American Feudalism

We have forgotten feudalism. We think of lords and gentry in the same way we think of knights and castles. Feudalism is little more than a fantastical setting for our imagination. Sometimes there are dragons. It isn’t an organizing analogy we use in our lives or in our politics. If we want nostalgia, we reach for the imagined America of the 1950s, or perhaps the settling of the wild west. If we want oppression, we are less likely to think of feudalism—that’s a European thing, medieval—and more likely to think of Jim Crow, or the Southern slavocracy itself.

Yet feudal metaphors were common in the Founding era and through the antebellum period. This is one lesson Harvard scholar Keidrick Roy tries to impress upon us in American Dark Age: Racial Feudalism and the Rise of Black Liberalism. To the Founding liberals, America represented a decisive turn away from feudal ideas of privileged hereditary orders and the perpetuation of concentrated wealth across generations. No thinker represents this early American anti-feudalism so well as Thomas Jefferson, who argued that the feudal practices of primogeniture and entail “raised up a distinct set of families who, being privileged by law in the perpetuation of their wealth were thus formed into a Patrician order, distinguished by the splendor and luxury of their establishments.” 

Racial liberalism

Jefferson believed the poor were as well endowed with talents and mental faculties as the rich, and favored an egalitarian regime in which their natural talents could rise. He worked on a “plan which prescribes the selection of the youths of genius from among the classes of the poor … to avail the state of those talents which nature has sown as liberally among the poor as the rich.” 

Unfortunately, the same nature that spread talents and virtue equally across the population had withheld those same blessings from the black race. For Jefferson, black people were “fixed in nature” as inferior to whites, and were “permanently ignorant and incapable of generating ideas on their own ‘beyond the level of plain narration.’” Roy notes Jefferson’s remarkable personal bias here, as he afforded no appreciation for any black genius of his time, from the young poet Phillis Wheatley to the astronomer and polymath Benjamin Banneker. Jefferson could imagine himself as—and has passed for centuries as—an anti-feudal and progressive thinker, despite holding inegalitarian notions of racial inferiority stemming from the very feudal principle of the “Great Chain of Being.”

Alexander Stephens, vice president of the Confederacy, averred that the Confederacy with its system of slavery improved on old Europe because it flattened the feudal hierarchy: all white men were treated with equal respect; all were gentry.

Many governments have been founded upon the principle of the subordination and serfdom of certain classes of the same race; such were and are in violation of the laws of nature. Our system commits no such violation of nature’s laws. With us, all of the white race, however high or low, rich or poor, are equal in the eye of the law. Not so with the negro. Subordination is his place. He, by nature … is fitted for that condition which he occupies in our system. … The substratum of our society is made … for the inferior race.

Abolitionists, including white ones, called out the absurdity of opposing class feudalism only to support racial feudalism. The watch phrase here, deployed hundreds of times in William Lloyd Garrison’s The Liberator and by Frederick Douglass after his break with Garrison, was “the aristocracy of skin.”

The difference between the anti-feudalism of the Founding Fathers and the anti-feudalism of the black liberals was ideology. Racial feudalism was sustained by a constellation of ideas naturalizing a racial order, and enforcing norms of racial fealty and racial honor. These all, of course, have feudal analogs. A racial order of whites over blacks was cast into theological and scientific terms, so that the social hierarchy felt organic and inevitable. Racial honor pressured whites to defend their superior positions over blacks with the same thick moral sensitivity observed in other honor cultures. And racial fealty encouraged blacks to accept their subservient roles in moral terms.

To understand the nature of their oppression, black liberals had to interrogate and critique American ideology from their own perspective. Black liberal philosopher Hosea Easton described how this ideology pervaded white society and propagated itself.

[T]here could be nothing more natural, than for a slaveholding nation to indulge in a train of thoughts and conclusions that favored their idol, slavery. It becomes the interest of all parties, not excepting the clergy, to sanction the premises, and draw the conclusions, and hence, to teach the rising generation.

Liberalism in Europe developed explicitly against the feudal order. Liberals above all else targeted privileges of monarchs, nobles, and the clergy for elimination. The third estate was to be liberated from servitude. Liberalism in the American context then would seem to require liberation of the slave class—blacks—from the gentry—whites.

Black liberalism

Roy distills black liberalism from the slave narratives, abolitionist speeches and writings, and political actions of several central figures. These include figures still celebrated today, like Frederick Douglass, Harriet Tubman, Harriet Jacobs, and David Walker, as well as figures that have fallen away from the (white liberal) canon, such as Hosea Easton, James McCune Smith, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and William Wells Brown. These and other black American public thinkers in the early 19th century had a range of views on specific issues, but they were united in a recognizably liberal ideology aspiring to complete the Founders’ ideals of individual freedom, equality, reason, representative government, and progress. (As a terminological aside, Roy dismisses any fussiness over “republicanism” versus “liberalism,” finding that the terms in the American context are “fundamentally imbricated.”)

