A Faithful Account of the Race

African American Historical Writing in Nineteenth-Century America

Stephen G. Hall

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780807859674, 9780807833056
• eBook ISBN: 9780807899199
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: Social Sciences

The civil rights and black power movements expanded popular awareness of the history and culture of African Americans. But, as Stephen Hall observes, African American authors, intellectuals, ministers, and abolitionists had been writing the history of the black experience since the 1800s. With this book, Hall recaptures and reconstructs a rich but largely overlooked tradition of historical writing by African Americans.

Hall charts the origins, meanings, methods, evolution, and maturation of African American historical writing from the period of the Early Republic to the twentieth-century professionalization of the larger field of historical study. He demonstrates how these works borrowed from and engaged with ideological and intellectual constructs from mainstream intellectual movements including the Enlightenment, Romanticism, Realism, and Modernism. Hall also explores the creation of discursive spaces that simultaneously reinforced and offered counternarratives to more mainstream historical discourse. He sheds fresh light on the influence of the African diaspora on the development of historical study. In so doing, he provides a holistic portrait of African American history informed by developments within and outside the African American community.

CHAPTER 1
Troubling the Pages of Historians

African American Intellectuals and Historical Writing in the Early Republic, 1817–1837

I have been for years troubling the pages of historians, to find out what our fathers have done to the white Christians of America, to merit such condign punishment as they have inflicted on them, and do continue to inflict on us their children. But I must aver, that my researches have hitherto been to no effect.—DAVID WALKER, Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, 1829

THE ERA OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC WAS, without a doubt, a hopeful and promising moment in American history. Not only had the country expanded demographically and spatially after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, it abolished the Atlantic slave trade in 1808 and successfully weathered a significant challenge to its sovereignty by defeating the British in the War of 1812. Yet, African Americans searched, often in vain, for recognition of, and appreciation for, their contributions to this national development and their achievements in this process. David Walker recognized the incongruity; he also understood the stakes involved in an accurate representation of the past. As Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World suggests, and literary historian Elizabeth McHenry’s recent work on black reading habits demonstrates, “troubling the pages of historians” became an important cause among black intellectuals and could very well serve as a central metaphor for their efforts during the era of the early republic. They “trouble[d]” the pages of historians as they searched existing documentary/historical records for evidence of other African Americans’ contributions to historical developments. And the evidence they found went to produce new texts, which, no doubt, also served to “trouble” the pages of historians who, to that point, had written history almost as if African Americans had no past.¹

The emergence of African American historical texts coincided with the explosion of print culture in the United States. Determined to present a nuanced and complex portrait of themselves as citizens and actors in the human drama, black intellectuals began to use and produce texts that accentuated their humanity in a world where slavery and black degradation were commonplace. While it is clear, as others have argued, that oratorical and commemorative historical expressions played a significant role in conveying historical messages in the African American public sphere, texts, especially pamphlets and later books, played an increasingly important role in shaping historical understandings in the black community.² Rooted in the desire of an expanding, educated, and literate population to define itself as more than slaves or circumscribed citizens, black intellectuals’ engagement with history centered on the interrogation of texts in the effort to understand and name the complex realities of African American existence in the modern world.

Naming the realities of black existence in the modern world required more than oratorical eloquence or rhetorical flourish, as important as both were. To be especially effective, it depended on the ability of intellectuals to penetrate the central texts of the Western canon, namely universal, classical, and biblical history. In doing so, these writers demonstrated their deep engagement with Enlightenment-driven modes of rationality, which in this case privileged reason over speculation and the written over the oral. Texts, in these intellectuals’ minds, not only provided access to the past but also helped to preserve that past and create new possibilities for the interpretation of black life and history.³

