Article
Reference
"A for Abolition": Hawthorne's Bond-servant and the Shadow of Slavery
MADSEN, Deborah Lea
Abstract
In his 1862 essay "Chiefly about War-Matters" Hawthorne, in the guise of "a Peaceable Man,"
devotes as much of his attention to the plight of poor Southern whites as he does to the immediate motive for war: the condition of enslaved blacks. In fact, he writes that "[t]he present war is so well justified by no other consideration as by the probability that it will free this class of Southern whites from a thraldom in which they scarcely begin to be responsible beings."1 The Civil War is represented as a sign of the imminent regeneration of the entire brutalized Southern race and, further, as ushering in the long-promised age of genuine American democracy. This essay, in which Hawthorne's sentiments are so deeply buried beneath layers of irony, signifies unambiguously, if nothing else, the pervasiveness of a pro-slavery mentality that has little to do with the geographical division of North and South. His
"Peaceable Man" takes pains to establish the historical status of American slavery as a phenomenon of very long standing and so makes us privy to "an historical circumstance, known to a few, that connects the children of [...]
MADSEN, Deborah Lea. "A for Abolition": Hawthorne's Bond-servant and the Shadow of Slavery. Journal of American Studies, 1991, vol. 25, no. 2, p. 255-259
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Journal of American Studies, Vol. 25, No. 2 (Aug., 1991), pp. 255-259.
"A for Abolition": Hawthorne's Bond-servant and the Shadow of Slavery
Deborah L. Madsen
In the essay "Chiefly about War-Matters" Hawthorne, in the guise of "a Peaceable Man," devotes as much of his attention to the plight of poor Southern whites as he does to the immediate motive for war: the condition of enslaved blacks. In fact, he writes that "[t]he present war is so well justified by no other consideration as by the probability that it will free this class of Southern whites from a thraldom in which they scarcely begin to be responsible beings."1 The Civil War is represented as a sign of the imminent regeneration of the entire brutalized Southern race and, further, as ushering in the long-promised age of genuine American democracy. This essay, in which Hawthorne's
sentiments are so deeply buried beneath layers of irony, signifies unambiguously, if nothing else, the pervasiveness of a pro-slavery mentality that has little to do with the geographical division of North and South. The "Peaceable Man" takes pains to establish the historical status of American slavery as a phenomenon of very long standing and so makes us privy to "an historical
circumstance, known to a few, that connects the children of the Puritans with these Africans of Virginia, in a very singular way":
They are our brethren, as being lineal descendants from the Mayflower, the fated womb of which, in her first voyage, sent forth a brood of Pilgrims upon Plymouth Rock, and, in a subsequent one, spawned slaves upon the Southern soil, – a monstrous birth, but with which we have an instinctive sense of kindred, and so are stirred by an irresistable [sic] impulse to attempt their rescue, even at the cost of blood and ruin. The character of our sacred ship, I fear, may suffer a little by this revelation ; but we must let her white progeny offset her dark one, – and two such portents never sprang from an identical source before (p. 50).
From the first settlement of New England, alternative destinies have been foreshadowed for the New World: in contrast to the "Cittie upon a Hill" which Puritan leaders interpreted as the glorious destiny of their experiment, ominous tokens of human depravity have suggested an American destiny that is no more than a repetition of Europe's mistakes. Hawthorne uses the vocabulary of typology to stress the historical determination of these alternative visions of national identity and to underline the inescapable nature of the consequences that follow from the choice between them.
Together with his concern over the psychological enslavement of white Americans by the ideology of slavery, this passage sets out Hawthorne's attitude towards slavery as a national evil which demands a national penance.
"Chiefly about War-Matters" is not the only document in which Hawthorne expresses this view of the slavery controversy as something that eludes such simple oppositions as North and South, black and white, rich and poor. In the first sentence of the article he observes that "[t]here is no remoteness of life and thought, no hermetically sealed seclusion, except, possibly, that of the grave, into which the disturbing influences of this war do not penetrate" (p. 43). Equally, the whole debate leading to war would seem to have been inescapable. This is the argument persuasively put by Eric Sundquist in his account of the American Renaissance as involved more deeply in the politics of abolition than has previously been acknowledged.2 Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter must
be counted among those Renaissance texts that do not transcend their historical moment, at least not in this regard. In the case of The Scarlet Letter, a hint of this historical specificity is revealed by the enigmatic figure of Governor Bellingham's bond servant.
