“Behold the Wicked Abominations That They Do”: The Nineteenth-Century Roots of the Evidentiary Approach in American Investigative Journalism

Abstract

The idea of investigative reporting is inextricably intertwined with Watergate in the popular and journalistic imagination. But this article traces the long history of the exposé tradition in American journalism, particularly arguing that the evidentiary mindset of investigative reporters first took root in the ferment of 1830s abolitionism. In myriad pamphlets and newspapers, abolitionists began unearthing and laying before the public documentary proof of the abuses of slavery. The apotheosis of this work came in 1839 with the publication of the book-length American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses. It was a tour de force of systematic, evidence-based journalism more than a century before the phrase “investigative reporting” came into use. By connecting the idea of exposing hidden wrongdoing with the documentary method, abolition writers established an early legacy of verification as justification for moral outrage in the act of reporting.

Acknowledgement

The author wishes to thank David Nord for reading a draft of this article, as well as the long-ago graduate school paper from which it derives.

Notes

1 W. Joseph Campbell, “Woodward and Bernstein Didn’t Bring Down a President in Watergate—But the Myth That They Did Lives On,” The Conversation, June 14, 2022, https://theconversation.com/woodward-and-bernstein-didnt-bring-down-a-president-in-watergate-but-the-myth-that-they-did-lives-on-183290.

2 “The Primogenitor,” Muck Rack Daily, June 6, 2022.

3 Journalism historian James Aucoin’s definition of investigative reporting includes five elements: exposure of information, public interest, an effort by someone to conceal the truth, reportorial effort, and reform as a goal. See Aucoin, The Evolution of American Investigative Journalism (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005), 91.

4 Good general treatments of investigative journalism that nevertheless focus mainly on the twentieth century include Aucoin “The Evolution of American Investigative Journalism” as well as Jon Marshall, Watergate’s Legacy and the Press: The Investigative Impulse (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2011).

5 Steve Weinberg, The Reporter’s Handbook: An Investigator’s Guide to Documents and Techniques, 3rd ed. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996), 3.

6 “Prize Winners by Category,” The Pulitzer Prizes, accessed July 2, 2022, https://www.pulitzer.org/prize-winners-categories. The local investigative category continued through 1984, after which it was replaced by a broader investigative reporting category that remains today.

7 The proportion of investigative reports entered in the Pulitzer competition between 1917 and 1960 hovered between ten and twenty percent each year. See Gerry Lanosga, “New Views of Investigative Reporting,” American Journalism 31, no. 4 (2014): 490–506.

8 “Top Journalists: SDX Names Eleven for ’47 Awards,” Quill, July 1948.

9 Carl R. Kesler, “Investigating with Honors,” Quill, June 1955.

10 A seminal study of these journalists is Louis Filler, The Muckrakers (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1976). See also John H. Harrison and Harry H. Stein, eds., Muckraking: Past, Present, and Future (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1975); Walter M. Brasch, Forerunners of Revolution: Muckrakers and the American Social Conscience (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1990); and Robert Miraldi, Muckraking and Objectivity: Journalism’s Colliding Traditions (New York: Greenwood Press, 1990).

11 First published as a series of articles, this work was later published as a book. See Henry Demarest Lloyd, Wealth Against Commonwealth (New York and London: Harper and Brothers Publishers, 1899), 7.

12 Aucoin “The Evolution of American Investigative Journalism” and Marshall “Watergate’s Legacy and the Press” are good references here. See also Thomas C. Leonard, “News for a Revolution: The Exposé in America, 1768–1773,” The Journal of American History 67, no. 1 (June 1980): 26–40; David L. Protess, Fay Lomax Cook, Jack C. Doppelt, James S. Ettema, Margaret T. Gordon, Donna R. Leff, and Peter Miller, Journalism of Outrage: Investigative Reporting and Agenda Building in America (New York: The Guilford Press, 1991); Bruce Shapiro, ed. Shaking the Foundations: 200 Years of Investigative Journalism in America (New York: Nation Books, 2003).

13 Richard S. Newman, The Transformation of American Abolitionism: Fighting Slavery in the Early Republic (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002).

14 See, for instance, Mark Feldstein, “A Muckraking Model: Investigative Reporting Cycles in American History,” Harvard International Journal of Press/Politics 11, no. 2 (2006): 105–120.

15 Newman, “The Transformation of American Abolitionism,” 95.

16 Jarvis Brewster, An Exposition of the Treatment of Slaves in the Southern States, Particularly in the States of Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia: Together With a System of Reformation Recommended (New Brunswick: D & J. Fitz Randolph, 1815), iii.

