Welcome to the third installment of a series of blogs revolving around the literature, religion, and history of captivity narratives, authored by religious collections assistant Colby Townsend!
Table of Contents
- African American Slave Narratives
- Fictional Slave Narratives and Slave Narratives in Fiction
- Conclusion
In Parts One and Two of this blog post series, I explored the variety of the Lilly Library holdings on Indian captivity narratives from roughly the seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries. The Lilly holds far more of this kind of captivity narrative than any of the other sub-genres of captivity that I will be exploring in this five-part series. We now turn to Part Three on slave narratives, which is unfortunately represented by far fewer examples in the Lilly’s holdings than Indian captivities. These examples range from Olaudah Equiano’s 1789 Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vasa (though the earliest edition the Lilly has is an 1829 abridged version, as seen below) to Sojourner Truth’s 1850 Narrative (the Lilly’s copy of this narrative is a first edition). We unfortunately do not have a handful of early African American slave narratives, like Briton Hammon’s Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings and Surprizing Deliverance of Briton Hammon (1760). Besides the seven examples of slave narratives in this post, I also highlight three fictional narratives written between 1836 and 1852, including Harriet Beecher Stowe’s famous Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852).
African American Slave Narratives
Like other subgenres under the captivity narrative umbrella, slave narratives grew out of a blending of conventions from multiple prior literary genres. For those studying slave narratives, it is crucial to also include these other genres and their historical contexts into one’s larger research agenda. As Yolanda Pierce has argued, “to fully understand the genre of slave narrative requires a familiarity with the other literary genres that have influenced the slave narrative form and that have also been transformed by the slave narrative tradition” (83). Though none of the parts of this blog post series on captivity narratives will cover these other genres, there are many resources available to study them,including articles and books from Tessa Whitehouse (103-118), Amy Culley (217-233), and D. Bruce Hindmarsh, among many others. These help to better inform our understanding of all the captivity narratives highlighted in this blog series, but especially the African American slave narratives. All of the texts shown in each part of this blog post series can be viewed and read at the Lilly by anyone once they make an appointment to visit the Lilly’s reading room.
Although the earliest African American slave narratives dates at least to the 1770s with A Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, an African Prince, as Related by Himself (1772), this copy of the second edition of Solomon Bayley’s Narrative is the earliest African American slave narrative at the Lilly. Published the same year as the first edition, both in London, and edited by Robert Hurnard, the narrative is Hurnard’s attempt, as he describes in a preface, to place together “fragments” from letters that Bayley sent to him while he was visiting the US in 1820. Although the copy is missing its binding it is in good condition and is only forty-eight pages in total for the narrative, plus the eight-page preface by Hurnard. With small blotting and foxing here and there, it is a highly readable copy of Bayley’s narrative.
The narrative begins with Bayley echoing the language of Paul’s New Testament epistles and addressing all potential readers through the language of Pauline Christianity. One feature throughout this narrative is Bayley’s frequent recourse to biblical language and explanations of his experiences through a Christian lens. He describes how he has recently realized he is getting old and that he wants to leave a record of his experiences as an enslaved person in Delaware and Virginia. He describes how he was able to free himself partially due to a new law in Delaware requiring that if an enslaver intends to move any enslaved people out of the state that the action will set the slaves free. His master was trying to move him to Virginia, so Bayley opened a lawsuit, and his master made a deal with him to work eighty dollars off and then he’d be free. His attention then turned to freeing his wife, which he did, and then his son as he was about to be sold at auction. Fortunately for him, he had a good rapport with locals in his area in Delaware and they helped him to get the winning bid. Throughout the narrative, Bayley attributes all of his successes to God and recommends to the reader to keep in mind how they owe everything to their creator. Bayley notes in one of his letters to Hurnard near the end of the book that he had just become a Methodist minister and this aspect of his upbringing and expertise comes through in his writing.
