Ancient Slavery and Abolition: From Hobbes to Hollywood 9780199574674

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CLASSICAL PRESENCES General Editors Lorna Hardwick

James I. Porter

CLASSICAL PRESENCES The texts, ideas, images, and material culture of ancient Greece and Rome have always been crucial to attempts to appropriate the past in order to authenticate the present. They underlie the mapping of change and the assertion and challenging of values and identities, old and new. Classical Presences brings the latest scholarship to bear on the contexts, theory, and practice of such use, and abuse, of the classical past.

Britannia, flanked by Charity and Justice, and overseen by a bust of William Wilberforce, celebrates the abolition of the slave trade in 1807. No slaves are visible. Watercolour by Henry Singleton.

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Ancient Slavery and Abolition From Hobbes to Hollywood

Edited by E D I T H H A L L , R I C H A R D A L S TO N , AND JUSTINE MC CONNELL

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Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox2 6dp Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Auckland Cape Town Dar es Salaam Hong Kong Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Nairobi New Delhi Shanghai Taipei Toronto With offices in Argentina Austria Brazil Chile Czech Republic France Greece Guatemala Hungary Italy Japan Poland Portugal Singapore South Korea Switzerland Thailand Turkey Ukraine Vietnam Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York # Oxford University Press 2011 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted Database right Oxford University Press (maker) First published 2011 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this book in any other binding or cover and you must impose the same condition on any acquirer British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Library of Congress Control Number: 2011929289 Typeset by SPI Publisher Services, Pondicherry, India Printed in Great Britain on acid-free paper by MPG Books Group, Bodmin and King’s Lynn ISBN 978–0–19–957467–4 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2

Acknowledgements This is the fourth book to have been produced by the Centre for the Reception of Greece and Rome at Royal Holloway, University of London. The essays it includes began life as some of the papers delivered at an international conference in order at Royal Holloway and the British Library in December 2007, in order to celebrate the bicentenary of the parliamentary act which abolished the slave trade in the British colonies in 1807; some of the other talks delivered at the conference are being published separately in a companion volume entitled Reading Ancient Slavery. Many individuals have contributed to the emergence of this work. We are particularly grateful to Leanne Hunnings, then a Ph.D. student at the Centre, whose idea the conference was and who worked so determinedly to ensure that it ran smoothly. Ahuvia Kahane, Sarah Butler, and Laura Proffitt provided staunch support. The contributions to the conference discussions made by William Fitzgerald, Lorna Hardwick, Sandra Joshel, Deborah Kamen, Patrice Rankine, and Greg Thalmann were invaluable. Fiona Macintosh and Naomi Setchell have offered continuous help. Katie Billotte rescued us when all seemed lost on the acquisition of certain images. Lottie Parkyn provided essential last-minute practical and moral support. At OUP, Hilary O’Shea and Dorothy McCarthy have been continuously encouraging, and the comments of the anonymous Readers proved exceptionally useful. Heather Watson’s copy-editing was wonderfully scrupulous, Angela Anstey-Holroyd’s proofreading eagle-eyed, and Brenda Hall’s index as magnificent as ever. Generous financial support was forthcoming from the Gilbert Murray Trust, the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies, and the Classical Association. But without the extraordinary generosity of one remarkable individual the conference could never have been held at all, and that individual is a lifelong campaigner against social injustice, Professor Marianne McDonald. We are more grateful to her than we can say.

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Contents List of Contributors List of Illustrations

1. Introduction: ‘A Valuable Lesson’ Edith Hall 2. The Good Master: Pliny, Hobbes, and the Nature of Freedom Richard Alston

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3. Appropriations of Spartan Helotage in British Anti-Slavery Debates of the 1790s Stephen Hodkinson and Edith Hall

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4. The Influence of Classical Ideas on the Anti-Slavery Debate at the Cape of Good Hope, South Africa (1795–1834) John Hilton

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5. A Stronger Muse: Classical Influences on Eighteenth-Century Abolitionist Poetry Brycchan Carey

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6. The Politics of Classicism in the Poetry of Phillis Wheatley Emily Greenwood 7. Between Victimhood and Agency: Nydia the Slave in Bulwer’s The Last Days of Pompeii Leanne Hunnings 8. The Problem with Prometheus: Myth, Abolition, and Radicalism Edith Hall 9. Recollecting Aristotle: Pro-Slavery Thought in Antebellum America and the Argument of Politics Book I S. Sara Monoson

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10. The Auctoritas of Antiquity: Debating Slavery through Classical Exempla in the Antebellum USA Margaret Malamud

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11. Yankee She-Men and Octoroon Electra: Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve on Slavery, Race, and Abolition David Lupher and Elizabeth Vandiver

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12. Universal Slave Revolts: C. L. R. James’s Use of Classical Literature in The Black Jacobins Lydia Langerwerf

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13. Eumaeus and Eurycleia in the Deep South: Odyssean Slavery in Sommersby Justine McConnell

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Postscript: Slavery, Abolition, Modernity, and the Past Ahuvia Kahane

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Consolidated Bibliography Index

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List of Contributors Richard Alston is Professor of Roman History at Royal Holloway, University of London. He has published extensively on Roman imperial and early Byzantine history. His current research foci are cultures of imperialism (ancient and modern) and historical philosophy. The work in this volume stems from interests in theories of the self. Brycchan Carey is Reader in English Literature at Kingston University, London. He is the author of British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility: Writing, Sentiment, and Slavery, 1760–1807 (2005); he is the editor (with Peter Kitson) of Slavery and the Cultures of Abolition: Essays Marking the British Abolition Act of 1807 (2007) and (with Markman Ellis and Sara Salih) of Discourses of Slavery and Abolition: Britain and its Colonies, 1760–1838 (2004). He has also authored many articles on slavery and abolition for scholarly journals and books. He is currently completing a book on the origins and development of Quaker anti-slavery rhetoric in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and planning future work on the intersection of science and culture in the long eighteenth century. Emily Greenwood is Associate Professor of Classics at Yale University. She is the author of two books: Thucydides and the Shaping of History (2006); and Afro-Greeks: Dialogues between Anglophone Caribbean Literature and Classics (2010). She has also co-edited two volumes of essays: Reading Herodotus: A Study of the logoi in Book 5 of Herodotus’ Histories (with Liz Irwin), and Homer in the Twentieth Century: Between World Literature and the Western Canon (with Barbara Graziosi). Edith Hall After holding posts at the Universities of Cambridge, Reading, Oxford, and Durham, in 2006 Edith Hall was appointed to a Research Chair in the Faculty of Arts at Royal Holloway, where she directs the Centre for the Reception of Greece and Rome. She is also Co-Founder and Consultant Director of the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama in Oxford. Her books include Inventing

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the Barbarian (1989), a commentary on Aeschylus’ Persians (1996), Greek Tragedy and the British Theatre (2005, with Fiona Macintosh), The Theatrical Cast of Athens (2006), The Return of Ulysses: A Cultural History of Homer’s Odyssey (2008), Greek Tragedy: Suffering under the Sun (2010), and, co-edited with Phiroze Vasunia, India, Greece and Rome 1757–2007 (2010). John Hilton is Professor of Classics at the University of KwaZuluNatal, Howard College, Durban, South Africa. He has taught at a number of other institutions, including Fort Hare University, Alice, South Africa. His publications include Alma Parens Originalis: The Receptions of Classical Literature and Thought in Africa, Europe, The United States, and Cuba (co-ed.) (2007); Apuleius: Rhetorical Works (co-trans.) (2001), An Introduction to Latin 1–4 (1990–1), and numerous chapters and articles on various topics, including the reception of Roman Law in South Africa, the ancient novel (Heliodorus), Azania and Latin linguistics. Forthcoming is A Commentary on Books 3 and 4 of Leucippe and Clitophon by Achilles Tatius. He is a past Chairperson of the Classical Association of South Africa, and is a member of the Advisory Boards of The Classical Receptions Journal, Acta Classica, and Nomina Africana. He has been reviews editor of the international classics journal Scholia and editor of the electronic reviews journal Scholia Reviews since 1991. Stephen Hodkinson is Professor of Ancient History at the University of Nottingham and Director of its Institute for the Study of Slavery. After studying both ancient and modern history, he has published widely on the socio-economic history of ancient Greece, with a particular focus on the Spartan agrarian economy and its reception in modern thought. His publications include Property and Wealth in Classical Sparta (2000) and Sparta: Comparative Approaches (ed.) (2009). He is currently co-editing The Oxford Handbook of Greek and Roman Slaveries and volumes on Slaves and Religions in GraecoRoman Antiquity and the Modern Americas and on Sparta in Modern Thought. Leanne Hunnings was awarded her doctorate at Royal Holloway, University of London in 2008 for her AHRC-funded thesis ‘Imagining the Ancient Greek Slave: Death, Social Death, and Resurrection’, which examined the links between the representation of slavery and

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death in archaic and classical Greek literature and its reception during the abolition debates in English literature, 1780–1840. Her academic interests include the role of women, ethnicity, and slavery as an ancient and modern social phenomenon. She has taught in Ireland and Spain, and contributed to human rights, global citizenship, and social justice education in the UK secondary school sector in 2010. Ahuvia Kahane is Professor of Greek and Director of the Humanities and Arts Research Centre at Royal Holloway, University of London. His most recent book is Diachronic Dialogues: Authority and Continuity in Homer and the Homeric Tradition (2006). Among his forthcoming publications are Epic, Novel, and the Progress of Antiquity and Antiquity and the Ruin (a special issue of European Review of History Revue Europe´enne d’histoire). His research interests include questions of historical time, representation, genre as well as the reception of antiquity in the history of ideas. Lydia Langerwerf has successfully submitted her doctoral dissertation ‘“No freer than the helots”: Messenian rebel behaviour in Pausanias’ Messeniaka in comparative perspective’ to the University of Nottingham. In addition to her membership of Nottingham’s Institute for the Study of Slavery, Lydia participated in the Forschungen zur antiken Sklaverei project at the Akademie der Wissenschaften und Literatur in Mainz. She has recently co-edited a volume on classical heroism entitled Zero to Hero, Hero to Zero: In Search of the Classical Hero (2010). David Lupher is Professor of Classics at the University of Puget Sound in Washington State. He is the author of Romans in a New World: Classical Models in Sixteenth-Century Spanish America (2003). His translation of Alberico Gentili’s De Armis Romanis is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. Justine McConnell is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Northwestern University, Illinois. Her AHRC-funded doctorate, supervised by Edith Hall, examined postcolonial responses to the Homeric Odyssey, with a particular interest in the themes of identity, displacement, and homecoming as explored by authors of ultimately African origins. It is now under contract to OUP. In Autumn 2009 she was a Mellon–Sawyer Ph.D. fellow at Northwestern, and has been

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a sessional Lecturer at Reading University and a Postdoctoral Fellow at the Centre for the Reception of Greece and Rome at Royal Holloway. Margaret Malamud is Professor of Ancient History and Islamic studies at New Mexico State University. She is co-editor of and contributor to Imperial Projections: Ancient Rome in Modern Popular Culture (2001; paperback 2005) and author of Ancient Rome and Modern America (2009). She is currently researching the engagement of African Americans with the classics, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. S. Sara Monoson is Associate Professor of Classics and Political Science and Chair of the Department of Classics at Northwestern University, Illinois, where she also directs the Classical Traditions Initiative. She is the author of Plato’s Democratic Entanglements: Athenian Politics and the Practice of Philosophy (Princeton University Press, 2000), which was awarded the 2001 American Political Science Association’s Foundations Book Prize for Best First Book in Political Theory. She has also written articles on Athenian democratic thought, Thucydides, and international relations theory. Her current project examines creative appropriations of Socrates in post-war American popular media. Elizabeth Vandiver, Clement Biddle Penrose Associate Professor of Latin and Classics at Whitman College, received her Ph.D. from the University of Texas at Austin. Her most recent book, Stand in the Trench, Achilles: Classical Receptions in British Poetry of the Great War, appeared in OUP’s ‘Classical Presences’ series in 2010. She has published two previous books and articles on a variety of topics, including Herodotus; Catullus; Livy; classical reception; and translation.

List of Illustrations Cover David Oyelowo as Prometheus in a production of the Aeschylean Prometheus Bound, directed by James Kerr, for the Aquila Theater Company at the Classic Stage Company, New York (March 2007). Photograph by Richard Termine Frontispiece Drawing with watercolour by Henry Singleton, c.1807, commemorating the abolition of the slave trade. # Trustees of the British Museum

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Figures 1.1 Engraved portrait of American author William Wells Brown (1850s)

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1.2 Thomas Clarkson in 1828. Print by Charles Turner after a painting by Alfred Chalon. # Trustees of the British Museum

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1.3 ‘Johnny Newcome in love in the West Indies’ (1808). Anti-abolitionist satirical print, published by William Holland in London. # Trustees of the British Museum

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1.4 Photograph of Alexander Crummell, Episcopalian pastor and abolitionist, c.1880

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1.5 Anonymous abolitionist etching which depicts abolition as an epiphany of Britannia, c.1833, originally circulated by the ‘Female Society for Birmingham for the Relief of British Negro Slaves’. # Trustees of the British Museum

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1.6 Hand-coloured etching (14 May 1792) printed by Richard Newton and published by William Holland, satirizing the campaign to end the British slave trade by suggesting that abolitionists were encouraging slave rebellions on the West Indian plantations. William Wilberforce is shown wearing a fool’s cap, and ass’s ears like Midas; a black man ties a blindfold around his eyes; a female figure representing justice points her sword towards an English

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List of Illustrations sailor and an English planter while she holds a notice which reads ‘Not Guilty’. # Trustees of the British Museum

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Sculptural drawing in black chalk by Friedrich Overbeck (c.1833), depicting Servitude as a kneeling slave, burdened with a heavy basket, and threatened by a man with a rod. # Trustees of the British Museum

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Undated pen and ink drawing with grey wash by John Flaxman (1755–1826), a design for a monument. Liberty frees an African slave and gives him the pilleus or Roman freedman’s cap. # Trustees of the British Museum

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Abolitionist oval cameo in jasper ware, modelled by William Hackwood and set in a gilt mount, from the factory of Josiah Wedgwood, bearing the legend ‘Am I not a man and a brother?’ (c.1787) # Trustees of the British Museum

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1.10 Lydia Maria Child in the 1860s, reproduction of a photograph held in the Library of Congress

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William Wilberforce in 1791, holding a document headed ‘Abolition of the Slave Trade’. Mezzotint print by Charles Hodges after a painting by John Rising. # Trustees of the British Museum

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Title-page of ‘An Abstract of the Evidence delivered before a Select Committee of the House of Commons in The Years 1790 and 1791 on the part of the Petitioners for the Abolition of the Slave Trade’. The emblem reproduces a print, probably by Thomas Bewick, published by the Society in Newcastle for Promoting the Abolition of the Slave-Trade (1789). # Trustees of the British Museum

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Frontispiece to Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects. Published in London by Archibald Bell (1773). # Trustees of the British Museum

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Engraving of the suicide scene from The Last Days of Pompeii, a dramatization of Bulwer-Lytton’s novel by John Oxenford, at the Queen’s Theatre, London, reproduced from The Illustrated London News, 27 January 1872. The show was produced by John Ryder, and Nydia was played by Henrietta Hodson

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Hercules liberating Prometheus. Cover of Poems on the Abolition of the Slave Trade, by James Montgomery, James Grahame, and E. Benger, with engravings from pictures by Robert Smirke,

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engraved by Abraham Raimbach. London (1809). Reproduced by permission of the Bodleian Library, Oxford

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David Oyelowo as Prometheus in a production of the Aeschylean Prometheus Bound, directed by James Kerr, for the Aquila Theater Company at the Classic Stage Company, New York (March 2007). Photograph by Richard Termine

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‘Flagellation of a Female Samboe Slave’, etched and engraved by William Blake. Plate in J. G. Stedman’s Narrative of a Five Years’ Expedition against the Revolted Slaves of Surinam, vol. I (London 1796). # Trustees of the British Museum

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John Flaxman, ‘The Storm’ (1792–4), showing Prometheus with Oceanids in the Aeschylean Prometheus Bound. Pencil, pen, and ink on light grey laid paper. # Royal Academy of Arts, London; photograph by Prudence Cuming Associates

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William Charles Macready, sketched by Martha Macready, in the leading role of Thomas Talfourd’s Ion at Covent Garden (1836). Reproduced courtesy of the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama

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Painting by Thomas Cole, Prometheus Bound (1847). The original is in the collection of the Fine Arts Museums, San Francisco

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Print by George Baxter (1852) showing three statues, with Hiram Powers’ statue The Greek Slave in the centre, at the Great Exhibition of 1851. # Trustees of the British Museum

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Cover of American Anti-Slavery Almanac for 1844, showing a slave woman and her baby assaulted by an eagle. Reproduced courtesy of Charles L. Blockson Afro-American Collection, Temple University Libraries

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Satirical print allegorizing the censorship of the Rheinische Zeitung (1843) by reference to the Aeschylean Prometheus Bound. The newspaper’s editor, Karl Marx, is assaulted by the eagle of Prussian censorship, in the presence of a ‘chorus’ of Rhine maidens instead of Oceanids. Reproduced courtesy of the International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam

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8.10 Harriet Jacobs, writer and abolitionist. Photograph (1894) reproduced from Jean Fagan Yellin’s 1987 edition of Incidents

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List of Illustrations in the Life of a Slave Girl; Jacobs’ book was originally published in 1861

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John W. Jones, (a) Slave mother and child and (b) Bank notes # John W. Jones, artist and author of the book and exhibition Confederate Corrency: The Color of Money: Images of Slavery in Confederate and Southory States Currency 10.1 Portrait of Sengbe Pieh (Joseph Cinque´), born in Sierra Leone and hero of the Amistad revolt, by Nathaniel Jocelyn (1840)

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10.2 ‘Portraits of Hannibal and Cyprian, with Vignettes Illustrating African Character, and Wrongs’, North American anti-slavery poster (1836). Library of Congress

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10.3 The Modern Medea, wood engraving after Thomas Noble’s painting Margaret Garner, reproduced from Harper’s Weekly, 18 May 1867

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11.1 Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve, American classical scholar, in the 1890s. Photograph reproduced courtesy of The Johns Hopkins University

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12.1 C. L. R. James in the mid-1980s. Photograph by Lance Watson, courtesy of the C. L. R. James Institute

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12.2 Harriet Martineau in about 1835, shortly after abolition in Britain 12.3 ‘Toussaint reading the Abbe´ Raynal’s work’, reproduced from J. R. Beard, The Life of Toussaint L’Ouverture, the Negro Patriot of Hayti: Comprising an Account of the Struggle for Liberty in the Island, and a Sketch of Its History to the Present Period (London, 1853)

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13.1 Promotional image for the movie Sommersby, directed by Jon Amiel (1993)

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14.1 The Last Moments of John Brown (1884), by Thomas Hovenden. The original is in The Metropolitan Mueum of Art, New York

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1 Introduction ‘A Valuable Lesson’ Edith Hall

William Wells Brown, the first black American novelist, was also one of the first former slaves to authorize himself as a legitimate historical subject able to comment on the history of a nation that had denied him his own history from the outset (Fig. 1.1).1 His view of America and its history stemmed from his personal experience and his extended visit to Britain, where he arrived in 1849. He had already spent much of his life with the status of fugitive, after escaping as a young man from slavery on New Year’s Day 1834, no doubt partly inspired by the long-awaited abolition of slavery throughout the British dominions in August of the previous year. When Brown visited Nelson’s column, he looked at the relief sculpture adorning the south-facing side of its pedestal. He was struck by the depiction of an armed black seaman on the deck of the Victory, near the famous admiral as he died at the battle of Trafalgar,2 since the contribution of black soldiers to military achievements was consistently erased from monumental art in Brown’s homeland.3 Thinking about the narratives encoded on ancient Roman monuments which he had seen in Britain then prompted Brown to question the way that his white countrymen distorted their public history: I once stood upon the walls of an English city, built by enslaved Britons when Julius Caesar was their master. The image of the ancestors of President Lincoln and Montgomery Blair, as represented in Britain, was carved upon

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Figure 1.1 Author and abolitionist William Wells Brown in the 1850s

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monuments of Rome, where they may still be seen in their chains. Ancestry is something the white American should not speak of, unless with his lips to the dust.4

Through his reference to the Roman subjugation of Britain, Brown here subverted white North American patriots’ exceptionalist view of their past, a view which made extravagant claims about their country’s innovative nature as a republic heralding a new era in world history. This era, it was claimed, was taking human liberty to an unprecedented new level. Yet the world history of slavery, in Brown’s interpretation, made it impossible to assert that any such significant rupture had been created by the Founding Fathers. Within the continuity that he assumes, Brown ‘uncovers a foundational history’ of an older republic, Rome. This radical resituating of American history in a longer perspective, leading directly back to Roman colonization, reveals the current masters of America to be descendants of slaves themselves.5 Brown’s distinctive view of American history was a challenging one in its time, but it was to exert a major influence on black activists over subsequent decades. Pauline Hopkins reminded the readers of Colored American Magazine at the turn of the twentieth century that Cicero had advised Atticus not to purchase slaves from Britain because they were unable to learn music and were also particularly ugly.6 Moreover, the tradition of invoking classical precedent while discussing slavery was in Brown’s time, of course, not remotely new: Toussaint L’Ouverture, the leader of the Saint-Domingue slave revolt, must have encountered Spartacus when he included Plutarch’s Lives amongst his reading on the plantation in the years before the uprising.7 Indeed, ever since the Portuguese initiated the second great era of slavery in Europe in the 1440s, ancient slavery had provided the material from which commentators could draw comparisons and material in defence or repudiation of the practice. Joseph Vogt identified no fewer than ninety-six major publications on the problem of ancient slavery and its moral aspects (many of them dissertations written in Latin) published between the mid-sixteenth century and the late eighteenth, when abolitionism began to make serious headway.8 The most important of these, at least in terms of the depth of its impact, was Thomas Clarkson’s An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce

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of the Human Species, particularly the African. This treatise began life rather accidentally, and in the form of a Latin prose composition, or rather, according to its title-page, ‘a Latin Dissertation which was honoured with First Prize in the University of Cambridge for the year 1785’. (In fact, Clarkson had already won a BA competition, and he wanted to become the first person to win the MA competition as well.) In 1752 the two Members of Parliament for Cambridge University had founded and funded ‘Members’ Prizes’ for composition in Latin, to be awarded annually. The title was always to be decreed by the Vice-Chancellor, who seems to have had considerable control over the adjudication process as well.9 The founders of the prize are unlikely to have realized that one of the winning compositions was destined to prove a turning-point in the slavery debate in Britain and to play a major role in global history.10 In 1785 the new Vice-Chancellor, Peter Peckard, set the topical question ‘Is it lawful to make slaves of others against their will?’ (Anne Liceat Invitos in Servitutem Dare?) Peckard was a Latitudinarian and had become convinced of the righteousness of the abolitionist cause in 1783 when the captain of the slave ship Zong ordered over a hundred slaves to be thrown overboard alive in an insurance scam. As Master of Magdalene College, Peckard decided to use his status to add weight to the anti-slavery movement, and early in 1784 he delivered a galvanic University Sermon denouncing the slave trade to a congregation which included the student Thomas Clarkson (Fig. 1.2). When Peckard, by now Vice-Chancellor, set the prizeessay competition title a few months later, Clarkson remembered the sermon and made the astute decision not to confine his prose composition entirely to antiquity. He also addressed, in contrived Golden Latin prose, the topic of the Atlantic Slave Trade.11 It is not surprising that he won. Although Clarkson had previously known little about this subject, it engaged his curiosity and his researches paid off. After having written the essay (and collected the prize), he translated it into English so that it could gain a wider audience. This cost him some effort, since he added new information and worked from a longer Latin draft than had been submitted for the prize. Moreover, his arduous classical training made him better at writing sentences in Latin than in his native tongue, and the published

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Figure 1.2 Thomas Clarkson in 1828

version retains some notes in Latin and Greek.12 But in 1786, the English version of the essay was eventually published. Clarkson’s treatise drew on earlier discussions of slavery, above all Some Historical Account of Guinea (1771) by the Philadelphian Quaker Anthony Benezet, but the richness of Clarkson’s repertoire of examples from ancient literature was partly a result of the form in which he was writing. Rarely has composition in the Latin language been put to such a progressive use. Clarkson’s choice of examples was also often highly original. They were to prove influential, shaping and informing the ways that slavery both ancient and more recent

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has been presented in academic and popular discourses virtually ever since. In his historical section in part I, Clarkson draws on Homer, Cicero, and Tacitus for categories of ancient slaves, on Thucydides to illustrate piracy, on the relationship between Odysseus and Eumaeus in the Odyssey,13 and a wide range of other sources including Herodotus, Xenophon, Demosthenes, Sextus Empiricus, Aristophanes’ Plutus, Aristotle, Plutarch, and Plautus (Stichus and Casina). He is also interested in the ancient authors who themselves belonged to the slave class, invoking a canonical list that still resurfaces today: the fable composers Aesop (whose choice of genre is defended) and Phaedrus,14 the philosopher Epictetus, the poet Alcman, and the comedian Terence: these examples, according to Clarkson (ibid.) ‘afford a valuable lesson to those who have been accustomed to form too precipitate a judgment on the abilities of men’.15 The relationship between Peckard’s incendiary sermon and Clarkson’s prize essay, which saw what ‘a valuable lesson’ ancient slaves could teach the world of the 1780s, illustrates well the two groups into which discussions of ancient slavery in both Europe and America were by this time tending to fall. One was highly polemical, and based on Christian scripture. Some Christian writers defended slavery by adducing evidence of its existence in the Old Testament or through Pauline and primitive patristic theology, while Christian abolitionists stressed the correlation between the establishment of Christianity and the historical decline of Roman slavery. Some argued that the moral stance of Christians had been the crucial factor in eradicating ancient slavery, and that Christianity had the potential to repeat this noble achievement.16 But the other group of discussions, of which Clarkson’s treatise is an example and which in an increasingly secular age came to overshadow the Christian controversy, placed more emphasis on pagan antiquity than on the Church Fathers. The universal assumption in those days was that ancient Greece and Rome were societies based on slavery (the still ongoing argument between Marxists, Weberians, and other economic historians on this issue had not yet commenced); the question, rather, was whether this was a model that could or should be imitated.17 As early as the sixteenth century, the French legal philosopher Jean Bodin anticipated the Enlightenment argument that the disappearance of slavery in mainland Europe was incontrovertible evidence of modern

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superiority over the ancients.18 Yet amongst the earlier specialist classical scholars to write at length on ancient slavery, the abolitionist voices were certainly in the minority. The more typical opinion was ¨ ber that expressed in his 1793 neo-humanist essay on pedagogy, ‘U das Studium des klassischen Altertums’ by Wilhelm von Humboldt, who praised ancient Greek education and culture, and argued that the achievements of ancient civilization were made possible by the institutionalization of slavery.19 If the achievements of ancient civilization were made possible by the ancient availability of coerced labour, then the remains of ancient civilization could be made to serve the requirements of slave-owners during the transatlantic trade and antebellum period. On its most simple level, this took the form of an identification of the slave traders’ activities with those of Republican Romans who had conquered Africa, especially Publius Cornelius Scipio, later ‘Africanus’ from his victory over Hannibal at the Battle of Zama in 202 bce. One Bristol slave ship called the Scipio was voyaging to Gambia in 1734.20 More bizarrely, although in South Africa there was a taste for calling slaves by ancient Greek names (e.g. Mentor and Adonis),21 in Europe slaves themselves were named after the ancient Roman conquerors of Africa. The Duke of Orleans had a favourite child slave whom he called Scipio,22 and the Earl of Suffolk’s black slave boy ‘Scipio’ was awarded a rather grand gravestone, which can still be seen in Henbury churchyard.23 An English anti-abolitionist satirical print of 1808 gives a black family a whole set of classical names fused with names associated with slave rebellions or slaves in fiction (Fig. 1.3): Lucretia Diana Newcome, Penelope Mimbo Newcome, Cuffy Cato Newcome, Caesar Cudjoe Newcome, Helena Quashebah Newcome, Aristides Juba Newcome, Hector Sammy Newcome, who ‘promises fair to be the Toussaint of his country’, and Hannibal Pompey Wampo Newcome. When Dickens attacked the continuation of slavery in America in Martin Chuzzlewit (first serialized 1843–4), the abused, now liberated slave whom the hero meets in chapter 17 is named Cicero.24 The neoclassical taste in architecture favoured by men made rich from the slave trade constituted a very slightly more sophisticated way of expressing the same identification of British colonial activities with those of ancient Greece and Rome; when the Bristol Society of Merchant Venturers rebuilt their Hall in 1783,

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Figure 1.3 Anti-abolitionist satire (1808): ‘Johnny Newcome in love in the West Indies’

it was in a distinctly classical style, like the stately homes built by eighteenth-century East Indiamen.25 The men who made fortunes from slavery also appropriated classical mythology as they defined and tried to dignify their activities; perhaps the most extraordinary example is the now infamous case of ‘The Voyage of the Sable Venus’. An important publication in the defence of slavery was Bryan Edwards’s History Civil and Commercial, of the British Colonies in the West Indies, which was first published in 1793 and ran into several editions.26 In the second volume, Edwards sidestepped the issue of sexual relationships between white men and black slave women (which, provided there was no official marriage, he implicitly condoned)27 by reproducing a poem which

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tackles the theme with what now seems breathtaking frivolity. It was penned in Jamaica in 1765 by Edwards’s private tutor there, the Revd Isaac Teale,28 and is a 26-stanza ode, celebrating the arrival of a female slave from Angola to the West Indies. The playfully erotic tone is set by the epigraph, a line from Virgil’s Eclogue 2.18: ‘The white blossom or privet falls, while the dark blueberries are picked’. In Virgil, this is addressed to a youth by a shepherd who is erotically fixated upon him. In Teale’s poem, the coy register is consolidated by conventional references to Erato, the Muse of love poetry, along with the love poets Sappho and Ovid. The ‘sable queen’ begins her journey in an inlaid ivory car drawn by winged fish, surrounded by peacocks, ostriches, and dolphins, soft breezes fluttering around her. Her skin surpasses ‘the raven’s plume, j Her breath the fragrant orange bloom’; she is as beautiful as the Venus of Florence (i.e. of Botticelli), and ‘at night’, we are with monstrous insensitivity told, it is impossible to tell the difference between white and black beauties. At this point the seagod assumes the disguise ‘of a Tar, j The Captain of a man of war’, and the sable Venus smiles at him with ‘mild consenting eyes’. The result is the birth of a mixed-race Cupid, before his mother arrives, to a rapturous reception, in Jamaica.29 Edwards commissioned an emerging book illustrator, Thomas Stothard, to provide a design for a plate to illustrate the poem, and the result is indeed an arresting near-parody of Botticelli’s ‘The Birth of Venus’ (1486). An almost naked and very dark, curvaceous woman, with a blank, unreadable facial expression, drifts at sea surrounded by uniformly white flying cherubs and muscular white male gods. The impact of the poem and the engraving together is not only to create an obscene travesty of what Africans really experienced on the Middle Passage, but to illustrate and legitimize white male fantasies about the black women in their possession. The ‘Voyage of the Sable Venus’ effaces all anxiety, violence, and coercion from the relationship, turning sexual intercourse with slaves, and indeed reproduction with them, into a wholly consensual affair: this Venus looks on her ‘Tar’ with ‘mild consenting’ eyes. Moreover, in an extraordinary allegorical move, Venus and Neptune come to stand for the entire institution of slavery itself, conceived as an ideal love affair which somehow unites the physical perfection of the African

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body with the desiring subject of the narrative, the male slave merchants and inheritors of the European cultural tradition.30 The abolition debate took place at a time when the school and university curriculum was dominated by the study of the Latin and Ancient Greek languages, with an emphasis on the composition of both prose and verse in these tongues. Perhaps inspired by Clarkson’s example,31 in 1794 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, then studying at Jesus College Cambridge, penned a Greek ode, with Pindaric and Aeschylean resonances. It deplores the slave trade by declaring Death a boon to those enduring slavery. Despite its unimpressive prosody and clumsy antitheses, it won the Browne Gold Medal for Greek verse composition:32 Abandon, O Death, the gates of darkness, And hasten to a race yoked to Ruin, You will not be greeted as a guest with cheek-tearing, Nor with lamentation, But with circling, foot-tapping choruses And with delightful songs. You are fearsome But nevertheless you dwell with Freedom, Hateful tyrant! Borne on your dusky wings, Alas! They look down on the swelling sea, Returning on feet that have wandered through the air, To the earth of their fatherland. There, beside fountains in citrus-groves, Lovers tell the ones they love All the dreadful things they suffered, Although human, at human hands.

But knowledge of the ancient languages could be used in support of exactly the opposite position in the abolition controversy, the justification of European enslavement of Africans. Africans’ alleged inability to learn the ancient languages of Greece and Rome was sometimes actually used to demonstrate that they were not humans worthy of liberty. In 1833 or 1834, at a time when American pro-slavery thinkers were very much on the defensive, the Senator for South Carolina, John C. Calhoun, notoriously declared at a Washington dinner party that only when he could ‘find a Negro who knew the Greek syntax’ could he be brought to ‘believe that the Negro was a human being and should

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be treated as a man’.33 The young black errand boy who overheard a discussion between two lawyers about the conversation, Alexander Crummell (Fig. 1.4), later said that it was this that motivated him to head for Cambridge University in England, where he indeed learned Greek as part of his studies in theology at Queens’ College (1851–3). It was the special status of instruction in the Greek and Latin languages

Figure 1.4 Alexander Crummell, Episcopalian pastor and Greek scholar

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that drove the great educationalist Anna Julia Haywood Cooper, born into slavery in North Carolina in 1858, to insist on being allowed to study them when at the age of 9, after emancipation, she won a scholarship to St Augustine’s College at Raleigh, NC.34 W. E. Du Bois, the hero of black reconstruction, acknowledged late in life that it was by good luck that he had a teacher liberal enough to teach him Latin and Greek ‘rather than carpentry and the making of tin pans’, and thus allow him to apply for a Harvard scholarship and acquire the authority that only an elite education could confer on a black campaigner.35 Michele Ronnick has recently written a fascinating essay on the nineteenth-century white educationalists who went out of their way to teach Classics to black students and to campaign against lynching.36 She has previously traced the gripping history of several early black American scholars of Classics, above all in her 2004 photo-essay ‘12 Black Classicists’, her editions of the writings of the scholar and race leader William Sanders Scarborough, and her analysis of the importance of Virgil in the African American experience.37 These supplement Keith Sandiford’s research into eighteenth-century African writers in Britain, especially Ignatius Sancho, Ottobah Cugoano, and Olaudah Equiano, who were themselves anticipated by the tradition of African literacy and learning—including classical learning—that had already been established in the sixteenth century at the height of the Spanish Renaissance.38 The chapters in our volume certainly complement the work of Ronnick and Sandiford, but our approach also has affinities with that practised by Niall McKeown in his thought-provoking The Invention of Ancient Slavery; we, too, stress that the shapes taken by the classical world in any historical context are conditioned by both the general ideological needs of the time and the contingent political agendas of individuals. But McKeown’s book centres on the constructions, uses, and abuses of ancient slavery in scholarly discourse in the twentieth century, whereas we are looking at a more culturally diffuse range of media in which slavery was discussed, over a longer period, and in directly political ways, ranging from the instrumental evidence placed before parliamentary committees to the sometimes rather self-congratulatory national narrative and hagiographical literature on the elite leadership of the abolition movement which developed in the wake of the Slave Trade Act 1807. Of course there has always been

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a dialogue between the representation of ancient slavery in scholarship and in other arenas of discourse such as parliamentary speeches, poetry, fiction, film, and theatre, but it is the non-academic receptions in which we have been primarily interested. Our enterprise was initiated partly in response to David Brion Davis’s millennial plea against over-localizing and specializing tendencies in slavery studies, which have often isolated the institution from its broader cultural context.39 These tendencies have also risked the displacement of slavery from the centre of the history of human civilization to a dangerously peripheral position.40 The strategies that he recommends in countering these tendencies both involve— potentially or actually—the continuing study of slavery in the ancient Greek and Roman worlds. The first is a comparative method, which examines two different instances of slavery to discover more about them each through the drawing of contrasts, comparisons, and parallels. An example would be the comparison of Roman latifundia with Virginia plantations, or Rosivach’s comparison of agricultural slavery in the Northern colonies and in classical Attica.41 The other strategy identified by Davis is the transhistorical approach, which looks for common roots and patterns to slavery, connecting its different manifestations, for example by tracing the continuations and transformations of the forms taken by captive and coerced labour from the Roman to the Byzantine world,42 or stressing that slavery has been part of the painful dehumanizing cost of modernization: the seminal works here are Orlando Patterson’s Slavery and Social Death (1982) and Freedom in the Making of Western Culture (1991). There is, however, a third possible way to assist in keeping slavery in the centre of the radar through engagement specifically with the cultural presence of Greece and Rome in slavery, and that is to examine the part played by classical images, arguments, and models in later eras. This book is an attempt to explore this specific and fascinating area of cultural history. Its particular focus—Ancient slavery and Abolition—was partly a result of a desire to participate in the global celebration of the bicentenary of the 1807 legislation that abolished the slave trade in the British colonies. Thinking about that legislation not only reminded us, as Paul Cartledge had fourteen years earlier in a seminal article on the continuing importance of ancient slavery in modern thought, that the ‘British experience of

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inflicting slavery’ is still a ‘fairly recent’ one.43 But we were also keen not to ignore this important anniversary, as many contemporary British scholars did, probably as a result of what Page duBois has astutely described as ‘a certain embarrassment in relation to the scholarship of the past that celebrated revolutionary impulses and such seemingly suspect categories as universal humankind’, which now ‘seems sentimental, utopian, tainted by association with twentieth-century fantasies of progress’.44 As we delved into the vast range of materials relating to what even the most hard-nosed postmodernist cynic intellectual must acknowledge was a momentous Act of Parliament, we discovered a rich seam of imagery and argumentation, used by both apologists and opponents of slavery, which derived from ancient Greek and Roman sources. One genre in which this is particularly obvious is the printed political cartoon: Britannia appears in some of these, in a manner reminiscent of the Homeric Athena manifesting herself on the battleground before Troy, to intervene on the behalf of slave suppliants

Figure 1.5 Abolition as an epiphany of a philanthropic Britannia (c.1833)

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(Fig. 1.5). As an enthusiast for abolition, on the other hand, William Wilberforce is disparagingly portrayed, like Midas, with ass’s ears (Fig. 1.6). But Wilberforce persevered, and the passing of the 1807 Act did indeed owe much to him. It also (eventually) led to the Slavery Abolition Act 1833, which actually emancipated all slaves in British territories, much credit for which must go to Wilberforce’s younger colleague Thomas Fowell Buxton, who was himself spurred on by his ardent Quaker mother.45 The reverberations of the 1833 legislation were felt across the planet, and a classical idiom was felt by many to be particularly appropriate for the iconography which celebrated it; for example, it was in this year that the founder of the Nazarenes, the printmaker Friedrich Overbeck, created in Rome a classicizing sculptural allegory of ‘Servitude’ (Servitus) in which the

Figure 1.6 Wilberforce has ass’s ears: anti-abolitionist satire (1792)

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violence of the slave-owner contrasts starkly with the neoclassical grace and proportions of the total arrangement (Fig. 1.7). The single most important date in British political history in terms of abolition is actually midnight on 1 August 1834, when the Act finally came into effect and 800,000 slaves were liberated. But just as important as the topicality of abolition in a year that celebrated the earlier act, which prompted us to make it the subject of the inaugural conference of the Centre for the Reception of Greece and Rome at Royal Holloway and the British Library in December 2007, was our commitment to emphasizing the positive and progressive role that Classics has played culturally as much as the reactionary and repressive one. Classical materials are given their political agenda by those who interpret them, and the ancient Greek and Roman slave has been resuscitated quite as often by abolitionists of slavery as by its promoters and apologists. Not for nothing did Victor Hugo influentially compare John Brown, at the time of his execution, with Spartacus.46 As the archetypal hero of the abolitionist movement, Spartacus did indeed become much more culturally prominent towards the end of the eighteenth century, after Diderot and other French philosophes had praised the ancient gladiator; Voltaire, an inveterate pacifist, regarded Spartacus’ uprising as just about the only example he could accept of a just war.47 Bernard Saurin’s five-act heroic tragedy Spartacus (1760) was not particularly focused on the institution of slavery, but it was a local success in Paris, whereas our contributor Leanne Hunnings has shown elsewhere that the first truly British Spartacus was the hero of the short novel Spartacus: A Roman Story (1822), written by a young woman who was later to become an ardent abolitionist, Susanna Strickland;48 this Spartacus is a Christlike Thracian shepherd, whose every thought was ‘turned on forming some plan for the emancipation of himself and his comrades’.49 The British interest in Spartacus actually originated as a response to a famous passage in the Abbe´ Guillaume Raynal’s seminal 1770 Histoire de Deux Indes, which ran through 38 French and 18 English editions and was judged by Clarkson and several other prominent Britons to be ‘one of the primordial agents in promoting anti-slavery ideas in England during the 1770s’.50 The Abbe´ had faith in the capability of blacks to find their own rebel leader who could show the way to freedom, provided only that the response of the colonial

Figure 1.7 Servitude as victim, by Friedrich Overbeck (c.1833)

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superpowers was not comparable with that of the Roman Senate in 71 bce: ‘Where is this great man to be found, whom nature perhaps owes to the honour of the human species? Where is the new Spartacus who will not find Crassus?’51 Abolition happened when it did in Britain (1807–33), and subsequently in North America (1863–5), not through any lack of wouldbe Crassus types amongst slave-owners, but for a variety of economic and political reasons. These included industrialization,52 and the international shockwaves created by the 1789 revolution in France, where the sharp controversy over slavery in the revolutionary assemblies had pinpointed the crucial issues. It also resulted in the temporary French abolition of 1794, overturned by Napoleon in 1802.53 British supporters of the French revolution, such as Tom Paine, almost inevitably supported abolition; when John Flaxman contemplated designing a monument entitled ‘Liberty’, the iconography of the French revolution collided with the abolition issue in his conception of Liberty bestowing the red cap of liberty on a kneeling slave (Fig. 1.8). The red cap had become adopted by French republicans because they knew that in ancient Rome, when slaves were manumitted they were given a red ‘Phrygian’ cap (pileus or pilleus) to wear: servos ad pileum vocare (‘to call slaves to the cap’) was a summons to liberty, by which slaves were frequently called upon to take up arms with a promise of emancipation (Livy 24.32). In ancient art, for example on coins minted during the reign of Antoninus Pius (138–61 ce), the personified Libertas sometimes wore or carried the cap.54 But Flaxman’s kneeling slave is most reminiscent of the man in perhaps the most famous of all images from the abolition movement, the seal designed in Josiah Wedgwood’s factory in Stoke on Trent, with the enchained slave asking, ‘Am I not a man and a brother?’ The seal became widely available as a cameo (Fig. 1.9), available in either jasper or basalt to a newly consumerist society.55 A range of other pro-abolition artefacts, especially china and porcelain, helped to make the cause fashionable in elite and influential circles.56 Some impoverished white Britons, for example in late eighteenthcentury Bristol, resented what they perceived as the special case being made by abolitionists for slaves as opposed to other coerced labourers (for example, those press-ganged into naval service).57 But

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Figure 1.8 Liberty bestows the red cap of the Roman freedman on an African slave, by John Flaxman

intimate connections existed between the anti-slavery movement and agitators for other forms of social emancipation, not only women’s rights and the Irish question (on which see Chapter 3 below), but on electoral and factory reform (a connection stressed in James Walvin’s England, Slaves and Freedom (1986) and in Chapter 8 below). But even the most economically orientated historians have recently been re-emphasizing the importance of ideological shifts—alterations in sensibility and ethical beliefs—in creating the widely felt abhorrence necessary to passing of legislation at parliamentary level.58 Over the last two decades the brilliance of both Wilberforce and Clarkson as publicists has begun to be acknowledged, even by those most sceptical about the ‘personality cult’ that emerged in self-congratulatory British narrative of abolition (although see Carey below, pp. 128–9); there has been a re-evaluation of the success in mobilizing public opinion of the (London) Committee for the Abolition of the Slave Trade (founded in May 1787).

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Figure 1.9 Abolitionist designer ware: Wedgwood cameo (c.1787)

There has been extensive analysis of the intellectual milieu of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment discussants of slavery and freedom that came in the wake of Locke’s Two Treatises on Government (1689), especially the works of Lord Shaftesbury, Francis Hutcheson, and James Beattie.59 The constant dialogue on slavery between French and British Enlightenment writers has been studied intensively.60 The contribution of novels by both men and women in the decades leading up to the first legislative measures has been reassessed.61 The exceptional importance of Christian conviction—

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especially in the case of Quakers and Methodists—to the success of the abolitionists’ cause has been acknowledged and documented painstakingly.62 Although there were reactionary plays performed in the theatre that attempted to justify slavery, a notorious example being Thomas Bellamy’s The Benevolent Planters (Theatre Royal, Haymarket, 1789), the stage was an early and important conduit for the dissemination of sentiments that built up repulsion for the inhumanity of slavery. This process began with theatrical adaptations of Aphra Behn’s 1688 novel Oroonoko, or the Royal Slave, whose author was described by Swinburne as ‘the first literary abolitionist . . . on record’ in the history of fiction.63 Oroonoko was dramatized in 1696 by Thomas Southerne, whose version actually played down its racial egalitarianism by transforming the heroine Imoinda from a black beauty (a member of a tribe which practised interesting ritual scarification) into a white woman, creating an Othello-like principal couple.64 But Southerne’s adaptation did enhance the influence of Behn’s novel in Britain, since it became one of the most popular plays of all time, performed at least once in every single season until 1801. Behn’s own picture of the long-suffering aristocrat Oroonoko and the beautiful, black, pregnant Imoinda, however much it has recently been criticized for its class politics and latent racist ‘othering’ of the heroic figure of the ‘Noble Negro’,65 in its time made a major impact on thinking about slavery in France after it was translated by Antoine de Laplace in 1745. Although Montesquieu’s Lettres persanes of 1721 had already established itself as the foundation text of anti-slavery opinion in France, it has been widely accepted that Behn’s appealing tale did much both to inform and to popularize Montesquieu’s most influential case against slavery in his Esprit de lois of 1748.66 Feminist scholars have stressed the contribution made by other literary women, especially Mary Wollstonecraft, Lydia Maria Child (Fig. 1.10), and Margaret Fuller, in the abolitionist struggle,67 and by black women writers, especially after reconstruction, in the cause of women’s advancement.68 The poems on (or relating to) slavery by canonical poets such as Blake, Cowper, Coleridge, and Southey have been collected and analysed.69 Familiar literary texts from the period between 1807 and 1833 have been examined from a perspective sensitive to abolitionist language; an illuminating example is Mary

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Figure 1.10 Lydia Maria Child in the 1860s

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Shelley’s ‘Promethean’ monster in Frankenstein, who has been read as an insurgent black Caribbean slave, the novel in which he features owing ‘much of its language and power to Jamaican and Haitian slave rebellions’.70 The role of painting in making the case for abolition as well as for defending slavery has been explored, notably in Marcus Wood’s brilliant Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America 1760–1865: the public display of a painting of Prometheus in the 1840s could play its own part in the campaign, fomented by now increasingly self-righteous Britons, to see slavery abolished in America.71 The mental processes by which individual earlier critics of slavery arrived at their conclusions have also begun to be re-examined, and the differences as well as the similarities between their positions clarified. The case has recently been made, for example, that Alexander Hamilton, one of the few Founding Fathers who vigorously opposed slavery (as Abraham Lincoln insisted in his anti-slavery oratory),72 had a very real concern about slavery based not on Hobbesian principles but on more traditional natural law theory. He had a deep-seated conviction that the natural rights of man imposed a corresponding duty to end slavery.73 His private papers reveal how his thinking developed partly though direct comparison of what he saw around him with the effect of slavery in antiquity: in 1777 he remarks how fully contemporary experience of slavery confirmed Plutarch’s view that the helots of ancient Sparta were the ‘Achilles’ heel’ of what was widely seen as an admirable republic.74 Hamilton developed his theory that the practice of slavery was nothing more than war carried from the battlefield to the household from delving into Cicero’s discussions of Roman law, and other passages of Roman history; he concluded that the Roman provinces were scenes of unremitting ‘rapine and cruelty’ owing to the doctrine that it was legitimate to enslave war captives.75 Several decades later, two Britons—a journalist and a scholar— made the imaginative leaps that allowed them to see that slavery, still legal in America, was highly relevant to the manner in which gentlemen, schoolboys, and university students should understand not Plutarch nor Cicero but a poet who created dramatized fictions. The interesting thing is how they use publications relating to the same author, Aristophanes, as vehicles through which to express

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diametrically opposing viewpoints. ‘Aristophanic’ complaints against both abolition and the 1832 Reform Act were expressed in the skilful, reactionary ‘The Possums of Aristophanes, Recently Recovered’, published in 1836 in the popular new Tory literary organ, Fraser’s Magazine for Town and Country. The unnamed author is likely to be the effective founder of the magazine William Maginn, a brilliant classicist and parodist of Greek and Latin authors.76 The Possums is presented as the newly rediscovered first version of Aristophanes’ Clouds, which, it is claimed, featured a chorus of possums. This allows the author to introduce a supercilious note about what it calls a familiar North American ‘negro’ minstrel song, Possum up a Gum-Tree. The reader is informed that while Aristophanes had satirized a new school of philosophy in the revised Clouds, in Possums his target had been ‘the new school of politics and legislation. He was, as every school-boy knows, an aristocrat; and the Possums breathe the very spirit of genuine Conservatism.’ That in The Possums Aristophanes had prefiguratively targeted not only slaves but the classes newly franchised in 1832 is proposed when the audience is sneeringly told that the Pheidippides figure, ‘Sophoswipos’, spends his time at the Mechanics Institute. The equivalent of Socrates is Micromegalus, a thinly disguised Earl Grey, the Prime Minister between 1830 and 1834, who had presided over some of the most far-reaching reforms in British history. Grey/Micromegalus practises twirling in order the better to legislate: My thoughts forsake the past, and learn to waltz With notions yet unheard of. Then, new schemes For public good arise. For public good Is not like sluggish ponds, that stand all still, And rot for want of motion: public good Changes its aspect daily. So the laws That guard it must change daily too.77

Micromegalus requests that his chorus of Possums expound their ‘thoughts on policy’ and ‘legislative principles’, to which the Possums respond, unintelligibly, in blatant imitation of an Aristophanic animal chorus, ‘Ullaboo, ullaboo j Lillibu, lillibu, lillibulero’. (The Lillibullero, of course, was a popular song that since the Glorious Revolution had often been used to satirize the sentiments of Irish

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or other rebels against the British monarchy and government). Here the chorus of possums, identified with North American slaves (who remained unemancipated), are also fused with every group that was struggling against the might of the British ruling class abroad and at home—autodidactic British workers at the Mechanics Institute, and rebels in Ireland. The abolition of slavery in the colonies preceded by decades both the full enfranchisement of British citizens and Irish independence, but its impact through shared imagery and contested exempla was surely not only to reverberate in these later struggles, but to hasten their successful outcome. For Benjamin Dann Walsh, however, Aristophanes presented a wholly different political opportunity. Born in Worcestershire in 1809, Walsh actually gave up Classics and emigrated to the USA in 1838, where he was later appointed the first State Entomologist of Illinois. But before he left England he published the first volume of The Comedies of Aristophanes, Translated into Corresponding English Metres (1837), which contains parallels between the slaves in Aristophanes’ Athens and those in the Deep South of America that are hardly ever found in classical literary scholarship in the nineteenth century. In the preface he collects evidence for and deplores the appalling floggings and punishments in antiquity; later he compares Roman and British imperialism: ‘The annals of Rome . . . present nothing but the spectacle of a powerful and unscrupulous tribe, gradually acquiring, by force and by fraud, the absolute dominion of the whole civilized world’.78 In the same year, across the Atlantic, the Maths Professor and abolitionist Elizur Wright effected a similar transformation of the polemical uses to which a particular ancient Greek author was put. In an anti-slavery journal published in New York, in a discussion within the context of slavery of the runaway problem, he rewrote altogether the standard North American patriotic reading of Xenophon’s famous story of the retreat of the ten thousand in the Anabasis. The standard identification adopted Xenophon’s Greeks as typological ancestors of the self-sufficient white American frontiersman, a version most famously exemplified in Emerson’s ‘Essay on History’, where he notes with approval that Xenophon’s men were quick to chop logs and cook, like good Americans, as well as fight:

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What is the foundation of that interest all men feel in Greek history? . . . The reverence exhibited is for personal qualities, courage, address, self-command, justice, strength, swiftness, a loud voice, a broad chest . . . not far different is the picture Xenophon gives of himself and his compatriots in the Retreat of the Ten Thousand . . . Throughout his army seemed to be of a boundless liberty of speech.79

Yet for Elizur Wright, the North American white man is actually the equivalent of the Asiatic tyrants from whom Xenophon was fleeing, while his Greeks are the forerunners of the heroic new runaways of North America, for example the Native Americans who have had to escape to Canada to avoid extermination: To escape from a powerful enemy, often requires as much courage and generalship as to conquer. One of the most celebrated military exploits on record is the retreat of the ten thousand Greeks under Xenophon, for a great distance through an enemy’s country. . . . But the retreat of the ten thousand native Americans now living in Upper Canada, escaping from worse than Asiatic tyranny, and having to pass hungry, and hunted, through the wide domains of false freedom, is far more worthy of being placed on record.

But in a further blow to the standard white version of ancient history, he also reminds his readers that the peaceful runaways are actually more deserving of sympathy than the rather unevolved men in Xenophon’s army, ‘those murderous old Greeks, in their brazen helmets and bull-hide shields’.80 Even the most familiar and apparently ethically uncomplicated narratives from antiquity could therefore be contested, and reinterpreted, depending on the polemicist’s agenda. A telling example to be discovered in the history of classical scholarship is the American Basil Gildersleeve’s reaction to Pindar. Gildersleeve was committed to a nostalgic vision of the Old South, a vision forged during his service in the Confederate cavalry during the American Civil War. Most classical scholars have known him as an exceptionally important figure in the history of Pindar studies: no late nineteenth- or twentieth-century commentary or scholarly article on the epinician genre was not at some level still informed by Gildersleeve’s brilliant and lucid commentary on the Olympian and Pythian odes (1885). Yet our understanding of this Confederate scholar’s own subjective responses to the Theban encomiast of the aristocracy is deepened by thinking

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about his politics. He had personally identified himself with Pindar, and above all with the anodyne, beautiful, aristocratic, conjured in Pindaric epinicia. That idealized ancient world, existing entirely in the elite imagination, exhibits a capacity for erasing all the pain entailed by its underlying mode of production (slavery); this quality resembles the artificial prettiness and fundamental denial of the truth demonstrated throughout the genre of the Confederate Romance, where the nineteenth-century southern plantation is a place of conjured delicate sentiment, magnolia blossom, and moonbeams, a set of images which attempts to obscure or eradicate the reality of systemic slave exploitation, rape, and torture.81 The processes by which Hamilton, Maginn, Walsh, Wright, and Gildersleeve arrived at their respective stances on slavery exemplify the diversity of the material studied in this book. Although the class background of abolitionists on both sides of the Atlantic has attracted recent interest,82 an enterprise that has included discussions of their education, the role of the ancient world in the unmaking of modern slavery has never been the target of a sustained and focused study. The overriding purpose of this book is therefore to explore one significant dimension of the ideological tussle with slavery that led to its abolition; this dimension is the way that various ancient Greek and Roman materials shaped and informed the debates about slavery conducted from the late seventeenth century onwards. The authors discussed are mostly British, Caribbean, North American, and South African, since the triangular flow of ideas between Europe, Africa, and North America was as incessant as the transportation of goods to Africa, slaves across the Middle Passage, or cotton, sugar, and tobacco to Bristol or Liverpool. But the story also encompasses much of the world, with other voices being heard from India, Russia, and New Zealand. Chronologically speaking, the book’s centre of gravity lies in the period of legislative change from the late eighteenth century to 1865, when the 13th Amendment to the United States Constitution abolished slavery altogether, but it is important to remember that the process of ending slavery has proved to be protracted. The parliamentary act of 1807, although closing the traffic in slaves to British nationals, if anything increased the total volume of foreign slaving on the western coast of Africa well into the 1830s.83 Ethiopia did not

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abolish slavery until 1936. Indeed, although nearly one hundred countries have now signed the international Slavery Convention first formulated in 1926, which commits signatories to outlawing slavery, it has still by no means been eradicated from the planet. Actual chattel slavery still persists in some regions; many more people are locked in statuses that are effectively equivalent to it, as bonded labourers paying off debts, serfs confined physically to the land they farm, or child workers leased out by their parents.84 Even in nations where slavery was eradicated in the nineteenth century, it is important to be aware that its traumatic psychological effects and socio-economic repercussions are ubiquitous, permanent, and still in a process of evolution, whether we are consciously aware of them or not.85 Scholars of Afro-American and Caribbean culture have emphasized that the literature and art they study always needs to be assessed in diachronic perspective so that the true centrality of slavery to the American and Caribbean consciousness can be appreciated. Sharon Patton has at last documented the impact on later art by African Americans made by the images, sculpture, musical instruments, and textiles which slaves created between 1700 and 1820.86 Since the Civil Rights movement, and especially since the earlier works of Henry Louis Gates Jr, a sizeable bibliography has been produced on works from the ‘Founding Fathers’ of the slave narrative, Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington, to Ralph Waldo Ellison, Toni Morrison, and Percival Everett.87 Many of these narratives and novels do not engage—at least on any explicit level—with Greek and Roman civilization, but others do, in some cases profoundly. The hero of Ralph Waldo Ellison’s Odyssey-based novel Invisible Man has his whole life informed by statements about relations between black and white made to him by his grandfather, who was born into slavery. The importance of the precedent of classical slavery to the cultural representations of slavery during the era of the transatlantic trade has had far-reaching consequences. It is demonstrated in the later chapters of this volume to extend to Caribbean historiography in C. L. R. James’s The Black Jacobins (1938) and to Hollywood’s representation, in the 1990s, of Civil War Tennessee. But the arguments which movies frame in imaginative and aestheticized terms were first articulated by political theorists reacting to the enslavement of Africans during

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the Renaissance, and turning as they did so to classical authors for illumination. In Chapter 2 Alston therefore establishes the broad intellectual framework within which the abolitionists were operating, by examining what was different about their philosophical position from that of earlier political theorists, both in antiquity (for example, Aristotle and Roman jurists) and the Early Modern period (especially Hobbes). Since both defenders and opponents of slavery turned to the Greek and Roman worlds in search of their arguments, Alston suggests that when we are faced with the difficult problem of the epistemic shift that ushered in abolition, we can once again turn to antiquity for illumination and to refine our understanding of the central issues at stake. The problem with slavery became apparent in the practical context of Enlightenment statecraft and commerce where laws had to be framed, and many landmark legal judgments against slavery were based on an absence of appropriate law rather than the presence of a developed juridical concern with the rights of the person. Nevertheless, it is notable that judgments went against the slave-owner and for the slave: the paradigms for accepting slavery were readily available, but were not accepted. Inspired by a series of articles that appeared under the pseudonym ‘Pliny’ in the Charleston Mercury in 1833, when slavery was abolished in Britain, Alston argues that the adoption of the pseudonym was a deliberate attempt to associate American slave-owners with the ‘cultured’ Roman gentleman and the ‘softer’ face of slave-ownership in the classical world that Pliny could be seen as presenting. Alston then shows why abolitionist arguments inevitably won the day: Pliny’s paternalist model of the benevolent slave-master was doomed to fail in the face of the capitalist theory of the person, with its attendant notion that human liberty was grounded in an inherent ontology. Hodkinson and Hall shift the focus, in Chapter 3, from the presence of Roman paternalism in political theory and argumentation to the importance of Spartan helotage in the framing of the early British parliamentary motions, between 1791 and 1796, for abolition of the slave trade. Helotage, particularly illustrated from the evidence of Plutarch’s Lycurgus, consistently appears as the primary ancient example of the inhumanity of servitude, cited both by some of those who wanted to argue for the legitimacy of their own (allegedly more

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lenient) slave-holding practices and by abolitionsts. The discussion covers the non-parliamentary sources in which these ideas were promulgated and developed—journalism, sermons, school textbooks— and shows how the comparison of helotage and West Indian slavery was consistently intertwined with the comparison of helots and the Irish peasantry. The changes in approaches to the Spartan system over a relatively short space of time between the English Commonwealth and the early nineteenth century illustrate the complexity of the slavery arguments in the process of their legislative evolution. Hilton’s study in Chapter 4 addresses the use of classical ideas and motifs in the discourse of slavery and abolition at the Cape of Good Hope, South Africa, between the years 1795 and 1834. He draws on a rich and complex body of evidence, including accounts of travel to and in the Cape, newspaper articles in the South African Commercial Advertiser and De Zuid-Afrikaan, monographs, letters, diaries, and archival court records. The uses to which classical texts were put in testimony about slavery at the Cape reveal a very different set of priorities from the discussions in Britain, arising from a profound clash between the Dutch view of slavery, which was influenced by Roman-Dutch law with its imperial and paternalistic bias, and the English view, inspired by the Magna Carta. The chapter argues that, as a result, the social and legal changes brought about by Roman jurists and emperors played a much greater role in implementing abolition in South Africa than in other British colonial contexts. The argument moves in the fifth chapter, with Carey’s study of English poetry, to the media through which sensibilities were developed during the eighteenth century that made abolition increasingly well supported across a broad spectrum of the British population. Abolitionists reached a wide audience through popular genres including novels, plays, songs, and particularly poems. Verses on slavery were written and published by the score in newspapers and magazines and in longer purpose-made volumes. Carey builds on the work of Willie Sypher and on his own British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility (2005) in order to explore how both the form and content of classical poetry were harnessed by abolitionists to their cause: Africa became by turns a land worthy of a tragic epic, of recasting as pastoral Arcadia, and as a point of comparison with the lands and peoples brutalized by Spartan helotage and Roman imperialism.

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Carey’s discussion of broad trends within the classicism of eighteenth-century abolitionist poetry provides essential context for Greenwood’s study in Chapter 6 of Phillis (or Phyllis) Wheatley. Born in West Africa, and a slave in Boston, Massachusetts, Wheatley was destined to become the first internationally famous black poet in modern times and a minor celebrity in Britain, where she lived and worked in the early 1770s. Introduced to a wide readership by her inclusion in the argument of Clarskon’s essay (see above), Wheatley had already configured herself as an ancient writer and also as a mythical figure from a prestigious classical text. In ‘To Maecenas’ (1773) this black poet, whose publication of poetry was unprecedented, tried on a series of identities she had encountered in her reading of classical authors, in a transparent quest to identify or formulate a poetic persona adequate to self-description. Greenwood argues that Wheatley herself was fully aware of the cultural presumption constituted by an enslaved African reading and writing about classical themes and that she adopted classical signifiers of Africanness in order to mediate her authorial persona. The actual implementation of the abolition of slavery in British territories came about in 1834, a year after the Act was passed. 1834 was also the year which saw one of the most resonant literary representations of slavery to circulate in the popular imagination of the British Empire. This is the portrait of the blind slave-girl Nydia in the popular novel published by Edward Bulwer (later Bulwer-Lytton), The Last Days of Pompeii. The novel was to prove exceptionally influential over the following decades; it ran into numerous editions and was adapted into stage performances ranging from bombastic tragedies to the light entertainment provided by extravagant spectacles. Hunnings argues in Chapter 7 that Nydia’s suicide, resulting from her painful position in the love-triangle between herself and two free characters, is doubly handicapped by her disability and her status. Hunnings uses ideas developed in Robert Burns Stepto’s study of slave narratives, From Behind the Veil (1979), to show how Nydia’s subjectivity is threatened with erasure and severely compromised as she is inspected by her male author and his implied readership, but the slave nevertheless appropriates, in her dying moments, a moral agency that paradoxically enables her to upstage the free characters.

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From the 1830s onwards, the current of arguments and images related to abolitionism became conspicuously transatlantic, as antislavery campaigners in North America sought support for their cause from the example of their former colonial ruling power. But another development was the cross-fertilization between the abolitionists’ array of arguments and images and the polemics produced by British campaigners for parliamentary reform. Here the multivalency of myth had lent it a particular attraction to authors and artists who wanted to draw parallels between different arenas of struggle for freedom and equal rights, especially universal suffrage, as I argue in Chapter 8. Yet the quest for mythical heroes who could be pressganged into the abolitionist cause proved frustrating: experiments were conducted on several ancient Greek figures—Atlas, Polyphemus, and Telephus, for example—with this end in mind. In the wake of the first French and English translations of Aeschylus’ tragedy Prometheus Bound in the 1770s, it was the chained, tortured philanthropist Prometheus who emerged as the most promising prototype of the slaves whom the abolitionists hoped to emancipate. But the recalcitrant, defiant, and vocal rebel of the Greek play needed considerable adjustment to render him acceptable to mainstream society. Since 1550, when the theologian Juan Gine´s de Sepu´lveda had used Aristotle’s theory of natural slavery in Politics book 1 to defend the right of the Spanish Empire to conquer the American Indians, that ancient Greek text resurfaced repeatedly in debates over slavery in the New World.88 In the 1830s the Confederate propagandists in America found themselves increasingly isolated and under pressure to respond to the effective tactics now being employed by Northern abolitionists. Key Confederate thinkers abruptly abandoned old arguments for slavery as a ‘necessary evil’ that they might, incrementally over a long time, possibly dismantle, in favour of a bold new case for the institution of black slavery as an unadulterated ‘positive good’ and permanent feature of Southern culture. The chief expositors of this view acknowledged a debt to Aristotle, specifically to the text of his Politics. In Chapter 9 Sara Monoson argues that Confederate academics, literary figures, and politicians, who acquired Aristotle’s treatise either in Greek, in translation, or through its representation in the contemporary scholarly and propagandistic work of compatriots, did far more with his work than claim its author to be a notable progenitor. Their

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texts betray a thoroughgoing engagement with his political philosophy. They embraced Aristotle because of his account of the natural slave, critique of labour, and ideal of the leisure class. These concepts helped them to articulate crucial elements in their ‘positive good’ theory, especially why slavery itself could actually be seen as benefiting black people, why free labour practices harmed white people, and why Southern society should be understood as a beacon of cultural excellence the world over. Garry Wills has shown in Lincoln at Gettysburg (1992) the importance to the Gettysburg funeral address—the founding ‘charter’ speech of postbellum America—of several examples and features of classical literature: Pericles’ epitaphios as recorded by Thucydides and the antithetical periods of Cicero and Tacitus.89 The Gettysburg address provided the climax to the rhetorical framing of the arguments before and during the Civil War in the ‘oratory of the Greek revival’.90 In Chapter 10 Margaret Malamud stays in antebellum America to ask which models from antiquity seemed most appropriate to the understanding of the momentous arguments framed (and indeed contested violently) there during the period from the 1830s to the Civil War. What to the ancient Greeks and Romans were ethnically other ‘barbarians’ here come to the fore, as abolitionists found inspiration in the Carthaginian resistance to Rome, in Medea’s defiance of Jason, and in the ancients’ admiration for the achievements of the Egyptian and Ethiopian civilizations. But Herodotus and the texts related to the Roman Republican heroes could be quarried with equal passion by polemicists on both side of the slavery debate. Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve, the founding father of North American Classics who has already been briefly discussed in this chapter, dominated the foundation of classical scholarship in North America to a degree which lends outstanding significance to his views on slavery. Professor of Greek at the University of Virginia, Gildersleeve fought for the Confederacy alongside his three brothers, and was indeed badly wounded in 1864. During the war he also wrote a substantial number of unsigned editorials in the Confederate press. There has been a longstanding debate about the extent to which Gildersleeve’s political position was grounded in racist convictions, and in Chapter 11 Lupher and Vandiver take a close look at some of his more neglected writings,

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dating from late in his career and also from decades before his two more famous works, the superficially revisionist 1892 essay ‘The Creed of the Old South’, and his comparison of ancient and nineteenthcentury slavery in ‘A Southerner in the Peloponnesian War’ (1897). The earlier pieces reveal a man who was not only convinced of the rightness of the Southern cause and the superior nature of the Southern way of life; he was filled with scorn for the North and for all things Yankee and defended slavery on grounds not only of pragmatism and expediency but of principle. Himself married to a woman whose family’s income derived from plantation slavery, he objected violently to the presence of black men in the Union army, and indeed to all forms of racial mixing, especially intermarriage. The first successful slave revolt, which had a major impact on the abolition debates, is usually held to have been that on the French colony of Saint-Domingue. It began in the wake of the French revolution in 1789 and culminated in the establishment of the first free black Republic in the Americas, the independent state of Haiti in 1804. The Trinidadian radical C. L. R. James’s study of the revolt in The Black Jacobins. Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1938) is itself now held to have been one of the foundation texts of the Civil Rights movement in the USA and subsequently of Pan-Africanism. But James’s view of history was heavily informed by his studies of slave revolts and his love of heroic drama, and in Chapter 12 Langerwerf analyses his portrayal of Toussaint L’Ouverture from a literary perspective. She compares James’s presentation of his Haitian rebel hero with the representations of two slave rebels from antiquity. The first is Pausanias’ depiction of the mythical hero Aristomenes of Messene in the fourth book of the Periegesis, in which he relates the Messenian struggle against enslavement by the Spartans; the second is Athenaeus’ use of the story, attributed to Nymphodorus of Syracuse’s Voyage to Asia, of the rebel Drimakos, who leads the slaves on Chios in a successful revolt against the Chians and founds a maroon community after having reached agreement with the slave-owners. The comparative method brings out traditional narrative tropes in James’s shaping of history, a reading which is further inflected by James’s stated views on the nature of the Aeschylean and Shakespearian tragic hero. The Odyssey, especially the relationship between Odysseus and Eumaeus, was already identified by Thomas Clarkson in his Latin

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prose composition as a seminal text in the representation and discussion of slavery, but it remains surprising to find it playing so prominent a part in a rare Hollywood attempt to address the social crisis precipitated by the end of the Civil War in post-emancipation Tennessee. In Chapter 13 Justine McConnell examines a film which is set at the precise moment that slavery was abolished in the Deep South, but which is, for convoluted reasons and in intricate ways, based on the plot of the Odyssey. The tension between Odysseus and Eumaeus in Sommersby (1993, directed by Jon Amiel) offers an unusually (for Hollywood, anyway) profound set of insights into the moral, emotional, and economic ramifications of radical shifts in the relationship between newly emancipated slaves and their former masters. In the Postscript, Ahuvia Kahane highlights some conceptual problems important to the study of the reception of ancient slavery in the modern era, perhaps especially so in the context of abolition. He focuses on what he describes as two basic ‘modalities’ of modernity, whose terms of engagement are notionally discontinuity (disjunction) and continuity (progression). The point, of course, is that each of these modalities contains, and requires the recognition of a dialectic between, disjunction and progression. Kahane illustrates his argument by means of two examples: first, some comments by Henry David Thoreau on the abolitionist John Brown, and second, statements by Engels and Marx on the role of ancient slavery in the evolution of the modern world. Kahane explores the limitations and prospects of these modalities and suggests their usefulness for further consideration of the material and arguments analysed in this volume. The ancient Greek and Roman worlds have been present in the struggle against slavery in multifarious ways and used emphatically by both sides in the argument. Aristotelian political theory and Roman law have been the source of many claims and lines of reasoning, and of the theses against which the abolitionists’ antitheses could be defined and refined. Studying the problem of slavery in the Athenian democracy and the Roman Republic stimulated intellects to realize that slavery was not to be tolerated in an advanced civilization. Ancient literature in numerous different genres, from epic and biography to epistolography, has provided many of the most stirring episodes, images, and heroes—Eumaeus’ conversations with Odys-

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seus, Prometheus chained to his rock, the oppressed helots, Spartacus’ uprising, Pliny’s paternalist slave-owner. The continuity of history and in particular of colonialism from the ancient world to the contested present has been a valuable source of perspective. Ancient myths about worker-Titans have served symbolic and allegorical ends. Ancient authors from Africa or of servile status have been adopted as cultural ancestors. The essays here cannot provide a comprehensive cultural history of all these phenomena, but we hope that they offer an illuminating variety of complementary perspectives on the ‘valuable lesson’ that the era of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century abolition believed it was learning from ancient slavery, and therefore on one of the most important arenas of struggle in which the Greek and Latin classics have ever been called to participate.

NOTES 1. Castronovo (1993), 527. 2. The massive cast-metal relief sculpture, in which the figures are more than life-size, was revealed to public view in December 1849 and can be admired today by any visitor to Trafalgar Square who stands with his or her back to Whitehall. There is a large, clear, contemporary drawing, which shows details of all the individual figures, including the black seaman in the group standing on the far left, in Anon. (1849a). The relief sculpture is one of four around the lower pedestal, depicting Nelson’s several victories. It was designed by John Edward Carew, and beneath it is inscribed the motto, ‘England expects every man to do his duty’. One contemporary journalist who described the panel (Anon. (1849b)) was particularly impressed by the ‘figure of the negro’, describing him ‘as a perfect work of art, full of character—the distended nostrils, strained eyeballs, and the firm manner in which the gun he has is clasped in his hand, clearly tell the emotions which might be supposed to occupy the mind under such circumstances’. 3. Brown (1854), 71. On the contentious issue of black men fighting alongside whites in America, see below, p. 328. 4. Brown (1968), 34. 5. Castronovo (1993), 530.

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6. Hopkins (2007), 168–9. Cicero (Letters to Atticus 4.17.13) does not actually say that the Britons are ugly, but that it is difficult to find one with literary or musical talent. 7. Harriet Martineau’s list of Toussaint’s favourite reading also includes Caesar’s Commentaries, Herodotus, Nepos, and a biography of Alexander the Great: see Martineau (1841), vol. 3, 254–5, and the magazine article by Pauline Hopkins in Colored American Magazine 2.1 (for November 1900), 9–24, reproduced in Hopkins (2007), 11–22 (see especially p. 15). 8. Vogt (1973), 1–7. 9. See Clark (1904), 273–4. 10. Wilson (1989), 15. 11. Walsh and Hyam (1998), 16–17. 12. Wilson (1989), 196 n. 4. 13. Clarkson (1786), 3–6, 9, 11. 14. Clarkson (1786), 27–9. 15. Clarkson (1786), 30. 16. Engerman (1986), 328. 17. Patterson (1977), 408. 18. Drescher (2002), 10–11. 19. Reproduced in Leitzmann (1896). See also Humboldt’s remarkable ¨ ber den idealization of the ancient Greeks in his more famous essay, ‘U Charakter der Griechen, die idealische und historische Ansicht desselben’ (1807), in Humboldt (1969), vol. ii, 65–72. 20. Dresser and Giles (2000), 19. 21. See Hilton’s chapter, below, pp. 109 and 110. 22. See Wood (2000), 154 with fig. 4.2. 23. See the images reproduced in Dresser and Giles (2000), 62 with further information on p. 73; Dresser (2007), 80. On Roman names for slaves see further Carey’s chapter below, pp. 130–1. 24. Cicero is depicted in the engraving by ‘Phiz’ opposite p. 212 of the 1844 edition. On Dickens on American slavery, see Purchase (2006). 25. See the engraving of the hall (which was destroyed in World War II) reproduced in Dresser and Giles (2000), 14. For a case-study of the relationship between slavery and stately homes in the Bristol area, see Dresser (2007), 210–16. For the neoclassical architecture commissioned by those who had made fortunes in India, see Hall (2010a). 26. On the author, see further Hodkinson and Hall below, p. 99 n. 42. 27. Edwards (1793), vol. 2, 26. 28. See Blouet (2000), 216. 29. Edwards (1793), vol. 2, 27–32.

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30. For a reproduction of the engraving and further discussion see Wood (2000), 21–2 with fig. 2.4. See also below, pp. 237–8. 31. Coleridge’s view of Clarkson seems to have been ambivalent. Despite his undoubted admiration for the reformer, in a letter to Daniel Stuart of February 1809, the poet satirized Clarkson’s monomania in describing him as ‘the moral Steam-Engine, or the giant with one idea’ (cited in Rodriguez (1997), 161). 32. Published in Coleridge (1817), 301; the translation is mine. 33. Crummell (1898), 10–11; see Gates (1987a), 21. 34. Shockley (1988), 204–5. 35. W. E. Du Bois (1920), 17. 36. Ronnick (2011). 37. Ronnick (2005), (2006), (2010). 38. Sandiford (1988), 17–42. 39. Davis (2000), 452. 40. See the excellent study of the centrality of slavery to the commercial and economic development of America in Hahn (2009), who stresses its penetration of every dimension of life in New England and the Middle Atlantic as well as the southern states. 41. Rosivach (1993). 42. Rotman (2004). 43. Cartledge (1993), 168; see also Cartledge (1992). 44. P. duBois (2007), 443. 45. See Harris (1933), 10–17; Barclay (2001), 81–107. 46. ‘Let America know and ponder on this: there is something more frightening than Cain killing Abel, and that is Washington killing Spartacus’ (Letter to the editor, London News, 9 Dec. 1859; republished in Ruchames (1959), 268–70). When he wrote the letter, an impassioned plea to save Brown, on 2 December 1859, Hugo believed that the execution had been postponed until mid-December; the letter was much reprinted and became ‘the most widely publicized commentary on John Brown to reach the United States from across the Atlantic’ (Drescher (1993), 499 and n. 2). On the equation of John Brown and Spartacus, see also Fine (1999), 232. 47. Voltaire (1877–85), vol. 18, 600; see Hunting (1978). The passage is conveniently reproduced in English translation in Engerman, Drescher, and Paquette (2001), 24. 48. Hunnings (2007). 49. Strickland (1822), 6. 50. Sandiford (1988), 51. 51. Raynal (1770), 466.

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52. See the review of bibliography in Huston (1990). 53. For a succinct overview of the slave trade in the French colonies, see Geggus (2001b). 54. See e.g. British Museum Coins and Medals Catalogue no. RE4p325.1948. For a depiction of ex-slaves wearing the cap in Roman funerary art, see Petersen (2006), 210–11 with fig. 133. 55. Oldfield (1992). 56. See Walvin (1994), especially images 184–8. 57. Dresser (2007), 79. 58. e.g. Anstey (1975); Eltis (1993); the discussion of Walvin (2001), ch. 18. 59. See e.g. Sandiford (1988), 43–51. 60. See e.g. Walvin (1986), 97–9. 61. See e.g. the fascinating reassessment of Sarah Scott’s novel History of Sir George Ellison (1766), by Stoddard (1995). 62. Coupland (1933) and Mellor (1951) are the foundation texts of this approach. 63. Swinburne (1915), 95. 64. See Duffy (1977), 276–7. 65. See the penetrating analysis of Ferguson (1992), 27–49, the comments of Dresser (2007), 135 on the impact of the stage adaptation in Bristol, and, for a discussion of feminist and postcolonial responses to Oroonoko, Fogarty (1994). 66. This case was first made in Jameson’s Montesquieu et l’esclavage (1911), 82–103. See also the discussion in Seeber (1937), 12–34 and 59–60. 67. See e.g. Ferguson (1992), Moore (1994) on Wollstonecraft and the discussion of Child in Harrold (2001) and Salerno (2005). On Margaret Fuller’s transcendentalist fusion of feminism and abolitionism, see especially Kearns (1964). 68. See Shockley (1988). 69. See e.g. Sandiford (1988), 61–72 and the essays in Plasa and Ring (1994). 70. Malchow (1996), 38. 71. Junker (2000), 50. 72. Abraham Lincoln, ‘Address at Cooper Institute’, 27 February 1860, in Lincoln (1989), 117. 73. Chan (2004). 74. Hamilton (1961), vol. 1, 403–4; see Chan (2004), 217. 75. Hamilton (1961), vol. 19, 332–3; see Chan (2004), 227. 76. See further Hall (2007a), 75–6. 77. Anon. (1836), 294. 78. Walsh (1837), ‘Preface’, xiii. Thanks to Chris Stray for alerting me to Walsh’s work on Aristophanes.

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79. Emerson (1979), vol. II, 14–15. The essay was first published in 1841. 80. Anti-Slavery Record 3.7 (July 1837), 1–2. See the discussion in Wood (2000), 94–5. 81. See the essays in Briggs and Benario (1986); Hall (2007b), 130–1. 82. On the class profile of the British abolitionists see Drescher (1994). 83. Robinson, Gallagher, and Denny (1963), 27–8. 84. See the penetrating article ‘Slavery by any other name’, published in The Economist for 6 January (1997), 42, excerpted in Engerman, Drescher, and Paquette (2001), 467–9. 85. On the transgenerational psychological trauma caused by slavery see Akbar (1984), Black (1997), Fletchman Smith (2000), Fairley (2003), and Hall (2010c). 86. Patton (1998). As Wood (2000), 12 n. 9 notes, one effect of this book ‘will be to force reconsideration of how African-American visual art has inflected white American and European visual art’. 87. See above all Gates (1987b), and the essays in McDowell and Rampersand (1989). 88. See the pathbreaking study by Hanke (1959) and Lupher (2003), 113–15. 89. This is in spite of Abraham Lincoln’s own self-presentation as a simple boy from the ‘wild region’ of the Indiana forest, roamed by bears, where education was rudimentary and if ‘a straggler supposed to understand Latin happened to sojourn in the neighbourhood, he was looked upon as a wizard’ (letter of 20 Dec. 1859, to J. W. Fell, reproduced in Lincoln (1907), 144–5 at p. 144). 90. On which see Winterer (2006).

2 The Good Master Pliny, Hobbes, and the Nature of Freedom Richard Alston

This chapter centres on a familiar problem. To answer that problem, I am drawn into a discussion of the fundamentals of ancient and modern political thought, a territory so obviously complex that it can hardly be covered adequately within the confines of a single chapter. Yet, it is fundamental to our activity as historians and political thinkers to attempt to understand and discuss issues such as the nature of freedom; comparative history provides the perspective which could potentially enable us to gain some critical purchase on the problems. Although one needs to be aware of the simplifications necessary in discussing fundamental political concepts in two different, complex, and variegated societies, and guard against those simplifications becoming misrepresentations wherever possible, a comparative method at least allows the comparanda with which all historical endeavours operate in one way or another to become explicit rather implicit and thus more open to critical attention. Further, if historical analysis is not to be confined to the minuscule which can be dealt with in relative academic safety, then we need to take risks that come with the majuscule and politically engaged history. The analysis that follows, however, cannot be just a question of comparative history. Indeed, it raises philosophical problems as to the nature of intellectual discourse. As I shall show, and as the other chapters in this volume demonstrate, the discussion of slavery in the

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eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was an issue of reception history. All sides in the debate derived much of the language and many of the conceptions with which they worked from biblical and classical discourses. The archaeology of knowledge within those discourses can be and is in the volume traced back into the classical period. Yet, I shall argue that the debate on slavery was a fundamental breach in that reception tradition, and was perceived as such at the time. In this breaking with the reception tradition, we face the problem of the archaeology of discourses: to what extent do these operate as ‘determining’ frames for thought within a period? A comparative history which ignores reception history is, of course, disingenuous in the extreme, and this may account for a decline in the popularity of comparative history as a serious intellectual endeavour. Nevertheless, a comparative approach does offer us a way out of the history of the present (or the history of various past presents) and establishes a distancing from the texts that might allow us better to uncover the distinctive structuring elements of societies ancient and modern.

THE FAMILIAR PROBLEM As far as one can tell, sometime in the seventeenth century, slavery became a philosophical problem. With the advent of the transatlantic slave trade that problem became less abstract and any discussion came to have political, economic, and social implications. This problematization of slavery led to the great abolition campaigns and acts which we celebrate in this volume. But, perhaps partly because it is so natural for us to see slavery as an abomination, an offence against fundamental human rights, we have perhaps missed the historical uniqueness of this ethical position. As Davis has shown, in other periods, in other societies, it is virtually impossible to find any thinker who considers slavery a stain to be expurgated from human societies and still less do we find any abolitionist movements.1 Yet, much of Early Modern political thought was grounded either in a reading of the Classics or in biblical interpretation. Importantly, these texts were not seen as mutually exclusive, belonging to different traditions of thought or conceptions of the self and its

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relationship to the divine. The Hegelian distinction between the philosophy of the Greek polis and the theology of the Judaeo-Christian tradition may have been emergent in the Early Modern period, but was hardly explicit. Political thought borrowed much of its language and many of its concepts from Roman writers, taking aboard Greek political theory mainly through its Roman receptions. The theorists who first started to think about slavery and engage with it as a problem turned first to classical political philosophy and to the common European heritage of classical (and especially Roman) history as the primary source of data against which political theories could be tested. In so doing, the scientific method of political inquiry, which we see so notably emerging in the Early Modern West, both drew on antiquity as its philosophical inspiration and used it as a laboratory in which the new theories could be tested. The Bible provided a further repertoire of political and moral thought which was obviously and powerfully influential on many of the leading abolitionists: much of the abolitionist discourse turned more easily and quickly to biblical themes. The biblical texts provided a primary moral account which would normally and could powerfully underpin political and social behaviour. Yet, although possessed of these prominent intertexts, from neither source can we find a convincing archaeology of reasoning that would explain why the modern Western world turned so decisively against slavery. Further, the slavery problem emerged in quite separate types of discourses, in philosophical, legal, religious, and, indeed, sentimental literatures, within the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. In part, one might explain this as being ‘the shock of the new’: the sudden re-emergence of large-scale chattel slavery and its associated trade, the concentration of the trade in the new lands of the West, the visibility of the wealth generated in the conspicuous consumption of fortunes, and even the new goods that became available in the shops of the metropolitan cultures made obvious and public a socio-legal category of persons that had been of very marginal or perhaps even solely historical interest for centuries. Lawyers, social thinkers, and politicians had to struggle with a new phenomenon, whereas classical thinkers were educated in a culture of slavery which naturalized, in some cases literally, the status. One might, for instance, argue that landmark legal judgments against slavery were

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based on an absence of appropriate law rather than the presence of a developed juridical concern with the rights of the person.2 Nevertheless, it is notable that judgments went against the slave-owner and for the slave. The paradigms for accepting slavery were readily available, but were not accepted. What was it then that differentiated the political and social thought of the abolitionist period from that of other periods? In what follows I take the thinking of Pliny the Younger on slavery and then look at various Early Modern thinkers on freedom and slavery. Putting ancient and Modern thought together allows us to throw into contrast notions of liberty and slavery, of the individual and society that bring us to the heart of the problem of slavery.3

PLINY THE YOUNGER I chose to look at Pliny’s treatment of slaves, rather than say that of Aristotle, partly because Pliny is not an abstract political thinker, and partly because of the reception of Pliny. Almost more than any other writer, Pliny has been taken as representing the comfortable gentry of Rome through his sociability, his world of good manners, and his crossing between the life of a country gentleman, the life of a politician, and that of a man of refined letters and that of a slaveowner. In fact, in 1833 a series of articles appeared in the Charleston Mercury in defence of slavery under the pseudonym ‘Pliny’.4 These contributions lambasted the British, and argued that the paternalism of the slave system was preferable to the capitalistic brutality of industrialism, and it is not hard to see in the adoption of the pseudonym a deliberate attempt to associate American slave-owners with the ‘cultured’ Roman gentleman and the ‘softer’ face of slaveownership in the classical world that Pliny could be seen as presenting. The original Pliny’s treatment of slaves figures at various points in the collection of letters, though most often slaves figure in their absence. In his accounts of his houses, for instance, we see a very detailed discussion of the architecture and de´cor, of the location and views, but Pliny depicts his life mostly as one of isolation, without notable human companionship, and his household, the large body of

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slaves who maintained the houses, cooked, cleaned, served, gardened, looked after the animals, read to the master, transcribed his thoughts, ran his messages, fetched his books, massaged him, helped him dress and undress, wash, and exercise, performed whatever other personal services he demanded, are all but invisible, heard in the distance on the Saturnalia, but otherwise absent. His slaves only appear in peculiar and particular contexts. Here, I concentrate on two particular letters (8.16 and 3.14). Ep. 8.16 concerns an outbreak of disease among his slaves. Pliny writes of his distress, and also of his practical attempt to ameliorate the situation, most notably in freeing the dying slaves or, if they died too suddenly, in honouring their wills with the single proviso that their bequests must not be to persons outside the household. In normal legal terms, a slave’s will had no validity since a slave had no true property and any goods a slave had accumulated should revert to the master. Further, a slave had no right of legal action. In this, s/he was in a worse condition than a minor or a woman, since both had legal power to act provided that their actions were ratified by a tutor (and a tutor was bound to act in the interests of the individual provided that the request was reasonable: should the tutor refuse, a woman or minor could apply for a new tutor). Thus women and minors had a restricted legal personality. A slave, however, had only a very limited legal personality. Slaves were legally the instrument of the master. However, we should not exaggerate, turning the slaves into non-persons or persons without social identity. Slaves were able to act as agents for their masters in a way a shovel or plough or donkey could not. Slaves also had legal agency in terms of criminal law: it was the slave rather than the master who was punished for criminal acts. Pliny was providing his slaves with a limited agency and acknowledging a limited legal personality, thus extending a de facto legal right. But also, and perhaps more significantly, Pliny extended an important social instrument to his slaves. Romans had particularly complex inheritance practices and instead of relying on customary or legal norms for the distribution of property after death, many Romans appear to have used testaments.5 These wills were more than just the distribution of economic resources; they were the last presentations of an individual to his or her social world. They were opportunities to display social

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relations, intellectual aspirations, political contacts and allegiances, and moral character. It was an important means of integrating a social circle and it ensured that social personality would, to a certain extent, be preserved beyond death. Heirs could benefit from this social circle through the administration of the will and their ultimate association with the deceased. The full implications of slaves producing a will is thus displayed since it might be assumed that slaves, without legal personality, were (largely) without social personality (explaining their virtual invisibility in many accounts of Roman social life), and without a family of their own, and the heirs and successors and generational continuity that went with it. Pliny, however, acknowledges both a quasi-legal personality for the slave and a social personality. The limitation of the bequests to the household is of symbolic and practical importance. Pliny explains it by analogy: he regards the household as a quasi-state for the slaves, and thus as Romans were not (normally) allowed to bequeath to nonRomans, so the slaves would not normally be allowed to bequeath outside the household. Pliny reverses a familiar and monarchic trope of political power. Since Augustus, emperors had posed as patres patriae, ‘fathers of the land’, which echoes the rather more benevolent Ciceronian parens patriae ‘parent of the land’, and established a metaphoric understanding of the state as family. Although one might argue that this metaphor was deep-rooted, reflected in Aristotelian views of the state as the union of families, a synoikism, or in the description of senators as patres conscripti, there is a crucial shift in emphasis between seeing the state as a combination of households (and being more than that combination) to be run by the heads of those households, and the state as a greater and single family (the implications of which I will explore below). As the emperors posed as the benevolent fathers of their greater families, so Pliny poses as the benevolent emperor of his household, a political image of which he could hardly have been unaware. Here we have the picture of the good master, a little overly benevolent (which is a self-image he repeats), but caring for his subjects, mourning their loss, and honouring their social and legal personae. The second letter (Ep. 3.14) concerns the murder of Larcius Macedo. The victim is generally recognized to have been a cruel master;

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he was attacked by some of his slaves, beaten, carried into the hot baths and left for dead. He was found by more loyal slaves (fideliores) and concubines, revived, and was able to give an account of the attack. He survived long enough to observe the traditional punishment, which was the execution of all servile members of the household. There is no doubt as to Pliny’s view: the executions were necessary both to extirpate the original offence and to keep the slaves in place. He discusses the exposure of masters, good and bad, to the brutality of slaves, a brutality that went beyond reason. Pliny’s approval of the execution of all the slaves in the household is in accordance with Roman law. There is some suggestion that this particular law was regarded as cruel by contemporary Romans. We have an extraordinary account of a popular demonstration against the enactment of this penalty under Nero. Also, Pliny himself is seen to oppose such a penalty in a different case in Ep. 8.14 (shortly before we see Pliny the good master). But rather than seeing this as an outbreak of sympathy for the servile community, we should note that the Neronian case involved a slave-owner who had extensive and separate estates and the sympathy was for those slaves who had nothing to do with the residence in which the master was killed. And in Ep. 8.14, the crucial element in the case was that it could not be established how the master had died and murder was just one of the possibilities. Even so, there was clearly a significant body of opinion that believed that the slaves should be slaughtered just in case. It would seem that interpreters who would see in these events attempts at ameliorating the position of slaves, or take them as evidence of moral qualms about slavery, are guilty of wishful thinking.6 Pliny’s approval of the rigorous enforcement of the law appears out of keeping with the general understanding of Pliny as the good master. To modern eyes, the killing of the slaves is repugnant and it has been difficult to understand how the refined Pliny, who is regarded as being kind to his slaves, could hold such a view. The two most important English translations, by William Melmoth (1746, a translation that was reused time and again in a variety of compendia of letters from antiquity and was in circulation throughout the eighteenth century), and by Betty Radice (1969), both insert ‘clarifications’ into the text.7 Whereas the text simply tells us that at the moment when it was realized that Macedo was not dead, diffu-

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giunt servi (the slaves fled), without differentiating between the different members of the slave household (the murderers, the fideliores, and the concubinae), Melmoth has ‘the murderers escaped’ and Radice describes the escapees as ‘guilty’. Both translators seem anxious to stress that only those directly involved in the crime would be punished, whereas the text is clear that the traditional punishment, which would mean the slaughter of all the slaves in the household, was carried out and one would normally assume that the fideliores who attempt to rescue the cruel master were themselves executed. Although these translators would seem to worry about a perceived inconsistency in Pliny’s view to the extent of emending the text, I see no incompatibility between the two letters. In spite of his kindnesses, there is no suggestion that Pliny had any reservations about the institution of slavery. Pliny clearly regarded his slaves as human, capable of human rationality and emotions. He sees slaves as social beings and persons with whom he can have a social and emotional relationship. Similarly, if his poem to Tiro is to be believed, slaves made perfectly satisfactory lovers (Ep. 7.4). He does not doubt the intellectual capacities of his slaves, nor is there any sense that slaves were incapable of being free or unsuited to citizenship. In this he is in keeping with Roman traditions since the only concern about the manumission of slaves, which seems to have been a large-scale practice, appears to have been that it potentially reduced the value of the estates which passed to the next generation. Manumission was an issue of luxuria, of conspicuous consumption rather than a concern over the ‘purity’ of the Roman citizen body. Slaves are never rendered as a radical ‘other’, forever separated from the free citizen body; they are always human. This acknowledgement of the humanity of his slaves is not an example of Pliny’s overly developed sympathy. As the letter continues, Pliny describes his grief at the loss of his slaves and complains that some would regard the loss of slaves as a purely financial problem. This is not, however, evidence for a debate in Roman society about the humanity of slaves, for which Pliny gives us one side, his opponents seeing a slave as merely an instrumentum vocale, a speaking tool.8 Instead, Pliny’s focus is on those who call themselves sapientes (philosophers). Pliny is making a contribution to the Stoic debate on the value of emotions and attacking the view that grief

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(alongside other emotions) is irrational and socially destructive. This is, in fact, a characteristic twist in the Plinian narrative. It moves attention away from the slaves, their suffering and grief, and their status to the prevailing concern of the collection, Pliny and his moral and social behaviour. The dying slaves retreat to their proper place, off-stage, as adjuncts of the master’s personality. Pliny ends the letter depicting himself being consoled and allowing himself to be consoled by his friends. He finds pleasure in weeping in the arms of a friend. In so doing, Pliny demonstrates that grief strengthens the bond between friends, displays further that friendship, reinforces social status, and establishes stronger social ties. Grief is thus useful for the master, which must have been a considerable consolation for the epidemicstruck slaves. In grieving for his slaves, Pliny accepts their humanitas and the power of his social connection to them. Yet, he still reacts overwhelmingly violently to the idea of slave revolt. This becomes even more puzzling when we recall his idea of the household being a state for slaves in which he is the imperial figure. If we take the analogy seriously, in the Larcius Macedo case the citizen slaves have reacted against the bad master and slaughtered him, an act of tyrannicide. One might expect them to be honoured for seeking their freedom, both for themselves and their fellow slaves, but instead they are to be condemned in and to horror. How can we understand this? Pliny had lived through tyranny and applauded those who had freed him and his class through assassination. The political assassination of tyrants had a long and glorified history in classical thought, which was to prove deeply problematic for emperors and for those who inherited the classical tradition in the modern age. Do we see in Pliny the ill-formed emergence of a new political doctrine, a doctrine that will elevate the master-emperor? Is the master always by definition good, a Leviathan in whose person the authority of the domus is concentrated and represented and against whom rebellion is an act against nature? To avoid attributing to Pliny what would appear, to our eyes, to be an obvious ideological and logical inconsistency and to understand better the ideas of slavery and freedom with which he operates, we need to look beyond the classical world and assess the ideological underpinnings of our views of slavery and the views that informed that abolitionist debate from the seventeenth through to the nineteenth century.

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The debate on slavery was the usual mix of sentiment, practical ethics, economics, politics, and more abstract thought. I want to trace one strand of that debate. The predominant philosophical defence of slavery appears to have been based on the right of contract. In Hobbes, the state of freedom was lost when an individual contracted him- or herself as a slave.9 This was done in order to preserve their lives once they had been defeated in war. The victor had rights over the persons of the defeated and could kill the individuals concerned. The beneficent victor generously spared the lives of the defeated and enslaved them instead. There was a contract between master and slave by which the master did not kill the slave in return for a lifetime of service. On making this contract, the slave was bound to serve loyally their saviour-master: it was thus a natural and indeed kindly act to enslave. Hobbes, however, could conceive of a second category of slave, one who did not agree to the contract but who was bound by force. This slave was much more dangerous, since that slave was not restricted by contract and could kill or escape from his master without moral censure. The practical implications of this distinction are not entirely clear and how the slave and master were to agree on the consensual nature of that contract is obscure. If there is an anti-slavery argument in Hobbes, it would centre on the obscurity of this contract.10 Becoming a servant/slave was a radical instance of the Hobbesian view of the state, and in fact the problems surrounding the status of a slave could be seen as running to the heart of the Hobbesian problem. In a state, the free individual gave up his freedom in order to obtain security of person and property in a union of free persons. This union was policed by the head of state (which could be a council) in whom an absolute authority was invested.11 Freedom, defined as the absence of impediment to action, must be partially given up to ensure the security of the individual and the preservation of freedom. Since there could (can) be no freedom without security, then the preservation of freedom was an absolute duty on the community and the individual was absolutely beholden to the community which guaranteed that security. We are thus born free, and desire freedom, but to live in society (which we must do to preserve our

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lives), we must give up that freedom. To preserve their lives, slaves enter a contract which is a radical form of what every citizen must do and since we are all, in one sense or another, enslaved to preserve our freedom, the exact status of slaves is a radical instance of a problem, but not a special problem in itself. The instance of the slave bound by force and the issue of the obscurity of contract would seem to be somewhat problematic for the Hobbesian idea of the state, but the obscurity of the contract between citizen and Leviathan, and the possibility of the Leviathan binding the citizen to it by act of violence (a very real possibility in a period of civil war and its aftermath), create a social and intellectual homology between the status of citizen and slave that would seem to argue for an acceptance of subservience by slaves and citizens as inevitable and desirable. For Hobbes, the status of slaves was largely an abstract or metaphorical question. Although one might criticize Hobbes for a sophistic attempt to justify the unjustifiable, this metaphorical interpretation of slavery merely built on a long tradition which stretched from classical philosophical images of the enslavement of the person to passions and the body or even to social convention, to Christian self-presentation as the slaves of God. Arguably, such metaphorical uses both further normalized slavery as an intellectual and social fact and made it very difficult to conceptualize the slave as being in a problematic status. Yet, for those who followed Hobbes, the issue of slavery became increasingly less metaphorical. The revival of chattel slavery on a scale not seen since antiquity gave focus to abstract notions of freedom and raised legal issues in both England and France. Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Mill took fairly similar and anti-Hobbesian positions on slavery, though these arguments may seem rather perverse to contemporary eyes. For them, slavery was a false contract. Contracts required a certain exchange, but a slave came away from a contract with nothing, not even his own person.12 To the Hobbesian argument that the slave was given his life, Rousseau retorted that this depended on the presumption that those defeated in war had given up their lives to others; that it was the right of the conqueror to kill those captures, whatever their status as combatants.13 Further, no one had the right to sell the freedom of another: child, wife, servant; since there was no right of absolute possession over another who was not already a slave. Indeed,

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the Hobbesian argument ended up as an argument for might being right: the ability to kill another individual gave the right to enslave. This could not be accepted by Enlightenment moralists. In Mill this idea develops further into a limitation on the rights of contract. Slavery was an abomination for Mill because it entailed contracting away freedom, which was a fundamental human characteristic.14 Liberty could not be contracted, because, like life itself, it was beyond contract. Still less could one contract away the rights of generations yet unborn. Much of this argument depends on the ius naturale. Hobbes starts by trying to define terminology, establishing the true meaning of words. Although Montesquieu argues for regional variations in the application of law, his Spirit of the Laws is also an attempt to uncover the principles underlying political society in all lands and ages through philosophical analysis. Mill’s ‘On Liberty’ is notably ahistorical, in the sense that although historical examples may be deployed, the argument is always from first principles. Starting from first principles, the individual as a thinking and rational agent is free. Freedom is defined by all these thinkers as being an absence of constraint. Yet, as soon as these autonomous individuals come into contact with other individuals, it is very likely that two freedoms will come into conflict, which is why a social order is necessary. There is thus a quasi-historical evolution from the asocial individual to the social individual. That joining of society is an act of will, and is contractual: the individual submits him- or herself to society in return for certain benefits, most notably protection from other individuals. In this way, the state comes to evolve. The preservation of social order is essential for the preservation of the individual. Absolute freedom is sacrificed to maintain that order. That sacrifice can be justified through the utilitarian ‘law’ of maximum advantage. This might be thought to allow for slavery in two ways. In the first instance, one could argue that freedom was aspirational and that slavery was a necessary stage through which the great society needed to pass so that it could, eventually, secure universal freedom. ‘Civilization’, the greater good, is achieved and secured through the unfortunate but necessary enslavement of a particular group. Secondly, the giving up of freedoms renders all to some extent unfree (there is always an impediment to action), and so slaves are just a special

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category of the unfree. Slaves were necessarily subject to the greater good of the state. Thus, the debate on abolition could quite respectably become a debate on the practicalities of a slaveless society: could the former slaves be induced to work; could the plantations be manned without slaves; were Africans the only race able to work in the climatic conditions of the plantations; would society collapse into disorder if the Africans were freed; could Africans be induced to accept normal social conventions without the institution of slavery? Slavery could be explained as a necessary stage in the development of a society, appalling though the situation may be, as it was in antiquity, but once America had developed sufficiently slavery could indeed be abolished. Further to this argument, slavery becomes a historical, social, and economic reality, however much one might disapprove of it in principle. Once the curse of slavery had been gifted to the Americans by the English, it was necessary to maintain the institutions of slavery in order to preserve social order, discipline and control the African population, and maintain the economy on which Euro-American civilization depended. Slavery could not be ended without an anarchy that would destroy all freedom. The good master who preserved social order needed to maintain slavery to preserve freedom. It is in this context that we can understand the importance of Adam Smith’s argument that slavery was economically disadvantageous: it answered the utilitarian case.15 This type of argument is live in our society. To what extent should individual liberties be sacrificed for the preservation of the social whole? But it is also an argument which in the case of slavery was bound to fail. In part, this relates to the issue of natural law. The philosophers start from the premiss that man desires to be free and then move to a consideration of how that freedom can be maintained in the context of society. The individual who makes the social contract, who aligns himself with the Leviathan, is a fully rational individual, not trapped by social, political, institutional, or historical factors. Indeed, the contract can only be seen as valid should the individual not be forced to participate; he or she must be a freely contracting individual. Freedom is a fundamental and basic characteristic of the human being. For this reason, Mill can deny that freedom can be contracted, any more than life can be contracted. Similarly, Montesquieu can deny that the slave contracts, since the

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slave is under compulsion and must make the contract to live. Further, Hobbes leaves the crucial caveat that the bound slave is under no obligation to serve the master; indeed, is obliged to resist. In Mill, especially, we see the beginning of the movement that led to universal declarations of human rights and the anti-slavery elements of those charters. But if freedom is a fundamental part of the human being, then it is very difficult that the fundamental human right of liberty could be sacrificed for part of the population to preserve the liberty of the rest (though this is an idea offered by Vogt in justification of Greek slavery: the price worth paying for Greek culture.)16 To do so would only be justifiable should one accept that the slave is less than fully human. One could argue that this is the point of the sentimentalist literature on slavery: it was to show that blacks could have finer feelings, could love, could accept Christ, could write poetry, make speeches, and desire freedom. The slavery problem was thus the problem of freedom.17 If freedom is to be limited, whose freedom should be limited and to what extent? Hobbes’s argument appears to have taken the point to a logical extreme: that every citizen was subjected to the absolute authority of the monarch; it is clear that others were not so persuaded. Hobbes’s argument was that the monarch was the only possibility for optimal government, away from the party and partial strife of the parliamentarians. In this instance, only a single individual should be free to avoid those unpleasant clashes between interest groups. Mill took a remarkably similar position: he may have believed that all wise and right-thinking men and women would agree on all issues once a proper debate had taken place, a position not dissimilar to that of the American pragmatists, and he was perfectly aware of the problem of limiting debate to those wise and right-thinking men and women: how can both justify and practically arrange the drawing of the line to separate the free from the unfree?18 One Liberal solution and the preferred one following the extension of the franchise and the end of colonial empires, and the solution maintained by thinkers such as Rawls, is to limit dramatically the sphere of the state and the social. A minimalist Liberal state allows freedom in private spheres and regulates the public sphere: it requires a strong and guarded boundary between public and private.19

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Slavery remains anathema because it also restricts freedom in the private sphere. The Liberal state cannot accept that limitation on freedom. Further, because freedom is essential to the definition of the person, slavery is an affront to the foundational ideology of the individual. The utilitarian argument for slavery would have to be overwhelming to justify the oppression of millions of people, and in the context of a rapidly industrializing economy in which labour could be conceptualized and extracted separately from that of the person (labour in classical economics is simply another input into production costs), then slavery becomes an obviously cruel archaism. The consequences of this conception are indeed worth celebrating; it offered very large numbers of people, the right of self-determination, freedoms in private life, security of the person, and the right to contract; it offered human rights as we know them; and a freedom from impediment in many areas of life; but we need to understand the limitations of this liberation and for this we return to Rome.

