Extra material for Lecture 2: Adams’ Letters and Toussaint L’Ouverture’s Constitution

S. Jarratt

1. Two case studies:

How do two subjects excluded from enlightenment’s claim – all men are created equal – use writing to argue their case for inclusion?

How does the theory of a republic of letters – a public sphere of freely circulating speech and writing – enhance our understanding of these two cases?

How does ethos in the genre of the letter (including the declaration and constitution as letters) across the divide between private and public spheres?

2. Implications of coverture: “married women, lacking independent economic power and therefore also lacking the ability to make free and independent political judgments, were vulnerable to the influence of their husbands”

3. 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)

4. 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”

5. 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

6. Enlightenment thinkers on 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

• 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

7. North American slavery: Britain, 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

8. 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; Napoléon returns to rule France, 1799; threatens to reinstate slavery

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