Calling Out Liberty: The Stono Slave Rebellion and the Universal Struggle for Human Rights

Chapter 5. The Heirs of Jemmy: Slave Rebels in Nineteenth–Century African American Fiction

- 116 Chapter 5 ,  ,  ,  ,  , the heirs of jemmy Slave Rebels in Nineteenth-Century African American Fiction The English language befriends the grand American expression. . . . It is the powerful language of resistance. —Walt Whitman, Preface to Leaves of Grass (1855) benedict anderson asserts that a nation is “an imagined political community”(6). Such a nation “is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. Ultimately it is this alliance that makes it possible, over the past two centuries for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings” (7). Nations promote “fellowfeeling ”; they create bonds of identity. As I note in chapter 1, Anderson also acknowledges that in early America “print-capitalism . . . made it possible for rapidly growing numbers of people to think about themselves, and to relate themselves to others, in profoundly new ways” (36). He posits that these national identities are produced when people participate in the shared practice of reading—most notably,when they read newspapers.Newspapers foster a particular community identity because they are locally produced for daily consumption; thus, reading a newspaper can become a ritualized and unifying cultural activity (34–35). Elizabeth McHenry writes that in the nineteenth century some African Americans also traveled this printed path to racial/ethnic or national identity—to the formation of an “imagined community.”She examines the efforts of free blacks in the North to gain access to the press and printed texts and to establish networks of print distribution and communication. The goal of these free blacks was to counter the popular argument that they were ignorant and incapable of useful literacy and to create black literary communities. The press was “a strategy that leaders in the black community believed would open the doors of American society to black people” - 117 slave rebels in nineteenth-century fiction (McHenry 86). African Americans used the press on behalf of the black middle and working classes to help establish an identity and presence in the United States. Certainly, the press was an important mechanism for whites to share information, trade, and take part in the ongoing narrative of nationhood, but the developing black press also served these purposes, allowing some freedmen to participate in that narrative or, perhaps, to create their own. Samuel Cornish and John Russworm’s Freedom’s Journal (1827), the short-lived first African American newspaper, was one such attempt to establish a literary culture within the African American community and, in so doing, establish that community’s legitimacy and its claims for equal treatment.The editors intentionally wrote copy that focused less on slavery, the most obvious and pressing concern in the African American community , and more on establishing readers.They believed that freedmen would be treated better if their day-to-day behavior changed—if they could participate in the “literary community,” broadly defined. Freedom’s Journal published a significant amount of “fluff” and was inexpensive, thus giving blacks ready material for reading and conversation. McHenry writes that Cornish and Russworm’s goal was for African Americans “to understand the public uses to which literature could be put” (102). African Americans, they concluded, should be able to participate effectively in the larger public sphere—this would give them the clout to press other claims, perhaps their rights as human beings. And yet, African Americans understood that being accepted by whites was not the only method for obtaining human rights. Human rights discourse manifests in much of nineteenth-century African American prose written by David Walker, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, T. Thomas Fortune, and countless others. For such writers, African American identity rests on this discourse because only through the bold assertion of one’s human rights could one hope to be treated as a human and, ultimately, as an American citizen.These writers pushed the ideals of the Declaration of Independence into the public sphere in hopes that America would truly become America, as Langston Hughes would write in the twentieth century. This human rights discourse, as it transformed and asserted itself, was not rooted in print culture alone; the claims expressed by the Stono rebels and other slave insurrectionists were also central to its development. Writing about victims of the South African apartheid regime, Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela notes that “the mistake is to see the political as separate - 118 slave rebels in nineteenth-century fiction from the personal—to see discontinuities between...