About Weekly Anglo-African

Weekly Anglo-African

The Weekly Anglo-African was an African American newspaper published in New York City by the brothers Robert Hamilton and Thomas Hamilton, first from 1859 to 1861 and, after an interruption, in a revived series from July 1861 until December 1865. Together with its companion monthly, The Anglo-African Magazine, it became one of the most influential African American publications of the years immediately before and during the American Civil War. Its final issue appeared in December 1865, the month the Thirteenth Amendment completed the abolition of slavery in the United States.

The weekly was a four-page paper sold at four cents a copy. Its motto declared that man must be free — if not through the law, then above the law. Its correspondents and subscribers stretched across the United States, and reached Canada and Jamaica.

The Hamilton Brothers

Thomas Hamilton (1823–1865) and Robert Hamilton (1819–1870) were the sons of William Hamilton, a leading Black abolitionist who had helped establish Freedom's Journal in 1827 and had worked with William Lloyd Garrison on The Liberator. The elder Hamilton helped found the New York African Society for Mutual Relief, lived through the anti-abolitionist riots in New York in 1834, and was critical of pacifist abolitionist newspapers such as The Liberator. He was an early champion of Pan-Africanism, arguing for the connectedness and shared heritage of African peoples wherever they lived, and he opposed the American Colonization Society, holding that Black Americans should claim full equality in the country of their birth.

The sons held similar views to their father, and they grew up inside the Black abolitionist world their father had helped to build. Thomas brought expertise as a reporter and journalist; Robert managed the business side and the magazine. Robert had also been involved in the family's earlier newspaper venture, The People's Press.

The Anglo-African Magazine

The brothers began with a magazine. In January 1859 they founded The Anglo-African Magazine, a monthly of thirty-two pages costing one dollar for a yearly subscription. Thomas founded it as a vehicle for the works of fellow African American writers. Its most famous contents were the first publications of Martin Robison Delany's antislavery novel Blake; or, The Huts of America, which the Hamiltons ran in the magazine in 1859. Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin had appeared a few years earlier; Blake, a story of a man separated from his wife by sale who builds a movement for Black freedom across the Americas, was the Black press's great fictional answer to it. The magazine was published until March 1860.

Founding the Weekly

Six months after the magazine, in July 1859, the Hamiltons founded the Weekly Anglo-African newspaper. Where the monthly carried literature and essays, the weekly carried the news of a community moving toward crisis: it had early successes in its coverage of slavery resistance, of the Dred Scott v. Sandford decision, in which the Supreme Court had held that Black Americans could not be citizens, and of John Brown's raid on Harpers Ferry in October 1859. The newspaper and magazine were the first publications to run Delany's Blake in its various forms, and the weekly also ran an incomplete serialisation of the novel.

The list of contributors showed the paper's standing. They included Delany himself, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Edward Wilmot Blyden and Sarah Mapps Douglass. William B. Gould served as a financial backer and reporter for the paper. Henry Highland Garnet later assisted Robert Hamilton in the editorial work as editor of the paper's Southern Department.

Sale and The Pine and Palm

Financial trouble forced a break. The Weekly Anglo-African was published in its first series until March 1861. Due to financial difficulties, the Hamiltons sold the weekly to George Lawrence Jr. and James Redpath, who renamed it The Pine and Palm. Redpath was the general agent of the Haitian Emigration Movement, and under its new owners the paper was used to press that movement — the organised emigration of Black Americans to Haiti — upon its readers, through circulars and articles setting out the movement's advantages.

The Hamilton brothers quickly saw that under its new owners the newspaper would no longer serve the needs of the Black community. Robert Hamilton therefore decided to start a new newspaper under the old name. When Redpath resigned as emigration agent in about August or September 1861, the original paper also reverted to the hands of the Hamilton family and resumed its original name — this time owned and edited by Robert Hamilton, Thomas having died in the interim according to the early Black press histories, though other records give Thomas's death as 1865.

The Revived Weekly of 1861

The first issue of the revived Weekly Anglo-African was published in July 1861, three months after the Civil War began. Under Robert Hamilton's management the paper increased in size, and contemporaries noticed that the editorial dash of its columns was perceptibly quickened. Garnet's contributions added brilliance to the paper. It was published at addresses including 50 Beekman Street and 184 Church Street in New York City.

The revived paper covered the war from the Black community's point of view: the progress of emancipation, the enlistment and treatment of Black soldiers after the Union began recruiting them in earnest in 1863, and the political future of four million people emerging from slavery. A complete file of the paper does not survive today, which makes reconstructing its full Civil War record difficult, but the issues that do survive — the Internet Archive holds issues from July 1859 through July 1860 — show a paper of news, lectures, African intelligence from Monrovia and elsewhere, and community announcements.

Emigration Debated

No question ran through the Weekly Anglo-African's life like emigration. Its father's generation had opposed the Colonization Society; Delany, its star contributor, hoped Blake would help raise money for his own emigrationist project in West Africa, and wrote frankly to Garrison in February 1859 that he was anxious to get a publishing house because the chances for a Black writer were so small. Thomas Hamilton, despite his own opposition to emigration, printed Delany's novel — twice, in incomplete runs, in the magazine and the weekly — because he understood its potential to enlighten and empower a transnational Black readership. The paper's sale to Redpath turned it briefly into an organ of Haitian emigration, and Robert Hamilton's revival of the title was in part a reclamation of the paper from that cause.

Final Issue and the End of the Hamilton Era

The Weekly Anglo-African's final issue appeared in December 1865. Thomas Hamilton died in 1865, and Robert Hamilton died in 1870. The paper thus closed in the same season as emancipation itself: the Thirteenth Amendment was ratified in December 1865. The wartime Black press that the Hamiltons had led — the Weekly Anglo-African alongside the Christian Recorder in Philadelphia and, on the Pacific coast, the Pacific Appeal and The Elevator — had carried Black opinion through the destruction of slavery, and the postwar years would belong to a new generation of papers in both North and South.

Legacy

The Weekly Anglo-African and the Anglo-African Magazine became two of the most influential African American publications of the pre-Civil War period. The weekly preserved the work of Delany, Shadd Cary, Blyden and Douglass in its columns, connected readers from New York to Canada and Jamaica, and demonstrated — in its sale, renaming and revival — both the fragility of Black newspaper finances and the determination of a Black editor, Robert Hamilton, to take his paper back when it ceased to serve its community. Its motto, that man must be free if not through the law then above the law, captured the spirit of a newspaper founded on the eve of the war that finally made that freedom law.