Martin expressed the shared understanding that the immigrant (the man from another country) would be assimilated as a “citizen,” and that the immigrant who came as an indentured servant was “qualifiedly” free, as opposed to the absolute unfreedom of the clause’s “intended” subject, the unnamed slave. As we saw in Douglass’s 1849 editorial response to Calhoun’s “Southern Address,” Douglass echoed Luther Martin’s claim when he declared that “the framers of that cunning instrument were ashamed of the name, while they had not the honesty to renounce the thing, slavery.”49 The historical and literary-critical point to emphasize here is that this disjunction between the “expression” and the “signified,” between “name” and “thing,” is one that inhered in the original ambiguity of the Constitution’s text.
Indeed, only a decade after the federal constitutional convention and long before the rise of broad antislavery agitation within the United States, the language of this apparently unequivocal “slave clause” came under scrutiny in the debates of the Alien and Sedition crisis. In the congressional debate over the Federalists’ Alien Friends Act of 1798, Jeffersonian Republicans cited the 1808 provision of the “migration and importation clause” to argue that the Alien Friends Act was unconstitutional. While Federalists asserted that the “migration and importation clause” referred solely to the slave trade, Jeffersonian Republicans insisted that the clause also applied to the immigration of free persons. They argued that the word “person” was general, and included immigrants, and that in addition to “importation,” which applied to the traffic in persons chattel—that is, slaves brought to the United States without their consent—the clause used the term “migration,” which indicated a “free act of the will.” This debate over the interpretation of that other key “slave clause” was resolved only when Abraham Baldwin (the only representative then in the House who had helped frame the Constitution) agreed that the clause applied to immigrants as well as to slaves. In doing so, Baldwin recalled the objections raised during the convention debates over the use of the word “slave” in the Constitution.50
As I have argued, the bondsman mediates the two opposing poles of personhood codified in the letter of the law: namely, the subjection of chattel slavery on the one side and the “freedom” of self-constituted political subjectivity on the other. The bondsman is thus a vanishing mediator in the strongest sense: as the “catalytic agent that permits an exchange of energies between two otherwise mutually exclusive terms,” and thereafter disappears.
Literary History and Forms of Contingency
Douglass recognized the labor bondage of both the slave and the servant to be the absent presence of the Constitution, reading the figure of the bondsman as the trace of this erasure. By reinterpreting the so-called slave clauses as referring instead to the labor bondage of indentured servitude and apprenticeship, Douglass draws our attention to the figure of the bondsman, whose ambiguous form of appearance in the letter of the law registers the historical links between enslaved and “free” laborers. In doing so, Douglass points to labor exploitation as an underlying core of the slavery debates. Douglass recognized the fundamental historical role of both enslaved and bound-yet-free labor to the building of the republic; he also recognized the need for some proper accounting. In an insight that few modern scholars have taken up, however, he went further to argue that the erasure of the word, the refusal out of guilty shame “to name the thing,” provided for the radical revision of the Constitution’s meaning and purpose. For if ambiguities of reference arise from the slave’s forms of appearance in the law, the words used to inscribe them in the Constitution could be given an altogether different “construction.” As Douglass asserted: “The language in each of the provisions to which the [Calhoun] address refers…[bears] the very opposite of the construction given it by this wily band of slaveholders, and they have just reason to apprehend that such a construction may yet be placed upon that instrument as shall prove the downfall of slavery.”51The point to emphasize here is that Douglass situated his own interpretation of those words written in the founding past within the diachronic movement of history itself, whose future, in what Douglass called “the ever-present now,” was still undecided.52
One of my historical arguments thus far has been that Douglass’s reading practice here illuminates the broader transformation in legal-literary hermeneutics caused by the political crises over slavery. Douglass’s “man from another country” highlights as well one of the critical claims of this study, which is that in order to historicize more fully the cultural texts of the past, we must also attempt to recover their historical situations as moments of contingency, to recall a sense of that “ever-present now.” This will require a rewriting of the historical context itself. It is to the question of how modern cultural historians can approach the texts of the past while recovering their historical situations of radical contingency to which we now turn.
Once again the bondsman, as legal form of appearance and as vanishing mediator between “subject” and “citizen,” will aid us in this elaboration. As a narrative concept which finds its vocation in accounts of historical transition, the bondsman can likewise be deployed productively to specify the critical perspective on history and periodization employed throughout this study. In the passage from any precapitalist mode of production to what Marx designates “the specifically capitalist mode of production” (Capital 1: 1021), there remains the distinction between the formal subsumption of labor by capital and its real subsumption. The first key point of this distinction between the formal subsumption and the real subsumption of labor by capital is “that capital subsumes the labour process as it finds it, that is to say, it takes over an existing labour process, developed by different and more archaic modes of production” (Capital 1: 1021). In such moments of labor’s formal subsumption by capital, the formal conditions for capitalist production arise or (depending upon the scale of development) are introduced by capital itself. The most central of these formal conditions is the transformation of the existing types of labor into wage labor. Marx refers to several examples of such formal subsumption of labor under capital:
When a peasant who has always produced enough for his needs becomes a day labourer working for a farmer; when the hierarchic order of guild production vanishes making way for the straightforward distinction between the capitalist and the wage-labourers he employs; when the former slave-owner engages his former slaves as paid workers, etc., then we find that what is happening is that production processes of varying social provenance have been transformed into capitalist production. (Capital 1: 1020)
The formal subsumption of labor requires the transformation of these different types of bondsmen into “free” laborers. Marx emphasizes that this change in forms of labor will occur most spectacularly through the use of law (in “mystified” forms of appearance): wage laborer and capitalist will meet as formal equals on the market (as seller and buyer of labor), through the legal form of the wage contract; and the worker must enter this market precisely because the only legal “property” he owns is his labor, now a commodity for sale. Necessity subjects them to the laws of contract and wage labor because, with their formal subsumption by capital, these workers become “free in a double sense”: “Free workers in the double sense that they neither form part of the means of production themselves, as would be the case with slaves, serfs, etc., nor do they own the means of production.…The free workers are therefore free from, unencumbered by, any means of production of their own” (Capital 1: 874). As I discuss in chapter 1, this formal subsumption of labor requires the assimilation and disciplining of these laboring subjects, their transformation into responsible and accountable free workers who recognize the obligations of contract and the bonds of debt.
However, while the labor process at this juncture is formally subsumed under capital, this