About The Ram's Horn

The Ram's Horn

The Ram's Horn was an African American abolitionist newspaper published in New York City from 1847 to 1849. It was published in partnership by Willis Augustus Hodges, a free Black abolitionist born in Virginia, together with Thomas Van Rensselaer. Short-lived even by the standards of the antebellum Black press, the paper was one of the few Black newspapers in the United States in the late 1840s, and it occupied a notable place in the movement's history: its columns carried the prospectus for Frederick Douglass's North Star, it drew its editor into collaboration with John Brown, and it gave a platform to Hodges's uncompromising demand for the immediate abolition of slavery by any means necessary.

Willis Hodges Before the Paper

Willis Augustus Hodges was born on February 12, 1815, in Princess Anne County, Virginia, to free parents — Charles Augustus Hodges, a free Black landowner and successful farmer who held 200 acres, and Julia Nelson Willis, a free woman of mixed-race descent. His origins gave him a lifelong concern for free Black people in the South, whose freedom was hemmed in by law and violence, and he later dedicated his autobiography to their plight.

When Willis was fourteen, his older brother William was arrested for antislavery agitation and jailed; William escaped and fled to Canada, but the incident marked the Hodges family as pariahs in the county, and young Willis was the victim of mob violence more than once. After the Nat Turner rebellion, Virginia's white legislature passed severe discriminatory measures against free Black people, fearing further uprisings. Willis Hodges left Virginia for New York in 1836.

The Making of an Abolitionist Editor

In New York, at the urging of his sister, Hodges devoted himself to study and began attending antislavery meetings. He quickly grew impatient with northerners he regarded as more men of words than of deeds, and became an impassioned advocate for the immediate abolition of slavery by any means necessary. He returned to Virginia in 1844 but was accused of preaching antislavery sermons and, with his brother Charles, was arrested and charged with disturbing the peace; the brothers were released without charge, and in 1845 Hodges returned to New York because of harassment from local whites.

In Williamsburg, Brooklyn, Hodges and his brother William opened a temperance grocery store, and together the brothers later established an African school in Williamsburg, which became Colored School No. 3. Hodges also aided the Underground Railroad. It was out of this world of Black abolitionist organising in Brooklyn and Manhattan that The Ram's Horn was launched in 1847.

Founding and Partnership

The Ram's Horn began publication in New York in 1847 and was published until 1849. Hodges co-founded the paper with Thomas Van Rensselaer, a Manhattan abolitionist. The paper belonged to the small second generation of the Black press: Freedom's Journal had pioneered Black newspaper ownership in the same city in 1827, and The Colored American had carried the tradition until the end of 1841, but by the mid-1840s New York's Black community again needed an organ of its own, and The Ram's Horn filled that gap for two years.

Hodges wrote from experience that few editors North or South could match. In the late 1840s, while in New York, he wrote an autobiography describing his early life in Tidewater Virginia and how whites acted violently toward and intimidated free Black people in order to control them. The book was later published as Free Man of Color: The Autobiography of Willis Augustus Hodges. The paper's editorials came from a man who had been mobbed, arrested and driven from his home state for his antislavery views.

Immediate Abolition, by Any Means Necessary

The Ram's Horn reflected its editor's impatience with gradualism. Hodges had little use for abolitionists who counselled patience, and his paper advocated immediate abolition without apology for the enslaved people's right to resist. That stance put The Ram's Horn at the militant end of the Black press of its day. Where some antislavery papers relied on moral suasion alone, Hodges's position — formed by his family's persecution in Virginia — was that slavery was a system of violence that would not be talked out of existence by words alone.

The North Star Prospectus

The paper's best-documented moment in print came in the autumn of 1847. Volume I, number 43 of The Ram's Horn carried the prospectus for a new antislavery paper to be published at Rochester, New York, under the title The North Star. The prospectus announced that Frederick Douglass proposed to publish a weekly antislavery paper whose object would be to attack slavery in all its forms, advocate universal emancipation, promote the moral and intellectual improvement of the coloured people, and hasten the day of freedom for the millions then enslaved. The price was two dollars a year in advance. Douglass's paper duly appeared in December 1847 and became the most influential Black antislavery newspaper of the era — and it had been announced to the movement in the columns of The Ram's Horn.

Douglass himself addressed the paper's readers: a letter from him to the readers of The Ram's Horn, dated August 1847, is preserved in the Frederick Douglass Papers and was written in the company of William Lloyd Garrison that summer. The suspension of The Ram's Horn in 1849 did not, as the early historian of the Black press Irvine Garland Penn noted, leave African Americans entirely without an organ, because The North Star was by then established at Rochester.

The John Brown Connection

Through The Ram's Horn, Hodges was introduced to John Brown, and a decade-long friendship ensued. Brown wrote for the paper, and the collaboration between the Black editor and the white abolitionist deepened over the following years. Brown went on to lead the raid on the federal arsenal at Harpers Ferry, Virginia, in 1859, in the hope of igniting a slave uprising; he was executed in December of that year. Hodges's association with Brown, begun in the newspaper's office in the 1840s, was one of the paper's most consequential legacies — it connected the Black press directly to the most militant strand of the abolitionist movement.

End of the Paper in 1849

The Ram's Horn ceased publication in 1849, after about two years. Like almost every antebellum Black newspaper, it operated without a secure financial base, dependent on subscribers drawn from free Black communities that were themselves poor and on the goodwill of white abolitionist allies. Its disappearance formed part of a pattern: of the Black papers founded before the Civil War, most lasted only a few years, and the movement's press history is a succession of short-lived titles whose editors carried their experience from one venture to the next.

Hodges After The Ram's Horn

The editor's career did not end with his paper. During the Civil War, Hodges returned to the South and served as a scout for the Union Army, using his knowledge of Princess Anne County and the surrounding country to assist federal forces in their occupation of the area. After the war he went home to Virginia and opened a school, and he became active in Republican Party politics. In the first election in which Black people were allowed to vote in Virginia, he was chosen to represent Princess Anne County at the state constitutional convention of 1867–1868 — the first Black person from the county to hold elective office — defeating a white candidate. He was elected to the county Board of Supervisors in 1870, re-elected in 1872, and elected a justice of the peace in 1874. At the convention he aligned with the Radical Republicans, supporting Black enfranchisement, the disenfranchisement of former Confederates and the integration of public schools. When conservative white Democrats regained power in Virginia, Hodges returned to New York in 1881. He died on September 24, 1890, in Norfolk, Virginia.

Legacy

The Ram's Horn was remembered in the earliest histories of the African American press, including Irvine Garland Penn's The Afro-American Press and Its Editors of 1891, which listed it among the handful of Black papers of the 1840s alongside The Colored American and The North Star. Its historical importance rested less on its circulation or longevity than on its position at a crossroads: it announced Douglass's North Star to the world, it embodied the militant immediatism of an editor who had personally suffered slavery's enforcement against free Black southerners, and it began the friendship between Hodges and John Brown. For a two-year New York weekly, that was a substantial mark on the abolitionist record.