Читать книгу The Punishment Monopoly - Pem Davidson Buck - Страница 8

INTRODUCTION

Ancestor Tales

Somewhere, just where and when I’m not sure, but surely in Scotland, a swaddled baby cries in his mother’s arms. Who his parents were, I don’t know, but I do know his name. He is Alexander Davidson. The year might be 1690, and the place might be Dingwall, in the Scottish Highlands. He most likely joined the Jacobite rebellion against the British Crown as a young man, and being on the losing side, found himself, willingly or not, crossing the Atlantic to the Chesapeake Bay, most likely sold as an indentured servant, most likely sometime in the decade after 1715. Davidson genealogy refers to him as Alexander I.

Some eighty years earlier, long before Alexander’s birth, a man with the last name of Radford was puking up his guts on one of the first ships bound for Jamestown, one of the “lesser sort” in a company of “gentlemen adventurers” headed for a world they considered new—and ripe for exploitation.¹ I have a cousin whose family mythology says his name was Benjamin. But perhaps the ancestral Radford really arrived much later, in 1652, and was named John. Whenever that first Radford arrived, though, he surely puked; ships hadn’t changed much in the intervening forty or so years. If he arrived on the earlier date, the first Radford was probably young, and most likely in some form of indentured servitude. If he came just a couple of years later, he might well have had to choose between the gallows and the years of servitude in the colonies.

When the first Radford arrives in the Chesapeake, the Powhatan are the dominant polity in that world, which they consider anything but new. They have been consolidating their power through the late 1500s and early 1600s, and now have a paramount chief, Wahunsonacock, whose reach and demands for tribute are becoming ever more extensive.

And, somewhere and sometime in Africa, war captives are sold, who, like that early Radford, would become some of the first non-Native people to enter the world of the Powhatan. Perhaps it was two of their descendants who are known, at least by whites, as Venis and Adam, and are held enslaved in the 1740s by that baby boy born in Dingwall, Scotland. More likely, however, they, or their parents or grandparents, arrived well after the first Africans at Jamestown. Africans arrived by ones and twos during the early years, and it wasn’t until after 1680 that they were brought and bought in large numbers. Statistically, Venis and Adam most likely arrived in the early to mid-eighteenth century. So they will enter this story after those early Radfords. And many years later, people who might be their descendants, Judah and Depha and eleven others, will enter the story, enslaved in the household of Alexander’s son.

Finally, there is Sarah Ellis, the last of the “founding generation” to enter these tales. She is a second- or third-generation English Virginian, born in 1717 in Christ Church Parish of Middlesex County. Most of her life is a bit of a mystery to me, hidden as it is, like that of most women, from official view under the “cover” of their husbands and fathers. Rules of coverture kept women, for the most part, off tax lists and out of the records of county court orders and of judicial proceedings. They are counted but nameless in early census documents. Regardless of whatever managerial power or influence they might have had in their own families and communities, it was mostly husbands and fathers and brothers who carried out public business. So, women don’t show up much in the records we can search today, making their lives even harder to document than the lives of men of that time. But what is clear is that Sarah later marries that baby born in Scotland, Alexander I, and that she bears a son, and dies in her mid-thirties. Alexander II, her son, marries and moves his family to North Carolina just before the Revolution, and then moves on to the Barrens of central Kentucky just after it became a state of the fledgling United States. Alexander I and Sarah Ellis are my seventh-generation grandparents; that first Radford is my eleventh-generation grandfather.

So it is these people and their descendants who will carry these ancestor tales—first Radfords, whom I will rudely abandon as soon as there are Davidsons to follow in Virginia. It was my father’s identification with Scotland, and my own curiosity about Davidson family mythology, that started this search, and that, rather than the story of the Radfords, is the track I will be following. But I will equally rudely abandon the Davidsons in the 1820s, just before my great-great-great-grandparents, Alexander II’s son Hezekiah and Eleanor Wilson Davidson, left Kentucky. The final chapter of this book, having left the ancestors, does a fast forward to the present, following the themes of these tales, so that the past can illuminate some of the most contentious issues of the twenty-first century.

I HAD HEARD ALL MY LIFE, growing up in Pennsylvania, that “we were abolitionists in Kentucky,” and that my ancestors had left Kentucky about when Lincoln did. There was also the story that my father’s great-uncle Ben Radford (the third of that name) had watched Abraham Lincoln playing horseshoes in Illinois when Lincoln was a young lawyer. It turns out that none of this is exactly true. It was Uncle Ben’s father-in-law who did the watching.² Lincoln left Kentucky considerably before the Davidsons did. Were they abolitionists? Well, that question will take some unraveling when we get to Kentucky in these tales.

