SOURCE: Clarke, George Elliot. “Must We Burn Haliburton?” In The Haliburton Bi-centenary Chaplet: Papers presented at the 1996 Thomas Raddall Symposium, edited by Richard A. Davies, pp. 1-40. Wolfville, N.S.: Gaspereau Press, 1997.

[In the following essay, Clarke proposes that the writings of Haliburton and the Marquis de Sade have been consigned to obscurity due to their similar offensive views on reform—that liberalism is a false promise of equality and that the elite should rule by strength. Haliburton, a conservative, opposed capitalism, reformism, and abolitionism because he saw these as products of a liberal world resulting in a breakdown of the natural hierarchy. Sade, a liberalist, maintained that the strongest members should have the freedom to dominate the weak.]

Admittedly, the incendiary interrogative that sparks this essay derives from Simone de Beauvoir's Faut-il brûler Sade?, or, in English, Must We Burn de Sade?, the title of her 1953 polemic that sought to rescue the writings and philosophy of Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade (1740-1814), as just matter for intellectual scrutiny. The choice of title is not intended to marry Sade and Thomas Chandler Haliburton (1796-1865), English Canada's grand, definitive writer of the nineteenth century, for that would figure an antinomian perversity. Yet, a parallel between Sade and Haliburton exists: both men's writings survive in a kind of limbo, quarantined from popular, intellectual discourse. De Beauvoir charges that “One may glance through heavy detailed works on ‘The Ideas of the 18th Century’, or even on ‘The Sensibility of the 18th Century’ without once coming upon his name” (10). Jane Gallop asserts that “Current writing about Sade is frequent, [but] due mention [is] always made of his exclusion from the literary canon” (6). Charles Rosen opines that Sade “has been a part of the canon of great authors for a long time, although there was great reluctance to admit this publicly” (28). If Sade is exiled from polite symposia, so is Haliburton: he is absent from most studies of nineteenth century, English-Canadian philosophy. According to scholar Alfred G. Bailey, “Students of Canadian Literature have been inclined to pass lightly over Haliburton's political writings …” (1). Although Northrop Frye recognizes that Haliburton's “Sam Slick papers” evidence “the North American development of the counsel of prudence …” (227), few scholars have meditated upon that counsel. In The Faces of Reason: An Essay on Philosophy and Culture in English Canada, 1850-1950 (1981), authors Leslie Armour and Elizabeth Trott omit Haliburton, though they scruple to divine traces of philosophy “between the lines of the Stepsure Letters” (64), referencing the 1821-1822 essays of social satire by Haliburton's contemporary and fellow Nova Scotian, Thomas McCulloch. To Armour and Trott, McCulloch's texts produce, valuably, “a critique of capitalism” (65), but the authors seem ignorant of Haliburton's richer, harsher assaults on the nascent, industrial system.¹

If Sade and Haliburton have been consigned to a purgatorial obscurity, their writings have, for divergent reasons, necessitated such exile. In the case of Sade, as de Beauvoir perceives, “his work is, for the most part, unreadable; philosophically, it escapes banality only to founder in incoherence” (10). “His accounts have the unreality, the false precision and the monotony of schizophrenic reveries” (53). As for Haliburton, his eccentric devotion to neo-feudal, social ideals, his advocacy of slavery, and his noxious racial caricatures are persuasive reasons for putting chunks of his oeuvre to the torch. If Sade “made the brutal discovery that there was no conciliation possible between his social existence and his private pleasures” (de Beauvoir 14), Haliburton also knew a profound divorce between his philosophical ideals and the political realities they contested. If Sade is “an extreme writer” who sees “a society and a system of social relations in extremis” (Carter 23), Haliburton is castigated as the barker of an extreme conservatism. Influentially, V. L. O. Chittick, in his hegemonic biography, Thomas Chandler Haliburton: A Study in Provincial Toryism (1924), deplores Haliburton's “stubborn and almost unique adherence to, and advocacy of, the principles of an outworn and utterly discredited type of Toryism …” (646). George L. Parker seconds that judgment, deciding that Haliburton became “an inflexible Tory” (332). If Sade feels “contempt and disgust” for women, “these servile, tearful, mystified, and passive creatures” (de Beauvoir 37), Haliburton feels similarly toward blacks; his mouthpiece, the Yankee clock peddler, Sam Slick, believes that “those thick skulled, crooked shanked, flat footed, long heeled, wooly headed gentlemen, don't seem fit for much else but slavery …” (Clockmaker [First Series] 124).² Terrence Craig, for one, condemns Haliburton's “offhand comments about the blacks of Nova Scotia” as “callous and complacently arrogant” (22).³ Scholars have solid reasons for marginalizing both writers' works.

Aside from their relative degrees of offensiveness and obscurity, other parallels unite Sade and Haliburton. Both men were aristocratic-minded reformers who fell out of favour with their fellow reformers (with Sade falling to the libertarian-Jacobin left, Haliburton to the conservative-Girondin right). If Sade was, as Angela Carter claims, “the very type of aristocrat who provoked the vengeance of the revolutionaries” (qtd. in Tisdale 295), Haliburton was a would-be aristocrat who wreaked literary vengeance upon revolutionaries. Sade thought the French Revolution had not gone far enough (his pamphlet, Français! Encore une effort, si vous voulez être Républicains, advocates, for instance, that female genitalia be deemed “common fountains” [Carter 72]); Haliburton thought, at various points throughout his career, that everyone had gone too far: Lord Durham, abolitionists, Yankees, British imperial bureaucrats, Canadian colonial unionists. If de Beauvoir redeems Sade by stressing that “the supreme value of his testimony is the fact that it disturbs us. It forces us to re-examine thoroughly the basic problem which haunts our age in different forms: the true relation between man and man” (89), Haliburton must be upheld in like terms. For one thing, as I state elsewhere, Haliburton developed a “revolutionary understanding of the new fluidity of class” (39). Finally, Sade and Haliburton employ their explicitly political and their implicitly political texts (i.e. Sade's tracts and fiction, Haliburton's histories and comic sketches) to spur their readers towards adopting one or another policy to erect their preferred, model societies. Intriguingly, their socio-political views sometimes harmonize, for both writers offer stringent criticisms of triumphalist liberalism, that is to say, of that Utopian doctrine valuing rights-based social contracts, free markets, the primacy of the individual, and notions of the perfectibility of humanity. Indeed, Haliburton's congruency with Sade highlights troubling lacunae in liberal philosophy.

II

Haliburton was born in Windsor, Nova Scotia, in 1796, only thirteen years after the closure of the anti-Tory Terror of the American Revolution and only two years after the termination of the Jacobin Terror phase of the French Revolution. Of these ineffable Terrors, which seemed harbingers of monstrous, social dérangements, the French ruction impressed Haliburton most directly, for his father, W. H. O. Haliburton, “came to maturity in the bloody period of the French Revolution and the upheavals of the Napoleonic Wars,” genealogist Gordon M. Haliburton observes (20). But Haliburton's mother, Lucy Grant, and her relatives also “suffered great tragedies as a result of the [American] Revolution” (Haliburton, Family 39). Certes, one can trace the genesis of Haliburton's royal conservatism to the two epochal revolutions that preceded his birth as well as to the comparably milquetoast, tentative Upper and Lower Canadian Rebellions of 1837-1838 and the rising clamour for the abolition of slavery that eddied around the British and French empires and the United States during his lifetime. Then again, as Gordon Haliburton finds, the familial experiences of radical ferment are “quite enough to explain the importance [Haliburton] attached to the British Constitution and traditional forces of order and government” (20). To characterize Haliburton as a species of living fossil, a ‘provincial’ Tory, as Chittick does, is facile and obscuring.⁴ Set within his times, Haliburton appears as the defender of a world view that, while anti-revolutionary, enacted a studied, principled war on the tenets of liberalism. Furthermore, Haliburton's reactions to slavery, abolitionism, and modernity bare the foundations of English-Canadian conservatism. If Haliburton was bourgeois in his blood, Tory to the bone, and Gothic in spirit, other English-Canadian intellectuals have shared these predilections, if not to an identical pitch. In sum, to construct a genealogy of English-Canadian conservatism, rouge or bleu, one must admit Haliburton's inaugural position.

