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2. Exodus as the Blueprint for Building Free Black Communities (1800–1840)
- Baylor University Press
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31 CHAPTER TWo Exodus as the Blueprint for Building Free Black Communities (1800–1840) I shall need, too, the favor of that Being in whose hands we are, who led our fathers, as Israel of old, from their native land and planted them in a country flowing with all the necessaries and comforts of life. —Thomas Jefferson, Second Inaugural Address The ears of Jehovah have been constantly open to them: He has heard the prayers that have ascended from the hearts of his people; and he has, as in the case of his ancient and chosen people the Jews, come down to deliver our suffering country-men from the hands of their oppressors. —Absalom Jones, A Thanksgiving Sermon As in their religious belief they have a tradition which has been handed down from time almost immemorial, that all the Ethiopian nations, in short that all africans descended from Jethro, the priest of Midean. —Boyrereau Brinch, The Blind African Slave, or, Memoirs of Boyrereau Brinch, Nicknamed Jeffrey Brace The book of Exodus furnishes many conclusive evidences of the direct sanction of slavery. —William Drayton, The South Vindicated from the Treason and Fanaticism of Northern Abolitionists 32 CLAIMING ExoDUS In the first decade of the nineteenth century, England and America’s divergent approaches to slavery caused a significant shift in the development of Afro-Atlantic Exodus narratives. Abolitionists gained a major victory when both countries outlawed the transatlantic slave trade. Each nation developed different philosophies regarding its continued involvement with slavery , however. The United States further entrenched itself as a slave society through a profitable domestic slave trade, while England began to consider how to improve the condition of slaves in the West Indies and legislate for their gradual emancipation. As it expanded territorially, the United States maintained an equal number of free and slave states, reflecting the country’s contentious division over slavery. In contrast, in 1833 Parliament abolished slavery throughout the British Empire. As England’s antislavery movement flourished and emancipation day drew near, Afro-British writers’ literary production diminished. By 1800, many of the late eighteenth-century Afro-British authors who invoked the Exodus narrative in their writings had died or disappeared from public record. other black writers in England published a variety of texts, most notably John Jea’s The Life, History, and Unparalleled Sufferings of John Jea, the African Preacher, Compiled and Written by Himself (1815), Robert Wedderburn ’s The Axe Laid to the Root (1817) and The Horrors of Slavery (1824), and Mary Prince’s History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave, Related by Herself (1831). Two of these writers appropriated the Exodus narrative in their work: Jea to encourage release from the slavery of sin and Wedderburn to demand the slaying of English slaveholders in Jamaica similar to God’s destruction of the Israelites’ Egyptian oppressors. British abolitionists continued to circulate stories in antislavery newspapers about enslaved Africans laboring in the West Indies, but they rarely contributed to the Afro-Atlantic Exodus tradition that Equiano, Cugoano, Marrant, and Wheatley had introduced. The Second Great Awakening, a religious revival that swept the United States from the late eighteenth to the mid-nineteenth century, reintroduced free and enslaved African Americans to the Exodus narrative, rekindled their hope for a deliverer, and made them the primary authors of Afro-Atlantic Exodus stories. As early nineteenth-century African American writers and their supporters began to shape new Exodus narratives, they embraced Moses as the model of a deliverer who would lead them to their promised land. In their writings they constituted themselves as God’s oppressed people and variously urged free and enslaved blacks to transform their American Egypt into a promised land, fight white racists in a contested American promised land, or emigrate to foreign black promised lands. In the process, [54.211.203.45] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 14:26 GMT) ExoDUS AS THE BLUEPRINT FoR BUILDING 33 some advocated nonviolent resistance, others physical rebellion. Editors of antislavery and black newspapers further encouraged the development of black Exodus stories by publishing articles instructing a national black audience how to transform the language of Exodus into abolitionist and reform rhetoric essential for community building in the African Diaspora. Although writers consistently turned to Moses as the primary leadership model in the early nineteenth century, some created fissures in the Afro-Atlantic Exodus tradition by invoking the Joseph and Joshua stories to characterize new leaders who called for reform in America or homes in foreign promised lands...