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NYR, October 13 2016
The Great Trap for All Americans
Maya Jasanoff
The Empire of Necessity: Slavery, Freedom, and Deception in the New World
by Greg Grandin
Picador, 400 pp., $19.00 (paper)
New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America
by Wendy Warren
Liveright, 368 pp., $29.95
One hundred and fifty years after the Thirteenth Amendment abolished
slavery in the United States, the nation’s first black president paid
tribute to “a century and a half of freedom—not simply for former
slaves, but for all of us.” It sounds innocuous enough till you start
listening to the very different kinds of political rhetoric around us.
All of us are not free, insists the Black Lives Matter movement, when
“the afterlife of slavery” endures in police brutality and mass
incarceration. All of us are not free, says the Occupy movement, when
student loans impose “debt slavery” on the middle and working classes.
All of us are not free, protests the Tea Party, when “slavery” lurks
within big government. Social Security? “A form of modern,
twenty-first-century slavery,” says Florida congressman Allen West. The
national debt? “It’s going to be like slavery when that note is due,”
says Sarah Palin. Obamacare? “Worse than slavery,” says Ben Carson.
Black, white, left, right—all of us, it seems, can be enslaved now.
Americans learn about slavery as an “original sin” that tempted the
better angels of our nation’s egalitarian nature. But “the thing about
American slavery,” writes Greg Grandin in his 2014 book The Empire of
Necessity, about an uprising on a slave ship off the coast of Chile and
the successful effort to end it, is that “it never was just about
slavery.” It was about an idea of freedom that depended on owning and
protecting personal property. As more and more settlers arrived in the
English colonies, the property they owned increasingly took the human
form of African slaves. Edmund Morgan captured the paradox in the title
of his classic American Slavery, American Freedom: “Freedom for some
required the enslavement of others.” When the patriots protested British
taxation as a form of “slavery,” they weren’t being hypocrites. They
were defending what they believed to be the essence of freedom: the
right to preserve their property.
The Empire of Necessity explores “the fullness of the paradox of freedom
and slavery” in the America of the early 1800s. Yet to understand the
chokehold of slavery on American ideas of freedom, it helps to go back
to the beginning. At the time of the Revolution, slavery had been a
fixture of the thirteen colonies for as long as the US today has been
without it. “Slavery was in England’s American colonies, even its New
England colonies, from the very beginning,” explains Princeton historian
Wendy Warren in her deeply thoughtful, elegantly written New England
Bound, an exploration of captivity in seventeenth-century New England.
The Puritan ideal of a “city on a hill,” long held up as a model of
America at its communitarian best, actually rested on the backs of
“numerous enslaved and colonized people.”
New England was never a “slave society”—where slaves performed the bulk
of labor—but it depended heavily on slavery nonetheless, due to its
economic entanglement with the Caribbean. As a crucial supplier of
provisions to the sugar islands, New England, one captain observed, was
truly “the key of the Indies without w[hi]ch Jamaica, Barbados & the
Caribee Islands are not able to subsist.” Fortunes made in sugar, fish,
and slaves underpinned the development of New England colonies in turn,
not least the colleges taking shape in Cambridge, Providence, and New Haven.
The greatest revelations of New England Bound lie in Warren’s meticulous
reconstruction of slavery in colonial New England. Enslaved Africans and
Indians have been “largely invisible” to historians of the region in
part because they blended into the economy alongside free laborers. They
weren’t invisible to colonists. With slaves comprising 5 to 10 percent
of the urban population, anyone in a New England town would have seen
slaves hauling water, loading warehouses, “boxing” pine trees for
turpentine, or serving meals in a wealthy family’s house.
Warren pores over the patchy archival record with a probing eye and an
ear keen to silences. One of Boston’s first colonists orders a slave to
rape and impregnate another “so that he might own a ‘breed of Negroes’”
to cultivate his land. In the heat of King Philip’s War in 1675 and
1676, the white women of Marblehead, Massachusetts, set upon two Indian
captives with sticks and stones, flaying them alive till “their heads
[were] off and gone, and their flesh in a manner pulled from their
bones.” The townspeople of Salem come across the body of a slave named
John, his chest torn by a bullet fired from the bottom of his rib cage.
