by Sasha Parrish

On June 20, 1860, Lydia Maria Child wrote to her fellow abolitionist, William Lloyd Garrison and referenced an almanac they planned to publish. She asked, “How many pages do you propose to have? …If you have illustrations, they ought to be much handsomer, than those in the old almanacs. The taste of the times requires it” (Child). Child was referring to The American Anti-Slavery Almanac, published annually by the American Anti-Slavery Society (AAS) to raise awareness about the evils of slavery. The AAS’s contributions towards the cause of abolition in the years leading up to the American Civil War cannot be downplayed. Founded in 1833 by white abolitionist, William Lloyd Garrison, the society had 2,000 auxiliary societies and approximately 200,000 members by 1840. By September of 1835, the AAS was publishing multiple monthly publications including 15,000 copies of Emancipators, 20,000 copies of Human Rights, 25,000 copies of Anti-Slavery Records, and 12,500 copies of Slave’s Friend, their children’s magazine. The American Anti-Slavery Almanac and the Anti-slavery Examiner were the society’s monograph publications and were just as popular (Shockley 234).

Of the AAS’s many publications perhaps the one most overlooked by historians is the almanac. Almanacs, traditionally, include information relating to farming. Weather forecasts, farmers’ planting dates, tide tables, astronomical (or astrological) information are all commonly found in almanacs. Most importantly, they were highly read in rural areas and cheap to produce. The almanac produced by the AAS included much of the traditional information but had a particular focus on highlighting the cruelty of slavery which was often downplayed in publications that supported the institution. Through images and short tales, the almanac provided those who were ignorant of slavery’s realities with narratives imbued with pathos to sway them towards abolition. The AAS was founded by and largely composed of white abolitionists, so its place in discourse surrounding the legacy of African American Print Culture may be somewhat obscure. However, the almanac spread the message of abolition throughout the rural north and south and numerous free blacks played a part in its production and in the AAS, which is largely credited with being most influential in the decision to abolish slavery. It is for this reason I study The American Anti-Slavery Almanac as an African American print culture artifact that contributed to the emancipation and the social uplift of enslaved African Americans.

Almanacs in general were a popular form of media in the nineteenth century, second only to the Bible (Goddu, 132). This was mainly because they were inexpensive to produce and to purchase.  The annual publications of The American Anti-Slavery Almanac were produced by the AAS from 1836-1844 and again for 1847. By the year 1839, the AAS had sold over a hundred thousand copies for only six cents. The popularity of the almanac led to the production of various other almanacs. The American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society (AFASS) published The Liberty Almanac between the years 1844-52. There were also versions of the almanac that were reprinted for particular regions. These include The New England Anti-Slavery Almanac for 1841 and The Western Liberty Almanac for 1844. There were also some reprinted for certain groups, such as The German Anti-Slavery Almanac (ibid).

The almanac, as a medium, was often employed as a mode of spreading political propaganda. During the American Revolutionary War, almanacs were used as a means of distributing propaganda in favor of the revolution. Arguably, the most famous were the almanacs published by Nathaniel Ames which sold about 60,000 copies per year. Eighteenth century almanacs contained the usual information about tides, weather forecasts, and anniversaries of important events. In addition, they were populated with poetry and scraps of prose and verse. The non-calendar pages usually included an author’s address to readers on the ‘state of affairs’, recipes, cures, special articles, lists of public officials, anecdotes, and even serialized stories. Due to the overall popularity of almanacs in the colonial period, writers were discouraged from discussing controversial subjects at risk of impacting sales (Raymond 370-1). As such, writers chose to leave more subtle messages. Nathaniel Ames was known for utilizing proverbs in his almanac to promote revolution, such as “It is better to wear a homespun coat, than to lose our LIBERTY” (Raymond 373). These messages planted the seeds of revolution in the minds of thousands of readers annually. The almanacs of the American Revolutionary War inspired the nation to begin question the status quo and reconsider their relationship to the English Monarchy. However, their authors did choose to prioritize readership over their causes. The authors of The American Anti-Slavery Almanac chose to be bold in arguing for their cause.

The AAS was dedicated to elevating the status and image of Black Americans within the minds of the public as a means of securing their emancipation. They wanted to ensure that white Americans understood people of color to be people, and thus have access to the same rights and liberties as all citizens. So strongly did they hold this belief that it is included as an article in The American Anti-Slavery Society Constitution:

Art. III. This Society shall aim to elevate the character and condition of the people of color, by encouraging their intellectual, moral, and religious improvement, and by removing public prejudice, that thus they may, according to their intellectual and moral worth, share an equality with the whites, of civil and religious privileges; but this Society will never, in any way, countenance the oppressed in vindicating their rights by resorting to physical force (American Anti-Slavery Society).

