the bottom landscape, the

slave master sits high on his horse, his two-story house behind him and a low-

standing slave cabin before him. The flags that flank the central image on either

side like spears are less beacons of hope and more signs of military power and
white oppression. Like the Capitol dome in the center image, which acts as a
backdrop to the scene of selling, the American flag, which peeks out from behind

two blank white flags, is allied with the power of whiteness and offers no redress

for the slave. Only by appropriating the balloon’s superior bird’s-eye view can

Douglass rise above slavery’s powerful perspective and claim his freedom. By
leaving the slaveholder in the dark, ignorant of his actual means of escape,
Douglass is able to obscure the slaveholder’s sight lines. Placed in the slave’s
visionless position, the slaveholder is “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).
However, according to Douglass, the attainment of the panoramic perspective

is fleeting, if not illusory, for the slave. First, the balloon is not a place of com-
mand 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” (My 335), the bal-

loon fails to provide an unobstructed panoramic view. By figuring his access to

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Anti-Slavery’s Panoramic Perspective

Figure 6. Nathaniel Orr, “Life as a Slave” (1855), woodcut engraving. Douglass, My 33a. Image cour-

tesy: American Antiquarian Society.

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: that it can ever be disembodied, omniscient, or passively experi-
enced. Second, once he arrives in New York, Douglass is quickly brought back
down to earth. Despite having the “free earth under [his] feet” (336), he quickly
finds 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 will betray him, the North sits in the shadow of slavery. 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

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Broadway,” Douglass becomes an urban flâneur. He represents the urban North
as providing both a new social field and subjectivai perspective: “A new world
burst upon my agitated vision” (336). His ability to negotiate this new visual ter-

rain remains tricky. Wandering the crowded streets of New York, Douglass is not

only cut free from the landscape he knows and the power structures he under-

stands, but his sight lines are also cut off. He loses “sight” of his only guide among

the throng and, once alone, becomes “an easy prey to the kidnappers” (338). It is

only once he is introduced to David Ruggles, secretary of the New York
Committee of Vigilance, who becomes to Douglass as “[ejyes to the blind,” that

he feels safe (341). Freedom, like slavery, Douglass argues, is a hostile landscape

with limited sight lines that require constant scopic negotiation.

Douglass’s ability as author, if not as character, to master these negotiations is

made clear in the way that he figures his escape for Northern readers. In depicting

his escape as a balloon flight, he not only refuses, as he does in the Narrative of the

Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), to disclose to the reader his
actual mode of liberation – thereby protecting his escape route for other slaves

and distinguishing himself from self-serving white anti-slavery activists who pub-

lish such accounts as a way to assert their victory over the slaveholder – but he

also places himself above and beyond the reader’s line of sight.24 Rebuffing his

readers’ gaze, he places himself outside of their view. Refusing to occupy the tra-

ditional position of the runaway in the landscape, he resists being re-imprisoned

within anti-slavery’s iconography or by his Northern readers’ voyeurism. In fore-

grounding to his “kind readerļs]” his use of metaphor by politely asking them to

“pardon the figure” of the balloon, Douglass asserts his right to his readers’ class

position as well as their perspective. Through his metaphorical bird’s-eye view,

Douglass performs the genteel class position of the lettered author, and in so
doing claims the same cultural authority and social status as his white middle-

class reader. Moreover, as the maker of metaphors, Douglass is able to write
himself out of embodiment and into abstraction. Through his mastery of
language, he claims – even as he critiques it as fantastical – his Northern white

readers’ bird’s-eye view.
Douglass’s narrative performs this scopic power play in image as well as word.

