How pioneering Black liberals battled Thomas Jefferson’s “Dark Age”

“All men are created equal,” wrote slaveholder Thomas Jefferson, in words that have been a source of consternation ever since. That was less true, perhaps, for a significant group of Black abolitionist writers who clearly understood Jefferson’s vision as limited by his belief in a natural hierarchy of color, even as he sought to break with the feudal hierarchies of England and the Old World. 

Those writers’ vision blossomed in the early 19th century even as the popularity of artificial hierarchies rebounded among American white people, particularly in the South. A new book from Harvard scholar Keidrick Roy, “American Dark Age: Racial Feudalism and the Rise of Black Liberalism,” lays out their pioneering critique of the enduring power of feudalism on American thought, along with a coherent framework of liberal ideas shaped by their individual and collective lived experiences. 

What emerged was arguably more robust, and more progressive, than the liberalism developed by white theorists. Roy focuses in particular on how these Black writers responded to the experience of the Middle Passage — the traumatic journey from Africa to America made by newly enslaved people — which he describes as “cheating social death,” and on how they used “the established part of an existing system to create a new one that serves a fundamentally different form or function.” For example, the ideas of moral and intellectual advancement that Jefferson championed in the context of a so-called natural aristocracy were reinterpreted within a framework of collective advancement for all Black Americans. 

While the impact of these thinkers on the campaign to end slavery and achieve full citizenship has been increasingly acknowledged in recent decades, the breadth, coherence and significance of their vision remains little known. There are echoes of the crucial role played by diverse forms of utopian thinking in laying the foundations for the civil rights movement, as explored in Victoria Wolcott’s “Living in the Future” (Salon interview here).

“American Dark Age” should become a watershed in our understanding of a crucial cohort of actors in American history, and also in rethinking the liberal political tradition. To explore these ideas further, Salon interviewed Roy via email. Our original exchange occurred before the presidential election, but I reached out to Roy later with one final question about how the lessons of this history intersect with Donald Trump’s return to power. 

There’s a gap between America’s self-image as a country founded on the idea of individual liberty and the horrific reality of slavery. Your book draws attention to a group of Black abolitionist writers who sought to explain and critique that gap, and also explore what to do about it. Let’s start with their explanation: The abstract ideas of liberty were excellent, they argued, but contradicted by “racial feudalism.” How did that idea confront the claims of founders like Thomas Jefferson that they were getting rid of feudalism entirely?

To be clear, “racial feudalism” is a term I’ve developed to describe how prominent Black liberals before the Civil War characterized slavery in the South and prejudice in the North. It points to their experience with artificial hierarchies, arbitrary violations of natural rights and freedoms, and abuses of political power by a tyrannical governing authority. While some Black Americans used the word “feudal,” others used related terms harkening back to the medieval world, including “vassalage,” “serfdom” and “Dark Age.” James W.C. Pennington, for example, characterized slavery as “an institution of the dark age” while critiquing the “monarchs, patriarchs, and prophets of the South.” Frederick Douglass depicted his plantation in Maryland as resembling “what the baronial domains were during the Middle Ages in Europe.” He also characterized the antebellum North as “the mere cringing vassal of the South” and a section of the country that contained “lords” and “nobles” of its own that comprised an “aristocracy of the skin.”

However, after declaring America’s independence from England, Thomas Jefferson and other founders believed their legislative and political actions had already eliminated the remaining vestiges of European feudalism. But Jefferson remained blind to the fact that his enslavement and subjugation of other human beings and his belief that Black people did not possess the capacity for reason provided political and philosophical backing for the “skin-aristocracy” that Douglass rejected. Indeed, generations of pro-slavery thinkers after Jefferson cited his ideas on race (while conveniently dismissing or decrying his statements on equality) as they worked to maintain America’s stratified society. 

I should add that Jefferson greatly admired the medieval world before the Norman Conquest of England in 1066 ended Anglo-Saxon rule. In John Adams’ telling, Jefferson even wanted America’s national seal to feature an image of the great Anglo-Saxon chiefs Hengist and Horsa, “from whom we claim the honor of being descended and whose political principles and form of government we have assumed.” 