This article serves as the basis for the motivation behind the creation of the AAS’s many modes of print media, especially the almanac. This project to rebrand blackness and slavery as a means of ensuring the abolition of the latter could not be accomplished through Ames’ method of utilizing a few subversive proverbs. Like the almanacs produced during the Revolutionary War, the AAS’ almanac included special articles, short stories, poems, imagery, and addresses to the public in addition to the calendar pages. Dissimilarly, these segments highlighted the trials and tribulations of the enslaved.

Take for instance the image on the cover of The American Anti-Slavery Almanac’s 1844 issue (Figure 1). The image depicts a black woman on the ground clutching a child to her breast and positioning them between herself and ground. Standing atop the woman, talons digging into her sides, presides a bald eagle with its wings outstretched. The woman’s head is turned, and she looks directly at the eagle who looks back at her, beak ajar. Behind the three figures sits the United States of America’s Capitol building with the U.S. flag waving from its spire (Figure 1). The message is clear, the black woman and her child, the black family that is, are trapped beneath the talons of the American government. Unable to get free, the woman still stares defiantly into the eyes of her oppressor and meets its gaze in challenge. She challenges the status quo of slavery and subjugation for the sake of her small child and does so right in the view of the government which seeks to keep her down. This is the America of the mid-19^th century, the picture says. Positioned directly above the image and below the almanac’s title are the words, “Being Bissextile or Leap-Year; and until July 4th, the sixty-eighth of the independence of the United States” (ibid). At first glance the words only convey additional information about the issue and the year in which it is being produced. However, the deliberate positioning of the text, “the independence of the United States” above the image of the subjugated subjects trapped under this representative of freedom, unable to hold it for themselves, provides a moving juxtaposition. The cover highlights the irony of the United States celebrating its independence and liberation from an oppressive power and proclaiming “liberty and justice for all” while Black American women and children (innocents) continue to struggle under the yoke. The imagery is deliberately unsubtle, as subtlety is not something that could be afforded. The Alamac could leave no doubt in the mind about the hypocrisy of slavery.

Six years prior to the publication of this 1844 edition of The American Anti-Slavery Almanac, abolitionist Angelina Grimke published her Appeal to the Christian Women of the South in an attempt to sway Southern Christian women towards the cause of Abolition. She writes, “Until the pictures of the slave’s sufferings were drawn and held up to the public gaze, no Northerner had any idea of the cruelty of the system, it never entered their minds that such abominations could exist in Christian, Republican America” (Grimke). While her claim that every Northerner was blissfully unaware of the cruelties of slavery may sound naïve it is not altogether baseless. Due to the rise of popularity of abolitionism, Southern plantation owners decided to produce their own propaganda to be distributed throughout the northern states, which would downplay the suffering of Black enslaved people. Grimke’s appeal was burned publicly in the South to suppress the spread of abolitionist messaging (Shockley, 234). Additionally, southern authors argued that the narratives spread by abolitionist writers were exaggerated. Defenders of slavery argued that the institution was beneficial for Black people and had saved them from savagery and civilized them. Grimke’s argument calls for the use of imagery to counter those fears by appealing to the pathos of those who remained unconvinced that emancipation was necessary. This is a call the AAS answered enthusiastically through more than just imagery.

The American Anti-Slavery Almanac included testimony from southerners of the atrocities they witnessed. In the 1840 issue, they included a segment ironically titled “How Slavery Improves the Condition of Women” (Fig.2). The segment features testimonies from several sources detailing the cruelties that enslaved women suffered. The testimony provided by Colonel T. Rogers describes an incident where, while staying in a boarding house for the night, he had come across a man traveling with several enslaved people whom he planned to sell. Among them was a woman who the slaver chastised for grieving. Days prior to this account her son had died on the road and been thrown into a mountain crevice rather than buried or properly grieved. The woman had been weeping for her child in the boarding house and the slaver threatened to give her “something to cry for”, presumably a beating (Schomburg). This particular account highlights the irony of the segment’s title. The woman, having lost her child and receiving no grace in her grief, as any white mother of the period would, is instead punished. The segment, with its tales of beating and cruelties asks the reader to consider the humanity of these women and to truly question whether slavery, as it’s defenders would argue, could in any way be indicative of uplift. The fact that these were testimonials, largely provided by respectable white men (a colonel and a preacher among them) appealed to both reason and pathos as they were true accounts from reputable sources. They left no question of their validity in a way that perhaps fiction would.

