Neoclassical Culture in a Society with Slaves: Race and Rights in the Age of Wheatley

On the eve of the American Revolution, radicals on both sides of the Atlantic increasingly defined the constitutional relationship between Great Britain and the American colonies as a form of civil or political "slavery." While some pamphleteers may have employed this language in an abstract and technical sense, an invocation of a pre-liberal ideology that political historian Quentin Skinner has recently termed the "the neo-roman theory of free states," many speakers and writers derived additional rhetorical force from a shrill and perverse conflation of the identities of white colonists and black slaves.¹ Indeed, in the late 1760s and early 1770s, white colonists in Massachusetts criticized British policy by explicitly comparing the political relationship between the American colonies and Great Britain to the condition of black slaves under a tyrannical master. Almost immediately, free and unfree black writers appropriated the rhetoric of political slavery for their own purposes, comparing the real condition of blacks in slavery to the metaphorical condition of the colonies in a way that both reproduced and critiqued the language of the imperial debate. In a series of documents that began to circulate in 1773, the year in which a young enslaved black poet named Phillis Wheatley traveled from Boston to London to oversee the publication of her Poems on Various Subjects, groups of black slaves in Massachusetts petitioned the colonial legislature for freedom by modulating their grievances through the dominant vocabularies of natural rights and evangelical religion, claiming an analogy between their physical condition and the political situation of the colonies. When black slaves applied the metaphor of political slavery to themselves—that is, when they claimed to be the obvious but buried referent for that metaphor—they forced white readers to confront normative meanings inherent in the rhetoric of political slavery.

In ways we are only beginning to appreciate, the Age of Revolutions gave rise simultaneously to a modern language of rights and to modern forms of racism. Lynn Hunt has recently argued that the articulation of new forms of racism during the French Revolution demonstrates that "the systematic denigration of what you are not requires a doctrine, and such doctrines only appeared once inequality had to be justified."² Racism, as George Fredrickson and others have persuasively shown, was certainly not new. White colonial Americans and Europeans had developed a number of doctrines—some rooted in the Christian religion, others in African culture—to help explain racial slavery in the century and a half before the American Revolution.³ The Revolution helped chip away at the legitimacy of such doctrinal justifications, but it also invented new ones. In the case of the slave petitions in Massachusetts in the early 1770s, some white readers clearly found the analogy between the black slave petitioners and the American colonies compelling, but others responded by narrowing the seemingly universalizing language of political liberty and by explaining why the case of black slaves in Massachusetts did not and could not resemble the case of Massachusetts itself. Like some modern historians of politics, a few contemporary theorists and writers argued that the connection between racial slavery and political slavery was merely a linguistic coincidence. In a way that would be unthinkable for modern historians, however, some radical white writers went on to claim that political slavery, a slavery of the mind, was far worse than racial slavery, a slavery of the body. Still others went further. When pressed to justify the uneven application of the language of liberty, to discriminate between the cases of white colonists and black slaves, whites also offered some of the first systematic accounts of the mental faculties of black people as naturally (rather than culturally) inferior to the mental faculties of white people and explained the enslavement of blacks as an effect rather than a cause of African intellectual and cultural inferiority.

In order to understand the conflations of mental and political equality at work in debates about race and rights during the American Revolution, this essay places those debates in the context of aesthetic disputes over neoclassicism and considers...