Political Activity and Resistance to Oppression: From the American Revolution to the Civil War 277
found themselves (and not by choice as immigrants). In a
process that Sylvia Wynter defi nes as neo-indigenization,
together with the fi rst indigenous peoples and western Eu-
ropeans, African descended peoples would become one
of the founding civilizations to the cultural matrix of the
Americas. Th erefore, when blacks contradicted the offi -
cial order of consciousness that defi ned the United States
from the early national period as an Anglo-American re-
public (rather than as a civilization constituted by settlers,
slaves, and displaced indigenous people), it was a challenge
mounted against what can be identifi ed, a century and half
before the Th ird Reich, as the fi rst racial state.
It is precisely within such a frame that the political ac-
tivity of blacks, beginning during the 1776 revolt, can be
understood. Th e moment was not missed to make clear,
in both political and intellectual terms, the stakes of the
Revolution for an enslaved population. Maria Stewart, who
according to Benjamin Quarles was the “fi rst native-born
American woman to speak in public and leave extant texts
of her addresses,” made this point most clearly in her 1832
lecture at Franklin Hall: “the whites have so long and so
loudly proclaimed the theme of equal rights and privileges,
that our souls have caught the fl ame also, ragged as we are.”
Earlier, Phillis Wheatley had made similar assertions in a
series of poems that sparked controversy during the late
18th century when they were published in London and
the United States. In her poem to the Earl of Dartmouth,
Wheatley noted that the new and independent nation was
free of the mournful wrongs and grievances unaddressed by
Britain: “No longer shalt thou dread the iron chain / Which
wanton Ty ranny with lawless hand / Had made, and with it
meant t’enslave the land.” However, Wheatley pointed out
that she understood such a dynamic precisely because of
her own experience (“Should you my, lord, while you pe-
ruse my song, / Wonder from whence my love of Freedom
sprung”), being “snatched from Africa” away from her fam-
ily. She therefore hoped others would not be subjected to
such a situation, to such tyranny: “And can I then but pray /
Others may never feel tyrannic sway?”
On the political level, some blacks demonstrated their
understanding of anticolonial liberty by embracing the fi ght
against the mother country. Although some fought on the
side of the Loyalists, an estimated 5,000 served in the Con-
tinental Army. Interestingly enough, both sides only reluc-
tantly admitted blacks to fi ght for their respective causes,
illustrating the depth of the fear of extending the “rights ofslaveholding whites, served an organizing role in the emer-
gent political system. It made some whites even more free
than others, by giving districts with slaves additional votes
for their property in humans. Over time, these extra votes
gave the South a third more representatives in Congress,
greatly bolstering the political power of the region and en-
suring that a slaveholding Southerner (or supporter) occu-
pied the presidency for much of the pre–Civil War era.
Yet in addition to the political implications for the
structuring of power in the emergent nation, the enslave-
ment of those of African hereditary descent also served a
metaphysical function. No wonder John C. Calhoun in-
sisted that to “make equality of condition essential to liberty,
would be to destroy both liberty and progress.” While the
black presence politically enfranchised some whites dispro-
portionately, blacks simultaneously also came to represent
symbolically the ultimate embodiment, within the lan-
guages of republicanism, of the anti-citizen, a dependent
who, like a child, would require that decisions be taken
on his or her behalf. Th is symbolic constitution (far more
powerful than the juridical expression to which it gave
rise) would be solidifi ed beginning in 1790, with the fi rst
of a series of naturalization acts that legally defi ned citizen-
ship as being the exclusive privilege of “free white persons”
(1790 act) with “good moral character” (1802 act). It is in
this context, therefore, that the black came to embody the
conceptual “other,” what it meant to be not fully human.
Moreover, this discourse of “naturalization” represented
not only a political strategy, but also a rhetorical one that
enabled a settler population to assert claims of nativity and
belonging over the claims of indigenous peoples, who aft er
having domesticated the continent as the original founders,
now found their lands being expropriated and their modes
of existence being characterized as primitive and barbaric
(not that many indigenous people would have conceptual-
ized ownership of lands in the same terms as Euro-American
settlers). Indeed, it became increasingly clear from the
Revolutionary era that although “all men are created equal,”
not all humans were considered as fully men, and thus, the
“rights of man,” as Trumper argued in George Lamming’s
classic novel, In the Castle of My Skin, could not incorporate
the “rights of the Negro.”
Nonetheless, despite the legal acts that represented the
black subject outside of the dominant terms of citizenship,
free and enslaved blacks consistently repudiated such an as-
sertion, as they laid claim to this new land in which they