Abstract
The investment of African American Freemasonry in abolition, respectability, and literacy reflected an anxious intersection between dissent and incorporation. Furthermore, although the first black lodge represented a small and self-selected group, black Masonic thought described black identity in the broadest descriptive and discursive terms. In seeming paradox, the desire of black Freemasons to be respectable also reflected their demand for recognition as a function of abolitionism and historiographical revision. In consequence, the earliest African American lodge of Freemasons labored to occupy two opposing positions simultaneously, that of a counterpublic and that of a universal public. This essay examines this tension to argue that the same traits that made black Freemasonry unique and novel—its narrow self-selection, its abolitionist origins, and its arguments in print—also structured its conscious drive to represent African Americans in debates about freedom, racial equality, and Masonic history.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
For a useful examination of the varied usages of the term cosmopolitan and how it relates to other categories like diaspora, nation, and state, see Cheah and Robbins (1998). The scholarship on eighteenth-century Anglo-cosmopolitanism is interwoven with literature that identifies and explores various Atlantic worlds. For examples that interweave discussions of cosmopolitanism and various Atlantic worlds, see Gilroy (1993), Bailyn (1996), Steele (1986), Solow (1991), and Carwardine (1978).
In addition to ties between Philadelphia and Boston, this letter suggests a series of networks that might have allowed Black Masons in the north to spread the Craft among former slaves in the mid-Atlantic and southern states.
While Belknap’s summary reveals one avenue traveled by gradual emancipation, in fact, this phenomenon occurred in several different ways. Scholars have identified several sources of northern gradual emancipation, including a general moral and religious uneasiness with slavery manifested in increasing private manumissions, legal action arising out of increased slave activism and a heightened concern about rights, changing political and legal definitions of freedom arising from evangelical and democratic sources, and growing public debate and discussion about slavery. Current debates about the origins and effect of public opinion revolve around issues of access to mechanisms of public expression, where publics can be understood to be several different things: enclosed architectural spaces, social associations, physically proximate individuals or groups, imagined social collectives, and networks of travel and communication.
Building on or reacting to the work of Habermas regarding the development of a public sphere in the eighteenth century, scholars also disagree among themselves about the meaning and significance of something called the public sphere (Habermas 1965; Forum: Alternative Histories of the Public Sphere 2005; Breen 1997, 70; Sweet 2003, 227; Wood 1993, 364–366; Brooks 2003, 137–138). Where Wood and Breen understood public opinion as a mechanism that adopted and amplified competing arguments, Sweet viewed public opinion as sentiment, defining it relative to “specific strains of humanitarian sensibility—attuned more to questions of innocence, the ‘natural affections’ among families, and cruelty than to questions of equality or even liberty” (Sweet 2003, 227).
The idea of liberation historiography is helpful because it allows for an examination of a Black intellectual tradition that is invested in challenging certain premises of the racial hegemonic order while simultaneously absorbing parts of this ideological system. However, this analysis differs from that Ernest, given that Ernest examines Black Freemasonry more in terms of its opposition to dominant discourses rather than as the result of a dialectical tension between exclusive and representative leadership. In addition, Ernest builds the analytical category of liberation historiography upon the work of the theologian James Cone; however, this raises a question about whether using Cone’s theological hermeneutics of historiography raises questions of anachronism (Cone 1969, 1989).
The Grand Lodge of London reprinted the work of Anderson until 1784 (Hamill 1986, 17).
References
African Lodge microfilm. (1779–1786). Records of African Lodge, No. 1 Minutes and Accounts, 1779–1786. Samuel Crocker Lawrence Library at the Grand Lodge of Massachusetts. Boston, Massachusetts. Minutes and accounts of African Lodge no. 1 meetings.
African Lodge microfilm. (1787–1802). Letters and Sermons By Prince Hall, 1787–1802. Samuel Crocker Lawrence Library at the Grand Lodge of Massachusetts. Boston, Massachusetts. Drafts of Prince Hall charges and sermons.
African Lodge microfilm. (1797). Letters and Sermons By Prince Hall, 1787–1802. Samuel Crocker Lawrence Library at the Grand Lodge of Massachusetts. Boston, Massachusetts. Black Freemasons in Philadelphia write letter to Prince Hall.
Anderson, J. (1723). edited 1924. reprinted 1942. The Constitutions Of The Free-Masons Containing The History, Charges, Regulations, &c. of that most Ancient and Right Worshipful FRATERNITY. For the Use of the LODGES. London: Printed by William Hunter, for John Senex at the Globe, and John Hooke at the Flower-de-luce over against St. Dunstan’s Church, in Fleet-street. In Year of Masonry 5723 Anno Domini 1723, edited by Silver Spring, MD: Masonic Service Association of the United States, reprinted by Whitefish, MT: Kessinger Publishing.
