Published Fall/Winter 2007
 
Literature, Law, and Slavery in Nineteenth-Century America
(on Maurice Lee's Slavery, Philosophy, & American Literature, 1830-1860, [Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006]; Arthur Riss' Race, Slavery, and Liberalism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature [Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2006]; Deak Nabers' Victory of Law: The Fourteenth Amendment, The Civil War, and American Literature, 1852-1867 [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2006])
by Todd J. Goddard | ns 69
In recent years, it has become increasingly difficult to draw clear lines between literary studies and various other academic disciplines. Although English departments still defend their respective territory and circumscribe, to some extent, acceptable objects of inquiry, many recent works of literary criticism are avowedly interdisciplinary and adopt the mantle of cultural criticism. Literary scholars continue to forge into many different realms of scholarly discourse, including environmental and legal studies, and cultural and intellectual history, to name a few. Maurice Lee's Slavery, Philosophy, & American Literature, 1830-1860, Arthur Riss' Race, Slavery, and Liberalism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature, and Deak Nabers' Victory of Law: The Fourteenth Amendment, The Civil War, and American Literature, 1852-1867, each make significant inroads into the fields of intellectual history and legal studies. Like Louis Menand's well-known study, The Metaphysical Club, and more recently Stephen Best's The Fugitive Properties: Law and the Poetics of Possession and Gregg Crane's Race, Citizenship, and Law in American Literature, they straddle multiple disciplines and resist easy categorization. At the same time, these books rely on close readings of literary texts, even canonical ones, to illuminate historical occurrences and currents of thought, while suggesting the cultural work of these texts as active contributors to history. While these studies foreground literature and are based on literary texts at an evidentiary, intellectual, and methodological level, each approaches literature as one of several essential archives. Rather than simply provide new readings, these authors use literature as support for broad, ambitious arguments about the ways ideas—often expressed or created in literature—circulate in, participate in, and shape American culture.
In Slavery, Philosophy, & American Literature, 1830-1860, Lee persuasively argues that during the middle third of the nineteenth century a diverse collection of writers in the United States looked to philosophy as a means to confront, understand, or intervene in the pressing issues of slavery. As Lee asserts, the slavery crisis and impending Civil War exposed the flaws and limitations of rational authority and the inability of the country to achieve a moral consensus. Writers were driven to seek not only new modes of understanding—that is, through philosophical discourse—but also ways to apply that knowledge in a practical and political way. Lee develops this compelling argument by reading works from a range of antebellum authors—namely, Edgar Allen Poe, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Frederick Douglass, Herman Melville, and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Each of these writers, in his or her own way, attempted to place philosophy and literature in the service of cultural work and to put ideas into action. They grappled with quandaries and questions, such as problems of representation, subject/object dualism, and the "foundations of moral and political law," a process which presaged postmodernism (2). For instance, Lee posits that Poe's desire for transcendental "oneness" remained frustrated by his simultaneous desire for prejudicial distinctions between black and white (51). Poe attempted to bring philosophical order to the slavery crisis, yet his order, according to Lee, was pro-slavery, anti-abolitionist, and "virulently racist " (14). Douglass, on the other hand, made a strong case for abolitionism based on Scottish Commonsense and used the example of his own mind to "vindicate African mental equality" against the assumptions of scientific racism present in mental philosophy. Douglass realized, however, the limitations of discursive reasoning in politics and philosophy (94).
Lee's thesis invites a host of definitional questions, which Lee admittedly tends to complicate rather than answer. The line between literature and philosophical or political writing is often less than clear, especially, Lee adds, in the antebellum period, "where disciplinary formations were often inchoate, where the slavery debate cut across multiple fields, and where enlightened thinkers attempted to bring all learning into coherence" (2). Like the authors and the period he examines, Lee's study is grounded in a rich, historical milieu. It ranges from literary criticism to political theory, antebellum philosophy, intellectual history, and more generally the study of "writers participating in a history of ideas and their use" (2). In doing so, Lee's book contributes to the history of ideas in America, like Crane's and Best's studies. Lee also merges two often-distinct critical approaches to antebellum literature, one emphasizing the philosophical contexts of literature and the other slavery. As Lee notes, American romanticism, especially transcendentalism, has often been associated with philosophical concerns, while the complex philosophical aspirations of antebellum slavery literature—namely, how writers attempted to adapt and apply philosophy to the pressing civic crisis of slavery—have largely been ignored (2).
