5 / “An Odd Place for Navigation”:

Itinerant Lecturers and Freedom of Speech, 1830–1849

John O. Wattles of Ohio toured Indiana in September 1842, crossing the north-central portion of the state, seeking out compatriots, attending and holding meetings, and observing the local progress of the antislavery campaign. In Grant County, he found and worked with steadfast new allies, “firm friends of humanity.” He eloquently praised the local activists he met there:

The abolition ship has weighed anchor, spread her sails, and, borne on by the fresh breezes of heaven, her broad banners waving in the winds, and her pendant streaming from her . . . topmast; she plunges over the billows, veering her course for freedom’s port. Some of our eastern friends who dwell by the sea, may think it an odd place for navigation, out here in the woods, but they must like to know that abolition can go across the land, as well as across the ocean.

No mere pleasure sailors, the inland antislavery mariners were prepared for a spiritual battle against what they deemed an unholy system. In this letter to the New Garden, Indiana, Free Labor Advocate and Anti-Slavery Chronicle, Wattles claimed “[t]he friends of freedom are mailed in the might of principle, and Jehovah backs their purpose.” Grant County’s activists did not have to fight slavery and prejudice alone, however, for Wattles noted that their neighbors were also “moving in the cause of the slave. The ‘incendiaries’ and their firebrands have set the prairies on fire.”1

Like other participants in the western abolition struggle, Wattles recognized that the majority of the movement’s membership and organizational apparatus lay in the East. Nonetheless, he informed Indianans and eastern readers who knew little of regional circumstances that Old Northwest abolitionism was both vital and arduous. Since antebellum newspapers widely quoted from each other and reprinted one another’s articles, Wattles could have anticipated that his words might travel far.2 He asserted that easterners must shift their reform focus across the miles to the West. Of Connecticut birth himself and only then a resident of the region for three years, Wattles knew well that many eastern people saw the Old Northwest as a backward, amoral woodland sparsely dotted with hamlets.3 He nonetheless asserted that this actually was fertile terrain, strategically essential for cultivating a new vision of American racial liberation, one he had himself only recently embraced. Hardly “an odd place for navigation,” he indeed foretold that Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio would instead prove central to the fight against slavery, and for civil rights and freedom of speech.4 As a traveling speaker, Wattles exemplified the era’s and the region’s most important propaganda technique.

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The abolition ship did not sail across these wooded seas uninhabited, for a dedicated cohort of traveling activists like Wattles piloted it for the antislavery cause, fighting for freedom of speech as they created and expanded antislavery networks. Since the Old Northwest’s population was dispersed, propagating reform there required itinerant lecturers to promote and strengthen the cause.

As advocates for the slave moved around the Old Northwest, their lecture tours demonstrate the transitory, maturing state of the region’s culture and society in the 1830s and 1840s. Activist women and men faced many challenges specific to this singular environment, which included both unusually extensive violent and nonviolent efforts to silence organizing activity, as well as the fatigue of advocating abolition across a large rural region with few allies. Itinerants’ provocative labor elicited community strife, and they found their surrounding milieu unusually contentious, but nonetheless vital to national reform. Anti-abolitionists sought to regulate discussion in these communities, and used threats of extreme violence to stifle unwanted voices that questioned deference toward social order, organized religion, economic sta­bility, and partisan politics.5 Speakers ranging from Marius R. Robinson in 1837 in Berlin, Ohio, to Lucretia Mott in 1847 in Richmond, Indiana, vehemently claimed the right to raise their voices in protest against slavery and racism.6 This regional context complicated itinerants’ mission, for widespread mobility and population expansion meant that people were often moving into Old Northwest towns at the same time as activists were passing through. Most residents had recently arrived, but many nonetheless rapidly developed a sense that they had the right to eliminate the topics of abolition and African American rights from local discussion.

While most Old Northwest people gave itinerant abolitionists a cold welcome, they were a product of their era, and thus hardly an anomaly. Under the “agency system,” national and state activist organizations employed lecturers to travel and stir up reform fervor across the United States. Itinerant organizing predated the antislavery movement; numerous other causes and reforms implemented it in the Early Republic. Evangelical religious organizations pioneered the agency system that later enabled abolition lecturers and other reformers to propagandize widely. “Parent societies” sent out agents to form local auxiliary societies across their scattered communities, which reunited en masse in periodic conventions.7 The numbers of itinerant lecturers, or agents, boomed from the end of the eighteenth century onward, and they used increasingly sophisticated methods over the decades.8 This conversion-centered tactic grew out of the era’s moral environment; the Second Great Awakening—which ended in the late 1830s—inspired broad-based action against social evils.9

Many antebellum reforms shared common methods. Their presses publicized impending events, at public meetings people subsequently composed and approved resolutions, and they then broadcast their results.10 Abolitionist lecturers and writers seized upon this inventive blend of critical thought and evangelical outreach to disseminate antislavery arguments across the northern states, but in the Old Northwest it was particularly necessary—and particularly difficult.

From the 1830s onward, as the population in the Old Northwest expanded, traveling individuals lectured in these new settlements. As the transportation infrastructure improved over the first decades of the nineteenth century, it became easier for a range of lecturers to reach people across the newly sprawling nation. Technological advances also enabled affordable printed materials, which travelers brought with them on their tours.11 This expansion of the agency system meant that despite the geographic and demographic challenges their communities posed, Old Northwest people commonly found sojourners in their midst. Whether they were abolitionists, evangelical preachers, or circuit court judges, a multiplicity of voices rang across the prairies.

Since antislavery organizing in the region required it, itinerant lecturing had a long and vibrant history as an organizing technique in the Old Northwest. It remained one of the most formidable weapons of the antislavery movement there from the 1830s until the advent of the Civil War, well after the point at which historians of northeastern activists claim the practice was moribund.12 Traveling lecturers, both local and eastern-based, joined the region’s antislavery struggle beginning in the early 1830s, when Theodore D. Weld traveled extensively across the area and organized numerous societies.13 Other lecturers simultaneously moved around the region to raise funds for causes linked to antislavery activism, such as African American schools and the anti-“Black Laws” movement.14 The actions of itinerants varied from state to state.

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The patterns of itinerant antislavery activism in the Old Northwest largely corresponded to general abolition trends in each state, in that states with stronger antislavery cultures had a greater amount of itinerant activity. This varied little between 1835 and 1861. Itinerants who inventively mixed critical thought and zealous persuasion organized in Michigan and Ohio from the early 1830s, and by the middle of the decade they were in Indiana and Illinois.15 Ohio subsequently maintained the most comprehensive itinerant coverage in the region.16 There and in Michigan, substantially higher numbers of itinerants visited than they did in Illinois and Indiana for any five- or ten-year period between 1835 and 1861. Itinerant traffic began later with sporadic visits to Illinois in 1837, but such speeches remained rare until after 1840.17 Indiana’s antislavery lecturing began in 1839, and that state maintained the smallest itinerant presence of the four Old Northwest states.18 This variation, and lecturers’ accounts, indicate that they faced the greatest number of difficulties and had the smallest representation in Illinois and Indiana, while Michigan, the northernmost of these states, had fewer virulently anti-abolition residents than the other three. Ohio was contentious, but abolitionists faced weaker opposition there than in Illinois or Indiana, which had much more developed anti-abolition and anti–African American cultures. Nevertheless, across all of these states, when itinerant activists aimed to address their western brethren and sisters, they consistently lacked the liberty to speak.

Much as sailors battle unpredictable storms, itinerants fought their own tempests to obtain the freedom of speech needed to spread their ideas over the Old Northwest seas. Strong-minded local people repeatedly rebuffed their attempts to lecture across the region. From at least 1835, in their speeches and writings, antislavery speakers and their supporters incorporated their work into a larger effort to ensure the free public expression of all sentiments, however unpopular. This connection began as early as 1835 with James G. Birney’s attempts to publish against slavery in Cincinnati, and with Theodore D. Weld’s and Augustus Wattles’s abolition organizing and mobbing in Ohio.19 Activists realized that to liberate slaves, they would have to preserve their ability to be present, well advertised, and vocal in public. While women played an unusually proactive role in the rough and tumble struggle for the right to advocate abolition, and faced more extensive opposition, all activists had to fight for this public intellectual space.20 The continual attacks on antislavery peoples’ right to public speech, and the challenges of organizing the geographically and ideologically scattered population into a reform body, meant that Old Northwest activism was different, and even more difficult, than activism in the East. In consequence, abolitionists there fervently defended the liberty of expression needed to disperse their ideas. Their vocal presence conflicted with others’ conceptions of government rights and protections for unpopular ideas.

Throughout the Old Northwest, anti-abolitionists constantly worked to restrict abolitionist speech and shore up white supremacy. They claimed that they must stamp out the threat open antislavery discussion posed to an orderly society, even if it required violence. To break down the abolitionists’ coordinating systems, they used mob violence, personal attacks, and property destruction to silence them.21

In this region, abolitionists used the law to defend themselves against this vigilante violence. They crafted broad freedom of speech claims, often based on the First Amendment, to justify their public action and face down vigilantism. Beginning in the early 1830s, abolitionists invoked state law in their defense, but soon they shifted the target of their requests for help. Prior to the Civil War, the era usually understood to mark the beginning of individual claims on the national government for rights, Old Northwest abolitionists articulated an understanding of federal rights that transcended those granted on the local level.

From the 1830s on, outside of the boundaries of extant law, antislavery people pushed for an expansive definition of freedom of speech. One early example is the aftermath of the Lane Seminary debates, where the antislavery students left in 1834 to protest the seminary trustees’ stifling of their lectures, immediate abolitionism, and activism in Cincinnati’s African American community. The vast majority of these men enrolled at Oberlin College after the faculty there guaranteed them freedom of speech and interracial admission to the college.22 Such activists changed the definition of liberty of expression so that they could continue their work even while their contemporaries besieged their rights. Legal scholar Michael Kent Curtis argues that this redefinition formed the primary check on northerners’ infringements on antislavery voices. Indeed, activists responded to attacks on their freedom of speech by expanding the scope of these protections, and constructing their new rights as national, federalized, universal, “basic and inherited.”23

Old Northwest reformers played a crucial role in changing the discussion over the First Amendment from merely addressing violations of their own right to speak to instead highlighting an impending threat to all Americans’ autonomy and democracy. Freedom of speech claims drew an increasingly large audience, especially following the start of the gag rule in the House of Representatives in 1836, and after the killing of Elijah Lovejoy in 1837.24 Increasingly, antislavery people’s free speech claims hinged on federal rights. By focusing in this way, abolitionists reinterpreted the First Amendment’s guarantees, since its original intent was to protect the right to free speech from government interference, not from attacks by their fellow citizens. They thus pushed for a sweeping definition of rights by invoking them as though they already existed and people could enforce them.25 At the time it was very difficult to implement First Amendment rights, for in terms of actual court action, the measure lacked regulatory muscle until the 1868 ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, and even then, the federal government did not use it to enforce the First Amendment on the states until the 1920s.26 Nevertheless, given the Old Northwest abolitionists’ keen need for tools for self-defense, they repeatedly called upon this new conception of a federal right to freedom of expression.

