The Press and Slavery in America, 1791-1859 , livre ebook

The Press and Slavery in America, 1791-1859
THE PRESS AND SLAVERY IN AMERICA
1791-1859
The Melancholy Effect of Popular Excitement
Brian Gabrial

THE UNIVERSITY OF SOUTH CAROLINA PRESS
2016 Brian Gabrial
Published by the University of South Carolina Press
Columbia, South Carolina 29208
www.sc.edu/uscpress
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data can be found at http://catalog.loc.gov/
ISBN : 978-1-61117-603-2 (hardcover)
ISBN : 978-1-61117-604-9 (ebook)
Front cover photograph: Frank Leslie s Illustrated Newspaper , front page, November 19, 1859, courtesy of the Library of Congress.
To Clesta, Esta, and Zona, the Sisters
We should not conclude that the function of history is to furnish a record of what man is not, but rather we should regard it as the matrix within which man s essential nature is expressed.
Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia
CONTENTS
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Preface
Introduction: Racism and Slavery in America
PART I The Press and Slave Troubles in America
1 Haiti in 1791, Gabriel Prosser s 1800 Conspiracy, and the 1811 German Coast Slave Revolt
2 Denmark Vesey s 1822 Conspiracy and Nat Turner s 1831 Slave Revolt
3 Slavery, the Press, and America s Transformation, 1831-59
4 John Brown s Greatest or Principal Object
5 From Madman to Martyr: John Brown s Transformation in the Northern Antislavery Press
PART II Media Discourses about Slavery
6 Dealing with Slavery s Enemies
7 A Racial Panic
8 Maintaining Slavery
9 Slavery Divides the Nation
10 Slavery s Immorality and Destruction of Civil Liberties
11 Slavery Destroys Freedom of the Press
Conclusion: The Press and Slavery s Legacy
Notes
Bibliography
Index
ILLUSTRATIONS
New Orleans and surrounding areas circa 1803
Charleston, South Carolina, circa 1823
Southampton, Virginia, and surrounding counties circa 1867
Slave distribution in Virginia, 1860
John Brown
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
No work of any length is completed without the help of others, especially friends and family members who lent their support and encouragement along the way. I thank them first. I would also like to single out a few others to whom I am especially indebted. My eternal thanks go to the reference librarians at the University of Minnesota and the New York Public Library for their invaluable assistance in locating secondary and primary sources. I am extremely grateful to Albert Tims and the University of Minnesota s School of Journalism and Mass Communication for providing me with the resources during my sabbatical year to revise the original dissertation that became this book. I must recognize the hard work done by my research assistants Katarina Koleva and Jonathan Montpetit, who spent hours, days, and weeks painstakingly and tirelessly double-checking my sources and footnotes. Finally, I want to acknowledge the significant editorial contribution of my friend and mentor Hazel Dicken-Garcia, whose incisive comments on an earlier draft of this book provided the clarity of structure and emphasis that I believe make this a worthwhile contribution to the study of journalism and race in America.
