Abolition of Slavery: Rhetorical Sources

References on the Abolition of Slavery, and on Pro-Slavery Rhetoric before the Civil War. Comprehensive on this subject in article literature from peer reviewed academic journals in rhetoric and communication. Selective in books and peer reviewed articles in other disciplines, relevant to anti-slavery and pro-slavery rhetoric in America before the Civil War. Please add articles that fit these categories.

Orator Pages

See these pages for sources listed in the notes on specific abolitionist orators.

Douglass, Frederick. The Rhetorical Douglass

List of Sources

Adeleke, Tunde. "Afro-Americans and Moral Suasion: the Debate in the 1830's." Journal of Negro History 83 (1998): 127-.

Ahern, Stephen. Affect and Abolition in the Anglo-Atlantic, 1770-1830. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2013.

Arkin, Marc M. "The Federalist Trope: Power and Passion in Abolitionist Rhetoric." Journal of American History 88 (2001): 75-98.

Auer, J. Jeffery, ed. Antislavery and Disunion, 1858-1861: Studies in the Rhetoric of Compromise and Conflict. Harper & Row, New York, 1963.

Bacon, Jacqueline. "'Acting as Freemen': Rhetoric, Race, and Reform in the Debate over Colonization in Freedom's Journal, 1827-1828." Quarterly Journal of Speech 93/1 (2007): 58-83.

Bacon, Jacqueline. The Humblest May Stand Forth: Rhetoric, Empowerment, and Abolition. Greenville: U of South Carolina P, 2002.

Bass, Jeff D. "An Efficient Humanitarianism: The British Slave Trade Debates, 1791-1792." Quarterly Journal of Speech 75 (1989): 152-165.

Boade, Erin. "'Infatuated Barbarians as They Are': Pro-slavery Challenges to the First Amendment in the 1830s, Mob Violence, and Associated Links." Free Speech Yearbook 45, (October 2011): 95-109.

Boocker, David. "Garrison, Milton, and the Abolitionist Rhetoric of Demonization". American Periodicals 9. (1999): 15-26.

Bormann, Earnest G. Forerunners of Black Power: The Rhetoric of Abolition. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1971.

Bormann, Earnest G."Some Random Thoughts on the Unity or Diversity of the Rhetoric of Abolition." Southern Communication Journal 60 (1995): 266-274.

Brooks, Corey. "Stoking the "Abolition Fire in the Capitol": Liberty Party Lobbying and Antislavery in Congress." Journal of the Early Republic, vol. 33, no. 3, 2013, pp. 523-547.

Browne, Stephen H. Angelina Grimke: Rhetoric, Identity, and the Radical Imagination. East Lansing: Michigan State UP, 1999

Browne, Stephen H. "Encountering Angelina Grimke: Violence, Identity, and the Creation of Radical Community." Quarterly Journal of Speech 82 (1996): 38-54.

Browne, Stephen H. "'Like Gory Spectres': Representing Evil in Theodore Weld's American Slavery As It Is." Quarterly Journal of Speech 80 (1994): 277-292.

Browne, Stephen H. "Textual Style and Radical Critique in William Lloyd Garrison's Thoughts on African Colonization. Communication Studies 47 (1996): 177-190.

Browne, Stephen H. "'This Unparalleled and Inhuman Massacre': The Gothic, the Sacred, and the Meaning of Nat Turner." Rhetoric and Public Affairs 3 (200): 309- .

Burkholder, Thomas R. "Symbolic Martydom: The Ultimate Apology." Southern Communication Journal 56 (1990): 289-297.

Carey, Brycchan. From Peace to Freedom: Quaker Rhetoric and the Birth of American Antislavery, 1657-1761. Yale University Press, New Haven [Conn.], 2012.

Carmack, Paul A. "The Lane Seminary Debates." Central States Speech Journal 1 (1950): 33-39.

Chesebrough, David B. Theodore Parker: Orator of Superior Ideas. Great American Orators 29. Westport, CT: Greenwood P, 1999.

