Social contract theory, African American slave narratives, and the reconstruction of early modern conceptions of political freedom

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Theses and Dissertations

College of Liberal Arts and Social Sciences

6-2011

Social contract theory, African American slave narratives, and the Social contract theory, African American slave narratives, and the

reconstruction of early modern conceptions of political freedom reconstruction of early modern conceptions of political freedom

Cavin Robinson

DePaul University

, [email protected]

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Social Contract Theory, African American Slave Narratives, and

the Reconstruction of Early Modern Conceptions of Political

Freedom

A Thesis

Presented in

Partial Fulfillment of the

Requirements for the Degree of

PhD. Of Philosophy

June, 2011

Cavin Robinson

Table of Contents

Introduction: Todorov and Narratology… 3

PART ONE: SOCIAL CONTRACT THEORY…21

Chapter One: Hobbes’ State of Nature read as a narrative…28

Chapter Two: Locke’s State of Nature read as a narrative…41

Chapter Three: Rousseau’s State of Nature read as a narrative…67

Chapter Four: A comparison of the narrative conventions found in the social contract

states of nature…87

Part Two: African American Slave Narratives…103

Chapter Five: Frederick Douglass and the Narrative of the Written Word…112

Chapter Six: Henry Bibb, and the Narrative of Love, and the Sanctity of the Family

Unit…130

Chapter Seven: Harriet Jacobs and the Narrative of Women and Chastity…147

Chapter Eight: A comparison of the narrative conventions found in the Slave

Narratives…165

Chapter Nine: Antagonistic Juxtaposition and Conclusion…203

Bibliography…239

Cavin Robinson

Introduction

“Negroes are to be regarded as a race of children who remain immersed

in their state of uninterested naïveté. They are sold, and let themselves be sold,

without any reflection on the rights or wrongs of the matter. The Higher which

they feel they do not hold fast to, it is only a fugitive thought. This Higher they

transfer to the first stone they come across, thus making it their fetish and they

throw this fetish away if it fails to help them. Good-natured and harmless when

at peace, they can become suddenly enraged and then commit the most frightful

cruelties. They cannot be denied a capacity for education; not only have they,

here and there, adopted Christianity with the greatest gratitude after a long

spiritual servitude, but in Haiti they have even formed a State on Christian

principles. But they do not show an inherent striving for culture. In their native

country the most shocking despotism prevails. There they do not attain to the

feeling of human personality, their mentality is quite dormant, remaining sunk

within itself and making no progress, and thus corresponding to the compact,

differenceless mass of the African continent…It is in the Caucasian race that

mind first attains to absolute unity with itself. Here for the first time mind enters

into complete opposition to the life of Nature, apprehends itself in its absolute

self-dependence, wrests itself free from the fluctuation between one extreme and

the other, achieves self-determination, self-development, and in doing so creates

world history

”

From the depths of the dark ages, Europe in the twelfth century had marked the

beginning of a new era. After centuries of creative and intellectual stasis the European

continent was reinvigorated by the spoils of the crusades. Much of the secular

knowledge dispersed during the dark ages, both within and out of Europe, found its way

into Middle Eastern Islamic libraries. The rediscovery of these texts and ideas ushered in

an era known as the Renaissance or the Early Modern Period. Whether argued to be a

bridge from antiquity to modernity or a lamentation of classical times, the Renaissance

was fueled by the art, culture, and thought of the ancient Mediterranean empires.

Questions of self-mastery and piety from Socrates, political efficacy from Plato and

Aristotle, and Scientific advances from Avicenna and Geber, are only a few of the

Hegel, G.W.F. Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind. Trans. William Wallace. Oxford University Press: New

York, 2003. §393 (zusatz) 43-44

Cavin Robinson

Introduction

dominant catalysts for what would become known as early modern political thought.

Simultaneous to the reclamation of these antiquated troves of knowledge was the

eventual decline in the political authority of the Church and the resurrection of secular

state authority. In this jumbled pot of circumstances writers such as Charles-Louis de

Secondat, baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke set out

to theorize, as did Plato and Aristotle before them, the locus of political authority.

Predicated on classical concerns such as self-mastery and piety, these thinkers developed

a common method for their inquiries known as the social contract. Breaking from the

ideas of the dark ages that piety and continuity were the linchpins of the state, or more

properly kingdom in those times, the social contract theorists posited that states can be

theorized, even if only hypothetically, as artificially constructed by men. If the state is

artificial then the central question of politics is no longer how do we properly ask God to

help us defeat our foes? Or, how do we protect the royal lineage so they can continue to

guide us? The primary questions for political philosophy became who had power? How

did they get it? And, should they have it? These concerns were intensified in the western

world after the works of Jean Jacques Rousseau, Immanuel Kant, and G.W.F. Hegel.

From this moment on it became sacrosanct in political philosophy to address these central

questions before making any claims tangential or otherwise.

Given the admitted artificiality of the social contract projects, this dissertation

aims to engage the curious absorption of terms, institutional relationships, and ideal body

politics created by the traditional social contract theorists into a larger nexus of a claimed

natural humanity generally, and a presumed universality of European identity specifically

from the renaissance into modernity. This claim is not new or controversial; there are

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Introduction

well documented critiques and praises of social contract theory on this issue of hegemony

represented principally in modernity by Carole Pateman’s The Sexual Contract, Charles

Mills’ The Racial Contract, and Emmanuel Eze’s Race and the Enlightenment. I, like

Pateman, Mills, and Eze, am primarily concerned with the way in which modern political

philosophy as a discipline has deployed terms such as equality, justice, and most

importantly, freedom; terms born from the renaissance and allowed to pass into

modernity relatively unchanged leaving one to question the degree to which they were

actually questioned, confronted, or challenged.

While the texts critiquing social contract theory as a method are innumerable,

honest attempts to challenge modernity’s appropriation of the terms and ideas coined and

erected within social contract theory’s principle texts are much harder to find. Of the few

political philosophic texts written on these central political terms in an effort to challenge

and engage them, the vast majority question not the definition and validity of the terms

but rather their application to certain identities, circumstances, and political constructs.

Hence most attempts to redefine these central terms end in a recapitulation of one of the

canonic early modern claims given by one of the social contract theorists as valid. My

problem with this practice is that if political philosophy as a discipline claims to search

for political efficacy in human societies, then inquiry into the concern that the claims and

theories of the discipline are not representative of a reasonable collection of human

challenges and concerns ought to be investigated more seriously in antiquity and

modernity. While critical work and thought has been applied to expanding the reach of

the western argument for the nature of the human subject, this attempt is fundamentally

limited by the experiences and history of the culture that has produced it. As such,

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Introduction

language becomes a limit in itself that cannot be overcome without a fresh perspective

from an external observer in history as constructed by classic political philosophy. This

dissertation will begin from the position that the term “freedom” and the necessarily

related terms, “justice” and “equality” are not free standing, logically-deduced terms, and

that they, to quote Marx from the Critique of the Gothe Programme, have the potential to,

“pass over in silence the conditions that alone give them meaning

It is my belief that the concept of “freedom” as articulated in modernity by

political philosophers is laden with the classic European concerns of antiquity and as

such transforms rather than vindicates identity when applied to non-westerners. Those

whose identities are not incorporated into what the west would qualify as a rational

human being are fundamentally viewed as different, exceptional, and most times

deficient when viewed through the lens of modern freedom. That may explain why the

American government so easily finds subjugated, un-free people all over the globe to

defend and set free at a moment’s notice. Thus what we consider liberalism, or the

practice of treating freedom as the principle end of the state, is predicated upon a subject

that, rather than being universal as is claimed, is actually specified and may or may not

actually represent the whole of the body politic. Thus the freedom created from modern

liberalism is, in theory and in praxis, necessarily supportive of certain centralized

identities and repugnant to others. Although it is my claim that liberalism and the

modern concept of freedom lack universal applicability, both can be engaged, critiqued,

and expanded from within the annals of western history. To do this we must first

” even in cases of

critically examined uses.

Tucker, Robert C. ed. The Marx- Engels Reader. 2

ed. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1978.

p.526

Cavin Robinson

Introduction

understand that the predominant notions of freedom from antiquity, foundational for the

rise of liberalism, were created by Europeans in response to European classic concerns

found in European societies. These notions of freedom were later taken up by modern

political philosophy through the conduit of Hegel, Kant, and universal history, condensed

and normalized via liberalism, and advanced in modernity as a fundamental yearning of

the human condition. This appropriation was performed without concern as to whether or

not the thinkers of the early modern period endeavored to take the perspectives and ideas

of other cultures into true philosophic consideration.

Of the charter cultural groups of America, and by extension the modern west,

African Americans were among those not included in the dominant group imbued with

hegemonic power. Fully western, yet artificially constructed as different, African

Americans have a rich written history that stretches back approximately 300 years and

some remnants of an oral history that stretches further. As W.E.B. Dubois masterfully

articulates in the Souls of Black Folk, to be Black in America is to possess a two-ness:

“After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and

Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with

second-sight in this American world, -a world which yields him no true self-

consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other

world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always

looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the

tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his

two-ness,- an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled

strivings; two warring ideas in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone

keeps it from being torn asunder…In this merging he wishes neither of the two

older selves to be lost…He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be

both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his

fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face.”

In the desire to retain this double-consciousness or two-ness, many Black writers write

not only to articulate themselves to the world but to also critique the force that prevents

Dubois, W.E.B.. The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Vintage Books, 1990. p. 8-9

Cavin Robinson

Introduction

them from being accepted as equals. The western assertion of Black as the other prevents

Blackness from being incorporated into western norms. The Blackness barred from the

inclusion in the West I refer to is not some metaphysical mystical or majestic power, but

rather an empirical legacy of struggle and a recorded history of responses to trauma,

victories won, challenges conquered, and most impressive of all, the only entire racial

culture created from scratch in modernity. Because of their proximity to the locus of

modern western power, the writings of vindication, freedom, and inclusion written by

African Americans and their brethren throughout the Diaspora are informed and

knowledgeable critiques of the shortcomings of western, supposedly universal, ideas.

The very existence of African Americans, as Du Bois articulated, is pro/anti-American

from Colin Powell to Ice-T. African American history is littered with legendary patriots

who died honorably for their country as well as merciless angry individuals who laid

down their lives in sedition attempts. Despite the vast chasm between these two

extremes, the two are unified by a common obsession of Black America with the

acquisition of freedom and political right within the American political structure.

Among these Black literary critiques of America, I have found a particular genre

to be useful in understanding the shortcomings of the early modern thinkers as well as the

expansion of the positive and useful aspects of their theories. Written primarily between

the 18

and 19

centuries, African American slave narratives were thematically created

for the sole purpose of discussing freedom as it pertains to African slaves in America.

Comparing the texts of social contract theory with African American slave narrative I

will demonstrate the manner in which African American slave narratives contain critical

Cavin Robinson

Introduction

ideas concerning freedom and the rational citizen that when read back into social contract

theory can be used to overcome the modern critiques of renaissance political philosophy.

Within the slave narratives, African Americans articulate their communal desire

for political inclusion and mass social acceptance in a foreign land in which they are

considered chattel. Blacks, both literally and literarily argued for the right to be free,

equal, and to have access to just treatment under the law within a society that will not

allow it. As such I will argue in this dissertation that African American slave narratives

are proper political philosophic texts filled with claims concerning freedom, servitude,

law, and the proper relation of the political subject to the seat of sovereignty. When read

as political philosophic texts, the slave narratives written by African Americans are

thematically analogous and philosophically contemporary to early modern social contract

texts. This analogy is the result of the ostracism experienced by African slaves who

achieved freedom via legitimate and illegitimate means. The slave narratives are

progressions from a constructed extra-political space to marginalized inclusion into the

greater US political sphere. When a slave manages to get to Canada or Great Britain

where slavery is abolished, or when they get their slave papers in the US they pass in

these narratives from a faux-state of nature on the boat in the middle of the Atlantic, in

the servant’s chambers of a northern mansion, or on the plantation in the south into

civilized society

The irony of this all is that this transformation is artificial. Slaves existed within the colonial body politic

in a negative fashion. They were accounted for by the sovereign power of the law through a slew of

prohibition laws mandating what Blacks and Whites could and could not do sexually and also through

fugitive slave legislation that delineated a legitimate free Black from an escaped piece of property. A farce

of statues governing their status as unique citizens making up a whole 3/5

of a human being existed as

well. Nevertheless despite their full immersion in the body politic they were, and in some cases remain,

rhetorically constructed as resting outside of the purview of the law and accounted within it as anything

other than property.

. This transformation and accompanying conversation that is

intertwined with it is reminiscent of the strategy implemented by the social contract

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Introduction

theorists in their movement from a state of nature to the discussion of an idealized body

politic. This dissertation explores this common strategy by looking at the structural and

thematic similarities between African American slave narratives and social contract

treatises in an effort to ultimately show the political philosophic value of African

American slave narratives to arguments for freedom, servitude, liberalism, and sovereign

responsibility both historically and in modernity.

To discuss the relationship between the two genres I will use Thomas Hobbes,

John Locke, and Jean Jacques Rousseau as representatives of social contract theory and

Henry Bibb, Harriet Jacobs, and Frederick Douglass as my exemplars of African

American slave narratives. Each genre presents potent arguments concerning the nature

of freedom in the narrative form. The slave narratives, as per their title, are complete

narratives. The social contract texts, though not traditionally recognized as proper

narratives, do however exhibit a narrative structure. Insofar as social contract texts all

draw their claims and inferences from their hypothetical foundations known as states of

nature, I argue that these texts can be said to be deduced from, and thus reliant upon, the

narrative form. My dissertation will commence with a discussion of narratology,

specifically the theories of Tzvetan Todorov. I will then discuss social contract theory,

the historical impetus for this genre, as well as its political philosophic goals. From that

point I will give exegetical readings of John Locke’s state of nature found in “The Second

Treatises of Government”, Thomas Hobbes’ state of nature found in “The Leviathan”,

and Jean Jacques Rousseau’s state of nature found in “The Social Contract”, “The

Discourses”, and “Emile”. I will relate each thinker’s state of nature to their over-all

work in order to demonstrate the foundational status of each to the larger works of which

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Introduction

they are a part. I will include a narrative analysis of the themes, paradigms, and patterns

that I have found to be emblematic of the genre’s discussion of freedom.

From that section, I will move on to a discussion of African American slave

narratives. Following the same method I will discuss Transatlantic Slavery and its affect

on Africa, America, Europe and their inhabitants. I will also talk about the birth of slave

literature in the U.S. and its relationship to abolitionist movements in the United States. I

will then give exegetical readings of Harriet Jacobs’ “Incidents in the Life of a Slave

Girl”, Henry Bibb’s “Narrative of the Life Adventures of Henry Bibb: An American

Slave”, and Frederick Douglass’ “Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass”. I will

also give a discussion of the themes, paradigms, and patterns I have found in the slave

narratives’ attempts to define and discuss freedom. I will then compare and contrast the

merits and strengths of each genre’s themes, paradigms, and patterns in terms of their

ability to coexist and be receptive to identity variance in a necessarily diverse world. The

reclamation of previously excluded identities in the purview a notion of freedom rooted

in the early modern period broadly construed would be considered evidence that early

modernity can in fact answer the modern critiques of Pateman, Mills, and Eze with the

critical caveat that the period is inclusive of texts and ideas once considered extra-

philosophical. By arriving at a space that is inclusive of the history, trials, and concerns

of more identities and social groups, this dissertation will have brought the canonical

political philosophic term freedom closer to being worthy of the label universal. To

paraphrase Todorov, we will have passed from a state of ignorance to a state of lesser

ignorance, regarding a conceptual definition for freedom.

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Introduction

Methodology: Todorov and Narratology

Again, my argument is that each philosophic argument for freedom is derived

from a narrative. More than a stylistic choice, the utilization of the narrative form is

strategic and systematic. In order to examine, compare, and contrast the systemic usage

of form, trope, metaphor, and theme within these “freedom narratives

” I turn to

narratology as my methodology. Narratology, though a literary method, has philosophic

import because of its attention to structure and form. Narratology aims to answer not just

whether or not a text is successful at appealing to a reader; it also probes into questions of

how the text achieves an affect on the reader through careful analysis of the rhetorical

progression of ideas, concepts, and circumstances within a narrative. Originating in

antiquity with Aristotle and begun in earnest with Vladimir Propp in the 1920’s,

narratology was not coined as a term and introduced into the academic mainstream until

Tzvetan Todorov’s Grammaire du Décaméron in 1969. Despite the many investigations

of narratology since its coinage, I feel that the method developed by Tzvetan Todorov to

compare, contrast, and analyze narratives is the most effective for my chosen texts of

study. There have been theorists after Todorov, most noted are Mieke Bal, Gerald

Prince, and Percy Lubbock. If we look at Gerald Prince’s Narratology he defines

narrative as “the representation of at least two real or fictive events or situations in a time

sequence, neither of which presupposes or entails the other.

I define “freedom narrative” as a text written in a narrative structure that utilizes the classic tropes of the

biblical fall, the imperiled sympathetic hero, and redemption via endurance and virtue to express the merits

of a specified individual or group which serve as exemplars of larger groups for whom the narrative is

intended construct, reform, challenge, or change the political rights of.

” In Bal’s Introduction to

the Theory of Narrative we find that he defines narrative as derived from a fibula which

he defines as “a series of logically and chronologically related events that are caused or

Prince, Gerald. Narratology: The Form and Functioning of Narrative. New York: Mouton Publishers,

1982. p.4

Cavin Robinson

Introduction

experienced by actors.

Todorov is a Franco-Bulgarian literary theorist, author, and philosopher. He is

widely considered as one of the founding contributors of Narrotalogy. In autumn of 1971

Todorov wrote an essay entitled The 2 Principles of Narrative wherein he raises the

question of whether narratives possess some inherent necessary structure that can be

interpreted, analyzed, and categorized.

” Whether it is Prince, Bal, Greimas, Propp, the analysis of

narrative seems to hinge on the carryover of meaning across disjoined literary time; the

essence of a narrative, and what separates one narrative from another, is the manner in

which this feat is achieved. The plot is what makes a narrative. From the beginning,

Todorov made this point.

In the essay he begins with a story of Ricciardo

Minutolo and his love for Filippelo’s wife Catella from the Decameron

Bal, Mieke. Narratology: Introduction to the Theory of Narrative. Toronto: University of Toronto Press,

1985. p.5

. In the story

Ricciardo deviously contrives a plot to get himself in bed with Catella. The whole story

is relatively short, 26 printed dual columned lines to be exact. From the story Todorov

asks two simple questions. The first is the question of whether this is a narrative, which

he answers himself admitting that anyone would recognize the story as a narrative. The

second question however is a little more difficult and proves to be the subject of the

essay: what makes the story a narrative? Todorov differentiates between a non-narrative

story, or what he calls a description, and a narrative proper. A merely descriptive piece is

temporally continuous in nature for Todorov, while a proper narrative is comprised of a

discontinuous structure: “Both description and narrative presuppose temporality that

differs in nature. The initial description was certainly situated in time, but this time was

Todorov, Tzvetan The 2 Principles of Narrative. Diacritics Vol. 1, No. 1 Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins

University Press, 1971, pp. 36-44 (hereafter referenced as Todorov, Diacritics)

A collection of novelas written by 14

century Italian author and poet Giovanni Boccaccio.

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Introduction

continuous; whereas the changes, characteristic of narrative, cut time into discontinuous

unities; the time of events.”

Interpreting narrative as discontinuous unities is an idea

Todorov takes from Vladimir Propp, who argues that all narratives follow certain pre-

determined routes of transformation. The status of possessing transformative moments is

definitive of narrative. Propp argues that there are thirty-one possible methods of

transformation

. All thirty-one of the functions are seen as independent and equally

important to the narrative. “‘If we read consecutively through the list of functions, we

see that no function excludes another. They all belong to the same pivot, and not to

several pivot points.’ The functions follow from one another and do not resemble one

another.”

In his discussion of narrative, Todorov evokes Propp’s analysis of The Swan-

geese. The story involves a little girl and her attempts to retrieve her little brother who

was taken by the swan-geese after she neglected her charge to care for him. Along the

tale she seeks help and council from different figures and eventually manages to reclaim

her brother, elude his captives, and finds her way back home. Within the story, Propp

manages to find twenty-seven distinct components of the story, eighteen of which exhibit

one way or another, the thirty-one functions he identified as characteristic of narratives.

The other nine are descriptions, transitions, or other necessary literary components of a

story. Seemingly validated, Todorov questions Propp’s argument that the thirty-one

elements of narrative are all independent and of equal statute. During his telling of the

tale that Propp utilized, Todorov states that he intentionally omitted several of the

Todorov, Diacritics, 38

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Introduction

functions of the tale. His claim is that despite the omissions of several functions the tale

still persists and retains its narrative quality:

Let’s try an experiment. When I told you this tale, I omitted a few of the

initial functions: for example, the parents had forbidden the daughter to go

away from the house, the daughter had preferred to go off to play, etc. The

tale was no less a narrative, was fundamentally identical to itself. I could

omit certain functions without causing a notable modification of the tale.

This leads Todorov to argue that there must be some type of hierarchical order to the

thirty-one functions, for they cannot all maintain the same value to the story if some can

be omitted while others cannot:

On the other hand, if I [Todorov] had not said that a boy and a girl lived

peacefully in their house; or that the geese kidnapped the boy; or that the

girl went after him, etc., the tale would no longer have existed, or else it

would have been another tale.

With the claim that Propp’s functions are not all of equal importance, Todorov

addresses the way in which one can rank or at least differentiate the significance of one

instance of a function to a story. He argues that despite the alterations each function

brings, only the functions that accompany a disjunct in succession are fundamental to the

differentiation between a narrative and a linear/ temporally successive story, or what

Todorov calls descriptions. The disjoining of succession, subsequent subtraction of

certain unnecessary details, followed by the recombination into a causal relationship

across disjoined time, is what creates narrative for Todorov. Transformations occur

when a subject moves from one setting of a narrative to another without a linear,

temporal continuum within the structure of the narrative. Something happens, or changes

at the very least, to make another reality possible. Not satisfied Todorov inquires into the

Todorov, Diacritics, 38

Todorov, Diacritics, 39

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Introduction

nature of transformations. “What then is nature of these transformations?... The passage

from A to non-A is in some sense the paradigm of all change. But this exceptional status

still should not go so far as to cover up the existence of other transformations-and we

shall see that they are numerous.”

Of these two basic forms of transformation, the first, interdiction, allows for only

a transformation of the subject from the positive or negative form to its antithesis. This

transformation for Todorov is reserved for the simplest kinds of narratives and is called

mythological. The second transformation is more complex requiring an accompaniment

to the predicate of the transformation: “A qualitative difference separates the first type of

transformation from the second. In the first case, we observe the modification of a basic

predicate, which was taken in its positive or negative form, with or without a modal

component. In the second case, the initial predicate is accompanied by a second one, so

that paradoxically, ‘to plan’ or ‘to learn’ designates an autonomous action, yet, at the

same time, can never appear by itself: one always plans for another action.”

Todorov then makes a fundamental distinction in

narrative structure between “interdiction transformation” where a negative obligation is

imposed and “intentional transformation” where an intention is actualized.

Todorov, Diacritics, 39

For the

second type of narrative transformation our knowledge of the effect of the

transformation, or the possible consequences of a transformation, remains unforeseen

until another point in time. The decision to plan an action is necessarily intertwined not

only with the performing of a pre-decided task but also the degree in which one

endeavors or is successful. These types of transformations are for Todorov

gnoseological. Quickly qualifying Todorov states that his goal is not to separate all

Todorov, Diacritics, 40

Cavin Robinson

Introduction

narratives into mythological and gnoseological. These two modes of transformation are

not exclusive. Utilizing the Swane-geese as an example, Todorov demonstrates how both

modes of transition are found within the text; however, there is a greater prevalence of

one over the other. He states that a good analysis of a narrative seeks not to find

exclusive use of one or the other method or transition, but rather the predominance of one

over the other.

Looking closely at gnoseological transformation, Todorov analyzes The Quest for

the Grail. A distinct mark of a gnoseological transformation is precluded with an anti-

climactic ending. Somewhere in the outset of the narrative the end is revealed. “A work

like The Quest for the Grail usually prefaces the sequences which relate material events

with others, in which the same events are evoked through predictions. There is

[however] a distinctive feature to these suppositional transformations: the characters

always carry them out, and even perceive them as a moral imperative.”

From the outset

events, relationships, and endeavors are related to the reader leaving little question as to

the fate of the various characters. Gawain, a character in The Quest for the Grail

recollects during a battle after he is smitten by Galahad, “Thus is confirmed the Utterance

that I heard on the day of Pentecost, concerning the sword which I struck. It was

announced to me that before long I should receive a terrible blow from it, and it is this

very sword with which this knight has just struck me. The deed has indeed occurred just

as it was foretold to me.”

Todorov, Diacritics, 40

This prior knowledge and its realization is only the prelude to

the transformation. After the deed is done comes a reassessment of prior assumptions.

The revealing of fates and events sparks a slew of assumption cleansing realizations

Todorov, Diacritics, 40

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Introduction

concerning the characters, their motives, and reactions. These assumptions come into

question after the manifestation of the event. “The events of the beginning are evoked

again but this time we see them from the vantage point of truth and not from that of

deceitful appearance.”

The draw or allure of the text is thus transformed from the

question “what will happen next?” to “why did this happen?”. “From the start we know

perfectly well what will happen, who will find the Grail, who will be punished and why.

Our interest derives from an entirely different question…‘what is the Grail?’”

Take the traditional story of Little Red Riding Hood for example. Little Red finds

herself in a quandary. We know that she is headed toward danger because we are told the

fate of the grandmother before Little Red gets on her way. We also know that her

salvation from her soon to be fate is at hand because the woodsman is not far away. At

the resolution of the text, Little Red’s state has been transformed from an endangered

child to one who is safe again yet we knew that would happen. The story is less about

Little Red’s change in state and more about the thematic questions one can derive from

this scenario such as the safety of innocents. We are left to question the morality of

leaving an elderly woman in the middle of a wolf-infested forest alone and compounding

that with allowing our children to travel through said forest unaccompanied. These

discussions, as does the meaning of the Grail, leave us with more questions than answers.

. The end

of gnoseological transformation is more than the mere understanding of a change in state

where character “a” and character “b” had trouble and by the end they have managed to

resolve that trouble that we find in a mythological narrative. Rather the change occurs in

our understanding of a particular concept, object, or idea.

Todorov, Diacritics, 40

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Introduction

By the end “we are not sure of possessing the truth; rather, we have passed from our

initial ignorance to a lesser ignorance.”

In the later pages of the essay Todorov identified an example of a third type of

narrative organization: ideological. The transformation within the ideological narrative is

neither a change of state, nor one of a change in understanding, but rather the relating of

multiple occurrences and happenings to a universal rule, concept, or idea. “Independent

actions, carried out by different characters and in various circumstances, reveal their

kinship, serving to illustrate or exemplify a common ideology.”

Comparing the events

and exploits of the characters, Todorov extracts rules from Pierre Choderlos’s Les

Liasons dangereuses and Benjamin Constant’s Adolphe: “one desires what one does not

have, one flees from what one does have. Consequently, obstacles reinforce desire, and

any assistance weakens it.” and “Since one person’s happiness always means the

unhappiness of the other, it is not possible to base one’s life upon the search for

contentment. But one can organize it around the requirement that he cause as little pain

as possible.”

Todorov, Diacritics, 41

These extrapolations become rational guidelines that can be read back

into the text to facilitate more understanding, as is the case in university classes

worldwide, or they can be utilized to tease out even higher order rules upon which the

previous ones were founded. Todorov admits in the essay that this list of narrative form

is not exhaustive. The goal is not to define or categorize all narratives; rather his

intention is to provide a paradigm for how narratives ought to be categorized. The

preeminence of one form of transformation or another gives us a better understanding of

Todorov, Diacritics, 43

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Introduction

the intent of the author and allows us to group like themes, ideas, and narratives in a more

useful manner.

Using Todorov’s methodology, I will search for transformations, themes, and

ideas in my analysis of the social contract theories and slave narratives I have chosen.

From the relationships, or lack thereof, that I find, I will be in a position to understand the

functionality (transitions within) each text on its own whereby I can then compare each

individual text to its classical genre (social contract or slave narrative). Ultimately, I will

be in a position to draw relationships or contrasts, where appropriate, between individual

texts and the classical genres as a whole on the topics of freedom, liberalism, and the

rational political subject.

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Part One: Social Contract Theory

Introduction

Social contract theory is a term utilized to identify a collection of political

philosophic arguments that attempt to locate legitimate political authority within a

hypothetical thought experiment. The hypothetical thought experiment, or method of

social contract theory, has come to be known as the tradition’s trademark characteristic.

Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau are arguably the tradition’s

most recognized figures. A classic social contract text begins from what is labeled the

“state of nature.” The state of nature is a hypothetical, pre-political space devoid of

positive law or governance. Within this hypothetical space, the social contractarian

engages the reader in a discussion regarding man’s natural characteristics, desires, and

habits. Based on an assessment of natural man, the social contractarian deduces the

hypothetical result of humanity acting according to its nature outside of governance and

positive law. The result of all hypothetical states of nature is always problematic.

