Freedom's Journal: The First African-American Newspaper

Jacqueline Bacon. Freedom's Journal: The First African-American Newspaper. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2007. Bibliography, notes, index. Pp. ix, 324. Cloth, $80.00. Paper, $29.95.

In the 1820s and 1830s, African-Americans in New York State and especially New York City actively debated abolitionism and West African colonization. In March 1827, Samuel E. Cornish and John B. Russwurm thrust Freedom's Journal into the center of that debate. Similar to William Lloyd Garrison's The Liberator published in Boston, MA and the African Observer published in Philadelphia, PA., Freedom's Journal helped readers engage with local, national and international issues. However, the Journal was unique: it was the first newspaper in the United States edited and published by African-Americans. Cornish and Russwurm envisioned their paper as a four-page weekly devoted to ending slavery, debating colonization, and exploring issues important to the African-American community in New York City and beyond. Like other papers of the era, the Journal was sold by subscription and distributed through the mail. Men and women from Haiti, Canada, England and the United States (both North and South) subscribed. While a multi-layered debate over slavery and colonization raged throughout the United States, Freedom's Journal offered African-Americans a means of documenting and working toward ending their oppression.

In this much needed work, Jacqueline Bacon provides a detailed analysis of the contents of Freedom's Journal. Despite its importance to journalism and the African-American experience, no historian has undertaken a comprehensive study of the newspaper. Bacon's work emphasizes the Journal's historical significance and demonstrates that scholars should consider it as a precursor to other often referenced African-American edited newspapers, like Frederick Douglass's The North Star (Rochester, NY). She does not attempt to glorify the paper or its editors; rather, she provides scholars and general readers an overview of the periodical's founding and its demise. By detailing the Journal's, short and long-term contributions, Bacon outlines some of the ways African-Americans influenced antebellum American culture. In the 1820s, the Journal was one of the only periodicals to publish works by black writers and intellectuals. Bacon liberally uses evidence from the newspapers to examine the anti-slavery ideology, the lives and the opinions held by African-Americans--not white abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison, Gerrit Smith, or Arthur and Lewis Tappan. This unique body of evidence lends authenticity to the work. Freedom's Journal ceased publication in 1829, but as a result of a careful reading of each issue and a thoughtful attempt to place the newspaper in its proper historical context, Bacon's work provides us with a much-needed assessment of its historical significance.

More than other publications of the period, Freedom's Journal offered African-Americans "useful knowledge." Black businessmen--from shopkeepers and craftsmen to boarding house keepers--found that advertisements placed in its pages brought customers to their doors. Editors Cornish and Russwurm promoted social activism throughout the United States by offering readers useful information about the African-American community. They regularly found clever ways to critique the white press's coverage of issues and events they deemed important. For instance, since it was so often used as a means of social control, they published articles offering critical perspectives on the criminal justice system. For instance, on 3 August 1827, the Journal was the nation's first newspaper to report the details of a lynching and burning that took place in Alabama. In contrast to other newspapers of the time, Cornish and Russwurm were bi-partisan. They asserted that the "free expression" of "opposing views" was their goal; therefore, it was not unusual for readers to find articles that challenged the political, social or cultural positions taken by Cornish and Russwurm (91). As a result, they produced a newspaper that was much more than an anti-slavery tract.

Cornish and Russwurm believed it was one of their duties to print self-help articles. Many scholars have assumed that they simply wanted to help readers gain the approval of the white population; however, Bacon argues that a careful reading of the Journal reveals an "antebellum African-American self-help discourse." (101) The editors encouraged readers to fight prejudice by living morally up-right lives. They could not immediately hope to eliminate the racist system, but all self-directed efforts at moral reform would help undermine commonly held misperceptions and stereotypes about African-Americans. Cornish and Russwurm promoted literacy, and argued that African-Americans needed educational opportunities if they were ever going to have public and political advocates. Increased literacy rates would, they believed, offer the community's youth a better understanding of their past. Therefore, the Journal demonstrated how, through self-help, African-Americans might obtain a sense of history that would serve as a building block for a viable community in the United States.

Bacon also uses material from Freedom's Journal to explore gender issues in the African-American community. It is clear that men wrote a majority of the newspaper articles. However, she asserts that while they may not give voice to women, they do provide a means of analyzing how African-Americans constructed masculine and feminine roles. Ideas of masculinity were tied to freedom and equality, and the editors reprinted works from intellectuals who promoted black manhood. Some contributors argued that it was impossible to obtain manhood and freedom in the United States; therefore they often encouraged free blacks to remove to West Africa where they could have both. Bacon found that, like their white counterparts, African-American women attempted to adhere to an ideology of "true womanhood," but community factors most shaped how African-American women confronted that ideology. Writers attempted to dispel widely held ideas that cast African-American women as immoral and offered readers empowering definitions of true womanhood. Since the community's future depended on their contributions, the Journal encouraged women to embrace education and social reform. As a result, the paper offered perspectives on key issues that encouraged readers to explore the boundaries of manhood and womanhood.

