Jefferson's Map, Douglass's Territory: The Black Reconstruction of Enlightenment in America, 1773-1865

Abstract

Generations of scholars have examined “the Enlightenment” as a plurality of variegated eighteenth-century movements led by white European and American intellectuals who were generally devoted to the principles of reason, science, liberty, and progress. However, an understudied collective of African Americans had also been working alongside and even within this transnational movement since the Revolutionary era to extend its premises and reshape its trajectory. To fully recognize the promise that Enlightenment ideas continue to hold, we must turn to the writings and speeches of Black thinkers such as Phillis Wheatley, Lemuel Haynes, Caesar Sarter, David Walker, Maria Stewart, Hosea Easton, Frances Harper, Harriet Jacobs, James McCune Smith, and Frederick Douglass. Reading their work as social and political philosophy reveals a range of early enhancements to foundational Enlightenment ideas that thinkers from Johann Gottfried von Herder and Friedrich Nietzsche to Horkheimer and Adorno to Walter Mignolo and Immanuel Eze have otherwise criticized for producing universalizing theories that elide the value of individuals. To ignore the ways that Black writers remade the Enlightenment into a usable philosophy is to accept the inequality, unrest, and polarization we face today as an ineluctable consequence of the intractable battle between modern ideas and postmodern critiques. However, engaging with their work invites us to see our present predicament as a corrigible condition we can overcome.

This dissertation comprises two distinct but interdependent books that can be read in any order. The first book illustrates how African Americans have rendered a more complete account of “the Enlightenment,” contesting conventions that narrowly define the tradition. It charts the intellectual history of several Black writers from 1776 through the end of the antebellum era and shows how their ideas contribute to contemporary debates. Specifically, it examines how they appeal to an active and just God (rather than deism’s distant God); how they venerate lived experience over modern empiricism’s controlled experiments; and how they reimagine what counts as “philosophy” during and after the Age of Revolutions. Ultimately, I demonstrate how their work indexes new directions in intellectual history and political theory by providing countervailing visions of reason, science, humanism, progress, and social contractarianism against the claims of the era’s most influential thinkers.

The second book, “American Dark Age,” interrogates the apparent contradiction in Jefferson’s assertion that “all men are created equal.” The project does not read Jefferson and his Declaration of Independence against the backdrop of the European and American Enlightenment traditions, as virtually all modern scholars have done. Instead, it seeks to understand the founder’s ideas as a product of the same medieval feudal traditions he claimed to supersede because of his attachment to a race-based aristocratic system I call racial feudalism. The second half of Book 2 shows how the Enlightenment tradition Black people reconstructed can help thought leaders and activists in the United States avert the race war that individuals such as Jefferson, movements such as Afropessimism, and coalitions spearheaded by neo-reactionary far-right groups have claimed to be all but certain in an interracial republic.