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1. Bound by Law: Apprenticeship and the Culture of “Free” Labor

The “case of the slaves,” Publius declared in The Federalist No. 54, “is in truth a peculiar one.”¹ Discussing the “three-fifths clause” of the Constitution’s provision for apportionment of representation and taxation (art. 1, § 2, clause 3), Publius was not pleading the case of the slaves, but rather advocating the view of “our Southern brethren” the slaveholders, and appealing for “compromise” over the inclusion of three-fifths of their slaves in the Constitution’s “numerical rule of representation” (FP 336). During the 1787 convention as well as the ratification debates for which The Federalist Papers were written, it was the three-fifths clause of the apportionment provision, more than any other “slave clause,” that highlighted the ambiguity of the slave’s form of appearance in the letter of the law, and exposed the contradictions of political representation in a slaveholding nation. Gouverneur Morris, the Pennsylvania delegate credited with writing the Constitution’s celebrated preamble, highlighted this direct link between political representation and the rights of modern citizenship in his objections to the three-fifths clause: “Upon what principle is it that the slaves shall be computed in the representation? Are they men? Then make them citizens, and let them vote. Are they property? Why, then, is not other property included?”² Like Morris, many nonslaveholding state delegates objected to any inclusion of slaves in the apportionment clause, as against the very “principle of representation.”³Slaveholding state delegates insisted, however, that their slaves be included in this “numerical rule of representation” on the grounds that the labor of these enslaved “other persons” contributed to the wealth of the nation. It was during these debates over the “true principle of representation” and this fundamental conception of modern citizenship that slavery emerged as the central point of division in the new nation.⁴

It was also in these debates that the Constitution first came to be described as a matter of “compact” between states with differing economic interests, requiring “compromise.”⁵ Because the case of the slaves was so peculiar, Publius continued: “Let the compromising expedient of the Constitution be mutually adopted which regards them as inhabitants, but as debased by servitude below the equal level of free inhabitants; which regards the slave as divested of two fifths of the man” (FP 339, emphasis in original). This characterization was a misleading rhetorical conceit, insofar as it implied that a slave was regarded in law as “divested” of manhood or humanity, rather than divested of legal rights and attributes. Historically, it has led to judicial and popular misunderstandings of the status of the slave in the original Constitution, and to critical misunderstandings of how slave personhood was recognized by state and society in the late eighteenth century. Yet there was partial truth in the characterization, insofar as slaves were regarded, by slaveholders and antislavery reformers alike, as “debased by servitude”; and they were included in the calculus of this constitutional provision for political representation only after extensive debate over the economic value of such servitude.⁶

The debates over the value of the slave’s debasing “servitude” reveal the political-economic history concealed by the slave’s form of appearance in the letter of the law, a form of appearance whose ambiguity would become central to the antislavery struggle, the Union crisis, and the definition of citizenship in a modern racial state. For the primary purposes of this chapter, the debates illuminate the historical understanding of freedom, slavery, and servitude as varying states of subjection to the law. As I observed in the introduction, the apportionment provision employed the bondsman as a figure to distinguish between the qualified freedom of those persons “bound to service for a term of years” and the absolute unfreedom of those “other persons” bound as slaves. Looking behind this form of appearance and recovering the social relations simultaneously codified and masked in this legal form supplements historical understandings of the “problem of slavery” and the “problem of freedom” in the Age of Revolution.⁷ The peculiar case of the slaves’ representation in the new Constitution was a political-economic problem, whose history reveals the intertwined roles of slave and “free” bond-laborers in the dialectical transformation of race as a mediation of class.

To appreciate the historical significance of the three-fifths clause to the Constitution’s inscription of the rights of citizenship, it is important to note that the three-fifths ratio did not begin as a ratio for the apportionment of representation. The ratio came from the 1783 Congress, when James Madison—who would later wear the mask of Publius in The Federalist No. 54 to explain its incorporation into the “compromising expedient” of the Constitution—proposed the ratio as a “compromise” in the context of negotiations over the calculation of property values, or “the index of wealth,” for the purposes of taxation.⁸ The application of the ratio to representation in the 1787 convention “was an entirely new concept.”⁹ While the bondsman’s form of appearance in this clause would suggest that the provision was primarily about political representation, its repressed history reveals it to be equally about property, and the wealth-producing value of those laborers owned as property.

In fact, this debate over the ratio for the enumeration of enslaved “other persons” began with the American Revolution and the drafting of the Articles of Confederation, likewise as a debate over the “index of wealth” for taxation. The debates of the Second Continental Congress over assessing the financial contributions of states to the cost of the War of Independence introduced those terms of labor that would be central to the 1787 constitutional convention’s debates over the three-fifths clause and “the true principle of representation” in the new republic: “the index of wealth,” and the relative values of free and enslaved laborers. At the center of this ongoing debate, from 1776 through 1788, was the question of how slaves were to be regarded under national law as opposed to local state law: as property or as persons.¹⁰

In the 1776 Congress of Confederation, representatives of the nonslaveholding states argued for taxation based on all the people of a state, including its slaves: “John Adams (of Massachusetts) observed that the numbers of people were taken by this article as an index of the wealth of the State, and not as subjects of taxation. That as to this matter, it was of no consequence by what name you called your people, whether that of freeman or of slaves. That in some countries the laboring poor were called freemen, in others they were called slaves: but that the difference as to the state was imaginary only.”¹¹ In Adams’s argument, the difference between slaves and the laboring poor was merely nominal: considered in their material conditions—without property of their own and serving as the perpetual dependent hirelings of others—the laboring poor were the equal of slaves; and thus for the state’s purposes, the laboring poor’s difference from slaves, their nominal freedom, was “imaginary only.” Adams elaborated upon the imaginary character of this distinction between slaves and the formally free laboring poor by proposing a hypothetical transformation: “Suppose, by any extraordinary operation of nature or of law, one half the laborers of a State could in the course of one night be transformed into slaves—would the State be made the poorer, or the less able to pay taxes?”¹²Adams’s counterfactual reinforces the political-economic understanding that it was the slaves’ “equal” status as laborers, as persons who “produce…profits,” that mattered to the “wealth of the nation,” and that the economic values of free and enslaved laborers were the same, insofar as the “surplus” produced by both types of laborers would be taxed to support the new nation-state: “Certainly five hundred freemen produce no more profits, no greater surplus for the payment of taxes, than five hundred slaves.…It is the number of laborers which produces the surplus for taxation; and numbers, therefore, indiscriminately, are the fair index of wealth.”¹³Drawing together his arguments regarding the equality of conditions and the equal value of slave and free laborers, Adams concluded: “That it is the use of the word ‘property’ here, and its application to some of the people of the State, which produces the fallacy.…That a slave may, indeed, from the custom of speech, be more properly called the wealth of his master, than the free laborer might be called the wealth of his employer; but, as to the State, both were equally its wealth.”¹⁴With this assessment of their equal status as producers of taxable surplus wealth for the state, Adams introduced those key words of the slavery debates, “property” and “persons,” whose contested meanings as applied to the peculiar case of the slave are linked to that “imaginary” distinction between slave and free laborers.

Unsurprisingly, slaveholding state delegates opposed a numerical rule of taxation inclusive of those “people of the State” they owned as slaves, and disputed Adams’s claims regarding the equal value of slave and free labor: “Mr. Harrison (of Virginia) proposed, as a compromise, that two slaves should be counted as one freeman. He affirmed that slaves did not do as much work as freemen, and doubted if two affected more than one.”¹⁵Harrison’s 1776 “compromise” ratio was premised upon a conception shared by many political elites of the period that slave labor was less productive than free labor, and so should not count as much as free labor in the calculus of taxable wealth. The antislavery Pennsylvanian James Wilson, who in the 1787 convention would introduce the three-fifths ratio into the Constitution’s apportionment clause, objected in this 1776 debate to the slaveholders’ labor-value calculus: “He acknowledged indeed that freeman worked the most; but they consume the most also. They do not produce a greater surplus for taxation.”¹⁶ What is of interest here is the point of agreement between the delegates of slaveholding and nonslaveholding states: both sides were of the view that “freeman worked the most.” Both sides took for granted the point, elaborated most famously by Adam Smith in An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), that free labor was more productive than slave labor.¹⁷ Yet the point of disagreement is equally significant to the debates over slavery in the early national period and later during the antebellum Union crisis, and to our historical understanding of modern citizenship. The value of labor, Wilson argued, ought to be considered in its relation to consumption as well as production: their relative values depended on the costs of reproducing these laborers.

