Abstract
This essay engages with the civic possibilities African Americans perceived in the social, economic, and political transformations associated with the antebellum market revolution. Against the emerging nineteenth-century hegemony of political and economic liberalism, African Americans formulated an ideal of economic citizenship that translated Black material successes and social mobility into an extra-legal symbolic citizenship; in particular, class stratification among African Americans was mobilized to counter the presumption of immutable, ontological Black abjection that justified ascriptive Jacksonian civic exclusions. The essay engages with two proto-sociological texts designed to challenge these exclusions by depicting stratified African American communities that testified to African Americans’ market participation in and contributions to the nation. As insiders of their respective groups, authors Joseph Willson—Sketches of the Higher Classes of Colored Society in Philadelphia (1841)—and Cyprian Clamorgan—The Colored Aristocracy of St. Louis (1858)—innovate a vernacular sociology that cobbles together political economy, proto-social science, reform and literary discourses to fashion empirical, reparative accounts of their better-off African American communities. Engaging with these texts allows us to understand the role that regional specificity played in formulating race, class, and status across an expanding nation, but more importantly, it makes us aware of the perils and ambiguities involved in making African Americans’ participation in the liberal marketplace, or economic citizenship, the basis of African American civic legitimacy.