The Press and Slavery in America, 1791–1859: The Melancholy Effect of Popular Excitement by Brian Gabrial (review)

Brian Gabrial’s The Press and Slavery in America explores how newspapers in the United States reported on six events: the beginnings of the Haitian Revolution (1791), Gabriel Prosser’s slave conspiracy (1800), the German Coast slave uprising (1811), Denmark Vesey’s slave conspiracy (1822), Nat Turner’s slave uprising (1831), and John Brown’s raid on Harper’s Ferry (1859). These “points of major crises and disruptions in the slave system,” Gabrial writes, “pushed slavery and race discussions into the public sphere, even at times when powerful forces tried to keep them silent” (xi). Reading reports from a selection of Northern and Southern newspapers, Gabrial identifies a series of “media discourses” that emerged through the coverage of each event. These discourses, he argues, “reflected the country’s ideological struggles as its sections, each representing legitimate and powerful cultural forces, grappled with and finally divided over slavery”; hence antebellum newspapers collectively provide an important account of how “a past, literate public viewed slavery” (xv, xvi).

Gabrial divides his book into two sections. The five chapters in the first section, titled “The Press and Slave Troubles in America,” offer quick histories of key events along with overviews of related newspaper reports. There is a notable imbalance in this section. Over the course of thirty-one pages, chapters 1 and 2 explain the circumstances and coverage of the Haitian Revolution, Prosser’s conspiracy, the German Coast uprising, Vesey’s conspiracy, and the Turner uprising. After the third chapter, which explores changes in the press in terms of politics and technology between 1831 and 1859, Gabrial then devotes the next two full chapters to how newspapers reported on Brown, his raid on Harper’s Ferry, and his subsequent trial and execution. The book’s first section thus spends nearly as much time and space on Brown’s raid as it does on the five earlier events. While Gabrial makes a convincing case that Harper’s Ferry and its aftermath marked a decisive shift in how newspapers, especially in the North, covered actual and incipient slave insurrections, the importance of Brown’s raid does not in and of itself explain the relative lack of attention paid to the book’s other subjects. Readers may be left a bit unsettled by this imbalance.

The book’s second section, “Media Discourses about Slavery,” is made up of six short chapters that focus on specific media discourses that newspapers developed in response to slave uprisings and conspiracies. Chapter 6 explores the ways in which Northern and Southern newspapers consistently framed insurgent slaves and their allies as enemies to the United States writ large. Chapter 7 unpacks the discourse of “racial panic” that accompanied accounts of slave insurrection, while chapter 8 focuses on how newspaper reports (especially from Southern outlets) framed their coverage in ways that worked to maintain the status quo of slavery (103). Chapter 9 focuses on the shift in “editorial tone” in Southern newspapers from apologias for slavery to staunch moral defenses of the institution (123). This chapter also begins to trace the sectional divide between Northern and Southern newspapers’ coverage of slavery, an investigation that continues in chapter 10. By the end of the 1850s, Gabrial argues, Northern newspapers (with some notable exceptions) consistently framed slavery as an immoral institution. Chapter 11 traces how slavery’s defenders threatened the freedom of the press, and the book’s conclusion touches upon the relevance of its main themes for the present day.

Gabrial convincingly shows how newspapers not only reported on but also helped shape attitudes toward slavery in general and slave resistance in particular. At times, though, his book sacrifices depth for breadth. For example, while Gabrial’s focus on specific instances of actual or imminent uprisings provides his book with a clear and manageable structure, he offers only brief sketches of the events themselves and...