answer question

The Rhetoric of Black Abolitionism: An Exploratory Analysis of Antislavery Newspapers in New York State

Author(s): Timothy Shortell

Source: Social Science History , Spring, 2004, Vol. 28, No. 1 (Spring, 2004), pp. 75-109

Published by: Cambridge University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/40267834

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Timothy Shortell

The Rhetoric of Black Abolitionism

An Exploratory Analysis of Antislavery Newspapers

in New York State

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 analy-

sis consistently showed the key features of political antislavery argumentation to be

most common in the Douglass newspapers (the North Star and Frederick Douglass'

Paper;.

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. How

did this remarkable change occur? What role did abolitionism play in the

Social Science History 28:1 (spring 2004), 75-109

Copyright © 2004 by the Social Science History Association

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76 Social Science History

political developments that led to the Civil War and emancipation? While the

main cause of death for American slavery may have been economic, ideology

certainly played a part (Foner 1970, 1980). Abolitionism deserves credit for

having continually pressed the question and for having demanded that north-

erners-particularly politicians and partisans- decide where they stood on the issue.

Despite the dramatic political shift, the emergent hostility of northern-

ers to "slave power" did not lead to an embrace of racial equality. The pre-

dicament for abolitionists was to figure out how to link opposition to slavery

with a call for civil rights, in the face of America's long history of racism. For

black abolitionists, this was not only a strategic problem, it was a matter of

self-definition. The goal of the movement, of course, was the eradication of

slavery in the United States, but the process through which this would be

accomplished involved the articulation of a free black American identity.

For free blacks, the matter of identity could not be left unresolved. It was,

after all, their future to be dreamed of and planned for. Black abolitionists,

in the day-to-day business of challenging slavery in a racist society, worked

out the details of their desideratum. They demanded liberty and equality and

justified their claims in the terms of America's political and cultural heri-

tage. In doing so, they realized that it was necessary to articulate what their

community would become when granted these rights. Their assertion that

"we are just like you" was not merely a pragmatic strategy to undermine

the validation of chattel slavery based on race, it was a sincere expression of their sense of what it meant to be American. 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.1

George A. Levesque (1970) noted that the large and impressive litera-

ture on American abolitionism had all but ignored the contributions of blacks.

Thirty years later, the neglect continues. Except for recent work by Frankie

Hutton (1992, 1993) and Bernell Tripp (1992, 1995) on the antebellum black

press, and John L. Lucaites (1997) on black rhetoric, there has been little

attention given to the role black leaders had in shaping antislavery activ-

ism, antebellum political discourse, or American reform. A complete under-

standing of abolitionism as a social movement is not possible without such

scholarship.

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Rhetoric of Black Abolitionism: Antislavery Newspapers in New York State 77

The social movements literature includes a thorough and engaging

debate of theoretical perspectives on the symbolic dimension of movements,

and in particular, on the role of discourse. Framing theory remains the most

common theoretical perspective (see Tarrow 1998; Snow and Benford 1992).

Marc W. Steinberg (1998) has argued for a new analytical metaphor that cap-

tures the dynamic quality of meaning in social movements. His use of the

"discursive field" is an intriguing approach, which has already yielded sig-

nificant results (Steinberg 1999).

The present study suggests a somewhat different method for describing

the circulation of ideas and arguments in social movement discourse. This

study proposes that movement discourse be viewed as a networked field of

concepts from which arguments are fashioned. This approach requires an

examination of the sociocognitive structure of a discourse, as well as an analy-

sis of its rhetoric. Through the circulation of meanings in their discursive

field, the black abolitionists discovered the arguments they needed to articu-

late their moral claims, and at the same time, found a way to express their

shared identity.

Because the "field" is a collective construction, it contains contradic-

tions and unresolved tensions. Even as arguments come to be expressed in

paradigmatic ways, alternative expressions are available and options are con-

tinually tried out; consensus is a tenuous achievement and never fully does

away with the multivocality of meanings. Moreover, because the discursive

field is never independent of hierarchical social relations, the construction

of meanings in movement discourse cannot be isolated from the process of

domination. Arguments contest particular arrangements, implicitly consent-

ing to others.

The present research employs an innovative strategy for the analysis of

the discursive field. The primary characteristic of this method is an attempt

to capture the processes of moral claims-making and collective identity con-

struction through the description of empirical patterns. Rather than setting

the elements of the field into fixed, static relations, this work uses quantita-

tive tools to express the probabilistic nature of various combinations. This

project combines the insights of Steinberg's dialogic model (1994, 1998, 1999)

with the tools of network analysis (Carley 1997; Carley and Palmquist 1992;

Palmquist et al. 1997) in an exploratory content analysis of five black news-

papers in antebellum New York State.

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78 Social Science History

The Historical Context

Northern states began the process of emancipation in the last decades of the

eighteenth century. New York lagged behind New England and Pennsylva-

nia, in part, because slavery was more vital to the Empire State economy.

New York passed a conservative gradual emancipation law in 1799 and then

revised it in 1817 to end slavery in the state by 1827 ?

Slavery in New York was a small-scale affair, with more than 80% of

slaves held by masters who owned five or fewer. In the Hudson Valley, many

slaves were regularly hired out for wages, and some disposed of their labor at

their own discretion. In the first quarter of the nineteenth century, runaway

slaves were common in New York City and not unknown in upstate areas.

Both free blacks and sympathetic whites assisted slaves seeking their own

freedom before it was to be granted by the state (Groth 1994). By the time

that abolitionist organizations such as the American Anti-Slavery Society

formed, in 1833, slavery had been abolished, but the memory of slaveholding

was still fresh.

New York had the largest black population in the antebellum North. At

the time that emancipation laws were being passed, the state was home to

more than 40,000 blacks, including more than 15,000 slaves (Berlin 1998).

Almost as soon as northern states decided on emancipation, in defining the

meaning of the rights conferred by the Constitution, lawmakers repeatedly

confirmed the widely held belief that the two populations, black and white,

should not mix. Blacks were prohibited from serving on juries or testifying

in courts, from owning guns, from serving in the military, and, in most states,

from voting. States feared that unless they restricted the rights of blacks, they

would attract a large population of freemen and fugitive slaves from neigh-

boring areas. This fear led to a kind of competition to deprive blacks of civil

rights (Tocqueville 1981). Legal restrictions and white prejudice ensured that

the economic prospects of northern blacks were as limited as their political

status (Litwack 1961).

Race prejudice was so common in nineteenth-century America that it

was almost always assumed. Where laws neglected to make explicit the differ-

ent status of whites and blacks, social norms ensured that the difference was

respected. During his tour of America in 1831, Alexis de Tocqueville (1981:

343) noted:

Race prejudice seems stronger in those states that have abolished slavery

than in those where is still exists, and nowhere is it more intolerant than

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Rhetoric of Black Abolitionism: Antislavery Newspapers in New York State 79

in those states where slavery was never known. ... In the North the

white man no longer clearly sees the barrier that separates him from the

degraded race, and he keeps the Negro at a distance all the more carefully

because he fears lest one day they be confounded together.

Because American slavery conflated race and servitude, whites could not see

blacks apart from this perceived sign of inferiority. White prejudice went a

long way to ensure that blacks would never escape this condition.

In the early national period through the first quarter of the nineteenth

century, the meaning of liberty was explicitly linked to an expanding notion

of citizenship. In the decades after the Revolution, citizenship tended to be

defined as a right of property holders. By the beginning of abolitionism, citi-

zenship was generally understood to be based on a community of shared iden-

tity. Equality before the law was to be guaranteed by the republican form of

government. As a result, citizenship was inevitably racial. Most whites could

not conceive of sharing their community with anyone who was not of Euro-

pean, Protestant heritage. From the debate over Missouri in the 1820s, to

the Dred Scott decision in 1857, northern politics validated the prevailing

view that the rights and privileges of citizenship were limited to whites. The

popularity of colonization, as a way to protect American liberty for whites,

is easily understood in this context. Blacks would never be accepted into the

American mainstream; if they were to be freemen, they would have to live

elsewhere (Condit and Lucaites 1991; Litwack 1961).

