Learning to Read like an Abolitionist: Benjamin Lundy and the Early Antislavery Print Sphere

Abstract: This essay demonstrates how Benjamin Lundy's antislavery periodical Genius of Universal Emancipation served as a tool for the expansion and training of a growing abolitionist readership in the United States in the 1820s. Engaging Americans throughout the nation in person and in print, Lundy forged a network that connected antislavery sympathizers to one another, impelling them to act on their convictions. By analyzing Lundy's coverage of Frances Wright's Nashoba experiment's formation through dissolution, the essay explores how the Genius of Universal Emancipation served as a critical foundation for abolitionism as a national movement. Lundy's unique brand of embodied editorship—his physical movement across the Union in tandem with his editorial voice in Genius —helped set the stage for the abolitionist movement's prominence on a national scale.