← New Books Network
New Books Network
Mary T. Freeman, "Abolitionists and the Politics of Correspondence" (U Pennsylvania Press, 2026)
01:12:36
Loading summary
Transcript48 lines
- [00:01]
Home Depot Announcer
Your summer starts now with Memorial Day deals at the Home Depot. It's time to fire up summer cookouts with the next grill 4 burner gas grill on special. Buy for only $199 and entertain all season with the Hampton bay West Grove seven piece outdoor dining set for only $499. This Memorial Day get low prices guaranteed at the Home Depot while supplies Last priced invalid May 14 through May 27 US only exclusion supplies. See homedepot.com Pricematch for details.
- [00:31]
Mary Freeman
So good, so good, so good.
- [00:33]
Nordstrom Rack Announcer
Everything you want for summer is at Nordstrom Rack stores now and up to 60% off. Stock up and save on the brands you love like Vince Sam, Edelman Frame and free people. Join the NordicLub to unlock exclusive discounts. Shop new arrivals first and more. Plus buy online and pick up at your favorite rack store for free. Great brands, great prices. That's why you rack
- [00:59]
Red Bull Announcer
ready to soundtrack your summer with Red Bull Summer All Day Play. You choose a playlist that fits your summer vibe the best. Are you a festival fanatic, a deep end dj, a road dog, or a trail mixer? Just add a song to your chosen playlist and put your summer on track. Red Bull Summer All Day Play. Red Bull gives you wings. Visit red bull.com brightsummer ahead to learn more. See you this summer.
- [01:25]
Mary Freeman
Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:29]
Michael Stout
Hello and welcome to the New Books Network. I'm your host, Michael Stout, and today I'm here with Mary Freeman to talk about her new book, Abolitionists and the Politics of Correspondence, which is out now from the University of Pennsylvania Press. Mary Freeman is an associate professor of history at the University of Maine with a focus on the political, social and cultural history of slavery and abolition. Her writing has appeared in the Journal of the Early Republic and she is currently developing research project on 19th century black activism in Maine and on the history of abolitionist archives. Mary, welcome to the show.
- [02:02]
Mary Freeman
Thanks for having me.
- [02:04]
Michael Stout
Of course. Well, I usually start with the beginning of the book. Let's start with the title Abolitionists and the Politics of Correspondence. What are the politics of correspondence and how did correspondence shape the abolitionist cause?
- [02:17]
Mary Freeman
Yeah, so the title, the Politics of Correspondence, really tries to get at the heart of my argument in the book. So I'm arguing that letter writing could be a political action, a political tool for the 19th century abolitionist movement. That correspondence was a tool that allowed abolitionists to communicate with one another, to transmit information, to organize as a group over long distances, to kind of coalesce as a national and even international movement. It was really the technology of the time for activist organizing. And I guess beyond the sort of practical and logistical aspects as this sort of organizational tool, it was also a medium for activists to express their ideas. At a time when censorship was very active, there was a lot of risk in stating one's anti slavery stance publicly. People were targeted by mobs and even killed that were expressing those ideas publicly. So correspondence also provided kind of a sheltered space. Maybe we can get into this later, but it's something that's bridging between a means of public and private expression. So I think of it as kind of an in between space, a sheltered space where activists could work out their ideas, communicate with one another, of course, and also kind of hone some of their most important ideas and arguments in a space that wasn't as exposed as some of the other more public venues that they were operating in. So a lot of other scholars have written about lots of other actions, both formal and informal, that we should consider to be political. Letter writing and correspondence is sort of my contribution to that whole conversation. And I want to argue that abolitionists used letter writing as a way both to kind of shape their movement, shape the politics of this era, and also react to what was going on around them.
- [04:56]
Michael Stout
Yeah, okay, great. Well, I hope that we get into many of those topics as well. Now, one of the questions that really was striking to me, one of the reasons I thought this book would be so interesting to talk to you about was because of this idea of correspondence. I'm familiar with that idea because it was the name of a journal that a political activist named C.L.R. james had in the 1940s and 50s. For him, it was a reference to the Committees of Correspondence from an earlier period. Can you talk a little bit about the relationship between those two things?
- [05:26]
Mary Freeman
Yeah, so. Well, first of all, I think correspondence is a long standing tool of activist organization spanning before and long after the abolitionist movement that I'm looking at and through the present day. But maybe we can get into that at another point. But yeah, thinking specifically about the topic of the Committees of Correspondence and kind of the era that I am looking at and where I start the book, which is in the era of the American Revolution, the 1770s. So right in the era of the Committees of Correspondence, there's certainly a sense that correspondence is a way for these kind of elite intellectual and political networks to organize internationally, transatlantically, certainly. And, you know, it's a. It's a tool where, you know, some of the leaders of the patriot movement and the American Revolution are using this to connect with like minded people across the British American colonies at that time. It's a way for them to kind of get their message out and to mobilize their supporters. But we often, especially in that kind of 18th century moment, tend to think of it as something that was primarily the realm of relatively affluent, educated people, often white men in this era. So what I like about thinking about correspondence as an activist tool is that it certainly applies to those kinds of activities, like the Committees of Correspondence in the American Revolution. But it also opens up how people that we might not expect kind of flipped the script and took that same vehicle, that same method of organization, and used it to mobilize for quite, quite radical causes and to make quite radical demands that, you know, even challenged what other activist groups were doing at that time or kind of, you know, push people to think in completely new directions.