Blacks recognized the persistence and virulence of American race preju-

dice but rejected the idea of colonization. Instead, they sought to be admitted

as equals into the American polity. New York remained a popular place for

free blacks to get on with the business of living. There were modest oppor-

tunities for earning a livelihood, and a large enough population in many

places to form the bonds of community. Black culture thrived in New York

City, as well as the other large population centers in the state (Franklin and

Moss 1994).

Black leaders disputed the "self-evident truths" of nineteenth-century

racial ideology, demanding that the nation live up to its republican identity.

They consented to the basic terms of American civic culture by seeking to be

included in it. Blacks in New York refused to be excluded from the American

experience. At the same time, they reflected critically on their own communi-

ties for failing to achieve, despite onerous circumstances, a status that would

prove their worth to the majority.

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80 Social Science History

Black Abolitionism in New York

New York City was a hub of black abolitionism. Beginning in the 1830s,

blacks held a series of conventions at which both slavery and racism were

passionately denounced. A network of safe houses and vigilance committees

protected the large fugitive slave population and the city's black churches

were an eager audience for antislavery literature (Foote 1995). Ministers in

the city, such as Henry Highland Garnet, Alexander Crummell, and Samuel

Cornish, were among the leaders of the free black community in the North.

Several other cities and towns in the state played host to significant black

abolitionist efforts. Conventions were held in Buffalo (1843), Troy (1847), and

Rochester (1853). The antislavery lecture circuit spanned from Rochester to

Brooklyn, from Saratoga to Buffalo, with stops in Geneva, Ithaca, Corning,

Bath, and a dozen other towns in the Finger Lakes region. Lecturers visited

the towns of the Hudson Valley and along the canal routes. The antislavery

message reached all corners of the state.

Black abolitionists sustained a more radical critique of American society

than their white colleagues. The same forces that generated a conservative

outlook, with regard to reform, among northern whites produced militancy

among blacks. Protestant revivalism has been identified as a source of the

emergence of immediatism in American antislavery agitation (Barnes 1964).

Black churches were steeped in millennial perfectionism. Whites were more

likely to have faith in the inevitability of progress; blacks had little reason to believe that American racism would end of its own accord. Whites wor-

ried that abolition would invite a more general attack on the institution of

private property, but blacks, who owned little capital and did not expect to

own any in the future, would not have feared such an attack as an outcome

of antislavery activism. Because nineteenth-century black institutions were

not invested in the status quo, they were more likely to breed radicalization

(Levesque 1970).

Perhaps the most extreme note sounded by the black abolitionists was

a call to self-defense by any means necessary. The early years of the move-

ment were dominated by William Lloyd Garrison's philosophy of nonvio-

lence, and both white and black leaders were far more likely to favor "moral

suasion." But, beginning in the middle of the 1840s, some black leaders

began to develop a rhetorical strategy for framing the call to violent resis-

tance (Ripley 1991). When Henry Highland Garnet delivered his eloquent "Address to the Slaves of the United States of America" at the National Con-

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Rhetoric of Black Abolitionism: Antislavery Newspapers in New York State 81

vention of Colored Citizens in 1843, his resolution was twice rejected by the

convention, but it was clear that blacks in the North were growing impa-

tient with the Garrisonian approach. Garnet's argument expressed the right

to self-defense in the fiery rhetoric of the American revolutionaries. Echo-

ing Patrick Henry, Garnet reminded the convention that men have the right

to resist oppression. Even if the call to violence led to a disastrous confron-

tation, Garnet reasoned, some conditions are so awful that death would be

preferable. Slavery, he proposed, was such a condition. As the situation of

slaves and free blacks worsened, Garnet's speech became increasingly popu-

lar (Shiffrin 1971). By 1854, black conventions went so far as to endorse the

principle of "Liberty or Death!" (Franklin and Moss 1994).

The argument connecting antislavery and racial equality was not well

received in New York or anywhere else in the North. Jacksonian populism,

the dominant political discourse of the first half of the nineteenth century,

was constructed on the basis of a partisan appeal to white working men. The

foundations of this appeal were racial superiority, male egalitarianism, and

expansionism (Saxton 1998); white workers were all too willing to believe

that their status depended on keeping blacks, Indians, and women in their

place- at the bottom of the status hierarchy. If artisans, yeomen, and laborers

realized that they would never achieve equality with Yankee aristocrats or

entrepreneurs, they took comfort in their assumed superiority to blacks, slave

and free.

Economic and social competition prevented white audiences from

thoughtfully considering the issue of civil rights. For much of the time the

second party system was functioning, Democrats controlled the national gov-

ernment on the basis of the alliance between northern white workers and

southern planters. The party of Jackson made citizenship for white work-

ing men seem inescapably linked to a defense of plantation slavery. In the

decade before the Civil War, this union broke down, as workers perceived

the expansion of slavery into the territories as a direct threat to their well-

being. Territorial expansion was a promise of economic independence in the

eyes of wage laborers. The Free Soil movement was founded on the equation

"free soil = free labor = free men," the logic of which necessitated the exclu-

sion of blacks. Representative David Wilmot, whose Wilmot Proviso was the

touchstone of political contention in the 1850s, explained the logic of his pro-

posal: "I plead the cause and the rights of white freemen. I would preserve

to free white labor a fair country, a rich inheritance, where the sons of toil, of

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82 Social Science History

my own race and color, can live without the disgrace which association with

negro slavery brings upon free labor" (quoted in Litwack 1961:47). When

they perceived that it was in their interest to do so, white workers would

oppose slavery as an un-American system of coercion but without endors-

ing the abolitionist argument that "all men are created equal" (Saxton 1998;

Roediger 1991; Wilentz 1984).

The use of the concept of free labor was increasingly common in the

antebellum period, particularly to emphasize the difference between North

and South. Free labor, through its binary opposition of slavery/freedom, dis-

guised the extent to which workers in the North were subjected to legal and

economic coercion, on the one hand, and social inequality, on the other hand.

Political expressions of this ideology (Whigs, Free Soilers, Republicans) had

to convince workers that the right to sell one's labor promised an opportunity

for achieved equality. Both black and white abolitionists supported this inter-

pretation, whether out of enthusiasm for commercial capitalism or the belief

that the absence of this freedom was a singular social evil (Foner 1996). For

blacks, of course, the difference between slavery and wage labor was para-

mount. They had to use whatever rhetorical tools were available to oppose

slavery. If they had suggested, following some of the radical union leaders,

that the conditions of slaves and wage workers were similarly unfree, it seems

unlikely that the cause of antislavery would have benefited. A total rejec-

tion of northern society would have doomed the effort to free their southern

brethren.

It was into this complex system of interpretations of freedom, indepen-

dence, citizenship, and race that the black abolitionists interjected their moral

claims to humanity and justice. Their "fighting words" were made of the

same discursive material as other popular forms of political speech. Partisan

politics, journalism, fiction, sermons, and lectures all made use of the styles

and voices of republicanism, political economy, and evangelical revivalism.

The black abolitionists were speaking in ways that their contemporaries could

understand. It was not simply a pragmatic decision. These discursive fields

form the context in which nineteenth-century social movements diagnosed

society, planned their reforms, and motivated participants to labor, some-

times at significant personal costs. Black abolitionists used newspapers, in

particular, to achieve these goals.

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Rhetoric of Black Abolitionism: Antislavery Newspapers in New York State 83

Black Abolitionist Newspapers

Free blacks constituted a crucial audience for the antislavery press. William

Lloyd Garrison often acknowledged the importance of the black community

for his Liberator. Black editors, such as Samuel Cornish, Frederick Douglass,

and Charles B. Ray, would do the same. The writers whose words appeared

in the black abolitionist newspapers understood that they addressed, in some

sense, the wider antislavery movement, but they were more deliberate in their

attention to their black readers.

Black newspapers span the abolitionist period, beginning in the late

1820s and continuing until the Civil War. Some ran for a considerable time,

but most were short-lived (Franklin and Moss 1994; Litwack 1961). Tension

within the antislavery community sometimes arose because white leaders,

such as Garrison, felt that the black papers were diminishing the readership

of the established journals. They failed to understand why northern blacks

wanted to express their outrage and their hopes in their own voices. This is

exactly the special mission that black editors set for themselves.

