If ever America undergoes great revolutions, they will be brought about by the presence of the black race on the soil of the United States; that is to say, they will owe their origin, not to the equality, but to the inequality of condition. (De Toqueville, Democracy in America, Book II, 1840)

In the weeks leading up to the pivotal presidential election of 1864, 140 abolitionists from seventeen states, including numerous slave states, met in the Wesleyan Methodist Church in Syracuse, N.Y., to discuss what one delegate called the end of the “long dark night of sorrow” and the “morning’s dawn” of a new meaning of freedom in America. Many of the speeches delivered over the course of four days in Syracuse focused on questions of “equal opportunities and equal rights.” We have “been subdued, not by the power of ideas, but by brute force, and have been unjustly deprived not only of many of our natural rights, but debarred the privileges and advantages freely accorded to other men,” read a portion of the declaration of wrongs and rights, a “strong document” according to the Liberator, “drawn with point and terseness.” Delegates demanded, among other things, the right of suffrage, equal access to education, equal pay for black soldiers, the ability to serve on juries and the immediate end of slavery. Referencing the profound service of black troops in the Union war effort, one delegate maintained that “Wagner, Hudson, Petersburg, and all the other battles of this war, have not been fought in vain.” For Frederick Douglass, the most famous abolitionist in America and the president of the convention, the delegates were gathered “to promote the freedom, progress, elevation, and perfect enfranchisement, of the entire colored people of the United States.” As historian David Cecelski has noted, the declaration made at Syracuse was the “philosophical underpinning for the black freedom struggle.”

For years, I have framed my classroom discussion of Reconstruction by guiding students through a transcript of a meeting of black religious leaders with Union General William T. Sherman in Savannah, Ga. It is in many ways a remarkable document, detailing responses to large and momentous questions: What did the Emancipation Proclamation mean? How could the government assist freedmen? What did freedom even mean? For the black minister Garrison Frazier, freedom entailed “taking” slaves from the “yoke of bondage” and placing them where they “could reap the fruit” of their “own labor.”

Recently, however, an invitation to write a piece on Reconstruction for the New York Times digital series on the Civil War era forced me to rethink my reliance on the Savannah meeting as a complete framework for the unit. I realized that in order to help my students fully understand how black abolitionists in the North thought about the meaning of the Civil War, I needed to engage some issues that were not raised in Savannah and to explore how other black leaders defined freedom. The deliberations at the Syracuse Convention gave the class a wider window into the civil rights movement in the nineteenth century. An ongoing digital history project at the University of Delaware on nineteenth-century black conventions provided easy access to a complete transcript, along with dozens of other black conventions.

My students enjoyed the experience of researching the lives of the Syracuse delegates on blackpast.org. Though the vast majority of delegates were male, Edmonia Highgate and Frances Ellen Watkins Harper also played roles at the convention, though unfortunately the texts of their remarks have not survived. Among those in attendance at Syracuse were Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, John Sella Martin, James W. C. Pennington, Abraham Galloway, and Jermain Loguen, all of whom had escaped from the upper South and later became active conductors on the underground railroad. Brown, Pennington, Douglass, and Loguen all wrote best-selling narratives, detailing their time in bondage and their escape to freedom. In addition to helping fugitive slaves, these men were at the forefront of the civil rights movement. Before the Civil War, Pennington helped to found the Legal Rights League in New York to battle racial segregation. Douglass and Brown, along with New York delegate Henry Highland Garnet, Rhode Island delegate George T. Downing, and Ohio delegate John Mercer Langston, participated in efforts to recruit black soldiers for the Union Army. In his speech at the convention, Garnet referenced the 1863 draft riots in New York City and the “demoniac” anti-black violence that gripped the city over service in the military. My students were able to research this large urban riot on blackpast.org, along with the activities of various benevolent organizations mentioned at the convention, including the African Civilization Society and the National Freedmen’s Relief Association.

A convention speech by John Mercer Langston afforded me the opportunity to introduce the class to U.S. Attorney General Edward Bates’s November 1862 ruling on citizenship. At Syracuse, Langston, a trained attorney, highlighted the equality principles of Jefferson’s 1776 Declaration and then summarized Bates’s ruling for the audience. Bates dismantled Chief Justice Roger Taney’s decision in Dred Scott v. Sanford (1857). The Constitution, declared Bates, said not “one word, and furnishes not one hint, in relation to the color or to the ancestral race” of citizens. Every person born free on American soil was, according to Bates, “at the moment of birth, prima facie a citizen” of the United States. Langston’s speech allowed me to revisit the story of the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation using some of historian James Oakes’s scholarship. Bates’s opinion meant that freed slaves were indeed “free persons” as understood by the Constitution and, most importantly, they were to be afforded the privileges and immunities of citizenship.

The fruits of decades of black activism can be seen in Bates’s groundbreaking decision. For example, in 1842, black activists, along with their white allies in the Whig party, led a successful effort to strike the word “white” from the Rhode Island constitution. Throughout the pre-Civil War era, African Americans led drives to desegregate schools, to end segregated travel on street cars in major cities, and to gain access to public accommodations. As historian James M. McPherson noted long ago, northern freedom fighters “could not hope to revolutionize the southern social order without first improving the status of Northern” blacks. George Downing, president of the 1859 New England Regional Convention, and fellow Rhode Islander James Jefferson, were major contributors to the Syracuse Convention and worked tirelessly to end segregation in public schools. As historian Kyle Volk has recently documented in a path-breaking book, black-led organizations sought to break the color barrier through petitioning campaigns, lobbying efforts and legal battles in the 1840s, ’50s, ’60s. My students are often surprised to learn that the civil rights activism that they associate with the NAACP in the twentieth century was part of the pre-Civil War era.

On discussion boards, my students explored the powerful “Declaration of Wrongs and Rights” produced at the end of the Syracuse Convention. They noticed its structural similarities to the Declaration of Independence and compared it to abolitionist texts we had already studied, such as Angelina Grimké’s 1836 “Appeal to the Christian Women of the South,” Douglass’s 1845 autobiography, and Douglass’s famous 1846 letter to Garrison, which was immortalized by Ken Burns in his film on the Civil War. “When I remember that with the waters of her noblest rivers, the tears of my brethren are borne to the ocean, disregarded and forgotten, and that her most fertile fields drink daily of the warm blood of my outraged sisters, I am filled with unutterable loathing,” wrote Douglass to Garrison.

Another thread in the students’ discussion focused on their observation that the debate in Syracuse was not simply an abstract, intellectual exercise on the meaning of citizenship, but a powerful conversation about American slavery, a “loathing” of a system that had destroyed the lives of millions of black Americans since the founding of the nation. Many of the delegates had been born into slavery in the South and it was their experiences that informed the construction of the declarations of “wrongs.” The text of the fourth “wrong” provided a wonderful opportunity for students to revisit what Douglass labeled the “dark night” of American slavery, a large topic in the fall term:

As a people, we have been denied the ownership of our bodies, our wives, homes, children, and the products of our own labor; we have been compelled, under pain of death, to submit to wrongs deeper and darker than the earth ever witnessed in the case of any other people; we have been forced into silence and inaction in full presence of the infernal spectacle of our sons groaning under the lash, our daughters ravished, our wives violated, and our firesides desolated, while we ourselves have been led to the shambles and sold like beasts of the field.

The subsequent statement of “rights,” which opened with a reference to all men being born “free and equal,” contained four sections. The delegates chastised all attempts to colonize them outside of the U.S. and demanded that land taken from rebel slaveholders be redistributed to slaves. Finally, the delegates desired to see the “immunities and privileges” of citizenship afforded to them.

At the end of the convention, Frederick Douglass was asked to draft an address to the nation that would reach a wider audience. Douglass drew from many of the themes he had put forth in his widely circulated wartime speeches, especially his December 1863 address to the American Anti-Slavery Society. In this jeremiad, “Our Work Is Not Done,” Douglass maintained that “mightier work than the abolition of slavery now looms” before the country. A true “abolition peace,” according to Douglass, had to include emancipation and civil and political equality for black Americans. Douglass declared in October 1864 that he was committed to the “right path”—emancipation and civil rights. Douglass understood that the “Slave Power” had yet to be completely vanquished, but he also feared the “shadow of slavery,” a reference to northern racism, which he believed was embodied in the ranks of the Republican party. “We may survive the arrows of the known negro-haters of our country,” wrote Douglass, “but woe to the colored race when the champions fail to demand, for any reason, equal liberty in every respect.”

Douglass had been fiercely critical of President Abraham Lincoln for months and in his speech in Syracuse he made it clear that though Union victory seemed near, there were still no firm guarantees about what a reconstructed union would look like. Douglass issued a stark warning to the Republicans: “make sure of the friendship of the slaves; for, depend upon it, your Government cannot afford to encounter the enmity of both.” In the end, Douglass maintained that the “change” in the conception of freedom that had been ushered in by the progress of the war and the Emancipation Proclamation was “great and increasing.” Douglass hoped to merge the cause of black equality with national renewal.          

After the Syracuse Convention, the newly created National Equal Rights League (NERL) took up the fight “to obtain by appeals to the minds and conscience of the American people, or by legal process when possible, a recognition of the rights of the colored people of the nation as American citizens.” Under Langston’s leadership, the NERL, which was headquartered in Philadelphia, began to oversee local branches across the North and in parts of the South that were under federal military control. The Pennsylvania Equal Rights League, perhaps the most well-known of the auxiliary organizations and well-documented by historian Hugh Davis, published a constitution in early 1865. The convention in Harrisburg, Pa., adopted a bold resolution: “As the nation has cast off slavery, let them destroy restrictions which prevent colored people from entries to libraries, colleges, lecture rooms, military academies, jury boxes, churches, theatres, street cars and from voting.” In May 1865, Octavius Catto, a delegate to the Syracuse convention and active member of the NERL, initiated a sit-in to desegregate streetcars in Philadelphia. After a driver unhitched the car that Catto had boarded in an attempt to prevent the black activist from riding, Catto simply sat down and stayed in the car until the next morning when he was joined by other black passengers who desired to be taken to work. In 1871, Catto was gunned down in broad daylight as he attempted to take part in an election. The white shooter was acquitted on all charges.   

Four years after Catto’s murder, the prominent Massachusetts Republican Senator Charles Sumner helped to orchestrate the passage of a far-reaching civil rights bill that built on the agenda of the NERL. American citizens, the 1875 Civil Rights Act declared, were entitled “to the full and equal enjoyment of the accommodations, advantages, facilities, and privileges of inns, public conveyances on land or water, theaters, and other places of public amusement.” During the lengthy debate on Sumner’s bill, a contentious battle was waged in Congress over whether or not the federal government had the power to prevent acts of discrimination committed by private businesses and individuals. In order to trigger the Fourteenth Amendment, there had to be some type of state action. Was private discrimination by a theater owner, for example, permissible? Syracuse delegate George Downing certainly did not think so. “If an inn” has its “right to exist by virtue of state authority” and is “regulated by it,” he argued, it “may be said that the state does the discriminating.”

The U.S. Supreme Court did not follow Downing’s line of reasoning. In 1883, the justices declared the 1875 statute unconstitutional. The justices viewed privately owned theaters and restaurants as outside of the bounds of state action. Discrimination by owners simply constituted private wrongs that the national government was powerless to correct. In his final autobiography, Frederick Douglass maintained that “future historians will turn to the year 1883 to find the most flagrant example” of “national deterioration.” Though Sumner’s bill was ultimately nullified by a court and indeed by an indifferent nation, the spirit of the law lived on. It was up to modern civil rights leaders and activists to carry on the work that had come out of the Syracuse Convention. The steadfast efforts of the NAACP, the successor organization to the NERL, eventually led to the passage of a civil rights bill that the nation could not ignore.

The author dedicates this article to his students at the Lawrenceville School.  

