Declarations in Dialogue: Voices from Outside

Two cases: Abigail Adams’ letters and

The Haitian Constitution of Toussaint L’Ouverture

Man/human

• All humanity? Or gender-specific?

• Are women considered within the political order? • “A careful reading of the main texts of the

Enlightenment in France, England, and the colonies reveals that . . . The use of man was in fact literal, not generic” (Kerber 15)

• All “men” created equal

• Kerber, Linda K. Women of the Republic. Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America. Chapel Hill: U of

North Carolina P, 1980.

Enlightenment perspectives on women in the political order

• Women disqualified from the political participation in most Enlightenment thought on the basis of sex (confinement to reproductive roles) or gender (lacking in qualities of rationality, discipline, strength of character, intelligence)

• Men and women in a state of nature: focus on women’s reproductive role

• Montesquieu: women subject to men by law of nature• Women’s weakness disqualifies them from “the distant chase, from

war, from the usual subjects of debate” (Condorcet qtd. in Kerber)• Rousseau, Emile: women’s empire: “of softness, of address, of

complacency; her commands are caresses; her menaces are tears”

• Locke: “Conjugal Society is made by a voluntary Compact between Man and Woman” (I. 62-65). L. entertained the idea of divorce

Economic barriers to participation

• Coverture: common law tradition (from England)• Blackstone, Commentary on the Common Law (1765): “By

marriage, the husband and wife are one person in law: that is, the very being or legal existence of the woman is suspended during the marriage, or at least is incorporated and consolidated into that of the husband; under whose wing, protection, and cover, she performs every thing”

• Implication: “married women, lacking independence economic power and therefore also lacking the ability to make free and independent political judgments, were vulnerable to the influence of their husbands”

Where do women stand in the concept of the bourgeois public sphere?

The (bourgeois) public comes into being in distinction from the “private,” or domestic sphere

A paradox: 18th-century political and cultural changes opened up spaces of freedom and liberty for middle-class men while narrowing the scope of activity, movement, standing for women of all classes [salon vs. “living room”]

The domestic sphere: intimacy, “pure” humanity, voluntariness: “ideas of freedom, love, and the cultivation of the person” (48)

Habermas, Jürgen. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (German, 1962; trans. English, 1989)

The “private” is its own public

• It was “a public sphere in apolitical form--the literary precursor of the public sphere operative in the political domain . . . The training ground for a critical public . . . A process of self-clarification of private people focusing on the genuine experiences of their novel privateness” (Habermas 29).

• . . . “the subjectivity originating in the intimate sphere of the conjugal family created, so to speak, its own public” (29)

• “The public’s understanding of the public use of reason was guided specifically by such private experiences as grew out of the audience-oriented subjectivity of the conjugal family’s intimate domain”

The genre of the letter: public or private?

• Cicero (1st-century B.C.E.); Elizabeth (16th century)

• The characteristic genre of the 18th century: “outpourings of the heart”

• “Experiments with the subjectivity discovered in the close relationships of the conjugal family” (Habermas 49)

• “Private” but not secret: oriented toward an audience; the epistolary novel (Richardson, Pamela, 1740)

Abigail Adams, 1744-1818

• No formal education; father a Congregationalist minister; taught reading, writing, and numbers by her mother; access to her father’s library of English and French literature

• Married to John Adams in 1764

• Lived in Braintree, Massachusetts; bore 6 children

• Second First Lady: 1797-1801

Portrait by Benjamin Blythe, 1766

An 18th-century middle-class white woman’s republic of letters

Adams’ house in Braintree, Massachusetts

“The Good House-wife,” Colonial Williamsburg Collection

Abigail’s letters

• To Isaac Smith (4/20/1771): using the letter for intellectual exchange, overcoming gender and geographical limitations: the “humble cottage” in Braintree: “in immagination place you by me that I may ask you ten thousand Questions” (235)

• To John (3/31/1776): “Remember the Ladies” -- ironic use of the language of rights

– restriction on “unlimited power”– “all Men would be tyrants”– we will “foment a Rebelion”

– no law without representation

• John’s reply (4/14/1776): picks up Abigail’s mocking tone – “I cannot but laugh” – Women: “another Tribe”– “We know better than to repeal our Masculine systems”– “Despotism of the peticoat”

Abigail’s letters (cont.)

