The Power of the Word

This Chapter looks at the role of paid anti-slavery agents or lecturers in raising public awareness about slavery. Strictly speaking, the agency system had its origins in Britain but it had its widest impact in the USA. The chapter looks at the growth of the agency system, its organization and size. It then moves on to look in greater detail at the men and women who became agents, among them Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, Abby Kelley, Lucy Stone and Susan B Anthony. Rather like civil rights activists during the 1960s, anti-slavery agents were front-line workers whose job it was to create an anti-slavery public and, in the process, sow the seeds of radical political change. It was demanding and sometimes dangerous work but the agency system would prove a vital part of the wider abolitionist effort right up until the eve of the American Civil War.