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Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title
Copyright
Contents
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Bonds of Sentiment
Part 1 Sympathy’s Empire
1 Capitalism and Slavery, Once Again With Feeling
2 Acts of Sympathy: Abolitionist Poetry and Transatlantic Identification
Part 2 Nation, Narration, Emancipation
3 Commerce, Sentiment, and Free Air: Contradictions of Abolitionist Rhetoric
4 Sympathy, Nerve Physiology, and National Degeneration in Anna Letitia Barbauld’s Epistle to William Wilberforce
Part 3 Spectacles of Suffering
5 To Force a Tear: British Abolitionism and the Eighteenth-century London Stage
6 “Pity for the Poor Africans”: William Cowper and the Limits of Abolitionist Affect
7 “We Beg Your Excellency”: The Sentimental Politics of Abolitionist Petitions in the Late Eighteenth Century
Part 4 Sentimental Bondage
8 The Contradictions of Racialized Sensibility: Gender, Slavery, and the Limits of Sympathy
9 The Cruelty of Slavery, The Cruelty of Freedom: Colonization and the Politics of Humaneness in the Early Republic
Selected Bibliography
Index
Recommend Papers

Affect and Abolition in the Anglo-Atlantic, 1770–1830
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AFFECT aND ABOLITION IN THE ANGLO-ATLaNTIC, 1770–1830

Affect and Abolition in the Anglo-Atlantic, 1770–1830

Edited by STEPHEN AHERN Acadia University, Nova Scotia, Canada

First published 2013 by Ashgate Publishing Published 2016 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017, USA Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business Copyright © Stephen Ahern and the contributors 2013 Stephen Ahern has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as the editor of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows: Affect and abolition in the Anglo-Atlantic, 1770–1830 / edited by Stephen Ahern. pages cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4094-5561-5 1. English literature—18th century—History and criticism 2. English literature—19th century—History and criticism 3. Slavery in literature. 4. Sentimentalism in literature. 5. Affect (Psychology) in literature. 6. English language—18th century—Rhetoric. 7. English language—19th century—Rhetoric. 8. Antislavery movements—Great Britain— History. 9. Antislavery movements—United States—History. I. Ahern, Stephen, editor of compilation. PR448.S55A38 2013 820.9’355—dc23 2012046556

ISBN 9781409455615 (hbk)

Contents Notes on Contributors   Acknowledgments   Introduction: The Bonds of Sentiment  

vii ix 1

Part 1 Sympathy’s Empire 1 Capitalism and Slavery, Once Again With Feeling   George Boulukos

23

2 Acts of Sympathy: Abolitionist Poetry and Transatlantic Identification  45 Tobias Menely Part 2 Nation, Narration, Emancipation 3 Commerce, Sentiment, and Free Air: Contradictions of Abolitionist Rhetoric   Anthony John Harding

71

4 Sympathy, Nerve Physiology, and National Degeneration in Anna Letitia Barbauld’s Epistle to William Wilberforce   Mary A. Waters

89

Part 3 Spectacles of Suffering 5 To Force a Tear: British Abolitionism and the Eighteenth-century London Stage   Brycchan Carey

109

6 “Pity for the Poor Africans”: William Cowper and the Limits of Abolitionist Affect   Joanne Tong

129

7 “We Beg Your Excellency”: The Sentimental Politics of Abolitionist Petitions in the Late Eighteenth Century   Christine Levecq

151

Part 4 Sentimental Bondage 8 The Contradictions of Racialized Sensibility: Gender, Slavery, and the Limits of Sympathy   Jamie Rosenthal

171

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9 The Cruelty of Slavery, The Cruelty of Freedom: Colonization and the Politics of Humaneness in the Early Republic    Margaret Abruzzo

189

Selected Bibliography   211 Index 219

Notes on Contributors Margaret Abruzzo is Associate Professor of History at the University of Alabama. She specializes in American intellectual and cultural history, with a focus on the history of morality. Her book Polemical Pain: Slavery, Cruelty, and the Rise of Humanitarianism was published in 2011 by the Johns Hopkins University Press. Her current research focuses on changing concepts of wrongdoing and moral responsibility in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Stephen Ahern is Associate Professor of English and Coordinator of the Writing Center at Acadia University in Nova Scotia. His book Affected Sensibilities: Romantic Excess and the Genealogy of the Novel, 1680–1810 appeared in 2007 with AMS Press. He has also published on Behn’s fiction, on Romanticism and disease, and on Tennyson’s verse, and he has contributed a chapter on the translation of early French fiction to the Oxford History of Literary Translation in English. George Boulukos is Associate Professor of English at Southern Illinois University Carbondale. His study The Grateful Slave: The Emergence of Race in EighteenthCentury British and American Culture was published by Cambridge University Press in 2008. His recent publications also include “Olaudah Equiano and the Eighteenth-Century Debate on Africa” (Eighteenth-Century Studies, 2007) and “The Horror of Hybridity: Enlightenment, Anti-slavery and Disgust in Charlotte Smith’s ‘Story of Henrietta’” (Essays and Studies, 2007). Brycchan Carey is Reader in English Literature at Kingston University, London. He is the author of From Peace to Freedom: Quaker Rhetoric and the Birth of American Antislavery, 1658–1761 (Yale, 2012) and British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility: Writing, Sentiment, and Slavery, 1760–1807 (Palgrave, 2005). He is the editor (with Peter Kitson) of Slavery and the Cultures of Abolition: Essays Marking the British Abolition Act of 1807 (Boydell and Brewer, 2007) and (with Markman Ellis and Sara Salih) of Discourses of Slavery and Abolition: Britain and its Colonies, 1760–1838 (Palgrave, 2004). He has also authored numerous articles on slavery and abolition for scholarly journals and books. A collection of essays on Quakers and Abolition, coedited with Geoffrey Plank, is forthcoming from the University of Illinois Press in 2014. Anthony John Harding is Professor Emeritus of English, University of Saskatchewan. He works on nineteenth-century life-writing, the literature of abolitionism, and the ethics of reading. With the late Kathleen Coburn, he co-edited volume 5 of the Bollingen edition of The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Princeton, 2002). His other recent publications include “Shelley, Mythology,

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and the Classical Tradition,” in The Oxford Handbook of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Michael O’Neill and Tony Howe (2012); “Gendering the Poet-Philosopher: Victorian ‘Manliness’ and Coleridgean ‘Androgyny,’” in Coleridge’s Afterlives, ed. James Vigus and Jane E. Wright (Palgrave, 2008); and “An Ethics of Reading: A Conflicted Romantic Heritage,” Keats-Shelley Journal (2008). Christine Levecq is Assistant Professor of Liberal Studies at Kettering University. She has published widely in the fields of African American literature and the literatures of the African diaspora. Her book Slavery and Sentiment: The Politics of Feeling in Black Atlantic Antislavery Writing, 1770–1850 appeared with the University Press of New England in 2008. Tobias Menely is Assistant Professor of English at Miami University (Ohio). He has essays published in PMLA, symploke, Mosaic, Eighteenth-Century Life, and the Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies. He is currently completing a book titled “The Community of Creatures: Sensibility, Sovereignty, and the Voice of the Animal.” Jamie Rosenthal is Research Assistant Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Her research interests include eighteenth-century British and transatlantic literature and culture, Caribbean studies, and critical gender and sexuality studies. Her current book project, “Of Bonds and Bondage: Gender, Slavery, and Transatlantic Intimacies in the Eighteenth Century,” focuses on women’s autobiographical narratives of slavery in the eighteenth-century Caribbean. Joanne Tong has most recently taught English at Auburn University. Interested in transpacific exchange and the literature of empire, her current research focuses on British literary and visual representations of China from the Macartney Mission to the Arrow War. She has published articles on Amelia Opie, William Wordsworth, and Joanna Baillie for Studies in the Novel, ELN, and Literature Compass. Mary A. Waters is Associate Professor of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature at Wichita State University. She is the author of British Women Writers and the Profession of Literary Criticism, 1789–1832 (2004) and editor of British Women Writers of the Romantic Period: An Anthology of Their Literary Criticism (2008), both from Palgrave Macmillan. Her other essays have appeared in venues such as Eighteenth-Century Studies, Nineteenth-Century Prose, and Women’s Writing.

Acknowledgments My deep thanks go to Ann Donahue, commissioning editor at Ashgate, who saw potential in this project from our first brief conversation at an ASECS conference, and who shepherded the book through to publication with consummate skill, generosity, and professionalism. I would also like to thank the peer reviewers whose insightful comments on early drafts made the final text that much better, and Noeline Bridge for her meticulous work on the index. I am grateful to my home institution, Acadia University, for providing the funding for assembling the index and reproducing the cover image in color, and to the Granger Collection for allowing me to reproduce that image here. ~ Stephen Ahern

Introduction: The Bonds of Sentiment In January 1777 a group of slaves delivered a petition for their freedom to the Massachusetts Council and House of Representatives. Echoing the language of the Declaration of Independence, the petitioners invoked the discourse of social contract theory to make their case, declaring the document “shows that your Petitioners Apprehend that They have in Common with all other men a Natural and Inalienable Right to that freedom which the Great Parent of the Universe hath Bestowed equally on all mankind.”1 They later point to the logical inconsistency by which a population can assert their right to self-determination by casting off the shackles of colonial bondage, and yet continue to enslave fellow humans. The real power of this petition, though, is that it appeals to feeling as much as to reason. Giving force to the cool logic of egalitarian argument, the document quickly shifts in register from logos to pathos, for it acts as testimonial, bearing witness to the pain of those unnamed thousands who have been “Unjustly Dragged by the hand of cruel Power from their Dearest friends and some of them Even torn from the Embraces of their tender Parents . . . in defiance of all the tender feelings of humanity.” The petitioners claim a natural right to just treatment based on a shared humanity with their readers, one evidenced by the affective bonds of the African family. Living in an Anglo-American culture that is deeply imbued with sentimentality, they demonstrate a shrewd understanding that invoking the language of feeling might wield a political force beyond appeals to mere reason. In the later eighteenth century writers arguing for the abolition of the slave trade and for the emancipation of those in bondage consistently focused on the workings of affect—on the fleeting, volatile registers of embodied subjectivity— to make their case. Activists on both sides of the Atlantic strove to abolish a cruel institution by representing the physical and emotional suffering of individuals in chains. The enslaved African’s capacity to feel intensely is offered as proof of a human dignity deserving of respect, and writers work to depict the slave’s distress in order to engage the reader’s pity and spur political action. Yet the representation of suffering is marked by recurring problems, at times veering into a distasteful savoring of the spectacle of the body in pain, at others working to naturalize the master-slave bond, or to celebrate a quality of raw animal sensation that dehumanizes the non-European. As George Boulukos has recently observed, it is not right for us to assume that “sentimental attention to the suffering of slaves” necessarily leads to progressive political action. Indeed, “Sentiment, on 1 “Petition for freedom to the Massachusetts Council and the House of Representatives, [13] January 1777” (manuscript copy). Collection of the Massachusetts Historical Society.

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close inspection, turns out to be a cultural form without a predetermined content.”2 A goal of the present volume is to focus in on how the politics of sentimental representation play out in discourses concerning slavery, and more generally in the politics of race, empire, and nation building at the turn of the nineteenth century. In a period marked by social change and political upheaval, sentimentalism was the glue that bound together the disparate elements of Anglo-American culture. As the essays here show with breadth of reference and in nuanced detail, the political implications of sentimental discourse depend in complex ways on the agenda of the writer and the preconceptions of the reader. The Politics of Sentimental Discourse: Accounting for Race The picture drawn in the petition above of families torn apart makes use of a foundational component of sentimental narrative. The oft-stated point of such depictions is to capture in minute detail the pain of another, and thereby generate enough sympathy that the reader will be motivated to try to relieve the conditions that produced the pain. From the early decades of the eighteenth century, publics on both sides of the Atlantic became increasingly concerned with questions of moral responsibility. Countering thinkers like Hobbes and Mandeville who posited a society driven by pragmatic self-interest, moral sense philosophers, evangelicals, and reformers asserted the primacy in human nature of benevolence, an innate passion or affect. As part of a drive to achieve concrete reforms—evidenced by the establishment of institutions to serve paupers, orphans, and fallen women—social activists, journalists, philosophers, politicians, poets, novelists, and dramatists produced texts that anatomized the ills of the unfortunate individual so as to cure the body politic writ large. Scholars have recently noted a less bright side to this preoccupation with depictions of the suffering of marginalized groups, showing how in their salubrious attention to detail such depictions tend to aestheticize the scene of suffering, and in the process to exploit society’s most vulnerable by making a spectacle of their pain.3 Indulging in the feast of pity, textual spectators 2 George Boulukos, The Grateful Slave: The Emergence of Race in EighteenthCentury British and American Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 3, 14. Lynn Festa writes of “the political volatility of the mode,” using notable examples to show that “acute sensibility and proslavery sentiments may go hand in hand; abolitionists did not possess a monopoly on sentimental feeling.” Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 178. 3 See, for example, Robert Markley, “Sentimentality as Performance: Shaftesbury, Sterne and the Theatrics of Virtue,” in The New Eighteenth Century: Theory, Politics, and English Literature, ed. Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown (New York: Methuen, 1987), 210–30; Judith Frank, Common Ground: Eighteenth-Century English Satiric Fiction and the Poor (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), esp. 63–89; Laura Hinton, The Perverse Gaze of Sympathy: Sadomasochistic Sentiments from Clarissa to Rescue 911 (Albany: SUNY Press, 1999); and my Affected Sensibilities: Romantic Excess and the Genealogy of the Novel, 1680–1810 (New York: AMS Press, 2007).

Introduction

3

and readers alike can wallow in scenes of affective excess without interrogating the material conditions that gave rise to the suffering in the first place. Deployment of sentimental tropes can work to efface the realities of economic and political inequity, resulting in a conserving rather than a reforming of the status quo. In addition to ignoring the contexts of suffering, and thereby opening no avenues for lasting relief, such treatments can be actively harmful, by reinforcing stereotypes related to gender (of women as inherently more emotional and volatile than men, and thus better suited as victims) or class (of beggars eager to please the affluent sentimental flâneur; of poor rural folk happy with their lot, and content to populate a pleasing prospect). These uses of the sentimental ethos are inherently political, by working less to make real the lived experience of the other, than to demonstrate the virtue and taste of the observer—one shown to be properly schooled in feeling response as a result of superior breeding. Productive investigations over the past two decades have applied this core critique to gender and class, but largely missing from analysis of the politics of sentiment at the turn of the nineteenth century is interrogation of how this all plays out in relation to race, particularly regarding the institutionalized locus of the most extreme suffering: slavery. Fine research on sentimentality and race has been carried out since the early 1990s by scholars looking at American culture of the mid-nineteenth century.4 More recently, scholars have begun to investigate the period some decades earlier, when the culture of sensibility was in its most influential phase, when categories of racial difference were still in flux, and when opposition to the slave trade was building in civil society on both sides of the Atlantic. Appraisal of the role of feeling has, of course, long been an important component of investigations of slavery as a result of the debate among historians about whether the rise of antislavery was caused by an emerging humanitarianism or, rather, by economic self-interest.5 A new generation of scholars has challenged 4 Most importantly, the collection The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America, ed. Shirley Samuels (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992); and Michelle Burnham’s Captivity and Sentiment: Cultural Exchange in American Literature, 1682–1861 (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1997). Other important studies of the cultural politics of affect in this period are: Glenn Hendler, Public Sentiments: Structures of Feeling in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001); Julie K. Ellison, Cato’s Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Bruce Burgett, Sentimental Bodies: Sex, Gender and Citizenship in the Early Republic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998); and Jane Tomkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). 5 So central has been this controversy that George Boulukos characterizes as doctrinaire “the association of abolition, sentimentalism, and capitalist—or ‘middleclass’—ideology in twentieth-century scholarship”; for a compelling reappraisal that moves us beyond the terms of this debate, see his essay “Capitalism and Slavery, Once Again With Feeling” in this volume. The key early texts in this controversy are: Reginald Coupland, The British Anti-Slavery Movement (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1933); Wylie Sypher,

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the assumptions of this earlier work, particularly the assumption that sentimentality was necessarily allied to the antislavery cause. Building on groundbreaking work by Markman Ellis, literary scholars Marcus Wood, Brycchan Carey, and George Boulukos have shown how the rhetorical tropes and formal strategies of sentimental representation could be tailored to support abolitionist, ameliorationist, or even apologist agendas.6 Other recent studies by Amit Rai, Srividhya Swaminathan, Christopher Brown, and Christine Levecq investigate the consequences that result when an ethics of feeling in relation to slavery and the slave trade is marshaled to build of a sense of national identity, whether this be based on a pan-Atlantic fraternity, a post-Revolutionary Britishness over against the colonial American, or a coming together of an African diaspora.7 A related strain in the scholarship considers the broader economic and ethical implications of the first wave of globalization, as transatlantic trade produced migration of populations, fluidity of identities, and increasing preoccupation with categories of race. Ian Baucom, Lynn Festa, and Laura Doyle have interrogated the sentimental habit of mind with particular insight, showing how the ambitions of empire shaped depictions of the colonial encounter, especially the realities of the Middle Passage.8 Guinea’s Captive Kings: British Anti-Slavery Literature of the XVIIIth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1942); and Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944). Later influential interventions include: Winthrop D. Jordan, White over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968); David Brion Davis, The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966), and The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975); and Thomas Bender, ed., The Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). 6 Markman Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Brycchan Carey, British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility: Writing, Sentiment, and Slavery, 1760– 1807 (New York: Palgrave, 2005); Boulukos, Grateful Slave. 7 Amit Rai, Rule of Sympathy: Sentiment, Race, and Power, 1750–1850 (New York: Palgrave, 2002); Srividhya Swaminathan, Debating the Slave Trade: Rhetoric of British National Identity, 1759–1815 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009); Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006); and Christine Levecq, Slavery and Sentiment: The Politics of Feeling in Black Atlantic Antislavery Writing, 1770–1850 (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2008). See also Evan Gottlieb, Feeling British: Sympathy and National Identity in Scottish and English Writing, 1707–1832 (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2007). 8 Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery and the Philosophy of History (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005); Festa, Sentimental Figures of Empire; Laura Doyle, Freedom’s Empire: Race and the Rise of the Novel in Atlantic Modernity, 1640–1940 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). On the interconnections of the culture of feeling and the Atlantic slave trade, see also Robert Mitchell, Sympathy and

Introduction

5

So scholars looking at both sides of the Atlantic continue to strive to answer the vexed question: is the sentimental ethos progressive or conservative? emancipatory or ultimately reinforcing of oppression? The present volume builds on the ongoing project in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century studies to disentangle the often contradictory assumptions and consequences of sentimentalism, aiming to advance the conversation on all of these fronts, and many of the essays included here return to key touchstones. One major shared concern is how writers on both the antislavery and proslavery sides of the debate deployed for political ends representations of heightened affect especially in the critical phase from around 1780 to the abolition of the slave trade in 1807. Another concern is to think critically from the local level to the abstract, asking such questions as: What are the dynamics of power in play at the site of suffering? What is the relation of the spectator to the spectacle of the body in pain? How do theorists of sympathy reconcile self to other in a society driven by acquisitive individualism, and governed by a mercantile system whose brutal logic is nowhere more apparent than in the institution of chattel slavery? Before turning to an overview of the essays in the present volume, I would first like to introduce some of the areas of inquiry, giving an account of the state of play in current scholarship while sketching out the theoretical concerns that make the politics of affect a challenging and productive avenue for investigation. The Difference Distance Makes, Part I: Ethics, Eros, Aesthetics Appeals to a shared human capacity for affective response, especially for a fellow-feeling that wells up in encounters with the suffering of others, were the cornerstone of the applied ethics of Enlightenment culture. As there emerged an increasing sense of the dignity of the individual and a concomitant belief in a communal responsibility to alleviate the causes of suffering, writers of fiction and nonfiction alike drew on a repertoire of rhetorical tropes and polemical gestures to engage their reader’s interest. A common strategy for stirring sympathy of the kind that might effect material change was to focus on an emblematic figure in distress. Moving a reader’s attention from the abstract to the particular could make real a problem that afflicted a whole population, by allowing the reader to visualize the scene of suffering and engage in imaginative identification with the plight of the victim.9 Whether the circuit of sympathy was from affluent to poor, from virtuous

the State in the Romantic Era: Systems, State Finance, and the Shadows of Futurity (New York: Routledge, 2007); Elizabeth Kowaleski-Wallace, The British Slave Trade and Public Memory (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006); and Philip Gould, Barbaric Traffic: Commerce and Antislavery in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003). 9 For a productive analysis of this rhetorical technique, see Ann Jessie Van Sant, Eighteenth-Century Sensibility and the Novel: The Senses in Social Context (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 27–31.

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man to fallen woman, or from metropolitan self to colonial subject—the more close up the encounter, the more affecting, the more effective. Bridging the gulf between self and marginalized other through affective identification may well be the first step toward grasping the lived reality of that other, and may lead to action that could alleviate a situation founded in inequity. The cause for change that invoked most insistently the rhetoric of affective excess—the abolitionist movement—benefited from growing outrage in a public confronted with stark depictions in poems, novels, and tracts of the horrors of the Middle Passage and of lives led in chains. By bringing closer the realities of this far-off trade, antislavery writers shocked their readers on both sides of the Atlantic into an awareness of its consequences. Yet recourse to a representational mode that relies on the depiction of excess is problematic, and indeed can backfire, producing unintended effects. In its very excess the spectacle of suffering can result in a distancing of viewer from viewed, for it generates a surplus of meaning and consequence that is at once aesthetic and political. The aesthetic surplus derives from the formal characteristics of a mode driven by an imperative to produce maximum affective impact. To signify the immediacy of experience and authenticity of emotion that is the ground condition of the sentimental ethos, writers make use of a storehouse of elements. These include the linguistic, with interjections and hyperbolic constructions used to signify intensity of affect; the typographic, with dashes and ellipses to indicate spontaneity of expression; and the visual, with tableaux of bodies frozen in attitudes of affective excess to capture moments of intense communion with the other. On a broader level, we also have structural elements, with fragmentation of spatial and temporal unity as well as repetition of episodic type. The first of these—fragmentation—works to highlight a model of social life and individual psychology preoccupied with the present, by mimicking the vagaries of everyday occurrence and by reflecting the operations of a consciousness reactive to external stimulus. The second—repetition—works to deliver recurrently those fleeting instances of communion which provide the main narrative interest. Such are the conventions of sentimental representation, drawn from the world of earlier romance narrative by the midcentury founders of domestic fiction. For Samuel Richardson and his successors, this is “writing to the moment,” a method for generating a sense of verisimilitude that can make a protagonist’s trials of virtue compelling for the reader. Reading publics on both sides of the Atlantic were already well schooled in consuming victim-centered narratives by the time Richardson’s Pamela appeared in 1740, having being raised on the amatory fiction made popular by Eliza Haywood and others in the early decades of the century. These were stories focused on the high-stakes game of negotiating a world riven by the operations of power, and in which it is hard to know just whom to trust. The new novelists of sentiment and their gothic inheritors later in the century move away from the realm of aristocratic privilege and into the sphere of the middling sort (of daughters of the gentry, rural parsons) or the socially marginal (of serving girls, fallen women, the insane). In the process they add the tensions of social

Introduction

7

difference and injustice to the tortuous workings of erotic desire that had long been a prime source of conflict driving the plot of early fiction. In so doing, the new novelists seemed to move away from dependence on formula and toward a realism that portrayed unique individuals living through unique experiences. Yet the mannered conventionality of the sentimental mode of representation works to undercut the ostensible realism of the situations depicted. This feature leads to unpredictability of response, as the writer of the attenuated episode of tender feeling, or the painter of the scene of woe, can never tell just how a reader or viewer might receive the affective coding of such a stylized form. There is always the possibility of slippage: a consumer of texts too versed in the conventions of over-the-top display might devour scenes of distress as so many bon-bons to be savored, all the while remaining free of ethical engagement with the causes of the suffering displayed. Or, conversely, if untutored in the conventions, she might see them as artificial and, on repeated exposure, hackneyed. Theorists of aesthetic response from Longinus to I. A. Richards have worried this problem with the depiction of emotional excess. What if the reader feels that the level of emotion raised is incommensurate with the situation at hand, and so the style of presentation overwrought and marked by artifice? Receiving the scene not as one of high pathos but of bathos, and unwilling to give himself over to the demands of the moment, might he respond more as skeptic than enthusiast? Commentators were increasingly likely to find a sentimental text more affected than affecting by the time the abolitionist cause was gaining momentum in the late 1780s. When drawing on sentimental tropes to depict the predations of slavery, writers ran the risk of hollowing out a response of genuine feeling in the very attempt to stimulate sympathy. The aestheticization of suffering that results from such a stylized representational mode has political implications as well. Lurking in the shadows is a concern identified by classical writers Aristotle and Lucretius, a vexing question that nagged at Enlightenment philosophers, too: what consequences flow from the fact that viewing another’s pain can stimulate a response of pleasure, rather than of unalloyed discomfort or horror? Early fiction is preoccupied with exploring the psychology of this ethical conundrum. From the pining lovers anatomized in amatory fiction, to the beggars and weeping damsels encountered on sentimental journeys, to the heroines observed under threat in gothic tales, a response of “painful pleasure” is stimulated in the observer as well as in the object in distress. This response can range in intensity from a bittersweet pensiveness all the way to a paralyzing fit of passion, and can vacate the need for a response other than a savoring of the moment. Even when response moves from passive reception to an impulse to act, the distance between the grand gesture and a genuine accepting of responsibility can be reasserted, as an observer alleviates suffering for the time being (the gift of a handful of coins might complement a tribute of tears)—and then moves on. Regardless of whether the sentimental picaro moves on to further opportunities to display his virtue, or the reader of antislavery verse turns the page to consume yet another vignette of the body in pain, a movement through

Affect and Abolition in the Anglo-Atlantic, 1770–1830

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catharsis brought on by vicarious experience of suffering can short-circuit the need to act outside the arena of representation. The visual imperative that drives sentimental depictions of distress can produce an erotics of pathos that allows, say, Mackenzie’s man of feeling, slumming it in a demimonde of lunatics and fallen women, to insert himself in situations where he can feed his reader’s appetite for scenes of sexual charge sublimated into chaste virtue. The greater the social distance between sentimental observer and the object of his gaze, the more ripe a situation can be for a voyeuristic feasting on the affect of others. In key instances, the often contradictory power relations in play are laid bare. Perhaps the most extreme example comes with Sterne’s sentimental tourist, Parson Yorick, whose reverie of ending up in the Bastille because he has neglected to acquire a passport is a striking dramatization of the sentimental gaze at work. From the comfort of a privileged station—he is, after all, the guest of an influential nobleman, who’s a big fan, and unlikely to throw him in the king’s dungeon— Yorick pictures himself picturing a true prisoner, one “of my fellow creatures born to no inheritance but slavery.”10 He plays here with the fluid dynamics of identity and identification, generating scopophilic pleasure and all the while asserting the power of his own subject position.11 The most radical situation of difference between observer and observed—when the object in view is a slave subject to torture—can move quickly into the pornographic, as Marcus Wood has shown in his reading of the visual culture around slavery.12 So representation of suffering can compound rather than lessen the exploitation of marginalized or persecuted groups. It would seem that always present in the act of depicting the suffering of others is potential for abuse, for subjecting the other to uses that objectify and as a result dehumanize. Is there built into the internal logic of sentimental rhetoric and narrative form a politics of domination that works to assert the power of the perceiving subject over the object of the sentimental gaze? Tracking the uses of sympathy from Enlightenment to Postmodern culture—from Clarissa to Rescue 911—Laura Hinton argues convincingly that there is indeed a psychic drive for ego-assertion at work, that “sadomasochistic desire underlies the experience Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy and Continuation of the Bramine’s Journal, ed. Melvyn New and W. G. Day (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002), 97. 11 Judith Frank observes that in this episode “Yorick’s ‘portrait’ of the captive seems at once a sadistic fantasy of surveillance and a masochistic fantasy of being looked at” (Common Ground, 86). Robert Markley notes the instability that marks Yorick’s selfpresentation in this episode and others, as he asserts a brand of bourgeois virtue through grand gestures of sympathy yet does nothing to alleviate the causes of the suffering he sees (“Sentimentality as Performance,” 225–27). 12 See Marcus Wood, Slavery, Empathy and Pornography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002). On this problematic, see also Mary A. Favret, “Flogging: The Anti-Slavery Movement Writes Pornography,” in Romanticism and Gender, ed. Anne Janowitz (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1998), 19–43. 10

Introduction

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of sympathy, through the perverse narrative spectator who creates and reflects sentimental image-making.”13 What she terms the “perverse gaze of sympathy” governs the relation between subject and object, forging a bond that is at once intimate and coercive, ostensibly reciprocal and yet menacingly narcissistic. Nowhere is this relation more raw than in the arena of slavery and affect, especially regarding the bond of master and slave. Sentimental Bondage Joan Dayan gets to the heart of the perverse power dynamic that structures the sentimentalization of the master-slave bond. By unpacking “the entangled metaphysics of romance and servitude”14 that underwrote the patriarchal culture of antebellum America, Dayan identifies a deep connection between the idealization of women in the courtly discourse of the South, and the assumptions of an ideology that naturalized the subordinate condition of the slave. How does this work? At the level of raw power politics, “racist discourse needed the rhetoric of natural servility to confirm absolute privilege” (240). Commentators claimed there existed deep feelings of loyalty on the part of the slave and of paternal care on the part of the master, analogous to the bond of devotion that underwrote romantic love. Such a model of attachment was used by proslavery apologists in the United States to justify on moral terms the continued existence of an institution under attack across the Anglo-Atlantic world. Dayan sees at work an ethos of “amorous bondage” that maps the properties of the romantic pair-bond onto the master-slave bond. True to romantic love convention, the male lover throws himself into a position of subservience to the object of his devotion; desire to possess the other compels the admirer into a state of self-enslavement. This positioning of lover as slave of the object of desire had, of course, characterized romance discourse since the Middle Ages, with anxiety about the power of the beloved bodied forth in tropes of supernatural enchantment, and with the underlying violence of the lover’s drive to possess the beloved revealed in tropes of military conquest. In Dayan’s account, what results in the slaveholding culture of the South is an intertwining of the dyads lover/beloved– master/slave, one that entails a perverse twisting of the material conditions truly in play. The real holder of power—of economic, political, juridical power; of the tyranny of narrative voice, of the cruelty of the gaze—casts himself as powerless, as enthralled in a relation of subjugation. Dayan notes that the desire to possess and control the other wholly, to give the concepts my and mine metaphysical as well as legal meaning, drives what Poe terms “the language of affectionate

See Perverse Gaze of Sympathy, 2–8. Joan Dayan, “Amorous Bondage: Poe, Ladies, and Slaves” American Literature 66,

13 14

no. 2 (1994): 241.

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appropriation.”15 Without any sense of irony, Poe hits here on the darker side of the politics of affect, when bonds of sentiment are forged to appropriate the identity, even the humanity, of the less powerful, of those who cannot talk back to the controlling voice in the world of the narrative, nor exert full agency in the world outside the text. Dayan observes that given this state of affairs, “Sentiment . . . is not only coercive but also despotic. The rare and special love between slave and master, man and wife, based on the law of property, becomes the medium by which perfect submission becomes equivalent to a pure but perverse love” (252). Dayan’s analysis offers explanatory power for how we might understand the relation between affect and slavery in the earlier decades that are the focus of the current volume. Building on Dayan’s notion of amorous bondage, and shifting focus to the turn of the nineteenth century, James Lilley identifies a relation of “sentimental servitude” hardwired into the sentimental romance. This narrative form, he argues, gives voice to a cultural imperative that defines the individual as at once an effective agent in a capitalist public sphere, and an authentic private self worthy of respect. The male agent has to sell himself to become an agent in the public sphere, yet in narratives marked by “ruin” he mourns this commodification of the self. By inhabiting a liminal space of melancholic nostalgia, the sentimental protagonist can protect the unique use-value of a feeling self, rather than be determined by a society increasingly governed by the logic of exchange-value. In this private realm disconnected from active being, getting, spending—from the world of commerce—“pure affection is finally accorded its proper value.”16 Yet what Lilley terms an “erotics of victimhood and servitude” typifies the relationship between lover and beloved, master and slave, in works of fiction and nonfiction alike in the period. Lilley’s shrewdest insight is to strip bare the politics of dominance and submission that underlies the ethos of sentimental romance, observing that while these narratives insist on the deferral of sexual desire, they celebrate at the same time a predatory desire to consume the pain of others. This fictional form imagines a communal space free of obligation, yet by effacing the power relations still at work even in a community of suffering souls, it acts to reinforce the distance between those with power and those without. In this way sentimental romance embodies an “erotics of enslavement,” which in texts such as Mackenzie’s Julia de Roubigné, an epistolary novel of romantic love and plantation slavery, defines the marriage bond in a patriarchal society, and also “informs all sentimental interactions between masters and slaves” (657). So the world of acquisitive desire intrudes even into the realm of idealized affection and familial obligation, in that the fetishized image of the single tear, of the weeping woman, of the piteous slave, is essentially undifferentiated. For it is an exchangeable sign of the most literal objectification: the turning of the subject into a commodity. From his April 1836 review of J. K. Paulding, Slavery in the United States; quoted in Dayan, “Amorous Bondage,” 242. 16 James Lilley, “Henry Mackenzie’s Ruined Feelings: Romance, Race, and the Afterlife of Sentimental Exchange” New Literary History 38, no. 4 (2007), 653. 15

Introduction

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As Lilley implies, the privileging of affect as a creative energy that can forge political community often occludes those without the power to assert the subjectivity of their pain, rather than being turned by others into spectacles for consumption. We see this problem in play so often that it becomes a standard feature in the contemporary representational storehouse. Whether in abolitionist tracts and political speeches, or in poems, plays, and novels, accounts of suffering are penned by those not in pain, and readers are made to inhabit the subject position of the observer of a succession of scenes of woe. This pattern typifies the work of white bourgeois activists like William Cowper, Hannah More, Thomas Clarkson, or William Wilberforce, and even of African ex-slaves like Ottobah Cugoano or Olaudah Equiano now writing at a distance from their earlier lives. The distancing effect perhaps accounts for why so many depictions of the slave in distress seem at root interchangeable. For the fragmentation of the narrative at once beckons and alienates the reader, as writers draw on a repertoire of possible scenarios to generate the requisite heightened affect, while this formulaic quality at the same time undermines the sense of a unique, profound, individuated experience. Both the figure of the slave and text itself are implicated in a system of commodity exchange in which the unit, the material object, to be moved—to be sold across the ocean, to be sold in the marketplace of publication—must move the reader to a vicarious interest in the suffering of others to achieve success, but not effect the kind of lasting identification with the body in pain that could constitute an existential threat to the reader, the holder of power in the primal scene of affective excess. This is why texts written in the romance mode are preoccupied with the experience of the intensely sensible body but require the formalized display of that body, with the reader asked to at once inhabit and to observe from afar the subjectivity of the lover or the slave in torment. No matter that the underlying drive of this affective fetish is amelioration (the reduction of pain) or abolition (the elimination of pain, of inequality, in the lover’s ecstatic union with the beloved, or the slave’s release into freedom). In the spectacle of subjection that feeds readerly desire, the suffering, swooning, paralyzed body of the enchanted lover is replaced by the body of the captive African, thereby literalizing the master-slave dialectic that had long been at the heart of romance narrative. So the bonds of sentiment, shot through with eros as well as agape, include a complex psychology of dominance and submission that belies the promise of the sentimental ideal: creation of a space for intimate encounters free from the workings of power. More broadly, a tendency to sentimentalize for political ends pervades writings about the institution of slavery, as much in the hands of apologists as of critics. Especially as pressure for reform increases from the abolitionist movement, we see slaveholders depict slaves as part of the family, as children in need of guidance and protection, and themselves as benevolent patriarchs motivated more by noblesse oblige than by bare-faced greed. In his recent investigation of the politics of feeling and slavery, George Boulukos shows how this conception of the master-slave relation was conceived under pressure, emerging to prominence only after the Mansfield judgment of 1772. Before this

Affect and Abolition in the Anglo-Atlantic, 1770–1830

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watershed decision, an assumption common to texts written by slaveholders and their supporters was that slaves had to be managed, at times with a necessary brutality, since as fellow humans they must love liberty and so their participation in a forced labor system could not be voluntary.17 Boulukos reveals how the language of feeling is deployed by apologists to counter antislavery sentiment, by naturalizing the relation of slave to master through the operation of an instinctive response of gratitude. It turns out that the ties that bind were not shackles but, rather, filial love. This vision of feeling masters and grateful slaves peaks late in the century, serving to shore up ameliorationist arguments and at the same time setting in motion serious political consequence, since “the idea that Africans could be grateful for slavery marks them as excluded from the values of liberty and independence which were already established as part of, but nonetheless increasingly central to, the definition of Englishness” (22). Ascription of affective difference reinforces separation of colony from metropole, by excluding the African from membership in a community defined by shared national character. A more invidious consequence of this focus on the workings of affect is that it served even in abolitionist texts to solidify an emerging racialist paradigm that for the first time essentialized the difference between black Africans and white Europeans (15, 22). As Boulukos observes, “the actual practice of slavery could not be based on gratitude; such slavery remains a fantasy, a dream.”18 We can see this quality of fantasy in the writings of plantation owners who strive to humanize the bond between master and slave, but, unable to admit or unwilling to challenge the moral corruption at its root, resort to set-pieces of excessive pathos that strike a note of obscene dissonance. Visual texts often draw on the same aesthetic of heightened affect. A striking example is the image reproduced on the cover of the present volume, where the breaking of the bond between an Englishman and his native mistress produces the affectively engaging if formally conventional tableau of bodies gripped by passion . . . even while the main transaction at hand is not a

Boulukos, Grateful Slave, 4–7. P. 2. Simon Gikandi investigates a related use of affect for political ends: the

17 18

tendency of slaveholders to portray slaves as happy, and plantation society as a result an attractive option for Europeans looking to thrive in the colonies. Gikandi shows how in their deployment of physical attitude and gesture as well as in their writings, slaves used sadness as a strategy of resistance. In signifying an affective response that countered the master’s narrative, they might de-colonize an identity fragmented by cultural dislocation by asserting a freedom grounded in the sensuous enjoyment of embodied living. “In the culture of slavery,” Gikandi observes, “the performance of sorrow often went hand in hand with the arduous task of recovering the self from psychic bondage and re-presenting it in public space” (191). See Slavery and the Culture of Taste (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), especially chapter 5, “‘Popping Sorrow’: Loss and the Transformation of Servitude.”

Introduction

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communion of feeling souls but an exchange of her person for a sack of money.19 For modern viewers and readers, there is a chilling disjunction between the assertion of a familial affection that binds slave to master, and the underlying truth that theirs is a connection enforced by violence. Such moves involve a mapping of the intimate space of the family onto a ruthless economic relationship that turns the human into a commodity accounted for only by its exchange-value, and that vacates individuality by making one person exchangeable for any other. There is something paradoxical if not perverse hardwired into the DNA of sentimentalism, which holds out the promise of reconciliation of self and other, and yet can be used to cover up the worst material abuses. The Difference Distance Makes, Part II: Policing the Boundaries of Self and Empire Scholars have begun to interrogate the ideological implications of sentimentalism when the European powers began to look outward. Thomas Haskell influentially argued two decades ago that a beneficial effect of the emergence of global trade underwritten by the instruments of finance capital was a new habit of mind, one that allowed citizens engaged in the market to conceptualize across large distances— whether geographic, temporal, or cultural—and to imagine what it is like to be an agent elsewhere.20 In this way the sentimental cast of mind could be seen to promote the development of a humanitarian sensibility, by offering an opportunity to imagine the other in a way that would allow sympathetic identification with radical difference. Such identification might entail recognition of identity (in the philosophical sense, of sameness) and thereby of equality. Yet as Lynn Festa has shown more recently, many texts written in the sentimental mode deploy the affective register of sympathy not to break down barriers by extending the category of the human, but rather to police the boundaries of the self, and in the process to help rationalize the exploitation of peoples and resources that fed the project of 19 Frontispiece to the Abbé Raynal’s popular Histoire des deux Indes (1780), the image illustrates an account of a shipwrecked Englishman saved by a native woman, who gives him her heart but is betrayed when he sells her into slavery (vol. 3, pp. 524–5). Though Raynal does not identify the story, it is clearly that of Inkle and Yarico, and Richard Steele (Spectator, 1711) the poet who has “devoted himself to shocking posterity with this monument to infamy, avarice, and perfidy” (my translation). By the time Raynal was recounting the story in the later eighteenth century, this parable of the moral dangers of empire and slavery had seen countless iterations across different media, attaining in the process a kind of mythic status. For the influence of the story on changing attitudes toward slavery, see the essays below by George Boulukos (“Capitalism and Slavery, Once Again With Feeling”) and Brycchan Carey (“To Force a Tear: British Abolitionism and the Eighteenth-century London Stage”). 20 See Thomas Haskell, “Origins of Humanitarian Sensibility, Parts 1 and 2,” in Bender, ed., Antislavery Debate, 107–60.

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imperial expansion.21 Festa notes that many representations of slaves worked not to create a bond of sameness; such a move to exchange the identity of the viewer with that of the object of suffering would necessitate lasting relief from distress, with the next step being political: emancipation. Rather, narratives preoccupied with the sentimentalized encounter acted to constitute the feeling self as against the suffering other by playing out “myriad acts of affective piracy.” The violence underlying such scenes stems from the high stakes in play, for “the sentimental mode’s investment in affective and psychological interiority helped distinguish the particularity of the human from the interchangeability of the commodity, the self-possessed individual from the dispossessed slave” (2–3). In her stock-taking of recent work on affect and the politics of empire, Festa identifies a strain in the scholarship that works to unpack the strategy of “sentimental mystification” that characterizes many accounts of encounters with non-Europeans. Sentimental discourse is often used as a cover for raw ambition to conquer, with writers of colonial narratives “rewriting large-scale historical traumas into private experiences of individual suffering and representing reciprocity rather than rapacity as the engine of exchange.”22 As the work of Festa and others confirms, not all uses of the language of fellow-feeling worked to bridge the distance between metropolitan reader and the colonial experience. Alterity became something to manage, as merchants, scientists, and politicians deployed the tools of reason to make sense of a complex world in order to dominate it. Writers strove to construct an image of self and of nation as defined against the other, whether embodied in the subaltern subject (such as the Creole woman) or the alien object of pity (such as the “poor Indian”23 or the slave). In text after text, the perspective privileged in the primal scene of suffering is that of the fully civilized spectator, who controls the scene, who controls the discourse. But what of the good intentions of those trying to counter the rapacious logic of colonial exploitation, especially on the sugar plantations of the Caribbean at the turn of the nineteenth century? What about the emancipatory potential of the sentimental worldview? The intertwining of affect and slavery reinscribes the fundamental contradictions built into the culture of sensibility. Even in a time when an emerging individualism founded in natural rights theory encouraged disenfranchised sectors of society to assert collective political will, sensibility See Sentimental Figures of Empire, esp. chapter 1. Festa, “Sentimental Visions of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Studies” Literature

21 22

Compass 6, no. 1 (2009): 30–33. On this phenomenon, see also Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (New York: Routledge, 1992). 23 Laura M. Stevens shows how emotional engagement with native peoples allowed missionaries to assert their own unique capacity to feel compassion, and in so doing served an ongoing project to create a sense of transatlantic community by asserting the moral superiority of British national character as against the less civilized. See The Poor Indians: British Missionaries, Native Americans, and Colonial Sensibility (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 10–15.

Introduction

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could act at once to undercut and to reinforce a status quo based on inequity. In this context, the body of the slave becomes a kind of stand-in, a cipher, for broader cultural anxieties, when what is at stake is not just money and power but the ontological status of the self in a new dispensation in which all seems up for grabs, with old social orders based on inherited rank and landed wealth destabilized by the free-flowing circulation of capital, and when refinement through virtuous selfimprovement and tasteful consumption become new markers of status and selfworth. Jonathan Lamb has argued that a preoccupation with sympathy typically arises in a time of destabilization of older categories, when the ties of obligation that bind members of a community are up for renegotiation.24 Nowhere are these underlying tensions more clearly manifest than concerning the notion of sensibility, which can be at once both egalitarian and elitist in its implications, as G. A. Starr has observed.25 The valorization of sensibility entails on the one hand a leveling impulse, as it assumes that all good is rooted in the feeling body, shared in common by every person (whether legally recognized as such or not). From this foundation, everyone should have the capacity to develop the moral virtue and aesthetic taste that marks the person of true sensibility. On the other hand, this democratic ethos, which proposes a kind of meritocracy of feeling selves, is undercut by another strain that had been there from the start: the aristocratic ethos, elaborated in the courtly romance fiction of the seventeenth century, which sees sensitivity of the body—later, refinement of the nerves—and nobility of spirit as a legacy of inheritance, of being born to the right family of suitably high rank. Of course, even when the democratic ethos becomes dominant, and the opportunity to develop a refined sensibility is in theory open to all, still excluded in effect are those who do not come within the ambit of European culture. Those beyond the pale of civilization were often characterized as lacking capacity for all but the most brutish sensation. Increasingly, proslavery apologists promoted this view as a rationale for not worrying about the experience of slaves. In a book published a year before Olaudah Equiano’s autobiography, for instance, William Beckford bases his argument against emancipation in part on the assertion that “a slave has no feeling beyond the present hour, no anticipation of what may come, no dejection at what may ensue: these privileges of feeling are reserved for the enlightened.”26 Equiano is clear that he intends his testimonial to demonstrate the humanity of the slave by revealing an interior self, and thereby to counter the racist Lamb notes that “sympathy thrives in situations of comparative powerlessness,” especially in times of change, when “the function and tendency of social roles is no longer directly apparent to those who fill them, either because power is the prerogative of an absolute authority or because it is distributed in ways that cannot be fully understood.” The Evolution of Sympathy in the Long Eighteenth Century (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2009), 1. 25 See G. A. Starr, “Egalitarian and Elitist Implications of Sensibility,” in L’Egalité, ed. Leon Ingber (Brussels: Bruylant, 1984), 126–35. 26 William Beckford, Jr., Remarks Upon the Situation of the Negroes in Jamaica (London: T. and J. Egerton, 1788), 84. 24

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assumption that Africans lack the capacity for profound affective response. By displaying his own constant care and worry, Equiano is able to assert his status as a feeling, thinking moral agent through time. But there was a reverse bias that even well-meaning abolitionists could display: depicting Africans not as unfeeling, but as constituted only by feeling. While taking pains to show that blacks can feel intensely, they could reinforce primitivist assumptions in play at least since the publication of Oroonoko (1688) that saw native peoples living in a state of childlike simplicity. In the very act of being set up as an ideal of uncorrupted innocence, they are evacuated of any capacity for higher-order reasoning or cultural sophistication—and thereby stripped of a political agency worthy of respect. Tensions between a drive to sympathize and a tendency to patronize are clear even in the writings of one of the most active participants in the early abolitionist movement, Hannah More, whose polemical poem “Slavery” (1788) was influential in turning public opinion against the trade. More’s poem aims to denounce the brutal treatment meted out to slaves; her method is essentially to show that slaves too can feel. She asserts their capacity for acute feeling as a point of shared experience, and exhorts her countrymen to force slave owners to experience the subjectivity of the tortured body, to “Wrench from Oppression’s hand the iron rod, / And bid the cruel feel the pains they give.”27 Blending sentimental vignette with polemical statement, More’s case for abolition rests on a claim on the reader’s common humanity with the African other, “For they have keen affections, kind desires, / Love strong as death, and active patriot fires” (69–70). Yet she shows an ability to sympathize and then patronize in the same breath, in the next moment claiming: “From heads to hearts lies Nature’s plain appeal / Tho’ few can reason, all mankind can feel” (149–50). Here More betrays her bias, by excluding those not educated in the European tradition as incapable of rational thought. She then returns to her overall thesis: that Africans deserve humane treatment because The nerve, howe’er untutor’d, can sustain A sharp, unutterable sense of pain; As exquisitely fashion’d in a slave, As where unequal fate a sceptre gave. (159–62)

There seems an egalitarian or even revolutionary implication to this observation, and yet More is careful throughout the poem to assert the limited grounds on which the African has a claim on the European. She makes clear that what they have in common is “sensation” (166), a capacity to feel that is rooted in the physiological processes of the body, an animal capacity, rather than the more culturally refined, superior capacity that goes by the name “sensibility.” In the closing lines, she clinches her argument as do many contemporaries in the abolitionist movement by invoking the specter of the nation to shame her reader into action: “Shall Britain, Hannah More, Slavery, A Poem (London: T. Cadell, 1788), title page.

27

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where the soul of freedom reigns, / Forge chains for others she herself disdains? / Forbid it, Heaven!” (251–52). So we have moral outrage, well-meaning disdain of hypocrisy, and the language of natural rights on the one hand; and on the other, with images of “untutor’d” Africans and of benign colonizers like William Penn, a paternalistic humanitarianism expressed in a tone of triumphalist complacency as More celebrates the AngloAmerican political tradition. We see the revolutionary promise of Enlightenment ideals of critical inquiry, equal justice, and the dignity of the person; and also the sense of virtuous exceptionalism that increasingly marked a country whose colonial ambitions were fired not only by military prowess and technological advance, but by a righteousness given voice in a mode of representational excess that could overwhelm the material realities of the encounter between the empowered and the powerless. More’s poem bodies forth the contradictory implications of politics, affect and agency concerning the social institution that demanded the most pressing change: plantation slavery. Teasing out the consequences of the transatlantic trade in people, goods, and ideas will be a multidisciplinary undertaking for years to come. As the essays in this volume demonstrate, an especially productive way into this phenomenon is to move forward our investigation of the intertwinings of the institution of slavery with a sentimentality that still dominates the cultural imaginary of the Anglo-Atlantic world. Affect and Abolition: An Essay Collection The first part of the collection, Sympathy’s Empire, introduces concerns fundamental to our project by considering how the transatlantic circulation of goods and people was paralleled—and in fundamental ways, shaped—by a culturally dominant circuit of feeling. The essays here consider the problematic nature of sympathy, both as theorized by Enlightenment moral philosophers and as subject of heated debate in recent scholarship concerning the historical uses and political consequences of affective agency. George Boulukos revisits the tradition in historical scholarship on slavery that views the abolitionist movement as resulting from the sudden emergence among metropolitan citizens of a humanitarian impulse based on sympathy with the plight of slaves. In “Capitalism and Slavery, Once Again With Feeling” Boulukos challenges three assumptions: that antislavery sentiment replaced what had been either wholesale ignorance or complacent tolerance of plantation slavery, that globalized trade encouraged the merchant class to sympathize with the enslaved other, and that the registers of sentimental affect were necessarily allied to the abolitionist cause. Boulukos shows instead that contemporary attitudes to the interrelationship of affect, capital, and slavery changed over time, and that the market was seen to encourage selfinterest as much as disinterested benevolence. In “Acts of Sympathy: Abolitionist Poetry and Transatlantic Identification,” Tobias Menely focuses on antislavery verse in order to account for the challenges faced by abolitionists who tried to forge a sense of community between free Britons and enslaved Africans by

18

Affect and Abolition in the Anglo-Atlantic, 1770–1830

bridging geographic, economic, political, and racial difference. Proposing a model of sympathetic agency that allies narrative structure and the power of performative utterance with the possibilities of political action, Menely offers us a way out of the impasse in recent scholarship that views sympathy as closing down the emancipatory potential of affective identification as much as opening it up. Nation, Narration, Emancipation, the second part of the volume, investigates the importance of rhetorical form and an ethics of feeling to the project of national identity construction that emerged in debates concerning the morality and efficacy of the British transatlantic slave trade. In “Commerce, Sentiment, and Free Air: Contradictions of Abolitionist Rhetoric,” Anthony John Harding critiques the tendency of writers of legal, polemical, and literary texts to invoke an ideal of Britain as a bastion of freedom, a land whose very “air” would not accommodate slavery. Harding reveals the complex political consequences of a rhetorical figure that not only was useful to the abolitionist cause but also supported nationalist and anti-Catholic views. Such sentimental patriotism worked to efface power inequities, and was, Harding contends, deployed to justify the program of imperial expansion that marked the opening decades of the nineteenth century. Mary A. Waters also considers the interconnections of affect, slavery, and nationalism in her essay “Sympathy, Nerve Physiology, and National Degeneration in Anna Letitia Barbauld’s Epistle to William Wilberforce.” Waters investigates the time soon after the French Revolution when concern about social instability was rife, and when the slave trade came to be seen as a particularly corrupting influence on the domestic body politic. As public debate became increasingly anxious and affectively charged, abolitionist writers like Barbauld made use of the discourse of sensibility to figure the moral decay of a slaveholding society as analogous to a nervous disease, one whose contagion might undermine the health of a nation founded on such virtues as courage and energy. The third part of the volume, Spectacles of Suffering, considers the aesthetic challenges and political implications of drawing on pathos to represent the realities of slavery. In “To Force a Tear: British Abolitionism and the Eighteenth-century London Stage,” Brycchan Carey offers a genealogy of dramatic representations of slavery from the mid-seventeenth through the turn of the nineteenth century. Carey tracks the shift in these texts from the register of tragic heroism to that of tender feeling, and thereby from the realm of the public to that of the private. Focusing his discussion on plays produced in London from the 1760s to 1800, Carey identifies a repertoire of rhetorical clichés and stock situations deployed by playwrights to move their audiences, but shows how excessive sentimentality could make the horrors of slavery finally unstageable, and as a result render impotent the possibilities for political action. Joanne Tong also considers the challenges of drawing on heightened affect to represent the suffering of others. In “‘Pity for the Poor Africans’: William Cowper and the Limits of Abolitionist Affect,” Tong shows how Cowper understands the inherent problems of pity, which, while it incites an affective response in readers faced with scenes of virtue in distress, exerts less political force than compassion, an emotion that entails an ethic of

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obligation to the suffering other. Cowper also reveals pity as offering a closed circuit of affect, with the result that sentimentalized depictions of suffering can act more as cathartic release-valve than spur to action, and in consequence fail to offer a pragmatic vision of reformist action that might counter the drive to expand the business of empire. In “‘We Beg Your Excellency’: The Sentimental Politics of Abolitionist Petitions in the Late Eighteenth Century,” Christine Levecq attends to the voices of slaves themselves, seeing a common tactical strategy and political vision in the manumission petitions submitted in post-Revolutionary America. Levecq tracks the deployment of sentimental rhetoric in petitions ranging from the colonial period through the 1790s. As had colonial subjects in their dealings with King George, slaves emphasized the existence of natural bonds of affection to argue for improved treatment from their masters. But as they detailed inhumane conditions in terms that invoked both the language of feeling and the discourse of individual liberty, slave petitioners also drew on a vision of the common good long established in the European tradition, and thereby demonstrated an awareness of transatlantic ideas and events as well as a sophisticated understanding of the paradoxes of liberal sentiment. The volume closes with Sentimental Bondage, a grouping of essays that examine how the political uses of affect on the ground of the colonial encounter could be more reactionary than emancipatory. In “The Contradictions of Racialized Sensibility: Gender, Slavery, and the Limits of Sympathy” Jamie Rosenthal reconsiders the fraught relationship among gender, race, and sensibility in slaveholding society. Shifting our focus away from the writings of abolitionist women of the metropole to those of a Caribbean plantation mistress, the essay shows how a white woman’s self-assertion as an independent agent comes at the expense of racist bias and proslavery sentiment. Rosenthal proves how easily the rhetoric of sensibility could be invoked not to forge a community of feeling selves but rather to assert radical difference based on the moral delicacy of the white and Creole woman as defined against the insensibility of the black and mulatto. Margaret Abruzzo then opens up our perspective on American society in the transition from colony to country by examining the question of what was owed to slaves once freed. In “The Cruelty of Slavery, The Cruelty of Freedom: Colonization and the Politics of Humaneness in the Early Republic,” Abruzzo tracks the characterizations of affect in debates about abolition that harnessed to differing causes both the pain of the enslaved African and the sympathy of the white citizen. Her essay shows how public acknowledgment of the suffering of slaves acted to stoke moral outrage, but at the same time worked to differentiate the slave as other, as determined by a legacy of cruelty. As a result support emerged for a gradualist approach to emancipation, for a mass transportation of freed slaves back to Africa, or even for a defense of the humaneness of continued enslavement. As do all the contributors to this volume, Abruzzo moves us toward a fuller account of the paradoxical uses to which affect—its embodied realities, its discursive structures—was put in this era, and in the process brings us closer to understanding in all its complexities the role of the Anglo-Atlantic in the formation of the modern world.

PaRT 1 Sympathy’s Empire

Chapter 1

Capitalism and Slavery, Once Again With Feeling George Boulukos

Three recent developments in historical and literary scholarship challenge longstanding consensus interpretations of the affective history of the British abolition movement. From Thomas Clarkson’s 1808 history of abolition to Lynn Hunt’s Inventing Human Rights, the point has been insistently repeated: from 1619 until (roughly) 1772, Britons ignored colonial slavery. But then something changed: around the time of the Somerset decision, Britons suddenly began to empathize strongly with the suffering of African slaves, and the feeling grew to such an extent that by 1787, they felt called to action.1 This outpouring of empathy took political form as the abolition movement, and slavery was no longer a matter of course, but instead the subject of heated debate and of an unprecedented outpouring of public feeling. This position, however, is strongly challenged by recent scholarly developments. The first is Christopher Brown’s recognition in Moral Capital that slavery was never simply taken for granted or viewed as morally acceptable in the British eighteenth century, but was always seen as at best distasteful;2 the change was not in feelings about, or awareness of, slavery, but in the sense of the practicality of antislavery action. The second is the contention by literary scholars—including Lynn Festa, Brycchan Carey, and myself—that sentimental depictions of slavery were not exclusively, or even primarily, abolitionist in intention, but were in fact often used to support slavery, 1 Thomas Clarkson, History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave Trade by the British Parliament (London: Longman, 1808); Lynn Hunt, Human Rights: A History (New York: Norton, 2008). Other notable examples include Frank J. Klingberg, The Anti-Slavery Movement in England: A Study in English Humanitarianism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1926; Hamden, CT: Archon, 1968), esp. 22–58; and Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005). Notable exceptions to the consensus include Marcus Wood, Slavery, Empathy and Pornography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), and Nicholas Hudson’s critique of the whiggism of scholarly views of abolition, “‘Britons Never Will be Slaves’: National Myth, Conservatism, and the Beginnings of British Antislavery,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 34, no. 4 (2001): 559–76. 2 Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). See also John Richardson, Slavery and Augustan Literature: Swift, Pope, Gay (New York: Routledge, 2004).

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negating the easy equivalence between sentiment and abolition.3 Taken together, clearly, these points undermine the long-held belief in the sudden emergence of abolition as a sea-change in the understanding of slaves and slavery through the sudden irruption of new, and yet widely held, sentimental, humanitarian sympathy with slaves.4 In this essay, I want to carefully think through the implications of disarticulating abolition and sentimentalism, most particularly the implications for the relation of abolition to a key third term: capitalism. The association of abolition, sentimentalism, and capitalist—or “middleclass”—ideology in twentieth-century scholarship emerges from the combined influence of three early twentieth-century studies, none of which would initially seem to have much in common: Reginald Coupland’s British Anti-Slavery Movement (1933),5 Eric William’s Capitalism and Slavery (1944),6 and Wylie Sypher’s Guinea’s Captive Kings (1942).7 This association became enshrined as later scholars took it for granted; the most influential works to do so being Winthrop Jordan in White over Black and David Brion Davis in his Problem of Slavery books.8 The association was brought back to the fore in slavery studies in the 1980s with Thomas Haskell’s articles on “Capitalism and the Origins of Humanitarian Sensibility” and the response to them, as documented in The AntiSlavery Debate edited by Thomas Bender.9 The elements of the consensus view Lynn Festa, Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth Century Britain and France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006); Brycchan Carey, British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility: Writing, Sentiment, and Slavery, 1760–1807 (New York: Palgrave, 2005); George Boulukos, The Grateful Slave: The Emergence of Race in Eighteenth-Century British and American Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). Carey disarticulates sentimental and abolitionist representations of slaves in the theater in his essay for the present volume. Margaret Abruzzo’s discussion in the present volume of the use of “humanitarianism” both to support and to oppose slavery in early America further advances this point. 4 For a discussion of the departures of Festa and Boulukos from a consensus view of sentiment, see Jamie Rosenthal’s essay in the present volume, which itself offers a study in proslavery sentiment. 5 Reprinted London: Frank Cass, 1964. First edition was Oxford University Press, 1933. It would be more precise to pair Coupland with Klingberg here, but Sypher responds much directly to Coupland. 6 Reprinted New York: Capricorn, 1966. First edition was University of North Carolina Press, 1944. 7 Sypher, Guinea’s Captive Kings: British Anti-Slavery Literature of the XVIIIth Century. Reprinted: New York: Octogon, 1969. First edition was University of North Carolina Press, 1942. 8 White over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Baltimore: Penguin, 1969); the two Davis books are The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966) and The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975). 9 Haskell’s essay was originally published in two parts in American Historical Review: part I in 90, no. 2 (1985): 339–36; and part II in 90, no. 3 (1985): 547–66. Both 3

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would seem inherently contradictory. From Coupland (via Clarkson and Klingberg) comes the idea of abolition caused by a rising humanitarian tide of feeling;10 from Sypher comes the idea of abolitionist writing as sentimental and therefore false and propagandistic; and from Williams comes the association of abolition with capitalism and its values. The work of all three men has been supplanted; each is considered important and influential but clearly dated. And yet, I claim, the consensus view of abolition as caused by the emergence of a bourgeois, sentimental culture, amounting to a strange synthesis of these three views, remains in place.11 Despite the centrality of sentiment to studies of abolition, it has long been viewed in ambiguous terms. At the time Eric Williams researched and wrote his epochal, still-debated work Capitalism and Slavery, putting forward the “Williams thesis” that slavery’s end in the British Empire was caused more by economic factors than by a heroic humanitarian movement, he was aiming to undermine the whiggish view of abolition as yet another example of Britain’s steady progress toward liberty and modernity, a consensus embodied in Coupland’s book, and particularly to challenge Coupland’s “sentimental” view of abolitionism. While Williams wrote, several literary researchers were examining slavery and abolition in English language literature. Such researchers—including Robert B. Heilman, and most prominently, Sypher—took for granted aspects of the whiggish view.12 Heilman, for example, refers to “humanitarianism as the alma mater of emancipation”;13 Sypher, in his influential work Guinea’s Captive Kings—which remained the sole volume devoted to the study of slavery in seventeenth- and eighteenth- century British literature until the 1990s—agrees with the causal linking of the emergence of sentimentalism and of abolition. The difference for Sypher is that he views sentimental, and hence abolitionist, representations of slavery not in a whiggish spirit, not as documents of the British love of liberty, were reprinted with an introduction and a series of responses in The Anti-Slavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation, ed. Thomas Bender (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992). 10 See Menely’s account of Clarkson’s narrative as sentimental in the present volume (see Chapter 2, 47, below). 11 Ian Baucom, in Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), interprets abolitionism as anticapitalist, or at least as opposing the regime of finance capital and speculative modernity, but subscribes to the consensus “irruption” view in other ways as mentioned below. 12 R. B. Heilman, America in English Fiction: 1760–1800: The Influences of the American Revolution (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1937), 29.There was a high degree of interdisciplinarity between literary and historical scholars on this issue in the early twentieth century. Clarkson offered an influential list of antislavery texts, emphasizing literary texts (Clarkson, 1:44–62); Klingberg (esp. 25–35) follows Clarkson and more explicitly C. A. Moore, “Shaftesbury and the Ethical Poets in England, 1700– 1760” PMLA 31, no. 2 (1916): 264–325. 13 Heilman, America in English Fiction, 29.

