Sounds of Sympathy: William Wells Brown’s Anti-Slavery Harp, Abolition, and the Culture of Early and Antebellum American Song

In “Sounds of Sympathy,” I contextualize William Wells Brown’s Anti-Slavery Harp (1848) within the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American hymnodic reforms, the ecstatic singing of the Second Great Awakening, minstrelsy, the rise of the Hutchinson Family Singers, and the culture of antislavery song more generally. Ultimately, I argue that Brown’s songbook—which included two of his own compositions—was Brown’s effort to harness sound as a tool to aid abolition.