UNDERGROUND RAILROAD LITERATURE

The abolitionist movement gathered friends and allies beginning in the early 1830s.  This was the first organized political movement in the United States in which blacks and whites met in common cause. Abolitionism motivated a minute handful of whites to take great risks in behalf of slaves.

One of these was Rev. Charles T. Torrey (1813-1846), a Massachusetts minister who joined the practical work of abolitionist resistance.  While living in York County, Pennsylvania, just north of the Maryland border, Torrey helped operate the Underground Railroad and went south to assist many fugitive slaves to freedom.  In 1843 he took his last trip south and was arrested in Baltimore on charges of aiding slaves to escape.  He was sentenced to six years in prison and sent to the Maryland state penitentiary, where he contracted tuberculosis and died on May 9, 1846. 

During his imprisonment numerous efforts were made to obtain Torrey’s release.  In Boston in August 1844, African American citizens held a rally in Torrey’s behalf.  They declared “We call upon all the friends of the anti-slavery cause in general, and on our colored friends every where in particular, to rally to the aid of him who is now suffering in behalf of down-trodden humanity, and to make use of his case to stir up fresh opposition in the public mind to the accursed system of slavery.”  Thousands attended Torrey’s funeral in Boston two years later. 

Joseph Cammet Lovejoy (1805-1871), editor of Memoir of Rev. Charles T. Torrey, who Died in the Penitentiary of Maryland, where he was Confined for Showing Mercy to the Poor (Boston: John P. Jewett, 1847), assembled Torrey’s biography from his diaries and writings.  Joseph Lovejoy was the brother of another abolitionist martyr, Elijah Lovejoy (1802-1837), an antislavery newspaper publisher killed by a mob in Alton, Illinois, and    Owen Lovejoy (1811-1864), a congressman from Illinois and Underground Railroad activist.

William Still (1819 or 1821-1902) was one of the most famous Underground Railroad operatives.  His parents escaped from slavery in Maryland and settled in rural Burlington County, New Jersey.  His mother, Charity, was recaptured and escaped again, but without her two sons, who were sold and sent to Alabama.  Later, Still recorded how he interviewed a fugitive in the Philadelphia office of the Pennsylvania Society for the Abolition of Slavery and suddenly realized he was speaking with his lost brother Peter. 

During his career working for the Philadelphia Vigilance Committee during the 1840s and 1850s, Still managed escape routes; provided food, shelter, and clothing for fugitives; and arranged transportation northwards with tickets and small sums of pocket money.  He was essentially an underground social worker for many hundreds, perhaps several thousand, fugitive ex-slaves.  The Underground Rail Road: A Record of Facts, Authentic Narratives, Records, &c., Narrating the Hardships Hair-Breadth Escapes and Death Struggles of the Slaves, as Related by Themselves or Witnessed by the Author (Philadelphia: Porter & Coates, 1872), an encyclopedia compendium based on his secret archive of interview and personal notes, records the cases or names of nearly 650 fugitives.  In terms of number of escapes assisted, Still and white abolitionist Isaac Hopper were the leading Underground Railroad agents on the Atlantic seaboard.   

Still, who owned a coal yard and real estate, was a practical business-man.  The Underground Rail Road was a subscription volume.  Still provided sales agents with sample books and sent them to collect orders from African American communities and white supporters of African American rights.  In the 1870s Pennsylvania blacks were organizing to obtain equal civil rights.  One of the implicit messages of Still’s Underground Rail Road publishing project was that the achievements of the African American struggle against slavery and its example of community unity could serve as an example for present and future struggles for equality.

RELIGIOUS ANTISLAVERY LITERATURE

Many antislavery texts emerged from religious traditions and disputation.  George Barrell Cheever (1807-1890) was a white clergyman and well-known controversialist.  A graduate of Andover Seminary in 1830, he became minister of a Congregational Church in Salem, Massachusetts, and then the editor of the Evangelist and a preacher in New York City.  While a radical opponent of slavery, Cheever differed from William Lloyd Garrison in being an antislavery constitutionalist dedicated to preservation of the Union. 

Cheever published widely and God Against Slavery: and the Freedom and Duty of the Pulpit to Rebuke It, as a Sin Against God (Cincinnati: American Reform Tract and Book Society, 1857) reinforced his reputation as a passionate opponent of African American slavery.  He denounced slavery in apocalyptic language:

“The brand of ignominy which you put upon the slave, when you call him a chattel, and treat him as such, is the brand burned deeper in your bargain, in your complicity with robbery, in the immorality of your legal title, than in his soul; and generation after generation cannot cover it up, can not eliminate it; can not vulcanize it, but that the fires of the last day itself will only bring out more clearly its essence of oppression and iniquity.” (113)

Cheever’s use of apocalyptic ideas was increasingly typical of religious antislavery rhetoric from the last decade prior to the Civil War.

