J OE L OCKARD Jacksonian Mobs, Free Speech, and the Rise of American Antislavery Poetry As a body, antislavery poetry in the antebellum United States presents a fascinating and largely unexplored intersection between emergent concepts of civil liberties, the impetus of political events, and their interpretation through poetic imagination. It is a body of poetry that numbers at least 10,000 individual poems by US authors appearing between 1810-1860, probably the largest group of topical poems published in the United States during the nineteenth century. Yet this is not poetry that has worn well with time. Save for a few specimens such as Julia Ward Howe’s now ubiquitous “John Brown’s Body” or John Greenleaf Whittier’s still-heavily anthologized “From Massachusetts to Virginia,” antislavery poetry remains ignored today by both the reading public and American literature critics. 1 Its tone, by turns sentimental and strident, alienates. Its imagery frequently derives from evangelical Christianity; religious antislavery poets often represent emancipation as spiritual ennoblement, rather than realization of a human right. Its characterization of blacks often indulged racial patronization. Inasmuch as then-contemporary political topics animated much US antislavery poetry, a need for detailed historical knowledge represents an obstacle for many present-day readers. There are still other obstacles relating to readership, first among them being author obscurity. Aside from a few figures such as Longfellow and more recently Frances E.W. Harper, nearly all antislavery poets are obscure at best, and more frequently anonymous. Given social strictures against women publishing under their own names, or the consequences of expressing ‘radical’ opinions opposed to slavery, a possible majority of antislavery poets employed pseudonyms or initials. Finally, since modernist criticism dismissed nearly the entire body of nineteenth-century American poetry, save Whitman and Dickinson, antislavery poetry was just more slag on the literary heap. Modernist criticism, to the negligible extent that US antislavery poetry even gained mention, regarded it as an amalgam of sentimental moralizing and atrocious verse-writing. 1 In terms of critical literature, I refer here only to the dearth of treatments of US antislavery poetry. British antislavery poetry, by contrast, has received extensive critical discussion. 118 J OE L OCKARD Antislavery poetry, like other sub-genres, has an aesthetic that requires knowledge of its traditions and a developed taste. James Basker observes acutely of antislavery poetry that “[W]hatever the unevenness in aesthetic value, because poetry fills the interstices of our culture, from public spaces to private corners, in moments of high ceremony and in the spontaneous effusions of popular culture, this material maps the emergence of a collective awareness, the gradual appropriation of a subject charged with aesthetic and moral power, and the spread of that awareness through the collective imagination of the Enlightenment.” 2 Not only does it map such a collective social awareness, but its out-of-hand rejection frames a desire to remain unaware on the part of those who prefer to overlook the massive intersection of slavery with American literature. Pejorative characterization of an extensive body of literature on the basis of minimal sampling, particularly as the great bulk of antislavery poetry remains uncollected and inaccessible to general readers, reveals rejection based more on critical prejudice than informed engagement. The Enlightenment-born ‘awareness’ that Basker identifies lies in a consciousness of human rights as a necessary and legitimate subject of imaginative literature, and of poetry as one means among many contributing towards expansion of those rights. As part of antislavery literature, this poetry is part of the first body of literary production in the United States where black and white writers published together in common cause: it represents the origins of US multicultural literature. While much antislavery literature represented whites discussing race slavery with other whites, it also embodied a cultural intermingling of black and white writers and inter-racial discourse in ways that had not previously prevailed in American literary production. 3 The ‘racial aesthetic’ introduced by antislavery poetry incorporated issues and metaphors relating to individual, racial, and national conscience and self-cognizance; antagonistic social relations between whites and blacks, or whites and whites; heroicization of the antislavery struggle and its participants; and a struggle for means to express potentially radical implications within abolitionist thought. 2 Basker [ed.], Amazing Grace: An Anthology of Poems about Slavery, 1660-1810 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002) xxxiii-xxxiv. 3 The degree to which US antislavery poetry incorporated multicultural participation is an open research question since a probable majority of antislavery poets were anonymous and remain unidentified. Given that there is no current evidence upon which to establish identities for these poets, there is no basis to sustain any hypothesis about the racial or gender identities of these hundreds or thousands of anonymous writers. It is a reasonable observation, however, that antebellum black poets had even more social risk considerations than whites that might cause them to conceal their authorial identity. Jacksonian Mobs, Free Speech, and the Rise of American Antislavery Poetry 119 This public poetry movement manifests an unanswered and troublesome historical question, one that is especially relevant to the history of civil liberties in the United States. Why did antislavery poetry rise to its first prominence in the United States only during the Jackson era? A wide variety of British reform writers had been publishing significant amounts of antislavery poetry since at least the 1770s, and their attention to the issue of slavery increased with the development of the Romantic movement. Discussion of the relationship between slavery and the Romantic imagination has been extended recently by Moira Ferguson, 4 Debbie Lee, 5 and others, 6 but this is a discussion that lies beyond present purview. It suffices for instant purposes to note that US antislavery poetry lagged substantially behind British antislavery poetry. The reasons for this lag may lie either in the earlier development of the abolitionist movement in Great Britain, or in the preponderant influence of radical Protestantism in early American antislavery poetry as contrasted with the more secular adoption of liberational themes in British Romantic poetry. Irrespective of the question of why such poetry did not develop earlier, on the North American continent antislavery poems remained isolated and rare productions in the latter eighteenth century. Phyllis Wheatley published various antislavery poems during the late 1760s and 1770s; obscure religious poets such as Jane Dunlap voiced early Methodist antislavery sentiments; early Federalist poets such as Philip Freneau, Joel Barlow, Timothy Dwight, and David Humphreys included in their work passages opposing slavery; and Quaker poet Joseph Samson published his long poem A Poetical Epistle to the Enslaved Africans in 1790. 7 A well-known poet like Sarah Wentworth Apthorp Morton published ‘The African Chief’ in 1792, 8 a poem that was to become much cited among abolitionists for its portrayal of African nobility in the face of slavery, but which was the only antislavery poem in a volume of nearly 300 pages. A few other late eighteenth-century writers published occasional anonymous antislavery poems in newspapers and journals. More Federalist-era antislavery poetry trickled into publica- 4 Ferguson, Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670-1834 (New York and London: Routledge, 1992). 5 Lee, Slavery and the Romantic Imagination (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002). 6 Carey, Brycchan; Markman Ellis; and Sara Salih [eds.], Discourses of Slavery and Abolition: Britain and its Colonies, 1760-1838 (Basingstroke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004). 7 Samson, A Poetical Epistle to the Enslaved Africans, in the Character of an Ancient Negro, Born a Slave in Pennsylvania, but liberated some Years since, and instructed in useful Learning, and the great Truths of Christianity (Philadelphia, 1790). 8 Sara Wentworth Morton, My Mind and its Thoughts, in Sketches, Fragments, and Essays (Boston: Wells and Lilly, 1823) 201-203. 120 J OE L OCKARD tion early in the nineteenth century. Richard Dinmore’s Select and Fugitive Poetry, an anthology published in 1802, 9 contains several antislavery poems whose inclusion reflects the radical politics of its journalist-anthologist. 10 Joshua Marsden, under lifelong influence from a conversion to Methodism at age twenty, included antislavery poetry in his Leisure Hours collection published in 1812. 