American Dark Age: Racial Feudalism and the Rise of Black Liberalism

How a group of Black liberal thinkers challenged the race-based feudalism that reigned in the early American republicThough the United States has been heralded as a beacon of democracy, many nineteenth-century Americans viewed their nation through the prism of the Old World.What they saw was a racially stratified country that reflected not the ideals of a modern republic but rather the remnants of feudalism.American Dark Age reveals how defenders of racial hierarchy embraced America’s resemblance to medieval Europe and tells the stories of the abolitionists who exposed it as a glaring blemish on the national conscience. Against those seeking to maintain what Frederick Douglass called an “aristocracy of the skin,” Keidrick Roy shows how a group of Black thinkers, including Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Hosea Easton, and Harriet Jacobs, challenged the medievalism in their midst-and transformed the nation’s founding liberal tradition.He demonstrates how they drew on spiritual insight, Enl