For one thing, Haliburton invests his authorial voice, whether his own or that of Slick, his première creation, with topical musings that, for all their homely aphorisms, dramatize political obsessions. In his 1844 “Valedictory Address,” his abandonment of his Clockmaker and Attaché sketches, the writer delineates the didactic imperatives of his work:

Neither the Clockmaker nor the Attaché were ever designed as books of travels, but to portray character—to give practical lessons in morals, and politics—to expose hypocrisy—to uphold the connection between the parent country and the colonies, to develop the resources of the province [Nova Scotia], and to enforce the just claims of my countrymen—to discountenance agitation—to strengthen the union between Church and State—and to foster and excite a love for our own form of government, and a preference of it over all others.

(136)

This remarkable, anaphoric last will and testament indicates that Haliburton saw a strategic consistency in his tactically inconsistent essays, fiction, and frank polemics.⁵ Moreover, this overarching harmony derived from concerns anchored in an idealistic conservatism, concerns which continue to animate English-Canadian, conservative thought.

To refuse to grapple with Haliburton's seemingly regressive Toryism shrouds the origins of English-Canadian progressive conservativism in its ‘Red Tory’—or, if one prefers, its ‘political romantic’ or ‘civic republicanism’—guise.⁶ Indeed, if Haliburton is a supreme rhetorician for the proto-Canadian, élite suspicion of radical social change, his conservatism also contains the germ of the social welfare ethos that tinges contemporary conservativisme rouge. This point is orthodox, for Haliburton arose from a community that was affianced to the principle of promoting constructive change within a more-or-less, orderly context. Armour and Trott agree that the French and the British populations in early Canada “came from societies which had escaped the full force of the dissolution of traditional societies in Europe” (20). Accordingly, they “saw community as natural and individuals as attaining merit in the context of some communal good” (20). This supposed communitarianism seeded an ontological sensibility (whether one calls it ‘Red Toryism’ or ‘political romanticism’ or ‘civic republicanism’) which has maintained enough cogency to have stimulated the creation of a distinctively different conservatism—and society—from those extant in the United States. George Grant articulates succinctly this Tory vision as it was affirmed by the Loyalist cause: “Our hope lay in the belief that on the northern half of this continent we could build a community which had a stronger sense of the common good and of public order than was possible under the individualism of the American capitalist dream” (Introduction x). Grant also finds that Canadian progressive conservatism has a strong affinity with socialism—“the use of the government to restrain greed in the name of social good” (Lament 59). Hence, “Canadians have been much more willing than Americans to use governmental control over economic life to protect the public good against private freedom” (Lament 71). Robert M. Timko posits that, in Canada,

Change and/or self-actualization have been traditionally understood, not as a matter of atomic or isolated selves affirming rights against the group or other members of the group, but as an affirmation of an evolutionary change within the community in pursuit of a common good.

(9)

By neglecting Haliburton's efforts to define a viable Tory alternative to the vertiginous revolutions of his era, we fail to appreciate that his thought erects a bridge between early British conservative philosophers like Edmund Burke and later English-Canadian, anti-liberal intellectuals such as Grant. Haliburton must be set within a constellation of Tory thinkers. For instance, Haliburton aligns favourably with the nineteenth century, Ontario philosopher James Beaven, who, in a lecture at Oxford University, defended King Charles I against Parliament, “with such verve that one would have thought that Cromwell must have been in the audience and that the parliamentarians must have committed their regicide yesterday” (Armour and Trott 34). In Rule and Misrule of the English in America (1851), Haliburton likewise damns “puritan rebels” as “saintly murderers of the unhappy monarch [Charles I]” (London 116-117). In his travelogue cum religious tract, Recreations of a Long Vacation (1846), the record of his tour of Anglican Church Indian missions in Ontario, Beaven exalts monarchy, but equates democracy with evil anarchy:

… I must always think that form of civil, as well as of ecclesiastical polity, to be best, which most directly tends to train the mind to reverence and submit to the one universal monarchy of the Supreme Being, and the limited monarchy which he has ordained in every family. Nor is it one of the least reproaches of American republicanism that, by the confessions of those who live under it, it tends most strongly to weaken that authority which God has revealed as placed in the hands of parents.

(102-103)

Here is a Tory vision of paternalism, religiously expressed. Haliburton does not dissent: “The patriarch of the little community maintains the same authority. His will is law, and all submit to it because it is parental … This is the oldest and most natural form of government” (Rule, New York 346). Beaven also tells us that “democratical theories are inapplicable to any state of great extent; and in an advanced condition of civilization; that, in short, if a state … begins with democracy, it must pass through aristocracy or oligarchy into monarchy or tyranny” (101). For Haliburton, testifies Stanley E. McMullin, “American culture, with its levelling tendency, simply could never aspire to the level of achievement attained by British monarchical government” (46). Such attitudes hearken back to Plato's anti-democratic, pro-aristocratic Republic (see Book VIII) and to Burke's Reflections on the French Revolution (1790) which impugned the French rebellion against “a mild and lawful monarch” (36). But they also anticipate Grant's validation of the Loyalist desire “to build, in these cold and forbidding regions, a society with a greater sense of order and restraint than freedom-loving republicanism would allow” (Lament 70) and also his defence of the English-Canadian “relation to the font of constitutional government in the British Crown” (Lament 72). In his ferocious riposte to Lord Durham's Report (1839), Haliburton sums up the Republic as an ensemble of violences: “The Lynching of the South,—the assassinations of the West,—the forays of the East …” (Reply 22). Limning the intellectual milieu of his famous, familial ancestor, Gordon Haliburton attests to the continued currency of such anti-Americanism:

Since animosity towards the American people and their country was the driving force behind the confederation of Canada (and sometimes, it seems, its continuance) it would not appear that Haliburton was singular in having such feelings, or that they require any individual explanation. The present generation, alive to the feelings expressed during the recent “Free Trade” election, knows that the old animosity is still very much alive and as long as there is an independent Canada it will continue to be … Haliburton's general attitude should not strike any patriotic nationalistic Canadian of today as being … in need of explanation.

(42)

Representatively then, Grant alleges, in Technology and Empire (1969), that “the American empire has been demolishing a people [in Vietnam], rather than allowing them to live outside the American orbit” (63).⁷ We must re-read and re-claim Haliburton as the Canadian progenitor of an anti-republican doctrine whose reactionary fervour is both revolutionary and populist.

Problematically though, Haliburton's conservatism bears a plague of racism; it infects his ideology, it pervades his satires. Shamelessly, however, Haliburton lays bare, without tears or shame, the implicit ideology of white supremacy that still clouds so much of our thinking about Canadian identity. Indeed, English-Canadian intellectuals have championed myriad prejudices since the foundation of the republican-free state. Craig records, for instance, that “When Stephen Leacock set out his wildly impractical plans for millions of new immigrants, he specifically meant Britishers within [an] Imperial context” (6). In his book, Strangers Within Our Gates (1909), James S. Woodsworth, a crusading Methodist and eventual co-founder of the socialist Co-operative Commonwealth Federation (CCF), expresses a “xenophobic cultural prejudice inevitably verg[ing] on racism” (Craig 27). Hilda G. Howard's romance, The Writing on the Wall (1921), was “Doubtless the most vitriolic example of racist fiction ever to appear in Canada” (Craig 49). Margaret Atwood's Strange Things: The Malevolent North in Canadian Literature (1995) espouses a white Canadianism, identified with the North, and even ventures the Rushtonesque notion that “many Natives are more white, genetically, than they are Native” (37). Austin Clarke's bizarre pamphlet, “Black Man in a White Land” (1967), published under the pseudo-Black Muslim pseudonym of Ali Kamal Al Kadir Sudan, suffers, after surveying the state of the Civil Rights Movement, this anti-Semitic spasm:

In the civil rights struggle, the Jew is not doing anything to ease the pressure on the Negro: if there were no Negro, there would be a Jew! The bad publicity that the black man gets today can be ascribed to the Jews because they control the communications.

(4)

Grant, too, vends gross generalizations that veer into prejudice:

The very solidarity of the Jewish community helped them to be successful in the impersonal world of the new technological states. It allowed them to be tough in the economic world, because they were more freed from the straining loneliness which was consequent on the impersonal world of mass civilization … Just read Hitler's account of his agony of loneliness in the gaudy decay of pre-World War I Vienna, and his identification of the Jews with that society, to understand an immediate cause of the immense calamity.