Whether it is the inability to procure and secure sustenance or the inability to defend

one’s own person, every state of nature eventually arrives at a moment where the ability

of individuals to preserve themselves adequately is threatened. This problem is resolved

through the awakening of reason which drives human beings toward contracting into an

organized society as a means of protecting themselves from the common problems of

need, want, or violence. In other words, the political space becomes humanity’s only

solution for the tri-partied problem of need, want, and violence and for this reason

humanity’s very ability to preserve itself becomes intimately intertwined with governance

and positive law. Though there are exceptions to this classical method, most notably

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John Rawls, (although it could be argued that Rawls’ “veil of ignorance,” is yet another

hypothetical state of nature from which a narrative of justice follows), all contracts have

three primary components; 1. a hypothetical pre-political scenario which questions man’s

primal nature and desires in said scenario, 2. a rational decision to contract into society

for one’s self-preservation of behalf of individual actors

Though the progression of a social contract argument ultimately ends in the

formation of an intricate governing structure, I am not interested here in an analysis of

these resulting governing bodies. To my mind, the real work of the social contract comes

in the state of nature and in the moment of compacting into governance. The body politic

that gets constructed is merely the logical end of the analysis of natural man and the

decision to participate in the process of compacting into society. In other words, I am

interested in questioning the hypothetical state of nature: Why was man constructed or

said to exist in this way as opposed to that way naturally? Why was this sequence of

events posited as possible as opposed to these possible events? What grants any of the

hypothetical scenarios and their resulting deductions their objectivity, or at least a

reasonable amount of determination from objective notions or experiences? The answer I

, and 3. the erection of a body

politic which is constituted to preserve humanity’s natural state of freedom against

structured premeditated attacks (Rousseau and Locke), or to provide security from

irrational random violence (Hobbes), each deduced as inevitable from the common plight

and needs of the individual compactors into the social compact.

Though for all of the social contract theorists a moment when all of humanity, or each member of a given

society for that matter, gathered together and voted to create society never occurred. This moment is

fictionalized based on the tacit agreement of men throughout the history of a given society. Because a

society persists, this fictionalized agreement is renewed daily in each action that reaffirms the existence and

continuity of the same society. Nevertheless, the narrative is still advanced as an event in an effort to add

rhetorically to its supposed universality.

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advance is that while it is the case that the authors of the aforementioned social contracts

founded their states of nature in what they perceived to be universalized experiences and

ideas, they utilized the latitude granted by the hypothetical status of the state of nature to

convey arguments for the centrality of certain key concepts to a governing structure free

from the burden of historical accuracy. Locke was free to discuss property without the

pressure to discuss chattel slavery or the working poor. Hobbes felt he would be free to

discuss absolute sovereignty without the burden of rebuttals from historians of tyrannical

societies or the claims of the parliamentarians voicing their displeasure with the royalists

and monarchs (though that did not go quite as well as he had hoped). Rousseau could go

on about the merits of the general will without explaining how it could deal with the

avalanche of examples of extraordinarily polarized societies where moderation or the

subtracting of the extremes would upset nearly everyone. Within the hypothetical

parameters of the state of nature, the thinkers were free to immerse themselves in

political concepts free from the force objective retorts could pose to their person/ state

making projects.

Seemingly tyrannical in nature, the theories developed by social contract theorists

have been demonized by some contemporary political theorists as overt self-serving

attempts to manipulate history. While I will not enter that debate here, I can state that it

appears clear that Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau each wrote in response to what they

perceived as grave threats to society posed by the sovereign body or the citizen’s

rejection of sovereign authority. Hobbes wrote in response to what he saw as the cause

for the continued rebellions of the British 17

century, namely the lack of recognition of

sovereign authority on behalf of the citizens. Locke wrote in response to what he

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considered to be unjust usurpation of rights to property by the crown which required a

rethinking of the citizen’s right to property. Rousseau wrote in response to what he

claimed was a decline in morals which led to a decline in civility and rule of law that

could only be corrected through a tempering of sovereign power that makes it more

responsive to the general population. Each thinker devised his theories out of a desire to

correct what they perceived to be larger evils in society. While the methods, language,

and conclusions may be debated, I do believe that history exonerates a large portion of

their respective work as being something much more than self-interested attempts to exert

their views on the larger society.

Critics of the social contract methodology, the most noted of which is David

Hume, launch the bulk of their attacks at both the state of nature and the resulting

obligation human beings have to a given body politic. Despite the fact that Hobbes,

Locke, and Rousseau all clearly acknowledge that their articulations of man in his natural

state is ahistorical, some still feel the need to argue the moot point that somehow that the

project’s ahistoricity invalidates any philosophical worth or objective practicality these

social contract arguments could have. To that point I would challenge one to explain

why it is logically necessary to attach an attempt to link the origin of governance to

reason and fundamental human needs to a specific historic occurrence? What is lost in

rooting the theoretical link between reason and governance in a theoretical construction

of mans needs and desires as opposed to the specific articulation of needs and desires by

some actual individual or group? What insight is gained from the claims of a historian

regarding the nature, needs, and habits gleaned from the relating of stories and facts of

events past that could not be conceptualized through ones experience of observing

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individuals from a distance by a philosopher? I see very little difference concerning what

one can know of man’s nature between a contractarian’s hypothetical state of nature and

history as related by a historian. Both, as articulations of history and recorded experience

are equally useful, but are also equally insufficient in their articulation of man’s universal

experience. The limitations placed on one also plague the other. The only difference is a

supposed fidélité historians are presumed to have towards historical accuracy that

philosophers may or may not possess; an assumption which is questionable at best.

Another major issue philosophers have taken with state of nature arguments is the

construction of the arguments themselves. Many find logical flaws in the claims of the

various states of nature, for instance Hume in Of Liberty and Necessity. In the text Hume

systematically attacks Hobbes’ method and claims. Because the remainders of the social

contracts are predicated on the claims made in the states of nature, any argument that

successfully damages the hypothetical thought experiments necessarily invalidates the

resulting deductions and political theories that rest upon them. I would like to discuss

this problem at length. I feel that this flaw in the social contract results from a misreading

of the text. When reading philosophy traditionally we search for premises and

conclusions all supported by facts and experiences and determine whether the train of

logic satisfies our reasonable sensibilities. Clearly, the hypothetical states of nature

cannot be validated through objective facts and experiences. Rousseau is clear on this

point. Thus, it is my argument that the states of nature advanced by all three thinkers are

more properly read as narratives. Rather than serving as the first few premises of

connecting syllogisms, the ideas and claims in the states of nature are the preconditions

for the arguments that follow, and as such, do not always fit neatly into the linear

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arguments for government that follow despite the fact that the obvious logical ties and

relationships abound between the two. This disjunction is the result of the social contract

method of a conjectural history. While I stated that the formation of the conjectural

histories of the social contract theorists differ very little from the construction of

historical truths advanced by historians, one cannot overlook the fact that each thinker

carefully notes the artificiality of the exercise, although when each leaves the respective

state of nature, there is no further mention of artificiality, but instead each thinker argues

for ethical and political claims and imperatives.

The difference between the hypothetical state of nature and the appeal to rational

argument for subsequent ethical and political claims is to my mind evidence that the

respective authors held themselves to two different burdens of proof. The first, that is the

state of nature, because of its artificiality, is not rigorously argued for, while the later,

because of its rational derivation and logical consistency is more strict. If this is the case

one cannot expect logical consistency to arise from claims that even the authors admit

ought to be held to a less rigorous burden of proof. In other words, for all the similitude

and carry-over of terms, Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau recognized the separation

between the state of nature claims and the arguments that follow.

Aside from the difference in the burden of proof each is to be subjected to, there

is also a difference of form between the original positing of the state of nature and the

constitution of the political space that ensues. Todorov, in his discussion of Propp’s

functions in The 2 Principles of Narrative claims that a narrative is a linear story in which

the succession has been disjoined and certain unnecessary details have been subtracted;

the remainder is then recombined into a causal relationship across disjoined time. In their

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articulations of the state of nature, Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau each depict humanity in

a pre-political space as systematically enduring circumstances en route to the eventual

awakening of reason which leads to the eventual entrance into civilized society. When

each scenario is pieced together, a narrative depicting man’s march to society is outlined.

Each circumstance is seen as an incremental step in a causal chain that explains the origin

of governmental authority. There is a fundamental disjunction between the time of the

state of nature claims and the temporality of all that follows; this difference reveals the

dependence of the idealized body political claims on the preceding state of nature

arguments. The key to this difference is the recognition of rhetoric advanced in narrative

form.

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CHAPTER ONE: HOBBES’ STATE OF NATURE READ AS A NARRATIVE

Hobbes, in The Leviathan, unfolds his state of nature in chapter XIII entitled “Of

the Naturall Condition of Mankind, as concerning their Felicity, and Misery”. In this

chapter we find man, containing the ontology described in the twelve preceding chapters,

set in a space where he is without an obvious advantage over his counterparts in society.

So our main character, “man,” is placed in the first scene, “a pre-political space,” and

faced with his first circumstance; the duty to preserve himself in spite of competition

from others against whom he has no distinct advantage. Hobbes makes it clear that the

equity described in individuals at the outset of chapter XIII is considered “setting aside

the arts grounded upon words, and especially that skill of proceeding upon generall, and

infallible rules, called Science; which very few have, and but in few things; as being not a

native faculty, born with us; nor attained, (as Prudence,) while we look after somewhat

els.”

Science for Hobbes is “attayned by Industry; first in apt imposing of Names; and

secondly by getting a good and orderly Method in proceeding from the Elements, which

are Names, to Assertions made by Connexion of one of them to another; and so to

Syllogismes, which are the Connexions of one assertion to another, till we come to a

knowledge of all the Consequences of names appertaining to the subject in hand.”

Science, derived from reason

Hobbes, Thomas, Hobbes: Leviathan. Edited by Richard Tuck, New York: Cambridge University Press,

2002. p.87 (hereafter referenced as Hobbes)

, requires a specific measure of leisure and safety. One

cannot develop methods and connections, assert or opine in any reliable fashion without a

reasonable amount of security and time. Hence the need and want of the pre-political

Hobbes, 35

“Reason, in this sense, is nothing but Reckoning (that is Adding and Subtracting) of the Consequences of

generall names agreed upon, for the marking and signifying of our thoughts; I say marking them, when we

reckon by ourselves; and signifying, when we demonstrate, or approve our reckonings to other men.”

Hobbes, 32

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space man finds itself in eclipses its ability to produce science in masse. This is due to

reason’s connection to appetite and aversion for Hobbes. Ratiocination, or thought, as a

voluntary motion competes with other impulses that affect the body. The drive to

categorize or signify competes with food, thirst, and sex in order to be the final internal

motion of the imagination resulting in will or eventually, action. In a space where

individuals have want or need, many of these base desires typically win out over the drive

for science resulting in diminished scientific aptitude. Put another way, where people

have want and need they do not have much time to sit and worry about the problems of

the world or about chemical properties of new substances. Thus, absent the plenty

produced by organized industry in society, there is need and want in Hobbes’

hypothetical, pre-political space resulting in the lack of scientific knowledge he speaks

of, further resulting in the equality prudence, “which equall time, equally bestowes on all

men, in those things they equally apply themselves unto,”

The realization of one’s equality with others is what drives the lineal story line.

“From this equality of ability, ariseth equality of hope in the attaining of our Ends. And

therefore if any two men desire the same thing which neverthelesse they cannot both

enjoy, they become enemies; and in the way to their End, endeavor to destroy or subdue

one another.”

grants.

Hobbes, 87

So in our scene we see a constant cycle arise where objects, land, and

resources are being quarreled over, and these quarrels are escalating into full blown fights

between men. It is at this juncture that we have our evidence of the fact that this is a

narrative. We have gone from man originating in a pre-political space then recognizing

their competition with other equally capable humans to moving forward linearly to

Hobbes, 87

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repeated attempts at acquiring the same objects. It is at this point in the text that we have

a sequence of the disjuncts in the temporal flow of the story that Todorov claimed was

indicative of a narrative. Hobbes explains that in the event that one manages to labor and

create convenience via farming or building that when their enterprise is finished they can

expect to be forced to defend that resource. In the event that the invaders are successful,

they too can expect to defend their newly acquired resources from another invader. Now

given the outset of the story, human beings, in the desire of nearly any object, would have

had to out-do all the others. So let’s say a person wanted to plant crops. This person

would have had to will over all the others who coveted the same land, seeds, and water

source. Here Hobbes has already assumed this has happened. A person has already

performed the requisite labor to acquire the rudiments of production, not to mention the

efforts and time put into acquiring farming skill in the first place. We then fast forward

past the actual labor to the circumstance that the person will face once the labor is

finished and the crop has been harvested.

So our farmer has learned to farm, sought land, acquired land, acquired or

developed tools, seeds, and a water source, tilled, planted, watered, irrigated, weeded, and

eventually harvested the crops. This three to five month period, more likely much longer,

is skipped in the story. We skip straight to the realization that the farmer must now

defend the literal fruits of his or her labor. At this point in the story we are faced with

another temporal jump. The actual defense is not even discussed. We skip straight to the

part where someone has successfully defeated the farmer and now possesses the fruits of

the labor. The time which must have transpired before someone successfully

dispossessed the farmer of his or her property, is not recounted. The narrative takes up

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only the actual battle itself. Imbued with true Spartan vigor, he or she may have held out

for decades in an epic fashion; nevertheless, however long it took, it is all left out. We

just skip to the invader’s realization that she too must defend the property as well. It is

here that we resume a linear story where the invader makes the realization that she is as

vulnerable as the person just dispossessed.

We have gone from the natural human being recognizing its equality in a linear

fashion to the natural human being recognizing that it must fight to procure property, and

then jump to an individual who, amidst this chaos, successfully acquires the prerequisites

of some type of production. We then skip to the end of that production, advancing to

then realization that the fruits of one’s labor must be defended; and then we jump to the

eventual loss of the fruits. Ultimately we have our invader making a similar realization

that he or she too must defend the spoils of his invasion from another and becomes

fearful for his or her life. To recount this in a diagram:

Scene 1

Original Human >>>Recognition of equality>>>Battles for acquisition of property

Time Disunity

Scene 2

One who has successfully acquired the prerequisites of production>>>Production begins

Time Disunity

Scene 3

Production is finished>>>Attack is anticipated

Time Disunity

Scene 4

Battle for defense of fruits of labor has been lost>>>Invader anticipates

attack>>>Invader becomes fearful of death

For Hobbes it is the realization of the fear of a sudden and violent death that awakens

reason and drives the individual out of the state of nature, it is important that we realize

the claim that is made here. Hobbes is not claiming that death conceptually should be

feared. Rather, it is prudent for an individual to not choose to enter into a state of death

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by acting in ways that would provoke violence from others and possibly cause death

prematurely. We are to take from the state of nature not an argument that people should

fear death, but rather the claim that people do fear a violent and premature death when

they are in their right mind. This, for Hobbes, is something that people already do. It is

not an “ought to”, as much as it is an observation of behavior. Hobbes justifies this

observation clearly when he reasons:

“It may seem strange to some man, that has not well weighed these things; that

Nature should thus dissociate, and render men apt to invade, and destroy one

another: and he may therefore, not trusting to this Inference, made from the

Passions, desire perhaps to have the same confirmed by Experience. Let him

therefore consider with himselfe, when taking a journey, he armes himself, and

seeks to go well accompanied; when going to sleep, he locks his dores; when

even in his house he locks his chests; and when he knows there bee Lawes, and

Publike Officers, armed, to revenge all injuries shall bee done him; what opinion

he has of his fellow subjects[?]…Does he not there as much accuse mankind by

his actions, as I do by my words?

”

The state of nature can be seen as the opening claim of a linear argument as Hobbes

states in his introduction. Hobbes advances a positive claim that man’s passions

demonstrate a nature that is necessarily violent which is directly linked to his argument

for sovereign power and the creation of a state predicated on the prevention of civil war

based on the reader’s willingness to “Nosce teipsum: Read thy self.

While this may seem to contradict my chosen method of reading the states of

nature arguments as distinct from the body politic arguments that follow it, in fact, it does

not. The “man” found in the outset of the Leviathan does not operate in the same fashion

as “man” from chapter 17 forward. There we find “The finall Cause, End, or Designe of

men, in the introduction of that restraint upon themselves, in the foresight of their own

”

Hobbes, 89

Hobbes, 10

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preservation, and of a more contented life thereby; that is to say, of getting themselves

out from that miserable condition of Warre, which is necessarily consequent (as hath

been shewn) to the naturall Passions of men, when there is no visible power to keep them

in awe, and tye them by feare of punishment to the performance of their Covenants, and

observation of those Lawes of Nature set down in the fourteenth and fifteenth

Chapters

.” This is clearly a summary of the preceding chapters evidenced by the

italicized portions. From this juncture on man is no longer being investigated. Man is

now a known entity. This is evident from the same claim stated two different ways in

chapters 13 and 17 respectively. “So that in the nature of man, we find three principall

causes of quarrel. First, Competition; Secondly, Diffidence; Thirdly, Glory,

” and “men

are continually in competition for Honour and Dignity…and consequently amongst men

there ariseth on that ground, Envy and Hatred, and finally Warre.

Hobbes, 117 (emphases mine)

” The first quote from

chapter 13 is investigative; we are proving that this is the case in the nature of man. This

proof is found via corroboration from the shared experience of the author and reader. To

get to this shared experience Hobbes admittedly uses what he defines himself as the

relation of a historical circumstance that may never have been true of the entire world yet

his understanding of America gives him confidence that he may be more correct than not.

This is the conditional move that I referred to earlier. It is a lowering of the burden of

proof. While Hobbes has no empirical evidence he is confident that he has rhetorically

created within the literary imagination of the reader a picture sufficient enough to be

granted the status of truth.

Hobbes, 88

Hobbes, 119

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The first fifteen chapters of Leviathan are full of conditional statements which

root man in this conditional tale of the all-important Chapter 13. While there may be a

powerful rhetorical pull to these claims, they are in fact tied to what Hobbes admits is a

possible false claim. Nevertheless in chapter 17 he moves from his argument against the

reduction of humans to the level of animal social ability to making the positive assertion

that man is that which he conjectured mankind to be. The conditional label is removed

and from chapter 17 on Hobbes operates as if the reader has accepted the literary

rhetorical link he has created in chapter 13. Thus, it is my argument that the founding of

the fear of a violent death at the root of man’s nature is predicated upon a separate

argument that Hobbes himself asks to be held to a different standard than the rest of his

text.

For Hobbes this rational fear of a violent death at the hands of another becomes

the foundation upon which the state derives its laws, its purpose, and its end. Rewritten

in a positive fashion, Hobbes’ primary goal both for philosophy, and all other human

endeavors, is the creation of the commodious life which is made possible through

removing all causes of preventable violent death with laws that promote civility, and

scientific advances that promote safety, comfort, and convenience. “The end scope of

philosophy is, that we make use to our benefit of effects formerly seen; or that, by

application of bodies to one another, we may produce the like effects of those we

conceive in our mind, as far forth as matter, strength, and industry, will permit, for the

commodity of human life

Molesworth, W. ed. The English Works of Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury Vol. I. London, 1839-45 p. 7

(Hereafter reference as De Corpore)

.” The commodious life is one full of leisure and material

possessions. To create such a lifestyle there would have to be a lasting peace between

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men to grant leisure as well as industry to create and maintain material possessions.

Understanding Hobbes’ ideal state as one with industry providing commodity and peace

providing leisure, Hobbes argues that the greatest avoidable threat to such a state of life is

civil war. “All such calamities as may be avoided by human industry, arise from war, but

chiefly from civil war; for from this proceed slaughter, solitude, and the want of all

things”

Civil war is nothing but other than individuals who find themselves in the position

of no allegiance to the sovereign. With no recognized sovereign, individuals willingly

break their covenants with one another, resulting in heinous acts being rendered

permissible through force creating the possibility of random violent death at the hands of

another. Though it is wholly possible that a civil war may produce no bloodshed, for

example, the Glorious Revolution, yet for Hobbes this is far from the point. For Hobbes,

“Warre, consisteth not in Battell onely, or the act of fighting; but in a tract of time,

wherein the Will to contend by Battell is sufficiently known: and therefore the notion of

Time, is to be considered in the nature of Warre; as it is in the nature of Weather. For as

the nature of Foule weather, lyeth not in a shower or two of rain, but in the inclination

thereto of many dayes together: So the nature of War, consisteth not in actual fighting;

. The fear of violent death at the hand of another for Hobbes is actualized most

fully in civil war. In such a state man is reduced to a war of all against all and is in the

most danger of being disposed of his life. Civil war for Hobbes was very avoidable and

occurs only as a result of the ignorance of the relationship between the lack of sovereign

protection and the possibility for the random violent deaths of many. Thus for Hobbes it

became imperative to suppress any and all cases of civil war if his state of commodious

life was to ever be realized.

De Corpore, 8

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but in the known disposition thereto.

The rational directs man towards self-preservation and the fear of death in the

state of nature. This fear is assuaged only through the mitigation of the causes of death

” The fear of civil war, like the fear of a violent

death, was equally as vexing in the threat of its realization. Hobbes wanted to not only

put an end to the seemingly never ending civil wars of the British 17

century, but also to

dissolve the inclination to civil war and absolve men from its ever happening again. The

rudiments of all civil war lay in any action of the ignorant that undermines sovereign

authority and leads to the erosion or destruction of the obligations citizens have to obey

the sovereign. Writing during the harsh reality of the English civil war, Hobbes sought to

argue for the justification of sovereign authority that would prevent individuals from

thinking it wise to create the possibility for civil war through acts of sedition. Rather

than beginning with simply positing a sovereign and deducing the benefits enjoyed by a

state as a result of having a sovereign, Hobbes begins with the notion that civil war is

avoidable. To suffer unnecessarily is irrational so the practice of civil war must also be

irrational. It became important for Hobbes to explore the process of reason and

determine where in their reasoning the authors of civil war went wrong in their

ratiocination. During this search for the origins of ignorance Hobbes is lead to the

development of an ontology and subsequently a state that if followed would result in the

commodious life. The search for the origins of ignorance and an explication of correct

ratiocination occurs in De Corpore. Hobbes’ argument for the legitimacy of sovereign

authority occurs in Leviathan and De Cive. The arguments posed for sovereign authority

in Leviathan and De Cive are all founded on and made possible by the ontology created

by Hobbes in De Corpore.

Hobbes, 88

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through rational acts. The development of peace through the choice to not quarrel and

covet one another’s lives and possessions and the promotion of comfort and convenience

to ensure health and happiness are the ends of reason and thus become the chief end of

the state. The state, for Hobbes, is erected to provide sovereign authority which, through

force, defends those who chose to live peacefully and develop the means by which a

commodious life can be had against those who chose to renounce reason and live by

force alone, as evidenced by their lack of care for their self preservation in their

challenging sovereign power against which they can never prevail. Each law and statute

in Hobbes’ body politic, as well as the absolute nature of the sovereign, has as its end and

purpose, the prevention of the causes of civil war, which for Hobbes leads to inevitable

premature death. The notion that civil war and death are synonymous can be derived

directly from Hobbes’ state of nature. Human subsistence and sustenance require

quarrels that result in the continuous threat of violence up to and including death. This

relationship is established in the state of nature narrative. If one does not enter into the

Hobbsean argument for his idea of legitimate government authority that begins in chapter

XIV with speak of contracts and continues in chapter XVI with the rudiments of

sovereign power, with the idea that human existence without safeguards against the

irrational behavior of some will lead to a constant fear of death, the whole argument

ceases to work. Sovereign power cannot be enacted without the war of all against all.

The sovereign’s seemingly extreme absolute power is accepted by the ignorant masses

only because it is meant to balance out a perceived extreme threat to the lives of those in

the state. Without the extreme threat, it would be equally irrational to, for no justifiable

reason, relinquish so much authority and power to one when he or she could be equally

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as, if not more useful, with a limited amount of power and authority for those without

access to scientific knowledge. For the sovereign, absolute power in praxis, not theory,

comes only as the result of the rhetorical fear of death. If there were no fear of death,

there would be in practice no absolute sovereign in Hobbes’s thinking. Thus the state of

nature, though it never systematically argues the claim that a violent death should be

rationally feared and as such should serve as the basis for governance, provokes the

reader

It may be argued that the fear of death is distinct from the war of all against all

thought experiment. Following Hobbes’ abject loathing of scholastics, we must root our

claims in defensible statements and sound judgment. For Hobbes, the claim that there are

three causes of quarrel is self-evident and defensible. From the three causes of quarrel

one can deduce the possibility of the war of all against all without the narrative leading to

a B-line straight from the beginning of chapter XIII to chapter XVII skipping all of the

ontology of chapters I-XII using chapters XIV-XVI as a logical preamble. Going further

even within the causes of quarrel one can reduce all three to the final one: glory. Vain-

glory is sufficient to cause the other two as well as create the war of all against all

resulting in a fear of death leading to the need for a society that bottles vain-glory with a

power that can over-awe it. Fear of death is still the order of the day yet it can be

rationally deduced without the narrative departure. Despite the concession of that truth,

to conflate the human condition, death and war, and rhetorically places the same

reader in the opinion that states of war are always the result of man’s fear of a violent

death. To which Hobbes so willingly adds the rest: If man’s chief concern is the fear of

death then why would he reject a sovereign absolute power which can protect man from a

preventable death caused by those without reason?

The reader who may be apt to think rebellion against the state is a wise course of action.

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we are still left with the fact that Hobbes felt it necessary to exude chapters, not pages,

but chapters, to set up and deploy this mini-narrative; why? Why would such a rabid

analytic waste his time with this narrative? The answer is because he felt, though in his

own logic would mean that he knew, that such a claim would be insufficient on its own.

While the logical, Hobbes argues, is always enough, ironically, the precondition

for the production of knowledge (society) requires a concession that rhetoric is needed to

persuade the body politic into the “correct” way of thinking. In this analysis we get a

fresh understanding of chapter XIII. Rather than being a chapter of claims and

arguments, chapter XIII is a rhetorical link between chapters I-XII and XIV through the

end of he text. It rhetorically answers the question: why? Because of the nature of the

material it is crucial that these individuals participate in sovereign rule in order for

Hobbes’ vision to work, thus those who remain unconvinced by reason must be

persuaded. Hence, we resort to rhetoric for the ignorant, which by his admission is the

majority. We’re not speaking of the illiterate or downtrodden which are traditionally

associated with ignorance, but rather the more etymologically fidel rendition of the term:

one who simply does not know as most dictionaries would concur to which we will

expound for Hobbes’s sake, one who has not become a practitioner of gubernatorial

science. The reason Hobbes included the narrative is simply because he felt he needed to

convince those who would not adhere or be persuaded by the blunt, as he thought factual,

claim that there are there causes of quarrel that result in an inevitable fear of death.

While logical necessity is defined by syllogistic relevance, I present Hobbes’ rhetorical

plea in chapter XIII as necessary to his overall argument despite its debatable necessity to

Hobbes’ greater syllogistic argument. Because Hobbes’ claims that the required societal

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adherence/ acceptance by the vast majority as essential, Hobbes utilized the narrative to

promote a rational imperative to ensure this acceptance thereby proving my previous

claim that the narrative was essential. We find that despite the claim that the three causes

of quarrel are sufficient, that the narrative is nevertheless still just as necessary in

Hobbes’ root claims thereby rendering Hobbes’s position that if man’s chief concern is

the fear of death then why would he reject a sovereign absolute power which can protect

man from a preventable death caused by those without reason?, still viable.

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CHAPTER TWO: LOCKE’S STATE OF NATURE READ AS A NARRATIVE

Of the three social contractarians I discuss, Locke’s state of nature is arguably the

longest and most detailed. Whereas Hobbes’ state of nature is contained primarily in one

chapter and Rousseau’s can be compounded in piece-meal fashion through paragraphs

and sections of three different texts, Locke’s state of nature is found complete, succinct,

clearly explicated in chapters one through six of “The Second Treatise” in Two Treatises

of Government.” Unlike Hobbes’ state of nature which was set up by ontological

arguments found in chapters 1-12 of The Leviathan and throughout De Cive, Locke’s

state of nature was placed at the outset of his original argument which began in the

second of the Two Treatises. Writing against royalist Sir Robert Filmer, Locke launched

a scathing critique of Filmer’s defense of the Divine Right of Kings in the First Treatise.

Philosophically satisfied that he had utterly dismantled Filmer’s point, Locke set his

sights on replacing, rather than revamping Filmer’s views of legitimate governmental

authority. The Second Treatise, and with it Locke’s state of nature, begins with a

summary of the First Treatise. Filmer advanced that the Divine Right of Kings gave

monarchs, in the case of Filmer and Locke the English Monarchy, absolute dominion

over the earth. This legitimacy came as a result of a promise made to Adam by God in

the Bible. Quoting Filmer in Patriarcha, “‘Adam’ says [Filmer], ‘being Commanded to

Multiply and People the Earth and to subdue it, and having Dominion given him over all

Creatures, was thereby the Monarch of the whole World, none of his Posterity had any

Right to possess anything but by his Grant or Permission, or by Succession from him.

Locke, John. Locke: Two Treatises of Government. Edited by Peter Laslett. New York: Cambridge

University Press, 2003. p.152 (Hereafter referenced as Locke)

”

Thus Adam’s status as first created, and the charge given to him by God in Genesis 1:24-

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31 to fill the earth and subdue it and the provisions granted to him by God in verse 29-30,

“

Then God said, "I give you every seed-bearing plant on the face of the whole earth and

every tree that has fruit with seed in it. They will be yours for food.

And to all the

beasts of the earth and all the birds of the air and all the creatures that move on the

ground—everything that has the breath of life in it—I give every green plant for food.