This 1829 version of Olaudah Equiano’s The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789) is a much shorter abridged version of the original two-volume set. The abridger, Abigail Field Mott, had visited several African Free Schools in New York, for both boys and girls, and was impressed by how excited the young scholars would get at the prospect of using tickets they earned in class through their work to purchase whatever their schoolteacher might have on hand for the classroom. She thought that having an abridged version of The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano would “not be thought unsuitable for distribution in those schools” (Preface), so she abridged the text and sent it off to the publisher. There appears to have been several different covers that the publisher and printers created for this 1829 edition. The Lilly copy focuses, both on the front and the back cover, on the enslaved people themselves and the current state of suffering they faced in antebellum America. The front cover features a version of the Wedgwood anti-slavery medallion from 1787 but adds a white man, also in the same chains, standing over him and looking forlorn. On the back cover, there are two scenes of daily life in enslavement, one where an enslaved man with a weighted muzzle wrapped around his face digs with a hoe and another where an enslaved man whips, at the instructions of an enslaver, another enslaved man that is tied to the ground.
Other copies, like this one at Princeton University Library, are far more subtle, showcasing a domestic setting with a father, daughter, and their dog. The father seems to be offering the dog a treat in order to get the dog to stand up. On the back cover, instead of including another scene or two, the publisher, Samuel Wood & Sons, lists other “Juvenile Books” that they have for sale. The two covers offer a dramatically different way of approaching Equiano’s narrative. One, the Lilly copy, seems far more explicitly part of the abolitionist cause. The other, at Princeton University Library, seems to suggest that this is just another nice book in a long list of books a child might have on their bookshelf at home.
Equiano’s original 1789 two-volume narrative, running twelve chapters and almost six-hundred pages, is abridged down to around twenty pages by Mott. Though much shorter, it appears that Mott chose specific parts of the narrative that could still tell a unified story about Equiano’s life without major gaps. The narrative begins with the kidnapping of Equiano and his sister at home when he is around eleven and, though he hopes he can escape and make it home, he realizes that he has been taken too far to safely travel back. He is separated from his sister and moved to Barbados on an enslaver’s trade ship, then sent to Virginia and is purchased by a member of the navy. Most of the narrative is about Equiano’s life at sea and his hope of earning enough money to purchase his freedom, which he eventually does. He compares his relatively good treatment by his owners as compared to what he would see of enslavement in the Caribbean and the colonies and eventually retires from sea life to live in England.
At four hundred pages, Charles Ball’s slave narrative is easily the longest example of a slave narrative at the Lilly Library. The size of the narrative has meant in its reception history that it has been utilized in many different ways. First, it was reprinted in a variety of periodicals and newspapers, reaching both the audiences already established for reading slave narratives and new ones. In a recent essay, Teresa A. Goddu shows how “Ball’s text…reached a range of anti-slavery audiences, a highbrow audience…a middlebrow one…a children’s audience…as well as a British…and a southern readership” (Goddu 160). Ball’s narrative helped to get the slave narrative into a far broader audience than it had been able to reach prior to its publication. Besides the periodical reprinting of the narrative, Goddu, in her recent book Selling Antislavery: Abolition and Mass Media in Antebellum America, has also explained how “six editions of the narrative were issued between 1836 and 1859, including a British edition” and it “was reprinted in an abridged version in 1858 under the title Fifty Years in Chains…and reissued in 1859 (9).
The abridged version caused controversy both at the time of its publication and in twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholarship because its editor, Isaac Fischer, took liberties with Ball’s story, besides publishing it without permission (DeLombard). Throughout the twentieth century, scholars doubted the veracity of Ball’s story. Now, according to Calvin Schermerhorn, “scholars have demonstrated its authenticity, though ‘Ball’ may be a pseudonym” (61). Unfortunately, doubting the authenticity of slave narratives is a common theme that arises in the study of scholarship on the African American slave narrative. Charles Ball’s narrative is, as noted above, very lengthy, and a good summary is provided in the African American National Biography (also posted on the website for the project Enslaved: Peoples of the Historical Slave Trade).
