of representation in the national legislature based on a population of slaves was illogical. Opposed to slavery and representing the state that had passed the first gradual emancipation act in 1780, Wilson “did not well see, on what principle the admission of blacks in the proportion of three-fifths could be explained. Are they admitted as citizens—then why are they not admitted on an equality with white citizens? Are they admitted as property—then why is no other property admitted into the computation? These were difficulties, however, which he thought must be overruled by the necessity of compromise.”32 The problem for those objecting to any inclusion of slaves in the numerical rule of representation was the other republican principle shared by all the framers: that “taxation and representation ought to go together.”33 This view was directly linked to the “true principle of representation” invoked by Patterson. At least since James Otis’s famous speech declaring “taxation without representation is tyranny” (in other formulations, it was slavery), this “principle of representation” was one of the primary rallying cries of colonial opposition to the abuses of Parliament, and the American Revolution itself. Yet precisely because “eleven out of thirteen of the States had [already] agreed to consider slaves in the apportionment of taxation,” they would also have to consider slaves in the rule of representation, if the slaveholding states were to enter into this “compact.”34
Addressing this shared view of the necessary link between taxation of wealth and a corresponding representation in the national legislature, Wilson articulated most clearly both the substantive political logic and the literary “equivocation” by which the three-fifths ratio of “other persons” entered into the apportionment clause. Emphasizing, like Madison, “the necessity of compromise,” Wilson “observed, that less umbrage would…be taken against an admission of the slave into the rule of representation, if it should be so expressed as to make them indirectly only an ingredient in the rule, by saying that they should enter into the rule of taxation; and as representation was to be according to taxation, the end would be equally attained.”35 The law’s desired object and intent—counting slaves for representation—could be reached indirectly if the clause was formulated as to count slaves solely for the purpose of taxation: slaves could enter the national body politic of legislative representation indirectly through the back door of wealth taxation. Wilson’s argument thus highlights also the ways in which the “spirit” of a law, its “object and intent,” could be separated from its “letter,” that mode through which the law is “expressed.” As we will see in the debates over the Union crisis, for those citing Madison’s record of Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787 as evidence of the “original intent” of this particular “slave clause,” Wilson’s turn to indirection as a way to address antislavery objections to the “admission of slaves into the rule of representation” confirmed their view of the Constitution as a document whose wording was deliberately “equivocal and ambiguous,” not only in its avoidance of the term “slave” but also in its positive inscription of them as “other persons” in the apportionment clause. Wilson’s suggestion for how to include slaves in the apportionment clause, proposed as a matter of “compromise” and avoiding “umbrage” through indirection, reveals the central political-economic truth of the slave’s absent presence in the Constitution, and the bondsman’s role as citizenship’s vanishing mediator. As that “peculiar species of property” whose labor produced surplus value, the slave was “originally intended” to be included only for the purposes of taxation.36 In a slaveholding nation adhering to the republican “principle of representation,” however, there could be no taxation of the enslaved as wealth-producing property without the indirect, partial representation of them as “other persons.”
If this history of the legal form of the three-fifths clause highlights the centrality of bond labor to the Constitution and to its inscription of political representation, as one of the fundamental rights of modern citizenship, it also underscores the framers’ understanding of slavery as a peculiar form of labor bondage in a broader spectrum of labor exploitation. In 1776, John Adams asserted that “the difference” between poor freeman and slave “as to the state was imaginary only” when considering them as wealth-producing laborers.37 In 1787, the Constitution’s provision for the apportionment of representation and taxation regarded those who were “bound to service for a term of years” as “free persons.” And as the framers debated the precise language of the apportionment provision’s distinction between these bound-yet-free persons and enslaved “other persons,” “the word ‘servitude’ was struck out, and ‘service’ unanimously inserted, the former being thought to express the condition of slaves, and the latter the obligations of free persons.”38 The broader Atlantic cultural history of this “imaginary” legal distinction between those free laborers “bound to service” and those slave laborers described by Publius as “debased by servitude below the equal level of free inhabitants” reveals the interdependence of slavery and servitude in the racialization of freedom and modern citizenship (FP 339). In the transatlantic eighteenth-century texts I examine together in this chapter, the bondsman figures as an allegory of transformation, a transitional state of passage by which the subject attains the freedom of independent self-mastery.
Visible and Invisible Characters in Letters from an American Farmer
For Hector St. John de Crèvecœur, the question, “What then is the American, this new man?” was answered by a “man from another country,” the immigrant: “Ubi panis ibi patria is the motto of all emigrants.”39 Letters from an American Farmer is regularly invoked in nationalist histories of American literature; yet with this motto and throughout Letters, Crèvecœur focuses on the economic conditions of national affiliation, emphasizing the distinction between the “national” consciousness necessary to the imagined community of the nation on the one hand and the nationalist ideology of patriotism on the other.40Significant to this distinction is the narrative fact that Crèvecœur’s emigrant is represented first as a figure of disaffiliation, and the failures of nationalist interpellation. Describing “the poor of Europe [who] have by some means met together” in America, Crèvecœur’s Farmer James asks rhetorically:
To what purpose should they ask one another what countrymen they are? Alas, two thirds of them had no country. Can a wretch, who wanders about, who works and starves, whose life is a continual scene of sore affliction or pinching penury; can that man call England or any other kingdom his country? A country that had no bread for him; whose fields procured him no harvest; who met with nothing but the frowns of the rich, the severity of the laws, with jails and punishments; who owned not a single foot of the extensive surface of this planet[?] (Letters 42)
Thus even as he introduces the question—“What then is the American?”—that would become central to later nationalist cultural projects, Crèvecœur’s American farmer focuses on the immigrant, this “new man,” as a figure that previously “had no country.” He cannot identify with a “country that had no bread for him”: Ubi panis ibi patria.
The recurring point of this famous Letter III is that individual subjects are tied to the nation not through affective bonds of “attachment” (Letters 43) but by the Lockean political-economic bonds of private property: “The American ought therefore to love this country much better than that wherein either he or his forefathers were born. Here the rewards of his industry follow, with equal steps, the progress of his labour. His labour is founded on the basis of nature, self-interest: can it want a stronger allurement?” (Letters 44).The series of contrasts between the lives of common men in Europe and the lives of common men in America all turn on the rewards of this self-interested labor: “From involuntary idleness, servile dependence, penury, and useless labour, he has passed to toils of a very different nature, rewarded by ample subsistence.—This is an American” (Letters 45). This economic basis of the immigrant’s answer to the question of American identity continues throughout the later, famously pessimistic Letters, and indeed accounts for that very pessimism: the “Distresses of the Frontier Man” in Letter XII are initiated by the destruction of these economic
