The Orations on the Abolition of the Slave Trade and the Uses of Print in the Early Black Atlantic

The Orations on the Abolition of the Slave Trade and the Usesof Print in the Early Black Atlantic

Joseph Rezek

Early American Literature, Volume 45, Number 3, 2010, pp. 655-682(Article)

Published by The University of North Carolina PressDOI: 10.1353/eal.2010.0033

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The Orations on the Abolition of the Slave Trade and the Uses of Print in the Early Black Atlantic

Scholarship on the early black Atlantic can benefit from more at-tention to the functions black writers assigned to print. Paul Gilroy’s ini-tial concern with circumatlantic travel in The Black Atlantic has led most scholars to focus on the experience of geographical dislocation as an index for a writer’s participation in the nonnational culture of the African dias-pora. In their introduction to Genius in Bondage: Literature of the Early Black Atlantic, for example, Vincent Carretta and Philip Gould single out Ignatius Sancho as an “emblem” of early black Atlantic writers because he was “[b]orn to enslaved African parents on a ship in the Middle Passage bearing its human cargo from Africa to the Americas and then brought to England” (1).1 Although the focus on biographical experience is cru-cial, it has not led to an examination of the media-specific functions of print publication. This essay proposes that the uses of print in an intercon-nected Atlantic economy helped some writers refigure the black Atlantic world as bound not only by the violence of dislocation but also by print’s ability to constitute a counterpublic imagined as limitless and unending.2 The importance of this particular function of print becomes clear through considering a series of relatively unknown orations published annually between 1808 and 1823 to commemorate the abolition of the transatlan-tic slave trade. These orations are quite different from the autobiographi-cal texts commonly discussed by early black Atlantic scholars. They were written by people who lived locally—figures who, unlike Sancho, Olaudah Equiano, Phillis Wheatley, and others, cannot derive their authority on the black Atlantic from their own experiences of dislocation. Instead of using the story of an individual life to explore black Atlantic double conscious-ness, these orations harness the recurring occasion of their production to project such consciousness onto the far-reaching community of readers that print could invoke.

JosePH ReZeK University of Pennsylvania

656 } eARLY AMeRICAn LIteRAtURe: VoLUMe 45 , nUMBeR 3

Understanding the full implications of such projection requires taking seriously an important lesson of recent work in transatlantic book history: that print publication in this period carried with it possibility of textual travel.3 We should remember that Paul Gilroy’s now familiar chronotope of the ship crossing and recrossing the Atlantic, so evocative of geographical dislocation, also refers to the movement and dissemination of texts. Gilroy proposes “the image of ships in motion across the spaces between Europe, America, Africa, and the Caribbean as a central organising symbol” for a theory of modernity not delimited by the concept of the nation-state. While this chronotope “focus[es] attention on the middle passage” and “on the various projects for redemptive return to an African homeland,” it also invokes the transatlantic “circulation of ideas” and “the movement of key cultural and political artefacts: tracts, books, gramophone records, and choirs” (4). The orations on the abolition of the slave trade emerged from and entered into the fluid networks of exchange that Gilroy mentions here, networks that scholars of book history and print culture have only begun to describe. This essay explores how print helps black authors of these orations con-stitute a counterpublic as it considers two related arguments the texts in-spire. The public conjured in these texts is defined, specifically, by the dual expression of the “politics of fulfilment” and “politics of transfiguration” that Gilroy argues animates black Atlantic cultural expression (37–38). Also, the way these orators use and theorize print complicates a descrip-tion of the early American public sphere that generalizes about the separa-tion of oral and printed expression.4 This is because they display a striking self-awareness about the future life of their texts in print. My concern with the uses of print builds toward an analysis of one extraordinary moment, in which an orator announces that he holds a printed version of a previ-ous commemorative address before his audience as he delivers his own oration. In this self-reflexive gesture, the speaker overlays his auditors’ ex-perience of hearing the oration with the presence of an indeterminable future audience. His fellow orators think of print this way, too; in a wish no less utopian for being entirely commonplace, one writer expresses the hope that “others . . . may honour this publication with a perusal” (Williams 353). The orations on slave trade abolition are freighted with the mystery of this ambiguous address and the kind of public only it can produce. The first half of this essay introduces the content and contexts of the

Orations on the Abolition of the Slave Trade { 657

orations and details their Atlantic politics, arguing against historians who have considered them within a national context and tied them to a teleo-logical story of American abolitionism. My discussion of the black Atlan-tic politics of the speeches is a lengthy one, unfamiliar as the documents are to most readers; it will set the stage for an elaboration of the way these orations conjure their limitless counterpublic. This elaboration depends upon a discussion of their clear ties to campaigns that led Great Britain to abolish the empire’s slave trade in 1807, an event that these writers asso-ciate with the American slave trade ban passed by Congress the same year. It also requires rethinking a methodological investment, found within scholarship on the black Atlantic and the early American public sphere, in what Joan W. Scott has called the “evidence of experience.” I suggest that these orations push hard against our reliance on such evidence and point us toward the discursive production of counterpublicity. This new direc-tion will enable me to linger on the self-reflexive gesture I have just men-tioned and to describe the way these texts highlight the specific mediating effects of print.

tHe oRAtIons AnD tHe PoLItICs oF tHe BLACK AtLAntIC

With the exception of slave narratives, the orations on the aboli-tion of the slave trade constitute the most sustained generic tradition in black writing before the rise of emancipation movements in the United States. These speeches have never received extended treatment by a liter-ary scholar, and they fill a significant gap in our knowledge of black Atlan-tic writing between that of well-known eighteenth-century figures and the proliferation of black writing after the late 1820s. Beginning in 1808 and continuing for several years, eleven black churchmen and intellectuals in New York and Philadelphia published at least fifteen speeches given each New Year’s Day to mark the date when the slave trade’s abolition originally went into effect, on January 1, 1808. These orations narrate the slave trade’s history and its consequences, from its origins in the sixteenth century to its abolition. They conjure idyllic pictures of Africa before European contact, horrifying scenes of the slave trade and New World slavery, celebratory portraits of British and American abolitionists, and an audience of “Afri-cans and descendants” that encompasses both local and diasporic commu-


