Black Atlantic Political Culture (Anglophone)

October 21, 2008 in Barry W. Higman, J. R. Kerr-Ritchie, Van Gosse

Van Gosse. “As a Nation, the English Are Our Friends: The Emergence of African American Politics in the British Atlantic World, 1772-1861.” The American Historical Review 113, no. 4 (October 1, 2008): 1003-1028.

First paragraph:

We know little about David Walker.
Yet in his day, he was the most notorious black man in the United
States. Probably born in 1796, a free emigrant from the lower South who
became a used clothes dealer in Boston, in 1829 and 1830 he published
three editions of his pamphlet Walker’s Appeal, in Four Articles, Together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World,
planning to smuggle it into the South via the black and white sailors
who were his customers. His hope was to confront slave owners, warning
them with apocalyptic arguments to repent, and the slaves themselves,
demanding that they renounce enslavement. If the masters refused their
just demands, he said, justice should come down in blood.

J. R. Kerr-Ritchie.  Rites of August First: Emancipation Day in the Black Atlantic World. (Antislavery, Abolition, and the Atlantic World.) Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007.

In his review, Barry Higman writes that:

“The principal contribution of J. R. Kerr-Ritchie’s valuable new book is
to draw together the experience of the British West Indies and the
United States, focusing on the period between the formal abolition of
slavery in the British colonies in 1834 and Abraham Lincoln’s
Emancipation Proclamation.”

Find the review in the October 2008 American Historical Review.  Buy the book here.