This character is dismissed as soon as he is introduced into the story. His only function is to admit Hester into the Governor's mansion and to reveal to us the noble appearance that Hester presents to one unfamiliar with her history. Yet Hawthorne elaborates to an unnecessary degree the nature of this character, "a free-born Englishman, but now a seven years' slave":
During that time he was to be the property of his master, and as much a
commodity of bargain and sale as an ox, or a joint-stool. The serf wore the blue coat, which was the customary garb of serving-men of that period, and long before, in the old hereditary halls of England.3
This description may be, simply, a part of Hawthorne's effort at historical authenticity, which is rigorously pursued throughout the novel. Certainly, this method of repaying one's passage from the Old World to the New was common. But this instance acquires greater significance when we realize that the description of Hawthorne's bond-servant forms a part of a more general mid-century
questioning of America's colonial inheritance and the interpretation of that inheritance popularized by Revolutionary activists.
The Governor's white bond-slave raises as questions the relationships between democracy and tyranny, humanity and commodity, personal value and use value, freedom and slavery in America. The distinction between a corrupt, despotic European culture and the democratic, virgin land of America is broken down by the image of an American who is obliged to experience New England as a "serf. " Migration, in this case, becomes the substitution of freedom for enslavement, a transformation that violates natural, if not civil, laws. The conflation of personal value and
commodity value is, however, a recurrent feature of the literature that promoted migration to the colonies. Those who ventured their capital by investing in the early settlement desired two things: a buoyant trade with the New World and a plentiful supply of settlers to make that trade possible. The settlers, for their part, were encouraged to think of themselves in terms of material success or failure. Even such later promoters of the American lifestyle as Crèvecoeur and Franklin based their arguments upon a clear equation of personal success with material wealth. Hawthorne highlights the fact that such success is purchased at a cost. And he underlines the sinister aspect of this equation through the paradox of voluntary slavery.
The discrepancy between idea and reality, material wealth and spiritual impoverishment, ideological freedom and bodily enslavement, is described by Michael Davitt Bell as having motivated the historians of the period to a wholesale questioning of the authority of the Founding Fathers to define a modern, democratic America.4 Romantic historians enlisted the Fathers in the cause of literary nationalism by popularizing a vision of the Puritans as leading actors in America's providential, though secular, history. The Great Migration was interpreted as a prefigurative type of the American Revolution, of the New World's democratic revolt against the authoritarianism of Europe. But this interpretation of colonial history was problematic: Puritans had fled persecution in Europe not in order to establish a separate democratic state but in order to create an authoritarian theocracy, bolstered by their own forms of persecution. This is the central tension informing the historical writing of nineteenth-century New England, as Michael Davitt Bell describes it. Were the Founding Fathers the agents or the enemies of tyranny? Did they exemplify or betray the American ideal of liberty? Romantic and patriotic allegiances were set at odds by the conflicting desires to condemn the Fathers as tyrants or to celebrate them as heroes of democracy. Governor Bellingham, the slave-holder, emerges from The Scarlet Letter as an ambiguous cultural hero. No different nor any worse than his peers, still he complicates the vision of American liberty by representing, in
"typical" form, the entire generation of Founding Fathers who were slave owners: figures like
Jefferson who counted amongst his wealth some two thousand slaves.
The doubleness of the American myth, the doubleness of the Founding Fathers, the doubleness of America's destiny as Hawthorne describes it in "Chiefly about War-Matters," can appear as a substantive version of Hawthorne's rhetorical ambiguities, the notorious elusiveness of his imagery which resists the effort to determine a stable set of meanings. And indeed, it is the effort to constrain and limit the semantic potential of America that appears sinister in Hawthorne's account. Here we have the rhetorical equivalent of slavery. That the legacy of the Revolution should be double, signifying freedom for some and the denial of natural rights for others, is not so bad as the suppression of this doubleness in favour of a unanimous declaration of the meaning of America.
