Book Tour: Redeeming Abolitionists and Huck Finn

Book Tour is a periodic review by Phil Christman of new titles, each exploring a theme to trace hidden connections among books and writers.

One of the strangest parts of being educated – and I mean here not “learning a lot of stuff” but “learning how to play the social role of ‘smart person’” – is that it can make you very stupid. You need to seem to know everything, and the laborsaving habits that enable you to maintain that appearance actually constrain your imagination and distort your picture of reality. This stupefying process, in my experience, takes two main forms: on the one hand, excess credulity – too much belief in one’s own credentials and in the credentials of one’s friends and mentors and in the academic fads that happened to be dominant during one’s training; and on the other hand, reflexive cynicism. The former is probably the easiest to see, and certainly the most irritating, but the latter is probably more corrosive, precisely because cynicism is so often the correct response to a situation. In a system that rewards the person with, not the truest, but the most cutting analysis, cynicism will therefore become one’s response to every situation, precisely because it seems safe. One can seem like the sharpest wit in every room. This is very dangerous. A cynical person misunderstands reality as surely as does anyone else who has the same answer to every question, and, since she believes everything is always already coopted, a cynical person often stops trying to improve the world.

I think it is this cynicism of the educated that accounts for the relative neglect of the large, diffuse network of activists who spent the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries working to end slavery. Here is a group of people who were right when the richest nations in the world were monstrously wrong. Here, moreover, is a group of people whose ideas won. Whatever role may be assigned the abolitionists in the process by which slavery became at least officially illegal in countries – England, the United States, Brazil – that owed much of their great wealth to it, the abolitionist cause prevailed, over a timeframe that even the most optimistic of them would have struggled to imagine at the outset. And yet what do most of us learn about them in school, or from pop culture? If your education was anything like mine, you read very little of them – maybe one good autobiography (by Frederick Douglass) and one bad novel (by Harriet Beecher Stowe). You probably picked up the idea that they were mostly naïve and patronizing (white) interlopers whose real effect was to replace chattel slavery for some with wage slavery for nearly all. Wherever they go, the word “bourgeois” follows, with its magical power to discredit without actually accusing. If they appear in a bestselling historical novel or stirring Oscar-bait movie, it is often so that comedy can be drawn from the social distance between the enslaved and those who were in a position to help them, even though some sort of distance is implied in the very existence of the concept “help” – I can’t get you out of quicksand if I’m also nose-deep in the stuff.

This is more or less how we still talk about the abolitionists, and it’s more or less how Southern gentlemen – who were, when it counted most, neither gentle nor men – talked about the abolitionists in the 1840s. (It is a less than subtle comment on the ultimate moral implications of this satirical mode that its most successful modern practitioner, Tom Wolfe – he did it to the racial liberals of the 1970s rather than the 1870s – affected the style of a plantation owner.) The smart and earnest young person, looking to history for models of how to live in an honorable and useful way in a world built on staggering cruelty and injustice, is thus warned off from following such disastrous examples as J. W. C. Pennington, William Lloyd Garrison, or the Grimke sisters. She sighs and signs up for another business class.

Manisha Sinha’s The Slave’s Cause (2016), a global history of abolition, is one of my favorite books, simply because it bothers to ask whether this picture is true – and then demonstrates, in enormous detail, that it is not. Through the scholarly feat of actually reading the abolitionists’ writings, Sinha shows that, whatever their individual missteps and necessary conflicts with each other, the antislavery activists of the eighteenth and nineteenth century were principled, effective, resourceful, and, as human beings go, exemplary. On the whole, they opposed all forms of exploitation, including capitalism. Their movement was not, meaningfully, a “bourgeois” movement, since abolitionism began and ended in the activities of the enslaved, the formerly enslaved, and those in danger – whatever their papers said – of being enslaved at any time. (In the same way, today, prison abolition is sometimes portrayed as an enthusiasm of white radical hobbyists, rather than, as it is, a movement that would cease to exist if you removed working-class black women from it.) Cinqué and Harriet Tubman were abolitionists, and William Lloyd Garrison and John Quincy Adams were also abolitionists, precisely because they threw themselves into the task of supporting people like Cinqué and Harriet Tubman.

