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Race, Reconstruction, and the Invention of “Negro Superstition,” 1862–1877

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  19 May 2021

DAVID G. COX*
Affiliation:
History Department, University of Southampton. Email: dgc1d15@soton.ac.uk.

Abstract

This article traces the postbellum development and dissemination of the notion of “negro superstition.” By the end of Reconstruction, many whites across the nation, both liberal and conservative, shared in the belief that credulity was the keystone of African American culture. The formulation of superstition as innate racial trait served the conjoined causes of sectional reconciliation and white supremacy, eroding white support for black citizenship. As liberal estimations of black Christianity declined and conservative depictions of African American magical beliefs proliferated, “voodoo” gained traction as a potent imaginary, shorthand for racial atavism, unreason, and dangerous sexuality.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press in association with the British Association for American Studies

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References

1 Beard, James Melville, K. K. K. Sketches: Humorous and Didactic (Philadelphia: Claxton, Remsen and Haffelfinger, 1877), 64Google Scholar.

2 For a discussion of the differences between liberal and conservative racial attitudes see Williamson, Joel, The Crucible of Race: Black–White Relations in the American South since Emancipation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984)Google Scholar. These attitudes correspond in important ways to free contract and paternalist traditions of liberalism. See Steedman, Marek, Jim Crow Citizenship: Liberalism and the Southern Defense of Racial Hierarchy (New York: Routledge, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For a critique of the concept of racial attitudes see Fields, Karen and Fields, Barbara, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life (London: Verso, 2012)Google Scholar.

3 The spelling “voodoo” will be used throughout in order to differentiate the ideological construct from the practised religion, which, in line with Haitian orthography, should be spelled “Vodou.” See Ramsey, Kate, The Spirits and the Law: Vodou and Power in Haiti (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2011), 6CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4 Certainly, representations of the other were not always straightforwardly hegemonic and, during the 1880s and 1890s, folklorists like William Wells Newell and authors such as George Washington Cable allied discussions of “voodoo” to liberal racial politics. See Lears, Jackson, No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920 (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1981)Google Scholar; Bronner, Simon, Following Tradition: Folklore and the Discourse of American Culture (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1998)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Lamothe, Daphne, Inventing the New Negro: Narrative, Culture, and Ethnography (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Cox, David G., “‘Half Bacchanalian, Half Devout’: White Intellectuals, Black Folk Culture, and the ‘Negro Problem’,” American Nineteenth Century History, 16, 3 (Sept. 2015), 241–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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6 Historians emphasizing the instrumentality of laissez-faire political economics tend to diminish the influence of race. See Heather Cox-Richardson, The Death of Reconstruction: Race, Labor, and Politics in the Post-Civil War North (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Andrew Slap, The Doom of Reconstruction: The Liberal Republicans in the Civil War Era (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010). According to Slap, 86, because most white northerners evinced a degree of racism, ascribing it causal power is too “easy.” This argument, however, occludes the protean, contingent character of race. See Barbara J. Fields, “Ideology and Race in American History,” in J. Morgan Kousser and James McPherson, eds., Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 144–68. For works emphasizing the role of race in the retreat from Reconstruction see Blight; Nancy Cohen, The Reconstruction of American Liberalism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002); Eric Foner, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–77 (New York: Harper and Row, 1988); John Sproat, “The Best Men”: Liberal Reformers in the Gilded Age (London: Oxford University Press, 1968); Nina Silber, The Romance of Reunion: Northerners and the South, 1865–1900 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993). For more on “naturalizing” racism see Jackson Lears, Rebirth of a Nation: The Making of Modern America, 1877–1920 (New York: HarperCollins, 2009).

7 Voltaire, The Works of Voltaire: A Contemporary Version, trans. William Fleming (Paris: E. R. DuMont, 1901), 273, quoted in Randall Styers, Making Magic: Religion, Magic and Science in the Modern World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 56.

8 “Superstition,” Christian Recorder, 2 Feb. 1861, 1.

