Setting the Stage of Black Freedom

Parades and "Presence" in the New Nation

In the aftermath of the armed conflicts of the American War of Independence, a series of "quiet" structural revolutions commenced. The United States had to instate an untested system of democratic governance called republicanism; implement new economies of capital, exchange, and labor predicated on the individual's absolute right to property; and readjust to the large-scale demographic shifts the war produced. The role of slaves and free people of color in the emergent polity surfaced as a markedly fraught question. On the one hand, dominant civic discourses rendered whiteness the precondition of citizenship. On the other, the prevalence of the rhetoric of egalitarianism threatened the permanence of such race-based civil circumscriptions. That many slaves and free people of color had distinguished themselves in the Revolutionary cause and demanded full citizenship in return made questions of civil inclusion all the more pressing.

These demands helped quicken antislavery sentiment in the period, when many already doubted the viability of slavery in a new nation founded on principles of democratic freedom. Indeed, northern state legislatures enacted gradual emancipation statutes, and slaveholders in all regions (most notably the Upper South) manumitted slaves in vast numbers. The increasing masses of free black people did not attempt to isolate themselves from their former masters; rather, they sought to expand the polity in such a way that included them as equal participants. In this effort they crafted a protest culture that merged (inherited) African notions of community, institution-building, and personal obligation to Enlightenment discourses and political practices. These doings, along with the patterns of black migration throughout the North American continent that emancipation instigated, laid the groundwork for what would become African America.

Throughout the early national period, African Americans continued to stress that their efforts toward the formation of the U.S. were at the core of their identity. As literary historian John Ernest writes, "In the pages of the early [black] historical texts, one encounters frequently both the history and prehistory of African American contributions to American military and political history." The most venerated and recurring historical figure in this literature is runaway slave Crispus Attucks. Attucks was one of the first men British soldiers killed in the Boston Massacre, an initiating event of the American Revolution, and he quickly became the iconic signifier of selfless black patriotism. His story appealed to early bla