Slavery, Race, and the
Making of American
Literature
Slavery, Race, and the Making of
American Literature
• Phillis Wheatley "On Being Brought from Africa to America”
Thomas Jefferson: From Notes on the State of Virginia
David Walker: From David Walker’s Appeal in Four Articles
William Lloyd Garrison: To the Public
Angelina E. Grimke: From Appeal to the Christian Women of the South
Sojourner Truth: Speech to the Women’s Rights Convention in Akron,
Ohio, 1851
Martin R. Delany: From Political Destiny of the Colored Race on the
American Continent
Henry David Thoreau: Slavery in Massachusetts
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Thomas Jefferson:
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He regarded himself as a man of science, and along with his achievements as a statements had an avid interest in the
natural world. The opening paragraph in Notes of the State of Virginia is extraordinarily long, almost relentless – he does
not pause or break up his prose …
His Notes on the State of Virginia are often seen as an embarrassment to his legacy – many 20th century History book left
it out
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Sought to abolish slavery and challenge the hierarchical claims of racial ethnologists by invoking the principles of the
Declaration
It can be important to link Garrison's commitment to abolitionism with his commitments to women's rights, temperance,
and pacifism…
What role did religion play? How was the Almighty evoked?
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In his Appeal – he directly addressed Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia
William Lloyd Garrison:
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Additionally, he is rather condescending toward the success of Phillis Wheatley - He dismisses the work of Phillis Wheatley
- commenting that Wheatley was a powerfully religious writer but not a true poet.
David Walker:
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NAAL says: Jefferson's Notes on the Notes on the State of Virginia celebrated the democratic ideals of the Declaration of Independence
while making it clear that he regarded those ideals as best realized by whites (787)…he presents black people as inferior to white
people…he leaves the question of race open to further empirical analysis
Garrison – was a militant – believe in the warrior Jesus
Jefferson alludes to a “Creator”
Walker invokes “Jehovah” and “ the Lord God of heaven”
Citing Jefferson’s words in the Declaration of Independence, Garrison quotes the famous phrase “endowed by their
Creator” but closes with a capitalized, furious vow, “SO HELP ME GOD!”
The Role of African-American women writers:
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Phillis Wheatley
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A fascinating poet – the first African-American, slave, woman poet
She reflects Puritan influence
Her poetry imitates the greats of European poetry – like Alexander Pope
She writes about liberty being an abstract or spiritual condition rather than freedom from slavery
What she sees as an enslavement is her former ignorance of Christianity and redemption
She was active with abolitionist groups and she views spiritual salvation as “the way to true felicity…”
Sojourner Truth
On Being Brought from Africa to America
by Phillis Wheatley
• 'Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan
land,
Taught my benighted soul to understand
That there's a God, that there's a Saviour
too:
Once I redemption neither sought nor
knew.
Some view our sable race with scornful
eye,
"Their colour is a diabolic die."
Remember, Christians, Negros, black as
Cain,
May be refin'd and join th'angelic train.
• Autobiographical…
• Expresses her pride in her
adopted religion…
• Shows her compassion for
Africa’s pagan religions..
• Published when she was
@ 19 (London 1773)…
• Was brought to American
from Africa 2 7-8 years
old…
• A remarkable woman was
educated in both English
and Latin, advises whites
that blacks (given the
opportunity of
Christianity) are equal to
whites in the sights of
God…
Thomas Jefferson
• Jefferson published only one full-length book, his Notes on the State of Virginia, but
the Declaration of Independence and his letters are also significant literary
achievements.
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The Declaration matters because of its significance for our national culture, the
letters because of their frequent power to express Jefferson's public ideals and
commitments, the importance of the many ideas and issues that fall under his
consideration, and the clarity of his consideration.
– Jefferson's sense of the historical moment conditioned practically everything he wrote.
– Jefferson does not write in traditionally conceived literary genres, i.e., fiction, poetry,
etc., but his best writing is in the form of public addresses, letters, and a political and
scientific account of his home state.
• This reflects the Enlightenment writing of the day (Scottish and Protestant)
– the cultural significance of these forms
– the artful construction of image and idea to move readers and to recognize that the
texts work (perform) as literature.
• Notes on the State of Virginia - can be seen as defining the American landscape, as
well as the place of America.
David Walker
• A freed black man in Boston • Maintained that the nation failed to
live up to its hype • Claimed the author of the Declaration
of Independence a racist • Attacks Thomas Jefferson • The tone: militance • The rhetorical questions, the multiple
exclamation points, the quoting of
biblical passages, the heated
terminology are features of the period
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• This is a central issue: The Appeal is
clearly directed to black people,
Walker's "brethren.”
