Yearly Archives: 2021
Apr 2, 2021 Angela Fernandez
Christopher Tomlins’s new book, In the Matter of Nat Turner: A Speculative History, is a tour de force. It retells the history of Nat Turner’s famous rebellion with a focus on Turner’s religious motivations. The book begins by explaining the shortcomings of previous accounts of Turner, attempting to reconstruct what might have motivated Turner to decide in August 1831 to lead a group of fellow slaves on a campaign in Southampton, Virginia, “to rise up and kill all the white people.” Tomlins’s book shows how historical speculation and conjecture can be done in a way that is nonetheless solidly grounded in biblical, philosophical, anthropological, and historical context. The book is about Turner, yes, but insofar as it demonstrates the approach—call it “grounded speculation”—it is also a reflection on history itself and what to do as a historian when the historical event you are interested in is simultaneously under-documented and over-interpreted.
Tomlins begins by outlining the problems with two widely-relied upon accounts of the Turner Rebellion, both titled The Confessions of Nat Turner, which co-opted Turner in the service of other agendas. First, there was the contemporary account given by white county lawyer Thomas Ruffin Gray to whom Turner confessed while in prison awaiting trial. Gray produced a very complicated text about which Tomlins writes, “[it] is undoubtedly evidentiary, but evidence of what?” (P. 31.) What follows is a very nuanced reading of the work and what can and cannot be inferred from it.
Secondly, Tomlins critiques the 1967 best-selling book written by white novelist William Styron. Styron purported to be providing a historical “meditation” on the event. However, he was not a historian. Tomlins persuasively argues that Styron was, in reality, using Turner to make sense of the race riots of the 1960’s and to fulfil Styron’s own self-involved fantasy of what he thought of as every Southerner’s duty to come to know “the negro.” Both men treated Turner’s “enthusiasm as insanity.” (P. 11.) And both were profiting by turning Turner’s story into their property. (P. x.)
Tomlins, by contrast, embarks on a “work of recovery and recognition” (P. x) to understand Turner “on his terms.” (P. 22, emphasis in the original.) Specifically, Tomlins analyzes how Turner saw himself as commanded by God to take up, as reluctantly as Abraham did the command to kill his own son, God’s “work of death.” What follows is simultaneously chilling and immensely instructive. Tomlins weaves, often through long and learned footnotes, his own reflections on philosophical topics such as Walter Benjamin’s concept of “divine violence,” central to Tomlins’s conjectures about Turner. (See Pp. 279-80, note 3.)
Tomlins wants most to emphasize the profound religious faith likely underlying Turner’s actions. He argues that faith has been washed out by those who have made but a feeble attempt to understand Turner, Grey who was “irreligious” (P. 86) and Styron who was not interested in religion. The Prologue starts with a of the cover of Styron’s novel (P.1), Chapter 1 with a reproduction of the title page of Gray’s work, and Chapter 2 with a photograph of Turner’s bible. (P. 50.) Tomlins starts the religious reconstruction with the Gospel of Luke because Turner lived all his life in St. Luke’s parish in Southampton County (P. 52), and because of the appropriateness of some of the teachings in this Gospel relating to “reversal” (P. 55) and how “the first [the white slave-owning Virginian] should be last and the last [the slave] should be first.” (P. 61.) As Tomlins describes, Turner “has been widely identified as a lay preacher […] was highly intelligent (that is generally accepted), and he was highly literate […] like Christ he too was thirty years old when [as he put it] the time came to ‘arise and prepare myself.’” (P. 77.)
In addition to a range of other biblical texts, Tomlins also connects Turner’s revolutionary eschatology and his Virginian Methodism to Jonathan Edwards, arguing that Turner likely saw himself as comparable to David in David and Goliath. (P. 79.) Chapter 3 takes up the notion of “divine violence” that Turner saw as demanding his action as a kind of Kierkegaardian “Knight of Faith” with no choice but to obey God’s command whatever ethics and the law said, and however horrifying the consequences. Chapter 4 describes the killings, what Turner called his “work of death,” deliberate and methodical. What was its logic? Tomlins writes that, according to Locke, “killing those who would maintain one in relations of dependence is a means to obtain a property in oneself.” (P. 96.) Perhaps that was the kind of politics that inspired others to follow Turner; yet for Turner, Tomlins emphasizes, it was first and foremost a matter of faith.
