To be sure, discussions of the 1790s have not been silent about race, whether in biographical accounts (e.g., discussions of Jefferson), local histories (such as the 1793 yellow fever epidemic in Philadelphia), or treatment of the world-historical impact of the Haitian Revolution. Indeed, much circumatlantic scholarship has followed Paul Gilroy and others in stressing a Black Atlantic, and we have been inspired by an impressive number of works exploring the centrality of enslavement to US cultural politics. These include older studies such as Winthrop Jordan’s White over Black and David Brion Davis’s writings, as well as such recent focused studies as Leonard L. Richards’s The Slave Power: The Free North and Southern Domination, 1780–1860 (2000), David Waldstreicher’s Runaway America: Benjamin Franklin, Slavery, and the American Revolution (2004), Henry Wiencek’s An Imperfect God: George Washington, His Slaves, and the Creation of America (2003), Gordon S. Brown’s Toussaint’s Clause: The Founding Fathers and the Haitian Revolution (2005), and Ashli White’s Encountering Revolution: Haiti and the Making of the Early Republic (2010). As important have been such new syntheses treating slavery as Garry Wills’s Negro President: Jefferson and the Slave Power (2003), Alfred W. Blumrosen and Ruth G. Blumrosen’s Slave Nation: How Slavery United the Colonies and Sparked the American Revolution (2006), Matthew Mason’s Slavery and Politics in the Early American Republic (2006), Peter Kastor’s The Nation’s Crucible: The Louisiana Purchase and the Creation of America (2004), Adam Rothman’s Slave Country: American Expansion and the Origins of the Deep South (2005), Eva Sheppard Wolf’s Race and Liberty in the New Nation: Emancipation in Virginia from the Revolution to Nat Turner’s Rebellion (2006), Craig Hammond’s Slavery, Freedom, and Expansion in the Early American West (2007), and Mason and Hammond’s Contesting Slavery: The Politics of Bondage and Freedom in the New American Nation (2011). Also significant has been a wave of cultural-critical works including Dana Nelson’s The Word in Black and White: Reading “Race” in American Literature (1992), Leonard Cassuto’s The Inhuman Race: The Racial Grotesque in American Literature and Culture (1997), Jared Gardner’s Master Plots: Race and the Founding of an American Literature, 1787–1845 (1998), Philip Gould’s Barbaric Traffic: Commerce and Antislavery in the Eighteenth-Century Atlantic World (2003), David Kazanjian’s The Colonizing Trick: National Culture and Imperial Citizenship in Early America (2003), Gesa Mackenthun’s Fictions of the Black Atlantic in American Foundational Literature (2004), Sharon M. Harris’s Executing Race: Early American Women’s Narratives of Race, Society, and the Law (2005), Andy Doolen’s Fugitive Empire: Locating Early American Imperialism (2005), the roundtable “Historicizing Race in Early American Studies” published in Early American Literature (2006, ed. Sandra Gustafson), Sean Goudie’s Creole America: The West Indies and the Formation of Literature and Culture in the New Republic (2006), Robert S. Levine’s Dislocating Race and Nation: Episodes in Nineteenth-Century American Literary Nationalism (2008), Agnieszka Solysik Monnet’s The Poetics and Politics of the American Gothic: Gender and Slavery in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (2010), and the special issue of Early American Literature “New Essays on ‘Race,’ Writing, and Representation in Early America” (2011, ed. Robert S. Levine).
These works have variously attempted to expand our understanding of the workings of slavery as an expansionist economic force and political program, but they are perhaps as important for the ways in which they foreground the interpretive challenges of understanding the United States as a slave nation. The Blumrosens, for instance, recast the Revolutionary political narrative as one of often indirect responses to the Somerset case, from the early 1770s to the Northwest Ordinance and the framing of the Constitution: as such, they insist on a reprioritized hermeneutic at odds with the usual practices of intellectual history. Garry Wills similarly foregrounds a minority yet substantial political discourse of the “federal ratio” and “Negro President,” clarifying what these terms meant for an antislavery analytic buried beneath a “national reticence.”13 Or, to take another example, Mason’s account of political struggles pre-1808 simultaneously stresses the ways in which consideration of slavery “insinuated itself into a wide array” of issues but also ways in which the analysis of slavery remained incomplete and unarticulated, in many instances beyond agents’ ability to formulate them coherently.14
What many of these works have in common, then, is a dual appreciation of the importance of slavery and a methodological awareness, even insistence, on its discursive elusiveness, which is variously explained through recourse to obfuscation, reticence, emergence, confusion, code, or even impossibility. Several years ago, the last term was something of the doxa in many US discussions of the Haitian Revolution, the discourse of which was simultaneously silenced or (in Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s term) “unthinkable.”15 But a decade’s worth of excavatory scholarship has perhaps confirmed that parts of the Haitian Revolution were thinkable, even if difficult to articulate, such that a major challenge we face today is not just the (historical) thinking about the moment but a better understanding of its distorted articulation. We thus follow the lead of Colin Dayan and Sybille Fischer, whose pathbreaking books have allowed critics to read for historical memory and agency beyond the textual record. For Dayan, vodou combines both intimate and communal religious enthusiasm to the political unconscious, while Fischer uses the psychoanalytic language of disavowal to make the gaps and absences of memory and cultural production legible.16 Comparison may here be drawn to revisionist interpretations of American gothic literature, in which a racial subtext is regarded as constitutive of more explicit narrative and thematic aims.17 It is in this vein that we try to read the political discourse of the era. Matthew Mason concludes his chapter “Slavery and Politics to 1808” with the observation that the Burr Conspiracy “engrossed Americans more than the slave trade debates did” and that “only thereafter” did it become “clear that slavery was the prime threat to the federal compact.”18 We would less dispute these claims, taken in their most literal sense, than note that the Burr Conspiracy was so engrossing because it was essentially a coded, indirect drama about slavery and slave revolution. And if slavery’s threat to the federal compact became clear in the aftermath, it was in part due to the revelatory distortions of the preceding decade. In this respect, our study of the Burr phenomenon is offered as an attempt to explore the coded racialization of US cultural discourse, in keeping with the imperative presented in Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark.19
Perhaps the best emblem of our project may be found in Aaron Burr’s death mask, now in the Laurence Hutton Collection at Princeton University. Hutton had acquired the mask but was not sure of its provenance: “I had no special admiration for Burr—who once killed a Scotsman,—but I had all the collector’s enthusiasm for Burr in plaster and I wanted to think my Burr was Burr.”20 But Hutton had met the person who had secretly made the mask, working as the agent for the best-known popularizers of phrenology, Orson Squire Fowler, Lorenzo Niles Fowler, and Samuel Roberts Wells. As Hutton noted, the Fowlers had found in the Burr mask evidence that his “destructiveness, combativeness, firmness, and self-esteem were large, and amativeness excessive.”21 Indeed, Orson Fowler, in his massive Sexual Science, dwelt on Burr’s massive amativeness,