Lydia Maria Child’s Appeal: A Milestone in Abolitionism

Synthesis of Abolitionist Theory and Methodological Scope Lydia Maria Child’s landmark treatise, An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans, published two and a half years after William Lloyd Garrison launched his militant antislavery newspaper the Liberator, provided the abolitionist movement with its first and most comprehensive book-length analysis of the slavery question. While owing debts to Garrison and her Quaker, British, French, and African-American predecessors, Child synthesized their arguments into an all-encompassing study that examined the problem of slavery and the prospects for emancipation from nearly every angle: historical, legal, political, racial, moral, and practical.

Child’s carefully worded title announces her book’s central thesis—that people of African descent belong to an oppressed "class," not to a biologically distinct "race," and that they are Americans, hence entitled to the fundamental rights of other Americans. An Appeal’s eight chapters survey the history of the African slave trade and point out its evil effects on participants as well as victims (chapter 1); compare the United States with other slave societies, ancient and modern, and prove that American slave law is the harshest in the world (chapter 2); demonstrate that emancipation can be accomplished safely without unleashing slave rebellions, and that slavery is economically more wasteful and less profitable than "free" (that is, wage) labor (chapter 3); identify the ways in which the Constitution allows slaveholding states to dominate Congress and govern national policy (chapter 4); contrast the American Colonization Society’s scheme of promoting voluntary emancipation by sending freed slaves to Africa with the Anti-Slavery Society’s commitment to abolishing slavery in the United States and obtaining for blacks "equal civil and political rights and privileges with the whites" (Appeal 130; chapter 5); refute claims that Africans are intellectually inferior (chapter 6) and morally debased (chapter 7); and condemn all forms of racial prejudice and discrimination practiced in the North, including employment bans, segregated facilities, and laws against interracial marriage (chapter 8). The far-reaching indictment of racism that occupies more than half of An Appeal makes it unique among white-authored antislavery works.

Throughout An Appeal, Child also pays special attention to women. She comments on the sexual exploitation of slave women, highlights the brutalizing effects of slavery on the character of slaveholding women, showcases the achievements of the 16th-century Angolan queen Zhinga, emphasizes the kindness of African women toward the Scottish traveler Mungo Park, and cites examples of how African-American and white women in New England have challenged racial prejudice.

Rhetorical Persuasion, Gender Dynamics, and Audience Engagement Child nevertheless addresses An Appeal to a gender-mixed rather than a female audience. Cultivating a rhetoric of rational rather than emotional persuasion, she orients her rhetorical strategies toward winning over hostile readers. Thus, she often lets the facts speak for themselves, deploys quotations to advance controversial views through the mouths of reputable spokesmen, frames arguments as rhetorical questions, disarms readers through humor, unsettles them with irony, admits to having held some of the biases and misconceptions she asks readers to renounce, and uses analogies to break down accustomed modes of thought, for example, by undermining distinctions between white Americans and cultural Others.

An Appeal’s broad scope, scholarly thoroughness, intellectual depth, and literary excellence won it an influence unparalleled by any other antislavery tract of its time. It converted a host of political and religious leaders to the abolitionist cause, emboldened many women to assume public roles in the antislavery movement, inspired a number of other abolitionist tracts, encouraged hitherto reluctant literary figures to speak and write against slavery, and offered a beacon of hope to African Americans.

In our time An Appeal remains relevant in new ways. As a work of pioneering scholarship, it anticipates comparative approaches to the history and sociology of slavery and race, legal analyses of slavery’s centrality to the U.S. Constitution and political system, interdisciplinary studies of European culture’s African origins, and Afrocentric methodologies. In sum, Child’s groundbreaking Appeal still has much to teach 21st-century readers.

Pedagogical Discussion Points and Analytical Prompts For Discussion or Writing
1. Find examples in An Appeal of the following rhetorical strategies: letting facts speak for themselves, speaking through quotations from other authors, asking rhetorical questions, using humor and irony, telling anecdotes, drawing analogies, exhorting readers to think, admitting to having previously held wrong opinions. Explain the effect each of the examples you have identified may have on a hostile or skeptical reader.

2. What patterns do you perceive in the way Child structures her chapters? How does she generally begin? At what point does she usually shift into an argumentation mode? How does she structure her arguments?

3. What are the various arguments Child uses to refute then-prevalent claims that Africans were intellectually and morally inferior to whites? To what extent do Child’s views or those of her opponents remain relevant today?