TURNING AMERICA AGAINST THE SINS OF SLAVERY
IN THE FALL OF 1837, REVEREND ELIJAH LOVEJOY MADE THE supreme sacrifice. While waging a journalistic campaign in opposition to slavery, he gave his very life to the cause. As the editor of an abolitionist weekly, Lovejoy had endured proslavery forces destroying his first printing press, then his second, then his third. Because he continued to speak out against the sale of African Americans, an angry mob set out to destroy his fourth press as well. When Lovejoy tried to stop the destruction of his property, he was killed.
Lovejoy didn’t, however, die in vain. His martyrdom propelled thousands of converts into the Abolition Movement, as his murder clearly demonstrated that an antislavery stand endangered not only the rights of African Americans but also the civil liberties of all Americans—white as well as black.
Though Lovejoy’s sacrifice was dramatic, his was only one of many losses that advocacy journalists suffered from the 1820s to the 1860s as they successfully turned the American conscience against the sins of slavery. The most famous of the crusading editors was William Lloyd Garrison, whose paper became synonymous with the abolitionist press. One of several dozen antislavery papers, the Liberator remained the focal point of the crusade because of Garrison’s strident rhetoric, debates with proslavery editors, and repeated public demonstrations—including burning the Constitution. Also important were the men and women of African descent who, as early as the 1820s, began to plead their own case through the early black press.
The “Peculiar Institution” Divides a Nation
Slavery had been a controversial issue since the founding of the United States, but economic developments in the 1820s created a geographic fault line that split the country into two distinct sections on the topic. The North began to industrialize, with a burgeoning of urban-based factories, while the South remained an agrarian society, with an economy dominated by the production of cotton and tobacco, both relying on slave labor to make a profit.
But the enslavement of human beings was more than an economic issue. Slavery was the rallying cry for northern progressives who wanted massive social change, an issue that crystallized complex social and economic differences between the North and the South. And just as Tom Paine had appealed to human emotions to translate colonial opposition to the British into terms the average citizen could relate to, abolitionist editors used highly charged rhetoric to place the slavery debate on a plane that made sense to a critical mass of the American public.
In the 1830s, the Abolition Movement focused on convincing all Americans that slavery couldn’t be allowed to exist. Many southerners saw slavery from a different perspective. They argued that it introduced a backward people to Christian civilization. In addition, apologists said slaves received food, clothing, shelter, and security during sickness and old age. For abolitionists, however, one fundamental fact canceled out every defense: slaves weren’t free. They couldn’t benefit from the fruits of their own labor, weren’t guaranteed the right to participate in the domestic relations of marriage and parenthood, and couldn’t regulate their conduct to prepare the immortal soul for eternity. Slaves were, in short, denied their rights as children of God.
To spread this message, abolitionists created their own newspapers—such as the Instigator in Providence and the African Observer in Philadelphia. The motivation behind these publications was a determination to spread the antislavery ideology to a larger audience throughout the nation as a step toward ending the “peculiar institution.”
Reverend Elijah Lovejoy: Journalistic Martyr
Elijah Lovejoy was born in Maine in 1802, the son of a Congregational minister. After graduating from Waterville College in his home state, Lovejoy earned a divinity degree from Princeton Theological Seminary. Powered by a desire to reform society, he established a Presbyterian newspaper in the far western state of Missouri in 1834.
Slavery soon emerged as his St. Louis Observer’s most controversial topic, particularly because Missouri continued to condone slavery. Lovejoy wrote, “Slavery is a sin—now, heretofore, hereafter, and forever, a sin.”1
The establishment press in St. Louis mobilized opposition to the Observer. Lovejoy’s paper should be silenced, the Missouri Republican argued, because commercial operations in the South would refuse to do business with Missouri if the state allowed Lovejoy to continue preaching against slavery. Virtually demanding violence against Lovejoy, the Republican said of Missouri citizens, “Every consideration for their own and their neighbor’s prosperity requires them to stop the course of the Observer.”2
Fearing for the safety of his wife and toddler son, Lovejoy relocated to Illinois, a free state. But during the move, slavery advocates pushed his printing press into the Mississippi River. He then bought a second press and proceeded to publish his paper. In the first issue of the Alton Observer, he wrote, “American negro Slavery is an awful evil and sin, and it is the duty of us all to effect the speedy and entire emancipation of our fellow-men in bondage.”3
The idealistic editor soon learned that Illinois wasn’t as accepting of his abolitionist stance as he’d hoped. One day when Lovejoy was in his home, a mob went to the Observer office and destroyed his second press. Antislavery leaders then sent him money to buy a third press, which proslavery forces promptly destroyed. Despite the continuing setbacks, the editor remained steadfast.4
Lovejoy borrowed the money to purchase a fourth press. When it arrived on November 7, 1837, he stored it in a warehouse near the river. That night, a crowd of 200 men gathered outside the building and directed Lovejoy to leave. When he refused, events escalated into a riot. Several men placed a ladder against an exterior wall of the warehouse, and one carried a torch to the top and set the roof on fire. As the building began to blaze, Lovejoy ran outside and aimed his pistol at the man on the ladder. Shots rang out from the crowd, and Lovejoy fell to the ground.
