Slavery and Silence: Latin America and the U.S. Slave Debate

by Paul D. Naish

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780812294309
Publisher:	University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.
Publication date:	06/30/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	304
File size:	7 MB

About the Author

Paul D. Naish (1960-2016) taught reading and writing, social science, and liberal arts courses at Guttman Community College of the City University of New York.

Read an Excerpt

Preface. Creatures of Silence

The early twenty-first century has been marked by a series of crimes and tragedies revealing, to the apparent surprise of many Americans, the longevity and pervasiveness of racism in the United States. Despite the fiftieth anniversary of important landmarks of civil rights legislation and the election of the nation's first African American president, a "postracial" future has not arrived. The bluntly discriminatory administration of justice reveals that the day-to-day lived experience of many nonwhite Americans differs significantly from that of whites. These sadly repeated discoveries of crude discrimination inspire equally regular calls for a "national conversation on race."

Considering how much the subject of race is openly debated at the beginning of the twenty-first century, it seems surprising that the need for further discussion is consistently invoked. But in the United States, race, for all its notoriety, is usually talked about in intimate contexts among people expected to hold roughly the same opinion. It is too loaded a topic to explore with strangers. Although it is a subject that affects the entire nation, there is nothing "national" about the conversation about race. In a society still much more segregated than we like to admit, it is difficult to talk freely, and frankly, about race.

In the thirty-five years before the Civil War, it was comparatively easy, for white people at least, to talk about race, to broadcast what today seems blindingly hateful and woefully ignorant and to present it as scientific fact. "At least 3/5ths of the northerners now believe the blacks are an inferior race," estimated abolitionist Theodore Dwight Weld in 1836. Not all white people declared blacks were less than human, but most believed they were decidedly less than whites. Even if people of African descent were free, declared Supreme Court Justice Roger Taney in the Dred Scott decision, they could never be citizens, and "the special rights and immunities guarantied to citizens do not apply to them."

But slavery was harder to discuss. As Ralph Waldo Emerson said, "[Slavery] does not love the newspaper, the mailbag, a college, a book, or a preacher who has the absurd whim of saying what he thinks." 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. To condemn it was to insult people who might be related by ties of blood or friendship or business, to threaten the very economy and political stability of the nation. The effects of the suppression of open discussion concerned thoughtful Americans: "Sooner or later [slavery] must be discussed," wrote abolitionist Amos Phelps in 1834. "Silence will never mend the matter. The very evil, that threatens us with such ruin, is in itself the creature of silence."

There were certainly partisans who chose sides in the debate, and more and more people identified themselves as opponents or supporters of slavery as the Civil War approached. But there were many, many others who hesitated to express what they thought for fear of unpleasant or even dire consequences. And the partisans increasingly found themselves cornered—publicly championing one side in the debate over slavery, but privately doubtful and unable to ignore weaknesses in their position.

How these people talked about what they hesitated to say—how they had a national conversation about slavery by talking about nations other than the United States—is the subject of this book.

Table of Contents

Preface. Creatures of Silence

Introduction. Surrounded by Mirrors
Chapter 1. Never So Drunk with New-Born Liberty
Chapter 2. "Our" Aborigines
Chapter 3. The Problem of Slavery
Chapter 4. Conquest and Reconquest
Chapter 5. An Even More Peculiar Institution
Epilogue. 1861 and After

Notes
Index
Acknowledgments

Editorial Reviews

★ 06/12/2017
In this innovative study of antebellum America, Naish (1960–2016), a historian at CUNY’s Guttman Community College, adopts a transnational approach by focusing on the ways in which people engaged in a “national conversation about slavery by talking about nations other than the United States.” Aside from those who were unreservedly committed to anti- or proslavery causes, Americans were reluctant to engage in unequivocal statements on the subject, finding “ways to talk about U.S. slavery without seeming to do so” through comments on its presence in Cuba, Brazil, Haiti, and Jamaica. Few Americans had firsthand experience of Latin America, but many ordinary people drew on what they understood of these societies’ histories and cultures in order to make coded arguments in support of or in opposition to U.S. slavery. Adroitly analyzing obscure 19th-century novels and interpreting the varied and often contradictory ideas that Americans of the era held about their southern neighbors, Naish makes two important contributions: he locates U.S. slavery in a hemispheric context and he illuminates the oft-overlooked fact that the practice was a taboo subject to all but its most fervent advocates and opponents. Naish died before completing the manuscript (brought to publication by his friend Evan Friss), but this thought-provoking work is testimony to his scholarly gifts. (Sept.)

