Americanism

New Perspectives on the History of an Ideal

Michael Kazin, Joseph A. McCartin, Michael Kazin, Joseph A. McCartin

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2012
• Print ISBN: 9780807858974, 9780807830109
• eBook ISBN: 9780807869710
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Theory & Criticism
• Index: History

What is Americanism? The contributors to this volume recognize Americanism in all its complexity — as an ideology, an articulation of the nation’s rightful place in the world, a set of traditions, a political language, and a cultural style imbued with political meaning. In response to the pervasive vision of Americanism as a battle cry or a smug assumption, this collection of essays stirs up new questions and debates that challenge us to rethink the model currently being exported, too often by force, to the rest of the world.

Crafted by a cast of both rising and renowned intellectuals from three continents, the twelve essays in this volume are divided into two sections. The first group of essays addresses the understanding of Americanism within the United States over the past two centuries, from the early republic to the war in Iraq. The second section provides perspectives from around the world in an effort to make sense of how the national creed and its critics have shaped diplomacy, war, and global culture in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Approaching a controversial ideology as both scholars and citizens, many of the essayists call for a revival of the ideals of Americanism in a new progressive politics that can bring together an increasingly polarized and fragmented citizenry.

Contributors:
Mia Bay, Rutgers University
Jun Furuya, Hokkaido University, Japan
Gary Gerstle, University of Maryland
Jonathan M. Hansen, Harvard University
Michael Kazin, Georgetown University
Rob Kroes, University of Amsterdam
Melani McAlister, The George Washington University
Joseph A. McCartin, Georgetown University
Alan McPherson, Howard University
Louis Menand, Harvard University
Mae M. Ngai, University of Chicago
Robert Shalhope, University of Oklahoma
Stephen J. Whitfield, Brandeis University
Alan Wolfe, Boston College

I Whose America?

See Your Declaration Americans!!!

Abolitionism, Americanism, and the Revolutionary Tradition in Free Black Politics

MIA BAY

Sometime during the eventful year of 1776, a mulatto man named Lemuel Haynes sat down and composed his own addition to the Declaration of Independence: a manuscript entitled “Liberty Further Extended.”¹ A Massachusetts resident and fervent patriot, the twenty-three-year-old Haynes might have also used the title to describe the course of his own life up to that point. Raised in indentured servitude, and released in 1774, Haynes had lent his own newly gained liberty to the defense of American freedom. He served as a minuteman that year and enlisted in the Continental army in 1776; when he contracted typhus, his military career came to an end. Haynes had no complaints about his military service but clearly thought the patriot cause was incomplete. Heading his manuscript with the preamble to the Declaration of Independence, which had been issued that summer, Haynes joined the founding fathers in condemning British “tyrony,” but called for self-scrutiny as well: “While we are Engaged in the important struggle,” he wrote, “it cannot Be tho’t impertinent for us to turn an eye into our own Breast, for a little moment, and See, whether thro some inadvertency, or a self-contracted Spirit, we Do not find the monster Lurking in our own Bosom.” At a time when his countrymen were “zelous to maintain and foster our own invaded rights,” Haynes observed, a much “greater oppression” than “that which Englishmen seem so much to spurn at” existed among them: “the practice of Slave-keeping.” The problem was as obvious as its remedy, Haynes contended, outlining his “main proposition: . . . That an African or, in other terms, that a Negro may Justly Challenge, and has an undeniable right to his [‘free(dom)’ is blotted out] Liberty: Consequently, the practice of Slave-keeping is illegal.”²

Lemuel Haynes was by no means alone in questioning the legitimacy of slavery in the new republic. From the dawn of the American colonists’ conflict with Britain, both black and white Americans had difficulty reconciling natural rights ideology with servitude. “The Colonists are by the law of nature free born, as indeed all men are, white or black,” pondered Massachusetts attorney James Otis in his widely circulated revolutionary manifesto, The Rights of the British Colonies Asserted and Proved (1764): “Does it follow that ’tis right to enslave a man because he is black?” Otis thought not, and named the slave trade as one of Britain’s many crimes against liberty. “Nothing better can be said in favor of a trade that is the most shocking violation of the law of nature, has a direct tendency to diminish the idea of the inestimable value of liberty, and makes every dealer in it a tyrant, from the director of an African company to the petty chapman in needles and pins on the unhappy coast,” he wrote. “It is a clear truth that those who every day barter away other men’s liberty will soon care little for their own.”³

