SOURCE: Castiglia, Christopher. “Abolition's Racial Interiors and the Making of White Civic Depth.” American Literary History 14, no. 1 (spring 2002): 32-59.

[In the following essay, Castiglia explores the dynamics of American social reformist discourse as mediated through a scheme of white sympathy and virtuous black suffering, using Garrison's writing and speeches as principal sources.]

How social order became understood in relation to the description and reform of specific types of citizens' interiority (their “natures” or “characters,” emanations of the “deep” self) is a topic central to understanding how social reform affected public opinion in the nineteenth-century US and how it continues to shape American social life to this day. Michel Foucault, in Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (1977), famously places the “inward turn” of state control at the advent of modernity, a shift he characterizes as a move from coercion, punishment, and the infliction of death to pastoral benevolence, discipline, and the extension of life. These shifts, for Foucault, enhanced the possibilities for human freedom while simultaneously restricting those options by regulating subjectivity through the statistical knowledges (“norms”) of human character that made accusations of delinquency or perversion greater dangers than the loss of freedom. In the US the antebellum movements for social reform played an instrumental role in the shifts Foucault describes, providing a range of discourses through which human “depth” was scrutinized for signs of social unrest. Through reform rhetoric, Americans came to see such unrest as caused less by economic or political inequality than by defects of the human will, personality, or “character.” In locating the vectors of social inequality and dissent in proximity to normative “character,” and by seeking to remedy social ills through the redisposition of delinquent interiority, nineteenth-century reformers, while making significant social gains for America's underclasses, simultaneously facilitated the individualizing and affect-saturation of political life.

Reform has remained oddly resistant to this analysis, however, in part because of trends in American historiography that have tended toward either/or choices: freedom or oppression, containment or liberation, revolutionaries or reactionaries. These trends have meant that Foucault's central insight—that the generation of citizens' interiority is particularly restrictive precisely because rooted in discourses of freedom, increasing the possibilities of human agency while prescribing the terms through which that agency can be understood—has been made incompatible with the liberatory impulses of nineteenth-century reform.¹ Yet the frustrations often expressed by those reformers (and not just by their twenty-first-century critics), who achieved greater personal liberty for citizens abjected by class, gender, and race without accomplishing the revolutionary (that is, structural) changes they sought to precipitate, invites a reading of antebellum interiority that conceives of individual liberty and collective restriction as simultaneous phenomena. In part this reading requires that we recognize the institutions of the civil sphere, not simply as sites of popular criticism of the state, as Jürgen Habermas has suggested, but as locations where subjectivity and state interest blend into affective hybrids that create both the possibilities for independent critique and forms of self-management that limit those possibilities.

The nineteenth-century reform movement that most acutely experienced this bind of expansive liberty and restrictive subjectivity, and hence has found itself caught in the struggle between containment and hagiographic historiography (with a strong emphasis on the latter), is arguably the American Anti-Slavery Society. Historians have long critiqued nineteenth-century theories of innate racial inferiority that supported slavery, recognizing their seemingly objective rhetorics of phrenology and social Darwinism as instruments of social power. At the same time, more progressive theories of innate virtues, arising from racialized conceptions of interior “natures,” have remained relatively unexplored, despite the fact that these theories, in many ways complementary to their more racist counterparts, have had a longer shelf life in American racial thought. To hasten that analysis, I want to examine the rhetorics of interiorization in the abolition writings of William Lloyd Garrison. I choose Garrison not because he invented the interiorizing tendency of nineteenth-century reform or even because he was its most determined progenitor. Rather, I choose Garrison because the discrepancy between structural and interiorized reform is so pronounced in his work: since his ambitions were genuinely revolutionary, the tensions generated within those ambitions by interiorization were more acutely felt and responded to with striking rhetorical creativity. Only by understanding Garrison at the tense crossroads of his day—mediating, as most antebellum social reformers did, between structural and interior analyses of power and inequality—can we understand apparent contradictions within the writings of a reformer who was at once anti-institutional and the center of a national network of abolition institutions; antinationalist and the primary advocate for considering African Americans as national subjects; anti-imperialist and yet capable of imagining a denationalized republicanism free to extend beyond the national borders. In the pages that follow, I explore these apparent contradictions not as weaknesses of Garrison's courage or powers of conception, but as symptoms of a shift in nineteenth-century social thought, as the workings of power moved out of the structural life of American society and into the interior lives of its citizens.

The least noted tension within nineteenth-century reform, and within Garrison's radical abolitionism, arises between the identifications of sympathy and the attribution of differentiated interiors to the abject and the privileged. Several critics have demonstrated the importance granted affective states—especially “sympathy”—in antebellum America. What I want to highlight, however, is the distinction between two interior states: affect, which characterizes white Americans as fully feeling subjects, and civic abstraction, which becomes the possession of black Americans. If slavery, as critics have argued, forced black Americans to bear the burden of embodiment spared white Americans who, in contrast, could identify with national abstractions such as virtue and liberty (abstractions that, as Toni Morrison argues, take on meaning only in visible contrast to enslaved black bodies), reformist abolition invested blacks with the burden of abstract civility, now viewed as defining their interior “characters.”² Racial difference persists, then, not on the physical body as an index of inferior character (as proslavery advocates claimed), but as differentiated interior states requiring different relationships to nationalism and social agency: by imagining African-American interiority as comprised of (the desire for) civic abstraction, white abolitionists saw black Americans as static emblems of a national “character” that sympathetic affect entitled white abolitionists to challenge and change. At the same time, sympathy as an affective state particular to liberal whites allowed an identificational mobility within the national symbolic only for the already-enfranchised white subject. White reformers took on blackness, not on the surface of the skin, but as a suffering interior, a civic “depth.” With an inner experience of black suffering, white reformers claimed a public authority that differentiated them from other whites, even while it maintained an affective difference from persecuted blacks.

