Affect and Abolition in the Anglo-Atlantic, 1770–1830

Stephen Ahern, Stephen Ahern

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781351960465
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism for Comparative Literature
• Index: Literature

At the turn of the nineteenth century, writers arguing for the abolition of the slave trade and the emancipation of those in bondage used the language of sentiment and the political ideals of the Enlightenment to make their case. This collection investigates the rhetorical features and political complexities of the culture of sentimentality as it grappled with the material realities of transatlantic slavery. Are the politics of sentimental representation progressive or conservative? What dynamics are in play at the site of suffering? What is the relationship of the spectator to the spectacle of the body in pain? The contributors take up these and related questions in essays that examine poetry, plays, petitions, treatises and life-writing that engaged with contemporary debates about abolition.

Part 1
Sympathy’s Empire

Chapter 1
Capitalism and Slavery, Once Again With Feeling

George Boulukos

Three recent developments in historical and literary scholarship challenge longstanding consensus interpretations of the affective history of the British abolition movement. From Thomas Clarkson’s 1808 history of abolition to Lynn Hunt’s Inventing Human Rights, the point has been insistently repeated: from 1619 until (roughly) 1772, Britons ignored colonial slavery. But then something changed: around the time of the Somerset decision, Britons suddenly began to empathize strongly with the suffering of African slaves, and the feeling grew to such an extent that by 1787, they felt called to action.¹ This outpouring of empathy took political form as the abolition movement, and slavery was no longer a matter of course, but instead the subject of heated debate and of an unprecedented outpouring of public feeling. This position, however, is strongly challenged by recent scholarly developments. The first is Christopher Brown’s recognition in Moral Capital that slavery was never simply taken for granted or viewed as morally acceptable in the British eighteenth century, but was always seen as at best distasteful;² the change was not in feelings about, or awareness of, slavery, but in the sense of the practicality of antislavery action. The second is the contention by literary scholars—including Lynn Festa, Brycchan Carey, and myself—that sentimental depictions of slavery were not exclusively, or even primarily, abolitionist in intention, but were in fact often used to support slavery, negating the easy equivalence between sentiment and abolition.³ Taken together, clearly, these points undermine the long-held belief in the sudden emergence of abolition as a sea-change in the understanding of slaves and slavery through the sudden irruption of new, and yet widely held, sentimental, humanitarian sympathy with slaves.⁴ In this essay, I want to carefully think through the implications of disarticulating abolition and sentimentalism, most particularly the implications for the relation of abolition to a key third term: capitalism.

The association of abolition, sentimentalism, and capitalist—or “middle-class”—ideology in twentieth-century scholarship emerges from the combined influence of three early twentieth-century studies, none of which would initially seem to have much in common: Reginald Coupland’s British Anti-Slavery Movement (1933),⁵ Eric William’s Capitalism and Slavery (1944),⁶ and Wylie Sypher’s Guinea’s Captive Kings (1942).⁷ This association became enshrined as later scholars took it for granted; the most influential works to do so being Winthrop Jordan in White over Black and David Brion Davis in his Problem of Slavery books.⁸ The association was brought back to the fore in slavery studies in the 1980s with Thomas Haskell’s articles on “Capitalism and the Origins of Humanitarian Sensibility” and the response to them, as documented in The Anti-Slavery Debate edited by Thomas Bender.⁹ The elements of the consensus view would seem inherently contradictory. From Coupland (via Clarkson and Klingberg) comes the idea of abolition caused by a rising humanitarian tide of feeling;¹⁰ from Sypher comes the idea of abolitionist writing as sentimental and therefore false and propagandistic; and from Williams comes the association of abolition with capitalism and its values. The work of all three men has been supplanted; each is considered important and influential but clearly dated. And yet, I claim, the consensus view of abolition as caused by the emergence of a bourgeois, sentimental culture, amounting to a strange synthesis of these three views, remains in place.¹¹