This ratio for the enumeration of enslaved inhabitants as a state’s “index of wealth”—as laborers and thus as the producers of a state’s taxable surplus—was fine-tuned in the 1783 Congress, with an even greater number of positions on the relative values of slave and free labor: some delegates argued “that two blacks be rated as one freeman”; others argued “for rating them as four to three”; and still others “sincerely thought three to one would be a juster proportion.”¹⁸ In 1783, the debate again focused on the relative productivity of free and slave laborers—as calculated in the difference between the costs of reproducing the laborers and the value of those commodities produced by them. Nonslaveholding state delegates “were for rating the slaves high” in this ratio, arguing “that the expense of feeding and clothing them was as far below that incident to freemen as their industry and ingenuity were below those of freemen.”¹⁹The slaveholding state delegates did not dispute the view of the nonslaveholding state delegates regarding the costs entailed in maintaining and reproducing slave laborers (“the expense of feeding and clothing them”).²⁰ Slaveholders insisted, however, on the much lower relative productivity of slave labor and thus a lower “taxable surplus” with respect to costs of reproduction, insofar as “slaves were not put to labor as young as the children of laboring families.” This relative productivity was lowered further, they asserted, because “having no interest in their labor, [slaves] did as little as possible; and omitted every exertion of thought requisite to facilitate and expedite it.”²¹ The slaveholders’ conception of the lower productivity of slave labor recognized the direct coercion required by slavery—formulated as an absence of “interest in their labor”—even as they argued that in the broader view of labor reproduction, slaves worked less than “laboring families.” This is the neglected prehistory of that legal form known as the “three-fifths compromise” of the 1787 constitutional convention.²²

The three-fifths clause (of Article 1, Section 2) was of such importance in the debates of the 1787 convention because, as nonslaveholding state delegates recognized, if a state’s representation in the federal legislature were based on the number of all of the state’s inhabitants, including its slaves, the slaveholding states would have a representation vastly disproportionate to their free populations.²³ Delegates of both slaveholding and nonslaveholding states objected to the idea that the three-fifths ratio, derived as we have seen as a compromise “index of wealth” for taxation, should be applied to the apportionment of representation. Slaveholding state delegates opposed the ratio because they demanded that all their slaves be counted. South Carolina and Georgia “insisted that blacks be included in the rule of representation equally with whites, and for that purpose moved that the words ‘three fifths’ be struck out.”²⁴ Their position was unsurprising since they would then have a greater number of representatives and legislative power. What is of special interest to our genealogy of the slave’s absent presence in the Constitution is that once again the arguments turned upon the value-producing labor of slaves, as compared to free labor: “Mr. Butler insisted that the labor of a slave in South Carolina was as productive and valuable as that of a freeman in Massachusetts; that as wealth was the great means of defense and utility to the nation, they were equally valuable to it with freeman; and that consequently equal representation ought to be allowed for them in a government which was instituted principally for the protection of property.”²⁵ As nonslaveholding state delegates recognized, this argument that slave labor was equally productive and valuable as free labor contradicted those arguments advanced by slaveholders earlier, in the context of taxation: “This ratio was fixed by Congress as a rule of taxation. Then, it was urged, by the delegates representing the States having slaves, that the blacks were still more inferior to freemen. At present, when the ratio of representation is to be established, we are assured that they are equal to freemen.”²⁶

If slaveholding state delegates opposed the three-fifths ratio because they supported “considering blacks as equal to whites in the apportionment of representation,” nonslaveholding state delegates opposed the ratio because they did not want slaves counted at all.²⁷ As we have seen, many were categorically opposed to the very idea of “slave representation.” In these objections, they returned to that point introduced by John Adams at the outset of the American Revolution regarding the contradictions in political representation produced by claiming “persons” as “property.” William Patterson of New Jersey “could regard negro slaves in no light but as property. They are no free agents, have no personal liberty, no faculty of acquiring property, but on the contrary are themselves property, and like other property, entirely at the will of the master.”²⁸ Focusing on those attributes of free personhood recognized by the laws of the state—personal liberty, free agency, and will—and pointing to the contradiction between these attributes of free personhood and the slave’s legal condition as property, Patterson’s arguments highlight the framers’ shared conception of the direct link between legal “free agency” and “the acquiring of property,” both of which require that the person not be subject entirely to the will of another. Elaborating these attributes of the self-willing “person” to be represented by the state, Patterson reminded the other delegates of “the true principle of representation,” as “an expedient by which an assembly of certain individuals, chosen by the people, is substituted in place of the inconvenient meeting of the people themselves. If such a meeting of the people was actually to take place, would the slaves vote? They would not. Why then should they be represented?”²⁹ Invoking the classic republican scene of assembly wherein citizens gathered together to agree upon the democratic will, Patterson cites the slave’s legal incapacities as marking the limits of the citizen. As property with no free agency or independent wills of their own, slaves would not in such a scene represent themselves; therefore they must not be represented.

The arguments of the nonslaveholding state delegates opposed to counting slaves equally with free persons in the apportionment clause centered upon this fundamental republican principle of representation: such inclusion of slaves defied the “true principle of presentation,” effectively making a slaveholder the representative of his slaves. Gouverneur Morris argued further that it was “encouragement of the slave trade, as would be given by allowing them a representation for their negroes.”³⁰ A corollary objection founded on this republican principle of representation was that the citizens of their states “would revolt at the idea of being put on a footing with slaves.”³¹In these objections, we see once again the ways in which the figure of the slave functioned in the republican imaginary, as the opposite not only of the “free inhabitant” laborer but also of the citizen. This legal status of citizenship need not yet be obtained by the “free inhabitant,” as was the case for thousands of immigrants, indentured servants, and apprentices. Those “bound to service for a term of years”—under the only form of labor bondage explicitly named in the Constitution—were understood to be “free persons.” As free laborers, they were considered always-already becoming citizens, and thus a logical part of that population to be represented in the government of the new nation.

Proposing the three-fifths ratio in the 1787 convention (taking it from the compromise ratio introduced by Madison in the 1783 taxation debates), James Wilson agreed with those who argued that any apportionment of representation in the national legislature based on a population of slaves was illogical. Opposed to slavery and representing the state that had passed the first gradual emancipation act in 1780, Wilson “did not well see, on what principle the admission of blacks in the proportion of three-fifths could be explained. Are they admitted as citizens—then why are they not admitted on an equality with white citizens? Are they admitted as property—then why is no other property admitted into the computation? These were difficulties, however, which he thought must be overruled by the necessity of compromise.”³² The problem for those objecting to any inclusion of slaves in the numerical rule of representation was the other republican principle shared by all the framers: that “taxation and representation ought to go together.”³³ This view was directly linked to the “true principle of representation” invoked by Patterson. At least since James Otis’s famous speech declaring “taxation without representation is tyranny” (in other formulations, it was slavery), this “principle of representation” was one of the primary rallying cries of colonial opposition to the abuses of Parliament, and the American Revolution itself. Yet precisely because “eleven out of thirteen of the States had [already] agreed to consider slaves in the apportionment of taxation,” they would also have to consider slaves in the rule of representation, if the slaveholding states were to enter into this “compact.”³⁴

Addressing this shared view of the necessary link between taxation of wealth and a corresponding representation in the national legislature, Wilson articulated most clearly both the substantive political logic and the literary “equivocation” by which the three-fifths ratio of “other persons” entered into the apportionment clause. Emphasizing, like Madison, “the necessity of compromise,” Wilson “observed, that less umbrage would…be taken against an admission of the slave into the rule of representation, if it should be so expressed as to make them indirectly only an ingredient in the rule, by saying that they should enter into the rule of taxation; and as representation was to be according to taxation, the end would be equally attained.”³⁵ The law’s desired object and intent—counting slaves for representation—could be reached indirectly if the clause was formulated as to count slaves solely for the purpose of taxation: slaves could enter the national body politic of legislative representation indirectly through the back door of wealth taxation. Wilson’s argument thus highlights also the ways in which the “spirit” of a law, its “object and intent,” could be separated from its “letter,” that mode through which the law is “expressed.” As we will see in the debates over the Union crisis, for those citing Madison’s record of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787 as evidence of the “original intent” of this particular “slave clause,” Wilson’s turn to indirection as a way to address antislavery objections to the “admission of slaves into the rule of representation” confirmed their view of the Constitution as a document whose wording was deliberately “equivocal and ambiguous,” not only in its avoidance of the term “slave” but also in its positive inscription of them as “other persons” in the apportionment clause. Wilson’s suggestion for how to include slaves in the apportionment clause, proposed as a matter of “compromise” and avoiding “umbrage” through indirection, reveals the central political-economic truth of the slave’s absent presence in the Constitution, and the bondsman’s role as citizenship’s vanishing mediator. As that “peculiar species of property” whose labor produced surplus value, the slave was “originally intended” to be included only for the purposes of taxation.³⁶ In a slaveholding nation adhering to the republican “principle of representation,” however, there could be no taxation of the enslaved as wealth-producing property without the indirect, partial representation of them as “other persons.”

