3 - Franklin-1978-George Washington Williams and The Beginnings of Afro-American Historiography

George Washington Williams and the Beginnings of Afro-American Historiography
Author(s): John Hope Franklin

Source: Critical Inquiry, Vol. 4, No. 4 (Summer, 1978), pp. 657-672
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
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George Washington Williams and the Beginnings
of Afro-American Historiography
John Hope Franklin
The last quarter of the nineteenth century was an exciting period in the
intellectual history of the United States. The pursuit of learning and the
diffusion of knowledge had taken on new life as an uneasy racial and
sectional peace settled over the nation and as government and business
began to support the educational enterprise as never before. Older in-
stitutions such as Harvard, Yale, and Columbia were experiencing a
period of reinvigoration thanks to new personnel, new ideas, and new
facilities. New institutions such as Johns Hopkins, Cornell, and the Uni-
versity of Chicago were prepared, even at their creation, to challenge
many of the old assumptions in the educational process and to chart bold
new approaches in their vigorous pursuit of new knowledge.
One of the most important changes taking place was this fresh and
lively interest in new knowledge. And if it was early emphasized by the
new universities, it soon became a preoccupation of the older ones as
well. In earlier years young people, aspiring to be scholars, had been
urged by their mentors to acquire the largest and widest possible range
of existing knowledge and familiarity with the ideas of the great scholars
and consequently to reflect the culture which such an acquisition pre-
sumably brought about. In later years, however, the power and passion
for discovering new truth became the ideal held up before the young
scholars by their elders.
While the change affected every area of intellectual activity to a
greater or lesser extent, nowhere was it more clearly pronounced or,
indeed, more generally pervasive than in the study and writing of Amer-
ican history. To the extent that the study of history had been formal, it
0093-1896/78/0404-0006$01.94
657
658 John Hope Franklin Afro-American Historiography
had been concerned with large, general themes, such as the history of
the world or a considerable portion of it. The writing of American his-
tory had, likewise, been of a general nature, for example, the History of
the United States by George Bancroft and another by Richard Hildreth, or
the History of New England by John Gorham Palfrey, or the great works
on the opening of the West by Francis Parkman. On the whole these
works sang hymns of praise to the great miracle that was the United
States; and with the fire of patriotism burning brightly in all that they
wrote, these historians seldom considered the possibility that what their
country did was not necessarily good or that what they wrote about their
country was not necessarily true.1
It was not until Yale reorganized its program of graduate studies
and Harvard and Michigan introduced the seminar in the 1870s that
students and professors began to focus their critical attention on specific
American historical themes that did much to illuminate and even to
revise the older, general themes. They began to publish monographs on
economic and political questions, on demographic problems in states
and municipalities, and on religious, educational, and even social
themes. As they became more conscious of themselves as professionals,
they organized the American Historical Association, launched journals
such as the American Historical Review, and began to benefit from the
findings of their counterparts in such fields as economics, political sci-
ence, and geography. It was doubtless with a sense of satisfaction that,
with the use of more authentic documentation, a wider variety of
sources, and a new rigorous methodology developed largely in Europe,
they could now regard themselves as "scientific" historians.2
Unfortunately, most of the writings of these new scientific historians
were flawed by a certain disregard for persons whose racial or ethnic
backgrounds happened to be different from their own. When they wrote
of slavery, their findings were based on the assumption that persons of
African descent were a different order of human beings, if indeed they
were human beings at all. When they wrote of the War for Indepen-
dence or the American Civil War, they completely ignored or quickly
1. The early major writers in American history have been studied and criticized. For a
convenient summary of their methods, approaches, and writings, see Michael Kraus, A
History of American History (New York, 1937), chaps. 6-8.
2. Ibid., pp. 291-320.
John Hope Franklin, president-elect of the American Historical So-

