Barbaric Culture and Black Critique: Black Antislavery Writers, Religion, and the Slaveholding Atlantic

By Stefan M. Wheelock

In an interdisciplinary study of black intellectual history at the dawn of the nineteenth century, Stefan M. Wheelock shows how black antislavery writers were able to counteract ideologies of white supremacy while fostering a sense of racial community and identity. The major figures he discusses—Ottobah Cugoano, Olaudah Equiano, David Walker, and Maria Stewart—engaged the concepts of democracy, freedom, and equality as these ideas ripened within the context of racial terror and colonial hegemony. Wheelock highlights the ways in which religious and secular versions of collective political destiny both competed and cooperated to forge a vision for a more perfect and just society. By appealing to religious sensibilities and calling for emancipation, these writers addressed slavery and its cultural bearing on the Atlantic in varied, complex, and sometimes contradictory ways during a key period in the development of Western political identity and modernity.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Release date: Dec 8, 2015
• ISBN: 9780813938257

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University of Virginia Press

© 2016 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

First published 2016

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress.

Cover art: Sacred History, Felandus Thames

For my beautiful Baby Niece

Amen and Selah

CONTENTS

Preface

Introduction

CHAPTER ONE

Ottobah Cugoano, Liberty, and Modern Atlantic Barbarism

CHAPTER TWO

Interesting Narratives, Civility, and the Problem of Freedom

CHAPTER THREE

David Walker, False Grammars, and American Racial Inheritance

CHAPTER FOUR

Maria Stewart and the Paradoxes of Early National Virtue

Conclusion

Notes

Index

PREFACE

THE RESEARCH FOR THIS BOOK was driven by a question and concern that, for me and a growing group of scholars committed to the field of early Atlantic studies, seems only to be growing in its historical pertinence: how does the history of race slavery matter to the cultural operations of reason and power that, in turn, have come to define the liberal parameters of our modern moment? The liberal emphasis on progress and an enlightened and shared humanity—at times promoted by scholarship and oftentimes enshrined in the public’s faith in democracy’s promises—has sometimes been advanced at the expense of disavowing an uncomfortable history and sidelining the specificities of race subjugation as a meaningful experience in the forward march of modernity. The price for the liberal disavowal of an uncomfortable history has, nevertheless, been hefty, as an elite liberal vision for the future could (and would) demand quiescence from oppressed peoples who were told to wait on (and hope for) some future occurrence when all would be made right.

The hashtag blacklivesmatter, which now rings prophetically through various quarters of the United States of America and internationally, suggests that liberal idealism has only half-lived up to its promises. This chant, this rallying cry—terse, yet resonant, in the way it exposes the congenital defects of a market-informed narrative of American freedom and equality —calls us to dispense with naive optimism to soberly reconcile the raced and classed realities of the present with the brutal heritages of a North Atlantic slaveholding past. In reckoning with the discomfort and ugliness of history, we better grasp a modern crossroads that could potentially lead us toward a more just and equitable future or down toward heightened forms of racial and class injustice.

The best scholarship on the early Atlantic leaves little doubt that the antislavery debate figures centrally and crucially in how we view the evolution of modern freedom and equality. The historian David Brion Davis, now famously, has codified the importance of the antislavery debate in the latter decades of the eighteenth century and into the early nineteenth century. Insightfully, he remarks in The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823, that if there was nothing unprecedented about chattel slavery or the slavery of one ethnic group by another, [w]hat was unprecedented by the 1760s and early 1770s was the emergence of a widespread conviction that New World slavery symbolized all the forces that threatened the true destiny of man. And Davis goes on to consider the ideological consequences of this rather apocalyptic sensibility from the perspective of the white enslaving culture.

