Political Activity and Resistance to Oppression: From the American Revolution to the Civil War 281
many of these very activists constituted the bedrock of the
fi nancial support for his antislavery newspaper, the Libera-
tor. Indeed, the concerted eff orts of blacks remained central
to the antislavery movement, especially with regard to the
production of slave narratives, which recounted in vivid and
oft en horrifying detail the lived experiences of those suff er-
ing under the legally sanctioned institution of slavery.
Nowhere else in the history of the institution of slavery,
which preexisted the formation of the post-1492 Americas,
will one fi nd such a substantial written record of the reali-
ties of slavery from the perspective of the slave. In addition
to the most popular antebellum narratives, such as those
authored by Frederick Douglass, William Wells Brown,
and Harriet Jacobs, there were numerous others, includ-
ing some written aft er the Civil War. When one considers
all the writings (narratives, broadsides, and pamphlets) of
the slaves and former slaves, one is forced to confront the
extent to which these represent an original, indigenous lit-
erary form that belong specifi cally to the fi eld of American
cultural and intellectual production. And despite the recent
excellent scholarship on the subject, it nonetheless seems
that this, to borrow Arna Bontemps’s term, “American
genre” has yet to fi nd its fully articulated theoretical ground
in the present contemporary canon of what is oft en defi ned
as literature.
As the case of the slave narrative implies, the experi-
ences and the political activities of blacks can also be un-
derstood in the context of the contributions made to the
general society. In fact, what has oft en been understood
only as “slave culture” and “resistance” was, more pro-
foundly, an attempt to institute a new kind of society, on
the basis of the experiences of all its peoples. Th us, the
slave’s reinterpretation of Christianity, which produced the
spirituals by fusing the symbolic systems of Africa with
those of those of Judeo-Christianity, gave rise to new cul-
tural forms that spoke to the existential reality in ways the
dominant society remained unable to. In other words, their
most powerful form of “resistance” was their “resistance”
to the explanatory model that underlay the organization of
the society. More than anything else, this dynamic—one of
trying to make a putative democratic and Christian society
embody its stated principles—has been the experience of
those of African hereditary descent in the Americas. One
is reminded here of Frederick Douglass when he asserted
that blacks needed the vote because had he lived under an
autocratic or aristocratic government “where the few boreFreedom’s Journal was also one of many organizations
and institutions created by blacks to deal with their socio-
political situation. Beginning circa 1775 with the establish-
ment of the Silver Bluff Baptist Church in South Carolina,
blacks in the North and the South created church and
non-religious organizations that tackled the issues that the
dominant refused to address, and logically so, given that
the origins of the problem lay with these very structures
of power (legislative, judicial, ecclesiastical). Some of the
innovations included new religious dominations, such as
with the establishment in 1816 of the African Methodist
Episcopal Church by Richard Allen, which followed Allen’s
formation (with Absalom Jones) of the Free African Society
in 1787. Some other organizations, primarily located in the
North, included mutual aid, fraternal, benevolent, temper-
ance, and educational associations, such the African Society
in Boston, the Female Literary Association in Philadelphia,
and the American Society of Free Persons of Colour, for
Improving Th eir Condition in the United States; for Pur-
chasing Lands; and for the Establishment of a Settlement in
Upper Canada, also based in Philadelphia. Societies such as
the American Society of Free Persons of Colour refl ected
the diversity of perspectives and approaches to the ques-
tions of colonization and of abolition. Without a doubt, no
organization was more central to black political activities
during this era than the antislavery societies.
Although the profound and, indeed, unavoidable con-
tradiction of an anticolonial revolt in the name of freedom
led some slaveholders (such as Robert Carter in Virginia)
to free their slaves, the Revolutionary era also prompted
the Northern states to adopt measures toward the gradual
abolition of slavery. As a result, manumission and antislav-
ery societies emerged across the region that began to call
for a gradual end to the institution of slavery. Although
complexly constituted, such as with the (initially) all-male,
all-white elite Pennsylvania Abolitionist Society formed in
1789, or with the movement for colonization, these move-
ments would be transformed with the infl uence of black
thought and action. Off ering critiques of the colonization
movement as well as groups that excluded blacks from their
own liberation, the antislavery movement underwent a
profound shift in the 1830s to call for immediate emancipa-
tion. William Lloyd Garrison, one of the founders of the
American Anti-Slavery Society in 1833, oft en ascribed his
conversion from supporting the American Colonization
Society to the interventions of black activists. Subsequently,