Page xi →Introduction Performing Freedom on Slavery’s Hearth

In the middle of the nineteenth century, Americans debated, formally and informally, in legislative halls, in reformers’ meetings, in streets and marketplaces, in mansions and hovels, in religious buildings and private homes. As sectional turmoil increased, the US Congress debated the Compromise of 1850, passing a series of measures including the Fugitive Slave Act, which New York writer and activist Harriet Jacobs would describe as “the beginning of a reign of terror.”¹⁰ Outside legislatures, ordinary Americans deliberated their past and their collective future. Sometimes these deliberations occurred in local cultural institutions Page xvi →created for the purpose of convening and discussing, for this was a heyday of debating societies in urban centers and rural communities alike. Debating society participants—often though not always white and male—practiced their skills in debate, public speaking, and parliamentary procedure in contexts of homosocial camaraderie, and thus they learned and enacted the forms of political, social, and cultural leadership.

Pre–Civil War Americans thus participated in a national culture that recognized the popular debating society as a familiar social form. Debating had been associated with teaching and learning in the West at least since the fifth century BCE, when the Greek Sophist Protagoras of Abdera taught his students to argue two sides of each question. Eighteenth-century American colonists, drawing on classical models and British precursors alike, established clubs like Benjamin Franklin’s Junto for debating and other intellectual pastimes, and young white male collegians founded literary and debating societies. College societies constituted extracurricular activity of their day: they were run by students rather than faculty, were conducted in English rather than Latin, and addressed issues from abstract questions of morals to current politics. Harvard’s Spy Club was holding “disputations” in the early 1720s, and college debating societies thrived from 1750 onward. By 1770 the College of New Jersey, later Princeton University, boasted two groups, the American Whig Society and the Cliosophic Society, with the latter name signaling “praise of wisdom.” Southern colleges followed suit. For example, two societies were organized at the University of North Carolina in 1795, the year it began offering classes. Both before and after the Revolution, such groups promoted the literary achievements and the speaking and argumentative skills of their members, as well as the pleasures of fraternal interaction and genial competition.¹¹

Popular, noncollegiate debating received a boost in the late 1820s, when the Yale-educated scientific lecturer Josiah Holbrook began promoting the establishment of local “associations of adults for mutual education,” which he called lyceums.¹² Although Holbrook envisioned lyceums as societies for cooperative scientific study, the cultural connection of education with debate was strong, and thousands of groups called lyceums were debating clubs, from Massachusetts to California.¹³ Free Black Americans, men and women, especially in urban centers such as Philadelphia and New York, established associations that promoted education and racial uplift; scholar-librarian Dorothy B. Porter pioneered the study of these groups, and Elizabeth McHenry’s Forgotten Readers recovers a detailed history.¹⁴ When in 1847 the young men of the Clionian Debating Society acknowledged Clio, the Greek Muse of history, in their name and stated their goals as “the promotion of their connection [to each other] and Page xvii →the improvement of their intellect,” they rhetorically linked themselves with other intellectual aspirants across the nation.¹⁵

If the Clionians’ educational goals were conventional, their social and political condition made their group distinctive—although, it turns out, not unique. Their minutes record two concurrent debating societies among Charleston’s free persons of color: the Enterpean and the Utopian Debating Societies.¹⁶ These references to the other groups are, at present, the only available evidence about them, and the names of their members are unknown. Conversely, the Clionian minutes name fifty-four discrete individuals (fifty-two men and two women) who were regular members, honorary members, or supporters (see appendix A), and they also refer broadly, without enumeration, to audiences for special occasions.¹⁷ The society’s secretaries characterize these audiences, formulaically, as “enlightened,” “delighted,” “large,” or “respectable,” with respectable meaning reasonably numerous but perhaps also signaling self-conscious behavioral standards. The members and honorary members were exclusively male, but women of the community supported the group by attending the special meetings and making occasional donations of money or books.¹⁸ Among the named individuals who can be identified through public records, extant accounts of other voluntary associations, or scholarly investigations, a few were members of the free Black communities in other cities, including honorary member Daniel Alexander Payne of Baltimore, a native of Charleston who in 1852 would be elected as the sixth bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Some people named in the minutes left Charleston during the society’s lifespan, relocating to northern US cities or to Canada. Most participants, however, were free persons of color residing in Charleston throughout the period. It is highly likely that the audiences for the Clionians’ special events were drawn from this tight-knit community, which frequently intermarried and established a variety of social institutions, including cooperative economic enterprises, benevolence and burial societies, and clandestine schools.¹⁹

Historians have provided invaluable foundations for the study of Charleston’s free Black community, from its heightened color consciousness and connections to influential white citizens to its religious, occupational, and wealth-holding characteristics.²⁰ Women far outnumbered men. Protestant Christianity was an important basis for moral action, and free persons of color were active in the city’s Episcopalian and Methodist congregations.²¹ Many were skilled workers, with women working as seamstresses and mantua makers and men as carpenters and tailors, shoemakers and barbers, butchers and Page xviii →masons.²² Several Clionian members, including Henry Cardozo and William O. Weston, would become Methodist ministers and educators, as well as Reconstruction-era public officials; both men also toiled as tailors during their working lives.²³ (Note that the Clionian minutes identify two different individuals by the name Henry Cardozo.)²⁴ Some among Charleston’s most prosperous free persons of color owned considerable property in real estate and also in human chattel. Those associated with the Clionians who held other people in bondage included several honorary members in the generation older than the regular members, such as wood factor Richard E. Dereef, carpenter Charles H. Holloway, shoemaker John Mishaw, and tailors Benjamin T. Huger, William McKinlay, and brothers Samuel and Jacob Weston.²⁵ Historians such as Larry Koger and Loren Schweninger have shown that both benevolence and commercial advantage motivated slaveholding among free persons of color in South Carolina. In the face of legal prohibitions on private manumission, free persons sometimes nominally owned relatives and friends. But free persons also bought and sold enslaved people in order to exploit their labor. For some free men and women of color, as historian Amrita Chakrabarti Myers notes, their sense of what their own freedom meant included enslaving others.²⁶

An alternative, and concurrent, connotation of freedom was the possession and skillful deployment of knowledge. Despite legal proscriptions against school-keeping by Black teachers, free Black adults in Charleston operated a number of private schools for their children. Sometimes the covert teachers were men and women of the community, including, in the 1850s, Clionian member Simeon W. Beaird and a supporter of the group, Frances Pinckney Bonneau, whose father, Thomas S. Bonneau, had taught Daniel A. Payne. Sometimes, more in keeping with the letter of the law, members of the community employed young white college students as teachers, like the Mood brothers: John Amos, Francis Asbury, and William.²⁷ Members of the Clionian Debating Society were educated in private schools like these, where readings might include histories of classical Greece and Rome as well as the liberty-filled speeches of Caleb Bingham’s Columbian Orator.²⁸

Comparative prosperity, educational attainments, and even participation in the enslavement of other people did not insulate free persons of color from virulent racism. Between 1820 and 1861 Charleston’s free Black population experienced increased constraints and oppression from white supremacists, including prohibitions on travel outside the state, prohibitions on learning, discrimination in churches, threats of violence, and, in the second half of the 1850s, repeated legal and legislative efforts at widespread enslavement of all Black people regardless of their legal status.²⁹ These were “political disadvantages” indeed.

Page xix →The decade during which the Clionian Debating Society flourished was thus a time of increasing fear, uncertainty, and upheaval. What could such a society have meant for its members? Marks notes that “voluntary associations among free people of color” in Charleston created opportunities “to maintain social links with individuals matching their racial and economic profile, to bolster social prestige, and to establish themselves as models of freedom in a society that by and large viewed African-descended people as suited only for slavery.”³⁰ The debating society’s minutes are consonant with this view; Clionian meetings created social support and also encouraged members to represent themselves as independent thinkers, performatively confounding white racial ideologies. Members of the society created a place for learning, camaraderie, and the performance of a commitment to public life, enacting self-respect and community involvement even as external threats mounted. The Clionian Debating Society thus exemplifies the organizational form that communication scholar Catherine R. Squires labels an enclave public, a “discursive institution” separate from dominant publics—often “deployed in response to conditions of intense oppression”—that can serve as “a source of history, pride, or community connections” and can generate “ideologies of self-determination.”³¹ To attempt to elucidate motivations, goals, and achievements of the Clionians, I now turn briefly to the features of their activities. Members of the group established governing protocols for membership and communal action, they organized and performed debates, they prepared and delivered speeches, they established a small library through donation and purchase, and—as evident in the two proceedings volumes—they created an archive of their own history.

