American Slavery and Russian Serfdom in the Post-Emancipation Imagination

Amanda Brickell Bellows

• Editorial: The University of North Carolina Press
• Año: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781469655550
• Categoría: Historia
• Categoría: Historia afroamericana

The abolition of Russian serfdom in 1861 and American slavery in 1865 transformed both nations as Russian peasants and African Americans gained new rights as subjects and citizens. During the second half of the long nineteenth century, Americans and Russians responded to these societal transformations through a fascinating array of new cultural productions. Analyzing portrayals of African Americans and Russian serfs in oil paintings, advertisements, fiction, poetry, and ephemera housed in American and Russian archives, Amanda Brickell Bellows argues that these widely circulated depictions shaped collective memory of slavery and serfdom, affected the development of national consciousness, and influenced public opinion as peasants and freedpeople strove to exercise their newfound rights. While acknowledging the core differences between chattel slavery and serfdom, as well as the distinctions between each nation's post-emancipation era, Bellows highlights striking similarities between representations of slaves and serfs that were produced by elites in both nations as they sought to uphold a patriarchal vision of society. Russian peasants and African American freedpeople countered simplistic, paternalistic, and racist depictions by producing dignified self-representations of their traditions, communities, and accomplishments. This book provides an important reconsideration of post-emancipation assimilation, race, class, and political power.

CHAPTER ONE

Radical Literature on the Eve of Emancipations

In the spring of 1861, the United States teetered on the brink of war. Americans anxiously wondered if tensions between the North and the South could be resolved after the recent secession of seven states, but there would be no peace. The Confederate bombardment of Fort Sumter on April 12 marked the formal commencement of hostilities that would last until General Robert E. Lee’s surrender to General Ulysses S. Grant at Appomattox Court House, Virginia, in April 1865. When Massachusetts author and abolitionist Lucy Larcom learned of the outbreak of war in Charleston in 1861, she recorded in her diary: “This day broke upon our country in gloom; for the sounds of war came up to us from the South,—war between brethren; civil war.”¹ Although the conflict between the North and the South centered on the right to own slaves and to expand slavery westward, Larcom did not believe that emancipation was certain. Instead, she contemplated the events unfolding before her, wondering, “What ruin [the rebels] are pulling down on their heads may be guessed, though not yet fully foretold.”²

Four million African Americans remained enslaved when the Civil War began. They resided in fifteen states where slavery was legal, eleven of which ultimately seceded from the Union. The outbreak of war occurred after what John Stauffer describes as “the fragmentation of America,” a phenomenon that largely occurred between the 1830s and South Carolina’s attack on Fort Sumter.³ This period was characterized by sectional arguments about whether slavery ought to be legally permitted in new territories and states as the nation expanded westward.⁴ The fear of disunion, or what Elizabeth Varon calls “the dissolution of the republic,” haunted Northerners and Southerners during the antebellum era.⁵ Events including the Nullification Crisis of 1832–1833, the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850, and the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 produced significant sectional turmoil and debate among advocates and opponents of slavery.⁶ Throughout these crises, many white Americans opposed war and the breakdown of the Union, but they maintained a plurality of opinions about slavery’s future.

Slave owners may have been the most vociferous defenders of bonded labor, but citizens involved in the trade of enslaved Africans or goods produced by slaves also feared that slavery’s demise would harm their economic interests. For instance, New York City’s cotton merchants, whose wealth was largely derived from the purchase and sale of cotton grown by enslaved men and women, likely worried that abolition would upend their business model.⁷ Furthermore, trading centers like New York City held what Calvin Schermerhorn argues were “the strongest financial links in the chain of credits and debts responsible for slavery’s vitality,” a fact that challenged abolitionists’ notion of a “free North” and “a slave South.”⁸ In April 1861, Harper’s Weekly lampooned Northern businessmen opposed to abolition with a caricature of a New Yorker named “Cotton Pork,” a “patriot” described as “dead against civil war.” Pork implores the reader: “ ‘Carry the sword and torch into happy plantations—and write off our outstanding Southern claims? Stain the national flag with American blood—and hand over the Southern market to foreigners? Never, never, never!’ ”⁹

By contrast, a group of predominantly Northern activists that included Larcom, ex-slave Frederick Douglass, William Lloyd Garrison, Wendell Phillips, and others staunchly opposed slavery. They supported abolition, a crusade that historian Manisha Sinha calls “a radical, democratic movement that questioned the enslavement of labor” and employed a range of approaches to convince the American population that slavery had no place in the republic.¹⁰ Many prominent antislavery leaders of the 1840s and 1850s favored immediate abolition over gradual emancipation or colonization schemes that sent African Americans abroad. Some abolitionists encouraged enslaved men and women to escape or rebel against their owners in the years leading up to the Civil War.¹¹ John Brown, a passionate opponent of slavery who led a raid on the federal armory at Harper’s Ferry in 1859, espoused and preached a kind of militant abolitionism that appealed to some but seemed too radical to others.¹² Brian Holden Reid argues that Brown’s actions highlighted the divisions among abolitionists of the era: while some “saw slavery as an unutterable evil that could be destroyed only by force,” others hoped the federal government would step in to prevent the Southern states from leaving the Union and restore peace before violence “disrupt [ed] the existing pattern of race relations in the South.”¹³