Where the earlier chapters deal with the religious reconstruction of what might have been Turner’s mindset and the event itself, the last two chapters of the book, Chapters 5 and 6, deal with the fall out or ripple effects of the rebellion in a fragile and fractious Virginia. The state was split between slave owners in the East and a West with more development-oriented interests. Here we are told about how Turner, “the self-possessed rebel” (P. 141), haunted the state’s Constitutional Convention in 1829-30, controversies over using (discounted) slave labor on public work projects, and debates about emancipation in 1831-32. The rebellion helped support pro-emancipation on the grounds of safety and security, the danger that “proximity” between blacks and whites raised, and the idea, however briefly entertained, from the Western part of the State that “the right of private property must yield to the right of society to be secure.” (P. 181.) The pro-property East, concerned about the loss of their capital in future slaves that would be born and manumitted once they reached the age of majority, pushed back against the idea that this “increase” was not naturally (and legally) theirs. To white Virginians, Turner had to be presented to the public as an irrational and insane aberration, the perpetrator of a wild and random massacre that made no sense and was unlikely to repeat itself. “‘[W]ild and intemperate’ proposals for abolition and emancipation … ‘subversive of the rights of property’” were neither necessary nor welcome. (P. 188.)
This work is very unlike Tomlins’s earlier books given the way that it focuses on a specific event. It is challenging reading for a number of reasons. First, there are the descriptions of the killings in Chapter 4. They put me in the mindset of Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, another best-selling “true crime” novel from the 1960’s, gripping yet awful in their details. Tomlins presents the killings in a very matter-of-fact and non-sensationalist way that gets the point across but nonetheless left me at least feeling disturbed.
Second, trying to climb inside spiritual and supernatural faith when you do not share it is not an easy thing to do and many readers will likely find themselves in this position. It is challenging for us (just as it was for Gray and Styron) not to secularize such an event. Yet in Turner’s case, Tomlins is asking us to refrain from turning Turner into “a conscript of modernity,” making him into something sensible to us and inappropriately substituting a flat figure for a three dimensional person who was motivated by spiritual and supernatural faith. (P. 280, note 3.)
Thirdly, looking for the logic in “divine violence” or “righteous violence” runs up against abhorrence of violence and the urge to condemn it in any form. Yet it is not our job as historians to try and stand in the same shoes as the Southampton County Court to condemn Turner’s acts (or to try to explain and try to excuse them). The job of the historian is to try to read and understand (especially difficult) events on their own terms and, as Tomlins elegantly puts it at the end of the book, “be ready to read what was never written.” (P. 218.) That imaginative leap is required when it comes to the thinly documented, e.g. the person at the center of the Turner Rebellion. It is just those topics that most deserve our attention, as they will often involve incidents, events, or people that are easy to misunderstand and manipulate into something quite different from who and what they were.
Mar 8, 2021 Michelle McKinley
Becoming Free, Becoming Black examines the fissures in the law that enslaved people throughout the Americas used to traverse a path from enslavement to freedom. Comparative approaches to the study of law and freedom in the past had stressed a divergence between Latin America and the British Atlantic, using Louisiana as a case for contrast or continuity. As the authors of Becoming Free, Becoming Black demonstrate, the situation on the ground revealed a striking degree of similarity in Virginia, Havana, and in New Orleans, and across time. Given the absence of a robust body of slave laws, enslaved people in 17th c. Virginia advanced claims that resonated with Iberian or Cuban claims. The authors posit that legal borrowing was a plausible strategy for enslaved people bringing freedom claims, as there was a fair degree of movement of petitioners between the British and Spanish Atlantic during this time.
The book tells a clear story about what the law of slavery was and how it came about, how it functioned and why it changed over time in three different sites. A secondary title of the book could have been: “A Survey of Free People of Color,” since the presence of sizable communities of free people of color made a significant difference in the ability to sustain freedom claims or to navigate one’s way from bondage to freedom. In all three sites, slaveholders and lawmakers—in a sense one and the same—repeatedly demonstrated serious attempts to crack down on the possibilities by which black people could remain free within a slave society.
