The Antislavery Almanac and the Discourse of Numeracy

The antislavery movement was obsessed with numbers; it embraced a statistical notion of social change. Accountings of the increase in the number of antislavery societies formed, money donated to the cause, tracts and periodicals produced and circulated were all offered as signs of the movement's progress and portents of its ultimate success. The Third Annual Report of the American Anti-Slavery Society (1836), whose publishing agent's report counts the total number of publications for the year at 1,095,800, "nine times as great as those of last year," advertised the exponential increase in the demand for antislavery publications and, hence, interest in the cause.1 In 1837 The Philanthropist computed the increase in antislavery societies for the previous three years at about "one society daily" despite "formidable opposition" and "the most virulent persecution" in order to conclude that the "world has witnessed no moral change like this since the Reformation."2 In keeping a strict account of its membership or publication figures, the American Anti-Slavery Society calculated its strength through numbers. Moreover, by aggregating itself either by accompanying its petitions of individually signed names with "statements that offered a numerical sum of the signatories" or by providing tables of antislavery societies in its annual reports that tabulated the number of members per society in order to amass them into a large membership total the American Anti-Slavery Society solidified itself into a commanding corporate body.3 The perception of the American Anti-Slavery Society (AASS) as an increasingly powerful entity in the 1830s relied not only, as David Paul Nord points out, on the cheapness of print (the low cost of printing, paper, and postage) and on print's ability to project through extensive circulation the AASS's identity and message, but also upon the rhetorical force of its numerical discourse.4 In adopting the emerging professional discourse of numeracy, the AASS, publicized itself and the progress of its principles to others through a new culturally authoritative language. As Patricia Cline