The Works of James M. Whitfield: America and Other Writings by a Nineteenth-Century African American Poet

Introduction

1 Introduction In his own time, James Monroe Whitfield (1822–71) was a celebrated African American poet and leader. He was the friend of Frederick Douglass and Martin R. Delany, and his poetry appeared in a number of abolitionist and African American journals. In 1853, he published his first and only volume of poetry, America and Other Poems, which secured his reputation among African American and abolitionist constituencies. He was profiled as a major African American poet in Delany’s The Condition, Elevation, Emigration and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States (1852), William C. Nell’s The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution (1855), and William Wells Brown’s The Black Man: His Antecedents, His Genius, and His Achievements (1863). Shortly after the publication of America, Whitfield, who regularly participated in African American conventions and meetings, emerged as a champion of the black emigration movement. His pro-emigration letters appeared in African American newspapers and were republished in pamphlet form in Arguments, Pro and Con, on the Call for a National Emigration Convention (1854). When he moved from his longtime home in Buffalo, New York, to California in late 1861 or early 1862, he was embraced by African Americans there as a black nationalist bard. He became the grand master of the Prince Hall Masons of California and was viewed by most African Americans in the Northwest as the great African American poet. Among Whitfield’s important writings of the 1860s was a commemorative poem on Lincoln and his accomplishments , which he read before thousands at a public occasion in San Francisco. An anonymous couplet published in the 1867 black 2 Introduction San Francisco newspaper Pacific Appeal nicely captures the high esteem, even awe, with which Whitfield was regarded by his contemporaries in California: “Whitfield commands; your aid, O Muses bring!/What muse for Whitfield can refuse to sing.”¹ Hailed as a poetic genius in California, Whitfield achieved little commercial success in his lifetime, and by the time of his death in 1871, he had begun to assume a somewhat invisible place within African American literary and cultural history. But he never quite vanished, remaining, like Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, a defining, if hard to detect , presence. Whitfield’s status of being both there and not there was to some extent anticipated (even ensured) by Martin Delany, who surreptitiously incorporated several poems by Whitfield into his novel, Blake; or, The Huts of America (1859, 1861–62), putting them into the mouths (and pens) of Delany-like leaders but without attributing their authorship. (Whitfield had dedicated America to Delany.) Whitfield is also evoked in a novel by his great-niece Pauline Hopkins, Contending Forces (1900), which includes fictionalized biographical profiles and anecdotes featuring Whitfield’s father, mother, and sister, Elizabeth, thereby underscoring how Whitfield’s reputation continued to live on through the memory of his extended New England family. Still, during the twentieth century, Whitfield received only dutiful brief mentions in histories of African American poetry, with a poem or two (sometimes more) republished in a few anthologies, and he continues to be little read and underappreciated.² And yet his 1853 poetic volume , America, which engages the very concept of America, anticipates by two years Walt Whitman’s own poetic volume of America, Leaves of Grass, and is itself one of the most provocative poetic volumes published in the nineteenth century. Whitfield’s current obscurity belies his importance to the history of American poetry as well as his centrality to antebellum debates about the future of blacks in the United States and the larger Americas. This edition seeks to restore Whitfield’s place in the canon of nineteenth-century U.S. poetry and, more specifically, African American literature and intellectual history. We include all of Whitfield’s ex- Introduction 3 tant published works, including the complete America and Arguments, which have not been republished since their first appearance during the 1850s. We are hopeful that this volume will contribute to the ongoing rethinking of nineteenth-century African American writing, which is far more variegated than the conventional focus on the slave narrative and novel would suggest. By situating Whitfield in relation to key debates in African American culture, the volume underscores the importance of poetry and periodical culture to black writing during the antebellum and Civil War periods. The volume also underscores the importance of the debate on emigration to blacks’ conceptions of the U...