Nearly sixteen millions of hands will aid you in pulling the load upward, or they will pull against you the load downward. We shall constitute one-third and more of the ignorance and crime of the South, or one-third to the business and industrial prosperity of the South, or we shall prove a veritable body or death, stagnating, depressing, retarding every effort to advance the body politic” [emphasis added].9
By using the term body politic—“an ancient metaphor by which a state, society, or church and its institutions are conceived as a biological (usually human) body,” as stated in Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (meaning a commonwealth or state)—Washington evoked clear images of the shared destiny of blacks and whites as the whole body of the nation.10
Washington’s metaphor of the nation as a unified, functioning entity echoes the rhetoric of John Winthrop, a British lawyer and leading figure in colonial America. In 1630, Winthrop, the first governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, stated that the American people should aspire to live in “a city upon a hill,” reminding them that “[t];he eyes of all people” were upon them.11 These two speeches, delivered by a white man and a black man living more than two and a half centuries apart, have similarities. First, Winthrop and Washington call for Christianity to be a force in nation (re)building. Winthrop stresses that Christian love will be “the bond of perfection” in the face of communal peril, whereas Washington describes the problem of racism against African Americans as “the great and intricate problem which God has laid at the doors of the South,” for which he proposed collaboration as the solution.12 Second, Winthrop and Washington invoke the image of a ship in distress to describe the failure to achieve Christian unity. In his speech, Washington compares the deadlock in race relations to a “ship lost at sea.”13 Winthrop notes, “Now the only way to avoid this shipwreck, and to provide for our posterity, is to follow the counsel of Micah, to do justly, to love mercy, to walk humbly with our God.”14 Finally, Winthrop and Washington ←2 | 3→use corporeal images to symbolize the working nation. The two men only differed in the scale of the implied “body politic.” Winthrop referred to it as “one man,” using a metaphor of the church:
To instance in the most perfect of all bodies: Christ and his Church make one body. The several parts of this body considered apart before they were united, were as disproportionate and as much disordering as so many contrary qualities or elements, but when Christ comes, and by his spirit and love knits all these parts to himself and each to other, it [has] become the most perfect and best[-];proportioned body in the world. (Eph. 4:15–16)15
Winthrop calls for the collaboration of all of its parts, saying, “For this end [prosperity], we must be knit together, in this work, as one man.”16 By contrast, Washington compared the working nation to “fingers” on one big “hand.” He reportedly raised his “hand high above his head” with his “fingers stretched wide apart,” saying, “In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress.”17 In his rhetoric, Washington indicates that slaves’ hands brought prosperity to the South for more than two and a half centuries—hands that sowed, plowed, picked, harvested, cleaned, cooked, raised, constructed, mended, undertook, and buried for “Massa” and his family in their servitude.18 Washington argues that friendship between the races would not harm white people because they would remain socially separate even if they collaborated for mutual prosperity. Using the metaphor of a struggle between the fingers, Washington warned of the possible financial loss that the country would incur if Americans cut some fingers off.
Washington’s body metaphor coincided with an increase in racial violence; he implicitly attacked “illegal” mob violence and demanded “willing obedience among all classes to the mandates of law.”19 According to a 1910 issue of The Crisis: A Record of the Darker Races—the official magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)—the known number of “colored men lynched without trial” peaked at 155 in 1892, totaling 2,425 from 1881 to 1910.20 During the time of slavery, enslaved Africans and their descendants had been treated as chattel, or pieces of property, and were considered valuable only when alive. Historian Stanley Elkins argues that it was virtually a non sequitur that a man would kill his own slave because, with a slave’s body being living “chattel,” no man would “destroy his own estate.”21 However, after slavery ended, the black body, alive or dead, became irrelevant to white people’s wealth. Sociologist Sarah A. Soule connects the increase in mob violence to socioeconomic competition and industrial growth because emancipated slaves and whites competed for jobs ←3 | 4→in the North and the South.22 As a powerful black leader from the time of his Atlanta speech in 1895 until his death in 1915, Washington attempted to reestablish African Americans’ value as free citizens and incorporate their bodies into the U.S. body politic as assets. He suggests a triple alliance of Northern capitalists, the white leadership class of a New South, and that African Americans should work together as a unified larger “hand” of America to increase the nation’s wealth.23
In the larger American body politic, a black body had been divided at the very beginning. In his essay “The Promised Body: Reflections on Canon in an Afro-American Context,” Houston Baker, Jr., maintains that the Founding Fathers, such as George Washington and James Madison, were concerned about slavery because it was “the semantic sign that marks [the] dimensions of the unnatural standing in direct contradiction to claims of an American natural”—the idea that an American is “a blessed human being endowed by Nature and Nature’s God with inalienable rights.”24 Nevertheless, they decided to incorporate the African body into unnatural slavery and the legislation by metaphorically dividing it into pieces. “In the language of the Constitution,” writes Baker, “the African body is fragmented into fifths, modeled into an object of trade, and subjected to immobile enslavement.”25 The dealing of an African body is thought to range up to 10 provisions, including this infamous three-fifths clause.26 A slave’s body was not in perfect shape, neither legally nor ideologically.
In Western political history, a body politic led by white males often lacked racial and gender perspectives.27 Although Washington’s body politic was based on a racial perspective, both his and Winthrop’s corporeal metaphors lacked references to gender because until 1920, the United States had denied women