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Introduction
- University of Georgia Press
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Introduction By the 1830s and 1840s, a small but noticeable number of free African Americans living in the North had received the education and training necessary to take up positions as teachers, ministers, and newspaper editors; a few had even achieved some measure of financial success as entrepreneurs and small-business owners. Aware of their anomalous and precarious status as free blacks in a slaveholding republic, they created a print culture to promote a spirit of racial consciousness, to provide their communities with information on the news of the day, and to offer African American readers advice on a range of personal and domestic concerns. Because much of this discourse centered on middle-class personal and domestic conduct and consisted of calls for education, morality, temperance, and economy, historians have generally characterized these efforts as evidence of “racial uplift ideology,” the discursive part of a larger campaign to redirect a phenomenon historian Patrick Rael defines as “racial synecdoche”: the white American tendency to highlight the “misdeeds of the few” African Americans who “were thought to have affronted public morality” and then to characterize those behaviors as innate racial traits and thus justification for continued antiblack discrimination and enslavement. Scholars argue that elite African Americans hoped that this process of racial synecdoche could be redirected and that a class of “elevated”—in other words, frugal, virtuous, well-educated, and well-mannered—African Americans could engage in an antebellum version of the “politics of respectability” and serve as examples proving the worth of the entire black population, undercutting the racism of the day, and bolstering the campaign for the abolition of slavery and the acquisition of citizenship rights. As scholars have also shown, the desire for “elevation” and “respectability” remained bound up in the development of northern black institutional life, political consciousness, and antislavery ideology and activism. [2] introduction This scholarship has done much to reveal the centrality of discourses of respectability to antebellum black protest thought and activism but has not fully explored such discourses’ impact on the ethos and culture of the emerging black middle class. Building on the work of scholars who see class formation as a cultural as well as economic process, this book focuses on the literature directed toward elite and “aspiring” northern African American readers in the three decades preceding the Civil War. Across a variety of genres—including convention proceedings, letters, personal narratives, didactic essays, humorous stories, and sentimental vignettes—a generation of northern black writers, activists, and intellectuals crafted a set of black middle-class ideals, simultaneously respectable and subversive, that fused advice on personal and domestic conduct with antislavery and transnational revolutionary themes. Repeatedly insisting that northern free blacks internalize their political principles and interpret all their personal ambitions, private familial roles, and domestic responsibilities in light of the freedom struggle, African Americans such as Susan Paul, Frederick Douglass, and Martin Delany offered virtuous political models and exemplary figures for elite and aspiring northern black readers to emulate. This rhetoric amounted to far more than endorsements of the “politics of respectability .” Rather, African American writers urged elite and aspiring African Americans to engage in a deeply personal politics by fashioning themselves into ideal husbands and wives, mothers and fathers, self-made men and transnational freedom fighters and by committing themselves to living what former slave turned Congregationalist minister Samuel Ringgold Ward would call “an anti-slavery life.” In the process, they began crafting a form of personal politics especially for elite and aspiring African American readers that ultimately defined the worldview of the emerging black middle class. The first chapter of To Live an Antislavery Life begins by exploring the various arguments that linked key forms of middle-class self-fashioning with the charge to live an antislavery life. By analyzing black conduct discourse—advice specifically directed to the courting sons and daughters and the young husbands and wives of the emerging northern black middle class—we will see that black conduct writers framed popular middle-class arguments about self-improvement as integral to a larger process of personal transformation. For these men and women, the personal conduct and behavior associated with middle-class forms of respectability constituted far more than a narrow political strategy or a public political performance. Rather, the processes of self-fashioning associated with respectability were deemed crucial to the personal transformations required to [18.233.223.189] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 13:16 GMT) introduction [3] become independent, virtuous, ideal men and women and therefore embodiments of...