Itinerant antislavery lecturers in the Old Northwest confronted physical opposition as they sought public forums, and many responded by citing citizenship claims to defend their freedom of speech. Anti-abolition violence in the region began with Weld and his early allies, who encountered mobs in 1835 and 1836 in Ohio.27 This phenomenon continued well beyond such famed incidents, including in the 1830s. In early 1837 hostile townspeople expelled Marius R. Robinson from a church in Hartford, Ohio. This Massachusetts-born man had attended seminary in Tennessee, and had become an avowed abolitionist by the early 1830s when he moved to Ohio. He lectured for the American Society in the West beginning in 1836, and soon married Emily Rakestraw, herself an abolitionist and women’s rights activist.28

At Hartford, Robinson’s foes interrupted his meeting, demanding that he be silent and let them speak. When he refused, they pulled him out of their church, and held him in the town square by pinioning his arms for half an hour. They thus pilloried him in a public space to silence him and show disapproval of his message. Robinson argued that as a “citizen,” he had to assert his right to speak despite such challenges: as “ . . . an American citizen [I] could not so far forget my duty and my rights as such as to render obedience to their direction.”29 He maintained this conviction throughout his public career, as did his determined compatriots in the region.

* * *

In their self-defense, antislavery activists in the Old Northwest also explicitly linked their freedom of speech struggles to a gendered concept of manliness that included a martial element. As passionate women and men fought for antislavery people’s liberty of expression, some revealed a preoccupation with assertive masculinity, and others questioned gender roles themselves with their activist work. In 1838 in Jacksonville, Illinois, abolitionist Albert Hale wrote to his compatriot Asa Turner about Turner’s fitness for the position of Illinois antislavery agent. Hale thought that they both lacked the mental fortitude to face volatile Illinois activism. This agent would confront the “thorough manly & deep discussions of . . . the freedom of speech and the press and the freedom of the slave” needed for that position.30 Thus Hale claimed that only a man who could forcefully argue against slavery could defend freedom of expression. Since abolitionists had to fight for a public forum, Hale and others relied upon projecting masculine force against their opponents. They used then-prevalent ideas of proper manhood as independent and powerful to decide who should be their Illinois advocate.31 Four years later in Knox, Illinois, the Liberty convention agreed, claiming that “history” had shown them that they must use a “prudent and manly regard to our own right” to face down attacks by the slave power.”32 They argued that without this vigor, antislavery activists lacked sufficient leverage to bring about slave liberation.

In fact, many abolitionists realized that in practice, literal manhood alone could not ensure free discussion or itinerant safety. Indeed, women could guard freedom of speech, as seen elsewhere in Illinois, where women protected men against anti-abolition mobs. In 1844, Irene B. Allan of Peoria shared an anonymous letter in the Chicago Western Citizen that detailed an incident from the early days of Illinois antislavery organization, presumably the late 1830s. The unnamed writer defended her fellow abolitionists against unfriendly residents of her town: “I stood sentinel at the kitchen door myself, and can answer for it that none came in without a pass.” She was thus instrumental in repudiating an anti-abolition mob.33 This woman’s reference to the “kitchen door” also reveals that this meeting took place in the ostensibly private space of a home, blurring the lines of public and private even as she acted outside of gender norms. Also in 1844 in western Illinois, Laura B. Coleman discussed women’s defensive presence at a speech by the Reverend Ichabod Codding in McDonough County. The women refused to leave upon the request of the mob members that sought to attack the men: “We told them that we had no idea of leaving yet.” Instead, Codding continued as planned and lectured for two hours.34

These physically assertive female bodyguards complicated discussions of manhood as needed to guard freedom of speech. This rhetoric may have fortified men’s confidence, and in some cases its proponents ignored local activist women’s contributions, but in reality female abolitionists frequently faced down anti-abolition challenges. At times women’s defensive strategy proved quite effective, which is surprising given that elsewhere in this same era, mobs showed few scruples about targeting women. In 1838 in Philadelphia, anti-abolitionists burned Pennsylvania Hall in a violent mob attack on attendees of the second National Convention of Anti-Slavery Women—clear evidence that women were not immune to anti-abolition violence.35

Women’s bravery extended across racial lines, too, for whether or not they embraced overt organization, African American women in the Old Northwest exhibited no hesitation about defending themselves and their families from slave catchers and others who sought to harm them.36 This protection was far from absolute across the region, as female meeting attendees and lecturers found throughout this era when they worked to secure the right to openly advocate their views. This was an essential right in the eyes of Old Northwest activist women and men, and both actively engaged in the struggle to speak on a range of platforms.

* * *

Abolitionist navigators in the Old Northwest fought to present their views to the public. Whether they were men or women, one main arena in itinerants’ local battle for antislavery expression was the fight to obtain speaking venues. Anti-abolitionists in the Old Northwest (and elsewhere) tried to silence visiting activists by refusing them space to advocate their message. Some objected to individual itinerants, others to antislavery lectures as inappropriate for the space in question, and still others opposed any sort of abolitionism in their town; all forced activists to be creative in finding speaking platforms. Local residents tried to control the flow of ideas through restrictions on abolitionists’ usage of a wide variety of buildings. Many of the determined Old Northwest abolitionists maintained their right to hold local meetings, despite dire consequences, and the presence of itinerant lecturers thus elicited conflict within communities.

Marius R. Robinson’s expansive 1837 tour of Ohio exemplifies this determination, for he covered a large area of the state, including numerous small towns itinerant abolitionists infrequently visited, with few like-minded residents. Robinson arrived in Berlin, Ohio, in June, and asked permission to use a building to hold a meeting. Locals refused him the use of churches, schools, and public halls, so Robinson opted to speak in a private home. In resorting to holding meetings in houses—or in ambiguously public spaces like churches—he and other abolitionists politicized spaces that prevailing ideologies defined as domestic, troubling the boundaries between public and private.37 In Berlin, Quaker merchant Jesse Garretson and his wife offered to let Robinson use their house. On June 2, he held one quiet meeting there, and scheduled a second meeting two days later to discuss his antislavery views on the Bible. This proposed religious theme and his persistence in organizing in the community incensed some town residents. Mob rumors began to circulate, which Robinson disregarded; they later proved to be accurate.38

Robinson depicted his freedom of speech trials in his account of the incident, called “Free Discussion,” in the New Lisbon, Ohio, Aurora of June 15, 1837, published near his in-laws’ home where he recuperated after the attack. June 3, the night before his second meeting, Robinson sat in Garretson’s store and chatted with him, his wife, and J. F. Powers. About ten o’clock at night, local anti-abolitionist Mordecai Hughes burst into the store and grabbed Robinson by the arm. He attempted to pull him out the door, claiming that he must depart since he had “‘ . . . disturbed the peace of our citizens long enough.’” Mrs. Garretson rose to his defense, intervening and claiming, “‘If you take him, you must take me too.’” A second man pulled Robinson by his other arm, aiming to get him outside. Mrs. Garretson continued her defensive efforts, and tried to prevent the rest of the men crowded outside from coming in. The mob entered the store regardless, and pulled Robinson toward the exit, although the Garretsons delayed them.39

While they struggled, Hughes commanded that Mr. Garretson “dismiss” Robinson from his property. Garretson would not, and asked the crowd to “stop and reason the matter.” They refused, and Robinson disparagingly noted that “brute force” ruled this encounter. He commented that the mob gave Mrs. Garretson no special handling despite her sex. They roughly pushed her over, and Robinson claimed that this attack made the crowd’s savagery apparent. This incident would perhaps look different were Mrs. Garretson’s perspective available, for she evidently volunteered to enter the fray in Robinson’s defense. Did she look for chivalry, or just defend a friend under siege without expecting gentler treatment as a woman? To add insult to injury, Hughes then chastised and attacked her for violating propriety in defending Robinson, told her to stop, and “pushed her.” Mrs. Garretson defied then-prevalent stereotypes of passive, retiring femininity, for despite the threats, wounds, and actions of her fellow town residents, she refused to abate her defense of Robinson until the crowd had bodily forced him into the street. After the men had departed, they left her bruised, with a sprained wrist and “considerable pain and soreness” in her breast.40

Once they had removed Robinson from the Garretsons’ protection, three men forced him to walk at least a mile out of the town limits. They dragged, harassed, and jabbed Robinson along the way, until they stopped outside of town to tar, feather, insult, and threaten him. After completing their “ministrations,” they held him fast and took him ten miles out of town to Canfield. There, where he knew no one, they left Robinson just before dawn.41

Robinson’s assailants told him they aimed to prevent him from holding his Berlin meeting the following day. They thus wished both to punish this lecturer for his transgression of town norms, and to make it impossible for him to speak as planned. In Canfield, Robinson found shelter with a sympathetic family named Wetmore, who cleaned him up and tended his wounds. These included burns from the hot tar and two serious cuts, including a deep one in his hip, incurred in the store as the men pulled him into some scythes.42 The Wetmores also lent him clothes. Robinson attended two church services in Canfield that day and gave an antislavery address in the evening. It was Sunday, and even grave insults and injuries could not keep Robinson out of church and off the lectern, although he did not succeed in speaking again in Berlin.43

Robinson’s attackers made no effort to hide their identities, and were well known in town. He publicized their names by printing them in the extended narrative of his trials for freedom of speech.44 The sheriff later confronted the anti-abolitionists, but pressed no charges.45 Local authorities never prosecuted any members of the crowd, and while they indicted Robinson for “inciting a mob,” they did not convict him.46

Robinson tied this silencing incident with a larger issue, the hold that slavery had over the nation, and its power to restrict individual freedoms. He saw the events as a “gross violation of my rights, in common with those of my fellow citizens,” and as proof that the “spirit” of slavery existed in the North as well as the South. Indeed, this spirit only respected violence, not “reason truth nor right.” He held few illusions about his attackers’ goal: to silence him at any cost. When one of them said “‘Don’t you see we have the power?’” Robinson saw this as a local expression of slaveholder sentiments.47 Thus Robinson, along with other itinerants, regarded the anti-abolitionists’ effort to keep him quiet as part of a larger national system of oppression and suppression of potential controversy and of activists’ rights.

In the face of this rancor, Robinson left the area and recuperated for a month at the home of his in-laws in Guilford, Ohio. He recovered sufficiently to return to lecturing in August. His health remained poor for some time, but he continued to tour through the end of 1837. He failed to recover his full strength until he took a lengthy hiatus from speaking.48 Berlin changed over the years, and by 1849 was so altered as to host an “immense gathering,” the convention of Ohio Anti-Slavery Young Men and Women, a substantial contrast to the violent community response and attack on Robinson 12 years prior.49

Robinson remained a lifelong combatant in the free speech fight. He became editor of the Salem, Ohio, Anti-Slavery Bugle in 1851, and after his break from speaking, he reemerged on the platform with an October 1853 address to the Michigan State Anti-Slavery Society in Adrian. He ascribed such great power to “free speech” and “free thought” that he claimed they were the tools needed to dismantle the slave system. In his view, slaveholders knew of this link, and thus opposed abolitionist speeches and publications.50 Pro-slavery people had to suppress open discussion, for permitting it would be tantamount to allowing the abolitionists to make further converts. For their part, Old Northwest antislavery people overtly denounced their foes’ widespread efforts to stifle their free speech.