- [07:48]
Michael Stout
Yeah, well, I love it as I love the. The way that you've conceptualized, and I think you're right about the way that it helps these activist groups build bonds, kind of develop their ideas in this space between completely private and completely public. So I think it's. It's really fascinating. So great. Yeah. Okay. Before we move on, I had one more question. One of the things I find really striking about this book is it has no subtitle. What. Tell me a little bit more about, just from a writerly perspective, what informed that decision?
- [08:18]
Mary Freeman
Well, I guess I think I. This sort of goes back to being in graduate school, and one of the professors I had in a class made kind of an offhand comment once about the power of not having a subtitle and really stating up front what it is that your book or article or publication is about. So that piece of advice, which perhaps was not really offered in a completely. I don't know. I don't know how serious this person was about it, but it really stuck with me. And when it came time to think about the title for this book, I think I originally did have a subtitle when I was submitting the first proposal. But I think even like an hour before I submitted the proposal, I flipped it around and got rid of the subtitle. And actually, I've heard that often this is not the case, but that title was what stuck with the book throughout the whole publication process.
- [09:29]
Michael Stout
Yeah, well, it's a good title and it has the benefit. It's exactly what you hope for. It kind of like, why say anything else? It kind of gives you the sense you even get the approximate chronology simply by the reference to abolitionists. So it's A kind of. It accomplishes a lot without so many words. So it's great. Great. Yeah. Now, you describe a letter written by four black men in 1773. This is kind of the opening of the book as an alternative founding document for the United States. Could you tell us a little bit more about that document and its own kind of quite radical demands for equality?
- [10:02]
Mary Freeman
Yeah. So if it's okay, I'll. I'm going to read just a little bit from this document. I. This is one of these sources that I came across it in a teaching context. It's a source that has been, you know, circulated and reprinted and republished many times. And it really stuck with me as an effective tool for teaching originally about the American Revolution and the impact on slavery. It's a document that a group, a committee, if you will, in Boston of black men who not all of them were enslaved at the time they wrote this letter, but they all had connections to slavery there, had been enslaved in the past or the present, or were connected to this broader community of enslaved people in the area. So they wrote this letter that addressed members of the Massachusetts legislature and basically were kind of trying to hold them accountable to their own principles. So I'm just going to read a little bit from the first paragraph.
- [11:13]
Michael Stout
Of course, please do.
- [11:15]
Mary Freeman
So they address this is. It would be individually hand addressed to a single member of the legislature. And they say, dear sir, the efforts made by the legislative of this province in their last sessions to free themselves from slavery gave us, who are in that deplorable state, a high degree of satisfaction. We expect great things from men who have made such a noble stand against the designs of their fellow men to enslave them. So they go on. But what I love about this letter is that, you know, and other scholars have analyzed the language and how they're really adopting some of these, you know, revolutionary ideas about, you know, fellow men and kind of drawing this line in the sand about all men being created equal that we go on to see in the Declaration of Independence a few years later. They're adopting that language and kind of turning it back on these Massachusetts emerging patriot movement that is arguing that the colonists are enslaved to Great Britain. And they're saying, well, what about us? What about us who are actually enslaved in the colonies, not just sort of metaphorically enslaved, turning that back on them. And, you know, they phrase it in the form of a letter. You know, there's also petitions from the same time period. But the fact that they're, you know, individually addressing members of the legislature in the form of a letter to make these claims is something that I just was turning over and over in my head, first in a teaching context and then I had to really work it into the book.
- [13:06]
Michael Stout
Yeah, yeah, that's great. That's great. Now, you referred to these folks as a committee. So this is a committee of correspondence.
- [13:13]
Mary Freeman
They refer to themselves as a committee. So I, you know, I, echoing what some other historians have observed, would argue that they are, you know, adopting that same model of the committee of correspondence, operating kind of in parallel to what the patriot movement was doing at that time. And, you know, again, kind of holding members of that movement accountable to the principles that they were articulating in this, this era. And so, yeah, in the introduction, I argue that this letter reflects how often we place the birthplace of organized abolitionism sometime in the late 18th century with the formation of white led antislavery organizations like the Pennsylvania Abolition Society. But actually we can see organized abolitionism, a committee of black men, some of whom are enslaved, speaking for a larger community of enslaved people, you know, kind of operating as an organized committee in this moment. So, you know, again, I'm kind of trying to frame the origins of the abolitionist movement in line with what a lot of other historians are currently doing to reframe the history of abolitionism, to prioritize the influence and the significance of black abolitionists to the formation and ongoing perpetuation of that movement.
- [15:05]
Michael Stout
Yeah, yeah. Well, it's a great move. I love it. What affected the. Now this feels like a good place to talk a little bit more about the effect that the act of writing itself had on people's sense of themselves as political subjects. Can you talk just a bit more about the politics of correspondence in a way?
