The Confluence of Law and Antebellum Black Literature

Abstract

This article argues that the acculturation of black Bostonians to the rhetoric of the law during the Revolutionary era was constitutive and sustaining. The article examines how three pivotal Boston-based antebellum authors—Prince Hall, David Walker, and Maria Stewart—appropriated the rhetoric of legal pleading used in Revolutionary-era government petitions and freedom suits (petitioning for redress of grievances, closely analyzing precedential texts, distilling ideas into reasoned argument, adducing factual proof, the pointed use of narrative and the interrogative mode) to produce a literature of complaint and rights–assertion. The central premise of the article is that antebellum black texts used these lawyerly discursive practices ironically, as an empowering move, to draw attention to the disparity between the rhetoric of rights and actual practice. Because these “lawyer’s words” called upon the authority and salience of the law as a source of rights in the process of claiming rights, lawyerly discourse served a sustaining strategy of empowerment for black people, and captured the sense of irony in their experience.