Manifest Diaspora: Black Transamerican Politics and Autoarchiving inSlavery in Cuba

Abstract

On 13 December 1872, crowds of black USAmerican citizens and Cuban exiles stepped out of the cold New York night and filed into the bustling warmth of the Cooper Institute. Heeding the call from the meeting’s pre-circulated announcement, the assembled men and women filled the great hall to show their support for the Cuban Liberation Army currently waging an anti-colonial revolution against Spain—what became known as the Ten Years’ War (1868–78)—and to vociferously express their collective condemnation of slavery’s stubborn persistence on the island. The crowd listened eagerly to the rhetorical portraits of Cuba’s political atmosphere and the growing international debate over its decolonization efforts. Their enthusiasm grew over the course of the evening as they witnessed theatrical orators deliver heartfelt appeals and recite stirring poetry detailing the atrocities of Cuban slavery and the rebels’ noble cause. By the convention’s close, those gathered resolved to petition President Ulysses S. Grant to recognize the belligerent rights of the revolutionaries in an official capacity, a gesture widely regarded as essential to the success of the Cuban military and the abolition of slavery. After the New Year, the meeting’s organizers—the Cuban Anti-Slavery Committee (CASC)—compiled a thorough transcript of that night’s proceedings along with the advertisement for the convention, New York penny papers’ news coverage of the event, and even minutes from a spinoff meeting held in Boston some days later. The CASC supplied these collected materials to a small printing outfit, which in turn fashioned a forty-two-page pamphlet titled Slavery in Cuba (1873) in the publisher’s distinctive blue wrapping. It was one of the longest pamphlets that the upstart firm of Powers, MacGowan, and Slipper had published to that point since the associates largely specialized in printing short informational and political leaflets out of their office in the Sun Building in the early 1870s. To date, Slavery in Cuba has been regarded as little more than an occasional footnote in internationally scoped historiographies of the Ten Years’ War. Through a careful examination of this pamphlet’s literary dimensions and its context within