Frederick Douglass's Travels

Douglass is an interesting figure because he has two transatlantic personas. The first is as a fugitive slave and abolitionist when he takes his two year journey to Ireland and Great Britain in 1845. The second is as post minister to Haiti and wealthy cosmopolitan traveler in the late nineteenth century. Fionnghuala Sweeney's book Frederick Douglass and the Atlantic World has got me thinking about how best to address his work in this chapter. Initially, I was going to deal primarily with "The Heroic Slave" and insurrection and mutiny, but I don't know if that's going to cut it. Part of the problem is that Douglass, far more than either Stowe or Delany, revisits maritime scenes in his writing over and over from his early days learning to write by watching the ship builders' markings in Baltimore, to his apprenticeship as a ship's caulker, to his sailor's disguise when he makes his escape, to his subsequent trips to Ireland, Africa, and Haiti. Haiti in particular is something he revisits in his writing both during abolition and in the Reconstruction Era.

The answer might be to deal with "The Heroic Slave" in two different registers. The first would be as I intended: within the context of the 1850 and the history of insurrection and mutiny. The second would be in the context of Douglass's larger project of self-fashioning through rewriting his autobiography. In a similar fashion to how Delany seems to return to Africa as a way of reversing the Middle Passage, Douglass seems to write about his voyages as a way of reconfiguring his view of the sea away from that first apostrophe as he looked over Chesapeake Bay in The Narrative of the Life. Between 1845 and 1882, Douglass goes from yearning to be on the "gallant decks" of the ships leaving Baltimore, to observing of voyage to Egypt that "Nothing in my American experience...ever gave me such a deep sense of unearthly silence, such a sense of vast profound, unbroken sameness and solitude, as did this passage" (Douglass, Autobiographies, 1008).The yearning in the latter quote is quite different from the that of the Chesapeake Bay soliloquy. There is something of Melville's Ishmael in his tone. Yet if being bound to the shore is representative of bondage to him, this "sameness and solitude" smacks more of desolation than anything else.

There's also the issue of Haiti. Prior to the Civil War he invokes Haiti to both point to a successful slave revolution and to talk up how white fears of slave insurrection are behind the United States' failure to recognize Haiti as a sovereign nation. After the Civil War Haiti represented the best argument against white hegemony as a black republic, despite its persistent instability.

I'm not sure how much of the Reconstruction era Douglass stuff is going to go in there but it's worth knowing about at any rate. Maybe I can somehow address it in the Billy Budd chapter as a way of demonstrating how these issues persisted after the Civil War.

Looking Ahead

I promised myself I wouldn't start writing until August but I'm thinking about revising that since I'm feeling antsy about all the stuff I have swirling around in my head. I'm probably going to spend another week reading and taking notes and then start outlining and generating some close readings of the texts I've read. I also need to organize my notes and figure out what I have the jettison and what needs more research. I think sticking to looking at Dred as my main text is still the right way to go but I also really need to figure out a better way to incorporate Douglass and Delany into that analysis. Here is a loose sense of how I'm going to organize the chapter.

The 1850s
I'm going to need to narrate the history following the Compromise of 1850 i.e. John Brown and bleeding Kansas, the abolitionist debates over black assimilation versus emigration, and pro-slaver supporters arguments in favor of the annexation of Cuba. More than that I need to the way these debates are echoes and continuations of the earlier abolitionist debates in Great Britain. Specifically, how desire for access to the Caribbean sugar market and fear of a black Cuba reenact issues surrounding the rise of the sugar plantation, the expansion of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and eventually the Haitian revolution. In the case of abolitionist debates over emigration, I need to tease out how emigration acts as a reversal of the trauma of the Middle Passage, the desire for return not merely about being a homecoming and the establishment of a black republic, but also a desire for a founding narrative, in which equality with white Americans established through an origin story similar say to the founding of Plymouth Rock.

Stowe
The journey she takes from Uncle Tom's Cabin to Dred is an interesting one involving both the influence of Douglass, critiques from Delany and others regarding the representation of slaves, and her trip to England prior to writing Dred. This last one is a bit flimsy but I think Clarkson and the British fight is on her mind during the gestational period of this novel. The character of Dred and the setting of the swamp allow her to negotiate both the present and the past in presenting abolition as the outcome of a longer history.

Revolution, Insurrection, Mutiny and the Slave Ship
The slave ship is a fraught image in this moment. On the one hand the Transatlantic slave trade has technically been abolished. But as Blake shows us, and as the Amistad, Tryal, and Creole cases also demonstrate, the slave ship won't go away. The slave ship mutinies and the slave insurrections provide rhetorical moments for abolitionists to invoke both the Haitian and American revolutions.

The Literary Representation of the Slave
Not sure where this is leading exactly but it seems to me that some of the problems I introduced in the first chapter on Grainger and Equiano become even more fraught, especially in the wake of the Compromise of 1850 and the Dred Scott decision. Douglass and Delany in particular use these texts about insurrection as a way of making opposite points in a way. Douglass ties Madison Washington to the history of the American Revolution as a way of creating an American identity for his character. Delany's Blake is more of a Moses figure leading people away from the States to some never-seen promised land. Stowe is a bit trickier. While Dred at once seem to be merely a representation of other insurrectionists from history she seems less concerned with creating an accurate black revolutionary figure than she is in using him to discuss abolitionists need to recognize themselves as fellow insurrectionists as well as highlighting the role of pro-slavery violence in creating these insurrectionist figures.