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Robinson’s travails were hardly anomalous, for other Old Northwest anti-abolitionists publicly proclaimed that they would use violence to exclude the antislavery message from their buildings. Churches, as ambiguously public structures, were quite restrictive, for clergy and congregants were often reluctant to address slavery or give a platform to outsiders. There does not appear to be a correlation between any particular denomination and these negative responses. Churches were inconsistent from one denomination to another, even one parish to another, as to whether they admitted abolitionist meetings.51

Some church authorities—including trustees and ministers—defended abolitionists’ freedom of speech. At Smithfield, Ohio, in 1841, local people refused to publicize Dr. Erasmus D. Hudson’s meeting, and some locals tried to lock him and his modest audience out of the church building. Hudson did get in, however, with the aid of the trustees, and he wrote that they had a “profitable meeting.” Almost as an afterthought, Hudson wrote that some anti-abolitionists also lobbed “addled eggs” at them.52 Hudson’s casual attitude toward this attack indicates a willingness to stand firm in the face of frequent challenges.

This victory aside, anti-abolitionists in Old Northwest communities frequently prohibited itinerants from using churches. Even when these lecturers were themselves ministers and behaved with caution, they still encountered silencing of their freedom of speech in these religious settings. The Reverend William T. Allan, who traveled Illinois in May 1841 as the agent of the Illinois Society, believed that Alton remained dominated by the “spirit of pro-slavery violence,” even four years after the riot that had ended with Elijah Lovejoy’s death. When he visited there that May, Allan successfully preached on one occasion in a local church, despite the town’s history of opposing free discussion and pro-slavery sentiment. This victory was short-lived, as he saw when he tried to hold more meetings. The following day a group of local people petitioned the mayor, begging him to stop Allan from speaking again. The mayor, in turn, wrote to the trustees of the church, asking them to refuse to allow Allan access. The trustees complied, and locked Allan out. The Cincinnati Philanthropist reported that “a mob assembled,” but they found the house closed and no abolitionists present to attack.53 Allan conceded, since he had no other venues in this hostile town once the mayor and trustees rallied against him.54 Local civic officials could thus assert their right to close even religious facilities, but they also fiercely protected secular spaces. Pro-slavery and antislavery factions battled over their right to speak out in both kinds of places.

Community members who controlled government buildings varied in their willingness to allow abolitionists freedom of speech. In June 1845, Giles B. Stebbins held a meeting in the courthouse at Warren, the county seat of Trumbull County, Ohio, when locals forbade him to speak in all other places.55 He quickly found a solution for his issues in Ohio this time, but this was not always so easy. In April 1844, Illinois activist Ichabod Codding encountered larger problems in securing a venue in Springfield, Illinois.56 He first tried churches, and then resorted to the State House. While the authorities allowed him in, community sentiment was evidently less decided. Levi Spencer, Codding’s fellow New York-born Illinois antislavery minister who attended the talk, wrote in his diary that Codding was speaking when a “tremendous and hideous noise” rang out from the lower level of the hall and made it impossible for him to continue. Their opponents egged the meeting, but as Spencer noted, “not much harm [was] done.” They rescheduled the meeting for the next day. Spencer was outraged that this “Capitol of a free state” could produce such injustice, for in his eyes, the seat of Illinois government should have heard the antislavery perspective. This was a view many Illinoisans failed to share, as their actions proved.57

Other communities in the prairie state strongly resisted itinerants’ speeches in public buildings. On May 27, 1846, the sheriff of Bloomington, Illinois, refused to allow traveling lecturer Owen Lovejoy to address local abolitionists in the courthouse. Levi Spencer lived there, and he and other abolitionists had been battling to speak locally against slavery since 1843, when a throng of men with clubs had broken up their county antislavery society meeting and attacked Spencer. Two days earlier, he noted that he and his few allies faced threats if they proceeded with their meeting plan. The predicted mob materialized, and on that day in May, Spencer wrote in his diary that the “crowded streets” were full of “oaths, threats” and “eggs.”58 They could not get any public building, so they met in a “Mechanic’s shop,” where Owen Lovejoy finally spoke. While he lectured, they heard the rhythmic smacking of eggs hitting the walls of the house, and entering in the windows. The eggs flew in from “adjoining buildings” while the authorities passively watched.59 The anti-abolitionists of Bloomington, like those elsewhere, continually persecuted activists as they relocated their meetings, and the government failed to stop them.

Community resistance to abolitionists’ freedom of speech drove them to use unusual, less politicized, locations for their meetings, including lofts, warehouses, private homes, fields, groves, and even barns. In their diaries, memoirs, and correspondence, itinerants reported the myriad places where people had gathered to hear their words, whether with hostility or open ears. On one eight-month jaunt in 1841–42 through Ohio, Indiana, and Michigan, on behalf of the American Society, Dr. Hudson was often accompanied by Charles C. Burleigh, the well-traveled Connecticut-born editor and lecturer who edited the National Anti-Slavery Standard and contributed to other antislavery papers including the Liberator and the Salem, Ohio, Anti-Slavery Bugle.60 Oliver Johnson, another agent for and founding member of the American Society, joined Hudson and Burleigh for part of the tour.61 In a letter from October 1841, Hudson revealed that he and Burleigh had, over the course of several weeks, spoken in a courthouse, a private home, Methodist and Friends meeting houses, an Associate Reformed Church, and a public hall, and had conducted multiple outdoor meetings.62 The outdoor grove had the advantage of admitting more people than any building’s capacity in the small towns typical of the antebellum Old Northwest. Itinerants sought out various venues until they found one that would accommodate them and allow them a public voice, but neither this nor acquiring an audience was simple.63

Itinerant lecturers in the Old Northwest faced an additional challenge to obtaining audiences and securing freedom of speech, since they relied upon an array of imperfect publicity techniques. These included informal mentions of meetings, handbills, word of mouth, and announcements in newspapers. Anti-abolitionists deliberately obstructed these efforts, and the news of an impending lecture often did not reach the targeted community, as occurred in 1841 in the small town of Lexington, Indiana. There, Dr. Hudson was unable to issue any advance announcement of his lecture, but he nonetheless obtained decent attendance due to word of mouth.64 Locals thus sometimes refused itinerants the publicity they needed to gather an audience.65 Poor publicity also had benign causes at times, including human error, but itinerants’ local foes more commonly controlled audience size and access to public forums through repressing the news of their events, a less obvious attack on freedom of speech.66 Even where abolitionists did find public forums and could publicize their talks, they still faced resistance in the Old Northwest.

Anti-abolitionist pressure could be acute, as was the case in 1841 in Dayton, Ohio. There, even while the lecturer backed down, his acquiescence failed to prevent a riot. That January, Thomas Morris, the former Democratic senator and Liberty Party vice presidential candidate, arrived in town to deliver an antislavery speech. A local mob warned him that they would attack him if he gave his scheduled address, so he cancelled it out of fear for his safety. Despite his decision to keep silent, anti-abolitionists attacked his carriage and driver with a “shower of brick bats,” and broke the windows of his host, local abolitionist Hibbert Jewett.67

Morris left town the next day, but Dayton remained heated, for a race riot began as the mob turned its attention to the local African American population. They first focused on a house (in some accounts a house of ill repute) where rumor had it that a white woman lived with “some negroes.” When told that the woman in question was actually “yellow,” or a fair-skinned biracial woman, the agitated men then asked whether there were any abolitionists in the house. A fight broke out, and the African Americans defended themselves. In the chaos, someone killed a white anti-abolitionist named McCreary, and injured several others. Throngs then attacked local African Americans and burned three houses. The conflict only ended when authorities jailed a man in connection with McCreary’s death. The Indiana antislavery newspaper, the Protectionist, the following month printed an account that supported the African Americans’ right to self-defense.68 Nonetheless, the local African American community paid a high price for abolitionists’ actions and attempts to speak, while Morris himself escaped harm. Following this riot, Dayton remained rife with controversy over abolitionists’ freedom of speech.69

* * *

Itinerants’ persistence in defending their freedom to speak could incite long-running disputes in communities, and these often betrayed strong concerns with limiting outsiders’ ability to influence Old Northwest towns. On September 29, 1841, Hudson, Burleigh, and Johnson met for a three-headed assault on slavery in Richmond, Indiana, a town that was notorious among abolitionists throughout the decade for virulent attacks on freedom of expression. Even in 1847, local Quakers greeted Lucretia and James Mott with hostility and tried to silence them, for they regarded them as troublemakers.70 Back in 1841, the three men could only obtain a small room, Warner’s Hall. Their audience did not all fit inside the space, but they were “respectable” and “attentive.” That evening they procured the Associate Reformed Church for their meeting, and Burleigh spoke there. A botched attempt to stop the meeting with a false fire alarm interrupted him, but the speakers continued.71 The anti-abolitionists of Richmond used this subterfuge to try to break up the meeting, but failed.72

After the trio left Richmond, a local newspaper, the Richmond Palladium, railed against them as “disgraceful.” Having failed to prevent the meeting, Richmond’s anti-abolitionists nevertheless derided the lecturers when they were no longer present to defend themselves. Arnold Buffum, who edited the Protectionist of nearby New Garden, reprinted this denunciatory piece shortly thereafter, noting that the Palladium’s editor was clearly trying to turn his readers against the travelers by using “contemptuous language, and odious epithets.”73

As Editor Holloway of the Palladium exemplified, a common technique used to silence antislavery lecturers was to claim that they were hired outsiders. Holloway deemed the speakers “imported lecturers,” “missionaries hired by the anti-slavery societies in the East, to awaken us to a sense of our sins,” and “itinerant demagogues.”74 He wrote “we will not . . . countenance hirelings, who travel from one community to another, exciting and disturbing all, without the least benefit to any.”75 Buffum responded that it was futile for the editor of the Palladium (or similar respectable others) to denounce anti-abolitionist attacks while they simultaneously condemned antislavery activists. He argued that community leaders were to blame for this contempt toward activists, and that they led the poorer elements, the “unprincipled and vicious,” to wreak violence upon them.76 With this letter he both appealed to prominent citizens to uphold free speech, and offered a justification to exonerate the people who actually carried out the attacks.

In contrast, Buffum argued that leaders could stop mob actions by respecting and protecting abolitionists’ right to a public voice. The editor of the Palladium had instead increased community hostility to lecturers by calling them “hirelings.”77 Buffum met efforts to ostracize antislavery people with suggestions for a fair resolution of future conflicts, including allowing speakers a say, and thus granting them their freedom of speech.

Antislavery people across Indiana reviled this incident of silencing in Richmond. The Indiana Anti-Slavery Society and the Union County [Indiana] Anti-Slavery Society both criticized the town in November 1841. The Indiana Society noted that Burleigh’s attempt to speak publicly presented such a threat to the people of Richmond that they muzzled him. In their words:

The only means whereby they could shut out conviction from the minds of the people, and secure the favor of slaveholders, was to shut the advocate of truth from their houses; thereby inviting the mobocrats to drive him from his stand, by the use of their best argument, to wit: eggs.