Bailyn, Bernard. (1996). ‘The Idea of Atlantic History’, Itinerario, 20, no. 1.
Belknap, Jeremy. (1795). On slavery in Massachusetts, CA. Response to the Queries of St. G. Tucker. Jeremy Belknap Papers, microfilm edition, 11 reels. reel 8. Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society. Boston Massachusetts.
Bentley, William. (1801). diary entry. ed. 1905. rpt 1962. The Diary of William Bentley, D. D.: Pastor of the East Church, Salem, Massachusetts. v. 2. P. 379. Gloucester, MA: Peter Smith.
Black Petition. (1773a). ed. 1951. “The humble Petition ofmany Slaves, living in the Town of Boston, and other Towns…” January 6. P. 6 in A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States, v. 1, edited by Herbert Aptheker. New York: Citadel.
Black Petition. (1773b). ed. 1951. April 20. P. 6 in A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States, v. 1, edited by Herbert Aptheker. New York: Citadel.
Black Petition. (1777). To the Honorable Counsel & House of [Representa]tives for the State of Massachusetts Bay in General Court assembled, January 13, 1777. Massachusetts Archives, 212, 132.
Breen, T. H. (1997). Making history: the force of public opinion and the last years of slavery in Revolutionary Massachusetts. In R. Hoffman, M. Sobel, & F. J. Teute (Eds.), Through a glass darkly: reflections on personal identity in Early America (pp. 67–95). Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Brooks, J. (2000). Prince hall, freemasonry, and genealogy. African American Review, 34(2), 197–216.
Brooks, J. (2003). American Lazarus: religion and the rise of African-American and Native American literatures. New York: Oxford University Press.
Brown, C. L. (2006). Moral capital: foundations of British abolitionism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Brown, R. (1989). Knowledge is Power: The Diffusion of Information in Early America, 1700–1865. New York: Oxford University Press.
Bullock, S. C. (1996). Revolutionary brotherhood: freemasonry and the transformation of the American social order, 1730–1840. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Burke, J. M., & Jacob, M. C. (1996). French freemasonry, women, and feminist scholarship. The Journal of Modern History, 68(3), 513–549.
Carwardine, R. (1978). Trans-Atlantic revivalism: popular evangelicalism in Britain and America, 1790–1865. Westport: Greenwood.
Cheah, P., & Robbins, B. (Eds.). (1998). Cosmopolitics: thinking and feeling beyond the nation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Cone, J. H. (1969). Black theology and Black power. New York: Harper & Row.
Cone, J. H. (1989). Black theology as liberation theology. In G. S. Wilmore (Ed.), African-American studies: an interdisciplinary anthology (pp. 177–208). Durham: University of North Carolina Press.
Coquet, C. (2001). “My God Is a Time-God: How African-American Folk Oratory Speaks (of) Time, ”Pp. 514–537 in African Americans and The Bible: Sacred Texts and Social Textures, edited by Vincent Wimbush. New York: Continuum.
Davis, T. J. (1989). Emancipation rhetoric, natural rights, and revolutionary New England: a note on four black petitions in Massachusetts, 1773–1777. The New England Quarterly, 62(2), 248–263.
Davis, D. B. (1999). The problem of slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823. New York: Oxford University Press.
Ernest, J. (2004). Liberation historiography: African American writers and the challenge of history, 1794–1861. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina.
Forum: Alternative Histories of the Public Sphere. (2005). The William and Mary Quarterly, 62(1), 3–107.
Forum: Black Founders in the New Republic. (2007). The William and Mary Quarterly, 64(1), 83–167.
Foster, T. A. (2003). Antimasonic satire, sodomy, and eighteenth-century masculinity in the Boston Evening-Post. The William and Mary Quarterly, 60(1), 171–184.
Furstenberg, F. (2003). Beyond freedom and slavery: autonomy, virtue, and resistance in early American political discourse. The Journal of American History, 89(4), 1295–1330.
Gellman, D. N. (2006). Emancipating New York: The Politics of Slavery and Freedom, 1777–1827. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.
Gilroy, P. (1993). The Black Atlantic: modernity and double consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Glaude, E. S., Jr. (2003). Of the Black Church and the making of a Black Public. In C.West & E. S. Glaude Jr. (Eds.), African American religious thought: an anthology (pp. 338–366). Louisville: Westminster Knox.