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but as embarrassing, excessive, mawkish. Although their motives for opposing the view of British sentimentalism as a key to abolition were radically opposed, Sypher and Williams strongly agreed that sentimentality was embarrassing. Williams uses “sentimentality” as an insult, dismissing Coupland as representing “the sentimental conception of history,” while charging Coupland and others like him with having “sacrificed scholarship to sentimentality.”14 Eighteenth-century literary sentimentality represented a problem for scholars in English departments; it was not a subject worthy of serious academic study, and any work labeled sentimental suffered from disqualifying failure of seriousness. The prime directive of English departments at this moment was to assess the value of past literary works, to assemble, and confirm, a canon of literary authors and texts truly worthy of study. Studying sentimental literature could be justified by scholars with bibliographic or historical themes to consider, but they had to make clear that they understood the shortcomings of their subject matter, and to redefine sentimentalism in more substantive terms—particularly through “humanitarianism.”15 Not opting for this strategy, Sypher found sentimental representations of slaves and slavery objectionable in two overlapping ways. Firstly, sentimental depictions of slavery were mere “propaganda” for abolition rather than genuine literature. Secondly, these representations were, to Sypher, simply unrealistic. In his interpretation, such representations did not appeal to audiences through revelatory depictions of the actual abuses of slavery. Instead, they joined in the Enlightenment fantasy of the “noble savage” and depicted enslaved Africans as unreal paragons of nobility and morality. Sypher’s discomfort with the “noble negro” stems largely from his discomfort with its refusal to acknowledge the vast cultural and racial differences between Africans and Britons in the eighteenth century. To put it more baldly: racial difference, for Sypher, is a key reality that abolitionist propaganda denies: the “noble negro” is a trope “used by anti-slavery writers to convince their readers that the negro is not really negroid.”16 In his review of Sypher’s book, Eric Williams is surprisingly sympathetic, both with the view of sentimental literature as mere propaganda, and with Sypher’s efforts to contain the works he analyzes within the disciplinary boundaries of canonicity. Williams sees the problematic implications of Sypher’s account of the unrealistic “noble negro” charitably, offering an antislavery reinterpretation of his own: the trope is disturbing because it “too often carries the vicious implication that the slavery of the ignoble Negro is deserved.”17 His harshest criticism is that Sypher takes for granted the work of the sentimental—and in Williams’s account 16 17

Williams, Capitalism and Slavery, 268, 178. Moore’s essay “Shaftesbury and the Ethical Poets in England” is a key example. Sypher, Guinea’s Captive Kings, 110. Eric Williams, “Literature and Slavery” [review of Wylie Sypher, Guinea’s Captive Kings], Journal of Negro Education 11, no. 4 (1942): 536. Alex Bontemps offers a similar account of Sypher’s use of “the Noble Negro,” in The Punished Self: Surviving Slavery in the Colonial South (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 144. 14 15

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unscientific—historians of abolition: “Sypher quotes as ‘of particular value’ the works of Coupland and Klingberg, who never consulted a single original document.”18 Returning to the same texts and issues in the 1960s, Winthrop Jordan, in his immensely influential book White over Black, returns to the scornful view of sentimentalism as producing distastefully sentimental propaganda, despite linking it to “humanitarianism.” Jordan sees sentimentalism as ineffectual due to its falsity, despite its centrality to abolition: “In the long run, this shift to extravagant sentimentality tended to vitiate anti-slavery as a program of action”; indeed, ultimately “as for the Negro’s future, the contribution of sentimental antislavery literature was to cloud it with tears.”19 Jordan seems to share with Sypher a sense that the lack of realism in sentimental writing about slavery undermines its usefulness: “Africa was thus transformed into the despoiled sylvan idyl of aggrieved and tear-stained humanity” (370). Sentimentality here is not simply equated to “humanitarianism,” but instead represents the most extreme and explicit demand for empathy. Jordan does offer a larger critique of the “humanitarian” response to slavery—the attack on brutality to demand reform and amelioration—and his response allows for a greater complexity than the simple equation of sentimentality and abolition by allowing for unintended consequences: “The supreme irony in this happy development was that with slavery humanitarian victories over brutality left the real enemy more entrenched than ever. As slavery became less brutal there was less reason that it should be abolished” (368). Jordan denies the possibility of ameliorationism, of reform-minded criticism of slavery that was not in fact abolitionist or emancipationist in intention. Seeming to lead in the direction of recent arguments that sentimentalism was not inherently abolitionist, Jordan instead implies that there are only two possible positions on slavery: proslavery and abolitionism. Equally influential with Jordan on literary studies of slavery has been the work of David Brion Davis. Davis is not at all scornful of sentimentalism. In fact, seemingly addressing Sypher in particular, Davis argues that sentimental literature is the key ingredient that shifts feelings for slaves, convinces Britons to stop taking slavery for granted, and thereby launches the abolition movement: The great question, then, was whether the literary imagination could build a bridge of sympathy and understanding across the enormous gulf that divided primitive and civilized cultures. And if modern taste finds the Negroes of eighteenth-century literature ridiculously contrived and their speech loaded with fustian or obsequiousness, this is really beside the point. Europeans could conceptualize the meaning of enslavement only in the familiar terms that increasingly aroused a sensitive response from the middle class: the separation of young lovers; the heartless betrayal of an innocent girl; the unjust punishment of a faithful servant.20

Williams, “Literature and Slavery,” 537. Jordan, White over Black, 371. 20 Davis, Slavery in Western Culture, 474. 18 19

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The change, notably, is not from obliviousness about slavery, but from an insensitivity to the suffering of slaves born of an instrumental view of them paired with a sense of vast cultural (although not necessarily racial) difference. Defoe’s Colonel Jack is Davis’s single example of the instrumental attitude. Although Defoe’s character “realizes that Negroes are human beings,” nonetheless his treatment of them shows that “when the Negro was categorized simply as a black, a heathen, or a savage, he could be no more than an impersonal object that men manipulated for certain purposes” (473). The decision to use Colonel Jack as an example of the instrumental attitude that was eventually undone by sentimental representations such as Oroonoko and “Inkle & Yarico” raises some problems from the perspective of literary scholarship.21 Why do the earlier texts represent the more modern, progressive attitude? Furthermore, how can Defoe’s text be treated as an isolated anomaly, when it in fact creates a paradigm—the grateful slave—for representing plantation slavery that becomes pervasive later in the century? In his volume on the height of the abolition movement, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, Davis is more explicitly committed to reading abolition in class terms, and hence linking abolition and sentiment as “bourgeois” phenomena; he works to recuperate the Williams thesis by making it a matter of ideology rather than of direct economic effects. Abolition for Davis is linked to capitalism not so much by the rising or falling profits of the sugar islands, but through the bourgeois ideology of individualism and free labor. The model of an irruption of humanitarian feeling for slaves has two primary variants. One, the one Davis offers, suggests that the attitude to slavery before the rise of widespread abolitionist feeling is one of knowing indifference. Britons know of colonial slavery, but they accept it because they do not or cannot conceive of Africans as sympathetic fellow human beings. Thus, they are content to allow colonial slaves to be treated in a harsh and instrumental fashion. The second model is introduced by Clarkson in his history, and has recent adherents including Ian Baucom and Srividhya Swaminathan. This is the ignorance model: Clarkson himself claims to have come to an awareness only in the process of composing his prize essay. He finds the revelations of his own essay unbelievable, despite having written it himself, and only comes to a total conviction of its truth in a roadside revelation, clearly meant to invoke Paul’s Road to Damascus conversion: I frequently tried to persuade myself in these intervals that the contents of my Essay could not be true. The more however I reflected upon them, or rather upon the authorities on which they were founded, the more I gave them credit…. I sat down disconsolate on the turf by the roadside and held my horse. Here a thought came into my mind, that if the contents of the Essay were true, it was time some person should see these calamities to their end. Agitated in this manner I reached home.22

Interestingly, Klingberg assimilates even Colonel Jack to the “humanitarian” view of slaves; he explicitly believes in the transformation of British public feeling on slavery in the course of the century. 22 Clarkson, History, 1:210. 21

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Clarkson implies that only ignorance of the horrible truth allows good, Christian Britons to leave colonial slavery unchallenged.23 Clarkson uses his own stages of awareness, verification, and conversion to action as a model for many of the other key figures such as William Wilberforce. He gives one particularly striking account: “One, however, whom I visited, Mr. Powys (the late Lord Lilford), with whom I had been before acquainted in Northamptonshire, seemed to doubt some of the facts in my book, from a belief that human nature was not capable of proceeding to such a pitch of wickedness.” Settling on the Zong case as the key piece of evidence, Clarkson gathers verifying documents from Granville Sharp for Powys: Mr. Powys read the account.—He became, in consequence of it, convinced, as, indeed, he could not otherwise be, of the truth of what I had asserted, and he declared at the same time that, if this were true, there was nothing so horrible related of this trade, which might not immediately be believed. Mr. Powys had been always friendly to this question, but now he took a part in the distribution of my books.24

Implicitly, Clarkson suggests, slavery is protected by the very horror it embodies. It is so inhumane that it is almost impossible for good Britons to believe. Swaminathan offers a similar view, presenting the first challenge facing antislavery writers as simply bringing about an awareness of the colonial situation: “The public reaction to African slavery underwent a critical change from general apathy to growing support over the course of the eighteenth century. Britain’s involvement in the slave trade and colonial slavery was firmly established by the mid-century; however, most Britons had only a peripheral awareness of colonial activities and a limited understanding of the practices on plantations.”25 Such a belief has a useful rhetorical effect for Clarkson: if ignorance of plantation conditions is the cause of apathy to slavery, then abolition will inevitably succeed once the public is sufficiently educated about it. This view has a flattening effect on understandings of specific texts about slavery, however. It misleadingly renders insignificant the difference between official abolitionism (limited to the slave trade only) and emancipationist or even ameliorationist views, by defining any text that reveals the truth of slaves suffering as drawing attention to slavery and thus contributing to the humane cause of abolitionism. And indeed, Clarkson’s own capacious history of proto-abolitionist texts elides the differences between literary representations, travel narratives, sermons, and polemical pamphlets that in fact, given careful contextualization, pursue quite divergent agendas.

See Harding’s reading of Clarkson’s construction of a “sentimental body politic” in the present volume (see Chapter 3, 78–79, below). 24 Clarkson, History, 1:240. 25 Srividhya Swaminathan, Debating the Slave Trade: Rhetoric of British National Identity, 1759–1815 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), 47. 23

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In other words, one problematic implication of the three-way equivalence between abolition, sentimentalism, and capitalism is that any but the most explicitly proslavery texts can be assimilated into an antislavery continuum: the act of calling attention to slavery, on any terms whatsoever, seems to be an antislavery act, if it is done in the face of public ignorance or indifference. Thus evangelical jeremiads on the sinfulness of slaveholding, ameliorationist fictions heralding plantation reform, and pamphlets by members of the London Abolition Committee strictly limiting their argument to the abolition of the slave trade all seem to participate in the same bourgeois, sentimental humanitarianism. But these writings in fact operate in very distinct historical moments and pursue very distinct agendas, employing very different rhetorical strategies.26 They only share a “humanitarian” perspective if we grant the assumption that slavery once enjoyed unanimous, if unquestioning, support. Further, the irruption of feeling that the consensus theory describes has never been given an adequate casual explanation, other than its broad link to capitalism and bourgeois values. The consensus theory does mesh well with many historical models of the emergence of modernity— whether they focus on individualism born of Puritan inwardness, on the social effects and ideological needs of a bourgeois economy, or on the internalization of discipline in a new episteme. Even Baucom’s interpretation of abolitionists like Clarkson and Granville Sharp as Derridean “witnesses against history,” who actually oppose the operations of speculative finance capital, depends on implicitly accepting Clarkson’s view of abolition as irruption or an overcoming of apathy and ignorance.27 But the more attention that scholars pay to the specific dynamics of culture around a specific issue, the less clear it is that any such seachange occurred in the last quarter of the eighteenth century. In this essay, I am, in other words, attempting to follow Roxann Wheeler’s recent polemical critique of the notion of “the culture of sentiment” as disablingly all-encompassing in our accounts of eighteenth-century slavery.28 Treasures that Money Can’t Buy In the mid-1980s, Thomas Haskell offered, as a rebuttal to Davis, an influential, and highly controversial, argument about the emergence of sentimental sympathy for slaves—and of abolitionism as a mass movement—in the late eighteenth Although I argue below that she does participate in the “irruption” consensus, Swaminathan offers a much-needed account of the differing rhetorical commitments of such participants in the abolition debate. 27 This is thematized throughout Specters of the Atlantic in the interpretation of abolitionists as exemplifying a “sentimental melancholy” and also as anticipating the “witness” to the Holocaust theorized by Derrida and Agamben. The argument unfolds throughout, but for key articulations see 174–75, 189, 211, 300 . 28 “Slavery and Feeling” panel, 2010 meeting of the American Society for EighteenthCentury Studies, Albuquerque, NM. 26

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century, one that attempted to revise the long-standing association between abolitionism and capitalism. Although Haskell himself does not address gender, his argument came at a crucial moment in the intellectual history of eighteenthcentury sentimentalism. Many feminist scholars of the 1980s rejected scornful views of sentiment, such as those offered by Williams, Sypher, and Jordan, arguing that “sentiment” has long been abjected through being associated with the feminine; their call for a reassessment of sentimentalism was a major factor in the development of many arguments for the cultural power, even centrality, of sentiment in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.29 Haskell’s essays stand out for their attempt to offer a concrete explanation for the sea-change in feeling in their claim that the culture of the marketplace itself placed demands on the merchant class that instilled a sense of responsibility and connection. Market relationships, in Haskell’s account, made people aware of—and forcefully connected to—distant others; broad familiarity with connections forged by the market represent what Haskell calls “recipe knowledge.” This “recipe knowledge” can lead Britons to see an equivalence between purchasing slaves in a West Indian port and going to Africa to kidnap them. But, as Lynn Festa suggests, Haskell ignores an obvious fact of which eighteenth-century commentators on slavery and commerce such as the Abbé Raynal were well aware. While the market might have had the power to forge connections between distant peoples, it also more clearly had the power to blind people to the human effects of their pursuit of self-interest.30 This critical view of the market, I will argue, dominated just those arguments about slavery which Haskell puts forward as showing that market recipe knowledge was the basis of the emergence of abolitionist sentiment.31 Haskell is so zealous in the defense of the positive moral effects of the market that he not only ignores the explicitly critical positions of eighteenth-century writers, but also overstates his agreement on this point with a key authority. Implicitly opposing Max Weber’s cultural approach to capitalism to Marx’s materialism—indeed, Haskell has been hailed as offering a Weberian alternative to Marxist models of abolitionist culture32—Haskell crucially misrepresents Weber’s view of the place of greed in emergent capitalist culture. Haskell quotes Weber’s contention that

Two foundational works in this vein are Jane Tomkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), and Nancy Armstrong, Desire and Domestic Fiction: A Political History of the Novel (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987). 30 Festa, Sentimental Figures of Empire, 213–14. 31 Menely in the present volume credits Haskell with a dialectical understanding of the capitalist marketplace (see Chapter 2, 51, below), but Haskell does not attend to the specific critique of the marketplace in such texts as Woolman’s. In contrast to my critique, Menely offers a very positive view of Haskell’s contribution. 32 Bender, “Introduction” to Anti-Slavery Debate, 11. 29

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Affect and Abolition in the Anglo-Atlantic, 1770–1830 / Boulukos the impulse to acquisition, pursuit of gain, of money, of the greatest possible amount of money, has in itself nothing to do with capitalism. This impulse exists and has existed among waiters, physicians, coachmen, artists, prostitutes, dishonest officials, soldiers, nobles, crusaders, gamblers, and beggars. One may say that it has been common to all sorts and conditions of men at all times and in all countries of the earth, wherever the objective possibility of it is or has been given. It should be taught in the kindergarten of cultural history that this naïve idea of capitalism must be given up once and for all. Unlimited greed for gain is not in the least identical with capitalism, and is still less its spirit. Capitalism may even be identical with the restraint, or at least a rational tempering of this irrational impulse.33

However, Haskell cuts off Weber just before his conclusion, in which Weber takes a more critical view of capitalism: “But capitalism is identical with the pursuit of profit, and forever renewed profit, by means of continuous, rational, capitalistic enterprise.” Weber’s central interest is in the paradoxical process through which a set of religious beliefs explicitly opposed to the pursuit of profit somehow came to make the pursuit of profit a central, self-justifying cultural value. Capitalism may not be simply equivalent to greed, but Weber emphasizes, not uncritically, that capitalism comes to justify the relentless pursuit of profit. This distinction may seem overly fine, but in fact it is crucial to understanding the Protestant abolitionism that Haskell points to as the product of market-based “recipe knowledge.” In his essay, Haskell closely examines only one abolitionist document, John Woolman’s 1762 essay “Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes, Part II.”34 Woolman provides Haskell with a concrete example of marketplace “recipe knowledge” in humanitarian abolitionism: Whatever Nicety of Distinction there may be, betwixt going in Person on Expeditions to catch Slaves, and buying those, with a View to Self-interest, which others have taken; it is clear and plain to an upright Mind, that such Distinction is in Words, not in Substance; for the Parties are concerned in the same Work, and have a necessary Connection with, and Dependence on, each other. For, were there none to purchase Slaves, they who live by stealing and selling them, would of Consequence do less at it.35

While Haskell italicizes the final phrase to emphasize that Woolman’s claim depends on an assumption of a responsibility born of market relations, I would instead emphasize the earlier phrase “with a view to self-interest.” While Haskell 33 Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York: Scribner, 1958), 17. Quoted by Haskell in Anti-Slavery Debate, 139. 34 Haskell does not distinguish between parts 1 and 2, but his key passages are from part 2. Part 1 was first published in 1746, part 2 in 1762. The quotations here are all from part 2, from John Woolman, The Journal and Essays of John Woolman, ed. Amelia Mott Gummere (New York: MacMillan, 1922), 348–81. 35 Woolman, Journal and Essays, 377.

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presents immersion in the marketplace culture of early capitalism as developing a sense of responsibility that helps lead to humanitarianism, Woolman himself is making an opposed point. It is the very “self-interest” licensed by that marketplace culture that blinds Woolman’s contemporaries to the moral responsibilities that their market exchanges should call forth from them. Indeed Woolman also reemphasizes the connection between these two insights born of close familiarity with market culture in a pithier formulation: “Some would buy a Negroe brought from Guiney, with a View to Self-interest, and keep him a Slave, who yet would seem to Scruple to take Arms, and join with men employed in taking Slaves” (377). Here the key connection between the moral failure of slave buyers and the blinding force of self-interest is more stark. In fact, for Woolman, the morally corrosive effects of self-interest in the marketplace culture of his day is a far more central theme than the claim that market relations beget responsibilities. Indeed, Woolman repeatedly addresses the issues of selfinterest and selfishness. He goes on to address the centrality of selfishness to the slave trade: Selfishness being indulged, clouds the Understanding; and where selfish Men, for a long Time, proceed on their Way without Opposition, the Deceivableness of Unrighteousness gets so rooted in their Intellects, that a candid Examination of Things relating to Self-interest is prevented; and in this Circumstance, some who would not agree to make a Slave of a Person whose Colour is like their own, appear easy in making Slaves of others of a different Colour, though their Understandings and Morals are equal to the Generality of Men of their own Colour. (367)

Woolman, being familiar with the market, seems to have a clearer recipe knowledge of the corrupting effects of self-interest than he has a sense of connection to enslaved Africans.36 This point is far more important to Woolman’s essay than the collapsing of the moral distinction between purchasing and personally capturing slaves. Indeed, the second part of the essay—from which Haskell’s key quotation comes—begins as follows: He who professeth to believe one Almighty Creator, and in his son Jesus Christ, and is yet more intent on the Honours, Profits and Friendships of the World, than he is in Singleness of Heart to stand faithful to the Christian Religion, is in the Channel of Idolatry.37

Woolman is centrally and explicitly concerned with the ways that a culture centered on profit—what Weber defines as “the spirit of capitalism”—undermines morality and religion. Indeed, Woolman is not nearly as interested in the experience For a related challenge to Haskell’s conception of “recipe knowledge,” see David Eltis, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 80–82. 37 Woolman, Journal and Essays, 52. 36

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and suffering of slaves themselves as he is in the immorality and irreligion born of capitalistic culture. While Woolman is certainly committed to a humanitarian goal, he does not use an explicit rhetoric of humanitarian concern, or any extended sentimental engagement with the experience of slaves.38 Instead he speaks in a familiar rhetoric of Protestant critique of worldliness and consequent falling away from God.39 Haskell argues against Marxian critiques of “bourgeois ideology” and “hegemony” by opposing a model in which the marketplace itself cultivates a “recipe knowledge” of connection and responsibility that has humanitarian results. Strikingly, Woolman, the one abolitionist Haskell examines, in fact addresses slavery to critique the marketplace and argue that accepting profit as a value leads to idolatry and a refusal to acknowledge moral responsibility. In other words, Woolman directly opposes Haskell’s rosy view of the market in the act of articulating the “recipe knowledge” it has apparently taught him. Despite Haskell’s supposed Weberianism, Weber would not be surprised in the least by Woolman’s strongly critical view of the dynamics of the marketplace. In the Protestant Ethic, Weber presents the emergence of the “spirit of capitalism” among the theological descendants of Puritanism as a striking paradox: “Examples of the condemnation of the pursuit of money and goods may be gathered without end from Puritan writings, and may be contrasted with the late mediaeval ethical literature, which was much more open-minded on this point” (157). Indeed, commenting on a passage from Benjamin Franklin that he presents as the embodiment of the spirit of capitalism, Weber himself sounds a strongly critical note: Let us pause a moment to consider this passage, the philosophy of which Kürnberger sums up in the words, “They make tallow out of cattle and money out of men.” The peculiarity of this philosophy of avarice appears to be the ideal of the honest man of recognized credit, and above all the idea of a duty of the individual toward the increase of his capital, which is assumed as an end in itself. Truly what is here preached is not simply a means of making one’s way in the world, but a peculiar ethic. (51)

The ethic Weber defines may not be identical with “greed,” entailing both responsibility (“the ideal of the honest man of recognized credit”), and also a devotion to profit such that Weber himself characterizes it as amounting to “a philosophy of avarice.” And Haskell could have found the same complex, two-sided dynamic that Woolman represents—showing “recipe knowledge” of both the responsibilities 38 Swaminathan notes that “Christianity provided both the initial foundation and language for sustained critiques of slavery in the early eighteenth century” (61), but also sees writers like Benezet (discussed below) as fusing Protestant Christian concerns with a budding secular humanitarianism (49). 39 See Hudson, “‘Britons Never Will be Slaves,’” for an account of the importance of Evangelical thought to early criticisms of the slave trade.

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and the excesses of the market—in a number of other important early antislavery thinkers, especially among the radical Protestant sects so crucial to Weber’s view of emergent capitalism. The important Quaker antislavery innovator and organizer Anthony Benezet, writing in 1759, attacks slave holding and trading as mere “avarice,” while, like Woolman, clearly delineating the moral responsibilities of “Purchasers”: I know there are many Arguments offered in favour of the Purchasers, but they are all drawn from Avarice or ill founded, none will stand the Test of that divine Rule: To do unto all Men, as we would they should do unto us. Without Purchasers, there would be no Trade; and consequently every Purchaser as he encourages the Trade, becomes partaker in the Guilt of it.40

Just like Woolman, Benezet shows a keen understanding of the dynamics of the market, and defines them primarily through the problem of “avarice.” It is an incomplete picture that shows Woolman and Benezet coming to their awareness of slavery’s cruelty through the connecting power of the marketplace. One could argue that they come to an awareness of slavery through their intense interest in the moral dangers of the marketplace, that slavery emblematizes these dangers for them. Certainly, both men invoke the responsibilities attendant on market exchange not to explain their own sense of connection to slaves, but instead to emphasize their culture’s typical failure to recognize and uphold those responsibilities. John Wesley, the tremendously influential evangelist, writing in 1774 joins with Woolman and Benezet in attacking the profit motive as lying behind the slave trade: How will you prove it necessary that one hundred, that one, of those slaves should be procured? “Why, it is necessary to my gaining an hundred thousand pounds.” Perhaps so: But how is this necessary? It is very possible you might be both a better and a happier man, if you had not a quarter of it. I deny that your gaining one thousand is necessary either to your present or eternal happiness.41

Lynn Festa pithily summarizes Adam Smith’s view of the problem of distance in sentimental feeling: “the smallest injury to the self supercedes the catastrophe of others.”42 Somewhat paradoxically, the case could be made that it is this very principle that lies behind the early critiques of slavery by members of radical Protestant sects. Their central concern is not so much with the Africans themselves, but instead with the corrupting effects of self-interest and marketplace behavior on the moral values of their immediate communities. Their view of marketplace Anthony Benezet, Observations on the Inslaving, Purchasing and Importing of Negroes (Germantown, PA: Christopher Sower, 1759), 3. From Early American Imprints, Series I: Evans digital edition (1639–1800). 41 John Wesley, Thoughts upon Slavery (Philadelphia: Cruikshank, 1774), 39. From Early American Imprints, Series I: Evans digital edition (1639–1800). 42 Festa, Sentimental Figures of Empire, 213. 40

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behavior is closer to that of a public scandalized by Mandeville’s “Fable of the Bees” than it is to the views of Hume or Smith. And, indeed, their condemnation of slavery is all the more absolute because they understand it as a form of Mammon or idol worship. In addition to having a very different orientation to commerce than do Raynal, Clarkson, and the late-century abolitionists more generally, these early radical Protestant arguments for abolition should not be unproblematically assimilated to the category of the sentimental, and are, arguably, only assimilated to “humanitarianism” in retrospect. Rhetorically, they are primarily structured not as engagingly sympathetic accounts of suffering slaves, but rather as jeremiads about contemporary moral failings. Benezet, chronologically the first of the three, is notably more sentimental than the other two, asking his readers to imagine the suffering of captives and their families: “How many mourn, a Husband, a Wife, a Child, a Parent, or some near relation taken from them.”43 But the captives in question are not Africans, but colonists taken by “Native Americans.” Benezet does ask his reader to use this familiar experience to understand the suffering of Africans, but the direct representation of suffering is that of the colonists themselves. This seeming sentimental appeal is part of Benezet’s jeremiad. Of the African slave trade, he remarks, “dare we say that this very practice is not one Cause of the Calamities that we at present suffer, and that the Captivity of our people is not to teach us to feel for others, and to induce us to Discourage a Trade, by which many thousands are yearly captivated?” (2–3). It is an angry God, not Anthony Benezet himself, who is intent on opening the hearts of the colonists to the sufferings of Africans. Scholars, working on the model of seachange in public feeling, have readily categorized such writings as “humanitarian” or “sentimental”; but in their particularity, it is difficult to classify these specific works in such terms. To do so requires their retrospective assimilation with a larger body of texts; this assimilation, I am arguing, distorts our accounts of their specific cultural work. Money Can’t Buy Me Love Strikingly, the first distinctly sentimental fictional depiction of slavery in eighteenth-century England—one that was constantly rewritten throughout the century—is also an example of attacking slavery, not so much in itself, but instead as a crystallizing example of the failure of feeling to operate in the capitalistic marketplace. Richard Steele’s “Inkle and Yarico” uses slavery specifically to attack the failures of sympathy, and more specifically its corruption by the marketplace, and his story does not appear to have been intended or received, initially, as a commentary on slavery in particular. When discussed, this has been seen as an illustration of the indifference to slavery of the British public in the early century. Benezet, Observations, 2.

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However, charting the development of Inkle and Yarico stories over the course of the century shows that the application of the tale as a critique of slavery was actually muted, rather than enhanced, as the slave trade became the subject of public debate.44 Further, as the story came to be presented in more overtly sentimental terms, the critique it offered of marketplace behavior was also greatly softened, even eliminated. Inkle’s depravity as a slave trader was made more and more to appear as an individual failing, rather than as the symptomatic failing of the merchant class or even of colonial plantation owners. Steele, as co-author of The Spectator with Joseph Addison, is often adduced as one of the creators of the modern, bourgeois self; The Spectator, in this view, is a kind of training ground for the middle classes to achieve respectability, manners, and controlled self-presentation. However, the sentimentality of the story depends on identification with the innocent, sincere love of Yarico and a disgust with the inexcusably self-interested behavior of Inkle. The dangers of the marketplace are touched on lightly, but are meant to be telling.45 Inkle is described so as subtly to separate his attractions from his intentions: Our Adventurer was the third Son of an eminent Citizen, who had taken particular Care to instill into his Mind an early Love of Gain, by making him a perfect Master of Numbers, and consequently giving him a quick View of Loss and Advantage, and preventing the natural Impulses of his Passions, by Prepossession towards his Interests. With a Mind thus turned, young Inkle had a Person every way agreeable, a ruddy Vigour in his Countenance, Strength in his limbs, with Ringlets of fair Hair loosely flowing on his Shoulders.46

Steele refrains from explicitly stating that “a mind thus turned” is in opposition to “a Person in every way agreeable,” but he relies for the ultimate effectiveness of his story on the reader to discern the implied distinction between body and mind. Nor does he offer evaluative comment on Inkle’s training. In fact, in so far as he comments, he seems positive. Inkle is a “perfect master” of numbers. Steele does explain that Inkle’s habitual “quick view of loss and advantage”—his mental habit of treating the world as if it could fit in a double-entry account—has the effect of “preventing the natural impulses of his Passions, by a Prepossession 44 See Frank Felsenstein, ed., English Trader, Indian Maid: Representing Gender, Race, and Slavery in the New World: An Inkle and Yarico Reader (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), for an excellent anthology of versions of the story from throughout the century. 45 My reading of “Inkle and Yarico” accords with Nicholas Hudson’s view of much early century fiction as critical of the marketplace; see his “Social Rank, ‘The Rise of the Novel,’ and Whig Histories of Eighteenth-Century Fiction,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 17, no. 4 (2005): 563–98. 46 Richard Steele’s “Inkle and Yarico” (The Spectator no. 11: Tuesday, March 13, 1711) is cited here from Donald Bond, ed., The Spectator (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956), 47–51; 50.

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towards his interests.” Is this a good or a bad thing? Steele leaves his position unstated, but clearly implied. Passions need to be regulated, and A. O. Hirschman argues that, over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, capitalism came to be understood as a good thing, largely as “interests”—especially financial interests—came, increasingly, to be understood as giving a check to passions.47 Following this logic, trade—doux commerce, in the French formulation—came to be understood as a civilizing force. But this is a development of the later century. For Steele, interest does not balance passion, but cruelly abolishes it. Inkle is shipwrecked, and after being rescued by Yarico, the beautiful Indian maiden, the lovers enter an idyll: The Indian grew immediately enamoured of him, and consequently sollicitous for his Preservation: She therefore conveyed him to a Cave, where she gave him a Delicious Repast of Fruits, and led him to a Stream to slake his Thirst…. In this manner did the Lovers pass away their Time, till they had learn’d a Language of their own, in which the Voyager communicated to his Mistress, how happy he should be to have her in his Country, where she should be Cloathed in such Silks as his Wastecoat was made of, and be carried in Houses drawn by Horses, without being exposed to Wind or Weather. All this he promised her the Enjoyment of, without such Fears and Alarms as they were there tormented with. (50–51)

Despite the love idyll, Inkle has not left behind the materialistic culture of the English merchant class. Indeed, his mind dwells on luxury silks and splendid carriages. While he is not preoccupied with accumulation, he is with consumption. Inkle trains her to spot passing ships, and after she does so, and she agrees to follow Inkle on board an English vessel. However, rescued from his vulnerable state, and reentering a more familiar one, Inkle returns to his mathematical habits of mind: To be short, Mr. Thomas Inkle, now coming into English Territories, began seriously to reflect upon his loss of Time, and to weigh with himself how many Days Interest of his Mony he had lost during his Stay with Yarico. This thought made the Young Man very pensive, and careful what Account he should be able to give his Friends of his Voyage. Upon which Considerations, the prudent and frugal young Man sold Yarico to a Barbadian Merchant; notwithstanding that the poor Girl, to incline him to commiserate her Condition, told him that she was with Child by him: But he only made use of that Information, to rise in his Demands upon the Purchaser. (51)

Steele narrates Inkle’s shift back to his interests from his passions by punning on the word “account.” What account will he offer his friends? Will it be a narrative The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before Its Triumph (1977; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). See also Amartya Sen, On Ethics and Economics (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987), and Pierre Force, Self Interest Before Adam Smith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003). 47

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tale of his developing passion for an Indian maiden? Will he tell of his gratitude to her for saving his life and tending to him? No, the account he will offer will be strictly financial. It will be a story of losses cut by all available means. Inkle is so tragically distanced from his passions by his market-mindedness that he fails to see his connection not only to Yarico, but even to his own child—the child she is bearing. The story does not offer an explicit moral; Steele only indicates his position on the story by allowing his narrator a closing remark: I was so touch’d with this Story, (which I think should be always a Counterpart to the Ephesian Matron) that I left the Room with Tears in my Eyes; which a Woman of Arietta’s good Sense, did, I am sure, take for greater Applause, than any Compliments I could make her. (51)

The proper tribute is tears—an acknowledgement of the very same sympathetic emotion that Inkle himself abandons in favor of self-interest. This story was published in 1711, right as the British negotiated for the asiento, showing a public intention of the British nation to become heavily involved in the international slave trade. While it is ambiguous what Steele might mean to be saying about slavery in general in this sentimental tableau—as the focus is on male and marketoriented failures of feeling—nonetheless he is clearly doing nothing to promote the image of slavery. Indeed, given the indictment of greed, he is not allowing much sympathy for arguments about the economic benefits of slavery and the slave trade that will begin to crop up in the next few decades. While Inkle is portrayed as a market insider, clearly Steele is making no claims about “recipe knowledge” born of practical economic experience. Still, Steele is demonstrating that the prejudice against trade, and against the pursuit of self-interest, was alive and well in the early eighteenth century, and that critical views of slavery had no necessary connection to the endorsement of capitalism. Stephen Duck’s poetic retelling of the story, first published in 1736, very much emphasizes the critique of avarice, and the link between avarice and slavery; indeed, he renames the central characters “Avaro” and “Amanda.” Avaro’s training in avarice by his father, and even his pledging of (imaginary) material goods to Amanda during the love-idyll are carefully preserved from Steele’s tale. However, Duck does not precisely follow Steele’s opposition between passion and interest, but instead sees a conflict between two passions, gratitude and avarice: For, tho’ his Av’rice moves him to the Ill His gratitude within him struggles still; And ‘twixt two Passions, neither guides his Will.48

Contrary to Haskell’s theory, the struggle is resolved by the force of the market—but it is by the market’s strange ability to act as a solvent of moral 48 Stephen Duck, “Avaro and Amanda,” Poems on Several Occasions (London: Osborne, 1738), 61–92; 86.

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concerns. Rather than coming to understand the purchasing of a slave as the moral equivalent of slave raiding, Avaro literally sees the slave market, and rather than recognizing any connection, he is inspired only with greed which overwhelms his sense of even the most intimate human responsibility: So stood the doubtful Youth a-while; nor wou’d Forsake the Evil, nor pursue the Good; Till, as the Sailors in the Haven Stay, To purchase Slaves, the Planters croud the Key: One asks, for what the Negro may be sold; Then bids a price, and shews the tempting Gold: Which when Avaro views with greedy Eyes, He soon resolves to gain th’alluring Prize; Nor Oaths, nor Gratitude, can longer bind Her fate he thus determines in his Mind. (86–87)

Here, rather than abstracting from generalized marketplace experience to a concept of connection and responsibility, Duck’s Avaro, seeing the sale of slaves, realizes that he can exchange his lover for “tempting gold,” and cannot resist the temptation. Perhaps the most popular version of the Inkle and Yarico story in the century, George Colman’s “Inkle and Yarico: An Opera” was published and performed in 1787, the same year as the public launching of the abolition movement. Colman retains the idea that Inkle’s failure to feel for Yarico is caused by his father’s training, but abandons the association between a marketplace mentality and a failure of compassion. In Colman’s play, the character most sympathetic to Yarico is Sir Christopher Curry, the governor of Jamaica. In a reversal of Duck’s version of the slave market scene, contemplating the purchase of slaves does have the effect of bringing immediate moral awareness. But the awareness is profoundly ambivalent; the character coming to a moral realization—and expressing an irrepressible feeling—does so because he is in the process of purchasing a slave. Feeling, apparently, is more difficult to avoid or ignore than it was in early versions of the story. In Colman’s play even Inkle himself seems to feel for Yarico’s fate. Not recognizing his intended father-in-law Sir Christopher, Inkle offers Yarico to him, wanting to be quickly rid of her: “If you could satisfy me you would use her mildly, and treat her with more kindness than is usual—for I can tell you she’s of no common stamp—perhaps we might agree.”49 Although Inkle is still motivated by the pursuit of self-interest, within the romantic comedy plot, his desire to shed one lover in order to secure a more attractive match is more conventional, and allows for his concern for Yarico. Sir Christopher responds at first as though a slave were any commonplace commodity, considering whether he has a need for one and how he could use her: “Oho! a slave! Faith, now I think 49 Colman’s play is quoted from Felsenstein, English Trader, Indian Maid, 166–233; 211.

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on’t, my daughter may want an attendant or two extraordinary.” He goes on to consider slaves in insultingly physical terms: “and as you say she’s a delicate girl, above the common run, and none of your thick-lipped, flat-nosed, squabby, dumpling dowdies. I don’t much care if—.” Inkle seems concerned at this callous language, interjecting: “And for her treatment—” (221). Suddenly, surprisingly, Sir Christopher shifts dramatically, offering a sentimental rebuke to Inkle that both exceeds and fails to meet the standard of the “responsibility” of Haskell’s marketplace recipe knowledge: Look ye, young man; I love to be plain: I shall treat her a good deal better than you would, I fancy; for though I witness this custom every day, I can’t help thinking the only excuse for buying our fellow creatures is to rescue them from the hands of those who are unfeeling enough to bring them to market. (221)

Sir Christopher’s position carries the authority of sentimental seriousness. He is, after all, rebuking the notorious ingrate Inkle. And yet the position he takes is very strange. He claims to be deeply familiar with the slave market—“I witness this custom every day.” As the governor of a slave island, he is more than a sentimental witness to slave markets; he is also an authority guaranteeing their continuation. Indeed, he does not oppose slave sales, but redefines them. He offers “the only excuse” for buying them, “to rescue them from the hands of those unfeeling enough to bring them to market.” Sir Christopher offers a logic for redefining the “recipe knowledge” of responsibility through the market. If slave sellers are inhumane and unfeeling, could it be that they are met in the marketplace by kind, caring purchasers? Is the only strategy for dealing with the responsibilities of the marketplace to avoid it? If selling—particularly as represented in the Inkle and Yarico story—can be an “unfeeling” act, can buying then be an act of love? Colman seems to embrace new ideas about the marketplace. On the one hand, it can be a place of responsibility and moral failing, but on the other, it offers possibilities of redemption. Colman’s conception here curiously— probably accidentally—embraces both ameliorationist arguments and proslavery arguments.50 Ameliorationists, including Clarkson, felt that restricting purchases of new slaves would force planters to care for their slaves and ameliorate their condition, thus creating a moral distinction between the cruelty of those who export slaves from Africa and those who already own them in the West Indies.51 By invoking “rescue,” however, Colman could be understood as following William Snelgrave’s influential proslavery account of West Africa, in his argument that the African slave trade itself could be understood as a rescue mission, bringing Africans from a savage, heathen, cannibalistic world into colonies that offer the

See Brycchan Carey’s account of Colman’s failure to engage seriously with abolitionist politics in his essay in this volume (see Chapter 5, 123, below). 51 See my account of Clarkson’s ameliorationism: “The Politics of Silence: Mansfield Park and the Amelioration of Slavery,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 39, no.3 (2006): 371–73. 50

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possibility of Christian redemption.52 Ultimately, Colman sentimentalizes the slave market, not simply by rejecting it, but by injecting both buyer and seller with intense feelings regarding the slave over whom they are bartering. From Sir Christopher’s perspective, to sell a slave is—like Inkle—to deny one’s emotional relationship with the slave, but to purchase a slave is to create an emotional relationship. However, Colman shows us that despite Inkle’s decision to sell her, the moment of exchange is in fact also emotionally charged for him. The moment is radically ambiguous as a statement about slavery and the slave trade. Colman reimagines Steele’s story to make it more thoroughly sentimental—all the characters are now awash in feeling—but he does so in such a way as to disrupt any expectation that feelings about slavery lead to abolitionism. I’d Rather Go Blind Fifty years after Steele published Inkle and Yarico, and two decades before Colman’s play, Sarah Scott imagined the grateful slave trope in her History of Sir George Ellison (1766), completely reversing Steele’s understanding of slavery and self-interest. Self-interest and sympathy, rather than being opposed, come into complete alignment for Scott. Her hero George Ellison sympathizes with slaves just enough to imagine a way to manipulate their self-interest, and therefore to harness it to his own. Scott—writing a decade before Smith published The Wealth of Nations—seems to anticipate Smith’s famous critique of slavery’s inefficiency through the lens of free labor. Rather than being excoriated for refusing to show any gratitude to his slaves for the labor that supports his life, as was Inkle, Ellison is celebrated for his “feeling” when he manipulates his slaves into becoming grateful to him, and thereby embracing their slavery.53 Scott is no abolitionist; she is certainly an ameliorationist, but her vision does not include an end to slavery or the slave trade but rather the reform and perfection of the institution. Moving from Steele to Colman to grateful slave fictions, we see sentimental sympathy go from being used to attack and expose the sinful excesses of self-interest to defending rational self-interest—and ultimately even slavery itself. Such representations of slavery have been claimed as steps toward abolition from Clarkson’s 1808 History until the present. But I contend that to assign such texts to a teleological development of antislavery and then define their meaning from their position in the teleology only serves to blind us to the actual complexities, and actual development, of eighteenth-century culture. Early antislavery texts—both Inkle and Yarico and the jeremiads—use slavery as 52 For my account of Snelgrave and his influence, see “Olaudah Equiano and the Eighteenth-Century Debate on Africa,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 40, no. 2 (2007): 241– 55, esp. 244. 53 This is a summary of my reading of Scott’s novel in The Grateful Slave, 128–35. For the novel itself, see The History of Sir George Ellison, ed. Betty Rizzo (1766; Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996).

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a sign of the moral blindness ensuing from the excessive self-interest in market culture. Later, especially in the 1780s, abolitionists (including Raynal, Clarkson, and even Equiano) might critique slavery as a form of avarice or cruelty, but they nonetheless wished ultimately to reconcile it to the progressive and civilizing force of the marketplace. In other words, early critiques of slavery take place in a culture in which the market is always under suspicion and in which the pursuit of selfinterest is most readily understood as vice. By the 1780s, however, the dynamic is reversed, and even committed Christian abolitionists like Thomas Clarkson want to harness the power of the market and of self-interest to the project of improving, ameliorating, and thereby, perhaps, eventually eliminating slavery. One could argue, then, that what changes is not so much the level of public empathy for colonial slaves, but the conceptualization of the relationship between slavery and the capitalistic marketplace. Early in the century, to attack slavery is to attack the excesses of the market. By the time abolition moves into the public sphere as an issue of debate, however, whether one wishes to maintain, reform, or eliminate slavery, one must provide a market-oriented justification. Capitalist ideology certainly dominates the age of abolition, but not more so among antislavery, ameliorationist, or proslavery writers. Abolitionists may have eagerly made use of sentimentalism, but sentimentalism does not imply an endorsement of either abolition or capitalism. Finally, we must understand that colonial slavery was a matter of public discourse throughout the century. Representing slavery—even representing its violence and inhumanity in sentimental terms—was not always an act of “witness” for or against capitalism, or even the slave trade itself.

Chapter 2

Acts of Sympathy: Abolitionist Poetry and Transatlantic Identification Tobias Menely

Promoted by Enlightenment moral philosophers as the crucial medium of ethicopolitical community, sympathy has developed a modern reputation as being neither consistent enough to constitute an ethical virtue nor charged enough to provide a political motivation. Sympathetic imperatives, seen as wayward and weak, offer an unsatisfactory explanation for the historical emergence of new forms of communal identification, because sympathy is understood, at best, to consolidate preexisting collective bonds. In this essay, I ask how sympathetic appeals in the British antislavery movement might be understood to act in such a way so as to extend collective identification. I focus on the self-reflexive rhetoric of sympathy in three abolitionist poems published in England in 1788, the year of the first nationwide antislavery campaign: Helen Maria Williams’s A Poem on the Bill Lately Passed for Regulating the Slave Trade, Hannah More’s Slavery, a Poem, and Ann Yearsley’s A Poem on the Inhumanity of the Slave-Trade.1 While their ideological commitments varied, all three writers were defining the public and political role of poetry in new and ambitious ways. All three, I argue, recognized a performative dimension to their humanitarian verse, as the medium of a sympathetic appeal that seeks to alter the identity of the audience to which it is addressed. In his Treatise of Human Nature (1740), David Hume had established the mediated quality of sympathetic identification and, by extension, its social implications in a proliferating print culture. He defines sympathy as the capacity “to receive by communication” another’s “inclinations and sentiments, however different from, or even contrary to our own.”2 In a humanitarian context, the sympathetic appeal may be understood as performative when this affective communication acts, at the edge of the body politic, to alter identification and/ 1 Helen Maria Williams, A Poem on the Bill Lately Passed for Regulating the Slave Trade (London 1788); Hannah More, Slavery, a Poem (London 1788); Ann Yearsley, A Poem on the Inhumanity of the Slave-Trade (London 1788). Hereafter poems cited in text by line number. 2 David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. David Fate Norton and Mary J. Norton (1740; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 206. My emphasis.

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or instigate political-juridical change. In this essay, I argue that such action may occur and yet be impossible to narrate. The sympathetic appeal is, in J. L. Austin’s terms, a perlocutionary speech act.3 Whereas the illocution names its own activity (e.g., “I promise”) and functions within an authoritative context, the perlocution acts, in the words of Stanley Cavell, without “standing conditions for its felicity.”4 It transpires within “the field of human interactions which is not governed by the conventions or conditions or rituals Austin invokes, but represents the complementary field occupied by or calling for improvisation and passion and aggression” (xx). As a perlocution, the sympathetic appeal occurs in a communicative situation in which its power is uncertain, for it seeks to constitute the very audience that would recognize and so make meaningful (“felicitous”) its performative force. The challenge of representing sympathy’s role in a given historical realignment of interests and identifications—an abiding problem in the historiography of abolition—reflects the perlocutionary quality of the sympathetic appeal. My aim in reading these three abolitionist poems is not to expose their imbrication within the epistemic or ideological context of their historical present, in line with recent criticism,5 but rather to consider how they stage their own status as verbal events or acts, which potentially alter the very fabric of their present, establishing the context of their reception. As J. Hillis Miller provocatively suggests, “only a performative theory of the historical event can account for historical change.”6 Long disdained for being narrowly topical, humanitarian poetry, I suggest, resists the imperatives of historicizing interpretation because its appeals, emerging from the contingency of the present, are addressed to a community still to come. The eighteenth-century Atlantic was the scene not only of the Middle Passage, in which human beings were remade into saleable and insurable objects, but also of the sympathetic acts by which national interests were reconfigured by way of transnational identifications. Before turning to the 1788 abolitionist poems, I consider the infelicity and ineffectuality associated with the sympathetic appeal in narratives about poetry’s place in abolition.

3 See J. L. Austin, How to Do Things with Words (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1975). 4 Stanley Cavell, forward to Shoshana Felman’s The Scandal of the Speaking Body: Don Juan with J. L. Austin, or Seduction in Two Language, trans. Catherine Porter (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), xx. A number of speech act theorists have argued that the distinction between perlocution and illocution cannot be maintained. 5 See, for example, Alan Richardson, “Darkness Visible? Race and Representation in Bristol Abolitionist Poetry, 1770–1810,” in Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing and Empire, 1780–1830, ed. Tim Fulford and Peter Kitson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998): 129–47. 6 J. Hillis Miller, Speech Acts in Literature (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001), 112.

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Humanitarian Poetry and the Narrative of Abolition When Thomas Clarkson composed the first chronicle of British abolitionism leading to the Slave Trade Act of 1807, he emphasized the role played by poets as “coadjutors” in the campaign to turn national sentiment against human commerce.7 His progressive historical narrative may be characterized as sentimental because he sees “impulses, feelings, and dispositions” as the locus of communal life and the primary impetus of political change (1.4–5). Since poetry acts on and alters the passions of its readers, literary history and abolitionism are closely allied in his chronology. In his well-known map of the antislavery movement as a vast river basin, one of the three tributaries is formed by the contributions of intellectuals and writers. Identifying Pope, Dyer, Thomson, Shenstone, Savage, Sterne, and Cowper as wellsprings in the history-altering torrent of abolitionist sentiment, Clarkson associates an emergent literary canon not with aesthetic excellence but with public and political influence. He devotes special attention to several works that significantly shaped national sentiment. Bicknell and Day’s The Dying Negro (1773) was one of the earliest poems written “expressly in behalf of the oppressed Africans,” and it “added to the sympathy in favour of suffering humanity, which was now beginning to show itself in the kingdom” (1.82–83). Citing a famous antislavery passage in Cowper’s poem The Task (1785), Clarkson attributes Cowper’s influence, in The Task and in his popular 1788 antislavery ballads, to the “value . . . put upon his sentiments, and the extraordinary circulation of his works” (1.108). Clarkson himself draws on rhetorical strategies anchored in the principles of moral sense philosophy and the conventions of sentimental literature. Mixing documentary and sentimental modes in a manner characteristic of antislavery rhetoric, he graphically depicts the devastation of native African communities, the horrors of the Middle Passage, and the brutality of West Indian plantation life—in scenes, he says, which are meant to “excite our pity” (1.17). Clarkson expects his readers to identify with the inhabitants of distant lands, expects that a sympathetic appeal will prevail over the alienating effects of geographical distance and racial difference. Direct participation in the slave trade, by contrast, requires the extinction of “moral feeling,” a willed imperviousness to the “tears and groans of innocent strangers” (1.19). Clarkson understands the ethical imperatives that animate popular abolitionism to be premised on sympathetic identification, even when mediated across transatlantic distances. He ascribes to the sympathetic appeal a performative quality: more than describing given identities, it actively constitutes new identifications. Yet the temporality of this linguistic action turns out to be difficult to narrate. Clarkson relies, after all, on a map to picture the abolitionist movement, refiguring sequential causation as static simultaneity, the temporality of humanitarian sympathy suspended between not quite and always already. Writing almost two decades earlier, at the beginning of the legislative process that culminated in the 1807 Act, Anna Barbauld was less sanguine about the 7 Thomas Clarkson, The History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, 2 vols (1808; Frank Cass: London, 1968), 1.108.

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role sympathetic appeals play in transforming national sentiment. Her “Epistle to William Wilberforce,” written in the weeks immediately after the failure of Wilberforce’s parliamentary motion to abolish the slave trade, begins by describing the ineffectuality of sentimental abolitionist rhetoric: “Cease, Wilberforce, to urge thy generous strains! / Thy Country knows the sin, and stands the shame! / The Preacher, Poet, Senator in vain / Has rattled in her sight the Negro’s chain.”8 The personified nation is identified with its gaze—“her sight,” “her averted eyes”—the medium by which its citizens know and feel for distant others. The “Country” is a collective spectator constituted by modes of attention and address, and it is this rhetorically animated collective body, a public and not the state, that bears moral responsibility for the nation’s actions. This is why Barbauld, like Clarkson, aligns the nation with the reading public. According to Barbauld, however, the bond forged between those who witness and those who suffer is too fragile to upend a long-standing and lucrative economic system: “She knows and she persists— Still Afric bleeds, / Uncheck’d, the human traffic still proceeds; / She stamps her infamy to future time” (15–17). Against the claims of avarice and custom, an “eloquence” that traffics in “images of woe” will “fail” (25, 55). The “muse,” she writes, is “too soon awaked,” implying that poetry may retrospectively document but not act to bring about abolition. Despite these expressions of disillusionment, Barbauld does not entirely eschew the prophetic mood, the poet’s performative promise of a “future time” in which justice will be realized and “the human traffic” ended. This time “to come” is given an eschatological dimension in the second stanza, associated with divine “vengeance” (42), but in the first and final stanzas the future anticipated as the basis for retrospective moral scrutiny is definitively secular, recorded by “faithful History, in her various page” (120). It is as if the humanitarian appeal simultaneously addresses a contemporary public that ignores its call and a future public that has heeded its call. The development that accounts for the difference between the present and “Succeeding times” (118), a nation ossified now in its narrow interests and a universal justice to come, is left undefined. This lacuna, I would argue, reflects not the failure of the sympathetic appeal but the impossibility of narrating its success. While separated by the legislative triumph of the Slave Trade Act, both Clarkson and Barbauld recognize the ambition of humanitarian poetry to shape public opinion and thereby motivate political-juridical change. The final three decades of the eighteenth century had witnessed an immense outpouring of Anna Letitia Barbauld, “Epistle to William Wilberforce, Esq. On the Rejection of the Bill for Abolishing the Slave Trade,” Anna Letitia Barbauld: Selected Poetry and Prose, ed. William McCarthy and Elizabeth Craft (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2002): 121–26, lines 1–4. While skeptical of the motivating power of sympathy, in her essay “On Romances” (Miscellaneous Pieces in Prose [London 1792]), Barbauld addresses those who see compassion as necessarily self-interested: “Surely they who would thus reduce the sympathetic emotions of pity to a system of refined selfishness, have but ill attended to the genuine feelings of humanity” (44–45). 8

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antislavery verse.9 Many of the era’s leading poets—including Mary Robinson, William Cowper, Hannah More, Helen Maria Williams, Erasmus Darwin, William Lisle Bowles, William Blake, Robert Southey, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and William Wordsworth—wrote poems, informed by the rhetorical conventions of sentimentality, animadverting on the slave trade and plantation slavery. This period of highly politicized literary production remains overshadowed by the story of the 1798 publication of Lyrical Ballads and the subsequent consolidation of high Romantic aestheticism. Wordsworth’s “language of men,” enlivened by the immediacy of “flesh and blood,” has in our critical genealogies taken the place of a poetics charged by the sight of vulnerable African bodies and the imperatives of a universalist humanitarianism mediated by sympathy.10 The effacement of antislavery poetry from the canon follows Romanticism’s rejection of what Wordsworth calls the “personification of abstract ideas” (such personifications, we will see, play a significant role in performative sympathy) and Romanticism’s skepticism regarding the political instrumentality of literary sympathy. Two charges against literary sympathy are widely echoed in modern criticism: 1) it is unable to effect a meaningful substitution between the witness and the victim (it fails to constitute an identification, to alter interest), and 2) the passions it creates in the witness do not lead to ameliorative activity on behalf of the victim (it fails to compel action). In Virtue in Distress, R. F. Brissenden sees a tragic element in later eighteenth-century depictions of suffering: “Most moving of all are the situations which are completely irremediable, those which all the generous impulses in the world can do nothing to alter, and to which we can offer only the tribute of our pity.”11 In her account of literary sensibility, Janet Todd describes literary feeling in the 1770s and 1780s as having “a decadent quality about it, a self-indulgent physicality and a self-contemplating vanity.” Sensibility, she claims, aims only to create an “emotional response, whose beginning and end are literary.”12 Susan Manning sums up the general critical consensus when she suggests that literary sensibility’s “narrative signature was . . . disjunctive, fragmentary.”13 See James Basker, Amazing Grace: An Anthology of Poems about Slavery, 1660– 1810 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005). 10 William Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1802), William Wordsworth, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 600. In the 1805 version of The Prelude, Wordsworth looks back at the “stir / Of a contention which had been raised up / Against the Traffickers in Negro blood,” a movement that spread “virtuous feeling, through the heart / Of the English People” and inspired “a whole nation crying with one voice.” Wordsworth attributes to abolitionism the seeds of a wider revolutionary ferment, and yet he acknowledges that the issue “had ne’er / Fastened on my affections,” which were focused on the transformative potential of the French Revolution (10.203–19). 11 R. F. Brissenden, Virtue in Distress: Studies in the Novel of Sentiment from Richardson to Sade (New York: Harper & Row, 1974), 6. 12 Janet Todd, Sensibility: An Introduction (New York: Methuen, 1986), 62, 93. 13 Susan Manning, “Sensibility,” Cambridge Companion to English Literature 1740– 1830, ed. Thomas Keymer and John Mee (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004): 80–99, 86. 9

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The mediated emotions of sympathetic identification seem to lack a force (a force more readily assigned to interest, reason, or principle) that would transcend situation and generate narrative movement, which is why studies of sentimental culture focus on its paradigmatic particularism: the isolated tableau of suffering, the freefloating affect of the sentimentalist.14 Recent scholarship has been sensitive to the sophisticated rhetorical elements of sentimental humanitarianism, but it remains axiomatic that the sympathetic appeal forever fails to complete the substitution of interests it promises to enact. Both Lynn Festa and Amit Rai see cross-racial sympathetic identifications as imbricated within forms of imperial differentiation that overdetermine the relation between the subject and object of pathos. “Pity carries within itself the very differences it is supposed to transcend,” Festa writes. “Sympathetic identification creates difference rather than similitude,” Rai claims.15 Suspicion among literary historians regarding the ethical imperatives of an antislavery poetry based in the conventions of sensibility has parallels in the larger historiographic debate on British abolition. As Clarkson himself observed, abolition raises difficult sociohistorical questions about the sources of moral obligation, the enlargement of collective sensibilities, and the extension of political rights. In the past half century, the governing assumption has been that abolitionist motivations must be aligned with the interests of class and nation. The Briton’s identification with the enslaved African is necessarily preceded by some more intrinsic identity. This argument is exemplified by the work of David Brion Davis, who links abolitionism with the rising middle class’s defense of wage labor and assertion of cultural hegemony.16 Other historians, notably Linda Colley and Christopher Leslie Brown, have argued that, particularly after the American Revolution, chattel slavery was incompatible with Britain’s self-image as a nation and burgeoning empire uniquely hospitable to individual liberty.17 Responding most directly to Davis, Thomas Haskell published a two-part essay connecting “humanitarian sensibility”—a felt experience of obligation not reducible 14 For example, Karen Halttunen claims in “Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain in Anglo-American Culture” that “emotional tableaux took precedence over narrative coherence” (307). American Historical Review 100, no. 2 (1995): 303–34. 15 Lynn Festa, Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 4. Amit Rai, Rule of Sympathy: Sentiment, Race, and Power, 1750–1850 (New York: Palgrave, 2002), xix. 16 See especially The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution 1770–1823 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975). The debate is summarized in Thomas Bender’s Introduction to The Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), which collects some of its key texts. 17 Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation 1707–1837 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992), 350–60. Christopher Leslie Brown, Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006). For a version of this argument with a literary inflection, see Suvir Kaul, Poems of Nation, Anthems of Empire: English Verse in the Long Eighteenth Century (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2000), particularly chapter 5.

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to self-interest—with certain cognitive changes wrought by the global expansion of the capitalist market. Haskell argues that interest, obligation, and motivation all manifest within contingent modes of narrative perception, what he calls a “cognitive style.”18 Rather than assuming that “feelings influence perception,” Haskell suggests that “antislavery sentiment,” with its “upwelling of powerful feelings,” reflected “a prior change in the perception of causal relation” (112). An eighteenthcentury market economy defined by contractual relationships, speculative financial instruments, and global commerce required in its participants a capacity to analyze causality across temporal and spatial distance. The expanding market effected a new awareness of “causal connection” among remote strangers (111), as well as innovative forms of “recipe knowledge” (130), ways of coordinating networks of actors and intervening in social, economic, and political systems. Changed perceptions of social causality and opportunities for ameliorative action, in turn, expanded the horizon of moral responsibility. It is worth noting that Haskell’s dialectical account does not ignore the fact that speculative capitalism and a global market produced the very forms of systemic oppression to which humanitarian sensibility responded. “There is nothing illogical,” he writes, “about attributing to the market two distinct effects: it authorized the more aggressive pursuit of interest in business affairs and by expanding the horizon of causal perception, it also encouraged in some people strong feelings of guilt and anger about suffering that had previously aroused no more than passive sympathy” (237). Haskell assigns a kind of internal legibility to the market, as if its lineaments of causality are visible to its participants, as if it discloses, rather than mystifies, the social relations it produces. In the argument that follows, I will be examining ways in which abolitionist poets sought to render visible a logic of exchange that transforms human beings into commodities. The poem, in other words, must reveal what the market does not. What I share with Haskell, though, is the sense that identity and interest are no more intrinsic to the historical subject than identification, and that identification, as a historical phenomenon, necessarily transpires within a given field of narrative perception. The conscription of an emotive self into a communal fabric of shared and even nonreciprocal obligations takes place within a particular mode of organizing time and narrating causality.19 Unlike Haskell, I am not making an argument about actual historical causality, 18 The two-part essay, “Capitalism and the Origin of Humanitarian Sensibility,” is included in Bender’s Antislavery Debate, from which I quote (111). On the subject of interest, Haskell writes, “My aim has not been to supplant the concept of interest . . . but to supplement it and suggest that its explanatory power may be exaggerated” (237). 19 In “The Structure of Sentimental Experience,” Glenn Hendler astutely treats the problem of “emotional response” and “concrete action” in the interpretation of sentimental literature (146) (Yale Journal of Criticism 12, no. 1 [1999]: 145–53). Brycchan Carey, in British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility: Writing, Sentiment, and Slavery, 1760–1807 (New York: Palgrave, 2005), notes several narrative elements associated with abolitionist sympathy. He describes, for instance, a rhetorical procedure in which the affective power of the moving scene is used to supplement rational, factual argumentation (50).

