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American Nineteenth Century History Volume 24, 2023 - Issue 2
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Articles

America’s black temperance movement, 1827–1894: charting a forgotten history

Sophie SalwayIndependent ScholarCorrespondence[email protected]
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Pages 119-144 | Published online: 30 Aug 2023

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  • Beecher, Lyman. Six Sermons on the Nature, Occasions, Signs, Evils, and Remedy of Intemperance. Boston, MA: T.R. Marvin, 1828.
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  • Speeches
  • Douglass, Frederick. “Intemperance and Slavery: An Address Delivered in Cork, Ireland, on 20 October 1845.” Yale Macmillan Center.: Accessed January 3, 2022. https://glc.yale.edu/intemperance-and-slavery.
  • Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins. “Woman’s Political Future.” In The World’s Congress of Representative Woman, edited by May Wright Sewall, 433–437. Chicago: Rand, McNally & Company, 1894.
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  • Proceedings of a Convention of Colored Men of Ohio, held in Xenia, on the 10th, 11th and 12th days of January, 1865: with the Constitution of Ohio Equal Rights League. Cincinnati, OH: A. Moore, 1865. Harvard University Library: Film W5167-3. Colored Conventions Project. Accessed February 3, 2022. https://omeka.coloredconventions.org/items/show/255.
  • Database Compilations
  • Chapin, Sallie. “Our Southern Letter,” Union Signal, April 26, 1883, p. 4 (Temperance and Prohibition Papers microfilm (1977), section III, reel 1).
  • Dublin, Thomas, and Angela Scheuerer. Why Did African-American Women Join the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union, 1880 to 1900? Binghamton, NY: State University of New York at Binghamton, 2000. ProQuest Alexander Street.
  • Early, Sarah J. W. “Work Among the Colored People of the Southern States,” National WCTU Annual Meeting Minutes of 1888. Chicago: Woman's Temperance Publication Association, 1888, 272–273 (Temperance and Prohibition Papers microfilm (1977), section I, reel 2, frames 814-15.
  • Harper, Frances Ellen Watkins. “The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union and the Colored Woman,” A.M.E. Church Review 12 (1888), 313–316. In Discarded Legacy: Politics and Poetics of Frances E.W. Harper, edited by Melba Joyce Boyd, 203–207. Detroit: Wayne State Univ. Press, 1994.
  • “Mrs. Harper's Report,” New Haven Register, 21 November 1894, p. 4 (Temperance and Prohibition Papers microfilm (1977),: section II, reel 42, frame 5).
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  • Schrad, Mark Lawrence. “The Forgotten History of Black Prohibitionism.” Politico. Last modified June 2, 2021. https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2021/02/06/forgotten-black-history-prohibition-temperance-movement-461215.
  • Journal Articles
  • Adeleke, Tunde. “Afro-Americans and Moral Suasion: The Debate in the 1830s.” Journal of Negro History 83, no. 2 (1998): 127–142.
  • Aviles, Lauryn. “The William Whipper Arguments and the Push for Color-Blind Abolitionism in the Antebellum North.” Tulane Undergraduate Research Journal 3 (2021): 1–15.
  • Bacon, Margaret Hope. “‘One Great Bundle of Humanity’: Frances Ellen Watkins Harper (1825-1911).” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 113, no. 1 (1989): 21–43.
  • Baumgartner, Kabria. “Love and Justice: African American Women, Education, and Protest in Antebellum New England.” Journal of Social History 52, no. 3 (2019): 652–676.
  • Bell, Howard H. “The American Moral Reform Society, 1836-1841.” Journal of Negro Education 27, no. 1 (1958): 34–40.
  • Block, Shelley. “A Revolutionary Aim: The Rhetoric of Temperance in the Anglo-African Magazine.” American Periodicals 12 (2002): 9–24.
  • Burgher, Denise. “Recovering Black Women in the Colored Conventions Movement.” Legacy 36, no. 2 (2019): 256–262.
  • Burks, Mary Fair. “The First Black Literary Magazine in American Letters.” CLA Journal 19, no. 3 (1976): 318–321.
  • Cantrell, Gregg. “‘Dark Tactics’: Black Politics in the 1887 Texas Prohibition Campaign.” Journal of American Studies 25, no. 1 (1991): 85–93.
  • Christmon, Kenneth. “Historical Overview of Alcohol in the African American Community.” Journal of Black Studies 25, no. 3 (1995): 318–330.
  • Cooper, Frederick. “Elevating the Race: The Social Thought of Black Leaders, 1827-50.” American Quarterly 24, no. 5 (1972): 604–625.