RIGHTS AND FREEDOMS Quite simply, much of this modern debate, including the reductionist definition of freedom as the absence of impediment to action, makes little sense in a Roman context. When Augustus restored the Roman Republic, the leges et iura populi Romani were restored. The libertas of the Roman Republic depended on a series of laws and rights. These were rights hard fought for, over generations of struggle with kings and magistrates. Notably, they were not ‘natural’, but achieved and granted. Nor were such rights universal: they were associated with a specific status group. Nor is it the case that those who did not enjoy this specific bundle of rights were by definition unfree. Quite where the boundary between libertas and servitude lay was an issue of political and philosophical debate, but it did not allow easy definition. Pliny is thus an indulgent master in allowing his slaves rights that progress towards freedom, but his slaves were not free. Yet even if Pliny himself is free, that freedom is a combination of rights allowed to him or achieved. He is thus able to say, probably without irony, that the emperor Trajan ordered him to be free, and so

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he was, meaning that he could exercise the rights of a free Roman.20 Yet, partly because those rights were not original, they could never exist absolutely, free of obligations, free of the social rights and laws that made him free. For Moderns the archetypal free figure is the Robinson Crusoe, a free man and a monarch of his land obligated to none and able to create a rationalistic state in the image of his consciousness. Such a man achieves absolute freedom in his isolation. For the Romans, he would simply be lost. Obligations and social connections mapped an individual into a web of status markers and it was that web that defined an individual’s being: he was a social creature bound by status; freedom was a marker of status. In this way, the Romans had no problem with freedmen, people who were given the rights and status of a free man; where they had problems is when the status of the freedman was in some way badly earned (through inappropriate sexual acts), or when the freedman came to exceed the status of the former master, or when a freedman got above his status through wealth or proximity to the emperor. And this explains Pliny’s violent reaction to the murder of the Bad Master. It was an offence against status, a revolutionary act against the fundamental political and social conceptions of the society, that a slave should overthrow the status of a master and kill him. It was not then a bid for liberty, to accede to a fundamental human good, but an attempt at social revolution and establishing an anarchy more powerful than any modern anarchy. For in a modern anarchy, social rules may be ignored, and status no longer maintained, but the individual remains untouched, sure of his or her ontological status as a thinking human being, whereas for the classical self, the ending of status meant, fundamentally, an ending of the way in which an individual could understand him- or herself. The fundamental difference with Pliny, and one of the reasons why there was not any abolitionist movement in antiquity, is that slavery and freedom were embedded in a web of status and social relations, in historical narratives and practices which explained the individual to the ancients: whereas the Enlightenment individual was born free and endowed with natural reason and was challenged by society, the Roman individual, slave and free, was part of a network of social obligations and relations, status markers, rules and rights, of which freedom and slavery were important, but perhaps not always crucial, markers. Abolitionism in

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the ancient world could only happen with the overthrow of society and a new, revolutionary ontology.21 The abolition of slavery was a step on the road to a better society, certainly. Yet, the abolition of slavery did nothing to end practices such as indentured or tied labour, sometimes practised within the British Empire, that bastion of liberal values, on an enormous scale; still less did it end poverty, inequality, or racism. The abolitionists successfully freed the slaves and in so doing allowed the former slaves to take their chances and place, acting as free agents in the capitalistic world. But, of course, the freedom achieved was limited. Freedom did not bring a radically new social location; the former slaves were still subject to brutal political and economic regimes, forced to contract for work in unfavourable circumstances, denied labour rights, political rights, and subject to arbitrary and prejudiced justice. Such rights were gradually won and the road towards freedom has been long and difficult. Freeing the enslaved ended a particularly brutal form of exploitation, but is in danger of closing our eyes to other pernicious activities. The narrow definition of liberty and the particular modern definition of the individual prevent us seeing freedom as relative and embedded with social and political practices. With Foucault, we might demur at traditional liberal discussions of liberty and especially an over-emphasis on the sovereign individual, attempting to once more see the individual within a network of repressive social and political practices, as part of a society.22 For similar reasons, Laclau argues that we should abandon the public– private divide so beloved of the liberal tradition so that emancipation can go beyond the restricted sphere of sovereignty.23 The unreal and unrealistic rhetoric which makes freedom the absence of impediment to action and the ultimate political and personal goal finally restrains the slow progressive struggle: it means that freedom becomes utopian, only achievable in a new and revolutionary system, making Jacobins of the abolitionists and their more modern fellow-travellers, easy targets as idealists and dreamers for the pragmatic liberals. Freedom, and thus slavery, exist within a particular ontological regime and frame of cultural, economic, and social powers. In this way, slavery cannot be transhistorical. The attempt of the pseudonymous nineteenth-century Pliny to insert Atlantic slavery into a ‘kinder’

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classical model, located in community and moderated by paternalism and community, as opposed to the capitalistic industrialism of the British economy, was ultimately disingenuous. Transatlantic slavery was embedded in the capitalist system: the goods from the plantations supplied the industrial machinery of Europe, fed the new consumer markets, and no doubt fed into and was fed from the capital markets generated by the trade.24 Slavery was thus a feature of this capitalistic mode. As such, slavery existed within a contractual mode of human relations and although measuring the relative inhumanity of different slave systems seems to be the worst kind of moral accountancy, it seems likely that Atlantic slavery was more brutal, more dehumanizing, and more desocializing: truly reducing slaves to assets, to labour resources, to marks in the accountancy ledger. Thus the lives lost in the trade become not a human tragedy but a financial loss which can be offset against the huge profits to be made in packing the human cargo so tightly into the slave ships. In such circumstances, it seems very likely that slaves had fewer opportunities to develop any agency or to achieve a small measure of social power in their relations with their masters. Yet, one would imagine that in ‘real’ situations human relations would cut across these ideological boundaries, perhaps even to the extent of disrupting the ideological base of Atlantic slavery. Simply because the ideology was more extreme, the reality of slavery and human suffering had the potential to puncture the ideological premisses on which Atlantic slavery was based, and thus we can understand better the significance of sentimental literature in the fight against Atlantic slavery, whereas in antiquity such literary sympathy for slaves offers no fundamental challenge to the institution. Yet, if the classical model was more robust and potentially more gentle in acknowledging the humanity of the slaves, and perhaps even more realistic in setting slavery within a social framework, it also had major ideological limitations. Pliny’s paternalism focuses political and moral power on the donor. Like all paternalisms, it reduces the status of the receiver, making the receiver an infant, dependent on the generosity and moral approval of the great. In a radical sense, and in spite of the acknowledgement of shared humanity, Pliny is unable to acknowledge a shared loss and a shared character: he is always the

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focus of attention, and the slaves’ disappearance from his perspective accurately reflects his inability to acknowledge and see and feel their suffering. What we come to see is almost a mania in Pliny, in which he can see the humanity of slaves, but he cannot and can never connect across the domestic political divide: he always sees with the masters’ eyes and there is no community of spirit. The deaths of slaves and the sorrow felt does not undermine the institution of slavery by allowing Pliny to see himself in his fellow men, but instead is an opportunity to reinforce the social order through a display of paternalism and a strengthening of the web of social relations through which Pliny asserts and guarantees his superiority. Paternalism reinforces hierarchies but also allows a circular ideological bond to develop by which the master–slave relationship becomes a predominant metaphor of order, extended across society and across conceptions of power, including those that affect the soul. Rationality has to achieve mastery of the human spirit, and especially the emotions, to ward off chaos, guaranteeing harmony and order. The master is that defender of order, that guarantor of society, who is ever-watchful against the brutality of slaves. When the master looks at slaves, he sees humans, but not as he is; humans as he could be, but whom he has surpassed. Once slavery becomes a predominant metaphor, then not only is slavery made the order of all things, but normalizes those hierarchies to the extent to which the rule of the master and the servility of the slave becomes the equivalent of a ius naturale sanctified by custom, practice, history, and social power. The strain of slavery corrupts the master in preventing him acknowledging a deep and shared humanity with his fellow, seeing not a version of himself when he looks into the face of the slave, but the differences that establish the social order. In a way Pliny is right to acknowledge a shared humanity, but that humanity is degraded by the experience of slavery and by the social and intellectual fortifications that it establishes between individuals. Those fortifications prevent the deepest identification across the servile–free boundary, identifications which would shake the foundations of that social convention and force individuals to work for social change.

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I have argued that ideologies of slavery are deeply embedded in theories of ontology. From this we can draw two conclusions. The first is that slavery is not transhistorical, but its conditions depend on the particular ontologies operating within a society. The second is that notions of liberty, closely linked as they are to issues of ontology and slavery, are also non-absolute, shifting between different societies. Wirszubski argued that there was a fundamental difference between an ancient (civic) liberty, which was defined in the political sphere, and a modern (individual) liberty in which liberty was exercised in the private sphere.25 We may see this as a differentiation of classical (perhaps even Platonic) and Liberal systems. But the argument here pushes the notion of liberty beyond this very modern public–private dichotomy into the very essence of the individual as an ethical being. I have argued that it is precisely this public–private division that Pliny is unable to see, either as good master when he extends rights to his slaves, or as bad master, when he fears the social consequences of slave revolt. I have presented here a largely Foucauldian analysis in which discourses shape the individual and give rise to societies, as discourses are in turn social products. But what if we turned the analysis round? Throughout this contribution I have given priority to the argument from philosophy (of various forms). One can read from the basis of ideology to the political and economic results. But if we read from the economics to the ideology, what would result? What if we argued that the economic and social systems that can be observed and understood encouraged intellectuals to look for explanations for the appalling inequalities that they could see before them, for reasons not to see their fellow humans in the faces of the oppressed, reasons that would allow them to sleep at night untroubled by their ethical ghosts? If Pliny was to look at the slave and see himself, see truly his fellow being, then would his world not fall apart and the economy, its history, and culture, that supported and made Pliny not disintegrate? How much better to theorize the status of the slave and sleep comfortably? The ideologies and ontologies would thus be the product of the economies rather than their cause. Atlantic slavery may

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have sought justification in contrasting itself with the barbarities of the industrial system and in annexing to itself some of the prestige of paternalism and classicism, but it can hardly be denied that it was in itself a product of the capitalist system. Faced with the capitalist theory of the person, the theory that justified the factory system and capitalist mercantilism, but in which slavery had become an aberration, though one economically necessary for the preservation of the slave-owners, their wealth and their way of life, one might expect that those slave-owners would, instead of thinking themselves out of existence, invent an alternative ontological system, looking to something beyond the industrial world, to a social paternalism and a classicism for salvation. Yet, precisely because paternalism is incompatible with the capitalistic mind-set, and paternalisms are generated often as conservative attempts to ‘soften’ inequalities or ‘restore’ archaic and often mythic social values and communal spirit, it did not represent a viable intellectual-political framework by which to maintain slavery. Atlantic slavery could be seen as one of those contradictions of capitalism that was initially formative of capitalism’s global drive for dominance, and then faced an inevitable destruction in the continuous motor of capitalistic change. Arguably that destruction was primarily economic rather than ideological, the ideological plane being justificatory of the class relations embedded within the system.26 The intermeshing of ideologies and economic systems is thus complex, with disputes within the ideological plane (such as the debates around abolitionism) forming competitive arenas even within the capitalistic mode. The debates become disputes within capitalistic ontologies and between the forms of capitalism on which those ontologies depend, but without obviously being competitive in a narrowly economic sphere. Liberalism and neo-Liberalism have consistently enforced their world-view(s) by the application of force as well as economic power, and this is what, in the end, overthrew the slave system. Perhaps here we can see the root of that very peculiar link between the pro-slavery movement and anti-colonialism in what became the US. Furthermore, the slavery debate gave liberal imperialism a justifiable moral authority which, translated into moral confidence, perhaps underpins interventionist strategies. But in so doing, the harshness of the capitalistic regime is softened, or perhaps obscured,

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by a further form of paternalism. Yet, as we see with Pliny, paternalism is but one more, perhaps more traditional form of authoritarianism. Such paternalisms refuse the local ontological systems in favour of capitalistic and, increasingly from the eighteenth century, globalist hegemonic systems. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, it was the British who were the most political representatives of that Liberal capitalistic system, and resistance to the British can be seen in part as a resistance to their aspirations for global hegemony. In this way, anti-colonial feeling would naturally slip into anti-British and pro-slavery, and pro-classical arguments. The paternalism that cloaked British liberal globalism obviously creates an ambivalence, and the decided ethical good of the abolition of slavery is rendered more complex by its capitalistic and authoritarian associations. It thus comes as no surprise that the salvationist Liberal hand is often bitten by reluctant beneficiaries of the ‘march of progress’.27 In this way, whether in classical or Atlantic modes, the ghosts of slavery haunt us still and will continue to do so until we listen to their messages.

NOTES 1. Davis (1966). 2. See the discussion of the English legal tradition in Schama (2006), 38–73. Schama emphasizes that the judgment was based on the fact that slavery was unknown to the laws of England. See also Davis (1966), 130–1. 3. This is hardly a road untravelled. See the early discussion of Constant (1816). A further aim of this analysis is to develop Wirszubski’s view that ancient notions of freedom centred on acquired political rights, whereas modern views centre on individual rights. See Wirszubski (1968), 1–6. 4. Rugemer (2004), 221–48. 5. Champlin (1991). 6. Arguably this is the case for all the ‘reforms’ in slave treatment that we see in the first century of imperial rule: there is more concern with the illegal imprisonment of free persons and the avoidance of social obligations to ‘care’ for sick slaves (and the nuisance factor that indigent former slaves would be), than any concern with the conditions of slaves in the Roman Empire.

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7. Radice (1969), 100–1 on 3.14, describes Pliny as ‘a kind and thoughtful master, not only towards the individual members of his household . . . but in his policy of allowing privileges to his slaves in the home and readiness to grant them freedom’. This translation was also used in the Loeb edition, first published the same year. 8. There is a considerable danger in taking the reductionist definitions we find in specialist texts as reflecting general views. If a legal text defines a slave as an instrumentum vocale, we need to understand that it is precisely and only in the context of a slave’s legal agency that we can understand slaves in this way. It tells us nothing about the social standing of the slave. 9. Hobbes (1991), 20 [104]. Hobbes is not unique in this view. See Davis (1966), 134–9, with references to Grotius and Locke. 10. The ambiguity of this obscurity would seem to allow us to read against the grain of the text, rendering Hobbes a thinker who allows an antislavery line. Edith Hall points out to me that in his translation of the Odyssey (1675) Hobbes routinely evades the status issue by translating all words to do with slave as ‘servant’, most conspicuously in the famous lines of Eumaeus in book 17 about the day of slavery taking half a man’s excellence away (17.322–3), which Hobbes translates (17.304–6) ‘Menservants of their duty careless are. j For half the virtue taken is away j Of whosoever is to service tied.’ 11. Hobbes (1991), 17–18 [88–90]. 12. Montesquieu, L’Esprit des lois XV. 2. 13. Rousseau [1762]. 14. J. S. Mill, ‘On liberty’, in Gray ed. (1991), 113–15. 15. A. Smith (1904 [1776]), III. 2; cf. IV. 7; I. 8. 16. Vogt (1975), 25 n. 26: ‘Slavery and its attendant loss of humanity were part of the sacrifice which had to be paid for this achievement [the Greek polis]’. 17. This is, of course, the essential thesis of Patterson (1991), though in reverse: Patterson argues that notions of freedom stem from the experience of slavery. For my purposes, the question of priority does not apply. 18. See Rawls (2005), especially xvi–xxxiii on the problems of A Theory of Justice and pp. 3–46 on fundamental ideas. The whole argument depends on a division between public and private spheres. 19. For a summary, see Honohan (2002). Neo-liberalism is a broad ‘Church’ and is a label applied with perhaps too much ease. See Rawls (2005) and (1971) for the problems of and attempted solutions to the liberal dilemma. I discuss the way in which Classical Republican

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20. 21. 22.

23. 24.

25. 26.

27.

Richard Alston thought has been used to reinforce the ‘cities of reason’ as opposed to the households of culture in ‘Post-Politics and the Ancient Greek City’ in Alston and van Nijf eds. (forthcoming). Pliny, Panegyricus 66.4: iubes esse liberos: erimus (you order us to be free; we are!). Berlin (2002), 186, remarks ‘conceptions of freedom directly derive from views of what constitutes a self ’. Foucault (1987), esp. 2–4: ‘there is a danger that [notion of liberty] will refer back to the idea that there does exist a nature or a human foundation which, as a result of a certain number of historical, social or economic processes found itself concealed, alienated or imprisoned in and by some repressive mechanism . . . Liberation opens up new relationships of power, which have to be controlled by the practices of liberty.’ Laclau (1996), 120. There is a huge bibliography on this issue, but see especially Williams (1944), which established a Marxist reading of the slave trade and abolitionism, though the latter part of the argument is now widely discredited. Wirszubski (1968), 24–30. See Drescher (1986), and esp. 67–88. It is notable that the abolitionist movement achieved its success in part through new modes of publicity and mass mobilization that depended on the new institutions and technologies of the industrial age. Moreover, one of the early successes of the methodology was the Manchester petition of 1787 which garnered more than 11,000 signatures. Manchester was to become the hotbed both of political radicalism (especially Chartism) and free-market economics and was at the forefront of the capitalistic revolution. It is no coincidence that it was also at the forefront of abolitionism. Berlin (2002), 203, claiming to follow Kant, argues that ‘Paternalism is despotic . . . because it ignores the transcendental reason embodied in me.’ This perception is widely shared, and the argument can be expressed in terms of the infantilization that follows from paternalism. But the reaction against paternalism is precisely because of the perception that the individual has a transcendental reason, and is thus part of the Enlightenment-capitalist conception of the individual. In a view of individuality that is hierarchic, then the authoritarianism of paternalism becomes difficult to see.

3 Appropriations of Spartan Helotage in British Anti-Slavery Debates of the 1790s Stephen Hodkinson and Edith Hall

For about half a millennium, between roughly the seventh and second centuries bce, the citizens of ancient Sparta exploited a native unfree population, the helots. The vast majority of helots worked the Spartiates’ landed estates, though some performed personal and domestic service, and increasingly large numbers fought in Sparta’s armed forces in the fifth and fourth centuries. Representations of the helots and their treatment were a prominent feature of contemporary accounts of Sparta and continued to influence her reception in later times.1 Owing to Sparta’s significant role in early modern and Enlightenment thinking, the helots were almost inevitably called upon as evidence in the controversies over the defensibility of slavery that are the topic of this volume. The subject of this chapter is a particular flurry of invocations of Sparta’s system of helotage during British anti-slavery debates in the 1790s. Our aim is to investigate the nature of these references, their use within contemporary abolitionist debates, and their relationship to other receptions of helotage in late eighteenthcentury political thought.

ANCIENT AND EARLY MODERN CONTEXT It is important to set references to the helots in 1790s debates in the context of earlier representations of helotage, both in antiquity,2 and

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in the period between the Renaissance and the abolition debates. The key feature of these representations is that even in classical antiquity they were overwhelmingly the work of outsiders. The Spartans themselves produced no substantial surviving accounts of their own society, and their voices are almost inaudible—except in the archaic marching songs of Tyrtaeus and fragmentary choral songs for teenage girls composed by the poet Alcman (who may or may not have been Spartan himself). Their leading and controversial role in Greek politics and thought in the classical period—as coalition leader against the Persian invasion and self-sacrificing heroes at Thermopylae, as hegemonic rival and counter-model to democratic Athens, and subsequently as domineering imperial power—provoked a diverse range of politicized representations, both positive and negative, tailored to contemporary local circumstances and replete with assumptions of otherness and of difference from the norm.3 Sparta’s exoticism became further enshrined from the late fourth century bce onwards, after her decline in power, as Hellenistic philosophy and subsequent Roman reinventions of the Spartan past transformed her social practices from a political to a moral ideal.4 The culmination is evident in the utopian society depicted in the writings of Plutarch, which exercised such a major influence upon perceptions of antiquity in early modern Europe.5 The perceived otherness of Spartan society can be seen, specifically, in ancient representations of its system of helotage. For classical contemporaries helotage was a highly contentious phenomenon. According to Plato, ‘the helot system of Sparta is of all Greek forms of slavery the most controversial and disputed, some approving the institution, others condemning it’ (Laws 6.776c). It was debated by all the major Greek historical and philosophical writers who formed the canon of early modern classical education. For critics such as Theopompos it was the most extreme form of oppression: ‘The helot population is in an altogether cruel and bitter condition’ (FgrH 155 fr. 13). Indeed, Aristotle’s Politics (2.1269a34–b12) represents it as a most problematic institution, in contrast to his defence of slavery in general as a natural institution. For Sparta’s supporters, however— especially Athenian aristocrats appalled by the blurring of distinctions between slave and free within Athens’ classical democracy—it was precisely the extremity of helot servitude and, conversely, Spartan

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freedom that appealed. Kritias, who subsequently led a Spartanbacked junta in Athens in 403, approvingly claimed that, ‘in Lakedaimon are to be found the most enslaved and the most free’ (88 B fr. 37 DK; cf. the ‘Old Oligarch’ [Ps-Xenophon] Constitution of the Athenians 2.11). So strong was the consensus regarding the extremity of helot servitude that even later proponents of the Spartan utopia, such as Plutarch in his hagiography of the Spartan lawgiver Lycurgus, were compelled to acknowledge the harshness of their condition. Indeed, Plutarch (Lycurgus 28.5–6) cites Kritias’ dictum—though without mentioning its author—but quickly attempts to salvage Lycurgus’ and the Spartans’ reputation by arguing that their excessive cruelties were not part of the lawgiver’s original measures, but a later reaction to the severe threat posed by the major mid-fifth-century helot revolt. In sum, helotage was ‘a peculiar institution’ which was questioned in ancient thought in ways that slavery in general was not. Despite the availability of these problematic images of helotage to early modern readers of ancient literature, English writers before the mid-seventeenth century tended to follow Kritias in presenting the Spartans’ domination over the helots in a positive light and portraying the helots themselves in a derogatory manner. In part, their approach reflects the general response to slavery in early modern thought, grounded in its long-standing association with influential religious and philosophical doctrines derived from the early Christian Fathers and the canons of the medieval Church and from the most respected ancient philosophers reinforced by the sanction of Roman law.6 But it also probably reflects the more specific influence of Sparta’s positive reputation in Renaissance thinking as an exemplar of a well-balanced polity with an ideal combination of military and civic discipline.7 References to the helots in sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century English writings were closely tied to the account in Plutarch’s Life of Lycurgus, made more widely accessible through the publication of Amyot’s French translation of his Parallel Lives in 1559 and Thomas North’s English translation of Amyot in 1579. However, the aspect of Plutarch’s account which seems to have made the most impact was not his admission of the helots’ harsh exploitation, but his report that the Spartans would force them ‘to drink too much strong wine, and then introduce them into their public messes, to show the young [Spartan]

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men what a thing drunkenness was; they also ordered them to sing songs and dance dances that were low and ridiculous, but to avoid the nobler kind’ (Lycurgus 28.4). In his advice book for princes, The Pilgrimage of Princes (1573), the courtier and moralist Lodowick Lloyd celebrated the Spartans’ discouragement of drunkenness: Worthie were the people of Sparta and Lacedemonia, of immortall commendations of perpetuall fame. They so abhorred this vile vice of drinkyng, that thei made their slaues and captives named Helotes, at their feastes appointed dronken, that their children might see the beastlinesse thereof . . .8

The antitheatrical satirist Stephen Gosson made similar polemical use of the helots in his The Schoole of Abuse (1579). In a tirade about the connection between drink and indecorous conduct, he complains that English equivalents of the ‘sottishe’ [i.e. foolish and drunken] helots were given more respect than Englishmen that resembled the valiant Spartans, who under Lycurgus’ laws were ‘all steele, fashioned out of tougher mettall, free in minde, valiaunt in hart, seruile to none’.9 It was during the English Revolution of the mid-seventeenth century that Sparta’s domination over the helots began to come under more critical scrutiny: specifically, within the constitutional debates during the English Commonwealth of the 1650s, as republican elements in the parliamentary New Model Army campaigned against Oliver Cromwell’s restoration of some monarchical and hereditary elements of the former constitution. For James Harrington, English Macchiavellian and the foremost contemporary advocate of classical republicanism, Sparta’s allegedly egalitarian society and popular system of government offered a powerful precedent for a stable republican system; but he was aware that the helots were a potential Achilles’ heel which could be exploited by his opponents. In his principal treatise, The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656), the ‘Archon’, Harrington’s fictional spokesman for his ideal new republic, argued that the disturbances caused by slaves to both the Roman and the Spartan republics were not an inherent fault of their republican constitutions or a contradiction of Sparta’s equality, since they were an external rather than an internal factor: The causes of commotion in a commonwealth are either external or internal. External are from enemies, from subjects, or from servants. To dispute then

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what was the cause why Rome was infested by the Italian or by the servile wars; why the slaves took the Capitol; why the Lacedaemonians were near as frequently troubled with their helots as Rome with all those . . . were to dispute upon external causes. . . . Lacedaemon was externally unquiet, because she was externally unequal, that is as to her helots, and she was internally at rest, because she was equal in herself. . . .10

One of Harrington’s critics, the royalist Matthew Wren, with some justification, protested in his 1657 refutation of Oceana that these disruptive helots were in fact not an ‘external’ problem, but ‘fundamental and essential to the Commonwealth’, since they ‘were not strangers but spread over the face of the whole Countrey’. Moreover, the Spartans could not have been relieved of productive labour, as their constitution required, ‘unlesse they had had the helots to perform those offices’.11 Harrington’s response, in his Prerogative of Popular Government (1657), makes it clear that the helots are merely an inconvenience to be argued away in order to preserve his thesis that an equal commonwealth would be a stable society. ‘Lacedaemon is either to be considered as not taking in the helots; and then in herself she was an equal commonwealth, void of any sedition or cause of it, how much soever she were troubled with the helots’; or if, as Wren claimed, ‘she took in the helots, it is undeniable that she took them in unequally, and so was unequal; whence the troubles by the helots must needs be impertinently urged against an equal commonwealth’.12 However, Harrington’s willingness, under the second alternative, to sacrifice Sparta as a model for an equal commonwealth, opened up his case to the further counter-argument, made by another opponent Henry Stubbe, that Sparta’s stability in fact demonstrated the merits of a hierarchical society: ‘yet this Common-wealth, so unequal, subsisted above 700 years’, notwithstanding its helot uprisings, which arose not from a defect in the constitution but, ‘as Aristotle observes’, from the subversion of Sparta’s neighbours.13 The Oceana debate shows a new awareness among classical republicans of the contradiction between Sparta’s reputation for civic equality and stability and her inequitable treatment of the helots; but the terms in which the helots’ subjection is discussed remain dispassionate. Nowhere is there any questioning of helotage as an

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institution, or moral or sympathetic engagement with the helots’ plight. This crucial shift did not occur until the early eighteenth century. It was connected to the contemporary debate about the relations between passion, reason, and sympathy, most famously instanced in David Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature (1739–40). In 1728 Francis Hutcheson had argued in An Essay on the Nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections that pity and sympathy make people aware of the need to discipline their passions: they restrain and educate the passions’ influence.14 In his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Adam Smith distinguished between ‘pity’, which signified fellow-feeling with another’s sorrows, and the ‘sympathy’ that could denote ‘our fellow-feeling with any passion whatever’.15 Sympathy was seen as the element in human nature which both made society possible and offered the hope of a good society. This optimistic conception informed the emergent bourgeois ideal of the ‘greatest happiness for the greatest number’, a phrase invented in the eighteenth century.16 This ideal found further validation in contemporary ideas of the ‘gentleness’ of commerce, according to which the effect of individuals acting predictably in their economic interests would produce a web of interdependent relationships and a cohesive community.17 The prevalent ideology perceived human beings as good, or at least as having the capacity to act benevolently rather than malevolently if given the chance. Expressions of this conviction are so pervasive that it has been called both an eighteenth-century collective ‘fantasy’ and ‘the propaganda of benevolence and tender feeling’.18 Both the very notion of ‘sensibility’ and the ‘sentimental’ fiction and drama which dominated this period depended on a confidence in the goodness of average human nature; at its most extreme this confidence was expressed in Rousseau’s conceptualization of virtue itself as a vehement and voluptuous passion.19 The evolution of this bourgeois ideology of sympathy, sensibility, and humanity by the 1730s radically affected perceptions of the helots. Discussions in the late 1730s and early 1740s began to include language that passed moral judgement on the ‘cruel conduct of the Spartans’ towards them,20 condemning ‘the utmost barbarity’ which they suffered.21 By the 1770s, the philosopher Herder predicted that ‘the time must come, when we shall look back with as much compassion on our inhuman traffic in negroes, as on the ancient Roman

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slaves, or spartan helots’;22 and the Whiggish clergyman William Temple fulminated against the Spartans’ ‘inhuman treatment’ of the helots, their ‘ingratitude, treachery and inhumanity hardly to be equalled’.23 Although a few less sympathetic references to the helots can still be found amongst conservative thinkers,24 the dominant language here—cruelty, barbarity, lack of humanity, the need for compassion—clearly prefigures the uses to which the helots were put in the British abolitionist debates, to which our argument now turns.

THE HELOTS IN BRITISH AB OLITIONIST DEBATES The years 1791–6 saw the first series of repeated attempts, led by William Wilberforce (Fig. 3.1), to persuade Parliament to abolish the slave trade (see above, pp. 15–18). These attempts coincided with and were much affected by the momentous events unfolding during those years in revolutionary France. The first parliamentary motion for the Abolition of the Slave Trade was proposed in the House of Commons in April 1791, but defeated by 163 votes to 88. The groundwork behind the motion was considerable. It had been preceded by a Privy Council committee inquiry, which in spring 1789 produced the ‘Report of the Lords of the Committee for Trade and Plantations on the Slave Trade’,25 and by the subsequent commissioning of a Select Committee of the House of Commons on the subject of the slave trade, which concluded its proceedings in early 1791 (Fig. 3.2). Although the motion was defeated, partly on account of anxieties aroused by the French Revolution, that it was heard at all was testimony to the effective work of the primary abolitionist organization, the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade (commonly known as ‘The London Committee’), formed just four years previously by a group led by Thomas Clarkson and members of the Quaker Committee on the Slave Trade.26 In the following year, in April 1792, Wilberforce made further, but frustratingly partial, progress when a renewed abolition bill was passed by the House of Commons, but only after supporters of the slave trade had secured an amendment to postpone its implementation until 1796. Even this modified bill was obstructed by

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Figure 3.1 William Wilberforce at work (1791)

Figure 3.2 Parliamentary evidence for abolition (1791)

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the House of Lords, which initially delayed the implementation process by announcing its own Select Committee inquiry (in practice it hardly met and eventually petered out) and in 1794 finally rejected the bill outright. As the revolution gained pace in neighbouring France, following the removal of the French monarchy and creation of the First Republic in August–September 1792, the mood even of the Commons turned against radical change. Wilberforce was unsuccessful both with his next abolition motion, of 26 February 1793, and with a 1794 bill to outlaw the supply of slaves by British ships to foreign colonies. Further abolition motions were defeated in every year until 1799, as was Philip Francis’s April 1796 motion for the Regulation of Slaves in the West Indies, which called for significant improvements in the rights of slaves. It is in the context of these repeated parliamentary debates over slavery, and committees established to hear evidence relating to the condition and treatment of slaves, that ancient slavery, and Spartan helotage in particular, were appropriated to inform and justify competing ideas and images about contemporary slavery circulating both in and beyond Parliament. Take, for example, the travelogue published in 1791 by Charles Topham Bowden, an English tourist who had travelled by horse through Dublin and remote parts of Ireland during the previous summer. He reports hearing an Irish merchant express his anger that the British had monopolized the wealth to be derived from the African slave trade. Bowden’s reaction is to declare his own abolitionist sympathies to his readers: Every man must view this trade with abhorrence who reflects on the desolation it has spread on the western coasts of Africa in the course of two centuries, and that the most fertile tracts of that continent are totally depopulated or deserted for above one hundred miles from the sea coasts, though formerly abounding with inhabitants. Long had this unhappy people remained unknown to the rest of mankind, from a supposition that nature could not sustain the intense heat at those torrid regions approximating the equator; and happy would it be for them they still remained unknown. This unjust and horrid cruelty is tolerated in the very days which condemn the antient Spartans for the captivity in which they held the Helots.27

Bowden brings the helots’ captivity into the anti-slavery argument by highlighting contemporary inconsistency in condemning the Spar-

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tans but tolerating the slave trade. Not only does Bowden take condemnation of helotage for granted, but he singles it out as the prime ancient point of reference, despite the apparent mismatch between the slave trade and a system of servitude which did not involve imported slaves. The comparative approach evident in Bowden’s work is also taken up, but from a pro-slavery perspective, in other texts of the same date. The first comes from a series of letters written by an anonymous author, calling himself ‘Detector’.28 The letters originally appeared in the London-based daily newspaper The Oracle: Bell’s World in May 1791. Later the same year they were incorporated in a volume, published in Liverpool, which comprised summaries of the House of Commons speeches on Wilberforce’s abolitionist motion of 18–19 April 1791, followed by various extra-parliamentary contributions. The volume has a distinct pro-slavery tone, with several contributions representing Liverpudlian merchant interests. However, the ‘Detector’, writing from a metropolitan perspective and following his self-adopted name, views the abolitionist movement in deeper political terms as a subterfuge for treasonous revolutionary designs. The influence of contemporary events in France is clearly evident. In his ‘Letter IV’, which appeared in The Oracle on 12 May, the ‘Detector’ sets out to refute a claim regarding the comparison of ancient and modern slave conditions made in the Commons on 19 April by the abolitionist MP William Smith. Responding to pro-slavery arguments regarding the antiquity and universality of slavery, Smith had argued that, ‘The slaves of antiquity . . . even under all the hardships they suffered, were in situation far preferable to that of negroes in the West Indies’; and he had quoted Macrobius29 to the effect that ‘ “a` majoribus nostris . . . servi familiares appellati sunt; quo`d vellent . . . a` servo omnem contumeliam, detrahere.” “Our ancestors denominated . . . the slave domestic: with the intention of removing . . . all contempt from that [sc. the condition] of the servant.”’30 The Detector’s refutation of Smith’s arguments begins with a series of comments on the deplorable situation of slaves in Athens, but then turns to the miserable condition of life endured by the helots: In Sparta the ground was tilled, and all sorts of trades managed by the Helots, whilst their masters, gentlemen-like, spent their time in dancing,

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feasting, and hunting:—but the being condemned to such drudgeries for life, had been supportable, had not they also been treated in the most barbarous manner, abused beyond the patience of men, and often murdered without having committed any fault, and without any shew of justice.

This picture is followed by some brief comments on the sources of slaves in Athens, Chios, and Homer and their treatment by the Elder Cato, before the ‘Detector’ concludes, Numberless other instances might be extracted from history, of the deplorable situation of Slaves among the Greeks and Romans, beyond comparison more wretched than in the Sugar Colonies. What then are we to think of the barefaced assertion of Mr. Smith, made in the face of the House of Commons—‘that their situation was much more comfortable among the Ancients;—that they were treated as familiares, &c.’ when he must have known that he laid himself open to detection by every School-boy?31

In contrast to Bowden’s work, in the list of ancient examples offered by the ‘Detector’, helotage does not receive priority of treatment, appearing only after a series of negative citations of the treatment of slaves in Athens. We use the term ‘citations’ advisedly, because the ‘Detector’s’ points are extracted almost verbatim from the then standard work on Greek antiquities, John Potter’s Archaeologia Graeca. The two volumes by this highly respected Bishop of Oxford had first been published in 1697 and 1699, radically revised and augmented for the second edition of 1706, and often ressiued— hence the ‘Detector’s’ comment that Smith had ‘laid himself open to detection by every School-boy’. The priority the ‘Detector’ gives to Athens reflects the fact that the citations come from Potter’s chapter in volume I on Athenian slavery, entitled ‘Of the Sojourners, and Servants, in Athens’.32 Towards the end of this chapter, Potter makes some critical remarks on Spartan helotage, dominated by evidence drawn from Plutarch and Thucydides,33 before concluding with comments on the treatment of slaves by Christians in antiquity. Nevertheless, despite their secondary position in his account, the ‘Detector’s’ invocation of the helots performs an important role in his polemic, one not fully satisfied by his comments on the maltreatment of Athenian slaves, because they enable him to counter abolitionist arguments regarding the cruel and arbitrary maltreatment of slaves by counter-citation of the barbarous abuse and the unjustified murder of innocent helots.

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The second pro-slavery text, which displays some striking similarities, is by the clergyman Richard Valpy, Headmaster of Reading Grammar School from 1781. Valpy was an able and ambitious Channel Islander and graduate of Pembroke College, Oxford, who had already established a reputation as an expert pedagogue with his The Elements of the Latin Language (1782). A zealous admirer of the British navy, he fundraised for its widows and orphans, and ardently opposed the French Revolution.34 In contrast to the ‘Detector’s’ anonymous letters, the occasion behind Valpy’s text was an official public ceremony, an invited sermon preached on 6 March 1792 at the opening of the spring Assizes at Reading. Such sermons were a longstanding part of the ritual of judicial assizes, an occasion designed, in Randall McGowen’s words, as ‘a time for consensus between the rulers of society’.35 This atmosphere of consensus is exemplified by the history of Valpy’s sermon, which was printed shortly afterwards for private circulation at the request of the High Sheriff, then published the following year at the further request of the Reading Grand Jury, along with a second sermon and the addition of extensive notes whose combined length far exceed the sermon itself. The text that interests us comes from one of these additional notes, which were written in April 1793, over a year after the original sermon.36 It is necessary, however, to understand its context within the sermon as a whole. Valpy chose an optimistic theme, ‘The Progress of Morality, Religion and Laws’, arguing ‘that the world is in a state of progressive improvement’. In his view, earlier ages were inferior in every respect. Even the Grecian states ‘may be described as a people imperious, gloomy and perfidious, . . . treating their slaves, and their prisoners, as victims devoted to cruelty’.37 Only the advent of Christianity had started a progressive amelioration in human conditions. Turning to recent times, he contrasts the divinely guided, gradual improvement in human affairs, exemplified in England, with the ‘human presumption’, exemplified in French thought, which demanded immediate root-and-branch change—with disastrous results. After outlining examples of Christian benevolence which had improved the welfare of their fellow Britons, he continues, ‘Nor are these acts of goodness confined to our fellow subjects. The oppressed multitudes of India, and the poor untutored Africans are embraced within the sphere of our benevolence.’ The sermon itself now

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passes on to other matters, but at this point the published version contains a long note:38 The powers of declamation have lately been employed with great success in describing the atrocities of modern slavery. The first orators in the British Parliament, and the lowest and the most ignorant of the idle multitude, have expressed their abhorrence, the former by their votes, the latter by their petitions, and both by their speeches, of a practice, by which they asserted that the English character has been stained with a deeper die of infamy than that, which had blackened any former age or nation. A cursory examination of the state of ancient slavery will perhaps enable the unprejudiced to form a different conclusion. The Helots of Sparta were reduced to so inhuman a servitude, that some late writers have called into question the veracity of their accounts, which are left of their condition. . . .39 Besides their labours in husbandry, in the course of which they were treated with a barbarity unexperienced by the very beasts of burden, they were harassed with military services. In the levies, their numbers were in the proportion of seven, to one citizen. In every engagement they were placed in the front of the Lacedaemonian troops, and were certain of perishing by the javelins of the enemy, if they advanced to meet, or to make, the attack; or by the swords of the regular army in the rear, if they retreated. If, in spite of this constant exposure to destruction, their numbers multiplied, the Spartan youths were permitted and encouraged at certain periods to issue forth in military accoutrements, to hunt these defenceless wretches, draw them into an ambuscade, and massacre them in cold blood.40

Valpy then continues with two brief comments on slaves in Athens, and lengthy comments on the maltreatment of Roman slaves. A brief sketch of the improvement in slave treatment under the teachings of Christianity, followed by the abolition of civil servitude in Europe after the removal of feudal oppression, leads into the argument that abolition of the contemporary trade in slaves would spell disaster for the Caribbean: An examination of the ancient state of slavery enables us to judge how far that of negroes in the West India Islands deserves equal reprobation . . . The laws lately enacted by the legislatures of the West India Islands for the protection of slaves afford the pleasing presage that their security will be established beyond the power of injustice, or the arbitrary demands of avarice. To this melioration the wishes of the feeling heart, and the endeavours of the humane politicians, may be directed with beneficial effects.

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But the forcible prevention of a supply of slaves from the coast of Africa is impracticable; and if it could be effected immediately, or in a given short period, the ruin of the islands would probably be the consequence.41

The opening words of this note suggest that Valpy’s discussion of ancient slavery, like that of the ‘Detector’, is stimulated by negative comparisons of modern with earlier slaveries in recent parliamentary debates. The note applies to slavery a combination of Valpy’s two earlier arguments: first, that ancient slavery was worse than modern; and, secondly (in the last two paragraphs), that West Indian slave conditions were being improved by recent legislation and humane endeavours, whereas immediate abolition of the slave trade would lead to the islands’ ruin. Unlike in the ‘Detector’s’ account, Sparta’s helots form Valpy’s first, and prime Greek, example of the inhumanity of ancient servitude. Like the ‘Detector’, his criticisms include the helots’ barbarous treatment and their arbitrary murder. But his account of the latter is embellished with additional details of the process of murder: the Spartan youths issue forth in military accoutrements, hunt, ambush, and then massacre the defenceless helots. At first sight, these details read like the knowledgeable classicist deploying expert knowledge of Sparta’s infamous krypteia; but in fact most of them (the military accoutrements and the hunting and ambuscade) are modern fiction. So too is most of the new ground of criticism in Valpy’s account: the helots’ harassment with military service. Valpy wrongly extrapolates the ratio of seven helots per citizen in the exceptional battle of Plataia (Hdt. 9.10; 9.29) as normal practice; and his graphic details (their placing in the front line and the killing of reluctant helots by the regular soldiers) have no basis in ancient writers. The texts considered thus far have, in keeping with most contemporary views, all assumed a completely negative interpretation of helotage. Yet there were other writers, opponents of slavery, who although they maintained a negative line, highlighted some aspects of helot conditions that they argued were actually superior to those under modern slavery. One example is William Preston, the first Secretary of the Irish Academy, in an open letter published in 1795 in response to Bryan Edwards’s defence of the colonial slave-holding class in his recent two-volume History . . . of the British Colonies in the

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West Indies.42 Preston presents the case for the abolition not just of the slave trade but of slavery itself. As his final ‘unanswerable proof of the misery of the wretched slaves’, he asserts: ‘their condition is such as to counteract the strongest natural propensities; and that, notwithstanding a very great yearly importation of negroes their number, instead of increasing, is rather on the decline’. Against the counter-argument that servile peoples normally increased only in very favourable circumstances, he cites a range of wretched unfree peoples—of whom the helots are the sole classical representative—whose populations nevertheless increased: The Jews multiplied under the Egyptian bondage, the Spartan helots multiplied, the British villeins multiplied, the northern serfs multiply; no favourable situations theirs, but wretched, on the contrary, in an extreme degree. . . . It follows, that the slavery of the negroes is more cruel and more destructive in its influence, than that of the Jews or helots of old, of the ancient English villein, or of the peasant in Poland or Muscovy at this day.43

Preston was a poet and playwright much involved with contemporary political issues (his most successful work was a play about the French Revolution), and his literary talents are reflected in the style and vigour of his prose here. But he hardly provides an analysis of helotage, apparently citing it simply as representative of ancient Greek and Roman slavery, and his alleged helot population increase has no basis in the classical sources. Nevertheless, his alignment of the helots with a range of other oppressed groups is an example of a broader tendency in eighteenth-century thought to which we shall return. Preston’s superficial analysis contrasts with that of another opponent of slavery who asserted that certain aspects of helotage were preferable to those of modern slavery. This was Sir Philip Francis, a radical Whig MP who, like Preston, originally came from an AngloIrish family, but had received a rigorous classical education at St Paul’s School in London, a training reflected in his more extended analysis of helotage.44 Francis had had a chequered career during and after his time on the Supreme Council of India in the 1770s, an experience which left its mark on his consideration of the parallels between the condition of the helots and of West Indian slaves, as is apparent from his references to the ‘Zemindars’ of Bengal, who

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collected taxes on their lands for the British government but kept a portion for themselves.45 Francis emerged in the 1790s as a supporter both of the French Revolution and of anti-slavery. Following the failure in March 1796 of Wilberforce’s latest abolition motion, he introduced his own motion on 11 April 1796 for the improvement of slave conditions in the West Indies. In this period before official records of parliamentary debates, speeches by MPs typically existed in more than one version. Several newspapers printed independent, often quite lengthy, summaries and MPs often subsequently published their own fuller (sometimes improved) versions of their major speeches.46 Among the versions of Sir Philip Francis’s speech, we can compare, for example, the Morning Chronicle’s report on 12 April 1796 written by the celebrated parliamentary reporter William Woodfall (and subsequently reproduced in his series, An Impartial Report of the Debates . . . in the Two Houses of Parliament) with the fuller version published shortly afterwards by Francis himself, which was later reproduced in The Parliamentary History of England (1818).47 Woodfall’s summary actually gives Francis’s arguments a logical flow often lacking in the MP’s own longer, somewhat rambling version; but the analysis here will mainly focus on Francis’s own account, since it provides a more complete discussion of the helots. Francis’s main proposal for improving the condition of West Indian slaves was to give them secure tenure of their own plots of land. His speech involved a tricky balance between convincing antislavery supporters that this measure would ultimately lead to abolition and assuring pro-slavery MPs that it would reinforce slavery’s continuation. It is in connection with the latter assurance that Francis invokes the precedent of the helots. Arguing that ‘rights of property [for slaves] are not incompatible with a state even of absolute slavery’, he asserts that ‘in fact they have existed together, under governments, which, in other respects, exhibited no sign of lenity, or even mercy, to their slaves’.48 After briefly citing the Roman peculium, he turns to his primary illustration: the helots. That example, however, is but little to my purpose compared to the condition of the Helots, under the tyranny of Sparta. My general wish and object is to make the service of the Negroes, as much as possible, a real service, by attaching it

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to the soil, and as little as possible a personal service. The Negroes, in our islands, are equally subject to both, or may be capriciously transferred from one to the other.

Emphasizing ‘the horrible barbarity’ with which the Spartans treated the helots, he insists that, nevertheless, In another instance, directly applicable to my present purpose, they departed boldly from all the vulgar rules of human prudence; and yet they acted wisely. They renounced the uses of property for themselves, and in effect gave the lands of Laconia to the Helots, to be cultivated by them, on the sole condition of returning to their masters a fixed and certain tribute in kind, equivalent to a quit-rent, which could never be increased. To every other intent of use and profit, the Helots were in fact proprietors of the lands. The amount of the demand on the produce of their labours being once made unalterable, a vigorous and general cultivation followed.49

The helots thus provide a historical demonstration of an argument Francis had made earlier, that tenure of their own plots would encourage West Indian slaves to work harder for their masters and seek personal improvement but not their liberty. At this point he reveals a personal interest deriving from his time in India. He reminds his audience that he had tried many years previously to persuade the English authorities to introduce a similar scheme regarding ‘the Zemindars’ in Bengal: the province, he claims, ‘cannot exist, with security of any kind to the natives, or with permanent advantage to the governing power, on any other principle’. Sparta, in contrast, had achieved both these desirable ends: The effective right of property was inviolable in the Helot, tho’ subject, in his person, to a cruelty at once deliberate and capricious, and tho’ his life was never safe. He still held a middle rank between the freeman and the domestic slave. The Helots were commonly enrolled in the Spartan armies; and tho’ seldom rewarded for their courage or fidelity, their condition was mended, at least for as long as the war lasted.

Through the example of the helots Francis thus attempts to assuage the concerns of both opposing sides. For pro-slavery MPs concerned about owners’ authority over their slaves, he insists that the helot’s person remained fully subject to Spartan domination. For anti-slavery supporters concerned about slave conditions, he maintains that the

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helots’ property rights were both real and effective in raising their status, even including the benefits of participation in the army. As if concerned to ram home this message, he concludes by reminding his listeners that, ‘This example of the Helots, Sir, is direct and powerful to my immediate purpose. They were slaves, and they had landed property, or an equivalent to it in the use and enjoyment.’50 As a well-known example of a primarily agricultural slave community, the helots were indeed more apposite as an analogy for West Indian slavery than most ancient slave populations; and their attested position vis-a`-vis the landholdings they cultivated was directly relevant to Francis’s proposal. In depicting that position he draws, without acknowledgement, upon a text in Plutarch’s Moralia (239e): The helots tilled the soil for them [sc. the Spartans], paying a return which was regularly settled in advance. There was a ban against letting for a higher price, so that the helots might make some profit and thus be glad to do the work for their masters.

The passage provides grounding for Francis’s account of the helots’ ‘fixed and certain tribute in kind’; and his reassurance to pro-slavery MPs that this fixed quit-rent led to ‘a vigorous and general cultivation’ is evidently based on its final sentence. However, the other key feature of his account—his claim that the Spartans ‘renounced the uses of property for themselves’, making the helots ‘in fact proprietors of the lands’—is not validated by this or any other ancient text. It is probably based instead on the contemporary late eighteenth-century notion that the Spartans had renounced private property. This notion had become current in French intellectual debates during the 1760s, especially through the influential writings of Gabriel Bonnot, abbe´ de Mably, a ‘classical republican’ of the French Enlightenment with an unusually advanced belief in egalitarianism.51 Mably’s writings were well known in British intellectual circles, partly through English translations, partly through the joint publication in London and Paris of his Œuvres Comple`tes in 1789, following a significant revival of interest in his radical ideas during the ‘pre-revolution’ in France.52 In the mid1790s the notion of the Spartans’ renunciation of property had come to the fore once again in French revolutionary debates, during discussions in summer 1793 about the introduction of an agrarian

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law. It had gained further prominence around the very time of Francis’s speech in April 1796 during the so-called Conspiration des E´gaux led by the communitarian agitator and journalist ‘Gracchus’ Babeuf, whose proposals included the establishment of a community of goods, including state acquisition of land and its equal allocation to peasant farmers.53 It is unlikely that the failure of Francis’s motion should be primarily attributed to the communist associations of his analogy with helot landed proprietors—the failure of the latest abolition motion the previous month suggests that the mood of the Commons was already set in favour of the status quo—but the contemporary revival of such egalitarian ideas across the Channel will not have encouraged positive reception for a proposal to take certain property rights from West Indian slave-owners and cede them to their slaves. The most striking aspect of these 1790s accounts is that, although they all regard helotage as a negative phenomenon, there was sufficient variety of interpretation for the helots to be used in different ways against different targets, not only by those on opposite sides of the debate but even by those on the same side. In general, pro-slavery writers like the ‘Detector’ and Valpy portrayed the helots’ treatment as undoubtedly worse than that of modern slaves; whereas antislavery supporters like Preston and Francis argue that in some respects it provided better conditions than modern slavery. On some issues, interpretations divide neatly along these straightforward lines: for example, the contrast between Francis’s depiction of the amelioration of the helots’ conditions during military service and Valpy’s picture of their harassment and destruction in the army. However, matters were not always so simple. Even a fierce pro-slavery advocate like the ‘Detector’ could countenance that, but for their barbarous abuse and arbitrary murder, helot agricultural drudgery in itself would have been supportable. Conversely, on the anti-slavery side, Bowden assumes that helotage is to be condemned unreservedly: his focus on the hypocrisy of those who tolerated the slave trade leads him to a different portrayal from Preston and Francis, whose concern was the condition of the slaves after their settlement in the Americas. This variety of interpretation was of course assisted by the different degrees to which each writer’s comments were grounded upon

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knowledge of the ancient sources. Through Potter’s work, the ‘Detector’ drew with reasonable accuracy upon a range of ancient writings, especially the account of the infamous krypteia in Plutarch’s Lycurgus (28.1–3); whereas, as we have already seen, much of the detail in Valpy’s account is fiction.54 However, the pro-slavery side had no monopoly on imaginary representations. As already noted, the alleged helot population increase that underpins Preston’s preference for helotage over modern slavery lacks any ancient backing. Francis’s account of the helots’ fixity of rent is grounded in an ancient source, but his depiction of the amelioration of their conditions during military service is based no less on unsupported speculation than is Valpy’s contrary picture of their harassment and destruction.

CONTEMPORARY CONTEXTUALIZATION How can we contextualize these appropriations of the helots in 1790s anti-slavery debates? Francis’s 1796 speech appears to mark the last contemporary reference to helotage in this context. Invocations of the helots all fall, therefore, within a six-year period starting in 1791: in fact, within the span of a single parliamentary session: the Seventeenth Parliament of Great Britain, which lasted from August 1790 to May 1796. The stimulus of the parliamentary campaign for abolition of the slave trade was clearly important. There is no evidence of references to the helots in anti-slavery contexts before the House of Commons debate in April 1791 gave the issue widespread publicity, especially among the opponents of abolition.55 Moreover, the three most substantial discussions (those of the ‘Detector’, Valpy, and Francis) all refer to or were made within the direct context of the parliamentary debates. In one sense the connection of helotage with these parliamentary debates may seem surprising, since the focus of most of those debates was the slave trade. Of all forms of ancient servitude, helotage, the exploitation of a native rather than an imported slave population, was prima facie the least relevant comparison. However, besides the fact that the paucity of surviving details about the ancient slave trade would have made like-for-like comparison difficult, the twin issues of the slave trade and of the practice of

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New World slavery were frequently intermingled in contemporary debates, both in and out of Parliament,56 a phenomenon evident in several of the texts considered above. The invocation of ancient slavery as either a better or a worse form of servitude than modern slavery was a valuable argumentative tactic in a period when classical precedents still counted in contemporary debates. As a predominantly agricultural form of servitude, helotage was the most suitable ancient comparison for the agrarian slavery practised on the plantations of the West Indies. Despite these considerations, the limited period during which the helots were appropriated in abolitionist debates indicates that the mere presence of parliamentary motions was insufficient in itself. There were also wider factors at work. The invocation of the helots in the period 1791–6 by both abolitionists and pro-slavery advocates coincided with the time when the anti-slavery cause was both newly prominent and hotly contested; and, above all, when the controversy surrounding this radical cause was heightened by its perceived association with revolutionary changes in France, at their radical peak during the National Convention of 1792–5, which witnessed both the execution of Louis XVI and the Reign of Terror. To defenders of slavery the revolution provided frightening evidence of the consequences of a popular movement which undermined the established order and private property rights. The ‘undoubted community of interest’ and tactics between abolitionists and the popular radical movement for British parliamentary reform (whose composition included a significant plebeian element) and the abolitionists’ intermingling of attacks on both the slave trade and the practice of slavery itself were important in stimulating this association with their cause.57 In contrast, despite further parliamentary abolitionist motions from 1797 to 1799, references to the helots fall away in the later 1790s; and they appear to be similarly absent in the following decade, when anti-slavery motions resumed in 1804, leading to the passing of the Slave Trade Abolition Act in March 1807.58 By the late 1790s the French Revolution’s radical era had ended with the Thermidorian reaction and the establishment of the Directory in 1795. From 1795 onwards British abolitionism also moderated into a primarily parliamentary movement, after the repressive ‘Two Acts’ (the Treasonable Practices Act and the Seditious Meetings Act) passed in that year

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effectively outlawed all public meetings, crippling both the radical corresponding societies and the public side of the abolitionist movement. By the middle of the following decade British politics (shorn of its populist elements) had unified politically during the Napoleonic Wars against France and abolitionists were able to present their cause not as a radical measure but ‘as elementary national interest in time of war’. The way for the 1807 Act was paved the previous year with the passing of Foreign Slave Trade Abolition Bill, which abolished two-thirds of the British slave trade by outlawing the trading of slaves to enemy and other foreign territories.59 In this context debates surrounding abolitionism were vastly different in character and lacked the controversy present in the early 1790s.60 In sum, the helots became a relevant point of reference in antislavery debates at (and only during) the time when popular passion and political controversy about abolition was at its height. Both defenders and opponents of slavery could take the cruel and bitter character of helot servitude—amply attested by ancient writers, as we saw earlier—as given and use it as an extreme case through which to argue, according to their persuasion, either that modern slavery was fundamentally more humane than helotage or that even the helots’ desperate condition was in some respects preferable to that of contemporary slaves. These arguments were a logical development of the newly sympathetic approach to the helots that had developed from the 1730s onwards. This approach led to the helots being used, in the final third of the eighteenth century, as an analogy for a diverse range of groups whose oppressed status authors wished to emphasize to their readers. In a chapter of his influential An Essay on the History of Civil Society (1767) entitled ‘Of rude nations prior to the establishment of property’, the Edinburgh moral philosopher and historian Adam Ferguson had argued that the subjection of women was related to underdeveloped property relations and had equated it to the position of the helots: While one sex continue to value themselves chiefly on their courage . . . , this species of property which is bestowed on the other, is in reality a mark of subjection . . . It is the care and trouble of a subject with which the warrior does not chuse to be embarrassed. It is a servitude and a continual toil,

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where no honours are won; and they whose province it is, are in fact the slaves and the helots of their country.61

At around the time that the position of women was beginning to come under scrutiny in the Scottish Enlightenment, the passing of the Sugar Act (1764) and the Stamp Act (1765), which did so much to inflame revolutionary sentiments in America, also produced in the mother country a barrage of publications discussing the correct relationship between Britain and her subject colonies. In one such pamphlet, published in 1769 as an address to King and Parliament, Gervase Bushe, apparently a Pitt Whig, argued for the colonial rights of self-taxation and the freedom of British subjects. For this ‘embryonic home-ruler’, as one political historian has called him,62 as for Adam Ferguson, the obvious analogy for Britain’s treatment of her American colonists was the relationship between the Spartans and helots: Now I defy any person to mention one single power, which the Spartan republic assumed over the Helots, which England does not assume over her Colonies.63

A similar, albeit historical, analogy is drawn in Alexander Kincaid’s The History of Edinburgh (1787), to depict the relationship between Edinburgh and the people of Leith in the fifteenth century. A series of favours granted by the nobility to the citizens of Edinburgh had authorized their ruthless exploitation of the nearby village on the south shore of the Firth of Forth: ‘the citizens of Edinburgh proceeded to act towards the inhabitants of this unhappy village, in a manner somewhat similar to that of the ancient Spartans towards their slaves, called Helots’.64 Kincaid’s comparison is an intelligent one which shows some understanding of the particularities of the status of the ancient helots, as an exploited population living separately but side-by-side with its masters. He illustrates the comparison by describing how Edinburgh citizens were permitted to build quays and open businesses in Leith, but the local people were prevented from having warehouses or inns of their own and forbidden from entering into business partnerships with people from Edinburgh. Amongst these diverse analogies with the helots, two comparisons which overlapped chronologically with the abolition debates stand

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out as particularly sustained. One is an analogy with the position of the Irish under English rule. Several decades before the parliamentary debates, Jonathan Swift’s Jacobite friend Sir Charles Wogan wrote complaining that the Catholic Irish ‘are reduced to the wretched condition of the Spartan Helots. They are under a double slavery. They serve their inhuman lordlings, who are the more severe upon them, because they dare not yet look upon the country as their own; while all together are under the supercilious dominion and jealousy of another over-ruling power.’65 But it was not only fellow Catholics who suggested parallels between the condition of Irish peasants and the ancient helots. In 1778 Thomas Campbell, a Church of Ireland clergyman dismayed by the ignorance of Irish affairs he encountered in England and by the bad policies that resulted, published a survey of rural life in southern Ireland aimed at changing English opinion (James Boswell described it as very ‘entertaining’).66 Amongst other things, Campbell argued for reform of the harsh penal code, and when describing the advance reaction of some Irish cottagers to their new landlord, wrote that ‘they like the Helots, were afraid of the lash of their accustomed masters’.67 The brutal punishments meted out to the Irish peasantry also attracted the attention of Dennis Taaffe, a Catholic priest and brilliant polemicist active in the Dublin political underground, who fulminated in 1798 that unenfranchised Irishmen ‘are the helots, doomed to toil, torture, or death, at the pleasure of their task-masters’.68 Taaffe was a member of the United Irishmen, the early Irish republican movement active between 1791 and 1798, which proposed an independent Ireland run by all religious denominations on an equal basis.69 The helots seem to have been consciously and collectively used as analogy by the members of this movement. Already in the 1780s one of their future members, the Ulster-born radical Presbyterian William Drennan, a man later tried for sedition, used them as a badge of identification in his Letters of an Irish Helot written under the pseudonym ‘Orellana’.70 They were also cited more than once by the noted Protestant champion of Catholic emancipation, William Todd Jones, himself subsequently imprisoned for his political activities. In 1784 he complained that the way that the unemancipated Irish were treated meant that ‘the ancient faith and ancient arms of Ireland ought to merge in the infamy of Grecian

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Helots’.71 Eight years later Jones tried to allay the anxieties of some of the Protestants amongst his fellow United Irishmen about the rights to be conferred on Catholics: The helots of Sparta were as much slaves as the bondmen of the Turk, or of the West Indies; and I challenge writers to enumerate any power which the Spartan republic exercised over the helots, which the English settler has not assumed over his Irish feudatory. The Lacedaemonians sported with the lives of their helots—In 1601, Roger Williams, at a gaol delivery at Waterford, was fined by Wogan, Lord Justice of Ireland, five marks, for killing one O’Driscol, he being a ‘mere Irishman;’ by which legal phrase was meant that he had no cross of English blood in him. . . . I do not insinuate that the Protestant of the present day may not be disposed to govern his helots with a little more forbearance, and humanity; but however mildly his despotic powers be administered, the servile state of the Catholic is not less that of a despotism.72

Here the licence that ancient Spartans had to kill helots is compared with the outrageously lenient punishment Williams received for killing a ‘mere Irishman’. But Jones also compares the Irish peasant’s situation with that of contemporary servile groups: serfs under the Ottoman Empire and slaves in the Caribbean. The three-way comparison between the helots, Irish peasants, and African slaves in the West Indies is, indeed, drawn several times by writers about late eighteenth-century Ireland. An anonymous tract complaining about the conduct of a local election in County Down in 1783 claims that the ‘wretched negroes’ scarcely count as black in terms of hardships ‘when compared to the Helots of Down’.73 Another anonymous tract Irish Independence, published in Dublin in 1800, reiterates the point: ‘Sparta was free, but she had her helots; Rome was free, but she had her slaves; Britain is free, but she has her negroes.—Can we say Ireland is free when she has her Catholics?’74 Despite this recurring rhetorical trope of a three-way comparison of helots with Irish peasants and West Indian slaves, there are important differences in the ways that helotage is appropriated in the abolition debates and in the polemics of Irish republicans. Irish writers frequently go beyond comparison or analogy to an identification of the Irish with helots, in the most extreme instances using ‘Helot’ as a pseudonym. However, they provide little analysis of

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the character of helotage or the nature of its relevance to contemporary Ireland, at least beyond references to violent punishments and the cheapness of Catholic life. Even Drennan’s Letters of an Irish Helot, despite its promising title, contains no further references to the helots in the body of its text. In Irish writings the helot analogy is primarily a label, powerful in resonance, but lacking in depth; whereas in the abolition debates the West Indian–helot comparisons are precisely targeted to contemporary debates. The historicity of some of their assertions may be questionable, but they display thought about the operation of helotage, and even about the complexity of helot conditions. (Preston, for example, combines their wretched situation with their demographic increase; and Francis their barbaric treatment with their property rights and military service.) Part of the reason, perhaps, is that West Indian–helot comparisons were linked to political conflict and used by both sides in an acerbic controversy, in which attempts to appropriate the authority of Spartan antiquity demanded precise interpretations to convince an educated audience and combat the arguments of opponents. In contrast, for proponents of Irish–helot analogies, with their shared opposition to the character of English rule, the moral force of broad-brush assimilation was more than sufficient. The other sustained helot analogy current in the 1790s is with the oppressed serfs or peasants of contemporary Poland. Its first appearance in the decade comes in an anonymous anti-radical pamphlet aimed against Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man, published in Dublin in 1793. Defending the right of landed proprietors to exclusive power over their private property, the author nevertheless agrees that this ‘rightful power’ over one’s own property should not be misused to usurp power over the property or persons of others. Selecting an historical illustration, he insists that, ‘The Spartan proprietors were no more justified in their treatment of the Helots, or the Polish nobles of the Peasants, than the Helots or Peasants would have been justified in making laws to govern the property of their masters. . . .’75 The casual manner in which our anonymous pamphleteer juxtaposes Spartan and Polish social relations suggests an analogy familiar to his British readers. Its primary source was Continental Enlightenment writers, especially the egalitarian ‘classical republican’ Abbe´ de Mably, whose British readership was mentioned earlier. In his De

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l’E´tude de l’Histoire (1775), published in London in 1789 as part of his Œuvres Comple`tes, Mably depicts Poland as dominated by a nobility whose serfs he describes as helots (‘ces Ilotes’). He proceeds to argue, in a strange inversion of the analogy, that, but for their long-suffering acquiescence and population decline, the Polish serfs would have hunted down their masters as the Spartans did to helots that they feared.76 In his damning account of Sparta in his Recherches philosophiques sur les grecs (1787–8), first translated into English in 1792, the Dutch ethnologist Cornelius de Pauw approached the analogy from the opposite angle, using Poland to illuminate the operation of helotage: ‘The Helotes possessed nothing of their own; and . . . they could be butchered with impunity. This right, which the lords of the manor in Poland likewise dared to exercise anciently against the peasants, supposes the most rightful despotism, ever conceived by the human mind, in its greatest degree of perversity.’77 As with the helot–Irish comparisons, the accounts considered thus far express little more than a simple analogy between the helots and Polish peasant serfs. However, one other work by a Continental writer, published (first in the original French, then in English translation) in London in the mid-1790s, presents a slightly more sustained discussion: the memoirs of Charles-Franc¸ois du Pe´rier Dumouriez, the former French general, ally of the Girondists and Minister of Foreign Affairs, now living in exile in England on a pension from the British government. In the early 1770s Dumouriez had fought in Poland as a professional soldier on behalf of the ‘Confederation of Bar’ (a league of Polish gentry and Catholic church leaders), organizing a Polish militia against the occupying Russian forces. In a critical assessment of the state of Poland, he asserts that, The Polish constitution is a pure aristocracy, but one in which the nobles have not a people to govern, for this name cannot be given to eight or ten thousand bondsmen, fixed to the soil, who do not possess any political existence, and whose slavery is sold, bought, bartered, inherited, and follows every mutation of property, exactly in the same manner as if they were domestic animals. The social body of the Poles is a monster composed of an union of heads and stomachs, without either arms or legs. Their regulations, and penal code, resemble those of the sugar colonies, which, for the same reason, will never be able to support their independence. The Polish nation consisted

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only, before the partition [of 1772], of a social body of eight or nine hundred thousand nobles, scattered over a surface, which, under another form of government, would have been able to have maintained thirty millions of freemen. The Spartans, indeed, had their helots; in the same manner as the Poles their enslaved peasantry: but the former occupied a very confined portion of territory, possessed austere manners, and a well ordered government. The Spartans armed their helots, made use of them, in time of war, and supplied with them the diminution of inhabitants, when the city became depopulated, by elevating a certain number to the rank of citizens. The noble Poles, on the other hand, dare not entrust arms in the hands of their slaves, and never admit them to the honour of nobility.78

Despite his brief and unspecific reference to Britain’s sugar colonies, Dumouriez’s chief comparison for relations between the Polish nobility and their ‘enslaved peasantry’ is the Spartans and their helots. The comparison is altogether in favour of the Spartans, whose austere and well-ordered occupation of a confined territory (he presumably means the five Spartiate villages in the Eurotas valley) is contrasted with the Polish nobility’s physical and economically wasteful dispersal over vast tracts of land. Dumouriez’s military experience in organizing the Polish militia directs his interest, above all, to a favourable (though historically exaggerated) account of the helots’ military role and social elevation to citizen ranks, in contrast to the Polish nobles’ lack of trust in their peasantry. His account of the background to his personal engagement in Poland’s affairs provokes a thoughtful use of the helot analogy which goes beyond the simple identification made by other writers and focuses on specific aspects of the helots’ social condition, in order to highlight contrasts in the Polish situation that illuminate the difficulties he faced in his military mission. Though he shares the other writers’ negative view of Polish exploitation, he consequently provides a diversity of approach lacking in references to the Irish–helot analogy. Indeed, his positive portrayal of certain features of Spartan–helot relations brings him closer to the standpoint of Philip Francis than any other contemporary writer. It is perhaps no coincidence that the perspectives of both men were informed by a common personal experience of having been external figures of authority in countries with a native ruling elite and a subject rural population. Among all

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the writers considered in this study, they were both very much the exception.

POSTSCRIPT In conclusion, although it was the discussions of the English Commonwealth during the 1650s which ended the previous negative characterizations of the helots themselves and first put them under a political spotlight, it was eighteenth-century changes in moral sensibilities which placed them centre-stage as an ancient analogy for contemporary oppressed groups. From that point onwards most references took for granted a blanket condemnation of their treatment by the Spartans. Only amidst the political controversies of the early to mid-1790s did some discussions seek to apply a more specific analysis of the helots’ conditions to an interpretation of the treatment of contemporary slaves, stimulated by the short-lived conjuncture of the public and parliamentary anti-slavery campaign with other radical populist causes at home and revolutionary developments in neighbouring France. With the passing of this conjuncture, generic negative approaches to the helots’ treatment became even more dominant in the early nineteenth century, as ‘orators in Parliament and elsewhere, drunk or sober’ could be heard ‘lamenting over the Helotism of Ireland, and the savage oppression of its rulers’.79 The Industrial Revolution brought a new kind of helots into focus, leading the Romantic Robert Southey to lament the ugliness which industrial labour inflicted on the landscape, asking why it is ‘that every thing which is connected with manufactures presents such features of unqualified deformity? From the largest of Mammon’s temples down to the poorest hovel in which his helotry are stalled, these edifices have all one character.’80 Thomas Carlyle’s panegyric of the working man in his Sartor Resartus is entitled, simply, ‘helotage’.81 The later nineteenth century saw the emergence of more daring metaphorical applications of the ancient helots. In his novel Pausanias, which is indeed about ancient Sparta, Edward Bulwer-Lytton can transfer the verb ‘helotize’ to restrictions imposed on ‘affection, genius, nature

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herself ’.82 By 1895 the Danish botanist J. E. B. Warming used the term ‘helotism’ to describe the symbiotic relationship between fungus and algae in the complex body of lichen.83 Whereas early modern and eighteenth-century discussions typically referred simply to ‘the helots’, the conspicuous feature of nineteenth-century accounts is thus the emergence of ‘system-terms’ (helotism, helotry, helotize, helotage) which became established as short-hand terms of generic application, thus further inhibiting the development of in-depth appropriations of the helots. However, as a link to later chapters of this volume which focus on the abolition struggle in America, we can close our study with one significant exception to this general nineteenth-century trend, which involves a more knowledgeable and thoughtful comparative discussion of helot conditions.84 This exception comes precisely in the context of US anti-slavery, through the voice of a black American, David Walker, who had been brought up, as the son of a slave father and a free mother, in Wilmington, North Carolina, and had direct personal experience of the conditions of plantation slavery. After moving to Boston as an adult, he became a tireless campaigner for abolition and in 1829 published his hugely influential Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, which was promptly banned in several American states. Walker argues passionately that the slavery endured by Africans in America was the worst that had ever occurred in world history, but feels that he has to specially address the case of Sparta’s helots as an earlier example of severe servitude. The sufferings of the Helots among the Spartans, were somewhat severe, it is true, but to say that theirs, were as severe as ours among the Americans, I do most strenuously deny—for instance, can any man show me an article on a page of ancient history which specifies, that, the Spartans chained, and handcuffed the Helots, and dragged them from their wives and children, children from their parents, mothers from their suckling babes, wives from their husbands, driving them from one end of the country to the other? Notice the Spartans were heathens, who lived long before our Divine Master made his appearance in the flesh. . . . Further—The Spartans or Lacedaemonians, had some frivolous pretext, for enslaving the Helots, for they [sc. the Helots] while being free inhabitants of Sparta, stirred up an intestine commotion, and were, by the Spartans subdued, and made prisoners of

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war. Consequently, they and their children were condemned to perpetual slavery.85

NOTES 1. Luraghi (2009), 261–70, Rawson (1969), s.v. helots. 2. This is a vast topic. For the controversies surrounding the discussions of the helots in antiquity, see e.g. Ducat (1990), Whitby (1994), Hodkinson (2000), ch. 4, Luraghi (2002) and (2009), Luraghi and Alcock (2003, eds.). 3. Ollier (1933–43), vol. 1, Tigerstedt (1965–78), vol. 1, Hodkinson (2005). 4. Ollier (1933–43), vol. 2, Tigerstedt (1965–78), vol. 2, Cartledge and Spawforth (1989), 190–211. 5. On which see especially Ziegler (1951), 947–62, Rawson (1969), Howard (1970), Cartledge (2001), and Birgalias, Buraselis, and Cartledge (2007). 6. Davis (1966), ix, 91–121. 7. Rawson (1969), 130–69. 8. Lloyd (1573), 203. 9. Gosson (1841 [1579]), 37–8. See also the reference in Braithwaite (1630), 177–8 to ‘those base Elyots slaved to ebrietie’. 10. Harrington (1656 [1977]), 274–5. 11. Wren (1657), 59–60. 12. Harrington (1657 [2007]), 426. 13. Stubbe (1659), 6. 14. See Mullan (1988), 18–19, 31. 15. Heilbroner (1986), 108. 16. Brissenden (1974), 31–4. 17. Hirschman (1977). 18. See the discussion of ‘sentimentalism’ in Brissenden (1974), 27–9. 19. Bernbaum (1958), 2; Babbitt (1919), 132. 20. England (1737), 301. 21. Turnbull (1742), 84. 22. Herder (1800), 447 (originally published 1784–91).

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23. Temple (1778), 25. See also William Roscoe’s invitation to the audience of his poem The Wrongs of Africa (1787), 35 to imagine for themselves ‘the groans of slaughter’d Helots’, and the ardent Rousseauan Sir Brooke Boothby’s reflections on the helots’ situation (1792), 180: ‘The most horrible and abominable of all inequalities among men . . . the most abject of slaves; and the cruel indignity with which they were treated’. 24. See, for example, one attack on the substantial number of large workhouses, or ‘houses of industry’ which had been built as a result of the Poor Relief Act of 1782, ostensibly in order to provide accommodation and work for paupers other than able-bodied adults: ‘The worker in the “Houses of Industry” . . . joins his class without a murmur, puts on his distinguishing habit, and appears to express no one symptom of shame or regret; like the Helots of old in Sparta’ (Alderson (1787), 21). 25. Parliamentary Papers, 1789, vol. 26, no. 646; much of the content of the report is discussed in Sheridan (1972). 26. For the importance of the work of this committee in mobilizing public opinion, see Oldfield (1992). 27. Bowden (1791), 55 (our emphasis). 28. The pseudonym ‘Detector’ (or ‘Detecter’), defined in Dr Johnson’s 1755 dictionary as ‘one that finds out what another desires to hide’, was in common use among anonymous newspaper correspondents in the late 18th century. It is therefore difficult to identify our ‘Detector’ with any known individual, but three possibilities merit discussion. (i) A certain Nathaniel Brassey Halhed wrote a large number of letters on Indian affairs under the pseudonym ‘Detector’ in 1782–3; but they ceased thereafter and there is no evidence that he took any interest in slavery: cf. Rocher (1983), esp. 105–9. (ii) There is another Detector, almost exactly contemporary with our correspondent, who contributed to The Diary, or Woodfall’s Register on Thursday, 23 June 1791, Issue 702, pp. 1–2; but his support for the current Prime Minister and government does not appear to match our Detector’s politics. (iii) Some three years later, in 1794, the former proprietor of The Oracle: Bell’s World, John Bell, appears (the reference is not totally clear) to be termed ‘the detector’ in an issue of its successor newspaper, the Oracle and Public Advertiser, Tuesday, 27 May 1794, Issue 18707, p. 3, col. 1. The fact that our Detector was given space for six substantial letters in John Bell’s newspaper in the space of 23 days may raise suspicions that the correspondent was in fact the proprietor; but this cannot at present be proved. 29. This seems to be a slight misquotation of Macrobius 1.11.11, which actually reads, ‘Nam et maiores nostri omnem dominis invidiam,

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31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36.

Stephen Hodkinson and Edith Hall omnem servis contumeliam detrahentes, dominum patremfamilias servos familiares appellaverunt’. (‘For our ancestors, intending to prevent any ill-will attaching to masters and any contempt attaching to slaves, even called the master the “father of the household” and his slaves “members of the household”.) But Macrobius was in turn almost certainly citing Seneca the Younger (one of his favourite authorities), who writes at Ep. Mor. 47.14: ‘Ne illud quidem videtis, quam omnem invidiam maiores nostri dominis, omnem contumeliam servis detraxerint? Dominum patrem familiae appellaverunt, servos, quod etiam in mimis adhuc durat, familiares.’ (‘Do you not see even this, that our ancestors prevented all ill-will from attaching to masters and all contempt attaching to slaves? They called the master “father of the household” and the slaves “members of the household”, a practice which still survives in mime performances.’) The Parliamentary History of England from the earliest period to the year 1803, vol. xxix, comprising the period from the twenty-second of March 1791 to the thirteenth of December 1792 (London, 1817), cols. 317–18. The Parliamentary History (to 1803), one of several collections of debates covering this period, was compiled retrospectively in 36 volumes from 1806 onwards: Thorne (1986), 368. ‘Detector’ (1791), 93. Note how the ‘Detector’s’ account of Smith’s actual words diverges somewhat from that in the Parliamentary History, in an age before the existence of an official record of parliamentary speeches. Potter (1728), vol. i, ch. 10. Potter (1728), vol. i, 69–70. See Hall (2004) and Hall and Macintosh (2005), ch. 9. McGowen (1987–8), 194. Valpy (1793). In the ‘Advertisement’ which prefaces the work Valpy states that ‘the Notes and Appendix were written in the month of April’, after which ‘domestic anxieties and misfortunes’ prevented publication of the work until 14 December 1793. He must be referring to April 1793 rather than April 1792, for reasons both internal and external to the text. (i) Since his comments mention both ‘Notes and Appendix’, they clearly relate to the volume as a whole, whose second sermon was not given until March 1793; (ii) A note on p. 55 indicates the omission of critical remarks on the new French Constitution of 1791, which had appeared in the original March 1792 printing of the sermon, following the demise of that constitution in autumn 1792; (iii) Appendix no. 1 refers to the French invasion of Belgium and Savoy during the campaigns of summer 1792 (p. 125).

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37. Valpy (1793), 14. Sparta in particular comes in for severe criticism (p. 18), with Valpy citing the recent critique by Cornelius de Pauw in his Recherches philosophiques sur les grecs (1788). 38. Valpy (1793), 63–9. 39. Here Valpy cross-refers to Barthe´lemy’s Voyage d’Anacharsis (1789), ch. xlii, xlvii, notes. 40. Valpy (1793), 63–5 (our emphasis, except for ‘modern’ and ‘ancient’ in the first paragraph, which are italicized in the original). 41. Valpy (1793), 68–9. He concludes that a gradual improvement in slave conditions, inspired by Christian mercy, will bring about an increase in indigenous slaves and an end to the slave trade without violation of public faith and private property. 42. Preston (1795); Edwards (1793). Edwards was a planter in Jamaica and highly respected historian, one of the ‘philosophes of the Caribbean’ (Davis 1975, 184) and a man of liberal views, who had for a time been critical of the slave trade; but, as a colonial property-owner and a West India merchant and banker, he was supportive of the survival of the sugar colonies and of the slave-holding planter class. His views, set out in numerous publications, including a 1789 pamphlet on West Indian trade, culminated in his 1793 history of the British colonies, on which see Davis (1975), 185–95. 43. Preston (1795), 24. For the comparison with the serfs in Russia, see further Hall’s chapter below, p. 237. 44. His father, the translator and writer, the Revd Philip Francis, was a good classical scholar; and the younger Francis himself made a reputation in classics as a schoolboy: John Cannon, ‘Francis, Sir Philip (1740–1818)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford 2004) [online at http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/10077]. 45. For the use by British writers of classical models in reference to their activities in India, see Hall and Vasunia (2010). 46. Thorne (1986), 368–9. 47. Morning Chronicle Tuesday, 12 April 1796; Issue 8270, pp. 1–2 = Woodfall (1796), 48–60; Francis (1796), 18–70 = The Parliamentary History of England from the earliest period to the year 1803, vol. xxxii, comprising the period from the twenty-seventh day of May 1795 to the second day of March 1797 (London, 1818), cols. 944–81. 48. Francis (1796), 40. 49. Francis (1796), 43–4 (our emphasis in the first paragraph quoted). 50. Francis (1796), 44–5.

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51. Wright (1997); Hodkinson (2007), 419–23. 52. Bonnot (1789 [1775]). 53. Hodkinson (2007), 427–8. Most of Francis’s other statements about the helots (their cruel treatment, enrolment in Spartan armies, and above all their ‘middle rank between the freeman and the domestic slave’) are grounded in the ancient sources—the ‘middle rank’ statement is a version of Pollux 3.83—though his claims about their treatment in the army are his own extrapolation. 54. e.g., as already noted, the claim that members of the krypteia were equipped with military accoutrements directly contradicts the evidence of the sources that they were sent out without weapons or with only daggers and basic rations (Plato, Laws 1.633b–c; Plutarch, Life of Lycurgus 28.3–7). 55. Bowden’s brief reference to helotage may possibly be an exception, but it is unclear from the 1791 publication date of his work whether he penned his comment before the prospect of the parliamentary abolitionist motion became public knowledge. 56. Cf. Davis (1975), 405–20. 57. Walvin (1980), 152–3: quotation from p. 152. The connections at a purely parliamentary level between the causes of abolition, parliamentary reform, and a third cause (repeal of the Test and Corporation Acts) are explored by Ditchfield (1980). 58. It has not been possible to make a thorough search of all printed works after 1800, comparable to that made possible for earlier periods by the existence of Early English Books Online and above all Eighteenth Century Collections Online. However, an online search of 19th Century British Library Newspapers for the period 1800–9 has not produced any relevant references to the helots. 59. Anstey (1980), 22. 60. Cf. Davis (1975), 444: ‘In order to raise no suspicions, the Whig leaders presented the Foreign Slave Trade Bill as merely a supplement to Pitt’s Order-in-Council—as a measure founded on sheer expediency, wholly dissociated from abolitionist principles or influence . . . the abolitionists pretended to be innocent onlookers.’ 61. Ferguson (1767), 126. On early feminists’ self-identification with the slaves of the West Indies, see further the chapters by Hall, pp. 21–3 and 228–9. 62. Mullett (1930), 554. 63. Bushe (1769), 17. 64. Kincaid (1787), 11.

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65. Wogan (1789), 37. Wogan’s original letter was undated, but was written between the commencement of their correspondence in 1732 and Swift’s death in 1745. 66. Boswell (1791), 609. 67. Campbell (1778), 317. 68. Taaffe (1798), 10. 69. See Curtin (1994). 70. Drennan (1785). Cf. the early nineteenth-century anonymous work, The Helot’s Defence of himself, O’Connell and Catholic Emancipation (1834). 71. Jones (1784), 46. 72. Jones (1792), 12–13. 73. Anon. (1784), 82. 74. Anon. (1800), 2. 75. Anon. (1793), 12. 76. Bonnot (1789 [1775]), 132–3: ‘Chaque gentilhomme polonois est une espe`ce de souverain dans ses possessions . . . Tandis qu’une noblesse fie`re s’est empare´e de tout le pouvoir, et ne veut point obe´ir aux loix, de vastes provinces sont habite´es et nonchalamment cultive´es par des serfs. Ces Ilotes deviendroient redoutables a` leurs maıˆtres, si une longue habitude ne les avoit accoutume´s a` tout souffrir, ou si le malheur de leur condition ne s’opposoit a` leur multiplication. N’en doutez pas, sans cet ane´antissement du peuple . . . les serfs polonois iroient a` la chasse des gentilshommes, comme les Spartiates alloient autrefois a` celle des Ilotes qu’ils redoutoient.’ 77. de Pauw (1793), ii. 279–80. 78. Dumouriez (1796), i. 294–6 (translation of Dumouriez (1794), i. 275). 79. South (1829), written from Cape Clear, Ireland, 30 Sept. 1823 (our emphasis). 80. Southey (1829), vol. i, 174 (our emphasis). In his review of Southey’s book, Macaulay (1830), 558 remarked that the new industrial workers, ‘the helotry of Mammon’, are less acquiescent and obedient than ‘the peasantry of that happy period, as Mr Southey considers it, which elapsed between the fall of the feudal and the rise of the commercial tyranny’ (our emphasis). 81. Carlyle (1831), book iii, ch. 4. 82. Bulwer-Lytton (1875), 106. 83. See Jackson (1900), 119/2 with Warming (1895), ii.iv.95. Cf. A Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary, ii (Oxford 1976), 70: helotism Add. 2 ‘A form of symbiosis in which one organism makes use of

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another as if it were a slave, by causing it to function to its own advantage; used esp. of the relationship of the fungus and alga in a lichen by those who regard it as neither mutualism nor parasitism.’ 84. Walker’s account is based on some elementary research. He cites Oliver Goldsmith’s History of Greece (1774)—though he probably read one of the many early nineteenth-century editions abridged for use in schools— and Plutarch’s Lives. 85. Stephen Hodkinson’s research was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council as part of the project ‘Sparta in Comparative Perspective, Ancient to Modern’.

4 The Influence of Classical Ideas on the Anti-Slavery Debate at the Cape of Good Hope, South Africa (1795–1834) John Hilton

Two hundred years ago, in 1807, the British parliament outlawed the slave trade within its dominions. However, at the Cape it was not until 1834 that slavery itself was finally abolished. Even then it was immediately replaced by four years of apprenticeship and there is evidence that enslavement continued to be practised beyond the borders of the colony until the 1870s.1 It is also doubtful whether it can rightly be said that there was an abolition, or anti-slavery, movement at the Cape at all,2 since many of the witnesses to slavery were visitors, missionaries, colonial officials, or settlers who spent only a few years in the land, and who were not always fully committed to its future.3 Attempts to eliminate slavery at the Cape were also complicated by a number of factors: slave labour had already been used there for almost one and a half centuries and formed the basis of the economy; Cape slavery had been legitimated through the use of Roman-Dutch, and in many instances, Roman, law, in which slaves featured heavily;4 as at Rome, slavery at the Cape was largely familial rather than predial,5 in the sense that Cape slaves, especially the home-bred ones, were often considered famuli or vernae rather than being used to work in gangs on large sugar or cotton estates;6 the moral imperative to rid the world of slavery coincided at the Cape with a slump in the wine trade in the early years of the nineteenth

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century and the need to create employment for emancipated slaves;7 the slaves and their owners also lived on remote, isolated farms in the vast, mountainous Cape hinterland and so found it difficult to communicate with the authorities; and, finally, reforms were largely initiated by the British, who had only recently (in 1795 and again in 1802) taken possession of the Dutch settlement after the Napoleonic wars. Moreover, on 5 July 1822, Lord Charles Somerset proclaimed that English ‘shall be exclusively used in all Judicial and Official Acts, Proceedings, and Business’,8 and, although the British kept RomanDutch law in place, they were accustomed to a different legal tradition to that of the Dutch-speaking citizens.9 Several scholars have written on the history of the emancipation of slaves at the Cape.10 This chapter concentrates specifically on the use of classical ideas and motifs in the discourse of abolition at the Cape between the years 1795 and 1834. There is a rich and complex body of evidence to draw on, including accounts of travel to and in the Cape, newspaper articles in the South African Commercial Advertiser and De ZuidAfrikaan, monographs, letters, diaries, and archival court records. There were many reasons why Europeans came to the Cape at the beginning of the nineteenth century. They ranged from scientific curiosity, to missionary zeal, and colonial office. Lady Anne Barnard, for example, accompanied her husband, John Barnard, to his post as Colonial Secretary in Cape Town, where in 1800 she wrote the letters and diaries that describe the controversial landing of ships with their cargoes of slaves from Mozambique.11 She writes: ‘I sighd & thought of Willbeforce [sic], how it would have agitated his nerves to have looked at them when it agitated mine who am not wound up as he is to vibrate to that key and who am accustomd to see Slavery all day long.’12 Lady Anne provides evidence of the familial character of Cape slavery, so reminiscent of the Roman model, in her account of a Dutch couple who were bringing up slave children as their own and had bequeathed their estate to their slaves,13 and, conversely, a chillingly violent and fatal assault on the newborn child of a black slave from a free, and presumably white, woman.14 John Barrow, the Private Secretary of Lord Macartney, the first British governor of the Cape, also left a record of his travels in the colony that illustrates the classical preoccupations of the educated visitors. The preface to his book paraphrases Pliny’s adaptation of Aristotle’s proverb

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concerning Libya as Africa semper aliquid novi offert ‘Africa always brings up something new’ (HN 8.42); he compares mating elephants to the piling of Mt. Pelion on Mt. Ossa,15 judges, by the ancient theory of physiognomy, that the Blacks of South Africa could ‘not be pronounced deficient in talent’,16 labels the coastal road around False Bay ‘the Thermopylae of the Cape’,17 calls the Boers ‘Arcadian shepherds’,18 and so on. Barrow put forward an ethnographical theory, supported by another visitor to the Cape, Henry Lichtenstein, a Professor of Biology at Berlin, that the Cape Khoi-San were descended from the Troglodytes, who lived along the Nile, since they conformed to the description of these people by Diodorus Siculus, and since their older women had the habit of throwing their pendulous breasts over their shoulders—a practice that Barrow associated with Juvenal’s women of Meroe¨ with breasts larger than their infants (Juv. 13.163).19 Such classically inspired speculations at times compared the role of Romans civilizing North Africa with the task of the British in bringing education to South Africa. Sir John Herschel, the leading intellectual of his day and an innovative translator of Homer, who came to the Cape to chart the stars of the southern hemisphere towards the end of the abolition period, makes this comparison explicit.20 Herschel was a Whig, who opposed slavery at the Cape. Not all were like him, however; Samuel Hudson, an essay-writer, diarist, and customs officer, wrote a treatise on slavery in which he noted that slaves at the Cape are better fed, clothed, and housed than the peasantry of England. At first opposed to slavery, Hudson overcame his objections and later became a slave-owner himself.21 An early anonymous anti-slavery tract by an ‘English officer’, published in London in 1806, makes extensive use of classical, particularly Roman, slavery in its argument.22 The author notes the abolitionist commonplace that slavery in Justinian’s definition (Inst. 1.2.3) was contra naturam,23 and so unjustifiable. He stresses the arbitrary, despotic, and even illegal right of the Roman paterfamilias to exercise power over his familia—wife, children, and slaves. At the very least, he views such power as a blot on Roman civilization, at most a barbaric practice. The author cites Gibbon on the paradox that slavery is most prevalent in societies that enjoy the highest degree of liberty.24 He recounts Gibbon’s analysis of the vast scale of slavery under the Roman Empire and deplores the cruel punishments inflicted on their slaves

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and their lack of legal rights, before recording the reforms of Hadrian, especially his law preventing the killing of slaves by owners, and the other acts of amelioration of slavery by other emperors that led, in his view, to the final abolition of the system in Europe. He constructs a sophisticated economic argument to show that the relative cessation of war during the Roman Empire had led to the scarcity of slaves which meant that they were of greater value to their owners and so were better treated. He also stresses the importance of the Christian religion (which he contrasts with Islam) in eliminating what he terms ‘that odious and abominable system, which renders one man the property of another’ and ‘the degradation of humanity, and a direct violation of the laws of Nature’.25 ‘No true Christian,’ he states, ‘although he might chastise his slaves for their faults, could ever treat them with capricious and unprovoked cruelty.’ In any case, he argues, the comparison between Roman slavery and African slavery is misleading, since slave traders were not in a state of war with the Africans and so could not justify their capture and enslavement as the Romans did.26 If we compare the condition of the enslaved negro, with that of the captive taken in war, the cases are in no respect parallel. The calamity of the latter, and the hardships of his fate, bear no proportion to the misery and injustices suffered by the former. According to the barbarous mode of making war in ancient times, the life of an enemy taken in arms was forfeited by martial law, consequently, when made a prisoner, his person was entirely at the disposal of the conqueror, who, according to the sanguinary maxims of ancient warfare, might, if he please, immediately take away his life, which was forfeited by the law of arms . . . Therefore, according to the ancient martial law, if he made him his slave there was no injustice in the case. . . . The case of the unhappy African, is, in every point of view, entirely different. The unoffending negro, in the forests and morasses of Africa, never so much as meditated hostility against Europe. He never gave any offence—never offered any injury to those who came from a distant quarter of the globe to make a prey of his person, as the wolf makes his prey of the lamb.

Moreover, he argues, cultured Romans such as T. Pomponius Atticus and M. Crassus had possessed numerous slaves. Nevertheless, they had treated them well and had educated those who showed talent. Rome and also the magnificent city of Constantinople described by Ammianus Marcellinus were highly sophisticated societies, and some slaves in the Roman Empire enjoyed a much higher lifestyle than

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African slaves and were more regularly manumitted. He concludes; ‘This goes to show the slaves of Rome, although initially badly treated, lived in a state of luxury and Asiatic magnificence, very different from the lot of the African slave.’27 These arguments could have been, and probably were, contested at the time. Their chief flaw is that they were not particularly original; many of the author’s points can be found in Clarkson’s Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species particularly the African.28 Moreover, far from being illegal as the author suggests, Roman slavery was governed by a complex and sophisticated system of law in which slavery was central. The revival of slavery in the seventeenth century had been possible largely because Roman law provided a legal framework in which this system of exploitation could be managed. The author also displays an inconsistent position on Roman civilization—on the one hand, it was a sophisticated society that allowed a high degree of freedom; on the other, it relied heavily on slavery. The author never resolves this paradox and, although he makes some complex economic arguments, he never entertains the thought that slavery made Roman civilization possible. His view that Christianity substantially ameliorated slavery and his suggestion that it was abolished in Europe at the height of Roman civilization are rather naı¨ve. His outlook is also shaped by the contemporary Enlightenment ideology, as is shown by his view that Roman slavery was contra naturam and therefore unjustifiable—a conclusion that Montesquieu advocated.29 Finally, the argument that the reduction in the supply of slaves during the pax Romana had led to the increased value of the slave, had much darker consequences at Rome and at the Cape than the author allows. Owners soon realized that, since Roman law ruled that the status of the child followed that of the mother (Just. Inst. 1.3.4, Dig. 1.5.5.1), the (perceived) sexuality of slave women could be exploited to make up the shortfall.30 Cape slavery was in many ways very different from the Roman version. English visitors to the Cape were often struck by the complex racial composition of the colony. William Wright, for example, who spent ‘ten anxious years’ (preface) as a radical Anglican minister at the Cape, during which he observed how slavery was practised at the settlement, noted that slaves at the Cape were ‘Asiatic and European not African’ and superior to their native neighbours.31 Wright goes

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on to contrast the ‘free-born mien’ of the indigenous tribes with their ‘broken-spirited countrymen’ and quotes Homer’s comparison between the lassitude of Odysseus’ neglected dog, Argos, on his master’s return, with his formerly sprightly and powerful strength (Odyssey 17.321–3)—a text that Homer uses as an analogy for the effect of slavery on a free man:32 But now he is in bad times. His master, far from his country, Has perished, and the women are careless, and do not look after him; And serving men, when their masters are no longer about, to make them Work, are no longer willing to do their rightful duties. For Zeus of the wide brows takes away one half of the virtue From a man, once the day of slavery closes upon him.

Wright makes the demoralizing effect of slavery on formerly free people grounds for his abhorrence of the practice despite the fact that he was, as he put it, ‘no friend to sudden or experimental changes’.33 His concern was also based on his perception as a Christian that forced labour was as bad for the masters as it was for the slaves. ‘It is indeed’, he tells us, ‘not only for the sake of the slaves, but for the interest, temporal and eternal, of their masters, that the stain of slavery should be blotted out for ever.’34 In his view, slavery could not be ameliorated or mitigated; it could only be abolished for good.35 Wright’s testimony about slavery at the Cape reveals a profound clash between the Dutch view of slavery, which was deeply influenced by Roman-Dutch law with its imperial and paternalistic bias, and the English view, inspired by the Magna Carta, that all individuals were equal, that they were innocent until proven guilty, and that they should be tried before a jury of their peers.36 Wright was also critical of Roman law on the specific moral ground that it did not make provision for slaves to marry and exposed slave women to abuse and exploitation: The Roman law, while it declared slavery to be a state contrary to nature, left the slave to be governed, in this respect, solely by the laws of nature. His children were, therefore, considered illegitimate; and, although incest was punishable, adultery was considered no crime in the slave.37

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However, he also used Roman law against the Dutch slave-owners, when cases of injustice came to his attention. For example, he noted that the Protector of Slaves, an office that had been created under the new English administration of the settlement, had, on a number of occasions, secured the liberty of slaves whose owners wrongly asserted their claim to own them, despite evidence of previous manumission. ‘The Roman law not only punished severely the act of detaining in slavery a man who was entitled to his freedom, but allowed full indemnification to the man so detained.’38 These cases showed that at the Cape freed slaves were sometimes deemed to be runaways who could be sold to cover the costs of imprisoning them.39 Alternatively, the testamentary manumission of slaves might be frustrated by the heirs to the estate, who sometimes destroyed wills or their codicils to prevent the slave escaping their ownership.40 Wright notes that in Roman law even the insolvency of the former proprietor did not affect the manumission of slaves by will—the most common method of manumission among the Romans—although he also relates a difference of view among Cape judges concerning the applicability of Roman law on this point.41 Another contested area that drew on Roman law directly concerned the admissibility of slave testimony against their owners. This issue had been thoroughly investigated in a doctoral dissertation at the University of Leiden in 1770 by Gysbert Hemmy, an inhabitant of the Cape whose father had acted as the Adjunct Fiscal on the Council of Justice.42 Hemmy found that the testimony of ‘Aethiopians, Chinese, and other pagans in the East Indies’ should be admitted in the Court of Justice at the Cape, citing the views of Roman jurists at the time of the Roman Empire extensively to support his case. There could be no doubt that Roman law did admit the evidence of slaves against their owners, especially in cases of treason, in which such slaves could even be rewarded with freedom in exchange for incriminating testimony. At the Cape, such testimony had been admitted but not under oath and often, following ancient Greek and Roman practice, under torture. The English judges at the Cape altered this procedure by eliminating torture and requiring slaves to swear an oath before giving evidence. The result was at times farcical, as when Adonis, the slave of Wessel Moolman, before giving his account of his punishment by his owner, declared that he

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did not know what an oath was or that there was a God.43 His story was deemed inadmissible and Moolman was found guilty, but only to the extent that he had used an illegal instrument to beat his slave. The introduction of the jury system by the English at the Cape had similarly unexpected results. Cape juries, to which slaves could not be, and Free Blacks were not, generally admitted, frequently brought not guilty verdicts in cases of excessive punishment of slaves, but added a judgment of guilty of using an illegal instrument to do so, which judges understandably dismissed. Such juries then often merely altered their verdicts to ‘not guilty’. The clash between the Roman-Dutch legal tradition at the Cape and what the settlers saw as English bias towards slaves came to a climax in a complex case brought by the Fiscal before the Court of Justice on 19 March 1827. It concerned Lodewyk, the slave of George Joseph Wanner, who annulled a clause of manumission in favour of Lodewyk in his will because of his subsequent criminal behaviour. Lodewyk was later sold to Coenraad Laubscher, whom the slave accused of abusive treatment. Laubscher countered that Lodewyk had assaulted him and that he had retaliated in self-defence. The newly admitted evidence of two slave women did not contribute substantially to the case, while Lodewyk’s advocate, De Wet, discounted the testimony of Laubscher’s young male slave Mentor, who claimed only to have seen Lodewyk attack his owner, on the grounds that his owner had promised him his freedom if he came to his defence during the struggle. The Fiscal argued, on the basis of Roman law, that Lodewyk should be put to death because he had raised his hand against his master.44 Advocate De Wet countered that this law, which was based on Roman precedent, had long been in disuse. The court imposed a sentence of death, which was overturned on appeal by the English governor, Major General Bourke, acting with Justice Kekevich as his assessor. Subsequently, Laubscher sold Lodewyk, separating him from his family, who remained with Laubscher. Trouble broke out again, however, when Lodewyk returned to Laubscher’s house to see his partner and their children. On encountering his former slave Laubscher beat him so badly that he was disabled for 22 days. Laubscher was arraigned for abuse and sentenced to 3 months in prison and a fine of 50 pounds sterling. Wright himself intervened in this case by attempting to buy the

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freedom of Lodewyk’s dependants. The South African Commercial Advertiser ran a full account of the trial of Laubscher on 26 May 1830, highlighting the cruelty of Laubscher’s assault on his slave. In response, the recently established Dutch-language newspaper, De Zuid Afrikaan, attacked the hypocrisy of those who had taken the slave’s side in this case, especially Wright, in a leader published on 11 June 1830, which proclaimed that: ‘Such is the wrong-headedness of the junta to which you belong, that there is no tree high enough, within the vicinity of Cape Town, to hange your worthy protege´e and his benevolent advocate’. The leader in De Zuid Afrikaan began by quoting Horace (Serm. 1.4.85: hic niger est; hunc tu Romane caveto, which the editor freely translated as ‘He is black, his partisans are still more so; beware, Africans, of such characters!’).45 The editor drew on the model of Juvenal for his satire: Juvenal, the Roman, was a man of wit and parts, he loved to give free vent to his satirical predilections, and thereby lashed the follies and vices of mankind—satire was his hobby, and although it brought him in bad repute with his neighbours, he did not care a straw for the damage, but went on in the way before him, chastising, with merciless rigor, all such as approached within arm’s length of him. Admirable Juvenal!

The case illustrates the divergence between English and Dutch views on the applicability of Roman law in Cape courts and acceptable treatment of slaves. It also shows how the testimony of slaves and manumission had become subject to contestation in legal proceedings in the colony. The struggle for reform in the colony was often fought out in the press, using classical analogies as illustrations. Thus the South African Commercial Advertiser, which was edited by the liberal John Fairbairn, ran a leader on 9 June 1830 which attacked the ‘nameless and degraded things from the Frontier’ for accusing the Advertiser of bias in the ‘immortal battle of Liberty and Justice’ and for demanding an independent newspaper.46 Fairbairn then cited the tolerance and equanimity of Themistocles, Aristides, and John Newton, when provoked by scurrilous abuse and destructive criticism. On 18 June 1830 the Zuid Afrikaan responded satirically to these classical analogies drawn from Plutarch, noting factual errors in Fairbairn’s leader: he had loosely called Aristides the friend of Themistocles; Aristides had never threatened to assault Themistocles;

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Themistocles had said ‘Strike but hear me’ to Barybiades, the Spartan admiral, not to Aristides; Themistocles had never betrayed his country to the Persians as Fairbairn had claimed; and so on. Finally, the article decried the unequal comparison between these eminent Athenian statesmen and the Scottish editor of the Advertiser. John Fairbairn was assisted in his newspaper initiative by a fellow Scot, Thomas Pringle. Like so many others of his time and class, Pringle received a classical education at Kelso Grammar School and read Classics for three years at Edinburgh University, although he did not take a degree. After working for twelve years as a clerk in the General Register Office and publishing poems and essays in his spare time, he became joint editor of the Edinburgh Monthly Magazine (later Blackwood’s Magazine). He left this journal during the economic recession in 1819, and went out to South Africa with the 1820 Settlers as part of an assisted emigration scheme. His encounter with the land and its peoples, particularly the Cape slaves and the indigenous Khoi-San and Xhosa tribes proved to have a formative effect on his Romantic imagination. Pringle proved to be unsuited to the harsh farming conditions in the Eastern Cape (which were far from the Arcadia, Utopia, and ‘Circean blandishments’ they had been made out to be)47 and moved to Cape Town where, in addition to his work as a librarian in the Government Library, he started a school with Fairbairn, who was ‘experienced in classical tuition’ and taught ‘the classical languages and other superior branches of education’ and assisted Pringle in editing the South African Journal and the South African Commercial Advertiser.48 His editorial activities brought him into conflict with the aristocratic and autocratic Governor of the Colony, the Plantagenet Lord Charles Somerset, which ended in the loss of his school, his editorships, and his librarian post. His defence of his actions in an interview with Somerset, was, by his own account, measured, but he nevertheless rejected an offer that would have allowed him to continue his work, quoting the cliche´d phrase from Virgil (Aeneid 2.49: timeo Danaos et dona ferentis = ‘I fear the Greeks even when they bear gifts’). In January 1826 Pringle wrote an article on the state of slavery at the Cape which later appeared in the New Monthly Magazine and led to his involvement in the abolition movement, which resulted in him meeting Wilberforce, Buxton, and Macaulay, and becoming the secretary of the

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Anti-Slavery Society.49 As shown by the record of a debate in Parliament on 25 July 1822, Wilberforce was concerned to prevent the extension of slavery to the Eastern Cape through the adoption of slaving by the 1820 settlers.50 Pringle had previously met the Revd William Wright and Andries Stockenstrom at the Cape, and cites many of the cases that Wright discusses.51 An interesting example of Pringle’s writing on the subject of slavery is his political fable, ‘The Honey-bird and the Woodpecker’, which appeared in The Tourist on Monday 14 January 1833.52 The poem, which was written for children, is drawn from the nature lore of the Khoi, who observed that the honeybird often joined forces with the woodpecker to find honey and bee larvae, in dead trees. The ‘moral’ of the fable is drawn explicitly at the end: the honeybird is the child audience, the bee is the ‘poor negro’ whose suffering supplies the sweet sugar for their tea—according to Pringle, ‘the comparison of a Caffer kraal to a “honey-nest” was borrowed directly from Colonial phraseology’.53 In the same issue of this magazine Pringle recounts the fate of the Xhosa chief, Makanna, who surrendered as a hostage during the wars between the British and the Xhosa, only to be shipped off to Robben Island, ‘a spot appropriated for the custody of convicted felons, rebellious slaves, and other malefactors, doomed to work in irons in the slate quarries’.54 Pringle’s poems rarely advertise classical influences, in fact his African Poems is headed by a quotation from Spenser that advertises the distance between the ancient classical world and his—and by extension Pringle’s—poetry (‘Rude Rymes, the which a rustic Muse did weave j In salvadge soyl, far from Parnasso Mount, j And roughly wrought in an unlearned loome) and this is underscored by Pringle by a quotation of three lines from Lucretius, which say much the same in Latin hexameters (1.926–8: avia Pieridum peragro, loca nullius ante j trita solo: iuvat integros accedere fontes, j atque haurire, iuvatque novos decerpere flores = ‘I wander over the pathless wilds of the Pierides (Muses), places that no-one has set foot on before: I take delight in approaching the springs, and drinking deep from them, and plucking fresh flowers’). Nevertheless, Pringle’s only known work of prose fiction, Pongola, is clearly a retelling of the Spartacus legend in terms of the Cape context. Pongola is an enslaved Khoi, who escapes from Boer control after being flogged, and gathers runaway slaves and Khoi around him

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into a force that conducts a campaign of attrition against the settlers. Eventually Pongola is tracked down to his hideout and killed, but only after exacting his revenge on his abuser by stabbing him with a poisoned ‘assagai’.55 In ‘The Emigrant’s Cabin’—a Horatian sermo— Pringle records a dialogue between himself and Fairbairn in which the latter contrasts Pringle’s humble frontier home with his classically educated past in Scotland: But can the comforts of your wattled den, Your sylvan fare and rustic tasks suffice For one who once seemed finer joys to prize? When, erst, like Virgil’s swains, we used to sing Of streams and groves, and ‘all that sort of thing’, The spot we meant for our ‘Poetic Den’ Was always within reach of Books and Men; By classic Esk, for instance, or Tweed-side, With gifted friends within an easy ride. (101–9)

Fairbairn also notes one of the commonplaces of British imperialist discourse—that the British had appeared to be savages to the Romans: Yet let us not these simple folk despise; Just such our sires appeared in Caesar’s eyes.

(253–4)

Fairbairn and Pringle attracted vitriolic satire for their support of the abolitionist missionaries of the London Missionary Society, such as Johannes Van der Kemp and John Philip. Van der Kemp56 had received a classical education at the Erasmus School in Rotterdam and Dordrecht and is known to have composed a Latin speech on the murder of Julius Caesar at the age of 16.57 After studying in Leyden, where he published a work of Deist philosophy in 1775, he moved to Edinburgh to study medicine and published a medical work on how life comes into being in 1782. However, the previous year he had published a 570-page, philosophical, more specifically cosmological, work, whose title alluded to the ideas of the ancient Greek philosopher Parmenides.58 The title-page refers the reader to Aristotle’s Metaphysics (3.1001a30) on the problem of how anything other than that which is, and that which is one, can come into existence. Critics of these works have rated them very highly, some even

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thought that they surpassed Hegel in originality of thought.59 However, Van der Kemp’s life changed, through a concatenation of events, from one of scholarship to one of active involvement in the Moravian and London Missionary societies. In 1797 he visited John Newton in London, and, although not much is known of their relationship, it may have been their common hatred of slavery, as well as Van der Kemp’s obvious knowledge of Dutch, that led to his choice of South Africa as the land in which he would carry out his mission.60 It is no small indication of the naı¨vete´ of the London Missionary Society that it thought van der Kemp’s knowledge of a dialect of Ethiopian would possibly be of use to him in Africa; in fact, Latin proved a more useful tongue with which to communicate with the Portuguese on the island of Mayo.61 On his arrival in Cape Town, he lost no time in writing letters condemning the practice of slavery there and calling for its total abolition.62 Van der Kemp set high standards; among the books he requested for the academy he envisaged in Bethelsdorp were Latin school books and Vossius’ Greek Grammar.63 The Head of the London Missionary Society at the Cape, the Revd John Philip, was also influential in the movement to rid the world of slavery and he brings a considerable weight of classical scholarship to bear on the question. He conceded that Dutch provincial administration, which was based almost directly on the Roman precedent, was superior to the British system, in that the Romans had constrained the powers of provincial governors to interfere in sentences imposed for capital offences. He noted that, to prevent bias, the Romans had excluded governors from the provinces in which they had been born and had forbidden the governor or his son from marrying or from buying slaves or property within his province.64 Likewise the Dutch had instructed their governors not to enslave the local inhabitants but to educate them, and, on at least one notable occasion, a governor who contravened the rule on owning land, was recalled and put on trial.65 However, Philip noted that Cape slavery was unlike ancient slavery in that it was based, at least in its later stages, almost exclusively on race. This ‘monstrous anomaly’, as he calls it,66 in which the white settlers hardly regarded their slaves as human, accounted for the slow pace of emancipation in the colony, but in Philip’s view, although philosophers such as Rousseau had argued that the human race had ‘derived from different stocks’,

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mankind was descended from ‘one blood’ created by God. Moreover, Philip noted, ‘we are all born savages’ and ‘we may see what our ancestors were at the time Julius Caesar invaded Britain, by the present condition of the Caffer tribes of South Africa’.67 He proceeds to relate an anecdote of how: seated one day in the house of a friend in Cape Town, with a bust of Cicero on my right hand, and one of Sir Isaac Newton on the left, I accidentally opened a book on the table at that passage in Cicero’s letter to Atticus, in which the philosopher speaks so contemptuously of the natives of Great Britain. Struck with the curious coincidence arising from the circumstances in which I then found myself placed, pointing to the bust of Cicero, and then to that of Sir Isaac Newton, I could not help exclaiming, ‘Hear what that man says of that man’s country!’ It is only under a free government, and in the possession of local advantages, that the human mind like the tree planted in generous soil, attains to its full growth and proportions.68

This story is not only highly rhetorical, but it is also a commonplace of Enlightenment thinking. It derives from Locke’s essay On Human Understanding,69 and is related in a Latin thesis written by Giesbert Hemmy (1770) on the ‘pagans’ in South Africa:70 Nam, si forte acutissimus Angliae Philosophus, Newtonus ingens, in sinu Soldaniae natus fuisset, cogitationes eiusdem non multum, credo, ab incolentium ibidem Hottentorum cogitationibus dissensissent; et contra, si forte Hottentotorum aliquis eo tempore in Anglia natus fuisset, summos forte philosophos in matheseos, philosophiae atque astronomiae scientia multis post se parasangis reliquisset. For if by chance the most intelligent English philosopher, the great Newton, had been born in Saldanha Bay, his thoughts, I believe, would not have differed from those of the inhabitants of the region; and, on the other hand, if by chance one of the Hottentots had been born in England at that time, he would have probably left the greatest philosophers in mathematics, philosophy, and the science of astronomy many parasangs (miles) behind him.

