The Black Romantic Revolution

Abolitionist Poets at the End of Slavery

Matthew F. Sandler, Matt Sandler

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781788735445
• eBook ISBN: 9781788735452
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

During the pitched battle over slavery in the United States, Black writers - enslaved and free - allied themselves with the cause of abolition and used their art to advocate for emancipation and to envision the end of slavery as a world-historical moment of possibility.

These Black writers borrowed from the European tradition of Romanticism - lyric poetry, prophetic visions - to write, speak, and sing their hopes for what freedom might mean. At the same time, they voiced anxieties about the expansion of global capital and U.S. imperial power in the aftermath of slavery. They also focused on the ramifications of slavery's sexual violence. Authors like Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, George Moses Horton, Albery Allson Whitman, and Joshua McCarter Simpson conceived the Civil War as a revolutionary upheaval on par with Europe's stormy Age of Revolutions. The Black Romantic Revolution proposes that the Black Romantics' cultural innovations have shaped Black radical culture to this day, from the blues and hip hop to Black nationalism and Black feminism. Their expressions of love and rage, grief and determination, dreams and nightmares, still echo into our present.

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Hereditary Bondsmen, Strike the Blow!

In which Black abolitionists take Lord Byron as a model of freedom and then later his legacy returns to haunt them

On Wednesday, August 16, 1843, during the afternoon session of the second day of the National Convention of Colored Citizens in Buffalo, New York, Henry Highland Garnet delivered one of the most radical and provocative speeches of the abolition movement. Garnet’s “Address to the Slaves of the United States of America” made strange and counterintuitive use of the occasion. In front of an audience of free people, Garnet nonetheless spoke directly to the enslaved, and argued that only they could free themselves from slavery. Despite Garnet’s ardor, the delegates to the convention voted to exclude his remarks from the published minutes of the convention, which would only contain a description of the debate about it. Garnet’s defense of his address is itself said to be “a masterly effort, and the whole Convention, full as it was, was literally infused with tears.” A young Frederick Douglass led the opposition:

Mr. Douglass remarked, that there was too much physical force, both in the address and the remarks of the speaker last up. He was for trying the moral means a little longer; that the address, could it reach the slaves, and the advice, either of the address or the gentleman, be followed, while it might not lead the slaves to rise in insurrection for liberty, would, nevertheless, and necessarily be the occasion of an insurrection; and that was what he wished in no way to have any agency in bringing about, and what we were called upon to avoid;… He wanted emancipation in a better way, as he expected to have it.

Douglass’s casuistry here represents an early moment of hesitation in what would become a life of carefully studied political decision-making. Garnet’s speech stayed with Douglass, however, and he would come around to its perspective over the next decade and a half of organizing.¹

Garnet’s “Address” represented an abandonment of the strategy of moral suasion, which Douglass, following Garrison and the American Anti-Slavery Society, had developed over the preceding decade to plead with white Northerners about the evils of slavery. Moral suasion involved impassioned appeals to the consciences of Northerners in hopes they might exercise political influence over Southern slave owners. Garnet, seeking a more immediate abolition, argues directly to the enslaved: “Brethren, the time has come when you must act for yourselves. It is an old and true saying that, ‘if hereditary bondmen would be free, they must themselves strike the blow.’ You can plead your own cause, and do the work of emancipation better than others.” Garnet’s call for violence expands the tradition of revolutionary liberalism and possessive individualism to include Black subjects. He sought to unify the organizing work of the free, literate Black North and the violent revolts of the enslaved South. As support for this performative gesture, he turns to a surprising precedent—the British Romantic poet Lord Byron, specifically Byron’s widely read epic poem Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–20). The original text, addressing Greeks suffering under the Ottoman empire, reads: “Hereditary bondsmen! know ye not / Who would be free, themselves must strike the blow?”²

Despite the initial suppression of Garnet’s “Address,” an extraordinary array of African-American writers would cite these lines in the coming decades. Martin Delany made them the epigraph to his Pittsburgh newspaper The Mystery in the late 1840s. Garnet finally managed to get the “Address” itself into print in 1848, bundled with David Walker’s comparably incendiary Appeal. Frederick Douglass, revisiting his caution of a decade earlier, quoted the passage in his short story “The Heroic Slave” (1853) and then again later as context for the famous fight with Covey in My Bondage and My Freedom (1855). Douglass retained the citation in the later versions of his narrative, The Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881, 1892). Later, W.E.B. Du Bois used it as the epigraph to a chapter of The Souls of Black Folk (1903). This little bit of British Romantic poetry thus appears in most of the major early texts of the Black radical tradition, a kind of shibboleth for the movement. The citation became a refrain of Black radical intellection, and in its rhythmic repetition through the nineteenth century, Black writers signaled their belonging within a world-historical struggle for emancipation. It also acted as ritualized act of cultural appropriation, through which Black abolitionists framed their most vociferous arguments for retributive violence in the voice of a widely admired white European culture hero. Finally, the citation from Byron was a commandment, an authoritative inversion of “Thou shalt not kill,” fit to the warped ethical requirements of a slave society.

