Antebellum African Americans, public commemoration, and the Haitian revolution: A problem of historical mythmaking

Journal of the Early Republic

Volumn 26, Issue 2, 2006, Pages 249-273

  Kachun, Mitch ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60949953289     PISSN: 02751275     EISSN: 15530620     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/jer.2006.0030     Document Type: Article

References (86)

1. Michel-Rolph lrouillot, Silencing the Past: rower and me Production of History (Boston, MA, 1995).
2. Caleb McDaniel, "Haiti's Usable Past: Violence, Anglophilia, and Antebellum American Abolitionists," unpublished paper presented at the Omohundro Institute for Early American History and Culture Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA, June 8, 2003, 1 (manuscript in possession of the author). A significant literature on African American emancipation celebrations has been developing in recent years.
3. and William H. Wiggins Jr., O Freedom!: Afro-American Emancipation Celebrations (Knoxville, TN, 1987).
4. A recent work focusing on black commemorations in the postbellum South is Kathleen Ann Clark, Defining Moments: African American Commemoration and Political Culture in the South, 1863-1913 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2005).
5. Articles and books with individual chapters on the subject include Kathleen Clark, "Celebrating Freedom: Emancipation Day Celebrations and African American Memory in the Early Reconstruction South," in Where These Memories Grow: History, Memory, and Southern Identity, ed. W. Fitzhugh Brundage (Chapel Hill, NC, 2000), 107-32;
6. Genevieve Fabre, "African-American Commemorative Celebrations in the Nineteenth Century," in History and Memory in African-American Culture, ed. Fabre and Robert O'Meally (New York, 1994), 72-91;
7. Eddie S. Glaude, Jr., Exodus: Religion, Race, and Nation in Early Nineteenth-Century Black America (Chicago, IL, 2000);
8. Leonard I. Sweet, "The Fourth of July and Black Americans in the Nineteenth Century: Northern Leadership Opinion within the Context of the Black Experience," Journal of Negro History, 61 (July 1976), 256-75;
9. William B. Gravely, "The Dialectic of Double-Consciousness in Black American Freedom Celebrations, 1808-1863," Journal of Negro History, 67 (Winter 1982), 302-17;
10. Ellen M. Litwicki, America's Public Holidays, 1865-1920 (Washington, DC, 2000);
11. John R. McKivigan and Jason H. Silverman, "Monarchial Liberty and Republican Slavery: West Indies Emancipation Celebrations in Upstate New York and Canada West," Afro-Americans in New York Life and History, 10 (Winter 1986), 7-18;
12. Patrick Rael, Black Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum North (Chapel Hill, NC, 2002);
13. David Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes: The Making of American Nationalism, 1776-1820 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1997);
14. Shane White, " 'It was a proud day': African Americans, Festivals, and Parades in the North, 1741-1834," Journal of American History, 81 (June 1994), 13-50.
15. Kirk Savage, Standing Soldiers, Kneeling Slaves: Race, War, and Monument in Nineteenth-Century America (Princeton, NJ, 1997);
16. W. Fitzhugh Brundage, "Meta Warrick's 1907 'Negro Tableaux' and (Re)Presenting African American Historical Memory," Journal of American History, 89 (Mar. 2003), 1368-400.
17. See Kachun, Festivals of Freedom, ch. 1 and 2, for a detailed analysis of the development of African American emancipation celebrations during the antebellum decades. Interestingly, I have not discovered specific discussions among antebellum black leaders regarding their reasons for not commemorating the Haitian Revolution; my conjectures in this regard are based on circumstantial evidence.
18. David Walker, Walker's Appeal, in Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in Particular, and Very Expressly, to Those of the United States of America, Written in Boston, State of Massachusetts, September 28,1829, electronic edition, Documenting the American South, , 24, accessed June 9, 2004;
19. Roy E. Finkenbine, "Toussaint Louverture and the Construction of the Black Hero, 1840-1860," unpublished paper delivered at the annual meeting of the British Historians of Nineteenth Century America, Cambridge University, October 2003;
20. Matt Clavin, " 'He was considered as the Washington of St. Domingo': Writing and Remembering Toussaint Louverture and the Haitian Revolution in the New Republic," unpublished paper presented at the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, Annual Conference, June 6-8, 2003; McDaniel, "Haiti's Usable Past."
21. Eugene D. Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York, 1974), 592;
22. Thomas Marshall Thompson, "National Newspaper and Legislative Reactions to Louisiana's Deslondes Slave Revolt of 1811," Louisiana History, 33 (Winter 1992), 5-29;
23. Douglas R. Egerton, Gabriel's Rebellion: The Virginia Slave Conspiracies of 1800 and 1802 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1993);
24. James Sidbury, Ploughshares into Swords: Race, Rebellion, and Identity in Gabriel's Virginia, 1730-1810 (New York, 1997);
25. Sidbury, "Saint Domingue in Virginia: Ideology, Local Meanings, and Resistance to Slavery, 1790-1800," Journal of Southern History, 63 (Aug. 1997), 531-52;
26. Sweet, "The Fourth of July and Black Americans";
27. Waldstreicher, In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes, 328.
28. Jeremiah Gloucester, An Oration Delivered... in Bethel Church on the Abolition of the Slave Trade, January 1, 1823 (Philadelphia, PA, 1823);