Moreover, according to Philip, the Khoi were not only the intellectual equals of the English, they were also as heroic in defending themselves against slavery as the ‘Spartans who fell at Thermopylae, contending for their political rights’.71 To the minds of the Dutch settlers at the Cape, this was transparent nonsense and, on 11 June 1830, the bilingual Cape newspaper

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De Zuid Afrikaan72 carried a satirical poem, one stanza of which I give below (I retain the italics of the original): Die onschuld, eer en deugd, ja Cicero’s talenten, In ’t Hottentotsche Ryk in omloop heeft gebragt; Die ’t vuilst en dierlykst ras moraal wist in te prenten, Waar zelf geen van der kemp—geen kicherer ooit aan dacht?73

The editor could not resist giving his campaign against Philip the obvious Demosthenic title.74 John Philip ends Researches in South Africa with a chapter stressing the role of Christianity in bringing about civilization. He argues that religion had always been the basis of law and society, even in classical antiquity:75 The laws of Minos, of Zaleucus, of the Twelve Tables, were founded upon the dread of superior beings. Cicero, in his treatise ‘De Legibus,’ considers a providence as the basis of all legislation. Plato refers to a Deity in every page of his works. Numa made Rome a sacred city, that he might render it eternal. ‘It was not fraud, it was not superstition,’ says a great man, ‘which established religion among the Romans it was that necessity which renders religion indispensable to the existence of society.’ ‘The yoke of religion,’ continues he, ‘was the only one which the Roman people, in their ardour for liberty, dared not to shake off; and that people which was so easily agitated, had need of being controlled by an invisible power.’

However, Philip does not concede that the ancient civilizations of Egypt, Greece, and Rome had been perfect societies, for all their scientific and cultural achievements: Egypt had sunk into ‘vile and degrading superstition’ in worshipping animals, Athens was ‘wholly given over to idolatry’ and had declined by ‘acquiring habits inconsistent with liberty and independence’, the Romans had multiplied their gods ‘to thirty thousand’, and ‘the vices of the body of the people were such as, in many instances, will not bear to have the names by which they were designated explained and translated into our language’.76 Despite the efforts of the London Missionary Society at the Cape, slavery persisted across the borders of the colony until the 1870s.77 The obduracy of the practice can also be observed in the case of the Caribbean island of St Martin. On 1 July 1863 a commission of inquiry in the Netherlands reported on the situation on St Martin,

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which the Dutch and French had divided between themselves in 1648. On 1 June 1848 the French abolished slavery in their section of the island. This lowered the horizon of expectation and increased unrest among the slaves in the Dutch zone, whose status, according to the commission, was left unclear. The Dutch governor criticized the French proclamation as ‘senseless’ (onzinnig),78 and issued a proclamation on 25 June 1849 that allowed punishment of slaves for insubordination. A detachment of troops from the garrison at Curac¸ao and two warships were sent to the island, not to perpetrate violence, according to the report, but ‘only to make an impression on the negro population, and to assure a safe departure for the inhabitants, in the unhoped-for case that their personal safety was threatened’.79 In the debate, recourse was had to Roman-Dutch law, specifically to Justinian, Digest 1.3.14 (trans. Watson 1989): Paulus libro LIIII ad edictum. Quod uero contra rationem iuris receptum est, non est producendum ad consequentia. Yet a ruling adopted against the ratio iuris (the underlying rationale of the law) ought not to be carried to its logical conclusion.

This text, in the eyes of the commission, did not allow owners limited rights over their slaves, as they claimed, and the report called for the complete and unambiguous declaration that the Dutch slaves on the island were free.80 Inasmuch as the argument can be reconstructed, the owners used Paul’s dictum to suggest that the underlying rationale of the law in this instance was that the proclamation of the abolition of slavery in the French sector of the island could not be extended to apply to the Dutch half. The commission clearly disagreed. They wanted the Dutch government to declare all the slaves on the island free and to provide an amount of 200,000 guilders to compensate owners for their losses and bring about economic change that would create employment on the island. There were various suggestions for the employment of the ex-slaves: a four-year apprenticeship, a threeday working week, peonage in which labour was rewarded by half the produce, the development of salt pans, and daily work at a rate of pay of 25 cents, but none of these proposals won the approval of the slaves. The government in the Netherlands feared that the freeing of slaves on the island after the proclamation of 1848 would result in attempts

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to obtain compensation from the Dutch treasury. In its response to the report, the government noted that Roman-Dutch law, and in particular, manumission by testament—a characteristically Roman practice—was responsible for some of the ambiguities surrounding the status of slaves on the island. If the legal status of slaves in the Dutch sector was unclear, the government argued, a child born to a slave woman, whose owner had manumitted her by will would be a slave prior to his death, since the mother would only be free after the death of her owner, and in Roman law the status of the child follows that of the mother. In fact, however, the government insisted that slavery had indeed been abolished in 1848 and that slaves could no longer be born there because there were no longer any servile women on the island. It went on to argue, that, if the commission wanted to rest its argument on Roman law, it would retaliate on the same grounds. There could be no compensation for slavery, in their view, since slavery was contra naturam in the legal definition of Justinian, and therefore owners had no basis in natural justice on which to base their claims.81 In the end, the argument of the commission, that slavery had not been completely and unambiguously abolished on 1 June 1848, prevailed, and the government was condemned for not providing compensation for the loss of slaves to owners after this date. This episode illustrates the readiness with which the Dutch authorities resorted to Roman law to settle disputes. It also shows that the process of emancipation could not be settled by proclamation, since deep-rooted factors such as the compensation of owners, the creation of employment, and the need for economic development to finance the payment of slaves stood intractably in the way. Despite the assurance of Richard Bourke, the Acting Governor, that the abolition of slavery was ‘a kind of revolution . . . casting off our old skin and proposing to appear on 1st January next [1828] as bright as Virgil’s snake’,82 resistance to the abolition of slavery proved to be strong, so strong that the struggle to free slaves precipitated the mass exodus of Dutch farmers from the colony known as the Great Trek.83 Free of the constraints of both the Dutch East India Company and the British Colonial Government, these farmers encountered indigenous inhabitants of the hinterland of Southern Africa and subjugated them to their power.84 Throughout the years of wander-

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ing the preservation of the master – servant relationship, reinforced by racial overtones, remained a fundamental principle of trekker society. In the Cape itself, however, enlightened criticism from educated visitors, settlers, and missionaries, succeeded in bringing about the emancipation of slaves, despite the relative failure of the locally based Philanthropic Society of the Cape of Good Hope. The evidence adduced in this chapter shows that classical ideas and the prevailing classical education of the influential reformers played an important part on both sides of the debate. If any single factor can be isolated from the many employed to persuade owners to relinquish their hold on captive labour it was the social and legal changes brought about by the Roman jurists and emperors that deserve to be highlighted. At a time when warfare within the Roman Empire had declined and the supply of slaves had dwindled, the value of slave labour was enhanced, and the role of women in perpetuating the system was clearly exposed. For the avaricious owner this logically entailed the exploitation of his slave women’s sexuality, for the abolitionists it became imperative to buy these females and to set them free. Under the influence of enlightened British government in the settled areas of South Africa there was only one outcome to this conflict. For the rest of the land it took considerably longer, perhaps even, it might be said, until 1994.

NOTES 1. Morton, F. (1994a), 1–2, (1994c), 167–86; Morton, B. (1994), 215–50; Eldredge (1994a), 93–126, (1994b), 127–66. 2. Watson (1990), 196–218 compares the anti-slavery movement at the Cape with the abolition debate in the United States. 3. Honourable mention should be made, however, of the Cape of Good Hope Philanthropic Society, which bought and emancipated young slave women, in the hope of depleting the source of slaves, since all children born of a slave mother followed her status: see Watson (1990), 67–89; 219–29. However, the Society did not have a major impact on slavery at the Cape. 4. For the influence of Roman law on slavery at the Cape, see Hilton (2007), 1–14. For the importance of slaves in Roman law see Buckland (1908), v, and Watson (1987). For the influence of Roman slave law in the Americas, see Watson (1989).

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5. A term then in regular use in South Africa for slaves whose main work was agricultural. 6. Mason (2003), 69; Shell (1994a), 88–132; Hugo (1970), 17–18. 7. Rayner (1986). However, Ross (1993), 133 notes a ‘steady rise in agricultural production throughout the first quarter of the nineteenth century’. 8. Eybers (1918), 23–4. 9. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the correspondence between the British governor, Sir John Cradock, to the Fiscal, Denyssen, dated 16 March 1813. Cradock had asked for an explanation of Roman-Dutch law as it affected slaves. Denyssen’s reply shows the strong influence of Roman law on slavery at the Cape. See Theal (1897), 9.143–61. 10. Edwards (1942), Rayner (1981,1986), Watson (1990), Ross (1993), Scully (1997), Mason (2003), amongst others. 11. Lenta and Le Cordeur (1999), 2.69, 94–5, 101, 110–11. 12. Lenta and Le Cordeur (1999), 2.71. 13. Lewin Robinson (1973, Letter 14, 29 November 1797). 14. Lenta and Le Cordeur (1999), 1.285. 15. Barrow (1801), 1.130. 16. Barrow (1801), 1.161. 17. Barrow (1801), 2.231. 18. Barrow (1801), 2.120. 19. Barrow (1801), 1.343; Lichtenstein (1815), 1.303–7. 20. Cf. Hilton (2006), 122–3; (2005), 87–108. 21. McKenzie (1993); Shell (1984); Marais (1957), 162. The supposedly benign character of Cape slavery is specifically refuted by Thomas Pringle (1835), 217. 22. See also another anonymous publication in 1828, Remarks on the Demoralizing Influence of Slavery by a Resident at the Cape of Good Hope, which remarks: ‘It has been remarked by Tacitus, one of the most shrewd observers of human nature, that there is nothing so sweet to the human heart, as the gratification which arises from the consciousness of having the life of a fellow-creature at one’s disposal.’ Which passage is meant? Perhaps Tiberius’ joy at the death of Germanicus (Ann. 3.2)? 23. Anon. (1806), 70–93. 24. Anon. (1806), 83. 25. Anon. (1806), 70; 93. 26. Anon. (1806), 120–1. The idea that capture in war justifies possession is found in John Locke’s Two Treatises of Government (1689). See Craton et al. (1976), 196. 27. Anon. (1806), 123.

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28. For example, the author begins, as Clarkson does, by tracing the origin of slavery to debt bondage in ancient Israel, Greece, Rome, and Germany. On Clarkson see further above, Ch. 1 pp. 4–6. 29. Craton et al. (1976), 197. 30. Such at least is the testimony of a German visitor to the Cape, Otto Mentzel (1785), 2.90. On this question in Roman law, see now Rodger (2007), 446–54. 31. Wright (1831), 61. In fact, slaves came to the Cape in roughly equal proportions from India, Indonesia, Madagascar, and Africa (Angola and Mozambique): see Shell (1994a), 40–1. On Wright, see Watson (1990), 43–8, who judges him to have been at the heart of the anti-slavery activity at the Cape (43). 32. Trans. Lattimore. This passage is something of a commonplace in abolitionist literature. It is quoted also by Clarkson (1786), 18. If pressed, the analogy suggests that it is the ‘rightful duty’ of the slave-owner to care for his slaves. 33. Wright (1831), 62. 34. Wright (1831), 53. 35. Wright (1831), 2–3. 36. On the legal situation at the Cape, see Crais (1990), 203–10. 37. Wright (1831), 14. For the full social implications of this, see Hugo (1970), 8–9. 38. Wright (1831), 11. Wright cites the case of Marthinus and four other negroes, whom a Mrs Herold claimed as slaves. 39. Wright here refers to the case of a slave by the name of Jason (Uitenhage, 8 March 1827). 40. The case of Abraham the manumitted slave of Gerhardus Asthysen (Uitenhage, 8 November 1827). 41. Wright (1831), 101. 42. Hewett (1998). 43. Uitenhage, 8 October 1831. See Wright (1831), 23–4. 44. In Roman law the slave was obliged to defend his owner against any attack. Cf. the discussion of the SC Silanianum in the Digest 29.5. 45. The term ‘African’ here, of course, refers to Afrikaners, or Boers. 46. Fairbairn noted that slavery is milder under despotisms such as Sparta or the Roman Empire. SACA 9 February 1831. 47. Pringle (1835), 4–6. 48. Wahl (1970), 94. 49. This article is reprinted in Pereira and Chapman (1989), 140–8. 50. Anon. (1822).

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51. Pringle (1835), 217. Pringle’s actual relationship with Blacks in the Eastern Cape was just as colonial as that of his fellow settlers, however. 52. The magazine carried a Horatian tag on its masthead (utile dulci ‘the useful with the sweet’ from the Ars Poetica 343). 53. See also Pereira and Chapman (1989), 88–91, esp. the footnote on p. 90. 54. Pringle (1835), 163. 55. Pereira and Chapman (1989), 159–64. 56. Van der Kemp was a remarkable character, who has been the subject of numerous biographies and even a novel (Millin 1952). 57. Enklaar (1988), 2. 58. Van der Kemp (1781, 1782). See the remarks of a German traveller to the Cape, who had met van der Kemp (Lichtenstein (1815), 1.290): ‘He [van der Kemp] studied particularly the ancient and oriental languages, and soon commenced a writer in his new profession: but his works, on account of their mystical tone and terrifying prolixity, did not obtain him many votaries in Holland, so that in the year 1780 he went over to England, where he succeeded better.’ 59. Enklaar (1988), 17. 60. John Newton also influenced Helperus Ritzema van Lier, who wrote an account of his conversion in Latin, which he addressed to Newton. Newton translated a part of this document and sent this to Cowper (Letter to Cowper, 9 Dec. 1788) and also some of Van Lier’s letters. Newton regarded these translations as more worth while than his translations of Homer (Letter 15 Oct. 1790). I owe these references to Marylynn Rouse, the directory of the online John Newton Project. 61. Enklaar (1988), 61. 62. Enklaar (1988), 81, and nn. 104, 105; 116, and nn. 160, 161. 63. Enklaar (1988), 129. 64. Philip (1828), 1.356–9. The references to Justinian are supplied in Philip’s footnotes. Gibbon’s observations on this subject are also noted (Decline and Fall 3.52). 65. Philip here refers to the well-known case of Simon van der Stel. 66. Philip (1828), 2.311. 67. Philip (1828), 2.315–17. 68. Philip (1828), 2.318. Philip quotes the text of Cic. Att. 1.4.16 in full. 69. 1.3.12: ‘Had you or I been born at the Bay of Soldania, possibly our thoughts and notions had not exceeded those brutish ones of the Hottentots that inhabit there. And had the Virginia king Apochancana been educated in England, he had been perhaps as knowing a divine, and as good a mathematician as any in it; the difference between him and a more improved Englishman lying barely in this, that the exercise

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70. 71. 72.

73.

74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79.

80. 81.

82.

83.

84.

John Hilton of his faculties was bounded within the ways, modes, and notions of his own country, and never directed to any other or further inquiries. And if he had not any idea of a God, it was only because he pursued not those thoughts that would have led him to it.’ Hewett (1998, ed.) 62. Philip (1828), 2.320. The conservative character of De Zuid Afrikaan is clear from its comment that ‘to have slaves about you is to have enemies’—an allusion to the Roman proverb in Sinnius Capito, Grammatica fr. 17.1: quot servi tot hostes ‘So many slaves, so many enemies’. Cf. Sen. Ep. 47.5.3: Deinde eiusdem adrogantiae proverbium iactatur, totidem hostes esse quo servos: non habemus sed facimus ‘Then the proverb that displays the same level of arrogance is touted, “so many slaves, so many enemies”: they are not naturally enemies, we make them so.’ ‘He [sc. Philip] has brought into being in the Kingdom of the Hottentots j The innocence, honour, virtue, and, yes, the talent of Cicero, j He knows how to depict the foulest and most bestial race as moral j Something even Van der Kemp and Kicherer did not think of doing.’ The slogan of the paper was Tros, Tyriusque mihi nullo discrimine agetur ‘I will deal with Trojan and Tyrian even-handedly’ (Virg. Aen. 1.574). Philip (1828), 2.361–2. Philip (1828), 2.363. See above, n. 1. Anon. (1863a), 20. Anon. (1863a), 14: ‘ . . . schlechts om die negerbevolking te imposeren, en aan de ingezetenen eenen veiligen aftogt te verzekeren, in het onverhoopt geval dat hunne persoonlijke veiligheid mogt bedreigt worden’. Anon. (1863a), 31. ‘Servitude is an institution of the law of nations whereby one man is, contrary to nature, subject to the dominion of another’ Servitus est constitutio iuris gentium, qua quis dominio alieno contra naturam subicitur. Just. Inst. 1.3.2 (trans. Thomas). King (1971), 87. The reference is to Georgics 3.416–39. This comment seems to recall the words of Pitt in a dramatic abolition debate in the English Parliament in which he referred to Virgil’s lines on the breaking dawn dispelling darkness. See Hochschild (2005), 233. See, for example, Marais (1957), 160. The causes of the Great Trek are, of course, complex. I do not mean to say that the abolition of slavery was the only cause of this movement, but it was clearly a contributory factor. See above, n. 1.

5 A Stronger Muse Classical Influences on Eighteenth-Century Abolitionist Poetry Brycchan Carey

Poetry mattered to eighteenth-century abolitionists. Whether as long narrative pieces printed and published as separate volumes or as short lyrics appearing in newspapers and magazines, anti-slavery verse was integral to the British abolitionist campaign from the outset. Indeed, one of the first actions of the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the African Slave Trade was to commission poems from some of the most famous popular poets of the day, including William Cowper, Hannah More, and William Roscoe. Inevitably, these poets, and many others, sought inspiration in what they already knew. Abolitionist poetry accordingly appeared in many familiar forms, and some obscure ones, and while much of it was couched in the sentimental language that was the literary fashion of the age, most of it shows signs of being influenced by a longer literary tradition. Hints of Pope, Milton, and Shakespeare are widespread, but almost as important to poets raised on a diet of both ancients and moderns are Homer and Virgil; epics and eclogues are important features of abolitionist verse. Despite this, abolitionist poets rarely discuss slavery in the ancient world; indeed, they make only sparing use of classical history and mythology. My argument in this chapter, therefore, is that abolitionist poets adopted classical form more than they borrowed classical theme and subject and that, since many abolitionists were Evangelical Christians, their

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view of the ancient world owed more to the Old Testament than it did to classical mythology. My method is simply a close reading of a selection of poetry associated with the late eighteenth-century abolitionist movement. In this chapter I will thus briefly consider the historical and literary background to abolitionist poetry before considering the ways that Thomas Day, Hannah More, and William Roscoe contrasted ancient slavery with the modern slave trade. I will follow this up by discussing the importance of epic and pastoral verse forms to a range of poets including Peter Newby, William Roscoe, Thomas Chatterton, and Edward Rushton.

I. CONTEXTS Slavery was a normal part of the social structure for all of the classical societies so much admired by the thinkers and politicians of the Age of Enlightenment. In fact, classical Europe was not alone in history in being a slave-owning society (or set of societies). Slavery, as far as we can tell, had existed in one form or another since time immemorial, and it by no means declined with the fall of the Roman Empire. Slavery remained an integral part of the societies and economies of medieval Europe, Asia, and Africa, and there seem to have been few societies anywhere in the world and at any time in history that managed without slaves. As Orlando Patterson famously argued a quarter of a century ago, ‘there is nothing notably peculiar about the institution of slavery’.1 In fact, slavery appears to be one of the few almost universal institutions. It is our industrial society that is peculiar, since uniquely in history it relies on coal, oil, and uranium rather than human sweat for its energy requirements. It would be wrong, however, to argue that the forms of slavery that could be witnessed in the Athenian agora, the traditional Igbo village, or in the fields of feudal Europe, had much in common with the system of chattel slavery that Western European nations imposed on the Atlantic world between the early sixteenth century and the late nineteenth century. There were indeed chattel slaves in the ancient world, but Atlantic slavery involved the wholesale transfer of entire populations between continents. Tens of millions of people were

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enslaved in the New World; millions more died en route. In the Americas, the work was dehumanizing and unremitting; discipline harsh and arbitrary; beatings, lashings, rape, and murder were commonplace. Those who were enslaved were reduced by the system to the role of cogs in a vast machine run by men whose only interest was to achieve a substantial return on their capital. Some forms of slavery, at other times and in other places, may have offered slaves the protection of a patriarch or a baron, but the plantocracy offered slaves no such protection. Some forms of slavery, at other times and in other places, offered slaves the hope of manumission, but for the majority of enslaved people in the New World, the only escape was death. Although the theory that the profits of slavery fuelled the industrial revolution is no longer widely accepted, it remains true that slaves provided much of the manual labour behind the growth of the British Empire.2 It is not, perhaps, coincidental that slavery was not abolished across the Atlantic world until the dawning of the age of steam—perhaps the most profound difference between the Roman Empire and the British Empire—but it would be wrong to argue that the growing availability of alternative energy sources was the sole reason for the European decision to turn their back on slavery and the slave trade. In the 1780s, when Thomas Clarkson and William Wilberforce rode about the country on horseback seeking supporters for the abolitionist movement, steam engines could do little more than pump water from mines. In the 1830s, when Parliament voted to abolish the institution of slavery throughout the British Empire, sugar, tobacco, and cotton were still largely farmed by hand. The slave trade in 1807, and slavery in 1833, were made illegal in the British Empire not primarily for economic reasons, but because a war of ideas had been won. That war had been fought on many levels, from the parliamentarian making his speech on the floor of the House of Commons to the enslaved person who refused any longer to accept orders from a sadistic overseer; from the quiet advocacy of the pacifist Quakers, to the violent overthrow of the plantocracy of San Domingue by the slaves who declared their own freedom and established the republic henceforth to be known by the name of Haiti. In the United Kingdom, self-styled enlightened men and women, who also often identified themselves as men of feeling and women of sensibility, at last woke up to the horrors of slavery and

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came together to form, in the 1780s, what would be the first modern political protest movement in British history. Committees were formed, meetings held, petitions sent around, a logo created, badges and posters displayed, tracts and pamphlets published, sermons preached, products boycotted, rallies held, questions asked in the House. When William Wilberforce delivered a famous speech in the commons in May 1789, it seemed like the slave trade was all but over: the morning newspapers agreed that this was the end ‘for the African occupation of bolts and chains’.3 They were wrong, as it turned out. Wilberforce was far less successful a campaigner than posterity has remembered, while the abolition campaign faced considerable opposition from vested interests with massive resources at their disposal. Worse still, with the outbreak of revolution in France, the public mood swung away from reform and towards reaction. Abolitionism was swamped under a tide of anti-Jacobinism while the French and British slugged it out for command of the seas. Wilberforce almost gave up; Clarkson dropped out. But after 1805, Trafalgar, British naval supremacy, a Whig government, and a whole host of other fortuitous circumstances, a consensus in both the country and in Parliament was swiftly reached, and the British slave trade was abolished in the spring of 1807. This was a war of ideas. Some historians, following Eric Williams, have claimed that the British slave trade was abolished only because it was no longer profitable, but these claims, while themselves historically important, are no longer widely accepted. It seems, to use a phrase coined by Seymour Drescher, that the British performed a sort of ‘econocide’, or economic suicide, giving up a branch of trade that profited them greatly, because, so it appeared, they had decided that slavery was incompatible with British ideas of liberty and justice.4 Of course, there is a great deal of humbug and hypocrisy in the idea that Britons abolished slavery and the slave trade in a fit of national virtue. British liberty extended only so far, as the millions throughout the Empire who laboured throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in conditions only just short of slavery knew only too well. Nevertheless, the abolition movement of the late eighteenth century was indeed a battle of ideas, and can be seen as the first stirring of what we might call ‘consumer politics’—some eighteenth-century consumers boycotted sugar, for example, while, as we have seen, the

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anti-slavery message was further propagated through a range of consumer goods including badges, prints, and posters. Foremost among these consumer goods were printed texts. Abolitionists reached a wide audience through popular literature including novels, plays, songs, and poems—particularly poems—which were written and published by the score in newspapers and magazines, in longer volumes either commissioned by the abolition committee or rushed into print by enthusiastic supporters, often expensively priced at a shilling or more, and in cheap printed ballads costing ‘an Halfpenny each, or 2s. 3d. per 100–1s. 3d. for 50–9d. for 25’.5 Anti-slavery poems were read by everyone from aristocrats to chapmen, for which latter the phenomenally popular poet William Cowper had been asked to write ‘some good ballads to be sung about the streets’.6 And thus the poets, almost all of whom had received either a formal or informal classical education, turned to the other slavery that they knew about: not the slavery across the water, but the slavery across time. The poets of anti-slavery were, of course, creatures of their own time and they adhered to the poetic conventions and fashions current in the late eighteenth century. Overwhelmingly, abolitionist verse was sentimental in tone and content and written in heroic couplets. Whether the central figures of the poems were suffering Africans or benevolent Europeans, the action of the poems often concerned the tears and sighs of the suffering and those who sympathized with them.7 A significant minority of abolitionist poets, however, reached back to older traditions and thus we have a selection of poems written in epic form and another selection composed according to the rules of several varieties of pastoral. I shall discuss these shortly, but first I will examine some of the poems that directly contrasted classical slavery with modern slavery.

II. DIRECT HISTORICAL COMPARISON IN VERSE The principal difficulty facing abolitionists who wanted to invoke ancient slavery was that classical writers had not on the whole condemned slavery. Most seemed to condone it, even when calling for some measure of amelioration, while few classical writers in any way

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challenged the idea that slavery was a natural, if unenviable, part of the social order. Abolitionists thus found little support for their cause either in classical drama, poetry, or philosophy. Even major figures such as Aristotle seemed, if anything, only to provide ammunition for pro-slavery apologists. Aristotle’s theory of natural slavery, developed in Politics, was accordingly received either with embarrassed silence or dismissive coolness by abolitionist writers. Aristotle is not mentioned at all by James Ramsay in his important Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves in the British Sugar Colonies (1784), although he devotes an entire chapter to ancient slavery.8 In Thomas Clarkson’s equally important Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species (1786), written in Latin and then translated into English, the history of classical slavery ranges across 30 pages, but Aristotle gets just a paragraph at the end of Clarkson’s list of the ‘cruel sentiments of the ancients’.9 Both authors agree that slavery was bad in Greece and worse in Rome. ‘In proportion as luxury increased among the Romans,’ argues Ramsay, ‘the condition of their slaves sunk gradually down to the lowest degree of wretchedness and misery . . . While they fancied themselves lords of the world, they forgot that they were men; while they indulged their amusement, they stifled their humanity.’10 Both the historical reality and the representation of slaves in classical literature was embarrassing to a generation of late-Enlightenment writers raised to view Graeco-Roman civilization as a fount of rationality, long blocked up, but once again beginning to flow. To make matters worse, slave-holders had enthusiastically embraced at least a veneer of classical erudition, and had taken to naming their slaves after prominent figures from ancient history. Naming a powerless person, often a child, after a military leader such as Caesar, Pompey, or Scipio was of course a grotesque irony which served to emphasize the power differential between slave and slave-holder. By the late seventeenth century, the convention had become sufficiently well established for Aphra Behn to show her eponymous hero Oroonoko being renamed Caesar by the overseer Trefry.11 By the late eighteenth century, it had become a cliche´, as William Cowper reminds us in his imagined poetic depiction of the post-abolition slave-trader selling off his business with the cry: ‘Come, buy off my stock, for I must no more j Carry Caesars and Pompeys to Sugar-cane shore’.12 All in all, the classical

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world provided little comfort for abolitionists and much for slaveholders. Despite these constraints, a small number of abolitionist poets were able to make direct comparisons between ancient and modern slavery, or at least to reflect on the inconsistency of pro-slavery attitudes to ancient and modern slavery. One early but important such discussion comes not in the body of a poem, but in its preface. The author was Thomas Day, in the ‘Dedication’ to the 1774 second edition of his poem The Dying Negro, which he co-wrote with John Bicknell between 1773 and 1775. The poem was based on a true story about a slave committing suicide that appeared in the London newspapers in 1773, and it arguably did more to promote anti-slavery sentiment in the 1770s than any other publication in any genre. In the preface to that second edition, reproduced in all later editions, Day makes a discussion of ancient Sparta the central turning point of his argument. He notes that it is customary to admire Sparta both for its martial glory and for its self-sacrificing ethos. ‘Yet’, he argues, ‘this admirable republic is tainted by atrocities, which tarnish the lustre of its sublime institutions.’13 He cites ‘the unfortunate Helotes, abused, insulted, and enslaved’. In 1774 this mixture of shame and imperial glory was a potent mixture, providing him with an opportunity to turn on the British colonists in America who were at that point embarking on their war to establish independence from Great Britain: But let us not too hastily triumph in the shame of Sparta, lest we aggravate our own condemnation. Let us remember, there is a people, who share the government and name of Britons; among whom the cruelty of Sparta is renewed without its virtue. It was some excuse for the disciples of Lycurgus, that if one man had been created by Heaven to obey another, the citizens he had formed best deserved the empire of the world. But what has America to boast? What are the graces or the virtues which distinguish its inhabitants? What are their triumphs in war, or their inventions in peace? Inglorious soldiers, yet seditious citizens; sordid merchants, and indolent usurpers; behold the men, whose avarice has been more fatal to the interests of humanity, and has more desolated the world than the ambition of its antient Conquerors! For them the Negro is dragged from his cottage, and his plantane shade—by them the fury of African tyrants is stimulated by pernicious gold; the rights of nature are invaded; and European faith becomes infamous throughout the globe. Yet, such is the inconsistency of

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mankind! these are the men whose clamours for liberty and independence are heard across the Atlantic Ocean!14

Day concludes: ‘Let the wild inconsistent claims of America prevail, when they shall be unmixed with the clank of chains, and the groans of anguish. Let her aim a dagger at the breast of her milder parent, if she can advance a step without trampling on the dead and dying carcasses of her slaves.’ As I have remarked elsewhere, this is interesting in part because Day is one of the earliest British writers to discuss the paradox of American liberty, a paradox neatly summed up a year later by Samuel Johnson when he asked ‘why is it we hear the loudest yelps for liberty from among the drivers of Negroes?’15 More central to my argument in this essay is the way that Day’s immediate political message is embedded within a more profound observation about the way that ancient history is both misremembered and misused. The image of the ‘sordid’ colonists ‘trampling on the dead and dying carcasses of [their] slaves’ contrasted with the noble idea of Lycurgus’ virtuous empire is a deliberate attack on the American colonists’ double standards, of course, but it also undermines colonial attempts to justify modern slavery by reference to ancient slavery. Modern America, Day argues, is in no way comparable with ancient Sparta. Day’s contention that Sparta could to some extent offset the vice of slavery by their virtue in other areas does not hold true for Americans, who are signally lacking in virtue. Therefore, the arguments used to justify slavery then can in no way be applicable now. In the context of 1774, this anti-American diatribe might be considered as little more than timely patriotic sentiment directed only against a few troublesome colonists if it were not for the fact that Day had already taken some pains to implicate all his metropolitan readers in the same double standards. A few lines before the American passage, he had critiqued the genteel assumptions of educated Britons with a short parody of the way that modern Britons contrasted themselves with ancient Greeks and Romans. ‘We boast of the gentleness of our manners,’ he argues, ‘and think the rugged virtues of antiquity ill-adapted to the genius of the present times. When you ask if Brutus sold his country, or the Spartan matrons frequented assemblies of nocturnal riot, it is thought a sufficient answer to say that we do not expose our

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children, or whip them at the alter of Diana, and that this is the age of generous sentiment, and refined humanity.’16 But as Day makes plain in the poem that follows, modern slaves, many of whom are children, are indeed routinely whipped and exposed, a fact that makes a mockery of claims by his contemporaries to be living in an age of ‘refined humanity’. The irony is strategic, of course. Day wants his readers to reflect not only on the shocking inconsistencies in the Americans’ colonial way of life, but also on the glaring double standards in their own metropolitan lives. More materially, he wants them to take action to mitigate and finally abolish slavery. Slavery, according to Day, was a blot on Sparta, not a cause of its greatness, just as slavery is a blot on modern America. Nevertheless, Day grudgingly allowed Sparta its Helots because in his view it was a virtuous republic in other arenas. The Liverpool lawyer William Roscoe was not so forgiving. Writing fourteen years later, at the start of the most intense period of abolitionist campaigning, Roscoe blamed slavery for the decline and fall of ancient empires. As we shall see, The Wrongs of Africa, which was published in two parts in 1787–8, was Roscoe’s attempt at an African epic and in part because of this, his fulsome periods and extended metaphors rarely lend themselves to pithy extracts. Here I reproduce in full the passage that blames slavery for the fall of empires, part of a much longer apostrophe to Freedom: Recall we then the days, when from the shores Of elder Greece, from Rome’s imperial bound, Burst forth exulting Pæans. Thee they hail’d Their patroness and pride: but oft their songs Mistook thy genuine glory; and prophan’d Thy name, idolatrous.—Ah! cou’d the breath Of incense please thee? or the sound of pipes Clamorous? whilst wasted on the self-same gale, The groans of slaughter’d Helots pierc’d thine ears; Or the shrill shriek of slaves, that unaccus’d, Expir’d upon the rack?—For this thy wrath Was kindled; soon at thy vindictive frown, Their lofty towers, and strong cemented walls. Shook to their base: thine heav’nly temper’d spear Struck the firm earth; and from the teeming North, And furious East, the torrents of thine ire

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It is, at best, debatable whether Roscoe’s historical analysis was widely shared by his contemporaries. Slavery can hardly be described as a notable theme in Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, for example, which was completed in the same year as Roscoe’s poem. Gibbon certainly does not blame slavery for the fall of Rome, but to question Roscoe’s powers of historical analysis is to miss the point. His strategy is rhetorical, not factual. This passage contains two clear messages, neither of which is directly about the classical world since the empire really being considered here is Britain. Like Day before him, Roscoe’s principal concern is to expose a modern double standard. ‘The breath j Of incense’ burned in freedom’s name or ‘the sound of pipes’ played in celebration of freedom can have little meaning when mingled with ‘The groans of slaughter’d Helots’. Although Roscoe’s setting is classical, the comparison with contemporary British political culture is direct. Since the Revolution of 1688, Britons had celebrated their freedom from Catholicism and absolutism by developing a language and a culture that placed ideas of liberty at the core. Just as Day had attacked the paradox of American liberty, so Roscoe attacks the paradox of British liberty, implying that if Britons never shall be slaves, then it is inconsistent for them to keep slaves. Since such attacks on the central political dogma of eighteenth-century Britain might be construed as unpatriotic, however, Roscoe (a lawyer, let us not forget) puts the question in a hypothetical case, the case of a generalized classical invocation of Freedom.

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The rest of the passage charts the downward spiral of an empire, a topic that was of great interest to Britons who had simultaneously watched their own empire in North America successfully fight for its independence (1775–83) while reading Gibbon’s serialized account of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire (1776–89). Roscoe’s insistence that empires fall when ‘priests and slaves j Now people all the land’ perhaps owes something to Gibbon, but his assertion that slaves are as much a cause of the fall of ancient empires as priests is a new departure. The scene of despoiled and unproductive land that follows is a perennial nightmare for all agrarian societies, invoked as a stern admonition. Roscoe concludes his address to Freedom with a warning to nations to ‘beware the touch j Of foul domestic slavery’. While this conclusion may have been viewed as something of a curiosity by many, there can be little doubt that his narrative of imperial catastrophe coupled with his imagery of famine and civic corruption would have resonated powerfully with the eighteenthcentury imagination. It may even have convinced some that Britain’s future as an imperial power depended on the eradication of slavery. My final example of a poem that views modern slavery in relation to the ancient world is Slavery, A Poem, written in 1788 by Hannah More, the bluestocking, conservative reformer, and friend of William Wilberforce. Like Day and Roscoe, More exposes the double standards that could be used to justify slavery but, unlike them, she largely avoids discussion of ancient slavery itself, seeking instead to contrast modern views of the ancient world with modern views of contemporary Africa. Her first point of attack is the inconsistency with which people describe Africans contrasted with the way they describe figures from classical history. In addition to other qualities, More argues, both Africans and ancient Romans have a highly developed sense of honour: Nor weak their sense of honour’s proud control, For pride is virtue in a Pagan soul; A sense of worth, a conscience of desert, A high, unbroken haughtiness of heart: That self-same stuff which erst proud empires sway’d, Of which the conquerers of the world were made. Capricious fate of man! that very pride In Afric scourg’d, in Rome was deify’d.18

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More’s comparison of ancient Romans and modern Africans is a form of primitivism, the celebration of supposedly virtuous, supposedly primitive, personal and cultural traits thought by many eighteenth-century figures to characterize those living in the so-called ‘state of nature’ or, at least, in a state considerably less developed and hence corrupt than eighteenth-century Britain was thought to be. Whether ancient Rome really qualifies as primitive is a moot point. Nevertheless, in More’s estimation, both ancient Romans and modern Africans are virtuous military heroes, though Pagans, who are strongly motivated by a sense of pride. More thus highlights the double standard by which character traits seen as classical virtues are also cited as African vices, and used as a justification for the continuation of the slave trade: if we admire Roman pride, she asks, why do we not admire African pride? In itself, this is a clever point, but a few dozen lines later on More presses home the classical parallels in lines that to my mind are the central argument of the poem. More argues: Plead not, in reason’s palpable abuse, Their sense of * feeling callous and obtuse: From heads to hearts lies Nature’s plain appeal, Tho’ few can reason, all mankind can feel.19

She follows up these lines with a footnote saying; ‘* Nothing is more frequent than this cruel and stupid argument, that they do not feel the miseries inflicted on them as Europeans would do.’ This argument—‘Tho’ few can reason, all mankind can feel’—typifies sentimental thought. The late eighteenth-century ‘age of sensibility’ may have democratized feeling, but it nevertheless remained an e´lite discourse in which ideas of social responsibility often remain patrician or paternalistic.20 More’s deployment of fashionable sentimental ideas is complicated, however, by her appropriation of two opposing tendencies in classical thought. In the following lines she contrasts passions inflamed by rhetoric and rhetoricians, or ‘pathos’, with the supposedly virtuous lack of passions, or ‘apathy’, associated with Stoic philosophers. She writes: Tho’ wounds there are which reason’s force may heal, There needs no logic sure to make us feel.

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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. Sense is as keen where Congo’s sons preside, As where proud Tiber rolls his classic tide. Rhetoric or verse may point the feeling line, They do not whet sensation, but define. Did ever slave less feel the galling chain, When Zeno prov’d there was no ill in pain? Their miseries philosophic quirks deride, Slaves groan in pangs disown’d by Stoic pride.21

The first six lines of this extract restate the observation that ‘all mankind can feel’ in a slightly more theoretical form, but in the seventh and eighth lines More revisits the idea of ancient and modern ‘primitives’ that she had raised a few pages earlier. Here, though, she seems to have reversed her earlier implication that Romans were primitives since ancient Romans and modern Africans are now contrasted rather than compared. Although their feelings are equal, this time the Romans are proffered as an example of refined civility rather than of Pagan pride. This inconsistency is rather less important than it might seem, however, since the poem’s primary argument is that feelings are the same for all people, in all places, and at all times, and it makes little difference to this argument whether Rome (or for that matter Africa) is a sophisticated arena of polished civility or a bristling band of noble savages. Either way, they feel the same. More accordingly concludes this section of the poem with an attack on the ‘philosophic quirks’ of Stoicism which, in its most simplistic form at any rate, was a deeply repellent philosophy for a sentimental author who believed that the honest expression of genuine emotions was the surest route to social harmony.22 The attack on Stoicism is an unusual manoeuvre for an abolitionist poet. David Brion Davis has pointed out that Zeno of Citium, the founder of the Stoic school and one of the few classical philosophers mentioned anywhere in abolitionist poetry, had reportedly expressed disquiet over slavery, while a few centuries later, the Roman Stoic philosopher Epictetus had reportedly argued that ‘that slaveholders could not attain true freedom and virtue, since the owner of a slave could not help but

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become a slave himself ’.23 More either knew little about Stoicism or, more likely, felt that their emphasis on reason over passion disqualified them from being competent judges of the misery of slavery. As proof, she offers the image of the Stoic philosopher being indifferent, not to his own pain, but to the pain of others. As ever, the real target is not the ancient world. When ‘Slaves groan in pangs disown’d by Stoic pride’, the Stoics here are not classical philosophers but modern merchants and politicians. The entire passage serves, therefore, not only to assert the primacy of the feeling heart but also to deride those defenders of the slave trade who sought to rationalize away the suffering that the trade caused.

III. FORM Attempts by eighteenth-century abolitionist poets to discuss slavery in the ancient world are sporadic, present-minded, and frequently incoherent; that the above three examples are among the most fluent such discussions is proof enough. Nevertheless, while few abolitionist poets engaged successfully with the history or philosophy of ancient slavery, rather more managed to competently deploy neoclassical verse forms. In this section I shall briefly survey abolitionist poems that draw on epic and pastoral traditions and I shall assess the extent to which the form of the poems contributes to their abolitionist credentials. There is no complete anti-slavery epic, but at least two poems from the 1780s seem sufficiently epic in their intentions to warrant being discussed in those terms. These are The Wrongs of Almoona, recently confirmed as the work of Peter Newby, ‘an English Catholic poet from Lancashire’, and The Wrongs of Africa, which as we have seen was written by the Liverpool lawyer William Roscoe.24 While Roscoe’s work has received some critical attention in recent years, Newby’s poem has been almost completely overlooked, not least because its unstable blend of violence and sentiment expressed in brisk heroic couplets makes it tough going for modern readers. Wylie Sypher notes that the slave Almoona’s threats to the slave-holder Alphonso contain ‘the loftiest and most terrible savagery’ while by contrast the

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ludicrously sentimental scene in which Almoona forgives the dying Alphonso is one of ‘the most gratuitously noble moments in noble savagery’.25 Michael Tomko argues that the poem has a ‘fraught message’ resulting in ‘a textual “split consciousness” at the level of poetic structure’.26 Both critics thus agree in seeing internal contradiction, or at least ‘doubleness’ to use Tomko’s term, as a defining feature of the poem. I agree, but I would also argue that what both critics have overlooked is Newby’s attempt to reconcile these opposing tendencies by placing them within the higher-order structure of the epic. According to its author, the poem is ‘founded on historical facts’ that took place in Jamaica in 1655. Newby may have heard the story either when he briefly visited Jamaica as a young man, from slave traders in the nearby port of Liverpool, or from a footnote to Edward Rushton’s West-Indian Eclogues which had been published the previous year (and which I discuss later in this essay). At any rate, it seems clear that the story already had existence in the Jamaican oral tradition before Newby translated it into epic verse. The epic structure that Newby imposed on the story of Almoona is not immediately discernible, but a brief plot summary emphasizing the poem’s use of epic conventions will bring it into the open. The poem begins in medias res, on the eve of the historical battle between the British and the Spanish that in 1655 decided the future of Jamaica. The island is beset by Terror, here presented as a personified supernatural force.27 We are introduced to the poem’s hero, Almoona, and his friend Zemka. In a series of long speeches, they plan an uprising of the slaves (4–11) while at the same time the first skirmish between the British and Spanish forces takes place (12–13). Against this backdrop Almoona, fired with ‘love and madness’ (12) makes his way to the house of Alphonso, the slave-owner who has taken captive and raped Almoona’s wife Teeaina. Meeting with the other slaves there, in a long speech Almoona expresses his intention to murder his wife to protect his honour (13–19). He enters the house, but at this point the poet intervenes with a digression that states his abolitionist sympathies and warns the reader that ‘some stronger muse’ might prompt him to write another poem directly attacking slave traders themselves (20–2). Returning to the narrative, we read a long and emotional dialogue between Almoona and Teeaina (22–8). Unexpectedly, Alphonso enters the house. Almoona challenges Alphonso to single

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combat and then murders his wife before making good his escape (28–32). Shortly after, the battle between the British and Spanish recommences. Almoona returns to the slaves, now recast as his loyal troops, and makes a long speech rousing them to action against their Spanish oppressors (37–40). They approach the British leadership and, after a long council of war, join forces with them (42–53). Almoona is armed (51) and goes into battle at the head of his troops. His courage and leadership are described in an extended simile: From rank to rank he goes: his words inspire Their breasts with thirst of fame; they catch his fire, And as the tyger, with rapacious eyes The near approaches of his victim spies, And fiercely crouching twists his tail with joy, Eager to make a spring and to destroy, So they, with brandish’d swords, their looks elate Dart on the Spaniards, and prepare their fate. (pp. 52–3)

At the height of battle, Almoona meets with Alphonso and ‘hand to hand with vigour they engage’ (58). This single combat ends with the defeat of Alphonso. As he dies he begs for Almoona’s forgiveness which is granted in excessively sentimental terms—Sypher’s ‘gratuitously noble’ moment (60). After his death, Almoona hints at an apotheosis by praying over the corpse and pointing to the skies, but this is not developed. The poem concludes with Almoona disbanding his army, issuing a moralizing speech, and returning, racked with grief, to his ‘widow’d cottage’ (66). The execution may be none of the finest, but the intention is clear: Newby had set out to write a plantation epic. This may not on the face of it seem particularly important since Newby might have chosen any particular form, or none, as the vehicle for his abolitionist sentiments. As we shall see, however, the epic form offers Newby more than just a vehicle for his opinions. To assess this, it is useful to contrast The Wrongs of Almoona with another epic (or quasi-epic) abolitionist poem: Roscoe’s The Wrongs of Africa. As we have already seen, Roscoe used classical precedent to predict that the British Empire would fall if the British continued to trade in slaves. It should not surprise us, therefore, to find Roscoe also adopting a classical

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poetic form. This he appears to do. The poem is certainly long enough for an epic: its two volumes contain well over a thousand lines of blank verse, while the preface to the second volume notes that ‘the whole will be comprehended in the third part’—a third part that never appeared. Like The Wrongs of Almoona, Roscoe’s poem deploys a range of epic conventions, from the opening invocation to the muse of a personified Humanity, through the depiction of a hero, Cymbello, to pitched battles fought between Africans and Europeans. Roscoe’s real inspiration is not Homer, however, but Milton. This becomes clear in lines such as: But say, whence first th’ unnatural trade arose, And what the strong inducement, that could tempt Such dread perversion? (I. 13–14) . . . . . . . Artful, and fair, and eloquent of speech, Was the first tempter, that in Eden’s groves, Guiltless before, brought sin, and pain, and death: And fair, and artful, were the cultur’d train, That wound the snare round Afric’s thoughtless sons, And dragg’d them to perdition. (I. 14–15)

The parallels with several parts of Paradise Lost are evident, but most readers would immediately note the correspondence both of tone and subject with some of the opening lines of Milton’s poem: Say first, for Heav’n hides nothing from thy view Nor the deep Tract of Hell, say first what cause Mov’d our Grand Parents in that happy State, Favour’d of Heav’n so highly, to fall off From their Creator, and transgress his Will For one restraint, Lords of the World besides? Who first seduc’d them to that fowl revolt? Th’ infernal Serpent; he it was, whose guile Stird up with Envy and Revenge, deceiv’d The Mother of Mankinde.28

Several other passages in The Wrongs of Africa also bear direct comparison with Paradise Lost, but for the sake of brevity I shall examine only one. Probably the most successful passage in the poem

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is the scene in which the descent into the interior of a slave ship closely mirrors the conventional descent of the epic hero into the underworld. The descent commences when the ship leaves the shore of Africa, and embarks on the notorious Middle Passage across the Atlantic Ocean. Roscoe depicts the scene as it would have been viewed from aboard the ship: Lessening on the sight, The distant mountains bow’d their cloud capt heads; And all the bright and variegated scene, Of hills, and groves, and lawns, and reed-built sheds, That oft had caught the prisoner’s ardent eye, Not hopeless of escape, now gradual sunk To one dim hue. Amongst the sable tribes Soon spread th’ alarm; when sudden from the depths Of crouded holds, and loathsome caverns, rose One universall yell, of dread despair, And anguish inexpressible; for now Hope’s slender thread was broke; extinguish’d now The spark of expectation, that had lurk’d Beneath the ashes of their former joys, And o’er despondency’s surrounding gloom, Had shed its languid lustre. (II. 10–11)

Again, the passage owes little directly to Homer or Virgil but instead draws on Milton and, through him, Dante. Several passages of Paradise Lost are hinted at, but the obvious allusion is to the depiction of Hell early in book 1 where Milton, himself alluding to the admonition ‘Lasciate ogne speranza, voi ch’intrate’ which appears over the gates to Dante’s Hell, describes: Regions of sorrow, doleful shades, where peace And rest can never dwell, hope never comes That comes to all; but torture without end Still urges.29

Given that the hold of a slave ship embarked on the Middle Passage was probably the nearest thing to Hell on Earth imaginable in late eighteenth-century Britain, Roscoe’s appropriation of Paradise Lost is an effective rhetorical manoeuvre. Not only does it draw attention to the diabolical nature of the slave trade, but it also

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reminds the reader of the central Christian message of Milton’s work and, by extension, of their own Christian duty. As with Newby’s The Wrongs of Almoona, however, what interests me is the way that Roscoe has placed his narrative within the higher-order structure of the epic, albeit a modern British epic rather than an ancient Greek or Roman epic. Nevertheless, although both poems are somewhat dissimilar in content, both in their different ways make use of a wide range of epic conventions, in particular, the depiction of martial heroes and their military exploits, successful or otherwise. On one level, this is merely another manifestation of the eighteenth-century impulse to primitivism. Both poets are making more or less direct connections between the recorded glory of classical military accomplishments and the imagined glory supposedly obtained by African warriors, either free or enslaved. This is especially true of Newby, but Roscoe too represents Africans as ‘fearless and firm’ warriors who in violently rising up against their oppressors ‘Struck terror thro’ the tyrants chilling veins, j And bad oppression tremble’ (II. 15–16). With its inbuilt celebration of honour, violence, and battlefield camaraderie, the epic is the ideal form in which to imaginatively present the exploits of what later generations would come to call ‘noble savages’. And yet, the camaraderie in most epic poems extends further than the battlefield. Epic poets often celebrate or promote ethnic or national identity such that epics become national mythologies. Arguably, then, both poets seem to have felt a need to create a ‘national’ mythology on behalf of the enslaved. This is, of course, deeply problematic, not least because it reaffirms Wylie Sypher’s contention that the ‘antislavery literature of eighteenth-century England wilfully ignores facts’.30 Among the facts being ignored is that, as was already known in the eighteenth century, even if not widely, Africa was not a nation but a collection of nations, each of which had rich and varied mythologies and shared narratives of their own. These traditions are by and large ignored by the poets of anti-slavery; certainly Newby and Roscoe paid them very little attention. In effect, this is an act of cultural imperialism and is one example of the many ways in which well-meaning abolitionists perpetuated imaginative but inaccurate ideas about Africa and Africans that could later be used to justify ideologies of empire. Noble savages in verse are merely savages in prose.

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The few lines about the decline and fall of ancient empires aside, Roscoe and Newby only really engage with the classical world in that by using the epic they establish formal, literary connections between the ancient world and modern Africa—and in Roscoe’s case, the connection is as much with the Puritan tradition of Milton as with the worlds of Homer and Virgil. Others took similar routes but with different poetic forms. Few went as far as Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who wrote an ode in Greek on ‘The Wretched Lot of the Slaves in the Islands of West India’, but anti-slavery odes in English are in fact relatively common.31 There are also several abolitionist poems that engage with various types of pastoral. Before concluding this essay, therefore, I would like briefly to draw attention to a small selection of these and examine how pastoral poetry could be used to emphasize how plantation life was as unnatural as it was barbaric. The best-known poem in a pastoral form that deals with slavery is James Grainger’s georgic poem The Sugar Cane, which appeared in 1764. It is difficult, however, to describe this poem as ‘abolitionist’ in any formal sense both because it was written before the foundation of the abolition movement, and because in accord with the demands of the georgic form it offers instruction to a would-be planter on the proper management of a sugar plantation and its slaves. In places, it laments the ‘tyrannic sway’ of ‘heart-debasing slavery’.32 More often, it offers advice on extorting the maximum labour from the enslaved. Frequently read as an apology for slavery, Markman Ellis has nevertheless argued that ‘despite itself, the poem’s georgic form reveals to the reader the essential incongruity between the labour of slave and free workers and, in this way, the poem stands as a significant, albeit macabre, monument on the road to abolition’.33 This revelation, as Ellis shows, is quite unintentional on Grainger’s part, but other poets recognized that the incongruity between pastoral idyll and plantation reality was a fruitful place to foreground the barbarity of slavery. Somewhat unexpectedly, therefore, several poets of the 1770s and 1780s turned to the eclogue as a form calculated to expose the evils of slavery through the mouths of the enslaved. The eclogue, which consists of dialogue between two or more characters, is usually, though not exclusively, a pastoral or idyllic verse form. In their original manifestation, particularly in the work of Virgil, eclogues were largely made up of idealized conversations

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between shepherds, but by the eighteenth century the form had diversified somewhat. Early in the century, poets such as John Gay and Jonathan Swift had experimented with various types of ‘urban pastoral’. Gay’s Trivia: Or, the Art of Walking the Streets of London (1716) was a mock-georgic in three books which drew, in part, on Swift’s earlier work including some of his best-known poems such as ‘A Description of the Morning’ (1709), ‘A Description of a City Shower’ (1710), and ‘A Town Eclogue. 1710. Scene, The Royal Exchange’ (1710). In the ensuing decades a flood of imitations followed so that, by the 1770s, pastoral was widely seen as a diverse form that was by no means confined to shepherds or, for that matter, the countryside. It would not then have seemed incongruous or inappropriate for Thomas Chatterton to publish his African Eclogues, as he did in the Court and City Magazine for February 1770. Chatterton is best known for his Rowley poems, imaginative reconstructions of fifteenth-century verse supposedly written by the fictitious monk Thomas Rowley and passed off by Chatterton as genuine discoveries. As James Basker has noted, in his African Eclogues Chatterton ‘invented a heroic and stylized poetic vision that, though set in Africa, is indistinguishable from the ethos of his Eurocentric medieval poems’.34 Other than consisting of dialogue, the poems have little in common with classical eclogue. As with the poems by More, Newby, and Roscoe, they present a primitivist vision of Africa not far different from Chatterton’s primitivist vision of the European Middle Ages. It is fair to say, however, that Chatterton’s depictions of ‘the hated chain’ of ‘common slavery’ offer little succour to pro-slavery apologists while his sympathetic treatment of Gaira, an African who had lost his wife and children to slave traders, probably provided some encouragement to the nascent abolitionist movement.35 Marcus Wood has gone further, suggesting that Chatterton’s lasting influence came from the way he ‘attempted to articulate extreme black revolutionary violence’.36 Certainly, in revenge for the enslavement of his family, Gaira vows to wage war on the slave traders and ‘strew the Beaches with the mighty dead j And tinge the Lilly of their features red’. To my mind, however, this is not so much an articulation of revolutionary sentiment but more a call to defend one’s homeland against invasion. In either case, however, Chatterton ensures that the reader’s sympathy is with Gaira, not with the European slave traders.

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Despite the name, Chatterton’s African Eclogues were neither strictly neoclassical nor abolitionist. That did not stop them from being popular, and over the following thirteen years they were imitated twice. The year after Chatterton’s efforts appeared, the littleknown Thomas Thistlethwaite issued ‘Bambo and Giffar; an African Eclogue’ in the September 1771 edition of Every Man’s Magazine.37 Reproducing the medievalism of Chatterton without his flair, the poem is nonetheless notable as one of the small but increasing number of poems to directly criticize the slave trade at this time. Twelve years later, in 1783–4, two American Eclogues appeared in subsequent editions of The Gentleman’s Magazine.38 These were written by George Gregory who was evidently a fan of Chatterton since he would later in the decade write his biography.39 Gregory nevertheless manages to avoid Chatterton’s medievalisms and presents eclogues that somewhat resemble their Virgilian prototypes. The first consists of a monologue by a slave called Adala, while the second, in which the fugitive slave Zamboia is in dialogue with his friend Mombaze, adheres more closely to the form. What is most striking about these poems, however, is their uncompromising opposition to slavery and the way in which the conventional language of pastoral verse counterpoints the harsh reality of plantation life. This is most evident in the conclusion to the second Eclogue, where, after much defiant talk, Zamboia is tracked down and hauled away: So talked these friends, and to the cottage haste; While sad Zamboia his pursuers trac’d. The ruffian band arrest the hapless swain, And pray’rs, and tears, and promises are vain: Their vengeful fervour, no—not gifts abate; But bound in chains, they drag him to his fate.

Regardless of its accuracy, the representation of slaves as ‘swains’ who occupy ‘cottages’ and who deal with misfortune with pious ‘pray’rs’ and sentimental ‘tears’ reinforces pastoral conventions familiar to British readers and serves to break down distinctions between Africans and Europeans. Unlike Chatterton and Thistlethwaite, therefore, Gregory seems to be making a conscious choice to use the pastoral form ironically for polemical ends. Although by putting European words in the mouths of his imagined Africans he is guilty of a form of

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cultural imperialism, as all abolitionist poets were, the American Eclogues nevertheless represent a strategic shift in the way that poetry was being deployed in the campaign against the slave trade. Hugh Mulligan’s ‘The Lovers, An African Eclogue’, which appeared in The Gentleman’s Magazine later in 1784, at last seems to have shaken off the legacy of Chatterton in all but its recognition that violent resistance was a valid response to enslavement. The dialogue between Zelma and Bura is punctuated by an uprising that takes place on board a nearby slave ship at which Bura exclaims ‘O friends! O countrymen! be greatly bold, j For justice strike, nor thus be tamely sold’.40 The allusion to Mark Antony’s funeral speech in Julius Caesar is obvious and may serve to remind the readers of the power of popular opinion when roused. In this instance, the enslaved Africans on board the ship rise up and destroy the ship, their enslavers, and themselves in one thunderous explosion. My final example is the best-known and most extensive of the spate of abolitionist eclogues to appear in the 1770s and 1780s: Edward Rushton’s West-Indian Eclogues, which appeared in 1787. There are four eclogues in total, plus eight pages of densely printed notes in which Rushton comments at length on the fauna and flora of the Caribbean, the history of the region, and on the sadistic practices of the plantation owners and their overseers. In some ways the endnotes are the real matter. The poems appeal to readers’ need for narrative and an emotional experience, but the notes present real evidence of atrocities while also establishing the rhetorical ethos of the poet. Thomas Day and Hannah More had both added footnotes to their anti-slavery poems, but only Rushton adds notes that rival the main poem in length. The effect is iterative, piling up both arguments and evidence against slavery calculated to move both the head and the heart. The following extract from the second eclogue, with its endnote, is typical. Here, two slaves plot against their master but one recalls the terrible punishment handed out to rebellious slaves: Oh! think on pedro, gibbeted alive! Think on his fate—six long days to survive!— His frantic looks,—his agonising pain,— His tongue outstretch’d to catch the dropping rain;

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The endnote, one of Rushton’s shorter, adds: A punishment not uncommon in the West-Indies. Some of the miserable sufferers have been known to exist a week in this most dreadful situtation. (See a most affecting account of one instance of this kind, in the Rev. Mr. Ramsay’s Treatise.)41

I have not been able to trace the account in James Ramsay’s Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves. It is possible that Rushton read the story in one of the many other anti-slavery publications that had appeared by 1787 but, in any case, we can note that the slave Pedro is ‘punished’ for his rebellion in the same way that the mythological Greek figure Tantalus was punished for his acts of rebellion against the gods. Like Tantalus, Pedro is taunted—tantalized— with food and drink which remains just out of reach. Whether Rushton’s inclusion of this story was directly inspired by the Greek myth is debatable, since such tortures certainly did take place in the British Caribbean, but the classical allusion is in line with his method. Like George Gregory, Rushton uses the language and form of the eclogue to counterpoint the dreadful reality of life on a sugar plantation. Nowhere is this more evident than in the opening lines of the poem: The Eastern clouds declare the coming day, The din of reptiles slowly dies away. The mountain-tops just glimmer on the eye, And from their bulky sides the breezes fly. The Ocean’s margin beats the varied strand, It’s hoarse, deep, murmurs reach the distant land. The sons of Mis’ry, Britain’s foulest stain, Arise from friendly sleep to pining pain; Arise, perchance, from dreams of Afric’s soil, To Slav’ry, hunger, cruelty, and toil:—42

The poem begins with depiction of an idyllic landscape in a tone appropriate to conventional pastoral verse. Eighteenth-century readers

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may have found the reference to noisy reptiles somewhat exotic (Rushton provides an endnote which suggests that he is in fact describing tree-frogs), but this exotic touch is not discordant. The seventh line brings an unexpected and abrupt shift from the pastoral to the polemic. Slavery is introduced at the outset as ‘Britain’s foulest stain’, not the Caribbean’s, and Rushton clearly does not want the metropolitan reader to think that slavery is somebody else’s responsibility. Having destabilized pastoral conventions from the start, Rushton proceeds to a dialogue between the enslaved Adoma and Jumba. By using the eclogue to depict slaves on a plantation, Rushton challenges the reader’s expectations, subverts the form, and exposes the irony of rural workers living in a world that could not be more unlike a vision of a pastoral idyll.

CONCLUSION: AB OLITIONIST POETRY AND THE ‘OTHER’ ANCIENT WORLD A few abolitionist poets used the ancient world to make comparisons that they hoped would undermine support for the slave trade, but their arguments were more about exposing contemporary doublethink and hypocrisy than they were about seeking legitimacy from classical thought. At the same time, other poets adopted neoclassical poetic forms, based particularly on the eclogue and the epic, in the hope either of exposing the brutality of plantation life though ironic contrast with pastoral idyll, or of establishing Africans as heroic figures. In the main, however, abolitionist poets steered clear of the classical world since Greek and Roman literature rarely offered them much comfort. It should not be overlooked, however, that while the great philosophers and poets of the ancient world had neglected to provide an unambiguous body of anti-slavery writing, there was a body of ancient writings, very much in circulation in eighteenth-century Britain, that appeared to offer more certain views on the question of slavery, not least because many of these writings had, traditionally, been authored by a man who led his people out of slavery in Egypt to their promised land in Palestine. All of the poets

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I have examined in this chapter and, indeed, almost all anti-slavery poets of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, allude directly or implicitly to the Bible even though, despite the enslavement of the Israelites, the Bible is far from consistent in the way it discusses the question of slavery. Nevertheless, in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, it was to Scripture rather than to Classics that abolitionists normally turned when they wanted to seek precedent from the ancient world. Neither the Bible nor the literature of the classical world offered any certain clues or direct injunctions on how to rid the world of slavery. Instead, abolitionists were forced to fall back on allusion to and interpretation of a few key biblical texts, discussion of the failure of the ancient world to rid itself of slaves, and opportunities and ironies generated by using a range of neoclassical poetic forms. The only clear feature that unites their use of all three is that they were able to find double standards and instances of hypocrisy in the ways that their contemporaries contrasted both classical and biblical slavery with modern slavery. Ultimately, then, discussion of the ancient world in abolitionist poetry was always a very presentminded exercise.

NOTES 1. Patterson (1982), vii. 2. The now widely challenged thesis that slavery bankrolled the industrial revolution is most closely identified with Eric Williams and, in particular, with his book Capitalism and Slavery (1944). 3. Star, 323 (Thursday 14 May 1789). For further discussion, see my British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility: Writing, Sentiment, and Slavery, 1760–1807 (2005), 168. 4. See Williams (1944), passim, and Drescher (1977). 5. [More and Eaglesfield Smith] ([1795]), title-page. 6. King and Ryskamp eds., vol. 3 (1983), 130. 7. The most substantial discussions of abolitionist verse can be found in: Sypher (1942); Basker (2002); Wood (2003); Carey (2005). The full text of most of the poems discussed in this essay can be found online at: http://www.brycchancarey.com/slavery/poetry.htm. 8. Ramsay (1784), 19–29.

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9. Clarkson (1786), 25. 10. Ramsay (1784), 25–6. 11. Behn (1688) in Salzman ed. (1994), 59. On the significance of the occasions in the novel in which the new name is used, see further Kroll (2004), 583. 12. Cowper, ‘Sweet Meat has Sour Sauce: or, the Slave Trader in the Dumps’ (1788) in Baird and Ryskamp eds., 3 vols. (1980–95), vol. 3, 15–16. 13. [Bicknell and Day] (1775), viii. 14. Ibid. viii–ix. For the excoriation of the Spartans’ treatment of the helots, by this time a conventional trope in abolitionist polemic, see above Ch. 3, pp. 71–85. 15. Johnson (1775), in Greene ed. (1977), 401–55; 454. I discuss this further in Carey (2005), 80–1. 16. [Bicknell and Day], Dying Negro, vi. 17. [Roscoe] (1788), 34–6. All subsequent references will be given parenthetically in the text. 18. More (1788), 5–6. 19. Ibid. 11. 20. For a detailed analysis of More’s sentimental rhetoric in this poem, see Carey (2005), 84–8. 21. More (1788), 12. 22. Her position is laid out in detail in her poem Sensibility. See More (1782). 23. Davis (1966), 74–7. 24. Tomko (2007), 25–43; 26. 25. Sypher (1942), 192 and 193. 26. Tomko (2007), 26. 27. [Newby] ([1788]), 2. All subsequent references will be given parenthetically in the text. 28. Paradise Lost, 1. 27–36. 29. Ibid. 1. 27–36. 30. Sypher (1942), 4. 31. See above, Ch. 1, p. 10. Another English translation is available in Basker (2002), 446–9. 32. Grainger (1764), 137. 33. Ellis (2004), 45–62; 46. 34. Basker (2002), 187. 35. Chatterton (2003 [1770]), 72–6. 36. Ibid. 73. 37. Basker (2002), 193–4.

152 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

Brycchan Carey [Gregory] (1783), 1043–4, and (1784), 45–6. Gregory (1789). Mulligan (1784), 199–200. [Rushton] (1787), 8 and 27. Ibid. 1.

6 The Politics of Classicism in the Poetry of Phillis Wheatley Emily Greenwood

Phillis Wheatley (1753?–1784), who came to fame as an enslaved African poet in late eighteenth-century Boston, is claimed as the originator of such diverse intellectual traditions as the black signifying tradition and black classicism;1 this chapter will examine both claims. The debate about Wheatley’s use of Classics, which early reception often dismissed as a derivative assimilation of neoclassical conventions, raises questions about eighteenth-century classicism as the preserve of the free, and intersects with ongoing debates about whether or not Classics is the birthright of a particular racial group. Or, to put it crudely—for this is what the racist criticism of some of Wheatley’s early readers boiled down to—whether or not Africans can do Classics. I will argue that Wheatley herself was fully aware of the cultural presumption constituted by an enslaved African reading and writing about classical themes. The retrospective identification of Wheatley as a founding voice in the black intellectual tradition speaks to the matter of her agency as author and the role of identitarian politics in the interpretation of her poetry. Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s subtle attempt to recuperate Wheatley’s reputation as a self-determining poet reveals the paradox that the chequered African-American reception of her poems has undermined her voice just as much as the hostile reception that she received from readers such as Thomas Jefferson, James Parton, Katherine Lee Bates,

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and William Long, who denied her capacity for original composition and instead attributed her poetry to parrot-like mimicry.2 Both types of racially encoded reception envisage Wheatley as a passive, impressionable poet and both types of reception detect the impression as that of the master. In 2003 Gates summarized the strange stasis of Wheatley criticism as follows: ‘too black to be taken seriously by white critics in the eighteenth century, Wheatley was now considered too white to interest black critics in the twentieth’.3 Gates quotes the view of the black critic Addison Gayle Jr. that Wheatley was ‘the first [black writer] to speak from a sensibility finely tuned by close approximation to [her] oppressors’, and that she ‘had surrendered the right to self-definition to others’.4 This chapter will revisit the question of self-definition in Wheatley’s poetry from the perspective of her literary appropriation of classical themes and, more controversially, texts. Taking my cue from the subtitle of Stephen Hinds’s influential study of allusion and intertextuality in Roman poetry, I consider the extent to which it is possible to speak of a ‘dynamics of appropriation’ of Classics in Wheatley’s work, insisting on the sense of power in the noun ‘dynamics’ whose etymology comes from the Greek noun, dunamis (power).5 I examine how Wheatley’s classical poetics are embroiled in the politics of her slave status and her free ambition.

ELEUTHEROSTOMIA: NO FREEDOM OF SPEECH WITHOUT FREEDOM? I have chosen to approach the question of Wheatley’s self-definition as reader of the Classics via discussion of an extract from Euripides’ Andromache. Amongst its many themes, this tragedy, which was first staged in Athens, perhaps in 425 bce, explores the domestic and sexual tension between Hermione, daughter of Menelaus and Helen of Troy, and Andromache, former wife of the Trojan hero Hector. Hermione is married to Neoptolemus, Achilles’ son, who has brought back the captive Andromache as his concubine as part of the spoils of the Trojan War. In one of the early scenes of the play Hermione, royal, free, Greek

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daughter of Helen and Menelaus, attempts to lord it over Andromache, Hector’s enslaved widow. Hermione prances around the stage in all her royal finery, luxuriating in her wealth, and boasts to Andromache that her father gave her a large dowry in order to guarantee her right to speak freely (ho¯ste eleutherostomein, l. 153). This striking compound verb, which fuses the Greek adjective eleutheros (‘free’) and the noun stoma (‘mouth’) also hints at the crucial difference in status between Hermione and Andromache: the one a free woman, the other a slave (doule¯). However, recent criticism of the play has suggested that, for all the cultural wedges that Hermione tries to drive between herself and her love rival, the differences that separate them are slight from the perspective of an Athenian audience for whom Hermione’s Spartan behaviour is strange and estranging—possibly even Barbarian, as Will Allan suggests.6 As for differences of status, Euripides reminds us that Andromache herself used to be a royal princess. Her enslaved status in the present is accidental, rather than integral. Or, as Nancy Rabinowitz notes in her analysis of the depiction of class and gender in this play, Andromache’s position corresponds to Aristotle’s concept of ‘slavery by nomos/ convention’ rather than phusis/nature (Politics 1.1253b20–3).7 As Andromache reminds the audience in line 12 of the play, her reversal of fortune has seen her transformed from being eleuthero¯tatos, a superlative adjective meaning ‘most free’, to being a doule¯ (‘female slave’).8 Although Hermione asserts her free speech and insists upon Andromache’s slave status, Andromache speaks no less freely than Hermione. The fundamental difference is not in their speech itself, but in the performative power of Hermione’s speech, contrasted with that of Andromache. Andromache’s speech is not backed up by wealth, position, or political power and this leaves her passive and vulnerable; as she remarks to Hermione: I am afraid that my being your slave will prevent me from speaking, even though my case is strong, and that if I win the argument I may for that very reason suffer harm. Those whose pride is great do not take kindly to hearing superior arguments from their inferiors.9

Scholars have suggested that although Andromache is notionally Hermione’s social and cultural inferior, she articulates the cultural and political values of Euripides’ audience with greater authority and

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moral force, defeating her rival in the verbal contests that were an unmistakable feature of Athenian tragedy.10 And yet, as Nancy Rabinowitz and Will Allan have observed, both women, qua women, are relatively powerless within the social landscape of the play. I want to suggest that the problematic concept of eleutherostomia, as it applies both to women’s speech and slaves’ speech, is a useful concept for thinking about Phillis Wheatley’s attempts to speak for herself, while constrained by a triple model of patronage: the literary patronage of her masters and the powerful whose recognition of her poetry had the potential to expedite her freedom, her patronized status as a woman,11 and—the ultimate constraint of human freedom—enslavement to other human beings. Andromache’s concern about her servile status invalidating the rightfulness of her arguments could have been written for Phillis Wheatley.

INTRODUCING WHEATLEY Phillis Wheatley was born in West Africa and was brought to Boston as a slave on 11 July 1761. Her slave name, Phillis Wheatley, is an amalgam of the ship on which she was transported as a slave (the Phillis) and the family name of her owners, John and Susanna Wheatley. Phillis Wheatley was about 8 years old when she arrived in Boston; she was bought as a domestic slave but was given relatively privileged duties in the household of her owners and was educated by Mary Wheatley—the daughter of the household. Boston in the 1770s had a population of 15,000, of which approximately 1,000 were slaves and was thus a ‘slave-owning’ society rather than a ‘slave’ society. However, as Joanne Pope Melish has argued, the relatively small percentage of slaves in New England should not obscure the important contribution that slave labour played in the development of the region’s economy, or the ideological significance of slave-owning as a way of life.12 Phillis Wheatley is known chiefly for the volume of her poetry that was published in London in September 1773, while she was still a slave, under the title Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral (Fig. 6.1). She was emancipated shortly after the publication of her poems and died in poverty in 1784.

Figure 6.1 Frontispiece to Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects (1773).

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In one sense, as a slave, Wheatley did not enjoy the right of freedom of speech, since she was ideologically excluded from public speech and from writing. And yet she did write, and not only did she write, but she was also published. She showed up the incoherence in a slave-owning society, which largely denied slaves access to learning and then maintained that they were incapable of it. Phillis Wheatley’s eloquence indirectly proclaimed the freedom of her owners, not just by virtue of the fact that she bore their surname and thus testified to their power to enslave others, but also by the fact that her achievement of the seemingly impossible made them seem supremely free, in the sense of liberal. In Euripides’ Andromache, Hermione’s claim to eleutherostomia is premissed on the size of her dowry and the economic independence and therefore domestic/social independence which this affords her. By contrast, for the ‘free’ expression of her speech, Phillis Wheatley was financially dependent upon the patronage of her owners, John and Susanna Wheatley, and on her sponsors in Britain—Selina Hastings the Countess of Huntingdon, and the Earl of Dartmouth. Hers was the speech of a slave authorized by her masters and their associates. However, as Hilene Flanzbaum has argued, ‘Wheatley’s writing was currency for her—better than dollars would ever be to negotiate her way out of the hardships of slavery’.13 Her poetry proved symbolic currency through its ability to represent an ideal of the freedom of Boston society towards her which proved so persuasive that it secured this freedom. Carla Willard has explained this bind in which the slave-poet put her audience in terms of ‘heroic entrapment’: ‘her poems call upon slave-owning readers to embrace emancipation to save face and live up to the “freedom” of their own Christian and political ideals. Thus, through celebration [of freedom], her poems structured the “entrapment” of her audience.’14 In a slightly different vein, Christopher Felker has suggested that Phillis Wheatley’s poetry was ‘currency’ in another sense as well, in that she was ‘valuable currency’ in an intercultural debate being waged on the terrain of personal liberty in Republican circles, testing the parameters of liberty and civic humanism.15 But the poems also represented literal currency as well, as attested by a surviving letter in which Wheatley attempts to negotiate and control issue of copyright and pricing, since, as a result of the

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manumission brought about by the publication of her poems, this book of poems now represents her chief source of income. In a letter dated 18 October 1773, Phyllis Wheatley wrote to Colonel David Worcester in New Haven asking for his assistance in promoting sales of her book —recently published in London—in Boston and to prevail upon the printers in New Haven not to reprint it, thereby depriving her of revenue from the royalties from the London edition.16 The idea that Wheatley’s poetry expedited her manumission is uncontroversial, but more controversial is the argument that the poems themselves are vehicles of eleutherostomia, the capacity to speak freely. Henry Louis Gates has argued forcefully and persuasively that the creation of literary texts (whether poetry, essays, or autobiographies) was crucial to the self-representation of black American writers as ‘speaking subjects’ which, in turn, was crucial to their identity as subjects rather than objects.17 But the response of the critical tradition has attempted to silence this speech by undermining Wheatley’s self-determination as author. In fact, where Wheatley’s poems are concerned, critics tend to play down the freedom of Wheatley’s writing given the constraints of (a) her slave status and (b) her dependence on literary models and conventions. As many scholars have pointed out, these two arguments are related: the knowledge of Wheatley’s slave status colours (quite literally) judgements about her originality and her relation to the white literary tradition, reflecting eighteenth-century prejudices about the imitativeness of the literary output of ex-slaves—whether Francis Williams (d. 1762) in Jamaica or Phillis Wheatley in Boston.18 An anonymous review of Wheatley’s poems, published in the London Monthly Review in October 1774 argued that ‘The poems written by this young negro bear no endemial marks of solar fire or spirit. They are merely imitative, and, indeed, most of these people have a turn for imitation, though they have little or no room for invention.’19 A century later a reviewer in issue 127 of the North American Review (Nov.–Dec. 1878) disparaged Wheatley’s poetry alongside the achievement of other black historical agents before concluding that, ‘a fatal facility of imitation stands in the way of this interesting race’.20 The reception of Classics in the black tradition has had to contend with racial prejudices about the imitativeness of black classicism, as a

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predominantly white establishment sought to preserve the ideological exclusivity of Classics as a liberal, humane subject by withholding it from the unfree or those whom crude racial prejudices divested of common humanity. In the essay ‘Of the Training of Black Men’ (chapter 6 of The Souls of Black Folk (orig. 1903)) W. E. B. Du Bois quoted from a recent editorial in a ‘prominent Southern Journal’ on the subject of giving classical education to students in Negro colleges:21 The experiment that has been made to give the coloured students classical training has not been satisfactory. Even though many were able to pursue the course most of them did so in a parrot-like way, learning what was taught, but not seeming to appropriate the truth and import of their instruction.

As Michele Valerie Ronnick and Patrice Rankine have demonstrated in recent publications,22 classicism is of huge significance in the fashioning of a tradition of black intellectualism since the ability to learn Classics was central to the debate about the educability of African-American slaves. The editorial quoted by Du Bois echoes the bigoted trope that educated slaves could only parrot education.23 For Katherine Lee Bates (1898), Phillis Wheatley was ‘a rare songbird of Africa thoroughly tamed in her Boston cage’,24 while for William Long (1913) she was both like a wax puppet and a ‘canary in a cage, a bird that forgets its native melody and imitates only what it hears’.25 The bird imagery is sly, since ‘rare song bird’ sounds momentarily complimentary, drawing as it does on long-established motifs of the analogy between poetry and bird-song. However, these specious avian metaphors essentially divest the slave of humanity. John Gilmore has examined how, in eighteenth-century English letters, the trope of the parrot as a mimic bird (imitatrix ales) was used to mock the output of black poets. Gilmore identifies what is at stake here: ‘To imitate classical authors, in Latin and in English, was to assert one’s rights over them, and to repeat the claim that the British were the true inheritors of all that was good in Roman culture.’26 In order to preserve the role that Classics played in the construction of a national, cultural identity, it was important to distinguish between imitation as practised by ‘legitimate’ cultural insiders, and mimicry as practised by others.

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And yet the dismissive tropes used by Jefferson, Bates, or Long do not manage to remove the disruption that Wheatley’s example poses to the idea of a liberal education as the native preserve of free, white Americans. There are clear contradictions in the way in which her work was marketed and received. The proposal for Phillis Wheatley’s first volume of poems, advertised in the Boston Censor on Saturday 29 February 1772, introduces the authoress as ‘phillis, a Negro girl’, who has written these poems ‘on the strength of her own Genius, it being but a few years since she came to this Town an uncultivated Barbarian from Africa’.27 In an advertisement for the London printing of her book (publication date 11 Sept. 1773), placed in the Morning Post and Advertiser in London on 3 September 1773 by the bookseller Archibald Bell, the idea of spontaneous Genius is repeated; the book is advertised as ‘one of the greatest instances of pure, unassisted Genius, that the world has ever produced’ and the poems described as ‘in a stile rather to have been expected from those who, a native genius, have had the happiness of a liberal education, than from one born in the wilds of Africa’. Similarly, in a letter sent from New York by Thomas Woolridge (24 Nov. 1772) to the Earl of Dartmouth—then secretary of state for the colonies, Phillis Wheatley is described as a ‘poor untutor’d slave’.28 And yet the volume of her poems printed in London in September 1773 included as part of their prefatory material a letter from John Wheatley to the publisher, ‘speaking for Wheatley’ and validating her status as writer (dated 14 Nov. 1772). In this letter John Wheatley notifies the reader that Phillis has not received ‘any Assistance from School Education’, but ‘only what she was taught in the family’ and remarks on her rapid acquisition of English and her inclination for Latin and the progress which she is making in learning it. While it is notable that John Wheatley emphasizes the limitations of the home-schooling which she has received and hints that she must have had some native aptitude/genius, his testimony shows that the adjectives ‘untutor’d’ and ‘uncultivated’ are a fiction. A tantalizing clue that Phillis might have had access to more formal education is contained in a copybook in the Special Collections at Emory University’s Robert Woodruff Library. Acquired alongside another copybook which contains Phillis Wheatley’s poem ‘Hymn to Humanity’ with a dedication ‘To S. P. Gallowy, Esq., who corrected various poetic essays

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of the authoress’, the inside back cover of the second copybook bears a ‘List of Scholars in King Street’, which is the street on which the Wheatleys lived. Dr Randall Burkett, the curator of the African American Collections at Emory, has suggested that Wheatley may have been tutored by the same tutor as these ‘scholars in King Street’, and that the tutor may have been S. P. Gallowy, who is otherwise unknown.29 I would suggest that these contradictions in the representation of Wheatley stem from prejudice, and genuine ambivalence and anxiety on the part of white society about the extent to which African slaves were capable of learning, let alone learning the Classics.30 In the response of many readers, the compromise seems to have been (a) either to concede the appearance of learning, but to question its authenticity so as not to be overly troubled by the example of Phillis Wheatley’s literary output, or (b) to treat her as a prodigy or Herodotean thauma (astonishment is a topos of early criticism of Wheatley) who is not natural or representative of her race.31 This critical strategy, which downgrades the classicism of Wheatley and other black authors as mimicry, presupposes a racial conception of the discipline of Classics, predicated on a similarly racial conception of the institutions of liberty and democracy and their corresponding values. In response, critics have pointed out the hypocrisy in admitting imitation as an intrinsic element of the literary tradition in the case of white writers and recognizing that discourses of originality can only be appreciated in the context of the imitation of tradition, while criticizing imitation in the case of Wheatley.32

WHEATLEY AS READER OF CLASSICS When we turn to the question of classical allusions in Wheatley’s poetry, the scope of discussion is twofold. Before addressing the question of how Wheatley used classical themes and texts in her own poetry, it is important to contextualize this question in terms of the ideological underpinning of Classics in the context in which Wheatley was writing. Echoing a long line of scholars, Seth Schein has recently reminded us that ‘the “classical” is ideological’, and that its power derives ‘from its relation to current social, political, and

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moral values that it helps to legitimate. [ . . . ] since antiquity, the discourse of the “classical” has functioned in just this way to legitimate a social order and a set of institutions, beliefs, and values that are commonly associated with western civilization and “our” western cultural heritage.’33 In the context of late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century America, the potential for the ideological conception of Classics along racial lines is evident in a notorious anecdote involving John Calhoun (1782–1850), vice-president of America from 1825 to 1832, and Senator for South Carolina from 1832 until his death. The source of the anecdote is a speech delivered by the Revd Dr Alexander Crummell (1819–98), the African-American preacher, missionary, and intellectual, who was one of the co-founders of the American Negro Academy in 1897. On 28 December of the same year, he delivered the Academy’s first annual address on the topic of ‘The Attitude of the American Mind Toward the Negro Intellect’.34 In the course of this lecture, in order to illustrate the phenomenon of ‘the denial of intellectuality in the Negro’,35 Crummell recalled how, as an errand boy in a New York office in 1833/4, he overheard two Boston lawyers talking about a conversation that they had had with John Calhoun (then Senator for South Carolina) on a recent trip to Washington. In the course of a discussion about Slavery, Calhoun had remarked that, ‘if he could find a Negro who knew the Greek syntax, he would then believe that the Negro was a human being and should be treated as a man’. This anecdote has become canonical in discussions of Black intellectualism. In an article entitled ‘Authority, (White) Power and the (Black) Critic; It’s All Greek to Me’, Henry Louis Gates used this anecdote to illustrate the civilizational discourses that govern criticism and associate intellectual authority with western culture. According to Gates, in this anecdote Greek syntax is the ‘foundation of the complex fiction upon which Western culture had been constructed’ in nineteenth-century America.36 This anecdote has already become a topos in Classica Africana.37 In her edition of the autobiography of the black classicist William Scarborough, Michele Ronnick uses Crummell’s anecdote about Calhoun to illustrate how Scarborough’s textbook First Lessons in Greek was a demonstration not only of his own intellectual capability, but of the intellectual capability of his race. Calhoun’s comment

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questions the humanity of the Negro and uses African-American ignorance of Greek as an implicit proof. As Patrice Rankine has observed in his book Ulysses in Black, the use of humanistic rhetoric in discourses of race where the Negro’s humanity is questioned on the assumption of intellectual inferiority—particularly vis-a`-vis the Classics—posed a challenge to Negro intellectuals to prove their civilization through mastery of Classics.38 One of the ironies of this tradition is that, while arguing for the intelligence and humanity of black men, it has often omitted to include women even when, as in the case of Phillis, black women have powerful voices to lend to the struggle.39 Hazel Carby has remarked on the fact that the American Negro Academy effectively excluded women.40 This exclusion is all the more glaring in instances where the example of black women and their contribution to American intellectual culture would have promoted the cause of the Negro Academy. The institutional masculinism of the Academy and the exclusion of Wheatley are demonstrated in an essay by William H. Ferris. Writing about the Reverend Alexander Crummell as an exemplar of the black intellectual tradition, Ferris has recourse to Greek to articulate Crummell’s defence of the intelligence and culture of the Negro: Dr. Alexander Crummell believed that the Negro belonged to the genus vir as well as to the genus homo, that he could be included in the class aner as well as anthropos, that he had a soul to be trained as well as a body to be clothed, sheltered and fed.41

It is notable that Ferris specifies not the humanity of the Negro, but rather his masculinity. The slippage between a gender-neutral category (Negro) and the masculine pronoun is striking, and in Ferris’s argument the general categories genus homo (human genus) and anthropos (human being) are considered less important than the Latin noun vir and the Greek noun ane¯r, both of which mean ‘man’. Black women are eclipsed in this black, male intellectual tradition and there is no mention of Phillis Wheatley, even when Ferris strays onto the subject of Terence, whom Wheatley had appealed to so memorably in ‘To Maecenas’, the first poem in her collection:42

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If we believe in God and believe as Crummell believed that the black man can scale the heights of human achievement and gain the summit, if we believe that we do not represent a stage in the evolution from the monkey to man, but that, in the language of Terence, Rome’s tawny-coloured poet, we are men and that nothing that is common to humanity is foreign to us.43

WHEATLEY’S AFRICAN-AMERICAN CLASSICS In recent years there has been a steady stream of scholarship on Wheatley’s classicism.44 Rather than rehearsing what has already been said, I propose to supplement existing studies by pointing to aspects of Wheatley’s classicism that have so far gone unremarked. My discussion focuses on Wheatley’s use of Classics in the poems ‘To Maecenas’,45 and ‘To the University of Cambridge, in New-England’.46 For too long Wheatley was denied the right to signify the Classics. The critical consensus maintained that her classical allusions were secondary allusions, derived from the neoclassicism of other poets. You know that you have been well and truly marginalized when even your neoclassicism is held to be derivative! Henry Louis Gates dramatizes this prejudice in his imaginary reconstruction of the trial that was supposed to verify Wheatley’s authorship of her poetry. Gates has Wheatley’s jury cross-examine her about themes from GraecoRoman mythology as a way of cross-checking her allusions: ‘“Who was Apollo?”; “What Happened when Phaethon rode his father’s chariot.”’47 If the soundness of Wheatley’s grasp of such general, classical knowledge was doubted, how much more doubtful seemed the notion that her poems might contain a sophisticated, reflective response to the classical tradition? In a series of articles dating from 1980, John Shields has presented compelling evidence for Wheatley’s inventive manipulation of the poetic conventions, of not just neoclassicism, but classicism as well.48 In particular, in what he terms Wheatley’s ‘subversion of classical stylistics’, Shields demonstrates how Wheatley manipulates the genres of pastoral and epic (specifically epyllion) to serve her anti-slavery and pro-liberty sentiments, which he has since termed her ‘poetics of liberation’.49 I propose to

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supplement existing research on Wheatley’s classicism by proposing that her engagement with Classics was more multifarious than has been supposed, and that it also extends to the level of language and syntax. One of the potential obstacles to this model of Wheatley’s multifarious classicism is a general reticence to accredit her with a functional knowledge of Latin or, indeed, with full linguistic competence. Critics pay lip service to the idea that Wheatley’s knew Latin, but do not bring her knowledge of Latin to bear on the interpretation of her poetry. Admittedly there is a genuine problem here, and that is the lack of evidence of the content of Wheatley’s classical education. The following statement by Shields encapsulates the prevailing state of ignorance about what Latin Wheatley learned and how she learned it: ‘Whoever tutored Wheatley in Latin (for of course someone must have), may well have asked her to write pastoral compositions in Latin, as was expected of students in early America’s Latin grammar schools.’50 However, the analogy that Shields draws with the typical curriculum in contemporary grammar schools is a reasonable one, and we are well informed about this curriculum.51 These grammar schools were restricted to boys, but girls could and did follow similar curricula under the guidance of private tutors.52 We know that Wheatley was initially tutored within the household by Mary Wheatley, daughter of John and Susanna Wheatley, but she also appears to have benefited from the instruction, whether formal or informal, from several of the Wheatley’s acquaintances who took an interest in her writing. Moreover, as we saw on pp. 161–2 above, it is possible that Wheatley received instruction from private tutors as well. In my discussion of the following poems I assume that Wheatley had read Horace (one of the staple grammar school authors) in Latin and that she was proficient in Latin language. There is a tendency in Wheatley studies to attribute Latinate features in her poetry to her reading of neoclassical authors such as Alexander Pope, but we ought to allow that Wheatley was fully capable of reading Latin literature for herself and that her response to Pope and her response to classical literature are not always interdependent.

The Poetry of Phillis Wheatley ‘ To

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(1773)

maecenas, you, beneath the myrtle shade, Read o’er what poets sung and shepherds play’d. What felt those poets but you feel the same? Does not your soul possess the sacred flame? Their noble strains your equal genius shares In softer language, and diviner airs. While Homer paints lo! circumfus’d in air, Celestial Gods in mortal forms appear; Swift as they move hear each recess rebound, Heav’n quakes, earth trembles, and the shores resound. Great Sire of verse, before my mortal eyes, The lightnings blaze across the vaulted skies, And, as the thunder shakes the heav’nly plains, A deep-felt horror thrills through all my veins. When gentler strains demand thy graceful song, The length’ning line moves languishing along. When great Patroclus courts Achilles’ aid, The grateful tribute of my tears is paid; Prone on the shore he feels the pangs of love, And stern Pelides tend’rest passions move. Great Maro’s strain in heav’nly numbers flows. The Nine inspire, and all the bosom glows. O could I rival thine and Virgil’s page, Or claim the Muses with the Mantuan Sage; Soon the same beauties should my mind adorn, And the same ardors in my soul should burn: Then should my song in bolder notes arise, And all my numbers pleasingly surprize; But here I sit, and mourn a grov’ling mind That fain would mount, and ride upon the wind. Not you, my friend, these plaintive strains become, Not you, whose bosom is the Muses home; When they from tow’ring Helicon retire, They fan in you the bright immortal fire, But I less happy, cannot raise the song, The fault’ring music dies upon my tongue.

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Emily Greenwood The happier Terence all the choir inspir’d, His soul replenish’d, and his bosom fir’d; But say, ye Muses, why this partial grace, To one alone of Afric’s sable race; From age to age transmitting thus his name With the first glory in the rolls of fame? Thy virtues, great Maecenas! shall be sung In praise of him, from whom those virtues sprung: While blooming wreaths around thy temples spread, I’ll snatch a laurel from thine honour’d head, While you indulgent smile upon the deed. As long as Thames in streams majestic flows, Or Naiads in their oozy beds repose, While Phoebus reigns above the starry train, While bright Aurora purples o’er the main, So long, great Sir, the muse thy praise shall sing, So long thy praise shall make Parnassus ring: Then grant, Maecenas, thy paternal rays, Hear me propitious, and defend my lays.

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This was the first poem in Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. As the prefatory material makes abundantly clear, this is the literary oeuvre of a slave. The title-page to the 1773 edition gives the following information about the author’s identity under Wheatley’s name: ‘negro servant to Mr. john wheatley, of boston, in New England.’ Given the extreme form of patronage that bound Phillis to her owners, John and Susanna Wheatley, and her reliance on a circle of influential patrons, we might assume that readers’ expectations were primed for a super-subservient dedicatory poem, over and above the typically self-deprecating tone of this genre. Instead, through careful control of the mood of her verbs, Wheatley strikes a tone of perfect equivocation where it is not clear who is the superior and who the inferior. Take the first four lines: Maecenas, you, beneath the myrtle shade, Read o’er what poets sing, and shepherds play’d. What felt those poets but you feel the same? Does not your soul possess the sacred flame?

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There are two ways of construing the verb ‘read’ at the beginning of the second line: either as (1) a simple, descriptive second-person singular verb in the indicative, or (2) as an imperative. In the first case, ‘you read’ would have the sense of the habitual present tense = you are given to read. In the second case, Wheatley’s opening address to her dedicatee would be an order: ‘Maecenas, you, . . . read ’, foreshadowing the subsequent imperatives in lines 9 (‘hear each recess rebound’), 54 (‘grant . . . thy paternal rays’), and 55 (‘Hear me propitious’). In line 2 the point is not that Wheatley uses the imperative mood, since her usage is ambiguous, but that she equivocates, using two different voices simultaneously.53 Paula Bennett has suggested equivocation as a synonym for the phenomenon of double voicing in the black tradition—using two different levels of discourse simultaneously, white and black, formal and vernacular—richly explored by Gates.54 However, in relation to Wheatley it is helpful to twist the etymology of equivocation (Latin aequivocare, lit. ‘to call equally’) to include the idea of equalizing speech: a verbal strategy that makes the addressee into the speaker’s equal. In addition to the imperatives highlighted above, a iussive tone is also present in lines (3–4), where the narrator poses two questions, both of which compel agreement (‘What felt . . . but’, ‘Does not’)? These interrogative structures reflect the Latin interrogative adverb nonne, which implies the answer ‘yes’. Similarly Wheatley’s questions imply, or even impel agreement on the part of her addressee. Taken together with the imperative subtext in lines 1–2, Wheatley’s apparent supplication has a decidedly iussive tone. This equalizing strategy is also conveyed in other ways as well: in line 3 the narrator introduces the concept of sameness through empathy—the ability to ‘feel the same’ as someone else as a result of reading what they have written. Thus the patron figure ‘Maecenas’ is credited with ‘equal genius’ as his client poets. Later in the poem (lines 25–6), Wheatley wishes in a conditional construction that she might rival Homer’s or Virgil’s poetry, and concludes that the result would be sameness, or equal status: Soon the same beauties should my mind adorn, And the same ardors in my soul should burn: (my emphasis)

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And yet, the narrator has already attributed the power of Virgil’s poetry to the inspiration of the Muses, and over the course of the poem the narrator has described her bodily experience of Homeric epic in terms that recall tropes of poetic inspiration: ‘A deep-felt horror thrills through all my veins’ (14). If the muses are working through her, as this vivid sensory imagery implies, then she is on the same footing as Homer and Virgil, not to mention her dedicatee ‘Maecenas’. Although this idea is contained in the form of an unfulfilled conditional clause (‘O could I . . . ’), the stress on similarity (‘the same . . . the same’) is pronounced, and serves to counteract the poet’s protestations of inadequacy, which are part of the rhetoric of dedicatory poems (lines 29–30): But here I sit, and mourn a grov’ling mind That fain would mount, and ride upon the wind.55

Sameness and equality are loaded themes in the context of a slave poet addressing her free patrons. The conventional self-deprecatory form of the dedicatory poem lends itself to Wheatley’s suit and, in fact, achieves a rare sincerity given the poet’s status as enslaved subject. The poet has no need for self-debasement, since society has done that for her. However, it is notable that the pre-eminent authority figure in the poem is not the dedicatee, but Homer, who is apostrophized as, ‘Great Sire of verse’ (11).56 In a well-known article on patronage in Roman poetry of the first century bce, James Zetzel describes the ‘substitution of the Muse for the human patron’ and links this process to the phenomenon of the ‘paradigm of the displaced patron’.57 This manoeuvre enabled poets like Horace to retain the patron as a poetic figure, while subordinating the patron’s social superiority to an artistic hierarchy in which poets and the Muse preside. One does not have to accept Zetzel’s argument that patronage was not a crucial socio-economic relationship for the Roman Augustan poets to entertain the view that patronage was also a literary figure, since these two aspects can exist simultaneously. According to Zetzel it was precisely the relationship of dependency on patrons among previous generations of poets that made the Augustan poets so keen to keep patrons in their place as accessories to, rather than primary enablers of, poetic creation.

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In Wheatley’s case the historical reality of patronage is more forceful, since her enslaved status constituted a relationship of utter dependency on her patrons. In the first instance she was dependent on her owners, John and Susanna Wheatley, who sponsored and encouraged her poetry, then on those influential members of New England society who took an interest in her poetry and discussed literature and religion with her and, in some cases, corresponded with her, and finally to British patrons, such as Selina Hastings Countess of Huntingdon, the dedicatee of Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. Arguably Wheatley’s short career as a poet reveals something of an enlargement of patronage in order to help her overcome the economic and social disadvantages that thwarted her initial attempts at publication in Boston in 1772.58 This conscious enlargement of patronage tells against trying to identify the ‘Maecenas’ of Wheatley’s poem with any one historical figure. John Shields has suggested that ‘Maecenas’ is Mather Byles, the New England Colonial poet, whose poem ‘Written in Milton’s Paradise Lost’ Wheatley alludes to and surpasses in ‘To Maecenas’,59 but allows that the appeal to ‘Maecenas’ also conceals a wider appeal to ‘the largely white audience who she hopes will purchase her volume’.60 After the dedicatory page it is hard not to identify Maecenas with the Countess of Huntingdon, in spite of the mismatch in gender, as well as with the nameless ‘best and most generous friends; to whom she considers herself, as under the greatest Obligations’ mentioned in the Preface.61 Astrid Franke is right to suggest that the Maecenas of Wheatley’s poem is a ‘hybrid figure’.62 The reality of Wheatley’s effective client status to rich, free patrons makes the subject of patronage all the more pronounced in her poetry: Wheatley was the object of double patronage, both as a slave and as an aspiring poet.63 These two forms of patronage—the one literary the other socio-economic—collide in her poetry, as in the dedication page, where the poems are dedicated to the Countess of Huntingdon ‘By her much obliged, Very humble, And devoted Servant, Phillis Wheatley.’64 Such self-effacing language is standard for this genre, which typically includes the figure of service or attendance upon a patron, but Wheatley’s actual servitude echoes through the words ‘obliged’, ‘humble’, and ‘servant’.

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That her patrons could patronize Wheatley as poet and yet be complicit in her slave status is a contradiction made explicit in her poetry. If they accept her poetry then they must also concede her equality and, consequently, her (right to) freedom. In a similar vein, Carla Willard has analysed what she calls Wheatley’s ‘turns of praise’ in terms of a ‘poetics of entrapment’ (see p. 158 above), whereby Wheatley’s praise of the themes of republican liberty and Christian equality makes her own lack of liberty a glaring contradiction of the ideals espoused by her readers in New England: The central impulse of this strategy is not chastisement but a call for social change. As Wheatley’s heroic embodies the idea that the citizen of a nonslave state is the grandest identity in any society, her poems call upon slaveowning readers to embrace emancipation to save face and live up to the ‘freedom’ of their own Christian and political ideals.65

If we extend the idea of ‘turns of praise’ to Wheatley’s praise of her patrons, then her praise is equally controlling because it assumes her patron’s acceptance of her status as poet and, correspondingly, their admiration of her work. As such there is a levelling out of the relationship. In ‘To Maecenas’, Wheatley goes so far as to blur praise with instruction; hence ‘you . . . Read’ in lines 1–2 is both indicative and imperative, praising her addressee for being the kind of person who reads great poetry and telling them what and how to read in the same breath. The language of master–slave and patron–client relationships shares significant ironies: in the case of the former, scholars have pointed to the contradictory language in which slaves were absorbed into the family unit, whether in ancient Rome or in eighteenth-century Boston. In Rome, slaves were considered part of the familia, the larger family unit, but this did not constitute familiaritas, the privilege of intimacy or co-identity.66 Horace, who was the son of a freedman, was one remove from the most common form of patronage in Roman society—that which bound freedmen to their former owners.67 Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s work on the ‘social misrecognition’ present in the economies of gift exchange, Phoebe Bowditch has re-examined Horace’s tendency to refer to literary patronage in terms of amicitia (friendship).68 She suggests that, rather than demonstrating that literary patronage is a conceit rather than an important, social institution

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in Horace’s poetry, the language of amicitia is intended to veil over any obligation that exists between the poet and his addressee and to protect the person of lower status. Turning to Wheatley, modern scholarship sometimes struggles with the reciprocal, affective, ties that apparently bound Phillis Wheatley to her owners. The fact that John and Susanna Wheatley fostered her education is an indication of their affection for her, but the contradictoriness or partiality of this affection is exposed by the fact that they regarded it as compatible with enslavement. As with chattel slavery in the Graeco-Roman world, antebellum society in New England sustained the peculiar institution of ‘family slavery’, which saw no contradiction in certain members of the ‘family’ living in bondage.69 Given this familial context, it is not surprising to find Wheatley using the language of kinship when she refers to her owners.70 There is a sense in which Wheatley uses her poetry to take both her owners and her patrons at their word: if they profess friendship and interest in her well-being, then let them act friendlily in a way that promotes her interests by emancipating her and supporting her in the free pursuit of her craft. Wheatley’s emancipation in 1773, shortly after the publication of her poems, is an indication of the success of this tactic, but conversely, her failure to thrive as a poet once free, or to secure publication for a second volume of poetry, implies that the patronage that she had previously enjoyed was conditional upon her slave status. Unlike Horace’s literary relationship with Maecenas, Wheatley’s socio-economic dependency on her several patrons was absolute and the language of servitude in which she couched this relationship was literal, rather than literary. Wheatley is disadvantaged in this sphere of poetry because enslaved (‘I less happy’), but the disadvantage can be overruled by the inspiration and the largesse of the muses, which exposes, in turn, the arbitrariness of her continued enslavement. In ‘To Maecenas’ the prominent references to ‘sameness’ and the objection ‘why this partial grace?’ in line 39 evokes contemporary Protestant debates about the justifiability of enslaving another human being when all human beings are created equal in God’s sight.71 As such, they appeal to the conscience of the dedicatee and the exploiting, slave-owning class to which the majority of Wheatley’s American readers belonged.

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As several critics have observed, the double-standard of Christian mercy on the one hand, and lack of mercy on the other hand is a recurrent theme throughout Wheatley’s collection. In the third poem of the collection, ‘To the University of Cambridge, in New England’, in a much maligned section of the poem, the Christian God is invoked as ‘Father of mercy’, whose ‘gracious hand Brought me in safety from those dark abodes’. ’Twas not long since I left my native shore The land of errors, and Egyptian gloom: Father of mercy, ’twas thy gracious hand Brought me in safety from those dark abodes.

These lines have been roundly criticized for their apparent disavowal of a proud black identity premissed on an African motherland, even though this is to make Wheatley reject a ‘back to Africa’ tradition that did not yet exist. Happily recent scholarship on Phillis Wheatley has overturned much of the slander of Wheatley as a poet who is not black enough, by demonstrating the nuanced and sophisticated antislavery arguments that she formulated by an appeal to several different traditions. As elsewhere, if one reads Wheatley’s verse closely, these lines speak several different languages simultaneously. The reference to ‘Egyptian gloom’ is an Old Testament reference to the bondage of the Israelites, whose servitude under Pharaoh became a powerful and enabling analogy for enslaved and oppressed AfricanAmericans.72 The poet’s description of her ‘native shore’ as ‘the land of errors’ is similarly a Christian reference to her previous ignorance of Christianity, as is the reference to ‘dark abodes’. Read superficially, these lines seem to echo the racialization of the Christian use of darkness and fairness as moral categories described by Kim Hall in the context of Early Modern England;73 probed further they reveal an ironic comment on the hypocrisy of this appropriation of Christianity to mask an unchristian trade. Probed even further, etymological ironies may also be in play if we entertain the possibility that Wheatley may be using her knowledge of Latin to double-voice English. The noun ‘error’, in the phrase the ‘land of errors’ is simultaneously an English and a Latin noun. In Latin the primary sense of error is wandering, and it is the secondary, metaphorical sense that gives us the English usage ‘error’—a mistake. Read with both languages in

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mind, Egypt is the land of wanderings, with reference to the exodus of the Israelites, as well as the land of errors from the Christian point of view of a land not yet penetrated by Christianity.74 As with the potential use of the imperative discussed on p. 169 above, the point is not that Wheatley intended her readers to see the Latin noun error behind the English nouns ‘errors’, since ambiguity resists this kind of lexical resolution; but rather that we should give Wheatley the benefit of ambiguity. As it is, critics continue to err in arguing for her agency as an author on the one hand, but restricting her field of signification. In fact, few readers of Wheatley, myself included, are equal to her capacity to signify, since we do not possess the ability to span the different traditions within which she composed (classical, neoclassical, romantic, scriptural, and an incipient black tradition). In the context of celebrating abolition, this is the freedom that we owe to her poetry.

NOTES I would like to thank the audience at the ‘Slavery and Abolition’ conference in December 2007 for their comments on an earlier version of this chapter, as well as subsequent audiences at St Andrews, Emory, and Yale. Last but not least, my thanks to the editors for convening the conference and for encouraging us all to think about the relationship between Classics and slavery in the context of the British bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade. 1. On Wheatley and black classicism, see Rankine (2006), 13–14, and Walters (2007), 39; on Wheatley and the black signifying tradition, see Gates (1984 and 2003). 2. For an overview of the critical reception to Wheatley’s work, see Robinson (1982). The views of the critics cited here are mentioned at ibid., pp. 55 (Parton), 57 (Bates), and 59 (Long). 3. Gates (2003), 82. See also Flanzbaum (1993), 72–4. 4. Ibid. 77–8. 5. Hinds (1998). 6. Allan (2003), 184, drawing on Hall (1989). 7. Rabinowitz (1998), 57. 8. Ibid. 63.

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9. Euripides, Andromache 186–90, translated by David Kovacs in vol. 2 of the Loeb Classical Library edition of Euripides. 10. McClure (1999), 177. 11. See Winterer (2007), 27 on 18th-century prejudices about (American) women’s imitative engagement with the Classics. In the context of 18th-century women’s classicism, Winterer examines Wheatley’s position in the double bind of gender and race (ibid. 31–4). 12. Melish (1998), 15 and passim. 13. Flanzbaum (1993), 74. 14. Willard (1995), 238. 15. Felker (1997), 83. 16. Letter dated 18 October 1773, from Phyllis Wheatley to Colonel David Worcester in New Haven, Connecticut, text in Carretta (2001, ed.), 146–7. 17. Gates (1988), 129. 18. On the critical reception of Francis Williams and the prejudice that his engagement with Classics in his Latin poem (1759) to George Haldane, the Governor of Jamaica, was an expression of a mimic facility rather than an expression of creative invention, see Gilmore (2005), passim. 19. Robinson (1982), 30–1. 20. Ibid. 55. 21. Du Bois (1965 [1903]), 62. Du Bois was the chair of the Classics department at Wilberforce University from 1894 to 1896. On Classics in The Souls of Black Folk, see Cowherd (2003). 22. See further pp. 163–4. 23. See Gates (1987b), 30 on ‘so-called mocking-bird poets’. 24. Robinson (1982), 57. 25. Robinson (1982), 59. 26. Gilmore (2003), 92. 27. The Boston proposals for publication of Wheatley’s poems were unsuccessful; see Robinson (1984), 27–8. 28. Robinson (1982), 21. 29. I am grateful to Randall Burkett for giving me a copy of his unpublished paper and for showing me the copybooks in Emory’s Special Collections library. Randall Burkett’s unpublished paper is summarized in Carretta (2001, ed.), appendix A, 195–7. 30. See e.g. Crummell (1898), and Jordan (1968), 187–90 ‘The Question of Negro Capacity’. 31. On ‘astonishment’/‘awe’ in response to Wheatley’s achievement, see: (1) John Wheatley’s letter to the publisher (14 Nov. 1772) ‘[Phillis], in sixteen Months Time from her arrival, attained the English Language, to which she was an utter Stranger before, to such a Degree, as to read any,

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34.

35. 36. 37.

38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

43. 44. 45.