Unlike Haynes, however, Otis and other white patriots did not see the abolition of slavery as a central goal of the new republic. Antislavery sentiment was widespread during the revolutionary era and generated considerable consensus against American participation in the African slave trade. But the importation of slaves was the only aspect of slavery as it was practiced in the United States that the white men who led the American Revolution even contemplated abolishing at the Constitutional Convention in 1787. And rather than requiring its abolition, the Constitution they wrote prohibited Congress from banning the slave trade before 1808, and did not require it to end thereafter—laying a very tentative sanction on a form of commerce already on its “last economic legs.”⁴ To be sure, antislavery activity was more vigorous on the state level, as well as among individual whites. The decades after the Revolution saw the passage of a series of gradual emancipation laws, which eventually ended slavery in the northern states. Likewise, these years witnessed a wave of manumissions undertaken by slaveholders in both the North and the upper South who were moved to renounce bondage by the liberating influences of the Revolution and/or the Great Awakening—which posed its own evangelical challenges to the sin of slavery. But despite slavery’s uneasy relationship with both evangelical Christianity and republican ideology, white antislavery activists of the revolutionary era, as Patricia Bradley notes, “failed to make the issue central to national identity.”⁵

The same, however, cannot be said of the nation’s black population, for whom, as Benjamin Quarles has observed, the Revolution was “truly revolutionary.”⁶ Among the enslaved, the Revolution fostered what Gary Nash has called “the largest slave uprising in American history,” inspiring tens of thousands of bondsmen and bondswomen to flee their masters for the British.⁷ Moreover, it had an equally profound effect among the black Americans who remained with the patriots. The American Revolution, as we see in the writings of Lemuel Haynes, offered African Americans new conceptions of liberty and natural rights, which informed and defended their attempts to liberate themselves as a people.

Long before 1776, as Peter Wood has noted, the experience of enslavement very likely ensured that “African-Americans thought longer and harder than any other sector of the population about the concept of liberty, both as an abstract ideal and as a tangible reality.”⁸ Not until the Revolution, however, did they acquire a powerful and commonly accepted lingua franca that could express their aspirations for liberty. Inextricably entwined with American nationality from the very start, black abolitionism took shape during the revolutionary era and encompassed not only challenges to the legality of slavery in the new republic, such as the one posed by Haynes, but also the long black struggle for freedom and civil rights in the new northern states. Looking back on that struggle in 1844, the ever-eloquent black abolitionist and physician James McCune Smith observed that “freedom . . . has bound us to American institutions with a tenacity that nothing but death can overcome.”⁹

Black Americanism and black abolitionism, however, are rarely discussed in tandem in scholarship on African American thought or abolitionism.¹⁰ The convergence between these two inextricably entwined elements of African American intellectual history is all too often lost in a historiography on black thought that assesses much of nineteenth-century black thought and politics in relationship to black rather than American nationalism and a historiography of abolitionism that typically begins with William Lloyd Garrison’s conversion to a commitment to the immediate abolition of slavery in 1830s.¹¹ Unlike the history of white abolitionism, which usually starts with Garrison’s rejection of gradual emancipation and schemes for the African colonization of American blacks, black abolitionism has no canonical story of its origins. Recent revisionist works on abolitionism have begun to stress the central role free blacks played in Garrison’s conversion to immediatism, which, although acknowledged by Garrison, has not always been recognized by historians.¹² Still, the question of exactly where the African Americans who influenced Garrison got their ideas remains underexplored. Studies of black abolitionism such as Benjamin Quarles’s Black Abolitionists (1969), Jane H. Pease and William H. Pease’s They Who Would Be Free: The Black Search for Freedom, 1830–1861 (1974), and Patrick Rael’s Black Identity and Protest in the Antebellum North (2002) pick up in the antebellum era. Written over a span of more than thirty years, all three books locate the beginning of this movement in free black opposition to the American Colonization Society (ACS), a white organization founded in 1816 that was dedicated to sending free blacks to Africa.¹³

The story may well begin earlier, however. The black anticolonization movement that mobilized shortly after the ACS’s inaugural meeting drew on antislavery conceptions of America that African Americans had championed since the very dawn of the revolutionary era. Forged in a crucible of slavery, servitude, and racial discrimination, African American ideas about liberty and the new nation were all the more powerful for being so difficult to realize and gave coherence and character to the long black struggle for abolition. This essay explores the foundations of black Americanism and abolitionism, tracing the multitude of links between the two.

