Category Archives: Periodicals and serials

Driving Nails into the Coffin: A True Story in The Slave’s Friend (1835-1838), the First Abolitionist Periodical for Children

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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.

 

Made by a Child: Vivie Wivie Redesigns The Flapper’s Magazette: More Issues of a Manuscript Magazine Acquired

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Our favorite girl journalist resurfaced miraculously a few weeks ago, when the New Jersey antiquarian bookseller Between the Covers offered Cotsen two issues of The Flapper’s Magazine edited by “V. V.” and published in Teddington, Richmond by Vivie Wivie & Co. in 1918. The address, which is the same as the editorial offices of The Flapper’s Magazette, leaves no doubts as to the brains behind the operation.

Would the two issues contain information that would lead us to the real young woman? Absolutely!

One issue has no publication date, but the second carries an announcement that starting with this, the May issue, the magazine will be issued every two months.  Flip through the new issues and it’s obvious that Vivie Wivie & Co. decided that the magazine needed a make-over.  The silly jokes and contests that were an endearing feature of the Magazette are history.  More sophisticated young women in daring hats are featured on the covers.And the contents? Each issue consists of more portraits of devastating modern beauties billed as “V. V.’s famous girls,” any one of which can be obtained as a full-page picture from Vivie Wivie & Co., according to another announcement.  No price is given, however. V. V.’s glamorous creatures, some with bobs, a few with wide-brimmed chapeaus, others bedizened with huge bows or artificial flowers, and some with long braids down the back (a “flapper,” according to OED), are signed “Viven Furniss 1918,” “V. Furniss 1918,” or “ViviE 1918.”   The sole man admitted to the Magazine’s pages is a handsome square-jawed aviator,  whom the reader may suspect, is the object of the editor’s dreams.  The only copy in the two issues are the captions.  Vivien’s artwork in the 1918 issues of The Flapper’s Magazine is much more accomplished than that in the Magazette, so it seems safe to say the Magazine is the work of a teenager, and the other of a little girl.

But can it be puzzled out how old she was when she made the manuscript periodicals?

Yes! Almost exactly.

It was pure wishful thinking on my part to have imagined that Vivien must have been the daughter (or other relative) of Harry Furniss (1854-1927), the Irish-born British artist famous for his humorous drawings and caricatures for Punch and illustrator of Lewis Carroll’s Sylvie and Bruno (1889) and Sylvie and Bruno Concluded (1993).  He also illustrated G. E. Farrow’s Wallypug series, sometimes collaborating with his artist-daughter Dorothy.  Dorothy was Harry’s only daughter.

So it was back to the drawing board.  Now that I knew that Vivien F. Furniss put together those two issues of The Flapper’s Magazine in 1918, I could search Ancestry Library with a bit more confidence.  It didn’t take that long to find our girl journalist Vivien Florence Furniss.   She was the daughter and oldest of the four children of the assurance clerk Percy Furniss and his wife Maude of Richmond on Thames in Surrey.  Her birth in 1903, parents, place of birth can be found in England and Wales Civil Registration Birth Index 1837-1917.  That would have made her 15 when she drew the “famous girls” of the Magazine.

This inconvenient fact blows out of the water my original dating of the Magazette to the 1920s.  The only evidence I could squeeze out of the text appeared in a limerick.  I leapt to the conclusion that its first line “There was a young lady of Bow, / Who attended a cinema show. / She was heard to remark / “Oh George! It is dark….” (the reader to provide a last line) contained an allusion to the It Girl, Clara Bow (1905-1965) who made her first picture in….  1921.   I should have checked to see if there were other limericks that began with that line.  There were several.

Is there other evidence that might establish how old Vivien was when she edited and illustrated the Magazette?   The picture of “The Little Patriot” showing a blonde girl draped in the Union Jack suggests that she might not have started her first publication project until Great Britain had entered World War I in August 1914.  That would have made her eleven.  Without any dates in the Magazette, it is impossible to know exactly when she was inspired to begin the project, but it seems safe to guess between 1914 and 1917.

This just goes to show how easy it is to give into the temptation to invent an origin story for child-made works on the few “facts” the text seems to contain. Revising the first post is a small price to pay for the discovery that Vivien didn’t abandon her project after one number, and if any thing, she seems to have become more interested in clothes and boys.  Who knows, maybe she did more than these three issues and those may surface on the antiquarian market one day.  What I’d like to know is, did the future Mrs. Philip W. Hume continue to draw after her marriage?  She lived to the ripe old age of 82, passing away in 1985.  Vivie, take a bow!