Clark, Elizabeth B. "'The Sacred Rights of the Weak': Pain, Sympathy, and the Culture of Individual Rights in Antebellum America." Journal of American History 82 (1995): 463-493.

Condit, Celeste Michelle, and John Louis Lucaites. "The Rhetoric of Equality and the Expatriation of African-Americans, 1776-1826." Communication Studies 42 (1991): 1-21.

Crosby, David L. "Anthony Benezet's Transformation of Anti-Slavery Rhetoric." Slavery & Abolition, vol. 23, no. 3, 2002, pp. 39-58.

Cummins, Amy. "'Loyal and Devoted Attachment': Anti-Abolition Rhetoric by Southern Women of Letters, 1852-1860." Southern Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal of the South, vol. 14, no. 2, 2007, pp. 13.

Cutter, Martha J. "Revising Torture: Moses Roper and the Visual Rhetoric of the Slave's Body in the Transatlantic Abolition Movement." ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance, vol. 60, no. 3, 2014, pp. 371-411.

Daly, John Patrick. When Slavery Was Called Freedom: Evangelicalism, Proslavery, and the Causes of the Civil War. Lexington: U of Kentucky P, 2002.

Deacon, Andrea. "Navigating" The Storm, the Whirlwind, and the Earthquake": Re-Assessing Frederick Douglass, the Orator." Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature (2003): 65-81.

Dick, Robert C. "Negro Oratory in the Anti-Slavery Societies: 1830-1860." Western Speech 28 (1964): 5-14

di Giacomantonio, William C. "For the Gratification of a Volunteering Society": Antislavery and Pressure Group Politics in the First Federal Congress." Journal of the Early Republic 15 (1995): 169-197.

Dill, R. Pepper. "An Analysis of Stasis in James H. Thornwell's Sermon, The Rights and Duties of Masters." Journal of Communication and Religion 11 (1988): 19-24.

Dorsey, Peter A. Common Bondage: Slavery as Metaphor in Revolutionary America. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2009.

Ericson, David F. The Debate over Slavery: Antislavery and Proslavery Liberalism in Antebellum America. New York: New York UP, 2000.

Fanuzzi, Robert. "The Trouble with Douglass's Body." American Transcendental Quarterly 13 (1999): 27-.

Finkelman, Paul], ed. Slavery and the Law. Madison, WI: Madison House, 1997.

Fitch, Suzanne Pullon, and Roseann M. Mandziuk. Sojourner Truth as Orator: Wit, Story, and Song. Great American Orators 25. Westport, CT: Greenwood P, 1997.

Funk, Albert W. "Henry David Thoreau's 'Slavery in Massachusetts'." Western Speech 36 (1972): 159-168.

Goodman, Paul. Of One Blood: Abolitionism and the Origins of Racial Equality. Berkeley: U of California P, 1998.

Hamilton, Cynthia. "Hercules Subdued: The Visual Rhetoric of the Kneeling Slave." Slavery & Abolition, vol. 34, no. 4, 2013, pp. 631-652.

Hammerback, John C. "George W. Julian's Antislavery Crusade." Western Speech 37 (1973): 157-165.

Hammerback, John C. "The Rhetoric of a Righteous Reform: George Washington Julian's 1852 Campaign against Slavery." Central States Speech Journal 22 (1971): 85-93.

Hartnett, Stephen J. Democratic Dissent and the Cultural Fictions of Antebellum America. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2002.

Hasian, Marouf. "Jurisprudence as Performance: John Brown's Enactment of Natural Law at Harper's Ferry." Quarterly Journal of Speech 86 (200): 190-213.

Hemmer, Joseph J. "Robert A. Toombs Speaks for the South." Southern Speech Journal 28 (1963): 251-259.

Hillbruner, Anthony. "Inequality, the Great Chain of Being, and Ante-Bellum Southern Oratory." Southern Speech Journal 25 (1959): 172-189.

