[In the following essay, Henry conducts a rhetorical analysis of the American Anti-Slavery Society's “Declaration of Sentiments,” drafted by Garrison, and studies its links to the Declaration of Independence.]

In the opening chapter of Rhetorical Questions, Edwin Black attends to the relationship between his most recent book and the path breaking Rhetorical Criticism: A Study in Method. “One conviction that influenced that old book,” he writes, “has influenced also the present one, a conviction that the intervening twenty-five years have only strengthened. It is that almost all talk about criticism is sterile. Criticism lives only in acts of criticism, not in oracular abstractions about it. Goering once said,” Black continues, “that when he heard the word ‘culture,’ he wanted to reach for his gun. I feel the same way about the prefix ‘meta-.’”¹ Because this essay takes as its starting point Martha Solomon Watson's insightful critique of the “Declarations of Sentiments” issued by the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833 and the Seneca Falls woman's rights convention of 1848, a meta-critical tack might well be in order. For Watson's proposition that the value of analyzing the texts resides largely in their interanimation of one another and of the Declaration of Independence, might well place critical theory at the center of discussion.

At least in the case of the American Anti-Slavery Society, however, proceeding to a conversation about critical method would be to miss an opportunity to right a serious disciplinary omission. For as Professor Watson herself observes,

[a]lthough these documents provide good materials for the process I wish to investigate, they merit consideration in their own right. Each was the first important statement of principles of what became major, national social movements in the nineteenth century; and, each was authored by persons who were the primary spokespersons for their movements. … Despite their importance, the documents have received very little attention from scholars in communication studies.

Karlyn Kohrs Campbell's discussion of Seneca Falls in Man Cannot Speak for Her, Watson writes, is the only extensive analysis she could locate of either text. While Watson's own examination of the documents' interdependence forms one perspective from which to posit a probative rhetorical-critical claim about the abolitionists' text, close reading of William Lloyd Garrison's “Declaration of Sentiments” on its own terms is at least equally illuminating. For in evidence is a rhetor who, as Watson contends, exploited the symbolic power of the Declaration of Independence and the founding fathers in propagating a course of action to correct past abuses. To disengage Garrison from that immediate context in search of a “larger” theoretical point, however, is to fail to appreciate the significance of such textual features for reaching multiple audiences at a particularly sensitive juncture in the early stage of the abolitionist movement.

Such disengagement is, as well, to risk missing masterful rhetorical artistry. Stephen Browne, in a highly praised work on Edmund Burke, articulates the dangers attendant to such a tack.² Browne writes that scholars who focus either on Burke's aesthetic value or his political philosophy, “too often reduce Burke to a set of propositions. The result is to lose sight of Burke as an artist, a fully embodied, three-dimensional master of rhetoric and oratory.” To “read Burke rhetorically,” he contends, “is to recall at every step that he was an orator—a public man who … was at once engaged and constrained by the expectations of the public mind.”³ Similarly, criticism of Garrison that situates his discourse in relation to context, audience, and subject reveals an exemplary practitioner of public argument.

This essay thus argues that full appreciation of the rhetorical genius embodied in the document Garrison crafted at Philadelphia hinges on examination of the American Anti-Slavery Society's “Declaration of Sentiments” as a study in instrumental rhetoric. Instrumental rhetoric is taken to mean (1) purposeful discourse, (2) shaped intentionally by a skilled rhetor, (3) for suasory effect on a target audience/s, (4) in response to immediate situational constraints. Such studies are neither necessarily superior nor inferior to analyses that seek the larger meaning/s of significant rhetorical experiences.⁴ Rather, what may be termed “common sense” and “deconstructive” critical exercises can approach discursive events in different but mutually reinforcing fashion.⁵

The argument is guided by the conviction that what have often operated in the past as conflicting voices in an irresolvable debate, might be more productively approached as separate contributions to a potentially productive conversation.⁶ In different terms, John Campbell proposes that neither extreme in the discussion need “win.” Rather, the systematic study of rhetoric and criticism might be best served in constructing a “rhetorical house of the middle way.” Instead of viewing disciplinary tensions as a permanent impasse, Campbell maintains that it “should be possible for rhetorical critics to analyze rhetorical objects at different levels of resolution (from micro to macro) and to move between episodes or epochs, as well as within them, in a natural yet methodologically rigorous way. A new kind of study—the longitudinal case study—would then emerge on the rhetorical horizon.” What Campbell proposes, perhaps most appealingly, is “not only a program for peace but also for progress.” The longitudinal case study aims to accommodate the best of both the ideological and textual critical projects, resulting in a

different style of rhetorical analysis. This different style would be more historical than ideological—though sharing with ideological analysis a diachronic concern for the movement of constitutive transformative experiences across time. It would be more social than textual—though sharing with close reading a jealous concern for the integrity of the text and the situated art of the speaker.⁷