- [15:23]
Mary Freeman
Yeah. So I want to be careful to say that writing a letter was not the sort of origin, moment or birthplace of a person's political consciousness. There's lots of ways that people can act and think politically that don't involve writing or writing letters. But I do think that there's a way that often historians, especially sometimes US historians, will look at letters from the 18th or 19th century and kind of look at them as a transparent window into the mind of the person who was writing this document. But letters in this time period, and I would say even through today, are, you know, they're not so straightforward. They involve a set of conventions that people were often following or manipulating in some ways, and they involve kind of a process of self narration, self presentation and imagining a discussion with a potential audience member or members. So to go Back to the 1773 letter authored by this committee of black men. And this is a theme that comes up over and over in the book. We have to not just think about, you know, not just sort of take everything that they're saying as the transparent truth, but think about why they're phrasing things in a certain way, who they're addressing, what they want to say to their audience. So in some ways, I think it's a really, it can be a really self conscious way of framing oneself as a political subject, you know, presenting oneself more deliberately in that way, then that gives us insight into that process in a way that other sources can do in some ways and can't do in other ways.
- [17:45]
Michael Stout
Sure, sure. Well, your sort of analysis of the letters here is touching on some of the observations that you made in the book about the archival turn. And you have a lot to say about archives. And as I mentioned at the start, even developing a project on abolitionist archives. Can you talk a little bit about how the so called archival turn influenced your interpretation of the sources you used to write the book, the materiality of the documents, who created the archives and those kinds of things?
- [18:14]
Mary Freeman
Sure. Well, I have to say, part of the answer to that question, I mean, part of it is certainly a methodological and theoretical engagement with a body of scholarship, but part of it is also kind of autobiographical. I grew up, my parents, my dad was an antiques and rare books dealer, so I grew up kind of in that side of the business. And then, you know, as I took a deeper steps into my academic journey, first as an undergraduate and then as a graduate student, I worked in archives at the institutions I was studying, basically across my career as a student, as an undergrad and grad student. So I'd say kind of my growing up experiences and my experience working in archives also gave me a lot to think about in terms of where different documents or collections come from, how they get to archival institutions, how they're organized, how they're presented to researchers, what is available, what isn't available, and why that is. So that was all kind of something that has always fascinated me, and I increasingly wanted to be transparent about how that affects me as a researcher. When I go into collections, I'm already thinking about some of those things from other parts of my experience. So that affects how I'm analyzing these sources and thinking about the collections I'm looking at. And often kind of approaching collections as holistically as possible, trying to avoid just kind of parachuting into an archive and picking out the one or two items from a collection that seem most promising and instead really trying to go through box by box, folder by folder, leaf by leaf, and think about, well, some of this is more overtly political than other aspects, but what does it mean that in a collection of hundreds of family letters, there's only 10 or 20 that touch on abolitionism? And what does that sort of mean in the greater body of this collection? So that's, I guess, kind of the archival institution and collection level. On an individual source level. I think this also comes into play, as you mentioned, with thinking about some of the aspects of an individual source, beyond just the content, the text content of what's in that source. So thinking about the material aspects, some of the letters in the book that I look at that were written by enslaved people especially, you can really see how precious this type of communication was in paper and pens and ink. All of those things underwent a lot of technological change in the time period I'm looking at, but especially in the earlier part of the chronology, up until the 1840s or 1850s, paper was still relatively expensive. So when an enslaved person composes a letter on this really beautiful half sheet of paper, you can see they may have drafted this on another kind of scrap piece of paper and then redrafted to make sure that the final composition, not just in terms of spelling and grammar, is as polished as it can be, but even the visual presentation can be quite striking. The penmanship, the way that they flourish with their signature, it all kind of comes together as like a material and visual object as well as a text. So I want to kind of keep that in focus, especially when it seems relevant to the analysis of the source. And there's other examples. Probably the one that is, for me, one of the most fun to think about is the practice of cross writing, which is people say, read between the lines. This is kind of like that, although even some people will actually write in between the lines, literally. But typically crosswriting is when a person writes kind of parallel lines all down one way of the sheet of paper, flips the sheet 90 degrees and then writes literally across what they've already written. So as a reader, it's really difficult to kind of decipher the cross hatched writing. As a writer, to me, I've found that often the people that practice this cross writing are women, which I think is either a conscious or unconscious demonstration of being economical. They're saving paper, they're using everything to the maximum possible extent, which is in line with gender, ideology, expectations of that time. But it Also often results in. They're kind of filling the sheet with a lot of mundane, kind of quotidian family business news. And then they get to the end and they realize, oh, I really wanted to include this little juicy piece of gossip. Or I know that I really shouldn't be talking too much about politics, but I just have to tell you this one thing before I sign off. So it's actually in those crosswritten portions that sometimes you can find what they really, really wanted to say in their heart of hearts, or at least that's how it feels to me. So, again, it's kind of a combination of following the thought process of the writer, but also looking at the source as something that is a material and visual object as well as a text.
- [25:04]
Michael Stout
Yeah, well, that's a great example of the way that you're bringing your personal experience to bear in a way that's meaningful to the field. So I think that's a great story about how this. This about how the personal interacts with, like, broader questions that we all want to know about when we're writing history. Now, you've mentioned the reframing of the origins of abolition related to this. You propose a new reading of Angelina and Sarah Grimke, suggesting how their letter writing influenced their activ. Can you tell us a little bit more about that?
