If there was much in the 1850s to encourage thinking about conflict and violence among abolitionists, the end of the decade saw a series of events that made such thought seem more pressing still. To some extent such thought was born of a pessimism brought on by such events as the Supreme Court’s 1857 Dred Scott Decision, which in effect institutionalized racial prejudice as the basis for all of American law and practice. That same pessimism underlay, for example, the widespread interest in emigration by about 1859 and 1860. For many abolitionists, there was an increasing sense that Garrisonian moral suasion was not going to be enough to bring slavery to an end, a sense that something more was needed.
That something more had been anticipated, during the 1850s, by violent confrontations over slavery. The war in Kansas was one such episode, as pro- and antislavery settlers came to violence over whether the territory should ultimately be slave or free. Still more important was John Brown’s 1859 raid on the Harper’s Ferry federal arsenal in Virginia and his later martyrdom. A veteran of the Kansas war, Brown led a raiding party of twenty-one men, including five African Americans, in an attack that he hoped would incite slave insurrections and inspire an all-out armed assault on slavery itself. Ten of his men, including two of the black recruits, were killed in the action, and seven, including Brown himself, along with the black volunteers John A. Copeland and Shields Green, a fugitive, were captured. Brown was executed on 2 December 1859, and Copeland and Green, two weeks thereafter.1
The Brown raid, and black participation in it, was part of the discussion that had been framed by ideas of romantic racialism, notably in the controversy over Stowe’s Uncle Tom, and by such works as Martin Delany’s Blake and Douglass’s “Heroic Slave,” among others. As Jeffrey Rossbach has noted, a few white abolitionists even questioned whether slaves would fight for their own freedom. Black participation in Brown’s raid was crucial, and Copeland’s martyrdom was widely noted in the abolitionist press. Letters that Copeland wrote from his cell shortly before his execution were widely reprinted in the Liberator and elsewhere. In those letters Copeland spoke as a martyr, and in the tradition that equated black revolutionaries with the heroes of America’s own Revolutionary past, commenting, as they did, on America’s own dedication to that past. “Could I die in a more noble cause?” Copeland asked. His courage was exemplary, and those who celebrated his martyrdom knew that it was representative as well.2
In the context of the sectional crisis such a black voice with revolutionary potential became an increasingly important element in abolitionist literature and in the evocation of an African American presence. The heightened tensions between North and South during the 1860 presidential campaign and following Lincoln’s election were reflected, in part, by a growing interest in black insurrectionist heroism. In early 1860 Frederick Douglass’ Paper published a story written for the paper about a group of “Liberators” conspiring to create an insurrection in Virginia. Such fictional accounts were supplemented by those based on fact, especially with the outbreak of war in 1861. Antebellum heroes whose very actions testified to the slaves’ willingness to fight and die for freedom enjoyed new visibility. The abolitionist Thomas Wentworth Higginson, who had been involved with Brown, paid tribute to Nat Turner in the June 1861 issue of the Atlantic Monthly and wrote a sketch of Denmark Vesey the following month, both of which were reprinted in Douglass’ Monthly; the following year, he celebrated Gabriel’s 1800 plot in Richmond. William Wells Brown drew on Higginson’s work for his own tribute to Turner, which appeared as a column in James Redpath’s Pine and Palm; Brown provided a brief sketch of Madison Washington for the paper as well.3
Such accounts provided a framework for more contemporary representations of black heroism. Osborne Anderson, who had been with Brown at Harper’s Ferry, the only black raider to escape, published a firsthand account of his experiences and about Brown using the framework of history to give meaning to his own aims and motivations. He wrote, “There is an unbroken chain of sentiment and purpose from Moses of the Jews to John Brown of America; from Kossuth, and the liberators of France and Italy, to the untutored Gabriel, and the Denmark Veseys, Nat Turners and Madison Washingtons of the Southern American States.” All had been martyrs for freedom. Their lives and careers supported Anderson’s own claim to a heroism comparable to that of any revolutionary and legitimized the contention that a revolutionary spirit could be found in the hearts of men of African descent.4
The power of such imagery was great. In 1861 and 1862, as African Americans agitated for the right to join the Union cause and the Union armies, they could refer to such heroes and martyrs as a basis for their own claim to recognition. Early in the war, a fugitive who distinguished himself by spying on the Confederates near Washington was celebrated in even the mainstream white press as a “rival of Toussaint L’Ouverture.” His exploits were noted in the abolitionist papers as well, although Phillip Bell, of San Francisco’s Pacific Appeal, suggested that the analogy was not quite apt, L’Ouverture having been a diplomat and statesman as well as a military hero.5