17 Brewster, An Exposition of the Treatment of Slaves, iv.

18 George Bourne, The Book and Slavery Irreconcilable With Animadversions Upon Dr. Smith’s Philosophy (Philadelphia: J.M. Sanderson & Co., 1816), 2–3. John W. Christie and Dwight L. Dumond have argued that Bourne’s book was influential in fostering support for more radical forms of abolition among some, in particular William Lloyd Garrison. See George Bourne and “The Book and Slavery Irreconcilable” (Wilmington, Delaware, and Philadelphia: The Historical Society of Delaware and The Presbyterian Historical Society, 1969).

19 Bourne, The Book and Slavery Irreconcilable With Animadversions Upon Dr. Smith’s Philosophy, 45.

20 Benjamin Lundy, ed., The Genius of Universal Emancipation Containing Original Essays and Selections on the Subject of African Slavery (Greeneville, Tennessee, 1821–1822), 1:3. Genius was published monthly and then compiled into bound volumes.

21 The name, subject matter, and evidentiary approach of “The Black List” can be thought of as prefiguring Ida B. Wells’s famous 1895 exposé of lynching, The Red Record.

22 Genius, 1:10.

23 Genius, 1:11.

24 Genius, 1:11.

25 Genius, 1:30.

26 Genius, 2:128. The reference to the mythological giant guardian with a hundred eyes carries an unmistakable resemblance to notions of the watchdog press, a cherished metaphor for contemporary investigative reporters.

27 Genius 1:11.

28 Genius, 1:94.

29 Genius, 1:85.

30 Genius, 1:18.

31 William H. Pease and Jane H. Pease, eds., The Antislavery Argument (Indianapolis, New York, Kansas City: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966). In this collection of antislavery writings, the Peases estimate that thirty to forty abolitionist publications were founded between 1831 and 1860.

32 Genius, 1:30.

33 The description is justified, no doubt, by lines such as this, referring to an anonymous critic whose letter Garrison responded to in The Liberator: “The author of it, I presume, is steeped to his lips in the blood of his slaves, and cherishes the unquenchable thirst of a cannibal.” Garrison, “To the Editors of the National Intelligencer,” The Liberator 1, no. 42, October 18, 1831, 1.

34 Amy Reynolds, “William Lloyd Garrison, Benjamin Lundy and Criminal Libel: The Abolitionists’ Plea for Press Freedom,” Communication Law & Policy 6, no. 4 (2001): 577–607.

35 Garrison to the editor of the Newburyport (Massachusetts) Herald, June 1, 1830, in The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison, Volume I, I Will Be Heard! 1822–1835, ed. Walter M. Merrill (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971), 99.

36 Garrison to Sunderland, Boston, September 8, 1831, in Merrill, The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison, 129.

37 Sometimes what needed exposing was actually hiding in plain sight. In the very first issue of the Liberator, Garrison wanted to lay bare the open secret that the domestic trade in captive people was being carried on in the nation’s capital. “Yes, let it be known to the citizens of America,” he wrote, “that at the very time when the procession which contained the President of the United States and his Cabinet was marking in triumph to the Capitol, to celebrate the victory of the French people over their oppressors, another kind of procession was marching the other way, and that consisted of colored human beings, handcuffed in pairs, and driven along by what had the appearance of a man on a horse! A similar scene was repeated on Saturday last; a drove consisting of males and females chained in couples, starting from Roby’s tavern on foot, for Alexandria, where, with others, they are to embark on board a slave-ship in waiting to convey them to the South.” See “The Slave Trade in the Capital,” The Liberator 1, no. 1, January 1, 1831, 1.

38 James S. Ettema and Theodore L. Glasser, Custodians of Conscience: Investigative Journalism and Public Virtue (New York: Columbia University Press, 1998).

39 Garrison, The Liberator, October 27, 1832. A particularly fine example of ironic juxtaposition came in La Roy Sunderland’s 1837 Anti-Slavery Manual. Recounting a brutal group flogging in the hot sun, he concluded, “The gentlemen who had done the whipping, eight or ten in number, being joined by their friends, then came under the tree, and drank punch until their dinner was made ready, under a booth of green boughs, as a short distance.” Anti-Slavery Manual, Containing a Collection of Facts and Arguments on American Slavery (New York: S.W. Benedict, 1837), 73.

40 In addition to these, Garrison drew inspirations from noted British abolitionists such as William Wilberforce, Thomas Clarkson, and Zachary Macaulay, whose work also undertook to expose the facts of slavery and enslavement.