He had leaned on a long-barreled musket and shot himself. Cotton Mather
receives a slave as a present from his congregation and immediately
renamed the man, because, as Warren writes, “What’s in a name? Mastery.”
In 1700 the Massachusetts judge Samuel Sewall published the colony’s
first call for abolition, albeit to deaf ears. The number of slaves in
New England increased up to the 1750s, then started falling; in the
1780s all the New England states passed laws phasing out slavery. By the
1830s, slavery had receded so far from New Englanders’ sense of
themselves that as sophisticated an authority on colonial times as
Nathaniel Hawthorne was astonished to see black people on a visit to
Williamstown, because he associated them with the cotton plantations of
the South. But the marks had been made. Through laws and labor
practices, ideas about freedom and rights, the “thread of slavery” had
been “so woven into the fabric of society that pulling it out…threatened
to wreck the entire design.”
Hawthorne’s young friend Herman Melville also mislearned his colonial
New England history. He named the ship at the center of Moby-Dick
(dedicated to Hawthorne) the Pequod for the Pequot Indians, whom he
believed, wrongly, were “now extinct as the ancient Medes.” As Greg
Grandin observes in The Empire of Necessity, however, Melville knew all
about the contradictions of slavery and freedom. Not long after
finishing Moby-Dick, he found a parable of American slavery and American
freedom in the adventures of a Duxbury, Massachusetts, sea captain named
Amasa Delano.
Born in 1763, Delano personified a kind of American freedom.
Relentlessly entrepreneurial, adventurous, and individualistic, he spent
some of his teens fighting in the American Revolution, sold New England
salt cod in Saint-Domingue, smuggled opium into China, chatted with the
king of Palau in the South Seas, and “considered the resemblance between
the Christian Holy Trinity and a three-headed statuette he came across
in Bombay representing Vishnu, Shiva, and Brahma.” He made money and
lost it all in a trading fiasco. Returning penniless to Massachusetts,
Delano built a new ship, named it the Perseverance, and considered where
to go in it. He could have turned slave trader—there was money in
that—but “he found slavery abhorrent.” He could have become a whaler,
but it took a lot of start-up capital to go into whaling, and a certain
kind of temperament. Delano went for easier prey. He chose seals.
Delano and his crew set out from Boston in 1799. For eighteen months
they criss-crossed the Atlantic and Indian Oceans in search of seals.
They weathered six months among hard-bitten Australian renegades sealing
in the Bass Strait; they passed from one depleted rookery to another in
the southeastern Pacific. By 1805, six years out, still no seals. The
crew plotted desertion; Delano “gave them good wholesome floggings” to
keep order.
Then one February day, rounding the island of Santa María off the coast
of Chile, they saw a ship. It flew no flag, its hull was caked in
barnacles and draped with kelp, “its sails threadbare and its rigging a
tangle.” Its name, just legible, was the Tryal. Acting out of maritime
courtesy, and perhaps hoping the ship “might even help him with his own
troubles,” Delano rowed over to the obviously suffering Tryal with a
boatload of provisions. He feared it might be a privateer in disguise,
but on boarding (as he described in his 1817 memoir Narrative of Voyages
and Travels in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres) he “saw the decks
were filled with slaves.” They “crowded around me to relate their
stories, and make known their grievances”—chiefly, a lack of water—while
the diffident young Spanish captain, Don Benito Cerreño, “had evidently
lost much of his authority over the slaves.” Cerreño was constantly
shadowed by a slave called Mori, and resisted all Delano’s efforts to
talk one-on-one.
After a long, strained, strange day on board, Delano got back into his
boat to leave. Just as he rowed away, Cerreño leapt from the Tryal’s
deck and into Delano’s boat. Frantically he blurted out the truth: the
slaves had rebelled two months earlier and forced him to sail to Africa.
