Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Samuel Ward and the Making of an Imperial Subject

2012; Frank Cass & Co.; Volume: 33; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/0144039x.2012.669899

1743-9523

Jeffrey R. Kerr‐Ritchie,

Canadian Identity and History

Abstract This article examines Samuel Ringgold Ward's anti-slavery labours in Canada, the United Kingdom and Jamaica between 1851 and 1866. It demonstrates the ways in which Ward transformed himself into an imperial subject through the pursuit of personal and race-based liberty. This transformation is explained in four ways: Ward's physical relocation from unfree to free soil; his advocacy of legal equality for all people regardless of racial origin; his calls for emigration to the British Empire; and his commitment to the spread of pan-African evangelical Christianity. The article's central concern is to reveal the contradictions between liberty and empire. Acknowledgement Thanks to Fionnghuala Sweeney for editorial improvements. Notes For these three views, respectively, see C. Peter Ripley, ed., Witness for Freedom: African American Voices on Race, Slavery, and Emancipation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993), 277; Ronald K. Burke, Samuel Ringgold Ward: Christian Abolitionist (New York: Garland, 1995); and R.J.M. Blackett, Building an Antislavery Wall: Black Americans in the Atlantic Abolitionist Movement, 1830–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1983). Samuel Ringgold Ward, Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro (London: John Snow, 1855). It is available electronically at http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/wards/ward.html. It was also reissued by Arno Press in 1968. All references are to the printed 1968 edition. For an authoritative statement on the production, mediation, and reception of the antebellum slave narrative, see Ashraf H.A. Rushdy, Neo-Slave Narratives: Studies in the Social Logic of a Literary Form (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 118–119. For a mainly ‘black American’ framework of the slave narrative, see Audrey A. Fisch, ed., The Cambridge Companion to the African American Slave Narrative (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2007). For recent studies of British imperial liberties in which people of African descent are largely depicted as grateful subjects, see Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire's Slaves (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2005); Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); and Simon Schama, Rough Crossings: The Slaves, the British, and the American Revolution (New York: Harper, 2006). Fiona Spiers, ‘Black Americans in Britain and the Struggle for Black Freedom in the United States, 1820–70’, in Essays on the History of Blacks in Britain, ed. Jagdish S. Gundara and Ian Duffield (Aldershot: Avebury, 1992), 85. Ward, Autobiography, iv, 236. Elisa Tamarkin, Anglophilia: Deference, Devotion, and Antebellum America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 190, 178–246. Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie, ‘Samuel Ringgold Ward’, in Encyclopedia of Emancipation and Abolition in the Transatlantic World, ed. Junius Rodriguez (Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, 2007), 559–560. Samuel R. Ward to Gerrit Smith, 18 April 1842, in C. Peter Ripley, ed., The Black Abolitionist Papers (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 3: 384. For insights into this activist milieu, see Graham Russell Gao Hodges, David Ruggles: A Radical Black Abolitionist and the Underground Railroad in New York City (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010). Colored American, 11 August 1838. Samuel R. Ward to Nathaniel P. Rogers, 27 June 1840, in Ripley, Black Abolitionist Papers, 3: 46. Speech by Samuel Ward, 25 March 1850, in Ripley, Black Abolitionist Papers, 4: 48. Ibid., 4: 49. Ibid., 4: 51. See also Ward, Autobiography, 107–110. McHenry was a fugitive from slavery in Missouri and was working as a cooper in Syracuse when his owner sent an agent to arrest him under the Fugitive Slave Act. Once arrested, an interracial crowd freed McHenry and helped him escape to Kingston, Canada. Twenty-six men were indicted, including Ward, who, along with eight other blacks, crossed into Canada. See Ripley, Black Abolitionist Papers, 2: 180. Ward, Autobiography, 127. The British Parliament passed the Abolition of Slavery Act (also known as the Emancipation Act) on 29 August 1833. It was implemented the following year on 1 August 1834. Ward, Autobiography, 157; Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie, Rites of August First: Emancipation Day in the Black Atlantic World (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2007), 125. Ward, Autobiography, 154. Ibid., 176. Ibid., 177–179. Ibid., 227. Ibid., 8. Ibid., 236. British Banner, 20 August 1853, reprinted in Pennsylvania Freeman, 25 August 1853, 135. Ward, Autobiography, 253. For accounts of Ward's activities in the United Kingdom, see National Anti-Slavery Standard, 19 August 1854; Liberator, 25 August 1854. Ward, Autobiography, 