Derrick Spires’s “Sketching Black Citizenship on Installment after the Fifteenth Amendment” asks how the literature of citizenship looked for African Americans who simultaneously celebrated a new relation to the state and recognized ongoing white supremacy, both North and South.Using theFifteenth Amendment, Frances Harper’s period literary work, and practices of Black serial publication in Reconstruction as anchors, it theorizes “reconstruction on installment,” individual moments significant in their own right but also constituting a to-be-completed story. Recognizing that Black print called on Black citizens not only to read widely but also to produce African American literature – literature by Black people, about Black people, and for Black readers of all sorts – it reads, in addition to diverse work by Harper, texts by Mary Shadd Cary, William Steward, Cordelia Ray, and William Still. The chapter thus develops an interpretive theory of Black Reconstructions as process and practice, a way of thinking about and doing the work of citizenship rather than simply ranking it as achievement.

Beacons of Liberty starts with Madison Washington, the enslaved man who led a famous shipboard slave rebellion in 1841, and Mary Ann Shadd, the first black woman newspaper editor in North America. Their stories introduce the importance of international free-soil havens to the U.S. anti-slavery movement. Free-soil havens abroad were places where slavery had either been curtailed or abolished by law or by local practice. In the late eighteenth and nineteenth century they emerged in places like Haiti, West Africa, Upper Canada, Mexico, and various new republics throughout Central and South America. Over five decades characterized by changing social conditions and evolving geopolitical relationships within and beyond the United States, international free-soil havens were often defined in very different ways by different people. The Introduction to this book explores what international free soil came to represent for slaves, free black people, and white reformers with impressive ideological diversity regarding the question of black freedom.

In the wake of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, free African Americans felt they had as much to lose as fugitive slaves. Many felt that they would never be recognized as citizens and that they would never be granted legal equality or social acceptance in the predominantly white United States. This chapter shows that, against this backdrop, free-soil havens abroad resonated more than ever as potent symbols of liberty, equality, uplift, and independence. They offered a stark contrast to the United States’ ongoing commitment to slavery at its very highest levels. Building on decades of practice, American anti-slavery advocates in the 1850s leveraged the practical and symbolic value of international free-soil havens to bolster the fight of freedom and equality at home and abroad. From national anti-slavery conventions to burgeoning black nationalist political thought, this chapter shows that free-soil spaces became dominant focal points of escape, resistance, and collective action until the outbreak of civil war in 1861.

While always hostile to white demands that they expatriate, free black northerners considered emigrating on their own terms, as an affirmation of their dual identity as black and American. Even as stalwart integrationists such as Frederick Douglass criticized his peers for betraying their enslaved kin, emigrationists such as Martin Delany, Mary Ann Shadd, and James Theodore Holly debated the true purpose of black exodus, as well as the most desirable destination, concurring only in their dislike for the ACS and Liberia. Where to go? Canada, for its proximity to the United States? The Niger Valley, for its connection to their African ancestry? Or Haiti, the one black-run state in the Western Hemisphere, and a bastion of black militancy? As emigrationists duly divided, exploring and settling distant lands, they were shocked to realize just how American, even “Anglo-Saxon” their assumptions really were – and how much they had to call on much-resented white assistance. And so, like white colonizationists, they entered the 1860s praying that some more powerful entity would assume the onerous task of fostering African American emigration.