The impression that emerges from the Clionian minutes is a profound sense of orderliness, a deep investment in the rule of law, and a commitment to language—written and read—as the foundation for appropriate action. The group adopted and signed a constitution immediately upon establishing the society, and members frequently read the constitution aloud when initiating new members or installing new officers. Although they often changed the rules, they adhered carefully to them once they were in place. They also appealed to the rules to adjudicate conflicts. For instance, one unusual meeting in 1848 erupted in turmoil that briefly turned physical, when “Mr. Jacob Green … shoved Mr. [William] Gailliard against the mantle peice.” The society managed this crisis by recurring to the letter of its constitution, a solution that required several discussions but apparently restored harmony.³²

Page xx →The Clionians conducted society business through officers and committees, and there was great scope for individual participation. They elected new officers about every four months in their most active years, a standing Committee of Queries proposed questions for debate, and the members appointed ad hoc committees to compose correspondence. They even dissolved the society by committee; at the last minuted meeting, a committee of five was appointed to effect termination.³³ Conrad D. Ludeke was a member of the dissolution committee. During his involvement with the Clionians, he had enjoyed a range of participatory opportunities. Ludeke joined the society in 1852, when he was about seventeen. He helped to write a letter of thanks to a donor, chaired an administrative committee, served as the society’s reporter and president pro tem, and participated in multiple debates.³⁴

The level of involvement in the debating society for Ludeke and his fellows contrasted sharply with their external situation. Although possessing rights to hold property, free Black men like the Clionian members were considered denizens, not citizens, of South Carolina, as historian Marina Wikramanayake has shown.³⁵ They thus lacked political rights, and so, for example, they could not aspire to vote in elections even when they reached the age of twenty-one. Within the debating society, however, they voted on everything: on the admission of new members, on officers and members of standing committees, on orators, and on society rules. They voted on when and how often the group would meet. Sometimes they determined to meet weekly, sometimes twice monthly or monthly. Thus they not only subscribed to the principle of the rule of law, but within the space of the society, they adopted the values and forms of democratic governance that the nation had failed to enact for them and for so many others.

Debating, the Clionian Debating Society’s main activity, was thus conducted in a deliberate, formal fashion. Typically, the Committee of Queries proposed several questions for debate at a future meeting and the society chose among them; two members were appointed, often in an alphabetical rotation, to prepare the affirmative and negative cases. On the evening of the debate, the two presented their cases, other members of the society joined in, and the debate concluded at a time stipulated in advance. The society’s president rendered a decision, although the minutes are ambiguous on whether the decision was made on the so-called merits of the question or the ability of the debaters to support positions; pre–Civil War debating societies rendered decisions in different ways, and there was not a widespread standard.³⁶ The Clionian minutes indicate the verdicts, but we should be careful not to assume that they necessarily reveal Page xxi →collective beliefs. Many verdicts are consonant with what we would expect this group to support, such as an affirmative decision on the question “Is education beneficial to society?”³⁷ Yet the president ruled for the negative in a debate asking “whether the United States was right in declaring her Independence,” and the terms of that debate and the rationale for the decision remain a tantalizing mystery.³⁸ Further, the same question debated at different times could result in opposing decisions. Some members, such as Enoch G. Beaird, Simeon’s brother, led the winning side in their assigned debates so often that it seems likely the decisions were responsive to the debaters’ performance.

The direct sources of inspiration for the queries are likewise uncertain. Historians of Charleston have correctly observed that the questions debated by the Clionians are similar to questions debated by students in the Chrestomathic Literary Society at the College of Charleston, a group that had split off from the college’s Cliosophic Literary Society in 1848, while Francis Asbury Mood was a student. Any implication that the Clionians followed the lead of the white collegians in selecting debate topics, however, is difficult to sustain when the dates of similar debates are compared, since the Clionians more often than not debated questions before the same questions were argued by the Chrestomaths.³⁹ Furthermore, debating questions were comparable around the country and had been so for decades, in college societies and popular groups alike. Although organizational records typically remained private, questions appeared in newspaper reports and in published books. For example, Charles Morley’s pocket-sized handbook, A Guide to Forming and Conducting Lyceums, Debating Societies, &c., published in New York in 1841, listed topics and questions that were already conventional, from “Are fictitious writings beneficial?” to “Did Napoleon do more hurt than good to the world?”⁴⁰ Later texts, such as Frederic Rowton’s The Debater (1846) and James N. McElligott’s The American Debater (1855), listed hundreds of debating questions along with advice about arguments, evidence, and resources.⁴¹ We do not know whether members of the Clionian Debating Society owned texts like these, but the crucial point is this: the details of what counted as a good debating question and hence an appropriate focus of intellectual energy were circulated widely in pre–Civil War US culture. Transference of questions by word of mouth also helped some questions to become standard, a part of shared assumptions about what a debate was.

The minutes record the Clionians’ debates on ninety-three questions (see appendix B). Usually they debated a single question in one meeting, but sometimes the debate was continued over two meetings. Like other debaters throughout the country, the Clionians argued issues of policy and value, both specific and abstract. They sometimes drew attention to current events. For instance, they Page xxii →debated in 1848 whether “the acquisition of California [would] be of any great use to the U.S.,” and in 1854 they asked of the ongoing Crimean War whether “France & England [were] right in interfering in the present struggle between Russia & Turkey.”⁴²

These “devotees of old Clio” spent a great deal of time with questions of historical interpretation, especially military careers.⁴³ They asked whether Charlemagne and Caesar were great men, and they repeatedly rehashed Napoleon’s life and career. They compared his military prowess to that of Hannibal, they debated whether “ambition … led Napoleon to battle,” they twice debated whether the exile to St. Helena had been right, and they argued about the meaning of Wellington’s victory at Waterloo.⁴⁴

They also devoted attention to questions about learning, asking whether “Literary or Military glory” was more “desirable,” whether “Ancient or Modern history” was more “interesting,” and “whether success[es] in difficult Sciences are the results of Genius, or Industry and Perseverance.”⁴⁵ The final query that the society adopted for debate—a question apparently never debated—turned out to be a poignant one. It was “Which is more conducive to Individual improvement—Solitude or Society?” At the group’s next minuted meeting, eight months later, the members discussed “the propriety and necessity of a change in the object and purposes … from a debating to a reading association … which was thought would be more favorable to the circumstances of the members.” Although a majority that evening chose to “continue as heretofore” and only to reduce the required quorum “from five to three members,” the group would shortly dissolve.⁴⁶ Improvement would have to persist in solitude, whether or not that approach was conducive to success.

Some questions that were common elsewhere were not taken up by the Clionians, and we are left to elicit meaning through absence. Direct questions about slavery, emancipation, and legal issues related to sectional tension were frequent in debating societies throughout the nation.⁴⁷ During the time that the Clionians were active, for instance, the Chrestomathic Literary Society debated questions such as “Is the American Union threatened with dissolution by the Slavery Question?” “Will the revival of the Slave trade be beneficial?” “Will the Slavery question produce a dissolution in the Union?” “Is Slavery Right?” “Who derived the greatest advantage from the Slave Trade, Master or Slave?” and “Is the law prohibiting the education of slaves in Carolina just?”⁴⁸ The topic roiling the nation was common in many venues. Although it seems probable that issues of enslavement arose during the Clionians’ debates on questions concerning topics such as the Mexican-American War, such details were not minuted.⁴⁹ The Clionians did not frame any debating questions directly about enslavement, and Page xxiii →the terms slavery, abolition, secession, emancipation, and even the South never appear in their minutes. Why? Did they fear surveillance or retaliation by local white elites? Community experience taught the validity of this concern.⁵⁰ Did they wish to avoid fostering ill will among themselves, since members’ families were both slaveholding and nonslaveholding? Or did they wish to use the comparatively safe enclave to practice their argumentative skills on questions that did not hit so close to home, to perform freedom from the ever-present culture of slavery?

