The War on Words: Slavery, Race, and Free Speech in American Literature
340
The War on Words: Slavery, Race, and Free Speech in American Literature
340Paperback
-
PICK UP IN STORECheck Availability at Nearby Stores
Available within 2 business hours
Related collections and offers
Overview
Proposing a radical new interpretation of nineteenth-century American literature, The War on Words examines struggles over permissible and impermissible utterance in works ranging from Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience” to Henry James’s The Bostonians. Combining historical knowledge with groundbreaking readings of some of the classic texts of the American past, The War on Words places Lincoln’s Cooper Union address in the same constellation as Margaret Fuller’s feminism and Thomas Dixon’s defense of lynching. Arguing that slavery and race exerted coercive pressure on freedom of expression, Gilmore offers here a transformative study that alters our understanding of nineteenth-century literary culture and its fraught engagement with the right to speak.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780226101699 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Chicago Press |
| Publication date: | 12/06/2013 |
| Pages: | 340 |
| Product dimensions: | 7.70(w) x 11.50(h) x 1.20(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
THE WAR ON WORDS
Slavery, Race, and Free Speech in American LiteratureBy MICHAEL T. GILMORE
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
Copyright © 2010 The University of ChicagoAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-226-29413-1
Chapter One
PART I Slavery, Race, and Free Speech
Slavery
Our point of entry is an incident that has no visible connection to the cultural ferment of the antebellum period, a flowering famously designated the "American Renaissance" in 1941 by the literary critic F. O. Matthiessen. Considered as a group, Matthiessen's subjects entered the literary lists in 1836, with Emerson's Nature, and they achieved their apogee in the 1850s, a decade launched by The Scarlet Letter and Moby Dick and more or less capped at the middle with Walden and Leaves of Grass. The literary marvel had pretty much spent itself by the end of the decade, and the date with which we begin is 1860, almost a boundary line between our two eras. The principal actors are not writers. They are the politicians Abraham Lincoln and Stephen A. Douglas, and the stage is not a lyceum or a pond or even a customhouse, though it does encompass the same Manhattan of which Melville mused and Whitman sang. The scene opens on the campaign trail, at New York's Cooper Institute, and then shifts to the floor of the United States Senate and to a proposal offered by Douglas to quash unfettered speech. This obscure piece of legislation, menacing fiction and poetry as surely as it aimed a dagger at democratic discourse, reveals how the antebellum struggles over slavery helped to shape the romantic imagination. Years of attacks on free inquiry created an atmosphere of intimidation that affected every literary work produced in the United States between the 1830s and the Civil War.
Lincoln had journeyed to the East to expound his position on slavery before the New York intelligentsia; his goal was to establish himself as a leader of the Republican Party and a dark-horse candidate for the presidential nomination. His audience, numbering fifteen hundred, included such opinion makers as Horace Greeley, Henry Ward Beecher, and William Cullen Bryant. Lincoln went into great historical detail to show that the Founders had regarded slavery as an evil and, while reluctantly accepting its existence in the southern states, had opposed its extension into the territories. He did not directly revive his charge, from the "House Divided" speech, of a high-level conspiracy to spread the "peculiar institution" throughout the republic. But neither did he mince words about the Slave Power's aggression, and he called upon his listeners to resist pressure "to unsay what Washington said, and undo what Washington did."
The rhetorical flourish was rooted in Lincoln's belief that nothing less than recantation would propitiate the South. It will not be enough, he asserted, to yield to them on the territories. It will not even suffice to desist from belaboring the slavery issue and simply leave them alone. For the South to be satisfied, Lincoln argued, we must
cease to call slavery wrong, and join them in calling it right. And this must be done thoroughly—done in acts as well as in words. Silence will not be tolerated—we must place ourselves avowedly with them. Senator Douglas's new sedition law must be enacted and enforced, suppressing all declarations that slavery is wrong, whether made in politics, in presses, in pulpits, or in private. We must arrest and return their fugitive slaves with greedy pleasure. We must pull down our Free State constitutions. The whole atmosphere must be disinfected from all taint of opposition to slavery, before they will cease to believe that all their troubles proceed from us.
On ten further occasions, as he traveled throughout New England delivering versions of his speech, Lincoln repeated this attack on Douglas. Notice his language: the senator from Illinois would ban all declarations that slavery is wrong. The subliminal allusion to the founding document of American liberty, almost certainly intended, resonated with the widespread northern fear that the "lords of the lash" would not rest until they had repealed the Declaration of Independence.
Lincoln's suspicions of a Slave Power conspiracy against civil liberties have generally not fared well with historians. Scholars have dismissed, even ridiculed, the idea of a concerted plot to overthrow the rights guaranteed in the First Amendment to the Constitution. But that is too literal a way of thinking about the matter. No one denies that Southerners had political differences among themselves, or seriously charges that a coterie of slave owners, headed by, say, John C. Calhoun, sat in a smoke-filled room and hatched a scheme to dominate the North. But what did exist in pre–Civil War America was a widespread resolve to muzzle opposition to slavery by arresting the free flow of information. Southerners initiated that repressive drive, but they would not have achieved the success they did without allies from the free states like Stephen Douglas.
