Apocalyptic Sentimentalism

Love and Fear in U.S. Antebellum Literature

Kevin Pelletier

• Publisher: University of Georgia Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9780820354675
  9780820339481
• eBook ISBN:
  9780820347738
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In contrast to the prevailing scholarly consensus that understands sentimentality to be grounded on a logic of love and sympathy, Apocalyptic Sentimentalism demonstrates that in order for sentimentality to work as an antislavery engine, it needed to be linked to its seeming opposite—fear, especially the fear of God's wrath. Most antislavery reformers recognized that calls for love and sympathy or the representation of suffering slaves would not lead an audience to "feel right" or to actively oppose slavery. The threat of God's apocalyptic vengeance—and the terror that this threat inspired—functioned within the tradition of abolitionist sentimentality as a necessary goad for sympathy and love. Fear, then, was at the center of nineteenth-century sentimental strategies for inciting antislavery reform, bolstering love when love faltered, and operating as a powerful mechanism for establishing interracial sympathy. Depictions of God's apocalyptic vengeance constituted the most efficient strategy for antislavery writers to generate a sense of terror in their audience.

Focusing on a range of important antislavery figures, including David Walker, Nat Turner, Maria Stewart, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and John Brown, Apocalyptic Sentimentalism illustrates how antislavery discourse worked to redefine violence and vengeance as the ultimate expression (rather than denial) of love and sympathy. At the same time, these warnings of apocalyptic retribution enabled antislavery writers to express, albeit indirectly, fantasies of brutal violence against slaveholders. What began as a sentimental strategy quickly became an incendiary gesture, with antislavery reformers envisioning the complete annihilation of slaveholders and defenders of slavery.

PART 1

Black Abolition and the Ideological Roots of Apocalyptic Sentimentalism

CHAPTER 1

David Walker, Nat Turner, and the Logic of Sentimental Terror

The first step of the earthquake, which is ultimately to shake down the fabric of oppression, leaving not one stone upon another, has been made. The first drops of blood, which are but the prelude to a deluge from the gathering clouds, have fallen. The first flash of the lightning, which is to smite and consume, has been felt. The first wailings of a bereavement, which is to clothe the earth in sackcloth, have broken upon our ears.

—William Lloyd Garrison, “The Insurrectionist,” (1831)

The ascendancy of love as the defining characteristic of sentimental fiction marked a crucial moment in literary criticism, for it announced a departure from critics’ earlier reading of the nineteenth-century canon as being dominated by the more “serious” works of male writers like Emerson, Melville, and Hawthorne. In order for modern scholars to claim that a formidable feminist presence existed within the American Renaissance, however, they first had to separate the sentimental tradition from nineteenth-century Calvinism, which previous generations of critics had equated with patriarchal power. Thus, they detached Calvinism’s severe brand of evangelical theology, which stressed the judgment of God, from a feminized sentimental philosophy that emphasized salvation through motherly love.¹ As a result, the prevailing scholarly view currently understands love to be the revolutionary impulse behind nineteenth-century sentimental reform, and critics use “sympathy” and “sympathetic identification” as shorthand for this process whereby love and compassion result from an affective bond formed across racial and class lines.²

These accounts that see sympathy and love as the inevitable outcomes of sentimental narration often suggest, through a subtle but unmistakable tautology, that these outcomes are, at the same time, produced by representations of sympathy and love, treating sympathy and love as both an effect and a cause within a given work of sentimental fiction. In most sentimental narratives, argues Glenn Hendler, “the motivating force behind the character’s actions is the subordination of the protagonist’s self in a sympathetic identification with an other.”³ According to Hendler, sympathetic identification, which is what sentimental fiction seeks to produce, is concomitantly the force that precedes the appearance of sympathy and that retroactively (and paradoxically) activates sympathetic identification in a particular character (and, the sentimental writer hopes, in the reader as well). Sympathy, in this view, is the outcome and origin of itself. Cindy Weinstein offers a similar formulation in an analysis of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, stating that tears are “the traditional evidence for sympathetic feeling and the primary mode of eliciting sympathy in Stowe’s novel.”⁴ For Weinstein, tears—the external signs of internal sympathy—are also what create sympathy in others. When a character weeps, he or she inspires other characters to weep, which may move the reader to shed a tear as well.

