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Revolutions and Reconstructions: Black Politics in the Long Nineteenth Century (Early American Studies) - Hardcover

 
9780812252323: Revolutions and Reconstructions: Black Politics in the Long Nineteenth Century (Early American Studies)
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0812252322 ISBN 13: 9780812252323
Verlag: UNIV OF PENNSYLVANIA PR, 2020

Inhaltsangabe

Revolutions and Reconstructions gathers historians of the early republic, the Civil War era, and African American and political history to consider not whether black people participated in the politics of the nineteenth century but how, when, and with what lasting effects. Collectively, its authors insist that historians go beyond questioning how revolutionary the American Revolution was, or whether Reconstruction failed, and focus, instead, on how political change initiated by African Americans and their allies constituted the rule in nineteenth-century American politics, not occasional and cataclysmic exceptions.

The essays in this groundbreaking collection cover the full range of political activity by black northerners after the Revolution, from cultural politics to widespread voting, within a political system shaped by the rising power of slaveholders. Conceptualizing a new black politics, contributors observe, requires reorienting American politics away from black/white and North/South polarities and toward a new focus on migration and local or state structures. Other essays focus on the middle decades of the nineteenth century and demonstrate that free black politics, not merely the politics of slavery, was a disruptive and consequential force in American political development.

From the perspective of the contributors to this volume, formal black politics did not begin in 1865, or with agitation by abolitionists like Frederick Douglass in the 1840s, but rather in the Revolutionary era's antislavery and citizenship activism. As these essays show, revolution, emancipation, and Reconstruction are not separate eras in U.S. history, but rather linked and ongoing processes that began in the 1770s and continued through the nineteenth century.

Contributors: Christopher James Bonner, Kellie Carter Jackson, Andrew Diemer, Laura F. Edwards, Van Gosse, Sarah L. H. Gronningsater, M. Scott Heerman, Dale Kretz, Padraig Riley, Samantha Seeley, James M. Shinn Jr., David Waldstreicher.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Van Gosse is Professor of History at Franklin and Marshall College. David Waldstreicher is Distinguished Professor of History at the Graduate Center, City University of New York.

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Introduction
Black Politics and U.S. Politics in the Age of Revolutions, Reconstructions, and Emancipations
Van Gosse and David Waldstreicher

This volume gathers historians of the early republic, the Civil War era, and African American life to consider not whether African Americans participated in the politics of the early, ante-, and postbellum republic, but how, when, and with what lasting effects. Together, the essays advance several important revisions with the potential to transform our understandings of black and U.S. political history in the period between the Revolutionary and Reconstruction eras. These revisions should also lead historians to consider anew the classic questions regarding how revolutionary the Revolution was; whether and how Reconstruction failed; and how conflicts shaped by African Americans and their allies might be considered the rule in American politics, not occasional and cataclysmic exceptions. They also suggest that black politics needs to be analyzed simultaneously as a politics of racial resistance intruding upon the political-electoral system and as the politics of biracial coalitions inside that system, rather than as one or the other. Emancipation, Reconstruction, and Revolution, in other words, are not solely events or even periods in U.S. history, but rather also interrelated processes that began at the beginning and continued through the nineteenth century.

Our project had its origins in the editors' separate and then shared realization that their own research kept pushing the narrative of an effective, cosmopolitan black politics further back in time than our colleagues who specialize in the twentieth century wanted to go. At the same time, we recognized numerous fellow travelers working in the history of the Revolutionary era and the long nineteenth century. We began to think that the "long reconstruction" traced in recent decades by southern historians interested in black struggles for and beyond the ballot box had decided parallels in the historiography of the early republic. Increasingly, we saw that formal black politics did not begin in 1865 with the end of the Civil War, nor in the 1840s with agitation by abolitionists like Frederick Douglass, but rather in the Revolutionary era's antislavery and citizenship activism.

