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Slavery and Silence. Paul D. Naish
Читать онлайн.Название Slavery and Silence
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isbn 9780812294309
Автор произведения Paul D. Naish
Издательство Ingram
There were certainly partisans who chose sides in the debate, and more and more people identified themselves as opponents or supporters of slavery as the Civil War approached. But there were many, many others who hesitated to express what they thought for fear of unpleasant or even dire consequences. And the partisans increasingly found themselves cornered—publicly championing one side in the debate over slavery, but privately doubtful and unable to ignore weaknesses in their position.
How these people talked about what they hesitated to say—how they had a national conversation about slavery by talking about nations other than the United States—is the subject of this book.
Introduction. Surrounded by Mirrors
In the winter of 1859 Julia Ward Howe, who would go on to write “The Battle Hymn of the Republic,” stopped in Nassau en route to Cuba, where she was struck by something that had not particularly troubled her at home in Boston. Like many opponents of slavery, she was no great believer in racial equality. Nonetheless, she hesitated in making one observation because it effectively justified the human bondage she publicly deplored. Perceiving what she identified as the indolence and idleness of the free black population of the Bahamas, she guiltily indulged in an expression of doubt about black capacity; “you must allow us one heretical whisper,—very small and low,” Howe confided in one of a series of anonymous articles published in The Atlantic beginning in May 1859 and collected in a volume called A Trip to Cuba in 1860. While she declared herself “orthodox” on the subject of abolition, the results of emancipation raised for her “the unwelcome question, whether compulsory labor be not better than none.”1
In the thirty-five years before the Civil War, Howe was not the only person of apparently “orthodox” beliefs about slavery who made a guarded confession of uncertainty. Across the great divide that separated antislavery activists from defenders of human bondage, few people were more indefatigable in slavery’s defense than the strident George Fitzhugh, who went so far as to argue in 1857 that so “natural, normal, and necessitous” was slavery that the enslavement of white people was justifiable.2 Yet in an 1855 personal letter to his friend George Frederick Holmes he confessed, “I assure you, Sir, I see great evils in slavery, but in a controversial work I ought not to admit them.”3
Howe’s remark was made in a published text, Fitzhugh’s in private correspondence. In confessing their guilty suspicions, neither was humiliated or persecuted. But both felt obliged to check their speech. In a political climate characterized by shouting, neither Howe nor Fitzhugh felt entirely at liberty to express a whisper of doubt about slavery.
Consider also Aaron Hulin, a Northern schoolteacher looking for work in Louisiana during this period. Upon beginning his trip south he wrote a friend in upstate New York, “they are so tenacious of their privileges in slavery, that were I, or any other man to disseminate the doctrine of Arthur Tappen [sic], or Murrel, I’d be killed, hung by public consent, without a hearing—SANS jury or trial!!!” Hulin went south at the moment of the “Murrell Excitement” in 1835, when suspicion of a slave conspiracy planned and financed by northern abolitionists terrified the white population along the Mississippi.4 “It behooves those who come into the south, at this critical time, to be at peace, and attend to their own business,” he wrote.5 But the atmosphere of paranoia and suspicion he described was often reported by visitors to the South, who felt surrounded by spies on every railway platform and steamboat landing. They exchanged accounts of “persons who had expressed themselves too freely … [and] had been escorted to the station by a party of the inhabitants, and forced to take their departure.”6
Figure 1. Most Americans had no firsthand experiences of life in Latin America and relied on a limited vocabulary of stereotypes about the region. But even those like William Meyers, a sailor who visited Cuba in 1838 and recorded his impressions in delightful watercolor sketches, often went looking for sights they had been primed to see and emphasized the most exotic, like this scene of enslaved musicians and smiling senoritas at a dance. William H. Meyers Diary/Diary: Voyage of Schooner Ajax from Philadelphia to Baltimore, Havana, Santiago and Cuba, n.d. Manuscripts and Archives Division, The New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations.
This book explores one instance of what happens when people hesitate to speak openly about a controversial subject—whether because they fear a kick under the table or a knife in the ribs—and resort to discussing it through metaphor. The people speaking behind this rhetorical mask were, like Howe and Fitzhugh, sometimes publicly associated with one side or the other of the slavery debate. They could not easily acknowledge the complexity of the situation, yet they were troubled by contradictions that threatened to dismantle their elaborate arguments. Just as often, they were ordinary Americans like Hulin, who saw discussions about slavery as volatile and destructive. The great mass of Americans who tried to keep their own counsel about slavery in the antebellum period were both black and white, male and female, northern and southern. They were bankers, farmers, politicians, merchants, publishers, preachers, and businesspeople. The majority kept silent because there was nothing to be gained by speaking up, and often a great deal to be gained by saying nothing.
But they found ways to talk about U.S. slavery without seeming to do so.
The impulse to indirection, to creative evasion, to criticism from a safe distance, has historically created rich and evocative political satire, children’s fables that comment on grown-up concerns, and subversive theatre and fiction.7 Sometimes the act of contextual substitution is obvious, even acknowledged. More often it is elusive, and the author’s intention is open to interpretation. Partisans do not write manifestos in this form, although they sometimes allow themselves to engage imaginatively with their opponents’ views. They playfully trespass into foreign territory, sampling the forbidden fruit.
The foreign territory invaded in this case was Latin America, a region most Americans had never visited and would never encounter directly but that they knew from news reports, travel accounts, commercial prospectuses, paintings, novels, and plays. The fact that most Americans had no firsthand knowledge of this area made it easier to reduce Latin America to stereotypes—sugar and coffee and gold; volantes, senoritas, and machetes; incense-clouded cathedrals, crumbling pyramids, and sultry jungles. It was a nearby world that was simultaneously and profoundly exotic: people spoke Spanish or Portuguese or African or Native American languages, practiced Catholicism, openly dined and slept with people of other races. In this context Americans could—and did—say things about slavery that they would never utter when talking about the United States.
The suggestion that slavery was the subject Americans displaced on this region for the purposes of inspection and analysis is apt to sound surprising. Surely in the thirty-five years leading up to the Civil War there was little reticence about slavery and little need for indirection. This period, after all, resounded with rabid proslavery invective and radical (and in the words of its opponents, fanatical) abolitionism. Proslavery propaganda filled books and journals, and abolitionist handbills and pamphlets featured illustrations of slave auctions and grisly whippings. This strident conflict was, moreover, made striking by its historical novelty. Until the early 1800s the inevitability, if not the rightness, of slavery went virtually unquestioned. Before the 1830s abolitionists remained a tiny minority, and slave owners felt little necessity for defending human bondage as a positive good. Then after a period of relative calm following the American Revolution, a series of events in rapid succession provoked open debate. William Lloyd Garrison began publishing his virulent antislavery Liberator newspaper in January 1831. Nat Turner’s rebellion roiled the South in August that same year. Britain abolished