Abstract
In Slavery and Silence, Paul D. Naish sets out to demonstrate the many ways that US writers used depictions of Latin America as a way to obliquely comment on the combustible topic of slavery in the United States. He notes that before the 1852 publication of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin, it was relatively rare for an author – even an author of fiction – to directly critique slavery as it was conducted in the United States. Naish’s analysis focuses on the 1830s and 1840s, a strategic time period filled with debates over westward expansion and laden with social and political tensions leading up to the Civil War. It was during these tumultuous decades that US writers turned to Latin America as a safely removed site within which they could reflect indirectly on topics that would have been difficult to address directly on US soil – whether that soil were literal or literary.
While Naish does make a reasonable case that writers of fiction and non-fiction used Latin America to work through US anxieties over slavery and expansion in the 1830s and 1840s, he does so in ways that are sometimes just as oblique as the writers he introduces us to. 1 The main problem is in the way the book itself is organized, and in the framing of individual chapters – neither of which is set up in a way that strengthens or clarifies Naish’s argument. The overall result is that, while the argument is there, the reader must work quite hard to sift it out from the book’s unhelpful and sometimes confusing structure.
The trouble begins with chapter 1. Essentially, chapter 1 sets up the background for the rest of the book and its meditation on how US writers positioned themselves and their subject matter vis-à-vis Latin America. Naish discusses political debate in 1826 over whether or not the United States should participate in the Panama Congress, a gathering of newly independent American states. At this point, two quite different paths lay before US politicians: hemispheric republicanism or race-based nationalism. Taking the path of hemispheric republicanism would mean that the United States saw itself as one among many relatively new American republics seeking to work together for mutual political and economic benefit. In contrast, the path of race-based nationalism assumed fundamental and unbridgeable social and cultural differences between the United States and its Central and South American counterparts that made such cooperation unthinkable.
Naish does a wonderful job of describing the political debate on both sides, and shows how the tide swung decisively toward the second path, culminating in US officials’ ultimate refusal to take part in the Panama Congress. The decision to go down the road of race-based nationalism paved the way toward a firmer commitment to territorial expansion and the extension of slavery across the Americas. From here, we have a smooth transition into the rest of the book with its study of US writers’ oblique comments on and critiques of slavery and expansion in the post-Panama United States. The problem, however, is that none of the framing described here is provided by Naish himself. Instead, he dives directly into the political debate about the Panama Congress and immerses the reader in this debate. But as one is reading it is not entirely clear how this debate and the contents of the chapter as a whole relate to the book’s core argument concerning slavery and silence.
Chapter 1’s main point is not made clear at the beginning of the chapter, nor is it made clear throughout the chapter. Instead, it is not until the very last paragraph that he finally writes, Americans in many situations discovered what the legislators in the Panama debates had realized: Latin America provided an excellent cover for a discussion of their apprehensions and anxieties about slavery before a vast audience. In the process of redefining the relationship between the early republic of the United States and the new republics of Latin America, the definition of republicanism became more limited, and the exceptionalism and racial composition of U.S. nationalism became more pronounced. (p. 63)
A statement along these lines at the beginning of the chapter, together with more explicit development of this major point throughout the chapter would have considerably strengthened the writing and provided a much clearer foundation for the rest of the book.
Organizational troubles continue on throughout the rest of the book. Chapter 2 begins with a discussion of how white US writers figuratively removed Indigenous peoples as the true founders of South American societies and instead replaced them which ancient Northern Europeans who were the original founders of great civilizations that flourished until the equivalent of barbarians in the form of Indians arrived to destroy everything. Again, Naish dives right into a discussion of writings from the 1830s and 1840s with no clear statement that helps the reader to understand why we are wading into this literature. It is not at all clear for much of the chapter, for instance, how the discussion relates to the core argument concerning ‘slavery and silence’. Matters would have been greatly clarified had Naish written something along the following lines at the beginning of the chapter: Writings from this time period consistently demonstrate the metaphorical removal of indigenous peoples from history and their replacement with the more ‘deserving’ ancestors of white U.S. Americans. In this imagined history, white Americans’ ancestors were the real founders of South American civilizations. It was understood that, were these more deserving white Americans to be given another chance to properly develop South American states in the 1830s and 1840s, they would bring their slaves with them. In this sense, novels and archaeological studies provided cultural and historical justifications for territorial expansion and the extension of slavery without having to spell this out explicitly.
Another organizational issues arises in the ordering of the chapters. Thematically, chapter 5 should follow chapter 2 because both deal with the ways US authors argued about the relative merits or challenges of taking over parts of Latin America. While chapter 2 considers how the imagined white origins of South America justified US expansion, chapter 5 considers arguments leading up to the Civil War about how socially and politically useful it would be to take over areas like Cuba and Brazil. Cuba might provide economic benefits, but its clearly non-white populace presented a social and cultural risk to US racial purity. On the other hand, some believed that Brazil could potentially act as a political safety valve to absorb enslaved or newly freed persons in order to decrease the risk of political uprisings on the US mainland. Because both chapter two and chapter five deal specifically with how the United States could or should be expanded to other parts of the Americas, it makes sense thematically that they should follow each other.
Chapters 3 and 4 both deal with the book’s core argument concerning slavery and silence by examining the ways novelists and literary-minded historians address critiques of US slavery using a Latin American setting. These are the clearest and best-organized chapters because it is clear from the beginning of each how they contribute to Naish’s core argument. In these chapters, Naish does provide a compelling account of how US writers felt stifled in their desire to critique US slavery and how using a Latin American setting allowed them to say what they really wanted to say. An excellent example of this occurs when Naish describes the work of William Prescott – a historian who wrote with a literary flourish. Naish writes, The Berkshire County Whig cited Prescott’s remark that no one was born into slavery in [ancient] Mexico; further, slaves could own property, their families were recognized, and they were allowed to marry freemen. ‘If our “glorious republic” would copy this law from the statues of these barbarians, slavery would soon be extinguished’, concluded the Whig. (p. 161)
This comment demonstrates the ways contemporary audiences made sense of the local significance of Prescott’s writing about Mexico.
In sum, Naish does make a case for the idea that Latin America was a useful literary site for US writers seeking to address slavery during a time when it was controversial and even potentially dangerous to do so. He often, however, gets in his own way when trying to make his argument. Some fairly simple re-organizing and re-framing would go a long way toward strengthening the book and its argument. For a start, chapters 1, 2 and 5 need clearer framing that provides a better explanation for how their contents address the core argument Naish seeks to establish concerning slavery and silence. Next, it would be helpful to re-organize the presentation of chapters so that chapters 2 and 5, which deal with debates concerning expansion, follow each other. With some re-framing and re-organizing the argument at the book’s core would emerge more clearly and Slavery and Silence would be a much more compelling read.