- [25:35]
Mary Freeman
Sure. So Angelina and Sarah Grimke, of course, are some of the most famous, Perhaps in the 19th century, most notorious abolitionist activists and women's rights activists. They were renowned and despised for speaking and writing publicly about the institution of slavery. They were both brought up in Charleston, South Carolina, in a very wealthy slaveholding family, and then kind of rejected that background when they moved north to Philadelphia, went on to be very prolific orators and writers on the topic of slavery, as well as the emerging movement for women's rights and feminism and that time period. So they're, you know, very well trodden ground historically. And what really fascinated me about them is that from our point of view, and probably even from the point of view of, say, like, 1840, they seem like inescapable. They're so famous, but they weren't always famous. They were kind of obscure. And they experienced this really rapid and dramatic rise to fame and notoriety that came about soon after Angelina Grimke wrote this letter to William Lloyd Garrison that he published, supposedly without her permission, in his newspaper, the Liberator. And it's a really powerful letter. She wrote it in the summer of 1835, when abolitionists were experiencing a really dramatic spike in violent attacks on themselves and Their movement. And she kind of wrote in this very militant tone, which is unexpected for a woman at this time, and essentially argued like, we need to be willing to lay down our lives for this movement. It is so morally important that we take this stand. So Garrison printed it as a way to galvanize his supporters, his readers, and, you know, kind of reinforce this idea that we're on the right track, we're on the right path. And that catapulted Angelina Grimke, as well as her sister, to fame. They went on again to serve as lecturers and write and publish a lot for the American Anti Slavery Society and went on to be, you know, kind of iconic women's rights activists as well. But it exposed them to a lot of criticism, and it took a toll on both of their mental and physical health over time. They kind of both faded from public view after Angelina married Theodore Weld. And, you know, they just, like, couldn't take it anymore and basically had to sign off from their most public activities. And that's all very well documented, but for me, I was really interested in how, even though they went on to become these enormously famous figures, that, for them, letter writing functioned in much the same way that it did for many other women in this time period who became involved in anti slavery activism. That it was a way for them to contribute to the movement when it was quite risky for them to speak out more publicly. And it was a way for them to feel connected to a larger cause, to kind of reach out beyond their immediate friends, family, community members, and tap into a larger national and international movement without having to, you know, physically move around. They could stay where they were and read the anti slavery newspapers and correspondence that they were receiving, and then write back and become contributors in that way.
- [30:06]
Michael Stout
Right, right. Well, it strikes me that this is a case of, you know, to return to an earlier topic, you mentioned this relationship between, like, private correspondence and public personalities or something like that. It seems like there's a little bit of uncertainty about whether or not there was consent in publishing the letter. But beyond that, I wanted to bring this. It seems like an opportunity to talk a little bit more about the public and the private and letter writing as a sheltered space. Maybe you could expand on that a little bit.
- [30:35]
Mary Freeman
Yeah. So, yeah, I mean, Angelina Grimke's letter to Garrison is a great example of how a letter that was originated as a private piece of correspondence became public, in that he published it in a national newspaper. So, you know, thousands of people ended up reading it, and it's preserved in print for us to read today. But, you know, I think this is true for all abolitionists, but perhaps especially for abolitionist women who had to be careful about not only the risks of political communication as sort of an unpopular, you know, piece of an unpopular activist movement at this time, but also women were, you know, they were expected to learn the art of letter writing, but mostly to stay in touch with family and friends. They were not expected to be writing to people who they didn't know, and they were expected to stick to topics that were appropriate for the gendered expectations of the time. So for women in this time period to write to people they didn't know, to write to strangers, and to write about political topics, that already could be risky, even if that was confined to a private communication. So I have examples in the book where women were sort of surveilled within their own households where their fathers or husbands could be keeping track of who they were writing to and perhaps disapprove if they were writing about political topics or writing to someone who was not, you know, an immediate family member. So there's that element of, you know, kind of how private is correspondence even within one's own home. It was, you know, a common practice for letters to be read aloud in social groups or exchanged among friends. People write about, you know, hey, I went and visited my friend and it was raining, so we spent all afternoon just going through all of her letters and reading. And, you know, I felt like I got to know her other friends who I've never met because I could read their letters. So this is all kind of part of the 19th century culture. So there's that way in which even private letters were not always completely private. And then there's, you know, also the element of risk in, you know, once a letter leaves your hands, you don't always know exactly how it might be tampered with before it's delivered or how it might become public in a way that you don't expect in some other way.
- [33:39]
Michael Stout
Sure, sure. Yeah. Well, there's also something really interesting in there about the way that the letters, as you've kind of suggested elsewhere, are helping to build. I don't know if it's the. If network is the right word or, like, audience for these ideas in the sense that many people write the letters in order to. They know that they're going to be read among maybe like a larger group of people, but. But not necessarily that they're going to be published in like, the leading abolitionist journal and circulated across the country. But there's. Is there Is it like a question of scale that separates those two things?
