Contested Bodies. Sasha Turner

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СКАЧАТЬ people’s access to power was often informal and ephemeral, and like the struggles over childbirth, infused the ongoing tensions that marked slavery and colonialism.

      Abolitionist activists of the 1780s concentrated their campaigns on the ability of enslaved people to become moral and productive subject-citizens. As Maurice Morgan explained, for the enslaved to be able to “talk the same language, read the same books, profess the same religion, and be fashioned by the same laws” as Englishmen, abolitionists needed to persuade Parliament that slaves could be reformed.⁵⁴ Unlike some proslavery advocates, including Edward Long, who asserted inherent African inferiority as a justification for their enslavement, activists and strategists like Morgan, Ramsay, and Wilberforce worked hard to convince the British public that Africans and their descendants were capable of improvement.⁵⁵ The proposed plan to harness the reproductive potential of women as a pathway to freedom and citizenship could only make sense if abolitionists avoided arguments about the inherent inferiority of African-descended people. Activists had to make the case that mothers would not reproduce their vices in their children. Abolitionist campaigns, therefore, concentrated on amendable external and environmental factors. They decried the works of philosophers like David Hume who argued for the inherent inferiorities of Africans and their descendants and only opposed the system of slavery because he viewed it as inefficient and exemplary of the wastes of imperial expansion.⁵⁶

      Abolitionists countered arguments like Hume’s by arguing that environmental conditions dictated morals, values, and accomplishments, but inherited bodily differences, like skin color and hair texture, had no bearing on mental capacities or achievements. For example, Morgan argued that “even though our bodies may be varied by colour, or any other corporeal distinction” there is no inherent difference in capabilities.⁵⁷ He declared that captive Africans and their descendants existed in a state of moral and intellectual void because plantation societies had not stimulated the development of such capacities. Morgan, and later Ramsay and Wilberforce, insisted that freed children sent from the colonies to England improved in intelligence and social aptitude. The difference, they explained, was that such youths had been conditioned and socialized from their infancy to a different way of life. Encouraging births and socializing enslaved children in a manner compatible with the abolitionist goal of creating moral and free colonies would allow planters to capitalize on youths’ capacity for reform.

      Although abolitionist writers generally avoided the racial inferiority arguments because of their potential to undermine their moralizing project, age introduced an exception to this rule. The writers believed it was far more difficult, if not impossible, for adults to unlearn behaviors of a lifetime. Thus, they proposed two separate Christianization programs: one for adults and another for youths. In their plans, children would be isolated and indoctrinated exclusively by white missionaries, whereas evangelists as well as successful (enslaved) converts would teach adults. Missionaries would create a privileged class of converts who would receive greater rations and finer quarters in exchange for encouraging conversion and virtuous living among their fellow enslaved. This elite group of believers would check against all un-Christian practices and habits that could undermine the work of proselytizers. Privileged disciples would “superintend” fellows of the same sex. Thus, a woman who sinned privately should be “mildly reproved in private” by another person of the same sex. The individual should be brought before the congregation to account for offenses that were more public. However, if the offender “obstinately persist[ed] in the fault” she should be banished from the congregation. Those who remained devout, were obedient to their masters, and kept the Sabbath should be rewarded with such indulgences that will further “encourage them in their work,” betterment, and uprightness.⁵⁸

      The private sins of enslaved people of particular concern to abolitionists were their sexual relations. Abolitionists upheld Christian marriage as foundational for preparing future generations of free people. In their misguided assumptions about what constituted intimate relationships between people of African descent, abolitionists echoed slaveholders’ refrain that enslaved people exercised no libidinal restraint and were like “perfect brutes” who engaged in “promiscuous intercourse.” “A man,” Ramsay claimed, “may have what wives he pleased, and either of them may break the yoke of their caprice.” Christian marriage was necessary to eradicate such loose sexual conduct and promote morality. Marriage “is the embryo of society, it contains the principles, and feeds every social virtue. The care of family,” Ramsay stressed, “would make them considerate, sober, frugal, and industrious.” In married men, he wrote, one finds “a more useful and trust worthy citizen than he who is single” (emphasis added).⁵⁹ In articulating abolition and reform through the reproductive lives of women, these proposals for encouraging marriage were not just about improving morals. The prevalence of venereal diseases in the colonies that undermined conception and birthrates meant that monogamous, Christian marriage also could eradicate what abolitionists thought was another obstacle to population growth.

      Christian marriages promised to eliminate perceived sexual promiscuity as well as engineer gender relationships. By placing women in the fields and breaking apart families, slavery and the slave trade prevented women from occupying their rightful place within the households of their fathers and husbands. Abolitionist criticism of demographic failure was therefore a critique of slavery’s disruption of the supposed natural gender order in which women related to men as dependents and men ruled over their wives and children. Plans to abolish the slave trade by encouraging biological reproduction were part of a much larger vision for ultimate emancipation that involved placing women in subordinate positions as wives and mothers while elevating men as husbands, fathers, workers, and ultimately citizens. Only by becoming heads of their families could enslaved men share the privileges of Englishmen. In effect, claims of citizenship were beyond women’s reach. The ability to belong and participate in colonial society as citizens relied on embracing British cosmologies and an elite gender order, like those imparted by Christianity and Christian marriages.⁶⁰

      Abolitionist critique of the gender disorder slavery produced extended to masters’ paternalism, which negated the autonomy of males. Like many proslavery writers, abolitionists used children as symbols of primitivism, characterizing male slaves as childlike and not self-reliant because they depended on their masters. Paternalism emboldened the power slaveholders held over their bonded laborers precisely because it undermined the masculinity of enslaved men. Enslaved men in Ramsay’s perception were not prepared to assume the full responsibilities of freedom. “Like children,” he argued, “they must be restrained by authority and led to their own good” (emphasis added). In order to partake of the liberties extended to English men, enslaved men had to unlearn their dependence on their masters, marry, and assume authority and responsibility for their own households and families.⁶¹

      Although these claims perpetuated the infantilized image of captive Africans used to rationalize slavery, abolitionist arguments were very different from those used by slavery defenders. In Ramsay’s postulations, children were “unspoiled by human nature” and consequently possessed the greatest potential for reform.⁶² Though childlike, enslaved adults lacked the innocence and open-mindedness of children. Missionaries were therefore more hard-pressed to realize their transformation. Tainted by the sociocultural circumstances of slavery and the slave trade, adults were irredeemable. This view reflected a more enlightened (though no less self-serving) view of African-descended people insofar as it avoided the argument that they were inherently inferior.⁶³ Such reasoning was essential to abolitionist articulation of colonial reform through the reproductive capacities of women because this framing reiterated that biological reproduction would not regenerate perceived African inferiority. The image of captive Africans as perpetual children unable to live independent of their masters would contradict a reform agenda elaborated through women’s reproductivity.

      To strengthen the argument that Africans and their descendants were capable of improvement, Ramsay extolled enslaved people born in the colonies, called “Creoles,” as having higher worth than those who were African born. Africans domesticated for “three or four generations in our colonies or made free three or four generations back were СКАЧАТЬ