The first issue of the Weekly Advocate appeared on 7 January 1837, under

the proprietorship of Phillip A. Bell (see Bell 1837). Bell's aim for the paper

was to increase readership among northern blacks by writing about the issues

that concerned the community, such as abolitionism, temperance, univer-

sal suffrage, and education. Bell's newspaper opposed colonization as well as

slavery. After nine issues, Bell joined forces with Cornish. The name of the

paper was changed to the Colored American for the release of the 4 March

1837 issue. The last issue of the paper appeared in 1842 (Jacobs 1976).

When Frederick Douglass returned to the United States from a lecture

tour of Great Britain and Ireland, he announced his intention to publish a

newspaper. He moved to Rochester and began publishing the North Star in

December 1847. The paper was a four-page weekly that carried on its mast-

head the motto "Right is of no sex- truth is of no color- God is the father

of us all, and we are all Brethren." Douglass's success as an editor estab-

lished him as the most prominent black in the United States and a towering

figure in the abolitionist movement. In 1851, Douglass changed the name of

his paper to Frederick Douglass' Paper, under which it ran until 1860. By 1855,

the paper had 3,000 subscriptions (Douglass 1994).

The Weekly Anglo-African Magazine was a leading black newspaper in

the years immediately preceding the Civil War. Edited by Thomas Hamil-

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84 Social Science History

ton in New York City, it began publication in July 1859 and lasted until

March 1861. Through its reporting, letters, and editorials, the newspaper

aggressively championed black cultural independence and racial identity. Its

national appeal derived from its emphasis on black life and culture. Hamil-

ton's editorials provided a platform for discussions of the key topics of the

day, including secession, slavery, and emigration.

The paper resurfaced again in August 1861. Edited by Robert Hamilton,

Thomas's brother, the new journal assumed a broader and more active role in

the defense of black rights during the Civil War years. Its offices were often

used for the recruitment of black soldiers. The paper regularly published let-

ters from black soldiers and provided communication for families separated

during the war. The paper circulated widely among black troops in the field

and southern blacks in Union-occupied territory. Publication was suspended

in December 1865. During its final year, the Weekly Anglo-African Magazine

became the official organ of the National Equal Rights League, an aggressive

advocate of radical reconstruction (Ripley 1985).

Method

Perhaps the most common use of ideology in the social sciences is to denote

the contest of meanings accompanying social conflict in which actors with

power have a distinct advantage. John B. Thompson (1990) has enumer-

ated the main ideological dimensions of modern discourse: legitimation, dis-

simulation, unification, fragmentation, and reification. Each dimension is sub-

divided into particular modes. Reification, for example, concerns arguments

about the immutability of current arrangements. An assertion that a par-

ticular aspect of social life is natural, and for that reason should not or can-

not be changed, is an instance of the naturalization mode. Fragmentation,

in contrast, concerns assertions about differences and identity boundaries.

The differentiation mode involves assertions about group identity and social

distinctions, "characteristics which disunite" the community, and keep the

powerless "from constituting an effective challenge to existing relations"

(ibid.: 65).

A promising development is the recent "discursive turn" in social move-

ment research. Steinberg (1994, 1998, 1999) has cogently assessed the theo-

retical problems of frame analysis. Drawing on Bahktinian semiotics and

cultural psychology, he shows how the concept of discourse supplies the

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Rhetoric of Black Abolitionism: Antislavery Newspapers in New York State 85

necessary flexibility and subtlety to account for the symbolic dimension of

modern social movements. Discourse analysis begins with the notion of

speech as a form of mediated action; it is a symbolic practice that produces

the cultural codes by which people make sense of their experience (Stein-

berg 1999). Text is produced as an interaction among actors in specific set-

tings. Meaning does not adhere to words independently of their use but rather

only through social interaction within a system of hierarchical relations. As a

result, the concept of dialogue suggests contention, negotiation, and struggle

rather than merely transparent communication.

Steinberg (1998) proposes that "discursive fields" be used to describe

how meaning facilitates and constrains collective action. He notes that "such

fields contain the genres that collective actors can draw upon to construct dis-

cursively diagnosis, prognosis, and motivation. They are historically and con-

textually dependent, partially structured through hegemony, and the vocabu-

laries, symbols, and meanings within them are dialogic" (ibid.: 856). The

notion of a field in which the planning, perception, and interpretation of col-

lective action take place suggests that the ways in which meaning making

promotes and inhibits action is not fully conscious or intentional. But neither

is it entirely outside the control of the actors involved.

Network analysis is a relatively new and under-utilized approach in the

social scientific study of discourse. The goal is to construct a "mental map"

based on coding of the semantic links among concepts (Carley 1997; Carley

and Palmquist 1992). This diagram of semantic relations reflects either a cog-

nitive map of an individual's knowledge domain or a sociocognitive map of a

group's discourse, showing the shared worldview among members of a social movement.

Network analysis allows the researcher to categorize the kinds of rela-

tionships between the ideas, or concepts, that comprise the building blocks

of a text. Kathleen Carley (1997) argues that concepts have meaning only in

relation to other concepts. Two concepts can be linked directly or indirectly,

resulting in local and extended networks. These relations may be measured

along several dimensions, including imageability, evokability, density, con-

ductivity, and intensity. When concepts have been categorized, a taxonomy of the network can be constructed.

The strength of network analysis lies in its ability to uncover structural

relations between the concepts and, therefore, to provide a glimpse at how

arguments might be put together. Arguments require a raw material of sensi-

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86 Social Science History

bility, and the network is best expressed through a matrix of co-occurrences.

The process of argument construction can be detailed through an analysis

of contingencies, rather than the more familiar forms of tag-and-sort coding.

A network analysis might show how the meaning of liberty differed for free

blacks who stayed in the North and those who fled to Canada following pas-

sage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850. This would be the case, for example,

if in the discourse of the former group "liberty" tended to be used with

"equality" and "America" while in the discourse of the latter group it tended

to be deployed with "justice" and "nature."

In the present study, computerized content coding using SemioCode

(Shortell 2002) generated frequencies and co-occurrences for a set of six-

teen themes (JUSTICE, LIBERTY, RIGHTS, UPLIFT, AMERICA, SLAVERY, GOD, BROTHERHOOD, COLORED, PROPERTY, LABOR, CHARACTER, SUFFERING, NATURE, POLITICS, and LAW).3 The

sociocognitive network was mapped using odds ratios to characterize proba-

bilistic relations among elements. Odds ratios are a measure of association in

contingency tables; instead of measuring the degree to which proportions of

one variable vary by the other, as in the standard Chi-square test, odds express

the likelihood that a random case is in one category of a variable rather than

any other. Odds ratios show if the odds for a category vary by values of the

other variable (Rudas 1998; Knoke and Burke 1980).

In addition, the present study used multidimensional scaling (MDS) to

illustrate the structure of the socio-cognitive network. The ALSCAL algo-

rithm was employed to calculate solutions separately for each subsample, and

for the black abolitionist discourse as a whole (see Everitt and Dunn 1992).

The strength of associations can be depicted spatially; items closer together

in the map are more highly related. Euclidian distances between points can

be interpreted as a measure of correlation between elements in the network.

The paragraph was employed as coding unit in all analyses (see Popping

2000). In written English, the paragraph is the basic syntactic container for

the argument. In this regard, as a coding unit, it falls between the "utter-

ance" and the "text" in the formal units of the Leech and Svartvik (1994)

communicative grammar. Researchers studying concepts generally use the

sentence or utterance as the coding unit, since the sentence is the basic syn-

tactic container for meaning. In this study, however, concepts are regarded

as the building blocks of arguments, and so it is necessary to use a standard

coding unit best suited for arguments rather than meanings.

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Rhetoric of Black Abolitionism: Antislavery Newspapers in New York State 87

Themes were operationalized as sets of keywords. Because the present

study is exploratory, any instance of any of the keywords for a theme triggered

the coding switch in the software- that is, the theme was coded as present in

that paragraph. Further work will need to be done to determine the optimal

level of breadth and depth for this kind of theme coding, but this algorithm

probably mimics typical human coding.4

The network of meanings thus laid out will permit the investigation

of argument construction, which is vital to understanding claims making

and collective identity construction in social movement discourse. While this

study cannot hope to fully depict the black abolitionists' rhetoric, it identifies

some of the discourse's central features. Rhetoric analysis consists of coding

for (1) tone, (2) mode, and (3) basis.

