Hostname: page-component-78c5997874-m6dg7 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-05T11:02:24.153Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Frederick Douglass and the Work of Freedom: Hegel's Master-Slave Dialectic in the Fugitive Slave Narrative

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 July 2009

Leonard Cassuto
Get access

Extract

When Frederick L. Olmstead came face to face with slavery in his travels through the South, he wrote that it was “difficult” to treat a human as property, but “embarrass[ing]” to treat property as human. Olmstead's dilemma encapsulates the difficulties that white slaveholders had in objectifying their slaves. American slaveholders tried to treat the slave as property, but couldn't consistently maintain that stance because they understood all along that the slave was human. Furthermore, the owners had to exploit that humanity in daily practice in order to manage the slave as property. Alexis de Tocqueville saw this conflict in action when he visited the South and witnessed the treatment of slaves: “Not wishing to raise them to their own level, [the owners] keep them as close to the beasts as possible” (emphasis added). Tocqueville's qualification is important. The masters do not succeed in turning the slaves into beasts; they can only approximate doing so. (The “almost” that Tocqueville includes in the epigraph quotation above further suggests this key gap.) Tocqueville's phrasing shows that he sees slaves as people who are being degraded to the status of objects — but who are nonetheless not objects. Moreover, Tocqueville's use of “we” suggests that he is not the only one who sees them as people. For Tocqueville and others unnamed, the slaves retain their human connection. They are not things, but people who are being uneasily forced into the category of “thing.”

Type
Research Article
Information
Prospects , Volume 21 , October 1996 , pp. 229 - 259
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1996

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

NOTES

1. See Olmstead, Frederick L.'s A Journey in the Back Country (1858)Google Scholar, quoted in Stampp, Kenneth M., The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (New York: Knopf, 1956), 193.Google Scholar Among historians of slavery, Stampp shows particular sensitivity to the conflict generated by objectification, reflected in the need to see the slave simultaneously as “chattel personal,” a human being requiring food and clothing (and who is to be uplifted by exposure to “civilized” culture), and a simple piece of goods to be bought, sold, or bartered (Peculiar Institution, ch. 5).

2. In teaching and assigning tasks, for example, the master acknowledged the slave's human intelligence. David Brion Davis calls attention to this paradox in The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1966).Google Scholar

3. de Tocqueville, Alexis, Democracy in America, book I, ed. Mayer, J. P., trans. Lawrence, George (New York: Doubleday Anchor, 1969), 361Google Scholar; epigraph quotation at 342.

4. Mintz, Sidney and Price, Richard, The Birth of African-American Culture: An Anthropological Approach (Boston: Beacon, 1992), 25.Google Scholar Anthropologists Mintz and Price emphasize that “slaves were defined as property; but, being human, they were called upon to act in sentient, articulate, and human ways” (25). As will become clear, I do not see the American slaveholder admitting the humanity of his property so easily, at least not consciously. The master's reluctance to recognize the slave becomes the source of continued struggle.

5. Blacks were legally liminal and ambiguously human in America from the beginning. Slavery laws antedated the Constitution, a document that itself treated slaves as people and property at the same time. The Connecticut Compromise, a crucial agreement between North and South at the Constitutional Convention, dictated that each slave was worth three-fifths of a (white male) person for purposes of representation. David Brion Davis shows how the political compromises made for the sake of united rebellion against the crown may have allowed the peculiar institution to endure much longer in the United States than it otherwise would have. Debate on interstate slave commerce, for example, centered in part of whether the word “slaves” would better serve in the text than “persons” (“The Constitution and the Slave Trade,” in American Negro Slavery, 3rd ed., ed. Weinstein, Allen, Gatell, Frank Otto, and Sarasohn, David [New York: Oxford University Press, 1979], 27)Google Scholar.

