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Slavery and Silence. Paul D. Naish
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isbn 9780812294309
Автор произведения Paul D. Naish
Издательство Ingram
From the beginning of the republic, politicians both within and outside the United States had sensed the wisdom of sweeping the subject of slavery under the carpet. The insistence that words do not mean what they seem to mean, the recourse to coded language when discussing difficult topics, goes back to the founding documents of the United States. Thomas Jefferson’s “all men are created equal” was a declaration subsequent generations took considerable pains to explain away. The Articles of Confederation and the Constitution usefully referred to “interstate commerce” and “property” and “other persons,” circumlocutions whose meaning was transparent to those who could interpret them. Foreign visitors attuned to the subtleties of national politics knew to shun this controversial subject: Edmond-Charles Geneˆt, hoping to win U.S. support in France’s wars with England and Spain in the 1790s, kept his opposition to slavery to himself on a fundraising tour of the U.S. South.4
In retrospect it is quite easy to understand why, early in the second quarter of the nineteenth century, a subject that had been successfully relegated to the shadows for so long suddenly seemed to pop out from every unlikely corner. In the years following the invention of the cotton gin and the purchase of Louisiana, slavery had become an economic lynchpin of the South and, indirectly, the North as well.5 Meanwhile, the abolition of slavery in Northern states proceeded apace, and audible antislavery voices both at home and abroad grew louder. In the years after the Missouri Compromise, avoiding the contentious subject became increasingly difficult.
Then an unexpected opportunity for safely airing concerns about race and slavery appeared. In 1825 the United States received an invitation to Panama to participate in a congress of all the republics of America. Mexico, Peru, Chile, Buenos Aires, Colombia, Venezuela, and Bolivia had recently emerged from prolonged wars of independence with Spain. Simón Bolívar, aware that the infant nations were still vulnerable to Spanish attacks, and eager to solidify trading treaties with England, proposed an assembly to discuss a defensive alliance and to forge commercial relationships. Bolívar was disinclined to jeopardize the arrangements recently established with Britain, which was sending an observer to the conference, by having the United States present. But Mexico and Colombia, who hoped for better trading relations with Washington, extended an invitation to the United States to attend the assembly when it would be held in the spring of 1826.6
Like many issues in the thirty-five years before the Civil War, the Panama Congress apparently bore only a tangential relation to slavery. Stated objections to U.S. participation in the congress touched on a variety of issues, from despotic overreaching by President John Quincy Adams to the dangers of implied foreign commitments. But as members of Congress held forth in an extended period of debate about the implications of participating in this gathering of all the American republics, they frequently emphasized everything about the populations of Latin America that made them seem unfit to participate in the republican project. In proclaiming these differences, congressional leaders discovered that they could talk about slavery in the most national forum imaginable without dire consequences.
That the Panama Congress debates would lead to American perceptions of Latin America as a second-rate region defined primarily by aspects of racial difference was not foreordained. The years before the announcement of the Panama Mission had been characterized by popular enthusiasm for the former Spanish colonies’ struggles for independence and embrace of republican government as well as canny, acquisitive expectation about how a liberalization of trade policies might benefit producers and exporters in the United States.7 Americans following the debates in their local newspapers did not always pick up on the racist cues their representatives were supplying, responding instead out of interests that were alternately idealistic or economically shrewd.
But much of the testimony marked a decided shift in the way Latin Americans were described and the limitations imposed by the characteristics they embodied. Rather than partners in the global republican project who happened to speak Spanish, practiced Roman Catholicism, and sometimes had African blood, Central and South Americans appeared in Congressional speeches as knaves and fools playing an absurd and possibly dangerous game of dress-up. After U.S. Senators and Congressmen finished their harangues in opposition to sending ministers to Panama—and even defenses of the idea—the eager, hopeful sense of republican fellowship yielded, if not to active disdain, certainly guarded hesitation.
The shift in national attitudes was neither immediate nor universal. As with many historical turning points, this one is easier to recognize in retrospect than it was at the time. It did not mark a shift as abrupt and complete as some historians assert.8 But the widely publicized congressional characterizations of Latin America established a vocabulary of difference, and both domestic and international developments made it easy to fall back on this vocabulary. A new way of understanding the identity of the United States through its relations with its southern neighbors took hold of the national imagination. Members of Congress referred directly or obliquely to the complexion of the republicans in whose company the U.S. ministers would convene and the effect this association might have upon white slaveholders’ ability to manage their bond people. This perception of racial difference, and the way slavery was understood, would prove pervasive in the way the United States would define itself against a Latin American foil in the coming decades.
The aspects of race and slavery that figured in the debates assumed an importance in the context of the time. It might not have been irreversible without the rise of the second-party system, the explosive importance of the slave economy in the United States, and the abolition of slavery in the West Indies. It corresponded, significantly, with a transition to a second-generation nationalism in the United States, from a colorblind one that invoked the universalizing possibilities of political ideology to one more narrowly connected to race. Most important, as slavery assumed a new role in the nation’s social and economic identity, Latin America provided a context—and the Panama debates set the tone—for the way slavery would be discussed for the next thirty-five years.
Writing in 1854, at the end of a thirty-year career in the Senate, Thomas Hart Benton recalled the 1826 Panama Congress as an “abortion” “long since sunk into oblivion.”9 At the time, however, the debate over U.S. participation in this now-forgotten assembly dominated much of the business of the Nineteenth Congress. More than sixty legislators participated, at length, in a debate that had far-ranging implications for future foreign policy and relations between the United States and its southern neighbors.10
In the United States, the debates over the implications of sending ministers on the Panama Mission coincided with the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, when citizens had occasion to reflect on the accomplishments of half a century.11 The Fiftieth Jubilee was marked everywhere by patriotic speeches, poems, and a series of thirteen toasts (one for each of the original thirteen colonies). Mixed with the cheers of festivity was not a little nostalgic awareness that the revolutionary era was fast fading away. “That was not the Lafayette that I remember!” mused eighty-nine-year-old John Adams when the last surviving general of the Revolutionary War, now an elderly visitor, appeared in Quincy, Massachusetts, on his 1824–1825 tour of the United States.12 The founding generation was in eclipse. “Columbia’s sires have gone to rest,” mourned the poet “Zero” in the National Intelligencer on the anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.13 As if to underscore the passing of the old order, on the Fourth of July, 1826, Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died within hours of one another.
The termination of the independence struggles by the former colonies of Spain that occurred just in time for this U.S. anniversary added poignancy to a national atmosphere that was at once triumphant and tinged with melancholy. Spain’s former colonies had followed the example of the United States in declaring themselves republics and producing written constitutions, in many cases copying whole passages verbatim. These were heady days: what stains of religious bigotry, superstition, and cultural backwardness could republican government and free trade not erase? Why should not the Spanish or Portuguese American, living in a modern, enlightened state, become the ally