The codes for tone (ANGER, JOY, SADNESS, and IRONY) were

designed to capture the use of emotion. Given that the focus of the present

study is on discourse as a collective practice, the psychological state of the

author is not a target of analysis. Rather, content coding aims to capture the

use of emotion as one oratorical option among others. Abolitionist discourse

could have included very little use of emotions- if, for example, the prin-

cipal argument against slavery were that it was economically inefficient- so

that the prevalence of different tones suggests something important about the

kinds of arguments thought of as most efficacious, in terms of claims making

and collective identity.

The present study defines mode as a dimension of rhetoric loosely based

on Geoffrey Leech's (1983) theory of pragmatics. Illocutionary action depicts

the social-relational aspect of arguments. The black abolitionists' assertions

can be described as adhering to particular kinds of social goals: to catego-

rize, to persuade, to condemn, and so on. Because meaning is not always easy

for an author to control- as Mikhail Bahktin (1981:293) puts it, "the word

in language is half someone else's"- the success of an illocutionary action is

not simply a matter of semantics. Arguments work, in the sociological sense,

because of the ways they are understood: as, generally speaking, (1) describ-

ing the social world, (2) explaining it, or, (3) evaluating it. For example, when

a speaker defines an incident as an instance of oppression (an evaluative illo-

cution), the communicative message is not exclusively or primarily about

the meaning of words. Rather, the message functions to create or reinforce a

shared understanding of the world, to motivate action, to make salient par-

ticular identity characteristics, and so forth.

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88 Social Science History

The most common illocutionary action in written English is the ASSER-

TIVE. The intent of this illocution is to state the facts about the subject

matter at hand. In contrast, the EXPLANATORY illocution includes asser-

tions that are designed to educate; arguments make connections that reflect

a didactic viewpoint. These two types can be contrasted, generally speaking,

as regarding the "what" question and the "why" question of a communica-

tive message, respectively. Finally, EVALUATIVE illocutions include argu-

ments whose primary purpose is to judge, to place facts in a moral prob-

lematic. Unlike the other two types, EVALUATIVE illocutions have to do

more with value (e.g., good/bad, beautiful/ugly, right/ wrong, etc.) than with

verisimilitude.

Next, paragraphs were coded in terms of basis (SIMILARITY or DIF-

FERENCE). With this dimension of rhetoric, the goal was to capture the

kinds of comparison employed in the logic of the abolitionist arguments.

When two concepts are linked, there is always an implicit or explicit basis

for the connection. The categories used in the present study for logical basis

are by no means exhaustive, but it seemed that equality and inequality (i.e.,

that concept X is the same as concept Y, or that X is not the same as Y) were

likely to be the most common types.

Paragraphs were coded for rhetoric by four trained readers. Only para-

graphs with at least two different themes, including at least one of the main

abolitionist themes (LIBERTY, RIGHTS, AMERICA, SLAVERY, COL-

ORED, SUFFERING, and POLITICS) were coded. This coding filter was adopted to ensure that the paragraphs examined would have a sufficient

density of antislavery content; the black abolitionist newspapers, after all,

reported on and discussed other things, including entertainment, organiza-

tions, travel, and so forth. Disagreements were resolved by discussion until

a majority agreed on the same code. If no consensus could be reached, the

paragraph was coded as neutral on that aspect.

Finally, in order to place the black abolitionist discourse along the power

dimension, the present research operationalized key modes of two of Thomp-

son's ideological dimensions most germane to the nineteenth-century dis-

cussion of race: NATURALIZATION and DIFFERENTIATION. Coding attempted to identify claims in the abolitionist texts that were used to dispute

the justification of racial inequality as natural and inevitable (naturalization),

and to dispute arguments in favor of the significance of racial differences

(differentiation). According to Thompson's (1990) formulation, ideological

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Rhetoric of Black Abolitionism: Antislavery Newspapers in New York State 89

Table 1 Extant black abolitionist newspapers in New York

Newspaper Dates of publication Freedom's Journal 1827-29Rights of All 1829 Weekly Advocate* 1837 Colored American * 1837-41 Mirror of Liberty 1 838-40 Northern Star and Freemen 's Advocate 1 842Ram's Horn 1846-48North Star* 1847-51 Frederick Douglass' Paper* 1851-59 Douglass ' Monthly 1 859-60 Weekly Anglo-African Magazine* 1859-61 Sources: Hutton 1993 and Ripley 1985.

Indicates that the newspaper was included in the sample.

communication follows relations of domination. In the present case, pro-

slavery arguments would be ideological, and therefore, antislavery arguments

counterideological. Again, four trained readers were used and disagreements

were resolved by discussion.

A sample of texts written by blacks in each of five newspapers (the Weekly

Advocate, the Colored American, the North Star, Frederick Douglass' Paper, and

the Weekly Anglo-African Magazine) published in New York State between

1827 and 1860 was drawn from published collections (Ripley 1985; Doug-

lass 1979) and available microfilm reels at the New York Public Library's

Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Table 1 lists extant black

abolitionist newspapers in New York State, and indicates those selected into

the sample. The authorship criterion was verified by comparison to a list of

black abolitionists compiled from the notes and commentaries presented in

Ripley 1985. Because of editorial and/or organizational continuity, texts were

pooled for the Weekly Advocate and the Colored American as well as for the

two Douglass newspapers.

In an exploratory study such as this, sampling is guided by practical con-

cerns. The sample was limited to five New York newspapers to make data

collection more manageable. Thus, some important black abolitionist peri-

odicals were not included. A full study of the rhetoric of black abolitionism

will require a more systematic sampling strategy. Moreover, since a proba-

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90 Social Science History

bility sample was not taken, some caution must be exercised when interpret-

ing the results.

Texts were not selected on the basis of content. Rather, this research

mined The Black Abolitionist Papers (Ripley 1985) and The Frederick Douglass

Papers (Douglass 1979) for texts that were presented or published in New

York. Those from the five newspapers in the sample were retained. Additional

texts were added from available microfilm reels for the Weekly Advocate, the

Colored American, and the Weekly Anglo-African Magazine. The primary con-

cern in this sampling strategy was that a sufficient amount of text could be

found for a variety of New York newspapers, in an exploratory attempt to

describe the structure of black abolitionist discourse. The present analysis

is based on 136 paragraphs (about 20,000 words) from the Colored Ameri-

can/Weekly Advocate, 79 paragraphs (about 12,000 words) from the Douglass

newspapers, and 42 paragraphs (about 4,500 words) from the Weekly Anglo-

African Magazine. In all, the present study examined 257 paragraphs (more

than 36,000 words) of black abolitionist text.

In addition, the present study used a sample of 179 paragraphs (about

14,000 words) from the Working Man's Advocate- a nineteenth-century New

York labor newspaper- as a point of comparison in terms of the socio-

cognitive network, in order to check the validity of the theme coding. Since

the abolitionist and labor texts share an immediate historical and geographic

context, they should have some properties in common. At the same time,

they represent different social movements, and as such, each should exhibit

a thematic profile reflecting the particular worldview of its movement. A

meaningful pattern of similarity and difference should be illuminated by the

comparison. If the contrast between the abolitionist texts and the labor texts

makes sense, the computerized coding algorithms are supported. If the con-

trast seems haphazard, it suggests that the coding algorithms are not mea-

suring the expected content.

Coding Examples

In order to clarify the operation of the computerized content coding, I present

a few examples of coded paragraphs. Themes coded as present are indicated.

Codes for tone, mode, and basis are given only when not coded as neutral.

The author of the letter presented below (signed "Sidney" [1841] but

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Rhetoric of Black Abolitionism: Antislavery Newspapers in New York State 91

probably penned by Henry Highland Garnet) writes to William Whipper,

a black intellectual and moral reformer, to argue for the value of race con-

sciousness among free blacks:

Again, it is one of the most malignant features of slavery, that it leads

the oppressor to stigmatize his victim with inferiority of nature, after he himself has almost brutalized him. This is a universal fact. Hence

the oppressed must vindicate their character. No abstract disquisitions

from sympathizing friends, can effectually do this. The oppressed them-

selves must manifest energy of character and elevation of soul. Oppres-

sion never quails until it sees that the downtrodden and outraged "know

their rights, and knowing, dare maintain." This is a radical assurance,

a resistless evidence both of worth and manliness, and of earnest inten-

tion and deep determination. {Colored American, 6 March 1841; see

Ripley 1985, 3:356) [Themes: RIGHTS, UPLIFT, SLAVERY, CHAR- ACTER, SUFFERING, NATURE; rhetorical tone: ANGER; rhetori- cal mode: EVALUATIVE; rhetorical basis: DIFFERENCE.]

