This chapter examines the strategies of producing and reproducing images of African Americans that subverted a culture of racist imagery created between 1810 and 1830. The portraits of four Black ministers – John Gloucester, Jeremiah Gloucester, Absalom Jones, and Richard Allen – provide opportunities to explore political, religious, and cultural debates facing African Americans during these decades. The acts of commissioning and circulating images underscore these leaders’ claims of citizenship and their right to Black religious independence. The chapter situates their portraits within the derisive and much more popular images of African Americans. Two groups of images studied in the chapter – the “bobalition" prints and Edward Williams Clay's "Life in Philadelphia" series – mock Black success, antislavery work, and patriotism. Analyzing the circulation, intended viewership, and medium of the images examined in this chapter enables a richer understanding of how African Americans recognized that, as cultural producers, they held stakes in the portrayals of blackness. Furthermore, their images expanded and refined discourses of race in the first few decades of the nineteenth century.

This chapter is about the religious sensibilities preached from pulpits and printed in black periodicals that shaped the philosophical and political aims of early African American writing. It examines the preaching and writing lives of eminent black clergy active between 1800 and 1830 and highlights their organizational networks within the Free African Society, the American Colonization Society, Prince Hall Freemasonry and a number of mutual aid societies. This chapter sets out to understand how, out of an inchoate black liberation theology, a black Protestant inheritance came to incorporate early African American literature, speech and non-fiction prose. The transitions under exploration include the coalescence of a liberating theology in early nineteenth century black religion.

This chapter argues the writings published by Blacks in the early national US must be understood in relation to the history of slavery in the British Empire. The author examines diverse forms of African American literature, which were focused on transatlantic concerns, such as “Orations on the Abolition of the Slave Trade” (1808–1823), given annually on January 1. These texts tell powerful stories of the history of the slave trade, and particularly its violence to familial ties, from the trade’s inception in the fifteenth century until its abolition in 1808. Written by free Black churchmen and intellectuals in New York and Philadelphia, including Absalom Jones, Peter Williams, Jr., Russell Parrot, and William Hamilton, these orations demonstrate a deep interest in the actions of the British Parliament and the state of slavery in the West Indies. This chapter also considers direct allusions to British and Afro-British abolitionists and their writings, from Clarkson and Wilberforce to Equiano, in the work of William Miller, Russell Parrot, William Whipper, David Walker, Maria Stewart, and others. The chapter concludes with a discussion of The History of Mary Prince (1831), the most important slave narrative to emerge from the British colonies and questions the inclusion of Prince’s narrative in a history of African American literature.