- [34:13]
Mary Freeman
Oh, that's a good question. You know, I think there's. There's certainly a sense that I get from some of these letters. Again, I mean, I think this is not necessarily only abolitionist women, but often abolitionist women who, you know, they're writing because they feel like they want to be part of something larger. There's this one young woman, she's actually a teenager when she's writing a lot of her letters that I talk about in the book. Her name was Charlotte Cowles. She lived in Farmington, Connecticut, and her immediate family was actually pretty strongly abolitionist. They had quite a lot of connections to the movement, but that would be mostly her father and her brother, so the male members of her household. But she, as a young woman felt pretty isolated outside of her family because she didn't find a lot of kind of community support among the other women in her, you know, in her friends and family kind of circuit in her community. So in her letters, I sense a lot of frustration that she feels like she's not getting this kind of political fuel in her day to day life. She's really only getting it by writing to her brother, actually, who lives in a neighboring town at that time. He's already kind of an adult off making his. His living in the world. So she kind of turns to letters because the only way for her to feel connected to this larger movement is by reaching beyond the people that she sees in her day to day life. And that's true of a lot of people in this book. They don't see a lot of support within their own communities for abolitionism, and they want to be involved. So they have to reach out, even sometimes to people that they don't know to. To find that community.
- [36:19]
Michael Stout
Right. I just think that's so interesting the way that you can be maybe relatively isolated, but then be finding these other networks to connect to that make it. They kind of give you like a more expansive vision of your own world or something like that. It's. It's really interesting. Now these, these letters are circulating by way of the postal service, which plays an important role in the book. Did abolition grow with the post office or how did, how did abolitionists engage with the postal service over time?
- [36:48]
Mary Freeman
Great question. So I guess against the, you know, the backdrop of this book, though, I do start with the sort of late 18th century, once we get into the period of the antebellum abolitionist movement. So kind of the 1830s onwards, as many people familiar with the 19th century know. This is a time of massive transformation for the US in terms of its economy, its transportation networks, urbanization, people moving to cities, people moving around in general. There's a lot going on, and part of that is with communication. Obviously, if you have better transportation networks, more efficient transportation, that's going to affect not just the transportation of people and goods, but also information. So there's kind of technological change going on that affects the efficiency and speed of communication. And that is connected to what's going on with the postal service in this time, which is it's becoming much bigger, much faster, and much more efficient. It's even kind of a subject of popular fascination in the mid 19th century because it's seen as kind of the pinnacle of modern technology, which from 2026 doesn't seems a little surprising. But at that time, people were kind of fascinated. How does it work that I can write a letter to someone who lives in another city, another state, across the country even, and it will go miraculously from my local post office to wherever they are in a relative short amount of time? I mean, depending where you were. I have letters from people who were kind of moving out to Michigan in the 1830s. And one of the women I look at in the book was really frustrated because it took two weeks for her to get anything from her family in Philadelphia. But if you lived along the Eastern seaboard in a relatively populated area, you could be getting your mail even faster than we can expect to get our mail today. Let's just leave it at that. So, yeah, it's a pretty. It's a time of transformation for lots of areas of American society, including communication technology and the postal service. So that's kind of unfolding in the background of the book. There's also postal reforms happening across this time period that mean that the cost of sending and receiving mail, receiving letters is going down so more and more people can access this. It was actually reformers argued that this was kind of a basic right, a basic need for people because everything was becoming so reliant on the ability to send and receive things through the mail. And also, literacy is expanding a lot in this time period. The kind of public school network was being built up. More and more people could expect to have access to literacy. So, yeah, that whole sort of broader context is really important for understanding why so many people, average people, were increasingly able to tap into this network of communication, including people who identified with the abolitionist movement for thinking about the significance to, you know, the organization of the movement and how they sort of saw themselves in Relationship to the postal system. The postal system was actually the strongest arm of the federal government in this time period. By the 1830s, about three quarters of federal workers were postal workers. And of course, there's also the issue of political patronage that's going on in the postal system at this time. So to be a postmaster was kind of a. A privileged appointment that could be a reward for loyal supporters of various political officials or parties. Abolitionists also kind of saw they're trying to push the federal government to take action against slavery. So if they can harness the postal network, which is an essential part of the federal government at this time, to their cause, that's actually a really subversive action that they're taking to kind of undermine federal claims to neutrality on this issue and use that engine of the federal government to spread their message to more and more people.
- [42:28]
Michael Stout
Right, right, right. So they saw in some way, the abolitionists saw the post office as potentially liberatory, but of course, the pro slavery forces did not agree. There's an infamous incident in 1835. Can you talk a little bit about this postal campaign that the abolitionists age and how it kind of changes their calculus in terms of what the postal service can be used for?