Despite the centrality of sentiment to studies of abolition, it has long been viewed in ambiguous terms. At the time Eric Williams researched and wrote his epochal, still-debated work Capitalism and Slavery, putting forward the “Williams thesis” that slavery’s end in the British Empire was caused more by economic factors than by a heroic humanitarian movement, he was aiming to undermine the whiggish view of abolition as yet another example of Britain’s steady progress toward liberty and modernity, a consensus embodied in Coupland’s book, and particularly to challenge Coupland’s “sentimental” view of abolitionism. While Williams wrote, several literary researchers were examining slavery and abolition in English language literature. Such researchers—including Robert B. Heilman, and most prominently, Sypher—took for granted aspects of the whiggish view.¹² Heilman, for example, refers to “humanitarianism as the alma mater of emancipation”;¹³ Sypher, in his influential work Guinea’s Captive Kings—which remained the sole volume devoted to the study of slavery in seventeenth- and eighteenth- century British literature until the 1990s—agrees with the causal linking of the emergence of sentimentalism and of abolition. The difference for Sypher is that he views sentimental, and hence abolitionist, representations of slavery not in a whiggish spirit, not as documents of the British love of liberty, but as embarrassing, excessive, mawkish. Although their motives for opposing the view of British sentimentalism as a key to abolition were radically opposed, Sypher and Williams strongly agreed that sentimentality was embarrassing. Williams uses “sentimentality” as an insult, dismissing Coupland as representing “the sentimental conception of history,” while charging Coupland and others like him with having “sacrificed scholarship to sentimentality.”¹⁴

Eighteenth-century literary sentimentality represented a problem for scholars in English departments; it was not a subject worthy of serious academic study, and any work labeled sentimental suffered from disqualifying failure of seriousness. The prime directive of English departments at this moment was to assess the value of past literary works, to assemble, and confirm, a canon of literary authors and texts truly worthy of study. Studying sentimental literature could be justified by scholars with bibliographic or historical themes to consider, but they had to make clear that they understood the shortcomings of their subject matter, and to redefine sentimentalism in more substantive terms—particularly through “humanitarianism.”¹⁵ Not opting for this strategy, Sypher found sentimental representations of slaves and slavery objectionable in two overlapping ways. Firstly, sentimental depictions of slavery were mere “propaganda” for abolition rather than genuine literature. Secondly, these representations were, to Sypher, simply unrealistic. In his interpretation, such representations did not appeal to audiences through revelatory depictions of the actual abuses of slavery. Instead, they joined in the Enlightenment fantasy of the “noble savage” and depicted enslaved Africans as unreal paragons of nobility and morality. Sypher’s discomfort with the “noble negro” stems largely from his discomfort with its refusal to acknowledge the vast cultural and racial differences between Africans and Britons in the eighteenth century. To put it more baldly: racial difference, for Sypher, is a key reality that abolitionist propaganda denies: the “noble negro” is a trope “used by anti-slavery writers to convince their readers that the negro is not really negroid.”¹⁶

In his review of Sypher’s book, Eric Williams is surprisingly sympathetic, both with the view of sentimental literature as mere propaganda, and with Sypher’s efforts to contain the works he analyzes within the disciplinary boundaries of canonicity. Williams sees the problematic implications of Sypher’s account of the unrealistic “noble negro” charitably, offering an antislavery reinterpretation of his own: the trope is disturbing because it “too often carries the vicious implication that the slavery of the ignoble Negro is deserved.”¹⁷ His harshest criticism is that Sypher takes for granted the work of the sentimental—and in Williams’s account unscientific—historians of abolition: “Sypher quotes as ‘of particular value’ the works of Coupland and Klingberg, who never consulted a single original document.”¹⁸

Returning to the same texts and issues in the 1960s, Winthrop Jordan, in his immensely influential book White over Black, returns to the scornful view of sentimentalism as producing distastefully sentimental propaganda, despite linking it to “humanitarianism.” Jordan sees sentimentalism as ineffectual due to its falsity, despite its centrality to abolition: “In the long run, this shift to extravagant sentimentality tended to vitiate anti-slavery as a program of action”; indeed, ultimately “as for the Negro’s future, the contribution of sentimental antislavery literature was to cloud it with tears.”¹⁹ Jordan seems to share with Sypher a sense that the lack of realism in sentimental writing about slavery undermines its usefulness: “Africa was thus transformed into the despoiled sylvan idyl of aggrieved and tear-stained humanity” (370). Sentimentality here is not simply equated to “humanitarianism,” but instead represents the most extreme and explicit demand for empathy. Jordan does offer a larger critique of the “humanitarian” response to slavery—the attack on brutality to demand reform and amelioration—and his response allows for a greater complexity than the simple equation of sentimentality and abolition by allowing for unintended consequences: “The supreme irony in this happy development was that with slavery humanitarian victories over brutality left the real enemy more entrenched than ever. As slavery became less brutal there was less reason that it should be abolished” (368). Jordan denies the possibility of ameliorationism, of reform-minded criticism of slavery that was not in fact abolitionist or emancipationist in intention. Seeming to lead in the direction of recent arguments that sentimentalism was not inherently abolitionist, Jordan instead implies that there are only two possible positions on slavery: proslavery and abolitionism.