The American Anti-Slavery Almanac was by no means the first of its kind. Benjamin Banneker’s almanac is the first almanac to be published by an African American man. There were six annual issues published between 1791 and 1802.  Banneker was a skilled astronomer and mathematician whose calculations allowed him to successfully predict a solar eclipse where others failed (Settle, 153). Banneker’s publication, like that of the AAS, attempted to contradict the predominantly negative and dehumanizing narratives being spread about his race, even going so far as to argue on behalf of his race with founding father and notorious slave owner, Thomas Jefferson (Collier 7). Banneker’s almanacs argued on behalf of the abolition of slavery. Banneker published this message as a Black man when anti-slavery did not have nearly the same amount of support that it would come to have in the mid-19^th century. His almanac is irrefutably a part of the legacy of Black American print culture.

Whether or not the same can be said for The American Anti-Slavery Almanac remains in question. If one chooses to define Black American print culture by its readership, then the almanac may not appear to be a part of it as racial breakdown on its readership remains unknown. However, the assumption can be made that the readership may have been white dominated by examining the almanac’s contents.  Given the almanac’s primary function was to spread awareness of the cruelties enslaved people faced, it is doubtful that said people were the almanac’s intended audience. However, it is possible for them to have been able to obtain access to the almanac. Still, the almanacs intended audience, those who it wished to sway with its radical messaging, were those who could vote to put an end to slavery: white men. As previously mentioned, the third article of the AAS constitution is clear about wanting to alter the perception of people of color in America without endorsing the employment of “physical force”.  This presumably refers to violent slave revolts such as those led by Nat Turner in August of 1831 (two years prior to the formation of the AASS). Nat Turner’s revolts famously caused major anxieties among whites throughout the U.S. of black retribution (Walbert and Wood). The AAS’s goal was to attest to the humanity of Black people and to quell white anxieties over Black violence in an effort to create lasting political change. It primarily appealed to those on the fence about abolition in Northern states as it was mainly published in the free states of Massachusetts and New York (with the exception being the 1837 issue published in Cincinnati, Ohio which did not legally abolish slavery until 1851). While Black people could likely access the almanac, they were clearly not a part of its intended audience. However, readership alone is not the sole determinant of Black Print culture.

Instead, let us look at The American Anti-Slavery Almanac’s authorship. The individual authors for the almanac’s segments, for the most part, are not credited. The almanac had several editors and publishers during its circulation. Some of its known publishers and compilers include Lydia Maria Child (1843, New York), Isaac Knapp (1838, Boston) and S.W. Benedict (1842, Boston); all of whom were white abolitionists. Between the years 1836 to 1838, the almanacs were edited by Bostonian minister Nathaniel Southard who also edited several editions of Slave’s Friend, the AASS’s children’s magazine. His almanacs tended to be more religious in nature and focused on denouncing slavery as sin. The editor for the 1839-41 editions of the almanac was Theodore Weld, husband to Angelina Grimke, member of the executive committee and chief editor of the society’s publications. His editions tended to be more political and attempted to calculate slavery’s criminality (Goddu, 64). Both editors were well to do white men and reflected much of the population of the American Anti-Slavery Society itself. The society’s participants largely came from religious communities, philanthropic societies, and circles of free Blacks. The involvement of free Black people in the almanac remains unknown and their role in the society itself was mostly as speakers (of which there were prominent figures such as Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown). Ultimately, the participation of Black Americans in the production of the almanac is difficult to trace. As such, authorship as a determiner of The American Anti-Slavery Almanac’s positioning in Black print history cannot truly be determined on this basis.    While neither the readership nor authorship of the publication may be enough for some to call the almanac a part of Black print culture’s history, I argue that its impact is. The American Anti-Slavery Almanac was the American Anti-Slavery Society’s most popular publication. The society was arguably the largest of its kind in the country and operated in the U.S. and abroad. It’s influence on the minds of the American public cannot be denied. Like William Lloyd Garrisons’s newspaper, The Liberator, which provided a platform for African American pro-abolition leaders, The American Anti-Slavery Almanac created a platform for the discussion of abolition. This platform and the society’s influence greatly contributed to the tensions that triggered the American civil war. While the AAS’s goal of attaining equal status for people of color is something activists still fight for today, the almanac successfully accomplishes this goal within its pages. The imagery and narratives within the publication evoke sympathy for the enslaved that Americans were actively discouraged from feeling, thus validating the humanity of enslaved Black people. Just like their white counterparts, enslaved people had families. Black mothers loved their children and sought to protect them. It is this active revision of the dehumanizing perception of Black Americans (sans patronization) which earns the The American Anti-Slavery Almanac a position in Black print culture history.

 

Figure 1: The American Anti-Slavery Almanac, for 1844. Being Bissextile or Leap-Year; and until July 4th, the sixty-eighth of the independence of the United States.- Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, The New York Public Library

Figure 2: How slavery improves the condition of women- Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, Manuscripts, Archives and Rare Books Division, The New York Public Library

Works Cited

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Goddu, Teresa A. Selling Anti-Slavery: Abolition and Mass Media in Antebellum America. Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020.

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