Addresses, Essays, Sermons and Society Publications

Between 1754 and 1891, Americans argued about slavery in every form the printing press allowed: Quaker essays and election sermons, orations delivered in Black churches on the anniversary of the slave-trade ban, appeals smuggled south in sailors' clothing, convention proceedings, society annual reports, constitutional treatises, satires, and poems. The 135 documents gathered here are that argument in its own words, 117 of them readable in full, free, right now.‍ ‍

Read together, they make a claim this project cares about. John Brown's A Declaration of Liberty by the Representatives of the Slave Population (1859) is often treated as the strange production of a singular man. It was not. It belongs to an established genre: the address written to the enslaved rather than about them. Henry Highland Garnet's 1843 Address to the Slaves—whose 1848 reprint Brown personally financed—and the Peterboro convention's 1842 address to the enslaved of New York are earlier entries in the same tradition. This section restores that context.

Because the section spans 137 years and 135 documents, it is published as five chronological pages. Each carries its own introduction, its landmark documents, and its full annotated list.

The Five Eras

I. Colonial and Revolutionary Beginnings, 1754–1800 — 12 entries. From John Woolman's quiet Quaker essay to the New-York Manumission Society. The founding contradiction: a revolution for liberty in a slaveholding republic.

II. Early Republic and Gradual Emancipation, 1800–1829 — 20 entries. The January First orations of Black New York, the fight against kidnapping, the founding of the colonization movement, and the first calls for immediate abolition.

III. The Immediatist Turn, 1830–1840 — 47 entries. The explosive decade: Walker, Garrison, the Grimké sisters, the mobbed founding of the New York State Anti-Slavery Society, and the colonization debate. The largest era in the section.

IV. Political Abolition and Crisis, 1841–1860 — 39 entries. Abolition enters politics and the streets: the addresses to the enslaved, the antislavery Constitution, fugitive rescues and their trials, and the conventions John Brown attended. The John Brown thread runs strongest here.

V. War and Retrospect, 1861–1891 — 17 entries. Emancipation argued and won, then remembered — closing with Frederick Douglass's 1881 address on John Brown at Harpers Ferry and Alexander Crummell's Africa and America.

The John Brown Thread

No section of this bibliography touches Brown more often. Garnet's Address to the Slaves (era IV) carries his money.

Gerrit Smith's Peterboro address (era IV) defines the genre his Declaration of Liberty joined.

The 1855 Syracuse convention of Radical Political Abolitionists (era IV) is the meeting Brown attended seeking money and arms for Kansas.

Theodore Parker (era IV) sat on the Secret Six. Elizabeth Cady Stanton's Slave's Appeal (era IV) invokes "the martyr John Brown" within weeks of his execution.

And Frederick Douglass's 1881 Storer College address (era V)—delivered at Harpers Ferry with Brown's own prosecutor in the audience.

Related Primary Sources

John Brown's Declaration of Liberty · Court Cases · Newspapers · Manuscript Collections · and the five era pages of this section, linked above.