Equally influential with Jordan on literary studies of slavery has been the work of David Brion Davis. Davis is not at all scornful of sentimentalism. In fact, seemingly addressing Sypher in particular, Davis argues that sentimental literature is the key ingredient that shifts feelings for slaves, convinces Britons to stop taking slavery for granted, and thereby launches the abolition movement:

The great question, then, was whether the literary imagination could build a bridge of sympathy and understanding across the enormous gulf that divided primitive and civilized cultures. And if modern taste finds the Negroes of eighteenth-century literature ridiculously contrived and their speech loaded with fustian or obsequiousness, this is really beside the point. Europeans could conceptualize the meaning of enslavement only in the familiar terms that increasingly aroused a sensitive response from the middle class: the separation of young lovers; the heartless betrayal of an innocent girl; the unjust punishment of a faithful servant.²⁰

The change, notably, is not from obliviousness about slavery, but from an insensitivity to the suffering of slaves born of an instrumental view of them paired with a sense of vast cultural (although not necessarily racial) difference. Defoe’s Colonel Jack is Davis’s single example of the instrumental attitude. Although Defoe’s character “realizes that Negroes are human beings,” nonetheless his treatment of them shows that “when the Negro was categorized simply as a black, a heathen, or a savage, he could be no more than an impersonal object that men manipulated for certain purposes” (473). The decision to use Colonel Jack as an example of the instrumental attitude that was eventually undone by sentimental representations such as Oroonoko and “Inkle & Yarico” raises some problems from the perspective of literary scholarship.²¹ Why do the earlier texts represent the more modern, progressive attitude? Furthermore, how can Defoe’s text be treated as an isolated anomaly, when it in fact creates a paradigm—the grateful slave—for representing plantation slavery that becomes pervasive later in the century? In his volume on the height of the abolition movement, The Problem of Slavery in the Age of Revolution, Davis is more explicitly committed to reading abolition in class terms, and hence linking abolition and sentiment as “bourgeois” phenomena; he works to recuperate the Williams thesis by making it a matter of ideology rather than of direct economic effects. Abolition for Davis is linked to capitalism not so much by the rising or falling profits of the sugar islands, but through the bourgeois ideology of individualism and free labor.

The model of an irruption of humanitarian feeling for slaves has two primary variants. One, the one Davis offers, suggests that the attitude to slavery before the rise of widespread abolitionist feeling is one of knowing indifference. Britons know of colonial slavery, but they accept it because they do not or cannot conceive of Africans as sympathetic fellow human beings. Thus, they are content to allow colonial slaves to be treated in a harsh and instrumental fashion. The second model is introduced by Clarkson in his history, and has recent adherents including Ian Baucom and Srividhya Swaminathan. This is the ignorance model: Clarkson himself claims to have come to an awareness only in the process of composing his prize essay. He finds the revelations of his own essay unbelievable, despite having written it himself, and only comes to a total conviction of its truth in a roadside revelation, clearly meant to invoke Paul’s Road to Damascus conversion:

I frequently tried to persuade myself in these intervals that the contents of my Essay could not be true. The more however I reflected upon them, or rather upon the authorities on which they were founded, the more I gave them credit…. I sat down disconsolate on the turf by the roadside and held my horse. Here a thought came into my mind, that if the contents of the Essay were true, it was time some person should see these calamities to their end. Agitated in this manner I reached home.²²

Clarkson implies that only ignorance of the horrible truth allows good, Christian Britons to leave colonial slavery unchallenged.²³

Clarkson uses his own stages of awareness, verification, and conversion to action as a model for many of the other key figures such as William Wilberforce. He gives one particularly striking account: “One, however, whom I visited, Mr. Powys (the late Lord Lilford), with whom I had been before acquainted in Northamptonshire, seemed to doubt some of the facts in my book, from a belief that human nature was not capable of proceeding to such a pitch of wickedness.” Settling on the Zong case as the key p...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: The Bonds of Sentiment
• Part 1 Sympathy’s Empire
• Part 2 Nation, Narration, Emancipation
• Part 3 Spectacles of Suffering
• Part 4 Sentimental Bondage
• Selected Bibliography
• Index