American Dark Age - by Keidrick Roy (Hardcover)

About the Book

"American Dark Age contends that life in early and antebellum America for Black people resembles what Keidrick Roy calls "racial feudalism," a race-based system of social stratification in the U.S. that operates as an extension of medieval ideas and customs. Accordingly, this project does not read Thomas Jefferson and his Declaration of Independence against the backdrop of the European and American Enlightenment traditions, as virtually all modern scholars have done. Instead, it seeks to understand Jefferson as a product of the same feudal frameworks he claimed to supersede. Jefferson's attachment to feudalism is most evident in his approbation of two new aristocracies during the Age of Enlightenment: (1) the aristocracy of the mind, which he calls a "natural aristocracy," and (2) the aristocracy of the skin, what abolitionist Frederick Douglass later dubs, with emphasis, "skin-aristocracy." After tracing the lineaments of racial feudalism, Roy shows how four African Americans-James McCune Smith, William Wells Brown, Francis Harper, and Harriet Jacobs-present distinctive but interconnected visions for overcoming its effects in the mid-nineteenth century by upending the antecedent feudal architecture of American liberalism, a broad tradition whose unifying strands otherwise emphasize individual liberties, egalitarianism, moral universalism, and meliorism (the belief in the possibility for social and political progress). Ultimately, Roy argues, McCune Smith, Wells Brown, Harper, and Jacobs maintained a spirit of cautious optimism against the retrogressive forces of plantation slavery in the South and what McCune Smith calls "caste-slavery in the North." Their quest to destroy racial feudalism and reformulate American liberalism established the conditions for initiating new ways of being "American.""--

Book Synopsis

How medieval-inspired racial feudalism reigned in early America and was challenged by Black liberal thinkers

Though the United States has been heralded as a beacon of democracy, many nineteenth-century Americans viewed their nation through the prism of the Old World. What they saw was a racially stratified country that reflected not the ideals of a modern republic but rather the remnants of feudalism. American Dark Age reveals how defenders of racial hierarchy embraced America's resemblance to medieval Europe and tells the stories of the abolitionists who exposed it as a glaring blemish on the national conscience.

Against those seeking to maintain what Frederick Douglass called an "aristocracy of the skin," Keidrick Roy shows how a group of Black thinkers, including Frances Ellen Watkins Harper, Hosea Easton, and Harriet Jacobs, challenged the medievalism in their midst--and transformed the nation's founding liberal tradition. He demonstrates how they drew on spiritual insight, Enlightenment thought, and a homegrown political philosophy that gave expression to their experiences at the bottom of the American social order. Roy sheds new light on how Black abolitionist writers and activists worked to eradicate the pernicious ideology of racial feudalism from American liberalism and renew the country's commitment to values such as individual liberty, social progress, and egalitarianism.

American Dark Age reveals how the antebellum Black liberal tradition holds vital lessons for us today as hate groups continue to align themselves with fantasies of a medieval past and openly call for a return of all-powerful monarchs, aristocrats, and nobles who rule by virtue of their race.

Review Quotes

"American Dark Age should become a watershed in our understanding of a crucial cohort of actors in American history, and also in rethinking the liberal political tradition."---Paul Rosenberg, Salon

"Black liberalism is too long neglected, and Keidrick Roy's American Dark Age brings black liberals back onto center stage where they belong."---Paul Crider, Liberal Currents

"Pointing to how feudal imagery is still a mainstay of far-right ideologues . . . Roy makes a persuasive case that studying these antebellum thinkers is critical today. It's a sophisticated reassessment of America's political history."-- "Publishers Weekly (Starred review)"

About the Author

Keidrick Roy is a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. In 2025, he will be Assistant Professor of Government at Dartmouth College. He has received national attention through media outlets such as CBS News Sunday Morning and the Chicago Review of Books and appears in the HBO documentary Frederick Douglass: In Five Speeches. He has curated two major exhibitions at the American Writers Museum in Chicago on Black American figures, including Frederick Douglass, Ida B. Wells, and Ralph Ellison.