The violent death of a well-educated, thirty-five-year-old clergyman—compounded with the failure of law enforcement officials to arrest anyone for his murder—sent shock waves through the nation. It also transformed the Abolition Movement, as the issue mushroomed from the relatively narrow one of denying rights to members of a disenfranchised minority group to the much broader one of threatening the civil liberties of all Americans.
In an editorial outlined in a heavy black border, William Lloyd Garrison used the murder of “a representative of Justice, Liberty and Christianity” to condemn the United States. Garrison wrote, “In destroying his press, the enemies of freedom have compelled a thousand to speak out in its stead. In murdering a loyal and patriotic citizen, they have stirred up a national commotion which causes the foundations of the republic to tremble.”5
Such statements ignited a tide of resentment and rage that spread like wildfire. Hundreds of ministers preached sermons eulogizing Lovejoy, and thousands of activists organized public protests supporting free expression. The American Anti-Slavery Society capitalized on the groundswell of protest, undertaking a campaign to keep the murder fresh in the memories of the American people. The society adopted the slain editor as a martyr, printed 40,000 copies of a publication that described the Alton riot, and issued stationery embossed with the slogan, “LOVEJOY the first MARTYR to American LIBERTY. MURDERED for asserting the FREEDOM of the PRESS.”6
As thousands of men and women previously indifferent to the issue of slavery came to believe that their own civil liberties were in jeopardy, local antislavery societies burst into existence and new members flocked into the national network, which was infused with new life and energy.
In addition to swelling the antislavery ranks, Lovejoy’s martyrdom also propelled the Abolition Movement into a new phase. Before this time, abolitionists had believed that once slave owners realized they were committing a sin, they’d voluntarily free their slaves. Lovejoy’s murder demonstrated, however, that this strategy would fail. The Alton riot showed antislavery forces that their crusade wouldn’t succeed unless they took direct action. If men and women committed to the cause hoped to end slavery, they’d have to enter the rough-and-tumble of politics.
William Lloyd Garrison: Radical Abolitionist Editor
William Lloyd Garrison founded and emerged as chief prophet of the American abolitionist crusade during the early nineteenth century. The primary vehicle he used to spread his gospel was the Liberator, the Boston weekly he edited for thirty-five years.
Garrison was born in Massachusetts in 1805. Poverty forced him to leave school at the age of ten, when he became an apprentice printer. While helping edit Genius of Universal Emancipation during the 1820s, Garrison grew increasingly vehement in his attacks on American slave traders.
In 1829, he set his sights on Francis Todd, who took slaves from Africa to Louisiana sugar plantations on his ship, the Francis. In an item labeled “Black List,” Garrison accused Todd of mistreating his slaves, stating, “Any man can gather up riches, if he does not care by what means they are obtained. The Francis carried off seventy-five slaves, chained in a narrow place between decks.”7
Todd filed a libel suit, saying the slaves hadn’t been chained but had been free to move below deck. The jury agreed with Todd, finding the accused guilty. Garrison could have avoided jail if he’d been contrite, but he refused and spent the next forty-nine days behind bars.
Reprinted from the Abraham Lincoln Papers at the Library of Congress.
Garrison then moved to Boston and began publishing, in 1831, what emerged as the archetype of advocacy journalism in American history, the Liberator.