• Walker acts like he is NOT writing to
whites….but is he?
– Does he seem to be speaking to two
differing audiences, even while
seeming to address one?
• He attacks all whites…and even
blacks on non-action • The rhetoric of the Appeal uses
techniques drawn from sermons biblical references - and from the
political platforms of the day • from Appeal in Four Articles….Men
include:
– The Indians of North and South
Americans
– The Jews
– The Greeks
– The Irish
– But not the Africans….they are only
good for slavery
Angelina E. Grimke
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Born and raised on a slaveholding farm in S.C.
Became an abolitionist and Women’s Rights advocate •
Followed Garrisonian Abolishism
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Shocking – as she lectured to and at both men and
women
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In a letter she had impulsively written to the
abolitionist Garrison, Angelina Grimké had aligned
herself with the abolitionists.
Garrison published the letter without her consent, •
and she was condemned by her meeting (she had
become a Quaker [Orthodox]) and even by her sister, •
her main emotional support. She stuck by her guns.
However, although she refused to recant, she was
for a time unable to decide what action she should •
next take.
Writing the Appeal to the Christian Women of the
South was the first public abolitionist document that
Angelina Grimké wrote as a public document, to be •
printed with her name on it.
Here she commits herself, as a southern woman of
the slave-holding class, to abolitionism--and to an
investigation of women's activism in the antislavery cause.
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An Appeal to the 0++ Women of the South:
http://utc.iath.virginia.edu/abolitn/abesaegat.html
Filled with biblical quotations and allusions
Written as an evangelical appeal - as the appeal of a
Christian woman to other Christian women to act to
end chattel slavery.
Not only is the language that of evangelical
abolitionism, but the logic is as tightly constructed as
a Christian sermon.
Her language is formal and stiff - is Latinate, stiff,
and formal – used as a religious argument
She says that slavery is sin, and that immediate
abolition of slavery means immediate abolition of
sin, perhaps immediate salvation.
Grimké's tactic is to legitimize--using biblical
references--the unprecedented involvement of
American women in the public controversy over
chattel slavery.
She is arguing that slavery is sin and must be ended
immediately; and she is arguing that women not only
can end it, but that they are duty-bound as Christians
to do so.
http://college.cengage.com/english/heath/syllabuild
/iguide/grimkesa.html
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William Lloyd Garrison
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The Liberator
Garrison is arguing against a
set of unstated positions--those
who claim to be "moderates,"
the apathetic.
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Throughout the editorial, he
addresses a whole range of
people, most of whom--when
one looks closely--he assumes
disagree with him.
In a way, the editorial can be
used to construct the variety of
opposed viewpoints; he is
challenging his opponents…
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http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4h2928.html
Through his newspaper, The Liberator, William Lloyd
Garrison spoke out against slavery and for the rights
of black Americans for 35 years.
The tone of the paper was established in the first
issue of the paper with Garrison's editorial entitled,
"To the Public," in which he made the bold statement
that he would "strenuously contend for the
immediate enfranchisement of our slave population."
In other words, not only would he crusade for the
emancipation of slaves, he would also work to give
freed slaves citizenship with the right to vote. And he
would do so with determination. . .
On this subject, I do not wish to think, or speak, or
write, with moderation. No! no! Tell a man whose
house is on fire, to give a moderate alarm; tell him to
moderately rescue his wife from the hand of the
ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her
babe from the fire into which it has fallen; -- but urge
me not to use moderation in a cause like the present.
I am in earnest -- I will not equivocate -- I will not
excuse -- I will not retreat a single inch -- AND I WILL
BE HEARD
The Liberator: "To the Public“
– http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/aia/part4/4h2928t.html
SOJOURNER TRUTH
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Born a slave – New York…and Emerges as one of the nations' greatest advocates of AfricanAmerican and Women’s Rights…
Experiences a Conversion experience and believes God has led her to the path
She is a Leading advocate at the Women’s Rights Conventions and Abolitionist movements…
She escaped slavery with her infant daughter in 1826…She would then go to court to
recover her son…
– She became the first black woman to win such a case against a white man.
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Her best-known extemporaneous speech on gender inequalities, "Ain't I a Woman?", was
delivered in 1851 at the Ohio Women's Rights Convention in OHIO.
