Staging a real state of emergency

The black and white anti-slavery radicals who followed martyred black activist David Walker and white editor William Lloyd Garrison saw themselves poised at the end of a decadent empire. Unitarian minister Theodore Parker (1810–1860) encapsulated their vision in an 1850 sermon, when he asked congregants, “Do you know how empires find their end? . . . Aye, how do the great States come to an end? By their own injustice and no other cause.”⁶ Garrisonians believed that an unprecedented political crisis started surfacing in the 1830s: Southerners, aligned with the Northern and British bankers holding mortgages on their plantations, held the United States hostage, justifying the systematic violence of chattel slavery through the spectral emergency of a bloody national slave revolt. Ruling through a state of exception, President Andrew Jackson (in office 1829–37) annexed Florida against international law; forced an entire population of Native Americans to relocate west of the Mississippi through the Trail of Tears (1830–38); and justified the ever-more-violent oppression of Southern slaves and their Northern allies by warning constantly of slave revolts and retaliation. Black and white anti-slavery women viewed “the class-based, racially segregated, gender-exclusive slugfest of the Jacksonian public sphere” with derision and horror.⁷ They were appalled, when – in the aftermath of Nat Turner’s 1831 rebellion in Virginia – governmental officials across the South aided President Jackson, trading on the fear of bloody slave revolts to tighten “security.”

The emergency that these Garrisonian abolitionists perceived, the end of empire that they felt themselves witnessing, was not identical to what Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben now calls a “state of emergency,” but there are uncanny traces of abolitionists’ rhetoric in present-day critiques of democracy. Agamben defines a state of emergency as a situation in which a sovereign power rules not through law or discipline but through creating a constant state of crisis that transforms lawmakers’ power into pro-forma approval after the fact. Justifying constant alerts through the idea that the present moment is an exceptional time, a time of emergency, the sovereign hails the spread of democracy even as lawmakers’ powers shrink. In the distinctly 1830s abolitionist version of this phenomenon, sovereign Southerners and their British allies misprision Northerners and the United States as a whole by worrying over slave revolts, thereby justifying chattel slavery. Radical abolitionists’ urgent desire to transform mainstream affect into a real feeling of crisis, in order to end slavery immediately – as well as their sense that the United States “empire” was about to implode – reverberates with Agamben’s vision. Attempts to create a real, counter-state of emergency are not new within the circum-Atlantic fold.⁸

Central to the transatlantic performance of this counter-state of emergency, black and white American women emulated British counterparts who had staged a 1790s West Indian sugar boycott and had lobbied the British parliament through an 1833 petition signed by nearly 300,000 citizens. An Englishwoman, Elizabeth Coltman Heyrick (1769–1831), launched the immediate abolitionist movement through the publication of an influential 1824 pamphlet. Within the year, the first female anti-slavery society surfaced in Birmingham, England. By the 1830s American women, first within the large free black community in Salem, Massachusetts, and then in Philadelphia, Boston, New York, and hundreds of other cities and small towns across the Northern and midwestern states, followed their British correspondents’ lead – but American women quickly surpassed their English counterparts in experimenting with public performances, including appearances on British stages.⁹

In fact, as James Forten, Jr. (b. 1811), a young black abolitionist, explained in a 1836 lecture for the Ladies’ Anti-Slavery Society of Philadelphia, American women’s particular province was to exhort their men during a state of emergency: “examine the records of history, and you will find that woman has been called upon in the severest trials of public emergency.”¹⁰ For women who championed the abolitionist views of Walker or Garrison, embracing this sense of public emergency meant rejecting day-to-day “democratic” politics, including the sham of voting, as ineffectual. It meant rejecting the state-supported violence embedded in the Constitution and the law. To be a radical abolitionist was to shun the semblance of democracy altogether, to show the inextricable tie between democratic freedom and slavery, in order to bring about a real democracy.

To the extent that Garrisonian abolitionists, schooled by black leaders, refused ersatz democracy, they rejected abstract citizenship and what Saidiya Hartman calls the state’s concept of the “blameworthiness” of the freed citizen.¹¹ They denied the state’s definition of the individual as the responsible party in a zone of biopolitical violence. Instead, they held the state responsible by trying to live materially and affectively outside of its boundaries, sometimes within microeconomic units based on free produce, even as they petitioned for change. They wanted slaves, who were, in their view, barely allowed to live, to be incorporated into the polis, and they wanted that polis transformed by a politicized, cosmopolitan love. They tried to sensitize privileged whites and blacks to the ways in which their complicity in slavery limited not only slaves’ political status but also their own.

In the eyes of these abolitionists, President Jackson and his Southern and white working-class allies were not representatives of the common man, nor were they democratic champions. In fact, they were the opposite. Through the gruesome biopolitics of slavery and Indian removals (not to mention the oppression of women), Jacksonians transformed many Americans into the walking dead: they passed state and federal edicts to tighten slave regulations and eviscerate the rights of free blacks. They singled out Northern abolitionists as well, instituting a gag rule to stifle women’s anti-slavery petitions and enforcing early laws requiring Northerners to return fugitive slaves to Southern masters.

Anti-slavery advocates, in turn, viewed the United States Constitution as invalid because of its compromises with Southern pro-slavery sentiment and its inability to shut down President Jackson’s sovereign usurpations of power. To sidestep the Constitution and Jackson’s power, then, these black and white abolitionist women tried to instate a real state of emergency, to let it be known that something was truly wrong in the way in which American democracy had come to function. As Agamben explains, Walter Benjamin’s eighth thesis on the concept of history sets the frame for this conversation about “exceptional” emergencies: Benjamin writes that:

Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence,” as Agamben notes, calls for violence “beyond the law,” violence to “shatter the dialectic between lawmaking and lawpreserving violence,” revolutionary violence which properly “neither makes nor preserves law, but deposes it and thus inaugurates a new historical epoch.”¹³ Initially, Garrisonians simply strove to live outside of the law, in both their circulation of affect and their material, daily lives. They refused to recognize the Constitution as the law of the land, even as they continued to utilize the remnants of citizen-based power available to them: petitioning, presenting memorials to lawmakers, forming political parties. They simultaneously improvised performances that propelled them beyond state-centered, legally-based modes of imagining citizenship.

