WHITNEY NELL STEWART AND JOHN GARRISON MARKS
Benedict Anderson famously described the nation as an imagined community.1 Yet in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world, the way these communities were imagined and reimagined by various groups represented perhaps the century’s most pressing political and cultural question. As various groups sought to code nation and citizenship as white, they confronted communities that were strikingly diverse.2 The problem of defining citizenship for such populations—multireligious, multiethnic, multiracial—was a global one, bound up in myriad ways with the effort to overthrow colonial rule.3 Yet the nations of the Atlantic world felt these issues particularly acutely during the nineteenth century, as societies built on African slavery struggled to reconcile the boundaries of citizenship with concepts of racial difference in the wake of emancipation. Throughout this fraught process, people of African descent both free and enslaved played an active role in shaping conceptions of national belonging and in defining the meaning of citizenship.
Throughout the nineteenth-century Atlantic, white authorities in colonial states and independent nations began to confront questions about how to define citizenship amid the wave of emancipation made possible by the Age of Revolutions and a growing international antislavery movement. Often excluded from national belonging based on racial difference, men and women of African descent capitalized on this Atlantic moment to make their voices heard and to weigh in on this crucial question. Throughout this era, people of African descent contributed in fundamental ways to debates regarding how to define citizenship, transforming notions of national belonging at a crucial juncture in the history of the modern world. Though the specifics of their expectations for citizenship and their success in seeing those expectations realized depended on the unique circumstances of each particular place and time, viewing this collective activity from an Atlantic perspective reveals the many ways that people of African descent used the uncertainties and possibilities of emancipation to stake claims to citizenship, national belonging, and equality, profoundly altering the contours of communities, nations, and the Atlantic world.
As the Atlantic world has grown as both a field and a historical perspective, historians have increasingly focused on the many links between the peoples of the Atlantic basin and the structures that bound them together. Capitalism, slavery, and race itself all formed and transformed within the crucible of the Atlantic world, often with tragic consequences for people of African descent.4 While seminal works by C. L. R. James and Eric Williams and more recent works by Cedric Robinson, Paul Gilroy, and others have examined the relationship of slavery and capitalism, modes of resistance among African-descended people, and the development of black diasporic cultures in the Atlantic, these questions continue to drive the work of contemporary scholars.5 Indeed, the renewed scholarly interest in exploring the centrality of racial slavery to the development of global capitalism—and the efforts of African-descended people to resist the oppression of that system—has represented some of the most exciting and most robust recent scholarship on the Atlantic world.6 While questions about racial capitalism and modes of resistance feature prominently in recent studies of the Black Atlantic, this anthology focuses on equally important though less frequently studied questions about race, citizenship, and national belonging. This volume’s broad approach allows us to see clearly the ways the Atlantic world both produced systems that oppressed people of African descent and facilitated the development of the cultural and intellectual tools that allowed them to challenge white colonial and national authorities, thereby staking claims to belonging.
While broad in approach, this volume’s essays are also rooted in the particular. Much of the scholarship on the Atlantic world has emphasized the ways people and ideas crossed borders both real and imagined, yet the worlds of many people of African descent remained profoundly local. The eleven essays presented here examine the complex and shifting concept of race, arguing that the Age of Emancipations represented a crucial moment in which people of African descent transformed the meaning of citizenship and national belonging. Each essay focuses on a distinct locale and community—from Canada to Brazil to Liberia and beyond—while both individually and collectively reflecting the Atlantic nature of emancipation. Indeed, placing local detail within broader imperial and national contexts has been essential to understanding variations in the institution of slavery, the definitions of race, and the worlds of African-descended people. Just as slavery differed on the sugar plantations of Jamaica, the urban bustle of Rio de Janeiro, and the swamps of the southern United States, black freedom varied immensely based on these local, national, and imperial contexts. Yet by viewing the worlds of Africans and their descendants through the prism of the Atlantic world, this volume demonstrates that African-descended people throughout the region collectively seized on the Age of Emancipations to stake claims to a new place within the nation via strategies, opportunities, and successes that reflected local particularities.