To Mercy Otis Warren (4/27/1776): political action– Proposal of a petition– Given the “natural propensity in Humane Nature to

domination,” there should be laws in our favor based on “just and Liberal principals”

– Abigail has been making a trial of “the Disintresstedness of his Virtue”

Abigail to John (5/26/1776): “we have it in our power not only to free ourselves but to subdue our Masters”

John Adams’ reflections, May 26, 1776

To James Stewart, not a response to Abigail; moral foundations: “in theory”

• “Whence arises the right of the men to govern the women, without their consent? Whence the right of the old to bind the young, without theirs?

• A series of questions: “why exclude women?”gender argument: their delicacyreproductive obligations: domestic carescoverture problem: influence of men in control of property

• Again, “for what reason”? Reasoning proves “you aught to admit women and children”

• Response to his own questions: fear of the multitude: “ “Depend upon it, Sir, it is dangerous to open so fruitful a source of controversy and altercation as would be opened by attempting to alter the qualifications of voters; there will be no end of it.”

John to Abigail, July 2, 1776: public deliberation and consensus on nation-formation set aside the question of women’s inclusion

“Time has been given for the whole People,

maturely to consider the great Question of

Independence and to ripen their judgments,

dissipate their Fears, and allure their

Hopes, by discussing it in News Papers and

Pamphletts, by debating it, in Assemblies,

Conventions, Committees of Safety and

Inspection, in Town and County Meetings,

as well as in private Conversations, so that

the whole People in every Colony of the 13,

have now adopted it, as their own Act. —

This will cement the Union, and avoid those

Heats and perhaps Convulsions which might

have been occasioned, by such a Declaration

Six Months ago.”

Adams Family Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society

Some conclusions

• The letter in this sequence exceeds its generic boundaries as predicted by a theory of the bourgeois public sphere: that is, as an exploration of subjectivity in an intimate sphere. Rather, A. Adams uses the medium as a kind of public: for the purposes of testing and critiquing Enlightenment ideas. She addresses her husband more as a policy-maker than as an intimate: testing his “disinterestedness.”

• The letter, with its context of intimacy, allows for a style different from the high seriousness of “rational-critical” debate. Those excluded from positions of power may adopt alternative styles strategically when high seriousness or direct challenge may not be effective.

• The “rhetorical question”: what happens when someone speaks? – J. Adams led to reflect on his position– Abigail’s progressive thinking about women’s rights enters into

circulation

The colony of Saint Domingue

Beard, J. R. (John Relly) (1863). Toussaint L'Ouverture: A Biography and Autobiography. Chapel Hill, NC: Academic Affairs Library, UNC-CH. Online Publication

“All men are created equal”: a paradox between a discourse of freedom and the

practice of slavery• In Enlightenment thought, “man” = free European

• The enslavement of non-Europeans to labor in colonies supported the economic system of the West, “paradoxically facilitating the global spread of the very Enlightenment ideals that were in such fundamental contradiction to it” (Buck-Morss 21).

• Terminology: “racial slavery” - “the slavery of Africans and people of African descent” (Davis 142); almost all enslaved people in the Americas and the West Indies were of African descent (but also indentured servitude and convict labor of Europeans); skin color was a significant feature of the cultural phenomenon of slavery, but “black” does not equal “slave”; “race,” a discourse

Buck-Morss, Susan. Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 2009.

Legal and economic points of referenceBritain, the American colonies/the United States:• British slave trade from Africa to the colonies from the 16th century forward, Canada to

Georgia• In 1775, slavery was a legal institution in all colonies; trade outlawed by 1825, but

illegal slave trade continues (e.g., Amistad)• Jefferson’s accusation that George III was responsible for slave trade in the South

(excluded paragraphs in the Declaration)• slave gatherings and literacy education outlawed in some states• Anti-slavery societies and writers (e.g., Benjamin Rush); individual colonies outlaw

slavery -- Vermont, 1777; Massachusetts, 1780s; Pennsylvania, “gradual emancipation” (Davis 152)

• 3/5 “compromise” inscribed in the Constitution, 1787: slave states allowed to count 3/5 of slave population in calculating representatives to Congress

France, the colonies of the West Indies:• Saint Domingue: richest colony in the entire colonial world; the pearl of the Antilles;

refined sugar from Saint Domingue was the basis of French bourgeois economy; by 1787, 40,000 slaves per year; “The fortunes created at Bordeaux, at Nantes, by the slave-trade, gave to the bourgeoisie that pride which needed liberty and contributed to human emancipation” (Jaurès qtd. in James, Black Jacobins 47).