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the most difficult Parts of the Sacred Writings, to the great Astonishment of all who heard her.’ (2) Thomas Woolridge, letter to the Earl of Dartmouth (24 Nov. 1772) ‘I visited her Mistress, and found by conversing with the African, that she was no Imposter; I was astonish’d, and could hardly believe my own eyes’. (3) Bates (1898), 78–9: ‘That a little wild black [ . . . ] to produce this volume of fluent, pious, decorous verse, pranked out with all the literary elegance of the day, is still a puzzle and an astonishment.’ See also Jordan (1968), 283–4 on the perception of Wheatley as ‘prodigy’, and Shields (2008), 6 on the theme of ‘amazement’ in the London reviews of Wheatley’s 1773 collection. See e.g. Gilmore (2005), 100; and Powers (2008), 104–11 (‘Imitation versus Authenticity’). Schein (2007), 75. Hall (2007b), passim traces the role of this ideologically conceived Classics in constructions of selfhood and subjecthood in the West. This lecture was published in the American Negro Academy Occasional Papers, no. 3 (1898). For Calhoun’s anecdote, see Crummell (1898), 10–11. Crummell (1898), 10. Gates (1987a), 21. On Calhoun’s anecdote and black classicism, see Ronnick (2005, ed.), 7 and 342 (n. 29), and Walters (2007), 6–7. Classica Africana was a term introduced by Michele Valerie Ronnick in 1996 to describe the phenomenon of black classicism—the African-American reception of Classics; it takes its cue from the term Classica Americana used by Meyer Reinhold as the title of his book Classica Americana: The Greek and Roman Heritage in the United States (1984). See Ronnick (2005, ed.), 334 (n. 10). Rankine (2006), 30. See Walters (2007), 6–7. Carby (1998), 5. Ferris (1920), 10. ‘To Maecenas’, lines 37–42: ‘The happier Terence all the choir inspir’d, His soul replenish’d, and his bosom fir’d; But say, ye Muses, why this partial grace, To one alone of Afric’s sable race; From age to age transmitting thus his name With the first glory in the rolls of fame?’ Ferris (1920), 16. Shields (1980a, 1993, 1994, and 2008); Hayden (1992); Walters (2007), 39–46. ‘To Maecenas’ is the first poem in the 1773 collection. See Carretta (2001, ed.), 9–10.

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46. The third poem in the 1773 collection Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral. See Carretta (2001, ed.), 11–12. An earlier version of this poem survives, written in 1767; see Carretta, op. cit. 105–6. 47. Gates (2003), 29. 48. Shields (1980a, 1993, and 1994). For the distinction between classicism and neoclassicism; see Shields (2008), 18. 49. On subversive pastoral and epyllion see Shields (1993); on Wheatley’s ‘poetics of liberation’ see Shields (2008), passim. 50. Shields (1993), n.p. (journal accessed online in html format). 51. See Reinhold (1984), 26–7 for the typical classical curriculum in 18thcentury grammar schools, with particular attention to the Boston Latin School. 52. See Winterer (2002), 23–4, and (2007), 12–26. 53. This sense of the verb ‘equivocate’ is now considered obsolete. The OED (s.v. 3) gives the following definition: ‘to use a word in more than one application or sense; to use words of double meaning; to deal in ambiguities’. 54. Bennett (1998), 66 on equivocation, responding to Gates (1988). 55. See Franke (2004), 242 who reads these lines in the context of the aesthetic of melancholy. 56. Lines 11–14: ‘Great Sire of verse, before my mortal eyes, The lightnings blaze across the vaulted skies, And, as the thunder shakes the heav’nly plains, A deep-felt horror thrills through all my veins.’ As Marsha Watson notes, readers of the poem sometimes misconstrue the apostrophe to the ‘Great Sire of verse’ as an invocation to the dedicatee/ Maecenas figure, but it is clear from the preceding lines that the ‘Sire’ referred to is Homer (Watson 1996: 109). 57. Zetzel (1982), 89 and 96 respectively. In the context of imperial patronage, compare Derek Walcott’s argument about the autonomy of the artist in the Caribbean in ‘The Muse of History’ (delivered as a lecture in 1971, and published in 1974): ‘It is the language which is the empire, and great poets are not its vassals but its princes’ (Walcott (1998) 51). 58. See n. 27 above. 59. See Shields (1980b), passim, where Shields argues that Byles was Wheatley’s poetic mentor, and (2008), 177–9. 60. Shields (2008), 178. 61. Robinson (1984), 147. 62. Franke (2004), 247. 63. Or triple patronage, if we factor in gender. See p. 156 above. 64. Robinson (1984), 145. 65. Willard (1995), 238.

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66. See Fitzgerald (2000), 4 and 51. 67. See Horace, Satires 1.6, line 6: me libertino patre natum (‘me, born of a freedman father’). 68. Bowditch (2001), 15–23. Earlier studies on Roman literary patronage and the language of amicitia include White (1978); Gold (1987), ch. 5; and Zetzel (1982), cited in n. 57 above. 69. Melish (1998), 28–9. 70. See Powers (2008), 120, ‘To what extent Phillis Wheatley “felt” family with the Wheatleys, as many of us are privileged to feel family, cannot be known, though from the evidence of the letters her affectionate attitude to them does not seem forced.’ 71. See Levernier (1991), passim, on the political persuasion of the New England clergy with whom Phillis Wheatley associated in Boston in the 1760s and 1770s, and their extension of natural rights philosophy to the enslaved members of their congregations. See also Jordan (1968), 212–15. 72. See the discussion in Richards (1992), 178. On shifting identifications with the Israelites and the Egyptians in the black tradition, see Gilroy (1993), 204–12 ‘Children of Israel or Children of the Pharaohs?’ 73. Hall (1995). 74. Paula Bennett points out that, in an earlier version of this poem, composed in 1767 (reproduced in Carretta (2001, ed.), 105), Wheatley attributes the metaphorical darkness not just to the absence of the Christian God, but to the absence of the Muses as well: ‘There, sacred Nine! for you no place was found’ (Bennett 1998: 72).

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7 Between Victimhood and Agency Nydia the Slave in Bulwer’s The Last Days of Pompeii Leanne Hunnings

The Wind and the Beam loved the Rose, And the Rose loved one; For who recks the wind where it blows? Or loves not the sun? None knew whence the humble Wind stole, Poor sport of the skies— None dreamt that the Wind had a soul, In its mournful sighs! . . . How its love can the Wind reveal? Unwelcome its sigh; Mute—mute to its Rose let it steal— Its proof is—to die!1

These stanzas come from the lament sung by the blind slave-girl Nydia in the popular novel published a year after his 1833 trip to Italy by Edward Bulwer (later Bulwer-Lytton), The Last Days of Pompeii. This novel was to prove exceptionally influential over the following decades; it ran into numerous editions and was adapted into frequent stage performances ranging from bombastic tragedies to the light entertainment provided by extravagant spectacles to classroom plays for educating the young.2 Nydia—a Greek slave in imperial Roman Italy—was one of the most familiar ancient slaves in British popular

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culture. Her song, set to music by several popular composers,3 circulated as sheet music and was performed by young women in drawing-rooms throughout the Victorian era. Nydia was the focus of a love triangle with two free characters. There seems little doubt that the pathos of her position, as a maiden doubly handicapped by her blindness and her status, struck an intense chord in Bulwer’s readers, and was partly responsible for the popularity of the work. Nydia’s lament, as it appears in the original text, is infused with pathos and foreboding. Nydia uses the Wind and the Beam allegorically to represent herself and her rival Ione, while the Rose stands for Glaucus, the young man who is loved by both female characters. It is the Wind’s fate to blow throughout the novel until Nydia’s death, but only ever as a futile force, in the desperation of unrequited love. The death foretold in this song is Nydia’s suicide, enacted in chapter 10. Nydia’s entrapment in disability and slavery, and the tragic outcome of her story, inspired numerous artists internationally, with the result that of all the characters in the novel she is the one who appears most frequently in the visual arts. The American sculptor later to be most intimately associated with the Republican cause in the Civil War, Randolph Rogers, in the 1850s created a statue of Nydia that is to be seen in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.4 Despite tugging at the heart-strings of her mid-nineteenth-century British and North American liberal readers, Nydia is a difficult character. She is doomed to emotional pain and loneliness, and thus has a pathetic appeal, but she is far from a simple victim of her position. She sits on the boundary between passivity and activity, objectivity and subjectivity, victimhood and agency. Although clearly isolated on a social and corporeal level, as this chapter will demonstrate, she is also an articulation of Bulwer’s response to contemporary trends within philanthropic thought, and gains a strange autonomy through her decision to commit suicide (Fig. 7.1). As a character she possesses an agency that ultimately enables her to transcend the conventions of servile-feminine passivity; she is imagined, sympathetically, as possessing the sensibilities of the free individual, capable of love and emotional and rational autonomy, while constrained by convention never to enjoy a legitimate love, and achieve social recognition. She thus embodies the complexity of the

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Figure 7.1 Nydia prepares to commit suicide

nineteenth-century response to slavery, as well as to femininity and disability. What follows here owes much to those feminist and post-colonial theorists who have been challenging the conventional, Hegelian opposition of subject and object, which virtually defined consciousness as the incisive, masterful, knowing subject’s experience of the passive, known object. Of enormous significance here is Moira Ferguson’s analysis of the centrality of the issue of authorial control to female writers during the era of colonial slavery, who struggled in the process of ‘connoting slaves as insiders and subjects with implied inner lives’.5 I have learned even more from Robert Burns Stepto’s study of black narrative, From Behind the Veil (1979). From studying the biographical accounts of nineteenth-century slaves, and the ways that they were paternalistically framed by white emancipationists, Stepto develops a critique of the whole notion of narrative control, a

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critique in which objects become subjects and subjects interact with other subjects.6 Nydia’s subjectivity is severely compromised and threatened with erasure as she is inspected by her male author and his implied readership, but she wrestles from them, in her dying moments, a moral agency that enabled her to upstage most of the free characters in the popular imagination. Nydia’s status as a slave is made clear in our first encounter with her in chapter 2.7 Slavery was indeed a topical institution in 1834, the year following the abolition of slavery throughout the British Empire, giving slaves their freedom and compensation to slaveowners. One might reasonably expect in this context that Nydia’s status would be an issue at the forefront of readers’ reception of the novel. This would seem even more likely given that The Last Days of Pompeii is widely regarded as the watershed work of fiction in Bulwer’s career, marking the transition from Romanticism to the world of the Victorian novel, since in it he first shifts his primary focus from the inner world of his protagonist to the effects of historical external events on a whole society.8 Bulwer’s own views on slavery can be partially uncovered through a reading of his study of the institution in antiquity in his historical study of Greece, Athens: Its Rise and Fall (1837).9 His chapter on the origin of slavery in Greece offers little more than a somewhat simplistic analysis of how slaves were derived from conquered lands, and the mechanics of the slave market,10 but his discussion of the helots in Sparta is, in accordance with the standard British abolitionists’ abomination of helotage,11 more heavily coloured with moralizing sentiment: We now come to the most melancholy and gloomy part of the Spartan system—the condition of the Helots.12

Bulwer uses a particular irony in his imagination of the individual ancient Spartan’s outlook: It was clearly a supreme necessity to his very existence as a citizen, and even as a human being, that there should be a subordinate class of persons employed in the occupations rejected by himself, and engaged in providing for the wants of this privileged citizen. Without Helots the Spartan was the most helpless of human beings. Slavery taken from the Spartan state, the state would fall at once! . . . It is exactly in proportion to the fear of losing power that men are generally tyrannical in the exercise of it.13

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Bulwer denounced the poor living conditions of the helots, the vicious exercise of power necessary to subdue them, and the social opprobrium and isolation they were forced to endure. Bulwer is much more lenient and emotionally detached when discussing Athenian slavery. One reason might well be uncovered in his next chapter, in which he refers to the ancient sources, and particularly Plutarch, in order to support the claim that Spartan helotage was the most extreme form of slavery in Greece: That much exaggeration respecting the barbarity of their masters existed is probable enough; but the exaggeration itself, among writers accustomed to the institution of slavery elsewhere, and by no means addicted to an overstrained humanity, is a proof of the manner in which the treatment of the Helots was viewed by the more gentle slave-masters of the rest of Greece.14

But one of the effects of attacking what he (like most people at that the time) perceives as the most extreme instance of ancient slavery at Sparta, is that Bulwer can avoid altogether engaging in a debate about whether or not Athenian slavery was—relatively speaking—a benign and benevolent institution. Since Athens, as a democracy, had begun to attract the attention of suffrage reformers in this period,15 the fact that it was also a slave-owning society presented them with an ideological problem.16 Although one way to address the problem would have been to defend household slavery while objecting to large-scale agricultural slavery, the problem of ‘democratic’ Athens’s participation in slavery is one which Bulwer chooses to ignore. Bulwer was actively engaged in politics in this period. In April 1831 he was elected MP for St Ives in Huntingdonshire, ‘as an independent radical’, and in 1832 became MP for Lincoln until 1841.17 In his capacity as an MP he was also involved in debates on chattel slavery in the British colonies. In a speech in 1838 in the House of Commons, he challenged the situation of Negro Apprenticeship in the colonies, which had been intended as a temporary ameliorative measure in the immediate aftermath of emancipation. Bulwer’s speech, Upon the Motion of Sir Eardley Wilmot for the Immediate Abolition of Negro Apprenticeship in the British Colonies on Tuesday 22 May 1838, allies the apprenticeship ‘solution’ with slavery, and rebukes his colleagues as Christians for maintaining an institution which was slavery in all but name:18

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But here we come to the fountain of Christianity itself its all-protecting brotherhood, its all-embracing love. That our common creed has conferred upon mankind, first and foremost of those blessings they have placed the abolition of that slavery which stained and darkened the institutions of the Pagan world. I know of no Pagan slavery worse than this Christian apprenticeship.19

In addressing a house full of men brought up with a common set of values founded in a Christian classical education, Bulwer’s alignment of the apprenticeship system with pagan slavery would summon up images of Greek and Roman barbarism which the ‘enlightened’ Christian Commons would like to think they had left far behind. Bulwer’s speech on Negro Apprenticeship provides a useful angle on the portrayal of Nydia in The Last Days of Pompeii, published just four years previously in the wake of the Liberal landslide at the 1832 election. The suffrage had been widely extended in the great Reform Act of 1832 (see further Hall, this volume below, Ch. 8), and slavery had been officially abolished shortly afterwards. In the novel, there is no acknowledgement of the brutalities of agricultural slavery in Imperial Italy, which seems an evasion in the light of Bulwer’s denunciation of the continuing suffering of former slaves under the apprenticeship system in his historiographical and political work. He does allow glimpses of the uglier side of the institution of slavery, notably in the beating of Nydia in book 2, chapter 3. But, in Nydia’s own view, her servitude is not the primary source of discontent. Indeed, when Glaucus offers to free her (albeit in what appears to be a fit of sulking at Nydia’s reluctance to live with Ione), she rejects his proposal in these emotive but dignified words: ‘Glaucus, I am a slave; what business have I with grief or joy?’ ‘Sayest thou so? No, Nydia, be free. I give thee freedom; enjoy it as thou wilt, and pardon me that I reckoned on thy desire to serve me.’ ‘You are offended. Oh! I would not, for that which no freedom can give, offend you Glaucus. My guardian, my saviour, my protector, forgive the poor blind girl! She does not grieve even in leaving thee, if she can contribute to thy happiness.’20

This is not one of Glaucus’ finest moments. From a twenty-firstcentury perspective, it all but amounts to the emotional blackmail of a young girl who, as he knows well, loves him, even if he does not realize to what a desperate extent. Yet Nydia’s instantaneous dismissal

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of the idea of freedom in favour of serving her benefactor, although it rings somewhat artificially, serves to highlight the important point that the politicized issues of manumission and emancipation are not the foremost themes for Bulwer in this novel. For the purposes of writing fiction, enslavement by love will obviously always upstage enslavement by legal servitude. Bulwer’s Negro Apprenticeship speech offers us a crucial reminder that the slavery battle had effectively been won in Britain, at least in terms of the legislative measures that had been taken, and the opinions it was now legitimate to express in public. Although slavery still survived, stubbornly, on a global scale (which may well explain the huge popularity of Bulwer’s novel and its staged and ‘pyrotechnic’ adaptations in America, Belgium, and France),21 there was no real need to turn Nydia into a political heroine fighting in the vanguard of the cause of abolition for a British audience, since the British colonies had legally abolished slavery the year prior to publication. In the immediate aftermath of the abolition, the problems associated with Negro Apprenticeship were at an embryonic stage, and publicly articulated attitudes to the colonies were benevolent enough. It was only four years later that the social problems and the endorsement of illegal slavery-related activities by the governing bodies of Barbardos and Guiana had become glaringly apparent. Even if Nydia herself does not regard her emotional subjectivity as defined by her status as slave, it certainly determines both her role in the novel and the way that other characters see her. Her slave status represents a critical aspect of her social liminality and isolation, and it is bolstered by other aspects of her characterization. Nydia’s construction within Bulwer’s imaginative recreation of the ancient world works to provide us with a character who epitomizes the solitude and discourses of victimization which are reflective of Bulwer’s negative perceptions of the nineteenth-century philanthropic movement. In the course of his elaboration of Nydia’s circumstances, he depicts a character who lacks agency throughout the novel in a way which has an affinity with the association of slavery and social death explored by Orlando Patterson.22 The mid-nineteenth-century period saw William Booth found the Salvation Army (originally named the Salvation Mission) in 1865, Octavia Hill embark on her pioneering initiatives to provide housing

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for the poor, and Thomas Barnardo begin his support of children’s homes (1867). Philanthropy was thus high on the political and social agenda.23 Throughout his literary career, Bulwer struggled with the tension between concepts of misanthropy versus sociability and the implications of each for social reform and philanthropic gestures.24 As Lane proposes, there is a paradox behind Bulwer’s championing of misanthropy (by which is implied aloofness and a certain contempt for mankind, rather than pure hatred) as crucial to debate and social change. The paradox lies in his concurrent concern with the idea that solitude would inevitably be destroyed by ‘inner monsters’ and that any hope of achieving inner harmony through detachment from the world was illusory. On the other hand, sociability was destructive: a few characters in Bulwer’s novels, as well as some of his own essays, express the view that social interaction can cause damage to refined and upright intellects, and that benevolence requires observing humanity in a detached way and from a certain distance:25 When we mix . . . we suffer by the contact, and grow, if not malicious from the injury, at least selfish from the circumspection which our safety imposes . . . It is [only] in contemplating men at a distance that we become benevolent.26

These contradictions, and indeed the overall idea that sympathy was inherently and inevitably limited, had implications for the changing dynamics of nineteenth-century philanthropy. They are also significant for the presentation in The Last Days of Pompeii of Nydia and her ‘benefactor’ Glaucus, and the paternalistic relationship between them. In the eighteenth century, as Hodkinson and Hall discuss above, pp. 69–71, Adam Smith had proposed in his Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) that one human being’s identification with another’s suffering could annul the intersubjective gap between them, but Bulwer, as Lane argues, emphasized the ultimate failure of such identification: ‘Because the limits of sympathy thwart our interactions with others, Bulwer shows that sociability is not the answer, but is instead an intractable philosophical faultline.’27 Bulwer recommends that since advanced humans live in ‘solitary contemplation’, they need to force themselves to take an interest in ordinary mortals. For Bulwer, the man who has forced himself to think about altruism

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will end up more reconciled to the actual absence of emotional connection required in the process. In the characterization of Glaucus’ responses to and treatment of Nydia, Bulwer exposes the very limitations even of profound sympathy and identification. Glaucus is certainly portrayed as a sympathetic, kind, tender figure, who is concerned for Nydia’s well-being, which adds a new moral dimension to a personality which, up to this point, has mostly confined its interests to gaming and socializing with the Pompeian upper classes. The crucial moment is when he intervenes to prevent the physical chastisement of the slave girl: ‘Fury!’ said Glaucus, and with his left hand he caught Nydia from her [Stratonice’s] grasp; ‘how dare you use thus a girl—one of your own sex, a child!—My Nydia, my poor infant!’ . . . Moved by her forlorn situation, her appeal to him, her own innumerable and touching graces, the Greek seated himself on one of the rude chairs. He held her on his knees, he wiped the blood from her shoulders with his long hair, he kissed the tears from her cheeks, he whispered to her a thousand of those soothing words with which we calm the grief of a child; and so beautiful did he seem in his gentle and consoling task, that even the fierce heart of Stratonice was touched. His presence seemed to shed light over that base and obscene haunt,—young, beautiful, glorious, he was the emblem of all that earth made most happy, comforting one that earth had abandoned!28

The dramatic way in which this episode is related gives Glaucus’ reaction an emotional as well as moral force which reflects well upon him, and moves even the heart of Stratonice, the one responsible for beating Nydia. Yet this is a very obvious case of the ‘liberal’ interventionist becoming ‘the story’: it is, after all, Glaucus’ beauty, elegance, and liberal sentiments that soothe both the monster (Stratonice) and the child-like slave. Although rescued, Nydia retains her inferior position, and the pathos of her situation is overshadowed by the beauty of the young man, which transforms even the squalor of the world around him, and is described in such a quasi-erotic manner by the male Bulwer-narrator that he becomes overwhelmingly the focus of this moment. As in many writings by white abolitionists, the slave is altogether upstaged by her free benefactor. The slave girl may be the object of his attentions, but it is Glaucus who is the object of our gaze as well as Stratonice’s. Rather than Nydia’s subjective experience

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of violence and trauma, it is to his experience of providing salvation that we as readers are invited to relate. This is not to say that the relationship between Glaucus and Nydia is not eroticized, since there is a suggestion of Nydia’s sexual availability and submissiveness when Glaucus wipes her blood with his hair, kisses and soothes her. Thus objectified, as beaten child-woman, Nydia offers another kind of focus for male fantasy. But where Bulwer’s presentation of Glaucus elevates him into an almost Christlike position, Nydia’s subjectivity is completely erased. Glaucus’ philanthropy has resonances with a speech from one of Bulwer’s characters in another almost contemporary novel, Godolphin (1833). Stanforth Radclyffe tries to persuade the alienated Percy Godolphin that public service is an admirable way of spending one’s life, and that the philanthropy implied by fulfilling public duty need not be inconsistent with the egoism implied by the Romantic vision of heroic action: ‘I see great changes are necessary: I desire, I work for these great changes. I am not blind, in the mean while, to glory. I desire, on the contrary, to obtain it; but it would only please me if it came from certain sources. I want to feel that I may realize what I attempt; and wish for that glory which comes from the permanent gratitude of my species, not that which springs from their momentary applause. Now, I am vain, very vain: vanity was, some years ago, the strongest characteristic of my nature. I do not pretend to conquer the weakness, but to turn it toward my purposes. I am vain enough to wish to shine, but the light must come from deeds I think really worthy.’29

The act of philanthropy thus becomes one that confers glory on the philanthropist, rather than foregrounding as primary concern the helpless individual in need. The scene with Glaucus is loaded with what is today known as ‘victimization rhetoric’; a tendency in philanthropic and charitable fields to create a ‘victim subject’ as a way of drawing attention to an amorphous collective ‘plight’ in order to appeal to the collective (usually Western) conscience; the goal is to persuade Westerners to approve legislative measures or to part with hard cash in order to address the situation. It is a powerful tool in Non-Governmental Organization campaigns. However, a correlative of this construction of the victim ‘subject’ is, unfortunately and paradoxically, to negate the victim’s subjectivity, turning them into

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an ‘object’. They are often construed as an exoticized ‘Other’ which feeds into the patronizing or colonial attitudes which helped to create the situation in the first place.30 Victimization rhetoric ignores the subjectivity and agency of the individual who is ‘suffering’: Through travelling to other people’s ‘worlds’ we discover that there are ‘worlds’ in which those who are the victims of arrogant perception are really subjects, lively beings, constructors of vision even though in the mainstream construction they are animated only by the arrogant perceiver and are pliable, foldable, file-awayable, classifiable.31

On returning to the text of Bulwer’s novel, it is clear that, in the case of Nydia, Glaucus willingly colludes in victimization rhetoric. This serves to emphasize how peripheral her apparent social incorporation actually is, to encourage the emotion of pity and above all to detach her entirely as a self from his perception of himself, rendering her distinctly and incontrovertibly an ‘Other’. As a consequence of this Glaucus has a tendency to ignore her agency and be unresponsive to her true subjectivity, instead focusing on how his philanthropic act enhances his own self-image. Thus Glaucus is unaware of the intensity of Nydia’s love for him, and the strength of her emotional attachment; the result is that he is baffled by her final suicidal act— an act which is the result of her subjective emotional decision. There is a complicated game going on here, however, since Bulwer’s implied readership does recognize that Nydia has an emotional life and is party to Nydia’s subjectivity. Bulwer elected to attribute to Nydia an apparently far more complex characterization and personality than he did to either Ione or Glaucus—in fact, Nydia’s very presence in the novel as a foil to Ione creates in the slave girl a three-dimensionality. Her other-worldliness, her weaknesses and follies in her pursuit of Glaucus’ love, her naı¨ve trusting of Julia, and her constant jealousy of Ione contrast with Ione’s flat twodimensionality as a moral figure, one whose virtue, beauty, and sweetness of disposition are never called into question. Bulwer’s decision to develop Nydia’s characterization quite elaborately, and to treat her essentially as the protagonist of the novel, bestows on her a cogency as a psychological presence and a complex subjectivity of which Glaucus, Ione, and the other characters of the novel are entirely unaware. The implied reader is constantly aware of Nydia’s

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overwhelming unrequited love. They are aware of her inner emotions and desperation. It seems, then, that Bulwer presents his Nydia in a way that implicitly challenges the victimization rhetoric and insensitive paternalist ‘altruism’ characteristic of nineteenth-century philanthropy. Glaucus thus epitomizes the unthinking (although not unfeeling) philanthropist. In his desire to ‘do good’, the philanthropist can forget about the real humanity of the victim he is rescuing, while revelling unreflectively in his own self-construction as altruistic benefactor. Nydia’s characterization, as will be discussed presently, creates an idealized victim, an exoticized ‘Other’, and (in Orlando Patterson’s terms) a ‘socially dead’ person, to highlight the contradictory dovetailing of benevolent gestures, altruism, and self-promotion of philanthropists within Bulwer’s contemporary social context. The fact of her slavery is just one aspect of many which serve to bolster Nydia’s otherness and externality to the social world inhabited by Glaucus and his lover Ione, as well as their inability to bridge the statusdependent ‘intersubjective gap’ which yawns between them and the blind slave. It is this very challenge to philanthropic ideology which determines the course of action which Nydia takes. Bulwer’s decision to challenge this victimization rhetoric, and to highlight the implausibility of altruism, motivates him to dramatize Nydia’s final act of suicide in a way that negates the erasure and disavowal of her subjectivity and agency by the other characters in the novel. Where did Nydia come from and why was she a slave? Stratonice, Nydia’s initial owner, relates how she had been tricked into purchasing a blind slave, with a hint at the physical chastisement that Nydia underwent once her new mistress realized the trick. Moreover, she assumes that Nydia had been kidnapped (‘Doubtless the Thessalian kidnapper had stolen the blind girl from gentle parents’).32 This assumption is accompanied by a moralistic footnote, in the narrator’s voice, on the unscrupulous practices of Mediterranean slave traders: The Thessalian slave-merchants were celebrated for purloining persons of birth and education; they did not always spare those of their own country. Aristophanes sneers bitterly at that people (proverbially treacherous), for their unquenchable desire of gain by this barter of flesh.33

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The idea of a kidnapped slave of originally high birth has numerous classical antecedents, above all the archetypal kidnapped princeslave, Eumaeus in Homer’s Odyssey.34 Bulwer is concerned in this episode to make the reader aware of the critical fact that Nydia is from a different background, perhaps even of gentle birth. This hints that Bulwer, himself of an upper-class personal history, found it necessary to explain an individual’s possession of certain characteristics and virtues as originating in an elevated social and biological origin—quite literally, in ‘good breeding’. He found it easier to reconcile breeding and class characteristics within the framework of conventional social hierarchies: his readership certainly did, at least as far as we are able to judge from the ‘slavery’ play by his close friend Thomas Talfourd The Athenian Captive (1838, on which see Hall in the next chapter of this volume), and from the ‘orphan’ novel Oliver Twist (also 1838) by their mutual friend Charles Dickens, in which the eponymous orphan hero turns out to have been well-born all along. It is even more significant, however, that the passage underlines—in the terms of social death theory—the natal alienation which Nydia experienced when she was wrenched from the structure of her natal home and lost her rightful social standing. Patterson was influenced by Moses Finley’s innovative emphasis on the ‘outsider’ status of the slave as a critical attribute of his or her condition, but writes that he prefers the term ‘natal alienation’, because it goes directly to the heart of what is critical in the slave’s forced alienation, the loss of ties of birth in both ascending and descending generations. It also has the important nuance of a loss of native status, of deracination. It was this alienation of the slave from all formal, legally enforceable ties of ‘blood’, and from any attachment to groups or localities other than those chosen for him by the master, that gave the relation of slavery its peculiar value to the master.35

Nydia’s violent extraction from her family and social class serves to underline the original source of her victim status within the novel, and her isolation as a figure in the free society of Pompeii. Nydia has also failed, however, to integrate into her new social classification, which assigns her to the category of slave. In book 2 there is described a rather comic scene of the life of the trained gladiators of the city. The scene shows a bawdy collection of gladia-

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tors engaged in drinking and eventually fighting each other, although Bulwer qualifies his description of the scene as follows: Yet, despite the situation of the house and the character of its inmates, it indicated none of that sordid squalor which would have characterized a similar haunt in a modern city. The gay disposition of all the Pompeians, who sought, at least, to gratify the sense even where they neglected the mind, was typified by the gaudy colours which decorated the walls . . .36

Female and male interact on the same level: Stratonice and Burbo, the principals of this episode, are presented as equally pugnacious, a result of the equality stemming from their shared experience of fighting in the arena. In this scene Bulwer dramatizes a ‘rough’ community, but nevertheless one with its own mechanisms of social control and distinctive camaraderie and sense of fun. It is at this point that the difference between these roguish but good-natured characters and Nydia is defined: ‘But tell me,’ said Tetraides, ‘where is that pretty young slave of yours—the blind girl, with bright eye? I have not seen her a long time.’ ‘Oh! she is too delicate for you, my son of Neptune,’ said the hostess, ‘and too nice even for us, I think. We send her into the town to sell flowers and sing to the ladies; she makes us more money so than she would by waiting on you.’37

Nydia’s ‘delicacy’, which is assumed to have resulted from her gentle birth, is a trope which Bulwer deploys in order to emphasize her isolation from the other, rougher, ‘congenitally’ working-class slave figures in the novel. The second scene portrays this social isolation in very vivid, violent detail. Nydia has been attending some of the Egyptian Arbaces’ ‘magnificent debauches’, and finds herself unable to attend any more: ‘Master, you may starve me if you will—you may beat me—you may threaten me with death—but I will go no more to that unholy place!’38

Her pleas rain on deaf ears, and she threatens to go to the magistrates. But she is reminded by Calenus (a priest of Isis present in the room because he is engaged in shady dealings with his cousin Burbo) that she took an oath not to reveal the goings-on at the feasts. Upon

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Stratonice’s entrance, Nydia pleads with her, woman to woman, only to be told that ‘these fine scruples are not for slaves’,39 a sentence neatly encompassing Nydia’s internal conflict between her innate nature and her subservient position as a slave; she is desperately uncomfortable with the idea of attending such feasts, but discovers that she must, because her body is no longer her own. In culmination of this critical scene, her passionate and intentional disobedience is rewarded with a beating. Here Bulwer trumpets Nydia’s difference, her isolation, and her sexual continence. She possesses ‘fine scruples’, which would be happily encountered and indeed desirable in a free woman such as Ione, but contradict her status as a slave. Her fundamental function in life is to obey unquestioningly the orders of her master and mistress. Nydia’s moral isolation is compounded by the attention given to her ethnicity, and its correlative relationship, in the popular imagination, to the practice of magic. Nydia, like the other two ‘good’ characters of the novel, Glaucus and Ione, is awarded by Bulwer a Greek, rather than Italian, provenance. It first appears that the free Ione comes from Naples rather than Athens,40 but Bulwer-Lytton is apparently at pains to emphasize Ione’s ‘Greekness’. Her beauty is reminiscent of Helen of Troy; she ‘delights’ in being thought to be a successor of the poetess Erinna; she is described as having a ‘Greek soul’;41 Arbaces confirms that she and her brother are ‘the children of Athenians who had settled at Neapolis’.42 Furthermore, Glaucus and Ione first ‘fall in love’ because they share a fatherland: They spoke of Greece . . . And Ione listened to him, absorbed and mute: dearer were those accents, and those descriptions, than all the prodigal adulation of her numberless adorers. Was it a sin to love her countryman? She loved Athens in him; the gods of her race, the land of her dreams, spoke to her in his voice!43

Bulwer’s insistence here upon the shared origin of these three characters permits a dichotomy to be established between the avarice, pretension, and hedonism of the Roman citizens of Pompeii and the greater refinement of the three Greeks now living in the same city, allowing the Greeks to appear in a more morally refined light. Bulwer’s preference for the Greeks becomes apparent through the

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channel of Glaucus’ own criticism of the manner in which Romans ape Greeks: ‘Yes, but those Romans who mimic my Athenian ancestors do everything so heavily. Even in the chase they make their slaves carry Plato with them . . . When the dancing-girls swim before them in all the blandishment of Persian manners, some drone of a freedman, with a face of stone reads them a section of Cicero’s ‘De Officiis’. Unskilful pharmacists! Pleasure and study are not elements to be thus mixed together—they must be enjoyed separately. The Romans lose both by this pragmatical affectation of refinement, and prove that they have no souls for either. Oh, my Clodius, how little your countrymen know of the true versatility of a Pericles, of the true witcheries of an Aspasia! . . .’44

We are left in little doubt as to which characters represent the ‘heroes’ of the piece. This use of a Roman context is typical of British literature of the 1830s, which found in the Roman world (among other things) a picture of immoral vice and luxury, and a site in which to examine spectacle and bloodthirstiness in a way which would implicitly contrast such debauchery with the idealized moral probity of Britons in the ‘decade of reform’.45 Yet the novel abjures a simplistic equation of Greek ethnicity with virtue and Roman ethnicity with vice. Bulwer seems carefully to blur the boundaries demarcating his three principal Greek characters; whilst Glaucus’ Athenian birth and Ione’s carefully outlined Athenian parentage weave them together seamlessly in a jointly apprehended unity deriving from their mutual lost homeland, Nydia is from Thessaly, a place inextricably linked with magic and sorcery. Bulwer was here drawing upon the time-honoured and instantly recognizable trope of Thessalian witchery, a traditional stereotype transplanted directly from the ancient world,46 and indeed discussed within his novel: ‘They tell me thou art a Thessalian,’ said she, at last breaking silence. ‘And truly!’ ‘Thessaly is the land of magic and of witches, of talismans and of lovephiltres,’ said Julia. ‘It has ever been celebrated for its sorcerors,’ returned Nydia timidly.47

Although it rapidly transpires that Nydia knows of no love potions herself, the emphasis on her Thessalian origin in this interchange

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with Julia (the deceitful daughter of rich Diomed), isolates Nydia from the other two Greeks. Whilst her ‘Greekness’ gives her, to a degree, a shared background with these two characters, she is fundamentally apart from them; through her heritage she is more closely aligned to the exoticized ‘Other’ of sorcery and magical deceit associated with the Egyptian Arbaces, who in his role as villain provides the third, darker, magical, racist ‘Eastern’ strand in direct contrast to the western Roman aspect to the novel: ‘Plod on, plod on, fools of ambition and of avarice! Your petty thirst for fasces and quaestorships, and all the mummery of servile power, provokes my laughter and my scorn. My power can extend wherever man believes. I ride over the souls that the purple veils. Thebes may fall, Egypt be a name; the world itself furnishes the subjects of Arbaces.’48

The link between magic and slaves is a crucial element in the ‘Othering’ of the slave. Indeed, ‘Thessalian’ magic is an important theme in Bulwer’s novel when it comes to the differentiation between the two women in Glaucus’ life; although Ione has been under the guardianship of Arbaces since a young age, she has resisted its powers and remains ‘pure’. Nydia, on the other hand, is vulnerable in respect of the magical arts, and her desperate love for Glaucus leads her to dabble in them. Her magical heritage causes her to believe strongly in the efficacy of magic, to which she eventually has recourse in order to coerce Glaucus into loving her. This process has resonances with (and may have been informed by) the actions of Deianira in Sophocles’ Trachiniae. The stratagem has disastrous consequences, since the love-philtre which she administers to Glaucus has been tainted at the command of Arbaces (who, since he is infatuated with Ione, is jealous of the young Greek). The potion causes not the madness of love, but the madness of the insane: ‘Oh! Glaucus! Glaucus! Do you not know me? Rave not so wildly, or thou wilt kill me with a word!’ . . . ’Glaucus! Glaucus!’ murmured Nydia, releasing her hold and falling, beneath the excitement of her dismay, remorse, and anguish, insensible on the floor.49

Exploiting Glaucus’ insanity, Arbaces frames him for the murder of Apaecides, the priest of Isis and Ione’s brother. He holds Nydia captive when she goes to him for help to restore Glaucus, afraid

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that she might inform authorities about the philtre. Nydia’s dabbling in magic, and her attempt to extort love from Glaucus, result in extreme peril for him as the object of her infatuation. This is, however, not the only time Nydia involves herself with magic. The formerly negative connotations of magic are reversed in the episode where she attempts to help to rescue Glaucus from his impending execution by tricking Sosias, Arbaces’ gullible slave. The name Sosias, with its clear overtones from New Comedy, is etymologically associated with the Greek for ‘security’, which may mean that it bears ironic connotations in Bulwer’s novel, since Sosias’ credulity and belief in magic actually results in Nydia’s escape.50 In displaying an influence from the genre of comedy, this passage reveals a lighter feel and idiom. Nydia plays on Sosias’ weaknesses, exploiting what she knows of magic, but this time for the good of Glaucus: ‘Ay! So you would have precise answers to those questions? There are various ways of satisfying you. There is the Lithomanteia, or Speaking-Stone, which answers your prayer with an infant’s voice; but, then, we have not that precious stone with us—costly it is, and rare. Then there is the Gastromanteia, whereby the demon casts pale and deadly images upon water, prophetic of the future. But this art requires also glasses of a peculiar fashion to contain the consecrated liquid, which we have not. I think, therefore, that the simplest method of satisfying your desire would be by the Magic of Air.’51

The episode reveals Nydia’s cunning in a sequence entitled, significantly, ‘They who blind themselves the blind may fool’. It also shows that she is prepared to exploit the trust of another slave for Glaucus’ sake, revealing a vertical loyalty to her ‘saviour’ Glaucus, rather than a horizontal loyalty to others in the slave class; after all, she might well expect Sosias to be severely punished for her escape. It also shows Nydia desperately trying to right her earlier wrong. Yet it also seems to suggest that Nydia possesses a greater familiarity with magical lore than she professes to Julia earlier, thus underlining her exoticism. Yet magic is not the only way in which Nydia is isolated. She is excluded from the intense bilateral relationship between Glaucus and Ione, as indeed from the rest of the world, because, as a blind person, she is physically disabled:

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at that moment a shadow darkened the threshold of the chamber, and a young female, still half a child in years, broke upon his solitude. She was dressed simply in a white tunic, which reached from the neck to the ankles; under her arm she bore a basket of flowers . . . her features were more formed than exactly became her years, yet they were soft and feminine in their outline, and without being beautiful in themselves, they were almost made so by their beauty of expression . . . a look of resigned sorrow, of tranquil endurance, had banished the smile, but not the sweetness, from her lips; . . . she was blind; but in the orbs themselves there was no visible defect—their melancholy and subdued light was clear, cloudless, and serene . . .52

The lingering description of the sightlessness of Nydia’s eyes emphasizes the manner in which Nydia can never be Viewer, but can only be Viewed. She is fundamentally denied subjectivity through her blindness in this way. Her lack of vision also stands, symbolically, for the social disability inherent in her condition as a slave. Her blindness becomes a personality trait in her characterization: in the description above it is responsible for a physically apparent ‘look of resigned sorrow’; she refers to her blindness on many occasions throughout the novel, and it is evidently a huge source of grief to her: ‘I am often ailing,’ said the blind girl touchingly; ‘and as I grow up I grieve more that I am blind.’ . . . ‘Poor Nydia,’ thought Glaucus, gazing on her; ‘thine is a hard doom! Thou seest not the earth—nor the sun—nor the ocean—nor the stars;—above all, thou canst not behold Ione.’53

Glaucus’ comprehension of Nydia’s ailment is hampered by the dominance of the victimization rhetoric; although he appears to express sympathy with Nydia, it is inauthentic. His final and strongest thought is that Nydia is unable to see Ione. Such a reference highlights the manner in which Glaucus can perceive Nydia’s plight only in relation to his own life-experience. For Nydia, we might expect, the earth, the sun and the ocean might well be the things in life she would love to see. It seems unlikely that the beauty of Ione would be a sight which she would specifically desire. The naming of Glaucus is plausibly of significance here; the stem glauk- in Greek suggests an opaque quality, and applies to sight, or light and to the eyes in particular. For Nydia, then, Glaucus may represent the light in her world of darkness, but he is also himself insensitive to what he sees before him.

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Bulwer himself articulated theoretical responses to literature in which he implies his belief that it is crucial for a good novel, a ‘work of art’, to inspire Aristotelian pity and terror in its readers: ‘Lytton maintains throughout his critical writings that it is the aim of highest genius to stir pity and terror; the example of Greek tragedy convinced him of that.’54 Although it would be too simplistic and certainly rather reductive to view Nydia as a character engineered solely to evoke ‘pity’, Bulwer’s pathetic portrayal of her constant grief at her blindness, along with her slave status and her heart-rending romantic situation, certainly aligns the narrator’s voice with the perspective of Glaucus. A powerful attempt to elicit readers’ sympathy is apparent in the second verse of Nydia’s haunting first song: Ye have a world of light, Where love in the loved rejoices; But the blind girl’s home is the House of Night, And its beings are empty voices. As one in the realm below, I stand by the streams of woe! I hear the vain shadows glide, I feel their soft breath at my side. And I thirst the loved forms to see, And I stretch my fond arms around, And I catch but a shapeless sound, For the living are ghosts to me.55

The song continues by personifying the very flowers which she holds, allowing them to express their desire to leave the hands of the blind girl, ‘shrinking’ from ‘this child of night’, and yearning for eyes that see them, being ‘for night too gay’. In this song of self-pity, therefore, even the flowers which Nydia holds wish to avoid her company in favour of the sighted. Bulwer stresses that Nydia’s blindness evokes not only pity; in his own words he describes the terror which also afflicted those gazing into her sightless eyes: ‘Of love!’ repeated Nydia, raising her large, wandering eyes, that ever thrilled those who saw them with a mingled fear and pity. You could never familiarize yourself to their aspect, so strange did it seem that those dark wild orbs were ignorant of the day; and either so fixed was their deep mysterious gaze,

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or so restless and perturbed their glance, that you felt, when you encountered them, that same vague, and chilling, and half-preternatural impression which comes over you in the presence of the insane,—of those who having a life outwardly like your own, have a life within life—dissimilar— unsearchable—unguessed!56

Kenneth Jernigan of The National Federation of the Blind has recently railed against this portrayal of the sightless Nydia as a literary character. He argues that she contributes to the perpetuation of the myth of the blind as ‘dehumanized’, and the manipulation of blindness for an aesthetic and commercialized aim: So it goes with the saccharine sweet that has robbed us of humanity and made the legend and hurt our cause . . . There is the self-sacrificing Nydia, in the Last Days of Pompeii . . . But enough! It is sweetness without light, and literature without enlightenment . . . Running like an ugly stain through many of these master plots and, perhaps, in a subtle way underlying all of them is the image of blindness as dehumanization, a kind of banishment from the world of normal life and relationships. Neither Dickens’s blind Bertha, nor Bulwer-Lytton’s Nydia, when they find themselves in love, have the slightest idea that anybody could ever love them back nor does the reader; nor, for that matter, do the other characters in the novels . . .57

Jernigan is appalled at Nydia’s portrayal by Bulwer as weak and ineffectual; he includes her in his long list of blind characters who, he feels, have contributed to a longstanding ‘cultural myth’ that inevitably dehumanizes blind people. For Jernigan, Bulwer’s portrayal of Nydia banishes her, along with all blind people by association, from mainstream society. He particularly objects to her sweet acceptance of her situation, her suicide for the sake of another, and her unquestioning acceptance that Glaucus could never love her, even while she burns desperately with love herself.58 In fact, the love between the two sighted principals, Glaucus and Ione, is in the novel presented with something approaching emotional and rhetorical excess, even by the standards of midnineteenth-century fiction. The characters are everything to each other and are all but oblivious to the lives of all others—enslaved or free—extraneous to their union. Their relationship might well have been influenced by the kind of unremitting obsessive love found in ancient Greek fiction, such as that shared between Chareas and

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Callirhoe in Chariton’s novel, or Daphnis and Chloe in Longinus’ romance. Bulwer highlights Nydia’s overwhelming infatuation for Glaucus and her immense emotional grief, most obvious in her allegorical love-song at book 3, chapter 2, quoted at the opening of this chapter. In this song, where the Rose represents Glaucus, we see the despairing loneliness and lovesickness of the ‘Wind’, representing Nydia. The line ‘None dreamt that the Wind had a soul’ above all illustrates Nydia’s distraught condition; this slave is disabled and excluded from authentic social, psychological, and emotional life. As a slave, Nydia is depicted as perfectly conscious of the controls she is forced to place on her emotions. But this psychological repression manifests itself through her art, thus foreshadowing the tragic conclusion to the novel, which in its final line refers to death as instrumental in the revelation of the Wind’s love. But the love-song, and with Nydia’s behaviour the novel, make it absolutely clear that her feelings for Glaucus must at all costs be kept secret. The pressure of hiding this extreme emotion shows itself in various revealing episodes. One of the most profound moments, which highlights Nydia’s devotion and the difficulty she finds in discovering any socially authorized stability or expressive outlet for her love for Glaucus, tells how she cherishes the moments of contact with him. It is Glaucus’ error, the year later, to clasp Nydia to himself, ‘deeming her still in soul as in years a child’, whilst Nydia herself begins to mistake his affections for romantic love, and becomes racked with jealousy upon hearing of Ione: Doomed, in the first rush of a thousand happy, grateful, delicious sentiments of an overflowing heart, to hear that he loved another—to be commissioned to that other, the messenger, the minister—to feel all at once that utter nothingness which she was, which she ever must be, but which, till then, her young mind had not taught her—that utter nothingness to him who was all to her; what wonder that, in her wild and passionate soul, all the elements jarred discordant; . . . Sometimes she dreaded only lest Glaucus should discover her secret. Sometimes she felt indignant that it was not suspected . . . Her feelings to Ione ebbed and flowed with every hour: now she loved her because he did; now she hated her for the same cause.59

It is difficult to ascertain whether one particular aspect of Nydia’s life is the cause of Glaucus’ failure to apprehend her changing emotional

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responses towards him; it may be her youth, or her slave status, or her blindness. Bulwer does not make it entirely clear, which suggests that perhaps it is in fact the combination of these factors, and not just one alone. Any single facet of Nydia’s life might not have been enough to make Glaucus oblivious to her; the combination of the three proves to be—literally—lethal. Moreover, Nydia’s ‘otherness’ itself might well constitute the reason for the unrequited nature of her passion: the pessimistic Bulwer wrote in his tract On the Want of Sympathy that people are incapable of loving differences because they could only relate to and love that which they saw in themselves and replicated in another, the ‘counterpart of self ’.60 In this reading, Nydia was far too different to have a workable chance of becoming identified as Glaucus’ psychological mirror and love object. The culmination of her novel-long isolation is, for Nydia, suicide; in an episode not without melodrama, she throws herself off the boat on which the characters find themselves when they are trying to escape the fury of the volcanic eruption. No one witnesses her death, and all that the look-out sailor sees is something he fancies to be a flash of white in the water, gone before he notices it. ‘No, no!’ she said, half aloud, and in a musing and thoughtful tone, ‘I cannot endure it; this jealous, exacting love—it shatters my whole soul in madness! I might harm him again—wretch that I was! I have saved him—twice saved him—happy, happy thought!—why not die happy?—it is the last glad thought I can ever know. O sacred Sea! I hear thy voice invitingly; it hath a freshening and joyous call. They say that in thy embrace is dishonour— that thy victims cross not the fatal Styx: be it so!—I would not meet with him in the Shades, for I should meet him still with her! Rest—rest—rest! There is no other Elysium for a heart like mine!61

The primary motivations for Nydia’s suicide are her emotionally shattering unrequited love for Glaucus, and her fear that her actions will result in harm to him, as they did when she used the love-philtre. Bulwer’s motivations for having Nydia commit suicide may be different: the act permits Nydia, finally, to exert autonomy. Her action is one which startles Ione and Glaucus because, given their prejudicial conception of Nydia, it is so unexpected: When the lovers awoke, their first thought was of each other; their next of Nydia. She was not to be found—none had seen her since the night. Every

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crevice of the vessel was searched—there was no trace of her. Mysterious from first to last, the blind Thessalian had vanished for ever from the living world! They guessed her fate in silence; and Glaucus and Ione, while they drew nearer to each other (feeling each other the world itself) forgot their deliverance, and wept as for a departed sister.62

The passage again emphasizes Nydia’s ‘otherness’, as ‘mysterious from first to last’, and ‘the blind Thessalian’. Yet, ironically, at the moment of her death, Nydia ceases to be natally alienated, since at last she becomes incorporated into a new family, wept for ‘as for a departed sister’. Moreover, Ione and Glaucus are unclear as to the motive for her death, but believe her absolutely worthy of a tomb amongst the dead of their family in Athens: Our beloved, our remembered Nydia! I have reared a tomb to her shade, and I see it every day from the window of my study. It keeps alive in me a tender recollection—a not unpleasing sadness—which are but a fitting homage to her fidelity, and the mysteriousness of her early death. Ione gathers the flowers, but my own hand wreathes them daily around the tomb. She was worthy of a tomb in Athens!63

Thus Nydia, in the minds of the two Athenians, becomes one with and of them. Worthy of a tomb in Athens (as opposed to Thessaly), she finally is invited to participate in their exclusive cultural heritage. Once dead, she is remembered where she felt she was not really known when alive; she occupies their thoughts. They make a daily homage to her with the flowers which she so loved and she is voluntarily ‘beloved’, without need for love-philtres. Once she has committed suicide, Glaucus and Ione finally realize that she was a sophisticated autonomous subject, with psychological stature, capable of a range of emotions. Thus I would argue that Bulwer’s decision to credit Nydia with a self-determining, final act of suicide, while portraying her as vulnerable to extreme devotion and emotionalism, actually in some way apportions her a degree of social vivification and reintegration. This, perhaps paradoxically, enables Glaucus and Ione and the implied reader to begin to comprehend, after her death, the fault-lines of the rhetoric of victimization that has entrapped Nydia throughout the novel, and begin to view her—and perhaps other, similar social victims in similar plights addressed by philanthropic gestures—as a figure possessing emotional depth,

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humanity, and above all, subjective consciousness and the ability to take reasoned decisions. Bulwer’s views on the inherent immorality of slavery and the urgent need for full emancipation of slaves—and latterly ‘apprentices’—in the colonies are not in the foreground of the narrative of The Last Days of Pompeii. The ‘backseat’ position of these issues may to some extent result from the political and chronological context in which the Last Days of Pompeii was created: that is, following emancipation in Britain and in British colonies in favour of the apprenticeship system. However, it seems that one of Bulwer’s political aims within the novel is to allow Nydia to be presented as a feeling subject, whose emotional life actually upstages that of the free couple whose romance the work celebrates. This, paradoxically, sits alongside the patent erasure of her importance as a social being through the self-regarding discourse of the nineteenth-century philanthropist-manque´ embodied in Glaucus. Bulwer certainly is seduced by the temptation to construe Nydia as a ‘victim’, in her suffering from unrequited love, and as a sign of complex ‘Otherness’, expressed in her social status as a slave, her blindness, her ethnicity and magic. These elements of her identity create a conceptual framework that allows him to evoke pity and fear in his readership and thus create a work of ‘art’ as he comprehends it. However, his final presentation of Nydia, and the constant windows into Nydia’s emotional state to which the readership is collusively party, even whilst the principal characters are ignorant of her suffering, bestow on her a degree of agency, subjectivity, and social and quasi-familial reintegration.

NOTES 1. Bulwer-Lytton (1834), 173–4. 2. e.g. Reece (1850); Medina (1858); Perruzini (1861); Buckstone (1887); Hollom (1931). 3. e.g. Rodwell (1835); Blockley (1840); Alcock (1885). 4. There is a photograph of the statue at http://commons.wikimedia.org/ wiki/File:Blind_Flower_Girl_of_Pompeii_01.jpg.

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5. Ferguson (1992), 247. 6. On the relationship between Stepto’s work and the treatment of classical themes in some recent literature, see further Hall (2007a) and (2009). 7. Bulwer-Lytton (1834), 9. 8. King and Engel (1981), 287–8. 9. The unpublished third volume of this work, long missing, was discovered by Oswyn Murray and published for the first time in Bulwer-Lytton (2004). All references are to page numbers in this edition. 10. Bulwer-Lytton (2004 [1837]), vol. 1, book 1, ch. 1, 43–82. 11. See the chapter by Hodkinson and Hall above, pp. 71–85. 12. Bulwer-Lytton (2004 [1837]), 138. 13. Bulwer-Lytton (2004 [1837]), 138–9. 14. Bulwer-Lytton (2004 [1837]), 140. 15. The Athenian democracy had begun to become an acceptable constitutional model in the 1830s, when Thomas Talfourd produced his Ion at Covent Garden (see Hall and Macintosh (2005), ch. 11) and George Grote was working on books v–vi of his History of Greece (although it did not begin to be published until 1846) and serving as an MP in the government that passed the Great Reform Act of 1832: see Saxonhouse (1993). 16. Clive (1989), 109. 17. See Andrew Brown (2004). 18. Bulwer-Lytton (1838), 9. 19. Bulwer-Lytton (1838), 24. 20. Bulwer-Lytton (1834), 149. 21. See Jones (2006), 80–5 for outdoor firework theatre based on the novel in Texas, and e.g. Pichot (1837) and Nuitter (1869). 22. Patterson (1982). 23. See further Williams Elliot (2002) and Prochaska (1980). 24. Lane (2002). 25. See especially Bulwer-Lytton (1833), 27 and the essays ‘On the want of sympathy’ and ‘The sympathetic temperament’ in Bulwer-Lytton (1835 [1868]), vol. 2, 15–11 and vol. 3, 137–203 respectively. 26. Bulwer-Lytton (1833), 27. 27. Lane (2002), 603. 28. Bulwer-Lytton (1834), 111–12. 29. Bulwer-Lytton (1833), 368; see King and Engel (1981), 286. 30. Kapur (2005), ch. 4. 31. Lugones (1990), 402. 32. Bulwer-Lytton (1834), 102. 33. Bulwer-Lytton (1834), 102n.

Between Victimhood and Agency 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58.

59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

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On whom see especially Rankine (2011). Patterson (1982), 7. Bulwer-Lytton (1834), 95. Bulwer-Lytton (1834), 100. Bulwer-Lytton (1834), 105. Bulwer-Lytton (1834), 106. See the exchange on p. 39 between the lustful Glaucus and Clodius. Bulwer-Lytton (1834), 46–7. Bulwer-Lytton (1834), 44. Bulwer-Lytton (1834), 53. Bulwer-Lytton (1834), 13. Brantlinger (1977). See e.g. Lucian’s Onos. For the Greek novels and magic see further RuizMontero (2007). Bulwer-Lytton (1834), 215. Bulwer-Lytton (1834), 40. Bulwer-Lytton (1834), 102. See further Wiles (1988), 59. Bulwer-Lytton (1834), 160. Bulwer-Lytton (1834), 49. Bulwer-Lytton (1834), 33. Watts (1935), 278. Bulwer-Lytton (1834), 7. Bulwer-Lytton (1834), 173. Jernigan (1974). It is possible that Nydia’s blindness metaphorically expresses her failure to convert to Christianity, unlike Glaucus, Ione, and the small sect of Christians which Bulwer mentions is growing in Pompeii (e.g. p. 297). For Bulwer’s interest in religious conversion: see Rochelson (1997), 173–5. Bulwer-Lytton (1834), 224–5. Bulwer (1835 [1868]), 105. Bulwer-Lytton (1834), 383. Bulwer-Lytton (1834), 384. Bulwer-Lytton (1834), 384.

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8 The Problem with Prometheus Myth, Abolition, and Radicalism Edith Hall

‘Prometheus delivered’ ‘Come, Outcast of the human race, Prometheus, hail thy destined place! Death shall not sap thy wall of clay, That penal being mocks decay; Live, conscious inmate of the grave, Live, outcast, captive, victim, slave!’ The Furies ceased; the wrathful strain Prometheus hears, and, pierced with pain, Rolls far around his hopeless gaze, His realm of wretchedness surveys; Then maddening with convulsive breath, He moans or raves, imploring death. Thus hours on hours unnumbered past, And each more lingering than the last; When Lo! before his glazed sight, Appears a form, in dauntless might. ’Tis he! Alcides, lord of fame! The friend of man, his noblest name! Swift from his bow the arrow flies, And prone the bleeding vulture lies. He smites the rock, he rends the chain, Prometheus rises man again!

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So begins the poem that explains the vignette decorating the cover of a widely disseminated collection of poems by three British authors. It was published in order to celebrate the passing of the 1807 Slave Trade Act (Fig. 8.1). The vision projected by this collection of poems was part of the process by which Prometheus became thoroughly—if problematically—identified with slaves in the contemporary world, and with not just the British but the international movement to abolish their captive status. In the picture, Prometheus is depicted as of ambiguous race or, as some have asserted, even passably African;1 in the poem, Prometheus is explicitly equated with Africa, while Hercules (‘Alcides’) represents Britain. The verses open with a resounding reference to the opening scenario of the Aeschylean tragedy Prometheus Bound,2 in which personifications of Strength and Violence hammer Prometheus to the rocks of the Caucasus. The Furies, whose vindictive voices here gloat on the desolate fate awaiting Prometheus, have been borrowed from another Aeschylean tragedy, Eumenides. The engraving was taken from a picture commissioned from Robert Smirke Senior (father of the more famous architect who bore the same name), Academician, anti-monarchist, and avowed democrat. The authors of the poems in the collection—James Montgomery, Elizabeth Benger, and James Grahame (sometimes spelt Graham)—were minor literary figures, each of whom had travelled their own unconventional route to the cause of abolition. Montgomery was a hymn-writer and supporter of radical causes in Sheffield;

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Figure 8.1 Abolitionist propaganda: Hercules liberates Prometheus

Benger was a feminist eccentric and aspiring dramatist, whose enthusiasm for abolition, along with prison reform and the rights of native Americans, is evident in her didactic-romantic novel The Heart and the Fancy (1813); Grahame (1765–1811), the author of ‘Prometheus delivered’, was a devout Christian, but eventually his politics became so extreme that his relatives suppressed his Fragments of a Tour through the Universe, which attacked not only slavery and the press-gang, but also war and even the monarchy.3 Anna Letitia Barbauld remarked in 1789, as the British parliamentary campaign for abolition began to gain momentum, that slaves

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could not be heard unless people were willing to hear them: ‘The voice of the Negroes could not have made itself heard but by the ear of pity; they might have been oppressed for ages more with impunity, if we had so pleased.’4 The most striking thing about this Prometheus poem, in comparison with the Aeschylean play, is indeed Prometheus’ inability to make himself heard. The Greek tragic Prometheus is a formidable orator. He delivers a number of extraordinary speeches, ranging in time from prehistory to the far distant future, which express his unambivalent hatred of Zeus, anger at the injustice he suffers, and barely suppressed desire to be compensated for his sufferings. On the other hand, the Georgian poet Grahame gives a voice to the Furies (representing the planters, merchants, and political figures who defended slavery), and agency to Britain in the form of Hercules, who liberated Prometheus in the lost Prometheus Unbound of Aeschylus. But to Prometheus—fettered, tortured, and finally delivered— there is granted in Grahame’s poem little more than the status of scrutinized object and the capacity to suffer. He may breathe convulsively, moaning and ‘imploring death’, but he plays no role in his own emancipation, and unlike the Aeschylean hero has no apparent intellectual grasp of the historical reasons for his past servitude and imminent emancipation. The focus of the poem shifts speedily and decisively from him to his heroic (British) deliverer, who ‘rends the chain’. For the slaves themselves to be thus overshadowed, or replaced altogether by self-congratulatory personifications of Britain, British justice, and busts of Wilberforce, was standard practice in the British iconography of the day,5 as exemplified in the Frontispiece to our volume. Grahame’s ineffectual, silenced Prometheus, in Smirke’s vignette significantly still on his rock rather than standing side-by-side with Hercules, reflects what Marcus Wood has called ‘the utterly problematic nature of the visual representation of slavery in Europe and North America’.6 The purposes of this chapter are threefold. It documents some key moments in the process by which Prometheus became adopted in abolitionist propaganda, but it also stresses how thinking about Prometheus can focus our attention on the ‘utterly problematic nature’ of the visual and literary representation of slavery, as well as the delicate relationship between abolitionism and other, more radical political causes.

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The abolitionists’ suffering, physical Prometheus ousted the intellectual Prometheus, derived ultimately from Hesiod, who had bestowed the light of human reason on matters obscured by religion and superstition, and therefore become an important point of identification for the European Enlightenment:7 the torch of the Enlightenment Prometheus, according to Rousseau, had been ‘the torch of the Sciences made to quicken great geniuses’.8 The new abolitionist configuration of the hero in some ways harked back to the Prometheus of the Renaissance and Early Modern period, whose suffering on the rock was felt to anticipate Christ’s passion on the cross;9 a particularly affecting depiction was the famous picture of Prometheus writhing under the eagle’s onslaught painted by Rubens and Snyders in 1618. Prometheus’ traditional omniscience, and his role in the physical creation of humans,10 meant that Christian fathers as early as Tertullian had compared him with their god (Apol. 18). But between the patristic, Renaissance, and Early Modern thinkers and the abolitionists lay not only the Enlightenment Prometheus but the Romantic Prometheus of Herder and Goethe, the poet-demiurge, whose gift of fire as inspiration could remake the world anew—an aesthetic and psychological revolutionary. Henry Fuseli reflects the general shift in contemporary responses to the Prometheus myth when in the first decade of the nineteenth century he created his unforgettable watercolour-and-pencil illustration of the brutal Aeschylean chaining of a physically vulnerable Prometheus to the mountain,11 whereas in 1770–1 he had envisaged the chained Prometheus as a cosmic creator figure, bestowing fire on planet earth from an elevated celestial position.12 The Aeschylean rather than the Hesiodic Prometheus also lies behind Grahame’s anti-slavery poem and the illustration of it with which this chapter began. Aeschylus had not been available in any modern language, including English, until the 1770s. The possibility that Aeschylus might profitably be translated was entertained after the appearance of the Marquis J. J. Le Franc de Pompignan’s French version of 1770, and the first English rendering of Prometheus Bound, by Handel’s erstwhile librettist Thomas Morell, was incorporated into his attractive edition of 1773; this had reached a relatively wide audience since the leading figure in the contemporary theatre world, David Garrick, who had a

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strong interest in Greek tragedy, had been responsible for raising the subscription. Morell’s edition was followed by the complete 1777 translation of Aeschylus by the Norfolk abolitionist Robert Potter, the massive effect of which was felt even earlier on visual artists than on poets and other writers.13 Potter, while having his portrait painted by George Romney, had told him the stories contained in Aeschylus’ plays, and in 1778 Romney produced his famous series of chalk ‘cartoons’ of scenes from Aeschylus, including a powerful image illustrating the first scene of Prometheus Bound.14 Shortly afterwards, in 1774, J. G. Schlosser published his German translation Prometheus in Fesseln in Basel, soon followed by versions in other European languages, including Ferenc Verseghy’s Hungarian translation of 1792 and Melchiorre Cesarotti’s Italian of 1794. The sudden accessibility of Aeschylus’ play certainly lies behind the ease with which Prometheus became such a pervasive political icon for the Romantic period, representing, as Curran has shown, the ultimate triumph of liberty through steadfastness and courage against the evils of a tyrannical regime.15 At a time when slavery was climbing ever higher on the political agenda, however, any image of the chaining and fettering of a naked body almost inevitably triggered a connection with the terrible descriptions and images of punishments of slaves in the contemporary world that abolitionists were ensuring achieved widespread circulation. As Marcus Wood has documented, a pressing concern of the period was ‘the ways in which artists in England and America drew, engraved, sculpted and painted the slave body as a site for the infliction of physical pain’.16 Even today, in a recent production of the Prometheus Bound (directed by David Kerr), which made no explicit reference whatsoever to slavery, critics remarked that it was absolutely impossible not to think about the history of the Atlantic slave trade and antebellum plantations when faced with the shackled body of the black actor David Oyelowo (Fig. 8.2). In late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, ‘enchained Prometheus’ pictures would have put their viewers in mind of the types of image of binding, fettering, whipping, and other tortures that had been made all too familiar through the widely disseminated publication by Captain John Stedman, Narrative of a Five Years’ Expedition against the

Figure 8.2 David Oyelowo as the shackled hero of Prometheus Bound (2007)

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Revolted Slaves of Surinam in Guiana (1793; a revised version with plates by William Blake including Fig. 8.3 was published in 1796).17 The edition of the Greek text of Aeschylus by the renowned English classicist Richard Porson was published in 1795, interleaved with engravings by Tommaso Piroli of illustrations by John Flaxman, the artist so closely associated with Josiah Wedgwood (who also produced the famous ‘Am I not a man and a brother’ cameo).18 These engravings were published separately during the same year. Prometheus Bound could now be easily read in English, and its effect in performance helpfully visualized. The pictures of the binding scene and the Oceanids cowering at Prometheus’ feet in Flaxman’s ‘The Storm’ reveal an attempt to give the bearded Titan a distinctive, craggy physiognomy as well as a massive physique (Fig. 8.4); the contrast with the familiar lineaments of the face of Hephaestus in profile above him in the binding scene is also quite marked. In ‘The Storm’, especially in Prometheus’ overhanging forehead and angry, rolling eyes, more apparent in profile, there are traces of an attempt to make him suggestive of an angry African slave. It was through Potter’s translation that access to the Aeschylean titan-victim-hero was suddenly offered to readers well beyond the classically trained elite in Britain in the late 1770s,19 at precisely the time when the abolitionist cause was beginning to make serious headway. It was through Flaxman’s illustrations, however, that the abolitionists visualized Prometheus as an archetypal slave in need of unbinding.20 Goethe’s unfinished Prometheus (c.1773) chronologically coincides with the rise of abolitionism, but also points forward to the problems presented to reformers by the victimized Titan. Goethe’s poem begins to reveal unease with the threat of uncontrollable violence inherent within Promethean rebellion; for the Romantics, the problem with Prometheus was that humanistic ideals and violence were ambiguously blended within a single figure.21 The ‘Freiheit’ for which Prometheus called, as the spokesman of Sturm und Drang, was tainted with arrogance and the threat of lawlessness, chaos, and violent retaliation. Moreover, once Napoleon had forced the Holy Roman Empire to dissolve itself in 1806, a more explicitly political Prometheus appeared. The parallel was increasingly drawn by Napoleon’s admirers, such as Goethe and the Italian poet and Homerist Vincenzo Monto, between the Titan and the man perceived as the brilliant,

Figure 8.3 Etching by William Blake in J. G. Stedman’s Narrative of a Five Years: Expedition (1796)

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Figure 8.4 John Flaxman, illustration of Prometheus Bound (1792–4)

enlightened, modernizing new Emperor who had dared challenge the authority of the rulers of the world.22 When disillusionment gradually crept into the Romantic presentation of Napoleon, however, especially after his confinement on Elba and his death, the parallel became most fully developed as this modern Titan’s power was wrested from him. The ambivalence towards the ‘magnificent failure’ of Napoleon’s project was illuminated by reference to the end of the Aeschylean Prometheus Bound, especially in the works of Byron and Blake, as Harold Bloom long ago demonstrated.23 The ‘dark side’ of the politicized Romantic Prometheus, moreover, became welded with an older poetic anti-hero. In the Englishspeaking world at least, ever since Milton’s Paradise Lost, Prometheus

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had also displayed diabolical features.24 Consider these lines from Satan’s speech to his confederate Beelzebub about God’s superior strength (Paradise Lost 1.91–6): . . . into what Pit thou seest From what highth fal’n, so much the stronger prov’d He with his Thunder: and till then who knew The force of those dire Arms? yet not for those Nor what the Potent Victor in his rage Can else inflict do I repent or change . . .

In his note on this passage, Milton’s eighteenth-century editor Thomas Newton plausibly commented: Milton in this and other passages, where he is describing the fierce and unrelenting spirit of Satan, seems very plainly to have copied after the picture that Aeschylus gives of Prometheus.25

Newton then quotes (in Greek) the Aeschylean Prometheus, where the Titan tells Hermes, Zeus’ henchman, that he will never reveal the secret which Zeus so desperately wants to hear: So let his blazing lightning be hurled forth And with the white-winged snow and subterranean Thunder let him confound the world and make it reel! For none of these things will bend my will to make me speak . . .26

The Satanic associations of Prometheus reverberate through much Romantic literature, especially Shelley’s profoundly Miltonic Prometheus Unbound, and are connected with the reception of the more dangerous side of Prometheus’ intellectual prowess. This Prometheus directly anticipates Carl Kere´nyi’s archetypal trickster god of ‘crooked’ counsel in his classic work Prometheus: das griechische Mythologem von der menschlichen Existenz (first published at a time of profound meditation on the failure of another gargantuan imperialist enterprise in 1946). The dangerous side of the Aeschylean Prometheus perhaps emerges most strongly in the surprising connections sometimes drawn by the Romantics between him and another unusual hero swallowed up into the underworld at the end of his story, Don Juan or Don Giovanni. The Satanic Don’s ways of spending his time on earth may differ widely

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from those of the philanthropic and omniscient Titan, but the two figures are alike in suffering because they remain true to their convictions and defiantly refuse to give in to a higher power. In what today seems a strange imaginative leap, in 1817 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who was undoubtedly thinking of the Aeschylean drama, pointed out in chapter 23 of Biographia Literaria that the figures of Prometheus in chains and the remorse-free Don Giovanni are similarly unyielding and noble in the face of torment. In a comment on the final scene of Shadwell’s Jacobean drama The Libertine (1676), where Don John tells the statue-ghost that he is constitutionally unable to relent, Coleridge asks: ‘Who also can deny a portion of sublimity to the tremendous consistency with which he stands out the last fearful trial, like a second Prometheus?’27 Prometheus thus shared characteristics with a whole range of figures on the moral spectrum, from Christ as benefactor of mankind, tortured by a tyrannical state power, to the most intransigent archetypal sex-addicted libertine of the European imagination. The Satanic aspect to Prometheus was never going to appeal to James Grahame, the author of our abolition poem ‘Prometheus delivered’. As a young man he always carried a Greek or Latin classical author around in his pocket by day, but obsessively perused the Greek New Testament he kept at his bedside. He was a zealous Christian, even by the standards of the late eighteenth-century Glaswegian middle class: his biographer records that he once returned from a walk on Arthur’s Seat near Edinburgh to spend ‘the night alone in pouring out extempore hymns to god’ in ‘an enthusiasm of devotion’.28 He was also capable of extremely vigorous articulation of his anger about social injustice, for example in his best-known poem ‘The Sabbath’, written in 1802. This includes a furious denunciation of the plantocrats who profess Christianity, but who enslave other men, Stolen from their country, borne across the deep, Enchain’d, endungeon’d, forced by stripes to live, Doom’d to behold their wives, their little ones Tremble beneath the white man’s fiend-like frown!29

He continues with the arresting scenario of the slave merchant ‘whose trade is blood’, convening ‘his ruffian crew’ on deck to hear the sacred service read on the Sabbath, enunciating the command-

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ment ‘Thou shalt do no murder’ even as an African woman expires before her child’s very eyes. The difference between Grahame’s Prometheus and the wrathful, morally outraged narrator of ‘The Sabbath’ is marked. So is the difference between his Prometheus and the voluble, articulate, angry protagonist of the ancient Greek play. So is the difference between Grahame’s Prometheus and the enraged hero and firstperson narrator of Goethe’s, who sneers at Zeus with anger, condescension, and implacable antagonism.30 So, for that matter, is the difference between Grahame’s Prometheus and the hero of the poem ‘Prometheus’ published by the American James Russell Lowell in The United States Magazine and Democratic Review (August 1843), who addresses Zeus in allegorical ways that associate him with the pro-slavery lobby, while predicting that his own ‘patience . . . at last shall overcome’. But this patient Prometheus is a safely white member of Lowell’s own radical clique on the reformist left wing of the Democratic Party.31 Grahame’s poem therefore offers an important insight into the central theme of this chapter—the difficulties faced by abolitionists when searching for source texts and archetypal images in classical myth and history with which to authorize their campaign. As Marcus Wood has argued, the slave had to be presented in very specific ways if his or her cause ‘were to stimulate notions of guilt and culpability on the part of an educated English audience, while at the same time not frightening such an audience off through fear or disgust’.32 Despite his obvious similarities, as impaled philanthropist, with Jesus Christ, the inherently rebellious Prometheus did not correspond precisely enough to the sort of slave abolitionists needed to portray if they were to win over mainstream public opinion. Their iconic slave would be docile, acceptably Christian, very grateful, and once emancipated would present absolutely no further challenge to civilized society. The challenge presented by Prometheus (as by 19th-century slaves) was what happened after his delivery. As Jean-Paul Sartre scathingly asked his white compatriots when they faced losing their colonies after World War II, ‘When you removed the gag that was keeping these black mouths shut, what were you hoping for? That they would sing your praises? Did you think that when they raised

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themselves up again, you would read adoration in the eyes of these heads that our fathers had forced to bend down in the very ground?’33 It is perhaps helpful to think about the way that other ancient heroes have been found to fit—or not to fit—the experience of slaves and their descendants. In the later nineteenth and twentieth centuries, several ancient Greek authors and mythical figures have become closely associated with the experience of slavery in works by former slaves and subsequently by anticolonial and postcolonial writers of ultimately African descent. It has been remarked that in Pauline Hopkins’s Contending Forces (1900), the name of the beautiful Sappho, which associates her with one of the very few female poets of antiquity, signifies Hopkins’s project as she ‘fictionalizes women’s collective efforts to create a countermythology’.34 In The Souls of Black Folk W. E. B. Du Bois articulated the risk of black people taking ‘one step forward and two back’ during the industrialization of the South by recounting the myth of Atalanta, tricked into a relationship with Hippomenes through the lure of golden apples;35 he also returned repeatedly to the myth of the quest for the golden fleece, above all in his novel The Quest of the Silver Fleece, in which the ancient story, compressed from Apollonius’ Argonautica, is actually narrated.36 The fleece, for Du Bois, resonated profoundly with the involvement of expatriated and enslaved Africans in the cotton industry. For Orlando Patterson in The Children of Sisyphus (1964), it was Sisyphus’ punishment that represented the endless travail of the poor, descended from slaves, condemned in eternity to labour fruitlessly for tiny wages.37 Counte´e Cullen’s personal investment in the racial strife he saw depicted in Euripides’ Medea, an investment revealed in his version of 1935, is transparent; although Toni Morrison has distanced herself from the connections critics have drawn between her Beloved (1987) and nineteenth-century associations of Margaret Garner with the mythical Medea, it is incontrovertible that for many female novelists as well as theatre writers considering the experience of women under slavery, Medea has attracted attention on account of her ethnic difference from Jason, his arrogant assumption that she has no right to expect respect on account of bearing his children, and his failure to take responsibility for them and their future social status.38 In the Caribbean and North America, for Aime´

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Ce´saire in Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (1939), for Ralph Waldo Ellison in Invisible Man (1952), and for Wilson Harris in The Mask of the Beggar (2003) as well as Derek Walcott in Sea Grapes and Omeros, the encounter between Odysseus and the Cyclops has been the focus of much analysis as the archetypal colonial encounter.39 And in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when the armoury of anti-slavery imagery was under construction, Prometheus was by no means the only classical mythical hero on whom abolitionist experiments were conducted. Jean de Pechme´ja, for example, was intrigued by the story of Telephus, the son of Hercules with two ethnic identities— biologically Greek but culturally Mysian—who spent some of his life as a slave in the palace of the Argive royal family.40 Inspired by the novelistic form of Fe´nelon’s Les Aventures de Te´le´maque (1699), but the political ideas of Montesquieu and Rousseau, in book VI of his utopian novel Te´le`phe (1780), Pechme´ja set out a plan for a system of free colonial labour. Acting as intermediary for a large band of fugitive slaves, Pechme´ja’s Te´le`phe proposes to their former masters that they be recalled to the plantations ‘not as slaves, but as citizens’.41 Te´le`phe was a useful enough figure for the anti-slavery sentiments at the time, since although he endured temporary enslavement and was brought up abroad he was of divine birth on his father’s side and of aristocratic Greek descent on his mother’s. But it is hardly surprising that this relatively minor mythical figure failed to ignite the imaginations of most other activists. American audiences looked to another Titan in addition to Prometheus. Joel Barlow’s first edition of his epic of the ‘discovery’ and foundation of America (1787), then entitled The Vision of Columbus, did not yet contain the appeal for the slave that was put in the 1807 revised version with its newly Homeric title The Columbiad. Book 8 of the revised epic contained a whole new polemical episode in which Atlas, ‘Great brother guardian of old Afric’s clime’,42 denounces to Hesper (America) the enslavement of Africans (Barlow, incidentally, was in contact with Robert Smirke, the painter of the vignette reproduced above, who also provided illustrations for Barlow’s epic).43 Enslave my tribes! What, half mankind imban, Then read, expound, enforce the rights of man!

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Two paintings by J. M. W. Turner suggest that revenge for the inhuman crime of slavery can be inflicted by elemental natural forces, which are allegorically associated with two massive Greek mythical figures not dissimilar to Titans. In Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus (1829), it has been argued that Odysseus’ ship, threatened by the vengeful fury of the bellowing Cyclops, consciously suggests an ancient slave galley; in The Slave Ship or Slavers Throwing overboard the Dead and Dying—Typhon coming on (1840), the violence of the oncoming storm may be rendered more powerful by the alternative title’s suggestion that it was activated by the mythical personification of the whirlwind, and son of Earth, Typhon himself.45 When a British playwright attempted to find a satisfactory hero in a Greek myth to stage in a tragedy to celebrate the 1833 abolition of slavery, he encountered such difficulties that was forced to invent a new pseudo-Greek tragic mythical plot and slave-hero altogether. In 1836 Thomas Noon Talfourd, a radical Liberal MP, abolitionist, and Chartist sympathizer, adapted Euripides’ Ion in order to celebrate all the reforms instigated by the Liberal party, especially the Great Reform Act of 1832, which had massively extended the male franchise. The play was performed at Covent Garden, to great acclaim, with the avowed Republican William Charles Macready in the starring role (Fig. 8.5). But in Talfourd’s attempt to write a play more specifically about slavery, The Athenian Captive (1838), he had to invent a plot involving a male slave (Thoas, a Euripidean name) who (somewhat like both Oedipus and Ion) does not know that he is the long-lost son of the Corinthian tyrant Creon and his wife, an Athenian aristocrat. The (apparently) ordinary citizen Athenian Thoas, now a prisoner of war and enslaved, refuses to take off his helmet in front of the king; when offered the choice of slavery or death, he responds, ‘Dost dare j Insult a son of Athens by the doubt j Thy words imply?’ The play’s most theatrically powerful feature is the contrast between Thoas’ first armoured, helmeted entry in Act I and his second, in a slave’s garb, in Act II. When Lycus, the wicked slavemaster comes to give him servile dress, Thoas laments,

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Figure 8.5 William Macready as the Republican hero in Talfound’s Ion (1836)

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Edith Hall Must an Athenian warrior’s free-born limbs Be clad in withering symbols of the power By which man marks his property in flesh . . . ?

Talfourd did really mean it: the Reading Mercury of 5 May 1838 reports that he spoke with considerable passion on the subject of ‘Negro Emancipation’ at a public meeting in his constituency. The action of his play underlines the equality of all members of mankind and the inhumanity of slavery, especially in the friendship between Hyllus and Thoas, which transcends superficial markers of status and race, and Hyllus’ fanstasy that he and Thoas can exchange clothes and thus erase the social boundary dividing them.46 The more mature members of Macready’s public at the performance of The Athenian Captive will have recalled that, twenty years before, he had starred as Gambia, the African slave who leads a revolt in Surinam in Thomas Morton’s The Slave: A Musical Drama, ‘as performed at the Theatre-Royal, Covent-Garden. The Musick by Mr Bishop’.47 Set in Surinam, the drama begins with the suppression of a slave revolt. The hero is Gambia, an African slave, who loves Zelinda, a ‘Quadroon’ slave, also beloved by Clifton, a captain in the English army. William Macready played Gambia and Miss Stephens played Zelinda, and the play is a celebration of the 1807 legislation. In the same year, Macready had also made his debut and caused a stir in the role of his notably—and as such much noted—sympathetic black Othello. Pechme´ja’s plantation reformer Telephus, Barlow’s new debate on slavery between an oratorical Titan Atlas and a personification of the West (an agon with no identifiable classical precedent), Turner’s Polyphemus and Typhon, and Talfourd’s invented, self-sacrificing mythical Greek idealist Thoas, therefore represented some experiments with giving abolition a mythical lustre without having to deal with the inherently troublesome Prometheus. The figure of the Titan’s liberator, Hercules, presented other difficulties, exemplified in The New World, a remarkable poem criticizing American slavery written in 1848–50 by Marx and Engel’s associate, the Chartist Ernest Jones, when in prison convicted of sedition. In the opening section Jones focuses on North America, conveying the doubleness of the British radical’s view of that new nation after the abolition of slavery

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in the British colonies. Jones’s poem offers a useful context in which to explore how the often strained applications of ancient mythology in the political imagery of this period can elucidate the complexity of the relationship between the abolitionist movement and campaigns for other types of reform.48 Since the American War of Independence, the new republic had offered an inspirational example at this time to British radicals and republicans, and Jones configures not the old but the new country, after independence had been secured, as a young Hercules who even as an infant could slay the British monarchy and religious intolerance. Young Nation-Hercules! whose infant-grasp Kingcraft and churchcraft slew, the twinborn asp! What glorious visions for thy manhood rise, When thy full stature swells upon our eyes!49

Yet in Jones’s picture the virtue of the new country is utterly compromised by its practice of slavery, which it has not outlawed despite the example set by the British abolitionism: Ah! that the wisdom here so dearly bought Would sanctify thy wild, luxuriant thought, And righteously efface the stripes of slaves From that proud flag where heaven’s high splendour waves!

This Hercules, grown from revolutionary babyhood to corrupt adulthood, plays no further part in Jones’s vision of the future and Prometheus does not appear. Towards the end of the poem, what Jones sees as the millennia-long persecution and domination of Africa comes to symbolize the oppression of the working people of the entire world, the victims of capitalist classes at home and imperialism abroad; as I have shown elsewhere, this procedure entails, remarkably for a Briton writing at this time, drawing a connection between British exploitation of colonial India and Britain’s implication in the history of the slave trade.50 Jones, the imprisoned Chartist, presents himself allegorically as an African, soon to take over first Europe and then the rest of the planet. Here Jones reveals the problems inherent in using ancient mythology when negotiating the perilous ideological seas between abolition and socialist revolution: he turns, rather than to myth, to the historical

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figure of Spartacus, supplemented (since Jones had received an excellent training in Classics at a German gymnasium, an education he was keen to display) by the much less familiar Ennus (or Eunus). This rebellious slave had led a Sicilian slave revolt in the second century bce.51 Africa’s example, configured by Jones as a resurrection of the historical ancient slave rebels Ennus/Eunus and Spartacus, can fire the dream of universal liberty dreamt by the new ‘chained men’ of Britain—the Chartist prisoners: Deep in the burning south a cloud appears, The smouldering wrath of full four thousand years, Whatever name caprice of history gave, Moor, Afrit, Ethiop, Negro, still meant slave! But from the gathering evil springs redress, And sin is punished by its own excess. . . . . . . Near and more near, and fiercer and more fierce, East, West, and South, the sable legions pierce; On! to the site, where ancient Rome once rose, And modern towns in meaner dust repose. Up, Ennus! tip! and Spartacus! awake! Now, if you still can feel, your vengeance slake!

Ennus and Spartacus, whose example has liberated the world’s slaves, can now help—in the imagination at least—to usher in universal suffrage. The references in classically educated writers such as Jones and Talfourd (who had been Head Boy of Reading School under the ardent Hellenist Richard Valpy)52 are products of an age when Classics as a subject was becoming institutionalized on the school curriculum, and professionalized at university level in Europe and North America. This was at approximately the same time as the cultural imagination, Romantic and Gothic, became obsessed with slavery and was concomitantly expressing the social tensions created by political revolution and social liberation.53 As Chris Baldick has described it, humanity was seizing responsibility for ‘recreating the world, for violently reshaping its natural environment and its inherited social and political forms, for remaking itself ’.54 Campaigners for women’s rights, for example, inevitably saw the common

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ground shared by slaves and women themselves as un-enfranchised subjects. Mary Wollstonecraft had unambiguously identified the relationship of a married man to his wife with that of an owner to a slave in A Vindication of the Rights of Women (1792),55 and feminist scholars have shown how important the anti-slavery movement was to the development of the movement for women’s rights in both Britain and North America.56 Indeed, one of the problems involved in the use of mythical references for slavery may have been that so many of the early abolitionists were women, and none of the obvious candidates—Prometheus, Atlas, or Telephus (let alone the historical Spartacus)—provided any point of identification for them, except in so far as the very few who wanted to display their knowledge of Greek, like Elizabeth Barrett Browning, could perhaps simultaneously display their commitment to anti-slavery when they published a translation of Prometheus Bound.57 Paradoxically, however, one instantiation of the Prometheus myth that has been discussed intensively in relation to slavery is Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus (1818). Malchow has argued in detail that the novel taps into contemporary ideas about non-whites, and in particular on fears and hopes of abolition in the West Indies. Malchow notes that in stage productions of Frankenstein the idea that the monster somehow expressed societal fears about emancipated slaves was made explicit through costume and other aspects of appearance.58 Other critics have seen the monster, rather, as an expression of fears of electoral and parliamentary reform, indeed of wholesale French-style revolution. But the point is surely that the mythical reference was multivalent. Promethean liberation meant different things to different captors and captives: Byron used Prometheus to stand for homegrown Irish rebels in ‘The Irish avatar’ (1821).59 The Prometheus of the other Shelley (Percy Bysshe) in Prometheus Unbound (1820) is perhaps the darkest and most threatening of all, since he is essentially another version of the same character as the tyrant Jupiter, in accordance with Shelley’s cyclical view of history. The slave, when liberated, may become the despot himself. As Stuart Curran has pointed out, Jupiter’s final speech in Prometheus Unbound act iii, scene i, which relates his descent into the abyss with Demogorgon, imitates the progression of Prometheus’ dialogue throughout act i (‘Ai! Ai!j . . . I sink . . . j

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Dizzily down—ever, forever, down . . . ’). Jupiter is ousted from his throne, the subject rather than the tyrant of fate embodied in the figure of Demogorgon or ‘Eternity’ (iii. i. 79–83; 52). Throughout Jupiter’s dialogue, Shelley uses the volcanic imagery associated throughout act ii with Demogorgon and revolutionary change.60 Indeed, in the face of his punishment, the tyrant Jupiter himself suddenly becomes a slave, appealing for mercy from Prometheus, and ultimately displaying as much nobility of character as his former torture victim, reconciling himself to his fate, even as he is slowly swallowed up by flame and smoke.61 Yet in the Prometheus myth’s great strength as a fluid category for the representation of ethical, aesthetic, and socio-political concerns, which explains its pervasive attractiveness in the era under discussion, also lay the greatest problem it presented to artists and campaigners for abolition. Promethean politics, if allowed to get out of hand, might lead to the total breakdown of all inhibitions, restrictions, controlling mechanisms and structures that upheld hierarchies, taboos, and imperatives—and therefore civilization itself. It was not simply a fear of the revenge that many who opposed abolition assumed emancipated slaves would inevitably take in the form of savage reprisals against their former oppressors, although such fears were indeed a factor. Nor was it anxiety about the practical problems involved in transferring large groups of people from one legal and economic status to another in the immediate aftermath of emancipation, an anxiety which was shown to be fully justified when the ending of slavery in each different context ‘was followed by a variety of adjustments and struggles’ over ex-slaves’ terms and opportunities for labour, as well as their civil and legal rights.62 ‘Promethean’ politics had a particular resonance in an era which was seeing the emergence of international socialism. Talfourd himself talked about the ‘Promethean’ heat of class struggle after the Peterloo massacre of 1819;63 the man who actually invented the term ‘communism’, a nineteenth-century Christian socialist and Chartist named John Goodwyn Barmby, in 1842 published the first issue of his call for socialism and entitled it The Promethean; or Communist Apostle. The case of Prometheus shows more clearly than any classical point of reference during this period the impossibility of keeping abolition isolated from other issues of social and legislative reform.

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Needing to distance themselves from class politics, Chartism, and communism, abolitionists, especially in America, emphasized that Prometheus was the victim of arbitrary and despotic violence. By the early 1840s, American sources can be seen adopting the victim Prometheus as abolitionist figurehead enthusiastically. A good example is the massive, elemental Prometheus picture (now in San Francisco) which the British-born American painter Thomas Cole embarked on in 1846 (Fig. 8.6); it was designed from the outset to be a major piece of public art for display in a prominent venue, the exhibition held at Westminster Hall, London as part of a competition for new pictures to hang in the Houses of Parliament, newly rebuilt after the fire of 1834. Cole, a passionate believer in the morally and politically transformative power of art, in 1846 had cited as his example as an artist an ancient Greek anecdote. This was Plutarch’s story in his Life of Nicias ch. 29 of ‘the Athenian captives whom the poetry of Euripides saved from slavery and death’. Cole appended to

Figure 8.6 Allegorical abolitionism: Thomas Cole, Prometheus Bound (1847)

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his discussion of this tale the comment, ‘Nor have the plastic arts been without their touching incidents, though often unrecorded perhaps’.64 The art critic Patricia Junker notes that Cole was inspired to paint Prometheus shortly after the notable abolitionist Henry David Thoreau had published his own translation of Prometheus Bound in the Dial (January 1843), introducing it merely by saying he had been attracted to the play on account of ‘the increasing value which this great allegory is acquiring’.65 Like all transcendentalists, Thoreau loved Greek myth and used it often,66 but Junker adds that the decision was taken in the immediate aftermath of the rapturous reception accorded to Hiram Powers’ sculpture The Greek Slave, unveiled in London in 1845 (Fig. 8.7). Powers’ chained naked woman is very white, and was herself originally conceived in response to tales of atrocities committed on Greek women by the Ottoman Turks in the 1820s. But Power was (like Cole) a committed abolitionist, and in America the sculpture undoubtedly fed antislavery sentiments to an extent that made a considerable political impact.67 It seems that Cole had a specific political reason for

Figure 8.7 Hiram Powers’ The Greek Slave, the central neoclassical statue in a group of three at the Great Exhibition (1851)

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choosing to portray the fettered Titan, a reason he shared with another American painter of an anti-slavery Prometheus picture at this time, William Page, who was explicit that ‘Prometheus is not a dead Greek fable but to us a living type’68 (without saying exactly a living type of what). By the date of Powers’ statue it was also possible to recognize a reference to the myth of the tortured Titan and his need for delivery from even lightly referenced images. The cover of the American AntiSlavery Almanac for 1844, for instance, offers an unmistakable allusion to the myth through the simple position of the vulnerable black slave mother, prone on the ground but shielding her baby from the onslaught of the aggressive eagle (Fig. 8.8). Near the patriotic symbol of the Capitol building, the stars and stripes floating overhead (the symbolism of both of which is ironically subverted), the American eagle is co-opted as a vicious raptor in a clear but inexplicit reference to the Prometheus myth.69 But the very substitution of a woman with a very young baby for a muscular Titan offers another clue to the difficulties that Prometheus presented to abolitionists, who were casting the proponents of slavery in the role of Zeus. If you free Prometheus, then where will the challenges he presents to the established order end? By the 1840s, as we have seen, Prometheus was widely associated with revolutionary politics that went far beyond the abolition of slavery. Karl Marx represented the censorship imposed on his revolutionary newspaper Die rheinische Zeitung as a scene from Aeschylus Bound: Marx is chained to his printing press, tortured by the eagle of Prussian censorship, and comforted by Oceanids who have become fused with Rhine maidens (Fig. 8.9). When addressing a mainstream North American audience, it was much more strategic to present Prometheus as a helpless and vulnerable mother and infant in need of protection. The dangerous potential for social upheaval unleashed by delivering Prometheus is almost certainly why Frederick Douglass seems to have stepped back from making too obvious the debt his self-representation owed to the archetypal tale of Prometheus’ defiant ‘anti-conversion’ in his biography. Along with the even more problematic Miltonic Satan, Prometheus lurks beneath his account of his momentous decision to fight the brutal ‘slave-breaker’ Edward Covey rather than submit to yet another beating Douglass is here presented as one who moves

Figure 8.8 The persecuting eagle of slavery: American Anti-Slavery Almanac (1844)

Figure 8.9 Karl Marx as Prometheus, tortured by the eagle of Prussian censorship (1843)

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‘outside the social structure and ideational superstructure of the white gods’,70 but the overwhelming dominance of the Christian element in the abolitionist movement made the subversive Titan far too problematic to be adopted as a simple mythical forebear. At least one scholar has argued that the issue came down fundamentally to colour and race. According to this view, it was difficult for any but the most radical opponents of slavery (whose views went far beyond abolition of slavery to extend to equality for all men legally, electorally, and economically) even to imagine a Greek hero like Prometheus as anything other than white-skinned. In the days of a nearly universal European and North American white subscription to the idea that the Greeks were biologically as well as (after William Jones’s researches in India) linguistically descended, like the Britons and Teutons, from white Indo-Europeans, black Greeks were almost inconceivable. Jared Hickman, for example, has asserted that the insistence ‘on Prometheus’s whiteness . . . was more than yet another expression of the white sentimental imagination’s inability to countenance black suffering except as registered in its own visceral response’.71 From America, Hickman cites an anonymous poem in an 1853 issue of The National Era, ‘Freedom’s Apostles’, which presented not the black slave but the white abolitionist as the Promethean captive, ‘fettered on the shore of Freedom’s sea’. He could have added the Yale-educated James Gates Percival’s massive poem ‘Prometheus’ (1859), which contrasts the (ludicrously idealized) ‘free’ ancient Greek world, identified with Prometheus and with abolitionists, and the corrupt disrespect for freedom that marks his contemporary world.72 Matters were further complicated by the association of Prometheus with the site of his confinement in the Caucasus, since this territory had recently been identified by the Go¨ttingen polygenist Christoph Meiners, and subsequently in the craniometric racial theories of Johann Blumenbach, as the place where the ideal white western Europeans had originated. Blumenbach’s De generis humani varietate nativa (On the Natural Varieties of Mankind), a University of Go¨ttingen dissertation published in 1776, was one of the most influential works in the development of subsequent concepts of human ‘races’ and the new meaning of the term ‘Caucasian’. It was a simple enough conceptual move in the 1830s to 1850s to connect

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(white) Caucasian and Circassian rebels against tsarist serfdom, such as Sufi Schamyl, with Prometheus, as both Russian and American writers did regularly; Schamyl’s fellow serfs, rather than the 1832 British Reform Act, are celebrated in this apostrophe to the Titan in Thomas Kibble Hervey’s ‘Prometheus’ poem (which was, according to its author, directly inspired by Aeschylus’ play):73 Forgotten never!—Spirit unsubdued! Amid that land of frozen plains and souls, Are beating hearts that wake long, weary nights, Unseen, to listen to thy far-off sigh; And stealthily the serf, amid his toils Looks up to see thy form against the sky. O for the day of rising! When thy voice Shall shake the mountains, and its trumpet tones Wake up an hundred echoes on the plains . . .74

It was, however, quite another matter to imagine what might happen if Promethean black men rebelled in the Caribbean or Tennessee. Indeed, Hickman points out that in a strange instance of the ‘Promethean slave’ trope, the blackness of a prominent slave rebel needed to be remarked upon in order to clarify the reference. In an Atlantic Monthly article (February 1860), Thomas Wentworth Higginson heroized the (by Higginson’s time) near-legendary Jamaican Maroon uprising of the 1730s, led by Captain Cudjoe (an escaped slave descended from Ashanti people of the Gold Coast), by identifying them as ‘the Circassians [i.e. Caucasians] of the New World, but they were black, instead of white’.75 Cudjoe could only be conceived as a black congener of the ‘true’ Promethean, the Caucasian rebel Schamyl, leader of the largely Muslim but acceptably pale Dagestan and Chechen mountaineers. ‘Promethean’ black rebellion is here valorized only by reference to a white one. Although there is some truth in these observations, it seems to me that the problem with Prometheus was far more serious and complicated than a simple matter of his skin colour. As we have seen, a black female Prometheus appeared on an American abolition publication in the 1830s; she almost certainly echoes Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793), especially plate 6, in which the eagle’s assault on the (female) rape victim Oothoon, the benign personification of America, is usually understood as an allegorical representa-

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tion of (amongst other things) American exploitation of its slaves.76 This interpretation seems particularly plausible given what Bromion, the thunder-god who has raped her, says in the text close to this image: Thy soft American plains are mine, and mine thy north & south: Stampt with my signet are the swarthy children of the sun; They are obedient, they resist not, they obey the scourge: Their daughters worship terrors and obey the violent.77

Oothoon represents the Arcadian natural environment of North America, superimposed on which are the ‘swarthy children of the sun’, who obey the scourge and the violent. Another American Prometheus who was used in the most mainstream and least politically unsettling abolitionist culture of the midnineteenth century was the equally helpless elderly Prometheus of Nathaniel Parker Willis’s poem ‘Parrhasius’. This strand in the reception of Prometheus allowed ‘single-issue’ poets to protest against the cruelty of slavery without incurring the risk of suggesting that any other social reform might be necessary or desirable. Martial’s account of the execution of criminals sometimes taking the form of the amphitheatre staging of the death of Prometheus had circulated fairly widely in English-speaking poetic circles since Thomas May’s English translation of Selected Epigrams of Martial had appeared in 1629: As to the Scythian rock Prometheus bound, Fed stil a bird with his breasts deathless wound Laureolus on no false gibber nere, So yeelds his brest a Calidonean beare His torne bloud-dopping members liv’d one wound, And in’s whole body was no body found. Sure he, that fuster’d thus, with impious sword Murder’d his Father, or had staine his Lord; Or rob’d the temples of their sacred gold, Or tired Rome, what ere, that crime of old His crime surpast; so what they did invent Of t’others harme, was his true punishment.78

But a much more useful Prometheus for the abolitionists was included in the appalling account preserved in the elder Seneca’s Controversiae 10.5 of the Athenian artist Parrhasius, who tortured

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an aged slave taken at Olynthus to death in order to capture the authentic appearance of the figure of Prometheus.79 One of the most striking North American mid-nineteenth-century poems using Prometheus presents an upsetting dissection of one human’s ability to deny any moral responsibility for the ignoring—indeed instigating— of another’s acute physical suffering. In his ‘Parrhasius’, Nathaniel Parker Willis, a poet from Maine famous in his day, retells the story in a poem, ostensibly to comment on the appalling lengths to which ambition will force an artist to go.80 But the effect focuses visual attention far more on the dying man. While he is given no more actual words to speak than most abolitionist Prometheuses, the poet’s strategy forces the reader to strain to hear his groans of agony: The poem begins in the slave market, with the ‘gray-hair’d and majestical old man j Chained to a pillar’. Exhausted, ‘he lean’d j Prone on his massy chain’, and his gore-smeared body in this posture forcibly reminds the painter of Prometheus. Having bought the slave and brought him to his studio, Parrhasius orders him to be bound and repeatedly revived, however often he may lose consciousness from pain: ‘bend him to the rack j Press down the poison’d links into his flesh j And tear agape that healing wound afresh!’ With mounting excitement Parrhasius reproduces his writhings and the quivering of his bloodshot eye, regretting only that he cannot reproduce in paint the sound of a ‘dying groan’. In his final death throes, however, the slave becomes almost an individual as Parrhasius describes what he can hear: ‘Shivering! Hark, he mutters Brokenly now—that was a difficult breath— Another? Wilt thou never come, O Death! Look! How his temple flutters Is his heart still? Aha! Lift up his head! He shudders—gasps—Jove, help him!—so—he’s dead.’

The old slave, although almost completely objectified by the painter’s eye within the poem and by the poem’s external audience, is heard— faintly—in his own voice as he dies in agony. His suffering is a spectacle that the free white Willis displays to his free white audience; the slave is also an ancient Greek himself rather than an African; any ‘Promethean’ threat he might pose to his vicious owner and to

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society after emancipation is also evaded by making sure that he is so very palpably dead. But the poem’s depiction of his suffering remains an unusually arresting use of a classical source in the slavery debate, perhaps the more so because the rest of Willis’s oeuvre is so conservative, sentimental, and anodyne. Indeed, it is not even clear that he was committed to abolition. His longtime domestic servant was Harriet Jacobs (Fig. 8.10), the redoubtable author of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861); in the latest edition of what has been called her ‘veiled autobiography’,81 Willis appears rather marginally as the singularly unappealing ‘Mr Bruce’, a sympathizer with the South. Willis was—if a reformer at all—only a single-issue one, and uses Prometheus only in the Titan’s least threatening incarnation—aged, in agony, voiceless, a victim, and in the end conveniently dead.82 This chapter has explored some ways in which classical mythology was used during the abolition debates between the late eighteenth century and the mid-nineteenth century, in both Britain and North America. It has argued that mythological precedents and archetypes proved remarkably thin on the ground when it came to framing and elaborating the struggle for abolition, and that it was inevitable therefore that Prometheus, bound and unbound, came to dominate the world of classical mythical reference in the cultural discourse surrounding slavery. Prometheus, however, proved problematic. His association with dangerous rebels such as Milton’s Satan and the libertine Don Juan compromised his status as a forerunner of the crucified Christ; his widespread adoption by very radical political causes, especially Chartism and revolutionary socialism, meant that single-issue abolitionists had to confine their appropriations of his myth to a very few of its dimensions: victimhood, suffering, and delivery by a superhero identified with benevolent whites. Prometheus was used extensively by abolitionists, in the face of a shortage of alternative mythical candidates, but only after he had been silenced, deprived of his exceptional intelligence and foresight, stripped of his more threatening aspects (desire for revenge, implacability, ability to force major compromises with the established authority), and indeed often reconfigured as a vulnerable woman or a very old man. Examining the problem that the abolitionists had with Prometheus therefore reveals much about the possibilities of uncovering

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Figure 8.10 Harriet Jacobs, writer and abolitionist, in 1894

strands in social and psychological history through inquiring into the shapes taken by the presence of the classical past. It is in the need to find authority from the past in the form of a classical hero in order to add both moral legitimacy and aesthetic sheen to a far-reaching

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reform, and also in the radical surgery that had to be performed on the hero to make him usable, that we can sense how deep the anxieties about emancipation ran. But its eventual and gradual success also kindled great hopes, inspired more extensive reform, and underlay later nineteenth-century hopes for a fairer future. Not for nothing is Daniel Deronda, the radical agitator shackled by his health, likened implicitly to Prometheus on his rock in George Eliot’s 1876 novel.83 To conclude on a less depressing and appropriately edifying note, here is a short poem entitled simply ‘Prometheus’ by the Scotsman and utopian visionary Ebenezer Storey (or Storry) Hay (pen-name ‘Fleta’), a solicitor who emigrated to New Zealand:84 By leaving the second stanza metrically incomplete, ‘Fleta’ implies that history awaits a new chapter altogether. The problem with Prometheus was not so much that he was eventually unbound. The real problem was the danger he posed to the established order. He had unique knowledge which could either keep Zeus on his throne or depose him. This meant that he was able to force Zeus into a compromise of cosmic proportions: the humans he had befriended never did give back fire, the world-transforming primordial privilege which Prometheus had wrested from the elite gods, the Olympian master class. How long, devouring vultures, will ye pierce With sharp and sluttish bills my flesh, and tear With agonising wrench your bloody fare From my exhaustless sides? Relentless, fierce, Meet ministers of Jupiter ye are! Whose gifts to men are massacre and war, And trampling pride, and all that is averse To that sweet lore I filched them from afar. But I, who have foreknowledge of all things, Know the predestined hour will come when He And all the race of tyrants and of kings Must fall, and man in brotherhood be free— Then all these sleepless years and your foul stings Shall have for guerdon Love and Liberty.85

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NOTES 1. Hickman (2008), although he ascribes the poem, incorrectly, to James Montgomery. 2. The question of the disputed authorship of the play is irrelevant to this chapter, since in the period under discussion hardly anyone doubted that it had been composed by Aeschylus. 3. The only known existing copy is held in the rare-book collection of the Newberry Library, Chicago. See Bayne (2004). 4. Barbauld (1825), vol. 1, 81. 5. Wood (2000), 4. 6. Wood (2000), 4. 7. See Raggio (1958); Jolle (2004), 398. 8. Cited in Ziolkowski (2000), 112–13. 9. The comparison receives its most fulsome expression in Edgar Quinet’s dramatic poem Pre´face a` Prome´the´e (1857), where Prometheus is liberated by two Archangels and converts to Christianity. 10. This tradition was derived from the account of his modelling of men from mud in Apollodorus’ Bibliotheke 1.7.1. 11. Now in the City of Auckland Art Gallery, New Zealand, reproduced in Tate Gallery (1975), 81. 12. Tate Gallery (1975), 84. 13. Hall and Macintosh (2005), 209–10. 14. The cartoon, which is held in the Walker Art Gallery in Liverpool, is available to be studied permanently online at www.liverpoolmuseums. org.uk/walker/exhibitions/romney/cartoons/cartoons13.aspx. 15. Curran (1986b). 16. Wood (2000), 216. 17. See Mellor (1995), 351–6. 18. See above, p. 20 and Fig. 1.9. 19. See further Hall and Macintosh (2005), ch. 7. 20. For the interplay between abolitionist iconography and Flaxman’s illustrations of Aeschylus, see also Maurice Lee (2005), 185. 21. Leidner (1989), 178. For an excellent recent discussion of the Romantics’ Prometheus see Corbeau (2005), esp. chs. 2–3. 22. See Trousson (1976), vol. 2, 336–9; Podlecki (2005), 52. 23. Bloom (1960), 79–80. 24. Werblowsky (1952), 47–8. 25. Newton (1749), vol. 1, 17.

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26. Newton calls this Prometheus Bound lines 991–4; in modern colometry it is actually lines 992–5. 27. Coleridge (1817), vol. 2, 219; see further Quillin (2005). 28. Clarke (1868), 203–4. 29. See the text reproduced in Clarke (1868), 234. 30. See Jolle (2004), 396. 31. See further Junker (2000), 49–50. 32. Wood (2000), 23. 33. Sartre (1969 [1948]), 5. 34. Campbell (1986), 39. 35. W. Du Bois (1965 [1903]), 263–6; see further Brodwin (1972), 307–9 and Cowherd (2003). 36. W. Du Bois (1911), 71–3. 37. Sisyphus provides an excellent example of the susceptibility of Greek mythical figures to appropriation by individuals holding diametrically opposing views. The well-educated South Carolina plantation owner Louisa McCord, a vociferous pro-slavery thinker, in a review of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin had likened the southern slaveholders’ need to refute ‘foul load of slander and villainous aspersion’ laid on their shoulders to the labour of Sisyphus, except that his punishment was in a sense of deserved, whereas the slave-holders were entirely innocent of any crime: McCord (1853), 81. 38. See Wetmore (2003), ch. 4 and also Malamud, below, pp. 295–6. 39. See Hall (2008), ch. 7 and McConnell (2009). 40. The story was told in the fragmentary tragedy Telephus by Euripides, which was parodied in Aristophanes’ extant Acharnians. See also Pausanias 1.4.9 and Hyginus, Fab. 100–1, Ovid, Met. 12.112, Trist. 5.2.15, Remed. Am. 47, Epist. ex Ponto 2. 26. 41. Pechme´ja (1780), vol. 6, 216–17; see Seeber (1937), 157. 42. Barlow (1807), 292. 43. The paintings were commissioned by the Pennsylvania Academy, which exhibited eleven of them in 1807, and reproductions included in the edition published that year, Barlow (1807). 44. Barlow (1807), 293. 45. Many critics have, I think incorrectly, assumed that ‘Typhon’ is an old way of spelling ‘Typhoon’, which would remove the sense of a primal divinity retaliating against the slave traders. But the spelling typhoon, according to the OED, was certainly standard by 1840: see for example Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound ii.iv.170. For a fascinating discussion of The Slave Ship in relation to Thomas Stohard’s pro-slavery engraving ‘The Voyage of the Sable Venus’ (1793), see Wood (2000), 53–4.