nities (Carman 15). The celebrations were usually held in African churches and often included religious services, hymns, festivals, and parades. Those who spoke in New York include William Hamilton, who would later work with William Lloyd Garrison on The Liberator, and who spoke before the New York African Society at the Universalist Church in 1809 and to the congregation at the Episcopal Asbury African Church in 1815; Peter Wil-liams, Jr., the first rector of the Asbury Church, who spoke there in 1808; Henry Sipkins, an original member of the New York Society for Mutual Relief, who introduced Peter Williams, Jr., in 1808, and who spoke at the same church in 1809; Joseph Sidney, an anti-Jeffersonian Federalist who spoke before the Wilberforce Philanthropic Association in 1809 and in the Asbury Church in 1814; Henry Johnson, who spoke in the Asbury Church in 1810; William Miller, who spoke on the same occasion; Adam Carman, who introduced Johnson in 1810 and gave his own address in 1811; and George Lawrence, who spoke at the African Methodist Episcopal Church in 1813. Other figures spoke in Philadelphia: Absalom Jones, a cofounder with Richard Allen of the first African churches in Philadelphia, spoke at the African Episcopal Church in 1808; Russell Parrott, a minister at the same church, spoke there in 1812 and 1814 and before a group of African benevolent societies in 1816; and Jeremiah Gloucester, son of the promi-nent black clergyman John Gloucester, spoke at the Bethel Church in 1823.5 Claiming these speeches as black Atlantic texts revises our current understanding of them as documents of American national culture. Schol-ars have either tied them to a uniquely African American political cul-ture with its roots in early slave festivals and its fruition in the abolitionist crusade or to an indigenous American tradition of celebrating Enlighten-ment rights discourse showcased in the Declaration of Independence.6 The gatherings to commemorate the abolition of the slave trade marked a sig-nificant turning point in the evolution of African American celebrations in the North, as festivals within eighteenth-century slave communities—like Election Day in New England and Pinkster in New York and New Jer-sey—gave way to what historian William B. Gravely has termed “freedom celebrations” sponsored by the leadership of newly established African churches and mutual aid societies. These “freedom celebrations” issued a more direct critique of white society than the satirical methods of earlier slave festivals because of their recourse to public parades and print pub-lication.7 Leonard Sweet argues, further, that the speeches on slave trade


abolition helped to “engender a sense of black consciousness and racial identity of inestimable value to the subsequent black abolitionist crusade” (269). Following the work of David Waldstreicher, Gary Nash assesses the significance of the speeches with relation to the dominant annual celebra-tory occasion in the early republic, held each year on July 4. “It made sense [for African Americans] to create alternative celebrations of freedom,” Nash writes, “especially after their exclusion from white festivities on the Fourth of July”; as such alternatives, the festivals were “meant to nurture an African-American identity” (Forgotten Fifth 143).8 To be sure, the familiar enlightenment discourse of self-government and natural rights emerges in the speeches on slave trade abolition as the writers transpose the ideals of “freedom” onto a vision of an Africa before its contact with Europeans and the slave trade. As William Hamilton remarks in his 1809 speech, the vic-tims of the slave trade were “deprived of life’s first and most valuable jewel and best blessing, their liberty” (35); other writers suggest that the aboli-tion of the trade will restore “our long-lost rights” and “the rights of men” (Lawrence 376; Sidney, Oration [1814] 6). This transposition of the rights celebrated within Fourth of July orations represents a critique of their ex-ceptionalist rhetoric.9 Such a centripetal and teleological view of these pamphlets—drawn in toward the discourse of American nationalism and drawn forward to mid-century abolitionism—obscures their salient features as texts that gesture out to the Atlantic and far back in time. The uninspiring place in U.S. his-tory the 1808 abolition of the slave trade occupies, especially compared to Emancipation itself, makes the forward-looking view quite tempting. The Constitution prohibited Congress from abolishing the trade until twenty years after ratification, and it was generally understood that the trade would be abolished at that time (Kolchin 79). As president, Thomas Jefferson introduced the abolition bill in 1807 not because of any aversion to slavery, but rather to preserve the interests of the planter class: not only did Virginia’s slave-holding establishment wish to profit from the inter-state slave trade (not affected at all by a transatlantic ban) but slaveholders throughout the South feared that a high proportion of new African slaves might be as destabilizing in the United States as it had been in Haiti (Black-burn 275–86). This early annual event did not last more than a few years, perhaps because the illegal slave trade continued, the institution of slavery was increasing in power and influence, and the priorities of black leaders


and activists eventually focused their efforts on the abolition of slavery itself.10 Indeed, some of the writers who commemorated the slave trade’s abolition express the moderate political agenda of a nation that in the early 1800s still considered total emancipation impractical. Joseph Sidney, for example, argues against emancipation because “our brethren in the South are in a state of deplorable ignorance,” and Absalom Jones advocates “laws, to ameliorate the condition of our brethren who are still in bondage” (Sidney, Oration [1809] 357; Jones 339). Placing the speeches within the progressive narrative of abolitionism might validate their enthusiasm for the abolition of the trade, which seems hyperbolic in the face of slavery itself; such a narrative also attempts to redeem their vexed racial politics. But it is precisely in their moments of uneasiness that these speeches strike me, especially because their increasing disappointment over the fail-ure of the slave trade ban resonates with the definitive features of black Atlantic culture, including a fully transatlantic understanding of history. The distinctiveness of that culture becomes clear through considering Paul Gilroy’s refiguration of W. E. B. Du Bois’s classic notion of racialized double consciousness—the sense of membership within both black and white worlds—as the tension between two political registers. The first reg-ister, a “politics of fulfillment,” demands that “bourgeois civil society live up to the promises of its own rhetoric” (37). This kind of politics includes the values traditionally associated with a definition of modernity tied to Enlightenment philosophy, what Gilroy identifies as “emancipation, au-tonomy, and citizenship” (16). In contrast to this political register, which functions as a “valuable element of modernity’s counter-discourse” (37), Gilroy identifies a more radical political ambition for “qualitatively new desires, social relations, and modes of association” (37). This kind of poli-tics is marked by “oppos[ition] to the formal logic and rational calculation characteristic of modern western thinking” (68). The politics Gilroy marks as Enlightenment’s necessary opposite “partially transcend[s] modernity” through its “resolutely utopian politics of transfiguration” (37). “This is not a counter-discourse,” he writes, “but a counter culture that defiantly re-constructs its own critical, intellectual, and moral genealogy in a partially hidden public sphere of its own” (37–38). Gilroy remains committed to the essential doubleness of the cultural tradition he describes even though transfigural politics energizes The Black Atlantic and animates its most powerful moments.