Publishers Weekly

"Naish is a superb writer, communicating complex ideas with a clear focus, and his engagement with historical texts is thorough and compelling. With all that has been written on issues of race and political identity in the first half of the nineteenth century, he has much to say that is fresh and revealing."

Louisiana State University Andrew Burstein

"By exploring how antebellum Americans imagined Latin American slavery, Naish sheds new and interdisciplinary light on how they understood slavery at home. Eloquent, surprising, and haunting, this book shows that Americans frequently turned their attention south of the border to air anxieties about human bondage, ones that seemed otherwise too dangerous to discuss."

Northwestern University Caitlin Fitz

"Slavery and Silence is an important contribution to the literature on the age of slavery and emancipation, and one whose big ideas are sure to make an impact, turning previous conceptions of the antebellum age on their head."

Brown University Matthew Guterl

"Paul D. Naish's sensitive, lively, careful study takes two subjects we might think we know all about-the politics of slavery and U.S. visions of Latin America-and shows their unappreciated relationship. Our understanding of both topics are enhanced without making the fate of slavery or of U.S.-Latin-American relations inevitable. An eloquent, important book from a scholar who will be greatly missed."

author of Slavery's Constitution: From Revolu David Waldstreicher

"Slavery and Silence is an exceptional history that rethinks American slavery within a hemispheric framework, accounting for the ways that Americans thought of themselves in relation to other people and places south of the Rio Grande. In doing so, it narrows the gap between US and Latin American historiography and demonstrates that not all historical silences are impenetrable."

The Journal of African American History

Paul D. Naish's sensitive, lively, careful study takes two subjects we might think we know all about-the politics of slavery and U.S. visions of Latin America-and shows their unappreciated relationship. Our understanding of both topics are enhanced without making the fate of slavery or of U.S.-Latin-American relations inevitable. An eloquent, important book from a scholar who will be greatly missed.

"Slavery and Silence is an exceptional history that rethinks American slavery within a hemispheric framework, accounting for the ways that Americans thought of themselves in relation to other people and places south of the Rio Grande. In doing so, it narrows the gap between US and Latin American historiography and demonstrates that not all historical silences are impenetrable."—The Journal of African American History

"Paul D. Naish's sensitive, lively, careful study takes two subjects we might think we know all about—the politics of slavery and U.S. visions of Latin America—and shows their unappreciated relationship. Our understanding of both topics are enhanced without making the fate of slavery or of U.S.-Latin-American relations inevitable. An eloquent, important book from a scholar who will be greatly missed."—David Waldstreicher, author of Slavery's Constitution: From Revolution to Ratification

"By exploring how antebellum Americans imagined Latin American slavery, Naish sheds new and interdisciplinary light on how they understood slavery at home. Eloquent, surprising, and haunting, this book shows that Americans frequently turned their attention south of the border to air anxieties about human bondage, ones that seemed otherwise too dangerous to discuss."—Caitlin Fitz, Northwestern University

"Naish is a superb writer, communicating complex ideas with a clear focus, and his engagement with historical texts is thorough and compelling. With all that has been written on issues of race and political identity in the first half of the nineteenth century, he has much to say that is fresh and revealing."—Andrew Burstein, Louisiana State University

"Slavery and Silence is an important contribution to the literature on the age of slavery and emancipation, and one whose big ideas are sure to make an impact, turning previous conceptions of the antebellum age on their head."—Matthew Guterl, Brown University

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