They argued that these violent methods would ultimately fail as they only revealed the conspiracy to hush abolitionists shared by northern elites and southern owners of men. Rather than permitting open debate, these collaborators depended on “a league of power, with the vile passions of the mob, to stifle discussion and smother the truth.”78 Indiana abolitionists saw how they could use evidence of their silencing to condemn and weaken their enemies, as they also tried later in Richmond.

Shortly thereafter, Hudson again found pressure to keep silent in Indiana when he visited Pendleton and Anderson in early October, and he used his reception there to state his views on tyranny and freedom of speech.79 In Pendleton, he addressed a gathering at the Baptist meetinghouse. While he found attendance good, certain residents showed their contempt for abolition by hurling eggs, or “pro-slavery, rotton arguments,” against the building, although no one was hurt.

Having connected free speech to liberty, abolitionists could link its denial to tyranny. When Hudson and local ally Dr. Edwin Fussell attempted to hold their scheduled meeting the following day at the nearby Anderson courthouse, their opponents locked them out and chased interested audience members from the area. Fussell—like his wife and first cousin, Rebecca Lewis Fussell—was from Pennsylvania, and an abolitionist since childhood. The Fussells found great resistance in Indiana to their customary outspokenness on abolition.80 At the courthouse, when the anti-abolitionists raised the clichéd question, “What have we [the North, Indianans] to do with slavery?” Hudson presented the ready evidence of the locked courthouse door as proof that slavery, even there, restricted all people’s rights.81 He used this to illustrate repression of freedom of speech, and the very presence of a throng in the square to stifle local abolitionist organizing reinforced his point. A close examination of one itinerant tour, the “One Hundred Conventions” Tour of 1843, definitively illustrates the central role that small Old Northwest places like Pendleton and Anderson played in antislavery and anti-prejudice activists’ struggle to speak freely.

* * *

On September 25, 1843, an irate throng expelled two abolitionist lecturers from their meeting in the Noblesville courthouse in central Indiana. Countenanced by the sheriff and prominent citizens, this small, vociferous mob from a nearby town quickly silenced visiting Massachusetts speakers Charles Lenox Remond and schoolteacher and future National Anti-Slavery Standard editor Sydney Howard Gay. While few locals supported abolition, and the lecturers faced advance threats, Noblesville’s citizens had resolved to protect their gathering.82 Before the meeting, the club-holding anti-abolitionists marched the village streets, loudly proclaiming that activists, especially African American ones like Remond, had no right to speak in their house of governance.83

The Noblesville mob entered the courthouse and demanded that the antislavery meeting disperse. Although the attendees initially resisted, the majority quickly lost their resolve, and left only a small group of abolitionists alone with the mob and the sheriff. They found no defense from him, for he also claimed that they should leave the building.84 Disgusted, Remond and Gay departed under the proud eye of their opponents. Remond, a founder of the American Society who had been lecturing since 1838, railed against the local people as spineless cowards for succumbing to this censorship pressure.85 While they suffered no injury, larger principles were at stake for Remond, as he wrote to his Rochester friends Amy and Isaac Post, a white Quaker couple with whom he and Frederick Douglass had recently stayed when the tour passed through their city. He seethed, “liberty was murdered by the cowardly surrender of unquestionable rights on the part of those in peaceable assembly.”86 Remond described this as mob tyranny, and was particularly offended by the fact that the interlopers were not even town residents, but nevertheless “drove the people of Noblesville from their own quiet meeting.”87

* * *

Noblesville was but one stop on the grueling, five-month “One Hundred Conventions” lecture tour of 1843, and one of many places in the Old Northwest where Remond, Gay, and other lecturers battled local resistance for a hearing. This tour exemplifies the ever-increasing opposition to freedom of speech that itinerant antislavery lecturers faced in this racially antagonistic region. Setting out from Vermont in early July, they continued across New York, Ohio, Indiana, and Pennsylvania, ending in Philadelphia that December. This strenuous campaign sent these seven men across five states: African American speakers Charles Lenox Remond and Frederick Douglass; and white lecturers John A. Collins, George Bradburn, James Monroe, Jacob Ferris, and Sydney Howard Gay. These one hundred meetings, or conventions, constituted a reform endeavor of unprecedented magnitude in terms of time, number of participants, and towns reached.88 In the minds of the tour organizers, both eastern and western, the Old Northwest represented essential yet forbidding terrain for fighting slavery, and they thus invested substantial time and money in it.

The tour arose in a context of interregional exchange and communication that blurred the distinctions between national and local activism. Three immediatist organizations—the Ohio American Society, the Massachusetts Society, and the American Society—called for and collaborated in planning the tour.89 People from both regions shared this task, for all saw that it was imperative that they reform the Old Northwest. In 1842, the Ohio American Anti-Slavery Society had asked the national executive committee of the American Society to send them prominent speakers, and that May, the Massachusetts Society voted to sponsor the tour to exploit the “comparatively new field” of the Old Northwest, fresh ground for sowing abolitionist seeds.90 They rapidly obtained their stable of lecturers for the tour, thus proving their enthusiasm for activism in the “Western and Middle” states.91 Six of the participants—all but Gay—were experienced lecturing agents for the Massachusetts Society and the American Society. Vermont-born John A. Collins had recently gone west to make arrangements.92

That same month, at the American Society’s Boston annual meeting, Old Northwest abolitionists also played a vital role in the tour preparations, for a group of them, including Indiana’s Dr. Fussell, had traveled east on a commodious wagon that they called the “Liberator,” lecturing along the way. Antislavery people reused this wagon for many years.93 Throughout the tour, the activists corresponded with local and major national papers such as the Liberator and the National Anti-Slavery Standard, linking the regions.94

In the Old Northwest, antislavery activists had much work to do prior to the tour, for interregional collaboration was central to the tour’s success. Local societies in Ohio and Indiana made preparatory arrangements including calls for publicity and hospitality in newspapers like the National Anti-Slavery Standard and several western antislavery papers.95 In one such article, Edwin Fussell pled with his Old Northwest neighbors to give all possible assistance to both the itinerants and their local audiences.96 While their hosts had diligently prepared for the lecturers’ arrival, they could not shield them from the trials and dangers of securing freedom of speech in these hostile communities.

* * *

In this underserved region, the battlefield was belief, the weapon the spoken word. On the men’s sojourn through Ohio and Indiana, numerous towns denied the lecturers the liberty to speak. Apart from the provocation of the “One Hundred Conventions” tour’s antislavery message, the speakers’ immediatist beliefs and interracial friendships gave hostile Old Northwesterners cause for complaint—and reason to mob. The lecturers and their local allies confronted a range of opponents that hindered their rights.

The tour threw its participants and their allies against substantial anti-abolitionist opposition. They faced both overt and covert efforts to suppress their right to speak, refusals of venues, fierce counterarguments, and, most notably, mobs.97 After his return to the East, Gay summed up their ordeal:

 . . . [H]ouses have been sacked and burned, printing presses have been destroyed, rewards offered for men’s heads, loss of reputation has been cheerfully met, every species of wrong and obloquy has been suffered; and through all, anti-slavery has lived, and the ears of the people now everywhere tingle to hear upon the subject.98

As Gay had seen, numerous communities that hosted conventions did so reluctantly, refusing to allow the lecturers to meet and speak freely.

Across the Old Northwest, local people denied the lecturers this liberty, but this opposition was generally milder in Ohio than in Indiana, where anti-abolition sentiment was stronger.99 At Massillon, Ohio, around August 20, a lawyer and a Methodist preacher verbally rebutted them. The eastern lawyer William A. White, unruffled, remarked, “Neither of their speeches were worthy of notice, and I believe the pro-slavery people who made them their cats-paws were ashamed of them before they finished.” White praised the local allies who sustained him and his fellow lecturers in the face of this challenge.100 In Utica, Ohio, a Whig named General Warner denounced abolition, and claimed, as White wrote, that abolitionists were “the immediate successors of the Jacobins of the days of terror.” Such inflammatory remarks did not daunt the itinerants, for White’s companions—Gay and James Monroe of Connecticut, a future professor and politician—both dismissed Warner’s claims.101 Thus, while the lecturers often noted their verbal antagonists in their letters, they adapted to this frequent opposition.

* * *

Audience rejoinders could be unpleasant, but a more troubling hazard of antislavery lecturing in the Old Northwest was the ever-present threat of violent anti-abolitionist attacks inspired by racial bias, partisan politics, and the desire to preserve local rule and the social order. Community leaders often shepherded hostile crowds that threw eggs and threatened the lecturers and their audiences with violent assault.102 In the case of the “One Hundred Conventions Tour,” while these risks escalated when itinerants traveled in mixed-race groups, mobs assaulted the speakers even when they traveled in racially homogenous units. The attacks grew more frequent in Indiana, but Ohio was far from quiet.

While interracial contact provoked some mobs, other mobs threatened and attacked even all-white groups of lecturers. In Wooster, Ohio, early in the tour, a partisan mob nearly attacked White and Monroe even though Douglass and Remond were not with them. Locked out of indoor venues, they could only obtain the town square for their scheduled meeting, and there tried to speak to a hostile crowd. A Democratic congressman named Benjamin Jones shouted contradictions throughout White’s speech. Jones’s partisan identity could certainly have informed his anti-abolition views—and intensified local disputes. By the hour of the evening lecture, the townspeople had already begun to threaten an attack, but this proved to be a bluff, although someone egged a home during the night.103 Bradburn encountered more animosity when he later traveled alone to Dayton, a place noted for its violent past and “infamous for its pro-slavery mobs.” Dayton at the time had just over 6,000 residents.104 Anti-abolitionists had previously attacked lectures that three other itinerants gave, most notoriously, that of Thomas Morris.

In 1843, Bradburn was thus pleasantly surprised when three of his four Dayton lectures proceeded undisturbed. Even though the final lecture met with the resistance he had anticipated, a “shower of stones and eggs,” the attendees remained, which he saw as “great progress” for Dayton, with its ugly history.105 Despite the violent and nonviolent resistance of such Ohio communities early in the tour, the “One Hundred Conventions” lecturers were still unprepared for the extensive trials they next faced in Indiana.

