Selling Antislavery: Abolition and Mass Media in Antebellum America

By Teresa A. Goddu

Beginning with its establishment in the early 1830s, the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS) recognized the need to reach and consolidate a diverse and increasingly segmented audience. To do so, it produced a wide array of print, material, and visual media: almanacs and slave narratives, pincushions and gift books, broadsides and panoramas. Building on the distinctive practices of British antislavery and evangelical reform movements, the AASS utilized innovative business strategies to market its productions and developed a centralized distribution system to circulate them widely. In Selling Antislavery, Teresa A. Goddu shows how the AASS operated at the forefront of a new culture industry and, by framing its media as cultural commodities, made antislavery sentiments an integral part of an emerging middle-class identity. She contends that, although the AASS's dominance waned after 1840 as the organization splintered, it nevertheless created one of the first national mass markets.

Goddu maps this extensive media culture, focusing in particular on the material produced by AASS in the decade of the 1830s. She considers how the dissemination of its texts, objects, and tactics was facilitated by the quasi-corporate and centralized character of the organization during this period and demonstrates how its institutional presence remained important to the progress of the larger movement. Exploring antislavery's vast archive and explicating its messages, she emphasizes both the discursive and material aspects of antislavery's appeal, providing a richly textured history of the movement through its artifacts and the modes of circulation it put into place.

Featuring more than seventy-five illustrations, Selling Antislavery offers a thorough case study of the role of reform movements in the rise of mass media and argues for abolition's central importance to the shaping of antebellum middle-class culture.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Release date: Mar 13, 2020
• ISBN: 9780812296969

Book preview

Selling Antislavery

MATERIAL TEXTS

Series Editors

Roger Chartier

Joseph Farrell

Anthony Grafton

Leah Price

Peter Stallybrass

Michael F. Suarez, S. J.

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

SELLING ANTISLAVERY

Abolition and Mass Media in Antebellum America

Teresa A. Goddu

UNIVERSITY OF PENNSYLVANIA PRESS

PHILADELPHIA

Copyright © 2020 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10  9  8  7  6  5  4  3  2  1

A Cataloging-in-Publication record is available from the

Library of Congress

ISBN 978-0-8122-5199-9

For Yoshi, Maya, and Kaita

Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1. Antislavery Inc.

Part I. Antislavery Print Culture

Chapter 2. Summing Up Slavery: The Antislavery Almanac and the Production of Fact

Chapter 3. The African American Slave Narrative as Factual Compendium

Part II. Antislavery Material Culture

Chapter 4. Speaking Objects: Antislavery Fairs and Sentimental Consumerism

Chapter 5. Antislavery Fairs and the Culture of Class

Part III. Antislavery Visual Culture

Chapter 6. Antislavery’s Panoramic Perspective

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

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

Notes

Index

Acknowledgments

Introduction

A coin box (Figure 1), commissioned by the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society (MASS) in 1839 as part of a fundraising plan, embodies the central tenets of this book: first, antislavery media emerged from specific institutional settings, and, second, they were multimodal, encompassing print, material, and visual forms. Although we are familiar with the robust media culture (songs, plays, pictures, games, dolls, plates, wallpaper) spawned by the success of antislavery’s most iconic text, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), we know much less about the media artifacts produced by the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS) and its auxiliaries from the society’s founding in 1833 to its dissolution in 1870.¹ Selling Antislavery maps the vast media archive generated by institutional antislavery in the antebellum era. By paying particular attention to the movement’s foundational phase in the 1830s—when the society was at the height of its organizational powers and before it splintered into warring factions in 1840—Selling Antislavery locates the emergence of abolitionist mass media in an earlier era and traces that period’s influence on subsequent decades. In providing the prehistory of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, it shows how Stowe’s novel and related products mark the apex rather than the birth of antislavery mass media.

