The recognition of the slave’s humanity as coextensive with the slave’s legal condition as property was inherited from English common law. Blackstone’s Commentaries, for example, while recognizing slaves as property in the West Indian and North American colonies, took for granted the law’s recognition of them as men and by natural right free: “[the] spirit of liberty is so deeply rooted in our soil, that a slave or negro, the moment he lands in England, falls under the protection of the laws, and with regard to all natural rights becomes eo instanti a freeman.”62Lord Mansfield’s famous 1772 ruling in Somerset v. Stewart (brought to litigation by Equiano’s friend Granville Sharp) proceeded from the accepted view that all humanity, including Africans, are by natural right free, and that the slave’s condition as property was the artificial creation of local (municipal) positive law.63
Moreover, Equiano himself reminds us of the legal and cultural recognitions of this “mixed character” of the slave as person and property through the two other documents embedded within the Interesting Narrative, his certificates of “good character.” As with Andrew the Hebridean’s passage from servitude to self-mastery in Crèvecœur’s Letters, the major steps in Equiano’s passage from slavery to freedom—through the cultivation narrative of apprenticeship—are marked by these textual “outward signs” of “visible character.” After having bought his manumission from his master, Robert King, and continuing to work for him for a year, Equiano decides to “return” to England: “I then requested he be kind enough to give me a certificate of my behaviour while in his service, which he very readily complied with, and gave me the following: Montserrat, 26th of July, 1767. The bearer hereof, Gustavas Vassa, was my slave for upwards of three years, during which he has always behaved himself well, and discharged his duty with honesty and assiduity. Robert King. To all whom this may concern.”64Equiano has been formally free for over a year when he obtains this certificate of his behavior (his manumission certificate is dated 11 July 1766); yet the certificate, for Equiano’s use as a free laborer (seeking employment as a sailor or hired servant), is given its social-textual authority through the signature of his former owner; and those attributes of “good character” to which the document attests (“he behaved himself well, and discharged his duty with honesty and assiduity”) are based on his performance of these traits while Equiano was Robert King’s slave. Indeed, Equiano’s “certificate of character” speaks the same language as the Quaker reformer David Barclay’s broadside “Advice to Servants,” whose central message was that “a good character” should be the highest goal of servants, “for it is their bread.”65 As we have seen, this good “visible character” was also one of the primary lessons in Crèvecœur’s history of Andrew the Hebridean, whose motto was that of all poor immigrants: ubi panis ibi patria (Letters 43).
These continuities between the good character traits of the slave and those of the formally free servant are then reaffirmed when Equiano later obtains another certificate, this time from another “old and good master,” Dr. Irving. This “certificate of [his] behaviour” reads: “The bearer, Gustavus Vassa, has served me several years with strict honesty, sobriety, and fidelity. I can, therefore, with justice recommend him for these qualifications; and indeed in every respect I consider him as an excellent servant. I do hereby certify that he always behaved well, and that he is perfectly trust-worthy” (Equiano 210). The formal difference in servile status indicated in these two certificates of character is worth noting: in the first certificate, the attributes of “good character” were demonstrated through Equiano’s services to his master as a slave, whereas in the second, they were demonstrated through his role as a servant. However, as documents signed by authorities identified with the full freedom of a master (over slaves and servants), these certificates of character serve the same social function. And as their contents reveal, the attributes of “good character” for the slave and for the “free” servant were the same; these were the traits of the ideal laboring subject, enslaved or free: the tractable person accepting his subjection to the mastery of another, willingly bound “to serve well and faithfully.”66
Equiano’s two certificates of “good character” together reveal a more complex conception of slave personhood than is represented in Equiano’s oft-cited manumission certificate. The writing of such “characters” for slaves signaled the social recognition of their possession of those attributes of the “moral person” considered necessary to the “free” laborer. While slavery is still exemplary here of the most extreme form of labor bondage and unfree personhood, it is also represented as existing along a spectrum of labor subjection, not in static binary opposition to “freedom” or “humanity.” Even as in the late eighteenth century to be a slave of “good character” was to be “honest,” “well-behaved,” and above all faithful to a master while bound in involuntary servitude, such an understanding proceeds from the cultural and legal recognition of the slave as both a member of humanity and a “moral person.” Thus while we can agree with the importance of the manumission certificate as exemplary of Equiano’s “mastery” of slave economics, we should not ignore the significance of these other embedded texts marking the narrative of Equiano’s passage from slavery to formal freedom. These social documents reinforce the political-economic fact that the attributes of “good character” for the slave were the same as those for the servant (in the words of these certificates: “honesty, sobriety, fidelity”), and that the primary difference between them was the legal freedom inscribed in the more spectacularly “peculiar” manumission certificate (Equiano 137).
In the narration of his passage from bondage to freedom, Equiano dwells on scenes that typify those traits listed in the two certificates of character he receives: honesty and fidelity. For example, Equiano repeatedly points out that while his mind was “replete with inventions and thoughts of being freed,” especially when faced with the horrors of slavery in the West Indies, he wished to obtain his freedom “by honest and honourable means, for I always remembered the old adage, and I trust that it has ever been my ruling principle, ‘that Honesty is the best policy’” (119).
In order to model the practicability of both slave emancipation and black civic assimilation, Equiano presents himself throughout the Interesting Narrative as “ruled” not by exterior restraints or fear of his master—as he declares, “I used plainly to tell him [the Captain]…that I would die before I would be imposed upon as other negroes were” (120)—but rather by the interior governance of the moral principle of “honesty,” that trait later listed as Equiano’s first distinctive trait in the certificate of “good character” given to him by his former owner, Robert King. This “good character” trait distinguishes Equiano from that most representative of unruly slaves, the fugitive: “Had I wished to run away, I did not want opportunities, which frequently presented themselves” (Equiano 123). Equiano’s contrast with the figure of the fugitive appealed to antislavery reformers and political elites alike. Throughout the transatlantic slavery debates, all sides referred to the maroon communities of escaped slaves that regularly “terrorized” the planter population with raids, and whose very existence provided a dangerous example to a restive slave population.
We should note further the political-economic significance of describing such a contrast with runaway slaves as “honesty,” which is to say we should remember that in the emergent bourgeois ideology of the late eighteenth century, “moral sense” necessarily carried political-economic significations. In the model of black assimilability Equiano stages in the Interesting Narrative, the “honest and honourable means” of obtaining freedom is equated with its “purchase” (126), such that slaveholders would be compensated for any losses sustained, by manumission or emancipation, of what Equiano calls the “first cost” (103) of their slaves. To make this last point is not to argue that Equiano sincerely believed that masters should be compensated for their freed slaves. Rather, it is to focus on slave autobiography’s