* * *

At Pendleton, in the center of the state, the silencing of abolitionists, extralegal violence, and miscarriage of justice melded together in a fiery confrontation that exemplifies the Old Northwest freedom of speech struggle. Between September 14 and September 16, men claiming to defend party politics, racial stratification, slavery, and republican government first attacked a meeting led by three of the convention lecturers—Frederick Douglass, George Bradburn, and William White—and then intimidated the local community. On the third month of the tour, the lecturers, particularly the famed speaker and writer Douglass, were already well seasoned when they arrived at the home of their congenial local hosts, the Fussell family. These men did not welcome their brutal treatment, but found it unsurprising in this contentious area of Indiana where most local people regarded their message as unpalatable. In the state as a whole, many residents held firm beliefs in their right to silence discussion of race or abolition.106

White, Douglass, and Bradburn arrived in Pendleton anticipating trouble, since local anti-abolitionists had threatened to stop them with violence. They expected that their opponents would shut the antislavery group out of the meetinghouse, for while a small group of outspoken Quaker enemies of slavery lived near Pendleton, local allies were very few and public abolition was unwelcome, especially when African Americans advocated it.107 As the convention approached, the lecturers heard increasingly direct warnings of violence. White claimed that these antagonists lived in “Columbus, a miserable, rum-drinking place” that was approximately six miles away. Shortly after the meeting began, the hostile trustees ejected them from the Baptist Church.108

Refusing to be dissuaded, the abolitionists and their audience met immediately outside of the church, where their foes joined them; local resident Dr. John Cook acted as an intermediary, working to calm the crowd—which White claimed was inflamed by alcohol—that threatened them with violence.109 While he was not an abolitionist, Cook affirmed “the right of speech.” The anti-abolitionists permitted Bradburn to speak until a rain shower interrupted them, and many fled indoors. The crowd remained outside the church, and only mildly attacked the speakers: “The mobocrats retired without making any assault upon us, save tossing at us a single stone, and one or two ‘evangelical eggs.’”110 The antislavery lecturers stood strong in the face of steady local challenge.

That evening, a group of Pendleton citizens took action to protect local freedom of speech. They held a meeting in which they unanimously passed a resolution denouncing their silencing, and Bradburn and White spoke to the assembled audience.111 White, pleased, “hoped we should have no more trouble,” but they soon did.112

While the abolitionists and their free speech allies took these direct, formal measures to protect their rights, their adversaries nonetheless attacked the next day’s meeting. Local organizer Dr. Fussell—foreseeing the likely need for a neutral meeting space—had set up an open-air facility in a grove near town, complete with seating and a plat­form; it resembled an outdoor revival stage.113 The convention assembled in the woods, and White noted that eleven anti-abolitionists were present at the outset, as was a sympathetic audience of 100 men and 30 women. First White spoke, followed by Bradburn, in total for over one and one-half hours. Bradburn was absorbed in his speech when Dr. Cook suddenly interrupted him, after noticing that their opponents were drawing near.

This group of about sixty men elicited strong invective from the abolitionists they targeted. Bradburn and White noted their attackers’ slovenly, ungentlemanly attire, their level of preparation for combat, and their partisan identities. The men were in their shirtsleeves, and appeared disheveled. They marched around the grove while prominently displaying their supply of “brick-bats, stones, and ‘evangelical eggs.’”114 They represented both major parties, for local people identified one leader, shoeless, in sagging clothing, to White as a Democrat, while the other leader, clad in a “coon-skin cap,” was a Whig.115 This fellow, whom Edwin’s uncle and local Quaker Solomon Fussell later identified as “Devault [David] Crowl,” evidently wore the cap with the tail in the front, lending what Bradburn thought was a ridiculous aspect to his proclamations and fierce utterances.116 In their descriptions of their assailants, the abolitionists scorned their character. Bradburn referred to them in stereotypical terms, as “sundry unshaven, lantern-jawed, savage-looking loafers,” who uttered “murderous threats, and blasphemous oaths, against abolitionists and ‘niggers.’”117 Even as Bradburn was likely to judge his opponents particularly harshly given that they had invaded and shut down the antislavery meeting, the interlopers’ later attacks on the speakers, particularly Douglass, bear out this interpretation of their intentions as violent. The participants on both sides of the encounter used familiar language to justify protecting or opposing open activist discussion. This local-level violence thus embodied larger national disputes over reformers’ freedom of speech, with the difference that the unsettled environment meant that these local tensions persisted longer, to an even more dangerous degree.

The situation at Pendleton quickly escalated into violence when the abolitionists refused their adversaries’ order to “disperse,” and stood their ground.118 While much of the audience appeared inclined to flee, White asked them to keep to their seats. The women remained seated, attesting to their bravery, while some of the men departed. White claimed of the women, “throughout the whole they showed themselves the more courageous party, as they ever have done.” He continued, noting that it was the refusal of the Pendleton citizens (presumably meaning the men present) to face down their aggressors that led to local mob power.119 These women—possibly assuming that their sex would protect them and that their opponents would not harm them—kept to their seats and demonstrated remarkable collective cohesion, which their male counterparts lacked.

As the anti-abolitionists began to throw their airborne weapons, Dr. Cook and William White attempted to reason with their attackers, which angered them further. One anti-abolitionist, James Jackson, tried to seize control with a profanity-riddled speech about the abolitionists’ political crimes, especially their nonvoting and immediatist views, including “‘letting the niggers loose for nothing.’”120 He made what White called a “most ridiculous spectacle,” but in the end found that words could not convey his message with the efficacy of gesture and violence.121 Falling silent, Jackson physically mimed his frustration, and Bradburn equated his convulsions with the jerks of a cadaver attached to a galvanic battery. His antics made the audience laugh aloud.122 Jackson realized that the situation was escaping his control and stated that “‘he could not talk, but he could fight.’”123 Refusing to allow this mockery, he thus incited the crowd to break up the speaking platform and the meeting.124

Following the destruction of the platform, the brawl began in earnest. The anti-abolitionists attacked the audience, pressing in and throwing them to the ground. They “knocked down” and wounded Micajah White, a Quaker, along with two other men (Mr. Graham and Dr. Vaughan). Famed abolitionist Levi Coffin later wrote that White, his nephew, lost two teeth to a brick.125 Douglass, despite identifying as a Garrisonian nonresistant at that time, entered the fray with a club to defend a man who the crowd was severely beating, and whom he thought was William White.126 Nonresistant principles could bend under pressure, especially when the lecturers needed to protect one another.

The attack at Pendleton is but one example of the tension between violence and nonresistance that mob attacks against abolitionists in the Old Northwest elicited. Frederick Douglass was the most famous nonresistant on the tour, meaning that he embraced the Garrisonian practice of nonviolence, but Gay also avowed these principles. Bradburn praised Douglass for abandoning “his non-resistance not for himself, but for a friend,” even though the man Douglass had saved was actually a stranger, not White. Douglass later claimed that the Pendleton incident had “cured” him of his nonresistance.127 As for William White, he openly admitted to striking blows to protect Douglass.

Following Douglass’s defensive action, his opponents wrested the club from his hands and attacked him with fury. They flung their various weapons at him, and Rebecca Fussell claimed to have placed her baby in the way to intercede when a man attempted to club Douglass. She wrote that Douglass managed to flee for a moment after “[m]yself and baby saved him from that blow.”128 Rebecca Fussell’s move to protect Douglass has implications for the role of gender and even age in protecting certain activists from harm. In making her decision to place her baby Linnaeus between the angry men and Douglass, she assumed that they would hurt neither her nor the baby, and thus saved Douglass a clouting. In tandem with the other women at the meeting who kept to their seats when their antagonists arrived, she proves that Old Northwest women both stayed in dangerous situations to protect the right to free expression, and actively resisted anti-abolitionist silencing.

The dangerous itinerant milieu thus had an active place for women and children, as the lecturers and meeting attendees who wrote about the Old Northwest conventions observed. White wrote of the benefits and the costs of this gender and age diversity when he discussed Ohio meetings, noting that unlike in Massachusetts, “all the mothers bring their babies.” In some cases, bringing the children must have been a practical choice if there was no one else to watch them at home, or if they had to nurse their babies. White found that this could prove disruptive, “when ten or a dozen set up a shout,” but overall welcomed their presence, thanks to “the desire it shows in the mothers to attend.”129 This lecturer believed that this attendance boded well for action for the cause. Old Northwest women were willing to risk their safety and that of their families to take part in and protect meetings that interested them. This speaks to their desire to participate in reform politics and to their strong degree of integration into Old Northwest abolition.130 Despite Rebecca Fussell’s valiant effort, Douglass did not escape harm for long.

* * *

While all of the lecturers were injured, the anti-abolitionists’ racial motivations are evident since they targeted Douglass, the lone African American lecturer present, and injured him the most severely with blows from rocks and fists. Chasing him, they shouted, “‘Kill the nigger, kill the damn nigger.’” White claimed that the scene exemplified Indiana’s racist character as the anti-abolitionist “hell-hounds” pursued him, “panting for his blood. It was a fearfully true picture of the flight of the fugitive slave, and it was fitting it should take place on the soil of this pro-slavery State.”131 One well-aimed stone hit Douglass on the head, knocking him down and creating a large lump. A circle of men quickly gathered around the fallen Douglass, aiming deadly blows at him, and wounding him on the hand and in the side.132 They directed their worst violence at this man whose identity and message most strongly violated community norms.

The several accounts of the melee name different men who intervened to stop this race-based attack.133 William White claimed to have done the rescuing himself, by flinging himself upon a man who aimed at striking Douglass a death blow. He walloped the back of White’s head with a stone, but White’s hat spared him the worst of the impact.134 By intervening, White attracted the wrath of the attackers, and “was badly wounded and bruised.”135 Others also interceded, and the violence ended.136 Once they had shut down the meeting and violently silenced the activists, the anti-abolitionists departed.

After Douglass’s allies had halted his attempted murder, William Lukens placed him in his wagon with the aid of Dr. Fussell and his brother-in-law Neal Hardy.137 They drove Douglass to Hardy’s home about two miles away, unconscious all the while. Once they arrived, Fussell and the Hardys cared for him.138 Douglass recovered swiftly, and surprised his friends by speaking the following day in the congenial setting of Friends Meeting House in nearby Fall Creek, albeit with a bandaged head.139

* * *

The activists’ contemporaries were very interested in this overt silencing of freedom of speech in Pendleton; newspapers, both antislavery and general, took note of it and condemned it. Many journalists and citizens saw it as an outrageous, blatant miscarriage of justice. The Whig-identified Indiana Courier wrote shortly thereafter to denounce the attackers’ violence and censorship intentions. The editor called the anti-abolitionists a “gang of lawless and uncivilized ruffins, armed and disguised” who recklessly assaulted a group “quietly and peaceably progressing with its business.” In the writer’s view, mobs were inexcusable expressions of low, wicked human emotions, especially when they aimed to stifle “the right of free discussion—a right as sacred as life itself and secured to every citizen by the law and the Constitution.” In response, all needed to rally to protect citizenship rights, deny mobs their approval, and prosecute their participants.140 This was not in fact what ensued at Pendleton, where freedom of speech continued to erode, and the local authorities proved disinterested in protecting activists’ rights. The attack on the touring lecturers at Pendleton demonstrates the determination on both sides to either hear or silence controversial antislavery views. The local partisan and racially biased climate was too firmly seated for the activists to overturn it, and this incident proves that not all views could peaceably earn a hearing in the Old Northwest.

