The Slave’s Friend. New York: American Anti-slavery Society, 1836-1838. (Cotsen 6598)

Because The Slave’s Friend was a “first,” certain facts are well known.  The monthly issues for children between six and 12 cost just a penny.  The editor was Lewis Tappan, the brother of the abolitionist Arthur,  the printer Ransom G. Wilson, and the illustrator the well-known wood cutter Alexander Andersen.  It was one of four publications The American Anti-Slavery Society launched in the early 1830.  In order to publicize its activities, the early numbers of the Friend were distributed free through the Society’s postal campaign to flood the southern states with abolitionist literature.  Incidents like the burning of bags of AASS pamphlets in Charleston, South Carolina post office proved great publicity for the organization.

Until recently, commentary on the periodical’s miscellaneous contents has been fairly cursory, as if the ways Tappan used to persuade his readership to accept the Society’s advocacy of immediate emancipation by non-violent means were self-evident.  Like any abolitionist publication, anecdotes of cruelty suffered by enslaved people figure prominently.  Should their sources be identified?  Should they be queried for accuracy? When reprinted from elsewhere, to what extent are they differ from the source material?

I decided to use as a test case a story in the July 1835 issue of The Slave’s Friend about two little girls named Joggy and Lorina.

The Slave’s Friend. July 1835

The Slave’s Friend. July 1835

My assumption that their story was probably reprinted from an earlier source was wrong:  it was literally hot off the press, based on articles about Captain Caleb Miller of the brig America, who brought them to America, that were run in The New Bedford Mercury and Boston Morning Post in June and early July.  Tappan seems to have drawn on the July 3 article in the Boston paper, which announced that Miller was charged with kidnapping and piracy in order to sell the two girls as slaves.  His story that the girls were given to him and he planned to raise them as his own was not believed.  He held on $3000 bail.

The Slave’s Friend. July 1835

Miller’s trial was closely watched by the abolitionist community because it would be the first case arising from the violation of United States laws against the African slave trade (The New Bedford Mercury suggested that “certain abolitionist gentlemen” had brought the case to light precisely for this reason.)   Tappan’s follow up article, however, focuses almost entirely on the girls’ whereabouts and welfare as more compelling way to rouse his readers’ sympathies than the details of Miller’s trial.  He went so far as to state that President Jackson deported Joggy and Lorena to Africa, a claim probably made on the strength of Jackson being listed as a supporter of the American Colonlzation Society (later revealed as  without his consent).

Reportage of the trial says little about the girls in comparison with Miller.  The Mercury, which was not noted for abolitionist sympathies, gave him a good character. The brig’s owners, New Bedford merchants William H. Hathaway and William S. Swain, testified that the ship had been trading on the African coast since 1830, but Miller had no orders to take slaves.  Testimony revealed that when the America was anchored in the “Rio Danda,” Miller was asked to transport 30 Africans to an undisclosed destination and his employer Swain claimed “it is common practice to take passengers, who are slaves, from one port to another, on the Coast of Africa,” as well as observing that “domestic slavery” was as common there as in the South.

Additional testimony from the trial in the August 7th Mercury via the New York Herald offered more information about the girls, confirming that they were  two places and therefore not related, that one was older than the other, and they disembarked the America on different days.  Their names are given as Lorena and Joarkana.   A crewman of color claimed responsibility for alerting New York  authorities about them being on board.  During the trial the girls made an appearance to “excite sympathy and to prejudice the jury against the prisoner.  There was no earthly reason for their being brought into court—and it reflected no credit on those who had ordered it to be done.” The captain and the mate were acquitted in New York on the charged of receiving and transporting Africans with the intent to sell them as slaves; however Miller was found guilty of bringing them back to be “held to labor.”

My effort to determine if the story of Joggy and Lorina was real did not exactly lay the matter to rest.   In making the girls’ story known, the newspapers had their own agendas, as did The Slave’s Friend.  It seems pretty clear that they were being used to rouse the public’s feelings and they drop out of the accounts without readers learning what ultimately happened to them.  More research will be needed to fill the blanks and reconcile the discrepancies in the narratives of Joggy and Lorina—and perhaps other scholars will investigate the origins of additional anecdotes about enslaved children in The Slave’s Friend.