Race, Romance, and Rebellion

Literatures of the Americas in the Nineteenth Century

Colleen C. O'Brien

• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780813934907
• Topic: Letteratura
• Subtopic: Critica letteraria dell'America Latina e dei Caraibi

As in many literatures of the New World grappling with issues of slavery and freedom, stories of racial insurrection frequently coincided with stories of cross-racial romance in nineteenth-century U.S. print culture. Colleen O'Brien explores how authors such as Harriet Jacobs, Elizabeth Livermore, and Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda imagined the expansion of race and gender-based rights as a hemispheric affair, drawing together the United States with Africa, Cuba, and other parts of the Caribbean. Placing less familiar women writers in conversation with their more famous contemporaries—Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, and Lydia Maria Child—O'Brien traces the transnational progress of freedom through the antebellum cultural fascination with cross-racial relationships and insurrections. Her book mines a variety of sources—fiction, political rhetoric, popular journalism, race science, and biblical treatises—to reveal a common concern: a future in which romance and rebellion engender radical social and political transformation.

1. “What Mischief Would Follow?”

Racial Boundaries, Antireformers, and White Space

The strong attractions of mind, person, manners, fortune, should be able to break through the barriers we now consider impregnable . . . the descendants of the European should covet alliance with the descendants of the African. There is no harm in the supposition, be the improbability of the thing what it may—the only question is, if the fact should happen so to turn out, what mischief would follow?

—Charles Emerson

In a letter dated October 17, 1849, Wendell Phillips thanked Ralph Waldo Emerson for the use of a set of volumes that he described as a “valuable contribution to the scanty stores of Haytian history.”¹ Phillips’s apparent claim that “Haytian history” existed only in “scanty stores” is interesting, not only because African American newspapers had been publishing stories about Haiti throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, but also because Phillips himself would consequently discover and contribute to a broad Haitian archive, lecturing on the heroics of Toussaint Louverture by the beginning of the Civil War.² For many reformers, rewriting the Haitian Revolution provided a corrective to the providential narrative of freedom that characterized United States history. Situating the Anglo-American concept of righteous rebellion in a hemispheric context, Charles Chauncy Emerson’s 1836 antislavery lecture, quoted above, places Haiti as the “other” foundational site of American Revolution. In the eyes of American romanticists like the Emersons, Haiti sometimes signified what Nick Nesbitt describes as “the capacity for self-determination that is a universal, immanent potential” (22), a nation whose founding fathers did not condone what David Brion Davis identifies as the sin of slavery—what Charles Emerson referred to as “sewing up the body politic . . . in a sack with a living viper” (quoted in Bosco and Myerson, Emerson Brothers 163). The two poles of representation that characterized Haiti in the nineteenth-century United States, however, were as distant as Nesbitt’s space of immanent potential and Charles Emerson’s viper-infested sack.

But Charles Emerson’s lecture also offered a site of radical possibility in postslavery society, one where “barriers we now consider impregnable” give way to alliances between “the descendants of the European” and “descendants of the African” (15). He expressed this vision of peaceful racial coexistence by suggesting that intermarriage between black and white might some day signify equality, a concept that many of the women in his circle and beyond would explore in their own writing. Although the longing for union was an ideal for some reformers and transcendentalists in the 1840s and 1850s, however, it was anathema to most slaveholders and even the more liberal sectors of American society. In the context of more conventional narratives of American identity, ones that affirmed the white republican gentleman’s benevolent care for and just representation of the women and slaves in his “family,” the potential for either of these “tribes” to demand their own rights spelled nothing more than an attack on the very tenets of Anglo-American culture and civilization.

Harking back to the foundational myth of white women who performed sexual favors for Toussaint Louverture, the confluence of women’s rights and abolitionist activism caused great anxiety for many mid-nineteenth-century Americans, who often imagined the abolitionist as a black man and the suffragist as a white woman. Mason Stokes explains, for example, how proslavery and antisuffrage lecturers and propagandists promulgated a version of the Eden story in which the snake was a black man and Eve an unruly activist woman who transgressed racial and gender boundaries through her illicit relationship with the snake. Just as the abolition of slavery presented a potential disunion within the nation, the abolition of masculine and feminine spheres would certainly disrupt the patriarchal family. The possibility of legally recognized unions between black and white seemed high; it was difficult for even the slave power to deny that such encounters had long taken place between white men and black women despite the barriers of patriarchy and racial slavery. De facto cross-racial marriage and the presence of so many people with mixed African and European lineage among the black population in the Americas was a social reality that emphasized the “naturalness” of cross-racial unions despite the law’s repeated attempts to define them as “unnatural” by forbidding or not legally recognizing interracial marriage.³

