Sacraments, Veils, and the Altar of Democracy: Calvinist Rhetoric in W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Minister’s Black Veil”

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Abstract: W.E.B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk (1903) often speaks in terminology that resonates distinctively with New English Protestant discourse. Souls does so partly because of a growing indifference among formerly animated Northeastern white abolitionists, which imperiled Black voting rights at the turn of the twentieth century. This article argues that Souls articulates a Black literary identity through metaphors reminiscent of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Minister’s Black Veil,” a text that takes on new meanings in light of the hermeneutics practiced within Souls . Du Bois reminds white Protestants that all America’s souls, regardless of race, remain bound by a sacramental force in New English visions of American democracy, while simultaneously drawing on Calvinist rhetoric to insist on the importance of liberal education to the personal and social transformation of African Americans.