In 1817, African American intellectuals comprised a small, but vocal minority, concentrated in well-established, primarily free communities, such as New Haven, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. Most were self-trained, some had matriculated at American liberal arts colleges, and a few had enjoyed access to educational institutions abroad. The creation and expansion of domestic institutions such as schools, churches, and literary and historical associations contributed to the growth of this small intellectual class. Black intellectuals, like African Americans in general, however, faced severe proscription in the public sphere. As members of a group conceptualized as a perpetual problem and nuisance in the North, and increasingly as “hewers of wood and drawers of water” in the South, black intellectuals faced an uphill battle in their effort to construct more promising and complex portraits of racial possibility. Although they usually rejected the tendency common among Enlightenment theorists to divide the world into a classic binary—the civilized and the savage—these intellectuals were strong proponents of the Enlightenment vision of the world suffused with reason.⁴

The strategies these early black intellectuals adopted came directly from historical methods common in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. For example, the idea of Providence posited God as an operative force in human affairs and the Bible as a major historical source. This concept, drawn from Puritanism, held that God played an active, even interventionist, role in human affairs. The jeremiad, a series of biblical injunctions that reminded believers of God’s original promises and commandments, complete with stern injunctions to encourage the faithful to follow them, were mainstays of historical writing not only during the colonial and revolutionary periods, but George Bancroft, the nation’s premier historian, continued to employ these traditions through the end of the nineteenth century.⁵ Another important concept was universal history, the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century term for world history, but more than that, the history of humankind from its advent to the present. Universal history in historical conceptualizations put the ancient world on center stage. Caroline Winterer described the tradition as the “culture of classicism,” a systematic engagement among educated Americans from the eighteenth to the late nineteenth century with the intellectual products of ancient Greece and Rome—from the poetry of Horace and Ovid, to the philosophical writings of Plato and Aristotle, to the historical commentary of Herodotus and Thucydides.⁶ A third strategy involves the idea of progress, perhaps the most important mode of eighteenth-century historicism. Drawn from the work of European thinkers such as Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Condorcet, progress meant that the historical past offered a roadmap to chart the possibilities of humankind. More often than not, progress was conceptualized in cyclical and millennial ways as eighteenth-century thinkers argued that human history advanced from simple societies to complex civilizations. Despite a growing belief during the eighteenth century that casual rather than providential forces determined historical outcomes, American intellectuals clung to a belief in the exceptional qualities of the new republic, and God’s hand loomed large in the events and occurrences of the period. Because of this thinking, more often than not, historical conceptualizations embodied a curious mixture of the sacred and the secular.⁷

This chapter explores some of the earliest manifestations of textual historical production among African American intellectuals through these lenses. Building on, as well as critically engaging, the work of Wilson Jeremiah Moses and John Ernest, I explore early nineteenth-century black historicism in the broadest possible terms in order to showcase the complexity of historical styles and approaches of that period. This chapter views these early historical works as far more than vindicationist—a defense of black humanity against racist disparagement. And they are more than contributionist in their focus on how African Americans have contributed to American society. Freemasonry played a role in these texts, as Joanna Brooks and Maurice Wallace have persuasively shown, but its influence is not adequate to explain the constant references in these texts to the ancient world, especially Africa. Moreover this study presumes that recent interpretations by Moses that frame early black historicism as Afrocentric and that Ernest calls “liberationist historiography” perhaps reflect as much about the post–civil rights movement moment out of which these interpretations came as they do the nineteenth century that produced the texts. The challenge here, therefore, is to revisit all of the common assumptions underlying scholarly beliefs about the driving engines of black historicism and, as much as possible, to keep the texts in the context in which they were created. Doing so will not necessarily negate any of the conclusions others have drawn about these texts. Nevertheless, it will reveal how much richer and more revealing they are. African American history was closely connected to European historical methods, but the point is not to “legitimize” the historical production of black intellectuals by connecting it to Europe. Rather the point is to emphasize that it was more than “race” work and racial writing. Without apologies or explanations (suggesting none were necessary), these writers and thinkers engaged the world of ideas and provided, themselves, a legitimate expression of and contribution to nineteenth-century historiography.⁸

