Spaces of Democracy in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Dred

MARIA KARAFILIS Spaces of Democracy in Harriet Beecher Stowe's Dred Today ... it may be space more than time that hides consequences from us, the "making of geography" more than the "making of history" that provides the most revealing tactical and theoretical world. Edward W. Soja, Postmodern Geographies Is the system of slavery, as set forth in the American slave code, right! Is it so desirable, that you will directly establish it over broad regions, where, till now, you have solemnly forbidden it to enter? Harriet Beecher Stowe, Dred By the mid nineteenth century, the persistence of the domestic slave trade, along with the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law and the Kansas-Nebraska Act, suggested that the abolition of slavery was not imminent. In fact, the "peculiar institution" was expanding , and threatened to turn recently acquired western territories into slave states. As emancipation seemed increasingly precarious, and the possibility offreedom for slaves in the United States less secure, Harriet Beecher Stowe wrote her lesser-known but more militant anti-slavery novel Dred: A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856). In Dred, Stowe depicts several potential sites where African Americans could participate in democratic communities and notions of racial hierarchy could be challenged. These potential sites include a reformed Southern plantation , a settlement offree and fugitive blacks in Canada, and a maroon community in the Great Dismal Swamp. The first two locales end up replicating the repressive systems ofhierarchy that undergird the racist, dominant order and thus are specious alternatives of democtatic pracArizona Quarterly Volume 55, Number 3, Autumn 1999 Copyright © 1999 by Arizona Board of Regents ISSN 0004- 1610 24Maria Karaflis tice, while the latter, the swamp, is the primary arena that holds out the possibility of meaningful sociopolitical transformation. These reconceptualizations of sites of democratic action serve to contrast the poetic and idealized notion of "America" with the geopolitical territory and official state apparatus of the "United States." By suggesting an alternative space—not the American sacred space of the Puritans and the Founding Fathers—Stowe challenges the concept of America as the otdained and divinely favored locus of freedom and equality and theteby tetertitotializes the national imaginaty. The geopolitical territoty of the United States is dissociated from the ideal manifestation of democracy, and the authot locates the latter somewhere else. This "somewhere else" is not in an experimental collectivity or commune in the United States (like Brook Fatm, for example), but in the "un-American" borderland space of the swamp. That location suggests both the degree to which racist ideologies have petmeated the American system, symbolized by the geopolitical territoty, and saturated the "land"—both the territory and its métonymie reference to the people and state—with anti-black sentiment. It also suggests a disturbing , concomitant need to physically remove oneself from U.S. soil in order to develop an alternative consensus and sociopolitical system. Examining Dred in terms of spatialization and the loci of democratic ideals and practices brings to the fore such questions as, "What can be a space offreedom for blacks in America?" and "Where can such marginalized populations achieve the liberty and freedom promised to all men by the Declatation of Independence and the U.S. Constitution?" These questions concerning space and freedom were particularly pressing and politically charged when Stowe was writing Dred in the 1850s, as the nation simultaneously debated extending slavery into the new territories and the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act, which separated the region into two distinct states and allowed for popular sovereignty to determine whether the states would be slave or free territories. Intranational borders, then, and the "line" at which slavery stops were hotly contested, and with profound social, economic, and political consequences. Dred represents an intervention into the debate concerning spaces of "freedom " and spaces of slavery in the United States, and it is an argument against extending slavery into the new territories. Charles Sumner, Stowe's close friend and Congress member, recog- Spaces of Democracy25 nized the value of Stowe's new book in combating the Kansas-Nebraska Act and arresting the spread of slavery. In a letter to her in the early 1850s Sumner wrote, "1 am rejoiced to learn, from your...