The triptych that faces his chapter “Liberty Attained” and announces the second

part of the narrative, “Life as a Freeman” (1855), pictures the panorama – and its

perspective – as the exclusive domain of whites (see Figure 7).25 Serving as a mir-

ror image to the original triptych of slavery, this illustration’s upper image rep-
resents the North as an industrious site of technology in the form of the train and

canal system along with the telegraph wire; in the middle image of the market

square (the buying of livestock rather than slaves), the North is associated with
commerce, while it is connected to education in the bottom image of a school. The

church spires in the bottom two images and the lighthouse on the far horizon in
the top image represent the North as a moral light of freedom. Lady Liberty,

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Anti-Slavery’s Panoramic Perspective

Figure 7. Nathaniel Orr, “Life as a Freeman” (1855), woodcut engraving. Douglass, My 334a. Image
courtesy: American Antiquarian Society.

sitting to the right of the central image in her flowing white robes and with her

liberty pole topped by a liberty cap and a shield that is decorated like the flag,
emblematizes the soft benevolence of Northern freedom. The farmer to the left

of the central image, who works alongside his horses rather than sitting on them

like the slaveholder, a whip in his hand, embodies a landscape of free rather than

slave labor. 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 resem-

bles, with its stripes, the flag). Indeed, there are no black figures in these pictures.

The emancipated slave remains excluded from this space. The only visible figure
of blackness in the image is the haunting shadow of slavery that lingers beneath

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G o d d u

the liberty cap. With her shield and her liberty pole that resembles the spears of

the earlier image, Lady Liberty defends the stars and stripes of white freedom

against slavery’s lurking shadow. Through its exclusion of blackness, this image

critiques, as does the chapter that follows, the North’s unwillingness to extend

liberty and its perspective to blacks. The liberty cap may represent the slave’s

manumission, but it remains symbolic rather than actualized in the picture.26
Through the juxtaposition of black word to 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

viewer, in its oversized form, an inflated self-image.

In the chapter that follows, 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 facing page. The
Northern subject, 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 once belonged exclusively to the

white Northern subject. 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 Northern whites who try to

circumscribe his perspective by excluding him from the train’s panoramic view

or by undercutting his right to stand up high on the speaker’s platform, but by

turning 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 freeman “cannot see things in the same light with the slave,” that he

cannot “look from the same point from which the slave does” (My 339), Douglass

asserts the slave’s viewpoint to be autonomous and unique.
Douglass’s narrative, then, works to disclose the racialized hegemony of the

panoramic perspective and to appropriate its power – however fantastical – for

the black viewing subject. He makes clear 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, Douglass argues, the
panoramic perspective is at once imaginary and extremely powerful By critiquing

that perspective even as he adopts it, Douglass troubles – even if he is not fully
able to reframe – the dominant field of vision. In laying bare the scopic power

inherent in white mastery, both North and South, Douglass disrupts the visual

hegemony by looking back.
Anti-slavery’s visual culture, then, is a contested one. While its dominant

mode, established by the AASS in the 1830s, appropriates and redeploys the
scopic structures of slavery in order to assert Northern superiority and the power

of whiteness, it also contains strong critiques of this visual narrative from both

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Anti-Slavery’s Panoramic Perspective

white and black activists. By identifying anti-slaver/ s crucial contributions to the

politics of sight and the formation of class in the antebellum era, we see how the

visual system of the plantation complex was imported into and extended by the

North. Slavery and anti-slavery worked similarly to configure visuality as a mode

of white power. Yet by looking at the ways in which anti-slavery’s visual narrative

was interrupted, parodied, contested, and critiqued, we also begin to identify the

practices that can disrupt this alignment. As Douglass shows, though, these dis-

ruptions are difficult to sustain – or even to make visible – since they are often

figured only through their haunting absence. The panoramic perspective may
be illusory, a fantasy of superiority, a projection of control, a dream of
innocence, but its power to frame reality and construct subjectivity made it a nec-

essary mode for black activists to inhabit, deploy, and resist.

Notes

I wish to express my gratitude to Shawn Michelle Smith, Martha J. Cutter, and

the two anonymous readers for their careful comments. Thanks also to Dana

D. Nelson, Mark Schoenfield, Catherine A. Molineux, and the participants of
Vanderbilt University’s 2012-13 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Sawyer
Seminar on “The Age of Emancipation: Black Freedom in the Atlantic World”
for their helpful feedback.

1. For critical assessments of the visual culture of the American anti-slavery move-

ment, see Radiclani Clytus, Jennifer Juanita Harper, Phillip Lapsansky, Maurie D.