It was only then that Delano realized he had witnessed, as Grandin puts
it, “a one-act, nine-hour, full-cast pantomime of the master-slave
relation,” in which rebel slaves pretended to be subject to a captain
they had effectively taken captive.
Melville lifted this episode from Delano’s memoir and reworked it into
his celebrated short story “Benito Cereno” (1855), “one of the most
haunting pieces of writing in American literature.” (It inspired Robert
Lowell, in turn, to write an eerie stage adaptation as part of his 1964
dramatic trilogy, The Old Glory.) In The Empire of Necessity, Grandin
peels back Melville’s story to show Delano’s and uncover the substance
of what actually happened on the Tryal. The result is inventive, vividly
written, often insightful. It’s also digressive and choppy, often to the
detriment of its argument.
Composed of nearly three dozen short sections, including a series of
“interludes” on Melville and his attitudes about slavery and freedom,
The Empire of Necessity becomes a kaleidoscope of the history of slavery
in the revolutionary era. At its best, the book reflects familiar
features from new angles. Instead of writing a history of the slave
trade that rehearses the well-known horrors of the Middle Passage, for
instance, Grandin delves into the tactics of contraband slavers,
describing methods of stealing and disguising ships that rarely appear
in the pages of Patrick O’Brian. Before the encounter with Captain
Delano some of the slaves on the Tryal had been sold in a dead-of-night
transaction on a deserted Uruguayan beach, while the ship that had
brought them from Africa was transformed—with five barrels of black
paint—from the Neptune to the Aguila, and spirited away under the
command of a newly promoted Portuguese cabin boy.
The Caribbean and Brazil were the primary destinations for African
slaves, but Grandin travels to the Río de la Plata, the hub of
Spanish-American slavery. Montevideo was the estuary’s “official slave
harbor.” Newly arrived captives were penned into the “squalid” caserío
de los negros, “a permanent refugee camp for people from all over the
African continent.” Some of them might have ended up as street hawkers,
advertising their wares “in a great lamenting dirge, as if all the pain
in the world were needed to announce that the barley cakes were made
that morning.” Others might have been sent across to Buenos Aires, fully
one third of whose population in the early nineteenth century was
African and mulatto.
Edouard Antoine Renard: Rebellion of a Slave on a Slave Ship, 1833
As this detail suggests, Argentina’s long-standing self-image as the
“whitest” nation in South America has required a deliberate erasure of
its African (to say nothing of its indigenous) heritage. Yet as Grandin
points out, Argentina’s extensive cattle industry, “which would drive
the country to the heights of the world economy…was all made possible by
slave labor” manning the slaughterhouses and salting plants.
Grandin’s tale begins in Buenos Aires, where Babo and Mori, the eventual
leaders of the revolt on the Tryal, were sold and sent to Lima. He
describes their journey across the dusty pampas, creaking in
cowhide-covered wagons through a landscape uncannily “similar to what
they had left behind” in Senegambia. Climbing up to the sharp peaks of
the Andes, they snaked “through a physical world that seemed not of this
world,” bodies freezing and heads pounding in the high altitude. They
had exceptionally clear views, in those mountain nights, of the inverted
southern moon.
This was of great significance for Babo and Mori, Grandin argues,
because they were Muslim. Babo, Grandin surmises, was “probably educated
in qur’anic schools” and “could have been a marabout (a cleric) or a
faqíh (a scholar) in his former life,” which meant that he monitored the
lunar cycle as exhibiting turns through a religious calendar. The slaves
crossed the Andes at the beginning of Ramadan; toward the end of the
sacred month they boarded the Tryal in Valparaiso and set sail for Lima.
On “the eve of the holiest day of that holy month: Laylat al-Qadr, or
the Night of Power,” they were at sea.
That was the night the slaves rebelled. Armed from a stash of axes and
knives, they slaughtered eighteen crew members, put their owner in
chains, and asked Captain Cerreño “if there were any ‘lands of black
people in these seas where they could be taken.’” They ordered Cerreño
to sail them back to Africa. He agreed and set off deceptively in the
opposite direction, hoping to run into salvation. Two months later the
Tryal met the Perseverance.
