The presence of algae, seaweed, and other treasures of the deep at American anti-slavery fairs speaks to the reach and widespread popularity of this practice. Obviously, the funds that would be raised by capitalizing on this trend were a major motivation for organizers. However, by turning to seaweed as a material curiosity and symbol, anti-slavery activists also transformed this trend in three major ways. First, they used this trend to shift the Atlantic Ocean from a place of violence and separation into a space of witnessing and potential connection. Secondly, these albums established a place for scientific curiosity in abolitionist circles, implicitly critiquing the racist and exclusionary institutions which produced scientific knowledge in the nineteenth century. Finally, the album I will discuss in this article asserted God’s promises to the enslaved by displaying the seaweed as an example of godly design.
Consider, for instance, an account of an antislavery fair from The Liberator which inserts the entirety of the poem “Sea Weed’s Address.” Following the opening epigraph “Where the Atlantic rolls, wide continents have bloom’d,” the address “to the American public” reads:
Regard us not as strangers! our race rose
At the creative word that call’d forth thine,
And with the doomed earth share in part thy woes,
And like thee for a new creation pines.
It continues:
Hast thou forgot the Lord, that we have heard.
Oft on our shores the cry of blood and strife,
And every vagrant breeze our groves that stirred.
Hath sighed the mournful tale of human life!
And the winds wail the sorrows they have seen,
Oppressed, and the oppressor every where;
For the abolitionist, these marine specimens were not separate from the world of suffering or an aesthetic distraction, but rather, through a common origin and shared environment (represented here by the “vagrant breeze” and wind), a witness to slavery’s horror. Unlike scientific practices which regard the seaweed as distinct from the economic, legal, and social conditions of slavery, this poem suggests that oppression reaches even the deepest depths of the ocean. In this cry, “Regard us not as strangers!” the seaweed implicitly announces itself as an abolitionist, also pining for a “new creation.” When looking closer at the presence of marine specimens at American anti-slavery fairs, it becomes clear that these objects were more than items of natural curiosity.