In Search of Liberty: African American Internationalism in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World

327 Pages·2021·5.977 MB·English

by  Ronald Angelo Johnson, Ousmane K. Power-Greene

In Search of Liberty
Race in the Atlantic World, 1700–1900
SerieS editorS
Richard S. Newman, Rochester Institute of Technology
Patrick Rael, Bowdoin College
Manisha Sinha, University of Connecticut
AdviSory BoArd
Edward Baptist, Cornell University
Christopher Brown, Columbia University
Vincent Carretta, University of Maryland
Laurent Dubois, Duke University
Erica Armstrong Dunbar, Rutgers University
Douglas Egerton, LeMoyne College
Leslie Harris, Northwestern University
Joanne Pope Melish, University of Kentucky
Sue Peabody, Washington State University, Vancouver
Erik Seeman, State University of New York, Buffalo
John Stauffer, Harvard University
In Search of Liberty
AfricAn AmericAn
internA tionAliSm in the
nineteenth-c entury
AtlAntic World
edited By
Ronald Angelo Johnson and
Ousmane K. Power-Greene
The University of Georgia Press
AthenS
© 2021 by the University of Georgia Press
Athens, Georgia 30602
www.ugapress.org
All rights reserved
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Johnson, Ronald Angelo, 1970– editor. |
Power-Greene, Ousmane K., editor.
Title: In search of liberty : African American internationalism in the
nineteenth-century Atlantic world / edited by Ronald Angelo Johnson
and Ousmane K. Power-Greene.
Other titles: African American internationalism in the nineteenth-century
Atlantic world
Description: Athens : The University of Georgia Press, [2021] |
Series: Race in the Atlantic world, 1700–1900 | Includes bibliographical
references.
Identifiers: lccn 2020055867 | iSBn 9780820360089 (hardback) |
iSBn 9780820360102 (paperback) | iSBn 9780820360096 (ebook)
Subjects: lcSh: African Americans—History—19th century. | African
Americans—Foreign countries—History. | Free blacks—America—
History—19th century. | Antislavery movements—History—19th
century. | United States—Race relations—Political aspects—History—
19th century. | Internationalism—History—19th century. | African
diaspora.
Classification: lcc e185.18 .i525 2021 | ddc 304.8096—dc23
lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020055867
content S
Prologue
JAmeS SidBury vii
Introduction
ronAld Angelo JohnSon And
ouSmAne K. PoWer-greene 1
PArt 1. North America
one On the Edge of Freedom: The Reenslavement of
Elizabeth Watson in Nova Scotia
frAnco PAz And hArvey AmAni Whitfield 17
tWo A Scheme to Desert: The Louisiana Purchase and
Freedom Seekers in the Louisiana-Texas Borderlands,
1804–1806
meKAlA AudAin 40
three Looking for Freedom in the Borderlands:
U.S. Black Refugees from Slavery in Early
Independent Mexico, 1821–1836
thomAS mAreite 57
PArt 2. Africa
four The International Migration of South Carolinian
Free People of Color, 1780–1865
lAWrence AJe 89
five Liberia as a Theater: Performance, Race-Making,
and the Liberian Nationality
cAree A. BAnton 112
Six The Making of a Pan-Africanist: George Henry Jackson
and the Lukunga Mission in the Congo Free State
mArcuS Bruce 142
PArt 3. Caribbean
Seven The British Emigration Scheme and the African
American Emigration Movement to the Caribbean
dexter J. gABriel 165
eight A Reinterpretation of African Americans and
Haitian Emigration
BrAndon r. Byrd 197
nine Frederick Douglass and Debates over the
Annexation of the Dominican Republic
clAire BourhiS-mAriotti 224
PArt 4. Europe
ten African American Women in Europe
PiA WiegminK 253
eleven Black Abolitionists in Ireland and the
Challenge of Universal Reform
AngelA f. murPhy 279
Epilogue
gerAld horne 297
Contributors 303
Prologue
JAmeS SidBury
Questions centering on separation and integration structure many of
the ways we understand the histories of African-descended people in colo-
nial British America and the United States. That is perhaps most obviously
true of our attempts to make sense of the long struggle for civil rights, first
for Black people’s right to recognized civic personalities and then, once that
was achieved, the ongoing battle for civic equality. But if the focus on ques-
tions of separation and integration emerged out of the brute presence of le-
gal segregation in American history—of Jim Crow—one need not look long
to find the themes of separation and integration arising elsewhere in inter-
esting variations. They are integral to W. E. B. Du Bois’s meditation on the
“two-ness” of “the Negro People” embodied in “an American, a Negro; two
souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings.” Du Bois’s impassioned plea
for a society that would allow “a man to be both a Negro and an American
without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors
of opportunity closed roughly in his face” arose out of a rapidly segregating
America and has remained central to our understanding of African Ameri-
can history because it speaks in an idiom rooted in the turn of the twentieth
century to issues that reach back into the seventeenth century and push for-
ward to the twenty-first. Those issues are unavoidably both national and in-
ternational, as Du Bois emphasized by beginning The Souls of Black Folk with
the prescient observation, made at the dawn of the new century, that “the
problem of the Twentieth Century is the problem of the color line.”1
Du Bois’s insight has offered generations of scholars a powerful lens
through which to read the rich literature on the cultures forged by enslaved
and free Black people during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. That
may be most obvious and controversial in the opening sentence of the first
chapter of Eugene D. Genovese’s Roll, Jordan, Roll—“Cruel, unjust, exploit-
ative, oppressive, slavery bound two peoples together in bitter antagonism
