Enjoy the Same Liberty by Edward Countryman

Author:Edward Countryman [Countryman, Edward]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
Published: 2011-02-28T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter Four

“Now Our Mother Country”

Black Americans and the Unfinished Revolution

“This land which we have watered with our tears and our blood is now our mother country and we are well satisfied to stay.”

—Richard Allen, 1827

Imagine the United States in 1826, half a century after Congress declared independence. The last members of the revolutionary generation, black, white, and native, female and male, patriot and loyalist, were recounting their long-ago memories to anybody who would listen, and preparing to fade into history. As they passed, they left behind a world vastly different from the one into which all of them had been born.

The differences were as great for black people as for anybody else. Consider one simple contrast between the colonial era and the early republic. Africans and their descendants in the colonial world were not simply victims, and we can watch them making their own history, within what life allowed. But we know hardly any of them face-to-face. We hear only a few of their spoken words: thus “Fire, fire, scorch, scorch, a little, damn it, bye and bye,” just before the New York City conspiracy trials of 1741. We have almost nothing that they wrote. They appear in many a painting, but always as subordinates, in the background, never as subjects in their own right. There are careful pen-portraits of people who escaped, but masters published these to aid in recapture, not to mark the escaped person as worth knowing. A few of their names clearly were African: Cuffee (Kofi), Cudjoe, Quashee, or perhaps Phillis. But in slavery’s circumstances such names signified degradation, not their bearers’ African past. Most of the names the enslavers forced upon them were diminutive (Billy rather than William), or fit for a goddess (Venus) but insulting to a slave. For all but a very few we cannot know even as much as the haunting modern-day markers (“male, age 25–30”) reveal at New York’s African Burial Ground.

The great project of the captors had been to wipe enslaved people off history’s record. Whether they were captured or born into slavery, their very names signified that they were to possess neither a past nor a future, only slavery’s eternal, hopeless present. When it seemed in 1775 that the free black Charles Town harbor pilot Thomas Jeremiah did have a vision of what might be, and that he would aid the British in order to bring his vision about, white Carolinians did not just hang him, after a summary trial. They burned his body (or forced their slaves to do it), as if to remove him completely from the earth and from memory. The year was 1775, not 1741. Somehow Jeremiah had found a niche and turned himself into a well-respected, prosperous figure on the Charles Town waterfront. He left records enough to reconstruct his life, his ordeal at the hands of the revolutionary authorities, and his death. Still, we have no idea what he looked like.

Half a century later the picture had changed. By then the American historical record abounded with black men and women whose full names we know.

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