The black and white women within the Garrisonian wing of the abolitionist movement rejected the notion that the slave was a figure who could legally be killed but not valued or “sacrificed” – a figure that Agamben calls “homo sacer.” Through their performances, they valued slaves’ lives – early on, paradoxically and problematically, by metaphorically “sacrificing” them and slowing down time to mourn them in same-sex societies; later by recognizing slaves’ resistance and independence and by imagining their own “privileges” extended to the emancipated, even as they simultaneously critiqued those same privileges. As homemakers, the inner core of activists adopted microeconomic policies that sidestepped the nineteenth-century version of the biopolitics of death: instead of consuming slave-produced goods, they purchased free-trade cotton, rice, and sugar. They cleaned and combed free cotton for weaving, tended sugar beet farms, set up microeconomic loans for free produce shops that traded across the eastern United States. They performed poems and plays in their parlors, sang hymns in their anti-slavery meetings as at church, and delivered speeches in town halls, inviting audiences to reassess, through the eyes of the subaltern, what Sara Ahmed calls the “stickiness” of emotions circulating in any given social gathering.¹⁴ Some simply tried to widen the family contract within “natural law” to embrace slaves as “sisters,” but many imagined past Enlightenment structures.

Eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosophers had developed the theory of natural law, arguing that it preceded all social contracts. “Natural” law rested upon a family compact in which the woman and child promised to obey the husband and father, who would purportedly represent their interests and protect their rights. This family contract modeled nationhood: the “whole people” of a nation (like the family members) promised to obey the propertied men who comprised the “body politic” (like the head of the family). This “body politic” purportedly represented the interests and protected the rights of the whole. John Quincy Adams (1767–1848), the sixth President of the United States (1825–29), explained this Enlightenment social contract as follows, revealing the limits of natural law: the whole people were “men, women, and children, born or unborn, natives, or foreigners, bond, or free” who were not “capable of contracting” and could “have no direct agency in the formation of the social compact which constitutes the body politic.” Only those “most capable of contracting” could covenant “for the whole,” and they could “never amount to more than one in five of the whole.”¹⁵ From the first, the United States operated on this natural law, modeling itself on the family compact. It was never, in Adams’s view, a true democracy, nor was it ever meant to be. Black and white American women organized female anti-slavery societies to end slavery and combat this view.

These anti-slavery societies differed from one another on ideological, religious, and practical grounds, which led the women within them to adopt different activist strategies. Furthermore, individual leaders within each wing of the movement developed their own specific performance tactics, adapting and adding to each other’s approaches. Garrisonians, especially Quakers and Unitarians, supported women’s participation in their denominations’ democratic processes, so many of them emerged as anti-slavery leaders.¹⁶ This volume analyzes the performance strategies of the Garrisonian wing of the female anti-slavery movement, retrieving leaders’ strategies for creating a real state of emergency.

Many anti-slavery activists rejected the Enlightenment model of democracy, but their political challenge was complicated: they had to develop a performance practice that would prove that slaves, including female slaves, were fully human and capable of contracting, of their own accord, with the state. At the same time, they had to reveal the violent underpinnings of that state, predicated on a sovereign power that designated only one in five residents as part of the true polis, relegating all others, including themselves, to various gradations of bare life. And they had to abrogate the supposedly natural law that provided the “rational” basis for the state: as daughters and wives, as sisters and nieces and cousins, they had to demand that their menfolk, their relatives, their neighbors and fellow church-goers, as well as the strangers upon whose doorsteps they stood, validate their activities and act with them as outliers, as immediate abolitionists rejecting the legalized violence of the state. As they gathered signatures on petitions, they abrogated natural law by valuing equally all the members of wildly disparate kinds of households. For instance, they routinely aggravated their neighbors by making the “request that domestics be called to give their signatures.” To conservatives, these radical female abolitionists signaled “the destruction of the domestic constitution.”¹⁷ They reimagined the body politic and the family. Some quietly embraced same-sex relationships. This book explores their varied repertoires, which haunt present-day theatrical stages as well as ongoing efforts to end human trafficking and forced labor.

Revising genealogies of anti-slavery performance to embrace a combination of strategies

Historians traditionally separate American abolitionists into three wings. The first wing, usually described as William Lloyd Garrison’s group, built in part upon David Walker’s radicalism and included middle-class Unitarians, Quakers, and members of various African Methodist Episcopal churches centered in Philadelphia, Boston, greater New England, and far-flung midwestern towns and cities and linked to a transatlantic network. In Philadelphia and even more strikingly in Boston, these Garrisonian female anti-slavery societies tended to revise performances of American republicanism. In their “Address of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society to the Women of New England,” for instance, Garrisonian women referred themselves as “the true descendants of the pilgrims” and called on Christian “freedom.” They did not, as evangelicals did, call themselves Christian sinners or redeemers.¹⁸

While twenty-first-century scholars might be more interested in the racial and class differences that were addressed within female anti-slavery societies, nineteenth-century women were equally struck by the difficulties of overcoming religious, denominational differences, because those differences anchored attitudes toward affect. Both Unitarians and Quakers embraced affective practices that emphasized reason and an outlier viewpoint. They were skeptical of sentiment and rejected evangelical notions that blacks were the cursed children of Cain or of Ham, the wayward son of Noah; instead, they viewed all humans as of the same origin.¹⁹ Unitarians typically embraced the emergent Universalist notion that all humans were saved because no reasonable God would require suffering.

In fact, many Garrisonians did not see humans as sinful, or view Christ as a crucified savior. They viewed the crucifixion as a breach in man’s reason and did not valorize salvation as the goal of human existence. Presaging the arguments of the contemporary human rights theorist Talal Asad, they came to critique the idea that a suffering, sympathetic Christianity could offer a pathway toward full humanity, and they tried to imagine other ways to force the state to recognize the rights of all. As Garrisonian activist Lydia Maria Child (1802–1880) explained to colonizationist Catharine Maria Sedgwick (1789–1867), she had “ceased to shed tears” over the slaves and “the emotions that used to produce them now boil up and create steam to supply my indignation and energy, till they move at the rate of steam cars.”²⁰ Rejecting both sentimental suffering and the Constitution, they championed moral suasion, even as they openly criticized non-abolitionist clergy and theatrically staged their (for women, symbolic) decision not to vote.

