American Abolitionists Research Articles

‘With almost electric speed’: mapping African American abolitionists in Britain and Ireland, 1838–1847

ABSTRACTAfrican American abolitionists made an indelible mark on nineteenth-century transatlantic society: their lectures were held in famous meeting halls, taverns, theatres, churches, and the private parlour rooms of wealthy patrons across the British Isles. This article will demonstrate how digital mapping techniques reveal not only the extent of how far African Americans travelled, but also how visualizing their tours can lead to new avenues of research. Digital mapping can reinvigorate scholarship on transatlantic activism by providing original insights into journeys by men such as Frederick Douglass and Moses Roper.

George Thompson, transatlantic abolitionism, and Britain in the American Civil War

ABSTRACTThe British abolitionist George Thompson was an unequalled public face of the Northern states in Britain during the American Civil War. Capitalising on his reputation from decades of anti-slavery activism stretching back to the 1830s, Thompson lectured convincingly to a variety of British audiences on the emancipationist potential of the war, encouraging them to lend their support to the Northern cause. Revealing his continuing intellectual debt and personal connections to the American abolitionists around William Lloyd Garrison, this article uses Thompson’s activism to emphasise the continuing importance of transatlantic Garrisonian ideology and networks in a period that historians have previously characterised as a ‘rupturing’ in the movement.

In Whose Interest? Ante-Bellum Abolitionism, the Bible, and Contemporary Christian Ethics

Abstract Christians look to Scripture to inform their ethical decision-making, believing that God speaks through it. However, disagreement as to what the Bible requires us to do can often lead to acrimonious splits within the church. So long as sharp divisions amongst Christians over ethical issues remain, injustices continue, and the reputation of the church is undermined. This article suggests that lessons may be learned from the story of the use of the Bible in the American Abolitionism debate which can help the contemporary church to discuss and perhaps even resolve some enduring ethical questions which are dividing Christians today.

Philadelphia and the End of Slavery

The role of the city of Philadelphia in the American abolitionist movement.

Reconsidering Politics in the Study of American Abolitionists

Reconsidering Politics in the Study of American Abolitionists

The concept of piracy in nineteenth-century American abolitionist rhetoric

ABSTRACTAmerican abolitionists used the concept of piracy as a rhetorical and tactical device to attack the institution of slavery during the antebellum period. Activists branded slaveholders as ‘pirates’ in order to delegitimize the validity of slave owners' title in stolen people and recognize enslaved peoples' rightful self-ownership. The pirate label further conveyed that slaveholders' violence against slaves was illegal and that enslaved people could lawfully use lethal force to resist those who held them captive, assaulted them, or kidnapped them. Thus, abolitionists characterized slave owners as pirates not only to stigmatize slaveholding but also to shape legal perspectives on slavery by reversing presumptions about property rights and about slavery-related violence.

‘A milder type of bondage’: Brazilian slavery and race relations in the eyes of American abolitionists, 1812–1888

ABSTRACTThis article examines how American abolitionists educated themselves about Brazilian slavery and race relations. Beginning with the Iberian–American Revolutions and ending with James Redpath’s 1867 influential exposé on Brazil, this article explores how American abolitionists viewed Brazil and how their understandings about Brazilian slavery and race relations changed over the course of the nineteenth century. These changes were not a progressive march by abolitionists toward a deeper and better understanding of Brazil but, instead, reflect how antislavery writers emphasized various aspects of Brazilian slavery and culture at different periods in order to further their own ideological and political agendas. At the same time, these agendas led abolitionists to pioneer some of the earliest methods for the comparative study of slavery on a global scale.

