This chapter examines the literary afterlives of white Confederates' household possessions, especially those damaged during military invasion, or degraded by the impoverishment experienced by elite white southerners in the Civil War’s aftermath. It argues that, alongside emancipation's arrival, the military incursion into southern plantations and wealthy households altered the premises of white possession beyond recall. The damaged objects left behind became more than just traces of enemy invasion to the privileged slaveholding women left to pick up the pieces. As these women revealed in their private journals, their own belongings represented a threat to the forms of selfhood and racial pedigree that had defined their antebellum lives. In exploring how ex-Confederate women, writing during Reconstruction, used fiction to reorganize and display their sullied possessions, this chapter outlines a material history integral to the myth of Confederate exceptionalism—a myth more recognizably reified by monuments to the Lost Cause.

Returning to David Walker’s Appeal, with an exclusive focus on its 1848 publication, this chapter traces the connections between the 1848 anti-monarchical revolutions in Europe, the Mexican American War, and an emerging vision of Black resistance to American Empire. This chapter reads Walker together with the works of Henry Highland Garnet and decisively demonstrates how African American literature articulated the principles and priorities of a transnational 1848.

In this chapter on the poetry of George Moses Horton, the local expands to encompass not only the city of Chapel Hill, North Carolina, but also the states of North Carolina and Virginia. This chapter shows how the 1831 Nat Turner insurrection and its aftermath profoundly shaped the enslaved Horton’s later poetry.

This chapter explores the effect of emancipation in Jamaica in particular on the work of Nancy Prince. Connecting Prince’s commentary on Jamaica to her struggles with white-led abolitionist organizations, this chapter looks closely at how Black freedom abroad could be used to critique the policies of US-based abolitionists.

This chapter interrogates the multiple and nuanced ways in which Harriet Jacobs engaged with developing communications technologies and policies ostensibly designed to connect different sections of the nation to one another. Reading Jacobs’s experiences in the 1830s in relation to an ongoing communications revolution in the United States, this chapter shows how Jacobs ingeniously manipulates formal and informal networks in order to secure freedom for herself and her family.

This chapter focuses on a community of Black women writers in Philadelphia who contributed essays and poetry to the Liberator newspaper. The Liberator provided a venue for such writings, but Philadelphia’s free Black women also decisively shaped the tone and politics of the nation’s leading abolitionist newspaper.

This chapter explores the interplay between the genre of the slave narrative and Supreme Court cases concerning copyright and fugitivity decided in the 1830s and 1840s. Looking in particular at the 1838 Narrative of James Williams, a work quickly challenged for its veracity, this chapter reveals important connections between literary works and legal decisions.

This chapter reveals the key theoretical intervention made by David Walker in his Appeal. Examining the work in its 1830 and 1848 iterations, this chapter unpacks the theory of cosmopolitanism developed by Walker and traces its effects.

This chapter shifts to the island of Cuba and the La Escalera conspiracy in the mid-1840s. As this chapter reveals, this conspiracy between free and enslaved people of color in the Spanish colony to overthrow their oppressors takes center stage in the later novels of Martin Delany and Andrés Avelino de Orihuela, each of whom turns to La Escalera in order to develop a particular vision of Black revolution in the hemisphere.

New Orleans provides the context for this chapter’s reading of Les Cenelles in relation to the concerns of the city’s community of francophone free people of color. As this chapter shows, the 1845 collection of poetry not only emerged from discussions over how to provide an education to the city’s Black francophone children, but also articulated a specific theory of education that would later find an institutional home in the city’s first school for free children of color.

This chapter traces how August 1st celebrations of West Indian Emancipation in the United States impacted the works of Frances Ellen Watkins and James Whitfield. As this chapter shows, such celebrations not only provided an occasion for Watkins and Whitfield to write and perform poetry, but also indelibly shaped the form and content of their works.

This chapter looks closely at how literary societies in New York and Philadelphia served as engines of the creation of a particular kind of Black modernity, as expressed in the speeches, essays, and poetry of the members of such societies.

This chapter reveals the profound impact that the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act had on the slave narrative by comparing narratives from the same author published before and after the passage of the act. Consulting pre- and post-1850 narratives by Henry Box Brown, William Grimes, and Josiah Henson, this chapter illuminates key ways in which the Fugitive Slave Act shaped one of the premier genres of African American literature.

This chapter reads Frederick Douglass’s writings from the 1840s and 1850s in light of the Irish Famine. In addition to providing a fresh perspective on Douglass’s writings and situating the theme of hunger at the center of his work, Finseth offers an elegant example of how environmental history intersects with African American literature.

An introduction to the volume, with a particular focus on the relevance of the writings of David Walker to the period.