Created to accompany the MASS’s Weekly Contribution Plan, which raised money for the cause by collecting small donations at regular weekly intervals, the coin box exemplifies many aspects of abolitionist media culture. It functioned as a treasury, an illustrated tract, and a domestic material object.² As a depository, it fulfilled an important institutional role, providing funds for the MASS when the economic depression of the late 1830s forced large contributors to withhold their donations. Paying, according to their ability, one, two, or six cents a week, the movement’s grassroots members raised substantial amounts without undue labor or sacrifice. By distributing across all abolitionists the responsibility of keeping the state society’s treasury constantly supplied with funds to support lecturers and produce printed material, the plan’s penny capitalism weathered market fluctuations and increased its members’ personal investment in the cause.³ A miniature of the treasury to which it is dedicated—TO THE MASS. A. S. SOCIETY—the box served as a sign of the society’s organizational strength and transformed its contributors into stakeholders every time they deposited a coin into its slot. The box compounded its cents, producing money for the cause as well as interest in it.

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

As a tract, the box solidified support for the society’s aims by stimulating sympathy for enslaved people and converting that feeling into economic capital. Issued as an "edition" for six and a quarter cents or seventy-five cents for a dozen, the box was, according to The Liberator, as useful as a tract, as it is convenient as a treasury.⁴ Appropriate devices and inscriptions cover every side as well as the top.⁵ The front features an image of a kneeling slave framed by rays of light, which melt the chains on the Corinthian columns in the foreground, promising her release. Emanating from an arc with the words Remember Your Weekly Pledge, the light derives its power from contributors’ steadfast donations. Contributors answer the kneeling woman’s prayer when they drop a coin into the top of the box, directly above her imploring eyes. Located in the heavens and sanctified by the biblical injunctions that frame the deposit slot and speak of transforming faith into good works, the donations assume God’s moral authority and power to lift the oppressed. Maria Weston Chapman’s poem, A Sabbath Morning Hymn, printed on one side of the box, further consecrates each contribution as a gift to freedom; the biblical injunctions on the other side remind readers of their duty to deliver the slave and show her mercy and compassion. The back, which lays out the objectives of the Weekly Contribution Plan along with step-by-step directions for conducting it, ties this sympathy for the slave to antislavery organization. Like many antislavery artifacts, the coin box speaks in several registers: sentimental and religious, organizational and instructional. The front image generates sympathy for the oppressed; the poetic hymn and quotations from scripture increase that sympathy and tie it explicitly to religious duty; and the back explains how good works for the slave are best performed through systematic donations to the antislavery cause. The box’s coordinated message teaches contributors to turn their sympathy into cents. By gathering coins, abstract feeling is turned into concrete action and sympathy is made to speak.

The alchemy by which this artifact transformed feeling into money was augmented by its companion tract, the Monthly Offering (Figure 2), which converted the box’s cents back into sentiment through the mediation of print. Edited by J. A. Collins, the MASS’s general agent, and published monthly (with some irregularity) from July 1840 until November/December 1842, the Monthly Offering was the official organ of the Weekly Contribution Plan.⁶ Contributors were asked to buy the box as well as subscribe to the tract for thirty-seven and a half cents a year. The synergy between the box and its companion text is evident in the tract’s title, which transforms contributions into a religious offering and reinforces the plan’s monthly collection schedule (agents visited once a month to gather the weekly contributions). The tract is also a visual replica of the box: it not only reduplicates the box’s image on its cover but also, in framing that picture with an ornate border, depicts itself as a box. If the depository is a tract, its companion tract is also a treasury, packed with print instead of money. Moreover, its print calls on readers to fill their boxes. Designed to aid and encourage contributors in their work of love and mercy, the Monthly Offering worked like the box to enlist sympathy for the cause, by holding up to view the suffering and benighted slave (1:2) and remind contributors through its regular arrival to be punctual in their payments.