Where Professor Watson's exploration of the three Declarations works longitudinally to delineate textual interanimation, this essay provides an alternative reading, one focused on the “integrity of the text and the situated art of the speaker.” Longitudinal elements are necessarily examined as well, however, albeit not in a manner that replicates Watson's critique. Instead, attention turns to how the abolitionists' Declaration of Sentiments evolved in the first of Garrison's four decades of anti-slavery advocacy during the nineteenth century, a period ripe for rhetorical-critical analysis.⁸

Ironically, the section of Professor Watson's essay in which she assesses the abolitionist text may stand on its own to exemplify the potential of iconic criticism for revealing the delicate interplay of a document's salient rhetorical features.⁹ Watson argues that the Declaration of Independence influenced Garrison's drafting of the American Anti-Slavery Society's “Declaration of Sentiments” in three ways. The founders' work is evident in: “(1) the use of structural and space metaphors to link this document to the political work begun with the Declaration of Independence; (2) the clear connection established between the founding fathers and this group; and (3) the argumentative approach” employed in 1833. The irony rests with Watson's endorsement earlier in the paper of Christopher Norris's indictment of poetry's New Critics, who “invented various ways of sealing the poem off within a timeless, self-sufficient realm of interlocked meaning and structure.” Despite Watson's disdain for the “sealing off” process, her attention to Garrison's work points to the data for an exceptionally valuable critique of the text as situated discourse carefully constructed by a facile rhetor to sway a diverse audience. Since Watson's reading of the American Anti-Slavery Society's “Declaration of Sentiments” is the stimulus for this essay, a brief summary of her evaluation's salient features precedes the alternative reading. The balance of this essay then delineates the instrumental features of the American Anti-Slavery Society's “Declaration of Sentiments,” and concludes with a comment on the wisdom of scholarly engagement cast in the conversational mode.

GARRISON'S DECLARATION AS RHETORICAL FRAGMENT

In laying open the structural and space metaphors that link the “Declaration of Sentiments” to the Declaration of Independence, Watson shows how the abolitionists depicted their work as an extension of the task begun by the nation's revered founders. Literally, the abolitionists' selection of Philadelphia as their meeting place allowed them to call forth the suasory force attached to what had become a “sacred ground” for United States citizens. Metaphorically, the “Declaration of Sentiments” draws from key figurative wording of the Declaration of Independence, averring that the “corner-stone upon which [the nation's fathers] founded the Temple of Freedom was broadly this—‘that all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, Liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.’”¹⁰ This paragraph, Watson maintains, begins a clever use of structural metaphors that extends throughout the statement. Ultimately, by combining edifice images (corner-stone, temple, overthrow of the foundations) with images that deal with the occupation of space (null, void, usurpation, infringement, transgression), the founders of the American Anti-Slavery Society “engrafted the principles they read into the Declaration of Independence into their own agenda.”

Watson next attends to a second parallel between the founders' principles and the abolitionists' appeal. Garrison and his adherents portrayed themselves as the “inheritors of the patriotic mantle of their forebears.” Taking as their assignment completion of the work begun in 1776, they immodestly claimed that, “In purity of motive, in earnestness of zeal, in decision of purpose, in intrepidity of action, in steadfastness of faith, in sincerity of spirit, we would not be inferior to them” (343-44). Yet the abolitionists differentiated themselves from their predecessors in two distinct ways. First, as Professor Watson demonstrates, Garrison pledged the Anti-Slavery Society to nonviolence. Because force and bloodshed were essential to the revolution, the abolitionists recognized that the country feared a return to violence. Thus, they vowed to achieve their goals through the “opposition of moral purity to moral corruption—the destruction of error by the potency of truth—the overthrow of prejudice by the power of love—the abolition of slavery by the spirit of repentance” (344). This separation of the revolutionaries' means and ends, Watson illustrates, proved an essential feature of the abolitionists' rhetorical strategy.

A second feature of that strategy surfaced in anti-slavery leaders' casting of their relationship to those on whose behalf they worked. As they spoke not for themselves but for those prevented by law from voicing their own cause, the abolitionists assumed a “we” persona. Acting as “community guardians,” they were thus able to become protectors of the social order, rather than the threat to that order that their detractors depicted in pro-slavery appeals. This movement eventuated in a further advantage. Exploiting the deistic conception of God evinced in the Declaration of Independence, the abolitionists subtly united their patriotic rhetoric with the religious fervor that defined the early nineteenth century.

The abolitionists' argumentative strategy constitutes the final parallel Watson discerns between the Anti-Slavery Society's manifesto and the Declaration of Independence. That strategy entailed enumerating the abuses suffered under slavery and providing a course of action to remedy the abuse. Although Watson's rendering of the parallels between the problems of the slaves and those of the patriots merits attention, her analysis of the abolitionists' rhetorical shrewdness in advocating a course of action is even more striking. On her reading, anti-slavery advocates separated the evils of the practice of slavery from the political philosophy that allowed that practice, concentrating their explicit attacks on the evils of the practice. This tactic permitted the abhorrent political philosophy that underlay the practice of slavery to be addressed indirectly. Abolitionists explicitly recognized State sovereignty, conceding that the “present national compact” precluded federal interference. Their goal, then, was to alter the national compact through “moral suasion and political action.”

