Beginning around 1830, some American anti-slavery activists known as abolitionists or immediatists undertook to
emancipate all slaves and to grant them full rights and U.S.
citizenship. Many abolitionists were Christian evangelists
to whom ending slavery was a moral imperative and pub lishing was a means toward that end. Early abolitionists
used newspapers as grass-roots organizing tools in Ohio,
Pennsylvania, and New England, forming groups and societies around the papers. They aimed to make the North a
haven for liberty and equality and to build a power base
for overturning slavery throughout the land. Their extensive
media included newspapers, tracts, prayer books, broadsides (single-sheet imprints), pamphlets, textbooks, primers, sheet music, novels, magazines, hymnals, symbols,
symbolic objects, and children’s publications.
Whether all slaves in the nation would be freed and
whether free blacks would assimilate as equals were hotly
contested issues in the North when abolitionism arose.
Northern states passed laws restricting the rights of free
blacks and the Constitution protected slaveholders’ property rights. Anti-slavery moderates favored gradualism and
resisted abolitionist challenges to desegregate their churches
or support Negro and women’s rights. Some southern and
conservative churches backed the colonization movement
begun in 1817 to send free Negroes to Africa as an alternative to universal emancipation and assimilation.
Controversy played out in the abolitionist press for more
than forty years leading to the Emancipation Proclamation
(1863) and Thirteenth Amendment (1865). A scattering of
studies list the main abolitionist newspapers, document violence against them and address related First Amendment
issues, but they do not include the breadth of immediatist
publications or the diversity of media during this critical
era.
New studies of the abolitionist press might include
expanded bibliographies of anti-slavery newspapers, magazines, tracts, and serials—including those edited and published by blacks that were clearly abolitionist in purpose
and vision; studies connecting newspapers and publishers
within the social history of the era; attention to regional
and community newspapers promoting abolitionist activities; interconnections between the abolitionist press and
religious, political, and social activity; and communication strategies of abolitionist, anti-slavery, and pro-slavery
forces.
Newspaper Chronology
Anti-slavery newspaper commentary and articles, books,
organizational reports, pamphlets, open letters, and sermons increased throughout the 1700s into the 1800s, but no
anti-slavery focused American newspaper is known to have
published before 1817.
Quakers began the earliest anti-slavery newspapers.
Charles Osborn, an Ohio Quaker, established The Philanthropist, in 1817. Elihu Embree’s Manumission Intelligencer (1819) became The Emancipator in 1820. In 1821,
another Quaker, Benjamin Lundy bought The Emancipator
and renamed it The Genius of Universal Emancipation. A
newspaper was central to Lundy’s strategy as he migrated
from Vermont to Ohio to Tennessee to New England,
speaking against slavery and starting anti-slavery societies.
He settled on making New England a hotbed of anti-slavery
influence and a haven for free blacks. Walking throughout
the region, he reportedly carried the Genius’s page beds
with him—publishing wherever a friendly printer lent his
shop—until setting up a Baltimore office in 1830.
Universal emancipation was controversial in the North.
As southern states passed laws banishing freed slaves,
they moved north but were not very welcome. An 1821, an
amendment to the New York state constitution did away with
the property qualification for white voters but increased the
property qualification for blacks from $100 to $250, thus
drastically cutting New York City’s black electorate when
black settlement was rising and feeding a cultural Renaissance. Free blacks met increasing barriers as the state’s
1827 emancipation date arrived.
That year, two black New Yorkers, Samuel Cornish and
John Russwurm, started Freedom’s Journal. It championed
freedom and the rights of free blacks, called for immediate emancipation, denouncing lynching and the colonization movement as anti-black and pro-slavery. It met violent
opposition but claimed a thousand subscribers and dozens
of subscription agents in the United States, England, Canada, and Haiti.
Cornish left the paper briefly and Russwurm abandoned
the abolitionist mission. Cornish returned but could not
revive the paper’s audience. He replaced Freedom’s Journal
with The Rights of All (1829-30). One agent, David Walker,
wrote four important articles in The Rights of All known
as “Walker’s Appeal,” supporting slave rebellion as self
defense and championing black liberation. The pamphlet
version of “Walker’s Appeal” was banned throughout the
South. Cornish, a Presbyterian minister and an abolitionist
leader, later published The Colored American in New York,
in the late 1830s.
The rise of abolitionism and the abolitionist press is
usually credited to William Lloyd Garrison, a fiery white
editor, leader and orator who briefly co-edited the Genius
of Universal Emancipation with Lundy in 1830. In 1831
Garrison began The Liberator as an organ for the New England Anti-slavery Society (1831–) and the American AntiSlavery Society (1832–). Uncompromising in its stand for
immediate abolition throughout the nation and full equality
for blacks, it circulated longer than any anti-slavery newspaper—thirty-five years—throughout New England, the
nation, and the world.