As this case demonstrates, conflicts over slavery and social control made securing reformers’ freedom of speech unusually difficult in the Old Northwest, and these virulent reactions could transform activists’ lives. Whereas itinerant lecturers certainly attracted their fair share of dramatic opposition, for them the experience was fleeting, and could cease as soon as they departed a problematic town. Since the Old Northwest was central to their shared reform mission, itinerants gave local societies mobile reinforcement and took direct action against slavery, and in turn, locals provided them essential support. The repeated challenges that resident abolitionists faced across the Old Northwest demonstrate that their institution-building and aid to visiting lecturers threatened their neighbors’ conception of community control sufficiently to elicit repeated violence. This constant resistance to Old Northwest abolitionists’ public activism plays an integral part in understanding itinerants’ freedom of speech struggles. Locals brought the conflicts over race and slavery into their homes by opening them to travelers and collaborating with them. After itinerants left, people continued to debate the parameters of speech and action in Old Northwest towns. Resident activists’ aid had serious consequences when they clashed with neighbors who refused to permit them to organize in their communities; indeed, their unwelcome message rendered them pariahs in their towns.

As the extreme case of Edwin and Rebecca Fussell exemplifies, these changes could happen almost overnight, even when they had already openly espoused abolition. At the same time as the bold attack at Pendleton inspired outrage across Indiana and the nation, the local freedom of speech drama unfolded further. The subsequent legal struggle had significant ramifications for both the Fussell family and the community. That family suffered wide-ranging effects for organizing the Pendleton antislavery meeting and hosting its speakers. Traveling lecturers like Gay knew well that eastern antislavery people “sacrifice[d]” far less than Old Northwest activists like the Fussells.141 Prior to the “One Hundred Conventions” tour, the doctor had a well-established medical practice, and the family had many friends in the region. The couple not only lost most of their material possessions and their livelihood, but eventually they had to move away.142 They paid substantial costs for their efforts to fight slavery and protect freedom of speech.

The Fussells and the itinerants ignited a struggle over local mores. Rebecca and Edwin Fussell’s existing antislavery beliefs expanded in the inhospitable soil of the Old Northwest. Fussell and his allies publicized their trials in both local and national newspapers, and used their challenges to raise awareness of the dire circumstances reformers faced in Indiana—and in the region. In Madison County, the “One Hundred Conventions” tour left wounds in the community beyond the physical kind the abolitionists sustained.

The conflict at Pendleton—an overt battle over freedom of speech—spiraled out into a larger cultural and legal struggle at Anderson, the seat of Madison County, nine miles away. After the touring abolitionists had departed, their opponents continued to shut down local reform. The attackers at Pendleton and the subsequent throngs at Anderson were open about their intention to silence abolitionists, beginning with their advance notice that they would mob the Pendleton meeting.143 In both towns, the anti-abolitionists freely opposed reformers’ liberty to speak and the local judicial process.

In Pendleton and Anderson, mob violence was a form of community control that anti-abolitionists overtly used to stifle divisive antislavery views.144 The night of the Pendleton attack, rioters rode through the village, warning that they would return with reinforcements to destroy the Fussells’ home. The abolitionists’ allies—including some Quakers—took up arms to respond to this threat, but it was a bluff. That these Quakers would violate nonresistance indicates the severity of the threat they felt. While the mobbing men did not return, the townspeople heard them shouting nearby.145 The abolitionists at Pendleton knew they were not yet safe.

The itinerants had stayed at the Fussell home since their arrival in town, but as the threats mounted, they decided it was prudent to disperse in houses throughout Pendleton. Bradburn wrote of Rebecca and Edwin’s flight from their home with much emotion:

O, it was a painful sight to see, as I saw . . . the doctor’s excellent wife, taking her leave of friends and relatives . . . and with an infant in her arms, accompanied by their two other little ones in his, hurrying stealthily out of their own house, in the evening’s darkness, to avoid being buried beneath its ruins by an infernal mob.146

They fled to Dr. Madison C. Walker’s house for safety.147

The abolitionists defended themselves in print, charging that prominent locals supported and legitimated the aggression at Pendleton and Anderson. After he left Pendleton, White claimed the anti-abolitionists were passive participants manipulated by “designing men,” including religious and Democratic Party leaders. Bradburn agreed, specifying that mob members were Baptists and Methodists.148 “F.”—most likely Edwin Fussell himself since they used very similar language—concurred, claiming in a letter to the Free Labor Advocate that the Anderson mob varied in terms of social status, “not merely the rabble but ‘men of property and standing.’” “F’s” quotation marks indicate his awareness that he was using a conventional phrase to describe mob composition, one that acknowledged community leaders’ investment in preserving the status quo, even if it entailed using illegal means.149 With this, he supported the common view that prominent men led anti-abolition mobs.150

* * *

The courts also weighed in on the identity of the anti-abolitionists and their responsibility for community disruption. The anti-abolitionists thus had to face the judgment of the legal system, not merely that of their antislavery targets. Initially, the case appeared to favor the abolitionists, for a grand jury indicted “some twenty” of the rioters. One, Morris Runnels (called Reynolds in most newspaper accounts), volunteered to stand trial in Anderson as a test case, assuming that he would receive a minimal sentence. If this happened, the other indicted men planned to undergo trial, but they also announced that if the jury imprisoned Runnels, they would then demolish the jail. Local lawyers had offered Runnels free defense, which he had declined, assuming a sympathetic verdict. Runnels pled guilty, and said, as Fussell paraphrased, “he had mobbed the abolitionists, and he . . . had come on purpose to be imprisoned, and was going to be, and was coming out over the prostrate walls.”151 Presiding Judge Killgore defied Runnels’s expectations, sentencing him to twenty days of jail time and a ten-dollar fine.152 The throng outside of the court responded with outrage, reiterated their plan to free Runnels by force, and even vowed to attack the judge and jury.

The drama continued, for the local government summoned the militia in response to the anti-abolitionists’ threats. Later that day, Thomas McAllister, the Democratic representative in the Indiana House, rode into town at the head of a throng of 200 to 300 men on horseback.153 They demanded Runnels’s release, and again intimated that they would destroy the jail with arms, which they claimed to have stockpiled nearby. They also threatened Judge Killgore, who, according to Edwin Fussell, responded by condemning the abolitionists for the events after the Pendleton meeting and absolving himself of the blame for jailing Runnels. Killgore claimed that since Runnels had pled guilty, the law forced him to convict. He begged the crowd to refrain from attack, for the militia would then have to respond. Instead, the judge recommended that they petition Governor Bigger to pardon Runnels. The crowd finally scattered once the messenger had sped off with the petition to Indianapolis, but its members went on intimidating local abolitionists and the people who participated in the trial.154

Addressed to the Whig Governor Samuel Bigger, the petition text identified its signers as local residents with a voice in county affairs. These “citizens of Madison County” pled that Runnels had committed a youthful indiscretion, out of his ignorance: “ . . . the strong probability is that he was not conscious of having violated any law.” Further, they argued that the penalty was overly harsh, given his lack of previous criminal behavior. They concluded by asking for Runnels’s release and for pardon. The petition signers represented a spectrum of the community, including local Quakers, which surprised Edwin Fussell.155 This petition had 220 signatures, many of which are illegible, and several appear to have been signed by the same hand. A range of citizens rallied in support of Runnels’s freedom, and made an argument that the governor evidently found persuasive. On October 12, 1843, Bigger inscribed on the petition’s reverse: “Pardoned as to the imprisonment in the county jail; Samuel Bigger.”156

Madison County’s residents anxiously awaited the petition results. Edwin Fussell, unable to exercise his freedom of speech, had gone lecturing with John O. Wattles and Valentine Nicholson. Persistent efforts to mob him made it increasingly evident that it was becoming impossible for him to live in Pendleton or maintain his medical practice.157 When he returned two days after the trial, the messenger had not yet brought back the petition, and he suffered persistent haranguing from his local opponents who blamed him for the meeting and the ensuing conflict. He and his friends debated whether his family should depart, for rumors of assassination plots circulated and he believed that they would never again be safe in town. The doctor found that even his allies saw his continued residence in Pendleton as unwise, but he steadfastly adhered to his values in the face of massive local opposition.158

Meanwhile, local authorities searched for men to protect Anderson’s official buildings from the anticipated riot, but they found few takers for this risky enterprise. The small number of volunteers and their antagonists poured into the Anderson town center. Fussell claimed that this third mob originated from throughout Madison County, and several nearby counties as well. As their numbers grew, the pardon arrived from Governor Bigger, Runnels went free, and the throng dispersed.159 In the eyes of Fussell and his abolitionist allies, this definitively refuted local freedom of speech.

* * *

Since violent anti-abolition had so drastically altered the Fussell family’s lives, they felt the pardon as a cruel blow. It was clear that activists could not rely on the authorities to use the law to defend their interests. “F.” wrote that with this decision, the Governor gave what he termed “mobocrats” free rein. Now, “they may trample down, abuse, and murder abolitionists, whenever or wherever they please, and shall not be punished by the laws of Indiana.”160 While there was a perfunctory trial, the court took no further punitive action against the anti-abolitionists. In addition to revealing the shortcomings of the Indiana judicial system, this outcome drove the Fussell family out of the state. They permanently relocated after a period of moving around the Midwest lecturing and searching for a Fourierist utopian community in which to settle. The Fussells shared their interest in the community movement with other Old Northwest abolitionists and some of the “One Hundred Conventions” tour lecturers.161 Unable to find a community, they ultimately instead moved to Philadelphia.162

Fussell later learned from his family and friends still in Indiana that the other indicted men never stood trial. The next court term was six months after the riot, and the remaining men appeared when summoned. The prosecuting attorney only called in anti-abolitionist witnesses, who claimed that they had not seen the indicted men “do anything wrong.” Despite the presence in the room of other witnesses able to provide damning evidence against the men on the stand, the judge did not call them, and dismissed the case for lack of proof.163 The legal consequences of these Indiana attacks on itinerant lecturers and on the Fussells’ freedom of speech thus vanished, along with the opportunity for them to raise their grievances in court.164

Fussell was outraged, and saw this as a transparent instance of politics and intimidation trumping the legal system. It was an election year, and the prosecuting attorney required the favor of the individuals in the mob and positive public opinion in order to win. In Fussell’s view, this attorney accordingly selected his witnesses from among men who so feared the mob that they remained silent.165 Fussell saw that securing freedom of speech was impossible in Madison County, and that his family had been correct to relocate for their safety. The anti-abolitionists regarded this as the necessary silencing of a voice that was outside of community norms, which threatened national stability and had continued to push an unpopular cause, even after the provocative itinerants from the East had left town. In Pendleton and Anderson, abolitionists elicited substantial disagreements about social control and their freedom to speak, which taught them that they could expect few guarantees of their rights in Indiana.

Fussell demonstrated the permanence of the move in March 1844 when he granted power of attorney to his brother-in-law Neal Hardy, and directed him to dispose of his assets. In Philadelphia, the Fussells still agitated against slavery, and persisted in their work for the community movement.166 In 1848, upon his first return visit to Pendleton, Edwin wrote to Rebecca of his visit to their former home. Tangled remnants of wildly growing honeysuckle and roses filled their garden, while the house itself was decrepit: “The ruin is complete and all trampled down under the feet of the heathen.”167 Fussell thought its decayed condition reminded local residents of the repression of local abolitionism, and yet their wild yard still thrived, as did his family.168 Central Indiana—and the region—remained charged for activism even after the Fussells departed for Pennsylvania with their lives irrevocably altered, for Pendleton was only one among many Old Northwest communities that resisted local abolitionist organizing and freedom of speech. Others across the region also sought to closely control problematic antislavery voices.