Silence is suggestive but not conclusive. In addition to questions of enslavement and sectionalism, the Clionians did not debate common topics such as dueling, the political rights of women, or the value of theatrical entertainments, although they did debate the displacement of Indigenous people and capital punishment, two of the most common issues for debaters nationally.⁵¹ If, as Drago observes, “the free black elite could ill afford to indulge in dueling or pander to its code of honor,” it is also true that political participation was elusive for the men as well as the women of this community, and religious activity was more significant than entertainment to many of these young men.⁵² Yet personal salience was clearly not a primary rationale for choosing debating questions, since it is difficult to imagine the direct relevance of a question like “Who was the Greatest and most virtuous General, Caesar or Pompey?”⁵³

We can envision, however, the possible personal import of a question like “Emigration: does it tend, or has it ever tended to the advancement of civilization?” The Clionians debated this topic in April 1852, concluding with a negative verdict. Emigration was a term frequently used to describe not only Black Americans’ colonization of places such as Liberia in West Africa but also the exodus of free persons of color from the slaveholding South. Two years before, a Clionian member had introduced the subject of “having Diplomas to present to members that may in time leave the State.” Departures of free Black Charlestonians would become common through the later 1850s and early 1860s. Yet the 1852 debating question was framed in such general terms that it could have invited a discussion of foreign immigration to the United States, an ordinary topic among debaters at the time.⁵⁴

Although the Clionians’ extant records are reticent about rationales for the choice of questions and the development of arguments, they do provide frequent hints of the emotional dimensions of debating activities. The questions are stylistically earnest, but society secretaries inscribe an impression of the debates as characterized by youthful zeal, not deadly solemnity. Minutes refer to the “spirited,” “animated,” or “heated” nature of the debates, or they claim that only the onslaught of time prompted debates to end. For example, the Page xxiv →secretary William O. Weston in 1853 recorded, “The sands of time had slipped from under us & we could plead no more.”⁵⁵ Whereas stringent local curfews imposed on the Black population made clock-watching vital for these young men, society secretaries tended to reframe the fact of legal restrictions into a commentary on the members’ passion for debating. Contrary evidence appears rarely, as when in 1848 a society president beseeched “earnestly that every member would study his debate thoroughly before every meeting.”⁵⁶ Far more often, the minutes portray the members as devoted and enthusiastic.

Whereas debating was the primary, titular focus of the Clionian Debating Society, the group also provided opportunities for public speaking in officers’ addresses and in formal orations. The Clionians practiced the oratorical art as epideictic, naming and celebrating shared values and stabilizing the community through regular rituals. At the ceremony of officers’ installation, new officers spoke to the membership, with presidents typically returning thanks, endorsing the society’s perseverance toward intellectual improvement, and offering encouragement. Subordinate officers indicated their commitment to the tasks before them, promising to do their best. These inaugural occasions ritually reconstituted the society, reaffirming the relationships among society members and their elected leaders.⁵⁷ The occasions of formal orations also stressed the society’s goals and, sometimes, its links to the larger community of supporters.

Formal orations were of two types (see appendix C): first, members periodically delivered short prepared speeches to other members. These were called “quarterly,” “semi-annual,” “regular,” or “private” orations. Second, at yearly anniversary occasions, annual orators spoke to members and guests. Five of the young men who delivered quarterly orations—Enoch G. Beaird, Simeon W. Beaird, Henry Cardozo, William Gailliard, and William O. Weston—were later elected annual orator. All annual orators except the first one were regular members of the society; on January 1, 1849, honorary member Job G. Bass delivered the first annual oration.

The texts of the Clionian orations do not survive, but the minutes provide brief descriptions. Topics emphasized the importance of well-directed learning for the individual and society at large. In orations before the members, for example, Enoch G. Beaird spoke on “good and careful reading,” both Simeon W. Beaird and Augustus L. Horry lauded the virtue of “perseverance,” and J. Μ. F. Dereef promoted “the advantages of reading standard works.”⁵⁸ Annual orations had similar topics, with Henry Cardozo discussing “the rewards and Page xxv →results of a well directed ambition” and Richard S. Holloway reflecting on the “advantages accruing from a cultivated mind.”⁵⁹ The minutes represent these orations as a ritual celebration of the society’s aspirations.

The orations are sometimes presented as evidence of speakers’ own intellectual qualities. For example, William O. Weston was a quarterly orator in August 1849, when he was about seventeen years old. He spoke on education, and the minutes record that his speech was “the grandest proof of the advantages derived from the attainment of the same.” The next year, when Augustus L. Horry spoke, the record stated that he “displayed a depth of intellect worthy of being cultivated.”⁶⁰ Thus the topical selections reinforced the purposes of the society, and individual performances offered evidence of its success, available for audience assessment.

Although the lectures described in the Clionian Debating Society minutes are similar to those delivered at other mutual-improvement societies, celebrating the virtues of personal commitments to learning, on one occasion a link to contemporary racial politics was more clearly in evidence. In 1855, when William O. Weston was society secretary, he recorded of Benjamain Roberts’s annual oration: “The ascendant star in the galaxy of Palestine’s hopes was burnished with a sun-like aspect by this son of Clio & the not far distant day when Ethiopia too shall stretch forth her hands, appeared but as the ’morrow before the phrophetic touch of the speaker.”⁶¹ In his elaborate literary style, Weston pointed to Roberts’s focus on learning as the basis for the global spread of Christianity, and the allusion to Psalm 68:31—“Ethiopia shall soon stretch out her hands unto God”—links his observations with one strand of nineteenth-century Black nationalism, signaling hope for the evangelization of Africa and revival of African power.⁶² Although the nuances of Roberts’s position remain elusive, the reference does illustrate an imagined connection with the peoples of the African diaspora broadly.

The Clionians not only emphasized debating and lecturing but also the reading and study necessary for competent oral performance and intellectual growth. Beginning in December 1848 they began discussing the establishment of a collection of print publications, and the minutes record additions to this library from 1849 through 1855 (see appendix D). The library was accessible to members, and on anniversary occasions it was displayed for visitors.⁶³ Members were assessed fees for purchases, but the collection grew primarily through donations. Sometimes the minutes simply record the addition of “pamphlets of good speeches” or “several valuable works,” but they do identify many of the Page xxvi →holdings.⁶⁴ The Clionians and their network of patrons simultaneously sought standard works and locally significant texts.

A few books held by the Clionians were ubiquitous in mutual-improvement associations of the time, especially Noah Webster’s famous dictionary and the autobiography of Benjamin Franklin.⁶⁵ Like other societies, the Clionians in their choice of published texts emphasized religious and historical themes, along with transatlantic intellectualism. The library was inaugurated when Job G. Bass gave the society a Bible in January 1849. Religious themes persisted, from the group’s purchase in 1850 of Francis Hawks’s Monuments of Egypt, which argues that archaeological discoveries in Africa reveal the truth of scripture, to the donation in 1855 of the works of the first-century Jewish historian Flavius Josephus.⁶⁶ Other works emphasized European history and echoed the debating questions. The library included two volumes of Thomas Babington Macaulay’s History of England, Thomas Carlyle’s French Revolution, William Grimshaw’s History of France, and Richard Swainson Fisher’s Book of the World.⁶⁷ Military and political history dominated the library’s holdings, but in 1850 the group purchased Elizabeth Starling’s Noble Deeds of Woman just four months after supporter Emma Farbeaux gave the society three unnamed books by “distinguished Authoresses.”⁶⁸ The Clionians held primarily nonfiction, although in 1849 Bass donated a volume by American writer James Kirke Paulding, and in 1851 the local schoolteacher Frances Pinckney Bonneau presented works of the Irish poet Thomas Moore.⁶⁹