To evaluate the role and impact of African-descended people in shaping ideas about race and nation in the Atlantic world, this volume focuses on a few major questions. What did nation and citizenship mean to these people? How did they challenge white authorities and demand that whites recognize blacks’ visions for citizenship and their place within the nation? In what ways did differences in legal regimes, religious institutions, state bureaucracies, and cultural values influence these efforts?7 The scholarship in this volume engages these broad questions from a perspective that allows us to consider more fully the shifting relationship between race and nation over the long nineteenth century. The anthology is divided into sections on mobility, law, labor, and the public sphere, four of the many paradigms that have guided studies of race, slavery, and freedom in the Atlantic world. Focusing on these themes leaves some categories unexplored—perhaps most obviously the role of gender—but allows the volume to address some of the central questions about race and nation in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world.8
One of the defining characteristics of Atlantic world history has been its emphasis on networks and movement—links between people, places, empires, and ideas. By emphasizing the central role of Africans and their descendants in the development of systems of trade, exchange, and migration as well as the importance of the circulation of ideas, goods, and people, scholarship in this field has stressed the centrality of movement to the formation of black culture and identity and of the Atlantic world itself.9 Yet even as these connections stretched within and across colonial empires and national borders, African-descended people often interpreted Atlantic lessons within a national framework. And the circulation involved not simply goods and ideas but also free and enslaved people of African descent. The essays in Part 1 explore how people of African descent used movement to find and declare their national place. The right to move when and where one wanted was often withheld from people of African descent, both enslaved and free, but they nevertheless used their feet to challenge and transform notions of citizenship and national belonging. And as they moved, they staked claims to a variety of different local, national, and diasporic identities, challenging white authorities to reconsider the place and role of people of color within the nation.
Matthew Spooner argues that mobility is central to understanding black southerners in revolutionary America, as enslaved people moved across borders, boundaries, and oceans to seek freedom in the moments of possibility presented by the American war for independence. Andrew N. Wegmann approaches questions about mobility through the lens of migration, examining how the internal racial politics and social mores of Louisiana and Virginia influenced free people of color’s involvement with or rejection of the Liberian colonization movement. Ikuko Asaka identifies how fugitive slaves from the United States who fled to Canada employed conceptions of nationhood and politics to craft identities as political exiles and refugees. Despite Canada’s vigorous anti-black climate, these émigrés equated their escape from the U.S. Slave Power with the experiences of refugees from Europe’s 1848 revolutions, revealing the heterogeneous concepts of the nation operative in the Atlantic world. For Africans and their descendants, movement, mobility, and migration not only crucially informed their understanding of the world and themselves but functioned as an indispensable tool for challenging white elites to recognize and respect African-descended people’s claims to freedom and citizenship.
While mobility has been central to questions pertaining to race in the Atlantic world, scholars have also long examined the intertwining of legal and racial systems. Since the publication of Frank Tannenbaum’s Slave and Citizen (1946), scholars of the Americas and Atlantic world—particularly those working from a comparative perspective—have examined how the law has shaped the social and cultural worlds of African-descended people.10 More recently, scholars have begun fervently reevaluating the scholarship on race, law, and citizenship.11 By more closely analyzing not just the text of law but the ways groups and individuals interpreted those laws in practice, historians reveal how exposure to the intellectual and cultural currents of the Atlantic world transformed understandings and uses of the law, particularly for people of African descent.12
The essays in Part 2 reveal a clearer sense of the ways race, nationality, law, and freedom transformed and how Atlantic discourses gained saliency in various local contexts. Analyzing Haiti’s “radical constitutionalism” in the wake of revolution there, Philip Kaisary explores how Haitians legally codified their visions of freedom. As he argues, the Haitian constitution is the only such document from this era that ensures unconditional freedom and citizenship. Martha S. Jones uses the experiences of George Hackett, a free black sailor and steward, to explore how the policies and procedures of a naval vessel and legal developments elsewhere in the Americas created a complex nexus between race, law, and citizenship that was carried back to the United States. These essays reveal that in courthouses, constitutional conventions, and beyond, people of African descent recognized the law’s potential to facilitate negotiations for rights and freedom and often used intellectual currents to push for national-level changes. Emancipation constituted a moment of opportunity in which people of color could redefine the rights of citizenship, achieve guarantees of freedom, and force states to recognize those rights and guarantees.
