The Ravishing of the Ear: Oral Agency, Seduction, and the Female Abolitionist

At the first convention of the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833, members called for the mobilization of free blacks and ex-slaves as professional “agents” who would bear oral witness to the wrongs of captivity. Writing to Theodore Weld in 1838, the abolitionist Angelina Grimké champions these roving lecturers by exalting the dynamic between the listener's ear and the speaker's ignited voice: The slave's “narratives” must “come burning from his own lips. … Many and many a tale of romantic horrors can the slaves tell.” In her pun at Pennsylvania Hall, Grimke endorses hearing as an almost mystical transportation into the space of political reform – the “here” of the Hall itself: “Here it – hear it. … Every man and woman present may do something … by opening our mouths for the dumb and pleading the cause of those who are ready to perish.” The outrage of abolitionists like Grimke consistently took the form of meticulous rhetorical suasion. But she and other cohorts understood that an impassioned speech might, by ravishing the senses, open consciousness to reason.

If Grimke often relied on what might seem the conventionally “feminine” Radcliffean allure of such oral testimonies, John Collins, a correspondent to William Lloyd Garrison, also intuited the talismanic aura that an audience, seized by slavery's “romantic horror,” might hear in an agent's lectures. “The public,” he notes, “have itching ears to hear a colored man speak, and particularly a slave. Multitudes will flock to hear one of his class speak.”