These black and white Garrisonians viewed the second anti-slavery wing, often associated with Arthur Tappan (1786–1865) and his brother Lewis (1788–1873), as an evangelical faction congregating primarily in New York City and Oberlin, Ohio. These “Tappanites,” a cross-class group that eventually embraced the vote, were more likely to emphasize Christian sinfulness, suffering, and redemption. Many of their associations, particularly in New York City, were segregated. They were typically composed of wealthy merchants’ wives, the relatives of evangelical clergy, and small-town women who had participated in evangelical revivals before moving to the city. Energized by revivals like those sponsored by Oberlin College’s Charles Grandison Finney (1792–1875), these Tappanite abolitionists, often Congregationalists, Methodists, Baptists, or Presbyterians, entered anti-slavery activism believing in inherent gender differences. New York women, heavily influenced by evangelical views, were not only slower to take up public activities in support of anti-slavery but also much less likely to do so in integrated associations. For instance, black women in Rochester initiated a female society in 1834, but white women waited until 1837 to follow suit – separately. Most New Yorkers joined abolitionist ranks through revivalism and emphasized, like the women of the Chatham Street Chapel society, the sinfulness of slavery and “the principles laid down by our blessed Savior Himself.”²¹ Accepting a quiescent role as pious practitioners of the faith, Tappanite women retreated somewhat after violent anti-abolitionist riots surfaced in the 1840s. Their political agency was muted by their decision to work through their menfolk, and by their continuing focus on Christian suffering as the route to a common citizenship.

Both the black and white evangelical press glorified female suffering in the 1830s: in 1839, for instance, the Colored American claimed that “Man is great in action – Woman in suffering.” Tappanite women believed fervently in the efficacy of this suffering: they hoped to rescue slaves from a sinful institution by sympathizing with their suffering and redeeming them. Too often, their practices stand in for the anti-slavery movement as a whole.²²

Religious differences among women, often tied to class differences, indeed led them to different conceptions of gender and different notions about how to attack slavery. While the Unitarian and Quaker Garrisonians typically focused on the similarities between men and women and envisioned equal access to political power outside the state, the Tappanite Congregationalists, Presbyterians, and Baptists concentrated on presumed gender differences, exalting women as more moral, and positioning the mother as the primary figure of anti-slavery advocacy.²³ This, in turn, reinforced heterosexism. Tappanites also moved gradually, advocating political action solely within the state. Eventually this religious and political split led to a fracture in the anti-slavery movement, a fissure echoed even within the Quaker movement, as the more radical Hicksites split off from the Orthodox Friends. Garrisonians complained bitterly of the Tappanites’ provincialism and racism, though they themselves had much to learn.

The third wing of the abolitionist movement, rooted in upstate New York, was tied directly to a political party: initially called the Radical Abolitionist Party and aligned with Gerrit Smith (1797–1874) and other upstate New York farmers and merchants, this party eventually morphed into the Liberty and Free Soil Parties. Over time, it entertained concessions to non-abolitionists.

The tripartite description of the anti-slavery movement, handy as it is, elides overlaps and crossovers: to cite just one example, a nineteenth-century Quaker named William Adams (1779–1858), who followed Lucretia Mott’s anti-slavery sermons closely as a fellow member of the Cherry Street Meeting House in Philadelphia, not only attended both Garrisonian and Tappanite anti-slavery meetings but also repeatedly voted for the Liberty Party.²⁴

As nineteenth-century abolitionist Harriet Martineau (1802–1876) described these early ranks, “the body comprehends men and women of every shade of color, of every degree of education, of every variety of religious opinion, of every gradation of rank, bound together by no vow, no pledge, no stipulation but of each preserving his individual liberty; and yet they act as if they were of one heart and soul.”²⁵ Partly because this diverse set of women could not legally vote, they were most active in the Garrisonian and Tappanite wings of the movement rather than the Liberty Party wing. Many abolitionists in these first two factions were the wives and daughters of the urban middle-class New England set, but a number of the most active abolitionists, those who signed petitions in both wings, were young factory workers in their twenties and thirties, women without property, often in smaller towns. They were women who spun, wove, bound shoes, tended machines, and identified as wage-bound. The best-known female abolitionists, those who took leadership positions within “promiscuous” or mixed-gender as well as female-only anti-slavery societies, were Garrisonians. In this book, black Garrisonians Sarah Louisa Forten (1814–1883), Maria W. Stewart (1803–1879), Sarah Mapps Douglass (1806–1882), and Ellen Craft (c.1826–c.1897), as well as whites Elizabeth Margaret Chandler (1807–1834) and Lucretia Coffin Mott (1793–1880) figure prominently.²⁶

Abolitionist histories typically (and paradoxically) cast these “radical Garrisonians” as comprising the most conservative of the three wings of the movement because of their supposedly apolitical approach, but the present study argues that their affective performance strategies were, in fact, highly politicized, precisely because they rejected the Constitution, political parties, and the vote. They were trying to make visible the lawmaking and law-preserving violence of the state and to combat President Jackson’s tactic of creating an ersatz state of emergency. Garrisonians tried to refuse the liberal democratic state even as they occasionally justified their tactics in terms of natural law or republicanism or exercised rights granted by the state: the right to petition, the right to free speech, the right to gather, the right to bear arms and protect their homes. Despite their disparate individual investments in a variety of religious and philosophical traditions, black and white women Garrisonians understood more fully than their counterparts in the Tappanite and Liberty Party wings how deeply embedded violence was, both within the laws of the state and the customs of religious demoninations.

In fact, as their efforts to assist slave refugees became increasingly subject to state violence and Southern litigation, Garrisonians practiced what they called “non-resistance” to the state. As Adin Ballou (1803–1890), a pacifist minister, explained, non-resistance meant that “we can neither fight for [government], legislate in it, hold its offices, vote at its elections, nor act any political part within its pale.” This proclamation of a real state of emergency through non-resistance alarmed politicians because, as one opined, it challenged “the right of a nation to govern its members.”²⁷

When they refused to recognize the Constitution as a governing document, when they refused to pay taxes, when they engaged in affective practices in which they refused to recognize Southerners’ right to compensation for lost “property,” or kidnappers’ right to recapture slave refugees, or Northern sheriffs’ right to imprison refugees in public jail cells, or colonizationists’ right to relocate all blacks, slave and free, in Africa, these abolitionist women were performing as outliers. The authorities recognized that fact: Garrisonian women’s political moves triggered anti-abolitionist riots “by gentlemen of property and standing.” Neighbors suddenly issued threats against their lives and livelihoods. Friends dropped them, clients avoided their businesses, and adversaries attacked their homes and persons. Their children’s educational and professional opportunities evaporated. Detractors threatened to send them South, to courtrooms that would aim state violence against them, white or black.²⁸

Garrisonians’ abolitionist performances, their “specific acts of opposition,” in fact “remain[ed] complicit in what they oppose[d],” but that is so, as Mark Sanders explains of efforts to end South African apartheid, because these acts of resistance are “dependent on a generalized complicity that is irreducible.”²⁹ Casting Garrisonians as apolitical conservatives, scholars often view as more radical and more effective those who – like Frederick Douglass, the Tappan brothers, and Gerrit Smith – abandoned Garrison’s principles in the 1840s to embrace Constitutional arguments against slavery. There is no disputing that this was a useful move at that particular historical juncture. However, it was also useful for Garrisonians in the 1830s to set the stage for that move – and it was especially efficacious for them to continue to expose the sham democracy within which the Tappanites and Douglass worked in the 1840s, 1850s, and 1860s.