One Nation Divided by Slavery: Remembering the American Revolution While Marching Toward the Civil War by Michael F. Conlin

Reviewed by: One Nation Divided by Slavery: Remembering the American Revolution While Marching Toward the Civil Warby Michael F. Conlin Margot Minardi One Nation Divided by Slavery: Remembering the American Revolution While Marching Toward the Civil War. By Michael F. Conlin. American Abolitionism and Antislavery. ( Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2015. Pp. xii, 226. $39.95, ISBN 978-1-60635-240-3.) This lively, eloquent, and meticulously researched book examines how Americans of different political persuasions interpreted the American Revolution in the context of their debates over slavery. Contrary to historians of the antebellum period who focus on nationalism within a particular region (generally the North), Michael F. Conlin argues that both northerners and southerners participated in the formation of "a common national identity" in the decades before the Civil War (p. 10). Examining Americans' uses of a wide variety of Revolutionary symbols, he concludes that "there was remarkable agreement among most antebellum Americans in the North and the South as to what civic virtues they valued and who displayed them" (p. 11). While emphasizing antebellum Americans' shared historical memory, Conlin also carefully considers variations in Revolutionary memory both within and across regions. He pays frequent attention to the '"Hotspurs'" at both extremes of the slavery debate—abolitionists and proslavery radicals—but he also considers the more measured voices in either section (p. 14). Indeed, some of his most interesting discoveries revolve around shared appropriations of the Revolution by southern moderates and northern doughfaces. As the book's title suggests, the question of slavery severely strained shared historical memory and national identity. While this conclusion is unlikely to surprise readers familiar with the period, what makes One Nation Divided by Slavery: Remembering the American Revolution While Marching Toward the Civil Warrewarding to read is Conlin's nuanced interpretation of different appropriations of Revolutionary history. The book is organized thematically, with each chapter focused on a symbol or set of symbols associated with the Revolution: the Fourth of July holiday; Thomas Jefferson, Monticello, and the Declaration of Independence; George Washington, Mount Vernon, and his Farewell Address; and a series of notable Revolutionary War battles, such as Bunker Hill and Cowpens. A brief final chapter follows these "history wars" up to secession and the [End Page 402]opening of the Civil War (p. 4). Across these chapters, and with admirable clarity and concision, Conlin traces how the various stakeholders in the slavery debates perceived these symbols as representing different implications for the future of slavery in the American nation. Readers interested in historical memory might wish for a deeper historiographical or theoretical engagement with that flourishing subfield. In particular, more analysis of the relationship between historical memory and contemporary politics would have been welcome. Were participants in the antebellum history wars simply shaping the past to meet their particular views of the present? Or were their perceptions of the past guiding their political positions in the antebellum period? Conlin might also have clarified the relationship between popular and elite memory of the Revolution. For example, his chapter on commemorations of Revolutionary War battles draws on a rich body of sources—literary magazines from both the North and the South, abolitionist letters and newspapers, antebellum histories (most notably, George Bancroft's), and the rampant monument building of the 1850s—to show how "conflicting understandings of the American Revolution underlay the political strife of the antebellum era" (p. 107). But the chapter concludes that "[m]ost Americans did not participate in the history wars" (p. 145). Conlin's attention to the limited reach of the acrimony over Revolutionary symbols is admirable, but it raises the question, again, of significance: if most people were happy to go along celebrating the Fourth of July and visiting battlegrounds, why and how did these contests over memory matter? This book will prove a valuable resource to scholars of regional and national identity, of appropriations of the American Revolution, and of sectional politics in the antebellum period. Conlin succeeds in showing his readers how powerful symbols of the Revolution tenuously united one nation divided by slavery. Margot Minardi Reed College Copyright © 2017 The Southern Historical Association

Estudios decoloniales y poscoloniales. Posturas acerca de la modernidad/colonialidad y el eurocentrismo

The article is part of one of the specific objectives of which the research project is framed. That is to investigate decolonial studies and their context, as they are platforms for critical theories such as Latin American abolitionism and feminism. As such, the article contextualizes decolonial studies developed in Latin America in recent decades. However, these studies should not be analyzed separately from other fundamental concepts when it comes to addressing decolonial criticisms, such as the relationship between modernity and coloniality and the way in which the eurocentric vision is reflected, also without forgetting an important antecedent to the decolonial theories: the postcolonial studies. For this, a study was carried out starting from the qualitative paradigm, thought of as an effort to understand social reality as a historical process, from a decolonial perspective, because precisely what is sought is to unravel the association to domination in Latin America during the 21st century. This implies the use of a hermeneutical historical approach, which presupposes the bibliographical analysis of multiple authors who have concentrated on the interpretation of the realities generated by colonialism and coloniality.

