Lecture Abstract

Whom do we mean when we talk about “the” American Enlightenment? My book Black Reason, White Feeling: The Jeffersonian Enlightenment in the African American Tradition complicates today’s polarized association of Enlightenment rationality with “whiteness.” This association not only tends to give historical figures such as Thomas Jefferson much more credit for their supposed rationalism than they themselves would ever have dreamed of; it also confines intellectuals such as Lemuel Haynes, David Walker, or Frederick Douglass to the roles of derivative thinkers merely reacting to a hegemonic “white” American Enlightenment supposed to have been fully in place the moment their arguments began. By contrast, my book tells the historically more dynamic story of how early African Americans actively contributed to shaping the body of thought known today as the American Enlightenment. Examining Jefferson’s position in African American intellectual and literary history, I illustrate that, in the context of the early United States, universalist Enlightenment concepts such as reason, knowledge, liberty, equality, etc., were far from necessarily “white.” Rather, these concepts emerged dialectically from the multiple tensions and interactions between two distinct late Enlightenment approaches: the nationalist concern with feeling, opinion, and secular faith that characterized Jefferson’s postcolonial opposition to the hierarchies of European rationalism (“Jefferson’s Enlightenment of Feeling”) and the more rigorously universalist emphasis on reason and knowledge publicly expressed by Phillis Wheatley, who had argued for the “Principle” of universal freedom and equality more than two years prior to the Declaration of Independence (“Wheatley’s Enlightenment of Principle”).

In my talk I will show these two late Enlightenment discourses in conversation with one another. I will trace the process of how a long tradition of African American proponents of Wheatley’s “Principle”—beginning with Lemuel Haynes, Benjamin Banneker, Daniel Coker, James Forten, George Lawrence, William Hamilton, David Walker, Hosea Easton, Maria Stewart, William G. Allen, James W. C. Pennington, Frederick Douglass, Martin Delany, William Wells Brown, William Wilson, and James McCune Smith—used Jefferson as a foil for their own more ambitious appeals to universal reason, in the process crafting the contradictory image of Jefferson, and the “Jeffersonian” Enlightenment, we know today. With Black Reason, White Feeling, I am providing not only a detailed history of the Jefferson image in African American thought, but also a history of the American Enlightenment that highlights the originality and decisive transhistorical impact of African American accounts of universal rationality.

About the Author

Hannah Spahn is the author of Thomas Jefferson, Time, and History (University of Virginia Press, 2011) and Black Reason, White Feeling: The Jeffersonian Enlightenment in the African American Tradition (under contract with University of Virginia Press), editor of the translation of Frederick Douglass’s first autobiography, Mein Leben als amerikanischer Sklave, with the leading German publisher of literary classics (Stuttgart: Reclam, 2022), and co-editor, with Peter Nicolaisen, of Cosmopolitanism and Nationhood in the Age of Jefferson (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter, 2013). She is currently teaching at the John F. Kennedy-Institute for North American Studies, Freie Universität Berlin, where she gained her PhD. She has been Gilder Lehrman Junior Research Fellow at the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies, Postdoctoral Fellow at the Institute for Advanced Studies, University of Edinburgh, and Principal Investigator, at the University of Potsdam, of “Character and Cosmopolitanism in Nineteenth-Century African American Literature” (German Research Foundation).

The Sadosky Memorial Lecture at the Robert H. Smith International Center for Jefferson Studies honors the exceptional scholarship and dedication to a robust academic community of the late Leonard J. Sadosky, a friend and colleague. Leonard’s path-breaking Revolutionary Negotiations: Indians, Empires, and Diplomats in the Founding of America (University of Virginia Press, 2010) helped set the stage for a new generation of exciting scholarship on the international history of the early American republic. It is our hope that this lecture series can provide some small addition to, and continued remembrance of, Leonard’s important contributions.