The strident editor was a man of courage and conviction. Most abolitionists were willing to compromise by supporting a gradual reduction in slavery over a period of years, but Garrison demanded immediate emancipation of all slaves. He wrote, “I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation. No! No! Urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest—I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—AND I WILL BE HEARD.”8
Garrison was soon known throughout the country because of his success as a provocateur. His ingenious system began with the simple act of exchanging his paper for those of some 100 other editors, most of them proslavery. The editors Garrison sent his paper to were so offended by his invectives that they quoted his words—accompanied by their own words of outrage—to show readers the extreme nature of the abolitionist ideology. When Garrison received his copy of a paper in which an editor had lambasted him, he didn’t shudder with pain: he celebrated. For Garrison would then reprint the editorial attack, along with his own vehement response, thereby giving his readers far more compelling content than his original editorial had.
For instance, after the editor of Connecticut’s Middletown Gazette read Garrison’s first editorial against slavery, the proslavery editor retorted with contempt, “Mr. Garrison can do no good, either to the cause of humanity or to the slaves, by his violent and intemperate attacks on the slaveholders. That mawkish sentimentality which weeps over imaginary suffering, is proper to be indulged by boarding school misses and antiquated spinsters; but men, grown up men, ought to be ashamed of it.” Garrison not only reprinted the Gazette’s attack but also used typographical flourishes to ridicule the paper’s suggestion that slavery didn’t cause pain, repeating the phrase in disbelief, “IMAGINARY suffering!!” Garrison then attacked the Gazette for betraying the progressive nature of the region of the country that it and the Liberator shared, writing, “Such sentiments, emanating at the south, would excite no surprise; but being those of New-England men, they fill us with disgust.”9
Although the explosive combination of Garrison’s extreme positions and his ability to set off editorial chain reactions raised his national profile, they didn’t make him popular. One letter to the editor read, “Your paper cannot much longer be tolerated. Shame on the freemen of Boston for permitting such a vehicle of outrage and rebellion to spring into existence among them!” Another screamed, “O! you pitiful scoundrel! you toad eater! you d—d son of a—! hell is gaping for you! the devil is feasting in anticipation! you are not worth—!”10
Evidence of Garrison’s growing influence on the nation’s conscience came in the form of the numerous governmental bodies that tried to silence him. The Georgia legislature offered a $5,000 bounty for Garrison, and a group of men in Mississippi later upped the ante to $20,000. On the federal level, US Postmaster General Amos Kendall condoned southern vigilante groups that rifled mail sacks in an effort to destroy copies of the Liberator.
Boston took its own action. In 1835, a mob of men assembled outside a hall where Garrison was speaking. Fearing for his safety, the editor slipped out a back window and sought refuge in a carpenter shop, where he climbed into the loft and hid behind a pile of lumber. The mob tracked him down, screaming, “Lynch him!” Several men then dragged Garrison to the window of the loft, stripped him, and coiled a rope around his neck. Just as the mob was poised to hurl Garrison out the window, supporters rescued him.
Such acts of intimidation didn’t cause Garrison to reduce his radicalism, but to increase it. In 1844, he proclaimed that Americans could no longer pledge their allegiance to a slaveholding and racist government and that all non-slaveholders should secede from the union. Garrison wrote, “The existing national compact should be instantly dissolved. Secession from the government is a religious and political duty. The motto inscribed on the banner of Freedom should be, NO UNION WITH SLAVEHOLDERS.”11
Despite the Liberator’s status as the most widely known voice for abolition, the paper didn’t build a large circulation. Paid subscribers never exceeded 2,500, most of them powerless African Americans. Garrison paid his printing costs through the fees he charged for speaking engagements, even though his words were almost always accompanied by jeering and heckling—and often stones and rotten eggs—from proslavery demonstrators.
The most notorious example of how far Garrison would go to arouse the American people to his cause came during an 1854 Fourth of July celebration in Framingham, Massachusetts. An article about the event in the Liberator described Garrison’s dramatic gesture: “Holding up the U.S. Constitution, he branded it as the source and parent of all the other atrocities—‘a covenant with death, and an agreement with hell.’” Garrison then set fire to the document. As the Constitution burst into flames, he declared, “So perish all compromises with tyranny! And let all the people say, Amen!” A few hisses and protests were drowned out by a tremendous shout from the crowd: “Amen!”12
By the 1850s, Garrison was by no means a lone voice against slavery, as mainstream newspapers also had joined the crusade. The New York Tribune had a circulation of 200,000 and was widely acknowledged as the leading opponent of slavery among mainstream papers. Publisher Horace Greeley became an ardent abolitionist and helped organize the Republican Party that brought Abraham Lincoln to the White House in 1860. In the West, Joseph Medill built the Chicago Tribune into an abolition advocate as well.
