Give me liberty, and give me slaves

In Fathering the Nation, Russ Castronovo brings to our attention a group of counter memories that existed in the period 1789–1865. These counter memories contradict the dominant memory in which the Founding Fathers, when they created the nation, endowed it with an unambiguous legacy of liberty. It has been possible to sustain this dominant memory, according to Castronovo, only by interpreting slavery as a temporary aberration from this legacy of liberty. This has been done by separating the Southern Founding Fathers—Washington, Jefferson, and Madison—from their identities as slaveholders. Indeed for Northerners such as Emerson, these Founding Fathers were not even Southerners. When antislavery Northerners captured control of national identity during the Civil War, they read the 1830–1860 generation of white Southerners out of the nation. Washington, Jefferson, and Madison were republicans and authors of liberty, while the Southerners of 1830 were unAmerican, neo-medieval tyrants.

But, for Castronovo, these white Southerners of 1830 were the sons and grandsons of Washington, Jefferson, and Madison. Influenced by Benedict Anderson’s study of the construction of modern nationalism, Imagined Communities, Castronovo is aware that modern historical writing played a major artistic role in that construction. ¹ This writing imagined nations as bounded, autonomous spaces, each with unified and organic peoples. David Levin pointed out in his 1959 book History as Romantic Art that the four major Northern historians writing at the time of the Civil War—George Bancroft, Francis Parkman, John Motley, and William Prescott—were able to imagine such an organic people in the United States because they self-consciously excluded Native Americans, African Americans, and Mexican Americans from “American” history. ² Only Anglo-Protestants, for them, could be included as citizens of the United States. These others, alien peoples, were destined to vanish from the national landscape.

Levin’s book was an early expression of the aesthetic revolution in which the generation of “American” historians of the 1950’s and 1960’s became aware that their teachers in the 1930’s had participated in the tradition of Anglo-Protestant racism, a legacy inherited from the Founding Fathers by Levin’s historians and each subsequent generation of historians until the aesthetic of an organic Anglo-Protestant “American” people lost its persuasiveness after World II. ³ Given this aesthetic revolution, it was possible for scholars, such as Anderson, to approach histories of homogeneous peoples as imaginative and time-bound constructions. The momentum of this scholarly deconstruction continues: Rescuing History From the Nation by Prasenjit Duara is, for example, a powerful current analysis of modern historiography in China and India which, like that of the Atlantic nations in 1830, has imposed a vision of unified peoples on immense cultural diversity. ⁴

But Castronovo does not emphasize Anderson’s argument that the model of organic peoples was constructed simultaneously on both sides of the Atlantic between 1770 and 1830 and then became influential in other areas of the world. Instead the focus of his critique is on the expression of that organicism in the writing of the American cultural historian, Sacvan Bercovitch. Bercovitch, unaware or uninterested in the possibility that the nationalism of the United States was not more recent than that of England, France, Germany, Argentina, Chile, or Brazil, contrasted a forward-looking jeremiad in the United States with a backward-looking jeremiad in Europe. The European jeremiad, as described by Bercovitch in his The American Jeremiad, evoked a medieval Europe much more than the modern western European culture which created the idea of progress that informed the imaginative world of the Founding Fathers. ⁵

Bercovitch argues that, through the rhetorical ritual of a jeremiad which postulated declension from an original national promise, it was possible to prophesy that the declension would be overcome and the original national promise restored. In this way, according to Bercovitch, critics of the declension could be co-opted back into a national consensus and the illusion of a sacred and timeless...