The Antislavery Almanac and the Discourse of Numeracy

The antislavery movement was obsessed with numbers; it embraced a statistical notion of social change. Accountings of the increase in the number of antislavery societies formed, money donated to the cause, tracts and periodicals produced and circulated were all offered as signs of the movement’s progress and portents of its ultimate success. The Third Annual Report of the American Anti-Slavery Society (1836), whose publishing agent’s report counts the total number of publications for the year at 1,095,800, “nine times as great as those of last year,” advertised the exponential increase in the demand for antislavery publications and, hence, interest in the cause.¹ In 1837 The Philanthropist computed the increase in antislavery societies for the previous three years at about “one society daily” despite “formidable opposition” and “the most virulent persecution” in order to conclude that the “world has witnessed no moral change like this since the Reformation.”² In keeping a strict account of its membership or publication figures, the American Anti-Slavery Society calculated its strength through numbers. Moreover, by aggregating itself—either by accompanying its petitions of individually signed names with “statements that offered a numerical sum of the signatories” or by providing tables of antislavery societies in its annual reports that tabulated the number of members per society in order to amass them into a large membership total—the American Anti-Slavery Society solidified itself into a commanding corporate body.³

The perception of the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS) as an increasingly powerful entity in the 1830s relied not only, as David Paul Nord points out, on the cheapness of print (the low cost of printing, paper, and postage) and on print’s ability to project through extensive circulation the AASS’s identity and message, but also upon the rhetorical force of its numerical discourse.⁴ In adopting the emerging professional discourse of numeracy, the AASS, publicized itself and the progress of its principles to others through a new culturally authoritative language. As Patricia Cline Cohen and others have shown, there was a broad cultural shift toward numeracy in the 1820s and 1830s, a shift that occurred in conjunction with the development of market culture and that was marked by the rise of statistical thinking, the invention of what Mary Poovey terms “the modern fact,” and a general explosion of numbers.⁵ The antislavery movement, like many other reform movements of the period, fully embraced this shift, utilizing numerical discourse both to name slavery as a social problem and to calculate its own social force.⁶ Numeracy served both as a core narrative discourse for the antislavery movement—a way to organize complex information into a system of knowledge that would render slavery visible and, hence, propel social action—as well as a model for its own centralized corporate structure.⁷ Numbers could simultaneously expose the horrors of slavery and promote the organizational system that undergirded antislavery’s success. Just as the state solidified its power in this period through what Oz Frankel describes as “print statism”—the unprecedented production, accumulation, and diffusion of social facts in and through official reports—so too did antislavery rely on the printed discourse of numeracy to establish their knowledge system as credible and their movement as legitimate.⁸

Antislavery’s enthusiasm for numbers signifies several broader points. First, that the antislavery movement operated not only in conjunction with its culture’s obsession with numbers but also with the cultural shift those numbers mark and enumerate: the emergence of market culture and mass society. Unlike the evangelical movement, which, as David Paul Nord and Candy Gunther Brown argue, fought against the flow of commerce even as it entered into it, the antislavery movement fully embraced—and exploited—the structures of the emerging market economy and its discourses for its own gain.⁹ Antislavery was not simply “of” its culture but situated at its leading edge. Second, that the antislavery movement’s discursive and distributional strategies were closely connected. Antislavery not only produced a new knowledge system through numeracy, solidifying slavery as a social fact, but also regulated and institutionalized...