What kind of a man would chase a whale around the world? Melville gave
his answer in Moby-Dick. Whaling took courage, skill, teamwork, and not
a little hubris. What kind of a man would club a seal? Whalers embraced
danger by hunting the greatest mammals on the planet; the most reckless
thing about sealing was the scale of the slaughter. On the barren
islands of the southern Pacific, crews were turned loose among bleating
herds of seals and sea elephants, each one a rippling prize of blubber
and skin. To claim one, all you had to do was thump it on the nose to
stun it, slip a knife under its jaw, and slide the blade down to the
tail, punching in a fatal stab to the heart along the way. Thump, stun,
slash, and stab. Sealers killed hundreds by the day, tens of thousands
in a single voyage. They fed themselves on seal steaks, on salted seal
tongues, and black pudding made of seal blood; they dwelled in whale-rib
huts covered with sealskins. They killed so many that they had to change
destinations from one voyage to the next, as seal populations were
hunted to extinction.
When Amasa Delano described what had happened on the Tryal, in one
chapter of his memoir, he said almost nothing about slavery. He was much
more concerned about getting paid. As soon as Cerreño explained what had
happened onboard the Tryal, Delano dispatched the men of the
Perseverance to wrest back control from the rebels, on the understanding
that his crew would win some prize money in exchange. Armed with their
sealing knives, Delano’s men retook the Tryal with savage efficiency. To
his dismay, however, once they reached harbor in Chile, Cerreño flatly
refused Delano’s demand for prize payment. More than half of Delano’s
chapter on the affair consists of documents concerning his extended
quest to get compensation in Spanish courts for taking over the ship.
Truly, for Delano, this encounter was a “tryal.”
When Herman Melville dramatized Delano’s account in “Benito Cereno,” he
said absolutely nothing about sealing. Writing in the 1850s, at the
height of antebellum America’s “impasse” over slavery, Melville used the
slaves’ masquerade, and Delano’s misunderstanding of it, to evoke “a
nation trapped…inside its own prejudices.” That’s why Melville named his
story “Benito Cereno,” not “Amasa Delano.” It’s why he ignored Delano’s
legal woes entirely, reproducing instead a version of Cerreño’s
firsthand account of the uprising as an attached “original document.”
It’s why he changed the ship’s name from the Tryal to the San Dominick,
playing on Saint-Domingue, the colonial name for Haiti.
The disjuncture between these tellings points to Melville’s curious role
in The Empire of Necessity. Sometimes he seems like a gate-crasher in a
history of the revolutionary era; other times he’s the agent of
Grandin’s most explicit meditations on slavery and freedom. Melville,
Grandin stresses, understood that there was no such thing as pure
freedom, because society placed bonds on everyone. “Freedom,” he wrote,
“is the name for a thing that is not freedom.” Captain Ahab is one of
literature’s great villains because he subordinates the freedom of his
crew to the service of his unfettered monomania. Ahab has been
interpreted as an irrational “insurgent,” as “a planet destroyer
embodying man’s insatiable quest for more and more resources”—even as a
forerunner of Hitler and Stalin. (Though it’s easy to appreciate The
Empire of Necessity without having to read “Benito Cereno,” it does help
to be familiar with Moby-Dick.)
But it’s Delano, Grandin argues, who “represents a more common form of
modern authority.” His business of sealing captured “the isolation and
violence of conquest, settler colonialism, and warfare, men brutally
exploiting one another and nature.” He’s the one who systematically
seizes resources until they’re exhausted, and who drives his disgruntled
crew into violence against blacks on the promise of financial gain. He’s
the one who endangers society “not because he is dissenting from the
laws of commerce and capital but because he faithfully and routinely
administers them.”