While the discourse of natural rights in the orations on slave trade abo-lition gestures toward fulfillment, after 1814 these writers abandon their enthusiasm for a more despairing, radicalized, and transfigural tone. The change in rhetoric, perhaps caused by the understanding that one defining institution of Western Enlightenment, the nation-state, had failed to end the slave trade, represents a striking instance of how these writers struggled with their attachments both to the promises of the West and to counter-cultural gestures of refusal. Writing in 1809, early in the tradition, William Hamilton triumphantly announces that abolition “stands unrivaled” (35); in 1812, Russell Parrott follows suit in declaring that “the abolition of the slave trade should be hailed by every lover of genuine liberty” (3). In his 1814 speech, however, Parrott begins to speak of “the partial abolition” of the trade (384), and in Sidney’s 1814 speech he struggles to define what “we ought to feel on this happy occasion” (5). Hamilton’s late speech on abo-lition, given in 1815, forgoes celebratory rhetoric in its opening moments and instead enumerates the dismal condition of a sixteenth-century Africa destroyed by European contact: Africa “became one continued scene of suspicion, mad jealousy, confusion, war, rapine, blood and murder” (395). Unlike the steady rhetoric that characterizes the earliest speeches on aboli-tion, Hamilton’s 1815 text is marked by hesitation and despair. He describes his speech as “a vain attempt at oratory” (391); he laments that he “seem[s] to wander” (396); he second-guesses his narrative pace, assuring listeners at one point that “we will hasten” (396); and, despite the slave trade’s abo-lition, he insists that “no effort can save” “the inhabitants of Egypt” (394). In Parrott’s final speech, given in 1816, his increasing despondence in the face of “those who still persist in this nefarious, and to them disgraceful commerce” is accompanied by a new argument for total emancipation, as he deplores the “injustice of retaining in ignominious servitude a class of fellow creatures” (4); and Jeremiah Gloucester, writing in 1823, calls for the end of “the tyrannical yoke of bondage in the south,” rails against the American Colonization Society, and celebrates the Haitian Revolution (10). After a few years, the legislation that abolished the slave trade had proved severely disappointing. The increasing rage directed at the event these speeches were written to celebrate should make us see in their pes-simism an unfulfilled, wrenching attitude toward the past. William Hamilton’s 1815 speech shows how such disappointment leads to a condemnation of New World colonization broadly conceived:


Would to God that Columbus with his exploring schemes had perished in Europe ere he touched the American Isles; or that Americus had per-ished in the ocean ere he explored the southern parts of the Continent; or rather that the hateful Cortes, with his murderous band, had been swallowed by an earthquake ere he reached the City of Mexico. Then might Africa been [sic] spared. (396)

In this indictment of the exploring missions of Columbus, Vespucci, and Cortez, Hamilton produces a view of transatlantic history reaching back to its violent beginning, when the Western Hemisphere became available for exploitative enterprises, or, as Hamilton earlier puts it, “sordid gain, the white man’s God” (395). His dramatic and impossible wish rejects more widespread antislavery rhetoric of the period, in which the conquest of the New World and the benefits of imperialism are hardly questioned. Such standard rhetoric uses the melodrama of despair in an attempt to eradicate present evils; the evils that Hamilton mentions here are ineradicable.11 His statement refuses the logic of rationality that supposedly guides politics in bourgeois society, and it jettisons a model of Western history that includes the expansion of European power as a necessary interval in its progres-sive march. This double refusal clears the way for imagining a community not beholden to Enlightenment-derived notions of political agency. In this moment, furthermore, Hamilton marks his world as linked together by transatlantic crossing (by “exploring,” “reach[ing],” and “touch[ing]” lands across “the ocean”) on the one hand and region on the other: Hamilton speaks of “Europe,” “the American Isles,” “the southern parts of the con-tinent,” and the “City of Mexico”—all geographies much larger or smaller than nations. Many other instances in these speeches demonstrate these writers’ awareness that slavery itself was not exclusively a national issue. The slave trade yoked empires, tribes, nations, and communities around the Atlantic in a system of racial oppression that made slavery the institution by which the circumatlantic world was dragged into modernity. Russell Parrott in 1814 seems keenly aware of this process:

The discovery of America opened a new era in the affairs of Europe. . . . It is from this period that we may date the commencement of the suf-ferings of the Africans, and the discovery of the new world; which, to one portion of the human family, has afforded such advantages, to the


unfortunate African, has been the source of the greatest misery; it was the precursor of his sufferings, his misery; and it removed him many ages from that state of civilization which his natural genius entitled him to enjoy. (383–84)

Parrott generalizes the history of slavery in a way that divides the Atlantic world not according to nation but to different “human families” with inter-twined destinies. He divorces the origin of modernity from Western for-mations like the Renaissance, Reformation, or Enlightenment. By identi-fying the “period” of “discovery” and the slave trade as a “new era,” Parrott engages in what Gilroy calls “rethink[ing] modernity via the history of the black Atlantic and the African diaspora into the western hemisphere” (17). As William Hamilton’s dramatic wish for the retroactive annihilation of Columbus and Cortez suggests, these writers frame their collective plight within the system of international imperialism. After narrating the in-auguration of the slave trade by Portugal, Spain, and England in the six-teenth century, Adam Carman puts it this way: “Thus, my brethren, we became viewed and considered as commercial commodities; thus we be-came interwoven into the system of commerce and the revenue of nations” (11). Such a history also inspires the image of a pan-African community grounded in a shared African racial heritage, the displacement occasioned by the institution of slavery, and a common Christian religion. Henry Sip-kins claims African heritage for his congregation as he addresses them di-rectly: “Rejoice, my brethren, descendants of Africa, that the exiles of our race are emerging from the depths of forlorn slavery, in which they have been environed” (Oration 372). By invoking the condition of exile (a rhe-torical move typical of these speeches), Sipkins emphasizes the exclusion of his “brethren” from European-style nationalism, which depends on the coincidence of place with a racialized, cultural insiderism.12 Carman sug-gests that religious affiliation joins race to contribute to the affiliations pos-sible among dispersed peoples; he applauds “those temples erected by the exiles of Africa in different parts of the world, which are dedicated to the service of the living God” (18). This invocation of the growing number of African Christian institutions throughout the Atlantic, in Nova Scotia, for example, or Sierra Leone, reminds his audience of the world that Jeremiah Gloucester invokes as well when, in his 1823 speech, he praises the “bril-liant exploits” of the black revolutionaries in Haiti (10). These writers re-construct the development of slavery and the multinational abolition of