Watson's analysis of the abolitionists' rhetorical sleight of hand in separating adherence to current law from a philosophical disagreement with the law is telling. For she builds her case carefully and compellingly, relying almost exclusively on the texts of the “Declaration of Sentiments” and the Declaration of Independence in so doing. Intentionally or not, this concentration reinforces Black's conviction that the rhetorical critic's province lies in the evaluation of appearances, as those appearances are manifested in textual data.¹¹ The analysis also reveals the value of close textual analysis, whether the critic's concentration is on the text as a discrete field of rhetorical action, or, as is Watson's concern, on discourse as a resource of fragments for the [re]construction of meaning over time. Although there is much to commend her use of the data for her explicit analytical purposes, Watson's paper provides evidence as well of the value of critical pluralism. For in addition to its interanimative functions in relation to the Declaration of Independence and the woman's rights statement issued at Seneca Falls, the abolitionists' document operated instrumentally to unify disparate convention delegates at Philadelphia in 1833.

GARRISON'S TEXT AS INSTRUMENTAL RHETORIC

Early in her analysis, Professor Watson terms the American Anti-Slavery Society's “Declaration of Sentiments” the “first important statement of principles of what became [a] major, national social movement in the nineteenth century,” a movement for which Garrison served as a “primary spokesperson.” Both Garrison's text and the woman's rights Declaration at Seneca Falls, she adds, “merit consideration in their own right.” John Campbell's notion of social-textual studies provides one perspective from which productive consideration proceeds. In the case of Garrison at Philadelphia, such a study entails examination of (1) the evolution and nature of Garrison's public advocacy, (2) the events of the summer and fall of 1833 that set the context from which the American Anti-Slavery Society document issued, and (3) the social-textual dynamics of the Declaration of Sentiments as situated rhetoric. Approached in this fashion, the present critique suggests the potential for mutually productive interaction between the practices of “ideological” criticism and the “close reading” of texts.

The dearth of rhetorical-critical analyses of William Lloyd Garrison's reform advocacy is striking, not least because Garrison's career spanned virtually half the century and ranged across myriad issues.¹² Abolition reigned supreme, but movements for temperance, women's rights, John Humphrey Noyes' doctrine of Perfectionism, and peace occupied his time and attention as well. Born in 1805, Garrison grew up poor, his father increasingly absent until deserting the family completely in 1808. Unable to care adequately for all of her children, his mother eventually apprenticed Garrison at age 13 to the printer of the Newburyport, Mass., Herald. The apprentice educated himself while spending seven years learning his trade.

In the process, Garrison's rhetorical character took shape, a character defined equally by a keen sense of audience and a penchant for powerful language. At the base of Garrison's rhetoric was the need for an audience, a need he began to fulfill by writing anonymous letters to the editor during his years in servitude. The presence of an audience, whether readers reviled or admired his claims, sustained Garrison throughout his career, even as he experienced incarceration, persecution, and death threats. “Anything,” his biographer Walter Merrill writes, “so long as people would listen.”¹³ He acquired an audience for his reform views in 1829 when he accepted Benjamin Lundy's invitation to co-edit The Genius of Universal Emancipation, then located in Baltimore. Perhaps because of an upbringing characterized by poverty and a forced apprenticeship, Garrison sought to understand slavery from the slave's perspective. Wendell Phillips, a contemporary who knew Garrison as well as any of his associates, contended that the abolitionist cause owed its success to the “fact that he looked upon the great questions posed by the state and by the church as a Negro looked upon them.”¹⁴

Garrison arrived at this perspective shortly into his editorship of The Genius, which carried Lundy's endorsement of the American Colonization Society. The Society favored colonization rather than emancipation as the ideal remedy to slavery. Influenced by events in Britain, however, where slavery in the West Indies was being combatted under the banner of “immediate emancipation,” Garrison became increasingly strident in his rejection of the expatriation option. In the 13 November 1829 issue of The Genius, for example, he erroneously charged Francis Todd and Nicholas Brown, owner and captain of the Francis, with engaging illegally in the coastal slave trade. Garrison was prosecuted for libel the following spring, convicted, and sentenced to six months in jail. He served 49 days, during which time his commitment to immediate emancipation intensified. He left prison determined to establish an alternative voice to the Genius's influential call for colonization.

