Race and Rights: Fighting Slavery and Prejudice in the Old Northwest, 1830–1870

5 / “An Odd Place for Navigation”: Itinerant Lecturers and Freedom of Speech,1830–1849

5 / “An Odd Place for Navigation”: Itinerant Lecturers and Freedom of Speech, 1830–1849 John O. Wattles of Ohio toured Indiana in September 1842, crossing the north-central portion of the state, seeking out compatriots, attending and holding meetings, and observing the local progress of the antislavery campaign. In Grant County, he found and worked with steadfast new allies, “firm friends of humanity.” He eloquently praised the local activists he met there: The abolition ship has weighed anchor, spread her sails, and, borne on by the fresh breezes of heaven, her broad banners waving in the winds, and her pendant streaming from her . . . topmast; she plunges over the billows, veering her course for freedom’s port. Some of our eastern friends who dwell by the sea, may think it an odd place for navigation, out here in the woods, but they must like to know that abolition can go across the land, as well as across the ocean. No mere pleasure sailors, the inland antislavery mariners were prepared for a spiritual battle against what they deemed an unholy system. In this letter to the New Garden, Indiana, Free Labor Advocate and Anti-Slavery Chronicle, Wattles claimed “[t]he friends of freedom are mailed in the might of principle, and Jehovah backs their purpose.” Grant County’s activists did not have to fight slavery and prejudice alone, however, for Wattles noted that their neighbors were also “moving in the cause of the slave. The ‘incendiaries’ and their firebrands have set the prairies on fire.”1 Like other participants in the western abolition struggle, Wattles recognized that the majority of the movement’s membership and “an odd place for navigation” / 135 organizational apparatus lay in the East. Nonetheless, he informed Indianans and eastern readers who knew little of regional circumstances that Old Northwest abolitionism was both vital and arduous. Since antebellum newspapers widely quoted from each other and reprinted one another’s articles, Wattles could have anticipated that his words might travel far.2 He asserted that easterners must shift their reform focus across the miles to the West. Of Connecticut birth himself and only then a resident of the region for three years, Wattles knew well that many eastern people saw the Old Northwest as a backward, amoral woodland sparsely dotted with hamlets.3 He nonetheless asserted that this actually was fertile terrain, strategically essential for cultivating a new vision of American racial liberation, one he had himself only recently embraced. Hardly “an odd place for navigation,” he indeed foretold that Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Ohio would instead prove central to the fight against slavery, and for civil rights and freedom of speech.4 As a traveling speaker, Wattles exemplified the era’s and the region’s most important propaganda technique. * * * The abolition ship did not sail across these wooded seas uninhabited, for a dedicated cohort of traveling activists like Wattles piloted it for the antislavery cause, fighting for freedom of speech as they created and expanded antislavery networks. Since the Old Northwest’s population was dispersed, propagating reform there required itinerant lecturers to promote and strengthen the cause. As advocates for the slave moved around the Old Northwest, their lecture toursdemonstrate the transitory, maturing state ofthe region’sculture and society in the 1830s and 1840s. Activist women and men faced many challenges specific to this singular environment, which included both unusually extensive violent and nonviolent efforts to silence organizing activity, as well as the fatigue of advocating abolition across a large rural region with few allies. Itinerants’ provocative labor elicited community strife, and they found their surrounding milieu unusually contentious, but nonetheless vital to national reform. Anti-abolitionists sought to regulate discussion in these communities, and used threats of extreme violence to stifle unwanted voices that questioned deference toward social order, organized religion, economic stability, and partisan politics.5 Speakers ranging from Marius R. Robinson in 1837 in Berlin, Ohio, to Lucretia Mott in 1847 in Richmond, Indiana, vehemently claimed the right to raise their voices in protest against slavery and racism.6 This regional context complicated 136 / “an odd place for navigation” itinerants’ mission, for widespread mobility and population expansion meant that people were often moving into Old Northwest towns at the same time as activists were passing through. Most residents had recently arrived, but many nonetheless rapidly developed a sense that they had the right to eliminate the topics of abolition and African American rights from...