Fragments of Afro-American collective memory crystallized into history with the publication of William Wells Brown's The Black Man: His Antecedents, His Achievements, and his Genius in 1863. Reflecting an intellectual journey from a lived to a remembered past which spanned the period from the American Revolution to the Civil War, Brown's biographical dictionary transcended political and geographical boundaries as it formalized the scope and content of Afro-American cultural heritage. The men and women Brown selected to represent the scope of black genius, capacity, and intellectual development made clear the contours of ethnic solidarity and historical memory which informed Afro-American identity. Hayti held a central position in that identity and historical consciousness at midcentury. Toussaint L'Ouverture and Crispus Attucks were claimed equally as AfroAmerican heroes; and the Haytian and American Revolutions were declared equally crucial political events in the shaping of Afro-American political and cultural identity. The Republic created by peoples of African descent, the slaves turned revolutionaries who had defeated Napoleon's army, and the succession of rulers who had guided the young nation into the international political arena, had been transformed in the AfroAmerican collective consciousness into figures and events of mythic stature. The origins of those lieux du memoire are located in the milieux of the Haytian Revolution and the successive waves of Afro-American migration which began in the 1820s and continued into the 1860s. Afro-Americans had probably first learned about the Haytian Revolution through the refugee gens de couleur who settled in urban centers from Philadelphia to New Orleans during the first decade of the nineteenth century. Whatever those initial impressions of Hayti may have been, however, by 1817 the dispossession and racial oppression implicit in Toussaint's revolution which had informed that immigration had been overshadowed by more powerful symbolism. Rejecting the African resettlement plan advanced by the American Colonization Society and daily disillusioned in their struggle to achieve full citizenship, the Afro-American elite found in the milieu of the Haytian Revolution a model of race unity fused with political autonomy which contrasted sharply to their own circumstances. Although debate over methodology often raged through convention halls and in the press after 1820, a single philosophical aim-the physical emancipation and spiritual reunification of New World peoples of African descent-had come to inform the Afro-American political agenda. In the eyes of many, by the 1820s Hayti had achieved that aim. Some translated that belief into personal action. In the decades after 1820,
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Sep 30, 2010
Jung-Hyun Chun + 1
Open Access