James Codman Hurd's 1858 study documented a gradual accretion over time of statutes that acknowledged the slave's humanity, including laws against starving slaves, protecting slave life and limb, and the like (Rose, Willie Lee, Slavery and Freedom, ed. Freehling, William W. [New York: Oxford University Press, 1982], 23–24).Google Scholar James Oakes discusses the masters' consequent legal quandaries in his later book of the same title (Slavery and Freedom: An Interpretation of the Old South [New York: Knopf, 1990], esp. 125–26).Google Scholar

6. Rose, Willie Lee, A Documentary History of Slavery in North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 192, 177Google Scholar; and Cobb, Thomas R. R., An Inquiry into the Law of Negro Slavery in the United States of America (1858)Google Scholar, quoted in Rose, , Documentary History, 199.Google Scholar

7. See Catterall, Helen T., Judicial Cases Concerning American Slavery and the Negro (Washington, D.C.: Carnegie Institute of Washington, 1929), 1: 318.Google Scholar Harriet Beecher Stowe also cites the murder case (Souther v. The Commonwealth, 1850)Google Scholar in the appendix to Dred [(New York: AMS, 1967), 2: 218–19]. Kenneth Stampp gives a lively legal survey of the convoluted state slave codes (Peculiar Institution, 206–31).Google Scholar He connects the inconsistency of the courts' treatment of the slave's status to a similar inconsistency on the parts of individual slaveholders (193).

8. Douglass, Frederick, “What to a Slave Is the Fourth of July?” in The Frederick Douglass Papers, Series One: Speeches, Debates, and Interviews, ed. Blassingame, John W. et al. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982), 2: 371.Google Scholar

9. All of these theories, informed by an historical view of the African as “savage,” made appearances in proslavery literature at one time or another.

10. Patterson, Orlando, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982), 322.Google Scholar

11. See Patterson, , Slavery and Social DeathGoogle Scholar, ch. 2 (esp. 51–62). Patterson also cites shaving as a marginalizing practice, but argues that it was less important in America because the difference between Caucasian and Negro hair was a major identifying badge of slavery here (61). (It is nonetheless worth pointing out that the shaving of captives did take place on American slave ships.) For other historical evidence of mutilation of slaves, see Stampp, , Peculiar Institution (188–89)Google Scholar; and Davis, , Problem of Slavery in Western Culture, (48–49).Google Scholar Winthrop Jordan links the castration of slaves in early America to a fear of the “aggressive” and “uncivilized” sexuality of Negroes (White Over Black [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968], 154–59).Google Scholar One is reminded in this case of the grisly castration scene at the end of Faulkner, William's Light in AugustGoogle Scholar, in which the mulatto Joe Christmas is mutilated before he is killed.

A terrifying fictional example of how physical mutilation becomes a component of social death is Bowles, Paul's “A Distant Episode” (in Collected Stories, 1939–1976 [Santa Rosa, Calif.: Black Sparrow, 1986], 39–49)Google Scholar, in which a linguist's tongue is cut out as a preliminary to his transformation into a mindless captive clown.

12. The following discussion of Hegel (whose tightly involuted style has fueled a large critical industry) is informed in part by the lucid analyses by Cooper, Barry (The End of History: An Essay on Modern Hegelianism [Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1984])CrossRefGoogle Scholar, Kojève, Alexander, (Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on The Phenomenology of the Spirit, ed. Bloom, Allan, trans. Nichols, James Jr [Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980])Google Scholar, Shklar, Judith N., (Freedom and Independence: A Study of the Political Ideas of Hegel's Phenomenology of Mind [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976])Google Scholar, and Smith, Steven B. (Hegel's Critique of Liberalism [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989]).Google Scholar Of these, Koj`ve's reading is probably the most influential, having acquired a legendary status in many Hegelian circles that has given it an intellectual life of its own.