Arthur Riss' Race, Slavery, and Liberalism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature argues for a reorientation of scholarship dealing with slavery and liberalism. As Riss explains, most recent scholarship on the US liberal tradition focuses on the paradox of slavery's existence within a nation whose founding documents "officially aligned the nation's political ambitions with the Enlightenment project of universal liberty and individual freedom" (28). According to Riss, one line of scholarship considers how either liberal ideals were distorted in practice or alternatively how circumstances external to liberal thought, such as labor shortages or anti-liberal traditions, contributed to the existence of race-based slavery. Another posits social injustice as somehow inherent to liberalism, with slavery serving as a symptom of liberalism rather than a contradiction. Riss insists that both approaches produce their own problems: the first ignores the complicity of certain liberal principles, such as notions of property, with race-based slavery; the other too easily dismisses the contributions of liberalism to resist social injustice based on race, gender, and sexuality (29). Riss challenges each of these lines and one of the central assumptions of liberal thought: the notion of "personhood" as absolute, fixed, and transhistorical.
Riss contends that scholars too often assume that Southern defenders of slavery disavowed or deliberately disfigured the meaning of "personhood" and on the other hand that abolitionists correctly interpreted the "truth" of it (5). Such reasoning, he argues, erroneously assigns a transcendent, immanent meaning to the "person," upon which racists imposed a false meaning to suit their purposes. Instead, Riss maintains that such arguments obscure the fact that "personhood" has historically been a profoundly contested conceptual category and one which was fiercely disputed during the antebellum period.
Like Lee, Riss' study foregrounds literary texts, primarily works by Harriet Beecher Stowe and Nathaniel Hawthorne, which "thematize[d] the act of representation" and participated centrally in "adjudicating the 'personhood' of the slave" (15). Although Hawthorne is typically considered as, at best, detached from the slavery debates and, at worst, complicit with advocates for slavery, Riss provides compelling revisionist readings of both Stowe and Hawthorne and presents both authors as important anti-slavery liberals of the antebellum period. For Riss, each offered important theoretical statements against slavery and "exemplif[ied] how the process of producing 'persons' is socially shaped, constrained, and stabilized" (19).
In Victory of Law: The Fourteenth Amendment, The Civil War, and American Literature, 1852-1867, Deak Nabers provides an intellectual history of the Fourteenth Amendment which accounts for the significant role of American literature in shaping American law before and after the Civil War. Nabers argues that the Civil War was really a "victory of law"—a phrase he borrows from Herman Melville—in the sense that antebellum anti-slavery thought shifted from opposing constitutional order to embracing it after the War as an "ideal of justice." Before the war, many anti-slavery thinkers, such as William Lloyd Garrison, rejected positive law—a term which typically denotes law established by a government and which is often contrasted with natural law—and legal institutions in general, since the very existence of slavery "required the sanction of positive law" (x). Nabers insightfully demonstrates how writers and pivotal political events throughout the 1850s brought about a reconciliation of natural law with positive law. What followed, Nabers argues, was the eventual reconciliation of natural law with the Constitution itself, a process which ultimately required the "enforcement of national law against state action" and the empowerment of the Constitution to emancipate slaves and give them civil rights.
Nabers' study departs from other scholarship dealing with the relationship between literature and law in antebellum America in that it recognizes reconciliation between natural or higher law and positive law. For instance, Nabers challenges Gregg Crane's recent claim that higher law is "defined chiefly by its hostility to positive law traditions" (17). For Nabers, the "most powerful forms of higher law thinking in the antebellum period are themselves highly positivist" (17). Though he focuses less on literary history, Nabers' revisionist study is built around astute readings of Herman Melville, Henry David Thoreau, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Walt Whitman, among others.
Each of these studies examines the ways that literature during the nineteenth century in America attempted to influence the legal and political affairs surrounding slavery. They do not portray passive literary authors, detached and above the fray, but ones committed to influencing the course of historical events and to reshaping American culture. According to these studies, writers sought to change American society in profound ways and did so more or less successively and through various approaches. In Slavery, Philosophy, & American Literature, 1830-1860, Lee contends that literary writers turned to philosophical discourse in an attempt to sway the slavery debates and foment change. Riss' Race, Slavery, and Liberalism in Nineteenth-Century American Literature examines how various authors engaged in debates over personhood and against slavery prior to the Civil War. In Victory of Law: The Fourteenth Amendment, The Civil War, and American Literature, 1852-1867, Nabers argues that writers helped reconcile natural law with positive law and helped lay the groundwork for the Fourteenth Amendment. These studies demonstrate in cogent, provocative ways the reciprocal relationship of literature to history, and if at times disciplinary boundaries remain unclear, we may benefit all the more.
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