Enslaved Pressmen in the Southern Press

Building on newly found archival evidence, this paper provides the first account of enslaved Black pressmen printing newspapers in the antebellum South. Using over thirty different articles drawn from antebellum newspapers, I first describe the labor involved in enslaved pressmen's presswork in Charleston, South Carolina, a major Southern printing hub where many enslaved pressmen labored. The next section models ways of reading white-authored texts about enslaved pressmen that recognize their strengths and limitations as evidence of the people they purportedly describe. The article concludes by highlighting the vast material presence of enslaved Black labor in the antebellum US print archive.