13. Shklar, , quotations at 58–59.Google Scholar

14. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, The Encyclopedia Logic, trans. Geraets, T. F., Suchtins, W. A., and Harris, H. S. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991), 241.Google Scholar

15. Shklar, , Freedom and Independence, 61.Google Scholar

16. Kenneth Stampp was the first to dissect the contradictory paternalism of the peculiar institution. Though Stampp was no Hegelian, his reasoning is similar to Hegel's when he says that the unarticulated goal of slavebreaking was to take the slave's identity away and instill in her or him not just obedience but absolute submission accompanied by a genuine desire to serve (Peculiar Institution, 143–48).Google Scholar Predictably, the latter need for recognition was not met; it was either resisted by the slave (examples of which I examine here) or else the master found in the slave's obedience not love but fear (381). Hegel argues that the broken slave offers no useful recognition at all, creating an ultimately unsolvable problem for the master. Patterson accepts Hegel's version of the slave's dilemma up to a point, but he accords the slave a good deal more flexibility in response and awareness of the master's paradoxical dependence on him. Moreover, Patterson strongly disagrees with Hegel about the extent of the master's dependence, arguing that the slaveholder could and did receive recognition from other members of his community, such as other masters (Slavery and Social Death, 334–42, 99–100)Google Scholar.

See also Stanley Elkins's controversial analysis (and the many debates that it occasioned) of the Sambo stereotype as a role-playing survival strategy of the slave in response to expectation of childlike behavior by the master, who believed that his slaves were enjoying their place as he enjoyed his own (Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968], 122–32).Google Scholar

17. Friedrich Hegel, Georg Wilhelm, Phenomenology of Spirit, transl. Miller, A. V. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1977), 118–19.Google Scholar

18. Smith, , Hegel's Critique, 120.Google Scholar

19. This unhappy self-consciousness is part of Hegel's account of the historical process. As I am concerned primarily with Hegel's treatment of the objectification idea, my own summary stops here. But the disequilibrium between unfulfilled master and actualized - and now dissatisfied - slave moves forward into Stoicism, Skepticism, and beyond; thus, according to Hegel, slavery is a condition that is historically surpassed.

20. Aristotle, , PoliticsGoogle Scholar, book I, trans. Jowett, Benjamin, in The Works of Aristotle, ed. Ross, W. D., vol. 10 (Oxford: Clarendon, 1921), ch. 4, 1253; and book I, ch. 6, 1255.Google Scholar

21. Orlando Patterson reconfigures Hegel's dialectic in terms of parasitism, focusing on the master's paradoxical dependence on the slave (Slavery and Social Death, 334–42).Google Scholar I am concerned here with the slave's achievement of consciousness and the case of open rebellion (which is, as Patterson says, one possible outcome of that consciousness).

22. Friedrich Hegel, Georg Wilhelm, The Philosophy of History, trans. Sibree, J. (New York: Dover, 1956), 93–99.Google Scholar

23. MrsSchoolcraft, Henry R. quotes Hegel at some length in The Black Gauntlet: A Tale of Plantation Life in South Carolina (New York: Negro Universities Press, 1969)Google Scholar, her 1860 novel extolling and defending slavery (405).

24. Davis, David Brion, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, 1770–1823 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1975), 558.Google Scholar Most of the analysis of Hegel that I could find in African-American literary criticism - with two notable exceptions - centers on The Philosophy of History. The most challenging, least dismissive treatment of that work is by James A. Snead, who uses Hegel's progressively cyclical model of history as the basis for reading black culture in terms of performance. Snead sees Hegel's “simply negative” reading of black culture as only the beginning of a cycle of repetition that contributes to an “ongoing reconciliation” of European and black culture (“Repetition as a Figure of Black Culture,” in Black Literature and Literary Theory, ed. Gates, Henry Louis Jr [New York: Methuen, 1984], 63, 75)Google Scholar.

In the specific case of the slave narrative, Charles T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates Jr. point to the Hegelian implications of the slave's act of autobiography, but only to rebuke Hegel's views on Africa (The Slave's Narrative [New York: Oxford University Press, 1985], xxviiiGoogle Scholar; see also Gates's separate indictment of Hegel in Figures in Black: Words, Signs, and the “Racial” Self [New York: Oxford University Press, 1987], 105–6).Google Scholar Another rare mention of Hegel in the critical literature of the slave narrative is by Donald Wesling, who says that the historical specificity of narratives like Douglass's are “a reproach to Hegel,” whose discussion is abstract and general (“Writing as Power in the Slave Narrative of the Early Republic,” Michigan Quarterly Review 26 [1987]: 460).Google Scholar The following pages may be read in significant part as a disagreement with these blanket condemnations.