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but rather about its (impossible) representation. I am interested in how three abolitionist poets represent their own capacity to shape history, given the ways in which the poem itself plays a role in reorganizing narrative perception. Margaret Cohen has characterized the sentimental genre by its “codes of narration,” above all the privileged narrative situation she terms “sentimentality’s primal scene”: “a spectacle of suffering that solicits the spectator’s sympathy.”20 In abolitionist poetry, however, sympathy establishes its narrative direction not in relation to a “primal” scene of suffering—the English reader’s decontextualized encounter with, say, an African body in pain—but rather by representing suffering as a condition of contingent social, economic, and legal differences. Sympathy and the Conditional Present Humanitarian sympathy depends on a calculation of conditionality that James Chandler has termed “sentimental probability.”21 Sympathetic identification requires an understanding of personhood as circumstantial, particularly in an emergent commercial society in which identity is increasingly determined by market exchange and financial speculation. Echoing Haskell, Chandler defines sentimental culture in terms of “a new mode of probability . . . codes of expectation and understanding of chance, design, and causality” (140). That a perception of contingent difference is what sets sympathetic substitution in motion, however, has been central to the theorization of emotive identification since Aristotle. In the Rhetoric, Aristotle defines pity as a “feeling of pain caused by the sight of some evil, destructive or painful, which befalls one who does not deserve it, and which we might expect to befall ourselves.”22 Pity is a relation among equals who have fared differently. In his guidelines for evoking pity, Aristotle emphasizes that suffering must be linked to twists of fate that might afflict the audience. Pity is a form of affective affiliation, in other words, facilitated by narratives of causality and calculations of probability. Accident is all that distinguishes the subject and object of pity, and any difference not tied to fortune, due either to the victim’s action or intrinsic nature, impedes its operation. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Adam Smith follows Aristotle in conceptualizing sympathetic identification as an emotional relation determined by perceptions of essential likeness and circumstantial difference. Sympathy is the principle, he writes, that Margaret Cohen, “Sentimental Communities,” in The Literary Channel: The InterNational Invention of the Novel, ed. Margaret Cohen and Carolyn Dever (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001): 106–32, 108. 21 James Chandler, “Moving Accidents: The Emergence of Sentimental Probability,” in The Age of Cultural Revolutions, ed. Colin Jones and Dror Wahrman (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002): 137–77. Chandler sees an overlap between “the issue of narrative movement” and that of “affective movement” (146). 22 Aristotle, Rhetorica, The Basic Works of Aristotle, ed. Richard McKeon (New York: Random House, 2001), 2.8.2. 20

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interests us in the “fortune of others.”23 It generates an affective identification that is disturbed by a conditional difference. This is why sympathy is intensified when we understand the particulars of a case, the “cause” of suffering (14). We judge the appropriateness of our identification by weighing the reasons for another’s circumstances. While we may be moved by the signs of suffering itself, our emotional identification will be amplified by a vivid recounting of the other’s “situation” (12). Because sympathy is a relation not so much with another’s sensation as with her condition, in Smith’s account, sympathetic identification requires identity to be rooted in circumstance. Chandler suggests that what accounts for circumstantial difference, and thus who may be included in the circuits of sympathetic identification, undergoes a significant development during the eighteenth century, as “society” comes to name not one’s personal companions but a totality of abstract forces and relations imperceptible to any individual. Sympathy’s range expands when the situational inequality that underlies the sympathetic relation reflects neither the dice-throw of fortuna nor the ineluctability of fate but instead the operations of humanmade systems. Such expansion is reflected in the transition in eighteenth-century sentimental culture, as described by Julie Ellison, “away from defining sentiment in terms of transactions between socially equal persons and toward scenarios of inequality,” a transition from an aristocratic to a bourgeois conception of sympathy.24 The asymmetry between witness and victim is related to a system of social relationships mediated through print, the market, and the politicaljuridical order.25 Humanitarian sympathy requires not a perception of one’s own vulnerability to the same conditions as the afflicted other, as for Aristotle, but the recognition that the other is enmeshed in the same social totality as oneself, such that one’s own actions are potentially causally related to the suffering other. Tragic pity is transformed into humanitarian sympathy, commiseration into active responsibility, when the causes of another’s suffering are related to alterable social, economic, and legal conditions. As Yearsley frames it, in A Poem on the Inhumanity of the Slave-Trade, in order to inspire practical sympathy the literary text must reveal the contingency Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. Knud Haakonssen (1759; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 11. 24 Julie Ellison, Cato’s Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 6. 25 Robert Mitchell argues that “theories of sympathy and identification emerged as responses to these perceptions of the contingency of the system of state finance, for these theories were attempts to understand the foundations and operations of social systems in ways that would explain, but also contain the disruptive effects of finance.” Sympathy and the State in the Romantic Era: Systems, State Finance, and the Shadows of Futurity (New York: Routledge, 2007), 5. Along similar lines, Ian Baucom writes that “to imagine, sympathize with, or invest interest in the suffering” of disenfranchised others constitutes “a recognition of systematicity per se.” Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham, Duke University Press, 2005), 232. 23

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of a “destructive system” that has through the naturalizing powers of “Custom” come to appear necessary (368, 21). An extended narrative sequence, the pathetic tale of Luco, evokes humanitarian sympathy by linking individual suffering with the transatlantic commerce that transforms people into commodities. After Luco is introduced “in chains” onboard a slave ship (52), the poem recounts the effects of his disappearance on his family, then follows him to the Caribbean sugar plantation, where he labors, resists a brutal overseer, and is burned alive as a warning to the other slaves. Rather than vividly detailing Luco’s suffering, objectifying his pain in a shared world of expressive signs, Yearsley focuses on its context and cause. She situates it in an economic system that seizes human beings, exchanges them as objects, and coerces their labor through torture and terror. The forward movement of Luco’s story is repeatedly suspended by shifts in the narrative focalization, which operate along perpendicular axes: from character to condition and from character to character. The initial close-up of Luco on the slave ship, for instance, gives way to contextualization when the narrator condemns “the toils spread by a Christian hand” (63). This focal shift interrupts particularized identification by classifying Luco’s story as typical. Then, rather than recounting Luco’s suffering on the plantation, the narrator draws the reader to Luco’s weeping brothers, his anxious mother and brooding father, his pining lover Incilanda. These images record the reverberations of Luco’s kidnapping within a larger network of kinship relations, thus identifying the system by which a human being enmeshed domestic relationships may be transformed into an exchangeable commodity—in other words, the system by which a person who is essentially like the reader is transformed into an object unlike the reader. The insistent close-ups on Luco’s family members also offer a way of depicting the persistence of a humanness that transcends Luco’s status as merchandise and slave, a human identity that endures in memory. “Luco’s form” lives on in Incilanda’s imagination (198), just as the enslaved Luco himself sees “In piteous imag’ry” his mourning family (246). Luco and his loved ones inhabit one another’s memory much as they come to occupy the imagination of the reader. The focal shifts thus model the form taken by a humanitarian sympathy that is called upon to reverse the process of objectification by recognizing the slave’s enduring humanity. There is a crucial difference, however, between native familial bonds and the sympathetic affiliations forged in a transatlantic public sphere. Luco and his family may live only in one another’s memories for the same reason that they enter the reader’s imagination, because of a system of global commerce and the laws that regulate it, but the “Fruitless imagination” and “Despair” of a family subjected to conditions beyond their control will be contrasted, in the poem’s final stanzas, with the transformative sympathy of a humanitarian public that is itself implicated in the oppressive system (249, 196). The two modes of narrative focalization, which contrast an unjust economic system with a natural kinship system, coalesce in an extended thought experiment that interrupts the Luco tale. Yearsley aligns the economic system of slavery not only with the particularized if also typical experience of its victims but also

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with the motives of its perpetrators, the merchants of Bristol and Liverpool. In defense of his activities, she imagines, the slave trader will assert that “His toils are for his children” (77). Such rhetoric, Yearsley points out, is fundamentally incompatible with a system of commerce that destroys families. The merchant “who from a bending parent steals / His dear support of age, his darling child” operates according to an economic logic that rejects the claims of a humanness defined not in terms of individual autonomy but rather in terms of kinship bonds (65–66). Yearsley asks the “seller of mankind” to imagine trading his own family for a profit: “Bring on / Thy daughter to this market, bring thy wife!” (83–84). Through sustained second-person address—“thy trade,” “thy pitiles ear” (109, 92)—the reader is positioned with the merchant, made to think like the slave trader, to enter his calculating logic, but with a perverse twist that literally brings home the consequences of the slave trade. While neither Hannah More nor Helen Maria Williams tells such an extended story, of the sort Williams deems a “tale of private woe” (71), both emphasize the link between practical sympathy and the circumstantial identity of the enslaved African. More worries that the individuating focalization of the sentimental anecdote may diminish the perception of systematicity: “No individual griefs my bosom melt, / For millions feel what Oronoko felt” (56–57). Yet she also allows that those millions pose a representational problem: “well may language fail” when the “baffled Muse” confronts a global economic system that transforms human beings into exchangeable commodities (143–44). In order to elicit practical sympathy, the abolitionist poem must represent not particular instances but rather the economic imperatives and institutions that produce situational inequality. Both poems are highly attentive, in other words, to the difference between Aristotelian pity and a humanitarian sympathy that requires torment to be traced to its social cause. More’s sympathetic appeals move between asserting an essential human similitude—e.g., “Sense is as keen where Congo’s sons preside, / As where proud Tiber rolls his classic tide” (163–64)—and ascribing difference, the slave’s suffering and despair, to the contingency of “Fortune” and the “Capricious fate of man” (89, 81). She demystifies this fate, however, revealing its cruel logic: it is the slave trade that produces fortunes and misfortunes. A “sordid lust of gold,” More says of the slaves, “their fate controls” (127). Such fate is determined by an “opprobrious commerce” (135), an “inverted trade” (141) premised on a mode of economic exchange that makes “MAN the traffic, SOULS the merchandize” (146). The “agent” of the “dire change” in the African’s condition is not cosmic fate but rather “the purchase made” (142). Williams offers a more sophisticated representation of the relation between circumstantial suffering and the speculative cognitive style associated with finance capitalism and chattel slavery. In a system of global commerce, she suggests, individual fate comes to be subject to probabilistic calculation. She indicts those who benefit from the slave trade but attribute their happiness to good “Fortune” rather than a ruthlessly efficient commodity system (91–108). As a response to such mystifications, Williams personifies the economic system of slavery, assigning it a

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brutal intelligence. Slavery “calculates the price of pain; / Weighs Agony in sordid scales, / And marks if death, or Life prevails; / In one short moment, seals the doom / Of years, which anguish shall consume” (154–58). These lines may refer to the notorious Zong Massacre of 1781, when the captain of a Liverpool slave ship drowned 132 Africans and then claimed insurance compensation for loss of cargo. Life-and-death decisions merely reflect different investment strategies. The slave is reduced not only to a commodity, an exchangeable and insurable object, but is also subject to a plantation calculus that measures the precise limits of suffering, making it possible to invest in torment. Slavery “speculates with skill refin’d, / How deep a wound will stab the mind; / How far the spirit can endure” (163–65). Williams contrasts this institution, which transforms human beings into objects of speculative calculation while making pain a cost of doing business, with universally applicable if unrealized principles—“Humanity” and “Justice” (275, 277)—that assign to human life a value independent of its economic exchangeability. Slavery is, in Williams’s account, a system designed such that identity comes to be determined by calculated and calculatable caprice. From another perspective, that of human kinship, slavery is a state of exception in which the laws of humanity and justice are suspended. All three of the 1788 poems highlight the moment of dislocation when the free African is forced into bondage: when “AFRIC’S less’ning shore recedes” (Williams 8), when Luco last gazes on his native land (Yearsley 59–62), when “the countless host” are “by rapine dragg’d from Afric’s coast” and the “victim [is] torn from social life” (More 77–8, 99). This staging of geographical displacement and domestic disruption reflects the gradualist aims of abolitionists, who sought the prohibition of the slave trade before turning to slavery itself, as well as the imperatives of a domestic ideology that measures normative human identity through the enduring affective power of kinship bonds. Yet it also shows the process whereby an African person is brought into the system of slavery, inducted into the circumatlantic triangular trade and made subject to its logics of speculation and commodification, its laws of property and personhood, its institutions of the slave ship and plantation. Isolating the moment when the African is subjected to the system of slavery, in the space-time of the Middle Passage, accomplishes the narrative procedure Barbauld considers key to abolition’s sympathetic appeals: revealing “the man” who resides “Beneath the bloody scourge” of the slave (8). The poem must identify the calculus that reduces the African to an exchangeable good and the institution that extracts his or her labor without recompense, as these are the systemic conditions that elicit a future-oriented sympathy. It must also represent a humanity that survives such objectification. Thus the slave appears as a person who is conditionally different from and essentially like the sympathetic reader, at once a saleable object and a sentient human being endowed with unalienable natural rights. The slave occupies a split temporality, immersed in a system that transforms him or her into a thing, yet retaining, in memory and in the capacity to appeal to another to recognize a species likeness, a kind of spectral humanity. Much as in Olaudah Equiano’s autobiographical Interesting Narrative (1789), in

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the 1788 poems the idealized African past introduces into the temporality of the present another time that anticipates a future in which the slave’s full humanity is again recognized, his or her “human rights restor’d” (More 260). The initial condition of sympathetic identification, circumstantial asymmetry, is the inaugural condition of plot. The sympathetic appeal is a narrative beginning (like all beginnings, in medias res), because it presents something—quite literally, the suffering slave—as out of place. The situational quality of identity creates the conditions for sympathetic identification as well as the conditions for narrative: the circumstantial imbalance out of which plots, and politics, emerge. It is the situation of suffering rather than its vivid representation, the conditionality of the sympathetic victim’s status rather than its necessity, that give sympathy its direction. The systematicity of slavery’s violence—a “destructive system” (Yearsley 368), a “barb’rous commerce” (Williams 228)—initiates not only sympathetic identification but also its narrative trajectory, its relation to the future. Humanitarian sympathy appears to establish a sequence of events directed toward the amelioration of suffering. Thomas Clarkson tells the following paradigmatic story: “If one, by suffering his heart to become hardened, oppresses a fellow-creature, the tear of sympathy starts up in the eye of another, and the latter instantly feels a desire, involuntarily generated, of flying to his relief.”26 This illustrative tale begins with a scene of oppression, the cause of which is immanent and identifiable, and it anticipates an ameliorative act. As Cohen observes, the sympathetic relation engendered by the scene of suffering “is the beginning of the spectators’ interpellation into sentimentality’s cultural work.”27 Sympathy provokes an affective disturbance, a “tear” and a “desire,” but there is a breach between this sympathetic impulse and the concrete ameliorative act. The interruption between “desire” and “relief,” between “sympathy” and “sentimentality’s cultural work,” is not unlike the gap in Barbauld’s account of the passage from a present in which the nation “knows and . . . persists” in its oppressive acts to “future times” in which such acts will be universally deemed a moral “crime” (17–18). For sympathy’s critics, this disjunction between affect and action, “desire” and “relief,” is its symptomatic weakness. The Sympathetic Appeal as Performative Speech If the sympathetic appeal establishes a narrative problem by anticipating change, what happens next is less clear. As is attested by both Barbauld’s “Epistle” and Clarkson’s tale of sympathy’s tear, the story of sympathy in abolitionist literature contains a key omission, a missing chapter. Sympathy seems to demand a change that, within the text, never occurs. As a narrative, the abolitionist poem is necessarily incomplete because its end, the form of closure that would signal a Clarkson, History, 1.4. Cohen, “Sentimental Communities,”108.

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realignment of conditions and an end to affective disturbance, manifests in a world outside the text. The text may inspire but not enact the “deed of Mercy” (Williams 59) that would “still the clank of chains, and sheathe the sword” (More 272). Abolitionist poems seek to act on their readers, which is why they relentlessly gesture at a futurity that, paradoxically, cannot be represented. Questions about this relation between a humanitarian text and its readers—does the text interpose or mediate between the spectator and the sufferer? generate or diminish social distance? function as an end or a beginning?—underlie the debate about the ethico-political efficacy of sympathetic identification. Moreover, to measure such efficacy, to measure sympathy’s capacity to act, requires us, as Haskell argues, to account for real-world opportunities for ameliorative action. More than one historian has argued that the history of abolition and the history of the public sphere as an agent of political influence are inseparable.28 J. R. Oldfield identifies the story of abolition as one of the “increasingly powerful role of the middle classes in influencing Parliamentary politics from outside the confines of Westminster.”29 The abolitionists’ instruments of influence, their forms of “recipe knowledge,” included the formation of public committees such as the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade; the distribution of poems, pamphlets, and consumer goods such as Josiah Wedgwood’s fashionable medallions and crockery; boycotts; lecture tours by famous abolitionists like Equiano; and, perhaps most significantly, petition campaigns, starting with the modest Quaker petition of 1783 and leading to the nationwide campaign of 1792, which included more than 500 petitions, signed by more than 400,000 citizens, in support of Wilberforce’s parliamentary motion. Yet even such novel forms of practical political participation as signing a petition, paying a subscription, or joining a boycott do not fully account for the ways in which reading and feeling may contribute to ameliorative outcomes.30 The experience of shared emotion mediated through print may itself be understood as a kind of social practice, particularly when public opinion is understood to shape norms and influence policy making.31 “The first wave of abolitionism,” Seymour Dresher claims, “enlarged the opportunities for new actors in the public sphere. The second expanded the public sphere still further.” “Public Opinion and Parliament in the Abolition of the British Slave Trade,” Parliamentary History 26 Supplement (2007): 42–65, 53. 29 J. R. Oldfield, Popular Politics and British Anti-Slavery: The Mobilisation of Public Opinion Against the Slave Trade 1787–1807 (Manchester: Manchester University Press 1995), 5. 30 Robert Mitchell makes the important observation that “antislavery efforts were oriented toward an unknown system-yet-to-come” (Sympathy and the State 119). 31 As Luc Boltanski observes, speech should be understood as a force of moral action when there is such a thing as “public opinion engaging directly with political institutions.” Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 18. He adds, “it is especially by means of emotions that we can conceive of the coordination of spectators . . . and consequently the transition from individual speech and concern to collective commitment” (xv). 28

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Action is located not in an individual subject who either is or is not motivated to pursue some ameliorative end but rather in the performative force of collective sentiment to compel political-juridical change.32 A temporal split appears, however, when we try to identify the subject being addressed by the sympathetic appeal, the subject who represents public opinion and is the agent of its influence. It is not clear whether the addressee of the abolitionist poem precedes or proceeds from the appeal. A public, Michael Warner observes, is located simultaneously in the domain of “social fact” and in a “discursive address or circulation.”33 A public is a collective body but also the mediating forms through which that body speaks and is spoken to. These mediating forms, which call into being a people no less than a person, introduce into the identity of the public a mark of incompletion. “The addressee of public discourse,” Warner writes, “is always yet to be realized” (55). Abolitionist poems speak to an audience that is being constituted by virtue of the sympathetic appeal.34 The sympathetic addressee is asked to identify, both with a suffering other and with others who so identify, and this summoning is directed at a person and a people that it seems to be in the act of producing. The collective address of abolitionist poetry, in which the sympathetic appeal is at once a kind of calling to and a calling into being, in which the poetic utterance has both constative and performative dimensions, exhibits the “disjunctive temporality” that Homi Bhabha sees as characteristic of the “narrative address of the nation.”35 Such address has as both its subject and object “the agency of a people,” meaning that it is “split in the discursive ambivalence that emerges in the contest of narrative authority between the pedagogical and the performative” (148). The pedagogical, in Bhabha’s terms, addresses a people whose identity is “constituted by historical sedimentation,” calling upon authority where it resides in the contemporary social totality (153). Effecting “the loss of identity in the signifying process of cultural identification,” the performative represents the contingency of present power structures while appealing to the authority of an emergent or anticipated collective (146). Bhabha contrasts the “continuist, accumulative Here we see the problem with interpretations of sentimental culture that locate sympathy’s insufficiency in the psychology of the individual reader. The usefulness of Raymond Williams’s concept of the “structure of feeling,” Hendler suggests, is that it “reminds us that the category of experience is never only an individual one, something that requires an imaginary ‘bridge’ in order to be shared or communication. As soon as it is experienced, anything—even or perhaps especially an emotion, whether felt directly or vicariously—is in this view a ‘social material process” (“Structure of Sentimental Experience,” 151). 33 Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002), 54. 34 As Chandler puts it, sentimental texts represent a “Briton who is at once the audience and the referent (object and subject) of the representation” (“Emergence of Sentimental Probability,” 165). 35 Homi Bhabha, “DissemiNation: Time, Narrative, and the Margins of the Modern Nation,” The Location of Culture (New York: Routledge, 1994): 145–48. 32

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temporality” of the pedagogical with the “repetitious, recursive” temporality of the performative (145). Such an account of the dual temporality of collective identity challenges genealogies of the nation (most significantly, Anderson’s Imagined Communities) that align nation formation with what Bhabha calls “homogenized empty time,” the experience of temporal simultaneity facilitated by the realist novel and newspaper. If the wide circulation and accelerated production of textual media produces national identity in a collective experience of the present, print culture also generates a constant deferral, an experience of alienation within identity, interposing “another temporality” within “the contemporaneity of the national present” (143). I would suggest that as an address to a national public, the sympathetic appeal of abolitionist poetry contains both pedagogical and performative dimensions. The pedagogical speaks to the contemporary reader implicated (or, we might say, interested) in the system of slavery, a reader who must be called upon to identify with the slave. The performative speaks to the reader in his or her act of reading and witnessing, as the end of such acts, which promise a realignment of interests and identities. Each of the 1788 poems begins by referring to the present and concludes by referring to the future, as if the narrative of the poem and the story of the nation are indivisible, as if the poem is simultaneously representing and creating the conditions of progressive change. What Warner calls “discursive address” (54) and Bhabha calls the “supplementary movement of writing” (154) is the poem itself: its images, commands, and appeals, its tropological animations and ventriloquisms. The scene of sympathy is the scene of saying, a “voice of Justice” that remediates “Luco’s groan” (Yearsley 94, 99). This mediated quality is intrinsic to all sympathetic relations, which is why any politics of sympathy is haunted by an anxiety, amplified in an era of mass media, about the textual supplement. The other’s affective experience must be brought into an economy of signs—whether somatic or semantic; spoken, written, or printed—which enables imaginative identification, allowing us to see ourselves in the other (as Smith suggests) or the other in ourselves (as Hume suggests). The critique of sympathy often reflects a covert suspicion that representations, the signifying proxies by which internal states enter a shared social world, fail to unsettle the autonomous, and prelinguistic, interests of the self. The sympathetic appeal is understood to fail as a performative speech act because vicarious experience has a different intensity and duration than direct experience. The abolitionist poem’s vacillation in its image of itself between a role that is descriptive (or pedagogical) and a role that is constitutive (or performative) reflects the impossibility of locating the force of sympathetic action: in sensation or in the mediating utterance that conveys sensation, in the collective sentiment of diverse readers or in the speech act that addresses those readers as a public and enlarges their horizon of identification. It should come as no surprise, then, that the abolitionist poems of 1788 express significant concern about their referents and their role, about the interchange between reality and representation, actual suffering and vicarious suffering. All three poems assert the verisimilitude of

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their pathetic scenes. They worry about the association between verse and fancy, emphasizing poetry’s role as a medium of documentation rather than imagination: “no fictitious ills these numbers flow, / But living anguish and substantial woe” (More 54–55); “But Fancy o’er the tale of woe / In vain one heighten’d tint would throw” (Williams 337–38); “Where pity breathing in the gale, dissolves / The mind, when fancy paints such real woe” (Yearsley 301–2). Significantly, these passages acknowledge not only the pathetic power of evidentiary verisimilitude, but also the necessary translation of sensation into speech, bare facts into literary representations (verse, story, and image, respectively). Each of the poems also compensates for the perception that something significant is lost in this translation. The incantatory “no more” of the opening stanza of Williams’s Bill Lately Passed celebrates the passage of William Dolben’s bill to regulate conditions on slave ships, but this present act also establishes a “promise” of further reform and slavery’s eventual abolition (1, 84). The poem moves from recording a present (and, at best, partial) triumph to anticipating future action, as the descriptive “no more” gives way to the prophetic “Soon, soon” of the final stanza (354). The audience addressed by the poem inhabits this dual temporality, at once the “consenting minds” who “dare[] to feel” (85, 46) and the incomplete object of the poem’s sympathetic imperatives and appeals, a collective to come that will “embrace / A distant sphere, an alien-race” (59–60). Williams remains fixated on those who “view unmov’d, the look, that tells / The pang that in the bosom dwells” (221–22), on the reader who does not yet sympathize, who has not yet acted. Even as the poem’s sympathetic appeals address such readers, it also seems to call upon a person, individual or corporate, who does not yet exist. This temporal ambivalence is recorded in the poem’s subtle shifts in tense and mood: from the past, “Thy powerful arm has interpos’d” (33); to the conditional, “When Mercy calls thee / … / Thy ardent spirit springs to heal” (43–45); to the imperative, “Oh! ease the pangs ye stoop to share” (171). This final injunction registers a familiar fissure in sympathy’s forward progress. There is a gap between the sharing and the easing of suffering, a gap related to the discontinuity between primary and mediated sensations. This gap is filled by another rhetorical supplement, as the entreaty is replaced by the potentially more powerful speech act of a direct exhortation. Moreover, by bringing to selfconsciousness the reader’s status as one who sympathizes, the exhortation adds a reflective dimension to affective experience. By recasting the sympathizing subject as a gazed-upon object, it works much like another sympathetic supplement: the tribunal of futurity. Just as Barbauld speaks of “future times,” Williams directs the reader’s attention to the judgment of “distant ages” (53). This awareness of being witnessed, of being an object of moral scrutiny, is meant to effect the transition from fellow-feeling to action. The self that witnesses itself witnessing is inhabited by a future self that has already heeded the sympathetic appeal and casts judgment on the self that has not. I would not wish to suggest, however, that in the rhetorical economy of abolitionist poems sympathy is elevated to an active force (and thus to a properly ethical or political phenomenon) only when its affective states give way

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to reflective self-awareness. More often what supplements the sympathetic appeal, what compensates for sympathy’s constant deferral, are further appeals to identify another’s emotions and interests as one’s own. For example, the compensatory command to “ease the pangs ye stoop too share” is followed by an extended sequence in which readers are asked to contrast their own domestic affections with the “desolate . . . state” of the slave separated from family—in other words, to sympathize (193). The epigraph of Yearsley’s Inhumanity of the Slave-Trade represents the temporality of the sympathetic appeal such that the direction of causality is ambiguous: “Go seek the soul refin’d and strong: / Such aids my wildest pow’r of song: / For those I strike the rustic lyre / Who share the transports they inspire.” It is unclear whether the sympathetic addressee preexists the reading experience or is herself constituted in her reading, whether latent social feeling inspires the reader to read abolitionist poetry or whether abolitionist poetry stokes social feeling. The poem is dedicated to Frederick Hervey, the fourth Earl of Bristol, an eccentric philanthropist who patronized Yearsley after her break with Hannah More. The dedication equivocates on the same issues as the epigraph, the performative felicity of the sympathetic appeal and the status of the poem’s addressee. “My Intention,” Yearsley writes, “is not to cause that Anguish in your Bosom which powerless Compassion ever gives: yet my Vanity is flattered, when I but fancy that Your Lordship feels as I do.” As Robert Mitchell proposes, the dedication seems to establish an important distinction between “powerful (that is, active) and powerless compassion” (112). Yet the nonparallelism between the initial negative claim and the second speculative claim introduces the problem of where this difference emerges, of what role Yearsley’s intentions and her fancied relation to her audience play in transforming quiescent commiseration into ameliorative action. Similar equivocations explain a series of reversals in the poem’s fourth stanza. The initial exhortations to action, the action of reading and witnessing—“But come, ye souls who feel for human woe” (31); “Approach, thou son, / Whose heart would shudder at a father’s chains” (32–33)—presume the existence of a reader who already feels for the suffering slaves. The role of the poem is secondary, supplementary—at best, it documents widespread humanitarian sentiment. But then Yearsley acknowledges that the poem’s sympathetic appeal requires its reader to overcome her interest in avoiding identification with slaves, in looking on the “sight / Horrid” (35–36). “Yet to this sight I summon thee” she writes (38), echoing the “yet” in the dedication as well as the implication in Barbauld’s “Epistle” that the nation’s “eyes” are “averted.” The addressee of the poem is now the “slave of avarice” (39) rather than those who “feel for human woe.” Like Barbauld’s nation, Yearsley’s audience refuses to look, as if to witness is already to identify. The role of the poem is thus two-fold: to compel the reader to witness and to bring before the reader’s gaze the “sight” of suffering. It is, paradoxically, witnessing that makes one willing to witness, sympathy that induces sympathy. As for Williams, for Yearsley the sympathetic appeal requires a supplement, but in this case the supplemental

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command, “Approach”—directed at both Yearsley’s fellow humanitarians and their opponents—must precede the appeal. Faced with this narrative contradiction, Yearsley turns away from the task of transforming the supporter of slavery into a sympathetic witness, turns away, quite literally, from her opponents: “Spare me . . . / . . . if I scorn / This gloomy wretch and turn my tearful eye / To more enlighten’d beings” (40–43). Before shifting to the Luco narrative, the sympathy-inducing “sight” to which the unwilling reader is being summoned, Yearsley again redefines poetry’s place in the affective life of the nation. Humanitarian poetry, she concedes, offers only a means of sublimating political melancholy, a site where, she says to her sympathetic readers, “ye may vent your sighs” (50). This ambiguity about whom precisely the poem is addressing expresses more than a poet’s misgivings about the motivating power of her verse. The ambiguity is itself productive. As in the other 1788 poems, in Yearsley’s Inhumanity of the SlaveTrade the second-person pronouns continually shift in their referents, between “ye Christians” who would “oppose my strain” (353) and “ye souls who feel for human woe” (31). The reader is positioned simultaneously as one who participates in and one who protests the oppressive system, as one who identifies with only his own interests and one who identifies (alongside others who so identify) with the suffering Africans. A disquieting effect is created when these two forms of address, which correspond to Bhabha’s pedagogical and performative modes, are brought into close proximity. The British reader, for instance, is expected to feel the guilt of his own involvement in the slave system, simultaneously the oppressor and his guilty conscience: “Sink, thou wretch, / Whose act shall on the cheek of Albion’s sons / Throw Shame’s red blush” (205–7). By enacting the initial command to sink to the ground with contrition, the addressee will have realized the future condition expressed by the “shall,” a condition that would be necessary to precipitate the act of remorse. A similar experience of moral disequilibrium is produced when the poem addresses “ye Christians,” at once exposing religious hypocrisy and appealing to religious duty, decrying the partial realization of ostensibly universal Christian values while invoking the oughtness expressed in those values. Personifying the Performative/Performing Personification Each of the 1788 poems concludes by foretelling a future era in which a personified figure that inspires or embodies collective emotion—Mercy for More, Eloquence for Williams, social love for Yearsley—will effect the abolition of slavery. These personifications assign agency to abstract social forces, which explains why, as we have seen, the most pervasive personifications in humanitarian verse are of commerce, the nation, universal moral principles, and transpersonal affective states. In all three poems, social feeling is figured as a systemic force, one of the personified agencies whose strife constitutes the social totality: Avarice and Mercy, Custom and Sympathy, Law and Justice, Commerce and Virtue, Oppression and Liberty. At the same time that these personifications represent otherwise invisible social forces, they also function as performatives. Even if only

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by their rendering visible, their ascribing of form and animation to what cannot be phenomenologically perceived, they speak to and of a collective body that is coming into being through its description. Yet in its inevitable performative dimension, we will see, the personification fails to effect the closure that eludes these poems, instead only restating the performative promise that sympathy makes. In More’s Slavery, the sudden appearance, in the penultimate stanza, of the “cherub Mercy from above, / Descending softly” mystifies the agency that produces collective sentiment at the same time that it attributes political authority to that sentiment (263–64). Of the three poets, More is the most disquieted by the democratic dimensions of a sympathetic appeal that promises to reconfigure the social order based only on the ventriloquized cries of the oppressed. Mercy’s deus ex machina arrival in the form of an angel sprinkling “celestial dew” withholds power from “that unlicens’d monster,” described earlier in the poem, “the crowd,” whose “stubborn mouth” “raves of mercy, while she deals out death” (21–32). Rather than welling up from below, in the voices of the oppressed calling for justice, Mercy descends from on high and discreetly spreads her influence, the trope of sympathetic contagion—“From soul to soul the spreading influence steals” (267)—here working to obscure the actual vehicles of collective sentiment. Yet the emancipatory “office” of Mercy is clear, and collective feeling, if not the vox populi, is shown to be an active political force (270). The gap between emoting and acting is definitively bridged when Britons “still the clank of chains” (272). Williams’s personification draws attention not only to the authority of public sentiment but to the mode of address that produces it. “OH Eloquence, prevailing art! / Whose force can chain the list’ning heart; / The throb of Sympathy inspire, / And kindle every great desire” (321–24). Eloquence is the supplement to description that effects the translation not of sensation into speech but of speech into sensation. Its “force” provokes a fully sensate sympathy, altering the contours of interest. And this performative power has political consequence, when Eloquence animates the voice “That shall, in BRITAIN’S Senate, trace / The wrongs of AFRIC’S Captive Race” and so effects the “lofty act” of emancipation (335–36, 358). Here Williams retreats. Having introduced a personification meant to close the gap between the sympathetic appeal and the ameliorative act, she reasserts her commitment to a pedagogical view of sympathy based on documentary realism. She obscures the performative dimension of the sympathetic appeal, asking of a harrowing scene that recalls the Zong Massacre, “Can Fancy add one horror more?” (349–50). To witness, she implies, is already to sympathize. It is unclear whether it is seeing or being addressed as one who sees that transforms sympathy into an active political force. After all, the very apostrophe that speaks to and of Eloquence itself testifies to the animating powers of the performative speech act. If eloquent address “reign[s] the sov’reign of the soul,” the poet’s animating speech act, at once a command and a figuring forth, provokes eloquence to its moving heights. “Fill . . . the breast,” she instructs Eloquence, “Bid on those lips thy spirit rest” (333–34). In a kind of supplemental regress, she seeks to move the personified linguistic agency that itself stands for the moving speech act.

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Yearsley’s Poem on the Inhumanity of the Slave-Trade concludes with an apostrophe to a personified “social love,” which achieves a prophetic tone no less ambitious than that found in the verse of Blake or Shelley (389). As in Barbauld’s “Epistle,” in Yearsley’s text the prophetic voice emerges at the very moment when secular time supplants eschatological time. The threat of divine retribution gives way to a cacophonous debate on the “publick good,” in which the “cry of Av’rice” and the “voice” of “Commerce” contend with “Virtue’s hundred tongues” and the “slave” who “Calls loud on Justice” (357–83). The poet’s sympathetic appeal seems closely associated with such public speech, especially when Yearsley, like Williams, seeks to rouse, through her own commanding utterance, those whose voices make law: “Speak, ye few / Who fill Britannia’s senate” (383–84). And yet “social love,” the “animating force” that can “touch the soul of man,” operates on an affective register that is “Too deep for language” (389–420). Speech gives way to the pure presence of feeling. Social love is associated with the prelinguistic immediacy of sensation, much as More’s Mercy spreads through affective contagion. Like the legislators whom Yearsley enjoins to speak, however, the personified figure of social love is itself animated through the poet’s performative command: “rise / Thou gentle angel” (392–93). Moreover, like Williams’s Eloquence, social love bears a striking resemblance to poetry itself, since what it does is transform man into a witness who through “sympathy” is made to identify with the “lamenting maid” and the “old slave” (406–8). Social love is the manifestation of collective sentiment as a political force that may challenge Custom, Law, and Commerce, but it is no less the appeals and utterances that animate such sentiment. The contradictions of sympathetic causation, which themselves reflect the disjunctive temporality of sympathetic address, reappear in a personification that at once displaces and testifies to the constitutive power of poetic language. Much like the interpellative speech act, the apostrophe, a calling out to that which it also calls into being, expresses the ambivalence of the performative, the disquieting recognition of the role played by the poetic enunciation in the constitution of the people. The poet’s attempt to detach the cause of social love from the signifying processes that so evidently produce it reflects an anxiety that it is impossible to locate the causal force so crucial to sympathy’s narrative promise: in utterance or impulse, in the individual or the collective, in the poem or the reader. These personifications—of Mercy, Eloquence, and social love—show the 1788 abolitionist poems as they work to represent an English reading public that sees itself in its seeing of the African other, or, we might say, that sees the other in its seeing of itself. Sympathetic identification, these poems seem to suggest, is transformed into humanitarian action when the collective addressee witnesses not only the suffering slave but its own witnessing of the slave’s suffering. What the reading public also sees, however, are the mediating forms that represent it to itself as something other than itself and in doing so introduce temporal deferral into its collective identity. The reading public, in other words, discovers in the sympathetic appeal its own unfulfilled promise, the promise that language makes and never fully delivers on—the promise of justice. Bringing together many of the concerns of this essay, Derrida writes,

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There is no language without the performative dimension of the promise, the minute I open my mouth I am in the dimension of the promise. . . . And from this point of view, I do not see how one can pose the question of ethics if one renounces the motifs of emancipation and the messianic.36

Ethical responsibility, Derrida argues, resides in the performative promise that language makes, as it provokes and disrupts, mediating between self and other, what is and what may be. Language is what promises an emancipation that is always to come, the promise being a performative speech act that initiates an obligation to futurity. In the 1788 poems, claims of simple referentiality give way to recognition of this performative dimension, the messianic promise implicit in the stories, tropes, and calls that constitute the sympathetic appeal. “I’ll dare the strain,” Yearsley writes, “Of Heav’n-born Liberty, till Nature moves / Obedient to her voice” (14– 16). This pathetic poetic utterance is traced back to the slave, not to his pain but to his power to express his pain, and thus to summon another through “his tear, / His sigh, his groan” (203–4), even his “eyes, / Silent, not inexpressive” (58–59). Williams describes the nation as the “wakeful ear” (3), the “thee” called upon by “Mercy” (43), which is to say, by the “groan of agony severe” and “the look, that tells / The pang that in the bosom dwells” (4 and 211). As I have already noted, More was particularly apprehensive about the egalitarian politics associated with the voice of the people. Her description of the fractious revolutionary crowd highlights the cacophony of voices, “whose roar terrific, bursts in peals so loud,” whose “stubborn mouth” and “magic cries” “rend[] the air with noise” (22–35). Yet even she is unable to abandon the performative force of such signifying acts: the entreaty of “the shrieking babe” (100), the “claim” made by slaves (138), by human beings who “groan in pangs” (170). The appeal borne by these utterances, the cries of the slave that are relayed and amplified by the poet, introduce into sympathy’s narrative a series of gaps: between the authority of the people and the authority of the sign, between the sensation that is felt and the sensation that is expressed, between identity and identification. Such gaps, I am arguing, are the condition of collective agency and obligation, of the possibility of perceiving a national community responsible for its actions. In order for the nation’s people to imagine their authority, Bhabha argues, they must inhabit an “alienating time,” a narrative temporality defined by “a nonsynchronous, incommensurable gap in the midst of storytelling” (161). The people no less than a person inhabit this division, at once referred to and called upon, the presence of identity always deferred through a scene or story, an animating trope or sympathetic appeal, even another’s cry. Bhabha’s point is not only that the people are alienated from themselves but also that they come to know themselves Jacques Derrida, “Remarks,” Deconstruction and Pragmatism, ed. Chantal Mouffe (New York: Routledge, 1996), 82. Stanley Cavell observes that J. L. Austin similarly “identifies speaking as giving one’s word, as if an ‘I promise’ implicitly lines every act of speech, of intelligibility” (forward to Felman, Scandal of the Speaking Body, xiii). 36

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and to act in this alienating temporality. When the nation reads itself in a poem that calls upon it to become something else—a process enabled through the ongoing and ever-postponed process of the self entering and being inhabited by others, of sensations being translated into utterances, of impulses metamorphosising into acts—the narrative gaps confirm that it may be something other than what it is. The inevitable lacuna in sympathy’s narrative is the opening between its didactic reference to an oppressive social totality—the source of a conditional asymmetry between the sympathetic witness and victim—and its performative appeal to a collective that would by its very existence make such oppression impossible and such appeals unnecessary. To mistake the “soon, soon” of sympathy’s promise with the ideological deflections of self-interest is, implicitly, to retain a metaphysics of morals according to which ethical imperatives reside only in an ideality that is, finally, unsayable. In the actual ethico-political world in which the mighty claims of justice have been made, and deferred, through the mediations of utterance, saying, and not least poetic saying, may well be the performative “force” that can in a man “make a fellow-creature’s woe / His own by heart-felt sympathy” (Yearsley 421–22).

PaRT 2 Nation, Narration, Emancipation

Chapter 3

Commerce, Sentiment, and Free Air: Contradictions of Abolitionist Rhetoric Anthony John Harding

The transatlantic slave trade, the economic and financial structures under which it flourished, and the political relations which enabled it to evade for so long all the abolitionists’ attempts to end it, are increasingly regarded as having played an integral part in the formation of modernity, rather than being aberrations, or relics of a less enlightened age. The view that nineteenth-century reforms eventually purged modern commodity capitalism of the stain thrown upon it by 250 years of slave trading has been seriously questioned, and seems to be in retreat.1 An important aspect of this more critical stance toward the era has been the questioning of abolitionist rhetoric and assumptions, particularly of the ways in which the abolitionist movement itself—though strenuously opposed to slavery and the slave trade—relied upon a language of economic and cultural dominance that continued to foster new kinds of colonialism. This essay traces the course of one element of that language, a key rhetorical figure adopted by eighteenthcentury abolitionist writers: the assertion that the very air of Great Britain was inimical to slavery.

1 While still valuable and informative, Roger Anstey’s The Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition 1760–1810 (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1975) can be taken as representative of the optimistic liberal humanist view. Anstey argues that while in the early 1700s virtually no one in Britain questioned the ethical basis of slavery, “the content of received wisdom had so altered by the 1780s that educated men and the political nation, provided they had no direct interest in the slave system, would be likely to regard slavery and the slave trade as morally condemned, as no longer philosophically defensible” (95– 96). On the ways in which the transatlantic slave trade was, nevertheless, a foundational practice of the modern age, see in particular Robin Blackburn, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492–1800 (London: Verso, 1997), 379–80; Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 44; and Ian Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), 17, 99.

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The “Free Air” of Britain as a Quasi-legal Principle This assertion, which enabled abolitionist writers to appeal to patriotic sentiment and particularly to Britons’ image of themselves as a free people, came into play as a legal argument in the case of Somerset v. Stewart, the case that led to the much-celebrated “Mansfield judgment” of 1772. Clearly, it would not have been necessary to use such an argument had there not been a glaring disjunction between the laws of Britain relating to personal liberty, and the laws that applied in the self-governing West Indian colonies. Robin Blackburn has precisely defined the ideological contradiction: “The Glorious Revolution had been carried through in the name of English liberties, yet in the colonies it confirmed undisguised racial slavery.”2 Before 1772, relatively few people in Britain would have had occasion to think about conditions prevailing on the slave plantations, and the few who did enquire about those conditions would most probably have relied on descriptions written by plantation owners or those who worked for them. In this respect, geographical distance worked in favor of the planter lobby. As Elizabeth Mancke has argued, British colonists at this time tended to see the Atlantic as a “buffer against the metropolitan government and a conceptual marchland between Europe and the extra-European world.”3 Yet the presence on British soil of an escaped slave, James Somerset, succeeded in showing how easily that “conceptual marchland” could be overleapt, and made to vanish, at least for a time. The Somerset case therefore exposed a vacuum in jurisprudence and, more broadly, a corresponding failure of the governing class to conceptualize what it might mean to have colonies.4 However, while persuasive in the one instance of the Somerset case, the image of the “free air” of England tended to obscure rather than to clarify the growing dependence of the British economy on trade with the Atlantic colonies. This essay thus takes up one important strand in the “rhetoric of British national identity” as it emerged in the latter half of the eighteenth century, a rhetoric that, as Srividhya Swaminathan has recently shown, drew on the antislavery debate for some of its key notions of Britishness.5 Specifically, I aim to show that while the Blackburn, Making of New World Slavery, 263. Elizabeth Mancke, “Empire and State,” in The British Atlantic World, 1500–1800,

2 3

ed. David Armitage and Michael J. Braddick (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002), 195. 4 Mancke notes that in the first half of the eighteenth century, the British government “had no plan or policy” to deal with the growing number of links between domestic British law and governance, and what was now increasingly being referred to as the “British Empire” (ibid., 189). 5 Srividhya Swaminathan argues that “participants in the slave-trade debates looked beyond regional loyalties to forge a shared national culture,” in Debating the Slave Trade: Rhetoric of British National Identity, 1759–1815 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), 13. Brycchan Carey shows in chapter 1 of British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility: Writing, Sentiment, and Slavery, 1760–1807 (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave, 2005) that a new understanding of rhetoric itself emerged in mid-century: a revaluation of its appeal to the emotions through the classically approved element of pathos. This revaluation had close connections with the drive to develop effective arguments against the slave trade.

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appeal to idealizing patriotic sentiment contained within this rhetorical figure had some effect in the formulation of a key legal decision, its “afterlife” in abolitionist poetry and prose also functioned as a way of concealing the realities of commerce and the associated extension of British imperial power. In his plea for the release of James Somerset, Hargrave, one of the lawyers representing Somerset, gave this rhetorical figure quasi-legal status. He characterized the action of Charles Stewart, Somerset’s former owner (who had had the young man seized and placed on a ship due to sail for Jamaica, where it was his intention to sell him), as an attempt to reintroduce perpetual servitude to a nation “whose air is deemed too pure for slaves to breathe in it.”6 When the abolitionist campaign gathered momentum, abolitionist poets such as Hannah More and William Cowper took up this idealized image of the island “nation” as a place divinely endowed with freedom. Their argument was that Britain’s colonies should benefit from the same blessings. As Cowper put it in 1785—misrepresenting the content of Lord Mansfield’s final ruling in the Somerset case—“We have no slaves at home. – Then why abroad? / . . . Slaves cannot breathe in England; if their lungs / Receive our air, that moment they are free; / They touch our country, and their shackles fall.”7 Such rhetoric readily connected with nationalist and antiCatholic tradition. Even Olaudah Equiano, whose Narrative attacked the hypocrisy of Britons in condoning the slave trade, simultaneously associated England with freedom.8 The effectiveness of this rhetorical figure in the hands of abolitionist poets such as Cowper has obscured the fact that it appeals to one particular form of patriotic sentiment, the championing of “liberty” as an inherently British trait, while masking the political structures that circumscribed it. While the planters and colonial officials who held power in the Atlantic colonies clearly embraced a version of “Anglo-British liberty”—that is, as David Armitage defines it, “the freedom embodied in Parliament and enshrined in the common law”9—in the mid-eighteenth century there was no effective political union for the provinces or dependencies of the emerging “empire,” nor did they have direct parliamentary representation. In consequence, as Armitage points out, “allegiance to the British 6 Passages from Somerset v. Stewart, Court of King’s Bench Easter Term, XII Geo. III, and from Lord Mansfield’s decision on the case, Trinity Term, XII Geo. III, are quoted from The English Reports online resource: http://www.commonlii.org/int/cases/EngR/1772/57. pdf, 499–510. The text in The English Reports (vol. 98) is reprinted from an original report by Capel Lofft. (The phrase quoted here is from English Reports 98:500.) 7 William Cowper, The Task, in Complete Poetical Works, ed. H. S. Milford (London: Henry Frowde, 1907), book II, lines 37, 40–42. 8 Olaudah Equiano, “The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, The African. Written By Himself” (1794), in The Interesting Narrative and Other Writings, ed. Vincent Carretta (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1995), 111. 9 David Armitage, “The British Conception of Empire in the Eighteenth Century,” in Greater Britain, 1516–1776: Essays in Atlantic History (Aldershot, UK: Ashgate, 2004), XII, 94.

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Crown remained the single most important bond of empire” (98). If in one sense a notion of freedom had been exported to the Atlantic colonies, this notion had become closely tied to the self-interest of a colonial elite that exercised considerable power, and had made it their business to cultivate close relations with the landed gentry in the mother country, particularly with Whig members of parliament. Ian K. Steele describes the power of this colonial elite as follows: In communities without ancient patterns of deference . . . new men of “substance” sought enough social order to allow themselves quiet possession of visible inequalities. These men sought to provide services a[s] brokers of political, economic, and social power between their locality and the colony and empire of which it was a part. . . . It is entirely appropriate that colonial leaders initiated changes in the meaning of the word “empire” to include themselves and their localities in an organic union with the British Isles in what, by 1740, was coming to be called the “British Empire.”10

The Somerset case thus represented a clash between a long-cherished principle of English common law—protection of the individual against arbitrary confinement— and the interests of a colonial elite, as well as those in the home country who supported commerce. It implicitly raised the question of just how British the Atlantic colonies could be, in the absence of unified political and institutional structures.11 Even in Britain itself, the idea of the state as a unified entity, in which the authority of Westminster could override that of locally powerful landowning aristocrats, began to take shape only in the last few decades of the eighteenth century.12 Indeed, the very absence of a strong centralized government fostered the idea that—in some way that was not often subjected to critical examination— Britain was more “free” than any Continental European nation. Blackstone’s Commentaries on the Laws of England (1765–1769) closed with this well-known appeal to those charged with the duty of governing the nation: “The protection of THE LIBERTY OF BRITAIN is a duty which they owe to themselves, who enjoy it; to their ancestors, who transmitted it down; and to the posterity, who will claim at their hands this, the best birthright, and noblest inheritance of mankind.”13 10 Ian K. Steele, The English Atlantic 1675–1740: An Exploration of Communication and Community (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), 277–78. 11 In this respect the arguments deployed in the Somerset case, and taken up by abolitionists after Mansfield’s ruling was handed down, tend to support David Armitage’s view that the conception of the British Empire that was current during the mid-eighteenth century was an ideology, and thus open to challenge—not an “identity.” See The Ideological Origins of the British Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 172. 12 See Chris Jones, Radical Sensibility: Literature and Ideas in the 1790s (London: Routledge, 1993), 76; Leith Davis, Acts of Union: Scotland and the Literary Negotiation of the British Nation, 1707–1830 (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 4–6; and John Richetti, The English Novel in History 1700–1780 (London: Routledge, 1999), 6–7. 13 Quoted in Anstey, Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, 113.

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The movement for abolition of the slave trade, which claimed public attention most powerfully in the 1780s and early 1790s, was coeval with such attempts to invent a unified nation, Great Britain, while reasserting its special claim to being free. The construction of a national self-image and national myth was simultaneous with, and implicated in, the belief that the soil and climate were inherently hospitable to freedom. Insofar as this belief could appeal to the Revolution settlement of 1688, the Bill of Rights, and legislation passed during the reign of William and Mary defining the duties and limiting the powers of the monarch, it could readily be embraced by Whigs; and yet, on the other hand, Tories—who distrusted the wealthy Whig landowners, and questioned the increasing predominance of mercantilism and financial concerns in national life—would have interpreted “freedom” in a rather different way, though still linking the idea with national tradition. As Nicholas Hudson has argued, well before 1772, “British authors were condemning the slavetrade as an evil supported by mercantile greed and the betrayal of Christianity . . . these antislavery sentiments derived from a deep and sometimes xenophobic patriotism.”14 Such patriotic beliefs about the national character could take on special importance when they influenced the interpretation of statutes and legal precedents. Brycchan Carey makes the point that “the substance of the Anglophone antislavery debate had largely been worked out” by the early 1700s.15 So far as religious and moral objections to slavery are concerned, this observation may be correct. However, the antislavery opinions of Samuel Johnson, William Warburton, and other prominent Tory writers who were hostile to the claims of commercial interests, and even Blackstone’s claim that liberty was the foundational value and most precious birthright of the British state, did not themselves lead directly to a concerted political campaign against slavery or the slave trade. Britons were shielded from the realities of plantation slavery, or chose not to examine them too closely, until their attention was focused by a particular case. These considerations are relevant to the moment when Granville Sharp, in 1767 still a young clerk in the Ordnance Department, sought legal advice about the likelihood of a successful action on behalf of Jonathan Strong. Strong was a black youth who had been brought from Barbados by his master, a lawyer named David Lisle, who beat and injured him. He had escaped and recovered, but was later kidnapped at Lisle’s instigation, and was fighting Lisle’s attempt to reassert ownership.16 Sharp consulted lawyers who asserted that the law was against him, Nicholas Hudson, “‘Britons Never Will be Slaves’: National Myth, Conservatism, and the Beginnings of British Antislavery,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 34, no.4 (2001): 567. 15 Brycchan Carey, British Abolitionism, 107. 16 Jonathan Strong was eventually released by order of the Lord Mayor of London. Held in a City of London jail, he managed to have a letter sent to Sharp, who appealed to the Lord Mayor, and won a favorable decision. See Adam Hochschild, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), 43–44; and Swaminathan, Debating the Slave Trade, 64–65. 14

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basing this view on opinions by Philip Yorke, Earl of Hardwicke (AttorneyGeneral 1724–1733, Chief Justice 1733–1737), and Charles, First Baron Talbot (a former Solicitor-General and Lord Chancellor 1733–1737). The Yorke-Talbot opinion, issued in 1729 and reaffirmed in its essentials in 1749, stated, in part: “We are of opinion, that a Slave by coming from the West-Indies to Great-Britain, or Ireland, either with or without his master, doth not become free; and that his master’s property or right in him, is not thereby determined or varied. . . . We are also of opinion, that the master may legally compel him to return again to the plantations.”17 There were opinions on the other side too, however. Chief Justice Sir John Holt of the Court of King’s Bench had expressed the view that a slave became free as soon as he set foot in England, and this view was reaffirmed by William Blackstone in his Commentaries on the Laws of England.18 Sir John Holt’s opinion was later cited by the lawyers acting for James Somerset (English Reports 98:501). In 1767, however, these were still only opinions, and carried no formal legal weight despite the eminence of the jurists who had issued them. Faced with these contradictory legal opinions, Sharp researched the question further, summarizing his findings in a pamphlet of about 150 pages, A Representation of the Injustice and Dangerous Tendency of Tolerating Slavery: or of Admitting the Least Claim of Private Property in the Persons of Men (London, 1769), in which he cited the opinion of Lord Chief Justice Holt, reviewed the history of villeinage and its abolition, and concluded that “under the British constitution force could not be used without legal process.”19 Sharp circulated his pamphlet to lawyers, but it was not until the Somerset case of 1772 that a clear legal decision was finally given by Lord Chief Justice Mansfield. Even then, the decision was strictly limited to the point actually at issue: namely, the attempt by Somerset’s former owner, Charles Stewart, to force Somerset to return to Jamaica. In legal terminology, Mansfield’s ruling was for a “return to a habeas corpus.” It did not affirm that a slave became free as soon as he or she set foot in England. But this did not prevent abolitionist writers from exploiting to the full the potent association of sentimental humanitarianism with patriotism and the notion of Britons as lovers of liberty. As Swaminathan expresses

Quoted in Swaminathan, Debating the Slave Trade, 64. See Frank J. Klingberg, The Anti-Slavery Movement in England: A Study in English

17 18

Humanitarianism (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1926), 37–38; Anstey, Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, 113–15; and Peter J. Kitson, “Introduction” to Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation: Writings in the British Romantic Period, 8 vols, ed. Peter J. Kitson and Debbie Lee (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1999), 2: xiii. On Lords Hardwicke and Talbot, see Basil Williams, The Whig Supremacy 1714–1760, 2nd rev. ed., ed. C. H. Stuart (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), 64–65; and Swaminathan, Debating the Slave Trade, 63–64. 19 Klingberg, Anti-Slavery Movement, 38

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it, the Mansfield judgment allowed antislavery writers to “[claim] a major victory for the right to liberty over property rights.”20 Indeed, when Mr. Hargrave, one of the lawyers acting for James Somerset, made the argument that English territory was “a soil whose air is deemed too pure for slaves to breathe in it,” and that “the laws, the genius and spirit of the constitution, forbid the approach of slavery” (English Reports 98:500), he was clearly invoking not a specific statute or legal opinion, but the court’s sense of the whole tendency of English law, viewed as an expression of the character of the (English) nation. Here Hargrave is reflecting the conclusions drawn by Granville Sharp in A Representation: “Slavery is by no means tolerated in this island, either by the law or custom of England.”21 Serjeant Davy, another of the lawyers acting for the plaintiff (Somerset), used the metaphor again when rebutting one argument of the counsel for the defendant, the argument that there were instances of “villeinage” recorded as late as the reign of Elizabeth; and that, as English law had clearly permitted landowners to hold men in service as villeins less than 200 years previously (and contrary to Hargrave’s argument that villeinage was “long expired” [English Reports 98:501]), there could be no legal justification for preventing a slave owner from exercising comparable authority over a slave. Arguing that in such a case an eighteenth-century court should not base its decisions on laws dating from the reign of Elizabeth, Davy continued, “For the air of England; I think, however, it has been gradually purifying ever since the reign of Elizabeth,” and concluded his address to the court by saying: “It has been asserted, and is now repeated by me, this air is too pure for a slave to breathe in: I trust, I shall not quit this Court without certain conviction of the truth of that assertion” (98:509). This suggests that the figure was not used casually but was an integral part of the plaintiff’s case. In summing up the nature of the decision that he was called upon to make in Somerset v. Stewart, Lord Mansfield framed the question as being “whether any dominion, authority or coercion can be exercised in this country” on an individual who was “a slave according to the American laws” (98: 509). His ruling, delivered on June 22, 1772, freed James Somerset, but did not in itself make slavery illegal in Britain. Pointing out that the question to be decided was strictly confined to “a return to a habeas corpus,” that is, whether Stewart had the right to force Somerset to board the ship in order to be taken back to Jamaica, Mansfield noted, “So high an act of dominion must be recognized by the law of the country where it is used,” and continued: “The state of slavery is of such a nature, that it is incapable of being introduced on any reasons, moral or political; but only positive law, which preserves its force long after the reasons, occasion, and time itself from whence it was created, is erased from memory: it’s so odious, that nothing can be suffered to support it, but positive law. Whatever inconveniences, therefore, may follow from a decision, I cannot say this case is allowed or approved by the law of England; and therefore the black must be discharged” (98:510). Swaminathan, Debating the Slave Trade, 88–89. Quoted in ibid., 68.

20 21

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Commerce versus Liberty: The Abolitionist Response Though Mansfield’s ruling was carefully limited to the question on the use of coercion against an individual who was a slave in another country but who “refused to serve” on reaching British soil, it did hand antislavery activists a significant legal victory. It imposed constraints on the power of a slave owner to compel a slave to return to America or the West Indies, where slavery was recognized under the laws of those colonies. Perhaps more importantly in the long run, it also gave abolitionists some moral leverage, since the contradiction between the claimed freedom bestowed on British subjects—simply by their presence on British soil— and the massive, violent, and ongoing denial of such freedom to hundreds of thousands of Africans was too gross and shocking to be ignored. Granville Sharp made the contradiction explicit in a pamphlet published in 1776: “It is not enough, that the Laws of England exclude Slavery merely from this island, whilst the grand Enemy of mankind triumphs in a toleration, throughout our Colonies, of the most monstrous oppression to which human nature can be subjected!”22 Hence when Thomas Clarkson in An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species (1788) staged a dialogue between an imaginary Briton and an African, who are together watching a chained gang of slaves making painful progress towards a barracoon or “factory” prior to their embarkation on the slave ships, he made the Briton protest that those tormenting the slaves are not typical of his countrymen, but mere “‘monsters . . . out of the common course of nature,’” continuing, “‘Their countrymen at home are generous and brave. They support the sick, the lame, and the blind. . . . They are in short, of all nations, the most remarkable for humanity and justice.’”23 Through this fiction of the liberal British gentleman and upholder of the national mythology, Clarkson was invoking, with ironic intent, what was by the 1780s a familiar self-image among his intended readers, an image of themselves as belonging to a society in which all ranks are bound together by reciprocal obligations and philanthropic feeling—an entity that Markman Ellis has termed a “sentimental body politic.”24 Indeed, when reviewing Clarkson’s History of the Abolition of the Slave Trade in 1808, S. T. Coleridge reverted to this idealized, paternalist vision of the nation’s shared philanthropic feelings, transcending divisions of rank and class, when he claimed that Clarkson’s campaign owed its eventual success to the fact that “Great Britain is indeed a living body politic: the chain of interests extends in unbroken links from the great

22 Granville Sharp, The Just Limitation of Slavery in the Laws of God, Compared with the unbounded Claims of the African Traders and British American Slaveholders (London: Printed for B. White, 1776), 2. 23 Thomas Clarkson, An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, in Kitson and Lee, Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation, 2:43–44. 24 Markman Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 107.

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city to the far extremities of the empire; and thoughts and feelings are conducted by it with the rapidity of an electric charge.”25 The ease with which Coleridge grafts the rather new metaphor of an electric charge on to the ancient image of the nation as human body shows the continuing potency of the idealized image of England, and its ability to conceal the actual functioning of British investment in overseas trade. If the great city is the brain, the empire is now identified with the bodily extremities, which (Coleridge wants us to believe) are linked to the center of power not merely by a “chain of interests,” but by “thoughts and feelings” that travel as electricity does through a circuit. Despite his proclaimed hostility to commerce, at least when commerce overrides humanitarian values in the pursuit of luxury goods, Coleridge here constructs a model of imperial relations that disguises the economic “chain of interests”— the system that consumed resources and human labor at the extremities, while redirecting wealth back to the power center—with the apparently benign concept of high-minded, ethically admirable thoughts and feelings flowing outward from center to periphery. The realities of commerce were in clear conflict with this vision of a single nation pulled together into one body politic by the rapid and uninterrupted transmission of “thoughts and feelings.” Herein lay one of the major contradictions for many middle-class abolitionists. To risk an oversimplification: while the Tory landowner might be able to despise commerce, lamenting the way in which it enriched those with no due sense of their responsibilities towards society—eroding the bonds of trust and mutual obligation that transcended class divisions—and was thus quite ready to see the commercialization of English life as a threat to freedom, the classes that depended more directly on trade identified commercial activity itself with both freedom and social progress.26 A powerful influence on eighteenthcentury discussions about the place of trade in national life, particularly in Whig circles, was the idea that it promoted harmony among the different peoples of the world, and even that the beneficial intercourse among nations supposedly encouraged by trade was part of a providential scheme to knit humankind together. In the early years of the eighteenth century, the value of the merchant class and of commercial traffic itself to the body politic became central to the Whig conception of the British national character. The best-known exposition of this positive assessment of trade is Joseph Addison’s description, in Spectator 69, of the pleasure to be derived from frequenting the Royal Exchange: Nature seems to have taken a particular Care to disseminate her Blessings among the different Regions of the World, with an Eye to this mutual Intercourse and Traffick among Mankind, that the Natives of the several Parts of the Globe

S. T. Coleridge, Review of “The History of the Abolition of the Slave Trade,” in Kitson and Lee, Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation, 2:240. 26 On this point, see Hudson, “‘Britons Never Will Be Slaves,” 569–70; and Richetti, English Novel in History, 9–10. 25

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might have a kind of Dependance upon one another, and be united together by their common Interest. . . . For these Reasons there are not more useful Members in a Commonwealth than Merchants. They knit Mankind together in a mutual Intercourse of good Offices, distribute the Gifts of Nature, find Work for the Poor, add Wealth to the Rich, and Magnificence to the Great.27

The mercantilist system, based on trade monopolies operating within a single “commonwealth,” later attracted criticism from those who considered it inefficient, and believed that it stifled individual initiative—Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations (1776) being the best known of these critiques. However, it was clearly possible to carry forward the notion that commerce benefited the human race from the earlier mercantilist concept of trade to the newer, anti-monopolistic theory, in which prices were to be established by market forces. Opposing the slave trade, then, inevitably meant separating one kind of trade from all the other kinds and explaining why it must be treated as an exception to the general rule that “Traffick among Mankind” was beneficial. (William Cowper, who clearly subscribes to the “Whig” view of trade as beneficial to the nation and the world, achieves this logical swerve but at the price of a certain awkwardness, as we shall see.) A closely related problem for abolitionists, as historians have pointed out, was that while many middle-class Britons may have found the idea of buying and selling human beings repugnant, they hesitated to urge an outright ban on the trade, because it would have meant challenging property rights—rights thought to be deeply ingrained in British custom and law. This at all events was the political calculation made by the twelve-man Abolition Committee that first met on May 22, 1787, chaired by Granville Sharp, one of three Anglicans on the committee. (The remaining nine members were Quakers.) At its June 7 meeting, the chief point to be resolved was whether to work for abolition of the slave trade only, or for emancipation. Though Sharp argued strongly for full emancipation, the majority view was that this goal was out of reach for the time being, as it would constitute a direct challenge to property rights and moreover would interfere with the legislative powers of the West Indian colonial governments.28 The rhetorical attraction of the claim that England’s “air” was “free” was, then, that it gestured toward cherished beliefs about the national character while avoiding any explicit indications about what this freedom consisted in, how it might be guaranteed in English law, or how it might apply to the situation in the colonies. Whig and Tory could each interpret the trope in ways favorable to their political assumptions. It also obscured several uncomfortable facts about British imperial power and the abolitionist movement itself: not only the fact that slave The Spectator (May 19, 1711), ed. Donald F. Bond, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1965), 1:294–95, 296. 28 See Gordon K. Lewis, Slavery, Imperialism, and Freedom: Studies in English Radical Thought (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978), 28, 35; and Hochschild, Bury the Chains, 110. 27

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plantations in the West Indies were largely owned and run by Britons whose wealth contributed to Britain’s prosperity on a colossal scale, but also the fact that in Britain and in the sugar colonies it was individual slaves themselves who initiated the original drive for freedom, by repeated attempts to escape and by other acts of resistance, a point made by Hochschild.29 The notion of freedom as something mysteriously inherent in the soil and air of England undoubtedly helped many abolitionists to consider themselves as bestowing freedom as a gift on suffering Africans, who then would be expected to respond with perpetual gratitude. As Marcus Wood has argued, this is the meaning encoded in the medallion that Josiah Wedgwood produced for the Abolition Society, with its well-known image of the kneeling slave: “at the rhetorical heart of white emancipation propaganda was its assumption that freedom remain[s] the gift of the white.”30 Reimagining Commerce: Abolitionist Poetry and the “Bonds Of Nature” In one sense, then, the trope of “freedom in the air” already typified an idealized Britain—a “space of poetic or fictional retreat,” as Ian Baucom calls it.31 In the poetry of Cowper, where the trope was most influentially deployed, it became the key rhetorical figure in an impassioned formulation of the sentimentalisthumanitarian position. It occurs both in the poem Charity, published in 1782, and in better-known, frequently quoted lines from The Task (1785). In Charity, a sharp distinction is drawn between the benefits of global trade—which is represented in Addisonian terms as strengthening bonds between human beings in far-flung lands, and bringing unmixed blessings to the world, including the benefits of the Christian gospel—and the antisocial cruelty and inhumanity of the slave trade, which severs the bond between one human being and another. It seems indeed as if the slave trade is regarded as a “loathsome traffic” not primarily because of the suffering it inflicts, but because it mars the otherwise beneficent face of British global trade: Heav’n speed the canvass, gallantly unfurl’d To furnish and accommodate a world, To give the pole the produce of the sun, And knit th’unsocial climates into one ................................ But, ah! what wish can prosper, or what pray’r, For merchants, rich in cargoes of despair, Who drive a loathsome traffic, gage, and span,

Bury the Chains, 48. Marcus Wood, “Emancipation Art, Fanon and ‘the Butchery of Freedom,’” in

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Slavery and the Cultures of Abolition: Essays Marking the Bicentennial of the British Abolition Act of 1807, ed. Brycchan Carey and Peter J. Kitson (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2007), 21. 31 Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic, 234.

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And buy, the muscles and the bones of man? The tender ties of father, husband, friend, All bonds of nature, in that moment end; And each endures, while yet he draws his breath, A stroke as fatal as the scythe of death.32

The apostrophe to Heaven remarkably manages to suggest that trade is necessary to correct an imbalance in nature, which has failed to spread the earth’s productive capacity evenly between the equator and the pole. The disparate climates of the world are “unsocial,” out of harmony with each other, perhaps with the added implication that they are hostile to human association, to societas. Trade, then, repairs this disunited and inharmonious world, weaving bonds between scattered communities, fulfilling their material needs by dealing in true wealth (“produce”). The transition from material to spiritual traffic, and the image of ships carrying the Christian gospel to pagan lands, has the effect—rather strange to modern eyes— of making all trade seem deserving of divine approval, a way of doing God’s work. The slave trade can then be attacked as a blot on this work of binding the world in social union, a perversion of trade’s true purpose. Those who buy and sell human flesh, “rich in cargoes of despair,” accumulate false wealth, and their trade, far from repairing a fallen world, does the opposite, cutting the “tender ties” and “bonds of nature.” In this sentimentalist depiction of the effects of enslavement, freedom is paradoxically the prerequisite for maintaining the “bonds of nature.” Freedom in other words is the precondition for the expression of affect. Cowper further develops the idea of humankind’s instinctual drive for freedom by making it the culmination of a natural progression: for, as the poem now argues, the noblest of beasts, the horse, values its freedom: Nature imprints upon whate’er we see That has a heart and life in it – Be free! The beasts are charter’d – neither age nor force Can quell the love of freedom in a horse. . . . (169–72)

Trafficking in slaves is in this way made to seem brutish, not only in the commonplace sense that it involves the violent degradation of another human being, but also in the sense that the man who enslaves another is lowering himself on the chain of being, reversing the ordained progression of the natural order toward higher degrees of freedom. Yet this freedom among human beings is realized and expresses itself in social union, the “bonds of nature.” In Book II of The Task, where there is a more explicit allusion to the language used in the Somerset case, the ironic contrast between social union as the proper or “natural” goal of humanity (the “bond of brotherhood”) and the brutalizing effects of enslavement (the bonds imposed on the slave) is set out more forcibly: William Cowper, Charity, Complete Poetical Works, lines 123–26, 137–44.