(“Céline,” 811-812)

Such race-haunted musings recur with depressing frequency in English-Canadian (and French-Canadian) literature. En fait, Canadian intellectuals concur most with Haliburton when, to de-contextualize a phrase in Craig, their “elitism, threatened by egalitarian idealism, is repressed into racism” (4).

Certainly, Haliburton uses race as a foil for class. His black—and blackened—characters are prime actors in his bluenose, Socratic dialogues on economic progress, liberty, and order, where they tend to illustrate either the pleasures of Tory paternalism or the perils of liberal reformism. Moreover, Haliburton's work cannot be extricated from the slavery debates of the age, for he defended slavery in precisely the terms employed by Southern apologists. Indeed, he shared the same, imperilled world view, namely, the fear that abolition and other socio-economic reforms marked the imminent collapse of Protestant/Christian civilization. “In the prevailing southern view,” historian Eugene D. Genovese emphasizes, “as virtually every antiabolitionist polemic makes clear, the South stood as the heir and guardian of that great Western tradition [of the rule of law and Christianity], and ‘Christian slavery’ stood as the modern bastion against a relapse into barbarism” (Dilemma 5). Haliburton accords with such beliefs. In an 1838 Clockmaker sketch, he gives us an escaped slave, Scip, who yearns for his former servitude because he is “unhappy” in “the absence of all that real sympathy, which, notwithstanding the rod of the master, exists nowhere but where there is a community of interests” (99). Slavery was, for Haliburton, a sweetly pacific, communitarian institution, a dulcet domesticity. Its defence was essential for, without it, liberalism would prevail and civilization fail.

This vision may seem wildly pessimistic, but a measure of Weltschmerz tinges conservatism: the Tory vision is either tragic—as in Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), or stoic—as in Grant's Lament for a Nation: The Defeat of Canadian Nationalism (1965). For the Tory, a Golden Age once existed when God spoke (pointedly) to men, kings ruled benevolently, and subjects were faithful in religion and loyal in politics. To deviate from this vision is to collapse civilization into a red, wet reign of terror. Haliburton was of this mind. McMullin proposes that “the continuing occurrence of revolution throughout Europe gave [Haliburton] little cause to hope for such a possibility as millenial order. His response was restrained pessimism” (44). For a tragedian Tory, in other words, there is no expanse between the yearnings of a Rousseau and the cravings of a Sade (the incarnation of the night-marish extreme of liberalism). One step toward ‘reform’ and one slides into tyranny: abolish slavery or unite the Canadas and one cankers civilization. In a sense, every conservative is Cordelia, admonishing the Lear-like powerful that any loosening of their authority will allow libertines—like Goneril or Regan—to wreck the society, dragging it into civil war and anarchy. Though Tory paranoia may seem ridiculous, there is virtue in its indictment of liberalism, a judgment that Sade pushes to its logical conclusions.

III

From the standpoint of the classical conservative, the liberal doctrine of the liberty of the individual, though promising equality, crafts a Darwinian universe, where survival depends on guile, bellicosity, and lucre. Hence, liberalism, if unchecked, must lead to sadism, or to appropriate de Beauvoir's clairvoyant phrase, a “terrifying optimism” (89). Burke warns, for instance, that tyranny can be mandated by “one short form of incantation—‘Philosophy, Light, Liberality, the Rights of Men’” (113). Sade's incisive insight is that liberalism bespeaks equality and liberty, but is, in the end, based on force. Or, to cite Maurice Blanchot, “For Sade, the equality of all human beings is the right to equal use of them all, freedom is the power to bend others to his own will” (41). Sade's novels draft, then, a world of elites, “and around them,” Blanchot sights, “an infinite, nameless dust, an anonymous mass of creatures which has neither rights nor powers” (44). For Sade, the “sovereign man” is “an absolute egoist” for whom “there is no circumstance … that he cannot turn to happiness” (Blanchot 50-51). John Fraser perceives that Sade seeks to depict “an almost cosmic will to dominance, an obsessive assertion of the isolated, unreachable self against all that is organic and natural, all natural pieties and connections, all claims of any kind that can be made upon the individual in the name of the more than merely individual” (128). Hence, law is no restraint upon the Sadean superhero, a position that one such protagonist, Dolmance, puts vigorously in La Philosophie dans le Boudoir [Philosophy in the Bedroom] (1795):

Those laws [of society], being forged for universal application, are in perpetual conflict with personal interest, just as personal interest is always in contradiction with the general interest. Good for society, our laws are very bad for the individuals whereof it is composed; for if they one time protect the individual, they hinder, trouble, fetter him for three quarters of his life; and so the wise man, the man full of contempt for them, will be wary of them. …

(287-288)

Sade imagines a liberalism that, in promising equality, erects a society where only the strong can truly exercise their will. In a Sadean state, then, Crime withers away because everything—abortion, theft, murder, incest, etc.—is permitted. Though we tend to situate conservatism on a continuum with fascism, Sade reveals that the liberal doctrine of “enlightened self-interest” can also underwrite notions of the ‘triumph of the will’. Too much in Sade accords too slyly with Machiavellian humanism, which sets “salvation in the symbol of a strong man” (Tucker 6). Exemplarily, this statement by a humanist thinker, presumably Joseph Renan, could be derived from Sade:

We aspire not to equality but to domination. The country of a foreign race must become once again a country of serfs, of agricultural laborers, or industrial workers. It is not a question of eliminating the inequalities among men but of widening them and making them into a law.

(Qtd. in Césaire 15)

Sadean libertarianism manufactures, then, a society of elites, whose members do what they please, ruling by amoral—and preternatural—violence.⁸

But, not only are Sade's libertines brutes, they are conscience-less capitalists. Here is Carter's portrait of Sade's notorious Juliette: “She is an advertisement of the advantages of free enterprise and her successes in business—her gambling houses, brothels and dispensaries thrive, her investments always yield fruitful returns—are so many examples of the benefits of a free market economy” (101). Even her “femininity is part of the armoury of self-interest” (102). Juliette cannot be otherwise, for the “Sadeian paradise is a model of the world, in its cash-sale structure” (Carter 83). At this point, Marx seems to wed Sade. For instance, according to David Brion Davis, Genovese, a nominal Marxist, “insists that we must recognize the market and ‘cash-nexus’ as ‘a revolutionary solvent of social relations,’ a ubiquitous acid that has eaten away the bonds of family, church, community, and nation” (44). But this analysis also appeals to Red Tories like Grant, who alleges, illustratively, that capitalism is “the great solvent of all tradition in the modern era” (Lament 47).⁹ Aimé Césaire's critique of Adolf Hitler also aligns liberal capitalism with barbarism: “he makes it possible … to grasp the fact that capitalist society, at its present stage, is incapable of establishing a concept of the rights of all men, just as it has proved incapable of establishing a system of individual ethics” (15). Césaire holds that “the iron man forged by capitalist society” is an “everyday monster” (47). If the liberal cry is ‘equal opportunity’, then the libertine/libertarian fulfillment of that phrase is ‘equal opportunity exploitation’. The liberty promised by capitalism and its contents is, for a Tory, as for a socialist, bloody, morbid, excruciating, and sadistic.

The liberal aspiration to erect a global regimen of egalitarian laws also holds Sadean implications. The apocalyptic consummation of Sade's dream of liberty would create, envisions Carter, a mundane, ruddy Kingdom of God:

In the Kingdom of God, man is made in the image of God and therefore a ravenous, cannibalistic, vicious, egocentric tyrant … The Kingdom of God and the secular Republic are notions that transcend monarchy, religion and democracy; they are to do with authoritarianism and libertarianism.

(140)

For German philosopher Georg Hegel,

the sole and only work and deed accomplished by universal freedom is therefore death—a death that achieves nothing, embraces nothing within its grasp … It is thus the most coldblooded and meaningless death of all, with no more significance than cleaving a head of cabbage or swallowing a draught of water.