We are, however, left wondering how black political thought and historical inquiry figure in this insight. It finally dawned on me that the scholarly practices that have best informed how we read the history of slavery, abolition, and their legacies have left us with a bit of unfinished business. Needed was the kind of critical reappraisal that went beyond an elite, white antislavery version of progress. The real challenge—one that set the writing of this book to a slow churn—would be to view the key debates on progress and freedom during the so-called Age of Revolution from a different, yet meaningful angle. Barbaric Culture and Black Critique, in an introductory way, attempts to meet this challenge. I return to the early ideological and intellectual crucible out of which the modern historical predicament of freedom and race subjugation emerges. And I explore how early black perspectives figure in North Atlantic debates on slavery, humanity, and the fate of freedom. It was the black abolitionist Frederick Douglass’s 1852 speech, his Fifth of July Oration, that first lit my pathway in pursuing this project.

Douglass had been invited to speak at Corinthian Hall in Rochester, New York, commemorating the seventy-sixth birthday of American independence—which, of course, he found absurd, given the countless number of blacks who, like himself, were former slaves (or were still slaves) during the sacred day when America celebrates the birthing of its national freedom. If perplexed by this invitation, Douglass saw a golden opportunity to inform whites about their historical blindness. Emphasizing the racial ironies at the heart of a white elite vision of history and destiny, Douglass proclaimed that the "rich inheritance of justice, liberty, prosperity, and independence, bequeathed by your fathers, is shared by you [meaning the whites], not by me. The sunlight that brought light and healing to you, has brought stripes and death to me. This Fourth July is yours, not mine. You must rejoice, I must mourn. These remarks anticipated Douglass’s profound question that continues to shadow an idealized narrative of American progress. Douglass asked, What, to the American slave, is your 4th of July? The question may be adjusted a bit to orient the reader toward what follows in the major discussions of this book: What, to slaves, is your version of progress and civilization?"

In Douglass’s remarks is a significant orientation in historical perspective. He reminds his audience that the successes of slavery and the slave trade in America (and by implication in the North Atlantic) were not borne simply on the enterprising vision of its commercial entrepreneurs alone: American slavery was being sustained by American politics and American religion. We glean from this observation an important kernel of truth: one can never be so narrowly fixed on the evils of race slavery to miss the modern cultural practices, both sacred and profane, that made the institution possible and gave it an enduring consequence. Barbaric Culture and Black Critique argues that black antislavery writers caught sight of this truth early and clearly. I am interested in the ways black historical writers viewed civilization and its discontents through the prism of black bondage.

THIS BOOK TOOK far too long to complete. There were, of course, the growing pains that come with the attempt to stake one’s claim in scholarly research: on a long and winding road toward a viable argument were countless intellectual dead ends, lost lines of inquiry, and detours of interest that would have to wait for some future opportunity for me to pursue them. Indeed, if it were not for the encouragement and goading of a number of colleagues across various disciplines, this work would never have seen the light of day. And beyond their encouragement is the Grace from above that sustained me through the long process of writing and revision.

The debts I have incurred along the way toward a complete work are substantial. First, I would like to thank my editor, Cathie Brettschneider, for her extreme patience and guidance in helping to shepherd this book through to its maturity, and Jane Curran and Mark Mones for their supreme reading skills and editing. And a hearty thank-you to the anonymous readers whose wonderful and incisive comments were indispensible in sharpening both the book’s conceptual trajectory and the discussions across the chapters. I am also very grateful to the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the Woodrow Wilson Foundation for a grant that allowed me time to conceptualize this book in its incipient stages.

This book also owes a huge debt of gratitude to a number of colleagues, first to David Kaufmann, Keith Clark, Tamara Harvey, Jessica Scarlata, Michael Malouf, Eric Eisner, Deborah Kaplan, Robert Matz, and Alok Yadav. I appreciate you all so very much. I would also like to genuinely thank Debra Lattanzi Shutika, Amelia Rutledge, John Foster, Yoonmee Chang, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Carla Marcantonio, Beth Hoffmann, Denise Albanese, and J. Samaine Lockwood for their continuing encouragement and support. And I most certainly cannot forget my brother and colleague, Mika’il A. Petin, for his unwavering support (our conversations kept me on point, man). I have also been blessed and fortunate to receive direction and insight from a number of people at various stages of my writing. I wish to thank Joanna Brooks, Philip Gould, Seymour Drescher, Colin MacCabe, Jonathan Arac, Paul Bové, Shalini Puri, Stephen Carr, David Bartholomae, Don Bialostosky, Jen Trainor, Fiona Cheong, Susan Z. Andrade, Vincent Carretta, Geeta Kothari, Mark Kemp, Nancy Glazener, Lois Williams, Jennifer Keating-Miller, Brenda Whitney, Tiyi Morris, and my man, Jim Seitz, for the great support and insights.

