Negotiating (through) the Skin: The Black Body, Pamphleteering, and African American Writing against Biological Exclusion

Abstract

This chapter turns to antebellum African American pamphlets, a part of the African American writing tradition generally understudied in comparison with the fugitive slave narrative. Considering the ways in which black pamphleteers dealt with the pressing task of tackling stereotypes and racialisms that sought to exclude the black body “biologically,” I demonstrate how their strategies of writing against this “biological exclusion” could also become a means for expressing environmental knowledge. While including seminal texts like David Walker’s “Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World” (1829), this chapter primarily focuses on lesser-known pamphlets by Hosea Easton, John Lewis, and William Whipper. The readings draw attention to alternative lines within the pamphlet tradition and suggest its relevance for ecocriticism.

The journey of the term and concept of race into the nineteenth-century U.S. is in many ways the history of its increasing biologization. While, etymologically, “race” can be traced back to an aristocratic context, a notion of race that linked the “racial” with a discourse of the “natural/biological” took root at least as early as the European Enlightenment.¹ It travelled across the Atlantic as swiftly as the vessels of the colonial slave-trade it helped justify, and became engrained in the practices of a young United States, where a biologized concept of race was rooted in “nature” rather than aristocratic birth. What came to the fore on the other side of the Atlantic was not only what historian Robert Young describes as a by then well-established “cultural pecking order, with those who had most civilization at the top, and those who were considered to have none […] at the bottom” (94), but also a set of increasingly elaborate strategies of “biological” justification for this “order.” Out of the broader “entry of life into history” in modernity that Michel Foucault, in The Will to Knowledge (1976), explains as an emergence of “biopower” (cf. 133–159), race came to mark a foundational paradox of the young United States as the “naturally” justified downside of the principle that “all men are created equal.”

Nowhere, perhaps, is this paradox more clearly recognizable than in Thomas Jefferson’s Notes on the State of Virginia (1785). Although the co-author of the “Declaration of Independence,” representing the revolutionary ideology of his era’s intellectual elite, generally condemns slavery in the spirit of freedom, the 23 “Queries” of Notes are at the same time a manifestation of a discriminatory biologization of race around Jefferson’s notion of blackness. The tract, to use Frantz Fanon’s term, “epidermalizes” race (11), reading skin color as the single most important marker of physical racial difference and deducing supposedly correlating mental differences along categories such as “memory, reason, and imagination” (Jefferson 149). On the one hand, Jefferson observes “the real distinctions which nature has made” in skin color, arguing that “[w]hether the black of the negro resides in the reticular membrane between the skin and the scarf-skin [i.e. epidermis], or in the scarf-skin itself; whether it proceeds from the color of the blood, or the color of the bile […], the difference is fixed in nature, and is as real as if its seat and cause were better known to us” (147).² On the other hand, he claims that by “[c]omparing them [Africans and Americans of African descent] by their faculties […] it appears to me that in memory they are equal to the whites; in reason much inferior, as I think one could scarcely be found capable of tracing and comprehending the investigations of Euclid; and that in imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous” (149).

Thus, Notes not only encapsulates a foundational paradox of the United States, but also acts stylistically and thematically as a precursor of nineteenth-century racial thought in at least three ways. First, as it articulates and sets up, often in a hypothesizing tone (“appears”; “scarcely” (149)), the paradigms of body and “racial character” along which a biologizing racial science came to develop. Second, by participating in a general rhetoric of othering through its constant use of “they/them” with respect to Americans of African descent. And, third, as it employs quasi-scientific language—one scholar refers to Jefferson as a “natural cum social scientist” (Jarrett 33)—to the end of claiming that blacks are “inferior to whites in the endowments of both body and mind” (Jefferson 153). In such ways, Jefferson’s reading of blackness as absence and abnormality, as supposedly doomed by natural, scientifically verifiable deficiencies, prefigures the characteristics of racial discourses of the nineteenth century (and beyond). Notes plays a signal role in what Young traces as a gradual shift from an “enlightenment universalism” and its “doctrine of human equality” to a mid-nineteenth century “darker aphorism: ‘different—and also different, unequal’” (92); the tract is part of a fabric that biologized race around notions of “blackness,” and that undoubtedly reached their climax, for the time being, during the antebellum period. Here, in the context of heightening sectional tensions and heated debate over slavery, it was not merely proslavery arguments but a wide variety of discourses including, for instance, craniometry, phrenology, or physiognomy that produced the “biological truths” of a broad racialization based on a supposedly essential, naturally given distinctiveness of the black body.

In what follows, I examine how this violently constructed distinctiveness of the black body affected the discursive position of the antebellum black writer, to demonstrate how African American strategies of writing against this “biological exclusion” could express environmental knowledge. To this end, Chap. 4 shifts the focus both in terms of tracing environmental knowledge through a (Foucauldian) biopolitical lens, and in terms of corpus, as I turn to antebellum (political) pamphlets, a type of texts that is generally underrepresented in comparison with the fugitive slave narrative. By moving away from the slave narrative, I do not mean to imply that the genre does not employ the rhetorical strategies and forms of environmental knowledge that are described in this chapter with respect to African American pamphlets. Nonetheless, the strategies I trace are more dominant in the latter. Pamphlets of the period are particularly striking examples of writing against a biological exclusion of the black body in ways that express an environmental knowledge that—even though they are explicitly political texts—goes beyond political rhetoric or a merely metaphorical use of nature. My readings aim to identify three particular strategies that involve an articulation of environmental knowledge: pamphleteers’ use of notions of “birth” and “blood” that stresses intimate connections to the land and its cultivation, their manner of “dissecting and environmentalizing” the black body that roots their egalitarianism in non-human nature, and their attempts at re-interpreting the master-signifier “nature” as such. To illustrate these strategies, I have included both well-known pamphlets by James Forten, David Walker, or David Ruggles, but also texts that are obscure even among well-informed readers, like those by Hosea Easton, John Lewis, or William Whipper, which were selected to draw attention to alternative lines within the tradition and to suggest their relevance for ecocriticism. Obviously, much more remains to be done in this respect and additional examples (also regarding the three strategies I describe) could have been chosen (e.g. pamphlets by figures like Henry Highland Garnet, Maria W. Stewart, or Frederick Douglass). Nonetheless, my choice of a range of diverse texts for this chapter serves well both the general aim of this study to broadly trace facets of foundational African American environmental knowledge, and my purpose to provide another useful starting point that highlights the relevance of this part of the African American tradition for ecocritical readings.

The Black Body: Biological Exclusion and Environmental State of Exception

At the heart of an antebellum biologization of race lay a set of including and excluding processes that constituted the epistemic basis of a variety of discourses, and that crucially shaped the discursive position from which African Americans formed and articulated environmental knowledge. A good starting point for outlining the racializing fabric of such processes is an 1841 lithograph by Edward Williams Clay, a Northern apologist of slavery.³ Clay’s depiction is, in many ways, typical of antebellum plantation pastoral. It characteristically emphasizes fundamental racial as supposedly “natural” differences between humans; differences that resolve, however, into a seemingly idyllic, harmonious, and mutually beneficent order. To the right, a white family discernible in attire and posture as Southern aristocracy express their “benevolent” attitude, stating, according to an inscription above, that “nothing shall be spared to increase the comfort and happiness” of the “poor creatures” portrayed in the left-hand corner. These “poor creatures,” on the other hand, appear to complement this attitude, as the text above the ensemble suggests: “God bless you massa! you feed and clothe us. When we are sick you nurse us, and when too old to work, you provide for us!” Black slaves are depicted as part of a supposedly benign social contract of the peculiar institution. They are the recipients of a colonial benevolence, whether as grateful, passive and docile elements in the left-hand corner, or as child-like, merrily dancing figures, apparently joyful and full of contentment, in the background.

The lithograph is, however, more than an instance of plantation pastoral, as it captures a particular positioning of the black body marked by processes of inclusion, exclusion and exception. The latter term, which has gained prominence especially in connection with Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer-project and its concept of a “state of exception,” denotes the paradoxical principle at the heart of a simultaneously excluding and including process. In a state of exception, an exclusion takes place that, at the same time and thereby, produces its own inclusion. Thus, the character of a “state of exception” is, according to Agamben, the creation of “a zone of indistinction between outside and inside, chaos and the normal situation” (19).