the slave trade to show that, following Olaudah Equiano and anticipating David Walker, they considered themselves truly, tragically, “citizens of the world.” One moment from Frederick Douglass’s midcentury writing can, by way of contrast, highlight these writers’ Atlantic understanding of history and the open politics of their texts. In a speech given on July 5, 1852, in Rochester, New York, Douglass posed his now famous question “What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July?” Douglass answers with a kind of American exceptionalism that dramatizes how much the concerns of Afri-can American leaders had changed since the abolition of the slave trade more than forty years earlier:

What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that re-veals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. . . . Go where you may, search where you will, roam through all the monarchies and despotisms of the old world, travel through South America, search out every abuse, and when you have found the last . . . you will say with me, that, for revolting barbarity and shameless hypocrisy, America reigns without a rival. (371)

While the urgency of the abolitionist cause in the years leading up to the Civil War leads Douglass to draw the map of global atrocity with America at its center, the retrospective view of the earlier writers, faced with the subject of the slave trade, diffuses the offense around the Atlantic. Such diffusion parallels the difference, too, between the subject of Douglass’s address—the American slave—and that of the earlier writers, the victims of the transatlantic slave trade. The difference between Hamilton’s utopian wish for a world that had spared Africa and Douglass’s exposure of Ameri-can hypocrisy marks the difference, too, between a transfigural politics propelled by impossibility and one that seeks fulfillment through tangible goals.

BLACK AtLAntIC CoUnteRPUBLICItY

Part of recognizing the Atlantic reach of these orations involves em-phasizing that these black writers lived as readers, writers, and intellec-tuals in a culture filled with printed texts from Great Britain—the kind of traveling “tracts” and “books” Gilroy proposes we consider when de-


scribing the black Atlantic. As James N. Green notes of the early national period, American bookselling, publishing, and reprint trades were “built on a foundation of British books” (75). The rhetoric of fulfillment em-ployed by the writers who commemorated the abolition of the slave trade bears close relation to the work of white British abolitionists like Granville Sharp, Thomas Clarkson, William Wilberforce; the transatlantic Quaker Anthony Benezet; and black writers like Olaudah Equiano and Quobna Ottobah Cugoano. Nearly all of the New York and Philadelphia orators declare that they commemorate not only the slave trade’s abolition in the United States but also in the British Empire.13 After giving thanks to Con-gress and the “British Parliament” for their legislations, Absalom Jones addresses Africa, the “dear land of our ancestors,” to proclaim that “thou shalt no more be stained with the blood of thy children, shed by British and American hands” (338). Henry Sipkins reminds his audience that the “sinful traffic” in slaves “has been recently extirpated by the parliament of Great Britain and . . . the ensuing act of the legislature of the United States” (“Introductory Address” 344). In Britain the campaign to abolish the slave trade resulted in hundreds of political tracts, poems, and works of fiction by black and white writers that either argued for the trade’s abolition or registered its importance as a pressing cause. While Parliament’s eventual abolition law may not have brought the British Empire any closer to eman-cipation, the issue of slavery itself was “perhaps second only to the French Revolution in its import on the social consciousness of [English] writers from 1780–1830” (Mellor 311).14 The importance of this transatlantic context is suggested by the fact that the leading British abolitionists occupy as privileged a place as American figures in the speeches on slave trade abolition: “among the names whom the Deity selected as the accomplishers of the great work of abolition,” writes Russell Parrott in a representative moment, “stand those of [Gran-ville] Sharp, [Thomas] Clarkson . . . [and William] Wilberforce” (Oration 387–88). Sharp, Clarkson, and Wilberforce had introduced an abolition bill in Parliament in the 1780s, only to have their course delayed by the French Revolution. Their success in 1807 after repeated failed attempts was due in part to the desire of Britain’s ruling classes to appease public opinion; one British supporter of the slave trade lamented that “every measure that in-vention or art could devise to create a public clamour was resorted to on this occasion. The Church, the theatre, the press, had laboured to create


a prejudice against the slave trade. . . . In every manufacturing town and borough in the kingdom all . . . arts had been tried” (qtd. in Blackburn 313; see also 131–60). This “clamour” undoubtedly reached across the Atlantic and swirled around the commemorators of abolition, in part due to the wide reprinting in New York and Philadelphia of British texts on the slave trade, including works by Sharp, Clarkson, and Wilberforce; the poetry of Hannah More and William Cowper; and Equiano’s Interesting Narrative. The rhetoric of the orations overlaps considerably with the rhetoric of the most famous British abolitionist tracts and poems, and at times these writers quote them directly. In his 1810 speech, for example, William Miller borrows a few lines from William Cowper’s poem “Charity” (published also in Philadelphia in 1803) to pose, in Cowper’s words, a question to European nations: “Canst thou, and honored with a Christian name, / Buy what is woman-born, and feel no shame?” (Miller 9). In precisely the lan-guage where the speeches on slave trade abolition seem most “American” we can discover a striking homology with abolitionist literature produced in Britain. Hannah More’s popular Slavery, a Poem (published in Philadel-phia in 1788 as well) betrays as strong a commitment to the discourse of rights and liberty as any Fourth of July oration:

Was it decreed, fair Freedom! At thy birth,That thou shouldst ne’er irradiate all the earth?While Britain basks in thy full blaze of light,Why lies sad Afric quenched in total night?15

