James Walker’s The Black Loyalists: The Search for a Promised Land in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone, 1783-1870 is a comprehensive study of black loyalists as a unique community in Nova Scotia and Sierra Leone. Part of Walker’s book is in direct relation and defense of the work Christopher Fyfe had done previously, History of Sierra Leone. Walker’s view on the subject is, even though Sierra Leone is such a small area comparatively to the rest of Africa, important developments and significant trends developed in Sierra Leone and Nova Scotia that are worth examining. The main topic that he looks at is Black Loyalists and the effects they have had on history. Through the book Walker uses Fyfe’s contributions to the study of Sierra Leone and is arguing that it is important for us to look at and to expand on it back to Nova Scotia. The most significant reason walker wants more attention to be draw to the development of the Black Loyalists community is that they had influenced other societies to a good extent. Contributions to other groups of people have been deemed important, but walker feels that an understanding of the development of the Black Loyalists is lacking. This book is slightly older, being written in 1976, a while before Atlantic studies had been developed as a way of looking at history.
Walker begins his book by looking at the origins of the Black Loyalists. He places the start of Black Loyalists to the declaration of Lord Dunmore, the Governor of Virginia, in November 1775. Dunmore declared that all slaves or free black willing to bear arms with the Majesty’s troops could do so. Slaves or servants were promised freedom and shortly after Dunmore’s proclamation runaway slaves started to flock to join the Governor’s ‘Ethiopia...
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...ing the movement from America, to Nova Scotia, and finally to Sierra Leone. After the first few chapters Walker jumps back and forth between societies and time seemingly at random using examples that fit his argument.
Besides small disagreements and slightly confusing organization Walker’s book reserves good reviews. It was an interesting read, however I think it underplayed the role that the Sierra Leone Company had on the Black Loyalist. Walker’s primary resources appear to be extensive. The endnotes he uses come at the end of each chapter and take up a good portion of the book. At the end of the book walker still has a comprehensive bibliography of primary and secondary sources that total 27 pages of references. This book is a great look at the connection between the Americas, Europe, and Africa that can be seen as prelude to studies of the Atlantic world.
After careful consideration, I have decided to use the books dedicated to David Walker’s Appeal and The Confessions of Nat Turner and compare their similarities and differences. It is interesting to see how writings which has the same purpose of liberating enslaved Black people can be interpreted so differently, especially in the matter of who was reading them. Akin to how White people reacted to Turner’s Rebellion, which actually had promising results while most would see the immediate backlashes and to which I intend to explain more. As most would put emphasis on the Confession itself, I assume, I decided to focus more on the reactions and related documents regarding the Rebellion.
Africans were brought to North America as slaves. This took place in Jamestown, Virginia in the early 1600’s.
There are many contradictions pertaining to slavery, which lasted for approximately 245 years. In Woody Holton’s “Black Americans in the Revolutionary Era”, Holton points out the multiple instances where one would find discrepancies that lie in the interests of slaveowners, noble figures, and slaves that lived throughout the United States. Holton exemplifies this hostility in forms of documents that further specify and support his claim.
South Carolina was one of the only states in which the black slaves and abolitionists outnumbered their oppressors. Denmark Vesey’s slave revolt consisted of over nine-thousand armed slaves, free blacks, and abolitionists, that would have absolutely devastated society in South Carolina for slave owners, and could have quite possibly been a major step towards the abolishment of slavery in the United states. Robertson succeeded in describing the harsh conditions of slaves in pre-civil war Charleston, South Carolina. This book also helped me to understand the distinctions between the different groups. These groups including the black slaves, free blacks, extreme abolitionists, and the pro-slavery communities.
In Brent Hayes Edwards essay, “ The Use of Diaspora”, the term “African Diaspora” is critically explored for its intellectual history of the word. Edward’s reason for investigating the “intellectual history of the term” rather than a general history is because the term “is taken up at a particular conjecture in black scholarly discourse to do a particular kind of epistemological work” (Edwards 9). At the beginning of his essay Edwards mentions the problem with the term, in terms of how it is loosely it is being used which he brings confusion to many scholars. As an intellectual Edwards understands “the confusing multiplicity” the term has been associated with by the works of other intellectuals who either used the coined or used the term African diaspora. As an articulate scholar, Edwards hopes to “excavate a historicized and politicized sense of diaspora” through his own work in which he focuses “on a black cultural politics in the interwar, particularly in the transnational circuits of exchange between the Harlem Renaissance and pre-Negritude Fran cophone activity in the France and West Africa”(8). Throughout his essay Edwards logically attacks the problem giving an informative insight of the works that other scholars have contributed to the term Edwards traces back to the intellectual history of the African diaspora in an eloquent manner.