ciety, is presently writing a biography of George Washington Williams.
He is the John Matthews Manly Distinguished Service Professor of His-
tory at the University of Chicago and the author of, among other works,
From Slavery to Freedom: A History of Negro Americans and A Southern
Odyssey: Travelers in the Antebellum North.
Critical Inquiry Summer 1978 659
glossed over the well-authenticated and crucial part that black people
played in nation building and in saving the Union. When they came to
consider the almost contemporary problems of reconstruction and the
subsequent disfranchisement, segregation, and general degradation of
Negro Americans, their scientific stance virtually collapsed as they be-
came unembarrassed partisans in justifying the course of action that had
been taken.
It was as though the historians had been determined to commit the
same errors that the founding fathers had committed. During the War
for Independence, when the patriots uttered high-sounding and glitter-
ing generalities about the rights of man, they actually meant the rights of
white men, as their conduct clearly indicated. When they wrote into the
Constitution that a slave was three-fifths of a man and that, under the
Constitution, he had no right to be free, they ceased to be credible in
their claim that they were working for the general welfare. Now came
the historians, operating under Ranke's mandate to write history as it
actually happened, who could not bring themselves to write about runa-
way slaves as normal, freedom-loving human beings. Nor could they
admit that the disfranchised freedmen had as much right to vote, under
the Constitution, as the illiterate European immigrant who had no
understanding of the way that democratic institutions were supposed to
function. In refusing to face the facts of history and in refusing to use
the same canons of scholarship to judge all peoples, such historians
forfeited their own claims of being scientific just as surely as the found-
ing fathers had forfeited their claims that they were shaping political
institutions in the interests of all the people.
It did not require a very shrewd or sophisticated observer to see the
defects that were inherent in the kind of history that the scientific histo-
rians were writing. Indeed, there had been a few sensitive souls who had
seen serious fallacies in the history that was being written even before the
scientific historians came on the scene. As far back as the time when
Jared Sparks, George Bancroft, John Gorham Palfrey, and Richard Hil-
dreth were writing their histories of the United States, little or no atten-
tion was given to the Afro-Americans, both slave and free, who were not
only increasing in numbers but who were also playing a part in the life of
the country that could scarcely be ignored. Robert Benjamin Lewis, a
Boston free Negro, saw this discrepancy; and that is why, in his pitifully
crude but clearly perceptive volume, Light and Truth, published in 1836,
he tried to set the record straight. A few years later James W. C. Pen-
nington sought to do the same thing in his Textbook of the Origin and
History of the Colored People. There were other works-James T. Holly's A
Vindication of the Capacity of the Negro Race for Self-Government, and Civilized
Progress (1857) and William C. Nell's Colored Patriots of the American Revo-
lution (1855), actually a rather full account of the history of Negroes in
the United States. But these were little more than protests against the
exclusion of Negroes in the general histories that white men were writ-
ing and mere suggestions of what true and complete histories of the
United States should contain.
But as white historians continued to ignore black people and as
blacks themselves developed clearer conceptions of the meaning and
content of historical works, they made other attempts. With the coming
of the Civil War and with the North's attempt, at the outset, to wage the
struggle without substantial assistance from the four million blacks, slave
and free, one of them, William Wells Brown, concluded that it was time
to confront white America. He would call attention to the absurdity of
fighting for union and emancipation with no regard for the interests and
resources of a group that was not only deeply interested but in a position
to make a significant contribution to the outcome of the struggle. Brown,
a fugitive slave who had written extensively in many forms and had been
an antislavery lecturer on both sides of the Atlantic, undertook the task
that he and many others believed needed to be performed. In 1863-in
the year of emancipation-he published The Black Man to answer "the
calumniators and traducers of the Negro" and to inform those "who are
ignorant of the characteristics of the race and are mere echoes of the
first." Although Brown's work fell far short of a really definitive Afro-
American history, the abolitionist Lewis Tappan called it 'just the book
for the hour," while the Boston Transcript described it as "the best ac-
count of the ability of the Negro ever put into print."3
But Lewis, Holly, Pennington, Nell, and Brown had not really met
the white historians on their own terms. None of them examined the
major developments in the history of the United States with a view to
seeing how such developments affected blacks and how blacks re-
sponded to them. They were content to refute the obvious assertions
made or implied by white historians that Negroes were not really a part
of the country's great historical developments. The best they could do,
under the circumstances, was to give examples of black men and women
who were not inferior and who were indisputable examples of what one
contemporary observer described as the "versatility and range of the
genius of the African race." Such works were, of course, not much better
history than Mason Locke Weems' impressionistic biography of George
Washington. But not one of these men had any training in history and,
indeed, they had little training of any kind. Theirs was merely a holding
operation in which they kept before the general public, blacks as well as
whites, some of the raw material which would, some day, be used in
writing a truly important history of the Negro people in the United
States.
By the time that the Harvard and Michigan seminars in history were
3. William Wells Brown, The Black Man: His Antecedents, His Genius, and His Achieve-
ments (New York, 1863), preface and p. 312.
launched and scientific history was assuming an increasingly important