In the early 19th century, there was renewed enthusiasm for the old model of European feudalism. By the 1830s, pro-slavery advocates were arguments attacking Jefferson’s claim that “all men are created equal.” How did their arguments and the underlying social structure form a cohesive whole?

Several factors were at work. During the American and French Revolutions, patriots such as Jefferson, Thomas Paine and Noah Webster sought to eliminate monarchical and aristocratic rule as well as the underlying legal structures (such as primogeniture and entail) that legitimated it. They saw these mandates as bound up in the oppressions of feudalism and what Jefferson described as “artificial aristocracy.” Though Jefferson told George Washington, “I certainly never made a secret of my being anti-monarchical and anti-aristocratical” in a 1791 letter, Jefferson also celebrated the idea of a ruling “natural aristocracy” of virtue and talent. 

However, this “natural” aristocracy implicitly and necessarily excluded Black people, who he believed could not generate ideas “beyond the level of plain narration.” Indeed, Jefferson deemed the African-American poet Phillis Wheatley’s work “beneath the dignity of criticism” and asserted that Black astronomer Benjamin Banneker possessed only “a mind of very common stature.” For him, Black people, by nature, would permanently exist as a separate caste and class at the bottom of the social order.

In the years following the American and French Revolutions, when calls for liberty from England and equality among citizens still echoed across the new nation, pro-slavery thinkers in the United States had little appetite for openly associating slavery and racial hierarchy with an antiquated European medieval feudal order. Such calls would have been out of step with the budding American Enlightenment liberal tradition. 

While there is evidence of slaveholders associating themselves with a type of feudal lordship and associating the skin aristocracy with medieval times during the opening decades of the 1800s, such claims blossomed in the 1820s and 1830s for several reasons. One prominent cause stemmed from the massive international influence of Scottish writer Walter Scott, whose famous novels such as “Ivanhoe” (published in 1819) and poems such as “The Lady of the Lake” (published in 1810) helped to bring about a type of medieval revival in the United States, particularly in the South, which one scholar deemed “Walter Scottland.” The spread of his works was coextensive with the rise of romanticism in Europe. Across America, too, parents were naming their children after characters in Scott’s oeuvre. Even Frederick Douglass derived his last name from a character in “Lady of the Lake.” 

Given these powerful cultural influences, notions of feudalism in the U.S. South could flourish despite the historical baggage of the American Revolution’s break from the Old World and its attendant monarchies and aristocracies. By the 1830s, elected officials such as James Henry Hammond could claim in the halls of Congress that American slavery retained the “advantages” of “the aristocracy of the old world,” adding that “slavery does indeed create an aristocracy — an aristocracy of talents, of virtue, of generosity and courage. In a slave country, every freeman is an aristocrat.” They consciously deployed the nostalgic language of feudalism as a political smokescreen to obscure their moves to consolidate the cultural, political and economic power that would sustain their elevated social positions and the collective ascendancy of their race.

This language continued through the 1860s, as evidenced by texts such as pro-slavery advocate J. Quitman Moore’s article in the Southern periodical De Bow’s Review titled “Feudalism in America.” Moore questioned whether “the feudal spirit will be ever revived on the Western Continent again,” describing it as “a social and political authority founded upon the subjugation of a weaker, by a more powerful race.” For him, “Southern society revived the genius of medieval civilization” and even surpassed it by imposing a racial hierarchy confirmed by ideas grounded in “science.” In this way, he and others reimagined the Old World feudal order as a type of racial feudalism in America.

And how did writers like Hosea Easton critique the workings and construction of this racial feudal order?

Hosea Easton was one voice among many antebellum African Americans who criticized what I have described as the racial feudal order. According to Easton, racial hierarchy in the United States followed what he called “European slavery” under “the Feudal system,” where “slaves were fixed to the soil.” He thus saw European feudalism and American slavery as part and parcel of the same framework for oppression, though like other Black writers he highlighted the unique brutalities and tyrannies of race-based slavery in the New World. Beyond identifying and criticizing racial slavery for African Americans in medieval terms, Easton similarly condemned the displacement of Indigenous people and Mexicans. Using the imagery of crusades, he assailed “the late unholy war with the Indians” and the “wicked crusade against the peace of Mexico” during the 1830s. 