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There is no flesh in man’s obdurate heart, It does not feel for man; the nat’ral bond Of brotherhood is sever’d as the flax That falls asunder at the touch of fire .............................. Thus man devotes his brother, and destroys; And, worse than all, and most to be deplor’d, As human nature’s broadest, foulest blot, Chains him, and tasks him, and exacts his sweat With stripes .............................. No: dear as freedom is, and in my heart’s Just estimation priz’d above all price, I had much rather be myself the slave, And wear the bonds, than fasten them on him. We have no slaves at home. — Then why abroad? And they themselves, once ferried o’er the wave That parts us, are emancipate and loos’d. Slaves cannot breathe in England; if their lungs Receive our air, that moment they are free; They touch our country, and their shackles fall. (II.8–11, 20–24, 33–42)

Once again in this passage, geography—the geography of what was for Cowper a fallen world—is endowed with the power to break up those bonds of sentiment that in a perfect world would unite human beings: Lands intersected by a narrow frith Abhor each other. Mountains interpos’d Make enemies of nations, who had else, Like kindred drops, been mingled into one. (II.16–19)

Yet, in a contrary interpretation of the geographical theme, it seems that England has actually benefited from its separateness as an island nation, since breathing English air instantaneously bestows freedom. This was an optimistic but widely adopted interpretation of the Mansfield judgment, and of the tradition of legal opinion represented by Lord Holt, William Blackstone, and others, which Mansfield had appeared to reconfirm. What is more unexpected, and perhaps more revealing of the disabling contradiction in which the abolitionist movement found itself, is Cowper’s subsequent appeal to Britons to “spread” the blessings of freedom through the Empire: “Spread it then, / And let it circulate through ev’ry vein / Of all your empire; that where Britain’s pow’r / Is felt, mankind may feel her mercy too” (II.44–47). The logic of this attack on slavery is, then, that human beings were destined to live in brotherhood, that the enslavement of other men is a violation of this bond, and that Britain, being itself fortunate enough to enjoy a climate of freedom at home, must strive to bring freedom as a gift of (British) “mercy” to all of its

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empire.33 Cowper does not find it necessary, in making this argument, to detail the kind of freedom referred to. It is enough to place it in opposition to slavery: though, from other passages in The Task (and from the earlier poem Charity), it is evident that he holds both a Christian and a civic-constitutional definition of freedom, invoking some seventeenth-century opponents of absolute royal power, such as Hampden and Sidney, but also the language of St John: “He is the freeman whom the truth makes free, / And all are slaves beside” (V.733–34).34 Hannah More’s Slavery: A Poem (1788) resembles Cowper’s work in contrasting the freedom enjoyed by Britons with the sad lack of freedom elsewhere: If Heaven has into being deign’d to call Thy light, O Liberty! to shine on all; Bright intellectual Sun! why does thy ray To earth distribute only partial day? . . . . Was it decreed, fair Freedom! at thy birth, That thou shou’d’st ne’er irradiate all the earth? While Britain basks in thy full blaze of light, Why lies sad Afric quench’d in total night?35

Cowper’s visionary notion of a great progressive plan is missing here, and More is careful to emphasize that freedom does not include the right to resist the established order; she proceeds to distinguish the “sober Goddess,” true Freedom, from the “unlicens’d monster of the crowd” (19, 21), alluding—according to More’s footnote in a later edition—to the “riots of London in the year 1780,” that is, to the anti-Catholic and anti-capitalist Gordon riots. (A later version of the poem adds ten lines here that further extend the description of this false “monster,” now referring to it as “mad Liberty” and blaming it as “on Freedom’s genuine coast, / Bellowing for blessings which were never lost”36— a clear attack on English sympathizers with the French Revolution.) Despite these allusions to political contention, both versions of the poem are consistent in claiming true freedom as an English prerogative, though See George Boulukos, The Grateful Slave: The Emergence of Race in EighteenthCentury British and American Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 34 Roger Anstey points out the religious underpinnings of Cowper’s concept of freedom: that without liberty, a person cannot be a Christian in the true sense (Atlantic Slave Trade and British Abolition, 162–63). Andrew Porter explains the connection between antislavery and the aims of evangelicalism in a broader context: “Slave-ownership . . . conflicted with the obligations of charity and evangelization; slave status removed the liberty for moral choice and ethical behaviour.” “Trusteeship, Anti-Slavery, and Humanitarianism,” in The Oxford History of the British Empire, ed. Andrew Porter (Oxford University Press, 1999), 3:202. 35 Hannah More, Slavery: A Poem (London, 1788), lines 1–4, 15–18. 36 Hannah More, The Black Slave Trade: A Poem, in The Poetry of Slavery: An AngloAmerican Anthology, 1764-1865, ed. Marcus Wood (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), lines 25, 45–46. 33

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simultaneously and rather inconsistently attempting to persuade the buyers of African slaves to leave Africans their God-given freedom: Ev’n you, of ruffian heart, and ruthless hand, Love your own offspring, love your native land. Ah! leave them holy Freedom’s cheering smile, The heav’n-taught fondness for the parent soil; Revere affections mingled with our frame, In every nature, every clime, the same; In all, these feelings equal sway maintain; In all the love of Home and Freedom reign.37

This is a version of the evangelizing program favored in Cowper’s Charity— trade as a way of spreading freedom around the world—though More’s poem appears to suggest, in a clearly self-contradictory way, both that the native populations of other countries already have freedom, and that the British ought to carry this gift to them (“Shall Britain, where the soul of Freedom reigns, / Forge chains for others she herself disdains? / Forbid it, Heaven! O let the nations know / The liberty she loves she will bestow” [251–54]). The assumption that commerce is beneficial and liberating was sufficiently widely held that even the Irish Quaker Mary Birkett calls in her Poem on the African Slave Trade for the resources previously put into the slave trade to be switched to the trade in precious metals and agricultural produce.38 Birkett’s criticism of England’s role in the slave trade is worth examining precisely because, though English by birth, she identifies herself emphatically as an Irish poet, looking sorrowfully on England’s “foul crimes” from the vantage point of an innocent country.39 Nevertheless, Birkett anticipates a time when the British will abolish slavery as well as the slave trade, thereby giving freedom, not (as we might perhaps expect) to plantation slaves in the West Indies, but . . . to Africa: Freedom! thy Name, which gladdens ev’ry plain, Throbs in my heart, and thrills thro’ every vein; For soon (blest hope!) on Afric’s mourning shore, Thy dawning sun shall rise to set no more; And soon will every virtuous British peer, Rise with one voice, and send thee smiling there. (69–74)

More, Slavery, lines 113–20. Mary Birkett was only seventeen when she wrote this, her first major poem. Born

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in England in 1774, the daughter of a candlemaker, she was brought to Dublin at the age of ten. On Birkett, see Clare Midgley, Women Against Slavery: The British Campaigns, 1780–1870 (London: Routledge, 1992), 36. 39 Mary Birkett, A Poem on the African Slave Trade. Addressed to Her Own Sex (Dublin: 1792), part 2, line 38.

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Later, the poem anticipates the grateful joy of Africans, as they welcome British ships to African ports, bringing the benefits of global trade to a new market. After 1791, anti-slave-trade rhetoric in England tended to mute the claims about freedom being native to English soil, and to emphasize instead the threat of vengeance and the feelings of guilt that Englishmen felt or should feel over their complicity in slavery. In 1788, Ann Yearsley had directly challenged the gross bias in English law that condemned a petty thief to hang while sparing the slave trader, and blamed both Commerce, for the greed that it encouraged, and the Christian churches, for condoning it. Advance, ye Christians, and oppose my strain: Who dares condemn it? Prove from laws divine, From deep philosophy, or social love, That ye derive your privilege. I scorn The cry of Avarice, or the trade that drains A fellow-creature’s blood: bid Commerce plead Her public good, her nation’s many wants.40

The increasing skepticism about the benefits of commerce—that “complicated gift,” as Mary Birkett called it41—became far more prominent as the sugar boycott got under way. This form of direct protest against plantation slavery was advocated only after the defeat of Wilberforce’s 1791 bill for the abolition of the slave trade, and while it probably did little to reduce the number of African men and women forced into slavery, it did ratchet up the level of abolitionist activism, and clearly radicalized many whose engagement with the cause had previously been limited to buying abolitionist pamphlets. As Julie Ellison has remarked in relation to Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s poetry, after the defeat of Wilberforce’s bill there was a “shift in tone from pity to indignation.”42 The Quaker attorney William Fox, proposing a boycott of sugar in a 1791 pamphlet, directly challenged the sentimentalist supporters of abolition, arguing that without some actual self-sacrifice, it would appear that “those numerous displays of humanity, of which this kingdom boasts, have not their foundation in any virtuous or valuable principle; but that to custom and ostentation they owe their origin.”43 Making a particular appeal to fellow Dissenters, Fox goes so far as to call consumption of sugar and rum imported from the West Indies “criminal” (2:165). By inaugurating a widespread boycott—at the height of the campaign, 40 Ann Yearsley, A Poem on the Inhumanity of the Slave-Trade, in Wood, The Poetry of Slavery, lines 148–54. 41 Mary Birkett, A Poem on the African Slave Trade, Part 2, line 7. 42 Julie Ellison, Cato’s Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 108. 43 William Fox, An Address to the People of Great Britain, on the Propriety of Abstaining from West India Sugar and Rum, in Kitson and Lee, Slavery, Abolition and Emancipation, 2:164.

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300,000 families are estimated to have given up sugar—Fox succeeded in forcing the antislavery movement into a new phase, in which the sentimental-humanitarian idea of bonds of feeling uniting different peoples became a motive for direct—if chiefly symbolic—action. Barbauld’s verse “Epistle to William Wilberforce” (1791) likewise pictured as ineffective the moral and rhetorical conventions of previous abolitionist poetry, but Barbauld’s approach is by way of parody. Commerce, in Barbauld’s vision of contemporary Britain, is no longer a benign form of intercourse weaving the fabric of human brotherhood, but a noxious traffic that imports only moral corruption into British homes: “By foreign wealth are British morals changed, / And Afric’s sons, and India’s, smile avenged.”44 Coleridge later added his voice to those calling for all dissenters and others friendly to the cause to cease consuming sugar and rum. His appeal unites the “retribution” theme with the argument that anyone who purchases the product of a nefarious trade is as guilty as those directly engaged in it: “What is the first and constantly acting cause of the Slave-trade? That cause, by which it exists and deprived of which it would immediately cease? Is it not self-evidently the consumption of it’s [sic] products? And does not then the guilt rest on the consumers?”45 In this rhetorical world, humanity of feeling is no longer enough, and indeed it is conspicuously represented as a form of self-indulgence. English “Liberty” as Sanctifying Imperial Ambitions If the kind of national self-understanding that was invoked by legal counsel, and subsequently by poets and pamphlet writers, to argue that the very climate of England was inimical to slavery started to appear inadequate in the 1790s, for over a decade it had a dominant presence in abolitionist rhetoric as an idealistic counterpart to the equally idealized image of the grateful slave whose chains are magically loosed by the operation of Britain’s “mercy.” From a radical-critical perspective, however, it can be understood as concealing the violence committed in the name of imperial defense. It tended to equate freedom with both a Christian social order and the expansion of trade, an expansion that brought about a concomitant rise in the dominance of finance capital. A critique of the sentimentalhumanitarian trope is required, not because it was politically ineffective, but for precisely the opposite reason: its political effectiveness warns us that it worked to reinforce the self-image and most deeply held assumptions of most members of the landed gentry, the commercial dissenting middle class, and the learned professions.

Anna Laetitia Barbauld, Epistle to William Wilberforce, Esq. On the Rejection of the Bill for Abolishing the Slave Trade, in Wood, Poetry of Slavery, lines 104–5. 45 S. T. Coleridge, The Watchman, March 25, 1796, in Collected Works, Bollingen Series LXXV, ed. Lewis Patton (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970), 2:137–38. 44

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Ian Baucom has shown how the notorious Zong incident46 can be read as a salient and definitive instance of the way in which the transatlantic slave trade and its attendant atrocities reveal interconnections between the commodification of human life and subjectivity by finance capital and the Enlightenment (especially Kantian) discourse that “invests itself speculatively in the concept of humanity,” and “abstracts the concept of humanity from the observed turn of human events.”47 Baucom argues for a “counterdiscourse of modernity” that will “acknowledge and take some affective property in the ruinous ‘past’ continuously, if nonsynchronously, present within now-being,” to “identify an affective, interested, and imaginary investment in the traumas of history as a truthful form of knowledge” (218, 222). From such a perspective, the rhetoric of attachment to a sentimental-humanitarian vision of England as the land of ancient freedoms, adopted by Cowper, More, and their fellow-abolitionists, can be reconfigured as a self-justifying and even hubristic misdirection of affect. If Baucom is right that sensibility, sentiment, and melancholy emerge in the eighteenth century “neither as a flight from knowledge or the cosmopolitan but as a self-consciously interested, while self-consciously fanciful, knowledge of the facts of modern European geopolitics” (230), the limits of this knowledge are particularly evident in the way they sanctified those nascent imperial ambitions that came to prominence in the 1800s. It is perhaps unnecessary to point out the flaw in the political logic that made Britons the undisputed possessors of a “freedom” which it was then their humanitarian duty to “spread” throughout the rest of the world. But the more difficult question to come to grips with is the one that Baucom raises, concerning the genealogy of modernity, and the extent to which the assumptions of eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury humanitarianism and its “modernizing” agenda continue to permeate Western liberal thought to the point where the concept of a benign imperialism has in recent times been reintroduced and offered for serious consideration. Arguing that the slave trade and plantation slavery are “part of the moral history of the West,” and not “discrete episodes in the history of a minority . . . [or] aberrations from the spirit of modern culture that were likely to be overcome by inexorable progress towards a secular, rational utopia,” Paul Gilroy has called for a more thoroughgoing analysis of “the relationship of racial terror and subordination to the inner character of modernity.”48 Such a reexamination needs to extend to the cultural and geopolitical preconceptions that underlay the affective language of abolitionism, and which continue to have an alarming afterlife in more recent political discourse.

In November and early December 1781, 131 slaves were murdered on the orders of the captain of the ship, by being thrown overboard (ostensibly in order to conserve the ship’s remaining supply of water but in fact to establish their commodity value so the insurance could be collected). 47 Baucom, Specters of the Atlantic, 207. 48 Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 70–71. 46

Chapter 4

Sympathy, Nerve Physiology, and National Degeneration in Anna Letitia Barbauld’s Epistle to William Wilberforce Mary A. Waters

By 1807 when the British Parliament finally voted to end the slave trade, both the rhetoric of sensibility and writing by women had become decisive elements in the pressure for abolition. While late-eighteenth-century Britons were coming to believe that women possessed exceptional access to virtue and sympathy, women saw in abolition an occasion to turn domestic virtue to service in public policy debates. Though the idioms of sensibility permeated writing by both men and women, women were especially inclined to enlist support for abolition by cultivating sympathy for those who suffer under slavery’s oppression. Sentimental tableaus of violently sundered personal ties, patient suffering, and physical agony saturate this literature, where the tears of shattered victims communicate freely to become the tears of the reader, inspiring benevolent action that will lead the state itself to virtue through abolition. Recent studies examining the literary and rhetorical deployment of sensibility in the cause of abolition have particularly attended to these ambitions, whereby feeling was put into circulation through verbal and visual formulas that had become widely familiar in order to then be channeled to public effect.1 But though compelling, these accounts leave unexplained a more material In The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), for example, Markman Ellis demonstrates that contemporary fiction and critical commentary engaged in some of the most public controversies, including the abolition of slavery. Jennifer Keith takes up the topic as one in which the structure of the gaze produced through pathetic vignettes creates challenges to antislavery poets who hope to avoid objectifying slavery’s victims, in “The Formal Challenges of Antislavery Poetry,” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 34 (2005): 97– 124. While his British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility: Writing, Sentiment, and Slavery, 1760–1807 (Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005) examines the rhetoric of sensibility in abolitionist letters, novels, poetry, pamphlets, sermons, and parliamentary speeches, Brycchan Carey’s essay in the current volume extends this analysis to drama. Most recently, in Debating the Slave Trade: Rhetoric of British National Identity, 1759– 1815 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009), Srividhya Swaminathan has shown that pathos is one of three classical rhetorical strategies that helped turn debates over abolition to service in constructing British conceptions of their national character. 1

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aspect of some antislavery literature: the alarming sense that British complicity with slavery was spreading moral corruption throughout society in the form of physical degeneration that corresponded to the corrosion of the mind. One such work is Anna Letitia Barbauld’s relatively early contribution to the abolition debate, her Epistle to William Wilberforce, Esq. on the Rejection of the Bill for Abolishing the Slave Trade (1791). A devastating portrait of the individual and national consequences of moral failure, Barbauld’s poem is often cited in discussions of British women’s abolitionist writing, but rarely does it receive extended close scrutiny.2 I depart from that practice here by analyzing the poem to illuminate what Alan Richardson has called the “contradictions, cruxes, and charged moments” that reflect “embodied approaches to the mind.”3 A charged poem from beginning to end, the Epistle to Wilberforce can clarify some neglected details of other sentimental abolitionist writing while elucidating an important thread in understanding the physiological foundations of emotion as it appeared in the period’s discourse of sensibility, a discourse that was central to the abolition debate. Scholars of sensibility have long recognized it as a discourse grounded in the body. Not only did the defenseless objects of sympathy—the threatened heroines, the virtuous abused, and in the case of abolition literature, the long-suffering slave—manifest their injuries and persecuted state bodily through tears, fainting, bowed stature, and collapse, but the witness or, more often, the reader of these symptoms was expected to respond in a similar language of the body—with tears, agitation, thrills, vibrations, heating and freezing of the blood. What stands out with Barbauld’s poem is the extent to which she grounds her polemic not just in the literary expressions of sensibility, but in sensibility’s most rigorous science as well. Though it acknowledges abolitionist efforts to generate sympathy, the poem turns attention away from the disempowerment and suffering of slavery’s victims in order to condemn both the perpetrators and those complicit in the crimes, and to prophesy the dissolution of the British moral, social, and political world. Barbauld invokes the standard language of literary sensibility, but only in sardonic condemnation of its failure to produce the expected effect. In place of the usual expressions of sympathetic emotion, most of the feelings depicted are abhorrent, and they lead to bodily effects that lack the fleeting qualities of sensibility’s more familiar physical manifestations, consisting instead of transformations that are as enduring as they are degenerate. In fact, the poem has more in common with apocalyptic satire such as the conclusion of Pope’s Dunciad than it does Most readings of the Epistle to William Wilberforce cite the same few short passages to support a thesis that then quickly turns attention either to other abolitionist writers or to other Barbauld poems, especially her more frequently considered Eighteen Hundred and Eleven. Consequently, some of the poem’s most provocative moments have been largely ignored. A recent significant exception to this practice is the discussion by Candace Ward in Desire and Disorder: Fevers, Fictions, and Feeling in English Georgian Culture (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2007),174–85. 3 Alan Richardson, British Romanticism and the Science of the Mind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), xvi, xvii. 2

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with, for example, Hannah More’s insistence on fellow-feeling as grounds for ending the British slave trade.4 If poems like More’s render the salutary moral effects of emotional responsiveness, Barbauld’s offers a vision of the opposite: the physical and moral decay that inevitably follows from defying the natural dictates of the heart. As a result, her poem does not merely contain examples of the sort of isolated cruxes and charged moments to which Alan Richardson alerts us, but rather consists in an extended illustration of the physiological understanding of mental activity as it had come to her contemporaries through popularization of the ideas of David Hartley. The Question of Sensibility Barbauld embraced poetic commentary on public questions with her first major publication under her birth name, Anna Aikin. Corsica: An Ode (1768) celebrates the island nation’s independent spirit expressed through its unsuccessful struggle against French domination. Her writing then took a less overtly political turn for many years, first with the 1773 publication of her volume Poems and a volume of Miscellaneous Essays in Prose coauthored with her brother, then in a series of publications in children’s, educational, and devotional literature. But with the onset of the turbulent 1790s, Barbauld resumed writing along those liberationist lines that had informed her earliest work, a thread that harmonized with recent calls for social and political reform in which religious Dissenters like herself were taking the lead. She embarked on a half decade of concentrated political and reform writing in both prose and poetry, addressing issues such as religious tolerance, civil rights, and the abolition of the slave trade. The first of these publications, a prose pamphlet entitled An Address to the Opposers of the Repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts (1790), relies on reasoned argument to build a convincing case in support of Dissenter advocacy for repeal of discriminatory legislation. The second, the Epistle to William Wilberforce, Esq. on the Rejection of the Bill for Abolishing the Slave Trade, draws on very different strategies. On the surface, Barbauld’s Epistle to Wilberforce may seem the antithesis of literature of sensibility. As its full title indicates, the poem’s occasion was the rejection of evangelical Parliamentarian William Wilberforce’s April 1791 bill to end the slave trade. A dark and censorious study in devastation, Barbauld’s poem relies on remorseless irony, personification, and the ceremonial march of formal metrical structure and rhyming couplets to produce a grim verse that seems to stalk appalled through a world that has turned its back on its own humanity by rejecting Wilberforce’s pleas. The voice is relentlessly public in tone; as William McCarthy observes, it is that of “a mature moralist qualified to pass judgment on

4 See More, Slavery, A Poem (London: T. Cadell, 1788), e.g., lines 55–75; 95–122; 147–57; 265–75.

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the nation and its leading men.”5 Two decades later Barbauld’s milder but similar poem Eighteen Hundred and Eleven (1812) was to receive harsh condemnation for its predictions that Britain’s imperial ambitions will bring about social and economic collapse. But the later poem offers as solace Barbauld’s visions of the nation’s revered cultural legacy dispersed across the globe, engendering the great civilizations of the future. The Epistle to Wilberforce, on the other hand, offers no Cassandra-like prophesy—only because social disintegration has already arrived. Meanwhile, the sole consolation it proposes is to assure Wilberforce that while most of British society collapses into its own moral abyss, he along with prison reformer John Howard “have sav’d yourselves—and that is all” (117). Despite these Juvenalian qualities, however, well-known forms of sentimental language inform the poem from its first lines. In addressing Parliament, Wilberforce had incorporated the rhetoric of sensibility to arouse sympathy and expose the brutal abuses of the slave trade.6 In Barbauld’s view, Wilberforce and his supporters had brought the slave’s all-too-pitiable humanity before British eyes by depicting his “deep groans” and “constant tear” (5–6). Barbauld, however, declines on her part to enlist reader tears through the tableaus of suffering that were common to established formulas of sentimental literature. Instead, she bemoans England’s callous failure to respond appropriately to Wilberforce’s appeals, act on the dictates of feeling, and end the abomination of “the Negro’s chain” and “the bloody scourge,” of which “Preacher, Poet, Senator” have been made fully aware (3–8). Even after a surge of abolitionist optimism so fervent that poets had already “rung” the “applausive peans” to celebrate the imminent “Astrean reign,” the slave trade continued: “Still Afric bleeds / Uncheck’d the human traffic still proceeds” (12, 14–16). Read too quickly, these lines might be interpreted as England’s failure to feel, but that is not Barbauld’s complaint. Rather, the appeals to sentiment in revelations of human cruelty and misery have “Claimed Pity’s tear, urged Conscience’ strong controul / And flash’d conviction on her shrinking soul” (9–10). The British have felt sympathy and acknowledged the iniquity of slave holding. But ultimately greed proves too much for the forces of reform. The profitability of commerce founded on slavery inspires an “artful” and ultimately persuasive combination of falsehood, sophistry, and ridicule that for the merchants and politicians with vested interests perverts the natural responses of benevolent feeling that should inspire moral action (29). Instead of shedding tears of pity, 5 Anna Letitia Barbauld: Voice of the Enlightenment (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2008), 295. 6 See Carey, British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility and “William Wilberforce’s Sentimental Rhetoric: Parliamentary Reportage and the Abolition Speech of 1789,” Age of Johnson: A Scholarly Annual 14 (2003): 281–305. Carey establishes that although accounts of Wilberforce’s speech vary substantially, they generally agree that Wilberforce emphasized evoking feeling as more persuasive than supplying facts. As Julie Ellison phrases it, Wilberforce’s speeches had invoked “the bodily rhetoric of sensibility.” See “The Politics of Fancy in the Age of Sensibility,” in Re-visioning Romanticism: British Women Writers, 1776–1837 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994), 236.

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the members of “Britain’s senate” have become so callous that they laugh aloud at accounts of misery (37–40). Parliament fails to pass Wilberforce’s resolution into law, and the consequences are inscribed on both the African and the English body: “Afric bleeds” and Britain “Stamps her infamy to future time, / And on her harden’d forehead seals the crime” (15–18). Though a long way from more easily recognized formulas, in lines like these we begin to see how Barbauld grounds her poem on the same physiological theories that undergird the language and literature of sensibility. Sensation, Affect, and Nerve Physiology As G. J. Barker-Benfield has noted, words like “stamps” along with related terms like “impression” derived from the new sensational psychology, which sought to offer a material explanation for sensation, emotion, learning, even the nature of the human character.7 Barker-Benfield places greater emphasis on the influence of physician George Cheyne, but the foremost contributor to the mid- to lateeighteenth-century understanding of the relationship between physiology and mental and emotional states was physician and metaphysician David Hartley, Cheyne’s close friend and professional associate.8 Published in 1749, Hartley’s Observations on Man outlined a comprehensive theory of mental and emotional activity grounded in the body, paying acute attention to early stages of psychological development and its social context.9 From foundations laid in Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) and Newton’s Opticks (1704), Hartley posited his theory of vibrations to explain how sensory stimuli are communicated along nerve fibers to the brain, the seat of all thought and perception. From this physiological foundation, Hartley developed a comprehensive model of human psychology that accounted in material terms for mental activity such as memory, complex ideas, normal emotional and intellectual development, and aberrant states of mind. For Hartley, after a sensation stimulates a nerve, the effects of vibration will leave a faint physical trace on the nerve that constitutes memory. These traces provide a corporeal explanation for Locke’s widely influential concept of the association of ideas, for when stimuli repeatedly occur in pairs, the physical traces will tend to associate the two stimuli. Eventually the association becomes so powerful that the occurrence of one stimulus from a pair provides sufficient cause G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in EighteenthCentury Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 17. 8 See Isaac Kramnick, “Eighteenth-Century Science and Radical Social Theory: The Case of Joseph Priestley’s Scientific Liberalism,” Journal of British Studies 25, no. 1 (1986): 1–30. Kramnick describes Hartley as “the towering intellectual influence that informed and shaped the optimism of Priestley and his circle” (15). 9 Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty, and His Expectations: In Two Parts, 2 vols (London 1749). Several portions of my summary of Hartley’s theories are indebted to Richard C. Allen, David Hartley on Human Nature (Albany: SUNY Press, 1999). 7

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to produce the vibrations associated with the other. Further, as these traces or “impressions” are established (or “stamped”), an increased receptivity to similar vibrations develops, and thus habits of mind can be explained. Hartley’s prominence in reformist thinking derives from his conjectures that this intelligible chain of physiological events meant associations might be predictably manipulated. In Locke, the association of ideas was accidental, a phenomenon perhaps to be regarded with suspicion. Well known is the ominous description in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding wherein once ideas come to be associated, “they always keep company, and the one no sooner at any time comes into the Understanding but its Associate appears with it; and if they are more than two which are thus united, the whole gang always inseparable shew themselves together.”10 Hartley suggested, on the other hand, that through intentionally cultivating desirable associations human personalities might be formed, or in the case of adults, re-formed along regulated lines to nurture advantageous social qualities such as industry, sympathy, morality, and social responsibility. As Isaac Kramnick phrases it, Hartley and his followers believed that the “moral sense was not innate . . . but ‘generated necessarily and mechanically,’” through “altering the causal chain of associations.”11 Particularly after Joseph Priestley published a popular abridgement,12 Hartley’s formulation, offering the prospect of infinite human perfectibility through education, became so influential in eighteenth-century movements for amelioration and reform that Kramnick describes Observations on Man as “the holy book for millenarian perfectionism” (15). Hartley’s ideas not only underlay virtually all practical plans for social advancement, but offered a theoretical foundation for the discourse of sensibility, the value of which lay in its ability to associate benevolent impulses with the pleasures of sympathy. And through the account of nerve structure and the theory of vibrations, Hartley grounded the means of creating these associations in specific physiological processes. The road from Hartley’s midcentury physiological theories to Barbauld’s revolutionary-era political jeremiad is more direct than initially might be imagined. Barker-Benfield recounts how these theories made their way into popular literature especially through Samuel Richardson’s novels, which provided the prototype for subsequent literature of sensibility. Cheyne, Hartley’s early mentor and colleague, was Richardson’s personal physician, and Richardson printed Hartley’s Observations on Man. Hartley’s ideas infused Richardson’s work, shaping depictions of emotion and its effects in his novels and penetrating from there deep into the language of sentimental fiction as it developed in the second half of the eighteenth century. Barbauld was not only widely read in this literature, but was to John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter H. Nidditch (1690; Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 395. 11 Kramnick, “Priestley’s Scientific Liberalism,” 16–17, quoting Hartley. 12 Hartley’s Theory of the Human Mind, on the Principle of the Association of Ideas (London: Joseph Johnson, 1775). 10

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become something of a Richardson expert herself, authoring critical essays on him and producing an edition of his correspondence that, though flawed, was to remain the standard until well into the twentieth century.13 What is more, Barbauld was familiar with Hartley’s text, as her reference to it in one of her critical essays shows.14 She may have encountered it through her friendship with Priestley, the radical Dissenting clergyman and scientist whose inspiration was significant to Barbauld’s intellectual development—so much so that she told him it was he who first persuaded her to try her hand at writing poetry. At the time of writing the Epistle to Wilberforce, Barbauld and Priestley remained close enough that she issued her pamphlet supporting repeal of the test acts, her first major political publication in many years, in defense of Priestley’s own call for their repeal. Priestley was so taken with Hartley’s theories that in addition to disseminating them himself, he infused them into his views on a wide variety of topics, including theology, philosophy, education, language acquisition and use, social and political reform, and aesthetics.15 In an unsympathetic Monthly Review article on Priestley’s abridgement, William Rose pointed out that everyone who knew Priestley would have known of his strong interest in Hartley.16 Given Priestley’s energetic promotion of Hartley’s theories, it would be surprising if a

The Correspondence of Samuel Richardson, 6 vols, selected and edited by Barbauld (London: R. Phillips, 1804), includes Barbauld’s critical biography, “The Life of Samuel Richardson, with Remarks on His Writings”; The British Novelists, 50 volumes, edited by Barbauld (London: Printed for F. C. & J. Rivington, 1810), also includes a critical biographical essay on Richardson prefixed to Clarissa in volume 1 as well as a substantial discussion of Richardson in “On the Origin and Progress of Novel Writing,” the prefatory essay to the set. Editions of Barbauld’s major critical essays can be found on The Poetess Archive at http://idhmc.tamu.edu/poetess/. 14 See Barbauld’s critical introduction, “Essay on The Pleasures of Imagination,” The Pleasures of the Imagination. By Mark Akenside. M.D. To Which Is Prefixed a Critical Essay on the Poem, by Mrs. Barbauld (London: Cadell & Davies, 1794), xiii–xx, xix. In his poem, Akenside followed Hartley’s description of the effects of the pleasures of imagination as described in Observations on Man. 15 For useful discussions not cited elsewhere in this essay, see George S. Erving, “The Politics of Matter: Newtonian Science and Priestleyan Metaphysics in Coleridge’s ‘Preternatural Agency,’” European Romantic Review 19, no. 3 (2008): 219–32; Robert Schofield, “Joseph Priestley on Sensation and Perception,” in Studies in Perception: Interrelations in the History of Philosophy and Science, ed. Peter K. Machamer and Robert G. Turnbull (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1978); Dabney Townsend, “The Aesthetics of Joseph Priestley,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 51, no. 4 (Fall 1993): 561–71; and Ruth Watts, “Some Radical Educational Networks of the Late Eighteenth Century and Their Influence,” History of Education 27, no. 1 (Mar 1998): 1–14. 16 [William Rose], “Article II. Hartley’s Theory of the Human Mind, on the Principle of the Association of Ideas: with Essays relating to the Subjects of it. By Joseph Priestley, LL.D. F.R.S. 8 vo. 6s. Johnson. 1775,” Monthly Review 53 (1775): 380–90; 54 (1776): 41–47. 13

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close friend with Barbauld’s intellectual curiosity and progressive views were not familiar with these ideas. If Hartley’s text provided much of the theoretical foundation for reform, however, not all of its implications were desirable. While normal levels of stimulation produce the traces on the nerve that make learning possible, in cases when nerve stimulation is exceptionally strong or recurs to excess, more extreme distortions in nerve fibers produce a cumulative loss of tone or resiliency, a laxness in the nerve, making the nerve less responsive to the same stimulus. By this means Hartley explains acclimation: a stimulus that is initially painful may with repetition become pleasurable because this stretching or distortion of the nerve results in a decreasing degree of vibration. Similarly, effects from pleasurable stimuli will gradually decrease, so that stronger stimuli may become necessary to create the same degree of pleasure. Thus, when excess stimulation causes the nerves to become overstretched or untoned, the individual becomes less responsive, weakened, preoccupied with seeking more intense forms of pleasure, less inclined to self-denial and moral or physical exertion. As with words like “stamp” and “impression,” terms that describe this state, such as “enervation” and “nervelessness,” passed quickly from medical and metaphysical discourse to other languages of mind and body, including the discourse of sensibility. We can see these effects beginning in the first stanzas of the Epistle to Wilberforce, a poem permeated with the vocabulary of nerve physiology. Opposing political positions and “Wit, Worth, and Parts and Eloquence”—the sum total of British persuasive excellence—have all united in their attempts “to rouse, to melt, or to inform the breast” (20, 24). Used metonymically to represent the seat of the emotions, “the breast” links the poem with threads of the discourse of sensibility that remain explicitly embodied, but only indirectly connected to the idiom of nerve physiology. But when Britons fail to act on their compassion, succumbing instead to an unholy cacophony of personified “seasoned tools of Avarice” that pervert natural expressions of feeling, it is the “forehead,” not the breast, that becomes “harden’d” (25, 18). Here metonymy locates the failure of response in the brain, the receptor organ for nerve vibrations in Hartley’s sensational psychology. In this case, failure to respond to emotional appeals with appropriate compassion is both cause and sign of diminished sensitivity. This failure of sensibility carries moral corruption from the slaveholding colonies across the Atlantic home to England, where it can undermine the vitality of British character. It comprises a fierce revenge for the otherwise powerless slave trade victims that easily traverses the natural boundaries between continents as “injur’d Afric, by herself redrest, / Darts her own serpents at her Tyrant’s breast” (45–46). Though in the context of this line “breast” most compellingly evokes the seat of the life force, it suggests the poisoning of emotional responsiveness, as well, thus more securely tying these passages to a discourse of sensibility that in the Epistle to Wilberforce becomes a matter of life and death. The language here, transferring the risks of tyranny from the oppressed to the oppressor, follows the logic of “colonial disease” described by Alan Bewell,

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whereby British imperial expansion was accompanied by concerns over the impact of disease on colonized populations, but even more so on the colonizers.17 In the context of colonial plantation-style agricultural methods and the transatlantic slave trade that supported them, the British came in contact with microbial populations from which natural boundaries had previously isolated them, falling victim as a result to a variety of endemic illnesses that not only spread rapidly among those who emigrated to the colonial settings but also threatened the home populations as colonizers returned, bringing strains of their infections with them. And indeed, Barbauld’s poem can be read fruitfully through the metaphorical slippage that Bewell describes, whereby the immorality inherent in colonialism spreads through the same processes and logic as bacterial infection. For example, the “vice” of the bondservant turns back on the “Tyrant” by means of “contagion” (46–48); the “languors” that result are “sickly” (49); luxuriousness is a “plague” (88); and the general “Corruption” spreads like a “leprosy” that “Infects” and “sickens at the heart” (96–99). Moreover, the penultimate stanza broadens out beyond the immediate topic of traffic in and enslavement of people of African origin, to extend the alarm over the effects on the British to include those emerging in conjunction with imperial expansion across more far-flung seas to India and the Orient. In Barbauld’s poem the diffusion of moral corruption is often represented through a striking language of disease that equates sweeping moral decline with epidemic infection, and reading the poem through this lens enriches our understanding of both its sentiments and its language.18 It does not diminish this reading, then, to insist that the poem’s language and images exceed the analogy of colonial disease, an analogy that turns out to be most fertile in passages depicting transmission but proves less so when the poem registers the effects of slaveholding and the slave trade on individual bodies. Romantic writers often expanded the language of contagion beyond a disease referent, whether literal or figurative, even in the restricted context of abolitionist Alan Bewell, Romanticism and Colonial Disease (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). 18 In Desire and Disorder, Candace Ward offers a rich reading of Epistle to William Wilberforce from this perspective, distinguishing such lines as key moments where the disease that Barbauld associates with the evils of slavery becomes identified with a moral disease that spreads “from the colonial margins” to “the very ‘heart’ of Great Britain” (181). See also Tim Fulford’s comments connecting these lines to a “modish Orientalism” underlain by “infectious . . . luxury.” “Romanticism and Colonialism: Races, Places, Peoples, 1785–1800,” in Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing and Empire, 1780–1830, ed. Tim Fulford and Peter J. Kitson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 35–47; 44. Lynn Festa, however, suggests that such a reading does not exhaust the poem’s potential when she points out that “the rhetoric of contagion does not supplant but rather exploits the sentimental model of mobile feeling.” Sentimental Figures of Empire in EighteenthCentury Britain and France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 199. I would argue that the reverse is just as compelling, especially in the case of Barbauld’s poem: depicting the transmission of feeling depends on an embodied model of the mental processes that generate emotional response. 17

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work. Hannah More, for example, uses the language of contagion to describe the spread of sympathetic feeling and liberationist impulses.19 In the case of the Epistle to Wilberforce, the depiction of the planter, the “Tyrant” of line 46, shows the consequences of vice passing from oppressed to oppressor, but the effects on the body vary considerably. Slaves show the physical manifestations of grief, pain, and resentment—they bleed, shed tears, shriek, and convey despair in angry and sullen glances that, as McCarthy observes, seem to suppress a volcanic violence of the kind that had erupted several times already and was soon to explode in the Saint-Domingue slave revolt. The slaves’ responses are both predictable and for the most part available for reader sympathy. Meanwhile, the slave owner’s body “melts,” becomes “nerveless,” afflicted with “languors.” Instead of suppressing vehement emotions as his slaves, however tenuously, seem to do, he loses his capacity for moderation and rational control as his degenerating body “blows to rage impetuous Passion’s flame” (49–50). The syntax is especially tricky in these lines, for when “Each vice, to minds deprav’d by bondage known, / With sure contagion fastens on his own,” the pronoun “his” initially appears to refer to the “minds deprav’d by bondage,” the slaves, when in fact it refers back to the “Tyrant” of the previous line (46–48). What emerges, then, is a portrait in which sensual excess engenders physical debilitation originating in overstimulation at the level of the nerve. In losing nerve tone, the tormenter becomes psychologically weakened, prey to emotional furies arising out of his own body. This explanation raises a question, however. If in the logic of this poem the “vice” is communicated from the slave to the slave holder, why would the effect on the latter be dramatically more violent? The disease model might register that as natives of tropical climates, Africans often enjoyed relative immunity to the colonial diseases that prompted British fears. But the extreme debilitation in one case yet not the other can here be more comprehensively accounted for by considering the relative positions of abused slave and frenzied planter in terms of Hartley’s theory. According to Hartley, the violent emotions such as “Anger, Revenge, Jealousy, Cruelty, and Malice . . . are most apt to arise in those Persons who have some real or imaginary Superiority over others.”20 Among other effects, this superiority positions one to insist on gratification of the will, which is normally accompanied by an experience of pleasure that, on repetition, becomes associated with the gratification itself rather than the pleasure obtained from the object of the will’s exertion. As Hartley explains it, in normal experience, disappointments will alternate with gratification so as to moderate desires and turn the mind away from gratification as an object in itself. But in circumstances where the will is virtually always gratified, as might happen in cases of extreme inequality of power, the pleasure of gratification chokes off other pleasures. Disappointment becomes intolerable, generating a physiological response identical to that of violent emotions such as rage. From this point it is a short descent from uncontrollable fury to near or even full-blown insanity: See More, Slavery, lines 263–68. Hartley, Observations on Man, 1.477.

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Violent Passions must therefore disorder the Understanding and Judgment, while they last; and if the same Passion returns frequently, it may have so great an Effect upon the Associations, as that the Intervention of foreign Ideas shall not be able to set things to rights and break the unnatural Bond. The same Increase of Vibrations makes all principle Ideas appear to affect Self, with the peculiar interesting Concern supposed to flow from personal Identity; so that these Vibrations exert a reflected Influence upon themselves by this means. And thus it appears that all violent Passions must be temporary Madnesses, and all Habits of them permanent ones. (1.398–99)

That is, violent passions overwhelm more reasonable associations and obscure the realistic perspective that would correct the unnatural one. The individual inhabits a sort of echo chamber of self-referentiality where the temporary madness of emotional extremes threatens to become a permanent condition of true insanity (see also I.371). In occupying a position in which his will is continually gratified, his emotions never restrained, his whims given free rein, the slave-owning planter is subject to these dire consequences. If excessive stimulation of a continually gratified will leads to nervous and hence moral debilitation, this connection would help clarify Barbauld’s contemptuous portrait of a brutal planter’s wife: Lo! where reclin’d, pale Beauty courts the breeze, Diffus’d on sofas of voluptuous ease; With anxious awe, her menial train around, Catch her faint whispers of half-utter’d sound; See her, in monstrous fellowship, unite At once the Scythian, and the Sybarite; Blending repugnant vices, misally’d, Which frugal nature purpos’d to divide; See her, with indolence to fierceness join’d, Of body delicate, infirm of mind, With languid tones imperious mandates urge; With arm recumbent wield the household scourge; And with unruffled mien, and placid sounds, Contriving torture, and inflicting wounds.21

This portion of the poem has proved particularly disturbing, probably in part because it has at best been incompletely understood. Moira Ferguson, for instance, rails at the “preposterousness” of this passage, for “women had very little to do with the execution and administration of slavery.”22 This objection, however, is Barbauld, Epistle to William Wilberforce, 57–70. Moira Ferguson, Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery,

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1670–1834 (New York: Routledge, 1992), 161–62. Ferguson is closer to the sense of this portrait when she alludes to the need for “decent-minded women’s attempts to stem their corruption.”

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not only false23 but misconstrues Barbauld’s point as well. The passage depicts a woman’s abuse not of a field full of slaves managed by a male owner or overseer, but rather of slaves over whom she does hold authority, the domestic servants who are near at hand—so near that she need not even leave her sofa to apply the “household scourge” (68, my emphasis). Marlon Ross recognizes this implication when he suggests that the portrait is one of a woman “masculinized by her petty reign.”24 But unless we presume that cruelty is an inherently masculine trait, the passage suggests neither masculinization of the planter’s wife nor that the reign, though confined to a domestic setting, is “petty.” Ross erroneously metaphorizes the vignette as taking place at a geographical remove, depicting a “whiplashing that occurs on the slave plantations far from the lady’s parlor.” More accurately, in Barbauld’s rendering of the scene, the whiplashing occurs in a parlor on a slave plantation, a parlor that, by its location and what occurs within it, has been transformed from a locus of polite sociability and domestic harmony to a nightmare chamber of sadistic horror. Where the image does resonate metaphorically is in implicating the domestic sphere—the site where sociable Britons consume the products of colonial slave labor—in the guilt associated with slave holding itself. Like many other Rational Dissenters, Barbauld refused to grant women absolution from culpability in a practice that underlay so many woman-dominated patterns of domestic consumption. It was women, after all, who oversaw much of British sugar consumption, and women Dissenters were crucial to the widespread sugar boycotts in which Barbauld’s own family participated. As was so often the case in the period’s discourse about women, the home stands in as a microcosm of the British nation, in this case regardless of on which side of the Atlantic that home stands. The passage alludes not to women’s administrative power, but rather quite literally to the West Indian wife’s actual contact with the slaves who serve in her own domain and, figuratively, to the role in sustaining demand for slavery’s products of that West Indian’s counterpart across the Atlantic, who was valorized as a repository of national virtue.25 Thus, while these scenes of domestic terror have been cited as an example of Barbauld’s evoking the moderating influence

23 See, for example, Mary Prince’s account of the abuses she faced from successive women owners in The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave (London: F. Westley and A. H. Davis, 1831). 24 Marlon Ross, The Contours of Masculine Desire (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 223. 25 Kate Davies documents the extent to which pamphlets, periodicals, and other literature opposing the slave trade called for women, the repositories of sympathy and domestic virtue, to turn to public account their role as overseer of domestic consumption and “diffuse a beneficent influence over the marketplace and the manners of men.” See “A Moral Purchase: Femininity, Commerce and Abolition, 1788–1792,” in Women, Writing and the Public Sphere, 1700–1830, ed. Elizabeth Eger et al. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 133–59.

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of the domestic to “acceptably” soften “her hard-hitting [political] message,”26 I would argue instead that women’s complicity with slavery here consists in their status as a site where the corruption associated with slave owning intersects with the feminine domestic sphere, converting its beneficent softness to degeneration and cruelty in a manner that threatens to cross the seas along with the commodities that depend on slave labor, ultimately tainting the British home and the nation’s women. This link between women on both sides of the Atlantic has been recognized by Diego Saglia and Kate Davies, both of whom have connected these images to the eighteenth-century luxury debates.27 In Davies’s words, the portrait of the planter’s wife “is both the sum of, and the spur to all commercial exchange, being both the embodiment of the leisure wealth affords, and the personification of the luxuriant desire to consume and possess which greases the wheels of the commercial machine” (149). But this observation, instructive in so far as it goes, seems inadequate to explain the surfeit of viciousness unless we recognize that the luxury debates were themselves grounded in the mind/body theories of Hartley and his immediate predecessor Cheyne regarding the effects on the nerves of satiation and excess. For the corrupt woman portrayed in Epistle to Wilberforce, indolent pleasures are laid on so profusely, her will so unremittingly gratified, that the excessive stimulation has left her nervous system overstretched, her demeanor sickly, her sensibilities blunted. Voluptuously languid yet brutally cruel, she “unite[s] / At once the Scythian, and the Sybarite,” barbaric brutality with luxurious effeminacy, to display a “monstrous fellowship” of “repugnant vices” not found in nature. Hers is a pairing of “indolence” with “fierceness,” mental infirmity with imperiousness, placidity with brutal torture (61–65). Replete with the pleasures of luxury and ease, she turns to a more intense and gruesome source of pleasure, that of “Contriving torture, and inflicting wounds” (70). As was the case with her tyrannical husband, this woman has been indulged to the point that she possesses a body so “delicate,” so indolent, that she can barely make her commands heard, and a nervous system so unsound that she has become “infirm of mind” (66). Yet in contrast to her husband’s rages, she expresses her cruelty “with unruffled mien, and placid sounds” (69). To find an explanation for this difference, we can once again turn to Hartley, this time taking into account Barbauld’s reference to a “future time,” suggesting that corruption will manifest in succeeding generations as well as that of the present (14).

Lucy Newlyn, Reading, Writing, and Romanticism: The Anxiety of Reception (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 142. 27 Diego Saglia, “The Dangers of Over-Refinement: The Language of Luxury in Romantic Poetry by Women, 1793–1811,” Studies in Romanticism 38, no. 4 (1999): 641– 72; and Kate Davies, “Femininity, Commerce and Abolition,” 133–59. 26

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Nervous Degeneration and the Nation’s Future The topic of future generations, of rearing and educating children in a manner that will turn them into moral, responsible, intellectually vibrant adults, was one near to Barbauld’s heart. It was also a topic that connected her to Hartley’s theory of human development as a process of associating ideas through the mechanisms of nerve vibrations and memory. Like other Enlightenment associationists, Hartley took his stand against innate ideas, but he contributed his own twist in emphasizing that humans come into the world with nervous systems already responsive to environmental stimuli. Even in early childhood, simple ideas begin to form when sensations are repeatedly paired, generating a connection between them. As education progresses, repeatedly pairing clusters of simple ideas generates the complex ideas that differentiate humans from lower animals. With its promise of human perfectibility through education, the doctrine of the association of ideas inspired widespread enthusiasm among educational theorists and social reformers, and Barbauld was no exception. Her children’s literature and educational materials such as Hymns in Prose for Children (1781) and Lessons for Children (1787–1788) apply Hartley’s ideas to early childhood educational methodology, associating pleasures of affectionate domesticity and intellectual discovery with duty, kindness, and appreciation of the natural world.28 Humans are naturally inclined toward benevolence, Hartley believed, because virtuous action inspired the strongest feelings of pleasure. Yet Barbauld’s educational and children’s writing includes several instances where intervention in the chain of nascent associations corrects moments of childhood callousness or cruelty so as to turn the infant mind to sympathy and kindness. Hartley—and Barbauld as well—recognized that to produce an adult who embodies the ideals of kindness and compassion, education must actively promote associations between deeds that benefit others and feelings of pleasure. Hartley conceded the need to account for distorted states of mind such as anger and malice not only as they occur in adults but as they first arise in the developing child. His explanation offers a means for understanding a problematic passage in Barbauld’s poem wherein corruption arising from slave ownership is passed on from parent to child into the next generation. According to Hartley, anger and cruelty in children originate in painful feelings that prompt the child to respond with defensive violence. Commonly, these painful feelings arise intermittently, and defensive action will ward off the source of the discomfort, resulting in relief. But in cases where ideas and experiences of pain or vulnerability are frequent and their source diffuse—as might be the case in the household of Barbauld’s planter, where the father is prone to ferocious rages and the mother idly malicious—the process of association mixes painful feelings so that apprehension arising from a confused multiplicity of sources produces a general tension or “uneasy State of the nervous System.”29 The feelings associated 28 William McCarthy explores this connection in “Mother of All Discourses: Anna Barbauld’s Lessons for Children,” Princeton University Library Chronicle 60, no. 2 (1999): 196–219. 29 Hartley, Observations on Man, 1.478.

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with specific stimuli producing unease become transferred to the general feeling of unease itself, prompting defensive responses that, by creating a chain of associated reminders of painful impressions, become the child’s lived reality, causing it to strike out not only at any source of displeasure, but even at the feeling of displeasure itself. Initially acts of violence are intended to remove a cause of uneasiness, but the successful removal of the uneasiness brings about pleasurable feelings of relief, triumph, power. Performing those acts becomes a source of pleasure—in such an environment conceivably the child’s only source of pleasure. Before long, the child begins to act aggressively where he perceives no threat, but only weakness. Meanwhile, painful or violent stimuli are especially likely to generate the nervous stretching and discontinuities that decrease responsiveness to mild, gentle pleasures. Having become a pleasure in themselves, cruelty and aggression suppress the more usual human pleasures of benevolence and virtue. In Barbauld’s poem, we saw this in the planter’s wife, who lolls about placidly “Contriving torture.” But we see it, too, in the depiction of the planter’s child, the conduit that spreads corruption into the future. Lynn Festa describes this brief passage as one that bears “all the markings of sensibility gone bad”:30 Fermenting swift, the fiery venom gains The milky innocence of infant veins; There swells the stubborn will, damps learning’s fire, The whirlwind wakes of uncontroul’d desire, Sears the young heart to images of woe, And blasts the buds of Virtue as they blow. (51–56)

Raised in the menacing atmosphere of parental violence, the planter’s child, too, becomes swept up by anger and cruelty, immune to the joys of learning, sympathy, and virtue, and extravagant in his demands for indulgence. Undeniably, Barbauld’s portrait presents a problem of nurture in the slaveholding family. But if we accept the all-too-easy association whereby the word “milky” indicates that the child imbibes corruption with his mother’s milk, we will quickly find we have gone down the wrong path. This interpretation ignores the fact that the child’s viciousness is more closely juxtaposed with, even begins in the same sentence as, the description of the brutal father, the “Tyrant,” who, like the Parliamentary representatives who sneer and jest at what should provoke compassion, has substituted profiteering and wanton indulgence for other more natural pleasures until nervous debilitation has left him emasculated and subject to outbursts of violence.31 Stephen C. Behrendt has suggested that this passage should be read as “an oblique reference to venereal disease, and . . . hints about sexual Festa, Sentimental Figures of Empire, 200. Barbauld had used this same phrasing in her essay “On Evil: a Rhapsody” to

30 31

describe the innocent condition of the first couple in the Eden before they fell from an emotionally balanced, sociable state of simplicity into irascible passions and violence. See The Works of Anna Lætitia Barbauld. With a Memoir by Lucy Aikin, 2 vols (New York: Carvill, 1826), lines 91–94; 91.

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excesses,”32 a reading that returns us to the rhetoric of disease associations, in this case not necessarily “colonial,” though certainly emphasizing the connection with the father. But if this suggestion resonates with some of the passage’s overtones, it adequately explains neither the child’s own psychology nor that of his parents. Rather than suggesting the maternal breast, “milky” should probably be associated with “veins” to suggest not the blood vessels, but the lacteal vessels of the small intestine. Their function is to carry chyle, a milky combination of lipids and bile, the product of normal operation of the autonomic nervous system. The line thus draws on archaic humoral psychology, for disruptions in precisely this aspect of human physiology would turn this innocent milkiness to the excess of yellow bile that engenders a choleric personality. Outmoded as a scientific theory by Barbauld’s time, the humors and their effects on personality nevertheless retained considerable metaphorical resonance, and even science still authorized the connection insofar as it was not until several decades later that physiologists discovered that the lacteals functioned as part of the pancreatic system rather than the liver.33 The use of the word “ferment,” also associated during the eighteenth-century with both emotional excess and humoral psychology, strengthens this connection. But more immediately germane to Barbauld’s time, the association with lacteals returns us to Priestley, who was a physiologist along with his many other pursuits, and through him to Hartley, who uses the terminology in this sense while drawing connections between the digestive system, the nerve vibrations, emotional vehemence, and even insanity. Discussing the effects of drunkenness, Hartley explains that alcohol is “absorbed by the Veins and Lacteals,” to create vibrations in the digestive system that are then passed to the brain.34 As in other cases, when the vibrations are extremely strong, they may “border upon, and even to pass into, the disagreeable Vibrations belonging to the Passions of Anger, Jealousy, Envy, &c.” (394). Such states are not limited, however, to those consequent on physical causes such as drunkenness: “Vigorous Vibrations,” Hartley affirms, “either of the sensory or ideal Kind, impart an extraordinary Degree of Activity to the Stomach and the Bowels” (96). Whether vibrations originate in external stimuli or in mental activity, they can disrupt the digestive system enough to set off a self-perpetuating cycle of mental and physical distress that may quickly descend into the harshest emotions. From these states of willful, uncontrolled irascibility it is only a short step to temporary or even enduring madness. In place of the tender cultivation of moderation, curiosity, and kindness, the violence of the slaveholder’s world

32 Stephen C. Behrendt, British Women Poets and the Romantic Writing Community (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press: 2009), 159. 33 Claude Bernard is credited with discovering that the source of chyle is the pancreas. See An Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine (Introduction à l’étude de la médecine expérimentale, 1865), trans. Henry Copley Green (New York: Dover, 1957), especially 153–54. 34 Hartley, Observations on Man, 1.393.

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affects his children literally at the visceral level, from there transmitting brutality and cruelty throughout the empire and into the future. This warped version of nurture explains why, even when Barbauld’s language escapes the contagion of disease metaphors, she envisions the consequences as a complete dissolution of British national character. With the entire nation save a small handful of the virtuous choosing the cynical path of an avarice that is “foreign” in origin, “British morals” are “chang’d.”35 Like the waning vigor of those who suppress their better impulses in favor of selfish gratification, the stalwart virtues central to British identity melt away: “Stern Independence from his glebe retires / And anxious Freedom eyes her drooping fires” (102–3). Together in turning their backs on the pitiable plight of the slave, Britons reap the consequences together as well; Barbauld advises Wilberforce to give up trying to “break” a “Nation’s fall” (116). And with childrearing so grievously perverted and children so utterly deformed, their hearts “sear[ed]” and their intellect strangled, hope for a more responsive future generation must be long delayed. In failing to abolish the slave trade, the nation has callously capitulated to short-sighted greed, and in doing so has sacrificed liberty, independence, moderation, and moral rectitude—the central virtues of British national identity—for not only the present, but for generations to come as well. Depicting the logical consequences of British failure to abolish the slave trade, Barbauld creates a portrait as grounded in scientific discourse as it is harsh. If Barbauld teased out the implications of Hartley’s theories in exceptional detail, she was far from alone in drawing on a vocabulary grounded in those ideas. We can glimpse how broadly similar images and language permeated the sentimental culture that dominated abolitionist discourse in other examples of poetry by women. These poems abound in images wherein slaveholding has perverted the resolute virtues arising from sympathy, producing the nervous strain, laxness, and inelasticity that lead to muscular debilitation and mental instability, with implications for Britain’s future. In “The Progress of Liberty” (1798), for example, Mary Robinson describes how the “grasp” of “potent” rebels that included slaves “palsy’d the monster’s arm,” while in “The African” (1798) the slave-owning rapist is a “wan Tyrant.” Elizabeth Tomlins depicts a “vengeful” slave master, one of a “degen’rate race,” whose soul “trifles could enflame; but nought subdue,” but whose physical strength is far less than that of the slave he would abuse. Mary Birkett explicitly implicates transatlantic patterns of domestic consumption and registers concern for Britain’s offspring when she declares that if with “benevolence firm” (her emphasis) British women refuse the “blood-stain’d lux’ry” then future generations will be safe from the taint and “we to souls unborn

L. 104. In the present volume, Anthony Harding points out that this passage figures a commerce that constitutes a “noxious traffic that imports only moral corruption into English homes” (see Chapter 3, 87, above). 35

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may whisper peace.”36 Nor is such language unusual in the work of male poets who draw on the discourse of sensibility, which includes virtually all those poets expressing abolitionist views. These writers diverge widely in the precision of the physiology they depict and the consistency with which they work the imagery through their poems. Probably in many cases, they had no direct exposure to Hartley’s ideas. Yet these examples show a pervasive currency of language that goes well beyond mere association of ideas, resting instead on the foundations in nerve physiology and the bodily processes that concur with theories about the material origins of emotion. If Kramnick is correct, Hartley’s ideas were so widely circulated that it would have been nearly impossible to avoid acquaintance with the general outlines of this discourse, especially for a literate individual interested in reform. Barbauld seems to have had a depth of exposure exceptional among women writers. We certainly know that she was familiar enough to mention Hartley’s name in her own work. Her immersion in Richardson’s fiction, her friendship with Priestley, her scientific and philosophical curiosity, her broad acquaintance with the literature of sensibility: any or all of these avenues could have been the source of that familiarity. Whatever the source of her acquaintance with Hartley’s ideas, several of the more perplexing passages of Barbauld’s Epistle to Wilberforce draw on his embodied science of the mind to prophesy for British society a future of moral and physical degeneration leading to an apocalyptic collapse. Only by heeding the natural dictates of the responsive heart to base national policy on a course of Hartley-inspired benevolent reform could the abomination of slavery be ended, British character set to rights, and the Nation’s fall be broken.

36 All poems are quoted from Amazing Grace: An Anthology of Poems about Slavery, 1660–1810, ed. James G. Basker (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2002). Mary Robinson, “The Progress of Liberty” (1798), 262–63; Mary Robinson “The African” (1798), 263–64; Elizabeth Sophia Tomlins, “The Slave” (1797), 350–52; Mary Birkett, “A Poem on the African Slave Trade. Addressed to Her Own Sex” (1792), 442–44.

PaRT 3 Spectacles of Suffering

Chapter 5

To Force a Tear: British Abolitionism and the Eighteenth-century London Stage Brycchan Carey

Eighteenth-century British abolitionism was acted out on many stages. From the mid-1760s, when the new and, at the time, rather eccentric antislavery ideals of American Quakers began to reach the British public, to 1807, when parliament voted to outlaw the trade in human beings in British ships, the reading public were bombarded with thousands of poems, pamphlets, novels, tracts, sermons, articles, treatises, and essays offering reasons why, or why not, the slave trade should be abolished. Some of these were performed: essays read out at public meetings, speeches delivered to parliament, poems and novels shared among family members, sermons intoned before pious congregations, tracts read aloud to illiterate village swains. At the height of the abolition movement—the heady five years between 1787 and 1792—antislavery was daily performed in the pulpit and in parliament, on the streets and in sitting rooms. It even put in a few short appearances on the stage where theatergoers were entertained with representations of suffering overcome, injustice rectified, and cruelty ameliorated, often lubricated with copious tears from actor and audience alike. Twentieth-century critics found such scenes distasteful. Wylie Sypher, the first critic of British antislavery literature, reflected the critical prejudices of his day when he argued of Thomas Bellamy’s play The Benevolent Planters (1789) that “few works are more drenched with sentimentality; possibly a complete drama of anti-slavery would have been more enervating than anti-slavery verse.”1 Most recent critics have ignored the play entirely, proving that silence is itself an eloquent form of criticism. Bellamy’s play is indeed thoroughly sentimental, although it most likely disappeared without trace after two performances not because of its sentimentality but because it argued for the reformation of slavery rather than for its abolition. Nevertheless, with its insistence on dramatizing the suffering of the enslaved through lachrymose sentiment rather than through the tragic heroism of an Oroonoko, it typifies many of the plays tackling the slavery issue that appeared between 1760 and 1800.

1 Wylie Sypher, Guinea’s Captive Kings: British Antislavery Literature of the Eighteenth Century (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1942), 244.

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This essay surveys sentimental representations of slaves and slavery on the eighteenth-century London stage.2 It considers plays by Thomas Southerne, Isaac Bickerstaffe, John Hawkesworth, Francis Gentleman, and John Ferriar, before concluding with close readings of passages from Bellamy’s Benevolent Planters alongside the anonymous English translation of the German playwright August Friedrich Ferdinand von Kotzebue’s Die Negersklaven (1796). In reading these plays, I adopt the same methodology that I have used elsewhere to analyze the sentimental rhetoric at work in poems, novels, and political writings. I have argued that “sentimental rhetoric was a collection of distinct and recognisable rhetorical procedures, with an emphasis on the depiction of physical and emotional suffering, some of which were derived from classical rhetoric and some of which were entirely new” while also establishing a brief typology of these procedures.3 I shall again use this approach, with the goal of showing how the writers under consideration here attempted to manipulate their readers and audiences’ emotions for political ends. This they achieved with only mixed success. This essay demonstrates that while most dramatists interested in slavery did not share Bellamy’s seemingly antireformist politics, many shared a tendency to sentimentalize their subject that went beyond the dramatic pathos required to establish a sympathetic bond between actor and audience, and that this rendered the sentimental moment unstable and, in many cases, unstageable. In consequence, dramatic interventions in the late eighteenth-century abolition debate ultimately contributed little either to the development of the discourse or to the progress of the campaign in parliament. Oroonoko in Verse and on Stage The British abolition movement may have been a creature of the 1760s and beyond, but both Africans and slaves had appeared on the British stage for many years previously. Shakespeare’s Othello was a familiar figure to eighteenthcentury theatergoers, although his Aaron seems to have been forgotten. Prospero’s island was located in the liminal zone between Europe and Africa, en route from Milan to Tunis, and was inhabited by an anagrammatic cannibal as well as an airy sprite. While the rise and fall of European empires—Roman, Holy Roman, and Ottoman—is at the center of Othello and Titus Andronicus, the “still vex’d Bermoothes” and the yet unproven colony of Virginia seem more central to The Tempest, written just five years after the founding of Jamestown, Virginia. Ariel For a recent discussion of slavery on the American stage in this period, see Heather S. Nathans, Slavery and Sentiment on the American Stage, 1787–1861: Lifting the Veil of Black (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). For an anthology of dramatic texts from this period with an extended critical introduction, see Franca Dellarosa, Slavery on Stage: Representations of Slavery in British Theatre, 1760s–1830s (Bari: Edizioni dal Sud, 2009). 3 Brycchan Carey, British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility: Writing, Sentiment, and Slavery, 1760–1807 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 18, 37. 2

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and Caliban are both Prospero’s slaves, and their little island lives are manipulated to effect bigger purposes in the metropolis of Milan. But while the plays clearly have their share of pathos, they remain products of the early seventeenth century. Late-eighteenth-century actors might have been able to bring sensibility to the roles, but Shakespeare’s texts cannot be described as sentimental.4 As the seventeenth century unfolded, British colonies worked by African slaves were planted across North America and the Caribbean and increasing numbers of British people had first-hand experience of colonial life and of slavery. Accordingly, there was an increased demand for both literary and theatrical representations of the colonial world and some playwrights obliged. Sypher contends that the second most popular play of the eighteenth century was The Tragedy of Oroonoko, Thomas Southerne’s dramatization of Aphra Behn’s 1688 novel, first performed late in 1695 and published the following year.5 A generalization such as this, averaged over an entire century, is not particularly helpful, but there is no denying that Oroonoko became an important part of eighteenth-century theatrical culture. The fact is, however, that Southerne’s Oroonoko is not a sentimental play in the way that the later eighteenth century would understand the term. In translating the novel to the stage, Southerne meets the expectations of contemporary audiences without challenging them unduly; he introduces a comic subplot replete with sexually suggestive language, Imoinda becomes white rather than black, and Behn’s ending is altered so that Imoinda stabs herself rather than being killed by Oroonoko. The result is a tragicomedy that oscillates between bawdy and sublime in a way that is frequently bathetic. With these alterations, The Tragedy of Oroonoko played to packed theaters for decades, proving that while early and mid-eighteenth-century theatergoers may not yet have embraced the idea that slavery was intrinsically wrong, they were nonetheless perfectly capable of sympathizing with and abhorring the plight of an enslaved African—or, at least, an enslaved African prince. Behn’s Oroonoko was not an abolitionist novel, nor was it in Southerne’s version an abolitionist play, but its popularity demonstrates that matters of empire and the problem of slavery resonated with contemporary audiences. Indeed, as Jane Spencer has cogently argued, the novel “is not a clear attack on the institution and practices of slavery, but the sympathetic treatment of Oroonoko and Imoinda, the descriptions of white cruelty, and even the narrator’s very inconsistencies and divided position, have the effect of presenting a disturbing picture of colonial life, and provide the germ for the later, abolitionist development of Oroonoko’s story.”6 This later development took place, as Spencer shows, in poems and discussions of the play, in foreign translations, and in revised versions of the play that became The best recent survey of the black presence in Shakespeare and on the early modern stage more generally is Virginia Mason Vaughan, Performing Blackness on English Stages, 1500–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 5 Sypher, Guinea’s Captive Kings, 116. The distinction of being the most popular play went, he notes, to Nicholas Rowe’s 1714 Tragedy of Jane Shore. 6 Jane Spencer, Aphra Behn’s Afterlife (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 232. 4

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increasingly sentimental and increasingly abolitionist. Spencer observes that “at first its sentimental appeal grew and was underlined in commentary; and gradually the sentimental pleasure of sympathizing with a betrayed prince or with a noble pair of distressed lovers became mixed with concern about the slave system that was at the root of their troubles” (232–33). Spencer’s detailed analysis of the Oroonoko tradition, taken together with other important readings of the text including Wylie Sypher’s earlier identification of “the legend of Oroonoko” and Sue Wiseman’s later reading of the treatment of Imoinda in the many dramatic versions of the story, provides a convincing set of readings of the plays to which it would be superfluous to add.7 It is worth noting, however, that in the later plays the transformation of tragicomedy to sentimental drama is part of the explicit project of each playwright. John Hawkesworth’s rewriting of 1759 is a case in point. In his preface, he justifies his decision to remove the comic scenes from Southerne’s text by arguing that, while the comic scenes were “degraded by a Connexion with some of the most loose and contemptible that have ever disgraced our Language and our Theatre,” the tragic scenes contain sufficient suffering to engage the sensibilities of the audience: The Attention is, throughout, invariably fixed upon the two principal Characters, Oroonoko and Imoinda; who are so connected as to make but one Object, in which all the Passions of the Audience, moved by the most tender and exquisite Distress, are concentered.8

The emphasis on “tender and exquisite Distress” marks Hawkesworth’s project as sentimental, for while the sublime passions of terror and indignation might be roused by the tragic representation of Oroonoko and Imoinda’s treatment at the hands of the planters, the idea of exquisite tenderness seems antithetical to the greatness of action needed to produce the tragic sublime. Tenderness is a small, private affair rather than an affair of great public importance and by extension forms part of the domestic rather than the public sphere. This transformation from public to private is further signaled by the contrast between the prologues added to Southerne and Hawkesworth’s plays. Southerne’s firmly locates the text in the public sphere, echoing both epic verse and tragic drama when it announces that the play is set “as when in Hostile Times two Neighbouring States / Strive by themselves, and their Confederates.”9 Hawkesworth’s prologue proclaims not Sypher, Guinea’s Captive Kings, 108–21; Sue Wiseman, “Abolishing Romance: Representing Rape in Oroonoko,” in Discourses of Slavery and Abolition: Britain and its Colonies, 1760–1838, ed. Brycchan Carey, Markman Ellis, and Sara Salih (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 26–44. 8 [John Hawkesworth], Oroonoko, a Tragedy, as it is now Acted at the Theatre-royal in Drury Lane by His Majesty’s Servants, by Thomas Southern, with Alterations (London: C. Bathurst, 1759), v. 9 Thomas Southerne, Oroonoko: A Tragedy As it is Acted at the Theatre-Royal, By His Majesty’s Servants (London: H. Playford, B. Tooke and S. Buckley, 1696), n.p. 7

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only his own text’s sentimentality, but makes a claim for Southerne’s intrinsic sensibility: This Night your tributary Tears we claim, For Scenes that Southern drew; a fav’rite Name! He touch’d your Fathers’ Hearts with gen’rous Woe, And taught your Mother’s youthful Eyes to flow; For this he claims hereditary Praise, From Wits and Beauties of our modern Days; Yet, Slave to Custom in a laughing Age, With ribbald Mirth he stain’d the sacred Page. (n. p.)