James Williams’s Narrative is an important part of the development of the slave narrative because of its complicated history and the damage it caused to an early American abolitionist group, the American Anti-Slavery Society. Williams’s Narrative would be the first time they published a slave narrative and, because of challenges to its authenticity, also the first time they would retract a slave narrative that they had published. One of the most interesting slave narratives in recent historical and literary criticism, scholarly commentary on James Williams’s Narrative (whose real name was Shadrach Wilkins) has gone from assuming the narrative was made up so that Wilkins could get a free ticket to England from the American Anti-Slavery Society to realizing, through Hank Trent’s recent work, that Wilkins was a brilliant runaway slave (Trent). He made it impossible for both the abolitionist society and Southern white enslavers (as well as most twentieth- and twenty-first-century scholars) to fact-check his story by alternating dates, names, and places. In his recent critical edition of the Narrative, Hank Trent provides exhaustive notes tracking Wilkins’s life, and there is a surprising amount of evidence to support the historical veracity of his Narrative, keeping in mind that some of the details were intentionally skewed by Wilkins.
Though this captivity narrative describes the captive, Lewis Gerard Clarke’s captivity among the “Algerines of Kentucky,” it is, in fact, a slave narrative and not a barbary captivity narrative. I will cover those in Part 4 of this series, but we already get a taste in Clarke’s narrative of the influence of the barbary captivity narrative on the broader genre. Clarke wants his readers to connect enslavement in the United States to its well-known history in Algiers (commonly referred to as Algerine in the early United States), where hundreds of American sailors had been captured in the 1780s, 1790s, and in the first couples decades of the nineteenth century during the First (1801–1805) and Second (1815) Barbary or Algerine Wars. From Clarke’s perspective, the enslavers in the American South were no different than the contemporary stereotypes against the pirates of the North African coast, including modern-day Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya, which included laziness, overindulgence, ravenous beasts, robbers, tyrants, and enslavers.
This narrative begins with a preface by J. C. Lovejoy, who not only introduces the audience to Clarke but also vouches for both the reality of his slave narrative and the sincerity of his religious belief. In contrast to the issues raised by “James Williams’s” (Shadrach Wilkins) narrative described above, “he is what he professes to be,—a slave escaped from the grasp of avarice and power,—there is not the least shadow of doubt. His narrative bears the most conclusive internal evidence of its truth” (vi). In the wake of James Williams’s narrative, it was now more important to establish the credibility of a slave narrative before its publication. After the preface, Clarke’s narrative then appears on pages 9–63 with appendices coming next, from pages 65–108, about the Clarke family, common questions that Clarke receives from the public and his answers, excerpts from John G. Whittier’s “What is Slavery?” and an article by Cassius M. Clay, and several more brief excerpts from articles and documents, as well as poetry. This copy has lost its binding but is in readable condition.
Clarke was born in enslavement and owned by his grandfather, Samuel Campbell. His mother, Letitia Campbell, and Grandmother, Mary, were also both enslaved by Campbell. Clarke’s father, Daniel Clarke (unnamed in the narrative), immigrated from Scotland and fought in the American Revolution. Campbell promised Daniel Clarke that his daughter, Letitia, would “be made free in his will. It was with this promise that he married her” (10). Lewis Clarke notes that Campbell was probably telling the truth, that in his will Letitia and her nine children would be made free, but he believes that someone in the Campbell family likely destroyed the will. They continued to live enslaved after Campbell’s death. The family were white-passing, which enraged at least one of Campbell’s daughters. At around the age of seven, Clarke was unfortunately sent to live and work at Betsy Banton’s home, Campbell’s daughter, a violent and abusive slaveowner. A local boy came over to speak with Banton’s sister, another Campbell daughter, and thought that Clarke’s enslaved sister was Ms. Campbell. Clarke describes how “the mistake was noised abroad and occasioned some amusement to the young people,” but Banton did not find it amusing at all. Instead, she told Clarke that “She would fix me so that nobody should ever think I was white,” and forced him to go out naked in the sun and pick herbs in the garden for many hours, “in order to burn me black” (21).
