After first doing so at abolitionist gatherings, it was through selling their narratives in print that the formerly enslaved were able to raise the money to support themselves and the cause of abolition. The dissemination and preservation of those accounts was made possible by the publishing power of the abolition movement whose radicalization and rapid expansion from when it began in the United States in the 1830s was, in turn, made possible to a large extent by the printing press. William Lloyd Garrison's weekly paper, The Liberator, first published in 1831, launched an 'antislavery print culture' that went beyond opposition to slavery based on Christian principles to brand it as a 'peculiar institution' and call for the immediate and unconditional emancipation of the enslaved on moral and democratic grounds (Fisch, 2007, p. 18). By the 1840s, the masthead of The Liberator, by then the official organ of the American Anti-Slavery Society, was carrying Garrison's slogan 'no union with slaveholders' and Garrison had declared slavery 'a covenant with death'. Before long there were dozens of abolitionist associations with their own periodicals running interviews with and publishing the narratives of formerly enslaved people (Finkelman, 2000, pp. 231-245).  
One driving theme in most antebellum narratives is the narrator's Christian faith, which had helped them to endure the trials of slavery. Their Christianity  
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[^0]:    2 All the narratives referred to in the above paragraph are available online at http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/index.html  
would enable them not only to make common cause with their readers - largely white, Northern, abolitionists with whom they shared a world view that bypassed differences of race and origin - but also to deliver a brilliantly pointed critique of the proslavery arguments of the Southern slaveholders. As one narrator, Henry Bibb, said of the man that had purchased him and his family: 'He looked like a saint [...] talked like the best of slaveholding Christians, and acted at home like the devil' (Bibb, 1849, p. 110).