This combination of performance strategies – working simultaneously within and outside of the state – may still be helpful in the fight against human trafficking and forced labor, because the tension among them shows what is and what is not possible in the way of establishing human rights within democracy. The traditional narrative in which Garrisonians pose as the most conservative of the three factions of abolitionism typically mutes an awareness of the often dangerous conservatism of the prophetic Christianity within the Radical Abolitionist and Liberty Parties. It muddies the problematic nature of evangelical performances of empathy (as distinct from sympathy) with the slave – performances, for instance, that led an 1846 black abolitionist newspaper to announce, without any qualification, of a white abolitionist: “Gerrit Smith is a colored man!”³⁰ Garrisonians such as Chandler, Forten, Stewart, Douglass, Mott, and Craft, as well as Maria Weston Chapman (1806–1885) and Susan Paul (1809–1841) in Boston or Grace Bustill Douglass (1782–1842) in Philadelphia, adopted a different notion of politics than evangelical Tappanites such as Mary S. Parker (d. c.1840–41) and her black and white followers, but it was not more conservative. Evangelicals believed in the Constitution, the state, the family; Garrisonians rejected the Constitution, the state, and many aspects of traditional family structures. Some lived within same-sex relationships, as Chapter 2 demonstrates. And whether they were black or white, Garrisonians tended to believe in woman’s rights as well as anti-slavery. One of their central challenges was to explore the relationship between themselves and the slaves through a revised notion of fellow feeling and reason.

Holocaust scholar Dominick LaCapra demonstrates that fellow feeling need not necessarily lead to the conflation of the self with the other as “symbolic capital in memory politics.”³¹ In an effort at thwarting this process of appropriation, Garrisonians refused Enlightenment philosopher Adam Smith’s notion of the “impartial spectator.” They did not envision like-minded equals or superiors as the impartial spectators of the slaves’ circumstances. Instead, they imagined slaves as the partisan, outlier spectators of their activism. This transformed Adam Smith’s Enlightenment notion of sympathy into a very different sort of act. Imagining slaves, even imperfectly drawn ones, as judges of one’s behavior interrupted one’s “felt proprietary power over the racial body.”³² It intervened in sympathy and unnerved auditors into an awareness of the limits of their knowledge of “appropriate” behavior. It challenged activists to acknowledge their complicity in slavery, as in abolitionist Abigail Kelley Foster’s closing salvo: after a first-person retelling of an imaginary slave’s circumstances, Foster turned to her audience and demanded, “when I see you and others standing by to witness, what do I hear from your lips?” The question was not simply what are you going to feel or think, but what are you going to say – and more importantly, do?

The traditional tripartite narrative about American abolitionism, which casts Garrisonians as ineffectual moralists, too often ignores, then, the different political attack that Garrison’s followers launched by shunning state practices to try to call a real state of emergency into being. It also ignores the contradictory forces within each faction: Garrisonians did engage in politics, despite their disclaimers: they actively lobbied, petitioned, wrote memorials, and shaped public sentiment through newspapers, organizations, fundraising. They helped overturn the gag rule and expand free speech rights. The traditional narrative casting Garrisonians as conservatives forecloses a consideration of the potential as well as the dangers generated by the intertwining of contradictory approaches. Finally, this narrative sometimes mutes the role of the disparate live performances within the movement and the ways in which they redirected the circulation of affect. Throughout, Garrisonian women relied upon live performances as well as performances in print to move their audiences toward action through an embodied, reasoned emotion.

Performing against race

This book approaches black and white women’s abolitionist performances through the interdisciplinary methods of performance studies, critical race theory, American studies, and feminist critiques of the Enlightenment. It differs from previous studies of women’s abolitionism by historicizing and theorizing black and white women’s cross-racial performances as activists, poets, lecturers, and daily actors within a transatlantic political movement, the female anti-slavery society movement.

As Heather Nathans demonstrates, nineteenth-century sentiment entered the theatre proper as well as activist anti-slavery performances during the antebellum period, disproving Thomas Jefferson’s argument that Africans’ sentiments were cloaked behind an impenetrable and unfeeling “veil of black.”³³ Nathans acknowledges the dangers of sentiment but argues that it offered whites a way “to push through traditional social and cultural barriers” and imagine slaves as full-fledged democratic citizens. Pushing through these barriers, however, did not lead to a democracy extricated altogether from notions of slavery and racism, and Daphne Brooks demonstrates how many nineteenth-century anti-slavery performers tried to address this fact through a “spectacular opacity” that layered out-sized identities on top of one another, to reveal race as “an optical, illusionistic, phantasmagoric stunt” and to make their bodies unreadable or multivalent.³⁴ Within female anti-slavery societies, however, black and white women improvised other sorts of practices to contest racialized democracy, responding to each other’s tactics and revealing individual styles of approaching anti-slavery performance.

An examination of the black as well as the white press of the time makes it clear that it was not a simple matter for black and white women to work together. Blacks and whites were equally likely to find interracial gatherings unwelcoming. Slavery was dismantled gradually in the north, and while some free blacks had no memory of progenitors of slave lineage, a number either remembered their parents’ or grandparents’ enslavement or knew of someone who had been enslaved. A few Northern blacks, including Sojourner Truth (Isabella Baumfree, c.1797–1883), were still enslaved in the mid-1820s; others lived as bonded servants. And many whites would have been able to remember a time when slavery existed in the North. Surely free blacks and whites at anti-slavery gatherings could not entirely ignore this fact, though there is ample evidence that they performed amnesia. Their recitations on abolitionist stages, however, were in part acknowledgments, indictments, and exorcisms of their complicity in slavery.