11 This antislavery poetry remained the exception. It awaited establishment of abolitionist journals until a coherence within this body of US literary production could achieve visibility. When it did become more visible, antislavery verse arrived as public poetry published mainly in newspapers and periodicals rather than in books. These columns were the first substantive concentration of antislavery poetry. Benjamin Lundy’s monthly antislavery newspaper The Genius of Universal Emancipation (1826-1839), bravely published in pro-slavery Baltimore, provided the first regular column for antislavery poetry. Although it featured the work of Elizabeth Margaret Chandler, Lydia Sigourney, and others, the column’s contents were limited by comparison to later abolitionist journals. 12 The Genius of Universal Emancipation editorialized specifically on the role of women and women’s poetry in promoting public discussion of slavery. “We would recommend the female advocates of Emancipation,” stated the preface to one poetry column, … as one means by which they may much advance the cause for which they are interested, occasionally to devote a few hours during the long evenings of the present season, to composing, or transcribing from authors who have written on the subject of slavery such extracts as may appear to them calculated to produce a good effect, and to send them for insertion to some newspaper or periodical, not expressly devoted to that subject; as by this means they might be read by persons, who would have in no other way their attention, or memory, awakened to the oppression of their brethren and sisters. 13 This writing community of women called into action against slavery was already at this date providing the majority of antislavery poems, and poetry 9 Dinmore, Select and Fugitive Poetry - A Compilation: with Notes Biographical and Historical (Washington: Franklin Press, 1802). 10 Dinmore [ed.], Select and Fugitive Poetry. A Compilation (Washington: 1802). 11 Marsden, Leisure Hours (New York: 1812). 12 For example, excluding textual citation of verse fragments, Universal Genius of Emancipation published 20 poems in 1833, 11 in 1834, 3 in 1835-6, 26 in 1837, and 11 in 1838. During this same period Garrison’s The Emancipator published 3-4 poems weekly, evidencing a political dynamism that attracted more submissions and an editorial policy that placed much more emphasis on poetry. 13 Unsigned, “The Long Evening,” The Genius of Universal Emancipation, vol. 2, no. 9, 3 rd series, February 1832, 149. Jacksonian Mobs, Free Speech, and the Rise of American Antislavery Poetry 121 contributions had become a means of political participation by reform-oriented women who were otherwise denied a forum. Only with inauguration of Garrison’s The Liberator in 1831 and publication of Whittier’s Poems Against Slavery in 1836, it being the first US antislavery poetry volume to receive significant national attention, did antislavery poetry begin to appear in a regular newspaper feature and in widelysold book form. During the 1840s the generic expansion of antislavery poetry continued with publication of anthologies such as Jairus Lincoln’s Anti-Slavery Melodies: For the Friends of Freedom (1843), 14 George Washington Clark’s heavily-reprinted The Liberty Minstrel (1844), 15 and William Wells Brown’s The Anti-Slavery Harp (1848). 16 The following decade of the 1850s witnessed a massive expansion of antislavery poetry, including popular verse responding to slavery-related political crises and long poems. Slave narratives often included fragments or whole poems; 17 controversial literature and public speakers frequently cited well-known antislavery verses. By the 1850s antislavery verse had become a well-established part of the American cultural scene. The question here, however, is how did antislavery poetry begin its emergence as a noticeable body of public poetry during the decade of the 1830s? There are several reasons. First, at the structural and organizational level, antislavery poetry rose together with an energized antislavery movement in the United States. There were new publishing opportunities available as the Garrisonian abolitionist movement, local antislavery organizations, and antislavery religious groups consolidated themselves and were able to find subscribers or financial means to print journals, annuals, tract series, and occasional productions. Contemporary readers need to be reminded of the eventual dimensions of this publishing development. Literally millions of antislavery tracts were printed and distributed. In a crude instrumental sense, the increasing organizational coherence of the antislavery movement throughout the 1830s both created a demand for political expression and provided the means for its fulfillment and distribution. Additionally, during this decade, antislavery 14 Lincoln [ed.], Anti-Slavery Melodies: For the Friends of Freedom (Hingham, MA: Elijah B. Gill, 1843). 15 Clark, The Liberty Minstrel (New York: Published by author, 1844). This anthology was reprinted in six editions within its first two years. In 1848 Clark also published The Free Soil Minstrel (New York: Martyn & Ely), a 228-page volume of antislavery and Free-Soil Party songs. 16 Brown [ed.], The Anti-Slavery Harp: A Collection of Songs (Boston: Bela Marsh, 1848). 17 Fugitive ex-slave William Green, for example, concludes his narrative with a 10-stanza “Anti-Slavery Song’ that summarizes the social conclusions of his story. Narrative of Events in the Life of William Green, (Formerly a Slave) Written by Himself (Springfield, MA: L.M. Guernsey, 1853) 22-23. 122 J OE L OCKARD poetry increasingly appears outside reform journals; prompted by controversy, daily or weekly newspapers exhibited a new interest in printing or reprinting occasional verse on the subject of slavery. Second, at the level of political environment to which this public poetry responded, it provided a rhetorical outlet for passionate demonization of slave-holding society. It sought to create or solidify among reform-minded white readers intense political and religious antipathies towards slavery. The 1830s in the United States were a period of contradiction for antislavery politics, since on one hand there was clear demonstration of an advance towards general emancipation with the end of slavery in Great Britain’s Caribbean colonies, with presentation of the ‘Report on the Extinction of Slavery’ to the House of Commons in 1832, 18 passage of the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, and the official end of slavery in British territories in 1838. Counterpoised against what appeared a march towards human progress in the Caribbean during this decade, however, were the expansion and consolidation of slavery in the South; the clearances of native tribes in Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi, to open land for slave-based agriculture; and the emergence of the Republic of Texas in 1836 as a new slave power. In the United States, human progress seemed perversely frustrated; if the antislavery movement was growing rapidly, slavery appeared to be expanding even more quickly. Antislavery ‘ultras’ represented a small minority discourse during the 1830s and the frustration of a minority evidences itself frequently in poetic expressions. This is a poetic canon whose imagery frequently describes slave-owning society and its advocates as demonic classes, slaves as their martyred prey, and the Southern states as a diorama of cruel, degraded and morally polluted scenes. The work of public poetry here lies in creating what Trotsky, writing of pre-revolutionary literature, called its role of generating “a spirit of social hatred.” 19 Yet this was not a pre-revolutionary poetry, unless evangelical eschatology is treated as a revolution. Most frequently hatred and demonization emerges in a religious language of sin and coming divine retribution, a language that re-cast the experience of African peoples under slavery as prefiguring the punishing enactment of divine justice. Third, in respect to generic politics and readership, US antislavery poetry arose as an event-driven sub-genre that formulated participatory citizenship as topical verse. Whereas early British antislavery poetry emerged from 18 House of Commons, Report from Select Committee on the Extinction of Slavery Throughout the British Dominion with Minutes of Evidence, Appendix and Index (London, 1832). 