Garrison intended initially to settle in Washington, D.C., but before he could do so Lundy moved The Genius to the nation's capital. So instead he returned to Boston, and on 1 January 1831 the nation heard the alternative voice for the first time. In the first issue of The Liberator, Garrison specified five groups that would define his audience. He anticipated emotional support from religious readers, financial relief from philanthropists, and shared love of country from patriots. A fourth group consisted in the “ignorant, the cold-hearted, The Tyrannical,” whom Garrison expected to instruct and to recruit to the cause of humanity's collective good. But above all, he addressed the “free colored,” for “we know that you are now struggling against wind and tide.”¹⁵

To aid in that struggle, Garrison promised an advocacy couched in severe language, but a language no harsher than the reprehensible institution that emancipationists sought to abolish. The first issue of The Liberator engaged the question of Garrison's suasory strategy in what has been termed the “most famous passage”¹⁶ in all of his writings:

I am aware, that many object to the severity of my language; but is there not cause for severity? I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation. No! no! Tell a man whose house is on fire, to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen;—but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest—I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—And I will be Heard. The apathy of the people is enough to make every statue leap from its pedestal, and to hasten the resurrection of the dead.¹⁷

Garrison's combining of familial images with metaphors grounded in nature defined his advocacy for the two years between the establishment of The Liberator and the founding of the American Anti-Slavery Society. And his unyielding devotion to full emancipation resulted consistently in language designed “to sting and to rebuke.” In concert with Campbell's notion of longitudinal case studies, the examination of discursive fragments is telling here for what it reveals about the evolution of the rhetorical strategy and tactics that undergirded the “Declaration of Sentiments.” Evident early on are Garrison's affinity for edifice metaphors and his characterization of slave owners and transporters as “manstealers,” both of which Watson cites as central to her reading of the “Declaration” as a link in the chain of interanimation with the Declaration of Independence and the Seneca Falls text.

Both figures contribute as well, however, to the evolution of a suasory repertoire that would inform Garrison's instrumental rhetoric at Philadelphia. Consider, for instance, the abolitionist's “Address Before the Free People of Color,” which he delivered at the Belknap-Street Church on 2 April 1833. It is not the edifice metaphor's presence alone that merits note. Rather, it is Garrison's strategic insinuation of the figure into his discourse, which reflects the careful use of language to dislodge an accepted or established image (or reality) in preparation for replacing it with a new image. Paul Ricoeur contends that the power to create a new reality by imposing a metaphor which “redescribes reality,” is contingent first on “creating rifts in the old order.” Such images work best, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson add, when cast in experiential terms.¹⁸ On this view, Garrison's instantiation of the edifice metaphor as a recurring theme in his discourse depended on his ability initially to depict slavery in the most heinous and despicable terms, then to substitute for forced servitude a palatable experiential reality. The edifice metaphor comprised the desirable alternative, particularly when contrasted with the “whip” and “chain” that Garrison let stand metonymically for the peculiar institution:

God will blow [slavery] into countless fragments, so that not the remnant of a whip or chain can be found in all the South, and so that upon its ruins may be erected the beautiful temple of freedom. I will not waste my strength in foolishly endeavoring to beat down this great Bastille with a feather. I will not commence at the roof, and throw off its tiles by piecemeal. I am for adopting a more summary method of demolishing it. I am for digging under its foundations, and springing a mine that shall not leave one stone upon another.¹⁹

In a tactic that recurred in his discourse, Garrison juxtaposed the anti-slavery advocates' desire to construct a “temple of freedom” with their opponents' “manstealing” practices. Alluding initially to his modest skill in expressing a forceful case, Garrison's words belied his professed limitations:

I wish I could denounce slavery, and all its abettors, in terms equal to their infamy. But, shame to tell! I can apply to him who steals the liberties of hundreds of his fellow-creatures, and lacerates their bodies, and plunders them all of their hard earnings, only the same epithet that is applied by all to a man who steals a shilling in his community. I call the slaveholder a thief because he steals human beings and reduces them to the conditions of brutes; and I am thought to be abusive! … I never will dilute or modify my language against slavery—against the plunderers of my fellow-men—against American kidnappers.²⁰

As his sense of audience matured, as his appreciation for the strategic and tactical powers of language evolved, Garrison's oratory and writing between 1829 and 1833 contributed to an emerging rhetorical character. And as his role as a public man developed, his notoriety grew at home and abroad. Invitations to foreign travel and speaking engagements increased concurrently. His “Address Before the Free People of Color” in April 1833 was, in fact, part of a farewell tour that preceded Garrison's journey to England to raise funds for Boston's Manual Labor School. As summer progressed, he turned his attention from the original purpose to track the progress of Britain's policy of abolishing slavery in the West Indies. The British commitment to emancipation reinforced Garrison's conclusion that colonization constituted a misguided course. These events of the summer of 1833 both solidifed key dimensions of Garrison's public advocacy and portended the conflict that would create a unique rhetorical situation to be engaged at Philadelphia in December.

