Black History Month: Honoring a First in African American History – William Cooper Nell and The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution

In 1855, Nell achieved a milestone in American historiography with the publication of The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution, the first book-length scholarly history by an African American. As a second-generation black Boston activist and as a Garrisonian abolitionist, Nell made the case that civil equality was due to African Americans, because of their significant contributions to the founding of the nation. He wished to reveal the largely unrecognized history of African American military valor and patriotism, not only to enhance the understanding of sympathetic white Americans, but to encourage the aspirations for social advancement of African Americans. As a youth, Nell had found the limitations that racial prejudice placed upon his opportunities nearly over-whelming. A couple of years after the Franklin medal incident he had told his Sunday School teacher, “‘What’s the use in my attempting to improve myself, when, do what I may, I can never be anything but a nigger?’” [1] Fortunately for Nell and for black Boston, he triumphed over this view.

This ambitious pioneering book falls into two distinct parts: the first is a state by state presentation of the military services of men of color in all American wars and of bio-sketches of notable people of color as well as selected information about the quest for equal rights and a socioeconomic profile of people of color within each state; the second considers vital contemporary issues confronting people of color: their citizenship rights, their social and cultural advancement, and his guardedly optimistic assessment of the success of the abolitionist movement and the possibilities for attaining equity within a racially integrated American society. In the final pages his book, Nell writes:

“The Revolution of 1776, and in the subsequent struggles in our nation’s history, aided, in honorable proportion, by colored Americans, have…left the necessity of a second revolution, no less sublime than that of regenerating public sentiment in favor of Universal Brotherhood. To this glorious consummation, all, of every complexion, sect, sex, and condition, can add their mite, and so nourish the tree of liberty, that all may be enabled to pluck fruit from its bending branches; and, in that degree to which colored Americans may labor to hasten the day, they will prove valid their claim to the title, ‘Patriots of the Second Revolution ’” (p. 380)

In the October 26, 1855 Liberator and in a broadside promoting the book, Nell published reviews of The Colored Patriots that had appeared in the local and national press. Critical notice of the book appeared in the mainstream New York Tribune, Philadelphia Sunday Dispatch, Providence Tribune, Kentucky Weekly News, Salem Register, Boston Evening Telegraph, Worcester Spy, Virginia Library Sentinel, and New Bedford Standard as well as in the anti-slavery and African American press, including the National Era, Ohio Anti-Slavery Bugle, National Anti-Slavery Standard, The Independent, and Zion’s Herald. Many reviewers commended Nell for his efforts. As an example of critical response to Nell’s book, the Boston Daily Chronicle considered that “Mr. Nell has done a good work, and done it well, too, in gathering together and placing before the world in a convenient form, numerous interesting facts that show how strong has been the spirit of patriotism in the bosoms of colored Americans, a race of men who would be perfectly justified in hating this country with savage hatred, so foully has it wronged them.”