Black Cosmopolitans
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BLACK COSMOPOLITANS BLACK COSMOPOLITANS Race, Religion, and Republicanism in an Age of Revolution Christine Levecq university of virginia press Charlottesville and London University of Virginia Press © 2019 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper First published 2019 ISBN 978-0-8139-4218-6 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-8139-4219-3 (e-book) 1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2 Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data is available for this title. Cover art: Jean-Baptiste Belley. Portrait by Anne Louis Girodet de Roussy- Trioson, 1797, oil on canvas. (Château de Versailles, France) To Steve and Angie CONTENTS Acknowledgments ix Introduction 1 1. Jacobus Capitein and the Radical Possibilities of Calvinism 19 2. Jean- Baptiste Belley and French Republicanism 75 3. John Marrant: From Methodism to Freemasonry 160 Notes 237 Works Cited 263 Index 281 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This book has been ten years in the making. One reason is that I wanted to explore the African diaspora more broadly than I had before, and my knowledge of English, French, and Dutch naturally led me to expand my research to several national contexts. Another is that I wanted this project to be interdisciplinary, combining history and biography with textual criticism. It has been an amazing journey, which was made pos- sible by the many excellent scholars this book relies on. Part of the pleasure in writing this book came from the people and institutions that provided access to both the primary and the second- ary material. All the libraries and archives I visited impressed me with the quality of their holdings and with the friendliness and dedication of their staff. My thanks go to the Michigan State University Library, the Archives of Michigan; in Paris and Vincennes, the Bibliothèque Na- tionale, the CARAN (Centre d’Accueil et de Recherche des Archives Nationales), the Service Historique de la Défense; the Royal Archives in The Hague, Regionaal Archief Leiden, the University of Leiden library, and the University of Amsterdam library. The fast pace with which eighteenth-century documents are being digitalized has also been a source of delight. I am immensely grateful to Kettering University for a sabbatical leave that allowed me to make great progress on the manuscript, and to— now retired— head of the Department of Liberal Studies, Karen Wilkinson, for her continuous support of my travel and research. To my reading group friends— Joy Arbor, Dave Golz, Whitney Hardin, David Marshall, Ben Pauli, Laura Mebert, Laura Miller- Purrenhage, Greg Schneider- Bateman, Denise Stodola, Pavitra Sundar— I owe both the benefit of sharp criticism and the memory of warm, collegial eve- nings around Denise’s table. Tremendous generosity from fellow scholars has helped transform the manuscript. While all of its weaknesses are my own, I warmly thank the following persons for giving of their precious time and expertise, in writing or in conversations, to help make it better: Daan Bronkhorst, x acknowledgments Vincent Carretta, Jeroen Dewulf, Kirsten Fermaglich, Eugene Hynes, Elisabeth Leijnse, Barbara McCaskill, John Saillant, Alyssa Goldstein Sepinwall, Michiel van Kempen. I am also deeply grateful to the two anonymous readers at the press, as well as to my editor, Angie Hogan. For their friendship and support during the years I was writing this book— and talked about it every chance I got— I thank Brigitte Assel- man, Cécile Blase, Ulric Chung, Yves Clemmen, Elisabeth Leijnse, Jean Mainil, Carine Mardorossian, Andrew Norris, and Hélène Varsamidou. Many thanks also to both my Levecq and my Manderfield families, for their love and encouragements. Two persons have dramatically changed my writing—and my life. One is Hazel Rowley, who still daily inspires me. The other is Rich Man- derfield, who constantly pushes me to think harder and look deeper, and who always makes it feel like an incredible adventure. The book is dedicated to my dear friends Steve and Angie Elliston, whom I remember toasting on their sixtieth wedding anniversary as “the most inspiring couple I know.” They are deeply missed. Parts of chapter 1 were originally published as “Jacobus Capitein, Dutch Calvinist and Black Cosmopolitan” in Research in African Literatures 44.4 (Winter 2013): 145–66. They are reprinted with permission from Indiana University Press. BLACK COSMOPOLITANS Introduction This book examines the life and thought of three extraordinary black men. Part of what makes them extraordinary is that they traveled exten- sively throughout the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Unlike mil- lions of uprooted Africans and their descendants at the time, these men did not have lives of toil and sweat in the plantations of the New World. One of them was born free, the other two became free in their youths, and it is this freedom that gave them mobility. What makes them espe- cially extraordinary is the way they used this mobility and the nature of their physical and