creative struggle for a just society based on the promises they saw in republican self-governance set against the developing national predilection to foreclose such possibilities through increasingly restrictive legal and social practices. The continued pressure of such a volatile landscape forced black theorists to rethink and rearticulate their relation to the state continually, resulting in a body of literature that offers some of the most incisive analyses of citizenship available today.
CHAPTER 1
Neighborly Citizenship in Absalom Jones and Richard Allen’s A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People During the Late and Awful Calamity in Philadelphia in the Year 1793
With regard to the emigration to Africa you mention, we have at present but little to communicate on that head, apprehending every pious man is a good citizen of the whole world.
—Reply of the Free African Society (Philadelphia,
Pennsylvania) to the Union Society of Africans
(Newport, Rhode Island), October 1789
The 1789 response from the Free African Society (FAS) to the African Union Society of Rhode Island’s proposal for a settlement in Africa projects a sense of optimism at the close of the eighteenth century. Rather than cite the new federal Constitution or the spread of “republicanism,” the FAS sees a cosmopolitan citizenship manifesting in the “expressive language of conduct” of those “persons who are sacrificing their own time, ease and property for us, the stranger and the fatherless, in this wilderness.”1 More than an article of faith, however, the FAS provides a statement about citizenship practices by way of what the good citizen does and, as important, how the good citizen views and engages others, stranger and friend alike. The pious citizen does not identify fellow citizens based on “worth,” nor can we identify the pious citizen outside this citizen’s actions. Rather, pious citizens reach out to those in need according to an ethic of neighborliness suggested in the golden-rule injunction to, as the FAS puts it, “do unto all men as we would they should do unto us.”2 The pious may be citizens of the world, but they demonstrate this citizenship through concrete local, everyday interactions.
Though formal citizenship was in flux for black citizens, accounts of citizenship such as the above statement from the FAS provide key critiques and interventions within contemporaneous paradigms. Even as federalists and antifederalists debated the nature of the bonds between citizens in a republic, the role of human interests in maintaining and/or disrupting those bonds, and the kinds of institutions best suited to managing those (particularly economic) interests, black citizens were forming citizenship practices based on their own experiences and understandings of political and religious texts. Even as civic republican and liberal versions of citizenship took shape in the late eighteenth-century United States, other civic schematics were not only possible but also concurrently being developed and enacted.
This chapter takes up one such account, Absalom Jones and Richard Allen’s A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People During the Late and Awful Calamity in Philadelphia in the Year 1793 and A Refutation of Some Censures, Thrown upon Them in Some Late (1794), to develop a social theory of citizenship as a practice of neighborliness.3 Written partially in response to Matthew Carey’s accusations of black theft and extortion during Philadelphia’s 1793 yellow fever epidemic in his A Short Account of the Malignant Fever, Lately Prevalent in Philadelphia (1793), Narrative draws on the image of the pious citizen of the world, Christian ethics, civic republicanism, and the notion of an “expressive language of conduct” to theorize neighborly citizenship as the proactive engagement with the suffering stranger out of what Narrative calls “real sensibility.”4 This active principle and Jones and Allen’s articulation of it through black citizenship pointedly critique and revise emergent notions of civic republican citizenship and fellow feeling.
Carey’s Account provided Jones and Allen with a distillation of early U.S. citizenship. This rendering of citizenship, outlined in this chapter’s first section, attempted to assuage fears that republican citizenship failed during the yellow fever epidemic by (1) drawing attention to “respectable citizens” whose virtue led them to assume responsibility for the faltering city and (2) noting that the massive flight during the epidemic did not signal the failures of fellow feeling but rather the freedom of republican governance. Jones and Allen reveal that the ethics subtending this reading encouraged a more passive approach to fellow citizenship that depended less on what citizens did on the ground and more on the power of narration to justify these activities. Indeed, this chapter’s second half, following Jones and Allen’s own critical strategies, highlights the ways the form and point of view Narrative takes model the kinds of bonds and citizenship practice Jones and Allen were theorizing. In contrast to Carey’s emphasis on the virtues of a managerial elite, Narrative reproduces some of Account’s key scenes from the perspective of the citizens on the ground, very ordinary “poor black” men and women, whose actions were otherwise unnoted or vilified.
Narrative’s vignettes describe specific encounters among strangers in the style of the parable of the Good Samaritan, fleshing out neighborliness as a citizenship practice robust enough to promote mutual responsibility yet open enough to promote more democratic engagement. Just as the parable uses narrative inversion to critically reevaluate the terms of the question “Who is my neighbor?” Narrative interrogates late eighteenth-century theories about the ethical relation between citizens by thinking about the kinds of relations the good citizen should actively produce rather than the inverse, how to produce or identify the good citizen.5 This shift in perspective suggests that fellow citizenship did not fail during the crisis; rather, early national narratives such as Carey’s sought it in the wrong places, ignoring the citizenship practices and potential fellow citizens right in front of them.
The pamphlet’s main thrust, then, was not simply refuting Carey’s charges. As I argue throughout this chapter, Jones and Allen’s Narrative provides a positive vision of citizenship that exceeds the goals stated in the title and that have preoccupied criticism on Narrative. I am not suggesting here a call-and-response model in which Narrative responds to Account’s provocation. Rather, Account provided a convenient and widely read medium for arguments already developing in black political thought through institutions such as the Free African Society and Church and from individuals including Benjamin Banneker. They appropriate the occasion of responding to Carey and use his text as a substrate—a widely circulating articulation of a common understanding of citizenship—for ideas that the two men and the collectives they represented had been working through over the past decade, as suggested in the Free African Society’s response to their Rhode Island counterparts.
Responding to Carey allowed Jones and Allen to use the style of public “Refutation” to make claims against Carey and the nation more broadly. As I discuss in this chapter’s final section, the appended “Address to Those Who Keep Slaves, and Approve of the Practice,” in turn, uses the proceedings of the black people as a case study that justifies and provides a framework for further “experiments”: emancipation, abolition, and the full incorporation of black citizens after slavery. In the moments characterized by Myra Jehlen as “history before the fact” or, in this case, citizenship before the fact, the terms of fellow citizenship were unsettled not just in Philadelphia in the immediate aftermath of the epidemic but also across a new republic still unsure of its federal compact.6 Even as Jones and Allen recounted events in recognizably republican terms, their narrative structure represents an attempt to reshape the discourse of citizenship in the messy moments when the city and the nation were trying to make sense of what seemed to be wholesale civic failure during the crisis.
Seizing the Moment: Jones and Allen’s Print Politics
Published