Hawkesworth’s decision to champion Southerne as a man of feeling before his time, enslaved by the conventions of late Restoration drama, is echoed in the preface to another rewrite of Oroonoko, published the following year by Francis Gentleman and first performed in Edinburgh. Gentleman’s defense of Southerne is two-pronged. In the “Advertisement,” Gentleman declares that “a noble personage” of his acquaintance had “recollected to have heard MR SOUTHERNE declare, in his latter days, that he most heartily regretted his complying with licentious taste, by writing anything so offensive to modesty, as the comic part of his works.”10 This appeal to the dual authority of nobility and literary progenitor is reinforced by lines in the prologue that, if not inspired directly by Hawkesworth, certainly rehearse the same argument: SOUTHERNE, whose tender muse could well impart, The noblest feelings to each melting heart; And raise, by force divine, for the distress’d, Grief’s tend’rest sympathy in ev’ry breast; Who wanted but attention to command, The subject passions with a master hand, Was forc’d, when he adventur’d on the stage, To prostitute his genius to the Age. (7)

Again, the word “tender” appears—twice in fact—and to it are added many of the other keywords of sentimental rhetoric: “feelings,” “melting,” “distress,” and “sympathy.” Unlike Hawkesworth, Gentleman casts Southerne not as a slave but as a prostitute, albeit an unwilling one. If Hawkesworth sought to identify Southerne with Oroonoko, Gentleman seems to be comparing him with Imoinda, the victim of (threatened) sexual violence. As critics have shown, both dramatists recast Oroonoko and Imoinda as sentimental rather than tragic heroes, but it is perhaps more surprising to find that Southerne himself is recast in sentimental terms. The implication is that sensibility is a universal quality that may be [Francis Gentleman], Oroonoko: or the Royal Slave. A Tragedy. Altered from Southerne by Francis Gentleman. As it was Performed at the Theatre in Edinburgh, with universal Applause (Glasgow: Robert and Andrew Foulis, 1760), 9. 10

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distorted or masked by the customs of the age, but one which will shine through to a more sensitive generation. This appeal to the universality of sensibility is itself a sentimental argument and one of the major tropes of sentimental rhetoric, so memorably summed up in Hannah More’s formula: “Tho’ few can reason, all mankind can feel.”11 Although More was extending sensibility geographically, to include Africans as well as Europeans, the same assumption holds here for history. In Hawkesworth and Gentleman’s estimation, Oroonoko, with the low comedy excised, automatically becomes a sentimental play because it was always a sentimental play underneath it all; always the product of the feeling heart of Thomas Southerne, now revealed as a man of feeling before his time. In 1788, a generation later and at the height of the abolition movement, John Ferriar authored another new version of Oroonoko based on Hawkesworth’s version, renamed The Prince of Angola, and advertised as being “adapted to the circumstances of the present times.” This version is significant not least because it restores Behn’s original ending in which Imoinda is killed by Oroonoko. It does not appear to have been performed in London, although it was staged in Manchester, its place of publication. The play’s importance lies not in its performance history, however, but in that it retells the Oroonoko story for the specific purpose of marshaling support for the abolition movement. To do this, Ferriar renders the language yet more sentimental and adds a long preface that is in many ways the first sustained critical analysis of the Oroonoko “legend.” Although Gentleman is not discussed, both Southerne and Hawkesworth are: the former, in Ferriar’s eyes, meaning “nothing more than to produce a mixed Play, capable of delighting the gross and depraved audience of that time” while of the latter he notes dryly that “Dr. Hawkesworth’s fame does not rest on Poetical merit.”12 Nevertheless, despite the failed sensibility of his predecessors, Ferriar does admit that the Oroonoko story is “particularly adapted” to his own rhetorical purpose “by its authenticity, as well as its pathetic incidents” (i). The question of the story’s authenticity continues to exercise literary historians to this day, but the emphasis on the utility of the play’s “pathetic incidents” both positions the play within the abolition movement, and explains clearly how its sentimentalism has an explicitly rhetorical purpose. Indeed, Ferriar urges the reader not to view this new version “merely as a poetical effort,” but to “view the Tragedy thus alter’d, as designed to communicate and extend those impressions of the African Slave Trade, which are already received by so large a proportion of the people of England” (vii–viii). Despite the existence of altered versions by Gentleman, Ferriar, and Hawkesworth, most of the tears shed by eighteenth-century theatergoers for enslaved people would have been brought forth by Southerne’s Oroonoko and not by one of the sentimentalized versions. Surviving cast lists show that, despite the objections, the comic characters omitted by the later playwrights are included in Hannah More, Slavery, a Poem (London: T. Cadell, 1788), l. 50. John Ferriar, The Prince of Angola, A Tragedy, Altered from the play of Oroonoko

11

12

and Adapted to the Circumstances of the Present Times (Manchester: J. Harrop, 1788), ii, vii.

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most public performances of the play in the 1780s and 1790s in London, meaning that Southerne’s version reigned supreme.13 Although not obviously sentimental, Southerne’s drama clearly retained the power to move an audience experienced in sentimental drama. Whether these tears had any effect was debated, not least by the poets. In lines that are now well known to scholars of abolitionist literature, Hannah More emphasized the distinction between her antislavery poem, which appeared in 1788, and performances of Oroonoko that to her were insufficiently engaged with the politics of the abolition movement. More recognizes the power of Southerne’s play to move, but laments that it has not impelled her (and by extension others) to political action: “O, plaintive Southerne!” she cries, “whose impassion’d strain / So oft has wak’d my languid Muse in vain!”14 In particular, it is the play’s status as fiction that troubles More, since a fictional story needs no redress in the real world: Tho’ not to me, sweet Bard, thy pow’rs belong Fair Truth, a hallow’d guide! inspires my song. Here Art wou’d weave her gayest flow’rs in vain, For Truth the bright invention wou’d disdain. For no fictitious ills these numbers flow, But living anguish, and substantial woe; No individual griefs my bosom melt, For millions feel what Oronoko felt: Fir’d by no single wrongs, the countless host I mourn, by rapine drag’d from Afric’s coast. (49–58)

More’s analysis also contains the trope of sentimental rhetoric that I have called the “rejection of false sensibility” which, in this case, is the direct opposite of active sensibility.15 Readers, theatergoers, and other citizens in possession of active sensibility can never weep uselessly over distress but instead feel compelled to carry out charitable or political acts to alleviate that distress. This critique of the uselessness of false sensibility is echoed by the Liverpool abolitionist William Roscoe who may have had Oroonoko in mind when he apostrophized Humanity and complained: Of crowded theatres, where in thy place Sits Sensibility, with wat’ry eye, Dropping o’er fancied woes her useless tear.16

Charles Beecher Hogan, ed., The London Stage, Part 5: 1776–1800, 3 vols (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967), passim. 14 More, Slavery, lines 37–38. 15 See Carey, British Abolitionism, 38–39. 16 William Roscoe, The Wrongs of Africa, a poem. Part the First (London: R. Faulder, 1787), 2. 13

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Both Roscoe and More possibly had in mind a notable recent interpretation of the role of Oroonoko by the actor Alexander Pope (1763–1835) who had played the part, alongside Elizabeth Inchbald as Imoinda, at the Theatre Royal, Covent Garden, in 1785–1786.17 In the eyes of at least one satirical poet, Pope’s performance was excessively sentimental. John Williams, writing for the first time under the pseudonym by which he is best known, Anthony Pasquin, produced a series of lampoons of prominent actors and actresses that appeared in two parts as The children of Thespis in 1786–1787. Unlike More and Roscoe, Williams appears not to have had any particular connection with the abolition movement, although as a Foxite Whig he was presumably sympathetic to it, but his critique of Pope’s sentimental delivery makes a similar point about the uselessness of false or exaggerated sensibility: In the African Captive, see POPE wake surprize, And call Pity’s tears into feminine eyes; When poor Oronooko is goaded by foes, The player outrageously pictures his woes: Tho’ his person is fashion’d and prun’d by Perfection, His weakness incessantly meets our detection; With a fine rounded voice, full of Melody’s tones, He wastes half its compass in sighs and in groans; And thinks ’cause the buskin he’s ta’en into keeping, His duty directs he should always be weeping. —When the tear of a man, from his eye-lids will start, It should seem like a tribute that’s wrung from the heart; As an offering that’s paid to the cause of a crime, To woe that’s unmeasur’d, and grief that’s sublime: But if they’re called forth on each trivial occasion Their worth is no more, and they lose their persuasion; Then Ridicule laughs, at the tears as they roll, To tell us the man has—a half-finish’d soul.18

The final line of this extract might be taken as a racist comment that Oroonoko, as an African, is less fully human than Europeans. This is a possible reading, but an unlikely one. It seems more likely that Williams is lampooning not Oroonoko’s character but Pope’s interpretation. Williams argues that Pope, with his sighs, groans, and incessant weeping, has not convinced his audience that Oroonoko is a fully realized human being and not merely a character in a playbook. Indeed, since these tears “lose their persuasion,” we can see strong parallels between Williams’s 17 Pope’s first performance as Oroonoko was on January 8, 1785, repeated on May 23. Inchbald first played Imoinda on November 9, 1785. They were billed together for three performances, with the final performance on June 30, 1786. Hogan, The London Stage, Part 5, II.763, 799, 841, 847, 891, 1048. 18 [John Williams, pseud], The children of Thespis. A poem. By Anthony Pasquin, Esq. Part the second (London: Denew and Grant, 1787), 34–35.

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poem and those by More and Roscoe in that Williams emphasizes the uselessness of Pope’s sentimental approach for effective communication and convincing portrayal of character. In the end, Williams suggests, Pope’s performance is bathetic; it intends to be sublime but it is merely ridiculous. Rejecting false sensibility is a key trope of sentimental rhetoric, but Williams’s verse seems not to belong to that discourse. It looks back to an older satirical tradition with its rhyming couplets while simultaneously anticipating the heavy attacks on sentimentalism that would emerge in the 1790s in the pages of The AntiJacobin and elsewhere. Williams’s assessment is also unambiguously gendered. Perhaps the most glaring line of his poem for modern readers is his assumption that Pope’s sentimental interpretation of Oroonoko will “call Pity’s tears into feminine eyes.” Women, he implies, will be fooled into tears by Pope’s feigned sensibility. By contrast, men will laugh with ridicule at these trivial tears. The satire presents women as having a diminished ability to detect genuine emotion while positioning Williams as a cool, impartial, and certainly unsentimental masculine arbiter of a dramatic performance that in his estimation is aimed at a feminine audience. In fact, it may well be the case that Pope sought primarily to appeal to the women present in the theater. If so, he may have done so with some success. One critic (or fan), styling herself “Theatrica” and writing in The Public Advertiser a few weeks before Pope and Inchbald’s final performance, praises Pope’s Oroonoko, while complaining that Inchbald’s Imoinda lacks passion: When Oroonoko wildly tells his grief, Just are his periods—clear the cadence falls; Expressive action speaks the savage chief, And high-wrought terror every heart appalls. But ah—no lov’d Imoinda from his hands, Receives the blow, which frantic passions guide; Cold and unmov’d the pleasing picture stands, He clasps a statue—whom he wish’d a bride.19

Theatrica’s solution is that Pope’s wife, the actor Elizabeth Younge whom he had married a few months earlier, should play the role of Imoinda. “Wanting Pope [by whom she means Mrs. Pope],” she argues, “the stage must want a charm / To raise the sigh—to draw the heart sprung tear.” Unlike Williams, then, Theatrica applauds Pope’s sentimental interpretation and sees Elizabeth Inchbald’s unsentimental performance as the production’s principal fault. That insufficient sensibility is at the root of the problem is clear. Theatrica does not wish to castigate Inchbald, in whom she recognizes a fine sentimental writer, as lacking sensibility in the round. Instead she portrays her merely as being deficient in sensibility while on the stage: 19 “Theatrica,” “The Tragic Muse to Mrs. Pope,” The Public Advertiser (Wednesday, May 10, 1786).

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Yet I neglect not, Inchbald, worth like thine, Because no pathos in thy voice appears; ’Tis in thy writings melting beauties shine— ’Tis there thy pathos each rack’d bosom tears.

Theatrica’s call for Elizabeth Younge to present a sentimental interpretation of the play suggests that ordinary theatergoers did not concur with More, Roscoe, and Williams’s high-minded rejection of false sensibility. This suspicion is perhaps confirmed by the fact that Younge did in fact go on to play Imoinda alongside her husband’s Oroonoko in a single performance in March 1788, although whether this performance was as sentimental as Theatrica hoped for is impossible to tell.20 The suspicion is more strongly confirmed by a popular ballad reworking of Williams’s The children of Thespis by John Devonshire, which appeared in 1794 and which is somewhat incongruously set to the ballad tune “Derry Down.” Here, the first few lines of Williams’s poem on Pope is reproduced, but the line “The player outrageously pictures his woes” is replaced with the line “This player judiciously pictures his woes.”21 Six years after the performance, Pope’s delivery was clearly still held in high regard in the popular imagination. Indeed, abolitionists and satirists alike may have expressed concern over the false sensibility Southerne’s play engendered yet, as Ferriar makes plain in his preface to the Prince of Angola, it was undoubtedly suitable to the task. It was popular as well. Between 1776 and 1800 the play was publicly performed in London more than twenty times, including Pope’s performances of 1785–1788. We have no way of knowing how often the play was performed in private “theatricals.” It is tempting to speculate that domestic productions might have been more likely to use one of the altered versions of the play, but for this we have no evidence. For all its seeming suitability to the task, however, the play was still a product of the late seventeenth century. As we shall see, abolitionist writers of the 1780s and 1790s had a much clearer idea of the wrongs that needed to be addressed than Behn, Southerne, or even Hawkesworth. “Mungo is a man” In its myriad versions, Oroonoko was by a long way the most popular representation of the enslaved on the eighteenth-century London stage, but it was not the only one. Marivaux’s 1725 play L’Isle des Esclaves (translated as The Island of Slaves) had been performed in London in 1761, for example.22 Richard Cumberland’s 1771 Hogan, The London Stage, Part 5, II.1048. John Devonshire, “Sons of the Drama” in Songs, political, satyrical and covivial,

20 21

dedicated to the laughter loving goddess Vestina, calculated to inspire mirth and set the festive table on a roar (London: the author, 1794), 37. 22 For an important recent discussion of Marivaux’s play and its 1761 performance, see Marie Hockenhull Smith, “‘. . . You’ll be made a slave in your turn; you’ll be told also

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sentimental comedy The West Indian, about Belcour, a gauche colonial let loose in London, includes roles for “Clerks belonging to Stockwell, Servants, Sailors, Negroes, &c.” There are also passing reminders of the sources of the protagonist’s wealth, coupled with vague indications that Cumberland found the violence inherent in slavery distasteful. For instance, when Belcour first arrives in London, he gets into a dockside fight, which he justifies by explaining that “accustomed to a land of slaves, and, out of patience with the whole tribe of custom-house extortioners, boat-men, tide-waiters, and water-bailiffs, that beset me on all sides, worse than a swarm of musquetoes, I proceeded a little too roughly to brush them away with my rattan.”23 Unsurprisingly, “a furious scuffle ensued,” but on this occasion Belcour makes good his escape. Later, he is admonished by the scheming Mrs. Fulmer for not acting quickly enough in his pursuit of Louisa Dudley: “Girls of her sort,” Mrs Fulmer snips, “are not to be kept waiting like negro slaves in your sugar plantations” (46). Although none of this counts as full-blooded abolitionism, it is nevertheless clear that Cumberland views plantation slavery as a socially destructive influence, disrupting the civilized social conventions that facilitate both trade and romance in the metropolis. Cumberland’s West Indian was more popular than The Island of Slaves but both were eclipsed by a comic opera called The Padlock, which appeared in 1768 with words by Isaac Bickerstaffe and music by Samuel Dibden. The Padlock is about an elderly miser, Don Diego, who locks up his sixteen-year-old fiancée, Leonora, for fear that other men will get their hands on her. Predictably, Leonora is receiving the attentions of a more suitable young man, Leander, who wins her hand in the play’s dénouement, but in some ways the main plot is a sideline. The most enduring figure of the play is Mungo, the miser’s black slave, who in the original performance was played in blackface by Dibden himself. Mungo speaks in what could charitably be described as an approximation of a Caribbean dialect, amply illustrated by the opera’s most famous lines—Mungo’s Song: Dear heart, what a terrible life am I led! A dog has a better, that’s shelter’d and fed; Night and day, ’Tis de same, My pain is dere game; Me wish to de Lord me was dead. Whate’er’s to be done, Poor black must run; Mungo here, Mungo dere, Mungo every where; that it is right that you should be so, and we shall see what you think of this justice’: Libido, Retribution and Moderation in The Island of Slaves,” Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 31, no. 2 (2008), 223–39. 23 Richard Cumberland, The West Indian: a comedy. As it is performed in the Theatre Royal in Drury-Lane (London: W. Griffin, 1771), 7–8.

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Above and below, Sirrah, come; Sirrah go, Do so, and do so. Oh! oh! Me wish to de Lord me was dead.24

Mungo’s song comes shortly after scenes in which themes of captivity are foregrounded and implicitly critiqued. Don Diego, the person who holds Mungo in servitude, imprisons Leonora, and this is reflected in her first entrance, in which she appears “with a bird on her Finger, which she holds in the other Hand by a String” (4). Keeping a pet bird is a common marker of sensibility in eighteenthcentury literature but it was also a powerful metaphor for enslavement, as Markman Ellis has shown in his analysis of the caged-starling passage in Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey.25 Leonora is put in the complex position of being both prisoner and imprisoner, although the latter seems more of an accidental than an intended meaning. By contrast, the invitation to sympathize with Mungo in the following scene is clearly intentional. In a long conversation, Don Diego asks Mungo if he knows “of any ill going on in my house.” Don Diego is referring to plots to seduce Leonora, but Mungo cleverly subverts his question: Mung. Ah, Massa, a damn deal. Dieg. How! that I’m a stranger to? Mung. No, Massa, you lick me every day with your rattan: I’m sure Massa that’s mischief enough for poor Neger man. (10)

And indeed, Don Diego strikes Mungo shortly afterwards, crying out “Take that— Now will you listen to me?” In the end, Mungo does get his revenge. By conspiring with Leander, Mungo is instrumental in bringing the true lovers together. Mungo’s actions can be seen as a form of resistance against his enslavement and even, by extension, against the institution of slavery itself. Nevertheless, despite a certain amount of sympathy being invited for its main character and despite the opera being, as Hazel Waters has noted, “refreshingly and boisterously disrespectful of authority,”26 this is not a piece of abolitionist writing. There is no declaration of antislavery, no call for the institution to be abolished, and Mungo remains enslaved at the end, even facing “bastinadoes for [his] drunkenness and infidelity” (30). In the same way as Oroonoko, however, The Padlock was turned to account by abolitionists. It appeared in press reports of the celebrated Mansfield Isaac Bickerstaffe, The Padlock: a comic opera: as it is perform’d by His Majesty’s Servants, at the Theatre-Royal in Drury-Lane, 2nd ed. (London: W. Griffin, 1768), 11. 25 Markman Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 71–79. 26 Hazel Waters, Racism on the Victorian Stage: Representation of Slavery and the Black Character (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 29. 24

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ruling on slavery in June 1772, for example, testifying to the popularity of Bickerstaffe’s comic creation in the mind of the reading public, and reminding us of the ways in which literature and politics are ever intertwined.27 One important abolitionist appropriation was by the anonymous country parson whose “Epitaph to The Padlock” was inserted by a friend in the Gentleman’s Magazine for October 1787. The author of this poem assumes the voice of Mungo, speaking to the audience once the applause has died down: TANK you, my massas! have you laugh your fill”—— Then let me speak, nor take that freedom ill. E’en from my tongue some heartfelt truths may fall And outrag’d nature claims the care of all. My tale, in any place, would force a tear, But calls for stronger, deeper feelings here. For whilst I tread the free-born British land; Whilst now before me crouded Britons stand; Vain, vain that glorious privilege to me, I am a slave, where all things else are free.28

There is a shift in dialect in the opening two lines, from Mungo’s stage Caribbean in line one to standard English in line two, and this shift is accompanied by Mungo’s direct appeal to the audience to “let me speak.” In effect, the poet is recasting Mungo as a serious and sympathetic figure, transporting him from the realm of comedy to the realm of sentiment. The truths that Mungo speaks are “heartfelt” and “would force a tear” wherever they were spoken, and this language is typical of the many sentimental critiques of slavery that appeared in poetry of the 1780s. But in the maneuver so typical of sentimental abolitionist poetry, the poet rejects theatrical sensibility as insufficient, and demands “stronger, deeper feelings” from the audience. The strongest feeling of all, in this poet’s estimation, is patriotism. Appealing to the citizens of the “free-born British land,” the poem concludes with an unambiguously abolitionist message: O sons of freedom! equalise your laws, Be all consistent—plead the Negro’s cause; That all the nations in your code may see The British Negro, like the Briton, free. But, should he supplicate your laws in vain, To break for ever this disgraceful chain, At least, let gentle usage so abate The galling terrors of its passing state, That he may share the great Creator’s social plan; For though no Briton, Mungo is a man! (914)

For more analysis of the play’s broader cultural impact, see Carey, British Abolitionism, 178–79. 28 “Epitaph to The Padlock,” Gentleman’s Magazine 57, no. 2 (October 1787): 913– 14. The poem was also reprinted in The Public Advertiser (Friday, November 2, 1787). 27

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The poem, which began by addressing the audience’s sensibility, thus continues for the most part by appealing to the audience’s belief in British freedom and the rule of law. Its abolitionism is undoubted, despite an ameliorationist call for “gentle usage” should slavery not be abolished. The final line is rooted in emerging discourses about the rights of man, as well as running counter to other emerging discourses that sought to deny the humanity of Africans. It is a rousing conclusion, but the extent to which the poem might have altered the mood in which theatergoers attended performances of The Padlock is debatable at best. Indeed, there is no evidence that the poem in fact ever made the transition from the Gentleman’s Magazine to the stage. There can be little doubt, however, that performances of the play itself must have taken on a set of unintended meanings once the question of the abolition of the slave trade became widely discussed in the 1780s. Benevolent Planters and Negro Slaves One of the first stage productions to cash in on the sudden boom in abolitionist sentiment was George Colman’s comic opera Inkle and Yarico, originally performed in 1787. The story dated back to the mid-seventeenth century, had been popularized by Richard Steele in his 1711 reworking for The Spectator, and was, in the words of Julie A. Carlson, “the most heart-rending story of the century . . . an acknowledged tear-jerker.”29 The Inkle and Yarico tradition has been examined by many critics, and it is not the intention to add significantly to that debate in this essay.30 It is worth noting, however, that when sentimentalizing Steele’s “heartrending story,” Colman committed the same sins that in the eyes of Hawkesworth, Gentleman, and Ferriar, Southerne had visited on Behn. Like Southerne, Colman adds new roles—Inkle’s servant, Trudge, and Yarico’s servant, Wowski—and the Trudge-Wowski romance provides a comic subplot. Just as Southerne felt that Behn’s ending her novel with Oroonoko’s murder of Imoinda was too shocking for 29 Julie A. Carlson, “Race and Profit in English Theatre,” in The Cambridge Companion to British Theatre, 1730–1830, ed. Jane Moody and Daniel O’Quinn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 175–88, 181. 30 A great many Inkle and Yarico stories, in English, French, and German, were written in the long eighteenth century. Many are collected in Laurence Marsden Price, The Inkle and Yarico Album (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1937). The most complete English-language collection, with detailed notes and an important introduction, is Frank Felsenstein, English Trader, Indian Maid: Representing Gender, Race, and Slavery in the New World. An Inkle and Yarico Reader (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999). For important discussions of Colman’s comic opera, in addition to Carlson, see: Felicity A. Nussbaum, The Limits of the Human: Fictions of Anomaly, Race, and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003); Daniel O’Quinn, “Mercantile Deformities: George Colman’s Inkle and Yarico and the Racialization of Class Relations,” Theatre Journal 54, no. 3 (2004), 389–409; and Linda Troost, “Social Reform and Comic Opera: Inkle and Yarico” online at www.uwec.edu/mwood/colman/troost.html.

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the stage, so Colman decided that the dénouement of Steele’s story was more than late-eighteenth-century sensibilities could bear. Yarico does not become pregnant with Inkle’s child in Colman’s text, presumably because the implication that she had had unmarried sex was no longer consistent with the image of an imposedupon innocent girl. More importantly, Inkle repents of his decision to sell Yarico into slavery, and marries her instead. The story thereby loses much of its force as an exposé of the brutal nastiness of the traffic in human flesh at the same time that it becomes increasingly sentimental. Inkle and Yarico was popular, and was frequently performed in London and beyond at a point when the abolition movement was at its height. Although its appearance coincided with the rise of the abolition movement, and it no doubt benefited from public interest in the slave trade question, it is difficult to see the play as a deliberate intervention in the debate. It does not appeal to its audience to take a political stance in the real world, nor does it engage very convincingly with the realities of the slave trade or plantation life as had been recently exposed in the works of James Ramsay and Thomas Clarkson. Ultimately, it would be difficult to describe it as an abolitionist play. This is consistent with the theater’s response to the abolitionist movement as a whole. Despite the popularity of the movement, very few dramas appear to have been specifically written either to engage with abolitionist thinking or to mobilize antislavery sentiment. As we saw earlier, Wylie Sypher was relieved by this absence, arguing that “possibly a complete drama of anti-slavery would have been more enervating than anti-slavery verse.”31 Nevertheless, both the absence, and Sypher’s relief at that absence, prompt us to ask what a fully formed drama of antislavery might actually have looked like. It is impossible to tell, of course, but a reading of two plays, Thomas Bellamy’s The Benevolent Planters (1789) and Kotzebue’s The Negro Slaves (1796), gives us some idea. The Benevolent Planters is certainly a sentimental play, but less clear is how far it is an abolitionist play. It owes something to Oroonoko although it is considerably shorter and simpler. The unusually (and implausibly) benevolent Jamaican planters Goodwin and Heartfree discover that among their slaves are the lovers Oran and Selima, who have been separated by “the fate of war,” and who each believes the other to be dead. These benevolent planters decide to reunite the lovers but wait until a festival takes place to do so, for no apparent reason other than their own sense of drama. At the festival, Oran appears uninterested in the games because of his deep melancholy. Selima is then produced to general acclaim and the lovers’ mutual happiness. The slaves are granted their freedom and a finale ensues in which a new song to the tune of Rule Britannia is performed. Bizarrely, this new song removes all references to slavery from what is already a song proclaiming freedom and resisting slavery, albeit in a Whiggish rather than an abolitionist mode.

Sypher, Guinea’s Captive Kings, 244.

31

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The motives of the planters are ostensibly presented as benevolent, as the title suggests, and this benevolence is seemingly grounded in both their own sensibility and their awareness of their slaves’ feeling hearts: “The grateful Africans,” argues Heartfree, “have hearts as large as ours, and shame on the degrading lash, when it can be spared.”32 The comment implies that there are occasions when the lash cannot be spared, which is hardly an abolitionist sentiment. Indeed, a closer reading shows that the planters might be moved by more mercenary considerations. Heartfree laments (or complains) of Oran that “his sorrow for Selima is so deeply rooted in his feeling bosom, that I fear I shall soon lose an excellent domestic.” Goodwin notes that a similar fate is overtaking Selima: “Inward grief has preyed upon her mind,” he tells Heartfree, “and like her faithful Oran, she is bending to her grave” (4). They resolve to reunite the lovers but the delay they create merely highlights the fact that Oran and Selima are the planters’ slaves, to be separated or reunited at the pleasure or, in this case, for the amusement of their owners. At the end of the play the lovers are granted their freedom, but the power structures of the plantation are left unchanged when Oran subjects himself voluntarily to servitude: O my masters! for such, though free, suffer me still to call you; let my restored partner and myself bend to such exalted worth; while for ourselves, and for our surrounding brethren, we declare, that you have proved yourselves The Benevolent Planters, and that under subjection like yours SLAVERY IS BUT A NAME. (9)

The moral seems to be not that slavery as a system is objectionable but merely that violent and unfeeling slave owners should moderate their ways. Indeed, the play seems to be a crude return to the sort of ameliorationist writing that began to appear twenty-five years previously. In the 1760s and 1770s, several authors, both of fiction and of nonfiction, had argued that happy slaves were more productive than unhappy slaves, and so a humane plantation would therefore be an efficient plantation. This was in some ways a progressive argument in the 1770s, but by the 1780s it had become associated almost entirely with proslavery reaction to the abolition movement.33 Bellamy thus seems curiously out of touch with current abolitionist thought. The play’s power as sentimental rhetoric is somewhat suspect as well. While the planters are ostensibly sentimental heroes, their benevolence and, indeed, their sensibility, is too shot through with self-interest to be convincing. A number of sentimental arguments are hinted at, and these include the theory of equality of feeling and the notion that a man of feeling (Oran in this case) may well be brought 32 Thomas Bellamy, The Benevolent Planters. A Dramatic Piece, as performed at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket (London: J. Debrett, 1789), 3. 33 See, for example, novels by Sarah Scott and Henry Mackenzie, discussed in Carey, British Abolitionism, 50–57; 63–67. For an important recent discussion of ameliorationism, see George Boulukos, The Grateful Slave: The Emergence of Race in Eighteenth-Century British and American Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

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to the grave by the strength of his emotional suffering. These arguments are not well developed and are not likely to have converted anyone to the abolitionist cause. The story itself is too complex to work as a simple sentimental parable, while being too short to contain any such parables. Only by its use of clichéd language does it attempt to bring tears to the eyes of the most feeling of its audience and, just as with the various versions of Oroonoko, much of this language comes in the prologue rather than the main play. In this verse, “spoken by Mr Kemble, in the character of an African sailor,” we are presented with the African victim of a slave-raiding party who “Dragg’d me from everything I held most dear, / And plung’d me in the horrors of despair.” The horror turns to sentimental delight when he is brought to England and informed that a “hallow’d band, / Impell’d by soft humanity’s kind laws” are campaigning against slavery. “Exult my heart,” exclaims the sailor, “and flow my grateful tears. / Oh sons of Mercy!”34 One suspects that the play and its prologue moved few people who saw it but, even had it succeeded in that respect, without having a strong political point to follow through on it falls short of being a good, or even a competent, example of sentimental rhetoric, nor is it a satisfying example of sentimental drama. The play ran for two nights at the Haymarket, before vanishing without trace.35 Appearing in 1796, several years after the high tide of the abolitionist movement, is The Negro Slaves (Die Negersklaven) by the German playwright August Friedrich Ferdinand von Kotzebue. The play is dedicated to William Wilberforce, whose fame extended beyond the shores of Great Britain not only as an abolitionist but also as a model of conservative reform in an age of revolution. It was translated anonymously, but faithfully, into English in the year that it was first published in Germany. Still remembered in Germany for his vast dramatic oeuvre, Kotzebue is now best known in English-speaking countries for Lover’s Vows (originally Das Kind der Liebe) written in 1798, and translated by Elizabeth Inchbald and others in that year. Although rarely read today, Lover’s Vows occupies many literary footnotes as it was the play that Fanny Price considered rather improper when it was performed in the absence of Sir Thomas Bertram in Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park (1814). Fanny’s doubts about the play may have been, as is usually suggested, that it dealt with matters such as illegitimacy and coquetry, which could not be discussed by a mixed group without some sense of impropriety. It is also possible, however, that Austen had The Negro Slaves in mind. Readers in 1814, regardless of their own views on slavery, would have understood both the irony and the impropriety of Sir Thomas’s family and their guests performing a play by a well-known abolitionist while he was away visiting his plantations in Antigua.

“Prologue” to Bellamy, Benevolent Planters, n.p. Performances on August 5 and August 10, 1789. Hogan, The London Stage, Part 5,

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2:1175.

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The Negro Slaves may not have been publicly performed in London,36 but it was available to be read, and it is uncompromising in its abolitionism. It too is a sentimental play, signaled in the author’s preface where Kotzebue relates that he “is not ashamed to confess that while he was writing this piece he shed a thousand tears. Should his readers or spectators mix their tears with his, his labour would then have some reward.”37 This demand for the reader to weep and the insistence that mere weeping will justify and advance the political position being promoted is a form of sentimental rhetoric: the author demanding, in sentimental terms, that the reader show him political solidarity by “mixing” his tears with their own. The play is long and complex, not least because of its choice of two alternative endings, one happy and one tragic. It tells the story of John and William, two European brothers in Jamaica. John is a brutal and callous slave owner while William is a true man of feeling. John plans to rape Ada, a slave and the innocent young wife of Zameo, the Oroonoko-like African hero who is also enslaved. In a further complication, Zameo’s father, the aged and despairing Ayos, has sold himself into slavery in order to see his son once more before he dies. In the happy ending, William buys the lovers from his brother and sets them free. The tragic ending has Zameo murdering his wife to protect her virtue, then killing himself—that, of course, is the ending of Oroonoko. Much of the play is taken up with conversations between John and William in which, despite William’s pleading, John determines to press on with his evil plan. William, meanwhile, becomes known by the slaves who recognize his benevolent character and seek his protection. One example will suffice to illustrate the sentimental tone of the play. In the following scene, a group of slaves are talking when they see William walk out of an arbor: ALL There he is! (They jump up and surround him) Be thou our master! WILLIAM I thank you, my children! I will endeavour to mend your lot. NEGRO God bless you! WILLIAM Would it were in my power to do you much good! NEGRO We are already comforted by what you say. ANOTHER And because your benevolent eyes say a great deal more. THIRD See brothers, he weeps! ALL (Pressing round him) He weeps! He weeps over our wretchedness. WILLIAM Have hope, poor men! It will be better with you. There lives a man in England who loves you, who is day and night meditating your relief, and who, warmed with the glorious fire of philanthropy, defends your rights with fervid eloquence. THE NEGROES Blessings light on that good man, who is a stranger to us! ANOTHER Tell us his name. WILLIAM His name is WILBERFORCE. (60)

It is not mentioned in Hogan, The London Stage. August Friedrich Ferdinand von Kotzebue, The Negro Slaves, a Dramatic-

36 37

Historical Piece, in Three Acts. Translated from the German of the President De Kotzebue (London: T. Cadell, Jr., and W. Davies, 1796), viii.

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This short extract, like much of the play, is painfully overblown for modern readers, not least because it makes use of almost all the tropes of sentimental rhetoric. In the first place, it concerns a sentimental hero (William) going among other sentimental heroes (the slaves). A sympathetic bond is quickly established between them, at first by William’s verbal declaration of his patriarchal duties and, later, through the nonverbal communication established by his tears. These tears impress the slaves and offer evidence to them (and the audience) of William’s honesty and benevolence: it tells the story of how a display of emotion, particularly an effusion of tears, demonstrates genuine feeling. The reader is encouraged implicitly to behave in like manner. Indeed, in this extract, William’s tears count for far more than his declarations of benevolence, just as his namesake William Wilberforce is “warmed with the glorious fire of philanthropy” rather than inspired by the philosophical language of the rights that he seeks to defend with “fervid eloquence.” Rational proofs are dismissed in favor of emotional ones. This is not enough, however, and in this extract the political argument and the identification of the living sentimental hero, the man of feeling, come after a sentimental passage in which tears are flowing. Kotzebue had made it plain in his preface that he hoped readers or spectators would be moved to tears themselves, and William’s exchange with the slaves would appear to be just such a moment. Having reduced his audience to tears (if all went to plan) Kotzebue then introduces the political material of the scene. A philanthropic man in England, we are reminded, who loves slaves and is moved by a benevolent zeal, is working day and night for their relief. The audience may have been expected to have realized that Wilberforce was the subject here, but just in case they were not able to recall his name they are reminded of it, although not before a crucial interjection by “The Negroes” who remark in unison: “Blessings light on that good man, who is a stranger to us!” (61). Here is an economical restatement of the parable of the Good Samaritan, the Biblical parable that more than any other could be adapted to articulate sentimental notions of benevolence, coming at the end of an increasingly emotional scene. The “Samaritan” is identified as Wilberforce and, by extension, the entire antislavery project is given a divine stamp of approval. It may have been almost impossible for an eighteenth-century spectator, fully experienced in sentimental literature, not to find some support in their heart for Wilberforce and his project after witnessing this scene in a crowded and emotionally charged theater. As far as we are aware, The Negro Slaves was never publicly performed in England. Its exaggerated sensibility was somewhat passé by 1796 and, in any case, the war with France and reports of the slave uprisings in Saint-Domingue had taken the steam out of the abolition movement. Antislavery sentiment was only rarely articulated in public after 1795. When abolitionism returned to the public arena a decade later it would be acted out in the Palace of Westminster, but only rarely in the theaters of Westminster. The dramas of that later phase that did touch on slavery, such as Obi, or Three-fingered Jack (1800), can rarely be described as

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belonging to the sentimental tradition.38 This cannot have harmed the cause in the slightest, for as we have seen, the drama of antislavery frequently overplayed its sensibility to such an extent that a genuine sympathetic bond between actor and audience could not be established. Plays such as Bellamy’s Benevolent Planters and Kotzebue’s Negro Slaves either lasted for only a night or two, or advanced such unrestrained sentimentality that they could not be staged at all. Thus, while the antislavery novel and the antislavery poem made a lasting impact on the campaign against the slave trade, dramatic interventions ultimately contributed little either to the development of antislavery discourse or to the progress of the abolition campaign in Parliament.

For detailed information on the many pantomime and melodrama versions of Obi see Diana Paton, Histories of Three-Fingered Jack: A Bibliography, online at www. brycchancarey.com/slavery/tfj/index.htm. 38

Chapter 6

“Pity for the Poor Africans”: William Cowper and the Limits of Abolitionist Affect Joanne Tong

Perhaps it is Fanny Price’s reading of William Cowper in Mansfield Park that is partly responsible for affixing the image of him as the traditionalist spokesperson for the preservation of the natural landscape and the comfort of the home in the minds of so many readers. While his rural sympathies and quiet domesticity have made it easy to overlook his commitment to a world beyond Olney, Cowper clearly possessed a keen awareness of certain global issues, the abolition of the slave trade in particular among them. As his recent readers W. B. Hutchings and Karen O’Brien have shown,1 there is ample evidence to indicate Cowper thought deeply about topical subjects of a political nature—about the French Revolution, about the East India Company, and about West Indian slavery. As a political thinker, he appears generally to advance positions less progressive than the vanguard agendas of his radical contemporaries, with the notable exception of his writings on slavery and the slave trade. What I find most distinctive about these works is their examination of the nature of literary writing as both a species of and a conduit for political action. Cowper’s view of political engagement itself as a problematic motive of art emerges as an inescapable concern of these works. From their earliest appearance in “Charity” (1782) to their latest in “To William Wilberforce, Esq.” (1792), the themes of slavery and abolition found their way into Cowper’s writing, and yet his willingness to treat these issues at all was grudging at best due to his misgivings about the role of poetry in the abolitionist movement and about the specific reliance of abolitionist poems on the stimulation of affect. A survey of Cowper’s oeuvre from his earliest poetic remarks on slavery 1 See Karen O’Brien, ‘Still at Home’: Cowper’s Domestic Empires,” Early Romantics: Perspectives in British Poetry from Pope to Wordsworth, ed. Thomas Woodman (St. Martin’s Press: 1998), 134–47; and W. B. Hutchings, “William Cowper and 1789,” The Yearbook of English Studies 19 (1989): 71–93. For Cowper’s attitude towards empire, see Vincent Newey, Cowper’s Poetry: A Critical Study and Reassessment (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1982); for a thorough characterization of Cowper’s establishment-style domestic politics, see Newey, “William Cowper and the Condition of England,” in Literature and Nationalism, ed. Newey and Ann Thompson (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1991), 120–39.

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to the “slave ballads” that were the culmination of his efforts on behalf of the abolitionist campaign reveals his growing disillusionment with the elusive ideal of activist art. Exploring the sense of ambivalence about the politicization of art that suffuses his works can help to explain why some of Cowper’s ballads gained so little traction among the reading public, and how these works might usefully be understood as poetic failures insofar as they signal an aesthetic retreat from their own affective intention. Natural Rights, Divine Providence, and the Roots of Cowper’s Abolitionism Cowper’s stance appears to have been a thoroughly abolitionist one, rather than the ameliorationist position adopted by some other Romantic writers such as Maria Edgeworth, who sought to end the trade but also prescribed benevolent paternalism in her popular tale “The Grateful Negro” as a model for reforming rather than ending the master-slave relationship in the British colonies in the West Indies.2 It is perhaps not easy to appreciate Cowper’s abolitionism in light of his own qualified support for Britain’s overseas colonies. He bemoaned the loss of the American colonies and initially backed British rule in India. Martin Priestman has identified Cowper’s political outlook as consistent with Whig mercantilism, which accounts for his willingness to relate the rise of the British Empire as a force of Providence to the extension of its trading tentacles around the world.3 Critical work aimed at resolving such apparent contradictions between the pursuit of spiritual ideals and the realities of colonial conquest has usefully emphasized the extent to which the figure of the benighted, foreign other shored up the putative moral authority of the European imperialist. In her study of the global division of labor in the nineteenth century, Lisa Lowe suggestively terms the interwoven commercial relationships among Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas in the European imperial context the “intimacies of four continents.”4 Lowe describes how the existence of a variety of forms of coerced and coercive labor in the New World colonies were the conditions of possibility for the development of European humanism’s concepts of freedom—concepts that tended in their theoretical elaborations to obscure these very conditions.5 Recognizing this blind spot at the center of liberal political philosophy helps us to see how similar disavowals come to structure the thinking See Maria Edgeworth, “The Grateful Negro,” in British Literature, 1780–1830, ed. Anne Mellor and Richard Matlak (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1996), 546–55. 3 See Martin Priestman, Cowper’s Task: Structure and Influence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 35. 4 See Lisa Lowe, “The Intimacies of Four Continents,” in Haunted by Empire: Geographies of Intimacy in North American History, ed. Ann Laura Stoler (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 191–212. 5 Lowe’s focus is on the figure of the transatlantic Chinese coolie who discursively structures the development in the early nineteenth century of a hierarchized and racialized world division of labor. 2

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of a range of British writers on imperialism. It is important to note that Cowper’s nationalist commitments were tempered but never eroded by the ravages of Britain’s transatlantic empire. Though the critic Peter Faulkner has found Cowper’s “ethos of ‘liberal’ Imperialism” hard to square with his abolitionism,6 Jane Austen arguably works out of the same twinned ideological framework. Even as Mansfield Park demands the reform of Sir Thomas’s plantocratic domination over the inhabitants of his estates in Antigua and at Mansfield, it endorses the forming of Fanny and William Price as exemplary imperial subjects at home and in the colonies, respectively. In his most famous work, The Task, Cowper refers to the Mansfield judgment of 1772, which ruled slavery unlawful in England, and demands that the same principle of freedom be spread to the colonies (in Cowper’s formulation, “That where Britain’s power / Is felt, mankind may feel her mercy too”).7 The exercise of “power” and “mercy” are presented not as antithetical but as complementary practices, or indeed as one and the same. In early 1788 Cowper’s friend the Reverend John Newton, a former slave trader, communicated to him a request from activist circles for some ballads suitable to be sung for the campaign to end the slave trade. Though the two of them had collaborated on the Olney Hymns (1779), these ballads were to be from Cowper’s own pen. When he was first approached with Newton’s request, Cowper was disinclined to take it up, not least because he did not view slavery and the slave trade as a new poetic subject for him. Referring to his long 1782 poem “Charity,” Cowper wrote to his cousin Harriot Cowper, Lady Hesketh, “It occurred to me likewise that I have already borne my testimony in favour of our Black Brethren, and that I was one of the earliest, if not the first of those who have in the present day, expressed their detestation of the diabolical traffic in question.”8 Though “Charity” was not, as Cowper imagined, in fact the first poem to advance the abolitionist cause—Thomas Day’s “The Dying Negro,” for example, was published nearly a decade earlier in 1773—it did constitute an early contribution to the genre. The several passages in “Charity” that address slavery highlight a religiously and philosophically inflected approach to the concept of freedom and serve as a useful template for evaluating the development of his 1788 poems. The moral vision that will ably govern Cowper’s analysis and repudiation of economic counterarguments about slavery proves less compatible with the stylistic features and affective strategies of abolitionist poetry, and ultimately appears inimical to translation through the very form of poetry in general. Cowper’s first concern here is developing an account of the divine social plan for the human race informed See Peter Faulkner, “William Cowper and the Poetry of Empire,” Durham University Journal n.s. 52, no. 2 (1991): 171. 7 The Task, The Poems of William Cowper, ed. John D. Baird and Charles Ryskamp, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980–95), 2:109–264, lines 46–47. 8 The Letters and Prose Writings of William Cowper, ed. James King and Charles Ryscamp, 5 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979–86), 3:103. 6

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by Enlightenment natural rights theory. We learn that “He made at first, though free and unconfin’d, / One man the common father of the kind,” so that all tribes, though “Diff’ring in language, manners, or in face, / Might feel themselves allied to all the race.”9 Cowper then turns to a topical account of the voyages of Captain James Cook to the Pacific, constructing Cook as the heroic inheritor of the Adamic legacy who recognized and fulfilled his charge to respect the “savage lives” he encountered: Wherever he found man, to nature true, The rights of man were sacred in his view: He sooth’d with gifts and greeted with a smile The simple native of the new-found isle, He spurn’d the wretch that slighted or withstood The tender argument of kindred blood, Nor would endure that any should controul His free-born brethren of the southern pole. (27–34)

Most remarkable about Cowper’s advancement of a “rights of man” argument is its marked difference from forerunners such as Thomas Spence’s The Real Rights of Man (1775) and famous subsequent formalizations such as Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man (1791) and revolutionary France’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen (1789). Whereas the former focused on reform of property laws and the latter two on political reforms toward the cause of popular sovereignty, Cowper brings the theory of natural rights explicitly to bear upon the issue of slavery. In this passage he also performs a rhetorical sleight-of-hand by depicting such human bondage as the violation of “kindred blood,” thereby recoding social ties as consanguineal ones and literalizing the notion of the human family, which he has already established as the expression of a divine order. Cowper pursues an even more expansive understanding of natural rights in a later passage even as he counsels forbearance to those caught in the institution’s snare: But slav’ry!—virtue dreads it as her grave, Patience itself is meanness in a slave: Or if the will and sovereignty of God Bid suffer it awhile, and kiss the rod, Wait for the dawning of a brighter day, And snap the chain the moment when you may. Nature imprints upon whate’er we see That has a heart and life in it, be free; The beasts are chartered—neither age nor force Can quell the love of freedom in a horse. (163–72)

“Charity,” Poems of William Cowper, 1:337–53, lines 17–18, 21–22.

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In a twist on the Rousseauean proposition that “man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains,”10 Cowper establishes that in the state of nature, all of God’s creatures who boast “a heart” share a yearning for freedom. Significantly, the possession of reason is not the litmus test for evaluating a being’s right to unfettered existence but rather the possession of a quality comparable to sentience, or the ability to experience feelings of pleasure and pain. It is perhaps not surprising that recent criticism has honed in on Cowper as an exemplum of a nascent animal rights sensibility that emerged in Romantic writing.11 Cowper’s connecting of the plight of human and animal beings set the stage for the rhetorical development of animal rights discourse, as the practice of borrowing from the discourse of abolition in writings on what Peter Singer and others now term “animal liberation” gained traction in the nineteenth century especially. Pity, Self-Interest, and Affective Agency in Cowper’s Slave Ballads Despite his serious initial hesitations about the slave ballads project broached by Newton, Cowper eventually gave in to the appeal of his friend and over the course of a few weeks in March of 1788 completed several poems, perhaps six in all, of which five are extant: “The Negro’s Complaint,” “Pity for the Poor Africans,” “Sweet Meat has Sour Sauce,” “The Morning Dream,” and an untitled epigram. Robert Southey in his literary biography of Cowper appears to have been the first to notice that a poem was missing from his published canon.12 In the midst of composition, Cowper pronounced himself happy with only one of them, as he confessed to Lady Hesketh, “There is but one of the three with which I am myself satisfied, though I have heard them all well spoken of. But there are very few things of my own composing that I can endure to read when they have been written a month, though at first they seem to me to be all perfection” (189). Presumably the “one” was “The Morning Dream,” which he had transcribed and sent to both Lady Hesketh and General Cowper at the end of March. This poem represents a departure in style and subject from the others, as it is the only one that features a poetic voice and persona that might be readily identified with Cowper himself, and also the only one that envisions an optimistic outcome of the abolitionist 10 Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On the Social Contract, The Basic Political Writings, trans. Donald A. Cress (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987), 141. 11 In a discussion of Cowper’s keeping of hares as pets, David Perkins has speculated that aspects of Cowper’s biography, from his experience with bullies at school to his religious conviction of his own damnation, led him to a “sympathetic identification with animals as victims.” Romanticism and Animal Rights (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 62. The argumentative turns of “Charity” suggest that Cowper arrives at this view not merely by way of his troubled personal history, however, but through a religiously informed interpretation of the world, and through his meditations on slavery in particular. 12 See The Life and Works of William Cowper, ed. Robert Southey, 15 vols (1835; New York: AMS Press, 1971), 2:315.

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movement. In the poem the speaker recounts his dream vision of the liberation of African slaves in the colonies through the defeat of the demon “Oppression” by the allegorical figure of a “goddess-like” Britannia, and his subsequent discovery upon waking that his dream has come true in reality.13 Unlike his other ballads, “The Morning Dream” as a piece of celebratory wish fulfillment does not attempt to enlist its audience’s sympathies towards the cause. A world apart from “The Morning Dream” is “The Negro’s Complaint,” a work that deploys strategies characteristic of the abolitionist genre to heighten its emotional appeal. It was the most successful of Cowper’s ballads in England, where it was sung as a ballad from the city to the countryside, as well as overseas in America, where it was reprinted in broadsheet form into the nineteenth century. In this poem, uniquely among his works, Cowper narrates the story from the point of view of a slave. Such ventriloquism of firsthand and eyewitness testimony is a feature found in other abolitionist poems of the period, including Amelia Opie’s “The Negro Boy’s Tale” (1802) and Robert Southey’s “The Sailor, who had served in the Slave Trade” (1798). What one might think of as a reportage function was likely influenced by contemporary testimonies written by escaped slaves and reformed slave traders.14 In another move characteristic of the genre, Cowper’s speaker provides a detailed account of the physical and mental costs that the production of colonial commodities exacts from producers. Sugar was the most labor-intensive crop of the New World plantations, and the process of planting and harvesting sugar, involving the de-topping, stripping, and cutting of cane, was characteristically back-breaking and dangerous work. The production of sugar in the British West Indies outstripped that of Britain’s rival European colonies after 1791. In that year, William Fox began a pamphlet war urging British consumers to boycott sugar, urging them to see themselves as inextricably tied to the depredations of slavery through their buying practices at home.15 A perverse form of transatlantic intimate contact is found in Cowper’s imagining of the European’s ingestion of the enslaved other through his consumption of colonial commodities. Debbie Lee has drawn attention to an underlying theme of British cannibalism in the image of the sugarcane in Cowper’s poetry and in other abolitionist works,16 citing these lines from “The Negro’s Complaint”: “Why did all-creating Nature /

“The Morning Dream,” Poems of William Cowper, 3:17–18. 1774 saw perhaps the first published book by a black British author, A Narrative

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of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, an African Prince, and Newton’s own Thoughts upon the Slave Trade (1788) came out in the same year Cowper composed his poems. 15 See William Fox, An Address to the People of Great Britain, on the Consumption of West India Produce (London, 1791). 16 See Debbie Lee, Slavery and the Romantic Imagination (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 180–81.

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Make the plant for which we toil? / Sighs must fan it, tears must water, / Sweat of ours must dress the soil.”17 The poem’s imagery is also uniquely reminiscent of Cowper’s specific religious preoccupations to which he gave expression in his private correspondence. For instance, “The Negro’s Complaint” draws on the imagery of “earthquakes, high winds, tempestuous seas” to which Cowper alludes in a letter to his friend Walter Bagot as the “scenes of horror” that God creates (Letters 3:178). Cowper exploits such disturbing scenes in his poem in order to show how the atrocious acts committed in violation of divine laws should be matched by the destruction of both the natural and human world: Hark—He answers. Wild tornadoes Strewing yonder flood with wrecks, Wasting Towns, Plantations, Meadows, Are the voice with which he speaks. He foreseeing what vexations Afric’s sons should undergo, Fix’d their Tyrants’ habitations Where his whirlwinds answer—No. (33–40)

In making its ethical case against slavery, the poem draws upon the argument articulated in “Charity” that the possession of a “heart” serves as the foundation for the natural rights of the individual being: Still in thought as free as ever What are England’s rights, I ask, Me from my delights to sever, Me to torture, me to task? Fleecy locks and black complexion Cannot forfeit Nature’s claim; Skins may differ, but Affection Dwells in White and Black the same. (9–16)

New to this poem is the assertion that the mind exists as an independent agent from the body and cannot be quelled by force. The speaker’s statement that he is “in thought as free as ever” functions as a contrasting account to the condition of his British masters. Turning the tables on those who profit from slavery, the speaker portrays them as captives of Mammon and challenges them to demonstrate the validity of their own claims to humanity, defined yet again as the capacity to exhibit emotional response: Slaves of Gold! Whose sordid dealings Tarnish all your boasted pow’rs, Prove that You have Human Feelings ’Ere you proudly question Ours. (53–56) “The Negro’s Complaint,” Poems of William Cowper, 3:13–14, lines 17–20.

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Because the very practice of enslaving others—which entails witnessing the suffering detailed in the poem—would seem to preclude the possibility of having “Human Feelings” in the first place, the burden of proof sits squarely on the shoulders of the exploiter. The poem’s conclusion works cleverly to call the resistant reader to action, demanding from him his own emotional response to the speaker’s plight, which he has now also witnessed, if he wishes to maintain his own claim to humanity. The singular success of “The Negro’s Complaint” among Cowper’s slave ballads may be attributed at least in part to the specific musical setting Cowper chose for it, which likely intensified its effects on its listening audiences. Newton’s friends had requested works suitable for vocal performance, and Cowper chose “Hosier’s Ghost” or “As near Porto Bello lying,” for “The Negro’s Complaint.” As the aesthetic theorist Leonard B. Meyer first argued, listeners are conditioned to experience through music the “arousal of affect.”18 And listeners’ affective experiences are produced not only by the musical stimuli contained within a work itself, but also by the extramusical references activated by the work: “Often music arouses affect through the mediation of conscious connotation or unconscious image processes. A sight, a sound, or a fragrance evokes half-forgotten thoughts of persons, places, and experiences; stirs up dreams ‘mixing memory with desire’; or awakens conscious connotations of referential things” (256). In the case of “Hosier’s Ghost,” the original lyrics that accompanied this tune provide a preexisting, melancholic context or reference for its later incarnation as an abolitionist work, as they tell the story of a British naval commander, Admiral Vernon, who never experiences the glory of battle but instead witnesses the death of his men and the destruction of his ships.19 Perhaps the listeners’ memories of the tragic overtones of the source text, combined with their auditory experience of the melody of the source tune, underscored the affective impact of “The Negro’s Complaint.”20 Other abolitionist works by Cowper, including those that make use of musical settings, function very differently from “The Negro’s Complaint” in terms of their rejection of the mechanics of affect. Cowper’s shortest poetic treatment of slavery was an epigram likely written in 1788 around the same time as the ballads but not printed until 1792 in the Northampton Mercury. Departing from the sympathetic appeal of “The Negro’s Complaint,” Cowper in this work constructs enslaved Leonard B. Meyer, Emotion and Meaning in Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1956), 31. 19 For the text of “Admiral Hosier’s Ghost,” see Thomas Percy, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, ed. Edward Walford (London: Frederick Warne, 1887), 281–82. 20 It is instructive to note that in her comprehensive study of African-American music, Eileen Southern has documented how disseminators of antislavery songs in the United States sought to draw exclusively upon well-known tunes for their musical settings. Songs from the British Isles were most common among these. See The Music of Black Americans: A History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 141–42. 18

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Africans in a detached manner as objects of pity rather than subjects who might volubly demand redress on their own behalf. Drawing from his arsenal of religious tropes, he does so here for the purpose of representing the enslaved as the purest type of victim: To purify their wine some people bleed A Lamb into the barrel, and succeed; No Nostrum, Planters say, is half so good To make fine sugar, as a Negro’s blood. Now lambs and negroes both are harmless things, And thence, perhaps, this wond’rous Virtue springs, ’Tis in the blood of Innocence alone— Good cause why Planters never try their own.21

As in “The Negro’s Complaint,” the trope of cannibalism is activated in the poem’s re-envisioning of a pagan purification rite as the modern practice of human sacrifice in sugar production. Cowper’s equation between lambs and Negroes also obviously calls to mind Jesus as the paradigmatic figure of the sacrificial lamb. The passivity of these “harmless things” is emphasized in the poem’s mapping of the crucifixion onto the fate of innocents who are forcibly bled by their masters for profit (5). With no salvation in sight for either masters or slaves, the poem concludes with a satirical jibe that is the hallmark of the classical epigram. The focus of this poem tends more than any of his other works to substantiate Cowper’s apparent support for full abolitionist measures. At the same time, it renders unimaginable any potential source of agency toward that end, as it pits disempowered slaves against irredeemable masters. Because the poetic intention is not about persuasion per se, this epigram stands out as the least political entry in Cowper’s abolitionist oeuvre, as it asks for no specific response from its readers to the violence that it allegorizes, not even, it seems, for sympathy. If the epigram marks a wholesale departure from the agenda of “The Negro’s Complaint,” “Pity for the Poor Africans” offers by way of a competing discourse a more engaged debate about the literary assumptions of that original agenda. This poem illustrates the limits of abolitionist rhetoric that seeks to induce an affective response in individuals in order to bring about institutional reform. Whereas “The Negro’s Complaint” pursues its objective of political persuasion through the masterful exercise of a rhetorical appeal to pathos, Cowper’s less popular “Pity for the Poor Africans” undoes this logic of poetic construction completely. It dramatizes the failure of sentiment to spur action, thereby critiquing its own operation. Specifically, Cowper suggests that pity, which is so easily evoked in abolitionist literature through its figuring of firsthand and eyewitness accounts of the victimization of slaves, is a political and moral dead end. Given the direction his other poems take on the subject, we can speculate that the necessity of providing a personalized narrative of the tragedy of a single enslaved individual “Epigram,” Poems of William Cowper, 3:183, lines 1–8.

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as a metonymic representation for the suffering of millions became distasteful to Cowper. Perhaps he feared that the necessity of personalization as a means to sensitize the public to suffering would merely allow readers to treat such a narrative as a conduit for individuated pity. As literature replaces politics, the expression of pity becomes in its worse form a strategy for absolving oneself of having to effect change by substituting affective for activist work. The Failure of Sympathy and the Aesthetics of Antisentimentality Clearly, the success of the affective appeal of a poem like “The Negro’s Complaint” is predicated upon a theory of benevolence as the foundation of human social behavior. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith defined sympathy as the natural capacity for “fellow-feeling” and referred to pity and compassion as specific manifestations of that projection of oneself onto the other resulting in shared pain and sorrow: “How selfish soever man may be supposed, there are evidently some principles in his nature, which interest him in the fortunes of others, and render their happiness necessary to him, though he derives nothing from it, except the pleasure of seeing it. Of this kind is pity or compassion, the emotion we feel for the misery of others, when we either see it, or are made to conceive it in a very lively manner.”22 In his survey of eighteenth-century theories of pity from Hobbes to Mandeville and from Goldsmith to Edwards, A. O. Aldridge has shown the antisentimentalist conception of pity located its source not in benevolence but in self-love.23 Far from being a virtue, pity was alternately seen as the grateful sense of relief that it is not oneself but rather someone else who suffers, as a fear that one might someday also fall subject to that suffering of another, and as a short-lived sense of sympathy that soon turns into disdain. Despite the dominant and substantive portrait of Cowper as a poet of sensibility whose most sustained creative efforts tend towards the sentimentalized celebration of retirement and rural life and who even embraces the literary display of his own sensitive nature, I suggest that through the course of the slave ballads Cowper’s growing sense of the limits of abolitionist affect presents a significant qualification to that portrait of Cowper by putting him more in line philosophically with those of the antisentimentalist camp. It is clear that as far as pity is concerned, Jon Mee is proven correct again in his astute claim that “affect too has a history,” which he makes in his most recent study of the Romantic discourse on enthusiasm.24 One of the prime subjects of 22 Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. Knud Haakkonsen (1759; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 11. 23 See A. O. Aldridge, “The Pleasures of Pity,” ELH 16, no. 1 (1949): 76–87. 24 Jon Mee, Romanticism, Enthusiasm, and Regulation: Poetics and the Policing of Culture in the Romantic Period (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 1. See also Mee’s Dangerous Enthusiasm: William Blake and the Culture of Radicalism in the 1790s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992).

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Mee’s work on affect is William Blake, who has been a popular focus for such theorizing. As Steven Goldsmith has suggested, Blake serves as a key touchstone for both writers and readers who have a stake in cultivating what he calls the “agency of emotion”: “We already see in Blake’s enthusiasm the work that many progressive artists and critics will continually ask of emotion for the next two hundred years: that it supply immediate, experiential evidence of a transformative agency whose effects cannot otherwise be measured.”25 Brian Massumi’s equation of affect with “intensity”26 or unstructured potential informs Goldsmith’s account of the “transformative agency” of emotion. It is precisely this open-endedness of affect that appears to worry Cowper, however. From his view of the abolitionist movement, the raising of political consciousness could not suffice as an adequate or satisfying end in itself. Tellingly, though Blake may have possessed much faith in the potential of prophetic and radical enthusiasm, he too recognized that a poetics of affect that addressed itself towards pity and seeking concrete, measured effects would backfire: “Pity would be no more, if we did not make somebody Poor.”27 Cowper had already explored this same territory before Blake in “Pity for the Poor Africans,” which critiques abolitionist poetry of the very sort he himself has written. Whereas the explicit target of blame for the perpetuation of slavery and the slave trade in “The Negro’s Complaint” were slave traders and masters, or those “Slaves of Gold” who do not scruple to chase profit, responsibility in “Pity for the Poor Africans” is shared by all who benefit from the institution, including the consumer who partakes in the market economy that delivers sugar and rum to the shores of Britain. The speaker of the poem is a not-so-innocent bystander, representative of the typical citizen, who is personally moved by accounts of the pains experienced by enslaved Africans provided by, for example, “The Negro’s Complaint,” and even acknowledges the injustice of slavery, but still refuses to effect change: I own I am shock’d at this Traffic of Slaves, And fear those who buy them, and sell, them, are Knaves. What I hear of their Hardships, their Tortures and Groans, Is almost enough to draw Pity from Stones.28

Cowper cannily suggests the speaker’s culpability through the opening words “I own,” which figuratively identify the speaker with a slave owner at the same time that they literally signify a confession of deep dismay at the treatment of slaves. Despite those feelings, the speaker refuses to act to overcome the obstacle Steven Goldsmith, “William Blake and the Future of Enthusiasm,” NineteenthCentury Literature 63, no. 4 (2009): 445. 26 See Brian Massumi, Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002), 15. 27 William Blake, “The Human Abstract,” The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake, ed. David V. Erdman (New York: Anchor Books, 1997), 27, lines 1–2. 28 “Pity for the Poor Africans,” Poems of William Cowper, 3:26–7, lines 1–4. 25

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that the system of slavery poses for his conscience. Learning to live with pity is then the task the speaker sets out to meet in the course of his narrative—a task, Cowper suggests, that many Britons have already mastered. Reiterating his strong feelings of pity, the speaker proceeds in the next stanzas to explain his opposition to abolition, and the poem begins to take on the form of a one-sided dialogue with an invisible interlocutor, understood as the voice of his conscience or the poem’s implied reader. What results is Cowper’s parodic representation of the ethically bankrupt justifications that formed popular defenses of the slave trade: I pity them greatly, but I must be mum; For how could we do without Sugar and Rum? Especially Sugar so needful we see; What, give up our Desserts, our Coffee, and Tea? Besides, if we do, the French, Dutch and Danes Will heartily thank us, no Doubt, for our Pains: If we do not buy the poor Creatures they will, And Tortures and Groans will be multiply’d still. (5–12)

The ironic treatment to which Cowper subjects the speaker’s rehearsal of arguments backfires to some extent. Historically, colonial competition more broadly and British economic interest more specifically were precisely the underlying rationales behind the opposition of lobbying groups such as the Liverpool merchants to abolition. Liverpool, the largest slave port in the Atlantic world at the end of the eighteenth century, was an important node in the global network of flows of goods, people, and capital. The export of East Indian textiles to Africa, the trafficking of human cargo to the Americas, and the importation of West Indian sugar and rum into England all involved the use of Liverpool ships.29 Liverpool also became the leading importer in Europe in the early nineteenth century of American cotton and West African palm oil, both of which, Anthony Tibbles has explained, helped fuel the Industrial Revolution.30 Individuals ranging from the tradesmen who built the slave ships, to the merchants who provisioned them with trade goods, to the investors who funded the voyages for a healthy return, to the inhabitants of cities radiating around Liverpool who worked at spinning and weaving all had a stake in maintaining the status quo.31 Thus while 29

I am not trying to suggest that these were the same ships making these voyages. Recent historiography has vigorously challenged what Herbert S. Klein calls the “myth of the so-called triangle trade.” The Atlantic Slave Trade (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 96. 30 Transatlantic Slavery: Against Human Dignity, ed. Anthony Tibbles (Liverpool: National Museums Liverpool, 2005), 72. 31 For a detailed account of the city’s economic interests in the slave trade, see James A. Rawley, The Transatlantic Slave Trade: A History (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981), esp. 193–218.