If this history of the legal form of the three-fifths clause highlights the centrality of bond labor to the Constitution and to its inscription of political representation, as one of the fundamental rights of modern citizenship, it also underscores the framers’ understanding of slavery as a peculiar form of labor bondage in a broader spectrum of labor exploitation. In 1776, John Adams asserted that “the difference” between poor freeman and slave “as to the state was imaginary only” when considering them as wealth-producing laborers.³⁷ In 1787, the Constitution’s provision for the apportionment of representation and taxation regarded those who were “bound to service for a term of years” as “free persons.” And as the framers debated the precise language of the apportionment provision’s distinction between these bound-yet-free persons and enslaved “other persons,” “the word ‘servitude’ was struck out, and ‘service’ unanimously inserted, the former being thought to express the condition of slaves, and the latter the obligations of free persons.”³⁸ The broader Atlantic cultural history of this “imaginary” legal distinction between those free laborers “bound to service” and those slave laborers described by Publius as “debased by servitude below the equal level of free inhabitants” reveals the interdependence of slavery and servitude in the racialization of freedom and modern citizenship (FP 339). In the transatlantic eighteenth-century texts I examine together in this chapter, the bondsman figures as an allegory of transformation, a transitional state of passage by which the subject attains the freedom of independent self-mastery.

Visible and Invisible Characters in Letters from an American Farmer

For Hector St. John de Crèvecœur, the question, “What then is the American, this new man?” was answered by a “man from another country,” the immigrant: “Ubi panis ibi patria is the motto of all emigrants.”³⁹ Letters from an American Farmer is regularly invoked in nationalist histories of American literature; yet with this motto and throughout Letters, Crèvecœur focuses on the economic conditions of national affiliation, emphasizing the distinction between the “national” consciousness necessary to the imagined community of the nation on the one hand and the nationalist ideology of patriotism on the other.⁴⁰Significant to this distinction is the narrative fact that Crèvecœur’s emigrant is represented first as a figure of disaffiliation, and the failures of nationalist interpellation. Describing “the poor of Europe [who] have by some means met together” in America, Crèvecœur’s Farmer James asks rhetorically:

To what purpose should they ask one another what countrymen they are? Alas, two thirds of them had no country. Can a wretch, who wanders about, who works and starves, whose life is a continual scene of sore affliction or pinching penury; can that man call England or any other kingdom his country? A country that had no bread for him; whose fields procured him no harvest; who met with nothing but the frowns of the rich, the severity of the laws, with jails and punishments; who owned not a single foot of the extensive surface of this planet[?] (Letters 42)

Thus even as he introduces the question—“What then is the American?”—that would become central to later nationalist cultural projects, Crèvecœur’s American farmer focuses on the immigrant, this “new man,” as a figure that previously “had no country.” He cannot identify with a “country that had no bread for him”: Ubi panis ibi patria.

The recurring point of this famous Letter III is that individual subjects are tied to the nation not through affective bonds of “attachment” (Letters 43) but by the Lockean political-economic bonds of private property: “The American ought therefore to love this country much better than that wherein either he or his forefathers were born. Here the rewards of his industry follow, with equal steps, the progress of his labour. His labour is founded on the basis of nature, self-interest: can it want a stronger allurement?” (Letters 44).The series of contrasts between the lives of common men in Europe and the lives of common men in America all turn on the rewards of this self-interested labor: “From involuntary idleness, servile dependence, penury, and useless labour, he has passed to toils of a very different nature, rewarded by ample subsistence.—This is an American” (Letters 45). This economic basis of the immigrant’s answer to the question of American identity continues throughout the later, famously pessimistic Letters, and indeed accounts for that very pessimism: the “Distresses of the Frontier Man” in Letter XII are initiated by the destruction of these economic bonds by the American War of Independence, which he calls “this unfortunate revolution” (Letters 191).

The central concern of Letter III is to explain the “metamorphosis” of the poor laboring immigrant from Europe, identified as a “man without a country,” into the American, which Crèvecœur’s Farmer James does by telling the “History of Andrew, the Hebridean” as “an epitome of the rest” (Letters 57). In tracing Andrew’s “metamorphosis” (59), Crèvecœur’s American farmer narrates an allegory of subject-formation, via the “invisible power” of political economy. The immigrant begins as a bond laborer, a servant indentured to a master, acquiring both technical training and moral cultivation through this “apprenticeship” (74). After fulfilling his contract and earning his freedom dues, he “become[s] a freeholder, possessed of a vote, of a place of residence, a citizen” (79): “From nothing, to start into being; from a servant, to the rank of master; from being a slave of some despotic prince, to become a free man, invested with lands.…It is in consequence of that change that he becomes an American” (59). By way of the Lockean telos of this transformational allegory, Crèvecœur’s ultimate answer to the question, “What is an American?” is that the “American” is an immigrant, who through his labors and “the laws of naturalization” (59) becomes a citizen, “performing as a citizen all the duties required of him” (82). He is one of those to whom Luther Martin referred when objecting to the Constitution’s “migration and importation clause”: a “foreigner who comes into a State to become a citizen,” coming not “absolutely free” but rather “qualifiedly so, as a servant.”⁴¹ His voluntary labor bondage serves as the ideal path to the freedom of American citizenship.

As representative “epitome of the rest,” the history of Andrew the Hebridean introduces into American literature several narrative tropes which will recur throughout the debates over the cultural characteristics of this ultimate figure, the “citizen.” The first is that already introduced in the structure of Andrew’s metamorphosis: the political coming-into-being of the citizen is based on the socioeconomic model of the passage from dependent servitude to independent self-mastery. The other tropes emerge within this structure of transformation and, like this larger structure, depend on the primacy of labor. First, there is the trope of “incorporation” (the eighteenth-century term for assimilation), which we have seen staged by those laboring poor who previously “had no country” but then, following “the motto of all emigrants,” become “American.” This first trope names the narrative structure of that process of assimilation mediating between the individual subject and the civic community. Second, there is the related trope of “visible character,” Crèvecœur’s name for the social recognition of this assimilating subject, and the figure for the public persona of that subject of citizenship divided between “invisible character” and “visible character” (Letters 50).

Crèvecœur introduces these two tropes together when he compares the “incorporation” of Europeans into “Americans” to the “dissemination” of “religious indifference” (Letters 50):

When any considerable number of a particular sect happen to dwell contiguous to each other, they immediately erect a temple, and there worship the Divinity according to their own peculiar ideas.…[They] are at liberty to make proselytes if they can…and to follow the dictates of their conscience; for neither the government nor any other power interferes. If they are peaceable subjects, and are industrious, what is it to their neighbors how and in what manner they think fit to address their prayers to the Supreme Being? But if the sectaries are not settled close together, if they are mixed with other denominations, their zeal will cool for want of fuel, and will be extinguished in a little time. Then the Americans become, as to religion what they are as to country, allied to all. In them the name of Englishman, Frenchman, and European, is lost, and, in like manner, the strict modes of Christianity, as practiced in Europe, are lost also. (48, emphasis added)

It is in this analogy, between the waning of religious sectarianism and the transformation of the “man without a country” into “an American,” that Crèvecœur introduces the split subject of this “new man,” the American citizen. Crèvecœur develops here the eighteenth-century view of religious belief as the primary index of the subject’s individual personhood, distinct from the abstract legal-formal person of the citizen. The particularity of religious belief (a sect’s “own peculiar ideas”) is considered not only distinct from but entirely irrelevant to the civic life of the community: “If they are peaceable subjects, and are industrious,” how they pray does not matter to their neighbors. Crèvecœur’s analogy uses religion as the site of all things considered “private,” as opposed to the public sites of the political (“peaceable subjects”) and the economic (“industrious”). As we have seen, this opposition would be codified in the U.S. Constitution itself. And throughout The Federalist Papers, religion is explicitly compared to private interests and inner passions, and the proliferation of political factions is likened to the proliferation of religious sects.⁴²