Clarke is sold by the Bantons to a slave labor camp and lives there for five years before being sold again into far better circumstances to an owner that allows him more mobility and to work to raise his own money. Only a year after being purchased by this new owner, the owner dies, and Clarke goes up again for auction. He is labelled spoiled because of the kinder treatment his last owner gave him, so he decides to run away after being auctioned and, because of his light complexion, he has an easy time walking north out of the slaveholding states. He realizes that he believes that no states within the US are actually free and goes to Canada, where it takes him a while to really believe that he is free in that country. After a while he does find comfort but then moves to Ohio to search for his brother Milton, who he finds living in Oberlin. After a while the two brothers go back to Kentucky to help their brother, Cyrus, escape enslavement and all three successfully make it out of the state.
This narrative continues from the previous one, printed only one year later by a different Boston publisher, Bela Marsh. The book includes the same preface and body text as the 1845 printing above, but when Lewis Clarke’s narrative ends in the middle of the book, Milton Clarke’s begins. J. C. Lovejoy, the author of the preface for Lewis’s narrative, wrote a short preface to begin Milton’s narrative. In it, he describes how Lewis’s narrative has now been out for a year and sold out the three thousand copies of that edition. Lovejoy explains that Milton wanted to add some of his own experiences, in particular an attempt to kidnap him in Ohio. He alludes to the recent court hearings regarding the kidnapping of Jerry Phinney, a resident of Ohio for sixteen years, prematurely reading it as proof that the law was increasingly against enslavers terrorizing the free states since the courts would eventually return Phinney to the South.
Milton Clarke’s narrative begins similarly to Lewis’s he adds some details and emphasizes certain characters within their extended family that Lewis did not. When their grandfather dies and the family decides to put them up for sale, one aunt protests that they can’t sell their half-siblings. Her siblings disagree and they move forward with their plan anyway, though Letitia and two of her ten children are inherited by Judith, Letitia’s half-sister and Campbell’s daughter and wife of Joseph Logan, a tanner. Milton describes the poor treatment he, his mother, and his siblings all received while enslaved in the Logan house. In one example, Logan reprimands Milton at a young age for apparently not tanning well enough and not feeding a horse the right amount of food. Thinking he is alone with the horse in a stall, Milton complains about Logan and how contradictory his instructions and punishment are. Logan is in the next stall and confronts Milton, grabbing him and wrestling with him. Milton describes how he didn’t know what to do so he bit hard onto Logan’s leg and would not let go. Logan then beats him so harshly that Milton almost dies and takes a month to recover.
Logan later dies and his father, Deacon Logan, purchases his estate and his slaves. Apparently, Deacon was a better master than his son, but he refuses to allow Milton to purchase his freedom after he inherits his sister’s estate. She had been purchased by a French buyer and set free so that they could marry, and then he died soon after. She left her estate to Milton, and he hoped to get free and use some of the money to purchase his freedom, but Deacon would not allow it. Instead, Deacon offers him a title that will allow him to travel freely between states, so he eventually goes to Ohio and never returns. While there, Milton helps runaway slaves to escape further north, particularly to Canada, and the enslavers in Kentucky become frustrated as his popularity in helping slaves to freedom grows. Eventually, kidnappers come for him to take him back to Kentucky, but they fail and both Lewis and Milton continue trying to help more enslaved people to freedom.
