The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Monday, January 27, 2025

Byblos: The Library of America just delivered Black Writers of the Founding Era, 1760-1800, a 700-page addition to the ever-growing magnificence of the Library’s unique anthologies: not just compendiums of period pieces, but chronologically arranged pieces that give you the immersive feel of the era, like reading a great correspondence. It’s history in real time, written by men and women who usually were unknowing atoms of greater explosive power than they knew, in historical movements not yet drawn out. Those volumes have included the two years of the debates on the Constitution, World War I’s peace movement, World War II, the civil rights era, the Vietnam war, the Civil War, Reconstruction, American sermons, two superb volumes of American speeches (words more than ideas keep remaking this nation: a double-edged sword, because words can be no less lethal and empty than ideology; for every Dream speech, there’s a few Calhoon poisons, and Reagan’s plagiarisms are more often remembered and quoted than Adlai Stevenson’s original wit). Now we have Black Writers of the Founding Era, edited by James Basker, a (white) American Studies and literary history specialist of the 18th century at Barnard College. We get writers we, most of us anyway, have never heard of, which is just the point: this book has shades of the 1619 Project, upending our assumptions and finally re-placing voices of the past in their rightful place: Jupiter Hammond, Phillis Cogsqwell, Phillis Wheatley, Newton Prince, Cuffee Wright, Sezor Phelps, and so on. It is, as the Library’s blurb puts it, “by far the richest and most expansive anthology of its kind ever assembled,” writers enslaved and free, painters, poets, preachers and cooks, those leaves of grass so long trampled and buried under whiter presumptions. They may not have known the weight of their voices yet, but as James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw put it in his life narrative (this one I vaguely recalled having been anthologized in the Library’s Slave Narratives a couple of decades ago), “It is possible the circumstance I am going to relate will not gain credit with many; but this I know, that the joy and comfort it conveyed to me, cannot be expressed and only conceived by those who have experienced the like.” 

—P.T.