Perhaps the most studied aspect of postemancipation societies has been labor, as scholars explore the many transformations and continuities in that arena during the transition from slavery to freedom. Labor has constituted one of the central themes of studies of race and slavery in the United States, Latin America, the Caribbean, and West Africa. Pathbreaking work by historians Thomas C. Holt, Julie Saville, Rebecca J. Scott, and others has emphasized the centrality of labor to conflicts between blacks and whites over the nature of emancipation and the meaning of freedom and citizenship.13 More recent work has continued to emphasize the central role of labor in the lives of African-descended people in a variety of geographic and cultural contexts, particularly in staking claims to national belonging.14
The essays in Part 3 reflect and contribute to this conversation about race, labor, and emancipation, investigating how labor informed conceptions of citizenship. Gad Heuman deftly explores how former slaves in the British Caribbean responded to the apprenticeship system, revealing how they imagined freedom as well as their place in local and imperial communities. By rejecting the terms of both emancipation and apprenticeship, former slaves forced colonial authorities to recognize black expectations for freedom. Caree A. Banton examines how labor informed conceptions of potential citizens after Liberia’s primary stream of migrants shifted from African Americans to Barbadians following the U.S. Civil War. Banton argues that Barbadians’ diasporic experience and specific labor skills—in contrast with enslaved Africans liberated from Atlantic slave ships and indigenous West Africans—allowed African American leaders in Liberia to view Barbadian migrants as potential citizens in a modern nation. Banton and Heuman reveal labor’s crucial role in the lives of African-descended people, particularly as they sought to re-create their worlds after emancipation. While slavery was of course more than just a labor system, formerly enslaved laborers recognized that whites’ need for workers offered a significant bargaining chip and did not hesitate to use it.
Scholars also have often looked at the ways African-descended people used the public sphere to stake claims to citizenship. As freedom opened new opportunities to participation in public life, people of African descent organized voluntary associations; published books, essays, and newspapers; and participated in marches, parades, and other activities designed to demonstrate their fitness for a place as national citizens.15 The essays in Part 4 contribute to this growing body of literature, examining how people of African descent from New York City to Popayán to Recife used the public sphere to transform the meaning of citizenship and the relationship between race and nation. Paul J. Polgar looks at how free people of color in Philadelphia, New York, and elsewhere in the early national U.S. North used the public sphere to develop a unique brand of antislavery activism and reform through an emphasis on personal and moral uplift. Through their claims to respectability, free black northerners attempted to demonstrate that African Americans could embody the values of republicanism and that enslaved people could survive and thrive in freedom. James E. Sanders analyzes how claims to modernity rang out in the public spheres of both Mexico and Colombia as republican leaders trumpeted the equality of the new nations, highlighting the contrast with North American racism and European monarchy. Sanders examines how subaltern people pressed their claims of belonging and citizenship in these new nations, publicly forcing leaders to live up to their boasts about racial equality and their ideas about the modern nation. Celso Thomas Castilho tackles the public discourse regarding abolition, revealing the complex relationship between “African” identity, abolition ceremonies, and political belonging in Brazil in the contentious years of 1888 and 1889. Castilho argues that private associational activity could spur civic action, as public demonstrations by Brazilian abolition associations allowed freedpeople to stake their claims at part of the national community.
The shifting relationship between race and nation represented one of the most pressing political questions of the nineteenth century. While the individual essays in this volume are replete with the kind of fine-grained detail that is possible only through a sharp focus on specific times and places, they combine to reveal that the process of reconciling racial difference with the rights of citizenship occurred both within and across national boundaries. By reincorporating the role of the nation in the lives of ordinary people while maintaining a broader Atlantic perspective, this volume offers scholars a way to reevaluate the meanings of freedom, emancipation, nation, and citizenship in the nineteenth-century Atlantic world.
1. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (New York: Verso, 2006).
2. Aimé Césaire describes the coding of the categories man and nation as white in Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (1972; New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000). The whitening of nation and citizenship has been explored recently by Robert G. Parkinson, The Common Cause: Creating Race and Nation in the American Revolution (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2016). For the relationship between race and nation in various Latin American contexts, see Nancy P. Appelbaum, Anne S. Macpherson, and Karin Alejandra Rosemblatt, eds., Race and Nation in Modern Latin America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).
3. Edward J. Blum, Reforging the White Republic: Race, Religion, and American Nationalism, 1865–1898 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007); Michelle U. Campos, Ottoman Brothers: Muslims, Christians, and Jews in Early Twentieth-Century Palestine (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010); Bruce Clark, Twice a Stranger: How Mass Expulsion Forged Modern Greece and Turkey (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009); Nicholas B. Dirks, Castes of Mind: Colonialism and the Making of Modern India (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2001); Ussama Makdisi, The Culture of Sectarianism: Community, History, and Violence in Nineteenth-Century Ottoman Lebanon (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000); Aamir Mufti, Enlightenment in the Colony: The Jewish Question and the Crisis of Postcolonial Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007).
4. The work of David Brion Davis has been central to this historiography, including The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975); Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006); and The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Emancipation (New York: Knopf, 2014). See also Joyce Chaplin, “Race,” in The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800, ed. David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
5. C. L. R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (London: Secker & Warburg, 1938); Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944); Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993); Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (1983; Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).
6. See, for example, Edward E. Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York: Basic, 2014); Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Vintage, 2015); Sven Beckert and Seth Rockman, eds., Slavery’s Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013). Robinson’s pathbreaking work, especially Black Marxism, has substantially influenced these recent works.