- [42:53]
Mary Freeman
Yes. So early on in the 1830s, as the antebellum phase of the abolitionist movement is taking shape, this is the era that kind of local level anti slavery organizations are starting to coalesce more and more into this nationally organized movement. This is the time when the American anti slavery society is founded in 1830. And it's before there's a lot of, you know, later on, by 1840, there's quite a few divisions that happen. But kind of in the early 1830s, there's this moment where abolitionists are. They feel a lot of optimism. They feel like their movement is growing really rapidly. They're able to organize on this national scale to an extent that they haven't really done before. And part of this is connected again to the changes in transportation, communication, technology that's going on in this time period. And they see a lot of promise in the postal network, and they also see this opportunity to kind of subvert federal authority on this issue. So in 1835, the American Anti slavery society, which is the headquarters, are in New York city. And kind of at the top are Arthur and Lewis Tappan, who are these wealthy merchant brothers who fund a lot of early abolitionist campaigns in this period. They and the officers of the American antislavery society come up with this plan to basically flood the postal network with Anti slavery literature. So newspapers, pamphlets, all sorts of publications. And their plan is to send this out all over the country. So not just in the south, but in the North. In the north, they have more obvious sort of targets, people, they have their sort of operatives in every community that they can send things to. In the south, it's a little different. So they basically look up in city directories, who are some of the important men in these communities, and send them the publications without having any prior contact with them. In the summer of 1835, this kind of erupts in that, you know, across the south, you're getting shipments of anti slavery publications. And it seems like it's this big conspiracy, which it kind of is. And Southerners are incensed. They're primarily concerned with the fear that access to anti slavery publications could incite slave rebellions. The American anti slavery society completely denies this. They say this is not at all their goal. They really want to target white southerners, including slaveholders, to try to convert them to their cause. But the, you know, Southerners are not, not hearing it. There's a massive riot in Charleston in the summer of 1835, where bags of mail are kind of taken out of the post office and burned. There's a kind of effigy of Arthur Tappan that's burned as well. And this whole controversy kind of percolates up through the chain of the federal government. In the end, Congress kind of reverts to the first amendment and says, we can't ban abolitionists from doing this. But on a state level, there are laws passed across the south to essentially censorship any kind of anti slavery material from coming in. So, you know, this kind of catalyzes a move towards the increased censorship and surveillance of the male. And abolitionists really have to revisit their strategy. They realize at this point, logistically, it's kind of impossible for them to reach white Southerners and convert them in the way that they had imagined. They also, you know, as a result of this violent backlash, really get a sense of how not just in the south, but in the north as well, there's a lot of opposition to their movement that can escalate to violence. And, you know, the same summer in 1835, there's a lot of riots in northern cities and towns that are, you know, essentially anti abolitionist mobs. So, you know, they kind of realize that the risks that are involved with what they're doing and they have to adjust their strategy. They continue to rely on letter writing and the postal system, otherwise there wouldn't be Much of the rest of my book, but they kind of realized that this idea that the postal network could be this vehicle for mass conversion, that people are just going to have this change of heart, that is not no longer something that they can consider to be realistic.
- [48:45]
Michael Stout
Right, right, right, right. Well, that's great. And it kind of focuses on the external obstacles that the movement faces. There's also a number of internal ones. You mentioned these divisions in the movement after 1840. They're connected to the world's anti slavery convention in London and the role of women in that. I wanted to ask kind of like, can you talk a little bit more about that specifically? And then also the way that these anti slavery fares in the aftermath. Kind of pull it, pull, pull the movement back together in some ways. So just, just first the divisions and then maybe we'll move on to the other stuff.
- [49:21]
Mary Freeman
Yeah, so like I said, the sort of early part of the 1830s seems like this more. The world is full of possibilities. I guess. For abolitionists after 1835, this kind of escalation of violence is a wake up call to the movement that they need to adjust their strategies. But their numbers continue to grow and they continue to kind of elaborate their various apparatuses of lectures and publications. And you know, as their movement grows, kind of inevitably, there are differences of opinion that arise on a variety of subjects. Some of it is related to the role of religion and various religious denominations, as well as conflict happening within denominations. Some of it relates to the relationship to electoral politics. Some of the most radical abolitionists, like William Lloyd Garrison, are basically opposed to any kind of involvement with political or religious institutional affiliations. Where others are arguing we need to kind of work within the existing political system in order to meaningfully change things. So those kind of issues are starting to arise. And one of the most explosive issues that comes up corresponds to the emergence of women's rights kind of out of anti slavery activism. So kind of come back again to the Grimm Keys who we talked about a little while ago. They're certainly not the only ones, but you know, an example of how some in the movement feel that women like the Grimkeys, who are speaking out against slavery and also start to talk about women's rights, are distracting from the main goals of the movement. And their sort of public notoriety is risking alienating people who might otherwise join their cause. So this all is building over. The later 1830s comes to a head in 1840 with the split that happens in the American anti slavery society where a group that's kind of opposed to women's rights being part of the anti slavery movement, who is more supportive of political formal politics and abolitionism and also has more religious affiliations. They split off and form a rival national network, the American and Foreign Anti Slavery Society. There's also this, the same year, a convention that happens in London that's meant to bring together abolitionists from Britain as well as the US and at that convention, there's a lot of debate and conflict about the role of women and the presence of women at the convention. There are seven women delegates from the US who attend and they end up being excluded from participating in the floor of the convention. They can only observe. And not only are they kind of relegated to observers, but some of them said they can't even see because their view is obscured by a screen. So all of this again is 1840 or so is another moment that abolitionists kind of have to adjust their movement strategies at a time when the threat are not perhaps so obviously coming from outside their movement, but their movement itself is splintering.
- [53:39]
Michael Stout
Right, right. That makes sense. Now, in the aftermath of this though, there's these things called anti slavery fairs that start to get organized. I thought that was really interesting because it felt almost like it provided to me at least, really great insight into the way that correspondence functioned between people to build these abolitionist sentiments as. Can you just talk a little bit about how those fairs are organized? Like the nitty gritty mail that's going back and forth to get it accomplished?