These same kinds of references, similarly integrated into the wartime context, appeared as well in James Gilmore’s 1862 novel, Among the Pines, continuing important conventions from abolitionist letters. The novel was a strange one, and as the literary historian Blyden Jackson has noted, was Unionist in sentiment without being entirely hostile to the South. Represented as an account of a northern visitor’s travels through the South, the novel put its protagonist, Edmund Kirke, in the company of a black driver who, speaking a thick dialect, professed his own dignity and devotion to freedom, his support for the northern cause, and even his hope for insurrection. When “Kirke” suggests that the insurrectionists might have little hope for success, the driver replies, “I knows most ob de great men, like Washington and John and James and Paul, and dem ole fellers war white, but dar war Two Sand (Toussaint L’Ouverture), de Brack Douglass, and de Nigga Demus (Nicodemus), dey war brack.” Far from ridiculing the driver, Gilmore indicated that his Kirke, following the model of the white convert, was strongly persuaded of a potential for rebellion that he had thought the slaves did not possess.6
Still, nothing brought such connections home more clearly than a theme that emerged even as blacks were agitating for the right to fight, the theme of black patriotism. Following William Cooper Nell’s well-known Colored Patriots of the American Revolution, other writers traced the role of African Americans in the war that had created the nation. The editor of the A.M.E. Church’s Christian Recorder, for example, wrote a series of articles on the topic designed to demonstrate the contribution of black people to the founding of the republic. Nell’s book enjoyed a revival during the Civil War. Amos Beman urged it on the young people of his New Haven church in 1863; and Nell himself felt he could justify a new edition of the book in 1864.7
Celebrations of black patriotism and heroism gained momentum as African Americans began to take their place in the Union armies after 1863. Abolitionist newspapers printed accounts of black bravery in the field. Letters and other documents from black soldiers became common. Songs sung by black troops headed for battle were also common and helped demonstrate both the bravery and the loyalty of the soldiers. In 1863, for example, the Liberator printed “A Negro Volunteer Song,” in which the troops proclaimed their faith that “God is for the right” and concluded, “The Union must be saved by the colored volunteer.”8
That such accounts were deemed effective was at least partially shown by Amos Beman’s review of one of the most elaborate evocations of black bravery and patriotism, Epes Sargent’s novel Peculiar, which appeared in 1864. Drawing on traditions of antislavery fiction, it told of a fugitive slave named “Peculiar Institution,” of his heroism in slavery and in helping to bring the institution to an end. It concluded with his courageous death as a soldier. Reviewing the book favorably for an antislavery publication, Beman wrote that it was the kind of story that would “strengthen the purpose of all friends of freedom and of the country to toil on for the utter destruction of the old Bastille of American oppression.”9
What made such accounts especially significant within the framework of black patriotism was what they said about African Americans themselves. At one level they continued a tradition whereby African Americans could make a stronger claim to a place in America than could many of those who received the privileges of citizenship to a greater degree. As one writer said in a letter to the Pacific Appeal at a time when blacks were still excluded from the army, “We were considered aliens, while the Irish, Germans, French and Italians were all welcomed to the call.” The writer asserted, “We were not discouraged. No; why should we be? The only true loyalists of the South were the blacks,” and added that “the only true heroism that has yet been manifested by the South showed itself in Robert Small,” the black seaman who had served the Union forces in South Carolina.10
At another level this idea of black patriotism reinforced the abolitionist standard that made commitment to racial equality a crucial test of commitment to American political and cultural ideals. From the beginning of the war, even as abolitionists worked to define the conflict as a war to end slavery, both sides, in one way or another, put blacks themselves at the center. If abolitionists wanted to define the conflict as one devoted to black freedom, others saw it as the product of an abolitionist obsession with black people. A popular parody of “Yankee Doodle” entitled “Nigger Doodle” appeared in the northern Democratic press. The chorus summarized African American and abolitionist goals:
Nigger Doodle’s all the go,
Ebon shins and bandy,
“Loyal” people all must bow
To Nigger Doodle dandy.