Further Reading:

Thanks to editor Darcy Fryer, this is the third essay I have been able to write on the meaning of freedom in the Civil War era for Common-place (Part I & Part II). In preparing to write the end of the trilogy, I re-read historian James M. McPherson’s invaluable 1964 work, The Struggle for Equality, along with his 1965 book, The Negro’s Civil War. The Genius of Freedom website sponsored by the Library Company of Philadelphia is a wonderful classroom teaching tool. I benefited from reading Kyle G. Volk’s Moral Minorities and the Making of American Democracy (Oxford, 2014). Hugh Davis’s ‘We Will be Satisfied with Nothing Less’: The African American Struggle for Equal Rights in the North During Reconstruction (Ithaca, 2011) and Douglas R. Egerton’s The Wars of Reconstruction: The Brief, Violent History of America’s Most Progressive Era (New York, 2014) helped in understanding northern civil rights activism in the Civil War era. Egerton’s Lincoln Prize-winning Thunder at the Gates: The Black Civil War Regiments That Redeemed America (New York, 2016) provided valuable insight into the ways in which black military service was connected to civil rights activism, a topic addressed by Massachusetts lawyer John Rock at the Syracuse Convention. James Oakes’s groundbreaking work, Freedom National: The Destruction of American Slavery, 1861-1865 (New York, 2013), provided insight into the significance of Attorney General Bates’s ruling on the citizenship question. For information on Jermain Loguen see Milton Sernet’s North Star Country (New York, 2001). David Cecelski’s The Fire of Freedom: Abraham Galloway and the Slaves’ Civil War (Chapel Hill, N.C., 2012) is a thoroughly engaging study and provides an excellent overview of the Syracuse Convention. Cecelski’s highly readable book would work well in any undergraduate or advanced high school class. Daniel Biddle and Murray Dubin’s Tasting Freedom (Philadelphia, 2010) is a detailed biography of Octavius Catto. In September 2017 the city of Philadelphia finally erected a statue to commemorate Catto’s career. All students of Frederick Douglass anxiously await the publication of David Blight’s Frederick Douglass: An American Prophet (New York, 2018).

This article originally appeared in issue 18.2 (Spring, 2018).

Erik J. Chaput, PhD, teaches American history at the Lawrenceville School, an independent boarding school in New Jersey, and in the School of Continuing Education at Providence College. He is the author of The People’s Martyr: Thomas Wilson Dorr and His 1842 Rhode Island Rebellion (2013).

There is a classic early episode of The Simpsons in which the denizens of Springfield eagerly prepare for their town’s bicentennial celebration. As part of a school assignment, precocious eight-year-old Lisa Simpson decides to investigate the exploits of her town’s founding father, Jebediah Springfield. She begins with the best of intentions, hoping to lionize a local hero. After some vigorous historical sleuthing, however, she uncovers a terrible truth: the man universally celebrated as a fearless pioneer of the western plains was actually a “murderous pirate” named Hans Sprungfeld. Hardly a patriotic hero, he was an assassin and a fraud who had tried to kill George Washington and whose tongue had been “bitten off by a Turk in a grog house fight.”

The Amistad case is usually presented as a key chapter in American history, a commentary on slavery as a distinctly American dilemma. Virtually all scholars who discuss the event pay little or no attention to the fate of the captives after their return to Africa, and when historians do attempt some accounting of the activities of the survivors, the story remains vague or incomplete.

Needless to say, Springfield residents are dismayed by Lisa’s findings and refuse to believe them. Her teacher gives her an F for “dead-white-male-bashing.” Even local historian Hollis Hurlbut (voiced by the marvelously deadpan Donald Sutherland) refuses to accept the truth. Undeterred, Lisa persists in her effort to defrock the villainous Sprungfeld. She convinces authorities to exhume his corpse and discovers new evidence to corroborate her theory. But, on the cusp of revealing her proof to the world, Lisa has a change of heart. She realizes that the legend of the hometown hero has united her small community. The myth itself, it turns out, is worth preserving, and she abandons her revisionist project. Although the moral message is not one that most professional historians would embrace, it speaks to a larger truth. Those looking to reappraise the careers of treasured celebrities had best tread lightly; iconoclasm is not always in vogue.

As leader of the 1839 Amistad slave revolt, the man known as Joseph Cinqué has earned a rightful place in our pantheon of heroes. The general outline of his story is well known. Kidnapped in Mende (in the hinterland of what is now Sierra Leone) and carried across the Atlantic to Spanish Cuba, he was one of many victims of an illegal but still thriving international slave trade. After his arrival in Havana in the summer of 1839, he and fifty-two other Africans were transferred aboard the schooner Amistad, destined for a lifetime of forced labor on Cuban plantations. Cinqué and some of his fellow captives managed to seize control of the vessel and attempted to sail home but were intercepted by the United States Navy as they veered into southern New England. Black and white abolitionists championed the rebels’ cause over a period of several years, and after a series of legal challenges that culminated in a dramatic Supreme Court showdown, the survivors were finally allowed to return home.

The informal representative for the Amistad group during their stay in America, Cinqué became one of the most celebrated Africans of the nineteenth century. He has been immortalized in portraits and novels and dominates the screen in a multiple award-winning film by Steven Spielberg (fig. 1). Like the larger-than-life monument to Jebediah Springfield featured prominently on the Simpsons’ town green, a fourteen-foot bronze statue commemorating his bravery stands just blocks from my apartment, in downtown New Haven, Connecticut. So, I must admit, I felt more than a little uneasy when I discovered evidence that appeared to substantiate rumors that Cinqué had participated in the slave trade upon his return to Africa. Perhaps Lisa Simpson was right. Perhaps old ghosts are best left undisturbed. Yet, I could not resist the urge to investigate this troublesome accusation. Especially now, in the aftermath of the two hundredth anniversary of the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade, there is no better time to reopen old controversies and revisit longstanding myths.

Over the past year, I have been investigating the life of ex-convict and radical antislavery activist George Thompson, including his role as director of the American mission station established in West Africa as an extension of the Amistad victory. Knowing that most of the Amistad survivors had deserted the mission long before Thompson’s arrival in the late 1840s, I suspected they would play only a very minor part in my story. But a brief reference in his memoir, the humbly titled Thompson in Africa, caught my attention. Tucked away in the middle of page twenty-four, following an account of his dinner with the governor of Sierra Leone and just before an update on his aggressive campaign against intoxicating drinks, Thompson announced that the famous Cinqué had been married in the house of an elderly native. According to Thompson, he had “conducted badly” thereafter and left the colony for Jamaica. What could this mean? Thompson was a prolific diarist; his published letters and journals alone amount to over two thousand pages. But I could not find much beyond this stray comment.

The 1839 Amistad uprising was one of only a few truly successful slave revolts in the history of the Atlantic World, and the Supreme Court trial that ensued is now widely recognized as a pivotal event in early American history. The brief reference to Cinqué in Thompson’s memoir had piqued my interest. So, like any curious student, I hurried to the nearest library to check out the existing scholarly literature. What I found was both disappointing and perplexing. Very little is known about Cinqué. The details of his life both before and after his capture remain obscured behind a haze of rumor and speculation. Even his true name is unclear. The Latinized version most popular during his lifetime was concocted by white slave traders in order to mask their illegal activities. His abolitionist allies tended to refer to him as “Cingue” or “Cinque,” while some modern historians prefer the Africanized “Sengbe Pieh.” (I have chosen to use the former in the interest of historical accuracy and because he seems to have presented himself as such in correspondence with his abolitionist friends.) These ambiguities stem from a biased and incomplete historical record, but they also reflect a deeper problem in the historiography of slavery.

Despite the widely heralded international turn in historical studies over the past two decades, the entire African phase of the Amistad revolt has been, and continues to be, ignored. The Amistad case is usually presented as a key chapter in American history, a commentary on slavery as a distinctly American dilemma. Virtually all scholars who discuss the event pay little or no attention to the fate of the captives after their return to Africa, and when historians do attempt some accounting of the activities of the survivors, the story remains vague or incomplete. Authoritative texts published as recently as 2006 devote only a few sentences to the lives of the former captives and get a number of the basic facts wrong, including the location of Mende (Cinqué’s homeland) and the number of white missionaries who accompanied the rebels upon their return. Most mysterious of all was the question of what had happened to their illustrious leader; no one seemed to know.

Nine years ago, preeminent Amistad scholar Howard Jones published an article in the Journal of American History that directly confronted Cinqué’s activities in Africa. Jones was especially concerned with rumors that the rebel hero had engaged in slave trading upon his return and traced such accounts to an obscure retrospective issued in the 1940s. He argued that there was not one shred of documentary evidence that could corroborate the story, and most experts today seem to agree. Yet the bulk of Jones’s research focused on books published in the twentieth century by novelists and academics. The disparaging remark in Thompson’s memoir suggested that Cinqué was the object of controversy at a much earlier date.

I returned to the library. A dissertation by the late Clifton Johnson, founding director of Tulane University’s Amistad Research Center, offered a wealth of information on the establishment of the American mission station in West Africa. Johnson concluded that “some” of the former captives had engaged in the slave trade and “proved a great hindrance to the mission.” But his primary source was the same dubious text identified by Jones—parts of which were noticeably plagiarized. Research published in 2000 by English professor Iyunolu Osagie offered a more sympathetic overview of the experience of the repatriated Africans and speculated that white authorities had labeled Cinqué “a ‘bad nigger’ because he did not cooperate with the missionary agenda.” But this only presented another dilemma. If the accusations of slave trading were utterly false, as Jones and Osagie maintained, what had prompted them? Could they have been conjured out of thin air simply because Cinqué refused to join the mission? Or did they have some basis in reality? I decided to dig through the early records of the Amistad mission to see for myself.

After their landmark victory in the United States Supreme Court in the spring of 1841, most of the former captives of the Amistad were eager to return home, and the scores of black and white activists who had aided their case were eager to comply with their wishes. Black abolitionists, in particular, interpreted the Supreme Court victory as a providential calling—a sign from God to spread the antislavery gospel in Africa—and led the effort to carry this message back across the Atlantic. Joining forces with the white, mostly Congregationalist, leadership of the original Amistad Committee, they formed the nucleus of what would eventually become the American Missionary Association. Their goal was to establish an antislavery outpost somewhere in the vicinity of Sierra Leone, with the Amistad captives as its charter generation. Three white missionaries and two black assistants were recruited for the job. But when they all piled on board the Gentleman in New York harbor in late November 1841, the relationship between the thirty-five former captives and their would-be benefactors was tenuous at best.

During the two-month voyage to Sierra Leone, the recently emancipated Africans worried that their white friends might abandon them to the captain for “a barrel full of money” and kept a close eye on the night sky and the ship’s compass to ensure they were following the proper course. They had good reason to be suspicious—when they had seized the Amistad three years earlier and attempted to return home, the surviving crew had secretly maneuvered the ship in the opposite direction at night. Tensions ran high as the group neared the African coast. European privateers suspected the Gentleman was a slaver, and it narrowly escaped capture when it stopped for supplies at São Tiago in the Cape Verde Islands. When the group finally arrived in Freetown, Sierra Leone, the hunt for friends and relatives began in earnest, and most of the Africans left the colony after a short period of time. Cinqué, who had been reunited with his brother at Freetown, remained in the area and helped the missionaries explore the coast for a suitable location for the mission.

Despite high hopes for a stable population of pious, industrious converts, the mission community began to disintegrate almost immediately. Problems agreeing on a site for the mission were made worse by conflicting ethnicities. Although commonly referred to as “the Mendians” by white Americans, in reality, the Amistad survivors were composed of at least six different West African ethnic groups, and not all wanted to remain in the same place. Mende territory, assumed to be the ideal location for a mission outpost, was buried deep in the interior, well beyond the sphere of British protection and surrounded by war and the slave trade. It took two years before a permanent base was established at the village of Kaw-Mendi in the Sherbro region of West Africa, 150 miles southeast of Freetown and about “two days walk” from Cinqué’s home.

The white missionaries had difficultly maintaining their authority over the remaining Africans. The Christian piety and discipline that had seemed so promising among some of the captives during their stay in America quickly melted away. One of the survivors got into a violent brawl with locals and was almost shot. Another began sharing mission supplies with his paramour. Yet another became dangerously intoxicated at a friend’s funeral. While preparing to leave the United States, church authorities had informed the missionaries that the Mende had no real “system of religion,” that they were essentially blank slates waiting to be inscribed by the benevolent hand of Christian Civilization. So the agents were shocked to find so many reverting to “heathen” practices virtually overnight (fig. 2). William Raymond, a white abolitionist who supervised the missionary operation for nearly six years, wrote home that it might “be better for me and the mission if they should all leave me, and I had another set of men.” Not long afterward, he dismissed all but four of the remaining group from his care, “on account of their bad behavior.”

