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Beginning in the late 1830s, Black New Yorkers mobilized statewide to regain unrestricted suffrage, offering an organizing model for free people of color nationwide. Leaders like the young Henry Highland Garnet, Dr. James McCune Smith, Samuel Ringgold Ward, and the veteran Stephen Myers (an associate of Governor William Seward) built a network covering dozens of counties. With the radical antislavery Liberty Party putting pressure on the Whigs, this effort culminated in an 1846 referendum in which “Equal Suffrage for colored persons” was overwhelmingly defeated.

This chapter uses part of a speech by the famous orator and abolitionist, Henry Highland Garnet, to examine some of the similarities between late 19th- and early 20th-century ideologies of racial egalitarianism in the New World and contemporary advocacy of hybridity, or what one scholar refers to as the “amalgamation thesis.” It further uses Garnet's declaration that the Western world is destined to become a “mongrel race” to pose a counterfactual for students of African-American studies, black politics, and African diaspora studies: What if Garnet's dictum, rather than Du Bois's declaration in the The Souls of Black Folk concerning “the color line” were the dominant trope for the probing of racial identification, categorization, and consciousness?

This chapter considers how the centrality of religion and violence play a significant role in the struggles of the African Americans for liberty and equality. The two provide a revealing lens for the interpretation of racial injustice in America, as well as the efforts to correct it. In particular, the accounts of David Walker and Henry Highland Garnet, two African American leaders who called for armed slave revolt, demonstrate the importance of biblical stories and prophetic rhetoric to mobilize a subjugated people. Both figures appealed to racial solidarity grounded in concerted efforts to achieve freedom. Their rhetorics have offered divergent understandings of the relationship between black slaves and white citizens.

This chapter elaborates three primary elements of “black classicism” that African American writers, editors, and activists would develop in relation to dominant modes of classicism and monumental culture: the appropriation of the classically inflected rhetoric of revolutionary liberty to the cause of radical abolitionism; the critical juxtaposition of the neoclassical architecture of national buildings and monuments with images of the infrastructure of slavery; and the imaginative transformation of these buildings and monuments from icons of democracy and civilization to symbols of imperial hubris and harbingers of ruin. The chapter traces these developments through the pages of black newspapers and abolitionist polemics by radical figures such as David Walker, Henry Highland Garnet, and especially William Wells Brown. Brown draws together all the elements of antebellum black classicism in writings across a number of genres, from memoir and travel narrative to moving panorama, antislavery lecture, and finally his novel Clotel.

The Promethean personae of Byron’s antiheroes—including Byron’s own Promethean posture, which made him a transatlantic celebrity—proved enormously influential for Atlantic antislavery writing. Clinching the argument for a fully integrated historicization of the Romantic Age and the Age of Abolition, this chapter ventures both to read the fantastic ontology of a poem like Manfred in relation to nineteenth-century racial hierarchy and to account for explicit Byronic borrowings and stylizations in the work of Henry Highland Garnet, Harriet Beecher Stowe, the Brazilian abolitionist-poet Antônio Castro Alves, and others. In following the travel of Byron’s famous lines from Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage—“Hereditary bondsmen! Know ye not / Who would be free themselves must strike the blow?”—from the freedom struggle in modern Greece (in which Byron died) to the freedom struggle in plantation America and beyond, I trace the circuits—and important short-circuits—of nineteenth-century Atlantic radicalism.

This chapter outlines the ideology of black republicanism, a form of citizenship politics focused on three arguments: the principle of birthright citizenship inherited from England; nativism (the claim to be “native-born” unlike immigrant Europeans); and military service, as veterans in the Revolution and the War of 1812. It begins with an 1840 “Address” by Henry Highland Garnet asserting “We are Americans,” and cites Frederick Douglass making the same claim. It brings in the American Colonization Society, which sought to remove African Americans to Africa, denying their possible citizenship. Finally, it suggests that racialism itself was sharply contested in the early republic via the trope of “complexion,” a mutable characteristic, versus “race” or “color.”

This epilogue considers the legacy of nineteenth-century sentimentalism, turning to contemporary civic statuary that memorializes nineteenth-century sentimentalists. Juxtaposing this statuary with the hauntingly ephemeral installation The Ghost of Liberty Street Church, the chapter offers postpresentist inquiry as a method that regards the archive as an urgent and poignantly incomplete political project. Where historicist approaches emphasize distance and difference from history through periodization, and charges of presentism name historians’ overidentification with the past, postpresentism holds in view intimacy and distance between past and the present. The epilogue lays out postpresentist readings of sculptures of Harriet E. Wilson in Milford, New Hampshire; Winnemucca Hopkins and Sojourner Truth in the United States Capitol Rotunda; and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Amelia Bloomer, and Susan B. Anthony in Seneca Falls, New York. These statues’ site-specific installations bring into relief the raced, gendered, and colonial legacies of the grounds beneath their podia and feet.

This chapter considers the foundational text of Mormonism, The Book of Mormon, and scrutinizes the place of race and indigeneity in its singular narrative form. Taking up the lineaments of anti-imperial critique to be found in the work--specifically, its glancing vision of the putative heroes, the Nephites, as self-blinded imperialists--the chapter examines how precisely such an anti-imperial reading of the moral of The Book of Mormon played out in the Mormons’ ventures into the West, where it came to be routed through the Saints’ fractured identifications and disidentifications with Native peoples, the imperial United States, and their own scriptural forebears.

This introduction situates the study within the fields of classical receptions, black classicism, and African American cultural studies. Drawing on postcolonial critical insights into classical tradition as a mechanism of imperial power, as well as work elaborating black classicism in the United States, the introduction sets the framework for a dialectical reading of African American cultural production in relation to dominant American cultures of classical monumentalism and public historiography. It establishes the relevance of the study to debates about theories of temporality and historical periodization within African American literary studies. It is bookended by discussions of the September 11 Memorial Museum and Kara Walker’s installation A Subtlety, a pairing that emblematizes how narrative and counternarrative unfold across US history in an ongoing contest, and which reveals black classicism as a force so significant that classical history and literature can never be deployed in public discourse without conjuring their own dialectical undoing.