(qtd. in Gallop 38)

Grant points toward a looming, de facto Sadeanism when he prophesizes, pace American philosopher Leo Strauss, the rise of a tyrannous, universal, homogeneous state, a location where liberty is monotony, pleasure a nullity, and dissent impossible.¹⁰

Ultimately, Tory and Sadean assessments of liberalism refer to Plato. Carter cites Plato's Republic as the model for Sade's Sodality (which appears in Juliette), “a parodic Good Society” dedicated to “libidinous gratification” and demonstrating “inflexibility and elitism” (90-91).¹¹ “The egalitarianism of the Sodality extends only to the members of the class of masters …” (92). It is a society that seeks to foster, to use a phrase of Georges Bataille, a “functional servility” (qtd. in Gallop 115). For his part, Haliburton seems to have Plato's Republic in mind when he models a perfect community in the Second Series Clockmaker piece, “English Aristocracy and Yankee Mobocracy,” in which the meetly-surnamed Reverend Mr. Hopewell conceives of a stratified, communal aristocracy: the first link in the allegorical chain of society is the “King,” “the next link” is the nobility, then “an Established Church,” then the gentry, then “the professional men, rich merchants, and opulent factorists,” and next the “people's nobility,” an estate produced by means of marriages between nobles and commoners (217-221). Haliburton's ideal society dissents from that of Sade mainly by disallowing the free expression of rulers' passions. To be sure, Haliburton seconds Burke's precept that “Society requires not only that the passions of individuals should be subjected, but that even in the mass and body, as well as in the individuals, the inclinations of men should frequently be thwarted, their will controlled, and their passions brought into subjection” (57). Furthermore, Haliburton's Utopia justifies Grant's intuition that classical Canadian conservatives “believed that the good life made strict demands on self-restraint. Nothing was more alien to them than the ‘emancipation of the passions’ desired in American liberalism” (Lament 70-71).

Though Tories must loathe all that Sade represents, Haliburton's defence of slavery connects his conservatism, ironically, to Sade's liberalism. The alliance is suggested by Jean Paulhan's preface to that echt-Sadean text, Histoire d'O [The Story of O] (1954), the erotic masterpiece written by Dominique Aury under the pseudonym of Pauline Réage. In “Le Bonheur dans l'esclavage” [“Happiness in Slavery],” Paulhan narrates the unusual event of an ex-slave ruction in Barbados, in 1838, in which two hundred blacks, newly emancipated, came one morning “to beg their former master, a certain Glenelg, to take them back into bondage” (xxi). When Glenelg refused to do so, his ex-slaves slaughtered him and his family. Paulhan speculates that Glenelg's former slaves may have felt that his regime was better than the brave, new world into which they had been thrust, with its “workhouses, the substitution of cell for lash, and the rule making it illegal for the ‘apprentices’—for such were the newly-freed workers called—to fall ill …” (xxii). Paulhan guesses that the ex-slaves' complaints likely contained “the rough draft of an apologia for slavery” (xxii). He also thinks that the disgruntled free men and women might also have voiced certain platitudes (which Paulan then glosses in parenthetical asides):

for instance, that there will always be slaves (which, in any case, seems to be borne out by the evidence); that they will always be the same (which is open to question); that one must resign oneself to one's condition and not waste in recriminations a time that might better be spent in games, meditation, and customary pleasures.

(xxxvi)

Here is the gist of Haliburton's defence of the ‘peculiar institution’. Paulhan also theorizes that, in all likelihood, “Glenelg's slaves were in love with their master, that they could not bear to be without him” (xxxvi), and that this “same truth … lends Story of O … that strong, fanatic wind which never ceases to blow” (xxxvi). One may espy in Haliburton's slavery apologias an identical, subterranean fanaticism, along with the fear that liberalism, engendering brutal labour conditions and hypocritical race relations, would cancel the loving paternalism that was slavery at its Christian best. In other words, liberalism heralded equality in theory, but oppression in practice. Such apparent aporia expose the hidden elitism in liberalism, its repressiveness, and establishes that race is the one sign around which both liberals/libertines and conservatives may make common cause.

Certes, Haliburton retails pastoral cliches of master-slave relations. See, for instance, “Slavery” (1838), in which Slick meets, at a Nova Scotian inn, Scip (the escaped slave of his brother, Josiah), whose joyous greeting of Slick mirrors the grovelling behaviour of black players in plantation romances. Recognizing Slick, Scip “suddenly pulled off his hat, and throwing it up in the air, uttered one of the most piercing yells I think I ever heard, and throwing himself upon the ground, seized Mr. Slick round the legs with his arms” ([The Clockmaker] Second Series 97). The “creature” continues, “incoherently asking questions, sobbing, and blaming himself for having left so good a master, and so comfortable a home” (The Clockmaker] Second Series 98). In Nature and Human Nature (1855), Slick, conversing with a doctor, declares that “the negroes of America, as a class, whether slaves or free men, experience more real consideration, and are more comfortable than the peasants of almost any country in Europe” (179). In the same book, Sorrow, a slave, states that “if you want to see wretches, go to Jamestown, and see de poor white critters, dat ab to do all dere own work deyselves, cause dey are so poor dey ab no niggers to do it for em” (290). Haliburton pictures slavery as a benign institution, thus affirming C. L. R. James's thesis that “The propagandists of the time claimed that however cruel was the slave traffic, the African slave in America was happier than in his own African civilisation” (7) and that “slaves were exempt from unhealthy, fatiguing, dangerous work such as was performed by the peasants of Europe” (14). Who would ever want to frustrate such bliss? Then again, pro-slavery ideologues were merely indulging fantastic claims—or “impertinent follies”—in the name of the “defence of property” (James 14). For the poets of reaction, it was essential that slavery appear as an idyllic existence. Slaves (workers) always live—in the easy consciences of their masters—exemplarily joyous lives.

Hence, Paulhan's “Happiness in Slavery,” despite its air of libertine fantasy, has strong affinities with Toryism. For instance, a realistic liberalism, a liberalism of the will, can find rapprochements with tyranny, or spawn its own despotism. For instance, James, in his history of the Haitian Revolution, notes that it was “Lameth, a right-wing Liberal,” who was “one of the most tenacious enemies of both political rights for the Mulattoes and abolition” (64). James also shows that, once the French Revolution was “in the hands of Liberals and moderates,” they strove to drive “the blacks [in Haiti] back to the old slavery” (124). For Grant, writes William Christian, “Modern contractual liberalism gave primacy to the will, and treated reason as a tool for the most effective achievement of the will's desires” (310). Such willfulness leads us directly to Paulhan, Sade, and Haliburton, for they invert the Rousseauesque ideal of Nature as a vista of natural and dignified liberty. Instead, for the Tory, nature is a picture of order, rank, and authoritarianism; for the libertine, Nature is a Darwinian realm where the strongest rule and the weak must resort to crime or revolt to survive. While English conservative philosopher Thomas Hobbes teaches that “Men escaped from the perilous state of nature, gave up natural rights to defend themselves, made a social contract, and created a sovereign” (Curtis 293), Sade's hero, Dolmance, upholds a contrary ‘social contract’: “Cruelty is natural” (Philosophy 253). Clearly, the Sadean vision constructs the more workable machinery for slavery—the exercise of authoritarianism—than does Toryism. Mischievously, Paulhan, in his essay, “The Marquis de Sade and His Accomplice,” propounds this possibility:

Everybody has complained, and rightly enough, that there are too many tortures in [Sade's novel] Justine … All the same, let's not be hypocrites. Our European literature includes another work, a greatly esteemed one, which contains … more tortures by far than all of Sade's writings. …

(25)

The text that Paulhan names is, not the Holy Bible, but Bartolomé de Las Casas's Brevissima relaciòn de la destruycion de las Indias (1552), which details Spain's genocidal enslavement of the indigenes of the West Indies. Haliburton obscures the horrors of slavery in order to maintain a conservative theory of Nature as the fount of order, but Sade and his disciples see that truly effective tyranny depends, on the free exercise of one's own will over those of weaker others, and that Nature, repecting only strength, never moral restraint, legitimates such oppressiveness. Even so, both Tories and libertines understand that liberalism frees the ferrous will. Haliburton appreciates, for instance, that “While the Puritans of New England made the world ring with their accusations against … tyranny … they did not disdain to make use of the instruments of despots, to enforce conformity to their own views” (Rule, London 310). But where Sade was a liberal in a hurry, Haliburton wanted to forestall the rise of a liberal—or, from his perspective, Sadean—world.