Even President Lincoln suggested that the presence of blacks had been responsible for the death and destruction the country had suffered.11
Such charges undoubtedly helped to maintain the vigor during wartime of earlier charges and countercharges regarding “amalgamation.” Leveled against abolitionists, the charges were advanced musically in “Nigger Doodle,” a new national hero who, according to the song, “favors ’malgamation.” The charges were advanced more formally in such pamphlets as David Croly and George Wakeman’s well-known Miscegenation, of 1864, initially presented as an abolitionist argument in favor of intermarriage. In their parody Croly and Wakeman quoted directly from such abolitionists as Wendell Phillips and Theodore Tilton, who were initially believed by some to be its authors, and in general drew heavily on abolitionist rhetoric. When, for example, they wrote, “Let us then embrace our black brother; let us give him the intellect, the energy, the nervous endurance of the cold North, which he needs, and let us take from him his emotional power, his love of the spiritual, his delight in the wonders which we understand only through faith,” their words were not too different from those of Haven and others during the 1850s. As Sidney Kaplan showed, such abolitionists as James McCune Smith, Angelina Grimké Weld, and Parker Pillsbury responded positively to the pamphlet. And it received warm reviews in the Anglo-African and the National Anti-Slavery Standard.12
Such language and ideas could seem credible during the war because abolitionists, black and white, continued to contrast their own attitudes with those of southern slaveholders through stories of interracial marriage, as opposed to the interracial sexual abuse of slavery. Epes Sargent’s Peculiar tells the harrowing story of the marriage of a young white man to the slave Estelle. Seeking to escape to the North, the two are captured and beaten, Estelle’s sufferings leading to her death at the hands of a jealous slaveholder. The contrast between slavery’s opponents and advocates, as Sargent dramatized it, was well in keeping with prewar motifs, and Sargent was not alone in drawing it. A year earlier Louisa May Alcott, in her short story “M. L.,” wrote about a young white woman who learned that her prospective husband had African ancestry but married him anyway. The story captured the essence of abolitionism, as the young bride’s rejection of her own prejudice and growing alienation from those who could not overcome theirs became the vehicle by which she came to recognize “the emptyness of her old life.”13
Toward the end of the war the same motif was used by Mrs. Julia Collins, wife of a prominent African Methodist Episcopal leader, in a novel serialized for the A.M.E. Christian Recorder from February to September 1865. Mrs. Collins wrote about a young man, Richard Tracy, who, although from a slaveholding family, married a beautiful quadroon named Lina, going with her to New England to escape the opposition of his parents and the strictures of his society. Forced to return to New Orleans, Richard remains true to Lina despite his father’s efforts to separate them. But in what turns out to be a prolonged absence a distraught Lina dies. The couple’s daughter, Claire Neville, born in New England, later finds herself in New Orleans employed as a governess in the home of the Tracy family. Unaware of her mother’s ancestry, she plans marriage with a young white man, only to have the secret of her ancestry exposed.
Claire’s fate was never to be revealed, since Mrs. Collins died before she could finish the novel. But as she told the story up to the time of her death she, like others, clearly saw the propriety of love across the color line, creating through her “black” characters dramatic proofs of possibilities for American virtue, as well as dramatic demonstrations of American failings.14
Still, both the testing role of African American figures and their authoritative voice in asserting that role found more direct expression in wartime, as the works of two poets in 1862 indicate. The minister and fugitive slave J. Sella Martin told of a black man joining a Boston crowd that included a decorated, wounded Union hero. Suddenly one of the crowd says contemptuously,
“There’s a ‘nigger’ everywhere—
In the church, and state, and barracks,
Still his woolly head pops in.”
As the poem continues, the speaker’s contempt turns to shame, showing that Massachusetts had always been at the forefront of any battle for freedom and that under the circumstances the ugly words supported tyranny rather than liberty. He embellished the story with an account of how, in the battle in which the soldier earned his stars, the black man, then a slave, had saved the hero’s life. An appreciation for the former slave’s own heroism, Martin wrote, was itself a test of Massachusetts’s continuing dedication to liberty.15
Another poem from the same year, appearing in the Pacific Appeal, made a similar point. The poet introduced the piece by saying that it had been inspired by a remark from a white man who, speaking of the causes of “the present rebellion,” said, “The Negroes have done it.” Surveying the history of black patriotism, the poet replied,
Yes! few people on earth
Would still love the land,
(Tho’ it gave them their birth,)
Where oppressed and enslaved
As we have been.
