The Precious Birthright

Black Leaders and the Fight to Vote in Antebellum Rhode Island

CJ Martin

• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN:
  9781625348388
  9781625348395
• eBook ISBN:
  9781685751104
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: African American History
• Index: History

In 1842, Black Rhode Islanders secured a stunning victory, a success rarely seen in antebellum America: they won the right to vote. Amid heightened public discourse around shifting ideas of race, citizenship, and political rights, they methodically deconstructed the arguments against their enfranchisement, exposing the arbitrariness of the color line in delineating citizenship rights and choosing the perfect moments in which to act forcefully. At the head of this movement, a cohort of prominent business and community members formed an early example of a Black leadership class in the US.

CJ Martin draws upon a wealth of sources—including personal correspondences, government and organizational documents, tax records, and petitions—to argue that Black leaders employed a unique combination of agitation and accommodation to ensure the success of the movement. By investigating their tactics, Martin deepens the story of how race played a crucial role in American citizenship, and by focusing on Black leadership, he relates this history through the people who lived it—who thought, debated, petitioned, and enacted their own liberation. Telling the story of a fight that was as important to the pioneers of interracial democracy as it was for the civil rights activists of the twentieth century, The Precious Birthright provides new insight into the larger story of Black freedom. 

Table of contents

• Cover 
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents 
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: “To Promote One Common Good”: Black Leaders in Revolutionary Rhode Island
• Chapter 2: “Dignified Abeyance”: Evolving Black Leadership and Disfranchisement
• Chapter 3: “Forever and Hereafter a Body Politic”: New Leadership and Organization, 1819–1824
• Chapter 4: “The Clouds of Evil”: Survival and Organization, 1820–1831
• Chapter 5: “How Long Will the Lord Suffer Us to Remain as We Now Are?”: Activists and Citizenship in the 1830s
• Chapter 6: “The Mustard Seed”: Part 1: Black Leaders, Allies, and Escalation of the Suffrage Movement
• Chapter 7: “The Mustard Seed”: Part 2: Citizenship
• Epilogue: “Friends to Social Order, True to Our Fellow Man”
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Back Cover