Black and white women abolitionists made their bodies present to one another in a new way in the anti-slavery movement: they gathered together in the same space, typically for their first time as fellow activists, often in sites that had previously been experienced as racially homogeneous. They were noticing the press of one another’s bodies as well as the touching urgency of the slaves’ imagined bodies. As Eve Sedgwick has explained in Touching Feeling, “even to talk about affect virtually amounts to cutaneous contact,” so on both sides, these black and white women had to overcome their apprehension, their distrust – even, at times, their mutual repulsion. In her first appearance in print, for instance, black abolitionist Sarah Douglass offered a vision of a utopian future in which “I see black and white mingle together in social intercourse, without a shadow of disgust appearing on the countenance of either.”³⁵ Blacks had to try to overcome their antipathy toward whites as whites had to try to overcome their racism. They all had to be aware of the “stickiness” of various historical performances of affect, but they also had to develop self-conscious practices, overarching strategies and provisional tactics that would enable them to reach their anti-slavery goals, often despite the customary workings of affect. This volume takes affect, as circulation, into account, even as it focuses on women’s mindful strategies to reshape it for abolitionist ends.³⁶

Performance was central to black and white women’s anti-slavery activism, especially within the Garrisonian wing of the movement. Women consciously shaped their daily conversations around anti-slavery themes, recited abolitionist poems, delivered lectures, and staged dramatic dialogues, playlets, and play readings. When a Garrisonian activist, black or white, stood at a lectern and assumed the role of an imaginary slave in the recitation of a poem or the retelling of a slave narrative, she understood herself to be performing a revised sympathy rather than an empathy with the slave. She did not “transform” into the imagined slave, or assume that she felt what the slave experienced. She remained aware that she was herself, complicit in the institution of slavery, even if she practiced free-produce advocacy, petitioned against slavery, and daily dedicated her time to the movement. She wore her own clothes, not the costume of a slave; spoke in her own voice, not some presumed slave dialect. Audiences, furthermore, were aware that she was, still, herself. They perceived her as a speaker, even as they witnessed her incomplete characterization of the slave, slaveholder, or abolitionist.

Furthermore, unlike the solitary, silent white reader, these black and white women activists who recited poems or delivered lectures about slaves monitored their awareness of the gap between their performances of imaginary slaves and actual Northern as well as Southern slaves’ lives. They knew slaves like Sojourner Truth, spoke at the same gatherings, and routinely aided slave refugees fleeing North. As they performed, they gauged disparate audience responses, particularly in the 1830s, when they were unaccustomed to jointly organized interracial gatherings. As they watched themselves from the imagined slaves’ place of judgment, they considered their spectators’ responses, from reserved silence to anger. Gradually, they realized the dangers of representing the slave’s pain and began to represent her agency. This practice worked against voyeuristically appropriating the pain of the other, against collapsing the self into the other. In intimate spaces such as parlors, Sunday school rooms, and town halls, the community judgment of their anti-slavery efforts was immediate, pressing, and palpable. As they tracked the audience, noticing the diverse impressions they left behind, women improvised a way forward, a way out of a pretend state of emergency into a real state of emergency and a cosmopolitan love.³⁷

Abolitionist activists carried within their performances an awareness of previous gatherings, previous efforts to formulate community across difference. They sensed the movement, either forward or backward, of the cause. And at the end of most poetry readings, dramatic dialogues, speeches, and non-professional abolitionist-sponsored theatrical productions, abolitionist performers, either implicitly or explicitly, challenged audience members to do something about the plight of the slave. Often they demanded that audience members dismantle privilege. Sometimes they demanded that those privileges be extended to slaves. Usually there was a petition to sign, a sign-up sheet for door-to-door solicitation of signatures, a set of dues to pay, a book to purchase, an anti-slavery fair to plan.

From 1820 to 1865, female abolitionists routinely performed across racial and class boundaries to stage their activism. White women from working-class mill towns as well as the urban elite met with black women from the ranks of slave refugees, freed women, the middle class, and the black elite. While some female anti-slavery societies were composed of only black or only white members, many, like the Philadelphia Female Anti-Slavery Society, were cross-racial from the first, and others integrated over time. For example, black women founded the first female anti-slavery society on February 22, 1832, in Salem, Massachusetts, but the president of that organization, Clarissa C. Lawrence, later became an officer of the integrated Salem Female Anti-Slavery Society, as well as a delegate to the cross-racial 1839 Anti-Slavery Convention of American Women.³⁸ Some groups started as white organizations and then became cross-racial: when Garrison castigated the all-white Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society for its racism, its leaders responded by coaxing a commitment to an interracial association from their more recalcitrant members. Although most of the 250 women on the final Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society membership list were white, as many as twenty-five of the seventy-five to one hundred actively involved members – those who “passed out petitions and anti-slavery tracts, made items for sale at fairs, or helped in society-sponsored schools and orphanages” – self-identified as black or “colored.” Somewhere between one-fourth and one-third of the active members of the Boston society were black. They, too, recited anti-slavery poems, shared stories of runaway slaves, and sympathized with the slaves.

Many studies of sentiment ignore the fact that many of the abolitionists who sympathized with the slave were free blacks, performing live within a political movement housed outside the state. The present study attempts a re-evaluation of these actual abolitionist performances, not silent readings, by focusing on young free black women’s recitations and speeches as well as performances by whites – and by insisting upon historicizing abolitionists’ disparate performances of “sympathy.”

Even before gathering in societies, abolitionist women drew upon established performance traditions such as reading aloud, first in their own homes, then in others’ homes, and eventually in public gatherings within church basements and civic halls. Families particularly embraced the pastime of after-dinner reading. Importantly, a family might comprise a brother, sister, and aunt, as with abolitionist Elizabeth Chandler; of two sisters, as in the case of activist Frances Wright (1795–1852); or of members of a boardinghouse such as the one run by evangelical Mary S. Parker; or of a couple like Lucretia and James Mott (1788–1868), who invariably housed refugees, anti-slavery agents, and traveling Friends. Group reading was an intergenerational pursuit in these polyglot homes: loosely conceived “families” passed long evenings by gathering around the fire or tea table to listen as someone read aloud. These rituals were viewed as occasions for discussion, in the United States and beyond: in an American report of how Icelandic families practiced this custom, for example, a reporter noted that family members interrupted their reader with remarks and questions. Valuing the roots of this practice within their own childhoods, readers in the late 1820s recalled how women were allowed to voice their views in these settings. One writer remembered, for instance, how her cousin Frank read aloud to cousin Martha, “and we heard, well pleased, her varied remarks and shrewd observations on men and things.”³⁹ As author Maria Edgeworth (1768–1849) advised:

Building upon the strategy of American actress and educator Susanna Haswell Rowson (c.1762–1824), who composed playlets for her female students to enact, Edgeworth advised women to read aloud, particularly “dialogues, dramas, and well-written narratives.”