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On June 1, 1843, Truth changed her name to Sojourner Truth and told her friends: "The Spirit
calls me, and I must go.“
– Isabella Baumfree, an African-American abolitionist and women's rights activist – renamed herself
Sojourner Truth…
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She became a Methodist, and left to make her way traveling and preaching about the
abolition of slavery.
In 1844, she joined the Northampton Association of Education and Industry in Northampton,
Massachusetts. Founded by abolitionists, the organization supported
While there, Truth met William Lloyd Garrison and Frederick Douglass
Martin Robinson Delany
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A social activist and reformer, black nationalist, abolitionist,
physician, reporter and editor, explorer, jurist, realtor,
politician, publisher, educator, army officer, ethnographer,
novelist, and political and legal theorist.
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Born free in what is now West Virginia - the son of a free
seamstress and a plantation slave, Delany in the early 1820s
was taken by his mother to western Pennsylvania after
Virginia authorities threatened to imprison her for teaching
her children to read and write.
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After an approximately eighteen-month stint with
Douglass, Delany attended Harvard Medical School for
several months but was dismissed because of his color.
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Outraged by Harvard's racism and the Compromise of
1850, in 1852 he published The Condition, Elevation,
Emigration and Destiny of the Colored People of the United
States, a book-length critique of the failure of the nation
to extend the rights of citizenship to African Americans,
and a book that concludes by arguing for black emigration
to Central and South America or the Caribbean.
– His mother Pati Delany, was the daughter of a
Mandinka prince, and his father, Samuel
Delany, descended from the Golah tribe in
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Africa. As a young boy he learned of his noble
African heritage from his grandmother, which
he contrasted with the oppression faced by
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blacks, including his own family, in America.
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In 1831 he moved to Pittsburgh, where he studied with Lewis
Woodson and other black leaders, and began his lifelong
commitment to projects of black elevation.
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He organized and attended black conventions during the
1830s and 1840s and during this same period apprenticed as
a doctor and began his own medical practice. In 1843 he
founded one of the earliest African American newspapers, the
Mystery, which he edited until 1847.
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In late 1847 he left the Mystery and teamed up with Frederick
Douglass to co-edit the North Star, the most influential
African American newspaper of the period.
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Delany's emigrationism conflicted sharply with Douglass's
integrationist vision of black elevation in the United States.
In response to Douglass's national
black convention of 1853, Delany in
1854 organized and chaired a
national black emigrationist
convention, where he delivered "The
Political Destiny of the Colored Race
on the American Continent," the
most important statement on black
emigration published before the Civil
War.
http://uncpress.unc.edu/browse/page/471
Martin Delany
A Black Nationalist Manifesto, 1854
• http://www.bowdoin.edu/~prael/lesson/delany.htm
• Delany is most remembered for his advocacy of black
separatism and emigration in the nineteenth‐century.
• Departing intellectual company with most abolitionists of
his time, Delany espoused black nationalism and
Pan‐Africanism in an effort to elevate the status of blacks in
the United States.
• His views, which emphasized the need for the separation of
the races and self‐government for blacks, often alienated
him from his colleagues, who still embraced an
accommodation philosophy focused on the integration of
blacks into white society.
The Compromise of 1850
• Sen. Henry Clay’s Compromise of 1850 admitted California as 31st state
Sept. 9, slavery forbidden; made Utah and New Mexico territories without
decision on slavery; made Fugitive Slave Law more harsh; ended District of
Columbia slave trade.
– The Compromise of 1850 was worked out by Henry Clay to settle the dispute
between North and South. On January 29, 1850, it was introduced to the
Senate as follows:
– California should be admitted immediately as a free state;
– Utah should be separated from New Mexico, and the two territories
should be allowed to decide for them selves whether they wanted
slavery or not;
– The land disputed between Texas and New Mexico should be assigned to New
Mexico;
– In return, the United States should pay the debts which Texas had contracted
before
annexation;
– Slavery should not be abolished in the District of Columbia without the consent
of its
residents and the surrounding state of Maryland, and then only if the
owners were
paid for their slaves.
– Slave-trading (but not slavery) should be banned in the District of Columbia;
– A stricter fugitive slave law should be adopted.
The Compromise of 1850
Compromise of 1850 attempts to settle slavery issue.
• As part of the Compromise, a new Fugitive Slave Act is added to enforce
the 1793 law and allows slaveholders to retrieve slaves in northern states
and free territories…
– The Fugitive Slave Law passed in September 1850 allowed escaped slaves to
be captured and brought back to their masters.
– The law also prosecuted anyone who helped hide slaves or who aided fugitive
slaves in any way.