And it was so,

” were the basis of Adam’s legitimacy as sovereign over the world. From

these two Biblical references Filmer deduced that God, void an actual mention of

property, granted the beasts and plants of the earth to Adam as property, not merely for

use. It is the supposed property right granted to Adam by God that is an adequate

justification for a conception of the Divine Right of Kings and the basis for Monarchical

power for Filmer. Those who can trace their lineage to the direct unblemished family

line of Adam most directly ought to be considered divinely selected to rule. This is quite

different from other conceptions of the Divine Right of Kings where divine selection is

usually the result of a show of God’s providence in a favorable battle outcome or the

concession of a religious leader i.e. Matthew 22:20-21 Where Christians are commanded

to acknowledge God’s order to respect earthly authority; "Caesar's," they replied. Then he

said to them, "Give to Caesar what is Caesar's, and to God what is God's.

Genesis 1:29

" Filmer

placed legitimacy in lineage which is provable and continuous only insofar as the legacy

of the lineage is maintained and is uncorrupted via marriage or the lack of a healthy,

suitable heir. It is this concept of legacy and lineage as the basis for governmental

authority granted by God that Locke attacks unsympathetically in the First Treatise.

Matthew 22:21

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Locke begins his state of nature with a summary of the First Treatise and its

unrelenting attack on the Divine Right of Kings with the blunt statement “It having been

shewn in the foregoing Discourse, That Adam had not either by natural Right of

Fatherhood, or by positive Donation from God, any such Authority over his Children, or

Dominion over the World as is pretended.”

To give is a verb that signifies the transfer of an object from one party to another.

For instance I can give you my coat or give you my sandwich. Colloquially speaking, to

give is to renounce ownership which is why if I gave you my sandwich and made the

statement: “I am giving this to you,” I would probably not expect it back. Properly

speaking this is not the case. Grammatically, to give merely means to transfer an object

yet the transfer of ownership or property rights is another matter altogether. Let’s look at

This statement he defends with four points.

The first point of defense is found within the statement itself. Locke claims that nowhere

does God actually grant Adam “dominion over the world.” Here Locke is not renouncing

Adam’s lordship over his family and children because he clearly supports a version of

that both throughout the First Treatise and in chapter six of the Second Treatise. Nor is

Locke renouncing the clear Biblical statement from God in Genesis where God gives

Adam the beasts of the field and greens of the earth for his sustenance. Locke, in a round

about way, argues an etymological distinction between give and dominion. Locke

discusses at length the claims made by God to Adam and Noah as well as the distinctions

in subordination between Adam, his children, Eve, and the things of the world (animals,

plants, and land). Under girding Locke’s appeals that God did not grant Adam exclusive

property rights is the need to determine what God meant in Genesis 1:24-31 when he

stated that he “gave” to Adam the things of the Earth for his subsistence.

Locke, 267

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the sandwich example once more. Though I may give you a sandwich, the transfer of

ownership requires another act. The affirmation that comes with my verbalized

statement: “I am giving you this sandwich” is requisite for a belief that I am granting

ownership. Without the corroboration of affirmation, the typical response would be a

question, “are you giving this to me?” or “can I have this?” despite the fact that you

indeed already physically posses the sandwich. Now yes, God did tell Adam that the

beasts of the field and greens of the earth were being given to him, but this was the first

act. Jesus had not yet been born so there was no Christian God in the flesh to literally

give, by hand, anything to Adam. The other two members of the trinity, God the Father,

and the Holy Spirit, according to the faith of which both Filmer and Locke ascribe,

cannot come into contact with the material world imbued with sin because of their

purity

This point specifically delineates between the Father and the Holy Spirit’s inability to come into contact

with mater and their ability to come into contact with sin. Mater in and of itself is not relegated as sinful in

the Bible therefore there is nothing that prevents its contact with Father and the Holy Spirit. Despite the

fact that Adam had yet to sin thus he was pure and enjoyed fellowship with God, the serpent was in the

garden thus sin was present. Though God is said in the Bible to have fellowshipped with Adam in the

garden, the presence of sin in their midst would have necessarily prevented the Father from interacting fully

with the world and Adam except via a method that did not require contact i.e. miracles or speech.

thus they perform tasks through speech acts i.e. God created existence out of the

void by speaking it into existence…“God Said” and it was. Thus God’s statement was

tantamount to God handing the world to Adam. This handing over was not however the

transfer of ownership but one of stewardship. To be a steward, or stigweard, properly

speaking is to be a guardian of another’s property. The world, for Locke, still belonged

to God. He was just giving it, or transferring it, to Adam to manage and watch over it.

This would account for the other tasks given to Adam: to multiply and populate, to name

the beasts and plants, to till and nurture the earth. If God gave ownership over the world,

Adam could do whatever he wanted with it. This was not so. God gave specific

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instructions to Adam, one of which he, through his spouse, violated and was punished in

perpetuity for transgressing namely, the eating of the fruit from the forbidden tree of

knowledge.

Adam as a stigweard is juxtaposed against Filmer’s desire to interpret God’s gift

as granting dominion over the earth. Dominion or dominium means to have legitimate

ownership of, lordship over, sovereign right to. In order for God’s statements in Genesis

to be interpreted as God’s desire to transfer ownership of the world over to Adam, then

the term give would have to be read as the transfer of power. God does use the word

“dominate” referring to Adam’s dominion over animals. This dominion however is more

complicated than it seems. Because man was made in God’s image, man was granted a

higher station on earth. Given reason, man was to till, harvest, and nurture the world. In

order to do so he had to lord over that which he had to manipulate for the greater good.

In order for man to obey God’s commandment to be a good steward of the earth, he had

to be granted dominion over the things in the earth in order to manipulate them as he saw

fit for the greater glory of God. In return God acknowledges that Adam has as his

payment or reward, nourishment that is to come from the plants of the earth and beasts of

the field. This nourishment at the time was given to Adam and Eve not exclusively, but

since they were the sole beneficiaries in existence, they by default received the entirety of

God’s gift on behalf of the humans that were to come; the ones they were commanded to

create. Locke explains to us that Adam’s lordship over all things was merely by default

and was in fact temporary, and that ownership of the earth, plants, and beasts belonged to

the human condition rather than Adam singularly.

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To add one more convincing argument that Adam did not receive a property in the

earth from God we look to another translation of the Bible. In the Hebrew Bible Adam is

commanded by God to “till (‘abad) and keep (shamar) the garden. These words are better

translated, “to serve” and “to guard.” These two Hebrew words are only used together

elsewhere in Scripture to describe the duties of the Levites. In Numbers 3:7-8 and

Numbers 8:26 the Lord gives the Levites the authority to minister in the tabernacle.

The last three of the four defenses of Locke’s summary of the First Treatise all

have to do with the functional problems of legitimacy derived from lineage. Locke

rhetorically grants Filmer his base claim hypothetically that God grated Adam ownership

over the world. Filmer’s argument still would not work for Locke because,

”

We find that the Garden of Eden is set up by God as a temple in which Adam and Eve

were to worship God through their acts. The land, animals, and the bounty that was Eden

was holy and meant for Adam to guard and keep clean for God as all temples are to be

presented spotless for the glory of God. The Garden belonged to Adam in the same sense

a church belongs to a pastor or a chapel belongs to a priest, they are to serve as stewards

and to tend to the church or chapel. They do not possess a property in the temples; rather

the temples belong to God whom they serve through the maintenance of the temples as an

act of reverence. We see again that Adam could not have possessed a property in the

world as Filmer professed.

“if [God] had [given ownership of the world to Adam], his Heirs, yet, had not

right to it. That if his Heirs had, there being no Law of Nature nor positive Law

of God that determines, which is the Right Heir in all cases that may arise, the

Right of Succession, and consequently of bearing Rule, could not have been

certainly determined. That if even that had been determined, yet the knowledge

of which is the Eldest Line of Adam’s Posterity, being so long since utterly lost,

Brian Pizzalato, “Adam: High Priest of Humanity.”

http://www.catholicnewsagency.com/resource.php?n=703

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that in the Races of Mankind and Families of the World, there remains not to one

above another, the least pretence to be the Eldest House, and to have the Right of

Inheritance.

”

Even if Filmer were able to convince Locke that God’s giving of the animals and plants

to Adam over which he had dominion established Adam’s property in them, there is

certainly no reference in the Bible concerning the transfer of property from Adam to his

heirs. God clearly, in other parts of the Bible, as is the case for Abraham, does state

when his will is to span generations in perpetuity. No such promise is made to Adam

beyond his curse to till and toil the land and for Eve to suffer in childbirth and its

reverberations throughout mankind. Thus we cannot assume that because Adam may

have been granted the right to the beasts and plants of the world that said promise also

was given to his heirs in perpetuity. Granting Filmer’s position rhetorically again, even if

there were a promise made to Adam’s heirs; there would be no way to delineate between

his heirs. We once again could not assume God would have wanted a patriarchic line or

matriarchic line, or maybe rule had nothing to do with family at all and could be passed

via some oligarchic or meritocratic means. There are an infinite number of ways in

which the order of people eligible to legitimately rule may be determined between

members of a certain lineal line. Locke states that there is no clear determination that

God, if he had in fact granted Adam and his heirs ownership over the world, would have

wanted one right of succession over the other. As if that were not enough, Locke finally

concludes his counterargument against Filmer with one last rhetorical concession. Even

if God had granted ownership of the world to Adam, and the ownership was also given to

his lineage in perpetuity, and there was some legitimate right of succession that could be

Locke, 267

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agreed upon as being Biblically based, there are no means by which we can determine

who the Eldest heirs of Adam are. Even if a determination of right of succession were to

be determined it would certainly have to take into account the proximity of certain

members of Adam’s heirs to the source of the family lineal line. In short, there’s no way

of telling who is older in terms of what Locke labels “nearness of blood.

Unlike Hobbes whose state of nature is succinct within itself, and could do

without the ontological chapters that precede it, Locke’s state of nature is moot without

the demolition of the Divine Right of Kings. More importantly, the impetus of the very

question of legitimate governmental authority is at stake as well. For Hobbes, the

ongoing civil wars were cause enough to ask are we, as Englanders, doing the right

thing? Are we endangering ourselves more by constantly engaging in these civil wars

which seem to cause more problems than they solve? Hobbes’ questioning of legitimate

” Here Locke

catches Filmer in a contradiction. If lineage and rights of succession are paternal then it

would be imperative to determine who among the lineage is closest, though Locke did

not have the word at the time I believe he would have used genetically, to the ruling

patriarch Adam. Because all of mankind is descended from Adam, the only ranking of

lineage and proximity to Adam could be a genetic one. Whose blood is least tainted via

time or other spontaneous means by which generational likeness may diminish over time

and generations? is the question that would then have to be answered. With this Locke

rests his claims having felt he successfully argued against any conceivable retort for rule

legitimated by the Divine Right of Kings. It is here that Locke’s hypothetical project

begins. The rant against Filmer, though not hypothetical, was a critical piece of Locke’s

state of nature.

Locke, 220

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governmental authority came directly out of a pressing concern for the country and the

safety and well being of his countrymen at the time. Locke’s questioning governmental

legitimacy however had less to do with the safety of his countrymen from war or harm

and more to do with the security of property rights and their affect on civility in general.

Locke felt that if people could be secure in the relationship between their labor and the

production of a commodious life then civil wars would cease to be a problem. Thus

Locke could not just reference fear from harm and the desire to be safe as the cause and

end of government. He wanted not only to provide security, but also structure certain

possibilities within a new governmental structure. Locke’s end desire, the bolstering of

property rights for the laboring man, could not work in a structure where a monarch had

absolute right to all property and the fruits of the labor of all. Hence he had to first get

rid of the Divine Right of Kings to create a void in which he could erect something anew.

After feeling satisfied that he has eradicated logical belief in any legitimate governance

that relied on the absolute authority of the strong or divinely selected, Locke states that he

“must of necessity find out another rise of Government, another Original of Political

Power, and another way of designing and knowing the Persons that have it, then what Sir

Robert F. hath taught us.

Locke, 268

” He makes clear that we are seeking an understanding of

power as distinct from other power relationships i.e. wife-husband, parent-child, master-

servant, etc... Though seemingly a mere definition, Locke foreshadows the result of his

state of nature at the end of chapter 1. Rather that investigating man’s nature and seeing

what we come up with, Locke already tells us what we are going to find. He is so sure

that he defines political power outright at the end of chapter 1. The hypothetical state of

nature that is to follow serves more as a justification for a subjective definition, so when

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we enter chapter 7, we are rhetorically prepared to take the normatively of his definition

of political power as objective and begin his argument proper with as little resistance or

skepticism as possible.

In the next chapter aptly titled, “Of the State of Nature,” Locke begins his thought

experiment yet he begins in an intentionally ambiguous way. This ambiguity will

continue throughout his state of nature. He states that we are going to derive political

power from its “original”. Locke intentionally blurs the line between the hypothetical

thought experiment and the relation of objective claims. Ideally the end result as I stated

will be the move from a subjective definition of political power, to the legitimate,

objective goal of his argued state beginning in chapter 7. The state of nature is a state of

freedom and equality. Holding true to his non-committal ways Locke readily establishes

a way around this supposed equality by acknowledging that we are equal, “unless the

Lord and Master of them all, should by manifest Declaration of his Will set one above

another, and confer on him by an evident and clear appointment an undoubted Right to

Dominion and Sovereignty.

Locke, 269

” In a desire to distance himself from Hobbes, Locke insists

upon a distinction between liberty and license. Locke repeatedly reduced Hobbes’

Leviathan and other political discourses to two words: force and violence. Locke’s

reading of Hobbes is that mankind in the state of nature is devoid of reason and despite

reason’s eventual awakening during the beginnings of the desire for civility; Hobbes’

state becomes nothing more than the acceptance of legitimated violence. The sovereign

for Locke is nothing more than a bully, who through force has beaten his subjects into

submission and acceptance. This, for Locke, is a farce of reason for Hobbes’ sovereign

becomes the tyrannical equivalent of a divinely entitled monarch and thus equally

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destructive to the assurances in the guarantee laborers have to the fruits of their labor

which Locke clearly states is critical to the formation of any rational state. To get around

this, Locke ascribes that reason is not something that has to be discovered or turned on so

to speak for humanity. It exists in the state of nature. The problem is that not many

chose to utilize their capacities for reason.

“The State of Nature has a Law of Nature to govern it, which obliges every one:

And Reason, which is the Law, teaches all Mankind who will but consult it, that being all

equal and independent, no one ought to harm another in his Life, Health, Liberty, or

Posessions.

” This law of nature is the reason that “thought [the state of nature] be a

State of Liberty, yet it is not a State of License

Self preservation charges me to protect my body and life from any attack. I can

also stretch self preservation arguments to justify my avenging the theft of the means for

”. This is the primary difference between

Hobbes and Locke. The war of all against all is not an issue for Locke because man

conceives of license in the state of nature. The limits of mine and thine, the rudiments for

property, are already conceptualized and known. Property, for Locke, is not seen as an

artificial right created by man. It is as central to the human condition as health and

liberty, property’s just defense however is another matter which requires positive law.

From this belief we are to see man’s capacity in the state of nature to be made aware and

mindful of the property and well being of themselves and others. It is here that Locke

explains that man also is conscious of transgression and punishment. This follows

rationally from the belief that man in the state of nature is capable of being aware and

mindful of property.

Locke, 271

Locke, 270

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my sustenance because of the threat my being deprived of those materials may cause me.

Locke however goes two steps further. Man in the state of nature recognizes that

property is an essential part of the human condition and as such must be defended. If one

felt permitted to deprive one or many of their property, how long will it be before this

person tried to deprive me of my property and life if they saw fit? This reasoning is the

basis for Locke’s claim that “every Man hath a Right to punish the Offender, and be

Executioner of the Law of Nature.

On the surface Locke seems to be setting up some notion that humans have some

base moral sentiment that obliges them to help others but this is not the case. From the

outset, the central relation being established in the state of nature is that between

individuals and their property. The extent to which the other matters to me is the defense

of my own right to obtain and maintain property. I help you because I am fearful that the

same may happen to me. The next step towards civility echoes more of the same. After

clearly acknowledging that criminality is an apparent sign of the willingness to place

one’s own desires before the need to respect others as taught by reason, thus justifying

the need for the rational to detain and if necessary destroy the criminal for their own

protection, Locke turns to a problem of self-interest. Recognizing that the state of nature

as hypothetically constructed is reliant upon individuals’ care of themselves and desire to

defend their own life and rights, and consequently those of other rational people for their

own benefit, up to and including death, Locke realizes that such a disposition would lead

” Any threat to the property of others is a threat to

my property and thus I am obligated to defend the property of others as my own. Further,

because I respect property rights, I understand that despite my assistance, the offended

still has the unique right of reparation. This is important.

Locke, 272

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to a perversion of justice. Logic would lead men to eradicate their numbers of anyone

with any inclination towards criminality. Such a disposition would contradict the key

Christian principles of forgiveness and transformation. Though criminals are said to have

“declared War against all Mankind, and therefore may be destroyed as a Lyon or a

Tyger,…By the same reason, may a Man in the State of Nature punish the lesser breaches

of that Law. It will perhaps be demanded, with death? [Locke answers], Each

Transgression may be punished to that degree, and with so much Severity as will suffice

to make it an ill bargain to the Offender, give him cause to repent, and terrifie others from

doing the like.

Skipping chapter four for now we find ourselves at the beginning of chapter five,

though knee deep in the state of nature, still lacking any evidence of narrative structure.

The narrative begins in chapter five. We have been conditioned to understand the subject

Locke is working with in chapter five. Man, free and equal (except in cases where God

” In short, punishments doled out must fit the severity of the crimes

committed. The only way to ensure this is to make sure that punishments are not

determined by those who have a stake in the transgression. In order for property to be

established and justly defended, there arises a need for judges among people endowed

with property. This would prevent the innocent from themselves, transgressing against

another because of their irrational, yet completely understandable, emotional tie to their

pain felt as a result of the transgression. Judges are the means by which men can obtain

and maintain property without feeling the need to resort to violence or the extermination

of criminals great and small. Property acquisition and maintenance become “rationally”

deduced as the logical end of the human condition and its just defense the primary need

of mankind.

Locke, 274-275

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has made it obvious that some are better than others and thus entitled to more), though

endowed with the luxury of consulting reason and living the commodious life, does not

seem to always do so. As such, man, realizing his obligation to preserve himself and

others, takes care to punish those who quit reason and transgress against others via the

violation of the person or property of another. To preserve justice in a world where self

preservation is protected legitimately by the death of a transgressor, man determines that

it would be best if people were not judges in their own cases and that impartial judges

handle the determination of punishments for transgressions. Before we get to men,

Locke goes back to man. Reiterating once more his disagreement with Filmer, Locke

brings up Adam and God’s granting Adam the world not for his dominion but rather for

his stewardship. Thus this begins our narrative. We conceive of Adam and Eve,

endowed with the same freedom, equality, and base recognition of property rights in the

Garden of Eden with the charges given to them by God to populate, till, and nurture the

earth. This scene is stated negatively. In § 25 Locke claims that it is clear that God gave

the world to man in common yet he realizes that this brings up a conundrum. Unless

Adam, or anyone else, has a God given property in the world, how is it that anyone

comes to possess a property in anything if everyone is an equal steward of the earth not

possessing any part of it? How is it that man can simultaneously honor his charge from

God to preserve himself yet not partake of the means of his sustenance which are all

around him for fear of unjustly robbing mankind, and establishing a property in an object

in which he has no right above anyone else? It is here that Locke vows to press forward

and demonstrate “how Men might come to have a property in several parts of that which

God gave to Mankind in common, and that without any express Compact of all the

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Commoners.

Adam and Eve must have already populated the earth and faithfully tilled and

nourished the earth in such a way that it can produce for more than just them two thus

creating the possibility for there to be a “men” and “mankind” to start § 26 with. This is

our first time disunity. We have progressed in time from Adam and Eve to a world

already populated. This place we find is a hunter gatherer world where labor and self

subsistence are man’s primary wants and needs. This is a space where God’s charge for

humanity to be stewards of the earth is already understood and the labor of people and

others are respected. “Thus this Law of reason makes the Deer, that Indian’s who hath

killed it; ‘tis allowed to be his goods who hath bestowed his labour upon it, though

before, it was the common right of every one.

” Locke, in order to achieve his end, has to begin from the premise that

God gave the world to Adam to be a steward of the earth. We are supposed to have that

thought at the end of the section. It is also the only logical way § 26 could begin. God

did not create all men simultaneously according to the Bible which Locke has repeatedly

referenced. God created Adam first so in order for § 26 to begin with claims about the

purpose of man’s stewardship of the earth already presupposes that Adam and Eve did

their jobs already.

Locke, 286

” It is here that Locke brings up for the

first time a notion that will be integral to the rest of his narrative, “the common of

mankind.” The size, nature, and right to “the common of mankind” are what drive

Locke’s narrative, his state of nature, and ultimately the direction of his conception of the

state. The lessons learned by the hunter gatherers of the meaning of labor as the mixture

of one’s hands with an object in the state of nature, the conceptual understanding of mine

Locke, 289

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from thine, and their legitimated right to acquire and establish property for their base

preservation insofar as they do not keep things past the point that the spoil, all push

mankind toward the second time disunity.

“But the chief matter of Property being now not the Fruits of the Earth, and the

Beasts that subsist on it, but the Earth it self; as that which takes in and carries with it all

the rest: I think it is plain, that Property in that too is acquired as the former. As much

Land as a Man Tills, Plants, Improves, Cultivates, and can use the Product of, so much is

his Property.

Locke, 290

” Now man has learned to cultivate and establish settlements on the earth.

This is evidenced by Locke’s discussion of “inclosure from the common” as the means

by which a property in land is established. The hunter gatherer period of human

development that lasted approximately 2.5 million years during the Paleolithic period.

Presuming that Locke did not relate 2.5 million years of human history in six sections we

can assume that he had to skip a few years. § 32 begins at the dawn of the Mesolithic

period where man discovers sustained agriculture. Rather than mere gathering or

sporadic, poorly planned, protection of certain desirable crops that owe the majority of

their being to nature as opposed to human labor, the Mesolithic period was the beginning

of conscientious attempts to repeatedly grow certain crops in the same plot, or range of

plots by human beings along with the domestication of the first animals. This was the

beginning of husbandry. As man began to populate and “acquire” land, the land

remaining “in common” was becoming scarce. This scarcity had, since hunter gatherer

times during the Paleolithic period, been dealt with the utilization of Locke’s notion of

the non-spoilage proviso. Men could gather and nourish themselves as long as they only

took that which was necessary for their survival and did not allow their provisions to

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spoil in their possessions. As certain population centers grew, the places that bore high

yields of edible plants, fruits, and vegetables became highly sought after. Popular trees,

bushes, herds, and rivers were over picked by hunters and gatherers. Finding less

available “in nature” to forage, mankind was forced to develop the means by which it

could provide for itself in a more reliable fashion. The development of settlements,

farms, and pastures made it possible for men to provide for themselves in one sedentary

spot and to no longer be subject to the haphazard production of nature. To maintain

civility and prevent the usurpation of labor, man had to find a way to demarcate between

mine and thine in a way that would be both clear to others and not require literal

consumption, adorning, or stowing other types of property did. Other types of property

could be handled, carried, or moved to a secure position. Locke placed these actions

under the same act: “removing an object from the state of nature.” If an apple was on a

tree one can climb the tree and remove the tree from its natural state. If one needed an

axe or hammer they could remove a femur from a large animal. If one required raiment

they could skin a deer or bear. All these acts require an individual to remove an object

out of the state that it naturally rests. Apples only grow on trees, femurs are found within

bodies, hides are affixed to animals. In order to acquire these objects they must be

removed from their current positions and taken elsewhere to be utilized. Land acquisition

however does not quite work the same way. Men could not grab an acre of land, place it

one their backs, and take it home to use it. There had to be developed another way by

which a property could be established in a tract of land. “As much Land as a Man Tills,

Plants, Improves, Cultivates, and can use the Product of, so much is his Property. He by

his Labour does, as it were, inclose it from the Common.

Locke, 290-291

” Man acquired property in a

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tract of land through his labor; by mixing his hands with the soil and enclosing the area

he labored upon in some recognizable fashion via a fence or markers of some sort. Locke

argued that insofar as individuals labored, acquired land, and respected the demarcations

of others, there was enough in the world that no one would be injured by the acquisition

of property. Because of the non-spoilage proviso, men were restricted by their labor. No

man’s labor could till and consume the entire world, thus men could only establish valid

properties in small plots of land.

“This [Locke] boldly [affirmed], That the same Rule of Propriety, (viz.) that every

Man should have as much as he could make use of, would hold still in the World, without

straitning any body since there is Land enough in the World to suffice double the

Inhabitants had not the Invention of Money, and the tacit Agreement of Men to put a

value on it, introduced (by Consent) larger Possessions and a Right to them.

” While the

Mesolithic period lasted from approximately 10,000 BC until 5,000 BC, the use of money

predated this era. However, I would argue that §36 still would be considered a time

disunity in the narrative story line. Locke points to the invention of money as a moment

of change in property dealings in §36, yet he is more specific in §37. “This is certain,

That in the beginning, before the desire of having more than Men needed, had altered the

intrinsick value of things, which depends only on their usefulness to the Life of Man; or

[Men] had agreed, that a little piece of yellow Metal, which would keep without wasting

or decay, should be worth a great piece of Flesh, or a whole heap of Corn.

Locke, 293

” Locke

makes it clear that he is not speaking of the use of red ochre or wampum, he is speaking

about gold. Also, Locke is not referring to money as a placeholder in a larger barter

Locke, 294

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system; rather, Locke is referencing the beginning of the use of money as a commodity.

Commodity money, as opposed to representative money, has value in itself.

Representative money, true to its name, merely represents an object exchanged and a

promise of payment to come. In short, representative money is an I.O.U. Commodity

money has within itself recognized value. There is no repayment expected. We know

that Locke is referencing commodity money from the first of out last two aforementioned

quotes. Locke states, “there is Land enough in the World to suffice double the

Inhabitants had not the Invention of Money, and the tacit Agreement of Men to put a

value on it, introduced (by Consent) larger Possessions and a Right to them.

This is a third time disunity. As I stated, though the use of money existed

concurrently to the Mesolithic period and thus seems to be a possible setting for Locke’s

visualizations in sections 36 and 37, it is more likely that the period he is referring to is

the rise of Mesopotamia and the beginning of commodity money which occurred around

3000 BC. Mesopotamia was established during the Neolithic period approximately 2000

years after the end of the Mesolithic period. This would necessitate a gap in Locke’s

narrative. We’ve jumped from the Mesolithic period and sped through its 5000 years to

highlight key moments: the erection of settlements and farms, the domestication of

animals, and the beginnings of trade. Now we find ourselves 2000 years into the

Neolithic period at the birth of commodity money. Along with commodities, man has

” “The

Invention of Money, and the tacit Agreement of Men to put a value on it” is the key part

of the quote. It is the moment that men decided to place value in the money rather than

the object exchanged that, for Locke, changed everything.

Locke, 293

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also developed two other concepts that would empower or plague, depending on your

perspective, mankind from that moment forward. We go back to our key quote, “the

Invention of Money, and the tacit Agreement of Men to put a value on it, introduced (by

Consent) larger Possessions and a Right to them.” Money, we find, had introduced both

excess and wealth. Locke recognized the controversial nature of this statement, hence the

insertion of “by consent” in parenthesis. He foreshadows here a justification that, though

it will be required later in chapter 5, has already been provided for in chapter 4. So

“larger possessions” are not only a desire, but a right, not because of the advent of

money, but because of the transformation of money into a commodity from a

representation of a commodity.

Until now the non-spoilage proviso has made it possible for all to survive, or as

Locke states, for the world to provide for twice the inhabitants. However, Locke tells us

that this too changes after money. No more will the earth suffice for twice the

inhabitants. The key to this is the caveat waste. One could not hoard apples because his

finite nature, namely the finite size of his stomach, would prevent him from eating an

infinite number of apples daily such that one could deplete the resources that could

possibly sustain many. In short, men have limits to what they can consume and thus,

because of the non-spoilage proviso, have a necessary limit to what they can gather or

acquire because without consumption, objects (apples, bananas, land, trees, water) would

spoil or be otherwise wasted in their possession rendering them to be found in violation

of the non-spoilage proviso and warranting punishment for their transgression against

mankind. Money however, more importantly metal money, does not spoil. If individuals

decided to use steaks as commodities or grapes then the non-spoilage proviso would still

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hold and excess would not be permissible. That, unfortunately is not what happened,

individuals “had agreed, that a little piece of yellow Metal, which would keep without

wasting or decay, should be worth a great piece of Flesh, or a whole heap of Corn.

“And thus, without supposing any private Dominion, and property in Adam, over

all the World, exclusive of all other Men, which can no way be proved, nor any ones

Property be made out from it; but supposing the World given as it was to the Children of

Men in common, we see how labour could make Men distinct titles to several parcels of

it, for their private uses; wherein there could be no doubt of Right, no room for

quarrel.

”

Because gold cannot spoil, man is entitled to hoard it. This introduced the legitimate

acquisition of more than one could consume in land and resources. As long as one could

trade that which is acquired and of a nature that it may spoil, or continually utilize and

improve and use that which is gained in the form of land, before it grows stagnant, rots,

or goes for a prolonged period of time without being labored upon, they could not be held

in violation of the non-spoilage proviso. This takes Locke into his fourth time disunity.

Locke, 294

” Here Locke does not merely restate what we found in section §32, that man,

through his labor, is entitled to land. Locke includes the key word “several” in the claim.

Man, prior to money, when the non-spoilage proviso was in force, was entitled to only

that which he could consume and was limited by his finitude. Now we find that man can

acquire several tracts of land, more than he can consume or utilize, and there is “no room

for doubt or quarrel.” This is a time disunity. We move from Mesopotamia around

approximately 3000 BC to the dawn of the Early Modern period in the 15

century.

