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Slavery and Silence. Paul D. Naish
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isbn 9780812294309
Автор произведения Paul D. Naish
Издательство Ingram
Chapter 2
“Our” Aborigines
While pro-and antislavery Americans used Latin America in their own ways to suit their own interests, Americans of all stripes sought to distance themselves from the modern Indians, proving, pseudoscientifically, that the ancient Americans—those of Mexico as well as the great mound builders of North America and the civilized makers of South America—must have been white.1 By linking themselves to the ancient, early nineteenth-century Americans distanced themselves from the modern, further enabling a safe space from which to project uncomfortable political discourse. Indeed, just as open discussions of Latin American slavery served as a means to say things about domestic bondage otherwise left unspoken, these archaeological speculations also operated as a form of displacement, a way of talking about the early republic by projecting modern attitudes back upon the ancient American past. “It would seem that the White race alone received the divine command, to subdue and replenish the earth! … thus the youngest people, and the newest land, will become the reviver and the regenerator of the oldest,” crowed Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton in 1846.2
As Americans displaced their qualms about slave societies by attributing all manner of deformities onto living, breathing Latin Americans, they were simultaneously finding much to admire in ancient civilizations of Mexico. The American response to the discovery of those civilizations offers an intriguing counterpoint to prevailing stereotypes. Here contempt gives way to admiration and in so doing throws the dominant pattern of displacement into sharper relief. Long dead Mexicans were the archaeological exception to the living rule.
By turning back the clock, archaeologists used a distant time and space in order to make contemporary political arguments, to justify the removal of Indians, and to reconceive the relationship between Americans and their southern neighbors. The stakes were never higher. Countless lives were lost. And the fate of slavery, inextricably tied to the question of expansion, hung in the balance.
Figure 4. Although there are few mid-nineteenth-century visual representations of aboriginal earthworks in North America, a fascinating exception is the Panorama of the Monumental Grandeur of the Mississippi Valley by John J. Egan (1850). First exhibited in Philadelphia, the artwork was featured as the centerpiece of a lecture series delivered throughout the Mississippi Valley. Archaeologists tried to establish a connection between the people who had built these mounds and the monuments of Mexico and Peru. John J. Egan, American (born Ireland), active mid-nineteenth century; Scene 24 from Panorama of the Monumental Grandeur of the Mississippi Valley; distemper on cotton muslin; overall: 90 in. x 348 ft. (228.6 x 10607.1 cm). Saint Louis Art Museum, Eliza McMillan Trust 34:1953.
Figure 5. Artist Frederick Catherwood illustrated John Lloyd Stephen’s accounts of his explorations of the Yucatan in the early 1840s (the 1844 illustration above depicts a pyramid at Tulum). His sketches, drawn in situ with exacting detail, made clear that there was little resemblance to North American mounds. Views of Ancient Monuments in Central America, Chiapas and Yucatan, plate 24. Frederick Catherwood, 1844, Rare Books Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.
In the decade following the Panama Congress, the risk of publicly opposing—even discussing—slavery rose higher and higher. The Nat Turner Rebellion in 1831 convinced many white Americans of a direct connection between increasingly radical abolitionist agitation and servile insurrection. Silencing national disagreements over slavery seemed imperative. By 1835 an era of mob assaults on antislavery activists had begun and would continue to nearly the end of the decade. Horrified by this climate of suppression, the poet John Greenleaf Whittier expressed his outrage at Southern attempts to mute voices raised against the injustice of human bondage in the 1835 “Stanzas for the Times.” Complaining that he was forced to “speak but as our masters please,” Whittier protested that he was made a slave himself. To make his portrait of Southern depravity particularly vivid, he used imagery recalling the bloodthirsty Aztecs of Mexico to represent the desecration of the nation’s altar of liberty:
Of human skulls that shrine was made,
Round which the priests of Mexico
Before their loathsome idol prayed;
Is Freedom’s altar fashioned so?
And must we yield to Freedom’s God,
As offering meet, the negro’s blood?3
Many Americans had, by the 1830s, learned to scorn and despise the inept, mixed-race, would-be republicans south of the border and the native tribes—the Aztecs in particular—renowned for their cruelty. But one group of Latin Americans retained the admiration of antebellum Americans. They had been dead for hundreds of years.
In the 1810s and 1820s independence liberated Latin America from the absolutism and secrecy of Spanish rule, inviting the curious to dig for buried treasure. Accounts of discoveries almost forgotten since the time of the Spanish Conquest trickled out of Central and South America. Ruins of ancient temples and pyramids encountered in the Yucatan—often decorated with intricate carving—excited the interest of both scholarly and uneducated Americans fascinated by the nascent field of archaeology. Who could have built the wonders in Tulum, Copan, and Palenque? Certainly not the ancestors of the disreputable natives of the nineteenth-century Americas, reasoned U.S. nationalists.4 The brutal Aztecs encountered by the Spanish could not have been responsible, nor the alternately treacherous and lazy tribes of North America. The nineteenth-century Indians being rapidly displaced from their homelands were nomadic and improvident; they drifted from place to place, warring savagely with other tribes. The long-vanished builders of America’s ruined monuments—the great mounds of the Ohio and Mississippi valleys, the pyramids of Central and South America—had been settled and civilized ‖ by whites.5
From the accounts of the conquistadores, U.S. readers knew that the Aztecs had displaced an earlier nation called the Toltecs: the nineteenth century would understand these Toltecs as migrants from Israel, Carthage, Wales, Egypt, or Scandinavia.6 According to early nineteenth-century theories, these people had crossed the Atlantic or Pacific in boats. In North America they built fortifications and serpent-shaped earthworks first glimpsed by nineteenth-century Americans as they moved west. In Central and South America the genius of these ancient peoples reached its apex in the great cities of the Yucatan and Peru. Then across the Behring Strait from Asia swarmed another race, the ancestors of modern Indians, like latter-day barbarians descending on Rome, massacring and driving off the people who first settled the continent.
However prolifically this remarkable assumption flourished in the reflexive racism of Jacksonian America during the 1830s and 1840s, it could not ultimately withstand the harsh sunlight of systematic observation nor the storms of serious scholarship. But for a period of twenty or twenty-five years, variations of this useful myth fit neatly into a historical moment when Americans intensively dispossessed Indians and mixed-race Mexicans from their land and installed in their place white settlers and their enslaved workforce. Great triumphs of past civilizations were considered de facto proof of the whiteness of their populations rather than demonstrations of nature’s democratic distribution of brilliance among all her people.7 With extraordinary economy, this line of analysis at once vindicated white supremacy, established an ancient connection between the inhabitants of North and South America, justified the appropriation of land occupied by nonwhite peoples, and mapped upon that land a space for immediate or potential cultivation by enslaved labor. Historian Sven Beckert refers to the conjoined forces “resting on the violent expropriation of land and labor” as “war capitalism.”8 Making clear the connection