The Same Principle Lives in Us:
The Impact of Revolutionary Ideology on American Blacks

The connections were obvious enough at the time. In the decades immediately preceding and following the Revolution, regardless of whether they fought in its battles, African Americans could not help but be aware of the emancipatory ideology that fueled American resistance to British rule. As Sylvia Frey comments, “Blacks, slave and free, urban and rural, artisan and field hand, were swept up by the force of the ideological energy.”¹⁴ Almost universally poor, and largely enslaved, black Americans had little direct interest in revenue stamps or sugar duties. But the idea of natural rights held an obvious appeal among the most unfree of Americans. As early as 1765, for example, the rhetoric of revolution sparked the imagination of a group of slaves in Charleston, South Carolina. Not long after watching a white mob protesting the Stamp Act with cries of “Liberty! Liberty and stamp’d paper,” they adapted the slogan to their own situation, throwing whites into a panic with calls for “Liberty.” South Carolina politician Henry Laurens, who recorded this incident, dismissed the slaves’ chant as “a thoughtless imitation” of whites. But a rising tide of slave unrest in Charleston and beyond would prove him wrong. The year 1775 saw the Charleston militia mobilizing against not only the possibility of a British invasion but also “any hostile attempts that may be made by our domestics.”¹⁵

Likewise, the small population of blacks in the North, who lived in close quarters with whites, proved equally receptive to discussions of revolutionary politics. Exposed to discussions of natural and inalienable rights among the whites with whom they lived, as well in the taverns, town halls, and marketplaces of the North, northern blacks embraced the principles of the Revolution as an expression of their own heartfelt political desires. “In every human Breast,” the young black poet Phillis Wheatley wrote a long-time correspondent in 1774, “God has implanted a Principle, which we call Love of Freedom; it is impatient of Oppression, and pants for Deliverance; and by the Leave of our modern Egyptians I will assert, that the same Principle lives in us”—a sentiment borne out by the poetry she wrote as a slave. Moreover, Wheatley, along with many other revolutionary-era Americans, had no trouble spotting the contradictions between the colonists’ demands for freedom from Britain and their determination to uphold slavery: “How well the Cry for Liberty, and the reverse Disposition for the exercise of oppressive Power over others agree,—I humbly think it does not require the Penetration of a Philosopher to determine,” she observed.¹⁶

Emancipated by her owner in 1773, Phillis Wheatley critiqued this contradiction in a public letter; other blacks who remained enslaved felt compelled to challenge it still more directly. Starting in 1771, northern blacks began to petition their local legislatures for freedom, often making explicit reference to the political principles that animated American opposition to Britain.¹⁷ “We expect great things from men who have made such a noble stand against the design of their fellow-men to enslave them,” a group of blacks told the Boston legislature that year in a bid to be allowed to purchase their own freedom.¹⁸ Black petitioners for “the Enjoyments of that which is the Natural Right of all men” grew more radical over time, warning that emancipation was required so that “the Inhabitance of this Stats No longer [be] chargeable with the inconsistency of acting themselves in the part which they condemn and oppose in others.” They also dropped their offers to pay for their freedom: Connecticut blacks who petitioned in 1779 noted that “we ask for nothing; but what we are fully persuaded is ours to Claim.”¹⁹ Moreover, slave petitioners also took their claims to the enemy. Between 1773 and 1774, British general Thomas Gage received several petitions from “a grate number of blacks,” all of whom promised to “fight for him providing he would arm them and engage to liberate them if he conquered”—an offer that Abigail Adams described to her husband John Adams as a “conspiracy of the Negroes.”²⁰

None of these petitions succeeded. Still, by June 1775, Thomas Gage had begun to advocate the British recruitment of blacks, and, five months later, John Murray, the earl of Dunmore and royal governor of Virginia, issued a proclamation offering freedom to slaves who supported the British cause—an offer that as many as one hundred thousand southern slaves would ultimately take up.²¹

Meanwhile, in the North, African American challenges to slavery also had far-reaching effects. In the decades following the Revolution, most northern states passed gradual emancipation laws—although Vermont abolished slavery by constitutional fiat in 1777, and slavery was declared illegal in Massachusetts and New Hampshire by way of a long and confusing series of court cases. In part, these laws reflected the antislavery sentiment of revolutionary-era white northerners. Yet the death of slavery in the North was by no means a purely legislative matter decided by whites. On the contrary, one of the most striking features of America’s first emancipation was the central role that African Americans played in securing the abolition of slavery in the North. A practical fact during the revolutionary era, black abolitionism encompassed far more than the challenges to slavery seen in slave petitions and the writings of Lemuel Haynes. African American efforts to bring about the immediate end of slavery are also seen in the multitude of routes to freedom black Americans managed to forge during the revolutionary era—both legal and otherwise.

As we have seen, even before the American Revolution, slavery was under siege from within in both the North and South. Slave freedom suits and petitions for liberty proliferated during the 1770s a...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Americanism
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction
• I Whose America?
• II Americanism in the World
• Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Index