This paradoxical figure of the exception as an “including exclusion”—not Agamben’s specific argument as a whole⁴—is productive for rethinking a biologizing antebellum racial politics as the context in which African American environmental knowledge emerged. Clay’s lithograph is, in this respect, the symbolic expression of a fundamental constellation that involved processes of an inclusion, exclusion and exception of the black body. Consider the interplay between the black figures on the left, the white figures on the right, and the hound at the center of the ensemble: on a basic level, the latter simply represents biological non-human life in the non-human animal itself. Reading the constellation as a whole, however, the biologically racializing dimension of the ensemble becomes perceivable, to begin with, regarding the coloring of the hound and its touchability in relation to the portrayed members of the white aristocracy. The coloring itself marks the animal as positioned closer to the “superior” race, the white hound symbolizing a domesticated and “civilized” animality of white humanity. Moreover, the girl’s touch of the animal’s snout, the possibility of tactile contact with this symbol of a domesticated “whitened” animality, further emphasizes the inclusion of this animality into a pastoral harmony, a pastoral framework of the “white human.”

The black figures, by contrast, are biologically excluded through the lithograph’s symbolism in two ways. First, the image spatially and visually severs them from any kind of connection with the “whitened” non-human animality represented in the hound; the enslaved are located exclusively amongst themselves, on the left-hand side or in the background. Secondly, the black characters are racialized and excluded through a distorting portrayal of their physiognomy; their facial features and bodily postures echo a variety of biologically excluding stereotypes that became more dominant from the 1830s on. Such stereotypes manifested in a variety of discourses that simultaneously articulated racial and environmental knowledge and that ranged from the works of the “American School” to the pamphlets published by proslavery conventions or the “manuals” on the “proper” treatment of slaves that were part of antebellum Southern culture. While the racial scientists themselves, coming from various disciplines, made their claims through the authorizing veil of scientific objectivity, their ideas were often openly politicized across popular antebellum discourses, which worked more explicitly and graphically towards producing the biological exclusion of the black body visible in Clay’s lithograph.

A typical example of how the assumptions of racist pseudo-scientific knowledge came to permeate antebellum discourse is Richard Colfax’s “Evidence against the views of the Abolitionists” (1833), a short text that aimed to demonstrate “to the public, that the physical and mental differences between negroes and white men, are sufficient to warrant us in affirming that they have descended from distinct origins” (8). To this end, Colfax “objectively” compared nerves and brains of both humans and animals to arrive at the biologically deduced racist belief that within “the great zoological chain,” “the negroes, whether physically or morally considered, are so inferior as to resemble the brute creation as nearly as they do the white species” (26, 30). Other proslavery arguments presented additional strategies for conflating enslaved body and black body into a single biologically excluded entity. Apart from producing stereotypes of a black “animality” or “beastliness,” which would have a longstanding and horrific legacy, some sought justification for slavery through the notion that “negro slaves alone are constitutionally adapted to labor in those climates where the great staples of cotton, rice and sugar can be produced” (Shannon 8). Others, such as the Georgian Robert Collins in his “Essay on the Treatment and Management of Slaves,” deployed the myth that “[n]egroes are by nature tyrannical in their dispositions […] so that it becomes a prominent duty of owners and overseers, to keep peace, and prevent quarrelling and disputes among them” (11). The best result, according to such arguments, would be effected through strict discipline (cf. 12–14), and “[a]s long as owners are governed by their own interest,” since only then would “the slaves have good security for a comfortable support” (15).⁵

In such ways, processes of inclusion, exclusion, and exception that were part of antebellum biologizations of race came to mark not merely the enslaved black body, but the black body as such, and produced a discursive position that is significant in the context of African American environmental knowledge. This position was not only characterized by what Orlando Patterson, in his 1982 Slavery and Social Death, has called the “slave’s natal alienation,” i.e. “the slave’s forced alienation, the loss of ties of birth in both ascending and descending generations” (5, 7), but also involved, especially in an antebellum U.S. context, the “biological” marking of the black body. Not just the “natal alienation and genealogical isolation” of an enslaved body (338), but, I want to propose, a biological exclusion and an environmental state of exception of the black body produced the characteristic position from which African Americans raised voice during the age of American racial slavery. If an exclusion took place on the level of the biological, then the inclusionary side of this process becomes visible on the level of the environmental. Through (pseudo-)scientific or popular discourses, but also through aesthetic modes such as the pastoral or the sublime, the black body was simultaneously biologically excluded and included, re-placed, and thus exceptionalized. In Clay’s lithograph, for example, the pastoral, as an aesthetic mode that expresses a dominant environmental knowledge, becomes complicit in this positioning of the black body as it environmentally includes what the imagery as a whole biologically excludes. The contact between the white child and a “whitened” non-human nature in the hound marks a white privilege at the expense of the racializing biological exclusion of the black body, while this same exclusion is included via a representational mode, in this case the pastoral, that expresses a dominant racialized environmental knowledge.

Tracing fundamental links between racial and environmental knowledge in terms of processes of inclusion, exclusion, and exception complements and expands existing scholarly concepts that are central to reading African American literature and culture ecocritically, for instance those by Outka, Myers, or, more recently, Lindgren Johnson. Outka’s important observation, for example, that “the conflation of blackness and nature served as the principle ‘justification’ for chattel slavery in antebellum America” (25), no doubt captures facets of what I have described here in terms of the “biological exclusion” of the black body. It could be expanded, however, through the notion of an “environmental state of exception,” to see more accurately how African American environmental knowledge emerged apart from Outka’s proposed divide between a (white) sublime as opposed to a (black) trauma response to non-human nature.⁶ Myers’s analogy between racism and (white) environmental estrangement, on the other hand, his idea that “Euroamerican racism and alienation from nature derive from the same source and result in the joint and interlocking domination of people of color and the natural world” (15), can also be reconsidered through identifying processes of biological exclusion and environmental exception. Largely falling short in my view of recognizing the complexities involved in the production of racialized environmental knowledge, Myers’s perspective ignores, speaking in the symbolism of the discussed lithograph, the ambivalence of the processes symbolized by the pastoralizing touch of the hound, which, in fact, produces the racist exclusion of the black figures through a Euro-American pastoral identification with nature rather than alienation from it. By contrast, fundamentally rethinking the dynamics of a racializing environmental knowledge in terms of processes of inclusion, exclusion, and exception, provides a basis for tracing how African American environmental knowledge developed precisely out of this paradox-ridden constellation, i.e. in response to the black body’s entanglements in a biological state of exclusion and an environmental state of exception. It helps identifying processes and developments in African American writing that potentially led to those moments Lindgren Johnson has recently described with the term “fugitive humanism,” where “moving into the human is potentially simultaneous with a new way of being human” (17, emphasis in original).

The Antebellum Black Writer: Agitating against Biological Exclusion

The biological exclusion and environmental state of exception of the black body marked the discursive position of the black writer, especially with respect to expressing environmental knowledge. To begin, the biologizing racialization of the black body fundamentally shaped the relation between the black writer’s claims to humanity—to being a “human animal”—and writing as such. The black written word in itself came to function, after all, as an inevitable marker, a “proof,” of humanity, since the central challenge from the very beginnings of the African American (written) literary tradition was, in a sense, that of refuting Jefferson’s assessment that “[a]mong the blacks is misery enough, God knows, but no poetry” (150). Accordingly, as numerous scholars have pointed out, “the production of literature was taken to be the central arena in which persons of African descent could […] establish and redefine their status within the human community” (Gates 129). African American letters were in this respect, from the start, and in and of themselves, political acts of resistance.

At the same time, the status of the black written word was characterized by its universalization along the biologically racialized black body. One of the central problems antebellum African American writers, whether free-born or formerly enslaved, had to come to terms with was their general perception as “a monolithic group, all slave-classed” (Blockett 116).⁷ Being a black writer inevitably meant writing not only for but to a certain extent as enslaved; it meant consciously agitating from a position of the racialized black body and articulating environmental knowledge out of a discursive position shaped by biological exclusion and environmental exception. Fugitive slave narratives responded in a variety of ways to this position, as my readings of the previous two chapters have shown. Even though the slave narrative displays a general impulse towards hyper-separation as part of its strategies of “humanization” that sought to sever the devastating ties with the non-human under slavery, many texts also engaged in signifying revisions of established Euro-American forms of environmental knowledge or found alternative means for articulating environmental knowledge. This could happen, for instance, by creating and using a subversive literary space such as the Underground Railroad that enabled an expression of alliances and identifications with the non-human material world (Chap. 2), through a double-voiced pastoralism (Chap. 3), or via a self-reflexive employment of the sublime (Chap. 1).