As they gathered outside the family circle, women adapted this sort of reading toward activist goals, incorporating certain theatrical strategies. Early anti-slavery societies, like the literary and benevolent associations that fostered them, provided women with new opportunities to speak with each other and also “as” each other, through newly theatricalized versions of reading aloud. The emphasis on performance in black literary groups “fostered an environment in which a truly democratic ‘sharing’ of texts could take place, and it ensured that cohesive groups could be formed from individuals with widely divergent literacy skills.”⁴¹ The same thing was true for white women, particularly in the frontier communities establishing abolitionist societies, as they, too, possessed various levels of access to education. These performances enabled women to practice public speaking, engage in reasoned debate, and learn political skills, from formulating a constitution and electing officers to defending and rethinking their political views. And these stagings of anti-slavery radicalism enabled black and white women to transform sympathy to new ends.

A note on methodology

To locate effective performance strategies, theatre artists and historians, like political activists, must be able to think through varied and conflicting notions of time. It is efficacious to imagine time simultaneously through a “circum-Atlantic fold” and through “segmented,” time-bound narratives.⁴² The Epilogue of this volume embraces the fold, collapsing past and present to examine the ongoing repertoire of anti-slavery, even as it highlights useful practices disappearing from view. The fold collapses time zones, accenting the continuance, the similarities, and the experiential qualities of performance practices. It is particularly helpful in highlighting genealogies of ongoing structural violence. It is not the only important methodology in approaching time, however. Temporarily separating the past, present, and future – provisionally establishing discrete frames or movable prosceniums for purposes of analysis – illuminates more clearly the differences, disruptions, and distances among performance practices. This approach to time is particularly useful in foregrounding short-term tactics and in clarifying the distinctive performance contours of a particular moment in time. Importantly, it enables us to see the limits of our own endeavors, and forces us to try to see our moment in time not as the center of all time and the residue of all repertoires, but as a dangling moment, just a random moment among trillions. Focusing upon time-bound practices sharpens an awareness of the disparate, novel ways in which activists have intervened in state-sponsored violence over time. It also provides present-day scholar-artists with fresh angles of vision on their own activist techniques. What we trace in the past is not just a version of or precursor to our own moment, but a distinct moment, with its own logic that challenges and mutates our own. This notion of time shapes the successive chapters of this book.

By juggling two notions of time, this book hopes to honor the differences among discrete past events even as it insists upon the impossibility of separating past and present. It reveals the distinctness of past performances of activism, even as it gestures toward the ways in which they bleed into the present-day fight against the trafficking of persons. It offers a cautionary tale and a set of new possibilities for fighting modern-day human trafficking and forced labor.

Four chapters and an epilogue

By revising anti-slavery sympathy, the women in the Garrisonian wing of the anti-slavery movement launched what has become an ongoing effort to refine strategies for staging the relationship between the self and the other. Instead of asking audiences to sympathize with and rescue suffering, enslaved others, they not only depicted slave agency but also turned their attention to working on the self as a means of connecting with the other. They transformed sympathy for slaves into a critical act of self-judgment and a consideration of non-Western notions of the self. They staged a compassion for these newly constituted selves as a means of deepening their activist commitments to others. For some, this meant a love of the self-same. This self-reverence set the stage for a consideration of the importance of traveling metaphorically beyond one’s childhood to improvise a provisional rather than a stable activist self. In traveling beyond the traditional behaviors of childhood, they achieved cosmopolitan self-possession within transatlantic communities.

Chapter 1, “From sentimental sympathy to activist self-judgment,” distinguishes sympathy from empathy and reveals how women transformed sympathy into “metempsychosis,” a practice wrenched from East Indian roots. Nineteenth-century women understood themselves to be exercising sympathy with, not empathy for, slaves. In fact, the English term “empathy” was not coined until 1909: a British psychologist named Edward Bradford Titchener (1867–1927) translated a German aesthetic term, Einfühlung, as “empathy” and then transferred that concept into psychoanalytical studies.⁴³ For early abolitionists, “sympathy” still evoked medical notions of involuntary responses among body parts and people. In the 1830s Garrisonian women converted this idea of sympathy as involuntary correspondence into a voluntary exercise that necessitated a particular kind of critical and partisan spectatorship, distance, and self-judgment, as well as an activated awareness of another’s material circumstances. For them, sympathy was not simply an emotional engagement with another’s situation, nor an attempt to compass the other’s very being.

Anti-slavery women’s performances of sympathy were shaped by a fluid sense of time and personhood that Timothy McCarthy and John Stauffer identify as “romantic,” but which was equally rooted in Eastern religious traditions such as Hinduism and Buddhism. From 1820 to 1840, as Western missionaries spread across Asia, and as abolitionists followed news of the British colonization of India, hundreds of articles on the Hindu practice of “metempsychosis,” or the transmigration of souls at death, appeared in over thirty different United States journals. By 1840, the number of East Indians subjugated by the British exceeded the number of slaves freed in the British Caribbean, and many transatlantic abolitionists, outraged at British imperialism, nonetheless grew curious about Eastern practices in the far reaches of empire. Some encountered metempsychosis or transmigration of souls through their classical readings in Pythagoras, some through Jeremy Bentham’s widely heralded 1789 defense of animals’ rights. Others first learned of metempsychosis through travel literature. Many Americans inchoately merged Hinduism with Buddhism. For instance, a Boston woman read about metempsychosis in Howard Malcom’s Travels in South Eastern Asia, and penned in her diary a detailed description of the “transmigration of souls” within the “Buddhist” tradition “believed by half the human race”: Buddhism, she recorded in her somewhat clouded journal, is “continual transmigration according to the merit of the last life,” as “beings . . . are doomed . . . to live, forever changing their form.”⁴⁴

In the performance of metempsychosis, souls merged, at the moment of death, into an unstable “all-soul.” From this amorphous soul, which demolished individualized suffering and redemption – and indeed the very concept of the individual – newly unanchored souls broke off to travel into new bodies. The nature of that body depended upon their prior behavior. One’s deeds determined what would happen after the merger with others into the “all-soul”: a beggar might evolve into a king or devolve into a rat. Encountering Hindu practices encouraged black and white Garrisonians to rethink their notions of the individual as well as the relationship between bodies and souls and to re-evaluate the practice of identification. They called their own anti-slavery practice “metempsychosis” to highlight the fragility of human existence, the mutability of human inter-relatedness, the transitory and fragmentary nature of identity, and the importance of good deeds.