41 William Lloyd Garrison, Thoughts on African Colonization: Or An Impartial Exhibition of the Doctrines, Principles and Purposes of the American Colonization Society. Together with the Resolutions, Addresses and Remonstrances of the Free People of Color (Boston, MA: Garrison and Knapp, 1832), iv, 5.

42 Garrison to Henry Benson, Boston, November 12, 1831, in Merrill, The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison, 140.

43 The title of the 1991 study of investigative reporters by Protess et al. captures this notion: The Journalism of Outrage.

44 A key controversy within the abolition movement revolved around whether it should happen gradually or immediately, with Garrison leading the charge of the “immediatists.” Much scholarship has been devoted to examining the various positions. Two references consulted here include Pease and Pease, The Antislavery Argument, 1966; and Newman, The Transformation of American Abolitionism, 2002.

45 Garrison, Thoughts, 54.

46 Garrison, Thoughts, 18. The quotation from the book of Proverbs (14:15) brings to mind the aphorism for careful reporters, usually attributed to the old Chicago City News Bureau: “If your mother says she loves you, check it out.” For background, see Susy Schultz, “Let’s Change this Journalism Motto Because ‘If Your Mother Says She Loves You, Check It Out,’ Doesn’t Check Out,” February 13, 2018, https://medium.com/@Susys/lets-change-this-journalism-motto-because-if-your-mother-says-she-loves-you-check-it-out-a953b9a8d96c.

47 Garrison, Thoughts, 10.

48 Garrison, Thoughts, 48–49.

49 Garrison, Thoughts, 42.

50 Garrison to Ebenezer Dole, Baltimore, Maryland, July 14, 1830, in Merrill, The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison, 104.

51 Garrison to George W. Benson, Boston, Massachusetts, December 10, 1832, in Merrill, The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison, 197.

52 See Merrill, The Letters; and Ripley, The Black Abolitionist Papers, Vol. III, The United States, 1830–1846, ed. C. Peter Ripley (Chapel Hill and London: The University of North Carolina Press, 1985). As Ripley and others have shown, Black leaders were frustrated by the lack of regard for prejudice toward Black citizens in the North, and even within the abolition movement.

53 In The Transformation of American Abolitionism, Newman points out that sometimes white essayists such as Lydia Maria Child “simply appended Black ‘testimony’ to their harsh essays condemning bondage” (105). On the other hand, as Rodger Streitmatter has shown, early Black newspapers did not address abolition as intensely as Garrison, devoting much of their efforts instead to promoting the advancement of free Black people in the north. The first black paper, Freedom’s Journal, was founded in 1827, but Streitmatter asserts that the first “strident Black abolitionist” newspaper was Frederick Douglass’s The North Star, which began publishing in 1847. See Streitmatter, Mightier Than the Sword: How the News Media Have Shaped American History (New York: Routledge, 2018), 27.

54 The 1830s saw a proliferation of antislavery publications and the establishment of a broad network of organizations devoted to immediate abolition, notably the American Anti-Slavery Society. See Pease and Pease, The Antislavery Argument, 1966; Newman, The Transformation of American Abolition, 2002; and Michael D. Pierson, “‘Slavery Cannot Be Covered Up with Broadcloth or a Bandanna’: The Evolution of White Abolitionist Attacks on the ‘Patriarchal Institution,’” Journal of the Early Republic 25, no. 3 (Fall 2005): 383–415.

55 Weld came to prominence as a rabble-rousing student at Lane Seminary in Cincinnati. In early 1834, when the trustees abolished his student antislavery society, he and others prepared a statement attacking the school’s actions. It was known by the students as “the Exposé” and published in the Emancipator on January 5, 1835, and later as pamphlet by AASS. See Gilbert H. Barnes and Dwight L. Dumond, eds., Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, Angelina Grimké Weld and Sarah Grimké, 1822–1844 (New York: De Capo Press, 1970), 1:181.

56 Anti-Slavery Office to Theodore D. Weld, New York, February 20, 1834, in Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, 1:125.

57 Anti-Slavery Office to Weld, New York, February 20, 1834, in Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, 1:129, 126.

58 The process of gathering facts about slavery could be grueling and depressing. In a letter that year to Lewis Tappan, Weld reported visiting thirty Black families in Cincinnati, mostly formerly enslaved people who worked for own freedom and were now paying their debts or paying to purchase friends and family from slavery. Weld wrote, “But I cannot tell half, and must stop. After spending three or four hours, and getting facts, I was forced to stop from sheer heart-ache and agony.” Weld to Tappan, Cincinnati, Ohio, March 18, 1834, in Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, 1:135.