Ancestor tales had never impressed me much, and even when I moved to Kentucky myself, and even when I wrote Worked to the Bone: Race, Class, Power, and Privilege in Kentucky, an anthropological history focused on the two central Kentucky counties where I live and work, I continued to ignore that family history.³ Ignore is actually the wrong word; it never crossed my mind to wonder whether my family history had any relevance to the book I was writing. And I had at that time no idea that my Davidson ancestors had settled less than an hour’s drive from where I now live—Hezekiah and Eleanor had lived in my own county. Coincidence?!

The story I am weaving now is, in a sense, my attempt to place that family history within the context of the understandings of class and race—particularly whiteness—that I developed in my first book. This included what I thought of as my search for my “one black drop,” which I was sure must exist somewhere among all those European ancestors. I never found it, though it quite likely is there, given the flexibility in the early days of colonial Virginia of what we now call race.

But more important, my goal is to use that family history as a vehicle for talking about the right to use force, and how that relates to the formation of governmental structures called “states”—entities that claim and enforce a monopoly on the use of force to exercise punishment. For ultimately, the state must punish to be a state, and, bottom line, this is what states and the force they control are for—to protect the ability of the few to set people up so that they have little choice but to hand over to them the value of the work they do. The citizens of some states have fought, with some degree of success, to limit or mitigate exploitation, and as a result states have varied enormously in the degree of security they provide for those who cooperate. But ultimately all depend on their power to punish those who don’t.

Using family history to do this will be tricky. This will be a story partially constructed from known facts, and partially a story constructed from likelihoods—a fiction, but not a baseless fiction. I don’t know, for instance, that in 1607 or even in 1652, a Radford was seasick on a ship bound for Jamestown. I do know that many people on those boats were, and my Radford might well have been one of them.⁴ And though I can know little of the men, I know even less of the women, and less again of the enslaved, of Venis and Adam and the others listed in my ancestors’ inventories. So this will be a creative reconstruction, a tale that illustrates not really my family history, but the history of many families as forming states that claimed from them the right to punish.

This story will start with the people who were there first, and in whose hands rested the fate of the ancestral Radford, if he actually arrived early, and of the others who arrived to risk their lives to create wealth for the already wealthy investors of the Virginia Company—safe, for the most part, in England.⁵ In that early period of colonial encroachment, two corporate not-quite-states confronted each other as Powhatan aristocrats decided how to deal with the Virginia Company’s officers and vice versa, and as both attempted to spread their use of force beyond the confines of their own groups. Even as they pushed outward to absorb more land and people, however, that use of force was contested within each polity. Punishment was contested both by those who suffered from it and by those who wished to gain the right to punish—to rule—for themselves. To clarify, “polity” is a term I will use frequently because it indicates a political, resource-managing, self-governing entity but leaves its actual form of organization ambiguous, and thus is very useful in talking about the process of state formation.

The struggle over the use of force within the Virginia English polity had, by John Radford’s arrival in 1652, become central and would in twenty years lead to Bacon’s Rebellion, a class-based uprising in which exploited Africans and English workers joined together against the elites who exploited them. In the aftermath of that rebellion, the racial distinctions were legally constructed that eventually justified hereditary racial slavery for those who would be defined by African descent, and enabled continued poverty for many of the others, now defined as white. Thus, separated by race, they were not likely to join again in a class-based challenge to the elites’ right to exploit—a classic example of divide and conquer.

That racialized distinction would endure despite the fact that enslaved Africans and English indentured servants did much the same work and lived in comparable physical misery, both exploited by the planter elites. By Alexander’s time these distinctions set indentured people, including probably Alexander himself during his first years in Virginia, apart from enslaved people like Venis and Adam. While John Radford may well have been involved in Bacon’s Rebellion—most people in Virginia were—by the time Alexander Davidson arrived, the rights of free white men to own and punish the enslaved and to temporarily own and (within some limits) punish the indentured were well established. Alexander, however, if he was in fact indentured and subject to his owner’s punishment, lived through that period of servitude and became free, unlike Venis and Adam, whom he later owned and had the right to punish, with whips if he so chose. As a father and husband, he also had the right to punish his wife, Sarah, as well as their children—a right that enslaved husbands and fathers could not claim.

