The Humblest May Stand Forth: Rhetoric, Empowerment, and Abolition

Abstract

The Humblest May Stand Forth: Rhetoric, Empowerment, and Abolition. By Jacqueline Bacon. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002. Pp. i, 352. Cloth, $39.95.) The Artistry of Anger: Black and White Women's Literature in America, 1820-1860. By Linda M. Grasso. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002. Pp. xi, 249. Cloth, $49.95; paper, $18.95.)Despite the entrenchment of freedom of speech in the Constitution, some people in antebellum American were not permitted to speak, and some truths could not be spoken. Jacqueline Bacon and Linda M. Grasso, researchers in rhetoric and literature respectively, examine ways in which various groups of marginalized Americans tackled this problem. Bacon, pointing to crucial relationships between rhetoric and liberation, explores ways that subaltern groups such as African Americans and white women made places for themselves in the discourse of antislavery and reform. Grasso argues that antebellum women, white and black, angered by oppressive gender ideology yet forbidden by that same ideology to express anger, fashioned an innovative artistry of to express their anger in their literary productions. Historians of the early republic will find both these works provocative and useful.Bacon's The Humblest May Stand Forth provides a close analysis of the rhetorical strategies of black abolitionist men, white female abolitionists, and black abolitionist women. She focuses on how members of these marginalized groups found their voices, legitimated their right to speak, and constructed their arguments. Bacon notes that until recently, abolitionist historiography has ignored these abolitionists, in effect continuing to silence them. Striving to recover their rhetorical productions, she concludes that standard narratives of antislavery as beginning with Garrisonian immediatism, dividing over the woman question and unwilling to contemplate violence until the 185Os, must be modified. For example, Bacon reminds us that a great deal of antislavery effort occurred long before 1831 in black associations not devoted solely to abolition. Accounts of abolition focussed solely on the American Anti-Slavery Society or the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society do not tell the whole story and indeed often ignore African Americans' struggles to achieve agency in these organizations.Drawing from the wide range of primary sources she has assembled, Bacon grounds her analysis in texts rather than theoretical frameworks. A firm grasp of historiography as well as classic theories of rhetoric and newer concepts such as muted group theory (8) inform her examination of rhetorical practices among those sidelined by mainstream discourses. Each group's practice of the technology of persuasion utilized prevailing discourses in subversive ways. Self-help rhetoric, for example, encouraged African-American participation in racial uplift to undermine racist stereotypes. However, it also critiqued white prejudice, demonstrated black agency, and promoted racial solidarity among African Americans. Similarly, black speakers promoted abolition and challenged racial prejudice by invoking distinctive versions of classic American forms such as jeremiads and revolutionary rhetoric and by the traditional African-American practice of signifying.Bacon details white female abolitionists' struggles to appropriate rhetorical authority, arguing they accomplished this by manipulating conventional notions of femininity. However, she criticizes their obliviousness to the concerns of African-American women. She notes, for example, how white women's antislavery discourse targeted negative impacts of slavery on white southern women and ways white female abolitionists utilized black women's suffering to authorize their own speech. Bacon attributes these failures to their inability to escape both their bourgeois worldview and an essentialist view of women that slid all too easily into racial essentialism. …