Bonds of Citizenship: Law and the Labors of Emancipation

Notes

211 Notes no t e s t o i n t roduc t ion 1. Frederick Douglass, “Letter to C. H. Chase,” North Star, 9 February 1849, in The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, ed. Philip S. Foner (New York: International, 1950), 1: 352–53. 2. Frederick Douglass, “The Address of the Southern Delegates in Congress to their Constituents; or, the Address of John C. Calhoun and Forty Other Thieves,” North Star, 9 February 1849, in The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, ed. Philip S. Foner (New York: International , 1950), 1: 354–55. 3. Ibid., 1: 355. 4. Ibid., 1: 356–57, emphasis in original. 5. Ibid., 1: 354. 6. Ibid., 1: 355. 7. Ibid., 1: 356. 8. In “What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?,” Douglass declares: “The existence of slavery in this country brands your republicanism as a sham, your humanity as a base pretense , and your Christianity as a lie. It destroys your moral power abroad. . . . [It] makes your name a hissing, and a by-word to a mocking earth” (“What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?: An Address Delivered in Rochester, New York, on 5 July 1852,” in The Frederick Douglass Papers, Series One: Speeches, Debates and Interviews, ed. John W. Blassingame, vol. 2, 1847–54 [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982], 383). 9. Douglass, “Address of the Southern Delegates,” 1: 356. 10. Ibid. 11. On the “culture of constitutionalism,” see Joyce Appleby, “The American Heritage: The Heirs and the Disinherited,” Journal of American History 74, no. 3 (December 1987): 798–813. 12. Douglass, “Address of the Southern Delegates,” 1: 356. 13. Eric Foner, Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men: The Ideology of the Republican Party before the Civil War (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 75. 14. Prigg v. Pennsylvania, 41 U.S. 539 (1842), 612–13. In this case, the Supreme Court ruled against the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania and in favor of Edward Prigg, a Maryland slave catcher hired by slave owner Margaret Ashmore to recapture her “fugitive from 212 Notes labor” Margaret Morgan. The Court also struck down as unconstitutional Pennsylvania’s 1826 personal liberty law, “An act to give effect to the provisions of the constitution of the United States relative to fugitives from labor, for the protection of free people of color, and prevent kidnapping.” The Court held that while states were not required to enforce the 1793 federal Fugitive Slave Act, they could not enact laws overriding it. 15. Frederick Douglass, “The Constitution of the United States: Is It Pro-Slavery or Anti-Slavery?,” in The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglas, ed. Philip S. Foner (New York: International, 1950), 2: 476; Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, vol. 1 (New York: Penguin, 1990), 127, hereafter cited in the chapter text as Capital 1. 16. Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar, Reading Capital, trans. Ben Brewster (London : Verso, 1997), 227. 17. Ibid, emphasis in original. 18. Ibid., 229, emphasis in original. For a related historical analysis of the “ambiguous identities” of race and class, see Etienne Balibar and Immanuel Wallerstein, Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities (London: Verso, 1991), esp. chaps. 3–5. 19. On the trace as the sign of the absent presence of a discourse, see Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), esp. chap. 2. On the trace and the relation between political discourse and deconstruction, see Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Feminism and Critical Theory,” in In Other Worlds: Essays in Cultural Politics (New York: Routledge, 1988), 77–94; and “Feminism and Deconstruction, Again: Negotiations,” in Outside in the Teaching Machine (New York: Routledge, 1993), 121–40. 20. Barbara Fields, “Ideology and Race in American History,” in Region, Race, and Reconstruction: Essays in Honor of C. Vann Woodward, ed. J. Morgan Kousser and James McPherson (New York: Oxford University Press, 1982), 143–77. 21. Robert J. Steinfeld, The Invention of Free Labor: The Employment Relation in English and American Law and Culture, 1350–1870 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991), 10. 22. William Wiecek, The Sources of Antislavery Constitutionalism in America (Ithaca, NY, and London: Cornell University Press, 1977), 78. 23. James Madison, The Debates in the Federal Convention of 1787 Which Framed the Constitution of the United States of America: Reported by James Madison, a Delegate from the State of Virginia, ed. Gaillard Hunt and James Brown Scott (Buffalo, NY: Prometheus, 1987), 2: 481. 24. Ibid., 2: 487. 25. Etienne Balibar, “Subjection and Subjectivation,” in Supposing...