In the hands of dedicated reformers, the incorporation of black suffering as the sign of white civic depth enabled progressive social change in nineteenth-century America. Like many strategies of dissenting authorization, however, it was ultimately absorbed into the culture, not as revolutionary ethics but as mass consumption, as entertainment divorced of ethical imperatives. …

1. THE SURPRISING AFFECTS OF SYMPATHY

In 1834, a prominent agent of the American Colonization Society, James Birney, announced that his opinions of the organization “have undergone a change so great, as to make it imperative on me no longer to give to that enterprise that support and favor which are justly expected from all connected with it” (3). Chief among the society's activities that Birney found “cruel, unmanly, and meriting the just indignation of every American” was its efforts to convince free blacks to emigrate to Africa by manipulating their “civil disabilities, disenfranchisement, exclusion from sympathy” (7). Birney's letter registers a shift in political influence away from the Colonization Society, which governed national debates about race and citizenship in the 1820s, and toward the organization to which Birney defected, the American Anti-Slavery Society, which beginning in the mid-1830s argued for the incorporation into full citizenship of black Americans. The most obvious difference between the Colonization and Anti-Slavery Societies is their differing efforts to racialize the national character by naming its outside and its inside, respectively.³ Although the Colonization Society strove to define citizenship by placing blacks outside the borders of the nation and therefore to define the national interior as white, the Anti-Slavery Society defined citizenship in relation to the individual characters of citizens. With this new strategy came a move to define racial injustice and to argue for national citizenship on the basis of interiorizing logics—the correct affective states for sympathetic whites and the deserving civic characters of black Americans—that correspond to, and in many cases supplant, more explicitly social arguments about economic opportunity, education, and class structure.

This shift is symptomatic of abolition's broader transformation from a relatively anomalous social movement in the 1820s to one in a spectrum of reformist projects in the 1830s and 1840s; antebellum reform often conceived social problems as arising from deformed or disabled interior states (bad morality, wounded character, perverted feelings) and increasingly envisioned the proper object of reform not as the poor, the degraded, or the disenfranchised but as the middle-class subject engaged in the act of reform. As abolition organizations experienced this shift, its leaders, as Birney indicates, became centrally occupied with whites' feelings toward blacks. As Birney's rhetorical order makes clear, “civil disabilities” were measured increasingly, not only in relation to economic and political “disenfranchisement” but also in relation to “exclusion from sympathy,” an affective state. Birney's distinction reflects broad trends in abolition rhetoric, suggesting not only the “inward turn” of reformist abolition but the ways interior differentiation came to substitute for morally intolerable social differences asserted on the basis of bodies.

Sympathy is never simply an outpouring of individual sentiment; it is an affective register of more obviously collective social arrangements.⁴ Some contemporary critics have celebrated sympathy for creating a fellow feeling that prompts the privileged to imagine themselves in the place of the less fortunate.⁵ This account of affective sociability builds on the first step in Adam Smith's 1759 Theory of Moral Sentiments, which argues that sympathizers create mental tableaux in which they see themselves in the place of the sufferer, thereby creating an imaginative bridge between socially separated peoples. Others have complicated such formulations of democratic sociability, noting how sympathy generates theatrical distance by creating suffering as a spectacle watched from afar.⁶ This second model makes a more careful use of Smith, who, denying the merger of sympathizer and sufferer, claims, “Mankind, though naturally sympathetic, never conceive, for what has befallen another, that degree of passion which naturally animates the person principally concerned” (26). Sympathetic identification, for Smith, is “but momentary,” kept in check by the sympathizers' self-concern: “the thought that they themselves are not the real sufferers, continually intrudes itself upon them, and though it does not hinder them from conceiving a passion somewhat analogous to what is felt by the sufferer, hinders them from conceiving anything that approaches to the same degree of violence” (26-27).

In both models, self-transformation lies with the person who extends sympathy. For Smith, however, sympathy also transforms the sufferer, who, sensing the spectatorial distance maintained by the cautious sympathizer, “longs for that relief which nothing can afford him but the entire concord of the affections of the spectators with his own” (26-27). The sufferer may achieve this “entire concord,” Smith writes, only “by lowering his passion to that pitch, in which the spectators are capable of going along with him. He must flatten, if I may be allowed to say so, the sharpness of its natural tone, in order to reduce it to harmony and concord with the emotions of those who are about him” (27).⁷ If one expresses an emotion too extreme or a suffering too unusual, the audience will be unable to identify and will experience no sympathy. The burden therefore falls on the sufferer to conceal extremes or anomalies, or to translate them into scenarios with which the audience will be familiar. Sufferers must transform themselves, in a model of imagined spectatorial normalization that Foucault, following Smith's contemporary Jeremy Bentham, called panopticism: just as the spectators place themselves in the sufferer's situation, Smith writes, so the sufferer must “imagine in what manner he would be affected if he was only one of the spectators of his own situation” (28).⁸ In sympathetic abolition, for instance, the suffering of slaves might be shaped to correlate with texts white audiences had previously encountered: other slave narratives, white reports of slavery such as Theodore Weld's American Slavery As It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses (1839), or especially popular works of fiction such as Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852). Even while serving as the keynote of benevolence, then, sympathy was a form of surveillant discipline—what we might call sympathetic discipline—in which the black sufferer must imagine himself or herself always in the eyes of whites, becoming a body shaped by an idea of a body.

At the same time that sympathy asks the sufferer to model his or her suffering on the expectations of the sympathizer, it also separates the two parties into distinctive “classes,” characterized by different interior capabilities (what Smith called “virtues”). The extension of sympathy gives rise to “the soft, the gentle, the amiable virtues, the virtues of candid condescension and indulgent humanity,” while the self-modifications that invite sympathy generate “the virtues of self-denial, of self-government, of that command of the passions which subjects all the movements of our nature to what our own dignity and honour, and the propriety of our own conduct requires” (3). In the end, sympathy generates affective knowledge of human “virtues” that become the basis of differential power: the sympathizer extends agency over the sufferer, while the latter controls only himself or herself. Sympathy affectively naturalizes social hierarchy without necessitating government involvement, order being maintained as the result of a newly privatized internal civility.