while creating an organic relationship so complex and ambivalent that nei-
ther could express the simplest human feelings without reference to the
viii JAmeS SidBury
other”—but scholars who reject both Roll, Jordan, Roll’s insistence on pa-
ternalism and its Black nationalist interpretation of slave culture nonethe-
less engage a similar dialectic of separation and integration.2 The struggle
to make sense of that tension lies at the heart of the creolization scholar-
ship that has been produced by followers of the theoretical model developed
by Sidney Mintz and Richard Price, and it is equally at play in interpreta-
tions that foreground cultural separation, including interpretations offered
by those who reject creolization and insist on ways of understanding en-
slaved people’s lives and communities that foreground West and West Cen-
tral African cultures. For scholars working in both traditions—for scholars
working in any tradition, even that associated with mid-twentieth-century
Howard University sociologist E. Franklin Frazier—one of the central chal-
lenges of African American history involves interpreting the contradictory
impulses toward separation and integration.3
Analogous themes run through the histories of periods preceding and
following Du Bois’s formulation of the trope of double consciousness. Al-
most anywhere we turn—to the study of urban residential patterns, of occu-
pational segmentation, of popular culture, of organized labor, or of political
behavior in the twentieth century—issues of racial separation and integra-
tion, of inclusion and exclusion, weave through accounts of African Ameri-
can history in ways that profoundly shape understandings of American so-
ciety, economy, and culture.4 The complex interplay of patterns of inclusion
and exclusion is particularly heightened at this moment as we look back on
eight years during which the son of a black Kenyan and a white American
served as president of the United States. That obviously represents evidence
of inclusion—evidence of inclusion that stunned many who believed they
would die without witnessing it—but the story is anything but straightfor-
ward. Despite being the first presidential candidate in two decades to win
two popular majorities and only the third to do so since 1952, Barack Obama
suffered unprecedented attacks on his legitimacy, attacks that helped fuel
the rise of a successor who campaigned on barely disguised promises of ra-
cial exclusion, promises he has kept since assuming office. Inclusion and ex-
clusion, separation and integration have moved in complicated and contra-
dictory directions throughout American history.
The important essays in this book contribute to a new departure in Af-
rican American history, but one with roots in perennial questions about
American history. The move to internationalize African American history
confronts what is, on the one hand, a long-standing tendency within much
American historiography to separate “general” American history—the his-
Prologue ix
tories of high politics, of foreign relations, of ideas—from the history of
“minorities.” (“Special interest” history is a term sometimes used by those
hostile to such work.) In doing so, these essays connect to the deeply trans-
national way that historians of race and of slavery and of African Americans
have almost necessarily approached the Black experience.5 This “transna-
tional tendency” begins with the coerced migration from African societies
to the Americas of Black victims of the Atlantic slave trade, which serves as
the empirical starting point for a wide range of interpretations of the rela-
tionships among the cultures of West and West Central African societies,
on the one hand, and the cultures of the enslaved in colonial British Amer-
ica, on the other. It continues with the links among North American slave
societies and slave societies elsewhere—especially those in the Caribbean—
and with the transnational engagement of Black American activists in the
abolition movement. It encompasses the related but distinct emigration and
colonization movements and the ways in which Black writers looked be-
yond the American nation-state when envisioning possibilities for collective
progress. None of these is a new topic. None has been ignored by previous
scholars.
Nonetheless, as the essays in this volume illustrate, many of these ques-
tions take on a different hue when their transnational qualities are seen as
fundamental rather than incidental to the story. A quick and necessarily su-
perficial survey of the relationship between these essays and the existing lit-
erature suggests how.
Black history has played a crucial but bounded role in the historiogra-
phy of North America. Histories of slavery, of the enslaved, and of various
forms of postbellum (white) repression and (Black) resistance to oppression
are staples of American historical writing. Their very prominence in the lit-
erature has, however, had an ironically segregating effect. Many historians
are attracted by and write to and within the well-established subfields that
comprise African American history. This can effectively distance the study
of state politics, of geographical expansion through the dispossession of Na-
tive peoples, of economic development, of ideas, and of foreign relations
from the study of Black people. This tendency should not be overstated.
One cannot study antebellum politics and continental expansion without
close attention to problems tied to the existence of slavery in the South,
nor do people study postbellum politics without attending to the rise of Jim
Crow, the disenfranchisement of the freed people, or the rise of racially re-
pressive regimes throughout and beyond the South. The study of scientific
racism is central to much of intellectual history, and the American version