The two exceptions, both very recent, to this widespread literary neglect of the Phenomenology (and more specifically, the master-slave dialectic) are Eric Sundquist's and Paul Gilroy's recent books, in which they persuasively outline the applicability of Hegel's master-slave dialectic to Frederick Douglass's situation (Sundquist, , To Wake the Nations: Race in the Making of American Literature [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993], 123–24Google Scholar; and Gilroy, , The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness [Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993], 60–63).Google Scholar This essay broadens their analysis and applies it to the work performed by the American slave.

Among historians, Eugene D. Genovese has long drawn on Hegel for insight into the slave's situation, even singling out Douglass as evidence on brief occasions. See Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made (New York: Pantheon, 1974), 88–89, 293Google Scholar; and his critique of Sambo, Elkins's thesis (In Red and Black: Marxian Explorations in Southern and Afro-American History [New York: Vantage, 1972], 73–101)Google Scholar, which is underwritten by Hegelian assumptions, and - with Elizabeth Fox-Genovese - the critique of Fogel and Engermann, 's economic thesis in Fruits of Merchant Capital: Slavery and Bourgeois Property in the Rise and Expansion of Capitalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1983), 151.Google Scholar Genovese generally frames his argument in terms of nation - that is, groups of people - rather than the individual. For another notable Hegel-inspired look at the master-slave relationship, see Rose, , Documentary History of Slavery, (11).Google Scholar

25. Cawelti, John G., Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1976), 34–35.Google Scholar

26. Early slave narratives were mostly accounts of conversion; this spiritual tradition provides the foundation and point of departure for the evolution of the genre. The genre became more confrontational and violent during the mid-19th century, as the tradition split into two strands: “providential and inexplicable” narratives and “historical and understandable” ones. Both strands draw on religious ideology and imagery, but the latter thread is the one that includes the popular fugitive slave narratives I am focusing on here (Andrews, William L., To Tell a Free Story: The First Century of Afro-American Autobiography, 1760–1865 [Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986]Google Scholar, chs. 2–4; quotation at 47).

Frances Smith Foster's religious overplot shows how later slave narratives draw on their religious roots. Foster describes the movement of the mature slave narrative as “a Judeo-Christian mythological structure on both the material and the spiritual levels” (Witnessing Slavery: The Development of Antebellum Slave Narratives [Westport, Conn.: Greenwood, 1979], 84).Google Scholar The narrator begins in the Eden of innocence, wanders in the wilderness, struggles for freedom and experiences Providential intervention, and then finally enters the Promised Land of freedom. Loss of innocence corresponds to the slave's discovery of his enslaved state. This is followed by a resolve to be free and a consequent decision to escape. The success of the escape, aided by divine intervention, leads to freedom (85).

27. Andrews, , To Tell a Free Story, 65.Google Scholar See Stephen Gould, Jay, The Mismeasure of Man (New York: W. W. Norton, 1981)Google Scholar; Horsman, Reginald, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981)Google Scholar; and Fredrickson, George M., The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1887–1914 (New York: Harper and Row, 1971).Google Scholar

28. See Sewell, Richard H., Ballots for Freedom: Antislavery Politics in the United States 1837–1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 167–68.Google Scholar The two swing states were New York and Ohio.

29. Cawelti, , Adventure, Mystery, and Romance, 32.Google Scholar

30. See Roediger, David, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London and New York: Verso, 1991)Google Scholar; and Lott, Eric, Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995).Google Scholar Roediger argues that the construction of class was always implicated with race and slavery in the antebellum North. Lott argues that blackface minstrelsy expressed the “racial unconscious” of the Northern working class. Also noteworthy is Saxton, Alexander's The Rise and Fall of the White Republic (London: Verso, 1990)Google Scholar, in which he examines - through its social supports and various cultural symptoms - the social construction of a segregated egalitarian reality for 19th-century American whites that was based on racism.

