This essay sketches the field of African American literary history from the nineteenth century through two concepts I take from Henry Highland Garnet and David Walker: “faithful reflection” and the “spirit of inquiry.” It asks: What would it mean for American literature and American democracy to represent black citizens faithfully? What would faithful representation mean for racism as structure and ideology? How have black writers theorized, invoked, and used the literary as a form of critical inquiry? Garnet and others ground faithful reflection in a democratic ethos antithetical to the racial capitalism animating U.S. citizenship. The spirit of inquiry assumes the power to ask questions and seek answers, a power often denied the black citizens that literary history often treats as objects of study. It invokes the epistemological and methodological challenges black subjects and Black Studies have historically foregrounded. The history I offer here does not flow chronologically. Instead, I follow concepts that develop asynchronously across time as much as they were revised and revived over time. After grounding the essay’s framework through Garnet and Walker, I trace these complementary practices through Phillis Wheatley’s poetic imagination and literary critical responses that draw on her to visualize black literary history’s generative work.

The chapter discusses Douglass’s three major autobiographical narratives – Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845), My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), and Life and Times of Frederick Douglass (1881, 1892) – in multiple and sometimes competing contexts. Taken together, Douglass’s autobiographies, which are indebted to the American autobiographical tradition established by Benjamin Franklin, reveal a black leader who regularly revises himself and his ideas. The Narrative appears to advocate William Lloyd Garrison’s moral suasionism and to draw on the slave narrative tradition. But Douglass worked against that tradition when he revised the Narrative for publication in Ireland in 1845 and 1846. In the 1855 My Bondage and My Freedom, Douglass emphasized his close connections to the black community and his support for revolutionary violence. His monumental Life and Times, written near the end of his career, linked the struggles and contingencies of his own life with that of the nation.

Returning to David Walker’s Appeal, with an exclusive focus on its 1848 publication, this chapter traces the connections between the 1848 anti-monarchical revolutions in Europe, the Mexican American War, and an emerging vision of Black resistance to American Empire. This chapter reads Walker together with the works of Henry Highland Garnet and decisively demonstrates how African American literature articulated the principles and priorities of a transnational 1848.

If the Civil War had changed policy makers’ attitudes to black resettlement, it was to divide them into supporters of inclusionary and exclusionary forms of the idea. By 1865, the Blairs had come out for the latter – and for the Democratic Party that embodied it. But the Republicans struggled to break from old ways of thinking. When President Ulysses Grant proposed annexing the Dominican Republic as a potential destination for African Americans, but as a fully fledged state of the American Union, his colleagues divided over whether his proposal was radical or reactionary. Meanwhile, in the southern United States, waves of white oppression in the 1870s and 1890s drove African Americans toward the offer of an ACS that, lacking the financial support of times past, struggled to meet demand. As the United States filled with settlers of European descent, and as the great imperialist land-grab left ever fewer foreign locations for African American resettlement, the proto-segregation represented by black colonization morphed into the local segregation with which modern Americans are more familiar.

Chapter 4 focuses on an era where numerous African Americans visited Britain and exploited the rise of popular abolition after the publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852. I argue that while activists such as William Wells Brown and the Reverend Samuel Ward manipulated the interest surrounding the novel to maintain antislavery sentiment, they used the opportunity to chastise and even harshly criticize Britain for its role in the slave trade. The chapter also focuses on two other famous figures in the 1850s, Henry ‘Box’ Brown and Frederick Douglass. ‘Box’ Brown refused to bend to any rule in transatlantic activist history, and while he initially incorporated Stowe’s novel into his visual panorama, he used his savvy business flair and did not solely rely on the text. He constantly reinvented himself and his repertoire to court his celebrity, and even starred in a play based on his own life. Lastly, I explore the reasons why Douglass’ exploitation of adaptive resistance in 1859 was comparatively less successful than his first visit in 1845, in part, he believed, because of the growing racism in British society that would become further entrenched during the Civil War.