Maria Weston Chapman’s tale, Pinda, published in the tract, also does both. Pinda, a fugitive slave, not only gains the reader’s admiration for her loyal affection for her husband and industrious self-sufficiency in freedom but also models how to convert sympathy into antislavery action. At the climax of the tale, just before Pinda flees from Boston with her fugitive husband, she becomes a subscriber to the Weekly Contribution Plan with such a large donation that the box must be opened, since her Mexican dollar will not fit into its small slot. Rich in the possession of liberty, Pinda donates her savings to extend freedom to others, with an effusion of heart, so lovely and so rare (1:28). Like Pinda, contributors could express their feelings and perform their own freedom by giving money to the enslaved woman on the coin box.

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

The Monthly Offering supplemented the box in several key ways. As in Pinda’s story, it reinforced the box’s message that sympathy is most properly expressed through cents. Its regular monthly arrival prompted the collection of cents and aided their increase by producing more compassion for the enslaved. It also served as a concrete emblem of what those cents were meant to fund: more print. The box and its tract enacted the circuit of sentiment, cents, and print that the antislavery movement more broadly propelled on a larger scale: print creating sympathy, sympathy generating cents, and cents producing more print.

Finally, as a decorative domestic object embedded in parlor culture, the box was a commodity that generated cultural capital for its contributors as well as the cause. Described as beautiful and designed to be placed on a chimney mantle or table in the most public room of the house, the box translated anti-slavery principles into household knowledge and attached them to middle-class values.⁷ Located near (and sometimes over) the hearth, alongside the parlor’s other ornaments, the box reflected and augmented the ideals of middle-class domesticity. Visually, its burning rays of truth extended the warming light of the domestic hearth upward, turning the parlor mantle into an altar of freedom. Discursively, it communicated the middle-class values of piety and charity, punctuality and thrift. As a savings bank, it instilled the habit of self-denial even as it emblematized prosperity. It taught contributors to perform generous thrift—to save in order to give. As a religious shrine, a little treasury of the Lord, whose ritual donation occurred every Sabbath morning, the box sanctified its cents by transforming them into a gift for the slave.⁸ In following the apostolic injunctions and preparing for worship by placing a gift to freedom in the box, contributors became one of God’s disciples, a ray of his light. By displaying the power of benevolence, the box made an accounting of its contributors’ moral virtue and magnified its meaningfulness.

In addition to espousing the middle-class values of domesticity and discipline, blessings and benevolence, the box reflected its contributors’ refinement and social status. Made for display—the Monthly Offering recommends that the box be given a conspicuous place in the most public room in the house (1:8)—it was an external sign of their sincerity and compassion, as well as their gentility. Chapman’s hymn, which tells of swelling heart[s] and gracious deed[s], links contributors’ moral sympathy to their refinement. Similarly, the Monthly Offering, containing the prose and poetry of the movement’s best writers (1:3) and advertised as an attractive gift book suitable for a Christmas and New Year’s present (1:161), represented, both discursively and materially, its readers’ anti-slavery sentiment as a sign of their good taste. As a conversation piece, the box encouraged both sociability and proper social affiliation; as a sign of economic capital, spiritual goodness, and cultural refinement, it compounded its contents by associating antislavery with a specific class consciousness. By packaging antislavery as a socially desirable enterprise as well as a holy cause, the box branded the movement as respectable.

The coin box offers a glimpse into institutional antislavery’s larger workings: its modes of organization, its production of novel media artifacts, and its creation of compelling cultural messages. It shows how antislavery leaders were at once institution builders, media innovators, and cultural entrepreneurs. By embedding their media within systematized organizational structures, they produced a mass media ahead of the mainstream. Moreover, by constructing their media as a cultural commodity, they installed antislavery at the heart of middle-class consciousness. Through a persuasive and persistent multimodal message, they transformed a marginalized cause into a mass social movement by the end of the 1830s. Antislavery succeeded not because it stood outside antebellum America’s emerging mass consumer culture but because, like the coin box, it compounded its growth.