IV

For this reason, Haliburton lambasted capitalism, reformism, and abolitionism. His important 1844 dialogue, “English Niggers,” takes on the first ‘evil’. Ensconced in London, his hero Slick pillories ‘dark, satanic mills’ and abusive labour practices. He charges that the white, urban proletariat—“misfortunate niggers”—are “a long chalk below our slaves to the south, and the cotton-manufacturers are a thousand times harder task-masters than our cotton planters …” (Attaché 208). Haliburton casts the worker as a “manufacturin' slave” (Attaché 217), whose natural foe is the factory-owner who violates “a law of natur',” “a law written in the works of God,” namely, that all beings must “feed, nurture, and protect, those they spawn, hatch, or breed” (Attaché 218). Since, for Haliburton, “natur” connotes order, he savages official, laissez-faire economics as its violation. Hence, the capitalist “won't listen to no reason, don't see no necessity, and hante got no affections” (Attaché 218). The factory owner, declares Haliburton's Slick,

calls together the poor, and gives them artificial powers, unfits them for all other pursuits, works them to their utmost, fobs all the profits of their labour, and when he is too rich and too proud to progress, or when bad spekelations has ruined him, he desarts those unfortunate wretches whom he has created, used up, and ruined, and leaves them to God and their country to provide for.

(Attaché 218-219)

Slick even advocates stringing up “some of the cotton Lords with their own cotton ropes …” (Attaché 224). Notably, the factory owner differs little from the capitalist Juliette that Sade fashions, a heroine whose libertine enterprises reveal that the “prosperity of crime depends on the fiscal morality of a market-place red in tooth and claw” (Carter 102). Haliburton's denunciation of liberal capitalism confirms Grant's theory that “The sense of the common good standing against capitalist individualism depended in English-speaking Canada on a tradition of British conservatism …” (Introduction x).

Haliburton's “English Niggers” sketch also confronts reformism. Here Slick damns the owner of the means of production as a “Liberal,” a “Reformer,” who “under that pretty word does all the mischief to society he can” (Attaché 219-220). The theme descends from Burke, who warns, in his essay on the French Revolution, that once the masses, “these miserable sheep have broken the fold, and have got themselves loose, not from the restraint, but from the protection of all the principles of natural authority and legitimate subordination, they become the natural prey of impostors” (251). For Haliburton, manufacturers are ‘impostors’ who pretend to give the poor rights, but, in truth, exploit them mercilessly. In Nature and Human Nature, Haliburton, via Slick, outlines his distrust of liberal reformism:

Conservatism, both in the States and in Great Britain … has a fixed principle of action, which is to conserve the constitution of the country, and not subvert it. Now, liberalism everywhere is distinguished by having no principle … It does nothing but pander … Again it says, enlarge the franchise, so as to give an increase of voters; that doctrine … weakens both monarchy and aristocracy. Then again it advocates free-trade, for that weakens the landed interest, and knocks from under nobility one of its best pillars.

(329)

Like the capitalist, the liberal reformer seeks changes in the social contract that will inevitably dissolve society into anarchy. In his non-fiction, Haliburton also protests political experimentation. He hopes, in 1851, that “A connected sketch of English ‘rule and misrule in America’” will furnish “valuable material for reflection … to those restless politicians who imagine a republican form of government suitable to the inhabitants of every country in the world” (Rule, London 2-3). He projects that such a volume would cure the mania for perilous, destabilizing innovations:

Warned by past failures, [statesmen] would learn, ere it be too late, to abstain from making experiments which have long since been tried and condemned … It will at last convince them that to substitute democratic for monarchical institutions is not the safest or best mode of retaining colonies, or enlisting the sympathy of their inhabitants.

(Rule, London 3)

Indeed, wise administrators of British North America would do well to fear “revolutionists,” who imagine American-style republicanism is “equally applicable to, or attainable by, every other people,” a conception which is, Haliburton advises, “a great and fatal error” (Rule, London 3). For this reason, Haliburton rails at the Report of the Earl of Durham—proposing a legislative union of the colonies of Upper and Lower Canada—in his pamphleteering, archly Burkean Reply (1839).¹² The Report is, first, “the production of a theorist, and not a practical man” (10); secondly, it gives succour to a “reckless, ‘liberal’ government” that would vote itself appropriations that colonists cannot afford (15);¹³ and, thirdly, it permits the failed rebels of 1837-1838 to dodge appropriate punishment, thus jeopardizing the security of the propertied (40-41). Naming himself a “Conservative Loyalist” (32), with a strong aroma of Burke in the margins, Haliburton stresses that “the first duty of Government [is] to protect people in the enjoyment of their property”; yet, he fears such opinions are “long since exploded for this enlightened age, when Reform has enlarged our ideas as well as extended our Suffrage” (41). In the book-length work, The Bubbles of Canada (1839), which he signed “S.S.”—for Sam Slick (perhaps to ensure a wide readership), Haliburton complains, again, that Durham has provoked sinister political agitation:

The federative union proposed by his lordship has opened a wide field for speculation, directed men's minds to theoretical change, afforded a theme for restless young demagogues to agitate upon, and led us to believe that our constitution is in danger of being subverted … [A]nd who, I would ask, that is attached to the mother country [Britain], and desirous to live under a monarchical form of government, can contemplate a scheme pregnant with so much danger, without feelings of dismay?

(253)

Haliburton opposes schemes that will prove “visionary, expensive, and dangerous” (Reply 18).¹⁴ Durham's Report has precipitated a crisis, he writes, a disturbance of the “balance of the constitution,” a “revolution” (Reply 42). The results, he forecasts, will be nasty:

The report of La Fayette, on his return from the States, subverted monarchy in France; the Report of your Lordship, equally laudatory of the Republic [the United States] and its institutions, is no less dangerous from its democratic tendencies to the Monarchy of England.

(Reply 42)

This is, for all its sedate expression, an eschatological vision of hell. With Reformers like Durham afoot, recklessly extending the franchise, organizing pricey, self-governing legislatures, permitting talk of republicanism, a vicious society, a Sadean terminus of history, is taking shape. In the end, Durham is a failure, “not from a deficiency of power, but from a deficiency of conduct in the dictator” (Bubbles 250).

Haliburton and other conservatives, crediting that the highest hopes for earthly happiness were represented by white (preferably Anglo-Saxon), elitist, paternalist government, felt that to allow other tendencies would engender violent chaos, even the multiplication of incarnadine, infernal rebels like Robespierre, L'Ouverture, Turner, and Papineau. Abolitionism, as a sign of anarchy, had to be denounced. As Genovese proposes, Tories, especially slaveholders, “agreed that abolitionism was a Trojan horse for all other detestable isms” (Dilemma 37). In fact, Haliburton's anti-abolitionism shadowed his anti-republicanism; both originated in the view that Nature (God) had ranked classes and races in an unimpeachable hierarchy. Haliburton's Slick sets out this precept in the aptly titled, Nature and Human Nature:

This world and all that is in it, is the work of God. When he made it, he gave it laws or properties that govern it, and so to every living or inanimate thing; and these properties or laws are called their nature … Each class [of animal] has its own nature.

(93)

McMullin writes that Haliburton's

critique of European republicanism … advanced a standard view of the natural world to substantiate the claim that democracy is the most unnatural form of political activity. ‘There is no democracy in nature,’ he said, ‘the lofty mountain rises boldly from the lowly valley, and the tall cedar or aspiring pine towers above the humbler trees of the forest …’.

(45)¹⁵

For Haliburton, “the transference of inequality in the natural order to social institutions [is] a normal and proper expectation” (McMullin 45). To protest the inegalitarian arrangement of slavery is to question the very order of the world. Slick skewers, then, an abolitionist's pro-black pretentions:

You are a so far and no further emancipationist. You will break up the social system of the south, deprive the planter of his slave, and set the nigger free, but you will not admit him to your family circle, associate with him, or permit him to intermarry with your daughter.

(Nature 326-327)

Abolitionism has ruined, Slick worries, a good thing: “[The slave] was once a life-laborer on a plantation in the south, he is now a prisoner for life in the penitentiary in the north, or an idle vagrant, and a shameless, houseless beggar” (Nature 327). Slavery is freedom; freedom slavery. Here Haliburton has discovered a signal, political theory, for Sade also appreciates, Gallop says, “the lack of true, unbridled liberty in any democracy: democracy being the realm where liberty is legislated” (19). If abolitionism threatened faith, civilization, and order, so did republicanism. Haliburton frets, in 1851, that “The latter class (revolutionists) are numerous everywhere” (Rule, London 3).¹⁶ Upsetting slavery could only generate societal division.