Unlike other racial logics in antebellum America, what is striking about sympathetic discipline is that it is not predictated on marked bodies; in fact, Smith's formulation of sympathetic difference requires the absence of bodies. Sympathy is aroused, according to Smith, by assaults on the sufferer's imagination—“the loss of his dignity, neglect from his friends, contempt from his enemies” (42), along with romantic disappointment—rather than by sensations of the body (hunger, sexual desire, pain), “because our imaginations can more readily mould themselves upon his imagination, than our bodies can mould themselves upon his body” (42). Translated to the racial context of antebellum America, Smith's observation has conflicting implications. On the one hand, it suggests a way for whites and blacks to merge through the imagination, suggesting an affective “sameness” once the burden of marked bodies is removed; in this sense, sympathy is consistent with other universalizing (“we're all the same under the skin”) forms of liberal humanism. On the other hand, it turns racial difference inward, naturalizing it as the product and sign of individual affect. By making the knowledge of civil behavior implicitly a racialized knowledge, sympathetic whites closed the borders between sympathizer and sufferer, ensuring that whites might flirt with imaginative racial merger while maintaining autonomy through the distance of white observation (what Eric Lott, building on Laura Mulvey's formulation of the patriarchal male gaze, has called “the pale gaze”).⁹

Despite its powerful role in generating a democratically feasible system of racialized difference and social hierarchy, sympathy has remained relatively invisible as a political force largely due its status as a “private” or “personal” emotion in an age when privacy was distinguished from the “motivated” realms of capital and state regulation. Yet, as my discussion of Smith suggests, affect was imagined in the interest of economic and social order, even as it generated the authority to criticize the nation-state. Although sympathetic white abolitionists made differences between blacks and whites predicated on bodies appear prejudicial and even ridiculous, then, they also helped establish an affective economy that allowed the regulation that might otherwise have been carried out on (the basis of) bodies to appear as individual (i.e., consensual) emotional response.

Sympathetic discipline, in short, was part of a watershed in American sociopolitical discourse. While eighteenth-century social critics issued declarations of independence that called for more equitable economic and political-representational systems, their nineteenth-century counterparts generated “declarations of sentiment,” which increasingly tied social dysfunctions such as racism and poverty not only to economic inequality but to disabled emotions as well (as indicated by Garrison's use of psychosocial terms such as “negrophobia” and “colorphobia” to account for American racism).¹⁰ Perhaps progressive politics are never possible without some appeal to the compassionate, imaginative identity-crossings that we call sympathy, and certainly the politics of sympathy practiced by white abolitionists in antebellum America helped produce seismic social transformations, especially the end of slavery. Yet sympathy became, in the course of the nineteenth century, the predominant political discourse, obscuring the social construction and distribution of structural power in a rhetoric of individual interiority. Sympathy, as Smith helps us see, always contained within itself, therefore, the double bind of nineteenth-century reform.

2. “A STUPENDOUS REPUBLICAN IMPOSTURE”: ANTINATIONALISM AND THE CITIZEN-FORM

Sympathy became, in reformist rhetoric, a precondition of (white) citizenship, distinguishing those possessed of a proper moral authority from those mired in self-interest. The central role of citizenship in sympathetic discipline generated certain contradictions, however. Citizenship was rooted in the institutions of the state, to which citizens are subject. At the same time, reformist authority rested on a critical distance from the state rather than on identification with its institutions.¹¹ To gain public authority, white abolitionists had to reconceive citizenship in opposition to the state, as a form of free moral will. At the same time, they sought the enfranchisement of freed black Americans, arguing for their right to enter the very state institutions from which white abolitionists distanced themselves. Sympathetic abolition thus generated two kinds of citizenship, based on differences of virtue, desire, and agency: one for the empowered (white) sympathizer and another for the self-regulating (black) sufferer.

Through the American Anti-Slavery Society, which he directed from 1833 to 1865, and the abolitionist newspaper, The Liberator, which he edited from 1831 to 1865, Garrison was the strongest voice to insist, contra the popular colonization societies, that black Americans must be made full US citizens.¹² Garrison was also, however, an avid critic of patriotic nationalism. Believing the US government to be colluding with slavery, Garrison refused to vote, honor American law, or hold public office, and once tore up a copy of the Constitution in public protest against federally sanctioned slavery. Although Garrison rejected citizenship for himself, however, he enshrined it as the highest goal black Americans could attain. These apparently inconsistent positions become compatible, however, if we recognize Garrison's conception of citizenship freed from its institutional (and hence ideological) origin in the nation-state, making it a purely personal (hence “consensual”) phenomenon consistent both with the affective register of sympathy and his conscientious anti-institutionalism.

Garrison's citizenship-without-nations might usefully be called, building on Etienne Balibar, the citizen-form.¹³ Garrison's construction of the citizen-form provided the illusions Balibar attributes to the nation, universalizing the state by making citizenship the result of divine wisdom, while individualizing the state by asserting the reflection of divine will in personal affect. Garrison's divorce of citizenship from the nation begins with his public stand against institutional and political organizations (a somewhat paradoxical stand given the vast nationalizing network of antislavery societies Garrison operated within). As Garrison declared on 6 December 1833, to the American Anti-Slavery Committee in Philadelphia, slavery “is a base overthrow of the foundations of the social contract” (“Declaration of Sentiments” 69), and therefore abolitionists were not bound by social institutions.¹⁴ Placing the individual (and interiorized) “character” in ascendance over both collective social formations and faddish commodification, Garrison declared, “There never yet was a divine human organization. Associations are not of heaven, but of man. They are no positive test of character. Men shape them as they do their coats, their hats, or their dwellings, according to their own taste and convenience” (“Claims and Positions of the Clergy” 236).

Although Garrison publicized his disdain for all conventional organizations, he reserved his particular animosity for the nation. Declaring America “a stupendous republican imposture” (“The American Union” 119), Garrison made his position on succession unmistakable: “If the Republic must be blotted out from the roll of nations, by proclaiming liberty to the captives, then let the Republic sink beneath the waves of oblivion, and a shout of joy, louder than the voice of many waters, fill the universe at its extinction” (“No Compromise With Slavery” 139). “The Republic that depends for its stability on making war against the government of God and the rights of man,” Garrison declared, “though it exalt itself as the eagle, and set its nest among the stars, shall be cast into the bottomless deep, and the loss of it shall be a gain to the world” (140). An abolitionist “cannot love his country,” Garrison insisted, “for he declares it to be ‘laden with inequity,’ and liable to the retributive judgments of Heaven”; nor can an abolitionist “be a good citizen; for he refuses to be law-abiding, and treads public opinion, legislative enactment, and governmental edict alike under his feet” (“The ‘Infidelity’ of Abolition” 4).