place in American intellectual life, there appeared on the scene a person
who could do justice to the history of Negroes in the United States. That
person, George Washington Williams, was never exposed to the teach-
ings of the scientific school, but his sense of history and commitment to
the new methodology were as deep as any student's who sat at the feet of
the masters in America's great educational institutions.
Williams' beginnings could scarcely have been more inauspicious.
Born in 1849 of a Negro mother of German and Negro extraction and a
father who traced his ancestry to Welsh and Negro forebears, Williams
had little schooling in the Pennsylvania backwoods where he grew up.
After desultory academic training in Pennsylvania he enlisted in the
Union Army at the age of fourteen. He was discharged because of his
age but persuaded the army officers to take him back, and he served with
distinction until the end of the war. Then, after a sojourn in the Mexican
Army and, once again, with the United States Army, he was mustered
out in 1868 and was ready to begin a civilian career. But the question
was, what would it be?4
In drifting from place to place in Missouri and Illinois, Williams
learned of the establishment of a new university for Negroes in Wash-
ington, named in honor of the commissioner of The Freedmen's
Bureau, General Oliver Otis Howard. Williams wrote directly to the
general, and in eloquent if broken English he entreated Howard to
please let him attend his university: "i will aprecate a good schooling
please let me come. .. and if i get a chance i will prove my self worthy of
all epences may be given if you say come i will at once come."5 The
application bore fruit, for in September 1869 Williams enrolled as a
student at Howard University.
His sojourn as a student in the nation's capital in the government-
backed college for blacks was brief. There is no indication in the records
that he was dissatisfied with Howard University; but he had confided to
General Howard that he was already doing "a little preaching," and as a
young man in a hurry, it may well be that he decided to get on with the
business of preparing for a vocation. In 1870 he enrolled in the Newton
Theological Institution, from which he graduated in 1874. In a class of
twenty-six Williams was one of twelve students selected to deliver a
commencement oration. Choosing as his subject "Early Christianity in
Africa," Williams displayed an interest in Afro-American historical re-
search and writing that would be an important aspect of his activities for
4. The elementary facts in the life of Williams are difficult to certify. The account in
the Dictionary of American Biography, s.v. "Williams, George Washington," contains numer-
ous errors, as does a piece I wrote several years ago: "George Washington Williams,
Historian," Journal of Negro History 31 (January 1946): 60-90.
5. Williams to Howard, 1 March 1869, Howard University Archives, Moorland-
Spingarn Research Center, Howard University, Washington, D.C.
the remainder of his life. "For nearly three centuries they have toiled in
bondage unrequited in this youthful republic of the west. They have
grown from a small company to be an exceedingly great people-five
million in number; no longer chattels, they are human beings; no longer
bondsmen, they are freemen, with almost every civil disability re-
moved."6 Ever sensitive to the implications of contemporary devel-
opments, Williams perhaps based his optimism regarding civil dis-
abilities on the sweeping Civil Rights Act then under consideration by
the Congress.7
The illiterate youngster of 1869 had become, in the span of five
years, a theological school graduate, a literate, articulate, and perceptive
student of the history of his people. Moving on after ordination to the
pastorate of the Twelfth Baptist Church of Boston, Williams saw another
opportunity to expand his historical interests and activities. The Twelfth
Baptist Church was one of the oldest independent Negro churches in the
United States. It was organized in 1840 when some forty black com-
municants withdrew from the First Independent Baptist Church of Bos-
ton. For years, the Twelfth Baptist had been a place of refuge for runa-
way slaves and an important center for developing leadership among
Afro-Americans during the antebellum period. It is difficult to believe
that this fledgling minister gave sufficient attention to his pastoral duties
for he spent much time doing research on the history of the church, and
within a year he had completed and published an extensive history of the
Twelfth Baptist Church. Even if the minister neglected his flock-and
there is no evidence that he did-the church could be ever grateful to
Williams for the manner in which he provided posterity with an intimate
and permanent account of its early development.8
Williams lived in a time of rapid and dramatic change in the United
States. Within the span of a very few years young men-young white
men, that is-were working their way from the bottom to the top of the
corporate ladder. Some were literally making fortunes overnight. These
were times of impatience and restlessness. If one did not succeed in one
place, he did not wait there for the tide of fortune to turn in his favor;
instead, he went out in search of a place where the tide was already
turning. Williams was as ambitious and as restless as any young man of
his time. He saw white men sitting in seats of power and wealth; he saw
black men rising to important positions in state governments and in the
Congress. But Boston seemed not to be the hub of dynamic activity that
it once was, and it did not take Williams long to decide that there were
6. Williams, "Early Christianity in Africa," MS in the Library of the Andover New-