The gradual, state-by-state emergence of free territories, in turn, shaped the terrain of black political action and imagination from the birth of the republic. The stress on rising racism in recent work continues to deepen our sense of what black politics was up against, but as Padraig Riley argues here, it can risk underestimating why racist politics—the reactionary political and cultural coalition-building that Alexander Saxton memorably called "the rise of the White Republic"—was pursued in the first place. Black politics—not just the politics of pro- and antislavery pursued by various factions of white partisans—was much more than a thorn in the side of democratic U.S. political culture in its mid-nineteenth century heyday. It did not prove only accidentally disruptive; its expressly motivated and consequential patterns began considerably earlier.

The practical strategies and ideological Americanism of black protest confronted and inspired racializing proslavery politics; it infuriated those who sought to establish and maintain cross-sectional partisan alliances. Black politics in and around the state (not just "resistance" or rebellion) produced racist backlashes that in turn shaped later protest strategies, as suggested in histories that trace the origins of modern left and liberal politics to antislavery and especially the black abolitionists. Every story we can tell about the making and remaking of the state, and the parties, needs to be examined as a matter of reciprocal influences, a dialectic of black and U.S. politics that can be surprising only when we forget something U.S. historians should no longer forget: that we are talking about four and a half million people by 1860. This is a number far too large to be an exception and too many not to shape the nature of the polity.

A Historiographical Ellipsis

Before turning to the individual and collective interventions made by the essays in this volume, we need to address the peculiar status of the historiography on black people's politics prior to the Civil War, without which the voluminous history of black politics during and after Reconstruction cannot be fully comprehended. There is a double problem here, two intertwined issues to be unpacked, so as to clarify why a book like this is needed—and why it comes so late, more than sixty years after historians like Kenneth Stampp broke the barrier against "Negro History" inside the then almost entirely white mainstream of the historians' guild.

On the one hand, African Americans continue to be excluded from the enormous corpus of antebellum political history, with few exceptions. This is among the most formidable bodies of scholarship in American historical writing, tracing with the weight of tragedy the declension into an extremely bloody civil war. So, the first problem is simply a silence, an ellipsis: insisting that political history is still white men's history should not be seen as a natural or organic fact.

The second problem is not an absence, but a profusion of scholarship all in one direction, which ends in the same ellipsis. In the past generation, dozens of historians have written books and articles analyzing what they considered to be the "politics" of black people in this period, and yet only a handful of those books and articles even acknowledge the participation of free people of color in the U.S. political system. By inference, they agree with the normative whiteness presumed by the political historians. Upon reflection, then, one problem, one absence, and one purpose of this book is to challenge that surely unconscious agreement.

To do so we will begin by examining what scholarship actually exists on black politics, in the traditional sense of political history—voting, elections, and parties (although, as discussed below, a new focus on legal and constitutional history is generating major insights into how free people of color engaged with the state). From there we will look at the three larger bodies of scholarship that claim to trace the politics of antebellum African Americans: first, and most obvious, the "slave politics" available to the unfree, those barred from any access to voting, elections, and parties; second, the "movement politics" of the free people of color, also outside of the electoral arena; and third, the "cultural politics" highlighted by scholars who focus on expression in various genres of literary and popular culture.

Assembling a historiography of black politics prior to Reconstruction is difficult, because the subfield itself is not even recognized as such, and there is no recognized body of work; rather, scholarship on black politics as part of antebellum American politics is spread among subfields that do not engage with each other, like tributaries leading in different directions. Until the 1960s, almost the only historical investigation of the topic came from some of the founders of black history, notably Charles Wesley, who wrote a series of well-sourced articles, and John Hope Franklin, who included North Carolina's pre-1835 black electorate in his classic study of that state's free people of color. White historians presumed that black politics were defined by Reconstruction, as either a pathetic tragedy or evidence of racial incapacity. When they did mention antebellum voting, as in James Truslow Adams's brief historiographical comment in 1925, they got it wrong. The signal exception was Dixon Ryan Fox's 1917 "The Negro Vote in Old New York," long cited as authoritative, although...

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Verlag
UNIV OF PENNSYLVANIA PR
Erscheinungsdatum
2020
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0812252322
ISBN 13 
9780812252323
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
384
Herausgeber
Gosse Van, Waldstreicher David
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Nicht verfügbar
Verantwortliche Person
Mare Nostrum Group B.V.
gpsr@mare-nostrum.co.uk

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