Japp, Phyllis M. "Esther or Isaiah?: The Abolitionist-feminist Rhetoric of Angelina Grimke." Quarterly Journal of Speech 71.3 (1985): 35-348.

Jasinski, James. "Constituting Antebellum African American Identity: Resistance, Violence, and Masculinity in Henry Highland Garnet's 1843 'Address to the Slaves'." Quarterly Journal of Speech 93/1 (2007): 27-57.

Jeffrey, Julie Roy. The Great Silent Army of Abolitionism: Ordinary Women in the Antislavery Movement. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1998.

Karns, C. F. "Forerunners of Black Power: The Rhetoric of Abolition." Southern Speech Communication Journal, vol. 37, no. 2, 1971, pp. 214.

Kennicott, Patrick C. "Black Persuaders in the Antislavery Movement." Speech Monographs 37 (1970): 15-24.

Kerr, Andrea Moore. Lucy Stone: Speaking Out for Equality. New Brunswick: Rutgers UP, 1992.

Kraditor, Aileen. Means and Ends in American Abolitionism: Garrison and His Critics on Strategy and Tactics, 1834-1850. New York: Pantheon, 1969.

Kurtz, Jeffrey B. "Condemning Webster: Judgment and Audience in Emerson's 'Fugitive Slave Law.'" Quarterly Journal of Speech 87 (2001): 278-290.

Lamb-Books, Benjamin. Angry Abolitionists and the Rhetoric of Slavery: Moral Emotions in Social Movements. Palgrave Macmillan, New York, 2016.

Lasser, Carol. "Voyeuristic Abolitionism: Sex, Gender, and the Transformation of Antislavery Rhetoric." Journal of the Early Republic, vol. 28, no. 1, 2008;2007;, pp. 83-114.

Lowance, Mason I., and Ellen E. Westbrook. The Stowe Debate: Rhetorical Strategies in Uncle Tom's Cabin. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1994.

Logue, Cal M. "Transcending Coercion: The Communicative Strategies of Black Slaves on Antebellum Plantations." Quarterly Journal of Speech 67 (1981): 31-46.

Logue, Cal M., and Eugene F. Miller. "Communicative Interaction and Rhetorical Status in Harriet Ann Jacobs' Slave Narrative." Southern Communication Journal 63 (1998): 182-198.

Lowry, Elizabeth. "Spiritual (R)Evolution and the Turning of Tables: Abolition, Feminism, and the Rhetoric of Social Reform in the Antebellum Public Sphere." Journal for the Study of Radicalism, vol. 9, no. 2, 2015, pp. 1-16.

Mailloux, Steven. "Re-Marking Slave Bodies: Rhetoric as Production and Reception." Philosophy & Rhetoric 35 (2002): 96-119.

Mayer, Henry. All on Fire: William Lloyd Garrison and the Abolition of Slavery. New York: St. Martin's P, 1998.

McBride, Dwight A. Impossible Witnesses: Truth, Abolitionism, and Slave Testimony. New York: New York UP, 2001.

McCormick, L. Ray. "James Henley Thornwell and the Spirituality of the Church: Foundation for a Proslave Ideology." Journal of Communication and Religion 19 (1996): 59-67.

McDorman, Todd F. "Challenging Constitutional Authority: African American Responses to Scott v. Sandford." Quarterly Journal of Speech 83 (1997): 192-209.

McKivigan, John R., ed. Abolitionism and American Politics and Government. History of the Abolitionist Movement 3. New York: Garland, 1999.

McKivigan, John R., ed. Abolitionism and American Reform. History of the Abolitionist Movement 1. New York: Garland, 1999.

McKivigan, John R., ed. Abolitionism and American Religion. History of the Abolitionist Movement 2. New York: Garland, 1999.

McKivigan, John R., ed. Abolitionism and Issues of Race and Gender. History of the Abolitionist Movement 4. New York: Garland, 1999.