The most famous of the Amistad survivors proved especially vexing for the missionaries. According to reports published by the antislavery press, Cinqué had been living with his father and working as a rice farmer when he was kidnapped and sold across the Atlantic (fig. 3). The veracity of these claims remains an open question; other accounts insisted that he was a prince or that he was a slaveholder who had trouble paying off his debts. Whatever the case, Cinqué proudly embraced his role as leader of the rebellion and, because of his celebrity status, acted as an unofficial spokesperson for the rest of the group. Audiences across New England declared him “a powerful natural orator … born to sway the minds of his fellow men,” and white abolitionists imagined his potentially illustrious career as “a preacher of the cross in Africa.” But their unmitigated adulation only bred disappointment.

When he left New York in November 1841, Cinqué assumed he would be in charge of the entire expedition and that the missionaries and all their supplies would be under his control. He decided to pursue an independent course when he realized that this would not be the case. Evidence from the antislavery press suggests that he became a conventional merchant, probably trading rum, tobacco, and various kinds of local produce. He did remain in the vicinity, however, and clashed openly with the white missionaries. William Raymond thought he was “both dishonest and licentious” and was not pleased when he attempted to carry away some of the younger Amistad survivors for a ritual clitoridectomy, or female circumcision. A major confrontation was avoided when the young women, who remained closely attached to the missionaries, refused to leave. Raymond declined to support the woman Cinqué had married in Freetown and at one point told him to remove all of his belongings from a communal home owned by the mission. Another missionary blamed Cinqué for causing “most of our troubles.”

After the first few months, as the missionaries gradually accepted the fact that Cinqué would not be joining their settlement, this kind of criticism dropped off precipitously. Even William Raymond was reluctant to completely dismiss Cinqué. During a brief trip home in the summer of 1843, he pointed out that the celebrated insurrectionist had played a key role in securing the land for the mission at Kaw-Mendi and seemed to approve of his entrepreneurial activities along the West African coast. Such statements were self-serving for the missionaries, who were in constant need of financial support. But they also signal a growing rapprochement with the Amistad survivors as the missionaries shed their initial optimism.

The evidence provided by George Thompson corroborates reports by Raymond and others that Cinqué left the colony for Jamaica sometime around 1845. Thompson’s reference to his “bad conduct” is less clear but probably reflected Cinqué’s earlier troubles with the white missionaries. Thompson, who arrived in West Africa in May 1848, probably never met the hero of the Amistad. It is unlikely that he had read reports about Cinqué’s behavior before leaving—he was serving out a twelve-year prison sentence for aiding fugitive slaves during this period. Still, he must have heard stories about Cinqué from the natives or the small population of British colonists.

The true meaning of Thompon’s statement remains open to interpretation. To “conduct badly” could mean any number of things for an abolitionist missionary operating in West Africa in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. During his tenure at Kaw-Mendi, Thompson punished native congregants for everything from Sabbath breaking and petty theft to adultery and homosexuality. More than a few of the mission residents were excommunicated for holding slaves, although it is not clear whether any of these were Amistad veterans. Many years after Cinqué’s disappearance, the African convert William Brooks Tucker left the mission and became involved with the slave trade. He was one of Thompson’s star pupils at the time, and it is possible that his story was later incorporated into the Amistad mythos alongside discussions of Cinqué. But it is impossible to know for sure.

In order to better understand Cinqué’s possible connection to the slave trade, it is necessary to take a much closer look at the world he and the other survivors encountered upon their return. West Africa was a region dominated by centuries-old indigenous cultures but profoundly altered by contact with the broader Atlantic World. The Europeans who set up makeshift slave clearinghouses, or “factories,” along the coast held tremendous financial and political power in the region and did extensive business with indigenous traders. When William Raymond moved the Amistad mission from Sierra Leone to Kaw-Mendi in 1844, he was shocked to discover that a Spaniard named “Luiz” was operating a large slave-trading factory just downriver. In fact, Luiz had sold many of the original Amistad captives, and he pressured the local chieftain to wage war against the American mission.

The Spaniard faced fierce opposition from Raymond. The twenty-nine-year-old missionary had been expelled from Amherst College for his uncompromising abolitionism and had cut his teeth working among fugitive slaves in Canada. He wasted no time establishing Kaw-Mendi as an antislavery sanctuary, even using mission funds to redeem captives from the surrounding countryside. With Raymond’s help, the British eventually dislodged the factory and expelled Luiz. Raymond purchased the friendship of the local chief for a considerable quantity of cloth and tobacco shortly thereafter. But he had been lucky. He was vastly outnumbered and almost certainly would have been kidnapped or killed if the Royal Navy had not intervened. A decade later, with British forces redirected toward the Crimean War, the coastal slave trade continued to thrive and large-scale slave plantations were established in the area surrounding Sierra Leone.

It is not hard to find examples of native complicity in the slave trade. The market in human lives was part of an international system of unfettered greed in which both Europeans and Africans conspired to exploit the less fortunate. Slavery was ubiquitous along the West African coast throughout the nineteenth century and played an integral role in the local economy (fig. 4). So it is certainly plausible that Cinqué and the other survivors had at least some contact with human trafficking. For ambitious merchants of all colors, the slave trade was often the quickest route to wealth. And an increasingly global economy only amplified the realm of opportunity. Twelve human beings could be purchased for just one large barrel of tobacco outside Sierra Leone and resold to planters in Cuba or Brazil for many times their original price.

The British Empire’s efforts to suppress the transatlantic slave trade had little more than symbolic impact on the domestic market. Indeed, most of the Amistad survivors were in serious danger of being re-enslaved if they ventured outside British-controlled Freetown. This state of affairs led to a maddening cycle of enslavement and redemption, as scores of former captives left the colony in search of lost family members and friends. “Some Mendians have been sold into slavery,” wrote American missionary James Steele, “then captured and brought here—then they have gone back, been sold, captured and brought here a third time.” The effect of the interior trade was so deeply ingrained that the missionaries could read it in the local architecture. Bucolic towns and villages had evolved into elaborate fortresses surrounded by deep trenches and accessible only by narrow passageways. Some featured double rows of walls topped with thick layers of brush and studded with small openings so that musketeers could fend off invading war parties (fig. 5).

Raymond’s settlement at Kaw-Mendi provided a certain degree of protection for those who agreed to live by its rules. But, for everyone else, it was almost impossible to avoid choosing sides in the endless civil wars that fueled the domestic slave trade. In November 1845, Raymond reported that James Covey, the sailor and former slave who had served as an interpreter during the Amistad trials, had allied himself with a local warlord and was participating in a slaving expedition. Some of the Amistad survivors found themselves on opposing sides of the same conflict. During an attack on the West African town of Mperri, Covey and Kinna (alias Lewis Johnson) were arrayed against former captives Fuliwa (George Brown), Sokoma (Henry Cowles), and Sa (James Pratt). Despite the protestations of his friends, Sa was taken prisoner and killed after the battle. It is not difficult to imagine Cinqué becoming embroiled in one of these brutal and unpredictable feuds. The situation had become so extreme by the end of the decade that one of the American missionaries published a letter in the National Era suggesting that the Amistad captives be renamed “the Amistad capturers.”

Without any concrete data tying Cinqué directly to the slave trade, however, the case remains highly speculative. In fact, the deeper I researched, the more I realized that there is substantial evidence indicating he is completely innocent of the charge. An unpublished letter, penned by white activist Hannah More and buried deep in the archives of the American Missionary Association, is especially significant. Originally a schoolteacher working among Native Americans on the western frontier, More journeyed across the Atlantic in the early 1850s to support George Thompson and the other abolitionists in West Africa. There she encountered a number of the Amistad survivors and used the wedding celebration of former captive Sarah “Margru” Kinson to compile an oral history of their ordeal. The survivors recalled their capture, rebellion, and emancipation in vivid detail for More. Most importantly, they continued to celebrate Cinqué. Some had even committed parts of his speeches to memory and were able to recite them verbatim. There was no mention of any later betrayal.

Diehard skeptics might argue that these men and women had good reason to forget such negative or harmful activities. As the late Carl Sagan once said, “The absence of evidence is not evidence of absence.” But, in this case, the silence of both published and unpublished documents seems highly unusual. Although antislavery boosters in the United States preferred to emphasize the mission’s small successes, they were remarkably candid about its difficulties, and there appears to be very little censorship of the many detailed reports issued by the white missionaries throughout the 1840s. Worried about creating a bad impression on his donors, Amistad Committee member Lewis Tappan admitted a temptation “to suppress part of this intelligence”—his very own Lisa Simpson moment. But, to his credit, he concluded that “the TRUTH ought to be communicated to the public.” Reports of the ritual circumcision debacle and Raymond’s frequent arguments with Cinqué were published and circulated in full, as were the occasional problems with the other Amistad veterans.

If Cinqué had become involved in the slave trade to any great extent, such juicy news almost certainly would have found its way into the missionaries’ voluminous correspondence. Assuming there was a conspiracy to hide this information for political gain, the matter would have to be discussed between the missionary agents and their supervisors in America. Yet none of their field notes contain so much as a hint that Cinqué was trading anything other than produce during his time in Sierra Leone. Even opponents of the antislavery movement, who eagerly pounced on the news of Cinqué’s relapse into heathenism as proof that the mission had failed, said nothing about his participation in the slave trade. Considering the ferocious intensity of the conflicts over slavery and abolition throughout the nineteenth century, it seems strange that they would neglect to mention it.

So what does all this mean? It is easy to see how the surviving evidence, the scattered correspondence, the brief journal entries, the cryptic allusions to “bad behavior,” could lay the groundwork for later rumors and allegations. But even if the charges against Cinqué are entirely bogus, they are rooted in real historical conflicts. The struggle of the white missionaries to control the Africans in their charge provided the immediate context in which such rumors could take hold and spread. The abolitionist agents and their supporters in America were neither crude racists nor simple-minded imperialists; it is hard to imagine them subscribing to stereotypes of the “bad nigger” so prevalent during this period. Even as he lamented the shortcomings of the Amistad group in the pages of the Anti-Slavery Reporter, Lewis Tappan reminded his readers that many calling themselves “Christian” had done far worse. But this did not stop the missionaries from calling out apostasy when they saw it. Cinqué’s real sin, in their eyes, was his ongoing challenge to their authority over the mission. And, in this way, he was not unlike many black activists who became frustrated with white paternalism and decided to pursue a more independent course.

Only a few months before the victorious Amistad captives set sail for Africa, a black correspondent from New Haven, who had probably met Cinqué during the rebel hero’s lengthy imprisonment there, published his thoughts on the subject in the New York newspaper the Colored American (fig. 6). The question of the day was whether black abolitionists should remain subordinate to the white-dominated American Anti-Slavery Society or establish their own separate organization. But the debate spoke to a much larger anxiety. “I am one of those who believe that colored men best know their own wants and grievances, and are best capable of stating them,” he wrote. “Let our white friends, if they wish to help us, give us their countenance and money, and follow, rather than lead us.” I cannot help thinking that Cinqué, if he were here today, might say the same.

If anything, Cinqué’s struggles with his white benefactors only reinforce his hero status. There is no Hans Sprungfeld, no tongueless pirate fiend, lurking behind the most famous of the Amistad rebels. But an excessive focus on this single figure would be a mistake. Framing the Amistad rebellion as a typical American story of individual triumph over oppression obscures the harsh realities that Cinqué and the other survivors faced upon their return. Even after winning their Supreme Court case, the Amistad veterans could not escape the shadow of slavery, and viewed from an African perspective, their story highlights the enduring and insidious reach of the slave trade. At the same time, it draws our attention to the international scope of antislavery activism and the commitment of both white and black abolitionists to open an African front in their revolutionary crusade. Surely this is a form of heroism as well.

