Slavery and Sentiment: The Politics of Feeling in Black Atlantic Antislavery Writing, 1770-1850

Introduction

In February 1782, an African-born woman named Belinda addressed a petition to the Massachusetts legislature, appealing for her readers’ sympathy. In the petition she first describes a happy childhood in a paradisiacal African environment, suddenly interrupted by a brutal invasion by white men into the “sacred grove” where she was praying, “with each hand in that of a tender parent.” In spite of “the tears, the sighs, the supplications ,” she was “ravished from the bosom of her country,” and separated from her parents forever. The ravishment and the suggestion of rape in this scene, together with the emphasis on familial attachment and separation , mark the text as sentimental: the reader is made to feel for the plight of a victim who suffers in her individual integrity as a person, a daughter, and a woman. The reader’s personal identification is actually encouraged from the beginning of the piece, where the author invites us into the early impressions of “her mind” and “her affrighted imagination ” (Belinda 142). We then follow her in her horrifying journey across the ocean and into slavery. At this point, using the vocabulary of natural rights theory, she directs the reader’s sympathy to the fact that “the laws rendered her incapable of receiving property,” even though she is a “free moral agent, accountable for her own actions.” Indeed, “freedom” has been “intended for all the human race.” She enjoins the legislature to let u Introduction The common good was lost in the pursuit of private interest. —royall tyler, The Contrast (1787) her enjoy part of “the immense wealth” of her former and now dead owner, “a part whereof hath been accumulated by her own industry” (143). In this text, individual victimization leads to a plea for personal sympathy based on the liberal idea of a natural right to freedom and to property, suggesting that the author knew such a combination to be a coherent and effective strategy.1 The Story of Quashi, the first version of which appeared in 1793 in the Massachusetts Magazine, appeals to a different sort of emotion. Here the protagonist proceeds, not from a desire for individual freedom, but from a communal identity defined both by his fellow slaves and by his master. Quashi grew up with his master as a “play-fellow,” and, to him, this “boyish intimacy” (Story of Quashi 5) was the sign of an egalitarian relationship . When, years later, the master threatens to whip him, Quashi, now a man who “takes pride in what he calls the smoothness of his skin” (6), feels the “wound to his honour” (7). He tries to reason with the master, but they end up in a fatal struggle, “in which each had several times been uppermost.” Quashi “got firmly seated on his master’s breast, now panting and out of breath, and with his weight, his thighs, and one hand, secured him motionless.” Reproaching the master for planning “‘a punishment of which I must ever have borne the disgraceful marks’” (9), he cuts his own throat. While the reader is made to feel for Quashi’s individual plight, his suicide symbolizes the destruction of the communal ethic that threatens not only him but all members of the community. Defined through male bonding and communal life, Quashi appears fully as a human being, endowed with feelings of tenderness, but also with a body that the text lovingly dwells on, and which makes him an equal, even a superior, during the fight.2 Here, the body is not the difference that creates individuals, but the equalizer that creates communities. In its emphasis on community and honor, in its intimation of an egalitarian relationship between two men despite the official hierarchy of slavery, in its free depiction of the entanglements of black and white bodies, the text reflects a republican sensibility, one that prepares readers to accept, not just free agency, but equal citizenship. The difference in the ways these stories appeal to the reader’s feelings is the subject of this book. Through their respective emphases on individual and community, on interiority and physicality, on personal property and brotherhood, and more generally on freedom and the common good, these texts express feelings with different political meanings. This book’s intended critical contribution is the idea that expressions of feeling in 2 slavery and sentiment eighteenth- and nineteenth-century transatlantic texts about slavery and the slave trade...