Rebels in Paradise: Sketches of Northampton Abolitionists by Bruce Laurie

Reviewed by: Rebels in Paradise: Sketches of Northampton Abolitionists by Bruce Laurie Matthew Mason (bio) Keywords Abolition, Slavery, Antislavery, Massachusetts, David Ruggles Rebels in Paradise: Sketches of Northampton Abolitionists. By Bruce Laurie. (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 2015. Pp. xi + 178. Cloth, $80.00, Paper, $22.95.) This latest monograph from an established historian of abolition examines five abolitionists from Northampton, Massachusetts. African American abolitionist David Ruggles is the best known of the five, although Laurie posits that the Free Soil and Republican Party politician Erastus Hopkins was the most significant of them. Taken together, these profiles illustrate the greatly varied nature of abolitionism even within one locality. The individual biographical sketches are illuminating, but the reader has to do almost all the work of discerning the larger significance of this collective picture. [End Page 181] Although Laurie apologetically included no women and only one African American in his five subjects, this group features a real socioeconomic assortment, from the wealthy businessman John Payton Williston through the political editor Henry S. Gere to the displaced free black man Ruggles. They also occupied a wide range along the spectrum of antislavery belief and action, disagreeing on questions such as whether to actively aid the Underground Railroad or to support John Brown. They also differed—as was abolitionists’ wont—on the efficacy of political action. In short, what Laurie says of Williston might well be said of his other subjects: He was “a contradictory figure who might give pause to modern-day readers in need of an iconic abolitionist” (84). Laurie’s narrative also highlights the complex context within which antislavery politics operated in antebellum Northampton, interacting with a wide range of other political, moral, and economic issues. His actors took diverse stances on those other questions and assigned them differing levels of priority. Their divergent positions at times rose to the level of conflict. For instance, while Sylvester Judd saw his staunch support for the Working-Men’s movement and his antislavery as “opposite sides of the same antiestablishment coin,” the industrialist Williston fought against child labor reform (23). Laurie’s “fine-grained treatment of the local scene” thus shows that “how antislavery politics played out on the ground” was rarely neat and tidy (3). Laurie is committed to making comparisons and contrasts among his five individuals, and to placing their individual stories within the appropriate contexts of sectional, state, and local politics. But he seems uninterested in explicitly developing the significance of his characters beyond the local. “None of” his figures besides Ruggles, he admits, “has ever figured in a popular or academic account of the abolitionist movement,” and this book never makes it clear why they should (1). Laurie is enough of an academic historian and makes enough historiographical forays that it would be unfair to dismiss this book as an exercise in local antiquarianism. But his historiographical passages are very few and dwell on micro points, rather than developing an argument or intervention in the literature for the book as a whole. The Acknowledgements section makes it clear that Laurie’s editors at University of Massachusetts Press were not inclined to stretch him beyond this posture, when he quotes them as saying that “we like” Northampton abolitionists “and have special affection for locals” (ix). While both producing parties thus seem to have settled for a rather [End Page 182] modest goal, it remains true that they reached it. For this book does provide readers “with a deeper and richer understanding of the meaning of political abolitionism in a particular place and time”—if they are willing to do a fair amount of the heavy intellectual lifting themselves (8). Matthew Mason Matthew Mason is an associate professor of history at Brigham Young University. He is the author of various books and articles on slavery and politics, including Apostle of Union: A Political Biography of Edward Everett (Chapel Hill, NC, 2016). Copyright © 2017 Society for Historians of the Early American Republic

Liberty Power: Antislavery Third Parties and the Transformation of American Politics by Corey M. Brooks