Books like these were standards of the day, common in libraries across the nation.⁷⁰ Yet the Clionians also established a collection of local print materials published by white intellectuals. The group owned copies of pamphlet speeches such as an address on the value of education delivered by Francis W. Capers when he was a professor at the Citadel, a lecture on geology delivered to the South Carolina legislature by Professor Richard T. Brumby of South Carolina College, and a sermon by James W. Miles, an Episcopal minister and a professor of Greek and history at the College of Charleston.⁷¹ In 1854 Henry Cardozo gave the society a copy of a book by John Bachman, a Lutheran minister and a College of Charleston professor of natural history, entitled The Doctrine of the Unity of the Human Race Examined on the Principles of Science. Published in 1850, Bachman’s book intervened in ongoing public debates about whether different races of people derived from a single origin or multiple origins. The multiple-origins—or polygenist—position was a powerful resource for proslavery advocates, and Bachman, a monogenist although he defended chattel slavery and white supremacy, criticized the polygenist perspective. Cardozo’s donation implies an interest in promoting engagement with Bachman’s ideas Page xxvii →among debating society members.⁷² The Clionians’ library seems to have lacked works supporting polygenism, despite their easy availability.⁷³

Contemporary US politics was not a theme of the society’s library holdings, and even Bachman’s book was presented as scientific scholarship, not a political polemic. One exception occurred in April 1850, however, when the society planned the purchase of “Five political speeches recently delivered in the Senate.”⁷⁴ If the term “the Senate” refers to the national legislature, then these speeches may have concerned topics like the Fugitive Slave Act, the abolition of slavery in the District of Columbia, or the imprisonment of free Black seamen in southern ports.⁷⁵ In their acquisition of print media, the Clionians may have tracked the ongoing sectional crisis and its local effects.

The Clionians not only amassed publications, but they also created a written history of their own activities, which they preserved with care. The two detailed volumes recording society proceedings are a case in point. These volumes also refer to documents that are no longer extant, such as a book of rules, treasurers’ records, and copies of correspondence. Further, the Clionians asked orators to supply handwritten texts of their orations for the society’s collections, and many speakers complied instantly, indicating that speaking from a prepared text was ordinary practice.⁷⁶ Much less customary was a request for a debater’s notes, although in 1848 the society asked William E. Marshall for a copy of his arguments against restraining the liberty of the press and Simeon W. Beaird for his arguments concerning the justice of the Mexican–American War.⁷⁷

Recordkeeping was a common activity of nineteenth-century debating societies, but the Clionian minutes are more explicit about the goals of preservation than most records. In 1849, for instance, Beaird minuted his motion following Weston’s quarterly oration: “S. W. Beaird now rose to move the Society, request a copy of the beautiful speech just delivered, that they may always preserve its valuable and sound contents among the relics of the body.”⁷⁸ The Clionians lived in a city already deeply invested in its history. In 1848 the white elite had celebrated the centennial of the Charleston Library Society with much fanfare about the significance of historic preservation and of establishing a record of excellence available for future emulation.⁷⁹ Furthermore, contemporaneous organizations within the free Black community in Charleston also kept detailed minutes; records still extant include those of the Brown Fellowship Society, the Friendly Moralist Society, and the Friendly Association.⁸⁰ The Clionians’ efforts to capture and preserve records of what they did and said, like the archiving efforts of other local groups, were a performative assertion of their own worth Page xxviii →and the value of their activities. Even now, their minute books assert the group’s presence, aspirations, and actions.

On July 20, 1853, Augustus L. Horry attended a Clionian Debating Society meeting. He had joined the society in 1849 and had participated actively, appearing regularly in debates, serving on committees of correspondence, and once, in 1850, delivering a quarterly oration. Horry had given gifts to the society: a maple table and four armchairs, some “valuable works” for the library, and a decorative picture. Then in December 1852, by letter from Philadelphia, Horry informed the group that he “had left the State ‘probably for life’” and thus, with regret, must resign. He promised to send a “Gilt Frame Mythological Picture” as soon as possible. The society unanimously elected Horry an honorary member. But then he returned to Charleston, and he was invited to the July 20 meeting of the Clionian Debating Society as an “especial guest.” Horry spoke at this meeting, and William O. Weston noted in the minutes that he concluded with gratitude, saying “that this memorable scene would be one that he would be able to point out as being a green oasis in the history of his life.”⁸¹ The metaphor of this meeting as a “green oasis” resonates with the sense of the society generally as a place of safety, growth, and sustenance. Yet the metaphor is not only spatial; Weston did not record Horry’s having said “a green oasis in the desert of my life.” The oasis is also temporal, an experience shared with others along an unfolding path, to be carried into the future. If the young men of the Clionian Debating Society created an oasis in space and time, how might we summarize its features? This oasis can, I believe, be understood as a place of renewal more than as a place of escape.

The living waters of this oasis were practices of literacy—reading, writing, speaking, debating—that were widely accepted as substantive education of the day. Across the nation, those who lacked access to formal institutions of higher education—as well as those few white men who had received collegiate training—created societies for themselves where intellectual culture could flourish, whether in coastal cities or interior settlements. These groups tended to be comparatively homogenous in gender, racial identification, and social standing. The Clionians operated consistently with other groups of ambitious young men in formalizing their procedures for action, in debating questions both abstract and concrete, in displaying their goals through oratory, in establishing library resources, and in generating scribal texts that asserted their own presence and intellectual capacities. They practiced their developing skills in the context of male camaraderie, and their minutes repeatedly referred to “our brotherlike Page xxix →assemblage,” “this brotherly Institution,” and the “beloved Society.”⁸² The positive value of the young men’s collaboration was regularly endorsed by men and women of their community.

Yet the members of the Clionian Debating Society performed these conventions of learning within a context of oppression, to which their 1858 phrase “present political disadvantages” elusively alludes. This phrase is a rare signal of the free Black community’s precarious situation within a decade’s worth of society minutes. It may be tempting to conclude that the Clionians chose conventional foci to distinguish themselves from enslaved people and to deflect white society’s suspicions of potential subversion, but such an assessment assumes that white elites were a primary audience for the Clionians’ activities.⁸³ Although the society’s minute books could have withstood the surveillance of white elites suspicious of Black revolt, neither the minutes nor the activities they describe rhetorically invoke a surveilling audience. The language of these minutes was written to be read by the Clionians themselves: literally because meetings began with the reading of the previous meeting’s minutes and also conceptually because the minutes carefully recorded items of significance to the participants and even contained oblique insider language, like Weston’s references to “the President’s hat” as the sign that the time for debate was at an end.⁸⁴ That is, an important way to read these minutes is as their language implies: as records created by young men reporting their activity to and for themselves. Likewise, the activities they minuted are represented as members’ displays for one another and occasionally for supporters. These are displays of thoughtfulness and rectitude. In their study of Black American manhood, Darlene Clark Hine and Earnestine Jenkins note that in the pre–Civil War urban North, free Black men often valued a vision of manhood that emphasized “honor and integrity … and being responsible for oneself, one’s family, and the community.”⁸⁵ In the urban South, the Clionians similarly enacted self-respect and, as their minutes stated, “usefulness to ourselves and to others.”⁸⁶

Furthermore, we should be careful not to collapse the Clionians’ emphasis on Western educational forms into a simple alliance with whiteness. It is true that classical subjects were the same as those taught by and to the white male elite, yet it does not necessarily follow that an interest in Western classical antiquity—or in debating, for that matter—was motivated by a desire for duplication. Instead, such an interest lays claim to the heritage of world culture generally, not defined by biological attributes but owing to curiosity and imagination. In 1903 W. E. B. Du Bois wrote in Souls of Black Folk: “I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not…. From out the caves of evening that swing between the strong-limbed earth and the tracery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Page xxx →Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension…. Is this the life you grudge us, O knightly America?” In rhetorical scholar Kirt H. Wilson’s interpretation, Du Bois’s book “redirects racial inquiry from biology to discourse—the process of perception, interpretation, meaning, and communication.”⁸⁷ Read beside the poetic genius of Du Bois, the everyday minutes of the Clionian Debating Society from a half century before seem to resonate with an impulse similar to Du Bois’s. In 1851 Clionian member Stephen J. Maxwell delivered a lecture on education, showing, as the minutes say, “the importance of Learning in preparing Man to act his part in the great drama of life and in opening his mental eyes to the works of nature particularly as exhibited in the Starry firmament above.”⁸⁸ On this reading, the Clionians, as they turn skyward, join a project of self-determination and, implicitly, of resistance to racist ideologies. Debating and lecturing and writing letters and reading books and voting on the rules become what Hine and Jenkins call one of “the myriad ways in which slaves and free people in the Americas, against all odds, kept alive the will to survive, for themselves and their descendants, with their humanity intact.”⁸⁹ This oasis, then, is a place to perform freedom, as individuals and as a collective. The form of freedom that was possible to perform, however, was severely limited, as elliptical references to “difficulties and discouragements” and “political disadvantages” demonstrate.⁹⁰

