Omission of the political opinions and literary creations of black Americans during the Founding era has produced an incomplete history of the birth and growth of the American republic that has distorted Americans’ self-understanding of who they are as a diverse but whole people. The most pernicious effect has been to reinforce the white supremacy that debilitated early and longstanding efforts to rid the nation of racial slavery and secure the equal protection of the law to all Americans regardless of race, color, or nation of origin. In Black Writers of the Founding Era, James G. Basker has compiled an anthology of 200 texts from more than 120 black writers that offers a much overdue public service announcement regarding the contribution that blacks have made to America.
The volume’s raison d’etre, according to the foreword by historian Annette Gordon-Reed, is “recovering marginalized voices.” To borrow from Carter G. Woodson, the creator of Negro History Week (now African American History Month), such a volume presents “not Negro History, but the Negro in history.” He added, “The case of the Negro is well taken care of when it is shown how he has influenced the development of civilization.” For far too long, few American history textbooks contained references to blacks in American history that extended beyond being either victims of white injustice or beneficiaries of white largesse. Their contributions to their liberation on American soil are largely missing, a liberation that also helped white Americans live up to their noblest professions.
The need for this volume is apparent when we consider the hue and cry raised last year by Florida’s revision of state standards of African American history for K-12 when they referred to the ability of enslaved blacks to express their humanity, talents, and skills despite their enslavement. Had the letters, stories, sermons, petitions, and literature contained in this volume been more widely known, the proposed standards would have been less susceptible to caricature and misrepresentation. Some had even condemned the new standards as teaching, along the lines of John C. Calhoun’s “positive good” thesis, that American slavery was a benefit to the slaves. Basker rightly declares that “the myth of Black passivity—if it ever had any truth to it—is finished.”
Like David Hackett Fischer’s African-American Founders: How Enslaved People Expanded American Ideals, which presents a narrative history of the impact that diverse strains of African slaves had on different regions of colonial America, Basker’s collection of primary source texts contributes to a more comprehensive account of “the deep origins of the civil rights movement” that coincided with America’s cultural and political development. In addition, it teaches how vital the founding principles of human equality, individual rights, and government by consent were to securing progress in civil and political rights for all Americans. To quote just one of the many sources in Basker’s collection, James Forten explained how emancipation would advance “the diffusion of knowledge among the African race, by unfettering their thoughts, and giving full scope to the energy of their minds.”
Black Writers of the Founding Era includes figures familiar to those conversant with the American colonial and revolutionary periods, such as Phillis Wheatley, Richard Allen, James Armistead Lafayette, Prince Hall, and Benjamin Banneker, but many more black Americans, free and enslaved, grace these pages and deserve to become part of the histories now written about America. For example, Felix Holbrook, an enslaved African in Massachusetts, presented “the humble petition of many slaves” to the royal governor and colonial house of representatives in 1773, arguing for their freedom by an appeal to “God, who loves Mankind, who sent his Son to die for their Salvation, and who is no Respecter of Persons.” A year later, a Massachusetts “Petition of a Grate Number of Blackes” identified themselves as “a freeborn Pepel and have never forfeited this Blessing by aney compact or agreement whatever” and argued that “we have in common with all other men a naturel right to our freedoms.” These and other petitions, sermons, and testimonials reflect the biblical and natural law principles circulating throughout the American colonies that would eventually take iconic shape in the Declaration of Independence and lead to a war for independence that would enlist, by Basker’s count, 5,000 to 8,000 black Americans.
To be sure, as many as 20,000 blacks took the occasion of the Revolutionary War to join the British or otherwise leave America for other parts of the British Empire, while others petitioned for their freedom so that they could return to Africa. For example, in 1787 the Free African Union Society of Newport, Rhode Island, sought help from a white abolitionist to raise funds for a trip to prepare their return to Africa “if such land can be obtained, and we may have a proper and good title to it.” But the vast majority of writings in this eye-opening collection amply demonstrates that, as Basker puts it, “Everywhere, Black Americans were claiming inclusion in the new American republic they helped create.” As Frederick Douglass would argue decades later, quoting Lord Byron, “Who would be free, themselves must strike the first blow.” Black Americans did not wait for obstacles to their freedom to be removed before they took initiative. They chose to be the agents of their own liberation, recognizing along with their white compatriots that the “land of the free” had to become the “home of the brave” for the struggle for equality and liberty to succeed.