- [54:08]
Mary Freeman
Yeah. So as the movement is splintering around again kind of this period, post 1835 through 1840 and beyond, I argue in the book that it's abolitionist women who are keeping the movement from completely falling apart during this time. So even though it's kind of contradictory in that anti slavery women are being kind of at the heart of scrutiny in terms of whether or not they should really be involved. If you look at what sort of the ordinary women are doing during this period, they are engaged with these debates, certainly they're following them. But a lot of what they're doing is just trying to keep keep the movement going. And one of the major things that they did was organize these anti slavery fairs, which were these big community events that happened everywhere from major cities like Boston and Philadelphia to small communities in relatively rural parts of the north, spanning New England, Mid Atlantic, out in the Midwest even. And they were a way for kind of going back to the idea of women in these relatively isolated communities feeling like they wanted to be part of something larger. They were a way for women to participate in abolitionism in a way that largely correlated to the expectations of what women should be doing with their time in this era. So kind of creating handcrafted items and foods to be sold at a public event that would support the abolitionist cause financially in one way or another. So it's a fundraising kind of activity. And what's really interesting is that it involves women. You know, often there's some ideological conflict going on around these events where, you know, different women have different ideas about, for example, what the money should be going towards or who should be in charge or who, you know, who should get the credit. There's, you know, that's that element, certainly. But what you find is that overall, it's bringing together women who probably have quite a wide range of views on these issues, and they're all working together. Even though they have these divisions, they're trying to find underlying unity among themselves and among, you know, the broader movement as a whole, which I kind of analyzed through how in their letters, they're talking about the practical elements of organizing the fairs, like, you know, who's going to be making the donuts, who's selling the punch, how much are we going to price these baskets at? There's a lot of that logistical communication that's happening, but they're also asserting this sense of, even though we don't know each other, even though we're far away from each other, even though we might disagree on certain things, we are all sisters here. We are all part of this larger movement that's more important than any of these. These kind of minor disagreements.
- [57:46]
Michael Stout
Yeah. Yeah. Well, I love that moment because it takes the. This sort of, like, quotidian interest and all of these very specific things, but then makes an argument for its relation to the politics of abolition, the kind of, like, maintenance of continuity in the movement and things like that. Is that kind of. Am I reading that right?
- [58:05]
Mary Freeman
Yeah, absolutely. That it's, you know, you. Oh. Again, scholars have certainly not completely dismissed these fairs, but I think there's, you know, agreement that they were essential fundraising tools, essential ways for women to be involved in the movement. But, you know, I would argue that more than just sort of the practical aspects of them, that they were a way for women to kind of shape the. The future of abolitionism at a time when it seemed uncertain whether the movement would really be able to continue as it had for the previous decade or so.
- [58:47]
Michael Stout
Right. You make a similar move toward the end of the book that I really liked. It was maybe my favorite moment in the book, where you take the sort of humble topic of penmanship instruction during Reconstruction. And you analyze these instruction books to demonstrate how. And this is, I'm quoting you, learning the skill of handwriting was understood by teachers and pupils alike as both practical training for daily life and an assertion of nascent political power. And then through this analysis, you make this direct line, and again, I'm using your words between the ability to express oneself in writing and the right to citizenship. So talk a little bit more about how you use these penmanship instruction books in order to make this really insightful and kind of like wide ranging analysis.
- [59:35]
Mary Freeman
Yeah, so, I mean, the chronology of my book goes through the Civil War and Reconstruction into Reconstruction. And, you know, that's. That chronology is also part of my argument and arguing that abolitionism, you know, that basically that era was yet another era where abolitionists had to regroup and figure out, well, what does our movement mean in this new political context, in the context of Reconstruction? One of the major ways that abolitionists contributed to Reconstruction was through education. So there were lots of northern women, white and black women, who went to the south during the Civil War and Reconstruction to serve as teachers in schools for freed people, children and adults. And, you know, not all of them were abolitionists. Certainly there's a lot, A lot of people who were kind of the opposite of abolitionists who were engaged in this work. But there were, you know, abolitionist women who did this work, and they really saw this as, you know, an extension of the activism that they had been doing up until this point, you know, before the Civil War. During the Civil War and after. This is all part of their kind of activist career. And so when northern teachers were going into the south during Reconstruction, you know, some of the fundamental things they're teaching in these schools are the schools of reading and writing and penmanship. And there's, you know, not. Again, not unlike education elsewhere during that time period, or education now, for that matter. There's a lot of somewhat, I don't know, not obvious or even invisible ideological concerns that go into what kids are taught and how they learn those things. Penmanship was no exception in this period. It was seen as a reflection of character. So having good penmanship translates to having good moral character, growing up to be an upstanding person who, you know, can kind of exercise one's rights and freedoms in a morally responsible way. And this was an idea that was very at the top of mind for the instruction of formerly enslaved people in the south, especially children who, you know, whether they were born before the war enslaved or whether they were being born into this sort of new generation of free people. They, you know, they needed to learn these practical skills, but they also, according to the kind of ideology of the time, they needed to learn how to, you know, exercise their freedom responsibly. And so one of the sources I analyze in the book is this really fascinating source. It's another source that I discovered sort of more in a teaching context and then was thinking about how to work it into my book. It's a penmanship copy book that was created, I think it was printed in 1865 and it was meant to be used in classrooms for freed people in the south during Reconstruction. The Freedman's writing book is the title and it has all this crazy, fabulous visual iconography on it, where has an image of a black man who's kind of dressed in a soldier's uniform for the Union. It has American flags. It has Abraham Lincoln on it. So there's all this kind of patriotic imagery on the writing book itself that is making this connection pretty clearly visually that if you are learning the skill of penmanship, you are sort of a citizen in training. You are being educated to live up to the patriotic ideals and values that are pictured on the COVID of the copy book of being upstanding citizen who serves their country, who knows the meaning of the symbols of the American flag, of the bald eagle, who is kind of understand the legacy of Abraham Lincoln in how the Civil War unfolded and emancipation unfolded. So to me, I thought it is a fascinating source because it's just really making clear how the practical skills of learning how to write are envisioned as ideologically laden with learning about the values of citizenship in this. This political moment.