In the place of patriotism, Garrison argued for global universalism: “Our country is the world, our countrymen are all mankind,” Garrison told a Boston Peace Convention in September, 1838; “We love the land of our nativity, only as we love all other lands. The interests, rights, and liberties of American citizens are no more dear to us, than are those of the whole human race. Hence, we can allow no appeal to patriotism, to revenge any national insult or injury” (74). Garrison's appeal to universal citizenship relied “upon moral power alone for success. The ground upon which we stand belongs to no sect or party—it is holy ground” (“A Fourth of July Oration” 199). Appeals to divine ground not only assured Garrison's moral authority, but placed his word above the give-and-take of public debate, since God's truths “are absolute and immutable” (“War Essentially Wrong” 89) and may “be denied, only as the existence of a God, or the immortality of the soul, is denied. Unlike human theories, they can never lead astray; unlike human devices, they can never be made subservient to ambition or selfishness” (“The Anti-Slavery Platform” 317).¹⁵ Speaking God's truth, Garrison universalized his positions through appeals to “human nature” without needing to sway public opinion: “The nature of man has been the same in all ages,” Garrison asserted, “and it has ever rebelled against oppression” (“The Great Apostate” 210). The abolitionist, in Garrison's metaleptic construction, derives his opinions about “the rights of man [not] from any book, but from his own nature” (“The ‘Infidelity’ of Abolition” 10-11), and may therefore assume a position both within and against national ideology.

In these proclamations, Garrison detached citizenship from the nation-state and attached it instead to God; yet like Ralph Waldo Emerson's divinity, Garrison's manifests itself in the virtuous composition of individual souls, evident in the cluster of civic virtues commonly known as “republicanism.” Republicanism, for Garrison, would outlive the nation, for its virtues, encapsulated as “the rights of man,” “are inherent and inalienable, and therefore not to be forfeited by the failure of any form of government, however democratic. Let the American Union perish, … still, these rights would remain undiminished in strength, unsullied in purity, unaffected in value, and sacred as their Divine Author” (“The American Union” 116). Asserting that abolition's “principles are self-evident, its measures rational, its purposes merciful and just” and that “[i]t cannot be diverted from the path of duty, though all earth and hell oppose; for it is lifted far above all earth-born fear” (“Fourth of July Oration” 200), Garrison constructs his moral exemplar from the stuff of enlightenment republicanism, including the language of the Declaration, the praise of rationality, and of benign duty and responsibility. Locating virtuous rights in the universality of divine edict and the autonomy of the individual soul, Garrison advanced a citizenship affect-dense and universalized, and, by virtue of these attributes, separate from the interests of the state.

Garrison is by no means unique in dividing citizenship from the state: as Habermas has shown, citizens throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries increasingly came to see their position in the civil sphere as distinct, even oppositionally so, from the state, a position fortified, as Garrison's is, by a sense of moral rectitude drawn from both private affect and institutional affiliation. One can speculate that this conception of citizenship within the civil sphere aided the abolitionist efforts to move public opinion against slavery and toward readiness for civil war; not only did it provide critics of the nation with an aura of personal passion and divine sanction that made them seem more patriotic than more obviously invested defenders of slavery, it placed the values most Americans cherished in regard to the nation beyond the reach of federal dissolution, assuring Americans that they could be patriots without remaining loyal to the nation. At the same time, however, the divorce of citizenship from the nation-state placed the stuff of civic virtue everywhere but where one might suspect the operations of power: whether universalized through God or individualized through affect, that is, citizenship came to function outside the reaches of ideology. The ways in which republicanism and the interests of the nation-state might be mutually reinforcing were obscured by the emphatic separation of citizens and nation that became an emblematic gesture of nineteenth-century reform.

Yet the divergent positions Garrison advocated in his writings suggest that the sites of potential overlap between radical reform and state interest were at times significant. A republicanism freed from the state, for instance, potentially works in tandem with (indeed, provides a liberal veneer to) the spread of nationalism beyond the nation's borders espoused by growing enthusiasm for US entrance into the imperial economy. At times, Garrison strenuously opposed that entrance, writing passionately against imperialist ventures in Mexico and Africa, especially in his diatribes against the American Colonization Society. At other moments, however, Garrison indicated his support of consensual colonization: “If our free colored population were brought into our schools, and raised from their present low estate, I am confident that an army of Christian volunteers would go out from their ranks, by a divine impulse and under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, to redeem their African brethren from the bondage of idolatry and the dominion of spiritual death” (Thoughts 37). Ironically, the very forces that would “enlighten” Africa, according to Garrison, would “darken” America: those institutions that he entrusts with securing African-American consent—education, religion, filiopietism—he named, in regard to white Americans, as sources of proslavery deception. The overlap of coercion and consent, central to his conception of the citizen-form, makes his notion of voluntary emigration seem consistent with his condemnation of the Colonization Society and other imperial ventures, even though Garrison's anti-institutional writings make that overlap seem, at best, questionable.¹⁶

Although the displacement of citizenship onto divine will shares a logic of irresistibly expansive republicanism with nineteenth-century imperialism, the “privatizing” of citizenship to individual affect had equally conflicting results. Since privileged Americans, in entering the public, risked evacuating the private, other Americans had to bear the burden of representing interiority in its threefold nature: morality, virtue, and affect. An extensive body of criticism has demonstrated that the association of white womanhood with a supposedly natural relationship to domestic privacy allowed white men to develop a commercial sphere unimpeded by emotional or moral qualms, while limiting the legal, social, and economic potentials of antebellum women. Black Americans bore a similar burden of interior representation, representing traits of piety, nurturance, and conjugal fidelity threatened by the outrages of slavery: mothers could not raise their children; husbands could not provide homes for wives or even ensure their wedding bond; women could not control their sexuality; slaves were not permitted a spiritual life. Constructed as pure, pious, and domestic, black Americans came to represent an already feminized privacy. The division of abolition authority into (black) privacy and (white) publicity meant, on the one hand, that black Americans themselves could not be represented as properly public figures (hence Garrison's objections to Frederick Douglass's decision to edit a newspaper and honor national institutions—that is, to enter the discourses of national publicity—himself, rather than through Garrison's mediation).¹⁷ On the other hand, it meant that white abolitionists needed to pass through a black interior (experiencing, through sympathy, black pain so as to speak with a public authority), allowing themselves a racially bivalent persona that blacks themselves were denied. Although whites such as Garrison could move in and out of the national symbolic, criticizing the nation so as paradoxically to gain ground in its public discourse, blacks, who had no privileged place in that public, were positioned as the unwavering bearers of (privatized, interiorized) virtue.