31. For a demographic profile of the abolitionist movement, see Magdol, Edward, The Antislavery Rank and File (New York: Greenwood, 1986).Google Scholar

32. Among the many literacy-centered readings of Douglass's Narrative (see note 34) Houston Baker's argument that Douglass's future is determined by his discovery of “the power of the word” is possibly the most influential (see The Journey Back: Issues in Black Literature and Criticism [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980], 32–46Google Scholar). Henry Louis Gates Jr. builds on Baker's work when he says that it is Douglass's mastery of white language that makes him into an active historical agent rather than a passive object (Figures in Black, 116–25Google Scholar). Among recent interesting examples, see Goddu, Teresa A. and Smith, Craig V. (“Scenes of Writing in Frederick Douglass's Narrative: Autobiography and the Creation of Self,” Southern Review 25 [1989]: 822–41)Google Scholar, Burt, John (“Learning to Write: The Narrative of Frederick Douglass,” Western Humanities Review 42 [1988]: 330–44)Google Scholar, and especially Eric Sundquist's recent argument that Douglass uses language as a form of self-fathering (“Frederick Douglass: Literacy and Paternalism,” Raritan: A Quarterly Review 6 [1986]: 108–24)Google Scholar. Lucinda Mac-Kethan extends these ideas perhaps the farthest in her reading, arguing that language (as opposed to force or violence) is both the medium and the message of the Covey scene (“From Fugitive Slave to Man of Letters: The Conversion of Frederick Douglass,” Journal of Narrative Technique 16 [1986]: 65)Google Scholar.

As might be expected, almost every reading of Douglass's Narrative cites Douglass's fight with Covey in one context of another. My argument for the formative importance of the actual violence of the episode amounts to a difference of emphasis with these critics rather than a notice of blatant omission. Among previous readers to dwell on the Covey incident in more detail, Ronald Takaki highlights the connection between violence and freedom in Douglass's life (Violence and the Black Imagination: Essays and Documents [New York: Putnam, 1972], 21–22Google Scholar), while David Leverenz highlights the differences in the telling of the scene in Douglass's first two autobiographies, arguing that the first centers on freedom and drama, and the second on manhood and power (“Frederick Douglass's Self-Refashioning,” Criticism 29 [1987]: 341–70Google Scholar). Waldo Martin also sees the fight as a “psychological declaration of independence” (The Mind of Frederick Douglass [Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1984], 47Google Scholar), whereas Donald B. Gibson says that Douglass deemphasizes his escape in order to make the fight with Covey into the climax of the Narrative (“Reconciling Public and Private in Frederick Douglass's Narrative,” American Literature 57 [1985]: 549–69)Google Scholar. In a kind of sequel to that essay, Gibson returns to the fight scene in his recent essay, “Christianity and Individualism: (Re-)Creation and Reality in Frederick Douglass's Representation of Self” (African American Review 26 [1992]: 591–603Google Scholar), in which he argues that the struggle with Covey is the central event in Douglass's realization of his own individuality and of individualism generally. Nancy Bentley has recently and persuasively read the Covey scene as an example of the black body's ability to exert force as a measure of humanity: for Douglass, freedom becomes a “reclaiming of [the] physical powers” of the mortal flesh (“White Slaves: The Mulatto Hero in Antebellum Fiction,” American Literature 65 [1993]: 519)Google Scholar.

33. Baker, , Journey Back, 32.Google Scholar

34. Douglass, Frederick, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An A merican Slave, Written by Himself, ed. Quarles, Benjamin (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1960), 23Google Scholar; page numbers are hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.

35. Gates, , Figures in Black, 89–90.Google Scholar

36. Douglass's erasure of his mother was partly rhetorical. He gives her a more prominent (though still small) role in his childhood when he recounts it again ten years later in My Bondage and My Freedom (see note 41).