Free people of color weakened the stability of the hyphen between black and slave, and black and citizen. In societies deeply committed to and profoundly shaped by slavery, free people of color could be accommodated in exceptional circumstances: as jurists, orators, preachers, soldiers, saints and intercessors. They could be exemplary citizens and proffer evidence of accommodation without threatening a socioracial order. But outside of the exceptions, the legal paths to freedom were consistently limited.
One of the ways that the authors trace these attempts at curtailing freedom is to examine local ordinances and decrees. Ordinances in the societies under review delimited all facets of black social life: where black people could sell wine, or hunt, or sell their wares, where they could gather and congregate to worship, whether they could ride a horse or a mule, and under what conditions they could bear arms. One wonders whether this comparative view of local ordinances is chicken and egg—was it the behavior that prompted the decrees? Or were legislative anxieties so high that they sought to pre-empt the behavior by outlawing it beforehand? The behavior prompting the decrees plainly demonstrates that black people did not comply with these ordinances. Indeed, the repeated nature of the promulgations suggests that very few people took these mandates seriously across the board.
Turning from the law on the books to the life on the ground, the authors weave together the official and judicial records with careful attention to notarial and sacramental records where possible. They show the consolidation of custom and equity into law that respected certain rights even when the tides turned over time. Manumission, and the concomitant right to seek a new owner, never disappeared, although these rights became more fragile and conditional. Though retrenchment occurred in the French codes, they were outpaced by the legislative ban on manumissions in the continental US that tied individual manumission to the larger question of emancipation. Fueled by fears of revolution, and the threat of dispossession, white slaveowners conditioned manumission or movement out of the territory (or out of the country all together in the case of Liberian “repatriation.”) This “tipping point” created real setbacks in Louisiana and Virginia for family integrity and for black prosperity. This was less true in Havana, where the numbers of free people of color were too large for repatriation, and where manumission continued to be registered as a slaveowner’s right. In all three sites, however, we see that black citizenship was undesirable, regarded as problematic, and incompatible with white liberal notions of political belonging.
Slaveowners were intent on retaining the “issue” of their female slaves because of womb enslavement. Yet, women far outpaced the numbers of manumitted slaves vis-à-vis their male counterparts in all three jurisdictions. Children also were freed in greater numbers, sometimes by grace, but more often by the efforts of family members to purchase children at a lower price. Sacramental records thus show that gender, domesticity and generational ties could create conditions for freedom in the womb. The archives reveal complex and often messy tales and shed light on the conditional precarity of children born to mothers in the process of self-purchase. The fact that legislative decrees mandated that self-purchase and/or coartación was an individual right not conferrable to children of the womb is undermined by the evidence across many colonial sites. As the authors note, conditional manumission and womb emancipation were most prominent in societies with large communities of free people of color.
Becoming Free, Becoming Black is a comparative study of slavery that spans different jurisdictions, plantation logics, and most importantly languages. It serves as a model for future comparative work and collaboration. The book encourages us to think through the politics of the archive. Historians of the Iberian world are privileged if not overly endowed with archival sources. Our colleagues in the British Atlantic resort to “critical fabulations” to reconstruct the lives of enslaved people, using documents that often portray the darkest hours of the slave trade. This has led many scholars to critique the archive of slavery, or reject it outright as a place of death, lies, and violence for black lives that presages the present condition.
Yet as de la Fuente and Gross show, these archives are not tombs– they are full of cacophonous voices recounting stories of flight, revolution, jurisdictional plurality, wrongful enslavement, and the lackluster performance of the law. Indeed, the full archival offering on display in this book could offer a counterweight to the insistence on the archive of slavery as a place of death.
Feb 5, 2021 Kunal Parker
Henry M. Cowles has written an absolutely brilliant book that traces the history of the idea of “the scientific method” from Darwin to Dewey. Although Cowles’ intended audience is historians of science, the book has important and tantalizing implications for those interested more generally in the twentieth-century modernist turn to method, process, procedure, and technique. This is a turn that American legal historians will recognize in the massive emphasis on procedure and process that marked twentieth-century American legal thought, beginning with the rise of the administrative state in the early twentieth century and reaching its apogee with the Legal Process School in the 1950s and 1960s.