ton Theological School, Andover, Mass.
7. See my "The Enforcement of the Civil Rights Act of 1875," Prologue 6 (Winter
1974): 225-35.
8. Williams, History of the Twelfth Baptist Church, Boston, Mass., From 1840 to 1874
(Boston, 1874).
other places more active and more attractive than the place of his first
professional appointment. He would seek them out.
In 1875 he went to Washington, D.C., where he attempted to launch
a newspaper, The Commoner. Although he had the support of many in-
fluential persons, including Frederick Douglass and John Mercer
Langston, the venture was not successful. Only three or four issues ever
appeared.9 For a livelihood he had to accept employment in the city's
post office to support his wife and infant son. He was pleased, therefore,
to accept a call from the Union Baptist Church of Cincinnati, Ohio,
where he was installed in March 1876. Ohio was a state in which exciting
things were happening. Already its governor, Rutherford B. Hayes, was
being mentioned as a presidential possibility, and its cities were prosper-
ous and growing in size. Cincinnati, whose black population had been
growing steadily since the antebellum years, seemed a most desirable
place to locate.10 Williams soon discovered that there were so many
attractive secular opportunities in Cincinnati that his interest in religious
matters flagged. He resigned his pastorate in December 1877, never
again to serve in a ministerial capacity.
Thereafter, Williams wrote a regular column for the Cincinnati
Commercial, served as internal revenue storekeeper for the U.S. Depart-
ment of the Treasury, and worked in the auditor's office of the Cincin-
nati Southern Railroad. Perhaps his most important connection in Cin-
cinnati was with the powerful Taft family. Judge Alfonso Taft, former
attorney general of the United States and father of the future president,
took Williams on as an understudy in his law offices. With the training he
received there and in evening classes of the Cincinnati Law School, Wil-
liams was admitted to the practice of law in the state of Ohio. It was
through the Tafts, moreover, that Williams entered politics. In addition
to performing yeoman service for the Republican party, he ran for a seat
in the state legislature. In his first attempt, in 1877, he was defeated; but
in his second effort two years later he was successful, thus becoming the
first Negro American to sit in a legislative body in the state of Ohio.
Williams' career seemed at last to be taking shape. He was a promis-
ing lawyer and a successful politician. He had become an active member
of the most important veterans' organization, The Grand Army of the
Republic, in which he rose to the position of judge advocate in Ohio. He
was in demand as a speaker and was already regarded as one of the
ablest and most eloquent men of his day. But he was tormented by a
nagging desire to devote more time to studying and writing history; and
he seemed unable to escape his desire. Indeed, as he worked on his
9. The first issue of The Commoner appeared on 4 September 1875. In the prospectus,
appearing on the first page, Williams said that the paper would be "to the colored people of
the cotintry a guide, teacher, defender, and mirror."
10. Wendell P. Dabney, Cincinnati's Colored Citizens: Historical, Sociological, and Bio-
graphical (Cincinnati, 1926).
numerous speeches, which invariably had a strong historical content, his

interest in historical writing increased. In 1876 he was invited to speak
on the program celebrating the centennial of American independence,
and he decided to speak on the American Negro. "I at once began an
investigation of the records of the nation to secure material for the
oration," he later recalled. "I was surprised and delighted to find that the
historical memorials of the Negro were so abundant, and so creditable to
him. I pronounced my oration ... and the warm and generous manner
in which it was received, both by those who listened to it and by others
who subsequently read it in pamphlet form, encouraged me to devote
what leisure time I might have to a further study of the subject."11 The
end product, he hoped, would be a comprehensive history of the Negro
race in America.
Leisure time was not enough, for what began as an avocation soon
became an obsession. Even while he was a member of the legislature in
Columbus, he spent much time working in the libraries in the state
capital; and when he was in Cincinnati on weekends and during legisla-
tive recesses, he worked in the library of the Ohio Historical and Philo-
sophical Society and among the collections of the great Cincinnati bib-
liophile, Robert Clarke. Surely, a major consideration in his decision not
to run for reelection to his legislative seat was his determination to pur-
sue more vigorously the subject in which he had become so immersed.
"Finding it absolutely impossible to write while discharging public duties
or practising law," he confessed in 1882, "I retired from the public
service several years ago, and since that time have devoted all my ener-
gies to this work. It is now nearly seven years since I began this wonder-
ful task" (1:vi).
This decision indeed represented a supreme commitment to the
study and writing of history on the part of Williams. At no time had his
career seemed brighter or more secure. As a Republican politician his
chances for reelection to the legislature seemed excellent. He was well
connected in Cincinnati. The editor of the influential Cincinnati Commer-
cial, Murat Halsted, admired him greatly and opened the columns of his
newspaper to Williams whenever he had something to say. He was a
great favorite of Cincinnati's most prominent citizen, Judge Alfonso
Taft, who encouraged him in his career in law and politics. Williams was
rapidly becoming an important national leader in the Negro community,
and he was in great demand as a speaker in various parts of the coun-
try.12 But Williams seemed unimpressed with these attractive prospects
11. Williams, History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to 1880: Negroes as Slaves, as
Soldiers, and as Citizens, 2 vols. (New York, 1882), 1:v. Page citations also apply to the reprint
edition published in the Arno Press American Negro: His History and Literature Series
(New York, 1968); the two volumes are bound together but paginated separately. All
further page citations to History of the Negro will appear in the text.
12. In 1875, for example, he spoke to a large audience in the hall of the House of
Representatives in Jackson, Mississippi (Jackson Daily Pilot, 6 October 1875).
as he compared them with the exciting prospect of writing a history of