Selling Antislavery develops these argumentative threads. First, it details the organizational structures and publication strategies through which institutional antislavery produced some of the antebellum era’s earliest mass media. Building on the influential model of evangelicalism and developing alongside the growth of the temperance movement, the AASS provides an important case study for the role of reform movements in driving the rise of mass media in the United States. While there are detailed studies of evangelical mass media—David Paul Nord on religious publishing, Peter Wosh on the Bible business, and David Morgan on the American Tract Society—studies of the AASS’s media are lacking.⁹ Trish Loughran’s explication of the material practices of organized abolition is an exception and, hence, serves as the foundation upon which this book builds.¹⁰ Selling Antislavery describes the distinctive set of business and publishing practices that the AASS developed in the 1830s to mobilize its media. Through the creation of an alternative publication system, the AASS was able to gain mass circulation for many of its products. By showing how the 1830s AASS built and ran its media machine, I make the case for antislavery’s centrality to nineteenth-century media history.

Second, this book expands our understanding of the range of popular forms that the antislavery movement produced. The AASS generated a wide array of print, material, and visual media: almanacs and slave narratives, domestic objects and gift books, broadsides and panoramas. Although the movement’s literary forms have garnered critical attention, its ephemeral and popular productions remain underexamined. Moreover, in focusing on the movement’s rhetorical appeal, critics have overlooked how the materiality of the antislavery artifact—its physical form and modes of circulation—helped to construct its message.¹¹ Working at the intersections of literary criticism, book history, and media studies, I attend to the close connections between the media object’s discursive, material, distributional, and marketing modes.¹² The dual meaning of selling in my title—to persuade as well as to vend—captures my focus on how the movement’s rhetorical approaches were consolidated by its material practices. I also foreground the dynamic intersections between print, material, and visual media. Rather than studying each in isolation, I show how they forged a larger media ecology.¹³ By synergizing these media forms, institutional antislavery popularized its message for a mass audience.

Third, this book demonstrates institutional abolition’s centrality to the formation of the northern white middle class by explicating how antislavery media promoted specific regional, racial, and class identities. Reform has long been seen as a key architect of nineteenth-century middle-class culture.¹⁴ Antislavery in particular became the engine that allowed the northern middle class to construct itself as white. Along with respectability and refinement, moral virtue and market aspiration, race was an important attribute of northern middle-class sensibility. By espousing the liberation of black bodies by white subjects, institutional antislavery crystallized class consciousness as racial superiority.¹⁵ Operating at the forefront of a new middle-class culture industry, abolition not only allied itself with the values and subjectivities of an emerging middle class but also worked to coalesce and extend them.¹⁶ Speaking its culture’s core discourses of class and consumerism and packaging its beliefs in material forms that appealed to the rising middle class, it both manufactured itself as a marketable commodity and married middle-class identity to antislavery ideology. A cultural as well as a political project, institutional antislavery wove itself into the fabric of middle-class culture.

Selling Antislavery tracks the emergence of mass media in the antebellum United States through the lens of a specific reform movement. By providing a material account of the AASS’s media products and publishing techniques, it reveals that the conditions for mass media—both in terms of variety and amount—were present as early as the 1830s. It investigates antislavery’s discursive forms as well as its material and visual practices to show how the antislavery movement disseminated its appeal and propelled middle-class culture. Although I foreground print, material, and visual media respectively, the book as a whole shows how these categories overlap and inform each other. Given the breadth of the antislavery archive, Selling Antislavery focuses on key discourses—facticity, consumerism, nationalism—and genres to reveal institutional antislavery’s wider expanse and to telescope its larger arguments. I trace patterns and survey genres instead of emphasizing individual works. When I do focus on a single text, I select less well-known works—American Slavery as It Is (1839) rather than Uncle Tom’s Cabin, for instance, or the Narrative of James Williams (1838) rather than the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845)—in order to highlight gaps in our knowledge of the antislavery canon. For the same reason, I concentrate on the long foreground of abolitionist mass media rather than the breakthrough forms of the 1850s. After focusing on the AASS’s largely white-authored works, the book concludes by attending to the cultural productions of black activists. By charting the institutional center that black abolitionists learned to work within and against, Selling Antislavery lays the groundwork for a more nuanced understanding of how these two media cultures overlapped and influenced each other.¹⁷

