Black May 2013
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PRINT AND PERFORMANCE IN AMERICAN ABOLITIONISM, 1829-1865 A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy by Alex William Black May 2013 © 2013 Alex William Black PRINT AND PERFORMANCE IN AMERICAN ABOLITIONISM, 1829-1865 Alex William Black, Ph.D. Cornell University 2013 “Print and Performance in American Abolitionism, 1829-1865” examines the relationship between the printed and performed work of Frederick Douglass, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Abraham Lincoln. It argues that each kind of work contributed to the other’s creation and presentation. The failure of their early efforts showed once and for all that the abolitionists would not have access to a system that allowed for the disembodied distribution of texts. Even if they continued to use the medium of print to publish their message, there would be immediate demands on their bodies for its circulation. They would need texts that could be easily distributed, but that could also elicit more distribution. These texts would instruct the reader how to perform them and how to get others to do the same. The proliferation of abolitionist literature is generally understood to have been a product of reprinting. In fact, reprinting worked in cooperation with reenacting. To date, studies of slavery and abolition have considered one medium or another. “Print and Performance in American Abolitionism, 1829-1865” investigates the coordination of material process and embodied practice that distinguished the abolitionist movement. BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH Alex William Black was born in Bakersfield, California. He holds degrees from Highland High School, the University of California, Berkeley, and Cornell University. iii For my family iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would first like to thank the members of my special committee: Shirley Samuels, Margo Crawford, and Nick Salvato. My dissertation began as a seminar paper in one of Nick’s seminars in my third semester. Nick has had an incalculable impact on my scholarship and on my pedagogy. Margo has never failed to offer insight and enthusiasm when I needed both. Shirley has offered untold support for this project, and myself, from the beginning. I would also like to thank Eric Cheyfitz, who sent me to the Futures of American Studies Institute, where much of my work got an early hearing. I appreciate the feedback that Don Pease, Eric Lott, Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, Soyica Diggs Colbert, and Lloyd Pratt, at the Institute, and Martha Schoolman, Robin Bernstein, Meredith McGill, and Elisa Tamarkin, elsewhere, have given me. I have participated in two writing groups while at Cornell. Thanks are due to Toni Jaudon, Jon Senchyne, and Brigitte Fielder, in one, and Jill Spivey Caddell, Tom Balcerski, and Nolan Bennett, in the other. I am grateful for their helpful feedback, as well as for the opportunity to read their own rich scholarship. My greatest thanks are due to the American Reading Group: Melissa Gniadek, Jon Senchyne, Brigitte Fielder, and Jill Spivey Caddell, in particular, are great colleagues, and better friends. They have my gratitude and my love. v TABLE OF CONTENTS Biographical Sketch . iii Dedication . iv Acknowledgements . v Table of Contents . vi List of Figures . vii INTRODUCTION: Bodies and Texts in Motion in Walker’s Appeal . 1 CHAPTER ONE: Melodrama and Time in Aiken’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Watkins’s “Eliza Harris” . 16 CHAPTER TWO: Blackface Minstrelsy and Violence in Conway’s Dred and Delany’s Blake . 56 CHAPTER THREE: Sympathy and Douglass’s The North Star . 84 CHAPTER FOUR: The Realization of African American Performance in Stowe’s The Christian Slave . 109 CHAPTER FIVE: Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in Print and Performance . 135 Bibliography . 162 vi LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1. Appeal . 7 2. “The Strategem” . 47 3. “The Black Swan” . 129 4. “The Stafford House” . 130 5. “The Black Siddons” . 132 6. “First Reading of the Emancipation Proclamation of President Lincoln” . 139 7. “Final Emancipation Proclamation” . 143 8. “Reading the Emancipation Proclamation” . 153 9. Proclamation of Emancipation . 155 vii Introduction Bodies and Texts in Motion in Walker’s Appeal In 1835, the American Anti-Slavery Society launched a mailing campaign that took full advantage of the era’s technological advances in communication and travel. Bankrolled by Arthur Tappan, the wealthy New York philanthropist, and planned by his brother, Lewis, the two-year-old organization mailed hundreds of thousands of pieces of abolitionist literature throughout the southern United States. The goal was reach 20,000 citizens who had an influence on the slavery debate. But for all of the stream driven presses and trains behind them, few of the publications reached their destinations. The mails were intercepted in the South by mobs, often with the explicit consent of government officials. Agents found with the documents in their possession were beaten. The Tappans, hundreds of miles away from where they were burned in