9 Emily Ogden, Credulity: A Cultural History of US Mesmerism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2018), 9. See also Jenny Franchot, Roads to Rome: The Antebellum Protestant Encounter with Catholicism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Ann Taves, Fits, Trances, and Visions: Explaining Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).

10 Ogden, 7.

11 See Edward Blum, Reforging the White Republic: Race, Religion, and American Nationalism, 1865–1898 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005); Curtis Evans, The Burden of Black Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). For the co-constituted nature of race and religion see Henry Goldschmidt, “Introduction: Race, Nation, and Religion,” in Henry Goldschmidt and Elizabeth McAlister, eds., Race, Nation, and Religion in the Americas (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 3–31.

12 Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Vintage, 2008), 185.

13 Yvonne Chireau, Black Magic: Religion and the African American Conjuring Tradition (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 12.

14 For this syncretic process see Jeffrey Anderson, Conjure in African American Society (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005).

15 See Chireau. For the relationship between Conjure and black Christianity see Theophus Smith, Conjuring Culture: Biblical Formations of Black America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994).

16 Franchot, xviii.

17 See Caroline Janney, Remembering the Civil War: Reunion and the Limits of Reconciliation (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2013).

18 See Jackson Lears, “The Concept of Cultural Hegemony: Problems and Possibilities,” American Historical Review, 90, 3 (June 1985), 567–93, 571.

19 For the concept of the black public sphere see Michael Dawson, Not in Our Lifetimes: The Future of Black Politics (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2011); Carla Peterson, Doers of the Word: African-American Women Speakers and Writers in the North (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995); Sinha, Manisha, “To ‘Cast Just Obliquy on Oppressors’: Black Radicalism in the Age of Revolution,” William and Mary Quarterly, 64, 1 (Jan. 2007), 149–60Google Scholar; Squires, Catherine, “Rethinking the Black Public Sphere: An Alternative Vocabulary for Multiple Public Spheres,” Communication Theory, 12, 4 (2002), 446–68CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

20 Kevin Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 2. See W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (Chicago: A. C. McClurg, 1903). Of course, the freedpeople continued to celebrate the dignity of their culture within the enclave of the black church. Although the focus of this article is middle-class discourse, it is important to recognize the persistence of this oral counternarrative. For the role of religion in contesting white supremacy see Joshua Paddison, “New Directions in the History of Religion and Race,” American Quarterly, 68, 4 (Dec. 2016), 1007–17, 1009. For some of the methodological difficulties faced by those seeking to access this oral tradition see Derek Chang, Citizens of a Christian Nation: Evangelical Missions and the Problem of Race in the Nineteenth Century (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 2010).

21 William Lloyd Garrison, “The Colored Population of the United States. No. 2,” The Liberator, 22 Jan. 1831, 14.

22 See Evans, The Burden of Black Religion, 17–63; George Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press of New England, 1987), 97–129.

23 Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom's Cabin: Or, Life among the Lowly (Jewett: Boston, 1852), 464, 473, 440.

24 Daniel Walker Howe, Making the American Self (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), 107.

25 Charles Ball, Slavery in the United States: A Narrative of the Life and Adventures of Charles Ball (New York: John S. Taylor, 1837), 165.

26 Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave (Boston: Anti-Slave Office, 1846), 14. For a discussion of Douglass's treatment of slave songs see Jon Cruz, Culture on the Margins: The Black Spiritual and the Rise of American Cultural Interpretation (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).

27 William Wells Brown, Narrative of William W. Brown: A Fugitive Slave (Boston: Anti-Slavery Office, 1847), 93, 91.

28 Douglass, 71, original emphasis. Uncle Tom's Cabin contains a similar reference to a “witch thing” that prevents slaves “from feelin’ when they's flogged.” Stowe, 440.

29 Austa French, Slavery in South Carolina and the Ex-Slaves; or, The Port Royal Mission (New York: W. M. French, 1862), 186, 190.

