The Fragments of Black Reconstruction

On 1 April 1865, the black New Yorker Thomas Hamilton announced the launch of a new journal. Hamilton had published and edited the Anglo-African, a weekly newspaper, since 1859, but now felt the need for a more frequent publication.¹ “On and after Tuesday, May 16th,” he declared, “A TRI-WEEKLY EDITION of this paper will be issued.” As an enticement to readers, Hamilton announced that a new piece of fiction, from a new author, would be serialized exclusively in this new paper. “In the first number of the Tri-Weekly will be commenced a story of thrilling interest,” he wrote, “written by a new and able contributor, entitled HEARTS AND HOMES: The recollections of an Octogenarian; A Story of Slavery in the British West Indies” (“Another”).² Written by an anonymous author using the pseudonym Landseer, Hearts and Homes (1865) was to be the corner-stone of the Tri-Weekly.³ But less than two months after this announcement, the 42-year-old publisher died. His brother Robert returned to New York City from his travels to take over the newspaper and immediately canceled the publication of the new journal. He did, however, decide to continue publishing Hearts and Homes in the Anglo-African’s regular weekly edition. Rather than starting the serialization of Hearts and Homes from the novel’s opening, Hamilton began with its fourth chapter, explaining that “[t]he three preceding chapters, published in the three issues of the Tri-Weekly; can be obtained at this office” (“A Word”). Beginning on 24 June, eight installments of one chapter each appeared in the Anglo-African. But publication stopped abruptly at its eleventh chapter, leaving readers (then and now) with a fragment of the presumably larger novel.

This essay recovers Hearts and Homes and places it into conversation with the Anglo-African’s coverage of a nascent Reconstruction.⁴ Hearts and Homes joins a small group of nineteenth-century African American novels, some of which have only recently been rediscovered, and is to my knowledge the first African American novel set in the British Caribbean. This setting not only underscores the transnational scope of early African American literature in general, and fiction in particular, but also overlaps with the specific concerns of the Anglo-African during the summer of 1865. At the very same time that the newspaper serialized a novel set on the island of Barbados during the time of slavery, editorials and articles consistently framed Reconstruction in the US as the domestic manifestation of an ongoing fight for black rights, after slavery, that had been raging in the Caribbean since the British abolished slavery in their colonies in the 1830s. I argue that the novel’s setting, plot, and fragmented form in particular reinforce the Anglo-African’s broader message to readers that the struggle for black equality postemancipation had not begun with the end of the Civil War and was not limited by the borders of the US.

My approach to Hearts and Homes builds upon a body of work that reads African American novels in relation to the black newspapers in which they were published. Scholars of serialized novels like Martin Delany’s Blake (1862) and Julia Collins’s Curse of Caste (1865), for example, have focused on the ways in which the themes of those novels reflect their host newspapers’ approaches to the Civil War and Reconstruction.⁵ In addition to connecting the content of the novel to the context of the newspaper, this essay foregrounds how the defining formal feature of Hearts and Homes dovetails with the Anglo-African’s reporting of Reconstruction. Like a number of nineteenth-century novels published in black newspapers, Hearts and Homes survives as a fragment. The novel’s missing pieces may help to explain why I have been unable to locate a single scholarly mention of Hearts and Homes, despite a robust and growing body of scholarship on African American novels published in black newspapers. But far from exceptional, this novel’s fragmented form makes it of a piece with a great deal of African American literature from the period. As the narrator of...