It is in the context of this division between private religion and public political-economic life that Crèvecœur introduces his figure for the split subject of citizenship, and the related trope of “visible character”:

Next to [the Catholic and the German Lutheran] lives a Seceder, the most enthusiastic of all sectaries; his zeal is hot and fiery; but, separated as he is from others of the same complexion, he has no congregation, where he might cabal and mingle religious pride with worldly obstinacy. He likewise raises good crops, his house is handsomely painted, his orchard is one of the fairest in the neighborhood. How does it concern the welfare of the country, or of the province at large, what this man’s religious sentiments are, or really whether he has any at all? He is a good farmer, he is a sober, peaceable, good, citizen.…This is the visible character; the invisible one is only guessed at, and is nobody’s business.…Thus all sects are mixed as well as all nations. Thus religious indifference is imperceptibly disseminated from one end of the continent to the other. (49–50)

Reiterating his claims regarding the community’s “indifference” to the “peculiar ideas” of a particular sect, Crèvecœur makes explicit the role of religion as structural placeholder of the private, and underscores the split within the individual subject of citizenship, between the “invisible character” of the private person and the “visible character” of the public citizen. While the passage “from a servant, to the rank of a master” (Letters 58–59) structures the economic narrative of assimilation (or “incorporation”), its completion is marked not by any detectable transformation of the individual’s inner character, but rather solely through the successes of “visible character,” the outward signs of good citizenship. Whereas “incorporation” names the process of civic assimilation, whose ideal fulfillment is epitomized by Andrew the Hebridean, the dependent indentured servant become independent propertied citizen, “visible character” names a state of social being within this ideal process of assimilation, mediating the social recognition of its successful completion. The political-economic basis of this civic identity is underscored at the end of Letter III: the history of Andrew as epitome of the American closes with a ledger “account of the property he acquired with his own hands and those of his son,” in “Pennsylvania currency.—Dollars” (Letters 82).

If in Crèvecœur’s Letters the “visible character” of good citizenship takes the form of material prosperity (his crops, house, orchard), the success of such “incorporation” into citizenship is also marked by another type of “character.” When Farmer James greets Andrew the Hebridean at the dock and asks him his plans, Andrew, still fresh off the boat bringing servants to America, replies:

I do not know, Sir; I am but an ignorant man, a stranger besides:—I must rely on the advice of good Christians.…I have brought with me a character from our Barra minister, can it do me any good here? [To which Farmer James replies] Oh, yes; but your future success will depend entirely on your own conduct; if you are a sober man, as the certificate says, laborious and honest, there is no fear but that you will do well. (73)

One of the popular eighteenth-century uses of “character” was “to indicate reputation (including the formal giving of a character, a character reference as we would now say).”⁴³ In the eighteenth century, “character” was itself a document one could obtain, whose text would attest to the merits of an otherwise invisible because internalized possession. This character was “an outward sign,” but one signifying the “inner character” of relatively fixed traits; and the bearer of the document was likewise considered an individual shaped by external forces.⁴⁴It is in this latter sense that “character” converges with what Pierre Bourdieu has described as “social capital.”⁴⁵Because Andrew is a “stranger” not yet assimilated into the community of citizens in Pennsylvania, he does not possess that socially “visible character” of a reputation for industry and sobriety (like the “good name” left to Farmer James by his father), and so must rely instead on another outward sign of his inner self, the written document from a legitimating authority, his Barra minister. Here “character” is nothing less than embodied social capital, which Andrew can then build upon, through his own industry and performance of its claims, to accumulate economic capital.

Following the formal logic of the split subject of citizenship—the division between “visible character” and “invisible character”—the transformation of the social capital of this written character into direct economic capital is likewise marked by a series of texts as “outward sign[s].”⁴⁶ After reading Andrew’s textual “character,” Farmer James decides to assist in Andrew’s “metamorphosis.” After Andrew has “served a short apprenticeship at [Farmer James’] house,” (Letters 74), Farmer James himself provides him with yet another character reference: “I went to Mr. A. V. in the county of——. . . I gave him a faithful detail of the progress Andrew had made in the rural arts; of his honesty, sobriety, and gratitude; and pressed him to sell him a hundred acres” (77), to which Mr. A. V. responds: “Well, honest Andrew,…in consideration of your good name, I will let you have a hundred acres of good arable land” (78). Significant to our understanding of the development of the representations of “character” in American literature is that the “character” written by Crèvecœur’s Farmer James in the pages of Letter III is a supplementary text which displaces that initial “character” written by Andrew’s Barra minister. Andrew’s minister, a legitimating authority from his old world, had provided Andrew with his initial character, yet it is the respected citizen of his new world, Farmer James, who functions as the legitimating authority necessary to Andrew’s accumulation of greater economic capital. From these two visible (because textual) characters, Andrew then obtains yet another document, a “lease” securing his property. As Mr. A. V. informs Andrew, still ignorant of such legal terms, “If ever you are dissatisfied with the land, a jury of your own neighborhood shall value all your improvements, and you shall be paid agreeably to their verdict” (78–79).

Crèvecœur closes this narration of the translation of “character” into lease, of “good name” into freehold property, with a discussion of the ways in which the terms for the attributes of free, independent personhood converge with the language of the economic. After Andrew tells them he “know[s] nothing of what [they] mean about lease, improvement, will, jury, &c,” Farmer James reflects: “[Those] were hard words, which he had never heard in his life.…No wonder, therefore, that he was embarrassed for how could the man, who had hardly a will of his own since he was born, imagine he could have one after his death?” (79). The scene marking Andrew’s crossing of that threshold from dependent bond-servitude to independent self-mastery turns upon this movement, from “will” in the sense of a necessary attribute of free personhood, to “will” as that legal document through which he can pass on his property, and the social capital of his good name, through the laws of inheritance.

Benjamin Franklin, who suggested to those inquiring about emigration to America that they read Crèvecœur’s Letters from an American Farmer, likewise employed this division between “invisible” and “visible” character in the depictions of his representative self.

Benjamin Franklin and the Character of the Fugitive Apprentice

Early in his Autobiography, Benjamin Franklin relates that he “lik’d [the printer’s profession] much better than that of [his] Father, but still had a Hankering for the sea. To prevent the apprehended Effect of such an Inclination, my Father was impatient to have me bound to my Brother. I stood out some time, but at last was persuaded and signed the Indentures, when I was yet but 12 years old.”⁴⁷ Critics have remarked upon both the oedipal structure and the self-consciously “representative” character of Franklin’s literary self-fashioning throughout part 1 of the Autobiography.⁴⁸In their focus on these psychological and psychoanalytic themes, they ignore the economic reality to which Franklin refers, and the character-determining, formative role Franklin himself assigns to this period.⁴⁹Franklin repeatedly emphasizes the significance of this apprenticeship under his brother, and characterizes the ploy he uses to free himself from his indentures as “one of the first Errata” of his life. In fact, it is the first of Franklin’s famous “errata” to be named as such in the Autobiography. And it is during this apprenticeship under his brother that the young Franklin “now had access to better Books” (Franklin 14), an initial store of cultural capital he links directly to his accumulation of social and economic capital later in life. Further, in introducing this moment of signing his indentures, Franklin is keen to point out that his life could have taken a different path, depending on the vocation to which he was bound: he might have become a clergyman, as his father had originally intended; or a tallow chandler and soap boiler (his father’s trade), a joiner, bricklayer, turner, or brazier; or he could have gone to Sea, as his brother Josiah “had done to his [father’s] great Vexation” (Franklin 12). Thus to appreciate the complexity of Franklin’s famous self-fashioning, we should attend to the ways in which Franklin narrates how he was formed in this apprenticeship period, for it is in his narration of the dynamic relation between social formation and the individual subject that Franklin becomes “representative” of the new American.