Reviewed by: Liberty Power: Antislavery Third Parties and the Transformation of American Politicsby Corey M. Brooks John H. Matsui Liberty Power: Antislavery Third Parties and the Transformation of American Politics. By Corey M. Brooks. American Beginnings, 1500–1900. ( Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2016. Pp. [viii], 302. $45.00, ISBN 978-0-226-30728-2.) Liberty Power: Antislavery Third Parties and the Transformation of American Politicssets out to reintegrate antislavery third parties into the history of antebellum politics. Corey M. Brooks focuses on the decades-long campaign [End Page 678]of political abolitionists to contest and expose the slave power's control of national politics, culminating in the birth of the explicitly antislavery Republican Party by the mid-1850s. In analyzing primary sources on the political wing of the antislavery movement, Brooks sails between the Scylla of antislavery hagiography and the Charybdis of proslavery screeds. Most crucial to Brooks's thesis among recent scholarship is James Oakes's Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861–1865(New York, 2012). As Oakes notes, by the 1850s three constituencies—political abolitionists, antislavery moderates, and slaveholders—recognized that if the federal government ceased to treat slaves as property, voluntary state abolition would follow. Abolitionists quickly recognized that Congress was the linchpin to fight the slave power; slaveholders' interests were disproportionately represented in both houses thanks to the three-fifths clause. Even as the American abolitionist movement fractured in the late 1830s over women's rights and pacifism, the volume of antislavery voices calling for a purely antislavery third party increased. Although many abolitionist voters chose to support the Whig Party in 1840, that election saw the birth of the Liberty Party. The Liberty Party had two potential goals: "achieving national political victory or pressuring one or both of the major parties to adopt an unequivocally antislavery platform" (p. 78). The chronology moves forward predictably for historians familiar with antislavery politics. Conscience Whigs and Liberty men gave way to Free Soilers in the wake of opposition to the invasion of Mexico and debate over the Wilmot Proviso, followed by the Kansas-Nebraska Act (1854) giving birth to the Republican Party as the Whigs fell apart. Yet Brooks places far more emphasis in Liberty Poweron prominent congressional posts than Richard H. Sewell dedicated to such seats in his foundational text on antislavery politics, Ballots for Freedom: Antislavery Politics in the United States, 1837–1860(New York, 1976). Brooks pays close attention to contests over the speakership of the House of Representatives, a post that readers of Leonard L. Richards's The Slave Power: The Free North and Southern Domination, 1780–1860(Baton Rouge, 2009) will know was occupied by slaveholders for two-thirds of the years through 1850. Republican Nathaniel P. Banks's successful campaign for this seat in 1856 thus marked a crucial moment in antislavery politicians' long war to craft a viable congressional coalition. Banks was a recent convert to the Republican ranks, and his candidacy united Republicans and nativist Know-Nothings. The Republican Party embodied the culmination of decades of labor by Liberty men and Free Soilers to found a voluntary association with millions of members dedicated to thwarting the mastery of slaveholding politicians over free state voters by "divorcing the federal government from slavery" (p. 211). Brooks's book deserves to be read in tandem with This Vast Southern Empire: Slaveholders at the Helm of American Foreign Policy(Cambridge, Mass., 2016) by Matthew Karp. As Karp demonstrates, the antislavery politicians Brooks studies faced a very confident—not isolationist—group of slaveholding politicians who had global ambitions. If Britain was an antislavery and antidemocratic empire by 1833, if not 1807, as is acknowledged in Liberty [End Page 679] Power, then the growing global influence of the British empire is seen as an existential threat to American slavery by the influential southern politicians Karp studies. Liberty Powermisses an opportunity to contribute to the historiography of antislavery politics in a transnational context by not paying more attention to trends in British politics from 1833, but then it would not be the book that Brooks promises his readers. John H. Matsui Virginia Military Institute Copyright...

