confirmed their view of the Constitution as a document whose wording was deliberately “equivocal and ambiguous,” not only in its avoidance of the term “slave” but also in its positive inscription of them as “other persons” in the apportionment clause. Wilson’s suggestion for how to include slaves in the apportionment clause, proposed as a matter of “compromise” and avoiding “umbrage” through indirection, reveals the central political-economic truth of the slave’s absent presence in the Constitution, and the bondsman’s role as citizenship’s vanishing mediator. As that “peculiar species of property” whose labor produced surplus value, the slave was “originally intended” to be included only for the purposes of taxation.36 In a slaveholding nation adhering to the republican “principle of representation,” however, there could be no taxation of the enslaved as wealth-producing property without the indirect, partial representation of them as “other persons.”
If this history of the legal form of the three-fifths clause highlights the centrality of bond labor to the Constitution and to its inscription of political representation, as one of the fundamental rights of modern citizenship, it also underscores the framers’ understanding of slavery as a peculiar form of labor bondage in a broader spectrum of labor exploitation. In 1776, John Adams asserted that “the difference” between poor freeman and slave “as to the state was imaginary only” when considering them as wealth-producing laborers.37 In 1787, the Constitution’s provision for the apportionment of representation and taxation regarded those who were “bound to service for a term of years” as “free persons.” And as the framers debated the precise language of the apportionment provision’s distinction between these bound-yet-free persons and enslaved “other persons,” “the word ‘servitude’ was struck out, and ‘service’ unanimously inserted, the former being thought to express the condition of slaves, and the latter the obligations of free persons.”38 The broader Atlantic cultural history of this “imaginary” legal distinction between those free laborers “bound to service” and those slave laborers described by Publius as “debased by servitude below the equal level of free inhabitants” reveals the interdependence of slavery and servitude in the racialization of freedom and modern citizenship (FP 339). In the transatlantic eighteenth-century texts I examine together in this chapter, the bondsman figures as an allegory of transformation, a transitional state of passage by which the subject attains the freedom of independent self-mastery.
Visible and Invisible Characters in Letters from an American Farmer
For Hector St. John de Crèvecœur, the question, “What then is the American, this new man?” was answered by a “man from another country,” the immigrant: “Ubi panis ibi patria is the motto of all emigrants.”39 Letters from an American Farmer is regularly invoked in nationalist histories of American literature; yet with this motto and throughout Letters, Crèvecœur focuses on the economic conditions of national affiliation, emphasizing the distinction between the “national” consciousness necessary to the imagined community of the nation on the one hand and the nationalist ideology of patriotism on the other.40Significant to this distinction is the narrative fact that Crèvecœur’s emigrant is represented first as a figure of disaffiliation, and the failures of nationalist interpellation. Describing “the poor of Europe [who] have by some means met together” in America, Crèvecœur’s Farmer James asks rhetorically:
To what purpose should they ask one another what countrymen they are? Alas, two thirds of them had no country. Can a wretch, who wanders about, who works and starves, whose life is a continual scene of sore affliction or pinching penury; can that man call England or any other kingdom his country? A country that had no bread for him; whose fields procured him no harvest; who met with nothing but the frowns of the rich, the severity of the laws, with jails and punishments; who owned not a single foot of the extensive surface of this planet[?] (Letters 42)
Thus even as he introduces the question—“What then is the American?”—that would become central to later nationalist cultural projects, Crèvecœur’s American farmer focuses on the immigrant, this “new man,” as a figure that previously “had no country.” He cannot identify with a “country that had no bread for him”: Ubi panis ibi patria.
The recurring point of this famous Letter III is that individual subjects are tied to the nation not through affective bonds of “attachment” (Letters 43) but by the Lockean political-economic bonds of private property: “The American ought therefore to love this country much better than that wherein either he or his forefathers were born. Here the rewards of his industry follow, with equal steps, the progress of his labour. His labour is founded on the basis of nature, self-interest: can it want a stronger allurement?” (Letters 44).The series of contrasts between the lives of common men in Europe and the lives of common men in America all turn on the rewards of this self-interested labor: “From involuntary idleness, servile dependence, penury, and useless labour, he has passed to toils of a very different nature, rewarded by ample subsistence.—This is an American” (Letters 45). This economic basis of the immigrant’s answer to the question of American identity continues throughout the later, famously pessimistic Letters, and indeed accounts for that very pessimism: the “Distresses of the Frontier Man” in Letter XII are initiated by the destruction of these economic bonds by the American War of Independence, which he calls “this unfortunate revolution” (Letters 191).
The central concern of Letter III is to explain the “metamorphosis” of the poor laboring immigrant from Europe, identified as a “man without a country,” into the American, which Crèvecœur’s Farmer James does by telling the “History of Andrew, the Hebridean” as “an epitome of the rest” (Letters 57). In tracing Andrew’s “metamorphosis” (59), Crèvecœur’s American farmer narrates an allegory of subject-formation, via the “invisible power” of political economy. The immigrant begins as a bond laborer, a servant indentured to a master, acquiring both technical training and moral cultivation through this “apprenticeship” (74). After fulfilling his contract and earning his freedom dues, he “become[s] a freeholder, possessed of a vote, of a place of residence, a citizen” (79): “From nothing, to start into being; from a servant, to the rank of master; from being a slave of some despotic prince, to become a free man, invested with lands.…It is in consequence of that change that he becomes an American” (59). By way of the Lockean telos of this transformational allegory, Crèvecœur’s ultimate answer to the question, “What is an American?” is that the “American” is an immigrant, who through his labors and “the laws of naturalization” (59) becomes a citizen, “performing as a citizen all the duties required of him” (82). He is one of those to whom Luther Martin referred when objecting to the Constitution’s “migration and importation clause”: a “foreigner who comes into a State to become a citizen,” coming not “absolutely free” but rather “qualifiedly so, as a servant.”41 His voluntary labor bondage serves as the ideal path to the freedom of American citizenship.
As representative “epitome of the rest,” the history of Andrew the Hebridean introduces into American literature several narrative tropes which will recur throughout the debates over the cultural characteristics of this ultimate figure, the “citizen.” The first is that already introduced in the structure of Andrew’s metamorphosis: the political coming-into-being of the citizen is based on the socioeconomic model of the passage from dependent servitude to independent self-mastery. The other tropes emerge within this structure of transformation and, like this larger structure, depend on the primacy of labor. First, there is the trope of “incorporation” (the eighteenth-century term for assimilation), which we have seen staged by those laboring poor who previously “had no country” but then, following “the motto of all emigrants,” become “American.” This first trope names the narrative structure of that process of assimilation mediating between the individual subject and the civic community. Second, there is the related trope of “visible character,” Crèvecœur’s name for the social recognition of this assimilating subject, and the figure for the public persona of that subject of citizenship divided between “invisible character” and “visible character” (Letters 50).
Crèvecœur introduces