Digital Snapshots

Published in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1846, The Anti-Slavery Alphabet illustrates how abolitionists used domestic imagery and consumer culture to draw women and children into the anti-slavery movement. The pamphlet does not flinch from describing the many terrors of slavery—the hounds, the whipping posts, and the holds of the slave ship all make their appearances—but the strength of the document lies in its ability to describe the “peculiar institution” in ways that would generate empathy among white women and children.

Disenfranchised and circumscribed by laws that limited their economic power, women used moral and religious pressure to become prominent members of the anti-slavery vanguard. Possessed of even fewer rights than their mothers, children could, nevertheless, throw their weight behind the cause. Indeed, literature professor Paula T. Connolly notes that children had a special place in the abolitionist crusade. Anti-slavery advocates believed that children were the “present and eventual instigators of a reformed nation.” “More than children’s moral and economic effects,” Connolly continues, “it was their anticipated political influence as the nation’s next generation of leaders that made them most powerful…”[i] The people behind The Anti-Slavery Alphabet would have concurred. Indeed, its author assured children that their voices had power: “Even you can plead with men that they buy not slaves again, and that those they have may be quickly set at liberty.” Children could even succeed where older abolitionists failed. “They may harken what you say,” the author stated, “though from us they turn away.” Children could also evangelize among their friends. The Anti-Slavery Alphabet encouraged them to seek every opportunity to preach against slavery. “Sometimes, when you from school walk, you can with your playmates talk,” the author reminded children, urging them to, “Tell them of the slave child’s fate, motherless and desolate.”

The motherless child was one that tugged at the heartstrings of middle-class readers steeped in a sentimental culture that celebrated domesticity. It was, moreover, one that children may have found especially terrifying. Time and again, The Anti-Slavery Alphabet reminded readers that slavery threatened their homes and families. “I is for the Infant, from the arms of its fond mother torn, and, at a public auction, sold with horses, cows, and corns,” the author rhymed. The author continued conjuring the specter of children torn from their mothers in other entries. “K is the kidnapper, who stole that little child and mother—Shrieking, it clung around her, but he tore them from each other.” Hard on the heels of this entry came “P,” which was for the parent “sorrowing and weeping all alone—the child he loved to lean upon, his only son is gone!”

The Anti-Slavery Alphabet underscored that the vibrant commercial and consumer cultures of cities like Philadelphia were underwritten by the enslavement of Africans and African-Americans in the southern states. Time and again, the author reminds readers that the luxuries they enjoy are the fruits of stolen labor. Some, like “the poisonous and nasty tobacco” that “gentlemen like to chew” may not have concerned children, but other slave staples wormed their way into children’s mouths. “S is for sugar, the slave is toiling to make,” the pamphlet chides, “to put into your pie and tea, your candy and your cake.” 

The Anti-Slavery Alphabet fixed the attention of its readers on the horrors of slavery—the forced relocations and sales, the destruction of families, and the threat of violence—in terms that a white, middle-class readership would have understood. In a society steeped in racism and that was far removed from the cotton, rice, and sugar plantations of the Deep South, slavery may have seemed abstract and distant. The Anti-Slavery Alphabet showed that slavery was a malignancy that gnawed away at the very domestic institutions that northern housewives and their children cherished.