Easton was followed by other Black abolitionists, such as Martin Delany, who criticized future president Zachary Taylor and his supporters in a letter to Frederick Douglass. As Delany put it, “The extent to which the American people carry this glorification of military crusaders is beyond a parallel. … The extent to which this homage is carried ceases to be respectful since it is neither kind nor complimentary, but like the homage of the serf to the noble or the vassal to his lord, it is ludicrous.”

Your book has major sections on “Racial Feudalism” and “Black Liberalism,” but between them there’s a section called “Middle Passage” with just one chapter, entitled “Cheating Social Death.” That’s clearly the fulcrum of the whole work. Explain what you mean by the concept of social death.

The concept of “social death” comes from Harvard sociologist Orlando Patterson, who developed the term some 40 years ago when analyzing commonalities among various slave societies around the world. According to Patterson, social death is a state of permanent and violent domination coupled with physical separation from one’s family or homeland and marked by a pervasive condition of dishonor. To be socially dead is to lose the culturally conferred distinctions of possessing a family, country and respect — it is to be recognized as what Patterson would call an “enemy outsider” living in the community as a “criminal insider.” 

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Remarkably, long before Patterson elaborated on this theory, African Americans such as David Walker, Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs all reflected on the condition of social death in their own 19th-century language. As Walker put it in 1829, “For what is the use of living, when in fact I am dead.” Under constant surveillance by her master, Jacobs similarly wrote, “I had rather live and die in jail than drag on, from day to day, through such a living death.” And Hosea Easton described forced segregation, which served to “withhold social intercourse,” as the “worst kind” of “murder.” After Patterson, some scholars associated with Afro-pessimism began to invoke social death somewhat differently as a condition that negates free will, agency and meaningful political action, and expanded its premises to describe the condition of current African Americans. I resist this tendency. 

In your discussion of cheating social death, you reference “bootstrapping,” which you describe as “using the established part of an existing system to create a new one that serves a fundamentally different form or function.” What does that look like in practice, and how is it accomplished?

Instead of resigning themselves to the culturally imposed condition of social death after their forced separation from Africa, antebellum Black liberals turned the social, political and legal conditions of their domination into weapons through extraordinary effort and resourcefulness. They boldly affirmed their identity as Americans in a society that did not view them as equal citizens. Though they recognized the antebellum nation as configured in such a way that militated against their social advancement, Hosea Easton, for example, claimed that Black people were “constitutionally Americans.” Frederick Douglass, too, was described by his friend James McCune Smith — the first African American to earn a medical degree — as having “passed through every gradation of rank comprised in our national make-up, and bears upon his person and upon his soul everything that is American.” David Walker went so far as to claim, “America is more our country than it is the whites — we have enriched it with our blood and tears.”

In describing the process of how antebellum African Americans “cheated” the conditions of forced separation, general humiliation and racial domination that constituted social death, I also reclaim the term “bootstrapping,” which, in its pejorative use today, displaces collective responsibility for social change onto minority communities. However, I use bootstrapping in a sense that remains attentive to the actual claims expressed by Black American liberals such as Douglass, Easton and Stewart, who saw internal racial uplift as a central tenet for transforming their societies even as they levied devastating critiques of antebellum America’s inegalitarian social and political system that make such personal uplift all but impossible. 

Remarkably, they persisted, and did not resign themselves to nihilism or pessimism. Maria Stewart, for example, exhorted her listeners by claiming, “Do not let your hearts be any longer discouraged; it is no use to murmur nor to repine; but let us promote ourselves and improve our own talents.” She also told her auditors to remove “I can’t” and replace it with “I will.” Also recognizing the intransigence of prejudice in American society decades later, in 1855, and refusing to wait on external support alone, Douglass published a statement in all-caps: “Our elevation as a race is almost wholly dependent on our own exertions. If we are ever elevated, our elevation will be accomplished through our own instrumentality.” 

One key belief of racial feudalism is that Black people are inherently lesser and incapable of development. In that context, the bootstrapping process to cheat social death is a remarkable feat of development. 

