A hybrid fellow’s forum with Andrew Hammann, postdoctoral fellow at the Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy at the University of Missouri from August 16, 2023. Recording available.
About the Presentation
Freedom in Black and White: The Politics of Slavery and Black Expatriation in Nineteenth Century America is the first book to tell the full story, from roughly 1816 to 1890, of how powerful white politicians tried for nearly a century to persuade the federal government to support the expatriation of Black Americans. Rooted in well-known declarations made by Thomas Jefferson in 1787 in Notes on the State of Virginia — centuries of enslavement had made it impossible for Black and white Americans to coexist on equal terms — this political movement insisted that expatriation would resolve two of the nation’s greatest issues: the institution of slavery and the free Black population that was the institution’s unintended consequence. Among the leaders of this greatly understudied movement were congressmen, Supreme Court justices, and presidents: Henry Clay, John Marshall, James Madison, Daniel Webster, and Abraham Lincoln, among many others. Freedom in Black and White, however, does not just tell the story of an understudied movement. It also illuminates this movement’s outsized role in embedding in American society the exclusionary idea that Black freedom was (and is) a national problem. And, importantly, it recounts the essential, intertwined story of how powerful Black Americans, such as James Forten and Frederick Douglass, vigorously contested this political movement at every step, how they repudiated the Black-freedom-as-a-problem ideology, and how they fought against attitudes, practices, and laws constructed upon this ideology’s false premises. In essence, Freedom in Black and White expands and refines our collective understanding of the intertwined histories of enslavement and race in the United States, not just with respect to the period when enslavement was legal but also with respect to the decades following its abolition. In this way, Freedom in Black and White also makes an important contribution to emerging work on slavery’s racialized “afterlives.”
About Andrew Hammann
Andrew Hammann is a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Kinder Institute on Constitutional Democracy at the University of Missouri. Previously, he was a Lecturer at Stanford University in the departments of History and African and African American Studies. His research and teaching focus on the intertwined histories of enslavement and race in the United States during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. His current book project, Freedom in Black and White: The Politics of Slavery and Black Expatriation in Nineteenth Century America (under contract with University of Virginia Press),tells the story of a mainstream but relatively understudied political movement that promoted the idea that slavery and Black freedom were existential threats to white freedom and to American progress. His recent article,“Beyond Antislavery and Proslavery: A New Term, Eventualism, and a Refined Interpretive Approach" (published in American Nineteenth Century History), addresses longstanding interpretive constraints faced by historians of American slavery and proposes a framework designed to enable more nuanced studies of the ambivalence inherent in the attitudes toward the institution evinced by so many white Americans. His book reviews have appeared in the Journal of the Civil War Era, the American Journal of Legal History, and the Journal of the Early Republic. He holds a BA from Yale University, an MBA from the University of Pennsylvania, and a PhD from Stanford University.