Chapter Excerpt  "Dreaded Eloquence"    In the late 1820s and
early 1830s, free blacks in the urban North formed literary
societies as a place in which to read and experiment with
rhetorical strategies. Embracing the Enlightenment stress on the
importance of the life of the mind, they turned to reading as an
invaluable method of acquiring knowledge, and to writing as a
means of asserting identity, recording information, and
communicating with a black public that ranged from the literate
to the semiliterate to the illiterate. These individuals were
vividly aware of the general perception, especially among white
slaveholders in the South, that black literacy and education
posed a significant threat to the future of the slave system and
to maintaining black subordination generally. They were aware
also of the centrality of written texts of national construction
to both the legitimacy of the new nation and to their status in
it. Through their own reading and writing, they sought effective
avenues of public access