19 Leon Trotsky [William Keach, ed.], Literature and Revolution (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2005) 188. Originally published 1925, International Publishers, New York. Jacksonian Mobs, Free Speech, and the Rise of American Antislavery Poetry 123 evangelical “moral cause” verse and Romantic political identification with oppressed subjects, beginning most notably in the 1830s American antislavery poetry employed these received British aesthetic formulae within the social impetus provided by US political events. Poetry columns and occasional poetry appearing in antislavery serials provided significant and crystallizing reaction to major political debates on slavery, and they dramatized incidents of civil conflict particularly from the Jackson administration forward. Public poetry became a leading means of defining social images of slave-owners and slaves, one that functioned especially effectively for antislavery reformers. It had noticeable effect in discomfiting consciences, if not in obtaining political conversions. New York City diarist William Templeton Strong, who strewed contemptuous references to blacks through his writing, read Longfellow’s poems on slavery in 1842, and was moved to write “It’s a puzzling subject, this same Abolitionism: there is but one question involved in it: Is slavery morally right or wrong? ” 20 Strong, then a 22 year-old law clerk, answered that question through equivocation and dismissal; his reaction no doubt paralleled that of many other Longfellow readers. Yet what public poetry against slavery accomplished was to bring such readers to the threshold of that moral question, even if they did not resolve it. While there is no doubt that most antislavery poetry during this stage of the abolitionist movement was preaching to the choir, it contributed towards the expansion of expressive paradigms that would find greater acceptance among later readers. Antebellum Mobs and the State of Exception The explanations above pertain to antislavery-movement publishing, aesthetic demands on poetry opposing slavery, and the readership of public poetry. In the secular US public sphere of the 1830s, central for our discussion of poetry and civil liberties, antislavery poetry functioned in response to the conflict between a newly militant abolitionist movement and violent reaction from pro-slavery, anti-black, or just anti-abolitionist mobs. When antislavery meetings stood to sing the then-popular movement anthem “I Am an Abolitionist,” sung to the tune of “Auld Lang’s Syne” with new verses provided by William Lloyd Garrison, they were expressing group solidarity through song. Indeed, many renditions of that song were likely inspired as a vocal response to a mob outside throwing stones and eggs at the building. Abolitionists emphasized that they stood as polite society 20 Strong, The Diary of William Templeton Strong, Allan Nevins and Milton Halsey Thomas [eds.] (New York: Macmillan, 1952) 1, 194-195. 124 J OE L OCKARD arrayed against the mob, a position from which they could condemn simultaneously slavery, lawlessness, and street roughs. Poetry and song served to emphasize an elevation above the political street. Among the varieties of Jacksonian street violence, Michael Feldberg observes, “During the 1830s, riots against abolitionists were numerically the most common form of collective violence.” 21 Anti-abolitionist riots were in various degrees, according to social context, manifestations of pro-slavery racism, pro-Union antagonism towards Garrisonian disunion, 22 class warfare, and bourgeois moral outrage over unacceptable radicalism. These mobbings during the 1830s notably included three days of anti-black and anti-abolitionist attacks in New York City in July 1834, leading to the burning of sixty buildings and six churches; 23 attacks on Prudence Crandall’s school in Canterbury, Connecticut, in September of the same year; serious anti-abolitionist riots in Utica, New York, in 1835; and the burning of Pennsylvania Hall in May 1838. John Greenleaf Whittier stood in disguise with salvaged papers beneath his coat as Pennsylvania Hall was burning and listened to shouts of “Hang Whittier! ”, 24 likely the last known occasion an American mob cared sufficiently to want to lynch a poet. Between 1834 and 1838, some forty-six major anti-abolitionist riots occurred, making this the commonest type of public mobbing during the middle of the decade. 25 At least thirteen presses and newspaper offices were destroyed by mobs, from Kentucky to New York State. 26 Hundreds more local disturbances against abolitionist speakers were recorded only in local newspapers and correspondence. The riots were so common that they took a central role in abolitionist consciousness and self-understanding as guardians of the frontiers of liberty. As Wendell Phillips phrased this consciousness, “We had heard, at a time of profound peace, in the midst of our most crowded cities, the voice of the multitude once and again overwhelm the voice of the laws, almost without the shadow of an attempt at resistance 21 Feldberg, The Turbulent Era: Riot and Disorder in Jacksonian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1980) 43. 22 J.T. Headley’s accounts of the anti-abolitionist riots, while antagonistic towards abolitionists, emphasize the role of nationalist sentiments. See Headley, Pen and Pencil Sketches of the Great Riots (New York: E.B. Treat, 1882) 79-83ff. 23 Paul A. Gilje, The Road to Mobocracy (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1987) 162-170. 24 John Pickard [ed.], The Letters of John Greenleaf Whittier (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1975) 1, 278. 25 David Grimsted, American Mobbing, 1828-1861 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998) 35. 26 Ibid. Jacksonian Mobs, Free Speech, and the Rise of American Antislavery Poetry 125 on the part of the civil magistrate.” 27 The rights of petition and free speech, integral to white male cultural self-comprehension in the United States, were under attack to quiet a dissident political minority. There were few deaths in these confrontations, however, in large part because most of the anti-abolitionist riots followed a predictable course with set roles, which historian Paul Gilje describes as follows: “Rioters outside a meeting hall shouted charivari-like, screamed, and blew horns and tin trumpets. Borrowing tactics from theater disturbances, the rioters pelted rotten eggs and rocks at the abolitionists, who relished acting as martyrs, and stood bowed but unshaken under this bombardment.” 28 Many of these smaller anti-abolitionist riots were like those the followed the antislavery agents James A. Thome and John W. Alvord, as they lectured in small towns and churches of rural Ohio during 1836. Alvord provided a representative description of one such a church meeting in Middlebury, Ohio: A goodly number soon gathered in, and Bro. Thome proceeded to lecture. All [was] still until about 8 [o’clock] when in came a broadside of Eggs. Glass, Egg shells, whites and yolks flew on every side. Br. Thome’s Fact Book received an egg just in its bowels and I doubt whether one in the House escaped a spattering. 29 There were regular injuries, as when Theodore Weld was hit in the head by a stone while lecturing in Circleville, Ohio, in March 1835. 30 Weld continued lecturing for days despite bouts of dizziness. Mob violence targeted individual abolitionists as well as attacks on meetings. In New York City during the 1834 riots, for example, a mob attacked the house, broke the furniture, and destroyed the possessions of antislavery figure Lewis Tappan. 31 The following year, on October 21 William Lloyd Garrison famously became the target of a mob that broke into a meeting of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society. 32 Within a day of his bare escape from the mob, an anonymous sonneteer, possibly a woman admirer, wrote: 27 Phillips, Speeches, Lectures, and Letters, 2 nd series (Boston: Lee and Shepard Publishers, 1891) 2. 28 Paul Gilje, Rioting in America (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1996) 81. 29 Alvord to Theodore Weld, 9 February 1836, in Gilbert H. Barnes and Dwight L. Dumond [eds.], Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, Angelina Grimké Weld, and Sarah Grimké, 1822-1844 (Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith, 1965) 260. 30 Weld to Elizur Wright, 2 March 1835, ibid 206-207. 31 Tappan to Weld, 10 July 1834, ibid 153-155. 32 Wendell Phillips Garrison and Francis Jackson Garrison, William Lloyd Garrison, 1805-1879, The Story of his Life Told by his Children, vol. 2 (New York: The Century Co., 1885) 4ff. 126 J OE L OCKARD … but yesterday, I saw thee go Surrounded by that fierce, insensate throng, Drunk with the wine of wrath, for evil strong, I felt my soul with bitterest fears overflow. O! with what earnestness of passion went, Forth from my heart, my whole soul after thee! (lines 6-10) 33 The poet’s professed admiration - “… a strange feeling, half of joy arose, / That friend of mine should have such men his foes” (lines 11-12) - was widespread. Demonstrated ability to face the mob without retreating contributed to an abolitionist speaker’s reputation for fearless perseverance. For the Garrisonian antislavery movement, whether in collective or individual confrontations with a mob, these were the occasions of a moral drama between the righteous forces of freedom and the anti-democratic tyranny of the streets. Rather than intimidate, such mobbings only served to confirm for abolitionists that their arguments were unanswerable. Furthermore, for those evangelical abolitionists who believed in non-resistance as an expression of Christian faith, a mob was an occasion to exhibit their principles in public. Political repugnance against anti-abolitionist riots began to take hold. Exemplifying that growing repugnance, a young Abraham Lincoln deplored the pervasive spread of mob actions as an interference with the public’s attachment to its government and stated “There is no grievance that is a fit object of redress by mob law.” 34 This type of riot faded from the national scene throughout the 1840s, a decade that saw more nativist riots than antiabolitionist disturbances. Occasionally it was Northern abolitionists who took direct action on the streets to free slaves, and they were sometimes cheered on by songs. One such poem by an anonymous author, titled “Rescue the Slave,” applauds Boston mob threats in 1843 to free by force the fugitive slave George Latimer. Such action, the poem argues, would constitute fulfillment of the American Revolution’s promise of freedom: Freemen, arouse ye, before it’s too late; Slavery is knocking, at every gate, Make good the promise, your early days gave, Boston boys! Boston boys! rescue the slave. 