between a pre-Revolutionary form of subjection to sovereignty and the imagined self-constituted subjectivity of U.S. citizenship.30
In Fredric Jameson’s formulation, a vanishing mediator is “a catalytic agent that permits an exchange of [historical] energies between two otherwise mutually exclusive terms”; it is a dialectical figure whose form mediates the transition between two opposed concepts and thereafter disappears.31 Jameson develops the concept of the vanishing mediator in his narrative analysis of Weber’s famous account of Protestantism’s role in the transition from the feudal mode of production to the capitalist mode of production; he proposes also that as a dialectical figure of historical transition, the vanishing mediator is likewise perceptible in Marx’s analyses of political events (for example, his analyses of the revolutions of 1789 and 1848). Its origins in narrative analysis remind us of the dual function of the vanishing mediator, which is to “combine the twin requirements of narrative irreversibility, and of figuration into agents or characters.”32 In Weber’s story of secularization, the movement called “Protestantism” is a historical character, a narrative agent that serves as a “mediation between the traditional medieval world from which it emerged and the modern secularized one that it in its turn prepared.”33 And it is a vanishing mediator in the sense that in “the final transition to the situation of modern capitalism…what happens here is essentially that once Protestantism has accomplished the task of allowing a rationalization of innerworldly life to take place, it has no further reasons for being and disappears from the historical scene.”34
As a narrative figure, the vanishing mediator need not be a historical movement, such as Protestantism; it can also be a singular character type, such as the figure of the prophet in Weber’s account of secularization and charismatic power. I have argued thus far that Douglass’s reading of the fugitive labor rendition clause, from the point of view of the “man from another country,” recognizes the labor bondage of the slave and the servant as the absent presence of the Constitution. Bonds of Citizenship proposes that this reading thus also makes visible the ways in which the category of the bondsman—the figure for both enslaved and indentured labor—functions as a vanishing mediator, making possible that category of personhood equated with full legal freedom in the new republic, the citizen.
Douglass does not make this point, but surely his “man from another country” would. This reader would notice that the fugitive labor rendition clause is the supplementary clause to the only section of the original Constitution that refers to the “privileges and immunities of citizens” of the United States. The first clause of Article IV, Section 2 reads: “The Citizens of each State shall be entitled to all Privileges and Immunities of Citizens in the several States.” Nowhere in the original Constitution is the term “citizen” defined.35National citizenship was clearly defined (over and against state citizenship) only after the Civil War, with the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment.36 Yet of all the provisions of the Constitution, Article IV, Section 2 comes closest to delimiting, if not explicitly defining, the term “citizens.”
I say delimiting because even in its narrowest interpretation, the clause recognizes the “citizen” as a figure always-already attached to certain “Privileges and Immunities,” and likewise recognizes the citizens of each state as “entitled” to the privileges and immunities of citizens of all other states.37 By entitling citizens of each state to privileges and immunities of citizens of all other states, this clause inscribes the citizen as a figure of unrestricted mobility, free to roam throughout the states of the new nation without legal disability. In explicit contrast to this new citizen’s freedom of mobility, the second clause of Article IV, Section 2 states: “A Person charged in any State with Treason, Felony, or other Crime, who shall flee from justice, and be found in another State, shall on demand of the executive Authority of the State from which he fled, be delivered up, to be removed to the State having Jurisdiction of the Crime.”38 This fugitive criminal rendition clause is the necessary supplement to the extraterritoriality of the “privileges and immunities” clause. Just as a unified national space is imagined through the extraterritoriality of the state citizen’s “privileges and immunities,” the different legal spaces of the individual states are united through this supplementary provision for the capture and rendition of the fugitive criminal. The movement of this fugitive criminal maps the intersections between the local police powers of the states and the national reach of the federal Constitution.
The fugitive labor rendition clause was proposed as the political-economic supplement to this fugitive criminal rendition clause, which, as we have seen, served to delimit the freedom of the citizen. Indeed, the fugitive labor rendition clause likens escape from labor bondage to a flight “from Justice”: in escaping from their economic bonds, fugitive slaves and servants fled the bonds of law and were, in the words of the authors of the clause, “to be delivered up like criminals.”39 Similarly, what is commonly known as the first federal “fugitive slave” act (of 1793), enacted to give force to the Constitution’s fugitive labor rendition clause, was actually entitled “An act respecting fugitives from justice, and persons escaping from the service of their masters,” and likewise linked to these different types of fugitives.40 As I discuss at greater length in the first three chapters of this study, it is through these supplementary figures—the slave and the servant—that this founding law establishes one of the central categories through which “freedom” would be imagined—and racialized—throughout nineteenth-century American law and literature: “freedom” as free mobility.41
Nor would the “man from another country” ignore the bondsman’s ambiguous forms of appearance in the Constitution’s other “slave clauses,” for there also the figure of the bondsman mediates the legal inscription of the passage from “subject” to “citizen.” Article I, Section 2—the Constitution’s all-important provision for apportionment of representation and taxation—scripts its infamous “three-fifths clause” thus: “Representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several states which may be included within this union, according to their respective numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole number of free persons, including those bound to service for a term of years, and excluding Indians not taxed, three-fifths of all other persons.”42 In chapter 1, I elaborate the significance of this negotiation of the “principle of representation” to late-eighteenth and nineteenth-century U.S. racial formations, and to the construction of blackness as “the badge of servitude.” For now, I continue in the tracks of the bondsman as vanishing mediator. Historians are right to remark upon the absence of “black,” “color,” and “race” in the catalogue of this clause’s accounting. The letter of the law, in its calculations for the purposes of representation and taxation, refers to only two types of “persons”: “free persons” and “other persons.”43 While such arguments provide an important critical corrective, they forget another category of persons that adds significantly to our understanding of the relation between the unspoken terms of “race,” “slavery,” and “labor.” Article I, Section 2 attempts a comprehensive survey of the persons then present in the states, even as it resists referring explicitly to racially marked freedom or unfreedom. Supplementing its description of “whole free persons,” the clause adds: “including those bound to service for a term of years”—that is, indentured servants. In the context of the later mobilizations of the concepts of free and unfree labor, indentured servitude and its ambiguous position here between “free persons” and those “other persons” (slaves) become particularly important. While we might agree with David Brion Davis on a structural identity between indentured servant and slave, we should also recognize the difference between them, one important enough to be included as a supplement to the Constitution’s calculus of representation. While indentured servants may be just like slaves in their material living conditions, their social standing, and the experience of corporal punishment, they are also legally different: for the purposes of political representation and direct taxation, indentured servants will be counted as whole persons; those “other persons” will not.44 This third term adds productive problems to familiar critical narratives of