McKivigan, John R., and Stanley Harrold, eds. Antislavery Violence: Sectional, Racial, and Cultural Conflict in Antebellum America. Knoxville: U of Tennessee P, 1999.

McClendon, Aaron D. "Sounds of Sympathy: William Wells Brown's "Anti-Slavery Harp", Abolition, and the Culture of Early and Antebellum American Song." African American Review 47, no. 1 (2014): 83-100. [http://www.jstor.org/stable/24589797].

McClish, Glen and Jacqueline Bacon. "I Am Full of Matter": A Rhetorical Analysis of Daniel Coker's a Dialogue between a Virginian and an African Minister." Journal of Communication & Religion, vol. 29, no. 2, Nov. 2006, pp. 315-346.

Michie, Elsie B. "Morbidity in Fairyland: Frances Trollope, Charles Dickens, and the Rhetoric of Abolition." Partial Answers, vol. 9, no. 2, 2011, pp. 233.

Minifee, Paul. "Rhetoric of Doom and Redemption: Reverend Jermain Loguen's Jeremiadic Speech Against the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850." Advances In The History Of Rhetoric 16, no. 1 (January 2013): 29-57.

Monsma, John W. "John Brown: The Two-Edged Sword of Abolition." Central States Speech Journal 13 (1961): 22-29.

Morris, Charles E. "'Our Capital Aversion': Abigail Folsom, Madness, & Radical Antislavery Praxis." Women's Studies in Communication 24 (2001): 62-.

Newman, Richard S. The Transformation of American Abolitionism: Fighting Slavery in the Early Republic. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 2002.

O'Rourke, David K. Servants, Masters and the Coercion of Labor: Inventing the Rhetoric of Slavery, the Verbal Sanctuaries which Sustain it, and How It Was Used to Sanitize American Slavery's History. Peter Lang, New York, 2016.

Pierson, Michael D. "Between Antislavery and Abolition: The Politics and Rhetoric of Jane Grey Swisshelm." Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies, vol. 60, no. 3, 1993, pp. 305-321.

Pribanic-Smith, Erika J. "Rhetoric of Fear." Journalism History 38, no. 3 (Fall2012 2012): 166-177.

Reynolds, Amy. "William Lloyd Garrison, Benjamin Lundy and Criminal libel: The Abolitionists' Plea for Press Freedom. Communication Law and Policy 6 (2001): 577-607.

Rezek, Joseph. "The Orations on the Abolition of the Slave Trade and the Uses of Print in the Early Black Atlantic." Early American Literature, vol. 45, no. 3, 2010, pp. 655-682.

Roberts-Miller, Patricia. Fanatical Schemes: Proslavery Rhetoric and the Tragedy of Consensus. Tuscaloosa, University of Alabama Press, 2009.

Robertson, Stacy M. "'A Hard, Cold, Stern Life': Parker Pillsbury and Grassroots Abolitionism, 1840-1865." New England Quarterly 70 (1997): 179-210.

Rogers, William B. "We Are All Together Now": Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, and the Prophetic Tradition. New York: Garland, 1995.

Rosen, Deborah A. "The Concept of Piracy in Nineteenth-Century American Abolitionist Rhetoric." Slavery & Abolition, vol. 38, no. 4, 2017, pp. 697.

Sánchez-Eppler, Karen. Bodily Bonds: The Intersecting Rhetorics of Feminism and Abolition. Oxford UP, 2000.

Sanchez-Eppler, Karen. Touching Liberty : Abolition, Feminism, and the Politics of the Body. Berkeley: U of California P, 1993.

Sanger, Kerran L. "Slave Resistance and Rhetorical Self-Definition: Spirituals as a Strategy." Western Journal of Communication 59 (1995): 177-192.

Selby, Gary S. "The Limits of Accommodation: Frederick Douglass and the Garrisonian Abolitionists." Southern Communication Journal 66 (2000): 52-66.