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the speaker of “Pity for the Poor Africans” acknowledges that revelatory accounts of the workings of the slave trade might be “almost enough to draw Pity from Stones,” he implicitly suggests that they do not constitute an effective economic or geopolitical counterargument to the national interest either in meeting consumer demand for sugar and rum or in maintaining a competitive edge against France or Holland, who, following Britain’s establishment of its first North American colony in Virginia in 1607, both began consolidating their own transatlantic empires in the subsequent decades of the seventeenth century. Cowper is simply uninterested in countering such extramoral positions on their own terms. But in elevating moral consideration above all others, the poem forces a false splitting of the choice to passively accept or actively resist the slave trade as either wholly pragmatic or wholly idealistic. Cowper nonetheless does his best to cast the pragmatic choice in this case as an indefensible one. In so doing, he makes use of an unusual analogy that reveals how deeply the issue of slavery troubled his religious convictions. Reminded of a case similar to his own, the speaker of the poem tells his invisible interlocutor, “Your Scruples and Arguments bring to my Mind / A Story so pat, you may think it was coin’d,” and then launches into a version of a scene from Augustine’s Confessions in which Augustine recalls an act of theft he committed with friends in his youth to illustrate his former condition of utter depravity. The allusion suggests the speaker’s moral will functions on the level of a child’s, as the stories of how they succumb to the corrupt practices of their peers are paralleled, as one of the young subjects echoes the speaker’s cry of pity: A Youngster at School, more sedate than the Rest, Had once his Integrity put to the Test: His Comrades had plotted an Orchard to rob, And ask’d him to go and assist in the Job. He was shock’d, Sir, like you, and answer’d, O no!— What rob our good Neighbour?—I pray you don’t go: Besides the Man’s poor, and his Orchard’s his Bread; Then think of his Children, for they must be fed. You talk very fine, and you look very grave; But Apples we want, and Apples we’ll have: If you will go with us, we’ll give you a Share; If not, you shall have neither Apple nor Pear. They ceas’d, and Tom ponder’d, “I see they will go;— Poor Man! what a Pity to injure him so!— Poor Man! I would save him his Fruit, if I could; But staying behind them will do him no Good. (21–36)

Alternate theories of a fundamental incompatibility between Cowper’s religious and abolitionist commitments have arisen from Cowper’s appropriation of one of the most famous texts of Christian philosophy. In his reading of “Pity for the Poor Africans,” D. L. Macdonald maintains that Cowper’s “religious preoccupations . . . undermined his abolitionism” because his sense of being “enslaved by [original]

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sin” rendered any considerations of earthly suffering secondary to the primary fact of humankind’s fallen condition.32 Macdonald arrives at this conclusion by way of the Augustinian allusion, which he connects to the story of the fall, cunningly referenced in the poem by the negative image of the “apple” (32). But the scene of pear stealing in the Confessions does not merely end with the young Augustine’s fall into sin, as it is later repeated and transformed in the scene of his conversion to Christianity. In the midst of this final spiritual struggle, he hears again that taunt of his peers from childhood—tolle, lege, “take it, pick it,”—but now interprets it as an injunction to take up his Bible (“take it, read it”), and consequently experiences a life-changing moment of illumination: “It was as though the light of confidence flooded into my heart and all the darkness of doubt was dispelled.”33 Pear stealing in Augustine thus bears within it the seeds of a salvational spiritual moment. Because he rewrote his enslavement to sin as liberation from it, using Augustine to make the case for an overriding obsession with original sin and damnation on Cowper’s part as does Macdonald glosses over the layered significances of the original text.34 In privileging Cowper’s spirituality over his political engagement we also miss seeing how embedded the one was within the other. There is some corroborating evidence that slavery was in fact an issue central rather than secondary to his religious beliefs. It served as a kind of limit case for his ability to resolve to his theological satisfaction the problem of evil. In his correspondence with Newton, Cowper confessed to doubting the righteousness of God’s will when reflecting on the condition of slaves past and present in the British colonies: Is it to be esteem’d a sufficient vindication of divine justice, if these miserable creatures, tormented as they have been from generation to generation, shall at last receive some relief, some abatement of their woes, shall not be treated 32

D. L. Macdonald, “Pre-Romantic and Romantic Abolitionism: Cowper and Blake,” European Romantic Review 4, no. 2 (1994): 172. In his own version of a relatively politicized Cowper, Tim Fulford seems to share Macdonald’s sense that Cowper’s focus on his own religious damnation was the motive and end to his political meditations. See Tim Fulford, “Wordsworth, Cowper, and the Language of Eighteenth-Century Politics,” Early Romantics, 117–33, esp. 120. 33 Saint Augustine, Confessions, trans. R. S. Pine-Coffin (New York: Penguin Books, 1961), 178. 34 It also obscures the fact that Cowper’s account of his own conversion bears eerie echoes to Augustine’s. As Deborah Heller reminds us, it was Cowper’s reading of some verses from Romans that precipitated his spiritual awakening: “Immediately the full beams of the sun of righteousness shone upon me. I saw the sufficiency of the atonement He had made, my pardon sealed in His blood, and all the fullness and completeness of my justification. In a moment I believed and received the Gospel.” Not only the circumstances but also the features of Cowper’s conversion are identical to Augustine’s: immediate, complete, and incontrovertible. The Letters and Prose Writings of William Cowper, 1:39. Also quoted in Deborah Heller, “Cowper’s Task and the Writing of a Poet’s Salvation,” SEL 35, no. 3 (1995): 575.

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absolutely as brutes for the future? . . . Is it essential to the perfection of a plan concerted by infinite wisdom, that such wretches should exist at all, who from the beginning of their Being through all its endless duration can experience nothing for which they should say, It is good for us that we were created? These reasonings and such as these engage me often and more intensely than I wish them to do, when the Case of the poor Negroes occurs to me. (Letters 3:106)

Cowper here appears to question the adequacy of the abolitionist position on the slave trade, which tended to emphasize how the trade’s positioning of slaves as marketable and replaceable commodities led directly to the poor treatment of them in the colonies. Cowper apparently recognizes that an exclusively antitrade agenda promises only “some relief, some abatement of their woes,” however (my emphasis). The institution of slavery itself preoccupied Cowper, taxing his ability to reconcile the empirical evidence of unrelieved mass suffering with his faith in a divine plan for good at work in the world. Notwithstanding the fact that the Augustinian allusion offers up this important biographical subtext for understanding the development of Cowper’s spirituality and its profound connection to his politics, it is simply not the case that the poem itself pursues a redemptive resolution. Rather, young Tom and the speaker both commit to their paths of sin with no promise of deliverance in sight, and thus the poem ends exactly where it began: His Scruples thus silenc’d, Tom felt more at Ease, And went with his Comrades the Apples to seize: He blam’d, and protested, but join’d in the Plan; He shar’d in the Plunder, but pity’d the Man. (41–44)

In the concluding line of the poem, pity makes its fourth and final appearance, by which time it has been thoroughly exposed as a sentiment utterly devoid of any ethical weight (44). The dilemma of activist poetry that Cowper identifies in this text is further complicated by the fact that the text itself, by providing a space for the recognition of a representative individual’s wrongdoing through his refusal to agitate for change, achieves a kind of cathartic purging of guilt through confession for its readers. Cowper runs the risk of suturing his readers into the text too well when what is called for is a defamiliarization of the values expressed by his speaker. In “Sweet Meat has Sour Sauce: or, The Slave-Trader in the Dumps,” Cowper introduces an even less sympathetic speaker and takes his critique of pity to its ultimate conclusion. Given the clash of an almost jovial tone and brutal subject matter in “Sweet Meat has Sour Sauce,” not to mention the objectionable views of its speaker, it is not surprising the popularity of “The Negro’s Complaint” eluded it too. Cowper himself appears to have recognized the satirical incongruity of form and content, describing the poem as “somewhat ludicrous” (Letters 3:135) and comparing it unfavorably to “The Negro’s Complaint” and “The Morning Dream.” This dissonance is heightened by its musical setting of “For He’s a

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Jolly Good Fellow,” indicated by the familiar upbeat refrain repeated at the end of every stanza of “Which nobody can deny, deny, / Which nobody can deny.” The musical and extramusical references at play here contribute to this ballad’s affective impact in a way very different from what we find with “Hosier’s Ghost” and “The Negro’s Complaint,” as the combining of celebratory musical context with gruesome verse produces a jarring and disorienting effect on its audience. Rather than pathos, something like black humor is evoked. The verse details the story of a slave trader who has drawn from the full repertoire of torture to control and abuse his imprisoned passengers. Having heard a rumor his “trading is like to be o’er,” he now seeks to sell off his “stock” of devices: “Fine chains for the neck, and a cat with nine tails”: “padlocks and bolts, and screws for the thumbs”: and “a notable engine to open his jaws.”35 The sadistic rounds that the speaker puts the slaves through are represented as perverse foreplay, as he showcases these instruments to “tickle the Negroes” and “squeeze them so lovingly” (10, 18). These exercises in cruelty are justified as conditioning for the main event—or their enslavement under colonial masters in the West Indies: “Thus going to market, we kindly prepare / A pretty black cargo of African ware, / For what they must meet with when they get there” (25–27). Not so different from the speaker of “Pity for the Poor Africans,” who responds to the shocking treatment of slaves with mere pity for their plight, is the slave trader of “Sweet Meat has Sour Sauce,” who feels pity only for himself for the loss of his business. The concluding stanzas of this poem take a bitter turn, upending the sentimentalist discourse of pity of which Cowper was so wary: But ah! if in vain I have studied an art So gainful to me, all boasting apart, I think it will break my compassionate heart, Which nobody, &c. For oh! how it enters my soul like an awl! This pity, which some people self-pity call, Is sure the most heart-piercing pity of all, Which nobody, &c. (33–40)

The strongest feelings of pity have their source in the basest form of self-love. If even a slave trader can believe he merits a claim for pity, then the primary assumption of sentimental poetry—namely, that cultivating sensibility has value as an end in itself and as a potential means to some progressive social end— comes under serious question. Pity is revealed as a closed circuit of affect, wilily gesturing towards the other but ultimately redounding upon the self, stymieing the political goals of abolitionist literature.

35 “Sweet Meat has Sour Sauce: or, The Slave-Trader in the Dumps,” Poems of William Cowper, 3:15–16, lines 2, 42, 11, 17, 23.

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Trifling with Politics: The End of Cowper’s Abolitionist Poetry Cowper’s sense of the uneasy relationship between aesthetics and politics pervades his private correspondence around the time of his composition of the ballad cycle. On March 31, 1788, just days after completing his ballads, Cowper wrote to Lady Hesketh to express his feelings of disappointment over the political failure of his latest commission: I shall now probably cease to sing of tortured Negroes, a theme which never pleased me, but which in the hope of doing them some little service, I was not unwilling to handle. What you tell me concerning the disposition of our great folks in this matter, is truely mortifying. It had been less dishonorable for England never to have stirred in it, than after having done so, to fall asleep again. Till now, we were chargeable perhaps only with Inattention, but hereafter, if the poor creatures be not effectually redressed, and all buying and selling of them prohibited for ever, we cannot be wrong’d by the most opprobrious appellations. Call us, who will, deliberately cruel and Tyrants upon principle, we are guilty and must acknowledge it. (140)

Cowper’s ballads arrived at a moment that witnessed the coalescing of political efforts to educate and move the public. Clarkson’s An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, particularly the African had come out in 1786, and Ottobah Cugoano’s Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species had appeared in 1787—the same year in which Clarkson and a group of Anglicans and Quakers founded the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade in England on the model of the American Friends, and William Pitt encouraged William Wilberforce to take up the cause of abolition in Parliament. Of course, in retrospect these years constituted only the very early stage of the historical campaign, which would take almost another two decades to win its first big victory in 1807, but as Cowper points out, all the information necessary to form a defensible opinion on the subject had already been disseminated by the time he made his contribution. In addition to his doubts about the efficacy of the affective mechanics of abolitionist poetry, he betrays in his correspondence here more interested concerns about the effect of the abolitionist movement on the national reputation. His apparent twinge of regret that the movement of which he was a part had been launched at all stems from his nationalistic anxiety about the sullying of British honor, for once “Inattention” or ignorance has been shattered, the collective culpability of all becomes an incontestable fact. Renewing this topic with Newton a few weeks later on April 19, 1788, Cowper confessed, “On the whole I fear that there is reason to wish for the honour of England that the nuisance had never been troubled, lest we eventually make ourselves justly chargeable with the whole offence, by not removing it” (Letters 3:149). Cowper was not the only Englishman to be bothered by a sense of widely shared shame, as assuaging the national guilt also served as the guiding theme of Wilberforce’s 1789 speech in Parliament on abolishing the trade, which sought to play to the movement’s advantage the desire to restore the nation’s honor.

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If politics and patriotism gave Cowper reason to reconsider sounding the issue of slavery, so too did his poetics. Early and contemporary readers alike have speculated as to why Cowper stopped writing on slavery and the slave trade, citing more often than not the inherent difficulty of the abolitionist genre. Cowper’s Victorian biographer, Thomas Wright, speculated that reconciling the poetic style of ballad composition with the subject of slavery and its attendant horrors posed the primary obstacle to Cowper’s work in that genre.36 And in his recent study, Conrad Brunström similarly suggests that Cowper refused demands for more poems “because the reality of slavery was too painful and horrible for poetic transmutation: no force of art could transform slavery into anything else.”37 But the transmutative function of poetry by definition carries potentially transformative power. Indeed, it seems to have been this very power that worried Theodor Adorno about post-Shoah art: Adorno’s musings on art that addresses the gravest violations of human rights serve as an enlightening commentary on the nature of the reconciliation of form and content at stake in Cowper’s works. Adorno’s oft-repeated and sometimes misunderstood dictum that “To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric”38 is illuminated by his subsequent clarification of the post-Auschwitz dilemma for art: “While the situation does not permit art— this is what was meant by the sentence concerning the impossibility of art after Auschwitz—it nonetheless demands it.”39 For Adorno, one of the biggest problems posed by the morally necessary practice of artistic production post-Auschwitz concerns the affective response that the form of the work of art triggers in its audience. Describing the effect of art about the Holocaust, he warns that “by transforming this suffering, despite all attempts at irreconcilability and severity, into an artwork it is as though the deference owed to the victims were violated. . . . By means of the principle of aesthetic stylisation the unimaginable fate of the victims appears as having had some kind of sense, it becomes transfigured, the horror is softened and this alone does a great injustice to the victims.”40 As Elaine Martin has cogently observed about these passages, Adorno’s fear lies in his intuition that “formal coherence offers the potential for aesthetic pleasure” and “might attribute a sense of meaning” to its subject matter.41 Especially when we consider the specific varieties of ballad verse that Cowper favored, it is clear that poetic form lends itself to the appreciation of robust sensory patterns, which in their logic and regularity may in turn through a kind of Gestalt See Thomas Wright, The Life of William Cowper (New York: Haskell House, 1892). Conrad Brunström, William Cowper: Religion, Satire, Society (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2004), 140. 38 Theodor W. Adorno, Can One Live After Auschwitz? A Philosophical Reader, ed. Rolf Tiedemann (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 162. 39 Quoted in Elaine Martin, “Re-reading Adorno: The ‘After-Auschwitz’ Aporia,” Forum 2 (Spring 2006): 11. 40 Quoted in ibid., 9. 41 Ibid. 36

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effect create the impression of a meaningful wholeness, with regard not only to the poetic form itself but also, more dangerously, to the poetic subject. In his correspondence with Bagot on the matter of requests for more of such poems in the wake of the success of “The Negro’s Complaint,” Cowper tried to articulate the problematic relationship between poetry and slavery, experienced and evidenced in the effort to create poetry out of slavery: Twice or thrice I have been assailed with entreaties to write a poem on that theme. . . . I felt myself so much hurt in my spirits the moment I enter’d on the contemplation of it, that I have at least determined absolutely to have nothing more to do with it. There are some scenes of horror on which my imagination can dwell not without some complacence, but then they are such scenes as God not man produces. In earthquakes, high winds, tempestuous seas, there is the grand as well as the terrible. But when man is active to disturb there is such meanness in the design and such cruelty in the execution that I both hate and despise the whole operation, and feel it a degradation of poetry to employ her in the description of it. (Letters 3: 177–78)

Here, Adorno’s fear that barbarism could be prettied up too much through artistic representation is reversed in this threat of the aesthetic beauty of poetry becoming tainted by the ugliness of slavery. Envisioning and translating “scenes of horror” evokes such feelings of antipathy that both the practice and product of composition are compromised. In the same letter, however, Cowper also presents the view that poetry itself is beneath what he terms this “odious and disgusting subject” (Letters 3:177). The nature of poetic or perhaps indeed any literary form appeared to Cowper at odds with the moral duty of abolitionism: “I hope also that the generality of my countrymen have more generosity in their nature than to want the fiddle of Verse to go before them in the performance of an act to which they are invited by the loudest calls of Humanity” (3:178). The disparaging reference to the “fiddle of Verse” with its connotations not only of triviality but also of dishonesty suggests that in attempting to take on the representational weight of depicting the horrors of slavery, poetry descends to the level of a mere distraction from the central ethical concerns of the abolitionist cause. Geared toward the production of mere affect, such literature becomes the fodder of a debased public that demands ever more texts of shocking brutality and pitiable victims for it to consume. It is significant that Cowper expressed these grave doubts about the potential for poetry to stir the conscience of his readers on the issue of slavery at the particular stage in the abolitionist movement in which Britain found itself. When James Phillips, a Quaker bookseller, asked Cowper for another poem for the cause, he declined. Writing to Newton on June 5, 1788, Cowper explained his reluctance to revisit the topic: “General censure on the iniquity of the practise will avail nothing, the world has been overwhelm’d with such remarks already, and to particularize all the horrors of it were an employment for the mind both of the poet and his readers of which they would necessarily soon grow weary” (Letters 3:172).

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Neither universalist moral claims nor personalized appeals packaged in poetry could interest or substantially affect the reader who has already become inured to such petitions. Like W. H. Auden, who provocatively declared that “poetry makes nothing happen,”42 Cowper posits that the practice of aesthetic contemplation does not intervene directly upon the realm of politics. Unlike Auden, however, who nonetheless saw in poetry “a way of happening, a mouth” (41) that might voice a method towards change, if not change itself, Cowper seems here to distrust even its capacity to offer that much, precisely because it has hitherto failed to deliver that much—and not for want of effort by himself. Cowper’s final return to the issue of abolition, four years after his gloomy assessment of his contribution to the campaign, was by way of a sonnet addressed to William Wilberforce that he wrote in 1792. Despite his poetic silence on the subject, Cowper followed the progress of Wilberforce’s campaign in the news in the intervening years from afar, and took the setbacks deeply to heart. In a letter to Lady Hesketh of May 27, 1791, Cowper revealed that the defeat of Wilberforce’s first parliamentary bill to halt the slave trade still smarted more than a month afterward: “As for Politics I care not a farthing about them. Let who will quarrel, and weep for me, I reck not, having no room in my head for any thing but the slavebill. That is lost, and all the rest is a trifle” (Letters 3:519). Given his personal and professional support of the campaign, he was understandably upset by rumors in early 1792 that he had reversed his position on the slave trade. Among the putative evidence cited for this reversal was Cowper’s continuing use of sugar and rum, a claim that he had refused to sign a petition against the trade, and a claim that he had been swayed by reading a written account about how the inhabitants of Africa had resorted to cannibalism as a means of population control prior to the beginning of the trade. Though Cowper dismissed as spurious the latter two claims while admitting the truth of the first in his correspondence, he apparently felt more was required on his part to defend himself against the accusation. When it appeared that Wilberforce’s campaign had finally met with some success in early April of 1792, Cowper took the opportunity to pen a literary response to the rumors plaguing him with the idea of “doing just honour to the gentleman with whose name they are inscribed, and of vindicating myself from an aspersion so injurious.”43 Cowper composed “To William Wilberforce, Esq.” from April to May of that year to celebrate the partial victory of the passage in the House of Commons of a compromise measure calling for the gradual abolition of the trade. Rather than indicating a reversal of his position to abjure abolitionist literature, however, this work tends to confirm the impression that Cowper viewed his own attempts to do “some little service” as best being finished. He composed the poem at the tail end of a time when he had much practice with the form through his translating of Milton’s Italian sonnets. The focus of the latter was firmly on 42 W. H. Auden, “In Memory of W. B. Yeats,” Selected Poems, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Vintage, 1989), 80–82, line 36. 43 Letters and Prose Writings of William Cowper, 4:60.

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romantic love, but Cowper’s poem to Wilberforce speaks also of love and forms a platonic love letter of sorts to the best champion of the cause from which he himself had professionally withdrawn: Thy Country, Wilberforce, with just disdain, Hears thee by cruel men and impious call’d Fanatic, for thy zeal to loose th’ enthrall’d From exile, public sale, and Slav’ry’s chain. Friend of the Poor, the wrong’d, the fetter–gall’d, Fear not lest labour such as thine be vain. Thou hast atchiev’d a part; hast gain’d the ear Of Britain’s Senate to thy glorious cause; Hope smiles, Joy springs, and though cold Caution pause And weave delay, the better hour is near That shall remunerate thy toils severe By Peace for Afric, fenced with British laws. Enjoy what thou hast won, esteem and love From all the Just on earth, and all the Blest above. 44

Savoring a shared moment of success, Cowper nonetheless hints that Wilberforce’s work is far from over. As with Anna Barbauld’s “Epistle to William Wilberforce, Esq. on the Rejection of the Bill for Abolishing the Slave Trade” from the year before, the encomiums in Cowper’s sonnet seem designed to encourage him on—despite the attacks on his character, despite the slow pace of reform, despite everything—to achieve the final victory. Though Wilberforce had assured his colleagues that he was not calling for emancipation, “an intention he could have never entertained for a moment,” 45 emancipation remained his ultimate goal. Cowper recognizes Wilberforce’s endgame in his approbation of Wilberforce’s attempt to “loose th’ enthrall’d / From exile, public sale, and Slav’ry’s chain”: the progression of enslavement is traced from capture to shipment to auction to permanent slavery. Yet he also supposes that the reward as he puts it of “peace for Afric, fenced with British laws” for Wilberforce’s dedication would only be gained by legal agitation. Literature had had its day, and politics by another means awaited.

“To William Wilberforce, Esq.,” Poems of William Cowper, 3:182–3, lines 1–14. Quoted in William Hague, William Wilberforce: The Life of the Great Anti-Slave Trade Campaigner (London: Harper Collins, 2007), 231. 44 45

Chapter 7

“We Beg Your Excellency”: The Sentimental Politics of Abolitionist Petitions in the Late Eighteenth Century Christine Levecq

On January 30, 1797, John Swanwick, a Pennsylvania Congressman, submitted a petition to the House of Representatives signed by four black men.1 In it the men told their individual stories, which followed a similar pattern: they had been born slaves in North Carolina, manumitted by their owners, and set upon for reenslavement both inside and outside the state. There was no place in the nation where they could live unmolested as free men. Would the Congressmen listen to the petitioners’ pleas and understand the unbearable situation they were in? Would they be moved by their plight, guided by a sense of humanity and justice? In their appeal to their readers’ sympathy, the petitioners followed a wellestablished tradition in the history of English petitions. Petitions had long been a form of communication between people and government in the colonies, and a pervasive sense of hierarchy often led petitioners to couch their statement of grievances in humble, ingratiating, or even emotional terms.2 The petitions sent by the Continental Congress to King George III during the American Revolution, for example, consistently referred to the bonds of affection that tied England to the colonies, and the authors seemed to hope to sway the king as one does an angry yet benevolent father. One finds similar appeals to sentiment in the many petitions addressed by American blacks to various institutions of government in the later eighteenth century, but those appeals also often feel like a sort of ploy or cover used by the authors to assert themselves and their ideas. If one looks closely at the language of the petitions, and particularly at the language of feeling, one finds hidden behind it an array of political messages that go much beyond the individual affective exchange that the moment is supposed to prompt. The very fact that blacks See Annals of Congress, 2015–2024. See Stephen A. Higginson for the important role played by petitions in the colonies

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due to the fact that colonial assemblies had both legislative and judicial functions. Since the assemblies often legislated in response to particular petitions, they “proceeded haphazardly” (146), and this unsystematic process, combined with significant backlog, must have made a petitioner’s reliance on emotion more likely. “A Short History of the Right to Petition Government for the Redress of Grievances,” Yale Law Journal 96, no. 1 (1986): 142–66.

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resorted to petitions shows a new confidence in their individual right to overt civic self-assertion.3 But though the authors were bold enough to write petitions and so assert themselves as would-be citizens, they also knew that emotion made their appeals more palatable for their white listeners. So they used it repeatedly in order to make a political point. What is more, the political messages embedded in these petitions reveal that blacks in the later eighteenth century were both assimilating and expanding on the revolutionary ideology that surrounded them. Petitioners knew about the Lockean principle of the natural right to life, liberty, and the fruits of one’s labor, and they frequently referred to it in their pleas against slavery and racial discrimination.4 Some of them also testified to their respect for the law, as it implied a general agreement with the rules of a liberal democratic state. But peppered throughout these texts are signs of a different political vision, one that sees individuals essentially as social beings defined by their communities. The authors seem to have been aware of what Lauren Berlant has called the “paradoxes of liberal sentiment,” in that this sort of sentiment aims at creating an emotional bond between different individuals, but at the same time downplays the idea of an equality achieved through shared community and citizenship.5 At a time when liberal individualism had become the liberatory concept in vogue, many black authors hinted at a political language more republican than liberal in inspiration, that they thought ultimately more likely to broaden the meaning of citizenship and national identity in America.6

3 For a discussion of how petitions had a similar meaning for women, see Susan Zaeske, Signatures of Citizenship: Petitioning, Antislavery, & Women’s Political Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). For a discussion of black petitions in terms of citizenship, see John Saillant, “Aspirant Citizenship,” in Beyond Douglass: New Perspectives on Early African-American Literature, ed. Michael J. Drexler and Ed White (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2008), 123–40. 4 See Thomas J. Davis, who argues that the 1770s petitions show the “use of Natural Rights ideology as a rhetoric of emancipation” (250). “Emancipation Rhetoric, Natural Rights, and Revolutionary New England: A Note on Four Black Petitions in Massachusetts, 1773–1777,” New England Quarterly 62, no. 2 (1989): 248–63. 5 Lauren Berlant, “Poor Eliza,” American Literature 70, no. 3 (1998): 636. As Berlant explains in more detail later in the essay, “when sentimentality meets politics, it uses personal stories to tell of structural effects. . . . Because the ideology of true feeling cannot admit the nonuniversality of pain, its cases become all jumbled together and the ethical imperative toward social transformation is replaced by a civic-minded but passive ideal of empathy. The political as a place of acts oriented toward publicness becomes replaced by a world of private thoughts, leanings, and gestures” (641). 6 For an analysis of this double process in terms of the political ideologies of liberalism and republicanism, see my study Slavery and Sentiment: The Politics of Feeling in Black Atlantic Antislavery Writing, 1770–1850 (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2008).

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This political knowledge, moreover, reveals that blacks at the time maintained an international, transatlantic consciousness, and to some extent, it is this awareness that distinguishes theirs as a radical, cosmopolitan voice. Many petitions allude to the slave trade, and to the uprooting that is both the cause of the slaves’ suffering and the source of their unique point of view. Throughout the Revolution, they repeatedly make reference to the colonies’ desire to be free of British impositions. Conversely, they also use the notion of the common good, which had been an important concept in Anglo-American political culture throughout the eighteenth century, and which remained a component of British political life even as American revolutionaries were increasingly moving toward a discourse of liberty. With its roots in classic republicanism, this concept also played a major role in two other major conflagrations of the end of the century, the French and the Haitian revolutions. The writers discussed here regularly made it clear that their awareness of transatlantic ideas and events gave them a special insight into their own position in American society.7 All these ideas found their way into the various petitions written at the time, and particularly into their distinctive use of sentiment. From all these perspectives, the 1797 petition marks a high point in the development of black petitions since the early 1770s. It is as if, in the last three decades of the eighteenth century, as the Declaration of Independence gave way to a more conservative Constitution, blacks became aware that liberal individualism might fail them and a different sort of politics was called for. Indeed, during this period free blacks in both the North and the South developed forms of protest and survival that went beyond the individual, and relied on association and communal collaboration.8 The petitions discussed here show that blacks at the time engaged not just with the vocabulary of the American Revolution, but also with the political ideas that were circulating across the Atlantic world. If this strategy led to the creation of exclusively black societies and associations, it also implied a longing for an interracial, cosmopolitan civic identity. From a 1773 slave petition addressed to the Massachusetts legislature to a 1799 petition by free blacks to Congress, the use of sentimental rhetoric reveals this gradual change. This argument builds on but does not reproduce the one made by Paul Gilroy in The Black Atlantic, in that it highlights the writers’ international consciousness but does not downplay the influence of modernity, including the desire for national belonging. 8 This does not necessarily mean that African Americans were developing a separatist philosophy. True, as Joanna Brooks argues, the last decades of the eighteenth century saw the rise of a black print public sphere that was meant to “interpellate African Americans as a collective subject” (82). “The Early American Public Sphere and the Emergence of Black Print Counterpublic,” William and Mary Quarterly 62, no. 1 (2005): 67–92. But as Richard S. Newman and Roy E. Finkenbine point out, black leaders at the time did not just promote a “black counterpublic.” They also “inaugurated a discourse of civic inclusion,” through which they “struggled to reappropriate revolutionary words, symbols, and ideas in the cause of interracial reform” (88). “Black Frontiers in the New Republic: Introduction,” William and Mary Quarterly 64, no. 1 (2007): 83–94. 7

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Perhaps it should come as no surprise that most of the black petitions we know of from the 1770s emanated from New England. Boston was one of the intellectual and publishing hubs of the Revolution, and blacks in the region jumped on the bandwagon. Phillis Wheatley, a Boston slave who became internationally famous when she published a collection of poems in London in 1773, clearly identified with the ideals of the Revolution. In her poem to William, Earl of Dartmouth, who had just been appointed secretary of state for the colonies, she celebrates the day when “Fair Freedom rose New-England to adorn,” eclipsing the “Tyranny” that had “meant t’enslave the land.” She then accounts for her love of freedom by recounting her kidnapping from Africa, concluding: “And can I then but pray / Others may never feel tyrannic sway?”9 She naturally sympathizes with America’s troubles because, she implies, as an African and a slave, she knew about love of freedom even before it became the central concept of the Revolution. Although Wheatley was comparatively privileged, her social environment is suggestive of the intellectual influences to which some Bostonian blacks had access. She came in contact with many liberal persons, particularly ministers, as we can gather from her elegies and her letters, as well as from the names of the men who testified to the authenticity of her poems on the first page of her collection. At the same time, she seems to have been in constant contact with the black community. Her most frequent and intimate correspondent was Obour Tanner, a black woman who lived in Worcester, and a few years after she obtained her freedom, she married John Peters, a free black. If not representative of the majority of blacks in New England, her life suggests a widespread familiarity with revolutionary concepts in the black community. So when a certain Felix addressed an antislavery petition to the Massachusetts governor, Thomas Hutchinson, as well as to the Council and the House of Representatives on January 6, 1773, he used appeals to feeling that echoed the mottoes of the Revolution. Speaking in the name of “many Slaves, living in the Town of Boston, and other Towns in the Province,”10 he appeals to both his readers’ familial feelings and their belief in the right to property, asking them to understand how “imbittered” slaves are since, “let their Behaviour be what it will, neither they, nor their Children to all Generations, shall ever be able to do, or to possess and enjoy any Thing, no, not even Life itself, but in a manner as the Beasts that perish.” This outburst is a brilliant conflation of feeling for one’s family with the principles of life and property, which he repeats immediately afterward in more dramatic fashion: “We have no Property! We have no Wives! No Children!

Phillis Wheatley, Complete Writings, ed. Vincent Carretta (New York: Penguin, 2001), 39, 40. 10 Felix, “To His Excellency Thomas Hutchinson,” in Race and Revolution, ed. Gary B. Nash (Madison, WI: Madison House, 1990), 171. 9

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We have no City! No Country!” (172). Only a heartless patriot would fail to sympathize with such a plea.11 Felix’s attitude toward the law also seems designed to please men who, for the most part, favored resistance by legal means even as they questioned the law. The 1765 Stamp Act, for example, had led to some rioting and material damage, but simply ignoring it had seemed the best method of response. The Sons of Liberty, associations of citizens that sprang up in the Act’s wake, were still bent on maintaining order. Felix’s petition arrived at a relatively quiet moment before the storm of the Tea Party and the First Continental Congress. In keeping with this respect for the law, Felix first points out that many blacks are “discreet, sober, honest, and industrious.” But his statement about the law that keeps him enslaved is convoluted enough that it implies criticism: “It would be impudent, if not presumptuous in us, to suggest to your Excellency and Honors any Law or Laws proper to be made, in relation to our unhappy State, which, although our greatest Unhappiness, is not our Fault; and this gives us great Encouragement to pray and hope for such Relief as is consistent with your Wisdom, Justice, and Goodness” (172). Surely the petition’s readers must sympathize with that profound feeling of unhappiness, as they know what it is to be crushed by insupportable laws. They must also feel the latent impatience, self-righteousness, and desire for independence that only respect for the legal process is still holding in check. As if to drive all these points home, Felix uses his knowledge of transatlantic developments to remind his audience of their revolutionary ideals. He informs them that God “hath lately put it into the Hearts of Multitudes on both Sides of the Water, to bear our Burthens, some of whom are Men of great Note and Influence” (171). Abolitionists on both sides of the Atlantic were becoming more vocal. Indeed, they had just won a major victory in the 1772 Somerset decision, which by most interpretations made slavery illegal in England. Felix implies that it is time for his readers to look into their “hearts,” and to put into them the same love of liberty that is driving antislavery activists. He may have hoped that they would emulate someone like Granville Sharp, who played an important role in the Somerset trial. To Felix, each American needed individually to undergo an affective transformation that could lead to similar radical changes, and to find inspiration from both sides of the Atlantic. Presumably the same Felix co-signed another petition dated April 20, 1773, this time as Felix Holbrook, in which he and Peter Bestes, Sambo Freeman, and Chester Joie push the notion of rights further. Once again, the demand for equality finds itself anchored in affect, as the petitioners point out that “the divine spirit of freedom, seems to fire every humane breast on this continent.”12 Even if freedom By 1773, not only the House of Representatives but also the Council had become radicalized, and they found themselves increasingly at odds with the governor. See Francis G. Walett, “The Massachusetts Council, 1766–1774: The Transformation of a Conservative Institution,” William and Mary Quarterly 6, no. 4 (1949): 605–27. 12 Felix Holbrook et al., “Sir, The efforts,” in Nash, Race and Revolution, 173–74. 11

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is objectively a human right, they present it as a divine form of inspiration that engenders a strongly personal emotional engagement. Thus fired up, the reader should be open to the petitioners’ special plea: that they be allowed their own time to work for themselves so that they can purchase their freedom. Even the Spaniards allow this, they point out, again showing their knowledge of practices in the Atlantic world, even though they “have not those sublime ideas of freedom that English men have.” In fact, slaves should be given compensation, and “demand all that of right belongs to us for past services.” But in a grand gesture of solidarity with their masters, the petitioners declare that they will not claim reparations, perhaps hoping that they are helping to generate a natural cycle of sympathy. Twice they call their own situation “deplorable,” while also asserting that they are asking for relief “which, as men, we have a natural right to” (173). Even if this is a group petition, its appeal is grounded in feeling for the individual: the reader can project himself into each individual life, and connect it to his own liberal political convictions. Affect serves the cause of personal freedom, and helps to feed the Revolution. Three more New England slave petitions from the 1770s keep resorting to liberal vocabulary, even if the variations that occur as the decade unfolds reveal a decreasing reliance on sentiment and an increase in appeals to sheer principle. The petition “To His Excellency Thomas Gage,” submitted on May 25, 1774, calls up heartbreaking scenes of familial separation, as the authors remind their audience that they were “unjustly dragged by the cruel hand of power from our dearest frinds and sum of us stolen from the bosoms of our tender Parents.”13 But when they describe their current family situation, they turn to the notion of duty. As slaves, they cannot “perform the duties of a husband to a wife or parent to his child.” “How can the wife submit themselves to there husbands in all things,” they ask, and “how can the child obey thear parents in all things?” In this, they ask less for sympathy than for an understanding that blacks are not only deprived of freedom, but are also prevented from performing the essential tasks of what they consider to be an orderly society. Since the passage echoes Paul’s epistle to the Colossians, the authors also insert themselves into a Christian order. The bonds of familial affection are now seen as conduits toward the creation of good Christian citizens. Still, citizenship is mostly confined to the private domestic sphere. On January 13, 1777, Prince Hall and seven other men submitted an antislavery petition to the Massachusetts legislature in which all affect seems channeled into “the tender feelings of humanity,” as if they wished to draw all the reader’s emotional energy toward the idea of a shared human core.14 Some passages of 13 “To His Excellency Thomas Gage,” in A Documentary History of the Negro People in the United States, ed. Herbert Aptheker, 3 vols. (New York: Citadel Press, 1951–79), 1:9. 14 “To the Honorable Counsel,” in Aptheker, Documentary History of the Negro People, 10. Aptheker does not mention the authors, but Charles H. Wesley does, in Prince Hall: Life and Legacy (Washington, DC: United Supreme Council Southern Jurisdiction, 1983), 64.

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this petition are strikingly similar to the previous one, so I assume the first must have served as a template. Still, there are some interesting additions and omissions that show a more assertive revolutionary stance, and an awareness of arguments held against Britain. Now equipped with the vocabulary of the Declaration of Independence, the authors assert that their right to freedom is not only natural but “Unaliable,” and it is one that “the Grat Parent of the Unavers hath Bestowed equalley on all menkind.” They even seem to try to emulate its philosophical reach by stating that a life of slavery “is far worse then Nonexistence.” Finally, they point out that “Every Principle from which Amarica has Acted in the Cours of their unhappy Dificultes with Great Briton Pleads Stronger than A thousand arguments in favours of your petioners” (10). It is now time, they imply, to realize that “feelings of humanity” must systematically lead to principled action. A May 1779 petition signed by “prime a Negro man” and “Prince a Negro man” on behalf of themselves and other petitioners, and addressed to the Connecticut legislature, is almost devoid of emotional appeal, as the authors choose to argue from revolutionary principle.15 They refer to the “Sense and Practice of civilized Nations,” and to the American War of Independence, which “excites the Admiration, and Reverence, of all the great Empires of the World,” placing their own plight in a clear international context and making their statement of equality truly universal. They assert that “we are endowed with the same Faculties with our masters,” and that nothing leads them to believe that “we are any more obliged to serve them, than they us.” They promise not to use “violent measures,” but the whole document has an urgency of tone that is new. The petitioners still rely on liberal individualism, but they speak as one rational being to another. It seems as if the appeal to individual sentiment has reached its limits, and the petitioners know it.16 One needs to keep in mind that appeals to the principles of liberty did not necessarily mean that blacks were patriots. As Benjamin Quarles points out, “the Negro’s role in the Revolution can best be understood by realizing that his major loyalty was not to a place nor to a people, but to a principle. Insofar as he had freedom of choice, he was likely to join the side that made him the quickest and best offer in terms of those ‘unalienable rights’ of which Mr. Jefferson had spoken.”17 Hence the petitions discussed here are only one segment—albeit a 15 Prime et al., “To the Honbl. General Assembly of the State of Connecticut,” in Aptheker, Documentary History of the Negro People, 10–12. 16 For more examples of 1770s and early 1780s petitions from Connecticut, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania that invoke revolutionary ideals, see Sidney Kaplan and Emma Nogrady Kaplan, The Black Presence in the Era of the American Revolution, 1770–1800, rev. ed. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989), 28–31; and John Saillant, “Aspirant Citizenship” in Beyond Douglass: New Perspectives on Early AfricanAmerican Literature, ed. Michael J. Drexler and Ed White (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2008), 129. 17 Benjamin Quarles, The Negro in the American Revolution (New York: Norton, 1961), vii.

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majority—of the black population. It is well known that thousands of blacks fled behind British lines wherever the British were offering them freedom in exchange for their loyalty. Aware of the predominant anti-British fervor, some petitioners did manipulate their readers’ patriotic feelings. The “memorial of Great Prince, Little Prince, Luke, Caesar, and Prue and her three children—all friends to America, but slaves,”18 which is dated “Lyme, Election day, 1779,” is the first petition to refer specifically to divisions among Americans. It states that “their late master was a Tory, and fled from his native country to his master, King George. . . . That your memorialists, though they have flat noses, crooked shins, and other queerness of make, peculiar to Africans, are yet of the human race, free-born in our own country, taken from thence by man-stealers, and sold in this country as cattle in the market, without the least act of our own to forfeit liberty; but we hope our good mistress, the free State of Connecticut, engaged in a war with tyranny, will not sell good honest Whigs and friends of the freedom and independence of America, as we are, to raise cash to support the war; because the Whigs ought to be free; and the Tories should be sold” (27–28). Presenting themselves as political allies, the petitioners clearly attempt to stir patriotic emotions by appealing to their readers’ allegiance to their state and to their country. Ultimately, though, it is hard not to hear a certain declaration of independence vis-à-vis both sides of the conflict, and an implicit statement that what matters above all is the principle of individual freedom. Anti-Tory appeals clearly had a better chance of success, as is shown in the case of a February 14, 1783, petition against a loyalist by a woman named Belinda, which takes full advantage of the new liberal philosophy, including its Lockean approach to labor. Here again, the appeal to feeling is strongly individualized. Belinda describes a happy childhood in Africa, surrounded by loving parents and beautiful nature. But she already knew about cruel white men, and “the idea of these, the most dreadful of all enemies, filled her infant slumbers with horror.” She makes the reader sympathize with “her affrighted imagination,” as well as with “the tears, the sighs, the supplications, bursting from the tortured parental affection” on the day when she was kidnapped.19 She describes her affliction during the Middle Passage, and her horrified discovery on reaching new land that she was to be a slave. Interestingly, her first criticism of the institution of slavery is that “the laws rendered her incapable of receiving property.” And now, after fifty years of loyal service for Isaac Royall, a wealthy loyalist who fled to England pursued by men “armed in the cause of freedom,” she finds herself “denied the enjoyment Quoted in Kaplan, Black Presence in the Era of the American Revolution, 27. Belinda, “Petition of an African Slave,” in Unchained Voices: An Anthology

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of Black Authors in the English-Speaking World of the Eighteenth Century, ed. Vincent Carretta (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996), 142. Sharon M. Harris points out that this petition is most probably a transcribed oral narrative, and that the transcriber uses “conventional late-eighteenth-century discourse” (178). “Whose Past Is It? Women Writers in Early America” Early American Literature 30, no. 2 (1995): 175–81

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of one morsel of that immense wealth, a part whereof hath been accumulated by her own industry” (143). She humbly asks for an allowance to save her and her daughter from misery. The appeal to feeling in this petition feeds the fullest array of revolutionary ideals pertaining to individual rights we have seen until now. And the members of the Boston legislature were indeed moved, since they decided to allow her fifteen pounds a year.20 On January 4, 1787, the Master of the African Lodge Prince Hall put his signature alongside that of 72 other blacks on a petition addressed to the Massachusetts legislature. In the petition the authors identify themselves as a group of people whose “ancestors have been taken from all our dear connections and brought from Africa and out into a state of slavery in this country,” and who still suffer from this history, even if they have “been lately in some measure delivered” from slavery “by the new constitution.”21 In 1783, indeed, a court case had led to the decision that slavery had no place in Massachusetts, since its constitution declared that “all men are born free and equal, and have certain natural, essential, and unalienable rights,” one of which was the right to liberty. But even though this constitution, masterfully written by John Adams, was more radically liberal than the future federal one would be, it did not promote the justice and equality that the black community expected. The appeal to sympathy in the description of their kidnapping from Africa now serves a new purpose. In the second half of the petition, the authors express their desire to “return to Africa our native country, which warm climate is much more natural and agreeable to us; and where we shall live among our equals and be more comfortable and happy than we can be in our present situation” (66–68). They hope that those who settled there would “form themselves into a civil society, united by a political constitution” as well as into “a religious society or christian church” (68). Hall’s signature on the document, as well as the signatures of other members of the African lodge, lead us to believe that the black Freemasons had become partisans of the incipient movement for emigration to Africa. The April 20, 1773, petition discussed above had already mentioned the desire to “transport ourselves to some part of the Coast of Africa, where we propose a settlement” (174). About a month before Prince Hall’s petition was submitted, a group of about 400 people, most of them black, had boarded a ship in England on their way to create a settlement in Sierra Leone. Ironically, the petition seems to capture a moment when Prince Hall, who had ardently supported the American Revolution and had most likely fought during the war, found common ground with the black loyalists who had left the country at the end of the war and joined the ranks of the London black poor. The See Vincent Carretta, ed., Unchained Voices: An Anthology of Black Authors in the English-Speaking World of the Eighteenth Century (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996), 144. 21 Quoted in Charles H. Wesley, Prince Hall: Life and Legacy (Washington, DC: United Supreme Council Southern Jurisdiction, 1983), 66. 20

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petitioners hope to elicit sympathy—and financial support—from the members of the legislature, less as individuals than as a newfound community with similar interests. The belief in a shared susceptibility to climate makes it clear that their bond was also racial. This new kind of petition indicates that black social and political thinking was changing in the 1780s, and that black solidarity and black community were becoming important sources of strength and hope. This phenomenon took place all over the country, but especially in the North, where free blacks started building institutions such as churches, schools, and benevolent societies.22 By 1787, Newport’s African Union Society had been in existence for several years. Philadelphia’s Free African Society was set up that very year. In April 1782, six Philadelphia free blacks wrote a petition to the state government, asking to have fenced in the black section of the burying ground to which they had been relegated (called Potters’ Field or Strangers’ Burial Ground). As Gary Nash points out, this seemingly simple request shows “signs of a rising consciousness among recent freedpersons that they were a distinct people who must work collectively to secure a place of dignity and security in white American society”23 The Boston black Freemasons had been developing this kind of consciousness for at least a decade. Already in 1775, Prince Hall and 14 other blacks had approached the British regiment stationed in the city, and on March 6 they were initiated as masons into an Irish military lodge. A year later, Prince Hall organized the first black lodge in America.24 But they became more active in the next decade. They asked for a charter from the Grand Lodge of London, which after some delay finally arrived in 1787. The black masons were also concerned about acquiring a public status and a public voice. On December 27, 1782, they celebrated the feast of St John by parading in the streets, “preceded by a band of music” and “dressed in their aprons and jewels.” When a Boston newspaper described the event rather condescendingly, referring to them as “St. Black’s Lodge,” Prince Hall set the record straight. A few days later, the paper published his reply: with all due respect, “our title is not St. Black’s Lodge,” and all they aspire to is “the true spirit of masonry, which is love of God and universal love to all mankind.” He adds that, “instead of a splendid entertainment, we had an agreeable one in brotherly love.”25 “Brotherly love,” of course, means the love shared by black masons, and Prince Hall seems to imply that, in spite of the fraternity’s universal goals, that is the only kind of love available to them, and they are happy to celebrate it with dignity.

See Robert L. Harris Jr., “Early Black Benevolent Societies, 1780–1830,” Massachusetts Review 20, no. 3 (1979): 603–25. 23 Gary B. Nash, Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community, 1720–1840 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), 94. 24 Harry E. Davis, “Documents Relating to Negro Masonry in America,” Journal of Negro History 21, no. 4 (1936): 412. 25 Quoted in Wesley, Prince Hall, 86. 22

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Considering all these signs of a new black consciousness, the decision to emigrate to Africa does not seem surprising. Several months after the January petition, however, the dream of emigration seemed to have been put aside. On October 17, 1787, a petition addressed to the State Legislature and bearing the name of Prince Hall requested equal rights to education, arguing that “as we are willing to pay our equal part of these burdens, we are of the humble opinion that we have the right to enjoy the privileges of free men.”26 Here we can hear the revolutionary rallying cry of “no taxation without representation,” as well as a hint at a long list of grievances, since “we beg leave to mention one out of many.” At this point, Hall decides to appeal to his reader’s familial feeling, and points out that black children “receive no benefit from the free schools in the town of Boston, which we think is a great grievance, as by woful experience we now feel the want of a common education” (19). He uses affect— invoking feelings of woe—to express his expectation of due access to interracial education. Sentiment now serves the statement of a right to equal education as an essential element in the shaping of all American citizens. Although the ideals of equality are similar to the ones expressed in the January petition, this petition asserts an American national identity, and a right to the privileges of the nation’s expanding community. It is not quite clear why Prince Hall made such a sudden switch from a desire to emigrate to a demand for equal access to education. Possibly the fact that the African Lodge received the long-awaited (and deemed lost) charter from England on April 29 played a significant role. With the precious charter in hand, the lodge had now been granted legitimacy as a fraternal body, and the black Freemasons must have seen in it a new incentive for civic self-assertion. Prince Hall, now Master of African Lodge No. 459, was playing a new role in the community. In a May 17 letter to William White, Grand Secretary of the British Grand Lodge, he promised to “make the constitution my guide.”27 He was referring to the masonic Book of Constitutions, which had been sent together with the charter, but one cannot help seeing a striking coincidence in the fact that that same month, national delegates were convening in Philadelphia to revise the Articles of Confederation, in a process that would lead to the writing of the United States Constitution. He had no way of knowing what the final product would look like, but he was not about to forget that his and his brothers’ access to the rank of Freemasons happened thanks to a British lodge rather than an American one,28 in a perfect example of what Freemasonry was all about. The new, less individualistic sort of argument found in the 1787 petitions naturally springs from the fact that these men were no longer asking for freedom Prince Hall et al., “Negroes Ask for Equal Educational Facilities,” in Aptheker, Documentary History, 19–20. 27 Quoted in Davis, “Negro Masonry in America,” 422. 28 The Americans would contest the legitimacy of the Prince Hall Freemasons for many years to come. 26

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only, but as we will see, it also colors the antislavery petitions written in the last decade of the century. On February 27, 1788, a mass petition under Prince Hall’s leadership was addressed to the Massachusetts legislature protesting the kidnapping and sale into slavery of three free black men.29 This was an all too frequent phenomenon at the time, and many blacks and whites protested this particular case. The petitioners, referring to the men as “our Brethren free citizens of the Town of Boston,” call their treatment “enhuman and cruel,” eliciting sympathy not just for three individuals, but for citizens and members of both the black community and the citizenry of Boston. They recount how the men were invited onto a ship under false pretenses, and the captain put them in irons and took them away, probably for sale on a Caribbean island. “What then,” they ask, “are our lives and liberties worth if they may be taken a way in shuch a cruel & unjust manner as these?” On an individual level, kidnapping highlights the instability of the concept of freedom for anyone who was black. Moreover, the petitioners continue, this has happened to “maney of our free blacks.” The social consequences are clear: “Maney of us who are good seamen” are stuck on land for fear of being kidnapped, and as a result, they “lorter about the streets for want of employ,” whereas, were they protected, they “might get a hanceum livehud for themselves and theres.” The petitioners ask for a legal intervention in order to prevent this stealing of “our Brothers & sisters” (20–21). Clearly the blacks are speaking with one voice here, putting affective pressure on the legislature by emphasizing their bonds of brotherhood.30 They emphasize at the same time how the kidnappings prevent blacks from being productive participants in the life and the economy of the city as a whole. The appeal is not just about individual freedom; it is about protecting a whole community. And this wider meaning was not lost on the petition’s readers, since a month later, on March 26, 1788, the state passed a strict anti-slave-trade law. But if broadening the concept of community through a sentimental appeal to brotherhood—both black and interracial—made the petitions more radical, it also tended to make them less likely to be successful in achieving change for that very reason.31 When a similar case of kidnapping occurred in Philadelphia in 1788, the white Pennsylvania Abolition Society petitioned Governor Thomas Mifflin, telling him that kidnapping a free man was a terrible crime. As a consequence, 29 Prince Hall et al., “Protest against Kidnapping and the Slave Trade,” in Aptheker, Documentary History of the Negro People, 20–21. 30 The signers were all black freemasons, so they were also “brothers” in that sense; interestingly, though, they don’t make that clear in the petition. 31 Even a petition that asked for some changes in court procedures was rejected. On July 1, 1791, three free blacks petitioned the South Carolina legislature on behalf of themselves and fellow free blacks, asking to be allowed to testify against whites, as well as to be judged by jury. Even though they insist on their rights as citizens, they are also careful to point out that they “do not presume to hope that they shall be put on an equal footing with the Free white citizens of the State in general.” Quoted in Herbert Aptheker, “Eighteenth Century Petition of South Carolina Negroes,” Journal of Negro History 31, no. 1 (1946): 99.

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Mifflin wrote to the governor of Virginia, asking for the extradition of the three men who had kidnapped John Davis. When Virginia’s governor refused, Mifflin decided to contact President Washington directly, and when Washington received the documents, he referred the issue to Congress. One might think that this development would have pleased the petitioners, but as Paul Finkelman points out, the law that resulted from this process must have made them bite their fingers. In February 1793, Washington put his signature to the Fugitive Slave Law, a law that can be seen as the result of Southern bullying and Northern apathy—or of what has been called the “federal consensus” on slavery. A slave owner or his agent was free to seize a person he claimed as his slave; the person was then brought before a judge (federal, state, city or town); proof of ownership could be oral; any person hindering this process was liable to be fined $500. Recourse to the law through petition had only revealed the conservative direction the Revolution was taking, and it seemed that any appeal to sentiment based on a sense of community was bound to fail. So there was little hope for the four men mentioned at the beginning of this essay, who petitioned Congress in 1797. Still, they presented a complex petition in which they used appeals to feeling that helped express a wide array of revolutionary ideas, ranging from individual freedom to full insertion in the national community. At the most basic level, the men complain that they have been deprived of their right to liberty. All four of them were emancipated by their masters in North Carolina, and they should remain free, they say, since after all, they have a “native right of freedom.”32 They believe in the power of the law, but not if the law is unjust or fickle. But they also offer a moving image of their communal plight, “several hundreds” of them having “been hunted day and night, like beasts of the forest, by armed men with dogs, and made a prey of as free and lawful plunder” (2016). Their readers should know that blacks have “natural affections” as well as “social and domestic attachments and sensibilities.” They ask for the Congressmen’s “sympathetic attention,” “not only with respect to our personal sufferings, as freemen, but as a class of that people” who are considered “unentitled to that public justice and protection which is the great object of Government” (2017–18). The authors are clearly moving their plight into the realm of the public sphere, insisting that government should actively promote their safety and their survival as a group. Achieving freedom is necessary but not enough; equal protection and insertion into the national community is now the goal. The petitioners also present themselves as hard-working citizens who contribute to the life—and the economy—of the country. Each of them gives a detailed account of his activities after being chased from the state, so we get an image of a black community that lives and identifies itself through work. Jupiter Nicholson worked in Portsmouth “sawing boards and scantling,” and then moved to Philadelphia, where he has been employed “at times, by water, working along Annals of Congress, 2015.

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shore, or sawing wood.” Joe Albert worked in Virginia for four years, “being chiefly engaged in sawing boards and planks,” and he has been living in Philadelphia for two years, working “along shores in vessels and stores, and sawing wood in the Winter” (2016). After being freed in North Carolina, Thomas Pritchet had bought a house, cleared some land, planted it with corn every year, and he was counting on producing thirty bushels the year he was chased away, “but this I was obliged to leave about one month before it was fit for gathering.” We can feel his pain when he describes how he “left my little farm, with my small stock and utensils, and my corn standing,” and escaped (2017). He has now been a waiter for more than two years. While all four emphasize their work ethic, at the same time they intimate that they are dissatisfied with their employment and could do much better if they were truly free. They contrast their own work ethic with the attitude of the violent men who pursue them and who, “induced by the profit afforded them by law, followed this course as a business” (2016). The naked, and in this case violent, pursuit of self-interest, they imply, should matter less, even if officially legal, than principles held dear for the sake of the common good. Ultimately, they also use the language of sentiment to underscore the importance of interracial alliances. They present their masters as “humane and conscientious,” hinting that any natural feeling of humanity should lead to justice (2015). Jacob Nicholson continued to live with his master after he was freed. Joe Albert’s master became his guardian, “providing me with a house to accommodate me and my wife,” and protecting his wife during one vicious assault by the hunters. After Albert was caught, a white man helped him escape from prison. Thomas Pritchet’s master set him free and gave him land. The petitioners even show exceptional sympathy for whites when they declare that “we are far from considering all those who retain slaves as wilful oppressors, being well assured that numbers in the State from whence we are exiles, hold their slaves in bondage, not of choice, but possessing them by inheritance, feel their minds burdened under the slavish restraint of legal impediments to doing that justice which they are convinced is due to fellow-rationals” (2018). Amazingly, the petition turns into a plea for sympathy for whites who live under the slavery of unjust laws. So this petition puts forward an interracial common interest. The petitioners use their appeal to humanity in order to convey the idea to the Congressmen that the whole country is suffering because of “such partial laws in support of habits and customs cruelly oppressive” (2017). They may be referring to the Fugitive Slave Law, the North Carolina law that prevents them from returning to their loved ones, or more broadly, the law of slavery that keeps so many people oppressed. In any case, they make it clear that if the Congress failed to act, the whole nation will turn into North Carolina. They are forcing the Congressmen to think in terms of the national community and what it means to them, and to envision the role of blacks within that community. It is a tall order, but it is the only political vision they think will trigger real change and affect their status as American citizens. The radicalism of the petitioners’ request becomes clear when contrasted with the response the petition received in the House. Although it did spark an unusually

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long discussion, indicating that the issue was of importance, the argument focused solely on the men’s right to petition, depending on the speaker’s interpretation of changing North Carolina laws. North Carolina representative Thomas Blount insisted that the petitioners were legally slaves and so did not have a right to submit a petition to Congress. The petition, according to him, should be tabled immediately. Appeals to sentiment were made by several Northerners, but they were narrowly focused on determining whether the blacks were slaves or free, and implied no reconsideration of the major tenets of the Fugitive Slave Law or of the institution of slavery. Pennsylvania representative Samuel Sitgreaves, for example, hoped that the House would give the petitioners “all the consolation of which their unfortunate case was susceptible,” and that, were that not possible, the refusal would be extended with “all due tenderness” (2020). Even Robert Rutherford, representative from Virginia, referred to the “nicest feelings of the heart” when advocating an investigation into the men’s status. Ironically, the Southerners proved more convincing in their appeal to what they considered plain principle. Virginia representative John Heath considered the issue a state matter that required no federal intervention. James Madison thought the case was a judicial one, and suggested the petitioners address a Court of Appeal in North Carolina. South Carolina representative William Smith declared that if slaves were entitled to petition the House, this tendency would “invite continual applications” (2021), and would make the work of the House impossible. In the end, thirty-three Congressmen voted in favor of receiving the petition, and fifty voted against it. A reconsideration of the national stance on slavery, as the petition implied was necessary, was clearly out of bounds, and appeals to sympathy for individuals were not going to change that. According to Sidney Kaplan, in drafting the document the petitioners probably received help from Absalom Jones.33 So it may be apt that the last petition I will discuss was also penned by Jones, who played an important role in the black community, and whose political ideas parallel what these petitions suggest were the values promoted by black leaders at the time. Jones used liberal revolutionary ideas to defend individual freedom, and he also adhered to a discourse of community in order to strengthen autonomous black institutions. At the same time, just like Prince Hall, he fostered interracial collaboration, and always had an eye on the achievement of an inclusive form of citizenship. Jones played an important role in the promotion of black autonomy and solidarity. A founder and leader of Philadelphia’s Free African Society, he helped initiate the movement toward the creation of a separate black church in that city. He and several colleagues organized themselves in order to collect funds, a difficult task in that many whites were disturbed by the pride and self-confidence implied by such a project. Its goals entailed “black unity in Christian fellowship and the general welfare of the city’s blacks.”34 Certainly, the longing for a black Kaplan, Black Presence in the Era, 267. Nash, Forging Freedom,112.

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church indicated a desire for an intimate realm that would be completely separate from all that whiteness symbolized. The constitution of the new church, approved in 1794, stipulated that only blacks could be elected to a church office apart from that of minister and assistant minister. Jones was approached to be its first minister because of his reputation as a steadfast defender of the black community. This church, the African Episcopal Church, together with the Bethel Methodist Episcopal Church established by Richard Allen that same year, contributed to “the emergence of a black consciousness in Philadelphia” (132). But Philadelphia’s black leaders also strove for interracial collaboration where white good will was present, indicating that their ultimate goal was a heartfelt, fully integrated form of citizenship. When in the late 1780s, white British activist William Thornton stormed into town to advocate emigration, he sparked no interest. According to Gary Nash, free blacks had been receiving “considerable support” (103) from the white Pennsylvania Abolition Society, which had recently reorganized itself and provided hope for an equal, integrated future. Because the society publicized the growing antislavery movement in England, it showed the benefits of transatlantic communication. The African Society also collaborated with the Abolition Society on trying to improve the condition of free blacks. In many ways, the values of both societies shared common ground. When it came to building the first black church in the city, the black leaders solicited funds from blacks and whites, and the breaking of the ground was celebrated at an interracial dinner. When yellow fever struck the city in 1793, many blacks helped to nurse the sick and bury the dead, displaying both their “civic virtue” and their “Christian humanitarianism.”35 Even as it was in the process of forging a black consciousness, the black community aimed for a full insertion into the life of the nation on a broad, communal, interracial basis. So when Jones wrote a petition, co-signed by 73 others, and addressed to Congress on December 30, 1799, his appeals to feeling ran the gamut of political ideas we have seen in the previous petitions. On the one hand, his request to end the kidnapping of free blacks relies on familiar appeals to sympathy for human physical pain and emotional suffering. He deploys the language commonly used at 35 P. 123. Joanna Brooks shows that Jones and Allen’s Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People, During the Late Awful Calamity in Philadelphia is “a document of conscious community formation” (166) that fosters black consciousness. American Lazarus: Religion and the Rise of African-American and Native American Literatures (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). Thomas E. Will focuses on how the 1793 epidemic of yellow fever afforded the leaders of the black community “an opportunity to forge new social bonds between members of their race and the larger community” (558). In Will’s reading of the Narrative, the ministers “assumed the existence of economic man; the individual, they held, was naturally motivated by self-interest. At the same time, Jones and Allen extolled civic virtue, civic involvement, and individual sacrifice for the greater good of the whole community” (561). “Liberalism, Republicanism, and Philadelphia’s Black Elite in the Early Republic; The Social Thought of Absalom Jones and Richard Allen,” Pennsylvania History 69, no. 4 (January 2002): 558–76.

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the time against the slave trade, describing how people are kidnapped and “hurried into places provided for this most horrid traffic, such as dark cellars and garrets,” and how they are “left to deplore the sad separation of the dearest ties in nature, husband from wife, and parents from children.” “Can any commerce,” he asks, “so detestably shock the feeling of man?”36 But this appeal is all the more powerful in that it comes after the first part of the petition, in which Jones makes clear that the petitioners are moved to write, not just because they are “deeply sympathizing” with their “afflicted brethren,” but also because they are “incited by a sense of social duty.” Indeed, they believe that the people they are speaking for are the “objects of your representation in your public councils, in common with ourselves and every other class of citizens within the jurisdiction of the United States.” To them, the current illicit trade is a sign that “this solemn compact is violated” (330). In other words, Jones calls on his readers’ sympathy to argue not just for freedom, but for an equal insertion of blacks into the life of the nation, both as brothers and as citizens. Whether he was inspired by the French revolutionary motto of liberté, égalité, fraternité, or whether he was expressing his complex political position as an African American, he certainly concluded three decades of black petitions in North America with a statement of urgency and determination.37 Petitions were public documents meant to sway political figures, and so there is a danger in reading them as genuine expressions of black political thought. This is all the more the case given that some of these petitions, such as Belinda’s, received help from a white hand. Still, the petitions discussed here give access to the array of political ideas found in the wider black print production, and so they may be seen as reflecting later eighteenth-century black engagement with revolutionary ideology. This engagement is profound, as blacks both borrowed from, and expanded on, major political ideas from the surrounding culture, from the emphasis on individual freedom to a devotion to the common good, often including an awareness of how transatlantic ideas and events helped shape their arguments. Each time, the appeal to sentiment gives a strong indication of how the authors wanted to sway their readers. Interestingly, eliciting sympathy for one person was often more successful than having readers envision broader, more systemic change toward an egalitarian community. This trend may not be surprising, as it has remained a salient characteristic of an American culture still deeply anchored in liberal individualism.

Absalom Jones et al., “To the President, Senate, and House of Representatives,” in Early Negro Writing, 1760–1837, ed. Dorothy Porter (Baltimore: Black Classic Press, 1995), 331. 37 The response to his petition was to be expected; this time, only one congressman voted in favor of considering the petition. 36

PaRT 4 Sentimental Bondage

Chapter 8

The Contradictions of Racialized Sensibility: Gender, Slavery, and the Limits of Sympathy Jamie Rosenthal

Understandings of sexual difference and social articulations of gender roles were crucial to the everyday maintenance of the slave system in the eighteenthcentury Atlantic world. The gendered nature of the political economy of slavery was reflected in the relations of power and sexual divisions of labor in plantation societies. White women occupied complicated positions within these societies. Though their location within the colonizing group afforded them a degree of privilege and power over black slaves, white women were subjected to white patriarchal authority and were assigned those duties considered to fall within the private, domestic sphere, including the care of husbands, children, and the plantation household. Yet despite the ostensibly private nature of women’s roles, the intimate, everyday practices of women had important political and economic effects on plantation society. This essay examines the ways in which white female colonists used the discourse of sensibility to assert female moral authority, while simultaneously reinforcing the subjugation and exploitation of black slaves. The discourse of sensibility was innovative and radical in its capacity to create new forms of community based not on characteristics such as education, rank, or wealth, but on sentimental identification borne out of natural fellow-feeling. As critics such as G. J. Barker-Benfield, Markman Ellis, and Brycchan Carey have noted, the literature of sensibility was closely linked to the rise of humanitarian reform movements during the eighteenth century.1 Sentimental writers used a variety of genres, sentimental tropes, and rhetorical strategies in an “attempt to reformulate social attitudes to inequality through the development of a new humanitarian sensibility.”2 Focusing on the experiences and suffering of a range of marginalized and disenfranchised groups within Britain and its colonies, including children, 1 G. J. Barker-Benfield, The Culture of Sensibility: Sex and Society in EighteenthCentury Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), especially 215; Markman Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); Brycchan Carey, British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility: Writing, Sentiment, and Slavery, 1760–1807 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005). 2 Ellis, Politics of Sensibility, 49.

