in literary and legal discourses of race, labor, and citizenship, between the early republican period and the mid-nineteenth century. By beginning with this earlier period, my study shows how many of the concepts and themes central to nineteenth-century literature, law, and civic culture—such as freedom of mobility; or the opposition between private conscience and public law—have intellectual precursors and formal models in the literature of the late eighteenth century.
In the second part of my argument (chapters 3, 4, and 5), I study how citizenship was transformed by antebellum debates over slavery, free labor, and national union. While other studies have explored how slavery shaped the definition of freedom in antebellum America, few have examined how developments in the world of wage labor, such as changes in contract law, the movement for the ten-hour workday, or the rise of “free labor” ideology itself, influenced legal and cultural understandings of slavery, and conceptions of slave personhood. As I argue in these chapters, citizenship was the legal form through which slave law and wage-labor law articulated their representations of free personhood, and the attributes of subjectivity required for such personhood. Chapter 3, “Fugitive Bonds: Contract and the Culture of Constitutionalism,” is organized around the reconfigurations of race, labor, and national citizenship during the Union crisis. Specifically, I examine the split within the antislavery movement between two radically opposed understandings of the constitutionality of slavery. I frame the chapter with a study of Frederick Douglass’s speeches and editorials immediately prior to and immediately following the 1850 Compromise, in order to track the development of Douglass’s shift from the Garrisonian position, which read the Constitution as a proslavery document, to the political- abolitionist position, which read the Constitution as fully opposed “in letter and spirit” to slavery. As we have seen, Douglass’s writings on the Constitution elaborated the trope of “a man from another country,” the figure for a legal hermeneutic whose perspective locates constitutional “intention” exclusively in the letter of the law. In this chapter, I historicize this trope as well as Douglass’s shift more generally, and I ground the changes in the culture of constitutionalism in the debates over slavery and free labor. I do so through related analyses of Joseph Story’s Commentaries on the Constitution of the United States (1833); the Supreme Court decision in Prigg v. Pennsylvania (1842); Wendell Phillips’s The Constitution: A Pro-Slavery Compact (1844); and Lysander Spooner’s The Unconstitutionality of Slavery (1845), all of which debated the Constitution’s “original intent” regarding slavery. Further, I historicize the slavery debates themselves in relation to transformations in contract and labor law initiated with the antebellum market revolution.57 In doing so, I make the case for a new understanding of the historical links between abolitionism, free-labor ideology, and the social construction of “race.”
Building upon the revisionary historical arguments of the third chapter, chapter 4, “Hereditary Bondsman: Frederick Douglass and the Spirit of the Law,” advances a new interpretation of Douglass’s My Bondage and My Freedom (1855). If historians and literature scholars have underestimated the radical character of Douglass’s change of political views in the 1850s, they have also underestimated the significance of Douglass’s changed self-representation in My Bondage and My Freedom. The dominant critical and popular understandings of Douglass remain based on the 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, published when Douglass still adhered to the Garrisonian view of the Constitution as a “pro-slavery compact.” As I argue, Douglass’s transformed political views led to significant changes in the content and the form of his literary self-representation, from revisions of formative episodes in his life to changes in narrative structure and point of view. I focus in particular on the representations of slave women in My Bondage and My Freedom to describe Douglass’s transformed understanding of the relation between gender and racial classifications; and on the depictions of Douglass’s “apprenticeship life” to describe his transformed understanding of the political and economic links between slave labor, “free labor,” and the formal freedom of American citizenship.
The slavery debates underscored a tension inherent in the very figure of modern citizenship, between the private self (of morality and ethics) and the public self (of market and law). As I discuss in chapter 3, for example, antislavery activists laid claim to the truths of the private self—“moral law,” or “the higher law” of God—over and against the demands of positive law and civic duty. In the first two chapters, I describe this figure as the “split subject” of citizenship: the individual citizen understood as structured by this central division between private self and public persona. In chapter 5, “‘If Man Will Strike’: Moby-Dick and the Letter of the Law,” I read Melville’s novel as a symbolic mediation of the transformations in this “split subject” of citizenship caused by the antebellum market revolution. My readings historicize the novel in relation to the labor struggles of this period: “criminal conspiracy” labor cases, labor strikes, and the transformations of contract law. In contrast to influential readings of Ahab as a “dictator” or “totalitarian” figure, I read Ahab as a romantic figure of resistance to the market and the rule of law. In the historical perspective advanced in this chapter, the hunt for Moby-Dick is a battle against the expansion of the rule of law—an expansion which Melville depicts as the colonization of individual and collective freedoms by the nation-state.
1. Bound by Law: Apprenticeship and the Culture of “Free” Labor
The “case of the slaves,” Publius declared in The Federalist No. 54, “is in truth a peculiar one.”1 Discussing the “three-fifths clause” of the Constitution’s provision for apportionment of representation and taxation (art. 1, § 2, clause 3), Publius was not pleading the case of the slaves, but rather advocating the view of “our Southern brethren” the slaveholders, and appealing for “compromise” over the inclusion of three-fifths of their slaves in the Constitution’s “numerical rule of representation” (FP 336). During the 1787 convention as well as the ratification debates for which The Federalist Papers were written, it was the three-fifths clause of the apportionment provision, more than any other “slave clause,” that highlighted the ambiguity of the slave’s form of appearance in the letter of the law, and exposed the contradictions of political representation in a slaveholding nation. Gouverneur Morris, the Pennsylvania delegate credited with writing the Constitution’s celebrated preamble, highlighted this direct link between political representation and the rights of modern citizenship in his objections to the three-fifths clause: “Upon what principle is it that the slaves shall be computed in the representation? Are they men? Then make them citizens, and let them vote. Are they property? Why, then, is not other property included?”2 Like Morris, many nonslaveholding state delegates objected to any inclusion of slaves in the apportionment clause, as against the very “principle of representation.”3Slaveholding state delegates insisted, however, that their slaves be included in this “numerical rule of representation” on the grounds that the labor of these enslaved “other persons” contributed to the wealth of the nation. It was during these debates over the “true principle of representation” and this fundamental conception of modern citizenship that slavery emerged as the central point of division in the new nation.4
It was also in these debates that the Constitution first came to be described as a matter of “compact” between states with differing economic interests, requiring “compromise.”5 Because the case of the slaves was so peculiar, Publius continued: “Let the compromising expedient of the Constitution be mutually adopted which regards them as inhabitants, but as debased by servitude below the equal level of free inhabitants; which regards the slave as divested of two fifths of the man” (FP 339, emphasis in original). This characterization was a misleading rhetorical conceit, insofar as it implied that a slave was regarded in law as “divested” of manhood or humanity, rather than divested of legal rights and attributes. Historically, it has led to judicial and popular misunderstandings of the status of the slave in the original Constitution, and to critical misunderstandings of how slave personhood was recognized by state and society in the late eighteenth century. Yet there was partial truth in the characterization, insofar as slaves were regarded, by slaveholders and antislavery reformers alike, as “debased by servitude”; and they were included in the calculus of this constitutional