Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019

Lucy Terry Prince is a 96-year-old Black woman. Every year she goes to her husband’s grave to place flowers on it. In 1774, she “made a successful stand before the Vermont state court” (115).

Prince was enslaved at birth. She is largely known for her literary works. Terry composed the first known African American poetry. Her poem “Bars Fight” is her only surviving work of poetry. In 1756 she married a free man named Abijah, who bought her contract and secured her freedom.

In 1762, Abijah was entitled to inherit 100 acres of land. A white man claimed that it was his instead. The resulting legal battle led to Lucy arguing and winning the case before the Supreme Court.

Williams College denied her son Festus’s admissions application because he was Black. Terry argued on his behalf for three hours. She couldn’t change the ruling, but “we cannot understate the magnitude of Terry Prince’s argumentation and willingness to take on white individuals and institutions in the eighteenth-century United States” (117). The author believes Terry’s ability to argue her causes forcefully, while avoiding white backlash and violence, is worth studying for modern Black Americans.

The Enlightenment led to great leaps in scientific progress, but it is also “when the modern scientific concept of race as a natural category was installed” (119). Science placed race in a hierarchy with evolutionary precedents. If evolution produced races, then they could posit slavery as a natural phenomenon. If science could prove that Black people were inferior, treating them as lesser human would be easier to justify. It also justified excluding them from democracy, since animals do not get a vote in legislating.

Benjamin Franklin believed that the racial differences required different political statuses. His views would change, but he did not view Black Americans as equal citizens until much later in his life: “Rather, his central objective was to include white people only in the new nation he and his ‘enlightened’ peers were creating” (122).

Mays examines the parallels between the American treatment of Indigenous people and the enslavement of Black people. In 1754 the French and Indian War began. England won, ushering in “a moment ripe with contradictions between freedom and unfreedom” (123). Europeans viewed the Indigenous Americans as savages, which made stealing their land more palatable. By calling America the New World, European settlers “separated the European world from the Indigenous and African ones, creating a distinction between civilization and savagery, or human and nonhuman” (123).

Mays imagines what an alliance between Black and Indigenous people could look like today, and what they could contribute to each other’s causes.

Miles writes, “The resolution of armed conflict between British troops and a multitribal Indigenous fighting force in May 1763 depended, in part, on the ownership of one Black boy” (126). He was in the middle of a fight that would be called Pontiac’s War.

Pontiac was an Odawa leader. He refused the terms of the end of the battle between Britain and France. The terms did not include Indigenous Americans in the allotments of land or any potential restructuring of borders. Pontiac gathered the many tribes to fight against the British. His demands included, “a British evacuation and the exchange of one Black child” (127).

Pontiac wanted to participate in Black slavery because it would give him “a visible status symbol in the form of a personal attendant of African descent” (127). This would advertise that his leadership was as valid as those in the European military. The British refused his offer, and there is no record of what happened to the boy.

Miles provides statistics for modern day Michigan’s prison population: it has increased by 450 percent since 1973 (129). He sees a corollary between the story of the boy and Michigan’s current prison system: “In the modern mass incarceration movement, the racialized ‘carceral landscape’ of colonial Great Lakes found an echo. The story of one Black boy foreshadowed the fate of too many Black prisoners” (129).

Phillis Wheatley’s first poem was published on December 21, 1767, in New England in the Newport Mercury. In the first published poem by an African American, Wheatley writes about a sea voyage. Gumbs wonders about Wheatley’s state of mind as she wrote it. Wheatley included a note with the poem, stating that it was written by a Negro Girl, an act that Gumbs describes as “capitalism as capture: the object speaks” (131).

Wheatley was serving dinner to the characters in the poem at her master’s house. She wrote the poem in a way she knew her audience—white New Englanders—would appreciate and respect: “Like other enslaved people whose life and measure of safety depended on the absolute agency and control of their white captors, [...] she had to know this audience better than they could bear to know themselves” (130).

Gumbs ends the essay by describing some of Wheatley’s other poems, particularly her frequent works depicting water: “In this case, the poet is separated by an ocean from her lineage and community” (133).

In 1742, a man named Chapel owned an enslaved baby named David George and the baby’s parents. George escaped Virginia in the early 1760s. After marrying and having children, George established the first Black Baptist church in the US. The religious life shared by Black Americans took hold in the late colonial period. He established the church with the preacher George Liele.

The author’s parents introduced him to that church. George founded the church to “interrupt the lies of slaveholder religion” (137).

The tension between Chapel and the chapel George founded is still here: “Though slavery officially ended after the Civil War, the Christianity that blessed white supremacy did not go away” (137). The author is a practicing Christian minister. He understands why religious affiliation falls every year. He believes that building on the type of faith George had—the type of faith that would found a freedom church—is the key to become a better nation.

In 1780, a woman named Mumbet sued for her freedom. Her owner, John Ashley, abused her terribly. The jury freed her. The British tried to use the example of people like Mumbet as a way to drive a wedge between Black Americans and slave owners. In 1775, John Dunmore, a British official in Virginia, “declared ‘all indentured servants, Negroes, or others…free that are able and willing to bear arms” (140).

A local lawyer named Thomas Sedgwick helped Mumbet try her case. The case helped end slavery in Massachusetts. She took the name Elizabeth Freeman and is now buried in the Sedgwick family plot.

The author visits Mumbet’s grave which, rather than pay tribute to her revolutionary victory, memorializes her service to the Sedgwick family: “It is another lesson in the politics of monuments. Freeman’s burial site remains an incomplete and misleading monument to her life” (142).

Reed’s poem uses Patrick Henry’s 1777 speech before the Second Virginia Convention as its theme. Henry framed his remarks as a justification for the Revolutionary War. He condemned England’s oppression of America, even though:

That year in Virginia existed so many actual

slaves that Henry’s echoes could have been nine Negroes opportunely plotting in

open air, his shadow daring daydreams of out-

running streams of liquid sterling (143).

Reed writes, “Not all rebels yell. Not all run” (143), reinforcing one of the many messages of Four Hundred Souls: All forms of resistance are worth celebrating, if they lead to racial equality.