* * *

The hostile reaction most Indianans had to antislavery led to ongoing violence and freedom of speech battles as the “One Hundred Conventions” tour continued beyond Pendleton. Douglass, Bradburn, and White encountered another mob in October at Richmond, the site of the Society of Friends’ expulsion of eight members the previous year for their refusal to renounce antislavery activism. Their disruptive presence tapped into the town’s and the state’s continual political and religious controversies, and illustrates the pervasive, violent opposition they faced.

Despite this tense history, the “One Hundred Conventions” lecturers’ first Richmond convention—on October 28, 1843—met successfully and freely, although the situation soon changed. Douglass spoke, and Bradburn explicitly refuted Henry Clay’s positions on slavery, engaging in the earlier debates over the Whig politician there. On October 29, Douglass went to lecture at Goshen, nearly 200 miles away.169 In Richmond, White and Bradburn led an effective morning meeting, but a church trustee locked the convention out of the building that afternoon. With the approval of another trustee in hand, a man crawled in the window to admit the audience. White began to speak, while outside a crowd with both antislavery and pro-slavery elements gathered.

Local lawyer James Green spoke out against the meeting in the street even though the abolitionists had invited him and his fellow anti-abolitionist, Wayne County senator Lewis Burke, inside to take part. Green attacked the speakers in language calculated to raise the ire of the audience, bluntly stating “that the Abolitionists ought all to be driven out of town.”170 Green selected his location wisely, for outside he faced no rebuttal. There he could, as eyewitness and local abolitionist Kersey Grave wrote, incite “the rabble” to attack the meeting. Shortly after his diatribe, someone flung “a dozzen or two of eggs . . . through the window in the direction of the speaker’s stand.” White had nearly finished speaking, and only a few of the eggs struck him, for most of them hit the wall. Burke, who Grave claimed was a slavecatcher, was in the egg-flinging crowd, and Grave used his presence to snipe at the mainstream Quakers, the “body Friends” that had expelled his brother Jacob the previous year for his antislavery affiliations:

Is it possible that the people of Wayne county send such a vile egg-o-tist and violator of good order and decency, to the legislature to make laws for them? We shall see whether the ‘body Friends’ vote for him hereafter, and thus prove their opposition to slavery and their regard for law, order, and decency...171

Green and Burke refused to join the meeting, and following the egging, the anti-abolitionists paraded the town, seeking their foes.

A group of approximately fifty men proceeded away from the church, along the main street. They harassed and called on several townspeople, and pelted one man’s house with stones and bricks, breaking windows and dishes.172 This anti-abolition group confirmed their vitriol with further violence. As was also true previously in Pendleton, the antislavery people’s accounts of their foes’ views may have been biased, but it is nonetheless evident from the anti-abolitionists’ actions that they wished to shut down antislavery discussion, even at the price of hurting others.

The Richmond convention catalyzed a broader freedom-of-speech controversy after the fact. The Wayne County Record printed a biased critique of Douglass’s Richmond speech, and among other insults and inaccuracies, it claimed that the mob pursued and egged him to retaliate for the content of an alleged speech on October 29.173 The editor called Douglass “impudent” as he ostensibly criticized the throng’s actions:

‘As the conductor of a public journal, we feel it our duty to condemn such disgraceful proceedings. We do not do this; because we feel a sympathy with the Negro abolition Lecturer. That he was impudent, and deserved all that he got, is perhaps true, but egging is not the way to meet such fanatics. Treat such persons with silent contempt.’174

Benjamin Stanton of the Free Labor Advocate denounced this “exhibition of spleen and prejudice against colored people.” He claimed that such articles added to the racialized oppression of both slaves and free African Americans, and blamed abolitionists for their own mobbing. He saw the choice of the word “impudent” as blatantly biased: “No man in his senses would call a white man impudent for talking just as Douglas did [or would have, since he was not there that day], under precisely similar circumstances.”175 A reader who signed his letter P. Q. R. echoed Stanton’s concerns in his next issue.176

Stanton used the errors and biases of the Record’s account to deconstruct bigotry through mockery. Since Douglass was in Goshen during the Richmond disturbance, White was the actual victim of the violence: “And as his name is, so is he,” wrote Stanton. He took his attack on skin prejudice to a personal level, noting that John B. Stitt, the editor of the Record, was in fact rather dark skinned. As was a common technique of antislavery activists who wished to ridicule absolute racial categories, and as he had done with his “colorometer,” he wrote that “the difference in color” separating Stitt and Douglass is “not vastly greater than between him [Stitt] and Wm. A. White.” With this claim, Stanton argued for equal rights by revealing “the folly of estimating men’s merits by the color of the skin.”177 In his view, Stitt had unmasked his prejudice as he erroneously attributed White’s speech to the allegedly “impudent” Douglass.

Stanton also had fiery words for another local editor, that of the Whig Richmond Palladium, who he claimed endorsed mobs and blamed abolitionists for their own mobbing. While Editor Holloway had advertised the antislavery meeting, he then supported Green. Stanton said Holloway claimed that Green tried to quell the mob with his speech in the street, but proved the opposite. Holloway quoted Green as misrepresenting abolitionists as partisan “hirelings,” a label which would in fact escalate mob anger.178 Holloway thus condemned abolitionists while claiming to support abstract liberty of speech. Stanton argued that Green’s speech only angered a mob of people loyal to the Whigs and mainstream churches, and asserted that such community leaders contributed to violent repression of the freedom to speak. He claimed that Green influenced public opinion to suppress free discussion, for mobs formed when prominent figures like Green, “of reputed respectability and standing,” countenanced anti-abolition attacks. Then, “the vulgar herd . . . are ready to assail them with their appropriate weapons, fists, stones, brickbats, and eggs.”179 He saw leaders as responsible for drawing others into such conflicts. These local temblors were but one form of upheaval that bore aftershocks across Old Northwest communities after itinerants’ departure, but lecturers also sought to avoid confronting excessive danger by strategically choosing their speaking schedules. Touring activists used their communication networks to determine who could securely lead their meetings, and who had the physical freedom to speak.

* * *

While they confronted extralegal violence and pushed with their public lectures against racism and anti-abolitionism, itinerants compromised at times when a change of personnel would allow them still to speak, but to do so more safely. That October, Remond avoided speaking in Indianapolis as he had planned, for he had heard from his friends that this could prove fatal. He in fact refrained from exercising his own freedom of speech, staying at Westfield while, in the wee hours of September 27, Gay and Monroe rode off to a tense Indianapolis with Fussell (who had briefly joined the tour) and other local companions.180 The abolitionists derided Indianapolis as vehemently anti-abolition, the “very fortress of pro-slavery in this State,” and a “moral refrigerator.”181 Remond expected they would find trouble, for word had reached him that “two hundred” mounted men had been “drilling” for a week and proclaiming that they would “burn, kill & distroy” any local convention. He saw Jesse D. Bright, Indiana’s lieutenant governor, whom he called a slaveholder, as responsible. Bright served in this role from 1843 to 1845, and did not actually own slaves, but was a close friend of Kentuckians Henry Clay and John C. Breckenridge.182 By then well acquainted with Indiana’s racial climate, the touring abolitionists had expected no support in the capitol.183 Even in the seat of state government, public sentiment so strongly opposed abolition that authorities would not defend activists’ rights, but they attempted local organization nonetheless. In Indianapolis, they found that the only check on extralegal violence was what the meeting attendees themselves imposed.

Once the men approached Indianapolis, they sent an advance guard to assess the safety of the situation.184 Despite word of an impending ferocious mob, they found no immediate threats, but their notoriety meant that no one permitted them to use any buildings. They could only speak on the steps of the State House, but they lectured twice to increasing audiences.185 At this, the pioneer antislavery meeting held in Indianapolis, they drew an audience of “influential” people, almost all of them men.186 While the meeting was tense, the abolitionists spoke and obtained a hearing. Monroe credited the peace that prevailed to “respectable . . . citizens[’]” calming presence.187 One attendee even came so close to violence as to put a brick in his pocket, intending to hurl it at Monroe, but sympathetic audience members stopped him. The speakers believed the meeting a success since they faced down such substantial threats and secured freedom of speech. Fussell said of this city, “the great pro-slavery citadel of this State,” that they left it “in a great ferment.”188 After their departure, Gay, Monroe, and Fussell reunited with Remond, and their lecture tour traveled on. While the others found freedom of speech in Indianapolis, Remond could not, and he thus provides further proof that African American activists in this region faced difficult choices between their safety and their freedom of speech.

This incident with Remond proves that under-recognized Old Northwest lecture campaigns like the “One Hundred Conventions Tour” are vital to understanding the impact of race in nineteenth-century America. Since African American populations in most Old Northwest places were tiny, traveling lecturers often closely collaborated and worked to protect one another regardless of race. Interracial cooperation was actually more common in this region than previously believed—albeit still controversial enough to elicit violence from Old Northwest observers.

Old Northwest abolition reveals that historians have underestimated the prevalence and longevity of grassroots interracial activism. Scholars have recently begun to uncover interracial activism in a variety of settings, but most studies of such amity characterize it as limited, and focus on eastern leaders. They find that few whites or African Americans were willing to pervade racial boundaries.189 While the gleaming stars of social reform remain important, so too are the lesser constellations and orbits of human collaboration. The lesser-known activists of the era, who took risks and sought change without the rewards of fame, could call for reform in novel ways. The social vision and actions of antebellum activists in the Old Northwest reveal that, in reality, such progressive levels of interracial friendship and empathy were not confined to the very few.

* * *

For their part, anti-abolitionists saw activist lecturers as upsetting the delicate balance of Old Northwest communities, especially when they traveled in interracial groups. The camaraderie and antislavery message of lecturing parties like the “One Hundred Conventions Tour” provided many Old Northwesterners with cause for complaint—and impulse to mob. While abolition lecturers in the early 1840s often faced down violent mobs, the men of the “One Hundred Conventions” tour saw continuous heightened attention to the interracial nature of their project. This made securing their right to speak difficult in Ohio, and even worse in Indiana. Southern Indiana was particularly confrontational; en route to Milan, Remond faced “repeated and gross insults.” Gay wrote of the ugly “fiendish spirit” behind local folks’s treatment of Remond, noting that the tenor of the place was such that this freeborn man “may esteem himself fortunate if he escapes arrest on suspicion of being a slave.”190 Interracial activist partnerships elicited community strife, but in the face of such hostility, solidarity across racial boundaries proved central to the travelers’ ability to pursue their goals, and strengthened their commitment to the cause.