There are further paradoxes. This group—like others of its day—was exclusionary along multiple axes, and the society simultaneously corresponded with Black abolitionists and made honorary members of Black men who held other people in bondage. Topics of racial justice were not explicit subjects of debate, although some queries suggest the possibility that they were discussed. Roberts’s oration hints at a sense of identification with people of the African diaspora broadly, and the donation of Bachman’s book and the apparent plan to acquire US Senate speeches suggest that discussions of race were not entirely deflected.

Three years after the Clionian Debating Society dissolved, the Confederate bombardment of Fort Sumter in Charleston Harbor began the bloody war that would end chattel slavery and, as Hine and Jenkins note, would “politiciz[e] black men.”⁹¹ It is one of the ironies of history that several men of the Clionian Debating Society, who in the 1850s had no prospect of political participation, would deploy their linguistic skills in and for US institutions.⁹²

Three examples demonstrate this. First, Conrad D. Ludeke (1835–1895) left Charleston for New York in 1860. In 1861 he enlisted in the Union Army—perceived as a white man with a “dark complexion”—and he served until 1866, achieving the rank of captain and serving as an adjutant, keeping infantry Page xxxi →records. After a stint as the chief clerk of the Metropolitan Police of New Orleans, Ludeke returned to Charleston in 1871, where he worked as a butcher and, later, a US pension agent, before his death in 1895.⁹³ Second, Henry Cardozo (1830–1886) went to Cleveland in 1858, where he worked as a tailor. Ten years later he returned to South Carolina, and he served in the state legislature during the 1870s. He was a Methodist minister and a trustee of Claflin University.⁹⁴ Finally, Simeon W. Beaird (1826–1894), having taught clandestinely in Charleston in the 1850s, also taught Black children during and after the Civil War in Augusta, Georgia. A Republican politician, he was elected to Georgia’s state constitutional convention in 1867, and in 1870 he chaired a delegation to the White House to alert President Ulysses S. Grant to the dire situation of Georgia’s Black citizenry. By 1873 Beaird was a Methodist minister in Aiken, South Carolina, and treasurer of Aiken County.⁹⁵ Perhaps he was also the one who kept the Clionian minute books safe before they entered the rare book trade.

The common features of these careers are practices of literacy, both written and oral, from recordkeeping to exhortation. Perhaps, like Horry, these men found the Clionian Debating Society to be “a green oasis” in the history of their lives as well. If so, their stint at the oasis may have given them space and time to hone their rhetorical skills. Extant records supply suggestive evidence of the practical benefits of learning for these men and many of their fellows. The minutes of the Clionian Debating Society thus offer strong and important evidence of the educational interests and investments of Black male leaders in the postwar South.

Yet that is not the whole story. Whereas from 1847 to 1858 members of the Clionian Debating Society might readily have envisioned that their practice in self-governance, debating, speaking, reading, and writing was preparing them for leadership within the free Black community in Charleston, they could not have known the results of the cataclysmic war on the horizon nor have self-consciously equipped themselves for leadership in national Reconstruction. Indeed, not all of them survived to see the war come. One society member, Alexander C. Forrester, died of tetanus in 1853, only two months after leading the affirmative side in a debate on the question “Does the distance of a Country’s dominions weaken the force of its Laws therein?”⁹⁶ He had little chance to deploy his skills in broader arenas. The vagaries of time and experience duly caution us to imagine what participation in the debating society could have meant at the time the members were meeting and not only to focus on practical results across time. From 1847 to 1858 the Clionians had fun together, learning and speaking and developing their skills. We would do well to imagine that Page xxxii →pursuing knowledge in society, not solitude, was not simply instrumental preparation for the future but also an experience of joy.