30 E. P. Whipple, “Reconstruction and Suffrage,” Atlantic Monthly, Aug. 1865, 238.

31 Margaret Washington Creel, “A Peculiar People”: Slave Religion and Community-Culture among the Gullahs (New York: New York University Press, 1988), 285.

32 Steven Hahn, A Nation under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2003), 44.

33 Mark Noll, “The Bible and Slavery,” in Randall Miller, ed., Religion and the American Civil War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 53.

34 Lawrence Levine, “Slave Songs and Slave Consciousness: An Exploration of Neglected Sources,” in Timothy Fulop and Albert Raboteau, eds., African-American Religion: Interpretive Essays in History and Culture (New York: Routledge, 1997), 73.

35 Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Army Life in a Black Regiment (Boston: Fields, Osgood, 1869), 262.

36 French, 265.

37 “The Freedman at Port Royal,” North American Review, 101 (July 1865), 10.

38 Evans, The Burden of Black Religion, 76–77.

39 Jean Lee Cole, ed., Freedom's Witness: The Civil War Correspondence of Henry MacNeal Turner (Morgantown: West Virginia University Press, 2013), 260, 261, 260.

40 See Charlotte Forten, The Journal of Charlotte Forten: A Young Black Woman's Reactions to the White World of the Civil War Era (New York, 1981); William Toll, “Free Men, Freedmen, and Race: Black Social Theory in the Gilded Age,” Journal of Southern History, 44, 4 (Nov. 1978), 575. Willie Lee Rose, Rehearsal for Reconstruction: The Port Royal Experiment (London: Oxford University Press, 1964), 94.

41 Forten, 153.

42 “Freedman at Port Royal,” 10, 4, 7.

43 French, 131.

44 Harriet Ware, “The Negro in South Carolina,” New York Times, 19 July 1862, 2.

45 Higginson, Army Life, 27.

46 Ibid., 190.

47 Marcel [W. F. Allen], “The Negro Dialect,” The Nation, 1, 24 (1864), 744–45, 745.

48 See Jacqueline Jones, Soldiers of Light and Love: Northern Teachers and Georgia Blacks, 1865–1873 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1980), 142; Joe Richardson, Christian Reconstruction: The American Missionary Association and Southern Blacks, 1861–1890 (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1986), ix.

49 See Taves, Fits, Trances, and Visions.

50 See Susan Walker, Journal of Miss Susan Walker: March 3rd to June 6th, 1862, ed. Henry Noble Sherwood (Cincinnati: Jennings and Graham, 1912), 16; Elizabeth Ware Pearson, ed., Letters from Port Royal: Written at the Time of the Civil War (1862–1868) (Boston: W. B. Clarke, 1906), 27.

51 Laura Towne, Letters and Diary of Laura M. Towne: Written from the Sea Islands of South Carolina, 1862–1884, ed. Rupert Sargent Holland (Cambridge: Riverside, 1912), 22; Marcel, 745. For a discussion of the shout's origins see Sterling Stuckey, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1987).

52 William Francis Allen, Charles Pickard Ware, and Lucy McKim Garrison, Slave Songs of the United States (New York: Peter Smith, 1867), xii, xiii. See also Towne, 20.

53 Charles Colcock Jones, The Religious Instruction of the Negroes in the United States (Savannah: Thomas Purse, 1842), 127. For the relationship between magic and resistance see Anderson, Conjure in African American Society; Geggus, David, “Haitian Voodoo in the Eighteenth Century: Language, Culture, and Resistance,” Jahrbuch für Geschichte Latinamerikas, 28, 1 (Jan. 1991), 2151Google Scholar; Diane Paton and Maarit Forde, eds., Obeah and Other Powers: The Politics of Caribbean Religion and Healing (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012); Walter Rucker, The River Flows On: Black Resistance, Culture, and Identity Formation in Early America (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University, 2006); Suttles, William Jr., “African Religious Survivals as Factors in American Slave Revolts,” Journal of Negro History, 56, 2 (April 1971), 97104CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

54 Edward Pollard, Black Diamonds Gathered in the Darkey Homes of the South (New York: Pudney and Russell, 1859), 58, 87.

