Selling Antislavery: Abolition and Mass Media in Antebellum America by Teresa A. Goddu

Abstract

Reviewed by: Selling Antislavery: Abolition and Mass Media in Antebellum Americaby Teresa A. Goddu Matthew Fox-Amato (bio) Antislavery, Slavery, Abolition, Media, American Anti-Slavery Society, Print culture, Material culture, Visual culture Selling Antislavery: Abolition and Mass Media in Antebellum America. By Teresa A. Goddu. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020. Pp. 344. Cloth, $55.00.) The American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS), for Teresa A. Goddu, was more than an influential organization in the 1830s: It was also a cultural machine. The scale and diversity of the AASS's cultural production back this point. Established in 1833, the AASS had reached an estimated circulation of 725,000 copies of its publications per year by the end of the decade. Its many publications included monthly periodicals such as Human Rightsand The Emancipator, the yearly American Anti-Slavery Almanac, and the widely read American Slavery as It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses(1839). It published images such as the broadside Slave Market of America(1836) and organized well-attended fairs in cities such as Boston and Philadelphia, where attendees could buy all kinds of consumer goods to support the cause. In Selling Antislavery: Abolition and Mass Media in Antebellum America, Goddu asks how AASS representations mobilized opposition to slavery while shaping the identities of the abolitionists who consumed them. One of the many virtues of Selling Antislaveryis how it treats abolitionist [End Page 154]literary texts as one of many cultural forms produced by the movement. After a chapter on the publishing strategies and distribution networks of the AASS, Goddu examines its representations in three sections: print culture (almanacs and slave narratives); material culture (consumer goods at fairs and the fairs as symbolic sites); and visual culture (images in publications and prints). A concluding chapter explores how Black artists and writers not affiliated with the AASS appropriated and contested its aesthetics. Blending business history with wide-ranging cultural analysis, Selling Antislaveryis a compelling contribution to our view of abolitionist media. The book joins a growing body of scholarship stressing the importance of visual and material culture to antebellum activists fighting for abolition and racial justice. Work over the last decade includes Maurie D. McInnis, Slaves Waiting for Sale: Abolitionist Art and the American Slave Trade(Chicago, 2011); Maurice O. Wallace and Shawn Michelle Smith, eds., Pictures and Progress: Early Photography and the Making of African American Identity(Durham, NC, 2012); Deborah Willis and Barbara Krauthamer, Envisioning Emancipation: Black Americans and the End of Slavery(Philadelphia, 2013); John Stauffer, Zoe Trodd, and Celeste-Marie Bernier, Picturing Frederick Douglass: An Illustrated Biography of the Nineteenth Century's Most Photographed American(New York, 2015); Darcy Grimaldo Grigsby, Enduring Truths: Sojourner's Shadows and Substance(Chicago, 2015); and Aston Gonzalez, Visualizing Equality: African American Rights and Visual Culture in the Nineteenth Century(Chapel Hill, NC, 2020). Though not limited to abolitionism, these and other works have shown how abolitionists were keen to use images and ephemera to denounce slavery, define their public personas, and forge political bonds. Selling Antislaveryunderscores these insights while deepening our understanding of how, precisely, abolitionists were able to blanket the nation with representations in the 1830s. This was possible, for Goddu, because the AASS employed "innovative organizational structures, new technologies of reproduction and publicity, and systematized distribution" (10). The organization's top-down management structure, which started with the executive committee in New York, catalyzed expansion. The New York office took the lead in strategizing fundraising, planning the production of texts, and training paid lecturers. The AASS also embraced new media technologies, such as the steam press. Once created, AASS texts circulated across the North, to Europe, and even into the slave [End Page 155]South, as in the case of the 1835 postal campaign. Goddu describes the personnel who enabled such distribution and the actual places where people encountered media, including the many reading rooms and bookstores housed in offices of local societies. Grounded in extensive research in newspapers, personal papers, and the records of the AASS executive committee, Selling Antislaveryoffers an invaluable resource for those interested in how the AASS produced and circulated abolitionist texts with great variety, over a vast geography, in...