35 33 Anonymous, “To W.L. Garrison,” Garrison and Garrison, ibid 45. 34 Lincoln, “Address Before the Young Men’s Lyceum of Springfield, Illinois,” 27 January 1838, in Lincoln, Speeches and Writings, 1832-1858, Don E. Fehrenbacher [ed.] (New York: Modern Library of America, 1989) 33. 35 Anonymous, “Rescue the Slave! ” 28-29 in Brown, ibid. For a parodic antislavery poem addressing the Latimer case, see Daniel Mann (‘Mr. Latimer’s Brother’), The Virginia Philosopher, or, Few Lucky Slave-Catchers: A Poem (Boston: n.p., 1843). Jacksonian Mobs, Free Speech, and the Rise of American Antislavery Poetry 127 Thus, according to this author, if justice were unavailable from the law, then the same mob actions against British authorities that preceded the Revolutionary war would rise to the defense of a fugitive slave. In such verse, invocation of the mob comes round-about, with a right-spirited crowd rising to liberate a fugitive slave. For both antiand pro-slavery mobs, the law remained inadequate to challenges against a just social order, and thus exception - voiced as popular will - governed public response. What this mob history and its poetics emphasize is the pre-eminence of moral arguments for a state of exception, whether in defense of or opposition against slavery. Agamben argues that one of the essential characteristics of a state of exception lies in its provisional abolition of the distinction between legislative, executive, and judicial powers. 36 This is a particularly useful concept for discussion inasmuch as that collapse of distinction corresponds directly to the local mobocracy that arose - or was stirred - to govern many American cities, towns and villages during the Jacksonian era. The difference between a “state of exception” and “mobocracy” is that the first is textual, formal, and national, whereas the latter is oral, informal, and local. Both claim temporary and exceptional justification for their refusal to acknowledge normal rule of law. In the absence of any effective political desire to control anti-abolition mobs, a localized state of exception governed. However, this argumentative equation with mobocracy is not sufficient of itself, for there are two basic versions of a state of exception that appear in Jacksonian antislavery poetry. First, according to Garrisonian and immediatist antislavery thought, it was slave-owning society itself that constituted an exception to norms of both natural law and positive US constitutional law. Thus the imagery associated with slave-owning society employs terms of excoriation, characterizing the South as a land where “the blood of the slave smokes from thy ground,” 37 as “lands that are scathed with a curse,” 38 and home of “the Moloch of Slavery.” 39 As a society founded on the institution of slavery, its very existence constituted an exception to divine justice and embodied evil. Theology and civil demonization interweave in the formulation of these images; they provide the necessary conditions for exception. Protection of slavery negated the legitimacy of the legal systems in slave states, and many poems decried the law as much as slavery. 36 Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005) 7. 37 C.M.S., Untitled poem, The Liberator 6 (February 20, 1836) 8: 32, line 13 (“From the Ohio Atlas”). 38 X., “Fourth of July, 1836,” The Liberator 6 (September 10, 1836) 37: 148, line 22 (“From the Times and Independent Press”). 39 J.B.G., “The Bereaved Father,” The Liberator 8 (December 7, 1838) 49: 196, line 58. 128 J OE L OCKARD One such poem by an anonymous writer poured vitriolic scorn on “democrats” who defended slavery and the means by which such nominally republican politics hollowed out legal protections while claiming an historic mantle of American freedoms: And her pure, democratic sons, whose cry Is long and loud for holy liberty, Rifle the mail - destroy the press - apply The lighted torch to ‘Freedom’s hall’ - decry The man who pleads for right in Congress halls - Hunt and shoot down the man of God who calls On them to “let th’ oppressed go free” - cowhide The unoffending traveler - deride, Insult, and lynch the victims of their rage - Trample on law and equal rights - and wage Eternal war with all that’s good. 40 The writer argues here that a state of exception to legal order in both the South and North is systemic in slave societies that rely on violence to maintain themselves. An unresolved contradiction governs a public sphere where white citizens claim the benefit of historic liberties while employing anti-democratic means such as postal censorship, press breaking, arson and all variety of assault in order to suppress dissent. The mob that coalesces at signs of dissent against slavery, according to this poet, is a constant force that betrays realization of the nation’s original promise. In its contention against the law, the mob raises itself whenever citizens seek to realize the law’s purposes of fair and equal treatment. The second state of exception constituted by pro-slavery mobs was that of moral anarchy in rebellion against a divinely-mandated order of human freedom. The mob represents the spectre of an ungoverned state that stands in opposition to this righteousness. Sin is the exceptional state that will be rectified by divine intervention on behalf of the slave and to punish the unrighteous. The mob is a hellish clan that demands blood sacrifice and martyrs. As the creators and shapers of this disturbance against a just social order, a mob collectively collapses legislative, executive, and judicial capacities into a counter-force to the justice that abolitionists are attempting to introduce into US society. Antislavery poetry of martyrdom depicts heroic failure in resistance against the mob, together with a promise that efforts will continue until justice has been achieved and the mobocracy’s state of exception is relieved. As one poem phrases this challenge to the mob, 40 J.W.B., “To the God of the Oppressed,” The Liberator 8 (November 30, 1838) 192, lines 26-36. “Freedom’s hall” (line 30) refers to the burning of Pennsylvania Hall in Philadelphia in May 1838. Jacksonian Mobs, Free Speech, and the Rise of American Antislavery Poetry 129 … shall the ruffian mob, by slavites led, With rank and fashion marshaled at its head, Sweep the proud monuments of freedom down, Unchecked, unchallenged, and almost unknown? 41 The appropriation of American traditions of direct popular action and violence by local political elites, this poet argues, reversed their use in the defense of freedom and now directed it against largely middle-class reformers who sought to confront political reaction. The purpose of this appropriation lies in the maintenance of a racial hierarchy that the antislavery movement threatened. As historian Edward Countryman has argued concerning the transatlantic applicability of E.P. Thompson’s discussion of moral economies, there was a new racially-defined version of a moral economy arising in the early United States, one defined by the intersection of white supremacy with an ideology of community self-control. 42 Antiabolitionist mobs embodied, at core, racial and racist demands for local community control of the color line that defined race relations throughout the United States. For abolitionists, the oppositional force in this moral economy, the task lay in struggling with white popular sovereignty nearly as much as with the institution of slavery. The likely prospect of mobbing served as a source of unity within the abolitionist movement. As Whittier phrased this sentiment, “It would be pitiful policy to quarrel among ourselves, when the hoofs of the mob are on the threshold of our meetings.” 43 When Whittier described abolitionists as “brethren of a common tongue” (line 10) in his poem “The Moral Warfare”, 44 he implicitly defined the embattled antislavery voice as alienated from but determined to conquer popular sentiment. The “common tongue” that Whittier emphasized as necessary for moral victory was a minority discourse claiming divine approval, a discourse whose construction relied heavily on images of sacrifice, martyrdom, and sanctification. The opponent in this drama, the mob, became an image of false democracy, a raging monster, and a killer of heroes. One poem described this force: 41 Anonymous, Untitled poem, The Liberator 8 (May 4, 1838) 18: 72, lines 60-63 (“From ‘Slavery Rhymes’”). 