Evidence of this is found in the litany of Locke’s justifications for the addition of value to

Locke, 296

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land via labor in sections 41 through 48. A key theme in those sections was America.

Made visible to the west in the late 15

century, America or the Americas for Locke was

both a hypothetical symbol and an objective. Here is where Locke once again blurs the

thought experiment and objective reality. “Thus in the beginning all the World was

America, and more so than it is now; for no such thing as Money was any where

known.

At the end of Locke’s narrative we find three crucial points. First that wealth,

excess, and the exclusive possession of land, water, and other provisions of life are rights

which are legitimated through labor. Some consider this a justification for colonialism.

Intended or not, colonialism does follow from Locke’s narrative. It becomes rational for

men to acquire and utilize under used land and vacant (whether the land is actually vacant

or just assumed to be) for the betterment of all mankind. Second, that we have yet, in the

century, reached what Locke would consider civility, for property rights are not

adequately protected in a monarchical rule where possessions can be commandeered ad

” According to many of his contemporaries, America was a savage place

devoid of civility and reason. However, America served as pseudo objective proof of

Locke’s state of nature. The America in the imagination of 15

century Europe was

exactly what Locke wanted to capitalize on, hence the time disunity. The claims of

value, labor, and property Locke advanced in sections 41-48 are meant to juxtapose Early

Modern Europe to their conceptions of what America was at that moment in their

historical imagination. Thus our narrative of mankind’s movement into what Locke

would consider civilized society has fast forwarded from Mesopotamia in 3000 BC to

Locke’s modernity in the 16

and 17

centuries, a span of well over 4000 years.

Locke, 301

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hoc with no recourse for opposition because it is ordained by God himself. Lastly, that

all this is established in reason itself and as such is objective, just, and unalterable hence,

“it is plain, that Men have agreed to disproportionate and unequal Possession of the

Earth.

Locke, 302

” This is where chapter 4 plays such an important role. In chapter 4 Locke

makes a distinction between slavery and drudgery. Slavery is the legitimate taking of

one’s life who has willingly quit nature through their renouncing of reason as

demonstrated by their actions. One who has their lives taken in this fashion could be

made to perform any task without the right to claim they have been transgressed against

because their actions have caused their body and life to no longer be considered their

own. Drudgery is something entirely different. Drudgery is the willing choice to

contract into labor, whatever the labor may be, during a time of hardship or extreme need

in order to receive alleviation from some burden or the desire to participate in some

irrational form of masochism for no apparent reason. The principle difference between

the two is ownership over one’s life. In slavery, one’s master is owner of their life and as

such has the right not only to dictate the will and actions of the slave but to also kill the

slave if she saw fit to do so. In cases of drudgery, the person who decided to contract

into a relationship of drudgery still retains ownership over their life. Though the terms of

a given contract may require hideous, strenuous, or excessively demeaning work, the

executor of the contract has no legitimate power over the life of the laborer which can

include death. This means that in cases where those, who by circumstance find

themselves under the burden of a contract they do not enjoy, cannot lay claim to being

enslaved or mal treated because of their choice to enter into their troubled situation. In

short, those who do not have things cannot justifiably cry out to those who do when they

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find themselves being exploited by those who own the means of production. Having

rationalized the origin of inequality, Locke concludes his narrative. We see that our

narrative proceeds as follows:

Scene 1 (Dawn of Time)

Adam and Eve >>>Ejected from Garden of Eden and charged to toil and populate the

earth>>>Adam and Eve perform their charge

Time Disunity

Scene 2 (Paleolithic Period)

Mankind has now populated the earth>>>Men provide for their own subsistence through

the acquisition of property>>>Free and equal, men learn to respect property and detest

those who do not

Time Disunity

Scene 3 (Mesolithic Period)

Certain areas of the world are overpopulated>>>Man deduces that husbandry is superior

to hunting and gathering>>>Man learns land acquisition rights

Time Disunity

Scene 4 (Mesopotamia: Neolithic Period)

Men decide to place commodity value on money>>>Men introduce wealth and

excess>>>Non-spoilage proviso is rendered moot

Time Disunity

Scene 5 (Early Modern Europe)

Man is still learning to subdue and utilize the earth to its maximum

efficiency>>>Colonialism and the dissolution of a Monarchy legitimated through the

Divine Right of Kings is seen as a practice legitimated by reason and practical need

Locke’s state of nature does not end however with the completion of his narrative

and flow into his argument for an effective state like Hobbes’ does. Locke adds one last

buffer between the reader and his actual syllogistic philosophic argument for a body

politic. Chapter 6 or “Paternal Power” is where Locke explicates the roles and duties of

members of the family unit as they relate to state and fatherly authority. Aside from the

obvious work one would expect to be done in a chapter entitled “Paternal Power” (a

discussion of what mom, dad, and baby are supposed to do in relation to the law and the

father’s authority he has over his family), Locke additionally does something much more

interesting. So his ideas concerning property, freedom, and individualism do not descend

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into some property or culture relativism where no one is obliged to anyone but

themselves, Locke tries to recover continuity across generations in nation and culture

without resorting to patriarchic lineal obligations of son’s to carry on the father’s legacy.

He does this by arguing that the though the father must respect the individual rights of the

child and allow them to follow their own paths, acquire their own property, and achieve

their own wealth, the father’s right to the fruits of his labor must be respected also. After

a father provides for the children up to adulthood, his possessions, wealth, and means are

all his own. He has the right to do with them as he pleases. If he offers his estate to his

children with conditions he in no way imposes on their freedoms. By tying land to an

obligation to a state, and consequently to the ideas of that state, Locke manages to create

the means by which culture, and nationality can be redeemed without the tyranny of

lineage. Likewise, the father has a means by which his legacy can be cemented for

posterity through the continuation of his acquisitions and holdings by his progeny; all this

without infringing upon the rights and freedoms of his children or others. Locke locates

the continuity of culture and nation, between the freedom of individuals and their

relationship to the legacies of which they are a part.

Locke establishes, by the outset of his argument for a legitimate body politic in

chapter 7 aptly titled “Of Political or Civil Society,” a seemingly objective relation

between property and the purpose of the state so that true political power, if you accept

his claims, can be seen as nothing other than, “a Right of making Laws with Penalties of

Death, and consequently all less Penalties, for the Regulating and Preserving of Property,

and of employing the force of the Community, in the Execution of such Laws, and in the

defense of the Common-wealth from Foreign Injury, and all this only for the Publick

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Good,

” as he clearly states at the end of chapter 1. This desire for an unrestrained, yet

protected, right to property is further carried into posterity in chapter 6 where Locke

outlines the right of fathers to legitimately oblige their progeny to furthering their works

via the offer of wealth through land. Locke utilizes reason as a guide to subdue culture,

history, the state, individual freedom, and rationality itself to the centrality of property as

a good. The recognition of, and submission to, property as a good in itself and as the

only legitimate desire for the rational man, is the end of reason, the mark of civility, and

the purpose of the state for Locke.

Locke, 268

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CHAPTER THREE: ROUSSEAU’S STATE OF NATURE READ AS A NARRATIVE

“I want to inquire whether in the civil order there can be some legitimate

and sure rule of administration, taking men as they are, and the laws as

they can be: In this inquiry I shall try always to combine what right

permits with what interest prescribes, so that justice and utility may not be

disjoined

”

Jean Jacques Rousseau, like Hobbes and Locke, set out in his treatise on the social

contract entitled Of the Social Contract or Principles of Political Right

to search for a

legitimate origin to political authority. However, unlike Hobbes and Locke who each

locate the strength, power, and force of the state at its head or ruling center (the sovereign

or legislative body), Rousseau determined that the power of governance lies in the people

of a given state. Though Rousseau does agree that there must be a sole executor of

legislated and governmental authority, the power of that seat does not reside with that

individual or group but rather in the will of those who are to be governed. Rousseau’s

concept of “The General Will,” though not originally his because conceptions of

democratic principles existed long before his social contract, was fashioned as a form of

political power as opposed to a facet or enemy of it. Though Rousseau’s Social Contract

makes no explicit mention of a state of nature as it relates to some primordial origin of

society, he does however still utilize and benefit from the use of the a hypothetical origin

of man. This origin is found in its most complete form in the On the Origin of

Inequality

Rousseau, Jean Jacques. Du Contrat Social. Paris: Garnier Frères, 1962 p.235 (Hereafter referenced as

Garnier Frères)

: “Je veux chercher si, dans l’ordre civil, il peut y avoir quelque règle

d’administration légitime et sure, en prenant les homes tells qu’ils sont, et les lois telles qu’elles

peuvent être. Je tâcherai d’allier toujours, dans cette recherché, ce que le droit permet avec ce

que l’intérêt prescript, afin que la justice et l’utilité ne se trouvent point divisées.

”

. In the Second Discourse Rousseau delves deeper into a relationship he

Politique: Du Contrat Social ou Principes du Droit Politique

Discours: Sur cette question propose par l’académie de Dijon: Quelle est l’origine de l’inégalité parmi

les homes et si elle est autorisée par la loi naturelle?

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uncovered in the First Discourse. Ruminating on whether or not humanity has actually

progressed morally as a result of the advancements made in the arts and sciences,

Rousseau determined that man has in fact been corrupted of the good in its nature by the

so called advances found in society: “Before Art had fashioned our manners and taught

our passions to speak in ready-made terms, our morals were rustic but natural; and

differences in conduct conveyed differences of character at first glance. Human nature

was, at bottom, no better, but men found their security in how easily they saw through

one another, and this advantage, to the value of which we are no longer sensible, spared

them a good many vices.

“I admit that since the events I have to describe could have occurred in several

ways, I can choose between them only on the basis of conjectures; but not only

do such conjectures become reasons when they are the most probable that can be

derived from the nature of things and the only means available to discover the

truth, it also does not follow that the consequences I want to deduce from mine

will therefore be conjectural since, on the principles I have just established, no

other system could be formed that would not give me the same results and from

which I could not draw the same conclusions.

” This led Rousseau to inquire into the root of what he

perceived to be the driving force behind the loss of rustic values: the origin of inequality

and the desire for wealth and excess. The Second Discourse is a complete conjectural

history of how man came into such an unequal state for which Rousseau’s Social

Contract is the prescription. Rousseau clearly admits his project at the end of Part I of

the Second Discourse where he states:

”

From this we can deduce that he intends to construct a hypothetical origin of man from

which he can erect les vérités that will enable him later construct his social contract upon

Gourevitch, Victor ed. Rousseau: The Discourses and other early political writings. New York:

Cambridge University Press, 2001. pp.7-8 (Hereafter referenced as Rousseau DEP)

Rousseau DEP, 159

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seemingly objective grounds. He also explains his intent to perform this task in a

narrative fashion:

“This [utilization of a conjectural history] will exempt me from expanding my

reflection about how the lapse of time makes up for slight likelihood of events;

about the astonishing power of very slight causes when they act without cease;

about the impossibility, on the other hand, being in a position to attach to them

the certainty of facts; about how, when two facts given as real are to be

connected by a sequence of intermediate facts that are unknown or believed to be

so, it is up to history, if available, to provide the facts that connect them; about

how, in the absence of history, it is up to Philosophy to ascertain similar facts

that might connect them.

”

In an almost verbatim anticipation of Todorov’s definition of narrative, Rousseau

explains how his depiction of his conjectural history will necessarily contain time

disunities that omit minute historical details which, if included, would have provided a

more consistent and complete linear story. He, being concerned with a much larger

project, will not concern himself with explaining every little occurrence and connection

because his concern is not the relation of a complete story rather, it is the highlighting of

historical moments through the use of narrative form in order to get certain concepts off

the ground for later philosophic use.

We can begin our narrative analysis of Rousseau’s state of nature at the outset of

Part II of the Second Discourse. Rousseau begins Part II with the blunt claim that society

begins with property and the respect by others of one’s property rights: “The first man

who, having enclosed a piece of ground, to whom it occurred to say this is mine, and

found people sufficiently simple to believe him, was the true founder of civil society.”

Rousseau DEP, 159-160

Here Rousseau references Pascal in Pensées, “295: Mine, thine.--"This dog is mine," said

those poor children; "that is my place in the sun." Here is the beginning and the image of

Garnier Frères, 66. “Le premier qui ayant enclose un terrain s’avisa de dire: Ceci est à moi, et trouva des

gens assez simples pour le croire, fut le vrai fondateur de la société civile.”

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the usurpation of all the earth.

” The moment a person distinguished a tract a land they

occupied from others, and found enough people to both believe and respect the enclosure,

Rousseau claims that civil society had begun. This simple fact for Rousseau, however,

was generations in the making, “much progress had to have been made, industry and

enlightenment acquired, transmitted, and increased from one age to the next, before this

last stage of the State of Nature was reached. Let us then take up the thread earlier, and

try to fit this slow succession of events and of knowledge together from a single point of

view, and in their most natural order.

We find our subject, man, in its first setting, occupying a bountiful earth in which

all the provisions necessary for his survival are provided. Though Rousseau makes no

mention of reason, natural man demonstrates little planning or thought in his actions; thus

one can believe that reason, if it was accessible, as was the case for Locke’s natural man,

was rarely, if ever, consulted. Rousseau concerns himself more with the base animal

drive of this natural human being. Each human being was lead by his base needs and he

or she followed their basic drives for life sustaining resources wherever they led him or

her with no meditation or restraint in the matter. “Hunger, other appetites causing him by

” Like Locke, Rousseau begins his state of nature

with a foreshadowing of its ultimate culmination in property. Unlike Hobbes who feels

bodily integrity or safety pushes men towards the sovereign, Rousseau and Locke feel

that concerns over property and the mutual respect of property concerns natural man and

serves as its catalyst towards civilized society. The rest of Rousseau’s state of nature, as

was the case for Locke, becomes an attempt to move a subjective claim to objectivity.

The only difference is that Rousseau admitted at the outset what he was up to.

Pascal, Pensées 1

partie, art. IX, § 53. “Ce chien est à moi, disoient ces pauvres enfants; c’est là ma

place au soleil: voilà le commencement et l’image de ‘usurpation de toute la terre.”

Rousseau DEP, 161

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turns to experience different ways of existing, there was one that prompted him to

perpetuate his species, and this blind inclination, devoid of any sentiment of the heart,

produced only an animal act.

” There were no relations, even between parents and

children for after the act of conceiving man and woman ceased to care for one another.

The father vacates all responsibility. The mother never develops the mythic inseparable

tie to the child she carries. The survival of a child from birth to an age when they can

fend for themselves is presumed to be a matter of chance as Rousseau extends natural

indifference to the mother’s relationship to the child, thereby raising the question of just

why a mother would care enough to allow the child to tag along with her for even a few

years. Ironically Rousseau suggests it is the child who may not have natural indifference;

although he does not develop the insight, he suggests that the child uses language in order

to communicate and plead with an otherwise indifferent and speechless mother

This natural indifference existed only for a time because the bitter realities of

existence soon forced Rousseau’s natural man to face new challenges to ensure its

survival.

“Such was the condition of nascent man; such was the life of an animal at first

restricted to pure sensations…but difficulties soon presented themselves; it

became necessary to learn to overcome them: the height of the Trees which

prevented him from reaching their fruits, the ferociousness of the animals that

threatened his very life, everything obliged him to attend to bodily exercise; he

had to become agile, run fast, fight vigorously. The natural weapons, branches

and stones, were soon at hand. He learned to overcome the obstacles of Nature,

fight other animals when necessary, contend even with men for his subsistence,

or make up for what had to be yielded to the stronger.

”

Garnier Frères, 67. “La faim, d’autres appétits, lui faisant éprouver tour à tour diverses manières

d’exister, il y en eut une qui l’invita à perpétuer son espèce; et penchant aveugle, dépourvu de tout

sentiment du cœur, ne produisoit qu’un acte purement animal.”

Rousseau DEP, 145

Rousseau DEP, 161-162

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This turn of events is evidence of the first disunity in the storyline. We are led to this by

the two phrases “such was,” and “at first.” Both phrases are indicators of elapsed time.

We have moved from a period when man is led by base desire to a period where these

desires or needs are now threatened by the environment in which man finds himself.

Other examples used by Rousseau give us further indication of elapsed time. He claims

that trees have grown and animals now threaten mankind. We can assume that since

these are new developments, humans earlier occupied a space of nascent bushes and

docile animals. The growth of trees and creation of vicious animals would have taken

time, although Rousseau does not seem aware of this. We jump immediately into a

period where man has already learned to deal with its change in fate as evidenced by the

use of pluperfect and past tense in the phrases, “he had to become,” and “he learned.”

Man has already become, learned, and still remains adapted to these changes. The use of

the pluperfect is short lived as Rousseau jumps immediately into yet another time

disunity in the next paragraph.

By the next paragraph mankind has developed the use of tools, discovered fire,

fashioned clothing, and began to eat cooked meat as opposed to raw flesh. Though

morality and recognition of other human beings as warranting trust and help by virtue of

their being a member of the same species has not developed, man is no longer guided by

need and begins to delineate between what one needs and what one ought to do to

preserve one’s life. This new development allows human beings to form herds and

mutual hunting expeditions. Trust was required, albeit only while the objective was still

unfulfilled. “Taught by experience that love of well-being is the sole spring of human

actions, he was in a position to distinguish between the rare occasions when common

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interest should make him count on help of his kind, and the even rarer occasions when

competition should make him suspicious of them.

Rousseau takes note to mention that though mankind had at this time began to

develop rudimentary herds and relationships, they had not developed language. “It is

easy to understand that such dealings did not require a language much more refined than

that of Crows or of Monkeys, which troop together in approximately the same way.

Some inarticulate cries, many gestures, and a few imitative noises must, for a long time,

have made up the universal Language.

” Mutual distrust leads to a

proverbial honor amongst thieves where though no party was above usurping the spoils,

each refrained out of fear of being reprimanded or punished by the entire group. This, in

a Kantian manner, means that they have no real sense of duty, rather they are obliged by

fear and desire for the end yet to be realized i.e. the venison that was to come.

” Reason is clearly being referenced at this point

in Rousseau’s state of nature because decisions are being made to facilitate humanity’s

well being and convenience, although it has yet to lead to the production of lasting

concepts and thoughts that would require the creation of language. Reason at this stage

of human development is instrumental, utilized more as a problem solving tool by man.

Despite advances man was still “scarcely profiting from the gifts Nature offered [him].

Rousseau transitions into the next time disunity by reminding the reader that he is

covering a vast amount of historical topography in a short amount of time: “I cover

multitudes of Centuries in a flash, forced by time running out, the abundance of things I

have to say, and the almost imperceptible progress of the beginnings; for the more slowly

”

Rousseau DEP, 163

Rousseau DEP, 161

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events succeeded one another, the more quickly can they be described.

The more the mind became enlightened, the more industry was perfected. Soon

ceasing to fall asleep underneath the first tree or to withdraw into Caves, they

found they could use hard, sharp stones as hatchets to cut wood, dig in the ground,

and make huts of branches which it later occurred to them to daub with clay and

mud. This was the period of a first revolution which brought about the

establishment and the differentiation of families, and introduced a sort of

property.

” Accounting for

a vast, yet smooth transition from savagery to the fashioning of societies grants Rousseau

the luxury he spoke of at the end of Part I of skipping details en route to larger claims.

We are reminded that this is in fact a narrative account of the happenings experienced by

natural man. This leads to the next time disunity; the construction of the family unit

which develops out of the inhabiting of sedentary camps:

If we delineate between this moment in the narrative and the previous one, we find that

Rousseau is distinguishing between the Paleolithic and Mesolithic periods. Evidence of

this is found in his descriptions of each moment in history. The hallmark of the

Paleolithic age is the use of tools and the formation of hunter gather groups. The move

from that period is marked by the rise of agriculture and the development of a sedentary

lifestyle that only husbandry can provide. Rousseau clearly defines the previous section

as Paleolithic, “On seashores and Riverbanks [men] invented line and hook; and became

fishermen and Fish-eaters. In forests they made bows and arrows, and became Hunters

and Warriors.

Evidence of our next time disunity, a description of the Mesolithic period though

not explicitly stated until later, is foreshadowed in two places. Because Rousseau is more

”

Garnier Frères, 69 “Je parcours comme un trait des multitudes de siècles, forcé par le temps qui s’écoule,

par l’abondance des choses que j’ai à dire et par le progrès presque insensible des commencements; car

plus les événements étoient lents à se succéder, plus ils sont prompts à décrire.”

Rousseau DEP, 164

Rousseau DEP, 165

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concerned with the rise of sexual tension, jealousy, shame, envy, and both conjugal and

paternal love, he waits to outline the material conditions of mankind during this period,

focusing initially on its moral maturation. He speaks about the affect of the material

conditions man resides in on the passions and desires of mankind:

“In this new state, with a simple and solitary life, very limited needs, and the

implements they had invented to provide for them, men enjoyed a great deal of

leisure which they had used to acquire several sorts of conveniences unknown to

their Fathers; and this was the first yoke which, without thinking of it, they

imposed on themselves, and the first source of evils they prepared for their

Descendants; for not only did they, in this way, continue to weaken body and

mind, but since these conveniences, by becoming habitual, had almost entirely

ceased to be enjoyable, and at the same time had degenerated into true needs, it

became much more cruel to be deprived of them than to possess them was sweet,

and men were unhappy to lose them without being happy to possess them.

”

In order to understand how this quote points to the Mesolithic period we must first

unpack it. Rousseau here is drawing from the First Discourse where he outlines how the

conveniences derived from the arts and sciences have made men slaves to convenience

itself. Natural man labored continually. As a result he had firsthand knowledge of his

food source, his surroundings; he was tremendously physically fit and agile, acutely

aware of pressing dangers, and was fully capable of surviving in almost any situation. As

reason impressed man to develop more and more tools to utilize for his convenience, man

lost natural capabilities with each advance. With hunting in groups man began to rely on

others rather than himself alone. This diminished man’s acute sense of danger, his ability

to focus on a given hunting target, his physical strength, endurance, and agility because

all the burden of the hunt was split between many people. The decrease in demands on

the body led to a weakening of abilities. Rousseau speaks of the burden of a sedentary

lifestyle as a “yoke” on the physical capabilities of mankind. He echoes this sentiment

Rousseau DEP, 164-165

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six paragraphs later where he describes the unequal burden placed on some as a result of

interdependent labor: “as soon as it was found to be useful for one to have provisions for

two, equality disappeared, property appeared, work became necessary, and the vast

forests changed into smiling Fields that had to be watered with the sweat of men, and

where slavery and misery were soon seen to sprout and grow together with the

harvests.

I want to distinguish between Rousseau’s relating of the narrative of mankind’s

move from the state of nature and his explanation of the narrative. Paragraphs 20-24 of

Part II clearly show that Rousseau was conceiving of the rise in agriculture in the time

disunity that Rousseau references in the weakening of mankind’s capacity to provide for

themselves as individuals and their developed and increasing reliance on convenience.

The time disunity, however, is not due to the rise in agriculture, but to the change in the

passions and desires of men. This is important because it allows Rousseau to distinguish

himself from Locke. Though Locke and Rousseau up until this point relate pretty much

the same narrative, Rousseau does not want to syllogistically tie himself to Locke’s

conclusion. Locke ultimately ends up rationalizing inequality and claiming that it is the

product of the advancements made by reason progressing towards the ideal of mankind’s

preservation of itself. Rousseau wants to deny the claim of progress and that reason

drives men towards convenience. This desire not to follow Locke’s lead is evident in the

next time disunity.

” At this point Rousseau finally discusses these material conditions and states

that this transformation is due to the rise in agriculture and advanced metallurgy which

are the two principle hallmarks of the later Mesolithic period.

“Things could have remained equal if talents had been equal and if, for

Rousseau DEP, 167

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example, the use of iron and the consumption of foods had always been exactly

balanced; but this proportion, which nothing maintained, was soon upset; the

stronger did more work; the more skillful used his work to better advantage; the

more ingenious found ways to reduce his labor; the Plowman had greater need of

iron, or the smith need of wheat, and by working equally, the one earned much

while the other had trouble staying alive…Thus, as the most powerful or the most

miserable claimed, on the basis of their strength or of their needs, a kind of right

to another person’s goods, equivalent, according to them, to the right of property,

the breakdown of equality was followed by the most frightful disorder: thus the

usurpations of the rich, the Banditry of the Poor, the unbridled passions of all,

stifling natural pity and the still weak voice of justice, made men greedy,

ambitious, and wicked. A perpetual conflict arose between the right of the

stronger and the right of the first occupant, which only led to fights and murders.

Nascent Society gave way to the most horrible state of war: Humankind, debased

and devastated, no longer able to turn back or to renounce its wretched

acquisitions, and working only to its shame by the abuse of the faculties that do it

honor, brought itself to the brink of ruin.

”

Like Locke, the rise in agriculture brought with it recognition of property in land which

led to the development of productivity, economy, money, and trade. These four

necessarily for Locke led to a natural inequality sustained by man’s tacit agreement to

agree to property rights and commodity money. For Rousseau, this was not the case.

Property, money, and the resultant inequality led man to “horrible state” where man

would be put in “a place of ruin.” Mankind at the rise of inequality is not at peace. Even

Locke recognizes this which is why he carefully makes the distinction between slavery

and drudgery in chapter 4 of “The Second Treatise of Government” to alleviate the

seemingly just cries of those who labor more yet have less despite the fact that Locke

touts labor as possessing some awesome power to create wealth.

The primary difference between Rousseau and Locke is that Locke claims that all

tacitly accept their fates and enter into a state of competition where all are aware of the

circumstances; they chose to labor in hopes of the opportunity to one day become

wealthy through their diligence. For Rousseau, the masses are duped into believing that

Rousseau DEP, 169-172

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the unfair circumstances in which the few possess and consume more than the many is

not the real issue. The pressing issue facing mankind gets reworked as safety and

opportunity to make one’s self secure through the development of wealth. “Lacking valid

reasons to justify and sufficient strength to defend himself; easily crushing an individual,

but himself crushed by troops of bandits; alone against all, and unable, because of their

mutual jealousies, to unite with his equals…at last conceived the most well-considered

project ever to enter the human mind; to use even his attacker’s forces in his favor, to

make his adversaries his defenders, to instill in them other maxims and give them

different instructions, as favorable to himself as natural Right was contrary to him.

Rousseau DEP, 172-173

” In

a fashion that would make Marx proud, Rousseau relates the confounding of the

proletariat by the bourgeoisie. Promising advancement and protection, the bourgeoisie

manipulates the proletariat. Like crabs in a barrel, each seeking its own liberation,

security, and freedom, the proletariat keeps watch on one another alleviating the

bourgeoisie of the task. Every time a crab almost makes it out of the barrel, a fellow

member of the proletariat pulls it back in because of some desire or naive belief that it

will be rewarded by the bourgeoisie. In the end, hollow and empty promises sufficiently

protect the bourgeoisie from the overwhelming majority of the proletariat: “All ran

toward their chains in the belief that they were securing their own freedom; for while

they had enough reason to sense the advantages of a political establishment, they had not

enough experience to foresee its dangers; those most capable of anticipating the abuses

were precisely those who counted on profiting from them, and even the wise saw that

they had to make up their mind to sacrifice one part of their freedom to preserve the

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other, as a wounded man has his arm cut off to save the rest of his body.

We find that Rousseau’s state of nature can be depicted as such:

” Submission

to positive laws is utilized by the wealthy to normalize relations between those with

wealth and those without it in a manner that is massively advantageous to the wealthy.

This is the rise of civilized society for Rousseau and the end of Rousseau’s historical

narrative.

Scene 1 (The Dawn of Time; Eden)

Original Man >>>Led by Passions>>>Provided for wholly by nature

Time Disunity

Scene 2

Nature presents challenges to man in the form of tall trees and ferocious animals>>>Man

develops rudimentary weapons and acquires advanced faculties to overcome nature’s

challenges

Time Disunity

Scene 3 (Paleolithic Period)

Man develops tools>>>Man Discovers Fire and begins to eat cooked meat>>>Man

begins to hunt in packs and associate with one another for mutual benefit

Time Disunity

Scene 4 (Mesolithic Period)

Man becomes sedentary>>>Jealousy and envy develop among men>>>Men find

themselves burdened by “the first yoke” which led men towards the diminishing of their

faculties

Time Disunity

Scene 5 (Post-Mesopotamian Society)

Agriculture and production led to property and inequality>>>Inequality leads to the

dissatisfaction of the poor>>>The poor are placated by promises from the wealthy in

exchange for their protection of the wealthy>>>The body politic is established to fashion

laws to ensure the protection of the wealthy from the poor

Unlike Hobbes and Locke whose state of nature narrative and their relating of an ideal

body politic are contained as one coherent narrative in the same text, Rousseau’s is not.

Locke and Hobbes’ respective descriptions of the state of nature come within treatises

intended to culminate in the relation of a conception of the ideal form of legitimate

governmental authority. Rousseau’s state of nature is found within a discourse intended

Rousseau DEP, 173

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to investigate the origin of inequality in man. The Second Discourse does not lead

directly to Rousseau’s Social Contract. To fully understand the force of the rhetorical

impact of the state of nature in the Second Discourse has on The Social Contract, we

must look at Rousseau’s Emile.

In Emile, itself a narrative, Rousseau discusses the proper way to educate a child

into what he considers to be a civil human being. Written concurrently with The Social

Contract, many of Rousseau’s ideas between the two texts are interdependent. Before

one can move from Rousseau’s state of nature as found in the Second Discourse to his

ideal body politic as found in Du Contrat Social one must answer a critical question:

why, if people tacitly submit to it, is the state erected at the end of the state of nature

insufficient in creating civilized men? Put another way, why is Locke’s conclusion of his

conjectural history wrong? This question is answered in Emile.

