Against the critical tendency of applying a static binary opposition between slavery and the “freedom” of wage labor to texts emerging in different historical situations—for example, to antislavery literature of the eighteenth century and antislavery literature of the mid-nineteenth century—we must emphasize the qualitative transformations constituted by that material shift from “mere” formal subsumption to the real subsumption of labor. These distinct historical situations will pose different expansions or contractions of any particular text’s horizon of thematic and formal possibilities. For example, we must distinguish the significance of the formally “free” laborer, against which the slave was defined during the early national period (the period of manufacture, characterized by the formal subsumption of labor) from the later significance of “free labor” and “free-labor ideology” in mid-nineteenth-century America, under what Marx famously described as “capitalist production in full swing” (Capital 1: 717). As I argue in chapter 1, it will make all the difference to a historically precise interpretation of the slavery-freedom opposition as it appears in The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789) that labor in this period is in the process of being formally subsumed, but not yet socialized as it would be under the large-scale industrial capitalism of the mid- and late nineteenth century, this latter socialization a “real subsumption of labor” wherein it is then necessary to speak of the “social productive forces of labour,” and of a “collective labourer” (Capital 1: 1052–54).53 Likewise, analyses of mid-nineteenth-century texts addressing the slavery-freedom opposition—be they legal-political debates over the Compromise of 1850 and the federal Fugitive Slave Act or literary texts such as My Bondage and My Freedom (the subject of chapter 4) and Moby-Dick (the subject of chapter 5)—would have to explore the various ways these texts register and apprehend the political and cultural mediations of the real subsumption of labor, and the transformation of slave and free laborers in the relations of production. This focus on the diachronic register of historical transformation is also marked by our “man from another country”: In the midst of changes in the very conceptions of free personhood and citizenship initiated by the political struggles of the antebellum Union crisis, Douglass’s reading recovered the significance of the bondsman to that original scene of writing, the constitutional founding of 1787–88. It is a historical materialist distinction maintained throughout this study.
Grounding the legal and cultural transformations of citizenship in this dialectic between slavery and free labor illuminated by Douglass, Bonds of Citizenship argues that in the age of Emancipation, the attributes of free personhood became identified with the rights and privileges of the citizen; and that individual “freedom” thus became identified with the nation-state, and understood as possible solely through national citizenship. The first part (chapters 1 and 2) situates early American citizenship and its literature, the early American novel, within the context of Atlantic slavery, Anglo-American legal culture, and the rise of nationalism. Chapter 1, “Bound by Law: Apprenticeship and the Culture of ‘Free’ Labor” examines the figures of apprenticeship and indentured servitude in a range of transatlantic texts of the late eighteenth century, in order to delineate the ambiguous legal and cultural spaces between slavery and “freedom.” Throughout Hector St. John de Crèvecœur’s Letters from an American Farmer, Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography, Ottobah Cugoano’s Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species, and Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, indentured servitude figures as an allegory of transformation, as a transitional state of passage by which the subject attains the freedom of self-mastery. Crèvecœur explicitly stages this transformational allegory as the coming-into-citizenship of “the American, this new man.”54 Franklin employs the allegory to depict his disruption of his own apprenticeship indentures as an exemplary moment of “asserting [his] freedom.”55 In the pioneering Black Atlantic texts of Cugoano and Equiano, apprenticeship and indentured servitude function as the formal structuring principles of textual self-representation. Further, they are proposed as practical models for gradual emancipation and the assimilation of the formerly enslaved into the late-eighteenth-century culture of merchant capitalism. As these texts reveal, in the late-eighteenth-century transatlantic world, the figure of indentured servitude had not yet been identified with “involuntary servitude” and instead could model the path to freedom. It is this cultural recognition of apprenticeship and indentured servitude as ambiguous, transitional states of labor bondage that the Constitution’s erasures of race and slavery both depends upon and disavows.
In his early American novel Arthur Mervyn; or, Memoirs of the Year 1793, Charles Brockden Brown uses this same figure of apprenticeship as allegory of transformation to highlight the problems and potential dangers inhering in the representative subject of citizenship. In Arthur Mervyn, these dangers arise from the radical disjunction between an individual’s civic persona and his invisible interior self, that imaginary space of moral sense and inner “character.” This disjunction between visible persona and invisible character destabilized traditional republican conceptions of virtue and credibility. In chapter 2, “Civic Virtues: Narrative Form and the Trial of Character in Early America,” I argue that the early American novel mediates this change in social forms through innovations in literary form. Reading the shared epistemological forms and narrative structures of texts such as James Wilson’s Lectures on Law and Brown’s Arthur Mervyn, I show how legal theorists repeatedly rely upon the apparently distinct realm of aesthetic judgment to decide the truth of legal and historical facts. Situating both the novel and Anglo-American theories of evidence in relation to Enlightenment theories of natural language, I argue further that Brown’s work is exemplary of the migration of procedures for ascertaining historical fact from the sphere of law to that of the novel. In Arthur Mervyn, the ideal republican citizen is a character whose testimony conforms to the law’s rules of evidence, and the narrative testimony that ultimately prevails is that which the novel represents as a true account of the historical facts. Taking Brown’s work as exemplary, this chapter thus situates the rise of the novel as a formal representation of the “imagined community” of the new nation in relation to what Christopher Tomlins describes as the concurrent “rise of the rule of law…to a position of supreme imaginative authority.”56
This focus on apprenticeship and indentured servitude thus also advances the investigation of several key themes and concepts explored throughout the study. In these first chapters I explore, in particular, the interdependent relation between the rights and privileges of the formally free subject and the legal spaces of the nation—a relation elaborated through the construction of categories such as “jurisdiction”