However, the transmission of property and the necessity for Anglo-Americans to envision the ever-expanding landscape as white space also motivated laws against intermarriage. The infamous Manifest Destiny tract attributed to the literary nationalists called the Young Americans, “A Great Nation of Futurity,” declares that “American patriotism is not of the soil . . . it is essentially personal enfranchisement” (qtd. in Wald 111). In other words, although “American patriots” have no indigenous claim to the territory they take up, their presence is justified by the ideals of a political experiment that converts the wild and untamed landscape into a civilized and productive sovereign territory. The inherent contradiction of disenfranchising enslaved laborers, however, had well-known consequences. Rousseau’s suggestion that the right of first occupancy applied only to settlers who cultivated and made “improvements” to that land should have caused some anxiety to slaveholders who never actually dirtied their hands with that soil. Although not all Americans agreed with the “Great Nation of Futurity” philosophy, the idea that the men and women who had performed virtually all of the agricultural labor in Haiti could lay claim to that landscape, rising up against their masters and demanding allotments of the land they had cultivated, certainly lingered in the political imagination. Both rebellion and cross-racial romance could yield an “amalgamated” landscape, the province of black and white rather than the patriotic space of white “personal enfranchisement.”

Even abolitionists who welcomed the tropes of romance and rebellion had trouble relinquishing the assumption that the American landscape should remain white space. Charles Emerson’s antislavery lecture invoked the topics of amalgamation and rebellion as central concerns in the slavery debate. Oddly enough, however, he assumed that a similar situation, brought about peacefully in the United States, would not involve any redistribution of land or property. Slaveholders would not be impoverished by emancipation because “their land will not be emancipated. There will be no abolition of the cotton tree, or the sugar cane, or rice or tobacco.” He thus maintains the fantasy of the American landscape as “white space” that becomes so central, four years later, to the Young Americans.

The project of defining the New World as white space required racial boundaries that were far more solid than national borders. As the United States, in particular, defined its Anglo-American mission and stretched the limits of white space to Louisiana and beyond, excluding the first occupiers or enslaved laborers from citizenship helped whiten the space. That the transmission of property and entitlement were passed from father to son made it imperative that white women be kept away from black or indigenous men. Emerging in the late 1830s, “medical” and “anthropological” texts that legitimated white male authority and explained the necessity for restrictive marriage laws focused intensely on the hypersexual black male body as a source of contamination, much as gothic tales of the Haitian Revolution devised what Angela Y. Davis has called the myth of the black rapist.

Attempting to use reason and scientific knowledge as the basis for defending the marriage contract as constructed through racial patriarchy, antireformers resorted to descriptions of the sexual act to draw distinct biological lines between racial groups and deny the reality of sexual relationships between black and white. Dr. Paul Broca, a distinguished member of the London Anthropological Society who was known as the founder of French anthropology, explained the dangers of allowing proximity between white women and black men very clinically: “One of the characters of the Ethiopian race consists in the length of the penis compared with that of the Caucasian race. . . . There results from this physical disposition, that the union of the Caucasian man with an Ethiopian woman is easy and without any inconvenience for the latter. The case is different in the union of the Ethiopian with a Caucasian woman, who suffers in the act, the neck of the uterus is pressed against the sacrum, so that the act of reproduction is not merely painful, but frequently non-productive” (28). As a justification for “breeding” practices that would increase the quality of one’s chattels, this shocking excerpt advocates white male sex with black women but depicts sex between black men and white women as painful, perhaps dangerous, and so unnatural as to be “non-productive” (28). While sex between an “Ethiopian” and a “Caucasian” woman was obviously not unthinkable, its implications concerned nations that reaped the benefits of slavery. Broca’s cosmopolitan résumé, furthermore, reminds us of the transnational dimensions of the politics and practice of constructing racial boundaries, even in a supposedly enlightened and rational Atlantic world where the boundaries of knowledge were porous.