The Rise and Fall of the Second American Republic (2024) is Sinha’s sequel to that extraordinary book. It tells a more depressing but, in its way, equally instructive story: how and why Reconstruction failed. Reconstruction has been the subject of distortions even more outrageous than those that cover the abolitionists, but for all that, it has also been the subject of at least two great defenses: W. E. B. DuBois’s Black Reconstruction in America (1935) and Eric Foner’s Reconstruction (1988). Sinha differs from these two writers, and from the many defenders who have followed in their wake, in giving greater attention to women’s activism, which in turn causes her to cover a longer timeline: she treats women’s suffrage as, essentially, the last victory of Reconstruction democracy, so the book stops at 1920. She is also at pains to disassociate Reconstruction from the anti-Indian Wars of the 1880s and 1890s, with which some writers group it – perhaps on the theory that Reconstruction strengthened the federal government to do good, and is therefore responsible every time the federal government does evil. Similarly, she thinks that the wild capitalism and colonialism of the post-1880 period represented another facet of Reconstruction’s defeat, not a consequence of the greater democracy it enabled. She writes, for example:

The reconstruction of the West was not a process parallel to southern Reconstruction but rather must be understood apiece with its downfall. To view the bold experiment in interracial democracy, recounted in Eric Foner’s canonical Reconstruction, as the same political process that led to the subjugation of indigenous nations, nativism, and the triumph of industrial capitalism and imperialism, is to completely miss the contestation that shaped this era. I argue that these events must be viewed as part of the long overthrow of Reconstruction and of the abolitionist aims of the American Civil War, and not as their consequence.

Taking up Reconstruction in turn as a military, presidential, congressional, and grassroots project, she shows just how much such contestation there was. At every turn, there were people who argued and acted for the idea that “all citizens and noncitizens are equally rights-bearing individuals and claimants before the state,” and that the state had an obligation to them. That, in other words, all people actually are created equal – or, to put it the homier and more concrete language of the political theorist who actually mattered most to almost every one of the contestants in Sinha’s story, that everyone is your neighbor.

How did such a set of ideas lose? Well, look at what happened to that guy. Sinha’s book doesn’t say much about the strategic missteps of her heroes, except their occasional and – yes – strategically stupid failures of solidarity with each other. The split within the first-wave feminist movement, between followers of Lucy Stone and Sojourner Truth who considered black women women and the followers of Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony who joined hands with unrepentant Confederate women, is narrated once again. Other than that, it’s a story of powerful interests doing more or less what powerful interests do, and bad luck: Lincoln dying while the racist alcoholic Andrew Johnson lived, for example. (By some accounts, John Wilkes Booth was part of a plot to decapitate the federal government, but the person assigned to Johnson failed.) Some readers will find this unsatisfying. Personally, I don’t think it requires that much explanation when good fails to win out permanently, but the failure to study, admire, and emulate its moments of temporary victory makes far less sense to me. In any case, I find Sinha’s own project of historical reconstruction wholly admirable, despite occasional lapses in prose style, and I hope both books find the widest readership possible.

Abolition was also a literary project. These activists wrote – autobiographies, pamphlets, reports, rebuttals, histories, sermons and Biblical exegesis. A lot of this writing continues to inspire due to the ideas it contains, or because its mere existence in the world represents a triumph over strong odds. But Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (1861) is not only a monument to human resilience and courage but also a masterpiece of autobiography. Written by a woman whose escape from slavery involved, at one point, living for years in a three-by-six garret, it is stirring, direct, written with startling economy, and even, every so often, grimly funny. Like every slave narrative, it also made me wish I had a time machine and several hundred guns.

Literary talent ran freely in the Jacobs family, it appears. Her brother John Swanson Jacobs also published an autobiography, A True Tale of Slavery, in 1861. However, that autobiography was the censored American republication of a manuscript originally so incendiary that Jacobs had had to publish it in an Australian newspaper in 1855. That earlier version, nearly twice as long, has sat in the archive like an unexploded bomb for 169 years. Historian Jonathan D. S. Schroeder has recovered it and, with copious notes and a long biographical essay, republished it under the title The United States Governed By Six Hundred Thousand Despots. Schroeder’s notes make it easy to crosscheck details between the two Jacobs siblings’ books, an especially useful feature.

The assumption that it’s somehow egocentric to redress evils done to other people in order to salve one’s conscience is incredibly common, in all sorts of contexts. It’s also crazy. That’s what consciences are for! That’s how they’re supposed to work!

The brother Jacobs’s book, like its title, only benefits from expansion. His story has its share of enraging details and gripping near misses, and he knows how to get out of their way and tell them all. Like his sister, he is a witty and efficient writer. Here he is, for example, describing his own early religious education:

My father used to take me with him to the Methodist church. I continued to go, when I could, until one Mr. Moumon came there to preach; he preached to the whites in the morning, and to the slaves in the afternoon. His discourse to the slaves was invariably about robbing henhouses and keeping everything about your master’s house in good order. This is what they call religious instruction given to slaves.

He sums up the religious culture of the antebellum South this way: “They steal infants from their mothers to buy Bibles to send to heathens, and flog women to unpaid toil, to support their churches.” Later, he describes his last “owner,” who had promised to free Jacobs upon his own death: “Doubtless he meant to do me a good turn; but he put it off too far.” It’s the understated and bitter irony characteristic of so much great political writing, from Tacitus (“They make a desert and call it peace”) to Orwell. In a late chapter, Jacobs brilliantly interlineates excerpts from the Declaration of Independence with text from later pro-slavery laws to spell out the racist implications that the framers of those documents so often hid from themselves. Also, he teaches how to mask one’s smell when fleeing a pack of bloodhounds. (“To cut and rub an onion on the bottom of the foot is one way, to sprinkle cayenne pepper in their track is another.”) You never know when that kind of thing might come in handy.