42 Countryman, “Moral Economy, Political Economy, and the American Bourgeois Revolution,” 147-165, esp. 158-160, in Adrian Randall and Andrew Charlesworth [eds.], Moral Economy and Popular Protest: Crowds, Conflict and Authority (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000). 43 Whittier to Elizabeth Neall, 10 February 1839, The Letters of John Greenleaf Whittier, John Pickard [ed.] (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1975) 1, 323. 44 Whittier, The Poetical Works (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Co., 1892) 57. 130 J OE L OCKARD Mobocracy, by nothing awed, In hellish fury stalks abroad, And hence do Abolitionists Encounter feathers, tar, and fists. Nought sacred in its jaundiced eye - Property burns, and martyrs die. 45 This was a poetry of battle joined, a demand for an end to the state of exception that enabled both mob rule and slavery. Alton’s Public Poetry As evidence for the preceding arguments, we shall turn here to a discussion of the poetry of martyrdom that appeared in The Liberator and other newspapers beginning early December 1837 after the murder of abolitionist newspaper publisher Elijah Lovejoy in Alton, Illinois. This was the first occasion where white sectors of the abolitionist movement addressed a white abolitionist’s death for the antislavery cause or encountered questions concerning the terms of racial privilege in antislavery work. While such abolitionist addresses may evidence an intrinsic social myopia, one that focused on a single white man’s death while leaving millions of black deaths without address, it is equally true that Lovejoy’s murder created what John Quincy Adams called “a shock as of an earthquake across the continent.” 46 The indisputable effect that a white minister’s death had testifies eloquently to the mass social blindness that prevailed due to racial hierarchy, one in which white abolitionists shared. The widespread idolization of Lovejoy crossed ideological boundaries too. Poetry mourning or celebrating Lovejoy appeared in The Liberator despite Garrison’s personal opposition to Lovejoy on grounds of his willingness to respond with violence in self-defense. Shortly after hearing the news of Lovejoy from Illinois in mid-November Garrison wrote to Hannah Fifield, an active abolitionist in Massachusetts, that “I am shocked and filled 45 Anonymous, ‘Extract from the Carrier’s Address of the Ohio Repository,” The Liberator 8 (January 26, 1838) 4: 16. A ‘Carrier’s Address’ was a popular poetic form throughout nineteenth-century US journalism. They appeared in newspaper supplements commonly printed at Christmas or New Years for the benefit of paper carriers, who used it to ask for holiday gratuities. These poems usually concerned topical politics and reflected a newspaper’s political position, so lengthy antislavery passages frequently appeared in such ‘Carrier’s Addresses’. This is an excerpt from such a poem. 46 Adams, ‘Introduction,’ at 12 in Joseph Lovejoy and Owen Lovejoy, Memoir of the Rev. Elijah P. Lovejoy; Who was Murdered in Defence of the Liberty of the Press, at Alton, Illinois, Nov. 7, 1837 (1838). Jacksonian Mobs, Free Speech, and the Rise of American Antislavery Poetry 131 with sorrow to learn, that he first took life before he lost his own, and that this reliance for victory in the darkest hour of the conflict was upon powder and ball.” 47 Nonetheless, despite a pacifism that was to gain organizational expression in the form of the Non-Resistance Society established in September 1838, Garrison found grounds to defend Lovejoy’s actions as more facts came to light. In correspondence with his close friend, the abolitionist and Unitarian minister Samuel May, Garrison argued that the deputization Lovejoy received before his death conferred civil authority upon him. Garrison described the death as a deadly consequence of a state of exception, one where Lovejoy and a well-ordered state fell together. Grasping at inadequately-stated facts, Garrison wrote, “He died, not as an abolitionist, but as one of the police of Alton, regularly enrolled by the Mayor, with others, to sustain the supremacy of law against anarchists and ruffians. When he fell, and the murderers triumphed, government fell.” 48 This distinction characterized Garrison’s comments on Lovejoy in The Liberator, 49 but he also recognized his view was a minority within the American Antislavery Society. Eventually he settled on the formulation that “Lovejoy was certainly a martyr, but, strictly speaking, he was not - at least in our opinion - a Christian [italics in original] martyr.” 50 This mantle of civil martyrdom Garrison wrapped about Lovejoy enabled him, as The Liberator’s editor, to publish without qualm a broad selection of Lovejoy commemorative poetry, both what contributors sent directly to his newspaper and what he reprinted from other journals. And poetry flowed. Lovejoy’s death in the midst of a direct confrontation with a pro-slavery mob animated angry antislavery imaginations. The Lovejoy poetry they produced employed evangelical imagery of social conflict and calls for the state to awaken to its imminent risk, such as were to become commonplace a generation later. But most crucially, the poetry frequently raised the Alton riot as an issue of conflict between “a merciless mob” and dissident citizenship demanding free expression. By elevating an individual abolitionist to martyrdom, public antislavery poetry advocated a concept of democratic citizenship based on individual expression and resistance to mob censorship. Public poetry provided a mode of both condemnation and heroic self-representation that appealed to white abolitionists drawn into antislavery activism despite, or sometimes because of, the social alienation, risks, and ostracism that such activity entailed. 47 Garrison to Hannah Fifield, 21 November 1837, Louis Ruchames [ed.], The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1971) 328. 48 Garrison to Samuel J. May, 30 December 1837, in Ruchames [ed.], The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison, vol. 2, 331-332. 49 Liberator 7 (December 22, 1837) 52: 205. 50 Garrison and Garrison, 190. 132 J OE L OCKARD After Elijah Lovejoy’s murder on November 7, 1837, US antislavery poetry encounters its first truly native abolitionist hero, one whose life turned into journalistic hagiography. The summary facts of Lovejoy’s life and death are that he was born, raised and educated in Maine, where he graduated from Waterville College (now Colby College) as his class laureate in 1826. He worked briefly as a teacher, then departed westwards in 1827 to take up teaching once again in St. Louis. Lovejoy’s poetry suggests a personality on fire, a preoccupation with achieving personal knowledge of his divine blessing, and a foreboding that his life would be short. 51 In 1832 Lovejoy returned east to the Theological Seminary of Princeton for studies; he was ordained in 1833 as a Presbyterian minister. Quite the religious bigot, Lovejoy was determined to convert the entire world to his faith, particularly the heathen Papists of Europe. 52 Europe was spared, as he began his crusade by heading west again. By 1835 Lovejoy was a circuit riding minister in Missouri and the editor of The Observer, a St. Louis reform newspaper he endowed with twin hatreds of slavery and Catholicism. 53 When local opposition arose, Lovejoy wrote that “The fire that is now blazing and crackling through this city, was kindled on Popish altars, and has been assiduously blown by Jesuit breath.” 54 After being burned out of his offices by a St. Louis mob, Lovejoy moved on to Alton, Illinois, where a mob greeted the now well-known abolitionist crusader by burning his new press on the dock. Mobs burned Lovejoy’s premises twice more in 1837 before he died on November 7 of 51 See his poem “My Mother,” 34-37 in Joseph and Owen Lovejoy, Memoir of the Rev. Elijah P. Lovejoy; Who was Murdered in Defence of the Liberty of the Press, at Alton, Illinois, Nov. 7, 1837 (1838). 52 Ibid 81-88. 