1. 1. Entry for September 18, 1850, in Clionian Debating Society (Charleston, SC), Proceedings, 1847–1851, Charleston Library Society, Charleston, SC (hereafter CDS-CLS); the “afflictions” query was selected on September 11. In this introduction, nonstandard spellings within quotations are not marked with sic.
2. 2. John Garrison Marks, Black Freedom in the Age of Slavery (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2020), 120.
3. 3. Charleston Library Society, “Clionian Debating Society,” 2023, https://charlestonlibrarysociety.omeka.net/collections/show/15; ad, Augustus Wilfrid Dellquest, Historic Augusta (Augusta, GA: A. W. Dellquest Book, 1917), 21; ad, The Biblio, July 1921, 24; CDS-CLS, seller’s card, inside front cover. In 1847 Greer’s shop was at 135 King Street.
4. 4. “Business Notes,” Publishers’ Weekly, July 8, 1922, 82; inside front cover and entries for September 22, 1851, January 14, 1858, in Clionian Debating Society (Charleston, SC), Proceedings, 1851–1858, David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Duke University, Durham, NC (hereafter CDS-Duke); “Annual Reports, 1931–1936,” box 17, George Washington Flowers Collection of Southern Americana Records, Rubenstein Library, Duke University; The Centennial Exhibit of the Duke University Library, Consisting of Material from the George Washington Flowers Memorial Collection of Books and Documents Relating to the History and Literature of the South, April 5–June 5, 1939 (Durham, NC, 1939), 5.
5. 5. Angela G. Ray, “Warriors and Statesmen: Debate Education among Free African American Men in Antebellum Charleston,” in Speech and Debate as Civic Education, ed. J. Michael Hogan, Jessica A. Kurr, Michael J. Bergmaier, and Jeremy D. Johnson (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2017), 25–28.
6. 6. See the flyleaf of W. H. Seat, The Confederate States of America in Prophecy (Nashville, TN: Southern Methodist Publishing House, 1861), http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/000778241, image 3.
7. 7. This introduction uses the present-day term free Black person interchangeably with the common term in pre–Civil War Charleston, free person of color, while recognizing that some of the people associated with the Clionian Debating Society would have chosen other terms, such as brown. The minutes themselves use no racial descriptors, and public records associated with these individuals use a range of terms to designate race, color, or ethnicity: black, brown, colored, dark, free person of color or FPC, mulatto, Negro, West Indian, and white.
8. 8. For the Act of 1834, see David J. McCord, ed., The Statutes at Large of South Carolina (Columbia, SC: A. S. Johnston, 1840), 7: 468–70.
9. 9. Theodore D. Jervey to E. Horace Fitchett, May 13, 1939, reproduced in E. Horace Fitchett, “The Free Negro in Charleston, South Carolina” (PhD diss., University of Chicago, 1950), 18; Edmund L. Drago, Initiative, Paternalism, and Race Relations: Charleston’s Avery Normal Institute (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1990), 27; Bernard E. Powers Jr., Black Charlestonians: A Social History, 1822–1885 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1994), 52; Michael O’Brien, Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810–1860, vol. 1 (Chapel Hill: Page xxxiii →University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 424. A revised edition of Drago’s 1990 book appeared as Edmund L. Drago, Charleston’s Avery Center: From Education and Civil Rights to Preserving the African American Experience, rev. ed., rev. and ed. W. Marvin Dulaney (Charleston, SC: History Press, 2006), see esp. 35–38. On my research trajectory, see Angela G. Ray, “Rhetoric and the Archive,” Review of Communication 16, no. 1 (2016): 43–59; and Angela G. Ray, “Archival Profusion, Archival Silence, and Analytic Invention: Reinventing Histories of Nineteenth-Century African American Debate,” Transactions of the American Philosophical Society 112, no. 3 (2023): 95–114.
10. 10. Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, ed. Lydia Maria Child (Boston, 1861), 286.
11. 11. Thomas S. Harding, College Literary Societies: Their Contribution to Higher Education in the United States, 1815–1876 (New York: Pageant, 1971), 19, 21, 89; J. Jefferson Looney, Nurseries of Letters and Republicanism: A Brief History of the American Whig–Cliosophic Society and Its Predecessors, 1765–1941, foreword by Tina Ravitz and Donald E. Stokes (Princeton, NJ: Trustees of the American Whig-Cliosophic Society, Princeton University, 1996), 4. See also David Potter, Debating in the Colonial Chartered Colleges: An Historical Survey, 1642 to 1900 (New York: Teachers College, 1944), 64–93; David Potter, “The Literary Society,” in History of Speech Education in America: Background Studies, ed. Karl R. Wallace (New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1954), 238–58; David Potter, “The Debate Tradition,” in Argumentation and Debate: Principles and Practices, ed. James H. McBath, rev. ed. (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963), 14–32; W. Martin Bloomer, “Controversia and Suasoria,” in Encyclopedia of Rhetoric, ed. Thomas O. Sloane (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 166–69; David Zarefsky, “Debate,” in Encyclopedia of Rhetoric, 191–97; W. Martin Bloomer, “Declamation,” in Encyclopedia of Rhetoric, 197–99; B. Evelyn Westbrook, “Debating Both Sides: What Nineteenth-Century College Literary Societies Can Teach Us about Critical Pedagogies,” Rhetoric Review 21, no. 4 (2002): 339–56; and Carly S. Woods, Debating Women: Gender, Education, and Spaces for Argument, 1835–1945 (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2018).
12. 12. Angela G. Ray, The Lyceum and Public Culture in the Nineteenth-Century United States (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2005), esp. 13–33; Carl Bode, The American Lyceum: Town Meeting of the Mind (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1956).
13. 13. As historian Joseph F. Kett observes, Holbrook “did not invent the popular literary society; rather, he baptized existing societies as lyceums”; Kett, The Pursuit of Knowledge under Difficulties: From Self-Improvement to Adult Education in America, 1750–1990 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994), xvii.
14. 14. Dorothy B. Porter, “The Organized Educational Activities of Negro Literary Societies, 1828–1846,” Journal of Negro Education 5, no. 4 (October 1936): 555–76; Elizabeth McHenry, Forgotten Readers: Recovering the Lost History of African American Literary Societies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002). See also, e.g., Emma Jones Lapsansky, “‘Discipline to the Mind’: Philadelphia’s Banneker Institute, 1854–1872,” in A Question of Manhood: A Reader in U.S. Black Men’s History and Masculinity, ed. Darlene Clark Hine and Earnestine Jenkins, vol. 1 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 399–414; and Shirley Wilson Page xxxiv →Logan, Liberating Language: Sites of Rhetorical Education in Nineteenth-Century Black America (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008).
15. 15. CDS-CLS, November 9, 1847.
16. 16. CDS-CLS, December 17, 1848, January 2, February 15, September 6, December 26, 1849, January 1, December 2, 1850, January 1, 1851; CDS-Duke, September 25, December 22, 1851, January 1, December 30, 1852.
17. 17. The minutes identify twenty-nine men who were members or who were considered for membership, twenty men who were honorary members or considered for that status, and six additional supporters. One person, Augustus L. Horry, was a member first and later, after he left Charleston for Philadelphia, an honorary member.
18. 18. For example, “a brilliant assemblage of both sexes” attended the 1854 anniversary meeting; CDS-Duke, January 2, 1854.
19. 19. Drago, Charleston’s Avery Center, 34; Powers, Black Charlestonians, 48–53; James B. Browning, “The Beginnings of Insurance Enterprise among Negroes,” Journal of Negro History 22, no. 4 (1937): 417–32; Robert L. Harris Jr., “Early Black Benevolent Societies, 1780–1830,” Massachusetts Review 20, no. 3 (1979): 603–25; Robert L. Harris Jr., “Charleston’s Free Afro-American Elite: The Brown Fellowship Society and the Humane Brotherhood,” South Carolina Historical Magazine 82, no. 4 (1981): 289–310; Michael P. Johnson and James L. Roark, “‘A Middle Ground’: Free Mulattoes and the Friendly Moralist Society of Antebellum Charleston,” Southern Studies 21, no. 3 (1982): 246–65; Marks, Black Freedom in the Age of Slavery, 117–53.
20. 20. See, e.g., Michael P. Johnson and James L. Roark, eds., No Chariot Let Down: Charleston’s Free People of Color on the Eve of Civil War (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984), 3–20; Drago, Charleston’s Avery Center; Powers, Black Charlestonians; Amrita Chakrabarti Myers, Forging Freedom: Black Women and the Pursuit of Liberty in Antebellum Charleston (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011); Marks, Black Freedom in the Age of Slavery; Warren Eugene Milteer Jr., Beyond Slavery’s Shadow: Free People of Color in the South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021); and Kerri K. Greenidge, The Grimkés (New York: Liveright, 2023).
