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such “ self-subverting quotation[s]. ”
8
Reprinting such ads was attractive because it
removed abolitionist discourse from the abstract realm of rhetorical defense or opposi-
tion and crucially used the slaveholders' own words, spelled out in the brass-tacks
language of commercial speech. The Grimké-Weld collaborative work, however, both
subpoenaed that “testimony” and highlighted the role of data supplied by the thousand
witnesses by omitting their own names from the work.
9
They shifted from a strategy
that treated these ads as anecdotes or vignettes to one that reinterpreted them as the
containers of data about the brutality of slavery. The marks, scars, and shackles that
slaveholders noted as a means of identifying individual runaways became the individual,
incremental indictments of slavery that might be systematically collected and analyzed.
The ads were abstracted, their information pried loose and accumulated, aggregated en
masse.
American Slavery As It Is
was one in a multitude of projects that helped to create the
modern concept of information, by isolating and recontextualizing data found in print.
In his essay “Farewell to the Information Age,” linguist Geoffrey Nunberg notes the
shift in the nineteenth century from understanding
information
as the productive
result
of the process of being informed to a
substance
that could be morselized and extracted
in isolated bits.
10
With its information abstraction,
American Slavery As It Is
became a
model and a source for other abolitionist works like Harriet Beecher Stowe's 1853
Key to Uncle Tom ' s Cabin
and William Goodell's 1853
The American Slave Code in Theory
and Practice.
But it is also a close ancestor of those forms of muckraking that have
depended more on sifting public documents and putting their information into new
juxtapositions rather than depending on going undercover or making secret materials
public. From the 1950s to the 1970s the investigative journalist I. F. Stone, for example,
scoured the
Congressional Record
and other government documents for many of his
revelations. Such materials documented “contradictions in the official line, examples
of bureaucratic and political mendacity, documentation of incursions on civil rights
and liberties.” His “use of government sources to document his findings was also a
stratagem. Who would have believed this cantankerous-if-whimsical Marxist without
all the documentation?”
11
Leaking and whistle-blowing may have a certain glamour,
but Stone's journalism, like the Grimkés' and Weld's abolitionism, depended on some-
thing at once more subtle and more provocative of present concerns, not the opening
of secrets but rather the painstaking extraction of already public information from the
sources that have obscured it by dint of sheer proliferation. Don't think of Wikileaks,
think of the power of search itself.