The abolitionist movement grew in strength during the tumultuous years that preceded the outbreak of war, but many white Americans, even those who disliked slavery, found the abolitionists’ views too extreme. Historian Adam I. P. Smith characterizes most mid-nineteenth-century Northerners as nonabolitionists or nonradicals who composed a “conservative majority.”¹⁴ They shared what he calls “a commitment to defend a free labor society in which white men could govern themselves, build communities, and make their way in the world,” but viewed slavery as “an institution that was not inherently antagonistic to the survival of the Union.”¹⁵ Some white Northerners only opposed the expansion of slavery into new territories or states, while others supported gradual emancipation or colonization.¹⁶ Thus, when Northern and Southern Unionists enlisted in the army in 1861, Gary Gallagher notes, “the loyal citizenry initially gave little thought to emancipation in their quest to save the Union” and abolition did not appear to be a certain consequence of victory.¹⁷ Confederate soldiers, by contrast, even those who did not own slaves, fought to preserve the institution of slavery in the South. Many viewed their struggle as a battle for freedom from Northern oppression, not recognizing the incongruity of what historian James McPherson describes as the paradoxical “pairing of slavery and liberty as … twin goals.”¹⁸ By the war’s end, however, the abolition of slavery had become a central goal of the Union army.

The experience of war also prompted discussion about the abolition of serfdom in Russia, where twenty-three million peasants were enserfed. Tsar Alexander II issued the Emancipation Manifesto on February 19, 1861, but he began considering the process of liberation shortly after Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War (1853–1856).¹⁹ Aware of his country’s need to modernize, the tsar established a committee to advise him about emancipation, instead of making a formal announcement about the possibility of abolition that would have caused widespread peasant unrest.²⁰ Next, the tsar’s government established provincial committees comprising two elected and two governor-appointed nobles that would ostensibly help craft the terms of emancipation in 1858.²¹ Two years after the committees’ deliberations began, the final manifesto was published.

During the years preceding abolition in Russia, as in the United States, public opinion about the prospect of emancipation was mixed. There was no abolitionist movement in Russia that paralleled that of the United States due to strict censorship laws and policing that prohibited the formation and expansion of such a program.²² For the most part, the peasantry remained unaware of the ongoing negotiations at the state level regarding the potential plans for emancipation. Historian Hugh Seton-Watson has observed that while “the reforming minority of landowners” and other liberal, public voices from the urban intelligentsia were “most articulate” in supporting the tsar’s push for emancipation, most landowners opposed abolition but were “ineffective in expressing their views.”²³ The nobility were essentially unified in spirit, but they did not form a cohesive movement to challenge the tsar’s government. Instead, planters on provincial committees sought to craft emancipatory terms that would minimize their losses, with desired outcomes that varied by region. While aristocrats possessing fertile land hoped to keep ownership of their territorial property, those with less productive acreage preferred monetary remuneration in the form of redemption payments.²⁴ Despite the nobility’s disapproval of emancipation and the potential for upheaval among the peasantry, expectations of civil unrest upon the issuance of the manifesto were largely unrealized. According to an officer who was on duty the evening before the tsar’s announcement, “There were no disturbances; the morning of Russia’s great day passed as peacefully as the preceding night.”²⁵ Even A. I. Levshin, a statesman who took part in the reform process, reflected with wonder: “For a long time I could not understand how the bureaucrats tackled such a great and terrible business with such ease.”²⁶

Despite the staunch opposition of different groups of people within both countries, autocratic Russia and the republican United States would successfully free millions of serfs and enslaved African Americans just four years apart. Nonetheless, emancipation was hardly an inevitable by-product of the Crimean War and the Civil War that resulted in territorial destruction and the deaths of hundreds of thousands of soldiers. Political, military, and economic forces markedly shaped the course of these events, but social and cultural forces also played an influential role. Indeed, the fight to end serfdom and slavery occurred not only in the corridors of power but also in the world of letters that shaped popular attitudes about the future of serfdom and slavery.

Chapter 1 considers the efforts of four writers who, with varying degrees of success, employed strikingly similar strategies to transform public opinion toward Russian serfs and enslaved African Americans on the eve of abolition. Russian poet Nikolai Nekrasov and playwright Aleksei Pisemskii and American authors Martha Griffith Browne and Louisa May Alcott produced original works of fiction, poetry, and drama that humanized the experience of bondage in distinct ways.²⁷ Their literary depictions of serfs and enslaved people are worthy of study for two reasons. First, they provide insight into the emancipatory imagination of four writers from privileged backgrounds who had never personally experienced enslavement or enserfment. Aristocrat Nekrasov and slaveholder Browne used sentimental language and imagery to encourage audiences to sympathize with oppressed serfs and slaves, whereas nobleman Pisemskii and Northern abolitionist Alcott helped audiences imagine bonded laborers as integrated citizens through radical portrayals that depicted loving interracial or inter-estate relationships.

Second, literary scholars and historians have not adequately examined the ways in which these authors sought to inspire abolitionist emotions in readers. For example, Alcott is best known for her internationally acclaimed children’s literature, such as the novel Little Women (1868), while her progressive short stories have been given scant scholarly treatment.²⁸ Although American scholars are much more familiar with writers like Fedor Dostoevskii and Lev Tolstoi than with Pisemskii or Nekrasov, perhaps because the most recent English-language biographies of Nekrasov and Pisemskii were published in the 1960s, Russianists consider the playwright and poet to have significantly contributed to the nation’s literary canon.²⁹ Even less is known about the ways in which they produced profoundly new depictions of Russian serfs and peasants. Lastly, Browne’s fictional slave narrative warran...