Arguments like the ones Hendler and Weinstein make are founded on the widely shared assumption that quintessential sentimental scenes will inevitably produce quintessential sentimental responses, so that representations of compassion will, in turn, arouse compassion in the reader, sympathy will invoke sympathy, love will generate even more love. These views comprehend sympathy and love to be autotelic, where affective bonds between persons are created and sustained merely by the presentation of sympathy and love within a sentimental narrative. Because many scholars writing on the sentimental tradition hold these same views, they often overlook instances when an autotelic logic breaks down, when sympathetic love is not the source of itself and some other catalyst is needed to assure its activation. When love could not be depended on as a guaranteed effect, nineteenth-century authors often turned to fear to stimulate readers into nurturing an affectionate heart. And within antebellum evangelical culture, biblical prophecies of God’s apocalyptic retribution provided writers with a powerful lexicon through which to generate this fearful response, suggesting that the fear inspired by a coming day of wrath was essential to the very operations of sentimentality within these works.

While expressions of love and warnings of retribution appear together with some frequency, specifically within the highly charged reform setting of Northern abolition, critics rarely regard this deployment of politicized terror to be a sentimental gesture. Gregg Camfield, for example, regards the Scottish Common Sense tradition, which stressed “moral sense” and sympathy as primary ways of establishing intersubjective relations, as the epistemological source of nineteenth-century American sentimentalism. And because the Scottish Enlightenment developed, at least in part, in opposition to Calvinist doctrine, something like apocalyptic fear cannot be seen as part of the grammar of sentimental narration.⁵ Camfield’s view is one that critics presumably share, given that none has described terror as a sentimental affect. What Camfield’s argument misses, however, is the fact that nineteenth-century sentimental sympathy was profoundly invigorated by the evangelical enthusiasm of the Second Great Awakening. Despite challenges to Calvinist theology leveled throughout the early part of the nineteenth century by more moderate religious denominations, representations of apocalypse—often constructed through fire-and-brimstone warnings of retribution and judgment—nevertheless remained and proliferated across denominational lines. This was especially true within abolition, where the apocalypse was deployed as a political category (and not merely a theological one) that antislavery radicals used to inspire a properly Christian response from their audiences: sympathize with and learn to love America’s slaves or else suffer God’s wrath.

In this chapter, I examine one of the first antislavery writers that brings together calls for love with threats of divine vengeance. Throughout his Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, David Walker repeatedly (and notoriously) details the apocalyptic consequences of slavery, with God exacting vengeance against brutal slaveholders. While Walker frequently underscores the penalty of slaveholding, he also at several key moments pleas for white readers to nurture compassion for the slave so that America can become a nation of racial harmony rather than discord. For Walker, creating sympathy and declaring God’s vengeance are both essential components of his antislavery critique, and these discourses often exist side by side in his argument. Walker, however, ultimately stresses vengeance more emphatically than he does love. As a result, readers, rather than having a sympathetic response to the Appeal, are horrified by it instead. Despite its failed attempt to instill greater sympathy, Walker’s Appeal assembles the basic elements of an inchoate apocalyptic sentimentalism by bringing together discourses of sympathy and vengeance. In this way, the Appeal helps establish some of the foundational narrative structures and tropes of antislavery sentimentality and thus serves as an instructive model for how to read fear as a sentimental mode in the antebellum period.⁶ Walker marshals the affects of love and terror and portends catastrophic consequences for America’s slaveholders, even as he outlines a theory of sympathy that might save the nation from ruin. Radicalized within the African Methodist Episcopal Church of Charleston, South Carolina, in the era of Denmark Vesey, David Walker begins to illustrate how abolitionist sentimentality, although traditionally viewed as a love-based, oftentimes melodramatic, domestic ideology, nevertheless had a ruthless and vengeful streak running through it, a streak that is not ancillary or accidental but constitutive of its very makeup.⁷