For another group of antebellum African American writers, free blacks, the discursive position from which they raised their voice (not the general situation) was in some ways similar. They, too, had to find adequate responses to the delineated position of the black writer that was bound to a biologically othered black body. Therefore, the same constellation of the biologically excluded and environmentally exceptionalized black body must also be taken into account when considering the production of environmental knowledge in the political and literary discourses of free black communities, in particular in the body of texts this chapter turns to, African American pamphlets.

While scholars have traditionally paid great attention to the antebellum period as “the golden age of the slave narrative,” black pamphleteering, with the exception of David Walker’s “Appeal,” has generally remained somewhat underrepresented (Foster 61). Although recently complemented by important online resources,⁸ there exist so far only a handful of printed collections, namely those by Porter (1969), Newman et al. (2001), and Thompson (2004), focusing exclusively on such texts,⁹ which may broadly be defined as

something between a broadside and a book. Adaptable as an argumentative essay, a short narrative of events, or a bare-bones sketch of an organization’s proceedings, the pamphlet could be used by all manner of activists. At the same time the pamphlet offered a media form that promised to preserve words and deeds in a discrete, individual, and long-lived object. (Newman et al. 2)

It was especially this versatility of the medium and the longevity of the written word, along with the relative freedom pamphleteering offered in terms of the writer/publisher’s control over the production and distribution process, which made this way of raising voice so appealing to free black organizations and individuals from the 1790s on. Apart from its general significance as a shaping force of antebellum culture, this set of texts is also of interest for readings of African American literature from an ecocritical perspective because black pamphleteering developed into intertextual webs marked by an impressive thematic diversity and “polyvocality” (Moody 139). Pamphlets became another primal place where African American writers devised forms of environmental knowledge; embedded within their more explicit concerns such as abolitionism, emancipation, education, women’s rights or (anti-)colonizationism, pamphleteers also addressed fundamental questions of the human in its non-human non-discursive material conditions.

In their struggle with the discursive position of a biologically excluded and environmentally exceptionalized black body, the component predominantly focused on in African American pamphlet literature of the antebellum period was the question and problem of biological exclusion. The idea of a biologically othered black body was, explicitly and implicitly, attacked by black pamphleteers, who were, if in different ways, by no means less affected by the ubiquitous racialization of the black body than those writers who had fled Southern enslavement. After all, as one of the most astute observers of antebellum culture, Frenchman Alexis de Tocqueville, noted as early as 1835, “race prejudice seems stronger in those states that have abolished slavery than in those where it still exists” (402). Often painfully recognizing the truth of these words in their daily lives and realizing at the same time to be living in the “golden age of Literature” (Whipper, “Address 1828” 107), pamphleteers effectively launched their voices from the fast-developing African American communities in Boston, Philadelphia, and New York City. They employed the new opportunities of a transforming mass media in order to turn oral discourse into a more widely and increasingly nationally received written protest¹⁰ that, among other things, aimed to “negotiate (through) the skin” of a biologically excluded black body. Black pamphleteers sought to “see through” the skin, so to speak, and produced environmental knowledge that was meant to “re-position” the human body in order to lay bare a common humanity around and beneath the color of the skin. In this, they employed, I want to suggest, three particular strategies of producing environmental knowledge against biological exclusion. Firstly, pamphleteers articulated their claims through the notions of “birth and blood”; secondly, they “dissected and environmentalized” the black body; and, thirdly, they wrote strategically through the discourse of “nature.”

Birth and Blood

“Birth” and “blood” are among the earliest and longest-standing themes in black pamphleteering. From the beginnings of the tradition, African American pamphleteers recognized both ideas as central to conceptualizing and articulating their humanity and their rights as citizens, and connected their claims of “birth” and “blood” with the founding documents of the United States. To pamphlet pioneers such as Richard Allen and Absalom Jones, Daniel Coker, Prince Saunders, or James Forten, revolutionary rhetoric offered a basic ideological framework, and it was their resourceful employment of this framework that in many ways laid the conceptual basis for antebellum African American pamphleteering and the abolitionism of the 1830s.¹¹

For black pamphleteers of the early nineteenth century, a period that was shaped by historical events such as the Haitian Revolution (1791–1804), the Denmark Vesey insurrection (1822) or the Great Awakening in the 1820s, the ideology of the American Revolution of which many had first-hand recollections represented both a great paradox and the foundation of their ideas on the meanings of “birth.” On the one hand, there was the undeniable contradiction of slaveholding founding fathers and the fact that a revolution that had also been the largest slave uprising in American history paradoxically established a system that justified racial slavery. In this sense, fighting a war for independence had eventually brought even more dependence for many Americans of African descent. On the other hand, the “self-evident” principles articulated through the American Revolution, namely that “all men are created free and equal” or, as the constitution of Massachusetts had it, “born free and equal,” made the founding documents an appealing vantage point for making claims against the advancing biological exclusion of the black body that manifested itself as the downside of American Freedom. The “Declaration of Independence” in particular provided early black pamphleteers with a powerful “mirror” to hold up to white Americans in order to show them that their conduct was, as James Forten put it in his “Letters from a Man of Color” (1813), “in direct violation of the letter and spirit of [the] Constitution” (67).

Although often deferential in tone and moderate in their claims, early black pamphleteers thus met the challenge of their times as they criticized the double standards of American democracy. Most often out of a black church that began to act, in W.E.B. Du Bois’s words, as the “great engine of moral uplift” (208), pamphleteers forged a rhetoric that centrally employed the notion of “birth” in order to make their more concrete political claims, for instance for racial equality, voting rights or uplift. A rhetoric of “birth” became particularly prominent in the wake of the American Colonization Society (ACS) in 1816 and its object of removing free blacks from American soil. James Forten, for example, joined by prominent Philadelphian churchmen Richard Allen and Absalom Jones articulated an elaborate “nativizing” connection between birth environment and national belonging in 1817. In a pamphlet that published the minutes of a protest meeting against colonization held at Philadelphia’s Bethel Church in January of that year, the participants, under Forten’s leadership, ascertained that, since

our ancestors (not of choice) were the first successful cultivators of the wilds of America, we, their descendants, feel ourselves entitled to participate in the blessings of her luxuriant soil, which their blood and sweat enriched; and that any measure or system of measures, having a tendency to banish us from her bosom, would not only be cruel, but in direct violation of those principles which have been the boast of this republic. (qtd. Billington 8–9)

Thus resolving, in opposition to the schemes of the ACS, that “we will never separate ourselves from the slave population of this country” (9), the pamphleteers make their political claims by articulating an environmental knowledge that centrally involves the notion of birth. They justify their rights to “the blessings of her luxuriant soil” with both the idea that their “blood and sweat” have enriched this soil, and with the argument that they were the “first successful cultivators of the wilds” (8). Not the mere fact of being born in the New World, but the notion of transforming and being transformed by a particular non-human environment (“wilds”) becomes their means of countering the colonization scheme of the ACS. In this sense, early forms of African American pamphleteering hint at an environmental knowledge gained early on that shows a remarkable resemblance to the American myth of an individual’s transformation through New World soil and that foreshadows what would become articulated much later in Frederick Jackson Turner’s “Frontier Thesis.”

The idea of birth as meaningful precisely because of its occurrence under particular environmental circumstances, and as guaranteeing human rights and American citizenship, ran into and through African American pamphleteering discourse of the antebellum period,¹² where it increasingly intersected with a rhetoric of blood. While “birth” had primarily attained a uniting function, as it enabled meeting racial exclusion through claims of a common humanity and nationality that emerged from being bound to a common native environment, “blood” had a much more ambivalent rhetorical potential. To recognize this potential, one must only think of the multiple ways in which blood could be “spilled.” It made all the difference whether one claimed, like the Rev. Jeremiah Asher of the Shiloh Baptist Church and others, to have “bled and died for liberty” in a nationally unifying War of Independence or the War of 1812 (18), or whether blood was, as some separatist voices threatened, to be spilled in slave insurrections or all-out race war.