The first chapter opens with an institutional history of the 1830s AASS. It provides an overview of the AASS’s organizational structures and its media products to show how each shaped and advanced the other. It focuses on the society’s business-minded branch centered in New York City, rather than its more radical voices (white or black), to show how the 1830s AASS’s institutional formation was integral to the movement’s larger influence. An investigation of antislavery’s popular media forms—printed texts, material artifacts, and visual representations—follows. Each part is anchored in the foundational period of the 1830s and then moves chronologically through the antebellum period to trace the historical development of a particular medium.

Part I surveys the 1830s AASS’s rationalized print system. It focuses on the discourse of fact to show how institutional antislavery used new modes of evidence to render slavery visible and present its own knowledge system as credible. In delineating how the cause collected and diffused information through a coordinated and corroborative print system, this section foregrounds its rational appeal. It investigates two genres that lay at the core of the AASS’s knowledge and print systems: the almanac and the slave narrative.

Part II deals with the material artifacts that the AASS’s female auxiliaries produced for their Christmastime fairs as well as the fairs’ business structure. Running from the 1830s through the late 1860s and operating as the society’s key fundraiser, the fairs show how an army of women workers used consumer culture to sell antislavery as an exemplar of sociability, refinement, and good taste. The fairs marketed antislavery as middle class, creating cultural as well as commercial capital. Speaking objects sold at fairs—domestic goods emblazoned with antislavery mottos—formulated white liberal subjectivity while foreign and fashionable items created a culture of class. This section examines the discourses of sentiment and refinement that made up antislavery’s appeal to the heart.

Part III analyzes the AASS’s extensive visual culture, highlighting the mass visual medium of the panorama. Through panoramic landscape pictures and broadsides that resembled miniature panoramas, institutional antislavery detailed slavery’s cruel operations and visualized the North’s superiority over the South. For northern viewers, the antislavery panorama communicated a message of nationalism and political power. This section examines organized antislavery’s appeal to the eye, showing how the movement’s panoramic pictures—specifically their commanding perspective—catalyzed new points of view. This part also brings black abolition to the foreground, attending to African American activists’ countervisual appeals. Through word and image, African American activists painted panoramas of slavery that also envisioned black freedom. The final chapter details their adaptations of the AASS’s visual iconography, revealing how black cultural producers looked back. Institutional antislavery expanded the field for black media even as it shaped—and often limited—the contours of that field.

The conclusion discusses the AASS’s Third Decade celebration, held in 1863 after emancipation was proclaimed, to reflect on the end(s) of antislavery mass media and the durability of institutional antislavery’s cultural project.

Chapter 1

Antislavery Inc.

In the 1830s, the founding decade of the American Anti-Slavery Society, the antislavery movement transformed itself from a small, heterogeneous, unpopular band of gradualists and radicals into an organized mass social movement that spread across the North and the West. Between its establishment in 1833 and its fragmentation in 1840, the AASS’s grassroots membership coalesced into a national reform organization. Vertically arranged, with state and local auxiliary chapters nested within a federated structure, and managerially directed by a centralized administration, the executive committee headquartered in New York City, the 1830s AASS resembled a modern business enterprise.¹ Its goal was to open the nation’s eyes, heart, and mind to the problem of slavery and the cause of freedom. Through pioneering business structures and publishing strategies, it created the infrastructure and tactics necessary for the mass communication of its message. It spread its ideology of reform by manufacturing an array of media products and circulating them widely through a coordinated distribution system. Both the number of the AASS’s auxiliaries and its media output rose dramatically through the 1830s. In 1837, The Philanthropist computed the rise in antislavery societies at about "one society daily" and in 1836 the AASS’s Third Annual Report counted the total number of publications as "nine times as great as those of last year."² By the end of the decade, the national society consisted of 1,650 auxiliaries and disseminated 725,000 copies of its publications yearly.³ Each propelled the other: the AASS’s institutional structure created mechanisms for mobilizing antislavery media on a mass scale, while its popular media forms generated interest in and won converts to the cause. The AASS drove the rise of new media in the 1830s and those media in turn facilitated the spread of antislavery reform.