BEFORE I CAN GO ON, I NEED to explain why I keep referring to states, force, and punishment. There has been much theorizing about what “states” are, and I will address those issues in the last chapter, for the very idea of a “state” is problematic. For now, however, I am referring to the state as a territory held under one governing entity, be it a kingdom, a dictatorship, or a democratic republic. Beginning with Weber, social theorists have generally argued that coercion and a monopoly on the use of force are central foundational processes in all states.⁶ States are, by definition, stratified, with some categories of people having far greater access to resources than others.⁷ The state uses force as needed to control inhabitants and to control/defend borders. The inhabitants of the territory, or at least most of them, believe that the use of force is legitimate; it is the state’s right and obligation. The state authorizes agents to make laws, make demands, regulate behavior, and, when necessary for enforcement, exert force. Those who resist will undergo punishment that is itself authorized by the state and carried out by agents of the state. The primary beneficiaries of the monopoly on the use of force are a subset of the population, the elite, and, to a lesser extent, those on whom they depend—their agents in using state power to enforce stratification. Stratification, in turn, enables wealth extraction—and wealth extraction is the basic point of state formation. Wealth extraction requires categories of people who are powerless to prevent the expropriation of the fruits of their labor. The power to punish is the essential tool that makes this feedback loop possible.⁸

Thus, states are about inequality, about making it possible for some few to gain wealth off the labors of the many, and the threat of punishment is an important component in convincing people to cooperate. Most people would prefer to keep the value of their labor for themselves, but the state apparatus provides the force to convince even the recalcitrant that they cannot do so. The state enforces the rights of individuals to own or control property, the resources people need to produce food and goods—the means of production. In enforcing those rights, the state at the same time enforces the propertyless condition—the dispossession—of many people. So, in enforcing the rights of property, the state also fulfills its other critical function: the supply and control of a cheap labor force to do the work of making wealth for others.

In these tales, we will see the state protecting the rights of the elite to own huge amounts of land and to use the labor of the dispossessed for their own benefit. In the early colonies, that dispossession applied only to those who were enslaved and indentured, but soon spread to many more people, people who were legally free. This is why force is required: to make sure that there are enough people without property who will go hungry unless they turn their labor over to someone else in return for wages or at least for a way to eat, and to be able to punish those who don’t cooperate or threaten to upset the system. How else would an elite “persuade” other people to make them rich? How else can wealth trickle up into the hands of the very few? In fact, people do at times revolt and resist, despite punishment, on a regular basis. Sufficiently organized, they sometimes force concessions, though punishment means that only rarely are they able to change the basic structure of inequality.

So when I refer to “the state,” I am referring to an entity that has the legitimate right to exert force both in relation to its borders and in relation to its inhabitants. Such entities are “sovereign.” The United States was becoming a modern nation-state by the time my ancestors left the East Coast and arrived in Kentucky. Modern nation-states claim that their sovereignty, their right of self-determination, their right to demand loyalty and obedience and thus their right to use force to punish—their right to exist at all—is based on the existence of a homogenous “nation,” a “people” who share the same values, culture, language, and history.⁹ Getting seriously disparate peoples to conceive of themselves as a nation, to legitimize the existence of the state, has been an ongoing challenge—and still is, as documented by the present furor promoted by the descendants of some immigrants over the acceptance of other immigrants as part of the state.

IN FACILITATING WEALTH EXTRACTION, the state acts as what sociologist Charles Tilly calls a “protection racket”—something that is often euphemistically referred to as the “social contract.”¹⁰ The state provides “protection” to citizens, and in return the citizens allow themselves to be exploited. The state may also provide benefits for some of the population in the form of a rising standard of living, helping to ensure their allegiance. This means that the legitimacy of a state in the eyes of its more protected citizens rests largely on its control of the use of force. The state, to fulfill its side of the contract, must be effective in maintaining an “orderly” society. It must provide its citizens the local peace they need to raise families with at least minimal success and to produce the surplus needed to fulfill elite demands, all without the fear of additional extractions of surplus by marauding neighbors or outsiders. Belief in that contract is part of what Edward Herman and Noam Chomsky have called “the manufacture of consent”—the orchestration of beliefs and fears that get people to accept, and ideally not even recognize, elite rule and their own exploitation.¹¹ But if Tilly’s “protection racket” is to work, citizens must believe they need protection—otherwise they might keep for themselves the value they produce, refusing to pay for protection. So, if there is no real external enemy, no threat of war or invasion, something fearsome will have to be invented. Certain people can be framed as dangerous, in need of punishment to protect everyone else. Punishing the already compliant, the “us,” won’t work. It is “them,” those Others who are framed as enemies. I will introduce several such enemies in these tales, ranging from witches to those so framed today—women with babies, criminals, Muslims, and immigrants—all of whom supposedly threaten the security of the compliant clients of the protectors. I will show how “the law” creates criminals, and how the state and its media allies foster fear of certain groups, telling us how dangerous they are in an attempt to manufacture consent. That the state provides protection in the face of fear gives it legitimacy in the eyes of many of its citizens. That the state created the fear in the first place remains invisible to most.¹²

