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

Antebellum slave society used the language of feudalism to defend America’s racial hierarchy, and in response Black abolitionists developed an anti-feudal critique that became a bedrock of American liberalism, according to this eye-opening debut. Historian Roy traces how Americans’ attitude toward feudalist imagery went from deeply disparaging during the Revolutionary era to highly romanticized during the 19th century. Walter Scott’s Arthurian legends were a major influence, according to Roy, but it was Thomas Jefferson’s “confused” combination of feudalism and liberalism in his political writing—which provided fodder for both pro- and anti-slavery advocates—that really set the stage for this intellectual battle. Roy shows how antebellum Black thinkers like Sojourner Truth, Hosea Easton, Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, and Frederick Douglass, in an effort to counter Jefferson, began to attack notions of racial fealty, honor, and order as retrograde and anti-democratic—remnants of an un-American feudal past. (The first novel by an African American, William Wells Brown’s Clotel, published in 1853, is a fictionalized adventure of Thomas Jefferson’s enslaved daughters, proving how central thinking about Jefferson was to Black thought at the time, Roy writes.) Pointing to how feudal imagery is still a mainstay of far-right ideologues—like Curtis Yarvin, who complains that American society lacks “mutual obligations” and is “atomized and structureless”—Roy makes a persuasive case that studying these antebellum thinkers is critical today. It’s a sophisticated reassessment of America’s political history. (Sept.)