C19: "Unsettling,": March 17-20, 2016, State College, PA

C19: "Unsettling,"March 17-20, 2016, State College, PA Hannah Lauren Murray (bio), Christy L. Pottroff (bio), Christine Yao (bio), William Hunt, and Anthony G. Cohen (bio) The 2016 C19 conference theme was "Unsettling," an indication that the fourth biennial meeting would feature work dedicated to new perspectives and revitalizing critiques. "Unsettling" necessarily called for revisionist approaches "to the methodologies, geographies, languages, and texts that disturb, divert, and reconstitute" the field, and it drew scholars prepared for the occasion. Race was a major analytical vector that helped destabilize such fields as print and material culture, science studies, law, and liberalism. Interdisciplinarity and intersectionality played important roles in topics including urban planning, nationalism, food studies, and religiosity, which unsettled canonical texts and scholarly methodologies. This unsettling resulted in a number of provocative tectonic shifts in nineteenth-century American literary studies. Program Link: https://c19conference.files.wordpress.com/2016/01/2016-conference-program-updated-3-3.pdf unsettling race, nation, and the borderline Presenters on the "Conversions: Race, Religion and the Politics of Belonging" panel considered how race manifests in antebellum religious texts. Ben Bascom examined Christianity as a tool against colonialism and slavery in Boyrereau Brinch/Jeffrey Brace's The Blind African Slave (1810). Bascom argued that through religious practice, Christians foster inclusion and change; in contrast, when [End Page 144] they adhere to the institution of slavery, they legitimize exclusion. Duncan Faherty investigated another slave narrative, on Omar Ibn Said's 1831 Arabic autobiography. Said's decision to write in Arabic and transcribe Koranic suras from memory, Faherty contended, demonstrates resistance against his state-imposed identity. Faherty asked what other texts may have been lost through white America's ignorance and mistranslation of enslaved persons' non-English expressions. Shelby Johnson read William Apess' "Eulogy on King Phillip" (1836) as a revisionary interpretation of Christian thought that materializes history and refuses Native American spectralization. In Apess' eulogy, a disinterred child's corpse bears material witness to suffering and thus, Johnson argued, forcefully indicts white apathy to Native displacement. Ashley Reed argued that Bayard Taylor's short story "Confessions of a Medium" (1860) illuminates white middle-class male anxieties concerning immigration and integration through spiritualist performance. When a white female medium channels spirits such as Blackhawk from the nation's unsettled borders, Reed noted, spiritualism's unruly world threatens to destabilize ideas of race, gender, and sexuality. Liberalism was another concept that conference participants interrogated. In "Race and the Fault Lines of Liberalism: Sex, Fashion, Food," contributors assessed how networks of communication and exchange in the Black Atlantic defy Eurocentric assumptions about the liberal subject and public sphere. In her discussion of Leonora Sansay's novel Zelica: The Creole (1820), Carroll Smith-Rosenberg questioned how the text's backdrop in the Haitian Revolution undermines the raced, gendered, and heterosexed attributes that the Ages of Revolution and Enlightenment too frequently assumed. Reconnoitering the print culture in nineteenth-century Harlem, Carla Peterson compared the society periodicals disseminated by publishers such as Philip Bell and James McCune Smith to [End Page 145] those of Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, and Washington Irving. For Peterson, the print culture activities of these "Black Gothamites" bespeak the presence of an African American public sphere and cultural consciousness, championing the adoption and refinement of a middle-class gentility. Reviewing the work of African American cookbook authors in the nineteenth century, Rafia Zafar understood the compiled recipes as reflecting the culinary knowledge and sensibilities of the African diaspora and an emergent black hospitality industry. According to Zafar, in works by chef-authors such as Malinda Russell and James Hemings, authors intimate first-hand experience with American chattel slavery to enhance recipes' authenticity. This attention to unconventional forms of writing and language likewise informed "The Poetic of Community: From Abolition to Post-War Reunion." The panel questioned how politicized instances of citation, intertextuality, and collective poetics might forge a new understanding of the circabellum's dynamic reading and writing publics. Faith Barrett presented on African American abolitionist Amos Gerry Beman's prolific scrapbooking efforts. According to Barrett, Beman's pairing of newspaper clippings with acrostic poems celebrates black leaders in the American antislavery movement while supplying examples of veneration, contemplation, and political...