The power to punish allows the state to make clear what happens to the noncompliant. The state itself, just like a Mafia boss running a protection racket, must be feared. So “governments decide how much punishment they want, and these decisions are in no simple way related to the crime rate.”¹³ Punishment provides the state with the opportunity to use certain bodies to produce “shock and awe,” spectacular displays of power over life and death. Executions and imprisonment, decisions to withhold life-supporting services such as healthcare, welfare, education, as well as the ability to declare exceptions to those rules, all demonstrate that the state is indeed sovereign, both to its own people and to other states.¹⁴ As Achille Mbembe says, “The ultimate expression of sovereignty resides, to a large degree, in the power and capacity to dictate who may live and who must die.”¹⁵ Steve Martinot states, “The prisoner is the means by which the state produces its overarching power.… The prisoner is the sign of the state’s presumed political legitimacy.”¹⁶ The stories of my ancestors offer numerous examples of how spectacular punishment and the demonstration of sovereignty are linked.

Ultimately, then, a state to be a state has to punish. It can’t just claim a monopoly on the use of force; it can’t just say, “Hey folks, we, the state officials, are the only ones who can use force, so we are in charge of punishing anyone who needs it. And if you try, we’ll punish you too. Somebody stole your stuff, report it to us and we’ll punish the thief. We are the only ones who can use force, with a couple of specified exceptions.” Very few people will buy into that, unless it is demonstrably true. The state has to prove its monopoly by actually using force to punish. And the force must be based on laws, no matter how unequal, to justify that use of force.

The state demonstrates its monopoly by punishing a carefully selected few, those defined as “Other”—as not real or rightful members of the polity and therefore inferior—by the majority of citizens. Selecting Others ensures that the punishing does not cause the majority to question the legitimacy of elite rule. Making this selection may well require another aspect of sovereignty, the ability to declare a de facto or de jure exception, thus getting people to accept that the standard rules, including those of human decency and state protection, don’t apply to these Others.¹⁷

Well-managed punishment produces a display of the state’s power over life and death—currently in the relentless grinding of the wheels of the legal system, but in the earlier stages of state formation through the public administration of intense pain: whippings, amputations, and sometimes the dismemberment and annihilation of offending bodies. The fate of a few Scottish Jacobite rebels—a fate Alexander I avoided, though he was probably one of those rebels—makes this clear. They were drawn and quartered: first hung by the neck, cut down while still alive, their innards ripped from their living bodies, and then literally pulled apart by horses tied to their four limbs. The shrieks of one victim, Archibald Burnet, could be heard a mile away.¹⁸ It would be hard to misunderstand the warning being delivered. The Powhatan likewise provided spectacular, lengthy, and agonizing deaths, but, unlike English executions, those deaths were considered to be an honor for worthy enemy captives. Ordinary Powhatan criminals were merely beaten to death with cudgels on a sacrificial rock altar.¹⁹

Foucault, in Discipline and Punish, begins with an unforgettable description of punishment by drawing and quartering in France.²⁰ Like the English punishment of Archibald Burnet, it was performed by a state in which the power to carry out such a killing was monopolized by the king. With the development of a modern state, however, spectacular punishments waned, and a “different physics of power” emerged,²¹ in which punishment had to appear to be a result of laws that reflected nature—the natural consequence of crime, rather than merely a king’s prerogative.²² Discipline, not painful punishment, was meant to create productive subjects who, though bowing to sovereign power, remained unable to recognize their own subservience.