This chapter shows how the AASS’s business model in the 1830s—its centralized bureaucracy and alternative publishing system—was integral to its creation of mass media. By capitalizing on innovative organizational structures, new technologies of reproduction and publicity, and systematized distribution, the AASS grew its base and popularized its argument. A media powerhouse, the AASS manufactured abolition as a compelling brand in the 1830s. Even after the society’s dissolution in 1840, the institutional identity and distinctive set of publication practices and media types it created and consolidated in the 1830s continued to shape the antislavery argument as the movement evolved. The 1830s AASS established the foundation upon which future forms of abolition would build.

*  *  *

The 1830s AASS patterned its media enterprise on several models: early British and U.S. antislavery movements, black abolitionism and print culture, and evangelicalism. Many of its texts and publishing tactics were drawn from British propaganda campaigns against the slave trade (1787–1807) and slavery (1823–34). From 1787 forward, British antislavery established itself as a national network, with coordinated petition campaigns and cheap promotional literature that could be distributed in large quantities through local agents.⁴ The AASS adopted British antislavery’s organizational structure as well as its multimodal media, such as Josiah Wedgwood’s medallion of the kneeling slave (1787), which operated as a visual icon as well as a consumer good, and its publicity methods, such as distribution of free publications.⁵ Similarly, the 1830s AASS was indebted to U.S. abolition’s first wave—less the republican strategies of the elite Pennsylvania Abolition Society (founded in 1775) than the grassroots organizing of the AASS’s immediate predecessor, the New England Anti-Slavery Society (NEASS, founded in 1832). As described by Richard Newman, the NEASS incorporated mass action strategies into its organizational framework: it inaugurated the agency system by appointing four traveling lecturers in 1832 and 1833, established its own official organ, The Abolitionist (1833), and disseminated publications.⁶ The AASS would employ all these tactics and more.

The 1830s AASS was also indebted to black abolitionism’s organizing strategies and print practices. Black resistance and activism, as Manisha Sinha argues, lay at the heart of the antislavery movement.⁷ Black antislavery activists organized in the 1820s through independent associations, such as churches, fraternal associations, vigilance committees, and literary societies. Antislavery societies like the Massachusetts General Colored Association (1826–32), the first antislavery society in New England, formed the institutional matrix out of which the NEASS and AASS would emerge.⁸ The NEASS first met in Boston at the African Church on Joy Street, and the AASS assembled in Philadelphia’s Adelphi Hall, which belonged to a black benevolent society.⁹ The black conventions of 1830–35, the only national antislavery gatherings before the AASS’s founding, laid the groundwork for the emergence of a national antislavery network.¹⁰

Black abolitionist print culture also shaped the AASS’s argument and media practices. Although black writers and activists, such as Phillis Wheatley and Olaudah Equiano, participated in transatlantic print culture as early as the eighteenth century, the black response to the colonization debate of the 1820s produced a more coordinated culture of print.¹¹ The first African American periodicals, Freedom’s Journal (1827–29) and Rights of All (1829), not only deployed a range of appeals, but also established broad distributional networks that extended throughout the United States, Canada, Haiti, and the United Kingdom: Freedom’s Journal, as Gordon Fraser shows, built a network that included forty-seven authorized agents and extended from Waterloo, Ontario, to rural North Carolina, from Port-au-Prince to Liverpool to Richmond, Baltimore, and New Orleans.¹² Similarly, David Walker forged a militantly discursive and typographically radical argument in his Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (1829), which he circulated through the mail and with the help of sympathetic black sailors traveling to the South.¹³ Black abolitionists’ innovative use of the press in the 1820s shaped the national debate over slavery and pushed the antislavery argument toward immediatism. The AASS would later duplicate their publishing tactics.

