The Social Lives of Poems in Nineteenth-Century America. Michael C. Cohen
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of poems were understood to have a constitutively social function, or, rather, particular kinds of poems were understood to be constitutive of sociality. That is, they engaged large audiences on diverse arrays of topics, but more important, they enabled certain concepts of community to become visible to members of the community. This relation was recursive, since people imagined such poems to participate in relations that the poems helped lay down. As we saw, these genres (most prominently the ballad) produced ambivalent feelings: they were and also were not literary, decorous, and decent, and while they were known to be popular and powerful ways of communicating, their powers were felt to be potentially and potently dangerous. Chapter 2 continues this line of thought by examining how one social reform project, abolition, drew upon the ambivalent charges ascribed to poems in the Jacksonian and antebellum eras. How did antislavery—the project most transformative in its vision and most incendiary in its practice—mobilize the energies encoded into common and widely read poetic genres? What sort of work did antislavery poems do? And what sorts of communities were formed or deformed by the circulation and exchange of antislavery verse?
I must begin by emphasizing that the work of abolition was borne on the wings of poetry, for—to put the point as strongly as possible—poems made reform possible as a social project. Anthologies by Marcus Wood and James Basker have demonstrated that antislavery poetry dates back at least one hundred years earlier than the organized movement itself.1 Thousands of authors wrote songs, hymns, laments, satires, ballads, and odes in the service of antislavery, to change hearts and minds, to recruit new members, and to build solidarity within local organizations and across the transnational movement. Abolitionist newspapers relied heavily on poems to provide front-page commentary or even to report news. Giftbooks of poetry, such as The North Star: The Poetry of Freedom by her Friends (discussed later), sold to raise money at abolitionist fairs, were exchanged as tokens among acquaintances, thus securing bonds of friendship in sympathy with the bondage of the slave. Making these books was one way to act politically; buying and giving them away were others. Songs and hymns condensed the evangelism at the heart of much antislavery activism, most famously in “Amazing Grace,” but also in hundreds of other hymns sung in and out of church. Such songs, which after the 1820s could be cheaply printed in large numbers, for distribution across the Atlantic world, also epitomized the mass mediation of reform. One example is Whittier’s poem “Our Countrymen in Chains!” (1835): as a broadside featuring Josiah Wedgwood’s famous engraving for the British Society for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, it sold for two cents a copy and was so widely distributed that in 1837, William Lloyd Garrison described it as having “been circulated in periodicals, quoted in addresses and orations, and scattered broad-cast, over the land.”2
Garrison’s biblical-sounding language shows how the evangelical mission of antislavery was bound up in its practices of communication and circulation. To sow the word was to spread the word; to reach hearts and minds, one had to reach eyes and ears. While pamphlets and orations could make a formal case against slavery, other genres—satires, invectives, polemics, songs, hymns, and ballads—were better able to reach larger numbers of people and ignite their passions. Sarah Lewis, an activist in Philadelphia, dramatically posed the advantages that “a few abolition songs” offered to “materially advance our cause” in 1841: “We know Tippecanoe songs did much towards the great Whig victory last year—When thee is in the humor of writing poetry could thee not write a song or two to some favorite national air—‘Hail Columbia’ or ‘The Star Spangled Banner’ for dignified composition and Yankee Doodle for the mobocracy—or to any popular air—national or not—.”3
Lewis’s bourgeois distinction between dignified and mobocratic compositions still emphasizes how important a “favorite national air” was to the work of reform: by harnessing the associative powers of tunes like “Yankee Doodle,” abolition could propagate on an almost subconscious level, controlling the mob or the quality as though without their will (which was a common interpretation of William Henry Harrison’s “Old Tippecanoe” songs of 1840). Lewis’s comment may idealize the efficacy of circulation, but it also demonstrates an astute understanding of how airs, tunes, and songs generate political agency, as Harrison’s campaign had made compellingly clear. The familiarity of a popular air, not its literary qualities, made it effective. Lewis diagnoses the media ecology of the 1840s, where new genres and technologies of communication worked in tandem with old ones (such as the familiar melody) to influence public discourse. Thus, as we will see, even though antislavery poets were keenly interested in the literariness of their work, they viewed a poem’s literary value as a subsidiary aspect of its broader social value, its ability to be carried in people and to carry people away.
Figure 9. John Greenleaf Whittier, “Our Countrymen in Chains!” (New York, n.d.). Courtesy of the Friends Historical Library of Swarthmore College.
This chapter extends the argument from Chapter 1 by examining the poetics of reform in the 1830s and 1840s. Antislavery activists used poems to mobilize energies and anxieties similar to those that suffused the scurrilous broadsides of balladmongers like Thomas Shaw or Jonathan Plummer. Those wares had seemed, at least to some contemporaries, to spread themselves invisibly and insidiously, despite the all-too-human presence of their peddlers, who attracted audiences while also exciting their disdain. Abolition songs and poems aspired to this idealized, invisible communication, to be so potent as to be always already familiar with audiences and so portable as to require no apparent means of transport. But as with the balladmonger, the abolitionist poet’s aspiration to invisible immediacy paradoxically heightened the visibility of communications systems in Jacksonian society. The antislavery conflict was very often waged in fights about speech, assembly, and circulation, in which battles to control institutions like the postal system or the lecture hall served as proxy challenges to local sovereignty, regional autonomy, or federal authority. In this kind of political situation, the blank, abstract conventions of so many antislavery poems promoted their circulatory power and intensified their messages about the freedoms of speech, thought, and association, as well as freedom from chattel servitude.
The typical antislavery poem therefore works first and foremost at the formal level, as something generic and conventional in the most positive sense. Abolitionist verse needed to be formally familiar: stanza patterns, airs and melodies, and rhetorical commonplaces all carried information in excess of any particular poem’s specific content and circumstances of composition, while the authority of the individual writer was always necessarily subordinated to the needs of the collective enterprise. Like ballads, antislavery songs are above all communal property. And one poet’s ability to cite or pass along the work of another, in the service of a social project requiring all the powers of circulation, created a circumstance in which the literary coterie could embody the imaginative work of reform. Friends forging bonds through the exchange of verses (often on the breaking of legal bonds or bondage) mimicked the kinds of sociable forces encoded in popular genres like the ballad. But the paradoxical capacity to pitch one’s “voice” through poems characterized by the way they could “echo” large numbers of similar poems led, in the 1840s, to a tangled set of political affiliations in which antislavery authors drew affective charges from the minstrel theater, thereby turning racial mimicry inside out into new social productions. The beginnings of an African American poetry (something I will trace in Chapter 6) are to be found in the “abolitionist minstrelsy” of the 1840s, which deployed the open conventions of antislavery verse genres (such as the “lines” and “stanzas” discussed below) to create a distinctly inauthentic, secondary, derivative voice of freedom.
The Politics of Circulation in the 1830s
As the most popular and prolific poet of the antislavery movement, Whittier’s career can illustrate the permutations of verse in the project of reform. Whittier began writing poems in the late 1820s, and his work first appeared publicly in a newspaper system that was firmly embedded in New England, even in rural areas. He sent his earliest poems anonymously to Garrison, who at the time was editing the Newburyport