Race, History, and Early America

Session Coordinator: Christopher Hanlon
Dept. of English, Eastern Illinois University
3811 Coleman Hall
600 Lincoln Avenue, Charleston, IL 61920
chanlon@eiu.edu

Frederick Douglass and the Anachronistic Self

This paper argues that our relationship to past works is like our relationship to past selves, which itself is like the self's relationship to an “other”: an ongoing attempt to imagine meeting places—a set of contact zones—where present and past, self and other, converge. Frederick Douglass's autobiographical writings provide a practical illustration of just such convergences. While, Douglass (on the surface at least) is less concerned with historical—than with self-representation, his presentation of self cannot help but be historical. This is because in his text, the narrating Douglass is different in both form and fact (to adapt one of his most famous formulations), from the Douglass that is the subject of the narrative. Like every narrative of history, Douglass' access to his past slave experience is mediated by his writing, his linguistic representation of it—by what might be called his narrating presence/presents.

Rhetorically, Douglass confronts this formal challenge by continually having his past and present selves slide into one another. This is apparent from the shifting verb tense s in the very beginning of the narrative, where his opening sentence, which begins “I was born in Tuckahoe”, invoking his “historical” self, turns immediately to “I have no accurate knowledge of my age”, which reinstates his narrating self . Similarly, when he writes a little later in the Narrative, "I look upon my departure from Colonel Lloyd's plantation as one of the most interesting events of my life " (74), he refers at once to the past (his departure from Lloyd's plantation) and the present (his current views of the event). And in one of the most memorable images in the Narrative, Douglass describes how he was forced to endure the winter with little shelter: “My feet have been so cracked with frost,” he writes, “that the pen with which I am writing might be laid in the gashes” (72). As interesting—and arresting—as this image may be in its merging of the traces of the past (his scars) and the prime symbol of his self-creation in the present (his pen), what is particularly interesting about this moment is the way it captures what might be called the present-within-history, the tendency of the present to slip into history. After all, once it is written, Douglass's “I am writing” is only an illusion, a linguistic performance of immediacy. Douglass's complex rendering of personal history—the creation of what I call an anachronistic self—thus suggests that we are no more locked into a particular self than we are bound by a particular present. Our selves are continually slipping into history, continually involved in a process of becoming.

Jeffrey Insko
Oakland University
insko@oakland.edu

National Characters: Race and Nation in Carey's American Museum or Universal Magazine

Matthew Carey's American Museum, or, Universal Magazine, published in Philadelphia from 1787 to 1792, was not only one of the few eighteenth-century American magazines with a life longer than a few issues, but also one of the first to focus on almost exclusively “American” content. Begun during the year of the Constitutional convention, the American Museum featured news, statistics, and articles on all of the states of the new union; debates about constitutional amendments; reprints of pamphlets, poems, and broadsides from the early years of the Revolution; and a wide variety of other material by American writers or on specifically American topics.

One notable category of content that appeared in just about every issue of the American Museum was articles under the heading “National Characters.” These ethnographic essays drew on various racial theories. Many dealt with Native American groups and others with various European ethnic groups. In addition to this series, in 1789 a debate over racial theory (specifically over the question of multigenesis) was sparked by the magazine's printing of excerpts from Samuel Stanhope Smith's Essay on the Causes of the Variety of Complexion and Figure in the Human Species and responses to Smith's essay by an English writer.

This paper will examine the ways in which the American Museum figured issues of race as central to the question of national identity. The paper will focus on the series of “National Characters” as a handbook for the development of an American character that would be as egalitarian as possible (thus aligning Carey and the Museum with the Jeffersonians and against high federalism). This depiction of the relationship between racial theory and nationalism will be complicated by consideration of the debate over Smith's essay and the humorous anecdotes about Africans and native Americans used as filler throughout the magazine. In its overwhelming concern regarding race and ethnicity as issues in the formation of national character, I will argue, the American Museum articulates a transitional moment from an older notion of race as nearly identical to “national character” and towards an emerging vision of race in which whiteness could emerge as a meaningful category.

Angela Vietto
Eastern Illinois University
cfarv@eiu.edu

Confederate Racial Identities and American Letters

During the opening years of the Civil War, a series of articles placed in prominent journals in the Confederate states described the political and ideological differences between the North and the South as having arisen from a deeper biological difference, a difference in race between the Northern and Southern people. For the authors of these articles, the war between the states was connected with a racial hierarchy separating white inhabitants of the Northern states from white inhabitants of the South, separating the “Puritan” from the “Cavalier.” The Civil War was therefore the consequence of what one commentator referred to as “an original antagonism existing between the North and the South, as a necessary sequence of their radical difference in race, ever active and growing, and which has resulted in the complete disruption of every tie which ever bound them together.” (1)

Much of this presentation will detail the discourse I describe above, the debate amongst Southern public intellectuals (along with their Northern counterparts) concerning the allegedly biological nature of the struggle between North and South. But I would also like to explore the possibility that the notion of a biological basis for the antagonism between the states may serve as a lens for reading works of creative literature written during the period. One anonymous, seven-stanza poem of 1862, entitled “The Old Scottish Cavalier,” focuses upon “the royal race” of a Scottish clan that resists “foreign rule” by keeping the clan “in peace at home.” (2) In his famous poem “Ethnogenesis,” the poet laureate of the Confederacy, Henry Timrod, refers to the Northern invasion of the South as a “tide of blood” it would be for Confederate troops to dam; while most scholars of Timrod have assumed that “blood” refers here to the violence a Northern invasion would bring, th context I outline suggests another meaning altogether: that Northern troops represented a different and inferior bloodline that threatened the sanctity of the Southern Cavalier/Norman stock. Ultimately, I would like to explore the possibility that the discourse over the racial distinctions between North and South should serve as a context for Ralph Waldo Emerson's English Traits, a book which is at pains to construct an ethnic taxonomy of England that suggests Emerson's engagement with—and desire to refute—confederate racial theory.

Christopher Hanlon
Eastern Illinois University
chanlon@eiu.edu

(1) “The Conflict of Northern and Southern Races.” De Bow's Review 31: 4-5 (October-November 1861), p. 391.

(2) See “The Old Scottish Cavalier.” Southern Literary Messenger 34: 12 (December 1862), pp. 639-41.