the Negro race.
Although Williams had no formal training in the methods of histor-
ical research and no opportunity to study historical criticism with the
great masters who were just beginning their seminars, he was quite
aware of what the duties and responsibilities of the professional historian
should be. He knew that he should go to the sources and gather his
information systematically and industriously. And this is the first thing
he did. After consulting hundreds of volumes, manuscripts, and news-
papers in the Ohio libraries, he went to many other parts of the country
where there were materials that would be helpful to him. In Mas-
sachusetts he worked at the American Antiquarian Society in Worcester,
and at the Massachusetts Historical Society and the Atheneum, both in
Boston. In New York City he worked in the Lenox and Astor Libraries
that were later to form the nucleus for the great New York Public Li-
brary. There he also did research in the Libraries of the New York
Society, the New York Historical Society, and the Magazine of American
History. He spent several months at the Library of Congress going
through eighteenth-century newspapers and other materials.13
Williams collected a considerable amount of information through
correspondence. For example, he wrote to every member of the pres-
ident's cabinet seeking data regarding the work of their offices; and he
reported that he received prompt replies containing all the information
he sought. In a similar fashion he received information from other gov-
ernment officials, church officials, and persons in private stations
(1 :viii-ix).
In several areas of research Williams was a pioneer. One was in the
use of newspapers. In the history seminars at the universities, little or no
stress was made on newspapers as an important historical source. Con-
sequently the monographs written by the first generation of scientific
historians reveal no extensive use of this critically important source for
social history. John Bach McMaster, who was teaching civil engineering
and working on the first volume of his History of the People of the United
States, was committed to the use of newspapers as a source for historical
data. But he did not get an opportunity to teach history at the University
of Pennsylvania until 1883. After that time he would urge his history
students to follow the example of their teacher. Long before that time,
however, Williams was already deeply involved in research in newspa-
pers in Ohio, New York, and Washington in order to broaden the base
of his findings.
Another area in which Williams was a pioneer was in the way that he
collected elusive material that would give him an angle of vision with
which many historians of his day or a later day were not even concerned.
13. Williams, History of the Negro Race, 1:ix. See, also, the Cincinnati Commercial, 20
June 1880, which reported that Williams would depart for the East the following day to do
research on his history.
He knew how difficult it would be to render a version of history that took

into account the role of the inarticulate masses and those whose records
could not be found in the usual repositories. Thus, he placed a letter in a
Negro weekly newspaper, the Huntsville (Alabama) Gazette, which he re-
quested "friendly papers" to copy. In the letter Williams informed the
public that he was writing A History of the Negro Race in America and
sought specific information on several topics. In addition to requesting
information on the process of reconstruction in the several Southern
States, he requested "the minutes of any colored church organization,
statistics on Negro schools, information on so-called Negro crimes, evi-
dence of the accumulation of capital among Negroes, materials on social
conditions among Negroes, and information on the cause or causes of
the exodus of blacks from the South." It is not possible to know how
successful Williams was in such a quest for materials. When his work was
published he did express his gratitude to all persons who had sent him
newspapers and pamphlets. Perhaps some of these items came in re-
sponse to the open letter he had placed in the newspapers.14
Finally, Williams was a pioneer in the field of oral history. When the
adjutant general of the United States denied him permission to examine
the records of the Negro regiments in the regular army, Williams was
not daunted. He simply went to Texas, New Mexico, the Indian Terri-
tory, and Kansas, where the troops were stationed.15 He interviewed
many black enlisted men and noncommissioned officers as well as the
white officers in command. Thus, he gathered valuable firsthand in-
formation not only for his general history but for his history of the
Negro troops which he published subsequently. While Williams resorted
to the interview method out of necessity, it doubtless added a new di-
mension to his treatment of recent history and clearly placed him among
the pioneers in the field of oral history. Indeed, I know of no similar
effort by other historians of his time, university trained or otherwise, to
use the interview method to collect historical data.
Williams was fiercely independent, and it is doubtful that he would
have accepted suggestions regarding the organization and interpretation
of his materials if anyone had offered them. He did write to George
Bancroft in 1881 to seek suggestions about any "obscure materials" that
might be of value in completing his History of the Negro Race. In his reply
Bancroft merely suggested that Williams follow the "severe laws of his-
torical criticism" and if he did he will have done "to the public and to
science a great service." Apparently he was very friendly with George H.
Moore of the Lenox Library, whose History of Early Slavery in Mas-
14. Huntsville Gazette, 5 November 1881, and People's Advocate (Washington, D.C.), 29
October 1881.
15. Williams, History of the Negro Race, 1:viii. Another reason for his visiting the
Southwest was his interest in a colonization project for blacks in New Mexico (Cincinnati
Commercial, 7 December 1880).
sachusetts Williams described as admirable. Late in 1882 when he had