This copy was owned by Alfred Stinson, a blacksmith in Thetford, Vermont, who apparently loaned it out with the inner cover notation ‘Return next Sabbath.’  The Project acquired this copy from Stinson’s descendant.

ANTISLAVERY TRACTS

Tract literature drove the antislavery movement and created an intense debate in the United States over the nature and limits of free speech.  Postmasters in slave states routinely confiscated antislavery journals and tracts mailed from the north.  Despite US constitutional First Amendment guarantees, possession of these ‘seditious’ materials was illegal in some states.  A few people were sent to prison for having or receiving antislavery tracts.

The Antislavery Record was a monthly publication of the American Anti-Slavery Society.  Its July 1835 issue, exhibited here, contained articles on the fate of recaptured fugitive slaves in New York City; the kidnapping and sale of a young African American woman in Ohio; arguments against the colonization movement that proposed sending African Americans to Liberia; reports on state and local abolitionist meetings; and a list of contributors.  Note that the tract is cheaply printed but illustrated, and its small size enables it to be folded for easy mailing.  The sale of tracts provided an important financial mainstay for the usually-impoverished antislavery movement and its traveling speakers.

William Henry Furness (1802-1896) was one of the best-known ministers in the United States.  He spent fifty years from 1825-1875 as a Unitarian minister in Philadelphia, where he was a leader in the antislavery movement.  Furness was a friend and supporter of William Still, and corrected proofs for Still’s The Underground Rail Road volume. 

This tract, Put Up Thy Sword: A Discourse (Boston: R.F. Wallcut, 1860), was a sermon Furness delivered as a guest at the Music Hall, the popular site of Theodore Parker’s church-less ministry in Boston. At the point Furness delivered the sermon in March 1860, the United States was less than one year away from civil war and the probability of domestic conflict was increasingly clear following John Brown’s raid in October 1859. Furness responds to this growing division of northern and southern opinion with a call both against slavery and against a violent fight over slavery. 

ANTISLAVERY POETRY

The antislavery movement produced massive amounts of poetry.  After nature poetry, antislavery poetry was probably the largest body of topical poetry in nineteenth-century America.  Most antislavery journals ran poetry columns; abolitionist meetings frequently included poetry recitations or songs that adapted antislavery poems. 

This commonplace book – a blank or printed book that is used to paste clippings – was the property of George Russell, an anti-Garrisonian abolitionist and the secretary of a local Massachusetts antislavery society.  Russell used Moses Stuart’s Course of Hebrew Study (Andover: Flagg & Gould, 1830) to paste in poetry from 1839-40 editions of the Massachusetts Abolitionist.   Hand-written annotations identify some of the pseudonymous poets.  Russell’s choice of an unused study text in biblical Hebrew speaks to the religious background of many members of the antislavery movement.

The Project is currently producing a digital edition of this text.

ANTISLAVERY COMICS

One of the Antislavery Literature Project’s current efforts is to create a series of antislavery comics to tell the history of African American struggles against slavery.  The sample comic here provides an interpretation of the famous ‘fight with Covey’ scene from Frederick Douglass’ 1845 narrative.

The artist, Bosomba Hissa Nsoli, was born in 1964 in Mbadanka, in the Democratic Republic of Congo.  Largely self-taught, he began by taking part in a group of young artists who attended a film animation course. He studied comics in 2000 in a workshop run by professional comic artists such as Barly Baruti and Eric Warnauts. He became an illustrator and comic artist for magazines such as BleuBlanc and Afrique Avenir. His work was selected for the Matite africane exhibition (Bologna, 2002), and he obtained a Mention in the 2003 Africa e Mediterraneo Award for his comic strip Pénitence, scenario by Patrick De Meersman. He recently published L'ile aux oiseaux (Lai-momo, 2006), a graphic novel dealing with African labor migration to Europe.

ANTISLAVERY TEACHING GUIDES

In order to introduce students and teachers to little-used texts of the antislavery movement, the Project has created an Antislavery Teaching Guide series. 

The most recent of these is the Teaching Guide to Early African American Antislavery Sermons (2006).  The guide introduces students to the historic African American tradition of New Years Day antislavery sermons, a tradition that prevailed from 1808 until the early 1830s.