The myriad accomplishments by Black Americans in the face of the oppressive conditions of slavery and racial hierarchy openly defied stereotypes of their inferiority. It is essential to recognize that antebellum Black liberals consciously mainlined a tension between advocating for broader systemic social change and the practical necessity of remaining defiantly entrepreneurial in a hostile environment that resisted their inclusion into the upper ranks of society. Nonetheless, they worked within the existing social and political structure to bore new lines of flight out of it through a process of immanent critique. As Douglass puts it, they would “see what ought to be by reflection of what is and endeavor to remove the contradiction.” I should emphasize that slavery was the prominent exception to Black American liberals tending to favor reform over revolution. They generally held that the system and its systemic evils should be immediately overthrown, and welcomed the Civil War as a type of eschatological event.

This also had remarkable results, in a more robust form of liberalism than was offered them by Jefferson and other prominent white liberals other white liberals. You describe the Black American liberal tradition as a cohesive philosophical framework with six key elements. I’d like you to say a few words about each, starting with that you call an “anti-feudal, anti-prejudice and anti-patriarchal political philosophy.”

Black American liberals rejected the elements of feudalism they recognized in racial prejudice, paternalism and patriarchy. In fact, they were deeply committed to advancing women’s rights, including the right to vote. Though other European and American liberal thinkers since the late 18th century mainly rejected feudal hierarchies, many have been accused of eliding questions of race or gender, questions which Douglass and other antebellum Black American liberals explicitly and forcefully confronted.

Next is the commitment to opposing “colonization,” a term that’s very specific to that era. 

Because of their commitment to realizing the aims and claims of America’s founding documents, most Black American liberals remained anti-colonizationist — that is, they opposed the various schemes promoting the involuntary (and thus illiberal) expulsion of Black people from America, a nation they saw as their home. Instead, they chose to remain in place and strive to make the United States live up to its stated precepts, even if that meant subjecting the nation to critique and themselves to danger. They had what Frederick Douglass described as “sufficient faith in the people of the United States to believe that a black [person] can ever get justice … on American soil.”

Then there’s what you call a “reformist practical philosophy.”

As mentioned, Black liberals operated through a critique of the existing order from within, rather than assuming the necessity of its wholesale destruction. For Black liberals, the idea of progress did not blindly assume its inevitability. Instead, they raised their pens and voices to secure liberty through calculated political reforms. At the same time, they worked toward self-improvement through intellectual and spiritual development. All of this is not to say that Black reformers rejected the idea of staging a political revolution when necessary to abolish entrenched systemic evils. Recall that Douglass, for example, recognized the need for such a break from the existing order to abolish slavery and extend the benefits of the American liberal project to all.

You describe them as possessing an “identity-aware ethical outlook,” as opposed to being either “identity-driven” or “identity-blind.”

Whereas some philosophers, such as John Rawls, have been criticized for describing an approach to politics that is blind to the historical dimensions of group identity, others, such as Charles Mills, might be critiqued for prioritizing group identity over all other factors. Returning to early Black American liberals allows us to envision what I call an “identity-aware” approach that recognizes history’s impact on the outcomes of various groups while lowering what philosopher Derrick Darby calls the “race-first” flag to build coalitions across racial and gender lines.

You write that they sought “political transformation through moral improvement,” as opposed to an apolitical or “white-defined” version of moral improvement.

The political outlook of Black American liberals generally synthesized secular political principles and Christian spiritual and moral teachings. Indeed, Douglass and other black abolitionists condemned slavery’s illiberal architecture by presenting the institution as the limit case for the principles of Christianity and philosophical notions of justice and fairness that might be described as a type of universal morality. Though Black liberals did not stipulate that the public must share their religious faith, they believed that transforming America’s racially coded statutes and customs could only be brought about through the moral advancement of the United States and its people. Without moral transformation, political changes to laws and leaders would be impermanent and vulnerable to backsliding.

Lastly, you argue they demonstrated a “spiritually communitarian worldview.”

Following their commitment to moral improvement, Black American liberals also recognized the fundamental equality of every human being in the spiritual sense of comprising “one blood.” This outlook inherently resists race- and gender-based hierarchy and embraces radical equality in ways that transcend socially constructed identities. 

Your last three chapters explore specific examples of how this political philosophy was articulated. One chapter looks at a literary example, William Wells Brown’s novel “Clotel,” which is something of a fantasia on the Sally Hemings story. Why is that noteworthy?