37. For an interesting parallel interpretation of this passage, see Genovese, 's Roll, Jordan, RollGoogle Scholar, in which he argues that Douglass is describing a “general education in the meaning of time” (294). Douglass describes his childhood in slavery in greater detail in the more ethnographically oriented My Bondage and My Freedom; the absence of such description in the Narrative thus illustrates the slave's objectification.

38. This attitude corresponds to Hegel's description of Stoicism, which follows the slave's discovery of his own humanity. Douglass connects this discontent to the vistas afforded by his literacy, but this link is not essential. For the as-yetilliterate William Wells Brown, kind treatment could be enough, as he describes in his own narrative (Narrative of William Wells Brown, a Fugitive Slave, in The Travels of William Wells Brown, ed. Jefferson, Paul [New York: Markus Wiener, 1991], 58):Google Scholar

Mr. Willi treated me better than Dr. Young ever had; but instead of making me contented and happy, it only rendered me the more miserable, for it enabled me better to appreciate liberty.

Brown learns to read sometime during the period covered by his 1847 narrative, but, interestingly, he does not even bother to note the event. (He says early on that he is unable to read a note, but by the time he reaches the threshold of Canada, he is reading books.)

39. Guthrie says that this strategy involves a gamble. We bet that the thing is alive, and if it is, there is a payoff of added significance in our world. If the entity is human, the significance is all the greater (Faces in the Clouds: A New Theory of Religion [New York: Oxford University Press, 1993], 3).Google Scholar

40. Douglass's description of his bestial mental condition might be a rhetorical pose only. It certainly is part of a larger rhetorical strategy - as will presently become clear - but given Douglass's scrupulous accuracy and the mysterious source of his resistance (he confesses that he “[knew] not where” the impetus for it originated), he may have been telling the truth about his loss of human consciousness.

41. Douglass, Frederick, My Bondage and My Freedom (New York: Miller, Orton, and Milligan, 1855), 246–47Google Scholar; page numbers are hereafter cited parenthetically in the text.

42. William L. Andrews emphasizes Douglass's later suggestion in My Bondage and My Freedom that it was “the devil” that inspired him to resist Covey (To Tell a Free Story, 227–30)Google Scholar. Obviously, Douglass is being disingenuous here; he means that his “fall” from the “grace” of the slaveholders' religion is what opens his eyes to his fallen state. This interesting reading of the Covey scene and its aftermath nicely meshes with Douglass's rhetorical attack on slaveholders' Christianity throughout the Narrative.

43. Gilroy, , Black Atlantic, 61Google Scholar. Gilroy reads Douglass through Hegel in the service of a broad critique of post-Enlightenment debates between “Eurocentric rationalism” and “occidental anti-humanism” (54). He argues that “the time has come for the primal history of modernity to be reconstructed from the slaves' points of view” (55).

44. In reading this outcome as a victory for Douglass, I differ with Gilroy, who sees it as an “impasse” and the basis for “a vernacular variety of unhappy consciousness” (that being the step in Hegel's formulation that follows the masterslave dialectic) that is witnessed in DuBois, Wright, and others (Black Atlantic, 62, 56)Google Scholar. Without opposing this latter conception, I would argue instead that the slave's achievement of a grudging acknowledgment of equality in combat from the master must be seen as a great advance; Douglass's violent achievement of personhood is what propels him into a condition that makes “unhappy consciousness” possible.

45. Foster, , Witnessing Slavery, 96.Google Scholar

46. Though Douglass's later experience hiring himself out in Baltimore and bitterly giving the money to his master fits Hegel's paradigm more closely, I would argue that the Covey experience had already fundamentally shaped his beliefs about the value of a slave's work.