Glaude, E. S., Jr. (2007). In a shade of blue: pragmatism and the politics of Black America (p. 2007). Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Habermas, J. (1965). Translated, 1991. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, translated by T. Burger and F. Lawrence. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Hall, P. (1792). A Charge, Delivered to the African Lodge on the 25th of June, 1792, at the Hall of Brother William Smith, in Charlestown. By the Right Worshipful Master Prince Hall. In J. Brooks & J. Saillant (Eds.), Face Zion Forward”: First Writers of the Black Atlantic, 1785–1798 (2002nd ed., pp. 191–199). Boston: Northeastern University Press.
Hall, P. (1797). A Charge, Delivered to the African Lodge, June 24, 1797, at Menotomy. By the RightWorshipful Prince Hall. In J. Brooks & J. Saillant (Eds.), Face Zion Forward”: First Writers of the Black Atlantic, 1785–1798 (2002nd ed., pp. 199–209). Boston: Northeastern University Press.
Hall, S. G. (2007). “‘A search for truth’: Jacob Oson and the beginnings of African American historiography. William & Mary Quarterly, 64(1), 139–148.
Hall, S. G. (2009). A faithful account of the race: African American historical writing in nineteenth-century America. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Hamill, J. (1986). The Craft: a history of English Freemasonry. Guildford: Biddles.
Hancock, Scott. (1999). The Law Will Make You Smart’: Legal Consciousness, Rights Rhetoric, and African American Identity Formation in Massachusetts, 1641–1855.” PhD dissertation. Department of History. University of New Hampshire, Durham.
Hinks, P. P. (1997). “To awaken my afflicted brethren”, David Walker and the problem of antebellum slave resistance. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.
Hinks, P. P. (2007). John Marrant and the meaning of early black freemasonry. The William & Mary Quarterly, 64(1), 105–116.
Hubbard, D. (1996). The sermon and the African American literary imagination. Columbia: University of Missouri Press.
Jeremy Belknap Papers ca. (1795a). Microfilm edition, 11 reels. reel 8. Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society. On slavery in Massachusetts. Response to the Queries of St. G. Tucker.
Jeremy Belknap Papers. (1795b). Microfilm edition, 11 reels. reel 8. Boston: Massachusetts Historical Society. John Eliot responsing to the Queries of St. G. Tucker.
Kantrowitz, S. (2010). ‘Intended for the better government of man’: the political history of African American freemasonry in the era of emancipation. The Journal of American History, 96(4), 1001–1026.
Kantrowitz, S., & Hinks, P. P. (Eds.). (2013). All men free and brethren: essays on the history of African American Freemasonry. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Kaplan, S. (1986). Blacks inMassachusetts and the Shays' Rebellion. Contributions in Black Studies, 8(2), 5–14.
Kaplan, S., & Kaplan, E. N. (1989). The Black presence in the era of the American Revolution. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.
Library and Museum of Freemasonry. (1779). GBR 1991 HC 28 A 1 1779. United Grand Lodge of England, London, UK, The General Regulations of the African Lodge sent by Prince Hall to the Grand Lodge of England. January 15.
Library and Museum of Freemasonry. (1787). GBR 1991 HC 28 A 4 1787. United Grand Lodge of England, London, UK. Letter from Prince Hall to William White Grand Secretary. May 16.
Library and Museum of Freemasonry. (1789). GBR 1991 HC 28 A 8 1789. United Grand Lodge of England, London, UK. Letter from Prince Hall to William White Grand Secretary, November 9.
Long, C. H. (2003). Assessment and new departures for a study of Black religion in the United States of America. In C. West & E. S. Glaude Jr. (Eds.), African American religious thought: an anthology (pp. 221–235). Louisville: Westminster John Knox.
Marrant, J. (1789). A Sermon Preached on the 24th Day of June 1789, Being the Festival of St. John the Baptist, at the Request of the Right Worshipful the Grand Master Prince Hall, and the Rest of the Brethren of the African Lodge of the Honorable Society of Free and Accepted Masons in Boston (1789). In J. Brooks & J. Saillant (Eds.), Face Zion Forward”: First Writers of the Black Atlantic, 1785–1798 (2002nd ed., pp. 77–93). Boston: Northeastern University Press.
Massachusetts Centinel 1786 August 19
Mather, Cotton. (1706). The Negro Christianized: An Essay to Excite and Assist that Good Work, the Instruction of Negro Servants. Retrieved November 1, 2012 http://digitalcommons.unl.edu/etas/28.
Melish, J. P. (1998). Disowning slavery: gradual emancipation and “race” in New England, 1780–1860. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Middleton, S., & Smith, B. G. (2008). Class matters: Early North America and the Atlantic World. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Moses, W. J. (1990). The Wings of Ethiopia: studies in African-American life and letters. Ames: Iowa State University Press.