Cugoano, too, framed the criminality of the slave trade as a betrayal of Enlightenment rights, and Olaudah Equiano tells how his “love of liberty, ever great was strengthened” by his first experiences as a slave, and that after manumission he returned to his “original free African state” (Equiano 48–49, 138; see Cugoano 135). Much of the rhetoric from the black com-munities in New York and Philadelphia gestures out to an abolitionist cam-paign across the Atlantic that had no direct impact on the laws that af-fected those communities. The point here is not to suggest that the drive to celebrate may have come from reading abolitionist tracts rather than from outrage at the atrocities of the slave trade. However, if we grant abolition in Britain its due importance for these speeches, we can better understand the momen-tum that produced them. They are part of the culminating moment of an


abolition movement that Dwight McBride, Hugh Thomas, James Basker, and Marcus Wood have amply demonstrated was a transatlantic phenome-non. The overlapping discourse of abolition suggests that these orations emerged from a thoroughly transnational marketplace for books. The scope of that marketplace also defines the horizon for their reach as poten-tially traveling printed texts. This is especially true for pamphlets printed in the major port cities of the eastern seaboard and tied to transatlantic communities of abolitionists, reformers, and religious groups. While many scholars have emphasized the presence of British books in America, evi-dence also exists for the presence in this period of American texts in Brit-ain.16 Even though I am not concerned here with tracing the actual dis-semination of these pamphlets, it is clear that print invokes the possibility of dissemination, especially given the circulatory intensity of transatlantic trade networks arguably more effective than those that connected the re-gional markets of North America. For authors and readers in this period, an imagined transatlantic readership may have been as important as actual dissemination, since “speech or printed item did not have to reach a large number of auditors or readers to ask them to think of themselves as part of a larger community” (Eastman 4). The possibility of dissemination, fueled by a utopian ambiguity of address and dependent on the materiality of publication, is central to how these speeches participate in the culture of the black Atlantic. The public made possible by means of print publication represents a constitutive part of these orations’ projection of diasporic consciousness. The generic status of these orations as texts composed for a recurring an-nual event, their negotiation of audience, and their consistent appearance in pamphlet form suggests the relevance of what Michael Warner has iden-tified as the logic of a public “conjured into being in order to enable the very discourse that gave it existence” (Warner, Publics 67). Print helps put this logic to work for these writers, and it produces other dynamics that Warner associates with the formation of publics, including a utopian ad-dress to an audience of strangers, a repetitive temporality, and, because these texts also help constitute a counterpublic, a “space . . . of circulation” that remains “transformative, not replicative merely” (122). This focus on the “transformative” role textual circulation can play within a counterpub-lic resonates with Gilroy’s identification of the possibility of a new socia-bility within the transfigural politics of the black Atlantic. Print enables the


projection of identificatory practices among “Africans” that subordinated the particularity of an individual’s experience to the unlimited scope of an imagined community. As I have mentioned, these writers do not have the personal diasporic histories to authorize the stories they tell about the slave trade. Such stories deserve our attention precisely because of their success in transcending what might be seen as the limits of the self. The centrifugal pull of their principal subject—Africa and the slave trade—unites their authors, as it does their public, in the condition of the diaspora, if not in a literal trans-atlantic experience of it. Joan W. Scott has influentially criticized the ten-dency in “histories of difference . . . [to] appeal to experience as uncontest-able evidence and as an originary point of explanation—as a foundation on which analysis is based” (777). Instead of such an appeal to the essen-tializing “evidence of experience,” Scott encourages an investigation of the “constructed nature of experience”; she wants to explore how experience itself, rather than being a “fact of difference,” can instead reveal “how dif-ference is established, how it operates, how and in what ways it consti-tutes subjects who act in the world” (777). In the case of the speeches on slave trade abolition, the “difference” these writers invoke in the name of “Africa” is established partly through the medium of print. Eddie Glaude, Jr., appeals to essentialized experience when he insists that the “local” lives of the African American communities that organized “freedom celebra-tions” gesture toward the formation of a “national community” rather than a diasporic one; “[p]ut simply,” he writes, “most people don’t live diasporic lives” (103). In appealing to a diasporic life as a precondition for such an identity, Glaude shares the epistemological protocols of many scholars of the early black Atlantic who turn to biography to authorize their claims about a writer’s cultural expression.17 The attention these speeches pay to the active engagement with print and publicity suggests that black Atlantic culture is constituted partly by the imagined effects print itself produces. Print’s function in constituting a public differs from its meaning for re-cent scholars of African American print culture who subordinate media specificity to the role of print in forming institutional and national belong-ing. Building on the idea that literary production constituted an appeal for mainstream recognition, for example, Elizabeth McHenry documents how in the mid-nineteenth century African Americans used publication and collective literacy to establish themselves as “capable, respected citi-


zens” committed to “civic” actions that would “facilitate involvement in the public sphere” (23, 56, 102). Taking a slightly different view, Joanna Brooks identifies a late-eighteenth-century print tradition opposed to white so-ciety, a “black print counterpublic” that was shaped by “the black experi-ence of public space” and that mirrored the structure of institutions like Masonic lodges and African churches (“Early American” 75). “[E]arly black forays into publication,” Brooks argues, promoted the “same prin-ciples of self-determination through collective incorporation” that shaped independent black organizations (82). McHenry’s and Brooks’s focus on national-political recognition and institutional life leaves out both the dis-cursive effects Warner emphasizes and the importance of transatlantic net-works of print circulation.18 My discussion of print’s effects also differs from a reading of these pam-phlets that would locate their material significance elsewhere, as the archi-val record of oratorical performances during celebrations that involved the embodied and, for many northern whites, scandalous presence of black people assembling in the urban spaces of New York and Philadelphia. These celebrations partake of a long tradition of African American perfor-mance and embodied protest that some scholars have traced to traditions of communal gathering in Africa.19 The orations also participate in early America’s broad culture of voiced expression described by Jay Fliegelman, Christopher Looby, and Sandra Gustafson. They thus support a critique of the argument that print dominated an early American public sphere char-acterized by the white bourgeois republican ideals of self-negation, dif-fusion, rational-critical debate, and the privileging of representation over immanence (Warner, Letters; Ziff). In contrast to this print-centered de-scription of the public sphere, a typical title page of these orations invokes voice, embodied collectivity, a delimited religious community, and the lived experience of a racialized and marginalized people: “An Oration on the Abolition of the Slave Trade; Delivered in the African Church, in the City of New York, January 2, 1809” (Sipkins, “Oration” 365). Documents like this, however, retain the potential to provide a new perspective on the early black Atlantic because they demonstrate a marked self-consciousness about print itself. To fill out the implications of Nancy Fraser’s contention (75) that “the bourgeois public was never the public,” that “there were com-peting publics from the start,” requires taking another look at print as a vehicle in and of itself for black Atlantic counterpublicity.20 This will also


require thinking of print as capable of producing meanings not circum-scribed by the embodied experience of religious or institutional life.