55 For the francophone Atlantic see Bill Marshall, The French Atlantic: Travels in Culture and History (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2009); Christopher Miller, The French Atlantic Triangle: Literature and Culture of the Slave Trade (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008).

56 Fitzhugh, George, “Hayti and the Monroe Doctrine,” De Bow's Review: Agricultural, Commercial, Industrial Progress and Resources, 31, 2 (Aug. 1861), 131–36Google Scholar. It is likely that Fitzhugh was introduced to “Vaudoux” by Gustave D'Alaux's condemnatory account of Haiti, Solouque and His Empire, published in French in 1856 and translated into English in 1861. See Gustave d'Alaux, Soulouque and His Empire, translated and edited by John H. Parkhill (Richmond: J. W. Randolph, 1861).

57 Wright, W. W., “Free Negroes in Hayti,” Debow's Review: Agricultural, Commercial, Industrial Progress and Resources, 27, 5 (Nov. 1859), 526–49Google Scholar. Among the many pro-slavery essays that discuss Haiti, but not Vodou, are Thomas Roderick Dew, Abolition of Negro Slavery: Review of the Debate in the Virginia Legislature, 1831–’32 (Washington: Duff Green, 1833); Josiah Nott, Two Lectures on the Natural History of the Caucasian and Negro Races (Mobile: Dade and Thompson, 1844).

58 For the impact of the Haitian revolution on the United States, as well as American representations of the republic, see Matthew Clavin, Toussaint Louverture and the American Civil War: The Promise and Peril of a Second Haitian Revolution (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 2010); Alfred Hunt, Haiti's Influence on Antebellum America: Slumbering Volcano in the Caribbean (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988); J. Michael Dash, Haiti and the United States: National Stereotypes and the Literary Imagination (Houndmills: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998); Ashli White, Encountering Revolution: Haiti and the Making of the Early Republic (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2010). Ironically, as Kate Ramsey has argued, the Haitian government's attempt to repress Vodou practices during the 1860s (thus demonstrating the republic's civilized status) introduced many white, Western commentators to Vodou, playing into the hands of white supremacists. Kate Ramsey, “Legislating ‘Civilization’ in Postrevolutionary Haiti,” in Goldschmidt and McAlister, Race, Nation, and Religion, 231–58.

59 See Fayette Copeland, Kendall of the Picayune (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1943).

60 “The Voudous Again,” Daily Picayune, 25 July 1851, 2.

61 Angel Adams Parham, “Caribbean and Creole in New Orleans,” in Martin Munro and Celia Britton, eds., American Creoles: The Francophone Caribbean (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2012), 60. For more on Americanization see Virginia Domínguez, White by Definition: Social Classification in Creole Louisiana (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986); Joseph Logsdon and Caryn Cossé Bell, eds., Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992); Elizabeth Thompson, Exiles at Home: The Struggle to Become American in Creole New Orleans (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009).

62 “The Voudou Vessels,” Daily Picayune, 1 Aug. 1863, 2. See Michelle Gordon, “‘Midnight Scenes and Orgies’: Public Narratives of Voodoo in New Orleans and Nineteenth-Century Discourses of White Supremacy,” American Quarterly, 64, 4 (Dec. 2012), 767–86, 772.

63 Daily Picayune, 12 July 1859, quoted in Carolyn Morrow Long, “Marie Laveau: A Nineteenth-Century Voudou Priestess,” Louisiana History, 46, 3 (Summer 2005), 262–92, 281.

64 See Winthrop Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968); Cornel West, “Marxist Theory and the Specificity of Afro-American Oppression,” in Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, eds., Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988), 17–33.