- [64:58]
Michael Stout
Yeah, I think it's just such a fascinating story in some ways. It's about in with the letter writing and the post office as new technologies. I thought that's. That's been like a really provocative and interesting way to think about the book and its lessons is like, what information people have access to through what new technologies. Like, there's just something really fascinating about that to me. To conclude then, I wanted to return to the premise of this book, which is that abolitionists cultivate radical ideas through interpersonal correspondence that does rely on these technologies. What lessons does this insight have for readers of the book today? Or maybe what are the main lessons of the book for readers more generally?
- [65:41]
Mary Freeman
Yeah, I mean, I guess I could take this in a bunch of different directions, but I'll return to a theme that I think I've brought up a few times, which is how There are certainly connections between the events of this book in mostly the 19th century and our present moment. So as I first started this project, which started as my dissertation back about 15 years ago, it was a moment where as a society, nationally and internationally, I think we were all still sort of learning what social media meant for us as a technology around that time. It was a moment where various activist groups, including Occupy Wall street, the Arab Spring movement, sort of early activism in response to acts of police violence in the 2000 and tens, a lot of those activist movements were reliant on social media to organize, to kind of raise public awareness of these issues. And there's a lot of talk at this time about how social media, I mean, to me felt like, oh, this is a letter writing of our moment. It's this technology that is accessible to just about anyone in the world. It allows for people to express radical or subversive political views when those views are not necessarily getting a platform in more mainstream or formal political realms. And it's resulting in these powerful waves of activism that at that moment, I felt relatively optimistic for the future. Over the course of writing this book and being a person in the world for the past 15 years, I think my perspective has changed along with, with, I think how many of us see the evolution of sort of the possibilities and perils of social media. You know, we've increasingly seen immense corporate concentration of power, both in terms of like financial power and resources, as well as surveillance, censorship, control, invisible algorithms powering these various social media giants. There's been increasing attention to all of those issues and kind of magnification of how social media can be a very imperfect, very flawed and perhaps even dangerous tool for activists who are expressing these same kind of radical views that, that 15 years ago seemed more optimistic. So, yeah, I think again, there's been sort of a back and forth in the way that I've thought about letter writing as a tool of the 19th century that was very, you know, allowed for this very democratic means of expression for people who were excluded in various ways from mainstream politics. But also that it involved risk, it involved surveillance, it involves censorship. You know, we were just talking about Reconstruction. In the chapter on Reconstruction, there's also incidents of postal censorship, surveillance, even, you know, moments of violence involving postal communication. So even after the Civil War, even after emancipation in the south, there's still, you know, these are still coming up as issues that abolitionists are dealing with. So, you know, it's. It can be an optimistic story, but it also, you know, we can't ignore The. The elements of power and risk and. And suppression that go alongside that, which I think is a lesson for our own times.
- [70:14]
Michael Stout
Yeah. No, I think that you're so right about that. It's. It's amazing. The. The idea that activists rely on this. It's. In one way, it feels like the activists are using social media, like they think it's a private space, but it turns out it's a public space with all of the surveillance and all the other stuff that's associated with that. It's like we learned that it was a private. That it was a public space over time through the doxing and all that kind of stuff. Is that. Is that fair? Yeah.
- [70:40]
Mary Freeman
And I mean, I think even. Even, you know, I think it. It's always been a public space, but I think there's been. Yeah. There's just the. The opportunities. Balancing the opportunities and risks of that and maybe growing awareness of how difficult it is to. Yeah. Truly be anonymous on these platforms and, you know, just the. The sort of constant data collection that's happening across all these different media.
- [71:12]
Michael Stout
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Well, Mary, this is a great book. It provides a lot to think about that we've been. We've kind of scratched the surface here, and it's been a great pleasure doing history with you. Thank you for your time. Thank you for our listeners. Abolitionists and the Politics of Correspondence is available now from University of Pennsylvania Press, and you can find it wherever the finest books are sold. Mary, I thank you again for being on the show today. Congratulations on the book.
- [71:34]
Mary Freeman
Thank you.
- [71:35]
New Books Network Host
Thank you for listening to this episode of the New Books Network. We are an academic podcast network with the mission of public education. If you liked this episode, please share it with a friend and rate us on your preferred podcast platform. You can browse all of our episodes on our website, newbooksnetwork.com Connect with us on Instagram and BlueSky with the handle ew booksnetwork, and subscribe to our weekly Substack newsletter at newbooksnetwork.substack.com to get episode recommendations straight to your inbox.