tHe PALIMPsest oF “AFRICAn GenIUs”

William Hamilton’s 1809 oration ties textual production to black Atlan-tic consciousness, to the history of the slave trade, and to the constitu-tion of a counterpublic through print publication. As Hamilton starts his commemorative address he reminds his audience that the abolition of the slave trade “stands unrivaled” as a laudable event for “Africans and descen-dants,” and he reflects on the injustices of the “abominable traffic” itself. When the “man-stealing crew entered” Africa’s shores, Hamilton writes, their goal was to “obtain the captives taken in war, [to] kidnap thousands” and “to commit, unprovokedly,” many “acts of cruelty on an unoffend-ing part of the human family.” Addressing his audience as “My Brethren,” he writes that the slave trade’s abolition proves how “our condition is fast ameliorating,” and he introduces an argument about how the publica-tion of writing by Africans around the world—of “specimen[s] of African genius”—can seal the case for racial equality. Hamilton’s quick transition from a centuries-long history of Africa to the present display of “African genius” invests each published “specimen” with the accumulated signifi-cance of the black Atlantic history he has told. For Hamilton, all of his “brethren” can implicitly claim the fruits of “African genius” as their own (“Address” 35–37) After a brief mention of Phillis Wheatley to refute the common pro-slavery claim that “Africans do not possess minds as ingenious as other men,” Hamilton turns to a much more proximate example of “genius” to defend his “brethren” and “descendants” against arguments of racial in-feriority. In a striking moment of self-reflexivity, Hamilton directs his audience to the printed version of an “oration on the abolition of the slave trade” given in his New York community a year earlier on the same occa-sion for which, now, he gives his own address. The earlier oration was writ-ten by Peter Williams, Jr., and introduced by Henry Sipkins. Hamilton writes:

Without naming others who have appeared in the interim of [Wheatley] and the present time, I hold in my hand a specimen of African genius; African I term it because in the position that the present argument


is offered, it makes no kind of difference whether the man is born in Africa, Asia, Europe, or America, so long as he is proginized from Afri-can parents. This book contains an introductory address and an oration on the abolition of the slave trade, delivered in the African church, the first of January eighteen hundred and eight, by two young men whom you are generally acquainted with: the address or frontispiece to the work is a flow of tasteful language, that would do credit to the best writers; the oration or primary work is . . . a close adherence to the plane of the sub-ject in hand, a warm and animating description of interesting scenes, together with an easy graceful style. If we continue to produce speci-mens like these, we shall soon put our enemies to the blush; abashed and confounded they shall quit the field, and no longer urge their su-periority of souls. (36–37)

At once an invocation of the African diaspora, a valorization of racial iden-tity and solidarity, an exhortation for creative efforts, and a piece of liter-ary criticism, this passage also emphasizes in a layered way the projection of an imagined public through print publication. The pamphlet he holds from the previous year contains the wish, quoted earlier, that others would “honor” it with a “perusal.” Hamilton’s announcement confirms that they have. On one level, Hamilton’s praise of the “tasteful language,” “warm and animating description,” and “easy graceful style” of what he clearly iden-tifies as an achievement doubles back on his own effort, in this speech, at “continu[ing] to produce specimens” like it. In publishing such a specimen himself, Hamilton implicitly “put[s his] enemies to blush,” thus inscribing within his demand for cultural production the guarantee of success. His “enemies”—including implicitly Thomas Jefferson, who denigrates black writing in Notes on the State of Virginia (1787)—will “quit the field” as he and his community publish their “genius” for public use.21 Hamilton’s speech also suggests that the black Atlantic world includes those who, through textual production and publication, contribute to a bond between individuals and a larger, nonnational community. By call-ing attention to the materiality of the oration—he holds it in his hand and offers it as a “book”—Hamilton emphasizes the pamphlet’s status as a text that could reach innumerable readers; he thus invokes a mediated, publicly articulated group consciousness. His own speech and the document he


holds are addressed to “brethren,” to “Africans and descendants”; through that address, they call into being a public more indeterminate than the embodied audience that assembled to hear them in churches and public places. By applauding Williams and Sipkins, who had expressed a hope for future readers, Hamilton imagines that publication fosters a virtual com-munity established through the ability of discourse to constitute counter-publicity. In this way, Hamilton’s dramatic gesture resonates with Michael Warner’s emphasis on “the mutually defining interplay between texts and publics,” and on the “reflexive circulatory field in the mode of address and consumption” that, in the case of these speeches, relates the diasporic consciousness contained in them to the imagined audience they conjure through print (Publics 16). Hamilton’s triumphant display of the earlier pamphlet presumes the usefulness and easy usability of print, and it also projects a desire for the ambiguity and promise of the counterpublic pub-lication invokes. Further, Hamilton’s mobilization of print opens up new possibilities of association, consciousness, and identity unhinged from the concept of the self showcased in the autobiographical texts of the black Atlantic archive. His decision to vindicate African “genius” by referring to the printed pam-phlet of a speech given a year earlier on the same occasion for which he has produced similar speech that, implicitly, will also be “contained” in a similar pamphlet, actually undercuts the individualism the term “genius” implies. The doubling here, of speech upon speech—extending back to the previous speech and out to future commemorative addresses—is a figure for the principal way the group of orations coheres: as a series of pamphlets bound together by the generic conventions that come with a recurring an-nual occasion. Hamilton’s gesture transforms the previous speech—the original one—into figural palimpsest onto which he and all subsequent writers on this particular occasion inscribe their own analogous discursive act. His opening remarks congratulating his community “on this first anni-versary” (34) resonate with other remarks by various speakers that empha-size repetition. Henry Sipkins writes that “we are again assembled” (Ora-tion 366), George Lawrence that “we have again assembled” (375), Russell Parrott that he is “[a]gain selected” to speak (Oration [1814] 383), while Hamilton in a later speech writes of “those who have addressed us here-tofore on these occasions” (Oration 394), and Jeremiah Gloucester of the “talents you so frequently witnessed on these occasions” (5). The dramatic