47. Nicholas K. Bromell's reading of Douglass's autobiographies makes a useful distinction between “working” and “slaving,” concluding that “the slave sometimes finds within self-motivated work an effective escape from the master's control” (By the Sweat of the Brow: Literature and Labor in Antebellum America [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993], 182).Google Scholar

48. Cobb, Thomas R. R., An Inquiry into the Law of SlaveryGoogle Scholar; quoted by Oakes, (Slavery and Freedom, 156)Google Scholar; Patterson, , Slavery and Social Death, 99.Google Scholar

49. Fanon, Frantz, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Markmann, Charles Lam (New York: Grove, 1967), 220–21, 57Google Scholar. Sartre, Jean-Paul, preface to Fanon, Frantz's Wretched of the Earth (trans. Farrington, Constance, preface by Sartre, Jean-Paul [New York: Grove, 1968], 18)Google Scholar. Fanon's general context is the colonial legacy of discrimination. His reading of Hegel goes further from the source than mine; Fanon says that the master wants only work from the slave, not recognition (220).

50. Ward, Samuel Ringgold, Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro (New York: Arno and the New York Times, 1968), 37, 42Google Scholar. Among slave narrators, Ward is the most eloquent spokesman for the work ethic. His book is less slave narrative then hortatory polemic, partly because the author lived only a few years as a slave before escaping with his parents, and so had little to tell of his life in bondage. For a general discussion of the rhetorical use of work in slave narratives, see Butterfield, Stephen, Black Autobiography in America (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1974), 17ff.Google Scholar

51. Douglass, Frederick, Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, Written by Himself, 2nd ed. (New York: Collier, 1892), 266Google Scholar. Douglass notes that his underground railroad work was “not entirely free from danger,” recalling Hegel's emphasis on the importance of risking one's life for recognition and freedom (ibid.). Douglass also privileges work in The Heroic Slave (1853), his only work of fiction. His hero, Madison Washington, combines escape, physical confrontation, and even trained labor (in this case, sailing) in an adventure that suggests that they're all related.

52. For example, Solomon Northup, kidnapped into slavery, writes in his 1853 narrative of how he successfully sued for his freedom, in what must be considered an act of resistance (Twelve Years a Slave, ed. Eakin, Sue and Logsdon, Joseph [Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1968]).Google Scholar

53. Green, Martin, The Great American Adventure (Boston: Beacon 1984), 1Google Scholar; and Cawelti, , Adventure, Mystery, and Romance, 39.Google Scholar

54. Green, , Great American Adventure, 5–6Google Scholar. These generic criteria also describe the genre of “survival literature,” a form of travel writing whose dominant themes were sex and slavery (see Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation [London: Routledge, 1992], 86). Survival literature first appeared in the 18th century and clearly influenced the development of the fugitive slave narrative during the next century.

55. Cawelti, , Adventure, Mystery, and Romance, 18, 40Google Scholar. This idealized image, says Cawelti, arises from the different sort of identification that formulaic literature creates, compared with mimetic literature (18). One result of this idealized identification, according to Cawelti, is that the adventure hero can be either exceptional or one of us, a superhero or an ordinary hero (40). In the fugitive slave narrative, he is both. Though Cawelti's argument focuses on fiction, I think it can be reliably extended to adventure stories of all kinds.

56. Spengemann, William C., The Adventurous Muse: The Poetics of American Fiction, 1789–1900 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1977), 121, 126–27Google Scholar. Spengemann views fiction through the lens of American travel writing; his reading of Tyler, Royall's The Algerine Captive (1797)Google Scholar is consistent in many ways with my reading of the fugitive slave narrative genre.

57. Cawelti, , Adventure, Mystery, and Romance, 34Google Scholar; and Green, , Great American Adventure, 221, 219Google Scholar. In keeping with the masculinism of adventure stories, the slave narrator-hero is almost always male - but this was largely because most fugitive slaves were men. (Men escaped slavery more often because women were frequently tied to the responsibilities of childrearing.) Similarly, most American adventure tales - with notable exceptions (such as Sedgwick, Catherine M.'s Hope Leslie [1827]Google Scholar and Southworth, E. D. E. N.'s The Hidden Hand [serialized 1859])Google Scholar – were written by men for a male audience. Martin Green describes the adventure experience as the “sacramental ceremony of the cult of manhood” (Great American Adventure, 6)Google Scholar. This association was particularly crucial for the fugitive slave narrator, whose manhood was feared by whites and denied in various ways ranging from literal castration (mainly an 18th-century practice) and other mutilations to the convoluted logic of the discourses of racial science and proslavery literature, which held the slave to be an eternal child.