The next two African American slave narratives are some of the most popular narratives of the genre. The first edition copy of Frederick Douglass’s narrative owned by the Lilly Library has “Moses Humphrey 1845” inscribed near the front endpaper, possibly the fish market shopkeeper in Poughkeepsie in the 1840s (Groth 143). Not unlike the Clarke brothers, who were enslaved by their grandfather and extended family, Frederick Douglass’s father was likely his owner, Captain Anthony. Born in the late 1810s, Douglass grows up on a very large farm and works in the home instead of the fields. He is sent to Baltimore to a relative of his enslaver, and Sophia Auld begins to teach him how to read before her husband (both Douglass’s new owners), Hugh, stopped her, possibly around the time of Nat Turner’s revolt in Southampton.
After Captain Anthony dies, Douglass is moved to Hugh’s brother’s (Thomas) house, where his new owner believes Douglass is difficult and needs to be trained and set right. Thomas sends him to work for Edward Covey for one year, a man known as what Douglass referred to as a “slave breaker” for his harsh approach to forcing enslaved African Americans into submission. One day while working in the field, Covey approaches Douglass to harass him and Douglass stands his ground. They end up fighting for hours and because Covey’s reputation rests on being able to subdue slaves he doesn’t want the story to get out that he had lost a fight to Douglass. Covey leaves him alone after this encounter, though Douglass describes how at this point he has realized his will is firm: he is going to be a free man. After being moved and rented out to a new master, Douglass learns to work in a shipyard and makes his plan to escape further north. Similar to other slave narratives already described in this post, Douglass chooses to downplay or simply not narrate exactly how he escaped, but once he does he joins the abolitionist movement in the North, eventually settling in Rochester, New York two years after his narrative was published.
The Lilly’s copy of Sojourner Truth’s Narrative is a first edition of the narrative. It includes: the seven-page preface written by Sojourner Truth; the narrative proper, which runs from pages 13 to 125; a reprint of Theodore D. Weld’s “Slavery A System of Inherent Cruelty,” from his American Slavery as It is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses (1839); and a final page of “Certificates of Character.” The narrative itself is a firsthand account from Truth, though she dictated the text and, as a note before the narrative explains, was not able to see the page proofs before publication. She narrates how she was born enslaved in New York around 1800 and how she was able to become free, go through a personal religious awakening, and then turn to her own activism both trying to convince the people of the country to get rid of the institution of enslavement and the actions she took up to 1850 to do so. Her life in enslavement was harsh, first being owned by a Dutch New Yorker that didn’t really know English, nor did she know Dutch, so difficulties ensued.
Eventually she is sold multiple times to brutal owners, falls in love with an enslaved man, and their owners do not approve of their relationship, so they make it impossible for them to be together. Eventually, one of her later owners, John Dumont, promises that if she works for him for a year then he will free her, but he goes back on that promise. Though the state of New York will free all enslaved people in 1828, she decides to escape in 1827 and make her own way. Her son, Peter, had been illegally sold into enslavement in the South, against New York state law, so she sued successfully to get him returned. She becomes a regular speaker at abolitionist meetings and joins several New Religious Movements throughout her life, including being a Methodist, part of Matthias’s Kingdom, a utopian society in Massachusetts, the Millerites, and eventually the Seventh Day Adventists. She is one of the best-known authors of African American slave narratives in the history of the United States.
Fictional Slave Narratives and Slave Narratives in Fiction
The development of the genre of the slave narrative in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries provided a coherent set of conventions to authors of fiction during the nineteenth century that led to the creation of fictional slave narratives. Some of these, including Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, were not only wildly popular in the nineteenth century but have continued to be in print and still enjoy a large amount of interest from the reading public. Some of these novels were written and published in a way, common in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, that made it unclear to their earliest audiences that they were fiction, while others included prefaces by the authors that made their literary and political ambitions and purposes clear from the beginning. I highlight three of these novels below, Richard Hildreth’s The Slave, or, Memoirs of Archy Moore (1836), which represents the former, while Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and Sophia Little’s Thrice Through the Furnace (1852) represent the latter.