Aiming for Pensacola: Fugitive Slaves on the Atlantic and Southern Frontiers by Matthew J. Clavin

Reviewed by: Aiming for Pensacola: Fugitive Slaves on the Atlantic and Southern Frontiers by Matthew J. Clavin John H. Matsui Aiming for Pensacola: Fugitive Slaves on the Atlantic and Southern Frontiers. By Matthew J. Clavin. ( Cambridge, Mass., and London: Harvard University Press, 2016. Pp. [x] 252. $35.00, ISBN 978-0-674-08822-1.) Although never explicitly referred to as such, Matthew J. Clavin's book is a significant contribution to borderlands history. If borderlands history once emphasized the frontiers of nations and empires, it now deals with, as Pekka Hämäläinen and Samuel Truett have written, "ambiguous and often-unstable realms where boundaries are also crossroads, peripheries are also central places, homelands are also passing-through places, and the end points of empire are also forks in the road" ("On Borderlands," Journal of American History, 98 [September 2011], 338). These words ring true for Florida, which was the site of imperial and racial conflict as well as cooperation between Africans, Native Americans, and Europeans well before the United States annexed it. The conflict between Spanish and English colonists, American nationals, Native Americans, and Africans over land and slavery hardly ceased in 1821. [End Page 407] This work's ambitious claims extend further than the existing research on self-emancipated slaves warrants. While at least three hundred fugitives from American slavery ran to Pensacola in the four decades before the American Civil War, they represent the tip of the iceberg of selfemancipated Americans in those years. Recent studies of the American abolitionist movement and the Underground Railroad reinforce this sense of scale. Manisha Sinha notes that historians today estimate some 150,000 African Americans freed themselves by running away between 1830 and 1860 (The Slave's Cause: A History of Abolition [New Haven, 2016], 382). Eric Foner concurs, suggesting that 1,000 to 5,000 annually voted with their feet for freedom in those three decades (Gateway to Freedom: The Hidden History of the Underground Railroad [New York, 2015], 4). Yet scale is not everything. Spanish Florida was a colonial society with slaves, but it also contained free people of color who "benefited from the absence of the inflexible binary racial divide that characterized neighboring Anglo-American societies and the strictly ordered caste system that persisted throughout much of Spanish America" (p. 26). Indeed, not only were some black Floridians free, but also some were armed. Louisiana's Third Battalion—stationed in Pensacola after the American Revolution—included black soldiers who wore red coats left behind by the British, an irony not missed by American visitors. Over a hundred black and mixed-race men formed part of the Pensacola militia, a phenomenon absent from the southern United States outside of New Orleans. By the final years of Spanish rule a majority of Pensacola's nearly one thousand residents were black. By 1860 Florida was by far the smallest of the future Confederate states in a demographic sense, and when admitted to the Union a few months before Texas, it had barely a quarter of the Lone Star State's population. Florida's white population was a third as large as that of Arkansas, the next smallest rebel state. Considering Florida's peripheral status and long coastline, it was little surprise that the Confederacy expended few resources on the defense of the state or that the Union was able to maintain control of Fort Pickens near Pensacola. By May 1862, Confederate forces abandoned the Pensacola region due to manpower shortages and the demand for soldiers along the western front in Tennessee. Black Floridians quickly allied with Union soldiers who occupied Florida. This military backwater was governed by abolitionist generals. Underground Railroad conductor Neal Dow of New England arrived at Pensacola as a Union brigadier general and began recruiting and arming slaves. Other antislavery officers organized Sunday schools where black soldiers and children alike could learn to read. From its inception as a Spanish colony through the American Civil War years, Florida defied the racial norms set by the Spanish, British, and Americans due in part to its location at the intersection of those competing worlds. Clavin has given American and borderlands historians an excellent study of one underappreciated frontier...