Hence, Haliburton's struggle to uphold slavery inspires him to utilize Sadean visions of revolutionary violences, glimpses of racial Armageddons. For one thing, the fantasy of the contented slave was not sustainable, for as Genovese testifies, “the historical record of slavery is full of people who were model slaves right up until the moment they killed their overseer, ran away, burned down the Big House, or joined an insurrection” (Red 108). The slave, though pictured as Sambo, or child-like, “if not handled properly, would revert to barbarous ways” (Red 78). Haliburton voices paranoic fear of just such a scenario. In “Cumberland Oysters produce melancholy for[e]bodings” (1836), Slick suffers a terrifying vision of a race war in the United States: “I expect the blacks will butcher the Southern whites, and the northerners will have to turn out and butcher them again; and all this shoot, hang, cut, stab, and burn business, will sweeten our folks' temper, as raw meat does that of a dog …” (First Series 57-58).¹⁷ The object portion of the title, “melancholy forebodings,” recalls Burke's Reflections: “Well, I guess we have the elements of spontaneous combustion among us in abundance; when it does break out, if you don't see an eruption of human gore, worse than Etna lava, then I'm mistaken” (First Series 57). Here is the Gothic underside of the Enlightenment. Haliburton seeks here to accomplish what Frantz Fanon sought: the utilization of violence to heighten the reader's political consciousness so that, to cite Gerald Tucker, “the facade of liberal democracy will be torn off and its oppressive nature will be shown” (82-83).¹⁸

Moreover, Haliburton's de facto defence of slavery weds him not only to Canadian, conservative, theological philosophers who prized “paternalistic conceptions of government” (Armour and Trott 47), but also to Southern U.S. slaveholders.¹⁹ Genovese's summation of the slaveholders's ideology merits iteration here, for it is practically a compendium of Haliburton's thought:

The point came to this: You northern conservatives share our revulsion against growing infidelity and secularism, against the rapid extension of the heresies of liberal theology, against the social and political abominations of egalitarianism and popular democracy, against the mounting assault on the family and upon the very principle of authority. You share our alarm at the growing popularity of the perverse doctrines of Enlightenment radicalism and the French Revolution—the doctrines of Voltaire, Rousseau, Paine. You share our fears for the fate of Western civilization. Yet you fail to identify the root of this massive theological, ecclesiastical, social, and political offensive against Christianity and the social order: the system of free labor that breeds egotism and extols personal license at the expense of all God-ordained authority. You fail to see that only the restoration of some form of personal servitude can arrest the moral decay of society. Indeed, you mindlessly celebrate free labor as a model and urge us to adopt it. In truth, the South stands virtually alone in the transatlantic world as a bastion of Christian social order because it rests upon a Christian social system. If, as you say, the world needs a social and moral order at once progressive yet conservative, dynamic yet regulated, republican yet immune to democratic demagogy, then our system, not yours, must be looked to as a model.

(Dilemma 37-38)²⁰

Haliburton would amend this Southern statement of Tory principles in only two ways: first, he would idealize Nova Scotia as one of the true Tory transatlantic outposts; secondly, he would refuse to uphold republicanism. For one thing, “France had demonstrated that republicanism could lead to heathenism” (45). Even Haliburton's republican protagonist, Slick, tenders only a temperate endorsement of his society:

Now, I like a republic, but I hate a democracy. The wit of man never could have devised anything more beautiful, better balanced, and skilfully checked, than our constitution is, or rather was; but every change we make is for the worse.

(Nature 329)

In every other way, though, Haliburton is in full concord with Southern slaveholders and their interests. This congruency is sensible, for as Davis notices, “the Southerners had much in common with English and Continental conservatives, with whom they had more contact than one might think” (45). If Genovese admires, “the Southern conservatives' understanding of human depravity and historical limits; their rejection of radical individualism; their respect for family, community, and other ‘organic’ social connections; and their advocacy of broad-based property ownership coupled with a recognition of the inevitability of social stratification” (Davis 45), so did Haliburton. Genovese attests that “conservatives, with a sense for the organic and traditional, have generally been attuned to the essential qualities of Southern life” (Red 260-261). It is difficult to separate the views of pro-slavery, Southern historian Ulrich Bonnell Phillips from those of Haliburton. According to Genovese, Phillips thought “The old plantation had molded whites and blacks into one community” (Red 292), while the impersonal industrial system had lessened “individual and family interest in the fate of the working classes” (Red 291). Haliburton's anti-abolitionist sentiments reflect this perception. If Phillips thinks “The presence of the planter and his [family] is required for example and precept among the negroes” (qtd. in Genovese, Red 291-292), Haliburton's Slick believes that blacks also require guidance, for “their reasoning powers are very limited” (Nature 297). Though Genovese considers Phillips's “portrayal of the plantation regime” to be, not a defense of slavery but “an appeal for the incorporation of the more humane and rational values of prebourgeois culture into modern industrial life” (Red 292), Haliburton is more honest. Knowing that his brand of ‘humane values’ is at stake in the slavery debate, Haliburton does not hesitate to defend slavery and to elect to do so, in part, by exploiting viciously racist depictions of blacks.

V

This strategy was important, for, as Paul Edwards and David Dabydeen declare, “Black autobiographies and testimonies formed an essential weapon in the arsenal of the abolitionists who were mobilising public opinion against the slave trade” (xiii). Nevertheless, Haliburton's attack on blacks was not just strategic, but de rigeuer. To conservatives, blacks were signs of liberal modernity: their struggle for emancipation jeopardized order, beauty, even whiteness itself. Hence, blacks represented the erosion of the possibility of the maintenance of civilization. They connoted a truly savage modernism, its irreducible, heart-felt darkness. Slave aspirations for liberty were, necessarily, a blackening of the Enlightenment.²¹ This ideological positioning entailed a commitment to Manichean polarities, an us-vs.-them approach that Fanon describes in Les Damnés de la terre [The Wretched of the Earth]:

As if to show the totalitarian character of colonial exploitation the settler paints the native as a sort of quintessence of evil … The native is declared insensible to ethics; he represents not only the absence of values, but also the negation of values … he is the absolute evil.

(41)

But Fanon's ‘settler’ belongs to the twentieth century; modern anti-black racism arose during the slave trade. As cultural anthropologist Nahum Dimitri Chandler witnesses, “The emergence of discourses of the Negro is historically co-extensive with the inception of what the philosopher Kevin Thomas Miles has called the ‘project of (white) purity’ in the modern era” (80). At this historical juncture, Chandler elaborates, “the question of the status of the Negro is quite indissolubly linked to a presupposition of the homogeneity and purity of the European subject” (80). For instance, Scottish philosopher David Hume propounds this white-exalting vision of blackness:

I am apt to suspect the negroes, and in general all the other species of men (for there are four or five different kinds) to be naturally inferior to the white. There never was a civilized nation of any other complexion than white, nor even any individual eminent either in action or speculation … In Jamaica indeed they talk of one negroe as a man of parts and learning; but ‘tis likely he is admired for very slender accomplishments, like a parrot, who speaks a few words plainly.

(252)

Haliburton parrots like sentiments throughout his sketches. Here is Slick's portrait of “a great big nigger wench … called Rose”:

My! What a slashin' large woman that was; half horse, half alligator, with a cross of the mammoth in her … Her foot was as long and flat as a snow-shoe, and her hands looked as shape less and as hard as two large sponges froze solid. Her neck was as thick as a bull's, and her scalp was large and woolly enough for a doormat. She was as strong as a moose, and as ugly too; and her great white pointed teeth was a caution to a shark.

(Nature 59)

Later, Slick catalogues the qualities of Sorrow, his servant:

He is a fair sample of a servant in the houses of our great planters. Cheerful, grateful, and contented, they are better off and happier than any portion of the same race I have met with in any part of the world. They have a quick perception of humor, a sort of instinctive knowledge of character, and great cunning, but their reasoning powers are limited. Their appetites are gross, and their constitutional indolence such, that they prefer enduring any suffering and privation to regular habits of industry.