According to Rachel Hope Cleves, “Richard Hildreth” was “the author of the first American abolitionist novel, The Slave; or, Memoirs of Archy Moore (1836).” Laura Langer Cohen, however, highlights how Hildreth and his publisher did not clarify that it was a novel when it was first printed, so she refers to it as an “antebellum pseudo-slave narrative” (108). Cleves goes on to explain how in an early nineteenth-century setting, Hildreth wrote the novel in this “anti-Jacobin milieu and…characterized slaveholders as violent Jacobins guilty of Gothic enormities” (242). Besides the physical and often deadly violence they did to enslaved persons, Hildreth viewed Southern enslavers as potential Jacobins against the US government as well. Taking up the counterrevolutionary rhetoric of the post-French Revolution period, Hildreth makes a forceful argument against American enslavement and its lived and potential ramifications.
When it was first published in Great Britain, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) was printed serially in thirteen parts by John Cassell of London. One could, plausibly, have taken all of the parts to a binder to get them bound into a single volume, but both copies of Cassell’s serialized edition that are housed at the Lilly Library were kept as they were printed. The images above and below are of Copy 2, which is housed in a black Morocco pull-off case. Similar to the abridged version of Olaudah Equiano’s Narrative above, this example of the novel highlights the variety of ways that the technology of print culture could help disseminate information in the nineteenth-century. Publishing the novel serially would mean more people would be able to afford the book, eventually owning all thirteen parts at a rate that allowed them to slowly purchase the whole novel. Each part was priced at twopence, which Robert Poole, in his history of the Peterloo massacre, notes “would buy a pint of beer or a small loaf” (xix). Cassell published the complete novel soon after the first serialized edition, and it is in this version that most of Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s earliest readers would have known it.
The story itself will be familiar to most readers of slave narratives or American fiction. Borrowing from the slave narrative, Stowe crafts a story focused on repudiating the institution of American enslavement through the negative and gut-wrenching experiences of a few enslaved families. Uncle Tom is, of course, at the story’s center, but it is the unfair and harsh treatment of Mr. Shelby, his son, and Haley, an enslavement dealer, in breaking apart enslaved families that becomes the focus. Eliza and Harry, her young son, escape and head north on the Underground Railroad when Eliza finds out that Mr. Shelby is going to sell Harry to Haley, which would presumably eventually land him at some unknown slave labor camp. Shelby also sells Uncle Tom to Haley in this transaction, so the story splits between narrating Uncle Tom’s experiences on new slave labor camps and Eliza and Harry’s escape north and Shelby’s attempts to catch them. They eventually make it safely to Canada and even reunite with long-lost family members there. Uncle Tom’s story moves from a relatively easy life on the St. Clare slave labor camp (where he goes after initially being sold) to his harsh treatment by a new owner, Simon Legree, which culminates in Legree beating Uncle Tom so harshly for treating other slaves on the slave labor camp that he dies at the end of the novel, just as George, the son of Mr. Shelby, arrives and tries to buy Uncle Tom back.
Written prior to Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin but published soon after it in 1852, Sophia Little states in the preface that she composed the novel quickly after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 in order to oppose it. She was glad to see what she considers an even better novel repudiating the Act in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, but she “wished that my feelings, concerning that law, should reach the ears of the people” (3). The narrative itself follows the experience of Gilbert and Marian, two mixed-race children of an enslaved mother and an enslaver father. In the opening scene Gilbert is with his mother on her deathbed after both he and she had suffered through cholera; he healed and got better and, though she got over cholera it damaged her already poor health enough that she was now dying.