Accordingly, “blood” attained a variety of meanings for antebellum pamphleteers that may best be grasped along the general lines of a “separating” and a “unifying” function. The latter was, as Paul Goodman has demonstrated in Of One Blood (1998), an integral part of the interracial collaborative efforts of the 1830s and 1840s, since reaching their overall goal of “contradict[ing] the assumptions upon which prejudice rested […] require[d] white abolitionists and free blacks to show the prejudiced by concrete acts that all were in fact ‘of one blood’” (247). The former, divisive function of a rhetoric of blood, on the other hand, is particularly strong in early black nationalist works, such as Robert A. Young’s enraged “Ethiopian Manifesto” (1829) or the most influential piece of African American pamphlet literature of the antebellum period, David Walker’s “Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World” (1829).

Often recognized as a milestone, Walker’s pamphlet stands at the center of a cluster of texts, as it both embraces its predecessors and their themes and at the same time inaugurates a more radical tradition that would mark the coming decades. Apart from the stylistic and thematic innovations of Walker’s text, such as its militant voice, its re-evaluation of racial history, or its radical “ethiopianism,”¹³ the “Appeal” also transforms notions of birth and blood. While echoing in this respect a by then established argument against colonization (Walker cites Richard Allen (64) and Samuel Cornish (76)), the “Appeal” also employs a separatist notion of “blood” that aims to unite the “Colored Citizens” of the United States and ultimately, “of the World,” under one black nationalist banner. In Article IV, Walker thus claims that

America is more our country, than it is the whites—we have enriched it with our blood and tears. The greatest riches in all America have arisen from our blood and tears:—and will they drive us from our property and homes, which we have earned with our blood? They must look sharp or this very thing will bring swift destruction upon them. The Americans have got so fat on our blood and groans, that they have almost forgotten the God of armies. (73)

In keeping with the general impetus of the “Appeal,” which continuously addresses its audience as “my brethren” and engages in the notion of a common lineage that is visible on the surface of the body in a common skin color, (black) blood becomes, for Walker, a divisive nationalizing factor. At this point, the text significantly departs from an earlier rhetoric. In the “Appeal,” it is no more a U.S. American environment out of which a rhetoric of being American-born and “American-blooded” emerges, but the traumatic spilling of “black blood” into that soil, which becomes the source of inalienable birthrights. Walker’s nationalism thus also signifies on an earlier African American environmental knowledge as it revises the notion of “environmentally induced” birthrights and shifts the source of such human rights from Forten, Allen and Jones’s “blood and sweat” of transforming a New World environment (qtd. Billington 8, emphasis mine), to the “blood and tears” of being forced to do so through slavery (Walker 73, emphasis mine).

The line of tradition that emerges at this point in Walker is thus, as Ian Finseth puts it in his discussion of the “Appeal” as a Black Nationalist manifesto, that of “an epidermalized Africanist ethos uniting the people he [Walker] collectively calls ‘my color,’ but detached from the actual geographical and cultural realities of Africa” (356–7). The racial pride furnished through a bond construed among blacks primarily plays on imagining the spilling of the soil with a distinct black blood, and it is due to this imaginative nature of his common-blood-ideology that Walker ultimately remains an “Americanist” who does not end up promoting colonization—an argumentative move that can be found in a variety of black nationalists.

Despite the significant impact of the “Appeal” across the nation and Walker’s influence on figures like Maria W. Stewart or Henry Highland Garnet, it is important to note the diversity that marks the pamphlet tradition with respect to engaging notions of birth and blood. A crucial example attesting to this diversity and to another strand of thought in the tradition is a pamphlet by Hosea Easton that was published in 1838, nine years after Walker’s tract had first made its appearance. In his lengthy “Treatise” Easton rhetorically employs “blood” in a way that illustrates the continuing presence and the development of pre-Walker ideas by pamphleteers of the 1830s. Easton clearly echoes and advances earlier claims respecting birth and blood, when he proposes:

The blood of the parents in seasoning of this climate becomes changed—also, the food for the mother being the production of this country, and congenial to the climate—the atmosphere she breathes—the surrounding objects which strike her senses—all are principles which establish and give character to the constitutional principles of the child, among which the blood is an essential constituent; hence every child born in America, even if it be black as jet, is American by birth and blood. (47–48)

Easton’s text thus exemplifies a line of tradition in African American antebellum pamphleteering that significantly diverged from Walker’s ideas and rhetoric, not only because it does not promote Black Nationalism, but especially also through its distinct employment of notions of birth and blood. In Easton’s case, it is not distinct, inheritable and “separate” black bloodlines and the traumatic spilling of such blood that built the foundation of African American birthrights. Instead, he makes a radical environmentalism the basis of his racial egalitarianism. His point is precisely that “[i]f blood has any thing to do with it [U.S. citizenship], then we are able to prove that there is not a drop of African blood, according to the general acceptation of the term, flowing in the veins of an American born child, though black as jet” (47, emphasis mine).

In this respect, Easton’s pamphlet stands as an example of those antebellum voices that embraced yet also significantly refined the rhetoric of birth and blood of a pre-Walker period into a more radical environmentalism. Part of the antebellum tradition’s rhetoric of birth and blood was based less on Walker and more on voices like Forten’s, who had claimed as early as 1813 that human bodies, whether clothed in a black or a white skin, are “sustained by the same power, supported by the same food, hurt by the same wounds, wounded by the same wrongs, pleased with the same delights, and propagated by the same means” (Letters, qtd. from Billington 14). Thus, a number of diverse arguments around the themes of birth and blood often aimed to merge a national with a natal and environmental belonging. Frequently involving articulations of fundamental relations between the human and its non-human non-discursive material conditions, these arguments are not just instances of writing against a biological exclusion of the black body, but simultaneously a form of African American environmental knowledge.

Dissecting and Environmentalizing the Black Body

Among the many influential strategies of Walker’s “multifaceted literary act” is the way in which the “Appeal” attacked the idea that “nature” or “biology” provided a justification for the oppression and enslavement of African Americans (Newman, Prophet 14). In that well-known part of his argument that launched an explicit assault on Jefferson, for instance, Walker energetically sets the stage for refuting arguments for a biological inferiority of the black body. Against Jefferson’s view that the enslavement of blacks in the New World was more benign than ancient Egyptian and Roman slavery due to the fact that the former was justified by “nature which has produced the [master/slave] distinction” (Jefferson, qtd. Walker 18), Walker suggests that no evidence can be found

that the Egyptians heaped the insupportable insult upon the children of Israel, by telling them that they were not of the human family. Can the whites deny this charge? Have they not, after having reduced us to the deplorable condition of slaves under their feet, held us up as descending originally from the tribes of Monkeys or Orang-Outangs [sic!]? (12)

Walker not only claims that American slavery is worse. Rather, his charge is aimed at a host of racist comparisons of African Americans with non-human animals. He rages against those who see blacks marked as “brutes” (8, 15, 19, 28, 35), “talking apes” (68, 69) or “Orang-Outangs” (12), and thereby sets the stage for a more aggressive pamphleteering rhetoric against the developing, biologically othering racialism of the antebellum period.

At this point, Walker’s attack hints at a second major strategy of black pamphleteers’ writing against biological exclusion. Beyond reclaiming their rights as humans and citizens through notions of birth and blood, pamphleteers also began writing against biological exclusion by producing an environmental knowledge that employed a strategy of conceptually, politically, and sometimes almost literally dissecting and environmentalizing the black body. At least from the 1830s on, such strategies that focused more explicitly on the body as such became a necessity in the context of a burgeoning racial science and its increasingly hostile “findings.” For while the 1830s saw the emergence of a “relatively high and rising black literacy” (Horton and Horton 130) as well as the advent of Garrisonian abolitionism and the black convention movement, the period also witnessed the most elaborate “scientific” arguments for inherent black inferiority to date. Although precursors of American polygenism such as Charles Caldwell, a Philadelphian physician and pioneering phrenologist, had launched attacks on the “environmental” idea that climate alone had produced racial distinctions during the 1820s,¹⁴ it was work by Morton, Nott, Gliddon, and, later, Agassiz, that became instrumental in verifying essentialist racial views on the basis of supposedly different origins of human “types.” Where Jefferson, some decades ago, had hypothesized on the idea of black inferiority, the “American School” provided seemingly solid evidence and scientific truths which became popular in a climate where, as one of its proponents put it in 1850, “[r]ace [was] everything: literature, science, art—in a word, civilization” (Knox v).