Black Americans chose to be the agents of their own liberation, recognizing along with their white compatriots that the “land of the free” had to become the “home of the brave” for the struggle for equality and liberty to succeed.
Basker’s lucid introduction describes the book’s contents and the types of contributors, which offers an informative sketch of the texts that follow in chronological order. Petitions and freedom suits, black soldiers, black loyalists and refugees, civic and religious leaders, and (nineteen) black women are featured categories in the introduction that constitute a primer on the black American history of the American revolutionary period.
While acknowledging the achievements of American independence, Basker closes the introduction with a concise argument that the volume’s writings attest to a “founding era . . . rife with missed opportunities.” This is proven by reading just a few of the petitions, sermons, and letters. They offer irrefragable arguments conveyed with a disposition equal parts humility and audacity. That said, there remains a debate regarding what the Founding generation could have, and therefore should have, done not as individuals but as public men during the American Revolution and early constitutional period. As the political theorist and Lincoln scholar par excellence Harry V. Jaffa once wrote of the Founders, “if they had attempted to secure all the rights of all men, they would have ended in no rights secured for any men.”
Basker cites the example of a 1799 petition to Congress that sought “equal rights and an end to slavery.” While this effort failed by a vote of 85-1, petitions at the state level were more successful, as Black Writers of the Founding Era shows. A majority of the slaveholding states abolished slavery through gradual manumission laws, while freedom suits brought by slaves not only freed the plaintiffs in Massachusetts but led to the abolition of slavery by 1783 throughout the commonwealth. Basker cites the Massachusetts case of Quock Walker in a note to an anonymous essay by “The Sons of Africa” titled “Thoughts on Slavery,” which added “Nature, Reason, and Conscience” to “Humanity and the Laws of Heaven” to condemn “this Practice of Slave-making,” prevent the further importation of slaves, and “adopt some Method to relieve those who are now in Bondage.”
Nevertheless, the congressional effort in 1799 that Basker calls “a disastrous decision” legitimately respects the federal context of American slavery. Petitions to Congress were rejected not simply because white southerners began shedding their commitment to human equality but also because few Americans North or South thought the U.S. Constitution empowered the federal government to regulate slavery in the states where it existed prior to the formation of the federal union. In the 1850s, while Lincoln and fellow Republicans repeatedly called for Congress to prevent the extension of slavery into federal territories, most Republicans denied that Congress had any authority to ban slavery in the states. Only a distinct minority of abolitionists, including Frederick Douglass and Gerrit Smith, argued that Congress could ban slavery throughout the United States.
Is Basker right to conclude that “the promise of the founding era stalled after 1800”? While conceding that Congress banned the transatlantic slave trade in 1808, he omits that in 1820 Congress passed a law equating the importation of slaves with piracy, a crime punishable by death. To be sure, that same year saw the admission of Missouri as a slave state, but Congress admitted Maine as a free state and banned slavery from all the remaining territory of the Louisiana Purchase north of the 36°30′ parallel, from which nine free states would eventually enter the federal union. These were palpable signs that freedom’s march had not halted, even in the face of southern opposition. White and black Americans continued to appeal to the principles of the Declaration of Independence as the key to national reformation on the slavery question.
It was the war with Mexico in the late 1840s, and the massive land acquisition that Americans exacted, that made slavery, in the words of Lincoln, “the great Behemoth of danger” in American politics. When Senator Stephen A. Douglas passed the Kansas-Nebraska Act in 1854, opening federal territory to the possibility of slavery by local popular sovereignty, he tempted white northerners to turn a blind eye to the expansion of racial slavery. As Lincoln understood it, if northerners allowed the “spirit of Nebraska” to supplant “the spirit of seventy-six,” then the universal promise of the Founding era would have been derailed as the true guide to progress and prosperity in America. As president of the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History and Richard Gilder Professor of Literary History at Barnard College, Columbia University, Basker knows this history as well as any other historian. Perhaps the confines of an introduction to primary sources by “Black writers of the founding era” constrained a more nuanced account of the challenges of abolishing slavery within a system of powers divided between the states and federal government.
Regardless, as part of the Library of America series, this anthology should now serve as required source material for any K-12 or collegiate textbook that claims to offer a reliable narrative of the making of America.