Black Muslims in early America
In this extract from Jefferson’s Muslim Fugitives: The Lost Story of Enslaved Africans, their Arabic Letters, and an American President, Jeffrey Einboden looks at the moment when President Thomas Jefferson received a letter in a script he recognized but could not read. The document was written in Arabic by Black Muslims requesting Jefferson’s intercession on their behalf after they were captured in Kentucky.
On the morning of October 4, 1807, Jefferson woke up to find himself in his bedroom at the President’s House for the first time in two months. Although likely stiff from his eventful journey over four days, Jefferson was not a man given to complaint. And besides, today there was no time for self-pity. Although he had been in Washington for less than a day, a “momentous matter” had already presented itself to the President which could not be postponed. An “interview” had been the sole request of the mysterious traveler whose note arrived the night before — a request that the president had decided to grant.
It was not wholly out of character for Jefferson to agree to meet a man entirely unknown to him; a president of populist ideals, Jefferson was remarkably accessible to the American people. But principles were surely not the only reason to meet Ira P. Nash. Jefferson’s motivations were likely much more mixed. Self-preservation, not merely public regard, may have seemed at stake. By the beginning of October, Aaron Burr was still on trial for a misdemeanor in Richmond, although acquitted of treason — an acquittal that left Jefferson feeling far from settled. Still eager for evidence against his nemesis, the president also harbored lingering anxieties for “the limits of the law” out West, hearing reports of overzealous recrimination against Burr supporters. The urgency of Nash’s note, and his origins in the “Teritory of Louisanna”, undoubtedly dovetailed with anxieties that plagued the president at the opening of October 1807. Waiting to speak with Nash directly, Jefferson may have braced for a shock. The frontier had already proved full of surprises. And yet, the president could not have anticipated the packet that this traveler had arrived in Washington to deliver. Nash carried no news of western conspiracies; instead, the “matter of momentous importance” he had promised the president turned out to be two manuscripts in a Middle Eastern tongue, written by African authors. If Jefferson was taken aback in the moment, his devotion to historical documentation, and his love of detail, was not long deferred. The day after their meeting, Nash supplied a dutiful summary, providing the president with a written report regarding the two Muslims he had encountered as captives in Kentucky.
Despite all his learning — despite his own far travels and foreign acts of translation — the president found himself illiterate as he faced two obscure pages penned on the frontier of the new nation he had helped form.
It was not Nash’s own writings, of course, but the two Arabic pages he transported to Jefferson that proved most precious. The first document was scrawled in large script, its thirteen lines spanning an entire page (pictured above). The second manuscript was, however, miniscule, its compact script covering an area less than a postcard. Although diminutive, these two documents possessed significance that far outstripped their size, capable of making even an American president feel small. After delivering his documents, Nash surely felt satisfied; not long after his delivery, he departed Washington, heading west once more, home to Louisiana. Jefferson, however, was left confounded on October 4. Despite all his learning — despite his own far travels and foreign acts of translation — the president found himself illiterate as he faced two obscure pages penned on the frontier of the new nation he had helped form. Volumes of rare scholarship lined Jefferson’s shelves at home, including books that described the same language in which these two documents were written, even citing some of their very words. And yet, these letters, written by two helpless West Africans, surpassed all of Jefferson’s skills. In 1797, Vice President Jefferson had translated a Middle Eastern fiction, Volney’s Ruins. A decade later, in 1807, manuscripts in Middle Eastern script reached President Jefferson, confronting him with two texts that seemed fantastic, but were tangible facts — texts that transcended not only Jefferson’s capacities of rendition, but his reading capabilities too.
Mirroring his signature issues, these Arabic manuscripts straddled Jefferson’s core concerns: literacy and liberty, freedom and speech.
If beyond his understanding, the pages that Nash delivered were nevertheless entirely recognizable to Jefferson. The nation’s president was one of the few Americans to whom the appearance of Arabic was not at all new. As he gazed at these manuscripts from the American West, Jefferson in 1807 saw the same language of a North African treaty he had authorized twenty years earlier, autographing on the first day of 1787 a compact with Morocco. And, as twenty years before, Jefferson found U.S. freedoms again bound up in Arabic composition. Beyond the specifics of idiom, the issues implied by these documents were also the very same that gave rise to Jefferson’s fame. Seemingly foreign to early America, these Arabic documents involved ideas and identities profoundly personal to the president himself. Although illegible, these fluid Middle Eastern lines encircled concrete truths to which Jefferson had dedicated his career. Embodying polarities of race and religion, claiming both Islamic and American origins, these two texts also traced challenges of deciphering and detention, the cracking of codes and unjust captivity. Mirroring his signature issues, these Arabic manuscripts straddled Jefferson’s core concerns: literacy and liberty, freedom and speech. Always interwoven in the American enterprise, these strands were tangled up in the Muslim writings delivered by Nash. And now it was the President’s task to unravel them.
Jeffrey Einboden is Professor of English at Northern Illinois University and a 2017 Fellow of the American Council of Learned Societies. Einboden’s most recent books include The Islamic Lineage of American Literary Culture (Oxford, 2016) and Islam and Romanticism (2014). He is the recipient of two fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, including a 2011 award supporting Einboden’s recovery, translation and teaching of Arabic slave writings.