Abolitionist women combined, in a sort of cultural stew, Eastern notions such as metempsychosis with notions of Buddhist and Christian suffering and outrage. The more fluid sense of time that stemmed from this stew incorporated sacred time, the slow time that they encountered in the world of East Indian religious traditions. At times these anti-slavery borrowings from Eastern notions seem startling, as when black radical David Walker writes that if God does not send a deliverer to end slavery, the reason is that “the world in which we live does not exist, and we are deceived with regard to its existence.”⁴⁵ Through this Buddhist-inflected statement, as Robert Forbes has noted, Walker calls “the entire ontological structure of the world” into question. Metempsychosis, which differs from both sympathy and empathy, morphed anti-slavery sympathy into a more radical enactment of inter-subjectivity.

As Chapter 1 demonstrates, Quaker Elizabeth Margaret Chandler learned from the failures of her predecessor, experimentalist Frances Wright: instead of embracing capitalism and rejecting sympathy, Chandler rejected capitalism and transformed sympathy into metempsychosis. Initially, as the editor of the “Ladies’ Repository” in the abolitionist newspaper The Genius of Universal Emancipation (1821–39), she asked readers to practice free produce “Conversations” in which they convinced untested, risk-averse acquaintances to join the anti-slavery cause. By 1830, Chandler advised readers to practice metempsychosis, to place themselves mentally into the concrete circumstances of slaves’ lives as they could best imagine them. But Chandler’s followers did not imagine a gentleman “of property and standing” as the “impartial spectator” to this imaginary scene, as Enlightenment scholar Adam Smith had suggested. Instead, they envisioned a partisan spectator, either a slave or a more radical version of themselves, passing judgment on their activism. As a result, over time they learned to imagine the slave not as a generic, abject trope but as an independent or resistant individual naming the limits of abolition. This development, launched through the practice of metempsychosis, was particularly useful at the very outset of the anti-slavery movement, when it was difficult to gather testimony from actual slaves and risky for refugees to take the stage. Metempsychosis became such a central part of early nineteenth-century performance culture that in 1836 Robert Montgomery Bird, one of celebrated actor Edwin Forrest’s playwrights, published a lively satire of it.⁴⁶

In a series of poetic publications between 1831 and 1834, Philadelphians Elizabeth Chandler and Sarah Louisa Forten debated the practice of metempsychosis, and their public dialogue serves in Chapter 1 as a comparative investigation of early approaches to abolitionist practice. Together Chandler and Forten offered their audiences poetry, speeches, essays, and dialogues, revising each other’s notions of how to embody abolition.⁴⁷ By contemplating how they directed women to perform anti-racism as well as anti-slavery through their poems, speeches, and dialogues – and by examining their exchange of views itself as a public performance – Chapter 1 demonstrates that Sarah Forten’s more individualized, resistant slaves gradually replaced the generic suffering slaves of Chandler’s earliest efforts, as Chandler herself adopted new representational strategies that highlighted slaves’ performances of self-possession.

Chandler and Forten’s “virtual” exchanges, their complementary contributions to The Genius of Universal Emancipation and the Liberator (Reference Magawisca1831–65), respectively, served in 1831 as a rehearsal for actual interracial gatherings within free produce societies later that same year. This formative time period, between the growing acceptance of immediate abolition among radicals in 1830 and their organizing in literary and intelligence societies as well as in interracial female anti-slavery societies in 1833, deserves careful attention because it reveals the dangers as well as the potential implicit in performing certain kinds of activism.

Chapter 2, “From the suffering of others to a ‘compassion for ourselves,’” investigates how black women further revised the performance of sympathy by adding the periperformative of self-care. At a time when Northern officials proposed “pass laws” to monitor free blacks’ movements – and colonizationists hoped to resettle blacks in Liberia, Mexico, or Canada – women incorporated a concern for their individual and collective selves into their anti-slavery activism. To grasp the crucial nature of this move within the free black community, consider that free blacks had voted in Pennsylvania for forty-one years as of 1832, but within five years the Pennsylvania Reform Convention adopted a new state Constitution to disenfranchise them. This juncture required a new approach, and women responded immediately. Instead of focusing solely upon slaves’ bodies, free black women, in particular, started becoming more conscious of their own fragile situations, their own particular connectedness with slaves’ plight. They regarded self-reverence as a crucial periperformative, but they disagreed about its nature. Boston’s Maria W. Stewart demanded that women “feel interested for ourselves,” advocating a self-advancement grounded in sisterly black unity, militant Christian righteousness, and democratic freedoms. She imagined a concern for the self within the church and state, through a Black Nationalist lens. In contrast, Philadelphia’s Sarah Mapps Douglass asked women to recognize the precariousness of their own situations and endorse a “compassion for ourselves” as well as a keener awareness of their interconnectedness with slaves. Hers was a compassion existing despite the state, linked to a desire to redress grievances against the state.⁴⁸

Both Stewart and Douglass delivered lectures, but Stewart appeared on the public dais as an individual, lobbing direct attacks on multiple targets within her diverse town hall audiences, while Douglass spoke in more protected zones, sponsored by a recognized women’s group. Partly as a result of the negative reception that Stewart faced, black and white women started assailing slavery indirectly rather than directly and collectively rather than individually. They formed these collectives within their homes, neighborhoods, churches, and, later, their free produce, literary, and anti-slavery societies. These societies, in turn, fostered a “compassion for ourselves.”

As Chapter 2 demonstrates, between October 1831 and October 1832, Stewart and Douglass debated their competing views in the Liberator. Both Sarah Forten and Elizabeth Chandler continued to publish poems during this period, and gradually their performances altered in response to Stewart’s and Douglass’s appearances: they, too, incorporated into their poems a compassion for the self and a renewed commitment to free blacks’ rights and privileges.