21. 21. Myers, Forging Freedom, 83; Drago, Charleston’s Avery Center, 43–44.
22. 22. Powers, Black Charlestonians, 46.
23. 23. On Cardozo, see Eric Foner, Freedom’s Lawmakers: A Directory of Black Officeholders during Reconstruction, rev. ed. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996), 40; and Minutes of the Annual Conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church: Spring Conferences of 1887 (New York: Phillips and Hunt, 1887), 84. On Weston, see Foner, Freedom’s Lawmakers, 226; and William H. Lawrence, A Sketch of the History of the Reorganization of the South Carolina Conference, and of Centenary Church,” in The Centenary Souvenir, Containing a History of Centenary Church, Charleston, and an Account of the Life and Labors of Rev. R. V. Lawrence, Father of the Pastor of Centenary Church (Charleston, SC, 1885), xvi.
24. 24. The two are called Henry Cardozo Jr. and Henry J. D. Cardozo. The former’s handwriting in the Clionian minutes is similar to writing of the Reverend Henry Cardozo from the 1870s, but this identification is speculative. See Henry Cardozo to Charles Holloway, September 7, 1875, in Holloway Family Scrapbook, Holloway Family Collection, Avery Research Center for African American History and Culture, College of Charleston, Charleston, SC.
25. 25. Page xxxv →Larry Koger, Black Slaveowners: Free Black Slave Masters in South Carolina, 1790–1860 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 1985), 143, 148–49, 226.
26. 26. Koger, Black Slaveowners; Loren Schweninger, Black Property Owners in the South, 1790–1915 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990), 104–8; Powers, Black Charlestonians, 39; Myers, Forging Freedom, 122–28.
27. 27. Drago, Charleston’s Avery Center, 46–47; C. W. Birnie, “Education of the Negro in Charleston, South Carolina, Prior to the Civil War,” Journal of Negro History 12, no. 1 (1927): 19; Ronald E. Butchart, Schooling the Freed People: Teaching, Learning, and the Struggle for Black Freedom, 1861–1876 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010), 21; Myers, Forging Freedom, 101–2; Daniel Alexander Payne, Recollections of Seventy Years (Nashville, TN: A.M.E. Sunday School Union, 1888), 15, 36; Francis A. Mood, For God and Texas: Autobiography of Francis Asbury Mood, 1830–1884: Circuit Rider, Educator, and Founder of Southwestern University, Georgetown, Texas, ed. Mary Katherine Metcalfe Earney (Dallas, TX: Listo, 2001), 40–50; Claude Carr Cody, The Life and Labors of Francis Asbury Mood, D.D. (Chicago: F. H. Revell, 1886), esp. 75–80, 92, 104–9. The obituary of Simeon W. Beaird stated that he was educated in the school of “the Rev. Mr. Mood, of the M. E. Church”; this may refer to John Mood (1792–1864), the father of John Amos, Francis, and William, or possibly to Henry Mood (1819–1892), their elder brother. See “The Rev. T. [sic] W. Beaird,” Southwestern Christian Advocate, January 24, 1895, 5.
28. 28. Payne remembered these curricular materials in his Recollections of Seventy Years, 15. He fled South Carolina in 1835 after white authorities closed his school (27–40). Payne was named an honorary member of the Clionian Debating Society in 1847, when he was living in Baltimore, and the members corresponded with him in 1849–1850; see CDS-CLS, December 22, 1847, May 21, 1849, May 29, July 31, August 14, 1850. In addition to serving as AME bishop, Payne was a founder and early president of Ohio’s Wilberforce University.
29. 29. Drago, Charleston’s Avery Center, 38–44; Michael P. Johnson and James L. Roark, Black Masters: A Free Family of Color in the Old South (New York: Norton, 1984), 153–94.
30. 30. Marks, Black Freedom in the Age of Slavery, 120.
31. 31. Catherine R. Squires, “Rethinking the Black Public Sphere: An Alternative Vocabulary for Multiple Public Spheres,” Communication Theory 12 (2002): 459, 460.
32. 32. CDS-CLS, partial entry, preceding February 2, 1848; see also February 2, 4, 9, 10, March 1, 1848. The pages recording the troubled meeting were torn from the minute book, following the society’s decision on March 1 to “blot [the record of the February 1 meeting] from off the proceedings of the Society.” Hence it is not possible to discern the reasons for the conflict.
33. 33. CDS-Duke, January 14, 1858. The minutes are not specific about the committee’s tasks; presumably the men would dispose of the society’s treasury and find homes for its library, record books, and other possessions.
34. 34. CDS-Duke, February 23, July 1, October 25, December 16, 1852, February 14, March 23, July 20, December 21, 1853, July 12, 1854, January 22, 1855, April 7, 1856, January 14, 1858.
35. 35. Marina Wikramanayake, A World in Shadow: The Free Black in Antebellum South Carolina (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1973), 48–54.
36. 36. Page xxxvi →Angela G. Ray, “The Permeable Public: Rituals of Citizenship in Antebellum Men’s Debating Clubs,” Argumentation and Advocacy 41, no. 1 (2004): 5n5.
37. 37. CDS-CLS, December 2, 1850 (query), January 6, 1851 (debate).
38. 38. CDS-CLS, November 23 (query), December 1, 1847 (debate).
39. 39. Drago, Charleston’s Avery Center, 36; Powers, Black Charlestonians, 52; Marks, Black Freedom in the Age of Slavery, 137; Mood, For God and Texas, 49–50. Drago lists nine questions debated by the Clionian Debating Society alongside similar questions debated by the Chrestomathic Literary Society at the college. Yet in only one case (question 6) did the collegians debate the question prior to the Clionians’ debate. Compare CDS-CLS; and Books 1, 2, and 3 (#173/4, 5, 6), Chrestomathic Literary Society Minute Books, College of Charleston Archives, Special Collections, College of Charleston, Charleston, SC. The debating records of the other College of Charleston debating society of the time, the Cliosophic Society, are not extant. At this time the members of each society at the college debated among themselves, not yet against the other group. The Chrestomaths first began to discuss the possibility of a debate between the two societies on January 20, 1858; see Book 3 (#173/6).
40. 40. Charles Morley, A Guide to Forming and Conducting Lyceums, Debating Societies, &c, with Outlines of Discussions and Essays, and an Appendix, Containing an Epitome of Rhetoric, Logic, &c. (New York: A. E. Wright, 1841), 26, 49.
41. 41. Frederic Rowton, The Debater: A New Theory of the Art of Speaking; Being a Series of Complete Debates, Outlines of Debates, and Questions for Discussion (London: Longman, Brown, Green, and Longmans, 1846); James N. McElligott, The American Debater: Being a Plain Exposition of the Principles and Practice of Public Debate (New York: Ivison and Phinney, 1855).
42. 42. CDS-CLS, September 18 (query), December 26, 1848 (debate); CDS-Duke, March 14 (query), March 28, 1854 (debate).
43. 43. CDS-Duke, July 20, 1853. Secretary Henry Cardozo noted what he called, positively, “the usual share of interest that historical questions generally afford”; CDS-Duke, June 14, 1852.
44. 44. On Charlemagne and Caesar, see CDS-Duke, December 13, 1852 (query), January 12 (debate), September 14 (query), September 28, October 12, 1853 (debates). On Napoleon, see CDS-CLS, February 23 (query), March 1 (debate), March 22 (query), April 5, June 7, 1848 (debates), March 14 (query), March 21, 1849 (debate), February 3 (query), March 31, 1851 (debate); CDS-Duke, June 28 (query), October 25, 1852 (debate).
45. 45. CDS-CLS, December 1 (query), December 8, 22, 1847 (debates), September 27 (query), October 4, November 5, 1849 (debates); CDS-Duke, October 27 (query), December 8, 29, 1851 (debates).
46. 46. CDS-Duke, June 2, 1856 (query), February 2, 1857.
47. 47. Ray, “Permeable Public,” 12; Richard L. Weaver II, “Forum for Ideas: The Lyceum Movement in Michigan, 1818–1860” (PhD diss., Indiana University, 1969), 164.
48. 48. Entries for December 19, 1849, in Book 1 (#173/4), February 21, 1855, in Book 2 (#173/5), October 8, 1856, February 11, April 22, June 3, 1857, in Book 3 (#173/6), Chrestomathic Literary Society Minute Books.
49. 49. On war with Mexico, see CDS-CLS, November 16 (query), November 23, 1847 (debate), June 7 (query), September 18, 1848 (debate); CDS-Duke, September 22 (query), October 13, 1851 (debate). See also Drago, Charleston’s Avery Center, 40.
50. 50. Page xxxvii →In 1836 Robert Y. Hayne, then mayor of Charleston, sent for the minutes of the Brown Fellowship Society to determine whether the group should be permitted to meet; Theodore D. Jervey, Robert Y. Hayne and His Times (New York: Macmillan, 1909), 433–34; see also Susan M. Bowler and Edmund L. Drago, “Black Intellectual Life in Antebellum Charleston,” April 7, 1984, p. 11, box 8, folder 7, Eugene C. Hunt Papers, AMN 1047, Avery Research Center. Free persons of color in 1850s Charleston would thus be well aware of the threat of surveillance.
