History Commons^™

From "No Country" To "Our Country!" Living Out Manumission And The Boundaries Of Rights And Citizenship, 1773-1855, Scott Hancock

Africana Studies Faculty Publications

During the Revolutionary War and the first decades of the early U.S. Republic, as free people of color sought to define their place in the new nation, they expressed little connection to an American nationality. But antebellum black leaders later articulated a powerful vision of Africans and Americans. As slaves and free blacks had done during the Revolutionary era, they based this African American identity in part upon a biblical view of human rights and a natural rights philosophy, but they also buttressed black identity formation by making a rights discourse the fulcrum of their argument for full inclusion in …