Itinerant lecturers’ tours transformed them, as occurred with the “One Hundred Conventions” tour where both the relatively seasoned lecturers (Douglass and Remond) and the near-novices (Monroe and Gay) forged a new solidarity and an expanded abolitionist consciousness that stretched from their homes in the East to the newer terrain they had just explored. It gave them new bonds of friendship, too. Monroe and Gay corresponded after the tour, and Monroe and Douglass remained in contact with one another for decades; Douglass wrote to Monroe in 1880 to praise his diplomatic work in Latin America.191 They did not easily forget their adventures on the road. Antislavery activists made personal ties with their lifelong interracial friendships, but also made other important connections across racial lines.

By virtue of their own demographics and those of the towns they visited, activists who worked for freedom of speech found that their housing arrangements often crossed racial boundaries and brought concerns about African Americans’ local status into Old Northwest households. In this contentious region, itinerant antislavery activists, whether they had traveled only locally or endured longer journeys from the East, were weary and needy sojourners. Old Northwest abolitionists provided the essential direct aid to itinerants that facilitated activism. From the mid-1830s through the Civil War, hospitality in private homes gave help to itinerants that was frequently invisible. Unlike the more densely settled East, the Old Northwest lacked a substantial infrastructure of commercial hospitality beyond the larger towns. Travelers thus drew upon local people for their vital needs of transportation, food, shelter, support, and company.192 As they battled for the freedom to speak in this harsh environment, human comforts became all the more important, and traveling lecturers welcomed the efforts of locals to host and aid them.193

The Old Northwest’s distinctive unity was also visible in local political abolitionists’ open cooperation with traveling Garrisonian organizers, which helped them each in their activist goals. The Old Northwest Liberty Party collaborated with and enabled immediatist lecturers to hold unusually large and successful meetings, and invited them to speak at its own gatherings.194 Among Old Northwest people who embraced abolitionism, ideology did not dictate all.

Transcending faction, antislavery people built fellowship in the Old Northwest that meant abolitionists who eschewed politics found warm collaboration and common cause even in the homes of political abolitionists. These cordial home stays included when Guy Beckley, editor of the Liberty Party newspaper, the Signal of Liberty, hosted immediatist Dr. Erasmus D. Hudson in Ann Arbor in October 1841.195 As he moved on to Ohio, Hudson found similar treatment regardless of locals’ abolitionist methods.196 Two years later, Ohio Whig representative Joshua Giddings and his family opened their Jefferson, Ohio, home to the lecturers of the “One Hundred Conventions” tour, as did other Ohio and Indiana families, regardless of their ideological affinities.197 The Giddings did this throughout the 1840s.198 The aid that both Liberty Party and Whig antislavery people provided to immediatist itinerants in the region complicates the picture of their unambiguous rivalries that emerges from an exclusive focus on the East.

Lecturers and locals forged their alliances in conflict, and itinerancy was only possible thanks to this assistance. In 1843, the two groups of abolitionists on the “One Hundred Conventions” tour, which themselves were integrated, lodged with a range of hosts like white Quaker farmer Seth Hinshaw of Greensboro, Indiana. Douglass—and likely White and Bradburn—stayed with Hinshaw’s family when they spoke there in late September. The capacity of local organizers to host them comfortably and with loving attention, even in the tense Old Northwest, particularly impressed the travelers.199 These homeowners also at times simultaneously housed both lecturers and escaped slaves.200 The pattern of interracial aid extended back to Remond and Douglass’s visit with the Post family in Rochester, New York, in the early days of the tour.201 The Posts and Remond, all longtime activists, remained close for years.202 Itinerant lecturers appreciated this long-lasting community support, as seen when Frederick Douglass stayed with Betsy Cowles and her welcoming relatives in Austinburg, Ohio, in the late 1840s.203 While they confronted mobs that forced them to make tough choices between self-defense and assertiveness, the travelers were thus not without solace, even as their wanderings took a toll on their bodies.

Local people mitigated the hazards of itinerancy with their widespread aid. Along with the mobs that their unpopular cause roused, itinerancy posed other physical risks: travel hazards, health problems, endless motion, and grueling schedules all wore the speakers down. In addition to the wounds Douglass and White sustained at Pendleton, Remond also incurred injuries when he fell from a carriage pulled by runaway horses.204 In general, life on the road was rough, from the long exposure to poor weather—riding on horseback or in rickety carriages from place to place—to the sheer wear on their vocal cords from speaking several times daily without amplification.205 The crowds taxed the health of the hard-traveling itinerants, and prompted local people to care for them.206 These activists calmly faced down opposition and continued lecturing in the Old Northwest.

* * *

In Old Northwest towns where reliable allies supported their freedom of speech, itinerant lecturers held more productive conventions. When Remond, Monroe, Gay, and Fussell went to Westfield, Indiana, they found numerous collaborators including some “Anti-slavery Friends.”207 Their second day in town, men threatened to attack their meeting, but the Westfield activists stood up for themselves, in Gay’s words, “knowing that there was no law to protect men but the law in their own right arms.” Gay approved of this bravery despite his nonresistant convictions, for even when they disagreed with their compatriots’ violent tactics, the travelers still sometimes saw them as necessary. In any event, the itinerants and their audience in this case faced no attack, although many of the local men had brought loaded rifles for self-defense. Gay said of their associates’ brinksmanship that it characterized both the pro- and anti-slavery people in this region of Indiana, which had a violent gun culture.208 The resultant convention was, in Fussell’s words, “numerously attended, interesting, and orderly,” but periodically interrupted.209 In Greenwood, Indiana, shortly thereafter, rumors of antislavery self-defense again deterred the anti-abolitionists who planned to invade the meeting. While attendance was sparse and Remond chose not to speak—revealing again the race-based limitations of freedom of speech—no violence materialized. Apart from the abolitionists’ boldness, the severe rain and Remond’s self-censorship—as in Indianapolis—may have also had an impact.210

Old Northwest abolition was not solely an uphill battle for freedom of speech against violent foes, for local reactions show that some of itinerant lecturers’ successes in the region came more easily. In 1843, the verbal talents of Monroe, Douglass, and Remond attracted substantial attention, and at Salem and Newark, Ohio, local residents also praised Monroe.211 The famed orator Douglass won his share of adulation in addition to mob opprobrium, and Old Northwest audiences’ reactions to his and Remond’s speeches demonstrate how expressive African American voices could affect the fraught racial environment of the region.212 In Oakland, Ohio, their efficacy is evident in the words of one Presbyterian minister and Liberty Party man who extolled their “eloquence.” He wrote:

The being who could stand unmoved, under the bold and lofty bearing, the . . . burning indignation of Remond; or the keen, withering satire, the . . . soul-shivering sarcasms of Douglass—all poured forth, too, from the fullness of hearts overflowing with universal benevolence . . . must be less, infinitely less than man. What a loathsome, soul-sickening, ineffably contemptible thing is this American prejudice against color.213

In this man’s view, the best way to invalidate racial bias was with African Americans’ forceful speeches and direct refutations of the errors of bigotry. The itinerants’ efforts for local and national rights thus spoke to and inspired varied audiences—when they secured the freedom to speak.

Apart from contemporary commentary in newspapers and letters, lecturers’ freedom of speech successes also emerge in the size and tone of their audiences. The “One Hundred Conventions” lecturers’ letters frequently discussed how they ranged “from the faithful few . . . to the overwhelming and enthusiastic gathering at Oakland,” where they found at least one thousand people from all across Ohio.214 The conventions in several Ohio towns grew to such size as to exceed the capacity of any available building. At Salem, the lecturers lured enormous crowds, and those present—estimated at between six hundred and one thousand—had to move to a nearby grove of trees because they no longer fit in the meetinghouse. Gay wrote of this grove that it took an hour to fill, and “ . . . It was a glorious meeting . . . and a most stirring sight that, a thousand people though they looked small and few beneath those tall trees.” In mid-August in Marlborough, Ohio, people could not fit indoors by the second day of the convention.215 These open-air meetings drew diverse audiences, “women with new-born babes, and old men with one foot in the grave,” walking, riding, and driving wagons.216 Such positive experiences affirmed for lecturers that their ventures could bear fruit even in the tense Old Northwest.

* * *

The “One Hundred Conventions” tour ended at the Decade Meeting, the ten-year anniversary of the American Society, at Philadelphia on December 4, 1843. The Massachusetts Society proclaimed the tour an unqualified success, and argued that they should “send out able men over as large a portion of the free States as is practicable, to startle the stertorous nation with their warning voices.” The easterners thus vowed to do more of this local organization in small towns, which continued ongoing efforts in the Old Northwest since the early 1830s. Both eastern and local organizers optimistically declared itinerant lecturing an effective tool, despite the “hostile influences” that in most cases kept meetings small and besieged for decades.217 They were well aware of the challenges that they faced in western turf, and this made them all the more dedicated to changing this difficult region and its culture.

The Old Northwest’s adverse reform environment shaped locals’ expression of antislavery and anti-prejudice principles. Itinerant lecturers and the allies who battled by their side demonstrated the radical commitment to their unpopular positions necessary for activism there, where their right to speak was highly contested. They crossed racial boundaries, and their collaborations sus­tained them through hardship and mob violence. Itinerants worked in symbiosis with local people, and each provided necessary services to the other. Human networks connected lecturers across the region and the nation, and highlighted regional differences. With their speeches, they provoked a wide spectrum of local reactions, and elicited both op­position and support for the cause.

Itinerant lecturers could in fact fracture Old Northwest communities that were antagonistic to antislavery organizing. Older considerations of itinerant abolition’s timing and location have underestimated anti-abolition’s formidable influence in the region, the longstanding and widely disputed efforts of lecturers there, and the consequent difficulties activists faced. As abolitionists there insisted on their right to a hearing, their foes de­nied that public discussion of their ideas was legitimate. Conflict arose from this refusal, as it pushed debate to the margins, and advocating abolition became an of­fense punishable by forced silence, violence, or death. Many locals believed that traveling activists escalated sectional animosity, and treated these “hirelings” and unwelcome “outsiders” with loathing and violence. While many itinerants were immediate abolitionists who held nonresistant principles, their harsh environment even occasionally pushed them to take up arms in their own defense.

As mobs roiled towns across the region in response to abolitionist action, men and women with widely variant views on slavery and race relations stepped outside of culturally sanctioned gender roles to defend their rights. Some women interceded to protect itinerant men from violence or endured it themselves while traveling, while still others were among the first to sling eggs in fury. Antislavery organizers saw this hotly contested and little known reform realm as so vital that they voluntarily confronted its myriad challenges. Still, many itinerants struggled on, and without their willingness to do so and without the support of local assistance, spreading abolition in this region would have been impossible.

Antislavery and anti-prejudice activists found the Old Northwest freedom of speech climate particularly challenging. While the 1830s and 1840s were anything but tranquil for itinerants in the region, persistent anti-abolitionist violence meant that they found the subsequent decade even more demanding. Itinerant activists and their foes heatedly debated race and rights as sectionalism escalated over the course of the antebellum period. Even through the Civil War and Reconstruction, the region’s political and ideological divisions made securing African Americans’ rights and lecturers’ freedom of speech ever more elusive.