The Black Newspaper and the Chosen Nation by Benjamin Fagan (review)

In The Black Newspaper and the Chosen Nation, literary scholar Benjamin Fagan takes a new approach to the study of the antebellum black press. Fagan argues that in addition to fostering a sense of community among black readers, antebellum black newspapers crafted and disseminated a rhetoric of "black chosenness" (p. 3). He contends that this notion of chosenness—the belief that black Americans were a "chosen people" destined to "lead the world to universal emancipation"—remained a recurring theme in black newspapers between the 1820s and the 1860s (p. 3). He argues that during this period black editors framed their points of view on issues such as the political efficacy of respectable behavior, the imminence of divine retribution, and the meaning of citizenship in terms of what they considered black America's divine purpose. In the process, Fagan demonstrates that the rhetoric of black chosenness remained a feature of free black political discourse from the 1820s through the Civil War.

Fagan argues that black chosenness was a dynamic concept, one that shifted and evolved in response to the political developments of the period. With this in mind, he devotes each chapter to a close reading of a specific newspaper, focusing on the distinctive ways that Freedom's Journal, the Colored American, the North Star, the Provincial Freeman, and the Weekly Anglo-African instructed their readers. For example, he argues that the editors of Freedom's Journal linked chosenness with respectability and sought to usher in emancipation by teaching black readers how to behave. The Colored American, meanwhile, conceptualized black chosenness in terms of millennialism, at times characterizing black Americans as agents of necessary reform and prophesying "millennial visions of an American apocalypse" (p. 46). In the pages of Frederick Douglass's North Star, black readers were instructed to see themselves as the chosen members of "a global army of liberation," stretching from Europe to the Americas (p. 74). And Fagan finds that the Provincial Freeman and the Weekly Anglo-African offered competing perspectives on the relationship between black chosenness and U.S. citizenship, with the Provincial Freeman embracing British citizenship and rejecting "racial solidarity as a pathway to liberation" and the Weekly Anglo-African insisting that free black people had a duty to support the Union and their newly emancipated brothers and sisters in the South (p. 116).

By analyzing antebellum black newspapers in this way, The Black Newspaper and the Chosen Nation reminds us that the early-nineteenth-century black press offered a range of perspectives for black readers. But this approach also runs the risk of overstating the ideological fault lines between papers and obscuring the diversity of articles published within each publication. For example, black newspapers continued to offer instruction on respectable behavior long after the demise of Freedom's Journal. The Provincial Freeman recommended that black Americans abandon the United States for Canada, publishing articles that fostered a sense of race-based community and identity outside the United States. Still, The Black Newspaper and the Chosen Nation has much to recommend it. The chapter on the Colored American is especially strong, with its analysis of the paper's visual depictions of biblical and indigenous history and its discussion of the paper's engagement with distinct and varied strains of millennialism. The volume's attentiveness to the networks connecting editors (both black and white) at various publications is also quite useful, and its analysis of how black newspapers engaged and refined notions of American exceptionalism is insightful. In sum, The Black Newspaper and the Chosen Nation offers an innovative take on the role that the black press played in the construction of black identity and political culture in the decades before the Civil War.