Black Lives in the Founding Era

This is a very special issue of History Now. It is part of the Gilder Lehrman Institute's “Black Lives in the Founding Era” initiative, which restores to view the lives and works of a wide array of African Americans in the period 1760 to 1800. Drawing on our archive of historic documents and our network of scholars and master teachers, the Institute is producing digital and print materials and offering a variety of programs throughout this year and beyond. These resources and programs will enable twenty-first-century students to understand the centrality and importance of African Americans in the history of the Founding Era.

Here, in sixteen remarkable essays, our contributors demonstrate the progress made by the historical profession in uncovering and narrating the lives of African Americans in the Founding Era. Through their research and writing, once-silenced voices are now heard, once-forgotten experiences are brought to light, and once-forgotten events have been added to the timeline of this era. The result is a fuller and richer understanding of America when it was a young republic. And, together, these essays help to balance the already richly documented narrative of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Black history with a closer look at the decades and centuries that preceded the rise of the Cotton South and the expansion of slavery that led ultimately to the Civil War, emancipation, and the struggle for civil rights.

To produce this special issue, we called upon our finest scholars—and, as you will see, they responded enthusiastically. Some of these historians are familiar to you; others will be welcome additions to your bibliographies. Although the topics of their essays are far from traditional, we have decided to organize them in our profession’s most traditional way: chronologically. This will allow you to see the historical narrative we are providing in its fullest sweep, as it develops across time and space.

Thus we begin with Michael Guasco’s essay, “The Development of Slavery in the Early Modern Atlantic World,” followed by Thomas J. Davis’s “The Great Negro Plot of 1741.” Sophie White then offers a look at the task of “Recovering Voices of the Enslaved in Colonial America,” and Vincent Carretta provides a new portrait of a familiar figure in “Phillis Wheatley, a ‘Genius in Bondage.’” Judith Van Buskirk carries our narrative to the Revolutionary Era with “African American Patriots in the Revolution,” and the Gilder Lehrman Institute’s own James Basker offers another perspective on Phillis Wheatley in his essay “Phillis Wheatley: Poet Laureate of the American Revolution.” Julie Winch emphasizes of the impact of the ideology of the Revolution, with its call for liberty and freedom, on African Americans in “James Forten and American Freedom,” while Graham Russell Gao Hodges reminds us that many Black Americans chose loyalty to Great Britain in “African Americans in Exile after the American Revolution.” Robert Olwell offers us a portrait of one Loyalist African American in “Scipio Handley’s Great Escape.” Lois E. Horton’s “Mutual Assistance: Building Black Community Life in Freedom” looks at the world of free Blacks in the post-Revolutionary era. Vincent Carretta provides a valuable assessment of “Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, a Self-Made Man,” while Jon Kukla gives us an opportunity to reconsider the twice-told tale of Sally Hemings in “Sally Hemings: Given Her Time.” Alan Taylor carries us into the early nineteenth century with his overview of “Freedom, Slavery and War in Virginia.” Margaret Washington turns our attention to the role of religion in the lives of early nineteenth-century African Americans in “Richard Allen, Jarena Lee, and the Second Great Awakening,” and Claude A. Clegg III asks us to consider the role of emigration rather than immigration in “African Americans and the Making of Liberia.” Finally, Alysha Butler-Arnold, 2019 National History Teacher of the Year, gives us much needed advice on “Avoiding the Trap of Whitewashing the Founding Era: Teaching Black Liberation during the American Revolution.”

As a special feature, this issue includes a remarkable video: a reading, by Renée Elise Goldsberry and other cast members of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton, of a 1777 freedom petition by enslaved African Americans in Boston. As Jim Basker points out, “The radical origins of the Civil Rights Movement in America can be traced to this petition, submitted by a group of eight enslaved men to the Massachusetts legislature, on January 13, 1777. This petition is the first to claim equal rights for Black people on the basis of the rights claimed for Americans in the Declaration of Independence, published just six months earlier. As a result of such efforts, Massachusetts became one of the first states to abolish slavery, by court decision, in 1783.” The producers of the video note, “As the women of Hamilton honor the progress that was made with this reading, we are also reminded of the struggle that Black women endured and still endure in their quest toward equality in this country.”

In addition to our special feature, we are pleased to offer essays from the archive, Book Breaks and Inside the Vault recordings, and Spotlights on Primary Sources pertaining to Black lives in the Founding Era. As always, we hope that these resources will be useful to you in your teaching and research.

We are confident that, as lifelong students of history and as its teachers, you will find much that is valuable—and excitingly new—in this issue. We hope that in the fall you will all be able to bring what you have learned to your students, in person, in the classroom once again.

Have a wonderful summer. We will be back with a new issue of History Now when the school year begins.

Carol Berkin, Editor
Presidential Professor of History, CUNY, and
Nicole Seary, Associate Editor, The Gilder Lehrman Institute