looked into Williams' newly published History of the Negro Race in America,
the historian Justin Winsor commented to Moore that it was obvious that
Williams "has had a helper in you. Good for you and good for him."16
Perhaps Winsor had in mind a footnote in which Williams wrote that
Moore's "refined sarcasm, unanswerable logic, and critical accuracy give
him undisputed place amongst the ablest writers of our times." But
Williams was not completely taken in, even by George Moore, for in a
footnote on the very next page he says, "Dr. George H. Moore says
Josselyn's Voyages were printed in 1664. This is an error. They were not
published until ten years later, in 1674" (1:173-74). Whether he was
right or wrong, on large matters or insignificant items, George Washing-
ton Williams was clearly his own man.
Williams wrote two significant historical works. The first was the one
I have been discussing, History of the Negro Race in America from 1619 to
1880: Negroes as Slaves, as Soldiers, and as Citizens. It was publised in 1882
by G. P. Putnam's Sons and appeared as a two-volume work of some
1075 pages, excluding the extensive index, and as a "Popular Edition,"
with the two volumes bound as one volume. In 1887 Harper and
Brothers brought out A History of the Negro Troops in the War of the Rebel-
lion, 1861-1865, containing some 341 pages. For this latter work Wil-
liams was perhaps one of the first historians to use the monumental
Official Records of the War of the Rebellion, which began to appear in 1880.
By this time, moreover, he was able to secure permission from the secre-
tary of war and the adjutant general to examine materials that had pre-
viously been denied him. He used manuscript materials in widely scat-
tered places, and he relied once again on personal interviews, even
though such a method was not as urgent as it had been when he was
writing his general history. By 1887 it was fair to describe Williams not
only as an indefatigable researcher but as an able, perceptive historian as
well.
Williams regarded his sources with that healthy skepticism that is a
hallmark-of a careful scholar. "I have found it necessary, in the interest
of history and science, to prick some bubbles of alleged history, and to
correct the record," he declared.17 He was constantly checking one
source against another and, where necessary, pointing out con-
tradictions or irreconcilable differences. For example, he worked as
hard on the question of abolition as he did on any other single topic. He
was anxious to give the abolitionists due credit for what they did in their
16. Williams to George Bancroft, 27 June 1881, and Bancroft to Williams, 1 July
1881, George Bancroft Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston, Mass. Winsor to
Moore, 9 December 1882, Lenox Library Papers, New York Public Library, New York,
New York.
17. Williams, A History of the Negro Troops in the War of the Rebellion, 1861-1865 (New
York, 1887), p. xiii. Page numbers also apply to the reprint edition (New York, 1969).
struggle against slavery. But he was unwilling to accept every word they
uttered as evidence of their uncompromising opposition to slavery on
humanitarian grounds. After examining the writings of Horace Greeley,
Williams concluded that Greeley "wished the slave free, not because he
loved him; but because of the deep concern he had for the welfare of the
free, white working-men of America" (2:50). After examining the writ-
ings of the antislavery leaders and the work of their societies, Williams
concluded that it was the writings of blacks such as Jermain Loguen,
David Walker, Samuel Ringgold Ward, Austin Stewart, and Frederick
Douglass that "exposed the true character of slavery, informed the pub-
lic mind, stimulated healthy thought, and touched the heart of two con-
tinents with a sympathy almost divine" (2:59).
As an historian of the Negro race and of the Negro troops in the
Civil War, Williams was essentially a revisionist. He was aware not only of
historical revisionism but also of his own role in setting the record
straight. Thus in looking at the prohibition of slavery in Georgia when
the colony was founded, Williams corrected those who had argued that
this exclusion was based on humanitarian grounds. If slavery was
" 'against the gospel, as well as the fundamental law of England,' " as
Georgia's founder, James Oglethorpe claimed, then why did Oglethorpe
himself own slaves and a plantation in South Carolina (1:316)? Williams
then pointed out that even in the official Georgia documents, slavery was
prohibited on political and prudential grounds, considerations which
were themselves brushed aside in less than twenty years.
Although the Civil War had ended almost twenty-five years before
Williams wrote his History of the Negro Troops, the role of the black soldier
had received scant treatment by the many white historians who were
already writing about that conflict. It was as though one hundred eighty
thousand black soldiers had not participated at all. "Even the appearance
of the Negro soldier in hundreds of histories of the war has always been
incidental," Williams declared. "These brave men have had no cham-
pion, no one to chronicle their record, teeming with interest and instinct
with patriotism."18 Consequently, the work by Williams on Negro troops
was a full-dress attempt to revise the history of the Civil War.
Nor did Williams shrink from the unpleasant task of correcting
blacks who had committed errors or misinterpretations regarding the
history of their own people. In his discussion of Benjamin Banneker, the
Negro astronomer, Williams asserted that "William Wells Brown, Wil-
liam C. Nell, and all the Colored men whose efforts I have seen, have
made a number of very serious mistakes respecting Banneker's parent-
age, age, accomplishments, etc." (1:385 n.). After citing the sources that
he had used, he proceeded to set the record straight with regard to these
18. Ibid., p. 328.
errors. On another occasion he chided William C. Nell for not citing any
authority in his discussion of the legal end of slavery in Massachusetts
(1:430). William Still, the black abolitionist, was not only a participant in
the affairs of the Underground Railroad, but from the time that his
book on the subject appeared in 1872 he was regarded as a leading
authority on the subject. But this did not place Still beyond the reach of
Williams' criticism. "It is to be regretted," he said, "that William Still, the
author of the U. G. R. R. [The Underground Railroad], failed to give any
account of its origin, organization, workings, or the number of persons
helped to freedom. It is an interesting narrative of many cases, but is
shorn of that minuteness of detail so indispensable to authentic historical
memorials" (2:58 n.). Williams seemed vexed to be compelled to go over
the same ground which he thought Still should have covered more thor-
oughly. He added valuable information to what Still had provided, but
he did not rewrite the history of the Underground Railroad.
Objectivity is an ideal to which most historians aspire, but few attain
it, even under the most favorable circumstances where neither fact nor
interpretation is in dispute. Objectivity is even more difficult to attain by
an historian whose function is largely revisionist. His takes essentially an
adversary position with regard to the historians he is seeking to revise,
and in his vigorous attempt to make his case, the danger of overstating it
and thereby revealing a personal subjectivity is ever present. One's own
personal involvement either because of, say, race or because of the
memory of events treated can have the effect of defeating any effort to
be objective. Williams was well aware of these possibilities, but he was
constantly striving to be as dispassionate as it was humanly possible to be.
Already, he had become infected with the current commitment to the
scientific approach on the part of the professionally trained historians.
In a letter in 1887 to Senator George F. Hoar, president of the American
Antiquarian Society, Williams assured Hoar that it was his intention to
use the resources of the Society to "promote science and history."19
On numerous occasions Williams wrote of his determination to pre-
sent only the truth as he saw it. "My whole aim," he said in the preface to
the History of the Negro Race, "has been to write a thoroughly trustworthy
history; and what I have written, if it have no other merit, is reliable"
(1:x). He was keenly aware of the pitfalls of writing about an event so
recent as the Civil War and one in which he had participated as a soldier.
He declared that he never trusted his memory, even about battles or
other events in which he had participated or had witnessed. Writing
about events within living memory also required "both fortitude and skill
to resist the insidious influences of interested friends and actors, to sepa-
19. Williams to Hoar, 20 September 1887, MS in the George F. Hoar Papers, Ameri-
can Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass.
rate error from truth with an even and steady hand, to master the
sources of historical information ... and to avoid partisan feeling and
maintain a spirit of judicial candor."20
There can be no doubt that Williams was quite familiar with the
highest canons of historical research and writing, that he knew what was
involved in the stupendous task of writing revisionist history in an atmo-
sphere charged with racial antipathies and filled with assumptions of
Negro inferiority. In his zeal to revise the highly prejudicial accounts
that his predecessors had written, Williams himself came rather close to
the brink of being an unreasoning zealot. He said that in the antebellum
North the only thing that young black men could aspire to was "the
position of a waiter, the avocation of a barber, the place of a house-
servant or groom, and teach or preach to their own people with little or
no qualifications." This is followed almost immediately by a discussion of
the remarkable achievements of Negroes in Boston in fields such as
education, the ministry, business, medicine, and law (2:132-33). Perhaps
these were exceptions to prove the rule, but Williams' generalization had
been so sweeping as to permit few, if any, exceptions.
Williams was not averse to making severely uncomplimentary re-
marks about persons or groups he regarded as opposed to freedom and
equality. He described white troops who did not care to serve with blacks
as persons upon whose "pedigree it would not be pleasant to dwell"
(2:262). Regarding the Fort Pillow affair of 1874 in which numerous
black soldiers were allegedly "massacred," Williams declared that the
incident demanded "great fortitude in the historian who would truth-
fully give a narrative of such bloody, sickening detail." Yet, he managed
to call the Confederate participants "barbarous," "fiends," "human
hyenas," and their actions a foul deed "blacker than hell itself" (2:359-
61, 375). Obviously, these were vexatious and outrageous matters, and
hisjudgment of them in subjective terms merely indicates how difficult it
was even for Williams to maintain a dispassionate calm. What is remark-
able is that, considering the problems with which he was concerned, he
was able to retain his equanimity as well as he did.
The major achievement of George Washington Williams was not
merely that he brought to his writing an enormous amount of research
that was virtually exhaustive, or that he was a pioneer in developing new
methods of historical research, or that, on the whole, he achieved a
commendable degree of objectivity. His great achievement was that he
used his materials, his talents, and his adherence to the principles of
historical research and writing in conceiving and executing two major
historical works in the general context of the larger picture of American
history. His works are not sketches of leading Negroes, or accounts of
black military heroes, or descriptions of Negroes degraded by slavery, or
20. Williams, History of the Negro Troops, p. ix.
recitations of the achievements of Negroes in freedom. Rather, they are