Literary and historical scholars generally see the development of print culture in the black community during this early period in two distinct phases: writings that appeared in the early republic from 1789 to the late 1820s, and those written from the late 1820s through the 1830s. The first period of African American print culture was influenced by the American Revolution, the rise of post-revolutionary ideologies that called into question the nation’s commitment to freedom and equality for all its citizens, critiques of the continued existence of slavery, and the growth and expansion of free communities of color. The latter period witnessed the development of a defined African American identity, the formation of important institutional sites such as the press, literary and historical societies, and the convention movement, and a decided shift from the antislavery tactics of the eighteenth century to the immediate abolitionist goals of the antebellum period.⁹

The explosion of African American print culture in the 1790s coincided with the post-revolutionary quest to reconcile the principles of liberty and equality contained in the Declaration of Independence with the discriminatory and exclusionary realities faced by a burgeoning African American population. Alongside other forms of historical expression, ranging from public festivals and displays to commemorative celebrations of seminal events such as the 1807 abolition of the slave trade, black intellectuals produced pamphlets, sermons, tracts, and other textual pieces to plead the case of African Americans and used the written word to construct what Richard Newman, Patrick Rael, and Phil Lapansky have termed “pamphlets of protest.”¹⁰ Pamphlet culture, as historian Lewis Perry noted, represented and contributed to a “reorganization of knowledge” that fueled print and intellectual production and allowed for the growth of the printing press and the production of chapbooks—small, inexpensive pamphlets that were literally read to pieces. These pamphlets, written primarily by ministers, lay community leaders, and antislavery activists, used a wide variety of approaches ranging from vindicationism and contributionism to moral suasion and sentimental advocacy to present their claims for black equality to the American public. In the process, they covered a wide range of subjects, including the plight of free blacks in the aftermath of the American Revolution, the ending of the Atlantic slave trade, and growing debates over the colonization movement. Nevertheless, one of the most frequently discussed topics in these early pamphlets was the history of Africa.¹¹ Partly because of this focus on Africa, modernist scholars tend to argue for the centrality of vindicationism, contributionism, and Freemasonry as driving forces in this early history.¹² But these works reveal much more.

Early historical narratives written by Puritan writers such as William Bradford and the subsequent histories of the American Revolution written by David Ramsay and Mercy Otis Warren had little to offer that provided a complex and nuanced discussion of the Americas. George Bancroft’s providential narrative gained wide acceptance as American history began to take shape between the 1840s and 1890s, but when black intellectuals looked to American history in this earlier period, they were more interested in discussing the gulf between American promises of liberty and equality embodied in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution, on the one hand, and the continued existence of the slave trade up to 1808, and after that, of slavery itself. Consequently, black writers selectively turned to eighteenth-century European historicism because, significantly, American historiography was in its infancy. European writers such as Montesquieu, Voltaire, David Hume, Edward Gibbon, and William Robertson produced magisterial treatises that discussed progress, historical causation, universal history, classical antiquity, and the history of the Americas. Although these histories were steeped in European national and ethnic prejudices, superiority and inferiority complexes, progressive and degenerate views of history, as well as a host of other limitations, this eighteenth-century historiography was, nevertheless, useful because it preserved some aspects of Renaissance humanism and, in some instances, expressed serious concerns about the colonization in the New World. It also continued to rely largely on classical and biblical models. These models allowed useful discussions of human progress that could transcend the limitations of the American present. Thus, they were especially useful to black writers.¹³

