26 pages • 52 minutes read
An Ante-Bellum Sermon
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Background
Historical Context
By the time Dunbar wrote “An Ante-Bellum Sermon,” the Civil War and the subsequent Reconstruction period had been over for decades. In fact, Dunbar himself never lived during the ante-bellum or pre-war period, as he was born in 1872, seven years after the war’s conclusion. The racial injustice Dunbar responded to for much of his career was actually not slavery but the fallout and backlash freed Black people faced in post-bellum America. Dunbar’s poetry about the ante-bellum plantation period was often disguising the dissatisfaction he felt about the lack of progress for Black people in his own post-bellum period.
Dunbar was writing in a time of severe racially motivated violence and discrimination. Although slaves in the South had been emancipated, they had no land or property of their own, and poverty often drove them to work for the very same masters from whom they had been freed. They received extremely low wages and became bound to their former masters by debt. Black prisoners found themselves forced into the same kind of work they did as slaves, and the unlawful lynching of Black men in the South became increasingly prevalent, particularly with the rise of the Ku Klux Klan. In fact, one of Dunbar’s most famous poems, “The Haunted Oak,” vividly portrayed the horrors of mob mentality and condemned the violence done to Black men by these lynching mobs. Only three years after the publication of “An Ante-Bellum Sermon,” the Wilmington insurrection and riots, an unprecedented act of racial violence against Black citizens, occurred in North Carolina.
Racial discrimination in the 1880s and 1890s was not limited to just sporadic acts of violence. Newspapers regularly featured essays promoting the superiority of the white race, and many white writers argued that Black men were not capable of thinking for themselves and were happier when given instruction by their former masters (for a more thorough examination of the racial violence and discrimination in America in Dunbar’s time, see Fishkin’s article in Further Reading). Even Paul Laurence Dunbar, a successful writer popular with white audiences, regularly experienced racial discrimination. After graduating high school, Dunbar faced rejection from every job he applied for and was left with only a low-paying job as an elevator operator. When he was established as a poet, he still struggled with discrimination. On one occasion, hotel staff refused to let him into his room because they did not believe a Black person could afford to stay there.
Although optimistic that Black people would be accepted and assimilate into American culture in the future, Dunbar also knew that that future had not come in his time. Even if Black Americans had been freed from slavery, Dunbar knew they were not free from the harmful impact of slavery, which is why so many of his poems portrayed ante-bellum America. Dunbar wrote poetry about the slavery he never experienced to examine and critique the ongoing racial prejudice he did experience in his own life time.
Religious Context
Prior to Dunbar’s writing “An Ante-Bellum Sermon” and prior to the emancipation of America’s slaves, Christianity had been a key tool in the suppression of Black slaves. While most of the abolitionists who protested slavery did so from a sense of religious conviction, slave-owning Christians also used scripture to justify the practice of slavery. The Christianity slaves most often had exposure to taught them they were the descendants of Ham, and they were rightfully enslaved because of the curse upon their ancestors Ham and Canaan as recorded in ninth chapter of the Book of Genesis. Furthermore, this strain of Christianity justified slavery by arguing it enabled white masters to evangelize and bring the light of Christianity to their less civilized Black slaves.
However, what these white ministers did not anticipate was that slaves would take this religion of “social control” and use it “as a way of fighting oppression” (Blount, Marcellus. “The Preacherly Text: African American Poetry and Vernacular Performance,” Vol. 107, No. 3, 1992. p 585). Both before and after the Civil War, Black Americans had adopted the religion of their masters and reconfigured it “to suit their experience” (Holladay, Meredith. “Religion, Race, and American History,” Vol. 406, 2012. p 75). Black Christianity particularly latched onto the Book of Exodus, which records how the kingdom of Egypt had enslaved the Hebrew nation of Israel for hundreds of years until God sent Moses to deliver the nation. With God’s power, Moses performed a number of miracles and sent 10 plagues against Egypt until Pharaoh finally relented and let the Hebrew people go free. Enslaved Black Americans “saw themselves as the enslaved Hebrews and their white masters as the Egyptians” (Holladay 75). This strong affinity to the story of Moses found its way into some of the earliest Black literary traditions in America, including the spiritual and the sermon, traditions in which “An Ante-Bellum Sermon” participates.
One of the most famous spirituals, “Go Down Moses” was anonymously composed during the period of Black enslavement and remains a significant song within Black churches to this day. Like “An Ante-Bellum Sermon,” the spiritual recounts the story of Moses freeing the enslaved nation of Israel to bring hope to its own enslaved, suffering audience. For Black Americans, spirituals like “Go Down Moses” have “always held importance, especially during periods of enslavement, persecution, or hardship,” precisely because “they provide ecstatic visions of an alternate world of solace and hope” (Abarry, Abu. “African American Legacy in American Literature,” Vol. 20, 4, 1990. p 380). However, allusions to the Book of Exodus as a means of unifying and uplifting the downtrodden Black race were not limited to spirituals only. Exodus was the favorite text of many Black preachers in the ante-bellum South, who cleverly preached the story of the Hebrew liberation to “educate and inform their black congregations without arousing the suspicions of the slaves’ owners” (Blount 587). The story of Moses thus enabled Black slaves to preach subtly against their own enslavement without repercussions from their white masters. It is this rich history of religious resistance that Dunbar represents in his poem “An Ante-Bellum Sermon.”
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