Democracy's Spectacle: Sovereignty and Public Life in Antebellum American Writing

Introduction

Introduction “Could the kind reader have been quietly riding along the main road to or from Easton, that morning, his eyes would have met a painful sight.” Midway through My Bondage and My Freedom, Frederick Douglass longs for an impossible spectator: a witness to the daily abominations of slavery who is in no way implicated by them.1 A writer more keenly attuned than almost any of his contemporaries to the ethical complexities that such “painful sights” entail, Douglass pauses to imagine such a spectator more than once—one who is both present and not present, capable of standing witness to atrocities but hovering almost spectrally outside of them.2 Such viewpoints are emphatically hypothetical in Douglass’s writing, emerging through the fiction of counterfactual clauses—“if any one wishes to be impressed with the soul-killing power of slavery . . . ,” “could the kind reader have been quietly riding by . . . ”—and standing in marked contrast to the “painful sights” that serve instead as repeated moments of “initiation” into slavery’s regime.3 Indeed, on the morning in question, scores of people did stand along the Easton road to watch as Douglass and four other men were arrested and dragged to prison on charges of plotting escape; but none of them could fill the role of the quiet rider Douglass envisions, because everyone whom he sees watching him is either a fellow slave or one of his persecutors. On that morning, Douglass and his friends become the occasion for a peculiar, impromptu public spectacle that marks yet another moment in his perpetual initiation , another passage through what he calls in 1845 the “bloodstained gate.”4 Douglass’s language of initiations and gates, as well as his longing 2 / introduction for a witness who can see without passing through them, echoes through his autobiographies as an expression of hope for a clear, locatable “outside ” to slavery. But the relentlessness with which such initiations recur suggests that slavery is instead a regime of thresholds, forever rendering indistinguishable “outside” from “inside,” and making of every spectator a participant. In its combining of “all manner of ribaldry and sport” with calls for the torture and execution of Douglass and his friends, the spectacle along the Easton road begins with a lost distinction between punishment and entertainment, as an eager crowd gathers around the scene of the men’s capture as if it were a public hanging. But, strictly speaking, no “law” has been applied to the men, aside from the blanket exception from all legal protection and right of the enslaved. Before the men reach the prison, before they face that farce of law which could hang them even though Douglass protests to the constables that no crime has been committed, their conviction is pronounced and their punishment begins. Even once they are clearly in the state’s custody, locked in prison and under its jurisdiction , the men remain partially outside of the law that holds them, since, as well as the presumed agents of an uncommitted crime, they are still the salable property of others. Convicted of guilt by the spectators before their imprisonment, assessed for sale after it, neither presented with the evidence against them nor put to trial, and held by the state until their confinement becomes unprofitable to their masters, the men are suspended on a bloody threshold that cannot be said to coincide exactly with the realms of law, public, private, or state. Douglass describes the brutal absurdities of this indecipherable position with characteristic irony, mocking both the “moral vultures” in the crowd and the baseless charges against him and his companions, so that the full measure of the violence done only becomes evident in a strange and haunting passage that appears near the end of the episode: We were literally dragged that morning, behind horses, a distance of fifteen miles, and placed in the Easton jail. We were glad to reach the end of our journey, for our pathway had been the scene of insult and mortification. Such is the power of public opinion, that it is hard, even for the innocent, to feel the happy consolations of innocence , when they fall under the maledictions of this power.5 Given the abuse the men suffer on the road, Douglass’s sense of relief at reaching the relative safety of the jail is perhaps unsurprising, but it comes as something of a shock to read of his susceptibility to “the power [3.146.105.194] Project MUSE (2024-04-23 08...