Grandin presents The Empire of Necessity as a reflection on the
entanglement of freedom with slavery. In apt tribute to Melville, it’s
just as worth reading as a reflection on narrative form. It’s no
accident that the conventions of modern Anglo-American history writing
came of age alongside those of the novel, in the first half of the
nineteenth century. Virtually all the period’s most popular novelists
(Scott, Cooper, Dickens, and of course Hawthorne) wrote fiction set in a
historical past, while the great Victorian historians—Macaulay, Carlyle,
Bancroft—modeled history on the plots and pacing of fiction. If today
many popular historians aspire to the condition of fiction (what greater
compliment than to say a history book “reads like a novel”? what more
lucrative prize than a film or TV option?), many Victorian novelists
aspired to the condition of history.
Where does the line between history and fiction lie? Historians don’t go
where sources can’t lead them, into the unrecorded realms of a person’s
thoughts, senses, or speech. Fiction writers, though, can enter
characters’ minds to determining effect. What Melville does so
brilliantly in “Benito Cereno” is something a historian would be
hard-pressed to achieve: he builds dramatic power through the
misperceptions of an unreliable narrator, and follows this with an
explosive revelation of truth.
History, by contrast, gains strength precisely from the reliability of
its narrator—the authoritative historian—who guarantees (usually with
the help of endnotes) that what is chronicled is more or less “true.”
Another line between history and fiction runs outside an individual’s
mind. Historians try to strip away the subjective in order to make
arguments: they identify patterns surrounding plots, locate individuals
in collectives, set problems in spatial and temporal perspective.
If postmodernism taught historians anything, it’s that subjectivity
can’t ever be avoided. Nonetheless, conditioned as much by professional
conventions as by kinds of evidence, historians writing for a general
audience still more or less follow the forms set by the Victorians.
There’s usually a central plot organized by an offstage “omniscient”
narrator, driven by chronology, and animated by strong leading
characters. Grandin wrote his National Book Award–shortlisted Fordlandia
(2009) in this mode. The Empire of Necessity adopts a far more
imaginative structure by fracturing chronology, perspective, and plot,
and these brave narrative choices pay off in a series of dynamic scenes
and memorable aperçus. Grandin’s use of fiction also implicitly
challenges the privileged status of archival sources in the writing of
history—which is important when we consider how few documentary traces
the anonymous millions of enslaved Africans left behind.
The novel has come a long way since the Victorians, and popular history
can benefit from a creative update. That said, any narrative’s success
at delivering an argument can rise or fall on matters of selection: what
to reveal when, how much detail to provide, which characters to place in
the foreground, and so on. Often Grandin drifts off into a sea of
stories. There’s a potted history of the Reconquista, an excursus on
Borges’s racism, an interlude on Melville’s portrayal of the Galápagos
tortoise. A short chapter tells of the San Juan Nepomuceno, seized by
slaves in 1800 and taken on “perhaps the greatest escape in the history
of New World slavery”; although its journey is prominently mapped on the
book’s endpapers, there’s no indication that anybody involved in the
Tryal knew anything about it. The thing about a kaleidoscope is that you
can be mesmerized by its colorful patterns and still have no idea what
you’re actually looking at.
“Who aint a slave?” asks Ishmael in Moby-Dick. Melville’s “implied
answer—no one,” Grandin argues, stemmed from his belief that “all human
beings…oscillate somewhere between the two extreme poles of liberty and
slavery that defined much of the political rhetoric of antebellum
America.” Listening to the Tea Partiers shrieking “slavery” today, we
can ask how much has changed.
The vital difference is that in Melville’s time abolition was the
nation’s most urgent challenge. Today’s cries of “slavery” by the Tea
Party and others just seem calculated to shut down productive discussion
of the most pressing question for our time: What does freedom really
mean in a neoliberal age? Freedom from poverty? From surveillance? From
big business? From taxes? And what can or should the state do to secure
it? Americans no longer seem to be a community of whalers, united by the
solidarities of industrial labor and endangered by the occasional
maverick Ahab. We’re an unruly bunch of sealers, out to thump, stun,
slash, and stab.
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