To point out Garrison's relation to more obviously invested social discourses is not to fault Garrison or any particular reformer for making bad choices, but is, rather, to demonstrate the ways in which reform operates always within the rhetorics, subjectivities, and interests of those social forms that it simultaneously seeks to challenge. It is, in short, to place reform more fully in its history.

3. “IN YOUR SUFFERINGS I PARTICIPATE”: BLACK VIRTUE AND WHITE CIVIC DEPTH

The pure virtues that black Americans developed through their degrading exposure to the outrages of slavery did not remain simply private, however; their very purity made them potentially synonymous with the idealized republican traits of the citizen-form. This translation of private to civic virtues was necessary to enable the cross-identifications central to white abolitionists' disciplinary sympathy. For Garrison, pain and disgrace became outward signs of a civic righteousness, in his own life and for persecuted blacks. Indeed, with Southern gentlemen offering rewards on his head, legislatures throughout the country banning his writings, and a lynch mob in Boston dragging him through the streets with a noose around his neck, Garrison understandably considered himself an American non grata. At times, however, Garrison seemed to take satisfaction in his exclusion, emphasizing in his writings and public speeches that “[t]he whole nation is against me” (Thoughts 7). Garrison's status as outsider not only granted him public authority, but rationalized his identification with black Americans as well. Wounded and despised, he appeared to share their condition.

Garrison's identification with black Americans—and the limitations of that identification—gave rise to a complex pedagogical discourse. Garrison imagined black citizens as abstract markers of civic virtues (making blacks more worthy of American citizenship than prejudicial, and hence unvirtuous, whites). Through sympathy with blacks, then, white abolitionists absorbed the virtues born of private purity and public pain. The yoking of sympathy and the citizen-form, in short, permitted radical reformers like Garrison to imagine “blackness” as white interiority, as a shared, yet unmarked, bond that rendered certain whites more virtuous and ultimately more “deep” than their opponents. Although white sympathy, as I have suggested, potentially locked black Americans in positions (“characters”) distinct from whites, it also allowed whites an identificational mobility that is a hallmark of white privilege.

Although abolitionists could maintain black Americans as abstract markers of civic virtue in rhetorical writings aimed to shame or convince (and hence distance themselves from) other whites, it became an awkward position to hold in relation to blacks as actual social agents. Not only might black Americans have a different notion of what constitutes virtuous citizenship, they might define themselves in ways that challenged white abolitionists' sympathetic identifications. When Garrison addressed black audiences, therefore, he paradoxically represented his black auditors both as markers of abstract virtues and as pupils needing instruction in those very civic virtues. In their construction as pupils, black Americans rhetorically mark a civility that they, by definition, do not possess. The rhetorical position of black Americans as both indexical of and lacking (needing instruction in) civic virtue allowed Garrison to incorporate black interior virtue as a grounds of his public authority, while maintaining a pedagogical distance from and a sympathetic discipline over his black “pupils.”

Garrison's 1833 Address to audiences of free blacks, delivered in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia just prior to his departure for England, provides a striking example of reformist abolition's disciplinary pedagogy. In his absence, Garrison warns, the free people of color must deport themselves civilly if they are to earn the sympathy of white Northerners, civility defined initially as New Testament forbearance: “Conquer their aversion by moral excellence; their proud spirit by love; their evil acts by acts of goodness; their animosity by forgiveness. Keep in your hearts the fear of God, and rejoice even in tribulation; for the promise is sure, that all things shall work together for good to those who love His name” (“Words of Encouragement” 172). Love of the name of the Father—the law of civil order and self-regulating obedience that rests on the affective relay of family, church, and state—here becomes the precondition first of white sympathy and then of its definitional corollary, civil entitlement. To love the unappealable name of the Father is to accept the sins of whiteness.

In the Address, Garrison sutures the universalizing and irresistible imperatives of divine law to the social work of nineteenth-century citizenship and labor: “I beseech you fail not, on your part, to lead quiet and orderly lives. Let all quarreling, all dramdrinking, all profanity, and violence, all division, be confined to the white people. Imitate them in nothing but what is clearly good, and carefully shun even the appearance of evil” (Address 21). Urging black auditors to be resigned, sober, hardworking, and polite, Garrison echoes his characterization of the freed West Indian slaves as “industrious, economical, orderly, docile almost to a fault, filled with grateful emotions, aspiring after intellectual and moral cultivation, and rejoicing continually over the boon of liberty” (“West India Emancipation” 345). Throughout his writings, and most particularly in his addresses to black audiences, Garrison inscribes the citizen-form onto the characters of those who, as emulators of republican virtue (good workers and loyal citizens, at once docile and free), will be even more representative (but not innately “possessed”) of republican civility than already-enfranchised white citizens.

Garrison encourages black emulation by promising not only white acceptance (probably not a very creditable incentive), but those rights and privileges provided by the very institutions from which Garrison has freed white abolitionists through his critique of nationalism. The question of whether blacks will enjoy the same rights and opportunities as whites under the national contract is moot, however, since Garrison's imagining of black civility rhetorically separates black Americans from the body politic. Asking his audience, “Do you not congratulate yourselves that you are so united?” (Address 13) and relegating “division” to licentious whites, Garrison defines civility as group cohesion. Even while Garrison asks blacks to become model citizens in ways that seem to promise incorporation within the national public, then, he also asks them to remain coherent as a group presumably distinct and distinguishable from the national body as a whole.