“Clotel” is remarkable for several reasons. Published in 1853, it was the first novel written by an African American, and, in my view, it presents the philosophy of Black liberalism in the form of a story (in a manner akin to Voltaire’s “Candide”). I read “Clotel” closely to illuminate how Brown made sophisticated arguments against slavery and the oppression of women that retain contemporary relevance. Notably, Brown takes the founding documents and Jefferson’s political thought seriously even as he critiques the practical implementation of these ideas and highlights their failure to extend to all Americans.

Chapter 8 is about two black women, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and Harriet Jacobs. What’s most important about their contributions?

Frances Ellen Watkins Harper and Harriet Jacobs articulate a version of Black liberalism that can be described by three unifying terms: liberty, reform and progression. For them, the idea of liberty pointed to the tangible abolition of slavery and racial hierarchy; reform represented the persistent human action required to achieve liberty through moral, social and political processes; and progression suggests a practical commitment to the possibility of effecting positive political change and acknowledges the potential for future improvement to be contingent rather than inevitable. They recognized actual social change as extending beyond the idea of temperance, which they saw as a necessary but insufficient condition for improving the U.S. social order during the mid-19th century. They sought to realize a type of liberty that was no more and no less restrictive than the best of what could be achieved by white American men, even as Black women uniquely withstood what Jacobs called the “wrongs, and sufferings, and mortifications peculiarly their own.” 

Chapter 8 explores Jacobs’ narrative “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” alongside Harper’s letters, poetry and speeches as among the most trenchant and still underexplored philosophical commentaries on how the United States might redress the systemic wrongs that conditioned the ideology of racial feudalism. Both women show the radical possibilities of reimagining liberalism as a tradition that takes seriously the plight of women in seeking to articulate a better way to achieve America’s highest egalitarian potential.

Chapter 9 is about Frederick Douglass and identity-aware liberalism, as expressed through his autobiographies. Why was this form so powerfully suited to his purpose?

The autobiographical form is well-suited for articulating an “identity-aware” liberalism because those who write them must contend with the tension between the particularity of individual experience and the universality of sentiments and ideas that can connect us to each other, and possibly to every human being in the world. Autobiography presents an alternative to identity-blind frameworks that tend to prioritize ideas to the exclusion of individuals and identity-driven frameworks that ignore the power of unifying ideas in favor of individual experience.

Your epilogue is titled “Up From Feudalism.” The concluding argument here, as I read it, is that the Black American liberal tradition you explore is richer than the much better-known White liberal tradition, and holds possibilities that critics of white liberalism need to seriously consider. Is that a fair reading? How would you explain it?

I love this question because I think it brings up an important point of clarification. I would resist labeling the antithesis of the Black liberal tradition as a “white liberal tradition.” Instead, I would frame the Black liberal tradition in opposition to a pro-slavery or even a Jeffersonian liberal tradition that patently made no space for Black people and women. I believe that no racial group holds a monopoly on effective political frameworks. Still, I think we can derive special insight from what I have labeled the Black American liberal tradition because it captures a little-known collection of essential American thinkers who had a lot to say about their unique position at the bottom of the hierarchy in a racially stratified society.

In my view, America and Americans can learn the most about the nation’s fundamental ideals and how to improve them from groups that had been systemically excluded from its promises. What I am calling the Black liberal tradition or, more precisely, a liberal tradition improved by the ideas and insights of antebellum Black Americans, is more aligned with a fully realized liberalism than perversions of the tradition we see in the writings of slaveholders and supporters who were committed to maintaining racial feudalism.

I have to ask a question about what just happened in America. What does this legacy of Black liberalism tell us about responding to Donald Trump’s return to power, and the extraordinary period of adversity that lies ahead? 

At the end of the talks I give about the early African American liberal tradition, I remind people that many of these thinkers, despite the severity of their circumstances, remained committed to bringing about change through political processes grounded in the liberal principles that inspired America’s founding documents. They recognized that while the arc of the moral universe is long, it did not necessarily bend toward justice. Triumph required applying the pressure of political appeals and fostering public dialogue across stark lines of division. Ultimately, early Black liberals rejected pessimism and apathy. Studying their resolve can show us what it looks like to have hope in the face of setbacks and to relentlessly bear witness to the plight of the most vulnerable among us.