Further Reading:

My analysis of the early years of the Mendi Mission is based on a close reading of the correspondence from both white missionaries and native Africans, especially as published in the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Reporter and the Union Missionary between June 1842 and August 1846. Complete runs of both newspapers are extremely rare, so I am grateful to the staff at Cornell University’s Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections, Yale University’s Sterling Memorial Library, and the American Antiquarian Society for their generous assistance. The American Missionary Association Archives, housed at Tulane University, are the standard resource for all things Amistad, including the missionary efforts in West Africa. This collection is also available on microfilm, but the current index is woefully inaccurate and some of the filmed documents are completely illegible.

The definitive modern work on the Amistad revolt and subsequent trials remains Howard Jones, Mutiny on the Amistad: The Saga of a Slave Revolt and Its Impact on American Abolition, Law, and Diplomacy (New York, 1987). Jones’s landmark article defending Cinqué against allegations of slave trading, along with replies from several preeminent historians, was published in the Journal of American History 87 (December 2000): 923-50. For an excellent analysis of the veneration of Cinqué and the celebrity status of the Amistad rebels within the United States, see Richard J. Powell, “Cinqué: Antislavery Portraiture and Patronage in Jacksonian America,”American Art 11 (Fall 1997): 49-73.

The earliest mention of Cinqué as a slave trader can be found in Fred L. Brownlee, New Day Ascending (Boston, 1946). Although he relies heavily on Brownlee, there is still much worthwhile information on the Mendi Mission in Clifton Herman Johnson, “The American Missionary Association, 1846-1861: A Study of Christian Abolitionism” (Ph.D. diss., University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, 1958). For a more recent account of the African dimensions of the Amistad saga, see Iyunolu Folayan Osagie, The Amistad Revolt: Memory, Slavery, and the Politics of Identity in the United States and Sierra Leone (Athens, Ga., 2000). Details on the commercial economy of the Sierra Leone region throughout this period can be found in Allen M. Howard, “Nineteenth-Century Coastal Slave Trading and the British Abolition Campaign in Sierra Leone,” Slavery & Abolition 27 (April 2006): 23-49.

This article originally appeared in issue 10.1 (October, 2009).

Joseph Yannielli is a graduate student in the department of history at Yale University. His essay “George Thompson among the Africans: Empathy, Authority, and Insanity in the Age of Abolition” is forthcoming in the Journal of American History.

Deep in the archive of the Cayuga Museum and Case Research Lab in Auburn, New York, sits an obscure twelve-page manuscript written in a neat hand. It is titled simply “Jane Clark.” Penned in 1897 by Julia C. Ferris, a white teacher and local educational leader, the manuscript narrates portions of the life of Jane Clark, an enslaved woman who escaped to Auburn in 1859.^[1] This narrative, rich with information about the Underground Railroad, has never been available to scholars, teachers, and lay readers—until now.

It is time to get over our fascination with biographies, and I say this as a scholar who specializes in a field, African American literature and history, in which one might wish for numerous biographies to emerge. For years, nineteenth-century African American history was, for many, just a small blank space. When asked to name as many nineteenth-century African American women as they can, my students generally struggle to come up with the predictable two that most people can manage: Harriet Tubman and Sojourner Truth. They don’t fare much better, if even as well, when it comes to naming African American men. And even those in the field who can name a great number of people can’t usually tell you much about them. This is a field in which one comes to expect short biographical entries—when you can find one at all—that include the inevitable phrase “little is known.” Little is known about Kate Drumgoold beyond what she writes in her own autobiographical narrative. Until recently, little was known about Henry “Box” Brown after he successfully escaped from slavery and moved to England. Little is known about William Wells Brown’s approach to writing, since no original manuscripts exist. Little is known about nineteenth-century African American life and thought.

So why wouldn’t we want to know more—and what better way than by populating the literary landscape with biographies? Surely, this would be better than the biographical gestures we now encounter, brief sketches that are about as satisfying, and often about as accurate, as the many monuments and historical markers that James W. Loewen so painstakingly surveys in Lies Across America. And yet I think we should look beyond biographies if we want to do justice to the lives across America that have been so long assigned to obscurity.

Let me begin by reviewing the nature of the problem. There are three main reasons why that helpless little phrase—“little is known”—is so annoyingly pervasive for those who research nineteenth-century African American history and literature. The first and most frustrating is that not much information has been found because no one has bothered to look. We’ve had, though, a few test cases that demonstrate how much can be found when someone actually takes the time to explore the archives. Harriet Wilson was virtually unknown, and then a rare find and a bit of an anomaly, and then an important entrance into black life in New Hampshire, and eventually a study in the complexly overlapping histories of abolitionism, spiritualism, African American women’s entrepreneurialism, and cultural mobility. Each new stage of research revealed much more about Wilson’s life and world, and other historical subjects as obscure as Wilson once was would no doubt benefit from the same sustained efforts. The second reason why “little is known” is because so much of the historical record has not been carefully preserved or formally archived. There are no manuscripts available for almost all of the writers I study—and in some cases, there are very few original documents that feature their writing at all, at least that we know of. The possibility exists that important documents are sitting in some unopened box in some unexplored corner of a library, or perhaps in a local historical society, or even in someone’s attic—depending on who recognized this history as worthy of preservation and what means they had for preserving it. In too many cases, though, we simply don’t have a rich or even clear trail to follow. The third reason “little is known” is because the overwhelming message of the most readily available, comprehensively preserved, and carefully archived historical record is that white lives are the ones that matter, and accordingly black lives are to be discovered, if at all, mainly in their connection with prominent white men and women. We have seen this important-by-association dynamic in histories of the antislavery movement, the Underground Railroad, and even in many histories of slavery that have been devoted, in whole or in part, to the lives of the enslaved. So those who go looking will often find themselves redirected, or will have to learn to read the cultural codes well enough to follow trails that lead only windingly, indirectly, to the subjects we are looking to study.

It would be natural enough, then, to want to know more, and especially to long for good biographies, but I hope we can do better than that—and if we want to capture the truths behind the slogan “Black Lives Matter,” we will need to do better than to aim for more biographies. I am not complaining about biographical research, mind you. Rather, I am questioning how that research is framed, how it is presented, who gets biographical attention, and what constitutes a just representation of an individual life.

To be fair, I should note that, my research interests and ethical commitments aside, I’m simply not a fan of narrative biographies. Certainly, I use them in my research, but I almost never read one from beginning to end, and when I do read them thoroughly, I usually do so in piecemeal fashion, starting someplace at the middle and reading out in both directions. I was a subject editor for the National African American Biography, a resource I use often, but even there, I see the narrative format simply as a convenient convention for conveying information. I simply don’t find a more-or-less-linear narrative focused primarily on an individual’s life to be useful in understanding the process and contours of that person’s life, the cultural and ideological networks that are part of that life, or the performative dynamics negotiated in that life—in short, the many relations, the winding paths, and the changing narrative lines that characterize anyone’s life. Life might be one damn thing after another, but an individual’s identity—involving the delicate play between the private and the public, the complex frameworks that shape how we will understand and relate to one another, and the extended networks in which we live and work—cannot be reduced to a linear narrative, however artfully crafted it might be.

Think about the biographical challenges we face even in approaching some of the most famous and influential African Americans of the nineteenth century. Nat Turner, Harriet Tubman, Sojourner Truth, Benjamin Banneker, and others were known largely through highly problematic narratives by white writers. When we turn to a figure like William Wells Brown, the biographical challenge is even more imposing. No one wrote about his life more frequently than Brown did in his various autobiographies, histories, and memoirs, but I’d challenge anyone to find a coherent self-presentation across those various autobiographical accounts—and a coherent biography drawn from his life misses the glimpse of Brown we get through his competing and contradictory autobiographical writings. Josiah Henson’s life was presented over a series of narratives, and in the later narratives, one can pretty much witness Henson disappearing into the legend that he was the model for Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom. Getting at the reality of his life requires something more than finding the reality behind the fictional character who came to dominate his life. Frederick Douglass had the advantage of representing his own life over different autobiographies, but his autobiographies don’t tell an increasingly full and authoritative story so much as provide a case study in the challenge of a black American’s search for a narrative framework by which his life might be understood. Harriet Wilson might be said to have addressed the same challenge, which is why we are still debating whether to identify Our Nig as an autobiographical act or as a novel that draws from the slave narrative tradition.

Rather than consider these various works as faulty biographical resources that can be corrected by a well-researched and authoritative biography, it might be better to ask why the African American writers who were most deeply invested in presenting their life story became instead examples of the limits of biography in understanding African American life. And as we answer that question, I believe we will discover why biography is problematic for approaching white lives as well. As Frederick Douglass realized when he published his first autobiography, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845), it was dangerous to go public with your story. Douglass soon had to leave the country for England, to avoid the very real possibility that, having been outed and located by the published story of his life, he could be captured and returned to slavery. William Wells Brown was in a similar situation, but perhaps worried as well about what might happen to his story when it became public and others could lay claim to it. Whatever his motivation, Brown both revealed and concealed his story regularly in a life-long autobiographical performance that always kept the public on the other side of the mask. Barack Obama might understand Douglass and Brown better than anyone. Certainly, he knows the danger that people will use your story to try to return you to the past, and he understands as well that the world is ready to manipulate the details of your story and fit you to a caricature, so you need to handle your self-presentation carefully and creatively. One nod to a black preacher or a thoughtful response to racial injustice could set the media off beyond your control.

Little is known? One might well say that far too much is known to hold black lives within the comforting confines of a narrative biography. It is a simple fact—or perhaps a complex set of facts—that African American lives in the nineteenth century were governed by different laws of time, space, mobility, and affiliation than were those of white Americans. Even if we focus only on nominally free African Americans, we encounter a complicated set of legal and social conditions shaping virtually every moment of every day. Being denied public transportation, entrance into a hotel, or service at a restaurant is not simply an insult or an inconvenience; such obstructions pose serious logistical problems, complicate one’s relationship with whatever white American with whom one might be traveling, and introduce one to a different social group (whether white or black) willing to accommodate one’s needs. One’s responses to such challenges constitute significant moments in one’s self-definition, influencing how those around will view the nature of the problem in addition to how they will view one’s own character. And the people one encounters during such moments—the community of support one turns to, or the community of prejudice one encounters—might play an important role in one’s life. One learns to think differently about the time it will take to travel, about the arrangements one must make for food and shelter, about the degree of comfort and convenience one can expect, about the people one will encounter along the way, and about the ways in which one’s response to every situation will be read and judged.

My point, again, is not that we should abandon biographical research, and I am definitely not going to suggest that we should follow William Wells Brown and Harriet Wilson in mixing fiction and biography. I can definitely do without a world that encourages the proliferation of works like William Styron’s The Confessions of Nat Turner, even if they were written by competent students of African American history, which Styron was not. Rather, I think there is value in looking at the kind of autobiographical tricksterism that we see in Brown, Wilson, and others, and I think we can learn from such examples of biographical violations as Styron’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel. Styron shows the dangers not only of playing with the facts but also of biographies that fail to capture the complexities of the biographical subject’s world, the cultural contexts that any individual inhabits, the complex relation between background and foreground that we witness whenever we examine an individual life. At a time when we see inelegant Styronisms every time the news features what it takes to be the latest example either of black leadership or of black criminality, which for many amount to the same thing, it might pay to think about how we understand not only individual black lives but also the cultural frameworks by which black lives are positioned, obstructed, or realized. In doing so, we might come to appreciate why even today it is not unusual to encounter African Americans who find some measure of tricksterism a valuable approach in their self-presentation.

Even if we had biographies of the most prominent African Americans of the nineteenth century, we would be only moderately closer to understanding the realities of black life in their time. It’s striking, in fact, that biographies have been written thus far without the benefit of a robust recovery of so much of nineteenth-century African American history, and it’s striking as well that the biographies that have been pulled from the documentary remains of the past have not, with few exceptions, inspired a reinvigorated recovery effort of African American organizations, schools, presses, or social life. How is it possible to put together a book-length study of a black life without adding significantly to what we know of black lives generally?