Their owners, Mr. and Mrs. Sedley Livingston, decide to sell them because Mrs. Livingston is constantly reminded of her husband’s relationship with their mother by their presence. They go to a relative named Arthur St. Vallery, who then attempts to make Marian his concubine, though she refuses and they eventually escape. While in pursuit of Gilbert and Marian, St. Vallery becomes ill and has to rest for a time, when he experiences a kind of transformation akin to Saul/Paul of the New Testament, converting to the abolitionist cause. In the end, St. Vallery frees those he has enslaved and allows Gilbert and Marian to marry those they love and to settle on his land in peace.
Conclusion
This wraps up Part Three of this blog post series on the Lilly Library’s captivity narrative holdings. We have gone through seven slave narratives and three novels depicting slaves that take heavily from the genre. Each of these narratives are central to our understanding of the intersection of race, religion, politics, and literature during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The authors of each of the fictional and non-fictional African American slave narratives pit the institution of enslavement in the US against religion, questioning not only its political and social validity but also the sincerity of the religion of enslavement’s practitioners. Some of the authors, like Lewis Clarke, compared slaveowners to “Algerines,” explicitly calling them out as non-Christian, while others, like Sojourner Truth, could not take seriously that a person could believe that God created all men equally while in the same breath defend the institution of enslavement. In the next two parts, I will be exploring the Lilly’s holdings on barbary captivity (Part Four a section of Part Five) and a variety of other sub-genres that fall under the larger umbrella of captivity narratives, including pirate and war captivity. Religion is at the heart of each of these sub-genres and the way their authors, whether writing autobiographies or fiction, depicted the issues at the center of their projects.
About the Author
Colby Townsend is a dual PhD candidate in English and Religious Studies. His dissertation examines the ways that transatlantic Romantic-era discourse around the origins of Native Americans as being from the East influenced authors of fiction, captivity narratives, and new American scripture. He is the co-editor, with Abby Clayton, of Printing New Religion: Transatlantic Movements of the Nineteenth Century (under contract with the University of Illinois Press), which is a collection of fifteen essays by scholars writing about the agential role print played in the development of New Religious Movements in the nineteenth century transatlantic world.
Works Cited and Consulted
Rachel Hope Cleves, The Reign of Terror in America: Visions of Violence from Anti-Jacobins to Antislavery (Cambridge University Press, 2009), 242.
Laura Langer Cohen, The Fabrication of American Literature: Fraudulence and Antebellum Print Culture (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), 108.
Amy Culley, “Life Writing,” in The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism and Religion, edited by Jeffrey W. Barbeau (Cambridge University Press, 2021), 217–233.
Teresa A. Goddu, “The Slave Narrative as Material Text,” in The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative (Oxford University Press, 2014), 160.
Selling Antislavery: Abolition and Mass Media in Antebellum America (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020), 273, nt 9.
Michael E. Groth, Slavery and Freedom in the Mid-Hudson Valley (SUNY Press, 2017), 143.
D. Bruce Hindmarsh, The Evangelical Conversion Narrative: Spiritual Autobiography in Early Modern England (Oxford University Press, 2005).
Yolanda Pierce, “Redeeming bondage: the captivity narrative and the spiritual autobiography in the African American slave narrative tradition,” in The Cambridge Companion to the African American Slave Narrative, edited by Audrey Fisch (Cambridge University Press, 2007), 83.
Robert Poole, Peterloo: The English Uprising (Oxford University Press, 2019), [xix].
Calvin Schermerhorn, Money Over Mastery, Family Over Freedom: Slavery in the Antebellum Upper South (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011), 230, nt. 61.
Hank Trent, ed., Narrative of James Wiliams: An American Slave, Annotated Edition (Louisiana State University Press, 2013).
Tessa Whitehouse, “Structures and processes of English spiritual autobiography from Bunyan to Cowper,” in A History of English Autobiography, edited by Adam Smyth (Cambridge University Press, 2016), 103–118.
Jeannine DeLombard’s entry on Charles Ball’s biography in the African American National Biography: https://oxfordaasc.com/display/10.1093/acref/9780195301731.001.0001/acref-9780195301731-e-34845.
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