59 George Bourne, Picture of Slavery in the United States of America (Middletown, CT: Edwin Hunt, 1834), 105.

60 Bourne, The Book and Slavery Irreconcilable With Animadversions Upon Dr. Smith’s Philosophy, 130.

61 Lydia Maria Child, An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans (Boston, MA: Allen and Ticknor, 1833), 93. Child quoted this incident from an 1826 publication, Letters on American Slavery, Addressed to Mr. Thomas Rankin, Merchant at Middlebrook, Augusta County, Virginia (Ripley, Ohio: D. Ammen, 1826). The incident also found its way into Weld’s American Slavery As It Is.

62 Child, An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans, 29–30. Child’s Appeal was influential in abolitionist circles but personally costly, causing a steep drop in sales of her other literary works. See Lydia Maria Child, Letters of Lydia Maria Child, With a Biographical Introduction by John G. Whittier and an Appendix by Wendell Phillips (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1883).

63 Lydia Maria Child, Authentic Anecdotes of American Slavery, 2nd ed. (Newburyport, MA: Charles Whipple, 1838).

64 Ford Risley, Abolition and the Press: The Moral Struggle Against Slavery (Evanston, Illinois: Northwestern University Press, 2008).

65 Human Rights 1, no. 1, July 1835.

66 American Anti-Slavery Society, Third Annual Report of the American Anti-Slavery Society; With the Speeches Delivered at the Anniversary Meeting, Held in the City of New-York, On the 10th May, 1836, and the Minutes of the Meetings of the Society for Business (New York: William S. Dorr, 1836), 16.

67 To cite just one example, from the nonprofit Virginia Center for Investigative Journalism’s website: “Journalism meant to shine a light on injustices and hold the powerful accountable is being snuffed out, and much of the commonwealth can now be considered a news desert.” “Shining a Light on Our Story,” accessed July 3, 2022, https://vcij.org/our-story.

68 American Anti-Slavery Society, Third Annual Report, 85.

69 Anti-Slavery Office to Weld, 1:129.

70 Samuel E. Cornish, “Why We Should Have a Paper,” Colored American, March 4, 1837.

71 Brewster, An Exposition of the Treatment of Slaves, 7.

72 Sunderland, Anti-Slavery Manual, 78. In fact, Sunderland asserted, he did not have space to give even “a thousandth part of the facts which might be adduced under this head.”

73 Charles W. Gardner, New York, May 9, 1837, in Ripley, The Black Abolitionist Papers, 206–7.

74 “Letter of Gerrit Smith to Rev. James Smylie, of the State of Mississippi,” Anti-Slavery Examiner 1, no. 3 (1837): 11–12.

75 William Drayton, The South Vindicated from the Treason and Fanaticism of the Northern Abolitionists (Philadelphia, PA: H. Manly, 1836).

76 “The Slaveholder’s Heart,” Anti-Slavery Record 1, no. 3 (March 1837): 1.

77 Child, An Appeal, 30.

78 Angelina E. Grimké, “Appeal to the Christian Women of the South,” The Anti-Slavery Examiner 1, no. 2 (September 1836): 32.

79 American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses (New York: The American Anti-Slavery Society, 1839). Weld is not credited on the title page but is listed in a prefatory note as the person to whom communications should be addressed. It is clear from Weld’s personal correspondence and other documents that he was the author.

80 Angelina Emily Grimké Weld, speech at Pennsylvania Hall, May 16, 1838, in The Public Years of Sarah and Angelina Grimké, ed. Larry Ceplair (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 319. A year later, Angelina’s sister expressed similar frustration about Northern perceptions of slavery: “Notwithstanding all that has been written, the public is comparatively ignorant of the sufferings of the slave, & we are every where met by the assertion that they are ‘well treated.’” Sarah Grimké to Elizabeth Pease, Fort Lee, NJ, April 10, 1839, in The Public Years, 331.

81 Grimké, in The Public Years, 320.

82 Grimké, in The Public Years, 322.

83 Weld to Gerrit Smith, New York, November 8, 1838, in Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, 2: 717.

84 Weld to Smith, in Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, 2: 717.

85 Weld to Smith, in Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, 2: 717.

86 Weld to Smith, in Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, 2: 718. In this emphasis on accuracy and credibility, Weld almost certainly had in mind the recent case of a pamphlet, “The Narrative of James Williams,” that had to be retracted by the AASS because its veracity was challenged by an Alabama newspaper editor. After receiving the editor’s complaint, the Society appointed James Birney and Lewis Tappan to investigate. Little more than a week before Weld’s form letter went out, Birney and Tappan issued a report that took up nearly a full column in The Emancipator and noted that the narrative would no longer be distributed. See “Narrative of James Williams: Statement Authorized by the Executive Committee,” The Emancipator, October 25, 1838, 104. Addressing the matter in a letter to Weld, Lydia Maria Child remarked, “To you and I, who look on the foundations upon which slavery rests, it is not of the slightest consequence whether James Williams told the truth or not; yet the doubt thrown on his narrative is doing incalculable mischief.” Child to Weld, Northampton, MA, December 29, 1838, in Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, 2:735–6.