To my righteous teachers and mentors, thank you. Lewis Gordon, Paget Henry, Marcus Rediker, and John Ernest: who could ask for better models of mentoring excellence? And, of course, the original crew: James Bryant (the gift of your thinking and friendship over the years has meant more to me than I can possibly describe); William Scott, Johnathan J. White, Felandus Thames, and Eric Andrae (my brothers in Christ). And last, but certainly not least, Richard E. Purcell, Neil Roberts, Rowan R. Phillips, Ben Vinson III, Zachary Morgan, Gene A. Jarrett, Marshall Lindsey, Anthony Bogues, and Ronald A. T. Judy—brothers beloved who first fostered intellectual courage in me.

And finally, it is to my family that this book is dedicated: first to my parents, Donald and Jacqueline Wheelock, to my sister and brother-in-law, Alexis and Demond Mayfield, to my grandmothers, Elmira M. Wheelock and Clara Bell Freeman (rest in peace, Grandma Clara Bell), and to my grandfathers, Frank Freeman and Alex J. Wheelock (both of whom have gone on from this world), and to Kevin Gilbert, Robert Smith, Jim Fairchild, and Rikki-Lynn Griffin; also to Jerry W. Ward and William Keach (I hope one day I will have lived up to the standard of academic excellence the two of you set for me); to Sheila Emerson, Leslie J. Abrams, Diane Johnson, Rhon Manigault, Paola Huet Andrae, Kim Jackson, and the folks at the Rappahannock coffee shop. I would also like to thank Elder Timothy T. Scott and the Harvest Celebration Church family. And I can’t forget my family at Bible Center. I love you all. And lastly to the love of my life, my heart and soul, RaShall M. Brackney, is this book dedicated: you told me that everything was going to be alright.

BARBARIC CULTURE AND BLACK CRITIQUE

INTRODUCTION

BARBARIC CULTURE AND BLACK CRITIQUE focuses attention on how early black writers first portrayed the slaveholding perversions of civilization and progress at a watershed moment in the political history of the Atlantic. The era spanning from the colonial Americans’ war for independence from Britain to the rise of industrial economies in the early nineteenth century promised an advanced stage in humanity. The historic emphasis on freedom and progress would find its way to the center of ideology and resistance in the radical Atlantic world. But at the very moment when Britain’s colonial subjects in North America began to fight a war for independence in the name of liberty, there had been at least 2.5 million slaves condemned to perpetual toil in the New World colonies.

These stark contradictions suggested much to an oppressed class of folk—most notably, the ways that slaveholding savagery shadowed progress. The charter generation of black writers glimpsed how the Atlantic plantation regime transformed the advanced civilizations of the North Atlantic quarter into culturally sanctioned contexts of commercial decadence. Black antislavery intellectuals began to voice the grievances of an oppressed community in perpetual thrall at the very same moment when revolution-era politics and thought gave early modern ideas of slavery and freedom their distinctive character. Indeed, slavery was to become the catchword to describe the range of oppression across class, gender, and race. White American colonial gentlemen, for instance, would claim their political enslavement under British tyranny. And yet, it seemed to blacks that the economic hegemony of the Atlantic plantation complex represented the worst form of human brutality and augured a dark future for the universal extension of freedom and equality. The complaint they leveled against the liberty-driven cultures of the Anglophone Atlantic was religious in its temper and tone. And their religious sensibilities would reflect the distress they felt over a seemingly wayward turn in modern Atlantic practices of reason, culture, politics, and ideology.