Variations on the phrase “hereditary bondsmen” were widely used in English to describe the condition of subalterns around the world, especially in areas of colonial interest like Ireland and South Asia. Byron borrowed it from Edward Gibbon, whose History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776–89) took the question of slavery’s deleterious effect on civic virtue as a consistent theme. Garnet’s “Address” to enslaved Black men takes measure of how far beyond the pale New World chattel slavery had taken Euro-American morality, with frequent references to Black families torn apart and the sexual exploitation of Black women in slavery. His case for revolutionary violence develops from an impossible choice between hereditary bondage and death: “You had far better all die—die immediately, than live slaves, and entail your wretchedness upon your posterity. … However much you and all of us may desire it, there is not much hope of redemption without the shedding of blood.” In moments like this, Garnet works at the imaginative limits of the abolition movement of the early 1840s. Though the conceit of the speech is its address to the enslaved, of course Garnet was speaking first to his colleagues, the free people of the convention movement, warning them about what their goal of abolition would require, and what would befall their people if it was not achieved.³

Byron’s call for violence had political and aesthetic dimensions, but its fundamental impacts were epistemological: “Hereditary bondsmen! know ye not / Who would be free, themselves must strike the blow?” His advice made practical sense in the context of the uneven demography of New World slave societies, where planter hegemony was maintained even though the enslaved far outnumbered their enslavers. In its ideal form, the “blow” that could upset this dynamic would contain the force of both an immediate, embodied liberation and a change in collective consciousness. With each citation, abolitionists reflected on the conditional dimensions of Byron’s point: the enslaved may or may not know that violence would set them free; violence may or may not in fact set them free; and they may or may not commit violent acts in prospective service to their freedom. But they also hoped that the knowing of its truth could be more than individual, that it could have symbolic and thus systemic ramifications.

Over the decade between Garnet’s address and his own citations from Byron, Douglass came to reconsider his equivocation between gradual and immediate calls for abolition. Westward expansion and the Fugitive Slave Law had expanded the territorial reach of slavery, but Douglass had also traveled to England and began to consider himself a man of letters in the manner of Rousseau, Goethe, and Byron. Douglass had read Thomas Carlyle’s depiction of the man of letters as a “hero” of world literature, who “make[s] manifest to us” the “Divine Idea” unfolding across human history. Increasingly, Douglass represented abolition in the United States as the next iteration of the universal development of human freedom, an idea which for him encompassed the history of revolution and nation-formation in Europe as well as the intercontinental struggle against slavery in the Americas. He was not alone in taking this view, and in a number of instances, the abolitionist interpretation of Byron connected the figurative “blow” for freedom to prophetic visions of world history.⁴

The lines from Childe Harold were not the only passages from Byron that would appear across the archive of early African-American literature; practically every well-known Black writer of the nineteenth century quoted the poet and worked through his influence. The point of tracking Byron through early African-American letters is not to prove its derivativeness or give a canonical white author his due, but to make the case that Byron’s model suited the cultural and political ends of Black liberation. Nineteenth-century Black radicals took up Byron as a way of processing their relation to the tradition of Romantic revolution. They found he embodied Romantic ideals in a renegade, exiled form of masculinity, grappling with deep psychosexual pain and alienation, identifying that struggle with the revolutionary spirit of the age. They wrote through Byron to imagine a freedom first from slavery’s bodily repression, but then also from its psychic consequences and its larger-scale political and ideological entrenchments. The blow, limited in its singularity and its physicality, nonetheless strikes out beyond the thousands of square miles of the antebellum South and the generations of enslaved people. It could liberate a whole people and a whole world.

Black abolitionists’ use of Byron extended beyond the justification of physical revolt to mount critiques of slavery as a regime of rape, to displace the moral coordinates of conventional representations of Blackness, to avoid the pitfalls of the market for narratives of slavery, and to deviate within the tradition of revolutionary liberalism. His influence became more controversial in the years after the Civil War, when Black sexuality came under renewed surveillance and when Byron’s reputation was increasingly marred by scandal. Byron’s radical masculinity, which had been so liberatory, now began to dangerously skirt the stereotypical hypersexualized Black criminal of the Jim Crow era. Byron’s emphasis on revolt fit uneasily into ideas about racial uplift and notions of culture as elevating. His articulation of embodied freedom made him less an aspirational exemplar and more a cautionary tale for African-American cultural and political leaders. His reputation as “mad—bad—and dangerous to know” mirrored the conundrum of Black leadership caught between the impulse to revolt, the strictures of racial uplift, and racist stereotypes of Black criminality.⁵

