Understanding the Contexts of African American Abolitionist
Writings: Suggestions for Teachers, Librarians and Students Using Web-based
Resources
By John Saillant, Professor of English and History,
Western Michigan University
Text-searchable historical resources provide students
in African American studies classes with new techniques and opportunities
to explore black-authored writings. Most early black Anglophone authors
(1760 to 1860) wrote in a complex, allusive style, referring commonly
to the King James Bible and contemporary Protestant sermons and less
commonly, but still in important ways, to hymns, histories, travelogues,
the classics and political tracts.
One tendency among both scholars and students has
been to read black-authored documents hermetically, without regard for
their discursive contexts. Another tendency has been to read black-authored
documents as intertextual, that is, drawing from other texts and responding
to them. Early black authors typically mined white-authored writings
for the ideas, values, rhetoric, and, more fundamentally, the structures
of thought that helped argue against the slave trade and slavery. Black
abolitionists usually borrowed from white authors, yet corrected them
or disagreed with them on racial matters. Without some awareness of
the intertextual strategies of its authors, early black abolitionist
writings are often all but incomprehensible and their authors alien
to our students.
Before offering some suggestions for teachers, librarians
and students, let us look at two ways of considering the intertextuality
of early black-authored writings.
One way is exemplified in the editorial and scholarly
writings of Vincent Carretta. Among his books are editions of Phillis
Wheatley and Olaudah Equiano and a biography of Equiano.[1] Carretta
has set the gold standard for the discursive context of early black
authors, attempting to reconstruct their very own libraries. Many of
the footnotes in his editions connect for twenty-first-century readers
the reading and the writing of the first black Anglophone authors.
Another way is exemplified in my own scholarly writings,
which include a monograph on Lemuel Haynes and articles on John Marrant.[2]
I annotate less, but seek to show how reliance upon various texts, along
with disagreements with them, made black abolitionist arguments possible.
Haynes, for instance, engaged the theologies of his day—both Calvinist
and Universalist—and built his abolitionism upon his views of
them. Marrant used references to the Bible as a covert way of communicating
to his black auditors and readers that they should flee North America
for Sierra Leone.
Both ways of understanding intertextuality require
something that students have rarely reached yet: familiarity with the
texts read by black authors along with intuition about which texts they
might have relied upon in writing. How can this familiarity be fostered
for students, not only making texts accessible to them but also making
them original researchers? One answer is a combination of modern search
techniques, careful reading of texts and guidance from instructors and
librarians who know the texts black authors read.
The famous, once infamous, David Walker (circa 1796–1830)
is a good example of such an author. Walker published an Appeal
to the Coloured Citizens of the World (several editions, 1829–1830).[3]
The Appeal makes several points: black people by intellectual
and practical means must resist both racism and the slave system; some
black people, far from resistant, are complicit in slavery; accord between
blacks and whites might be possible, even desirable, but it was far
from realization around 1830. Walker recommended a revolution both mental
and physical—free your minds and fight back. The Appeal
brought a price upon his head in some areas of the South. The dominant
reading of the Appeal has been to understand it as a product
of black communities, both Southern and Northern, as well as an extension
of black oral culture, particularly sermonizing.
However, Walker was recognized in his time as a voracious
reader. William Lloyd Garrison wrote, for instance, "We are assured,
by those who intimately knew him, that his Appeal was an exact transcript
of his daily conversations; that, within the last four years, he was
hurtfully indefatigable in his studies."[4] Familiarity with his
context suggests another source of the Appeal: the documents
of the American Revolution and the federal convention, all commonly
available in Boston in the 1820s. Walker almost certainly relied on
Thomas Paine's Common Sense, The American Crisis, The Rights of
Man, and The Age of Reason as well as Publius's The
Federalist.
A search of a digital resource including The Federalist,
for instance, yields a large number of unattributed quotations and paraphrases
from its numbers, often several from one number near one another in
the Appeal.[5] The first two parts of the Appeal,
its "Preamble" and "Article I" (out of four), cover
in a modern edition six and twelve pages respectively. In these eighteen
pages there are at least ninety-seven quotations or near-quotations
from The Federalist. There is a similarly large number of attributed
quotations and paraphrases in these same pages from Thomas Paine as
well as attributed quotations and paraphrases from the Bible and from
Thomas Jefferson. Walker seems to have named white authors when he disagreed
with them (Jefferson) but hidden his sources when he agreed with them
(Paine and Publius). Today most of the documents Walker used, or seems
to have used, are available in reliable searchable databases, and we
can reconstruct his reading by searching for words and phrases from
the Appeal in books Walker might have read.
What was the attraction of The Federalist
for the author of the Appeal? How did its concerns support
his abolitionism? Let us leave those as questions for the students.
But let us identify how we can guide them to informed answers that flow
from their own use of these new digital resources. Often students are
creative in their database sleuthing and surprise us with their well-informed
responses. We can suggest elements of the context for them and set them
hunting. We can suggest resources where the hunting may be good. To
encourage students to read not just the words returned by the search
engine, but the document itself, we must tell them that while occasionally
an author borrows in a lapidary style, early black authors engaged the
meaning and the significance of texts that seemed to have some bearing
on the abolition of the slave trade and of slavery. Students who want
to understand black abolitionism must understand its contexts.
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Works Cited and Consulted
[1]. Complete Writings: Phillis Wheatley, edited
with an introduction by Vincent Carretta (New York: Penguin Books, 2001).
Olaudah Equiano: The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings,
edited with an introduction and notes by Vincent Carretta (New York:
Penguin Books, 2003). Vincent Carretta, Equiano, the African: Biography
of a Self-Made Man (Atlanta: The University of Georgia Press, 2005).
[2]. John Saillant, Black Puritan, Black Republican:
The Life and Thought of Lemuel Haynes (New York: Oxford University
Press, 2003). John Saillant, "'Wipe away All Tears from Their Eyes':
John Marrant's Theology in the Black Atlantic, 1785-1808," The
Journal of Millennial Studies (Volume 1, Number 2: Winter, 1999),
available online at .
[3]. The standard modern edition is David Walker's Appeal to the
Coloured Citizens of the World, edited with a new introduction
and annotations by Peter P. Hinks (University Park, Pennsylvania: The
Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000). An online edition is available
at .
[4]. The Liberator, January 29, 1831, quoted
in Peter P. Hinks, To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren: David Walker
and the Problem of Antebellum Slave Resistance (University Park,
Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), p. 117.
[5]. An online searchable edition of The Federalist
is available through the Avalon Project at Yale Law School at .
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