Celebrating such true patriotism, the poet turned the white man’s charge into a vehicle for conveying an understanding of American history that was superior to that of the white man who had made the charge, a vehicle that made an understanding a what black people had done a test of loyalty.16
Given such views, it is not surprising that African Americans, including fugitives, continued to exercise the authority they had assumed in the context of abolitionism since the 1830s. Douglass, Brown, Loguen, Pennington, and other prominent fugitives lent the weight of their authority to the Union cause, and to the effort to make black soldiers an integral part of the Union effort. Less prominent fugitives also provided testimony in support of the Union. Miss Oneda De Bois, a former Alabama slave who had emigrated to Haiti, returned to the United States for a lecture tour in the North. Distinguished by “her able vindication” of people of African descent, along with “her proud disdain of the contumely so heaped upon them, her defence of their soldierly qualities,” and her ability to place American events in the context established by the revolution in Haiti, her lectures were well received. One Journalist described her words as “exceedingly touching, even eloquent.”17
The authority of fugitives and others extended beyond that of testimony on behalf of the Union cause. One of the most celebrated instances of the assertion of a distinctly African American authority occurred in Britain, in a much-publicized exchange between the fugitive William Craft and the British social scientist James Hunt. The exchange took place at a meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, following the reading of a paper by Hunt in which he attempted to demonstrate black inferiority. During the time devoted to discussion Craft, having recourse to abolitionist tradition, cited Roman prejudices against the “stupid people” they had enslaved in Britain and cited black progress, against enormous odds, in Haiti and America as evidence of African equality. According to at least one account, he spoke “with great fluency, and at the same time with great modesty,” and was “loudly applauded” for his efforts.18
No less celebrated was the series of pieces Charlotte Forten wrote detailing her experiences as a black teacher in Union-held territory in South Carolina. She began her efforts in late 1862, with letters addressed to Garrison that she hoped he would publish in his Liberator “if he thinks it worth printing, which I do not,” a comment typical of those she tended to make about her own work. Not surprisingly, Garrison did publish them, noting that they were “from a young colored lady,” a “granddaughter of the late venerable James Forten,” whose name, Garrison said, “is not unfamiliarly associated with those of Benjamin Franklin and Rush, of the old Revolutionary days.” No less prominently, in 1864 Forten had two lengthy accounts of her South Carolina experiences published in the Atlantic Monthly. Sponsored by the abolitionist poet and longtime family friend John Greenleaf Whittier, Forten was identified by Whittier as one “herself akin to the long-suffering race whose Exodus she so pleasantly describes.” In Forten’s accounts, no less than in the works of other men and women of color, race, authority, and the moral status of abolitionism were as strongly linked in wartime as they had been throughout the course of the abolition movement.19
Forten’s pieces also helped to convey the multiplicity of messages informing African American writing during the war. In working to convey both her sympathy for and distance from the freedmen and freedwomen of the islands, Forten helped emphasize the genteel possibilities that had informed her career and those of other black writers since at least the early 1830s. Presenting herself to be as much an outsider as the white northern teachers she joined in South Carolina, she helped challenge the racial determinism at the core of any case for black inferiority.
At the same time, in her articles Forten was one of several writers who began to look more closely at the world of the slaves, now freed, themselves. Despite her well-documented ambivalence about the people she encountered, she was one of a number of people who began to record folk forms, especially folk hymns, for publication to a wider audience. If, in her diary, she described one of those songs—a funeral hymn with the chorus “Sing, O graveyard”—as “a strange wild thing,” when she wrote her Atlantic articles she was ready to acknowledge “the deep pathos” of that refrain. Suggesting that the words had “but little meaning,” she nevertheless said of the “tones” that “a whole lifetime of despairing sadness is concentrated in them.” In conveying such a sensibility, Forten joined a number of abolitionists who saw in the voices of the slaves, and the freedmen and freedwomen, a testimony to their humanity and, both within and outside the conventions of romantic racialism, their fitness for freedom.20
The recording of folk traditions began almost as soon as Union troops and observers began to take control of parts of the South in 1861 and continued throughout the war. In September 1861 the Weekly Anglo-African published an account of “Contraband Singing” in which the author described one song’s “simple melody of nature, fresh and warm from the heart.” By the end of 1861 one of the most prominent songs, “Let My People Go,” was becoming very well known, and for more than simplicity and warmth. In introducing it a correspondent for the National Anti-Slavery Standard wrote that it had had to be sung stealthily during slavery and could be performed openly only by those out of slavery’s reach. “The verses surely were not born from a love of bondage,” he wrote, “and show in a portion, if not in all of the South, the slaves are familiar with the history of the past, and are looking hopefully toward the future.”21
It is not surprising that the prophetic role African American voices had asserted since at least the days of Phillis Wheatley continued to be assumed in the era of the Civil War. The poet James Madison Bell, who spent the war years in San Francisco, published a lengthy poem written for the city’s 1862 First of August celebration detailing the “challenge of Slavery to Liberty” as the chief cause of the War. And he declared:
America! America!