There has been surprisingly little discussion of Douglas's extraordinary sedition law. In 1860 the Illinois senator was the most formidable politician in the United States. Later that year, as the candidate of the northern Democrats, he received the second highest number of popular votes for the presidency and lost the election, not because he defied southern extremism, but rather because he did not go far enough to satisfy it. (Southern Democrats, irked by Douglas's refusal to back a blanket slave code for the territories, ran their own candidate, John C. Breckinridge.) Yet only a handful of sources mention the Senate resolution, and perhaps the fullest treatment still remains that of Henry Wilson, a Republican senator from Massachusetts whose History of the Rise and Fall of the Slave Power in America, a massive three-volume work consisting of more than two thousand pages, was published in 1874. Wilson was present in the Senate at the time of the proposed law, and he had not forgotten its trampling on democratic freedoms.
The impetus for Douglas's bill was the recent raid on Harpers Ferry. John Brown's plot, though it failed to ignite a slave insurrection, had crystallized southern grievances at antislavery agitation in general and at the Republican Party in particular. For all their anti-intellectualism, slaveholders had never deluded themselves about the fecklessness of words. They may have mocked northern "isms," but they recognized their potency, and they knew that unless they silenced unfriendly speech, that airy nothing would depose their way of life. Although Douglas did not always see eye to eye with the South, his Senate measure, titled the "Invasion of States" resolution, fully endorsed the region's outrage against linguistic malfeasance. As he laid out his indictment, the "Little Giant" drew an equation between the murderous violence of Brown and his followers and the verbal pillorying of chattel bondage. Condemnation of the South's property and institutions incited criminal behavior and was as guilty as action itself. Douglas did not flinch from identifying those responsible for this lethal and seditious discourse:
I have no hesitation in stating my firm and deliberate conviction that the Harper's Ferry crime was the natural, logical, inevitable result of the doctrines and the teachings of the Republican party, as explained and enforced in their platform, their partisan presses, their pamphlets and books, and especially in the speeches of their leaders in and out of Congress.
This accusation was greeted by "Applause in the galleries." The Illinois senator proceeded to name Lincoln and William Seward of New York as the principal rhetorical conspirators he had in mind, Lincoln for his statement in the "House Divided" speech that the Union could not endure half slave and half free, and Seward for his "Irrepressible Conflict" speech asserting that the two sectional labor systems could not peacefully coexist.
Nor did Douglas stop there. Having singled out two leading political adversaries as dangers to the country, he went on to enunciate a fit penalty for all verbal wrongdoers whose object was "to alarm the people of the other section, and drive them to madness." As Lincoln was to warn at Cooper Institute, it would not be sufficient under Douglas's plan simply to disavow acts of lawlessness like Brown's. Antislavery agitators must "also repudiate and denounce the doctrines and teachings which produced the act." They must cease speaking words and thinking thoughts that would "molest" the domestic institutions of the southern states. Should they persist in their intemperate recriminations, Douglas would treat them as felons guilty of undermining the public safety: "I will open the prison doors to allow conspirators against the peace of the Republic and the domestic tranquility of our States to select their cells wherein to drag out a miserable life as a punishment for their crimes against the peace of society." Everyone in the United States Senate knew that Lincoln and especially Seward stood high on the list of possible Republican candidates for president. The senator from Illinois, likely candidate of the Democrats, was proposing that his rivals be jailed for holding and voicing opinions contrary to his own.
Douglas scoffed at the charge, leveled by some of his fellow law makers, that the South's aggressiveness toward northern freedoms was fueling the Republican onslaught. A man proud of his evenhandedness, as critical of the proslavery Missourians who had swarmed into Kansas in 1855 as of the New England backers of Brown, Douglas acknowledged that Southerners had committed trespasses too. But he had no doubts about assigning the lion's share of the blame for worsening conditions to the antislavery movement, or, as he put it, to the "revolutionary and treasonable" opinions circulated by "the Abolition or Republican party." It was this partisan outpouring, this avalanche of books, tracts, newspapers, and public oratory, which had provoked "the South to assail and abuse and traduce the North." Acts of retaliation by slaveholders being "essential to the Republican cause," the party's spokesmen routinely ratcheted up their rhetoric until they secured the violent reaction they desired and could justify themselves "upon the plea of self-defense." Republican language, then, bore a double responsibility. It instigated not only the Harpers Ferry raid, but also the assaults on northern rights of which Republicans were constantly complaining. The North, if it were serious about protecting basic liberties, simply had to agree to cease criticizing slavery.