Writing from the free black community in Brooklyn, Joseph C. Holly

(1848) provides an analysis of "slave power"- the term used by abolition-

ists to refer to the domination of slave-holding interests in the federal gov-

ernment-an idea that would become common in abolitionist writing in the

1850s:

In the formation of a constitution for the government of the confed-

eracy, the North did not only mortgage every particle of its soil as a

hunting ground for the bloodhounds of slavery, biped and quadruped,

to dog the track of, and worry the panting fugitive from the worse than

deathlike vale of Southern oppression; they did not only pledge every

strong arm at the North to go to the South in case the slaves, goaded by

oppression, should imitate the "virtues of their forefathers," and vindi-

cate their rights by subscribing to the doctrine of Algernon Sydney-

that resistance to tyrants is obedience to God- and crush them in sub-

jection to their galling yoke; but in the spirit of compromise and barter,

stipulated that the slaveholder should have additional power in propor-

tion as he became the great plunderer of human rights, the more insolent

to the great declaration of fundamental principle, the substratum of

all democratic institutions. (North Star, 12 May 1848; see Ripley 1985,

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92 Social Science History

4:18) [Themes: RIGHTS, SLAVERY, GOD, CHARACTER, SUF- FERING, BODY; rhetorical tone: ANGER; rhetorical mode: ASSER-

TIVE; rhetorical basis: DIFFERENCE.]

Uriah Boston, a leading figure in the free black community in Pough-

keepsie, New York, writes to Frederick Douglass on the question of separa-

tion versus integration as a strategy for achieving equality with whites. Doug-

lass was one of the leading voices on the separation side of the debate; Boston

(1855) writes to argue in favor of integration:

The true policy, in my opinion, for the colored people to pursue is, lessen

the distinction between whites and colored citizens of the United States.

We are American citizens by birth, by habit, by habitation, and by lan-

guage. Why, then, wish to be considered Africans. "African churches" -

African schools will do while nothing better is to be had. These will

do very well in Africa, but not in the U.S. The presumption with most

people is that no man is a proper citizen of one certain country while he

claims at the same time to be a citizen of any other country. It therefore

seems out of place and unreasonable to claim to be Americans, and at the same time claim to be Africans. Common sense would seem to dic-

tate that if we are American citizens, then we are in our own country of

right; but, on the other hand, if we be Africans, then surely our country

is Africa. For my part, I claim to be an American citizen, and also claim

to be a man. When I claim to be anything else, I trust I shall evince my

bravery and wisdom by taking my proper place, whether it be in Africa or

elsewhere. "Colored Americans" will do in the United States, but "Afri-

cans" never. I shall be greatly mistaken if the free colored people of this

country shall consent to be packed and labelled for the African market

by "Ethiop" and "Communipaw." {Frederick Douglass' Paper, 20 April

1855; see Ripley 1985, 4:323) [Themes: LIBERTY, RIGHTS, UPLIFT, AMERICA, BROTHERHOOD, COLORED; rhetorical mode: EX- PLANATORY; rhetorical basis: DIFFERENCE.]

Proslavery advocates often used the economic difficulties of the sugar

plantations in Jamaica after slavery was abolished on the island as evidence

that blacks were unfit for freedom. Samuel Ringgold Ward (1859), who had

emigrated to Jamaica in 1855, writes to G. W. Reynolds, editor of the Visitor

in Franklin, New York, to defend the island's reputation:

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Rhetoric of Black Abolitionism: Antislavery Newspapers in New York State 93

The blacks were denied all education, and almost all means of moral

and intellectual enlightenment. Such are always the demands of slavery.

As a consequence, emancipation found the negroes, as a whole- there

were a few in the towns in better circumstances- as ignorant, and

almost as much heathens, as when they were first stolen from Africa.

Since emancipation, something has been done for the education of the

negroes, and more for their evangelization, but when I tell that out

of a revenue of 200,000, our sapient Legislature doles out but 3,000

a year for the education of the entire population- 400,000- you will

not be surprised to learn that the education of the masses goes on but

slowly. (Weekly Anglo-African Magazine, 27 August 1859; see Ripley

1985, 5:20) [Themes: LIBERTY, UPLIFT, SLAVERY, COLORED; rhetorical mode: ASSERTIVE.]

It is interesting to note that the preceding passage was one of the few that was

reliably coded for IRONY. Of the tone codes, only ANGER occurred often

enough and was reliably coded for to be analyzed in the present study.

In the following editorial, Thomas Hamilton (1860) bemoans the absence

of an attitude of racial equality in Abraham Lincoln's presidential campaign,

suggesting that the Republicans- despite their antislavery platform- were as racist as the Democrats:

The Republican party today, though we believe in the minority, being

the most intelligent contains by far the greatest number of these two

classes of men, and hence, though with larger professions for humanity,

is by far its more dangerous enemy. Under the guise of humanity, they do

and say many things- as, for example, they oppose the reopening of the

slave trade. They would fain make the world believe it to be a movement

of humanity; and yet the world too plainly sees that it is but a stroke

of policy to check the spread, growth, and strength of the black masses

on this continent. They oppose the progress of slavery in the territo-

ries, and would cry humanity to the world; but the world has already

seen that it is but the same black masses looming up, huge, grim, and

threatening, before this Republican party, and hence their opposition.

Their opposition to slavery means opposition to the black man - nothing

else. Where it is clearly in their power to do anything for the oppressed

colored man, why then they are too nice, too conservative, to do it. They

find, too often, a way to slip round it - find a method how not to do

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94 Social Science History

it. If too hard pressed or fairly cornered by the opposite party, then it

is they go beyond said opposite party in their manifestations of hatred

and contempt for the black man and his rights. (Weekly Anglo-African

Magazine, 17 March 1860; see Ripley 1985, 5:71) [Themes: RIGHTS,

SLAVERY, COLORED, SUFFERING, POLITICS; rhetorical mode: ASSERTIVE; rhetorical basis: DIFFERENCE.]

In addition, some examples of the ideology coding also would be useful.

Exemplars of the naturalization mode are presented below.

"Sidney" (1841) responds to William Wrapper's call for full integration on the basis of moral reform:

The elevation of a people is not measurably dependent upon external

relations or peculiar circumstances, as it is upon the inward rational

sentiments which enable the soul to change circumstances to its own

temper and disposition. Without these, the aids of sympathizing friends,

the whisperings of hope, the power of eternal truth, are of but little

advantage. We take the case of an individual. His ancestors have been the

objects of wrong and violence. In consequence, they become degraded.

At the season of thought and reflection he feels a desire to escape from

the degradation of his sires, and the oppressions of the many. The sympa-

thy of friends is excited, and they make active exertions. (Colored Ameri-

can, 6 March 1841; see Ripley 1985, 3:356) [NATURALIZATION]

William J.Wilson (1853), using the pseudonym "Ethiop," corresponded

with Frederick Douglass on the need for distinct black institutions in the

North. Writing from Brooklyn, Wilson describes the effects of racism upon

the black community in New York City:

The result of all this, upon my mind, may be summed up in a few words.