The right to prescribe national identity is a dangerous privilege, situated as it is on the knife edge that separates the representative voice from the dictator's decree.
In these terms, it could be argued that Hawthorne represents the Civil War as a genuine revolution, dedicated to the overthrow of the psychological shackles that have operated historically to keep Americans, black and white, enslaved. The coming together of white and black in an America that is quite different to the typological projections of Pilgrim Fathers and Founding Fathers alike, may herald an age of genuine democracy in a culturally mixed nation. The Scarlet Letter offers a critique of the whole issue of "Fathers" and their right to determine identity.
Governor Bellingham redefines a "freeborn Englishman" as a "serf"; he transforms his bond-servant into a "commodity of bargain and sale." In this way, Bellingham dramatizes the psychology of slavery: individuals are reduced to chattels, selfhood becomes a commodity. Human value takes on an additional and more powerful significance as a bodily exchange value. Pearl possesses this same doubleness in the eyes of the Puritan community: as a body for which the state must take
responsibility and as the figurative child of sin.
Like Bellingham's bond-servant, Pearl is made a commodity both by her own actions and by those of her father. She represents herself as the "wages of sin" made manifest, the "punishment"
that is the exchange value of sin. But it is Dimmesdale who attributes to Pearl a literal exchange value. He assesses her worth in terms of the worldly reputation he must surrender if he is to
acknowledge her. And it is not until Pearl is publicly acknowledged that she assumes a stable value and identity. Until then she is variously the scarlet letter in living form, the offspring of the "Black Man," and a potential burden to the Puritan community. The final scaffold scene assimilates Pearl's doubleness into a single value, that of humanity: "as her tears fell upon her father's cheek, they were the pledge that she would grow up amid human joy and sorrow, nor for ever do battle with the world, but be a woman in it" (p. 181). Pearl's is a transformation from the status of a sign to that of human being, from multiplicity to a self-determined singularity of identity, as her father
acknowledges her rightful place within the human community generally and the Puritan community in particular. Within a stable social context Pearl finds the freedom to determine her own life;
without this context she is held in thrall by the symbolic interpretations of those around her.
Freedom within social constraints is the reward of suffering that Hester too discovers. At the margins of society and free from its prescriptions she finds "a freedom of speculation " which the Puritan community would have held to be "a deadlier crime than that stigmatized by the scarlet letter." Here she discovers a special dispensation to question and criticize the norms of her society.
But the sanction that she thought she possessed to articulate the possibility of social change is a qualified one. An individual so compromised in social terms cannot be "the destined prophetess"
and so Hester must resign herself to the roles of advisor and comforter, and to the perspective of the critic rather than the reformer.
Where Pearl and Hester find personal liberation within the restraints imposed by society, Dimmesdale finds himself enslaved by these social definitions. His words and actions are
interpreted by the community so that they always offer proof of his reputed sanctity and godliness.
Simply by confessing his sin, in the knowledge that his listeners will misinterpret the truth, he converts his own words into falsehoods. The awareness that he can so easily and hypocritically
exploit his audience in this way is Dimmesdale's most exquisite torture. Like the brutalized Southerner described in "Chiefly about War-Matters," who has such urgent need of moral and intellectual education, Dimmesdale too requires the "education of the heart" that would enable him to act as a responsible being. The freedom to take responsibility for themselves is what liberates Hester and Pearl from psychological enslavement; the opportunity for self-determination on a national scale is what may liberate America into genuine democracy. Certainly, it is the inability to
"own" himself that keeps Hawthorne's bond-servant in the shadow of slavery.
Notes
1. Nathaniel Hawthorne, "Chiefly about War-Matters," Atlantic, 10 (July 1862), 55.
2. Eric Sundquist, "Slavery, Revolution, and the American Renaissance," in The American
Renaissance Reconsidered : Selected Papers of the English Institute, ed. Walter Benn Michaels and Donald E. Pease (Baltimore & London: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1985).
3. Nathaniel Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (1961, rpt., New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1978), 77.
4. Michael Davitt Bell, Hawthorne and the Historical Romance of New England (Princeton : Princeton University Press, 1971).