the histories of Negro Americans as they confronted the total forces on
the national scene that affected virtually every aspect of their lives. Wil-
liams was concerned with the interaction of blacks with these forces and
with the people behind them. This was a stupendous undertaking, and
Williams was the first to recognize it. "I have been possessed of a painful
sense of the vastness of my work from first to last," Williams said as he
completed his History of the Negro Race (1:v).
One obvious difficulty that Williams faced in writing his History of the
Negro Race was the fact that even as he achieved a clear view of the larger
picture, he was not always able to execute his conception because there
were inadequate monographic works to inform his own work. He fretted
that there was no adequate treatment of the Underground Railroad, but
he did not take the time to write a monograph on the subject. Nothing of
importance had been written on the legal background of Negro educa-
tion before the Civil War; therefore, there is a sixty-five page chapter on
the subject in the second volume. Chapters such as this give the History of
the Negro Race the rather mixed appearance of being both general and
monographic history. Even so, the larger conceptual framework is there,
and it remains in view even when the work digresses to provide one with
necessary specialized information.
The works by Williams were widely and, for the most part, favorably
reviewed. Regarding his History of the Negro Race in America, the Atlantic
Monthly was distressed by his "petty hostility to Massachusetts" but admit-
ted that he had produced a "work of great value."21 While the Nation
conceded that it was a valuable work of reference, it was, nevertheless, a
"crude performance of a mind in no way exceptionally endowed."22 On
the other hand, the Magazine of American History hailed it as the "result of
long and conscientious study by a vigorous and patient mind" and
"perhaps the most creditable performance that has yet come from the
pen of any representative of the African race in America."23 The Boston
Transcript called the History of the Negro Race "a remarkable work" and
praised Williams' ability and skill in handling his materials, while the
Westminster Review praised the work that contained "no needless or of-
fensive vituperation."24 This last evaluation must have pleased Williams
immensely.
The white academic community was silent, and few if any of the
scientific historians took notice of either of Williams' works. They did not
review his works, and they did not include them in the numerous critical
bibliographies that they prepared in the closing years of the nineteenth
century. It is ironic that Williams, the advocate of science in history, the
21. Atlantic Monthly 51 (April 1883): 564-68.
22. Nation 36 (12 April 1883).
23. Magazine of American History 9 (April 1883): 299-300.
24. Boston Transcript, 2 April 1883: Westminster Review 120, no. 239 (July 1883): 254.
proponent of objectivity and truth in history, should receive no notice

