Slavery and Silence - Paul D. Naish

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hero takes his new bride on a visit to his family in Massachusetts. What impresses Martha is the level of prosperity enjoyed by the general population, but her new husband wants her to see his family occupying a position above the common herd. Berrian sends Bryan, his clownish but loyal Irish servant, ahead of the bridal party “with a good round sum of dollars” to be invested in “plenty of wine, turkies, and pies for a sociable visit of a whole winter” as well as new clothes for his family and a fresh coat of whitewash for his father’s stone fence.126 Bryan, a veritable Potemkin preparing a village for the state visit by the empress, does his work well: Berrian finds his mother decked out in “false ‘everlastings,’ false teeth, and every thing false but her maternal heart” and his father suitably unrecognizable in a “long-tailed wig.”127 Berrian’s whole village proceeds to partake in an extended orgy of “invitations, and dinners, and parties without number” where his less fortunate neighbors vie with one another in their degree of fawning adulation.128 “The people there all possess, at least, a most accurate sense of the real and practical utility of dollars; and much as they look down upon all assumption of every sort, they think none the less of a man for being rich.”129

      A curious contrast, to be sure: two festive occasions, the one in aristocratic Mexico where “old and young, parents and children, masters and servants, on these occasions … join in the same dance;” the one in the United States characterized by whitewash, false hair, and envy, where “merits” are equated with dollars.130 Martha’s kindness has a surprising allegorical significance. Much the way she cited “republican notions” to justify the inclusion of the unwashed masses in a dance, Mexico’s new government took seriously the era’s professed commitment to liberty. In 1821 the Patriots issued a provisional constitution called the Plan de Iguala extending citizenship rights to Indians, mestizos, and free afromestizos. The Constitution of 1824 began a process of gradual emancipation of slaves.131 Meanwhile Berrian supports not only the separation of the races—no “coppercolored” maidens for him—but also the reinforcement of an economic hierarchy. Looked at from one perspective, Hispanic “amiability” bodes well for the future relations of the United States and the Spanish republics. But from another angle, some troubling ambiguities emerge. The relationship points up ways in which the United States falls short of its own professed ideals—as it did in working to oppose the independence of Cuba for fear of immediate emancipation. Is Flint suggesting that it is in this failed goal of republican equality that the success of the project of independence is marred? Except for Martha’s challenge concerning Berrian’s fastidiousness about the fandango, there seem few suggestions that Flint regards Berrian’s segregation by class as unnatural or undesirable. Still, Martha’s censure hangs in the air.

      Her compatible political ideals do not seem to explain Martha’s suitability as a partner for Berrian. Republicanism is easy. Seemingly more relevant are the essential characteristics of her pedigree. First, she is white. As the undisputed daughter of Gachupin (European-born) parents, Martha’s racial background is above suspicion. (In marked contrast, nine years later the novelist Robert Montgomery Bird would acknowledge that even “among the southern provinces of Spain and Portugal … the blood of Europe has mingled harmoniously with the life-tides of Africa.”132) But almost as important is her breeding and secure upper-class status. What Berrian champions about Martha is not her empathy for the hoi polloi (which is suspect), nor her harmonious political inclinations, but her refinement and dazzling fortune. It is the ignorance and laziness of the mixed-race majority, not the aristocratic expectations of Martha’s family and the other members of the elite, that present the greater threat to the new order.

      Analyzing Martha’s suitability as a fit spouse for Berrian suggests one more reason why U.S. suspicion of the Latin American population grew during the early nineteenth century. The fading confidence that mastering the lessons of republicanism would bring Latin America into fellowship with the United States reflects a turn away from the late eighteenth-century faith in the effects of culture and improvement to a nineteenth-century emphasis on heredity and ultimately race.133 The Enlightenment had promised that inborn skills and talents could be developed and twisted habits straightened out; nineteenth-century thought tended to see determinism in bloodlines. The French Revolution and its aftermath (which included its echo in Saint Domingue) did part of the work of discouraging faith in human perfectibility.134 Race and “blood”—noble or otherwise—would increasingly be credited with an unopposable power that no subsequent training could correct.135 White fear of pollution by the nonwhite races contributed as well to an awareness of genetic difference that would reach its zenith (or nadir) in scientific racism.136

      That Flint himself became increasingly conflicted about the probable future of republicanism south of the U.S. border (and increasingly able to see Latin America as a context for discussing U.S. slavery) is demonstrated a few years later among the pages of his journal The Western Monthly Review. In September 1829, supplying his readers with a digest of Robert Owen’s visit to Mexico, Flint mentions the “ignorant, factious, bigoted and versatile inhabitants, who seem as little fitted to enjoy that liberty, for which they are struggling through revolutions, as the slaves of our southern country would be, if they were at once emancipated.”137 Flint also produced “Paulina, or the Cataract of Tequendama,” a short story set in Colombia that reprises in eight pages many of the situations of the 600-page Francis Berrian. Published in 1830, its hopes for the proximate progress of republicanism were decidedly tepid, amid “the heavy, monotonous and sickening chronicle of politics, and Bolivar, and what knave of to-day has supplanted the fool of yesterday.”138

      In the years following the Panama Congress debates of 1826, many of the new states of Latin America failed to live up to the rosy predictions of U.S. optimists. Some of the republics slipped into a period of caudillismo, where local strongmen and petty dictators snatched the reins of power over separate territories. At the same time, some took the concepts of liberty and republicanism to an extreme to which the United States would not follow. Democratic politics in the post-1826 United States would furnish a dance floor where different classes might “mix together” as long as the dancers were white. In the United States the meaning of the newly emerging democracy was trimmed to exclude men of color and women generally. In the years that followed, the franchise was increasingly withheld from black freemen, and the possibility of manumission for individual slaves was similarly circumscribed. The Nat Turner Rebellion of 1831, demonstrating how sorely slaves chafed under bondage, was met not with a less burdensome yoke but with heavier chains. The new republics of Latin America had extended an invitation to attend a congress, but also challenged the United States to accept an enlarged definition of its own ideals. Like Francis Berrian answering Martha’s invitation, the United States refused, instead erecting higher barriers between slavery and freedom.

      The multivariate nature of U.S. responses to the Panama Mission both in and out of Congress suggests that what happened in 1826 was not an abrupt change in attitude by citizens of the United States concerning their southern neighbors. But the proclamations of difference, particularly racial difference, began crowding out expectations of fellowship and communion. The debates laid the groundwork necessary for displacing representations of slavery: they established Latin America as essentially different from the United States. In 1826 the understanding of race and slavery was only one of the ways the United States differed from Latin America, but it would come to be the most conspicuous because of changes taking place in the United States. That difference made Latin America the perfect proxy for the United States in a variety of situations.

      In the years that followed, the United States continued to hold up its southern neighbors for purposes of comparison. But with the rise of Jacksonian democracy, scientific racism, and virulent abolitionist and proslavery rhetoric, the differences between Latin America and the United States became more useful than the similarities. A national print culture enabled by steam presses and cheap postage that could reach large sections of the country—indeed the nation as a whole—fostered a rhetoric that presumed to speak for the United States, and that rhetoric was often racist and xenophobic. Americans in many situations discovered what the legislators in the Panama debates had realized: Latin America provided an excellent cover for the discussion of their apprehensions and anxieties about slavery before a vast

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