African American Literature

By the early nineteenth century, civil rights agitators like Maria W. Stewart felt no compunction in affirming God’s investment in both the eternal and the earthy redemption of black people. Echoing, perhaps even alluding to, Wheatley’s famous quatrain (‘Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,/Taught my benighted soul to understand/That there’s a God, that there’s a Savior too;/Once I redemption neither sought or knew./Some view our sable race with scornful eye,/“There color is a diabolic die.”/Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain,/ May be refin’d, and join th’ angelic train), in On being brought from Africa to America, Stewart announced to African Americans in 1831: “Many think, because your skins are tinged with a sable hue, that you are an inferior race of beings; but God does not consider you as such.”
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Initially, African American writers like Benjamin Benneker used the egalitarian language of the Declaration of Independence to try to shame white America into abolishing slavery. But as early as the expatriate Victor Séjour’s pioneering short story The Mulatto (1837) and with increasing vehemence in the speeches of mid-century eloquent platform orators, such as Henry Highland Garnet and Frederick Douglass, the right of African Americans to armed resistance to slavery was proclaimed. The Founding Fathers’ justification of revolution gave ample precedent for violent action in the name of freedom. Regardless of the means of rhetorical attack, African-American literature throughout the pre-Civil War era maintained as its central priorities the abolition of slavery and the promotion of the black man and woman to a status in the civil and cultural order equal to that of