This chapter addresses examples of African American autobiography published before the Civil War that both called for and complicated the concept of a Black community, narratives not about the journey from slavery to freedom but about the story of a tenuous freedom and an uncertain community, a collective story under development and in need of a proper telling. Many of these autobiographies speak of platforms built, of relations established, of communities forged; others speak of the need for such platforms, the absence of immediate relations, the longing for community. What they all share, however, is the commitment to telling a different story about Black life and ambition than the one that was all but required of African Americans at the time, the story of suffering under slavery.

Eric Gardner’s “Reconstructing the Rhetoric of AME Ministry” begins to consider how a group long crucial to Black print – ministers and church activists – adapted religious rhetoric after the Civil War and specifically reached into militaristic language in ways that allowed Black writers and readers to think about national and local citizenship, church engagement, the mission and meaning of the Civil War, the continuing violence surrounding many Black lives, and Black print within the larger arena of Black faith. Initially anchored in two key books published early in Reconstruction by major AME figures, Bishop Daniel Payne’s The Semi-Centenary and the Retrospection of the African Methodist Episcopal Church and Benjamin Tucker Tanner’s An Apology for African Methodism, the essay broadens to consider how such rhetorics reached into texts such as Harper’s serialized Recorder novel Sowing and Reaping and Henry McNeal Turner’s eulogy to Charles Sumner.