|
|
|
To "cast just obliquy" on Oppressors: Black Radicalism in the Age of Revolution
Manisha Sinha
| HISTORIANS have yet to fully appreciate the alternative and radical nature of black abolitionist ideology and its origins in the revolutionary era and the early Republic. Most continue to portray black abolitionists, in Patrick Rael's words, not as "counter-hegemons" but as "cofabricators" of northern political culture. They argue that African Americans appropriated mainstream values and ideas to construct a black protest tradition. But the terms adoption, assimilation, or appropriation hardly do justice to African Americans' intellectual and political engagement with the revolutionary tradition. A commitment to revolutionary republicanism could range from a conservative belief in propertied citizenship to more progressive ideas of universal liberty and equality and even demands for social justice and economic parity. Though racial slavery could act as the material basis for the growth of republicanism, revolutionary ideals also posed a threat to slavery's existence. As David Brion Davis has pointed out, revolutionary ideology furnished the first sustained theoretical critique of slavery in the western world.1 Black abolitionists not only developed a comprehensive critique of slavery in the early Republic but also subjected the American revolutionary tradition to criticism. |
1
|
|
African American abolitionists used the metaphor of revolution to argue for a host of ideas and positions, and their use of the revolutionary tradition involved more than just extending the principles of the American Revolution to black Americans. The idea of revolution became the basis of an oppositional tradition of black radicalism that departed dramatically from mainstream American political thought and its premises. Far from simply invoking the ideals of the American Revolution, African Americans emerged as its most stringent and vocal critics. Indeed, they developed a powerful counternarrative to the history of revolutionary republicanism in the United States that highlighted slavery rather than freedom and independence as its central legacy. Revolution to black abolitionists meant not just the incomplete promise of the American Revolution but the Haitian Revolution, a way to justify the overthrow of slavery through slave rebellion and abolitionist instigation.2 Their notion of revolution was transnational and expansive, transcending the narrow and largely uncritical celebration of the American Revolution that became de rigueur in nineteenth-century America. African American abolitionists did not merely indulge in the static invocation of revolutionary principles, they contested the legacy of revolution in the United States. |
2
|
|
Some of the earliest instances of African American condemnation of republican hypocrisy were the black freedom petitions penned during the American Revolution. Written by different groups of slaves in the New England states, these petitions demanded an end to slavery, the rights of citizenship, or transportation back to Africa. According to some historians, they highlighted the contradiction between the existence of slavery and the colonists' fight for self-government. But by using the language of revolutionary republicanism, they also imbued the black demand for freedom with an immediatism that was missing from the plans for gradual, compensated emancipation advocated by most northern antislavery whites at that time. Whereas white Americans dominated the organized revolutionary antislavery movement and saw black slaves as the objects of their benevolence, African Americans began to develop a distinct antislavery radicalism, outside the organizational boundaries of the mainstream movement, that was based on revolutionary rhetoric and the insistent plea of the natural rights of man. A 1774 petition of Massachusetts blacks argued for "an act of the legislative to be pessed that we may obtain our Natural right our freedoms and our children be set at lebety." In 1779 nineteen "natives of Africa" from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, claimed "for the sake of justice, humanity, and the rights of mankind" that "the God of nature gave [us] life and freedom, upon the terms of the most perfect equality with other men; That freedom is an inherent right of the human species."3 |
. . . |
There are about 5257 more words in this article.
Please log in (or, if you are not yet an
authorized user, please go to the
User Setup page) to gain full access rights. Or if you're already logged in register your subscription.
|