  • De Vera, Samantha. “‘We the Ladies … Have Been Deprived of a Voice’: Uncovering Black Women’s Lives Through the Colored Conventions Archive.” Interdisciplinary Studies in the Long Nineteenth Century 19, no. 27 (2018): 1–9.
  • Fulton, DoVeanna S. “Sowing Seeds in an Untilled Field: Temperance and Race, Indeterminacy, and Identification in the Nineteenth Century.” Legacy 24, no. 2 (2007): 207–224.
  • Griffin, Charles J. G. “The “Washingtonian Revival”: Narrative and the Moral Transformation of Temperance Reform in Antebellum America.” Southern Journal of Communication 66, no. 1 (2000): 67–78.
  • Hamilton, Cynthia S. “Dred: Intemperate Slavery.” Journal of American Studies 34, no. 2 (2000): 257–277.
  • Harris, Paisley Jane. “Gatekeeping and Remaking: The Politics of Respectability in African American Women’s History and Black Feminism.” Journal of Women’s History 15, no. 1 (2003): 212–220.
  • Hutton, Frankie. “Social Morality in the Antebellum Black Press.” Journal of Popular Culture 26, no. 2 (1992): 71–84.
  • Jackson, Debra. “‘A Cultural Stronghold’: The ‘Anglo-African Newspaper’ and the Black Community of New York.” New York History 85, no. 4 (2004): 331–357.
  • Kachun, Mitch. “Interrogating the Silences: Julia C. Collins, 19th-Century Black Readers and Writers, and the ‘Christian Recorder’.” African American Review 40, no. 4 (2006): 649–659.
  • Lee, Nedra K. ““To Rise from the Darkest Ignorance”: Black Texans’ Engagement with the Politics of Racial Uplift.” Journal of African Diaspora Archaeology and Heritage 10, no. 3 (2021): 232–256.
  • Levine, Robert S. “Disturbing Boundaries: Temperance, Black Elevation, and Violence in Frank J. Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends.” Prospects 19 (1994): 349–374.
  • Maillard, Mary. “‘Faithfully Drawn from Real Life’: Autobiographical Elements in Frank J. Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends.” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography 137, no. 3 (2013): 261–300.
  • Materson, Lisa G. “African American Women, Prohibition, and the 1928 Presidential Election.” Journal of Women’s History 21, no. 1 (2009): 63–86.
  • McCormick, Richard P. “William Whipper: Moral Reformer.” Pennsylvania History 43, no. 1 (1976): 22–46.
  • Miller, Floyd J. ““The Father of Black Nationalism”: Another Contender.” Civil War History 17, no. 4 (1971): 310–319.
  • Otter, Samuel. “Frank Webb’s Still Life: Rethinking Literature and Politics Through ‘The Garies and Their Friends’.” American Literary History 20, no. 4 (2008): 728–752.
  • Rury, John L. “The New York African Free School, 1827-1836: Conflict Over Community Control of Black Education.” Phylon (1960) 44, no. 3 (1983): 187–197.
  • Scheick, William J. “Strategic Ellipsis in Harper’s ‘The Two Offers.’.” Southern Literary Journal 23 2 (1991): 14–18.
  • Tillery, Tyrone. “The Inevitability of the Douglass-Garrison Conflict.” Phylon (1960) 37, no. 2 (1976): 137–149.
  • Tyrrell, Ian R. “Women and Temperance in Antebellum America, 1830-1860.” Civil War History 28, no. 2 (1982): 128–152.
  • West, Stephen A. “‘A Hot Municipal Contest’: Prohibition Politics in Greenville, South Carolina, After Reconstruction.” Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 11, no. 4 (2012): 519–551.
  • Yacovone, Donald. “The Transformation of the Black Temperance Movement, 1827-1854: An Interpretation.” Journal of the Early Republic 8, no. 3 (1988): 281–297.
  • Books
  • Blocker, Jack S. American Temperance Movements: Cycles of Reform. Boston, MA: Twayne Publishers, 1989.
  • Bordin, Ruth. Woman and Temperance: The Quest for Power & Liberty, 1873-1900. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1981.
  • Buccola, Nicholas. The Political Thought of Frederick Douglass: In Pursuit of American Liberty. New York: New York University Press, 2012.
  • Bullock, Penelope L. Afro-American Periodical Press, 1838-1909. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981.
  • Cooper, Valerie C. Word Like Fire: Maria Stewart, the Bible, and the Rights of African Americans. Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2011.
  • Dabel, Jane E. A Respectable Woman: The Public Roles of African American Women in 19th-Century New York. New York: New York University Press, 2008.
  • Dannenbaum, Jed. Drink and Disorder: Temperance Reform in Cincinnati from the Washingtonian Revival to the WCTU. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1984.
