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The American Negro, unlike his brethren, has been the pupil of the cool, aspiring, all conquering Saxon, and in no little measure he has partaken of all the greatness of his master. From him has he learned that form of government that is as surely destined to prevail the world over, as there is absolute worth in man …

Having resided by the side of their white brethren, blacks had imbibed the principles of republican government and Protestantism. “And being the most imitative of men, as saith his enemies, he bids fair to rival his great teacher.”77

Even as blacks emphasized their American roots, they could not agree on whether they were Negro, colored, black, or African Americans. The ongoing debate over how they should be addressed revealed at the same time differences over how they conceptualized themselves as a race and a regard for how whites employed the various terms. The objections to “negro,” for example, rested partly on its association with slavery and the tendency of whites to use it as a term of reproach. “We call each other colored people, black people, but not negro because we used that word in secesh times,” a South Carolina freedman testified in 1863. Both “negro” and “black” also suggested unmixed ancestry and hence excluded large numbers of colored people. “Is your Chairman a negro?” James Lynch asked the delegates to a Convention of the Colored People of Tennessee. “Or your Secretary, or any of your officers, or your other members or those sergeants sitting over there? They are all mixed blood. We are not ashamed of the term ‘negro,’ but to call it a ‘negro convention’ is a lie.… It is very hard to tell whether there is any pure blood or not, because white men used to love colored women very much.” Nor did “African” fare very well, particularly at a time when black leaders sought to educate their people to their Americanness. Henry M. Turner, a leader in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, agreed with several of his ministerial colleagues that the term “African” should be stricken from the title, if only because it suggested exclusion; on the other hand, “unlike the most of my race,” he claimed pride in being called a Negro. “When I am walking the streets of a city, and hear some one say, there goes a negro preacher, or a negro chaplain, I feel a peculiar exaltedness.” By the 1870s, the issue was far from settled, though “colored” seemed the most acceptable term, and a Louisiana newspaper indicated a willingness to accept “Negro” as long as it was capitalized, like any other nationality. “The French, German, Irish, Dutch, Japanese and other nationalities, are honored with a capital letter but the poor sons of Ham must bear the burden of a small n.”78

Whatever terminology they used to describe themselves, some blacks preferred to look, act, and sound as little Negro, colored, or black as possible. By adopting the fashions, the life styles, the manners, and even the color of white society, they would be absorbed into the dominant society that much sooner. The advertisements appearing in black newspapers, for example, not only acknowledged the premium placed on whiteness but sought to place that aspiration within everyone’s reach; if they could not turn white, they could purchase various devices calculated to bring them to the threshold of whiteness.

There cometh glad tidings of joy to all,

To young and to old, to great and to small;

The beauty which once was so precious and rare,

Is free for all, and all may be fair.

BY THE USE OF CHASTELLAR’S WHITE LIQUID ENAMEL

Still other advertisements promised scientific treatments that would enable black women to excel “the famed beauty of the Caucasians.”79

What they could not achieve with skin whiteners or hair treatments, some blacks hoped to attain by modeling their social functions and attire on white society. If they could not be absorbed into that society, they would establish their own society within a society—a replica of that from which they were excluded. Such pretentiousness, however,