Too often, African American biographies function as isolated, at times almost random, historical markers on an otherwise unmarked historical landscape. Instead of marking important sites of public memory, complex networks of only loosely associated or even contesting narratives of the past, and therefore forums for debate or for complex social and political negotiations, African American biographies tend to operate as isolated but all too familiar stories, tales of exceptional individuals. Biographies offer a kind of closure, a sense of resolution, of completeness. Arguably, a biography of Frederick Douglass should force one to realize how much about Douglass’s life and his world remains unknown, but it is all too possible for many readers to get through a biography of Douglass without even realizing that one has encountered very few African Americans along the way, that the biography’s index is populated primarily by white people, and that the documentary record favors the white American’s reading of history, even of black history, even of Douglass’s life.

I find myself thinking along these lines whenever I read a biography, thinking about how far removed it is from the lives I sense when reading autobiographies or local histories. We might encounter messy disputes with unresolved outcomes when we meditate on the role of genre in Wilson’s Our Nig, or on the accessibility of the autobiographical subject in the Narrative of Sojourner Truth, or on the use of sources in Brown’s My Southern Home, or on the development of a lifelong project of self-representation in Douglass’s autobiographies—but when we read the biography, everything comes together nicely. We might wonder at the extensive efforts to create the kinds of organizations that can stand in for a well-governed community that we encounter when we read about African Americans in Philadelphia, Boston, or New York in the early nineteenth-century, and we might leave the experience thinking about the hundreds of people involved, and the dozens of leaders we’ve discovered connected to the most prominent African Americans, but when we read a biography of Frederick Douglass, we see leadership presented on a more manageable scale. It’s not at all surprising that scholars of black literary and cultural history—Sylvia Wynter, Alexander G. Weheliye, Saidiya Hartman, Hortense Spillers, Lloyd Pratt, and others—increasingly are arguing for an understanding of what it means to be human that focuses on the collective, the performative, the unknown and unknowable. Nineteenth-century African Americans didn’t spend their days trying to prove to white Americans that they were in fact human. Instead, they forged new versions of humanism, taking communities formed by racist force and transforming them into communities devoted to ongoing and collective self-determination.

Ultimately, then, I want to suggest that we should question the assumed parameters of our research, the narrative construction, and even the focus of the biographies we either write or wish for. A useful example might be Jean Fagan Yellin’s biography of Harriet Jacobs, which was soon complemented by The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers, including a searchable CD, that connects readers to the documentary world behind the biography—or the more old-school model, Philip S. Foner’s five-volume The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, which takes readers through a world of documents as well as a biographical narrative. A very recent and productive model of a useful approach is Robert Levine’s The Lives of Frederick Douglass, which begins by taking seriously the possibility that Douglass lived, in fact, many lives. Exploring Douglass’s various autobiographical writings, Levine presents a complexly fluid life, one fed by many streams. Obviously, this approach is limited to those individuals who were engaged in sustained and still-preserved acts of self-representation, but when available, this approach takes us much further than does the standard biography.

I value such approaches, but I’d like to find ways to reimagine biography altogether, first by looking back at early African American biographical texts. It is revealing, I suggest, that the promise of African American achievement has been represented so often by way of the distinct genre known as collective biographies—basically, collections of biographical sketches unconnected by any overarching narrative but all serving a central point about the importance of the people (usually, both famous and relatively unknown) represented by the volume as a whole. From William Wells Brown’s The Black Man: His Antecedents, His Genius, and His Achievements (1863) to such relatively recent works as Kareem Abdul-Jabbar’s Black Profiles in Courage: A Legacy of African American Achievement (1997), collective biographies have been a staple of African American publishing. African American history was always deeply enveloped, complexly contextualized by other histories, other communities, and often the overall story presented has been the product of an activist determination, both individual and collective, to resist the pressures of the defining contexts and surrounding communities.

Today, that tradition is most strongly evident in the records painstakingly constructed by amateur historians and activists (both black and white) in the service of local or regional communities—for example, Mark J. Sammons and Valerie Cunningham’s Black Portsmouth: Three Centuries of African-American Heritage (2004), or H. H. Price and Gerald E. Talbot’s Maine’s Visible Black History: The First Chronicle of Its People (2006). Such local histories often lack an overarching or connecting narrative, beyond the overwhelming evidence of communities, lives, and events not accounted for elsewhere, and the guiding narrative of such histories almost always involves the painstaking attempt to gather together and preserve the fragmented records of isolated people and events so as to indicate a broader collective story not yet told and perhaps even unrecoverable as a single, coherent narrative. Like the Black Heritage Trails that are often associated with these texts, reading African American history can involve a more-or-less charted pilgrimage through a cultural landscape of important alliances across both space and time, sometimes a pilgrimage negotiated against the pressures and competing narratives of a nearly successful historical erasure. In these writings, the lives of apparently inconsequential people are placed next to biographies of the most prominent performers on the public stage, seemingly isolated incidents are placed next to grand historical battles, and what can be known is related to an imagined past and an envisioned future. This complex mix of historical focus, moreover, is usually framed by a social and political environment that is always provisional, shifting, and vulnerable—making it difficult to determine what might eventually emerge as central or marginal, as important or incidental.

Looking back at the collective biographies of the past makes it possible to look forward to what we might aim for today, when digital resources make a culturally rich approach to historical and biographical recovery more possible than it has ever been before. Rather than use the tools available to us to place newly imposing monuments on an otherwise scarcely populated historical landscape, we could use the lives we know best as entrance into the lives and the worlds that remain unknown to any but the most determined archival researchers among us. With the digital revolution, archives themselves are changing, and we accordingly have the opportunity to imagine a richer and more demanding history than ever before.

It is becoming increasingly possible to access the scattered documentary remains of the African American past wherever they are, and perhaps even to connect with the nontraditional archives—the bookstores, the churches, the fraternal organizations, the community organizations, the attics and basements—in which so much of what has been preserved of African American lives is held. This is a history that involves gathering together various historical sites and individual stories that replicate broad patterns of racial control and resistance, representing both an imposed and collectively determined communal identity, the feedback loops of U.S. racial history. This is also a history that involves attending to the local variations in that pattern, the unpredictable effects of the convergence of chaotic laws and incoherent social practices restricting or otherwise channeling community interactions and the possibilities of agency. In the feedback loops connecting history and memory, shaping both broad collective frameworks and specific communities, is a process—stable in its general contours, but unpredictable in its local manifestations, a combination of scripted identity and improvisational performance—central to any just understanding of African American history.

The biographies we most need now are those that actually represent complexly contextualized and interconnected lives—and we have the tools we need now for such biographical work. With the help of digital ego-networks, we can graph the system of relations connected with any biographical subject we wish to study. We can locate African American lives in black communities, and we can come to a better understanding of the relations among black and white Americans generally. Whether we enter by way of specific locales (Boston, Philadelphia, New York, Charleston, New Orleans), initiatives (the Colored Convention movement, the abolitionist movement, the women’s movement), or organizations (the A.M.E. Church, mutual benefit societies, the Prince Hall Freemasons), we can get a better sense of how black lives functioned, and how people worked together to ensure that their lives would matter. There are a couple of features of this approach that make it particularly attractive, and perhaps primary among them is that it would not be conceptualized primarily as an attempt to recover any one person’s biography, nor as an attempt to look at any single person’s life in isolation. At base, the purpose of such an approach would be not simply to recover and reprint but also to read and attend to the documents related to black lives in daily performance, and always with a piercing awareness of what we do not yet know, and at times even what we cannot hope to know.

In other words, such an approach would help us piece together the networks and patterns that emerge when we study people’s lives not as abstract and coherent individual stories, or independent tales, but as they were lived, in concert with others, often involved in various and even competing narratives, contributing to and benefitting from collective efforts. It is a matter of accounting for various historical and cultural attractors, various dynamics by which the turbulent forces that shape African American life acquired identifiable stability, the process by which cultural forces merged into cultural formations and by which black identity was claimed from within and not simply imposed from without.

In short, the approach that I’m looking for might lead us to focus more on recovering communities than on recovering individual narratives. This approach might help us get beyond the biographies that announce that one well-documented black life matters and enter more substantially into a recognition that Black Lives Matter, beyond the exceptional, representative, or putatively archetypal life stories, accounting for even those not fully represented in the documentary record. Not incidentally, such an approach might also help us highlight the networks of affiliation fundamental to whiteness—the networks of opportunities, standards of achievement, and environmental support for white Americans, which would in turn also highlight the importance of the Black Lives Matter movement.

Even for those who are not interested in studying African American history and literature, I think it would be good to get over the illusion that biographies provide a useful entrance into lives lived in the context of American history and culture. Even after many years engaged in African American Studies, having grown to expect the ongoing marginalization of my field, I’m still surprised to read a biography of a white American from the nineteenth century and discover that this story of a life richly lived has almost nothing to say about race or slavery. Certainly, it’s encouraging to encounter such books as Henry Wiencek’s An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America or David Waldstreicher’s Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery, and the American Revolution, but one can only reflect on how many biographies of these two “founding fathers” one can read without encountering slavery or race as not just a side note, and not even just as a prominent concern, but as a central, defining presence in these lives, and in the early life of the developing republic. And one can read any number of biographies of white American writers with almost no mention of race. They were white, after all, so why talk about race? What role could U.S. racial history possibly have when telling the story of a white person’s journey from obscurity to prominence—the early education, the eventual connections, the wonderful coincidences, the fortunate encounters, the ultimate self-discovery and determination to succeed, against all odds? What possible role would race play in such a story when the subject is white?

Autobiographies, biographies, and collective biographies have become such dominant genres in African American literary history because the challenge of relating the dynamics of black lives has always been and is still so daunting. As we look back and attempt to recover the many black lives that have emerged in research on African American history and print culture, even when we can gather reliable facts from the scattered documents available, we are faced with the task of accounting for the often absurd contexts, as shaped by white supremacist ideologies, within which those “facts” operated. Not incidentally, we are faced with the same task when approaching white lives, though that challenge remains largely invisible to the great majority of Americans, biographers included. But by finding more innovative and complex ways to approach black lives as actually lived, as collectively performed, as improvisationally imagined, we will find ourselves not only appreciating African American history but also reevaluating white American history—and thereby coming just a bit closer to a productive understanding of American history generally, one distinguished not by biographies along the road but by maps that show where the roads connect, and how they might be navigated. We all might then be able to follow those maps to discover where those who came before us lived, where we live now, and why it matters to get it right.

This article originally appeared in issue 17.1 (Fall, 2016).

John Ernest is the Judge Hugh M. Morris Professor of English and chair of the Department of English at the University of Delaware. He is the author or editor of twelve books, including Chaotic Justice: Rethinking African American Literary History (2009) and The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative (2014).

Students document antebellum African American civic engagement

The high-school students in the extracurricular Project Apprentice to History (PATH) in Beverly, Massachusetts, are not your typical honors students, yet their achievements are extraordinary. From their work on a project on African Americans in antebellum Boston, these students obtained a sense of connection to real people in history whose lives seemed at times ordinary and at other times heroic. The PATH students’ willingness to engage in hard work with primary sources gave meaning to the contributions of people who have either been forgotten or never before appreciated. (Click here to learn more about PATH.)

The research project focused on African Americans’ civic engagement through membership in voluntary associations. Many of these, such as the Boston Vigilance Committee and the Boston Anti-Man Hunting League, were abolitionist groups actively involved in the Underground Railroad, while other voluntary associations focused on temperance, prison reform, and other reform movements in the first half of the nineteenth century. The project began as a result of a fieldtrip W. Dean Eastman’s U.S. history classes took to the African American Meeting House on Boston’s Beacon Hill. The visit triggered questions about the role of Bostonians in both the Underground Railroad and the abolitionist movement. “I was wondering if there was a way to find out who the fugitive slaves were,” one student said, “and who, if anyone, helped them.” Another student was “interested in social divisions at that time period in Boston. Who were the ‘upper-class’ African-Americans? Who was in the ‘lower-class’?”

By ultimately combining all we could find on each African American citizen and group, we focused on the point where public and private history meet, where local history intersects with broader historical trends and events. The students compiled a database of cross-referenced demographic data from the U.S. Census, Boston city directories, and Boston tax records. They also digitized and indexed hundreds of articles from William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist newspaper The Liberator.  Eventually, they published the results of their original research on the Web. And the testimony of the students themselves is indicative of just how meaningful the project was for them.