• Le Code Noir, French legal code regulating treatment of black slaves in the colonies, 1685: legalized slavery, humans as property, allowed for physical torture and killing of slaves; regulations prohibiting assembly; some protections for marriage, family, and children

Some Enlightenment ideas about race

• Jean-Jacques Rousseau, On the Social Contract, 1762: “Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.” -- slavery as a metaphor; no reference to Code Noir

• Debates over the boundary between species (human/animal) and “types of mankind” within the Great Chain of Being

• David Hume, 1748: “I am apt to suspect the Negroes, and in general all other species of men, to be naturally inferior to the whites . . . No ingenious manufactures among them, no arts, no sciences . . . Such a uniform and constant difference could not happen . . . If nature had not made an original distinction between these breeds of men” (Essays: Moral, Political and Literary”)

• Immanuel Kant, 1764: “The difference between the two races is thus a substantial one: it appears to be just as great in respect to the faculties of the mind as in color” (from “Observations of the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime”)

• Counterarguments from Francis Hutcheson, Montesquieu, Condorcet; Society of the Friends of Blacks (Amis des Noirs) founded in Paris, 1788

“Promissory note” of the Declaration of Independence

• “unalienable rights”: alienation, the capacity to be separated from, to give or sell away

• “life, liberty, pursuit of happiness” (Locke: life, liberty, property)

The Declaration travels

• July 14, 1789: storming of the Bastille Prison, beginning of the French Revolution

• August, 1789: Declaration of the Rights of Man and the Citizen – 1. Men are born and remain free and equal in rights. Social distinctions may be

founded only upon the general good.– 2. The aim of all political association is the preservation of the natural and

imprescriptible rights of man. These rights are liberty, property, security, and resistance to oppression.

– 4. Liberty consists in the freedom to do everything which injures no one else; hence the exercise of the natural rights of each man has no limits except those which assure to the other members of the society the enjoyment of the same rights.

– 11. The free communication of ideas and opinions is one of the most precious of the rights of man. Every citizen may, accordingly, speak, write, and print with freedom, but shall be responsible for such abuses of this freedom as shall be defined by law.

• October, 1789: Appeal to the National Assembly by mulattoes of San Domingue to be seated as representatives of the West Indies; supported by the Amis des Noirs (anti-slavery); petitions denied. Davis: “it was precisely this issue of rights and representation for free coloreds that opened the way for slaves in Saint-Domingue to free themselves” (163).

Slave revolt in San Domingue

• 1791: Boukman, Vodou priest, leads slave insurrection in the North; burns plantations

• April, 1792: French Legislative Assembly decrees full equal rights for all free blacks and mulattoes in the French colonies

• Civil war: British, Spanish, French; Toussaint L’Ouverture fought with Spanish to preserve plantation system

• February, 1794: French National Convention outlaws slavery in all French colonies, grants citizenship to men regardless of color

• 1794-1800: L’Ouverture joins French; defeats British and Spanish; accepts nominal French sovereignty, then expels French leaders

• 1801: L’Ouverture in control of the entire island; composes Constitution and sends it to Napoleon

Toussaint Bréda/L’Ouverture

• 1743-1803, born to African parents sold into slavery

• Perhaps educated by his French godfather; Jesuit priests

• Some literacy; dictated letters• Attained freedom in 1776;

owned a plantation and slaves• Joined the rebellion in 1791

Handler and Tuite, The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slave Life in the Americas. A Visual Record. Digital Media Lab. U of Virginia Library.

Toussaint Louverture, Chef des Noirs, Insurgé de Saint Domingue (Paris [1800]). Copy in the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University

Haitian Constitution of 1801

• Abolition of slavery• “Men” not divided legally by color• Colony as family led by the father• Toussaint Louverture, governor for life• Attachment to French government• No right to free assembly

• Under the state of emergency (Art. 77) still obtaining, no sphere for public participation is legally structured. Private or domestic sphere is legislated into the state.

• Liberty and security without freedom• Circulation: a legacy for future struggles: Frederick Douglass’

address, Columbian Exposition, 1893