The dynamic of always already failed emulation is prefigured in the pedagogical structure of the address itself: praising his audience for the “spirit of virtuous emulation so great among you, as to pervade all classes, from the grey head to the youth” (Address 13), Garrison asserts a common trait—the desire to imitate—that unites internal fractions, while also putting a permanent difference between this new united “class” and the exemplary teacher whom they are to emulate. Above all, in contrast to the courageous figure of the enraged abolitionist who actively fights the prejudices of his country, Garrison praises his auditors for “bearing all your trials and difficulties in the spirit of Christian resignation” (Address 13). In other writings, Garrison reveals the disciplinary intent of the “resignation” he here attributes to free blacks. In “West India Emancipation,” for instance, Garrison, imagining the charge that freed slaves will seek revenge, replies, “On the contrary, is it not to be taken for granted, as a matter of course, that they will manifest the liveliest gratitude, be docile as lambs, perform their enumerated labor with alacrity, and make each field and hill vocal with melody? ‘Instinct is a great master’” (336). As Garrison suggests in the Address, “instincts” are not innate, but are the products of his rhetorical interpellation: “It is said that I am exciting your race against the whites, and filling your minds with revengeful feelings. Is this true? Have not all my addresses and appeals to you had a contrary effect upon your minds?” (Address 13).

Although Garrison's portrait of the freed black, instructed by white abolitionists in the lessons of republican self-regulation, is on one level strategic, pacifying white anxiety about black retribution following emancipation, it is also a condition and a justification for the authoritative pedagogy of the Address itself. The costs to his audience of such a pedagogy are indicated when Garrison grounds the authority by which he instructs those more intimately acquainted with the horrors of slavery and racism: “not that I am qualified in all things to instruct you,” Garrison acknowledges; “yet you have shown, in a thousand ways, that the course I have pursued has secured your cordial approbation—that the language I have spoken has been the language of your own hearts—that the advice I have given has been treasured up in your memories, like good seeds sown in good ground, and is now producing fruit, ten, thirty, sixty, and even a hundred fold” (Address 4). Having gained his public authority from their experience (their approbation secures his right to speak and instruct), Garrison's words first reflect but then “improve” (“producing fruit”) that experience. His agricultural metaphor naturalizes his pedagogical power over the memory of black Americans, while echoing, albeit in a liberalized and sympathetic form, the plantation structure he works to abolish. Black citizens become the conduit between profit (what is produced through them without credit to their labor) and the identity of the “master” (who accumulates his authority as the surplus value of their uncredited labor) in ways that repeat, rather than subvert, the labor hierarchies of the Southern plantations. Because of this echo, perhaps, Garrison is able to characterize his address as both a reflection of and a substitution for the interiors of black citizens: his words become interchangeable with their hearts and memories. Their experiences have circulated through his public address and return to them in the twinned form of “improved” affect and white public authority, a sympathetic circuit that leaves the emulative pupils devoid of a language to critique that authority or to express a dissenting countermemory.

If the lack of civil virtue signified by their emulative desire threatens to deny black Americans access to public authority, their very exclusion opens a space of authenticating identification for the sympathetic abolitionist. In the course of the Address, Garrison increasingly names himself among the persecuted. Discussing the widespread change in public opinion regarding slavery, Garrison tells his audience, “Scarcely any credit belongs to myself. … To you, much of the applause belongs. Had it not been for your cooperation, your generous confidence, your liberal support, as a people, I might have been borne down by my enemies” (Address 23). Expressing his humble gratitude to his black supporters, Garrison, asserting that prejudiced whites are his enemies, not theirs, can imagine that his audience supports the beleaguered white abolitionist, and not the other way around. Outcast from the state, Garrison, in his own mind at least, is no longer fully white. “I never rise to address a colored audience,” Garrison begins the Address, “without feeling ashamed of my own color; ashamed of being identified with a race of men, who have done you so much injustice, and who yet retain so large a portion of your brethren in servile chains. To make atonement, in part, for their conduct, I have solemnly dedicated my health, and strength, and life, to your service. I love to plan and to work for your social, intellectual, and spiritual advancement. My happiness is augmented with yours; in your sufferings I participate” (Address 12). If blacks represent outcast purity in Garrison's Address, other white people represent the corruption caused by overidentification with the state, signified by a fear and hatred of suffering blacks.

Yet corrupt whites also represent, by virtue of their control over national rhetoric, extraordinary public authority. If Garrison takes on a persecuted but pure interiority associated with blacks, through his pedagogical acumen—he is the object of admiring applause—he assumes a public authority that distinguishes him from his emulative auditors. Sharing a “complexion” with whites but a suffering interiority with blacks, Garrison can assume a place in national politics without surrendering his incorruptible purity. From this position, Garrison can appear as either an idealized white or an abject black (but never a prejudiced white or a dutiful black) citizen.

Although he gained an ideal authority through his cross-identifications, Garrison risked a good deal as well, as the Boston mob made clear when it threatened to blacken Garrison's face and hands before lynching him. The mob apparently understood better than Garrison himself that freed blacks were potentially a threat to the racist underpinnings of the industrial North, not just the docile emulators of its civil principles. Less physical but perhaps no less threatening, Garrison's cross-identifications suggest a lack at the heart, not of black citizenship, but of public authority itself. Garrison's Address suggests that public authority exists only in the circulation between blacks and whites, nation and citizens, teacher and student, but belongs finally to no one. If white civil virtue circulates in a purely discursive space, so Garrison, who wishes to possess those virtues as the grounds of his public authority, must also circulate between the “whiteness” and “blackness” he has created. In gaining his authority, then, he risks his claim to authenticity (the indwelling “truth” of one's “character”) upon which that authority depends.

