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6 Race, Citizenship, Sentiment, and the Construction of an Antislavery Public Sphere “cato mungo, who lately arrived into this city from the United States of America, where he has been kept in slavery for upwards of twenty years, has given us a long and melancholy account of the treatment of the poor African in that land of cruelty,” read the opening line of an excerpt from the imaginary “Gazette of Guinea.” This curious parody, printed in a 1795 edition of Mott and Hurtin’s New-York Weekly Chronicle, provided a multilayered satire of public discourse regarding racial bondage. Conferring the name Cato Mungo on the African returnee made him the bearer of two names—one evoking Rome, the other evoking Africa—used to signal black characters in newspaper poems and anecdotes. The heading “african intelligence” placed above the “Gazette of Guinea” by-line was a racially motivated pun. Africans did not produce such “intelligence” as a newspaper, which was presumably a reflection on their backwardness.1 Paradoxically, this item was also an assertion of African intelligence, an issue central to an emerging discourse on the nature of racial difference in lateeighteenth -century America. By imagining what such an African newspaper would report in standard English prose—that American slavery unnaturally degraded its victims and divided them from their families—this submission also attacked American slavery. The “Gazette of Guinea” announced that Mungo’s full story would soon be printed “in a pamphlet . . . [so] that the people here may be informed of the miserable state of their brethren, who have been so unfortunate as to fall into the hands of the Americans.” The piece turned the tables on the United States’ racially myopic view of justice at a time when newspapers decried the enslavement of white American sailors on Africa’s Barbary coast. An item that incorporated elements of racially disparaging humor actually extended a form of sympathy in a forum where New Yorkers debated the contours and details of public life. Thus, this curious item in the Weekly Chronicle had done Benjamin Franklin’s Historicus satire one better by enlisting an imagined black African slave, rather than an imaginary Algerian enslaver, to critique slavery. Race, Citizenship, Sentiment, and the Antislavery Public Sphere 103 I. Throughout the 1780s and 1790s, New York newspapers employed the voices of Africans, usually fictive and enslaved, to develop arguments about the nature of citizenship in post–Revolutionary War America. Editors represented black voices in poetry and prose, in soliloquy and dialogue. Language from the mouths of black speakers could convey the irreducible nobility of the captive, the essential ignorance of the servile, or gradations in between.2 How African and African American voices were rendered provided raceladen commentary on the suitability of slavery and the proper dimensions of the public sphere.3 New Yorkers grappled with the relationship between race and citizenship as they considered gradual abolition. Newspaper portrayals of black voices revealed some of the perceived implications of abolition. Such portrayals also displayed the proslavery and antislavery tactics deployed to persuade the public. Sometimes published black voices articulated standard, or elevated, English speech; at other times, words tumbled forth in a dialect fraught with nonstandard pronunciations and misspellings. Editors and correspondents also used black voices to critique slavery directly. Whatever the degree of explicit political content in an individual rendering, the context and varied potential associations were political in nature.4 Through these voices, some real but most imagined, New Yorkers discussed the possibility of African American citizenship. In a region moving irresolutely toward a slaveless democracy, the prospect of black freedom stimulated consideration of African American access to public discourse and exercise of the franchise. Constructing the black voice in newspapers thus became an exercise in evaluating such qualities as intellect and moral character.5 This discourse emerged when ideological conceptions of race were at best partially articulated and in pronounced tension with republican egalitarianism. Thus, this earlier discourse was distinct from the succeeding nineteenth-century working-class and immigrant embrace of black minstrelsy as a way to reinforce “whiteness.”6 The method and terms of the debate over black citizenship grew out of larger patterns of thought on late-eighteenth-century public rhetoric. The post-Revolution expansion of published material, such as newspapers aimed at a broad public audience, encouraged a definition of discourse that hinged as much on the printed as the spoken word. One of the crucial advantages of print was its pretense of capturing spoken words. Publishers...

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