Mclnnis, Bernard F. Reilly, Jr., Marcus Wood (Blind), and Jean Fagan Yellin.

2. For discussions of the development of vision and visual technologies specific to
the antebellum United States, see Laura Schiavo and Peter John Brownlee.

3. There is an extensive body of criticism that argues for the panorama’s centrality

to the visual culture of the nineteenth century and its production of new types of

citizens and subjects. See, for instance, the standard histories by Richard D.

Altick and Stephan Oettermann along with work by Tanya Agathocleous,
Wendy Bellion, Alison Byerly, Bernard Comment, William H. Galperin, Angela

Miller (“Panorama”), and Gillen D’Arcy Wood.
4. For an extended discussion of the panoramic perspective, see Byerly

(“Prodigious”; Are 29-82).
5. Oettermann, for instance, argues that the panorama was an “apparatus for teach-

ing and glorifying the bourgeois view of the world” (7).

6. The role of race in the consolidation of class more broadly in the nineteenth-

century United States has been addressed by a number of historians and literary

critics such as Eric Lott, David R. Roediger, and Alexander Saxton.

7. My argument builds on the work of Saidiya V. Hartman, who discloses “the sav-

age encroachments of power that take place through notions of reform, consent,

and protection” (5).

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Goddu

8. See David Morgan for a discussion of this cultural belief (6).

9. The scrolling panorama became popular in the United States during the antebel-

lum period. Called “moving panoramas,” they contained a series of connected
scenes that unwound from two spools before a stationary viewer. An early

form of cinema, the moving panorama was one of the first forms of visual

mass media in the United States. The definitive work on the moving panorama
is Erkki Huhtamo’s Illusions in Motion (2013). For other discussions of the mov-

ing panorama, see Oettermann (63-66), Miller (“Panorama”), and Byerly
{Are 41-47).

10. See Oettermann (38-41) for the history of the simultaneous emergence of the two

modes. Albert Boime names the panorama’s superior viewpoint the “magisterial

gaze” and argues that, as a specifically American perspective, it “embodied the

exaltation of a cultured American elite before the illimitable horizon that they

identified with the destiny of the American nation” (38).

1 1 . A Bird’s Eye View of American Slavery was first advertised in The Emancipator on

October 12, 1837. 1 have been unable to find an extant copy, but the advertise-

ments for it supply some information. Compiled by N. Southard (editor of several

issues of The American Anti-Slavery Almanac) and available from R. G. Wilhams,

publishing agent of the AASS, as well as from Isaac Knapp in Boston, the print

was clearly a production of the AASS. One advertisement also gives some insight

into how it was circulated. The Emancipator states: “It ought to be placed in every

shop, store, and public place, to remind us of the groans of the slave, which are

going up to God and calling for vengeance upon this guilty nation” (“All”).

12. In addition, Miller argues that the panorama’s assimilative knowledge is a
marker of social class. The panorama’s seamless movement from “the particular

to the general” or the “local to the transcendent” required an “aesthetic intelli-

gence marked by social class – literate and genteel, at several removes from

die crassly utilitarian” (“Everywhere” 214).
13. The Genius of Universal Emancipation ran semi-continuously from 1821 to 1839.

This particular image was reproduced in February 1823 above an ongoing
column tided “The Black List,” which in this issue offered evidence about the

“detestable traffic” of the internal slave trade (“Detestable”).

14. See Marcy J. Dinius for a discussion of the visuality of font in the Genius

of Universal Emancipation as well as the radical type of abolitionist texts more

generally.

15. For a more general discussion of how “benevolent whiteness” was constructed in

the antebellum era, see Susan M. Ryan (5).

16. The Genius of Universal Emancipation describes this image as a copperplate

engraving, executed by “one of our ingenious Baltimore artists, from a design

furnished by the editor, and drawn by a young gentieman of this city.”
Prepared expressly for the Genius of Universal Emancipation , it was also available

“separately, on fine paper, with or without frames” (July 1830).

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Anti-Slavery’s Panoramic Perspective

17. The Capitol masthead began July 4, 1827 and ran until the eagle masthead
replaced it on September 2, 1829 (running until March 5, 1830).