Thine own undoing thou has wrought,
For all they wrongs to Africa,
This cup has fallen to thy lot.
Others adopted a similarly prophetic voice in calling attention to the sin against Africans that had brought America’s fratricidal war upon the nation.22
Still, if the Civil War enhanced African American writers’ assertion of the moral authority underlying African American testimony, it also exacerbated other issues for which African American history and African American self-assertion were equally critical. These, too, helped define important directions for African American writing. The most significant issues emerged with force as even the most ardent Unionists realized that the war had come to be defined as a war for emancipation. This realization led to renewed debate, however rooted in the antebellum period, over the fitness of African Americans for freedom. As the historian James McPherson has shown, the debate brought out all of the evidence that had previously been adduced, including the history of black achievement, not to mention more recent annals of heroism and patriotism, the evocation of ancient African greatness, and the exemplary character of prominent men and women.23
The debate also gave rise to a variety of works intended to prove the fitness of black people for freedom. Even as the era saw an explosion of interest in black revolutionaries, there was a renewed interest in intellectual and literary figures, all of whom helped make the case for racial equality. Such publications as the Liberator and the Standard reprinted works by Phillis Wheatley and Ignatius Sancho. Hollis Read, in his book The Negro Problem Solved, of 1864, linked figures from the past with such modern talents as Frances Ellen Watkins and Charlotte Forten to show that “the gifts of nature are of no rank or color.” The Virginia slaveholder turned abolitionist Moncure Conway wrote a sketch of Benjamin Banneker for the 1863 Atlantic Monthly in which he cited the famous correspondence with Jefferson and asserted that “the most original scientific intellect which the South has yet produced was that of the pure African, Benjamin Banneker.”24
Still, the most noticed wartime book to celebrate black accomplishments was William Wells Brown’s 1863 book The Black Man, His Genius and His Achievements. Aimed at the “calumniators and traducers of the Negro,” Brown’s lengthy book also reviewed African and African American history, including stories of ancient Africa, to prove racial equality. But it was composed mainly of brief biographies of men and women of achievement—from Banneker and Wheatley to Douglass, Nell, and Remond—all of whom exemplified what men and women of African descent were capable of accomplishing.25
The book was not without controversy. Brown’s biographer William Edward Farrison reported that Charlotte Forten found it “a silly book” despite the favorable attention she received in its pages. A reviewer for the Pacific Appeal thought Brown had left too much out, that he had neglected too many important people and put in too much about himself. Another of the paper’s correspondents defended Brown, noting that any author had to be selective and suggesting that the book would “do much good.” The reviewer for Douglass’ Monthly similarly praised the book, emphasizing not only the book’s usefulness but also its imprimatur owing to Brown’s being “a man of colour” and a former slave. Hollis Read borrowed from it heavily for his own 1864 study of the prospects of emancipation, The Negro Problem Solved. Read not only identified Brown as “a colored writer and ex-slave” but also singled him out as an exemplar of what black people were contributing “to the science, the literature, and the intellectual advancement of the country.” Despite the controversy, then, the book did well. Samuel May, who was critical of much that had been written on African American prospects as either too “eulogistic” or “hostile,” singled out The Black Man as “a quite sensible & useful book, for ordinary purposes & popular reading.”26
Emancipation did not mean an end to the needs Brown’s volume sought to address. If anything, those needs were heightened. How freedmen and freedwomen would assume their new status, as well as the role they, and all African Americans, would play in an America without slavery, was itself a matter for discussion. A number of abolitionists, following the lead of Charlotte Forten and her colleagues in South Carolina, began to devote themselves to training freedmen and freedwomen for freedom. Harriet Jacobs, for example, helped to open schools for the freed in northern Virginia even before the war ended. In 1865 Lydia Maria Child produced a primer that sought to inculcate racial pride by providing “accounts of what colored people have done,” including “the best specimens of colored authors.” In the tradition of abolitionism, it also sought “to diminish prejudice against color at the North” by, again, presenting the testimony black achievement and, especially, literature provided against negative ideas.27
