Turning from communities of free people of color in Louisiana to New York City, Chapter 3, “Freedom’s Conduit: Spiritual Justice in ‘Theresa, A Haytien Tale’,” examines early African-American print culture, particularly the first African American short story, the anonymously authored “Theresa, A Haytean Tale” (1828). While Haitian Revolutionary histories in the US have often centered on Toussaint Louverture, “Theresa” follows the travails of a young woman and her all-female family in their struggle for Haitian independence. A cross-dressing spy against the French, Theresa frequently experiences visitations, possessions, and visions from God. Theresa’s political and spiritual labor forms a complex network of spiritual cosmologies and Haitian Revolutionary iconographies that help expand colonized understandings of gender and sexuality. In doing so, the tale reroutes the energy systems of both colonial plantation violence and early African-American domesticity by imagining a prophetic form of female futurity tied to Haitian independence, not biological reproduction. Ultimately, I argue, “Theresa” transforms the cult of Mary, showing how the female body serves as an instrument of divine energies in which the final product is not a child but instead political sovereignty.

This chapter examines the publication of “Theresa” in Freedom’s Journal, a short story about women’s wartime heroism into the broader history of the Haitian Revolution. “Theresa” paints an image of mixed-race womanhood that was not insignificant for both this American venue and for a larger transatlantic context. Like the anonymously written British epistolary novel, The Woman of Colour, A Tale (1808), “Theresa” shows mixed-race women who are aligned with Black racial uplift rather than white assimilation. Moreover, both of these texts present images of mixed-race heroines who differ significantly from those of the “tragic mulatta” genre that would gain popularity during the antebellum period. Instead, “Theresa” frames its mixed-race heroines as models not only of racial solidarity but also of radical abolitionist action. In this, “Theresa” anticipates postbellum mixed-race heroines, through foregoing mixed-race women’s heterosexual union with Black men with their political action alongside them. The chapter offers an analysis of early nineteenth-century texts such as Laura Sansay’s Secret History; or, the Horrors of St. Domingo (1808) and Zelica the Creole (1820), which make the safety of white women the priority of their mixed-race characters.

This chapter is about the religious sensibilities preached from pulpits and printed in black periodicals that shaped the philosophical and political aims of early African American writing. It examines the preaching and writing lives of eminent black clergy active between 1800 and 1830 and highlights their organizational networks within the Free African Society, the American Colonization Society, Prince Hall Freemasonry and a number of mutual aid societies. This chapter sets out to understand how, out of an inchoate black liberation theology, a black Protestant inheritance came to incorporate early African American literature, speech and non-fiction prose. The transitions under exploration include the coalescence of a liberating theology in early nineteenth century black religion.

From their initial explosion, African American women’s literary societies would go on to outnumber men’s organizations from the 1830s through the 1850s. Literary societies were also sites for the imbrication of oratory and print, since they included not only reading but also listening to texts read aloud, so that members of literary societies need not have been textually literate. Taking Maria Stewart’s first letters to the editor, in Freedom’s Journal in 1827 and The Liberator in 1832, this chapter will argue that the social gospel that would go on to define her career includes a prototypical Black feminist politics that we see emerging in the interconnected female-dominated Black literary societies and fledgling Black press around this time and reaching into the decades that follow. Stewart saw reading newspapers as essential to responsible citizenship for Black women, and understood both literary societies and newspapers as ways to forward her radical politics.

A transformation of the Declaration of Independence’s symbolism in the 1820s that proved useful for those advancing claims on behalf of black Americans. In the first instance, the Declaration became more closely associated with a commitment to equality. In the second instance, the project of unifying the nation around the sacred text of the Declaration had the effect of providing a written expression of American nationalism as a value-laden concept. This chapter traces the ways in which free black writers sought to exploit both opportunities, ultimately generating an understanding of American citizenship that would inform the wider abolitionist movement of the 1830s. These efforts saw free black writers advance claims upon American citizenship with pamphlets, including David Walker’s Appeal, and the first African American owned and operated newspaper in the United States, Freedom’s Journal. Associating this understanding of the Declaration with the U.S. Constitution provided a framework for understanding the Constitution as committed to an expansive notion of the People and provided an important orientating concept for the abolitionist movement as it evolved into the 1830s.