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CHAPTER 1 Troubling the Pages of Historians African American Intellectuals and Historical Writing in the Early Republic, 1817–1837 I have been for years troubling the pages of historians, to find out what our fathers have done to the white Christians of America, to merit such condign punishment as they have inflicted on them, and do continue to inflict on us their children. But I must aver, that my researches have hitherto been to no effect.—DAVID WALKER, Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, 1829 THE ERA OF THE EARLY REPUBLIC WAS, without a doubt, a hopeful and promising moment in American history. Not only had the country expanded demographically and spatially after the Louisiana Purchase in 1803, it abolished the Atlantic slave trade in 1808 and successfully weathered a significant challenge to its sovereignty by defeating the British in the War of 1812. Yet, African Americans searched, often in vain, for recognition of, and appreciation for, their contributions to this national development and their achievements in this process. David Walker recognized the incongruity; he also understood the stakes involved in an accurate representation of the past. As Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World suggests, and literary historian Elizabeth McHenry’s recent work on black reading habits demonstrates, “troubling the pages of historians” became an important cause among black intellectuals and could very well serve as a central metaphor for their efforts during the era of the early republic. They “trouble[d]” the pages of historians as they searched existing documentary/historical records for evidence of other African Americans ’ contributions to historical developments. And the evidence they found went to produce new texts, which, no doubt, also served to “trouble” the pages of historians who, to that point, had written history almost as if African Americans had no past.1 The emergence of African American historical texts coincided with the explosion of print culture in the United States. Determined to present a nuanced {18} TROUBLING THE PAGES OF HISTORIANS and complex portrait of themselves as citizens and actors in the human drama, black intellectuals began to use and produce texts that accentuated their humanity in a world where slavery and black degradation were commonplace. While it is clear, as others have argued, that oratorical and commemorative historical expressions played a significant role in conveying historical messages in the African American public sphere, texts, especially pamphlets and later books, played an increasingly important role in shaping historical understandings in the black community.2 Rooted in the desire of an expanding, educated, and literate population to define itself as more than slaves or circumscribed citizens, black intellectuals’ engagement with history centered on the interrogation of texts in the effort to understand and name the complex realities of African American existence in the modern world. Naming the realities of black existence in the modern world required more than oratorical eloquence or rhetorical flourish, as important as both were. To be especially effective, it depended on the ability of intellectuals to penetrate the central texts of the Western canon, namely universal, classical, and biblical history. In doing so, these writers demonstrated their deep engagement with Enlightenment-driven modes of rationality, which in this case privileged reason over speculation and the written over the oral. Texts, in these intellectuals’ minds, not only provided access to the past but also helped to preserve that past and create new possibilities for the interpretation of black life and history.3 In 1817, African American intellectuals comprised a small, but vocal minority , concentrated in well-established, primarily free communities, such as New Haven, New York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. Most were self-trained, some had matriculated at American liberal arts colleges, and a few had enjoyed access to educational institutions abroad. The creation and expansion of domestic institutions such as schools, churches, and literary and historical associations contributed to the growth of this small intellectual class. Black intellectuals, like African Americans in general, however, faced severe proscription in the public sphere. As members of a group conceptualized as a perpetual problem and nuisance in the North, and increasingly as “hewers of wood and drawers of water” in the South, black intellectuals faced an uphill battle in their effort to construct more promising and complex portraits of racial possibility. Although they usually rejected the tendency common among Enlightenment theorists to divide the world into a classic binary—the civilized and the savage—these intellectuals were strong proponents of the Enlightenment vision of the world...

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