Antislavery Societies 317Highland Garnet the editor of the journal’s “Southern De-
partment.” Garnet accepted the post, hoping to develop
a site for Southern black intellectual expression. Before
that bureau could fully take shape, however, the magazine
closed its doors in December 1865. In its fi nal issue, writers
admonished Northern blacks, encouraging them to resist
the comforts of urban economy and to travel instead south-
ward. Th ere, they explained, Northern blacks could be in
service to the formerly enslaved.
Reaching and publishing the most prominent names
in mid-19th-century African America, the Anglo-African
indisputably became the most infl uential black journal dur-
ing its brief tenure. Covering everything from astronomy
to chess, from black literature and abolitionism, it off ered
a stunning profi le of black accomplishment in a divided
nation.
See also: Abolition, Slavery; Delany, Martin R.; Garnet,
Henry Highland; Pennington, James Williams CharlesKathryn Emily Loft onBibliography
Th e Anglo-African Magazine. New York: Arno Press and the New
York Times, 1968.
Hite, Roger W. “Stand Still and See the Salvation”: Th e Rhetorical
Design of Martin Delany’s Blake.” Journal of Black Studies 5,
no. 2 (December 1974):192–202.
Hutton, Frankie. Th e Early Black Press in America, 1827 to 1860.
Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1993.Antislavery Societies
Antislavery societies were institutions involved in fi ght-
ing for the natural rights of liberty and equality for black
people in America. Th e battle against slavery commenced
prior to the Revolutionary War, when African Americans
organized and protested against slavery through peti-
tions. In fact, there are petitions on record dating as early
as 1661 in which blacks collectively ask for their freedom.
Th e earliest African American organizations, called mutual
aid societies, focused on many issues in addition to slavery
and were secular in nature. In 1775, Philadelphia Quakers
organized the fi rst antislavery society. Blacks and whites in
the early years, however, operated in segregated organiza-
tions because whites eschewed black participation or even
attendance in their meetings.caricatures of blacks propounded by the white press and
blackface minstrelsy. Furthermore, the journal carefully
monitored progress within the abolitionist movement and,
in particular, provided in-depth reportage of the trial and
execution of John Brown.
A typical issue included everything from poetry to sta-
tistical analysis, from fi ctionalized descriptions to polemical
realities. Th e April 1859 issue, for example, included “A Sta-
tistical View of the Colored Population of the United States
from 1790 to 1850,” a report on the relationship between
meteorological climate and African American survival. Con-
trary to popular opinion, the writers concluded, blacks were
not genetically predisposed to tropical labor; rather, they were
meant to work in a temperate landscape. According to this sci-
entifi c study, being forced into tropical labor worked against
the black man’s very biological constitution. Alongside the
charts and numerical listings of this “statistical review,” Ham-
ilton included an essay addressing the “educational wants of
the free colored people” and, aft er that, another sermon by
James W. C. Pennington articulating the economic deprav-
ity of the slave trade. In addition to these treatises, Hamilton
included a poem by Frances Ellen Watkins, “Gone to God,”
an elegy for a dying mother, and the formal minutes from the
New York African Society for Mutual Relief.
Also within this issue was the serial continuation of
Martin Delany’s picaresque novel Blake, or, the Huts of
America, one of the nation’s fi rst African American novels.
An epic narrative of an escaped slave, Blake was not only a
fi ctional tale but also an ethnographic travelogue, with the
central character journeying throughout the South and the
Caribbean to organize a slave rebellion. Although seemingly
discordant with the statistical and expository off erings else-
where in the journal, Blake coordinated perfectly with the
Anglo-African, providing vivid fi ctional illustration of the
political and sociological realities discussed with objective
gravity in the journal. Such disparate contributions were
bound by common racial cause and intellectual ambition.
Inaugurated during the height of the antislavery eff ort,
the publication of the Anglo-African Magazine continued
on and off throughout the war, despite the death of Th omas
Hamilton. Th omas’s brother Robert took over editorial re-
sponsibility and assembled a team of war journalists. Dur-
ing the war, the journal published whenever enough reports
accumulated; in addition to battle descriptions, Robert in-
cluded letters home from black soldiers. Eventually, Rob-
ert Hamilton even named controversial abolitionist Henry