65 Franchot, Roads to Rome, 107.

66 For a description of a Vodou ceremony including all of these elements see New Orleans Era, 1 Aug. 1863.

67 “Education in Hayti,” New York Times, 11 Feb. 1866, 4.

68 See Alasdair Pettinger, “From Vaudoux to Voodoo,” Modern Language Studies, 40, 4 (Oct. 2004), 415–425.

69 “African Superstitions in America,” Nashville Union and American, 16 Nov. 1866, 1. The Union and American's account was modelled upon an article in the Daily Picayune, 1 May 1864, 1.

70 Eric Lott, “Blackface and Blackness: The Minstrel Show in American Culture,” in Anne Marie Bean, James V. Hatch, and Brooks McNamara, eds., Inside the Minstrel Mask: Readings in Nineteenth-Century Blackface Minstrelsy (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1996), 18.

71 Franchot, xxii.

72 Cincinatti Enquirer, 22 May 1865, quoted in Leon Litwack, Been in the Storm So Long: The Aftermath of Slavery (New York: Knopf, 1979), 223.

73 Cincinnati Enquirer, 21 Nov. 1866, 1.

74 Cincinnati Enquirer, 30 Nov. 1866, 1.

75 Quoted in “African Superstition,” Detroit Free Press, 9 July 1867, 3.

76 Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 19 Dec. 1867, 1. Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 30 Dec. 1867, 10.

77 Congressional Globe, 40 Cong., 2 sess., 28 May 1868, 2632. Congressional Globe, 39 Cong., 1 sess., 26 Jan. 1866, 448. Edward Pollard, The Lost Cause Regained (New York: G. W. Carleton, 1868), 170.

78 John van Evrie came close to a discussion of “voodoo.” Like Fitzhugh, Van Evrie drew upon Gustave D'Alaux's Solouque. Van Evrie framed the coronation of Solouque, “a serpent worshipper and Obi-man, as chief or emperor,” as the inevitable result of Haitian independence. John H. van Evrie, White Supremacy and Negro Subordination (New York: Van Evrie, Horton, 1868), 330.

79 Faust, “The Proslavery Argument,” 15. See George W. Stocking Jr., Victorian Anthropology (New York: Free Press, 1987), 184. To Edward Pollard, the “political question of the negro” was now “simply and purely a question of natural history.” Pollard, Lost Cause Regained, 112, 142.

80 Louisville Daily Courier, 13 March 1868, 1. “Voodooism,” Daily Milwaukee News, 18 July 1869, 6.

81 By 1871, the New Orleans Picayune could reflect that these festivities had “been too frequently described to need repetition.” “Voudou Superstition,” Daily Picayune, 25 June 1871, 5.

82 Attending this “Voudoo Festival” were the “colored citizens who regulate the affairs of Louisiana, and send men to Congress to legislate for the nation.” “A Voudoo Camp Meeting,” Cincinnati Enquirer, 28 July 1870, 4.

83 “Congo Court Gossip,” Charleston Daily News, 17 June 1869, 1; “Voodooism,” Galveston Daily News, 15 Oct. 1868, 2.

84 Cincinnati Enquirer, 15 Dec. 1869, 4.

85 Galveston Daily News, 21 Oct. 1870, 3.

86 Texas Ledger, 28 May 1870, quoted in “Voudooism in Texas,” San Francisco Chronicle, 5 July 1870, 1.

87 Edgefield Advertiser, 15 May 1873, 1.

88 Louisiana Democrat, 19 Nov. 1873, 2.

89 Congressional Globe, 40 Cong., 2 sess., 11 Jan. 1868, 458. See Cox-Richardson, The Death of Reconstruction, 28.

90 “Affairs in New Orleans,” New York Times, 5 May 1867, 1. See also “Emotional Religion,” American Missionary, March 1870, 59.

91 Albion Tourgée, A Fool's Errand by One of the Fools (New York: Fords, Howard, and Hulbert, 1880), 120.

92 “Our Southern Work: Its Lights and Shades,” American Missionary, June 1869, 135, original emphasis.

