“Do you understand your own language?” Revolutionary topoi in the rhetoric of African‐American abolitionists

Abstract

In his 1829 Appeal to Coloured Citizens of World, a militant condemnation of evils of slavery and a prophetic call for a potentially violent end to institution, African-American abolitionist David Walker demands, See your Declaration Americans! ! ! Do you understand your own language? (75). Walker's question highlights a fundamental and enduring paradox: in spite of centrality of Declaration of Independence to our nation's founding and to America's self-definition, continual reinterpretation of text and controversies over its meaning and significance are endemic to national discourse. Antebellum Americans faced a particular theoretical and exegetical problem with respect to Declaration of Independence. Nineteenth-century rhetoric often elevates document to a religious significance in mythologizing founding of America, idealizing creation of a completely new nation dedicated to liberty and (Wills, Inventing xvi-xxii; Wills, Lincoln 86-89, 100-03, 10910). Yet many antebellum Americans supported slavery and opposed full civil rights for free African Americans. Supporters of slavery engaged in complicated gymnastics in order to support ideals of American Revolution as well as nation's peculiar institution. Many proslavery rhetors argued that, based on Founding Fathers' intentions, Declaration's promises of freedom and did not include African Americans. Another argument suggested that term equality did not connote that all Americans should have same rights. Some supporters of slavery even downplayed significance of articulation of certain rights in Declaration of Independence.' Within this context, African-American abolitionists who wished to feature Declaration of Independence and related themes of American Revolution in their antislavery rhetoric could not rely on conventional interpretations. They needed to appropriate these topoi, redefining them in service of abolition. Celeste Michelle Condit and John Louis Lucaites demonstrate that antebellum AfricanAmerican men crafted a concept of that countered proslavery formulations, using rhetorical revision of Declaration of Independence to extend scope of terms such as equality, liberty, and human rights (69-98). Condit and Lucaites emphasize rhetoric that is, in Gary Woodward's terms, primarily adaptory-appealing to common ground with an audience and aiming to reduce dissonant messages that clash with their beliefs (28-30). In adaptory rhetoric, the expectations of others form basis of a persuasive situation, and rhetor attempts to adapt message to avoid a clash with audience's