In addition, I briefly consider Nat Turner’s Confessions for its enactment of a politics of terror that Walker’s Appeal merely threatened. Unlike Walker, Turner expresses no desire to reconcile with white enslavers and displays no interest in the possibility of interracial sympathy. For this reason, Turner stands in contrast to David Walker’s project rather than as its expression (as it is usually imagined). However, Turner’s confession serves as a crucial bridge linking Walker to later writers like Maria Stewart, Lydia Maria Child, and especially Harriet Beecher Stowe. Following his insurrection in Southampton County, Virginia, Turner comes to stand as the very symbol of religious violence, a form of violence that surprisingly becomes sentimentalized throughout the antebellum period. Turner represents his rebellious actions to Thomas Gray through an apocalyptic idiom, and it is this discursive mode that writers like Stowe will incorporate in sentimental works of antislavery fiction. In Dred, for example, slave insurrection becomes part of a sentimental strategy, so that the panic produced by the threat of rebellion emboldens sentimental pleas for love. Constructing slave violence within an apocalyptic frame, Turner’s discourse further joins insurrection to apocalyptic theology, where the latter is often used as a euphemistic stand-in for the former. This literary shorthand, of which Turner is the representative figure, will be deployed again and again in the years leading up to the Civil War. Turner should be read, then, in the way antebellum Americans read him: as the fulfillment of Walker’s prophesy (even if Turner had no knowledge of Walker’s Appeal) and as an agent of wrath terrorizing the slaveholding South.

By discounting the fiery evangelical context in which American sentimentalism developed, scholars have framed it as a discourse rooted in a European bourgeois aesthetic. They have similarly mischaracterized the forms of violence that appear in texts like Walker’s Appeal and Turner’s Confessions, choosing to treat them as representations of revolutionary agency rather than as religiously motivated. It is this misreading that I explore in considerable detail in the final section of the chapter. It is critical to see these examples of violence as stemming from a religious rather than secular discourse for two important reasons. First, Walker and Turner articulate a notion of power that is not predicated on a liberal-revolutionary model, one in which the perpetrators of these violent acts possess a self-determining rational agency. Instead, each text unfolds a theory of force that requires self-abnegation and a state of dependency on a transcendental deity, and these traits conflict with the belief in a secular liberal autonomous will, a move that offers a more problematic, but potentially more powerful, expression of selfhood. It is in this section that I begin to outline some of the important distinctions between revolutionary and religious violence by showing that the descriptions of power Walker and Turner provide are fundamentally different from the prevailing norms of liberal discourse. Second, these examples of theological violence catalyze sentimentality by supporting pleas for sympathy and love. It is religious violence, often presented within an apocalyptic context (rather than a secular revolutionary one), that undergirds the structure of sentimentality I examine throughout this book.

David Walker and the Sentimentality of Terror

“But why are the Americans so very fearfully terrified respecting my Book?”⁸ This question, posed by David Walker about his Appeal, will no doubt strike modern readers as disingenuous, given what we know about the effects his work had throughout the South. Once the Appeal began circulating, officials arrested anyone who possessed copies of the document. Laws were enacted quarantining Northern black sailors in order to prevent them from disseminating Walker’s polemic or any other literature thought to agitate slaves or endanger the autonomy of the planter class. Southern authorities were in such a state of agitation, in fact, that prohibitions against black literacy were reinvigorated and earnestly enforced.⁹ As one writer in The North Star put it, “This little book produced more commotion among slaveholders than any volume of its size that was ever issued from an American press.”¹⁰ Indeed, the Appeal was the most incendiary attack against slavery in the antebellum period, and it achieved this status by constructing a rhetoric of terror that portended bloody insurrection and linked ideas of slave rebellion with prophecies of God’s apocalyptic retribution. “Perhaps,” warns Walker in a paradigmatic example of this linkage, “they will laugh at or make light of this; but I tell you Americans ! that unless you speedily alter your course, you and your Country are gone! ! ! ! ! ! For God Almighty will tear up the very face of the earth! ! !” (A 39; original emphasis). Warnings such as this one pervade the Appeal and inflamed the anxieties of Southerners, many of whom would have remembered Gabriel Prosser’s and Denmark Vesey’s thwarted but nevertheless alarming attempts at insurrection and wondered if similar rebellions were being organized in which slaves would ultimately succeed in killing their masters.

