Databases Reference
In-Depth Information
to look up subjects such as “Lives of slaves unprotected, 155” and “chopping of slaves
piecemeal, 93. ”
22
The index entries also editorialize: “plantations second only to hell,
114. ”
23
The individual and specific horrors were thus catalogued, sorted, and made
accessible to be used as evidence in speechmaking or novel writing.
The index provided its users with tools for quick access to information, and enhanced
the users' authority, and thus the authority of the topic. Readers reported that they
could use
American Slavery As It Is
to “ stump ” slaveholders — one said he related incidents
of cruelty from the topic, and when the slaveholders said they were lies, “he would
pull Weld's volume from his pocket and give names, places, and dates from Southern
papers. ”
24
The Grimké-Weld mode of reading the proslavery press so convinced readers
of its reliability that they even felt confident substituting the Grimké-Weld readings for
their own. As Louise Johnson discovered, and as Meredith McGill and Trish Loughran
explore in relation to 1830s reprinting practices, Charles Dickens took the topic up in
his
American Notes
in 1842.
25
He quoted from it without attribution, recording specific
ads that he lifted from
American Slavery As It Is
in his reports on his Southern travels as
though he had come across the ads himself. In other words, he drew on a work compiled
in New York and New Jersey from papers mailed from the South, to flesh out and
provide detail for his own travels in the South.
26
Circulation and recirculation became
a mode through which readers and travelers themselves came to understand the South
and slavery. Writers like Stowe, Dickens, and the man who used the topic to stump
Southerners, relied on
American Slavery As It Is
for knowledge and details. But for ex-
slaves speaking on the abolitionist circuit, it was a ready reference, containing informa-
tion on laws having to do with slavery. Its “thousand [white] witnesses” carried authority
that reflected back on the speaker's own statements. When Frederick Douglass read
from it in an 1846 talk to English working people he thereby established that his own
experiences and observations fit a larger pattern. He read aloud from the laws on
slavery, recorded in
American Slavery As It Is
because “no better exposure of slavery can
be made than is made by the laws of the states in which slavery exists. I prefer reading
the laws to making any statement in confirmation of what I have said myself; for the
slave holders cannot object to this testimony, since it is the calm, the cool, the deliberate
enactment of their wisest heads, of their most clear-sighted, their own constituted
representatives. ”
27
He extended the circuit of recirculation by recommending that his
listeners read Dickens's
American Notes
for more information.
The representations of slavery in
American Slavery As It Is
were amplified and sent
back out. The material recirculated back to the Southern newspapers, as well, and