This genealogy illustrates how, as Jared Sexton puts it, “the politics of interracial sexuality are fundamental to racial formation” (15). The convergence of race and sexuality, however, is more than a prurient preoccupation or a “persistent focal point of psychosocial anxiety” (15). Defining race through biology—particularly by obsessing over the differences articulated in interracial reproduction—“is foundational for racial difference—the field for its production, contestation, and containment” (15).⁴ Whether through coercing sexual submission or forcing labor, the reality of racial slavery was that one could be coerced because he or she was black and therefore had no sovereignty of self. Lacking self, one could not own any other kind of property; thus the racist construction of blackness also protected an American landscape envisioned as white space from infiltration or encroachment. In this case, the ideal of cross-racial sexual relationships as a type of romance collapses; they can take place only through coercion and violence.

The psychosocial connection between interracial “romance” or heterosexual relations and acts of rebellion, in the writings of antireformers, much as in writings by experts from colonial powers, also unveils the critical role of property and entitlement to the creation of racial boundaries. Because insurgents who took over territory were also believed to take white women, this kind of romance and rebellion renders human bodies and geographic bodies metaphorically interchangeable. Just as encounters with black men could supposedly do great damage to the bodies of white women, black property ownership was perceived as threatening and destructive to the sovereign political body built upon what Anglo-Americans imagined as white space.

Politicians, scientists, and medical doctors alike went to great lengths to prohibit sexual relations between black men and white women. For example, Dr. Alexander Walker’s treatise Intermarriage: or, The mode in which and the causes why beauty, health, and intellect result from certain unions and deformaty [sic], disease, and insanity from others . . . , first published in London in 1838, was reprinted and, according to advertisements and endorsements printed in the front matter of one of these editions, enthusiastically received in the United States. The book’s title page touts it as “essentially scientific” and “transcendently important” in its illustration of the “laws of nature.” While England was the political vanguard in abolishing the slave trade and emancipating its colonies, its print culture clearly worked in the opposite direction. Walker’s basic premise is that intellectual and moral characteristics are inherited from the father and physical strength and vital organs from the mother’s “blood.” This argument conveniently supports “breeding” between white men and black women, certainly a boon to slave masters and overseers who were “fathering” a burgeoning mulatto population and expanding their property, both real and chattel, in the Americas. Conversely, since intellectual vigor is passed down from the [white] father, Walker sets the stage to demonstrate the inherent danger of crossing a black man with a white woman—the birth of an imbecile, physically degenerate child. A few years later, American Dr. Josiah Nott registered his concern about passing on “intellectual vigor” from the white race to the black because “every one at the south is familiar with the fact that the mulattoes have more intelligence than the negroes, make bad slaves, and are always leaders in insurrections” (28). In this case, it seems that Vincent Ogé rather than Louverture serves as the iconic Haitian example.

A chain of events beginning with cross-racial sex and culminating in the presence of rebellious, amalgamated bodies that would lay claim not only to freedom but also to the landscape through acts of insurrection is typical in mid-nineteenth-century writing about race and sex. Anxieties about racial “mixing” shaped political rhetoric in the United States, both in terms of race and gender rights on a national level and in terms of new territories, such as Louisiana, that might absorb new racial groups into the constituency. A public obsession with the idea of “blood” as an essence that differentiated between male and female bodies as well as between Anglo and African or Native bodies made political rhetoric very carnal and sexual rather than abstract and intellectual. Both proslavery and antislavery factions used the term “amalgamation” to describe the blending of black and white blood that took place when these cross-racial sexual relationships produced offspring. Early American legal documents and political writing, including Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia, reflect a similar obsession with amalgamation. As A. Leon Higginbotham illustrates, the concept of “racial purity” had a foundational role in defining “what it meant to be white and superior” in the United States and to lay claim to territory or property within its expanding boundaries (41). The historical reality of amalgamation, therefore, had a seminal effect on the very definition, and the exclusionary parameters, of American citizenship. According to Higginbotham, “the 1662, 1705, and 1723 Virginia statues have always been analyzed for their use of race to define who was a free person, who was a slave, and who was a servant. This sort of analysis is certainly crucial to understanding how the form of slavery that the colonists developed in the New World was unique, in that it relied exclusively on race. But the statutes also have another meaning that is equally important. With the legislators’ rather compulsive preoccupation with interracial sex, the statutes grounded the precept of inferiority firmly in biology. If black blood was the mark of inferiority, sex became the instrument by which it was transmitted” (41). Thus the spectacle of interracial sex marked the erasure of whiteness and its attendant privilege: it defined whiteness as “no blackness” and tied black inferiority to black sexuality.