One of the books Franklin read during this period was “Locke on Human Understanding” (Franklin 17), whose conceptions of agency and freedom would be enacted in Franklin’s narrative of his escape from the bonds of his apprenticeship. What is most significant to our understanding of this formative period in Franklin’s apprenticeship is his narration of the conflict between the economic bonds of labor and the affective bonds of the family: “Tho’ a Brother, he considered himself as my Master, and me as his Apprentice; and accordingly expected the same Services from me as he would from another; while I thought he demean’d me too much in some he required of me, who from a Brother expected more Indulgence” (20). Franklin highlights the conflicting expectations of the contracting parties: his brother, viewing him solely as an apprentice, expected “the same Services” from Franklin as he would any other bound servant; in contrast, Franklin considers the familial relation and so “expected more Indulgence.” Significantly, Franklin never refers to his brother as his master; rather, it is the brother who “considered himself as my Master”: for his brother, the familial bond had been displaced by the economic, once the indentures were signed. Thus while there may very well be an oedipal drama subtending Franklin’s departure from his family, the political unconscious of this departure begins first and foremost as the apprentice’s flight from the laws of the master-servant relation.

Franklin underscores the significance of this political-economic relation in the transition to the narration of his escape from these indentures:

Our Disputes were often brought before our Father, and I fancy I was either generally in the right, or else a better Pleader, because the Judgment was generally in my favour: But my Brother was passionate and had often beaten me, which I took extremely amiss; and thinking my Apprenticeship very tedious, I was continually wishing for some Opportunity of shortening it, which at length offered in a manner unexpected. Note. I fancy his harsh and tyrannical Treatment of me, might be a means of impressing me with that Aversion to arbitrary Power that has stuck to me thro’ my whole Life. (20–21)

Franklin locates the origins of his lifelong “Aversion to arbitrary Power” in his own subjection as an apprentice to the “tyrannical treatment” by his brother, and thus proposes a direct allegorical reading of their master-apprentice contract as a socially and politically representative power relation.

Appearing in a text published after the success of the American Revolution, whose leaders famously cited Locke’s justification of the Whig Revolution (in his Second Treatise of Government) in their own justifications of colonial resistance to abuses of Parliament, Franklin’s allegory is suggestive in many ways. First, James Franklin’s character-function in this allegory of power is made explicit: disregarding the familial bond, the brother identifying as master is characterized as “passionate,” and the treatment of his apprentice “tyrannical.” In the conceptual grammar of Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (which, as Franklin points out immediately prior to narrating this episode, he had read at this time), “passionate” is opposed to the calm of just reason and true liberty of thought: “But if any extreme disturbance…possesses our whole mind, as when the pain of…an impetuous uneasiness, as of love, anger, or any other violent passion, running away with us, allows us not the liberty of thought, and we are not masters enough of our own minds to consider thoroughly and fairly; God…will judge as a kind and merciful Father. But…the moderation of and restraint of our passions, so that our understanding may be free to examine, and reason unbiased give its judgment…it is in this we should employ our chief care and endeavors.”⁵⁰ While James Franklin cannot master his passions and thus behaves as a tyrannical master over his own brother, the apprentice Benjamin Franklin, having read “Locke on Human Understanding” (Franklin 17), is the figure of reason (and his father, not unlike God, the “kind and merciful Father,” thus often showed him favor). As Locke elaborated in this chapter “On the Idea of Power,” the mind has the “power to suspend the execution and satisfaction of any of its desires,” that is, the power to contain unreasonable “passions.”⁵¹Locke argued that this “power to suspend the prosecution of this or that desire” was “the source of all liberty.…This is so far from being a restraint or diminution of freedom, that it is the very improvement and benefit of it; it is not an abridgment, it is the end and use of our liberty; and the further we are removed from such a determination, the nearer we are to misery and slavery.”⁵²Locke incorporated this conceptualization of power and “freedom” (along with its contrasting metaphorical “slavery”) into his Second Treatise of Government (1690) based on the same analogy Franklin invokes in his apprentice’s allegory of “Arbitrary power”: just as “a man…cannot subject himself to the arbitrary power of another…but only so much as the law of nature gave him for the preservation of himself…this is all he doth, or can give up to the common-wealth, and by it to the legislative power.”⁵³ Thus while the legislative power is “the supreme power in every common-wealth…[i]t is not, nor can possibly be arbitrary power over the lives and fortunes of the people.”⁵⁴It is on this fundamental philosophical principle regarding the nature of man, that “no man or society of men [have] a power to deliver up their preservation…to the absolute will and arbitrary dominion of another,” that Locke would rest his political defense of the “supreme power of the people” to free themselves from the social contract: “when ever any one shall go about to bring them into such a slavish condition, they will always have a right…to rid themselves of those who invade this fundamental, sacred, and unalterable law of self-preservation, for which they entered into society.”⁵⁵ Locke’s philosophical defense of the natural right of resistance to “arbitrary power” circulated widely, and Franklin’s allusion to it in these lines introducing the representation of his escape from his indentures thus frames the significance of that act, and inflects its subsequent “representative” meaning, even before Franklin narrates it. Franklin, who describes (immediately prior to the narration of this episode) how to “inform and to persuade” through humility and subtle indirection, compares his own subjection under his master’s “tyrannical treatment” to the colonies’ subjection to the “arbitrary power” of Britain, and suggests an analogy between his apprenticeship indentures and the contract of civil government. Thus even before naming it his life’s “first errata,” Franklin has excused himself of breaking his indentures, assigning blame to the master for abusing his contractual powers.

Throughout the Autobiography, Franklin focuses on the split between the public self and the private self. This is especially so in part 1, which narrates his formative years as an apprentice and then journeyman printer—that period during which, as Benjamin Vaughn asserted in his letter to Franklin (included by Franklin in the Autobiography), “the private and public character is determined” (Franklin 74). What is equally significant to our understanding of the influence of Franklin as a literary model for that “new race of man, the American” is the device through which Franklin escapes the indentures binding him to his master, for the device turns upon the division between public character and private character, what Crèvecœur described as the difference between “visible character” and “invisible character.” And the “manner unexpected” by which Franklin’s “Opportunity of shortening” his apprenticeship occurred is likewise significant for what it reveals about this split subject: “One of the Pieces in our News-Paper, on some political Point which I have now forgotten, gave Offense to the Assembly. [James Franklin] was taken up, censur’d and imprison’d for a month.…During my Brother’s Confinement…I had the Management of the Paper, and I made bold to give our Rulers some Rubs in it.…My Brother’s Discharge was accompany’d with an Order of the House, (a very odd one) that James Franklin should no longer print the Paper called the New England Courant” (Franklin 21). The “visible character” of “Benjamin Franklin” first appeared in the public sphere of print in the circumstances of the state’s attempts to suppress political speech. It is also significant that it was thus publicly known that Franklin, the apprentice, was managing the paper during his master’s confinement, and giving “Rubs to our Rulers in it,” which led others to “consider [him] in an unfavourable Light, as a young Genious that had a Turn for Libelling & Satyr” (21). Franklin represents himself as a young apprentice already fully capable of taking on the duties of the master printer, and already overstepping the limits of his station. In order “to evade” the House’s “very odd” injunction

it was finally concluded…to let it be printed for the future under the Name of Benjamin Franklin. And to avoid the Censure of the Assembly that might still fall on him, as still printing it by his Apprentice, the Contrivance was, that my old Indenture should be returned to me with a full Discharge on the Back of it, to be shown on Occasion; but to secure to him the Benefit of my service I was to sign new indentures for the Remainder of the Term, [which] were to be kept private. (Franklin 21)

The “contrivance” thus relies on a twofold split between “private” and “public” character. First, as I have noted, with the newspaper now printed officially under the “Name of Benjamin Franklin,” the textual character of Benjamin Franklin as a master printer (what would become his most iconic role) made its public debut. Further, for the “very flimsy scheme” to work, this new public character required that Franklin be “discharged” from his apprenticeship indentures: the contract, which only bound him because it was a publicly recognized document, would be dissolved, while his “new Indentures for the Remainder of the Term…were to be kept private” (Franklin 21). As a secret, “private” contract in direct contradiction to the public character Benjamin Franklin had since assumed, these new indentures did not really bind him.