18. Miller argues that Northern nationalism was crystallized through landscape and

discusses the “politicization of the landscape under the pressures of sectional-
ism” (Empire 6).

19. Some scholars attribute this image to Patrick H. Reason, a black engraver who

was best known for his engraving of the kneeling slave titled “Am I Not a
Woman and a Sister?” (1835). However, I have found no evidence to substantiate
this attribution.

20. The kneeling slave masthead ran from April through September 1830.

21. There is a rich field of criticism that investigates how African Americans engage

the visual. For example, see Sarah Blackwood, Michael A. Chaney, Nicole R.

Fleetwood, Maurice 0. Wallace and Shawn Michelle Smith, and Ivy G. Wilson.
22. See Chaney for a reading of Harriet A. Jacobs’s panopticon (148-75).

23. Black anti-slavery activists such as William Wells Brown, Henry “Box” Brown,

James Presley Ball, and Anthony Burns toured both the northern United States

and England with panoramas of slavery. For discussions of how African
Americans adopted the panorama form, see Daphne A. Brooks (66-130),
Chaney (113-47), Clytus (“Envisioning” 194-270), Shelly Jarenski, and Cynthia
Griffin Wolff.

24. Frederick Douglass critiques those 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 ben-

efit to … the slaves escaping – In publishing such accounts, the anti-slavery
man addresses the slaveholder, not the slave’ y (My 324).

25. Lisa Brawley argues that these images depict “the generic iconography of white

nationalism and portray a narrative of progress from which [Douglass] is
excluded” (120). Brawley provides a detailed reading of how Douglass appropri-

ates the “descriptive power of the tourist in order to challenge a reconfigured
national landscape into being” (124).

26. Marcus Wood shows how the liberty cap is taken from the slave and given to the

white female abstraction of freedom within Adantic emancipation propaganda in

order to retain freedom as the “property of the dominant white society” (Horrible

51). More generally, Wood argues that the “liberation fantasy” of freedom, gifted

by empowered possessors to the disempowered slave, is a self-serving rhetoric
that reinforces white hegemony (2).

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Contents

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p. 16

p. 17

p. 18

p. 19

p. 20

p. 21

p. 22

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p. 24

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Issue Table of Contents

MELUS, Vol. 39, No. 2 (Summer 2014) pp. 1-261

Front Matter

Guest Editor’s Introduction: Visual Culture and Race [pp. 1-11]

Anti-Slavery’s Panoramic Perspective [pp. 12-41]

“Making Good Use of Our Eyes”: Nineteenth-Century African Americans Write Visual Culture [pp. 42-65]

Parallax, Transit, Transmotion: Reading Race in the Allotment Photographs of E. Jane Gay [pp. 66-92]

“Unashamedly Black”: Jim Crow Aesthetics and the Visual Logic of Shame [pp. 93-114]

Seeing “As Others See Us”: The “Chicago Defender” Cartoonist Jay Jackson as Cultural Critic [pp. 115-120]

Drawing Offensive/Offensive Drawing: Toward a Theory of Mariconógraphy [pp. 121-152]

The Optical Revolution of ADÁL’s “Los Out of Focus Nuyoricans” [pp. 153-156]

Representational Static: Visual Slave Narratives of Contemporary Art [pp. 157-187]

Witnessing and Wounding in Suzan-Lori Parks’s “Venus” [pp. 188-207]

“Dyaspora” All Up in the Mix: Jean-Ulrick Désert, Mapping Fragmented Archaeologies [pp. 208-210]

The Empire Sings Back: Glee’s “Queer” Materialization of Filipina/o America [pp. 211-234]

Reviews

Review: untitled [pp. 235-237]

Review: untitled [pp. 238-240]

Review: untitled [pp. 241-243]

Review: untitled [pp. 244-246]

Review: untitled [pp. 247-249]

Review: untitled [pp. 250-252]

Review: untitled [pp. 253-255]

Contributors [pp. 256-259]

Journal Information [pp. 260-260]

Submission Information [pp. 261-261]

Back Matter

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