Stephen G. Hall

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Stephen G. Hall | A Search for Truth: Jacob Oson and the Beginnings of African American Historiography | The William and Mary Quarterly, 64.1 | The History Cooperative

A Search for Truth: Jacob Oson and the Beginnings of African American Historiography

IN 1817 Jacob Oson, a Connecticut minister, schoolteacher, and self-described "descendant of Africa," addressed the free black population of New Haven, Connecticut, and, later that year, New York City. He denounced the objects and aims of the recently formed American Colonization Society—a group organized for the explicit purpose of sending free blacks to Africa—three months after an eventful meeting of Philadelphia's black community at Mother Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church. His address, A Search for Truth; Or, An Inquiry for the Origin of the African Nation, assessed the place of Africa and African Americans in the rise of Western civilization. "My thoughts run on my people and nation," wrote Oson, "I wish to inquire, who was our common Father and from whom we sprang? And whether our ancestors were such an ignorant race of beings, as we, their descendants, are considered to be." Cognizant of the difficulties he faced in reconstructing the African past because of slavery and its effect on free and enslaved alike, Oson grounded his inquiry in a biblical search for truth: "I know well that the task is arduous to inquire into this subject, on account of our opposers, for they are many; but ought I give up the inquiry after Truth on this account? Certainly not."¹	1
In the intellectual universe of black writing prior to 1830, Oson's work is an example of early historical textual production. Rather than viewing African Americans' understanding of history through historical memory, commemorative celebrations, or festivals, A Search for Truth points to history writing as an important, if not central, lens through which scholars can interpret historical and humanistic understandings among free blacks in the early Republic.²	2
African American historical writing in the early Republic prior to the publication of David Walker's Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World (1829) is underexplored. Though historians and literary scholars alike have uncovered a wealth of oratorical eloquence among African Americans in the colonial and early Republic periods, most historians have generally dismissed black historical writing as ill-formed or as reaching its maturation only after the Civil War. African American intellectuals crafted a historical language in the early Republic, however, that forcefully responded to slavery's hold on the South, the perilous and precarious existence endured by free black populations in the North, and the continued assaults on black intellectual capacity and capabilities. These assaults were best dramatized in the colonization movement and escalating mob violence against white and black abolitionists throughout the early Republic and into the antebellum period.³	3
Why was history important to African Americans? Conventional wisdom locates black historical origins in traditions of protest and a desire for liberation, assumes that forms of historical expression were primarily oral and commemorative, and suggests that this historical production was largely disengaged from mainstream trends in American intellectual history. But especially for the small coterie of autodidacts and college-trained black intellectuals in the early Republic, history furnished critical answers to the most pressing questions of the day regarding black origins, existence, and future possibilities. It offered a key to unlock a wealth of information about the black presence in biblical times and classical antiquity. These two historical epochs supplied an opportunity for black intellectuals to juxtapose the complex positioning of blackness in earlier periods with their current enslaved or nominally free position in the contemporary world of the nineteenth century.⁴ Other components of this black historiographical tradition included the involvement of black writers in the emerging print culture of the day, their engagement with the culture of classicism and veneration of ancient Greek and Roman culture, and the continued influence of the Bible on scholarly life.	. . .

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