Anti-slavery, abolitionist, and abolitionist-sympathetic
daily newspapers proliferated in every Northern state
between 1830 and the Civil War. Most notable was Horace Greeley’s adamantly anti-slavery New York Tribune,
whose national circulation was greater than any other in
the era.
Lewis and Arthur Tappan, silk traders who became abolitionists around 1830 were key benefactors of the abolitionist press. They originally sponsored The Liberator; Lewis
later funded the Emancipator, the most widely circulated
anti-slavery newspaper of the era. He got involved with the
Amistad case (a case involving blacks who had been kidnapped and sold into slavery in Africa and who rebelled
as their ship traveled near Cuba) and wrote daily reports on its developments to the Emancipator. Tappan also began
a journal, Human Rights, and a children’s magazine, The
Slave’s Friend.
Violence against the abolitionist press was widespread
in the 1830s. A mob attacked Lewis Tappan’s New York
home in 1834 and burned his furniture in the street. When
Elijah Lovejoy, a New England Congregationalist minister,
went to St. Louis and began publishing the abolitionist St.
Louis Observer (1834–36), mobs destroyed his press three
times. He moved to nearby Alton, Illinois in 1837, began
the Alton Observer, and was killed by a mob that threw his
fourth press into the Mississippi. That year free blacks lost
the vote in Pennsylvania and Michigan and the Antislavery
Herald began in Boston.
New papers in the 1840s reflected splits in anti-slavery
societies over female activism, electoral involvement, and
church segregation. The Liberty Party in 1842 founded The
Abolitionist while Cornish, the Tappan brothers, and James
Birney published for the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. An African American, Martin Delaney, began
the Pittsburgh Mystery in 1843. The Antislavery Bugle
began in 1845.
In December 1847, Frederick Douglass, a former slave,
after years of public speaking and organizing, began The
North Star. Unlike the Liberator, it defended slave rebellions and acknowledged the African American experience.
The North Star merged with the Emancipator in 1851, and
continued as Frederick Douglass’ Paper until he began
Douglass’ Monthly, an abolitionist magazine, in 1860. Douglass had a tremendous following. Newspaper debates arose
between Douglass and Garrison over slave rebellions, electoral activity, and the Constitution.
By the late 1840s, The Liberator went to the fringe,
sponsoring Constitution burnings and declaring a moral
imperative for whites to harbor escaping slaves. Uncle
Tom’s Cabin was first serialized in an anti-slavery newspaper, The National Era, in 1851, illustrating layers of media
in abolitionist publishing. In the United States, there are no
known female abolitionist newspapers, although Canada’s
Provincial Freeman, begun in 1853, was edited and published by Mary Ann Shadd Carey, a black woman born in
Delaware.
Anti-Slavery Imprints as Organizing Tools
Imprints allowed organizers to present their cases and
enabled audiences to review and consider them. Abolitionists societies formed around newspapers, appointing members as subscription agents. Literature including
newspapers, magazines, tracts, and other serials flowed at
anti-slavery fairs, speaking tours and public meetings, in
Sunday Schools, and countless other activities.
Abolitionists aggressively wrote letters to newspapers
and launched a national petition campaign to outlaw slavery in the District of Columbia in the 1830s. Sympathetic
newspapers published petition text and mailing instructions
for filled petitions, enabling readers to copy the words and
circulate petitions independently. In response to floods of
petitions, an 1835 gag rule banned the traditional reading of
petitions in Congress for nearly a decade.
Abolitionists sent thousands of newspapers broadsides,
letters, pamphlets, tracts, and petitions to post offices in
the South for general distribution. Southern postmasters
refused to distribute them and states passed laws banning
postal distribution of abolitionist materials including newspapers when federal courts did not uphold the postmasters’
actions. Georgetown, D.C., outlawed any Negro leaving a
post office in possession of seditious materials, and in 1835
the Charleston post office was ransacked, anti-slavery newspapers and other literature sent by abolitionists removed and
burned. Northern female activists organized to visit friends
and relatives in the South to personally deliver publications
about the evils of slavery.
The abolitionist press is an important part of the history
of the events leading to the Civil War and in the eventual
end of slavery? Certainly, among America’s many reform
movements this was one of the most successful, and that
success came at a terrible price.
Further Reading
Jacobs, Donald M., Heath Paley, Susan Parker, and Dana Silverman. Antebellum Black Newspapers: Indices to New York
Freedom’s Journal (1827–1829), The Rights of All (1829),
The Weekly Advocate (1837), and The Colored American
(1837-1841) Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1976.
McFeely, William S. Frederick Douglass. NewYork: W. W. Norton, 1991.
Nye, Russel B. Fettered Freedom: A Discussion of Civil Liberties
and the Slavery Controversy in the United States, 1830–
1860. East Lansing: Michigan State College Press, 1949.
Rogers, William B. “We Are all Together Now”: Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, & the Prophetic Tradition.
New York: Garland Publishing, 1995.
Williams, Robert C. Horace Greeley: Champion of American
Freedom. New York: New York University Press, 2006.
Carmen E. Clark