Central to the success of our project was close collaboration with libraries, museums, and archives, including the Boston Athenaeum, the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the Boston African American Historic Site. In addition to providing essential records of various voluntary associations, these institutions allowed our students to see where and how much of the most important research into the American past is undertaken.

At early, before-school sessions at the Beverly Public Library, students continued the research they had started on the previous Saturday in Boston. Students printed copies of the original enumeration sheets from an 1850 U.S. census CD-ROM. Using blank census forms, they then began the process of transcribing and entering into a spreadsheet all of the individual demographic data from the African Americans that was listed. This painstaking process involved deciphering the handwriting of the census enumerators. “I definitely got a lot better at reading primary documents,” said Alison Woitunski, class of 2004. “You would be surprised at how difficult it is to read someone’s handwriting on paper that’s over 100 years old.”

This process also helped students develop research skills. “The most important skill I learned was how to conduct primary research,” Ryan Morse, class of 2004, said . “Beyond that I learned how to organize a really well-written paper, and to organize my thoughts to come out in the best way possible.”

From the 1850 census, our database expanded to include categories such as age, sex, race, occupation, literacy, value of real estate, and place of birth. The 1848-53 Boston city directories listed names, occupations, and addresses of adult residents of Boston. Prior to the 1848 directory, the list was segregated, making it easier to develop an initial database that included street addresses. Starting with the 1849-50 directory, it was difficult to tell the race of the residents. And, although the 1850 census expanded the categories of our database, it omitted the important category of street address.

We found an answer in the 1850 tax records at the Boston city archives. In these manuscripts all adult names were listed by address, occupation, and race. We photocopied and digitized the records for Beacon Hill and then transcribed the data into a table. Now we were able to link African Americans from the 1850 census with their respective residences. By combining city directories, the census, and tax records, we could trace the lives of nearly two thousand African Americans through 1848-53 using our database.

During the course of the project, students began narrowing their research to topics that could be answered through the database. What was the racial and gender composition of the members of the various abolitionist groups? To what extent had both slavery and the slave trade flourished in Massachusetts? How did segregation impact Massachusetts’s schools, marriage laws, and passenger train accommodations? We were particularly curious about the years 1850-53 because of the ramifications of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Who were the fugitive slaves living in Boston in 1850? Did the neighborhood population change in the ensuing years?

We found an invaluable source of information on voluntary associations in The Liberator. Students digitized nearly five hundred articles dealing with these groups between the years 1831 and 1855, discovering many names from our database appearing in these articles. 

At the Massachusetts State House Special Collections, one of our students, Alison Woitunski, discovered an account book of the Boston Vigilance Committee listing fugitive slaves. From this account book she created a chart identifying both the fugitives and their benefactors. Again, many of these names could also be linked to our database. 

At the athenaeum we discovered an 1852 map depicting every structure in the city. We began considering economical ways of accessing the database using Geographical Information Systems (GIS) technology. Having only a rudimentary concept of the capabilities of GIS, we enlisted the help of Roland Adams, GIS Manager for the City of Beverly, and the possibilities became clear. GIS integrates maps with data, so that points on a map are designated to correspond to a database. Under Adams’s direction students arranged the information from the database into GIS format. Through careful research comparing a modern GIS map to the 1852 map, students were able to match parcel ID’s from the Boston Tax Assessors Office to the Beacon Hill addresses in our database. Now by clicking on a particular building on the modern-day map, one could see who was living there in 1850.

The culmination of the project arrived when students presented the results of their research at the Downtown Boston Harvard Club on February 9, 2004, before historians, archivists, and their parents and peers. Of the project, Alison Woitunski said, “[L]ooking back, I am not quite sure how I managed to be at PATH meetings at 6:30 A.M. or spend so many Saturday afternoons doing research in Boston, but I’m glad that I did.” Molly Conway added, “[O]ne thing I learned from this experience is that history is about finding the truth in what happened; when we used the Latin word for truth, veritas, we meant it also as a virtue.”

Online visitors may now access the resources developed by the students in PATH by visiting our Website.

This article originally appeared in issue 5.3 (April, 2005).

W. Dean Eastman teaches history at Beverly High School in Beverly, Massachusetts, and has been the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including the Disney American Teacher Award (1991), Harvard University’s Derek Bok Prize for Public Service (2000), and the Preserve America Massachusetts History Teacher of the Year Award (2004).

Kevin McGrath is a library teacher at Newton North High School in Newton, Massachusetts.

If pop culture is to be believed, 2017 was a good year for black science, science fiction and fictions of science. Hidden Figures introduced film-goers to the work of black female scientists like Mary Jackson and Katherine Johnson; science fiction fans anticipated Jordan Peele’s upcoming adaptation of Lovecraft Country; the universe of Black Panther rapidly expanded through comics and film; and Octavia Butler’s dystopian Parable of the Talents (1998) was resuscitated due to its prescient portrayal of the fictive Senator Andrew Steele Jarret and his (in 1998, still un-trademarked) slogan: Make America Great Again. But, of course, the reasons for Butler’s sudden popularity reveal a bleaker state of affairs. If, this time around, Oscars were not quite so white, very few people would mistake 2017 as a good year for racial justice.

The hate-filled currents of Donald Trump’s presidency, freshly invigorated by Charlottesville, and the residual racism of scientific inquiry, converged in a September editorial in Nature, the most influential publisher in the sciences. In it, the anonymous author(s) defends the Central Park statue of J. Marion Sims, the nineteenth-century scientist who performed gynecological experiments on enslaved women’s bodies without anesthesia; as well as Parran Hall at the University of Pittsburgh, named after Thomas Parran Jr., director of the infamous Tuskegee experiment. To remove these figures from the public eye, the author(s) claim, would be to “whitewash history.”

As though history were some stable and pure truth to be apprehended by the intrepid man of science; as though history had not already been whitewashed by centuries of archives, monuments, museums, and curricula; as though we could not distinguish the descriptive question of “what happened” from the normative question of “what merits commemoration.” To make this kind of claim, in other words, requires a certain amount of confirmation bias—we selectively see what we want to see (for example, a statue of J. Marion Sims as the embodiment of scientific history) and fail to see the great and messy rest (the patients, plantation owners, investors, competing scientists, activists, etc.) To be fair, in their conflation of “history” with processes of history making, the editors propose alternatives—for example, contextual information or “equally sized” commemorative statutes to the victims—but these are inadequate and perhaps disingenuous suggestions. In moral life, commensurability is not measured by mass or circumference, and racist histories of science—histories that persist in the present-day medical community—cannot be countered with a contrite footnote. Instead of proposing true historical redress, the editorialists confirm the right to public space that these statues and buildings have always enjoyed.

In contrast, Britt Rusert’s Fugitive Science imagines what comes after the statues have fallen. Suffice it to say, she goes much further than an apologetic plaque, and her results are fascinating. Fugitive Science insists on the role of African American scientific actors not as objects or specimens, but rather as active participants working within and against a dynamic set of scientific discourses and practices. Deploying Foucault’s concept of counter-science, Rusert intervenes in narratives of racist pseudo-science, establishing not only a more inclusive history of early American science, but in doing so, arguing for a revision of the concept of the human. Rusert’s work, both masterful and suggestive, should not only be of interest to scholars of African American literature and antebellum science, but it also contributes to a number of critical turns, including the post-human, the environmental humanities, and archive theory.

Rusert’s first chapter begins with a figure hostile to the notion of black “radical empiricisms” (20)—or, indeed, hostile to blackness itself: Thomas Jefferson, whose infamous claims of African deficiency in Notes on the State of Virginia (1785) sparked a tradition of antebellum black critique, beginning with Benjamin Banneker, and comprising David Walker, James W.C. Pennington, and James McCune Smith, among others. In tracing this tradition, Rusert intervenes in the centrality of Jefferson to antebellum racial theory. De-monumentalizing, as it were, the Founding Father, Rusert situates Banneker as the progenitor of African American science and even—in the chapter’s most suggestive sections—science fiction. Chapter two builds on the first chapter’s exploration of African American ethnologies through its consideration of black portraiture and ekphrastic writing as opaque “modes of resistance” to the racist scopic regime of antebellum science. Turning from iconicity to embodied practices of visuality, Rusert’s third chapter traces the cross currents between popular scientific lecture circuits and black performance in the United States and Britain. Here, Fugitive Science is at its most international, chronicling the transatlantic movements of figures like Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown, William and Ellen Craft, and Henry Box Brown.

From the transatlantic, Rusert turns to the cosmic in her fourth chapter’s consideration of Martin Delany’s scientific inquiry. Reading Delany’s Blake alongside his writings on statistics, ethnology, astronomy, and electricity, Rusert highlights the linkage between planetary revolution and slave revolution in order to “imagine new worlds of freedom” (179). These expansive new worlds condense, in chapter five, into the feminized “tight spaces of the parlor and the classroom” (27). Here, Rusert considers the scientific work (capaciously defined to include friendship albums, natural history cabinets, and pedagogical lectures) of African American educator Sarah Mapps Douglass. Just as Rusert begins the book with a specter of racist pseudoscience—Thomas Jefferson—so too does she close the book with meditations on an equally looming figure: Sarah Baartman and the pathologizing of black women’s bodies. In doing so, Rusert moves from speculative fiction to speculative archival theory, working with and against her archives to conjecture on—although, as she admits, not fully recover—black women’s challenges to racial science. Through attention to the “gaping silences and gaps” (184) of the archive surrounding Baartman and Douglass, Rusert challenges the “Hottentot paradigm” with a “speculated, fragmented history of black women engaging with natural science” (217).

I left Fugitive Science with two questions. The first concerns the scope of the project: while Rusert declares that nineteenth-century racial science “spanned the globe,” (11), her objects of inquiry are nearly all Anglo-American. What she calls a “deeply Atlantic science” (13) remains, in the end, largely a story of Anglophone U.S. culture and, occasionally, its dealings with Britain. There is plenty of rich terrain here alone and Rusert treats that terrain both thoughtfully and thoroughly. I would, however, be keen to see scholars take up Rusert’s promise of a “global and diverse network of experiments, theories, and practitioners” (13) by engaging with other sub- and supra-national units, especially across Native American, African, Caribbean, and Latin American cultures. When we shift Rusert’s axis from the Anglophone to the multilingual, from the transatlantic to the hemispheric, global, or diasporic, I suspect new histories will become legible, expanding and deepening Rusert’s suggestive claim that natural science “meditates(s) on the category of the human itself” (6).

This spatial and linguistic shift brings me to my second question: how do we demarcate scientific doctrines and practices from pseudoscience in a way that is both inclusive and reparative? Many of the discourses and practices Rusert describe look like science, sound like science, smell like science, but are not necessarily science. This is not a criticism: what we consider “science” has been formed through a historical process of normative evaluation. But can we draw the boundaries of “science” broadly enough to include diasporic traditions of folk knowledge production but narrowly enough to exclude racist theories, now deemed pseudoscientific, that have been used to oppress and dehumanize people of African descent? At times, it seems that Rusert’s counter-narrative to racist pseudo-science does not have the conceptual space to address folk beliefs and spiritual practices that are epistemically warranted but not necessarily systematized. Although Rusert gestures toward these traditions (what she calls a vernacular “underbelly of fugitive science” [29] and, at times, “mysticism” [6]), diasporic spiritual traditions, including Conjure, Vodou, and Obeah, are largely subordinated to those knowledge disciplines that a twenty-first-century reader would recognize as scientific: for example, astronomy, physiology, geology, botany and (more controversially) ethnology. Scholars seeking to build on Rusert’s work may want to consider the interplay between institutional and folk knowledge in order to expand, revise, and internationalize our criteria for demarcating pre-twentieth-century scientific inquiry.

This article originally appeared in issue 18.2 (Spring, 2018).

Mary Grace Albanese is an assistant professor of English at Binghamton University (SUNY). Her work has appeared in American Literature, ESQ, and The Henry James Review, among other venues.

