“This Week Black Paul Preach’d”: Fragment and Method in Early African American Studies
Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 2016
Documents concerning Thomas Paul (c. 1773–1831), Nathaniel Paul (1770s–1839), and their siblings,... more Documents concerning Thomas Paul (c. 1773–1831), Nathaniel Paul (1770s–1839), and their siblings, dating from their early lives, before they became involved in the abolitionist movement, are examined. The documents suggest that by 1805 the Paul family was committed to defending the Calvinist theology of Baptist Isaac Backus (1724–1806), to critiquing Universalist Christianity, and to soliciting charitable donations for semi-independent black Baptist churches. In Boston, in 1806, Thomas Paul opened the First African Baptist Church. This essay argues that documents from the early history of black Baptists should be interpreted with a method different from that used for early black Congregationalists, Methodists, and Anglicans. With little access to print culture, early black Baptists are more likely to have left brief fragments as manuscripts than to have published full-length tracts, sermons, poems, and memoirs. The method recommended is comparative, taking into account both contemporary black authors and white co-religionists. Utilization of this method reveals a set of black Baptist concerns that predate the organized, immediatist abolitionist movement by several decades. This method may be extended to other fragmentary documents.
Some Thoughts on the Subject of Freeing the Negro Slaves in the Colony of Connecticut, Humbly Offered to the Consideration of All Friends to Liberty & Justice," by Levi Hart
The Spirit of Modern Republicanism: The Moral Vision of the American Founders and the Philosophy of Locke
Journal of the Early Republic, 1990
... Nietzsche taught us all to call "value judgments." The most basic moral judgments c... more ... Nietzsche taught us all to call "value judgments." The most basic moral judgments came ... Having discovered, or having rediscovered, that history lacks rational coherence, modern thought was ... essential, as regards humanity and the permanent principles of human nature; or one ...
This essay attributes an 1815 condemnation of fornication, published in Vermont, to Lemuel Haynes... more This essay attributes an 1815 condemnation of fornication, published in Vermont, to Lemuel Haynes (1753-1833). Redressing a deficit of scholarly attention to sexuality in early African American print culture, it contextualizes Haynes's document within a spectrum of similar texts, and notes the variety of print culture instruments available to early African American authors, including anonymous publication, financial subscription, and publishing under a white author's name.
“This Week Black Paul Preach’d”: Fragment and Method in Early African American Studies
Early American Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 2016
Documents concerning Thomas Paul (c. 1773–1831), Nathaniel Paul (1770s–1839), and their siblings,... more Documents concerning Thomas Paul (c. 1773–1831), Nathaniel Paul (1770s–1839), and their siblings, dating from their early lives, before they became involved in the abolitionist movement, are examined. The documents suggest that by 1805 the Paul family was committed to defending the Calvinist theology of Baptist Isaac Backus (1724–1806), to critiquing Universalist Christianity, and to soliciting charitable donations for semi-independent black Baptist churches. In Boston, in 1806, Thomas Paul opened the First African Baptist Church. This essay argues that documents from the early history of black Baptists should be interpreted with a method different from that used for early black Congregationalists, Methodists, and Anglicans. With little access to print culture, early black Baptists are more likely to have left brief fragments as manuscripts than to have published full-length tracts, sermons, poems, and memoirs. The method recommended is comparative, taking into account both contemporary black authors and white co-religionists. Utilization of this method reveals a set of black Baptist concerns that predate the organized, immediatist abolitionist movement by several decades. This method may be extended to other fragmentary documents.
Lemuel Haynes was schooled in the New Divinity, the Calvinist theology of the students of Jonatha... more Lemuel Haynes was schooled in the New Divinity, the Calvinist theology of the students of Jonathan Edwards. Haynes declared himself a follower of Samuel Hopkins, the leading interpreter of Edwardsean theology in the last third of the eighteenth century. Hopkins favored colonization, the expatriation of African Americans, but he also developed at length a claim that whites should exhibit disinterested benevolence in their relations with blacks. Edwardsean ethics cast disinterested benevolence as the highest moral state. Haynes argued that disinterested benevolence could unite black and white and, in fact, according to the scriptural covenant between God and Abraham, mandated the manumission of slaves and their acceptance into free society.
In the second half of the eighteenth century, British and American men and women began criticizin... more In the second half of the eighteenth century, British and American men and women began criticizing the slave trade and slavery as violations of the principles of Christianity, natural rights, and political security. A black spokesman for abolitionism was Lemuel Haynes (1753–1833), one of the first African Americans to publish. Haynes served as a minuteman in the American War of Independence and began writing against the slave trade and slavery in the 1770s. After ordination in a Congregational church, he assumed a pulpit in Rutland, Vermont, where he became a leading controversialist, defender of the theology of Jonathan Edwards, and interpreter of republican ideology. He was dismissed from his pulpit in 1818, because his affiliation to the Federalist Party and his opposition to the War of 1812 offended his congregation. The last 15 years of his life were characterized by pessimism about the ability of Americans of the early republic to defeat racism as well as by a defense of Purit...
Some Thoughts on the Subject of Freeing the Negro Slaves in the Colony of Connecticut, Humbly Offered to the Consideration of All Friends to Liberty Justice," by Levi Hart
Nineteenth-century exslave narratives allow us to understand the way in which freedmen, freedwome... more Nineteenth-century exslave narratives allow us to understand the way in which freedmen, freedwomen, and runaways experienced and enjoyed liberty. In such narratives, liberty, naturally enough, it seems, is the opposite of slavery. Once free, one was no longer a slave. Yet we should view this understanding of slavery and freedom as a problem in itself, as a rhetorical and time-bound use of the notions of enslavement and liberty. This article argues that an early exslave narrativist, John Jea, articulated a dichotomous, unrealistic, yet characteristically American, notion of the relationship between slavery and freedom: that anyone who is not a slave is free. Expressed in evangelical Protestantism, liberal individualism, and laissez-faire economics, this notion was a staple of nineteenth-century American ideology. It is no longer a convincing notion, since it obscures not only the variety of the experience of slaves, freemen, and freewomen, but also the forms of bondage that accompani...
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