Two antebellum pamphlets, by Hosea Easton (1837) and John Lewis (1852), are particularly revealing African American responses to this public climate as they form an environmental knowledge that “dissected and environmentalized” the black body. The relative lack of scholarly attention to both texts so far is particularly surprising with respect to the former, Easton’s “Treatise on the Intellectual Character and Civil and Political Conditions of the Colored People of the U. States,” a rich and more than 50-page tract the author wrote one year before his premature death.¹⁵ Published in 1837, the “Treatise,” although, as noted above, often referring back to earlier pamphleteering themes, cannot be properly understood without Walker as a context. The relation between the two pamphlets is ambivalent, as Easton’s text shares thematic and stylistic similarities with Walker, but also follows a diverging argumentative trajectory. On the one hand, Easton’s pamphlet echoes Walker’s radical statement both formally and content-wise. The “Treatise” employs the quadripartite structure of the “Appeal” (and by extension signifies on Jefferson), and shares an alternative long-term historicization of racial history and a general emphasis on the constructedness of racial difference. On the other hand, there are significant differences between Walker’s and Easton’s arguments that make the latter particularly valuable for tracing the production of environmental knowledge against the biological exclusion of the black body. Apart from differences in rhetoric, style, and intended audience, and Easton’s disengagement of the idea of imaginatively essentialized “black blood,”¹⁶ the “Treatise” provides a contrast to Walker’s Black Nationalist argument and represents one of the most elaborate attempts at refuting biological exclusion through a radically de-racializing “environmentalism” of the antebellum period.

Easton’s strategy involves two fundamental conceptual “dissections” of the biologically racialized black body: first, a separation of body from mind, and, second, a separation of enslaved body from black body. Moreover and above all, however, Easton’s argument is rooted in a basic notion of “natural variety.” Writing against the epidermalization of race, the “Treatise” primarily aims to show that skin color is an arbitrary racial marker, since “the variety of color, in the human species, is the result of the same laws which variegate the whole creation” (5). To support this claim, Easton repeatedly employs descriptions of non-human material environments, for instance, when he writes that

[w]e need only visit the potato and corn patch, (not a costly school,) and we shall be perfectly satisfied, for there, in the same hill, on one stalk, sprung from one potato, you may find several of different colors; and upon the same corn-stalk you may find two ears, one white or yellow, and the other deep red; and sometimes you may find an astonishing variety of colors displayed on one ear among the kernels; and what makes the observation more delightful, they are never found quarrelling about their color, though some have shades of extreme beauty. […] If you go to the field of grass, you will find that all grass is the same grass in variety; go to the herds and flocks, and among the feathered tribe, or view nature where you will, she tells us all that we can know, why it is that one man’s head bears woolly, and another flaxen hair. (6)

Easton draws an analogy between the physical variety found in non-human non-discursive materialities and the physical variety in human bodies, thus conveying, through a discourse of “nature,” the idea of a general law of variety. This law, by extension, is linked to a celebration of the divine, as it was ultimately “God [who] gave nature the gift of producing variety, and that gift, like uncontrolled power every where [sic!], was desirous to act like itself” (5). Physical variety becomes for Easton primarily a reason for celebration, not for separating and categorizing, or hierarchizing and subduing specific forms of (human or non-human) materialities.

From this perspective, natural variety cannot be “understood,” as it is eventually rooted in god. After all, “it is impossible for man to comprehend nature or her works. She has been supplied with an ability by her author to do wonders, insomuch that some have been foolish enough to think her to be God. All must confess she possesses a mysterious power to produce variety” (5–6). Exterior, physical distinctions in humans, among which, Easton stresses, the color of the skin is merely one, are to be accepted and revered as expressions of a God-given law of variety in the way humans would accept and revere the “innumerable colors” of “the same species of flowers” (5). This implies that such distinctions cannot be grasped in (pseudo-)scientific terms that produce supposedly true—yet ultimately false, since inevitably arbitrary—assumptions based on bodily markers that lead to the biological, man-made exclusion of one part of a (human) species. Easton therefore undoes, from the start, one of the fundamental assumptions underlying the production of the racializing and biologically excluding knowledge of the antebellum period, namely the idea “that the observed biological traits and social behaviors of various human populations held the key for understanding how those natural processes worked” (Finseth 340). It is exactly not possible, says Easton, to grasp such “natural processes” purely epistemologically; a more egalitarian acceptance and celebration of creation, not the urge to thoroughly understand it, are central facets of Easton’s environmental knowledge.

The first of the two central “dissections” of the biologically racialized black body that Easton’s text performs on this general basis is the conceptual separation of physical variety among the human species from variety in the realm of mental differences, i.e. a general separation between body and mind. The latter, i.e. mental, “intellectual differences,” are seen as belonging to an entirely “new field of investigation”:

I call it a new or another field, because I cannot believe that [physical] nature has any thing [sic!] to do in variegating intellect, any more than it has power over the soul. Mind can act on matter, but matter cannot act upon mind; hence it fills an entirely different sphere; therefore, we must look for a cause of difference of intellect elsewhere, for it cannot be found in nature. (6)

Thus denying the immediate correlation between body and mind that was central to the racial sciences, which more or less directly deduced mental inferiority from (supposed) physical inferiority, Easton nonetheless regards the availability and the living out of the potential of the mind as depending on environmental factors. This point of his argument is essential. Although he ascribes “whatever imperfections there are in the mind” to “its own sphere” (6), Easton admits that black slaves are marked by “intellectual and physical disability and inferiority” (21), due to differing circumstances that have stunted their mental growth and compromised the living out of their originally given potential. Easton’s is therefore a constructivist argument that proposes a radical “environmentalism” with regard to mental faculties since, on the outset, he sees “no truth more palpable than this, that the mind is capable of high cultivation; and that the degree of culture depends entirely on the means or agents employed to that end” (7, emphasis mine). Although physical varieties, which are only an expression of nature’s “mysterious power to produce variety,” are treated as separate from mental varieties, both depend in their development, Easton argues, on concretely encountered conditions (6).

Easton primarily illustrates his “environmentalism” with respect to body and mind along the question of slavery. Regarding the slave body, his argument turns to the example of slave mothering and focuses on environmental factors as producing tangible differences in the slave population’s progeny. After giving a description of “a mother that is a slave” (24), Easton goes on to argue that it is not

a matter of surprise that those mothers who are slaves, should, on witnessing the distended muscles on the face of whipped slaves, produce the same or similar distensions on the face of their offspring, by her own mind being affected by the sight; and so with all other deformities. Like causes produce like effects. (24–25)

Often explicitly setting his notions against the fast-developing racial sciences (cf. 21, 23, 24–25, 42), Easton does not deny but is “perfectly willing to admit the truth of these remarks [on a physical and mental inferiority], as they apply to the character of a slave population” (23). Yet, the “Treatise” at the same time exclusively attributes the causes of a physical and mental deformity that Easton observes in the enslaved to the circumstances under which the “slave mother” can only bring “into the world beings whose limbs and minds were lineally fashioned for the yoke and fetter” (23). Radically prioritizing nurture over nature, he goes even further when he reads the “soul-and-body destroying influence” of slavery as affecting the body and mind of its victims up to the point that an enslaved individual is eventually “metamorphosed into a machine, adapted to a specific operation, and propelled by the despotic power of the slave system” (24, 51).

Apart from this idea of multiple influences on the enslaved body through the physical and mental conditions under which it was held, and through direct inheritance, Easton sees anti-black prejudice as originating exclusively in the realm of the mind. That is, although generally claiming, like most of his pamphleteering contemporaries, that “the true cause of this prejudice is slavery” since prejudice was ostensibly drawn from observation of the bodies of the enslaved (38), Easton identifies prejudice itself as wholly constructed out of that cultural climate in which “race is everything” (Knox v). Evidence for this constructedness he finds in the undifferentiating nature of prejudice, for

if color were the cause of prejudice, it follows, that just according to the variegation of the cause, (color) so would the effect variegate—i.e. the clear blooded black would be subject to a greater degree of prejudice, in the proportion he was black—and those of lighter caste subject to a less degree of prejudice, as they were light. (37)

Since this is not the case, Easton concludes that “[c]olor, therefore, cannot be an efficient cause of the malignant prejudice of the whites against the blacks; it is only an imaginary cause at the most” (38). Anti-black prejudice as such is produced in the realm of the (public) mind, even if the body and mind of the enslaved have indeed become altered and deformed through circumstance and inheritance.

