Prince Hall, Freemasonry, and Genealogy

Abstract

For scholars of early African-American literature, question of influence can be particularly vexing. American writing about Africa and Africans preceded emergence of first African-American writers by a century or more. On basis of this written record, old historicists could claim that religion made a Phillis Wheatley; only belief in artistic genius or a commitment to of resistance prevents new historicists from saying same, not only about Wheatley but about eighteenth-century Black poet Jupiter Hammon as well. [1] The origins of Black political discourses have proven similarly resistant to historicist unraveling. When did Africans in America begin to describe themselves as a people? How did geographical formulations such as Africa, Ethiopia, and become keywords and conceptual touchstones of early Black nationalism? Robert Alexander Young's Ethiopian Manifesto (1827) and David Walker's Appeal to Colored Citizens of World (1829) are generally acknowledged as primary print instances of Black nationalism or literary Ethiopianism, but intellectual prehistories of Manifesto and Appeal remain subject of speculation and debate. W. E. B. Du Bois claimed that the tale of Ethiopia Shadowy and Egypt Sphinx was a remnant of Egyptian and ideas preserved by diaspora's scattered tribes. [2] Following Du Bois, some scholars continue to affirm veiled origins of Black nationalism, Ethiopianism. and Egyptophilia as products of instinct, ideology, or experi ence. Others have attempted to specify textual sources for these traditions. St. Clair Drake emphasized influence of Biblical proof texts on development of Ethiopianism. More recently, it has been suggested that African-Americans first got idea of a glorious African past from eighteenth-century excerpted in American Colonization Society's African Repository and reprinted in Freed om's Journal (1827-1828) (Dain 146-47). Three lately republished and repopularized eighteenth-century speeches--John Marrant's Sermon to African Lodge of Honourable Society of Free and Accepted Masons (1789) and Prince Hall's Charges to Lodge at Charlestown (1792) and Metonomy (1797)--suggest a more extensive and complex history for Ethiopianism. [4] Prince Hall established African Lodge of Freemasons in Boston in 1780s and invited celebrity evangelist John Marrant to serve as its chaplain. In Sermon and Charges, Marrant and Hall expostulated a vital and portentous genealogy of African America. Their public claims to a common Black history and destiny--to legacy of Ancient Egypt and prophetic future of Ethiopia--prefigure and precede similar claims by David Walker and Robert Alexander Young. These three speeches document an early and little understood chapter in Black intellectual history, and they posit a much earlier point of inception for literary Ethiopianism than that generally agreed upon by scholars of th e discourse. Marrant's Sermon and Hall's Charges also reveal influence of early American mysticism on development of Ethiopianist tradition. Prince Hall's initiation into Freemasonry in 1775 admitted him to a parallel universe where Hermeticism, Egyptophilia, and Kabbalism flourished alongside, if not intertwined with, Enlightenment rationalism. [5] By time he invited John Marrant to give 1789 Sermon to African Lodge, Hall had spent fourteen years wending his way through fraternal networks and dusty bookshelves of New England Freemasonry. His researches in mystical vernacular prepared him to compose an unnatural history of African America, a counternarrative to eighteenth-century empiricisms and natural histories which classified Africa as a cipher, perpetually primitive and unintelligible. [6] More than an archival resource, Freemasonry was also a venue for exercise of cultural authority. …