By caring for themselves as well as the slaves, Stewart and Douglass refocused their audiences on their own material circumstances. This led women to perceive the dangers they themselves faced, but also prompted them to consider further the wider material circumstances surrounding slavery and their complicity in these structures. Furthermore, it created an awareness of differences within the self and prompted them to foster a love of the self-same: within the self, the black community, and the larger anti-slavery community. This embrace led to the possibility of validating same-sex love. This potentiality may be traced through the union of Mary Grew (1813–1896) with Margaret Jones Burleigh (d. 1891), and the bond between Sallie Holley (1817–1893) and Caroline F. Putnam (1826–1917), who flourished within the affective umbrella of the Garrisonians.

Chapter 3, “‘Beyond our traditions’ to a provisional, practical activism,” investigates how this notion of embodying a concern for the self gradually developed into a more mobile performance of one’s relationship to the self and others. Quaker Lucretia Coffin Mott transformed abolitionist practice through her belief that through their “inner lights,” women would develop provisional selves, “would be carried beyond our education, beyond our traditions, beyond the religion of our childhood.”⁴⁹ Focusing on a provisional selfhood altered the relationship between activists and slaves as well as among activists themselves. This chapter, along with Chapter 4, asks how this figurative traveling beyond a stable self, as well as the women’s amplified, transatlantic travel to the British Isles and Europe in the 1840s and 1850s, altered the ways in which American women staged anti-slavery. The abolitionist world-traveling of a pivotal leader of the female anti-slavery movement, Lucretia Mott, a delegate to the 1840 World’s Anti-Slavery Convention, helped Garrisonians develop new, more flexible and practicable anti-slavery tactics.

Quaker women provided leadership in many facets of the female anti-slavery movement, so this analysis of Mott’s real and imaginary travels broadens scholars’ understanding of abolitionist performances as a whole. Mott was a follower of Elias Hicks (1748–1830), whose Doctrinal Epistle (Reference Hicks1824) argued that American Quakers should not, in an eagerness to gain civic acceptance alongside other mainstream Protestant denominations, follow the lead of British Orthodox Quakers and adopt a uniform doctrine, church hierarchy, and set ritual. Instead, Hicks urged Quakers in the United States to develop a performance-based, practical ministry grounded in ever-shifting, half-perceived “truths.” In fact, Hicks was reluctant to record his thoughts about Quaker principles, because he feared that they would become set doctrine. He believed in the efficacy of performance, particularly improvisation.

Unlike evangelical Christians, Hicks’s followers did not value the image of the crucifixion; they did not valorize pain or suffering as a road to redemption. Nor did they expect others to agree with them. These facts figure prominently in how they staged their commitments to abolitionism: Mott’s Hicksite focus on the provisional and imperfect nature of her performances informed her 1840 appearances in British Orthodox Quaker territory and translated into useful anti-slavery strategies in the transatlantic movement as a whole.

Chapter 4, “From anti-slavery celebrity to cosmopolitan self-possession,” focuses on the improvisations of Ellen Craft, a slave refugee who disguised herself as a white master to flee with her husband from rural Georgia to Boston in the 1840s. Craft transformed travel into an extemporaneous performance of self-ownership and cosmopolitan citizenship, eventually settling in the British Isles. At pivotal moments in her travels, she capitalized on the power of remaining, paradoxically, still in motion onstage. As she began to move within an elite circle of British abolitionists, Craft staged a series of disruptive performance interventions, using “her tongue with considerable effect” to question others’ biases.⁵⁰ These moments kept reverberating or “speaking” even when she moved out of the “mobile prosceniums” that encased them, allowing her to be still speaking even when she was silent. While Lucretia Mott advocated traveling past childhood traditions, Craft demonstrated how childhood customs, such as a master and slave’s traveling together, could be adapted to new ends. Importantly, she used improvisation to shield herself not only from the slaveholders of her youth but also from the sentimental abolitionist “family.” And just as crucially, she rejected Lydia Maria Child’s abolitionist vision of a reproductive, “hybrid” future in which intermarriages between “mulattas” and whites purportedly solved the problems of slavery and race.

Instead, Craft improvised her own version of a compassion for the self, her own notion of cosmopolitan citizenship, interrupting spectators’ secret pleasure in the “National Thing,” that disparate set of beliefs and practices that constitutes national citizenship. By investigating the paradoxical performance of stillness in motion, this chapter takes seriously the work of both Harvey Young, who writes tellingly about the power of stillness, and Henry Louis Gates, Jr., who identifies the importance of travel and exchange. By examining Craft’s performances not only of racial ambiguity but also of racial identification, it also engages the call by Tavia Nyong’o for an “untamed hybridity” that collapses time within the circum-Atlantic fold.⁵¹ And it explores, too, the paradoxical way in which Craft’s moments of outspokenness echoed through her silence onstage.

The Epilogue, “The repertoire of anti-slavery,” reveals how nineteenth-century American anti-slavery performances haunt present-day efforts to fight against forced labor and the trafficking of persons, illuminating the fractures in the ongoing production of democracy as well as anti-slavery. Present-day performances of anti-trafficking are ghosted, to use Marvin Carlson’s evocative term, by their nineteenth-century predecessors. These hauntings illuminate the shortcomings of present-day efforts to end the trafficking of persons, shortcomings that often surface, as well, in activist performance pieces. As a number of scholars of the Holocaust argue, current critiques of empathy fail to envision a critical harnessing of emotion.⁵² Reconsidering certain aspects of nineteenth-century sympathy (not present-day sympathy or empathy), as transformed by Garrisonians, may aid performance scholars and artists in this complex, thorny task.

In closing

This analysis of nineteenth-century performances of sympathy invites further study of present-day performances of inter-subjectivity on activist stages. It reveals how nineteenth-century black and white women transformed imperialist performances of sympathy and Enlightenment democracy into productive activist critiques of the state. The precise constellation of concepts and practices that comprise “empathy” did not emerge until the late nineteenth century, and when they surfaced, they erased many of the critical interventions investigated in this volume. The current-day term “empathy,” in fact, is what linguists call a “repair term” – it recuperates part, but not all, of what was meant by the practice of “sympathy.” What fell away was, in part, the critical interventions of black and white Garrisonian women. By analyzing the ways in which these activists transformed Enlightenment philosopher Adam Smith’s notions of sympathy, by mapping the potential as well as the dangers in their sympathetic practice of “metempsychosis” and its successors, Performing Anti-Slavery recuperates certain useful periperformatives, particularly self-awareness, self-judgment, a compassion for the collective self, and a self-possession that deepens into cosmopolitan love.