Slavery, Freedom, and Women’s Bodies

Slavery, Freedom, and Women’s Bodies Sasha Turner (bio) Camilla Cowling. Conceiving Freedom: Women of Color, Gender, and the Abolition of Slavery in Havana and Rio de Janeiro. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013. xii + 326 pp.; ill. ISBN 978-1-4696-1087-0 (cl); 978-1-4696-1088-7 (pb). Sarah Franklin. Women and Slavery in Nineteenth-Century Colonial Cuba. Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2012. xi + 223 pp.; ill. ISBN 978-1-58046-402-4 (cl). Mary Frederickson and Delores Walters, eds. Gendered Resistance: Women, Slavery, and the Legacy of Margaret Garner. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013. xvii + 234 pp.; ill. ISBN 978-0-252-03790-0 (cl); 978-0-252-07942-9 (pb). Madeline Zilfi. Women and Slavery in the Late Ottoman Empire. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2010. xii + 281 pp.; ill. ISBN 978-0-521-51583-2 (cl); 978-1-107-41145-6 (pb). The recent body-centered analytical turn in slavery scholarship has yielded fresh insights into the centrality of the female body to slave resistance and slavery’s ideological foundations.1 By focusing on the womb, each of the books under review reveals the significance of the reproductive body to the entrenchment and destruction of slavery. Because women’s reproductive ability threatened the social order, elite men enacted regulations to preserve the status quo. Sometimes, the subjugated populations who had different ideas about childbearing fought for bodily and maternal autonomy. At other times, they appropriated elites’ gendered expectations to fit their quests for freedom. While the womb was the single most important symbol in struggles over freedom and slavery, these authors also investigate contests over the body’s adornment, movement, and sexual contact, arriving at novel conclusions on how bodies shaped domination and resistance. Camilla Cowling’s Conceiving Freedom most directly studies how the womb shaped contests over freedom and slavery. From the enactment of partus sequitur ventrem, the legal code adopted by New World colonies stipulating that children shared their mothers’ status, to the nineteenth century Free Womb Laws of Cuba and Brazil, enslaved women understood that [End Page 177] elites exploited their reproductive capacity. With significant limitations, the 1870 Moret Law in Cuba and the 1871 Rio Branco Law in Brazil promised freedom to children born of enslaved women. In both territories the laws were ambiguous and silent on many important issues. Women battled with slave owners and city officials over legal restrictions and contradictions to ensure that their children gained the freedom that these laws promised to them. What is fascinating about Conceiving Freedom is its rich documentation of how enslaved women, using scribes and political connections, filed legal claims. These women, remarkably, used legal suits even when the laws disempowered them. Many were strategic in their quests, they put slave owners’ and officials’ reputations at risk and manipulated customs and emergent beliefs about motherhood. Imploring servants of the courts and members of the royal family to “put yourself in my place,” petitioners received aid from among the highest and most prestigious officials, including the imperial family in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (80). The second section of Conceiving Freedom demonstrates that women of color framed their appeals to maternal ideals within the political climate of the nineteenth century. Brazil and Cuba were hubs of growing and influential abolitionist campaigns. Like their American and British predecessors, Latin American abolitionists highlighted how slavery denied black women the rights and experiences of motherhood, their sacred duty. Depicting the most heartbreaking scenes of family separation through literature, speeches, and graphic illustrations, abolitionists singled out the separation of mothers and children as one of slavery’s most egregious assaults on womanhood. Women petitioners borrowed this tactic of emotional manipulation and sometimes received abolitionist support during legal proceedings. Although Conceiving Freedom convincingly establishes how the social and cultural environment shaped enslaved and freed women’s claims, it is not equally clear how women of color influenced abolitionists. Teasing out their impact on abolitionism would bolster Cowling’s argument that women claimants shaped the unfolding of emancipation. Conceiving Freedom reveals that although most women did not succeed in freeing their children, their suits did compel officials to extend certain prohibitions reserved for enslaved women...

Lee V. Chambers.The Weston Sisters: An American Abolitionist Family.

Lee V. Chambers.<i>The Weston Sisters: An American Abolitionist Family</i>.

Giant’s Causeway: Frederick Douglass’s Irish Odyssey and the Making of an American Visionary by Tom Chaffin