Despite the Appeal’s apparent fixation on the penalties whites will incur if slavery continues, and notwithstanding Walker’s abiding rage at the injustices free and enslaved blacks are made to endure, Walker’s project aspires not merely to hasten the destruction of white America but to fundamentally reimagine interracial relations in the antebellum period. To this end, Walker’s plea seeks to establish a form of sympathetic connection between his white audience and slaves, one that might catalyze a change in or even a dismantling of the slave system, and he relies throughout the Appeal on what will become by midcentury a classic strategy for sentimental writers: Walker addresses his readers’ hearts. He announces to his audience early in the Appeal that, with God’s help, he will “open [their] hearts to understand and believe the truth” (1) of the slave’s degradation and the need for Southerners to relinquish their slaveholding practices. “I appeal to every man of feeling,” says Walker (10), suggesting that moral reform begins with feeling right, a view that Harriet Beecher Stowe will codify twenty years later in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Walker reasons that a man who witnesses firsthand the slave’s burden, provided he is “not a tyrant, but has the feelings of a human being, who can feel for a fellow creature,” will surely “see enough to make his very heart bleed” (21). The bleeding heart is a sympathetic heart, and redressing slavery begins for Walker as it will begin for so many antislavery reformers who adopt sentimental conventions: with appeals to emotion and calls for the reformation of the heart.

Walker believes that white and black Americans can learn to live together harmoniously, provided a proper affective bond between them can be constituted. Indeed, his ultimate goal in the Appeal is a racially integrated nation in which blacks enjoy the same respect and rights as citizens that whites enjoy. “Treat us like men,” says Walker, “and there is no danger but we will all live in peace and happiness together. … Treat us then like men, and we will be your friends” (A 70). Given the Appeal’s angry tone, it is possible to overlook Walker’s reconciliatory vision, where racial segregation and acrimony are overcome in favor of amity between all citizens, regardless of skin color. Walker remains emphatic, though, in his desire for unity, assuring readers that any misgivings they might have are unfounded and underscoring interraciality as a necessary national ethos as well as a real political possibility. “And there is not a doubt in my mind,” Walker states, “but that the whole of the past will be sunk into oblivion, and we yet, under God, will become a united and happy people. The whites may say it is impossible, but remember that nothing is impossible with God” (70). Notwithstanding the hardships they have suffered under slavery, black Americans will surrender the past in order to realize a more promising future. It could be said, then, that the aim of the Appeal is nothing less than the creation of a racially heterogeneous but nevertheless unified nation-state that is sanctioned by God and federated by feeling, with each citizen affectively associated with every other citizen.

Even as he unfolds this vision in which a compassionate white audience feels for black slaves, and this sentimental solidarity, in turn, leads to national unity, Walker faces a problem, one that antislavery reformers and sentimental writers throughout the 1840s and 1850s would continue to face: that is, white Americans are simply not feeling for or sympathizing with slaves, regardless of how pitiable or deplorable the slaves’ circumstances might be. Calling for sympathy or representing scenes that are meant to elicit a compassionate response from white readers is not necessarily going to achieve the desired effect. Walker explicitly engages the failure of white Americans to sympathize with slaves and their willingness to take the slaves’ wretchedness as a fact of nature and a reflection of God’s will. “But the Americans,” says Walker, “having introduced slavery among them, their hearts have become almost seared, as with an hot iron, and God has nearly given them up to believe a lie in preference to the truth! ! !” (A 43). Instead of enabling whites to bond with and learn to care for black slaves, white hearts have been hardened by slavery and have thus lost their capacity to feel. Walker cannot simply appeal to the hearts of white readers when these hearts no longer perform their primary function as symbolic repositories of emotion and agents of sympathetic identification. It is typically at these moments when Walker imagines the failure of white sympathy that he also expresses his deep rage for white Americans and articulates some of his most emphatic calls for divine retribution, such as this one, which immediately follows the preceding passage:

And I am awfully afraid that pride, prejudice, avarice and blood, will, before long prove the final ruin of this happy republic, or land of liberty! ! ! ! … Will the Lord suffer this people to go on much longer, taking his holy name in vain? Will he not stop them, PREACHERS and all? O Americans! O Americans! ! I call God—I call angels—I call men, to witness, that your DESTRUCTION is at hand, and will be speedily consummated unless you REPENT. (43; original emphases)

Warnings of God’s vengeance like this one can be found throughout the Appeal and underscore the limits of white sympathy. It is the inability or unwillingness of white Americans to sympathize with blacks that inspires in Walker such fury and ultimately compels him to e...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Sentimental Apocalypse
• Part One. Black Abolition and the Ideological Roots of Apocalyptic Sentimentalism
• Part Two. Salvation through Motherly Vengeance: The Sentimentality of Harriet Beecher Stowe
• Part Three. John Brown and the Legacy of Apocalyptic Sentimentalism
• Coda: The Civil War and Modern Apocalyptic Sentimentalism
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index