This chapter argues that eighteenth-century African Atlantic authors perceived in the lives of Black people, distorted and destroyed by the slave system, a chaos that could be understood, protested, and then converted into a transition to a better Black world. The key to this understanding was Reformed Christian religion, and the guides to this transition were supposed to be religiously informed writers. Texts of early African Atlantic authors treat the changes they observed in the lives of Black people, for example, in the human body being reproduced in new sexual and labor regimes, in foods consumed in West Africa and the Americas, and in music as performed in old and new contexts. The telos of Black lives was a divinely inspired utopia, one millenarian version of which was Sierra Leone. Black authors responded to one another concerning their visions of holy goals for their people. The persistence of the slave system and new forms of racism crushed concrete efforts to create new Black societies in places like Sierra Leone. Yet textual interactions – these Black authors responding to one another – constituted the origins of the African American literary tradition. Black millenarian letters closed the eighteenth century; Black literature opened the nineteenth century.

This chapter argues the writings published by Blacks in the early national US must be understood in relation to the history of slavery in the British Empire. The author examines diverse forms of African American literature, which were focused on transatlantic concerns, such as “Orations on the Abolition of the Slave Trade” (1808–1823), given annually on January 1. These texts tell powerful stories of the history of the slave trade, and particularly its violence to familial ties, from the trade’s inception in the fifteenth century until its abolition in 1808. Written by free Black churchmen and intellectuals in New York and Philadelphia, including Absalom Jones, Peter Williams, Jr., Russell Parrot, and William Hamilton, these orations demonstrate a deep interest in the actions of the British Parliament and the state of slavery in the West Indies. This chapter also considers direct allusions to British and Afro-British abolitionists and their writings, from Clarkson and Wilberforce to Equiano, in the work of William Miller, Russell Parrot, William Whipper, David Walker, Maria Stewart, and others. The chapter concludes with a discussion of The History of Mary Prince (1831), the most important slave narrative to emerge from the British colonies and questions the inclusion of Prince’s narrative in a history of African American literature.