Courtesy of the Library of Congress.
Between 1861 and 1865, more than 600,000 Americans died in the Civil War. And then, finally, in December 1865, the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution abolished slavery.
With Garrison’s goal achieved, he ceased publishing the Liberator. Other journalistic voices then praised him for transforming public sentiment on the most controversial issue of the era. The Nation wrote of Garrison’s commitment to the Abolition Movement, “It is, perhaps, the most remarkable instance on record of single-hearted devotion to a cause.” The magazine went on to say of the Liberator, “It has dropped its water upon the nation’s marble heart. Its effect on the moral sentiment of the country was exceedingly great. It went straight to the conscience, and it did more than any one thing beside to create that power of moral conviction which was so indomitable.”13
In recognition of the central role Garrison had played in abolishing slavery, he was invited to Charleston for a great jubilee. The climax of the day came when liberated slaves hoisted the editor onto their shoulders and carried him to a platform, surrounded by thousands of African-American men and women who understood what he’d done for them. Black orator and activist Frederick Douglass spoke for the multitude, calling Garrison “the man to whom more than any other in this Republic we are indebted for the triumph we are celebrating today.”14
Men at the highest level of government joined in lionizing Garrison. US Senators Charles Sumner and Henry Wilson accompanied Garrison onto the Senate floor. And in the ultimate statement of honor, President Abraham Lincoln received Garrison at the White House for a session in which the men talked privately; it was a historic meeting that brought together the two men who’d done more to end slavery than any others.
African-American Journalists Find Their Voices
Although African Americans had begun, by the late 1820s, to publish their own newspapers, the abolition of slavery didn’t dominate the early black press to the degree that it dominated Garrison’s Liberator. In a country that remained largely hostile to people of African descent, it was remarkable for newspapers owned by blacks to speak at all. For such voices to speak loudly was impossible.
The first black newspaper was Freedom’s Journal, founded in New York City in 1827. The premier issue contained the eloquent purpose that would continue to sustain the genre for generations to come, saying, “We wish to plead our own cause. Too long have others spoken for us.” That “we” referred to Reverend Samuel Cornish, who had founded a Presbyterian church in Manhattan, and John B. Russwurm, who had graduated from Bowdoin College the previous year. The two young men focused their weekly on promoting education, convinced that it was the key to the advancement of their race. Not until halfway through their inaugural editorial did the editors so much as mention slavery. Even then, the reference was a vague one. “We would not be unmindful of our brethren who are still in the iron fetters of bondage,” the editorial stated. “They are our kindred by all the ties of nature; and though but little can be effected by us, still let our sympathies be poured forth, and our prayers in their behalf, ascend to Him who is able to succour them.”15
Freedom’s Journal faced severe financial difficulties. Advertising was impossible to secure because very few businesses targeted black consumers, whose economic strength was minimal. The first black newspaper ceased publication in late 1829, never having approached the decibel level of the Liberator.
It’s not surprising, then, that the first defiant African-American journalist spoke from the pages of the Liberator rather than those of the black press. What is surprising is that the voice came from a woman. For during the early nineteenth century, society relegated women—black or white—to the home, reserving the realms of business, economics, and politics exclusively to men.
Maria Stewart, however, refused to accept that limited definition of a woman’s place. Born free in Connecticut in 1803, Stewart was orphaned at the age of five and widowed while still in her twenties. Propelled by the zeal of religious conviction, she began writing for the Liberator in 1831. Garrison showcased Stewart’s essays by creating a “Ladies’ Department,” complete with a woodcut of a black woman in chains.
Much of Stewart’s passion was aimed at the abolition of slavery. She urged her fellow African Americans to look up from their labor and see the reality surrounding them, “Cast your eyes about, look as far as you can see; all, all is owned by the lordly white.” Stewart went on to call the United States a civilization defined by sin, saying: “America has become like the great city of Babylon, for she has boasted in her heart—‘I sit a queen and am no widow, and shall see no sorrow!’ She is indeed a seller of slaves and the souls of men; she has made the Africans drunk with the wine of her fornication.” Using terms such as “lordly white” and “fornication” while accusing white America of practicing “fraud” and committing the sins of Babylon clearly placed Stewart in the camp of militant abolitionists, far closer to the radicalism of Garrison than the caution of Cornish and Russwurm.16
Boston’s African-American community denounced Stewart’s fiery discourse, saying it was unseemly for a woman to speak so boldly. In a graphic expression of their disapproval, local black men pelted Stewart with rotten tomatoes. In 1833, Stewart shifted her energies from journalism to education, eventually founding her own school for African-American children.