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46. See Hall and Macintosh (2005), 303–7. 47. Morton (1816). 48. On the ambivalent equation drawn by the Chartists between the British working class and black slaves, see Mays (2001). 49. Citations from Jones’s poem are taken from Jones (1857). 50. Hall (2010b), 44–9. 51. For the ancient sources on the slave revolt led by Eunus at Enna, in central Sicily, see Diodorus Siculus 34/35.2.1–48 and Strabo 6.2.6. There is today a large bronze statue of Eunus (‘Euno’) breaking his chains beneath the walls of the Castello di Lombardia in Enna. 52. On Valpy, himself no anti-slavery campaigner, see this volume above, pp. 77–9. 53. See e.g. Malchow (1993), 90. 54. Baldick (1987), 5. 55. See e.g. Wollstonecraft (1792), 144–5. 56. Mellor (1995); Kearns (1964), 120. 57. See Hardwick (2000). 58. Malchow (1993). 59. On the Romantic Prometheus in general see Dougherty (2006), 93–115. 60. Curran (1986a), 201. 61. Quillin (2005), 15. 62. Engerman, Drescher, and Paquette (2001), 423. 63. Brain (1904), 84–5. 64. Cole, MS comment cited in Junker (2000), 47. 65. So Junker (2000), 49. Thoreau also subsequently translated the Seven against Thebes, having begun to work on Aeschylus in 1839, during a period when he was in very close correspondence with Ralph Waldo Emerson. At this time Thoreau professed himself extremely interested in the figure of ‘the brave man’: see Kaiser (1960), 3. For discussions of Thoreau’s education and reading in the Classics, see Seybold (1951) and Kaiser (1953). 66. Maurice Lee (2005), 186–7. Margaret Fuller, the transcendentalist whose twin causes were feminism and abolitionism, strongly encouraged other women to study Greek myth, especially stories involving figures such as Prometheus and Minerva who represented mental faculties. See Capper (1987), 517. Her study of German literature had included making a translation of Goethe’s ‘Prometheus’, according to Schultz (1942), 175. 67. Junker (2000), especially 54 n. 48. 68. Unpublished and unfinished essay by Page on the poetry of Lowell, cited in Junker (2000), 50. 69. Davis (1998), 71–2.

246 70. 71. 72. 73.

74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82.

83. 84. 85.

Edith Hall Andrews (1986), 229. Hickman (2008). See Percival (1859), vol. 2. See the epigraph to the poem (reproduced in Hervey (1866), 225–7), which is discussed for its political fervour but without reference to the serf uprising in Trousson (1976), vol. 2, 344–5. Hervey (1866), 227. ‘The Maroons of Jamaica’, reproduced in Higginson (1889), 116–50 at p. 116. Curran (1986a), 444 with 448 fig. 2; Podlecki (2005), 57; Hutchings (2001). Blake (1965), 45. May (1629), no. 7 (no page number). For a brilliant discussion of the ancient text and its relevance to modern discussions of the limits of realism see Morales (1996). Willis (1850), 77–82. Baker (1999), 4. The Parrhasius story was used after the American Civil War in a pseudoclassical tragedy by the Louisiana playwright Espy Williams, written in 1878, and performed often in New Orleans until at least 1889. The slavery issue was deracialized and complicated in another direction by making Parrhasius’ wife the long-lost daughter of the slave whose torture was central to the plot. A shortened version of Williams’ Parrhasius was then produced by the famous Shakespearian actor Robert Mantell, with some success, in provincial theatres in San Francisco, Memphis, and Kansas: see Nolan (1961). At the end of ch. 16, Deronda’s psychological suffering is likened to ‘the cry of Prometheus’; see also the motto at the head of ch. 38. Reproduced from Sladen (1888), 215; Hay had published some of his own poems in his study of Wordsworth (1881). This essay has benefited greatly from the input it received when delivered in three North American contexts. In February 2009 it was delivered as the James Dolliver lecture at the University of Puget Sound; in February and March 2010 it was delivered as the Edith Kreeger Wolf Lecture in Humanities at Northwestern University, Evanston, Illinois, and at the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts, Notre Dame University, as the Provost’s Distinguished Women’s Lecture. I am especially grateful for the insightful remarks of David Lupher, Elizabeth Vandiver, Sara Monoson, Kate Bosher, Patrice Rankine, Bonnie Honig, and Isabelle Torrance.

9 Recollecting Aristotle Pro-Slavery Thought in Antebellum America and the Argument of Politics Book 1 S. Sara Monoson

In the view of Southern slave-owners passionate about the excellence of planter society, the growing national and international movement for the immediate and total abolition of black slavery in the United States which was gathering steam in the 1830s, appeared nothing short of ‘fanatical’, and the need for an aggressive response, urgent.1 In the torrent of pro-slavery propaganda that ensued, Aristotle played a prominent and often noted, yet poorly understood, role. Southern academics, politicians, and polemicists who read Aristotle’s work either in Greek or in translation or who encountered elements of his philosophy through its representation in the work of others, claimed him as a notable progenitor of the pro-slavery cause. Some took evident pleasure in recalling that this venerable Greek philosopher was a ‘warm’, ‘strenuous’, and ‘zealous’ advocate of slavery.2 Some pronounced his writings ‘man’s best guide’, second only to the Bible.3 Scripture was the main moralizing reference point within the debates, but in this chapter I would like to consider whether the various references to Aristotle were more than ‘learned embroidery’ to the main argument.4 Are the appeals to Aristotle in various proslavery sources a sign of a significant consideration of his political philosophy among the Southern intelligentsia, or simply a further example of the very nineteenth-century American penchant for

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deploying ancient authorities whenever possible?5 I consider in this chapter the extent to which American pro-slavery propaganda of the 1830s–50s exhibits any intellectual engagement with the arguments of Aristotle’s Politics book 1. Interpretation of this inglorious episode in the reception history of classical antiquity is a surprisingly tricky project. For example, not once did John C. Calhoun, a beloved Southern leader (he served as senator from South Carolina, vice-president under two different presidents, and was himself once a leading candidate for president), actually mention Aristotle in his many, widely circulated and highly esteemed speeches in support of slavery. Yet, in an 1840 private letter he makes plain his own familiarity with and affection for Aristotle’s writings on politics: I would advise a young man . . . to read the best elementary treatise on Government, including Aristotle’s, which I regard as among the best.6

His contemporaries celebrated perceived similarities between their views.7 Another source suggests a different kind of difficulty. George Fitzhugh, a popularizer of the pro-slavery argument, mentions Aristotle only in the context of chiding comments aimed at philosophers in general in his 1854 tract, Sociology for the South. But, once alerted by an admiring correspondent to connections between the views developed in that essay and the content of the philosopher’s works, he laments his own earlier failure to draw on that resource. Writing in response he says: I am in a fix. If I admit I never read Aristotle, why I am no scholar. If I did read him, I am a plagiarist.8

He vows to make full use of Aristotle in his future work and indeed does so, as is apparent in the text of his next wildly popular polemic of 1857, Cannibals All! These examples suggest some of the methodological complexities that attend this investigation. I keep in focus the extent to which recollecting Aristotle could be, in the hands of American pro-slavery writers, a politically potent act and investigate why some writers purposefully and explicitly ‘draft’ Aristotle into service,9 rather than focusing on every substantive commonality recognizable to us today.

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I begin by setting out overviews of the argument of Politics book I and of the contours of pro-slavery ideology so that the basic resemblances between these two perspectives that have exercised commentators are clear.10 I then detail three contexts within which these propagandists routinely, and explicitly, turn to Aristotle. First, I show that they rely upon Aristotle to anchor their pro-slavery activism in a sophisticated philosophical objection to natural rights theory, shielding it from the charge of being motivated by colour prejudice or race hatred. Second, I demonstrate that they appeal to Aristotle to shore up their view that the North in truth practises a variant of slavery—wage slavery—that causes far more human misery than chattel slavery as practised in planter society in the South. They also use references to Aristotle to differentiate their sociological critique of industrial capitalism from that of contemporary socialists. Third, I explain that Southern propagandists appeal to Aristotle’s theory of natural slavery to support their identification of black Africans as that part of the human family naturally suited to slavery. Some, recognizing that Aristotle’s theory in Politics book I actually struggles to identify precisely who qualifies as a natural slave, further claim that American pro-slavery theory’s basis in race represents a significant advance over Aristotle’s reliance upon examination of the native social and political condition of candidate populations. I conclude by discussing an inconvenient aspect of the argument of Politics book I that pro-slavery propagandists consistently ignore, whether wilfully or not. They disregard the fact that Aristotle’s discussion is occasioned by contemporary attacks on the justice of slavery. The text of the Politics makes clear that Aristotle was arguing with abolitionists in his own time and not, as pro-slavery writers regularly suggest, simply setting out the philosophical justification of a practice that went unquestioned during venerable Greek antiquity.

I. THE BASIC RESEMBLANCE OF PRO-SLAVERY THOUGHT TO THE ARGUMENT OF POLITICS B OOK 1 The central claims of Aristotle’s Politics book 1 can be simply stated. Nature produces a plurality of sorts of people. This variation has

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moral and political importance. He proposes that, as political scientists, we must decipher these differences and conduct a normative inquiry into how best to order them hierarchically and into partnerships so as to form a just state and thus produce the material conditions necessary for human happiness, virtue, and freedom to come into being in the world. As scientists, we can identify slave, along with male, female, adult, child as differences found in nature. We can further understand that a partnership between a natural slave and a natural ruler can form a simple compound that, when joined together with other simple compounds (husband and wife, father and children), produces a household capable of generating wealth. This compound combines, in turn, with other households to form more complex social organisms—villages and cities—that can develop social, economic, and political formations supportive of prosperity, virtue, and happiness. As the 1853 translation puts it: Hence it is evident, that a state is one of the works of nature, and that man is naturally a political animal, and that whosoever is, naturally, and not accidentally, unfit for society, must be either inferior or superior to man . . . It is clear then, that man is truly a more social animal than bees.11

To best understand the distinct purposes and excellence of the most complex form of natural human association, a political community, Aristotle insists one must start by investigating in detail the character of its component parts. And so he attends to the master–slave relationship in detail. He offers definitions of ‘natural slave’ that capture the sociological condition of such status. A slave is ‘an ensouled article of property’, an instrument for the maintenance of life separable from its owner, and a person who is not merely the slave of the master but who wholly belongs to the master.12 He continues by stressing that while all human beings have reason, not all are capable of deliberation and ruling. Some souls possess a deficient form of reason. He concludes, again in the 1853 rendering: From the hour of their birth, some are marked out for the purpose of obeying, and others for ruling . . . [there are some who are] inferior to their fellows as the body is to the soul, or brutes to men . . . these, I say are slaves by nature . . . some are free by nature, and others are slaves, and that in the case of the latter the lot of slavery is both advantageous and just.13

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It is advantageous because the master–slave relationship supplies a slave with rational direction and a pathway to participation in excellence. Aristotle proposes that the relationship addresses the deficiency of the slave in a way that is mutually beneficial to both parties. A natural slave gains some skills and forms of knowledge appropriate to his service activities and an opportunity to practise a variant of the moral virtues like courage and temperance, even a form of happiness. The master gains both wealth and release from labour (e.g. drudgery, menial tasks, and debilitating work) and can spend his leisure time developing his public and intellectual life. The relation is just, then, because being rooted in nature, it advances the high purposes of the polis (not just life but good life) and, when properly practised, amounts to an exercise of authority that tends to the well-being of the ruled (slave) as well as the ruler (master)— indeed to that of the entire household and community. Aristotle goes to great lengths to explain how one should go about empirically determining in practice precisely who is indeed fitted for slavery. As slave nature is based on a condition of soul, it is not easily visible. His answer, too complicated to recount here, is that barbarian peoples act in their own lands in a manner that supports the inference that they have a natural deficiency of reason that suits them for dependence on natural rulers. In book 1 he also argues that accumulating wealth through the production of agricultural surpluses is more conducive to the development of the habits of virtue than mercantile or financial activities and thus reasons that communities based on agriculture are better positioned to form good political orders.14 Aristotle’s theory can be viewed as a defence of the polis from the very real threats to its continued survival as the locus of independent political activity presented by the conquests of Philip and Alexander. A sense of peril also frames the development of pro-slavery ideology in the South. Calls for immediate abolition raged in the United States from the 1830s. International developments (abolition in Britain and its possessions, several Caribbean, Central and South American nations, including Mexico in 1829) and the enactment of a wave of emancipation statutes in Northern states made a choice between abolition and civil war appear inevitable. William Lloyd Garrison’s Liberator began publishing. Abolitionist literature blanketed the

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South, prompting efforts to suppress its distribution, even to confiscate the US mail. In addition, Nat Turner’s Slave Rebellion, know in Virginia as ‘the Southampton Massacre’, made the threat of violent insurrection palpable and the need to avert it pressing. National political crises and tenuous resolutions were nearly routine (e.g. Three-fifths Compromise, Missouri Compromise, nullification, Fugitive Slave Act). Pro-slavery theorists understood that to face down the new wave of ‘incendiary’15 demands for immediate abolition and shore up the resolve of compatriots they had to offer more than a plea for tolerance of their peculiar institution as a necessary ‘evil’. They had to argue that it was an unadulterated positive good and should remain a permanent feature of Southern culture. Southern leaders took up this challenge with relish, eagerly setting out to ‘meet the enemy on the frontier’.16 The tracts they produced fearlessly and sometimes brilliantly attach the defence of slavery to a conception of the grand meaning of America meant to compete with the vision of the more liberal founders like Jefferson. They question, at times rail against, natural rights theory and the philosophical abstraction, ‘rights of man’, as well as what they take to be the empirically falsifiable notion of the ‘natural equality of all’. They unabashedly question the sagacity of phrase ‘all men are born free and equal’ enshrined in the Declaration of Independence.17 Instead, they argue for founding American politics on the premiss that inequalities are rooted in Nature and ordained by God. Of necessity, they claim, in every society there are those suited to command and be free, and those destined for a labouring life of one sort or another. Scripture confirms it. Furthermore, history reveals that civilization itself requires such ordered hierarchies among human beings. ‘In all social systems,’ one famous pro-slavery oration before the US Senate begins, ‘there must be a class to do the menial duties, to perform the drudgery of life . . . Such a class . . . constitutes the very mud-sill of society and political government; and you might as well attempt to build a house in the air, as to build either the one or the other, except on this mud-sill.’18 Great ones marked by exceptional cultural achievement are no exception; witness Greece and Rome. America’s excellence, too, requires slavery. This is apparent, they imply, if one examines contemporary American society critically. The accomplishments of the North, as well as the South are in fact both predicated

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on forms of slavery—nasty ‘wage slavery’ in the industrial North and kind black slavery in the agricultural South. And each part of America today faces fanatics who would bring chaos and misery; consider abolitionism and radical socialism. Allowing black slavery to flourish and expand could shape the economic life of the nation, they suggest, enabling the whole country to ‘retard’19 the awful conflicts between labour and capital that beset every age, thus setting America on its rightful path to greatness. The alternative is the collapse of the Union. ‘Abolition and the Union cannot co-exist,’ former VicePresident Calhoun declared. He continued, ‘As a friend of the Union I openly proclaim it . . . To maintain the existing relations between the two races, inhabiting that section of the Union is indispensable to the peace and happiness of both.’20 To complete the defence of slavery advocates had to demonstrate not only that slavery is a natural and necessary institution but that two further claims were also true: first, that in being based on black slavery, planter society is indeed founded on a correct identification of a specific population suited to slave status and, second, that black slavery as practised is, for both slave and master, ‘a positive good’.21 Accordingly, pro-slavery propagandists set out to amass what they took to be compelling empirical evidence for the slavish nature of black Africans and for the benefits of the relationship of master and slave that accrue to whites and blacks alike. They wade into demography, sociology, and, of course, religion.22 And they offer anecdotal evidence and personal testimony in support of some astonishing assertions. For example, Professor Thomas R. Dew, president of the College of William and Mary, proposed that ‘A merrier being does not exist on the face of the globe than the Negro slave of the United States.’23 There are indeed obvious similarities between the argument of Politics Book 1 and Southern pro-slavery ideology. Both take human nature to be plural, a hierarchical social order to be a part of nature, and slavery to be a natural element of a key building block of that order, the household. Both assert that some human beings are fitted by their very nature for slavery and that a reliable means of identifying precisely who that is can be explicated. Both locate the origin of wealth in the productivity of labour. Both assume the enjoyment of

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freedom requires a release from labour. Both insist on the coincident nature of the interests of master and slave. Both conclude, in the words of the modern writers, that slavery is best understood not as a necessary evil but rather as a positive good. Leading Southern theorists observed the parallels. As we saw above, after gaining some familiarity with Aristotle’s writing at the behest of a correspondent, in a private letter Fitzhugh worried that his own earlier writings probably appear to have plagiarized Aristotle. In the opening pages of a subsequent publication he recalls the experience: ‘We procured in New York a copy of Aristotle’s Politics and Economics. To our surprise, we found that our theory of the origin of society was identical with his, and that we had employed not only the same illustrations but the very same words.’24 Others note similarities less dramatically. Dew’s important Review of the Debate in the Virginia Legislature of 1831 and 1832 reminds readers that Aristotle, like contemporary Southerners, maintains that it was ‘reasonable, necessary and natural . . . [for] comparatively few freemen to be served by many slaves’. He continues, suggesting that, like modern opponents of abolition, Aristotle ‘believed slavery necessary to keep alive the spirit of freedom’.25 Chancellor (i.e. Chief Judge) of South Carolina William Harper, observes connections between Aristotle’s thought and Southern political theory when he says in a speech: I know of few works more worthy to be recommended than the Politics of Aristotle. Little of what is just or profound on the principles of government has appeared since, of which the traces may not be found there.26

William Grayson, a writer best known for his reply in verse to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, in 1856 stresses that Calhoun’s theories are ‘as ancient as Aristotle’.27 Nevertheless, while it is certainly true that these observations suggest that some Southern writers found reading Aristotle ‘a deep source of inspiration’28 and took comfort in his company, it would be absurd, of course, to say any favoured slavery because they followed Aristotle.

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II. CITING ARISTOTLE’S POLITICS IN RESISTANCE TO THE AUTHORITY OF PREVAILING NATURAL RIGHTS THEORY A new edition of the Greek text of the Politics (with accompanying Latin translation) as well as at least three translations into English were all in circulation during the 1830s–50s.29 This wave of scholarly and publishing activity may itself be a sign of the political significance conservative thinkers of the time invested in Aristotle’s political writings.30 The tenor of the introductory essay by Gillies produced for the 1804 edition and reprinted in a new edition for Oxford’s Bohn’s Classical Series in 1853 suggests as much. Gillies straightforwardly asserts that Aristotle stands as a corrective to the ‘specious theory’ (i.e. natural rights) advanced by Locke, Rousseau, Paine, and the ‘innumerable pamphleteers whose writings occasioned or accompanied the American and French revolutions’. It continues, Such works . . . have produced and are still producing, the most extraordinary effects; by arming the passions of the multitude with a false principle, fortifying them by specious arguments.

He acknowledges that challenging Locke means broaching the ‘delicate subject of slavery’ but does not address the issue, content only to expresses confidence in ‘the judgment of my author’.31 Pro-slavery propagandists, however, recognize that in Aristotle they had a nearperfect vehicle for situating their objections to abolition in a rigorous philosophical protest against the dominant—and to them pernicious—political theory of the time, the doctrine of natural rights. Linking the pro-slavery cause to opposition to natural rights theory would, they hoped, catapult pro-slavery thought into the realm of grand social theory and provide, at least in their own eyes, a measure of protection from the charge of narrow-minded colour prejudice and irrational race hatred. Early evidence for this appears in an 1838 essay, ‘Thoughts on Slavery’, for the Southern Literary Messenger. The anonymous author (‘a Southron’) opens his case for slavery based on Scripture with

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some comments on the insidious reasoning of natural rights theory. In particular, he appeals to Aristotle to show that Montesquieu ‘feebly’ reasons that slavery originates ‘in the establishment of a right, which gives one man such power over another, as renders him absolute master of his life and fortune’ and denounces slavery wholesale as ‘bad in its own nature’ because, by necessity, it causes only harm, producing no good at all. From this mistaken view, Southron continues, Montesquieu infers that the state of slavery . . . is neither useful to the master nor to the slave; not to the slave because he can do nothing through a motive of virtue, nor to the master, because by having an unlimited authority over his slaves, he insensibly accustoms himself to the want of all moral virtues, and becomes fierce, hasty, choleric, voluptuous, and cruel.32

Southron finds this view thoroughly obnoxious. ‘This is not slavery as it exists in this country,’ he protests. In the United States slavery is regulated by law. The US Constitution made slavery an ‘integral portion of federal representation’, he reminds readers.33 What really unsettles him so is that the ‘friends of the rights of man’ characterize slavery as necessarily vicious. He allows that it can be cruel. He accepts that at times and in places ‘abuses of slavery’ have taken place and have caused suffering and vice. But, he insists, ‘with the abuses of slavery we have no concern: it has been abused in every age, by every people’.34 Because Scripture teaches that slavery is the result of the ‘agency of the Creator himself ’35 and the influence of religion can, he argues, produce kind masters and happy slaves, a true account of slavery’s origin must, unlike Montesquieu’s, leave room for its capacity to be beneficial. A true account of its origin would demonstrate that ‘the denunciations of slavery in all writers upon natural law apply only to the flagrant abuse of this institution’, not to the institution itself. He proposes that just such an account can be found through ‘an attentive perusal of the first six chapters of Aristotle’s political treatise’.36 He then spends quite a few pages reporting Aristotle’s view of social life as natural to man, focusing on detailing why he proposes that husband, wife, children, and slaves are the necessary elements of the family, the first and most natural development of man’s essentially social nature.

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The strongest expression of the importance of Aristotle’s standing as an opponent of natural rights theory for pro-slavery thought appears in the fiery work of the popular propagandist, George Fitzhugh.37 He even admits to his readers that couching certain claims in Aristotelian reasoning is a necessary part of the presentation of a strong case for slavery. For example, Fitzhugh tells his readers point blank that while his own claim to any authority on such matters might be thought ‘repulsive’ by many, the same cannot be said about the identical doctrine ‘coming from Aristotle’.38 Delivering certain views through the medium of an Aristotelian objection to the theory of natural right, he implies, makes them appear to be based on matters of principle and thus harder to dismiss as the product of colour prejudice or hatred. He follows through on this in two publications both of which appeared in 1857—his popular propagandist tract, Cannibals All! and quasi-scholarly joint review of the 1853 Walford edition of the Politics and Economics of Aristotle and 1851 (posthumous) publication of Calhoun’s Disquisition on Government for De Bow’s Review. At the outset of Cannibals All! Fitzhugh proclaims: ‘the true vindication of slavery must be founded on [Aristotle’s] theory of man’s social nature, as opposed to Locke’s theory of the Social Contract’.39 He offers his popular readership a condensed account of that theory, focusing on the natural place of slaves in a wellordered household. He invites readers to infer that abolition would initiate the collapse of healthy families, and, in turn, cause the breakdown of the entire social and political order. He frames his discussion with an appeal to Aristotle to suggest that to defend slavery is, in effect, to defend the cause of civilization itself against the destructive influences of social contract and natural rights theory. Abolition is, from this vantage point, a fanatical outgrowth of this prevailing philosophy. With Aristotle on board he can urge that they, not us, are the irrational extremists in the grip of a false ideology. In his essay for De Bow’s Review Fitzhugh pleads this case even more aggressively. He implores fellow Southerners to recognize that ‘while statesmen, not philosophers, formed our government, the latter threw in and attached a plentiful batch of abstractions, taken from the doctrines of Locke, Rousseau, and such like political

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visionaries, that have done no good and are threatening much harm’. He explains: Unfortunately for us of America, the minds of Franklin, Jefferson, Paine, and probably many others who gave tone and direction to public opinion during, and just after our revolution, were tinctured with this rash philosophy.

It has fallen to anti-abolitionists to ‘assail’ that entire philosophy. But, he laments, ‘there is little other political philosophy in the world’ upon which to draw. It is time, he continues, for ‘the religious, the moral and the conservative’ to search out an ‘opposite philosophy with which to repel and refute their assaults’. He revels in his discovery of Walford’s 1853 English edition of Aristotle. ‘In this work of Aristotle will be found the book which they need.’ Aristotle is the ‘fountain-head’ of a whole tradition of thought in which the South should gleefully place itself.40 A first step toward producing a generation of Southern intellectuals fully cognizant of the South’s standing as the true heir to a venerable tradition would be, Fitzhugh urges, ‘to cast aside all our old school books and text books and adopt new ones’.41 He acknowledges that many are in the process of producing such invaluable new works and identifies Calhoun as a pioneer in this regard. But he insists that none can compare to Aristotle. That is why he so enthusiastically recommends the edition of Calhoun’s writings on government edited by Richard Cralle. In his view, ‘Calhoun . . . maintains much of the doctrines of Aristotle.’42 Since the Walford edition came out three years after Calhoun’s death in 1850 Fitzhugh assumes that it is doubtful that Calhoun had actually read Aristotle. That is probably not right. The Ellis edition was available and Calhoun does betray familiarity with it in his personal correspondence.43 Nevertheless, from Fitzhugh’s point of view, Calhoun’s presumed unfamiliarity with Aristotle’s writings makes his work even more important. For him, ‘the coincidence of opinion between these two great, observant, learned, and experienced men, living more than two thousand years apart, goes far to strengthen the authority of Aristotle [and] to prove his adaptation for modern use’.44 The doctrines of Calhoun and Aristotle repudiating social contract theory are, he insists, ‘of vital importance to the South’ and their treatises should ‘be used as text books in our schools’.45 While such pronouncements bolstered

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Southern self-confidence, they inspired little more than mockery in the North. For example, one abolitionist orator announced: I know there are men in Virginia and South Carolina who quote Aristotle and Cicero in favor of American slavery; they seem to have read the translations of these authors only to get arguments against the Natural Rights of mankind. Similar men have studied the Old Testament but to find out that Abraham was a slaveholder, that Moses authorized bondage; they have read the New Testament only to find divine inspiration in the words of Paul, which they wrest into this: ‘Slaves, Obey your masters.’46

III. ARISTOTLE’S PART IN THE SOCIOLOGICAL CASE FOR SLAVERY IN THE AMERICAN SOUTH Another striking feature of Southern pro-slavery writing is its sociological cast. Pro-slavery writers supplement the philosophical justification of slavery discussed above with a case for the excellence of the Southern plantation model of slavery in particular. They root this case in what they take to be a careful analysis of empirical reality. They focus on detailing what they take to be the material advantages of living in bondage on a plantation when compared with other forms of service observable throughout history and across cultures. They aim especially to establish a contrast between the deprivations suffered by free labouring people in increasingly densely populated contemporary European and Northern industrial societies and what they believe to be the comfortable material condition of black slaves in Southern plantation society. In this way they expect to inoculate themselves against charges wielded by abolitionists that slavery is, by necessity, vicious. Instead, pro-slavery writers insist that slavery in the American South is a kindly institution that arouses paternalistic feelings among owners. Pro-slavery writers appeal to Aristotle to support the sociological element of their argument in two distinctive ways. First, they position their turn to the empirical evidence as an Aristotelian, and therefore intellectually sound, move. As Harvey Wish detailed in 1949, a ‘more or less explicit’ notion of a ‘direct antithesis in social

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philosophy between Aristotle and Plato . . . was applied to the sectional conflict’.47 From the Southern point of view, Northern abolitionists and socialists practise a model of thinking akin to Plato’s utopianism and wild flights of imagination while they, in contrast, follow Aristotle’s practice of reasoning from extensive observation. When Scripture is not sufficient, one pro-slavery activist stresses, the ‘only efficient, trustworthy mode of procedure is by reference to history, and by legitimate induction from the facts which human experience may offer’.48 Second, they draw upon Aristotle to argue that the abject condition of free labourers in industrial society renders their formal status as ‘free men’ nearly farcical. Instead, they propose, such workers are in truth in relations of dependence best captured by the provocative phrase, ‘wage slaves’, and necessarily suffer living conditions more terrible than those of the typical black slave.49 In an 1850 essay explicitly designed to deepen Southern proslavery thought by drawing upon Aristotle, the scholar George Frederick Holmes argues that in Politics book 1 Aristotle identifies slavery as a specific ‘relation of dependence’ in which the slave has no control over the disposition of his own person and no property of his own.50 He claims that free industrial labourers are in a conceptually identical condition. They are utterly dependent upon a relationship with an employer to secure all their material needs and labour under conditions that preclude any accumulation of wealth. Plus, he reasons, the inner logic of industrial capitalism causes the reduction of labourers to a condition of near destitution and unmitigated misery— employers can maximize the extraction of wealth from these labourers only by driving wages down as much as possible. Their lives are consumed with activity aimed at securing merely the material conditions of life (much of that activity mind-numbing drudgery) and admit of little, if any, opportunity to take up activity that expresses human freedom—autonomy, contemplation, or political activity. Industrial labourers do not enjoy any meaningful freedom. They enjoy no true independence. They have no leisure time in which to cultivate virtue and excellence. They are in a condition that Aristotle’s theory identifies as distinctly unfree.51 And so a proper sociological understanding of American society shows that two different forms of slavery power its economic development, wage

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slavery in the North and black chattel slavery in the South.52 Referring to northern conditions as virtual slavery, Holmes calmly insists, ‘The absence of the name is no evidence of the absence of the reality.’53 The Aristotelian critique of free labour by pro-slavery thinkers like Holmes resembles that of contemporary socialists and they acknowledge this. For example, the propagandist Fitzhugh writes: Nothing written on the subject of slavery from the time of Aristotle, is worth reading, until the days of the modern Socialists. Nobody, treating of it, thought it worthwhile to enquire from history and statistics, whether the physical and moral condition of emancipated serfs or slaves had been improved or rendered worse by emancipation. None would condescend to compare the evils of domestic slavery with the evils of liberty without property.54

Pro-slavery writers stress, with the socialist critics, that wage slavery produces large numbers of whites who do not live self-directed lives but instead suffer oppression and exploitation that renders them perpetually impoverished. The way in which northern capitalists’ extract wealth from labouring whites is, Fitzhugh says, a form of ‘moral cannibalism’.55 In his view, and in that of mainstream Southern pro-slavery writers, Northern American society thus offers no advance at all over the old societies of Europe in which pauperism, wretchedness, and unrest (e.g. the revolutions of 1848) are rampant.56 In the tumultuous national politics that followed the economic depression of 1837, moreover, critiques of capital expressed by Calhoun, the South’s most prominent national political figure, appealed to some labour activists on the ‘radical left’. Seeking a way to reduce the influence of the business class and moderate the power of the federal government, some labour Jacksonians advanced the ‘perverse proposal that labour’s redemption depended on the slaveholders’ triumph’ and worked to forge a slave- holding/labour political alliance.57 Unlike socialists and other left-leaning critics of industrial capitalism, of course, pro-slavery writers expected the struggle between capital and labour to expose the necessity and attraction of slavery and the essential truth, expressed in Aristotle, that a successful society

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requires a slave-based economy. Fitzhugh makes this point with characteristic drama: The world will only fall back on domestic slavery when all other social forms have failed and been exhausted. That hour may not be far off.58

They actually contend that slavery of the sort practised in the American South is a humane and attractive condition necessary not only to develop wealth and freedom for owners but also to advance the well-being of the labouring segment of society and to preserve the family. They attribute the good condition of slaves in part to the influence of Christianity on white owners and overseers.59 But they also consider Aristotle to have identified a main reason for its essential gentleness in the course of his argument in Politics book 2 against Plato’s proposal for common ownership and gender equality (that is, for abolishing private property and the family) in his Republic. Aristotle maintains that human beings naturally better care for things they own privately and more easily neglect the condition of things owned in common. He writes: ‘Property that is common to the greatest number of owners receives the least attention; men care most for their private possessions.’60 Aristotle stresses a complementary point in book 1 when he argues that proper household management (a part of the skill of ‘wealth-getting’) takes ‘more interest in the human members of the household than in that of its inanimate property, and in the excellence of these than in that of its property’ and goes on to detail the peculiar excellence that a natural slave can develop when placed in a relationship of dependence on a natural ruler.61 With Aristotle pro-slavery propagandists assert that it is in the very logic of ownership for a slave-owner to care for the well-being of his investment (cruelty is on this view an actionable violation, not indicative of true slave-holding behaviour). The employment of ‘wage slaves’, on the other hand, has an internal logic that will not elicit similarly beneficent behaviour from the free men of standing. One Southern propagandist could even write in all seriousness that If the English laws were to allow slavery, such as we have, there would be many more persons wishing to sell their liberty than of those wishing to buy!62

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The pro-slavers fantasized that the condition of black slaves was comfortable and advantageous, and dismissed any evidence to the contrary as malignant fictions or anomalies. Visual evidence confirms the widespread embrace of this fantasy throughout the South.63 That this attitude persisted during the Civil War is apparent from the images on Confederate currency of happy slaves cheerfully working in the fields (Fig. 9.1a, b).64 How could they be so deluded? That is of course a complex question. But clearly this is an extraordinary example of how it is possible for beliefs to be resilient in the face of an excess of contradictory evidence in plain sight. Consider that Fitzhugh wrote to Frederick Douglass suggesting that he and his fellow freemen should be immediately and beneficially re-enslaved. Competition with white labourers was, he argued, killing off freed blacks. They are ‘neither so moral, so happy, nor half so well provided as the slaves’. He even proposed a modification of slavery be made available to free blacks: ‘Let them select their masters.’65 The extraordinary claims about the material comforts enjoyed by slaves (which depended, of course, upon wilful ignorance of the vast amount of evidence of the physical brutality visited upon black people) does not exhaust the sociological case for slavery produced by pro-slavery writers, nor their interest in Aristotle in this context. They assert, as we have seen, that the very condition of dependence is a positive good. Recall that in Aristotle’s view, for slavery to be just it must benefit both free master and slave. But he does not equate access to material comforts with benefits sufficient to justify this relation of utter dependence. Instead, Aristotle’s discussion focuses on the way a relation of dependence upon the master corrects a deficiency in reason (a lack in the soul) and provides the slave with a route to the practice of a certain measure of (appropriate) virtues.66 Taking a cue from Aristotle, the ‘positive good’ theorists included fuller enumeration of the benefits of slavery for the slaves, focusing on access to Western civilization and the Christian religion. These benefits, they assume, amply satisfy the Aristotelian demand that the relation of dependence profit the slave in more ways than receipt of bodily well-being.

Figure 9.1 John W. Jones, (a) Slave mother and child; (b) Original bank note, interpreted in the series “Confederate Currency: The Color of Money” by John W. Jones

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IV. SURPASSING ARISTOTLE: RACE AND THE INTERPRETATION OF THE INTENTIONS OF NATURE Pro-slavery writers identify with Aristotle’s confident assertion that the requirements of civilization make it ‘manifest’67 that among the persons that inhabit the earth, some are slaves by personal constitution and character of soul (that is, by nature) and some are by nature free and destined to rule. And they follow Aristotle in claiming that to craft a just and prosperous state it is necessary to sort people into these categories, assign them appropriate functions, and deliver distinctive benefits. But they have a far more complex relation to Aristotle’s discussion of how it is possible to tell who is by nature of which character. Aristotle assumes that it is a difficult task to identify precisely which persons in the world are natural slaves and offers a scientific way of navigating this political problem. In sharp contrast, American pro-slavery advocates assume that it is in fact very easy to tell who is by nature suited to slavery and who to freedom because, in their view, these different conditions of soul map perfectly onto the different races. They adapt Aristotle’s arguments to their racist purposes and boldly claim that in doing so they are correcting and improving upon the wise philosopher’s work. Aristotle starts from the observation that the ‘intentions of nature’68 are not perfectly clear in individual empirical cases because a condition of soul is invisible. For Aristotle, a capacity to work philosophically with the distinction between appearances and reality is necessary to make accurate inferences from empirical observation about precisely who possesses a slavish soul and who does not. Aristotle dismisses body type as a reliable indicator of free or slave by nature even though natural slaves will be especially suited to hard physical labour. As a matter of fact, he acknowledges, ‘Slaves often have the bodies of freemen.’69 Moreover, it does not even occur to him to consider skin colour as a useful sign. He does not trust physical markers much at all. And so, he takes it to be a chief task of political science to make the intentions of nature apparent to rational people. He argues that an observable form of human activity

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must supply the basis for a reasonable inference about the slavish or free condition of a human soul. The activity to which he devotes the most extensive attention—victory and loss in war—is rejected as a poor indicator. He offers a different observable form of activity— endurance of despotism without resentment—as a good sign that faulty deliberative capacities, and thus slavish natures, are widespread in a population. And it is on this basis that he confidently concludes that natural slaves can be found among the barbarian peoples of Europe and Asia. He then offers that it is reasonable to treat these group memberships as good proxies for slavish nature. He does not argue that race itself is a physical marker of a condition of soul. Pro-slavery ideologues seized upon Aristotle’s idea of ‘natural slavery’ because it appears to give credence to their interpretation of the significance of race. But these great admirers of Aristotle should have been forced to navigate his stern warning about the unscientific character of relying upon observation of body type to judge a condition of soul. Most didn’t bother. This is in large part because they believed that scriptural authority renders this complexity in Aristotle irrelevant.70 They read the Old Testament story of the curse of Canaan and the scriptural identification of his father Ham’s dark colour as ‘a racial marking that prefigures the bodily appearance of their own black slaves’.71 Canaan and his descendants were to be slaves to his brothers and their progeny. They imagine black Africans to be the modern descendants of Canaan, ordained to be slaves to other races of men.72 A poor but persistent translation of a specific passage from book 1 has perhaps facilitated the neglect of Aristotle’s critical comments on drawing inferences from the appearance of bodies. This passage might have suggested to some pro-slavery thinkers that even though Aristotle did not argue that racial characteristics are determinate, he gestured towards the idea that visibly discernible physical ‘marks’ of slave and free nature actually existed. They reconciled Aristotle’s cautionary comments and race theory by finding in Aristotle the germ of their favoured view. In the 1853 Walford edition the passage reads: From the hour of their birth, some are marked out for the purpose of obeying, and others for ruling.73

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The verb translated ‘marked out’ is dieste¯ke (from diiste¯mi), to ‘separate out’. It carries no necessary implication of a physical marking. In other passages in book 1, for example, Aristotle uses the same verb to ‘separate’ (distinguish between) a theory of justice from the idea of rule of the stronger.74 Translating it as ‘marked out’ in the passage above betrays a modern inclination to treat ‘biological’ features as defining. In addition, this phrase appears immediately after Aristotle acknowledges that ‘authority and subordination are conditions not only necessary but also expedient’.75 Placing one in slavery or freedom from birth is an expedient. The issue that Aristotle continues to explore as this passage develops is the basis on which it is just to separate out an infant, that is, to act in an opportune way. How can one discern his nature with reasonable confidence? Aristotle later answers that a group membership—Greek or Barbarian—can indeed be a legitimate signifier. But he does not ‘ascribe these differences to race or physiognomy’ in the sense that Southern propagandists understood those terms and does not recognize biological race as a legitimate signifier.76 It is also the case that pro-slavery writers find the language of ‘natural slave’ an economical and dramatic way of representing the full force of their racist assessment of people of African descent and deploy it without much attention at all to the details of Aristotle’s critical views. ‘Natural slave’ captures the consequence of viewing blackness as an ‘eternal brand’ of inferiority worn upon the face.77 Judge Upshur, for example, proclaims that slavery’s ‘true character and tendencies as a political institution, were much better understood by Aristotle than by Wilberforce’ but, when he compares ancient and contemporary views of slavery, entirely ignores Aristotle’s critical theory of natural slavery, focusing only on the typical Greek practice of enslaving ‘captives in war’ who were ‘for the most part white men like themselves’. Thus on the subject of who gets marked out for slavery, he finds modern slavery a huge advance. The ancients had to politically navigate the problems that attend the errors of identification or the possibility that slaves could become assimilated into the free population (through manumission or fraud). Their free population could easily become corrupt even if their disciplinary policies were harsh. ‘Our safety,’ in contrast, ‘is in the color of the slave; in an eternal, ineffaceable distinction of nature’

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that precludes the possibility of easy assimilation. In his view, the very fact that Americans and their slaves recognize colour as a biologically based, inescapable, and easily detectable indicator of a slave nature accounts for the special excellence of Southern plantation society. Accordingly, he concludes, ‘We should cherish this institution, not as a necessary evil which we cannot shake off, but as a great positive good, to be carefully protected and preserved.’78 Some pro-slavery writers do engage somewhat more carefully with Aristotle’s discussion of the empirical identification of slave and free natures. The most notable example of this effort is an 1850 essay by George Frederick Holmes, ‘Observations on a Passage in the Politics of Aristotle relative to Slavery’, in the Southern Literary Messenger. He seeks to supplement or even deepen Southern pro-slavery thinking by making it attentive to the substantive arguments of Aristotle about how to go about identifying populations of natural slaves. Holmes divides his study into an examination of the accuracy of Aristotle’s ‘position’ and of the accuracy of his account of its proper ‘application’. Aristotle’s basic ‘position’ he identifies as follows: ‘Nature has clearly designed some men for freedom and others for slavery.’79 He summarizes Aristotle’s ‘application’ of this position as the identification of the Greeks with freedom and Barbarian races of Asiatic origins with slavery. Holmes’s case for the ‘general truth’80 of Aristotle’s ‘position’ that ‘Nature has clearly designed some for freedom and others for slavery’ is not our central concern here. I note only that he places great stock in the observation of the ‘universality of the habit of slavery’ in some form or other throughout the 2000 years of history since Aristotle’s day (dwelling on the essential identity of wage labour with dependence) and the philosophical assessments of the origin of human society. His attention to Aristotle’s ‘application’ of the idea of natural slavery to flesh and blood realities, however, is telling. Here we find his confrontation with Aristotle’s comments on Greek and Barbarian races and failure to treat visible biological differences as markers of free or slave souls. Holmes argues that Aristotle recognizes the concept of ‘race’ but is not adept at using it to structure his analyses. Referring to Aristotle’s conclusions regarding the natures of Greeks and Barbarians, he is pleased to observe that ‘Aristotle maintains that . . . there are certain

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races designed by nature for servitude, as there are others as manifestly designed for freedom and command.’81 But, he proposes, though often ‘paying strict attention to the characteristics of different races’, his application of ‘the great principle’ is simply ‘erroneous’.82 In his view, Aristotle places the Asiatics, the Barbarians, in the slave class, and the Europeans in the free class, noting that while Aristotle gives a ‘marked pre-eminence to the Greeks’ he seems alert to the promise of the ‘uncivilized races of northern Europe’.83 Holmes considers this a muddle. He explicitly attributes Aristotle’s classification of Asiatics as natural slaves to what he calls ‘the peculiar prejudices of the Greeks’ arising from their wars with the Persians and the hostility these conflicts engendered among the Greeks.84 But, though Holmes is quick to denounce Aristotle’s motivation as prejudice, he is also quick to come to the defence of the mode of reasoning Aristotle relies upon in his account of their fitness for slavery. To redeem Aristotle he adds that his observation that Asiatics exhibit a distinct capacity to endure despotism without resentment holds not only in antiquity but for centuries more. Holmes insists the usefulness of race is its capacity to signal a condition of ‘universal duration’—a free or slave nature—not a particular culture’s capacity more or less to maximize these potentials in any particular period. In his view, by failing to see white and black as the crux of race matters, Aristotle bungles the race-sensitive aspect of his analysis of natural slavery. Holmes softens Aristotle’s error by referring to the backward state of science during Aristotle’s lifetime. In ‘our own day’, in contrast, ‘the distinct functions of different races in the onward march of human progress promises to be recognized as the principle axiom of historical science’.85 A decade later Fitzhugh echoes Holmes’s argument. He too prefers not to abandon Aristotle’s theory of natural slavery but instead to use modern ‘science’ to correct it. He writes: ‘Aristotle was neither anatomist, physiologist, nor phrenologist; hence, he mistook varieties of the Caucasian race for distinct and inferior races or species of the human family.’86 Having dispatched Aristotle’s ‘abhorrent’87 practice of finding a hierarchy—including slave and free by nature—in the diversity of Caucasian peoples, Holmes moves to consider whether an Aristotelian mode of reasoning can today reach the determination as to whether there indeed appear to be ‘certain races destined for freedom

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and others for servitude’.88 That is, he considers whether an Aristotelian mode of analysis of history can produce findings that square with what he thinks he knows to be true about the distinctive natures of white and black races. He claims to practise a form of ‘induction’. In particular, he claims to be able to infer from the historical record the essential meaning of race. The result of his efforts is a stunningly race-inflected progress narrative. I quote this noxious account at length as it weaves together Aristotle-inspired ideas (persistent patterns of activity that suggest natural aptitudes, functionalism, that free and slave exhibit distinctive virtues) to support the introduction of strong racial categories into an Aristotelian analytic framework. Holmes writes: The destinies and especial services of the Egyptians, Greeks, Carthaginians, Romans, Saracens, Germans, French, and Anglo-Saxons are definite and clear. It is equally clear that since the commencement of the historic age the torch of human advancement has been exclusively in the hands of the IndoGermanic races. Does a doctrine capable of such wide and useful application fail us in regard to the question of Slavery? By no means, the distinction between the Caucasian and Negro is a palpably specific difference, and all history teaches us that it has been attended with an equally wide and palpable difference of functions . . . In all ages . . . the Negro has been the slave and has never appeared as the master. In those cases where he has attained national independence, by a voluntary gift, or successful rebellion, as in Liberia and St. Domingo, or by emancipation, or free colonization, as the West Indies and Sierra Leone, his condition only serves to exhibit his utter incapacity to avail himself of the advantages of freedom. The various Caucasian races, on the contrary have wholly or in part been subject at times to a servile condition, but with the progress of civilization they have uniformly advanced, and have extricated themselves from slavery by the exhibition of an aptitude for freedom. The virtues of the Negro are the virtues of Slavery, and become vices when his condition is changed. The virtues of the Caucasian unfit him for Slavery.89

Holmes concludes his reconciliation of Aristotle and race science by bringing Scripture back in: ‘The whole long sweep of history is only an illustration and confirmation of the truth of the prophetic destination of the race of Canaan.’90

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It is perhaps ironic that by taking the observable omnipresence of slavery and racial inequality in history as evidence of their natural justice Holmes actually commits a logical error that Aristotle warns against in Politics book 1. Aristotle explicitly counsels against treating the extent of a practice in history as evidence of its natural justice. Aristotle himself never marshals the ubiquity of slavery through history and cross-culturally as evidence of its roots in nature and justice. Instead, Aristotle insists on the logical separation of these issues. In Aristotle’s view it is wrong to treat the prevalence of slavery as an indication of its justice. This is likely because, as a sensitive observer and scientist, he suspects that many factors might account for such a condition. In his world chief candidates would be the prevalence of war and the pervasive practice of enslaving prisoners, as well as the frequency of violent crime, banditry, abandonment, and abductions and the development of a legal and illegal slave trade. His critical theoretical concern is to identify why slavery is for some portion of the human family a natural and beneficial condition, how we can accurately identify that population and precisely how this relationship can produce a positive good for all involved. Whether just forms of slavery are also commonplace in the world and whether the observable practices of slavery are in all cases just, are for him, in principle, different questions.91 Holmes does not display a similar measure of sensitivity to complexity. In his zeal to reconcile Aristotle and race theory, and to assert that Southern thought in this way surpasses Aristotle, he neglects other analytical distinctions Aristotle considers necessary to properly think through the question of the justice of slavery.

V. PRESERVING PRECEDENT: AN ASPECT OF B OOK 1 ROUTINELY IGNORED IN AMERICAN PRO-SLAVERY WRITING Pro-slavery writers take no notice of the fact that Aristotle’s text provides evidence of a controversy over the justice of slavery in antiquity. They treat his systematic attention to objections to slavery

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as parts of an abstract philosophical investigation, not as the development of a response to real critics. But Aristotle explicitly positions his discussion of slavery in opposition to calls for abolition among his own contemporaries. Aristotle writes that he is responding to those who maintain ‘that for one man to be another man’s master is contrary to nature, because it is only by convention that makes the one a slave and the other a freeman and there is no difference between them in nature, and that therefore it is unjust, for it is based on force’.92 His entire examination of the question of slavery aims to intervene in a debate not only over how best to understand the master–slave relation but over whether it is contrary to nature or not. And Aristotle actually starts his discussion by agreeing at least in part with contemporary critics of slavery. He insists that slavery is just only when the slaves are naturally suited to that condition and can benefit from it, and not when the slaves are relegated to that condition as a result of having suffered a misfortune (e.g. having been defeated in battle) or as a result of some other accidental occurrence. At best pro-slavery writers miss, but more likely they suppress or ignore, the evidence in Politics book 1 for slavery’s justice actually having been disputed in Aristotle’s own time. Pro-slavery propagandists do not identify with Aristotle’s effort to respond to critics. Instead, they appear invested in the view that Aristotle expresses the underlying philosophical justification of a practice that went unquestioned in Greek antiquity. Pro-slavery writers seem completely oblivious to a potential parallel between Aristotle’s effort to quiet contemporary abolitionists and their own struggle. The reason would seem to lie in the value pro-slavery ideologues place on Greek antiquity as precedent. They treat Greece as an exemplar of what an ‘unmitigated’ slave society can accomplish. Pro-slavery writers represent the ubiquity of slavery throughout recorded history as a sign of its natural justice and cite Greek antiquity as a standard-bearer of what unhesitatingly following nature in this regard makes possible. ‘The testimony of all antiquity [is] in its favor’, wrote the anonymous Southron in 1838.93 There is no room in their portrait of ancient slave society for any hint of uncertainty regarding the justice of this institution. For example, Southron writes that Aristotle ‘enunciat [ed] the natural origin of slavery, so revolting to the friends of the rights of man, so directly opposed to the prevailing notions of free-

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thinkers . . . in a period of unmitigated slavery, without fear of contradiction’. He continues, slavery was advanced as an unquestionable fact, open to the observation of the whole world, which none could question, because it was the deliberate opinion of the age in which he lived.94

‘The whole of the ancient world’, wrote Thomas Dew in his account of the Virginia Legislature’s debate on slavery, ‘never for a moment doubted’ slavery’s justice.95 I have shown that pro-slavery writers of the antebellum period indeed worked with Aristotle’s views and arguments in Politics book 1 as they struggled to craft a sophisticated intellectual response to increasingly pervasive demands for abolition. These authors did not simply pepper their publications and speeches with light-handed references to the philosopher to show off their classical learning and elevate the standing of the writer, comfort compatriots by placing them in illustrious company, or irritate opponents who themselves venerated antiquity. The widespread practice among Southern intellectuals of citing of Aristotle is not ornamental. Their citations, adaptations, and corrections of Aristotle are all evidence of a dynamic engagement with this ancient text by a community of activists.96 Their shared attachment to Aristotle in part defined them. And their varied and at times complicated deployments of his arguments and words capture a part of their intellectual and political practices. The Aristotle they prize may be nearly unrecognizable to today’s moral philosophers and political scientists who focus on other, more contemporary, aspects of his thinking, chiefly his account of democracy, plurality, the emotions, and virtue ethics. But it is worth remembering that this episode in the reception history of Aristotle’s Politics book 1 shows that Aristotle could provide an intellectual framework for a toxic way of thinking about human differences.

NOTES 1. Harper (1838), 59, Calhoun (1837), 2, Southron (1838), 744. ‘Immediatism’ also sparked a wave of Northern ‘anti-abolitionism’. See Tise (1987), 261–85.

274 2. 3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21.

22. 23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28.

S. Sara Monoson Dew (1832), 16; Bledsoe (1856), 62; Hunter (1845), 462. Fitzhugh (1857a), 41. Finley (1980), 18. No single American ideological camp from the colonial to civil war period had a monopoly on classical learning or an exclusive claim to an ancient intellectual pedigree. See Wish (1949), 264–5, Reinhold (1984), Richard (1994), Wood (2000), Winterer (2002), Meckler (2006), Greenwood (2009), Malamud (2009). Harrington (1989), 65. Fitzhugh (1857b), 169, discussed below. George Fitzhugh to George F. Holmes, 11 Apr. 1855. In Holmes Letter Book (Duke University Library). I owe this citation to Harrington (1989), 67. I borrow this phrase from Wish (1949), 266. e.g. Jenkins (1960). Walford (1853), 6–7 (Politics 1254a20–5). Politics 1253b32, 1254a12–13. Walford (1853), 11, 12, 13. The preceding two paragraphs are drawn from Monoson (2010). Calhoun (1837), 2. Calhoun (1837), 1. Harper (1838), 5. Hammond (1858). Holmes (1850), 199. Calhoun (1837), 3. Calhoun (1837), 3. ‘Positive good’ became a watchword of Southern ideology. Abolitionists mocked it. See Liberator Files, 22 September 1854. They draw on the theories of contemporaries Thomas Robert Malthus and Auguste Comte. Dew (1832). Fitzhugh (1857a), 9. Dew (1832), 16, 112. Dew reviews not only the principled defence of slavery but details the ‘utter impracticalities’ gradual or sudden abolition would present—mass deportation of blacks to Africa (the ‘colonization’ solution), the establishment in Virginia of a free multiracial society, the introduction of free white or black labour into plantation agriculture. Harper (1835), 16. Grayson (1860). Wish (1949), 254.

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29. Ellis (n.d.), Gillies (1804), Walford (1853), Bekker (1831). Holmes (1850), 193 and Fitzhugh (1857b) comment on their sources. 30. The English Civil War, emergence of natural rights theory, Greek independence movement, and resistance to the abolition movement all occasioned some resurgence of interest in Aristotle’s political writings. Note that Locke presents his Two Treatises on Government in part as a response to Filmer’s Observations on Aristotle’s Politiques. Also see Barker (1906). Congreve (1855), vii (Greek text based on Bekker with notes in English) lists scholarly work currently in circulation in English, French, and German. 31. Walford (1853), xxxv, xxxvii (reprint of the ‘Introduction’ to Gillies (1804)). 32. Southron (1838), 737–8. 33. This is a reference to the inclusion of the slave population in the calculation of the size of a State’s delegation to the House of Representatives—each slave counted as 3/5th of a person. See Article 1, Section 2, Paragraph 3 of the US Constitution. 34. Southron (1838), 742. 35. Southron (1838), 742. 36. Southron (1838), 738. 37. Other authors who make explicit their dependence on Aristotle to articulate opposition to natural rights theory include Holmes (1850) and Bledsoe (1856). 38. Fitzhugh (1857a), 9. 39. Fitzhugh (1857a), 9. 40. Fitzhugh (1857b), 164–5. 41. Fitzhugh (1857b), 166. 42. Fitzhugh (1857b), 169. 43. See n. 6 above. 44. Fitzhugh (1857b), 169. 45. Fitzhugh (1857b), 172. 46. Parker (1858). 47. Wish (1949), 258. 48. Holmes (1850), 196. 49. They use this phrase, e.g. Fitzhugh (1957a). 50. Holmes (1850), 195. 51. Only those who are ‘released from menial occupations’ can hope to develop virtue. Politics 1278a10 (trans. Rackham (1977)). 52. Cf. the quasi-Marxist cast of their argument to what Marx actually wrote about American slavery: ‘Direct slavery is just as much the pivot of bourgeois industry as machinery, credits, etc. Without slavery you have

276

53. 54. 55. 56. 57.

58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64.

65. 66. 67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72. 73.

S. Sara Monoson no cotton; without cotton you have no modern industry. It is slavery that has given the colonies their value; it is the colonies that have created world trade, and it is world trade that is the pre-condition of large-scale industry. Thus slavery is an economic category of the greatest importance. Without slavery North America, the most progressive of countries, would be transformed into a patriarchal country. Wipe out North America from the map of the world, and you will have anarchy—the complete decay of modern commerce and civilization. Cause slavery to disappear and you will have wiped America off the map of nations . . . Modern nations have been able only to disguise slavery in their own countries, but they have imposed it without disguise upon the New World.’ Marx n.d. 94–5 (Paris, 1847) (my emphasis). Holmes (1850), 199. Fitzhugh (1857a), 15, my emphasis. Fitzhugh (1857a), 11. Fitzhugh (1857a), 9–10. Wilentz (2005), 533. See the discussion of labour activist Orestes Brownson’s ties to Calhoun in Wilentz (2005), 532–9. See McCurry (2010) on the anti-democratic cast of Confederate politics towards non-slave-owning whites in the South. Fitzhugh (1857a), 4. e.g. Southron (1838). 1261b33–5, trans. Rackham (1977). 1259a20–5 and ff. trans. Rackham (1977). Dew (1832), 26–7. See Wood (2000). To view these images see ‘Color of Money Collection’ at the John W. Jones Gallery accessible at http://gallerychuma.com/ColorofMoney. htm. Jones is a contemporary painter who interprets the iconography on Confederate currency. I owe this citation to Mailloux (2002), 109. Fitzhugh sent Douglass a copy of Sociology for the South through a mutual acquaintance. See Monoson (2011). phaneron, 1255a3. bouletai he¯ phusis, at 1254b27. 1254b33. Genesis 9. 20–7. Mailloux (2002), 104. e.g. Holmes (1850), 200. Walford (1853), 11 (Politics 1254a23–4). Reckham (1977) and Everson (1996) also use ‘mark’ for diiste¯mi in this passage.

Aristotle and Pro-Slavery Thought 74. 75. 76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96.

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1255a19, also see 1254b15–20; 1256a29. sumpheronto¯n, trans. Rackham (1977). Mailloux (2002), 114, quoting Hannaford (1996), 57. Upshur (1839), 686. See also Calhoun (1837), Dew (1832), Fitzhugh (1857a) and (1861). Upshur (1839), 687. 1255a1–2, Holmes translating (1850: 193). Holmes (1850), 194. Holmes (1850), 194, my emphasis. Holmes (1850), 200. Holmes (1850), 194. Holmes (1850), 194. Holmes (1850), 200. Fitzhugh (1861), 448. Holmes (1850), 194. Holmes (1850), 200, my emphasis. Holmes (1850), 200. Holmes (1850), 200. I draw on the more extensive discussion in Monoson (2011). 1253b23–6, trans. Rackham (1977). Southron (1838), 737. Southron (1838), 738, my emphasis. Dew (1832), 15. For comparison, see Hanke (1959), 13, 16–17, 113–14 on the use of Aristotle in arguments about native peoples of North America.

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10 The Auctoritas of Antiquity Debating Slavery through Classical Exempla in the Antebellum USA Margaret Malamud

In 1839, while awaiting the outcome of the trial of the slaves who revolted to secure their freedom on the ship called Amistad, AfricanAmerican abolitionist Robert Purvis commissioned a portrait of the leader Sengbe Pieh (known as Joseph Cinque´ in the press) from the abolitionist painter Nathaniel Jocelyn. Jocelyn dressed Cinque´ in a toga because he believed Cinque´ embodied the Roman virtues and values admired by the American Revolutionary heroes: the willingness to fight to the death for liberty (Fig. 10.1). It is well known that the Revolutionary generation admired the Roman Republican model of government and found exemplary models of behaviour in the actions of Roman elites. What is less well known is that African Americans also engaged with the culture of classicism that permeated the young American republic. In this chapter I show how and why African Americans mobilized knowledge of classical texts and antiquity in their fight for liberty and equality. African Americans and abolitionists legitimated, debated, and contested African Americans’ political and cultural identities through selective references to Greek and Roman antiquity. Pro-slavery advocates also quarried antiquity in support of their position. As tensions between the North and South escalated in the antebellum era, Southern planters and politicians pointed to Greece

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Figure 10.1 Sengbe Pieh (Joseph Cinque´), hero of the Amistad revolt, by Nathaniel Jocelyn (1840)

and Rome’s reliance on slavery as a justification for modern slavery and they too appropriated figures and episodes from the Greek and Roman past in debates and diatribes over the burning issue of slavery. As I demonstrate, references to antiquity in antebellum America were fiercely contested; their meaning shifted in accordance with the specific ideological and political concerns of their producers. Diverse groups appropriated classical history for varied ends—most especially for debates, explicit and implicit, about slavery, politics, and culture.

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AFRICAN AMERICANS AND THE CLASSICS Classicism was democratized in antebellum America, reaching more broadly into American culture than it had in the eighteenth century.1 Knowledge of the classics extended beyond aristocratic males to the middle and working classes, women, and African Americans. American schoolbooks contained histories of Greece and Rome and school readers offered excerpts from classical literature and oratory. Plutarch was hugely popular and read in the English translation by John Dryden.2 Translations of other Roman and Greek authors became widely available. In the 1820s the Harper publishing firm issued a series of inexpensive books called ‘libraries’ including the Harper’s Classical Library. The Classical Library had thirty-seven titles and featured translations of the works of Cicero, Horace, Virgil, Livy, Plato, Demosthenes, and others at an affordable price. It also offered ‘curricula’ for self-study in households, libraries, and churches.3 It is instructive that in 1831 the newspaper the Workingman’s Advocate assumed there would be a working-class readership of the Classical Library. The paper commented with approval that ‘the Classical Library will furnish, in a cheap form, approved translations of the most esteemed authors of Greece and Rome, and thus afford general access to sources of knowledge which have heretofore been attainable only by a few. It will be one means of breaking down the monopoly of knowledge which has so long enabled the few to rule and oppress the many.’4 From the point of view of the editors of the Workingman’s Advocate, affordable access to the classics could have politically liberating results. What access did African Americans have to the classics? Educated blacks in northern cities recognized the importance of literacy and education for the improvement of the conditions of African Americans, but African Americans were excluded from almost every social and educational institution. Most northern public schools either excluded African Americans or established separate schools for them. Private academies and colleges also refused to admit African Americans. Unable to attend white schools, they slowly established their own educational institutions. In New York, the Manumission

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Society organized the African Free Schools in 1787 and eventually transferred them to city authorities. By 1820 a share of the state school fund went to support African-American public schools in a few northern states.5 By the 1830s the abolitionist movement actively supported African-American education. In 1831 a high school for classical studies, the Canal Street High School, was established for African-American students in New York City. By the 1850s a few schools in large cities offered classical education to black students. The coeducational Institute for Colored Youth in Philadelphia, for example, offered a ‘classical course’ that included Virgil’s Aeneid, the Odes of Horace, Cicero’s Orations, and Xenophon’s Anabasis. The William Watkins Academy for Negro Youth in Baltimore offered Greek, Latin, and public speaking.6 Still, only a fraction of children benefited from these efforts. The academic opportunities for learning Greek and Latin were few and with notable exceptions (such as African Americans who trained in theological seminaries or studied abroad), most African Americans read the classics in translation, and discussed them not in schools but in literary and historical societies. Beginning in the late 1820s, enterprising African Americans in northern urban black communities established their own literary and historical societies and their own newspapers.7 In their heyday, from the 1820s to the 1840s, there were around fifty of these societies in northern cities from Baltimore to Buffalo.8 Many offered instruction to beginning and advanced readers. The Phoenix Society in New York, for example, offered instruction in reading three times a week with a choice of three evening times. In 1832 a group of African-American women founded the Female Minervian Association, naming the society for ‘the daughters of the goddess whose name they bear’.9 The societies offered free lectures, lending libraries, reading rooms, and reading lists for discussion groups. The lectures were well attended: as many as 500 people regularly attended the Phoenix Society’s lectures in New York.10 It is likely that the affordable Harper’s Classical Library was on the shelves of the libraries of African-American literary and historical societies. What did members of these societies aspire to achieve? They aimed for mastery of the fundamentals of a good education—and that

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meant some knowledge of the classics. In an 1828 address to the Colored Reading Society of Philadelphia, William Whipper, a wealthy African-American businessman and abolitionist, asserted, ‘The station of a scholar highly versed in classic lore . . . is indeed higher than any other occupied by man.’11 Whipper advocated a ‘liberal education’ and urged young African Americans to study Greek and Latin, though he acknowledged the difficulty ‘for those who have arrived to the years of maturity’ to embark on language training.12 Contributors to African-American newspapers reminded readers, ‘Cato was eighty when he began to learn Greek. Plutarch at seventy studied Latin.’13 For those who had the motivation and resources, there were opportunities for private instruction in the classical languages. African-American newspapers frequently advertised tutors who were willing to accept pupils individually or in small groups for pay and teach them Latin and Greek.14 Many African Americans believed knowledge of the classics offered a path to becoming exemplary citizens, equal in knowledge to white men and women. In William Whipper’s words, knowledge of the classics meant that ‘a fund of ideas is acquired on a variety of subjects; the taste is greatly improved by conversing with the best models; the imagination is enriched by the fine scenery with which the classics abound; and an acquaintance is formed with human nature, together with the history, customs and manners of antiquity’.15 The founders and members of the literary and historical societies idealistically believed that were white Americans to see educated blacks, they would recognize them as worthy of full membership in civic life. The founders of the Philadelphia Female Literary Association women’s society saw their purpose as trying to ‘break down the strong barrier of prejudice, and raise ourselves to an equality with those of our fellow beings who differ from us in complexion’.16 To that end, the members of the Colored Reading Society of Philadelphia agreed to meet once a week. ‘It shall be our whole duty’, they resolved in the Society’s mission statement, ‘to instruct and assist each other in the improvement of our minds, as we wish to see the flame of improvement spreading amongst our brethren, and friends.’17

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Margaret Malamud THE WEAPON OF ORATORY

In 1832 the abolitionist newspaper the Liberator published a speech given by a member of the Philadelphia Female Literary Association on the occasion of its first anniversary. The speaker drew a parallel between the role of the literary society for its members and the ‘vault’ the Greek orator Demosthenes constructed as a place to practise and conquer his defects of speech.18 ‘On his first attempt to speak in public, [Demosthenes] he was hissed’, she noted. But he persevered, she said, and after hard work attained ‘brilliant success’. The end result of hard study, she reminded her listeners, was that ‘Demosthenes’ eloquence was more dreaded . . . than all the fleets and armies of Athens.’ For her, as Elizabeth McHenry has pointed out, the Philadelphia Female Literary Association was like Demosthenes’ vault—a protected place to practise and study, safe from the jeers of whites at a black person’s attempt to imbibe the classics.19 Demosthenes and Cicero offered role models of men who through hard work rose to public power as orators respected even by their enemies. William Garrison, editor of the Liberator, told one of the founders of the society, Sarah Mapps Douglass, that the society’s activity ‘puts a new weapon into my hands to use against southern oppressors’.20 Training in classical oratory and debate provided African Americans with a powerful weapon to combat charges of racial inferiority and to argue for political and social inclusion in the civic realm. African-American newspapers described good oratory and frequently cited the oratorical performances and words of Cicero and Demosthenes as exemplary. ‘Clear, strong, terse, yet natural and not strained expressions; happy antitheses; apt comparisons; forms of speech that are natural without being obvious; harmonious periods, yet various, spirited, and never monotonous or too regularly balanced; these are what will be always sure to captivate every audience, and yet in these mainly consists finished, and elaborate, and felicitous diction.’ This writer for the Colored American went on to cite in Latin Cicero’s De Oratore 3.51: ‘Mirabile est cum plurimum in faciendo intersit inter doctum et rudem, quam non multum

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differat in judicando’, where Cicero noted that even the unlearned/ ignorant can make good judgements about good and bad oratory; arguing that people are innately able to perceive the difference between good and bad diction.21 The Philadelphia Demosthenian Institute, formed in 1837, was organized primarily to prepare its members for public speaking. Demosthenes was praised for the ‘transcendent glory’ of his oratory and admired because ‘He bestowed the industry, which has made his name proverbial, on acquiring and perfecting the power of public speaking, because, without possessing that power it was impossible for him to acquire political influence, and exert himself effectively in his country’s cause.’22 One contributor to the newspaper the Colored American described with pride his visit to the Demosthenian Institute in January of 1841 where he heard young men ‘display their elocution’ and noted that one young man delivered ‘an eloquent address on the character of Demosthenes’.23 The Institute proudly published its own paper, the Demostheneian Shield, with the motto ‘Frangas non flectes’ (You may break [me] but you will not bend [me]).24 The lecture platform of these societies was the training school for a number of African-American anti-slavery activists. Martin R. Delaney, newspaper editor and abolitionist, was the founder and a leading member of the Theban Literary Society in Pittsburgh and Frederick Douglass, shortly after his escape from slavery, joined a debating club called the Baltimore Mental Improvement Society where free blacks practised their public-speaking skills.25 The key textbook that aspiring public speakers used was Caleb Bingham’s The Columbian Orator. The Columbian Orator was one of the most popular schoolbooks of the early Republic and was in regular use up until the Civil War, going through twenty-three editions between 1797 and 1860. Bingham’s text is a primer on oratory and it contains ancient and modern speeches, plays, poems, and instructions and rules for public speaking. Bingham included nearly a dozen speeches and excerpts from classical sources or on classical topics and provided examples from antiquity to demonstrate the power of oratory. For example, Bingham pointed out that Julius Caesar was so overwhelmed by Cicero’s oratorical performance that ‘the conqueror of the world became a conquest to the charms of

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Cicero’s eloquence’. ‘Neither his [Caesar’s] skill, nor resolution of mind, was sufficient force against the power of oratory’ and Caesar pardoned one of his own enemies, Ligarius, whom Cicero represented.26 In Baltimore in 1830, 12-year-old slave Frederick Douglass took fifty cents he had earned polishing boots, and bought a copy of The Columbian Orator, the text his white playmates were assigned in school.27 Douglass later recounted that he cherished this book so much he carried it with him as he escaped from slavery in 1838. It was, he said, his ‘rich treasure’ and his ‘noble acquisition’.28 Frederick Douglass went on to become the most celebrated African-American orator of the nineteenth century. The main influences on his antebellum oratorical style were from the slave storyteller, the AfricanAmerican preacher, and The Columbian Orator.29 In his reader, Bingham paraphrased Cicero’s De Oratore—and offered his students pages on rules for speaking: gesture, pronunciation, harmonious cadence, and emphasis. Excerpts from Plato, Demosthenes, Caesar, Cicero, Quintilian, and others illustrate rhetorical theory. Bingham’s rhetorical sections are specific in their recommendations and they direct the reader to the appropriate classical authors for further study. The Columbian Orator instructed its readers in how to speak with classical force. Good oratory required not only eloquent words but also correct use of voice and gesture. Bingham opened his reader by quoting Quintilian’s views on the importance of oratorical performance. ‘It is not of so much moment what our compositions are,’ declared Quintilian, ‘as how they are pronounced; since it is the manner of the delivery, by which the audience is moved.’30 To perfect one’s oratorical delivery required training, and Bingham pointed to the exemplary efforts of Demosthenes who, according to Plutarch, ‘found means to render his pronunciation clear and articulate, by the help of some little stones put under his tongue . . . And because he had an ill custom of drawing up his shoulders when he spoke, to amend that, he used to place them under a sword, which hung over him with the point downward.’31 After this inspirational anecdote about the famous Greek orator, Bingham turned to the specifics of proper voice and gesture. Frederick Douglass, as we shall see, clearly absorbed The Columbian Orator’s instructions.

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‘Let us suppose then a person presenting himself before an assembly, in order to make a discourse to them . . . He will first settle himself, compose his countenance, and take a respectful view of his audience . . . A grave and sedate aspect inclines them to think him serious; that he had considered his subject, and may have something to offer worth their attention . . . To speak low at first has the appearance of modesty, and is best for the voice.’ The orator ‘require[s] a great variety of the voice, high or low, vehement or languid, according to the nature of the passions he designs to affect’. Appropriate body movements and facial expressions must accompany speaking— Bingham pointed out that the Greeks and Romans utilized ‘a warmth of expression and vehemency of motion . . . they did not think language itself sufficient to express the height of their passions, unless enforced by uncommon motions and gestures’. To make this point, he quoted Cicero’s mocking of an adversary ‘Where is that concern, that ardor which used to extort pity even from children? Here is no emotion either of mind or body; neither the forehead struck, nor the thigh; nor so much as the stamp of the foot. Therefore, you have been so far from inflaming our minds that you have scarcely kept us awake.’ Bingham stressed the importance of eye management because, again quoting Cicero, ‘all the passions of the soul are expressed in the eyes . . . ’.32 Following the advice in The Columbian Orator (and Cicero), Frederick Douglass ‘spoke calmly and deliberatively at first; but as he went on . . . his voice grew louder, clearer and deeper . . . ’.33 As he approached his peroration, ‘his eyes flashed, his face lighted up, his voice rose and swelled like the notes of an organ and rang in stentorian tones over the audience, he moved more rapidly about the platform and his gestures grew more animated . . . Then, stepping to the front of the platform with head thrown back, outstretched arms and voice that rang out like a clarion’, Douglass concluded.34 Oratory, Douglass knew, was a weapon and the voice its instrument ‘Speech! Speech! The live, calm, grave, clear, pointed, warm, sweet, melodious, and powerful human voice is [the] chosen instrumentality.’35 Audiences frequently commented on Douglass’s voice: ‘his voice is full and rich, and his enunciation remarkably distinct and musical. He speaks in a low conversational tone most of the time, but

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occasionally his tones roll out full and deep as those of an organ. The effect is electrical.’36 Listening to oratory was a favourite popular entertainment in the antebellum era and by all accounts Douglass was a magnificent orator. His speeches were long, averaging two hours in length. Still, audiences couldn’t get enough of him. ‘Even Douglass’s longest addresses were sometimes too short for his audiences; standing in crowded halls, seated on uncomfortable benches, or gathered in the open air, they were held spellbound by his oratory. One reporter recalled that he appeared in Philadelphia in 1852 and ‘spoke for two hours to an audience which filled every seat and packed the aisles. Ten o’clock came and he stopped amid the cries, Go on! Go on! . . . He spoke for another hour and a quarter, and not a man or woman left the audience.’37 Douglass employed a variety of classical oratorical strategies and techniques—satire, humour, ridicule, invective, pathos, wit, subversive theatrics, and mimicry—to assail the romantic pretence of classical republicanism and virtue advanced by Southern slaveowners (described below). In his antebellum oratory he was especially known for his mimicry of pro-slavery ministers, most famously in his ‘Slaveholder’s Sermon’. Reporting on one of Douglass’s speeches in 1842, the Liberator declared that when he spoke of Southern white ministers, ‘he evinced great imitative powers, in an exhibition of their style of preaching to the slaves . . . His graphic mimicry of Southern priestly whining and sophistry was replete with humor and apparent truth.’38 Douglass derided Southern claims to the legacy of Greek and Roman republican virtue, and accused Southerners of lacking intellectual, moral, and civic virtue.39 One of Douglass’s popular themes was the degenerate progeny of the Revolutionary generation. His rhetorical inspiration may well have been an excerpt from Cato’s speech in the Roman Senate after the Catiline Conspiracy in The Columbian Orator. ‘Do not imagine, Fathers’, Cato orated, ‘that it was by arms our ancestors rendered this Commonwealth so great, from so small a beginning . . . But they had other things, that made them great, of which no traces remain amongst us: at home, labor and industry; abroad, just and equitable government; a constancy of soul, and an innocence of manners, that kept them

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perfectly free in their councils: unrestrained either by the remembrance of past crimes or by craving appetites to satisfy. For these virtues, we have luxury and avarice; or madness to squander, joined with no less, to gain; the state is poor, and private men are rich. We admire nothing but riches: we give ourselves up to sloth and effeminacy; we make no distinction between the good and the bad; whilst ambition engrosses all the rewards of virtue.’40

In perhaps his most famous oration, ‘What to a Slave is the Fourth of July?’ delivered on 5 July 1852 in Rochester, New York, Douglass similarly asserted that the descendants of the Founding Fathers were a degenerate offspring. The signers of the Declaration of Independence were statesmen, patriots and heroes, and for the good they did, and the principles they contended for, I will unite with you to honor their memory. They loved their country better than their own private interests; and, though this is not the highest form of human excellence, all will concede that it is a rare virtue . . . They were peace men; but they preferred revolution to peaceful submission to bondage. They were quiet men; but they did not shrink from agitating against oppression . . . With them, justice, liberty and humanity were ‘final;’ not slavery and oppression. You may well cherish the memory of such men. They were great in their day and generation. Their solid manhood stands out the more as we contrast it with these degenerate times . . . ’41

Just as Cato in Sallust accused his contemporaries of a decline from former disinterested patriotism into self-interest, avarice, and luxury, so Douglass accused white Americans of hypocrisy and a betraying of the ideals for which the Founding Fathers were willing to give their lives. Douglass’s African-American contemporaries compared him to eloquent Greeks and Romans. James M. Gregory, professor of Latin at Howard University, compared him to Cicero: ‘Cicero says, “the best orator is he that so speaks as to instruct, to delight, and to move the mind of his hearers.” Mr. Douglass is a striking example of this definition. Few men equal him in his power over an audience.’42 William Sanders Scarborough, professor of Greek at Wilberforce University, predictably, compared him to Demosthenes and also to Homer’s Nestor.43 In his obituary of Douglass, Scarborough wrote that Douglass was

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A veritable Pylian Nestor, from whose lips flow words sweeter than honey, he has justly earned the title of ‘old man eloquent,’ and in listening, one is inclined to believe the prophecy which old Homer put into the mouth of the blue-eyed goddess, Pallas Athena, when she says to Telemachus: ‘In part thy mind will prompt thy speech; in part j A god will put the words into thy mouth’ has descended in some mysterious manner as a legacy to him.44

Linking Douglass’s eloquence and oratory to heroes from GraecoRoman antiquity incorporated him into a genealogy of great orators rooted in the venerable civilizations of Greece and Rome. Not only did Douglass prove himself more than worthy of this lineage, he used the same classical oratorical techniques his white contemporaries used to bolster their pro-slavery positions to support his position on the necessity of abolition.

CLASSICAL MODELS OF RESISTANCE The black abolitionist David Walker utilized a Roman–Carthaginian metaphor in 1829 in his Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World.45 Mixing Roman and Christian references, he called white slave-holders Romans, and anticipated that God would send black slaves a Hannibal to overthrow the white Romans of his time. When I view that mighty son of Africa, hannibal, one of the greatest generals of antiquity, who defeated and cut off so many thousands of the white Romans or murderers, and who carried his victorious arms, to the very gate of Rome, and I give it as my candid opinion, that had Carthage been well united and had given him good support, he would have carried that cruel and barbarous city by storm. Beloved brethren—here let me tell you, and believe it, that the Lord our God will give you a Hannibal . . . God will indeed, deliver you through him from your deplorable and wretched condition under the Christians of America.46

In striking contrast to the usual reverence for the Roman Republic and its heroes, Walker identified with Carthage because it was an African empire ruthlessly sacked and destroyed by Rome. Hannibal, Carthage’s greatest general, came close to defeating Rome. The Roman historian Livy, whose history of Rome was well known in

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the United States and paraphrased in school textbooks, gave an admiring account of Rome’s greatest adversary whose talents and charisma made him a worthy foe of Rome’s generals.47 Walker appropriated Hannibal and turned him into a messianic hero for African Americans. When God sends a Hannibal to lead American slaves, they must unite and fight. If they do, they will defeat the white southern slave-owners who are oppressing noble Africans, the descendants of the Carthaginians (Fig. 10.2). David Walker was not alone in his use of the Roman–Carthaginian metaphor. In 1832 Sarah Mapps Douglass, a Quaker educator, contributed three essays to William Lloyd Garrison’s abolitionist paper the Liberator under the pseudonym ‘Sophanisba [sic]’, a Carthaginian princess who drank poison rather than be taken captive and paraded in a Roman triumph through the streets of Rome.48 Douglass, a black woman, admired the pride and courage of the ancient Carthaginian woman.49 The white abolitionist Harriet Beecher Stowe, prior to writing her best–seller Uncle Tom’s Cabin, also praised the courage and determination of the women of Carthage in resisting Roman conquest and slavery: ‘The Carthaginian women in the last peril of their state’, wrote Stowe, ‘cut off their hair for bow-strings to give the defenders of their country; and such peril and shame as now hangs over this country is worse than Roman slavery, and I hope every woman who can write will not be silent.’50 Stowe cast Carthaginian matrons rather than the more typical Roman matrons as exemplary models for American women. She hoped to inspire women to join the ranks of the abolitionists battling slavery in the American South. Black and white abolitionists repeatedly pledged hostility to slavery in the same spirit as Hannibal reputedly had sworn enmity to Rome. Attendees at a rally of the Western New York Anti-Slavery Society held in Rochester, New York, in February 1845 pledged that ‘As Hannibal swore on the altar of his country eternal enmity to Rome, so let us swear on the altar of truth, liberty and equal rights, eternal enmity to Slavery.’51 In Frederick Douglass’s Paper one mother addressed female readers: ‘O mothers, as we wish our country free of her greatest enemy, as we wish our children to enjoy the blessings of life, liberty, and happiness, temporal and eternal, let us follow the example of Hamilcar, and early and perseveringly teach our sons how vile, how dreadful a thing slavery is, let us teach them eternal hostility

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Figure 10.2 ‘Portraits of Hannibal and Cyprian, with Vignettes Illustrating African Character, and Wrongs’, anti-slavery poster (1836)

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to slavery.’52 In 1847 former president John Quincy Adams was one among many who wrote letters to newspapers urging Americans to oppose slavery with the same passion that he believed ‘animated’ Hamilcar, the Carthaginian general and father of Hannibal, in administering an oath to his son to resist to the death the Romans. Adams thought the spirit of the oath Hannibal swore of ‘eternal inextinguishable hatred’ for Rome should inspire opponents of slavery: The spirit which animated Hamilcar in administration of the oath to his son was identically the same as that which actuated Cato in closing every speech he made in the Senate of Rome with the memorable words, Delenda est Carthago [and Carthage must be destroyed]; and we have recently had the utterance of the same sentence from the Moloch of Slavery, applied to the angel of light, Abolition.53

Adams is referring to the pro-slavery slogan Delenda est Abolitio (abolition must be destroyed), thus suggesting that had Cato the Elder lived in nineteenth-century America, he would have been as adamant about the evils of abolition as he had been certain of the necessity to destroy Carthage. Passionate resistance to slavery in the spirit of Hannibal’s resistance to Rome should inflame the hearts of abolitionists. The slogan Delenda est servitudo (slavery must be destroyed) also rallied opponents of slavery.54 Some Southern slave mothers who escaped southern plantation life took their children with them. A few mothers, when they realized they were being pursued, resisted capture by killing themselves or killing their children. They did so because of fear of losing their children if caught. The 1850 Fugitive Slave Act included punishments that separated a woman from her children if the family was returned to slavery. Caroline Winterer has revealed that black writers for the abolitionist press hailed these women as both Roman and Carthaginian heroines.55 In 1848, for example, Martin R. Delany, the editor of the North Star, a newspaper published by and for blacks, praised a ‘heroic mother’ who ‘cut the throat of her child’ in Covington, Kentucky, rather than return to slavery without him. For Delany, she was ‘A noble woman!—more deserving of fame than the . . . noble wife of Asdrubal!’56 The slave mother deserved even greater praise than the aristocratic Carthaginian wife of the general Asdrubal who killed herself and her children rather than submit to Roman capture.

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In perhaps the most famous of all nineteenth-century fugitive slave cases, the case of Margaret Garner, abolitionists invoked Roman and Greek allusions to help make sense of her actions. In 1856 Margaret Garner, her husband, Simeon, and their four children escaped slavery in Kentucky and crossed the frozen Ohio River to Cincinnati. A posse tracked them down to their hiding place. As the men broke down the door, Garner, preferring death to slavery for her children, seized a knife and cut the throat of her daughter and tried to kill her other children. She and her husband were jailed and sent back to Kentucky into slavery. On her way back south, she tried to kill herself and one of her remaining children by jumping from a steamboat into the Ohio River. She was rescued but her daughter drowned. This is the story that inspired Toni Morrison to imaginatively recreate Garner’s life in her 1987 novel Beloved. At the time, as Caroline Winterer has told us, James Bell’s poem, ‘Liberty or Death’ understood her actions as noble and Roman: Why did she with a mother’s hand, Deprive her child of breath! She’ll tell you, with a Roman’s smile, That slavery’s worse than death.57

Bell’s poem assimilates Garner into the pantheon of Roman and American patriots who chose death rather than enslavement to the ‘tyranny’ of Julius Caesar or George III. An editorial in the Liberator similarly suggested that Garner was deserving of comparison with Roman and American heroes: Patrick Henry spoke the words—‘Give me liberty or give me death!’ Margaret Garner did the deed, and with her own hand took the life of her child . . . Will not [someone] . . . deliver orations and sermons, and write eulogies on that slave mother, and make her name, her fame, and her heroism, known to the ends of the earth, as one who, like that Roman of old, could put the knife into the heart of her child, to save her from its Christian and Republican ravishers?58

Here, Garner is compared to Patrick Henry and to the Roman soldier Virginius who stabbed to death his daughter Virginia rather than allow her to be enslaved and become the victim of a tyrannical patrician’s lust.59 Rather than condemning Margaret Garner, this

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writer argues that Margaret Garner should be praised as a courageous defender of liberty. Pro-slavery activists, unsurprisingly, angrily rejected such classical and positive interpretations of Garner’s actions. ‘The Abolitionists regard the parents of the murdered child as a hero and heroine, teeming with lofty and holy emotions,’ fumed the Cincinnati Enquirer, ‘who, Virginius like, would rather imbue their hands in the blood of their white offspring than allow them to wear the shackles of slavery.’60 Supporters of slavery dismissed with contempt the comparisons of black fugitive slaves and murderers to noble Romans of the Republic and American revolutionary heroes. Margaret Garner was also compared to Medea, the barbarian sorceress from beyond the Black Sea who murdered her two sons rather than let them live with her Greek husband, Jason, who had abandoned her for a Greek princess. In 1867 Thomas Satterwhite Noble painted Margaret Garner, which Civil War photographer Matthew Brady photographed. An engraving of his photograph appeared in Harper’s Weekly on 18 May 1867 entitled The Modern Medea (Fig. 10.3). Noble’s painting portrays Garner as a noble victim rather than as a barbarian; it is slavery that is indicted not the slave mother. Garner points defiantly to her dead children as if to say to the slavers ‘See what you have driven me to! Here is your chattel!’61 The linkage of Garner to Medea was connected to a European production of an adaptation of Euripides’ tragedy that toured America to great acclaim in 1866–7.62 The play was a nineteenth-century adaptation of Euripides by the French dramatist Ernest Legouve´ and the Italian actress Adelaide Ristori played Medea. In Legouve´’s adaptation, Medea is stripped of her primal rage and jealousy. She is not monstrous—she kills her children so that they will not be taken away from her. Medea, as Joy Kasson has observed, ‘kills her children from an excess of maternal devotion’.63 ‘There was never any doubt,’ Fiona Macintosh has commented, ‘that her love for her children exceeds her hatred for Jason.’64 Americans’ views of Medea were shaped by the watered-down version of Euripides on offer at the time, an interpretation that domesticated Medea for the consumption of European and American audiences. In Legouve´’s interpretation of Euripides and in Noble’s painting of Margaret Garner both women were portrayed as mothers driven over the edge by threats to their

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Figure 10.3 The Modern Medea (1867)

children. That is why some who were sympathetic to Garner’s actions could praise her as a heroic ‘dusky Medea’.65

THE ROMAN AFRICAN In 1839 slaves aboard a ship called the Amistad revolted to secure their freedom while being transported from one Cuban port to another. The slaves had been kidnapped from the Colony of Sierra Leone and sold to Spanish slavers. Their leader was Sengbe Pieh, a young Mende man, popularly known in the United States as Joseph Cinque´. The captured Mende people demanded that the slavers return them to Sierra Leone.

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When a gale drove the ship north-east along the United States coastline and the Amistad was seized off Long Island, a reporter from the New York Sun witnessed Cinque´’s defiance of his captors and his repeated attempts to escape. He dived from the ship and swam for forty minutes with the ship in pursuit. When he was finally hauled on board and manacled, he addressed his fellow mutineers. A Spanish cabin boy with some knowledge of African dialect translated his speech, which was recorded by the reporter from the New York Sun. Friends and Brothers—We would have returned [to Africa] but the sun was against us. I could not see you serve the white man, so I induced you to help me kill the Captain. I thought I should be killed—I expected it. It would have been better. You had better be killed than live many moons in misery. I shall be hanged, I think every day. But this does not pain me. I could die happy if by dying I could save so many of my brothers from the bondage of the white man.66

Northern abolitionists formed a committee to defend the African captives and John Quincy Adams pleaded the cause of the African captives before the United States Supreme Court. On 9 March 1841 the Supreme Court issued its final verdict in the Amistad Case—the captives were cleared of charges of murder and piracy. They were freed and they eventually returned to Africa. While waiting for the outcome of the trial, wealthy black abolitionist Robert Purvis commissioned a portrait of Cinque´ from the white abolitionist Nathaniel Jocelyn. Jocelyn depicted Cinque´ as a classical hero who stares from the canvas with a proud and dauntless look. Jocelyn dressed him in a toga (and left out Cinque´’s tattoos on his arms and chest) to suggest that Cinque´’s willingness to fight to the death for liberty embodied the virtues of Cato and other Roman Republican heroes who preferred death to bondage. Late eighteenthand early nineteenth-century sculptors typically clad the Revolutionary generation in classical dress to show their embracement of Roman Republican values.67 Jocelyn dared to paint Cinque´ as a noble Roman African, a radical departure from the usual demeaning ways Africans and African Americans were represented in art.68 Some welcomed the connection between antiquity, the Founding Fathers, and the actions of the rebel slave:

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This noble hero, by his defense of liberty, has placed himself side by side with Patrick Henry, John Hancock, Thomas Jefferson, and Samuel and John Adams fathers of the revolution. The justice of the nation has stood up in vindication of his deeds. How could they have done otherwise, with an example so illustrious as the American Revolution before them.69

And the New York Sun pointed out that Had he lived in the days of Greece or Rome, his name would have been handed down to posterity as one who had practiced those most sublime of all virtues—disinterested patriotism and unshrinking courage.70

Purvis cherished the portrait, which hung above his desk in the sitting room of his home in Philadelphia. He had artist and engraver John Sartain make a mezzotint of the painting in 1841 and affordable copies were sold through the Pennsylvania Antislavery Association office.71 One proud owner of a mezzotint wrote in The Colored American ‘We shall be proud to have our apartments graced with the portrait of the noble Cinque´, and shall regard it as a favor to our descendants, to transmit to them his likeness. And who that has any humanity in his heart, or any veneration for a hero, and who has any knowledge of this case, would not like to have this likeness about them?’72 Frederick Douglass also had a copy of Sartain’s mezzotint hanging in his library at his home in Washington, DC.73 But others were outraged at the linkage of Roman antiquity, the virtues of the Revolutionary generation, and Africans. An African in a toga? Many found the depiction of an African as a heroic warrior clad in Roman dress offensive. Jocelyn’s painting was so controversial that it was banned from its inaugural showing; the Artists’ Fund Society of Philadelphia refused to show the portrait in its annual exhibition. Jocelyn promptly resigned his honorary membership.74 John Neagle, president of the Artists’ Fund Society, returned the portrait to Purvis along with a letter in which he wrote that it was ‘contrary to usage to display work of that character, [and] believing that under the excitement of the times, it might prove injurious both to the proprietors and the institution’. Outraged, Henry C. Wright, a friend of Purvis, wrote a passionate letter to the Pennsylvania Freeman, a Philadelphia abolitionist newspaper, exposing the real reason the painting was not shown.

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The plain English of it is, Cinque is a negro. This is a Negro-hating and negro-stealing nation. A slaveholding people. The negro-haters of the north, and the negro-stealers of the south will not tolerate a portrait of a negro in a picture gallery. And such a negro! His dauntless look, as it appears on canvass, would make the souls of the slaveholders quake. His portrait would be a standing anti-slavery lecture to slaveholders and their apologists. To have it in the gallery would lead to discussions about slavery and the ‘inalienable’ rights of man, and convert every set of visitors into an antislavery meeting. So ‘the hanging committee’ bowed their necks to the yoke and bared their backs to the scourge, installed slavery as doorkeeper to the gallery, carefully to exclude every thing that can speak of freedom and inalienable rights, and give offence to men-stealers!! Shame on them!75

Purvis’s painting of a toga-clad African willing to fight to the death for liberty was too politically inflammatory to display.

AB OLITIONIST SCHOLARSHIP In the 1830s white abolitionist writer Lydia Maria Child wrote pamphlets, histories, and a novel in which she made use of antiquity in her arguments against slavery. The daughter of a baker, Child achieved financial independence through her writing. She embraced abolitionism with fervour and devoted three years of her life to researching and writing her Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans, published in 1833. In it, she offered a well-researched set of arguments to refute the moral, legal, economic, and racial aspects of the slavery controversy. Her Appeal was a definitive analysis of the history of slavery and the southern slave code.76 Child’s title probably alluded to the title of black abolitionist David Walker’s 1829 incendiary pamphlet Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World in which Walker called for an uprising of slaves against their masters. Her work is also in part a response to the pro-slavery Thomas R. Dew’s Review of the Debate in the Virginia Legislature of 1831 and 1832 published in 1832 and produced in the wake of the 1831 Nat Turner Revolt. Dew had a section in his book on the ‘Origin of Slavery and its Effects on the Progress of Civilization’ in which he offered a scholarly defence of slavery.77 Slavery, he claimed, had always existed for the benefit of slave and master. Dew went on to

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argue that slavery in America was milder than slavery in antiquity citing slavery as a punishment in antiquity for non-payment of debts or failure to comply with a contract. American slavery, Dew insisted, was a necessary and benevolent institution. Neither the condition of slaves nor the evidence of history justified the abolition of slavery. Child’s book, like Dew’s, starts with the history of slavery ‘in different ages and nations’. Child pointedly disagreed with Thomas Jefferson’s well-known claim in Notes on the state of Virginia, that American slavery was less cruel than slavery in antiquity.78 ‘The ancients’, Child claimed, ‘made slaves of captives taken in war, as an amelioration of the original custom of indiscriminate slaughter; the moderns attack defenseless people, without provocation, and steal them, for the express purpose of making them slaves.’79 American slavery, Child asserted, ‘is more odious than the ancient; and . . . the condition of slaves has always been worse just in proportion to the freedom enjoyed by their masters’.80 Modern slavery, she argued, is history’s most cruel form of slavery.81 Child accused the United States, ‘the most democratic society in history’, of having the most stringent slave codes. ‘Slavery is so inconsistent with free institutions,’ she wrote, ‘and the spirit of liberty is so contagious under such institutions that the system must either be given up, or sustained by laws outrageously severe; hence we find that our slave laws have each year been growing more harsh than those of any other nation.’82 An American example of this in the South were the harsh new laws enacted in the aftermath of David Walker’s Appeal and the Nat Turner Rebellion to prohibit the teaching of reading and writing to black people. The Virginian law against educating slaves, free blacks, and children of whites and blacks, was typical of these new laws. Slavery, Child concluded, inevitably degrades both slave and master.83 Racial prejudice, Child pointed out, was absent in Greek antiquity. ‘while the blacks were the leading race in civilization and political power, there was no prejudice among whites against their color. On the contrary, we find that the early Greeks regarded them as a superior variety of the human species, not only in intellectual and moral qualities, but [also] in outward appearances. ‘The Ethiopians’, says Herodotus, ‘surpassed other men in longevity, stature, and personal beauty.’84 Prejudice against skin colour, she argued, is the product of their social condition.

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Taking up this same point, one contributor to the Colored American newspaper termed racial prejudice in America ‘colorphobia’ and he marshalled the classics to prove that it is a cultural construct rather than natural law. Anti-black passion is, we are told, ‘a law of nature,’ and not to be trifled with! ‘Prejudice against color’ ‘a law of nature!’ Forsooth! What a sinner against nature old Homer was! He goes off in ecstasies in his description, of the black Ethiopians, praises their beauty, calls them the favorites of the gods, and represents all the ancient divinities as selecting them from all the nations of the world as their intimate companions, the objects of their peculiar complacency. If Homer had only been indoctrinated into this ‘law of nature,’ he would never have insulted his deities by representing them as making negroes their chosen associates. What impious trifling with this sacred ‘law’ was perpetrated by the old Greeks, who represented Minerva, their favorite goddess of Wisdom as an African princess . . . How little reverence for this sublime ‘law’ had Solon, Pythagoras, Plato, and those other master spirits of ancient Greece, who, in their pilgrimage after knowledge, went to Ethiopia and Egypt, and sat at the feet of black philosophers to drink in wisdom . . . this ‘law of nature’ was never heard of till long after the commencement of the African slave trade . . .85

Knowledge of the ancient Greek past proves, this author argued, that racial prejudice is a modern invention linked to the slave trade, not a law of nature. In Child’s historical novel Philothea: A Grecian Romance (1836), she projected nineteenth-century debates about slavery onto fifthcentury Greece.86 Child casts Sparta as an ancient version of the American South, where, like Southerners, Spartan citizens disdain manual labour, boast about their love of freedom, and mock and abuse their slaves. ‘I heard this same Lysidas [a Spartan], the other day,’ said [the Athenian] Philæmon, ‘boasting that the Spartans were the only real freemen; and Lacedæmon the only place where courage and virtue always found a sure reward. I asked him what reward the Helots had for bravery or virtue. “They are not scourged; and that is sufficient reward for the base hounds,” was his contemptuous reply. He approves the law forbidding masters to bestow freedom on their slaves; and likes the custom which permits boys to whip them, merely to remind them of their bondage . . . He says the sun of liberty shines brighter with the dark atmosphere of slavery around it . . . Lysidas boasted of salutary cruelty; and in the same breath told me the Helots loved their masters.’87

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Athenians, on the other hand, display the characteristics and values of the American North. Child had worked hard keeping her family and the family farm solvent. She was proud of her accomplishments. In 1829 she published a best-selling advice book, The Frugal Housewife, which she dedicated ‘to those who were not ashamed of economy’.88 In Child’s novel, Athenians, in contrast to the lazy Spartans, embrace work as a guarantor of freedom and virtue. Anaxagoras, the grandfather of the heroine Philothea, speaks with pride about her household accomplishments: ‘We still believe Hesiod’s maxim, that industry is the guardian of virtue, Philothea plies her distaff as busily as Lachesis spinning the thread of mortal life.’89 Philothea is praised for her industriousness and frugality: ‘she loved to prepare her grandfather’s frugal repast of bread and grapes, and wild honey; to take care of his garments; to copy his manuscripts; and to direct the operations of Milza, a little Arcadian peasant girl, who was her only attendant. These duties, performed with cheerful alacrity, gave a fresh charm to the music and embroidery with which she employed her leisure hours . . . ’.90 Anaxagoras is the mouthpiece of another truism in the American North’s critique of the South: ‘There is one great mistake in Lacedæmonian institutions’, he observes. ‘They seek to avoid the degrading love of money, by placing every citizen above the necessity of laborious occupation; but they forget that the love of tyranny may prove an evil still more dangerous to the state.’91 In Child’s novel, the Athenians, like her compatriots in the North, linked the ability to produce for themselves as a fundamental right and guarantor of liberty and virtue. In her view, Spartans, like Southerners, mistakenly linked liberty to inequality, hierarchy, and indolence.

THE ANCIENT AND SOUTHERN MASTER CLASSES Northern criticisms of ancient and modern slavery outraged proslavery Southerners.92 Northern opponents of slavery and pro-slavery advocates were well aware that Greece and Rome relied on slave labour, but Southerners repeatedly emphasized this aspect of ancient history. As early as 1790, Southerners pointed out that Greece and Rome were

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slave-holding societies: ‘There never was a Government on the face of the earth, but what permitted slavery,’ commented Representative James Jackson of Georgia, ‘The purest sons of freedom in the Grecian Republics, the citizens of Athens and Lacedaemon, all held slaves.’93 South Carolina lawyer and writer David McCord insisted, ‘All the greatest and freest people of antiquity were slaveholders.’94 ‘The free states of antiquity abounded with slaves,’ wrote South Carolinian statesman John C. Calhoun, who argued that ‘there has never yet existed a wealthy and civilized society in which one portion of the community did not, in point of fact, live on the labor of the other.’95 In 1854 Virginia planter and lawyer George Fitzhugh pointed out correctly that ‘Liberty and equality are the new things under the sun.’96 Slavery, he and others argued, was a basic building block of civilized life. Pro-slavery writers stressed the virtues of an ordered, hierarchical society and praised aristocratic values. Hierarchy was built into the very structure of the cosmos, and slavery was part of the natural order. Dominance and subordination were intrinsic to social relations, insisted Fitzhugh, and it is human nature to be in ‘a constant conflict, war, or race of competition’. Men are unequal and ‘bestowing upon men equality of rights, is but giving license to the strong to oppress the weak’. This fundamental inequality is best handled, Fitzhugh believed, by an acceptance of dependence and inequality. ‘A state of dependence is the only condition in which reciprocal affection can exist among human beings—the only situation in which the war of competition ceases, and peace, amity and good will arise.’97 South Carolinian plantation mistress Louisa S. McCord asserted that God had arranged the world in a hierarchical fashion: ‘Equality’, she claimed, ‘is no thought or creation of God. Slavery, under one name or another, will exist as long as man exists . . . ’.98 Like Fitzhugh she believed that slavery was a kindness to an inferior race that would otherwise be destroyed in the competitive state of war that is characteristic of the human species. When viewed through this lens, slavery can be seen as benevolent. Slavery is good for the black person who is ‘protected’ from annihilation. Slavery provides the basis for an enlightened and paternalistic form of social organization.

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Aristotle’s Politics was a gift to pro-slavery authors.99 W. J. Grayson, a contemporary of John C. Calhoun, looked to Aristotle for support and wrote ‘a democratic government cannot exist unless the laboring classes be slaves . . . It is not a new thing, but it is two thousand years old . . . it is as ancient as Aristotle.’ ‘Aristotle’s Politics’ he believed, ‘should be [a] textbook in all Southern colleges’ for his words on slavery are ‘as clear and emphatic as language can furnish . . . ’.100 Southern intellectual and statesman Hugh Legare´, summarizing Aristotle, wrote: ‘The relation of master and slave is just as indispensable in every well ordered state, as that of husband and wife, or the other domestic relations.’101 George Frederick Holmes, professor of history and political economy at the College of William and Mary, citing Aristotle’s Politics, wrote ‘Nature has clearly designed some men for freedom and others for slavery—and with respect to the latter slavery is both just and beneficial.’102 Thomas R. Dew also utilized Aristotle in his pro-slavery arguments: If we look to the Republics of Greece and Rome, in the days of their glory and civilization, we shall find no one doubting the right to make slaves of those taken in war . . . Aristotle, the greatest philosopher of antiquity, and a man of as capacious mind as the world ever produced, was a warm advocate of slavery—maintaining that it was reasonable, necessary and natural, and accordingly in his model of a republic, there were to be comparatively few freemen served by many slaves.’103

Aristotle’s views on slavery were adapted to legitimate the southern master class’s reliance on slavery. Slavery, Southerners insisted, was the basis of an enlightened and paternalistic form of social organization. Southerners argued that political order and culture depended on a leisured class. Those enamoured of Athenian culture and Roman institutions made the argument that slaves provided the leisure necessary for their achievements. George Frederick Holmes claimed that ‘A slave society had produced Pindar, Thucydides, Plato, Aristotle, and Roman slaveholders had conquered the world, legislated for all succeeding ages, and laid the broad foundations of modern civilization and modern institutions.’104 Slavery was the sine qua non of the great achievements of antiquity, insisted George Fitzhugh: ‘this high civilization and domestic slavery did not merely co-exist,’ he

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wrote, ‘they were cause and effect . . . Greece and Rome were indebted to this institution alone for the taste, the leisure and the means to cultivate their head and their hearts . . . [without it] they never would have produced a poet, an orator, a sculptor or an architect . . . ’.105 Southern elites flattered themselves that slavery allowed the flourishing of their own patrons and producers of culture. ‘Domestic slavery has produced the same results in elevating the character of the master that it did in Greece and Rome’, Fitzhugh bragged. ‘He is lofty and independent in his sentiments, generous, affectionate, brave and eloquent . . . History proves this . . . Scipio and Aristides, Calhoun and Washington, are the noble results of domestic slavery.’106 Just as slavery bolstered the characters of the master class of antiquity, so it enables the virtues of antiquity’s descendants in the American South to blossom. Greece and Rome flourished because slavery freed citizens from the necessity of labour and gave them otium—the leisure necessary for participating in politics and the cultivation of the arts. Similarly, slavery provided otium for the Southern master class. The connection between slavery, otium, and liberty had deep roots in Southern culture. The 1776 design for the seal of the state of Virginia included a motto chosen for the outer rim placed in an arc around personifications of Libertas, Ceres, and Aeternitas: Deus nobis haec otia fecit (God has granted us this leisure).107Otium, as David Fischer has pointed out, is here both leisure and independence. It is freedom from having to till the soil (which slaves will do) and a freedom from dependence on another’s will.108 Southerners linked liberty to inequality, hierarchy, and leisure. ‘I am an aristocrat,’ said Senator John Randolph of Roanoke, Virginia, ‘I love liberty, I hate equality.’109 Liberty, Southerners argued, depended upon hierarchy and inequality. In sharp contrast to the value northern Anglo-Saxon Protestants placed on labour and industriousness, elite Southern whites aspired to be free from labour. In the North, the legacy of the Puritans meant that labour was virtuous and idleness was viewed as disreputable and bordering on sinfulness. In the South, labour was viewed with contempt. Overseeing agriculture in the form of plantations farmed by slaves was a noble occupation for free men. As in ancient Greece, the work slaves performed was unfit for citizens. ‘In Sparta,’ Thomas R. Dew pointed out, ‘the freemen were forbidden to perform the offices

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of slave, lest he might lose the spirit of independence. In modern times, too, liberty has always been more ardently desired by slaveholding communities.’110 The spirit of liberty, Southerners argued, burned with more intensity in the breasts of Southerners than in Northern breasts.

A SOUTHERN GREECE Like many Americans influenced by romantic nationalism, Southerners idealized ancient Greece as the home of beauty and culture, and all that was noble and timeless. Even more than the North, the South glorified Greek culture and praised the autonomy of the Greek city-states. Southern supporters of the compact theory of a confederation of states admired the autonomy of the Greek city-states. Proslavery theorists generally loved classical Athens—‘The soil of Athens is consecrated ground’, wrote Holmes in 1847.111 Addressing alumni of the University of Virginia, one alumnus linked Athens to the American South, pointing out that in Athens, only free citizens ‘answering in position to our white men of the South’, were allowed the vote; her democracy was, like democracy in the South, in reality, ‘a refined nobility’.112 This elitist vision of Athenian democracy was preferable to views on democracy popular in the North.113 The South envisioned the golden age of ancient Athens as an aristocratic republic whilst the North viewed Athens an egalitarian republic. Some Southerners drew flattering parallels between Greek political culture and Southern society. The industrial North, they believed, preferred a centralized federal government like that of imperial Athens or imperial Rome. But the agricultural South, like ancient Greece, was a loose confederation of free states based on the institution of slavery. In George Fitzhugh’s view, ‘the ancients, in the days of Herodotus, when the country around the Levant and the Islands in the Mediterranean were cut up into hundreds of little highly enlightened States, seem to have understood the evils of centralization quite as well as the moderns.’114 On the superiority of Greek culture, Fitzhugh wrote: ‘It is idle to talk of progress, when we look two thousand years back for models of perfection . . . The ancients

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understood the art, practice and science of government better than we. There was more intelligence, more energy, more learning, more happiness, more people, and more wealth, around the Levant, and in its islands, in the days of Herodotus, than are now to be found in all Europe.’115 Slavery enabled planter elites to imaginatively identify with the beautiful, aristocratic, and idealized world conjured up in Greek sculpture, poetry, and art. Southern elites embraced the Greek Revival style in architecture and the decorative arts, building their plantations and town homes with porticoes, pediments, Doric columns, wide cornice lines, and hierarchical arrangements, and symmetry. Inside, ladies wore Grecian robes, and ladies and gentlemen sat on Grecian sofas and klismos chairs and entertained with Wedgwood porcelain decorated with figures and decorative motifs from Greek mythology and art.116 Many of the planter gentry regularly spent a season at the Virginia Springs, a Greek-themed mineral springs resort in Fauquier County, Virginia, popular from the 1820s until the Civil War. By 1834, a four-story Greek Revival hotel, ‘the pavilion’, stood on a rise as the centerpiece of the resort which spread over 3,000 acres. Twelve huge Doric columns supported a wide portico that stretched the nearly 200-foot length of the buildings, offering a promenade. The springhouse resembled a Greek temple with Doric columns, a domed roof nearly 40 feet in diameter and a statue of the Greek goddess of health, Hygieia. It stood at the foot of the hill, opposite the hotel.117 The guests referred to the springhouse as a temple. At some mineral spring resorts, planter families built their own personal ‘cottages’ as elegant Greek Revival houses.118 For Southern visitors, the Grecian architecture and elaborate landscapes at the springs reflected the refinement, nobility, and grandeur of their own plantation society.119 This romantic identification with ancient Greece and the elegant Grecian style of these resort buildings and plantation homes existed entirely in the Southern elite imagination, masking the suffering entailed by its underlying mode of production, slavery.120 The industrial North threatened this idyllic way of life. Classicist Basil Gildersleeve was horrified at the despoiling of a Southern pastoral by Northern industrialization. He feared a corruption of a whole way of life. ‘Mills and manufactories on every stream and in

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every valley . . . and no wonder that those who cling with love, which is often the highest reason, to the old frame-work of our society, shudder at the thought of a Lowell on the Appomattox or a Manchester in the Piedmont regions . . . ’ he wrote. ‘Slave labor is to be withdrawn . . . and the country is literally and metaphorically to go to grass . . . Yankees and Yankeefied Southrons are to dye the rivers of Virginia with indigo and copperas, and make her skies black with the smoke of their furnaces.’121 It is interesting to compare the words of the Bostonian Lydia Maria Child, who looked with pleasure at what she described as the ‘neat and flourishing villages in every valley of New England. The busy hum of machinery made music with her neglected waterfalls. All her streams, like the famous Pactolus [River in Lydia], flowed with gold.’122 Gildersleeve, on the other hand, saw a dehumanizing manufacturing hell. Child and other Northerners viewed their way of life as embodying the best of Greek democracy. They believed their way of life realized Thomas Jefferson’s vision of a yeoman democratic republic worked by hardy and industrious free men and women. Gildersleeve and other Southerners viewed plantation life as an idyll of unspoiled, unsullied rural nature in danger of destruction by Northern industrialism.123 Liberty and upholding the values and ideals of the early American republic were, of course, what Southerners claimed they were fighting for in their struggles against an increasingly aggressive North. Federal tariffs, opposition to slavery in newly conquered territories, and abolitionist diatribes on the moral evils of slavery were deemed oppressive. In the Southern War for Independence, separation from the Union embodied the spirit of the American Revolution. Southerners argued they had the right to pull out of a Union that was oppressing some of its members. Separation from a tyrannical power was not only permissible, it was necessary and virtuous—it was rooted in the ideology of the American Revolution. At the same time that the Greeks were elevated as a model both for politics and culture, there remained an abiding deep love and respect among conservative planter elites for the heroes of the Roman Republic, for Plutarch’s noble Romans, who had been such an inspiration to the Revolutionary generation. Southern orators and politicians claimed that they were upholding the liberty for which

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their forefathers were willing to give their lives, while the North was going the way of tyrannical imperial Rome. As the Civil War drew to its inexorable close, the faltering South turned to Cato’s willingness to die rather than submit to the ‘tyranny’ of Julius Caesar for inspiration. In 1865, shortly before the fall of Richmond, Virginia, the prominent writer and journalist Edward Alfred Pollard composed a small pamphlet, The Glory of History is Honour, urging the people of Richmond to continue to resist the Yankees. In his pamphlet, he compared the contemporary struggle to the battle of Cato and the Roman Liberators against Caesar. Pollard was a member of the aristocratic elite of Richmond, a city located on seven hills which led its inhabitants to call it ‘our Rome’, and whose capitol building Thomas Jefferson had designed after a Roman temple.124 To inspire his fellow citizens, Pollard cited passages from Plutarch that describe the fall of Utica and Cato’s suicide: ‘For me,’ said Cato, ‘intercede not. It is for the conquered to turn suppliants, and for those who have done an injury to beg pardon. For my part, I have been unconquered through life, and superiour in the things I wished to be; for in justice and honour I am Caesar’s superior.’125 Pollard makes Richmond the South’s Utica and those who resist the Yankee Caesar comparable in honour to those who held out against the Roman Caesar. ‘My friends,’ Pollard wrote, ‘this is not rubbish. The glory of History is indifferent to events: it is simply Honour . . . I am for Virginia going down to history, proudly and starkly, with the title of a subjugated people . . . rather than as a people who ever submitted and bartered their honour for the mercy of an enemy.’126 Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederacy, was compared to Cato both during the war and after his death in 1889. A panegyric declared ‘not Cato himself spoke to his Senate at Utica with more dignity and steadfastness than does the Southern President when addressing his suffering fellow countrymen’.127 Shortly after Appomattox, the last battle of the war, Virginia planter Edmund Ruffin, who had fired the opening shot of the Civil War at Fort Sumter, wrapped himself in the Confederate flag and committed suicide at his plantation. Like Cato, he preferred death to living under the tyranny of a (Yankee) Caesar.