intellectual interventions in the world around them. These men share a consciousness of the violence and destruction directed toward people of African descent and a willingness to set them- selves in motion in order to bring about change. And because they were literate and eager to express themselves, they gave a voice to their pro- gressive perspectives. They were exceptional men, and their experiences and writings helped shape not only racial but also social and political thought in the eighteenth century. If one judges from their biographies, they had little in common. These men lived in different national and ideological contexts, and to a great extent, they absorbed the ideas and beliefs that surrounded them. Jaco- bus Capitein was taken to the Netherlands from Africa as a child, and he took in the unique mixture of Calvinism, ethnocentrism, and toler- ance that prevailed in the Dutch republic. Jean-Baptiste Belley lived in Saint- Domingue, a French colony, and emerged as a proponent of the ideals of the French Revolution. John Marrant grew up in Charleston, South Carolina, and was exposed to the influences of Methodism, the American Revolution, and later, Freemasonry. In many ways, these men had more in common with the people around them than with each other: their thought was anchored in its own, unique cultural background. But they share something important: an intellectual strategy made possible by their cosmopolitanism and by the critical stance that it 2 black cosmopolitans enabled. Through their travels and their exposure to various social and cultural contexts, these men developed a universalizing, multiracial view of human life that, in each case, radicalized surrounding ideolo- gies. Even after inheriting the liberationist and revolutionary ideas that made the eighteenth century such a groundbreaking time, they pushed those ideas further in their own distinctive ways. They were cosmopol- itans, not just physically but philosophically and politically. And as such, they made an important contribution to the ideological renewal that was the Enlightenment. Because each of these men also had connections to the black com- munities around him, the picture that emerges is that of an eighteenth- century Atlantic world that fostered an elite of black thinkers who took advantage of existing ideologies in order to spread a message of univer- sal inclusion and egalitarianism. Their contributions were the result of their own reflection, but also of an environment that made their physical and intellectual independence possible. Indeed, while they had different racial histories, Holland, France, England, and the American colonies all still carried a certain racial openness inherited from previous centu- ries. Black cosmopolitans exploited this openness before the nineteenth century, in a new racial turn, closed its doors on them. Cosmopolitans Though they never referred to themselves as such, in the most basic meaning of the term, all three men were cosmopolitans in that, to vary- ing degrees, they had the freedom to travel, and they were exposed to different cultures. Capitein grew up on the West African coast and in the Netherlands, first in The Hague and then in Leiden, and he went back to Africa, where he served as a mediator between the whites on a Dutch trading post and the local population. Belley grew up in Saint- Domingue, traveled to Paris at the height of the French Revolution, went back to Saint-Domingue twice, and died in France. Marrant went from New York to Charleston, from there to London, from London to Nova Scotia in Canada, from there to Boston, and then back to Lon- don. Aside from Capitein’s and Belley’s original voyages from Africa, they were among the few blacks who traveled the Atlantic world for reasons other than the slave trade. Their exposure and openness to new cultures gave them a sense of multiculturalism one often associates with the cosmopolitan life.1 introduction 3 They were also cosmopolitan in the sense that they were familiar with, and actors in, spaces that were not determined by national iden- tities or boundaries. Capitein had no clear national identity, and the marginal zone he occupied on the African coast after he returned forced him to think in terms of mixed communities. Belley was passionately French, but the troubles in Saint- Domingue throughout the 1790s kept its identity in a state of uncertainty. Marrant’s life seems a moveable feast without any strong national connection or feeling. More important, these men were cosmopolitans because they devel- oped a particular sensibility reflected in the original meaning of the term: to varying degrees, they became citizens of the world. Their cos- mopolitanism was more political than that of Ira Berlin’s “Atlantic cre- oles,” people of mixed ancestry and heritage who emerged on African and American shores during the early phases of the slave trade, and more philosophical than that of many free blacks who just tried to make a life for themselves in a racially fraught Atlantic world.2 Their commit- ment to the world was not just about knowing and partly integrating other cultures.