58. Green, , Great American Adventure, 5.Google Scholar

59. The full title of David Walker's 1829 pamphlet was David Walker's Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in particular, and very expressly, to those of the United States of America.

60. Stuckey, Sterling, Slave Culture: Nationalist Theory and the Foundations of Black America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 137.Google Scholar

61. Bettelheim, Bruno, The Informed Heart: Autonomy in a Mass Age (New York: Free Press, 1960), 258–59Google Scholar. Bettelheim's source for this incident is Kogon, Eugen's Der SS-Staat (Frankfurt, 1946).Google Scholar

62. Fanon, , Black Skin, 42.Google Scholar

63. The phrase is Parry, Benita's (“Problems in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse,” Oxford Literary Review 9 [1987]: 28).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

64. Green, , Great American Adventure, 67.Google Scholar

65. The generic pattern of the freak show pamphlet that has been anatomized by Robert Bogdan: the history of the freak (including its “capture” or, in the case of American oddities, birth and development) is followed by a “scientific” or “medical” explanation of “its” condition, endorsements of authenticity, and in the case of exotics, a description of the native land (Freak Show: Exhibiting Human Curiosities for Fun and Profit [University of Chicago Press, 1988], 19–20).Google Scholar

66. My summary here is informed by Lindfors, Bernth, “Circus Africans” (Journal of American Culture 6, no. 2 [1983]: 9–14)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Bogdan, , Freak Show (ch. 7)Google Scholar. “Racial freak” is my own term. I use it because it is the most direct.

67. The Chicago World's Fair of 1933–34 featured a “Darkest Africa” exhibit that was “Presented by Buck, Who Brings 'Em Back Alive” (quoted in Bogdan, , Freak Show, 195).Google Scholar

68. The managers of freaks often posed for photographs with their exhibits (whom they often had legal title to), with the body language suggesting a sense of possession, and of Hegelian master-slave linkage, for the manager has nothing to manage without “his” freak (cf. Bogdan, , Freak Show, 13, 198).Google Scholar

69. Bogdan, , Freak Show, vii.Google Scholar

70. Green, , Great American Adventure, 4.Google Scholar

71. I am defining the term “resistance” politically (in terms of rejecting an ideology imposed from outside) rather than psychoanalytically (where it refers to the psychological forces opposing the conscious desire to change), though as various critics have shown, these two apparently opposing meanings actually do intersect. See Davis, Lennard, Resisting Novels: Ideology and Fiction (New York: Methuen, 1987), 12–13.Google Scholar

72. Said, Edward, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993), 216Google Scholar. Said cites two other major themes of the literature of resistance: the reappropriation of history to restore a national language and culture, and the establishment of an integrative view of community (215–16). The latter does not really emerge in America until the African-American literature of Reconstruction and beyond.

73. Carla L. Peterson points to a paradox of the slave narrator's liberation: the authors wind up re-objectifying themselves as commodities, selling their lives for titillation of the audience in exchange for money in the capitalist system (“Capitalism, Black [Under]development, and the Production of the African-American Novel in the 1850s,” American Literary History 4 [1992]: 562)Google Scholar. Fiction, Peterson says, was an option that partly insulated the black author from this commodification. One possible rebuttal to Peterson's argument is William L. Andrews's insistence that slave narratives exist as a dialogic enterprise, always assuming a relationship with a reader that is more than pecuniary (To Tell a Free Story, 17–18).Google Scholar

74. Andrews, , To Tell a Free Story, 9.Google Scholar