Irony and Modernity in the Early Slave Narrative: Bonds of Duty, Contracts of Meaning

In his 1810 narrative, the African American Methodist deacon George White recounts a particularly terrifying dream he experienced following a camp meeting in 1804. Some time after awaking, White tells his wife about the dream and its visions of hell: "I related the whole to my bosom companion; who, having heard it with astonishment, and much affection, was desirous to know what I thought would be the result; concerning which, I gave her my opinion in full; and we covenanted together from that time, to be more faithful to God than ever, and to escape, if possible, the torments I had seen" (11). A similar moment of mutual "covenanting" occurs in the 1810 narrative of Boyrereau Brinch, which extends from Brinch's childhood in Africa through the Middle Passage to his service in the American Revolution and his struggle for economic independence in Vermont. In Barbados, where he and the other slaves are put up for sale, Brinch meets an African brother and sister who "had pledged themselves never to part but by death" (Brinch and Prentiss 101). Yet the brother, Bangoo, is soon sold to a man "who had doubtless been devoted to the covenants of our Lord and Saviour, perhaps had crossed himself before the image of Christ, suspended upon the cross" (101).

What these passages, among many others in the literature of the Black Atlantic, help to illuminate is the power of "covenanting together" in the early slave narrative.¹ That phrase aptly captures both the religious and the personal dimensions of a whole pattern of meaning that runs throughout the genre, one in which the Christian doctrine of duty to God is mirrored and supplemented by, and at times even secondary to, an ethic of interpersonal obligation. For many writers of the Black Atlantic, the ancient notion of a covenant with God, rooted in biblical theology, provided a means of understanding suffering within a providential framework and promised that the faithful would be rewarded and the unfaithful punished. Yet an evolving intellectual and ideological environment rendered traditional covenantalism, in itself, insufficent as a strategy of either survival or literary rhetoric. "Man is accountable to God and his fellow creatures," wrote Adam Smith in 1761. "But tho' he is, no doubt, principally accountable to God, in the order of time, he must necessarily conceive himself as accountable to his fellow creatures, before he can form any idea of the Deity, or of the rules by which that Divine Being will judge of his conduct" (130n2). Not all of his contemporaries would have agreed, but Smith's observation, offered during his exegesis of moral judgment, reflects a subtle epistemic shift, toward a kind of ethical pragmatism whereby responsible conduct in this world becomes, "necessarily," a prerequisite to religious understanding. Here was a more secular form of thinking about duty, one less reliant on scriptural doctrine and more embedded in the evolving social currents of the eighteenth-century world. What I argue in this essay is that this expanded concept of human duty, especially as captured in the notion of a "social contract," functioned as a complex, unpredictable, and energizing force in the slave narrative during its formative decades.

This perspective provides leverage on a key issue that has intrigued, even bedeviled, scholarship on the eighteenth-century Atlantic world, namely the relation—philosophical, social, and material—between the emergence of Western "modernity" during this period and the African or "black" persons who found themselves caught up in the international system of commerce managed by European imperial powers. In any analysis of that relation, difficult questions press forward: How did Enlightenment liberalism—with its image of the rational, accountable, and essentially "free" human subject—interact with intensifying political debates surrounding slavery, abolition, and race? How were those debates influenced, and their participants imagined, by the testimony of African-descended persons; and conversely, how was this testimony itself shaped and constrained by the discursive protocols they observed? How are we to understand the published writings of Black Atlantic narrators as they (and often their white editors) triangulated their experiences between different...