The progress of the early modern Atlantic looked different to a subjugated and enslaved people tortured, whipped and beaten, raped and racially harassed. The book turns its attention to the religious-intoned rhetoric of early black political and historical engagement. It highlights the investigative potential and power of black antislavery literatures through examining how this early writing tradition characterized the cultural production of North Atlantic freedom and civilization at a crucial period in their unfolding. How, I ask, do early black religious perspectives on history and politics lend insight into the progress and path of Anglophone political and cultural awareness, developing as they were against the material backdrop of commercial slavery?

The discussion of the influence of Atlantic slavery in revolution-era civilization is vital. As we reassess an early historical period that has been credited with making the practices of politics, ideology, and culture modern, the focus on race slavery has steadily shifted how we imagine the ideological crucible out of which progress and liberty emerged. Never has the early political history of freedom seemed more ironic and tragic in light of recent findings. The vital discussion of slavery and its historical discontents is helping us gain a better sense of the historical course and potential of North Atlantic civilization coming out of an era of cataclysmic upheaval.

The black historical imagination sought to capture the ways slavery contorted the language and practices of civilization. Early black critiques of the early Anglophone Atlantic began with startling language: they asserted that the influence of race slavery brought the supposed superior cultures of the white Atlantic dangerously close to becoming apostate, reprobate, and nearly apocalyptic in their anti-Christian cultural practices. The state’s sanction of commercial enslavement promised the resurgence of barbarism with devastating consequences for the historical potential of freedom and civilization on the whole.

I argue that the prophetic sensibilities in black historical writing significantly shifted the terms of political and historical inquiry by unmasking the barbaric dimensions of a civilization based on slaveholding. As black historical writers recast the practices of civilization against a slaveholding backdrop, they discerned the ironic and savage character of progress and freedom in the North Atlantic.

Black political interrogations of slaveholding in the Atlantic began with a radical biblical revisionism. Blacks engaged the political currencies of their historical moment with an acute sense of how Protestant Christian sensibilities generally informed reason, politics, and agency. If the interpretation of the Bible had long been central to ongoing debates over political identity and conduct in an English-speaking Protestant culture at the close of the eighteenth century, the general belief was that God set down principles for the progress of liberty and equality through His Holy Word. Black writers asserted that God deplored race slavery and would one day vindicate the rights of a people in chains.

Joining their white antislavery colleagues, blacks helped shift the emphasis away from what appeared to be the Bible’s legal sanction of enslavement to the weightier matters of God’s plan for universal brotherhood and sisterhood. Black antislavery writers worked a mainly Protestant rhetoric of protest and its condemnation of slavery into a strong ideological framework for resistance and critique. They condemned a supposed progressive era for its slaveholding excesses and its continued practices in racial subjugation—expanding and refining already longstanding discourses on rights and equality. They also criticized the narrow vision of a post-revolutionary democratic republicanism that sanctioned black bondage.

They also did more than plead for the freedom of a people. I propose that they thematized how the culturally apostate practices of commercial slavery opened the way to the emergence of a barbaric culture. The language of apostasy is theological, calling to mind images of an individual or collective turn away from religious authority and moral precepts. By the late 1780s, the African antislavery writer Ottobah Cugoano insisted that North Atlantic cultures of slavery were historically regressing into a commercial form of apostasy. Cugoano uses the term sparingly in his major work, Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery (1787). And yet, he invokes the language of apostasy strategically to describe the barbaric era into which he believed the Christian nations of Europe were entering. A little over forty years later, the radical black firebrand David Walker also invoked such language in his Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (1829). Walker sought to capture how the morally reprobate sensibilities of Christian Americans historically sanctioned and made sacrosanct the savage enslavement of black folk in the United States during its early national period.