The country’s first strident black abolitionist newspapers were the publishing enterprises of Frederick Douglass. Born into slavery in about 1817, Douglass ran away from his Maryland plantation in 1838. With the support of abolitionists, he became a riveting public speaker who described from firsthand experience the most heinous dimensions of chattel slavery. His intellect and gift as an orator made him the most important African-American leader of the nineteenth century.
Douglass’s most influential journalistic product was the North Star, which he founded in Rochester, New York, in 1847. Douglass stated, “The object of the North Star will be to attack Slavery in all its forms and aspects; Advocate Universal Emancipation; and hasten the day of FREEDOM to the Three Millions of our Enslaved Fellow Countrymen.”17
Douglass modeled his paper after the Liberator, with his editorial tone and content mirroring Garrison’s—differing only in that the black editor’s writing had a grace the white editor’s didn’t. Douglass’s prose was often informed by memories of his early life in bondage. An 1848 article read, “He is no other than a thief who calls me or you his own property, and if one sinner is such above all others, it is he who would inflict stripes upon a human being, and quote scripture in justification, as did a master of mine, when brutally flogging a female slave—‘They who know their master’s will and do it not, shall be beaten with many stripes.’ The slaveholder is a depraved man.”18
The North Star was read not only in the United States but also in Europe and the West Indies. Its international distribution during an era when two-thirds of northern blacks and virtually all southern blacks were illiterate served to boost circulation considerably. With five white subscribers for every African-American one, the North Star soon surpassed the Liberator in circulation, reaching a subscriber list of 3,000.
Like Garrison, Douglass aroused the wrath of proslavery forces. The New York Herald demanded that Douglass be banished to Canada, and the Albany Sunday Dispatch called him a “saucy nigger.” The Dispatch encouraged readers to take action against Douglass, advising, “As a moderate sum of money would, doubtless, induce Douglass to go to Toronto or Kingston, in Canada, where he will be much more at home, the Rochester people will do well to buy him off.”19
By mortgaging his home and soliciting financial support from England, Douglass continued publishing his paper for thirteen years.
And so, by 1850 a sustained African-American press had emerged. It had become an important source of racial pride and identity as well as a powerful instrument in the abolitionist struggle. This advocacy press served several purposes. By providing firsthand descriptions of the brutality that defined slave life, the writing by Douglass and other former slaves destroyed the myth that southern masters were kind. In addition, the eloquence and high literary qualities of the work of women and men such as Stewart and Douglass undermined charges that black people were intellectually inferior. On a broader scale, creation of black abolitionist papers was a crucial step in establishing that the Abolition Movement wouldn’t be a phenomenon resting entirely on white shoulders.
Moving Abolition onto the National Agenda
Even though Americans historically have prided themselves on being a freedom-loving people, two of the landmark events in the history of this nation’s first century were armed conflicts. The Revolutionary War was the most important event of the 1700s, and the Civil War was the most important event of the 1800s. Both conflicts were fueled partly by economic factors—the American Revolution by the colonists refusing to pay high taxes to the British and the Civil War by the incompatibility of the agrarian South with the industrializing North. In neither case, however, did economics alone propel citizens into open warfare, as emotional forces also played an essential role in igniting the conflicts. And, likewise, in both cases those emotional elements were articulated to the American people in the form of journalistic publications.
In the decades leading up to the war between the North and the South, the emotionalism was focused on the issue of slavery, and the journalistic force that placed that debate on the national agenda was the abolitionist press. Beginning in the 1830s, antislavery newspapers such as Elijah Lovejoy’s St. Louis Observer and William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator raised the consciousness of the nation to a sinful abomination in fundamental conflict with the ideals of democracy. Garrison strategically positioned the Liberator at the center of the storm. The epitome of the activist editor, he calculated a formula by which his strident discourse, angry rhetorical conflicts with proslavery editors, and dramatic acts of public defiance ensured that neither he nor his crusade was ignored.
Between 1830 and 1850, the abolitionist press—black as well as white—succeeded in articulating and disseminating throughout the nation the moral indictment of slavery that precipitated the Civil War and ultimately forced the “peculiar institution” into a dark corner of American history.