Muraskin, W. A. (1975). Middle-Class Blacks in a White Society: Prince Hall Freemasonry in America. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Nash, G. B. (1988). Forging freedom: the formation of Philadelphia’s Black community (pp. 1720–1840). Cambridge: Harvard University Press.
Nash, G. B. (2005). The unknown American revolution: the unruly birth of democracy and the struggle to create America. New York: Penguin.
Nash, Gary B. and Jean R. Soderlund. (1991). Freedom by degrees: emancipation in Philadelphia and its aftermath. Oxford University Press.
New York Packet. (1788). Complaint of Prince Hall about kidnapping. February 26.
Newman, R. (2002). The transformation of American abolitionism: fighting slavery in the early republic. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Poole, T. G. (1992). What country have I? Nineteenth-century African-American theological critiques of the nation’s birth and destiny. The Journal of Religion, 72(4), 533–549.
Rael, P. (2002). Black identity and Black protest in the Antebellum North. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Roberts, R. (1994). “Patriotism and political criticism: the evolution of political consciousness in the mind of a black revolutionary soldier”, in “African American culture in the eighteenth-century”, special issue. Eighteenth-Century Studies, 27(4), 569–588.
Saillant, John. (1999). “‘Wipe away all tears from their eyes’: John Marrant’s theology in the Black Atlantic, 1785–1808.” Journal of Millenial Studies 1(2). Retrieved November 1, 2012 (http://www.mille.org/ publications/winter98/saillant.PDF).
Saillant, John. (2001). “Origins of African American Biblical Hermeneutics in Eighteenth-Century Black Opposition to the Slave Trade and Slavery.” Pp. 236–250 in African Americans and the Bible: Sacred Texts and Social Textures, edited by Vincent Wimbush w/asst of Rosamond C. Rodman. New York: Continuum.
Santamarina, X. (2006). Thinkable Alternatives in African American Studies. American Quarterly, 58(1), 245–253.
Sidbury, J. (2007). Becoming African in America: race and nation in the Early Black Atlantic. New York: Oxford University Press.
Skocpol, T., Liazos, A., & Ganz, M. (2006). What a mighty power we can be: African American fraternal groups and the struggle for racial equality. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Solow, B. L. (1991). Slavery and the rise of the Atlantic System. Cambridge: University of Cambridge Press.
Steele, I. K. (1986). The English Atlantic, 1675–1740: an exploration of communication and community. New York: Oxford University Press.
Stevenson, D. (1993). The origins of Freemasonry: Scotland’s century, 1590–1710. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sweet, J. W. (2003). Bodies politic: negotiating race in the American North, 1730–1830. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Tabbert, M. A. (2005). American Freemasons: three centuries of building communities. New York: New York University Press.
Walker, C. D. B. (2008). A noble fight: African American Freemasonry and the struggle for democracy in America. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.
Jr, W., & Joseph, A. (1994). Black square and compass: 200 years of Prince Hall Freemasonry. Richmond: Macoy Publishing and Masonic Supply.
Wallace, M. (1997). ‘Are We Men?’: Prince Hall, Martin Delany, and the Masculine Ideal in Black Freemasonry, 1775–1865. American Literary History, 9(3), 396–424.
Warner, M. (2002). Publics and counterpublics (abbreviated version). The Quarterly Journal of Speech, 88(4), 413–425.
Wesley, Charles H. (1977). Prince Hall: life and legacy. Washington D.C.: The United Supreme Council, Southern Jurisdiction, Prince Hall Affiliation and the Afro-America Historical and Cultural Museum.
White, S. (1991). Somewhat more independent: the end of slavery in New York City, 1770–1810. Athens: University of Georgia Press.
Wilder, C. (2001). In the Company of Black Men: the African influence on African American culture in New York City. New York: New York University Press.
Wolf, E. S. (2006). Race and liberty in the New Nation: emancipation in Virginia from the Revolution to Nat Turner’s Rebellion. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press.
Wood, G. S. (1993). Radicalism of the American Revolution. New York: Vintage.
Ziff, L. (1991). Writing in the New Nation: prose, print and politics in the Early United States. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Acknowledgments
I thank the anonymous readers of the Journal of African American Studies, the staff of the Massachusetts Historical Society, and the following for their support and their critical insights: Jason Ambroise, Amor Kohli, John Karam, Mark Hauser, and Kalyani Menon.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Sesay, C.M. The Dialectic of Representation: Black Freemasonry, the Black Public, and Black Historiography. J Afr Am St 17, 380–398 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12111-013-9250-9
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12111-013-9250-9