The American Dreams of John B. Prentis, Slave Trader

Seven. Relic(t)s

Relic(t)s relic: 1. Something that has survived from a past culture or period. 2. A keepsake: souvenir. 3. An object of religious significance. 4. relics. A corpse. relict: 1. An organism or species of an earlier era surviving in a changed environment. 2. A widow. —Webster’s Dictionary, 1996 “All knowledge is, of course, to some extent imaginary,” writes Ian Baucom in Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History. “The boast of evidence, however, is that it limits and constrains the promiscuity of the imagination, weds imagination to a liturgy of facts, records, documented events. If to know is always, in part, to imagine, then evidence demands that imagination bind itself to the empirically demonstrable” (15). As long as we bind our imaginations to what is demonstrable in written documents, however, those who were dispossessed in life will remain dispossessed after death. Imagination is not merely personal; it is also social. The way we imagine antebellum history continues to inform and shape public debates, public policy, and social identities. Women such as Catharine Prentis appear in historical archives only as remnants of the remnants of their husbands, but they are a stubborn species that persists in the ways we in the twenty-first century imagine or fail to imagine them. The slaves who lived with the Prentises and the thousands of people in whose lives John Prentis speculated also persist as meaningful relicts, even when invisible. Saidiya Hartman notes that historians who want to recover the stories of the subaltern must “struggle within and against the constraints and silences imposed by the nature of the archive—the system that governs the appearance of statements and generates social meaning” (Scenes 11). Searching for people who have vanished from history not as a consequence of the natural cycle CHAPTER 7 174 chapter seven of life and death but through social acts of denial, repression, and forced disappearance requires an active quest through lights and shadows, facts and imagination. We must search for meaning not only in what we can demonstrate but also in what we imagine between the lines. We need to search for ways to register the significance of the lives of people who did not own their own stories and were not able to bear witness to their erasure. Registering absences, gaps, and vanishings in the archive, our gaze oscillates between the visible and the invisible. Silences and blank spaces are crucial components of what Baucom calls a counterarchive that testifies to the significance of lives that might remain unnamable, unnarratable, and never fully lived. When Catharine Dabney married John Prentis in 1814, the two young people became, as the English judge William Blackstone infamously put it, “one person in law, so that the very being and existence of the woman is suspended during the coverture, or entirely merged and incorporated in that of her husband” (433). Upon John’s death in 1848, the year in which Marx and Engels called for the abolition of the family because the “bourgeois family” was founded on “capital, on private gain” through the exploitation of wives, prostitutes, and children (100), Catharine became a relict in the tradition of English law. “In the decades after the American Revolution, widowhood made most women socially marginal and even destitute. Some widows, however, retained considerable economic, social , and political privilege; they lost their husbands but not all of their husbands’ reflected glory” (Kirsten Wood 1). Catharine Prentis was in the latter group. Court records suggest that she became the executor of John’s estate without difficulty or contestation. City of Richmond At a court of Hustings held for the said city, at the Courthouse, the 16th day of September 1848— This last will and testament of John B. Prentis, late of this city, deceased, was this day proved by the oaths of William Lambert and Charles Howard , two of the subscribing witnesses thereto and was thereupon ordered to be recorded. And at a like Court, held on the 10th day of October 1848. On the motion of Catharine Prentis, the only executor named in the last will and testament of John B. Prentis, late of the city deceased, who made oath thereto as the law directs, and entered into and acknowledged a bond in the penalty of thirty thousand dollars, conditional according to law (but without security, the will directing that none should be required relic(t)s...