Without relating the whole of the narrative we can locate the answer to our

question in three terms; conscience, pity, and empathy. Despite the crucial role sexual

awakening plays in the creation of a rational adult, the making of a citizen requires basic

provisions for one to utilize reason to adequately respect and provide for themselves and

to allow others to do the same. The problem we find as related in the entirety of the First

Discourse, the end of the state of nature in the Second Discourse, as well as the issue at

the outset of The Social Contract, is that of society’s weakening of natural man and

making him dependent on the very conveniences that supposedly should bring him

happiness: “Men enjoyed a great deal of leisure which they had used to acquire several

sorts of conveniences unknown to their Fathers; and this was the first yoke which,

without thinking of it, they imposed on themselves, and the first source of evils they

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prepared for their Descendants; for not only did they, in this way, continue to weaken

body and mind, but since these conveniences, by becoming habitual, had almost entirely

ceased to be enjoyable, and at the same time had degenerated into true needs, it became

much more cruel to be deprived of them than to possess them was sweet, and men were

unhappy to lose them without being happy to possess them.

The principle antagonism we find between society and nature is expressed by

Rousseau as that between amour propre and amour de soi. Both terms mean love of self,

however, the nuanced difference is for Rousseau crucial. Amour de soi is likened more to

self-preservation. All creatures are directed in their nature to seek their own preservation

through the acquisition of the means of their subsistence. Amour propre is self-regard

wherein one’s self is intertwined with others and where we measure ourselves in

relationship to others. This type of self love for Rousseau leads to the development of

everything that is evil in society. Amour propre creates competition and crushes

compassion. Men become preoccupied with lifting themselves above all others so that

they might be justly esteemed above all others. This is the answer to our question: why,

if people tacitly submit to it, is the state erected at the end of the state of nature

insufficient in creating civilized men? The answer is because such a society leads to

competition, hatred, jealousy, and ruin. When inequality is seen as a state where

individuals are obsessed with property acquisition, the only logical result is a society

” The conundrum was that

men had become dependent on these conveniences so a “return to nature” was not in the

least bit practical on some grand social level. The only solution for Rousseau was a

gradual reclamation of what was lost, hence, the desire to begin with the children and

educate them into the ways of natural man.

Rousseau DEP, 164-165

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where commodities flow back in forth in a ceaseless competition, normalized by positive

laws, and all desire to usurp all, and none can rest out of fear they might lose ground to

their fellow citizens. Here Rousseau implicitly points out the irony in Locke’s position.

While Locke admonishes Hobbes for his relating of the war of all against all in his state

of nature, Locke’s own articulation of the ideal body politic is nothing more than a

proverbial capital war of all against all where the stakes are just as high as in Hobbes’

state of nature. Man in such a state can never truly be his own creation and as such

becomes created by society itself. Rousseau states: “If one had only to listen to the

inclinations and follow where they lead, the job would soon be done. But there are so

many contradictions between the rights of nature and our social laws that one must

constantly twist and turn in order to reconcile them. One must use a great deal of art to

prevent social man from being totally artificial.

The alternative to such a society for Rousseau lies in a reawakening of natural

man through the proper education of the amour du soi. Self preservation can be

productive of morality and virtue when combined with the sentiments of pity and

empathy and guided by conscience. Men, though endowed with a sense of self-

preservation that urges them to seek their own sustenance, are for Rousseau also led by

conscience. Like reason for Locke, conscience is always present; it just has to be heeded.

“There is in the depths of souls, then, an innate principle of justice and virtue according

to which, in spite of our own maxims, we judge our actions and those of others as good or

” Such a society for Rousseau is not

ideal, especially when man would have been better off in the state of nature where he was

self-reliant and not weakened by dependence on others and convenience.

Rousseau, Jean Jacques. Emile or On Education. Introduction, Translation, and Notes by Allan Bloom.

New York: Basic Books, 1979. p. 317 (Hereafter referenced as Rousseau Emile)

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bad. It is to this principle that I give the name conscience.

” “Conscious is the voice of

the soul…Too often reason deceives us. We have acquired only too much right to

challenge it. But conscious never deceives; it is man’s true guide. It is to the soul what

instinct is to the body; he who follows conscience obeys nature and does not fear being

led astray.

” The pangs of conscience are sufficient to guide human beings in a moral

direction. Despite its strength, human beings still need to adhere to the sentiments of pity

and empathy for conscience to be effective. “It is man’s weakness which makes him

sociable; it is our common miseries which turn our hearts to humanity; we would owe

humanity nothing if we were not men. Every attachment is a sign of insufficiency. If

each of us had no need of others, he would hardly think of uniting himself with them.

Amour propre leads men to find happiness through favorable comparison to

others. This leads to the desire to be “in the first position,” as Rousseau states. Amour de

soi leads men to their conscience which in turn leads men outside of themselves towards

others not for comparison, but for service. To have pity on another is to recognize the

shortcomings, flaws, and needs of another. “To become sensitive and pitying, [one] must

know that there are beings like him who suffer what he has suffered, who feel the pains

he has felt, and that there are others whom he ought to conceive of as able to feel them

too. In fact, how do we let ourselves be moved by pity if not by transporting ourselves

outside of ourselves and identifying with the suffering of another, by leaving, as it were,

our own being to take on its being?

”

Rousseau Emile, 289

” Rousseau describes here the capacity for empathy.

Empathy, distinct from sympathy, is the act of placing one’s self in another’s shoes so to

Rousseau Emile, 286-287

Rousseau Emile, 221

Rousseau Emile, 222-223

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speak; it is to fully emulate another in the experience of pain or disquiet. Whereas

sympathy causes one to have a sense of sadness at the fact that another suffers, empathy

requires one to feel through the imagination what another is experiencing as if they are

going through the experience with the afflicted party: “Thus, no one becomes sensitive

until his imagination is animated and begins to transport him out of himself.

Rousseau believes that the corruption found in society outlined in the First and

Second Discourses and The Social Contract is curable through a reversion in society to a

more primitive state where man is lead by amour de soi.

” When

individuals possess the capacities of pity and empathy, they are capable of following their

conscience wherever it may lead them. Empathy and pity will restrain men from

usurping power and resources to the degree that they cause pain and suffering to others

because to hurt another would cause them pain. Thus self-preservation is intimately tied

together with the care of others thereby completing our transformation from amour

propre, or the care of status and power, to amour de soi, the care of one’s intimate

relations to others.

“Dear Emile, I am very glad to hear a man’s speeches come from your mouth and

to see a man’s sentiments in your heart…I knew that when you looked at our

institutions from close up, you would hardly gain a confidence in them which

they do not merit. One aspires in vain to liberty under the safeguard of the laws.

Laws! Where are the laws, and where are they respected? Everywhere you have

seen only individual interest and man’s passions reigning under this name. But

the eternal laws of nature and order do exist. For the wise man, they take the

place of positive law. They are written in the depth of his heart by conscience

and reason. It is to these that he ought to enslave himself in order to be free. The

only slave is the man who does evil, for he always does it in spite of himself.

Freedom is found in no form of government; it is in the heart of the free man. He

takes it with him everywhere. The vile man takes his servitude everywhere. The

latter would be a slave in Geneva, the former a free man in Paris.

”

Rousseau Emile, 223

Rousseau Emile, 473

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It is here that we can see the culmination of Rousseau’s state of nature. We

cannot enter into civilized society until there is a social transformation where mankind is

led by amour de soi as opposed to amour propre. Rousseau’s First Discourse set up and

answered the question: “Are men benefited by the arts and sciences or corrupted?” To

which Rousseau answered resoundingly that men are thoroughly corrupted by the

conveniences offered to society. He explains in The Second Discourse that men are

stripped of their capacities to be self-sufficient as a result of convenience thereby making

them dependent on one another. Because mankind’s nature is to be independent, men

seek self-sufficiency in dependency which leads to societal competition and the enslaving

of the many by those with power and means. Society becomes a cesspool of

manipulation, contriving, and jockeying for the position of the master of the many.

Rousseau demonstrates in Emile that the truly enlightened man is self sufficient and

utilizes conscience as his guide to rise above the societal competition that promises

freedom but grants only chains. It is only then that we can enter into Rousseau’s The

Social Contract where he outlines his ideal body politic. Far from serving as a salve to

the ills of humanity, Rousseau’s body politic is made possible only through the

acceptance of his assessment of his contemporary society and his claim that conscience’s

directing us toward pity and empathy for others would not lead to our being duped, taken

advantage of, and destroyed.

For these reasons it is clear why Rousseau had to defend himself against Hobbes

and Locke in the outset of his Social Contract. The first several chapters of Rousseau’s

Social Contract are meant to simultaneously summarize and remind the reader of the

evils uncovered in the Discourses and renounce the prevailing theories levied by Grotius,

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Hobbes, and Locke, thereby rhetorically setting up the reader to accept the general will as

objectively necessary. If body politics are erected on positive laws which do not have

conscience as their sole origin, i.e. the states advanced by Hobbes and Locke, they lead

men necessarily to a corrupt amour propre which, among other things, legitimates

slavery. A recovery of the amour de soi, a concept created within tensions from his own

conjectural historical narrative, is the only means by which we can escape such an

enslaved position. Ultimately a body politic erected on the conscience of mankind rather

than the will of a man, or group of men, is the only solution. The general will becomes

objectively deduced as rationally necessary.

We see that the movement of Rousseau’s narrative in his social contract provides

the conceptual grounds upon which his entire body politic is theorized upon. The general

will is rendered necessary through an understanding of man’s need to regain primordial

independence. This independence is a completely artificial creation that arises out of

Rousseau’s conjectural history. Thus, the necessity of the general will is rooted in

artifice.

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CHAPTER FOUR: A COMPARISON OF THE NARRATIVE CONVENTIONS

FOUND IN THE SOCIAL CONTRACT STATES OF NATURE

Each social contract thinker set out to derive from a conjectural history a concept

of an ideal body politic. The ideal body politic each thinker deduced can be adequately

substituted for that which can provide the maximum amount of allowable freedom for

individuals. Thus what it means to be rational and free for each thinker can be

adequately found through the concessions made and refused at the outset of their body

politics and the end of their states of nature. That which man could not live without, and

was willing to sacrifice his rights and freedoms for in order to gain security in, can be

seen as what man requires to be considered free for each thinker. Governance is erected

on the promise of the protection of life and liberty. The motivation out of each state of

nature grants us insight into what mankind wanted government to protect, revealing what

mankind determines is a prerequisite to a state of freedom. Before jumping to the

conditions of freedom for each thinker I want to address the process by which Hobbes,

Locke and Rousseau rhetorically utilized similar references and conventions in order to

draw the reader to an apex that would transform a subjective narrative claim to an

objective philosophical premise at the outset of their arguments for an ideal body politic.

All three narratives utilized the notion of a fall from grace. Christians, all three,

the urge to mimic the Biblical fall of man must have been socially and personally great,

not to mention rhetorically both effective and necessary. In a world that was global,

however one that also lacked the sense of a world community or humankind that we take

for granted in modernity, the early moderns had to find a way to get their readership to

think on a grand species wide scale. Also, though there were acute political freedoms of

speech, it would have been literal suicide to launch a scathing attack against one’s own

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country, its principles, and God. Rather than fight status quo, whether by faith or

coercion, Locke, Rousseau, and Hobbes embraced religious metaphors, examples, and

justifications. God and the Bible served as both a common starting point for all intended

readers and as a place to hide from critique and accusations. Though the former worked

masterfully, the later equally failed miserably. Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau each found

themselves persecuted despite their repeated attempts within their works to ground their

claims in readings of accepted Biblical principles. Nevertheless, their choice of

convention was not made in vain. The choice of the fall as a means by which they drew

their readers into their narratives worked masterfully. Knowledge of Adam and Eve’s

fall from grace, which Locke used literally, and the resultant suffering that followed,

rhetorically placed the reader in an ideal position to be chastised for their iniquities by the

claims about humanity’s shortcomings that would follow. This, original position, is one

where man is free and equal. Though both Rousseau and Locke add to this freedom an

understanding of license, this license does not serve as a restriction because there is no

acting concept of politically determined property that could negate natural man’s acting

justly on his own liberty insofar as they do not bodily injure another. The mention of

license in the original position for Rousseau and Locke served more as a philosophical

seed that bore fruit later in the argument, mainly, allowing them to separate themselves

from Hobbes. More importantly to strengthen the Biblical reference, these original

positions are ones in which man’s every need is provided for by nature. They are relative

Gardens of Eden. From this position, following the Biblical narrative found in Genesis,

man is forced to toil and labor for his sustenance. Though this step is a point of departure

for Locke and Rousseau from Hobbes, the relation of the Biblical narrative by this point

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in each narrative, has already performed its rhetorical duty. The utilization of “the fall”

in each state of nature serves a dual role. First, the fall is meant to set up the states of

nature as narratives with gnoseological transformations. Simultaneously the fall is a part

of a greater ideological transformation that is contrived between the state of nature

narratives and the ideal body politics that rise out of them.

Gnoseological transformation, Todorov explains, are narratives that begin with an

anticlimactic and lead the reader conceptually from a greater to a lesser ignorance. The

transformation comes not in the resolution of the character’s issue in the narrative, rather,

the transformation occurs in the reader’s understanding of a given idea or concept. “The

events of the beginning [in a gnoseological transformation] are evoked again [in the end]

but this time we see them from the vantage point of truth and not from that of deceitful

appearance.”

Todorov, Diacritics, 40

The fall serves both as the anticlimactic and that which is made clear at

the end of the states of nature. We begin each state of nature with a reference to a free

and equal state in which God provides lavishly. This allusion to the Biblical fall and the

redemption of man through his denial of his passions and utilization of reason to grasp

that which is truly good and justifiably desirable gives us our anticlimactic. We already

know goods things do not last and that there is redemption in man’s flawed nature. Even

from children’s tales, the readers of the treatise would have anticipated a break from a

tranquil beginning and some redemption to come in the form of a return to the rational

where the good and just triumphs over evil and irrational. The fall is also referenced at

the end of each state of nature as a transition into the arguments for an ideal body politic.

We are reminded of how far humanity had come to get to the point in which the mere

acceptance of one basic tenant can provide lasting peace; much like the Biblical

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redemption requires the acceptance of Christ as one’s savior to ensure one’s place in

heaven where one is granted life everlasting.

Our passing from greater to lesser ignorance is shown through the revealing of

our non-adherence to the requisites of true society to the knowledge of what we lack.

The arguments for the ideal body politics advanced by each thinker become the means by

which we can utilize this knowledge for our greater good. So we end each state of

nature, not with a return to normalcy, rather, in gnoseological fashion, we end with more

questions than answers that the arguments for civilized states that follow each state of

nature provide. This is why I continually referred to the states of nature as rhetorical,

because their purpose is to place the reader in a position to ask the ideal question that the

argument to follow is more than capable of answering. The presumed objectivity of the

principles, and the body politics that emulate them, are derived from the ease in which

the two fit together for the reader. The states based on the need for safety, the centrality

of property and competition, and the sovereignty of the individual all become the pre-

accepted answers for a questions that have yet to be raised, but are raised due to the

concerns manufactured in the states of nature of the three thinkers. How can I be safe in

a war of all against all? How can I best be protected and aided in an inevitable

competition for capital and property? How can we free ourselves of the moral, physical,

and spiritual weaknesses our desires for convenience have caused us? These questions

complete the gnoseological transformations found in the state of nature narratives and

lead to the ideological transformations found only through its pairing with the arguments

for the specific ideal body politic for which is was created. Ideological transformations

entail the relating of multiple ideas to a centralized concept. “Independent actions,

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carried out by different characters and in various circumstances, reveal their kinship,

serving to illustrate or exemplify a common ideology.”

Another similitude between the three narratives is the theme of property and

possessions leading necessarily to inequality and competition. This convention of the

rise of inequality serves several functions. First it reinforces a shared origin of all

persons. If the goal is to create ideas and principles that oblige the entirety of society

people must think of themselves as equal even in their difference. As Hobbes states, all

have an equal hope in attaining that which they desire. Despite obvious inequalities, the

readers must believe that their advantageous or at the other end of the spectrum,

seemingly Godly forsaken position, does not grant them cause to opt out of the argument.

All are complicit in the historical evils and eventual transcendence of mankind to the

construction of an idealized state. Secondly, the rise in inequality completes the fall.

The rational fleeing of one’s

self destruction at any cost, the centrality of property accumulation and protection, and

the merits of self-sufficiency over dependency all become centralized ideas upon which

the states of nature and body politics both point to for Hobbes, Locke, and Rousseau

respectively. Because both the state of nature narratives and the syllogistic arguments

that follow corroborate the same concept or idea, the seeming subjective nature of said

idea becomes transformed into a valid objective claim that is rationally supported. As I

stated earlier, the state of nature narratives are not so much a part of the syllogistic

arguments for ideal states as much as they set the tone, preparing the reader to ask the

right question that the argument to follow is more than capable of answering in the

interest of transforming the subjective particular claim into an objective universalized

idea.

Todorov, Diacritics, 43

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Man, robbed of his equality and most of their freedoms, are placed in the peril of living

life in a permanent non-free state. Even those with means as Hobbes states, are in like

danger of being dispossessed and reduced to a state of being non-free. All are required to

identify with this circumstance of being fallen as it is a necessary condition of the state of

man in much the same way Christianity dictates that we are all sinners because of the fall.

Lastly, inequality is inextricably tied to labor so that even when humanity is redeemed in

the ideal body politic, labor becomes a requirement of all men for which abstaining is

punished naturally by poverty. Welfare is never an issue for these idealized states outside

of those who do not possess the capacity for labor (children, the elderly, and the mentally

incapacitated). Even in an idealized state, inequality is made possible and is justified by

nature such that those who are impoverished can launch no accusations against those

who, through their labor, subdue more than others. Rather than restricting the wealthy,

the poor are encouraged to labor more. The body politic is seen as being responsible for

the means by which people can labor, acquire, and subsist, rather than the promise of

provisions and sustenance. The pursuit of happiness is all that is promised.

Another common convention is the promotion of the idea of reason as being

productive, but not necessarily good or evil. Rousseau explains this best with his idea of

perfectibility. Perfectibility is “the faculty of perfecting oneself…this distinctive and

almost unlimited faculty, is the source of all man’s miseries,…it is the faculty which by

dint of time, draws him out of that original condition in which he would spend tranquil

and innocent days,…the faculty which, over centuries, causing his enlightenment and his

errors, his vices and his virtues to bloom, [and] eventually makes him his own and

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Nature’s tyrant.

Rousseau DEP, 141

” Rousseau points to the freedom in reasoning. Our capacity to create

and act can be used either to our advantage or our detriment. Each narrative seeks to

retain freedom, for it is freedom that gives mankind the capacity to be otherwise. The

possibility to change is rooted in the freedom of reason and thought. If we can think

otherwise, we can chose to act otherwise, thereby create a new reality for ourselves that

would be the result of our rational choice to act in a certain fashion. With this claim, the

resulting arguments become less a question of how can we do this? To what kind of state

ought we to create? This is also explains why outside of the narrative, each state of

nature was also accompanied by an argument meant to clear philosophical space so to

speak. Each state of nature narrative was paired with arguments against prevailing

beliefs about legitimate government authority to which the claims of reason’s misuse in

the state of nature narrative could be loosely compared to. Hobbes does this well in his

plea to his readers concerning the day to day precautions they take in securing their

belongings. Hobbes challenges the reader to think, if you find that the government you

ascribe to possesses legitimate authority and is fashioned in a way that provides for your

safety, why then do you lock your doors, and chests in your home? The reader is forced

to question the legitimacy of the way things are and is further convinced that things can

be better despite one’s presumed comfort. We become capable of recognizing that

despite the believed fact that our current state was rationally created, as to was natural

man following reason in the state of nature, and that there exists a better way of being.

Locke, Rousseau, and Hobbes opened up gradations of difference within the rational so

that the reader could see themselves as rational, yet lacking a rationally constructed

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government. This rhetorical stroking of the reader’s ego tells them that it is not your fault

that things are this way, and I can show you how it can be better.

We can begin to see what each thinker individually, and the tradition as a group

view to be the prerequisites of freedom. Hobbes argues man in the state of nature is

faced with the constant threat of physical violence. Despite any attempt to abstain from

this threat, man will still be vexed by the sheer possibility of having to endure some

episode of violence. Freedom for Hobbes has to be defined abstractly because he

admittedly has no concept of free will. “By this it is manifest, that not onely actions that

have their beginning from Covetousnesse, Ambition, Lust, or other Appetites to the thing

propounded; but also those that have their beginning from Aversion, or Feare of those

consequences that follow the omission, are voluntary actions.

Hobbes, 45

” Though individual act is

materialistic in nature for Hobbes, and as such is determined, he claims that

determination makes choice and actions in the world no less binding or full of

responsibility. The determined nature of act or will no less robs man of his presumed

sense of choice than does God’s knowledge of eternity make his creation of a person

responsible for the choices of that person. As God sits outside of time, and men within,

the choices made by men are active with respect to the perspective of mankind yet are

fully known and determined from the perspective of God. Hobbes’ notion of

determination and freedom works the same way. Men, though determined, from a

perspective of objective reality, from the perspective of man’s cognition, choice and will

exist and as such so to does the belief of free will, despite the fact it does not exist

objectively. This allows Hobbes to make the ontological claim that there is no free will,

while simultaneously claiming that man has both choices and responsibilities to himself

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and others in social interactions and state forming. Higher order ratiocination shows man

the relationship between the objective circumstances one interacts with and the

determined nature of our reason and wills. Hence it becomes rational to seek peace and

comfort and flee war and violence. We become what we are confronted with

consistently. If man is to tend to his preservation and seek reason, man must “seek peace

and follow it.” We can conclude that above all, freedom for Hobbes is freedom from

violent death, and ignorance which comes through order and predictability. Hobbes’ fear

of the unknown, or the possibility of being acted upon by an irrational circumstance, is

equal to his fear of death; hence the need for the sovereign. Absolute sovereign power is

constant, dependable, and predictable. The relation between the citizen and the sovereign

for Hobbes is meant to mimic the relation between Christians and Christ. Through faith

in Christ men are relieved of their worries because they rest in the promise that God will

protect them insofar as they live a Christ-like life. The sovereign is expected to protect

citizens insofar as they respect the laws of the state. Freedom for Hobbes is a freedom

from death and irrationality, and a freedom to act within the limitations of the law to

secure any desire of the heart that does not conflict with the interest of the sovereign. To

be assured of life, and to be made certain there will be no whimsical alterations to what is

right, just, and true that were not rationally necessary for one’s survival, is true freedom

for man according to Hobbes. “A FREE-MAN, is he that in those things, which by his

strength and wit he is able to do, is not hindered to doe what he has a will to…But as

men, for the atteyning of peace, and conservation of themselves thereby, have made an

Artificiall Man, which we call a Common-wealth; so also have they made Artificiall

Chains, called Civill Lawes, which they themselves, by mutuall convenants, have

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fastened at one end, to the lips of the Man, or Assembly, to whom they have given the

Sovereigne Power; and the other end to their own Ears…The Liberty of a Subject, lyeth

therefore only in those things, which in regulating their actions, the Sovereign hath

praetermitted: such as is the Liberty to buy, and sell, and otherwise contract with one

another; to choose their own aboad, their own diet, their own trade of life, and institute

their children as the themselves think fit; & the like.

Locke is much more distinct and straight forward in his discussion of freedom.

Property is clearly the end of reason and governance for Locke. We need it for both the

sustaining and preservation of our lives. The accumulation of wealth is also seen as

rational for to provide for one’s subsistence for a day is good, put to provide for one’s

subsistence in perpetuity is better. Thus, man’s right to preserve himself is inextricably

tied to his right to acquire and retain property. Regardless of Locke’s motivations,

whether it be a reasoned deduction or a political argument against the historical

circumstance he was in, the right man has to do what he wills with the property he owns

is inalienable to a state of freedom for him. He goes as far as unite the physical body

with one’s property. The acquisition of property for Locke entails the mixing of one’s

hands with an object or tract of land. This “mixing of one’s hands with” causes the land

or object to “hath by this labour something annexed to it, that excludes the common right

of Men. For this Labour being the unquestionable Property of the Labourer, no Man but

” Thus a political subject for

Hobbes must be guaranteed by the sovereign above all the keeping of contracts through

force if necessary. Through the keeping of contracts, individuals in the body politic have

the maximum liberty possible to act and remain free from the possibility of a violent

death at the hands of another.

Hobbes,146-148

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he can have a right to what this is once joyned to.

100

” Property as such, literally contains

a metaphysical piece of the laborer within it. This piece of the laborer that is within the

property grants the laborer the right to act “as if” the property is a component of her body

such that it is “Lawful to kill a Thief, who has not in the least hurt him, nor declared any

design upon his Life, any further then by use of Force, so to get him in his Power as to

take away his Money, or what he pleases from him: because using force, where he has no

Right, to get me into his Power, let his pretence be what it will, I have no reason to

suppose, that he, who would take away my Liberty, would not when he had me in his

Power, take away everything else.

101

100

Locke, 288

” Locke draws and analogy between the protections

of one’s life with the right to do what one wills with their property. To subdue my

property to your will is equivalent to threatening my very life and is punishable with

maximum force. My liberty or freedom is not just my bodily integrity, or my right to act

free from the fear of violence like Hobbes, it is also my right to do what I will with the

property I own; this right in inalienable to man. Locke clearly relates political

responsibility to submission to a state that accepts both personal freedoms and individual

property rights. In Chapter 16 entitled “Of Conquest,” Locke discusses the attempted

origin of governance through force. He argues that not only can a man not be forced to

submit to a government but property cannot be commandeered where one does not

submit to such governance that possesses such a right. “Every Man is born with a double

Right: First, A Right of Freedom to his Person, which no other Man has a Power over,

but the free Disposal lies in himself. Secondly, A Right, before any other Man, to inherit,

with his Brethren, his Father’s Goods. By the first of these, a Man is naturally free from

101

Locke, 280

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subjection to any Government, though he be born in a place under its Jurisdiction…By

the second, the Inhabitants of any Countrey, who are descended, and derive a Title to

their Estates from those, who are subdued, and had a Government forced upon them

against their free contests, retain a Right to the Possession of their Ancestors, though they

consent not freely to the Government, whose hard Conditions were by force imposed on

the Possessors of that Country.” Here we see that a man’s person and their rights to

property are inseparable. Government is valid insofar as they respect both the person and

the possessions of that person. Freedom is seen as the right most certainly to life, and

basic liberties, but above all the right to acquire and dispose of one’s property as one

wills. “For Liberty is to be free from restraint and violence from others which cannot be,

where there is no Law: But Freedom is not, as we are told, A Liberty for every Man to do

what he lists: But a Liberty to dispose, and order, as he lists, his Person, Actions,

Possessions, and his whole Property within the Allowance of those Laws under which he

is; and therein not to be subject to the arbitrary Will of another, but freely follow his

own.

102

“For freedom is like the solid and hearty foods or the full-bodied wines fit to feed

and fortify robust temperaments used to them, but which overwhelm, ruin and intoxicate

weak and delicate ones that are not up to them. Once Peoples are accustomed to Masters,

they can no longer do without them. If they attempt to shake off the yoke, they move all

the farther away from freedom because, as they mistake unbridled license for freedom,

which is its very opposite, their revolutions almost always deliver them up to seducers

”

102

Locke, 306

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who only increase their chains.

103

The body politics constructed by Locke and Hobbes provide man with chains

rather than freedom according to Rousseau. If to be free is to not only have safety and

property rights but to also have no hindrances placed upon the actions of your will within

the limits of the law, what happens when the law or the material circumstances of society

constrain one’s will to that of another? There is no freedom in such an existence. This is

the life that a society not led by conscience offers for Rousseau. A society driven by

convenience brings luxury, leisure, and most importantly status however, the very things

that have made life easier have enslaved men to their use and thus also made us slaves to

those who produce and have skills in them. So too is the laborer made slave to the owner

of property. Unskilled at providing for his own provision he is forced to labor for coin to

exchange for food. Man in modernity is a slave to convenience and the producers of

convenience and as such is not free. Society becomes a space where people trade their

integrity for convenience in order to acquire honor and status and are willing to do, say,

or give anything for more.

” For Rousseau, freedom can only come after the

realization of amour de soi. As articulated throughout his writings, most notably in the

First Discourse man has developed a fallen nature through a farce of society and has yet

to be redeemed. The movement into so called society advanced by political philosophy

of the time, principally Hobbes, had only weakened mankind’s moral sensibilities and

integrity.

103

Garnier Frères, 27. “Car il en est de la liberté comme de ces aliments solides et succulents, ou de ces

vins généreux, propres à des nourrir et fortifier les tempéraments robustes qui en ont l’habitude, mais qui

accablent, ruinent et enivrent les foibles et délicats qui n’y sont point faits. Les peuples, une fois

accoutumés à des maîtres, ne sont plus en état de s’en passer. S’ils tentent de secouer le joug, ils

s’éloignent d’autant plus de la liberté, que, prenant pour elle une licence effrénée qui lui est opposée, leurs

révolutions les livrent presque toujours à des séducteurs qui ne font qu’aggraver leurs chaînes.”