It is this very split, between Franklin’s public character as one discharged from the bonds of his indenture on the one hand, and his private character as an apprentice still bound by secret contract on the other, that Franklin would manipulate when, as he describes, “a fresh Difference arising between my Brother and me, I took upon me to assert my Freedom, presuming he could not venture to produce the new Indentures” (Franklin 21). Franklin manipulated the already existing split between public and private character, while thus revealing the greater significance of the former to the social order of early America. Ultimately Franklin says that “it was not fair in me to take this Advantage, and this I therefore reckon one of the first Errata of my Life” (22). Yet we should note that what Franklin calls an errata was his manipulation of that split between public and private enacted in their contrivance to evade the House’s order; Franklin does not say it was an errata to have “assert[ed] my freedom” (23). Franklin here is “representative” not of patience, but rather of the individual capable of mastering the split between public and private, visible and invisible “character,” in order to leap past that period of apprenticeship inscribed in the laws of master and servant.⁵⁶

Nor should we underestimate this aspect of the “character” Franklin represents in his Autobiography: twice in the next pages narrating the journey of his escape he refers to himself as the “figure” of the fugitive indentured servant: “I cut so miserable a figure too, that I found by Questions ask’d me I was suspected to be some runaway Servant, and in danger of being taken up on that suspicion” (Franklin 24). And later, after having arrived in Philadelphia, “several sly Questions were ask’d me, as it seemed to be suspected from my youth & Appearance, that I might be some runaway” (27). It is this representative version of Franklin, as the young apprentice who appropriated the discourse of his master (it was his master’s “contrivance” after all) and manipulated the terms of his subjection in order to assert his freedom, that made the Autobiography popular among “the youth”—young apprentices and journeymen—throughout the post-Revolutionary republic of the 1790s and the first half of the nineteenth century. It was a period of the early republic which saw the rapidly decreasing structural mobility promised by the eighteenth-century political-economic model of apprenticeship, and the breakdown of its cultural ideology: the individual’s gradual and orderly movement from bound, “qualifiedly free” subject to a position of independent self-mastery.⁵⁷

Mixed Character and The Interesting Narrative of Olaudah Equiano

In an influential interpretation of the significance of Olaudah Equiano’s representation of his manumission certificate to the larger cultural work of The Interesting Narrative, Houston Baker has argued that the “document…signals the ironic transformation of property by property into humanity.”⁵⁸ Baker resituated Equiano’s Interesting Narrative in the “social ground” of eighteenth-century mercantilism with the critical insight that the Narrative “vividly delineates the true character of Afro-America’s historical origins in a slave economics and implicitly acknowledges that such economics must be mastered before liberation can be achieved.”⁵⁹This understanding needs to be supplemented with a more expansive view of the political-economic “social ground,” one which comprehends the broader spectrum of labor subjection and bondage through which antislavery writers like Equiano imagined freedom, and those attributes of social personhood required for its realization.⁶⁰ The claim that the document “signals the ironic transformation of property by property into humanity” is based on a historically inaccurate opposition between property and humanity. While there were eighteenth-century proslavery texts, such as James Tobin’s Cursory Remarks upon the Rev. Mr. Ramsay’s Essay, that questioned or denied the humanity of Africans, most of the eighteenth-century literature defending slavery accepted the philosophical and religious recognitions of their humanity, if only to claim it to be an uncivilized and a naturally inferior one. And in the context of a historical analysis of Equiano’s manumission certificate as not only a “linguistic occurrence” but a legal document, we should note that eighteenth-century British and American laws governing slave property did not deny the humanity of slaves. In British colonial and American slavery law, property and humanity were not absolutely opposed terms, and the slave was recognized throughout the transatlantic world as both property and person. In the United States, the recognition of slave humanity was extended to the legal recognition of the slave “as a moral person.” Writing behind the mask of Publius in The Federalist No. 54 (1788), James Madison cited this dual recognition to explain the Constitution’s three-fifths clause and its ratio for the counting of slaves as persons (“three-fifths of all other persons”). Madison argued that though legally the slave was chattel property, “the slave is no less evidently regarded by law as a member of society, not as a part of the irrational creation; as a moral person, not as a mere article of property.” The proposed federal Constitution, Madison continued, thus “views them in the mixed character of persons and of property. This is in fact their true character. It is the character bestowed on them by the laws under which they live.”⁶¹

The recognition of the slave’s humanity as coextensive with the slave’s legal condition as property was inherited from English common law. Blackstone’s Commentaries, for example, while recognizing slaves as property in the West Indian and North American colonies, took for granted the law’s recognition of them as men and by natural right free: “[the] spirit of liberty is so deeply rooted in our soil, that a slave or negro, the moment he lands in England, falls under the protection of the laws, and with regard to all natural rights becomes eo instanti a freeman.”⁶²Lord Mansfield’s famous 1772 ruling in Somerset v. Stewart (brought to litigation by Equiano’s friend Granville Sharp) proceeded from the accepted view that all humanity, including Africans, are by natural right free, and that the slave’s condition as property was the artificial creation of local (municipal) positive law.⁶³

Moreover, Equiano himself reminds us of the legal and cultural recognitions of this “mixed character” of the slave as person and property through the two other documents embedded within the Interesting Narrative, his certificates of “good character.” As with Andrew the Hebridean’s passage from servitude to self-mastery in Crèvecœur’s Letters, the major steps in Equiano’s passage from slavery to freedom—through the cultivation narrative of apprenticeship—are marked by these textual “outward signs” of “visible character.” After having bought his manumission from his master, Robert King, and continuing to work for him for a year, Equiano decides to “return” to England: “I then requested he be kind enough to give me a certificate of my behaviour while in his service, which he very readily complied with, and gave me the following: Montserrat, 26th of July, 1767. The bearer hereof, Gustavas Vassa, was my slave for upwards of three years, during which he has always behaved himself well, and discharged his duty with honesty and assiduity. Robert King. To all whom this may concern.”⁶⁴Equiano has been formally free for over a year when he obtains this certificate of his behavior (his manumission certificate is dated 11 July 1766); yet the certificate, for Equiano’s use as a free laborer (seeking employment as a sailor or hired servant), is given its social-textual authority through the signature of his former owner; and those attributes of “good character” to which the document attests (“he behaved himself well, and discharged his duty with honesty and assiduity”) are based on his performance of these traits while Equiano was Robert King’s slave. Indeed, Equiano’s “certificate of character” speaks the same language as the Quaker reformer David Barclay’s broadside “Advice to Servants,” whose central message was that “a good character” should be the highest goal of servants, “for it is their bread.”⁶⁵ As we have seen, this good “visible character” was also one of the primary lessons in Crèvecœur’s history of Andrew the Hebridean, whose motto was that of all poor immigrants: ubi panis ibi patria (Letters 43).

These continuities between the good character traits of the slave and those of the formally free servant are then reaffirmed when Equiano later obtains another certificate, this time from another “old and good master,” Dr. Irving. This “certificate of [his] behaviour” reads: “The bearer, Gustavus Vassa, has served me several years with strict honesty, sobriety, and fidelity. I can, therefore, with justice recommend him for these qualifications; and indeed in every respect I consider him as an excellent servant. I do hereby certify that he always behaved well, and that he is perfectly trust-worthy” (Equiano 210). The formal difference in servile status indicated in these two certificates of character is worth noting: in the first certificate, the attributes of “good character” were demonstrated through Equiano’s services to his master as a slave, whereas in the second, they were demonstrated through his role as a servant. However, as documents signed by authorities identified with the full freedom of a master (over slaves and servants), these certificates of character serve the same social function. And as their contents reveal, the attributes of “good character” for the slave and for the “free” servant were the same; these were the traits of the ideal laboring subject, enslaved or free: the tractable person accepting his subjection to the mastery of another, willingly bound “to serve well and faithfully.”⁶⁶

Equiano’s two certificates of “good character” together reveal a more complex conception of slave personhood than is represented in Equiano’s oft-cited manumission certificate. The writing of such “characters” for slaves signaled the social recognition of their possession of those attributes of the “moral person” considered necessary to the “free” laborer. While slavery is still exemplary here of the most extreme form of labor bondage and unfree personhood, it is also represented as existing along a spectrum of labor subjection, not in static binary opposition to “freedom” or “humanity.” Even as in the late eighteenth century to be a slave of “good character” was to be “honest,” “well-behaved,” and above all faithful to a master while bound in involuntary servitude, such an understanding proceeds from the cultural and legal recognition of the slave as both a member of humanity and a “moral person.” Thus while we can agree with the importance of the manumission certificate as exemplary of Equiano’s “mastery” of slave economics, we should not ignore the significance of these other embedded texts marking the narrative of Equiano’s passage from slavery to formal freedom. These social documents reinforce the political-economic fact that the attributes of “good character” for the slave were the same as those for the servant (in the words of these certificates: “honesty, sobriety, fidelity”), and that the primary difference between them was the legal freedom inscribed in the more spectacularly “peculiar” manumission certificate (Equiano 137).

