The Origin of Black Politics in America, 1790-1860

FAIN: FB-58325-15

Van Erben Gosse
Franklin and Marshall College (Lancaster, PA 17603-2827)

This project, to be published by the University of North Carolina Press, is a comprehensive study of the electoral and partisan politics of free men of color from the Revolution to the Civil War. It studies their transnational impact across the British Atlantic world, where they received considerable diplomatic and material support; their national impact via the promulgation of an ideology of nonracial republicanism appealing to a substantial minority of the Northern electorate (including sectors of the Federalist, Whig, and eventually Republican parties); finally, their participation as voters in key northern states, including New England other than Connecticut, Pennsylvania prior to disfranchisement in 1838, New York both before and after partial disfranchisement in 1821, and Ohio, where they were never formally enfranchised but voted in large numbers because of state Supreme Court rulings permitting "mulattoes" to vote as whites.

Associated Products

Fight for black voting rights precedes the Constitution (Article)
Title: Fight for black voting rights precedes the Constitution
Author: Van Gosse
Abstract: na
Year: 2015
Primary URL: https://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2015/03/12/fight-for-black-voting-rights-precedes-constitution/VM0V8vsrIFHXxPb1Qv9kAJ/story.html
Format: Newspaper
Periodical Title: Boston Globe

Emancipations, Reconstructions, and Revolutions: African American Politics and U.S. History in the Long 19th Century (Conference/Institute/Seminar)
Title: Emancipations, Reconstructions, and Revolutions: African American Politics and U.S. History in the Long 19th Century
Author: Van Gosse
Author: David Waldstreicher
Abstract: A Conference to be held at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York and the McNeil Center for Early American Studies of the University of Pennsylvania [February 8-9, 2017] Emancipations, Reconstructions, and Revolutions seeks to gather historians of US politics and African-American life to consider collectively not whether African Americans participated in the politics of the early, ante- and post-bellum republic, but how, when, and with what lasting effects. It will bring together various historiographical revisions now in process, including the recognition that the Civil War and Reconstruction typify rather than divide the middle period of American history. We are on the cusp of a new understanding of our national origins, seeing the American Revolution as a violent civil war shaped in large part by slavery and black participation. The Revolutionary settlement of half-slave and half-free thus defines a first Emancipation and first Reconstruction, part of a single “long” process beginning in the North and culminating in the South. We believe that our understanding of modern African American and U.S. politics will be fruitfully renovated by rethinking prior emancipations and reconstructions, in ways that do not take for granted the nature and outcomes of revolutions that could easily be described as civil wars followed by reconstructions.
Date Range: 2016-2017
Location: Graduate Center of CUNY and McNeil Center of the University of Pennsylvania

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