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

PART I. America

31 PART I America In 1853, the James S. Leavitt Company, a relatively small press in Buffalo known for its Universalist and Unitarian publications,¹ brought out Whitfield’s first and only collection, America and Other Poems. Dedicated to Martin R. Delany, whose emigrationist politics Whitfield had recentlyembraced,thevolumeconsistedoftwenty-fourpoems,atleast eight of which had been previously published in Frederick Douglass’s newspapers. Other poems may have appeared in more obscure African American newspapers. The book measured approximately four by six inches and was bound with soft covers in the manner of a pamphlet. The small size and light weight would have facilitated the efforts of Whitfield, and perhaps others, to peddle a dozen or so books at a time. Whitfield sold copies of the book at his barbershop and onboard ships, where he sometimes worked as a barber. Easily rolled up or folded, America could be carried in one’s shirt or pants pocket and passed from one reader to another.² Whitfield’s contractual relationship with the Leavitt Company is unclear. There was broad sympathy for abolitionism among Universalists , Unitarians, and other liberal Protestant groups in the Northeast, so Leavitt may have offered a royalties contract for a volume by the city’s leading black poet. Or, just as likely, Whitfield may have used some of his savings from barbering to commission Leavitt as his publisher and then actively vended copies in order to recover his initial investment. We get some sense of Whitfield’s situation from America’s anonymous introduction, which reports that Whitfield works as a barber and “writes in such intervals of leisure as he is able to realize.” The 32 America and Other Poems author of the introduction self-identifies with Whitfield as an African American and hopes that the volume will succeed with “our people.” In all likelihood, the author of the introduction is Whitfield himself. After all, who else would have known that Whitfield “feels the ‘Divine spark’ within”? Like William Wells Brown, who anonymously introduced his novel Clotel, published the same year as America, Whitfield may have wanted to avoid the typical situation of having a white editor introduce (and in some ways appropriate) a black text.³ The self-authored introduction triumphantly announces the advent of a black American poet who has composed, organized, and published a volume of poetry on his own terms. Despite the relative obscurity of the press, America received considerable attention, garnering reviews in the most prominent antislavery newspapers of the time: William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator, Douglass’s Frederick Douglass’ Paper, and Mary Ann Shadd’s Provincial Freeman, which was the most influential black journal in Canada. As noted in our introduction, America was also reviewed in the Pennsylvania Freeman, and it was probably reviewed in other small-circulation black abolitionist newspapers as well. Reviewers hailed the volume. Douglass’s regular reviewer and business manager, Julia Griffiths, declared in Frederick Douglass’ Paper that “Mr. Whitfield is a genius, and a genuine lover of the muses.” Garrison asserted in the Liberator that Whitfield “evinces genius of no common order.” The anonymous reviewer in the Provincial Freeman exclaimed that Whitfield is “entitled to a first place among the colored men, known as such in the United States, who have been inspired by the Muses,” concluding that a copy of America “should be in every family.”⁴ In addition to praising Whitfield ’s poetic genius, reviewers typically offered a sampling from the book and in this way helped to circulate Whitfield’s poems to those who might not have access to a bookseller with the volume.⁵ Douglass and Griffiths also reprinted one of Whitfield’s poems in their fundraising collection, Autographs for Freedom (1853), thereby linking Whitfield with such popular writers as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Catharine Sedgwick , and John Greenleaf Whittier, who were also contributors.⁶ America and Other Poems 33 America secured Whitfield’s contemporary reputation as a great African American poet, but that reputation could not make a career. Despite his entrepreneurial efforts at selling his well-received book in Buffalo and elsewhere, the volume failed to provide him with the income he needed to become a full-time author, and his poetry writing became more sporadic. Over the next eighteen years, Whitfield would nevertheless strive “to cultivate, improve, and fully develop the talent which God hath given him” (as he puts it in the introduction to America), and poetry would remain central to his work as an antislavery...