This chapter focuses on a community of Black women writers in Philadelphia who contributed essays and poetry to the Liberator newspaper. The Liberator provided a venue for such writings, but Philadelphia’s free Black women also decisively shaped the tone and politics of the nation’s leading abolitionist newspaper.

From their initial explosion, African American women’s literary societies would go on to outnumber men’s organizations from the 1830s through the 1850s. Literary societies were also sites for the imbrication of oratory and print, since they included not only reading but also listening to texts read aloud, so that members of literary societies need not have been textually literate. Taking Maria Stewart’s first letters to the editor, in Freedom’s Journal in 1827 and The Liberator in 1832, this chapter will argue that the social gospel that would go on to define her career includes a prototypical Black feminist politics that we see emerging in the interconnected female-dominated Black literary societies and fledgling Black press around this time and reaching into the decades that follow. Stewart saw reading newspapers as essential to responsible citizenship for Black women, and understood both literary societies and newspapers as ways to forward her radical politics.

Chapter Four shows how slaveholding elites across jurisdictions responded to the growth of the free population of color during the Age of Revolution with fear and repression. They feared large-scale slave revolts, the rise of abolitionism, and the assertiveness of free people of color. Beginning in the 1830s, and with increasing fervor in the 1840s and 1850s, white slaveholding elites across the Americas sought to crack down on free people of color and manumission. They also looked for ways to remove free people of color from their midst through various “colonization” schemes, to realize the old dream of a perfect, and perfectly dichotomous, social order of blacks and whites, enslaved and free. This chapter explores the growing restrictions on manumission and free people of color in Louisiana and Virginia during the antebellum era, which stand in contrast to the significant but less successful efforts of Cuban slaveholders to limit the rights of free people of color. By 1860, these jurisdictions were on truly divergent paths concerning race and freedom. Black freedom was described as an anomaly or a legal absurdity in Virginia and Louisiana, but not in Cuba.