Slavery and the Making of Early American Libraries: British Literature, Political Thought, and the Transatlantic Book Trade, 1731–1814 by Sean D. Moore

Abstract

Reviewed by: Slavery and the Making of Early American Libraries: British Literature, Political Thought, and the Transatlantic Book Trade, 1731–1814 by Sean D. Moore Wayne A. Wiegand (bio) Slavery and the Making of Early American Libraries: British Literature, Political Thought, and the Transatlantic Book Trade, 1731–1814 sean d. moore Oxford University Press, 2019 256 pp. In 1737 the Boston Weekly Newsletter carried an ad from a Massachusetts bookseller announcing he would auction off “the best Part of the Books which should have been Sold last night, together with Two likely young Negro Women” (vii). For Sean D. Moore, this transaction demonstrates a clear connection between a slave trade economy and the texts that grounded the cultural and intellectual infrastructure colonial American leaders used to justify the American Revolution. The foundation for his analysis of that infrastructure are the contents and circulation records of five social libraries established in East Coast port cities in the eighteenth century by white wealthy men who benefited financially, either directly or indirectly, from colonial America’s slave-based economy. These libraries include the Library Company of Philadelphia (founded in 1731); the Redwood Library of Newport, Rhode Island (1747); the Charleston (South Carolina) Library Society (1748); the New York (City) Society Library (1754); and the Salem (Connecticut) Social Library (1760). Sandwiched between an introduction and conclusion, each library gets a chapter of analysis, and for each Moore focuses on at least one major book to help reconstruct the imagined and interpretive communities in which they were read. For the Salem Social Library it is Oroonoko (1688 and 1759), for the Redwood Library Windsor Forest and Essay on Man (1713 and 1733), for the New York Society Library Robinson Crusoe (1719), for the Charleston Library Society Chrysal, or, the Adventures of a Guinea (1760 and 1765), and for the Library Company of Philadelphia Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudo Equaino, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789). By combining a close literary analysis of the contents of these books with an examination of the reading patterns of library subscribers (many of which are reflected in circulation records), Moore attempts to identify how they influenced attitudes toward abolition and facilitated civic engagement on the subject of slavery. Books circulating frequently and quickly, he contends, can be assumed to document actual reading. While these books [End Page 548] tended to validate behaviors, their influence was not uniform. Proslavery readers read texts differently than antislavery readers (a conclusion particularly evident at the Library Company of Philadelphia). By sequencing his analysis around the publication dates of these books, Moore also follows the shifting antislavery sentiments reflected in these eighteenth-century texts. Each of these libraries served as a place for the cultural elite to access books published mostly in London and acquired largely through British booksellers. By pooling their resources to acquire selected titles the libraries made it possible for members to put their cultural capital on public display, to facilitate discussion of the books they had read, and to exchange information on a variety of subjects in their social interactions. And while these libraries were exclusive and private, taken together they facilitated a kind of civic engagement among their highly influential members that collectively helped craft public policies. Because the author seeks to detail how library subscribers used the texts their libraries made available to them to build their cultural and intellectual infrastructure, Slavery and the Making of Early American Libraries is a history of reading more than a history of books. As such, it relies on literary more than quantitative analysis to contextualize how these wealthy white eighteenth-century men read the texts in their libraries, which, Moore contends, became “incubators” (xii) for ideas that later helped justify the American Revolution. Moore’s narrative is populated with numerous phrases like might have and words like possibly and may, thus frequently asking his readers to make connections slightly beyond what his evidence permits. This is often the case for historians of reading, who cannot interview their subjects to evaluate the influence of texts the latter have read, and who have to rely on a limited body of extant archival material that documents their act of reading. In the...