whatever from the group that had made the pursuit of science, truth,
and objectivity in history into a conscious, respectable, and well-
organized profession.
But Williams had created a field of historical study, where his white
counterparts had not. Single-handedly and without the blessing or ap-
proval of the academic community, Williams had called attention to the
importance of including Afro-Americans in any acceptable and com-
prehensive history of the nation long before the historians of various
groups of European-Americans or Asian-Americans had begun to advo-
cate a similar treatment for their groups. And if Williams did not im-
press the white professional historians, he gave heart and encourage-
ment to future Afro-American historians. When the History of the Negro
Troops appeared in 1887, nineteen-year-old W. E. B. Du Bois was a
college senior at Fisk University and editor-in-chief of the student maga-
zine, The Fisk Herald. In the columns of the Herald Du Bois wrote, "At last
we have a historian; not merely a Negro historian, but a man who judged
by his merits alone has written a splendid narrative. The Herald con-
gratulates George W. Williams, and the race, which may justly be ...
[proud] of him."25 Many years later, Carter G. Woodson, the founder of
the Association for the Study of Negro Life and History and of the
Journal of Negro History, described Williams' History of the Negro Race as a
"unique and valuable work" and the History of the Negro Troops as "one of
the most valuable accounts of the Civil War."26 With words like these
from Du Bois and Woodson, on whose shoulders much of the second
stage of Afro-American historiography would rest, it is not too much to
say that George Washington Williams was responsible for the beginnings
of Afro-American historiography.
25. The Fisk Herald, January 1888, p. 8.

26. Woodson's appraisal of Williams was found among his papers and made available
to me by Dr. Charles H. Wesley when he was executive director of the Association for the
Study of Afro-American Life and History, which had been founded by Woodson in 1915.

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3 - Franklin-1978-George Washington Williams and The Beginnings of Afro-American Historiography

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George Washington Williams and the Beginnings of Afro-American Historiography

Author(s): John Hope Franklin

John Hope Franklin

John Hope Franklin, president-elect of the American Historical So-

launched and scientific history was assuming an increasingly important

6. Williams, "Early Christianity in Africa," MS in the Library of the Andover New-

numerous speeches, which invariably had a strong historical content, his

as he compared them with the exciting prospect of writing a history of

He knew how difficult it would be to render a version of history that took

sachusetts Williams described as admirable. Late in 1882 when he had

18. Ibid., p. 328.

20. Williams, History of the Negro Troops, p. ix.

recitations of the achievements of Negroes in freedom. Rather, they are

proponent of objectivity and truth in history, should receive no notice

25. The Fisk Herald, January 1888, p. 8.

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