An Enquiry Concerning the Intellectual and Moral Faculties, and Literature of Negroes

Book excerpt: Gregoire was an early nineteenth century French Roman Catholic bishop who turned his attention to the place of African Americans in Catholic and Euro-American thought. His work is, among other things, a devastating critique of Thomas Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia, in which the third president muses about black inferiority. Gregoire's views made an American edition difficult, as Jefferson opposed the book's appearance. An Enquiry is one of the few of Gregoire's thirty-plus books to be translated into English, and its publication in Brooklyn in 1810 was an event for African Americans. In this new edition, Graham Hodges presents a pristine reproduction of the original text in modern font, and offers a critical introduction to Gregoire, Franco-American abolitionism, and the influence of this important work on the development of the African American intellectual tradition.