87 Hadwen to Angelina G. Weld, Worcester, MA, January 1, 1839, in Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, 2: 737.

88 Thome to Weld, Augusta, KY, February 7, 1839, in Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, 752–3.

89 Sereno and Mary Streeter to Weld, Madison, Ohio, December 26, 1838, in Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, 733.

90 Sarah Grimké to Elizabeth Pease, Fort Lee, NJ, April 10, 1839, in The Public Years, 332.

91 Quoted in Catherine H. Birney, The Grimké Sisters: Sarah and Angelina Grimké, the First American Women Advocates of Abolition and Woman’s Rights (Reprint Services Corporation, 1885), 258.

92 Quoted in Birney, The Grimké Sisters, 258. In fact, Weld went on to say, the book “contained but a tiny fraction of the nameless atrocities gathered from the papers examined” (259).

93 Weld, American Slavery As It Is, 3. Weld did note that in a few cases where informants still lived in states where slavery was legal, their names were withheld to protect them from “popular fury.”

94 Weld, American Slavery As It Is, 3.

95 Weld, American Slavery As It Is, 26.

96 Angelina and Sarah Grimké also provided their own testimonies for the book.

97 Ebenezer Chaplin to Angelina Weld, Athol, MA, October 1, 1839, in The Letters of Theodore Weld, 799.

98 As quoted in The Emancipator, June 13, 1839, 2.

99 Harriet Beecher Stowe, The Key To Uncle Tom’s Cabin; The Original Facts and Documents Upon Which the Story is Founded. Together with Corroborative Statements Testifying the Truth of the Work (Boston, MA: John P. Jewett and Company, 1854). Stowe’s book itself can be thought of as a muckraking novel, predecessor to Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle. Both works started out as serials in periodical publications, Stowe’s in The National Era and Sinclair’s in Appeal to Reason.

100 Weld to Smith, New York, October 23, 1839. In The Letters of Theodore Dwight Weld, 809.

101 David Paul Nord has done notable work revealing that reporting predated reporters, memorably describing Cotton Mather as a news reporter in “Teleology and News: The Religious Roots of American Journalism, 1630–1730,” The Journal of American History, 77, no. 1 (1990), 9–38. See also “‘Plain and Certain Facts’: Four Episodes of Public Affairs Reporting,” Journalism History 37, no. 2 (2011), 80–90; “Tocqueville, Garrison, and the Perfection of Journalism,” Journalism History, 13, no. 2 (1986), 56–63; and “The Evangelical Origins of Mass Media in America, 1815–1835,” Journalism Monographs, no. 88 (1984).

102 James Redpath, for instance, wrote a column called “The Facts of Slavery” for Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune starting in 1854. See Brooke Kroeger, Undercover Reporting: The Truth About Deception (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2012), 15–30.

103 Angelina Grimké to Beecher, 1837, in Letters to Catherine E. Beecher, In Reply to An Essay On Slavery and Abolitionism, Addressed to A.E. Grimké (Boston, MA: I. Knapp, 1838), 99. Unmasking would become an important trope in antebellum literature, as David Reynolds has shown. A popular character type who needed unmasking was the “oxymoronic oppressor.” See Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville (Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press, 2011). The classic oxymoronic oppressor, as Reynold notes, was the Christian enslaver, whom Garrison lampooned “as great a solecism as a religious atheist, a sober drunkard, or an honest thief.” Garrison to George Shepard, Hartford, September 1830, in The Letters of William Lloyd Garrison, 108.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Gerry Lanosga

Gerry Lanosga, PhD, is an associate professor in the Media School at Indiana University, where he teaches and researches in the areas of journalism practice, media law, and journalism history. His work has been published in journals including American Journalism, Journalism, Journalism Practice, Journalism Studies, and Digital Journalism. Previously, he had a twenty-year career as a print and broadcast journalist in Indiana, covering government, writing a weekly column, and producing investigative projects, winning national recognitions including a George Foster Peabody Award, Sigma Delta Chi’s national public service award, and the Freedom of Information Medal from Investigative Reporters and Editors.