Civic Virtue and State Power

Abstract

Abstract This chapter focuses on how race—specifically Blackness—was understood as a barrier to civic belonging and participation. By focusing on Jeffrey Brace’s memoir The Blind African Slave (1810)—a neglected anti-slavery narrative about a Black Revolutionary War veteran—this chapter shows how this narrative challenges white republican narratives of belonging. Brace’s narrative offers an important precursor for nineteenth-century abolitionists for how he challenges the conventions that led to his being pressed to leave the Vermont town he called home. This chapter argues that Brace actively queers the norms of propertied whiteness that exclude him even as he reclaims them for himself.