Historians have long debated the specific historical circumstances
that gave rise to American antislavery agitation in the late 1820s and
1830s. Some have placed abolitionism within a broad international framework
of ideas and social attitudes by looking at the development of antislavery
impulses throughout the West in the "age of revolution."
Others have argued persuasively that antislavery fervor is best understood by looking at various forms of religious influence: Quakerism in the late eighteenth century, as well as the vast evangelical wellsprings produced by the Second Great Awakening. Still others have argued that a broad "humanitarian impulse," of which abolitionism was an important example, derived from the fundamental shifts that occurred as a result of the changing relationship between production and ownership that defined market capitalism. Regardless of where they place their particular emphasis, however, historians agree that to understand American abolitionism is, in part, to understand the vast social and cultural transformations that took place in the early republic and antebellum eras.
Without displacing reform, religion, or markets in my study of antislavery agitation, I nonetheless argue that we cannot fully or adequately understand the origins of abolitionism unless we take seriously the nearly universal resistance of free blacks to colonization and the development of mass print culture in the first third of the nineteenth century. Building on the pioneering work of historians like Benjamin Quarles and Paul Goodman, as well as relevant scholarship in literary and African-American studies, I locate the origins of radical abolitionism in the emerging culture of dissent that developed primarily within northern African-American communities from 1817 to 1830. If, as most historians argue, the two most significant characteristics of radical abolitionism were an uncompromising insistence on the immediate abolition of slavery and the absolute equality of blacks and whites, then we must look to African Americans themselves to determine the extent and nature of their influence on what historians have called "Garrisonianism." Indeed, long before the spectacular debut of William Lloyd Garrison in 1831, northern free blacks rejected white conceptions of a "herrenvolk republic" (an imagined community in which blacks, once emancipated, had no place) and instead pushed for a more inclusive democratic society that guaranteed full citizenship to all Americans.
In my paper, which distills the first two chapters of my dissertation, I will look at the extent to which the early mobilizations of free blacks helped to lay the ideological and cultural foundations for radical abolitionism. By examining the founding and distribution of newspapers like Freedom's Journal and The Rights of All, as well as the impact of radical pamphlets like David Walker's Appeal, I will attempt to situate the early activities of free blacks within the broader context of the development of mass print culturea phenomenon that would become essential to the abolitionist crusade leading up to the Civil War.
I will use these print sources to explore a developing abolitionist consciousness among African Americans around issues such as the Haitian Revolution, slave revolts in the United States, abolition laws in the Northern states, July 4th and 5th celebrations, and, most importantly, widespread white support for African colonization. All told, my paper will argue for a reconsideration of the origins of American abolitionism by highlighting the central role that African Americans played in defining the terms of the movement that sought, at last, to redeem the nation.