Bonds of Citizenship
America and the Long 19th Century
General Editors
David Kazanjian, Elizabeth McHenry, and Priscilla Wald
Black Frankenstein: The Making of an American Metaphor
Elizabeth Young
Neither Fugitive nor Free: Atlantic Slavery, Freedom Suits, and the Legal Culture of Travel
Edlie L. Wong
Shadowing the White Man’s Burden: U.S. Imperialism and the Problem of the Color Line
Gretchen Murphy
Bodies of Reform: The Rhetoric of Character in Gilded Age America
James B. Salazar
Empire’s Proxy: American Literature and U.S. Imperialism in the Philippines
Meg Wesling
Sites Unseen: Architecture, Race, and American Literature
William A. Gleason
Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights
Robin Bernstein
American Arabesque: Arabs and Islam in the Nineteenth-Century Imaginary
Jacob Rama Berman
Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the Nineteenth Century
Kyla Wazana Tompkins
Idle Threats: Men and the Limits of Productivity in Nineteenth-Century America
Andrew Lyndon Knighton
Tomorrow’s Parties: Sex and the Untimely in Nineteenth-Century America
Peter Coviello
Bonds of Citizenship: Law and the Labors of Emancipation
Hoang Gia Phan
Bonds of Citizenship
Law and the Labors of Emancipation
Hoang Gia Phan
New York University Press
New York and London
NEW YORK UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York and London
© 2013 by New York University
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Phan, Hoang Gia.
Bonds of citizenship : law and the labors of emancipation / Hoang Gia Phan.
p. cm.—(America and the long 19th century)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-8147-3847-4 (cl : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-8147-7170-9 (pb : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-0-8147-3893-1 (e)
ISBN 978-0-8147-7192-1 (e)
1. Slaves—Legal status, laws, etc.—United States—History. 2. Citizenship—United States—Philosophy. 3. Citizenship—United States—History. 4. Slavery—United States—History. 5. Indentured
servants—Legal status, laws, etc.—United States—History. 6. Social structure—United States—History. 7. Slavery in literature. 8. Citizenship in literature. 9. Master and servant in literature. I. Title.
KF482.P49 2013
342.7308’7—dc23
2012035343
References to Internet Websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.
A book in the American Literatures Initiative (ALI), a collaborative publishing project of NYU Press, Fordham University Press, Rutgers University Press, Temple University Press, and the University of Virginia Press. The Initiative is supported by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. For more information, please visit www.americanliteratures.org.
For Tho and Lien Phan
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction. “A Man from Another Country”: Citizenship and the Bonds of Labor
1. Bound by Law: Apprenticeship and the Culture of “Free” Labor
2. Civic Virtues: Narrative Form and the Trial of Character in Early America
3. Fugitive Bonds: Contract and the Culture of Constitutionalism
4. Hereditary Bondsman: Frederick Douglass and the Spirit of the Law
5. “If Man Will Strike”: Moby-Dick and the Letter of the Law
Conclusion. The Labors of Emancipation: Founded Law and Freedom Defined
Notes
About the Author
Acknowledgments
This book has benefited from the intellectual and material support of many. At the University of California, Berkeley, I was fortunate to work closely with Stephen Best, Colleen Lye, and Samuel Otter. Individually and collectively they inspired and challenged me as this project first took shape. A special word of gratitude goes to Stephen for his invaluable support and encouragement of the project throughout its inception and writing. I am grateful also to Angela Harris for sharing her legal expertise as reader and interlocutor.
The University of California, Berkeley, and the Berkeley English Department provided much-needed institutional support for my research in its early stages. Over the course of the project, additional support was provided by the Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities; the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; Williams College; the University of Massachusetts, Amherst; and the Five Colleges, Incorporated. The Law and Humanities Junior Scholar Workshop held at Columbia Law School (2003) afforded me the opportunity to share my work with a brilliant grouping of scholars. I thank David Eng, Katherine Franke, Cheryl Harris, Daniel Hulsebosch, Teemu Ruskola, and Austin Sarat for their suggestions during discussion. Special thanks to Walter Johnson, whose illuminating commentary on my paper for the Workshop helped me to refine this book’s historical arguments. Audiences at New York University, Williams College, and the Five Colleges also provided productive dialogue. At the University at Albany, SUNY, Bret Benjamin, Rosemary Hennessey, and Mike Hill encouraged and pushed my research further, while sharing their own work with me and giving generously of their time to mentor me as a junior colleague.
At the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, I am grateful to many English Department colleagues for their support and research stimulus: Nick Bromell, Suzanne Daly, Laura Doyle, Mason Lowance, Asha Nadkarni, Jordana Rosenberg, TreaAndrea Russworm, Joseph Skerrett, Jenny Spencer, and Ron Welburn. I am especially grateful to Ruth Jennison, my comrade at Berkeley long before we became colleagues at UMass, for these many years of intellectual collaboration. I want to thank also my colleagues in the W. E. B. Du Bois Department of Afro-American Studies, whose work is a model of interdisciplinary scholarship: Amilcar Shabazz, Manisha Sinha, James Smethurst, and Steven Tracy. The following pages have also benefited immensely from the scrupulous attention of the readers for NYU Press. I am grateful for the support of my series editors, David Kazanjian, Elizabeth McHenry, and Priscilla Wald. NYU Press editor-in-chief Eric Zinner supported this book project from its very beginning. I thank him and assistant editor Ciara McLaughlin for guiding me through the publication