A radical change in the process of our development is here demanded. At

present, what we find around us, either in art or literature, is made so to

press upon us, that we depreciate, we despise, we almost hate ourselves,

and all that favors us. Well may we scoff at black skins and woolly heads,

since every model set before us for admiration has pallid face and flaxen

head, or emanations thereof. I speak plainly. It is useless to mince this

matter. Every one of your readers knows that a black girl would as soon

fondle an imp as a black doll- such is the force of this species of educa-

tion upon her. I remember once to have suddenly introduced one among

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Rhetoric of Black Abolitionism: Antislavery Newspapers in New York State 95

Table 2 Percentage of paragraphs containing themes

Abolitionist texts

All Douglass Anglo- Working Man's Theme texts3 CA/WA* papers0 African Advocate JUSTICE 8.6 5.9 8.9 16.7 3.4 LIBERTY 26.4 20.6 39.2 21.4 19.8 RIGHTS 20.6 22.1 21.5 14.3 28.2UPLIFT 17.9 22.8 10.1 16.7 5.1 AMERICA 25.3 21.3 32.9 23.8 26.0 SLAVERY 23.7 14.7 48.1 7.1 11.3GOD 14.8 14.0 21.6 4.8 4.0 BROTHERHOOD 31.5 32.4 29.1 33.3 18.6 COLORED 24.1 20.6 22.8 38.1 2.8PROPERTY 3.5 5.2 1.3 2.4 18.6LABOR 11.7 11.0 15.2 7.1 19.2 CHARACTER 21.0 21.3 24.1 14.3 13.0 SUFFERING 21.0 17.7 30.4 14.3 10.7NATURE 5.8 8.1 1.3 7.1 8.5 POLITICS 18.7 16.9 27.9 7.1 23.2LAW 11.3 10.3 10.1 16.7 9.6 Paragraphs 257 136 79 42 179 a Includes all texts from all black abolitionist newspapers.

b Includes the Colored American and the Weekly Advocate.

c Includes the North Star and Frederick Douglass' Paper.

a company of twenty colored girls, and if it had been a spirit the effect

could not have been more wonderful. Such scampering and screaming

can better be imagined than told. As simple as these slight incidents may

seem at first sight, they lie at the bottom of half our difficulties. {Fred-

erick Douglass Paper, 11 March 1853; see Ripley 1985, 4:130) [Theme:

NATURALIZATION]

Results

Table 2 shows the prevalence of themes in each subsample and for the dis-

course as a whole (i.e., all the black abolitionist texts taken together), with a

sample of texts from a labor newspaper for comparison. The thematic pro-

file of the Douglass newspapers corresponds to what is typically thought of

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96 Social Science History

as abolitionist discourse. The themes of LIBERTY, SLAVERY, and SUF-

FERING are all more common in the Douglass newspapers than the Colored

American /Weekly Advocate or the Weekly Anglo-African Magazine. In addi-

tion, POLITICS and AMERICA are also more common in the Douglass newspapers.

The Colored American /Weekly Advocate shows some similarity to

the Douglass newspapers- compare RIGHTS, BROTHERHOOD, COL- ORED, and CHARACTER- though the typical abolitionist themes are somewhat less common. The Colored American /Weekly Advocate displays

what might be called self-help orientation, with UPLIFT one of its most

prominent themes. The Weekly Anglo-African Magazine is clearly most dis-

tinctive. The themes of JUSTICE, COLORED, and LAW are more com-

mon here than in the other black abolitionist newspapers, which is probably

a result both of its cultural bent and its publication in the years immedi-

ately preceding the Civil War. It appeared at a time when dissolution seemed

inevitable and emancipation a more realistic possibility; it was, therefore, less

concerned with undermining the validity of proslavery arguments and more

concerned with securing the full status of citizenship.

Comparing the abolitionist discourse with that from the labor news-

paper, the Working Man's Advocate ', similarities and differences are evident.

Both kinds of discourse are affiliated with social movements; as a result,

RIGHTS is common in both samples. The same is true of LIBERTY and

AMERICA. But there are important differences between the two types of

discourse. The abolitionist texts are more likely to use SLAVERY, of course,

but are also more likely to employ a self-help/moral exhortation language, as

evidenced by the greater prevalence of UPLIFT, CHARACTER, and GOD.

Discussion of race, indicated by COLORED, is also more common in the

abolitionist texts than in the labor discourse. Labor themes, such as LABOR

and PROPERTY, are more common in the Working Man ys Advocate sample. Table 3 shows the odds of various themes in combination with SLAV-

ERY in the black abolitionist texts. The table gives odds and odds ratios. "Odds of first" and "Odds of second" indicate the odds of the first theme

and second theme in the pair being present in a paragraph. These odds are

simply another way to express prevalence. "Odds ratio" is a ratio of the cross

product of the 2 x 2 contingency table; it expresses the extent to which the

odds of one theme are contingent on the condition of the other. Values larger

than one indicate positive association. For example, the odds that a paragraph

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Rhetoric of Black Abolitionism: Antislavery Newspapers in New York State 97

Table 3 Odds of co-occurrence for SLAVERY and selected themes

Themes Newspaper Odds of first Odds of second Odds ratio

SLAVERY & CA/WA* 0.17 0.26 3.20LIBERTY (20) (28) (8) Douglass 0.93 0.65 2.42papersb (38) (31) (19) Anglo- 0.08 0.27 -African (3) (9)

SLAVERY & CA/WA 0.17 0.21 -POLITICS (20) (23) Douglass 0.93 0.39 5.83papers (38) (22) (17) Anglo- 0.08 0.08 -African (3) (3)

SLAVERY & CA/WA 0.17 0.27 5.11CHARACTER (20) (29) (10) Douglass 0.93 0.32 0.77papers (38) (19) (8) Anglo- 0.08 0.17 -African (3) (6)

SLAVERY & CA/WA 0.17 0.21 2.33SUFFERING (20) (24) (6) Douglass 0.93 0.44 2.32papers (38) (24) (15) Anglo- 0.08 0.17 -African (3) (6)

Note: Number of paragraphs given in parentheses. A dash indicates that the value could not be calculated.

a Includes the Colored American and the Weekly Advocate .

Includes the North Star and Frederick Douglass1 Paper.

selected at random from the Douglass newspapers (Table 3, row 2) would

contain the theme SLAVERY was 0.93 (present in 38 paragraphs, absent in

41: 38 -T- 41 = 0.93). The odds that a randomly selected paragraph would con-

tain LIBERTY was 0.65 (present in 31 paragraphs, absent in 48: 31 ■*■ 48 =

0.65). The odds that LIBERTY would be present, though, is contingent on

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98 Social Science History

the presence of SLAVERY. LIBERTY is 2.42 times more likely to occur in

paragraphs in which SLAVERY is also present.5

In general, the odds suggest that SLAVERY and these selected themes

tended to co-occur. In only one particular instance, SLAVERY and CHAR-

ACTER in the Douglass newspapers, was there an inverse contingency. The

depiction of probabilistic relationships demonstrates that these associations

were not absolute. It is not true, for example, that every time SLAVERY

appears, so does LIBERTY. Sometimes the combination is needed for a par-

ticular argument, and sometimes it is not. The meaning of the two themes cannot be fixed in static relation to the other.

The arguments in black abolitionist discourse were built on strategic

combinations based on the flexible meanings of the concept "slavery" and

other symbols of American social and political life. The tactical pairing of

SLAVERY and LIBERTY, SUFFERING, POLITICS, or CHARACTER

was necessary to accomplish the specific goals of the movement. Not all pos-

sible combinations occur precisely because argument construction is inten-

tional, even if not always fully conscious to the individual authors. Insight

into the deliberate nature of contention over the meaning of slavery is possible

through the analysis of these contingencies. The fact that SLAVERY is more

likely to occur with CHARACTER than with PROPERTY, and with POLI-

TICS more than with LABOR, indicates the kinds of arguments believed to

be effective in the claims-making of black abolitionism.

Table 4 displays the odds of various themes in combination with COL-

ORED in the black abolitionist texts. This pattern of contingencies illustrates

the manner in which this discourse was a part of the construction of a col-

lective identity of black Americans in the nineteenth century. Most impor-

tant in this regard is the co-occurrence of COLORED with RIGHTS, with

SUFFERING, and with BROTHERHOOD. These combinations suggest the outlines of the central subject position in prophetic speech, the suffering

victim on whose behalf divine justice is exercised.

Table 5 displays the partial thematic structure for SLAVERY by news-

paper group and for the black abolitionist discourse as a whole.6 In the MDS

results, smaller numbers indicate greater association between themes. Since

the solutions are not directly comparable across subsamples, the average dis-

tance between all pairs of themes is given. The MDS solution not only shows

the association between a particular pair of themes but also yields clusters of related themes.

