To Live an Antislavery Life: Personal Politics and the Antebellum Black Middle Class

CHAPTER ONE: African American Advice Literature and Black Middle-Class Self-Fashioning

CHAPTER ONE African American Advice Literature and Black Middle-Class Self-Fashioning But why should I repine; are we not to sacrifice rather than indulge self? Born as we are to the stern performance of duty rather than the pursuit of happiness. —Charlotte Forten (1855) In the decades after the American Revolution and the founding of the new nation, northern states began abolishing the practice of racial slavery. Beginning with the state of Vermont, which outlawed slavery in its 1777 constitution ; Pennsylvania, which enacted gradual emancipation legislation in 1780; and Massachusetts, whose supreme court ruled in 1783 that slavery violated the state constitution, the institution slowly disappeared from the North, becoming instead a sectional phenomenon exclusive to the states of the Upper and Deep South. In the midst of this transition, free northern African Americans set about creating a vibrant set of community institutions—establishing churches and schools; founding literary, temperance, and mutual aid societies; and organizing to combat the spread of slavery, promote the welfare of their brothers and sisters, and fight for civil and political rights. They also began fostering and increasingly relying on a black public sphere and print culture to discuss and deliberate the political issues of the day. In forums such as all–African American conventions, black-edited newspapers, and black-authored pamphlets, roughly 230,000 northern African Americans created community, nurtured abolitionist ideals, debated whether to leave the United States for distant shores, and attempted to unify a population of free blacks—a mere 500,000 free black men, African American Advice Literature [11] women and children in the North and South combined—and facilitate the liberation of the four million African Americans who remained enslaved on the eve of the Civil War. In this context, the Reverend John Berry Meachum, a clergyman living in St. Louis, Missouri, published a brief pamphlet, Address to All the Colored Citizens of the United States. Equal parts personal narrative, scriptural exegesis, black history lesson, assessment of the current state of the race, and discussion of the political choices and strategies available to antebellum free blacks, Meachum’s short 1846 Address tackled an astonishing array of subjects that the author believed would be of interest to his African American readers. He called for free African Americans to promote a spirit of racial unity by holding regular political conventions and building a stratum of leaders who would be capable of guiding their brothers and sisters forward into a better, truly free world. Sounding surprisingly like some twentieth- and twenty-first-century critics of black culture, Meachum also admonished free blacks to stop using the “term Negro” as one of reproof. Pointing out that “it is now used as a term of reproach by both black and white,” Meachum argued that “we must therefore stop it, for unless we do, others will use and apply those terms to us with impunity.” And throughout the pamphlet, Meachum insisted that his readers cultivate an air of respectability. Proclaiming, “If you do not respect yourself others will not respect you,” Meachum urged his readers to fashion themselves into respectable men and women through education, temperance, industry, and morality. He advised them to remain industrious throughout the week rather than “work a great deal one or two days and then loiter three or four days.” He insisted that a “good education” was the “principal way of advancing in life” for those who hoped to rise in status and fashion themselves into truly free men and women. Reminding his readers to attend to matters of character and conduct, as he had, Meachum wrote, “We must cultivate all the christian graces which the apostle Peter recommends—‘add to your faith virtue, and to virtue knowledge, and to knowledge temperance, and to temperance patience, and to patience godliness, and to godliness brotherly kindness, and to brotherly kindness charity.’ Upon the exercise of these graces and christian qualities depend our elevation in this life, and our eternal happiness in the world to come.” Finally, he underscored the prescriptive nature of his pamphlet by closing his preface with an admonishment : “Do not look at this little book with a careless eye, but receive instruction and advice.” Meachum’s Address, with its interest in fostering black unity and improving [12] Chapter One the social and political condition of Americans of African descent, is a classic example of early-nineteenth-century free African American political discourse . Given its emphasis...