  • Epstein, Barbara Leslie. The Politics of Domesticity: Women, Evangelism, and Temperance in Nineteenth-Century America. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1981.
  • Forman, P. Gabrielle, et al. The Colored Conventions Movement: Black Organizing in the Nineteenth Century. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021.
  • Frazier, E.: Franklin. Black Bourgeoisie. New York: Free Press, 1957.
  • Gardner, Eric. Black Print Unbound: The Christian Recorder, African American Literature, and Periodical Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.
  • Gilkeson, John S. Middle-Class Providence, 1820–1940. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986.
  • Gusfield, Joseph R. Symbolic Crusade: Status Politics and the American Temperance Movement. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1963.
  • Harris, Leslie M. In the Shadow of Slavery: African Americans in New York City, 1626-1863. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003.
  • Higginbotham, Evelyn Brooks. Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993.
  • Mendez, James G. A Great Sacrifice: Northern Black Soldiers, Their Families, and the Experience of Civil War. New York: Fordham University Press, 2019.
  • Morone, James A. Hellfire Nation: The Politics of Sin in American History. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003.
  • Pease, Jane H., and William H. Pease. They Who Would Be Free: Black’s Search for Freedom, 1830- 1861. New York: Atheneum, 1974.
  • Pegram, Thomas. Battling Demon Rum: The Struggle for a Dry America, 1800–1933. Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 1998.
  • Quarles, Benjamin. Black Abolitionists. New York: Oxford University Press, 1969.
  • Rorabaugh, W. J. The Alcoholic Republic: An American Tradition. New York: Hill and Wang, 1978.
  • Schrad, Mark Lawrence. Smashing the Liquor Machine: A Global History of Prohibition. New York: Oxford University Press, 2021.
  • Smith, John David. ed. Black Soldiers in Blue: African American Troops in the Civil War Era. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.
  • Stancliff, Michael. Frances Ellen Watkins Harper: African American Reform Rhetoric and the Rise of a Modern Nation State. New York: Routledge, 2011.
  • Sterling, Dorothy. We are Your Sisters: Black Women in the Nineteenth Century. New York: W. W. Norton, 1984.
  • Thompson, Paul H. A Most Stirring and Significant Episode: Religion and the Rise and Fall of Prohibition in Black Atlanta, 1865-1887. DeKalb, IL: Northern Illinois University Press, 2013.
  • Tyrrell, Ian R. Sobering Up: From Temperance to Prohibition in Antebellum America, 1800–1860. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1979.
  • Walker, George E. The Afro-American in New York City, 1827-1860. New York: Routledge, 2019.
  • Willis, Deborah. The Black Civil War Soldier: A Visual History of Conflict and Citizenship. New York: New York University Press, 2021.
  • Wilson, Keith P. Campfires of Freedom: The Camp Life of Black Soldiers During the Civil War. Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 2002.
  • Book Chapters
  • Boylan, Anne M. “Benevolence and Antislavery among African American Women in New York and Boston, 1820-1840.” In The Abolitionist Sisterhood: Women’s Political Culture in Antebellum America, edited by Jean Fagan Yellin, and John C. Van Horne, 119–138. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994.
  • Foster, Francis Smith. “Introduction.” In Minnie’s Sacrifice, Sowing and Reaping, Trial and Triumph: Three Rediscovered Novels by Frances E. W. Harper, edited by Frances Smith Foster, xi–xxxvii. Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1994.
  • Herd, Denise. “The Paradox of Temperance: Blacks and the Alcohol Question in Nineteenth- Century America.” In Drinking: Behaviour and Belief in Modern History, edited by Susanna Barrows, and Robin Room, 354–375. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991.
  • Nero, Charles I. ““Oh, What I Think I Must Tell This World!” Oratory and Public Address of African-American Women.” In Black Women in America, edited by Kim Marie Vaz, 261–274. London: Sage Publications, 1995.
  • Parker, Alison M. “Frances Watkins Harper and the Search for Women’s Interracial Alliances.” In Susan B. Anthony and the Struggle for Equal Rights, edited by Christine L. Ridarsky, and Mary M. Huth, 145–171. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2012.
  • Rosenthal, Debra J. “Deracialized Discourse: Temperance and Racial Ambiguity in Harper’s ‘The Two Offers’ and Sowing and Reaping.” In The Serpent in the Cup: Temperance in American Literature, edited by David S. Reynolds, and Debra J. Rosenthal, 153–164. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1997.
  • Book Reviews
  • Kerr, K. Austin. “Review of Profits, Power and Prohibition: Alcohol Reform and the Industrializing of America, 1800-1930, by John J. Rumbarger.” American Historical Review 96, no. 1 (1991): 250–225.

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