Black religious interrogations of commercial slavery and its historical corruptions carried a heuristic power. This study seeks to reposition early black critique through investigating where black antislavery texts sit in relation to a broader field of political discussion post 1770. It charts its course through a tumultuous period in political and social change, ending as the fight against slavery takes a radical leap forward in the United States in the 1830s. It examines how black antislavery texts contributed to the shape of early modern political understanding.

The political and religious vocabularies of late eighteenth-century Anglo Christian civilization are detectable— if not made outright explicit— in the work of the principal writers of this study. Scholars have shown how Olaudah Equiano’s deeply religious autobiography at times behaves as a treatise on the commercial realities of British colonialism, trade, and slavery. Ottobah Cugoano’s polemic, others have shown, may be placed in the tradition of eighteenth-century natural law theory. I would add that Maria W. Stewart’s sermonic essays build on (and revise) longstanding North American republican emphases on practices in moral and civic virtue. And David Walker’s infamous pamphlet sought to launch an investigation into the political and theological sources of black wretchedness in the context of what he sarcastically identifies as America’s republican land of liberty.¹ Walker engaged no less than Thomas Jefferson over the issue of American religion, republicanism, and their relationship to racist modes of political inheritance and destiny.

The grouping of these authors together may, on the surface, strike one as arbitrary, given the epic historical changes that required black historical writers to retool their focus in the critical period from the 1780s until the 1830s. I should note, however, that my intention is not to establish ideological continuities in a seamless historical arc from Cugoano to Stewart. Rather, I am interested in the evolving ways blacks addressed race slavery and its cultural bearing on Atlantic progress in the half century after the American War. The historicist dimensions in early black critique refashioned religious expression into a powerful tool for interrogating the ironic cultural and historical evolution of freedom and civilization enmeshed in practices of slaveholding and race subjugation. As a consequence, this early writing tradition would provide an alternative reading of Atlantic history and development that not only instituted ideological imperatives for a black culture in formation but also advanced political thought through showing how ideologies of progress warped in the face of a thriving Atlantic plantation regime and commercial advance.

The kind of critical foray made here is haunted, however, by an especially persisting problem in the study of intellectual history. Black antislavery texts remain marginalized in the more comprehensive accounts of early Atlantic intellectual currencies, despite our best efforts. The tendency has been to imagine the rise of political and cultural modernity as principally a process in secularization growing out of metropolitan exchange, deliberation, and debate. Against a backdrop where the more secular and elaborate philosophical systems of the Enlightenment count as legitimate forms of early political and historical inquiry, black prophetic declarations, sermonizing, and black autobiographical accounts of freedom seem like idiosyncratic and outmoded pronouncements. And yet, as one philosopher has observed, the prophetic dimensions in black Christianity negate what is and transform prevailing realities against the backdrop of the present historical limits, even in cases where the historical reality touts centuries as an era of progress and reason.² Still, the thematic contrast between Enlightenment inquiry and black prophetic reflection has meant that influential historiography on the period of revolutions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Jonathan I. Israel’s important work, as a case in point) assigns early black thinkers virtually no place in the sweeping accounts of intellectual currencies that gave rise to revolution-era political thought on freedom, democracy, and civilization.

The historical work done on abolition has tried to rectify this problem somewhat by featuring black perspectives in the various crosscurrents of antislavery debate. But there remains a limited sense concerning the intellectual forays black thinkers made under the banner of antislavery reflection. In even the most thoroughgoing historiographies on antislavery intellectual production, black writers occupy either an ancillary or derivative role in contributions to intellectual trends.³ My exploration of black intellectual history is intended as a direct response to lapses in current intellectual historiography.

Blacks looked out on the greater ideological and cultural terrain and glimpsed the dire effects of slavery on their historical circumstances. What might we learn from this? We could be bolder and more audacious in characterizing the critical importance of black antislavery writings in ongoing efforts to come to terms with the ideological currencies of the slaveholding Atlantic. In the attempt to give the language of black resistance broader implication in the foundations of political and historical inquiry, I insist throughout that black writers were more than antislavery advocates: they were interlocutors in an important debate on the historical and cultural evolution of Anglo Protestant modernity.

