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129 The Lord appointed . . . seventy also, and sent them two and two . . . into every city and place. — luke 10:1 We are thy sisters. God has truly said, That of one blood the nations he has made. Canst thou unblushing read this great command? O, Christian woman! In a Christian land. Suffer the wrongs, which wring our inmost heart, To draw one throb of pity on thy part! Our skins may differ, but from thee we claim: A sister’s privilege and a sister’s name. — sarah forten, “we are thy sisters” chapter 8 The Antislavery Vanguard, 1833–1843 I When Isabella returned to her previous lifestyle, the Abolitionist movement was in full throttle. Although she had learned not to place her faith in religious leaders, and was never guided by institutions, her association with Zion Church placed her in the center of antislavery activism. She apparently did not join the Abolitionists while in New York City. Yet the movement into which she would step as Sojourner Truth was already well established there. The birth pangs of the early antislavery movement, though preceding the emergence of Sojourner Truth, are the subject of this chapter; they are important to understand as the context of her involvement in antislavery, woman’s rights, and other reforms. New York City was the national headquarters of the antislavery movement in the 1830s, but Massachusetts was its birthplace. First, black Yankees transformed and expanded their lodges, benevolent associations, and literary societies into antislavery groups. This inspired white men and women to take up the cause. The new movement’s most unique and unprecedented aspects were its biracial makeup and call for immediate emancipation and for Northern blacks’ social equality. New York provided the financial backing for the national movement.1 130 sojourner truth and the antislavery apostles New York also replaced Philadelphia around this time as the national black capital and nucleus of cultural, political, intellectual, and ecclesiastical leadership . The Colored American replaced Freedom’s Journal as the nation’s only black weekly; the Mirror of Liberty was a black monthly; and the Emancipator, the New York organ of the AASS, covered black community events. The clergydominated black leadership controlled most community activism; the Colored American listed ten black churches in 1840. Reverend Peter Williams Jr.’s elite St. Phillips African Episcopal Church was rebuilt from ashes after the riots with a seating capacity of two thousand. Reverend Theodore Wright’s middle-class Shiloh Church (First Colored Presbyterian) seated sixteen hundred. The most thriving Baptist church was the working-class Abyssinian.2 Zion Church, “Mother of the rest,” adopted an antislavery creed in its founding Book of Discipline; its membership was made up of a black working-class majority, and it had the most militant leadership. Zion’s bishop, Christopher Rush, a self-emancipated North Carolinian, was a conspicuous Abolitionist who also presided over the biracial Phoenix Literary Society. When a suspicious fire destroyed Zion in 1839, Rush led a massive restoration campaign; the new threestory structure was reportedly the largest black-owned Protestant house of worship in the world. Under Rush’s tutelage, Zion churches expanded into a conference in 1848. Yet Rush was intolerant of women preachers such as Isabella. In fact, he spearheaded the conference’s conservative position on female ordination.3 For Isabella and other black New Yorkers, the streets held an outside as well as a homegrown danger. The city was a kidnapping hub; kidnapping rings and syndicates were linked to police and local officials, and armed blacks vigilantly fought slave-hunting abductors and their henchmen. Editor David Ruggles, another Zion communicant, believed that “more blacks were seized in New York City than on the West African Coast.” Ruggles cofounded the New York Vigilance Committee, headquartered at Zion, which sheltered, fed, clothed, transported, and counseled self-emancipated people on the run. The black lady preacher certainly knew the ubiquitous Ruggles, whom slave hunters pursued “as though he were an outlaw, or a wild beast,” vowing to “get rid of him by foul means.” Always in trouble with the corrupt legal system and frequently arrested, Ruggles was severely beaten in jail. Singular among black leaders in his support of outspoken women, Ruggles may very well have been the “gentleman” who introduced Isabella to Gilbert Vale.4 Although Zion’s gender conservatism constrained Isabella’s discipleship, she was in the lap of black radicalism. Isabella returned to Zion at a point when black women were broadening their benevolent and community outreach activities into...

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