53 For discussion of the effects of Lovejoy’s fanning of anti-Catholicism in Saint Louis, see William Barnaby Faherty, “Nativism and Midwestern Education: The Experience of Saint Louis University, 1832-1856,” History of Education Quarterly 8 (Winter 1968) 4: 447-558, 551ff. 54 Ibid 149. This aspect of Lovejoy’s beliefs, the attribution of a Catholic conspiracy in support of slavery, has been either overlooked or downplayed by writers attracted to Lovejoy as a martyr in the cause of freedom. Former senator Paul Simon, himself a Lovejoy biographer, both recognized and dismissed this issue on brief consideration: “He was particularly intolerant of Catholics. It was not simply a matter of disagreeing on certain doctrines; he condemned anyone associated with the Catholic Church. It was characteristic of the age he lived in to express extreme opinions, and his were extreme.” Simon, Lovejoy: Martyr to Freedom (St. Louis, MO: Concordia Publishing House, 1964) 25, also 138. While Simon recognizes the humanity in such an error, like other Lovejoy writers he avoids exploring the intellectual link between anti-Catholic and antislavery discourses. For more on the same, see Jenny Franchot, Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994) 102-105. Jacksonian Mobs, Free Speech, and the Rise of American Antislavery Poetry 133 that year, shot by a mob that had gathered to destroy a fourth new press just arrived in a storehouse. The City of Alton prosecuted twelve of Lovejoy’s supporters and eight defendants alleged to have participated in the mob: all were found not guilty. Without any single defendant accountable for Lovejoy’s death, many abolitionists held responsible the City of Alton and its mobs. His brother Owen Lovejoy, who was to become a leading political abolitionist and a founding figure of the Republican Party, pointed an accusing finger at the city itself in his “Open Letter to the Citizens of Alton, Illinois.” Owen’s knowledge was based on personal residence in Alton during the events leading to the death of his brother. Alton, he wrote, had been overcome by forces of social darkness: A tumultuary, lawless, fanatic power, over-mastering or overawing the civil authority, enslaving public sentiment - paralyzing the public conscience - freezing with fear the sympathies of even the generous, the intelligent, and the good, and, with a few noble exceptions, making the mind of your whole city to hold its breath, and crouch in silence before it - ferocity victorious over right, brute force over free opinion - a gang of ruffians claiming to be regulators of free speech and the press, usurping the name of the people, and grasping in the same polluted clutch, the functions of accuser, judge, and executioner - ‘Making night hideous’ with their loathsome triumph … Such are the images that now start at the name of A LTON . 55 With rhetorical fires fueled by such damning phrases, Alton became synonymous with an American Sodom. Although no worse than many other US cities and better than a significant number of other cities in its treatment of abolitionists, not to mention black residents, 56 it was Alton that suffered long-lasting national stigma and became synonymous with intolerance of free speech. Scare headlines such as appeared in The Liberator - “F URTHER FROM A LTON - H ORRID S TATE OF S OCIETY - C HRISTIANS F LEEING TO S AVE T HEIR L IVES ! ” 57 - characterized the vituperation abolitionists heaped on the city. Years later an Alton minister was traveling in Ohio, stated where he was from, and heard the response “Alton! It is covered with blood! ” 58 But denunciations of Alton manifested a substitution: the city and the violence 55 William F. and Jane Ann Moore, His Brother’s Blood: Speeches and Writings 1838-64 - Owen Lovejoy (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2004) 5. 56 There were few antebellum poems dealing with inflictions by specific cities against blacks. One example, following the arson of a black school, was Garrison’s ‘Sonnet on reading an account of the disgraceful proceedings at New-Haven, relative to the Afric-American College,’ The Liberator 1 (October 8, 1831) 41: 161. 57 The Liberator 7 (December 1, 1837) 49: 195. 58 Melvin Jameson, Elijah Lovejoy as a Christian (Rochester, NY: Wetmore and Co., 1907) 8. 134 J OE L OCKARD against Lovejoy substituted for the whole territory of slavery. Rhetoric and poetry that localized guilt within Alton simultaneously spoke to a far broader distribution of responsibility for slavery. Henry Clarke Wright, one of the more perceptive antislavery activists, spoke to the hypocrisy inhering in this simultaneous martyization of Lovejoy and demonization of Alton: May the whole nation feel deeply this tragedy; but millions of our citizens are daily being offered on the same altar on which Lovejoy was offered, and sacrificed to the same demon to which he was sacrificied. Who feels for the slave? The poor Indian - who feels for him? … a whole nation almost exterminated, butchered, MURDERED by the American church and republic. Who feels? The murder of one clothes the nation in sympathetic sorrow; the murder of thousands, ay, millions, fills it with shouts of joy and triumph. Two men are butchered, and the nation is disgraced forever - a whole people is butchered, and the nation is covered with glory! 59 Lovejoy rose as Alton declined. Whether because of or despite his fervent pursuit of martyrdom, Lovejoy became for his contemporaries the symbol of embattled abolitionism and a willingness to die in the assault upon slavery. The unsightly aspects of Lovejoy’s political writings, such as bigoted charges that “Judge Lawless is a Papist”, 60 disappeared in his elevation to a hero who stood for free speech against pro-slavery mobs and who communed with God before confronting the mob. This was the political appreciation that prevailed in the aftermath of his murder and that has continued to define the historical understanding of Lovejoy’s death in Alton. Michael Kent Curtis describes Lovejoy’s death as having “crystallized support for a broad and general view of free speech in the North and dramatically strengthened the view that mobs and the institution of slavery threatened liberty and representative government.” 61 The transformational power of the Alton Riot, Curtis argues, lay in the creation of a new social emphasis on protection of free speech and access to public forums. These themes do appear in the poetry about Lovejoy and the Alton Riot, but in more complex form: they arrive conjoined with themes of social heroism, martyrdom, gothic ghoulishness, and spiritual damnation caused by slavery. With these themes, poetry about Lovejoy animates the imagery of violated human rights, especially in its figuration of the mob. 59 Wright, ‘Case of Br. Lovejoy,’ The Liberator 7 (December 8, 1837) 50: 1. 60 Ibid 176. The reference here is not to a mob but rather to Judge Luke Edward Lawless, an unfortunate name for the holder of a judicial appointment. Lawless was a controversial pro-slavery judge in Missouri who defended lynching blacks and publicly attacked Lovejoy’s newspaper. 61 Michael Kent Curtis, Free Speech, ‘The People’s Darling Privilege’ (Chapel Hill, NC: Duke University Press, 2000) 241-247. Curtis provides an excellent and detailed treatment of Lovejoy and Alton in chapters 10 and 11. Jacksonian Mobs, Free Speech, and the Rise of American Antislavery Poetry 135 In The Liberator, Lovejoy’s idolization began with a poem from Alonzo Lewis, a now largely unremembered poet and regional historian whose Romantic verse on Massachusetts landscapes was quite popular throughout the nineteenth century. 62 Lewis’s poem “Lovejoy” characterizes him as a noble defender of human rights “which God has given” (line 4). 63 “’Twas joy to thee to bleed” (line 5), writes Lewis, employing a trope that was to become repetitive among later commemorative poems. Lewis’s 32-line poem in rhyming quatrains, probably the first poem on Lovejoy published, has little to recommend itself as memorable. The poem voices fairly standard themes of sacrificial patriotism, masculine affirmation of freedom, and martyrdom for the nation. It invokes Washington and Lafayette, and promises that Lovejoy’s name will become “the battle word, / To lead our spirits on! ” (lines 31-32). The use Lewis made of Lovejoy as a rallying call paralleled the rhetoric of other Garrisonian abolitionists, and the presence of Lewis - “the Lynn Bard” - added literary gravitas to the call. From December 1837 through the following year, over twenty poems concerning or referencing Lovejoy and Alton appeared in the pages of The Liberator. Many more appeared in other antislavery journals and the general press. By the occasion of the Boston antislavery fair at year’s end, a commemorative print of Lovejoy featuring the words of his mother - “’Tis well! I would rather my son had fallen a martyr to his cause, than that he had proved recreant to his principles” - together with a martyr-poem was available for purchase by fairgoers. 64 The thematic trajectory of momentous sacrifice and martyrdom established itself from the beginning. Lovejoy was not only instantly canonized, but served to exemplify the true height of commitment demanded of abolitionists. A poem by W.H.T. Barnes entitled “Addressed to the Co-Workers of the Martyred Lovejoy” 65 mourned “For human rights he did fall” (line 14) and enjoined others to exhibit similar willingness to confront injury or death at the hands of proslavery mobs. Lovejoy’s death served, in rather predictable verse, as an occasion to urge the antislavery movement forward: 62 Lewis (1794-1861) was a well-known intellectual figure, poet, historian, justice of the peace, newspaper editor, teacher, and civil engineer from Lynn, Massachusetts. His publications included Poems (1823), The History of Lynn (Boston: J.H. Eastburn, 1829), and Love, Forest Flowers and Sea Shells (Boston: B.B. Mussey, 1850), which went through ten editions. Lewis was an active member of the American Anti-Slavery Society. 