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that Southern newspapers not only could be made to speak against themselves, but also
could be picked through, tagged, and sorted to support a new mode of understanding.
That new mode of understanding might be called informatic, though informatics—like
computers—of course lay many years in the future. Weld and the Grimkés arrived at
an informatic sensibility out of the growing sense of urgency that abolitionists felt—the
sense that simply softening the hearts of slaveholders was ineffectual and that hard facts
were needed—which impelled them to turn to a new way of working. Like present-day
academic researchers who pick through databases for particular uses of words, for
authors' names, or for fragments of poetry to place them into new contexts that will
yield new interpretative possibilities, Sarah and Angelina Grimké and Theodore Weld
reconceived of ads and articles in proslavery papers as alienable bits—as content—that
could be broken free of context and aggregated, strung along different threads to yield
a damning portrait of slavery written in the slaveholders' own words.
Notes
1 .
American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a ThousandWitnesses
(New York: Arno, [1839] 1968). On
authorial attribution, see note 9 below. Critics have also argued that the topic—addressed to
readers who might never have seen black people—popularized a focus on enslaved people's
inhuman suffering, which made them seem less human.
2. See Trish Loughran,
The Republic in Print: Print Culture in the Age of U.S. Nation Building,
1770 - 1870
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 355, for details of how the testi-
monies of first-hand witnesses to slavery's abuses were gathered in response to a widely dis-
tributed “personalized circular letter” reproduced using the new technology of lithography.
Harriet Beecher Stowe also reported these procedures in
A
Key to Uncle Tom's Cabin: Presenting
the Original Facts and Documents UponWhich the Story Is Founded
(Port Washington, NY: Kennikat,
[1853] 1968), 21.
3. Jean Fagan Yellin, “ Doing It Herself:
Uncle Tom ' s Cabin
and Woman's Role in the Slavery
Crisis, ” in
New Essays on Uncle Tom's Cabin,
ed. Eric J. Sundquist (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press, 1986), 90.
4. Benjamin P. Thomas,
TheodoreWeld: Crusader for Freedom
(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers Uni-
versity Press, 1950), 172.
5. Gilbert H. Barnes and Dwight L. Dumond, eds.,
Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, Angelina
Grimk é Weld, and Sarah Grimk é , 1822 - 1844
, vol. 2 (Gloucester, MA: Smith, 1965), 789.
6. Adam Hochschild,
Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves
(Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), 197.