– The law was very expensive to the United States of America as it cost
thousands of dollars to return all slaves to the places from where they had
escaped.
– A boom also began in the slave catching business.
– It was easy to take any black person, free or not and say they escaped. Slave
catchers roamed the whole continent looking for black people.
– Because of this law many blacks escaped to Canada in the 1850's and 60's.
– The Fugitive Slave Law was responsible for the escalation of blacks in Chatham
and Buxton (Canadian towns), as they were final stations of the Underground
Railroad.
The Kansas-Nebraska Act was passed
by the U.S. Congress on May 30, 1854.
• The Kansas-Nebraska Act was passed by the U.S. Congress on May 30, 1854.
• It allowed people in the territories of Kansas and Nebraska to decide for
themselves whether or not to allow slavery within their borders.
• The Act served to repeal the Missouri Compromise of 1820 which prohibited
slavery north of latitude 36°30´.
• The Kansas-Nebraska Act infuriated many in the North who considered the
Missouri Compromise to be a long-standing binding agreement.
• In the pro-slavery South it was strongly supported.
• After the Kansas-Nebraska Act was passed, pro-slavery and anti-slavery supporters
rushed in to settle Kansas to affect the outcome of the first election held there
after the law went into effect.
• Pro-slavery settlers carried the election but were charged with fraud by anti-slavery
settlers, and the results were not accepted by them.
Henry David Thoreau: 1854 Slavery in Massachusetts
• http://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Slavery_Massachusetts.html
• Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
• was a philosopher and writer best known for his attacks on American social institutions
and his respect for nature and simple living.
• He was heavily influenced by the writer Ralph Waldo Emerson, who introduced Thoreau
to the ideas of transcendentalism
• In addition to Civil Disobedience (1849), Thoreau is best known for his book Walden
(1854), which documents his experiences living alone on Walden Pond in Massachusetts
from 1845-1847.
• Throughout his life, Thoreau emphasized the importance of individuality and selfreliance.
• He practiced civil disobedience in his own life and spent a night in jail for his refusal to
pay taxes in protest of the Mexican War.
– (Thoreau was opposed to the practice of slavery in some of the territories involved.)
– In addition to this domestic conflict, the Mexican-American War (1846-1848) proved a point of much
contention: Precipitated by boundary disputes between the United States and Mexico, the war was
ultimately fought in order to expand American territory--many Americans felt it was our "Manifest
Destiny" to seize all the land we could--and as a result the United States gained much of the present
American Southwest, including California, Nevada and Utah.
– Thoreau and other opponents of the war argued that the campaign constituted an unnecessary act of
aggression and that it was pursued on the basis of arrogance rather than any philosophically
justifiable reasons.
– It is thought that this night in jail prompted Thoreau to write Civil Disobedience.
– Thoreau delivered the first draft of the treatise as an oration to the Concord Lyceum in 1848, and the
text was published in 1849 under the title Resistance to Civil Government.
– On the 4th of July in 1854 – Thoreau gained radical and militant abolitionists and gave his Slavery in
Massachusetts speech
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The 4th of July in Framingham, Massachusetts, he spoke along with the most militant
abolitionists of the day…and vigorously protested the rendition (return to his owner by
federal authorities) of fugitive slave Anthony Burns, and seconded the call for an end to the
Union that continued to condone slavery.
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Thoreau’s July Fourth speech would be published as “Slavery in Massachusetts,” and it
exposed Thoreau to a potentially new audience for Walden – this event will give Walden the
success his earlier works did not receive….This public appearance clearly associated him with
radical abolitionism, and those who would not normally have read his works now took a
second at Transcendentalist…
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This speech is made directly in relation to:
– FUGITIVE SLAVE ACT…and Fugitive slave Thomas Sims…a condemnation at northern complicity with
pro-slavery forces…
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Thoreau equates the suffering of slaves with Christ’s, and he unequivocally advocates
violence in the fight to end slavery.
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Historians surmise that Boston’s shame over its inaction in 1851 when Thomas Sims was
returned to slavery at least partially motivated abolitionist zeal with regard to Burns, so that
Thoreau’s engagement this summer with the issue of slavery mirrored the growing
antislavery sentiment of many New Englanders.
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On May 22, 1854, Congress had passed the Kansas Nebraska Act,:
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legislation that effectively repealed the Missouri Compromise of 1820.
Western territories could now determine by popular sovereignty whether to admit new states as free or
slaveholding, and enraged Bostonians and antislavery voices throughout the nation protested what they
regarded as a blatant victory for the pro-slavery Congress.