David Walker was “born a free black in late eighteenth century Wilmington,” however, not much more information is known about his early life. During his childhood years, Walker was likely exposed to the Methodist church. During the nineteenth century, the Methodist church appealed directly to blacks because they, in particular, “provided educational resources for blacks in the Wilmington region.” Because his education and religion is based in the Methodist theology, Methodism set the tone and helped to shape the messages Walker conveys through his Appeal to the black people of the United States of America. As evident in his book, Walker’s “later deep devotion to the African Methodist Episcopal faith could surely argue for an earlier exposure to a black-dominated church” because it was here he would have been exposed to blacks managing their own dealings, leading classes, and preaching. His respect and high opinion of the potential of the black community is made clear when Walker says, “Surely the Americans must think...
One of the most persuasive African American writers of antebellum America, was able to shake the American society with his pamphlet: Appeal to The Colored People of the United States. Walker, A free Negro born in Wilmington, North Carolina in 1796, although enjoyed a little more "freedom" than the rest of his colored brethren in bondage took on the role of a Jeremiadic speaker and writer to his people. In Walker's Appeal, Walker followed a method used by a Free black man in 1788 using the pseudonym of "Othello" in a two-part essay responding to Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia , called Essay on Negro Slavery. Following "Othello's" Jeremiadic essay, Walker had a warning for white Christian America about the wrathful vengeance of God that would befall upon them because of the institution of slavery.
Marable, Manning. Race, Reform, and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction and Beyond in Black America, 1945-2006. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007.
The quote above is from the British governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore who proclaimed freedom for African American slaves who fought for the British, after George Washington announced there would be no additional recruitment of Blacks in the Continental army in 1776. For numerous free blacks and enslaved blacks, the Revolutionary War was considered to be an essential period in black manifestation. Many public officials (like Dunmore), who initially had not expressed their views on slavery, saw the importance of African Americans and considered them an imperative tool in winning the war. Looking back, it almost seems like an inherent paradox in white America’s desire of emancipation from England while there still enslaving blacks. This concept has different grounds in white’s idea of liberation in comparison to that of the African-Americans. To white Americans, this war was for liberation in a political/economical tone rather than in the sense of the privatized oppression that blacks suffered from. But what started this war and what would this mean for blacks? How did these African Americans contribute to the war effort? What were there some of their duties? How did the white communities perceive them? How did it all end for these blacks? The main topic of this paper is to show how the use African Americans helped the control the outcome of the war while monitoring their contributions.
Much of Edmund Morgan's text is a narrative history; starting with the initial stirrings of the colonial drive in England at the end of the sixteenth century continuing through the beginning of the eighteenth century; in which the firm establishment of African slavery and the momentum towards American Revolution coincide. But American Slavery American Freedom also reaches beyond narrative: it seeks to explicate how race ideology was developed within the context of colonial Virginia and it clearly demonstrates how race and racism were used as tools for political mobilization; a concept that transcends that one specific time and place.
“This morning Capt. Draper spake to the Innkeep of hiring away the negro and then spake to the boy himself, telling him of coming liberty; of the need to stand with his brother man and resist the tyranny of those who own us all, slave and free alike, that parliament are protectors of the slave-trade, having Interests in it; that , can we sting parliament, they shall no longer think so easily to rob us
Quarles, Benjamin. The Negro in the American Revolution. The University of North Carolina Press; November 25, 1996
Walker addresses biases established by Jefferson decades before his time that still significantly shape the way many think about blacks. In doing so, Walker is able to draw attention the problematic logic behind said arguments. Ultimately, in his Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, David Walker addresses the arguments, presented in Thomas Jefferson’ Notes on the State of Virginia, of race superiority, slavery, citizenship, and Jefferson’s own default validation by means of his authority, to further and strengthen his own abolitionist
Writing around the same time period as Phillips, though from the obverse vantage, was Richard Wright. Wright’s essay, “The Inheritors of Slavery,” was not presented at the American Historical Society’s annual meeting. His piece is not festooned with foot-notes or carefully sourced. It was written only about a decade after Phillips’s, and meant to be published as a complement to a series of Farm Credit Administration photographs of black Americans. Wright was not an academic writing for an audience of his peers; he was a novelist acceding to a request from a publisher. His essay is naturally of a more literary bent than Phillips’s, and, because he was a black man writing ...
While Collins does a succinct job of examining the economic and political factors that heightened colonization, he fails to hone in on the mental warfare that was an essential tool in creating African division and ultimately European conquest. Not only was the systematic dehumanization tactics crippling for the African society, but also, the system of racial hierarchy created the division essential for European success. The spillover effects of colonialism imparted detrimental affects on the African psyche, ultimately causing many, like Shanu, to, “become victims to the white man’s greed.”