Educated for Freedom by Anna Mae Duane

Author:Anna Mae Duane
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HIS036000 History / United States / General
Publisher: NYU Press

Napoleon Francois Charles Joseph. Ink drawing, 1825, by James McCune Smith. New-York Historical Society & Museum, New-York African Free-School Records, vol. 4.

CHAPTER 6

Follow the Money, Find the Revolution (CIRCA 1850–1855)

AMONG his formidable talents, the young James McCune Smith had been an adept visual artist. At least two of his childhood drawings survive in the records of the New York African Free Schools. The lesson behind one of those drawings—a rendition of Benjamin Franklin, replete with coonskin cap—is not hard to deduce. Franklin was celebrated throughout the early republic, held up as a model for young people to follow. The reason why a twelve-year-old Black student spent a significant part of his day drawing the likeness of Napoleon Francois Charles Joseph is harder to discern. Napoleon Francois Charles Joseph (more popularly known as Napoleon II) was the son of Napoleon Bonaparte. At the age of three, he was named the heir apparent to all his father’s wealth and power. Shortly after, however, the tables turned. The defeated Napoleon Bonaparte was forced to abdicate all claims to power for himself and for his progeny. We do not know if young James McCune Smith, or the classmates who probably admired his handiwork, took heart from this story of the defeat of hereditary power. If Napoleon II’s fate was not secured by his father’s high status, perhaps their own fates were not doomed by their fathers’ lack of it.

At the time when James McCune Smith was sketching his portrait of a royal exile, Henry Highland Garnet was in the midst of his own frantic exodus, running with his family away from the Maryland plantation where he had been born into slavery. Now, as an established minister, husband, and father headed for England, Garnet found himself once again far from home, stepping into a new world that promised freedom from afar, but that got decidedly more complicated up close. As he stepped off the ship after crossing the Atlantic in August of 1850, there was another relative of Bonaparte ruling France, having risen to the throne after the June massacre of 1849 that crushed the dreams of a global alliance that the revolutions of 1848 had raised. Although the little Bonaparte that Smith had sketched back in New York had died in 1832 without leaving an heir, his cousin had recently come to power. That cousin dubbed himself Napoleon III, reaffirming the brief, largely symbolic reign of the young boy whose likeness Smith had drawn with such pathos.1 And France was not the only site where the hopes of the 1848 uprisings had been dashed. Throughout Europe, one after another, the gains of revolution were being lost. Revolutionary thinkers such as Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels had fled to England to escape persecution. The famed Hungarian rebel Kossuth had been imprisoned.2

Still, as Garnet set foot on the other side of the Atlantic, he found himself as far from slavery’s grasp as he had ever been. He followed in the wake of many of his friends and colleagues.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.