Neither the appropriation of another's suffering nor the consequent inauthenticity is particular to the remarkably earnest Garrison. Rather, both were central to the allure and the anxiety caused by antebellum reform in the US. Appeals to the sufferings of a “group” to which one did not belong—the poor, alcoholics, criminals, sex workers—increasingly supplied the intimate pain that entitled more privileged citizens to engage in public debate with an authorized moral authority. Taking one's authenticating intimacy from a group by definition alienated from one's social identity both generated and forestalled claims to authentic interiority. To be sure, these reformers brought about significant changes in American civil life, relieving suffering and remedying social policies through their moral activism. Despite their label as “reformers,” however, some, such as Garrison himself, wanted a social revolution and blamed the absence of that radical change on outside forces: Southern racism, governmental cynicism, weakness of white Northern resolve. But part of the failure, surely, resulted from reform's own program, for liberal sympathy worked, not only on behalf of the suffering subaltern, but in the interest of national pride, aggressive global expansion, and white civility as well. Such politics, I have argued, follow an affective circuit from compassion to empathy to inclusion, the trajectory of which is to pull the suffering other into a state of normative plentitude—the state of civil health—from which “proper” feelings (gratitude, docility, ambition, but never rage or resentment) emanate. Once social relations became the domain of interior forces—sympathy and character, phobia and human nature—reform came to be limited to initiatives (medical, moral, and domestic) aimed at standardizing human nature toward a set of fixed social virtues, foreclosing social analyses of structural ills and diminishing the value of cultural difference. In suggesting the normative work of civil inclusion, then, I am not attempting a cynical argument in which power is all-pervasive and irresistible. Rather, I want to suggest that part of what makes power unassailable is precisely its equation with “natural” or “universal” (the two become the same) civic sentiment, and that, if power were denuded of its discursive associations with “inner life,” we might ultimately create more liberating modes of civil organization better suited for public justice.

Notes

1. Steven Mintz notes that antebellum reform not only “arose in a millennialist sense of possibilities” (xiv), but also “believed the only way to stabilize the social order was to internalize self-restraints within the depth of individual character” (xiv). Mintz further observes that antebellum reform's “efforts to replace physical coercion resulted in less visible, but no less potent psychological forms of discipline” (xv). Despite his insight that these forms of discipline were essentially psychological, centered on the creation of a “sober, educated, self-disciplining citizenry” (xiv), Mintz quickly shifts to the institutional sites of social discipline, claiming that “reformers effectively created new institutions of social control and confinement, ranging from poorhouses and prisons to reformatories and asylums” (xv). Perhaps because he eliminates the psychological effects of reformist discipline on those not confined to such institutions, Mintz is able to imagine an unambivalently progressive contemporary inheritance from antebellum reform, stripped of its “internalize[d] self-restraints”: antebellum reforms, according to Mintz, “reinvigorated American ideals and reinforced the nation's commitment to equality and social justice. If Americans today recognize the various forms that oppression, inequality, exploitation, and tyranny can take, this is largely on account of past reformers who stuck thorns in the side of indifference and dared to dream of a new world” (xiii). Mintz is right to claim that antebellum reformers reinvigorated America's commitments to justice, especially at a moment when the ideals of the Declaration of Independence were beginning to seem cynically rhetorical. In formulating this inheritance, however, he ignores his own insight that reform resulted in self-mastery and psychological control as much as in justice, much less “equality.” His optimistic claim that Americans today—who continue to elect politicians who dismantle affirmative action and welfare, fight initiatives for universal health care, deregulate the “free market,” define “marriage” legally in relation solely to heterosexual couples—can “recognize the various forms that oppression, inequality, exploitation, and tyranny can take,” though qualified by the conditional “if,” suspends the self-managing disciplines at work not only on the criminal and the abject but on the normative middle-class citizen. Those self-managements, too, are the legacy of antebellum reform.

2. Cf. Lauren Berlant's “The Queen of America Goes to Washington City: Notes on Diva Citizenship” (1997).

3. On the American Colonization Society, see my “Pedagogical Discipline.”

4. Walter Jackson Bate was among the first critics to note the social function of sympathy in choreographing civic morality in eighteenth-century England. Bate documents the rise of a specific mode of sympathy that linked classic conceptions of civic order to an early Romantic focus on states of feelings, giving rise to a distinctively modern individualism. At the center of this philosophic development, according to Bate, was Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments.

5. See, e.g., Elizabeth B. Clark, “‘The Sacred Rights of the Weak’: Pain, Sympathy, and the Culture of Individual Rights in Antebellum America” (1995).

6. See, e.g., Barnes, David Marshall, The Surprising Effects of Sympathy (1988), and Julia Stern, The Plight of Feeling: Sympathy and Dissent in the Early American Novel (1997).

7. Barnes has persuasively argued that “[i]n a move that anticipates Foucault's study of modern disciplinary forms, sympathy is revealed to be a self-regulating practice” (18), one of the key “affective forms of disciplinary control” (8) in early America. Barnes argues that postrevolutionary women were encouraged to form sympathetic relations to sentimental novels in which wayward daughters learn to subject themselves to the authoritative if arbitrary rule of fathers, thereby rationalizing the “consensual” subjection of citizens to the founding fathers of the national family. Demonstrating “early national culture's attempts to reconcile conservative republican values of duty to others with a liberal agenda of self-possession” (12), sentimental fiction is the logical outgrowth of Smith's theory of sympathy, in which “imagining oneself under the constant scrutiny of others, one eventually comes to internalize that perspective. What follows is Smith's vision of an individual conscience that takes shape as a separate subject … who, by temporarily adopting the other's perspective, manages to teach us the ‘most complete lesson of self-command’” (21). Through her focus on sympathy's regulation of the gendered subject (in both senses of the word), Barnes poses a compelling critique of antebellum reform—“Why reform social and political structures when you can reform the woman herself?” (10)—similar to the one I am suggesting here. Although Barnes suggests that under such disciplinary reform “difference is to be negated rather than understood” (22), I argue that the goal of racial discipline is neither negation nor understanding, but internalization; and to Barnes's assertion that “to read sympathetically is to read like an American” (2), I would add that it is to read like a white American, since the end result of racial sympathy, I am contending, is not the subsuming of difference into a national sameness, but the reification of white Americanness through the manufacture of racial character. Gender is made to produce a fantasy of sameness in postrevolutionary America, in other words, while race is made to produce difference.

