Slavery and the Democratic Conscience. Padraig Riley

Чтение книги онлайн.

      Figure 2. Description of frontispiece from Thomas Branagan, The Penitential Tyrant.

      Yet Branagan’s work had a disruptive potential, and it often broke down the boundaries of the “virtuous slave” narrative. He relished describing the deaths of Christians at the hands of Africans, clearly endorsing African resistance and, by extension, slave resistance in the Americas. He named one of his African heroes Louverture, after Toussaint Louverture of the Haitian Revolution; his counterpart among the Christian enslavers was Leclerc, the name of the French general who tried to reconquer Saint-Domingue for Napoleon in 1802. Both men die in the course of the poem, but meet different fates. Leclerc is electrocuted by God’s retributive lightning bolt, while Louverture, killed by Christian treachery, ascends into heaven, to take a seat alongside other virtuous men, including George Washington, John Wesley, George Whitfield, Branagan’s infant son (who died in 1802), and Jesus Christ. That mental picture of the after-life encapsulates Branagan’s idiosyncratic political imagination. Like most moments in Avenia, the scene is elaborately overworked, and it salvages Christianity even as it indicts “Christian” slave traders. Christian faith remains the fundamental determinant of goodness and truth, judging Europeans and Africans alike. Yet the scene also exemplifies Branagan’s more complex political motivation, which runs throughout much of his early work: to advocate empathetic identification with the victims of slavery.³⁴

      In The Penitential Tyrant, his second poetic endeavor, Branagan argued for a human universalism based on empathetic recognition. Inspired by God, humans should “feel our brother’s grief, our brother’s wo; / Feel sympathetic love for all our race, / And circle man in one kind embrace.” For Branagan, sympathy was rooted not in pity for the weak, but rather in empathetic acknowledgment of another’s suffering. In an essay appended to the 1807 edition of the poem, Branagan asked white Americans to put themselves in the position of the slave. Imagine, Branagan asked his readers, that a French army had invaded New York, captured 10,000 white Americans (including one’s family members) and enslaved them in the West Indies. The thought experiment sought to provoke white Americans to regard African slaves as their “brothers and sisters indeed, children of the same primeval parents, but dispersed over the face of the earth by the accumulation of intermediate generations.” African slaves were not alienated from the American body politic, but rather equal members of the human family. Their slavery was as morally revolting as the slavery of one’s own kin.³⁵

      Many northern Jeffersonians, like Duane, understood slavery as an institution that embodied unjust power. They perceived the authority and wealth of a man like George Washington from an ideological distance and deemed slavery wrong because slaveholders behaved like aristocrats. Although Branagan made similar arguments, he constantly asked his readers to think of slavery from the perspective of the slave and thus to understand slaveholder power in terms of the suffering it caused. This shift in perspective enabled Branagan to interrogate how non-slaveholders participated in such suffering. Whereas Duane’s attack on Washington emphasized his and like-minded democrats’ distance from slavery, Branagan emphasized his and his readers’ proximity to the institution and their complicity in sustaining it. For example, like other early antislavery radicals, he opposed the use of sugar, because it was tainted by slavery. He implored his readers (especially those “desirous of vindicating the propriety of using the produce of slavery”) to put themselves,

      for one moment, in the same condition in which the poor unhappy slaves now are; and view, from the West-Indies, the votaries of liberty and religion, in America, drinking out of their jovial bowls, or China tea cups, the produce of thy labour, thy sweat, and thy blood—and then, and not till then, let thy conscience answer, is it right or wrong? is it just or unjust? is it pleasing or not to that impartial holy Being who is no respecter of persons?³⁶

      The passage illuminates the importance of empathy in Branagan’s work, and the critical role of conscience as the seat of ethical judgment—the intersection in the mind between one’s own life, the lives of the oppressed, and abstract principles of equality and justice.

      Branagan put his vision of human solidarity into practice during his time in Philadelphia, as he formed relationships with elite African Americans in the city, who helped support his literary efforts. Readers of the Preliminary Essay were asked to contribute funds for Avenia by way of Richard Allen, Absalom Jones, and James Forten, three of the most prominent black men in Philadelphia; Allen had paid for the printing of Branagan’s first work, perhaps believing Branagan an ally in the antislavery cause. Yet when Branagan spoke directly to white northerners, he spurned Allen’s generosity by endorsing racial exclusion in Pennsylvania. In his Serious Remonstrances … to the Citizens of the Northern States, also published in 1805, Branagan set out to explain the dangers of slavery to the North. He indicted the abusive power of the masters over their slaves, and their institutional power under the three-fifths clause of the Constitution. But he also contended that the northern states had to end slavery because the institution foisted free and runaway blacks onto them—or rather, into them, as their very “bowels” were filled with “three hundred thousand well informed and aspiring Negroes.” The metaphor indicated Branagan’s convoluted thought: “bowels” in this case referred to either the stomach or simply the interior of the body; the incorporation of “Negroes” promised internal explosion. But in the early nineteenth century, “bowels” also referred to the seat of sympathy, or sympathy itself. As Branagan would ask in one of his later essays, “Can we be so unreasonable as to suppose, that God will hear the prayers of the person who shutteth up his bowels of compassion against his brother?”³⁷ Yet Branagan had trouble maintaining the two main senses of “bowels” alongside each other. Pennsylvania was beset by an internal enemy, and Branagan, who had befriended slaves in Antigua and glorified Africans in Avenia, now argued “that the Northern States would have flourished far more, if there was not a negro in the Union.”³⁸ He turned to a series of racist phobias СКАЧАТЬ