The conventional account of the modernist turn to method runs as follows. Around 1900, thinkers in diverse realms of Euro-American intellectual life—ranging from law to literature, mathematics to music, physics to painting—became newly aware of the rickety scaffolding propping up their disciplines and endeavors. What were once deemed established truths, unassailable rationalities, given moralities, and transcendental aesthetic norms suddenly seemed spurious, the product of nothing but history, the tottering fabrications of fallible men. In the American legal context, this moment is exemplified in the scholarly writings, addresses, and judicial opinions of Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr. The modernist moment was famously disorienting, simultaneously frightening and challenging, at once fraught with promise and uncertainty. Old moorings had come undone. How was one to make sense of the world? How was one to proceed?
Although responses varied widely depending upon discipline and national tradition, one broad important trend reverberated across diverse fields and formations. Thinkers increasingly turned away from a conception of knowledge as ends, truths, substances, and foundations and towards knowledge as tools, means, methods, procedures, processes, protocols, and techniques. This was true of the sciences, the principal focus of Cowles’ book. As he puts it, science went from being “something like knowledge” to becoming “a tool for thinking.” (P. 6.) But the trend extended far beyond the scope of Cowles’ study. A creature of the early twentieth century, scientific management theory, applied alike in government bureaucracies and corporations, placed ends firmly in the background as a knowledge of means, methods, and processes took center stage. Artists and writers foregrounded in their work their means of production—painterly technique or language itself—instead of the object those means had once served to represent. In the 1940s, articulating a development that was already decades-old when he was writing, the Legal Realist scholar Karl Llewellyn would argue that law was not so much ”what courts have decided” as it was “how they go about deciding cases, and how they use the authorities with which they work, and how and why those authorities themselves came into existence,” in short, that law was primarily a method or way of doing things.
Philosophy was hardly immune to this sweeping re-orientation. Indeed, it played a central role in bringing it about. American philosophical pragmatism, the United States’ most celebrated homegrown philosophical tradition, insisted that ideas mattered principally insofar as they became means or tools and were put to work in the world. Early in his book, Cowles invokes John Dewey’s How We Think (1910), in which Dewey announced the five sequential steps of what came to be seen as the blueprint for “the scientific method,” beginning with a “felt difficulty,” moving on to the identification of a hypothesis, and ending with “observation and experiment leading to its acceptance or rejection,” in short, the testing of the tool/hypothesis in the world of facts. (P. 2.) If Dewey was a key figure in the articulation of “the scientific method”—and thus in the reorientation of modern science from substance to method—it is important to emphasize that Dewey’s shadow (and hence the shadow of “the scientific method” as he imagined it) fell over fields extending well beyond the sciences to law, politics, education, and even the arts.
In a series of chapters that offer brilliant, penetrating, and highly self-assured readings of the writings of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Anglo-American philosophers, philosophers of science, and scientists, Cowles gives us a history of how we got to Dewey’s How We Think. It is Cowles’ origin story—if a concept as simple as that of an “origin story” can be applied to so sophisticated a book—that is of interest.
As it emerged from the eighteenth century, Cowles argues, British science was still tethered to—and continued uncritically to venerate—Baconian empiricism. As revealed in the writings of Herschell, Whewell, and others, however, British philosophers of science were beginning to insist on the importance of hypothesis as a way for the scientist to proceed. Scientists could not begin from a brute collection of facts; they needed the conceptual leap into the void that the hypothesis represented. Of course, once formulated, the hypothesis would have to make its way in the world and be tested against the facts. It would succeed or fail based on how it would fare.