93 American Missionary, Jan. 1870, 7. See James McPherson, The Abolitionist Legacy: From Reconstruction to the NAACP (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1975), 201.

94 “The American Problem,” American Missionary, Nov. 1873, 253. For declining northern enthusiasm for Reconstruction see “Northern Responsibility,” American Missionary, July 1872, 159.

95 “Negro Voters,” American Missionary, Oct. 1872, 230. See also Congressional Globe, 41 Cong., 2 sess., 26 April 1870, 2979.

96 “An All Night Contest with Superstition,” American Missionary, June 1872, 121, 122.

97 “Obstacles: From a Missionary in the South,” American Missionary, Sept. 1870, 209–10. The convergence of liberal and conservative discourse was further illustrated by the Missionary's decision to republish an essay by the pro-slavery author and architect of Lost Cause mythology Edward Pollard. See Edward Pollard, “The Romance of the Negro,” American Missionary, Nov. 1871, 241–47.

98 See Jay Riley Case, An Unpredictable Gospel: American Evangelicals and World Christianity, 1812–1920 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012).

99 Benjamin Tucker Tanner, An Apology for African Methodism (Baltimore, 1867), vii, 66, 67.

100 Blum, Reforging the White Republic, 67.

101 Congressional Globe, 42 Cong., 2 sess., 17 May 1872, 3587. See also Congressional Globe, 41 Cong., 3 sess., 14 Feb. 1871, 1221.

102 H. Grady McWhiney and Francis Simkins, “The Ghostly Legend of the Ku-Klan,” Negro History Bulletin, 14, 5 (Feb. 1951), 109–12. For the possibility that Klan members were attempting to appropriate and exploit the spiritual beliefs of the freedpeople see Elaine Frantz Parsons, Ku-Klux: The Birth of the Klan during Reconstruction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015), 76; Gladys-Marie Fry, Night Riders in Black Folk History (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 62; Andrew Silver, Minstrelsy and Murder: The Crisis of Southern Humor, 1835–1925 (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2006), 70–71.

103 William Wells Brown, “A Night with the Ku-Klux,” New National Era, 12 Oct. 1871, 1.

104 Edward Tylor, Primitive Culture: Researches into the Development of Mythology, Philosophy, Art, and Custom (London: J. Murray, 1871), 15.

105 G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: The Lectures of 1827, ed. Peter Hodgson (Berkeley: University of California Press), 101, quoted in Styers, Making Magic, 64.

106 William Toll, The Resurgence of Race: Black Social Theory from Reconstruction to the Pan-African Conferences (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979), 13. As Stephen Prince has argued, in the national construction of southern identity, there were no “neat and tidy” counternarratives. K. Stephen Prince, Stories of the South: Race and the Reconstruction of Southern Identity, 1865–1915 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2014). 4. See also Rael, Patrick, “The New Black Intellectual History,” Reviews in American History, 29, 3 (Sept. 2001), 357–67CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

107 Jeremiah Moses, The Golden Age of Black Nationalism, 1850–1925 (Hamden: Archon, 1978), 23. See also Patrick Rael, Black Identity and Black Protest in the Antebellum North (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 175.

108 Appiah, Anthony, “Alexander Crummell and the Invention of Africa,” Massachusetts Review, 31, 3 (Autumn 1990), 385–406, 388Google Scholar. See William Wells Brown, The Rising Son, or, The Antecedents and Advancement of the Colored Race (Boston: A. G. Brown, 1882). See also Dickson Bruce, “Ancient Africa and the Early Black American Historians, 1883–1915,” American Quarterly, 36, 4 (Winter 1984), 684–99, 692.

109 George Vashton, “Africa as a Field for Missions,” New Era, 21 April 1870, 1.

110 “From Ohio,” New National Era, 4 June 1874, 1.