In the narration of his passage from bondage to freedom, Equiano dwells on scenes that typify those traits listed in the two certificates of character he receives: honesty and fidelity. For example, Equiano repeatedly points out that while his mind was “replete with inventions and thoughts of being freed,” especially when faced with the horrors of slavery in the West Indies, he wished to obtain his freedom “by honest and honourable means, for I always remembered the old adage, and I trust that it has ever been my ruling principle, ‘that Honesty is the best policy’” (119).

In order to model the practicability of both slave emancipation and black civic assimilation, Equiano presents himself throughout the Interesting Narrative as “ruled” not by exterior restraints or fear of his master—as he declares, “I used plainly to tell him [the Captain]…that I would die before I would be imposed upon as other negroes were” (120)—but rather by the interior governance of the moral principle of “honesty,” that trait later listed as Equiano’s first distinctive trait in the certificate of “good character” given to him by his former owner, Robert King. This “good character” trait distinguishes Equiano from that most representative of unruly slaves, the fugitive: “Had I wished to run away, I did not want opportunities, which frequently presented themselves” (Equiano 123). Equiano’s contrast with the figure of the fugitive appealed to antislavery reformers and political elites alike. Throughout the transatlantic slavery debates, all sides referred to the maroon communities of escaped slaves that regularly “terrorized” the planter population with raids, and whose very existence provided a dangerous example to a restive slave population.

We should note further the political-economic significance of describing such a contrast with runaway slaves as “honesty,” which is to say we should remember that in the emergent bourgeois ideology of the late eighteenth century, “moral sense” necessarily carried political-economic significations. In the model of black assimilability Equiano stages in the Interesting Narrative, the “honest and honourable means” of obtaining freedom is equated with its “purchase” (126), such that slaveholders would be compensated for any losses sustained, by manumission or emancipation, of what Equiano calls the “first cost” (103) of their slaves. To make this last point is not to argue that Equiano sincerely believed that masters should be compensated for their freed slaves. Rather, it is to focus on slave autobiography’s relation to the discourse of the master, and thus to attend to how such traits defining “good character” are represented by Equiano as profitable to the slave who would be free. For instance, in his narration of the episode wherein he passes on the opportunity to escape, Equiano repeats that principle by which he was governed (“honesty is the best policy”), and adds: “Indeed my captain was much afraid of my leaving him and the vessel at that time, as I had so fair an opportunity: but…this fidelity of mine turned out much to my advantage hereafter” (123). Significant here is that Equiano uses the second of those terms listed as a trait of good character, “fidelity,” and once again characterizes it in the terms not of the slave’s religious or moral self but rather in its material “advantage” to him.

As described by Equiano, the value of this “fidelity” arose from how it gained him credibility with his master. After the ship’s mate accuses Equiano of planning to run away, his master, Robert King, tells Equiano that he must therefore sell him. In response to this accusation and to the threat of being sold, Equiano refers to the several prior opportunities he had to escape, and repeats to his master the declaration he had made earlier to the reader of The Interesting Narrative, of his belief that “if ever I were freed, whilst I was used well, it should be by honest means” (Equiano 124). Equiano is not categorically opposed to escape as the means of becoming free for he qualifies this belief in the “honest means” of becoming free with the condition of good treatment (“whilst I was used well”). Likewise, in the beginning of this chapter he tells the reader he had agreed to serve as a sailor because he thought he might “possibly make [his] escape if [he] should be used ill” (115). And immediately after declaring to his master that he had never intended to escape, Equiano tells the reader, “at that instant my mind was big with inventions, and full of schemes to escape” (125). In this dialogue between the slave accused of infidelity and the master as judge of the slave’s credibility, Equiano distinguishes between what the slave says in the face of the master and what the slave is thinking. What this disjunction highlights is the performative aspect of Equiano’s “good character” of fidelity to his master. The slave does not have to actually believe in the idea of “being freed…by honest means,” yet the value of his fidelity—of not attempting escape despite many opportunities—comes from the credible performance of this trait for the master, as well as for readers debating the practicability of abolition of the slave trade, slave emancipation, and the assimilation of the formerly enslaved into the culture of free (because voluntary) labor subjection.

Equiano elaborates this point further through the corroborating testimony of the captain:

I then appealed to the captain, whether ever he saw any sign of my making the least attempt to run away.…[The] captain confirmed every syllable I said, and even more; for he said he had tried different times to see if I would make any attempt of this kind, both at St. Eustatia and in America, and he never found that I made the smallest; . . . and he did really believe, if ever I meant to run away, that, as I could never have had a better opportunity, I would have done it the night the mate and all the people left our vessel at Guadaloupe. (Equiano 125)

The captain corroborates the truth of Equiano’s claims of fidelity not by reference to anything Equiano has said (e.g., the assertion of his belief that whether he would be free depended on God’s will), but rather through reference to Equiano’s performance of such fidelity by remaining with the ship in the absence of an overseer and passing over his many opportunities to escape.

The episode closes with the translation of this fidelity to the master, as a trait of “good character,” into its economic value to the slave seeking freedom:

[My] master immediately [said] that I was a sensible fellow, and he never did intend to use me as a common slave; and that, but for the entreaties of the captain, and his character of me, he would not have let me go from the stores about as I had done; that also, in so doing, he thought by carrying one little thing or other to different places to sell I might make money. That he also intended to encourage me in this, by crediting me with half a puncheon of rum and half a hogshead of sugar at a time; so that, from being careful, I might have money enough, in some time, to purchase my freedom: and, when that was the case, I might depend upon it he would let me have it for forty pounds sterling money, which was only the price he gave for me. (Equiano 126)

If Equiano’s manumission certificate documents how “chattel has transformed itself into freeman through the exchange of forty pounds sterling,” Equiano’s narration of this transformation highlights that the price Equiano later pays to purchase his freedom is a price originally suggested here by his master, and is represented as the reward for the slave’s honesty and fidelity.⁶⁷

The dialogue was an especially popular form in antislavery literature. In addition to reminding us that Equiano’s Narrative belongs to a wider literary tradition (not an exclusively Anglo-African, African American, or Black Atlantic one), the dialogic form of this key episode emphasizes that conceptions of freedom, and of its contrasting degrees of unfreedom, were produced through the dialectic of master and bondsman, a dialectic whose very imaginative possibility depended upon both the implicit and explicit recognitions of slave humanity, and of the “mixed character” of the slave as both chattel property and moral person. Equiano employs the narrative symmetry of the dialogue form to emphasize the economic value—to the slave and to the master—of slave fidelity as a “good character” trait. This narrative symmetry is marked by the master’s promise, at the dialogue’s close, to let Equiano purchase his freedom “for forty pounds sterling money, which was only the price he gave for me” (Equiano 126). This dialogue between master and slave had opened, we recall, with Robert King learning of Equiano’s possible infidelity—“he heard that I meant to run away” (124)—and consequently telling him, “And therefore…I must sell you again; you cost me a great deal of money, no less than forty pounds sterling; and it will not do to lose so much. You are a valuable fellow…and I can get any day for you one hundred guineas, from many gentlemen in this island” (124). Whereas in this opening exchange of the dialogue, Equiano’s master, fearing the loss of the forty pounds he had paid for Equiano, threatens to sell him to a West Indian slaveholder, in the dialogue’s conclusion, the master, after having been reassured of Equiano’s fidelity, promises to sell to Equiano his manumission for this same price of forty pounds. The trial of Equiano’s “good character” is framed by these dialogic exchanges between master and slave, and the success of Equiano’s performance of fidelity is marked by the change in the master’s address to his slave from threat to promise, from believing forty pounds too great a sum to lose (“it will not do to lose so much”) if the slave were to escape from his bondage, to considering it an equitable price (“only the price he gave for me”), if the slave could earn it while continuing to serve his master faithfully.

While Equiano mentions his “thoughts of being freed” (119) prior to this moment, he highlights in this dialogue that it is his owner Robert King who initiates the material possibility of this transformation from chattel property to free man—in Equiano’s words, to become “my own master” (137)—by “credit[ing] me with a tierce of sugar and another of rum” (126). The visible character trait of fidelity thus becomes of direct financial value to Equiano, marked by this translation of the credibility of Equiano’s claims of fidelity into merchant “credit”—that is, by the conversion of the social capital of good “character” into economic capital.⁶⁸

The dialogue form also illuminates the ways in which the master’s promise introduces those very terms later inscribed into Equiano’s manumission certificate and his certificates of good character, thus underscoring the widespread recognition, in the interdependent discourses of the master and the slave, of the continuities between the “moral person” of the slave and the free servant. These continuities are represented here through the combined narratives of assimilation and accumulation contained in the master’s address to his slave at the dialogue’s conclusion. Based on both “the captain’s character of [Equiano]” and Equiano’s own successful performance of the good character trait of fidelity, the master recognizes his slave as a “sensible fellow” and decides to “encourage” his industry. The master ties his promise of manumission to the inculcation of the market’s values: “from being careful, I might have money enough, in some time, to purchase my freedom” (Equiano 126). Through the voice of the master, Equiano represents freedom here as something “earned,” both in its direct economic sense—the individual accumulation of capital—and in its assimilative, moral sense: the slave must learn to trade well and to “be careful” with his time and money if he is to obtain freedom.