During his months in England, Garrison encountered Elliott Cresson, an agent for the American Colonization Society. Despite his own support for colonization early in his abolitionist advocacy,²¹ Garrison had little tolerance for those who could not see the wisdom of emancipation, and he challenged Cresson to public debate. Cresson declined the invitation, but he followed Garrison's public appearances, giving particular attention to incidents that might help at home to portray the emancipationist as an unpatriotic radical. Garrison provided the materials for such a characterization on July 13, when he addressed an anti-colonization meeting in London. Introduced at Exter Hall by British abolitionist George Thompson, Garrison announced himself a “citizen of the world,” and recited a series of charges against the United States. His opening sentence echoed the phrase that had headed each issue of The Liberator from its inception on 1 January 1831: “My country is the world and my countrymen are all mankind.”²² It “is true,” he continued, “in a geographical sense, I am now in a foreign territory; but still it is a part of my country. I am in the midst of strangers; but still surrounded by my countrymen. There must be limits to civil governments and national domains.”²³

At one level, such an introduction might be interpreted simply as a skilled orator flattering the assembly. But Garrison's message functioned at other levels as well, not least of which was the apparent disparagement of his citizenship in a nation against which he held serious grievances. Although he declared a strong “love for the land of my nativity” and pride in “her civil, political, and religious institutions,” Garrison averred that he had “some solemn accusations to bring against her.” Nine successive paragraphs then began, “I accuse.” Garrison's recitation of the charges reflected his propensity for appropriating the nation's founding documents for argumentative purposes, his finely honed talent for powerful language, and his use of familial images to equate the evils of slavery with the destruction of civilization:

I accuse her, before all nations, of giving an open, deliberate and base denial to her boasted Declaration, that “all men are created equal; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” …

I accuse her of legalizing, on enormous scale, licentiousness, fraud, cruelty and murder. …

I accuse her of stealing the liberties of two millions of the creatures of God, and withholding the just recompense of their labor; of ruthlessly invading the holiest relations of life, and cruelly separating the dearest ties of nature; of denying these miserable victims necessary food and clothing for their perishable bodies, and light and knowledge for their immortal souls; of tearing the husband from his wife, the mother from her babe, and children from their parents, and perpetrating upon the poor and needy every species of outrage and oppression.²⁴

Such cues reflect the continuing evolution of Garrison's public voice, a voice understood most fully neither through the accumulation of fragmentary data nor from the Philadelphia manifesto in isolation, but from an appreciation for both as complementary dimensions of his advocacy. Elliott Cresson and American Colonization Society adherents ensured that Garrison's alleged lack of patriotism evident in that advocacy preceded his return across the Atlantic in the fall. Potential American Anti-Slavery Society supporters thus balked at the need to rush forward, particularly with the controversial Garrison in a central role. Yet Garrison persevered, eschewing caution as a temporary victory for slavery proponents, and he proceeded to Philadelphia for the American Anti-Slavery Society organizational meetings in early December. Once in residence, Garrison encountered an audience that constituted a demanding rhetorical challenge.

That audience merits consideration. Leaders of regional anti-slavery societies scheduled a meeting for Philadelphia in the fall of 1833 to form a national organization. Under pressure from citizens of Philadelphia, Arthur and Lewis Tappan, philanthropists and founders of the New York Anti-Slavery Society, agreed to exercise their influence to postpone the national meeting to the spring of 1834. Garrison, however, insisted on acting swiftly. With the backing of his New England Anti-Slavery Society, Garrison's case carried the day, and a meeting was called for 5-6 December 1833, at Philadelphia. Although united by their opposition to slavery, participants ranged from the moderate stance assumed by the Tappans and their followers to the more radical posture of Garrison and his supporters. Once assembled, delegates drafted a constitution, which proved to be more a set of organizational guidelines than an inspirational document that might generate fervor for the society's cause. Recognizing the need for such a document, participants appointed a committee to prepare what would become the Declaration of Sentiments, and a subcommittee selected Garrison to draft its report. Garrison worked through the night, presenting his draft to the subcommittee the next morning. After debating—and ultimately deleting—a single paragraph, the subcommittee and committee of the whole commended Garrison's document to the assembled delegates.²⁵

Professor Watson reads the abolitionists' use of structural and space metaphors, the connections made between their cause and that of the founding fathers, and the parallels between the argumentative approaches evinced in the abolitionists' manifesto and the Declaration of Independence as evidence of the texts' interdependence. Her analysis is at least equally valuable, though, for the potential insight provided for a study that would attempt neither to isolate the text, nor to “seal it off” from its context, but that would aspire to understand the instrumentality of Garrison's manifesto.

As instrumental rhetoric, the “Declaration of Sentiments” is a critical marker in the solidification of the nineteenth century anti-slavery movement. The meeting at Philadelphia culminated early efforts to focus public attention on the slavery controversy, and pitted moderates against radicals in the quest to define the next stage of movement activism. This is a crucial phase in a social movement's life cycle, as the goal shifts from establishing public awareness of a perceived ill to adopting a document that identifies the problem's root causes and prescribes fitting remedies.²⁶ The advantage rests with leaders who can function as visionaries as well as agitators, leaders possessed of the rhetorical facility to shape the form and content of the manifesto in which subsequent activism will be grounded.