gesture in Hamilton’s speech, like these other comments, subordinates the specific identity of each author to the larger effect of the group’s produc-tions. A single author’s uniqueness is subsumed into the essence of the document as a material text. Hamilton’s focus on the transformation of “African genius” into such material implies that other “specimens” may also be fundamentally pub-lic and impersonal. This view of black Atlantic literature shifts critical em-phasis from the individual to the collective, from the black Atlantic writer to the public brought into being by black Atlantic texts. The impersonality Hamilton’s gesture implies does not involve the Habermasian principle of negation that is sometimes attributed to participation in the public sphere, a principle that rests on the definition of the bourgeois citizen as autono-mous property owner (see Warner, Letters 34–72).22 The impersonality that the orations promote signifies a public composed of strangers—one essen-tially different from the delimited group assembled to hear them. The im-personality of the pamphlets is thus overdetermined by both the public they conjure and the generalized history they tell. It suggests that power-ful expressions of black Atlantic double consciousness are present in dis-courses unconcerned with an individual’s account of his or her own per-sonal experience. The gesture toward print in William Hamilton’s 1809 address suggests that the speeches derive membership in a community of “Africans and de-scendants” not only from the common experience of racial terror but also from an assent to inclusion in the utopian address they issue through dis-course. Assent may prove more palpable when discourse is accompanied by presence, within the congregation, on the day of celebration, after the parade and before the jubilant hymnal. However, as soon as this event ac-quired its conventions—that is, by the time it is possible to speak “again” and “again” and “again”—the anticipation of a printed record becomes part of the proceeding itself. Nothing could suggest this more powerfully than Hamilton’s decision to bring the previous year’s published address with him as he speaks, and to praise the oration contained in that pam-phlet—an act whose self-reflexive reverberations suggest his own oration and future orations would also be printed for distribution. The conven-tionality of these orations thus makes the intangibility of their black Atlan-tic counterpublic constitutive of the tangible experience of embodied par-ticipation. The moment of voiced expression, then, far from contrasting


with print’s impersonal dissemination, in fact refers to it. Hamilton’s mo-ment of self-reference suggests that one defining aspect of such a recur-ring celebratory event was the knowledge that it might have a future, me-diated existence in print. This is not only about reaching actual readers; it is about imagining them as part of the crowd. That is to say: print’s unknown consequences haunted these celebrations as much as the lived celebrations haunt the archive.

More work needs to be done before the uses of print in the early black Atlantic are fully understood. It remains to be seen, for example, whether publications similar in structure to the slave trade orations contribute in an analogous way to the discursive production of counterpublicity. Such texts include those that emerge from other recurring events or occasions for which a printed record may have been expected: for example, the annual conferences of African churches or abolition societies, which resulted in a number of published minutes between 1818 and 1834; celebratory occasions like the anniversary of the birth of George Washington, the anniversary of the abolition of slavery in the state of New York, or other commemo-rative religious or political events, which resulted in published texts by Daniel Coker, Joseph Corr, Prince Hall, Jupiter Hammon, Lemuel Haynes, William Whipper, and others; or the public executions of black subjects like John Joyce, Edmund Fortes, Johnson Green, and Abraham Johnston, which resulted in a series of published confessions that developed their own special conventions and themes. Other black Atlantic texts that do not involve repetition or conven-tion could also be sites for discussing the uses of print. The significance of Benjamin Banneker’s famous letter to Thomas Jefferson, for example, can be located not only in its exposure of the hypocrisy of American law but also in its circulation in print: first in a Philadelphia pamphlet, then in northern magazines, and finally in Banneker’s inclusion of it in the 1793 edition of his Almanack (Andrews 234). The huge popularity of John Mar-rant’s A Narrative of the Lord’s Wonderful Dealings (1785), which was re-printed at least forty-four times, may also suggest the importance of print, especially since Marrant revised his narrative to emphasize abolitionist politics once readerly demand increased (Weyler 41–46; see also Brooks and Salliant). And the publication history of Venture Smith’s Narrative (1798), originally serialized in a local newspaper, The New London Bee, and


subsequently published as a single volume, surely suggests that attention to the circulation of print could help determine how reading practices help form group consciousness (Gould 124). Dorothy Porter has accounted for nearly three hundred editions or reprints of writing by African Americans that appeared in the United States and Britain between 1760 and 1835, and her research does not include Afro-British figures like Sancho or Cugoano, whose works were widely reprinted, reviewed, and excerpted in the period (“Early American”). While we are ready to mark the identify-forming role of Phillis Wheatley’s personal negotiation of a transatlantic network of patrons and printers to assure the publication of her Poems in 1773, we are currently less ready, I think, to assess the meanings that may derive from her work’s wide dissemination in more than three dozen editions published in various formats in cities around the Atlantic seaboard (Porter, “Early American” 261–66). Joseph Sidney’s 1814 speech on slave trade abolition includes what could be seen as a reading list for his audience, a guide to recent writing of the black Atlantic. Much like Hamilton’s 1809 speech, Sidney asks his audience “what think you” of black writing as he applauds “composers of poetry” and “orators,” including among the latter some of the authors this essay has considered: Peter Williams, Henry Sipkins, William Hamilton, and George Lawrence (Oration [1814] 10). What would black Atlantic culture look like if we considered the relationship to print that Sidney intimates here as one of that culture’s definitive features? All writers of the black Atlantic, no matter how locally or globally they lived, were members of societies flooded with many traveling and influential printed texts as well as their own productions. Their diasporic consciousness emerged through the interplay of many experiences, print itself not the least of them. They uti-lized print to announce their place in the black Atlantic world and through that announcement to shape, reciprocally, the contours of that world.

notes

Thanks to Richard Yarborough, who first introduced me to these orations. This essay has benefited from his advice and the feedback of Joanna Brooks, Sandra Gustafson, Carrie Hyde, Christopher Looby, David Kurnick, Kate Marshall, Ian Newman, Sianne Ngai, Jordan Alexander Stein, Edlie Wong, the staff of the Library Company of Philadelphia, and the Gender, Race, and Sexuality Reading Group at UCLA.


1. Other scholars emphasize a black author’s travels “among New England, Florida, Cuba, and England”; “dramatic stor[ies] of . . . wayfaring and adventure”; and “shared experiences of alienation, depersonalization, and displacement” (Weyler 49; Potkay and Burr 1; Brooks, American Lazarus 96).

