Year: 2004
Type: article
Abstract: Speeches to the enslaved Stanley Harrold's new book provides full texts of three abolitionist speeches that bear the distinction of having been addressed-at least as far as their titles go-to slaves: Gerrit Smith's Address of the Anti-Slavery Convention of the State of New-York to the Slaves in the U. States of America, delivered in Peterboro, New York in January 1842; William Lloyd Garrison's Address to the Slaves of the United States, presented in Faneuil Hall, Boston, in May 1843; and Henry Highland Garnet's An Address to the Slaves of the United States of America, delivered in August 1843, in Buffalo, New York at the first black national convention since 1835.In addition, Harrold supplements these slave speeches with two related works, also in full text versions, which analyze and extend various emergent themes of the primary three: Nathaniel E. Johnson's Rights of a Fugitive Slave, and Gerrit Smith's A Letter to the American Slaves from those who have fled from American Slavery, in which neither purported audience nor announced writers are actually operative.Abolitionist rhetoricians were eminently capable of imagining being heard by slave listeners, and they also believed they possessed the power to provide the words and thoughts of African Americans on either side of the slavery-freedom boundary.On the basis of his detailed readings of these five central documents, Harrold puts forward a revisionist interpretation of the history of abolitionism, seeing the movement(s) in a fermenting state of ambiguity, indecisiveness, and virtual self-contradiction regarding many-or even all-the issues that abolitionists wished to address.The reformers who wanted to abolish the institution of slavery were anything but secure or stable in their beliefs.While they were usually extremely committed, their arguments among themselves 1 Sears: The Rise of Aggressive Abolitionism: Addresses to the Slaves
Source: Civil War Book Review
DOI: 10.31390/cwbr.6.4.6
Author: Richard Sears
Language: English
Subfield: Anthropology
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4391804885