Hence, Easton’s writing against the biological exclusion of the black body operates not only through the conceptual separation of body from mind that shows the environmental dependencies of both and ultimately suggests the social constructedness of race and prejudice. Moreover, his argument also involves a second major separation between black body and enslaved body, which, after all, had been conflated into one entity through a biologizing racism. In this respect, Easton’s response to the racialisms of his day extends further than Walker’s. Although, as Blockett suggests, the language of the latter is “indicative of a larger, social tension between ‘scientific’ theories of race largely internalized by blacks and whites and his more subversive argument that the degradation of his race was socially constructed by enslavement” (121), Walker never “dissect” the black body “through the skin.” His Black Nationalism does not deconstruct race at its core. Easton, by contrast, moves precisely in this direction by radically environmentalizing black body and mind, as well as by literally proposing to

anatomize him [the black man], and the result of research is the same as analyzing or anatomizing a white man. Before the dissecting knife passes half through the outer layer of the skin, it meets with the same solids and fluids, and from thence all the way through the body. (49)

By dissecting and environmentalizing the black body both on a conceptual, and, here, on an imagined literal level to counter proslavery arguments, Easton wages war on the biological exclusion of the black body through a form of environmental knowledge. His argument demonstrates how such knowledge itself became involved in multi-layered strategies of resistance that included, in Easton’s case, three primary elements: first, conceptually separating body from mind and black from enslaved body; secondly, thoroughly environmentalizing racial difference along these anatomized categories; and, thirdly, ultimately rooting his argument in an authoritative discourse of “nature” as the general source of a God-given variety in the human species that is to be celebrated. If thus, goes Easton’s somewhat naïve conclusion, prejudice and slavery were to end, “nature” would reverse the atrocities committed on African Americans. On the one hand, the environmentally produced features of the enslaved body would gradually vanish, as “[t]heir foreheads […] would begin to broaden. Their eye balls […] would fall back under a thick foliage of curly eyebrows […] [and] [t]hose muscles, which have hitherto been distended by grief and weeping, would become contracted to an acuteness, corresponding to that acuteness of perception with which business men are blessed” (53). On the other hand, Easton believes the same to be true for the realm of the mind, as “[t]hat interior region, the dwelling place of the soul, would be lighted up with the fires of love and gratitude to their benefactors on earth, and to their great Benefactor above” (53). Eventually, Easton’s optimistic idea is that, in this way, “their whole man would be redeemed” (53).

Another pamphlet that demonstrates how “dissecting and environmentalizing” the black body was used as a strategy of writing against biological exclusion is John Lewis’s “Essay on the Character and Condition of the African Race” (1852). Published as an addendum to the “Reminiscences” of the life of a founder of the “Second Freewill Baptist Church” in Providence, Rhode Island, Lewis’s pamphlet is a typical example of pamphleteers’ explicit challenges to the assumptions of antebellum racial science. While Lewis, like Easton a man of the church, grounds his argument in the first part of the “Essay” primarily in religious discourse, referring to “the cardinal virtues and excellences of bible Christianity” as providing an “unquestionable” power by which to overcome “corrupt public opinions” (194; 192), he devotes the second chapter of his essay, entitled “Physical Condition of the African Race, as compared with the other Races of the Human Family,” to refuting the racial sciences through an environmental knowledge that dissects and environmentalizes the black body.

Lewis’s is essentially an argument for the biological similarities of all human bodies and, in this respect, stands in the legacy of Easton rather than Walker. The pamphlet attempts to (re-)unite what had been constructed, on the grounds of the biologisms of the “American School,” as distinct species, i.e. to ground humanity in a “shared biology” beyond, or literally “under” varying shades of skin color. At the heart of Lewis’s “biologically” arguing egalitarianism that explicitly talks back to (pseudo-)scientific claims lie two strategies: first, the demonstration of analogies among human bodies that negotiates through the skin, i.e. that reaches beyond the surface of the human body; secondly, the delineation of a resulting analogy with respect to diseases, as they may afflict both white and (often pathologized) black bodies.

With regard to the first strategy, note how Lewis virtually “zooms” into the human body and what he calls its “mechanical construction”:

The frame of bones skilfully put together is a master-piece of Infinite wisdom; this frame covered with muscles, forming a part of his existence, is supplied by a beautiful chemical process in himself, in operating the aliment carried into the stomach as the arrangement of the nerves throughout the whole system […]; the blood vessels to convey the vital stream which contains animal life to all parts of the system […]; all fitly and wisely arranged, and this whole system covered with a skin to guard it. (195)

The human body, thus imaginatively “radiographed,” reveals what Lewis conceives as the physical essence of humanity. By moving beneath the outer layers of the human body, claims of supposedly fixed racial distinctions that purported to rely on a verifiable, physical make-up of the body are exposed as groundless, since, Lewis goes on,

in viewing this wonderful material construction of the human body, where is there any difference but simply in the covering of the body, an effect that classes and distinguishes the human race nationally; but which cannot add or detract from the perfection of their physical construction. (195)

Distinctive features visible in external physical makeup are mere superficialities, the skin and its color are a mere “covering” and neither a racial essence in themselves nor hinting at a racially differentiable essence lying inside or beyond the body. Thus, Lewis’s rhetorical radiation of the body attacks “epidermalization” (Fanon) as such, since phenotype is unveiled as defining neither the human body physically nor the (worth of) “character” acted out through any particular body. As the “covering consists of three parts, viz: 1^st, ‘The cuticle or scarf-skin; 2d, the reto mucorscum and 3d [sic!], the cutis,’” and as, to Lewis’s knowledge, “[t]he 2d lies between the 1^st and 3d [sic!], and contains the color,” the supposedly physically distinguishing factor between groups of humans is revealed as a false indicator by anatomizing the body. “Color” is exactly not residing in the significant—and significantly analogically built—substances of “the flesh, blood bones, or the muscles, of which the human body is composed” (195).

Explicitly quoting passages from the (pseudo-)sciences against which his text revolts,¹⁷ Lewis is, on the one hand, able to turn those sciences that proposed a racial essentialism directly against themselves. He explicitly confronts the disciplines involved, for instance when claiming that “the coloring is in the covering of the body, [that] it [therefore] cannot affect those laws peculiar to human beings, for the great principles of physical law, supported by Anatomy, Physiology, and Phrenology, are alike in all human beings,” and ultimately proposes that it was “God, [who] has wisely arranged all this” (195). Thus, he claims, echoing a prominent idea of divine vengeance that had been present in African American letters since Phyllis Wheatley, that “an attack on his [God’s] Infinite prerogative […] will fix a guilt on [the offenders’] characters which must be answered to at the Judgement” (195).

On the other hand, Lewis suggests, out of his anatomy of the human body, a second analogy with respect to human diseases, which follows his logic of an overall biological similarity of all human bodies. He proposes that “[a]ll human bodies are subject alike to the same disease, and the color of the body does not require any variation in medical treatment, that is, in the same locality” (195). At this point, Lewis not only refutes what Etter describes as the “‘medical,’ pathological perspective so salient in proslavery discourse” (87) and its “environmental” arguments for a specific “natural” immunity of the black body to particular diseases and climates.¹⁸ Rather, the way in which Lewis refers to “the same locality” shows how he links his imaginative “snapshot through the skin” with a broader environmentalization of the racialized body. Although not as elaborate and radical as Easton’s “Treatise” in this respect, Lewis emphasizes that the diseases of the human body are the results of

national or local habits affecting the treatment of the body in its physical condition, [which] will have a controlling influence in the development of the physical man. This united with the geographical locations, subjecting the body to different atmospheric temperatures, gives different character and appearance to the human system. (195)

Hence, Lewis, like Easton, stresses the role of environmental factors in shaping human bodies. Although bodies cannot be distinguished in any sense on the mere basis of their “covering,” since there is no essential difference between a “black,” “brown,” “beige,” or “white” human body in terms of its biological essence, Lewis nonetheless engages in an “environmental” idea as one possible explanation of occurring physical differences within the human species.