2. As I discuss below, my definition of a counterpublic comes mainly from Michael Warner’s recent work on the discursive formation of publics; see Publics and Counterpublics (65–124).

3. See Armory and Hall; Basker; Bell; Green; Gross and Kelly; McGill, American Literature and Traffic; St. Clair; Sher; Tennenhouse; Tamarkin; and Wood.

4. Carolyn Eastman has recently emphasized the inseparability of the two media. In A Nation of Speechifiers, she writes that in the early national period “print and oratory were thoroughly interdependent and mutually constitutive” (5).

5. We know more about some of these writers than others. On William Hamilton (1773–1836) see Newman 110; on Absalom Jones (1746–1818) see Brooks, Ameri-can Lazarus 18–84, and Nash, Forging Freedom 111–19; on Peter Williams, Jr. (1780–1840), see Foner 571; on Henry Sipkins (1788–1838), see the introduction to Sipkins’s writing by Ferguson and Basker 277–82; on Russell Parrott (1791–1824) see Whiteman; and on Jeremiah Gloucester, see Kachun 28–30. Dorothy Porter reprints eight of the speeches in Early Negro Writing: 1760–1837, and the others can be found in anthologies, on microfilm, or in research libraries. A similar event was held in Boston through the 1820s, usually on July 14. Participa-tion at celebratory dinners and parades in Boston did not result in publication by black writers, although it did result in a series of anonymous, racist broadsides satirizing the event.

6. On the history of African American festivals and celebrations in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, see Gravely; Rael 54–81; White; Waldstreicher 323–48; Pierson; Fabre; Kachun 16–35; Glaude 82–104; Quarles; Sweet; and Melish. Gravely, White, Waldstreicher, and Glaude discuss the speeches on slave trade abolition directly. On African churches and other important venues for black political expression in early America, particularly the Masonic lodges, see Curry 174–215; Brooks, American Lazarus 115–50; and Wesley.

7. The most important occasions subsequent to the celebrations of slave trade abo-lition included commemorations of the final abolition of slavery in New York State on July 4, 1827 (often celebrated on July 5 to avoid hostility from white Inde-pendence Day revelers), the abolition of slavery in the West Indies on August 1, 1834, and, most famously, Emancipation itself, held on June 19 every year after 1865.

8. David Waldstreicher also frames the black writers’ engagement in the context of nationalism: “free blacks appropriated white political culture for the purposes of antislavery activity and cultural autonomy. They used the tools of American nationalism to create black nationalism” (325). See also White 49 and Kachun 10.

9. On the direct responses of African Americans to the white Fourth of July events in the nineteenth century, including the staging of rival events on July 5, see Sweet; Quarles; and James.


10. In South Carolina alone tens of thousands of new slaves were imported after 1804 in anticipation of the ban expected in 1808, and Hugh Thomas has esti-mated that “[a]s many Africans were probably introduced into the United States in the last twenty years of the eighteenth century and the first eight years of the nineteenth century as in the entire era since the 1620s” (546). The precise reason why the celebrations ceased remains unknown, though speculations abound (see especially Kachun 41).

11. For an account of the standard Anglo-American antislavery rhetoric, see McBride 16–84.

12. David Kazanjian has elaborated on Gilroy’s delineation of precisely how this in-siderism consolidated itself in American and Atlantic contexts of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

13. Peter Williams; Henry Sipkins in 1809; Adam Carman in 1811; Russell Parrott in 1812, 1814, and 1816; and William Hamilton in 1815 all mention the act of Parlia-ment or the efforts of British abolitionists.

14. Some of the most notable literary figures of the time engaged the issue of the slave trade, including Samuel Johnson, William Cowper, Hannah More, Mary Wollstonecraft, Robert Burns, Robert Southey, Maria Edgeworth, William Wordsworth, Amelia Opie, Ann Yearsley, and Edmund Burke.

15. Quoted in Basker 335. Robert Southey and Samuel Taylor Coleridge used similar discourse to argue for abolition, as did Cowper in his famous poem “The Negro’s Complaint” (reprinted in Philadelphia’s The American Museum in 1791 and else-where); Cowper’s African narrator remarks,

Still in thought as free as ever,What are England’s rights, I ask,Me from my delights to sever,Me to torture, me to task? (qtd. in Basker, 300)

See also Southey’s poems in Basker 428–35 and excerpts from Coleridge’s poem “Fears in Solitude” (Basker 449–50). Anthony Benezet engages in Enlightenment discourse as well, writing in Some Historical Account of Guinea (also published in Philadelphia in 1788) that Africans before European contact were “free by nature, endued with the same rational faculties as Europeans” (109).

16. For British books in America, see the first three volumes of A History of the Book in America (Amory and Hall; Gross and Kelly; and Casper et al.), as well as the work of Meredith McGill and Richard Sher. For a record of American texts in Britain, see Ward and Cairns.

17. See n. 1. Vincent Carretta’s claim that Olaudah Equiano fabricated his African birth in his Interesting Narrative certainly invites a discussion, too involved for this essay, on what is at stake when black Atlantic scholars rely on—or ignore—the evidence of Equiano’s experience of the middle passage (see Carretta 2003).

18. For other work on African American writing that is attentive to print but not to transatlantic circulation, see essays that cover the antebellum period in Vogel.

19. See n. 4. On African cultural origins, see Pierson and Fabre.


20. Many others have followed Fraser’s critique of the theory of the public sphere offered in Habermas. See especially Calhoun, where Fraser’s essay initially ap-peared. Looby, Forum, which contains essays by Waterman and Slauter in addi-tion to Brooks, “Early American,” devotes close and comprehensive attention to contemporary historiography of work on the public sphere.

21. In this sense, Hamilton participates in what Gustafson describes as the “perfor-mance semiotic of speech and text” in early America, where “claims to authen-ticity and relations of power were given form and meaning through the reliance on or freedom from text in oral performance” (xvi–xvii). A survey of the ex-amples in Gustafson’s book suggest that Hamilton’s gesture is a rare usage of this “performance semiotic,” since it represents a black author appealing to authority by referring to a printed text by another black author.

22. Indeed, a focus on print need not endorse the description of the public sphere outlined by Warner’s and Ziff ’s scholarship on the eighteenth century, even though I find Warner’s later work on counterpublics very useful.

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