The Mayflower and the Slave Ship: Pilgrim-Puritan Origins in the Antebellum Black Imagination

This essay argues that antebellum black writers claimed America in part by reimagining a national rhetoric of Pilgrim-Puritan origins. Various connections have been drawn between the Puritans and early black writers, including a revised tradition of typological identification with Israel, captivity narratives, and, most frequently, the “black jeremiad.” In addition to these scholarly genealogies, black writers struggled more directly with their spiritual genealogies in an effort to reconcile a growing investment in American and Protestant identity with an emergent sense of black roots. Since Paul Gilroy, a growing number of scholars have examined the importance of origins for antebellum black writers in conversation with dominant Euro-American traditions, yet American Protestantism remains a minor presence in these studies. If early black studies of antiquity, biblical history, and European historiography, for example, were crucial to an emergent sense of black roots, they intertwined in complex ways with black writers’ investment in American Protestantism and its vision of history. Ultimately, black writers further radicalized abolitionists’ revolutionary Puritan genealogy as they made it their own, expanding this spiritual lineage to sanction fugitive slaves, black revolutionaries, and eventually the black troops of the American Civil War, imagined as the culmination of a sacred destiny that was both black and American, traceable to the Mayflower and the slave ship alike.