Roy identifies six ideas uniting black liberalism:

1. An anti-feudal, anti-prejudice, and anti-patriarchal political stance. Where many American Enlightenment thinkers could either justify racial feudalism or blissfully fail to see it, Roy’s black American liberals opposed all attempts to justify and naturalize racial inequality, both descriptive and prescriptive. One could already guess from the gendered make-up of the black liberals under discussion that black liberalism would be more feminist than its mainstream counterpart. But commitment to women’s rights were common among the men as well, especially with Frederick Douglass and William Wells Brown.
2. Opposition to black emigration and colonization. Black liberals were neither separatists nor nationalists, but instead believed blacks were at least as American as anyone else. Indeed, having mixed their blood and labor with the soil to produce its vast wealth, blacks had perhaps even greater claim to call themselves Americans. Black liberals furthermore held to a faith that justice was possible in America, even for blacks.
3. Reformist practical philosophy. Black liberals believed progress was possible—though never inevitable—through structural reforms and educational and spiritual development. In this sense, they were reformers rather than revolutionaries, though we should remember that many of these individuals broke existing laws in order to secure liberty for themselves and others by way of the Underground Railroad and other endeavors. American law could be both interpreted and amended to secure freedom for all. 
4. Identity-aware ethical outlook. Black liberals built their ethics and political philosophies not from abstract a priori reasoning, but out of their own experiences as slaves and nominally free but oppressed black Americans. Black liberals were neither “colorblind” nor race-essentialist.
5. Political transformation through moral improvement. Changing laws and swapping out political leaders will not be enough to achieve black freedom. Moral improvement would be necessary to prevent such political changes from retrogressing. Black liberals tended to believe in a transcendent morality, usually Christian.
6. Spiritually communitarian worldview. Antebellum black liberals believed all human beings were united by “one blood” and promoted care for all on this principle. This too was rooted in Christian values.

Throughout the book, the dominant idea that separates black liberals from other black thinkers of the time was the issue of emigration. Emigrationists and black nationalists tended to argue that America was irredeemably racist and that in order to find freedom and self-determination, blacks would have to settle their own communities, either within or outside America’s physical boundaries, but in either case apart from white Americans.

This is a tidy taxonomy of antebellum black political thought, and it is similar to analyses by earlier scholars like Michael Dawson (see his Black Visions). Roy does leave some interesting edge cases on the table. Emigrationists weren’t liberals, but there was significant collaboration and camaraderie between them and black liberals. The separatist Martin Delany co-founded the abolitionist newspaper, The North Star, with black liberal Frederick Douglass, for example. 

Christian faith was indeed a major component of antebellum black liberalism, but Douglass provides something of a counterexample here as well. Though he made frequent Biblical references, Douglass both denied the existence of miracles—in a speech on liberal reform titled It Moves, a clear reference to Galileo’s Church-upsetting observations about the cosmos—and praised famous freethinkers like Robert Ingersoll. William Wells Brown was even more forthcoming than Douglass about his lack of faith. There are doubtless other examples, religious faith being the intensely individual thing that it is. Other black liberal religious skeptics may not have felt free to express their views.

The OG American liberals

The real value American Dark Age adds is in simply introducing readers to antebellum black liberals not as a small and scattered assortment of individuals, but as a sizable, coherent school of thought. Most histories of liberalism focus on French and British liberals and completely elide early American black liberals.

Consider the timeline. Alexis de Tocqueville penned the first volume of Democracy in America in 1835. John Stuart Mill began his serious political writings in the 1840s, with the great liberal ur-text On Liberty published only in 1859. The Economist began circulation in 1843, coinciding with the Anti-Corn Law League of the famed Manchester Liberals John Bright and Richard Cobden. The antebellum black American liberals Roy discusses wrote in the 1830s, 40s, and 50s (and later, but Roy restricts his study to before the Civil War), roughly contemporary with this legendary genre-defining second wave of liberal thinkers, following the first wave of the American and French Revolutions. We have good reason to think of the antebellum black American liberals as founding the creed as much as these other canonical liberals.

When we look back for inspiration and guidance as American liberals, we naturally reach for the wisdom of the (white) Founding Fathers. But here is where Roy’s concept of racial feudalism comes into play. A liberalism that divides humanity into a master class and a slave class deserves an asterisk as “white liberalism.” The liberal theory alive in the early American republic that rejected all forms of feudal hierarchy should, perhaps, just be called liberalism, but we know it now as black liberalism. When we look to our liberal forebears, perhaps we should look first to the genuine liberals, the black liberals. 

This isn’t just a matter of historical curiosity. Liberalism has evolved and speciated through the centuries. Many modern schools of liberalism resonate with certain aspects of antebellum black liberalism. For most modern liberals, for example, the state is not seen as an ominous threat but as a tool for providing justice, security, and public goods and services for the public weal. This is consistent with black liberals who favored a powerful state capable of protecting the weak—especially black citizens—against the depredations of the powerful. 

Many modern liberals have made room for identity-based demands for equality. At least some liberals have made common cause with feminists, LGBTQ activists, immigrants’ rights advocates, collective labor, and so on. Identity-aware concerns like these were already present in antebellum black liberals. Likewise, black liberals defended a thicker political ethos that could readily answer the trenchant communitarian critiques of liberalism popular in the late 20th century.

Acquainting ourselves with the early black liberals thus reveals throughlines to modern liberal ideas that we have failed to appreciate, leaving those modern ideas prone to charges of inauthenticity and even illiberalism from more conservative wings of the liberal tradition. Exploring early black liberal thought can also build bridges between liberalism and other black intellectual traditions. Black feminism and black radicalism have roots in antebellum black liberalism. Understanding such connections opens up these fertile intellectual traditions to liberal uses and interpretations. It also makes modern forays like the black radical liberalism of Charles W. Mills feel less exotic.

Black liberalism is too long neglected, and Keidrick Roy’s American Dark Age brings black liberals back onto center stage where they belong.