147, 28. Ibid., 149. Ibid., 236. It is Ward's self-assurance throughout the Autobiography that makes it hard to view him as a sycophant. A Narrative of the Adventures and Escape of Moses Roper from American Slavery (Philadelphia, 1838), in North Carolina Slave Narratives: The Lives of Moses Roper, Lunsford Lane, Moses Grandy, and Thomas H. Jones, ed. William L. Andrews (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 71. Ward, Autobiography, 149–150. Ibid., 227. Ibid., 322. Mary Daly, ‘Revisionism and Irish History: The Great Famine’, in The Making of Modern Irish History, ed. D. George Boyce and Alan O'Day (London: Routledge, 1996), 73–76. Fionnghuala Sweeney, Frederick Douglass and the Atlantic World (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007), chap. 4 (quotes from 71). For the Morant Bay rebellion, see Gad J. Heuman, The Killing Time: The Morant Bay Rebellion in Jamaica (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1994). Samuel R. Ward, Reflections upon the Gordon Rebellion (1866). Thanks to the staff in the Special Collections Library at the University of Michigan for providing a photocopy at short notice. Ibid., 1. Ibid. Ibid., 4. Ibid., 6. Ibid., 7. Ibid., 8. There is some evidence to suggest that such tensions helped fuel deep animosity between Marcus Garvey and W.E.B. Du Bois. See W.E.B. Du Bois, ‘A Lunatic or a Traitor’, Crisis, May 1824, 200. But see Ward, Autobiography, 261. Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (London: Pluto, 1984), chap. 8. Gundara and Duffield, Blacks in Britain; Dorothy Thompson, ‘Ireland and the Irish in English Radicalism before 1850’, in Outsiders: Class, Gender, Nation (London: Verso, 1993), 103–133. Paul Gilroy, ‘There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack’: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), chap. 3. Samuel R. Ward to Henry Bibb, 16 October 1851, in Ripley, Black Abolitionist Papers, 2: 182. Ward, Autobiography, 135. Henry Bibb, Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb: An American Slave, Written by Himself (New York, 1849), http://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/bibb/menu.html; Voice of the Fugitive, January 1851. Mary Ann Shadd, A Plea for Emigration, or, Notes of Canada West (1852. Reprint Toronto: Mercury Press, 1998). Provincial Freeman, 23 September 1854. Blackett, Building an Antislavery Wall, 174. Falmouth Post and Jamaica General Advertiser, 4 May 1858, in Burke, Christian Abolitionist, 59. Ward, Autobiography, 117. Ibid., 155–156. Ibid., 193–199. Ibid., 197. Thomas C. Holt, The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor, and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832–1938 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 144. Kerr-Ritchie, Rites of August First, 199. Ward, Autobiography, 27. This makes Ward's silence on the role of poor soil and the difficulties of farming in provoking the uprising in Morant Bay all the more puzzling. Harvey Amani Whitfield, Blacks on the Border: The Black Refugees in British North America, 1815–1860 (Burlington: University of Vermont Press, 2006), chap. 3. Jane Rhodes, Mary Ann Shadd Cary: The Black Press and Protest in the Nineteenth Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1998), 35, 43–44. Ward, Autobiography, 139. Ibid., 31–33. Ibid., 80–81 (original emphasis). The parallel with the outcome of this first African American U.S. presidency is striking. Book of Psalms 68:31; Sylvia R. Frey and Betty Wood, Come Shouting to Zion: African American Protestantism in the American South and British Caribbean to 1830 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998). James Mursell Phillippo, Jamaica: Its Past and Present State (Philadelphia: J.M. Campbell, 1843); Kerr-Ritchie, Rites of August First, 42. Wilson Jeremiah Moses, Alexander Crummell: A Study of Civilization and Discontent (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). Kerr-Ritchie, Rites of August First, 199. Ibid., 211–217. For eloquent statements of this self-serving view of Africans' fitness for slavery, see Drew Gilpin Faust, ed., The Ideology of Slavery: Proslavery Thought in the Antebellum South, 1830–1860 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1981). C.H.A. Dall, ‘West India Emancipation’, Liberator, 20 August 1852. For the Afro-Asiatic roots of world civilization, see Ward, Autobiography, 274–275. Provincial Freeman, 15 July 1854. Ward, Autobiography, 411 (original emphasis). Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (London: Heinemann, 1959). For the American Revolution, see Douglas R. Egerton, Death or Liberty: African Americans and Revolutionary America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). For the American Civil War, see Ira Berlin, Joseph P. Reidy and Leslie S. Rowland, eds., Freedom's Soldiers: The Black Military Experience in the Civil War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Additional informationNotes on contributorsJeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie Jeffrey R. Kerr-Ritchie is Associate Professor of History, Howard University, 2441 6th Street NW, Washington, DC, 20059, USA.