Expressions of cross-racial desire seem least frequent among black male authors and orators, suggesting that the fixation on the sexually ambitious black male body was, in large part, a white fantasy. Despite David Walker’s assertion in the Appeal . . . To the Coloured Citizens of the World (1829) that “I would not give a pinch of snuff to be married to any white person I ever saw in all the days of my life,” black demands for justice and calls to action often translated, in the white imagination, into demands for access to white women (Gilyard and Wardi 1047). Again, it is ironic that antireformers knew that the majority of mulatto children were born to black mothers and white fathers, yet they still demonized black men as the sexual aggressors. Representations of and anxieties about the Haitian Revolution fixated on the potential dangers of mulatto or free black populations. Vincent Ogé, the free black man massacred by the colonists in 1791 for demanding French citizenship, was the son of a wealthy mulatto woman in Port au Prince. That his murderers literally split his body apart after torturing him publicly suggests a deep psychological hatred toward blackness and the desire to eradicate it from the body politic just as they violently tore apart and bashed Ogé’s cross-racial body. This is a revolutionary moment that the Russian theorist Mikhael Bakhtin would have understood—a moment where “the scene” of political upheaval “is consistently portrayed as a tearing to pieces,” a carnivalistic dismembering of the body (Problems 161).

Similar antipathy toward black incorporation into the body politic existed in the United States and often confused the very presence of cross-racial bodies within the republic with a bestial desire, on the part of blacks, to infiltrate and corrupt the white female body and the Anglo-American body politic. Somehow, spectral images of cross-racial sex erased white men’s violations of the black women’s bodies and focused on panic-ridden predictions of the black male rapist overtaking (and contaminating) the white woman’s body and the body politic of the United States. This impulse toward Anglo-Saxon or white nationality, though pronounced, did not go unchallenged, as I will discuss below. If aggression was a racial trait, there was a wealth of evidence that it was endemic to Anglo-Saxons, particularly in the conquest of the United States and its expanding borders. Many activists were well aware—and critical of the fact—that the British Empire, the font of Anglo-American “greatness,” established its “dominion” through violence rather than innate cultural or intellectual superiority. Theodore Parker, for example, announced in 1854 that the early settlers of Plymouth Bay “had in them the ethnologic idiosyncrasy of the Anglo-Saxon—his restless disposition to invade and conquer other lands; his haughty contempt of humbler tribes which leads him to subvert, enslave, kill, and exterminate; his fondness for material things” (quoted in Frederickson 100).⁵

It is interesting that antireformers, who often invoked the powers of Anglo-Saxondom, projected these hypersexual, violent stereotypes upon the black male body. One example of the antireform hysteria over abolition and its supposedly “amalgamationist” undertones comes in an 1835 treatise by Massachusetts Attorney General James Trecothick Austin, written in response to William Ellery Channing’s denunciation of slavery. As part of a volume of short works on slavery that Senator Charles Sumner had bound and eventually donated to Harvard University, Austin’s Remarks provides a quintessential example of U.S. paranoia about racial coexistence in a postslavery society, or “amalgamation.”

Austin argues that even if black men emerge from slavery “intelligent, moral, and industrious, with all the capacity and inclinations of the white man. . . . [t]hey would be negroes still” (45). Basing his predictions, perhaps, on the precedent set by Toussaint Louverture and deeply invested in an assumedly immutable biological difference between black and white, Austin continues and echoes Jefferson: “The more their intelligence, the greater would be the mutual hostility of the two races; and the final possession of power would be the result of a war of extermination, in which one or the other race would perish” (45). Compare Jefferson’s sentiments in Notes on the State of Virginia: “Deep rooted prejudices entertained by whites; ten thousand recollections, by the blacks, of the injuries they have sustained; new provocations; the real distinctions which nature has made; and many other circumstances, will divide us into parties, and produce convulsions which will probably never end but in the extermination of the one or the other race.—To these objections, which are political, may be added others, which are physical and moral” (145). This flashback to the Founding Fathers is another consistent move in debates over insurrection, whether articulated by the likes of Austin or as a justification for uprisings voiced by abolitionis...