Alongside Slavery's Asides: Reverberations of Edward Young's The Revenge

In an 1847 lecture before the Female Anti-Slavery Society of Salem, William Wells Brown stated: “Were I about to tell you the evils of Slavery, to represent to you the Slave in his lowest degradation, I should wish to take you, one at a time, and whisper it to you. Slavery has never been represented; Slavery never can be represented.” In these oft-cited lines, Wells Brown makes a strong claim for the absolute impossibility of representing slavery. But I wish to pause and stay with his earlier suggestion that it might just be possible to tell about slavery in a whisper. Breaking through the fastidiousness of the audience, a whisper can bring the condition of slavery close.

American Claimants

This chapter examines descriptions of the British Museum in travel narratives and diaries by American travelers to show how it informed broader conversations about the development of American museums. Visiting during the mid-nineteenth century, American tourists encountered a museum that was attempting to organize its collections and define its purpose as a public museum, and their descriptions highlight the anxieties raised by this process. Nathaniel Hawthorne lamented the museum’s vast quantities of objects, linking a fruitless search for meaningful artifacts to questions of genealogy. Other American travelers more explicitly considered the role of visitors in interpreting collections. The artist Orra White Hitchcock reflected on the place of women in the museum’s galleries, while the Black abolitionist William Wells Brown celebrated the opportunity to continue his education and to participate in critical discussions of the museum.

“Not Altogether Ridiculous”

Spanning a long literary history, from 1742 to 1934, this essay argues for the military epaulette as an important material signifier through which the arbitrary nature of rank and colonial authority was revealed and challenged. This essay connects the anxieties attending the introduction of epaulettes in newly nationalized European armies to the historical and rhetorical impact of such uniforms on depictions of so-called Black chiefs, including Toussaint Louverture, Lamour Derance, and Nat Turner. In the context of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century slave revolts and imperial and colonial war fronts, this otherwise semiotic feature of the military uniform was a catalyst for a particular kind of confrontation over authority of signification in the tug-of-war between rank and race. This essay tracks a consistent rhetoric of violence and ridicule in these confrontations as they appear in histories, novels, and plays. In the work of Walter Scott, Victor Hugo, William Wells Brown, and Martin Delany, attempts to read epaulettes produce a violent form of colonial desire that is only permitted when couched in the rhetoric of ridicule and the ridiculous. The essay’s final pages turn to the first half of the twentieth century, when the still violent stakes of subverting the uniform persist through an ambivalence stemming from the literal and figural “costuming” of the Black chief.

The Power of the Word

This Chapter looks at the role of paid anti-slavery agents or lecturers in raising public awareness about slavery. Strictly speaking, the agency system had its origins in Britain but it had its widest impact in the USA. The chapter looks at the growth of the agency system, its organization and size. It then moves on to look in greater detail at the men and women who became agents, among them Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, Abby Kelley, Lucy Stone and Susan B Anthony. Rather like civil rights activists during the 1960s, anti-slavery agents were front-line workers whose job it was to create an anti-slavery public and, in the process, sow the seeds of radical political change. It was demanding and sometimes dangerous work but the agency system would prove a vital part of the wider abolitionist effort right up until the eve of the American Civil War.

Singing Abolition

This Chapter deals with a hitherto neglected aspect of anti-slavery opinion building, namely the role of anti-slavery songs. Hundreds of these songs – really abolitionist poems set to popular melodies -- were produced during the nineteenth century, on topics as diverse as the slave experience and contemporary public events. In essence, these were protest songs, designed to inform and inspire. The Chapter also looks at the emergence of anti-slavery performers, chief among them the Hutchinson Family Singers from New Hampshire, who electrified audiences during the 1840s with their performances. In 1846, the Hutchinsons visited Britain where they met with a different reception, their peculiar brand of musical advocacy alienating some section of the British public. The chapter analyses the reasons for this ‘failure’, while concluding with a discussion of spirituals (slave songs) as performed by African American visitors to the UK, among them Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown.