Fair Use Blog

A few weeks ago I mentioned that we had added a 1907 short study on "Slavery in Auburn, Alabama" to the Fair Use Repository. The booklet was published as part of the Alabama Polytechnic Institute Historical Studies series. Meriwether Harvey is listed as the author of the booklet; it is evident from the text that Harvey based the study on some fairly extensive first-hand interviews with family or acquaintances in some of the prominent white families that had formerly owned slaves in the area of Auburn, and also at least some interviews with local African-Americans who had been born under slavery. If you wanted to find information about the author, though, what was available was fairly limited. Harvey was not a member of the Alabama Polytechnic faculty in 1907, and the booklet gives no further detail about its author.

John David Smith, the author of An Old Creed for the New South (2008), describes the the booklet and its author on pp. 173-4, 179:

Fortunately, a talented amateur historian and a number of graduate students went beyond such romanticized views of slavery on the state and local level. [...] Meriwether Harvey and James K. Turner conducted even more minute grass roots research on slavery in Auburn, Alabama and Edgecombe County, North Carolina, respectively. [...] The essays by Meriwether Harvey and James K. Turner remain important because they represent the type of micro research on slavery that still cries out to be written. Harvey, a student at Alabama Polytechnic Institute at Auburn, made the most detailed examination of the period of slavery in any one locale. He focused on slavery in Auburn, in 1860 a small cotton-producing community of one thousand whites and seven hundred blacks....

Smith helpfully, and correctly, identifies Meriwether Harvey as a student at Alabama Polytechnic (now known as Auburn University) -- but misidentifies Harvey as "he." After a bit of research with old copies of the Glomerata at the Auburn University Library Special Collections section, I can now introduce you to Miss Meriwether Harvey, a 19 year old Senior co-ed student at Alabama Polytechnic Institute, who graduated with honors as part of the Class of 1907. Alabama Polytechnic (formerly the Agricultural and Mechanical College of Alabama) had in fact admitted a small number of female students since 1892, -- including Miss Meriwether Harvey.

Blockton, Ala.

"Merie." General.

A very congenial piece of curiosity.

Despises frivolity. "Isn't the Captain of Company K handsome!" Believes in maintaining her rights and doing the right. A natural-born mythologist. Always eager to talk about the Conway Cabal (?). Never sends post cards to the professors. Hardest boner of Co-eds. Pretends that she is going to "IV" but makes I's. "I'm shocked to think that Napoleon wrote L-O-V-E letters."

Honorary member of Websterian Literary Society; Distinction '05.

This is from p. 41 in the Senior Class section of the Glomerata, API's official yearbook, Vol. X for the school year ending in 1907.

Ms. Harvey was one of only eight women enrolled at Alabama Polytechnic in 1907. She graduated with honor as part of the Class of 1907; here is her listing in the 1907-1908 Alabama Polytechnic Institute catalogue:

Many thanks to the Auburn University Archives and Special Collections Department for their help in locating and identifying the author of this remarkable local study. More information about Meriwether Harvey is now available through Meriwether Harvey at ''Notes from the Margins''.

I'm happy to announce, as an update to the ongoing Liberator online archive project that two more volumes of The Liberator -- Vol. XII and Vol. XIII -- are now available, in full page-scan PDF facsimiles -- at the Liberator online archive:

• Vol. XII of The Liberator (Jan.-Dec. 1842) at Fair Use Repository (52 issues)
• Vol. XIII of The Liberator (Jan.-Dec. 1843) at Fair Use Repository (52 issues)

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p>The early 1840s were eventful and contentious years in the American Abolitionist movement, with much of the controversy centered on Garrison, Abby Kelly and their radical allies -- especially the ultras' strident opposition to electioneering and political parties, and their principled defense of women's freedom to participate equally in the Abolitionist movement. In May 1840, the American Anti-slavery Society underwent a schism in the conflict over both propositions; more conservative, politically-oriented and anti-feminist abolitionists attempted to purge Garrison from the AAS, and when they failed to run him out, they left to form a new, conervative American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society. The pages of The Liberator in 1841-1842 were full not only of news about national events, slavery, war, but also internal debate within the movement over the AAS/AFAS split and the electoral campaigns of the recently-formed Liberty Party, as well as new reports and arguments over the Come-Outer religious movement, endorsed by Garrison, Abby Kelly, and others, which called on Christians to come out of mainline denominations that did not reflect their conscientious beliefs on spiritual practice or which refused to take a moral stand against slavery, alongside established features such as the Refuge of Oppression columns (in which Garrison quoted, verbatim, the words of defenders of slavery and racism, in order to demonstrate the inhumanity of their views), international updates on the Caribbean and on the speaking tours of British Abolitionists, reflections on religious and moral topics, and pages of bad moral reform poetry. To see it as it happened, you can now check out 104 more issues of The Liberator available online, in full, for free, from January 1841 to the end of December 1842.

If you enjoy this project or find the materials useful, you can help support the work and speed up the on-going progress with a contribution to the project, in any amount, through the Molinari Institute -- the not-for-profit sponsor of the Fair Use Repository. You can read more about the fundraiser and the archive project in the introductory post here at Fair Use Blog.

Read, cite, and enjoy!

From time to time I have mentioned my ongoing project of making full issues of William Lloyd Garrison's The Liberator available here at fair-use.org. The Liberator is big (52-53 issues every year, for 35 years!) and the project has progressed at a slow pace. But I'm happy to announce that, thanks to a break from other obligations, a sponsorship from the Molinari Institute, and generous contributions from supporters all over the Internet, the project will be able to proceed much more quickly and steadily from here on out -- hopefully with every issue of The Liberator available in full, online, for free, by the beginning of August 2014. But we need your support to make it happen!

Here's the deal. When the fundraiser project started, thanks to occasional scanning when I had the time to volunteer, fair-use.org had ten years' worth of The Liberator online: Volumes I.-IX. (1830-1839) and Volume XXI. (Jan.-Dec. 1851). In order to finish the remaining 25 years' worth of issues this summer -- instead of sometime around 2019 -- we're raising funds through our fiscal sponsor, the Molinari Institute -- in order to get the scans online and begin to prepare an extensive, open, free and researcher-friendly archive and index for anyone who wants to learn more about radical abolitionism and the history of American social movements. The fundraiser will cover the labor costs for the scanning and the increased web hosting costs for what's likely to become a very widely used web resource.

We started the fundraiser with a soft, quietly circulated launch last week. And I'm happy to announce to-day that, thanks to generous donations from 8 donors, we've already raised over 10% of our goal -- $246 out of the projected $2,000 budget. And also that thanks to the donations, we've already been able to add two new volumes -- Volume X. and Volume XI. of The Liberator (1840-1841) are now available online. We're on track to add the next two volumes (XII. and XIII.) by the end of this week.

About the project:

Our goal is to make every issue of The Liberator, from 1831-1865, available in full, online, for free, and to add free tools to aid students and researchers in searching through the archives of the paper.

• Phase I. is to scan every issue from every year of The Liberator from microfilm sources and to make facsimile PDFs available online for free at fair-use.org/the-liberator. If the fundraiser is fully funded, we should be able to add about two new volumes' worth of facsimile PDFs each week, and complete Phase I by August 2014.
• Phase II. is to prepare a free, online hypertext index of The Liberator, similar to the Individuals and Titles and Periodicals sections of Wendy McElroy's indispensable Comprehensive Index to LIBERTY. The index will provide an easily searchable, easily browseable and interlinked complete table of contents for every issue of The Liberator and an index of names, book titles and periodical titles appearing in its pages. If we reach our stretch goals for the fundraiser, then the fundraiser will cover most of the labor cost for Phase II as well as for the scanning project. After Phase I is complete, I should be able to work out a plausible timeline for completing Phase II, but my guess at this point is that it could possibly be completed by the end of the year.
• Phase III. would be to begin to transcribe individual articles and columns from the PDF facsimiles into lightweight, standards-based, linkable searchable HTML. This will be an immense amount of work and systematic effort to complete it will be a bit down the road. We'll do another round of fundraising to support the Phase III transcriptions once Phase I. is complete and Phase II. is in progress.

About The Liberator

Garrison's Liberator, running from 1831–1865, was the most prominent periodical of radical Abolition in the united states. Proclaiming, in the first issue, that:

. . . I am aware, that many object to the severity of my language; but is there not cause for severity? I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation. No! no! Tell a man whose house is on fire, to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hand of the ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which it has fallen; -- but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present. I am in earnest -- I will not equivocate -- I will not excuse -- I will not retreat a single inch -- AND I WILL BE HEARD.

Together with the circle of black and white radicals that his paper attracted, Garrison's Liberator helped to organize, and offered a forum for, the Abolitionist movement that spent the next 35 years working for the immediate emancipation of all slaves, condemning racial prejudice and "American Colorphobia," and insisting that emancipation could only truly come about by inspiring a radical moral and social transformation. It urged a politics of radicalizing conscience, and denied that electoral gamesmanship, partisan politics, or political compromise would ever bring about liberation on their own. In the age of the Fugitive Slave Acts, the Garrisonians denounced the united states Constitution as a weapon of the slavers, "A Compromise with Death and an Agreement with Hell." Rejecting the use of either political or military power as a means of overcoming the slave system, they argued for Disunion ("No Union with Slaveholders, religiously or politically"), holding that the Northern free states should secede from the Union, thus peacefully withdrawing the Federal economic, political and military support that the Slave Power depended on, and (they argued) driving the slave system to collapse, by kicking out the Constitutional compromises that propped it up. Garrison and his circle, in the face of condemnation from more conservative anti-slavery activists, also constantly drew parallels and connections between the struggle against slavery and other struggles for social liberation, taking early and courageous stances in defense of women's rights and international peace.

What You Can Do To Help

If you enjoy this project or find the materials useful, you can help support the work and speed up the on-going progress with a contribution to the project, in any amount, through the Molinari Institute -- the not-for-profit sponsor of the Fair Use Repository. We can accept credit card donations through GoFundMe.com and we can also accept Bitcoin donations to bitcoin:18Bojnp2UG3iDpXT9CxjutjsXQjWgbmSCW. (If you send us a BTC contribution, please contact us to let us know who you are, what you donated and where we can reach you, so that we can send you a thank-you and, if you want, keep you up to date with the progress of the project!) Contributors have the option of having their names appear, with our thanks, on the archive page at fair-use.org/the-liberator/, or remaining anonymous if they'd prefer. You can also get periodic updates (no more than one e-mail a week) about both the progress of the fundraiser and the progress of the scanning project.

Please share this notice far and wide! We can finish this project on a small budget, but we need your help in getting the word out. A link here will work fine; or you can link directly to the GoFundMe.com fundraiser page at www.gofundme.com/8tb288

If you have access to microfilm and scanning equipment, you could also help the project immensely by contacting us at fair-use.org about hosting any alternative page-scans of some issues -- as with any 19th century periodical, many of the issues that we are scanning already had blemishes, tears or folds on the pages when they were preserved in microfilm, and if any parts of the text are illegible in our edition (the American Periodical Series microfilm collection, University Microfilms International, Ann Arbor, Mich., as found in the Auburn University Libraries in Auburn, Ala.) we'd love to have alternative page-scans of those issues from other sources.

Thanks for anything you can do. And as always, read, cite, and enjoy!