History of the United States I / Unit 17 USH1 2420 worked example, 60 to 90 seconds
Print as a Political Instrument
The idea
Printed matter did political work in this period that no institution could do. Garrison's Liberator gave abolition a national voice from eighteen thirty-one. Uncle Tom's Cabin, serialised in eighteen fifty-one and published in eighteen fifty-two, became the century's bestseller and was translated into sixty languages. Douglass's Narrative of eighteen forty-five named the White people who had brutalised him. And the Lincoln-Douglas debates of eighteen fifty-eight were published nationally, which is how an Illinois senate contest made a national figure.
In practice
A novel, a newspaper, an autobiography and a transcript, each reaching an audience no speech could assemble.
Where people slip
The common mechanism is worth naming. Print reached people who had no direct knowledge of slavery and no vote in the states where it existed, and it reached them at home. Note also who it enfranchised in practice. Stowe and others held themselves morally obligated to mould the nation's conscience despite lacking voting rights, which made print the one public instrument the law did not deny women.
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