Foucault takes the sovereignty that is built on the power to punish as his starting point. However, there is a prehistory to that starting point. Polities moving in directions that eventually lead to what we call states fight long and hard to gain the power to punish, wresting it out of the hands of local people. As a ruling elite becomes stronger, it more and more effectively prevents less powerful individuals or groups from defining and punishing transgressions. Thus gaining a monopoly on punishment is integral to state-making and is required if states are to exist at all. As a polity concentrates punishment in fewer and fewer hands it becomes more state-like, enabling a feedback loop in which greater punishing power allows greater dispossession and a greater concentration of wealth—those hallmarks of a state. In this process Davidsons and Radfords gradually lost their rights to punish as the US state became stronger, preventing any but state-authorized agents from punishing. Sovereignty thus rests at base in the control of punishment. The tales in this book will follow that development.

Throughout this history, other nations surrounded Radfords and Davidsons, all claiming their rights as unconquered, though diminished, autonomous sovereign polities. We can presume the Davidsons were aware of Cherokee and Shawnee struggles to create or maintain sovereignty, just as early Radfords must have been aware of Powhatan and other East Coast nations’ claims to sovereign status. Native Americans, in signing treaties at various times with the US, British, French, and Spanish governments, reserved to themselves territory they continued to claim and certain rights concerning the use of force within those borders. At least in the early days of Radford history, both parties conceived of those treaties as agreements between equal sovereign entities. But by the time Alexander Davidson arrived in Virginia, the conception of Native American polities as equal to colonial entities had disappeared on the East Coast, although it was still relevant west of the Appalachians. The Shawnee leader Tecumseh envisioned another sovereign Native polity north of Kentucky, in the Old Northwest, a vision he came surprisingly close to realizing. I say “surprisingly” because our present understanding of history generally leads us to see such efforts as doomed from their inception because they weren’t on what we see as the inevitable trajectory that led to the United States in its present form. But, had Tecumseh succeeded, that Native polity would have been a sovereign state, controlling the use of force within its own borders; it would have had the right to punish those within its borders as it saw fit; and it would have exercised the right to regulate and defend its own borders in relation to other states.²³

THE FOUNDATION OF A STATE’S sovereignty is its monopoly on the use of force internally to control the population and externally to maintain borders. That control depends on the power of a governing elite, a power it could not acquire without dispossession, and punishment is what allows dispossession to exist, with the wealth of the few built on the labor of the many. And that wealth, in turn, feeds the power to use force.

While some who do the work of wealth-making lead reasonably comfortable lives, those who do the hardest and arguably the most productive and important work lead lives of struggle and suffering. This was true of the enslaved, and it is still true. Without the use of force and punishment, it is hard to imagine how the seriously dispossessed, leading lives of deprivation, loss, and exhaustion, could be kept from revolting. Davidsons and Radfords, from Jamestown to Kentucky, were directly involved in the US history of state-making, in the inequality that entailed, and in the capitalism that both depended on and enabled it. Capitalism depends on acquiring labor and resources through dispossession—through the literal taking of people and land to prime the pump of capitalist accumulation. Rosa Luxemburg said long ago that capitalism always requires something from outside capitalism.²⁴ That “something extra from outside” sets off the chain of accumulation. You will see it frequently in these tales. It involves using people and land or other resources that have not come by way of capitalist social relations. This use is not legitimized by paying wages or by purchase; it is the stealing of people, coerced labor, the theft of land, conquest to gain control of critical resources. Acquiring them requires force, chicanery, or dispossession, or all three, and the whole process is enabled by a state that ideologically legitimizes such behavior, that when necessary employs military might, and that provides the necessary policing and punishing needed to maintain it. This is as true today as it was in the days of the slave trade and the colonial plundering of Native American lives and resources.

To talk about dispossession and punishment, about who has the power to punish whom, and how gaining exclusive right to determine punishing is the mark of a sovereign state, I use stories of the intertwining lives of my paternal ancestors, Davidsons and Radfords, with the peoples they encountered, owned, and fought, African and Native American, Scottish and English. All in these tales were caught up in the struggles to establish and maintain sovereignty over a wider and wider area and over more and more people, more and more of whom were dispossessed. That struggle, which eventually led to the formation of the United States, has left its mark on the country today and shapes continuing efforts to mark and legitimize sovereignty. In a world the Native people came to say had been “turned upside down” there was nothing inevitable about the outcome—either then or now.²⁵