275Political Activity and Resistance
to Oppression: From the American
Revolution to the Civil War
Slave songs are a testament to the way in which Christian-
ity provided slaves with the precedents, heroes, and future
promise that allowed them to transcend the purely tempo-
ral bonds of the Peculiar Institution.Historians have frequently failed to perceive the full impor-
tance of this because they have not taken the slave’s religi-
osity seriously enough. A people cannot create a music as
forceful and striking as slave music out of a mere uninter-
nalized anodyne. Th ose who have argued that Negroes did
not oppose slavery in any meaningful way are writing from
a modern, political context. What they really mean is that
the slaves found no political means to oppose slavery. But,
slaves, to borrow Professor Hobsbawn’s term, were prepo-
litical beings in a prepolitical situation. Within their frame
of reference there were other—and from the point of view
of personality development, not necessarily less eff ective—
means of escape and opposition. If mid-twentieth century
historians have diffi culty perceiving the sacred universe
created by slaves as a serious alternative to the societal sys-
tem created by southern slaveholders, the problem may be
the historians’ and not the slaves.’
Lawrence Levine, Black Culture and Black ConsciousnessTh e 1776 anticolonial settler revolt against the parlia-
mentary monarchy of England was punctuated with mul-
tivalent political languages, one of which asserted that the
colonists feared not only tyranny but also enslavement by
the mother country. Th e kind of slavery against which the
colonists were rebelling, however, did not concern the so-
cial conditions to which African and African-descended
slaves had been subjected (central to which remained a lack
of political representation in the emergent nation). Rather,
the colonists remained preoccupied with their ability to
exercise certain liberties that they believed were being in-
creasingly undermined by the political administration and
the mercantile policies of the mother country. Th ese liber-
ties did not sacrifi ce the concept of rugged individualism
but remained circumscribed by the prescriptions of local
communal institutions (parochial government and church).
Indeed, one could scarcely fi nd use of the language of de-
mocracy associated with the claim that “all men are created
equal” because this term (which seems to have come into
the English political lexicon only aft er 1789, in the wake
of the French revolution) was initially used very hesitantly,
given that it was oft en associated with terror and misguided
revolution in Europe. Refl ecting this zeitgeist, the Federalist
Papers, whose infl uence on contemporary public opinion
may be debatable (though its infl uence on U.S. political
thought remains indisputable), drew an important distinc-
tion between a republic and a democracy, preferring the
former to the latter because it was thought that a republican
government could “refi ne and enlarge the public views, by
passing them through the medium of a chosen body of citi-
zens, whose wisdom may best discern the true interests of
their country, and whose patriotism and love of justice, will
be least likely to sacrifi ce it to temporary or partial consid-
erations.” It was further argued that under such a system, “it
may well happen that the public voice pronounced by the