AMERICAN LITERATURE

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the

norton

anthology

American

literature

ninth edition

Slavery, Race, and the Making of American Literature

Thomas Jefferson

From several perspectives, this is the most challenging cluster in the anthology. The opening selection, from Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, is a passage that many of his admirers would prefer to avoid—and twentieth-century textbooks featuring his work commonly left it out. The five excerpts that follow Jefferson in this cluster, essays and speeches by David Walker, William Lloyd Garrison, Angelina Grimké, and Sojourner Truth, can be read as rejoinders to the celebrated author of The Declaration of Independence, the Founder who put the phrase “all men are created equal” into the national imagination—from whence it would enter—by slow, hard stages—into the national ethos.

Jefferson regarded himself as a man of science, and along with his achievements as a statesman, he is remembered to this day for an array of interesting domestic inventions and gadgets and for his lifelong interest in the natural world. The opening paragraph of this excerpt is extraordinarily long, almost relentless. Why doesn’t he pause or break up the prose, as he does in The Declaration of Independence? Do you see relentless “scientific” exposition or argumentation here or some other rhetorical strategy at work? Where, in your view, are Jefferson’s grossest lapses in logic, observation, and basic knowledge of the world—and how is language used here in an attempt to maneuver past these weaknesses?

This portrait of Thomas Jefferson by Charles Wilson Peale currently hangs in the U.S. Department of State building in Washington, D.C. It is from some time in the 1790s.

Image credit: Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division

David Walker

“See your Declaration Americans!!! Do you understand your own language? Hear your language, proclaimed to the world, July 4th, 1776—

‘We hold these truths to be self evident—that ALL MEN ARE CREATED EQUAL!! that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness!!’”

In his Appeal, Walker directly engages with things that Jefferson wrote in Notes on the State of Virginia and the Declaration of Independence. Walker is anything but subtle in his critique of Jefferson, and we can see in the excerpt on this slide that Walker availed himself of typography as well as rhetoric to launch his attack on American hypocrisy. Discuss with your students Walker’s use of exclamation points, italics, and capitalization to get across his message. Why did he do this? How does the typography complement the rhetoric of his critique? Does it seem like Walker is attempting to reproduce vocal cadences in his use of typography? Is he trying to make his text “shout”?

William Lloyd Garrison

The Liberator

Pictured here is the masthead of The Liberator, William Lloyd Garrison’s antislavery newspaper. Garrison’s name was synonymous with abolitionism throughout the antebellum period. Garrison, like Walker, invokes the Declaration of Independence. How are the two men similar in their use of this founding document to criticize slavery? Are there any differences in their approach given that one is white (Garrison) and the other African American (Walker)?

Image credit: Bettmann/Corbis via Getty Images

Angelina E. Grimké

“But after all, it may be said, our fathers were certainly mistaken, for the Bible sanctions Slavery, and that is the highest authority. Now the Bible is my ultimate appeal in all matters of faith and practice, and it is to this test I am anxious to bring the subject at issue between us.”

Much of Grimké’s Appeal to the Christian Women of the South is concerned with refuting Biblical justifications for slavery. How effective is she in shooting down the idea that the Bible condones racial slavery? Grimké spends a great deal of time using evidence from the Bible itself to make her argument. Is the Bible the only grounding for her counterargument? To what else does she appeal in her efforts to deny slaveholders their biblical claim?

Sojourner Truth

The shortest passage in the set is Sojourner Truth’s complete speech at the Women’s Rights Convention in Akron, Ohio, in 1851. This speech is transcribed because the speaker never learned to write. What does Sojourner Truth accomplish in this brief address? How does she avail herself of repetition and invective to drive home her point?

This photograph of Sojourner Truth circa 1870 is from the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution.

Image credit: National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

1856 broadside of a slave sale

1863 Broadside of a Slave Sale

Slavery was a ubiquitous presence in the antebellum United States, as this broadside of a slave sale makes evident. Broadsides such as this would have dotted urban and rural areas alike.

Image credit: Library of Congress

Runaway slave broadside

Broadsides such as this 1847 announcement of a reward for the apprehension and return of five runaway slaves would also have been a part of antebellum Americans’ experience with slavery.

Image credit: Library of Congress

An American Slave Market

This 1852 painting, titled An American Slave Market, is signed “Taylor.” Abolitionists wanted to spread the imagery of slavery throughout the Union so that non-slaveholding states could not turn a blind eye to the reality of slavery. Paintings such as this were part of an effort to accomplish that goal.

Image credit: Getty

Picking Cotton on a Georgia Plantation

In contrast to abolitionists who wanted to spread the shocking imagery of the slave trade throughout the United States were those artists who viewed slavery as innocuous and picturesque. This illustration from Balou’s Pictorial (1858), for example, depicts slavery as little more than a part of the American landscape rather than as a blight on the American conscience.

Image credit: Library of Congress

Am I Not a Man and a Brother

One of the most iconic abolitionist images is this illustration of a male slave in chains asking, “Am I not a man and a brother?” An accompanying image of a female slave in chains asking, “Am I not a woman and a sister?” also circulated widely (see the next slide).

Image credit: Library of Congress

Am I Not a Woman?

“Am I Not a Woman and a Sister?”

from George Bourne, Slavery Illustrated in its Effects upon Women, 1837

This image from George Bourne’s Slavery Illustrated in Its Effects upon Women (1837) suggests the increasing interconnections between antislavery and the campaign for women’s rights.

Image credit: Bettmann/Corbis via Getty Images

Whitfield, “Stanzas for the First of August”

From bright West Indies’ sunny seas, Comes, borne upon the balmy breeze, The joyous shout, the gladsome tone, Long in those bloody isles unknown; Bearing across the heaving wave The song of the unfettered slave.

. . . . . . . . . .

And from those islands of the sea,

The scenes of blood and crime and wrong,

The glorious anthem of the free,

Now swells in mighty chorus strong;

Telling th’ oppressed, where’er they roam,

Those islands now are freedom’s home.

Whitfield’s “Stanzas for the First of August” loses much of its political impact when read out of context. The First of August was routinely celebrated by abolitionists to commemorate the Slavery Abolition Act of 1833, which abolished slavery throughout the British Empire. In many African American communities, celebrations on the First of August often took precedence over celebrations of U.S. Independence Day on the Fourth of July. Discuss the poem’s focus on islands in the first and final stanzas, which are reproduced on this slide. What islands are these, and what is their relationship to the history of slavery? What are the political implications in 19th-century America to claim that “Those islands now are freedom’s home”?

“Stanzas for the First of August” is another example of how to redefine the African-American experience by thinking beyond national borders, as is Delany’s Political Destiny of the Colored Race on the American Continent, which takes an explicitly transnational approach to situating race and national identity within the history of the world and the geography of the globe. Whitfield does not appeal to the Declaration of Independence or other U.S. documents to call for an end to slavery (as activists such as Frederick Douglass often would). Rather, he looks to the end of the British slave trade for an example to the United States. What is the rhetorical value of such a move? How does it—or how could it—affect U.S. politics by looking beyond national boundaries?

This concludes the Lecture PowerPoint presentation for

Slavery, Race, and the Making of American Literature

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