Slavery and Silence
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In the thirty-five years before the Civil War, it became increasingly difficult for Americans outside the world of politics to have frank and open discussions about the institution of slavery, as divisive sectionalism and heated ideological rhetoric circumscribed public debate. To talk about slavery was to explore—or deny—its obvious shortcomings, its inhumanity, its contradictions. To celebrate it required explaining away the nation's proclaimed belief in equality and its public promise of rights for all, while to condemn it was to insult people who might be related by ties of blood, friendship, or business, and perhaps even to threaten the very economy and political stability of the nation. For this reason, Paul D. Naish argues, Americans displaced their most provocative criticisms and darkest fears about the institution onto Latin America. Naish bolsters this seemingly counterintuitive argument with a compelling focus on realms of public expression that have drawn sparse attention in previous scholarship on this era. In novels, diaries, correspondence, and scientific writings, he contends, the heat and bluster of the political arena was muted, and discussions of slavery staged in these venues often turned their attention south of the Rio Grande. At once familiar and foreign, Cuba, Brazil, Haiti, and the independent republics of Spanish America provided rhetorical landscapes about which everyday citizens could speak, through both outright comparisons or implicit metaphors, what might otherwise be unsayable when talking about slavery at home. At a time of ominous sectional fracture, Americans of many persuasions—Northerners and Southerners, Whigs and Democrats, scholars secure in their libraries and settlers vulnerable on the Mexican frontier—found unity in their disparagement of Latin America. This displacement of anxiety helped create a superficial feeling of nationalism as the country careened toward disunity of the most violent, politically charged, and consequential sort.
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SLAVERY AND SILENCE
LATIN AMERICA AND THE U.S. SLAVE DEBATE
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Churches refrained from endorsing antislavery activities or declaring slavery a sin, fearful of driving congregants away and discouraging fundraising.65 Anna Quincy Thaxter Cushing, a comfortably situated doctor’s wife of Dorchester, Massachusetts, generally attended the First Church (Unitarian) twice on Sundays, hearing one sermon “in the forenoon” and another in the afternoon, the topics of which she dutifully noted in her diary. In August 1855 a sermon by a visiting divine stirred up trouble in the congregation. “Mr. Fred. Frothingham, of Montreal, … introduced the subject of slavery by way of illustrating the subject about which he was speaking, and spoke of it at some length,” wrote Cushing that Sunday; “some twenty people saw fit to leave the church. A very undignified and illbred proceeding, to say no more.” Congregants demanded whether the pastor had known what the visiting clergyman had planned to say: “some of his friends, most of them, probably, think that it will be better to let the whole affair pass over in silence,” wrote Cushing—which is apparently exactly what happened.66
Sometimes silence on the subject of slavery signaled the despair Americans felt at the possibility of ever finding a remedy. Harriet Beecher Stowe, of all people (referring to herself in the third person), was later to recall, “It was a sort of general impression upon her mind, as upon that of many humane people in those days, that the subject was so dark and painful a one, so involved in difficulty and obscurity, so utterly beyond human hope or help, that it was of no use to read, or think, or distress oneself about it.”67 Stowe ultimately decided there was something she could do, and almost singlehandedly piloted the subject of U.S. slavery to the foreground of mainstream fiction in 1852 with the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. But before she put slavery front and center in her bestselling novel, most American literature aiming at a national audience kept slave characters on the periphery in the “plantation novel” tradition, where they bowed to their masters and joked merrily with each other.
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