Smith, Arthur L. "Henry Highland Garnet: Black Revolutionary in Sheep's Vestments." Central States Speech Journal 21 (1970): 93-98.

Smith, Ralph R., and Russell R. Windes. "The Interpretation of Abolitionist Rhetoric: Historiography, Rhetorical Method, and History." Southern Communication Journal 60 (1995): 303-311.

Speicher, Anna M. The Religious World of Antislavery Women: Spirituality in the Lives of Five Abolitionist Lecturers. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 2000.

Speicher, Anna M. "Symbolic Convergence and Abolitionism: A Terministic Reinterpretation." Southern Communication Journal 59 (1993): 45-59.

Stauffer, John. The Black Hearts of Men: Radical Abolitionists and the Transformation of Race. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2001.

Sterling, Dorothy. Ahead of Her Time: Abby Kelley and the Politics of Anti-Slavery. New York: W. W. Norton, 1991.

Strong, Douglas M. Perfectionist Politics: Abolitionism and the Religious Tensions of American Democracy. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 1999.

Sweet, Leonard I. "The Fourth of July and Black Americans in the Nineteenth Century: Northern Leadership Opinion Within the Context of the Black Experience." Journal of Negro History 61 (1976):
256-275.

Towns, Stuart. Oratory and Rhetoric in the Nineteenth-Century South: A Rhetoric of Defense. Westport, CT: Praeger, 1998.

Trudeau, Justin Thomas and Megan Elizabeth Morrissey. "“Bring in an Honest Verdict”: Prosecuting Southern Whiteness in American Slavery as It Is." Southern Communication Journal, vol. 82, no. 5, Nov/Dec2017, pp. 312-323.

Vorenberg, Michael. Final Freedom: The Civil War, the Abolition of Slavery, and the Thirteenth Amendment. Cambridge Historical Studies in American Law and Society. New York: Cambridge UP, 2001.

Vonnegut, Kristin S. "Poison or Panacea?: Sarah Moore Grimké's Use of the Public Letter." Communication Studies 46 (1995): 73-88.

Wagner, Gerard A. "Sojourner Truth: God's Appointed Apostle of Reform." Southern Speech Journal 28 (1962): 123-130.

Warren, Lenora D. "Insurrection at Sea: Violence, the Slave Trade, and the Rhetoric of Abolition." Atlantic Studies: Literary, Cultural, and Historical Perspectives, 2013, Volume 10, Issue 2.

Weaver, Richard L. "The Negro Issue: Agitation in the Michigan Lyceum." Central States Speech Journal 22 (1971): 196-201.

Wheaton, Patrick G. "Abolition, Martyrdom, and Freedom of Expression: Wendell Phillips' Eulogy of Elijah Lovejoy." Free Speech Yearbook, vol. 43, 2006-2009, pp. 123-133.

Whitby, Gary L. "Economic Elements of Opposition to Abolition and Support of South by Bennett in New York Herald." Journalism Quarterly 65 (1988): 78-84.

Whitby, Gary L. "Horns of a Dilemma: The Sun, Abolition, and the 1833-34 New York Riots." Journalism Quarterly 67 (1990): 410-419.

Wiethoff, William. The Insolent Slave. Greenville: U of South Carolina P, 2002.

Williams, Andreá N. "Frances Watkins (Harper), Harriet Tubman and the Rhetoric of Single Blessedness." Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism, vol. 12, no. 2, 2014, pp. 99-122.

Wilson, Ivy G. "On Native Ground: Transnationalism, Frederick Douglass, and" The Heroic Slave"." PMLA (2006): 453-468.

Zaeske, Susan. "Signature of Citizenship: The Rhetoric of Women's Antislavery Petitions." Quarterly Journal of Speech 88 (2002): 147-168.

Zeitz, Joshua Michael. "The Missouri Compromise Reconsidered: Antislavery Rhetoric and the Emergence of the Free Labor Synthesis." Journal of the Early Republic 20 (2000): 447-449.

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