PREFACE
Human nature is rarely ever so base as not to love liberty. 1 The historian Joseph Cephas Carroll made that observation about all who fight for freedom. Yet from the moment they landed on American soil, black Americans were not seen as worthy or even capable of having such emotions, and those who did possess them were considered dangerous and threatening to white society. The negro, once roused to bloodshed, and in possession of arms, is as uncontrollable and irrational as a wild beast. 2 That quote appeared in America s then-largest-circulation newspaper a month after John Brown s 1859 raid sent southern slave owners into spasms of fright and rage. While likely offending today s contemporary readers, the words would have hardly disturbed the sensibilities of most nineteenth-century white newspaper subscribers, who thought such language acceptable, even logical. 3 Yet to reach that degree of acceptance, powerful forces had been working for several centuries to influence European and American thought about black people, creating discourses about race and slavery that normalized their subjugation. In America, as news papers became the preeminent nineteenth-century form of mass communication, reaching previously unsurpassed audiences, their crucial role in disseminating these discourses, which were inseparable, cannot be underestimated, especially in the U.S. antebellum years. This book examines the press s role in informing Americans about slavery and race during those years and the constituted media discourses about them. More specifically the book approaches this examination at points of major crises and disruptions in the slave system, namely when slaves rebelled or conspired to do so, and takes as objects of study news accounts of two slave revolts, two conspiracies, and one raid. All of these events pushed slavery and race discussions into the public sphere, even at times when powerful forces tried to keep them silent. 4
The historian Helen G. MacDonald once observed, The press of a country, at one time guides and directs public opinion, at another merely acts as the reflector and registers. 5 In either instance an extensive look at what is contained in past newspapers can help later generations understand the society and culture that created them, helping make sense of then commonly held beliefs contained in discourse. Notably, this book differs from other important contributions about slavery and the press in that its focus is on northern and southern mainstream newspapers and how they informed a general, white readership about slavery when slave troubles occurred. Such events generated important news and opinion about black Americans, a group largely ignored in the mainstream press during the antebellum years. The book also departs from other scholarship in that it systematically examines news content that spans nearly seventy years to identify media discourses that consistently appeared over time and expressed ideas about black Americans, both slave and free. What becomes clear from these newspaper accounts is that when disruptions occurred in the slave system, white authorities took repressive and violent steps to restore the status quo, in this case slavery and its racial hierarchy, and to suppress black Americans in general. What this book cannot be, however, is a comprehensive history of American slavery or race, the press, or the events considered. Instead the focus remains on media discourses about race and slavery in antebellum America, suggesting that those discourses have resonance in contemporary U.S. society.
Those discourses began to shift in the United States as the country neared the Civil War s final break, illustrating how fierce and powerful reactionary responses, which emanated from a powerful class of Americans who demanded slavery s preservation, competed with a growing antislavery voice that articulated strong sentiment to see it end. Such discourses highlight the sustenance that slavery provided the ongoing contest between the country s two dominant strands of political thought, conservative and liberal. Further, as this book explores the genealogies, chronologies, and discontinuities of these discourses, it offers perhaps a new look at the nineteenth-century American press as an elite social institution that ignored, supported, or resisted slavery, a horrific system that left its destructive mark on those American blacks forced to endure its vicious spiritual, psychological, and corporal transgressions.
The Civil War historian Kenneth Stampp has called slavery America s most profound and vexatious social problem before the Civil War. 6 It was the great and tragic American paradox, existing in a society founded on an enlightened ideal that asserted all men are created equal. To compensate for this bizarre dissonance, many of the nation s most powerful and intellectual elites, including newspaper editors and politicians, adhered to a racist ideology that, for a variety of philosophical, religious, and scientific reasons, framed blacks as inferior beings, a rationale that seemed common sense to most white Americans. 7 As a result probably no other constitutionally protected institution damaged the nation s culture and society more as it thrived in an intellectual and philosophical environment that should have killed it.
Despite increasing social and legal protections afforded slavery in the early to mid-nineteenth century, the system with its seemingly harmonious master and slave relationship belied undercurrents of resistance and white fears of it. The image of black violence and retribution, drawn not only from Nat Turner but from memories of what had occurred in Santo Domingo [now Haiti], continued to haunt the Southern imagination, the historian George M. Fredrickson has keenly observed. 8 The slave insurrection or the threat of it became a lasting fear among the South s antebellum whites, who lived in lands where blacks often outnumbered whites. The thought of slave rebellion and its ensuing violence, from mysterious late-night fires to open slave defiance, created a constant anxiety that Winthrop Jordan has called gnawing, gut-wringing because it presented an appalling world turned upside down, a crazy nonsense world of black over white. 9 To ease this apprehension and to prevent any form of slave resistance, as Frederickson has noted, Southern slave owners were extraordinarily careful to maintain absolute control over their people an