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VICTRIX CAUSA DIIS PLACUIT SED VICTA CATONI The conquering cause was pleasing to the gods but the conquered cause pleased Cato. (Lucan, Pharsalia 1.128)

After a botched attempt to fall on his sword, the defeated but defiant Cato put an end to his life, as Plutarch memorably relates: ‘Cato did not immediately die of the wound; but struggling, fell off the bed, and throwing down a little mathematical table that stood by, made such a noise that the servants, hearing it, cried out. And immediately his son and all his friends came into the chamber, where, seeing him lie weltering in his own blood, great part of his bowels out of his body, but himself still alive and able to look at them, they all stood in horror. The physician went to him, and would have put in his bowels, which were not pierced, and sewed up the wound; but Cato, recovering himself, and understanding the intention, thrust away the physician, plucked out his own bowels, and tearing open the wound, immediately expired.’128 By thus expiring, Cato created an exceptionally active afterlife for himself. He remained a potent exemplar for Southern loyalists long after the end (one cannot call it a resolution) of the Civil War. In 1914, as the United States was about to enter the Great War in Europe, the United Daughters of the Confederacy funded the Confederate Soldiers’ Memorial at the Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia. Moses Ezekiel, born in Richmond, Virginia, in 1844, designed and executed the thirtytwo-foot bronze and marble memorial. The South is personified as a woman, crowned with olive leaves. Her left hand holds a laurel wreath representing a moral victory and honour, which she bestows upon her fallen sons and daughters. Below, in the centre of the base of the monument, is the goddess Athena holding up with her left arm a female figure representing the South, who is collapsing in military defeat. She holds in her hand a shield inscribed with the word ‘Constitution’. At the base of the monument is a Latin inscription from Lucan’s Pharsalia, the epic of Rome’s civil war, whose hero is the unyielding Cato: Victrix causa diis placuit sed victa Catoni. In the ears of those devoted to the Confederate cause, Lucan’s defeated causa still resonates. In 1999, interpreting the monument 85

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years after its dedication, on the occasion of the 191st birthday of Jefferson Davis, Father Alister C. Anderson, Chaplain-in-Chief of the Sons of Confederate Veterans, remarked that the line from Lucan ‘illustrates the truth of an historical continuum from the time of this ancient war to that of the War for Southern Independence . . . victrix causa, referring to Julius Caesar’s inordinate ambition and his lust for total power, is compared with President Lincoln and the Federal Government’s desire and power to crush and destroy the South . . . and Cato represents the noble aims of the Southern Confederacy.’129 Those loyal to the Confederacy appropriated Lucan’s noble Cato for their ‘lost cause’. Since the administration of Woodrow Wilson (1913–21), presidents have annually sent a wreath to the Arlington Confederate Monument.130 On the 18 May 2009 dozens of American scholars sent a letter to President Barack H. Obama asking him not to send a wreath because the ‘monument was intended to legitimize secession and the principles of the Confederacy and glorify the Confederacy’. As for the Latin motto, it is ‘a classical reference which . . . implies that Lincoln was a despot and the Union cause unjust; [and that] Cato, the stoic believer in “freedom,” would have sided with the Confederacy . . . [which is] a denial of the wrong committed against African Americans by slave owners, Confederates, and neo-Confederates, through the monument’s denial of slavery as the cause of secession and its holding up of Confederates as heroes . . . We ask you to break this chain of racism . . . and not send a wreath.’131 Even Obama was caught in the nexus of these associations. He had to negotiate carefully the potent symbolism of the monument with its ideologically charged Latin motto. The nation’s first African-American president sent a wreath to the Arlington Confederate Cemetery.

NOTES 1. Winterer (2007), Malamud (2009), and Richard (2009). 2. For a discussion of the influence of Plutarch in America, see Reinhold (1984), 250–64. 3. Cremin (1980), 303.

312 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

Margaret Malamud ‘Classical Library’, Workingman’s Advocate, 5 November 1831. Litwack (1961), 121. Winterer (2007), 181, 187. Porter (1936), 555–76; and McHenry (2002). Porter (1936) lists the names and locations of the societies, 557–8. Winterer (2007), 181. Cooper (1972), 620. Whipper in Wesley (1971), 109. Whipper in Wesley (1971), 111. ‘Elevation’, North Star, 4 May 1849. See, for example, ‘Colored Friends, Attention!’ Colored American, 24 November 1838; ‘The Academy’, Freedom’s Journal, 17 October 1828; and ‘Union Seminary’, Freedom’s Journal, 4 July 1828. Whipper in Wesley (1971), 111; also quoted in McHenry (2002), 51. Liberator, 3 December 1831 also cited in McHenry (2002), 48–9. Whipper in Wesley (1971), 108. See Plutarch, Life of Demosthenes 7.6. Liberator, 13 October 1832 quoted in McHenry (2002), 56. Garrison cited in Bruce (2001), 199. ‘Popular Oratory’, Colored American, 5 October 1839. ‘Demosthenes’, Frederick Douglass’s Paper, 18 December 1851. ‘A Visit to My Friends in Philadelphia’, Colored American, 23 January 1841. ‘Our Infantile Prote´ge´, the Demosthenian Shield’, Colored American, 31 July 1841. Stauffer (2008), 72. Blight (1998), 7. Blight (1998), xiii–xiv. Douglass quoted in Blight (1998), xv. Fishkin and Peterson (2001); Cook and Tatum (2010), 49–92. Blight (1998), 5–6; Quintilian, Institutio Oratoria 11.3.2. Plutarch, Life of Demosthenes 10.851 and Lives of the Ten Orators 8.844e. Blight (1998), 19, 12, 8, 9, 17. Liberator, 18 March 1844 quoted in Blassingame (1979–92), vol. 1, xxxi. Champion Magazine, quoted in Blassingame (1979–92), vol. 1, xxxi. Douglass in the North Star, 23 November 1849 quoted in Blassingame (1979–92), vol. 1, xxv. The Akron Ohio Beacon in 1850 quoted in Blassingame (1979–92), vol. 1, xxx. Blassingame (1979–92), vol. 1, xxviii. Liberator, 4 November 1842.

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39. See, for example, Douglass’s ‘Revolutions Never Go Backward’ (1861) and ‘Fighting the Rebels with one hand’ (1862) in Blassingame (1979–92), vol. 3, 428–34 and 473–88. 40. Sallust, Bellum Catilinae 52.255–67; abbreviated in Blight (1998), 41–2. 41. Blassingame (1979–92), vol. 2, 359–87. 42. Gregory (1893; 1969), 89. 43. For Scarborough’s comparison of Douglass and Demosthenes, see Scarborough in Gregory (1893; 1969), 10. 44. ‘Hon. Frederick Douglass’, Cleveland Gazette, 20 March 1886. 45. Some of the material in this section is adapted from Malamud (2008). On Walker see further above, Hodkinson and Hall, Ch. 3, pp. 95–6. 46. Walker in Aptheker (1965), 82–3. 47. See book 21 of Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita. 48. Winterer (2007), 183–4. 49. See Livy’s description of her in Ab Urbe Condita, book 30. 50. Stowe quoted by Langston Hughes in Sanders and Johnston (2005), vol. 5, 492. 51. ‘An Address to the People of the United States’, Liberator, 28 February 1845. One reader of the Liberator compared himself to Hannibal in his hatred of slavery: ‘and like a young Hannibal, I swore then and there eternal hostility to American slavery’. G. W. S. ‘Why not Rejoice?’, Liberator, 13 February 1857. After a meeting in Boston, the attendees ‘separated, after pledging, as did Hannibal, “Eternal Hostility to Slavery”’. ‘Declaration of Sentiments of the Colored Citizens of Boston on the Fugitive Slave Bill’, Liberator, 11 October 1850. 52. ‘I Wish I Could Do Something’, Frederick Douglass’s Paper, 9 July 1852. 53. ‘Letter 1—No title,’ National Era, 8 March 1849. 54. ‘Emancipation’, Liberator, 10 October 1862. Several ancient sources including Plutarch’s Life of Cato the Elder 17 and Pliny the Elder, NH 15.74 say that Cato used these words in various slightly different forms. For the evolution of the slogan see Little (1934). 55. Winterer (2007), 180–90. 56. Martin R. Delaney to Frederick Douglass, 20 May 1848, in North Star, 9 June 1848, quoted in Winterer (2007), 185–6. Delaney (and others) may well have been familiar with Felicia Hemans’ 1819 popular poem ‘The Wife of Asdrubal’, which offered a sympathetic interpretation of the actions of the Carthaginian matron. 57. Winterer (2007), 186–7. 58. Henry C. Wright, ‘Liberty or Death’, Liberator, 29 February 1856. 59. Livy, Ab Urbe Condita 3.44–53.

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60. Cincinnati Enquirer quoted in Winterer (2007), 187. Garner’s children’s father might well have been her white owner and master. 61. ‘Garner’s outstretched hands transmit several messages at once; her abject posture casts her as victim rather than aggressor, since it is apparently the cruelty of slavery that has driven her to this desperate act. Motioning to the dead bodies, she appears to offer the slave-owners their chattel, which she has rendered worthless. She seems to point to the consequences of her own violent act as if to say, “See what you have driven me to!” it is both a gesture of defiance and desperation.’ Furth (1998), 39. 62. See Kasson (1990), 223–30 and cf. Furth (1998), 52–4 for discussions of the production and reception of Medea in America. 63. Kasson (1990), 223. 64. Macintosh in Hall, Macintosh, and Taplin (2000), 15. 65. One reviewer of Noble’s painting wrote: ‘There is an excellent picture, too, of the high heroic order, by Thomas S. Noble, representing an episode in our history which might be put in one of the panels of the rotunda of the National Capitol. It tells in forcible lines the story of Margaret Garner, that dusky Medea, who cut the throat of her child to save it from falling into the hands of the slave-hunters, who were in pursuit of her.’ ‘The National Academy of Design’, The Independent— Devoted to the Consideration of Politics, Social and Economic, 25 April 1867. 66. Cabin boy quoted in Alexander (1984), 37. 67. Cinque´’s toga is a blend of ancient and tribal dress. Mendi tribesmen draped their bodies in cloth from three to four feet wide and from six to nine feet long, leaving the right arm and shoulder bare. Alexander (1984), 44. 68. Powell (1997) and McElroy (1990). 69. ‘Cinque´’, Colored American, 27 March 1841. 70. Quoted in The Amistad Revolt: An Historical Legacy of Sierra Leone and the United States, http://usa.usembassy.de/etexts/soc/amistad.pdf, 6. 71. ‘Portrait of Cinque´’, Colored American, 27 February 1841. 72. ‘Portrait of Cinque´’, Colored American, 27 February 1841. 73. Gregory (1893; 1969), 208. 74. Alexander (1984), 32; 45. 75. Neagle and Wright letters, published in ‘The “Hanging Committee” of the Artists’ Fund Society “Doing Homage to Slavery”’, Philadelphia Pennsylvania Freeman, 21 April 1841. Reprinted in New York Emancipator, 17 June 1841 quoted in Powell (1997), 65–6.

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76. For a cultural biography of Child, see Karcher (1994); see also Winterer (2007), 169–77. 77. Dew (1832), 9–28. 78. ‘We know that among the Romans, about the Augustan age especially, the condition of their slaves was much more deplorable than that of the blacks on the continent of America. The two sexes were confined in separate apartments, because to raise a child cost the master more than to buy one. Cato, for a very restricted indulgence to his slaves in this particular, took from them a certain price. But in this country the slaves multiply as fast as the free inhabitants. Their situation and manners place the commerce between the two sexes almost without restraint.— The same Cato, on a principle of oeconomy, always sold his sick and superannuated slaves. He gives it as a standing precept to a master visiting his farm, to sell his old oxen, old waggons, old tools, old and diseased servants, and every thing else become useless. ‘Vendat boves vetulos, plaustrum vetus, ferramenta, vetera, servum senem, servum morbosum, & si quid aliud supersit vendat.’ The American slaves cannot enumerate this among the injuries and insults they receive.’ Jefferson (1853), 152–3. 79. Child (1836), 28. 80. Child (1836), 38. 81. Child (1836), 38–9. 82. Child (1836), 74–5. 83. Child (1836), 28–9. 84. Child (1836), 186. Herodotus, Histories, 3.17 and 20. 85. ‘Prejudice against Color’, Colored American, 5 September 1840. I analyse antebellum African-American and abolitionist uses of classical references to ancient Egypt and Ethiopia in the construction of an Egyptian ancestry for African Americans in ‘Black Minerva: The Uses of Antiquity in Antebellum African American History’, forthcoming in Daniel Orrells, Gurminder Bhambra, and Tessa Roynon, eds., African Athena: New Agendas (2011). 86. My discussion of Philothea is indebted to Winterer (2007), 173–5. 87. Child (1861), 117. On the role in other abolitionist polemic played by the trope of Spartan flogging, and the ancient sources, see above, Ch. 3, pp. 74–5. 88. Child quoted in Winterer (2007), 169. 89. Child (1861), 146. See Hesiod, Theogony 905–6. 90. Child (1861), 79. 91. Child (1861), 118.

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92. Some of the material in the next two sections is adapted from Malamud (2009). 93. US Representative James Jackson of Georgia quoted in Fox-Genovese and Genovese (2005), 69. 94. McCord (1851), 357. 95. Calhoun’s ‘Speech on the Reception of Abolition Petitions’ quoted in Harrington (1989), 65. 96. Fitzhugh (1965 reprint of 1854), 34. 97. Fitzhugh (1965 reprint of 1854), 36, 38, 45. 98. McCord, quoted from Lounsbury (1996, ed.), 441. 99. Aristotle was attempting to describe an ideal social system, so that slaves as part of a social system must be the people who are directed by others and unable to assume autonomy. This creates a paternalistic view of society (slaves as permanent children) which was exploited by the pro-slavery lobby. For a more detailed analysis, with a rather different emphasis, of Aristotle in pro-slavery polemic, see the previous chapter in this volume by Sara Monoson. 100. Grayson quoted by Harrington (1989), 65–6. 101. Legare´ quoted in Fox-Genovese and Genovese (2005), 274. After the summary, he begins his next paragraph, ‘However that may be’. 102. Holmes (1850), 193. 103. Dew (1832; 1970), 16. 104. Holmes quoted in Harrington (1989), 68. 105. Fitzhugh (1965 reprint of 1854), 43. 106. Fitzhugh (1965 reprint of 1854), 44. 107. The motto comes from Virgil, Eclogue 1.6. 108. D. Fischer (2004), 64–5. 109. Randolph quoted in D. Fischer (2004), 67. 110. Dew (1981), 66. 111. Holmes quoted in Fox-Genovese and Genovese (2005), 288. 112. M. R. Garnett, An Address Delivered before the Society of Alumni of the University of Virginia, quoted in Miles (1971), 271. 113. Miles (1971), 271. 114. Fitzhugh (1965 reprint of 1854), 18. 115. Fitzhugh (1965 reprint of 1854), 158–9. 116. See the many examples in Cooper (1993). 117. I follow the description of the resort in Lewis (2001), 13. 118. Lewis (2001), 23–4. 119. In Lewis’s words the resort ‘physically embodied their idealized version of the Slave South’. Lewis (2001), 17. 120. Lewis (2001), 26–7; 56.

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121. ‘Slaves vs. Mechanics’, 17 November 1863, in Briggs (1998), 153. 122. Child (1836), 117. 123. For an in-depth study of Gildersleeve, see the next chapter by David Lupher and Elizabeth Vandiver. 124. Ronnick (1997), 19. 125. Pollard (1957), 360–8. Plutarch, Life of Cato the Younger 64.4–5. Pollard also quoted by Ronnick (1997), 20–1. 126. Pollard (1957), 365–8. Pollard also wrote Southern History of the War (1865) and The Lost Cause (1866), his most popular book. 127. Panegyric quoted by Ronnick (1997), 19. 128. Plutarch, Life of Cato the Younger 70.5–6. Plutarch’s Lives The Translation called Dryden’s corrected from the Greek and revised by A. H. Clough, 5 vol., Bigelow, Brown & Co: New York, 1911, vol. 4, 492. 129. Anderson’s speech, delivered on 6 June 1999, is available at the Arlington National Cemetery website http://www.arlingtoncemetery.net/ anderson-address.htm 130. Prior to the administration of George H. W. Bush (1989–93), this was done on or near the birthday of Jefferson Davis. Starting with George H. W. Bush, it has been done on Memorial Day. 131. The letter is available on the History News Network at George Mason University http://www.hnn.us/articles/85884.html.

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11 Yankee She-Men and Octoroon Electra Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve on Slavery, Race, and Abolition David Lupher and Elizabeth Vandiver

‘FOUNDING HERO’ OF AMERICAN CLASSICAL STUDIES Serious scholarly study of Greek and Roman literature, history, and culture began in the United States in the closing decades of the nineteenth century, when the first American scholars of international reputation also founded the country’s first graduate programmes in Classics. In the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth, the pre-eminent champion of Classics in America and the finest American classical scholar of his time was Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve (Fig. 11.1).1 His prolific output included scores of articles on a wide range of classical subjects. The Latin grammar that he produced with his former student Gonzalez Lodge is still widely used,2 but his most important scholarship was in the field of Greek syntax and the study of Pindar’s epinician poetry. His 1885 commentary on the Olympian and Pythian Odes remains a work with which Pindarists must reckon.3 Gildersleeve’s greatest contribution to American classical studies was his inauguration of the first Classics graduate programme in the United States at Johns Hopkins, where he was the first professor formally appointed when the university was founded in 1875. The

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Figure 11.1 Classicist and Confederate apologist Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve in the 1890s

graduate programme at Johns Hopkins followed the German rather than the English model, and since Gildersleeve had received his doctorate at Go¨ttingen in 1853 when he was not yet 22, he had direct experience of and enthusiasm for this form of education.4 In his nearly forty years of teaching at Johns Hopkins, Gildersleeve trained scores of American classical scholars, directing nearly seventy dissertations.

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Gildersleeve’s efforts to advance the professional study of Classics in the United States extended beyond his academic positions at Johns Hopkins and earlier at the University of Virginia. In 1877–8, he served as president of the American Philological Association (founded in 1869), and in 1909 he was elected to a second term. But the project dearest to his heart arose from his acute sense of the isolation experienced by many ambitious classical scholars in the United States and their hunger for what he called ‘a medium of philological intercommunication’.5 Accordingly, in 1880 Gildersleeve founded the American Journal of Philology. This was the first quarterly journal in the United States to provide a venue for scholarly articles on all aspects of philological study. During his forty-year editorship, AJP printed articles not just on Latin and Greek but on languages as diverse as Sanskrit and Tagalog and on the grammar and syntax of post-classical European languages. The journal’s contents later became entirely classical, and it remains to this day one of the leading classical journals in the United States.6 As editor of AJP, Gildersleeve wrote a ‘Brief Mention’ for each issue, in which he commented on recent publications (especially European) and offered various reflections on classical subjects composed in what he termed his ‘kaleidoscopic style’.7 Gildersleeve was widely recognized as the greatest American classicist of his time, and he retains his prestige as a scholar and educator of considerable historical consequence. Until well into the twentieth century, he also remained a figure who commanded something akin to reverence from later classical scholars, and photographs of the fullbearded, twinkly-eyed ‘Zeus’—a common nickname for him in the years of his glory—adorned many American Classics departments. As Thomas Habinek puts it, ‘a self-consciously American classical establishment seeks a founding hero, and with his professional record and international reputation, Gildersleeve is the likeliest candidate’.8 But Greek heroes—founding heroes (oikistai) among them—displayed an unsettling tendency to reveal themselves as highly ambiguous beings, now beneficent, now baleful. Something similar has happened recently in the case of this modern founding hero. Over the last quarter of a century, eloquent and influential voices have protested against the ‘secular canonization of Gildersleeve’, as some critics have blamed this oikiste¯s of American Classics for much

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of what they regard as signal failings of classical studies in the United States.9 In 1986 Seth Schein claimed that the supposed neglect of Athenian tragedy in American scholarship ‘had been largely the legacy of one man’s taste and influence’—that man being Basil Gildersleeve.10 Page DuBois has intimated that Gildersleeve’s influence inhibited American classicists from acknowledging the importance of slavery for Graeco-Roman culture.11 And Thomas Habinek found in the quasi-reverence for the Hellenist Gildersleeve the explanation for what he regarded as the undervaluing of Latin literature by twentieth-century American classical scholars.12 This growing unease with Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve is inextricably bound up with an aspect of his life not obviously connected with classical scholarship: his role as a passionate defender of the Confederate cause during the American Civil War and his later advocacy of what he himself christened, in an 1892 article, ‘the creed of the Old South’.

GILDERSLEEVE AND THE OLD SOUTH Approaching his sixtieth year, Basil Gildersleeve proudly declared himself ‘a Charlestonian first, Carolinian next, and then a southerner—on my mother’s side, a southerner beyond dispute’.13 His maternal grandfather, Bazile La Noue (later spelled Lanneau), arrived in Charleston in 1755 as a 12-year-old orphaned Acadian deportee but eventually established himself as one of the pillars of Charlestonian society. Gildersleeve’s father Benjamin, on the other hand, was from Connecticut, ‘and that flaw in my title made me perhaps the more tenacious of my nativity’. Still, Benjamin Gildersleeve did his best to compensate for his unfortunate Yankee origins. During the Nullification Controversy of 1831, when South Carolina came very close to seceding from the Union, Benjamin’s position as an ‘ardent nullifier’ assured his in-laws ‘that, for a northerner, he was a passably good southerner’. Given this family background, it was inevitable that Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve would fight for the Confederacy. When the war began, Gildersleeve was Professor of Greek at the University of Virginia, a position he had held for five years. He

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offered his services to the Confederacy without hesitation, as did his three brothers,—indeed, even their 70-year-old father decisively lived down his Yankee origins by volunteering for the Richmond Home Guard. All five family members survived the war. Over the course of the war, Gildersleeve taught a greatly reduced student body at the University of Virginia during the school year and undertook military service in the summer; he wrote in 1892 that he ‘earned the right to teach Southern youths for nine months . . . by sharing the fortunes of their fathers and brothers for three’.14 He was severely wounded on 25 September 1864, while carrying orders for General John B. Gordon in a skirmish at Weyers Cave, Virginia, when a Spencer bullet shattered his thigh. He walked with a limp for the rest of his life, but the wound had another and happier lasting consequence: he spent five convalescent months at Hillandale, the estate near Charlottesville of Raleigh Colston, a cousin of fellow University of Virginia faculty members. After his convalescence, Gildersleeve married Colston’s daughter Elizabeth. Gildersleeve contributed to the Southern war effort with his pen as well. Between 22 October 1863 and 4 August 1864, he published 63 unsigned editorials in the Richmond Examiner. The Democratic party had founded the Examiner in 1847 as a semi-weekly counterblast to the dominant Richmond Whig, hiring as editor the charismatic and temperamental 22-year-old John Moncure Daniel.15 Shortly before the war, the paper became a daily, and its popularity grew over the course of the war. Gildersleeve’s editorials were not confined to readers in the capital of the Confederacy, since ‘the Examiner was well known from Texas to Virginia, and actually had more subscribers in some of the distant states of the Confederacy than in the immediate vicinity of its place of publication’.16 Daniel modelled his paper on the London Times and was renowned for his pride in and control over his editorial writers. They were expected vigorously to support the political agenda of the paper, which combined fierce adherence to the Confederate cause with an escalating contempt for Jefferson Davis and his cabinet. Daniel was also deeply contemptuous of what he regarded as Jewish influence in Davis’s cabinet, most visible in the person of Judah P. Benjamin, first Secretary of War, then Secretary of State for the Confederacy. Gildersleeve’s editorials make it clear that he supported Daniel’s positions on these topics; he

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admired Daniel deeply and remembered him fondly for the rest of his life.17 Daniel and his co-editor Edward Alfred Pollard, who after the war emerged as one of the most industrious celebrators of the ‘lost cause’, may be credited with setting not just the Examiner’s editorial policy but also the tone of its editorials. J. Cutler Andrews notes that: ‘Few American editors of his day employed more severe invective or resorted more to sarcasm’ than did Daniel,18 and similar rhetorical strategies appear in Pollard’s widely read post-war writings. No one who reads through Gildersleeve’s editorials will be able to deny that this man of deep learning and wide-ranging literary culture felt completely at home in the editors’ offices of the Richmond Examiner in 1863–4.19 The invective and sarcasm favoured by Daniel and Pollard are on constant display in Gildersleeve’s editorials—and it is highly doubtful that these elements entered in only when the editors revised the pieces. Gildersleeve was not only certain of the rightness of the Southern cause and the superior nature of the Southern way of life; he was filled with scorn for the North and for all things Yankee. He brought his professional interests to bear on the Yankees in the second of his editorials, ‘Historical Parallels’. Here, after comparing the privations of blockaded Richmond to the Athenian general Demosthenes’ plan of surrounding the Peloponnese with a ring of fortresses, Gildersleeve recalled how the Spartans ultimately dismantled the walls of Athens to the sound of flutes, and ‘so the marble fronts of the Fifth avenue are to be leveled with the street with the notes of the banjo and the rattle of the bones’—the musicians to be, of course, slaves who would have escaped the fate of emancipation.20 In the same editorial, Gildersleeve noted that while we were deriving comfort and instruction from the story of the great war between the Dorians and Ionians, the Yankees hugged themselves at the thought that they were the modern representatives of the ancient Romans . . . For our part they are heartily welcome to their prototypes, to all the lignumvitae consuls, to all the leather-lunged tribunes. A more canting, lying, thievish race than the Roman was never suffered by the Master of history to run so long a career on His footstool; and the sympathies of every generous soul must always be with their antagonists, whether those antagonists were nations or individuals. . . . In all the wearisome annals of the Republic there is

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but one great man [Julius Caesar], and him they killed; in all their versemanufactory there is but one great poet [Lucretius], and he wasted his talents on the dullest of themes and died a maniac.21

What do Gildersleeve’s wartime editorials reveal of his views on slavery and abolition? First, one naturally wishes to know if he was himself accustomed to the service of slaves. The editorials are silent on this question, but in a letter of 10 September 1863, written while he was in camp, Gildersleeve says ‘I suppose my place is suffering somewhat, intrusted [sic] as it is to the care of eye-servants, please give them a hint of my speedy return.’22 Much later, in his essay ‘A Southerner in the Peloponnesian War’ (1897), Gildersleeve described the privations of the war years and commented: ‘I will only tell of what I have lived, as demanded by the title of this paper . . . In our direst straits we had not learned to dispense with household service, and the household servants were never stinted of their rations, though the masters had to content themselves with the most meager fare.’23 These references make it reasonable to assume that until his thirty-fourth year, Gildersleeve, a town-dwelling Southerner, was accustomed to the service of at least a few domestic slaves. Indeed, on 6 March 1865 a visitor to Charlottesville wrote a letter that brings to brief life a particular slave in the Gildersleeve household. During a Federal cavalry raid on Charlottesville some houses were broken into: At Oakhurst, Mr. Gildersleeve’s place, just outside the University grounds, the stragglers . . . ran all over the house, ransacking bureau drawers, trunks and wardrobes. Taking out the ladies’ underclothes and dresses and finally dressing themselves up in them and wildly dancing about the yard, much to the terror of the ladies. Mr. Gildersleeve’s sister, Mrs. Howard, had put all her silver and things in her baby’s crib. The baby was asleep and the old nurse was sitting by rocking it, but the ruse did not answer, they turned the baby out on the floor, found and took the hidden treasure. They shook the old nurse to find out if she had anything concealed on her person much to the old negro’s indignation.24

Gildersleeve would also have acquired some extended experience of plantation slavery during the winter of 1853–4 when he tutored the children of the wealthy English-born planter Daniel Blake near Charleston. Not long after he wrote his last editorial, he was a witness of the end of the plantation system while convalescing from his

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wound at the Colston estate near Charlottesville. When Gildersleeve’s father-in-law Col. Raleigh Colston died in 1893, the Loudoun County Mirror’s obituary noted that ‘the misfortunes of war destroyed his resources’.25 It is not difficult to guess what ‘resources’ were meant here. In any case, there is no doubt that Gildersleeve married into a family that had lived off the labour of plantation slaves. Gildersleeve’s comments on slavery and abolition in the Richmond Examiner editorials can be divided into two categories, each of which displays a concern about abolition. Some editorials refer to slavery as a key part of the Southern social economy, under threat from abolition; others express fears that abolitionists could encourage slaves themselves to become disloyal. A good example of the first category is his complaint in early December 1863 that the Yankees are unaware of ‘all the interests which ramify from our peculiar combination of capital and labour. In short they look upon the institution [slavery] as a dead post, and not as a living tree.’26 In another editorial, writing about European criticisms of the South’s ‘peculiar institution’, he lamented, ‘We are hated for our adherence to a system of labour which runs counter to the fashionable cant of this self-laudatory century.’27 In early May 1864 he deplored the fact that the South had become ‘the by-word of super-sentimental Europe’ and defiantly declared that ‘we are content to keep aloof from the “spirit of progress” which is making all over the world a sad hotch-potch of the elements of true civilization’.28 A November 1863 editorial, ‘Slaves and Mechanics’, was more concerned with fears of organized labour than of emancipation, for ‘negro worship is but the corollary of the modern Evangel of Labour’.29 Indeed, Gildersleeve suggested a possible scenario in which black slaves might be used to checkmate the threat of white labour. If it should at some point happen that ‘the blacks cease to be profitable in the field, we can transfer them to the workshops, and the more elaborate the fabric the more minute the sub-division of labour—the easier will be the management of the race, the less the danger from the thievish propensities of this peculiar people’.30 The fact that during the war the slaves displayed an acquisitive streak would facilitate such a transformation in their use—and he even suggested that many slave-owning families were currently suffering

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as a result of ‘the high-bred tradition, which forbids the inspection of a slave’s peculium’ and he added: ‘No wonder the negroes do not feel the war.’31 Turning from the institution of slavery to the slaves themselves, we find their presence most vividly recorded in a gloomy editorial of Christmas Day 1863, where Gildersleeve complained about the ‘present nuisance’ of revelling blacks in a tone worthy of Ebenezer Scrooge: Certainly, if an active police were appointed for Christmas week, they might make our negro carnival so disagreeable to the perambulatory sons and daughters of Africa that they would cease to associate ‘hiring-time’ with visions of independence, heavy fees and light fingers. In this section of the country we have been letting the reins of authority slip through our hands. We must gather them up at once, and hold them firmly for the future, or we shall not be worthy to guide the destinies of a race which Providence has given us to control for their good and ours. And we know no better time for the resumption of authority than the present.32

Accounts of American pro-slavery arguments often posit an evolution from the defence of slavery as a ‘necessary evil’ to its celebration as a ‘positive good’ for slaves and slave-owners alike—an evolution frequently attributed to the pressure of abolitionist arguments and agitation.33 Gildersleeve’s invocation of ‘Providence’ here seems to be an obeisance to the ‘positive good’ trend. But the cited passage presents slaves more as annoyances and even potential threats to the masters than as beneficiaries of those masters’ guidance. What makes these complaints especially disturbing is the fact that ‘hiringtime’, which fell on New Year’s Day, was in the minds of many slaves less associated with ‘visions of independence’ than with fears of the break-up of slave families and friendships. Escaped slave Harriet Jacobs wrote, ‘Were it not that hiring-day is near at hand, and many families are fearfully looking forward to the probability of separation in a few days, Christmas might be a happy season for the poor slaves.’34 While the Christmas 1863 editorial lamented the boisterous unruliness of blacks in the holiday season, another morose editorial published six days later began: ‘Today closes the gloomiest year of our struggle’—and proceeded to claim that ‘in the complete upturn-

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ing of our social relations, the only happy people are those who have black hearts and black skins’.35 On 4 November 1863 Gildersleeve had proclaimed that, despite Northern attempts to encourage slaves to rise up against their masters, ‘our negroes are better Christians than their would-be liberators’, but his confidence in the slaves seemed to wane over the next few months.36 By April 1864 he was fulminating against the presence of free blacks in the Union army. After Nathan Bedford Forrest’s troops slaughtered black Union soldiers who had surrendered to them at Ft. Pillow, Tennessee, on 12 April 1864, Gildersleeve declared that what had happened there was ‘an earnest of a determination on our part . . . to discard henceforth that dangerous element of weakness, the spurious, puling, sentimental cant of a false, a morbid, a perverted humanity’.37 Similarly, in subsequent satirical comments on Lincoln’s remarks about the incident, Gildersleeve asserted that at Ft. Pillow ‘we have shown that we, as a people, are heartily tired of a policy, dictated partly by sentimentality, partly by a foolish deference to the good opinion of the world, partly by official awe of Washington—a policy to which we have sacrificed too long the lives of our brave soldiers and our solemn sense of duty’.38 Two editorials of April 1864 revealed Gildersleeve’s visceral revulsion at a supposed Yankee policy of racial equality and even racemixing. The laboured point of the title of ‘Sambo the Ass’ was that the Yankees were riding the blacks as their vehicles to victory as Mohammed, in legend, preferred his favourite ass to a chariot of fire for a visit to heaven. The editorial is a sustained attack on supposed Yankee flattery of useful free blacks as social equals, a policy set at the highest level: ‘White House and Black House are synonymous’. And he stated that ‘a monstrous word of Yankee coinage, Miscegenation, a word that would have made Quintilian stare and gasp, foreshadows the culmination of the “man and brother” theory’.39 Not quite two weeks later, this ‘monstrous word’ received an editorial of its own, in which Gildersleeve claimed that the Yankees, not content to make mulattoes of themselves by their supposed policy of granting social equality to blacks, were preparing to impose miscegenation on a defeated Southland. ‘The white wives, which they have promised to their negro followers, are our sisters and our sweethearts. Think of that, men of the South, and strike harder the next time you meet the foe.’40

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Rebarbative though it be, the editorial ‘Miscegenation’ demands further examination in a chapter in a volume on slavery and abolition. First it is important to note that it was a contribution to what might be called a ‘media phenomenon’ of the first months of the year 1864—the year in which Abraham Lincoln was campaigning for reelection. Given the Confederate reverses of the previous campaigning season (notably the battle of Gettysburg and the fall of Vicksburg in early July of 1863), there was a strong belief in the South that only a Democratic defeat of Lincoln could make a favourable negotiated settlement possible. The word ‘miscegenation’ was in fact an artefact of the Democratic campaign. It formed the title of an anonymous tract published in New York City in the last weeks of 1863 (though dated 1864): Miscegenation, The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro.41 While purporting to be a radical abolitionist tract advocating the voluntary mixing of the white and black races as not only inevitable but highly beneficial to American society, the tract was in actuality a ‘political dirty trick’ concocted by two newspapermen on the staff of the staunchly antiRepublican and anti-abolitionist New York World: David Herbert Croly, Irish-born editorial manager of the paper, and George Wakeman.42 Reading this tract in the early twenty-first century is often a disorientating experience, for much of it comes across as an attractive celebration of tolerance and an appreciation for cultural and racial diversity. Indeed, some have yielded to the temptation to imagine that the authors were on some level ‘double agents’, seduced by the large-hearted rhetoric of their own prose.43 This is wishful thinking. The tract was clearly the work of ‘two white men who did not condone a word they wrote’—a reductio ad absurdum of radical abolitionist pleas for the political and social equality of blacks and whites.44 At the same time, its circulation before publication was an attempt to entrap certain prominent abolitionists into endorsing the tract, thereby disgracing themselves in the eyes of more moderate supporters of the Northern war effort—and some did in fact fall victim, among them Lucretia Mott and the Grimke´ sisters.45 The Northern Democratic press avidly seized upon the hoax and treated it as an authentic statement of radical abolitionist hopes and aims, and the neologism ‘miscegenation’ almost immediately took its

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place in American English, replacing the earlier standard term ‘amalgamation’. Gildersleeve, for all his skill as an interpreter of texts, was utterly taken in. What seems especially to have incensed him was the notorious chapter ‘Heart-Histories of the White Daughters of the South’, which assures readers: ‘Nor are the Southern women indifferent to the strange magnetism of association with a tropical race. Far otherwise. The mothers and daughters of the aristocratic slaveowners are thrilled with a strange delight by daily contact with their dusky male servitors.’46 Gildersleeve fumed: ‘The standard of female virtue at the South is beyond dispute the highest known. Miss Dickinson cannot understand this . . . She talks of horrible sympathies with the “emotional capacities” of “dusky servitors,” and plunges into a depth of beastliness whither decency refuses to follow her.’47 It is clear from the words quoted just above that Gildersleeve believed the author of the tract was the fiery young Pennsylvanian abolitionist orator Anna Dickinson (1842–1932).48 He was not alone in this suspicion. Reporting on the Miscegenation furore in the London Times of 18 February, the US correspondent reported that when Anna Dickinson was late to a scheduled speech, ‘advertisements and laudatory notices of this tract were handed around . . . which suggested to many that the lecturer was either the author of the book or pecuniarily interested in its sale’.49 Also, on 26 March, the Democratic New York Herald claimed that the tract was ‘said to have been written by Miss Ann [sic] Dickinson or Mr. Theodore Tilton’.50 Gildersleeve, then, avidly latched onto the rumour of Dickinson’s authorship and suggested that she was drawn to miscegenation because she was a kind of ‘hybrid’ herself ’, for ‘it is to the production of this kind of hybrid that the Yankee she-men, (we cannot call them women), are about to devote their abounding energy’.51 Not content with heaping scorn on Dickinson in what Briggs terms his ‘nearly hysterical jeremiad on miscegenation’,52 Gildersleeve mentioned her again—wittily and classically, but irrelevantly—ten days later in an editorial ridiculing Lincoln’s address at the Sanitary Fair in Baltimore. Lincoln had declared: ‘But here we are; the war has not ended, and slavery has been much affected.’53 Gildersleeve jeered: ‘“Here we are,” he exclaims, as if the trip were over, as if he were about to ascend the steps of the Capitol in triumph

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and return thanks for the brilliant termination of his career of conquest—scandens cum tacita virgine Pontifex—Lincoln the High Priest! The silent virgin Miss Dickinson! How classical!’ The jest here, of course, is that while the indefatigable, passionate, and (controversially) well-remunerated Anna Dickinson was no doubt a ‘virgin’ (‘America’s Joan of Arc’ was her common sobriquet), during the war years she was very seldom ‘silent’. A month later, on 23 May, Gildersleeve’s editorial consisted of a burlesque poem, supposedly sung by a unit of Italian merchants and street vendors who had fled at the sight of Sheridan’s men during the defence of Richmond. The ‘Song of the Italians’ proposes busts of ‘fair Anna Dickinson, great Miscegenatrix j And then for the sweet Yankee misses j Fred Douglass and crafty Ulysses.’54 While Northern Democrats repeatedly claimed that the tract confirmed their suspicion that miscegenation was the next item on the agenda of the radical abolitionists, Gildersleeve went so far as to assert that it was already actually a settled war aim of the Lincoln administration. When one examines his ‘Miscegenation’ editorial against the background of the extensive journalistic coverage of the tract in both the Northern and the Southern—as well as the British— press, one cannot but be struck by the extremity of Gildersleeve’s claim. His editorial of 25 May reiterates the point in a litany of supposed Federal war-plans: ‘the anaconda plan, the bisection theory, the famine project, the arson-device, the gunboat mania, isolation, centralization and miscegenation’.55 It is possible that this claim was paralleled in other Southern papers, but the closest parallel we have located is a broadly satirical Democratic tract of late 1862 or early 1863, apparently published in Philadelphia.56 While it might be tempting to dismiss Gildersleeve’s wartime editorials as ‘youthful indiscretions’ whose disinterment would have caused him some distress, his own later references to the editorials suggest otherwise. In 1908 William Mynn Thornton, Dean of the University of Virginia, at work on an essay about Gildersleeve for the Library of Southern Literature, contacted him for suggestions of his own writings that might qualify more as ‘literature’ than scholarship. In a memorandum attached to his reply to Thornton, Gildersleeve declared that ‘some of my best things, as I remember them, are interred in the Richmond Examiner 1864–5 [sic]. But I shall never have the

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time, even if I should muster up the courage to collect these scattered proofs that I was something more than an honest and fairly successful teacher of a language that seems to be going to the wall.’57 Although Gildersleeve did imply that reprinting these editorials would require courage, he also remembered them as ‘some of my best things’. These are scarcely the words of someone eager to hide or repudiate pieces composed in an unfortunate period of his life. Nor did he ever lose his affection and respect for John Moncure Daniel, the Examiner’s fiery editor. In the 1915 reprinting of his essays ‘The Creed of the Old South’ and ‘A Southerner in the Peloponnesian War’, he also chose to reprint a sonnet that he had composed in Daniel’s memory ‘out of the bitterness of this reconstruction period’, in which he celebrated his editor as a ‘fearless fighter for our race’.58 And he noted that Daniel edited the paper to which ‘I had contributed more than threescore editorials during the years 1863–4’.59 After the war’s end, though most of his time was devoted to teaching, Gildersleeve soon found himself drawn back into writing for a wider audience. Indeed, all of his publications for the remainder of the 1860s were articles for two Southern journals founded during the Reconstruction period by his friend William Hand Browne: the Southern Review (1867–77) and The New Eclectic Magazine (1868–78; renamed Southern Magazine after 1871).60 In 1890 Gildersleeve observed that his eight Southern Review essays ‘were written in the years 1867–69, by a man of the Old South, and form a part of his life-long work for the furtherance of higher education and literary development among the Southern people, with whom he is identified by birth, by feeling and by fortune’.61 He regarded these essays as part of ‘the brief but hapless struggle to keep up a distinct literary life in the Southern States’. They range from such classical subjects as Lucian and Julian the Apostate to what Gildersleeve regarded as the virtually Sophoclean tragedy of the Emperor Maximilian in Mexico. (During the war, when contemplating his course of action should the South be defeated, he had studied Spanish in case he might emigrate to Mexico.) Most relevant here is the essay ‘Limits of Culture’, published in October 1867. This was an omnibus review of two recent Northern books advocating practical over classical education and of John Stuart Mill’s Inaugural Address at St Andrews. But it was also a

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contribution to a lively Southern debate over the proper place, if any, for the study of the classical languages in the financially strapped and deeply disrupted colleges of the Reconstruction South.62 While Gildersleeve gladly accepted some reforms in classical teaching (including the elimination of verse composition), he insisted that ‘we need the high ideal of antiquity in order to counteract the depressing tendencies of modern civilization, and especially those of American civilization’—above all, a single-minded focus on ‘material wellbeing’.63 The peroration to this essay brought to the fore the continuing conflict of North and South that had been implicit throughout, complete with metaphorical suggestions of a Northern attack upon—and Southern defence of—states’ rights. We of the South have little left except our system of higher education, and it is our duty to meet the assault that is making [sic] on it—an assault which is part of the grand attempt to crush all individuality of development into a homogeneous centralization. Already do we see the snares spread, already is the ‘vast slave-net of mischief ’ preparing to draw all the educational institutions of the country into the meshes of a West Point system. In a few years the Minister of Public Instruction will send out his sergeants to drill the free citizens of this republic into passive tools of a great central power, and we can well understand why studies which stir so many earnest doubts of our present condition should be thrust into the background, so that none but dreamers may think of the wonders which Greek autonomy wrought, or the immeasurable woe which was the price of Roman unity and the cause of Roman ruin.64

Here Gildersleeve not only presented the teaching of Latin and Greek as a defence of Southern higher education as a whole; he also cast this defence as an act of resistance to Northern aggression. What is being defended here, however, is no longer ‘a system of labour which runs counter to the fashionable cant of this self-laudatory century’, but a system of studies that raises ‘so many earnest doubts of our present condition’. Slavery emerges fleetingly as a metaphor and a classical allusion (Aeschylus, Agamemnon 361), yet the ‘slave-catchers’ are not Southern masters reclaiming their runaway property, but Northern educational carpetbaggers.65 Perhaps the most widely cited expression of Gildersleeve’s ‘unreconstructed’ views occurred in an arresting context: the introduction to his edition of Pindar’s Olympian and Pythian Odes (1885), where

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he looked back to the war between the independent Greek city-states and the Persian Empire. Pindar was from Boeotia, an area that Medized during the Persian War. Gildersleeve commented: The man whose love for his country knows no local root, is a man whose love for his country is a poor abstraction; and it is no discredit to Pindar that he went honestly with his state in the struggle. It was no treason to Medize before there was a Greece, and the Greece that came out of the Persian war was a very different thing from the cantons that ranged themselves on this side and on that of a quarrel which, we may be sure, bore another aspect to those who stood aloof from it than it wears in the eyes of moderns, who have all learned to be Hellenic patriots. A little experience of a losing side might aid historical vision.66

In Gildersleeve’s view, the Union from which the Southern states seceded was always—or should always have been—something more like those loosely ranged ‘cantons’ of archaic Greece than a unified nation. It is fully in accord with the view he presented here in 1885 that twenty-three years later, in the first of three public lectures at the University of Virginia, the old grammarian and Southern rights advocate declared, ‘It was a point of grammatical concord that was at the bottom of the Civil War—“United States are,” said one, “United States is,” said another.’67 Gildersleeve’s comparison of the Boeotia of Pindar’s youth with the American South of his own younger days may seem an odd aside in a volume published by a Northern schoolbook firm, and indeed the editors of the American Book Company objected to the comparison. Gildersleeve insisted on including it; in a ‘Brief Mention’ of 1906 he commented: ‘It will hardly be believed that in 1885 I received a friendly intimation that it would be more prudent for me to screen the parallel and efface the sentence “A little experience of a losing side might aid historical vision.” I have lived to see a more tolerant day.’68 In a three-part article for Atlantic Monthly on ‘My Sixty Days in Greece’ (1897), Gildersleeve developed the trope of Pindar as an ‘old comrade’ who proved a better travel guide to Greece than Baedeker or Pausanias.69 In the AJP ‘Brief Mention’ alluded to above, Gildersleeve quoted from his famous commentary these words about Pindar: ‘There is an aristocratic disdain in his nature that yields only to kindred spirits or to faithful service.’70 But the context of

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that quotation reveals that he was speaking of Pindar’s proudly difficult style (‘Pindar is a jeweler’), not of his attitude to social matters or to politics; Pindar’s ‘aristocratic disdain’ requiring modern ‘kindred spirits’ is less an invocation of ‘the aristocratic, traditional, elegant world conjured up in Pindar’s victory odes’ than it is a strikingly apolitical claim that ‘his call across the centuries is to the lovers of art as art’.71 Gildersleeve’s clearest assimilations of the classical world to the Old South are not to be found in his Pindar commentary, but elsewhere scattered among his later writings— writings for which, as it happens, he served as his own editor.

SPOKESMAN FOR THE SOUTH In 1890, with the encouragement of his old editor and current Hopkins colleague William Hand Browne, Gildersleeve published his Southern Review pieces (as well as three later ‘educational essays’ from the Princeton Review) as Essays and Studies. The book was published in a limited edition of 600 copies, 500 of which were bespoken by subscribers before publication, and attracted the favourable attention of the prominent Boston man of letters Horace Scudder, editor of the Atlantic Monthly. Scudder wrote Gildersleeve on 6 August 1891, hoping that he might find ‘an opportunity to make more intelligible to the educated man of the North . . . those springs of conduct that sent the Southerner into the field with untroubled conscience and high sense of duty’.72 Gildersleeve called the offer ‘tempting as every invitation must be to set one’s self right’. He cautioned that ‘I am not the man to handle it, if it is to be treated philosophically and historically’, but continued: I might be able to show how plain the faith was that stretched before our feet. The cause was one for which I wrote, prayed, fought, suffered but in the long agony I never was haunted by a doubt as to the righteousness of the course which we followed and even if there had been a doubt as to the justice of our cause, the command of the State would have sufficed.73

The resulting essay, ‘The Creed of the Old South’, was published in the January 1892 Atlantic Monthly, and was quickly accepted as a

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powerful statement of the views to which its title gave a name. Indeed, many non-Southerners, even non-Americans, found the essay profoundly moving. Gildersleeve particularly cherished the reaction of William Archer, Scottish drama critic and champion and translator of Henrik Ibsen. When the essay was republished in book form in 1915, Gildersleeve quoted Archer in a note: I met a soldier-scholar in the South who had given expression to the sentiment of his race and generation in an essay—one might almost say an elegy—so chivalrous in spirit and so fine in literary form that it moved me well-nigh to tears. Reading it in a public library, I found myself so visibly affected by it that my neighbor at the desk glanced at me in surprise, and I had to pull myself sharply together.74

Looking back on the war from the distance of thirty years and from the height of a career in which he increasingly felt himself an advocate of American merit to Europeans, Gildersleeve nevertheless remained unapologetic in the modern sense, and apologetic in the root sense, for the culture of his youth. Not surprisingly, the stridency of the Richmond Examiner days is gone, and in keeping with its tone of melancholic nostalgia, the essay downplays issues that might cause hostility or scepticism in its readers. Thus in ‘The Creed of the Old South’ Gildersleeve is at some pains to minimize the importance of slavery for the war, although he had written quite differently in 1863–4. Near the end of the essay he admits that ‘scant allusion has been made in this paper to the subject of slavery’, but comments that the reason for this is that ‘slavery was simply a test case’, not the main point at issue at all; the point was and remained ‘Liberty’.75 In the essay’s last paragraph, he writes, ‘That the cause we fought for and our brothers died for was the cause of civil liberty, and not the cause of human slavery, is a thesis which we feel ourselves bound to maintain whenever our motives are challenged or misunderstood, if only for our children’s sake.’76 Thus the man who in 1863 wrote about the unfortunate effects of over-leniency to slaves at Christmas, and who claimed that Providence had decreed slavery as a benefit to the slaves, in 1892 appears to remember none of that; slavery’s importance as an institution and its human cost are both minimized and trivialized by its relegation to the status of a ‘test case’, and ‘liberty’—the liberty, of course, of

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freeborn citizens—is foregrounded as the point over which the war was fought. This relegation of slavery to an unimportant side issue is consistent with Gildersleeve’s thinking about slavery throughout his life; George Kennedy’s statement that ‘Gildersleeve was morally opposed to slavery, but . . . had hardened himself to it’ seems to be wishful thinking pietatis causa.77 While Gildersleeve appears simply not to have been much interested in slavery itself, none of his statements on slavery indicate moral opposition. In a letter of 1863, in which he called slavery ‘the Jonah of our vessel’, Gildersleeve recognized that slavery could become a point of contention among social classes within the South and that this was a potential liability for the Southern cause.78 But his concerns in this letter seem to be purely practical, not based on any moral opposition. In ‘The Creed of the Old South’ Gildersleeve asserts that there was no one Southern position on slavery. He briefly describes several different Southern views, from the ‘theorists who maintained that a society based on the rock of slavery was the best possible in a world where there must be the lowest order’, through those who ‘knew that slavery was doomed by the voice of the world’ and ‘the thousands and tens of thousands in the Southern States [who] felt the crushing burden and the awful responsibility of the institution’, to ‘the practical men who saw in the negro slave an efficient laborer’ and on the other hand ‘the practical men who doubted the economic value of our system’, to the ‘small and eminently respectable body of benevolent men who promoted the scheme of African colonization’. Curiously, and frustratingly, Gildersleeve does not specify which of these opinions he himself held.79 After surveying the range of Southern wartime opinion on the question of slavery and concluding that ‘the people at large had no theory, and the practice varied as much in the relation of master and servant as it varied in other family relations’, Gildersleeve turns at last to the abolitionist movement as one matter on which there was full agreement: ‘The abolitionist proper was considered not so much the friend of the negro as the enemy of society.’ He proceeds to claim that the progress of the war, which meant that ‘the abolitionist saw the “glory of the Lord” revealed in a way he had never hoped for’, also uncovered a fundamental misconception held by abolitionists. Had Southern slavery been the ‘system of hellish wrong and fiendish

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cruelty’ that abolitionists depicted, the war would have confirmed their ‘prophetic imagination’ by unleashing widespread slave uprisings, ‘and the horrors of San Domingo would have polluted this fair land’.80 As it happened, however, no such uprisings took place during the war. Gildersleeve insisted that credit for the avoidance of slave uprisings and their attendant massacres be given not to the forbearance of the blacks but to the kindness of their masters. ‘For the negro race does not deserve undivided praise for its conduct during the war. Let some small part of the credit be given to the masters, not all to the finer qualities of these “brothers in black”.’ Likening the slave system to a school whose closure supposedly no one now regrets, he adds: ‘Its methods were old-fashioned and sadly behind the times, but the old schoolmasters turned out scholars who in certain branches of moral philosophy, were not inferior to the graduates of the new university.’81 Thus this celebrated teacher constructs a conceit that the slave system of the South was comparable to a rather ‘oldfashioned’ school—with, apparently, a wry dig at the free blacks of the post-war period as ‘graduates of the new university’. This is perhaps his fullest contribution to the standard pro-slavery apologist’s topos that the institution of slavery was fundamentally benevolent and even educative to the slaves while burdensome to the masters.82 In 1897 Gildersleeve wrote another essay for the Atlantic, ‘A Southerner in the Peloponnesian War’, in many ways a companion piece to ‘The Creed of the Old South’, and in fact he reissued the two together as a book, with extensive annotations, in 1915. The second essay lists many parallels between the ancient war and his own, and indeed includes a rare comparison between ancient and modern views of slavery. He concedes that ‘there was no slavery question in the Peloponnesian war, for antique civilization without slavery is hardly thinkable’, but since actual chattel slavery, for him, was merely a ‘test case’ of states’ rights, this is not a significant difference; ‘after all, the slavery question belongs ultimately to the sphere of economics’.83 But Pericles had cast the Athenians’ struggle as a fight against enslavement, and so too, Gildersleeve says, Southern citizens had fought against enslavement by the North. It is fascinating that when Gildersleeve makes this specific comparison between ancient and modern views of slavery, he focuses not on the experience of the actual slaves but on the masters’ fears that political submission would be equiva-

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lent to ‘slavery’ for themselves. For Gildersleeve, the slavery that is worth fighting over is transposed from those who genuinely suffered under the ‘peculiar institution’ to those who benefited from it, and he is able to claim that the war was in fact fought over slavery—the threatened ‘enslavement’ of Southern states and citizens by Northern ones. Thus, in discussing the Southern view of secession and the powers of the Union, he invokes Pericles: When he [Pericles] addressed the people in justification of the war, he based his argument, not on a calculation of material resources, but on a simple principle of right. Submission to any encroachment, the least as well as the greatest, on the rights of a State means slavery. To us submission meant slavery, as it did to Pericles and the Athenians . . . Submission is slavery, and the bitterest taunt in the vocabulary of those who advocated secession was ‘submissionist’.84

This interpretative turn, which Kennedy cites as evidence that Gildersleeve was ‘a bold and energetic rhetorician’, who here ‘goes on the offensive and seizes the word slavery’, allows the slave-holders to become the ones threatened with enslavement.85 Gildersleeve’s use of Pericles’ presentation of slavery as a threat to the masters is all the more notable since for Pericles the idea was not entirely far-fetched; although he was talking about ‘slavery’ of one polis to another, in his society the losers in a war could become actual as well as metaphorical slaves (as the women and children of Melos discovered to their cost; Thucydides 5.17). Gildersleeve’s adaptation of the same comparison to a war in which the citizens of neither side were threatened with actual slavery, and yet the citizens of one side held an enslaved population under their control, is not only distasteful but unusually tone-deaf for a scholar whose comparisons of classical and modern societies normally employed a more sensitive touch.

SLAVERY, AB OLITION, AND MISCEGENATION REVISITED From 1907 to the present, many eminent scholars and writers— among them, Alfred North Whitehead, T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden,

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and Wole Soyinka—have been invited to deliver the Page-Barbour Lectures at the University of Virginia. But only one classical scholar has so far been invited: the second Page-Barbour Lecturer, Basil Gildersleeve.86 Gildersleeve’s three Page-Barbour Lectures, delivered in 1908, were published the following year as Hellas and Hesperia, or The Vitality of Greek Studies in America. As the title indicates, the guiding theme of these loosely organized and incorrigibly ‘kaleidoscopic’ lectures was the constant interpenetration that Gildersleeve perceived between Greek language and literature and modern American life. Returning to Charlottesville, his home in the war years, he inevitably seized several opportunities to recall the cause he had served with pen and sword. Thus, in the first lecture he noted that ‘the period in which some of us lived most intensely, in which we lived on the highest plane on which mortal man can live, has its parallels and its principles in Thucydides’ History of the War Between the States’.87 And further on, developing a hint from his Pindar commentary of 1885, he wrote: ‘Like the Greeks, we Americans have found out our oneness by conflict with one another, as well as by contrast with others. . . . American is as distinctive now as Greek was then, and it was War, the father of all things, that revealed us to ourselves.’88 Only two passages in these lectures considered the matter of slavery, and those only somewhat obliquely and even obscurely. In a passage in the last lecture, Gildersleeve proclaimed—or affected— an optimism about the future of American life. Invoking a figure ‘we owe ultimately to a Greek poet, Alcaeus,’ he intoned: ‘Our ship of state has a strange way of righting itself, had that way in the time of the chainbox, which may be supposed to symbolize the days of slavery, and will continue to have it in these times of the waterballast, which may be supposed to represent the wave of prohibition.’89 We do not fully understand the point of the metaphor in this perhaps intentionally obscure passage. Suffice it to say that this confused metaphor introduced a passage dealing with immigration in which Gildersleeve declared that ‘there is a tingle of adventure in the mingling of blood’—by which he apparently meant primarily a mingling of European ‘blood’—and then proceeded, somewhat counter-intuitively, to hold up ancient Greece as a model of success ‘in unifying and harmonizing a vast number of foreign elements’.

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And he added: ‘Great as was the assimilative power of the Greek, not less great, it is to be confidently hoped, is the assimilative power of the American.’90 The most arresting allusion to slavery in Hellas and Hesperia, however, occurs quite early in the series. At the beginning of the first lecture, Gildersleeve confessed that his own specialty in the study of ancient Greek was the study of Greek grammar—‘Greek, which they tell me is doomed, and grammar which is damned already.’91 While he reassured his audience that he would spare them grammatical minutiae, he nonetheless declared that he was not ashamed of being a grammarian, ‘and if I chose I might enlarge upon the historical importance of grammar in general, and Greek grammar in particular’. He gave two examples of what he had in mind. One was the notion, mentioned above, that ‘it was a point of grammatical concord that was at the bottom of the Civil War’. Here is the other: ‘A whimsical scholar of my acquaintance used to maintain that the ignorance of Greek idiom that brought about the mistranslation “Men and brethren” (Acts ii. 29) is responsible for the humanitarian cry, “Am I not a man and a brother?” which made countless thousands mourn.’92 One could be tempted to take the word ‘humanitarian’ here in a positive sense, but recall the use of the term in the context of abolition in ‘A Southerner in the Peloponnesian War’ a decade earlier: ‘The humanitarian spirit, set free by the French Revolution, was at work in the Southern States as in the Northern States.’ For a Southerner of Gildersleeve’s stamp a ‘humanitarian spirit’ that was ‘set free’ (interesting phrase in this context) by the French Revolution was scarcely a good thing.93 Indeed, ‘humanitarian’ is clearly Gildersleeve’s post-war euphemism for ‘sentimental’, his favourite wartime adjective for anti-slavery opinion. In any case, the relative clause ‘which made thousands mourn’ leaves us in little doubt as to how Gildersleeve, in his seventy-sixth year, viewed the consequences of abolitionist agitation in the antebellum period. But who was this ‘whimsical scholar’ who (implausibly) suggested that the abolitionist motto ‘Am I not a man and a brother?’ was due to the King James ‘mistranslation’ of Peter’s words ¼æ Iºç as ‘men and brothers’? The answer reflects Gildersleeve’s characteristic indirection: the scholar in question was clearly Gildersleeve himself.

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For shortly after the war, in his Southern Review essay on Maximilian, alluding to Napoleon III’s pro-‘Latin’, anti-Anglo-Saxon intervention in Mexico, he had pronounced Friedrich Max Mu¨ller’s slogan ‘nations and languages against dynasties and treaties’ to be ‘certainly better than that other slogan of “manhood and brotherhood”, which gets its form, if not its warrant from the mistranslation of a phrase in the Greek Testament’.94 This abolitionist motto appears to have rankled Gildersleeve most of his adult life. In addition to his claim in 1868 and 1908 that it rested on a translational howler, we have seen that in a Richmond Examiner editorial of April 1864 he characterized the supposed Yankee plan of forced racial amalgamation as ‘the culmination of the man and brother theory’.95 But he also invoked the motto in a remarkable series of comments on the Libation-Bearers of Aeschylus. Written from 1893 to 1911, these seldom-cited passages in two ‘Brief Mentions’ and an important AJP article on Pindar not only display his continuing irritation with abolitionist propaganda, but also his continuing fascination with race-mixing—or, to use the coinage that the hoax of early 1864 gave our language, miscegenation. An examination of these arresting interpretations of a famously problematic scene in Aeschylus will form, then, a fitting conclusion to our exploration of the theme of slavery, race, and abolition in the work of Basil Gildersleeve. In a ‘Brief Mention’ in the autumn of 1893, Gildersleeve reported with approval the brilliantly eccentric English classicist A. W. Verrall’s reading of Aeschylus’ description of the tokens which enabled Electra to recognize her long-lost brother Orestes. Defending Aeschylus against Euripides’ mockery and adopting a hint from William Ridgeway, Verrall suggested that Orestes’ footprints and the lock of his hair would have immediately been recognizable to Electra, for these descendants of the Asiatic Pelops possessed ‘such physical peculiarities as would signify and amount to a difference of race. Nothing is more likely.’ Referring to their supposedly distinctive feet, Verrall offered an arresting analogy: ‘In respect of extent, in its broad and radical character, the difference of type described by Aeschylus may be compared with that between the feet of negroes and of whites.’96 Then, after comments on the supposedly distinctive nature of Pelopid hair, Verrall declared: ‘In comparison with the Achaeans around

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them Orestes and Electra were octoroons.’97 Gildersleeve did not simply present an account of Verrall’s speculations; he latched onto the ‘octoroon’ analogy and pushed it even further, to the extent of apparently taking it literally: ‘The illustration is not inapt, and an American student of the drama can readily imagine a colored Electra recognizing the kinky hair and “gizzard foot” of a man and a brother.’98 Since Orestes was, of course, both a man and Electra’s brother, and since Gildersleeve took him to be an ‘octoroon’, this invocation of the abolitionist motto displays a fair sample of Gildersleevian wit. Gildersleeve returned to—and even further modified—Verrall’s odd theory in a somewhat intrusive paragraph in his 1910 AJP article ‘The Seventh Nemean Revisited’, an impressive attempt to elucidate what may well be Pindar’s most baffling poem. Alluding to the reference to ÆŁ  (fair-haired or reddish-haired) Menelaus at line 28, and noting that the adjective is also standard for that hero in Homer, Gildersleeve allowed himself to recall ‘the ingenious Mr. Verrall . . . and the kinkyhaired Pelopidai’. It is important to bear in mind here that Verrall himself had said nothing about kinky hair. Indeed, he declared that to ask what ‘particular marks’ Aeschylus might have found in the traditions about the Pelopids ‘is needless and would not be safe’—though he himself soon yielded to the speculation that their hair might have appeared ‘feathery’.99 Clearly, the all-too-vivid analogy Verrall used while accusing Euripides of misreading Aeschylus seduced a Southern classicist into misreading Verrall himself. But given Gildersleeve’s attraction to Verrall’s racial theory about the Pelopids, how could Menelaos be ‘fair-haired’? The answer was simplicity itself: ‘Menelaos must have harked back to his white ancestors, must have inherited his fair hair from Hippodameia. Hence his union with Helen.’100 (Helen, of course, would have settled for no manifest ‘octoroon’.) A year after he published this study of Pindar’s Seventh Nemean, Gildersleeve returned a third time to Verrall’s notion of a distinctly Pelopid racial peculiarity, in an AJP review of William Ridgeway’s Origin of Tragedy. Here Gildersleeve recalled that Verrall had indicated ‘his debt to Professor Ridgeway for the hint out of which has been developed the essay on the scene of the Recognition’.101 Gildersleeve accounted for his own earlier attraction to the idea:

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The explanation, as stated by Mr. Verrall, had a certain fascination for me, having lived all my life in constant presence of an alien race in which hair and foot are marked peculiarities, so that I was prepared to accept enthusiastically Mr. Verrall’s statement that Orestes and Electra were octoroons. ‘Ebo-shin’ and ‘gizzard-foot’ were familiar words in the mouth of that typical Virginian, Henry A. Wise, who was a close observer of racial peculiarities and taught the youths of my generation to distinguish between the ‘mulatto’ and the ‘molungeon’. To a people jealous of their blood, these things were matters of prime moment. No wonder then, that, carried away by Mr. Verrall, whom I am always happy to follow when I can, the standing phrase ÆŁe ºÆ seemed to be a strong confirmation of the theory. . . . Menelaus, unlike Agamemnon, harked back to his white granddam Hippodameia and passed for a white man; and it was his light complexion that secured for him the hand of Helen, really a goddess of light.

And so we learn at last the provenance of the phrase ‘gizzard-foot’ to refer to the supposedly distinctive foot of the black. It was a notorious statement of Henry A. Wise, Governor of Virginia from 1855 to 1860 (when Gildersleeve was teaching at the University of Virginia). Declaring that ‘all nature abhors vacuums and mongrels’, Wise insisted that true Virginians ‘can put up better with pure Africans— wool, flatnose, odor, ebo-shin, and gizzard-foot and all—better than they can bear that cross of the Caucasian and cuffey which you call a mulatto’.102 Gildersleeve here explained his earlier fantasy of an ‘octoroon Electra’ by simultaneously blaming the clever Professor Verrall and that ‘close observer of racial peculiarities’, Governor Wise. Note also that Gildersleeve invoked here the notion of ‘passing’— virtually a national obsession in the United States in the post-war decades and the early twentieth century.103 (‘Molungeons’ or ‘Melungeons’, whom Gov. Wise distinguished from mulattoes in another widely quoted witticism, were a somewhat mysterious mixed-race group in north-eastern Tennessee and south-western Virginia.)104 But no matter how resonant his language, Gildersleeve was using it to characterize a view that he was now (perhaps a bit ‘elegiacally’) abandoning. Once he had an opportunity to inspect Ridgeway’s theory, he was compelled to realize that Ridgeway in fact claimed that Orestes and Electra were ‘of the blonde Achaean race from the North, and thus differ from the dark aboriginal people of Argolid. So it seems that I have been guilty of following one of the idola tribus.’

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Yet he was eager to salvage what he could of the racial scenario inspired by his misreading of Verrall’s use of Ridgeway’s hint: Still, I am happy to think that I need not abandon my theory as to ÆŁe

ºÆ, for according to Dr. Brooks, it is much more likely that our ƺŁÆŒe ÆNå Å  should have harked back to a white male ancestor than to a white granddam.

‘Dr. Brooks’ was the zoologist and specialist in heredity William Keith Brooks (1848–1908), a fellow professor at Johns Hopkins. Whether derived from conversation over sherry or from a perusal of Brooks’s popularizing book The Law of Heredity (1883), the idea that hereditary reversion favoured male ancestors appealed to Gildersleeve as a second-best to the ‘octoroon Electra’ fantasy.105 Now that he had learned from Ridgeway that Menelaos’ grandmother Hippodameia was not, after all, a ‘white granddam’, but in fact one of the ‘dark aboriginal people of the Argolid’, it was much pleasanter to imagine that Menelaos’ nephew and niece would have been able to recognize each other not because of their ‘kinky hair’ or ‘gizzard-feet’ (to say nothing of ‘ebo-shins’), but because they shared the racial characteristics of their lily-white Pelopid ancestors—and not the dark blood of their hated mother Clytemnestra.

CONCLUSION Gildersleeve’s late work, including his Page-Barbour lectures in 1909 and his republication of ‘The Creed of the Old South’ and ‘A Southerner in the Peloponnesian War’ in 1915, clearly demonstrate that the passage of years and the supposedly mellowing period of old age never changed his mind about the justice of the ‘cause’ for which he had fought and been maimed. His claim that slavery was only a ‘test case’ and that the war was not about the issue of slavery at all makes it all the more striking that his view of the abolition movement apparently remained unchanged throughout his long life. His discussion of the ‘man and brother’ motto as late as 1908 indicates that the irritation he felt with abolition, and his scorn for the idea of nonCaucasians as ‘brothers’, remained robust nearly fifty years after ‘Am I

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not a man and a brother’ had become a document of historical rather than immediate significance. The oikiste¯s of American Classics was, to the end of his life, an unreconstructed Southern apologist. His presence on the mental screen of American classicists as a guiding or inhibiting figure, whose personal tastes in scholarship, it is claimed, had profound influence on the direction of American Classics for the better part of a century, is therefore all the more noteworthy: a Southern apologist became the primary advocate of Classics in the United States as it moved onto the twentieth-century world stage as a unified country. The reception of Gildersleeve by American classicists, and the degree to which it is valid to say that his tastes directed and even still direct the emphases of American classical studies, is a topic that deserves its own exploration and to which we hope to return at another time.106

NOTES 1. Ward W. Briggs is writing a full biography of Gildersleeve. In the interim, see Briggs’s entry in Briggs and Calder (1990), 93–118. We take biographical details from this source and from Briggs (1987) and Briggs (1992), esp. ‘Introduction’, xix–xxxi. See also the essays in Briggs and Benario (1986). 2. Gildersleeve and Lodge (1895; repr. 1997). 3. For lists of Gildersleeve’s publications, see Briggs in Briggs and Calder (1990), 114–18; Briggs (1992), 326–36; Miller (1930), xxx–liii. 4. See Calder (1998). For qualifications of the extent of Gildersleeve’s ‘Teutonomania’, see Newmyer (1986), esp. 32. 5. ‘University Work in America’, Gildersleeve (1890), 98 = Briggs (1992), 118; originally published Princeton Review (1879). 6. See Kennedy (1986), in Briggs and Benario (1986), 42–9. 7. Many of these essays are collected by Miller (1930). Gildersleeve’s characterization of his own style may be found on p. 196 = AJP 31 (1910), 109. See also Kopff (1986). 8. Habinek (1998), 25. 9. The phrase is Habinek’s (1998), 24. 10. Schein (1986), 54. 11. DuBois (2003), 13–21.

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12. Habinek (1998) , 18–33. 13. Passages in this paragraph are cited from ‘Formative Influences’, in Briggs (1998), 34–5. 14. Gildersleeve, ‘Creed of the Old South’, in Briggs (1998), 362. For Gildersleeve’s war service, see Briggs (1990), 99–100, and Briggs (1998), 11–12. 15. See especially Andrews (1970), 28–32. 16. Ibid. 32. 17. See below, n. 59. 18. Ibid. 30. 19. Briggs has collected and annotated the editorials; Briggs (1998), 115–339. 20. Briggs (1998), 120. 21. Ibid. 120–1. 22. Briggs (1987), 40; letter to Socrates Maupin. Briggs notes that the OED defines ‘eye-servant’ as ‘one who does his duty only under the eye of his master or employer’; ibid. 41 n. 16. See also below, n. 106. 23. Briggs (1998), 410. 24. Letter of Susan Leigh Blackford to her husband Charles Minor Blackford (a relation of Gildersleeve’s future father-in-law), in Blackford (1894; repr. 1947), 283. 25. Duncan (2008), 92. Briggs (1987) appears to be in error in dating Colston’s death to 1901; 47 n. 9. 26. Briggs (1998), 178. 27. Ibid. 205–6. 28. Ibid. 304–5. 29. Ibid. 152. 30. Ibid. 154. Gildersleeve seems to be using ‘fabric’ here in the sense of German Fabrik, a factory. 31. Briggs (1998), 154. For a similar use of the Roman concept of peculium to refer to an American master’s extra-legal indulgence of a slave’s ‘private’ funds, see Sawyer (1858), 216. 32. Briggs (1998), 209. 33. The standard scenario was anticipated by an 1837 exchange in the US Senate between Sen. William Cabell Rives of Virginia, who called slavery a ‘lesser evil’, and Sen. John C. Calhoun of South Carolina, who maintained that the institution was ‘a good where a civilized race and a race of a different description are brought together’; Ford (2009), 526–27 and ch. 17 generally (‘The Ideological Reconfiguration of Slavery in the Lower South’). See also Simms (1852/1968), 179–80. For some recent qualifications and challenges to the standard view, see Grant (2007) and Vanderford (2009).

348 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

43. 44. 45. 46.

47. 48.

49. 50. 51. 52.

David Lupher and Elizabeth Vandiver Jacobs (1861/1987), ch. xii, ‘Christmas Festivities’, 118. Briggs (1998), 213–14. Ibid. 132. Ibid. 298. Ibid. 303. Ibid. 279–83; quoted passages on 281 and 282. ‘That would have made Quintilian stare and gasp’ is from Milton, Sonnet xi. Briggs (1998), 291–4; quoted passage on 294. [Croly and Wakeman], (1864). Sollors (2004) reprints extensive extracts of the tract, 350–80. The fullest studies of the tract’s reception remain Kaplan (1949) and Bloch (1958). The latter is more reliable than the former in the citation of newspaper articles during the controversy. See also Wood (1968), 53–79; Young (1995), 144–7; Lemire (2002), 114–44; Ings (2006); Pascoe (2009), 27–9. We borrow the apt term ‘political dirty trick’ from Roediger (1991), 156. See Bloch (1958), 37–42; Talty (2003), 70–2 (where Croly is labelled ‘on some level a double agent’); Ochieng’ Nyongo´ (2009), 28–9. The quoted characterization of the tract is from Ings (2006), 650. Kaplan (1949), 286–91. [Croly and Wakeman] (1864), 42. The anonymous reviewer of the tract in the London Anthropological Review pronounced this chapter ‘too indecent for us to quote from; we believe that only a Mulatto or a Mulatress could have strung together such licentious absurdities’; Anon. (1864a), 120–1. Interestingly, on 15 Jan. 1864 the Democratic New York World reprinted from the Philadelphia Inquirer the report of a rumour that the author was ‘a highly intelligent and educated mulatto girl’; Anon. (1864b). Briggs (1998), 292. For Dickinson’s remarkable life, see Gallman (2006); he does not mention the rumours of her authorship of the tract. Similarly, Briggs’s comments on Gildersleeve’s reference to Dickinson (1998), 292 n. 3, do not note her supposed authorship. [Mackay] (1864), 9. Kaplan (1949), 294–5, misdates this first to 8 February, then to 5 February. Quoted in Bloch (1958), 19. Briggs (1998), 293. Ibid. 18. Briggs’s comment that ‘the South has enemies within, particularly the threat of miscegenation . . . but the greedy immoral Yankees are the villains throughout’ (16) seems to misrepresent Gildersleeve’s point; the editorial presents miscegenation as a threat from without and in fact

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53. 54. 55. 56.

57. 58.

59.

60.

61. 62. 63. 64. 65.

66. 67. 68. 69. 70.

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vehemently denies that it is present in any significant amount in Southern society. Lincoln (1989), 589. Briggs (1998), 318. ‘Ulysses’ presumably refers to Ulysses S. Grant. Ibid. 321. Though this 16-page burlesque (God Bless Abraham Lincoln!) bears no date or place of publication, internal evidence indicates that it appeared in Philadelphia shortly after the Battle of Fredericksburg (11–15 Dec. 1862). It purports to be a sermon by an abolitionist preacher privy to a post-war plan of the Lincoln administration to replenish the reunited nation’s supply of males by forcing white women to intermarry with blacks. Women who proved reluctant would be ‘flung out . . . for the use of the unbridled and unbroken-in Black Ourang-Outangs, to deal with them according to their natural instincts’ (14). Briggs (1987), 283. The usage of the term ‘race’ was quite broad at the time, and it seems likely that Gildersleeve means the South in general here rather than white Southerners in particular; however, in either case his implicit defiance of Northern norms remains steadfast. Briggs (1998), 387 n. 72. Here Gildersleeve assigns the correct dates to his Examiner editorials, unlike in his 1908 letter to Thornton. Even in the account of his 1896 visit to Greece published in Atlantic Monthly, he could not resist telling a quite irrelevant story about ‘the foremost editor in the Confederate States, John M. Daniel’; Gildersleeve (1897a), 204. The Southern Review was co-founded by Browne and A. T. Bledsoe, prominent pro-slavery writer and Assistant Secretary of War for the Confederacy. Gildersleeve (1890), prefatory note. A useful survey is Stetar (1985). See also Curtis (1997), esp. 449–57 (on Gildersleeve). Gildersleeve (1890), 16. Ibid. 39–40. Gildersleeve footnoted the Aeschylean phrase ªªªÆ @ Å Æƺ ı at the phrase ‘snares spread’: (1890), 39. However, it seems that the immediately following phrase in quotes is actually his attempt to render these words—with a distinctly American resonance. Gildersleeve (1885), xii. Gildersleeve (1909), 16. Miller (1930), 136. Gildersleeve (1897a) passim, but see especially the concluding pages. Miller (1930), 134; quoting Gildersleeve (1885), xlii.

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71. Hall (2007c), 394 (see also above pp. 26–7); Gildersleeve in Miller (1930), 134. 72. Cited in Briggs (1987), 185 n. 2. 73. Gildersleeve to Scudder, 10 Aug. 1891; Briggs (1987), 184. 74. Archer (1899), 121. 75. But see, in contrast, the infamous ‘Cornerstone’ speech by Alexander Stephens, the Vice-President of the Confederacy, which ascribes a central role to slavery as a cause over which the war was fought; Stephens (1866), esp. 85–90. 76. Briggs (1998), 384; 388. 77. Kennedy (1977), 22. 78. Briggs (1987), 39; letter to Socrates Maupin. 79. Briggs (1998), 384–5. 80. Ibid. 385. 81. Ibid. 385–6. 82. Other writers expanded the metaphor to cast slavery as a ‘school’ for the moral improvement of masters as well as slaves; see e.g. Harper (1860) ‘the tendency of slavery . . . to elevate the character of the master’ (597). Hammond (1860), however, emphasizes the similarity between corporal punishment of schoolboys and of slaves (652–3). 83. Briggs (1998), 396. 84. Ibid. 372. 85. Kennedy (1977), 22. 86. James Bryce spoke on ancient democracy (1913) and George Mylonas on his Mycenae excavations (1955). 87. Gildersleeve (1909), 47–8; cf. near the end of the lectures: ‘A Southerner, I shared the fortunes of my people in the Civil War, but whether on the edge of battle in the field or in the vise of penury at home, my thoughts were with those who registered the experiences of the Peloponnesian War, with Thucydides and Aristophanes’ (124). 88. Gildersleeve (1909), 94. 89. Ibid. 107–8. 90. Ibid. 110. 91. Ibid. 13. 92. Ibid. 16. For a more plausible account of the origin of the abolitionist motto, see Honour (1976), 63. 93. On Southern reactions to the French Revolution, see Fox-Genovese and Genovese (2005), 11–40. 94. Gildersleeve (1890), 481—and see also n. 2 on that page, where the particular biblical passage is cited. 95. See above, p. 328, and n. 39.

Basil Gildersleeve on Slavery and Race 96. 97. 98. 99. 100.

101. 102. 103. 104.

105.

106.

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Verrall (1893), lv. Ibid. lvii. Gildersleeve, ‘Brief Mention,’ AJP 14.3 (1893), 398. Verrall (1893), lv (‘particular marks’); lxi (‘feathery’). Gildersleeve (1910), 134; = Briggs (1992), 204. Two other passages in this essay contain regional, virtually personal references. In contrast to the Panhellenic Herakles, the Aiakidai of Aigina ‘are, let us say, champions of State-Rights. They were the Virginians, the Carolinians of the Old South’; Briggs (1992), 200. Describing the unsettling Aiakid Neoptolemos, he says: ‘He lies in Pythian soil, this sacker of the city of Priam, not this butcher of Priam, in which latter capacity one thinks of him first, just as there are two aspects of General Sherman’s march to the sea’; Briggs (1992), 204. Gildersleeve (1911), 214. Quoted from Richmond Enquirer, 11 March 1856, in Simpson (1985), 122–3. On Southern whites’ extraordinary and growing anxiety about ‘passing’ as late as the 1920s, see Smith (2002). On Melungeons, see Cassidy and Hall (1996), vol. 3, 565–6. Wise’s joke—‘A mulatto is the child of a female house-servant by “young master”; a molungeon is the offspring of a field hand by a Yankee peddler’—was cited in an anonymous review of J. E. Cairnes’s The Slave Power; Anon. (1863b), 124. See Brooks (1883), 137–9. There are declarations throughout his book of the male’s prominent role in establishing phenotypically marked variation. When this article was already in press, Ward W. Briggs wrote to us to say that he had discovered an entry in the slave census of 1860 showing that Benjamin Gildersleeve, Basil Lanneau Gildersleeve’s father, owned three slaves: a 60-year-old woman, a 50-year-old woman, and an 11-year-old boy. All were described as ‘mulatto’ (personal communication from Ward W. Briggs, Jr., 17th February 2011). It therefore now seems almost certain that Basil Gildersleeve grew up in a household that included slaves. We are very grateful to Professor Briggs for bringing this to our attention and for sending as a PDF of the entries in the census. The authors wish to thank Ward W. Briggs, Jr., William Breitenbach, Edith Hall, Katharine Nicholson Ings, Kristin Johnson, and James Stimpert for their assistance with various aspects of this article. Any remaining errors are of course our own.

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12 Universal Slave Revolts C. L. R. James’s use of Classical Literature in The Black Jacobins Lydia Langerwerf

The lifelong engagement of the Trinidadian activist and intellectual C. L. R. James (Fig. 12.1) with the history of the French colony SaintDomingue’s transformation into the independent state of Haiti in 1804 was to a large extent inspired by the successes of the black rebels in overthrowing the colonial regime. In the preface to the 1980 edition of The Black Jacobins. Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, he noted that he ‘was tired of reading and hearing about Africans being persecuted and oppressed in Africa, in the Middle Passage, in the USA and all over the Caribbean’. Through his representation of the ‘Black Jacobins’ he could counter this depressing image with an anti-colonial story of ‘people of African descent ( . . . ) taking action on a grand scale and shaping other people to their own needs’.1 As has also been noted by Kara M. Rabbit, James constantly emphasized the greatness of the rebel leader Toussaint L’Ouverture (originally named Toussaint Bre´da) as a hero through the use of classical allusions.2 His classical education may have much to do with this, but he was also able to make use of a long-existing analogy with Spartacus. David Scott has in his influential Conscripts of Modernity already persuasively argued that James’s figuration of Toussaint diverges from this representation of Toussaint as an epic hero. Through

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Figure 12.1 C. L. R. James, author of The Black Jacobins

his investigation of James’s portrait of the revolutionary leader in the context of the literary genres of romance and tragedy, he concludes that although the 1938 edition carried a strong anti-colonial message and presented Toussaint’s exploits as an epic struggle, the 1963 revised edition contains a post-colonial emphasis on Toussaint’s failure to unite his Enlightened ideals with the construction of a new society without slavery.3 I will first review both versions of The Black Jacobins, as well as the 1936 play to which James contributed, as post-colonial texts, connecting the comparison with Spartacus to James’s views on tragedy and its civic role in the Athenian polis. In light of these views, other classical heroes in addition to Spartacus may become suitable for comparison with Toussaint L’Ouverture. In the remainder of this

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chapter I will therefore compare James’s portrait of Toussaint with the representation of two other ancient slave rebels. The first is Pausanias’ depiction of the mythical hero Aristomenes of Messene in the fourth book of the Periegesis, in which he relates the Messenian struggle against enslavement by the Spartans. The second is Athenaeus’ use of the story, attributed to Nymphodorus of Syracuse’s Voyage to Asia, of the rebel Drimakos. The latter may be less known than Spartacus, but he is interesting in a post-colonial perspective as he not only led a slave revolt on the island of Chios, but comes to terms with the Chian slave-owners and settles a maroon community.

‘A COURAGEOUS CHIEF ONLY IS WANTED’ James was hardly the first writer—French, Caribbean, or otherwise— to have been attracted to Toussaint L’Ouverture as a hero. The successful slave revolt on the French colony of Saint-Domingue,4 which began in the wake of the French Revolution in 1789 and culminated in the establishment of the first free black republic in the Americas, the independent state of Haiti in 1804, made an understandably huge cultural impact and provided strong arguments in the debates on abolition of the slave trade for both the abolitionists and their opponents. Cousin d’Avallon’s seminal biography of Toussaint was published in 1802, even before the independent republic was proclaimed. The parallel it drew with Spartacus was inevitable given that Toussaint was himself portrayed as having been inspired by reading the influential passage calling for a ‘new Spartacus’ to arise in the Abbe´ Guillaume Raynal’s 1770 Histoire de Deux Indes (see above, Introduction, pp. 16–18); even more importantly, the Governor of Saint-Domingue, General E´tienne Laveaux, referred to him publicly as ‘Spartacus’ when he appointed him his second-incommand in 1794: ‘the negro, the Spartacus, foretold by Raynal, whose destiny it was to avenge the wrongs committed on his race’.5 This parallel was commonplace by the time Captain Marcus Rainsford published his Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti (1805), with its arresting illustrations.6 It was a pronounced theme in Alphonse Lamartine’s stirring Toussaint L’Ouverture (premiered

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6 April 1850),7 a ‘boulevard’ drama performed at the ‘people’s theatre’, the Porte-Saint-Martin,8 with the (white) Fre´de´rick Lemaıˆtre, renowned for his emotive performances in melodrama, delivering a notably sympathetic delivery of the black hero’s role. Partly because of the popular success of Lamartine’s play, the Spartacus parallel has been drawn in almost all the many more accounts of L’Ouverture published in French subsequently.9 Laveaux’s reference to Toussaint as Raynal’s ‘Black Spartacus’ is mentioned by James in The Black Jacobins, and also Toussaint’s own reading of Raynal finds pride of place in James’s work.10 It is in particular crucial to the play The Black Jacobins, based on James’s research, which was staged in London 1936 starring Paul Robeson as Toussaint. The first scene with Toussaint opens by representing him seated in his armchair, an open copy of his Raynal on his lap. Rereading Raynal’s call for a ‘new Spartacus’, he focuses on one particular sentence and repeats it over and over again until the light fades out: ‘A courageous chief only is wanted’.11 Spartacus is not mentioned specifically, however; in the more extensive quotation from Raynal in The Black Jacobins the reference to Spartacus is also passed by. Before addressing James’s use of other classical motifs, in the light of which his partial silence on Spartacus may seem a strange omission, it will be helpful to look at the literary response to the Haitian Revolution in England. The English response was no less powerful than the French, and by no means only after Wordsworth’s sonnet ‘To Toussaint L’Ouverture’ of 1802. Part of Elizabeth Helme’s novel The Farmer of Inglewood Forest (1796) centres on the character of Felix, an African sold into slavery in the Caribbean who recounts how he had declined to participate in a slave revolt transparently modelled on events in Saint-Domingue, out of gratitude to a benevolent master. The novel reveals the terror of slave revolts felt by many white people at the time, but also emphasizes the mutual capacity for feeling and cooperation shared by people of all races.12 The Spartacus parallel, unsurprisingly, is not emphasized in this novel, with its complicated views on slave rebellion. It was, however, completely unencumbered by such ambivalence that Harriet Martineau (Fig. 12.2) wrote her 1841 novel—what would today be called ‘fictionalized biography’— about Toussaint L’Ouverture, The Hour and the Man, with the

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Figure 12.2 Harriet Martineau shortly after abolition in Britain

specific aim of using it to convert her extensive North American readership to abolition.13 One of the Americans on whom Martineau’s novel had the greatest effect was Wendell Phillips, who later became president of the AntiSlavery Society and delivered a much-republished lecture on Toussaint L’Ouverture in December 1861. He pointed out that the parallel

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with Spartacus actually did not work all that well since, however miserable Toussaint’s own death, the Saint-Domingue uprising had been extremely successful. In this, he argued, it was unique in the history of slave revolts: You may also remember this—that we Saxons were slaves about four hundred years, sold with the land, and our fathers never raised a finger to end that slavery. They waited till Christianity and civilization, till commerce and the discovery of America, melted away their chains. Spartacus in Italy led the slaves of Rome against the Empress of the world. She murdered him, and crucified them. There never was a slave rebellion successful but once, and that was in St. Domingo.14

The heroes of political history with whom Phillips preferred—perhaps strategically—to equate the San Domingo rebel were not barbarian slaves but Greek, Roman, English, French, and white American republicans: You think me a fanatic tonight, for you read history, not with your eyes, but with your prejudices. But fifty years hence, when Truth gets a hearing, the Muse of History will put Phocion of the Greek, and Brutus for the Roman, Hampden for England, Fayette for France, choose Washington as the bright, consummate flower of our earlier civilization, and John Brown the ripe fruit of our noonday, then, dipping her pen in the sunlight, will write in the clear blue, above them all, the name of the soldier, the statesman, the martyr, Toussaint l’Ouverture.15

Philips’s depiction of Toussaint as a statesman is, as we will see, of particular interest in comparison with Drimakos, one of the few ancient slave leaders who were at least partly successful. Despite the impact of Martineau’s novel upon him, this was a very different, more upbeat picture of the San Domingan leader than hers. Martineau’s picture, as Susan Belasco has shown in an important article, has a fundamentally tragic tenor. Martineau had gone out of her way during a trip to Europe to visit the prison, Chaˆteau de Joux, where her hero had died. She recorded in her autobiography and letters how deeply moved she was by the dreariness of the setting, the isolation of his death, and the stoicism with which he was said to have met it.16 Her noble, self-sacrificing Toussaint L’Ouverture, a family man and a sage as well as a strong, heroic man of action, is portrayed as reading

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the ex-slave and Stoic philosopher Epictetus when he is a young man meditating on the plight of his people. But Martineau had done her research on her Epictetus-like hero (who was indeed extremely well read (Fig. 12.3)), often lending the novel a curiously academic tone. In the final volume of the novel she lists his favourite reading, which in fact really did also include Plutarch’s Lives, Caesar’s Commentaries, Herodotus, Nepos, and a biography of Alexander the Great.17 He had read about ancient Greek and Roman leaders and their quandaries, and he will have met Spartacus in Plutarch’s Life of Crassus. But with Martineau a very different version of L’Ouverture as a reflective, almost reluctant, hero entered the discourse surrounding him, and it is one which has lingered on in the biographical tradition ever since, in tension with the ‘action hero’ that the ‘black Spartacus’ parallel suggested. If Martineau’s The Hour and the Man was the most influential picture of the Toussaint L’Ouverture in the nineteenth century (as it surely was), in the twentieth that function was performed by C. L. R. James’s The Black Jacobins.18 James’s representation of him shares similarities with both Martineau’s and Philips’s. Like the latter, he emphasizes the unique successes of the slaves. Being inspired by Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution (1930) and Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon (1852), James uses the successful revolution as a model for the struggle to gain African independence.19 The establishment of an independent state led by former slaves would not only be a strong antidote against victimizing narratives of slavery and imperialism, but also a strong example of what it takes to have a successful revolution. As we have seen, his later analysis that he wrote The Black Jacobins because he was ‘tired of reading and hearing about Africans being persecuted and oppressed in Africa, in the Middle Passage, in the USA and all over the Caribbean’, expresses his desire to counter the victimization of black people by writing ‘a book in which Africans of other people’s exploitation and ferocity would themselves be taking action on a grand scale and shaping other people to their own needs’.20 But his interpretation of the Haitian Revolution as a slave revolt must also be seen in the context of his Pan-African agenda.21 Various references throughout The Black Jacobins to developments in his own time, especially Mussolini’s invasion of Abyssinia and the involvement of

Figure 12.3 Toussaint L’Ouverture reading

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colonized black peoples in the First World War, many of which have been replaced in the 1963 edition by references to the anti-colonial struggles in Africa, demonstrate his commitment to the revolution taking place during his own lifetime.22 At the heart of his history is his interest in the dynamics between revolutionary leadership and the agency of the masses. The centrality of these dynamics to James’s theory of revolution comes out clearly in the preface of the first edition of The Black Jacobins, where he starts out by stating that: The writer believes, and is confident the narrative will prove, that between 1789 and 1815, with the single exception of Bonaparte himself, no single figure appeared on the historical stage more greatly gifted than this Negro, a slave till he was forty-five. Yet Toussaint did not make the revolution. It was the revolution that made Toussaint. And even that is not the whole truth.23

The definition of ‘the whole truth’ is, for James, the crucial, but ultimately unresolved issue in understanding both future and past revolutions. He continues his preface by addressing the difficulties in writing history. He notes that today’s historians, in contrast to ‘the traditionally famous historians’ (‘from Tacitus to Macaulay, from Thucydides to Green’), neglect the agency and influence of historically great men.24 The importance of Raynal’s message that ‘a courageous chief only is wanted’ bears out James’s engagement with revolutionary leadership. Although he considers Toussaint’s leadership of vital importance to the Revolution, he also remarks that: Not one courageous leader, many courageous leaders were needed, but the science of history was not what it is today and no man living then could foresee, as we can foresee today, the coming upheavals. Mirabeau indeed said that the colonists slept on the edge of the Vesuvius, but for centuries the same thing has been said and the slaves had never done anything.25

Although the first thing to note about the passage is the extent to which James made use of and responded to Raynal and Mirabeau, it is also informative about his post-colonial stance. Written in 1938, there may be no need to spell out the upheavals to which he refers, although the connection to Mirabeau’s Vesuvius-comment is suggestive of the anti-imperialist analysis James brings to his narrative of the Haitian Revolution. The passage appears in a context wherein he

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explains how the slave-owners brought their troubles onto themselves by allowing their prosperity to be based on such extreme inequality. The comment that slaves had not acted before, even though the situation had long been equally explosive, is, as James well knows and acknowledges elsewhere,26 not true, but it serves to emphasize the magnitude of the present revolt. Understanding ‘revolution’ as a radical change in the relationships between people, in other words the establishment of a new kind of society, James distinguishes between the Haitian Revolution and previous slave revolts not just on the basis of the slaves’ achievements in overturning the colonial regime, but also on the basis of their desire to fulfil the ideals of the French Revolution. The Haitian revolutionaries fought for more than their personal freedom. The question remains, however, what or who sparked the longwaiting Vesuvius. What was ‘the whole truth’ of the Revolution’s cause? Toussaint’s commitment to the Revolution (and not just to the revolt) is the decisive factor in James’s representation of his leadership, but his evaluation starts, as we have seen, from the question whether he made the Revolution or was made by the Revolution. That this is the leading theme of The Black Jacobins is clear also from the 1938 preface in which James acknowledges that: Great men make history, but only such history as it is possible for them to make. Their freedom of achievement is limited by the necessities of their environment. To portray the limits of those necessities and the realization, complete or partial, of all possibilities, that is the true business of the historian.27

Accordingly, as we will see in the next section, Toussaint is always shown operating and manoeuvring within the limits of his possibilities and his awareness of these limits is one of the aspects that make him both great and tragic. Martineau’s portrait of Toussaint as a reflective, tragic hero is of interest here, as James explains the successes as well as failures of the Revolution through the qualities and weaknesses of Toussaint. His reserve and aloofness first appear as positive features of his personality, although already in James’s introduction of him, the tragic consequences of these characteristics are foreshadowed.

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TOUSSAINT ’S ‘POLITICAL VICES’ In his account of Toussaint’s decision to join the revolution, James emphasizes that partly because of his privileged position in his master’s household and the chance to read Caesar and Raynal, he had been able to acquire ‘a formidable mastery over himself, both mind and body’.28 Toussaint’s self-awareness of his superiority to most other slaves, was one of the reasons, according to James, that he had no doubt about who Raynal’s ‘courageous chief ’ would be. It was also a key factor in the development of the slaves’ revolt into a full-scale revolution. James remarks that the three slave leaders before Toussaint’s advent, Biassou, Jean Franc¸ois, and Jeannot, showed ‘a sense of order, discipline and capacity to govern’, but had no real sense of direction, and adds, ‘To these bewildered political leaders Toussaint brought his superior knowledge and the political vices which usually accompany it’.29 James describes how Toussaint joined the initial revolt in 1791, working as a doctor, but soon came to the fore as a commander, acting as governor-general of the now semi-independent colony until he was captured by a French force sent by Napoleon to reinstate slavery in May 1802. Full independence was achieved in January 1804, when Toussaint’s former general Jean-Jacques Dessalines declared himself to be emperor of the free Republic of Haiti. James is interested almost exclusively (as Martineau had been) in Toussaint and does not give much information on the other leaders of the revolution such as Dessalines and Henri Christophe. As a consequence he virtually ignores the finale and aftermath of the revolution. Dessalines only presided over the Republic until his assassination in 1806, after which civil war ensued, pitching the north, under the control of Alexandre Pe´tion, against the south, ruled by Henri Christophe. In 1824 Haiti was pressurized into making damage payments to the former French planters, which plunged the country into severe poverty and further violence. The instability of Haiti continued throughout the nineteenth century and the occupation of the country by the USA during 1915–38,30 and the situation has not changed today.31 James’s disavowal of this troubled history of Haiti has rendered his account a ‘Rise and Fall of Toussaint’ rather than a history of the independence

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of the new nation, making the story inherently tragic, as in Martineau’s vision, but with the addition of a larger sense of the tragedy inherent in the history of a whole people.32 James’s concentration on Toussaint has other consequences as well. As we have seen, David Scott has called attention to the introduction of tragic elements into the 1963 narrative, and there are some explicit references to tragedy that appear first in this second edition.33 These could very well have resulted from James’s increasing doubts about leadership in and after revolution. James engaged with the political leadership of Kwame Nkrumah in Ghana and Eric Williams in Trinidad and experienced at close quarters the difficulties of leading a post-colonial society to prosperity.34 Like Nkrumah in James’s Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution (1977), Toussaint demonstrates a single-mindedness as well as rigidness in his dealings with the masses which is reminiscent of Creon in Sophocles’ Antigone. Scott may, however, have underestimated the possibility of reading the first edition of 1938 as a tragedy as well,35 especially given that his first literary work on Toussaint L’Ouverture was actually a stage play, produced in London in 1936. James has, with justification, been criticized for denying the masses their part in history by his focus on Toussaint as a leader and by his tendency to stage the ‘revolution’ as an active agent.36 Nevertheless, the relationship of the leader to the masses is given prime importance in both editions of The Black Jacobins. Through his focus on Toussaint’s interaction with the rebel slaves, James succeeds, although only partially, in acknowledging their importance for the events of 1789–1804. It is therefore all the more striking that James’s depiction of Toussaint L’Ouverture is at its most ambivalent precisely when he discusses this aspect of his leadership. James points out that ‘Toussaint’s presence had that electrifying effect characteristic of great men of action. He lived with the men and charged at their head ( . . . ) He shared all their toils and dangers. But he was self-contained, impenetrable and stern, with the habit and manner of the born aristocrat.’ And a few lines further on, he adds that ‘his most trusted officers worshipped him, but feared rather than loved him’, concluding that ‘this excessive reserve and aloofness, though they grew on him and would one day have their full consequences, were of inestimable value in those early undisciplined

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days’.37 According to this passage, Toussaint is a good leader for two reasons. The first, his solidarity with the other rebels and his tendency to command from the head of the troops, is unproblematic. Elsewhere James comments that Toussaint ‘had that reckless physical bravery that makes men follow a leader in the most forlorn causes’ and ‘could make soldiers accomplish the seemingly impossible’.38 As for Toussaint’s reserve, we have seen that James considers this to be valuable in the beginning of the revolt. In his chapter 4, ‘The San Domingo Masses Begin’, James’s text abounds in comments such as ‘nothing but an iron discipline could have kept order among that heterogeneous body of men just released from slavery’ and ‘masses roused to the revolutionary pitch need above all a clear and vigorous direction’, but he also gives an indication that Toussaint’s qualities would turn sour towards the end: ‘To these bewildered political leaders Toussaint brought his superior knowledge and the political vices which usually accompany it’.39 When, as governor of SaintDomingue, Toussaint took on the responsibility of making the colony economically viable and decided to appease the plantation owners by restoring the plantations, he forced the former slaves to return to work, albeit in return for a share in the profits.40 James does not attack this policy as such, but he criticizes Toussaint for not explaining it to the masses.41 James argues that Toussaint, with vision, courage and determination was laying the foundations of an independent nation. But, too confident in his own powers, he was making one dreadful mistake . . . His error was his neglect of his own people. They did not understand what he was doing or where he was going. He took no trouble to explain. It was dangerous to explain, but still more dangerous not to explain.42

He contrasts this neglect with Dessalines’s lack of scruples towards the French, which is understood very well by the masses. And although he will judge Dessalines harshly later on in the book, when he discusses Dessalines’s behaviour towards the whites at the time when he was the first emperor of Haiti,43 he comments with respect to Toussaint that he ought to have listened better to the masses’ need for revenge: Always, but particularly at the moment of struggle, a leader must think of his own masses. It is what they think that matters, not what the imperialists

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think. And if to make matters clear to them Toussaint had to condone a massacre of the whites, so much the worse for the whites.44

The juxtaposition of Toussaint and Dessalines is best understood in the context of James’s theory of revolution. At first reading it seems that James’s desire to depict Toussaint as a great man, a prominent figure on the historical stage, runs counter to the idea that the revolution was carried out by a mass movement.45 This ambivalence is expressed in the citation above, p. 361. James comments that ‘It was the revolution that made Toussaint’, but immediately adds ‘And even that is not the whole truth.’ But such a conclusion neglects the extent to which James uses Toussaint as a focal point to help him understand the essence of revolution. Toussaint not only interacts as a revolutionary leader with his followers, but, in a manner reminiscent of James’s first literary production, a collection of short stories, both his ambition to achieve the ideals of the French Revolution and his unwillingness to give in to the people’s desire for revenge against the slave-owners, symbolize the revolutionary character of the slaves’ uprising.46 Unlike previous uprisings, the rebels are not simply trying to escape and achieve individual freedom, but they have joined a revolutionary movement striving for a new kind of society. Toussaint’s role of giving direction to the ‘bewildered’ political leaders is vital in bringing the uprising to this revolutionary level. David Scott argued in his seminal work that, through his concentration on Toussaint as a revolutionary leader, James structured the first edition of The Black Jacobins as a romantic anti-colonialist epic. The story of the Haitian Revolution was first and foremost an example of black slaves overturning the colonial regime and settling a new state based on liberte´, e´galite´, and fraternite´. Toussaint’s connection to these French ideals, however, also results in a continued dependence on the colonial power. James makes this explicit in the second edition, when he makes this remark on his hero’s refusal to accept British support against the French: Toussaint was then as always devoted to the French Republic. This devotion will in the end lead him to an untimely and cruel death. But it gave him a splendid life. To all the blacks, revolutionary France, which had decreed equality and the abolition of slavery, was a beacon among the nations. France was to them indeed the mother-country. Toussaint, looking always

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to the development of the blacks as a people, did not want to break with France, its language and tradition and customs, to join the slave-holding British. He would be faithful to France as long as France was faithful to the blacks.47

Although James foreshadows the unfortunate results of Toussaint’s devotion—his death during imprisonment in France—he makes it clear that Toussaint not only acted with the best intentions, but also attempts to transform the revolt from the overturning of the master class into the overcoming of slavery as a degrading system. It is important in this respect to remember that James introduced Toussaint as different from the rest of the slave population due to his privileged background.48 James is clear about the effects of the revolution on the mentality of both the free and enslaved population of Saint-Domingue. Describing the difficulties of rebuilding the devastated and ruined island, he remarks that ‘for nearly ten years the population, corrupt enough before, had been trained in bloodshed and soaked in violence’.49 At the same time, however, he emphasizes in the second edition of The Black Jacobins that ‘at bottom the popular movement had acquired an immense self-confidence’.50 Their military and political successes took away the shame of being black that had kept them down as slaves: The Revolution had awakened them, had given them the possibility of achievement, confidence and pride. That psychological weakness, that feeling of inferiority with which the imperialists poison colonial peoples everywhere, these were gone.51

Both the continuation of forced labour and the introduction of better working conditions are explained by James through reference to this changed mentality. Toussaint’s measures against Dessalines’s whipping of black labourers were ‘not only humanity’: ‘Any regime which tolerated such practices was doomed, for the revolution had created a new race of men’.52 It is both ironic and tragic therefore that it turns out to be the tyrannical and whipping Dessalines who is better understood by the masses than the enlightened despot Toussaint. The unscrupulous Dessalines, using Toussaint’s enforcement of labour as an excuse to act as slave master, would be the one to achieve independence for the colony.

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The description of Toussaint as a ‘conscript of modernity’ illustrates the tragic character of Toussaint’s ‘political vices’ very well. Not only is Toussaint bound to his political enemy, France, but like the colonists he knows no other way to exploit his territory than to keep the plantations running and enforce cheap labour. James does not fault his hero for his striving for prosperity. He criticizes Toussaint’s inability to communicate his plans to the masses and laments his failure to keep in touch with them, but for him these vices are part and parcel of his virtues as well. James comes to conclude that Dessalines’s uncivilized and unenlightened crudeness is needed to make a clean break with the colonial power.53 Dessalines would not, however, have been able to give the revolt its revolutionary meaning. In the next section I will discuss how James in both editions of The Black Jacobins uses the juxtaposition between Toussaint’s and Dessalines’s styles of leadership to develop a post-colonial perspective on the Haitian Revolution.

