The Works of James M. Whitfield

America and Other Writings by a Nineteenth-Century African American Poet

Robert S. Levine, Ivy G. Wilson, Robert S. Levine, Ivy G. Wilson

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2011
• ISBN:
  9780807877814
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: American Poetry
• Index: Literature

In this comprehensive volume of the collected writings of James Monroe Whitfield (1822-71), Robert S. Levine and Ivy G. Wilson restore this African American poet, abolitionist, and intellectual to his rightful place in the arts and politics of the nineteenth-century United States. Whitfield's works, including poems from his celebrated America and Other Poems (1853), were printed in influential journals and newspapers, such as Frederick Douglass's The North Star. A champion of the black emigration movement during the 1850s, Whitfield was embraced by African Americans as a black nationalist bard when he moved from his longtime home in Buffalo, New York, to California in the early 1860s. However, by the beginning of the twentieth century, his reputation had faded. For this volume, Levine and Wilson gathered and annotated all of Whitfield's extant writings, both poetry and prose, and many pieces are reprinted here for the first time since their original publication. In their thorough introduction, the editors situate Whitfield in relation to key debates on black nationalism in African American culture, underscoring the importance of poetry and periodical culture to black writing during the period.

PART I America

In 1853, the James S. Leavitt Company, a relatively small press in Buffalo known for its Universalist and Unitarian publications,¹ brought out Whitfield's first and only collection, America and Other Poems. Dedicated to Martin R. Delany, whose emigrationist politics Whitfield had recently embraced, the volume consisted of twenty-four poems, at least eight of which had been previously published in Frederick Douglass's newspapers. Other poems may have appeared in more obscure African American newspapers. The book measured approximately four by six inches and was bound with soft covers in the manner of a pamphlet. The small size and light weight would have facilitated the efforts of Whitfield, and perhaps others, to peddle a dozen or so books at a time. Whitfield sold copies of the book at his barbershop and onboard ships, where he sometimes worked as a barber. Easily rolled up or folded, America could be carried in one's shirt or pants pocket and passed from one reader to another.²

Whitfield's contractual relationship with the Leavitt Company is unclear. There was broad sympathy for abolitionism among Universalists, Unitarians, and other liberal Protestant groups in the Northeast, so Leavitt may have offered a royalties contract for a volume by the city's leading black poet. Or, just as likely, Whitfield may have used some of his savings from barbering to commission Leavitt as his publisher and then actively vended copies in order to recover his initial investment. We get some sense of Whitfield's situation from America's anonymous introduction, which reports that Whitfield works as a barber and “writes in such intervals of leisure as he is able to realize.” The author of the introduction self-identifies with Whitfield as an African American and hopes that the volume will succeed with “our people.” In all likelihood, the author of the introduction is Whitfield himself. After all, who else would have known that Whitfield “feels the ‘Divine spark’ within” Like William Wells Brown, who anonymously introduced his novel Clotel, published the same year as America, Whitfield may have wanted to avoid the typical situation of having a white editor introduce (and in some ways appropriate) a black text.³ The self-authored introduction triumphantly announces the advent of a black American poet who has composed, organized, and published a volume of poetry on his own terms.

Despite the relative obscurity of the press, America received considerable attention, garnering reviews in the most prominent antislavery newspapers of the time: William Lloyd Garrison's Liberator, Douglass's Frederick Douglass’ Paper, and Mary Ann Shadd's Provincial Freeman, which was the most influential black journal in Canada. As noted in our introduction, America was also reviewed in the Pennsylvania Freeman, and it was probably reviewed in other small-circulation black abolitionist newspapers as well. Reviewers hailed the volume. Douglass's regular reviewer and business manager, Julia Griffiths, declared in Frederick Douglass’ Paper that “Mr. Whitfield is a genius, and a genuine lover of the muses.” Garrison asserted in the Liberator that Whitfield “evinces genius of no common order.” The anonymous reviewer in the Provincial Freeman exclaimed that Whitfield is “entitled to a first place among the colored men, known as such in the United States, who have been inspired by the Muses,” concluding that a copy of America “should be in every family.”⁴ In addition to praising Whitfield's poetic genius, reviewers typically offered a sampling from the book and in this way helped to circulate Whitfield's poems to those who might not have access to a bookseller with the volume.⁵ Douglass and Griffiths also reprinted one of Whitfield's poems in their fundraising collection, Autographs for Freedom (1853), thereby linking Whitfield with such popular writers as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Catharine Sedgwick, and John Greenleaf Whittier, who were also contributors.⁶