As Lincoln would later say about a related argument, "That is cool." In fact the logic was typical of slaveholders: since all the country's ills stemmed from agitation or utterance, the only way to restore harmony between the sections was to extinguish the verbal irritant. Put the Republican leadership behind bars, Douglas waxed to a peroration, and you halt the torrent of insults aimed at the South and "strike terror into the hearts" of other troublemakers. "Then we shall get to the root of the evil." Douglas's deployment of this antidemocratic reasoning prompted an immediate response on the Senate floor. Two Republican legislators rose to answer in ways intended to underline the difference between antislavery rhetoric and a more primitive use of language to bully and intimidate—words as an instrument or adjunct of physical force.
The two senators, William P. Fessenden of Maine and Wilson of Massachusetts, anticipated Lincoln's similar if more vivid retort at Cooper Institute. Fessenden spoke first and challenged Douglas to take a stand against the real agents of linguistic transgression—not those who voiced their dislike of slavery without offering violence, but those who repeatedly vowed to dissolve the Union unless the majority did their bidding. This refrain, thundered by southern fire-eaters since the 1830s, had become an "electioneering trick" trundled out every four years to browbeat critics into renouncing their rights. The tactic, said Fessenden, was nothing less than an attempt to enslave the North. If citizens couldn't cast their ballots without threats of retaliation, without fearing that, if they voted their consciences, their political opponents would dismantle the country, they were no longer free men but groaned under "heavier bonds ... than ever were placed on an African." Wilson, two days later, added his own protest against warnings of disunion. These "disloyal and revolutionary threats" were not political dialogue in any meaningful sense of the term. Their sole purpose was "to intimidate the people."
Lincoln, addressing the New York gathering a month later, took the Republican critique of slaveholder speech to its end point. He followed up the debates in the Senate by suggesting that the southern threat to secede moved out of the category of discourse and into that of lawless and violent behavior. It was not linguistic persuasion; rather, it amounted to armed coercion. And blaming antislavery oratory for the crime merely compounded the culpability of the perpetrator. "In that supposed event" of a Republican being elected in November, Lincoln declared to the South, in a passage I have already cited, "you say, you will destroy the Union; and then, you say, the great crime of having destroyed it will be upon us! That is cool. A highwayman holds a pistol to my ear, and mutters through his teeth, 'Stand and deliver, or I shall kill you, and then you will be a murderer!'" There is no difference in "principle," Lincoln continued, between "the threat of death to me, to extort my money, and the threat of destruction to the Union, to extort my vote." The threat was not worthy of a democratic polity, and neither the South's bluster of intimidation, nor the comparable tyrannizing represented by Douglas's proposed sedition law, would succeed in stifling discussion. The man whose surprise elevation to the White House would ignite a civil war concluded by exhorting his listeners: we Republicans must not be frightened from our duty by "menaces of destruction to the Government nor of dungeons to ourselves."
The "Invasion of States" resolution was tabled a week after its introduction and never came to a vote. Many reasons contributed to the decision to let it die. Southern legislators rightly regarded Douglas's bill as a belated sop to win their support for his presidential bid, and in 1860 they were in no mood to forgive him for past failures to embrace their positions. No doubt, too, after days of Republican rebuttal, slaveholders saw the potential danger to themselves in the measure, which, in banning seditious speech, could easily have been turned against their own cries of disunion. But the proposed law's burial in the Senate does not palliate its undemocratic content and should not deflect us from appreciating its political—and, yes, literary—significance.
Had it passed, the resolution would have culminated the slave interest's long battle to impose intellectual conformity on the Republic, a campaign that, refusing to accept the verdict of the ballot box, reached its climax with the bombardment of Ft. Sumter in 1861. Although the assault on free speech specifically targeted abolitionist protest, it had, and it was meant to have, a chilling effect on all discourse. The chain of events stretching from physical attacks on editors and printers in the 1830s to Douglas's bill outlawing Republican rhetoric constituted a history of coercion against the literary as well as the political imagination, a sustained attempt to throttle the openness necessary, not simply for people to debate politics, but for them to think and write as free individuals. Suppression weighed on everyone who earned a living from language, and its influence can be discerned as readily in works that scarcely glance at the subject of slavery as in those that take the peculiar institution as their polemical and thematic centerpiece.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from THE WAR ON WORDS by MICHAEL T. GILMORE Copyright © 2010 by The University of Chicago. Excerpted by permission of THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
AcknowledgmentsIntroduction
Part I: Slavery, Race, and Free Speech
Part II: Antebellum
Emerson: Prospects
Thoreau: Words as Deeds
Fuller: History, Biography, and Criticism
Hawthorne and the Resilience of Dissent
Stowe: From the Sacramental to the Old Testamental
Part III: Antebellum/Postbellum
Speech and Silence in Douglass
Whitman: From Sayer-Doer to Sayer-Copyist
Slit Throats in Melville
"Speak, man!": Billy Budd in the Crucible of Reconstruction
Intertext: "Bartleby, the Scrivener"
Part IV: Postbellum
Tourgée: Margin and Center (with an Addendum on Jackson and the Indian Question)
James and the Monotone of Reunion
Was Twain Black?
Crane and the Tyranny of Twelve
Choking in Chesnutt
Dixon and the Rebirth of Discursive Power
Timeline
Notes
Index