In 1863, as the Civil War raged, the escaped slave, abolitionist,
and novelist William Wells Brown identified two groups most harmful
to his race. "The first and most relentless," he explained, "are
those who have done them the greatest injury, by being instrumental
in their enslavement and consequent degradation. They delight to
descant upon the 'natural inferiority' of the blacks, and claim
that we were destined only for a servile condition, entitled
neither to liberty nor the legitimate pursuit of happiness." "The
second class," Brown concluded, "are those who are ignorant of the
characteristics of the race, and are the mere echoes of the first."
Four years later, Brown wrote the first military history of African
Americans, The Negro in the American Rebellion. This text assailed
those whose hatred and ignorance inclined them to keep blacks
oppressed after Appomattox. This critical edition of The Negro in
the American Rebellion, one of Brown's least-analyzed texts, is the
first to appear in more than three decades. In his introduction,
historian John David Smith identifies the text's Anglo-American
abolitionist roots, sets it in the context of Brown's other
writings, appraises it as military history, analyzes its
interpretation of black masculinity and honor, and focuses closely
on Brown's assessment of contemporary racial tensions. Largely
ignored by scholars, The Negro in the American Rebellion, Smith
argues, is a powerful transitional text, one that confronted
squarely the neo-slavery of the Reconstruction era. "Whites," Brown
wrote, "appear determined to reduce the blacks to a state of
serfdom if they cannot have them as slaves." His important text was
a call to arms in the ongoing race struggle. Smith's analysis,
framed within recent scholarship on slavery, emancipation, and
African American participation in the U.S. army, is long overdue.
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