The Maritime Imaginary
Hopefully by the time I work these other things out, I'll have a clearer sense of how they play into the role of the maritime in abolitionist texts. For the moment though I'm stuck on this quote from "The Heroic Slave" (1853)

During all the storm, Madison stood firmly at the helm,— his keen eye fixed upon the binnacle. He was not indifferent to the dreadful hurricane; yet he met it with the equanimity of an old sailor. He was silent but not agitated. The first words he uttered after the storm had slightly subsided, were characteristic of the man. 'Mr. Mate, you cannot write the bloody laws of slavery on those restless billows. The ocean, if not the land, is free.'(Douglass 237)

A vexed statement if there ever was one. On the one hand he's correct. The opportunity for mutiny while at sea demonstrates the illusion of authority aboard a ship. On the other hand it seems to me that the kind of freedom attained through mutiny epitomizes the problem of negative freedom, a freedom from tyranny but not necessarily enfranchisement.

Race and Representation

It occurred to me today as I was alternating between Blake and Levine's book on Delany and Douglass that it's high time for a Douglass biopic. Better yet, an HBO miniseries. Douglass has always seemed to be an impossible figure to cast but for a while now I've thought Jeffery Wright might make a good match. He's still young enough that he could transition from younger Douglass to elder Douglass rather believably. The two problems with him are the voice and the height. Wright may be a trifle too short, but it Joaquin Phoenix can get away with playing Johnny Cash...

Because I still have The Wire on the brain I thought Idris Elba might make a good Martin Delany.

Not bad, you think?

Re-reading Blake is painfully slow but there's too much stuff to ignore. It's fascinating the way in which Delany's back to Africa emigration rhetoric echoes both Clarkson and Equiano in both the potential for Africa to yield riches outside of slavery and in terms of emigrated blacks as "raw material" for new nation builders. What's really strange is how he remains so pro-Christian, even to the point of denigrating native Africans, despite his contempt for the role for prayer over action in some abolitionist circles. A fascinating man, Martin Delany.

Once again it's shaming to realize how much I've pushed aside in just this one decade (1850-1860). Both Levine and Sundquist write about the desire of many in both the North and South to annex Cuba for it's sugar supply. For the South, this is also part of what fuels their push to extend slavery into the Western Territories. Turn the Gulf of Mexico into a sort of miniature version of the Atlantic Triangle (Sundquist, Empire and Slavery in American Literature 1820-1865), even to the point of wanting to reopen the Transatlantic slave trade. Delany's staging a rebellion there is both a reflection of abolitionist anxieties over what the annexation could mean for the extension of slavery in the States, and a strange sort of reenactment of the Haitian revolution.

Thinking about anxieties over Cuba really clarifies why Haiti might be on people's tongues for reasons other than insurrection. I'm thinking of taking a look at Life and Times next to get more of a sense of Douglass's own thoughts on both Haiti and Cuba next.

Is Dred the antebellum Boogey Man?

I'm rereading Stowe's Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp and thinking about the problem of the figure of the slave in abolitionist literature a post-revolutionary context. It's a problem I outlined in my first chapter and still haven't quite figured out how to flesh it out fully.

One of the things that has always fascinated me about Dred is the say that it displays Stowe's own evolving thought processes regarding both abolition. On the one hand she writes with an eye towards addressing critiques of the figure of Uncle Tom, allowing some space for black rage in an abolitionist text. On the other, she can't quite bring herself to imagine the revolt itself, let alone the possible success of such a revolt. I'm alternating my re-reading of Dred with Bob Levine's book Martin Delany, Frederick Douglass, and the politics of Representative Identity. In chapter 4 he notes that Stowe in her appendix containing Thomas Gray's Confessions of Nat Turner she excises any mention of the fate of Turner's accomplices. In suggesting that the hammer has yet to definitively fall on the Turner Insurrection, Levine sees Stowe as "rhetorically participating in the political terror inspired by the heroic tradition of the black heroic deliverer as embodied both by [Nat] Turner and her fictional creation Dred" (Levine 174). I've never really thought of the text in this way, although if one is looking at the text as something of a corrective for Uncle Tom's Cabin it makes a certain amount of sense.

Yet I can't quite let go of this nagging feeling that there still something squeamish in Stowe's treatment of violence. Part of it is that Dred isn't just an combination of real-life conspirators Vesey and Turner, but an amalgamation of both literary and real-life figures of slave insurrection going all the way back to Behn's Oroonoko. Turner and Vesey themselves are already imbued with a certain kind of spectral dread (no pun intended) because of this longer history, both in terms of slavery, insurrection and the Haitian Revolution and the literature that accompanies them. This makes Dred almost a comfortably familiar figure upon which to foist white American anxieties regarding insurrection. Part of Melville's genius in Benito Cereno was taking this image of that tall Coramantee-like warrior and making him the decoy for the real leader, wee Babo.

Violence is probably not the thing that Stowe is squeamish about but rather the dislocation of it from familiar sites be they these maroon swamp communities or in threatening slave figures. What if Old Tiff suddenly snapped and massacred the Cripps?

These are mostly older thoughts but I'm revisiting them both as way of recapturing some of the questions that initially drew to this text. I think in the same way that Grainger struggled to reconcile the virtue of production with the evils of slavery, Stowe struggles to deal with the violence of insurrection in a way that both embraces the rights of black to rebel and yet keeps it at a distance.