Literature (2010), and the special issue of Early American Literature “New Essays on ‘Race,’ Writing, and Representation in Early America” (2011, ed. Robert S. Levine).
These works have variously attempted to expand our understanding of the workings of slavery as an expansionist economic force and political program, but they are perhaps as important for the ways in which they foreground the interpretive challenges of understanding the United States as a slave nation. The Blumrosens, for instance, recast the Revolutionary political narrative as one of often indirect responses to the Somerset case, from the early 1770s to the Northwest Ordinance and the framing of the Constitution: as such, they insist on a reprioritized hermeneutic at odds with the usual practices of intellectual history. Garry Wills similarly foregrounds a minority yet substantial political discourse of the “federal ratio” and “Negro President,” clarifying what these terms meant for an antislavery analytic buried beneath a “national reticence.”13 Or, to take another example, Mason’s account of political struggles pre-1808 simultaneously stresses the ways in which consideration of slavery “insinuated itself into a wide array” of issues but also ways in which the analysis of slavery remained incomplete and unarticulated, in many instances beyond agents’ ability to formulate them coherently.14
What many of these works have in common, then, is a dual appreciation of the importance of slavery and a methodological awareness, even insistence, on its discursive elusiveness, which is variously explained through recourse to obfuscation, reticence, emergence, confusion, code, or even impossibility. Several years ago, the last term was something of the doxa in many US discussions of the Haitian Revolution, the discourse of which was simultaneously silenced or (in Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s term) “unthinkable.”15 But a decade’s worth of excavatory scholarship has perhaps confirmed that parts of the Haitian Revolution were thinkable, even if difficult to articulate, such that a major challenge we face today is not just the (historical) thinking about the moment but a better understanding of its distorted articulation. We thus follow the lead of Colin Dayan and Sybille Fischer, whose pathbreaking books have allowed critics to read for historical memory and agency beyond the textual record. For Dayan, vodou combines both intimate and communal religious enthusiasm to the political unconscious, while Fischer uses the psychoanalytic language of disavowal to make the gaps and absences of memory and cultural production legible.16 Comparison may here be drawn to revisionist interpretations of American gothic literature, in which a racial subtext is regarded as constitutive of more explicit narrative and thematic aims.17 It is in this vein that we try to read the political discourse of the era. Matthew Mason concludes his chapter “Slavery and Politics to 1808” with the observation that the Burr Conspiracy “engrossed Americans more than the slave trade debates did” and that “only thereafter” did it become “clear that slavery was the prime threat to the federal compact.”18 We would less dispute these claims, taken in their most literal sense, than note that the Burr Conspiracy was so engrossing because it was essentially a coded, indirect drama about slavery and slave revolution. And if slavery’s threat to the federal compact became clear in the aftermath, it was in part due to the revelatory distortions of the preceding decade. In this respect, our study of the Burr phenomenon is offered as an attempt to explore the coded racialization of US cultural discourse, in keeping with the imperative presented in Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark.19
Perhaps the best emblem of our project may be found in Aaron Burr’s death mask, now in the Laurence Hutton Collection at Princeton University. Hutton had acquired the mask but was not sure of its provenance: “I had no special admiration for Burr—who once killed a Scotsman,—but I had all the collector’s enthusiasm for Burr in plaster and I wanted to think my Burr was Burr.”20 But Hutton had met the person who had secretly made the mask, working as the agent for the best-known popularizers of phrenology, Orson Squire Fowler, Lorenzo Niles Fowler, and Samuel Roberts Wells. As Hutton noted, the Fowlers had found in the Burr mask evidence that his “destructiveness, combativeness, firmness, and self-esteem were large, and amativeness excessive.”21 Indeed, Orson Fowler, in his massive Sexual Science, dwelt on Burr’s massive amativeness, adding this story about the crafting of the mask. The “posterior junction with the neck” was, in Burr, so large “that when his bust was taken after death, the artist took his drawing-knife to shave off what he supposed to be two enormous wens, but which were in reality the cerebral organs of Amativeness.”22 The excitement of discussing the death mask is such that it evokes anecdote after anecdote, two of which may be shared here. One is the story of Burr’s experiment with a life mask, apparently following the example of his then British host Jeremy Bentham. The mask was taken by the Italian-Irishman Peter Turnerelli, who reportedly left a small stain on Burr’s nose that he could not remove. The other is this story from Hutton:
A proud young mother once exhibited to me her new-born and first-born babe, now a blooming and pretty young girl. I was afraid to touch it, of course, and I would not have “held” it for worlds; but I looked at it in the customary admiring way, wondering at its jelly-like imbecility of form and feature. Alas! when I was asked the usual question, “Whom does she favour?” I could only reply, in all sincerity, that it looked exactly like a pink photograph of my death mask of Aaron Burr. And the young mother was not altogether pleased.23
The phrenological framing, belied by the “jelly-like imbecility of form and feature” of the unformed baby, may be read as the pseudoscientific codification, decades after its career, of the thing called Burr. And where “amativeness” looms ever larger—just as it does in racial discourse—there is a subtle constant concern with color through these details: the white mask, the dark stain caused by the life mask, the pinkish baby face. In Hutton’s Portraits in Plaster, Burr is brought up near the end, immediately preceded by considerations of the masks of Washington, Franklin, and Jefferson. Discussion of Burr is then followed immediately by consideration of the masks of Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, John C. Calhoun, and Abraham Lincoln, as if Hutton is staging some strange theatrical version of the Civil War played out in masks. Two more masks remain—first, that of Lord (Henry) Brougham, a contemporary of Burr and active within British abolition, and then, finally, oddly yet not so oddly, the “Florida Negro Boy.” Why end with this boy, “one of the lowest examples of his race”? Hutton insists that “his life-mask is only interesting here as an object of comparison,” for “whatever the head of a Bonaparte, a Washington, a Webster, or a Brougham is, his head is not.”24 The boy from Florida thus emerges as the point of comparison, the uninteresting illustration so powerful that it must conclude Hutton’s book, the puzzle and its own solution, the conclusion of the sequence that takes us from Washington to Burr and on to Lincoln.
1. The Semiotics of the Founders
Where did (or do) the Founding Fathers come from?
There are two default answers that seem to prevail. The first understands the elevation of the Founders as a natural phenomenon, the result of some determinable combination of moral or social complexity, political superiority, and/or practical efficacy. Thus, we remember Thomas Jefferson because of his leadership of the Democratic Party, his authorship of the Declaration of Independence, the hallmarks of his presidency, his exceptional intellect, his tortured grappling with slavery, and so on. Or we commemorate George Washington because of his military leadership, his combination of virtues, his special status as a “first” president, his Farewell Address, and the like. By this reasoning, the lesser status of second- and third-tier figures (the Patrick Henrys, Silas Deanes, or Light-Horse Harry Lees) simply reflects their lesser abilities or achievements. A second, more complex explanation for the Founders’ status focuses on their construction by contemporary and subsequent cultural productions. We honor a Benjamin Franklin because of his thorough self-promotion and an extensive array of portraiture, poems, parades, and so forth, which have been glossed and perpetuated for more than two centuries. That both of these explanations—a quasi-Darwinian natural selection of great men or the concerted efforts of cultural hegemony—seem commonsensical and, often enough, compatible speaks to the tremendous cultural power of the Founders,
