Rejecting Citizenship: Africa, Islam, and the U.S. Civil War

Soon after his 1860 arrival in the United States, Nicholas Said–an African Muslim man who had been enslaved in Africa, Europe, and Asia–volunteered for the Massachusetts 55th Regiment. After the Civil War, he published his... [ view full abstract ]

Soon after his 1860 arrival in the United States, Nicholas Said–an African Muslim man who had been enslaved in Africa, Europe, and Asia–volunteered for the Massachusetts 55^th Regiment. After the Civil War, he published his autobiography “A Native of Bornoo” in the most prestigious white literary magazine of its day, the Atlantic Monthly. However, at every turn, Said elected not to embrace the military or literary institutions to which he was offered entree, effectively refusing to perform American citizenship after the war.

After rising to the rank of sergeant, Said requested a demotion to serve as a medic to address the inferior medical treatment received by African American troops. Said did not base his claims to citizenship on military service—something countless individuals have done throughout U.S. history. The political uses of another Muslim immigrant soldier, Humayun Khan, serve as a reminder that military service maintains a critical polemical purpose in times of grave crisis. Nonetheless, it is important to reflect on the broader implications of such claims, and also to determine how Said saw himself.

Said’s “American” bona fides as a war veteran writing in the Atlantic render his rejection of American exceptionalism all the more dramatic. He spent the last decades of his life as a teacher in the South and he self-published a longer autobiography that further effaced his American experiences. Making no claims to America, Said’s writings reinscribe African and Islamic history, culture, and traditions in ways that facilitate a profound rethinking of race, religion, and citizenship in nineteenth-century African American literature.