7. The meanings and boundaries of freedom and its attendant rights were not formed in isolation but were developed through negotiations between black and white. Historians who have emphasized this negotiation include Kim D. Butler, Freedoms Given, Freedoms Won: Afro-Brazilians in Post-Abolition São Paulo and Salvador (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1998); Frederick Cooper, Thomas C. Holt, and Rebecca J. Scott, Beyond Slavery: Explorations of Race, Labor, and Citizenship in Postemancipation Societies (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Matt D. Childs, The 1812 Aponte Rebellion in Cuba and the Struggle against Atlantic Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); Laurent Dubois, A Colony of Citizens: Revolution and Slave Emancipation in the French Caribbean, 1787–1804 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Ada Ferrer, Freedom’s Mirror: Cuba and Haiti in the Age of Revolution (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014); Aline Helg, Liberty and Equality in Caribbean Colombia, 1770–1835 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
8. The scholarship on gender and race in the Atlantic world is vibrant and vital, including but certainly not limited to the work of Jennifer L. Morgan, Marisa J. Fuentes, Sowande’ M. Mustakeem, and Saidiya Hartman. See Jennifer L. Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011); Marisa J. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016); Sowande’ M. Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea: Terror, Sex, and Sickness in the Middle Passage (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2016); Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2007). The editors hope that others will continue to examine how gender shaped African-descended peoples’ pursuit of nation and citizenship.
9. See R. J. M. Blackett, Building an Antislavery Wall: Black Americans in the Atlantic Abolitionist Movement, 1830–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002); James Sidbury, Becoming African in America: Race and Nation in the Early Black Atlantic (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); James H. Sweet, Recreating Africa: Culture, Kinship, and Religion in the African-Portuguese World, 1441–1770 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003); John K. Thornton, Africa and Africans and the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400–1800 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998).
10. Frank Tannenbaum, Slave and Citizen: The Negro in the Americas (New York: Knopf, 1946). See Gilberto Freyre, Brazil: An Interpretation (New York: Knopf, 1951); Carl Degler, Neither Black nor White: Slavery and Race Relations in Brazil and the United States (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1986); Herbert Klein, Slavery in the Americas: A Comparative Study of Virginia and Cuba, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
11. See Lauren Benton, Law and Colonial Cultures: Legal Regimes in World History, 1400–1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2001); Alejandro de la Fuente, “Slave Law and Claims-Making in Cuba: The Tannenbaum Debate Revisited,” Law and History Review 22, no. 2 (Summer 2004): 339–69; Alejandro de la Fuente, “From Slaves to Citizens? Tannenbaum and the Debates on Slavery, Emancipation, and Race Relations in Latin America,” International Labor and Working-Class History 77, no. 1 (Spring 2010): 154–73; Alejandro de la Fuente and Ariela Gross, “Comparative Studies of Law, Slavery, and Race in the Americas,” Annual Review of Law and Social Science 6 (2010): 469–85; Rebecca J. Scott, “Paper Thin: Freedom and Re-Enslavement in the Diaspora of the Haitian Revolution,” Law and History Review 29, no. 4 (November 2011): 1061–87.
12. See Melvin Patrick Ely, Israel on the Appomattox: A Southern Experiment in Black Freedom from the 1790s through the Civil War (New York: Vintage, 2005); Kirt von Daacke, Freedom Has a Face: Race, Identity, and Community in Jefferson’s Virginia (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2012).
13. See Thomas C. Holt, Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832–1938 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991); Julie Saville, The Work of Reconstruction: From Slave to Wage Laborer in South Carolina, 1860–1870 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Rebecca J. Scott, Slave Emancipation in Cuba: The Transition to Free Labor, 1860–1899 (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000).
14. See William Dusinberre, Them Dark Days: Slavery in the American Rice Swamps (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2000); Natasha J. Lightfoot, Troubling Freedom: Antigua and the Aftermath of British Emancipation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015); Jason P. McGraw, The Work of Recognition: Caribbean Colombia and the Postemancipation Struggle for Citizenship (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014); Seth Rockman, Scraping By: Wage Labor, Slavery, and Survival in Early Baltimore (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009); Rebecca J. Scott, Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005).
15. See Butler, Freedoms Given, Freedoms Won; Childs, 1812 Aponte Rebellion; John Garrison Marks, “Race and Freedom in the African Americas: Free People of Color and Social Mobility in Cartagena and Charleston” (PhD diss., Rice University, 2016); Patrick Rael, Black Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum North (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Michele Reid-Vazquez, The Year of the Lash: Free People of Color in Cuba and the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011).