Graduation Year
2015
Document Type
Dissertation
Degree
Ph.D.
Degree Name
Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)
Degree Granting Department
History
Major Professor
John M. Belohlavek, Ph.D.
Committee Member
Brian Connolly, Ph.D.
Committee Member
Stephen Prince, Ph.D.
Committee Member
Johnhenry Gonzalez, Ph.D.
Keywords
Civil Rights, Slavery, Politics, Nationalism
Abstract
This work explores the role that ideas about Africa played in the development of a specifically American identity among free blacks in the United States, from the early nineteenth century to the Civil War. Previous studies of the writings of free blacks in the Revolutionary period, and of the American Colonization Society (ACS), which was devoted to removing them back to an African homeland, have suggested that black discussions of Africa virtually disappeared after 1816, when the colonization movement began. However, as this work illustrates, the letters, books, newspapers, and organizational records produced by free blacks in the antebellum era tell a different story. The narrative of the ancestral homeland free blacks created in the late eighteenth century, when the Atlantic slave trade still supplied slaves to the United States, was one that emphasized the connections between Africa and its scattered descendants throughout the Americas. After the establishment of the ACS in 1816 free blacks’ dialogue related to the land of their ancestors did not disappear, but it did change dramatically. As this study reveals, the overarching impact of colonization, racial pseudo-science, and racism generally in the antebellum period, made Africa a subject that free black leaders and writers could not avoid. They had to talk about it. Paradoxically, they found that they needed to validate Africa, even as they rejected it. Free black Americans found themselves faced with the tasks, ultimately, of legitimizing their African origins, even as they spurned the idea of Africa as home.
Scholar Commons Citation
Vickers, Edward Jason, "To "Plant Our Trees on American Soil, and Repose Beneath their Shade": Africa, Colonization, and the Evolution of a Black Identity Narrative in the United States, 1808-1861" (2015). USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations.
https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/etd/6045