Reviewed by: Giant’s Causeway: Frederick Douglass’s Irish Odyssey and the Making of an American Visionary by Tom Chaffin Patricia J. Ferreira (bio) Giant’s Causeway: Frederick Douglass’s Irish Odyssey and the Making of an American Visionary. By Tom Chaffin. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2014. Pp. 292. Cloth, $29.95.) Ireland, especially in the last ten years, has embraced the fact that Frederick Douglass toured the country for four months beginning in late 1845, on an antislavery lecture circuit that would also take him to Scotland and England. Although Olaudah Equiano, on behalf of the British campaign to end slavery, and Charles Lenox Remond, another American abolitionist, also traveled to Ireland, respectively in 1791 and 1840, only Douglass’s journey has garnered significant contemporary attention. Plaques in Cork and Waterford commemorate his visit to both cities, a dramatic nine-foot statue by the sculptor Andrew Edwards awaits permanent installation in Dublin, a full-length documentary titled Frederick Douglass and the White Negro explores the visit as well as African American–Irish relations and is regularly aired on national television, and state universities as well as Trinity College have hosted forums on the former slave turned international statesman. Tom Chaffin’s contribution in Giant’s Causeway: Frederick Douglass’s Irish Odyssey and the Making of an American Visionary is the extensive, documented backdrop he provides to every step of Douglass’s Irish sojourn. Through Chaffin’s deft storytelling the reader learns not only that his subject sailed aboard the paddle steamer Cambria to Ireland, but also what transpired when fellow passengers, especially those from slaveholding states, learned that the former slave was among them. Once Douglass reaches Ireland, the reader is treated to such scenes as his meeting with Daniel O’Connell, the revered freedom fighter who advanced the repeal movement, advocating an end to the Act of Union between Ireland and England. Chaffin re-creates the circumstances so vividly that we feel as if we are witnessing close up the pair exchanging handshakes and pleasantries before discussing the conflicts that individually brought them to the fore of nineteenth-century social reform and made for their mutual admiration. Given the acrimonious relations between African Americans and the newly emigrated Irish, Chaffin also conscientiously treats Douglass’s initial [End Page 273] reticence to travel to Ireland as well as the tension between his mission and the reality of what he saw there. For instance, Douglass became conflicted by the singularity of his mission—to garner Irish support and involvement in ending the slave trade—when all around him he saw the ravages of the impending Great Famine. He also battled the bigoted responses of clergy, from a range of denominations, after he implicated them for their toleration of slavery. Given the sectarian divisions of Ireland, such incriminations were potent well beyond their perceived religious heresy. As Chaffin skillfully renders the details of Douglass’s Irish sojourn, he does not stray from the delicate circumstances that his subject was forced to negotiate. As a result, Chaffin’s text moves well beyond a simple chronological accounting. With all of the particulars, however, there are instances where the text digresses needlessly. Since the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass remains one of the preeminent accounts of an individual’s move from slavery to freedom, there is no need for Chaffin to give a synopsis of the autobiography. Douglass’s writing of his own story is far more powerful and politically important than secondary summarizing. It also intrudes too much on the original ground Chaffin is staking with his focus on Douglass in Ireland. Additionally, the way Chaffin contends with the Dublin editions of the Narrative—continuously stressing that they were “‘British Isles’” versions—ignores the recognized scholarship on the political implications of their Irish context. Surely it is crucial that the first place the Narrative was published outside of the United States was Ireland? Rather than giving air to such significance, however, Chaffin focuses on the well-worn causes and impact of the famine as well as British Prime Minister Robert Peel’s anxiety over the spread of potato blight. Again, not only is such attention unnecessary, it seems excessive and...

“Aren’t I a Woman(ist)”: The Spiritual Epistemology of Sojourner Truth

This paper analyzes African American abolitionist and women’s rights activist Sojourner Truth in the context of two rhetorical paradigms—womanist theology and Black feminist standpoint epistemology—in order to highlight the ways that she used the podium and the pulpit to validate the black woman’s experience and her particular embodied ways of knowing. Significantly, Truth asserted her authority in public spaces as a black woman whose life was rooted in Afro-centric thought and tradition. The paper enhances scholarship in the field of theological-based rhetoric and extends the work of rhetorical scholars who have focused on her famous speech, “Aren’t I a Woman.” The paper highlights Truth as a maverick feminist theologian who was instrumental in the abolitionist and women’s rights movements.

The Weston Sisters: An American Abolitionist Family by Lee V. Chambers (review)

The Weston Sisters: An American Abolitionist Family. By Lee V. Chambers.

The Weston Sisters: An American Abolitionist Family

The Weston Sisters: An American Abolitionist Family

The Weston Sisters: An American Abolitionist Family by Lee V. Chambers (review)

The Weston Sisters: An American Abolitionist Family by Lee V. Chambers (review)