But in addition to the influence of eighteenth-century European antecedents, early black historicism included elements of the culture of classicism that permeated the American public sphere and higher education in the eighteenth century and for much of the nineteenth. Because of the focus in recent analyses on black Masonry as a driving engine for black interest in Africa (Egypt and Ethiopia), scholars have overlooked African American intellectual engagement with the classics. In other instances, references to the premodern world in early black histories appear to be a nascent form of Afrocentricism.¹⁴ But black intellectuals, as others have also noted, were much more sophisticated in their scholarly production, appealing to classical texts of Herodotus, Strabo, and Diodorus Siculus as well as early Church writers such as Josephus, Jerome, and Eusebius precisely because this history predated the rise of the Western hemisphere, which significantly inaugurated the slave trade. This approach allowed these writers to use the Western canon to offer a more complex portrait of themselves in the human drama in part by presenting a much longer genealogy of black involvement in world affairs than their introduction to the Americas primarily as slaves.¹⁵ Thus, as useful as modernist and postmodernist approaches are for aiding our understanding of these nineteenth-century texts, we can look squarely at the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries for even greater insights into black historicism.

Orations, subsequently published as pamphlets, not only provide some of the best illustrations of the complex approaches to the past utilized by black intellectuals, but also demonstrate how they deployed print culture to situate African American history in the larger and longer stream of universal and classical history. The first pamphlets, which primarily focus on the slave trade, include John Marrant’s You Stand on the Level with the Greatest Kings on Earth (1789); Peter Williams’s Abolition of the Slave Trade (1808); and William Hamilton’s O’ Africa (1815). Although all of these pamphlets predate the stated starting point of this study, their inclusion allows us to see some of the eighteenth-century roots of early nineteenth-century historical writing.¹⁶

John Marrant’s You Stand on the Level is an excellent example of early black historicism. Marrant, one of the earliest black preachers in the English colonies and chaplain of Prince Hall’s African Lodge, offered a cursory overview of ancient Africa. One of the central purposes of Marrant’s pamphlet, as demonstrated by the pamphlet’s title, is the vindication of the race. Drawing heavily on the institutional knowledge provided by black Masons about ancient Africa, Marrant reconstructed its history prior to the rise of the slave trade, ranging from the origins and development of ancient kingdoms to early advances in the arts and sciences. Marrant did not disguise his interest in and indebtedness to the ancient arts of Masonry throughout the text. Indeed, black Masonry figured prominently in African American social, institutional, and intellectual culture in the early republic.¹⁷ But a closer look at his methodology and sources shows they are firmly grounded in even broader eighteenth-century historical approaches.

Marrant demonstrated his knowledge of the classics and their connection to biblical exegesis when he referenced the writings of the Roman philosopher Seneca in his discussion of the duties of human beings to one another. Seneca was one of the first Roman thinkers to depart from the Aristotelian notion articulated in Politics and the Nicomachean Ethics that certain groups were not usually destined for slavery. Seneca not only promoted the idea of humanity’s consanguinity but insisted that slaves be treated with kindness. Marrant’s knowledge and use of the classics is also apparent in his discussion of early human history, especially the story of the Garden of Eden, which the ancients believed was located on one of the four rivers at the corners of the earth (Tigris, Nile, Ganges, Euphrates). Marrant’s reference was not based exclusively on the Bible but on the opinions of “the learned” whom he cited as early Christian writers, including Josephus, Eusebius, and Jerome. In fact, he cited Josephus to support the assertion that “Paradise did, as it were, border upon Egypt, which is the principal part of the African Ethiopia, which the ancient writers hold is meant there.” In another instance, when citing the great ancient builders of civilizations honored by Masonry such as Nebuchadnezzar (Babylon), Cyrus (Persia), Julius Caesar (Rome), and Herod the Great (Judea), he referenced Josephus’s description of the erection of the Second Temple by Herod.¹⁸

Marrant did not limit his concerns to the past but also reflected on the present, noting that slavery was not the nat...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• A FAITHFUL ACCOUNT OF THE RACE
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• CHAPTER 1 Troubling the Pages of Historians
• CHAPTER 2 To Present A Just View Of Our Origin
• CHAPTER 3 The Destiny of the Colored People
• CHAPTER 4 The Historical Mind of Emancipation
• CHAPTER 5 Advancement in Numbers, Knowledge, and Power
• CHAPTER 6 To Smite the Rock of Knowledge
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index