What Cowles shows dazzlingly is how, through a set of complex back-and-forth journeys (hence: no simple origin story), the injection of hypothesis into the empiricist terrain of British science came to be mirrored in the Darwinian account of nature itself and vice versa. Even as British scientists were coming to accept the idea that the scientific method should consist of hypotheses tested against facts, the Darwinian organism came to be seen as itself a kind of hypothesis as it confronted its environment, either to flourish or perish therein. And if evolution was neither more nor less than “the method of nature,” as the Darwinian account came to be understood to be, would that not also necessarily be the way in which the human mind proceeded, as a continual hypothesizing of ideas and a trying out of those very ideas in the world? As Cowles proceeds, exploring contexts ranging from the study of animals to the ethnography of “savages” to psychologists’ study of children, the link between Darwin and Dewey—a link of method—comes gradually into view. As exemplified in Dewey’s 1910 articulation of “the scientific method,” pragmatism’s “trial-and-error” approach to the world was, if one follows Cowles’ argument, nothing other than the Darwinian “method of nature” itself.
The star of the show in Cowles’ book is reflexivity. As philosophers and scientists thought harder and harder about the problem of knowledge, training their gaze relentlessly outward and inward, the lines between subject and object, mind and world, investigator and investigated, blurred and eventually vanished. Objects of inquiry became versions of the subjects performing the inquiry, even as those subjects rendered themselves objects. Cowles writes of his subjects’ “ratcheting up the reflexivity of the mind sciences” (P. 142), one of many comparable characterizations in the book, but one gets the impression that “ratcheting up … reflexivity” is as much Cowles’ own intellectual commitment as it is that of his nineteenth-century subjects. The reader senses Cowles’ enjoyment of his own bravura performance in talking about the bravura performances of his subjects. Here, too, then, investigator and investigated mirror one another, historian becoming archive and vice versa, reflexivity always leading to more of itself, although one is left wondering whether Cowles’ nineteenth- and early-twentieth century subjects were as invested in the pleasures of reflexivity—and the pleasures of method—as he so evidently is.
Cowles is not the first scholar to have explored the connections between evolution and pragmatism. Many have recognized that Darwinian evolution, together with pragmatism, played a crucial role in destabilizing the foundations of the Euro-American disciplines around 1900. But what Cowles does that is arresting, in my view, is to show to spectacular effect how the Darwinian “method of nature” underlies (even as it mirrors) the pragmatist method. Just as nature tested its hypotheses in the world, the Deweyan pragmatist (himself a part of nature) would try out his ideas in the real contexts in which he or she lived and worked. Cowles thus reveals that the pragmatist method—with its (to me) maddening Teflon-like resistance to critique and its bland and ubiquitous “but what else could there possibly be?” correctness—itself has a concrete historical grounding in the Darwinian understanding of nature and the related methodological crises of nineteenth-century Anglo-American science. Far from being a response to the modernist vanishing of foundations, Cowles shows, the pragmatist method remained anchored in an understanding of nature as foundation, where the foundation was, of course, method. In The Promise of Pragmatism (1994), the intellectual historian John Patrick Diggins articulated the modernist/pragmatist focus on method as follows: “Without access to the objectively real, the philosopher settles for the processes of knowing instead of the thing known.” But Cowles seems to suggest that, far from “settl[ing] for the processes of knowing instead of the thing known,” a tragic maneuver for a newly disenchanted world, the pragmatist philosopher might instead have been instantiating in his thinking something like “the objectively real,” namely, nature’s method. In other words, Cowles’ leaves us with the conundrum of puzzling through the joining of the anti-foundational modernist turn to method, on the one hand, with pragmatism’s embrace of nature’s method as foundation, on the other, forcing together yet again that which we take to be opposites, anti-foundationalism and foundationalism.
Cowles does not pursue, except perhaps obliquely, the conventional story of the modernist turn to method in law and elsewhere with which I began this review. But his story about the connections between the Darwinist “method of nature” and the pragmatist/modernist method must compel some rethinking of the conventional story, including the current narrativization of the development of twentieth-century American legal thought. Precisely what kind of rethinking is another matter. Towards the end of the book, Cowles recognizes that the larger turn to method in the twentieth-century would repeatedly exceed or overshoot its imagined referent in the Darwinian “method of nature.” After all, brute nature did not ordinarily become “aware” of its history with a view to changing it; its methods of proceeding were always realized in and by its results. By contrast, the early-twentieth century modernist/pragmatist, aware that history had left his world devoid of foundations, turned to method without any assurance that the method would be confirmed by its results. The goal was frequently to transform the existing world in one way or another, with results that ranged from the benign to the disastrous. At the same time, the link between the Darwinian “method of nature” and the diverse methods that were adopted in different disciplines and endeavors (for example, the turn to procedure in law) is far from obvious. None of this is Cowles’ problem. He has written a wonderfully smart book that complicates our understanding of modernism by giving us a unique account of its past.