Garrison proved such a leader in crafting the “Declaration of Sentiments,” a document that can be read as the culmination of four years of public advocacy for immediate emancipation. Watson's attention to the parallels between Garrison's work and the Declaration of Independence informs such a reading, but so does an appreciation for the manifesto's instrumental dimensions, beginning with structure. Although Watson acknowledges the importance of the broad organizational framework of the Anti-Slavery Society's text, with its movement from a recitation of grievances to a plan of action, she is less concerned with the importance of this tack for Garrison's convention audience. But it is the carefully constructed framework of the forty-four paragraph document that enabled Garrison to adapt antecedent tactics to immediate suasory purposes.

The first four paragraphs comprise Garrison's introduction, wherein the convention's Philadelphia setting and emancipatory purpose are linked to the founders' meeting fifty-seven years earlier. Paragraphs five through seven distinguish the abolitionists' means and ends from those of their forebears, with particular attention to the Revolutionary Fathers' willingness to employ violence to resolve grievances. Although averring the severity of those grievances, paragraphs eight and nine document the even more reprehensible circumstance of “Two Millions of our people,” the enslaved who constitute one-sixth of the nation's population. “Hence we maintain,” a single sentence paragraph ten, begins a series of six paragraphs specifying slavery as a violation of civil, religious, and natural right. Paragraph sixteen—“Therefore we believe and affirm”—initiates a second successive series of linked claims, declaring first that “there is no difference, in principle, between the African slave trade and American slavery,” and announcing in conclusion that all laws “admitting the right of slavery” are “utterly null and void.” Paragraphs twenty-two through thirty articulate the terms of a satisfactory resolution of the abolitionists' grievances: equality for all citizens, no compensation for slave owners, and nothing less than the “immediate and total abolition of slavery.” The next four paragraphs engage the difficult issue of states' rights. Garrison acknowledges the sovereignty of each state to legislate on slavery, but he adds quickly that Congress has the right to abolish slavery where the Constitution prevails; more importantly, the “highest obligations” mandate that citizens of the free states “remove slavery by moral and political action.”²⁷

Their “views and principles” thus established, in signing the “Declaration of Sentiments” convention delegates pledged themselves to a sustained course of action:

We shall organize Anti-Slavery Societies, if possible, in every city, town, and village of our land.

We shall send forth Agents to lift up the voice of remonstrance, of warning, of entreaty and rebuke.

We shall circulate, unsparingly and extensively, anti-slavery tracts and periodicals.

We shall enlist the Pulpit and the Press in the cause of the suffering and the dumb.

We shall aim at a purification of the churches from all participation in the guilt of slavery.

We shall encourage the labor of freemen over that of the slaves, by giving a preference to their productions;—and

We shall spare no exertions nor means to bring the whole nation to speedy repentance.

Our trust for victory is solely in God. We may be personally defeated, but our principles never.²⁸

A final paragraph pledged delegates “to overthrow the most execrable system of slavery that has ever been witnessed upon earth—to deliver our land from its deadliest curse—to wipe out the foulest stain which rests upon our national escutcheon.”

Garrison arrived in Philadelphia directly from a controversial tour of England and a tumultuous return to the United States. Recognizing the diversity of his audience, yet committed to the radical cause of abolition, he adapted brilliantly to the situational constraints the convention presented. A master of strident language, he agreed to erase from his original draft the most controversial paragraph submitted to the subcommittee.²⁹ Remaining vociferous language was retained for its functional value, for its capacity to articulate the Anti-Slavery Society's grievances or to delineate remedies. The shock value of language that would “rebuke” was essential to focusing the nation's attention on slavery; a more refined prose would help convert that attention to action. Hence, when Garrison called forth the familial images that defined earlier discourse, the images served as means to an end rather than as ends in themselves. Consider the following:

… those for whose emancipation we are striving … are ruthlessly torn asunder—the tender babe from the arms of its frantic mother—the heart-broken wife from her weeping husband—at the caprice or pleasure of irresponsible tyrants;—and for the crime of having a dark complexion, [they] suffer the pangs of hunger, the infliction of stripes, and the ignominy of brutal servitude.³⁰

Garrison's style here contrasts sharply with the avowedly “harsh” and “uncompromising” tone characteristic of The Liberator's first issue, as well as of much of Garrison's discourse in the intervening two years. Where severity was in order to dislodge the culture's dominant “reality,” Garrison intuitively understood that moderation was more likely to accommodate a diverse audience convened to establish a national anti-slavery society. That he responded appropriately not only marked a critical juncture in the life of the abolitionist movement, but also in the evolution of Garrison's rhetorical character.³¹

TOWARD A CRITICAL CONVERSATION

Still four days shy of his twenty-eighth birthday on 6 December 1833, William Lloyd Garrison proposed for adoption a Declaration of Sentiments to serve as the founding document of the American Anti-Slavery Society. Textual and contextual evidence reveals that Garrison brought to the task a fervent commitment to immediate emancipation and a powerful rhetorical repertoire with which to advance the cause. Yet he was immensely sensitive to the competing sentiments of his audience, a gathering not fully convinced of the superiority of emancipation over colonization, and a public averse to his alleged lack of patriotism before British audiences. The Declaration of Independence and reverence for the founding fathers thus formed integral features of an instrumental rhetoric aimed at swaying doubters and sustaining the emancipationist cause. On this reading, Garrison's structural and stylistic tactics thus evinced immediate suasory purposes outside the explanatory scope of an interanimationist analytical project.