63 The Liberator 7 (December 8, 1837) 50: 200. 64 The Liberator 8 (January 12, 1838) 2: 6. 65 W.H.T. Barnes, ‘Addressed to the Co-Workers of the Martyred Lovejoy,’ The Liberator 8 (February 9, 1838) 6: 24. 136 J OE L OCKARD At Lovejoy’s grave, O! linger not to weep, But man the pulpit and the noble press, O’er slavery first a holy conquest reap, And heal the wounds of millions in distress. (lines 21-24) Another poet responded months later to these sentiments with verse meant to stir abolitionist spirits: A thousand hearts are beating high, Nerv’d for the contest, stern and strong, Firmly resolved to “do or die” - A mighty and unflinching throng, Ready to fall as Lovejoy fell; Their lives for human rights to sell. 66 Such antislavery poetry treated human rights as a concept that needed no further exploration than the ritual damnation of slavery. There were fewer poems that pursued the interpretive work of explaining precisely what human rights were or why they might be worthy of considerable sacrifice. Poems that did discuss specific freedoms tended to treat them both metaand ahistorically as a national heritage, as freedoms once realized and now under assault: The precious legacy, Bequeathed by holy sires - Freedom of speech! Right to discuss, and right to publish truth! This precious legacy, tyrants would rob Us of - they boldly bid us hold our tongues! And threaten D EATH to such as dare avow Their hatred to the foul fiend S LAVERY … (lines 8-14) 67 Here the Republic is in danger and it is the sacred task of abolitionists to rise to the defense of constitutionally-guaranteed liberties. The tone of these poems is usually positive, defiant, and in a fighting mood - “…millions, roused, shall pledge upon thy grave / Death to oppression! Freedom to the slave! ” 68 Such defiant words were common, but in a few poems social despair seeps through. The failure of the law and civic institutions to protect Lovejoy warned that no abolitionist was safe engaging in antislavery campaigning, especially those in western towns with substantial pro-slavery sentiment and less-established civic peacekeeping capacities. As one poet wrote: 66 U.G.B., ‘My Country,’ The Liberator 8 (June 18, 1838) 27: 108. Reprinted from the Quincy Patriot. 67 R., ‘The American Republic,’ The Liberator 8 (March 9, 1838) 10: 40. 68 W.H.B., ‘Sonnets,’ The Liberator 7 (December 29, 1837) 53: 212. Jacksonian Mobs, Free Speech, and the Rise of American Antislavery Poetry 137 There is no safety in the strength of laws, Else, why did Lovejoy die in Freedom’s cause? There is no safety for the pen or press, If deeds like this, the laws cannot repress… (lines 9-12) 69 State sovereignty has disappeared; legitimate sovereignty disappears when a populist dictatorship nullifies the legal protection under which Lovejoy functioned. The poet, like other abolitionists, writes to articulate the difficulties of a situation where law effectively has been suspended for those engaged in antislavery agitation. Yet, like other poets regretting the state’s failure to protect Lovejoy, the pseudonymous “Arion” fails to recognize that blacks have lived under a state-sanctioned state of exception as patrol laws, Black codes, and lynch violence created legal and extra-legal means for whites to exercise a racialized state of exception for blacks. If Lovejoy’s death represented a massive failure in the protection of civil liberties, then a civic evil was abroad that had violated those liberties. Poetic figuration of that evil provided a rich psychological vein of images. In Dover, New Hampshire, at a commemoration meeting held in the Congregationalist church on November 29, another public poem, “Dirge,” 70 written for the occasion, raised Lovejoy as a figure whose sacrifice upheld divine law in the midst of slavery’s lawlessness. The poem’s imagery is startling, dark and demonic. It begins “from Freedom’s western plain, / Sounds of direful tumult come” (lines 1-2) before entering into a description of slavery’s supporters as fiendish demons invading the territories of freedom. “Hark! - a hundred demons’ yell / rends afar the midnight air…” (lines 5-6) Moreover, Lovejoy’s death is a cannibalistic feast that the blood-stained pro-slavery party is now enjoying: L OVEJOY bleeds! - now Slavery quaffs Deeply from the Martyr’s veins! 71 Wild the bloody Demon laughs, Loud the joy infernal reigns! (lines 9-12) Such imagery converts to new use the regular appearance of cannibalistic tropes in antislavery poetry. In one anti-sugar poem, for example, the poet 69 Arion, ‘The Alton Riot,’ The Liberator 7 (December 22, 1837) 52: 208. 70 E. Mack, ‘Dirge,’ The Liberator 7 (December 8, 1837) 50: 200. 71 This sort of provocative imagery was calculated to rouse Southern anger. One South Carolina poet who responded was William Grayson, who wrote sarcastically “The slaveholders are man-stealers, why not man-eaters? […] The topic is recommended to Messrs. Greeley and Garrison, and particularly to Mrs. Stowe in her next story. It will be as authentic as the rest of her facts, and as readily believed by her Northern and European readers.” Grayson, The Hireling and the Slave, Chicora, and Other Poems (Charleston, SC: McCarter and Co., 1856) 161-162. 138 J OE L OCKARD revolts at the thought of eating the blood of slaves, where a conserve “is sprinkled o’er with human blood- / A brother’s or a sister’s warm life’s blood: / The purple current, coloring the ground / They’re forced to till. -And, knowing this, shall I / Assist in riveting the chain? ” 72 Lovejoy’s murder here serves both to nourish slavery and to stir the nation to rise against slavery. Although his slain body comes to rest, its murder causes “Freedom’s G ENIUS ” to “cry blood” at his grave (lines 28-31) and the animating spirit of his spilled blood “Wakes Jehovah’s Arm of R IGHT ! ” (line 32). The poem suggests a transcendent economy of transference between a martyred body, the nation, and a divine spirit that will bring salvation to both. Equally macabre is another poem, “The Voice of Blood,” which appeared in mid-December as a reprint from The Philanthropist, the antislavery newspaper that James G. Birney and Gamaliel Bailey had established the previous year in Cincinnati and that was also sacked by a mob. 73 The poem’s anonymous author conceives of Alton and the entire state of Illinois as being visited by an amorphous spirit-voice of death that casts a darkness over the land as it passes. At Alton, site of Lovejoy’s death, when the voice of blood arrives - … the child, when he hears it, shall cry for light! Tho’ the sun is high and the day is bright; And the mother, in frantic mood, Shall shriek as it mutters, the cradle near, In a whisper so loud that the dead might hear; “I AM BLOOD ! T HE VOICE OF BLOOD ! ” (lines 11-16) The stanza imaginatively fuses two biblical plagues of Egypt, the rivers of blood and death of first-born children (in this case imputed), together with a prophetic voice that has substance, that can shadow out the sun. That voice floods the prairies with its force and fear, demanding that the state’s citizens rouse themselves in the name of freedom. This is a Poe-esque vision-poem that urges a citizenry to awake from a potential nightmare of blood, or face their own death in consequence of neglecting the call of freedom. The poem carries very much the same tone as parts of the “Open Letter” where Owen Lovejoy warned the city where his brother had been murdered that “Yea, in the L AST G REAT C ONGREGATION the gory phantom will start forth and arraign you at the bar of eternal justice.” 74 Yet the malignant force of “The 72 ‘Edna’, untitled, The Genius of Universal Emancipation 3 (May 1833) 7, 3 rd series, 112. For a similar anti-sugar poem with cannibalistic imagery, see ‘Ela’, ‘Oh Press Me Not to Taste Again,’ The Genius of Universal Emancipation 3 (November 1832) 1, 3 rd series, 13. 73 For a history of the three anti-abolitionist riots and press sackings conducted against The Philanthropist, in 1836 and 1841, see Grimsted 58-64. 74 Moore and Moore, 13. Jacksonian Mobs, Free Speech, and the Rise of American Antislavery Poetry 139 Voice of Blood” remains disembodied, as an imaginative expansion upon a single death: the poem misses a larger specificity, that being the unimaginable mass of deaths caused by centuries of slavery. Other antislavery poems had a broader vision that did not make such omission. For comparative example, Peter Randolph’s “The Blood of the Slave” prose-poem, published in his slave narrative, Sketches of Slave Life: or, Illustrations of the “Peculiar Institution”, voices a jeremiadic cry for recognition of past, present, and future blood spilled and that names this mass of victims: The blood of the slave cries unto God from the ground, and it calls loudly for vengeance on his adversaries. The blood of the slave cries unto God from the rice swamps. The blood of the slave cries unto God from the cotton plantations. (lines 1-6) The poem continues: The blood of the slave cries unto God from the huntingdogs that run down the poor fugitive. The blood of men, women and babes cries unto God from Texas to Maine. Wherever the Fugitive Slave Law reaches, the voice of its victims is heard. 