The Rhetoric of Black Abolitionism

Abstract

In a span of thirty years, from 1832 to 1862, American abolitionists were able to reverse public opinion in the North on the question of slavery.Despite the dramatic political shift, the emergent hostility to “slave power” did not lead to an embrace of racial equality. Abolitionists, in the face of America’s long history of racism, sought to link opposition to slavery with a call for civil rights. For black abolitionists, this was not only a strategic problem, it was a matter of self-definition. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the meanings of liberty, labor, and independence were the basis of contentious republican politics. Black abolitionists used this rhetorical raw material to fashion “fighting words” with which to generate solidarity and deliver their moral claims to the nation. This research employs an innovative strategy for the analysis of the discursive field, in an exploratory content analysis of five black newspapers in antebellum New York State. Computerized content analysis coded for themes, rhetoric, and ideology in a sample of more than 36,000 words of newspaper text. Although the discourse of black abolitionism is a social critique, it also contains a positive assertion of what free blacks would become. As important as the theme of “slavery” was to the discourse, so too were “colored” and “brotherhood.” This analysis consistently showed the key features of political antislavery argumentation to be most common in the Douglass newspapers (theNorth StarandFrederick Douglass' Paper).