8. In Bentham's model prison, prisoners were visible to guards, who were not themselves visible to the prisoners. The result is that prisoners, who are always potentially watched (but are never assuredly so), begin to act continually as if they are under guard. Having internalized surveillance, then, prisoners lose the ability to distinguish between coercion (what is imposed from outside) and consent (behaviors produced, under internalized scrutiny, as if from free will). Modes of self-regulation produced under internalized cultural scrutiny Foucault called, following Bentham, panoptical, which became the basis of the shift from punishment (force exerted by external authority) to discipline (force produced through self-regulation based on the self's desire to conform with norms produced by new knowledges of the body, natural and social science taking the place of the guards in Bentham's prison).

9. Lott describes the “pale gaze” as “a ferocious investment in demystifying and domesticating black power in white fantasy by projecting vulgar black types as spectacular objects of white men's looking” (153).

10. Garrison wrote, “The retributive justice of God was never more strikingly manifested than in this all-pervading negrophobia, the dreadful consequence of chattel slavery” (“The ‘Infidelity’ of Abolition,” Selections 6).

11. Garrisonian abolition emerged during a period when, as Habermas has shown, the “public” became, throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, a place where critical debate, animated by private, autonomous conviction, was increasingly directed at—rather than animated by—collective institutions. To the degree that one challenged Church and State, one gained status as a moral individual, privately suited for public authority.

12. See, e.g., Thoughts on African Colonization.

13. For Balibar, the “nation-form” operates as an ideological structure by generating a twofold illusion. In the first, “the generations which succeed one another over centuries on a reasonably stable territory, under a reasonably univocal designation, have handed on to each other an invariant substance” (86). Joined to this is the illusion that “the process of development from which we select aspects retrospectively, so as to see ourselves as the culmination of that process, was the only one possible, this is, it represented a destiny” (86). The nation-form thereby resolves “the interminable conflict between theological universalism and the universality of nationalism” (95).

14. Unless otherwise noted, all references to Garrison's speeches are to Selections.

15. His position at the heart of public controversy yet outside its relativist jurisdiction required that Garrison deny the source of his successes in the opinion-saturated domain of print: “Now, on what are right and wrong dependent?” Garrison asked. “On recorded declarations? On ancient parchments or modern manuscripts? on sacred books? No. Though every parchment, manuscript, and book in the world were given to the consuming fire, the loss would not in the least affect the right or wrong of moral actions. Truth and duty, the principles of justice and equality, the obligations of mercy and brotherly kindness, are older than all books, and more enduring than tablets of stone” (“War Essentially Wrong” 89-90). Garrison's repeated denial of his reliance on print reveals an anxiety about his relation to public opinion and, therefore, to the very organizational vogues, distributional markets, and national public-formations—in short, to ideology—he criticized in others. At the same time, however, Garrison's own newspaper, The Liberator, was effecting exactly the manipulation of public opinion. Throughout Garrison's writings, the agency of print was always subsumed on the one hand by providential wisdom and, on the other, by the affective response of readers, who were constructed as embodied consumers, both of the print-commodity and its ideology. That the readership of The Liberator was mostly black sets the stage in disturbing ways for the economic incorporation of African Americans within the nationally “inclusive” utopia set forth by the newspaper. African Americans would become citizens simultaneously with their interpellation as consumers, both functions merging in the consumption of “identities” such as “black” and “virtuous citizen.” At the same time, the newspaper's editor, insofar as he was also the public (white, male) voice of authority, could eclipse his own situation within the economic market. Given the role of newspapers in generating the imagined national community, it is not surprising that the ambivalence Garrison expressed about print is similar to his ambivalence about the nation as a social institution. My argument attempts to introduce the question of racial triangulation (between Garrison as exemplary, racially mobile citizen, prejudiced white citizens at large, and suffering blacks) into Robert Fanuzzi's fascinating analysis of Garrison's use of print to create a triangulation between Garrison as private citizen, the market public for The Liberator, and a “political subject conceived and refined through the political economy of newspaper publishing” (123). Compelling as that argument is, to leave “race” out of an analysis of the print public generated by The Liberator is to miss the extent to which Garrison's political subject exemplifies white republican citizenship at the threshold between radical individualism and market democracy.

16. Just as disturbing, however, is the connection Garrison draws between African and North American expansion, which Garrison exalted as precisely the kind of voluntary displacement of citizens that African colonization could ideally become (Thoughts 15-17). In making such a claim, Garrison brackets the role of westward expansion in extending and strengthening slavery in the US (a connection he elsewhere acknowledged and condemned, but only at the level of federal agency, as when the government admitted Texas as a slave state). In bracketing that connection, Garrison sidestepped as well the consistency of his fantasy of citizenship-without-nations with the imperialist rhetorics of Manifest Destiny: both relied on divine injunction; both freed the citizen-form from specific national borders to generate a universal, imperialist “mission”; both justified their universalism through claims to “uplift” benighted people of color; and both, as Alexander Saxton notes, relied on “an intermediate language by which rational and moral ideas—self-evident to the intellect or logically deducible—could be transposed into emotional, metaphorical, even sensual images, comprehensible at the inferior levels of the social order” (46); both, that is, having freed citizenship from its national borders sought to map it onto—and into—the bodies of unwilling people of color.

17. On Douglass's battles with Garrison, see William Cain's introduction to William Lloyd Garrison.

18. I am building here on Berlant's critique of the ways in which “the violently rationalized world is put forth in the name of the authenticity of feeling, especially the feelings of love and suffering, the claims of which stand on the high ground of an ethics beyond politics: sentimental politics are being performed whenever putatively suprapolitical affects or affect-saturated institutions (like the nation and the family) are proposed as universal solutions to structural racial, sexual, or intercultural antagonism” (“Poor Eliza” 638). Sentimental politics are especially likely to substitute for structural antagonism, Berlant argues, in “capitalist culture, both at the juncture where abstract relations of value are sublimated into and represented by particular kinds of subaltern bodies and at the place where the magical autonomy of the commodity form (the mirror of the stereotype) is positioned as the disembodied solution to the experience of social negativity or isolation” (642).

Works Cited

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