America secured Whitfield's contemporary reputation as a great African American poet, but that reputation could not make a career. Despite his entrepreneurial efforts at selling his well-received book in Buffalo and elsewhere, the volume failed to provide him with the income he needed to become a full-time author, and his poetry writing became more sporadic. Over the next eighteen years, Whitfield would nevertheless strive “to cultivate, improve, and fully develop the talent which God hath given him” (as he puts it in the introduction to America), and poetry would remain central to his work as an antislavery activist and reformer—and to his sense of himself as an artist. We are pleased to make available to a new generation of readers the complete text of Whitfield's elegant, intense, and wide-ranging America, a poetic volume that addresses America through the eyes of a poet whose imagination remained unconstrained by the nation.

NOTES

1 Stephen Rensselaer's Historical Sketches and Incidents Illustrative of the Establishment and Progress of Universalism in the State of New York (1848) is a typical Leavitt publication; the Leavitt company also published Universalist sermons, church histories, and (beginning in the 1850s) the annual reports of the Buffalo Young Men's Christian Association. Whatever the contractual situation, America may have been hastily produced, because there are some obvious errors. For instance, the contents page is missing one poem, “The North Star,” and lists the title of “Stanzas for the First of August”(which is correctly titled near the close of the volume) as “Stanzas for the month of August.”

2 There is evidence that the volume had a significant life in the culture after its publication in 1853, passed from reader to reader and sometimes even rebound in more sturdy and attractive covers and presented as gifts. The American Antiquarian Society, for example, holds a volume that was rebound in cloth and stamped with leaves on the front and back covers. This particular volume was given as a gift in 1859 by one W. I. Currier, whose nameplate is glued onto the inside front cover, to George W. Sleeper. (Our thanks to Ezra Greenspan for sharing this information; Greenspan speculates that the book was a gift from a teacher to a student.) Unlike this attractively bound volume, most copies of America, as they circulated from reader to reader and from household to household, fell apart over the years or were lost. The tattered copy from the Library of Congress that we initially consulted in 2001 for this edition is now missing, and WorldCat lists fewer than thirty extant volumes.

3 See John Sekora's classic “Black Message / White Envelope: Genre, Authenticity, and Authorship in the Antebellum Slave Narrative,” Callaloo 32 (1987): 482–515, and Robert Stepto, From behind the Veil: A Study of Afro-American Narrative (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1979), 6–7. For another notable black self-introduction from the period, see Harriet E. Wilson's Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black (1859).

4Frederick Douglass’ Paper, 15 July 1853, 3 (the review is signed J. G., for Julia Griffiths); Liberator, 18 November 1853, 3 (the review is signed ED. LIB., for Garrison, the editor of the Liberator); Provincial Freeman, 15 July 1854, 3.

5 For instance, accompanying the review in the 18 November 1853 issue of the Liberator were three poems from America: “Self-Reliance,” “Delusive Hope,” and “Ode for the Fourth of July.”

6 Douglass and Griffiths reprinted Whitfield's “How Long?” See Autographs for Freedom (Boston: J. P. Jewett, 1853), 46–54.

AMERICA AND OTHER POEMS

BY J. M. WHITFIELD

BUFFALO PUBLISHED BY JAMES S. LEAVITT 1853

Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1853, by
J. M. WHITFIELD,
in the Clerk's Office of the District Court for the Northern District
of New York.

To
MARTIN R. DELANY, M.D.¹
THIS VOLUME
IS INSCRIBED AS A SMALL TRIBUTE OF RESPECT
FOR HIS CHARACTER,
ADMIRATION OF HIS TALENTS, AND LOVE OF HIS PRINCIPLES,
BY THE
AUTHOR.

CONTENTS

• AMERICA 41
• Christmas Hymn 46
• Lines on the Death of John Quincy...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• The Works of James M.Whitfield
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I America
• Part II Black Nationalism and Emigration
• Part III Poems from California
• Selected Bibliography