(Nature 297)

As far as Haliburton is concerned, blacks are not ready material for liberty. He essays to answer the slaveholders's central question: “are Negroes human, and if so, are they ‘fully’ human?” (Chandler 81), and his answer is not positive, at least not unhesitatingly so. In due course, then, in the summer of 1853, in an account that the African-American abolitionist Samuel Ringgold Ward presents, Haliburton made anti-black remarks at a London meeting on the promotion of Black education in the West Indies. Though Ward names, wrongly, a “C. S.” Haliburton, there is no doubt he means the author of The Clockmaker sketches:

… he ridiculed the idea of a college for Negroes. A school of an ordinary sort would have met his approval, but a college was generally understood to be a place for the education of a gentleman—a gentleman, among that race, was entirely out of the question. He was neither an Englishman nor an American, having been born “along shore,” in Nova Scotia: but he was free on that occasion to say, that he shared in the prejudices generally entertained by Americans in regard to Negroes; and could not regard such feelings as unnatural or unjustifiable, but as inevitable. The idea of mixing with Negroes was, naturally, to a white man, altogether and unconquerably repulsive … He made another point, about the ruin of the West India planters by emancipation, which showed but too plainly that, to the heart's core, he was entirely with and for slavery, and that it was next to impossible to find a more malignant enemy to the Negro than the Honourable C. S. [sic] Haliburton.

(260-261)²²

Ward's report illuminates some of the tenets of Haliburtonism: the pugnacious colonial identity, the defence of race (and class) privilege, the romanticization of slavery, and the use of repugnant imagery to justify prejudice. Fascinatingly though, Haliburton was disturbed enough by the criticism that he received at this meeting that he gave his own version of it, via his Slick persona, in Nature and Human Nature, which appeared the same year as Ward's Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro, namely, 1855. In the sketch, “A Foggy Night,” Slick discusses the aforementioned, London meeting:

So much nonsense is talked about niggers, I feel riled when I think of it … When I was to London last, I was asked to attend a meetin', for foundin' a college for our colored brethren. Uncle Tom had set some folks half crazy, and others half mad, and what he couldn't do Aunt Harriet [Beecher Stowe] did … I told them niggers must be prepared for liberty, and when they were sufficiently instructed to receive and appreciate the blessing, they must have elementary knowledge, furst in religion and then on the useful arts, before a college should be attempted, and so on, and then took up my hat and walked out. Well, they almost hissed me, and the sour virgins who bottled up their humanity to pour out on the niggers, actually pointed at me, and called me a Yankee Pussyite.

(174-175)

Haliburton, speaking as Slick, defends rank as usual, for slavery is a bulwark of white civilization. Hence, Slick, referring to Sorrow, asks, “Here is a sample of the raw [African] material; can it be manufactured into civilization of a higher order?” (182).²³ This question is a marvellous revelation of the stakes involved in ending slavery: the potential decline of white civilization if the black could not be upgraded to fit neatly within it. To be sure, Haliburton did not only subject blacks to such critiques. In The Bubbles of Canada, Haliburton, considering the future of Quebec, proclaims that “A greater folly can hardly be conceived than conferring a constitutional government upon a people so situated,” that is to say, not prepared for it (48). Haliburton even suggests that the U.S. insistence upon the use of English in Louisiana is wiser than the British practice in Quebec whose people “remain so much French as the inhabitants of Normandy” (Bubbles 54).²⁴ Still, no matter that Haliburton dispenses an array of prejudices in his rhetorics that seek to conserve monarchical, loyalist, and paternalistic values, his attention to blackness is central, for, if modernity represented liberty, it wore, increasingly, disturbingly, a black face, for it was blacks and their allies—women, workers, and religious minorities—who were clamouring for the demise of l'ancien régime. Hence, for Haliburton, blackness figured an inherent instability, a worrisome eruption of libertarian ideals.²⁵ The choice was stark: either conservatism or atavism.

But the future was being introduced by figures like Frederick Douglass, who had no truck with Tory, pro-slavery apologetics:

Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation, are men who want crops without ploughing up the ground … Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will.

(61)

Or, as Malcolm X was to declare more than a century later, “You can't be anti-slavery and pro-slavemaster …” (109). Or, as Mary Prince, rejecting pro-slavery sermons, asked, “How can slaves be happy when they have the halter round their neck and the whip upon their back?” (83).

One can only wonder what Richard Preston, the founder of Nova Scotia's African Baptist Association and the African Abolitionist Society, must have thought of Haliburton and his rebarbative fulminations as he went about his tasks of organizing churches and orating against slavery. Surely, Preston sensed that history was on his side, while Haliburton could only register the rise of a plantation tradition in literature that dreamt nostalgically—falsely—of ‘the good old days’ of slavery. Of course, Preston—and many others—were right. Slavery perished, and Haliburton's lily-white conservatism fell before the ‘black-ass’ modernism he so detested, and the fall carried with it a goodly part of his prestige. Indeed, his work serves to highlight the problematic imbrication of conservatism with racism. His political pronouncements affirm James's aphorism: “there is nothing so fierce as an imperialist in the colonies” (375).

English-Canadian intellectuals are rightly shamed by this, our history of racialism; thus, we have silenced Haliburton or Bowdlerized his work. His fate is equivalent to that of Phillips: “At present he is probably read apologetically and uneasily …” (Genovese, Red 276). Even so, the progressive side of his conservatism—the ideal of communal action—survived, arguably, into the Woodsworthian CCF and into Grantian neo-nationalism. Nor is Haliburton odd; he is patently orthodox. He inherited Burke's suspicion of reform and Plato's vision of a stratified social order, and he was true to his inheritance. It is dishonest to dismiss him as a jesting pessimist. No, just as feminism has had to query Sade, so must we interrogate the racist philosophy of Haliburton and his paternalistic allies, to define an antidote to a reborn, liberal, rapacious capitalism, the fulfillment of Sade's dream. To return to the question raised by this essay's title: to burn Haliburton would be to incinerate our own history.

Notes

1. Haliburton has vanished so fully from our consciousness that poet and professor Douglas Lochhead, the author of Haliburton's entry in The Canadian Encyclopedia (1988), declares “No full bibliographical study of Haliburton's career has yet been made, nor is there a book-length biography” (951). Yet, V. L. O. Chittick's exhaustive biography, including an annotated bibliography of Haliburton's works, appeared in 1924.

2. If Sade has been blacklisted because of his, well, sadism, Haliburton's ostracism stems in part from his racism. Eugene D. Genovese's critique of Ulrich Bonnell Phillips, a Southern historian, is relevant here: “his racism cost him dearly and alone accounts for his lapse from greatness as a historian. It blinded him … it prevented him from knowing many things he in fact knew very well” (Red 262). Like Phillips, or Sade, Haliburton is a writer whose work must now be framed with appropriately apologetic prefaces.

3. See my article, “White Niggers, Black Slaves: Slavery, Race and Class in T. C. Haliburton's The Clockmaker,” in the Nova Scotia Historical Review (13-40) for a discussion of Haliburton's usage of racial tropes. Though Craig thinks that Haliburton “did not have a racial axe to grind” (22), I demonstrate the opposite.

4. This point is crucial, for too many commentators dedicate themselves to merely delineating Haliburton's ‘extremism’ or ‘contradictions’. Unfortunately, Chittick's splendid study of Haliburton qua ‘provincial Tory’ is partially to blame for this state of affairs, for he fails, curiously, to name a single one of Haliburton's political-philosophical influences. Too, given Haliburton's careful attention to matters ranging from Irish-American labour to African-American slavery, from Nova Scotian industry to British factory conditions, from the union of the Canadas to the disintegration of the United States, the epithet ‘provincial’ in Chittick's title must be retired.

5. Only Stanley E. McMullin's fine essay, “In Search of the Tory Mind: Thomas Chandler Haliburton and Egerton Ryerson” (1985), advances a coherent appreciation of Haliburton's thought.