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100

Law and the state, rather than being predicated on truth and justice are rooted in

order are maintenance of the status quo. Constructed not by reason, the very laws

themselves Rousseau finds often contradict one another thus Rousseau proclaims that,

“one aspires in vain to liberty under the safeguard of the laws. Laws! Where are the

laws, and where are they respected? Everywhere you have seen only individual interest

and man’s passions reigning under this name. But the eternal laws of nature and order do

exist. For the wise man, they take the place of positive law. They are written in the

depth of his heart by conscience and reason. It is to these that he ought to enslave

himself in order to be free. The only slave is the man who does evil, for he always does it

in spite of himself. Freedom is found in no form of government; it is in the heart of the

free man.

104

A society where amour de soi was awakened would create a circumstance were

individuals could, without injury to others, truly act the wills of their heart in objective

reality absent hindrances insofar as the desires do not restrict the liberties of others.

Combined with Rousseau’s notion of the general will where laws are understood as the

result of the will of the people, the only limit to mankind’s freedom would be imposed by

man himself and not material circumstance like Locke, or fear as is the case in Hobbes.

” The awakening of amour de soi allows man to revert to a state of moral

self-sufficiency where he is less apt to be drawn into a false society by promises of honor

due to his accumulation of conveniences because he is secure in his self-worth. When

men are no longer reliant on others for recognition of their worth they find no rational

desire to submit themselves to the wills or control of others. They are free to define

themselves for themselves.

104

Rousseau Emile, 473

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101

Freedom is truly seen as originating in “the heart of the free man,

105

” as related to him by

conscience and reason and fashioned into the just and necessary limits of his will in

society. Freedom is the enacting of one’s will in the world restricted only by the self-

imposed limits of the general will, which itself is only a manifestation of man’s

conscience and reason such that freedom is seen as only being restrained by reason and

conscience. “Who, then, is the virtuous man? It is he who knows how to conquer his

affections; for then he follows his reason and his conscience; he does his duty; he keeps

himself in order, and nothing can make him deviate from it. Up to now you were only

apparently free. You had only the precarious freedom of a slave to whom nothing has

been commanded. Now be really free. Learn to become your own master. Command

your heart, Emile, and you will be virtuous.

106

Central to the notions of freedom expressed by all three thinkers are reason,

safety, and most notably property. We find that the central concern of governmental

legitimacy and the possibility for freedom for the social contract genre of political

philosophy can be narrowed due to questions of preserving self-agency in the

preservation of one’s life and the preserving of property. Only Rousseau goes one step

further and includes the need for a moral imperative in society, yet this need for moral

sentiments still, at base, serves the interest of an equal distribution of right to agency and

basic property holding requisite for one’s self-sufficient preserving of themselves.

Though this definition works for those endowed with rights to property, and the means to

gain it through legitimate means, does this mean that we are incapable of defining our

freedom outside of our relationship to property and agency directed towards the

”

105

Rousseau Emile, 473

106

Rousseau Emile, 444-445

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102

preservation of my life? Am I not more than my safety and property? Are material

holdings that I am free to dispose of and the comfort of physical security, enough to be

considered free? To answer these questions I will investigate freedom from another

perspective. I will investigate the African American slave narratives of Henry Bibb,

Harriet Jacobs, and Frederick Douglass to determine whether or not the concept of

freedom found in the social contract tradition adequately expresses what those writers,

and the tradition they are a part of, yearned for when they sought to escape the perils of

slavery and gain what they considered to be the freedom they deserved as human beings.

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PART TWO African American Slave Narratives

Introduction

“The fabric of tradition in Afro-American literature is woven from slave

narratives and Negro spirituals, the earliest and most significant forms of oral and

written literature created by blacks during slavery. Not only did the spirituals

identify the slave’s peculiar syncretistic religion, sharing features of Protestant

Christianity and traditional African religions, but they became an almost

secretive code for the slave’s critique of the plantation system and for his search

for freedom in this world. Similarly, the narratives identified the slave’s

autobiographical and communal history as well as his active campaign against

the “peculiar institution.” Both forms of cultural expression from the slave

community create a vision of history, an assessment of the human condition, and

a heroic fugitive character unlike any other in American literature.

107

”

African American slave narratives are the expressed written accounts of the first

hand experiences of African slaves in the Americas who were forced into chattel slavery

from the 15

to 19

centuries. Before discussing the objectives and ends of these

narratives we must first gain historical context and make an important etymological

distinction. Slavery is defined as “The condition or fact of being entirely subject to, or

under the domination of, some power or influence.

108

107

Dixon, Melvin. “Singing Swords: The Literary Legacy of Slavery." The Slave’s Narrative. Eds. Charles

T. Davis and Henry Louis Gates Jr. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. 298.

” Within this definition are two

dominant historical models of slavery: Greco-roman and chattel. Greco-roman, despite

its name, is a model that is descriptive of the majority of historical instances of slavery in

civilized cultures. Slavery was seen as the voluntary giving up of one’s life as a result of

the committing of a crime with a known penalty of death or the unsuccessful engaging in

war against a state and subsequently having been taken captive by that same state. An act

to deprive one of life by force is repaid with the offender’s surrendering of their life to

108

"slavery, n." The Oxford English Dictionary. 2nd ed. 1989. OED Online. Oxford University Press. 4

Apr. 2000 <http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/00181778>.

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104

those he transgressed against. This submission however in most cases was merely

symbolic for the transgressed, rather than losing their life, usually ended up a day laborer.

In a rational exchange of needs, the master tended to the slave’s basic needs in exchange

for their prolonged life and service. In this exchange the offender, though possibly

despised and abused, was nevertheless still seen as a human being entitled to a base

margin of respect and reciprocity. In most cultures slaves still retained rights to marry, to

honor their chosen God, and to learn to read and write. Quite frequently slave

populations within a generation or two were assimilated into the greater society they

served becoming full-fledged citizens of those lands most notably evidenced in the rise of

the Roman and Chinese Empires. Despite the proper relation between master and slave,

namely the possession of the right of death the master held over the slave, there was a

respect due to the slave as a human being. Chattel slaves were different. Chattel, or

property, slavery was one exclusively experienced by Africans brought to the Americas

in antiquity

109

No longer is this circumstance the exclusive experience of African American slaves. The sex traffic in

our modernized society also ontologically equates primarily young women, but also young men, with

property whose use is only found in their ability to give sexual gratification.

. Chattel slavery is the circumstance where slaves are equated

metaphysically with property. The ontological existence of the person is reduced to its

most base form. Men, women, and children, rather than seen as human beings with

inalienable rights, endowed with reason and expressible sentiments that base human

sympathies should respond to, were viewed as collections of muscles, bones, and sinews

that respond to auditory commands. They were nurtured insofar as the components of

their being, their physical bodies, needed edification through food and water and their

minds needed programming to perform tasks efficiently. Chattel slaves because of their

automotive faculties had a use value similar to cattle and other livestock. As such, the

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105

chattel slaves were seen as devoid of the capacity for reason, emotion, or love, thus

making the most horrible of atrocities permissible. From the realities of the slave ships,

to the development of grotesque tools to manipulate and punish them, to the unrepentant

ripping of their known familial bonds, to the repeated violent abuse of their very bodies,

chattel slaves were dispossessed of their humanity and reduced, at best, to the level of

useful animals.

The origin of chattel slavery starts in 1441 when the first slaves were brought to

Portugal from Mauritania. Portugal in the midst of a renaissance period, in the 15

century attempted to capitalize off recent military successes against the Muslims in

northern Africa. With the rest of Europe locked in several wars and quarrels, Portugal set

out to expand its empire south into Africa. Ignorant of the size, population, and

inhabitants of the land, Portugal decided to “explore” the African continent. Hopeful that

the continent would be sparsely populated with Muslims they could execute, and a path

to Asia they could forge either by land or by sea, Portugal sent expeditions south into the

proverbial unknown. The initial expeditions brought back both news and cargo that

would damn the entire continent of African for centuries and bring Europe and the west,

wealth in perpetuity. It was discovered that the southern cape of Africa is more than

manageable to navigate around and Asia in fact was not that far. Also, the continent of

Africa was populated with a myriad of people that have a wealth of useful slaves that can

be bought at a fair price. Portugal quickly recognized the economic opportunity and

desired to send droves of merchants to purchase slaves from African tribes. First King

Alfonso required a right or patronage or “jus patronatus” from the pope as this right could

only be designated by the pope as per its designation in the Epistolae decretales as “ius

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106

spirituali annexum.” Pope Nicholas V wrote in the papal bull Romanus Pontifex

(January 8, 1455) which reinforced the initial sentiment reflected in the papal bull Dum

Diversas (June 18, 1452)

“Nicholas, bishop, servant of the servants of God. For a perpetual remembrance.

The Roman pontiff, successor of the key-bearer of the heavenly kingdom d vicar of Jesus

Christ, contemplating with a father's mind all the several climes of the world and the

characteristics of all the nations dwelling in them and seeking and desiring the salvation

of all, wholesomely ordains and disposes upon careful deliberation those things which he

sees will be agreeable to the Divine Majesty and by which he may bring the sheep

entrusted to him by God into the single divine fold, and may acquire for them the reward

of eternal felicity, and obtain pardon for their souls. This we believe will more certainly

come to pass, through the aid of the Lord, if we bestow suitable favors and special graces

on those Catholic kings and princes, who, like athletes and intrepid champions of the

Christian faith, as we know by the evidence of facts, not only restrain the savage excesses

of the Saracens and of other infidels, enemies of the Christian name, but also for the

defense and increase of the faith vanquish them and their kingdoms and habitations,

though situated in the remotest parts unknown to us, and subject them to their own

temporal dominion, sparing no labor and expense, in order that those kings and princes,

relieved of all obstacles, may be the more animated to the prosecution of so salutary and

laudable a work.

which in turn influenced King Alfonso V of Portugal’s support

of the expanded slave trade. I quote the text at length:

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”

The papal bulls, recognizing both the economic opportunities and moral concerns made

the prolonged and excessive use of African slaves not only permissible in the eyes of

God, but transformed the practice of trading African slaves into an institutional goal of

110

Davenport, Frances Gardiner ed. 1917. European Treaties Bearing on the History of the

United States and Its Dependencies to 1684. Washington D.C.: Carnegie Institution of

Washington. p. 12. “Nicolaus episcopus, servus servorum Dei. Ad perpetuam rei memoriam.

Romanus pontifex, regni celestis clavigeri successor et vicarius Jhesu Christi, cuncta mundi

climata omniumque nationum in illis degentium qualitates patema consideratione discutiens, ac

salutem querens et appetens singulorum, ilia propensa deliberatione salubriter ordinat et disponit

que grata Divine Majestati fore conspicit et per que oves sibi divinitus creditas ad unicum ovile

dominicum reducat, et acquirat eis felicitatis eterne premium, ac veniam impetret animabus; que

eo certius auctore Domino provenire credimus, si condignis favoribus et specialibus gratiis eos

Catholicos prosequamur reges et principes, quos, veluti Christiane fidei athletas et intrepidos

pugiles, non modo Saracenorum ceterorumque infidelium Christiani nominis inimicorum

feritatem reprimere, sed etiam ipsos eorumque regna ac loca, etiam in longissimis nobisque

incognitis partibus consistentia, pro defensione et augmento fidei hujusmodi debellare, suoque

temporali dominio subdere, nullis parcendo laboribus et expensis facti evidentia cognoscimus, ut

reges et principes ipsi, sublatis quibusvis dispendiis, ad tarn saluberrimum tamque laudabile

prosequendum opus peramplius animentur.”

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conversion and extermination of infidels. Soon the tremendous influx of slaves made the

Mercado de Escravos the official birthplace of the European colonialism and

Transatlantic Slavery that would come in the succeeding centuries. Rather that Greco-

roman slavery where the captives would be “civilized” into the ways of the Europeans

they were reduced ontologically because of their disbelief in a Christian God to objects

that could be used and extinguished with no moral consequence to be paid. This was the

birth of colonialism; the bizarre and peculiar practice of “civilizing” non-western, non-

Caucasian peoples through force in the claimed interest of religious sanctification and

progress towards civility, but the practiced interest of economic gain and the production

of commodious living for the Caucasian citizens of the western empires.

By the time Christopher Columbus “discovered” the Americas, the African slave

trade was already a staple in European society. With Europe’s population increasing

exponentially as well trade between Europe, Asia, and Africa higher than it had ever

been, Europeans began racing for new sources of income and faster trade routes. These

desires led to the “discovery” of the Americas. From the outset attempts to colonize the

Americas were for the production of new sources of income. Though many independent

missions had other initiatives that sound better in songs and on pamphlets, the majority of

settlements in the Americas were state sanctioned attempts to produce cash cows for the

crowns of Europe. Each nation in Europe sent bevies of expeditions to the Americas with

the intention of creating a permanent settlement from which production in the region

could begin. Though the 16

century was full of failed colonization attempts in the

Americas, the 17

century brought with it sustained settlements and population increases.

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During the 17

century the European powers (England, Portugal, Spain, France,

and the Netherlands) each sought to expand their colonies through an influx of laborers.

Most came in the form of indentured servants from Europe and Africa while there were

also among the population permanent slaves as well. By the end of the 17

and early 18

centuries tensions between the French traders, English farmers, and Spanish lords and

missionaries changed the landscape of the Americas forever. As populations increased,

workforces increased and correspondingly so too did the yields from the investments

made by the European monarchies. Desiring more profit each power sought expansion in

the new world. This desire led to clashes and confrontations that continued well into the

century yet out of the quarrels came three distinct territories: the indigenous and

Spanish to the south, the British and indigenous in central North America, and the French

and indigenous in the north. The relationship that would spawn the United States of

America and the experiences of African Americans that would be recounted in African

American slave narratives came from the unique relationship between the British and the

indigenous peoples in the central region of the North American continent.

Like other empires in the new world the British sought wealth and productivity

from its colonies. Tobacco and cotton had proven to be profitable crops yet their

production was labor intensive. Lacking the manpower to increase productivity and

failed attempts to subdue the native peoples into captivity left the British wanting for

labor. The British turned to the African slave market to procure laborers to increase the

profitability of their plantations. Unlike the slave trades of other countries, the British

slave trade and productivity of its plantations quickly surpassed all others. Soon after

slaves flooded into the British American colonies, the questions of the morality or

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prudence of the practice of slavery was socially questioned. Despite the increase in

productivity and exponential gains in quality of life, the British, determined that the

Africans were too valuable a commodity to be freed. Unlike the Portuguese, the

Protestant British could not rely on the papal bulls to justify their decisions. They turned

to positive law, a move that would become common in the soon to form United States, to

normalize their desired behavior. The slave codes of 1705 passed in the colony of

Virginia were the first to establish Blacks as uniquely non-qualified for naturalization

into free citizens as they were classified as heretical non-human beings and were to be

considered as property in the eyes of the law.

From this period on in history, the “peculiar institution” in the United States had

unofficially begun. Later decades brought exponential increases in profits, slaves,

productivity, and laws to normalize and constrain the system and maintain status quo. By

the 19

century slavery was a normalized, prized institution of the United States and the

producer of her great wealth and opulence enjoyed throughout modernity. Though

freemen in the newly formed United States by the outset of the 19

century were

enjoying an unrivaled period of convenience and decadence, their neurosis for capital,

class, and convenience led to the vile increase in slaves and labor. Concurrent to the rise

of decadence was the descent into monstrosity experienced on the plantations of the

United States. As generations of slaves grew less and less estranged and more acclimated

to their maters and one another, the social ignorance of African slaves that both had been

and remained the unseen hand in slavery began to lose its grip. As African slaves

developed common languages and traditions, many were also learning the ways of their

masters. Most important of all cultural developments was the ability to read and write

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English. By the 19

century African American Slaves had gained the ability to

communicate their suffering. Though to first official slave narrative, Britton Hammond’s

A Narrative of the Uncommon Sufferings, and Surprizing Deliverance of Briton

Hammon, a Negro Man (1760), and a precious few others were written in the late 18

century, the quintessential narrative form which would become paradigmatic of the

African American slave narrative tradition appeared first in Olaudah Equiano’s The

Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African,

Written by Himself in 1814.

The African American slave narrative became a vehicle which African slaves in

America could voice their displeasure with their position in society. Lacking positive

legal rights and standing as an equal as a human being on an ontological level, the only

recourse of the African slaves was through the demonstration of their rationality. Writing

for African American slaves was more than a record for posterity or mere story telling.

The relation of the tales found in African American salve narratives were also both

undeniable demonstrations of reason and humanity, qualities Blacks were supposed to be

ontologically without, and socio-political arguments meant to urge those with means and

influence to aid the suffering slaves in removing the chains of their oppression. The

writers were expressing the fundamental desire of a community of slaves to be free, an

act that had never occurred in recorded history. The oppressed were confronting their

oppressors literarily. As such, the narratives that result cannot be read as mere stories

meant to relate a tale of events. The texts are arguments for freedom. Within the choices

to relate or to hide certain experiences are claims regarding morality, economy, and

political right. In an effort to continue my efforts to investigate the manner in which

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political philosophy’s traditional conceptualization of freedom may be enriched I will

analyze the slave narratives of Henry Bibb, Harriet Jacobs, and Frederick Douglass. I

will explicate the manner in which the narrative storyline for each text expounds a

fundamental claim regarding the nature of freedom as a concept and a greater desire for

the reader to recognize the need slaves have of its social materialization in slave

communities. I will begin with Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass an American

Slave.

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CHAPTER FIVE: FREDERICK DOUGLASS AND THE WRITTEN WORD

“Very soon after I went to live with Mr. and Mrs. Auld, she very kindly

commenced to teach me the A B C. After I had learned this, she assisted me in

learning to spell words of three or four letters. Just at this point of my progress,

Mr. Auld forbade Mrs. Auld to instruct me further, telling her, among other

things, that it was unlawful, as well as unsafe, to teach a slave to read. To use his

own words, further, he said, “If you give a nigger an inch, he will take an ell. A

nigger should know nothing but to obey his master- to do what he is told to do.

Learning would spoil the best nigger in the world. Now,” said he, “if you teach

that nigger (speaking of myself) how to read, there would be no keeping him. It

would forever be unfit him to be a slave. He would at once become

unmanageable, and of no value to his master. As to himself, it could do him no

good, but a great deal of harm. It would make him discontented and

unhappy.

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”

Frederick Douglass was an ex slave who threw off the shackles of his subjugation and

became arguably one of the first and most important spokesmen for an entire oppressed

people. Born in Maryland in 1818, Douglass was a slave from birth. Facing the same

evils afflicting his brethren in bondage, Douglass endured all the facets of southern

American plantation slavery. The seasoning process was not lost on him. Seemingly

destined to be an average run of the mill slave, Douglass received a gift in the form of

education. With his newly honed capacity Douglass was able to maneuver himself to

freedom. A diamond in the rough, Douglass, rather than simply escaping to freedom and

rescinding into obscurity, grew ever bold and visible in his desire to see slavery abolished

in the American south. His determination took him from the Wye House Plantation to

Washington D.C. with many stops along the way. Douglass over the course of his life

became an accomplished orator, writer, politician, and most notably abolitionist. Of the

many accomplishments, texts, awards, accolades, and speeches given and received by

111

Gates, Henry Jr. ed. The Classic Slave Narratives. New York: First Mentor Printing, 1987. pp. 274-275

(Hereafter referenced as Douglass)

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Douglass, few of his works were as critical and timely as his publication Narrative of the

Life of Frederick Douglass an American Slave.

Published in 1845, Douglass’ narrative, though not the first slave narrative, nor

the paradigm setter, became the gold standard for African American slave narratives in

particular, and Black literature in general during the 19

century. Douglass masterfully

relates the tale of his bondage and his escape to freedom. Like all slave narratives,

Douglass’ story contains the usual progression from the plantation to a state of liberty

however, there is a concurrent progression in Douglass’ text that I would like to

illuminate and discuss. Unlike my analysis of the state of nature arguments in the social

contract texts, Douglass’ narrative, along with Jacobs’ and Bibb’s, are self professed

narratives. Rather than proceed in the manner of the preceding section by rendering the

text apart into each example of a time disunity, I will be grouping the chapters of the

slave narratives into larger paradigms that can be considered epochs in the life of the

author. As Todorov claimed, not all sections of a given narrative are critical. Though

every section of the slave narratives has biographical merit, not all are equally persuasive

and significant in the authors’ auxiliary goal of making a claim for liberty which, the

explication thereof is my central concern. Douglass’ narrative can be broken into four

major sections: an introduction to slavery I-IV, his education V-VII, his awakening VIII-

X, and his liberation XI.

After having his prose validated by white men William Lloyd Garrison, a well-

known publisher and abolitionist, and Wendell Phillips, an accomplished lawyer and also

fellow abolitionist, Douglass begins his narrative “I was born in Tuckahoe, near

Hillsborough, and about twelve miles from Easton, in Talbot county, Maryland. I have

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no accurate knowledge of my age, never having seen any authentic record containing

it;

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” a seemingly innocent admission in itself, the claim that he did not know his real

age, but is emblematic of something far larger. He continues, “By the larger part of the

slaves know as little of their ages as horses know of theirs, and it is the wish of most

masters within my knowledge to keep their slaves thus ignorant.

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It is important to note that despite setting up his original position as one where he

was purposefully made ignorant of his own origins, Douglass spitefully contradicts his

own circumstance by demonstrating his rational prowess. He does this by demonstrating

his grasp of slavery as an institution; his claim to know that it is the wish of most masters

to keep their slaves ignorant shows that he understands that the method through which

” Though the first

segment of the text, chapters 1-4, are indeed about painting a vivid picture of plantation

slavery in the mind of the reader, behind the setting is also the theme of ignorance.

Douglass labels the plantation tradition of one in which the laborers, namely the slaves,

are kept in intentional ignorance of their circumstance and matters of the world to be

sure, but more importantly of slaves are prohibited from knowing themselves. This claim

should strike a chord in those knowledgeable of philosophic pursuits for γνῶθι σεαυτόν

or to know thyself is considered the height of human reason. How one could ever be true

to thine self without knowledge of themselves is a mystery I am sure Shakespeare would

have difficulty unraveling. Douglass posits the slave as one who must find themselves by

themselves. Douglass by “an early age” had already been deprived knowledge of his

birth and his father, and separated from his mother. This space of ignorance was

Douglass’ original position.

112

Douglass, 255

113

Douglass, 255

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slaves remain in bondage is the master’s control of knowledge. Also, he was able to

eventually deduce his age at 17 by hearing his master approximate his birth year. Neither

feat is amazing out of context, but for a being that is claimed to be without rational

faculties, such deductions should be incapable without assistance from someone with an

education. Douglass demonstrates that though he begins his text with an admission that

he too was once in the state of ignorance that his once fellow slaves remained in, he was

able to eventually grasp the knowledge that was systematically kept from him since birth.

The first paragraph is meant to depict Douglass as a rational man from whom knowledge

he had the capacity to retain was kept, as opposed to a feeble, humble slave who knew

nothing and was happy to just be alive.

“I have often been awakened at the dawn of day by the most heart-rending

shrieks of an own aunt of mine, whom he used to tie up to a joist, and whip upon

her naked back till she was literally covered with blood. No words, no tears, no

prayers, from his glory victim, seemed to move his iron heart from its bloody

purpose. The louder she screamed, the harder he whipped; and where the blood

ran fastest, there he whipped longest. He would whip her to make her scream,

and whip her to make her hush; and not until overcome by fatigue, would he

cease to swing the blood-clotted cowskin. I remember the first time I ever

witnessed this horrible exhibition. I was quite a child, but I well remember it. I

never shall forget it whilst I remember any thing. It was the first of a long series

of such outrages, of which I was doomed to be a witness and participant. It

struck me with awful force. It was the blood-stained gate, the entrance to the hell

of slavery, through which I was about to pass. It was a most terrible spectacle. I

wish I could commit to paper the feelings with which I beheld it.

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”

Douglass’ initiation into slavery was, as was the case for most authors of slave narratives,

bloody, violent, and lasting. This process was intentional by southern slave masters. The

process of seasoning required young slaves to be taught obedience and fear in order to

keep them docile and servile. It is easy to get literarily moved by the vivid nature of the

prose and the craft in which Douglass articulates his view while he ironically states that

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Douglass, 258

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he wished he had the words to do so. One can get bogged down in the discussions of the

natures of his two masters and the beatings and horror stories but underneath it all

Douglass is making claims for a progression of his understanding. The “blood-stained

gate” he passed through was the beginning of his education. Though I consider the first

four chapters to be centered on Douglass’ articulation of his state of ignorance, he did not

lack an education in his early years. Douglass learned how to be a slave. He learned

about a code of ethics between slaves, “The slaveholders have been known to send in

spies among their slaves, to ascertain their views and feelings in regard to their condition.

The frequency of this has had the effect to establish among the slaves a maxim, that a still

tongue makes a wise head. They suppress the truth rather than take the consequences of

telling it, and in doing so prove themselves a part of the human family.

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” He also

learned a perverse pride slaves had in their condition, “they seemed to think that the

greatness of their masters was transferable to themselves. It was considered as being bad

enough to be a slave; but to be a poor man’s slave was deemed a disgrace indeed!

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These forms of “knowledge” Douglass hardly counts as an education. They were

the products and facilitators of his servitude. Even his recognition of the sorrow songs,

as powerful as they are emotional, remain simply that; emotional. The sorrow songs stir

the soul and communicate suffering, “every tone was a testimony against slavery, and a

prayer to God for deliverance from chains,” but nevertheless in all their beauty they were

ineffective because most masters and other whites had, “no flesh in [their] obdurate

heart[s].

”

117

115

Douglass, 266

” Communicability of one’s ideas and sentiments was important to Douglass.

Even at the ushering into the slave culture, the want he relates is not deliverance but want

116

Douglass, 267

117

Douglass, 263

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of the means to preserve his sentiments in words; “It was the blood-stained gate, the

entrance to the hell of slavery, through which I was about to pass. It was a most terrible

spectacle. I wish I could commit to paper the feelings with which I beheld it.

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This, for means of consistency, would be the first time disunity. Douglass was

sent to Baltimore to live with Captain Thomas Auld. This was critical to him because “it

is possible, and even quite probable, that but for the mere circumstance of being removed

from that plantation to Baltimore, [he] should have [then], instead of being [there] seated

by [his] own table, in the enjoyment of writing [his] Narrative, been confined in the

galling chains of slavery.

” By the

end of chapter 4 Douglass succeeded in articulating a clear picture of the nature of

plantation life, giving “some description of it, and of slavery as it there existed.” Young,

fully inculcated into the slave culture, yet thirsty for a means by which he could express

and preserve his thoughts and feelings.

119

118

Douglass, 258

” Douglass’ move to Baltimore brought him into contact with

Mrs. Auld who would teach him the rudiments of reading and writing. This was the first

step towards knowledge and understanding for Douglass. Had he not realized the

magnitude of her gift, it was quickly and callously reinforced by Mr. Auld’s insistence

that Mrs. Auld cease instructing Douglass for not only was it unlawful but furthermore it

was dangerous because his value as a slave was contingent on his naïveté. Mr. Auld’s

words “sank deep into [Douglass’] heart, stirred up sentiments within that lay slumbering,

and called into existence an entirely new train of thought. It was a new a special

revelation, explaining dark and mysterious things, which [his] youthful understanding

had struggled, but struggled in vain. [He] now understood what had been to [him] a most

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Douglass, 273

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perplexing difficulty- to wit, the white man’s power enslave the black man. It was a grad

achievement, and [he] prized it highly. From that moment, [he] understood the pathway

from slavery to freedom.

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Once Douglass had a taste of literacy he ached for more. When Mr. Auld forbade

Mrs. Auld against instructing Douglass, she complied and no longer taught him so he had

to find instruction elsewhere. Douglass retroactively determined himself to be around 12

when he decided to compensate for his loss of Mrs. Auld through what he labeled as

“various stratagems.” While performing his tasks as an errand boy Douglass utilized the

privilege his master enjoyed over his neighbors to his advantage. Recognizing that the

children along his route could be coerced with the fresh bread that was readily available

at his master’s house, Douglass used portions of bread as payment in exchange for daily

lessons from several school age boys. The “bread [he] used to bestow upon the little

hungry urchins, who, in return, would give [him] that more valuable bread of

” Naturally the text as autobiographical is reflective in nature.

Douglass’ knowledge of the relationship between his literacy and his freedom is mostly

hindsight. Nevertheless he is very clear in that it is literacy that is the doorway to

freedom. The ability to learn and communicate with others for Douglass is critical in

acquiring freedom. For our purposes this is only half our concern for the recognition of

freedom’s importance is only a step towards realizing the manner in which freedom

enables men to move closer to a sense of self-completion as a human being. This

transformation had yet to occur for Douglass hence the beginning of his education led to

an insatiable desire for the self-assurance only literacy could bring for through literacy

Douglass gained the ability to, rather than rely on others, to teach himself new ideas and

truths as he saw fit.

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Douglass, 275

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knowledge.

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“I was now about twelve years old, and the thought of being a slave for life began

to bear heavily upon my heart. Just about this time, I got hold of a book entitled “The

Colombian Orator.” Every opportunity I got, I used to read this book.

” The more Douglass learned to read and write, the more he read and

wrote. This was the key to the next time disunity in the epochs of Douglass’ life.

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” Here we begin

to see Douglass move from recognizing freedom as desirable and knowledge as being

central to those who are free, to an actual act of one’s free will and self-determination.

Though Douglass clearly in his narrative and other writings and speeches labels the entire

process of growing from illiteracy into literacy as being transformative of his life yet I

would claim that en route to his freedom, his first free acts were not his literal first steps

on New York soil. Douglass was free when “I got a hold of a book,” and “every

opportunity I got, I used to read this book.” This was the beginning of self agency in the

making of one’s self. Douglass decided to read and decide if what he read was true or

not true. The ideas he took from the Colombian Orator would shape his life. The

importance is not the ideas of freedom and morality he found in the text, rather, it was the

fact that he chose to read and chose to believe the ideas in the text without manipulation.