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Rhetoric of Black Abolitionism: Antislavery Newspapers in New York State 99

Table 4 Odds of co-occurrence for COLORED and selected themes

Themes Newspaper Odds of first Odds of second Odds ratio

COLORED & CA/WA* 0.26 0.28 2.62RIGHTS (28) (30) (11) Douglass 0.30 0.27 1.57papersb (18) (17) (5) Anglo- 0.62 0.17 4.00African (16) (6) (4)

COLORED & CA/WA 0.26 0.30 0.66UPLIFT (28) (31) (5) Douglass 0.30 0.11 7.44papers (18) (8) (5) Anglo- 0.62 0.20 - African (16) (7)

COLORED & CA/WA 0.26 0.21 1.19SUFFERING (28) (24) (8) Douglass 0.30 0.44 3.07papers (18) (24) (9) Anglo- 0.62 0.17 4.00African (16) (6) (4)

COLORED & CA/WA 0.26 0.48 2.00BROTHERHOOD (28) (44) (14) Douglass 0.30 0.41 2.45papers (18) (23) (8) Anglo- 0.62 0.50 0.86African (16) (14) (5)

Note: Number of paragraphs given in parentheses. A dash indicates that the value could not be calculated.

a Includes the Colored American and the Weekly Advocate.

b Includes the North Star and Frederick Douglass' Paper.

As Table 5 shows, SLAVERY appears to be more tightly integrated

in the Douglass newspapers, as indicated by the generally smaller dis-

tances between SLAVERY and other themes, than in the Colored Ameri-

can/Weekly Advocate or the Weekly Anglo-African Magazine. An impor-

tant thematic cluster is seen in the Douglass newspapers, consisting of

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100 Social Science History

Table 5 Partial thematic structure for SLAVERY

Newspaper

Douglass Anglo- SLAVERYand All texts3 CA/WA* papers0 AfricanLIBERTY 1.4 2.0 1.0 2.3RIGHTS 0.9 1.5 1.7 4.2AMERICA 0.8 0.2 0.9 2.1COLORED 1.0 2.4 1.2 3.3SUFFERING 0.8 1.0 0.6 2.6POLITICS 1.2 2.3 0.3 3.3 Theme averaged 1.8 2.1 1.7 2.9Grand average6 2.3 2.4 2.2 2.3Stress' 0.16 0.17 0.17 0.21 Note: Distances are calculated from ALSCAL solutions for three dimensions. Values are Euclidian distances

between elements in the subject space. Smaller distances indicate a stronger association.

a Includes all texts from all black abolitionist newspapers.

b Includes the Colored American and the Weekly Advocate.

c Includes the North Star and Frederick Douglass1 Paper.

dAverage distance for theme across its 15 pairs.

e Average distance for all 120 pairs.

*Goodness-of-fit indicator for ALSCAL solution. Lower values indicate that more of the variation in the

original co-occurrence matrix is accounted for by the coordinate solution.

SLAVERY-LIBERTY-SUFFERING-POLITICS, which might be consid- ered the definitive constellation of abolitionist discourse. This is the intersec-

tion of political and prophetic speech. The Colored American/ Weekly Advo-

cate shows some affinity to this structure; the Weekly Anglo-African Magazine

is most distinctive in this regard.

Table 6 gives the results of the rhetoric coding.7 Coders were able to

achieve sufficient agreement only on ANGER, so only these results are

presented. Because there were too few paragraphs that contained multiple

themes, including at least one of the key themes, in the Weekly Anglo-

African Magazine, only the Colored American/ Weekly Advocate and the Doug-

lass newspapers are included separately. Both use ANGER about equally

often. The Colored American /Weekly Advocate uses the ASSERTIVE and

EXPLANATORY modes with about the same frequency, substantially more

often than it uses the EVALUATIVE mode. The Douglass newspapers, in

contrast, use the EVALUATIVE mode almost as much as the ASSERTIVE.

The extent to which a discourse is disputatious can be indicated in a simple

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Rhetoric of Black Abolitionism: Antislavery Newspapers in New York State 101

Table 6 Percentage of paragraphs containing rhetoric features

Sample a

Douglass Rhetoric feature CA/WA* papers0ANGER 23.3 27.8ASSERTIVE 36.7 34.3EXPLANATORY 40.0 22.9EVALUATIVE 13.3 31.4SIMILARITY 23.2 14.3DIFFERENCE 50.0 48.6Paragraphs0 30 36 aThere were too few paragraphs from the Weekly Anglo-African Magazine to code, so it was omitted from

the sample.

b Includes the Colored American and the Weekly Advocate.

c Includes the North Star and Frederick Douglass' Paper.

way by the ratio of evaluative to assertive illocutions. It appears that the

Douglass newspapers were more likely than the Colored American /Weekly

Advocate to favor this kind of discursive formulation; the index of disputation

for the former is 0.92 and for the latter is 0.36.

As shown in Table 6, arguments based on DIFFERENCE were more

common than arguments based on SIMILARITY. This may be a function

of the popularity of racist assertions in nineteenth-century public speech.

The black abolitionists had to argue, time and again, against assertions that

race differences were natural, were important, and were permanent. Because

proslavery arguments relied, logically, on difference, abolitionist discourse

tended to employ this basis in much of its own argumentation.

The results of the ideology coding are shown in Table 7. The Doug-

lass newspapers stand out as most likely to employ arguments challenging

NATURALIZATION and DIFFERENTIATION; the prevalence of both modes is more than twice as common in the Douglass newspapers than

in the other newspapers. Odds ratios indicate that the two modes are con-

tingent in each subsample. The odds that DIFFERENTIATION will be present in paragraphs where NATURALIZATION is present, compared

with paragraphs where NATURALIZATION is absent, are 9.59 for the Colored American /Weekly Advocate, 1.90 for the Douglass newspapers, and

4.27 for the Weekly Anglo-African Magazine (not shown in Table 7). Because

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102 Social Science History

Table 7 Percentage of paragraphs and selected contingencies of ideological dimensions

Sample

Douglass Anglo- Ideological dimension CA/WA* papers b African NATURALIZATION 11.8 33.3 16.7

Odds with:

LIBERTY, BROTHERHOOD, or POLITICS 0.99 1 .40 1.12SLAVERY 1.07 1.63 - SUFFERING, BODY,C or JUSTICE 0.93 1 .67 1 .20

DIFFERENTIATION 11.8 25.0 11.9 Odds with:

LIBERTY, BROTHERHOOD, or POLITICS 1 .79 2.83 -SLAVERY 1.43 1.08 1.18 SUFFERING, BODY,C or JUSTICE 1 .02 1 .83 1 .76

Paragraphs 136 36 42 Note: A dash indicates that the value could not be calculated.

a Includes the Colored American and the Weekly Advocate.

bIncludes the North Star and Frederick Douglass' Paper.

CBODY was one of the themes omitted from Table 2 because it occurred in fewer than 5% of all newspapers.

It is included here for theoretical interest.

the number of paragraphs in which the modes are present is quite small, these

odds are, at best, general indicators of contingency. It is impossible to make

comparisons between them.

NATURALIZATION is more likely to occur in paragraphs where re-

publican themes, such as LIBERTY, BROTHERHOOD, or POLITICS, are present than in paragraphs in which these republican themes are absent

in the Douglass newspapers and the Weekly Anglo-African Magazine but

not in the Colored American /Weekly Advocate. DIFFERENTIATION was

contingent with these republican themes in the Douglass newspapers and

the Colored American /Weekly Advocate. NATURALIZATION is also more

likely to occur with SLAVERY than without it in both the Douglass news-

papers and the Colored American /Weekly Advocate. DIFFERENTIATION

was more likely in paragraphs containing the SLAVERY vocabulary in the

Colored American /Weekly Advocate than in the Douglass newspapers. The

odds of NATURALIZATION being present in paragraphs with such pro-

phetic themes as SUFFERING, BODY, or JUSTICE were higher in the

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Rhetoric of Black Abolitionism: Antislavery Newspapers in New York State 103

Douglass newspapers and the Weekly Anglo-African Magazine than in the

Colored American /Weekly Advocate. The same pattern obtains for DIFFER-

ENTIATION. In the Colored American /Weekly Advocate ■, both ideological

modes appear to be independent of the use of these prophetic themes.

