This essay sketches the field of African American literary history from the nineteenth century through two concepts I take from Henry Highland Garnet and David Walker: “faithful reflection” and the “spirit of inquiry.” It asks: What would it mean for American literature and American democracy to represent black citizens faithfully? What would faithful representation mean for racism as structure and ideology? How have black writers theorized, invoked, and used the literary as a form of critical inquiry? Garnet and others ground faithful reflection in a democratic ethos antithetical to the racial capitalism animating U.S. citizenship. The spirit of inquiry assumes the power to ask questions and seek answers, a power often denied the black citizens that literary history often treats as objects of study. It invokes the epistemological and methodological challenges black subjects and Black Studies have historically foregrounded. The history I offer here does not flow chronologically. Instead, I follow concepts that develop asynchronously across time as much as they were revised and revived over time. After grounding the essay’s framework through Garnet and Walker, I trace these complementary practices through Phillis Wheatley’s poetic imagination and literary critical responses that draw on her to visualize black literary history’s generative work.

Many writers saw the US Civil War as an apocalypse, but they construed that apocalypticism in different ways. I approach the apocalyptic archive of Civil War literature by tracking the aesthetic techniques authors employed to represent the war’s cataclysmic dimensions and the political, religious, and historical meanings they assigned to the nation’s convulsion. My readings show how reflecting on the Civil War as an apocalypse occasioned formal innovations that pushed nineteenth-century writing in unexpected directions and how apocalyptic representations of the conflict went hand in hand with millenarian appraisals of the nation’s, and sometimes the hemisphere’s, future. Ultimately, I argue that such apocalyptic and millennial thought is inextricable from the history of race relations in America, for any appraisal of wartime upheaval is also necessarily an overt or tacit reflection on the history and legacy of slavery. I make this argument by considering writing by William Wells Brown, Matthias Carvalho, John De Forest, Emily Dickinson, Frederick Douglass, Frances E. W. Harper, Ruban His Sacred Nest, Abraham Lincoln, Herman Melville, Henry Timrod, and Walt Whitman.