A GREEK TOUSSAINT James makes his interpretation of the Haitian Revolution as a tragedy explicit when he writes as follows: The defeat of Toussaint in the War of Independence and his imprisonment and death in Europe are universally looked upon as a tragedy. They contain authentic elements of the tragic in that even at the height of the war Toussaint strove to maintain the French connection as necessary to Haiti in its long and difficult climb to civilization.54

The nineteenth-century comparison between Toussaint and Spartacus which, as we have seen, made a considerable impact on James’s representation of the Saint-Domingian, no doubt contributed much to his analysis that Toussaint’s imprisonment and death were universally looked upon as a tragedy. His role as Raynal’s ‘courageous chief ’ in both the play and the book reinforces this impression. However, we have also seen that an interpretation of The Black Jacobins as tragedy suggests that in some respects the Sophoclean Creon would be a more apt comparison to Toussaint than the epic

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hero Spartacus. This is even more the case when looked at in the light of James’s engagement with the Athenian polis as an example for post-colonial democracy. For James, direct or grass-roots democracy would provide an escape from the western, and hence colonial concepts of representation and nation-states.55 It will be a useful exercise therefore to interpret the slave leader’s tragic ‘political vices’ in the context of James’s views on tragedy and on the Athenian polis. In a letter to literary critic Maxwell Geismar, two years before the second edition of the Black Jacobins, James would define a sense of the tragic as ‘a sense of the inability of man in society to overcome the evil which seems inseparable from social and political organization and to judge humanity by the degree to which man is able to struggle against this overriding doom; to establish moral and psychological domination over the feeling of impotence and futility which it would otherwise impose’.56 James universalizes the genre of tragedy from Aeschylus via Shakespeare to Melville, arguing that Toussaint differs from their heroes in that his powers decline rather than rise during his quest to overcome the situation of impotence. But in a deeper sense the life and death are not truly tragic. Prometheus, Hamlet, Lear, Phe`dre, Ahab, assert what may be the permanent impulses of the human condition against the claims of organized society. They do this in the face of imminent or even certain destruction, and their defiance propels them to heights which make of their defeat a sacrifice which adds to our conceptions of human grandeur. Toussaint is in a lesser category. His splendid powers do not rise but decline. Where formerly he was distinguished above all for his prompt and fearless estimate of whatever faced him, we shall see him, we have already seen him, misjudging events and people, vacillating in principle and losing both the fear of his enemies and the confidence of his own supporters.57

James’s placement of Toussaint in a ‘lesser category’ is connected to the rebel leader’s failure to escape from a colonial concept of revolution and freedom. I stated above that James does not criticize his hero for his striving for prosperity, but for his failure to communicate his plans to the masses. The involvement (and education) of the people is, however, of paramount importance in lifting the revolution to yet another level, namely that of the grass-roots democracy. James’s universalizing of the genre of tragedy is combined, furthermore,

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with an understanding of literature as an expression of ‘Zeitgeist’.58 In relation to Hamlet, for example, he wrote that there ‘was no flaw in Hamlet’s character. It was his character’, and continued to explain how the social and economic environment of the sixteenth century made Shakespearian drama possible.59 Similarly, with respect to Toussaint he makes clear how the specific social and economic circumstances of Saint-Domingue at the end of the eighteenth century made his appearance possible. His tergiversations, his inability to take the firm and realistic decisions which so distinguished his career and had become the complete expression of his personality, as we watch his blunders and the inevitable catastrophe, we have always to remember that here is no conflict of the insoluble dilemmas of the human condition, no division of a personality which can find itself only in its striving for the unattainable. Toussaint was a whole man. The man into which the French Revolution had made him demanded that the relation with the France of liberty, equality, fraternity and the Abolition of slavery without a debate, should be maintained.60

The mention of Toussaint’s ‘inability to take the firm and realistic decisions which so distinguished his career’ has given rise to the scholarly suggestion that what can be called his ‘tragic flaw’ is his hesitation in choosing between French civilization and Haitian independence.61 This inability to decide could disqualify him as a tragic hero. The passage clarifies nevertheless that his doubts at this moment are not representative of his whole career and that Toussaint was a ‘whole man’. Toussaint’s declining powers are shown elsewhere, namely in his misjudgement of events and people, through which he alienates his supporters and loses the fear of his enemies. Even though we have seen that James recognizes the roots of this misjudgement in the reserve and aloofness that Toussaint also exhibits in the beginning of the revolt, and which were in fact, according to James, inherent to his character, he now remarks: The hamartia, the tragic flaw, which we have constructed from Aristotle was in Toussaint not a moral weakness. It was a specific error, a total miscalculation of the constituent events. Yet what is lost by the imaginative freedom and creative logic of great dramatists is to some degree atoned for by the historical actuality of his dilemma.62

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Aristotle’s use of the word ‘hamartia’ has been a matter of much scholarly debate.63 In the Christian tradition it has often been mistranslated as ‘tragic flaw’: the Renaissance imported into Aristotle the idea that it is a defect of character that brings about the protagonist’s downfall. Shakespearian tragedies are a good example of this interpretation and since C. L. R. James was an avid reader of Shakespeare, it is not surprising that he considers Toussaint’s ‘error’ to be connected to his character and translates it into ‘flaw’.64 As is clear in this passage however, he also saw something closer to the true meaning of Aristotelian hamartia, which is not a defect of character but a mistake, and he argues that Toussaint ‘misses the mark’—to use a literal translation of the verb hamartanein—due to a miscalculation of the situation and not a fault of character. James’s use of the term ‘hamartia’ here is somewhat confusing: the fault is not a fault of character. Nevertheless, the miscalculation causing the fault is typical of Toussaint’s character. So how did Toussaint miscalculate?65 Toussaint, in his admiration for the French Revolution, was attempting to create a colony in which former slaves, mulattoes, and whites could live peacefully side by side and prosper by hard work. James acknowledges that ‘Toussaint was attempting the impossible— the impossible that was for him the only reality that mattered’, but forgives him his idealism: The realities to which the historian is condemned will at times simplify the tragic alternatives with which he was faced. But these factual statements and the judgments they demand must not be allowed to obscure or minimize the truly tragic character of his dilemma, one of the most remarkable of which there is an authentic historical record.66

Ultimately, James considers, Toussaint’s idealism causes his downfall, but he is forgiven for this as his imagination made the unthinkable reality—ex-slaves taking their fate into their own hands:67 But not Shakespeare himself could have found such a dramatic embodiment of fate as Toussaint struggled against, Bonaparte himself; nor could the furthest imagination have envisaged the entry of the chorus, of the ex-slaves themselves, as the arbiters of their own fate. Toussaint’s certainty of this as the ultimate and irresistible resolution of the problem to which he refused to limit himself, that explains his mistakes and atones for them.68

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This does not excuse Toussaint’s failure to communicate. The real fault lies, according to James, not in Toussaint’s policy but in his mistaken trust that the ex-slaves will share his ideal without elucidation or explanation.69 In other words, although James depicts the masses, and Dessalines as their representative, as arbiters of their own fate to the extent that they removed Toussaint in order to take ‘bare freedom’, he also laments the failure of Toussaint’s ideals, which were the ideals of the French Revolution. The Black Jacobins has been read as the history of ‘a mass uprising in which the leader became trapped in bureaucracy and was slowly transformed into a self-effacing dictator who capitulated, contained, and defused the popular revolution’.70 In this interpretation, Toussaint followed the pattern of what Trotskyites would call the ‘Bonapartism’ of Stalin: being seduced into abandoning the democratic movement and becoming the charismatic leader of an autocratic one.71 James’s overall image of Toussaint is, however, more positive than that. An interpretation of The Black Jacobins as a tragic narrative— or at least a narrative informed by an Aristotelian or neo-Aristotelian conception of the tragic hero—brings out Toussaint’s errors as well as the greatness of his character and the interconnectedness of these two. Such an interpretation is problematic in the light of James’s ambition to centralize the agency of the masses, but it fits well with his rigorous classical education, obtained at Queen’s Royal College in Port of Spain, and cultural interests.72 In the final part of this chapter I will argue that in his portrayal of Toussaint James may have been thinking of other ancient slave leaders in addition to Spartacus.

A DARING AND DESPOTIC TOUSSAINT With the interpretation of Toussaint’s tragic dilemma and his problems in communicating with the people, we come to James’s key issue, which is the problem of ruling while and after revolting. This pragmatic question—however tragically it is answered—is very different from Martineau’s more romantic approach. In the remainder of this chapter I hope to demonstrate how this aspect comes out in a reading of The Black Jacobins alongside two ancient accounts of slave

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revolts. The first is Aristomenes’ abortive revolt against the Spartan domination of Messenia, which Pausanias places in the late eight or early seventh century bce.73 The second example is from book 6 of Athenaeus’ Deipnosophistae; the diner Democritus cites from the third-century Voyage to Asia by Nymphodorus of Syracuse about the slave rebel Drimakos. It is not necessary to my argument to prove that James had read these or thought about them in detail, since my aim is to elucidate his own strategies in his portrayal of Toussaint’s career through comparison with structurally similar stories. But nobody involved in the far left organizations of which he was a member was unaware of any of the ancient slave revolts, which are standard material in the orthodox and ‘authorized’ Marxist and Trotskyite histories that he will certainly have been encouraged to read, and this factor, in conjunction with his classical education, makes it in fact not at all unlikely that he had investigated Aristomenes and Drimakos. Although both ancient accounts focus on the role of the rebel leader as instigator for the revolt and on his relationship with his followers, the analyses that they give of these two aspects are very different. This is partly because of the fact that the revolt in Chios is successful,74 whereas the Second Messenian War only leads to exile and re-enslavement. I will argue that both leaders, much more so than the Spartacus of Plutarch and Appian, share characteristics with Toussaint. The latter is more like Aristomenes in the beginning of the uprising and at the very end, when his capture by Napoleon’s troops is imminent. But he resembles Drimakos during the time that he was governor, and acting, in the words of James, as ‘a fascist dictator who actually did the work’.75 By emphasizing his tremendous daring, Pausanias positions Aristomenes as a leader within a body of other young men, who are willing to die for an ideal, regardless—or possibly even because of— their inexperience with warfare (Paus. 4.14.6–8). Pausanias often combines the Messenians’ daring (for which he uses a word that often has negative connotations: tolme¯)76 with aponoia, which implies desperation and loss of sense. The combination of these two words appears as a positive characteristic when through daring and desperation the Messenians win a victory over the Spartans at the Battle at Boar’s Grave. However, desperate daring does not equate

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with courage, and the repeated use of tolme¯ and aponoia, especially since the repetition entails the exclusion of any other words that might signify daring or courage, may refer to the ultimate futility of the Messenian cause.77 Furthermore, Aristomenes is depicted by Pausanias as a limited kind of leader. After the successful battle at Derai, Aristomenes is chosen by his fellow rebels to be their king, but he refuses the status of king and is elected to be strate¯gos autokrato¯r instead (Paus. 4.15.4–5).78 Daring is also an important characteristic of Toussaint. It is mainly through his decision to lead his troops into combat at their head that he inspires the rebels and earns their trust.79 Although the origin of his nickname, L’Ouverture, is elusive, he may also have earned it by his reputation for invariably finding openings in the enemies’ lines.80 In James’s depiction of Tousssaint, daring seems a purely positive character trait. Nevertheless, as in the case of Aristomenes, Toussaint’s daring becomes stronger when his desperation grows. It is strongest precisely at the moment that he knows that his trust in the French is betrayed and that his ideal will not be realized: Toussaint on February 8th did not yet know the full extent of his reverses, but as the blows fell upon him he braced himself not for surrender but for resistance. The dream of orderly government and progress to civilization was over. He had held on to the last shred of hope for peace, but as he saw the enemy close in, then and then only did he prepare to fight. Grievous had been his error, but as soon as he decided to look the destruction of San Domingo fairly in the face, he rose to the peril, and this, his last campaign, was his greatest. He outlined his plan to Dessalines: ‘Do not forget, while waiting for the rainy season which will rid us of our foes, that we have no other resource than destruction and fire. Bear in mind that the soil bathed with our sweat must not furnish our enemies with the smallest sustenance. Tear up the roads with shot; throw corpses and horses into all the fountains, burn and annihilate everything in order that those who have come to reduce us to slavery may have before their eyes the image of that hell which they deserve.’81

Toussaint’s last campaign is reminiscent of Spartacus’ heroic death. Both Plutarch and Appian emphasize the desperate nature of the slaves’ situation and Spartacus’ awareness of his imminent defeat.82 Pausanias’ representation of Aristomenes, however, demonstrates both the positive meaning of daring as an element of courage and

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its limitations when paired with despair. Similarly, daring is useful to Toussaint at moments when he has nothing to lose as a slave in the beginning and when he is about to be captured by the French towards the end. It will not help him, as we will see, as a governor. The contrast between Aristomenes’ hatred of the Spartans and Toussaint’s love for the French Republic opens up possibilities for comparing their leadership with that of Drimakos. At the start of his citation of Nymphodorus, Democritus says that Drimakos’ courage (andreia)83 and his luck form the basis of his position as leader of the slaves. The passage continues by saying that as the expeditions against him failed, Drimakos offered terms to the Chian slave-owners (Athenaeus 6.265d–266a). In exchange for his and the other fugitives’ freedom, he promises not to take more than he needs from the Chians’ storehouses and not to encourage any further runaways to join him. With respect to future runaways, he says to the Chians (Athenaeus 6.265f–266a): Those of your slaves who run away I will examine to find out the reason, and if in my judgment they have run away because they have suffered something irreparable, I will keep them with me, but if they can urge no justification, I will send them back to their masters.

Drimakos acquires a position in which he is the arbiter of just reasons for slave flight and therefore of what masters can and cannot do with their slaves. Thereby, he effectively dictates the rules and terms for maintaining a system of slavery. After Drimakos’ death, the Chians encounter renewed problems with their slaves, but only until they build a shrine to Drimakos worshipping him as a benevolent hero (Athenaeus 6.266d–e).84 This worship reinstates Drimakos in death as the supreme judge in matters concerning slavery. The story of Drimakos is a positive one, in which the military aspect in his leadership stands out. He leads the fugitives ‘as a king would lead an army’ (Athenaeus 6.265d and 6.266a). The basis of his authority is fear: ‘The fugitive slaves who were living with Drimakos feared him much more than their own masters, and so treated him with great respect and obeyed him as if he were their military officer’ (Athenaeus 6.266a). The behaviour of the fugitive slaves testifies to Drimakos’ power of control. Before and after his leadership there is chaos: the slaves

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damage the Chians’ lands and obey no law. But during his period of eminence, they fear him and are controlled by military discipline. To the slaves he is not unlike their former masters, except concerning his power. Those that are with him fear him more than their masters and those that would in other circumstances have run away prefer not to, when by doing so they risk his judgment. Drimakos is a benevolent hero, but he seems to be benevolent especially to the Chian slaveowners. The fact that he is worshipped after his death as a civic hero adds to this impression.85 The ability to inspire fear is also a prime characteristic of Toussaint. James makes it clear that Toussaint’s instatement as governor is accompanied by a change in his appearance as a person of authority, and he cites Toussaint himself: ‘Remember that there is only one Toussaint L’Ouverture in San Domingo and that at his name everybody must tremble’.86 As we have seen, James combines his representation of Toussaint as ‘old Toussaint’ who ‘shared all their toils and dangers’ with that of a man ‘self-contained, impenetrable and stern, with the habit and manner of the born aristocrat’. His men ‘worshipped him, but feared rather than loved him’.87 James’s comment that his officers ‘feared rather than loved him’ is close to Nymphodorus’ characterization of Drimakos in Athenaeus’ Deipnosophistae. The clearest expression of this fear-inspiring ability can, however, be found in chapter xi, ‘The Black Consul’, in which James expands on Toussaint’s military dictatorship. James partly excuses him, claiming that Toussaint ‘showed himself one of those few men for whom power is a means to an end, the development of civilization, the betterment of his fellow-creatures’, but is highly critical of Toussaint’s use of his power. This is especially the case when he describes Toussaint’s execution of his nephew Moı¨se after an insurrection.88 But so set was Toussaint that he could only think of further repression. Why should the blacks support Moı¨se against him? That question he did not stop to ask or, if he did, failed to appreciate the answer. In the districts of the insurrection he shot without mercy. He lined up the labourers and spoke to them in turn; and on the basis of a stumbling answer or uncertainty decided who should be shot. Cowed by his power they submitted.

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Drimakos’ disciplinary power over his subjects and his benevolent attitude towards the Chians can be compared with James’s critique of Toussaint’s ‘tragic error’ in neglecting the wishes of the ex-slaves in his ambition, which James admires, to lead the country to prosperity. Drimakos’ and Toussaint’s power can be contrasted with Aristomenes’ control over the Messenian rebels and his hatred for the Spartans. Aristomenes, by his refusal of the title of king, also refuses the civic responsibility that comes with it. As a strate¯gos autokrato¯r he has the means to take revenge on the Spartans, and thereby satisfy his personal hatred for them, while he does not need to bother with serving the Messenian common good. This is corroborated when the Messenians, after their final defeat, ask Aristomenes to lead them into exile, which he refuses as well.89 Drimakos does take up the position of king, but becomes a benevolent hero for the slave-owners. Toussaint also takes on the responsibility to lead Saint-Domingue and is in the end thought of by his own people to be too benevolent for the plantation holders. The difficulty which connects these three accounts is the problem of carrying responsibility while or after leading a violent uprising. Following the interpretation of David Scott, Toussaint is confronted by an impossible choice; he cannot realize the ideals of the French Revolution in Saint-Domingue as the connection with France would cost the ex-slaves their freedom, and is therefore forced to choose between his responsibility to govern Saint-Domingue peacefully within the Empire and his freedom.90

CONCLUSION The political background of James’s evaluation of Toussaint’s leadership explains why he centralizes the role of the slaves. He could only do so by excluding the agency of mulattoes, free blacks, and the planters in bringing about the Revolution, and ignoring the troubles Haiti experiences after its independence. The interpretation of the Haitian Revolution as a slave revolt has a long history. We have seen how from the start the historiography of the events was shaped by political ambitions and fears. The upheaval of the former French

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colony could only be used in the debates on abolition if it was understood as a slave revolt. James’s classic on the Haitian Revolution is not just an attempt to rewrite the history of the island into a narrative that acknowledges the agency of the ex-slaves to an extent unprecedented in Martineau or any of the other previous ‘hagiographers’ of Toussaint L’Ouverture. It is also written as a prescription for the future. The Black Jacobins gave James a podium from which to express his ideas on leadership and revolution, and in that context, although James admires Toussaint, he criticizes him for not explaining his actions to his followers. This criticism is very similar to the one that he would confront Nkrumah with in his book on the Ghana Revolution.91 Finally, it is thought-provoking to conclude with a consideration of the way in which the incompatibility of Toussaint’s leadership as a rebel slave and as a governor comes to the fore in a comparison with Aristomenes and Drimakos. Aristomenes displays great daring in his struggle against the Spartans, but he refuses to serve the Messenians as their king. Drimakos is praised in an account that betrays a negative opinion towards the fugitive slaves. He develops into a civic hero who mitigates but maintains and legitimates the system of slavery. Toussaint begins as a leader somewhat like Aristomenes, acquiring the love of his followers by sharing their toils and leading them in a daring manner. When, however, he has won control over Saint-Domingue through his military victories and accepts the role of governor, the troubles with his leadership start. He makes the tragic mistake of neglecting his own people in trying to achieve the French Revolution’s ideals of liberty, equality, and fraternity. The fault is tragic as it is born from an ideal for which Toussaint eventually dies, but it makes him similar to Drimakos as he demands the obedience from his followers as if they were his slaves.

NOTES 1. James (2001), xv. 2. Rabbit (1995). 3. Scott (2004), cf. the recent review of Scott’s theory in Jefferess (2008), 48–9.

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4. Spanish San Domingo was never successfully conquered by the rebels. 5. See Beard (1853), 82–3. 6. Rainsford (1805), 245–8. The prints are reproduced accessibly (without being credited) in Percy Waxman’s The Black Napoleon (1931). 7. See Freeman (1988). 8. Striker (1985), 81. 9. e.g. Saint-Re´my (1853). Gragnon-Lacoste (1877), Schoelcher (1889), Vaucaire (1933), Ce´saire (1961). 10. Laveaux: James (2001), 139–40; for Toussaint’s reading of Raynal: James (2001), 20. 11. The play is easily accessible in Grimshaw (1992), 67–111. 12. Ferguson (1992), 230–1. 13. She had already effectively raised Toussaint L’Ouverture’s ghost in Demerara, an ironic story of plantation life included in her Illustrations of Political Economy, vol. 1 (1832). 14. Phillips (1872), 491–2. 15. Phillips (1872), 492. 16. Belasco (2000), 168. 17. See Martineau (1841), vol. 3, 254–5. 18. The most recent works to follow in the footsteps of Martineau and James include Madison Smartt Bell’s novels All Souls’ Rising (1995) and Master of the Crossroads (2000). James’s influence is also clear in nonfiction, for example Wenda Parkinson’s ‘This Gilded African’: Toussaint l’Ouverture (1978) and to a certain extent in Dubois (2004). 19. Cf. Hall and Schwarz (1998), esp. 21; Farred (2003), 119. 20. James (2001), xv. 21. Hill (1986), Richards (1995), Rabbit (1995), 121, Hall (1995), Walcott (1995), 44, and Idahosa (1995). 22. This is especially clear in the appendix to the second edition: ‘From Toussaint L’Ouverture to Fidel Castro’. James’s multifaceted work cannot be summarized in a few pages, but it is necessary to point out that his capacities as a revolutionary activist, Marxist theorist, journalist, historian, writer, and literary and cultural critic cannot be understood in isolation. C. L. R. James moved from Trinidad and Tobago to England in 1932 with the aim of furthering his literary career, but by the time that he wrote The Black Jacobins, in 1938, he had become involved in the Independent Labour Party and had left it in 1936 to form an open party with the Trotskyist Marxist Group of which he was a member; he had joined the International African Service Bureau, the precursor of the Pan-African Congress led by George Padmore, while he himself chaired the International African Friends of Abyssinia, campaigning against

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23. 24. 25.

26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33. 34.

Lydia Langerwerf Mussolini’s occupation of Ethiopia. In 1936 he was involved in the play about Toussaint, starring Paul Robeson, in 1937 he wrote a history of the rise and fall of the Communist International, World Revolution, and wrote A History of Negro Revolt in the same year as The Black Jacobins. This year also marked his departure for the United States where he stayed until ousted in the McCarthy era (1953). His still authoritative study of Melville, Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World We Live In (1953), written in part to defend his case to be allowed to stay in the USA and distributed for this purpose to all members of the Senate, testifies to his interest especially in how literature can be a window on changes in time. On the years following his deportation, cf. above, p. 364 and n. 34. James (2001), xix. James (2001), xix. James (2001), 44. Mirabeau’s famous remark, said to have been made in the revolutionary assembly in Paris in 1789, was part of the tradition of the Saint-Domingue narrative since very early in its canonization: see e.g. Lacroix (1819), 89. James (2001), 12–18. James (2001), xix. James (2001), 73–5. James (2001), 75–7. America’s excuse in 1915 was that Haiti might side with the Germans in World War I, but the continued presence of marines until 1938 was primarily motivated by protection of American business interests. Nicholls (1979), Bellegarde-Smith (1990). Farmer (2003) is a more recent critical discussion of America’s involvement up until this day. Rabbitt (1995), Wilson-Tagoe (1998), 27–9. Most notably the new introduction to chapter 13: James (2001), 235–7. In the years following his deportation from the USA, James became more and more involved in the decolonization of Africa. The struggle for independence in Ghana, on which James would later write Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution (1977), convinced him at first of the importance of decolonization for international socialism, but in time also made him revisit the issues of leadership he had addressed in The Black Jacobins. In 1958 he was asked by Eric Williams to return to Trinidad to edit the party newspaper of the National Movement. He took leave of this job in the same year that he published his revised edition of the The Black Jacobins. His experiences in Trinidad, which were not altogether positive, provoked in him a somewhat less optimistic view on the possibilities of revolution, but did not culminate in total disillusionment.

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35. Scott (2004), esp. 202–4 on Toussaint as Creon. Compare Rabbitt (1995). 36. Miller argues that ‘James’s “effacement” of the people in The Black Jacobins is not so much the result of an oversight on the author’s part but rather an unavoidable consequence of a method which is literary in form while employing categories from the Enlightenment’. See also Dupuy (1995), Rabbitt (1995) and Wilson-Tagoe (1998), 27–9. Henry (1992), 226 comments on James’s ‘belief that the masses acting collectively in response to life’s problems often produce solutions that equal in originality those of the individual genius’. Toussaint may in some respects be seen as a personification of the masses: James (2001), 234 states that Toussaint ‘accomplished what he did because, superbly gifted, he incarnated the determination of his people never, never to be slaves again’ . 37. James (2001), 119–20. 38. James (2001), 203. 39. James (2001), 75–7. Henry and Buhle (1992) argue that these passages demonstrate James’s awareness of the limitations concerning spontaneous mass movements. Rather, I think that James is trying to show the limitations of leadership. 40. Cf. Fick (1990) on Tousaint’s juggling with responsibilities. 41. Needless to say, with ‘masses’ James means primarily the ex-slaves. This is one instance where the heterogeneity of the masses is ignored, even though it constituted Toussaint’s biggest problem. Fick (1990) and Dupuy (1995). 42. James (2001), 195. 43. James (2001), 298–302. Note, however, Wilson-Tagoe (1998), 28, who comments that ‘James’ empathy with Toussaint seems so total that even where he draws contrasts between the personal vision of Toussaint and Dessalines he fails to see the ideological implications of the contrast’. 44. James (2001), 229–34. 45. Although Blackburn (1988), 28–9 is right in praising James for pioneering the explanation of slave revolt in terms of mass movements. See also Blackburn (1995), 82. James’s early novelistic work, such as James (1936), offers a good antidote. Hamilton (1992) tries to interpret The Black Jacobins as a continuation of the ‘photographic’ portraits of ordinary individuals that James offers in these early works. 46. Compare the short discussion in Jefferess (2008), 48–9, whose comparison of Toussaint with Gandhi concentrates on Toussaint’s allegiance to the French Revolution as a revolutionary form of resistance. This more

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47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56.

57.

58.

59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

64.

Lydia Langerwerf positive approach challenges Scott’s representation of Toussaint as a ‘conscript’. James (2001), 174. James (2001), 73–7. James (2001), 196. James (2001), 198. James (2001), 198. James (2001), 197. James (2001), 195. James (2001), 235–7. Cf. Henry (1992), Look Lai (1992), Worcester (1995), Carby (1998), 224. Letter to Maxwell Geismar, 11 April 1961 in Grimshaw (1992). Compare James’s letter to Bell in Grimshaw (1992), 220–31, cited from 220: ‘My ideas of art and society, and my specifically literary criticism, are based upon Aristotle and Hegel. I doubt if there are many beside professional scholars who read and re-read Aeschylus and Shakespeare as much as I; but it is precisely these studies that have led me to see comic strips and soap operas as I do.’ James (2001), 235–7. Henry and Buhle (1992) criticize James’s principle that texts and identities are in part the result of creative activities systematically influenced by the interests of particular social projects, and remark on the lack of a philosophy of language in his critical thinking. Rabbitt (1995), 125 argues that ‘James seems to be attempting to move from a potentially limited historic paradigm to a more poetic one’ and comments on the universal application of Toussaint’s character. ‘Notes on Hamlet’ and ‘Letter to Leyda’ in Grimshaw (1992), 243–6 and 231–7. James (2001), 235–7. Miller (2001), 1082. James (2001), 235–7. James, although often using the word ‘flaw’, interprets the hamartia of Toussaint as an error or missed aim, which is in accordance with the interpretation of hamartia in Aristotle by Bremer (1969). See also Dawe (1968), Else (1967), Schu¨trumpf (1989), Rorty (1992), and Sherman (1992). Rabbitt (1995), 133 n. 7, commenting on James’s use of an Aristotelian tragic structure, points out that he devotes more attention to the effect than to the cause of the error. Compare Miller (2001), who detects Kantian influences in James’s use of hamartia.

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65. The interpretation of Rorty (1992), 10 of hamartiai as ‘contingent byproducts of admirable character traits’ is close to James’s idea of Toussaint’s faults. 66. James (2001), 235–7. 67. I disagree therefore with Miller that James considers Toussaint’s inability to choose a major flaw. At stake here is rather Toussaint’s ability to think beyond the tragic dilemma. See also Scott (2004), 185. 68. James (2001), 235–7. 69. At James (2001), 283, James writes that ‘The race question is subsidiary to the class question in politics, and to think of imperialism in terms of race is disastrous. But to neglect the racial factor as merely incidental is an error only less grave than to make it fundamental’. I agree with Dupuy (1995), 111 that ‘though James believed that L’Ouverture understood this to be the case, namely that the race question is above all a political and social question, L’Ouverture’s mistake was to deal with it in those terms and to ignore the fears and feelings of the masses while at the same time appearing to take the side of the whites’. 70. Hall (1992), 9. 71. Hall (1992) and Richards (1992). 72. Hall (1992) and Richards (1992). Miller (2001), 1075–6 argues that ‘James’s own vacillations amount to a mirror image of Toussaint’s flaw. He too, as he claims for Toussaint, has a kind of historical faith in the masses to determine their own destiny, and yet he chronicles the Haitian revolution first and foremost by focusing on the emergence of a particularly enlightened individual who takes precedence over the masses themselves.’ 73. Whether there really was a Messenian revolt after Spartan subjugation of Messene is a debated issue, but of no relevance to our interpretation of Pausanias’ book 4 as it is safe to say that his account is certainly of mythic idiom and proportions whether it be based on myth or not. Ogden (2004) has dealt with the supposed historicity of the revolt and suggests that Pausanias may have followed folk stories. 74. Drimakos’ successes invite comparison especially with Wendell Philips’s representation of Toussaint. 75. James (2001), 130. 76. Cf. Roisman (2003) and (2005) on the negative implications of tolme¯ in the speeches of Athenian orators. 77. Langerwerf (2008). 78. I discuss this matter further in Langerwerf (2008) and, briefly, below. 79. James (2001), 203, 119–20. 80. James (2001), 102, 344 n. 8.

384 81. 82. 83. 84.

85. 86. 87.

88. 89. 90. 91.

Lydia Langerwerf James (2001), 243. Plutarch, Life of Crassus 11.6; Appian, The Civil Wars 120. A decidedly more positive word than tolme¯. Garlan (1988), 181–3 compares Drimakos’ community with maroon communities in the Caribbean, arguing there is nothing illogical with a maroon leader protecting his independence by collaboration with the colonists. He, however, misses the mitigating role of Drimakos as a civic hero and judge of what are just reasons of running away. Note also Drimakos’ connection to the introduction of a system of weights and measures. Langerwerf (2008). James (2001), 180. James (2001), 120. This phrase is itself reminiscent of the famous Latin saying attributed to despots, ‘let them hate provided that they fear’ (oderint dum metuant). A favourite proverb of the emperor Caligula (Suetonius, Caligula 30), it had originally been put in the mouth of the Argive tyrant Atreus by the Republican tragedian Accius (fr. 168 Warmington). James (2001), 225–6. See Dupuy (1995) on Toussaint’s conflict with Moı¨se. Langerwerf (2009). Scott (2004). James (1977b).

13 Eumaeus and Eurycleia in the Deep South Odyssean Slavery in Sommersby Justine McConnell

This volume has addressed some exemplary presentations of the use—and abuse—of ancient Greek and Roman classics in discussions surrounding slavery in the modern world, and the ways in which the institution, its victims, as well as its profiteers, have been represented. One of the most important texts in this debate has always been the Homeric Odyssey, especially since Thomas Clarkson’s seminal discussion of Eumaeus, the ‘virtuous’ slave, in his An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, particularly the African (1786), as Hall has shown above in the Introduction, pp. 3–6.1 It is little surprise, then, to find the Odyssey as an ingredient in the recipe developed in the Hollywood cinema industry for the representation of slavery and its abolition in the experience of the USA. This chapter examines a film which is set at the precise moment that slavery was abolished in the Deep South, but which is, for complicated reasons and in complex ways, based on the plot of the Odyssey. The tension between Odysseus and Eumaeus, and the original Odyssey’s ‘class ambivalence’ (as Peter Rose has labelled it in Sons of the Gods, Children of Earth and which has been so carefully documented by William Thalmann in The Swineherd and the Bow),2 elicits in the story told in Sommersby a (for Hollywood) unusually profound set of insights into the moral, emotional, and economic ramifications of radical shifts in the relationship between newly emancipated slaves and their former masters (Fig. 13.1).

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Figure 13.1 The Odyssey in Reconstruction Tennessee, through late twentiethcentury eyes

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But the story is more intricate even than this. There is a further, crucial intertext in the form of a previous film which had only a tangential relationship with the Odyssey. Jon Amiel’s 1993 film, Sommersby, acknowledges in the closing credits that it is based on the French film Le Retour de Martin Guerre, starring Ge´rard Depardieu and released in 1982. One of the scriptwriters on Sommersby, Nicholas Meyer, described the decision to remake the French film in this way: Martin Guerre did well in America. But people don’t want to read subtitles, and when the studios talk box office they’re talking millions, not thousands.3

This seems disingenuous to say the least: what of the change of setting not just by country, from France to America, but also by era, from the sixteenth century to the nineteenth? This shift alters the cultural focus of the film; Jason Drake has noted that ‘the religious intolerance and moral certainty of Guerre’s universe . . . have been replaced by the racism and social bankruptcy of post-Civil War Tennessee’.4 This allows for a detailed exposure of this tumultuous time in American history, and lays bare the role and lot of the newly freed black slave at the time. The picture of slavery in the Deep South at this time is illuminated by awareness of the mode of ancient slavery that is constructed in the Odyssey, which works alongside Le Retour de Martin Guerre as a guiding inspiration for Sommersby. The Odyssean Eumaeus and Eurycleia are reconfigured in Sommersby’s Joseph and Esther, thereby exploring not just the parallel characterizations and the effects of newly granted freedom, but also the model of Orlando Patterson’s ‘fictive kinship’ and the class tensions present within that unstable and changing society. The later film is not, as Meyer claims, merely an American remake of the former: Sommersby takes Le Retour de Martin Guerre as its base text, and then combines it with Homer’s Odyssey to produce a film that warrants more attention than the critics gave it on its release. It is interesting to note that Meyer went on to write a screenplay of the Odyssey in 1995, which, although never produced, includes many of the salient features deployed in Sommersby, not least in terms of the prominence afforded to Eumaeus and Eurycleia and their roles as trusted figures very close to the family, and in Odysseus’ quest to ‘learn’ wisdom, rather than rely on his innate intelligence.5

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What Amiel’s film may have lost in the transition from the beautiful artistry and attention to historical detail of Martin Guerre to the more blockbuster-like Sommersby, it compensates for in the illumination of the inherently Odyssean elements of the story, and its engagement with the socio-political situation of America during Reconstruction. The hero of the film introduces the notion of freemarket capitalism where wealth, not race, is the primary criterion by which people are judged; in this way an alternative is offered to the slave-holding ways of the past, and a new mode of living is demonstrated in the face of their defeat by the Union forces and the abolition of slavery. It is this that enables the regeneration of Vine Hill seen at the end of the film, marking the new, hopeful, era of Reconstruction. Sommersby must be appreciated as a primary text in its own right, not being derived from a novel, but from the multiple authorship of Amiel, Meyer, Daniel Vigne, and Jean-Claude Carrie`re, the last of whom went on to work with Peter Brook on his 1989 version of The Mahabharata, and who is clearly intrigued by the potential for transferring ancient epic verse to the screen. Le Retour de Martin Guerre is based on a true story, recorded in two sixteenth-century French texts: Jean de Coras’s Arrest Memorable (1561), and Guillaume Le Sueur’s Admiranda historia of the same year.6 Soon after his wedding to Bertrande de Rols, the young Martin Guerre left his village and his family. Eight years later a man returned claiming to be him, and was welcomed back by the village and his family, including his wife. Things continued smoothly for some time, and he and Bertrande had another child. Only later did his true identity begin to be suspected and a court case was brought against him. In the film, his wife stands by him throughout, until the dramatic reappearance of the real Martin Guerre, now limping in on a wooden leg.7 When this man arrives, despite the impostor’s superior memory of details such as Martin’s wedding to Bertrande, the latecomer’s true identity as the real Martin Guerre is accepted by all on the basis of his appearance that is still recognizable to everyone. The impostor, Arnaud du Tilh, concedes his defeat, and is hanged. Jean de Coras was the judge in the historical trial and it was he that first noted the parallels with Homer’s Odyssey. He compared Bertrande to Penelope, and stated his belief in the impostor’s claim that he had decided to return home after so long, by citing Odysseus’

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refusal of Calypso’s offer of immortality and his own eventual return.8 Yet these comments (along with all the other annotations) were left out of Coras’s text when it was translated into English, and similarly play no role in the film. Clearly the themes of departure and return, of recognition and disguise, and of reintegration into a community are all integral to both Le Retour de Martin Guerre and the Odyssey, but it is not until Jon Amiel directs Sommersby that the link is once again made explicit. There can be no doubt that Amiel’s film intends to align itself with the Odyssey, and I would contend that it is to this that Amiel alluded when he denied that Sommersby was a remake, but instead considered it ‘a retelling of a mythic, timeless story’.9 The themes that are central to both Martin Guerre and the Odyssey are equally important in Sommersby, but now further unmistakable allusions have been added. Most interestingly, the racism of the Deep South has replaced the religious bigotry of Le Retour de Martin Guerre; this racism, epitomized in the cowardly masks of the Ku Klux Klan, connects to a crucial element not present in Le Retour de Martin Guerre, but integral to the Odyssey: slavery and the figure of the ‘loyal slave’. The Odyssey depicts a few of these figures, the primary ones being Eumaeus and Eurycleia, whose counterparts are to be found in Joseph and Esther in Sommersby. This period in American history, immediately following the Civil War, saw institutional racism overturned, if only temporarily, as is alluded to in the angry exchange between Mr Folsom (a witness against ‘Jack’, and a member of the Ku Klux Klan) and the black judge, played by the distinguished actor John Earl Jones at ‘Jack’’s trial:10 mr folsom: In two years when the Yankees are gone, you will be back in the field where you belong! judge: Quite possibly, Mr Folsom. But in the meantime, you are in contempt of my court and I sentence you to 30 days in county jail. (85 mins)

The status of black people was uncertain at this time: Tennessee was the first Southern state to be readmitted to the Union, because unlike their neighbours, they ratified the 14th Amendment (that black and white people should share equal citizen rights) in 1866. Tennessee had, in fact, abolished slavery in April 1865, even before the Civil War

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officially ended; however, the result of this was that although slaves suddenly became free, they were destitute and most of them were compelled to become share-croppers. Such work often ensured that they remained living in terrible poverty, as exploitative landowners would tally up the share-croppers’ debts and profits at exactly the same amount, thus leaving them with nothing. This situation continued for decades, and its culmination can be seen in episodes such as the early scene in Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man (1952), where Jim Trueblood tells his story, living as he does in a shack, in acute poverty.11 Unlike many of his Southern white counterparts, including most of his friends, ‘Jack’ does not discriminate on the grounds of race, and this is another respect in which he differs from the real Jack Sommersby. As a member of the Confederate forces, he would have supported slavery, but ‘Jack’s’ lack of racism and his proposal of equal rights for black people to buy land are features of his characterization as a saviour of Vine Hill, who introduces a new mode of production which ensures the survival and regeneration of the town. Just as Odysseus restores order and prosperity to Ithaca, so ‘Jack’ will do likewise in Sommersby; and while Odysseus himself is responsible for the slaughter of many of the young men of Ithaca and this action is condoned, ‘Jack’ returns to a society that similarly lacks young men, as a result of the Civil War. The returning hero in both works has to have changed in order to achieve a successful nostos—Odysseus learns by his adventures and so returns a wiser man,12 while ‘Jack’ is quite literally a different man when he returns. The American Civil War has attained such legendary status that it can form an evocative substitute for the Trojan War. As Gore Vidal has written, ‘What the Trojan War was to the Greeks, the Civil War is to us’.13 The historian Charles Roland even entitled his account of the Civil War An American Iliad, and declares in the preface that ‘the American people engaged in a great sectional conflict that re-enacted all of the heroism and sacrifice, all of the cruelty and horror, of the Greco-Trojan war’.14 The Union general and future president of the United States, Ulysses S. Grant, supported the Radical Reconstruction that did much to help the South recover after their defeat. As a result, the Southern states’ relationship to Grant was complex and problematic, and ensured widespread familiarity with and use of the Roman version of Odysseus’ name.15 In addition, as Lupher and

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Vandiver have discussed in this volume (p. 340), Basil Gildersleeve, founder of the American Journal of Philology, frequently compared the American Civil War to the Peloponnesian War, most notably in his 1897 essay, ‘A Southerner in the Peloponnesian War’.16 He depicts the American Civil War as being fought over the issue of slavery; but by an impressive rhetorical manipulation that ignores actual slavery, and derives from Pericles’ own oratory, it is the danger of the South being enslaved by the North that is being resisted, rather than the enslavement (of which the Confederates were in favour) of African Americans. Although warning against the dangers of mapping more modern slavery uncritically onto ancient slavery, Page duBois nevertheless demonstrates that this was a rhetorical trope of the nineteenth century that was adopted by some, and posed a problem that had to be side-stepped by others.17 The portrayal and function of slaves in the Odyssey has been much debated. On one side is the view argued for by Moses Finley and developed further by William Thalmann, that the role of slaves in the Odyssey is faithfully to underpin aristocratic society, rather than to have individual identities each in their own right.18 On the other side is the argument of scholars such as Felix Jacoby, who consider the Odyssey to be remarkable in its representation of slave characters, and Peter Rose who considers texts to express class tensions rather than taking one coherent and consistent position.19 Thalmann identifies two contrasting models of slavery in the Odyssey: the non-autonomous and therefore corruptible slave, versus the innately noble and therefore loyal slave.20 He makes it clear that both these models deny subjectivity to the slave and are formulated from the perspective of the elite. Peter Rose, though, is interested in the large proportion of the epic in which Odysseus is occupying the role of a beggar; he contends that this provides the audience with a view of the suitors, and of Ithacan society as a whole, more informed by the perspective of a wandering beggar than of a returned king.21 This enables the Odyssey to go beyond the constraints that a rigidly orthodox Marxist view perceives in literature, considering the literary work to reflect a historical situation but be distorted by the bias of the ruling class. The Odyssey counters this bias by the perspective made available to its audience through Odysseus’ experiences as a beggar, which reflect those of Athenian peasants who

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were compelled to ‘endure the jeering charges of shiftlessness from the idle class that ha[d] appropriated their source of livelihood’.22 Aristotle’s theory of ‘natural slavery’ posits that some people are born to be slaves, others are born to be free, and their physical and moral make-up will be appropriate to their status. However, he acknowledges that discrepancies may occur: a slave may be born with the body of a slave, well-suited to hard manual labour, but the soul of a free man, able to reason for himself, or vice versa.23 The situation of men captured in wars and enslaved by their enemies also problematizes his theory, as he discusses.24 The Odyssey’s two opposing models of slavery, seen in the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ slaves of the epic, both support the hierarchical structure of slavery, though via different routes. The ‘bad’ slaves merely swap one set of masters for another when they do the bidding of the suitors and thus are seen to need to be governed; the ‘good’ slaves, so loyal to their master even in his absence, support the sense of a hierarchical structure mutually beneficial to all.25 Nevertheless, Rose is right to observe that Odysseus’ time as a beggar highlights the tensions inherent within such a hierarchical society. Eumaeus famously declares (Od. 17.322–3), ‘All-seeing Zeus takes half the good out of a man on the day he becomes a slave.’26 Though he is prompted into such a statement by the neglect that the dog Argus has suffered at the hands of the palace’s slaves in Odysseus’ absence, the fact that the words come from a demonstrably ‘good’ slave ‘implicitly calls that hierarchy into question from the bottom’.27 It may not be enough to excuse Eumaeus from his own generalization regarding a slave’s nature purely on the basis of his royal birth (Od. 15.413–14), though the epic undoubtedly does propose this as a possibility, as Eurycleia’s aristocratic lineage (Od. 1.429) confirms. Eumaeus’ words are betrayed by his own behaviour, and the assumption of a slave’s inability to make moral decisions is proved incorrect. Eumaeus and Eurycleia are the two main slave characters in the Odyssey, and their counterparts in Sommersby play a similar, though reduced, role. These are characters who are present in the film more than they speak, taken into the inner sanctum of the family, particularly in the case of Esther/Eurycleia. Orlando Patterson has discussed the ‘quasi-filial fictive kinship’ that is a part of many forms of slavery; this involves slaves being encouraged to refer to their masters

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in the language of familial relations such as ‘father’, but far from being intended to express an emotional closeness, this denotes the relationship of authority that the master has over the slave, and demands a loyalty to the master and his family.28 In addition, it contributes to what Patterson terms ‘natal alienation’: the slave is deliberately disconnected from his ties of kinship by physical removal from his family, by the master’s lack of acknowledgement of the slave’s familial ties, and by the removal of his name, all of which contribute to the ‘social death’ of the slave.29 Patterson formulated his theory of ‘natal alienation’ after drawing on Moses Finley’s work on Graeco-Roman slavery, in which Finley emphasized that the slave’s status as an ‘outsider’ was integral.30 Patterson’s terminology supplements this by stressing the removal of family ties and suggesting a sense of the deracination that was suffered by slaves.31 Esther and Joseph’s biblical names allude to the practice of naming slaves after characters from the Bible or classical literature. The re-naming of slaves contributed both to the establishment of ties of ‘fictive kinship’ and to the ‘natal alienation’ of the slave, as Patterson has discussed: ‘the changing of a name is almost universally a symbolic act of stripping a person of his former identity’.32 Furthermore, the choice of Esther and Joseph specifically, two very positive figures in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, contrasts with the racist, Bible-thumping evangelism of the preacher and suitor-figure, Orin. These two are the main black figures of the film, though the film has carefully constructed the context in which it is set. The opening scenes see ‘Jack’ making his way back home, to the real Jack Sommersby’s home at any rate; on the way, through varying countryside and changing seasons, he passes a group of uniformed soldiers, of both black and white men, signifying that they are on the Union side (as the slave-holding Confederate forces did not allow black men to fight alongside them).33 Later the bodies of two black people are seen hanging, presumably the victims of the Ku Klux Klan. Nearer home, groups of vagrant African Americans are seen travelling with all their worldly goods: he hitches a ride on a cart with one family, then passes a larger group. Such enforced itinerancy was the result of the sharecropping which so many newly freed slaves found themselves obliged to do, in terrible poverty, for years. This engagement with the political situation of the time distinguishes Sommersby from that

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other, more-lauded Homeric Odyssey, Anthony Minghella’s Cold Mountain (2003), based on the 1997 Charles Frazier novel. This latter film, also set during the Civil War and Reconstruction, barely acknowledges the role or presence of black people.34 While Eurycleia recognizes Odysseus by his scar, ‘Jack’ offers up the recognition token of the memory of the special dumplings Esther used to make. This provides a distorted echo of Odysseus’ behaviour: Odysseus prevents Eurycleia making her discovery known, while ‘Jack’ is pushing people to recognize him, though as Jack Sommersby, rather than as Horace Townsend. This is indicative of the distinction that Robert Rabel makes between Odysseus and the impostor Arnaud du Tilh in Le Retour de Martin Guerre: Odysseus is a master of dissimulation, Arnaud of simulation.35 ‘Jack’ too focuses more on pretending to be someone else (i.e. Jack Sommersby) than on disguising his original identity, that of Horace Townsend. Esther duly believes that she recognizes ‘Jack’, and resumes her place close beside him, walking at the front of the crowd with him as he goes to greet Laurel when he first returns, and telling him all the changes that have happened in the town and the people who have been killed in the war. Evidently the original Jack Sommersby, who, it will soon become apparent, was a racist, nevertheless had a relationship with Esther that was not obstructed by racism. Or rather, her role within the household encouraged a ‘fictive kinship’ with those who had grown up there; this echoes Eurycleia’s similar relationship with Odysseus and Telemachus, both of whom she nursed, and which also belies the true hierarchy of that microcosm of society.36 Esther’s is a very privileged position within the household, just as Eurycleia’s was. She is within the inner sanctum: Esther is there when the doctor tells Jack that Laurel is pregnant, it is Esther who first congratulates ‘Jack’ on the birth of his new child, and Esther and Joseph are the only non-family members who wave ‘Jack’ off as he leaves to buy the tobacco seeds for the town to plant. As William Thalmann identified, this ‘fictive kinship’, by which a slave seems to be raised almost to the level of the master’s kin, blurs the inequalities within the relationship.37 Actual familial relations are also hierarchical, although in a more benevolent manner, so the language of kinship can express closeness without equality, and thus the master’s authority is not

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lessened by this ‘fictive kinship’; as Patterson notes, it can in fact be strengthened by the loyalty it demands of the slaves.38 Joseph has a more central role in Sommersby than Esther (just as Eumaeus is more active than Eurycleia in the Odyssey), and he is given fragments building towards an impression of his personality, unlike Esther who remains much more in the mould of Moses Finley’s ‘stock types’.39 Although Joseph is first remembered by ‘Jack’ with the words, ‘Yes, yes, I do remember! My daddy paid $100 for you’, ‘Jack’’s behaviour towards him and the other black people outrages the local white townspeople when he proposes that they should have an equal opportunity to buy the land they work.40 As the land that ‘Jack’ is proposing everyone can buy is currently his, this proposal has reminiscences of Odysseus’ promise to Eumaeus and Philoetius that he will give them wives, possessions, and homes near his own, if he defeats the suitors (Od. 21.212–16). Joseph is a Deep South embodiment of a Eumaeus that has been freed, a scenario that we never see in Homer. This proposal also marks ‘Jack’’s ushering in of a new ‘mode of production’ contrasting with the old semi-feudal, patriarchal order of the slave-holding South: the new mode is free-market capitalism, in which wealth is the only criterion by which people are judged. The impostor ‘Jack’’s return is thereby heroic in that it saves the community from the poverty and despair to which they were heading, just as Odysseus saves his own household, which in turn, it is suggested, will restore order and prosperity to Ithaca as a whole. Particularly striking given Joseph’s lack of status, not just as a newly freed slave facing some severe opposition to the prospect of him owning land of his own, but also lacking that close intimacy that is the privilege of sole female domestic slaves who bring up the children of the household, is his courage in voicing his fears and doubts. It is Joseph who voices the fear that must be in many of the people’s minds, that ‘Jack’ will sell all the precious goods that they have donated, and run off with the money rather than using it to buy tobacco seeds for the people to plant. He asks ‘Jack’, ‘You will be coming back, won’t you?’ In doing so, Joseph finds an independent voice that raises him to a level of equality with ‘Jack’, and marks his own boldness among the townspeople. This follows another important moment in the portrayal of Joseph: the valuable item that he

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donates is an ivory horn given by his great-grandfather, a tool-maker, to his grandmother when she married. That is, Joseph has a lineage and a family history that was often denied to slaves deliberately, by breaking up family units, and selling slaves off to different masters. Just as both Eumaeus and Eurycleia have family histories, giving them aristocratic backgrounds that seem intended to explain their loyalty, their good behaviour, and their superiority to other slaves, Joseph here too is set aside from the mass of slaves, and is seen as having a family network of his own. This is reinforced by the fact that a member of his family (presumably his son though this is never explicitly stated) is often seen playing and working with Jack and Laurel’s son, Robert.41 There is a sense therefore, that not only have the makers of Sommersby used the Odyssey as a model for the two characters of Esther and Joseph, introducing them where they were not present in Le Retour de Martin Guerre, but that they have also cast them in two opposing moulds, corresponding (though perhaps unwittingly) to the views of critics such as Finley and Thalmann on the one hand, and Peter Rose on the other. Esther, modelled on Eurycleia and correspondingly close to the family, yet has very little personality of her own: she is there as the archetypal kindly black nurse figure, so familiar from Deep South filmic depictions,42 but we do not know what she is like as an individual: she is one of Finley’s ‘stock types’. Joseph, on the other hand, is not only portrayed as an individual but, further, his role highlights the class tensions present in the society. The film is clearly and consciously anti-racist, and the locals who object to Joseph and his family owning land are seen in one of two lights. They are either petty and narrow-minded, as in the case of the woman who does not want to live next door to blacks (to her comment ‘Jack’ replies, ‘Well, where you gonna live then?’), or they are cowardly and malicious (as in the Ku Klux Klan members). The film, therefore, is not a one-sided anti-racist polemic, but a nuanced exploration of the class tensions. When ‘Jack’ returns home he greets his wife, his son, and his dog; but in a manipulation of the Argus scene in the Odyssey (Od. 17.292– 327), this dog recognizes that ‘Jack’ is not Jack, and is only soothed when the impostor holds out a handkerchief belonging to the real Jack for the dog to sniff. As ‘Jack’ later kills the dog to avoid it exposing

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his secret, this dog too, being capable of recognizing his master (or recognizing that it is not his master), like Argus dies as a result of this recognition. Further allusions can be seen in the scar on his chest that the real Jack Sommersby has, but that ‘Jack’ does not. It is by a scar from a boar hunt that Eurycleia recognizes Odysseus (Od. 19.466–75), and it is by his lack of scar that the three men looking for work know that ‘Jack’ is not who he says he is. Recognition tokens are an important part of the Odyssey, building up to a gradual consciousness and acceptance of Odysseus’ true identity by all. Terence Cave begins his 1988 work on anagno¯risis with a discussion of the historical tale of Martin Guerre as retold by Coras, and aligns it with the Odyssey, observing that, ‘Penelope’s fear that another man than Odysseus might return to reclaim his identity, his property and his marital rights was in fact realized in this case.’43 The pattern is similar in Sommersby, but of course the end result is the opposite: the recognition tokens lead to a final understanding that ‘Jack’ is not the real Jack Sommersby. In fact, Aristotle might have approved of Sommersby’s pattern of recognition as an improvement on Homer’s, depending as it does more strongly on recognition tokens that are revealed by a certain course of events, rather than those that are deliberately offered up as proof of identity.44 This is a necessary consequence of the impostor plot line—‘Jack’ does not have true recognition tokens to affirm his identity because he is not the man he claims to be. In an effort to persuade others of his identity he tries to offer false tokens (he speaks to Esther of her home-made dumplings, and to Laurel of the handkerchief she gave him and the shirt she made for him),45 but as if in agreement with Aristotle’s terming of these kinds of recognition scenes as being ‘with the artificial aid of tokens or amulets’, these tokens are being used to prove a false identity.46 ‘Jack’ is pushing people to recognize him, though as Jack Sommersby, rather than as Horace Townsend, and this provides a distorted echo of the conduct of Odysseus when he prevents Eurycleia making her discovery known, and swears Telemachus to secrecy. It is in this arena that Robert Rabel identifies one of the greatest original elements of Sommersby.47 In Amiel’s film, Rabel sees the nature of human identity as being fundamentally different from

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that view of it that is posited in both Martin Guerre and the Odyssey. He believes that the latter two consider the self to be fundamentally stable and unchanging, capable of being disguised but not capable of being wholly changed; while Sommersby, on the other hand, finally validates a conception of the self that is radically mutable.48 This reading of the Odyssey need not exclude that put forward by R. B. Rutherford among others, who argues that Odysseus ‘learns’ to be moral through his adventures, in a form of ethical paideia through experience.49 Odysseus may learn and develop as a result of his adventures, while simultaneously having a stable identity. However, in Sommersby the notion of malleable identity goes much further and identity itself becomes a subjective entity, capable of being manipulated and created by an individual. This, as Rabel argues, is best understood by referring to the works of the German philosophers Max Stirner and Friedrich Nietzsche. Stirner, in Das Einzige und sein Eigentum (1844, translated as The Ego and Its Own), sees the self as a ‘creative nothing’, and his successor Nietzsche went on to view the self as an individual’s own fictional creation in Beyond Good and Evil.50 At the end of Sommersby, this is the philosophy behind what ‘Jack’ explains to Laurel: he talks of having buried Horace Townsend, when he has in fact buried Jack Sommersby. What he is claiming for himself is the choice to exchange identities, and the possibility of doing this: he wants to be judged as Jack, as the Jack he has been, and even as the Jack before it was him. He will never be the disreputable Horace Townsend again, because although Townsend’s crimes were petty in comparison to the murder of which Jack is accused, it is as Jack that ‘Jack’ has done good and admirable things. The crimes of which Horace Townsend is accused include gaining money under false pretences as a confidence-trickster, getting a girl pregnant and then leaving her, and deserting from the army.51 All three have modern reminiscences of the Homeric Odysseus. Though Odysseus does not use his cunning to steal from others, his most renowned trait of tricksiness leads others to trust him when they should not (the Cyclops and Circe are both lured into a false sense of security by Odysseus); though none of the women he encounters has his child,52 Calypso and to a lesser extent Nausicaa both feel deserted by him; and his desertion from the army not only recalls Odysseus’

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initial reluctance to go to Troy and the trick that he carried out to try and avoid it,53 but, conversely, it contrasts starkly with the heroism in battle that is associated with him. Thus, if ‘Jack’ is a deserter, this is an additional way in which the role of the returning Odysseus is inverted—not a hero returning, but a coward nicknamed ‘Yellow Horace’. A further element may be at work in Horace Townsend’s history of running away. As has been noted, Joseph questions ‘Jack’’s intention to return with the tobacco seeds—he may be right to do so. At that moment, ‘Jack’ may have been planning to disappear with the money, but in a manner analogous to that which Pietro Pucci discerns in Odysseus’ beggar’s disguise, ‘the force of the signifier’ may have such a powerful effect that the ‘disguising props are somehow so possessive and masking that their force is never fully dispelled even when Odysseus reveals signs of his “real” self ’.54 Therefore the ‘disguising props’ which ‘Jack’ has taken on in Vine Hill effectively take him over, so that his adopted identity becomes an integral part of his personality. Rabel considers this anti-essentialist conception of the self to contrast with the Odyssey’s view, mentioning that it was in the Odyssey that Horkheimer and Adorno first see the notion of an essentialist self as arising.55 That a person may be capable of creating their own identity, or abandoning a previous identity entirely and taking up a new one, goes against, in Rabel’s view, the Odyssean conception of the self, in which a person is able to disguise himself, but his essence remains unchanged and will eventually be revealed. In support of this, Rabel cites Odysseus’ long period of disguise as a beggar when he returns to Ithaca, and the story of Proteus that Menelaus tells to Telemachus (Od. 4.399–424): Proteus will return to his ‘natural form’ before he speaks. Adorno advocates an anti-essentialist self, which he sees in Odysseus’ proclamation to the Cyclops that he is ‘No-man’. At this moment, as Adorno says, ‘He acknowledges himself to himself by denying himself under the name Nobody; he saves his life by losing himself.’56 However, Odysseus goes on to proclaim his name, and it is at that moment that Adorno considers him to be making a mistake and retreating back to the bourgeois safety of a non-dialectical position, and thereby to the essentialist self that has led Odysseus to often be considered as the start of Western Man, or as a ‘prototype of the

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bourgeois individual’.57 In Sommersby there is no ‘natural form’ for each man; he can choose and control this himself, and in this sense could be seen as an embodiment of the anti-essentialist self. The introduction of Odyssean elements can also be seen in the figure of Orin in Sommersby. He stands in for all Penelope’s suitors, who play a vital role in the plot of the Odyssey, but who are almost entirely absent from the story of Le Retour de Martin Guerre (Bertrande is asked near the start if she has had any suitors, and she says yes, but that she rejected them). It is Orin, fuelled by jilted pride, who will pursue the claim that ‘Jack’ is not who he says he is. Orin, who at first appears as a harmless, slightly pitiful figure, is gradually revealed as a man of menace, culminating in his exposure as a member of the Ku Klux Klan. In this sense of the good and evil within one man, he may be reminiscent specifically of the suitor Amphinomus, who tries to restrain the other suitors at times and is liked by Penelope (‘Because he was a man of principle’—Od. 16.398), but ultimately has still been part of their corrupt and transgressive group, as his name amphi- nomos may suggest. The fact that Orin has been wooing Laurel is not his crime, and even ‘Jack’ does not consider it to be so (the assumption that he was dead being a fair one, as the ending of the film confirms), but now that her husband is back, and Laurel has chosen to stay married to him, ‘Jack’ feels that Orin should concede defeat. He refuses to, and there is even a pared-down version of Odysseus’ battle with the suitors, with ‘Jack’ and Orin having a violent fight in the barn. Rather than this ending with a bloody victory for the returning heroic husband (of course there is no real returning husband, so this would be misleading), the fight is interrupted by Robert, Sommersby’s young son, announcing that his mother has just given birth. After Odysseus’ battle with the suitors in Homer, his reunion with Penelope takes place and his family becomes complete once again; after ‘Jack’’s battle with the suitor Orin, his family too becomes complete, with Laurel having given birth to a child of ‘Jack’’s own. Even when he is beginning to suspect the truth about ‘Jack’’s identity, Orin still helps save the crops from the hornworms that attack it.58 This sign of nature thwarting their efforts is, as he tells Laurel, a sign of the immorality of her household: the hornworms ‘are a sign of the rottenness that is eating at this place!’59 It is

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reminiscent of Exodus, chapters 7–12 in the Old Testament, where ten plagues are sent to Egypt to convince Pharaoh to let the Israelites leave. In addition, it has echoes of Homeric omens, such as the one in the Odyssey that persuades Amphinomus that the suitors’ plot against Telemachus will fail (Od. 20.241–5). The wife in a story of a returning husband inevitably plays a central role, although in the reflection of historical stereotypes current during the eras in which the two films are set, in each case it is a secondary or subservient role. For Elizabeth Guild, the two films ‘diminish the significance of the wife whilst seeming to amplify it’:60 unlike in Coras’s original account and in Homer itself, the wife’s role in the films is not ambivalent. The predominant factor in Bertrande and Laurel’s relationships with their impostor-husbands is love, and the films barely touch on the wife’s own growing awareness that this man is not her husband, or the conflicting emotions this may arouse. Even after being accepted by his son and killing the suitors, Odysseus realizes that Penelope could prevent him from achieving his nostos. Unlike the others, who have accepted recognition tokens, or in the case of Telemachus has ‘recognized’ Odysseus as his father by the very act of recognizing him without being shown tokens of proof,61 Penelope sets out to test him herself, and is in fact the only person in the Odyssey who manages to outwit him, thereby demonstrating their homophrosyne¯ (‘like-mindedness’, Od. 6.181) by her cunning. At the heart of the Odyssey is the question of identity, and even at this moment that could have been so ripe for a romantic reunion between the long-parted lovers, Homer maintains the focus on identity. The two films, Le Retour de Martin Guerre and Sommersby, on the other hand, both sacrifice questions of identity in favour of focusing on the ‘love story’ elements of the tale.62 As a result of this sacrifice, one of the most predominant traits of the Homeric Penelope, her cunning intelligence, is lost in the films. There do, however, remain the other characteristics for which she is renowned: her patience and steadfastness. The wives of both films continue to await their husbands’ return, despite being courted by suitors. Laurel Sommersby echoes Penelope’s behaviour particularly closely in this respect, in that she has promised to marry Orin if Jack does not return within a certain time period, just as Penelope promises to marry one of the suitors when the shroud she is weaving

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is finished. Penelope’s reluctance to do this leads her to unpick her handiwork each night though; Laurel’s emotions on the other hand are shrouded in even more mystery in Sommersby, and the audience cannot be sure if she lacked the cunning or reluctance to delay her marriage to Orin. Part of Guild’s criticism of both Le Retour de Martin Guerre and Sommersby arises from their depiction of the wife and their tendency to give her depth only in terms of her husband. Thus she sees that, The question of the man’s identity and desire remains complex, embodying epistemological, ethical, and political issues. The woman’s identity, on the other hand, crystallises around adulterous love, and only by proximity to the man is it lent something of the resonance of what he represents.63

This diminution of the female role avoids confrontation with a complexity that would have diluted the focus on the male protagonist, but would also have illuminated and enlivened the wife-characters that are otherwise, in Guild’s view, condemned to two-dimensionality.64 However, there is another, more rewarding, possibility at work here: the mystery of what the women in the two films are thinking corresponds very closely to the epistemological position taken by the Odyssey, where the audience knows what is going on in Odysseus’ head, but not in Penelope’s. Just as in the Odyssey Penelope remains, to a large extent, a figure of unresolved mystery, so too do Bertrande de Rols and Laurel Sommersby. A final and perhaps most explicit indication of the debt Sommersby owes to Homer is seen in the two moments when ‘Jack’ reads to his son from the Iliad.65 While this moment reflects that episode in Le Retour de Martin Guerre when the impostor shows that he is now literate and teaches his wife to write her name, the choice of text is far from coincidental. Given the extensive parallels with the Odyssey that have been outlined above though, it does raise the question of why the Iliad was chosen rather than the Odyssey, and also what the chosen Iliadic episodes bring to the film. In answer to the first point, Rabel suggests that Sommersby is casting itself as a new Odyssey, and as posited by Harold Bloom’s theory of ‘the anxiety of influence’,66 the film must repress memories of its predecessor: ‘The audience, in effect, mimics “Jack”, provided that, as “Jack” reads Homer, the audience reads Sommersby as Homeric epic.’67 ‘Jack’ is

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thus seen as a storyteller, just as Odysseus was, and just as in Homer the ability to tell a story is praised and seen as one of Odysseus’ great qualities; so too in Sommersby, ‘Jack’ reflects the makers of the film. The first extract that ‘Jack’ reads out is from book 6 of the Iliad, where Hector, the perfect husband and father-figure, is preparing for battle: ‘Jack’’s own final decision is foreshadowed by Hector going out to fight, and to die, for a principle he believes is right.68 The tenderness of Hector’s relationship with his wife and son is seen in the famous episode where, after a moving discussion with Andromache, he removes his helmet in order not to frighten the baby Astyanax. Yet, this ideal family situation does not dissuade Hector from sacrificing his life to defend his city, thereby fulfilling his sense of duty and following the path he sees to be designated by that duty. The second extract ‘Jack’ chooses is from book 15 of the Iliad, the moment when Hector finally breaks through the Greek lines and sets light to the ships.69 Most interesting here is that ‘Jack’ reads this to calm his son after the traumatic experience of the Ku Klux Klan attacking Joseph and setting fire to a cross in front of their house, which surely links the KKK to the Trojans in a problematic relationship, illustrating more about the KKK’s feeling that their livelihood and community are under threat than it does about the objective reality of the situation. That Sommersby is not a straightforward remake of Le Retour de Martin Guerre, and that its involvement with the Odyssey is both explicit and multi-layered, cannot be in doubt. The model of slavery represented in the film is undergoing vast, identity-altering change, as the institution of slavery is officially overturned, only to be replaced by the scarcely more liberal share-cropping. In this sense, Peter Rose’s perspective of slavery in the Odyssey, with the class tensions being represented and the precarious position of the elite being examined, is also at work in Sommersby. Patterson’s model of ‘fictive kinship’ is demonstrated in the film through the figures of Joseph and Esther, whose roles are illuminated by their Homeric predecessors Eumaeus and Eurycleia. The figure of ‘Jack’ interacts with that of Odysseus in a number of ways too: a deserter rather than a war hero, an impostor rather than the true figure, he nonetheless saves the community from the disarray into which it had fallen, and leads them to a new way of life which can meet the demands of postabolition society. When the film was released, it was largely greeted

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by negative reactions from the critics who failed to see or to value this dialogue being conducted between the ancient poem and the Hollywood film. They were perhaps helped in this by the film’s misleading credit that claims only Martin Guerre as its source, rather than the Odyssey itself, but to miss the Homeric strands is to miss a crucial and intriguing layer of this modern take on the theory, practice, and precise history, of North American abolition.70

NOTES 1. The importance of Eumaeus in the interpretation of ancient slavery was stressed in several papers delivered at the conference: see the essays by Alston, Rankine, and Hunnings in Alston, Hall, and Proffitt (2011). 2. Rose (1992); Thalmann (1998). 3. Joan Dupont, ‘Nicholas Meyer and the Art of the Remake’, International Herald Tribune, 2 June 1993, quoted in Davis (1997), 19. 4. Drake (1993), 57. 5. Meyer’s screenplay is available at http://nmeyer.pxl.net/odyssey_view. html. 6. The full title of Coras’s text is Arrest memorable, du parlement de Tolose, Contenant une histoire prodigieuse, de nostre temps, avec cent belles, & doctes Annotations, de monsieur maistre Jean de Coras, Conseiller en ladite Cour, & rapporteur du process. Prononce es Arrestz Generaulx le xii Septembre MDLX. 7. The role of Bertrande in the historical case recorded by Coras is more complex: she was a plaintiff at the trial against the impostor. She said that she now knew that she had been tricked, but she also told how the impostor could retell stories about Martin Guerre’s past, stories that only she and Martin could have known. The details of this are recorded in Davis (1997), 17. 8. Coras ([1561] 1565), 4–5 annotation 2; 11–12, annot. 6; 17, annot. 16. 9. Quoted in Charity (1993), 26. Incidentally, in this same article, Charity quotes Jon Amiel as saying he prefers to remain living in London, rather than move to Los Angeles, because, ‘I find that living in a city where work is life and life is work and movies are everything is like having one eye—it becomes possible to judge perspective.’ Such monocular imagery evokes the Odyssey’s Cyclops, which may have been in Amiel’s mind both because he was modelling Sommersby on that ancient text, and also

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10. 11. 12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31. 32. 33.

34.

35. 36. 37.

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because of the Ku Klux Klan (who referred to their leaders as ‘exalted cyclops’ and feature in the film). I follow Elizabeth Guild’s precedent in denoting the impostor (later revealed as Horace Townsend) as ‘Jack’. Ellison (2002 [1952]), 36–54. On this poverty see especially Douglass (1888). Nicholas Meyer made much of this in his screenplay of the Odyssey, focusing on Odysseus’ need to become wise, rather than be merely clever. Vidal (1988). Roland (2004), xi. Hall (2008), 136–7. Gildersleeve (1897b). DuBois (2003), 13–21. Finley (1978) and Thalmann (1998). Jacoby (1961) and Rose (1975). Thalmann (1998), 51. Rose (1992), 106. Rose (1992), 110. Aristotle, Politics 1254b27–33. Aristotle, Politics 1255a21–8. Thalmann (1998), 51; 87. Translation by E. V. Rieu, revised by D. C. H. Rieu (1991), 264. Rose (1992), 110. Patterson (1982), 63. Patterson (1982), passim. Finley (1968). Patterson (1982), 7. Patterson (1982), 55. The Confederate forces finally relaxed this rule in the spring of 1865, but fewer than 200 African-American men fought alongside them before the war ended. On the issue of black soldiers in the Civil War, see further Lupher and Vandiver above, p. 328. On the differences between the films see also Hall (2008), 136–8. However, it is worth noting Elizabeth Vandiver’s discussion (2004), 137–8 of the Hermes-like, ‘yellow man’ slave in Frazier’s novel, who helps the protagonist Inman on his Odyssean journey home by providing him with food, a map, and advice. Rabel (2003), 394. This impression is indebted to Thalmann (1998), 77–8. Thalmann (1998), 88.

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38. Patterson (1982) and Thalmann (1998), 88. 39. Finley (1978), 53. 40. T. E. Shaw (otherwise known as Lawrence of Arabia) commented on the issue of slavery in the Odyssey in a way that could apply equally aptly to Sommersby, particularly in terms of Odysseus/‘Jack’ being ahead of their own times: ‘the associate of menials, [Odysseus] makes himself their friend and defender by understanding. Was it a fellow-feeling, or did he forestall time in his view of slavery?’ (Shaw (1962), 154.) 41. This ties in further with the passage from the Odyssey (cited earlier: 21.212–16) where Odysseus promises not just possessions, a wife, and a home to Eumaeus, but also that he will be regarded as a friend and brother of Telemachus. 42. See Davis (2000) on the depiction of slaves in films. 43. Cave (1988), 13. 44. Aristotle, Poetics 1454b 20–1: ‘The use of tokens for the express purpose of proof . . . is a less artistic mode of recognition’. Translated by S. H. Butcher (1895). 45. The scene with the shirt that Laurel made for Jack (26 mins) corresponds to a very similar scene in Le Retour de Martin Guerre, where Bertrande had made breeches for her husband that were also the wrong size for him, and unceremoniously rejected by the original husband. 46. Aristotle, Poetics 1455a20. 47. Rabel (2003). 48. Rabel (2003), 393. 49. Rutherford (1986). 50. Nietzsche (1998). 51. Sommersby, 1hr 22mins. 52. The lost poem Telegony, part of the ancient epic cycle, told of Odysseus’ child by Circe, but this story is out of keeping with Homer, and is not a myth that was likely to have been credited by the Homeric bard. 53. Cypria, arg. 5. See West (2003), 71. 54. Pucci (1987), 88. 55. Horkheimer and Adorno (1972), 68. 56. Horkheimer and Adorno (1972), 60. 57. Horkheimer and Adorno (1972), 43. 58. Humbert (2001), 18, reads this differently. She argues that the fact that Orin knows how to get rid of the hornworms illustrates that he, like the worms, is evil: the hornworms endanger the tobacco crop, just as Orin endangers Laurel and ‘Jack’ ’s love. 59. Sommersby, 56 mins. 60. Guild (1997), 48.

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61. Goldhill (1991), 9–12 discusses the fact that Telemachus must accept Odysseus as his father without being given any proof (as the others are)—this is crucial to the patriarchal, patrilineal theme of the epic, related to the father–son ecomonic line of transmission within the oikos. 62. Guild (1997), 45. 63. Guild (1997), 48. 64. On the neglect of Penelope’s potential in recent film adaptations of the Odyssey see also Hall (forthcoming). 65. These two moments occur at 44 mins and 62 mins in the film. 66. Bloom (1973), 122. 67. Rabel (2003), 398. 68. Homer, Iliad 6.392–502. 69. The extract ‘Jack’ reads begins at Iliad 15.592–4, but then continues with an amalgamation of phrases from elsewhere in the Iliad: ‘Now the Trojans, like ravening lions, rushed upon the Greek ships, for the heart of Zeus was with them. And their spirits filled like sails in the morning, and the weariness of their legs departed, and their mighty shields grew light on their arms, and they knew that victory would be theirs.’ 70. I would like to thank Edith Hall, Nick Lowe, Bob Rabel and Patrice Rankine for their illuminating comments on this subject.

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Postscript Slavery, Abolition, Modernity, and the Past Ahuvia Kahane

The contributions to this volume focus on a particular aspect of the question of slavery: the part played by classical images, arguments, and models of ancient slavery in later eras, and specifically in the context of abolition. Binding ‘ancient’ and ‘slavery’ together compounds two large critical nodes (indeed more than two, but two will do for a start). First, there is the problem of ‘ancient’ and ‘modern’, of the past as such, of change and continuity, of parentage and progeny, of presence and absence, of memory and recurrence. This is the ontological and epistemological problem which, translated into particular historical terms, has, since the Querelles des Antiques et Modernes and before, defined antiquity as something that is other from ourselves and our experience, yet is also a part of us. Second, there is the problem of ‘slavery’, of freedom and responsibility. This is the ethical problem which defines our relationship to others and otherness. Historically speaking, it is an older problem which is as well attested in cultures that openly endorse slavery (as, for example, in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and elsewhere) as in those that oppose it. Within the space of these two problems one could map a large proportion of the historical and philosophical discourse of continuity and change, between the ‘ancient’ and the ‘modern’. Adding the term ‘abolition’ further complicates our inquiry. ‘Slavery’ assumes a state of existence. ‘Abolition’ suggests a movement (akin, perhaps to what Aristotle in Physics 4 calls kine¯sis) in the world

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of practice with a distinct ‘before’ and an ‘after’, a change or shift in polarity. ‘Abolition’, then, pushes closer to the surface problems in the phenomenology of history and what we could call ‘the structure of change’. Furthermore, the term ‘abolition’ gives greater urgency to the imperative of defining ethico-historical positions. Antiquity practised slavery widely. It commonly endorsed such practice, also as a matter of principle, and saw no contradiction between slavery and a reflective state of mind. Aristotle made known allowances for such bias in his writing, in passages discussed, for example, by Sara Monoson in her chapter. Modernity sees things differently. We sometimes claim to have abolished ‘antiquity’’s views of slavery. Even when in practice it has failed to oppose slavery (for surely, widespread forms of slavery are also attested today),1 Modernity seems to have brought human reality into the debate, to problematize it, and bring its discomforts and discontents to the surface. Yet we cannot eject Aristotle, or indeed far worse and less thoughtful proponents and beneficiaries of slavery, out of history—our history, that is. We can no more elide them from our own existence and consciousness than we can, say, disavow a hereditary or historical link to an ancestor who has taken part in acts we censure; not, at least, without disavowing a certain sense of responsibility, shame, a cognizance of history and indeed humanity.2 And, of course, it does not necessarily follow that the one who has ‘abolished’, and the one who has condemned, or the era or social structure surrounding the condemnation, even if their abolition is in earnest, are, simply by the act of condemnation themselves freed from ethical scrutiny or critique. William Wilberforce, so often mentioned in this volume, was without doubt the agent of true social, juridical, and legislative change in the process of abolition in England. Yet even his appreciation requires, and has at times received important, sometimes critical qualifications.3 These, then, are some of the very large problems which reside in the background to the chapters in this volume. In this postscript I want to try to elucidate some aspects of these problems by commenting on some of the positions of modernity in relation to slavery and the past. I shall do so by means of two contrasting historical/discursive examples. Both are familiar. The first concerns words by Henry David Thoreau about the abolitionist John Brown and his

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view of classical learning. The second has to do with remarks by Friedrich Engels on ancient slavery, with some further comments on antiquity and its place in modern consciousness, which I take from Marx’s Grundrisse. I want to take a look at the relationship between, on the one hand, the idea of a break, an ‘abolition’ of past practice, and, on the other, the idea of continued engagement, an ongoing recognition and battling-with, and perhaps a responsibility towards the vexed images of ancient slavery.4 My first example, then, concerns Henry David Thoreau, American transcendentalist, philosopher, and icon of civil disobedience, also discussed in Hall’s chapter above, p. 232. Thoreau was an important exponent in the debate over abolition. Among other things he wrote, in 1859, his famous ‘A Plea for Captain John Brown’.5 It’s an apologia, in the grand tradition (Socrates and Christ come to mind. Both could be read as references into Thoreau’s essay). It’s a speaking for, a defence that strives to turn the tables on the accusers and to speak of the defendant in the highest terms of praise. Such speaking, however, is usually a speaking for oneself. A ‘self-defence’ assumes the possession of a voice, and is in this sense an enfranchised act. In contrast, Thoreau is speaking for another. He takes responsibility for—and speaks on behalf of—John Brown, who did not at that point have a voice, and who, through his earlier actions spoke for— or gave voice to—yet others, who were enslaved, disenfranchised, and who thus did not themselves have a voice. An important deferral is here at work. We will presently return to this point. John Brown, also mentioned elsewhere in this volume,6 is the martyr of Harper’s Ferry. He is the man who in October of 1859 led the assault on a munitions depot in Virginia in the hope of arming an insurrection against slavery, and failed, gloriously.7 Brown was captured, tried by the state, found guilty, and hanged shortly afterwards (Fig. 14.1). He was also the man for whom the bells tolled, literally, in churches and assembly houses, long after his death. Some, for example Alfred Kazin, have argued that Brown’s actions, unsuccessful as they were, sparked off the American Civil War.8 Brown is an iconic figure. His actions call to the fore the relations between freedom and terror, between absolute silence and absolute voice, between different conceptions of states-of-nature and the

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Figure 14.1 The Last Moments of John Brown (1884), by Thomas Hovenden

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contractual value of social life and civilization. Brown’s actions also call into question the authority, indeed the oppressive authority and thus tyranny, of the past. They challenge the voice of ancestry, of the ‘Mother’ and the ‘Father’, which is embodied paradigmatically in classical culture. This, at least, is the image that emerges from the words of Thoreau, who, at the time of Brown’s death, was among the few to speak without equivocation on Brown’s behalf. In ‘A Plea for John Brown’ Thoreau says, most beautifully: He [John Brown] did not go to the college called Harvard, good old Alma Mater as she is. He was not fed on the pap that is there furnished. As he phrased it, ‘I know no more of grammar than one of your calves.’ But he went to the great university of the West, where he sedulously pursued the study of Liberty, for which he had early betrayed a fondness, and having taken many degrees, he finally commenced the public practice of Humanity in Kansas, as you all know. Such were his humanities and not any study of grammar. He would have left a Greek accent slanting the wrong way, and righted up a falling man.9

Brown, it seems, did not study in a ‘good old’ Mother university. He was as free of the knowledge of antiquity as a calf. There is something irresistible and hopeful in these words, and especially in Thoreau’s characterization of Brown’s moral stance and its final metaphor. The letters of the alphabet become the human body, as the human body turns into the letters of the alphabet, diacritics and all. These words seem to offer complete commitment to the fragility of living matter, which, in the image of the letters, underscores the body as a social being. Reading this metaphor we might recall Giorgio Agamben’s interpretation of Foucault and the idea of biopower: If one of the symptoms of modernity is the accelerated evolution of technologies that reduce being to bare life (i.e. technologies that increasingly control ‘life itself ’ and strip humanity of all aspects but life),10 then here, in Thoreau’s beautiful image, through the conflation of body and letter, we find affirmed the irrevocable unity of being and humanity, free from dehumanizing technological advance—free from strokes of pedantry and from the ‘grammar’ of oppression. Yet for the sake of a critique we should, perhaps, resist even the beauty of these words. We cannot reduce our understanding to a

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binary analysis. Remember, for example, that on the surface of Thoreau’s words we are told that Brown did study. He went to a new university, but this one seems to be a university of life, and perhaps in this sense a university much older than Harvard. We are told that he did pursue his studies sedulously and that he had indeed taken ‘many degrees’. The referents may be different, but these are the terms and discourse of learning. In this passage, grammar and the correct slanting of a Greek accent function as the emblems of old knowledge. This is ‘Greek Wisdom’ and its history. Antiquity and its ethical values are here embodied in the contemporary practice of ‘proper’, rhetorical use of words and good classical/Greek grammar, and overall, in the practice of philology and the proper science of antiquity, of which classical scholars in particular claim to be keepers. If Harvard is that ‘good old’ alma mater, the nurse, the parent, and if its students are the sons, and if offspring bear any relation to their progenitors, then clearly, it is the emphasis on the grammar and rhetoric of Greek Wisdom that marks the questionable ethical practice of the old world’s ‘educated’ class, the wealthy and the powerful. Proper grammar is the outward mark of the ethical practice of those who exercise control over the body of a man (and indeed, although unsaid, over the body of a woman, too). These are also the people who would let him fall. It is against this practice of educated provenance, against its embodiment of antiquity and its values, that Thoreau so movingly protests. The ethics of classical culture and the use of slavery in antiquity are not discussed at length by Thoreau in his plea for John Brown. But Thoreau’s vivid contrast between the educated progeny of famous almae matres and John Brown, who was not their progeny, between the care for the Greek accent and the neglect of accents, between a disregard for the fallen and care for the fallen man, between (adapting the Foucaldian/Agambenian terms) a biopolitical power and a consciousness that resists such power, there lies, even in its lack of detail, a forceful condemnation of antiquity, its values, and of the ethics of learning, and the ethics of studied homage to the past. Greek grammar here could easily be viewed as a technical appendix to the endorsement of slavery as a ‘natural’ state. The link can be made grotesquely explicit, for example, in the words of the Senator for South Carolina, John C. Calhoun (quoted by Hall in the Introduc-

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tion), who declared that when he could ‘find a Negro who knew the Greek syntax’ he would ‘believe that the Negro was a human being and should be treated as a man’.11 Sartre once wrote, ‘to treat a man like a dog, one must first recognize him as a man’.12 The implication of the Senator’s words, that a Negro should not be treated as a man, embodies, it seems to me, precisely ‘the concealed discomfort of the master’, as Sartre would say, that is, a recognition of ‘the human reality of his slaves . . . while at the same time refusing them the economic and political status which, in this period, defines human beings’. The perversity of the act of occlusion performed by Calhoun is not hard to see. But his mechanism of occlusion, in various permutations, reaches far more disconcertingly even to true champions of liberty. Let us not forget, for example, the admiration of the Enlightenment, and even of Rousseau, for Sparta, or for Thermopylae (on which see Hodkinson and Hall’s chapter, above, pp. 65–102). It is an admiration inseparable from the elision of that city’s privilege and its abuses.13 John Brown was born in Ohio, a workman, a leather tanner and sheep farmer. He was a simple man, not only to those who praised him, but to those who condemned him. The charge that Brown was a ‘misguided fanatic’ has been attributed even to Abraham Lincoln, the so-called Father of American Liberty.14 But should we fall into the trap of this idea of simple men and noble savages? And, more practically, was John Brown really a man who knew no more Greek grammar than a calf? The fact of the matter is that, in Thoreau’s plea at least, we do not hear Brown’s allegedly simple, ‘calf-like’ words directly. For, strictly speaking, this is not Brown’s apologia. It is, for the most part, Henry David Thoreau’s apology. It is Thoreau who takes it upon himself to speak, as an advocate, ‘on behalf ’ of the silent ‘tanner and sheep farmer’ John Brown (the ‘calf-like’ man—in this conflation of farmer and beast, master and slave, we see something of the scale of the problem).15 Let’s not forget, unlike John Brown, Thoreau himself did go to Harvard (between the years 1833 and 1837), where he did, in fact, study Greek and Latin, philosophy, and rhetoric (although he did, if we believe some versions, refuse to take, or at least to pay for his actual degree).16 Thoreau may not have liked to declare it, but he himself did, in fact, know the right way for a Greek accent to slant. Indeed, it is such learning that he has used

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to press his point, in perfect, rhetorical form. Arguably, but for Thoreau’s complicity in the discursive and pedagogical classical habitus of a contemporary American elite, but for his social status, his place in culture, and his knowledge of Greek grammar and rhetoric, he would not have been in a position to ‘plead’, rhetorically. Thoreau was, without doubt, striving for the right things, but in his own ‘practice of humanity’ he has effectively silenced John Brown, who may have thus become a ventriloquist’s dummy, a ‘mute subaltern’, the ethical voice of a resistance that can never be heard.17 The problem, however, is more radical. For, as we know, John Brown himself was not ignorant or mute as a calf. He did speak his own apologia, and, although he did not go to Harvard, he spoke in eloquent rhetoric. He was, to judge by his own powerful words, no beast. Here is a quote from his last speech in court, at his trial (2 Nov. 1859):18 I see a book kissed here which I suppose to be the Bible, or at least the New Testament. That teaches me that all things whatsoever I would that men should do to me, I should do even so to them. It teaches me, further, to ‘remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them’. I endeavored to act up to that instruction. I say, I am yet too young to understand that God is any respecter of persons. I believe that to have interfered as I have done as I have always freely admitted I have done in behalf of His despised poor, was not wrong, but right. Now, if it is deemed necessary that I should forfeit my life for the furtherance of the ends of justice, and mingle my blood further with the blood of my children and with the blood of millions in this slave country whose rights are disregarded by wicked, cruel, and unjust enactments, I submit; so let it be done!

These are deeply moving words. They are, we might say, words that echo the Socratic defence. Or, to take a different tack, they are the counselling and protective words of a shepherd (a pastor, in Latin), not the words of a calf (or a lamb). They are, indeed, if not in practice then at least in essence, a sermon. They are also, essentially, a scholar’s reading of the book. Harvard, of course, was above all a divinity school. Brown, we might say, is speaking precisely as a man of learning, a man who ‘had taken many degrees’. It seems to me, then, that here, in this pointed example of Brown and Thoreau, we have a good illustration of the paradoxes—quite

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distinct in themselves—of one form of movement, or ethical modality, of the modern in relation to the past. This modality—against the backdrop of antiquity—we could describe as one whose dialectic is instigated by a rupture, or an act of disjunction. That, we might say, is one of the meanings of Thoreau’s rebellious disdain for a diacritic’s ‘proper’ slant and indeed, for his reading of John Brown’s actions. The version of modernity which we have so far glimpsed begins its dialectic with the claim of breaking with history, of disjoining ourselves from the past and from our almae matres, of leaving behind the slanting of accents and the unspeakable, irresponsible burdens of culture, even as they are some of our most hallowed cultural possessions. To be sure, no characterization of history is ever so distinct, so reductively descriptive. I am not trying to generalize about all revolutionary action or to offer a concise definition of modernity. What I do wish to point out is that somehow, by striving to push slavery into the realm of the past, we may nevertheless be lured to speak of ‘abolition’ in terms that are other than historical, and thus risk, even in the most practical sense, a certain sense of occlusive satisfaction. Such satisfaction, whatever we make of its historico-philosophical consequences as regards the question of freedom in general, can also occlude our understanding of classical antiquity. There are many other strands to modernity and its approaches to the past. Consider, then, the contrast offered in F. Engels’ pamphlet Anti-Du¨hring, written in 1878 (about twenty years after Thoreau). In part II of the work, which considers political economy (chapter 4), Engels describes the growth of communities (in a manner comparable, perhaps, to Aristotle’s in the Politics), the organization of labour, and the emergence of slavery. He begins with the family, with the gradually increasing capacity of man’s labour-power ‘to produce more than was necessary for its mere maintenance’, which is the point when labour power acquires a value. Engels continues: But [initially] the community itself and the association to which it belonged yielded no available, superfluous labour forces. On the other hand, such forces were provided by war, and war was as old as the simultaneous existence alongside each other of several groups of communities. Up to that time one had not known what to do with prisoners of war, and had therefore simply killed them; at an even earlier period, eaten them. But at the

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stage of ‘economic situation’ which had now been attained, the prisoners acquired value; one therefore let them live and made use of their labour. Thus force, instead of controlling the economic situation, was on the contrary pressed into the service of the economic situation. Slavery had been invented.19

The problem of means of production, of divisions of labour, of the relations of agrarian societies and urban culture is, in this passage, and elsewhere, inherent to the exercise, and remains so even as we pass through its various historical stages, say in Marxist terms, from ‘savagery’, to ‘barbarism’, to ‘civilization’.20 Yet as Engels stresses, It was slavery that first made possible the division of labour between agriculture and industry on a considerable scale . . . Without slavery, no Greek state, no Greek art and science; without slavery, no Roman Empire. Without Hellenism and the Roman Empire as the base, also no modern Europe . . . It costs little to inveigh against slavery and the like in general terms, and to pour high moral wrath on such infamies . . . But that tells us not one word as to how these institutions arose, why they existed, and what role they have played in history.21

What I wish to draw from this passage, in particular, is the uncomfortable dependency of modern Europe on slavery and the responsibility of Modernity to do more than to ‘pour high moral wrath on such infamies’. In the face of deep continuity, in other words, it is not enough to declare a state of rupture. Putting aside the critique of Engels’ philosophy of history, I want to bring out some implications of his point for readings of antiquity. I shall do so with the aid of one more comment, in this case from the work of Karl Marx. Marx asks the following question: If, as both he and Engels thought, the early history of the West was marked by barbarism, and if slavery was a necessary condition for the formation of modern Europe, how do we dissociate ourselves from it? How, we might say, do we ‘abolish’ what is part of us? In the Grundrisse, that ‘rough draft’ of Das Kapital, Marx problematizes the issue provocatively by asking how it is that we derive pleasure from the literary remains of antiquity. For Marx literary production is never a matter of pure aesthetics, and never separate from the means of production and the social reality of its contexts. Marx considers the example of Homer,

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who embodies and represents problematic and oppressive practice. Marx, of course, was a great lover of Homeric poetry. He says, It is recognized that certain forms of art, e.g. the epic, can no longer be produced in their world epoch-making, classical stature . . . that is, that certain significant forms within the realm of the arts are possible only at an undeveloped [my emphasis] stage of artistic development.22

Marx explains that, despite such underdevelopment, we obtain aesthetic pleasure from Greek art (and epic) because it opens up a window to our past as a civilization. A man cannot become a child again, or he becomes childish. But does he not find joy in the child’s naivete´, and must he himself not strive to reproduce its truth at a higher stage? Does not the true character of each epoch come alive in the nature of its children? Why should not the historic childhood of humanity, its most beautiful unfolding, as a stage never to return, exercise an eternal charm? . . . The Greeks were normal children. The charm of their art for us is not in contradiction to the undeveloped stage of society on which it grew. (It) is the result, rather, and is inextricably bound up, rather, with the fact that the unripe social conditions under which it arose and could alone rise, can never return.’23

Here, then, is a different means of abolishing the past, even as we acknowledge our association with it and, indeed, confess to a pleasure in observing some of its remnants. If we keep to the metaphor of human development and the stages of life, it might seem that we are within the realm of orthodox historical progressionism.24 Yet it seems to me that Marx’s words here can, and should, be read in a slightly different way. In this passage, the movement of time is marked, quite conventionally, through the metaphor of human development and genealogy. Indeed, the arguments rest on the metaphor of human time and the growth of human cognition and ethical consciousness. Yet—this is the crucial point—the metaphor cannot be rationalized. We, in the present, are the adult progeny: we look upon our avatars, our progenitors, who are, in fact, childlike! It is we in the present, then, the offspring, who are held ‘responsible’. It is to us that the ethical imperative is visible, and only so from our ‘late’ perspective in the present. It is we in the present who can look straight to the childish

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behaviour of our parents/ancestors in the past. If we follow Marx, then, genealogically speaking, we ourselves are the children. Yet ethically speaking, we are the adults. Within the terms of the narrative as it is described by Marx, we have, as ‘children’, that ‘underdeveloped’ element within us. We are, however, children who have the ability to observe the childish naı¨vete´ of our ancestors, and thus of ourselves. It is only we, according to this reading, who can refract the image in the mirror, who effect, in our practice of reading the literary works of an undeveloped past, in our pleasure at the childlike failings of our ancestors, a kind of understanding or purgation. Marx’s complex image can help us understand both Engels’ position and likewise the words of Thoreau and Brown. In exposing the failure of a ‘timeline’ we can expose what one influential contemporary philosopher of history, Jacques Rancie`re, has recently called, ‘the illusion’ of a ‘mimetic’ relationship between history and the telling of history.25 Yet, at least according to Rancie`re, exposing the mimetic illusion is not a rejection of history. This action makes possible the re-acquisition of history as a regime of truth. It seems to me that even my telegraphic discussion here hints at a re-acquisition of this sort. The initial gesture of the passages from Engels and Marx is one of ‘continuity’. But, just as earlier, in our reading of Thoreau and Brown we had to qualify the gesture ‘rupture’, so now, we have qualified the opposite element. It is, I think, beyond doubt that all these modern figures are not in accord with the ancient view of slavery. In this critique I have certainly not been trying to suggest otherwise, nor indeed to undermine the idea of abolition. Quite the contrary: my underlying assumption is that this idea demands constant care. The ontological and ethical dichotomies of ‘present’ versus ‘past’—these terms are meaningful as opposites, but their relation demands active vigilance. One essential means of effecting such ongoing care and vigilance is by looking at the part played by classical images, arguments, and models in later eras.

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NOTES 1. As reports by UNESCO and other organizations attest. See e.g. recently Quirk (2009). 2. This can be radicalized. Giorgio Agamben (2002), 104–5 says, ‘If we experience shame in nudity it is because we cannot hide what we would like to remove from the field of vision; it is because the unrestrainable impulse to flee from one-self is confronted by an equally certain impossibility of evasion.’ Or as Levinas, the source of Agamben’s argument here, says, this shame is ‘precisely the fact of being chained to oneself, the radical impossibility of fleeting oneself to hide oneself from oneself, the intolerable presence of the self to itself. . . . What shame discovers is the Being that discovers itself.’ (Levinas (1987), 87, cited in Agamben (2002), 105). In the more immediate present, Derek Gregory, for example, mentions an Iraqi blogger by the name of ‘Riverbend’ who speaks of the shame she feels at the travesty of Abu Graib. Clearly this Iraqi woman cannot be thought of as accountable for the actions that occurred in that place. (See Gregory and Pred (2006), 235 n. 78.) 3. See for example British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility (2005) by Brycchan Carey, who is one of the contributors to this volume. The problem, endlessly discussed, can be polarized in the person of Thomas Jefferson, by virtue, on the one hand, of his pivotal position in American history and in the writing of the Declaration of Independence, and, on the other hand, his slave-owning practice in Monticello (Jefferson did not liberate any of his slaves in his lifetime), his relation to Sally Hemmings (with whom he fathered children), and to slaves and black Americans in general. 4. Joan Copjec (2002), 14, in the context of a recent discussion of Antigone and Athenian tragedy, its locality, and its relation to the present, phrases the question with exemplary precision: ‘How can we account for the temporal nomadism of figures from the past?’ She asks: ‘How is it possible that the drama of Antigone still concerns us?’ but the import is general, of course. 5. Reproduced in Redpath (2008), 17–42, also in Thoreau (1993), 31–48. 6. See above pp. 16; 38 n. 46; 358. 7. See recently, for example, Reynolds (2005). 8. Kazin (2003). 9. Thoreau (1993), 32.

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10. See Agamben (1996). The idea is expressed and developed in many other works by Agamben, including Homo Sacer (1998), Remnants of Auschwitz (2002), and State of Exception (2005). 11. Hall, in this volume, page 11, citing Crummell (1898), 10–11; see Gates (1987b), 21. 12. Sartre (2004), vol. 1, 111. F. Jameson, in his introduction to this edition (p. xiii), notes that the Critique has ‘not had the attention it deserved’ partly because of its unfinished state. But as Jameson adds, ‘It is a work of extraordinary resonance and influence, with the potential, even when one disagrees with it, to provoke discussion.’ 13. The problem of enlightenment, or humanism is both important and difficult. But we must beware of reductive conclusions. Rousseau, for example, was no friend of scholarly pedantry: ‘One can read these words carved in Marble at Thermopylae: Passer-by, tell them at Sparta that we died here to obey her holy laws. It is quite obvious that it was not the Academy of Inscriptions which wrote that’ (Rousseau (1979), 343). 14. Gow (1862), 13. 15. Between the calf and that other sacrificial animal, the lamb, lie important religious themes in John Brown’s narrative and in the narrative of abolition in general, especially concerning martyrdom and sacrifice. See e.g. Blight (2001). In a speech for the NAACP at Harper’s Ferry in 1932, W. E. B. Du Bois says (Du Bois (1997), 128): ‘John Brown broke the law; he killed human beings. . . . Those people who defended slavery had to execute John Brown although they knew that in killing him they were committing the greater crime. It is out of that human paradox that there comes crucifixion.’ An engraving on the front of Victor Hugo’s ‘Letter on John Brown’ (on which see further detail above, this volume, pp. 16 and n. 46), designed by Hugo and widely circulated and re-circulated in 1859, bears the caption Pro Christo—Sicut Christus, John Brown: see Drescher (1993). 16. See e.g. Wagenknecht (1981), 10. 17. This is essentially the problem of silence and ventriloquism (common in discussions of race, gender, post-colonial studies, etc.) raised already by Auerbach in Mimesis (1957), 29–35, for example, in relation to Tacitus’ eloquent Latin prose. See the silencing of the common soldier in the first book of the Annales: ‘Percennius does not speak his own language, he speaks Tacitean’ (p. 34). Discussion and further perspectives in J. Rancie`re (1994), 25–30. 18. Lawson (1915), 800. 19. Engels (1947), 215–16. See discussion in Sartre (2004), 157, where Sartre repeats Engel’s point: ‘It would be pointless for us to take up a moral

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20.

21. 22.

23. 24.

25.

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position—which would be entirely meaningless—and to condemn the ancient system of slavery.’ See e.g. Engels in Marx and Engels (1990), 139: ‘Savagery—the period in which the appropriation of natural products, ready for use, predominated; the things produced by man are, in the main, instruments that facilitate this appropriation; Barbarism—the period in which knowledge of cattle breeding and land cultivation is acquired, in which methods of increasing the yield of nature’s products through human activity are learnt; Civilization—the period in which knowledge of the further processing of nature’s products, of industry proper, and of art are acquired.’ Engels (1947), 215–16. Marx (1973), 87. See Eagleton (1976), 10, who says, summarizing Marx’s argument, ‘certain major artistic forms like the epic are only possible in an undeveloped society’. Marx (1973), 87. Marx’s words here, and generally progressionism within some versions of historical materialism, have come under heavy criticism, not the least by materialists and Marxist critics like Eagleton, Jameson, and others (who move forward by reading, for example, the Marx of the ‘Theses on Feuerbach’). See Jameson (1982), 18 and n. 17. Rancie`re (2007).

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Waxman, Percy (1931), The Black Napoleon: The Story of Toussaint L’Ouverture, New York. Welsh, F. (2000), A History of South Africa, London. Werblowsky, Raphael Jehudah Zwi (1952), Lucifer and Prometheus: A Study of Milton’s Satan, London. Wesley, Dorothy Porter (1971), Early Negro Writing, 1760–1837, Boston. West, Martin L. (2003, ed.), Greek Epic Fragments, Cambridge, Mass., and London. Wetmore, Kevin (2003), Black Dionysus: Greek Tragedy and African American Theatre, Jefferson, NC. Whipper, William (1828), ‘An Address Delivered in Wesley Church on the Evening of June 12, Before the Colored Reading Society of Philadelphia, For Mental Improvement’, in Wesley ((1971) ed.), 105–19. Whitby, Michael (1994), ‘Two Shadows: Images of Spartans and Helots’, in Hodkinson and Powell (eds.), 87–126. White, Peter (1978), ‘Amicitia and the Profession of Poetry in Early Imperial Rome’, Journal of Roman Studies 68: 74–92. —— (2007), ‘Friendship, Patronage and Horatian Sociopoetics’, in S. Harrison (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Horace, Cambridge, 195–206. Wiesen, D. S. (1976), ‘The Contribution of Antiquity to American Racial Thought’, in J. W. Eadie and M. Reinhold (eds.), Classical Traditions in Early America, Ann Arbor, 191–212. —— (1980), ‘Herodotus and the Modern Debate over Slavery’, The Ancient World 3, 3–16. Wilberforce, William (1789), Abolition Speech delivered in the House of Commons, 12 May 1789, Morning Star 78 (13 May), 323. Wilcox, Kirstin (1999), ‘The Body into Print: Marketing Phillis Wheatley’, American Literature 71.1, 1–29. Wilentz, Sean (2005), The Rise of American Democracy, New York. Wiles, David (1988), ‘Greek Theatre and the Legitimation of Slavery’, in L. Archer (ed.), Slavery and Other forms of Unfree Labour, London. Willard, Carla (1995), ‘Wheatley’s Turns of Praise: Heroic Entrapment and the Paradox of Revolution’, American Literature 67.2, 233–56. Williams, Bernard (1993), Shame and Necessity, Berkeley and Oxford. Williams Elliott, D. (2002), The Angel out of the House: Philanthropy and Gender in 19th-Century England, Charlottesville, Va., and London. Williams, Eric (1944), Capitalism and Slavery, Chapel Hill, NC. Willis, Nathaniel Parker (1850), The Poetical Works of N. P. Willis, London. Wilson, Ellen Gibson (1989), Thomas Clarkson: A Biography, London.

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Index* ‘A Description of a City Shower’, Jonathan Swift, 145 ‘A Description of the Morning’, Jonathan Swift, 145 A History of Negro Revolt, C. L. R. James, 379 n. 22 ‘A Southerner in the Peloponnesian War’, Basil Gildersleeve, 33–4, 325, 338–9, 341, 345–6, 390–1 ‘A Town Eclogue’, Jonathan Swift, 145 A Treatise of Human Nature, David Hume, 70 A Vindication of the Rights of Women, Mary Wollstonecraft, 229 Abolition in Britain 1834, 18, 128 persisting social evils following, 57 in America in 1865, 27 in Tennessee, 389–90 see also Abolitionism, abolitionists Abolitionism, abolitionists in America: classical models of resistance, 290–6 concept of Prometheus as victim, 233 concept of Roman African, 279, 281–2 and Fig. 10.1, 297–9 dissociation from class politics, 231 scholarship, 299–302 slogans, 293 and n. 54, 341–2 views of Basil Gildersleeve, 326–32 see also African Americans and individual persons

in Britain: arguments for, against, literary involvement, 21–4, 30–1, 128–9; see also Poetry as epiphany of philanthropic Britannia, Fig. 1.5 class profile, 27 and n. 82 early focus on slave trade, 85, 86 factors promoting support for, 18–20 ideological, not economic basis, 128 links with movement for parliamentary reform, 24, 31, 86, 185 and n. 15, 186 media used to support, 30, 125–9; see also Poetry popularity of artefacts in support of, 18 and Fig. 1.9 repeated parliamentary debates, 71–74, 86, 87, 113, 124 n. 82, 186 restriction to parliamentary movement, 187 scope of campaigns, 127–9 self-congratulatory aspects, 212 strength in Manchester, 62 n. 26 see also individual Acts of Parliament cultural imperialism, 146–7 presentational problems, 221–2 Christian approach, 6, 20, 67, 174–5 and n. 74, 185–6

* The index in general follows a word-by-word organisation. Where there are several or many items on similar subjects, e.g. Prometheus, references to these are preceded by references to the mythical figure, followed by references to the original classical source, and then by the various works listed alphabetically. Footnotes of a purely bibliographical kind have not been indexed (the full bibliography on pages 425–65 should be consulted), but substantive material occurring in the footnotes has been indexed, as have the illustrations.