29. White, '"It was a proud day,'" 41
30. Brenda Gayle Plummer, Haiti and the United States: The Psychological Moment (Athens, GA, 1992), 5, 37.
31. Columbia Centinel and Massachusetts Federalist (Boston), Feb. 15, 1804;
32. New York Daily Advertiser, Mar. 5, 7, 1804.
33. Ira Berlin, Slaves Without Masters: The Free Negro in the Antebellum South (New York, 1974), 314-15.
34. Genius of Universal Emancipation (Baltimore), August 1825, 167 (emphasis added);
35. Robert Stein, "From Saint-Domingue to Haiti, 1804-1825," Journal of Caribbean History, 19 (Nov. 1984), 189-226.
36. Genius of Universal Emancipation, Aug. 1825, 169.
37. Mies' Weekly Register (Baltimore), Sept. 3, 1825.
38. New York American, Sept. 16, 1825;
39. Richmond Enquirer, Aug. 2, 1825;
40. undated editorial from National Intelligencer (Washington)
41. reprinted in Boston Statesman, Aug. 11, 1825;
42. New York National Advocate, Aug. 5, 1825. I surveyed the following additional papers for the months of July through Sept. 1825:
43. Baltimore American and Commercial Daily Advertiser; Baltimore Patriot and Mercantile Advertiser; The Charleston Courier, The National Gazette and Literary Register (Philadelphia);
44. New-York Spectator; The Statesman (New York);
45. Poulson's American Daily Advertiser (Philadelphia);
46. The Philadelphia Gazette, and Daily Advertiser, Philadelphia Recorder; New York Evening Post; United States Gazette (Philadelphia);
47. City Gazette and Daily Commercial Advertiser (Charleston). Almost all of these carried some mention of France's recognition of Haiti, and several included substantial commentary on the event, but none mentioned any activities by African Americans other than the observances held in Baltimore and Boston.
48. National Philanthropist (Boston), July 20, 1827;
49. Boston Statesman, Aug. 16, 1825.
50. Columbian Centinel (Boston), Aug. 24, 31, 1825.
51. Daily Missouri Democrat (St. Louis), Aug. 10, 1859.
52. The Liberator (Boston), Aug. 19, 1859.
53. Benjamin Quarles, Black Abolitionists (New York, 1969), 124-26;
54. Kachun, Festivals of Freedom, ch. 2.
55. Alfred N. Hunt, Haiti's Influence on Antebellum America: Slumbering Volcano in the Caribbean (Baton Rouge, LA, 1988), 159.
56. Hunt's sources are listed as follows: J. Theodore Holly, A Vindication of the Negro Race (New Haven, CT, 1857), 44;
57. Freedom's Journal, June 1, 1827.
58. Also see Frederick Douglass' Paper, Apr. 15, 1855;
59. James F. Clarke, Conditions of the Free Colored People of the United States (New York, 1853), 249;
60. Mies' Weekly Register, Sept. 3, 1825, 4.
61. Fahre, "African-American Commemorative Celebrations," 86, 91n26, 27;
62. Eric Foner, Nothing but Freedom: Emancipation and its Legacy (Baton Rouge, LA, 1983);
63. Weekly Anglo-African, Aug. 6, 1859.
64. Christopher Phillips, Freedom's Port: The African American Community of Baltimore, 1790-1860 (Urbana, IL, 1997), 174;
65. Leonard P. Curry, The Free Black in Urban America, 1800-1850: The Shadow of the Dream (Chicago, IL, 1981), 212-13;
66. Gary B. Nash, Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia's Black Community, 1720-1840 (Cambridge, MA, 1988), 177, 189.
67. Simon P. Newman, Parades and the Politics of the Street: Festive Culture in the Early American Republic (Philadelphia, PA, 1997), 160.
68. Elizabeth Rauh Bethel, The Roots of African American Identity: Memory and History in Free Antebellum Communities (New York, 1997), 6.
69. Litwicki, America's Public Holidays, 52;
70. Chris Dixon, African America and Haiti: Emigration, and Black Nationalism in the Nineteenth Century (Westport, CT, 2000), 30.
71. Rael, Black Identity and Black Protest, 77;
72. Clark, Defining Moments, 18.
73. Sally Hemings & Thomas Jefferson: History, Memory, and Civic Culture, ed. Jan Ellen Lewis and Peter S. Onuf (Charlottesville, VA, 1999), 14. The assorted essays in that volume offer thoughtful explorations of the implications of the Jefferson-Hemings affair from a variety of perspectives.
74. Nell Irvin Painter, Sojourner Truth: A Life, A Symbol (New York, 1996), 287.
75. Michael P. Johnson, "Denmark Vesey and His Co-Conspirators," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 58 (Oct. 2001), 915-76;
76. "Forum: The Making of a Slave Conspiracy, Part 2," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 59 (Jan. 2002), 35-202;
77. Robert L. Paquette, "From Rebellion to Revisionism: The Continuing Debate About the Denmark Vesey Affair," Journal of the Historical Society, 4 (2004), 291-334.
78. C. Vann Woodward, "Clio with Soul," Journal of American History, 56 (June 1969), 5-20.
79. Walter Isaacson, Benjamin Franklin: An American Life (New York, 2003);
80. Joseph J. Ellis, American Sphinx: The Character of Thomas Jefferson (New York, 1997);
81. Joseph J. Ellis, Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation (New York, 2000);
82. and Ron Chernow, Alexander Hamilton (New York, 2004).
83. On interpretive disagreements regarding the founding generation, see, for example, David Waldstreicher, "Founders Chic as Culture War," Radical History Review, 84 (2002), 185-94
84. and H. W. Brand, "Founders Chic," Atlantic Monthly, 292 (Sept. 2003), 101-104, 106, 108, 110. A search of the H-SHEAR discussion list using the keyword "founders" will lead to some interesting exchanges on the issue.
85. Michael P. Johnson, "Reading Evidence," William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 59 (Jan. 2002), 135-202;
86. David Lowenthal, Possessed by the Past: The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History (New York, 1996).