Race, Ethnicity and Publishing in America

C. Cottenet

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137390523
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Race, Ethnicity and Publishing in America considers American minority literatures from the perspective of print culture. Putting in dialogue European and American scholars and spanning the slavery era through the early 21st century, they draw on approaches from library history, literary history and textual studies.

Part I
Historiography

1

Early African American Historians: A Book History and Historiography Approach – The Case of William Cooper Nell (1816–1874)

Claire Parfait

In a recent book on West Indians and Africans settled in Britain from the 1930s on, entitled Ending British Rule in Africa: Writers in a Common Cause, Carol Polsgrove investigates the struggles of a group of activists looking to find outlets for their anti-colonial writings. She notes that getting their works printed and published was a major challenge. This applies in an even more evident way to early African American historians.

After being long ignored (with a few exceptions, such as Earl E. Thorpe and Benjamin Quarles), early African American historians have been ‘rediscovered’ and examined in recent works. Thus, in his Liberation Historiography (2004) John Ernest examines early historical African American print in the light of liberation theology; he analyzes a wide corpus of early works of history whether published as pamphlets, books, in magazines, in the proceedings of conventions, and in autobiographies such as William Wells Brown’s slave narrative (1847). African American history, according to Ernest, has to be viewed as performative, attempting to create a community and chart a proper course of action in antebellum America. This attempt was greatly complicated by the status of African Americans, the scarcity of sources, and the dominant (white) historical narrative. Margot Minardi’s Making Slavery History: Abolitionism and the Politics of Memory in Massachusetts (2010) interweaves notions of history and memory to focus on competing black and white accounts of the Revolution and emancipation in the Bay State. The competition involved works of history but also processes of commemoration and Minardi highlights the struggles of African Americans for the inclusion of their own heroes in the national pantheon. While Minardi’s work covers Massachusetts from the Revolution to the Civil War, Stephen G. Hall’s A Faithful Account of the Race: African American Historical Writing in 19th-Century America (2011) looks at the evolution of African American historiography within the evolution of mainstream American historiography, in pamphlets, books and periodicals from the first decades of the nineteenth century to the 1930s.¹ Hall scrutinizes and contextualizes the works of a number of African American historians and shows how they used the scholarly trends of their times to produce a counter-narrative meant to challenge their current status in American society. While each of the three works breaks new ground, and can be considered as authoritative, none pays much attention to the publishing histories of the works under scrutiny, with the exception of the pages devoted to the publication of William Still’s The Underground Railroad (1872) in A Faithful Account of the Race.

In ‘The Talking Book and the Talking Book Historian: African American Cultures of Print – The State of the Discipline’, Leon Jackson lamented the lack of communication between scholars of African American culture and book historians (Jackson 2010). This essay aims to help bridge the gap by exploring the publication, promotion, circulation and reception of the works of an early African American historian, William Cooper Nell. Nell wrote a pamphlet entitled Services of Colored Americans in the Wars of 1776 and 1812 (1851, revised and expanded edition 1852) and a book, Colored Patriots of the American Revolution (1855).

‘History has thrown the colored man out’, said William Wells Brown in an address to the American Anti-Slavery Society in New York in May 1860 (Quarles 1988, p. 111). This is a neat summary of the reason why African Americans started to write history. In 1855, black historian William Cooper Nell introduced his Colored Patriots of the American Revolution as ‘an attempt to rescue from oblivion’ the services of black soldiers during the Revolution, a task sorely needed since no one had so far undertaken to write such a record (Nell 1855, p. 9). The aim of nineteenth-century black historians was thus, as Benjamin Quarles notes (Quarles 1988, p. 113), to ‘disinter their history’, thereby serving a two-fold objective: to counter misrepresentations and neglect, and to provide African Americans with a more positive self-image. Those are the very arguments W. W. Brown made in his preface to The Black Man, issued in 1863, during the Civil War: his work was born out of the desire to refute common misrepresentations and vindicate ‘the Negro’s character’ (Brown 1863, pp. 5–6). This, of course, was particularly relevant in 1863, in the context of the debate over the emancipation of slaves and the participation of African Americans in the war.

