To bear the 'slave's heavy cross': Religion and the jeremiadic tradition as literary and social constructions in African-American protest, 1760--1865

This dissertation argues for the continuity of the Negro Jeremiad on other forms of African-American protest. Recently, scholars of the origin of the Negro jeremiad have shown how black leaders have employed jeremiadic rhetoric of social prophecy and criticism to create a variant that is specifically African American. Wilson Jeremiah Moses and David Howard-Pitney have argued that the Negro jeremiad has been a leading feature of black protest rhetoric from the antebellum through the modern civil rights era. I hope to complement and expand upon their scholarship by examining other forms of nineteenth-century African-American protest (i.e. slave narratives, novels, poetry, rebellions) to show how they where consistently influence by the American jeremiad and how they have employed elements of the jeremiad to advance distinct social interests and political agendas. In The Afro-American Jeremiad: Appeal For Justice in America, Howard-Pitney appropriately suggests what the components of the jeremiad are: "citing the promise, criticism of present declension or retrogression from the promise, and resolving prophecy that society will shortly complete its mission and redeem the promise" (8).;Before I begin my discussion of the Negro jeremiadic rhetoric, however, I try to re-create their nineteenth-century audiences. What I have found is that in the writings and actions presented here, the most common rhetorical goal was not to simply attack their audiences, but to recruit them (although there will be a few differences) into their cause and, therefore, save them from doom and return them back to God's covenant.;In their jeremiads, slaves and former slaves in the New World assimilated the religious ideas and practices that were held or observed by their communities and their oppressors. However, instead of embracing disciplines of this religion, some also protested these practices. It becomes necessary to note that the figures examined here seemed to use jeremiads largely as literary and social devices; they adopted the Judeo-Christian myth structure; they alluded to Old Testament stories and prophecies; and they defined good and evil by Christian standards. This dissertation will investigate some ways Negroes broke the subjected silence imposed upon them in their writings and other forms of challenging their slaveholders' conformity.