The American Revolution as civil war

In the opening number of The Crisis Thomas Paine saves some choice words for the loyalists: “And what is a Tory? Good God! what is he? I should not be afraid to go with a hundred Whigs against a thousand Tories, were they to attempt to get into arms. Every Tory is a coward; for servile, slavish, self-interested fear is the foundation of Toryism; and a man under such influence, though he may be cruel, never can be brave.” Paine doesn’t so much define loyalism here, as he does the character of loyalists. His strategy is typical of patriot accounts of loyalists, which dissolve the category of loyalism by emphasizing the individual loyalist over the shared vision of loyalism. Characterizations such as this make it virtually impossible to understand loyalist motivations or thinking. Framing the question in terms of individual loyalists and using the term as an ad hominem empties loyalism of any ideological, political, or conceptual meaning. This strategy has proven remarkably effective. For most of the past two hundred-odd years the answer to the question of what made someone a loyalist at the time of the American Revolution has been more or less irrelevant. Although subsequent political and cultural historians may not partake of Paine’s vicious rhetoric, loyalism and loyalists remain among the most poorly understood aspects of the Revolution.

Not only have loyalists been generally dismissed as self-interested, cowardly, antidemocratic, elitist collaborators, their numbers have often been distorted and minimized. Determining who was a loyalist and under what conditions can be very difficult. Given the intimidation and violence to which they were subjected by crowd action, committees of safety, and patriot agitators like Paine, most loyalists carefully avoided public scrutiny. Many signed oaths of allegiance to the patriot cause when threatened with public action; some successfully maintained a pretense of neutrality; and still others kept their secret safe. This may explain why calculations of the percentage of loyalists in the colonies and early states have varied from one-fifth to one-third of the total population. The most famous estimate of the percentage of loyalists at the time of the Revolution comes from an 1815 letter John Adams wrote to James Lloyd in which he calculates that one-third of the population were “averse to the revolution.” In the same letter Adams also suggests that another third wavered in their allegiances. Even at the more conservative (probably too conservative) 20 percent figure favored by some historians, the idea that such a significant proportion of the population may have opposed the independence movement is a staggering fact—a fact that remains virtually unaccounted for in our reckoning of the Revolution. Moreover, if we add the significant numbers of blacks and Native Americans who, for various reasons, sided with the British, the percentage of loyalists swells to an even greater proportion of the population. In this discussion I have focused solely on the white settlers because they form the core of the typical narrative of the Revolution.

My aim here is less to suggest how a consideration of loyalists and loyalism might change our view of the Revolution and more to begin to develop a working definition of loyalism that does not reinscribe their marginality. Only in so doing can we truly begin to understand their significance. In what follows, I want to begin to sketch out a definition of loyalism that is not inherently prejudicial by drawing on two writers, J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur and James Fenimore Cooper. These two authors have often figured as paragons of the exceptionalist thesis, or the idea that there is something very, very different about American identity, and that something is often equated with patriotism. Crèvecoeur and Cooper, however, had strong ties to loyalism and produced early works in which loyalist characters play major roles. These characters suggest that in many cases loyalists opposed the Revolution not only because they cherished their historical, commercial, and affective links to the British Empire but also because they objected to the cost it exacted on their communities. Just as significantly, Crèvecoeur and Cooper respectively imply that loyalism, despite its apparent alienation from the mainstream, has played a vital role in the development of American culture and society.

Farmer James and the Dilemma of the Revolution

In the influential third chapter of Letters from an American Farmer—which bears the title “What is an American?”—Crèvecoeur’s narrator Farmer James describes the process whereby European (primarily British) immigrants to Pennsylvania were transformed into Americans. Critics have typically read this chapter as evidence of the emergence of a new and distinct American national identity in the late eighteenth century. In other words, “What is an American?” has served as a cornerstone of the American exceptionalist account of the Revolution. In the exceptionalist view, which dominated so much of literary and historical analysis of American culture and politics during the last century, the forces shaping colonial America and the early United States are fundamentally different from those shaping Europe and the rest of the world. The United States and its people are seen to represent a special instance in the history of the world. Farmer James’s description of the process whereby European immigrants are transformed into Americans has often been understood to reinforce the proposition that the Revolution was the inevitable consequence of America’s radical difference with Europe. Crèvecoeur, however, was a loyalist who fled the colonies to return to his native France. Farmer James, the hero and narrator of the Letters, is also a loyalist, albeit one who in the end opts out of the war altogether. Crèvecoeur’s case illustrates the difficulties a more complicated and nuanced version of loyalism poses for the patriot narrative of the Revolution.

The exceptionalist reading of “What is an American?” emphasizes those moments in the chapter when Farmer James celebrates the differences between European and American identities: “The American is a new man,” he asserts, “who acts upon new principles; he must therefore entertain new ideas and form new opinions.” If we look more closely at the chapter, however, we can see that Crèvecoeur sets up the narrative of transformation with a scene that affirms the ties between the Old World and the New. The chapter opens with an account of what he imagines a newcomer might see and feel upon landing in Philadelphia.

I wish I could be acquainted with the feelings and thoughts which must agitate the heart and present themselves to the mind of an enlightened Englishman when he first lands on this continent. He must greatly rejoice that he lived at a time to see this fair country discovered and settled; he must necessarily feel a share of national pride when he views the chain of settlements which embellish these extended shores. When he says to himself, “This is the work of my countrymen, who, when convulsed by factions, afflicted by a variety of miseries and wants, restless and impatient, took refuge here. They brought along with them their national genius, to which they principally owe what liberty they enjoy and what substance they possess.” Here he sees the industry of his native country displayed in a new manner and traces in their works the embryos of all the arts, sciences, and ingenuity which flourish in Europe.

The trajectory of the narrative here emphasizes continuity with an English and European past rather than a radical break with a hopelessly antiquated and hierarchical world. This imagined English traveler recognizes the new world he encounters in British North America to be an extension of English aesthetic and social ideals. The American colonies, rather than rejecting or ignoring European culture and society, have evolved by developing their English and European inheritance. Crèvecoeur strategically uses the term “national” to describe the character of these people and their work, and thereby privileges the deeper connections between Americans and Britons. He uses “country” and “countrymen” to refer to the place that is British North America, but he never identifies the people of the thirteen colonies as a nation. This is true throughout the Letters.

Crèvecoeur thus sets up his account of the development of an American identity by calling attention to continuities between Europeans and British North Americans before turning to the differences between them. This sense of a dual identity, in turn, explains Farmer James’s reaction to the Revolution in the last chapter of the Letters, a chapter that has long puzzled scholars, who have often argued that it is inconsistent with the rest of the text. I want to focus on one moment in particular from that closing chapter, because I think it offers an insight into a completely different understanding of the Revolution. Struggling to come to grips with the onset of the Revolution, Farmer James is so distraught that he suffers a nervous breakdown. Recovering his wits but still unable to choose a side, he seeks divine guidance.

Great Source of wisdom! Inspire me with light sufficient to guide my benighted steps out of this intricate maze! Shall I discard all my ancient principles, shall I renounce that name, that nation which I held once so respectable? I feel the powerful attraction; the sentiments they inspired grew with my earliest knowledge and were grafted upon the first rudiments of my education. On the other hand, shall I arm myself against that country where I first drew breath, against the playmates of my youth, my bosom friends, my acquaintance? The idea makes me shudder! Must I be called a parricide, a traitor, a villain, lose the esteem of all those whom I love to preserve my own, be shunned like a rattlesnake, or be pointed at like a bear? I have neither heroism nor magnanimity enough to make so great a sacrifice.

Borrowing not from the language of republicanism or liberalism but from the vocabulary of sentimentalism, Farmer James presents the Revolution as a choice between killing his father and killing his brothers. The politics and ideals of the Revolution are irrelevant to Farmer James who, elsewhere in the chapter, dismisses the political debates of the Revolution as an elite game that callously ignores the sufferings of ordinary people. Rather than feeling implicated in the political stakes of the Revolution, Farmer James experiences the conflict as a local matter that potentially pits him against his family, friends, and neighbors.

Framed as a prayer, Farmer James’s plea for wisdom revolves around feelings and affective relations rather than social, political, ideological, or economic concerns. By the end of the passage, his feelings of disorientation merge what appear to be two choices into one inevitable outcome; the apparent binary of patriot and loyalist dissolves. Neither side offers a substantially different outcome because regardless of which side he chooses, Farmer James will be seen by many as a traitor and a villain. From the point of view of social relations, the political choices of the Revolution are inherently unsatisfactory because they divide and fracture a once peaceful community. Crèvecoeur’s poignant account of the dilemma of the Revolution is a far cry from Paine’s characterization in The Crisis. Instead of cowering in fear, Farmer James presents the reader with a profound ethical conundrum. The enormous psychological and emotional weight of this decision drives him to temporary insanity and ultimately he opts to avoid the question altogether by removing his family to the western backcountry. Like Crèvecoeur and his semi-autobiographical hero Farmer James, most loyalists were deeply ambivalent about the Revolution. They were torn between their local attachments and their allegiance to the British Empire. The latter had supplied not only an affective and historical connection but also a link to European commercial, political, and cultural centers of exchange. This is a version of loyalists and loyalism to which popular historians and scholars of the Revolution alike have for the most part failed to attend.

Crèvecoeur’s characterization of Farmer James demonstrates why loyalists challenge the powerful narratives of unity and consensus that were so important to the patriot rhetoric of democratic Revolution. For patriots, alienating and disenfranchising the loyalists was crucial to ensuring the Revolution’s success, but all too often subsequent generations of historians have, albeit tacitly, accepted patriot characterizations of loyalism as the truth. Put simply, loyalists have been omitted from the history of the Revolution because there is no convenient place for them in the stories of triumphal democracy and freedom that inform most histories of the Revolution. Erasing the loyalists, dismissing them as self-interested cowards, radicalizing them as a band of fanatical hard-liners, or as is more typically the case, alienating them by lumping them in with the English invader makes it possible to imagine that there was no meaningful domestic opposition to the “patriot” plan of separating from Great Britain and adopting a radical new democratic form of government. This narrative tells the story of American independence as a conflict between the newly emergent United States and the powerful and established British Empire. By its logic loyalists had to be Britons: they could not be Americans when “American” had become a synonym for patriot. Not being Americans, in turn, loyalists would not be considered relevant to the story of the early United States. This was, of course, Paine’s strategy in those sections of Common Sense and The Crisis where he attacks loyalists. Ironically, the viciousness of Paine’s antiloyalist rhetoric suggests that he understood them to pose a significant threat to the success of the patriot movement. Crèvecoeur’s Farmer James, the sympathetic, sentimental, ambivalent loyalist, presents the greatest challenge because he is virtually impossible to demonize. Perhaps this explains why scholars have so often ascribed a patriot point of view to Crèvecoeur and his hero.

Cooper’s British Americans

Early in his career, James Fenimore Cooper published two novels about the Revolution and early republic in which loyalists figure prominently, The Spy (1821) and The Pioneers (1823). In these novels loyalists are often sympathetic figures whose experience of the Revolution, much like Farmer James’s, is no less traumatic and difficult than that faced by patriots. I want to focus on The Spy in particular because it is the only novel in which Cooper directly treats the War of Independence. In his introduction to the 1831 edition,Cooper comments explicitly on his view of the Revolution.

The dispute between England and the United States of America, though not strictly a family quarrel, had many of the features of a civil war. Though the people of the latter were never properly and constitutionally subject to the people of the former, the inhabitants of both countries owed allegiance to a common king. As the Americans, as a nation, disavowed this allegiance, and as the English chose to support their sovereign in the attempt to regain his power, most of the feelings of an internal struggle were involved in the conflict. A large proportion of the emigrants from Europe, then established in the colonies, took part with the crown; and there were many districts in which their influence, united to that of the Americans who refused to throw away their allegiance, gave a decided preponderance to the royal cause. America was then too young, and too much in need of every heart and hand, to regard these partial divisions, small as they were in actual amount, with indifference.

