Law, Print Culture, and the Forms of Abolitionist Argument

Alex Black, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, "Law, Print Culture, and the Forms of Abolitionist Argument"Book history studies of northern abolitionism concentrate on the movement’s print-based campaigns, which began in... [ view full abstract ]

Alex Black, Hobart and William Smith Colleges, "Law, Print Culture, and the Forms of Abolitionist Argument"

Book history studies of northern abolitionism concentrate on the movement’s print-based campaigns, which began in earnest with the attempt to mass mail their publications to the South in 1835. This scholarship characterizes the movement as one in which emergent print technologies superseded residual forms of organization like circuiting lecturers. The move to centralized production and decentralized distribution was, in these accounts, a move away from the dangers of embodied circulation networks. This paper, which examines the legal arguments surrounding one man’s prosecution for publishing inflammatory literature in the District of Columbia during the 1835 postal campaign, argues that abolitionists and antiabolitionists alike understood publication to encompass embodied acts of circulation. These acts could include what the man was confirmed to have done: possessing, annotating, and lending an abolitionist pamphlet. The prosecuting attorney, Francis Scott Key, argued that to have a copy of the pamphlet was to be responsible for its production. John Greenleaf Whittier, whose work was reprinted in the pamphlet, equated those same acts with speech. This more capacious sense of publication can better account for the coordination of print and performance that, I argue, exemplified the work of the American Anti-Slavery Society.