“All men are created equal,” wrote slaveholder Thomas Jefferson, in words that have been a source of consternation ever since. That was less true, perhaps, for a significant group of Black abolitionist writers who clearly understood Jefferson’s vision as limited by his belief in a natural hierarchy of color, even as he sought to break with the feudal hierarchies of England and the Old World.
Those writers’ vision blossomed in the early 19th century even as the popularity of artificial hierarchies rebounded among American white people, particularly in the South. A new book from Harvard scholar Keidrick Roy, “American Dark Age: Racial Feudalism and the Rise of Black Liberalism,” lays out their pioneering critique of the enduring power of feudalism on American thought, along with a coherent framework of liberal ideas shaped by their individual and collective lived experiences.