In the 1830s, black abolitionists operated both inside and outside of the AASS’s institutional structures. They were members and part of its leadership structure: six black abolitionists were named to its board of managers in 1833, and Theodore Wright, a Presbyterian minister, Peter Williams, an Episcopal priest, and Samuel Cornish, founder of Freedom’s Journal, all served on its executive committee.¹⁴ Yet the AASS remained white-dominated.¹⁵ Although its aim, according to its constitution, was to elevate the character and condition of the people of color, its main focus was conversion to the cause.¹⁶ The dissolution of southern slavery rather than the promotion of northern equality was its central concern.¹⁷ Hence, African American activists continued to chart their own course in the 1830s, focusing on improving the condition of northern blacks, creating vigilance committees to aid and protect fugitive slaves, holding state and national conventions to form political coalitions to demand racial equality, and establishing educational societies to support literacy.¹⁸ Black cultural producers fostered the black press with new periodicals, such as the Weekly Advocate (1837), the Colored American (1837–41), the Mirror of Liberty (1838–40), and the National Reformer (1838–39), and developed their own distributional networks, such as David Ruggles’s bookstore and reading room.¹⁹ With the dissolution of the AASS’s centralized institutional structure in 1840 and the broadening of the movement, African Americans took on an even more visible role.

Besides the influence of earlier abolitionist groups, institutional antislavery developed out of and in tandem with benevolent reform movements, especially evangelicalism. As David Paul Nord asserts, the evangelical movement, institutionalized as the American Bible Society (1816), the American Sunday School Union (1824), and the American Tract Society (1825), was foundational to formulating the organizational structures and publication strategies of later reform movements, including abolition.²⁰ Evangelical societies were the first to create national networks of auxiliaries directed by a centralized board of managers. By arranging themselves hierarchically (from executive committee through department heads and regional managers down to grassroots volunteers), with systematized procedures that facilitated the flow of information between center and periphery (record-keeping forms, cards of instruction, in-house newsletters), they operated as large-scale business firm[s].²¹ In the 1820s, they built their own publishing houses, taking advantage of modern industrial technologies, such as stereotyping, steam-powered presses, and machine-made paper.²² Committed to the widespread circulation of Bibles and religious tracts, they not only created regional distributional networks of depositories and paid agents but also relied on local labor, turning every church into a book depository and every member into a tract disseminator. Through the pioneering use of bureaucratic organization, centralized publishing, and coordinated distribution, the evangelical movement produced the first mass media in the United States.²³

Evangelicalism strongly shaped abolition. Many abolitionist leaders were drawn from the evangelical movement: Arthur Tappan bankrolled the American Tract Society before funding the AASS, and members of the AASS’s executive committee, Elizur Wright and Joshua Leavitt, worked as colporteurs for the Tract Society. The AASS adopted similar organizational structures, publishing procedures, and distributional strategies.²⁴ Like later business corporations, it was a vertically integrated, horizontally diversified, managerially coordinated enterprise.²⁵ By making its chief business to organize Anti-Slavery societies, if possible, in every city, town and village, in our land, the AASS established auxiliaries at the level of the state and county as well as the town and school district.²⁶ While these franchises had separate memberships, they understood themselves to be part of a larger, hierarchical system: county societies were auxiliaries to their state societies, which in turn were ancillary to the AASS.²⁷ In return for forwarding a copy of their constitution, a list of their officers, and the number of their members to the national office, auxiliaries were sent official acknowledgment of their incorporation into the parent society: first a letter of recognition, later an engraved diploma of membership.²⁸ In turn, by listing societies that were founded on the same principles, and seek the same object in the same way at the end of each annual report, the AASS advertised itself as the sum of its proliferating parts.²⁹ Even as the AASS fixated on spreading—its annual reports puffed the exponential increase of auxiliaries—it worked to connect its multiplying parts into a unified whole.

