'The Indian image in the Black mind': representing Native Americans in antebellum African American public culture

My dissertation considers how ideas about Native Americans were figured into free African American rhetoric in antebellum America. Scholarship about the 1830s has emphasized how white reformists from the North supported the gradual abolition of slavery by calling for blacks in America to emigrate to West Africa while opposing the policy of Indian Removal. Yet, scholars have not explored how African Americans linked Indian Removal with the abolitionist causes. While there has been an emergence of literature about the experiences of enslaved African Americans within the "Five Civilized Tribes" (Cherokee, Seminole, Chickasaw, Chocktaw and Creek), there is a dearth of historical research about how ideas about Native Americans were part of the underpinnings of free African American intellectual life. The "Indian Image" is not monolithic in the "Black mind." In fact, I argue that African American writers present three different perspectives about Native Americans that are distinct, and not necessarily complementary to each other, or to those ideas held by white Americans. First, some African Americans aligned themselves with Native Americans to critique white supremacy and bolster their struggles for abolition and citizenship. In some instances, this alliance was linked to either real or imagined shared ancestral relationships between African Americans and Native Americans. Secondly, some African Americans espoused uplift ideologies in order to position themselves above Native Americans along racial, class and gender hierarchies. Thirdly, some African Americans compared and contrasted between Native American and white slaveholding practices, and perceived Native American slaveholders as being more benevolent. This project builds upon scholarship about racial ideologies in the early American republic by demonstrating that African Americans explored diverse ideas about social constructions beyond anti-slavery rhetoric alone. It contributes to a growing subfield of African American and Native American comparative histories which is linked with the scholarship of racial construction by historians such as George Frederickson and Mia Bay. I document the historical binaries of Black/Indian which are inextricably linked to the White/Black and White/Indian binaries explored in these earlier works. Given the resources in African American early print culture, my methodological approach is interdisciplinary. I analyze a range of primary sources in order to examine the language, descriptions, narrative sketches, and rhetorical choices that African American writers used to describe contemporary and past experiences of Native Americans. My sources include articles in the African American press, letters, speeches, memoirs, church and political organizational records and narratives of former slaves. In addition, I draw on interdisciplinary insights from a number of academic fields, including African American and Native American histories, Literature, Racial Theory, and American Studies. My introduction chapter defines the methodological framework and intervention of my dissertation. Chapter 1 examines of the rhetoric that appears within the emerging print culture of the eighteenth-century to reveal the varied ways that writers of African descent invoked Native Americans. The "Indian image" changes over the eighteenth century: from violent/"savage" images of indigenous people in the mid-eighteenth century to viewing them as either allies or foes. African Americans invoked ideas their about Native Americans either symbolically or due to actual encounters in the later decades of the eighteenth century. Chapter 2 illuminates how Native Americans figured in the emergence of the black printing press and pamphlets for the purpose of bolstering the challenge against slavery, Indian Removal and African colonization in the first two decades of the nineteenth-century. I consider the mission of the Freedom's Journal, America's first black-edited newspaper, and the implicit ways that the editors juxtaposed news coverage about Native Americans and reports of violence and racial uplift. I also examine the symbolic ways in which David Walker's Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World, which was first published in 1829, incorporated the symbolic use of Native Americans in order to illicit violent opposition to slavery. Chapter 3 examines the impact of federal policies, particularly the Indian Removal Act of 1830, and the expansion of slavery. A tragedy for many members of the Five Civilized Tribes, the Act also causes widespread fear amongst free African Americans who were concerned about their own future in the new Republic. Two issues about Native Americans dominate African American writings in these years: the Seminole Wars in Florida and two Supreme Court decisions pertaining to the Cherokee Nation. This chapter also discusses how many African Americans who were ancestrally linked with Native Americans challenged nascent pseudo-scientific ideas about the constructions of race. Chapter 4 analyzes how black-edited newspapers from the 1850s in the North and in Canada included reports which revealed that there was more limited actual contact between Native Americans and African Americans than in the earlier decades of the nineteenth century. I also examine the various ways that some African Americans claimed "Indianness" as a form of social capital as evidenced through their writings in memoirs and newspaper reports about legal cases. Finally, my conclusion chapter ends with a debate that occurred amongst an organization of free black men in Brooklyn, New York in 1860 around the issue of comparing the historical injustices faced by African Americans and Native Americans.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.