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the poor, the sick, the insane, prisoners, animals, and slaves, sentimental writers sought to move readers to sympathy and benevolence. Scholarship on the relationship between sensibility and slavery has often focused on the important role of sensibility in the abolition movement, illustrating how antislavery writers elicited the sympathy of the British public through sentimental depictions of black slaves.3 The recent work of Lynn Festa and George Boulukos departs from this view by demonstrating that sentimental rhetoric functions as a way to differentiate among humans as well as to forge social bonds. Festa persuasively argues that sentimentality allowed the British and French to construct “communal identities based on the distinction between the community of feeling subjects and shared, but excluded, sentimental objects.”4 Boulukos shows that the sentimental trope of the grateful slave ultimately served to reinforce notions of racial difference by suggesting that through the benevolent acts of white slave owners, slaves could be taught to embrace their subjection.5 Still, even in these works that note the forms of racial differentiation inherent in sentimental narratives of slavery, there has been little attention given to the ways in which gender structures racial difference and in the process contributes to the economic function of the plantation system. Like Festa and Boulukos, I contend that while the culture and literature of sensibility could create social bonds and foster humanitarian reform, sentimental representations of colonialism and slavery could also mask or reinforce structural inequalities. Yet I further argue that white women’s deployment of sensibility, whether used to exhort the benevolent treatment of slaves or to justify the violence perpetrated against them, was of ideological and practical importance as a tool for managing and disciplining slaves and thereby bolstering the economic growth of plantation societies. As Caribbean Studies scholars such as Hilary Beckles, Evelyn O’Callaghan, and Cecily Jones have shown, white women’s management of the plantation home led to their daily, intimate contact with black slaves, producing new hierarchies in which white women’s agency emerged to enforce new forms of subjection over black and “colored” men and women.6 Confronted with the daily realities and struggles of For a thorough discussion of the relationship between abolitionism and sensibility, see Carey, British Abolitionism. 4 Lynn Festa, Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 11. 5 George Boulukos, The Grateful Slave: The Emergence of Race in EighteenthCentury British and American Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 6 Hilary McD Beckles, Centering Woman: Gender Discourses in Caribbean Slave Society (Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 1999); Evelyn O’Callaghan, Women Writing the West Indies, 1804–1939 (London: Routledge, 2004); Cecily Jones, “‘To Be Free is Very Sweet’: Racialized Representations of Slavery in Maria Nugent’s Journal and Mary Prince’s History,” Sargasso, no. 1 (2005–2006): 69–88. The term “colored” was used to refer to mixed-race people in the eighteenth-century British Caribbean. The term “mulatto” was also sometimes used to denote all mixed-race people, though it most often referred specifically to a person with one white parent and one black parent. 3

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plantation society, including everyday slave resistance and the pervasive threat of slave rebellion, white women used the discourse of sensibility as a strategy for maintaining power and extracting labor from black slaves. To substantiate this argument, I analyze the production of gender and racial power in Janet Schaw’s Journal of a Lady of Quality, an epistolary travel narrative written from 1774 to 1776.7 Schaw’s journal exemplifies the ways in which white women could use sensibility to differentiate between whites and blacks and to delineate proper and effective forms of slave management. I begin by briefly discussing women’s status within British society and the important links between sensibility and gender, then turn to a close reading of Schaw’s Journal. Schaw establishes her moral virtue by expressing sympathy for the suffering of poor Britons, while sorting slaves out of the moral community by depicting them as insensible. This portrayal works to justify the subjugation of slaves, conjoining sensibility to common economic, proslavery discourses regarding the proper treatment of slaves. At the same time, it buttresses a racialist protofeminist response to miscegenation that ultimately grants moral authority to white British and creole women at the expense of black and colored women. Schaw’s journal demonstrates the capacity of sensibility to be used as a tool for both resisting and maintaining social inequalities. By granting white women such as Schaw a new form of agency and authority, the discourse of sensibility enabled them simultaneously to subvert patriarchal ideologies and reinforce the racist ideologies and institutional structures underpinning the exploitation of black slaves. Sensibility and the Moral Authority of British Women The discourse of sensibility held a special significance for British women, who recognized its potential to undermine patriarchal ideologies and promote gender equality. Though women’s access to forms of wealth, mobility, and power differed depending on their class, race, and location, women in Britain were categorically denied full citizenship in their exclusion from education, suffrage, and property ownership. Denied formal education and political rights on the basis of their alleged intellectual inferiority to men—particularly their supposed irrationality— women occupied a second-class status within British society. Gender ideologies such as the cult of domesticity promoted the division of a male public sphere and a female private sphere, encouraging women to remain within the private space of the home and placing primacy on their roles as homemakers, wives, and mothers, while marriage laws, property laws, and land laws maintained women’s legal subordination to men. Janet Schaw, Journal of a Lady of Quality; Being the Narrative of a Journey from Scotland to the West Indies, North Carolina, and Portugal, in the years 1774 to 1776, ed. Evangeline Walker Andrews and Charles McLean Andrews (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1922). 7

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While patriarchal ideologies, institutions, and laws had very real implications for women’s lives in the eighteenth century, women increasingly occupied important roles in British society and in the project of empire. Bourgeois British women were not relegated solely to the domestic realm, but were “enabled to enter a new public world, comprised of those walks, streets, shopping parades, and amusement centers of the ‘urban renaissance’” where they exerted economic agency through various forms of consumption.8 In addition, British women began to write and publish in unprecedented numbers during this period, a fact that Anne Mellor uses to challenge Jürgen Habermas’s conception of an androcentric public sphere.9 British women also played important ideological and practical roles in the projects of empire building and slavery. Arguing against a tradition of early scholarship that portrayed empire, slavery, and abolitionism solely as male enterprises, recent work by historians and literary critics demonstrates the importance of women’s participation in the British imperial enterprise and the development of both pro- and antislavery ideologies and policies. For instance, Hilary Beckles shows that white women participated in the Caribbean slave plantation system as transmitters of proslavery ideologies, as managers of slavebased households, and as economic actors, while Moira Ferguson and Clare Midgley investigate the integral roles played by women in the British antislavery movement.10 These studies provide evidence of the multiple ways in which women challenged patriarchy by exercising new forms of female agency. Sensibility was a highly gendered cultural discourse and was intimately linked to the shifting of gender relations during the eighteenth century. Women’s nerves were considered to be “more delicate and more susceptible than men’s,” resulting in women’s supposedly greater capacity for refined feeling and compassion.11 Markman Ellis contends that sensibility “was a distinctly feminine field of knowledge, which, although available to both men and women, was particularly associated with the behaviour and experience of women and often apostrophized as a feminine figure.”12 The gendering of sensibility worked simultaneously to women’s advantage and disadvantage: British women were held to be more morally virtuous than British men and non-European men and women as a result of their finer sensibilities, but were also considered to be more vulnerable to the dangers of the predatory masculine world and to various disorders, including the

Barker-Benfield, Culture of Sensibility, xxvi. Anne K. Mellor, Mothers of the Nation: Women’s Political Writing in England,

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1780–1830 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 1–3. 10 Beckles, Centering Woman; Moira Ferguson, Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670–1834 (New York: Routledge, 1992); Clare Midgley, Women against Slavery: The British Campaigns, 1780–1870 (London: Routledge, 1992). 11 Barker-Benfield, Culture of Sensibility, xvii. 12 Ellis, Politics of Sensibility, 24.

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corrupting effects of excessive consumption.13 Despite the problematic nature of sensibility, women recognized its potential for realigning gender relations, and emphasized their supposedly finer sensibilities in order to gain a new degree of power and authority within British society and the empire. Texts by white women in Britain and the Caribbean illustrate the complex relationship between gender and race in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. British women’s antislavery writing, as well as their significant participation in the abolition movement, testifies to the fact that white British women’s subjugation to white men enabled many women to sympathize with the suffering of black slaves. British women writers frequently drew parallels between gendered and racial subjugation, portraying white women and black slaves as common victims of white male patriarchy.14 However, the potential alliance between white women and slaves was hindered by the social structure of Caribbean society, in which white women held a position of power over all slaves. As Cecily Jones explains, “in the racially stratified slave societies of the Americas where gender and race functioned as key organizing principles, their social location within the dominant white group afforded all white women, regardless of social class, not only a privileged status, but conferred in their hands the ability to exercise power over all enslaved persons.”15 While white women’s views on race and slavery were certainly not homogeneous, texts by white women in the Caribbean tend to reflect their belief in notions of racial difference and their subscription to proslavery ideologies. These writings illustrate that within the colonial context, white women often drew on the assumptions and ideals of sensibility not to create social bonds, but to establish and maintain racialized power.

Barker-Benfield, Culture of Sensibility, 218–19. See also Kathleen Wilson, “Empire, Gender, and Modernity,” in Gender and Empire, ed. Philippa Levine (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 18. 14 For a discussion of the parallels that Mary Wollstonecraft and other feminist writers draw between gendered and racial subjugation, see Moira Ferguson, Colonialism and Gender Relations from Mary Wollstonecraft to Jamaica Kincaid: East Caribbean Connections (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 8–33. 15 Jones, “Racialized Representations of Slavery,” 74. This was not necessarily true in the early stages of plantation slavery, when poor white women often labored on plantations or in the urban service sector and were held in low regard by bourgeois and elite whites. By the late seventeenth century, however, planters and colonial officials responded to the shortage of white women in the Caribbean and the threat this posed to colonial society by using legislation and social customs to distinguish between white and black women. For instance, by the eighteenth century, Caribbean planters generally did not hire white women as field laborers. Class differences consequently became less significant than racial differences in determining power structures. See Hilary McD Beckles, “White Women and Slavery in the Caribbean,” History Workshop 36, no.1 (1993): 66–82; and Beckles, Centering Woman. 13

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Janet Schaw’s Sentimental Objects: Poor White Emigrants Janet Schaw’s journal demonstrates the ways in which white women could deploy the discourse of sensibility to assert female moral authority, while supporting proslavery ideologies underpinned by notions of racial difference. Schaw, a single, childless woman from an upper-class Scottish family, was unconventional for her time. Although she does not express an explicitly feminist agenda, she challenges dominant gender ideologies by portraying herself as an independent, intelligent, and morally virtuous woman. However, Schaw’s assertions of female agency are not indicative of a wider belief in social and political equality; rather, her claims to female selfhood are predicated on the othering of various “inferior” classes of people, particularly black slaves. Schaw establishes her moral authority by displaying pity and compassion for the British poor, while denying sympathy for black slaves by insisting on their innate difference, especially their tendency to be reactive and their incapacity for prolonged suffering. Schaw traveled to the Caribbean in 1774, where she visited Antigua and St. Kitts, small sugar-producing islands that form part of the chain of Leeward Islands. She was accompanied by her brother Alexander, who had been appointed customs officer at St. Kitts. She then traveled to North Carolina to visit another brother, Robert, who owned a plantation on the Cape Fear. As was the case in all Caribbean colonies at the time, the whites on the islands were greatly outnumbered by black slaves. (The population of Antigua consisted of 2,590 whites and 37,808 blacks in 1774; the population of St. Kitts consisted of 1,900 whites and 23,462 blacks.)16 The Caribbean section of Schaw’s journal contains limited explicit evidence of the political and racial tensions caused by the prerevolutionary events in North America and the various Caribbean slave revolts that culminated in the Haitian Revolution by the end of the century. Even so, her insistence on the absolute difference between feeling whites and unfeeling blacks reveals colonists’ pervasive anxiety about slave rebellion and the survival of British colonial society. Antislavery resistance was endemic to the Atlantic slave system, as the work of C.L.R. James, Eugene Genovese, Hilary Beckles, Saidiya Hartman, and others has demonstrated.17 Slaves engaged in myriad forms of individual and collective Eric Williams, From Columbus to Castro: The History of the Caribbean 1492–1969 (New York: Vintage, 1984), 105. While I wish to emphasize the extremely uneven ratio of black slaves to white colonists in the Caribbean, I would note that racial statistics such as these are often unreliable. Also, these statistics do not take into account intermediate racial designations. 17 C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1989); Eugene Genovese, From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1979); Hilary McD Beckles, Black Rebellion in Barbados: The Struggle Against Slavery, 1627–1838 (Bridgetown: Antilles, 1984); Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). 16

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resistance, included feigned illness, work slowdowns, theft, unlicensed travel, and running away.18 This everyday resistance, as well as the multiple slave revolts that occurred in the colonies, created an atmosphere of insecurity and fear, evidenced by the systematic violence perpetrated against slaves in order to maintain their subjugation. As Hartman notes, the excess of force with which everyday acts of resistance were met “serves to illustrate the terror that is part and parcel of the everyday landscape of slavery” (63). Schaw justifies the brutal treatment of slaves by suggesting that violence is a necessary aspect of the slave system and by disavowing the long-term psychological and physical suffering of slaves. Schaw’s investment in elite white privilege, afforded in large part by the slave plantation system, is evident early in her journal. Several days into the transatlantic voyage from Scotland to the Caribbean, Schaw discovers that she and her family are not alone on the ship when she encounters a crowd of poor Scottish emigrants on deck. Her initial description of the emigrants reveals her class prejudice: “Never did my eyes behold so wretched, so disgusting a sight. They looked like a Cargo of Dean Swift’s Yahoos newly caught” (28). By alluding to Gulliver’s Travels, Schaw locates her journal within the popular genre of travel narratives, thereby positioning herself as the civilized, refined European traveler and the emigrants as the first of various others she will encounter on her journey. While her disgust with the emigrants evidently has to do with their lower-class status, her comparison between the emigrants and Swift’s ape-like Yahoos reveals a slippage between class and racial identities. In Swift’s novel, Gulliver describes the first Yahoo he meets in terms similar to those used in eighteenth-century descriptions of Africans: “the Face of it indeed was flat and broad, the Nose depressed, the Lips large, and the Mouth wide: But these differences are common to all savage Nations.”19 By comparing the emigrants to Yahoos, Schaw simultaneously racializes them by implicitly equating them with African slaves. Schaw’s conflation of the white emigrants with Yahoos and thereby with African slaves seems to result not only from the revulsion she feels at encountering “so disgusting, so wretched a sight” as the crowd of poor, dirty emigrants but also from the fact that their treatment on board the ship is, to some degree, similar to that of slaves. Schaw explains that the emigrants had been “smuggle[d] aboard” the ship and confined “under the hatches” throughout the first few days of the journey. “They were fully as sensible of the motion of the Vessel as we were,” she writes, “and sickness works more ways than one, so that the smell which came from the hole, where they had been confined, was sufficient to raise a plague aboard” (30). Her description of the emigrants’ situation on the ship— their confinement, their sickness, and the horrible smell of the hold—resembles accounts of the Middle Passage. However, the obvious suffering that is suggested by this image of confinement and illness does not elicit Schaw’s sympathy, but her disgust. As Lynn Festa notes, Schaw’s failure to sympathize immediately with the Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 51. Jonathan Swift, Gulliver’s Travels (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 222.

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emigrants illustrates that “suffering by itself is inadequate to arouse emotion.”20 For Schaw, the emigrants’ proximity to African slaves, and thus their difference from her, interferes with the possibility of sympathetic identification. Schaw’s initial revulsion toward the emigrants is transformed into displays of pity and compassion several days later, however, when she witnesses the emigrants’ distress as the ship passes by the island from which they have been exiled. Schaw learns that the emigrants were forced to leave their homes on the Orkney Islands after their rents were raised beyond what they could possibly afford. When describing the scene in which the emigrants view their home for the last time, she replaces her previous language of prejudice with the language of sensibility: “My attention was caught by one of the most affecting scenes that could be presented to a feeling heart, and, I thank God, mine is not composed of very hard materials. It is so warm on my mind that I fear I will not be able to reduce it into order, but if I am able to paint it the least like what I felt it, I am sure you will share my feelings” (33). Significantly, Schaw begins her account by emphasizing her own feelings, rather than the feelings of the emigrants. In Schaw’s retelling of the story, her ability to convey her own emotional response to the emigrants’ suffering and to enable the reader to share her feelings becomes just as important as the emigrants’ plight, if not more so. When Schaw redirects the reader’s attention to the emigrants, she represents them as passive victims. Apostrophizing the Scottish landowner who forced them off their land, she writes, Hard-hearted, little Tyrant of yonder rough domains, could you have remained unmoved, had you beheld the victims of your avarice, as I have done, with souls free from guilt, yet suffering all the pangs of banished villains; oh! had you seen them, their hands clasped in silent and unutterable anguish, their streaming eyes raised to heaven in mute ejaculations, calling down blessings, and pouring the last benedictions of a broken heart on the dear soil that gave them being. (33–34)

Schaw portrays the emigrants, with their hands clasped in anguish and eyes streaming with tears, as innocent victims forced into exile by the selfish, tyrannical greed of the landowner. Her depiction of the emigrants as passive and silent sufferers not only contrasts their innocence with the landowner’s guilt. By emphasizing the emigrants’ powerlessness, Schaw also underscores her own agency, derived in large part from her superior social status. Although Schaw claims to deplore the oppressive treatment of the emigrants, it is paradoxically her (belated) recognition of their suffering that makes them “respectable” in her eyes. She writes, “Where are now the Cargo of Yahoos? they are transformed into a Company of most respectable sufferers, whom it is both my duty and inclination to comfort, and do all in my power to alleviate their misfortunes, which have not sprung from their guilt and folly, but from the guilt and folly of others” (36). Schaw’s claim that it is her “duty” to do “all in [her] power” to help the emigrants again reinforces the notion of their powerlessness. Her Festa, Sentimental Figures of Empire, 175.

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comments exemplify the paternalistic attitude of many bourgeois and elite British women, who were seen to embody “the highest level of civilization” and therefore to have the right and responsibility to assist those peoples they considered socially and culturally inferior.21 It is significant, however, that Schaw’s sympathy for the emigrants only develops as a result of their “transformation.” When Schaw views the emigrants as racialized figures comparable to Yahoos, they do not warrant her compassion, but once they manifest recognizably European affect (by staring longingly at Scotland and mourning over their exile), she is able to feel for them. Once Schaw begins to view the emigrants as objects of sympathy, they no longer appear as a “crowd” of “wretched human beings,” but instead as individual figures, each with his or her own “tale of wo [sic].” Among these, the figure that interests Schaw most is a mother, the embodiment of moral virtue and domesticity: In this general group of Sorrow, there was one figure that more particularly engaged my attention. It was that of a female, who supported with one arm an Infant about a month old, which she suckled at her breast; her head rested on the other, and her hand shaded her face, while the tears that streamed from under it bedewed her breast and the face of the Infant, who was endeavouring to draw a scanty nourishment from it. At her knee hung a little Cherub about two years old, who looked smiling up into her face, as if courting her notice, and endeavoring to draw her from her melancholy Reflexions; while a most beautiful little girl about eight years old stood by, and wept at the sight of her Mother’s tears. (35)

Schaw elicits the sympathy of the reader through the sentimental trope of a virtuous family injured by self-interested greed. Within the literature of sensibility, the family served as the paradigmatic locus of social affections, exemplified here by the mutual love and distress of the emigrant mother and her children. This scene is significant for two reasons. On one hand, Schaw’s depiction of the Scottish emigrant family as tearful, passive sufferers ultimately serves to highlight her own moral authority and agency. On the other, her portrayal of white suffering, represented by the mother and her children, especially the figure of the little Cherub, stands in stark contrast to her later portrayal of a supposedly unfeeling black slave family. Schaw’s account of the emigrants’ suffering demonstrates how sentimental representations ostensibly intended to evoke sympathy can work to reinforce social inequalities. The Plantation Economy and the Limits of Sensibility’s Moral Community Despite Schaw’s emphasis on feeling and benevolence in her discussions of the white emigrants, her expressions of sympathy and compassion do not extend uniformly to black slaves. Rather, Schaw circumscribes the humanity of slaves by insisting on their limited sentience. The importance of feeling in Schaw’s distinction between whites and blacks illustrates the collusion of the discourse of sensibility with eighteenth-century discourses of racial difference. The theory Wilson, “Empire, Gender, and Modernity,” 21.

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of innate racial difference emerged in contrast to the theory of environmentalism, which held that physical and cultural characteristics are shaped by climate and other environmental factors. Some of the most extreme proponents of the theory of innate racial difference were also polygenists, asserting that whites and blacks belong to different species. In The History of Jamaica, for example, the Jamaican planter and historian Edward Long recites the popular myth of miscegenation between male apes and African women to argue that blacks are closer in nature to apes than to European humans.22 Drawing on the discourse of innate racial difference, Schaw portrays blacks as reactive, incapable of long-term reflection, and impervious to psychological suffering in order to support divergent arguments regarding the nature and management of slaves. She initially advances arguments in favor of ameliorative reforms of slavery, suggesting that kind and compassionate treatment of slaves will result in their devotion and willingness to labor productively; however, she later justifies the systematic violence perpetrated against slaves by portraying them as insensible. She also condemns miscegenation, which threatens the stability of the slave plantation system by blurring the distinction between whites, whom she includes within the moral community of feeling humans, and blacks, whom she excludes from that community. Though Schaw’s arguments may appear contradictory, both arguments ultimately work to justify the subjugation and exploitation of black slaves by suggesting that blacks, unlike whites, are particularly suited for slavery. Even when Schaw displays sympathy for slaves, her sentimental expressions are undermined by her apparent self-interest, as evidenced by her brief mention of a slave being transported on board the ship. Before the ship leaves the coast of Scotland, Schaw is warned by her brother Alexander that she may hear screaming because the ship owner’s slave Ovid is being brought on board and put in irons. She writes: We desired to know what crime the poor wretch had committed to deserve so hard a sentence. He replied, he knew of none. . . . my brother left us, and went on Deck to mitigate, if possible, the rigours intended against this unfortunate creature, and we lay trembling in fearful expectation of the event, but happily for our feelings, poor Ovid finding himself overpowered by numbers, submitted without resistance. (22–23)

Schaw’s concern regarding the circumstances of the “unfortunate creature” seems intended to indicate her sympathy for him. Her sympathy is called into question, however, by the pleasure she feels upon learning that he submitted to his confinement “without resistance.” Schaw’s relief over Ovid’s failure to resist his subjugation suggests that her initial concern was due not to his oppressive treatment and suffering, but rather to the possibility of his rebellion. Edward Long, The History of Jamaica, vol. 2 (London, 1774). For a discussion of Long in relation to theories and myths regarding racial difference, see Laura Brown, Fables of Modernity: Literature and Culture in the English Eighteenth Century (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 239. 22

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In the Caribbean and North Carolina sections of Schaw’s journal, her economic interests become more clearly articulated as she deploys sensibility to support various arguments regarding the management of slaves. While she at times acknowledges the humanity of black slaves, she differentiates them from whites by characterizing them as reactive and incapable of extended reflection and suffering. The first slaves that Schaw encounters in Antigua are those of Colonel Samuel Martin, a leading planter on the island, whom she refers to as “the loved and revered father of Antigua” (103). She presents the slaves “through the lens of a benevolent paternalism,” asserting that they are well cared for, happy, and healthy.23 Martin’s estates, she writes, “are cultivated to the height by a large troop of healthy Negroes, who cheerfully perform the labor imposed on them by a kind and beneficent Master, not a harsh and unreasonable Tyrant. Well fed, well supported, they appear the subjects of a good prince, not the slaves of a planter. The effect of this kindness is a daily increase of riches by the slaves born to him on his own plantation” (104). Schaw’s depiction of devoted slaves cheerfully serving their benevolent master exemplifies the popular sentimental trope of the grateful slave. George Boulukos contends that representations of grateful slaves begin by recognizing slaves’ humanity through an acknowledgment of their capacity for suffering, only later to assert their difference from and inferiority to whites by portraying them as “so overwhelmed by passionate, irrational gratitude that they enthusiastically accept their state of slavery.”24 Schaw’s use of the grateful slave trope justifies slavery by suggesting that blacks willingly choose their subjugation. By representing Colonel Martin’s slaves as “subjects of a good prince,” she imagines slavery as a consensual system of mutual exchange, thus obscuring the forms of domination and exploitation that characterize the transatlantic slave system. Schaw’s account of Colonel Martin’s slaves clearly illustrates the relationship between sensibility and the economics of slavery. Through kind treatment, she explains, Martin has gained the loyalty and submission of his slaves, who are willing to serve him even without the formal constraints of slavery. According to Schaw, Martin has freed his household slaves, believing that “no slave can render that acceptable Service he wishes from those immediately about himself,” and “the alacrity with which they serve him, and the love they bear him, shew he is not wrong” (104–5). She implies that by implementing ameliorative reforms, slave owners can induce productive slave labor and prevent rebellion.25 Schaw’s Elizabeth Bohls, “The Aesthetics of Colonialism: Janet Schaw in the West Indies, 1774–1775,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 27, no. 3 (1994): 376. 24 Boulukos, Grateful Slave, 4. 25 Samuel Martin himself seems to have endorsed this view. Significantly, Martin’s father, Major Samuel Martin, was killed by his slaves on December 27, 1701, during one of the first recorded slave rebellions in Antigua. Though the official report of the incident does not state why Martin’s slaves rebelled, the archival record suggests that the slaves were most likely provoked by poor treatment. See David Barry Gaspar, Bondmen and Rebels: A Study of Master-Slave Relations in Antigua (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985), 185–88. 23

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sentimental account obfuscates the oppression, coercion, and exploitation inherent in even the most seemingly benevolent relationship between master and slave. By emphasizing the love, gratitude, and loyalty that Martin’s slaves and ex-slaves supposedly feel toward him and downplaying the degree to which their “freedom” to act in accordance with their own desires is constrained by the social and legal structures of plantation society, Schaw naturalizes black subjection and servitude. Schaw’s representation of Colonel Martin as a benevolent prince rather than a cruel tyrant can also be understood in relation to her loyalist views. During her visit to North Carolina, Schaw expresses a strong disapproval of the American rebels, depicting them as traitors who corrupt their fellow colonists with false statements about the “implacable cruelty of the king of Great Britain” (198). Her loyalist politics color her views on slavery: portraying the Caribbean plantation as a microcosm of society, she suggests that slaves owe obedience to their rightful masters just as British subjects owe obedience to their monarch. Claiming that the revolutionaries are attempting to frighten colonists into supporting their cause by spreading false rumors about a royal proclamation, Schaw states, “The King’s proclamation they never saw; but are told it was ordering the tories to murder the whigs, and promising every Negro that would murder his Master and family that he should have his Master’s plantation. This last Artifice they may pay for, as the Negroes have got it amongst them and believe it to be true. Tis ten to one they may try the experiment, and in that case friends and foes will be all one” (199). Schaw stresses the danger posed by the political divisions among whites in North Carolina, which provide an opportunity for slaves to revolt. Denouncing the American rebels for using the threat of slave rebellion to gain support for their cause, she insists that in the case of an insurrection, revolutionaries and loyalists will all appear alike in the eyes of black slaves. Throughout her journal, Schaw uses a variety of rhetorical strategies to distinguish between whites and blacks and to legitimize the brutality of the slave system. While her depiction of Colonel Martin’s slaves attributes humanity to blacks by acknowledging their capacity to reason and to feel, at other moments she distinguishes blacks from whites by associating them with nonhuman animals. Upon first encountering black children in Antigua, she writes, “Just as we got into the lane, a number of pigs run out at a door, and after them a parcel of monkeys. This not a little surprized me, but I found what I took for monkeys were negro children, naked as they were born” (78). By ostensibly mistaking black children for monkeys, Schaw momentarily expels blacks from the category of the human. Though she corrects her mistake, her initial misrecognition of the black children and the casual manner in which she relates the story work to reinscribe notions of black alterity promoted by the racist theories and anecdotes of proslavery writers such as Edward Long. Schaw differentiates blacks from whites not only by emphasizing their physical differences, but also by depicting them as insensible. While sensibility’s emphasis on feeling could foster the benevolent treatment of slaves, it could also be used for the contrary purpose of justifying the violence of the slave system. Just as

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slaves’ supposed incapacity for extended reflection and reasoning facilitates their gratitude for the benevolent acts of their masters and their acceptance of slavery, according to Schaw, it also diminishes the impact of physical violence. In a key passage, she writes, Every ten Negroes have a driver, who walks behind them, holding in his hand a short whip and a long one. You will too easily guess the use of these weapons; a circumstance of all others the most horrid. They are naked, male and female, down to the girdle, and you constantly observe where the application has been made. But however dreadful this must appear to a humane European, I will do the creoles the justice to say, they would be as averse to it as we are, could it be avoided, which has often been tried to no purpose. When one comes to be better acquainted with the nature of the Negroes, the horrour of it must wear off. It is the suffering of the human mind that constitutes the greatest misery of punishment, but with them it is merely corporeal. As to the brutes it inflicts no wound on their mind, whose Natures seem made to bear it, and whose sufferings are not attended with shame or pain beyond the present moment. (127)

Schaw seeks here to justify the violent treatment of slaves in several ways. First, she insists on violence as a crucial form of social control for the functioning of the slave plantation system. Though she avoids any explicit mention of slave resistance, her comment that slaves do not think or feel “beyond the present moment” alludes to their unpredictability, and thus the threat of their rebellion. Throughout her narrative, she uses the discourse of sensibility to negotiate between the anxieties over slave insurrection that pervade Atlantic plantation societies and the moral civilizing upheld as the justification for British imperialism. At the same time, she attempts to diminish the horror of this violence by portraying blacks as “brutes” impervious to psychological suffering. By insisting on the slaves’ diminished capacity for suffering, Schaw uses the notion of innate racial difference to separate African slaves from the sentimentalized objects of sympathy—namely, the British poor. Schaw can only show sympathy for “slaves” when they are removed from any association with blackness and racialized as white. Finally, by defending the “horrid” actions of creole slave owners, she implicitly constructs a moral hierarchy in which the “humane Europeans” are superior to the white creoles, and both groups are superior to the animalized slaves. As further evidence of the supposed insensibility of black slaves, Schaw insists on their disregard for familial attachments. After observing a slave family being sold at the market, she writes, “The husband was to be divided from the wife, the infant from the mother; but the most perfect indifference ran thro’ the whole. They were laughing and jumping, making faces at each other, and not caring a single farthing for their fate” (128). By representing the slave family as indifferent to their impending separation, Schaw defends slavery against the charges of abolitionists, who pointed to the fracturing of African families as one of the main evils of the slave system. As Kathleen Wilson notes, British women involved in the antislavery cause “brought their supposed feminine compassion

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and sympathy to bear on the sexual exploitation of black women and the breakup of families slavery enjoined.”26 In contrast, proslavery writers portrayed black women as unfeminine, immoral, and devoid of familial bonds. Beckles observes that the black woman was “ideologically constructed as essentially ‘non-feminine’ in so far as primacy was placed upon her alleged muscular capabilities, physical strength, aggressive carriage, and sturdiness.”27 At the same time, black and colored women were portrayed as inherently promiscuous, a characteristic that supposedly contributed to the instability of slave families. Slaves, especially female slaves, were also accused of being indifferent and even cruel toward their children. Although planters’ poor treatment of slave women suggests that they believed it was cheaper to purchase new slaves than to support their natural reproduction, they instead blamed the natural decrease of the slave population on slave women’s supposed disregard for motherhood and domesticity.28 Schaw’s representation of the slave family at the market supports such views regarding slaves’ lack of familial bonds. Her contrasting representation of the white emigrant family and the black slave family again reinforces the distinction between whites, who belong to the community of feeling human beings, and blacks, who fall outside of that community. Schaw’s need to distinguish between feeling whites and unfeeling blacks leads to her condemnation of the widespread miscegenation occurring in the Caribbean. While she speaks highly of the white creole men overall, she denounces their sexual relationships with black women: They are mortals, and as such must have their share of failings, the most conspicuous of which is, the indulgence they give themselves in their licentious and even unnatural amours, which appears too plainly from the crouds of Mullatoes, which you meet in the streets, houses and indeed every where; a crime that seems to have gained sanction from custom, tho’ attended with the greatest inconveniences not only to Individuals, but to the publick in general. The young black wenches lay themselves out for white lovers, in which they are but too successful. (112)

Schaw views miscegenation as “unnatural” because it defies her belief in innate racial difference, blurring the racial and social boundaries on which the slave plantation system depends. She also sees it as interfering with the economic functioning of the plantation system by producing a population of mixed-race slaves unfit for hard labor. Pro- and antislavery writers expressed concern about the common practice of miscegenation between white men and black and colored women in the Caribbean. While the prevalence of miscegenation is understood partially as a consequence Wilson, “Empire, Gender, and Modernity,” 21. Beckles, Centering Woman, 10. 28 Ibid, 11. See also Henrice Altink, Representations of Slave Women in Discourses on 26 27

Slavery and Abolition, 1780–1838 (New York: Routledge, 2007), 11–20.

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of the scarcity of white women in the Caribbean colonies, various contemporary accounts suggest that white men in fact often chose black and colored women over white women. Barbara Bush notes that moral critics “decried the fact that white men appeared content with negro or mulatto mistresses, producing a ‘spurious race of children.’”29 Edward Long, for example, argued that in Jamaica, “a place where, by custom, so little restraint is laid on the passions, the Europeans, who at home have always been used to greater purity and strictness of manners, are too easily led aside to give a loose to every kind of sensual delight: on this account some black or yellow quasheba is fought for, by whom a tawny breed is produced.”30 The anxiety over miscegenation was caused not only by the fact that it increased the mixed-race population, but also by the fact that white men often rewarded their black and colored concubines for their loyalty by bequeathing property and wealth to them or manumitting them and their offspring.31 Though Schaw condemns the immoral behavior of white creole men, she ultimately lays the blame for miscegenation on black women by portraying them as cunning seductresses. The figure of the scheming black Jezebel who uses her sexual powers to acquire favors from white men is common within proslavery texts.32 Representation of black women’s sexuality as morally debased justified the sexual exploitation of black women by white men. As Evelyn O’Callaghan explains, “White women were supposedly completely fulfilled in nurturing domesticity and motherhood, and so refined that sexuality was repulsive; black women, who supposedly thought of little else, were by default ‘fallen’ temptresses and therefore subject to institutionalized rape.”33 Schaw’s claim that black women seduce white men once again removes the possibility of sympathy for blacks by denying the sexual violation of slave women by white men. While Schaw’s critical depiction of white men’s sexual relations with black women is consistent with other accounts of the period, her positive portrayal of white creole women challenges the popular trope of the degenerate creole woman. The social hierarchy in the Caribbean was delineated primarily on the basis of race, with sharp divisions between whites, mixed-race people, and blacks; within this system, however, the power structure was further complicated by the distinctions drawn between white Europeans and white creoles. As the work of Bush, Beckles, and O’Callaghan has shown, eighteenth-century European writers frequently 29 Barbara Bush, “White ‘Ladies’, Coloured ‘Favourites’ and Black ‘Wenches’: Some Considerations on Sex, Race and Class Factors in Social Relations in White Creole Society in the British Caribbean,” Slavery and Abolition 2, no. 3 (1981): 251. 30 Long, History of Jamaica, 2:328. 31 See Bush, “White ‘Ladies’, Coloured ‘Favourites’ and Black ‘Wenches’,” 253; and Beckles, Centering Woman, 165. 32 For a discussion of miscegenation and representations of black women as scheming temptresses, see Barbara Bush, Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 1650–1838 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 110–18. 33 O’Callaghan, Women Writing the West Indies, 28.

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represent white creoles as culturally and morally degenerate.34 Creole women are represented as being especially vulnerable to the corrupting influences of empire and slavery. While white British women are portrayed as the embodiment of moral and domestic virtue, their counterparts across the Atlantic are seen as “pallid imitations of ‘real’ English ladies: gauche, indolent, extravagant, and prone to display the ‘vulgar manners’ of their black servants.”35 European commentators often describe creole women living in idleness and luxury by mercilessly exploiting the labor of their slaves. The figure of the “cruel white mistress” appears in numerous eighteenth- and nineteenth-century texts, including W. P.’s The Jamaica Lady (1720), Sarah Scott’s The History of Sir George Ellison (1766), and Mary Prince’s The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave (1831). These texts portray white creole women as just as brutal and violent—if not more so—as white men. In her History, Prince recalls the abuses she endured at the hands of one of her mistresses: She taught me to do all sorts of household work; to wash and bake, pick cotton and wool, and wash floors, and cook. And she taught me (how can I ever forget it!) more things than these; she caused me to know the exact differences between the smart of the rope, the cart-whip, and the cow-skin, when applied to my naked body by her own cruel hand. And there was scarcely any punishment more dreadful than the blows I received on my face and head from her hard heavy fist. She was a fearful woman, and a savage mistress to her slaves.36

Prince’s narrative illustrates the corrupting influence of slavery on white women and men alike. Rather than exhibiting proper feminine sensibility, Prince’s mistresses seem to derive pleasure from their ability to exert power over her and other slaves through various forms of violence. Though European observers were sometimes shocked by white creole women’s cruelty toward slaves, their use of violence as a form of social control is consistent with their investment in the social and economic interests of plantation society.37 White women’s cruelty toward female slaves can also be understood as a response to their jealousy of black and colored women, with whom they often had to compete for the attention and resources of white men.38 Commentators not only portray creole women as morally depraved, but also claim that their intimate associations with domestic slaves leads to their cultural 34 Bush, “White ‘Ladies’, Coloured ‘Favourites’ and Black ‘Wenches’,” 254–56; Beckles, “White Women and Slavery in the Caribbean,” 76–80; O’Callaghan, Women Writing the West Indies, 26–39. 35 Wilson, “Empire, Gender, and Modernity,” 34. 36 Mary Prince, The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave (London: Penguin, 2000), 14. 37 Beckles, Centering Woman, 66–67. 38 Bush, “White ‘Ladies’, Coloured ‘Favourites’ and Black ‘Wenches’,” 256; Beckles, Centering Woman, 66; and O’Callaghan, Women Writing the West Indies, 30–31.

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degeneracy. Maria Nugent, the wife of a Jamaican governor, consistently portrays creole women as ignorant and silly in her journal. Lamenting their use of the Creole language, she writes, “Many of the ladies, who have not been educated in England, speak a sort of broken English, with an indolent drawling out of their words, that is very tiresome if not disgusting.”39 Edward Long claims that within rural plantation settings, creole women’s social isolation leads them to adopt the African customs and manners of their slaves: “We may see, in some of these places, a very fine young woman awkwardly dangling her arms with the air of a Negroe-servant, lolling almost the whole day upon beds or settees, her head muffed up with two or three handkerchiefs, her dress loose, and without stays. At noon, we find her employed in gobbling pepper-pot, seated on the floor, with her sable hand-maids around her.”40 Claims regarding the degeneracy of white creole women emphasize the dangers of racial and cultural contamination. At the same time, they suggest that creole women’s lack of sensibility, civility, and intelligence makes them especially susceptible to the corrupting effects of slavery. In a clear attempt to counter such negative stereotypes of white creole women, Schaw idealizes them as models of womanhood. She asserts that the women “are in general the most amiable creatures in the world, and either I have been remarkably fortunate in my acquaintance, or they are more than commonly sensible, even those who have never been off the Island are amazingly intelligent and able to converse with you on any subject. They make excellent wives, fond attentive mothers and the best house wives I have ever met with” (113). Unlike white creole men, whose “unnatural” behavior threatens the stability of the white family and thus the British colonial enterprise, the creole women are shown to strictly uphold their duties as virtuous wives and mothers: “The sun appears to affect the sexes very differently. While the men are gay, luxurious and amorous, the women are modest, genteel, reserved and temperate” (113). By insisting on creole women’s combined qualities of sensibility, intelligence, gentility, and domesticity, Schaw vindicates her sex from charges of female ignorance and immorality. Her emphasis on white women’s moral virtue challenges patriarchal gender ideologies, while simultaneously reinforcing notions of racial difference that work to legitimize the economic and sexual exploitation of slaves. Underscoring the complex position of white women in the eighteenth-century Caribbean, Schaw’s journal shows how white women strategically deployed sensibility as a means to assert female agency and maintain a position of power over black slaves. Schaw highlights her moral authority by expressing sympathy for those oppressed by class inequalities, but denies sympathy to those oppressed on the basis of race. Drawing on the contemporaneous discourses of sensibility and innate racial difference, she portrays blacks as insensible, and thus unable to become objects of sympathy. Schaw’s narrative demonstrates the important role 39 Maria Nugent, Lady Nugent’s Journal of Her Residence in Jamaica from 1801 to 1805, ed. Philip Wright (Kingston: University of West Indies Press, 2002), 98. 40 Long, History of Jamaica, 2:279.

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that sensibility played in the struggles over gender, class, and race relations in the eighteenth century. Despite its potential for creating social bonds that transcend boundaries of gender, class, race, and nationality, sensibility could also buttress divisions and inequalities. Within Caribbean plantation societies, where the contest for power was played out on a daily basis, sensibility became a powerful tool for white women simultaneously to resist patriarchal authority, justify the violences of slavery, and bolster the economic development of the plantation system.

Chapter 9

The Cruelty of Slavery, The Cruelty of Freedom: Colonization and the Politics of Humaneness in the Early Republic Margaret Abruzzo

In 1808 when the British activist Thomas Clarkson celebrated the recent abolition of the slave trade, he introduced his history with graphic descriptions of slaveholders’ cruelties and slaves’ sufferings. Such accounts were needed “to affect the heart—to arouse our indignation and our pity,” so that readers would properly “value the blessing of abolition.”1 Today, scholars similarly tend to view emotional or graphic invocations of slaves’ suffering as obvious, even natural, rhetorical strategies for fighting slavery.2 As historians have recently rediscovered, Anglo-American ideas about pain shifted dramatically during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Pain had once been seen as a necessary (if unpleasant) part of life, something to be grudgingly accepted. Now, its deliberate infliction inspired Thomas Clarkson, The History of the Rise, Progress, and Accomplishment of the Abolition of the African Slave-Trade by the British Parliament (London: E. Taylor and Co., 1808), 10. 2 James Huston, for example, argues that Northerners’ shock upon seeing slaveholding cruelty for the first time spurred abolitionism. “The Experiential Basis of the Northern Anti-slavery Impulse,” Journal of Southern History 56, no. 4 (1990): 609–40. For the role of cruelty in antislavery, see Karen Halttunen, “Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain in Anglo-American Culture,” American Historical Review 100, no. 2 (1995): 303–34; Elizabeth Clark, “‘The Sacred Rights of the Weak’: Pain, Sympathy, and the Culture of Individual Rights in Antebellum America,” Journal of American History 82, no. 2 (1995): 463–93; Thomas Bender, ed., The Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); John Wood Sweet, Bodies Politic: Negotiating Race in the American North, 1730–1830 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003), 225–67; Henrice Altink, “‘An Outrage on all Decency’: Abolitionist Reactions to Flogging Jamaican Slave Women, 1780–1834,” in Representing the Body of the Slave, ed. Thomas Wiedemann and Jane Gardner (London: Frank Cass, 2002), 107–22; Cynthia Davis, “Speaking the Body’s Pain: Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig,” African American Review 27, no. 3 (1993): 391–404; and Franny Nudelman, “Harriet Jacobs and the Sentimental Politics of Female Suffering,” ELH 59, no. 4 (1992): 939–64. 1

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moral outrage.3 We still have much to learn about the way this moral language worked, especially in the context of the slavery debate. Like Clarkson, we too often assume that growth of humanitarianism translated directly into antislavery sentiment. As Clarkson put it in 1808, “If one, by suffering his heart to become hardened, oppresses a fellow-creature, the tear of sympathy starts up in the eye of another, and the latter instantly feels a desire, involuntarily generated, of flying to his relief.”4 For Clarkson, sympathy flowed directly into antislavery action; the lines of the slavery debate neatly divided the humane from the cruel, the sympathetic from the hard hearted. Yet Clarkson’s confidence that the tears of sympathy would wash away slavery was too sanguine. The rise of humane concern about suffering changed people’s attitudes in many ways, but rarely in a simple or stable fashion. Although humane culture demanded that good people sympathize with suffering victims, the practical outcomes of that sympathy took many shapes in the eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury Anglo-American world. While Clarkson thought that meaning of sympathy was clear, pointing unequivocally to antislavery, humaneness achieved its exalted role not because its meaning was obvious, but precisely because humaneness could mean many different things. To understand the complexity of depictions of suffering and victimhood, we must recognize that appeals to suffering, victimhood, and cruelty both challenged and reinforced slavery.5 James Turner, Reckoning with the Beast: Animals, Pain, and Humanity in the Victorian Mind (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980). 4 Clarkson, History, 4. 5 Although historians stress that slaveholders claimed to be benevolent, historians have paid less analytic attention to the role of new ideas about pain and humaneness in shaping proslavery arguments. Exceptions include Joyce E. Chaplin, “Slavery and the Principle of Humanity: A Modern Idea in the Early Lower South,” Journal of Social History 24, no. 2 (1990): 299–315; Joyce E. Chaplin, An Anxious Pursuit: Agricultural Innovation and Modernity in the Lower South, 1730–1815 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1993); Jeffrey Robert Young, Domesticating Slavery: The Master Class in Georgia and South Carolina, 1670–1837 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999). Most recently, Lacy Ford suggests that paternalism aimed to accommodate new humanitarian ideals, but because Ford views paternalism as an alternative to programs such as colonization, gradualism, or diffusion, he is much less interested in how humanitarianism affected these movements. See Deliver us from Evil: The Slavery Question in the Old South (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009), esp. 144–47. Literary scholars have also begun to challenge the idea that sentimentalism served only antislavery. George Boulukos, a scholar of British literature and contributor to this volume, suggests that early ameliorationists contributed to later proslavery arguments by making slavery less cruel and thus more palatable. See The Grateful Slave: The Emergence of Race in Eighteenth-Century British and American Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), esp. 3–4, 14. Brycchan Carey suggests that eighteenthcentury West Indian defenders of slavery, like their antislavery critics, used sentimental tropes. See British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility: Writing, Sentiment, and Slavery, 1760–1807 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), esp. ch. 4. 3

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In the sentimental discourse of the Early Republic, humanitarian objections to slavery’s cruelty often coexisted and worked in tandem with humanitarian queasiness about—or even hostility to—immediate emancipation. Even as slavery’s critics denounced cruelty and called on Americans to pity sufferers, depictions of suffering also undercut emancipationist programs. In 1773, Patrick Henry could denounce the cruelty of slavery while confessing his own hypocrisy for continuing to own slaves. Americans, he suggested, should push for the abolition of slavery, but if no opportunity arose, he added, “let us transmit to our descendants, together with our slaves, a pity for their unhappy lot, and an abhorrence for slavery. If we cannot reduce this wished-for reformation to practice, let us treat the unhappy victims with lenity.”6 Pity functioned as both a call for and alternative to emancipation. In the longer term, ambivalent depictions of suffering helped legitimize antebellum proslavery arguments that slavery was a humane institution. By the 1830s, slavery’s defenders routinely argued that emancipation, not slavery, was the truest cruelty. Free blacks, not slaves, were the real victims of cruelty; emancipation deprived helpless slaves of slavery’s protections: guarantees of food, clothing, and shelter. Freedom, a slaveholder claimed in 1861, amounted only to the “freedom to starve.”7 Antebellum proslavery arguments for the humaneness of slavery took root in the deeply ambivalent depictions of the suffering of enslaved and free African Americans in the Early Republic. To understand the ambivalent meanings of humaneness, this essay explores Early Republican discussions of slavery, before the slavery debate polarized into a contest over immediate emancipation framed in increasingly sectional terms. Although early reformers criticized slavery in the Southern states, they framed the problem in an Atlantic context. Drawing on eighteenth-century rhetoric denouncing the slave trade, reformers initially focused on the cruelty of the slave trade and, secondarily, the cruelties that the trade had doomed Africans to endure in slavery. Antitrade struggles united reformers on both sides of the Atlantic, who read each others’ pamphlets, shared ideas and information, and borrowed rhetorical strategies. After the constitutional moratorium on banning the African slave trade lapsed, Congress outlawed the trade in 1808 (a year after Parliament abolished the British trade). Yet, American critics of slavery continued to emphasize the slave trade. As activists grappled with the question of American, especially Southern, slavery, they placed the blame on—and saw the solution in—the mass migration of Africans and African Americans across the Atlantic. The colonization movement promised to undo the slave trade by sending former slaves to Africa, whether to the American colony of Liberia or the British colony of Sierra Leone.

Patrick Henry to Robert Pleasants, Jan. 18, 1773, reprinted in The Friend: A Religious and Literary Journal 23, no. 36 (Fifth Month 25, 1850), 287. 7 Maunsel White, Memoranda Book, May 6, 1861, Maunsel White Papers # 2234, fol. 7, Southern Historical Collection, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (hereafter SHC). 6

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These discussions about colonization offer a particularly fruitful way to understand the ambivalent and fluid meanings of humaneness. In the Early Republic, proslavery and antislavery claims about the cruelty of emancipation or the cruelty of slavery had not yet hardened into polar opposites. Although they would later be seen as mutually exclusive arguments, proslavery claims that emancipation was cruel and antislavery claims that slavery was cruel initially worked together. Both took root in Early Republican depictions of African Americans as perpetual victims of cruelty in America, always to suffer either in freedom or in slavery. Many white Americans insisted that slavery was cruel and that immediate emancipation was a cruel solution. The colonization movement even fused these claims together to show that humaneness meant sending blacks out of the country, especially to Africa. The movement operated on the premise that without removal, African Americans would always be victims of cruelty, whether they endured the pains of whippings in slavery or the pains of poverty and prejudice in freedom. Depictions of African Americans as victims served complex and contradictory purposes in the Early Republic. To understand this ambivalence, we must first understand that concern about cruelty paradoxically often took root in selfregarding concerns, rather than concern for the experiences or rights of victims. Early humanitarianism stressed the wrong of inflicting pain, rather than the rights of victims to be free from pain. The indirection of early humanitarianism mattered; it encouraged slavery’s critics to seek solutions that focused on white morality and safety, rather than restoring the rights of blacks. These tensions were magnified in the colonization movement, which drew support from both slaveholders and their critics. Significantly, while some activists identified colonization with “the cause of suffering humanity,” not all appeals to black victimhood aimed at relieving— or even pitying—suffering.8 The importance of cruelty in Early Republican thought about slavery and colonization has been obscured, in part, by scholars’ tendency to identify concern about cruelty with altruism or empathetic concern for the experiences of sufferers. A rhetorical emphasis on cruelty and victimhood should not, however, be confused with altruism or selfless empathy. Self-regarding concerns, as historians rightly note, drove the movement to transport African Americans out of the United States—especially to Africa. Slaveholders were, after all, a substantial constituency in the colonization society, and whites feared that slavery’s cruelty endangered their own safety.9 Yet despite these self-regarding Robert Munford to Richard Smith, Treasurer of the American Colonization Society, November 3, 1826, American Colonization Society Papers (hereafter ACS), Reel 1, Library of Congress. 9 George M. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on AfroAmerican Character and Destiny, 1817–1914 (1971; Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1987), 1–42. My point, however, is not to determine whether colonization destabilized or reinforced slavery; rather, my aim is to show the fluidity of Early Republican conceptions of the moral meaning of cruelty and victimhood. For an analysis of the motives of manumitters, see Eric Burin, Slavery and the Peculiar Solution: A History of the American 8

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motives, the rhetorical stress on white cruelty and black suffering mattered a great deal. Images of black suffering convinced whites that their own safety was imperiled by the cruelty and suffering of slavery; blacks’ status as victims made them dangerous. Crucially, it was the ideological flexibility and capaciousness— not the moral purity—of the language of victimhood that made it such an appealing (and ambivalent) language. The Dangers of Cruelty Even as slavery’s critics pitied black suffering, they focused on the moral and spiritual dangers that cruelty posed to whites. Edwards Coles explained that “happiness can never exist in the breast of that individual who lives by the misery and wretchedness of others.”10 One colonizationist musing on “man’s inhumanity to man” reflected that “sin makes (nay rather is) misery.”11 Slavery’s critics used cruelty as a symbol of white moral and spiritual failings; Thomas Clarkson described slave scars as “inhuman marks of passion, despotism, and caprice.”12 The scars of enslaved blacks bore witness, inscribed in flesh, to slaveholders’ moral disorder. The scars embodied slaveholders’ self-inflicted moral wounds and foreshadowed the eternal pain facing tormentors in the afterlife. In 1787, Philadelphian Benjamin Rush recounted a dream about a paradise full of former slaves. They described the horrors of slavery, but the point was not to draw attention to their own pain, which was the “means of our present happiness.”13 Rather, the pain foreshadowed the torments awaiting cruel slaveholders: “For every act of unnecessary severity he inflicts upon his slaves, he shall suffer tenfold in the world to come” (308). One slave warned a former owner: “His soul must be melted with pity, or he can never Colonization Society (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2005); P. J. Staudenraus, The African Colonization Movement 1816–1865 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961); Vivien Elizabeth Sandlund, “‘To Arouse and Awaken the American People’: The Ideas and Strategies of the Gradual Emancipationists, 1800–1850,” (PhD diss, Emory University, 1995); Douglas R. Egerton, “‘Its Origin is Not a Little Curious’: A New Look at the American Colonization Society,” Journal of the Early Republic 5, no. 4 (Winter 1985): 463–80. 10 Scrap, undated, Edward Coles Papers, Box 1, f. 5, Manuscript Collections, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library (hereafter MC–PUL). 11 L. Drury to the American Colonization Society, November 4, 1826, ACS, Reel 1; the quotation “man’s inhumanity…” is from Robert Burns, “Man Was Made to Mourn: A Dirge.” 12 Thomas Clarkson, An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, Particularly the African, Translated from a Latin Dissertation, which was Honoured with the First Prize in the University of Cambridge, for the Year 1785, with Additions (reprint, Philadelphia: Joseph Crukshank, 1786), 99–100. 13 Benjamin Rush, “Paradise of Negro-Slaves.—A Dream,” in Essays, Literary, Moral and Philosophical, 2d ed. (Philadelphia: Thomas and William Bradford, 1806), 306.

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escape the punishment which awaits the hard-hearted” (309). Those who showed no mercy to slaves, Thomas Branagan similarly warned, “will find no mercy.”14 Cruelty also mattered because it undermined the moral standing of an entire culture, not just the morals of the tormentors. As Jonathan Edwards (Jr.) argued in 1791, the “incessant and inhuman cruelties” of the slave trade hardened people’s hearts and depraved their manners. The corruption, he warned, afflicted not only those who tormented captives, but “all who habitually see these cruelties.” Cruelty morally poisoned the entire society that tolerated and thereby sanctioned it.15 Edwards’s fears about the moral poison of observing or perpetrating cruelty resonated widely. Eighteenth-century Americans treated cruelty as morally important because indifference to or delight in the misery of others signified moral and social breakdown. A wish to bring pain to others suggested a deep capacity for malice lurking in the human heart. The desire to cause pain—even to an insect— exposed malevolence at the core of the human heart.16 Fears about the moral dangers of perpetrating or tolerating cruelty took root in the moral philosophy that Americans imported from Scotland in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. When activists called people to sympathize with the sufferings of the enslaved, they invoked the concept of sympathy. As Adam Smith explained in 1759, sympathy was “fellow-feeling with any passion,” a capacity for imaginative projection into the feelings of another.17 Sympathy gave people an interest in the happiness and welfare of others, thereby educating individuals in morality and allowing them to live in a harmonious society. Yet sympathy had its limits. For Smith, observers could share only passions that seemed appropriate to them in a given situation. These limits grounded moral judgment: the inability to share passions that seemed inappropriate, Smith explained, created the sentiment of moral disapproval. But if moral judgment grew out of sympathy, those who suppressed sympathy for sufferers also sabotaged their own morality.18 The specific way that sympathy operated varied among philosophers, but numerous theorists Thomas Branagan, “Buying Stolen Goods Synonymous with Stealing; or, the Immorality of Using the Produce of Slavery Demonstrated,” in The Penitential Tyrant; or, Slave Trader Reformed: A Pathetic Poem, in Four Cantos, 2d. ed. (New York: Samuel Wood, 1807), 227. 15 Jonathan Edwards, The Injustice and Impolicy of the Slave Trade and of the Slavery of the Africans: Illustrated in a Sermon Preached before the Connecticut Society for the Promotion of Freedom, and for the Relief of Persons Unlawfully Holden in Bondage, at their Annual Meeting in New Haven, September 15, 1791, 3d ed. (1791; New Haven, CT: New Haven Anti-Slavery Society, 1833), 6, 9. 16 Turner, Reckoning, 13; see also James Steintrager, Cruel Delight: Enlightenment Culture and the Inhuman (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 37–83. 17 Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. D. D. Raphael and A. L. Macfie (1759; Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1984), 10. 18 David Hume described sympathy as an ineluctable contagion, but he similarly argued that anyone “unaffected with the images of human happiness or misery” would “be equally indifferent to the images of vice and virtue.” An Enquiry Concerning the Principles 14

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gave sympathy a crucial role in morality. The association between sympathy and morality was so strong that John Witherspoon, a Scottish moral philosopher and president of the College of New Jersey (Princeton), explained that sympathy was simply “a new phraseology for the moral sense.”19 Drawing on this widespread conviction that sympathy was a crucial element of both human nature and human morality, critics of slavery attributed great significance to slavery’s cruelty and to how observers responded to cruelty. Cruelty injured the souls of slave owners and unfeeling observers; those who tolerated cruelty could tolerate any immorality. Americans frequently quoted a passage of William Cowper’s poem The Task (1785), in which he described slavery’s cruelty as an assault on sympathetic observers: My ear is pain’d My Soul is sick with ev’ry day’s report Of wrong and outrage with which earth is fill’d There is no flesh in man’s obdurate heart, It does not feel for man. 20

Significantly, rather than directing attention first to the suffering of enslaved blacks, Cowper focused on the pain—or lack of pain—in those learning about or observing cruelty. He contrasted his “sick” soul and “pain’d” ear with the unfeeling hearts of slaveholders and observers. Even when Cowper directly described a whipping, he focused on observers and callous slaveholders; slaveholders inflicted lashes on human beings “that mercy with a bleeding heart / Weeps when she sees inflicted on a beast.” The real blood of slaves gave way rhetorically to mercy’s bleeding heart. Cowper elided slaves’ bodily injuries and observers’ and perpetrators’ moral injuries, and stressed the latter. Cowper joined a host of other critics in denouncing the effects of cruelty on white sensibility, manners, and morals. Reformers called on Britons and Americans to cultivate soft, gentle passions and to moderate their turbulent passions. Cruelty, which was associated with disorderly passions and unfeeling hearts, clashed with this vision. Slavery’s cruelty would harden hearts and, as Alexander McLeod warned New Yorkers, “destroy the finer feelings.” The only acceptable response, he suggested, was to “Weep with those that weep.”21 The slave trade’s cruelty, Anthony Walke, an Episcopal minister in Virginia, argued in 1793, did “the most of Morals, in Hume’s Moral and Political Philosophy, ed. Henry D. Aiken (1751; New York: Hafner, 1948), 217. 19 Anonymous, Lecture Notes from Witherspoon, Moral Philosophy, 1794, p 23, 30, Lecture Notes Collection, Box 59, fol. 9, University Archives, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library. 20 The Poems of William Cowper, ed. John D. Baird and Charles Ryskamp, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 2:139–40, lines 5–9, 23–25. 21 Alexander McLeod, Negro Slavery Unjustifiable: A Discourse (1802; reprint, Glasgow: Stephen Young, 1804), 12, 34. Cf. Romans 12:15.

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cruel Violence” to justice and “the Feelings of Humanity.”22 Walke pitied slaves’ sufferings, but violence to the feelings of humanity eclipsed the violence done to the bodies of slaves. Cruelty not only hardened hearts, but it also poisoned morality. Indifference in the face of suffering signaled deep moral failure, even an incapacity for morality. Moralists warned that children should be forbidden any cruelty—even to the smallest animal or insect—“lest their hearts grow hard and unrelenting, and they learn in time to practice these cruelties on their own kind, and to murder and torture their fellow-mortals.”23 Cruelty rendered the heart insensible to the delicate passions and sentiments crucial for morality. Indifference to suffering and cruelty, slavery’s critics warned, endangered the moral health of the whole nation. Building on the principle that morality demanded sympathy for victims, activists used the languages of sympathy and spectatorship to widen moral responsibility, hinting that passive spectators bore responsibility for the cruelty they observed. In his 1808 history, Thomas Clarkson printed an engraving of implements of the slave trade, including manacles and a thumbscrew, which he had found displayed in a shop window in Liverpool in 1787. This public display suggested not only common usage, but also the public’s implicit moral acceptance.24 Suggestively, Clarkson used “you” in describing the thumbscrew’s use, subtly positioning readers as torturers: “By turning [the key] further you may make the blood start from the ends of them. By taking the key away, as at E, you leave the tortured person in agony” (376). The idea that people bore responsibility for cruelties they only observed or tolerated fostered a more expansive language of moral responsibility. The lines separating spectatorship, toleration, and participation in cruelty could be thin. Throughout Thomas Branagan’s Penitential Tyrant (1807), the Philadelphian positioned himself as a spectator of slavery’s cruelties: “Their wrongs I saw and heard, their mighty woes / I now relate.”25 But Branagan had been no mere spectator; he had worked on a slave ship and as an overseer in Antigua. Yet Branagan placed the burden of his guilt on apathetic observation (see 58–59, 7, 16, 21). Even a rare description of his own cruelty slipped between observation and cruelty: For I myself have oft stood by unmov’d Dead to entreaty I have often prov’d Dead to remorse, I often have stood by, And still as often did the lash apply! (69)

Anthony Walke, “Short Remarks on Slavery, & The Treatment of Negroes” (1793), Miscellany Book, 1791–1805, p. 31, Walke Writings, Filson Historical Society, Louisville, KY (hereafter FHS). 23 Isaac Watts, quoted in Mathew Carey, ed., The School of Wisdom, or, American Monitor, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia, 1803), 68. 24 Clarkson, History, 374–75. 25 Branagan, Penitential Tyrant, 58–59. 22

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In eliding his hard-hearted reaction with cruelty, Branagan deployed a common rhetorical strategy. Activists routinely denounced the slave trader or slaveholder who, “dead to every sensation of pity, regards not the voice of the sufferers”; callous observation and insensitivity to victims’ sufferings were the seeds from which cruelty grew.26 Observers might even become tormentors who could “calmly indulge” in cruelty that previously “made them shudder.”27 The ability to watch calmly as victims writhed in agony also enabled cruelty. Alexander McLeod warned his congregation that, just as butchers and executioners grew hardened to their victims’ pain, slaveholders grew steeled against the sufferings of slaves “under the lash.” Moreover, McLeod warned, “nor is the transition great to become hard-hearted to all men.”28 Slavery, countless activists warned, encouraged “a train of evils too tedious to enumerate.”29 Observing cruelty, likewise, eroded spectators’ moral defenses against sin. William Moore, a Maryland Quaker, worried that repeatedly seeing moral evil and cruelty corrupted spectators. “What we once viewed with disgust and horror,” Moore explained, could soon be viewed “without much emotion if not entire indifference.”30 Francis Hall, a British visitor, similarly explained that shock faded quickly, helping explain “why so much cruelty has been tolerated in the world.”31 Fellow Briton Zachary Macauley argued that distance protected Britons from the hardening effects of cruelty; they were thus in a better position than Americans to judge slavery’s effects.32 Familiarity with slavery, a Philadelphian wrote, “not only softens its horrors, but hides its dangers.”33 Critics even feared slavery’s effects on themselves. In 1819, Edwards Coles of Virginia tried to escape the moral dangers 26 Peter Williams, An Oration on the Abolition of the Slave Trade, Delivered in the African Church, in the City of New-York, January 1, 1808 (New York: Samuel Wood, 1808), 18. 27 Nathaniel S. Prime, The Year of Jubilee; But Not to Africans: A Discourse, Delivered July 4th, 1825, Being the 49th Anniversary of American Independence (Salem, NY: Dodd and Stevenson, 1825), 13. 28 McLeod, Negro Slavery Unjustifiable, 12. 29 Thomas Branagan, Serious Remonstrances, Addressed to the Citizens of the Northern States, and their Representatives (Philadelphia: Thomas T. Stiles, 1805), 32. 30 William W. Moore to Enoch Lewis, 7th mo. 18, 1825, Meeting for Sufferings, Miscellaneous Papers, C3.3, Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, Quaker Collection, Haverford College. 31 Francis Hall, Travels in Canada, and the United States, in 1816 and 1817 (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme & Brown, 1818), 319. 32 [Zachary Macauley], Negro Slavery; Or, a View of Some of the More Prominent Features of that State of Society, as it Exists in the United States of America and in the Colonies of the West Indies, especially in Jamaica (London: Hatchard and Son, 1823), 13. 33 A Philadelphian [Robert Walsh?], Free Remarks on the Spirit of the Federal Constitution, the Practice of the Federal Government, and the Obligations of the Union, Respecting the Exclusion of Slavery from the Territories and News States (Philadelphia: A. Finley, 1819), 99.