51. 51. CDS-CLS, June 20 (query), June 27, July 5, 1849 (debates); CDS-Duke, May 11 (query), June 8, 22, 1853 (debates); Ray, “Permeable Public,” 12; Angela G. Ray, “Learning Leadership: Lincoln at the Lyceum, 1838,” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 13, no. 3 (Fall 2010): 383n48.
52. 52. Drago, Charleston’s Avery Center, 38.
53. 53. CDS-Duke, June 14 (query), June 28, 1852 (debate).
54. 54. CDS-Duke, April 12 (query), April 26, 1852 (debate); CDS-CLS, July 8, 1850. See Ray, “Permeable Public,” 11; Bjørn F. Stillion Southard, Peculiar Rhetoric: Slavery, Freedom, and the African Colonization Movement (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2019); and Marks, Black Freedom in the Age of Slavery, 137.
55. 55. CDS-Duke, May 11, 1853.
56. 56. CDS-CLS, May 17, 1848.
57. 57. On the symbolic significance of inaugurals, see Karlyn Kohrs Campbell and Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Presidents Creating the Presidency: Deeds Done in Words (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 29–56.
58. 58. CDS-CLS, December 26, 1848, December 26, 1849, August 14, 1850; CDS-Duke, July 26, 1854.
59. 59. CDS-Duke, January 2, 1854, January 7, 1856.
60. 60. CDS-CLS, August 15, 1849, August 14, 1850.
61. 61. CDS-Duke, January 1, 1855. On Roberts’s later ministerial career, see Lawrence, A Sketch of the History,” xiv; and A. W. Pegues, Our Baptist Ministers and Schools (Springfield, MA: Willey, 1892), 412. Pegues’s focus is E. Rainey Roberts, son of Benjamain L. Roberts and Catherine Dereef Roberts, and the text provides useful detail about the family.
62. 62. William R. Scott, “Ethiopianism,” in Encyclopedia of Black Studies, ed. Molefi Kete Asante and Ama Mazama (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2005), 234–35.
63. 63. See, e.g., CDS-Duke, January 2, 1854.
64. 64. CDS-CLS, April 10, 1850; CDS-Duke, September 25, 1851.
65. 65. CDS-CLS, December 26, 1849, December 2, 1850.
66. 66. CDS-CLS, January 1, 1849, December 2, 1850; CDS-Duke, June 18, 1855.
67. 67. CDS-CLS, October 8, December 26, 1849; CDS-Duke, December 8, 1851.
68. 68. CDS-CLS, December 2, August 14, 1850. On Farbeaux, see Ray, Archival Profusion,” 109–13.
69. 69. CDS-CLS, December 26, 1849, March 10, 1851.
70. 70. Comparing the Clionian Debating Society’s list of library acquisitions with catalogs now held at the American Antiquarian Society that were published by mid-nineteenth-century lyceums, young men’s associations, and debating societies reveals considerable overlap, especially for works mentioned in the previous paragraph. Furthermore, two decades after the Clionians created their library, a number of the same texts were listed in Charles H. Moore’s What to Read, and How Page xxxviii →to Read, Being Classified Lists of Choice Reading, Appropriate Hints and Remarks, Adapted to the General Reader, to Subscribers to Libraries, and to Persons Intending to Form Collections of Books, Brought Down to September, 1870 (New York: Appleton, 1871).
71. 71. CDS-CLS, April 17, May 1, 1850, August 11, 1851.
72. 72. CDS-Duke, December 6, 1854.
73. 73. See William Stanton, The Leopard’s Spots: Scientific Attitudes toward Race in America, 1815–59 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1960); and, for texts, Robert Bernasconi, ed., American Theories of Polygenesis, 7 vols. (Bristol, UK: Thoemmes, 2002).
74. 74. CDS-CLS, April 10, 1850.
75. 75. Recent Senate speeches were available in published form; see, e.g., Proceedings of the U.S. Senate, on the Fugitive Slave Bill,—the Abolition of the Slave-Trade in the District of Columbia,—and the Imprisonment of Free Colored Seamen in the Southern Ports: with the Speeches of Messrs. Davis, Winthrop and Others ([Washington, DC]: T. R. Marvin, [1850]).
76. 76. See, e.g., CDS-CLS, February 16, 1848; CDS-Duke, January 7, 1856.
77. 77. CDS-CLS, January 26, October 1, 1848. The position that Beaird supported in the debate is not apparent from the minutes.
78. 78. CDS-CLS, August 15, 1849.
79. 79. James L. Petigru, Oration, Delivered before the Charleston Library Society, at Its First Centennial Anniversary, June 13th, 1848 (Charleston, SC: J. B. Nixon, Printer, 1848), 3.
80. 80. Brown Fellowship Society Records, 1794–1990, and Friendly Moralist Society Records, 1841–1856, both at the Avery Research Center; Friendly Association Records, 1853–1869, South Carolina Historical Society, Charleston, SC. See also Harlan Greene and Jessica Lancia, “The Holloway Scrapbook: The Legacy of a Charleston Family,” South Carolina Historical Magazine 111, nos. 1–2 (January–April 2010): 5–33.
81. 81. CDS-Duke, September 25, 1851, December 16, 30, 1852, July 6, 20, 1853; see also CDS-CLS, February 28, 1849, and passim.
82. 82. CDS-CLS, December 17, 1848, May 22, December 2, 1850.
83. 83. O’Brien, Conjectures of Order, 424. Cf. Marks, Black Freedom in the Age of Slavery, 120.
84. 84. CDS-Duke, April 14, May 11, August 3, October 12, 1853, February 1, April 25, 1854.
85. 85. Darlene Clark Hine and Earnestine Jenkins, “Black Men’s History: Toward a Gendered Perspective,” in Question of Manhood, ed. Hine and Jenkins, 1:22.
86. 86. CDS-CLS, May 17, 1848.
87. 87. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk, rpt., with an introduction and chronology by Jonathan Scott Holloway (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), 83; Kirt H. Wilson, “Towards a Discursive Theory of Racial Identity: The Souls of Black Folk as a Response to Nineteenth-Century Biological Determinism,” Western Journal of Communication 63, no. 2 (1999): 204. See also Kirt H. Wilson, “The Racial Politics of Imitation in the Nineteenth Century,” Quarterly Journal of Speech 89, no. 2 (2003): 89–108.
88. 88. CDS-CLS, April 14, 1851.
89. 89. Hine and Jenkins, “Black Men’s History,” 2.
90. 90. Page xxxix →CLS-Duke, January 14, 1858.
91. 91. Hine and Jenkins, “Black Men’s History,” 51.
92. 92. Marks notes that the Clionians’ hope in the viability of freedom within the United States may have come about directly “because of their affiliation with the society”; Marks, Black Freedom in the Age of Slavery, 137.
93. 93. Entry for June 19, 1860, in Friendly Association Records, 1853–1869; Conrad D. Ludeke, Compiled Military Service Records, Records of the Adjutant General’s Office, 1780s–1917, Record Group 94, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, DC; Conrad D. Ludeke, Military Pension Application File, Records of the Department of Veterans Affairs, 1773–1985, Record Group 15, National Archives. See also Ray, “Rhetoric and the Archive,” 50–56; and Angela G. Ray, “The Agency of the Archive and the Challenges of Classification,” in Recovering Argument, ed. Randall A. Lake (London: Routledge, 2018), 64–65.
94. 94. Journal of the Senate of the State of South Carolina, Being the Regular Session, Commencing November 22, 1870 (Columbia, SC: John W. Denny, Printer to the State, 1870); Lawrence, A Sketch of the History,” xix–xlvii; Minutes of the Annual Conferences of the Methodist Episcopal Church… 1887, 84; Foner, Freedom’s Lawmakers, 40; Claflin University and South Carolina Agricultural College and Mechanics’ Institute, Orangeburg, S.C., 1876–77 [Orangeburg, SC, 1877]. See also Neil Kinghan, A Brief Moment in the Sun: Francis Cardozo and Reconstruction in South Carolina (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2023).
95. 95. “The Freedmen’s Celebration,” Christian Recorder, July 29, 1865, 1; “School Directory,” Loyal Georgian, February 17, 1866, 3; Heather Andrews Williams, Self-Taught: African American Education in Slavery and Freedom (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005), 110, 113, 128–29; J. T. Trowbridge, The South: A Tour of Its Battle-fields and Ruined Cities (Hartford, CT: L. Stebbins, 1866), 490–91; Journal of the Proceedings of the Constitutional Convention of the People of Georgia, Held in the City of Atlanta in the Months of December, 1867, and January, February and March, 1868, and Ordinances and Resolutions Adopted (Augusta, GA: E. H. Pughe, 1868); “Washington,” New York Tribune, March 17, 1870, 1; Appointments of South Carolina Conference,” Christian Recorder, March 6, 1873, 2; Annual Report of the Comptroller General of the State of South Carolina, for the Fiscal Year Ending October 31, 1874, to the General Assembly, in Reports and Resolutions of the General Assembly of the State of South Carolina, at the Regular Session, 1874–’75 (Columbia, SC: Republican Printing, 1875), 200; “Rev. T. W. Beaird.” A photograph of Beaird’s tombstone in Pinelawn Cemetery, Aiken, SC, appears on www.findagrave.com. Secondary sources sometimes confuse Simeon W. Beaird with Thomas P. Beard (1837–1918), a Black newspaper editor and politician in postwar Augusta, GA. See also Ray, “Warriors and Statesmen,” 25–28.
96. 96. CDS-Duke, June 8, 1853; see also February 23 (query), March 9 (debate). Forrester died on May 18, 1853, at age twenty-two; “South Carolina, U.S., Death Records, 1821–1971,” Ancestry.com (online database), 2008, https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/8741/.