For most of the Journal's history Cornish and Russwurm did not support West African colonization, but they published articles that informed readers about events taking place in Africa and Haiti. In the 1820s, African-Americans began looking to the past to begin the process of community building, and the editors encouraged readers learn more about their history. One misconception they hoped to combat was that Africa was an "uncivilized" country populated by people who had not made valuable contributions to man's history. In article after article, they linked African-Americans to the peoples of Egypt. In so doing, the editors provided African-American readers (and others) with a usable past--one that argued that the core components of western civilization originated in Africa. To support such arguments they reprinted articles from the African Repository and Colonial Journal and other periodicals that reminded readers of Egypt's important role in Christianity. Also, they demonstrated links between the heritage of readers and Colchos, the Sidonians, the Carthagenians but especially the Ethiopians--who were among the earliest peoples to establish a government and a police force. Such connections obligated readers to improve themselves and live virtuous and Christian lives in the United States. Articles in the Journal linked Haiti to this promise of future greatness. In 1827, the paper ran a series on the Haitian Revolution and a lengthy biography of Toussaint L'Ouverture. These accounts cast L'Ouverture in heroic terms and indicated that Haiti was a shining example of successful black self-rule.

Like a vast majority of New York City's free blacks, Cornish and Russwurm did not promote or support West African colonization, but the Journal's pages were one of the few places where African-Americans could express their positions on the subject. Not only did they expose what Bacon describes as "the biases" and "racist goals" of the American Colonization Society (ACS), but also they made forceful arguments as to why readers should fight for their political rights and for the freedom of their brothers and sisters in the United States. Bacon notes that despite objections to colonization, Cornish and Russwurm included articles that explored the experience of men like Paul Cuffee in Sierra Leone. Allowing readers to judge for themselves the problems and possibilities of colonization, the editors regularly published articles exploring the activities of the ACS. The paper questioned the goals of many of the society's members. Cornish and Russwurm warned readers that many colonization supporters viewed it as the best means of undermining opposition to slavery in the United States. In short, they argued "the natural tendency of colonization is to retard emancipation." (195) Moreover, the editors documented the fact that many supporters of the colonization of free blacks argued that it increased the value of every slave. If colonization removed free blacks, who agitated for political rights and an end to slavery, the institution of slavery would have a more viable future and the value of every slave would increase dramatically. Bacon's research reminds us that in the 1820s West African colonization was a divisive and exceedingly complex issue for free African-Americans.

Bacon devotes only one chapter to the way Freedom's Journal addressed the anti-slavery debate. In doing so, she both demonstrates her argument that while the Journal addressed the anti-slavery movement its editors envisioned it as a newspaper that would suit the needs of and inform the African-American community. Building on recent studies of the anti-slavery movement, she takes a holistic approach to the paper's coverage of the institution of slavery. Like other free blacks, Cornish and Russwurm felt linked to their brothers and sisters in bondage. They published articles that shed light on the harsh realities of slavery with the hope that they would undermine pro-slavery arguments. While northerners read Robert Walsh, Jr.'s Appeal from the Judgments of Great Britain Respecting the United States of America (1819) asserting that the "physical condition" of the slave was "positively good," Freedom's Journal printed articles that opened a window onto the horrors and immorality of slavery (212). The editors made it difficult for the average reader not to condemn the institution and not feel some affinity for those in bondage. Moreover, readers found articles on how the American legal and political systems helped to perpetuate slavery. Others articles focused on using Christianity as a means of challenging slavery's morality and often called for the immediate emancipation of all slaves. In the end, the editors of the Journal made it clear to all readers--especially African-Americans--that they were needed in this fundamental "struggle against oppression". (252)

Although other historians have overlooked it, Bacon demonstrates that Cornish, Russwurm and Freedom's Journal had a profound and long lasting impact on the anti-slavery debate. Though their lives took different paths after Freedom's Journal ceased publication in October 1829, both Cornish and Russwurm spent their lives working to advance freedom and end slavery. Cornish continued to be a public figure in the United States. He became involved in the Phoenix Society, and the New York Committee of Vigilance. He supported the goals of abolitionists like William Lloyd Garrison, but as a minister he disliked the Liberator's anti-clericalism. In 1840, he joined other prominent African--American leaders to form the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. Late in 1829, Russwurm moved to Liberia where he found the freedom he had long sought in the United States. Once in the colony, he carried on his work by reviving the newspaper the Liberia Herald, becoming a superintendent of schools, and establishing business partnerships with like-minded Americans. In 1836, the Maryland Colonization Society appointed Russwurm governor of what later became the independent republic of Maryland in Liberia. Cornish and Russwurm used Freedom's Journal to express their views, but it quickly became a forum for African-American readers to discuss and debate their vision of America's future.

Historians--whether they focus on the history of journalism, race, black communities or the anti-slavery movement--are in Jacqueline Bacon's debt. She has painstakingly read and analyzed every advertisement, every article and every editorial published in Freedom's Journal. Her work puts to rest the idea that the Journal was only an anti-slavery newspaper, and in so doing she demonstrates that it had a much larger and more significant impact than we have been led to believe. Bacon demonstrates that the newspaper's contents influenced a generation of anti-slavery advocates, including Theodore Wright, Gerrit Smith, and William Lloyd Garrison. Whereas in Root and Branch (1999), Graham R. Hodges sees the paper as an organ of the black middle class, Bacon argues it represents an attempt to build a viable African-American community of all classes. Also, this work sheds light on the complex goals of and challenges faced by the African-American writers and editors Samuel E. Cornish and John B. Russwurm; therefore it should help both historians and general readers understand that the general treatments of these men and their newspaper in Leslie Harris's In the Shadow of Slavery (2003) and Craig S. Wilder's contribution to Slavery in New York (2005) are wholly inadequate. Bacon has produced a carefully researched and tightly argued study of Freedom's Journal, and it should be required reading for anyone who studies this period.

Thomas D. Beal

Department of History

State University of New York, Oneonta

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