Significantly, however, and in this respect the “Essay” seems to be more farsighted than Easton’s earlier radical “environmentalism,” Lewis self-consciously recognizes the dangers that lie in too radical an emphasis on environmental factors as explicating human differences, as they might in turn be interpreted as racial differences that could lead to justifications of racist practices. He admits, knowing that racial scientists have argued that “‘the African is wholly inferior to the European, as his color subjects him to a hot climate, where a natural imbecility incapacitates him to rank with intelligent beings,’” that he does “not” want to be understood as proposing this to be the “whole and sale case of the difference in the complexion of the human race” (195). Thus, instead of diverting into a radical environmentalism as Easton did, and clearly opposed, on the other hand, to a Black Nationalist essentialism based on imagining a bond of black blood of the Walker-kind, Lewis chooses a moderate yet effective strategy of exemplification through an autobiographical move. He inserts a first-hand experience through a self-assertive African American “I”:

I declare this [“environmental” determinism in proslavery arguments] false. I know by experience as a colored man, my physical habits having been formed in a cold and Northern climate, the ability to endure depends on an acclimated life, and if the physical habits of a white and colored man be formed alike in early life, in a tropical climate, they will be equally affected in a frigid climate, and so vice versa. (195)

Lewis’s achievement is thus not only that of undoing a biologically deduced racial essentialism by argumentatively “peeling off” the covering of the body to show a common human essence, but also of alerting his readers to the potential effects of particular circumstances and conditions, since only “where man is alike circumstanced irrespective of color, there are the same physical characteristics” (196). That Lewis remains somewhat indeterminate on these points appears to be a strength rather than a disadvantage in his case.¹⁹ Not being as radical in his ascription of human differences to environmental circumstances as Easton gives his argument the edge of a more mediating non-absolutism that hints at the contradictions and risks that had to be taken into account from an African American perspective when producing environmental knowledge as a means of resistance.

The environmental knowledge articulated by pamphleteers such as Easton and Lewis therefore involved more than a rhetoric of “birth and blood” as part of their strategy of writing against the biological exclusion of the black body. Their pamphlets are exemplars of a second major strategy of antebellum African American pamphleteering that emerged in response to the immediate discursive context of the racial sciences—the strategy of conceptually “dissecting and environmentalizing” the black body. Writing in this way against biological exclusion was vital to free black communities, as it directly related to one of their central concerns, namely that of education, or, more precisely, the idea of improvability. In this context, it was essential, as William Hamilton noted in an 1834 pamphlet, to demonstrate that the black “[m]an is capable of high advances in his reasoning and moral faculties” (113), and texts such as Easton’s or Lewis’s did just that by creating a de-racialized knowledge of the human in its non-human non-discursive material conditions. Only through the fundamental support of such a broader environmental knowledge that gave weight to the idea of improvability did the many institutions formed during the antebellum period in free black communities, such as literary or reading societies, make sense. Only through this kind of knowledge that fundamentally refuted the ideas of scientific racism would it become possible to effectively ‘uplift the race,’ since only then, as an 1828 pamphlet by William Whipper inaugurating the “Colored Reading Society of Philadelphia” claims, could one reasonably harbor the hope that such institutions “may be destined to produce a Wilberforce, a Jay, or a Clarkson, or give the world a Franklin, a Rush, or a Wistar” (“Address” 119).

Writing through “Nature”

Nine years later, on August 16, 1837, the same William Whipper delivered another speech turned into a pamphlet, at the first African Presbyterian Church in Philadelphia. Just as the city itself, being the home of both William Still’s famous Underground Railroad hub and the world’s largest collection of “crania,”²⁰ represents the struggle of a nation increasingly polarized over questions of slavery and race, Whipper’s “Speech,” too, partakes in this fundamental struggle through its employment of a discourse of “nature” that was central to antebellum pamphlet literature. In Whipper’s case, this struggle was acted out through nature in the sense of “human nature,” which he conceives along an enlightenment tradition, in terms of a natural human capacity of reason. Basing his definition of man in the divine and citing an unnamed authority, Whipper puts forward that

[a] very distinguished man asserts ‘that reason is that distinguishing characteristic that separates man from the brute creation,’ and that this power was bestowed upon him by his Maker, that he might be capable of subduing all subordinate intelligences to his will. It is this power when exerted in its full force, that enables him to conquer the animals of the forest, and which makes him lord of creation. (Whipper “Speech” 239)

Thus rooting its general ethos of “non-resistance” and moral suasion in enlightenment thought and a biblical anthropocentrism (238), Whipper’s address represents antebellum African American pamphlets’ tendency to focus on “nature” as “human nature,” and furthermore exposes a general rhetorical principle of antebellum discourses of “nature.” It hints at the way, in which the term became a discursive nodal point where arguments over the interpretation of “divisive” and “unifying” characteristics of certain phenomena or objects clashed. As Whipper delineates the “ruder passions of our nature” (irrationality) as well as the “noblest gifts of our nature” (reason) in the “object” human (“Speech” 240), his text exemplifies a third, fundamental strategy in which antebellum pamphleteers’ wrote against the biological exclusion of the black body: the strategy of writing through “nature” as a contested master-signifier. In addition to writing against biological exclusion through a rhetoric of birth and blood or by dissecting and environmentalizing the black body, “nature” itself figured as a central discourse around which pamphleteers aimed to write themselves into humanity. This third facet of African American pamphleteers’ environmental knowledge pertains not so much to the particular Romantic or scientific meanings of nature or “the natural,” but to a specific discursive function that “nature” attained conceptually and rhetorically in antebellum discourse.

One may trace two basic aspects of this function of “nature” with respect to African American pamphleteers’ strategies of writing against biological exclusion. The first and primary one pertains to the way in which nature became a “discursive axis” through which pamphleteers articulated their claims; the second concerns the role of descriptions of non-human non-discursive material environments. The basic function of “nature” as “discursive axis” becomes visible in the ways in which arguments ascribe generalized meanings to “natural” objects—those “natural objects,” in most cases, being human bodies—out of observable similarities and differences. “Nature” became, in this sense, the conceptual and discursive pole around which similarities or differences in phenomena could supposedly be settled into coherent, absolute, “true” general principles. Supposedly, that is, since any seemingly solid grounding of a principle in “nature” most often meant its clash with other, opposing principles articulated through the same master-signifier. If some argument about an object or phenomenon was rooted in “nature,” it was simultaneously unrooted, as it became part of a contested discursive axis, which cut through various discursive formations, and which materialized through this six-letter word.

Take, for instance, some of the arguments discussed with respect to strategies of “dissecting and environmentalizing” the black body. One observation was that of an analogy, a similarity in an “object,” the human body; pamphlets such as Lewis’s or Easton’s proposed that “the flesh, blood bones, or the muscles” were the same in all “natural” human bodies (Lewis 195). Claims of this kind conceptually collided with dominant positions arguing for a supposedly racially defining dissimilarity, for instance in skin color, that was observable in the same “object.” Crucially, this collision occurred rhetorically on the same plane, that of nature. The same authoritative discourse, i.e. nature/the natural, referred to within various discursive formations became a means of settling a “truth,” from the point of view of each perspective. A clash occurred, then, in the ascription of meaning to difference or equivalence through the master-signifier “nature.” It was not essential or even disputed that an object such as the human body, as a graspable, material phenomenon was indeed composed of perceivable differences as well as equivalences. What became crucial, however, was attributing distinct, ultimately absolute meanings to either a difference or an equivalence through “nature” in a process that produced this signifier as a discursive axis that fundamentally shaped the position from which African American environmental knowledge could be expressed. The struggle that becomes visible in the term and function “nature” thus marks the general struggle of a racially infused environmental knowledge.