To achieve their objectives, nineteenth-century African American historians followed much the same pattern: they usually glorified the African past, especially by dwelling on the rich civilizations of Egypt and Ethiopia. Haiti was used as evidence of black abilities, while biographies of great men and women provided role models for readers. Clarence Walker notes that in these narrative, rather than analytical, works, ‘character sketches of people and their careers were the basic units of exposition’. He adds, ‘When combined, the sketches created a panorama of black achievement’ (Walker 1991, p. 93).

As John Ernest has demonstrated in his Liberation Historiography, the writing of history by nineteenth-century African Americans had a performative function. Indeed, at a time when African American contributions were mostly ignored, the mere fact that early African American historians claimed to be writing history from their own point of view represented a triple challenge: to the existing order, to mainstream history, and to the status African Americans had been given in American society.

William Cooper Nell (1816–74) was born in Boston in 1816;² his father, a tailor and activist, was one of the founders of an anti-slavery group, the Massachusetts General Colored Association, in 1826. W. C. Nell was a bright student and received an award when he graduated from the African Meeting House school in 1829 at age 13. Because he was colored, however, he was given The Life of Benjamin Franklin rather than the medal white pupils received, a slight which he felt keenly. By 1832 Nell was working as an errand boy in the office of William Lloyd Garrison. That year he also became the secretary of the Juvenile Garrison Independent Society. By the late 1830s, he was writing reports and news items in Garrison’s Liberator, and helping blacks find jobs via ads in the same paper; he was the secretary of the Adelphic Union Library Association, which organized lectures,³ occasionally addressed meetings, and also helped with his father’s tailoring business.⁴ Yet in spite (or perhaps because) of all this activity, Nell was frequently without money; several projects failed to materialize – such as work in an insurance office, in 1845, or in a law firm in 1849. He did some tutoring (in the ‘Elementary branches’), and placed an ad in the Liberator of December 18, 1846, looking for work as an accountant or copyist.⁵ He was greatly disappointed in 1845 to learn that Frederick Douglass intended to sell his Narrative himself at a forthcoming convention: Nell had ‘fondly anticipated the peddling of Douglass’s work as a means of putting some shillings in [his] pocket’.⁶ He occasionally reverted to tailoring when he needed money.⁷ He was often in poor health and remained chronically short of money until he began to work at the Boston Post Office in the 1860s.

Active in the New England Temperance Society, Nell was a grassroots organizer, a community leader (Horton and Horton 1999, pp. 61–9). In the mid-1840s he started a long struggle that would end in 1855 with the desegregation of Boston’s public schools, and after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act in 1850, helped found the Boston Vigilance Committee which aided fugitive slaves.

At the same time, he sought to improve his mind. White abolitionist Wendell Phillips, with whom he had struck up a long-lasting friendship, lent him books and recommended ‘profitable reading’. Nell was particularly grateful since, as he explained in an 1841 letter to his mentor, ‘I am not at all as familiar with History as I ought to be.’⁸ For Nell, knowledge was key to the improvement of African Americans. At a meeting in September 1841, he argued ‘We must be a reading people’, explicitly linking intellectual effort, freedom and equal rights – an enduring concern, which would a century later find an echo in Eliza Gleason’s work, as Cheryl Knott notes in her essay for this volume – a point which he was to make again and again, in the columns of various papers, and later in pamphlets and books.⁹ History was particularly useful as a means to claiming these equal rights, and it is interesting to note that a decade before he wrote his first history pamphlet detailing the services of African American soldiers during the War of Independence, Nell described the stakes of history for African Americans in the following terms:

But let light be shed to dispel the mists of ignorance, and it will be remembered that we are Americans; that we have a claim to the soil for whose independence our fathers struggled by the white man’s side, in the contest of ’76. The services then rendered, invest us with a right to freedom, in addition to the claims of our common nature.¹⁰

Like other nineteenth-century African American historians, Nell believed that ignorance about African Americans was an obstacle to their elevation. Readers had to be enlightened, whether they were white or black. Indeed, these early histories were meant for African Americans as much, if not more than, for white readers, unlike slave narratives, which mainly targeted a white audience. The idea was to provide African Americans with a ‘usable past’, one that would make them proud and give them hope. As for white readers, the allusions to a rich African past and to the many contributions of African Americans to the building of the country would, it was believed, help dispel misrepresentations, show the outrage of slavery, and encourage whites to give African Americans their full place in American society.¹¹

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