111 E. K. D., “From Texas,” New National Era, 9 July 1874, 1.

112 Quoted in Moses, Wilson, “Dark Forests and Barbarian Vigor: Paradox, Conflict, and Africanicity in Black Writing before 1914,” American Literary History, 1, 3 (Fall 1989), 637–55, 647CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

113 Rael, Black Identity and Black Protest, 175.

114 A. C. Bartlett, “From Mississippi,” New National Era, 1 Oct. 1873, 1.

115 See Foner, Reconstruction, 470, 352.

116 New York Daily Tribune, 1 May 1871, 1, quoted in Heather Cox Richardson, West from Appomattox: The Reconstruction of America after the Civil War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 103.

117 “Social Rights of the Negro,” Chicago Tribune, 7 Feb. 1872, 4.

118 “Obi: Witchcraft among the Blacks,” Chicago Tribune, 26 Dec. 1872, 6. See Handy, M. P., “Witchcraft among the Negroes,” Appleton's Journal, 8 (14 Dec. 1872), 666–67Google Scholar.

119 “The Northern Press on Voudooism in Louisiana,” New Orleans Republican, 30 July 1873, 1.

120 American Missionary, July 1873, 151.

121 “The Freedman as Legislator,” American Missionary, April 1874, 85.

122 “South Carolina: The Social and Moral Condition of the Colored Population,” New York Times, 4 July 1874, 5. See also “The Negro in the South,” New York Times, 12 May 1874, 4.

123 “Freedman as Legislator,” 85.

124 “South Carolina,” 4.

125 “The Nation Still in Danger,” American Missionary, July 1875, 151.

126 Richardson, Christian Reconstruction, 252.

127 American Missionary, Sept. 1875, 197; Frederick Douglass, “The Emancipated Man Wants Knowledge,” American Missionary, Aug. 1875, 171.

128 Quoted in the Pulaski Citizen, 26 Aug. 1875, 4.

129 See Gordon, “Midnight Scenes,” 776.

130 “Negro Superstition,” New York Times, 12 April 1874, 10; “Negro Superstition,” New York Times, 1 March 1874, 5.

131 “Alabama: Religion among the Whites and Negroes,” New York Times, 12 Dec. 1874, 1. A week after the Times published its latest Alabama epistle, it printed a letter from Tennessee portraying black Christianity as a fine crust overlying superstitious depths. Tellingly, it is unclear whether the author was a missionary, denouncing degradation to drum up support, or a conservative, adopting a paternalist tone to demonstrate degradation. “Sorcery among the Negroes,” New York Times, 20 Dec. 1874, 6.

132 “Leaves of Travel,” New York Times, 12 Dec. 1874, 1.

133 Pittsburgh Commercial, 31 Dec. 1874, 2.

134 “Negro Piety: Hasty Generalization,” American Missionary, Oct. 1875, 218. See also “Communication: Why Is It?”, American Missionary, Nov. 1875, 253–55.

135 King, Edward, The Great South (Hartford: American Publishing, 1875), 432Google Scholar, 607, 585, 586, 781, 586, 781, 608.

136 Pike, James S., The Prostrate State: South Carolina under Negro Government (New York: D. Appleton, 1874)Google Scholar, 67, 60, 263.

137 See Atchinson Daily Champion, 2 Sept. 1877, 4.

138 Mary Bryan, “Lost Rosie; or, Kountz the Conjurer,” The Intelligencier, 7 Dec. 1876, 2.

139 As a Mississippi newspaper speculated after Charles Caldwell, an African American senator, was shot in the back of the head without warning, “This Voodoo worshiper (we assume this must be his religious status) was said to be drunk. Senator CALDWELL was instantly pursued by some chivalrous sons of the Sunny Land, and a lively passage with firearms ensued.” Harrisburg Telegraph, 1 Jan. 1876, 2.

140 The Tennessean, 3 March 1877, 2.

141 “Negrology,” American Missionary, March 1878, 67, 68.

142 Beard, K. K. K. Sketches, 69.