6. These labels require explication. The label “Red Tory” was defined by Gad Horowitz in his famous article, “Conservatism, Liberalism, and Socialism in Canada: An Interpretation” (1966), as denoting “a conscious ideological conservative with some ‘odd’ socialist notions … or a conscious ideological socialist with some ‘odd’ tory notions …” (32). Leslie Armour and Elizabeth Trott assert “The Red Toryism of popular legend … is related to a traditional communitarianism” (25). But other political scientists deem the term inaccurate. Rod Preece, in his article, “The Myth of the Red Tory” (1977), posits instead the centrality in Canada of a Whig-influenced conservatism, indebted to Edmund Burke, which harmonizes laissez-faire economics with state intervention. For Preece, socially-conscious conservatism is a kind of leftover of “political romanticism” that viewed the state as an organic whole transcending all individuals (9). For Janet Ajzenstat and Peter J. Smith, however, introducing Canada's Origins: Liberal, Tory, or Republican? (1995), “The formative influence in Canada's past was not solely liberalism, or the combination of liberalism and tory conservatism, but a lively opposition between liberalism and a civic republican philosophy with a progressive agenda” (2). Civic republicanism “supposes that those representing the community in institutions of government will articulate a sense of the common good and an idea of civic virtue to which all members of the polity adhere” (8). In contrast, liberalism, being akin to elitism, is the philosophy of “the powerful and privileged” (8). I confess that I am more partial to the suggestive imprecision of ‘red tory’ than to the unreflective nostalgia implied in ‘political romanticism’ or with the problematic phrasing of ‘civic republicanism’ (which seems to erase the fact that Canadian republicans have suffered convincing military and electoral defeats). Given that Preece's ‘political romanticism’ and the ‘civic republicanism’ of Ajzenstat and Smith share ‘Red Toryish’, communitarian roots, these concepts may be more closely related than their inventors care to contemplate … McMullin finds that “Definitions of the liberal and conservative mind in Canada have always been difficult largely because both groups worked from the centre, sharing a common base” (51).

7. See The New Romans: Candid Canadian Opinions of the U.S. (1968), edited by Al Purdy, and the cartoon booklet, What's the Big Deal? Some Straightforward Questions and Answers on Free Trade (1988), published by the Pro-Canada Network, for other rich, contemporary examples of Canadian intellectual anti-Americanism.

8. As eccentric as Sade's system of violent domination appears to be, it may be, from some vantages, a rather forensic analysis of how majorities treat minorities. To a First Nations person, the Canadian Confederation may resemble a Sadean system, given the hellish residential schools in which generations of Native children were forcibly incarcerated and subjected to a rank brutality. Slave narratives, including John William Robertson's Halifax-published Book of the Bible Against Slavery (1854), cast slavery as a Sadean system, complete with plantation oligarchs, rape, whippings, chains, the entire paraphenalia of oppression. Edmund Burke witnesses that “in a democracy, the majority of the citizens is capable of exercising the most cruel oppressions upon the minority …” (121-122).

9. The terminological similarity between Genovese and Grant may not be accidental. In some of his writing, Genovese seems to contest Grant. His assertion that “Those who argue that the United States lacks a conservative tradition stumble badly when they consider the Old South and its heritage” (Red 293) seems to counter Grant's claim that “the United States is the only society on earth that has no traditions from before the age of progress” (Lament 65). Genovese's quotation of Satayana's statement that “The necessity of rejecting and destroying some things that are beautiful is the deepest curse of existence” (qtd. in Red 295) seems to answer Grant's thought that “Those who loved … older [conservative] traditions … may be allowed to lament what has been lost, even though they do not know whether or not that loss will lead to some greater political good” (Lament 96). It would be intriguing to determine the exact extent to which Genovese is conversant with Grant.

10. Peter Self defines Grant's Distopia in these terms:

    In this State, a rich élite will use psychological techniques to control society, the masses will be kept quiet with a superfluity of consumer goods and entertainment, while the weak will be bullied or liquidated … It will be an affluent, technologically sophisticated society, without any basic concern for justice or the sanctity of life.

    (32)

    This state is “the pathological end product” (Self 32) of what Grant terms the “spirit of modernity” (qtd. in Self 32).

11. Perhaps Sade's philosophy mirrors Percy Bysshe Shelley's dilemma: “his political liberalism … was in conflict with that perverse, unorthodox Neo-Platonism which conceived the world outside of man's mind to be degenerate, totally divorced from the good” (Curran 149-150). Shelley's tragedy, Beatrice Cenci (1819), features, in any event, a Sadean villain in the form of Francesco Cenci.

12. Haliburton's Reply to the Report of the Earl of Durham is written, like Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, as a series of letters. But a more substantial relation between both works is their mutual suspicion of theory-driven radicalism and their four-square defence of property, monarchy, hierarchy, and religion. If Burke asserts that “The power of perpetuating our property in our families is one of the most valuable and interesting circumstances belonging to it, and that which tends the most to the perpetuation of society itself” (49), Haliburton's anger at Durham stems from his alleged backing of the objectionable principle that “the property of any individual or any body of men should be forcibly taken from them, and distributed among others to appease their turbulent clamours” (Reply 41).

13. Note that Burke objected to the French Revolution, in part, because “everything human and divine [was] sacrificed on the idol of public credit, and national bankruptcy the consequence; and, to crown all, the paper securities of new, precarious, tottering power … held out as the currency for the support of an empire …” (37). Haliburton's assault on Durham is likely derived from Burke's critique of the French Revolution.

14. This description could also be applied to one of the isolated, Gothic chateaus where Sade's comédiens hold their pornographic symposia.

15. Note that Haliburton's vision of Nature does not differ, substantially here, from the ‘survival-of-the-fittest’ model of Sade.

16. Haliburton was certainly not the only proto-Canadian Tory to dread the mounting republican tide. To Canadian philosopher James Beaven, God had passed judgment on the American Republic by permitting its citizens, that is to say, “the rebellious subjects of England … to work out their national chastisement by their own hands … which seems gradually and inevitably approaching” (90-91).

17. Interestingly, both “Cumberland Oysters” and Edgar Allan Poe's “Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841) may recapitulate the mass fear that whites experienced in the wake of the Nat Turner Rebellion of 1831, in Virginia, in which slaves massacred 55 whites.

18. Grant attempts a similar maneouvre in Technology and Empire, noting that the obscene war against Vietnam is “being done by the English-speaking empire and in the name of liberal democracy” (65).

19. See Beaven and Thomas McCulloch, but also a modern, non-theological conservative such as Austin Clarke, for other paternalistic visions.

20. Even some late twentieth-century African Americans cheer the ‘noble’ dreams of the slaveholders. Eddy L. Harris renders this confession:

    Of all the men who emerged heroic from battlefields in the Civil War to capture my imagination, only one wore a Yankee uniform. All the rest were Confederates. They were the same men glorified in … statues … They were Jeb Stuart and Stonewall Jackson and Robert E. Lee.

    (153)

21. Almost every black text on slavery enacts a coded attack on capitalism. In Michelle Cliff's novel, Free Enterprise (1993), for instance, an investor, Miss Alice Hooper, must struggle with the unsavoury implications of abolitionism:

    For if I cut every link to every enterprise which might have supported the traffic in human souls—sold every piece of stock in every maritime company, for example—I would still have to reckon with the mills, the question of property in and of itself. This is something I struggle with, believe me, and because of which I could be seen, at best, eccentric, at worst, a traitor to my class.

    (78)

22. Mr. David States, my cousin and a Nova Scotian genealogist, directed me to this citation.

23. The statement also demonstrates Haliburton's concord with the preachments of enlightened racists like Hume.

24. Celebrations of Haliburton's pro-French and pro-Catholic parliamentary statements, especially as they pertained to Acadians, must be tempered by consideration of these negative utterances. Note Haliburton's argument that responsible government “is unsuited to the poverty, ignorance, and inactivity of the French Habitants …” [Rule, London 4].

25. Black abolitionists were precursors of the modern, for, as Adam Potkay declares, “The abolition of slavery was … according to the more advanced political economy of the [later eighteenth century], a sure way to add to the wealth of nations” (14). Even two early black British writers, Quobna Cugoano and Olaudah Equiano, shared Scottish economist Adam Smith's belief that “a world crisscrossed by peaceful trade would be more advantageous to all than a world given to slave routes; they subscribed, moreover, to the age's typically buoyant faith in the compatibility of international commerce and Christian values” (Potkay 14-15). And if the American Revolution marked the commencement of a progressive and redemptive liberalism, it is a signal point that its first slain champion was a black man, namely, Crispus Attucks.

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