Does Whiggish Founderism Work for Black or Cultural History?

Abstract

In 2007, Richard S. Newman introduced a group of essays in the William and Mary Quarterly under the rubric of “Black Founders in the New Republic.” He argued that the relatively neglected first generations of antislavery activists and community leaders like Richard Allen deserved that title at least as much as the white founding fathers who had been experiencing a revival in popular narratives and some scholarly circles. Calling them Black founders, Newman implied, would help historians appreciate the “spectrum of thought and activism” they displayed even as figures like Allen and Benjamin Banneker alternately claimed and challenged Washington and Jefferson. The analogy of founding fathers, as a generation and an array of leaders who theorized and strategized and organized, might even gain them some of the attention and veneration that white founders had been afforded in a spate of bestsellers.1 At the time I remember thinking at the time that applying “founders” lingo to African Americans in the early republic risked letting what I and others had been calling “Founders Chic” off the hook. It begged the question of the relationship between white and Black founders and thus obscured the question of the relationship of slavery and of African Americans to the larger narrative of U.S. history. It also might bury the increasingly evident historiographical relationship between the two topics, slavery and the founding of the United States, which was not so much one of an emerging opportunity for African American history as a backlash to it—for it seemed obvious that increased attention to slavery and Black histories, especially in the form of Sally Hemings, had itself sent some historians into impassioned searches for still-heroic, still “revolutionary” founders (first Adams, then Washington, then Franklin, later Hamilton) whose antislavery credentials had been newly exaggerated.2 Perhaps I needn’t have worried so much. There proved to be plenty, perhaps all too many, other ways to keep those tensions in focus—and even on the front page.