A culture of dissent: American abolitionism and the ordeal of equality

My dissertation examines the central role of abolitionist print culture in transforming conceptions and practices of equality in nineteenth-century America. Beginning with black protests over slavery and colonization during the American Revolution and early republic, and ending with John Brown's apocalyptic raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859, I argue that the abolitionists seized a critical moment in the advance of print technology and the expansion of literacy and literary production to develop a culture of dissent: a print-based political formation, both public and counter-hegemonic in nature, through which the abolitionists enacted a radical critique of slavery to imagine a new democracy based on the "first principle" of equality. Inspired by the protests of slaves and free blacks during the American Revolution and early republic, and sustained by an interracial rank and file, they were the first to understand, articulate, and embrace the struggle for equality as the principal litmus test for American democracy.;Chapter One, "Declarations and Demonstrations," examines a variety of African American writings to show how slaves and free blacks in the "Age of Revolution" challenged the contradictions and prejudices of the white Founders by adapting their professions of equality to fuel an emerging antislavery sentiment.;Chapter Two, "Rights and Representations," explores the short but influential run of Freedom's Journal, the nation's first black and abolitionist newspaper, as well as David Walker's Appeal to argue that black protest and print culture constituted the official origins of American abolitionism.;Chapter Three, "Papers, Pamphlets, and Petitions," examines the "architecture" of the abolitionist culture of dissent during the 1834s and 1840s to show that print culture was the principal medium through which abolitionists advanced their egalitarian creed in the antebellum public sphere.;Chapter Four, "Facts, Fictions, and Fugitives," traces the emergence of "literary abolitionism" in the 1840s and 1850s. Against the backdrop of the Fugitive Slave Law and growing concerns about the ascendancy of the "Slave Power," I argue that abolitionist writers were increasingly uncertain about the future of the United States as an egalitarian democracy---an impulse that culminated dramatically in John Brown's violent raid on Harpers Ferry in 1859.