Human Rights Discourse in the Antebellum Black Press

• Date: 14 October 2011
• Pages: 121-137
• Published date: 14 October 2011
• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1108/S0275-7982(2011)0000006009
• Author: Timothy Shortell

HUMAN RIGHTS DISCOURSE IN

THE ANTEBELLUM BLACK PRESS

Timothy Shortell

ABSTRACT

The resolution of the slavery issue in the United States may have had

more to do with economic development and political power than a shift in

public morality, but there can be no question that abolitionist discourse

played a major role in the expansion of America’s republican vision in the

nineteenth century. In the human rights discourse of the black

abolitionists, ideological conflict centers on the dimensions of reification

and fragmentation. Potential answers to the rights question – who is to be

included in the American republic? – involve contentious claims about

group identities. To examine systematically the strategic use of the

jeremiad as a human rights argument in the black abolitionist discourse,

this research produced a content analysis study of the antebellum black

press in New York State. The findings present the hegemonic discourse

and the case that the human rights argument could not have been made

without simultaneously undermining the hegemonic view. The black

abolitionist discourse in antebellum New York State was the first

American experience with the jeremiad as a human rights argument and

would not be the last.

Human Rights and Media

Studies in Communications, Volume 6, 121–137

Copyright r2011 by Emerald Group Publishing Limited

All rights of reproduction in any form reserved

ISSN: 0275-7982/doi:10.1108/S0275-7982(2011)0000006009

121

INTRODUCTION

The resolution of the slavery issue in the United States may have had more

to do with economic development and political power than a shift in public

morality, but there can be no question that abolitionist discourse played a

major role in the expansion of America’s republican vision in the nineteenth

century. The debate over slavery occurred almost 100 years before our

modern human rights discourse emerged, but the central issues in the

dispute anticipated, in many ways, contemporary discussions of human

rights. At the heart of the matter was the question of who was to be included

in the new society. Both sides, proslavery and abolitionist, engaged the issue

in terms of the natural rights, which provided the ideological foundation of

the American Revolution. The question of citizenship depended on a more

basic inquiry: who was fully human?

The idea of ‘‘human rights’’ was uncommon, although not unheard of,

before the twentieth century. Revolutionary fervor in the late eighteenth and

nineteenth centuries focused attention on the issue of political rights. In the

rhetoric of the American and French Revolutions, the ‘‘rights of man’’ were

described as deriving from a divine source, but it was the state that enacted

and guaranteed them. The events of the World War II forced politicians and

ordinary citizens alike to rethink the issue of rights, in particular, whether or

not the state could be trusted to protect them (Donnelly, 1998).

In the natural rights model, whether grounded in metaphysical or

theological terms, individuals possess certain rights by virtue of their

humanity. As such, these rights are universal – in the sense of including

everyone accepted as fully human – and inalienable. In current debates,

liberal natural rights advocates have tried to elaborate a theory of human

nature upon which to build the notion of human dignity that justifies

universal rights, but with little success (Dunne & Wheeler, 1999).

In the nineteenth century, however, the fundamental issue was not a

theory of human dignity. It was, rather, the definition of humanity. The

century’s great human rights struggle, over chattel slavery, was argued in

terms of race and humanity. In the United States, the vocabulary of the

Revolution marked the boundaries of the contentious public debate over

who was to be included in the humanity whose rights were self-evident.

Abolitionists tried to use the republican discourse as a critique of the

legitimacy of property in humans and as a justification of the doctrine of

free labor. The black abolitionists were, it might be said, America’s original

human rights vanguard.

TIMOTHY SHORTELL122