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of owning slaves or tolerating his neighbors’ cruelty. Since he could only “feel its [slavery’s] sufferings, without the capacity of relieving it, all that I can do is to preserve my principles, & save my feelings, by flying from the scene of its oppression.” He fled to Illinois.34 Activists found these ideas about moral contamination strategically useful, especially because, as John Riland warned, “evil is contagious.”35 Since cruelty was a moral contagion, one person’s cruelty became everyone’s business. Cruelty, Jonathan Edwards Jr. explained, harmed even those who merely “habitually see these cruelties,” producing widespread moral damage that was “extremely hurtful to the state.”36 Slavery could not simply be an individual choice when it ruined the moral health of the entire nation. Slavery’s cruelty harmed not only victims and tormentors, but poisoned an entire culture that wished to see itself as civilized, virtuous, and humane. Moral contamination threatened not only the souls of whites, but their bodies as well. The spilling of blood by “whips and scourges,” activists warned, “defiles those lands where it is suffered to pass with impunity,” inviting God’s wrath.37 Groaning slaves implored God to punish their oppressors, “for the many injuries we daily inflict.”38 The blood of slaves, Thomas Branagan warned, “cries to heaven for vengeance.”39 Given the prospect of divine judgment, even tolerating cruelty posed terrible risks. Vengeance, many activists warned, would likely take the form of a slave rebellion or race war, ignited by white cruelty. Thomas Jefferson was not alone in his fear God would aid blacks in their fight for liberty.40 Slaveholders, another writer warned, lived “under the constant fear of death.”41 Slavery, critics argued, began a vicious cycle. “The natural Love of Liberty,” Benjamin Rush

Edward Coles to N.B. [Nicholas Biddle?], April 6, 1815, extract, Edward Coles Papers, Box 1, f. 15, MC–PUL. 35 John Riland, Memoirs of a West-India Planter (London: Hamilton, Adams, & Co., 1827), 48. 36 Edwards, Injustice and Impolicy of the Slave Trade, 6, 9. 37 David Barrow, Involuntary, Unmerited, Perpetual, Absolute, Hereditary Slavery Examined; on the Principles of Nature, Reason, Justice, Policy, and Scripture (Lexington, KY: E. & C. Bradford, 1808), 17–18. 38 Humanitas, Reflections on Slavery, with Recent Evidence of its Inhumanity. Occasioned by the Melancholy Death of Romain, a French Negro (Philadelphia: for the author by R. Cochran, 1802), 38. 39 Thomas Branagan, A Preliminary Essay on the Oppression of the Exiled Sons of Africa (Philadelphia: for author by John W. Scott, 1804), 22. 40 Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. by William Peden (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1955), 163. 41 George Ritter, A Speech Delivered on the 13th. January 1802, Before the Society, Called the Proficuous Judicatory, Concerning the Advantages that Would be Derived from a Total Abolition of Slavery (Philadelphia: for the author, 1802), 17–18, 10–11. 34

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wrote, “can only be overcome by severe Laws and Punishments.”42 Such severity, however, sparked the fires of revenge among the enslaved. Fears of uprisings plagued whites, especially after the Haitian Revolution. Reports of revolts led by the enslaved Virginian Gabriel in 1800, Denmark Vesey in 1822, and Nat Turner in 1831—as well as smaller uprisings or murders—underscored the danger.43 Rachel Blanding, a Northerner living in South Carolina, reported a suspected revolt. Yet she found the “thirst for revenge” understandable; three weeks later, she wrote that the would-be insurrectionists “died like hereos [sic].”44 Moral theories—especially the popular idea that wrongdoing brought earthly misery—taught Americans to fear the consequences of cruelty. Cruelty made victims’ “thirst for revenge” understandable, even predictable. Slavery, Thomas Branagan warned, “nurture[d] an enemy in the bowels of our country,” waiting for the chance to avenge “barbarities.”45 The “fraud, rapine, and cruelty” exercised toward slaves, Olaudah Equiano warned slaveholders in 1789, “compel them to live with you in a state of war.”46 An 1802 pamphlet described a recent plot as “an organization that cruelty produced.” With enough cruelty “submission becomes impossible.”47 Cruelty would rebound back on slaveholders since, as Thomas Clarkson put it, “action and reaction are equal to each other, as well in the moral as in the natural world.”48 The study of moral science proved that vice naturally spawned misery—not simply as punishment, but through the natural workings of cause and effect. Cruelty naturally sparked a desire for revenge, returning pain to the original tormentor. Even though whites only rarely acted out of selfless concern for the experiences of suffering blacks, they nevertheless defined cruelty as a serious problem. Objections to cruelty drew their strength from whites’ concerns about the moral and physical dangers that cruelty posed to whites. Cruelty mattered [Benjamin Rush], A Vindication of the Address, to the Inhabitants of the British Settlements, on the Slavery of the Negroes in America, in Answer to a Pamphlet Entitled, ‘Slavery Not Forbidden by Scripture’; Or a Defence of the West-India Planters from the Aspersions Thrown Out Against them by the Author of the Address (Philadelphia: John Dunlap, 1773), 20–21. 43 Historians debate whether paranoid whites invented the Vesey conspiracy, but the point is that the story hit a nerve. See Michael Johnson, “Denmark Vesey and His CoConspirators,” William and Mary Quarterly 58, no. 4 (2001): 915–976; and “Forum: The Making of a Slave Conspiracy, part 2,” William and Mary Quarterly 59, no. 1 (2002): 135–202. 44 R[achel] Blanding to Hanna Lewis, July 4, 1816; July 25, 1816, William Blanding Papers, South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina. 45 Branagan, Serious Remonstrances, 43, 46. 46 Olaudah Equiano, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself, ed. Werner Sollors (1789; New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001), 83. 47 Humanitas, Reflections on Slavery, 8. 48 Clarkson, History, 20–21. 42

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because it turned whites into tormentors and enslaved blacks into victims. While victims could inspire pity, they also inspired contempt and fear; victimhood was dangerous. Human nature remembered injuries, Thomas Branagan warned. “It is impossible in the nature of things,” he concluded, for free blacks “to be reconciled to the whites; while hundreds of thousands of their countrymen are groaning, bleeding, and dying.”49 Removing Cruelty, Removing Victims Even as reformers denounced slavery’s cruelty and pitied its suffering victims, their path to humanitarianism—through self-regarding concerns about white morality and safety—had profoundly ambivalent results for the institution of slavery and enslaved laborers. While portraying African Americans as suffering victims, reformers also treated the presence of those victims as the core problem. As polemicists stressed the moral and physical dangers of cruelty, they fantasized that expelling black sufferers from whites’ presence would protect whites. White critics of slavery described the presence of black victims as a moral contagion; merely by being present, African Americans forced whites into a vicious cycle of dangerous cruelty. Whites self-servingly described slavery as forced upon them; they could not remove it without also removing its victims.50 Racism played a key role in the push to banish blacks, but their status as victims lent narrative structure and logic to prejudice. African Americans were defined as a menace precisely because whites inevitably treated them cruelly. Casting blacks as perpetual victims allowed whites to define their push for a white nation as prudential concern for the safety and happiness of both groups, rather than mere selfish prejudice. As many whites defined the presence of black victims as the core problem, some turned to colonization as a plausible solution. Colonizationists pushed to send blacks—both enslaved and free—out of the country, typically to the west coast of Africa (especially to Liberia or Sierra Leone). Colonizationists depicted the suffering black population as the source of the moral problem, reprinting statistics showing rapid population growth.51 In part, that growth—and the spread of slavery westward—quashed hopes that slavery would die on its own. But an Branagan, Serious Remonstrances, 39. As Joanne Pope Melish argues, white New Englanders identified slavery with

49 50

the presence of once-enslaved people. Joanne Pope Melish, Disowning Slavery: Gradual Emancipation and “Race” in New England, 1780–1860 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998), esp. 163. 51 Mathew Carey, Letters on the Colonization Society with a View of its Probable Results, 2d. ed. ([Philadelphia]: Young, 1832), 14–15. Colonization is often (justly) labeled racist; however, victimhood was crucial in creating a narrative logic for objecting to the presence of blacks. For the analytical limits of the racism label, see Egerton, “‘Its Origin is Not a Little Curious’,” 463–480; Sandlund, “‘To Arouse and Awaken the American People’,” 113.

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obsession with population statistics also revealed a deep discomfort with the presence of black victims, whether enslaved or free. Whites elided slavery and its victims, depicting both as poisoning the white republic’s virtue. Branagan described the Northern black population as an “accumulating gangrene, which is devouring the vitals of the body politic.”52 Another Philadelphian wrote that “humanity shudders” at the growing slave population; he added, “Herds of slaves must be offensive in their existence as men” both to God and to “the sensibility of our purified hearts.”53 The suffering of African Americans made their presence revolting to humane whites. Victims were also threatening. In a popular story, a master attacked a “faithful slave.” In one version, the man patiently endured the unmerited whipping, but later attacked his tormentor, throwing him to the ground. The enslaved man stood over him with a knife, saying, “You are now in my power, and one of us must die.” But the threatening victim turned into a sacrificial victim by continuing: “I spare your life, and put an end to my own existence—so saying, he drew the knife across his own throat, and poured his blood onto the bosom of his cruel master.”54 For readers attuned to Biblical imagery of bloodguilt and redemption in Christ’s blood, the imagery was striking. Justice demanded the slaveholder’s death, but the innocent victim sacrificed his blood in place of the guilty man’s. Blood simultaneously symbolized the white man’s guilt, the black man’s innocence, and the master’s chance to repent. The blood also hinted at an alternative ending in which the blood drenching the slaveholder’s clothes was his own. The threat was barely contained. Thomas Day’s famous poem The Dying Negro (1773) depicted a man who killed himself rather than return to West Indian slavery; Day warned that “his avenging rage / No tears can soften, and no blood assuage.”55 Stressing passivity could not contain the instability of the category of suffering victim, threatening always to seek revenge if pushed too far. The portrait of slaves as miserable victims verging on dangerous insurrection worried antislavery writers, even as they used it to frighten slaveholders. Slavery’s critics tried to teach slaves patience and submission to suffering, tapping into a religious language in which patient endurance earned spiritual rewards. At an 1808 Boston celebration of the abolition of the American slave trade, Jedidiah Morse reminded black listeners of the “benefits” that God brought out of their

Branagan, Serious Remonstrances, 16. [Walsh?], Free Remarks, 98. 54 Freeborn Garretson, A Dialogue Between Do-Justice and Professing Christian 52 53

(1805; Wilmington: Peter Brynberg, 1810), 24–25; Branagan, Preliminary Essay, 112–16. An early version appeared in James Ramsay, Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves in the British Sugar Colonies (London: James Phillips, 1784), 251–54. 55 Thomas Day, The Dying Negro, A Poem by the Late Thomas Day and John Bicknell, Esquire. To which is Added, a Fragment of a Letter on the Slavery of the Negroes (London: John Stockdale, 1793), 47.

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pains; Christian freedom, he added, “infinitely overbalances all their sufferings.”56 In the British author Hannah More’s The Sorrows of Yamba, Yamba detailed her sufferings under a cruel master. She attempted suicide but was saved by a kind missionary, who “sooth’d and pitied all my wo,” but “Told me ’twas the Christian’s lot, / Much to suffer here below.”57 Writers denounced white cruelty and demanded white pity, but they also called on enslaved blacks to submit to suffering patiently, thus walking a fine line between challenging and condoning slavery. The Episcopal Bishop William Meade of Virginia (a colonizationist) reprinted the poem, suggesting that parts be read to slaves “to reconcile them to their poor estate.” The rest, he added, should be read “by the friends of humanity.”58 By casting black people as victims, whites had difficulty imagining them in roles other than passive victim or vengeance seeker. Perpetual victims had no real place in America. While some whites hoped that ameliorating and eventually abolishing slavery would fix the problem, many others believed that violence and victimization necessarily defined race relations. One activist fretted that ameliorating African Americans’ condition only worsened matters, ensuring that “the more keenly will they feel these mortifications, to which they will be constantly exposed so long as they remain in the country.”59 Even the mere memory of cruelty precluded harmony. Emancipation could not erase a long history of murder, rape, and enslavement, Thomas Branagan warned whites. “If you,” he cautioned, can “associate with your murderers and ravishers; then you forfeit your title as a patriot, are unworthy the name of relative, or even a rational being.”60 Jefferson opposed the emancipation and integration of blacks into American society by invoking the “ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained.”61 Cruelty and victimization would forever define race relations. Not coincidentally, some whites applied a similar logic to argue for Indian Removal: without it, Native Americans would perpetually suffer.62 Jedidiah Morse, A Discourse Delivered at the African Meeting-House, in Boston, July 14, 1808, in Grateful Celebration of the Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, by the Governments of the United States, Great Britain and Denmark (Boston: Lincoln & Edmands, 1808), 17–18. 57   [Hannah More], The Sorrows of Yamba; Or, The Negro Woman’s Lamentation (Boston: Lincoln & Edmands, 1819), 4–5. 58 William Meade, ed., Sermons Addressed to Masters and Servants, and Published in the Year 1743, by the Rev. Thomas Bacon, Minister of the Protestant Episcopal Church in Maryland. Now Republished with other Tracts and Dialogues on the Same Subject, and Recommended to all Masters and Mistresses to be Used in their Families (Winchester, VA: John Heiskell, 1813), 183. 59 Thomas Eddy to Thomas Pym Cope, 7 mo. 29, 1824, Thomas Pym Cope Papers, Box C, Quaker Collection, Haverford College. 60 Branagan, Serious Remonstrances, 114. 61 Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, 38. 62 Susan M. Ryan, The Grammar of Good Intentions: Race and the Antebellum Culture of Benevolence (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003), 30. 56

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“Humanity,” Andrew Jackson argued in 1830, “has often wept over the fate of the aborigines of this country; and Philanthropy has been long busily employed in devising means to avert it,” but to no avail. True humanity and philanthropy demanded Indians’ eviction from their ancestral lands; the choice to remain in close proximity with whites doomed Indians to annihilation.63 Victims might merit sympathetic tears, but they did not belong in America. Imagining black people as perpetual victims also reinforced their exile from political life. Christianity praised the spiritual status of victims, but American political traditions scorned those who did not demand “liberty or death.” Those who refused to fight for liberty deserved slavery. As James Henry Hammond, who would later become a proslavery leader, put it in 1829 in a Fourth of July Speech, “Patience under usurpation is a word for slaves!”64 The line between pity and contempt was thin.65 Still, for whites who suspected that a natural desire for liberty beat in the breasts of enslaved blacks, the prospect that slaves would demand “liberty or death” was terrifying. Black victims necessarily lay beyond the pale of the republic. Their status as passive victims made them unsuited for freedom, but the possibility that they would demand freedom—or revenge—made their presence too threatening to tolerate. The rhetoric of victimhood challenged the indefinite perpetuation of slavery. Yet the path whites took to this conclusion—through fears about white morality and safety—mattered. White activists sought solutions aiming at removing white guilt, rather than redressing the wrongs of victims; they tried to remove suffering from America not by alleviating it or removing its causes, but by removing sufferers. Thomas Branagan proposed making amends by sending freedpeople to Africa and “thus, like Pilate, let us wash our hands, and shake their blood from our garments.”66 Perhaps Branagan did not fully intend the analogy, but it is striking: Pilate washed his hands of the guilt of crucifying Jesus, but he did not save Jesus.67 Colonizationists tried to wash away their guilt without restoring black rights. The tendency to view black victims (rather than white actions) as the problem made removing blacks from America seem morally plausible. Just as the colonization movement took root in whites’ pity, fear, and contempt for black victims, the movement also significantly reshaped white ideas about black suffering. The effects of colonization on the institution of slavery and the lives of enslaved people were, at best, mixed. Some slaveholding critics of slavery 63 Andrew Jackson, “Second Annual Message. December 7, 1830,” in Messages of Gen. Andrew Jackson (Concord, NH: John F. Brown and William White, 1837), 114. 64 James Henry Hammond, “An Oration Delivered in the Presbyterian Church on the Fourth of July 1829,” Hammond Papers, Reel 1, Library of Congress. 65 For a fuller analysis of this slippage, see Darryl Scott, Contempt and Pity: Social Policy and the Image of the Damaged Black Psyche, 1880–1996 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1997). 66 Branagan, Serious Remonstrances, 24. 67 Matthew 27: 24–26.

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used colonization to escape slaveholding, especially North Carolina Quakers, who colonized 652 African Americans by 1830.68 Yet many manumitters were more ambivalent in their motives, using colonization both to shore up their power at home and to remove their guilt (often posthumously, via wills).69 Yet colonization’s legacy was only partly about immediate, concrete effects (or lack thereof) on enslaved people or the institution of slavery. Colonization—and the arguments for its benevolence—left an enduring legacy in shaping how people thought about the relationship between slavery and cruelty for decades. Colonizationists denounced slavery’s cruelty and admitted that slavery meant suffering. Crucially, however, they also placed the guilt for that pain squarely on the slave trade, treating colonization as atonement for the wrongs done to Africans or “the wrongs which slavery has inflicted on Africa.”70 Around 1833, one New Yorker hoped emigration would be a “retreat to Elysium . . . in order that [slaves] may be somewhat compensated for the painful privations” of the trade.71 The writer collapsed all the suffering of slavery into the trade—even though twentyfive years had elapsed since the American slave trade had been abolished (and twenty-six since Britain had abolished theirs), and the percentage of African-born slaves was rapidly shrinking. Yet the slave trade made a convenient rhetorical target, in part because it put the blame for slavery safely in the past, on a practice that Virginia’s legislature boasted that they had “zealously sought to terminate” even before the Revolution.72 Americans could emphasize British, rather than American, responsibility for the cruelty of the trade and slavery.73 Just as crucially, it also meant that colonizationists could portray blacks as suffering victims without blaming individual slaveholders. William Thornton, a Philadelphia colonizationist and critic of slavery, nevertheless owned a large plantation in his native Tortola. Although he described himself as an “oppressor,” he also insisted that “I inherit the misery of being a tyrant.” (Indeed, in 1783, a friend dissuaded him from freeing his slaves, arguing that Thornton had inherited them, and was thus not responsible for their enslavement.) By blaming 68 Claude A. Clegg, III, The Price of Liberty: African Americans and the Making of Liberia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003), 31. 69 Burin, Slavery and the Peculiar Solution, 24–56; esp. 41, 53–54. 70 Josephus Wheaton, The Equality of Mankind and the Evils of Slavery, Illustrated: A Sermon, Delivered on the Day of the Annual Fast, April 6, 1820 (Boston: for Samuel T. Armstrong by Crocker & Brewster, 1820), esp. 12–18; “Resolutions of State Legislatures in Favour of the American Colonization Society,” African Repository & Colonial Journal 5 (Dec. 1829), 306. 71 A Citizen of New-York, Remarks Upon a Plan for the Total Abolition of Slavery in the United States (New York: S. Hoyt & Co., [1833?]), 14. 72 “Resolutions of State Legislatures in Favour of the American Colonization Society,” African Repository and Colonial Journal 5, no. 9 (Nov. 1828), 300. 73 See, for example, Robert Walsh, An Appeal from the Judgments of Great Britain Respecting the United States of America (Philadelphia: Mitchell, Ames and White, 1819), esp. 309–14.

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the trade and working for colonization, Thornton could simultaneously condemn slavery’s cruelty and insist on his own humaneness.74 Crucially, colonizationists blamed the slave trade for ensuring that blacks, unless colonized, would suffer as perpetual victims—whether as victims of whips or of the physical and metaphorical cruelties of a freedom defined by abject poverty, starvation, and prejudice. Colonizationists rhetorically positioned slaveholders as the helpless heirs of a cruel legacy, from which emancipation offered little hope of escape. Only removal could “rescue” even free blacks from “the disqualifications, the degradation, and the proscription to which they are exposed in the United States.”75 The “Cruelty of Benevolence”: Perpetual Victims and the Perils of Emancipation Despite colonizationists’ denunciations of cruelty, their rhetoric had profoundly ambivalent effects on white Americans’ perceptions of emancipation. By positioning African Americans as perpetual victims of white cruelty, colonizationists cast the humaneness—and not simply the practicality—of emancipation into serious question. Mathew Carey explained in 1832 that “the free coloured population in this country labour under the most oppressive disadvantages, which their freedom can by no means counterbalance, is too obvious to admit of doubt.” Carey blamed white prejudice, but he nevertheless concluded that free African Americans’ “situation is more unfavorable than that of many slaves.”76 Even as colonizationists called for pity, their rhetoric undermined emancipationist solutions. Colonization fed upon and nourished the idea that free blacks lived in greater misery than their enslaved counterparts. Virginia colonizationists described a free black as a “miserable outcast,” enjoying neither true freedom nor the “careless security” of slavery.77 In 1819, James Madison praised Edward Coles for deciding to free his slaves, but Madison questioned the value of freedom. “I wish,” said Madison, “your philanthropy would compleat its object, by changing their colour as well as their legal condition. Without this they seemed destined to a privation of that moral rank & those social blessings, which give to freedom more than half its value.”78 William Thornton, Political Economy: Founded in Justice and Humanity, In a Letter to A Friend (Samuel Harrison Smith: Washington, 1804), 6; John Coakley Lettsom to William Thornton, February 19, 1787, Reel 1, William Thornton Papers, Library of Congress. 75 Carey, Letters on the Colonization Society, 6–7. 76 Ibid., 27. 77 Minutes, January 16, 1826, p. 30, Records of the ACS, Virginia Branch, Virginia Historical Society, Richmond J. Wicksan to Mary Blackford, [1830], Blackford Family Papers #1912, f.6, SHC. 78 James Madison to Edward Coles, September 3, 1819, Edward Coles Papers, Box 1, f. 19, MC–PUL. 74

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The idea that freedom was, at best, a half blessing encouraged the idea that, despite the wrongs of slavery, emancipation might not be a benevolent solution. Samuel Miller echoed a common sentiment when he criticized slavery but also attacked the “cruelty of benevolence”: freeing unprepared slaves.79 A white Alabamian similarly worried that “mistaken ideas of humanity” would lead to the miseries of “indiscriminate emancipation.”80 Slaveholders who considered manumitting their slaves could expect warnings about the inhumanity of emancipation. When Edward Coles told Thomas Jefferson in 1814 that he planned to quit slavery, Jefferson saw no practical way out. He warned that manumissions were illegal, and if Coles escaped slavery by selling his slaves, they might end up with a cruel owner. Jefferson chided: “Until more can be done for them, we should endeavor, with those whom fortune has thrown on our hands, to feed & clothe them well, protect them from ill usage, require such reasonable labor,” but “be led by no repugnancies to abdicate them, and our duties to them.”81 Even as colonizationists criticized cruelty, they weakened support for emancipationist solutions by depicting freedom as a major source of black pain. Benevolence might only thinly shade over other concerns: crime rates, the costs of poor relief, and fears of an “idle,” disgruntled population often loomed larger than altruism. John Taylor of Caroline lamented that the free black population’s situation spawned vice: “Cut off from most of the rights of citizens, and from all the allowances of slaves, it is driven to every species of crime for subsistance [sic]; and destined to a life of idleness, anxiety and guilt.” Significantly, however, writers often framed such fears in terms of compassion for black victims; Taylor blamed free blacks for causing slaves “the most perpetual pain of repining at their own condition” by giving them a glimpse of unattainable freedom.82 William Thornton similarly speculated that releasing some enslaved laborers would leave the remaining ones more miserable.83 Virginia colonizationists even framed their fears of crime in terms of humaneness: free blacks could be restrained only by severe punishments “painful to every feeling heart.”84 Sincerely or not, colonizationists invoked benevolence to argue against emancipation without removal. They did not create the idea that emancipation could be inhumane, but by linking their criticisms of slavery to criticisms of emancipation, they lent humanitarian credibility to the idea. 79 Samuel Miller, A Discourse, Delivered April 12, 1797, at the Request of and before the New-York Society for Promoting the Manumission of Slaves, and Protecting Such of Them as Have Been or May Be Liberated (New York: T. and J. Swords, 1797), 7. 80 Origen Sibley to Ralph Gurley, June 9, 1827, ACS, Reel 2, Library of Congress. 81 Thomas Jefferson to Edward Coles, August 25, 1814, Edward Coles Papers, Box 1, f.14, MC–PUL. 82 (Versailles) The Kentucky Farmer, Vol. 1, no. 13, September 18, 1824, p. 105, FHS. 83 Thornton, Political Economy, 9. 84 Copy of the Memorial of the Petersburg [Virginia] Auxiliary Colonization Society, Jan 5 1827, American Colonization Society, Reel 1, Library of Congress.

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Colonizationists reassured slaveholders that even if slavery was wrong, the most humane short-term solution was to ameliorate slavery, not to manumit their slaves. Across the ideological spectrum, whites took comfort in the idea that the harshness of slavery was mellowing over time. As Robert Walsh saw it, a greater concern for human rights and “a quicker sympathy with human sufferings” had led to “a great and striking amelioration.”85 When Jonathan Edwards Jr.’s pamphlet was reprinted in 1822, an editor added a footnote to Edwards’s descriptions of cruelty explaining that they were no longer accurate: “We can testify to the mildness and humanity of the treatment which the slaves generally experience from the respectable Planters of the South. Instances of cruelty, we doubt not, occur, but we believe receive no countenance from public opinion.”86 This confidence in amelioration had significant—but not always obvious—political implications. The reliance on amelioration as a temporary solution softened white views of slaveholding. Calls for amelioration implied that slavery could be detached from cruelty and thereby discouraged criticisms of slaveholders. After visiting the Carolinas and Georgia, Reuben Legett, an antislavery New Yorker, explained in 1825 that rather than “seeing cruelty & wretchedness at every step as I had expected, I found the masters were kind harted [sic] men & the Slaves in a good degree contented & comfortable.”87 Such claims—from a self-identified critic of slavery—signaled the erosion of assumptions that slavery was cruel. Amelioration simultaneously gave hope to slavery’s critics and mollified slaveholders; it could be a step toward emancipation, even as it weakened the idea that emancipation was necessary. If all owners acted humanely, Ray Clarke contended in 1819, “it would be questionable, whether emancipation of Blacks would be a blessing.”88 Nevertheless, the softened image of slaveholders only hinted at a nascent disposition to view slavery as benevolent. Rather than viewing slavery as intrinsically benevolent, slaveholders justified their personal conduct in relative terms. Ray Clarke doubted the value of emancipation, but he still contrasted the kindness of a “good master” with “the fetters and cat-o-ninetails [sic] of a WestIndia planter.”89 Like Clarke, American slaveholders weighed their own behavior against that of other slaveholders, whether West Indian planters or neighbors. And amelioration had clear limits; it did not preclude violence. At its core, humaneness was a relative concept. Slaveholders saw themselves as humane not because 85 Robert Walsh, An Appeal from the Judgments of Great Britain Respecting the United States of America (Philadelphia: Mitchell, Ames and White, 1819), 408, 406. 86 Jonathan Edwards, Injustice and Impolicy of the Slave Trade, and of the Slavery of Africans (Boston: Wells and Lilly, 1822), 9. 87 Reuben Legett to William Newbold, 11 mo. 5, 1825, Meeting for Sufferings, Miscellaneous Papers, C3.3, Philadelphia Yearly Meeting, Haverford College. 88 Ray Clarke to Obadiah M. Brown, March 9, 1819, Obadiah M. Brown Papers, 1.6, Rhode Island Historical Society. 89 The “cat-o’-nine-tails” is a whip. Ray Clarke to Obadiah M. Brown, March 9, 1819, Obadiah M. Brown Papers, 1.6, Rhode Island Historical Society.

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slavery was itself benevolent, but because they ameliorated its sufferings. Even whites who compared the suffering of slaves to the suffering of the free poor (especially the British poor) often denounced the “intrinsic horrors and miseries” of slavery.90 Such invocations of humaneness struck a delicate balance; humaneness still demanded some squeamishness about slavery. But by the 1820s, the balance was tipping. In an 1829 address to the Agricultural Society of South Carolina, the younger Charles Cotesworth Pinckney argued that “if the absence of mental and bodily pain be the test of human happiness,” slaves fared better than “half the freemen in the world.” Slavery even gave emotional security to slaves who died in the comfort of knowing that their families would be protected from the evils of poverty. Pinckney denied that slaves were punished severely (their punishments differed little from those endured by sailors, soldiers, and children) and argued that slaves were treated more leniently than free criminals. The self-interest of slaveholders protected slaves, while the poor had no such protections. In short, slavery was more humane than freedom in poverty. Pinckney still depicted blacks as victims, but freedom—not slavery—was cruel. Colonization was an “absurdity and cruelty”; there was no “humane and rational means” of emancipating slaves. Slavery alone provided a truly humane solution.91 Pinckney’s outright defense of slavery on the grounds of humaneness horrified colonizationists. Yet they had helped create it. Despite their horror at his conclusion, colonizationists had also rejected immediate emancipation in favor of amelioration—even if only as a short-term solution.92 They agreed that American freedom offered little to African Americans. Whatever colonizationists intended, they created the logic for defining slavery as a humane alternative to the cruelty of freedom. The structure of their rhetoric rested on a comparison of freedom to slavery; slavery was cruel, but it would be crueler to emancipate slaves without colonization. Only removal made emancipation humane. Pinckney simply denied that removal offered a humane alternative. For decades, the softening image of slaveholding had taken shape within the context of criticism of the principle of slavery. Those criticisms were often perfunctory, but public culture demanded them. Pinckney’s argument defending the humaneness of slavery against the cruelty of emancipation startled Americans not because his basic ideas were radically new, but because he had abandoned that ambivalence. He refused to pay public homage to the idea that slavery was inhumane. White Americans had relentlessly linked the idea that slavery was cruel 90 Walsh, Appeal, 319. Walsh was most interested in defending Americans from charges of unique cruelty, not defending slavery itself. He thus spent much of his time criticizing the cruelty of the British slave trade. 91 Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, An Address Delivered in Charleston . . ., 2d ed. (Charleston: A. E. Miller, 1829), 3–4, 4–5, 17, 9. 92 “Review of An Address Delivered in Charleston, Before the Agricultural Society of South-Carolina, at its Anniversary Meeting, on Tuesday, the 18th August, 1829, by Charles Cotesworth Pinckney,” African Repository and Colonial Journal 5, no. 11 (Jan. 1830): 331.

The Cruelty of Slavery, The Cruelty of Freedom

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to the idea that emancipation was cruel. Pinckney tore these two ideas apart, with far-reaching consequences. Pinckney’s argument signaled the beginnings of a new debate about slavery, one focused not on colonization, but abolition. By the 1830s, more radical antislavery and proslavery movements coalesced, eager to destroy the movements that preceded them. In 1832, William Lloyd Garrison published a stinging indictment of gradualism and colonization, accusing them of tolerating cruelty and supporting slavery: the movements amounted to the proposal that “slave-drivers shall apply the lash to the scarred and bleeding backs of their victims somewhat less frequently.”93 Slavery’s defenders, in turn, denounced abolitionists for offering blacks only the freedom to suffer, and they described emancipation as “cruel and inhuman.”94 The colonization movement did not die, but it no longer commanded the rhetorical center of the debate. Yet the movement played a critical, continuing role in the debate by providing the moral rhetoric that would be used to attack and to defend slavery. Altruistic concern for the suffering of enslaved laborers did not necessarily motivate colonizationists, but it mattered that activists persistently depicted blacks as perpetual victims of an amorphously defined cruelty. The choice to frame colonization as the only humane path between cruel emancipation and cruel slavery shaped the slavery debate for decades. Antebellum whites, whether defenders or critics of slavery, used images of black victimhood to cast themselves as the true protectors of helpless black sufferers. Slavery’s defenders and critics alike built upon the rhetorical foundations laid by colonizationists. Even as colonizationists castigated slaveholders who bloodied slaves’ backs with the lash, they denounced slaveholders who neglected to meet slaves’ needs by abandoning them to freedom. By treating freedom in America without colonization as a half good and near evil, colonizationists encouraged the idea that African Americans would be better off in slavery if they could not be sent to Africa. Whites simultaneously condemned the cruelty of slavery and the cruelty of emancipation. But without colonization and gradualism to hold those two strains of rhetoric together, they split apart. Depictions of suffering played crucial roles in the American debate over slavery, but appeals to victimhood both reinforced and challenged slavery.

93 William Lloyd Garrison, Thoughts on African Colonization: Or an Impartial Exhibition of the Doctrines, Principles and Purposes of the American Colonization Society. Together with the Resolutions and Remonstrances of the Free People of Color (1832; Facs. reprint, New York: Arno Press and the New York Times, 1968), 79. 94 James Kirke Paulding, Slavery in the United States (New York: Harper & Bros., 1836), 59.

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212

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Blackburn, Robin. The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492–1800. New York: Verso, 1997. Bohls, Elizabeth. “The Aesthetics of Colonialism: Janet Schaw in the West Indies, 1774–1775.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 27, no. 3 (1994): 363–90. Boltanski, Luc. Distant Suffering: Morality, Media and Politics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Boulukos, George. The Grateful Slave: The Emergence of Race in EighteenthCentury British and American Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008. Brooks, Joanna. “The Early American Public Sphere and the Emergence of a Black Print Counterpublic.” William and Mary Quarterly 62, no. 1 (2005): 67–92. Brown, Christopher Leslie. Moral Capital: Foundations of British Abolitionism. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Burgett, Bruce. Sentimental Bodies: Sex, Gender and Citizenship in the Early Republic. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998. Burnham, Michelle. “Between England and America: Captivity, Sympathy, and the Sentimental Novel,” 47–72. In Cultural Institutions of the Novel. Ed. Deidre Lynch and William Warner. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996. ———. Captivity and Sentiment: Cultural Exchange in American Literature, 1682–1861. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1997. Bush, Barbara. Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 1650–1838. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990. ———. “White ‘Ladies’, Coloured ‘Favourites’ and Black ‘Wenches’; Some Considerations on Sex, Race and Class Factors in Social Relations in White Creole Society in the British Caribbean.” Slavery and Abolition 2, no. 3 (1981): 245–62. Byrd, Alexander X. Captives and Voyagers: Black Migrants Across the EighteenthCentury British Atlantic World. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008. Carey, Brycchan. British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility: Writing, Sentiment, and Slavery, 1760–1807. New York: Palgrave, 2005. ———, Markman Ellis, and Sara Salih, eds. Discourses of Slavery and Abolition: Britain and its Colonies, 1760–1838. Basingstoke, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004. ———. From Peace to Freedom: Quaker Rhetoric and the Birth of American Antislavery, 1658–1761. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012. ———, and Peter J. Kitson, eds. Slavery and the Cultures Of Abolition: Essays Marking the Bicentennial of the British Abolition Act of 1807. Woodbridge, UK: D.S. Brewer, 2007. Carretta, Vincent, and Philip Gould, eds. Genius in Bondage: Literature of the Early Black Atlantic. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001. Chandler, James. “Moving Accidents: The Emergence of Sentimental Probability,” 137–77. In The Age of Cultural Revolutions. Ed. Colin Jones and Dror Wahrman. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002.

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Chaplin, Joyce E. “Slavery and the Principle of Humanity: A Modern Idea in the Early Lower South.” Journal of Social History 24, no. 2 (1990): 299–315. Cheng, Anne Anlin. The Melancholy of Race: Psychoanalysis, Assimilation, and Hidden Grief. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Clark, Elizabeth. “‘The Sacred Rights of the Weak’: Pain, Sympathy, and the Culture of Individual Rights in Antebellum America.” Journal of American History 82, no. 2 (1995): 463–93. Cohen, Margaret. “Sentimental Communities,” 106–32. In The Literary Channel: The Inter-National Invention of the Novel. Ed. Margaret Cohen and Carolyn Dever. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001. Coleman, Deirdre. Romantic Colonization and British Anti-Slavery. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Davis, Cynthia. “Speaking the Body’s Pain: Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig.” African American Review 27, no. 3 (1993): 391–404. Davis, David Brion. Inhuman Bondage: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the New World. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. ———. The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975. ———. The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture. New York: Oxford University Press, 1966. Davis, Thomas J. “Emancipation Rhetoric, Natural Rights, and Revolutionary New England: A Note on Four Black Petitions in Massachusetts, 1773–1777.” New England Quarterly 62, no. 2 (1989): 248–63. Dayan, Joan. “Amorous Bondage: Poe, Ladies, and Slaves.” American Literature 66, no. 2 (1994): 239–73. Dellarosa, Franca. Slavery on Stage: Representations of Slavery in British Theatre 1760s–1830s. Bari: Edizioni dal Sud, 2009. Doyle, Laura. Freedom’s Empire: Race and the Rise of the Novel in Atlantic Modernity, 1640–1940. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. Dresher, Seymour. “Public Opinion and Parliament in the Abolition of the British Slave Trade.” Parliamentary History 26 Supplement (2007): 42–65. Ellis, Markman. “Ignatius Sancho’s Letters: Sentimental Libertinism and the Politics of Form,” 199–217. In Genius in Bondage: Literature of the Early Black Atlantic. Ed. Vincent Carretta and Philip Gould. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001. ———. The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. Ellison, Julie. Cato’s Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999. Ericson, David F. The Debate Over Slavery: Antislavery and Proslavery Liberalism in Antebellum America. New York: New York University Press, 2000. Ferguson, Moira. Colonialism and Gender Relations from Mary Wollstonecraft to Jamaica Kincaid: East Caribbean Connections. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993.

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———. Subject to Others: British Women Writers and Colonial Slavery, 1670– 1834. New York: Routledge, 1992. Festa, Lynn. Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. Fisher, Philip. “Making a Thing into a Man: The Sentimental Novel and Slavery,” 87–127. In Hard Facts: Setting and Form in the American Novel. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. Force, Pierre. Self-Interest Before Adam Smith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Gikandi, Simon. Slavery and the Culture of Taste. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011. Gilroy, Paul. Postcolonial Melancholia. New York: Columbia University Press, 2005. Gottlieb, Evan. Feeling British: Sympathy and National Identity in Scottish and English Writing, 1707–1832. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2007. Gould, Philip. Barbaric Traffic: Commerce and Antislavery in the EighteenthCentury Atlantic World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. Gwilliam, Tassie. “‘Scenes of Horror,’ Scenes of Sensibility: Sentimentality and Slavery in John Gabriel Stedman’s Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam. ELH 65, no. 3 (1998): 653–73. Halttunen, Karen. “Humanitarianism and the Pornography of Pain in AngloAmerican Culture.” American Historical Review 100, no. 2 (1995): 303–34. Hamilton, Cynthia S. “Dislocation, Violence, and the Language of Sentiment,” 103–16. In Black Imagination and the Middle Passage. Ed. Maria Diedrich, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Carl Pedersen. New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Hartman, Saidiya. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1997. Haskell, Thomas. “Capitalism and the Origins of Humanitarian Sensibility, Parts 1 and 2,” 107–60. In The Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation. Ed. Thomas Bender. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992. Hendler, Glenn. Public Sentiments: Structures of Feeling in Nineteenth-Century American Literature. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001. ———. “The Structure of Sentimental Experience.” Yale Journal of Criticism 12, no. 1 (1999): 145–53. Higginson, Stephen A. “A Short History of the Right to Petition Government for the Redress of Grievances.” Yale Law Journal 96, no. 1 (1986): 142–66. Hinton, Laura. The Perverse Gaze of Sympathy: Sadomasochistic Sentiments from Clarissa to Rescue 911. Albany: SUNY Press, 1999. Hirschman, Albert O. The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before Its Triumph. 1977; Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997. Hochschild, Adam. Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005.

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Hudson, Nicholas. “‘Britons Never Will be Slaves’: National Myth, Conservatism, and the Beginnings of British Antislavery.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 34, no. 4 (2001): 559–76. ———. “From ‘Nation’ to ‘Race’: The Origin of Racial Classification in Eighteenth-Century Thought.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 29, no. 3 (1996): 247–64. James, C.L.R. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. New York: Vintage, 1989. Jones, Cecily. “‘To Be Free is Very Sweet:’ Racialized Representations of Slavery in Maria Nugent’s Journal and Mary Prince’s History.” Sargasso, no. 1 (2005– 2006): 69–88. Jones, Chris. Radical Sensibility: Literature and Ideas in the 1790s. London: Routledge, 1993. Jordan, Winthrop. White Over Black: American Attitudes toward the Negro, 1550– 1812. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968. Juang, Richard Milton. “A Taste for Flesh: British Slavery, Sentiment and the Epistemology of Race and Domination,” 59–74. In New Perspectives in Transatlantic Studies. Ed. Heidi Slettedahl Macpherson and Will Kaufman. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 2002. Kaplan, Sidney, and Emma Nogrady Kaplan. The Black Presence in the Era of the American Revolution, 1770–1800. Rev. ed. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1989. Keith, Jennifer. “The Formal Challenges of Antislavery Poetry.” Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 34 (2005): 97–124. Klingberg, Frank J. The Anti-Slavery Movement in England: A Study in English Humanitarianism. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1926. Kowaleski-Wallace, Elizabeth. The British Slave Trade and Public Memory. New York: Columbia University Press, 2006. Lamb, Jonathan. The Evolution of Sympathy in the Long Eighteenth Century. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2009. Lee, Debbie. Slavery and the Romantic Imagination. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002. Levecq, Christine. Slavery and Sentiment: The Politics of Feeling in Black Atlantic Antislavery Writing, 1770–1850. Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 2008. Lewis, Gordon K. Slavery, Imperialism, and Freedom: Studies in English Radical Thought. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1978. Libby David J., Paul Spickard, and Susan Ditto, eds. Affect and Power: Essays on Sex, Slavery, Race, and Religion in Appreciation of Winthrop D. Jordan. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005. Lilley, James. “Henry Mackenzie’s Ruined Feelings: Romance, Race, and the Afterlife of Sentimental Exchange.” New Literary History 38, no. 4 (2007): 649–66. Lutz, Alfred. “Commercial Capitalism, Classical Republicanism, and the Man of Sensibility in the History of Sir George Ellison.” SEL 39, no. 3 (1999): 557–74.

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Macdonald, D.L. “Pre-Romantic and Romantic Abolitionism: Cowper and Blake.” European Romantic Review 4, no. 2 (1994): 163–82. MacDonald, Joyce Green. “Race, Women, and the Sentimental in Thomas Southerne’s Oroonoko.” Criticism 40, no. 4 (1998): 555–70. Massumi, Brian. Parables for the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002. Midgley, Clare. Women Against Slavery: The British Campaigns, 1780–1870. London: Routledge, 1992. Mitchell, Robert. “‘The Soul that Dreams It Shares the Power It Feels So Well’: The Politics of Sympathy in the Abolitionist Verse of Williams and Yearsley.” Romanticism on the Net 29–30 (2003): 35 paragraphs. ———. Sympathy and the State in the Romantic Era: Systems, State Finance, and the Shadows of Futurity. New York: Routledge, 2007. Mullan, John. Sentiment and Sociability: The Language of Feeling in the Eighteenth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 1988. Nash, Gary B. Forging Freedom: The Formation of Philadelphia’s Black Community, 1720–1840. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988. ———. Race and Revolution. Madison, WI: Madison House, 1990. Nathans, Heather S. Slavery and Sentiment on the American Stage, 1787–1861: Lifting the Veil of Black. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Nudelman, Franny. “Harriet Jacobs and the Sentimental Politics of Female Suffering.” ELH 59, no. 4 (1992): 939–64. Nussbaum, Felicity A. The Limits of the Human: Fictions of Anomaly, Race, and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003. ———. Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire in Eighteenth-Century English Narratives. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995. Oldfield, J. R. Popular Politics and British Anti-Slavery: The Mobilisation of Public Opinion Against the Slave Trade 1787–1807. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1995. Phillips, Mark Salber. Society and Sentiment: Genres of Historical Writing in Britain, 1740–1820. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Porter, Andrew. “Trusteeship, Anti-Slavery, and Humanitarianism,” 198–221. In The Oxford History of the British Empire, vol. 3: The Nineteenth Century. Ed. Andrew Porter. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. New York: Routledge, 1992. Rai, Amit S. Rule of Sympathy: Sentiment, Race, and Power, 1750–1850. New York: Palgrave, 2002. Richardson, Alan. “Darkness Visible? Race and Representation in Bristol Abolitionist Poetry, 1770–1810,” 129–47. In Romanticism and Colonialism: Writing and Empire, 1780–1830. Ed. Tim Fulford and Peter Kitson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998.

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Ryan, Susan M. The Grammar of Good Intentions: Race and the Antebellum Culture of Benevolence. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003. Saillant, John. “The Black Body Erotic and the Republican Body Politic, 1790– 1820.” Journal of the History of Sexuality 5, no. 3 (1995): 403–28. Samuels, Shirley, ed. The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford University Press, 1992. Sandiford, Keith A. Measuring the Moment: Strategies of Protest in EighteenthCentury Afro-English Writing. Selinsgrove, PA: Susquehanna University Press, 1988. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003. Smith, Mark M. How Race is Made: Slavery, Segregation, and the Senses. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Starr, G.A. “Egalitarian and Elitist Implications of Sensibility,” 126–35. In L’Egalité. Ed. Leon Ingber. Brussels: Bruylant, 1984. Stern, Julia A. The Plight of Feeling: Sympathy and Dissent in the Early American Novel. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997. Stevens, Laura. The Poor Indians: British Missionaries, Native Americans, and Colonial Sensibility. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. Sussman, Charlotte. Consuming Anxieties: Consumer Protest, Gender, and British Slavery, 1713–1833. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2000. Swaminathan, Srividhya. Debating the Slave Trade: Rhetoric of British National Identity, 1759–1815. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2009. Sypher, Wylie. Guinea’s Captive Kings Guinea’s Captive Kings: British AntiSlavery Literature of the XVIIIth Century. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1942. Thomas, Helen. Romanticism and Slave Narratives: Transatlantic Testimonies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. Tomkins, Jane. Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790–1860. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Trubey, Elizabeth Fekete. “Emancipating the Lettered Slave: Sentiment and Slavery in Augusta Evans’s St. Elmo.” American Literature 77, no. 1 (2005): 123–50. Ward, Candace. Desire and Disorder: Fevers, Fiction, and Feeling in English Georgian Culture. Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2007. ———. “Transports of Feeling: Constructions of the Black Man of Feeling in Eighteenth-Century Colonial Literature,” 443–60. In Transport(s) in the British Empire and the Commonwealth / Transport(s) dans l’Empire britannique et le Commonwealth. Ed. Michèle Lurdos and Judith Misrahi-Barak. Montpellier, France: Publications de l’université Paul-Valéry, 2007. Wheeler, Roxann. The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in EighteenthCentury British Culture. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000. Wickberg, Daniel. “What Is the History of Sensibilities? On Cultural Histories, Old and New.” American Historical Review 112, no. 3 (June 2007): 661–84.

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Wiedemann, Thomas, and Jane Gardner, eds. Representing the Body of the Slave. London: Frank Cass, 2002. Williams, Basil. The Whig Supremacy 1714–1760. 2nd ed., rev. C. H. Stuart. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962. Williams, Eric. Capitalism and Slavery. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944. Wilson, Kathleen. The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century. London: Routledge, 2003. Wood, Marcus. Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America, 1780–1865. Manchester, UK: Manchester University Press, 2000. ———. “Emancipation Art, Fanon and ‘the Butchery of Freedom,’” 11–41. In Slavery and the Cultures of Abolition: Essays Marking the Bicentennial of the British Abolition Act of 1807. Ed. Brycchan Carey and Peter J. Kitson. Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2007. ———. Slavery, Empathy and Pornography. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002. Zaeske, Susan. Signatures of Citizenship: Petitioning, Antislavery, and Women’s Political Identity. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003.

Index abolition economic factors leading to, 25 economic opposition to, 140–41 emancipation vs., 80 publications, 109 reformation vs., 109 of slave trade, 191, 204 abolitionism ameliorationism vs., 29 cannibalism in, 134–5 and capitalism, 31 class and, 50 drama and, 114, 119–28 emancipationism vs., 29 genres of, 29–30 movement in England, 75, 166 Quakers and, 109 rhetoric of, 48, 71 sensibility and, 89, 172 sentimental literature and, 27–8 Somerset decision and, 78, 155 Wilberforce’s bill and, 86 women and, 174–5 abolitionist poetry; see also names of individual poets discourse of sensibility in, 105–6 personifications of collective emotion in, 63–6 sympathetic appeals in, 52, 57–63 Adams, Joseph, 159 Addison, Joseph, 37, 79–81 affect; see also pathos; sympathy; compassion; benevolence; pity abolitionist poetry and, 129–30, 145 freedom and, 82 in petitions, 155–7, 161 affective excess abolitionism and, 6 used by both antislavery and proslavery sides, 5 in visual texts, 12–13

Africa colonization to, 159, 161, 166 freedom of Africans in, 85–6 kidnapping from, 154 African Union Society, 160 Aikin, Anna; see also Barbauld, Anna Laetitia Corsica: An Ode, 91 Albert, Joe, 164 Allen, Richard, 166 ameliorationism abolitionism vs., 29 colonization and, 207 in drama, 124 emancipation vs., 208 feeling masters–grateful slaves and, 12 in poetry, 122 and proslavery, 190n5 American Revolution/War of Independence, 151–9 Declaration of Independence, 1, 153, 157 antislavery literature fiction, 128 poetry, 49, 128 and public awareness of slavery, 29 sentimental humanitarianism of all genres, 30 sympathy used in, 172 Aristotle, 7, 53, 55 Rhetoric, 52 Augustine, St., Confessions, 141–3 Austen, Jane, Mansfield Park, 125, 129, 131 Bagot, Walter, 135, 147 Barbauld, Anna Laetitia An Address to the Opposers of the Repeal of the Corporation and Test Acts, 91 and dissolution of British national character, 105 Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, 92

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Epistle to William Wilberforce, 48, 62, 65, 87, 90–93, 95–101, 103, 106, 149 and Hartley’s ideas, 95–6, 102, 106 Hymns in Prose for Children, 102 Lessons for Children, 102 Miscellaneous Essays in Prose, 91 “On Evil,” 103n31 and planter’s wife, 99–100, 103 Poems, 91 political and reform writing, 91 and shaping of public opinion, 48–9 Beckford, William, 15 Behn, Aphra, 114, 118, 122–3 Oroonoko, 111 Belinda (petitioner), 158–9, 167 Bellamy, Thomas, The Benevolent Planters, 109–10, 123–5, 128 benevolence association of impulses with sympathy, 94 cruelty of, 206 of paternalism, 130 and pleasure, 102 self-interest vs., 2 of slavery, 207 Benezet, Anthony, 34n38, 35–6 Bickerstaffe, Isaac, 110 The Padlock, 119–22 Bicknell, John, The Dying Negro, 47, 131, 201 Birkett, Mary, 105–6 Poem on the African Slave Trade, 85–6 black women creole men’s relationships with, 184–5 depictions of, 184 and miscegenation, 184–5 sexuality of, 185 blacks; see also free blacks; slaves attachments and sensibilities of, 163 Britons’ attitudes toward, 28 in drama, 110–11 and petitions, see petitions rights to civic self-assertion, 151–2 solidarity/community, 160, 165–6 transatlantic ideas and, 153, 167 Blackstone, William, 75, 83 Commentaries on the Laws of England, 74, 76 Branagan, Thomas, 194, 198–203

Penitential Tyrant, 196–7 Britain abolition of slave trade, 89, 191 antislavery movement in, 75, 166 plantations and prosperity of, 81 slavery and spread of moral corruption in, 90 Somerset decision and illegality of slavery, 155 capitalism, 24–5, 31–4, 38, 43; see also market Cheyne, George, 93–4, 101 Clarkson, Thomas on abolition, 50 and ameliorationism, 41, 57 An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, 78, 145 The History of the...Abolition of the African Slave-Trade, 23, 28–9, 42, 47, 57, 78–9, 123, 189 on sympathy and antislavery action, 190, 193 Coleridge, S. T., 78–9, 87 Coles, Edward, 193, 197–8, 205–6 Colman, George, Inkle and Yarico, 40–42, 122–3 colonialism/imperialism abolitionist rhetoric and new kinds of colonialism, 71 depictions of colonial encounter, 4 and social/economic collapse, 92 colonies/empire British trade with, 72–3 “colonial disease” in, 96–7 Mansfield judgment and, 131 slavery in England vs., 78 colonization to Africa, 159, 161, 166 and amelioration, 207–8 cruelty of, 208 and emancipation vs. amelioration, 205, 208–9 racism and, 200 and slave trade, 191 compassion, 48n8, 138; see also pity Cowper, Harriot, see Hesketh, Harriot Cowper, Lady

Index Cowper, William, 73 and abolitionism, 129–31, 137, 141–2 and affect, 139 “Charity,” 81–2, 84–5, 129, 131–2, 135 and condition of slaves, 142–3 and freedom in England, 73, 88 and Mansfield judgment, 131 “The Morning Dream,” 133–4, 143 “The Negro’s Complaint,” 133–9, 141, 143–4, 147 “Pity for the Poor Africans,” 133, 137–42, 144 on relationship between poetry and slavery, 147 “Sweet Meat Has Sour Sauce,” 133, 143–4 Task, The, 47, 81–4, 131, 195 “To William Wilberforce, Esq.,” 129, 148–9 and treatment of slaves, 142–3 creoles language, 187 men’s relationships with black women, 184–5 in Schaw’s social hierarchy, 183 women, 173, 185–7 Cugoano, Ottobah, 11 Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, 145 Cumberland, Richard, The West Indian, 118–19 Day, Thomas, The Dying Negro, 131, 201 Defoe, Daniel, Colonel Jack, 28 Devonshire, John, 118 drama and abolitionism, 119–21, 123–8 Africans in, 110–11 ameliorationism in, 124 benevolent planters in, 124, 126–7 sentimental rhetoric in, 109–10, 113–14, 124–6, 128 slaves in, 110–11, 118–22, 124 Edgeworth, Maria, “The Grateful Negro,” 130 Edwards, Jonathan Jr., 194, 198, 207 Equiano, Olaudah, 11, 15–16, 43, 58, 199 Interesting Narrative, 56–7, 73

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Faulkner, Peter, 131 Felix (petitioner), 154–5 Ferriar, John, 110, 122 The Prince of Angola, 114, 118 Fox, William, 86–7, 134 Free African Society, 160, 165–6 free blacks blamed for causing pain for slaves, 206 institutions built by, 160 kidnapping of, 162–3, 166–7 living conditions, 166, 205 petitions by, 160 as victims of cruelty, 191 freed slaves in Britain, 76–7 cruelty and, 192 in drama, 124 freedom/liberty and abolition, 25 and affect, 82, 155–6 and antislavery, 75, 155 in Britain vs. colonies, 72–3, 83–4, 88 cruelty of, 208 Mansfield judgment and, 76–7 in petitions, 163 slavery vs., 84 Freeman, Sambo, 155–6 Freemasons, black, 159–61 French Revolution, 153 Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen, 132 Fugitive Slave Law, 163–5 Gage, Thomas, 156 Garrison, William Lloyd, 209 Gentleman, Francis, 110, 114, 122 Oroonoko: or the Royal Slave, 113–14 Haitian Revolution, 98, 127, 153, 176, 199 Hall, Francis, 197 Hall, Prince, 156–7, 159–62 Hammond, James Henry, 203 Hampden, John, 84 Hargrave, Francis, 73, 77, 93 Hartley, David, 91, 93–6, 98–9, 101–4, 106 Observations on Man, 93–5, 104 Hawkesworth, John, 110, 112–14, 118, 122 Heath, James, 165 Henry, Patrick, 191

222

Affect and Abolition in the Anglo-Atlantic, 1770–1830

Hesketh, Harriot Cowper, Lady, 131, 133, 145, 148 Holbrook, Felix, 155–6 Holt, Sir John, 76, 83 Howard, John, 92 humanitarianism and abolitionism, 3–4, 190 and emancipation, 191, 206 and modernity, 88 humaneness, 190, 205, 206, 207–8 paternalism and, 190n5 sensibility and, 13, 50–51 sentimentalism and, 27 sympathy and, 45–6, 53–5, 57 Hume, David, 36, 60, 194n18 Treatise of Human Nature, 45 Hutchinson, Thomas, 154 Inchbald, Elizabeth, 116–17, 125 Inkle and Yarico (Colman), 40–42, 122–3 “Inkle and Yarico” (Steele), 28, 36–9 Inkle and Yarico stories, 122n30 Jackson, Andrew, 203 Jefferson, Thomas, 157, 198, 206 John, St, 84 Johnson, Samuel, 75 Jones, Absalom, 165 Kotzebue, August Friedrich Ferdinand von Lover’s Vows (Das Kind der Liebe), 125 The Negro Slaves (Die Negersklaven), 110, 123, 125–8 liberalism and individual freedom, 165 in petitions, 152, 156–7 republicanism vs., 152–3 Locke, John, 152, 158 Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 93–4 Long, Edward, 182 The History of Jamaica, 180, 185, 187 Macauley, Zachary, 197 Mackenzie, Henry, 8 Julia de Roubigné, 10 McLeod, Alexander, 195, 197 Madison, James, 165, 205 Mancke, Elizabeth, 72

Mandeville, Bernard, 2 “Fable of the Bees,” 36 Mansfield judgment, 11–12, 73, 76–8, 83, 120–21, 131; see also Somerset v. Stewart decision manumission(s), 151, 185, 204, 206–7; see also freedom/liberty Marivaux, Pierre de, Isle des Esclaves, L’, 118 market; see also capitalism and awareness of slavery’s cruelty, 35 and connections with distant others, 31, 33–5, 51 corruption of behavior in, 35–6 and sugar production, 139 masters, see slaveholders/-holding Meade, William, 202 mercantilism; see also trade/commerce and chattel slavery, 5 criticism of, 80 and slave trade, 75 Middle Passage, 4, 6, 56, 158, 177 Miller, Samuel, 206 Moore, William, 197 More, Hannah and false sensibility, 118 and freedom in England, 73, 88 and language of contagion, 98 and personified figures for emotions, 63, 65–6 and practical sympathy, 55 Slavery, a Poem, 16–17, 45, 61, 64, 84–5, 91, 114–15 The Sorrows of Yamba, 202 Morse, Jedidiah, 201–2 Native Americans, removal of, 202–3 Newton, John, 136, 142–3, 145, 147 Olney Hymns, 131 Nugent, Maria, 187 Opie, Amelia, “The Negro Boy’s Tale,” 134 Oroonoko (novel; Behn), 111 Oroonoko (play), 16, 28 and abolition movement, 114 and The Benevolent Planters, 123 Ferriar’s version, 114 Gentleman’s version, 113–14 Hawkesworth’s version, 112–13 and The Negro Slaves, 126

Index popularity of, 118 Southerne’s version, 112–16 Paine, Thomas, The Rights of Man, 132 Pasquin, Anthony, see Williams, John pathos in 1777 petition, 1 dramatic, 110–11, 114 in poetry, 137 sentimentalization beyond, 110 subject/object differentiation in, 50 Pennsylvania Abolition Society, 162–3, 166 petitions by Absalom Jones, 165–7 affect in, 155–7, 161 by Belinda, 158–9, 167 characteristics of petitioners, 151–2 to Congress, 163–5 in Connecticut, 157, 158–9 by Felix, 154–5 by Holbrook et al., 155–6 in Massachusetts, 1–2, 154–7, 159–62 “memorial of Great Prince, Little Prince [et al.],” 158 by Nicholson et al., 163–5 by Prince Hall, 1–2, 156–7, 159–62 sentimental rhetoric in, 153, 161, 164, 167 by Swanwick, 151 “To His Excellency Thomas Gage” (1774), 156 Pinckney, Charles Cotesworth, 208–9 pity in abolitionist literature, 137–8 and economic interests, 141 and emancipation, 191 slave ownership and, 139–40 theories of, 138 plantations gender and, 172–3 hierarchies on, 172–3, 183 humanization of master-slave bond on, 12 owned/run by Britons, 80–81 power structures on, 124 Pope, Alexander (actor), 116–18 Pope, Alexander, Dunciad, 90 Priestley, Joseph, 94–6, 104, 106 Prince, Mary, The History of Mary Prince, a West African Slave, 186

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Pritchet, Thomas, 164 proslavery ameliorationism and, 190n5 and capability of refined sensibility, 15 Quarles, Benjamin, 157–8 race class vs., 175n15, 177 discourse of sensibility and, 179–80 gender and, 172–3, 175 grateful slave and, 172 as innate, vs. environmentalism, 180 and miscegenation, 184 and “noble negro,” 26 and power, 173, 175n15 and proslavery ideologies, 176 and insensibility/sentience, 179–80, 182–3 and sympathy, 183, 187 Ramsay, James, 123 Rational Dissenters, 100 Raynal, Abbé, 31, 36, 43 Histoire des deux Indes, 13n19 Richardson, Samuel, 6, 94–5, 106 Pamela, 6–7 Robinson, Mary, “The Progress of Liberty,” 105 romance narratives amorous bondage in, 9 language of contagion in, 97–8 master-slave dialectic in, 11 sentimental representation conventions in, 6 Roscoe, William, 115–18 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 133 Rush, Benjamin, 193, 198–9 Rutherford, Robert, 165 Schaw, Janet, Journal of a Lady of Quality, 173, 176–88 Scott, Sarah, The History of Sir George Ellison, 42, 186 sensibility; see also sentimentalism/ sentimentality and abolitionism, 89, 172 in abolitionist poetry, 105–6 discourse of, 89, 92, 105–6, 178–80, 183; see also sentimental rhetoric and economics of slavery, 181–2

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Affect and Abolition in the Anglo-Atlantic, 1770–1830

and racial difference, 179–80, 182–3 self-interest and, 50–51, 124–5, 178–9 and violence of slave system, 182–3 sentimental literature and abolitionism, 27–8 depictions of slavery in, 23–4, 36, 172 enslavement/servitude in romance discourse, 9–11 lack of realism in, 27 and pleasure in others’ suffering, 7–8 as propaganda vs. literature, 26 sentimental rhetoric; see also sensibility: discourse of as cover for ambition to conquer, 14 as differentiating among humans, 172 and management of slaves, 181 in petitions, 153, 161, 164, 167 and rejection of false sensibility, 115–17 sentimentalism/sentimentality and abolition, 23–7 and antislavery, 4 attacks on, 117 and capitalism, 43 and humanitarianism, 27, 30 and political action, 115–16, 123 power dynamics of, 9 Sharp, Granville, 29–30, 75–6, 80, 155 The Just Limitation of Slavery in the Laws of God, 78 A Representation of the Injustice and Dangerous Tendency of Tolerating Slavery, 76–7 Sitgreaves, Samuel, 165 slave trade abolition of, 89, 191, 204 abolition vs. emancipation, 80 as betrayal of Christianity, 75 blamed for slavery, 204 capitalism and, 43, 71 colonization and, 191 and commodification of human life, 88 England and, 85–6 greed and, 35 participation in, and feeling, 47 self-interest and, 33 Slave Trade Act of 1807, 47–8 slaveholders/-holding Britons and, 80–81 colonization as escape from, 204

Fugitive Slave Law and, 163 master-slave relationship, 1, 9–13, 182 and pity, 139–40 self-interest, and protection of slaves, 208 and violent emotion, 98–9 slavery changes in feelings regarding, 23–30 cruelty of, 191–2, 195, 207 drama audiences and, 111 in England vs. colonies, 78, 155 mercantile system and, 5 natural rights theory and, 56, 132–3 sensibility and, 172 sentimental depictions used to support, 23–4 slaves; see also freed slaves; petitions as commodities, 143 compensation/reparation from masters, 156 creole women and, 186–7 dramatic representations of, 110–11, 118–22 and family, 183–4 management of, 12 numbers of, 176 resistance/rebellions, 81, 98, 173, 176–7, 181–3, 198–9, 201 sensibility vs. insensibility of, 15–16, 173, 176–7, 180–81, 183 sentimental depictions of, 172 treatment of, 142–3 women and, 99–101, 171–3, 175 Smith, Adam, 35–6, 60 The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 52–3, 138, 194 The Wealth of Nations, 42, 80 Snelgrave, William, 41 Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 30, 58, 80–81, 145 Somerset v. Stewart decision, 23, 72, 74, 77, 82, 155; see also Mansfield judgment Sons of Liberty, 155 Southerne, Thomas and false sensibility, 118 as man of feeling, 112–14 More on, 115 The Tragedy of Oroonoko, 111–15 Southey, Robert, 133

Index “The Sailor, who had served in the Slave Trade,” 134 spectators as controller of scene/discourse, 14 cruelty and, 196–7 of pain/suffering, 1–3, 5, 7–8, 11 perverse gaze of sympathy, 9 Spence, Thomas, The Real Rights of Man, 132 Stamp Act (1765), 155 Steele, Richard, 13n19, 122–3 “Inkle and Yarico,” 28, 36–9 Sterne, Laurence, A Sentimental Journey, 8, 120 suffering aestheticization of, 2–3, 7 and challenges to vs. reinforcement of slavery, 190 commercial calculation of, 55–6 growth of empathy regarding, 23, 190 slaves’ capacity/incapacity for, 176–7, 180–81, 183 of slaves compared to poor, 208 Swanwick, John, 151 Swift, Jonathan, Gulliver’s Travels, 177 sympathetic appeals addressees of, 59, 62–3 as performative, 45–7, 57–63 in petitions, 166–7 sympathetic identification abolitionism and, 47 in abolitionist poetry, 45, 65 and amelioration, 58 differentiation and, 13, 50 sympathy and antislavery, 172, 190 and communal identification, 45 contagion and, 98 humanitarianism and, 45–6 and morality, 194–6 racial differences and, 183, 187 sadomasochism and, 8–9 self-interest and, 180 Taylor, John, 206 “Theatrica,” 117 Thornton, William, 166, 204–6 trade/commerce; see also mercantilism benefits of, 79–81, 85–6

225

of British with Atlantic colonies, 72–3 and finance capital, 87–8 freedom and, 79, 85, 87 and humanitarian sensibility, 13 and moral corruption, 87 and race, 4 Turner, Nat, 199 W. P., The Jamaican Lady, 186 Walke, Anthony, 195–6 Walsh, Robert, 207 Washington, George, 163 Wedgwood, Josiah, 58, 81 Wesley, John, 35 Wheatley, Phillis, 154 white women and black slaves, 171–3, 175 creoles, 185–6 participation in slavery, 174 in plantation societies, 171, 175, 187–8 and sensibility, 171–2, 176, 187–8 whites and cruelty, 193, 199–200 emotion and, 152 numerical ratio to black slaves, 176 Wilberforce, William 1789 speech in Parliament on abolishing slave trade, 145 bill for the abolition of the slave trade, 58, 86, 91–3, 145, 148 and emancipation, 149 use of rhetoric of sensibility, 92 Williams, Helen Maria, 55–6, 63–6 A Poem on the Bill Lately Passed for Regulating the Slave Trade, 45, 61 Williams, John, 116–18 The Children of Thespis, 118 Witherspoon, John, 195 Woolman, John, “Some Considerations on the Keeping of Negroes, Part II,” 32–5 Wordsworth, William, Lyrical Ballads, 49 Wright, Thomas, 146 Yearsley, Ann, 61, 63, 66 A Poem on the Inhumanity of the SlaveTrade, 45, 53–5, 62, 65, 86 Yorke-Talbot opinion, 76 Zong massacre, 29, 56, 64, 88