Jan 7, 2021 Binyamin Blum
As the parent of a very curious four-year-old, I am accustomed to being asked the question “why?” about every statement I make. Specifically, I have recently been asked to explain why people die, and what happens to them once they do. In her article When Dead Bodies Talk: Colonial and Ritual Autopsies in French-Ruled Africa (1918–1945) Ruth Ginio explores the cultural underpinnings of how we approach such questions and the kinds of answers we find satisfying. Ginio begins the article with a revealing exchange in Nii Ayikwei Parkes’s 2009 novel, Tail of the Blue Bird. Parkes, a Ghanaian author, tells the story of Kayo, a young Westernized Ghanaian forensic pathologist, who is sent to a secluded village to examine an unidentified body to determine whether a murder had taken place. A local hunter by the name of Opanyin interrogates the visitor about his peculiar profession:
‘You explain deaths?’
‘Yes.’ Kayo’s tone was defiant.
‘Then, tell me, why do people die?’
‘Because they are old, or sick, or someone attacked them. I don’t know.’
‘Then you can’t explain deaths.’
‘Opanyin, that is my job. It is part of what I do.’
‘I am a hunter. I kill beasts so I can eat, but I know they don’t die because I shoot them or trap them; that is how they die but is not why they die.’
According to Ginio, this story epitomizes the difference between French and African death inquests in the early twentieth century. In both societies, examination of the dead body lent clarity and closure. But in each society the autopsy sought to answer a different question: whereas French medicine in both the metropole and the colonies remained occupied only with the who and how, West African autopsies were preoccupied with the metaphysical why. Each society employed different procedures to answer such questions, yet upon closer scrutiny each seemed equally ill-suited for the task at hand. Ginio identifies three objectives of French death investigation in West Africa: to establish whether the victim was raped before being slayed; to prove intent to kill in cases of domestic violence; and the autopsy as a scientific means to prove the truth, since local accounts were mostly distrusted. Yet French autopsies were ill-suited for the tasks for which they were designed. The bodies were often examined several days or even weeks after the death, which rendered an autopsy utterly useless beyond its performative aspects.
More importantly, the French autopsy failed to answer the why question, which from a local vantage point was far more crucial. The why could only be addressed through a ritualistic autopsy, conducted in the presence of elders and family representatives. Dissecting various parts of the dead body, these local autopsies were designed to answer the question of whether witchcraft—on the victim’s part or on that of their rivals—was involved in the death. Ginio’s account helps explain some tensions over what Ian Burney has termed the “jurisdiction” over the dead body. Local outrage over French autopsies did not merely stem from the desecration of the corpse; it was perceived as spoliation of evidence and obstruction of justice. With the destruction of the body by the seemingly scientific French autopsy, the corpse was no longer accessible to the family, and no closure concerning the reason for death could be achieved.
Ginio’s findings are especially illuminating in light of other accounts regarding the utility and necessity for forensic science in the colonies. Native mendacity was a common trope in both the British and French empires, which made scientific evidence far more appealing to colonizers than eye-witness accounts. But the necessity for forensic evidence in the colonies went beyond that: Sir Sydney Smith, Principal Medico-Legal Expert to the Egyptian Government, explained that forensic sciences were particularly crucial in Egypt, because Europeans found it so difficult to discern the motives of local criminals. “Motive, which plays so prominent a part in connection with Western crime, is often difficult to understand in the East, for murders of an extremely revolting nature may have what appears to be a most insignificant motive.” This inability to discern motives was a central driver of forensic science. To some extent, in the process, forensic scientists stopped exploring the why question both on its more superficial level (why this individual murdered this particular victim) but also on the more profound level (why did this person die?). As many of us, not only four-year-olds, are preoccupied with death and its underlying causes, Ginio’s article provides us with a useful prism for examining where and how we seek our reasons.