As Child’s effort indicates, at least in the immediate aftermath of emancipation there was a general tendency to view events, and to define purposes, within the framework created in the abolition movement. The prophetic role of African American voices retained its vigor with the coming of emancipation. With the advent of freedom, however, that role could be enhanced, celebrating the practical accomplishments of black soldiers in quelling the southern rebellion and the larger role of African Americans, whose emancipation meant a realization of the larger purposes of American liberty. It could also mean the recognition of equal rights on the part of freedmen and freedwomen as yet another test the country must pass to prove, still further, its dedication to stated principles. As a California state convention resolved in October 1865, African Americans would prove their own loyalty to the reunited nation “if the American government will become sufficiently just to accord to us the full rights of citizenship.”28
Further development of an African American voice took place within the framework such words implied, all informed by a mood of anxious optimism. The voice remained strongly assertive, and there was good evidence for its efficacy in the visibility of some of its strongest figures. Antebellum celebrities, including Douglass, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and William Wells Brown, continued to occupy a place within the old abolitionist world, speaking widely to receptive audiences of black and white Americans. For at least a few years after the war the interracial ideals that had brought them fame and authority continued to play a role in their careers. New celebrities also appeared, including those whose autobiographies were intended to capture the imaginations of black and white readers alike and those who hoped to use the stories of their lives to provide financial support for themselves and their families.
Still, things did not stay exactly the same. For one thing, what many believed to be the end of the antislavery cause changed the possible settings for an African American voice significantly. Garrison’s Liberator was discontinued in 1865, and the National Anti-Slavery Standard ceased publication about five years later. These, along with the black-edited papers, all of them having subscriber lists that transcended color, had been the major outlets for black writers hoping to reach an interracial audience. Nothing arose to take the place of the major abolitionist papers, and the African American press changed markedly after emancipation, increasingly serving an exclusively black readership. This had not necessarily been their intent. When the Elevator was founded in 1865, the veteran editor Phillip Bell announced, “We wish to obtain as large a circulation among our white fellow-citizens as among colored,” following a precedent he and his colleagues had laid down before the Civil War. William McFeely has shown that the New National Era, founded at the end of the decade, similarly sought an interracial audience but failed to gain white subscribers despite Frederick Douglass’s prominence as editor. The creation of an African American press to serve the African American community was the trend in post-emancipation America, as newspapers multiplied rapidly throughout the country, reaching local audiences and attuned to local affairs.29
Thus, through the years of Reconstruction, African American writers continued to produce. One can trace the continuing careers of writers begun during the antebellum period, including those of Brown, Harper, Bell, and Whitfield. One can see the emergence of new figures whose careers began in the aftermath of emancipation and continue beyond the end of Reconstruction, notably Elijah Smith and John Willis Menard. Since their works appeared in black-edited publications with mainly black readers, however, they failed to receive the national stature their predecessors had achieved. When, in the 1890s, such writers as Charles Chesnutt and Paul Laurence Dunbar became so widely recognized as “firsts,” theirs was a celebrity based on historical amnesia growing out of a nearly thirty-year absence of black writers from the national stage.
Still, what might be considered a national hiatus brought on by the post-Reconstruction “nadir” in American race relations could not entirely diminish the special authority that had been defined for an African American voice during the debate over slavery. Writers themselves continued to stress certain key themes, including the ironies inherent in American professions of liberty in a land of oppression and the special perspective African Americans, as a people at the margins, brought to understanding the nature of American history and society. A dominating gentility, little different from that of the antebellum era, expressed the overwhelming aspirations of African Americans for a place in the mainstream of American life.
The dynamic created by abolitionism was not present in the closing years of the nineteenth century. It would never quite return to American literary life until it was re-created, in a sense, by the Civil Rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s, when, again, the African American voice, along with that of other American minorities, was invested with a distinctive moral authority that it continues to hold for many readers. Still, the themes and images, and the stances created in the context of the abolition movement, building on frameworks going back to the seventeenth century, were kept alive by African American writers for a long time. Revitalized by events, made relevant by circumstances, they have continued to shape American ideals, and American anxieties, down to our own time. Until the color line is truly abolished, if it ever is, they are likely to continue to shape American culture, and American consciousness, for some time to come.