75 (lines 18-22) The power of Randolph’s prose-poem, by contrast with ‘The Voice of Blood,’ lies in its Whitman-esque invocation of a series of images from slavery, an image series that rolls forward as a therapeutic tempest. Unlike ‘The Voice of Blood,’ the scene is national rather than local. This specification of national experience over specificity of local place raises an important issue relating to the poetry of the Alton riot: how does geographic delimitation of the site of violated liberties, where in fact these violations are widespread, configure a poem’s power? Is this Lovejoyand Alton-related poetry less powerful for its focus on one death, one town, and one history, given the near limitless violations of liberties throughout the United States? If ‘The Voice of Blood’ seems an Illinois gothic, ‘The Blood of the Slave’ is a national jeremiad where blood stretches “from Texas to Maine.” Is ‘The Voice of Blood’ or Lovejoy poetry parochial or less compelling for its narrow focus? This question points to the use of public poetry for political and religious sanctification of the murder of an abolitionist by an Illinois mob, a use that functioned by converting a local incident into a national cause. Thomas Stone, a minister in Lovejoy’s native Maine, captured this expansion-via- 75 Peter Randolph, Sketches of Slave Life: or, Illustrations of the ‘Peculiar Institution’ (Boston: Published for the Author, 1855) 80-81. 140 J OE L OCKARD sanctification in a memorial sermon entitled “The Martyr of Freedom,” first delivered in late November, 1837. Noting first the early Christian tradition of using “martyr” as a synonym for “witness”, Stone argues that Lovejoy was precisely such an apostolic witness: “Grant that Lovejoy were as rash and imprudent as has been alleged, yet certainly he died in attestation and defense of the great truth, G OD DEMANDS IN THE G OSPEL OF HIS S ON , THE REDEMPTION OF SLAVES FROM A CRUEL OPPRESSION .” 76 In meeting his death in defense of this truth, Stone argued, Lovejoy had met the fundamental test of martyrdom. Martyrdom begins within the local, but the martyrmaking process stretches towards the social horizons for greater meaning. The truth that a martyr attests cannot be permitted to remain local; for an ideological movement to succeed, that truth must be celebrated on an everextending basis in order to attain an expansive recognition. An integral part of this process, public poetry served as a leading vehicle in the antislavery movement’s elevation of Lovejoy. From this perspective, both “The Voice of Blood” and “The Blood of the Slave” can be viewed as points along an expressive continuum where martyrdom begins with the individual and local, and moves towards the collective and national. If freedom is a universal right, then martyrdom contributes towards a universal human benefit. It is this potential universality of meaning in the act of martyrdom that works against the local: Lovejoy inevitably means more than Alton. An aesthetic consequence of this imagistic shift can be found in a poem such as Eliza Lee Follen’s “To the Martyrs of Freedom”, 77 which she renders as “a free translation from the German of T.G. Salis”. 78 The poem, which counsels those “who in evil times were born” (line 9) on due patience in the fight for human rights, creates an unspecific environment where principles alone define its geography: In the cloud-tent of distant skies, Truth calmly waits, with balance true, Casts off traditionary lies, And gives to Justice homage due. Reason proclaims eternal laws; Mad mobs and tyrants, in their hour - Aye, for whole ages, hurt her cause, But never can destroy her power (lines 25-32). 76 Thomas Stone, The Martyr of Freedom: A Discourse Delivered at East Machias, November 30, and at Machias, December 7, 1837 (Boston: Isaac Knapp, 1838) 3-4. 77 Follen, ‘To the Martyrs of Freedom,’ 34-37 in The Liberty Bell (1843). 78 The reference here is to Johann Gaudenz Salis-Seewis (1762-1834), whose Gedichte (Carlsruhe: Christian Gottlieb Schmieder, 1799) was a popular volume of German romantic poetry in print throughout the nineteenth century. Jacksonian Mobs, Free Speech, and the Rise of American Antislavery Poetry 141 What Alton provides that this unspecific geography does not is an instant case of “mad mobs” that impede the cause of reasoned justice and human rights. It is this geographic specificity, appearing for the first time in US antislavery poetry in other than pejorative references to southern states or laudations of northern ones, that marks Alton/ Lovejoy poetry as a milepost. Thus an anonymous January 1838 poem such as “Mob Notoriety of Certain Places” 79 mentions as minor prefaces to Alton such cities as Canterbury, Connecticut, where Prudence Crandall’s school was destroyed; New York City, where anti-black and anti-abolitionist riots had occurred; and Vicksburg, Mississippi, which had shortly before lynched gamblers. However, Alton alone is with the laurel crowned: Here, only Blood is crying from the ground! This city, crimsoned now with scarlet dyes, Reflects its image on the vaulted skies (lines 23-26). Such a focus on one geographic site repeats the entire imaginative process that selects one individual as a representative martyr, and so turns one incident among many into a didactic example of tragedy. Yet Lovejoy’s death and the Alton Riot were a negligible part of the daily redundancies of violence experienced by black slaves, who lived within a permanent state of exception. The prominence of Lovejoy and Alton derives as much from the privilege granted to a white martyr and his value for abolitionist propaganda as from confrontation over civil liberties such as free speech and free press. If the body of poetry about Alton and Lovejoy represents a notable milepost in antislavery poetics, it also instantiates the absence of systemic outlook that looked beyond white lives, an infatuation with religious oppositions of Christian good and demonic evil, and the frequent weaknesses of such poetry. The Alton Riot unquestionably produced a wave of public reaction that focused attention on realization of the free speech guarantee in the First Amendment to the United States constitution. Harriet Martineau, surveying the United States and its society for her British readers, wrote in The Martyr Age of the United States (1839) that “The anniversary of Lovejoy’s death will be a sacrament day for his comrades till slavery shall be no more…” and that the shock created by the murder of a minister exercising free speech would carry into the minds of US citizens “some notion that they are living in remarkable times, and that they have some extraordinary neighbors.” 80 Martineau’s observation that Lovejoy’s case spoke to the remarkable nature 79 Anonymous, ‘Mob Notoriety of Certain Places,’ The Liberator 8 (January 9, 1838) 3: 12. 80 Martineau, Writings of Slavery and the American Civil War, Deborah Anna Logan [ed.] (DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2002) 71. 142 J OE L OCKARD of the times has continued to characterize treatments of the case as a civil liberties landmark. It is this spirit of documenting remarkable history and citing it as cautionary example for present-day civil liberties issues that brought Paul Simon, in his earnest, tolerant and profoundly decent Midwestern liberalism, to write a Lovejoy biography. Writing in 1964, in the midst of the Civil Rights Movement to which he contributed, Simon cited Martin Luther King’s calls for racial equality and found in Lovejoy’s fight “a struggle for human dignity for the oppressed.” 81 Later, others standing in opposition to women’s rights employed Lovejoy and Alton to their own ends: the case has been cited in anti-abortion legal argument as an instance of the suppression of free speech kindred to “restrictions upon the First Amendment rights” of abortion clinic protestors, 82 part of the anti-abortion movement’s persistent misappropriation of abolitionist history. Yet the symbolic contribution of the Lovejoy case continues to be felt in free speech cases into the twenty-first century, appearing in legal contexts as varied as pornography and attempts to secure parade permits for gays and lesbians. 83 But that symbolism has, for the most part neglected the imagery used in anti-slavery poetry as it created a Christian martyr of his face-to-face confrontation with mob violence. Acknowledgements and thanks to A. Robert Lee and Sarah Liu for their comments. 81 Simon, 141. Simon’s concluding chapter, “Does the Spirit of Elijah Lovejoy Still Live? ” (137-142), discusses Lovejoy as an inspiration in civil rights work. 82 Lynn Wardle, “The Quandry of Pro-Life Free Speech: A Lesson from the Abolitionists,” 62 Alb. L. Rev. 853, at 915, 922. 83 Re pornography, see Haberman v. Hustler Magazine, Inc., 626 F. Supp. 201, 1986 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 30902; 229 U.S.P.Q. (BNA) 15; State of Oregon v. 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