Moviestore Collection Ltd / Alamy Stock Photo.

The rediscovery of a book as good as Jacobs’s is an occasion for celebration. It’s also a melancholy reminder of a whole discursive and conceptual world – the world of enslaved black Americans – that, though partially preserved in autobiography and later oral history, mostly exists for posterity in hints and mysterious details, often set down carelessly in the books of their enemies. The loss of the cultural works that a freer people would have had time to make is obviously nowhere near the top of slavery’s crimes. But thinking about all that we’re missing is a way of meditating on the interiority of people who were sold off like sides of beef.

Percival Everett’s new novel James gestures at this vast, mostly undescribed continent of human inwardness via one of Everett’s brilliant, brash jokes. James is a retelling of Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the viewpoint of the escaped slave Jim, a character Twain loves but sees from outside. It posits, among other dramatic departures from both its parent text and known reality, that the outrageously broad African American Vernacular English that Twain prided himself on understanding is – like so much else – something black people invented to keep white people off their backs. The black characters in this novel, when unobserved by outsiders, speak mostly in a drily classical style. Everett makes this plain early in the novel, when James meets with his family for what may be the last time:

That evening I sat down with Lizzie and six other children in our cabin and gave a language lesson…. “White folks expect us to sound a certain way and it can only help if we don’t disappoint them,” I said. “The only ones who suffer when they are made to feel inferior is us. Perhaps I should say ‘when they don’t feel superior.’ So, let’s pause to review some of the basics.”

“Don’t make eye contact,” a boy said.

“Right, Virgil.”

“Never speak first,” a girl said.

“That’s correct, February,” I said.

Lizzie looked at the other children and then back to me. “Never address any subject directly when talking to another slave,” she said.

“What do we call that?” I asked.

Together they said, “Signifying.”

Longtime readers of Everett will recognize this last exchange as containing one of his signature moves. In Erasure, his most famous novel – it was recently adapted to film as American Fiction – he posits that the drearily naturalistic style of some canonical African American novels is something done for white readers. This isn’t mine, he says in effect; it’s yours. “Signifying,” of course, is often similarly canonized as the most quintessentially Black of Black Things, and Everett here seems to disclaim it entirely. In an infinite regress of mirror reflections, what belongs to whom?

James, like all of Everett’s philosophical satires, asks a lot of great questions, in ways that startle and amuse. James has dream-dialogues with John Locke (“Don’t start up with that now,” Locke tells James, of his incredibly racist Carolina constitution, “It was a job”). It also solves the problem of Twain’s novel, with its notoriously unsatisfying ending. (So does John Keene’s masterful short story “Rivers,” from his 2015 collection Counternarratives.) Everett’s wit, imagination, and invention never flag. Over dozens of books, forty-one years’ worth, they rarely have.

But I found myself deeply frustrated by one moment, which happens when Huck takes his leave of James to join the Union Army:

I considered the northern white stance against slavery. How much of the desire to end the institution was fueled by a need to quell and subdue white guilt and pain? Was it just too much to watch? Did it offend Christian sensibilities to live in a society that allowed that practice? I knew that whatever the cause of their war, freeing slaves was an incidental premise and would be an incidental result.

James’s assumption that it’s somehow egocentric to redress evils done to other people in order to salve one’s conscience is incredibly common, in all sorts of contexts. It’s also crazy. That’s what consciences are for! That’s how they’re supposed to work! It isn’t self-interest to follow their promptings; they exist precisely to deliver us from self-interest by making us feel injuries to other people, to a lesser extent, in ourselves.

White guilt and pain at the existence of slavery was not further proof of some mysteriously and specifically white neurosis, as James and James seems to imply. (Elsewhere, James comments to another character that “White people love feeling guilty.” The defeated Confederacy strenuously denied itself this pleasure, as Sinha’s book makes clear.) Rather, the existence of slavery itself was, if anything, the proof of a pathological absence of these things, of sensibilities dulled by greed and cowardice and the mesmeric powers of habit into a state lower than any other animal’s. This isn’t anything as simple or defensible as skepticism of white people or the US government. It’s cynicism so powerful as to distort reality, as the last sentence of the paragraph makes clear: James very nearly reaches across the aisle to today’s Confederate apologists, who also maintain that the Civil War somehow wasn’t really “about” slavery. It always was. If Lincoln hadn’t figured that out in time – something else Sinha’s books make clear – the Union might well have lost.

Any movement against injustice simply is a coalition of those unusually oppressed by circumstance and those unusually oppressed by conscience. We might as well get used to it, and stop wringing our hands. There’s work to be done.