468

Index

Abolitionism, abolitionists (cont.) debates on, approach comparing classical models, 75–6 dialogue between Enlightenment writers, 20, 29 factors precipitating American Civil War, 251–2 impact of visual arts, 23, 214–17; see also individual artists, subjects links with: campaigns for women’s rights, 19, 23, 87, 228–9 demand for other forms of social emancipation, 19, 21, 228–9 movement for parliamentary reform, 24, 31, 86–7, 185 and n. 15, 186 success due to modes of publicity, modern technologies, 62 n. 26 Abraham, slave in the Cape, case concerning, 122 n. 40 Abyssinia, Mussolini’s invasion of, 359–61 and n. 22 Acharnians, Aristophanes, 244 n. 40 Adams, John Quincy anti-slavery views, 293 plea for slaves rebelling on Amistad, 297 Admiranda historia, Guillaume Le Sueur, source for Le Retour de Martin Guerre, 388 Aeneid, Virgil, in curriculum at Institute for Coloured Youth, Philadelphia, 282 Aeschylus Agamemnon, allusion to slavery cited by Gildersleeve, 333 and n. 65 concept of tragedy, 369 Libation-Bearers, cited by Gildersleeve, 342 Prometheus Bound: early translations, editions, 32, 213–14 end of Napoleon paralleled with, 216–18 Flaxman’s illustrations for Porson’s edition, Fig. 8.4 inspiration for Hervey’s ‘Prometheus’, 237

Karl Marx’s reference to, 233, 235 Fig. 8.9 source for ‘Prometheus delivered’, 210, 214 Thoreau’s translation, 232 and nn. 65–6 Aesop, drawn on by Clarkson, 6 African Americans characteristics, scale of chattel slavery, 126–9 classical models of resistance for, 290–6 effective exclusion of women from Negro Academy, 164 impact of art created by, 28 and n. 86 literary, historical societies, 282–3 newspapers for, 283 self-representation through writings, 158 training in oratory, 284–90 see also Black peoples African Eclogues, Thomas Chatterton, 146 African Poems, Thomas Pringle, 123 Agamemnon, Aeschylus, allusion to slavery cited by Gildersleeve, 333 and n. 65 Alcaeus, cited by Gildersleeve, 340–1 Alcman drawn on by Clarkson, 6 surviving choral songs, 66 Alexander the Great, biography of, known to Toussaint L’Ouverture, 359 All Souls’ Rising, Madison Smartt Bell, 379 n. 18 America see United States of America America, Central, abolition of slavery in, 251 America, South, abolition of slavery in, 251 American Anti-Slavery Almanac, cover alluding to Prometheus myth, 233, 234 Fig. 8.8 American Civil War black people in Union army: men fighting alongside whites in America, 1–3 and n. 3, 328, 393 and n. 33

Index slaughter of surrendered in 1864, 328 Cato seen as model hero by southerners, 310–11 concepts of central issues, 336 and n. 75 Confederate reverses, 329 evocative substitute for Trojan War, 390 factors precipitating, 251–2 Gildersleeve’s recollection of Southern aims, 337–8 participation of Gildersleeves, 322–3 stance of Confederates on slavery, 32–3, 307–11 American Eclogues, George Gregory, 146 American Journal of Philology foundation, 321 Gildersleeve article on Pindar, 342 American Negro Academy, effective exclusion of women, 164 American Philological Association, Gildersleeve a president of, 321 Amiel, Jon, film-maker, 387–9 and n. 9; see also Le Retour de Martin Guerre Amistad (slave ship), rebellion on, 279, 281 Fig. 10.1, 296–8 Amphinomus, suitor in Odyssey, Orin compared with, 400–1 Amyot, Jacques, translation of Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, 67 ‘An Address to the People of the United States’, 1857 issue of Liberator, 313 n. 51 An American Iliad, Charles Roland, 390 An Essay on the Civil Society, Adam Ferguson, 87 An Essay on the nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections, Francis Hutcheson, 70 An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, Particularly the African, Thomas Clarkson, scope, influence, 5–6, 107 and n. 28, 130, 385

469

Anabasis, Xenophon, in curriculum at Institute for Coloured Youth, Philadelphia, 282 interpretation by Wright in antislavery writings, 25–6 Anderson, Alister C., Chaplain-in-Chief of Sons of Confederate Veterans, 310–11 Andreia, quality associated with Drimakos, Toussaint, 376 and n. 83 Andromache, Euripides concept of eleutherostomia in, 155–6, 158–9 signifiers of slave status 156, 159 Angola, slaves from, in Cape of Good Hope, 122 n. 31 Anti-abolitionist satires in 1808, Fig. 1.3 in depiction of William Wilberforce, Fig. 1.6 Anti-colonialism growth of, 88 interrelation with slavery, abolitionism, 62 Anti-Du¨hring, Friedrich Engels, 417–18 Anti-slavery debate see Abolition, Abolitionism, Slavery Anti-Slavery Society Pringle the secretary of, 122–3 Wendell Phillips a president of, 357 Antigone, Sophocles relation to the present, 421 n. 4 see also Creon Aponoia, use of term, 373–4 and n. 76 Appeal in Favour of That Class of Americans Called Africans, Lydia Maria Child, 299–300 Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, David Walker, 290–1, 299 Archaelogia Graeca, John Potter, on Athenian slavery, 76 Archer, William, review of Gildersleeve’s ‘The Creed of the Old South’, 336 Aristides, cited by John Fairbairn, 112

470

Index

Aristomenes, slave hero depiction in Pausanias’s Periegesis, 34, 355, 373–4 and nn. 73–4, 76 Toussaint compared with, 355, 373 and nn. 73–4 and 76, 378 Aristophanes Acharnians, 244 n. 40 Clouds, inspiration for The Possums, 23–4 drawn on by Clarkson, 6 parallels to episodes in Peloponnesian War, 350 n. 87 use by Benjamin Dann Walsh in anti-slavery writings, 25 Aristotle concepts of: hamartia, 370–1 and n. 63 justice, 272–3 slavery, 52–3, 54, 249–54, 302–6, 409 drawn on by Clarkson, 6 editions of: stimulus to proslavery supporters, 255–8, 266–7 Walford’s 1853, 257, 258, 266 factors stimulating interest in, 255 and n. 30 importance accorded to recognition tokens, 397 and n. 45 knowledge of, in ante-bellum America, 248–9, 253–4 and nn. 21 and 25 Metaphysics, cited by Van der Kemp, 114–15 Nicomachean Ethics, endorsement of slavery in, 409 Politics Book I: and pro-slavery thought in antebellum America, 312–18 cited in opposition to theory of natural rights, 256–9 cited in support of sociological case for slavery, 259–63 concept of justice in slavery ignored by pro-slavery Americans, 271–3 concept of ‘natural’ slavery, slaves in, 32–3, 251, 253, 265–71, 392

G. F. Holmes’s observations on, 268–71 impact of new editions on slavery debates, 255 on master/slave relationship, 251, 262–3 particular similarities between pro-slavery ideology and, 249–54, 304–5 and n. 99 resemblance of pro-slavery thought to argument of, 249–54 representation of slavery in, 66, 130 Arlington National Cemetery, Confederate Soldiers’ Memorial, 311 Arrest Memorable, Jean de Coras, source for Le Retour de Martin Guerre, 388 and n. 6 Art of African Americans, impact of, 28 and n. 86 role in arguments for, against slavery, 23, 214–17, 231 and Figs. 8.6–7 Artists’ Fund Society of Philadelphia, rejection of portrait of Cinque´, 298 Assassination, political, approach of classical thought, 49 Atalanta, mythical figure, cited by Du Bois, 222 Athenaeus, Deipnosophistae, depiction of slave hero Drimakos in, 34, 373 Athens: Its Rise and Fall, Edward Bulwer, views of slavery in, 184 Athens, classical comments on slavery in, by proslavery writers, 75–6, 78 concepts of democracy, 185 and n. 15 various views on slavery, 67, 184–5 see also Greece, ancient Atlantic Monthly, Gildersleeve’s articles for, 334–5, 338–9 Atlas, concept of, as prototype of slave, 32 Auden, W.H., Page-Barbour Lectures, 330–40

Index Babeuf, ‘Gracchus’, Conspiration des E´gaux, 84 Baltimore Mental Improvement Society, 285 ‘Bambo and Giffar; an African Eclogue’, Thomas Thistlethwaite, 146 Barbarism, Marx’s theory of, 418 and n. 21 Barbauld, Anna Letitia, abolitionist, 211–12 Barlow, Joel anti-slavery works, 226 paintings commission, exhibited, 244 n. 43 The Columbiad, 223 The Vision of Columbus, 223 Barmby, John Goodwyn inventor of term ‘communism’, 230 The Promethean; or Communist Apostle, 230 Barnard, John, Colonial Secretary in Cape Town, 104 Barnard, Lady Anne, on slavery in South Africa, 104 Barnardo, Thomas, philanthropic efforts, 187–8 Barrow, John, on classical preoccupations of visitors to Cape of Good Hope, 104–5 Bates, Katherine Lee, hostile reception of Phillis Wheatley, 153–4, 161 Beattie, James, influence in dialogue on slavery, 20 Behn, Aphra, Oroonoko, or the Royal Slave feminist, post-colonial response to, 39 n. 65 influence of Southerne’s translation, 21 and n. 63 Belgium, adaptations of Bulwer’s The Last Days of Pompeii, 187 Bell, James, ‘Liberty or Death’, 294 Bell, John, possible identification as ‘Detector’, 97 n. 28 Bell, Madison Smartt All Souls’ Rising, 379 n. 18 Master of the Crossroads, 379 n. 18 Bellamy Thomas, The Benevolent Planters, 21

471

Beloved, Toni Morrison, 222, 294 Benezet, Anthony, Some Historical Account of Guinea (1771), 5 Benger, Elizabeth abolitionist poetry, 210–11 The Heart and the Fancy, 210–11 Benjamin, Judah P., in Confederate cabinet, 323 Berlin, Isaiah, on freedom, 62 n. 21 Biassou, slave leader, 363 Bible, The concepts of political thought derived from, 42, 43 influence on abolitionist poetry, 125–6, 150 reference to, in American debates on slavery, 247 Bingham, Caleb, The Columbian Orator, 286 Black classicism accused of imitativeness, 159 and n. 18 contribution of William Scarborough, 163 exclusion of women, 164 in Classica Africana, 163 and n. 37 Phillis Wheatley claimed as originator of, 153–4 significance, 160 see also individual persons Black peoples admired in ancient Greece, 300–2 African, pro-slavery protagonists’ view of, 266–7 American, ante-bellum, access to education, 300–1 and concept of octoroons, 341–6 characteristics, scale of chattel slavery, 126–9 concepts of: as less than human, 414–15 as ordained to be slaves, 32–3, 249 250–1, 252, 253, 265–74, 391–2 educability, 158–60 and n. 21 education in classics, 153–4, 160–1, 161–5 and nn. 33 and 37 enslavement during Renaissance, representation in movies, 28

472

Index

Black peoples (cont.) intellectual tradition: Phillis Wheatley claimed as originator of, 153–4 racial prejudices, 161 reception of classics in, accusations of imitativeness, 159–61 justifications for enslavement, 10–11; see also Slavery, defence of men fighting alongside whites in America, 1 and n. 3, 328, 393 and n. 33 revelling criticised by Gildersleeve, 327–8 seaman sculpture on Nelson’s Column, 1 and n. 2 status in America immediately following Civil War, 389–90 tradition of literacy and learning in sixteenth century, 12 women: contribution of writings to antislavery movement, 21–3 women, relationships with white men, attitudes to, 9 see also African Americans Blackford, Charles Minor, 347 n. 24 Blackford, Susan Leigh, 347 n. 24 Blake, Daniel, Gildersleeve a tutor to children of, 325 Blake, William equation of end of Napoleon with Prometheus, 216–18 illustrations for Stedman’s Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Slaves of Surinam in Guiana, 214–16 and Fig. 8.3 poems relating to slavery, 21–3 Visions of the Daughters of Albion, 237–8 Bledsoe, A.T., co-founder of Southern Review, 349 n. 60 Blindness, significance in portrayal of Nydia, 199–201 Blumenbach, Johann, De generis humani varietate nativa, 236 Bodin, Jean, on disappearance of slavery, 6–7

Boers in South Africa factors determining view of slavery, 30, 108–12 and nn. 38–40 Great Trek, 119 and n. 83 Bonded labourers, form of slavery, 28 Bonnot, Gabriel see Mably Booth, William, foundation of Salvation Army, 187 Boothby, Brooke, reflections on helotage, 97 n. 23 Boston Censor, terms of advertisement for Wheatley’s work, 161 Botticelli, ‘The Birth of Venus’, parodied, 9–10 Bowden, Charles Topham, abolitionist, 74–5, 76, 100 n. 55 Bre´da, Toussaint see Toussaint L’Ouverture ‘Brief Mention’ (two), Gildersleeve, 321, 334–5, 342 Bristol Society of Merchant Venturers, neoclassicism, 7–8 and n. 25 Britain culture criticised: by Thomas Day, 131–3 by William Roscoe, 133–4 see also Abolition, Abolitionism, England, Parliament, Slave trade, Slavery Britannia, depiction of, as Athena, 14–15 and Fig. 1.5 British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility, Brycchan Carey. 421 n. 3 British Empire, contribution of slavery to growth of, 127–8 Brook, Peter, The Mahabharata, 388 Brooks, William Keith, The Law of Heredity, 345 Brown, John compared to Spartacus, 16 and n. 46 concept of, as sacrificial offering, 415– 16 and n. 15 iconic figure, 411–14, 420 Thoreau’s interest in, 35, 410–17, 420 Victor Hugo’s Letter on John Brown, 16 and n. 46, 422 n. 15

Index Brown, William Wells life, 1 and Fig. 1.1 view of American history, 1–3 Browne, William Hand co-founder of Southern Review, 332 and n. 60 colleague of Gildersleeve, 335 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, knowledge of Greek, 229 Brownson, Orestes, ties with John C, Calhoun, 275 n. 37 Bryce, James, Page-Barbour Lectures on democracy, 350 n. 86 Bulwer, Edward (Bulwer-Lytton) anti-slavery views, 94, 184–5, 225, 205 association of good character with elevated social class, 192–3 Athens: Its Rise and Fall, views of slavery in, 184 belief in inducing pity, terror, 200 concepts of Greece, Rome, distinguished, 195–5 Godolphin, 190 On the Want of Sympathy, 203 political activities, 185–7 Pausanias, representation of helotage in, 95, 184–5 significance of concepts of misanthropy, sociability, 187–8 The Last Days of Pompeii, 31, 181–205 Burkett, Randall, 161–2 and n. 29 Bushe, Gervase, pamphlet on colonial rights, 88 Buxton, Thomas Fowell abolitionist, 15 contact with Thomas Pringle, 112–13 Byron, George, Lord, equation of end of Napoleon with Prometheus, 218 Caesar, Julius Commentaries known to Toussaint L’Ouverture, 37 n. 7, 359 excerpts illustrating rhetorical theory, 286 Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, Aime´ Ce´saire, 222–3 Cairnes, J. E., The Slave Power, 351 n. 104 Calhoun, John C.

473

attitude to negro people, 10, 163, 414–15 defender of slavery, 10, 163, 253–4, 261 and n. 57, 304 knowledge of Aristotle, 248, 253, 258 posthumous Disquisition on Government, reviewed by Fitzhugh, 257–8 ties with Orestes Brownson, 275 n. 37 Callirhoe, Chariton, 201–2 Cambridge ‘Members Prizes’ for Latin composition, awarded to Thomas Clarkson, 4 Campbell, Thomas, comparison of Irish with helots, 89 Canaan, curse of, 266 Canal Street High School, New York, 282 Cannibals All!, George Fitzhugh, 248, 257 Cape of Good Hope agricultural development, 103–4 and n. 7 anti-slavery debate: contribution of William Wright, 122 n. 31 influence of classical ideas, 30, 103–20 in United States and, compared, 120 n. 2 Dutch provincial administration favourably compared to British, 115–16 establishment, basis of British rule, 103–4 factors precipitating Great Trek, 119 and n. 83 factors promoting migration to, 103–4 slavery in: anonymous tracts comparing classical slavery with, 105–7 and n. 22 slavery in, character of witnesses to, 104 clash between English, RomanDutch laws, 108–10 differences between Roman slavery and, 108–12 and nn. 31–2 economy founded on, 103–4 effect of introduction of jury system, 110

474

Index

Cape of Good Hope (cont.) ethnicity, 107–8 and nn. 31 and 45 final emancipation, 120 legislation restricting, abolishing, 120 persistence after legal abolition, 103, 117–20 predial character, 103 and nn. 4–5 status of children born of slave mother, 107 and n. 30, 120 n. 3 Philanthropic Society, aims, achievements, 120 and n. 3 Capitalism concept of the individual in, 64 n. 27 industrial, proslavery attacks on conditions in, 260–1 and n. 51 interdependence of slavery and, 57–8 and n. 24, 61; see also Engels, Marx paternalism incompatible with, 61–2 and n. 27 Carew, John Edward, sculptor of Nelson’s Column, 19 n. 2 Carey, Brycchan, British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility, 421 n. 3 Caribbean area abolition of slavery in, 251 centrality of slavery to consciousness of, 28 comparison of slavery in, with Spartan helotage, 29 Carlyle, Thomas, reference to helotage in Sartor Resartus, 95 Carrie`re, Jan-Claude, scriptwriter, for Sommersby, 388 for The Mahabharata, 388 Carthage, resistance to Rome, inspiration for abolitionists, 33, 290–1 Cartlege, Paul, on importance of ancient slavery in modern thought, 13–14 Cartoons see Political cartoons Casina, Plautus, drawn on by Clarkson, 6 Cato Joseph Cinque´ compared with, 297

seen as model hero by Confederate states, 310–11 slogans derived from, 293 and n. 54 speech after Catiline Conspiracy, 288–9 Caucasus, significance in questions of race, colour, 236–7 Centre for the Reception of Greece and Rome, Royal Holloway College, inaugural conference, 16 Ce´saire, Aime´, Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, 222–3 Cesarotti, Melchiorre, translation of Aeschylus into Italian, 214 Chapmen, anti-slavery ballads for, 129 Chariton, Callirhoe, 201–2 Charleston, South Carolina, Gildersleeve connections in, 322, 325–6 Charleston Mercury, significance of ‘Pliny’ articles, 29, 44 Chartism, Chartists equation of working class with American slaves, 228, 245 n. 48 Chartists, rise in Manchester, 62 n. 26 Chattel slavery see Slavery, chattel Chatterton, Thomas African Eclogues, 146, 147 influence of classical poetic forms on, 126 Child, Lydia Maria abolitionist writings, 21 and Fig. 1.10, 299–302 and n. 87 Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans, 299–300 Philothea; a Grecian Romance, 301–2 The Frugal Housewife, 302 view of northern way of life as embodying Greek democracy, 308 Child workers, present day, effectively slaves, 28 Christianity, Christian church approach to slavery, 6, 20–1, 67, 174–5 and n. 74, 185–6 concept of amelioration of slavery by, 107

Index early fathers’ concept of Prometheus, 213 Christophe, Henri, leader of southern Haiti, 363 Cicero African Americans’ admiration for, 284–5 availability in Harpers’ Classical Library, 281 on categories of slaves, drawn on by Clarkson, 6 and n. 6 cited by John Philip, 115–16 De Oratore, 286 echoes of, in Gettysburg address, 33 excerpts illustrating rhetorical theory, 286–7 Frederick Douglass compared to, 289 Orations, in curriculum at Institute for Coloured Youth, Philadelphia, 282 views on purchase of slaves from Britain, 3 Cicero, liberated slave named, in Martin Chuzzlewit, 7 and n. 24 Cincinnati Enquirer, condemnation of Margaret Garner, 295 Cinema, importance accorded to Homer’s Odyssey, 385–7 Cinque´, Joseph leader of rebellion on slave ship, 279, 281 Fig. 10.1, 296–9 portrait depicting as noble African, 279, 281 Fig. 10.1, 297 Circe, story of child fathered by Odysseus, 398 and n. 53 Civil Rights movement, significance of James’s The Black Jacobins, 34 Civil War see American Civil War Civilisation, Marx’s theory of, 418–19 and n. 21 Clarkson, Thomas, An Essay on the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, Particularly the African, scope, influence, 3–4, 5–6, 107 and n. 28, 130, 385 likeness in 1828, Fig. 1.2 Coleridge’s view of, 10 and n. 31

475

founder of the ‘London Committee’, 71 Thomas, influence, 19, 127 reference to Phillis Wheatley, 31 Class, social, among abolitionists, 27 and n. 82, 129 Classica Africana, description of black classicism, 192 and n. 37 Classicism, neoclassicism distinguished, 165 and n. 48 see also Classics Classics abolitionist poetry in verse forms drawn from, 138–49 arguments derived from, in debates on slavery, 1–36, 222 direct literary comparison of approach to ancient, modern slavery, 129–38 education in, 166 and n. 51, 228 education of black people in, 153–4, 160–1, 161–5 and nn. 33 and 37 enslaved Africans reading, writing about, 153–4 from slavery-based societies, 129–32 influence on: anti-slavery debate in Cape of Good Hope, 30, 103–20 eighteenth-century abolitionist poetry, 125–50 knowledge of, in ante-bellum America, 247–8 and n. 5, 254, 279–82 models found in, for analogy with slaves, 221–32 models of resistance drawn from, 290–6 reception in black tradition: factors affecting, 159–60 racial prejudices, 160–1, 161–5 and nn. 33 and 37 search in, for material to celebrate abolition, 231–2; see also individual authors, works study in America, foundation, 319; see also Gildersleeve Clouds, Aristophanes, inspiration for The Possums, 23–4

476

Index

Cold Mountain, Anthony Minghella, 393–4 Cold Mountain, Charles Frazier, 393 and n. 34 Cole, Thomas, ‘Prometheus Bound’, 231–3 and Fig. 8.6 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor abolitionism, 10 comment on paralleling of Prometheus and Don Juan, 220 poems relating to slavery, 21 view of Clarkson, 10 and n. 31 Colonialism classical parallels cited, 223 see also Anti-colonialism Colored Reading Society of Philadelphia, 283 Coloured American Magazine, 3, 285, 301 Colston, Elizabeth, marriage to Basil Gildersleeve, 323 Commentaries, Julius Caesar, known to Toussaint L’Ouverture, 37 n. 7, 359 Committee (London) for the Abolition of the Slave Trade, mobilisation of public opinion, 19 Commonwealth, English (1650s), references to Sparta during constitutional debates, 69 Communism, invention of term, 230 Comte, Auguste, drawn on, by pro-slavery supporters, 274 n. 22 Confederate Soldiers’ Memorial, Arlington, 311 Confederates, in American South anti-democratic cast of politics, 276 n. 57 appeal to Aristotle, 32 currency, 263 and n. 64, 264 Fig. 9.1(b) stance on slavery, 32 see also American Civil War Constantinople, slavery in, 106–7 Controversiae, Seneca (elder), 238–9 Cooper, Anna Julia Haywood, educationalist, 11–12

Coras, Jean de, Arrest Memorable, source for Le Retour de Martin Guerre, 388–9 and nn. 6–7 Cotton plantations, manual basis, 127 Court and City Magazine, publication of Chatterton’s African Eclogues, 145 Cowper, William, abolitionist poetry, 21, 125, 129 Cradock, Sir John, Governor of the Cape of Good Hope, 121 n. 9 Crassus, M., characteristics as slave owner, 106 Creon (in Sophocles’ Antigone), Tousaint L’Ouverture compared with, 368–9 Critiques of Dialectical Reason, Jean-Paul Sartre, 422 n. 12, 422–3 n. 19 Croly, David Herbert, authorship of anonymous tract on Miscegenation, 329 Cromwell, Oliver, constitutional policies criticised, 68 Crummell, Alexander concept of humanity of black people, 163–5 and n. 37 episcopalian pastor and Greek scholar, 11 and Fig. 1.4 Cudjoe, Captain, leader of Jamaican slave rebellion, 237 Cugoano, Ottobah, eighteenth century African writer in Britain, 12 Cullen, Counte´e preoccupation with racial strife, 222 references to Medea, 222 Cultural imperialism, characteristic of early abolitionists, 146–7 Cyclops encounter with Ulysses, cited as archetypal colonial encounter, 223 Ku Klux Klan equated with, 404 n. 9 Daniel, John Moncure editor of Richmond Examiner, 323, 332 and n. 59 Gildersleeve’s admiration for, 332 Dante, influence on Roscoe’s The Wrongs of Africa, 142

Index Daring, characteristic of both Aristomenes, Toussaint, 374 Dartmouth, Earl of, sponsor of Phillis Wheatley, 158 Davis, David Brion, studies on slavery, 13 Davis, Jefferson comparison to Cato, 309 criticisms of, in Richmond Examiner, 323 Day, Thomas abolitionist poetry, contrast of ancient slavery with modern slave trade, 125, 131–8 footnotes, 147 The Dying Negro, 131–3 De Bow’s Review, publication of George Fitzhugh’s pro-slavery reviews, 257–8 De generis humani varietate nativa, Johann Blumenbach, 236 De Oratore, Cicero, 286 De Zuid Afrikaan conservative approach, 111, 116–17 and nn. 72–74 evidence on anti-slavery debate from, 30, 104 Declaration of Independence, equality principle rejected by southern slave-owners, 252 ‘Declaration of Sentiments of the Colored Citizens of Boston on the Fugitive Slave Bill’, 1850 issue of Liberator, 313 n. 51 Deipnosophistae see Athenaeus Delaney, Martin R. abolitionist, 285 founder of Theban Literary Society, 285 Delenda est Abolitio, pro-slavery slogan, 293 and n. 54 Delenda est servitudo, abolitionist slogan, 293 and n. 54 Demerara, Harriet Martineau, 379 n. 13 Democracy in classical Athens, concepts of, 185 James Bryce’s Page-Barbour Lectures on, 350 n. 86

477

Demosthenes African Americans’ admiration for, 284 availability in Harpers’ Classical Library, 281 drawn on by Clarkson, 6 excerpts illustrating rhetorical theory, 286 Frederick Douglass compared to, 289 Demosthenian Shield, 285 De´pardieu, Gerald, 387 Deronda, Daniel, likened to Prometheus by George Eliot, 242 and n. 83 Dessalines, Jean-Jacques assassination, 363 contrasted with Toussaint L’Ouverture, 365–6 and n. 43, 367–8, 372 rule in Haiti, 363, 367 ‘Detector’ identification of, 97 n. 28 origins of term, 97 n. 28 pro-slavery letters in debate on slavery, 75–76 and n. 31, 79, 85 Dew, Thomas R. pro-slavery views, 304, 305–6 Review of the Debate in the Virginia Legislature on the Abolition of Slavery 1831–32, 253 and n. 25, 299–300 Dial, publication of Thoreau’s translation of Prometheus Bound, 232 and nn. 65–6 Dickens, Charles attack on slavery (in Martin Chuzzlewit), 7 Oliver Twist, association of good character with elevated social class, 193 Dickinson, Anna, abolitionist ridiculed by Gildersleeve, 331–2 rumoured authorship of tract on Miscegenation, 330 and n. 48 Diderot, Denis, praise of Spartacus, 16 Disquisition on Government, John C. Calhoun’s posthumous, reviewed by Fitzhugh, 257–8

478

Index

Don Juan (Don Giovanni), parallels with Prometheus, 219–20 Douglass, Frederick compared to Homer’s Nestor, 289–90 communication from George Fitzhugh, 263 and n. 65 echoes of Prometheus in works of, 233 founding father of slave narrative, 28 member of Baltimore Mental Improvement Society, 285 owner of mezzotint of Cinque´, 298 skill as orator, 287–90 ‘Slaveholder’s Sermon’, 288 ‘What to a Slave is the Fourth of July?’, 289–90 Douglass, Sarah Mapps articles on classical models of resistance, 292 founder of Philadelphia Female Literary Association, 284 Drennan, William comparison of Irish with helots, 89–90 Letters of an Irish Helot, 89 Drimakos comparison with Toussaint L’Ouverture, 34, 358, 373, 375–7 and nn. 85–6, 378 slave rebellion led by, 34, 358, 373–6 and nn. 84–5 Dryden, John, popularity of translation of Plutarch, 281 Du Bois, W. E. B. black campaigner, 12 on education of black people, 160 and n. 21 on John Brown, 422 n. 15 ‘On the Training of Black Men’, 160 and n. 21 The Quest for the Silver Fleece, 222 The Souls of Black Folk, on myth of Atalanta, 222 Dumouriez, Charles-Franc¸ois du Pe´rier, comparison of Polish serfs with helots, 92–3 Dutch see Boers Eastern Cape (in South Africa), slavery in, 112 and n. 51

Eclogues, classical, influence on abolitionist poetry, 125, 146–8 Edinburgh Monthly Magazine (later Blackwood’s Magazine), Thomas Pringle an editor of, 112 Edwards, Bryan defence of slave-owning class, 79–80 and n. 42 History Civil and Commercial of the British Colonies in the West Indies (1793), influence, 9–10, 79–80 and n. 42 Egypt, ancient, criticised by John Philip, 117 Electoral reform movement, links with pressure for abolition of slavery, 19 Eleutherostomia concept of, in Euripides’ Andromache, 154–6, 158–9 Phillis Wheatley’s claim to, 189 Eliot, George, characterisation of Daniel Deronda, 242 and n. 83 Eliot, T. S., Page-Barbour Lectures, 339–40 Ellison, Ralph Waldo, Invisible Man, 28, 222–3, 390 ‘Emancipation’, Liberator (1862), 313 n. 54 Empire, ideologies of, perpetuated by abolitionists, 143–4 Engels, Friedrich Anti-Du¨hring, 417–18 on role of ancient slavery in modern world, 35, 420, 423 n. 26 England influence of Magna Carta on view of slavery, 30 response to revolution in Haiti, 356 see also Britain English, proclaimed official language in Cape of Good Hope, 104 English Civil War, emergence of natural rights theory in, 275 n. 30 English law clash between Roman-Dutch law and, 108–12 slavery not known to, 43–4 and n. 2

Index Enlightenment admiration for Sparta, Thermopylae, 415 and n. 13 concepts of: the individual, 64 n. 27 Prometheus, 213 slavery as contra naturam, 107 dialogue on slavery, 20, 28–9 in Britain, influence of Mably on views on Sparta, 83 in France, views on Sparta, 83 in Scotland, scrutiny of position of women, 88 Enna, statue of Eunus in, 245 n. 51 Epic poetry, classical, influence on abolitionist poetry, 125, 129, 138–44, 149 Wheatley’s manipulation of genre, 165 Epictetus drawn on by Clarkson, 6 known to Toussaint L’Ouverture, 358–9 on slavery, slave owners, 137 Epyllion, Wheatley’s manipulation of genre, 165 Equiano, Olaudah, eighteenth-century African writer in Britain, 12 Equivocation, concepts of, 169 and n. 53 Esprit de lois, Montesquieu, influence, 21, 52 Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves in the British Sugar Colonies, James Ramsay, 139, 148 Esther (character in Sommersby), reconfiguring of Eurycleia, 387, 389, 392–3, 395 Ethiopia, Ethiopians abolition of slavery, 1936, 27–8 admired by Herodotus, 300 Mussolini’s invasion of, 359–61 and n. 22 Eumaeus, importance in interpretation of ancient slavery, 385 and n. 1 reconfigured in Sommersby, 387–8, 389, 392, 395–6

479

Eunus bronze statute of, 245 n. 51 slave revolt led by, 228 and n. 51 Euripides Andromache, concept of eleutherostomia in, 154–6, 158–9 Ion, 224, 225 Fig. 8.5 Medea, 222, 295 Telephus, 244 n. 40 Eurycleia, reconfigured in Sommersby, 387–8, 389, 392, 395–6 Everett, Percival, contribution to slave narrative, 28 Every Man’s Magazine, publication of Thistlethewaite’s ‘Bambo and Giffar’, 146 Eye management, importance for orator, 287 Ezekiel, Moses, designer of Confederate Soldiers’ Memorial, 310 Factory reform movement, links with pressure for abolition of slavery, 18–19 Fairbairn, John association with Thomas Pringle, 112–13 classical references in leaders written by, 111 and n. 46 support for missionaries of London Missionary Society, 114 Female Minervian Association, 282 Feminism response to Oroonoko, 39 n. 65 see also Women’s rights Fe´nelon, Franc¸ois, Les Aventures de Te´le´maque, 223 Ferguson, Adam, An Essay on the Civil Society, 87 Ferris, William H., on intellectual capacity of black men, 164 Filmer, Robert, Observations on Aristotle’s Politiques, 275 n. 30 Finley, Moses, on ancient slavery, 391, 393, 396 First Lessons in Greek, William Scarborough, 163

480

Index

Fitzhugh, George Cannibals All!, 248, 257 communication with Frederick Douglass, 263 and n. 65 knowledge of Aristotle, 248, 254 pro-slavery views, 248, 257–8, 262, 263, 269, 303 review of Walford edition of Aristotle, Calhoun’s Disquisition on Government, 257–9 Sociology for the South, 248 Flaxman, John association with Josiah Wedgwood, 216 conception of ‘Liberty’, 18 and Fig. 1.8 illustrations for Porson’s edition of Aeschylus, 216, 218 Fig. 8.4 Foreign Slave Trade Abolition Act see Slave Trade Abolition Act Forrest, Nathan Bedford, commander at slaughter of black Union troops, 328 Fort Pillow, Tennessee, slaughter of surrendered black Union soldiers at, 328 Foucault, Michel, on repercussions of liberation, 57 and n. 22 Fragments of a Tour through the Universe, James Grahame, 211 Franc de Pompignon, Marquis J. J. Le, translation of Aeschylus, 213 France abolition debate in, 18, 21 adaptations of Bulwer’s The Last Days of Pompeii, 187 response to revolution in Haiti, 355–6, 362 see also French Revolution Francis, Philip abolitionist, 81 and n. 44, 85, 93 comparison of West Indian slavery with helotage, 81–2 and n. 53, 91 parliamentary motion for regulation of slaves in the West Indies, 74, 81, 83 Franc¸ois, Jean, slave leader, 363 Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus, Mary Shelley, anti-slavery resonances in, 21–3, 229

Franklin, Benjamin, alleged adherent of natural rights theory, 257–8 Frazier, Charles, Cold Mountain, 393–4 and n. 34 Fredericksburg, Battle of, 349 n. 56 Freedom in the Making of Western Culture, Orlando Patterson, importance, 13 Freedom, human right to concepts of, as fundamental human characteristic, 52–5 and n. 17 general, individual distinguished, 44 and n. 3 in public, private spheres distinguished, 54 and nn. 18–19, 60 and n. 25 slow progress towards universal, 57 ‘Freedom’s Apostles’, Anon, 236 French Revolution Gildersleeve’s view of repercussions, 341 impact on campaigns for abolition of slave trade, 18, 71, 75, 77, 86, 128 origins of red cap of ‘liberty’, 18 source for C. L. R. James, 362–3 Toussaint L’Ouveture’s admiration for ideals of, 366–7 and n. 46, 371, 375, 377, 378 Fugitive Slave Act 1850 (American), 252, 293 Fuller, Margaret, contribution to antislavery movement, 21 Furies, identified with perpetuators of slavery, 212 Fuseli, Henry, concept of Prometheus, 213 Gallowy, S. P., perhaps tutor of Phillis Wheatley, 161–2 Gandhi, comparison of Toussaint L’Ouverture with, 381–2 n. 46 Garner, Margaret children’s father, 314 n. 60 compared with classical models of resistance, 294–6 and n. 61 portrait, photographs of, 295, 296 Fig. 10.3, 314 n. 65 Garrick, David, interest in Greek tragedy, 213–14

Index Garrison, William commendation of Philadelphic Female Literary Association, 284 see also Liberator Gay, John experiments with ‘urban pastoral’, 146 Trivia: Or, the Art of Walking the Streets of London, 145 Georgics, Virgil, reference to, 119 and n. 82 Gettysburg address classical echoes, 33 ridiculed by Gildersleeve, 331 significance, 33 Gettysburg, Battle of, repercussions, 329 Ghana, C. L. R. James’s interest in revolution, 364 and n. 34, 378 Gibbon, Edward, on slavery, 105, 135 Gildersleeve, Basil Lanneau admiration for John Moncure Daniel, 332 ancient Greece cited: as comparison with American Civil War, 340 and n. 87 in justification of secession from Union, 334, 339 approach to slavery, race and abolition: classical allusions in presentation of, 333–4, 338–9, 339–46 described, evaluated, 26–7, 33–4, 319–46 articles for Atlantic Monthly, 334–5, 338–9 attracted by: favouring of male ancestors in hereditary reversion, 345 and n. 105 octoroon theory of A. W. Verrall, 342–4 authority on Pindar, 26–27, 333–5, 338–9 background, 319–22 concepts of: miscegenation, 328–31, 339–46 Federal war aims, 330–2

481 essays, editorials: ‘A Southerner in the Peloponnesian War’, 33–4, 325, 338–9, 341, 345–6, 390–1 ‘Brief Mention’ (two), 321, 334–5, 342 Essays and Studies, 335 evidence of views on slavery derived from, 327–46 Hellas and Hesperia or The Vitality of Greek Studies in America, 341 ‘Limits of Culture’, 332–3 ‘Miscegenation’, 329, 332 ‘My Sixty Days in Greece’, 334–5 ‘Sambo the Ass’, 328 ‘Slaves and Mechanics’, 326 ‘Song of the Italians’, 332 ‘The Creed of the Old South’, 33–4, 332–7 and n. 58, 338, 345 ‘The Seventh Nemean Revisited’, 343 and n. 100 founding hero of American classical studies, 319–22 and Fig. 11.1, 333, 345–6 interest in Mexico, Maximilian, 332, 342 justification of slaughter of surrendered black Union troops, 328 Latin grammar of Lodge and, 319 marriage, 323 Page-Barbour Lectures, 339–40, 345 passionate Southerner, 319–406 photographed in 1890s, 320 Fig. 11.1 pride in editorials, 332–3 responses to: anonymous tract on Miscegenation, 330–2 and n. 48 Gettysburg address, 331–2 review of Ridgeway’s Origin of Tragedy, 343 scorn for all things ‘Yankee’, 324, 326, 327–8 service, wounding, in Confederate army, 322–3 teaching of Latin, Greek as defence of Southern values, 333, 341–2 unease with, 322

482

Index

Gildersleeve, Basil Lanneau (cont.) view of northern industrialization, 308 work as editor of American Journal of Philology, 321, 381–90 Gildersleeve, Benjamin, 322 Gine´s de Sepu´lveda, Juan, use of Aristotle to justify Spanish conquests, 32 ‘Gizzard-foot’, origin of term, 408 Glaucus portrayal of love of Ione and, 201 relationship with Nydia, 189–90 God Bless Abraham Lincoln, burlesque on Federal war aims, 372 and n. 56 Godolphin, Edward Bulwer, 190 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, Prometheus, 213, 216–18, 221 Golden fleece, quest for, cited by Du Bois, 222 Goldsmith, Oliver, History of Greece, cited by Walker, 102 n. 84 Gosson, Stephen, The Schools of Abuse, 68 Gothic revival movement, obsession with slavery, 228–9 Grahame (Graham), James abolitionist poetry, 209–10, 212, 221, 243 n. 1 background, Christian faith, 220 Fragments of a Tour through the Universe, 211 ‘Prometheus delivered’, characterisation in, 221 ‘The Sabbath’, 221 Grainger, James, The Sugar Cane, 144 Grant, Ulysses S., support of Radical Reconstruction, 390 Grayson, William comment on Calhoun, 254 pro-slavery views, 304 Great Trek, factors precipitating, 119 and n. 83 ‘Greatest happiness for the greatest number’, concept of, 70 Greece, ancient admiration for black peoples, 300–1

cited in justification of secession from Union, 334 criticised by John Philip, 117 idealized by southerners, 307 knowledge of: in American education, 281 in American slavery debates, 279–311 oratory, emulated by African Americans, 284–90 portrayal of Rome by Bulwer distinguished, 195–6 relationships of slaves in, 392–3 slavery in: concept of, as basis of society, 6–10, 53–4 and n. 16, 133–4, 250–1 condemned by modern abolitionists, 131 opposition to, and Aristotle’s concept of justice, 272–3 Greece, modern, interest in Aristotle stimulated by independence movement, 275 n. 30 Greek language courses in, at William Watkins Academy for Negro Youth, 282 Gildersleeve’s belief in teaching of, 333, 341–2 importance in debate on slavery, 10–12 Greek mythology, search in, for material to celebrate abolition, 209–42; see also individual figures Greek Revival, expressions of, in southern states, 306–9 Greek tragedy, inspiration of pity, terror in, 199 Gregory, George, American Eclogues, 146–7 Gregory, James M., admiration for Frederick Douglass, 289 Grimke´ sisters, abolitionists, misled by anonymous tract on Miscegenation, 329 Grotius, Hugo, concept of slavery as based in contract, 63 n. 9

Index Guerre, Bertrande, role in case of Martin Guerre, 388–9 and n. 7, 400, 401 Guerre, Martin, true story of, 388–9 and nn. 6–7 see also Le Retour de Martin Guerre Haiti civil war, instability, 363 effects of revolution on mentality of population, 367 enforcement of cheap labour in, 367–8 occupation by US, 363 and n. 30 responses to revolution in, 356–9 slave rebellion leading to independence, 34, 127, 355–6, 362–5 see also Toussaint L’Ouverture Halhed, Nathaniel Brassy, use of pseudonym ‘Detector’, 97 n. 28 Ham (biblical figure), significance of dark colour in slavery debates, 266 Hamartia, use of term, 370–1 and nn. 63–5 Hamilton, Alexander, classical background for opposition to slavery, 23, 27 Hannibal, as model of resistance for black slaves, 290–1 and n. 51 Harper, William, on Aristotle, 254 Harpers’ Classical Library, 281 Harrington, James Prerogative of Popular Government, 69 Sparta cited in support of republicanism, 69–70 The Commonwealth of Oceana, 69–70 Harris, Wilson, The Mask of the Beggar, 222–3 Hay, Ebenezer Storey (Storry), ‘Prometheus’, 242 Hellas and Hesperia or The Vitality of Greek Studies in America, Gildersleeve’s Page-Barbour Lecture, 340–1

483

Helme, Elizabeth, The Farmer of Inglewood Forest, 356 Helotage, helots, of Sparta in arguments for, against slavery, 29–30, 36, 78–96 comparison with: Irish situation, 89–91, 93 situation in Leith, 88 decline as reference point for abolitionists, 87 defined, 95 and n. 83 perceptions of, in eighteenth century, 69–71, 87–8, 94–5 Plutarch’s views on, 23, 66–7 representation of: by Plato, 66 effect of bourgeois ideology, 70 in abolitionist debates, 71–85, 87, 94–6, 184–5, 131–4 in classical times, 65–6 in condemnatory terms, 94–6 in early modern thought, 68–71, 88–94 Hemmings, Sally, relation to Thomas Jefferson, 421 n. 3 Hemmy, Giesbert on admissibility of evidence from slaves, 109–10 thesis on ‘pagans’ in Sourth Africa, 116 Henry, Patrick, Margaret Garner compared to, 294 Hercules, mythical figure, represented as liberator of slaves, 210 and Fig. 8.1, 227 Herder, Johann Gottfried von concept of Prometheus, 213 views on Sparta, 70 Heredity, theory of favouring of male ancestors in, 345 and n. 105 Hermione (Euripides’ character), signifiers of free status, 155, 158 Herodotus admiration for black peoples, 300 cited in arguments for, against slavery, 33 drawn on by Clarkson, 6

484

Index

Herodotus (cont.) known to Toussaint L’Ouverture, 37 n. 7, 359 Herschel, Sir John, comparison of slavery in Rome and Cape of Good Hope, 105 Hervey, Thomas Kibble, ‘Prometheus’, 237 Hesiod, representation of Prometheus, 213 Hierarchy, southern linkage of liberty with inequality and, 305 Higginson, Thomas Wentworth, on Jamaican uprising of 1730s, 237 Hill, Octavia, philanthropic efforts, 187–188 Histoire de Deux Indes, Abbe´ Raynal, 16–18, 355–6, 361 Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti, Marcus Rainsford, 355–6 Historical societies, for African Americans, 281–3 History Civil and Commercial of the British Colonies in the West Indies, Bryan Edwards, influence, 8–9, 79–80 and n. 42 History of Greece, Oliver Goldsmith, cited by Walker, 102 n. 84 History of the Russian Revolution, Trotsky, influence on C. L. R. James, 359 Hobbes, Thomas concept of slavery as based in contract, 51–52 and nn. 9–10, 54 theory of monarchy, 54 treatment of slavery in translation of Odyssey, 60–1 n. 10 Hollywood, classical resonances in representation of slavery, 28, 34–5 Holmes, George Frederick, pro-slavery views, 261, 248–54, 304 Homer Frederick Douglass compared to Nestor of, 289 influence on abolitionist poetry, 125

Karl Marx’s love of, 418–19 on categories of slaves, drawn on by Clarkson, 6 on effect of slavery on free man, 108 Wheatley’s admiration for, 170 and n. 56 see also Odyssey Hopkins, Pauline, Coloured American Magazine, 3 Horace availability in Harpers’ Classical Library, 281 cited by De Zuid Afrikaan in comment on Lodewyk case, 111 known to Wheatley, 166, 170 model for Pringle, 113 and n. 52 Odes, in curriculum at Institute for Coloured Youth, Philadelphia, 282 socio-economic status, 172 Hudson, Samuel, treatise on slavery, 105 Hugo, Victor, Letter on John Brown, 16 and n. 46, 422 n. 15 Human rights concept of slavery as offence against, 43–4, 55–6 J. S. Mill the precursor of movement for maintenance, 53–4 of individual, general, political distinguished, 44 and n. 3, 60–2 and n. 25 see also Civil Rights Humboldt, Wilhelm von, concept of contribution of slavery to Greek civilisation, 7 and n. 19 Hume, David, A Treatise of Human Nature, 70 Huntingdon, Selina Hastings, Countess of, sponsor of Phillis Wheatley, 158, 171 Hutcheson, Francis An Essay on the nature and Conduct of the Passions and Affections, 70 influence in dialogue on slavery, 20 Iliad, significance of reference to, in Sommersby, 402

Index Illustrations of Political Economy, Harriet Martineau, 379 n. 13 Imitation, black classicists accused of, 159–60 Immediatism, in American ante-bellum debate on slavery, 247 and n. 1 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Harriet Jacobs, 240 India, slaves from, in Cape of Good Hope, 122 n. 31 Individual, the, concepts of in capitalism, 63 n. 27 in Enlightenment, 64 n. 27 rights in general, political spheres distinguished, 44 and n. 3, 60–2 and n. 25 Indonesia, slaves from, in Cape of Good Hope, 122 n. 31 Industrialization, Industrial Revolution conditions compared to helotage, 94 and n. 80 dependence on slavery questioned, 127 and n. 2 stimulation of abolitionist movement by, 18 Inequality, southern linkage of liberty with hierarchy and, 305 Institute for Colored Youth, Philadelphia, 282 International African Friends of Abyssinia, C. L. R. James a chairman of, 379–80 n. 22 International African Service Bureau, C. L. R. James a member of, 379–80 n. 22 Invisible Man, Ralph Waldo Ellison, 28, 222–3, 390 Ion, Euripides, 224, 225 Fig. 8.5 Ireland, Irish question links with pressure for abolition of slavery, 19, 24–5 peasants compared with: helots, 30, 88–91, 94 serfs in Ottoman empire, 90 West Indian slaves, 90 ‘Jack’ (character in Sommersby), Odyssean echoes, 393–404 Jackson, James, pro-slavery views, 303

485

Jacobs, Harriet escaped slave, 327 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, 240 servant to Nathaniel Parker Willis, 240, 241 Fig. 8.10 Jacoby, Felix, on portrayal of slaves in Odyssey, 391 Jamaica, slave rebellion in, 237 James, C. L. R. A History of Negro Revolt, 379–80 n. 22 accused of downplaying role of masses, 364 and n. 36 anti-imperialism, 361–62 career, 379–380 concepts of: Athenian polis, 369 hamartia, 370–1 and nn. 63–5 successful revolution, 361 tragedy, 368–78 criticized for absence of philosophy of language, 382 n. 57 interests: in decolonization in Africa, 364 and n. 34 in qualities of leadership, 364–5 and n. 34 likeness, 354 Fig. 12.1 Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: The Story of Herman Melville and the World we Live In, 379–380 n. 22 Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution, 364 and n. 34, 378 Pan-Africanism, 359–61 and n. 22 theory of revolution, 366–8 and n. 45 World Revolution, 379–80 n. 22 see also The Black Jacobins Jason, slave in the Cape, case concerning, 122 n. 39 Jeannot, slave leader, 363 Jefferson, Thomas alleged adherent of natural rights theory, 258 concept of American slavery as less cruel than in antiquity, 299–300 and n. 78 founding father of America, 252, 308

486

Index

Jefferson, Thomas (cont.) hostile reception of Phillis Wheatley, 153–4, 161 Notes from Virginia, 300 paradoxical relationship to slavery, 422 n. 3 relation to Sally Hemmings, 422 n. 3 Jernigan, Kenneth, 201 Jocelyn, Nathaniel, portrait of Joseph Cinque´, 281 and Fig. 10.1 John Hopkins University, inauguration of classics program, 320 ‘Johnny Newcome in love in the West Indies’, anti-abolitionist satire, 8 Fig. 1.3 Johnson, Samuel, attack on slavery in America, 132 Jones, Charles Ernest anti-slavery stance, 226–8 association with Marx and Engels, 226 educational background, 227–8 The New World, 226–7 Jones, John Earl, portrayal of judge in Sommersby, 389 Jones, William Todd, comparison of Irish with helots, 89–90 Joseph (character in Sommersby), reconfiguring of Eumaeus, 387–8, 389, 393, 395–6 Jury system, effect of introduction in Cape of Good Hope, 110 Justinian cited by John Philip, 123 n. 64 cited in debate on abolition of slavery in St Martin, 118 concept of slavery as contra naturam, 105 Juvenal, cited by De Zuid Afrikaan in comment on Lodewyk case, 111 Kere´nyi, Carl, Prometheus: das griechische Mythologem von der menschliche Existenz, Satanic associations of Prometheus in, 219 Khoi-San people, admired by John Philip, 113, 116

Kincaid, Alexander, The History of Edinburgh, 88 Kritias, representation of slavery, 66–7 Krypteia, cited in comparison of helotage and slavery, 85 and n. 54 Ku Klux Klan equated with Cyclops, 404 n. 9 linked to Trojans, 402–3 portrayal in Sommersby, 389 and n. 9, 396 La Noue, Bazile, 322 Labour (Labor), in America freedom from, an aspiration of southerners, 305 valued as virtue by northern Protestants, 305 Lamartine, Alphonse, Toussaint L’Ouverture, Spartacus theme in, 355–6 Laplace, Antoine de, influential translation of Behn’s Orinooko, 21 Larcius Macedo, murder of application of Roman law, 46–9 Pliny’s response to, 47–9, 55–6 Latin language courses in, at William Watkins Academy for Negro Youth, 282 Gildersleeve’s belief in teaching of, as defence of Southern values, 333 importance in debate on slavery, 10–12 Laubscher, Coenraad, case concerning treatment of slave Lodewyk, 110 Laveaux, E´tienne, likening of Toussaint L’Ouverture to Spartacus, 355 Lawrence of Arabia (T. E. Shaw), comment on slavery in Odyssey, 406 n. 40 Le Retour de Martin Guerre, story line of Odysseus and, compared, 385–404 Le Retour de Martin Guerre (film) based on true story, 385–9

Index engagement with socio-political situation in America, 387 Odyssean elements, 385–404 representation of wife in, 401–2 source for Sommersby, 387–8, 403 themes common to Odyssey, Sommersby and, 389, 403–4 Le Sueur, Guillaume, Admiranda historia, source for Le Retour de Martin Guerre, 388 Leadership, C.L.R.James’s interest in qualities of, 364–365 and nn. 34, 39 Legare´, Hugh, pro-slavery views, 304 Legouve´, Ernest, adaptation of Euripides’ Medea, 295 Lemaıˆtre, Fre´de´rick, portrayal of Toussaint L’Ouverture, 355–6 Les Aventures de Te´le´maque, Fe´ne´lon, 223 Letter on John Brown, Victor Hugo, 16 and n. 46, 422 n. 15 Letters of an Irish Helot, William Drennan, 91 Lettres persanes, Montesquieu, foundation text of anti-slavery opinion, 21 Libation-Bearers, Aeschylus, cited by Gildersleeve, 342 Liberalism, and neo-liberalism, 54–5 and n. 19, 61 Liberator articles: ‘An Address to the People of the United States’, in 1857 issue, 51 by Sarah Mapps Douglass, 292 by William Lloyd Garrison, 251–2 ‘Emancipation’ (1862), 313 n. 54 on Margaret Garner, 294–352 ‘Why not rejoice?’, 313 n. 51 ‘Declaration of Sentiments of the Colored Citizens of Boston on the Fugitive Slave Bill’ (1850), 313.n. 51 report on sermon by Douglass, 288 Liberty Gildersleeve’s concept of, as central issue in American Civil War, 336 and n. 75

487

John Flaxman’s conception of, 18 and Fig. 1.8 red cap of, 18 and n. 54, Fig. 1.8 southern linkage of hierarchy, inequality with, 304–59 ‘Liberty or Death’, James Bell, 294 Lichtenstein, Henry, on classical preoccupations of visitors to Cape of Good Hope, 105, 123 n. 58 Life of Nicias, Plutarch, inspiration for Thomas Cole, 231 Lillibullero, song of rebellion, 24–5 ‘Limits of Culture’, Basil Gildersleeve, 332–3 Lincoln, Abraham on John Brown, 415 self-presentation, 40 n. 89 see also Gettysburg adress Literary societies, for African Americans, 282–3 Lives, Plutarch known to: David Walker, 102 n. 84 Toussaint L’Ouverture, 3, 359 Livy admiring account of Hannibal, 290–1 availability in Harpers’ Classical Library, 281 Lloyd, Lodowick, The Pilgrimage of Prices, 68 Locke, John concept of slavery as based in contract, 60 n. 9 natural rights theory, 255 and n. 30, 257 On Human Understanding, source for John Philip, 116 Two Treatises on Government, influence, 20, 275 n. 30 Lodewyk, case concerning treatment of, 110–11 Lodge, Gonzalez, Latin grammar of Gildersleeve and, 319 London Committee see Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade London Missionary Society, abolitionist missionaries, supported by Fairbairn and Pringle, 114–15

488

Index

London Monthly Review, review of Phillis Wheatley’s poems, 159 Long, William, hostile reception of Phillis Wheatley, 153–4, 161 Longinus, romance on Daphnis and Chloe, 201–2 Lowell, James Russell political stance, 221 ‘Prometheus’, 221 Lucan, Pharsalia, inspiration for Confederate Soldiers’ Memorial, 310–11 Lucretius, cited by Pringle, 113 Lycurgus, Plutarch cited in arguments for, against slavery, 29–30 representation of slavery in, 67–8, 85 and n. 54 Lytton see Bulwer-Lytton Mably, Gabriel Bonnot, Abbe´ de De E´tude de l’Histoire, 91–2 influence of views on Sparta, 83, 91–2 and n. 76 Oeuvres Comple`tes, 83, 91–2 Macartney, Lord, British governor of the Cape of Good Hope, 104 Macaulay, Thomas, Lord on comparison of industrial revolution with helotage, 101 n. 80 contact with Thomas Pringle, 112–13 McCord, David, pro-slavery views, 303 McCord, Louisa S., pro-slavery views, 303 McKeown, Niall, The Invention of Ancient Slavery, 12 Macready, William Charles avowed Republican, 224 in Morton’s The Slave: A Musical Drama, 226 in Talfourd’s adaptation of Ion, 224, 225 Fig. 8.5 Macrobius, cited in abolitionist debates, 75 and n. 29 Madagascar, slaves from, in Cape of Good Hope, 122 n. 31 Magic, link with slaves, 197–9

Maginn, William classicist, parodist, 24 probable authorship of The Possums, 24–5 stance on slavery, 24, 27 Magna Carta, influence on English view of slavery, 30, 108 Makanna, Xhosa chief, Pringle’s interest in, 113 Malthus, Thomas, drawn on, by proslavery supporters, 274 n. 22 Manchester anti-slavery petition of 1787, 62 n. 26 radicalism in, 62 n. 26 ‘Manhood and brotherhood’, slogan of abolitionists, Gildersleeve’s objection to, 342, 345 Mantell, Robert, performance of Parrhasius, 246 n. 82 Manumission concept of, 48 testamentary, controversies caused by, 109 and n. 40, 127, 128–9 Marriage, between white men and black women, attitudes to, 9 Marthinus, slave in the Cape, case concerning, 122 n. 38 Martial account of execution of criminals, 238–9 May’s translation of Selected Epigrams, 238 Martin Chuzzlewit, Charles Dickens, attack on slavery, 7 Martineau, Harriet Demerara, 379 n. 13 Illustrations of Political Economy, 379 n. 13 likeness, Fig. 12.3 on Toussaint L’Ouverture’s knowledge of classics, 20 n. 7, 359 representation of Toussaint L’Ouverture, 358–9, 363, 372 The Hour and the Man, 356–9 Marx, Karl association with Chartist Ernest Jones, 226 depiction as Prometheus, 235 Fig. 8.9 love of Homer, 418–19

Index on American slavery, 275 n. 52 on slavery in ancient and modern worlds, 35, 418–20 and nn. 21 and 25 reference to Prometheus Bound, 233 The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, influence on C. L. R. James, 359 Marxism, approach to slavery, 64 n. 24 ‘Masses’ heterogeneity, 381 n. 41 term equated with ex-slaves, by C. L. R. James, 365 and n. 41 Toussaint’s problem with, 365 and n. 41, 369, 372 and n. 72 Master of the Crossroads, Madison Smartt Bell, 379 n. 18 Maximilian, Emperor in Mexico, 332, 342 May, Thomas, translation of Selected Epigrams of Martial, 238 Medea, mythical figure attitudes to murder of children, 295 defiance of Jason, an inspiration for abolitionists, 33 interest in, because of ethnic difference from Jason, 222 Margaret Garner compared to, 295 and n. 65, 296 Fig. 10.3 Medea, Euripides, 222, 295 Melancholy, echo of, in ‘To Maecenas’, 178 n. 55 Melmoth, William, translation of Pliny, 47 Melville, Herman C. L. R. James’s study of, 379–80 n. 22 concept of tragedy, 369 Mentzel, Otto, on status of slaves in Cape of Good Hope, 122 n. 30 Messenia see Aristomenes Metaphysics, Aristotle, cited by Van der Kemp, 114–15 Methodists, approach to abolition of slavery, 20–1 Mexico abolition of slavery in, 251 Gildersleeve’s interest in, 332, 342 Meyer, Nicholas Meyer, scriptwriter for Sommersby, 387, 405 n. 12

489

Mill, John Stuart Inaugural Address at St Andrews, 332 ‘On Liberty’, 52–4 and n. 16 opposition to Hobbes’s view of slavery, 51 precursor of human rights movement, 54 Milton, John influence on abolitionist poetry, 125, 144 Paradise Lost: echoes of diabolical features in representation of Prometheus, 219–65 parallels with, Newby’s The Wrongs of Almoona, 142–3 Minghella, Anthony, Cold Mountain, 393–4 Minors, legal status in ancient Rome, 45 Mirabeau, source for C. L. R. James, 361 Miscegenation Gildersleeve’s concept of, 328–9, 332, 339–46 meaning of term, 328 Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro, authorship of anonymous tract, 329–30 and nn. 46 and 48 ‘Miscegenation’, Basil Gildersleeve, 329, 332 Missouri Compromise, 251 ‘Mocking-bird poets’, 176 n. 23 Molungeons (Melungeons), in context of theories on race, 344 and n. 104 Montesquieu concept of slavery as contra naturam, 107 Esprit de lois, 21, 52 influence, 21, 52, 223 Lettres persanes, foundation text of anti-slavery opinion, 21 opposition to Hobbes’s view of slavery, 52, 53–4 theory of natural law, 256–308 Montgomery, James, abolitionist poetry, 210, 243 n. 1

490

Index

Monto, Homerist Vincenzo, concept of Prometheus, 217–18 Moolman, Wessel, case concerning punishment of slave, 109–10 Moralia, Plutarch, on helotage, 83 More, Hannah abolitionist poetry, 125 comparison of ancient Romans, modern Africans, 136–8 footnotes, 147 primitivist vision of Africa, 145 Slavery, A Poem, 135–8 Morell, Thomas, translation of Prometheus Bound, 213–14 Morning Post and Advertiser, terms of advertisement for Wheatley’s work, 161 Morrison, Toni Beloved, 222–67, 294 contribution to slave narrative, 28 Morton, Thomas, The Slave: A Musical Drama, 226 Mott, Lucretia, abolitionist, misled by anonymous tract on Miscegenation, 329 Mozambique (Mocambique), slaves from, in Cape of Good Hope, 104, 122 n. 31 Mulattoes, in context of theories on race, 344 and n. 104 Mu¨ller, Friedrich Max, slogan ‘nations and languages against dynasties and treaties’ admired by Gildersleeve, 342 Mulligan, Hugh, ‘The Lovers, An African Eclogue’, 147 ‘My Sixty Days in Greece’, Gildersleeve, 334 Mycenae excavations, George Mylonas’s Page-Barbour Lectures on, 350 n. 86 Mylonas, George, Page-Barbour Lectures on Mycenae excavations, 350 n. 86 Mythology ancient, problems in searching for material to support abolition, 209–42 see also Classics

Napoleon Bonaparte, paralleled with Prometheus, 216–18 Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Slaves of Surinam in Guiana, John Stedman, 214–16, 217 Fig. 8.3 Natural law, rights Aristotle’s Politics Book I, cited in opposition to theory of, 256–8 emergence of theory of, 275 n. 31 pro-slavery philosophical objection to theory of, 249, 252 relevance to issue of slavery, 53–4 Negro Apprenticeship scheme, criticisms of, 185, 187, 205 Negro Emancipation, Talfourd’s speech on, 226 Negroes see Black peoples, Race Nelson’s Column, figure of black seaman, 1 and n. 2 Neoclassicism classicism distinguished, 165–6 and n. 48 in architecture, influence of slave trade on, 7 Nepos, known to Toussaint L’Ouverture, 20 n. 7, 359 Neptune, classical deity, association with institution of slavery, 9 Nestor, in Homer, Frederick Douglass compared to, 289–90 New England, contribution of slavery to regional development, 156 New Monthly Magazine, Pringle’s article on slavery at the Cape in, 112 New York Canal Street High School, 282 Phoenix Society, 282 New York Sun, report on speech of Joseph Cinque´, 297–8 New York World, publication of anonymous tract on Miscegenation, 329 Newby, Peter influence of classical poetic forms on, 126 primitivist vision of Africa, 145 The Wrongs of Almoona, 138–41

Index Newton, John cited by John Fairbairn, 112 classical interests, 123 n. 60 influence, 115 and n. 60 Newton, Thomas, on Satanic associations of Prometheus, 219 Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle, endorsement of slavery in, 409 Nkrumah, Kwame, C. L. R. James’s interest in, 364 Nkrumah and the Ghana Revolution, C. L. R. James, 364 and n. 34, 378 Noble, Thomas Satterwhite, portrait of Margaret Garner, 295 and Fig. 10.3, 314 nn. 61 and 65 North American Review, disparaging review of Wheatley’s poetry, 159 North, Thomas, translation of Amyot into English (1579), 67 Notes from Virginia, Thomas Jefferson, 300 Novels, support for abolition movement derived from, 30, 34–5 Nullification Controversy, 1831, 322 Nydia (character in The Last Days of Pompeii) analysis of character, 183–4, 191–2 association of Thessalian birth with witchery, 196–7 lament, 181 manifestation of slave status, 31, 181–91 relationship with Glaucus, 190–205 representation in arts, 181–2 and n. 4, 183 Fig. 7.1 significance of: blindness, 199–201 gentle birth, 192–3 suicide, 182, 183 and Fig. 7.1, 204 Nymphodorus of Syracuse, Voyage to Asia, Toussaint compared with Aristomenes, 355, 373 Obama, Barack H., wreath sent to Confederate Soldiers’ Memorial, 311

491

Observations on Aristotle’s Politiques, Robert Filmer, 275 n. 30 Octoroons A. W. Verrall’s concept of: discussed by Gildersleeve, 342–5 link with William Ridgeway’s Origin of Tragedy, 343–4 Odes, Horace, in curriculum at Institute for Coloured Youth, Philadelphia, 282 Odysseus, mythical figure characterisation, 390 and n. 12, 397–400 encounter with Cyclops, cited as archetypal colonial encounter, 223 ship equated with slave galley, 224 significance of portrayal as beggar, 391–2, 399 story of child by Circe, 398 and n. 53 Odyssey, Homer analogy on effect of slavery on free man, 107–8 concept of kidnap of high-born slave in, 93 drawn on by Clarkson, 6, 34–5 ‘good’ and ‘bad’ slaves in, 392–3 importance in slavery debate, 385–7 portrayal, function of slaves in, 391 prominence in Hollywood’s films concerning slavery, 35 racism in Sommersby and, compared, 389 significance of recognition tokens, 396–7 story line of Sommersby and, compared, 392–4 themes central to Le Retour de Martin Guerre, Sommersby and, 389 ‘Old Oligarch’ , representation of slavery, 67 Old Testament, influence on abolitionist poetry, 125–6 Oliver Twist, Charles Dickens, association of good character with elevated social class, 193 Omeros, Derek Walcott, 223 On Human Understanding, John Locke, source for John Philip, 116

492

Index

‘On Liberty’ John Stuart Mill, 52–4 and n. 16 On the Natural Varieties of Mankind, Johann Blumenbach, 236 ‘On the Training of Black Men’, 160 and n. 21 On the Want of Sympathy, Edward Bulwer, 203 Orations, Cicero, in curriculum at Institute for Coloured Youth, Philadelphia, 282 Oratory importance of eye management, 285 training of African Americans in, 284–90 Orellana see Drennan, William Orin, character in Sommersby, representation as man of menace, 400 and n. 58 Oroonoko, Aphro Behn feminist, post-colonial response to, 39 n. 65 influence of Southerne’s translation, 21 and n. 63 Otium, concept of slavery as productive of, 305 Overbeck, Friedrich, sculpture ‘Servitude’, 15–16 and Fig. 1.7 Oyelowo, David, impact of appearance as shackled Prometheus, 214, 215 Fig. 8.2 Page, William, painter of anti-slavery Prometheus picture, 232–3 Page-Barbour Lectures, University of Virginia, 339–40 see also Gildersleeve Paine, Thomas abolitionist views, 18 natural rights theory 255, 257–8 Rights of Man, anti-radical pamphlet against, 91 Painting, role in arguments for, against slavery, 23 Pan-African Congress, C. L. R. James a member of, 379–80 n. 22 Pan-Africanism, significance of James’s The Black Jacobins for, 34 Paradise Lost, John Milton

echoes of diabolical features in representation of Prometheus, 218–19 parallels with, Newby’s The Wrongs of Almoona, 142–3 Parkinson, Wenda, ‘This Gilded African’; Toussaint L’Ouverture, 379 n. 18 Parliament, British focus of early debates on slave trade, 86–7 links of pressure for reform with abolition movement, 24, 31, 86, 185 and n. 15, 186 repeated debates over slavery, 71–4, 86, 87, 113, 124 n. 82, 186 Select Committee on the slave trade, 71–4 Parmenides, alluded to, by Van der Kemp, 114 Parrhasius, Espy Williams, 246 n. 82 ‘Parrhasius’ , Nathaniel Parker Willis, 239–40 and n. 82 Parrot, use as trope to mock output of black poets, 160 and n. 23 Parton, James, hostile reception of Phillis Wheatley, 153–4 Pastoral verse classical, influence on abolitionist poets, 126, 129, 144–9 Wheatley’s manipulation of genre, 165 Paternalism, in Roman approach to slavery, concepts of, benevolence, 29, 35–6, 46, 56–9, 61–2 Patronage, significance for classical, abolitionist poetry, 171–2 and nn. 57 and 63 Patterson, Orlando concept of ‘fictive kinship’, 387–8, 392–3 Freedom in the Making of Western Culture, 13 Slavery and Social Death, 13, 126 The Children of Sisyphus, 222 Pausanias, depiction of slave Aristomenes, 34, 355, 373–4 and nn. 73–4 and 76

Index Pausanias, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, reference to helotage, 95 Pauw, Cornelius de, Recherches philosophiques sur les grecs, 92 Pechme´ja, Jean de, Te´le`phe, 223, 226 Peckard, Peter, Vice-Chancellor of Cambridge, abolitionist, 4, 6 Peculium, concept of, relative to slavery, 326–7 and n. 31 Pelopid race, Verrall’s concept of, 342–5 Peloponnesian War, cited as comparison with American Civil War, 340 and n. 87 see also Gildersleeve Penelope parallels in Sommersby and Le Retour de Martin Guerre, 401–3 Pennsylvania Academy, Barlow’s paintings commissioned, exhibited by, 244 n. 43 Percival, James Gates, ‘Prometheus’, 236 Pericles echoes of epitaphios in Gettysburg address, 33 Gildersleeve’s allusion to presentation of slavery, 338–9 Periegesis, Pausanias, depiction of slave hero Aristomenes in, 34, 373–4 and nn. 73–4 and 76 Peterloo massacre, Talfourd’s description of, as ‘Promethean’, 230 Petion, Alexandre, leader of northern Haiti, 363 Phaedrus, drawn on by Clarkson, 6 Pharsalia, Lucan, inspiration for Confederate Soldiers’ Memorial, 361–2 Philadelphia, publication of God Bless Abraham Lincoln, burlesque on Federal war aims, 332 and n. 56 Philadelphia Demosthenian Institute, foundation, aims, 285 Philadelphia Female Literary Association, 284 Philanthropy representation of, by Edward Bulwer, 188–90

493

significance in nineteenth century, 188 Philip, John admiration for Roman law, 115 classical scholarship, 115–16 and n. 64 head of London Missionary Society at the Cape, 115 supported by Fairbairn and Pringle, 114 Phillips, Wendell influenced by Harriet Martineau, 357 lecture on Toussaint L’Ouverture, 357–8 president of Anti-Slavery Society, 357 Philothea; a Grecian Romance, Lydia Mary Child, 301–2 Phoenix Society, New York, 282 Pileus, pilleus, in origins of ‘red cap of liberty’, 18 Pindar Gildersleeve’s work on, 320, 334–5, 342–3 use in forming Gildersleeve’s stance on slavery, 26–7, 334–5 Piroli, Tommaso, engravings for Porson’s edition of Aeschylus, 216 Pitt, William (the Younger), on abolition of slavery, 124 n. 82 Pity, belief in inspiration of, as crucial to good writing, 200 Plantation agriculture manual basis, 127 southern concept of, 308–9 Plato appeal to, by north American abolitionists, 260 availability in Harpers’ Classical Library, 281 excerpts illustrating rhetorical theory, 286 Republic, proposals for common ownership, gender equality, 262 Plautus, drawn on by Clarkson, 6 Plays, support for abolition movement derived from, 30 ‘Pliny’, articles in Charleston Mercury by, 14, 44

494

Index

Pliny the Younger attitude to freedom, 55–6 and n. 20 concept of slavery, slaves, 45–9, 58 model of benevolent slave-master, 29, 35–6, 45, 48, 58–9, 62 response to murder of the ‘Bad Master’, 46–9, 50, 55–6 Plutarch Amyot’s translation of Parallel Lives, 67–8 drawn on by Clarkson, 8 Life of Lycurgus, cited in arguments for, against slavery, 29, 67, 85 and n. 54 Life of Nicias, inspiration for Thomas Cole, 231–2 Lives, known to: David Walker, 102 n. 84 Toussaint L’Ouverture, 3, 359 Moralia, on helotage, 83 popularity in ante-bellum America, 281 representation of Spartan society, 66 techniques as orator, 286 views on slavery, 23, 66 see also Cato Plutus, Aristophanes, drawn on by Clarkson, 6 Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, Phillis Wheatley dedication, 171 frontispiece, 157 Fig. 6.1 prefatory material, 168 publication, 156 and Fig. 6.1 Poetry, abolitionist classical influences on, 30, 150–67 in England, 30, 125–6 importance in eighteenth century, 125 neoclassical forms, 149 verse forms drawn from classics, 125, 129, 138–49 works specially commissioned, 125, 129 see also individual poets, works Poland, comparison of serfs with helots, 91–4 Polis, Athenian Aristotelian concept of place of slavery in, 251 C. L. R. James’s concept of, 368–9

Political cartoons classical resonances in, 14–15 in abolition dialogue, 14–15 and Figs. 1.6–8 Political thought, language, concepts derived from classical sources, 42–3 Politics Book I, Aristotle and pro-slavery thought in ante-bellum America, 312–18 cited in opposition to theory of natural rights, 256–9 cited in support of sociological case for slavery, 259–63 concepts of: justice in slavery ignored by pro-slavery Americans, 271–3 ‘natural’ slavery, slaves in, 32–3, 251, 253, 265–71, 392 G. F. Holmes’s observations on, 268–71 on master/slave relationship, 251, 262–3 impact of new editions on slavery debates, 255 on master/slave relationship, 251, 262–3 particular similarities between proslavery ideology and, 249–54, 304–5 and n. 99 resemblance of pro-slavery thought to argument of, 249–54 Pollard, Edward Alfred co-editor of the Richmond Examiner, 324 The Glory of History is Honour, 309 Polyphemus, mythical figure concept of, as prototype of slave, 32 depiction by Turner, 226 Pomponius Atticus, T., characteristics as slave owner, 106 Pongola, Thomas Pringle, echoes of Spartacus, 113–14 Poor Relief Act 1782, 97 n. 24 Pope, Alexander influence on abolitionist poetry, 125 known to Wheatley, 166 Porson, Richard, edition of Aeschylus, 216

Index Postcolonialism, response to Oroonoko, 39 n. 65 Potter, John, Archaelogia Graeca, on Athenian slavery, 76 Potter, Robert, translation of Aeschylus, 214 Powers, Hiram, sculpture The Greek Slave, 232–3 and Fig. 8.7 Prerogative of Popular Government, James Harrington, 69 Preston, William, views on slavery, 79–80 and n. 42, 84, 91 Pringle, Thomas African Poems, 113 article on slavery in the Cape, 113 association with John Fairbairn, 112–13 classical sources, 112, 114 in anti-slavery movement in Britain, 112–13 relations with Lord Charles Somerset, 112 support for London Missionary Society, 114 ‘The Emigrant’s Cabin’, 114 ‘The Honey-bird and the Woodpecker’, 113 and n. 52 Privy Council, Report of Committee on Slave Trade, 1780, 71 Prometheus, mythical figure equated with Titans, 223 adoption in abolitionist propaganda, 212, 231–42 American concept of, 231–7 association with class politics, 230, 233–6 challenge presented after release, 221–2 concepts, depiction of: among early Christian fathers, 213 among Enlightenment thinkers, 213 as inarticulate, uncomprehending, 212 as of ambiguous, African race, 210 and Fig. 8.1 as orator, in Aeschylus’ tragedy, 212 as pre-figuring of Christ on the cross, 213 and n. 9, 220

495

as prototype of slave, 32, 35–6, 210, 214–16 by Robert Smirke, 210 and Fig. 8.1, 223 in Flaxman’s ‘The Storm’, 216 and Fig. 8.4 in Renaissance, Early Modern times, 213 in Romantic movement, 213, 216–20 depiction of Karl Marx as, 235 Fig. 8.9 difficulties presented to abolitionists, 221–42 impact of visual representations, 210 and Fig. 8.1, 214–16 and Fig. 8.2, 217 Fig. 8.3 in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, 229 Napoleon paralleled with, 216–18 parallels with Don Juan, 219–20 representation by black female, 237–8 Satanic associations, 219–20, 233 significance of colour, race, 236–7 ‘Prometheus’, Ebenezer Storey (Storry) Hay, 242 Prometheus, Goethe, 213, 216–18, 221 ‘Prometheus’, James Gates Percival, 236 ‘Prometheus’, James Russell Lowell, 221 ‘Prometheus’, Thomas Kibble Hervey, 237 Prometheus Bound, Aeschylus early translations, editions, 32, 213–16 end of Napoleon paralleled with, 216–18 Flaxman’s illustrations for Porson’s edition, Fig. 8.4 inspiration for Hervey’s ‘Prometheus’, 237 Karl Marx’s reference to, 233 Romney cartoons, 214 source for ‘Prometheus delivered’, 210, 214 Thoreau’s translation, 232 and nn. 65–6 ‘Prometheus Bound’ , Thomas Cole, 231–2 and Fig. 8.6 Prometheus: das griechische Mythologem von der menschliche Existenz,

496

Index

Carl Kere´nyi, Satanic associations of Prometheus in, 219–20 ‘Prometheus delivered’ characterisation in, 221 sources, 210, 214 publication, 210 and nn. 1–2, 211 Fig. 8.1 representation of Prometheus, as inarticulate, uncomprehending, 212 Prometheus Unbound, Aeschylus, 212 Prometheus Unbound, Shelley characterisation in, 229 Satanic associations, 219 spelling of typhoon, 244 n. 45 Property rights egalitarian approaches to, in eighteenth century, 83–4 in Sparta, 83 perceived threat to, from revolutionary France, 86; see also French Revolution Purvis, Robert, portrait of Cinque´ commissioned by, 281 and Fig. 10.1, 297 Quaker Committee on the Slave Trade, contribution to the ‘London Committee’, 7–8 Quakers, approach to abolition of slavery, 20–1, 127 Querelles des Antiques et Modernes, 409 Quintillian, excerpts illustrating rhetorical theory, 286 Race, racism and education of black people in classics, 153–4, 160–1, 161–5 and nn. 33 and 37 and concept of octoroons, 342–5 Gildersleeve’s rejection of equality, 328–9 in American debate on slavery, 249, 266, 300–2 in Sommersby and Odyssey compared, 389–90 see also Miscegenation

Radice, Betty, translation of Pliny, 47 and n. 7 Rainsford, Marcus, Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti, 355 Ramsay, James, ‘Essay on the Treatment and Conversion of African Slaves in the British Sugar Colonies’, 130, 148 Randolph, John, views on liberty, equality, 305 Raynal, Abbe´, Histoire de Deux Indes, 16–18, 355–6, 361 Reading Mercury, review of Talfourd’s The Athenian Captive, 226 Rebellions by slaves classical models, 34, 290–6 in Jamaica, 237 led by Toussaint L’Ouverture, 34, 353–78 names associated with, 7 of Drimakos, 34, 358, 373–6 and nn. 84–5 of Eunus, 228 and n. 51 of Nat Turner (Southampton Massacre), 251–2, 299–300 of Spartacus, 16, 35–6, 113–14, 227–8, 357–9 on slave ship Amistad, 279, 281 Fig. 10.1, 296–8 repugnant to Pliny, 49 Reception history of classics, relation of debate on slavery to, 41–2, 247–8 Recherches philosophiques sur les grecs, Cornelius de Pauw, 92 Recognition tokens, significance, 482–3 and n. 45, 400–1 and n. 61 Red cap of liberty, 18 and n. 54, Fig. 1.8 Reform Act 1832, link with abolition of slavery, 186; see also Parliament Republic, Plato, proposals for common ownership, gender equality, 262 Republicanism, in seventeenth century England, Sparta cited in support of, 69–70 Resistance, by slaves, classical models, 290–6; see also Rebellions

Index Review of the Debate in the Virginia Legislature on the Abolition of Slavery 1831–32, Thomas R. Dew, 253 and n. 25, 299–300 Richmond Examiner foundation, 323 Gildersleeve’s pro-Confederate editorials, 324, 332–4, 337 John Moncure Daniel the editor of, 323, 332 Richmond, Virginia, capitol modelled on Roman temple, 309 Richmond Whig, 323 Ridgeway, William, Origin of Tragedy, link with Verrall’s concept of octoroons, 343–4 Rights of man, pro-slavery objection to theory of, 252 Rights of Man, Thomas Paine, anti-radical pamphlet against, 91 Ristori, Adelaide, portrayal of Medea, 295 Ritzema van Lier, Helperus, influenced by John Newton, 123 n. 60 Robben island, Pringle’s account of, 113 Robeson, Paul, portrayal of Toussaint L’Ouverture, 356, 379–80 n. 22 Rogers, Randolph, statue of Nydia, 182 and n. 4 Roland, Charles, An American Iliad, 390 Roman African concepts of, 279, 281 Fig. 10.1, 297–9 see also Rome, ancient Roman law admired by John Philip, 115 application to murder of Larcius Macedo, 47–9 approaches to amelioration of conditions of slaves, 47 and n. 6 influence on Dutch view of slavery, 30, 108–12 and nn. 38–40, 119 and n. 81 legitimation of slavery, 103 and n. 4, 106, 121 n. 9 used to defend rights of slaves in Cape of Good Hope, 109 Roman-Dutch law

497

clash between English law and, 108–12 imperialist, paternalist basis, 108 in Cape of Good Hope: influence on Dutch, 108–12 maintained by British administration, 104 legitimation of slavery, 30, 104, 121 n. 9 Romantic movement concept of Prometheus, 213, 216–20 obsession with slavery, 228 Rome, ancient admiration for, in southern states, 309–11 attitudes to slaves in, 172 British perception of, 114 criticised by John Philip, 117 knowledge of: in American education, 279 in American slavery debates, 279 legal status of women, minors in, 45 oratory, emulated by African Americans, 284–90 political thought derived from, 43 portrayal of Greece by Bulwer distinguished, 195–7 slavery in: comments on, by pro-slavery writers, 78 concept of, as basis of society, 7–10, 23, 106–7, 134–5, 136–8, 252 concepts of benevolent paternalism of slave owners, 29, 35–6, 46, 48, 56–9, 61–2 condemned by abolitionists, 130 familial character, 104, 392–3 parallelled in Cape of Good Hope, 103 and n. 4, 106–107 and nn. 21–2 slaves in: attitudes to, 172 duty to defend master, 122 n. 44 legal status, 45–6, 55–7 red cap worn after manumission, 18 and n. 54, Fig. 1.8 rights, 45–6, 55–6 and n. 20 testamentary capacity, 45–6

498

Index

Romney, George, Aeschylus cartoons, 214 Ronnick, Michele, on teaching of classics to black students, 12 Roscoe, William abolitionist poetry: commissioned, 125 contrast of ancient slavery with modern slave trade, 125–6, 133–4 influence of John Milton, 144 primitivist vision of Africa, 146 The Wrongs of Africa, 97 n. 23, 133–5, 138–43 Rose, Peter on portrayal of slaves in Odyssey, 391–2, 396, 403 Sons of the Gods, 385 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques admiration for Sparta, Thermopylae, 415 and n. 13 concept of Prometheus, 213 conceptualisation of virtue, 70 influence, 223 natural rights theory, 255, 257–8 opposition to Hobbes’s view of slavery, 51 Ruffin, Edmund, Virginia planter, suicide of, 309 Rushton, Edward footnotes, 147 influence of classical poetic forms on, 126 West Indian Eclogues, 139, 147–9 St Domingue, slave rebellion in, 34, 127, 353–78 see also Haiti, San Domingo, The Black Jacobins, Toussaint L’Ouverture St Martin, abolition of slavery in French, Dutch portions distinguished, 117–18 Salvation Army, foundation, 187 ‘Sambo the Ass’, Basil Gildersleeve, 328 San Domingo, Spanish, failure of rebels to conquer, 379 n. 4

Sancho, Ignatius, eighteenth century African writer in Britain, 12 Sandiford, Keith, on teaching of classics to black students, 12 Sappho, identified with women’s movements, 222 Sartain, John, mezzotints of portrait of Cinque´, 298 Sartor Resartus, Thomas Carlyle, reference to helotage, 94 Sartre, Jean-Paul Critiques of Dialectical Reason, 422 n. 12, 422–3 n. 19 on repercussions of decolonisation, 221–2 Saurin, Bernard, Spartacus, 16 Savagery, Marx’s theory of, 418–19 and n. 21 Scarborough, William Sanders admiration for Frederick Douglass, 289–90 First Lessons in Greek, 163 Schlosser, J.G., translation of Aeschylus, 214 Scipio, name given to black slave boys, 7 Scipio Africanus, identification of slave traders with, 7 Scipio, slave ship, 7 Scudder, Horace, editor of Atlantic Monthly, 335 Seditious Meetings Act 1795, 86–7 Seneca (elder), Controversiae, 238–9 Sengbe Pieh see Cinque´, Joseph Sentiment, explored by Hannah More, 135–8 Serfs, present day, effectively slaves, 28 Servitude, depiction as victim, Fig. 1.7 ‘Servitude’ , sculpture by Friedrich Overbeck, 15–16 and Fig. 1.7 Sextus Empiricus, drawn on by Clarkson, 6 Sexual relationships, between white men and black women, attitudes to, 8–9 Shadwell, The Libertine, 220 Shaftesbury, Lord, influence in dialogue on slavery, 20

Index Shakespeare, William concept of tragedy, 369 hamartia in tragedies of, 371 influence on abolitionist poetry, 125 Shamyl, Sufi, linked with Prometheus, 236–7 Shaw, T.E. (Lawrence of Arabia), comment on slavery in Odyssey, 406 n. 40 Shelley, Mary, Frankenstein; or, the Modern Prometheus, antislavery resonances, 21–3, 229 Shelley, Percy Bysshe Prometheus Unbound: characterisation in, 229–30 Satanic associations, 219 spelling of typhoon, 244 n. 45 Sherman, General, classical comparison invoked by Gildersleeve, 351 n. 100 Sierra Leone, rebellion of slaves from, 279, 281 Fig. 10.1, 296–300 Sinnius Capito, ‘So many slaves, so many enemies’, 124 n. 72 Sisyphus, cited by Orlando Patterson, 222 Skin colour see Black peoples, Race Slave trade, traders appropriation of classical mythology, 9–10 campaigns for abolition: effects of French Revolution, 71, 128 first parliamentary motion in Britain, 71–4 influence of Wilberforce, 71 see also Abolitionism, abolitionists espousal of neoclassicism, 7 Greek ode by Coleridge deploring, 10 identification with Scipio Africanus, 7 interdependence with capitalism, 57–9 and n. 24 responses to emergence of, 43–4 volume on west coast of Africa, 27 Slave Trade Act 1807 (Foreign Slave Trade Abolition Act) entry into force, 16, 86 and n. 60, 128 foreign nationals not covered by, 27

499

ideological, not economic background, 128–9 limitations, 27–8 ‘Prometheus delivered’ published in celebration of, 210 Slave-owning, slave owners attitude to education of slaves, 158 concept of benevolent paternalism, 29, 35–6, 46, 56–9, 61–2 ideological way of life in New England, 156 trend in legal judgments against, 44 see also United States of America, southern states ‘Slaveholder’s Sermon’, Frederick Douglass, 288 Slavers Throwing overboard the Dead and Dying - Typhon coming on, J. M. W. Turner, 224 and n. 45 Slavery abolition: in America, in 1865, 27 in Britain, in 1834, 15, 16, 128 in Tennessee, 389–90 persisting social evils following, 57–9 see also Abolitionism, abolitionists ancient, abolition, modernity and, 409–20 centrality of Homer’s Odyssey in cinematic representation, 385–6 chattel: characteristics in Americas, 127 issues raised by, in England, France, 51–2 parliamentary debates on, 185 responses to emergence of, 43–4, 51–2 comparisons of ancient, modern: dangers of, 390–1 literary examples, 129–38 concepts of: as based in contract, 50–5 and n. 9 as central cause of American Civil War, 350 n. 75 as contra naturam, 105, 107, 119; see also Natural law

500

Index

Slavery (cont.) as economically disadvantageous, 53–4 as persecuting eagle, 1844, Fig. 8.8 contribution to fall of empires, 134, 144 in British education, 23–4 instruments of revenge for, 224 of Aristotle, 52–3, 54, 249–54, 302–6, 409 of Engels, 417–20 of Karl Marx, 275–6 n. 52, 417–20 debate on: concepts derived from biblical, classical sources, 1–12, 42–3, 54 and n. 16, 259; see also Classics dichotomy in, E3 importance of classical languages, 10–12 relation to Reception History, 41–2, 247–8 see also Abolitionism; Slavery, defence of defence of: and Mill’s concept of liberty, 52, 54 and opposition to theory of natural rights, 53–4, 249, 255–9 and n. 31 and rejection of portrait of Cinque´, 298–9 appeal to Scripture, 266 appeal to Spartan helotage, 78–96; see also Helotage arguments related to wage slavery, 250, 252–3, 260–1 as based on right of contract, 50–1 and n. 9 as positive good, 253 and n. 21, 259–63, 268, 327 and n. 33, 338 and n. 82 by Christian writers, 6 in ante-bellum America, reference to Aristotle, 247–73 literary attempts, 21 on ground of difficulties following abolition, 254 and n. 25 on sociological grounds, 259–63

resemblance to arguments of Aristotle, 52–3, 54, 249–54, 272–3, 302–6, 409 seen as economically advantageous, 22 n. 40. 57–9 and n. 24, 250–1, 254 slogan Delenda est Abolition, 293 theatrical attempts, 21 see also individual defenders Dutch view of, 30 endorsement in ancient world, 414 ‘familial’, 173–4 imagery and argumentation derived from political sources, 1–12, 14, 16 in America: and ancient Rome, contradictory view of, 299–300 centrality to commercial, economic development, 22 n. 40, 60–1 and n. 24 ideological premises and those of ancient world distinguished, 57–9 southern concept of, as enlightened, paternalistic, 259–63, 304–6, 338–9 in ancient world: Aristotle’s concept of ‘natural’ slavery, slaves, 32–3, 251, 253, 265–71, 392 comments from northern states, 302 concept of, as basis of society, 6–10, 53–4 and n. 16, 133–4, 250–1 productive of otium, 305–6 traditionally invoked in debates, 1–12, 29, 35–36, 42–3, 44–9, 53–54 and n. 16, 57–9 views of Edward Bulwer, 184–5 interdependence with capitalism, 57–9 and n. 24, 61–2, 128 legal judgments against, basis, 45 limitations of Slave Trade Act 1807, 27–8 paradoxical aspects, 410–12 and n. 3

Index paternalism and: in ancient Rome, 29, 35–6, 46, 48, 56–9, 61–1 incompatibilities, 61–2 and n. 27 persistence of forms of, 27–8, 126–8, 409 and n. 1 relationship with stately homes in Bristol area, 21 n. 25 replacement by ‘apprenticeships’, criticisms, 185, 187, 205 societies dependent on, 126–7 theatrical approaches: attempts at justification, 21 promotion of abolition, 21, 30, 356, 379–80 n. 22 tradition of invoking classical precedent, 1–12, 41–3, 53–4 and n. 16 transgenerational effects, 28 and n. 85 treatment of women under, 222 see also Freedom, Helotage, Slave-owners, Slave traders, Slaves Slavery, A Poem, Hannah More, 135–8 Slavery Abolition Act 1833: entry into force in 1834, 16, 127, 184 Talfourd’s works in celebration of, 225–6 and Fig. 8.5 Slavery and Social Death (1982), Orlando Patterson, importance, 13 Slaves admissibility of testimony against owners, 45, 109–10, 111 Aristotelian concept of ‘natural’, 32–3, 251, 253, 265–71, 392 Cicero’s comments on British, 3 and n. 6 concepts of: acceptable treatment in English, Roman-Dutch law, 108–112 black people as ordained to be, 32–3, 249 250–1, 252, 253, 265–74, 391–2 kidnap of high-born, 193 customs in naming of, 7, 393 education of, attitude of slaveowners, 158

501

escaping: effects of Fugitive Slave Act on black mothers, children, 293 and n. 56 treatment in Rome, Cape of Good Hope compared, 103 in America: in Deep South, parallels drawn between slaves in Athens and, 25 scope of Fugitive Slave Act, 252, 293 status under US Constitution, 256–308 and n. 33 in ancient Rome: slaves in: attitudes to, 172 duty to defend master, 122 n. 44 legal status, 45–6, 55–7 red cap worn after manumission, 18 and n. 54, Fig. 1.8 rights, 45–6, 55–6 and n. 20 testamentary capacity, 45–6 in Cape of Good Hope see Cape of Good Hope link with magic, 196–8 manumission: concept of, 48 testamentary, controversies caused by, 109 and n. 40, 127, 119 portrayal, representation: by Gildersleeve, as unruly, 327–8 function in Odyssey, 391 problems presented after emancipation, 221–42, 389–90, 392–4 rebellions see Rebellions relationships with masters: in Odyssey, Sommersby compared, 395–404 see also Greece, Rome ‘Slaves and Mechanics’, Gildersleeve, 326 Slavers Throwing overboard the Dead and Dying, 224 and n. 45 Smirke, Robert (Senior), representation of Prometheus, 210 and Fig. 8.1, 223

502

Index

Smith, Adam concept of slavery as economically disadvantageous, 53 Theory of Moral Sentiments, 70, 188 Social class, association of good character with elevated, 193 Social contract, relevance of concept to issue of slavery, 50–5, 258; see also Natural law Social status of abolitionists, 27 and n. 82 of slaves in ancient Rome, 45–6, 55–7 slave rebellion a threat to, 56 Socialism, international, rise of, 230 Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade evidence to parliamentary committee, 71 and Fig. 3.2 foundation, 19, 71 poetry commissioned by, 125 Sociology for the South, George Fitzhugh, 248 Some Historical Account of Guinea (1771), Anthony Benezet, 2–3 Somerset, Lord Charles Governor of Cape of Good Hope, 14, 112 relations with Thomas Pringle, 112 Sommersby (film) classical resonances, Odyssean slavery in, 35, 385–404 Le Retour de Martin Guerre a source for, 387–8, 404 racism in Odyssey and, compared, 389–90 representation of wife in, 401–2 significance of reference to Iliad, 402 themes central to Odyssey, Le Retour de Martin Guerre and, 389 ‘Song of the Italians’, Basil Gildersleeve, 332 Songs, support for abolition movement derived from, 30 Sons of the Gods, Peter Rose, 385 Sophocles, Antigone, relation to the present, 421 n. 4 see also Creon

South Africa influence of classical ideas on antislavery debate, 30, 103–20; for details see Cape of Good Hope maintenance of master-slave relationships by trekkers, 119–20 South African Commercial Advertiser, evidence on anti-slavery debate from, 30, 104, 111 South Carolina Gildersleeve connections in Charleston, 322 Nullification Controversy, 1831, 322 Southampton Massacre, Nat Turner’s slave rebellion, 251–2, 299–300 Southern Literary Messenger pro-slavery publications: anonymous essay ‘Thoughts on Slavery’, 256, 272 essay by George Frederick Holmes, 268–71 Southern Magazine, Gildersleeve’s articles for, 332 Southern Review founders, 332 and n. 60 Gildersleeve’s articles for, 332–4, 335 Southerne, Thomas, influence of dramatisation of Behn’s Oroonoko, 21 and n. 65 Southey, Robert poems relating to slavery, 21 reference to helotry, 94 ‘Southron’ , ‘Thoughts on Slavery’, 256–308 Soyinka, Wole, Page-Barbour Lectures, 339–40 Spain, conquests in Americas, use of Aristotle to justify, 32 Sparta admiration for Thermopylae and, 415 and n. 13 cited in abolition debates in America, 301, 305–6 concepts of property rights in, 83 influence in modern, Enlightenment thinking, 65 marching songs of Tyrtaeus, 66

Index representation of: in ancient Rome, 66 in classical antiquity, 66–7 effect of bourgeois ideology, 70 in eighteenth century, 69–71 reputation: in French Enlightenment, 83 in Renaissance thinking, 66–7 see also Helotage, helots Spartacus concept of, as slave hero, 35–6, 227–8 cultural prominence, 16 echoes of, in Pringle’s Pongola, 113–14 John Brown compared to, 16 and n. 46 known to Toussaint L’Ouverture, 359 rebellion, 16, 35–6, 113–14, 227–8, 357–9 Toussaint L’Ouverture likened to, 355–6, 368–9, 373, 374 Spartacus, Bernard Laurin, 16 Spartacus: A Roman Story, Susanna Strickland, 16 Stamp Act 1765, repercussions, 88 State, the, Hobbes’s concept of contract with, 50–1 Steam power see Industrial Revolution Stedman, John, Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Slaves of Surinam in Guiana, 214–16, 217 Fig. 8.3 Stephens, Alexander, ‘Cornerstone’ speech, 350 n. 75 Stephens, Miss, in A Musical Drama, 226 Stichus, Plautus, drawn on by Clarkson, 6 Stockenstrom, Andries, encounter with Thomas Pringle, 113 Stoicism, Stoics, attacked by Hannah More, 135–8 Stothard, Thomas, illustration for ‘The Voyage of the Sable Venus’, 9 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, women of Carthage taken as model of resistance, 292 Strickland, Susanna ardent abolitionist, 16 Spartacus: A Roman Story, 16

503

Stubbe, Henry, participation in Oceana debate, 69 Sugar boycotted by abolitionists, 128 manual basis of plantations, 127 Sugar Act 1764, repercussions, 88 Swift, Jonathan, experiments with ‘urban pastoral’, 145 Taaffe, Dennis comparison of Irish peasantry with helots, 89–90 role in United Irishmen, 88 Tacitus echoes of, in Gettysburg address, 33 on slavery, 6, 121 n. 22 Talfourd, Thomas Noon abolitionist, radical Liberal, 224 adaptation of Euripides’ Ion, 224, 225 Fig. 8.5 comment on Peterloo massacre, 230 educational background, 228 The Athenian Captive, 193, 226–7 Tantalus, comparison with, in abolitionist poem, 148 Teale, Isaac, ‘The Voyage of the Sable Venus’, 8–9 Telegony, lost part of epic, 406 n. 52 Telemachus, recognition of Odysseus, 401 and n. 61 Te´le`phe, Pechme´ja 223, 226 Telephus, mythical figure concept of, as prototype of slave, 32 focus for anti-slavery sentiments, 223 Telephus, Euripides, 244 n. 40 Temple, William (Whiggish clergyman), views on Sparta, 70–1 Tennessee abolition of slavery, 389–90 post-emancipation, classical resonances in portrayal of, 28, 35 readmission to Union, 389–90 Reconstruction Tennessee, Odyssey in, 386 Fig. 13.1 Terence drawn on by Clarkson, 6 in Wheatley’s ‘To Maecenas’, 164; see also ‘To Maecenas’

504

Index

Terror, belief in inspiration of, as crucial to good writing, 200 Tertullian, concept of Prometheus, 213 Thalmann, William on portrayal of slaves in Odyssey, 391, 396 The Swineherd and the Bow, 385 The Athenian Captive, Thomas Talfourd, 193, 226–7 The Benevolent Planters, Thomas Bellamy, 21 ‘The Birth of Venus’, Botticelli, parodied, 9–10 The Black Jacobins, C. L. R. James author accused of downplaying role of masses in, 364 and n. 36 concepts of: as anti-colonialist epic, 366–7 as tragedy, 364, 368–78 leading theme, 362 significance, influence, 34–5, 359 and n. 18, 378 Spartacus analogy mentioned in, 355, 356 theatrical production, 1936, 356, 379–380 n. 22 use of classical literature in, 28, 34, 353–78 and n. 56 The Children of Sisyphus, Orlando Patterson, 222 The Columbiad, Joel Barlow, 223 The Columbian Orator, Caleb Bingham, scope, influence of, 286 The Comedies of Aristophanes, Translated into Corresponding English Metres, Benjamin Dann Walsh, 25 The Commonwealth of Oceana, James Harrington, 69–70 ‘The Creed of the Old South’, Basil Gildersleeve, 33–4, 332–7 and n. 52, 338, 345 The Dying Negro, Thomas Day, 131–3 The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon, Karl Marx, influence on C. L. R. James, 359 The Elements of the Latin Language, Richard Valpy, 77

‘The Emigrant’s Cabin’, Thomas Pringle, 114 The Farmer of Inglewood Forest, Elizabeth Helme, 356 The Frugal Housewife, Lydia Maria Child, 302 The Gentleman’s Magazine, publication of abolitionist poetry, 146 The Glory of History is Honour, Edward Alfred Pollard, 309 The Greek Slave (sculpture), Hiram Powers, 232–3 and Fig. 8.7 The Heart and the Fancy, Elizabeth Benger, 210–11 The History of Edinburgh, Alexander Kincaid, 88 ‘The Honey-bird and the Woodpecker’, Thomas Pringle, 113 The Hour and the Man, Harriet Martineau, 356–9 The Invention of Ancient Slavery, Niall McKeown, 12 The Last Days of Pompeii, Edward Bulwer frequent adaptations, 187 popularity, 181–2, 186–7 significance, 31, 184 see also Nydia The Law of Heredity, William Keith Brooks, 345 The Libertine, Shadwell, 220 ‘The Lovers, An African Eclogue’, 147 The Mahabharata, Peter Brook, 388 The Mask of the Beggar, Wilson Harris, 222–3 The National Era, 1853, publication of ‘Freedom’s Apostles’, 236 The New Eclectic Magazine, see Southern Magazine The New World, Charles Ernest Jones, 226–7 The Oracle; Bell’s World, pro-slavery letters by ‘Detector’ in, 75–6 The Pilgrimage of Prices, Lodowick Lloyd, 68 The Possums, perhaps by William Maginn, relevance to debate on slavery, 24–5

Index The Promethean; or Communist Apostle, John Goodwyn Barmby, 230 The Quest for the Silver Fleece, W. E. B. Du Bois, 222 ‘The Sabbath’ , James Grahame, 221 The Schools of Abuse, Stephen Gosson, 68 ‘The Seventh Nemean Revisited’, Gildersleeve, 343 and n. 100 The Slave: A Musical Drama, Thomas Morton, 226 The Slave Power, J. E. Cairnes, 351 n. 104 The Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing overboard the Dead and Dying), J. M. W. Turner, 224 and n. 45 The Souls of Black Folk, W. E. B. Du Bois, on myth of Atalanta, 222 ‘The Storm’, John Flaxman, 216, 218 Fig. 8.4 The Sugar Cane, James Grainger, 144 The Swineherd and the Bow, William Thalmann, 385 The Tourist, publication of Pringle’s ‘The Honey-bird and the Woodpecker’, 113 and n. 52 The United States Magazine and Democratic Review, publication of Lowell’s ‘Prometheus’, 221 The Vision of Columbus, Joel Barlow, 223 The Vitality of Greek Studies in America, Hellas and Hesperia or, Gildersleeve’s Page-Barbour Lectures, 340–1 ‘The Voyage of the Sable Venus’, Thomas Stothard’s designs for, 9–10 The Wrongs of Africa, William Roscoe, 97 n. 23, 133–5, 138–43 The Wrongs of Almoona, Peter Newby, 138–41 Theatre approaches to slavery in: attempts to justify, 21 promotion of abolition, 21, 31 Theban Literary Society, 285

505

Themistocles, cited by John Fairbairn, 111 Theopompos, anti-slavery views, 66 Theory of Moral Sentiments, Adam Smith, 70, 188 Thermopylae admiration for Sparta and, 415 and n. 13 referred to, by John Philip, 116 Thessaly, trope of witchery, 196–7 This Gilded African, Toussaint L’Ouverture, Wenda Parkinson, 379 n. 18 Thistlethwaite, Thomas, ‘Bambo and Giffar; an African Eclogue’, 146 Thoas, figure invented by Talfourd, 226–69 Thoreau, Henry David on John Brown, 35, 410–17, 420 translation of Prometheus Bound, 232 and nn. 65–6 Thornton, William Mynn, essay on Gildersleeve, 332 ‘Thoughts on Slavery’, anon., 1838, 255–6, 272–3 Three-fifths Compromise, 252 Thucydides on piracy, drawn on by Clarkson, 6 parallels in South to episodes in ‘History’ of, 340 and n. 87 Tilh, Arnaud du, imposter in Le Retour de Martin Guerre, 388, 394 Tilton, Theodore, rumoured authorship of tract on Miscegenation, 330 ‘To Maecenas’, Phillis Wheatley, 31, 167–75 ‘To Toussaint L’Ouverture’, William Wordsworth, 356 ‘To the University of Cambridge in New England’, Phillis Wheatley, 165, 174 Tobacco plantations, manual basis, 127 Tolme¯, negative connotations, 373–4 and nn. 76 and 83 Torture, in cases involving evidence from slaves against masters, 109

506

Index

Toussaint L’Ouverture ability to inspire fear, 376 and n. 87 admiration for ideals of French Revolution, 366–7 and n. 46, 371, 375, 377, 378 analogy with: Aristomenes of Messene, 355, 373 and nn. 73–4, 76, 378 Drimakos 34, 358, 373, 375–7 and nn. 85–6, 378 Gandhi, 381 n. 46 Spartacus, 355–6, 368–9, 373, 374 capture, imprisonment, death in France, 357–8, 363–4, 367 concept of hamartia applied to, 370–1 and nn. 63–5 contrasted with Dessalines, 365–6 and n. 43, 367–8, 372 cultural impact, 16, 355–6 and n. 13 dilemma as governor of Haiti, 377–8 enforcement of cheap labour in Haiti, 367–8 knowledge of classics, 1–3 and n. 7, 37 n. 7, 353, 359 photographed, 360 Fig. 12.3 ‘political vices’, 363–8 problem with ‘masses’, 365 and n. 41, 369, 372 and n. 72 qualities of leadership, 364–5 and nn. 36 and 39 representations: as ‘courageous chief ’, 368 as tragic hero, 363–4, 369–377 by Martineau, James, compared, 357–9, 362 theatrical, 356, 364, 379–80 n. 22 self-awareness, 363 see also The Black Jacobins Tragedy, genre of, C. L. R. James’s concept of, 368–72 Treasonable practices Act 1795, 86–7 Trinidad, C. L. R. James’s association with, 364 and n. 34 Trivia: Or, the Art of Walking the Streets of London, John Gay, 145 Trojan War American Civil War an evocative substitute for, 390–1

Ku Klux Klan linked to Trojans in Sommersby, 403 Trotsky, Leon, History of the Russian Revolution, influence on C. L. R. James, 359 Turner, J. M. W. The Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing overboard the Dead and Dying - Typhon coming on), 224 and n. 45 Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus, 224, 226 Turner, Nat, slave rebellion (the Southampton Massacre), 251–2, 299–300 Two Treatises on Government, John Locke, influence, 20, 275 n. 30 Typhon depiction by Turner, 226 spelling of typhoon and, 224 and n. 45 Tyrtaeus, marching songs, 76 Ulysses Deriding Polyphemus, J. M. W. Turner, 224, 226 United Daughters of the Confederacy, 310 United Irishmen helots used as analogy by, 89 role of Dennis Taaffe, 89 United States of America abolitionism in: influence of David Walker, 95 reference to example of British legislation, 32 views of Basil Gildersleeve, 319–46 adaptations of Bulwer’s The Last Days of Pompeii, 187 ante-bellum: pro-slavery thought in, and Aristotle, 247–3 penchant for classics, 247–8, 279–82 centrality of slavery: to commercial, economic development, 22 n. 40, 57–9 and n. 24, 60–1 to consciousness of, 28 Civil Rights movement, see Civil Rights concept of, as heralds of new era of liberty, 1

Index Constitution: 13th Amendment abolishing slavery, 1865, 27 status of slaves under, 256 and n. 33 influence of Roman slave law in, 120 n. 4 northern states: anti-abolitionism in, 273 n. 1 attitudes to slavery in, 303 emancipation legislation in, 252 southern way of life threatened by industrialization of, 307–8 Radical Reconstruction, 390 significance of Gettysburg address, 33 slavery in: attacked by Samuel Johnson, 132 attacked by Thomas Day, 131–4 centrality to consciousness, 32–4 parallels drawn between slaves in Athens and, 25–6, 299–302 southern states: attitudes to slavery in, 302–11 concept of Aristotle as pro-slavery, 248 glorification of Greece, Rome, 306–11 intensification of pro-slavery ideology, 251–4 suppression of achievements of black soldiers, 1 see also Gildersleeve use of Aristotle in arguments about native peoples, 277 n. 96 Universal suffrage, campaign for, links with abolition movement, 32 University of Virginia classical studies at, 321 Gildersleeve’s chair of Greek at, 322–3 Page-Barbour Lectures, 339–40 and n. 86 see also Gildersleeve Upshur, Judge, on concepts of slavery, 267 Utilitarianism, and attempts to justify slavery, 52–4 Valpy, Richard headmaster of Reading School, 228 pro-slavery views, 77–9 and nn. 36–7, 41, 84

507

The Elements of the Latin Language, 77 Van der Kemp, Johannes classical studies, 114 contact with John Newton, 115 work with London Missionary Society, 115, 123 and n. 58 Venus, classical deity, association with institution of slavery, 9–10 Verrall, A.W., concept of octoroons, 342–5 Verseghy, Ferenc, translation of Aeschylus into Hungarian, 214 Vicksburg, fall of, repercussions, 329 ‘Victimisation rhetoric’ defined, 190 in The Last Days of Pompeii, 190–1, 199 Victrix causa diis placuit sed victa Catoni, inscription on Confederate Soldiers’ Memorial, 311 Vidal, Gore, 390 Vigne, Daniel, scriptwriter for Sommersby, 388 Virgil Aeneid, in curriculum at Institute for Coloured Youth, Philadelphia, 282 availability in Harpers’ Classical Library, 281 Eclogues: influence on abolitionist poetry, 144–5 No. 2.18, echoed in ‘The Voyage of the Sable Venus’, 9–10 Georgics, reference to, 119 and n. 82 influence on abolitionist poetry, 125, 144–5 Wheatley’s admiration for, 169–70 Virginia, design for state seal, 305 Virginia Springs, Greek Revival features, 307 Virginians, classical comparison invoked by Gildersleeve, 351 n. 100 Virginius, Margaret Garner compared to, 294–5 Visions of the Daughters of Albion, William Blake, 237–8 Voltaire, praise of Spartacus, 16

508

Index

Voyage to Asia, Nymphodorus of Syracuse, 355, 373 Wage slavery, concept of, and defence of slavery, 250, 252–3, 260–1 Wakeman, George, authorship of anonymous tract on Miscegenation, 329 Walcott, Derek Omeros, 223 on artistic autonony, 178 n. 57 Sea Grapes, 223 Walford, Edward, edition of Aristotle, 257, 258, 266 Walker, David Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, 95–96 and n. 84, 290–2, 299 influence, 95–6 sources, 102 n. 84 Walsh, Benjamin Dann, use of Aristophanes in anti-slavery writings, 25, 27 Wanner, George Joseph see Lodewyk Warming, J. E. B., reference to helotism, 95 and n. 83 Washington, Booker T., founding father of slave narrative, 28 Wedgwood, Josiah, association with abolitionists, 18, 216 Wedgwood Seal, pro-abolition artefact, 18 West Indian Eclogues, Edward Rushton, 139, 146–7 West Indian slavery parallels with helotage, 71–83 see also Caribbean area, Slavery Western New York Anti-Slavery Society, Hannibal taken as model of resistance, 292 and n. 51 ‘What to a Slave is the Fourth of July?’, Frederick Douglass, 289–90 Wheatley, John, 156, 158, 161 and n. 31, 166, 168, 171, 173 Wheatley, Mary, 156, 166 Wheatley, Phillis (Phyllis) accused of imitativeness, 159–60, 162, 166

biographical details, education, 31, 156–8, 161–2, 165–6, 171, 173 claimed as originator of black classicism, intellectual tradition, 153 concept of ‘Genius’ of, 161–2 critical reception of work, 153–4, 159–61 and n. 31, 165–8, 174 implications of enslaved status, 169–75 and nn. 63, 70 knowledge of Latin, 166, 174 life and work discussed, 31, 153–79 manumission, emancipation, 156, 173 multifarious classicism, 166 Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral: dedication, 171 frontispiece, 157 Fig. 6.1 prefatory material, 168 publication, 156 and Fig. 6.1 poetic skills, 165–6, 169–75 response to Christianity, 173–4 source of income, 158–9 and n. 16 sponsors, 158, 171 ‘To Maecenas’, 31, 167–75 ‘To the University of Cambridge in New England’, 165, 174 Wheatley, Susanna, 156, 158, 166, 168, 171, 173 Whipper, William, abolitionist, address on education in classics, 283 White men, relationships with black women, attitudes to, 9 Whitehead, Alfred North, Page-Barbour Lectures, 339–40 ‘Why not rejoice?’, in 1857 issue of Liberator, 313 n. 51 Wilberforce, William classical resonances in cartoon depictions, 15 concern to prevent extension of slavery to Eastern Cape, 110 contact with Thomas Pringle, 112–13 depiction in anti-abolitionist satire, Fig. 1.6 failed parliamentary motions on abolition, 80–1 influence, 19, 71 and Fig. 3.1, 127, 410

Index William Watkins Academy for Negro Youth, courses in classics offered at, 282 Williams, Eric C. L. R. James’s interest in, 364 and n. 34 Capitalism and Slavery, 150 n. 2 on economic basis of slave trade, 128 and n. 2 Williams, Espy, Parrhasius, 246 n. 82 Williams, Francis, critical reception of work, 189–90 and n. 18 Willis, Nathanial Parker, ‘Parrhasius’, 239–40 and n. 82 Wise, Henry A., originator of term ‘gizzard-foot’, 344 Wogan, Charles, comparison of Irish with helots, 89 and n. 65 Wollstonecraft, Mary A Vindication of the Rights of Women, 229 contribution to anti-slavery movement, 21 Women exploitation, and perpetuation of slavery in Roman empire, 120 slaves, treatment of women, classical parallels drawn on, 221–3 status: in ancient Rome, 45 related to helotage by Adam Ferguson, 87 scrutinised during Scottish Enlightenment, 88 self-identification with West Indian slaves, 105 n. 61 Women’s rights, movement for, links with pressure for abolition of slavery, 19, 21, 23, 87–8, 228–9 Woodfall, William, reports on parliamentary debates, 81

509

Worcester, Colonel David, Phillis Wheatley’s letter to, 159 Wordsworth, William, ‘To Toussaint L’Ouverture’, 356 Workhouses, inmates compared to helots, 97 n. 24 Workingman’s Advocate, approval of Harpers’ Classical Library, 281 World Revolution, C. L. R. James, 379–80 n. 22 Wren, Matthew, refutation of Harrington’s Oceana, 69 Wright, Elizur, interpretation of Xenophon, in debate on slavery, 25–7 Wright, William contribution to anti-slavery movement in Cape of Good Hope, 107–8 and n. 31 encounter with Thomas Pringle, 113 and n. 51 intervention in case concerning slave Lodewyk, 110–11 on slavery in Cape of Good Hope, 107–8 and nn. 31–2 Xenophon Anabasis: in curriculum at Institute for Coloured Youth, Philadelphia, 282 interpretation by Wright in antislavery writings, 26 drawn on by Clarkson, 6 Xhosa people, Pringle’s interest in, 113–14 ‘Zeitgeist’, C. L. R. James’s concept of, 369–70 Zeno of Citium, view of slavery, 137 Zong, slave ship, massacre of slaves from, 4