Bound by “the Principles of 1776”: Dilemmas in Anglo- American Romanticism and Douglass’s The Heroic Slave

KELVIN C. BLACK Bound by “the Principles of 1776”: Dilemmas in AngloAmerican Romanticism and Douglass’s The Heroic Slave T he publication of Frederick douglass’s 1853 historical novella The Heroic Slave based on Madison Washington’s 1841 slave uprising onboard the Creole, a U.S. slave ship bound for New Orleans, came just two years after his change of opinion on the pro-slavery character of the United States Constitution. This change in Douglass’s interpretive ap­ proach to the document was marked by two literal and very public shifts in allegiance: the first was from William Lloyd Garrison’s radical, yet non­ violent, abolitionism to Gerrit Smith’s reformist abolitionism, which was more capacious in its thinking regarding the means by which slave libera­ tion could be achieved; and, following from the first, Douglass’s second shift in allegiance saw him go from a principled skeptic of the Revolution­ ary ideals that supposedly lay at the foundations of the American Union, to a forceful, though I believe strategic, defender ofthe Revolutionary princi­ ples the vast majority of nineteenth-century Americans believed to be en­ shrined in the Constitution. Whereas Douglass previously, and Garrison still, saw an irreparable flaw in those foundational principles given the Constitution’s legalization and martial defense of slavery, Douglass now saw in the Constitution a document in reconcilable contradiction with its preamble, the aspect of the document in closest sympathy with the Decla­ ration of Independence and the best illustration, he and Gerrit Smith be­ lieved, of the true intents, aims, and aspirations—the spirit—of the law. Douglass now believed that the Constitution “might be made consistent in its details with the noble purposes avowed in its preamble.”1 1. “Change of Opinion,” in Frederick Douglass: Selected Speeches and Writing, ed. Philip Foner, abridged and adapted by Yuval Taylor (Chicago: Lawrence Hill Books, 1999), 173— 74SiR , 56 (Spring 2017) 93 94 KELVIN C. BLACK Strikingly, Douglass’s dilemma over how best to accomplish abolition/ change in society places him solidly within a transatlantic Romantic tradi­ tion profoundly shaped by what I call the reform-revolution dialectic produced by the late eighteenth-century debate between Edmund Burke and Thomas Paine over the significance of the French Revolution. This debate, I argue, had aesthetic and political consequences for expressions of national attachment and detachment that also may be observed in the way Douglass proffers an attachment to national ideals and foundational princi­ ples rooted in revolutionary violence as the justification both for Madison Washington’s liberation struggle, and for viewing him, as his name invites, interchangeably with the founding fathers, whom the nation’s white con­ sensus recognized as heroes. The sympathetic turn towards familiar national symbols and the deci­ sion to promote, rather than dispel, national romance is just as much an aesthetic choice as it is a political one. And William Wordsworth features just such a choice regarding his disillusionment with the French Revolu­ tion, and the normative critique of national life that served as its inspir­ ation, in the increasingly counter-revolutionary 1805 and 1850 versions of his autobiographical poem The Prelude, the latter version published posthu­ mously and the only one known to the nineteenth-century public. Once a Jacobin, Wordsworth had been England’s poet laureate at the time of his death in 1850, and in many ways his poetry had come to be considered na­ tional poetry.2 While I am indebted to and align myself with James Chan­ dler’s pace-setting work on Burke’s influence on Wordsworth’s poetics in Wordsworth’s Second Nature: A Study of the Poetry and Politics, my distinct contribution to this area of inquiry builds on his work by reading Words­ worth through the lens of the debate Burke and Paine had over the significance of the French Revolution, which not only construed reform and revolution as dialectical narratives of change, but also as the central di­ lemma for the construction of one’s worldview, a choice that promised to impact the very nature of one’s everyday sympathies and attachments. More than merely a Burkean turn in thought, Wordsworth’s change of opinion on what forms of attachment and/or...