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CHAPTER 4 The Historical Mind of Emancipation Writing African American History at the Dawn of Freedom, 1863–1882 Whenever emancipation shall take place, immediate though it may be, the subjects of it, like many who now make up the so-called free population, will be in what Geologists call, the “Transition State.” The prejudice now felt against them for bearing on their persons the brand of slaves, cannot die out immediately. Severe trials will still be their portion—the curse of a “taunted race” must be expiated by almost miraculous proofs of advancement; and some of these miracles must be antecedent to the great day of Jubilee. —CHARLES L. REASON, “Introduction: The Colored People’s Industrial College,” 1854 BETWEEN 1863, which marked the passage of the Emancipation Proclamation , the publication of William Wells Brown’s The Black Man, and the decisive Union victory at Gettysburg, and 1882, the year of the publication of Joseph Wilson’s Emancipation: Its Course and Progress, there occurred a decisive shift in the style and content of historical writing among African Americans. Between Brown’s and Wilson’s work, William Still’s The Underground Railroad represents a tangible example of the method by which black scholars wrote and disseminated African American history. Still, head of Philadelphia’s Vigilance Committee from 1850 to 1861, reconstructed the harrowing tales and escapes of fugitive slaves and printed them in a massive tome, which he subtitled, “A Record of Facts, Authentic Narratives, Letters &c., Narrating the Hardships, Hair-breadth Escapes and Death Struggles of the Slaves in Their Efforts for Freedom, as Related by Themselves, and Others, or Witnessed by the Author.”1 Still’s innovations in publishing and dissemination laid the groundwork for the subsequent explosion in the production of and market for black historical texts in the 1880s and 1890s.2 Momentous changes in book production and distribution occurred against the backdrop of the Civil War—the most cataclysmic event of the nineteenth century in America and a harbinger of change in the culture. The historian {124} THE HISTORICAL MIND OF EMANCIPATION Robert Wiebe has characterized this period as one in which the United States “searched for order.” The nation moved from an insular, disconnected, autonomous set of “island communities” to a more cosmopolitan, connected, and bureaucratized set of interlocking spheres. These changes affected the intellectual community in significantly different ways than other sectors of society. An insular, elitist, and regionally oriented intellectual class gradually evolved into a more pluralistic, scientific, and nationally oriented intelligentsia. As Dorothy Ross has noted, the intellectual crisis of the Gilded Age (1865–96) involved diminishing the power of the antebellum clerical elite, which had held the social sciences in colleges hostage to religious concerns and moral philosophy. With the gradual transference and eventual adoption of German models of scientism and objectivity in American institutions of higher learning as the period progressed , the clerical leadership of the nation’s intellectual life increasingly came under scrutiny.3 The formation of educational institutions throughout the South during the postbellum years led to the establishment of the black academy. But unlike for the white population, this period did not see a substantial departure from the clerically oriented model of the antebellum period in these new institutions.4 As Johns Hopkins, Cornell, and Stanford, and graduate departments at Columbia and Harvard enthroned scientism and objectivity, a substantial number of the new black normal schools and colleges, still dominated by clerical elite and missionaries, emphasized religion and moral philosophy. Their purpose was to enhance conditions for the group, to be sure, but also, significantly, to act as a mechanism of social control and, in some instances, as a means of discouraging significant agitation for civil and political rights. Consequently, the emergence of a black, university-trained elite with graduate degrees in the newly constituted social sciences was in the offing, but not a tangible reality in the years between 1863 and 1882.5 Located outside of the nascent black academy, giving them some degree of autonomy from the clerical elite who dominated the educational institutions for some years to come, “older” black intellectuals, especially historical writers like William Wells Brown and William Still used the status garnered from the antebellum period to promote their racial agenda and lend their experience to a race just emerging from slavery. Frederick Douglass, the representative man of the race until his death in 1895, used the pen as a weapon to end slavery and to define freedom. And the critical markers for...

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