The vertical integration required for national organization occurred through the AASS’s centralized management structure. The 1830s AASS was run by an executive committee and a paid staff of professional managers, headquartered in New York City—the geographic center of the moral nation, according to executive committee member Henry Stanton.³⁰ They hired and trained agents, planned national legislative action, organized petition campaigns, raised money, and produced publications. During its period of intense organizing in the mid-to late 1830s, the leadership included prominent businessmen like Arthur and Lewis Tappan; activists trained in other reform movements like Theodore Weld, who was radicalized by the evangelist Charles Finney and who worked as a temperance lecturer and an agent in the manual labor movement; newspaper publishers like James Birney, who edited The Philanthropist (1836–43); and writers, including the poet John Greenleaf Whittier.³¹ Each staff member had his own job: Wright was corresponding secretary and edited several of the society’s periodicals; Birney ran the agency system for lecturers; Weld was in charge of publications; Stanton supervised finances and organized petition campaigns; and Joshua Leavitt edited the society’s official periodical, The Emancipator (1835–41).³² This specialized division of labor marked the complexity of the AASS’s bureaucracy as well as its conscious coordination.

Through a tight-handed, top-down mode of managing, the New York office produced a systematized structure of interlinked societies in the 1830s.³³ The executive committee treated its auxiliaries as subsidiary agencies rather than equal partners. It recommended plans of operation or called attention to particular problems—such as the pressing pecuniary need to sustain agents—in order to focus its auxiliaries’ efforts toward similar ends.³⁴ Believing that by working in concert far greater results would ensue, the New York office synchronized the AASS’s many moving parts for maximal organizational efficiency.³⁵ The whole organization, as the executive committee of the New York ASS argued, should operate like a well-oiled machine, each part a wheel moving in proper order and proportion according to the relative position and functions of each.³⁶ Through strong oversight and the efficient and ready cooperation of its auxiliaries, the executive committee understood that it could do much.³⁷

Effective communication was the key to this harmonious coordination. Information was funneled from the center to the periphery and back again through official periodical organs, annual reports, instructional circulars, and intelligence gathered from the field. Town societies were asked to give monthly accounts of their condition and prospects to their county societies, which condensed this information and conveyed it quarterly to the state society, which then forwarded it to the parent.³⁸ The AASS, in turn, related its activities, finances, and progress to the membership through its annual report, which was published in large numbers for extensive distribution.³⁹ Members were also invited to New York for a yearly business meeting—the May Anniversary—to hear speeches, share ideas, and elect new leaders. Similarly, state and county societies were encouraged to organize conventions, and local auxiliaries were asked to hold regular monthly meetings—termed the Monthly Concert of Prayer for the Slave—to communicate information and build community.⁴⁰ By maintaining a constant correspondence and connection with the auxiliary state societies, the New York office gathered its affiliates’ best practices and dispersed them back out to the field.⁴¹ Through its emphasis on communication and coordination, the AASS managed, during its rapid expansion in the mid-1830s, to connect inward even as it grew outward. By regulating its subsidiaries through centralized control and a well digested system of measures, it consolidated a loose affiliation of auxiliaries into a single society.⁴²

The AASS extended this systematic, coordinated approach to its paid labor force—its salaried lecturers. From its outset, the AASS commissioned agents to spread its message and form societies. The executive committee not only assigned each lecturer a specific field of labor but also supplied a set of directives. The printed circular Particular Instructions outlines the best mode of argumentation (the presentation of facts), a method for choosing places to visit (prominent places where the