Conclusion

Black abolitionists generated a coherent, positive identity in the process of

reporting on slavery and exhorting the nation to righteousness. In many ways,

black abolitionist texts are similar to other mid-nineteenth-century political

discourses. Like the labor texts, the discursive repertoire of black abolition-

ism was anchored by the republican field. Arguments challenging the domi-

nant racial ideology are common, indicating that assumptions about race were

being acknowledged as well as contested. 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.

The present results consistently show the key features of political anti-

slavery argumentation to be most common in the Douglass newspapers. Dis-

cussion of slavery dominates the pages of the Douglass newspapers much

more than the others (it is more than three times more frequent than in the

Colored American /Weekly Advocate and more than six times more frequent

than in the Weekly Anglo-African Magazine). Most of the republican themes,

such as JUSTICE, LIBERTY, RIGHTS, AMERICA, and POLITICS, are more common in the Douglass newspapers. Prophetic themes, such as SUF-

FERING and JUSTICE, are also more frequent. The EVALUATIVE mode

was more likely to be used. These features lend the Douglass newspapers

their distinctive rhetorical profile.

The decision to include various concepts or rhetoric elements together

transcends the individual authorial intent. As Steinberg (1998, 1999) has

argued, the discursive field is bounded by social and cultural factors, within

which movement participants act. The present analysis shows that the argu-

ments used were selected from an available repertoire; on some occasions, for

example, SLAVERY was used with POLITICS, and on others, it was used

with CHARACTER. Although various arguments were, in a sense, always

potentially available, some were more common in particular instances of anti-

slavery argumentation. Other arguments were tried and discarded, and some

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104 Social Science History

were never employed, because they failed to resonate with the audiences (free

blacks, sympathetic whites, politicians and partisans, etc.) or were simply

unimaginable.

To the extent that the antebellum black newspapers studied here con-

stitute parts of the same discourse, the results suggest that the discourse

included a good deal of variation. The "discursive turn" in social movements

theory, as articulated by Steinberg (1994, 1998, 1999), provides a framework

for making sense of this dispersion. In contrast to a "frame," which connotes

a static, finished entity, a "discursive field" evokes change and experimenta-

tion. Some of the key features of black abolitionist discourse were intentional.

The emphasis on such themes as COLORED and BROTHERHOOD, and

the turning of republican ideas on the basis of race, were deliberate strategies

in the effort to articulate a positive identity.

In contrast to the frames approach, the present analysis suggests the

strategic construction of arguments based on shifting meanings in the socio-

cognitive network. The contingencies presented here clearly show that argu-

ments were deliberate rather than formulaic. As the network approach

stresses, concepts are flexible, moving between poles of general use and spe-

cific deployment, and between the poles of idiosyncratic meaning and social

consensus (Carley 1997).

At the same time, black abolitionist discourse reveals its dependence on

the wider American worldview. It articulated a criticism of slavery on the

basis of normative beliefs about labor. Instead of a total rejection of Ameri-

can society, black abolitionists reassured the majority that blacks wanted to

be Americans; their complaints demanded change at the same time as they

affirmed allegiance to the emerging liberal capitalist belief system. Although

not definitively shown by the present results, the topography of the black abo-

litionist field, as described here, shows that the discourse was not completely

outside of the mainstream in nineteenth-century America.

There were many possible arguments against slavery available to the

black abolitionists. The present results, including the comparison between

abolitionist and labor discourse, show that their black abolitionist discourse

was, in a fundamental way, familiar to audiences in nineteenth-century

America. Their claims were grounded in the language of republicanism. Per-

haps the most striking manifestation of this is the frequency of moral exhor-

tation. The present analysis is in agreement with Hutton (1992) that black

newspapers were an important source of socialization. The moral claims and

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Rhetoric of Black Abolitionism: Antislavery Newspapers in New York State 105

the collective identity of American blacks rested on the condition of agree-

ment with the prevailing moral standards.

The energy spent contesting the dominant attitudes about racial differ-

ences testifies to the power of the hegemonic view. Black abolitionists asserted

that oppression, rather than nature, determined their degraded state. Their

arguments legitimated the notion that race was a biological category - that

blacks were alike, and as a group might achieve equality with whites - and

underscored its importance in structuring American society. The idea that

race was a social construction designed to perpetuate inequality was simply outside the discursive field.

Some methodological issues need to be resolved with further research.

Additional studies will have to determine the ideal point, in terms of diversity

and intensity, at which to set the computerized coding scripts. A systematic

attempt to evaluate computerized coding compared to human judgment is

required. The present study, nonetheless, demonstrates the utility of network

analysis. This approach has the virtue of revealing discursive structure with-

out specifying a priori all the possible links between concepts. The present

analysis could be contrasted with Carley's (1997) technique for mapping the

conceptual network. Semantic grammars (see Franzosi 1989), which were not

used here, might also illuminate substantial and rhetorical features of aboli- tionist discourse in the same manner.

The black abolitionists' "fighting words" challenged white America to

fulfill its promise as "the shining city on the hill." They argued that blacks

played a critical role in the salvation drama of the American experiment;

redemption will come, they contended, only when blacks have been granted

liberty and equality. At the same time, through their discourse, black abo-

litionists constructed a positive identity for blacks in America and tried to

make this collective sense of self the basis for political solidarity. The dis-

cursive field of black abolitionism was not entirely strategic or intentional.

Antislavery arguments were built of the same discursive components used

by other antebellum reform movements. Black abolitionists did not reject

American society in toto. To do so would have meant certain defeat. Whether

deliberate or not, their criticism of slavery reinforced the emerging liberal

capitalist worldview. Black abolitionism, like every other antebellum social

movement, could not completely transcend the hegemonic discourse of the nascent commercial elite.

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106 Social Science History

Notes

This work was supported, in part, by a grant from the City University of New York PSC-

CUNY Research Award Program. An earlier version of this article was presented as a

paper at the 2001 annual meeting of the Social Science History Association in Chicago.

Nancy Sanchez, Enrique Marin, and Zuleika Rodriguez assisted in the coding. Thanks are

due also to Mary Howard, George Cunningham, Marc Steinberg, the staff of the Schom-

burg Center for Research in Black Culture, and, especially, the reviewers and editors of

this journal.

1 I have borrowed this apt phrase from Steinberg (1999). It refers to the production of

contentious discourse by a social movement. Particularly interested in class forma-

tion, Steinberg draws out the power dimension of discourse as a symbolic practice.

He notes (ibid.: 14) that "discourse is both a mediator and source of power. Dis-

course mediates power by facilitating the social action of control and exploitation. It

is a form of power, for through it consciousness is shaped and the possibilities for

action and change are culturally constituted. Fighting words are thus both a conduit

and source of power."

2 New York passed a gradual emancipation act in 1785, but it was rejected by the Coun-

cil of Revision, oddly enough, because it deprived freedmen of the right to vote. Such

was the effect of Revolutionary idealism. After New York slaves were freed 40 years

later, when cooler heads prevailed, they were soon after stripped of the franchise

(Litwack 1961).

3 Additional themes were coded for but are excluded from the present discussion

because they were very uncommon (appearing in fewer than 5% of the paragraphs)

in all newspapers.

4 It is beyond the scope of this article to discuss the relationship between human and

computer coding. Preliminary work in the development of SemioCode suggests that

trained student coders generally use a "first instance" algorithm. One advantage of

computerized coding tools is, perhaps, the ability to explicitly determine the coding

practice and reliably employ it.

5 The formula is foo x fn -=- f01 x f10. In the example discussed, this is equal to 29 x 19

+ 19 x 12 = 2.42. The odds that LIBERTY is present when SLAVERY is present

was 1.58 (19 + 12), and the odds that LIBERTY is absent when SLAVERY is present

was 0.65 (19 -s- 29). The ratio of the former to the latter (1.58 -s- 0.65) is 2.42.

6 The goodness of fit measure (stress) indicates that the three-dimensional solution

accounts for only a fair amount of the variation in the original distance matrix. To test

hypotheses about the structure of the discourse, more texts need to be analyzed. As

an alternative strategy, individual differences MDS solutions were calculated using

the INDSCAL algorithm. The results do not differ substantially from the ALSCAL solutions shown.

7 Because of time constraints, a random sample of paragraphs from the Douglass

newspapers was selected for coding.

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Rhetoric of Black Abolitionism: Antislavery Newspapers in New York State 107

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