Cooper ties himself in knots in this passage. Throughout the paragraph he qualifies each statement to the point where what might otherwise seem to be crucial distinctions are blurred, even to the point of being emptied of meaning. Phrases such as “not strictly,” “never properly,” “most of the feelings,” and “partial divisions” obscure as much as they reveal. The language of this paragraph suggests that Cooper finds himself torn between a desire to recognize the internal divisions between Americans at the time of the Revolution and a wish to produce a narrative of American nationhood.

Cooper struggles to reconcile those two impulses because so often the national argument has depended upon the alienation of the loyalists and the dichotomization of American and British identities, values, and cultures. In spite of such manifest fears about acknowledging the potential legitimacy of loyalism, Cooper invites his readers, albeit tentatively, to understand the Revolution as a civil war. By equating it with a family quarrel or an internal struggle, Cooper represents the war as a conflict pitting Americans against one another rather than an international conflict between two wholly separate peoples. Like Crèvecoeur, then, Cooper has chosen to explore the way the Revolution splinters the American family. He does so in The Spy by focusing on a family that is divided in its loyalties and by situating the action in New York, perhaps the most divided of the former colonies. The major conflicts in the novel, both on the battlefield and off, take place between family members, friends, and neighbors who often appear to agree on everything but the question of American independence.

The central drama of the novel concerns the fate of Henry Wharton, an accused spy, who is captured by the Americans while visiting his family in Westchester. In order to make his way safely from New York City—the center of British military operations for much of the war—to his family’s Westchester home, Henry is forced to cross the American “picquets” in White Plains. Fearful of being identified as a loyalist, Henry disguises himself for the journey. Although he sought to do nothing more treacherous than visit his family, the use of a disguise technically makes him a spy. During Henry’s trial, the accusation, although it is never explicitly stated as such, seems to be that Henry avails himself of the pretext of visiting his family in order to survey the positions of the American troops.

The matter is complicated because the ranking officer of the troop that detains Henry is his sister Frances’s fiancé, Major Peyton Dunwoodie. Frances, an ardent patriot who had promised to marry Dunwoodie at the conclusion of the war, vows that she can never consent to the proposed union should her brother be hanged as a spy. Dunwoodie, who believes Henry is innocent and does everything in his legal power to help him, finds himself torn between his duty as an officer and his love for Frances. Henry and Dunwoodie are close friends too. Unlike Frances, Henry understands Dunwoodie’s predicament and urges Frances to marry Dunwoodie in spite of the American officer’s role in his capture and detention. The novel makes it clear that, political differences notwithstanding, Henry and Dunwoodie share a commitment to the same male sense of duty and honor, one that absolves Dunwoodie of any personal responsibility for Henry’s death. They both insist on separating their duty from their feelings, their role as soldiers from their personal relationship—a theme that is repeated throughout the novel. Frances, who in many respects emerges as the true hero of the novel, refuses to give credence to such distinctions, especially when Henry is innocent of the charges.

Cooper has thus structured these relationships so that Frances is torn between her feelings of loyalty towards her brother and her love for Dunwoodie. In so doing, Cooper suggests a profound affinity between Henry and Dunwoodie, although one is a loyalist and the other a patriot. Both are presented as honorable figures, each equally sincere in his motives for adopting his respective causes and each equally committed to the rules of conduct governing his professional position. The novel never suggests any fundamental ethical or character flaw in Henry. If anything, Henry narrowly avoids becoming the victim of a great American injustice. The patriot Dunwoodie and the loyalist Henry are much more alike than they are different. The problem the novel addresses, therefore, is not related to Henry’s character or the reasons for his decision to espouse the loyalist position—the narrative’s silence on the question implies that such questions are irrelevant. Instead, the novel explores how the divisions created by this “family quarrel” lead to artificial distinctions that distort human relations and destroy communal values. Frances is thus left to negotiate the same problem that had paralyzed Farmer James in Crèvecoeur’s text.

Ultimately, the novel suggests that Henry and Dunwoodie are wrong to choose the political over the personal. They are wrong, that is, to privilege duty over feelings. That message is delivered most effectively in the novel’s denouement when Henry’s escape to safety is ensured by Dunwoodie’s acknowledgement of the wisdom of Frances’s priorities. When Dunwoodie meets Frances after learning of Henry’s escape he complains, “I can almost persuade myself that you delight in creating points of difference in our feelings and duties.” Frances replies, “In our duties there may very possibly be a difference . . . but not in our feelings, Peyton—You must certainly rejoice in the escape of Henry!” Frances, who has been urged to keep Dunwoodie busy for two hours to insure Henry’s escape, dramatizes the union of feelings and duty when she decides that the best way to delay Dunwoodie’s pursuit of Henry is to accept his proposal of marriage on the condition that the wedding take place immediately. She feels so guilty about deceiving Dunwoodie that she reveals her reasoning to him: “Stop, Peyton; I cannot enter into such a solemn engagement with a fraud upon my conscience. I have seen Henry since his escape, and time is all important to him. Here is my hand; if, with this knowledge of the consequences of delay, you will not reject it, it is freely yours.” By accepting her terms openly, Dunwoodie appears to accept Frances’s view of the proper relationship between feelings and duties. Cooper stages this scene so that Dunwoodie’s consent to Frances’s terms establishes that he has finally learned this important lesson and can now collect his reward.

By combining the discussion of duty and feelings with an insistence on the fundamental similarities between loyalists and patriots, Cooper has constructed a novel in which the affective relations between family members, friends, and neighbors supersede the political debates of the Revolution. Hence, the aim of the novel is not simply to foster reconciliation between patriots and loyalists but to challenge the notion that the distinction between them was ever particularly meaningful. Cooper’s aim is not to dismiss the dispute over rights and sovereignty that motivated the Revolution but instead to remind his readers of the contingent and fluid meaning of those debates. Once the war had concluded, Americans needed to find ways to reconcile with one another and rediscover their fundamental commonalities. To this end, Cooper and Crèvecoeur challenge the easy dichotomies of loyalist and patriot, Briton and American, instead underscoring the fundamental continuities between both. Those continuities can be difficult to perceive if we privilege the political. In  Letters and The Spy the political is relegated to the background in favor of an emphasis on local or personal relationships.

In light of Crèvecouer’s and Cooper’s respective representations of loyalists at the time of the American Revolution, I’d like to conclude with a definition. Let me emphasize the provisional nature of this description of loyalism. I see my work on loyalism and loyalists as one entry point into a subject that requires much more study and analysis. In that spirit, I propose the following definition: A loyalist was an American who favored reconciliation with Great Britain during conflicts that began with the Stamp Act and concluded with the War of 1812. Loyalists, who constituted up to one-third of the population at the time of independence, opposed the Revolution for a variety of reasons, including affective, sentimental, economic, political, religious, and philosophical ones. Most loyalists were proud to be American colonials and identified strongly with their local communities and governments. In many cases, they resented the British government’s efforts to tax them and shared the view, held by most mainland British-Americans, that those measures violated their rights as British subjects. In spite of such concerns, they were proud of their British heritage, which in fact had taught them (and their patriot counterparts) to cherish their rights, and they wished to remain a part of the powerful British Empire. Understanding themselves as imperial subjects, loyalists saw no necessary contradiction between their local identity as Americans and their national identity as Britons. Although large numbers of them migrated to British Canada during the War for Independence, many also stayed in the new United States and many of this latter group became important figures in the politics and culture of the early American republic. To recognize loyalism as a legitimate response to the late eighteenth-century colonial controversies in British North America thus requires us not only to recast the Revolutionary conflict as a civil war but also to revise our understanding of the dynamics of consent, coercion, resistance, nation formation, and peoplehood during the Revolution.

Further Reading:

The classic treatment of loyalists is Mary Beth Norton’s The British Americans: The Loyalist Exiles in England, 1774-1789 (Boston, 1972). More recently, Judith Van Buskirk’s Generous Enemies: Patriots and Loyalists in New York (Philadelphia, 2002) explores relationships across the political divide in the British “occupied” New York City. A spate of pieces published in a variety of venues in the last year suggests a resurgence of interest in loyalists. To name a few, Alan Taylor published an article on loyalist exiles to Canada, in the Journal of the Early Republic (Spring 2007), Maya Jasanoff contributed a provocative piece on loyalists in the New York Times Magazine (July 1, 2007), and, of course, readers of this publication will recall that Ed Griffin wrote about his current work on the loyalist Mather Byles for the July 2007 edition of Common-place.

A fuller account of Crèvecoeur’s instrumentality to the exceptionalist paradigm and his text’s critique of the Revolution can be found in my forthcoming essay, “The Cosmopolitan Revolution,” which will appear shortly in a special double issue of the journal Novel: A Forum on Fiction dedicated to the early American novel. For an excellent account of the challenges critics have faced when attempting to reconcile “Distresses” with the rest of the Letters, see Grantland S. Rice, The Transformation of Authorship in America(Chicago, 1997).

The body of scholarship on Cooper is long and deep. Two works in particular that attend to concerns I address in this essay are Shirley Samuels, Romances of the Republic: Women, the Family, and Violence in the Literature of the Early American Nation (New York, 1996)–which explores Cooper’s habitual treatment of political and ideological themes in domestic terms—and Wayne Franklin’s recent biography of Cooper, James Fenimore Cooper: The Early Years (New Haven, 2007), in which he discusses Cooper’s relationship with the Delancey family.

This article originally appeared in issue 8.1 (October, 2007).

Edward Larkin, an assistant professor of English at the University of Delaware, is the author of Thomas Paine and the Literature of Revolution (2005). His current book project bears the working title Tory America: Loyalism and the Logic of Empire in the Early United States.

Over the past few decades, the American Revolution, traditionally the purview of early American historiography, has become an important focus for American literary and cultural studies. Yet much contemporary scholarship continues to characterize “Revolutionary America” as essentially Patriot writing and printed media, with little attention paid to the thousands of Americans who were not as interested in declaring their independence from Britain. When Loyalists of the American Revolution are considered at all, much of the focus is on men, with figures such as Benedict Arnold, John Andre, Jonathan Odell, and Joseph Stansbury standing in the spotlight.

But consider Mrs. Nathaniel Adams, a Loyalist who testified in the court martial of a Continental soldier accused of destroying her home during the Battle of White Plains. Consider Elizabeth Graeme Fergusson of Philadelphia, deemed a Loyalist against her will when she delivered George Johnstone’s attempted bribe to Joseph Reed. Consider, as well, Sarah Cass McGinn, a Loyalist well-versed in Iroquoian languages who served the British as an interpreter during the war. Many Loyalist women—self-identified and otherwise—participated in or were affected by the war, and I have named only a few. Dorothea Gramsby, Catherine and Mary Byles, Peggy Hutchinson, Anna Rawles, Margaret Morris, Janet Shaw, Anne Hulton, and Phila Delancey also either identified as Loyalists or had that identity thrust upon them. Those who stayed behind as their husbands, brothers, and sons left home to fight can tell us what life was like running businesses, raising children, and tending property, all while living among neighbors and relatives who shunned them for their politics. Those who fled in exile write about slipping away in the dark of night, babies in tow, possessions left behind, lurching toward cold and unfamiliar destinations far from home—narratives that provide another, often unrepresented perspective on the American Revolution (fig. 1).

Discussing eighteenth-century Loyalists has been difficult, in part, because their political perspectives do not fit neatly into the American origin story. In his 2007 Common-Place article “What is a Loyalist?” Edward Larkin raises this very point. To the Loyalists, the founding fathers were tyrants, not leaders. The “Sons of Liberty” were vigilantes, not victors, and the war meant the collapse of order and civilization, not the defeat of longstanding injustice. Further complicating the Loyalist/Patriot divide is the harsh truth that people did not always get to decide their political affiliation for themselves. While some had the luxury of pledging loyalty to the crown, others had loyalism thrust upon them. Self-appointed Committees of Safety branded as Loyalists merchants who refused to sign nonimportation agreements, even though their reasons for protest may have been monetary rather than political. Anglican priests were automatically Loyalists due to their affiliation with the Church of England. Unless they made a public display of disavowing their family members, people with prominent Loyalist relatives were assumed to be Loyalists-by-association. The Loyalist Claims Commissioners defined Loyalists very broadly, granting money or land to those who fought for the British or pledged allegiance to Great Britain (even after fighting for or pledging allegiance to the Rebels).