Accordingly, arguments that revolved around “nature” in this way not only played out on the level of what I have called the “dissection” of the racialized black body. As “nature” turned into a contested discursive axis that became a nodal point for a variety of antebellum discursive formations ranging from proslavery, scientific or political, to anti-slavery or Black Nationalist thought, black pamphleteers employed the discursive function of “nature” in a variety of ways. Beyond using nature as a discourse pertaining to a general human nature that arose out of the reasoning faculties of man (Whipper), other pamphleteers, for example William Watkins or Nathaniel Paul, used moral nature as a sign “of the inherent dignity of manhood” in order to claim that “we are entitled to ALL the rights and immunities of CITIZENS” (Watkins 4, 5), or referred to divine nature, a “God of Nature” (Paul 5; 20; 22), according to whose principles “it is the duty of all rational creatures to consult the interest of their species” (20).

Yet others, and this concerns the second aspect with respect to writing through “nature” against biological exclusion, appropriated the discourse of nature through depictions of the non-human non-discursive material world in order to give further strength to the meanings and principles they sought to root in the master-signifier. Revealing examples of this kind are Whipper’s Philadelphia-“Speech” (1837) and David Ruggles’s “‘Extinguisher’ Extinguished!” (1834). Based on his wishful idea that “peace and quietude” for mankind may be achieved by abandoning “the rude passions that animate them” in favor of “exerting their reasoning powers” (Whipper, “Speech” 242), the former criticizes the current state of humanity by taking recourse to non-human nature, stating that

[t]here are many species of animals that are so amiable in their disposition to each other, that they might well be considered an eminent pattern for mankind in their present rude condition. The sheep, the ox, the horse, and many other animals exist in a state of comparative quietude, both among themselves, and the other races of animals when compared with man. And if it were possible for them to known [sic!] the will of their author […] they might justly be entitled to a distinction above all other species of creation, that had made greater departures from the will of the divine government. (242)

Out of his conviction that “[t]he rich bequest of Heaven to man was a natural body, a reasonable soul and an immortal mind,” Whipper exposes the unnaturalness of biologically excluding and racially divisive human practices, and roots his ideas in a master-signifier “nature” that, for him, was organized along principles of similarity (242). He turns to the non-human non-discursive material as a mirror exemplary of universal values and a divine will from which parts of humanity have departed, and suggests transferring the principle of overwhelming analogies among non-human nature that lead to a god-intended harmony, to human nature. Although non-human animals do not know they are acting in accordance with God’s plan, they represent this plan in Whipper’s depiction, and thereby set an example for humanity.

Ruggles’s “‘Extinguisher’ Extinguished!,” a pamphlet of considerable length and rhetorical prowess published three years earlier in New York City, which primarily aims to refute a racial tract by one Reverend Dr. Reese,²¹ is equally explicit in employing a depiction of non-human non-discursive material environs as a reference point for an argument through the discourse of nature. When defending abolitionists against the charge of promoting “amalgamation” and attacking whites’ repugnance “to marry your sons and daughters to colored persons” (13), Ruggles reminisces about his childhood to demonstrate that it was essentially a misled “public opinion” that had thoroughly corrupted a “true” human nature:

In by-gone days in New England, the land of steady habits, where my happiest hours were spent with my play mates [sic!], in her schools—in her churches—treading my little pathway over her broad hills and through her deep valleys. When we waded and swam her beautiful silver streams—when we climbed her tall pines and elms and oaks—when we rambled thro’ her fine orchards, and partook of sweet fruits—when we followed our hoops and our balls—when we wended our way from the top of the snowy white hills to the valley. When on the icy pond we skated till [sic!] the school-bell would bid us ‘retire!’ Then—then, her morals were rich—she taught us sweet virtue! Then Connecticut, indeed, was the queen of our land!—then nature, never, never, taught us such sinful ‘repugnance!’ She was strong to the contrary. It took the most powerful efforts of a sophisticated education to weaken her hold (14, emphasis in original)

Nature becomes more for Ruggles than merely a rhetorical device in which to root an ultimate truth or general principle, in his case that of racial egalitarianism. In fact, the passage as such strikes as being somewhat out of place, since explicit nature writing may not be expected in a pamphlet primarily engaged in refuting a racist tract. The quote is, however, well embedded in Ruggles’s overall strategy, as it represents his attempt to meet what he recognizes as one of his adversary’s central argumentative concepts, namely nature: Reese had identified intermarriage as “incongruous and unnatural” (16). By producing environmental knowledge through a form of politically motivated nature writing, Ruggles engages nature as discursive axis, as he shapes his own meanings of the term. His description of New England’s non-human natural environs not only creates empathy in his readership through the portrayal of an innocent encounter with the natural world, but also works to strengthen the meanings he himself ascribes to “nature” as a master-signifier, as that to which to return from an misguided public opinion dominated by an unfounded and unnatural prejudice. For both Whipper and Ruggles depicting non-human materialities thus attains the function of underpinning the universal truths that they root in the contested discourse “nature,” whether those truths are articulated in terms of a divine harmony of creation or through the primal scene of an uncorrupted childhood experience.

Hence, the overall function of “nature” as discursive axis becomes visible especially when juxtaposing African American pamphleteers’ enunciations and those of antebellum racial thought. In contrast to mobilizing “nature” as part of a strategy of exposing similarities and equivalences in creation that is characteristic of black pamphleteering, antebellum racialisms primarily aim to identify dissimilarities and differences as general organizing principles of their objects of inquiry. A remark from New York phrenologist John H. van Evrie is, perhaps unconsciously, most revealing in this respect. In 1853, van Evrie claimed that his science’s goal was to find the “simple, though mighty truth” that “[t]he human creation like the animal creation, like all the families or forms of being, is composed of a certain number of races, all generally resembling each other yet each specifically different from all others” (105, emphasis mine). As this phrase implies, those who wrote through “nature” from whatever perspective did not disagree about the existence of both equivalences and differences in the objects or phenomena they observed. What they disagreed about was the ascription of meanings and general truths deduced on the basis of either difference or equivalence that were then turned into absolutes through a discourse of nature. While racialisms focused on the “specifically different” as marks of a biologically verifiable, distinct essence, in order to biologically exclude, this perspective was countered powerfully on the same discursive plane by black pamphleteers’ notions of equivalence in creation, as they stressed what van Evrie calls the “generally resembling” (105). Thus, writing around the master-signifier “nature” ultimately depended not so much on observation and more on diverging modes of interpretation within discourse; less on material essence or a clear referent and more on emphasis, position and selectivity. While “the dissimilar” was selected, endowed with meaning, and essentialized through biological racialism, the true meaning of nature for black pamphleteers most often lay in equivalences and analogies, in “the similar,” and thus in the potential to unify. Nature, in this way, figured as a continuously contested discursive battleground, a discourse on which black writers continued to signify not only during the antebellum period but throughout a tradition of African American environmental knowledge.

In conclusion, the ways in which antebellum black pamphleteers dealt with the pressing task of attacking the stereotypes and racialisms that sought to “biologically” ban them from the realm of the human show additional facets of a foundational African American environmental knowledge. In their attempts at writing against the biological exclusion of the black body, and embedded within their more explicit themes, such as abolitionism, emancipation, education, women’s rights or anti-colonizationism, pamphlets became (and should be reconsidered more widely as) another place where antebellum African Americans sought redefinitions of the human in relation to its non-human non-discursive material conditions. My readings have spotlighted three ways in which such redefinitions occurred. First, by engaging with ideas of “birth” and “blood,” which often emphasized close material connections to the land, to being its original cultivators endowed with a primal environmental knowledge. Second, (and to some extent against a Walker-tradition) by environmentalizing the black body, in the sense of celebrating and de-hierarchizing human variety paralleled by a variety seen in non-human nature as God’s creation (Easton), as well as by arguing for biological similarities among the human species (Lewis). And, third, by attempting to redefine “nature” as a master-signifier, sometimes through depictions of the non-human non-discursive material world (Ruggles). Even if “nature,” in the last sense, figures primarily as a discursive battleground, and although the strategies and texts considered in this chapter are explicitly striving for racial justice, the pamphlet tradition attests to the ways in which black writers, from the start, produced texts that are simultaneously “political” and “environmental,” which makes them highly relevant for ecocriticism. Antebellum African American writing, whether in pamphlets or in the fugitive slave narrative (or, potentially, in a variety of other texts and genres such as travel narratives or spiritual narratives, which are not treated in this study), involved diverse forms of environmental knowledge. In this sense, African American writing developed its own, distinct forms of “nature writing.”