“Being careful” is especially significant in the context of this promise of a future opportunity to purchase his freedom, for it emphasizes that attribute of moral personhood considered a distinguishing feature of the free laboring subject: foresight. Even as the slave is enjoined to accept his present bondage, he is “encouraged” to practice his industry and the self-discipline of being careful with his money—to behave like a “sensible” free laborer—with a view toward a possible future, the end of his enslavement “in some time.”⁶⁹Countering the proslavery view of black slaves as living solely in and for the present, Equiano depicts the master’s recognition of his slave as a moral person with the foresight necessary to comprehend the significance of the master’s promise.

Assimilation and Universal Emancipation

Equiano’s representation of the master’s promise of manumission as a reward for the slave’s fidelity draws directly from the proposals for practicable emancipation made by fellow abolitionists such as Anthony Benezet, Granville Sharp, Benjamin Rush, and Ottobah Cugoano. In his influential Historical Account of Guinea (1771), Benezet discussed the “expediency of a general freedom being granted to the Negroes” through the gradualist model of assimilation.⁷⁰Benezet opposed sending to Africa those slaves already imported to the colonies, or those “born in our families,” on the grounds that such a deportation “would be to expose them, in a strange land, to greater difficulties than many of them labour under at present.”⁷¹He acknowledged, however, the possible difficulties attending immediate emancipation, due to what was described as the degraded moral characters of these slaves, which Benezet argued were the artificial “effects,” the social product, of an unnatural enslavement: “To let them suddenly free here, would perhaps be attended with no less difficulty; for, undisciplined as they are in religion and virtue, they might give a loose to their evil habits, which the fear of a master would have restrained. These are objections, which weigh with many well disposed people, and it must be granted, there are difficulties in the way.”⁷² Speaking directly to the economic concerns of the political elite, Benezet “offered for consideration” this proposal:

That all further importation of slaves be absolutely prohibited; and as those born among us, after serving so long as may appear to be equitable, let them by law be declared free. Let every one, thus set free, be enrolled in the county courts, and be obliged to be a resident, during a certain number of years, within the said county, under the care of the overseers of the poor. Thus being, in some sort, still under the direction of governors, and the notice of those who were formerly acquainted with them, they would be obliged to act the more circumspectly, and make proper use of their liberty, and their children would have an opportunity of obtaining such instructions, as are necessary to the common occasions of life; and thus both parents and children might gradually become useful members of the community. And further, where the nature of the country would permit…suppose a small tract of land were assigned to every Negroe family, and they obliged to live upon and improve it, (when not hired out to work for the white people) this would encourage them to exert their abilities, and become industrious subjects.⁷³

Benezet’s proposal both assumes and projects a narrative of moral cultivation, and its concomitant “inculcation” of “economic virtues.”⁷⁴The transformation from slave subject to free (because voluntary) laborer is imagined through the reciprocal inducements of “obligation” and “encouragement.” Even when formally free, the formerly enslaved would be “under the direction of governors,” and thus continue to feel “obliged to act the more circumspectly, and make proper use of their liberty.” The discipline of the lash—the “restraint” provided by “the fear of a master”—would be replaced by the slave’s moral self-discipline, marked here by that recurring term, “obliged.”

The result of such an assimilation of slave subjects into the world of “free” labor, Benezet concludes, is that “both planters and tradesman would be plentifully supplied with cheerful and willing-minded labourers, much vacant land would be cultivated, the produce of the country be justly increased, the taxes for the support of government lessened to the individuals, by the increase of taxables, and the Negroes, instead of being an object of terror, as they certainly must be where their numbers are great, would become interested in their safety and welfare.”⁷⁵ I should emphasize as well that in order to imagine this transition to formal freedom, Benezet draws from the extant models of labor discipline applied to the British and colonial American “white” working class, as indicated here by his references to the “the overseers of the poor” and “the direction of governors” as the disciplinary mode through which the formerly enslaved would “become industrious subjects.”

Ottobah Cugoano concludes his Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species (1787) with proposals for the abolition of slavery that follow the same gradualist model of apprenticeship and assimilation invoked by Benezet:

I would propose that a total abolition of slavery should be…proclaimed; and that a universal emancipation of slaves should begin from the date thereof, and be carried out in the following manner:…[T]hat it should require all slaveholders to mitigate the labor of their slaves to that of lawful servitude.…And that it should be made known to the slaves that those who had been above seven years in the islands or elsewhere, if they had obtained any competent degree of knowledge of the Christian religion, and the laws of civilization, and had behaved themselves honestly and decently, that they should immediately become free; and that their owners should give them reasonable wages and maintenance for their labor.⁷⁶

While Cugoano appealed to religious feeling and moral sentiment throughout the preceding pages, his positive proposals for the practical implementation of “universal emancipation” transposes the religious assimilation of conversion onto the economic assimilation of the “lawful servitude” of apprenticeship and indenture. The time period of seven years proposed by Cugoano may have come from the Bible—the jubilee, when bond servants were set free, arrived every seven years—yet more likely came from the standard term limits of the contracts for apprentices and indentured servants: as early as 1562, the Statute of Artificers imposed a minimum of seven years of service for all persons entering an industrial calling and specified that the apprenticeship was not to expire before the worker reached the age of twenty-four.⁷⁷

Cugoano’s transposition of conversion onto servitude underscores the double nature of the structure of assimilation, as, on the one side, an “incorporation” of the individual subject by the community, which enjoins, on the other side, a transformation of the individual subject, such that this subject would be deemed worthy of such incorporation. The seven years thus figure as a period of apprenticeship, in the sense of what Cugoano pointedly calls a “lawful servitude” governed by training and instruction: “For in the course of that time, they would have sufficiently paid their owners by their labor, both for their first purpose, and for the expenses attending their education. By being thus instructed in the course of seven years, they would become tractable and obedient, useful laborers, dutiful servants and good subjects.”⁷⁸Thus, while the proposed “universal emancipation of slaves” would be immediate, their labor subjection would continue as a “lawful servitude” until they paid their former masters “for their first purpose and for the expenses attending their education,” just as apprentices paid theirs; and until the formerly enslaved were themselves transformed into “good subjects,” and acquired the moral “character” of free laborers: “tractable and obedient, useful and dutiful.”

In addition to the extant models of labor discipline for “free” laborers, abolitionists looked to the slavery laws of other colonial states to describe the practical transition from slavery to freedom. To argue the practicability of gradual emancipation in the British West Indies, for example, Granville Sharp invoked the Spanish colonial system of slave self-purchase, coartación, as a model “worthy our imitation, in case we should not be so happy as to obtain an entire abolition of slavery”:

As soon as a slave is landed, his name, price, &c., are register’d in a public office, and the master is obliged to allow him one working day in every week to himself, besides Sundays, so that if the slave chuses to work for his master on that day, he receives the wages of a freeman for it, and whatever he gains by his labor on that day, is so secured to him by law, that the master cannot deprive him of it. This is certainly a considerable step towards the abolishing [of] absolute slavery. As soon as the slave is able to purchase another working day, the master is obliged to sell it to him at a proportional price, viz. 1–fifth part of his original cost: and so likewise the remaining 4 days at the same rate, as soon as the slave is able to redeem them, after which he is absolutely free. This is such an encouragement to industry, that even the most indolent are tempted to exert themselves. Men who have thus worked out their freedom are inured to the labour of the country, and are certainly the most useful subjects that a colony can acquire. Regulations might be formed upon the same plan to encourage the industry of slaves that are already imported into the colonies, which would teach them how to maintain themselves and be as useful, as well as less expensive to the planter. They would by such means become members of society, and have an interest in the welfare of the community, which would greatly add to the security of the colony; whereas, at present, many of the planters are in continual danger of being cut off by their slaves—A fate which they but too justly deserve!⁷⁹