The transfiguration of secular Enlightenment sensibilities into revolutionary politics has assumed too much as a thematic emphasis in the ongoing study of the revolution period. The emphasis on progress and the forward march of mind are a familiar refrain in the intellectual discourses of the revolution era generally, and in the Anglophone Atlantic world particularly. And yet, important national discussions on the fate of freedom and progress in Britain, the British Caribbean, and the early United States were significantly framed in both secular and religious terms. Historians continue to insist that the issue of slavery in revolution-era Anglophone cultures requires a decidedly nuanced approach—one that readily recognizes how religious and apocalyptic sensibilities interact with secular versions of hope to undergird early understandings of a shared political future.

David Brion Davis, Marcus Rediker, Christopher L. Brown, Srividhya Swaminathan, and others have forcefully argued for the centrality of the antislavery campaign in the intellectual and ideological debates over the meaning of freedom in the Anglo Atlantic, emphasizing how the debate on slavery substantially shifted the meanings of hegemony and resistance across time and region. One crucial way the antislavery debate shifted the ideological terrain was to contrast modern reason and civilization with the commercial practices of slavery. In the liberal antislavery imagination, reason and civilization are invoked as counteragents to the barbaric practices of race slavery.

As literary historian Philip Gould notes, the role the antislavery campaign played in denouncing chattel slavery as a savage practice was crucial in the decades leading up to abolition in the British West Indies: antislavery writers recast slavery as an illicit mode of commerce. And out of antislavery sentiment would first emerge the notion that the slave trade was, in essence, barbaric traffic, the kind of commerce out of keeping with the mannered practices of enlightened culture. This sensibility would exert considerable influence in the collective efforts of an Anglo Atlantic to distinguish the difference between civilized and savage practices.⁴

Even more, British and American antislavery radicals increasingly condemned their countrymen for perpetuating the national sin of slavery in the decades following the American Revolution. In much of the antislavery historical writing of the mid- to late eighteenth century, the advent of Christianity (and by implication, the rise of Protestant sensibilities) represented an epochal turn in human sociability. Writing when Britain’s North American colonists first struck for independence, the abolitionist and dean of Britain’s early antislavery movement, Granville Sharp, insisted that Britons and their American counterparts were historical heirs to the New Testament gospel dispensation, which affirmed that all mankind are to be esteemed our brethren and under which modern liberty and natural equity thrived.⁵ Slavery, then, sins against the progress of Anglo political cultures because the practice violates the historical advent of Christianity as God’s fullest expression of love and equality. And Sharp’s ideas helped lay the groundwork for a modern Anglo Atlantic politics based on the moral rejection of slavery. As we shall see, Walker later inverts this general premise to give it a different emphasis.

One might ask, however: What, then, distinguishes blacks’ rhetorical condemnation of slaveholding apostasy and barbarism from language already circulating among white antislavery elites? On the surface of things, nothing. In his searing political tract, The Law of Retribution (1776), Sharp, for example, heartily condemned the heresy and apostasy of slaveholders and the barbarism of commercial slavery in Anglo imperial culture, denouncing the whole of Anglo civilization for its crimes against black humanity, long before a black historical writing tradition fully appeared on the scene. The antislavery founding figure and Sharp’s North American counterpart, Anthony Benezet, warned in his Some Historical Account of Guinea (1772) that slavery risked the regression of Anglo Christian cultures into a millennium of darkness and savagery. Certainly, blacks shared much with their white antislavery colleagues, both by way of ideological commitments and language. And the rhetoric of black prophetic denunciation belongs to this antislavery culture of hope and expectation. Indeed, I argue below that the affinities in perspective between early black antislavery writers and their white colleagues call for a far more complicated view of black intellectual history than what Paul Gilroy has famously proposed as countercultural practice.

But dig deeper, and we find important