About Pennsylvania Freeman

Pennsylvania Freeman

The Pennsylvania Freeman was an abolitionist weekly newspaper published in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, from 1838 to 1854. It began in 1836 as the National Enquirer, founded by the veteran antislavery editor Benjamin Lundy, and it became the Pennsylvania Freeman when the poet John Greenleaf Whittier took over as editor in 1838. For sixteen years under the Freeman name, the paper served as the organ of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society, carrying abolitionist news, argument and poetry to readers in a city that stood at the border between the free North and the slaveholding South.

The Freeman's life was marked from the start by violence and by chronic financial difficulty. Its offices were caught up in the destruction of Pennsylvania Hall in May 1838, only days after the hall opened, and the paper lost money for most of its existence, as antislavery newspapers almost always did. It survived through the support of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society, the proceeds of antislavery fairs organized largely by women, and a succession of committed editors, and it ended in 1854 when it merged with the National Anti-Slavery Standard of New York.

Founded as Lundy's National Enquirer

The paper was started by Benjamin Lundy on August 3, 1836, under the title National Enquirer, with the fuller name National Enquirer and Constitutional Advocate of Universal Liberty. Lundy was the pioneer of antislavery journalism in the United States: his Genius of Universal Emancipation, founded in 1821, had preceded William Lloyd Garrison's The Liberator by a decade. By 1836 Lundy had settled in Philadelphia and launched the Enquirer as a new weekly vehicle for the cause, sponsored by the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society.

The paper's first offices were at 223 Arch Street in Philadelphia. Its founding came at a moment when organized abolitionism in Pennsylvania was expanding, with the state society employing agents, distributing literature and petitioning Congress against slavery in the District of Columbia and against the interstate slave trade. A weekly newspaper gave that work a regular public voice in the state's largest city.

Whittier takes the editorship

In 1838 John Greenleaf Whittier succeeded Lundy as editor, and the paper was renamed the Pennsylvania Freeman. Whittier, a Massachusetts Quaker poet, had been drawn into print by Garrison, who published his first poem in the Newburyport Free Press in 1826, and he had already edited several newspapers and written the 1833 pamphlet Justice and Expediency urging immediate abolition. He had worked for the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1836 and was among the most literary figures in the movement.

Under Whittier, the Freeman combined editorial argument with poetry and reform reporting, and its editorials carried the stamp of a writer who would become one of America's best-known poets. Whittier's tenure, however, was brief and turbulent, dominated by the disaster that struck Philadelphia's abolitionists in the spring of 1838.

Pennsylvania Hall and the fire of May 1838

Philadelphia abolitionists had raised some forty thousand dollars to build Pennsylvania Hall, a venue for free discussion, abolitionist meetings and offices for the movement's work. The Freeman was to have been moved into the new building, but it had not yet been relocated when a mob attacked the hall. Pennsylvania Hall opened on May 14, 1838; three days later, on May 17, it was ransacked and burned by a mob, an arson that destroyed the building within days of its dedication.

Whittier was caught up in the violence himself. Accounts of his life record that he escaped the burning hall in a hastily assembled disguise. The destruction of Pennsylvania Hall became one of the most notorious episodes in the history of anti-abolitionist violence in the North, and the Freeman, as the movement's Philadelphia paper, both reported it and embodied the determination to continue publishing in its aftermath.

The Anti-Slavery Office on North Fifth Street

After the fire, the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society rented quarters at 31 North Fifth Street, an address that for the next two decades was known simply as the Anti-Slavery Office. There the society maintained a book depository and reading room alongside the editorial offices of the Pennsylvania Freeman. The depository sold antislavery literature of all kinds, making the office a distribution point for the movement's print as well as the home of its newspaper.

James Miller McKim, one of Philadelphia's leading abolitionists, was central to this operation. He managed the book depository and served as business manager of the Freeman, on a starting salary reported at six hundred dollars a year. By 1841 the society's executive committee could report that his careful management had much improved the depository's condition. The newspaper itself, however, remained in chronic financial difficulty, lacking adequate support from advertisers, like nearly every antislavery paper of the period.

An organ of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society

Throughout its run the Freeman was the organ of the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society, and its pages reflected the society's campaigns. It reported antislavery meetings and conventions, printed speeches and resolutions, followed the petition drives that flooded Congress, and covered the legal and political struggles of free Black Pennsylvanians. An 1852 item in its pages, for example, described a letter by three Chester County African American abolitionists, Abraham Shadd, John Gladman and George Shreve, protesting a state effort to prevent the immigration of colored persons into the commonwealth.

The paper also served as a source for the wider movement. When Garrison and Frederick Douglass toured Pennsylvania in 1847, the Freeman's issue of August 12, 1847, was among the papers recording their appearances, including a meeting at Bethel A.M.E. Church in Philadelphia chaired by Robert Purvis. Such coverage made the Freeman an indispensable record of abolitionist activity in the mid-Atlantic states.

Supported by the antislavery fairs

The Freeman's finances rested heavily on fundraising by women. The Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society held its first annual fair of useful and fancy articles shortly before Christmas in 1836, and the fairs continued every year through 1861, selling needlework, art, pottery, handmade goods and baked goods, many of them contributed by British women supporters. By the last fair the society had raised some thirty-two thousand dollars.

Most of the proceeds supported the Pennsylvania Anti-Slavery Society, which employed a full-time paid agent and published the Pennsylvania Freeman from 1838 to 1854. The arrangement illustrated a wider pattern in abolitionist journalism: papers that could not survive on subscriptions and advertising alone were kept alive by the organized labor, much of it women's labor, of the movement behind them.

Editors after Whittier

Whittier's editorship gave way to a succession of editors over the paper's sixteen years. Miller McKim was among those who edited the Freeman in its later years, in addition to his work as the society's agent and the paper's business manager. The paper continued under various editors through the 1840s and into the 1850s, maintaining its weekly abolitionist witness as the national argument over slavery sharpened.

Those years brought the Mexican-American War, the Compromise of 1850 and the Fugitive Slave Act, which made Philadelphia, a frequent destination and transit point for freedom seekers, a battleground over rendition. The Freeman covered a state and city where antislavery organization, vigilance work and legal defense of African Americans were closely intertwined, and its offices stood a short distance from the communities doing that work.

Merger and end in 1854

In 1854 the Pennsylvania Freeman ceased independent publication and merged with the National Anti-Slavery Standard, the New York weekly that served as the organ of the American Anti-Slavery Society. The merger ended an eighteen-year publishing history that had begun with Lundy's National Enquirer in 1836. The Freeman's readers and mission passed to a national paper at a moment when abolitionist journalism was consolidating around fewer, larger publications.

The paper's end came just as the slavery question entered its most explosive decade. Within a few years of the merger, the Kansas-Nebraska Act, the founding of the Republican Party and the approach of civil war transformed the political terrain the Freeman had worked, but the paper itself did not live to cover those events.

Legacy

The Pennsylvania Freeman is remembered as Philadelphia's principal abolitionist newspaper of the late 1830s and 1840s and as the journalistic home, however briefly, of John Greenleaf Whittier during the most dangerous season of his editorial career. Its association with Pennsylvania Hall linked it permanently to one of the emblematic acts of anti-abolitionist violence in the free states.

Historians continue to use the Freeman as a primary source for the antislavery movement in Pennsylvania, from the society work financed by the women's fairs to the visits of Garrison and Douglass in 1847 and the protests of Black abolitionists in Chester County. Its run demonstrated both the fragility of reform newspapers, which lived year to year on subsidy and sacrifice, and their durability when a movement organization stood behind them.