With this act of choice “the silver trump of freedom had aroused [his] soul to eternal

wakefulness. Freedom now appeared, to disappear no more forever.

123

Literacy had brought about not only the desire for freedom, but the resolve to act

in Douglass. This new period of boldness and contriving is the next epoch in Douglass’

” Abolition,

freedom, escape, freedom were words that would burden him until their full realization in

the years to come every day of his life.

121

Douglass, 278

122

Douglass, 278

123

Douglass, 279

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life. The “captive freeman” as Douglass now was, one conscious of their unjust captivity

aching to be free, as Mr. Auld said years ago, brought Douglass little to no happiness.

“Behold! That very discontentment which Master Hugh had predicted would follow my

learning to read had already come, to torment and sting my soul to unutterable

anguish…it opened my eyes to the horrible pit, but to no ladder upon which to get out…I

preferred the condition of the meanest reptile to my own.

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” Douglass “often found

[himself] regretting [his] own existence, and wishing [himself] dead; and but for the hope

of being free, [He had] no doubt but that [he] should have killed [himself], or done

something for which [he] should have been killed.

125

” Chapters 8-10 depict Douglass’

response to his desire for freedom which manifests itself into a plan to procure his

freedom along with a myriad of new realizations and perspectives. Because of his

acquisition of literacy, Douglass now understood more that the average slave. Overheard

conversations, once gibberish, were now full of both useful and hurtful information. This

was demonstrated clearly in the beginning of chapter VIII. When Douglass’ old master

died he was sent back to Colonel Lloyd’s Plantation to be valued. He realized not only

by visual and context clues but also through knowledge of words the actual proceedings

of which he was a part; the equating of human life with animals. “I saw then more

clearly than ever the brutalizing effects of slavery upon both slave and slaveholder.

126

124

Douglass, 279

”

Though Douglass depicts the difference between himself and his fellow slaves as one of

seasoning and physical conditioning, the active process of resisting one’s acceptance to a

fate they know is naturally not theirs demonstrates that Douglass’ differences are far

more than a more kind and modest master. His education and literacy allowed him to

125

Douglass, 279

126

Douglass, 282

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reflect upon his position in such a manner that prevented the ordeal of the valuation from

breaking his soul. Fear rose in his heart at the open callous acts of violence, but it never

allowed him to become one with the possibility of being ontologically a slave for whom

freedom is not an inalienable right.

Another example of Douglass’ new perspective occurred shortly after the

valuation. After returning to Baltimore, an argument between his masters resulted in

Douglass’ being informed that he was to leave and would never be allowed to return to

Baltimore. More evidence that literacy meant more than his physical circumstance, he

lamented not being transferred where he would me certainly be treated more harshly and

forced to labor more, his primary concern was his inability to continue his lessons.

Literacy was his life’s primary want. Nevertheless, Douglass in hindsight realized his

missed opportunity. He regretted never having made an attempt to escape while in

Baltimore for his chances at success were markedly greater in the city than in the country.

Despite his vigor and determination to be free, he lacked the perspective to think and act

in a manner that would procure his freedom. The desire to be free rose negatively from

the horrors of the plantation, the means to become free came from the literacy he

acquired in Baltimore, yet both were worthless without the courage and conviction that

came from the world perspective and self-esteem that only an adequate degree of literacy

and knowledge could provide. While in Baltimore, though he was acquiring literacy, he

had yet to reflect on ideas, concepts, and life. This reflection did not occur until he read

the Colombian Orator; nevertheless, his “determination to run away was again revived.

[He] resolved to wait only so long as the offering of a favorable opportunity. When that

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came, [he] was to be determined off.

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Chapter IX is interesting when juxtaposed against the first four chapters. First

off, Douglass took note to mention that he “had now reached a period in [his] life when

[he] can give dates.

” Gaining knowledge of the route both from his

destination to Baltimore and recognizing the direction of a ferry off to Philadelphia gave

Douglass hope of later devising a plan of escape.

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“In August 1832, my master attended a Methodist camp-meeting held in the Bay-

side, Talbot county, and there experienced religion. I indulged a faint hope that

his conversion would lead him to emancipate his slaves, and that, if he did not do

this, it would, at any rate, make him more kind and humane. I was disappointed

in both these respects. It neither made him be humane to his slaves, nor to

emancipate them. If it had any effect on his character, it made him more cruel

and hateful in all his ways; for I believe him to have been a much worse man

after his conversion than before. Prior to his conversion, he relied upon his own

depravity to shield and sustain him in his savage barbarity; but after his

conversion, he found religious sanction and support for his slaveholding cruelty.

He made the greatest pretentions to piety. His house was the house of prayer.

He prayed morning, noon, and night. He very soon distinguished himself among

his brethren, and was soon made a class-leader and exhorter. His activity in

” This was no little accomplishment for it underscored the

progression of his literacy, understanding, and proverbial entrance into history which for

many philosophers is made possible only through reason. In all four chapters Douglass is

describing his circumstances, masters, and their mannerisms, and demeanors. There is a

difference between his articulation of his maters in the beginning of the text and his

description of Captain Auld. In the first four chapters Douglass took care to relate

happenings and dispositions. Master did this and master did that, sometimes he would

this, and sometimes he would that, one time I remember this or that happening.

Douglass’ tone in chapter IX was different. Though he still related happenings, he also

began relating a coded argument against religious hypocrisy whose target could easily

been any of the non-abolitionists reading his manuscript.

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Douglass, 285

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revivals was great, and he proved himself an instrument in the hands of the

church in converting many souls. His house was the preacher’s home. They

used to take great pleasure in coming there to put up; for while he starved us, he

stuffed them.

129

”

Douglass was levying a claim not only at his master but at religious proponents of slavery

in general. The first four chapters were more a relation of the horrid circumstances slaves

found themselves in where chapter nine was an argument that God and religion were

insufficient in transforming the hearts of slave masters. Despite the repeated appeals to

human charity and love, Douglass realized that slavery had in fact corrupted the masters

far more than he thought. Still believing in “the power of truth over the conscience of

even a slaveholder,

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129

Douglass, 287

” Douglass realized that the “truth” would require far more than

religion or Biblical claims. This I believe was the origin of Douglass’ lifelong

commitment legal reform and oral debates as opposed to relying only on religious

convictions alone for the conversion of new believers in the abolitionists’ cause. That

Douglass’ concerns where now the degree to which men exemplified the ideologies they

professed rather than just which master was more lenient, and who got beat, and how

hard, demonstrates the progression of his rational concerns. Douglass had clearly moved

from concerns only of self-preservation to contemplations on truth and the consistency of

one’s acts with their professed claims. The rudiments of literacy had bloomed into both

the contemplation and articulation of universal concepts like justice, fairness, and

equality. These notions, rather than remaining in the gut as emotional urges that

something is just not right, have matured into a capacity to analyze the actions of others.

Both the knowledge of these concepts and the application of them to his natural condition

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enabled him in chapter X to confront Mr. Covey and to realize the transformation of his

consciousness into that of a free man.

In 1832 Douglass had difficulty submitting to the life of a productive slave. As a

result his master, recognizing the degree to which his other masters had “spoiled” him,

sent his away to a known “nigger breaker” and respected church leader named Mr.

Covey. Though Douglass had through his education ignited the passions of freedom in

his soul, his experiences at Mr. Covey’s succeeded in extinguishing them. “Mr. Covey

succeeded in breaking me. I was broken in body, soul, and spirit. My natural elasticity

was crushed, my intellect languished, the disposition to read departed, the cheerful spark

that lingered about my eye died; the dark night of slavery closed in upon me; and behold

a man transformed into a brute!

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” Disheartened, Douglass devolved to the life of a field

Negro. His experiences with Mr. Covey had exacerbated him such that he sought

freedom not within his own agency but from without. He sought help in mere

compliance; that did not work. He sought help from Master Thomas; he would not help.

To the contrary, Master Thomas threatened Douglass with a beating of his own if he did

not go back to Mr. Covey and finish his year of service. After fleeing a sure beating on

his return to Covey’s Douglass, while biding time in the woods ran into a slave named

Sandy Jenkins whom Douglass considered an advisor. After hearing Douglass’ plight,

Sandy suggested that he go back to Mr. Covey but to also he “must go with him into

another part of the woods, where there was a certain root, which, if [he] would take some

of it with [him], carrying it always on [his] right side, would render it impossible for Mr.

Covey, or any other white man, to whip [him].

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131

Douglass, 293

” Initially skeptical Douglass relented,

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Douglass, 297

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took the root, and went back to Mr. Covey. The root seemed to work at first. When

Douglass got back he was not whipped and was merely instructed to finish a few tasks.

At this juncture in the story Douglass is eventually threatened with a beating which he

resists and accomplishes the feat of impressing Mr. Covey to cease beating him thus

restoring a margin of dignity in his manhood. Though this is both critical and

transformative in the text I would argue that more important to the physical retaliation is

the rational brokenness that Douglass experienced before his decision to fight. Douglass

explained after experiencing unusual kindness from Mr. Covey, “Now, this singular

conduct of Mr. Covey really made me begin to think that there was something in the root

which Sandy had given me; and had it been on any other day than Sunday, I could have

attributed the conduct to no other cause than the influence of that root; and as it was, I

was half inclined to think the root to be something more than I at first had taken it to

be.

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Douglass, 297

” Though Douglass admits earlier in the chapter that Mr. Covey had succeeded in

breaking him, the truth was that he hadn’t. Douglass still retained a certain amount of

pride which allowed him to have the audacity to attempt to seek refuge in Master

Thomas. Though he was becoming pessimistic and agreeable, Douglass had not yet

reverted to a mere conciliatory field Negro until he began to believe in the root. The root

represented all that he aspired to leave behind when he learned the importance of book

learning and the power it had over slaves. Folk wisdom or slave knowledge, though

effective in maintaining a margin of sanity in slaves, merely kept the slaves docile and

agreeable to their own enslavement; the idea that a root would keep him safe, thus

permitting him to just do his job peacefully was such a placation. Like the sorrow songs,

the false pride slaves had in their master’s wealth, the honor of comradery among slaves,

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the root gave the slaves a placating peace that enabled them to forgo their own agency

and natural right to fight for their freedom. The return to a state of ignorance he had not

been in since a child was a breaking point for Douglass which I believe, gave him the

resolve to fight despite the fact Douglass claims to not know the origin of this sentiment.

After the fight with Mr. Covey Douglass states,

“This battle with Mr. Covey was the turning-point in my career as a slave. I

rekindled the few expiring embers of freedom, and revived within me a sense of

my own manhood. It recalled the departed self confidence, and inspired me

again with a determination to be free. The gratification afforded by the triumph

was a full compensation for whatever else might follow, even death itself. He

only can understand the deep satisfaction which I experienced, who has himself

repelled by force the bloody arm of slavery, I felt as I never felt before. It was a

glorious resurrection, from the tomb of slavery, to the heaven of freedom. My

long-crushed spirit rose, cowardice departed, bold defiance took its place; and I

now resolved that, however long I might remain a slave in form, the day had

passed forever when I could be a slave in fact. I did not hesitate to let it be

known of me, that the white man who expected to succeed in whipping me, must

also succeed in killing me. From this time I was never again what might be

called fairly whipped, though I remained a slave four years afterwards. I had

several fights, but was never whipped.

134

”

Those interpreting this quote may afford too much attention to the phrase “repelled by

force the bloody arm of slavery,” yet I claim that the entire quote Douglass is referring

more to the resurrection of his being guided by reason rather than traditional folk

wisdom. He states in three places verbs with the prefix “re”: rekindled, revived, and

recalled. He also used the adverb again. All four terms point to a return to a previous

state. Nowhere in the narrative does Douglass mention the use of force so this return the

he speaks of could not be referring to his use of force. Rather the expiring embers of

freedom were the same embers ignited by his acquisition of literacy. The force used in

repelling slavery I do not believe was merely his physical arm but his choice to believe

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Douglass 298-299

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his own worth whatever the cost

135

In the final stages of chapter 10 Douglass related a failed attempt at gaining

freedom which finally came to fruition in chapter 11. Despite the ordeals he experienced

in these pages, the effect on Douglass’ narrative with respect to his claims of what

Christian America could and should do to bring liberty to the slaves in bondage these

experiences had is marginal. Though one could note that during the failed escape the

primary concern of those in custody was not their physical captivity or possible

punishment but the possession of the written notes which points to the claim that the

possession of knowledge is dangerous, there is one other notable exception. While

staying with Mr. Freeland, Douglass was able to keep a Sabbath school where he was

permitted to instruct other slaves in letters and in Christ. “I look back to those Sundays

with an amount of pleasure not to be expressed. They were great days to my soul. The

. Be believed himself free despite the attempts of

other slaves to render him docile through their folk wisdom, despite his masters who tried

to beat him into submission, despite his own physical and mental doggedness, Douglass’

spirit persevered to think itself free thus making the agency of a physical struggle of

defense possible. The “feeling that he never felt before” was the resolve to accept death

before reverting back to a state of docility which only ignorance of his worth as a human

being could bring. Thus without being physically free, underscoring once again that the

repulsion of the bloody arm of slavery was not necessarily corporeal in nature, Douglass

was free. Free in mind, free in spirit, free in his ability to learn and construct his world

view and his destiny on his own. This transformation leads to the final time disunity in

the narrative and Douglass’ eventual physical escape from bondage.

135

One must also remember the fervor with which Douglass pursued literacy. Douglass was denied further

education and he decided to take it through the coercion of the white children along his route. The force

Douglass refers to in throwing off the bloody arm of slavery could also refer back to this as well.

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work of instructing my dear fellow-slaves was the sweetest engagement with which I was

ever blessed…Every moment they spent in that school, they were liable to be taken up,

and given thirty-nine lashes. They came because they wished to learn. Their minds had

been starved by their cruel masters. They had been shut up in mental darkness. I taught

them, because it was the delight of my soul to be doing something that looked like

bettering the condition of my race…And I have the happiness to know, that several of

those who came to Sabbath school learned how to read; and one, at least, is now free

through my agency.

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We find that the narrative, though an explicit story of the exploits of one

individual, contains a claim supported through the life experiences of the protagonist.

Literacy is crucial to freedom. Without literacy, one is forced to accept the truths and

ideas that are handed to him, or to forge baseless beliefs to assuage man’s mind’s desire

to be fed information. The culmination of Douglass redemption and escape from

bondage came not when he was physically free or safe to walk about New York as he

saw fit, nor was it when he came under control of his finances. Douglass’ freedom came

from the self-affirmation made possible through his own agency that was awakened

through the ideas and truths he acquired via reading. Douglass was free the moment he

accepted death over the acceptance that his station in life was to be determined by

another who would give him the truths he needed to know about himself. We are brought

back to the beginning of the text. Douglass, though intentionally made ignorant of

” Here Douglass makes it clear that the path to freedom is not the

physical beating down of one’s master but through the enlightenment that comes from

literacy and the self-agency it provides. The power of literacy is so potent that once

gained, it can spread to others as he explains.

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himself, his age, his father, estranged from his mother and a sense of self and purpose in

life, finds himself and defines himself for himself which finally in the end gives him

something worth dying for. It seems fitting that Douglass in his text would quote Patrick

Henry while plotting his escape, “In coming to a fixed determination to run away, we did

more than Patrick Henry, when he resolved upon liberty or death. With us it was a

doubtful liberty at most, and almost certain death if we failed. For my part, I should

prefer death to hopeless bondage.

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”

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CHAPTER SIX: HENRY BIBB AND THE NARRATIVE OF LOVE AND THE

SANCTITY OF THE FAMILY UNIT

“When I offered myself for matrimony, we mutually engaged ourselves

to each other, to marry in one year…we had the happiness to be joined in holy

wedlock. Not in slave-holding style, which is a mere farce, without the sanction

of law or gospel; but in accordance with the laws of God and our country. My

beloved wife is a bosom friend, a help-meet, a loving companion in all the social,

moral, and religious relations of life. She is to me what a poor slave’s wife can

never be to her husband while in the condition of a slave; for she can not be true

to her husband contrary to the will of her master. She can be neither pure nor

virtuous, contrary to the will of her master. She dare not refuse to be reduced to

a state of adultery at the will of her master; from the fact that the slaveholding

law, customs, and teachings are all against the poor slaves.

I presume there are no class of people in the United States who so highly

appreciate the legality of marriage as those persons who have been held and

treated as property.

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”

Born into slavery in Shelby County Kentucky, Henry Bibb eventually escaped the

physical conditions of slavery for good in January of 1842. Though Bibb never became a

politician and diplomat like Douglass, he nevertheless became every bit the abolitionist

establishing the first Black newspaper in Canada: “Voice of the Fugitive.” After the

futility of rescuing his family from the grips of slavery, Bibb turned is sights to the

overall plight of slavery itself. The forum of the “Voice of the Fugitive,” was

indispensable as it gave ex-slaves a platform from which they could simultaneously voice

their opinions and demonstrate contrary evidence of their supposed lack of morality,

rationality, and literacy.

“Flogged up” in Shelby County Kentucky, Bibb resoundingly experienced similar

plights to other slaves who also wrote narratives. Experiencing loneliness and emptiness

almost since birth, Bibb was a quintessential slave. “I can truly say, that I drank deeply

of the bitter cup of suffering and woe. I have been dragged down to the lowest depths of

138

Bibb, Henry. The Life and Adventures of Henry Bibb An American Slave. Introduction by Charles J.

Heglar. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2001. pp. 191-192 (Hereafter referenced as Bibb)

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human degradation and wretchedness, by Slaveholders.

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Borrowing paradigmatically from Douglass, Bibb too uses cynicism and irony to

challenge slavery and the logic of its justification by slave owners. Bibb states that,

“Reader, believe me when I say, that no tongue, nor pen ever has or can express the

horrors of American Slavery. Consequently I despair in finding language to express

adequately the deep feeling of my soul, as I contemplate the past history of my life.

” Bibb, like most other

mulattos, possessed memories of his mother, yet never knew his father. Though he was

told his father was James Bibb by his mother, he never met him or discovered any

corroborating evidence that he could use to confirm the claim. Sheltered initially from

the hardships of slavery, Bibb was sent out to be useful the moment his age permitted.

Around the age of 8 he was already providing for the education of his playmates.

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Bibb, 13-14

”

Though an obvious attempt to elevate the reader’s conscious far beyond the limits of the

definitions of the words on the page, the statement also serves ironically as a

contradiction in that despite the admitted futile attempts, the author, in this case Henry

Bibb, is actually achieving that which he claims is not possible. The ramifications of this

only serve to solidify the abolitionist message of the text. First, it protects the idea of

slavery as an inexplicable horror, which requires immediate action, rather than the mere

relation of a tale, which, though unfortunate, has little to no reverberations that require

action on the part of the reader absent their preexisting empathy or sympathy. Second,

the practice of the writing of that which is presumed indescribable through writing

enables the ex-slave authors to demonstrate their literary prowess through the practice of

achieving that which is admittedly thought to be unachievable. Insofar as the text

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succeeds in painting a picture of American Slavery in the reader and summoning

emotions that may lead towards abolitionist attempts, the text achieves the professed

impossible. In so doing, the text becomes demonstrative of more than the demonstration

of the literacy of the ex-slave authors; this act is an illustration of the mastery of the

English language by those who were presumed to be incapable of merely attaining

proficiency in it. Further, as an affront to those who continue to strive to keep slaves

ignorant, Bibb, like Douglass, explains the futility of such an enterprise. “Although I

have suffered much from the lash, and for want of food and raiment; I confess that it has

been no disadvantage to be passed through the hands of so many families, as the only

source of information that I had to enlighten my mind, consisted in what I could see and

hear from others. Slaves were not allowed books, pen, ink, or paper, to improve their

minds. But it seems to me now, that I was particularly observing, and apt to retain what

came under my observation. But more especially, all that I heard about liberty and

freedom to the slaves, I never forget. Among other good trades I learned the art of

running away to perfection. I made a regular business of it, and never gave it up until I

had broken the bands of slavery.

141

Though his narrative in many was paradigmatic, Bibb departed from most slave

narratives in a unique fashion. Most narratives, like Douglass’, utilized the outset of the

” Though Bibb did not acquire literacy at an early

age, he nevertheless picked up an equally valuable nugget of knowledge: the ability to

escape. This demonstrated that despite the attempts of slave owners to keep the slaves

ignorant and docile, they were irreversibly, undeniably human and would not merely rest

in servitude. Each interaction with slaves brought them one-step closer to freedom

regardless of its nature. Abolition was posited conceptually as an inevitability.

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narrative to capture the reader emotionally with tales of horrid actions by supposed

Christian men. Beatings, floggings, mutilations were commonplace both in reality and in

the depiction of that reality in the narratives of those who lived through those

experiences. Much of the pain, trauma, and ironically hope, and initiative to free one’s

self came as the result of the brutality expressed at the very beginnings of the lives of the

ex-slave authors. This was not the case for Bibb. Bibb, though he gives his analysis of

the conditions faced by slaves in the American south, he does not dwell on vivid imagery

and stymie in the violent early years of his introduction to the peculiar institution of

slavery. This is because Bibb was neither shaped nor solely motivated through the fear of

being eternally subjected to his heinous condition of servitude. His courtship to his wife

would define his character and ambitions, and eventually become the condition for his

eventual permanent freedom. It is here that we can interject a time disunity into Bibb’s

life. Distinct from his early years, Bibb’s courtship, eventual marriage, and the trails he

faced trying to defend his family make up the second epoch of his life and our first time

disunity within the narrative.

“To think that after I had determined to carry out the great idea which his so

universally and practically acknowledged among all the civilized nations of the earth, that

I would be free or die, I suffered myself to be turned aside by the fascinating charms of a

female, who gradually won my attention from an object so high as that of liberty; and an

object which I held paramount to all others…when I had arrived at the age of eighteen,

which was in the year of 1833, it was my lot to be introduced to the favor of a mulatto

slave girl named Malinda.

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Bibb, 33

” To say that Bibb fell in love would be a massive

understatement. Bibb was wholly enraptured with his wife. So much so, that as he states

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in more than one place in the narrative, the thought of being with her rivaled, and

sometimes almost replaced, his desire for liberty. The beginning of Chapter III serves as

more of an ode to his wife to be. Yet, in the midst of his happiness, the reality of his

circumstance burdened his joy. “But oh! that I had only then been enabled to have seen

as I do now, or to have read the following slave code

iii

, which is but a stereotyped law of

American slavery. It would have saved me I think from having to lament that I was a

husband and am the father of slaves who are still left to linger out their days in hopeless

bondage.

143

First and foremost of the challenges slave unions face is their not being

recognized by the state and their masters; “marriage among American slaves, is

disregarded by the laws of this country. It is counted a mere temporary matter; it is a

union which may be continued or broken off, with or without the consent of a

slaveholder, whether he is a priest or libertine…A slave marrying according to law is a

thing unknown in the history of American Slavery…Licentious white men, can and do

enter in at night or day the lodging places of slaves; break up the bonds of affection in

families; destroy all their domestic and social union for life; and the laws of the country

afford them no protection.

” Bibb ruminates, on the vexing quandaries a civil, rational, Christian man,

husband, father, wife, mother, woman, child, and slave all face when navigating these

identities concurrently. Despite the typical hurdles all men and women face when

endeavoring to forge a marriage, i.e. parental disapproval, other suitors, relationship

spats, and child rearing, Bibb communicates that slave marital unions face additional

daunting challenges.

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Bibb, 35

” Despite their faith and even at times their willingness to

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remain conciliatory to their masters, slaves were refused the right to marry and to

maintain a sanctified home. The former is of little consequence because slaves devised

all types of ceremonies and rituals that in their eyes united man and woman as husband

and wife without the jurisdiction of American law. The latter however was

overwhelmingly problematic, especially for Christians for whom chastity was a Godly

commandment and repeated adultery was sin. More than liberty, slave owners and those

they permitted, had the license to violate repeatedly the unifying bonds of slave marriages

primarily and most frequently though the violent act of rape or the equally abhorrent

coerced willful intercourse. Husbands and wives were each prey to the sexual whims of

their masters, forced to fall into sin and disgrace their marriage repeatedly. The

dissolution of chastity within the marriage created distrust and in many cases disgust

between husband and wife especially in Christian marriages. Slave unions were faced

with the burden of “sharing” the bodies of their spouses against their will with those

whom they loathed and despised on a regular basis.

The second challenge slave marriages faced above and beyond state recognized

unions was the inability to reliably protect, console, and support one another in other non-

sexual circumstances. Any marriage councilor or relationship expert would concur that

trust is the centerpiece of any relationship. Without trust, humans have difficulty fully

relying on one another. Husbands and wives by traditional Christian doctrines, are

supposed to be best friends, the primary companions of one another, marital partners are

confidants par excellence. Aside from the sexual brutality committed against slave

marriages, the typical trademark experiences of slavery also had a unique toll on the trust

in a marriage. Whippings, floggings, beatings, brandings, and other medieval tortuous

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practices were commonplace and married individuals were not spared in the least. These

occurrences however did more than damage the individual psyches of those afflicted, the

trust between husbands and wives were tarnished with each occurrence. The husband’s

inability to “save and protect” his wife from the brutal whip, or a wife’s being prevented

from soothing the wounds of a fresh flogging of her husband undermined the basic trust

and faith each needed to have in one another to build a stable Christian union. Husbands

and wives are supposed to help, protect, and nurture one another. These basic tasks were

made impossible for the members of slave unions. Along with a lack of trust and faith on

behalf of one spouse, there was paired an equally damaging depression and self-abasing

on behalf of the other.

“With my new residence I confess that I was much dissatisfied. Not that

Gatewood was a more cruel master than my former owner- not that I was

opposed to living with Malinda, who was then the centre and object of my

affections- but to live where I must be eye witness to her insults, scourgings and

abuses, such are common to be inflicted upon salves, was more than I could bear.

If my wife must be exposed to the insults and licentious passions of the wicked

slave-drivers and overseers; if she must bear the stripes of the lash laid on by an

unmerciful tyrant; if this is to be done with impunity, which is frequently done by

slaveholders and their abettors, Heaven forbid that I should be compelled to

witness the sight.

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”

The third, and perhaps most trying of the three challenges to a slave union is the bearing

and rearing of children. A complex problem, bearing children is considered by most a

blessed occasion for a married couple. This however was not often the case for slave

unions. As per the first unique challenge to slave unions I outlined above, chastity was

almost non-existent in slave unions. As the master, his family, and his minions helped

themselves to both husband and wife alike, slaves were almost powerless against the sin

of adultery. A biological consequence of fornication naturally resulted in bastardized

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Bibb, 42

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children. Many children reared by slave mothers were the result of rape and forced

intercourse. This fact created an almost instant doubt in the mind of any slave husband

whose wife was with child. Quite often slave husbands had to simply deal with the fact

that their wives were impregnated by any number of white men who had legitimated

access to her body by virtue of her being a slave. As if this difficulty were not enough,

even in the cases where a slave husband and wife procreated a child willingly, the task of

being a caring, nurturing, and protective parent was more than a notion. As was the

challenge for husbands and wives to care and nurture one another despite the antagonism

of the slave master, the task of doing the same for children was increasingly difficult.

Having inherently more value due to their docility, ability to be coerced, and their youth,

slave children were prized by slave owners. As such, slave children were quickly

seasoned and watched carefully by slave breakers and owners. Any number of heinous

acts were committed against them daily in an effort to get them to “know their place.”

Against this, slave parents had little to no defense. The health and well-being of their

children was out of their control. Most slave parents had no appeal to anyone but to God

concerning the fate of their most precious children.

“[My] dear little daughter was called Mary Frances…there was no one to take

care of poor little Frances, while her mother was toiling in the field. She was left

at the house to creep under the feet of an unmerciful old mistress, whom I have

known to slap with her hand the face of little Frances, for crying after her mother,

until her little face was left black and blue. I recollect that Malinda and myself

came from the field one summer’s day at noon, and poor little Frances came

creeping to her mother smiling, but with large tear drops standing in her dear

little eyes, sobbing and trying to tell her mother that she had been abused, but not

able to utter a word. Her little face was bruised black with the whole print of

Mrs. Gatewood’s hand. This print was plainly to be seen for eight days after it

was done. But oh! This darling child was a slave; born of a slave mother. Who

can imagine what could be the feelings of a father and mother, when looking

upon their infant child whipped and tortured with impunity, and they placed in a

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situation where they could afford it no protection. But we were all claimed and

held as property; the father and mother were slaves!

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”

Above these circumstances, as if he high probability that the child was not biologically

procreated in the union, and the near impossibility of protecting the child from injury and

abuse were not enough, the children of slaves were removed from their biological parents

quickly and almost without exception. Slave parents more often than not were well

aware that they most likely would rear a child to a pre-pubescent age and never see that

child again. Nevertheless most slave parents cherished their children and held fast to the

unlikely hope that they could live to see their children grow free and succeed in life

where they failed, as impractical a dream it may have been.

These three burdens were the unique plight of slaves who wished to be married.

