African Americans in the Early Republic

Abstract

Any teacher using a textbook published before the 1980s would find virtually nothing on African Americans?slave or .free, North or South?in the era of the American Revolution and the early republic. Though about 20 percent of the population, African Americans simply did not exist in the pre-1980s story of how the Revolution proceeded and how the search for life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness affected those most deprived of these unalienable rights. Nor did textbooks take any notice of the free black churches, schools, and benevolent societies created by an emerging cadre of black leaders after the Revolution. A cursory examination of pre-1980s texts shows black history beginning when the first Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619 and then jumping magically over about two hundred years until the Missouri Compromise in 1820 pro duced heated arguments among white legislators over the spread of slavery. While older textbooks treat antebellum slavery and the rise of abolitionism after 1820 in some detail, they leave unnoticed the fast-growing free black communities of the North and upper South. The outpouring of scholarship on African and African American history in the last third of this century, prompted by the civil rights movement and the opening up of the historical profession, has gradually remedied the astounding erasure of one-fifth of the American population in the nation's formative years. Yet many school textbooks today still lag a decade or more behind current scholarship on African Americans. Today, most students learn something about such figures as Olaudah Equiano, Crispus Attucks, and Richard Allen and have at least some notion that slaves and free blacks fought heartily in the American Revolution, began to throw off the shackles of slavery before the Emancipation Proclamation, and resisted slavery before Nat Turner's rebellion of 1831. Yet there is much still to be learned before the student graduating from high school can claim a basic grasp of both race relations during the nation's formative decades and the role of free and enslaved blacks in the nation's explosive growth. Five African American topics?some historians might add more?ought to be essential parts of the history curriculum that young Americans learn as they study the years between 1760 and 1830.