U.S. Online - The Lecturing Tours of Black Abolitionists

"A Scene of Tumult and Uproar": Mapping the Gruelling Lecturing Tours of Black Abolitionists

This article gathers together the lecturing information of Frederick Douglass, a “lecturing genius” on antislavery who was previously enslaved. The writer of the article, Hannah Rose-Murray, used an interactive map on a website called ZeeMaps to plot the information she had gathered from resources such as local newspapers. By doing this she has created a platform on which we can look at a glance and see patterns of how Douglass travelled the country. It is a visual embodiment of the lengths he put in to ensure the abolition movement was successful.

This is relevant knowledge as we can determine how Douglass used the growing industrialism in Britain to make his travelling easier. It demonstrates that industrialism was key to the growing abolition movement and network, ensuring the word of antislavery spread as efficiently as possible at the time.

Murray notes that, on the map, “each [pin] has a variety of detail ranging from who spoke, where, the time, ticket price and whether the meeting in question was on behalf of a specific society.” This gives us an indication as to how extensive the abolition network was, with many people giving lectures all over the country, as shown on the map. It also demonstrates the key role that these abolitionists played in getting to word out to people in quieter areas. Murray alludes to this when she states that Williams Wells Brown gave a lecture on the Isle of Wight, in “a tiny town where few people would have ever seen a person of African descent before.” By including these people in their antislavery audience, they recruit more supporters, whether they have seen a black person before or not, but they are still invaluable to the movement through word of mouth.

By using reports in newspapers as a resource for this project, Murray gains more than just dates and times. For example, a lecture that Douglass gave created a “scene of tumult and uproar”, this is indicative of how delving into the events, and looking past the basic facts, can paint an image of what it was like to be in the room and give a sense of the atmosphere. This then leads to a more vivid understanding of the times and the attitude towards antislavery.

The article is important as it raises awareness of how integral speaking to large audiences via lectures was, and how key it was to ensuring enough people condemned slavery, to cause a change, and to promote antislavery across the country. It gives us an understanding of the effort the black abolitionists put into this movement to end the suffering.