effigy, feared for their lives. They had been targeted the year before by antiabolitionist rioters in New York City. The failure of the mailing campaign showed once and for all that the abolitionists would not have access to a system that allowed for the disembodied distribution of texts. Even if they continued to use the medium of print to publish their message, there would be immediate demands on their bodies for its circulation. They would need texts that could be easily distributed, but that could also elicit more distribution. These texts would instruct the reader how to perform it and how to get others to. The proliferation of abolitionist literature is generally understood to have been the product of reprinting. Reprinting worked in cooperation with reenacting. “Print and Performance in American Abolitionism, 1829-1865” argues, then, that the printed and performed work of abolition contributed to each other’s creation and presentation. 1 Recent studies of abolitionism portray performance as the exception to the rule of print. Performance is either the work of minor figures or the minor work of major figures. I argue that performance drove the whole movement, its printed work especially. The titles of the first and last texts of my study illustrate how vital performance was to the production of printed texts. David Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World and Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation both have celebrated, if unknown, publication histories. Both of their names—appeal, proclamation—announce the way that they were circulated. Both authors, that is, planned for their texts to have a corporeal component, to be performed. These same studies that focus on the role of new technologies—namely, steam power—in the abolitionist movement tend to overlook the changes, in demography and strategy, that marked the decades-old movement’s radical turn in the 1820s. In highlighting mass print campaigns made possible by innovations in communication and large amounts of capital, these studies see a continuity between the earlier movement that was dominated by powerful white men and the later movement that included a much broader coalition of free born and formerly enslaved black men and women and white men and women. They also neglect the fact that, as the nineteenth century progressed, abolitionists of both races were increasingly denied access to these print networks of publication and distribution. The organized abolition movement, like the United States, began in the 1770s in Philadelphia. The Pennsylvania Abolition Society, formed in 1775, included Thomas Paine and Benjamin Franklin in its all white, all male membership. In its fifty years of operation, it concentrated its efforts on suing for the freedom of individual slaves in the courts and petitioning for the freedom of all slaves in the legislature. There were other societies in the early republican 2 era, but they were all located in the Northern states. The New York Manumission Society, founded in 1785, included John Jay and Alexander Hamilton as members. Like the Pennsylvania Abolition Society, the New York Manumission Society pursued political means for the abolition of slavery. It also organized boycotts of businesses that profited from the slave trade. Black societies existed, as well, though they worked separate from the white ones. The Free African Society, led by Richard Allen and Absalom Jones and formed in Philadelphia in 1787, operated as a mutual aid society for the city’s free black population. Abolitionism was transformed in the Jacksonian period. The radical abolition movement of the 1830s was characterized for its renovated tactics and by the makeup of its ranks. Black men and black and white women were allowed to participate for the first time in mainstream organizations. Strategy changed with the new demographic. Abolitionists would no longer appeal to authority (the church, the state) if those authorities would not listen. They would appeal directly to the people. The cause had gained a new urgency with the establishment of the American Colonization Society in 1816, which promoted the repatriation of free (and freed) African Americans in Africa.1 Scholars of literature tend to portray the activities of radical abolitionists as following one of two models: a performance model or a print model. In the performance model, abolitionists work mainly as lecturers. In the print model, which is often represented as superseding the performance model, they work mainly as editors and novelists. The long history of depicting Frederick Douglass’s career as moving from the former to the latter is an example of the inability to imagine both models coexisting, even within the work of a single figure.2 The unprecedented 1 This condensed history of abolitionism in the United States is drawn from Mayer and Richard S. Newman. 2 See, for example, Fishkin and Peterson, and DeLombard. 3 success of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin would also seem to support this notion, despite the fact that the unauthorized dramatizations may have reached more people.3 The problem with the print model is that it emphasizes actions like the mailing campaign.