Matt Sandler - The Black Romantic Revolution

The Black Romantic Revolution

Matt Sandler is director of the MA program in American Studies at Columbia Universitys Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race. He was previously an adjunct professor at Louisiana State University, Gettysburg College, and the University of Oregon. His writing has appeared in a number of journals, anthologies, and online publications. He is from Miami, Florida.

The Black
Romantic Revolution

_________________________

Abolitionist Poets at
the End of Slavery

Matt Sandler

First published by Verso 2020

Matt Sandler 2020

All rights reserved

The moral rights of the author have been asserted

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Verso

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versobooks.com

Verso is the imprint of New Left Books

ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-544-5

ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-543-8 (LIBRARY)

ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-546-9 (US EBK)

ISBN-13: 978-1-78873-545-2 (UK EBK)

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Sandler, Matt, author.

Title: The black romantic revolution : abolitionist poets at the end of slavery / Matt Sandler.

Description: First edition. | London ; New York : Verso Books, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: During the pitched battle over slavery in the United States, Black writers-enslaved and free-allied themselves with the cause of abolition and used their art to advocate for emancipation and to envision the end of slavery as a world-historical moment of possibility. They borrowed from the European tradition of Romanticism-its lyric poetry, prophetic visions-to write, speak, and sing their hopes for what freedom might mean. Authors like Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, George Moses Horton, Albery Allson Whitman, and Joshua McCarter Simpson conceived the Civil War as a revolutionary upheaval on par with Europes stormy Age of Revolutions Provided by publisher.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020015400 (print) | LCCN 2020015401 (ebook) | ISBN 9781788735445 (paperback) | ISBN 9781788735438 (library binding) | ISBN 9781788735469 (ebk)

Subjects: LCSH: American poetry African American authors History and criticism. | American poetry 19th century History and criticism. | Romanticism United States History 19th century. | Liberty in literature. | Slavery in literature. | African Americans in literature.

Classification: LCC PS153.N5 S255 2020 (print) | LCC PS153.N5 (ebook) | DDC 811/.309896073 dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020015400

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020015401

Typeset in Sabon by MJ & N Gavan, Truro, Cornwall
Printed in the UK by CPI Group (UK) Lrd, Croydon CR0 4YY

Dedicated to the memory of
Marcellus Blount,
teacher, friend, and fellow romantic,
without whom this book would not exist.

Is it possible to believe that the slaves who were whipped into building the pyramids saw their work in a lyrical light?

Antonio Gramsci, 1930

Naturally and necessarily the enemy of literature, it has become the prolific theme of much that is profound in argument, sublime in poetry, and thrilling in narrative. From the soil of slavery itself have sprang forth some of the most brilliant productions, whose logical levers will ultimately upheave and overthrow the system. Gushing fountains of poetic thought, have started from beneath the rod of violence, that will long continue to slake the feverish thirst of humanity outraged, until swelling to a flood it shall rush with wasting violence over the ill-gotten heritage of the oppressor.

Lucius Matlack, 1849

Power from my tongue flows like a river

George Moses Horton, 1845

Thus we have found how yearns the poorest slave
For freedomhow at patriotisms shrine,
The ardor of exile is divine

Albery Allson Whitman, 1884

Oh, life is fading away, and we have but an hour of time! Should we not, therefore, endeavor to let its history gladden the earth?

Frances Ellen Watkins [Harper], 1859[?]

Contents

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I n early 1861, the abolitionist lecturer, organizer, and poet Frances Ellen Watkins Harper took an interest in the case of Sara Lucy Bagby, who had escaped from slavery in western Virginia to Cleveland, Ohio. Bagbys arrest under the Fugitive Slave Law attracted significant attention; four Southern states had already seceded, and it was widely considered a test of Northern allegiance to the Compromise of 1850, which had provisionally settled conflict about the reach of slavery in the West. Harper had married the previous fall, taking her husbands poetic surname, and she intended to settle in Ohio, which by then had been traversed by fugitives from the Southwest for decades. As she had since the start of her career as an abolitionist a decade and a half earlier, Harper responded to the news about Bagbys case with a poem, entitled To the Union Savers of Cleveland: An Appeal from One of the Fugitives Own Race. Announcing herself as a Black woman, she addressed the white Ohioans who hoped to avoid the outbreak of sectional conflict by sending Bagby back to slavery. She took their politically expedient moral weakness as the occasion for a prophecy:

Men of Cleveland, had a vulture

Sought a timid dove for prey

Would you not, with human pity,

Drive the gory bird away?

Had you seen a feeble lambkin,

Shrinking from a wolf so bold,

Would ye not to shield the trembler,

In your arms have made its fold?

But when she, a hunted sister,

Stretched her hands that ye might save,

Colder far than Zemblas regions,

Was the answer that ye gave.

On the Unions bloody altar,

Was your hapless victim laid;

Mercy, truth, and justice shuddered,

But your hands would give no aid.

And ye sent her back to the torture,

Robbed of freedom and of fright.

Thrust the wretched, captive stranger.

Back to slaverys gloomy night.

Back where brutal men may trample,

On her honor and her fame;

And unto her lips so dusky,

Press the cup of woe and shame.

There is blood upon our city,

Dark and dismal is the stain;

And your hands would fail to cleanse it,

Though Lake Erie ye should drain.

Theres a curse upon your Union!

Fearful sounds are in the air;

As if thunderbolts were forging

Answers to the bondmans prayer.

Ye may bind your trembling victims,

Like the heathen priests of old;

And may barter manly honor

For the Union and for gold;

But ye cannot stay the whirlwind,

When the storm begins to break;

And our God doth rise in judgment

For the poor and needys sake.

And your guilty, sin-cursed Union

Shall be shaken to its base,

Till ye learn that simple justice

Is the right of every race.

To the Union Savers of Cleveland was broadcast throughout the abolitionist press. First published in the Ohio-based abolition newspaper The Anti-Slavery Bugle on February 23, 1861, it was then reprinted in William Lloyd Garrisons Liberator on March 8. Bagbys fame came to include the fact that she was the last person in the United States returned to bondage under the Fugitive Slave Law. She was finally freed from slavery a few months later, when Union forces took West Virginia in the summer. Harpers poem is what one of her contemporaries, James Monroe Whitfield, called a song of fiercest passion: it orchestrates love, rage, and sadness at once. It begins with a depth of feeling for its subject so intense as to seem inhuman; Bagby is a timid dove and feeble lambkin; her captor a gory bird and a wolf. With these simply fabled figures, Harper implicates her Northern, white contemporaries in the systemic, national, and epochal crime of slavery, now overdue for a reprisal.