Clearly such a reading centers on traditional analytical topoi of context, audience, rhetor, and text. But it does not do so with an eye toward “privileging” one tack over another. Attention to text is offered instead as a contribution to discussion and debate about the place of public address studies in the larger scholarly conversation. Projects that feature text not only inform but in some ways define the uniqueness of the discipline's contribution. In Martin Medhurst's view, for example, rhetorical-critical studies will influence intellectual engagements when projects eventuate in scholarship that “makes a difference.” Interest “in the functioning of texts is the sine qua non of making a difference,” he contends, “for it is in the explication of the rhetorical dynamics of the text that public address scholars are (or ought to be) most expert.”³² This is not to demean the place of context in scholarship but rather, as Stephen Lucas advises, to urge an appreciation for the “rhetorical artistry” of important texts.³³ And Dilip Gaonkar emphasizes the interdependence of text and context when he notes that the “pressing task, for which ‘textual studies’ are ideally suited, is to offer an understanding of ‘contexts’ (non-discursive formations) through a reading of texts (discursive formations) while allowing the text to retain its integrity as a field of action.”³⁴

In her critical project, Martha Watson finds a focus on a text's “integrity as a field of action” too confining. Her interest in the abolitionists' and suffragists' Declarations of Sentiments stems from the extent to which the texts “appropriated and exploited the rhetorical force embedded in the Declaration of Independence in different, but equally powerful ways.” More importantly, she argues, “the interpretations of the Declaration of Independence provided in the two documents altered and shifted its meaning significantly.” Professor Watson's readings of the documents commend the vitality of public address scholarship. Her attention to textual detail, probing argument, analytical insight, and persuasive prose urge careful reading and contemplation of her thesis. Watson's explanation and application of intertextuality promises a valuable addition to the rhetorical critic's inventory of analytical approaches.

Textual and contextual evidence in this examination of the “Declaration of Sentiments” crafted by Garrison confirms Watson's contention that the principles of the Declaration of Independence and the achievements of the founding fathers informed Garrison's suasory strategy and tactics. Moreover, to the extent that her analysis reveals the interanimation of these texts in combination with the woman's rights Declaration of Sentiments, she achieves, in John Campbell's terms, a productive and instructive “act of criticism.” Yet the critique need not be viewed as incompatible with a reading of the abolitionists' text as an immediate call for action, designed to unify a disparate audience.³⁵ Rather, Watson's analysis may combine with a textual-social assessment to provide an even larger understanding of the texts themselves. As divergent, yet complementary, voices in a scholarly conversation, the interanimationist and textual-social perspectives operate together to yield a more comprehensive understanding of the promise and prospect of rhetorical-critical studies than does either voice speaking in isolation.

Notes

1. Edwin Black, Rhetorical Questions: Studies of Public Discourse (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 17-18.

2. James R. Andrews, review of Stephen H. Browne, Edmund Burke and the Discourse of Virtue (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press 1993) in Quarterly Journal of Speech 81 (1995): 253-54.

3. Stephen H. Browne, Edmund Burke and the Discourse of Virtue (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1993), 2, 4.

4. The idea that “rhetorical experiences” constitute the critic's focus of study is borrowed from Wayne Brockriede, “Rhetorical Criticism as Argument,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 60 (1974): 165-74.

5. Malcolm O. Sillars, Messages, Meanings, and Culture (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 10-11.

6. See, for example, the “dialogue” in the “Forum” of the Quarterly Journal of Speech 78 (1992): Michael Leff, “Things Made By Words: Reflections on Textual Criticism,” 223-31, and Barbara Warnick, “Leff in Context: What is the Critic's Role?”, 232-37.

7. John Angus Campbell, “Between the Fragment and the Icon: Prospect for a Rhetorical House of the Middle Way,” Western Journal of Speech Communication 54 (1990): 347, 368.

8. Recent works indicating the prospective value of such inquiry are Gregory Clark and S. Michael Halloran, Oratorical Culture in Nineteenth Century America: Transformations in the Theory and Practice of Rhetoric (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993), and Kenneth Cmiel, Democratic Eloquence: The Fight over Popular Speech in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990).

9. The notion of “iconic criticism” as approached by Watson and in this essay is exemplified in Michael Leff and Andrew Sachs, “Words the Most Like Things: Iconicity and the Rhetorical Text,” Western Journal of Speech Communication 54 (1990): 252-73.