Nineteenth-century African-American culture’s intimacy with Byron might well be thought of in contemporary activist terms: he is a problematic ally, mobilizing and authorizing at times, but also inclined to risks and compromises that make collective action more difficult. In one of the few direct comments on New World chattel slavery in his poetry, Byron observed that the end of the transatlantic trade had only served to raise the price of enslaved people. In a journal entry lamenting the effect of slavery on the Americas, he wrote, “I sometimes wish that I was the owner of Africa, to do at once, what Wilberforce will do in time, viz.— sweep Slavery from her desarts and look upon the first dance of their Freedom.” These are hardly the thoughts of an ideal white fellow traveler for Black abolitionists—Byron had always been glib and darkly negative, and in the postbellum era this became more of a hindrance than a help to Black radicals.⁶

This chapter traces the cultural politics of Black Byronism, expanding from the incidental but insistent citation of his lines on bondage to a range of antislavery and Black radical ideological possibilities. It finds Byron at the threshold of Romanticism, greeting Black artists and intellectuals as they arrive. It begins by elaborating Byron’s attraction for abolitionists, especially around the question of sexual violence in slavery. It then follows a series of poetic projects, by George Moses Horton, George Boyer Vashon, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Albery Allson Whitman, as they put Byron’s work to political and aesthetic purposes in different contexts across the nineteenth century. So this chapter moves both chronologically and conceptually, from hereditary bondage and the blow for freedom to Black interiority and world-historical process. Byron by no means encompassed the ideological complexity of Black Romanticism, but he makes an excellent introduction to its possibilities, and shows how Black writers worked through Romantic tradition to envision self-emancipation and imagine Black collectivity.

“Why does the slave ever love?”

Byron was infamous across the political spectrum of nineteenth-century America, as he was throughout the European and Atlantic world. His “oriental tales” about swashbuckling, morally compromised, and archly perceptive heroes were wildly popular, and the way his poems seemed to disclose the details of his lurid personal life further excited his readership. His exile from England after the end of his marriage and his commitment to Greek independence seemed, to audiences around the world, a realization of a radical liberalism that exceeded the political results of the age of revolutions. In an 1832 essay, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow noted the local effects of the Byron craze in the United States: “Every city, town, and village had its little Byron, its self-tormenting scoffer at morality, its gloomy misanthropist in song.” Longfellow points to the ironies in Byron’s popularity—how a writer so scornful of convention could appeal so widely, how a putatively tortured poetics could take and make such pleasures, and how Byron’s provincial imitators could identify with his dramatically cosmopolitan life.

Beyond his obvious links to ideals of freedom, Byron’s appeal to Black abolitionists derived from his ethics and his representation of alienated interiority. The Byronic hero consistently reversed the moral coordinates and color symbolism of early nineteenth-century Atlantic culture. In The Corsair (1814), for example, Byron’s description of his hero Conrad collapses the darkness of Conrad’s interiority and the swarthiness of his complexion, pointing to the prospect of his redemption through darkness: “In Conrad’s form seems little to admire, / Though his dark eyebrow shades a glance of fire.” Through these tricks of light and shade, Byron encoded fragments of autobiography into fictional proxies, drawing the audience in with gossip about his own lurid life, and playing on the dynamics of their sympathies and principles. In these moments, Byron provided Black thinkers with a template for working through the interplay between racist projection and lived experience. If a darkly Byronic character could attract the understanding and identification of contemporary audiences, then perhaps racially Black characters could do the same. In the context of centuries-old associations between skin color and cultural difference, Byron’s play with color symbolism and character had important effects for Black Romantic writers.⁷

Byron’s preoccupation with slavery in the eastern Mediterranean also interested abolitionists grappling with the more modernized slavery of the so-called “American Mediterranean.” In Don Juan (1819–24), Byron depicts the luxuriant pleasures of the master class i...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Introduction: The Fugitive Romance
• 1. Hereditary Bondsmen, Strike the Blow!: In which Black abolitionists take Lord Byron as a model of freedom and then later his legacy returns to haunt them
• 2. The Supernatural Avenger: In which George Moses Horton, enslaved near the campus of the University of North Carolina, takes flight into symbolism
• 3. The Seething Brain: In which free-born poet-activists across the North think and feel their way through the impending crisis to the Civil War
• 4. The Uprising of Women: In which Frances Ellen Watkins Harper writes, speaks, and sings against sexual objectification and economic exploitation
• 5. Freedom Is an Empty Name: In which Albery Allson Whitman imagines a collaborative resistance of Black and Native people to US empire in the aftermath of Reconstruction
• Conclusion: Dreams and Nightmares
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• Bibliographic Essay
• Index