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The Precious Birthright
Black Leaders and the Fight to Vote in Antebellum Rhode Island
by CJ Martin
Published by: University of Massachusetts Press
Series: Black New England
288 Pages, 6.00 x 9.00 x 0.87 in, 1 chart
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In 1842, Black Rhode Islanders secured a stunning victory, a success rarely seen in antebellum America: they won the right to vote. Amid heightened public discourse around shifting ideas of race, citizenship, and political rights, they methodically deconstructed the arguments against their enfranchisement, exposing the arbitrariness of the color line in delineating citizenship rights and choosing the perfect moments in which to act forcefully. At the head of this movement, a cohort of prominent business and community members formed an early example of a Black leadership class in the US.
CJ Martin draws upon a wealth of sources—including personal correspondences, government and organizational documents, tax records, and petitions—to argue that Black leaders employed a unique combination of agitation and accommodation to ensure the success of the movement. By investigating their tactics, Martin deepens the story of how race played a crucial role in American citizenship, and by focusing on Black leadership, he relates this history through the people who lived it—who thought, debated, petitioned, and enacted their own liberation. Telling the story of a fight that was as important to the pioneers of interracial democracy as it was for the civil rights activists of the twentieth century, The Precious Birthright provides new insight into the larger story of Black freedom.
CJ Martin is a faculty member at the College of the Holy Cross. His work has appeared in journals such as Rhode Island History and Commonplace.
“What immediately jumps out from The Precious Birthright is its wealth of new evidence documenting the agency of hitherto obscure leadership groups among Black men and women in Providence from the 1780s on, including their social position and relationships with each other, and their alliances with a sector of the city’s white elites. This constitutes a significant deepening in the narrative of this state’s free people of color.”—Van Gosse, author of The First Reconstruction: Black Politics in America, From the Revolution to the Civil War
“With convincing arguments and grounded in original research, The Precious Birthright is enlivened with portraits of remarkable Black political activists, writers, and organizers—and a series of tumultuous events, including remarkable examples of institution-building, violent attacks, and heartbreaking setbacks.”—John Wood Sweet, author of Bodies Politic: Negotiating Race in the American North, 1730–1830 and The Sewing Girl’s Tale: A Story of Crime and Consequences in Revolutionary America.