10. American Anti-Slavery Society, “Declaration of Sentiments,” 6 December 1833, Three Centuries of American Rhetorical Discourse, ed. Ronald F. Reid (Prospect Heights, Ill.: Waveland, 1988), 343. I follow Martha Watson's lead in using this version of the document, further references to which are cited in the text of this paper. An alternative text includes an additional paragraph, which would be inserted between paragraphs 31 and 32 of this version. That text is in Wendell Phillips Garrison and Francis Jackson Garrison, ed., William Lloyd Garrison: The Story of His Life (1885; reprint, New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969), 408-12.

11. Black, Rhetorical Questions, 9.

12. Rudimentary background, but limited analytical detail, is provided in Robert T. Oliver, History of Public Speaking in America (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1965), 229-32; Lloyd Rohler, “William Lloyd Garrison: Abolitionist,” American Orators Before 1900, ed. Bernard K. Duffy and Halford R. Ryan (New York: Greenwood Press, 1987), 183-89; and D. Ray Heisey, “Slavery: America's Irrepressible Conflict,” America in Controversy: History of American Public Address, ed. Dewitte Holland (Dubuque, Iowa: Wm. C. Brown Publishers, 1973), 103-21. Remarkably, but a single journal article touches on Garrison, and in that Loren Reid examines Garrison as the rhetor's subject rather than as rhetor: “Bright's Tributes to Garrison and Field,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 61 (1975): 169-77.

13. Walter M. Merrill, Against Wind and Tide: A Biography of William Lloyd Garrison (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1963), 46.

14. Truman Nelson, ed., Documents of Upheaval: Selections from William Lloyd Garrison's The Liberator, 1831-1865 (New York: Hill and Wang, 1966), xv. Celeste Michelle Condit and John Louis Lucaites, in a masterful scholarly enterprise, similarly credit Garrison's capacity for empathy. On their reading, however, white abolitionists owed an equal or greater debt to the public rhetorical efforts of African Americans. See: Crafting Equality: America's Anglo-African Word (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 69-72 passim.

15. Merrill, Against Wind and Tide, 47-48.

16. Ibid., 45.

17. William Lloyd Garrison, “To the Public,” The Liberator, 1 January 1831, reprinted in Garrison and Garrison, ed., William Lloyd Garrison, 225. See also: Three Centuries of American Rhetorical Discourse, ed. Reid, 321-23.

18. Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor, trans. Robert Czerny (1975; reprint, Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), 22; George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, Metaphors We Live By (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 153-57.

19. Garrison and Garrison, eds., William Lloyd Garrison, 335.

20. Ibid., 336.

21. Perhaps the most complete statement of Garrison's brief endorsement of colonization is his 4 July 1829 address at Boston's Park Street Church, ibid., 127-37.

22. The Liberator carried the motto, “Our Country is the World—Our Countrymen are Mankind” on the masthead of each issue, ibid., 219, 233.

23. William Lloyd Garrison, “Address at London's Exeter Hall,” 13 July 1833, ibid., 369.

24. Ibid., 372-73.

25. Delegates representing ten of the union's twelve free states participated; sixty-three delegates signed the final document. For accounts of Garrison's role in pushing for the society's formation, drafting the document, and securing the Declaration's adoption, see: Russel B. Nye, William Lloyd Garrison and the Humanitarian Reformers (Boston: Little, Brown, 1955), 68-72; John L. Thomas, The Liberator (Boston: Little, Brown, 1963), 171-76; Garrison and Garrison, eds., William Lloyd Garrison, 397-419; and Merrill, Against Wind and Tide, 76-80.

26. Charles J. Stewart, Craig Allen Smith, and Robert E. Denton, Jr., Persuasion and Social Movements, 3d ed. (Prospect Heights, Ill.: Waveland Press, 1994), chap. 4.

27. American Anti-Slavery Society, “Declaration of Sentiments,” 343-46.

28. Ibid., 346.

29. Garrison and Garrison, eds., William Lloyd Garrison, 400.

30. American Anti-Slavery Society, “Declaration of Sentiments,” 344.

31. Subsequent abolitionist activism would be measured against the terms of advocacy defined by the American Anti-Slavery Society at Philadelphia: Aileen S. Kraditor, Means and Ends in American Abolitionism: Garrison and His Critics on Strategy and Tactics, 1834-1850 (New York: Pantheon Books, 1969).

32. Martin J. Medhurst, “Public Address and Significant Scholarship: Four Challenges to the Rhetorical Renaissance,” Texts in Context: Critical Dialogues on Significant Episodes in American Political Rhetoric, ed. Michael C. Leff and Fred J. Kauffeld (Davis, Calif.: Hermagoras Press, 1989), 30 and 35-36.

33. Stephen E. Lucas, “The Renaissance of American Public Address: Text and Context in Rhetorical Criticism,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 74 (1988): 246-52.

34. Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, “The Oratorical Text: The Enigma of Arrival,” Texts in Context, ed. Leff and Kauffeld, 275.

35. For an explanation of the concept of critical or rhetorical compatibility, see Black, Rhetorical Questions, 14-16.