This gives credence to Bibb’s claim that the union of marriage was far more sacred and

important to slaves than freedmen for the simple fact that it took more of a sacrifice and

more endurance to remain bound husband and wife as a slave than it did free men and

women. Though admittedly ignorant of the full obligation he was committing himself to,

Bibb, fully infatuated with Malinda, chose to get married and subject himself to the

aforementioned trials and tribulations. The next few years of his life would be spent

attempting to mitigate that which was intentionally created to be incommensurable. As a

slave Bibb was intended to be solitary, docile, and dependant. As a husband and father

Bibb endeavored to be unified with his family, aggressive in their defense, and

independent is his ability to provide and care for their well-being. Needless to say, Bibb

could not do both simultaneously. In an effort to both follow his conscience and be

reverent to his God, Bibb sought to rid himself of the hindrances to his most important

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role; that of a husband and father. Bibb made multiple attempts to escape, most of which

were successful. Each time he returned to rescue his family and without exception, he

was recaptured.

Seemingly insatiable in his attempts, Bibb by chapter 13 had found himself

subject to a most disagreeable master. The Deacon, as he was called, had decided to sell

Bibb after sparing his life and not killing him after his latest attempt to run away from the

Deacon’s farm. After a successful sale, Bibb’s reputation, which preceded him, as a

runaway worked to his advantage as he convinced his new gambling owners that their

intent to resell him would be more successful if they managed to procure his wife and

child, as he would be less likely to runaway knowing they were safe with him. Though

he did not know at that time, this would be the last time he ever would see his wife and

child again. Unique in comparison to the myriad other attempts at freeing his family, the

experience of trying to buy his family makes up the third epoch and second time disunity

of Bibb’s narrative. While traveling from Texas to Indian Territory west of the

Mississippi Bibb had convinced his owners to attempt to purchase his wife and child

from the Deacon. Upon arrival, the agitated Deacon proved to be anything but

conciliatory in the trade. In a dramatic scene, Bibb’s wife clung to her husband sobbing

and begging as his new masters pleaded the Deacon to sell. “Such appeals made no

impression on the unfeeling Deacon’s heart. While he was storming with abusive

language, and even using the glory lash with hellish vengeance to separate husband and

wife…[Bibb’s masters] told him that they would give a thousand dollars for [his] wife

and child, or anything in reason. But no! he sooner would see me to the devil than

indulge or gratify [him] after [his] having run away from him; and if they did not remove

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[Bibb] from his presence very soon, [the Deacon] said he would make them suffer for

it.

147

” While this scene transpired Bibb’s wife continually pleaded as did his daughter

Frances look on as their pleas fell on deaf ears until, “when [Malinda] saw there was no

help for [she and Bibb] and that [they] should soon be separated forever, in the name of

Deacon Whitfield, and American Slavery to meet no more as husband and wife, parent

and child—the last and loudest appeal was made on [their] knees. [They] appealed to

God of Justice and to the sacred ties of humanity; but this was all in vain. The louder

[they] preyed the harder he whipped, amid the most heart-rendering shrieks from the poor

slave mother and child, as little Frances stood by, sobbing at the abuse inflicted on her

mother.

148

Chapters 14-17 of the narrative make up the fourth epoch in Bibb’s life and come

after the third time disunity. Bibb was sold to a Native American who eventually died

giving Bibb the opportunity to take his leave and escape to the north. As many read slave

narratives as entertainment, literarily the height of the action, the supposed

transformation is the most important part of the story. Thus it would seem awkward in a

text on freedom, during an explication of a slave narrative, one would make the claim

that the moment of the final physical release from bondage was of a lesser consequence

than what was to follow but that is my claim. Though Bibb relates the tail of his physical

escape from bondage in chapters 14-17, like Douglass, this was not his escape from the

” As traumatic as the experience was, all the drama was to no avail, as the

Deacon simply would not sell Bibb’s family and they were forced to leave empty handed.

Bibb lived up to his word that if the sportsmen attempted to gain his family he would

agree to be sold and act accordingly to help to sale go smoothly.

147

Bibb. 146-147

148

Bibb, 147

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mental chains of slavery. Douglass was able to procure his freedom in his reclamation of

his manhood through the replenishing of his self-worth that gave him the desire to fight.

The rock bottom of beginning to believe the use-value of the root motivated Douglass to

reclaim his recognition of a man worthy of freedom and endowed with the means to

procure it. Bibb, like Douglass, was ambivalent to his physical bondage as enchained or

not, his perception of his self-worth and status as a man, or free man resided in his ability

to free his wife and child from bondage. Despite however many times Bibb reached a

“free state,” he never regarded himself as free because his wife and child were still in

bondage. Thus, he returned to attempt to free them time and time again. In chapter 17

Bibb finds himself in Detroit affiliated with an abolitionist group and lecturing of his

experiences. Despite the grotesque charade, he endured during his last attempt to free his

family Bibb still possessed hope that he would one day succeed in removing them from

slavery. We find that Bibb, despite his free status once again is willing to risk his liberty

in the pursuit of his family’s freedom. “In view of the failure to hear anything of my

wife, many of my best friends advised me to get married again, if I could find a suitable

person. They regarded my former wife as dead to me, and all had been done that could

be. But I was not yet satisfied myself, to give up. I wanted to know certainly what had

become of her. So in the winter of 1845, I resolved to go back to Kentucky, my native

state, to see if I could hear anything from my family.

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Bibb’s findings that winter would make up the fourth time disunity and fifth

epoch of his life. Once in Kentucky Bibb found out that his wife had become the willful

concubine of her master. It is this moment that Bibb, unfortunately, became free of his

marital bonds and free from servitude to forge a new life.

”

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Bibb, 188

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“No sooner had I landed in Madison, than I learned, on inquiry, and from good

authority, that my wife was living in a state of adultery with her master, and had

been for the last three years. This message she sent back to Kentucky, to her

mother and friends. She spoke of the time and manner of our separation by

Deacon Whitfield, my being taken off by the Southern black legs, to where she

knew not; and that she had finally given me up. The child was still with her.

Whitfield had sold her to this man for the above purposes at a high price, and she

was better used than ordinary slaves. This was a death blow to all my hopes and

pleasant plans…From that time I gave her up into the hands of an all-wise

Providence. As she was then living with another man, I could no longer regard

her as my wife. After all the sacrifices, sufferings, and risks which I had run,

striving to rescue her from the grasp of slavery; every prospect and hope was cut

off. She has ever since been regarded as theoretically and practically dead to me

as a wife, for she was living in a state of adultery, according to the law of God

and man.

150

”

To say the least, Bibb was disappointed. Even more poignant, upon hearing the news that

Malinda related herself, Bibb still required further corroboration and convincing from his

mother to cease his attempts to be united with his wife and child. Upon resigning himself

to his position, Bibb acknowledged his circumstance and decided to move on. “In view

of all the facts and circumstances connected with this matter, I deem further comments

and explanations unnecessary on my part. Finding myself thus isolated in this peculiarly

unnatural state, I resolved, in 1846, to spend my days in traveling, to advance the anti-

slavery cause. I spent the summer in Michigan, but in the subsequent fall I took a trip to

New England, where I spent the winter. And there I found a kind reception wherever I

traveled among the friends of freedom. While traveling about in this way among

strangers, I was sometimes sick, with no permanent home, or bosom friend to sympathise

or take that care of me which an affectionate friend would. So I conceived the idea that it

would be better for me to change my position, provided I should find a suitable

person.

151

150

Bibb, 188-189

” With this Bibb eventually marries again and moves on with his life,

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Bibb, 190

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concluding his narrative with a few closing remarks and recollections to close his

narrative.

At first glance, this seems like just a mere romance novel with an unhappy

ending. I argue that Bibb’s love and loss is a claim for his ontological dependence on his

wife and child for his recognition of himself as free. Like Douglass who was free despite

his physical chains in his education, literacy, and self worth, Bibb was in a state of

slavery despite his lack of chains because of his inability to free his wife and child and

reconcile himself to them. This portrait of one’s ontological dependence on their family

is Biblical in nature and stands in contrast to the stratified depiction of the family found

in European political philosophic texts prior to the 20

century. In traditional European,

and then American, depictions of the family the father was presented as a master under

which the wife and children had supporting roles. As found in chapter 6 of The Two

Treatise of Governent by Locke, chapter XX of the Leviathan by Hobbes, and the entirety

of Emile by Rousseau, the family was discussed primarily as its use value to the creation

of the free man who was the father or the rearing and eventual freedom of a male heir.

The family was intended to serve and support the free man yet he existed complete and

autonomous to it. The family was a source of support and obligation yet it was

fundamentally external to the ontological being of the freeman. A man could be free

while his wife was enslaved. A man could consider himself free while his child was

incarcerated. In exceptional instances, most notably in Hobbes’ chapter XX, women can

be conceptually posited as head of households yet in still, the family remains depicted as

a power struggle between autonomous individuals rather than as a cohesive, ontologically

interdependent unit. For Bibb, this was not the case. His existence had become

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dependent on his wife and child. He could not consider himself a free man while his wife

and child were in bondage. This belief has roots in his Christian faith as evidenced by the

eventual dissolution of the marriage.

“18

And the LORD God said, It is not good that the man should be alone; I will

make him an help meet for him.

And out of the ground the LORD God formed

every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam

to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living

creature, that was the name thereof.

And Adam gave names to all cattle, and to

the fowl of the air, and to every beast of the field; but for Adam there was not

found an help meet for him.

And the LORD God caused a deep sleep to fall

upon Adam, and he slept: and he took one of his ribs, and closed up the flesh

instead thereof;

And the rib, which the LORD God had taken from man, made

he a woman, and brought her unto the man.

And Adam said, This is now bone

of my bones, and flesh of my flesh: she shall be called Woman, because she was

taken out of Man.

Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and

shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.

And they were both

naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed.

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”

Christianity tells us that God, when he constructed man, endeavored to find him a help

meet. One who would not only serve, submit to, and aid Adam in his tasks, but to be a

companion, nurturer, and most importantly, metaphysically bond to him in a fashion that

would make them (husband and wife) one flesh before the eyes of God. “One flesh,” as

the scripture states Bibb took literally. To him, being in a state where he lacked chains or

whips, he still considered himself bonded to the commitment he made to protect, nurture,

and provide for his wife and child; his very being depended on their freedom. This is

very different from the manner in which political philosophy during the early modern

period forth depicted the marital union. Rather than Bibb being an isolated individual

who seemed to have contacts to people to whom had befallen a terrible condition, he

looked in the mirror and saw a half-slave. Half-in, half-out, Bibb saw the struggles,

travails, and sufferings of his wife and child as his own because they were, as God

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Genesis 2:18-25

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commanded one flesh, ontologically one person before God. Therefore no matter what

luxury or opulence Bibb found himself in, he was still a slave because his better half was

still in bondage. Hence his repeated attempts, not just to free his wife and child from

servitude, but to make himself whole through their freedom. For Bibb, his status as a

free-man was Biblically, ontologically, and metaphysically tied to the delivering of his

wife and child from slavery. Further evidence of the Biblical basis of Bibb’s recognition

of his own freedom is seen through the dissolution of his marriage. In an innumerable

amount of places, the Holy Bible labels both fornication and adultery as a sin. Because

all sin is accounted turning away from God, those who sin willfully are considered

Blasphemers who take God’s name in vain. Bibb’s wife “had finally given [him] up.

The child was still with her. Whitfield had sold her to this man for the above purposes at

a high price, and she was better used than ordinary slaves…She has ever since been

regarded as theoretically and practically dead to [Bibb] as a wife, for she was living in a

state of adultery, according to the law of God and man.

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Bibb, 189

” The willingness of his wife to

submit to the whims of her master was the equivalent of willful sin. Bibb’s wife, in his

eyes and according to the Christian doctrine, should have preferred death to her

conceding to her status as a concubine. It is only sin that breaks his bond of marriage, not

distance, not will, not hope, nor, material circumstance. This would explain why Bibb

makes such a big deal about his second marriage being forged by law and in God’s

commandment. In scripture, that which is bound by God is protected by God. Bibb,

possibly to protect his frail emotions relegated his first marriage to something God had

not wrought, and his second to a union which was forged in Christ. This provided him

closure for the past and hope for the future but most applicable to my claims, the unions

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were both based in Biblical reverence in which Bibb constructed his identity as

ontologically dependent on his bond with his wife and their co-dependent child.

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CHAPTER SEVEN: HARRIET JACOBS AND THE NARRATIVE OF WOMEN AND

CHASTITY

“During the first years of service in Dr. Flint’s family, I was accustomed to share

some indulgences with the children of my mistress. Though this seemed to me

no more than right, I was grateful for it, and tried to merit the kindness by the

faithful discharge of my duties. But now entered on my fifteenth year-a sad

epoch in the life of a slave girl. My master began to whisper foul words in my

ear. Young as I was, I could not remain ignorant of their import. I tried to treat

them with indifference or contempt. The master’s age, my extreme youth, and

the fear that his conduct would be reported to my grandmother, made him bear

this treatment for many months. He was a crafty man, and resorted to many

means to accomplish his purposes…He tried his utmost to corrupt the pure

principles my grandmother had instilled. He peopled my young mind with

unclean images, such as only a vile monster could think of. I was compelled to

live under the same roof with him- where I saw a man forty years my senior daily

violating the most sacred commandments of nature. He told me I was his

property; that I must be subject to his will in all things. My soul revolted against

the tyranny. But where could I turn for protection? No matter whether the slave

girl be as black as ebony or as fair as her mistress. In either case, there is no

shadow of law to protect her from insult, from violence, or even from death; all

these are inflicted by friends who bear the shape of men.

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”

Harriet Jacobs

155

154

Yellin, Jean Fagan. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself. Cambridge: Harvard

University Press, 2000. p. 27 (Hereafter referenced as Jacobs)

in an effort to add her “testimony to that of abler pens to

convince the people of the Free States what Slavery really is” wrote Incidents in the Life

of a Slave Girl under the pen name Linda Brent. Privileged as much as a slave could

consider themselves, Jacobs enjoyed a mild introduction to slavery until her she was

eventually relinquished to Margaret Horniblow’s five year old niece, and by default her

father, Dr. James Norcom. A lifetime of enduring the lust and manipulations of men

forged the life that Jacob shared in her narrative. Resisted and condemned by slave

masters and their mistresses alike for her brutal honesty, Jacobs’ narrative depicted life as

an enslaved woman with all of its unspoken and often neglected vicissitudes. Though she

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Jacobs wrote her text under the pen name Linda Brent. Also, throughout the text, the characters also are

given pseudo-names. Extensive research done by Jean Fagan Yellin uncovered Jacobs’ true identity as

well as those of the characters in her narrative. This text will use the actual names of the characters

uncovered by Yellin as opposed to the pseudo-names given by Jacobs.

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had her fair share of speaking engagements and published letters and essays, Jacobs’

abolitionist works were more grassroots in nature. Every bit as important to the cause,

Jacobs participated in fundraisers, food drives, and medical shelters as well as many other

events of this type. Ever ready to add her voice to abolitionist affairs, she penned letters,

solicited funds and supplies, and drummed up support on behalf of many small

organizations and concerned citizen groups aimed at the eventual dismantling of the slave

culture of 19

century America.

A slave narrative by definition, Jacobs ironically spends the majority of her

narrative outside of the direct authority of her master. Nevertheless, like Douglass and

Bibb, her status as a slave was more than her legal designation as such or her actual

physical bondage. As Douglass’ chains where in his mind preventing the rise of his

manhood and reason, and Bibb’s chains were more a barrier that prevented him from

being reconciled with his family outside of the boundaries of bondage, Jacobs’ chains

prevented her from conceptualizing herself beyond her sexuality. Harriet Jacobs, as was

the case for women in bondage, was a sex object first, and a working slave second, and a

human being never. Jacobs’ spent the entire narrative trying to escape the pursuit of

those who would reduce her to sexual servitude and though she was driven to use the

same sexual wiles to manufacture aspects of her escape, it was Jacobs’ wit and fortitude

that eventually gained her freedom. Jacobs in her narrative relates many details of her

life and experiences of which six main periods of her life construct what I would consider

an argument for a unique requirement of freedom. Chapters 1-4 make up her

introduction to slavery. Chapters 5-10 depict her involuntary and voluntary sexual

awakening. 11-16 are the chapters where Jacobs encounters life as a slave mother in

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bondage. Chapters 17-29 lay out the details of her impressive seven year confinement in

her grandmother’s attic. 30-40 are the chapters where Jacobs’ continues to elude Dr.

Norcom upon leaving the attic; and they lead to chapter 41 where Jacobs finally finds

liberty. This path through the text illuminates Jacobs’ insistence not only on her freedom

from bondage and her care for her children, additionally it demonstrates Jacobs’

insistence on her right to develop a worth as a woman independent from her sexual use

value to men. SHE wanted to build a home for her children, not just care for them, and

she was not going to wait around for Samuel Tredwell Sawyer, or any other man, to do it.

For an American slave in the 19

century, Jacobs was born into relative luxury.

Born a slave in 1813 in Edenton North Carolina Jacobs, by her own admission, “never

knew it till six years of happy childhood had passed away.

156

” Due to the skill of her

father and the luck of her mother and grandmother to have a descent mistresses, Jacobs

had escaped much of the horrid, early images that plagued most common slaves in the

plantation south. Nevertheless her fortunes changed by the age of six when her mother

died. Left in the care of her grandmother’s mistress she was put to more intensive labor

but still nothing close to the degradation experienced by the majority of other American

slaves at the time. “No toilsome or disagreeable duties were imposed upon me. My

mistress was so kind to me that I was always glad to do her bidding, and proud to labor

for her as much as my young years would permit…Those were happy days- too happy to

last. The slave child had no thought for the morrow; but there came that blight, which

too surely waits on every human being born to be a chattel.

157

156

Jacobs, 5

” Around age 12 Jacobs’

mistress died. Brief hopes that the bond her former mistress, she, her mother, and

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Jacobs, 7

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grandmother shared would result in her being freed were dashed when her former

mistress’ will was read. She had been bequeathed to the daughter of her mistress’ sister.

Even before Jacobs had knew the totality of the calamity that had just descended upon

her, she was adequately traumatized by the fact she had been sold.

“My mistress had taught me the precepts of God’s word: ‘Thou shalt love thy

neighbor as thyself.’ ‘Whatsoever ye would that men should do unto you, do ye

even so unto them.’ But I was her slave, and I suppose she did not recognize me

as her neighbor. I would give much to blot out from my memory that one great

wrong…I try to think with less bitterness of this act of injustice…I bless her

memory…Notwithstanding my grandmother’s long and faithful service to her

owners, not one of her children escaped the auction block. These God-breathing

machines are no more, in the sight of their masters, than the cotton they plant, or

the horses they tend.

158

”

If there remained any glimpse of freedom, any semblance of humane treatment, or feeling

of self-mastery Jacobs may have fooled herself into keeping from her sheltered childhood

it was shattered at the reading of her mistress’ will. Jacobs was fully introduced to the

annals of slavery and the depths to which those who were a part of it would sink to

maintain status quo.

Jacobs was sent to stay with the sister of her former mistress and her husband, Dr.

James Norcom. Unlike her former mistress, the Norcoms were typical owners who

treated their slaves like the chattel their social status dictated they were. “Mrs. [Norcom],

like many southern women was totally deficient in energy. She had not strength to

superintend her household affairs; but her nerves were so strong, that she could sit easily

in her chair and see a woman whipped, till blood trickled from every stroke of the lash.

She was a member of the church; but partaking of the Lord’s supper did not seem to put

her in a Christian frame of mind. If dinner was not served at the exact time on that

particular Sunday, she would station herself in the kitchen, and wait till it was dished, and

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Jacobs, 8

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then spit in all the kettles and pans that had been used for cooking. She did this to

prevent the cook and her children from eking out their meagre fare with the remains of

the gravy and other scrapings…Dr. [Norcom] was an epicure. The cook never sent a

dinner to his table without fear and trembling; for if there happened to be a dish not to his

liking, he would either order her whipped, or compel her to eat every mouthful in his

presence. The poor, hungry creature might not of objected to eating it; but she did object

to having her master cram it down her throat till she choked.

159

From this juncture in her life throughout the first four chapters, Jacobs’ narrative

read like a paradigmatic childhood awakening into slavery. It had just come much later

in life for Jacobs. Whippings, floggings, and harsh treatment were the norm. Notably at

the end of each chapter (one through four) is a scene of a mother struggling to get her

children out of slavery in one form or another. In chapter one Jacobs’ grandmother had

hoped the death of her mistress would provide for the freedom of her children and

grandchildren but this was not the case, they were all sold on the auction block despite

her years of faithful service. At the end of chapter two is the story of a poor woman

whose child was dying which led her to exclaim, “The baby is dead, thank God; and I

” This was a new life for

Jacobs. To make matters worse she was quickly initiated into her fate with the death of

her father. Miserable, distraught, and in need of consoling, Jacobs had one meager

request: to visit her dead father who was but under a mile away. The need flowers for an

upcoming dinner party required Jacobs’ time and attention preventing her from seeing her

father. Jacobs was able to gain more insight to the manner in which her worth, or lack

thereof, was constituted.

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Jacobs, 12

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hope my poor child will soon be in heaven too,

160

It is apropos that the next epoch of her life was foreshadowed by her recognition

of the importance of the right to protect children for slave mothers. The first time

disunity brings us to the next phase of Jacobs’ life: sexual awakening and eventually

motherhood. Now fifteen, Jacobs had entered into what she referred to as “a sad epoch in

the life of a slave girl.” Now more mature emotionally and physically, her de facto

master, Dr. Norcom began to lust after her sexually. Only a child, Jacobs was subject to

innuendo and innuendo, advance after advance with little ability to resist without fear of

” while being mocked by Mrs. Norcom

in her pain and loss. Chapter three concludes with a woman who had hopes that having

seven children would guarantee that she could keep one or two, hoping that they all could

not possibly sell. This woman was sadly mistaken. The master auctioned off all of her

children leaving her distraught, empty, and broken. Finally chapter four ended on a

slightly better note with Jacobs’ grandmother’s son Joseph successfully escaping to New

York. Despite the happiness her last remaining son Mark Ramsey was still in bondage

and she still endeavored to labor for his freedom. Each ending highlights a different

reality for slave women. Whether respected, diligent lifetime workers, grassroots

abolitionists, or disregarded chattel, all slave women were subject to lose their children to

servitude, the auction block, or death with little to no ability to stop it. No law would

protect them, no man could save them, and no beneficence could be expected of those

who enslaved them. As would be discovered latter in the narrative, slave women were

empowered and protected by their own agency only. Those who rolled over and

conciliatorily accepted their condition were used and lost their precious children, while

those who acted proactively stood a chance to protect their seeds with their own hands.

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being reprimanded. Only sheer wit and cunning enabled her to strategically prevent her

from being merely raped in broad daylight in what was supposed to be both her home and

workplace. Ironically Jacobs demonstrated a clear grasp of her status as chattel and that

the advances she received from Dr. Norcom were the result of his power, hormones, and

unchecked social legitimacy gone mad. It was common for slaves to endure the

ridiculous desires, demands, and expectations of members of the supposed higher class,

namely white men. What troubled and surprised Jacobs most was not the behavior of Dr.

Norcom, rather it was the actions, or lack thereof, of Mrs. Norcom. “The mistress, who

ought to protect the helpless victim, has no other feelings towards her but those of

jealousy and rage…I [explained what occurred between the master and I] as she ordered.

As I went on with my account her color changed frequently, she wept, and sometimes

groaned. She spoke in tomes so sad, that I was touched by her grief. The tears came to

my eyes; but I was soon convinced that her emotions arose from anger and wounded

pride. She felt that her marriage vows were desecrated, her dignity insulted; but she had

no compassion for the poor victim of her husband’s perfidy. She pitied herself as a

martyr; but she was incapable of feeling for the condition of shame and misery in which

her unfortunate, helpless slave was placed.

161

We find that Jacobs, through her frustration is suggesting something if not

unheard of in the antebellum south, definitely unpopular; that African slave women were

women who deserved to be championed in the same manner as White women by

proponents of the meager women’s movement of the time. If her mistress were at all

concerned for the manner in which women were subject to the brutal whims and

” Beyond the sheer amazement that she had

to endure the mistress’ misplaced anger and hostility Jacobs’ emotions tell another story.

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Jacobs, 33

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advances of men and felt any solidarity with her as a woman she would at the very least

not be angry at her for having to endure the burden of Dr. Norcom’s innuendos. Jacobs’

claim was a feminist call to arms for solidarity in which she was calling her mistress out

for being a traitor. “I have not written my experiences in order to attract attention to

myself; on the contrary, it would have been more pleasant to me to have been silent about

my own history. Neither do I care to excite sympathy for my own sufferings. But I do

earnestly desire to arouse the women of the North to a realizing sense of the condition of

two millions of women at the South, still in bondage, suffering what I suffered, and most

of them are far worse.

162

” Mrs. Norcom “possessed the key to her husband’s character

before I was born. She might have used this knowledge to counsel and to screen the

young and the innocent among her slaves; but for them she had no sympathy. They were

the objects of her constant superstition and malevolence.

163

” Jacobs illuminated the

intersection between class and gender where seemingly universal and morally pure

documents like “The Declaration of Independence” and “The Declaration of Sentiments”

placed a double burden upon slave women. “Slavery is terrible for men; but it is far more

terrible for women. Superadded to the burden common to all, they have wrongs, and

sufferings, and mortifications peculiarly their own.

164

162

Jacobs, 1

” To be Black and a woman was a

unique burden more than either singularly. Included in the sufferings of each but

excluded in the redemptive cries of each, Black women were left as outcasts and forced

to champion their own cause for liberation and equal rights. Sojourner Truth, Harriet

Tubman, and others became glaring examples of warring souls whose dogged strength

alone kept them from being torn asunder before Du Bois ever was penned his tern double

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164

Jacobs, 77

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consciousness. Not worthy of being delivered from adultery, rape, and molestation by

white women and their movement, and relegated to a “woman’s place” as dependant and

inferior by the larger abolitionist movement, the unique sufferings of Black women went

unnoticed, unchallenged, most importantly, unaided.

“Reader, I draw no imaginary pictures of southern homes. I am telling you the

plain truth. Yet when victims make their escape from this wild beast of Slavery,

northerners consent to act the part of bloodhounds, and hunt the poor fugitive

back into his den, ‘full of dead man’s bones, and all uncleanness.’ Nay, more,

they are not only willing, but proud, to give their daughters in marriage to

slaveholders. The poor girls have romantic notions of a sunny clime, and of

flowering vines that all the year round shade a happy home. To what

disappointments are they destined! The young wife soon learns that the husband

in whose hands she has placed her happiness pays no regard to his marriage

vows. Children of every shade of complexion play with her own fair babies, and

too well she knows that they are born unto him of his own household. Jealousy

and hatred enter the flowery home, and it is ravaged of its loveliness.

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”

The burdens of slave women and slave men are obvious, but the tie between slave women

and free women was uncharted territory. Jacobs uncovers the lewd and lascivious

behavior of male slave masters yet more shockingly, she vocalizes the degree in which

their mistresses are both conciliatory, and tacitly party, to the daily brutalization slave

women endure. Rather than choosing to allow herself to be defined by her plight, Jacobs

attempted to transcend her mistress’ jealousy and misplaced anger.

This epoch of Jacobs’ life still had much to teach her. She made the grave

mistake of falling in love with a free colored carpenter. For both personal and business

reasons Dr. Norcom fervently objected to the very idea of selling Jacobs. Though she

had forged a bond with this man she realized that her station in life would prevent them

from ever being free and happy together. Out of love she entreated him to leave her and

to save himself by leaving for the free states. “I advised him to go to the Free States,

where his tongue would not be tied, and where his intelligence would be of more avail to

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him. He left me, still hoping the day would come when I could be bought. With me the

lamp of hope had gone out. The dream of my girlhood was over. I felt lonely and

desolate….After my lover went away, Dr. [Norcom] contrived a new plan. He seemed to

have an idea that my fear of my mistress was his greatest obstacle…my master said he

was going to build a house for me, and that he could do it with little trouble and

expense…I vowed before my Maker that I would never enter it. I had rather toil on the

plantation from dawn till dark; I had rather live and die in jail, that drag on, from day to

day, through such a living death…I would do any thing, every thing, for the sake of

defeating him. What could I do? I thought and thought, till I became desperate, and

made a plunge into the abyss.

166

In perhaps the most philosophic chapter of the text, Jacobs in chapter ten relates

her regrettable decision to intentionally give herself to Samuel Tredwell Sawyer with the

intention of pitting him against Dr. Norcom in hopes that he could use his status as a

white man to her advantage. If Swayer fell in love or impregnated her he, in her

estimation, would seek to purchase her from Dr. Norcom thereby achieving her end of

escaping Dr. Norcom’s advances. In addition to explaining struggles of slave mothers in

protecting their children, exposing the hypocrisy of southern mistresses, and the futility

of choosing who she loves, Jacobs tackled another problem Black women faced. “He

was an educated and eloquent gentleman; too eloquent, alas, for the poor slave girl who

trusted in him. Of course I saw whither all this was tending. I knew the impassable gulf

between us; but to be an object of interest to a man who is not married, and who is not

her master, is agreeable to the pride and feelings of a slave, if her miserable situation has

left her any pride or sentiment. It seems less degrading to give one’s self, than to submit

”

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to compulsion. There is something akin to freedom in having a lover who has no control

over you, except that which he gains by kindness and attachment. A master may treat

you as rudely as he pleases, and you dare not speak; moreover, the wrong does not seem

so great with an unmarried man, as with one who has a wife to be made unhappy. There

may be sophistry in all this; but the condition of a slave confuses all principles of

morality, and, in fact, renders the practice of them impossible.

167

” Aside from the choice

to love whomever one chooses (which she shares with Bibb especially), the right to rear

children (which she also shares with Bibb), and the solidarity she should share with her

mistress as a woman, Jacobs relates the importance of the freedom to choose whom one

submits their body to in sexual intercourse. Not to be confused with or conflated with the

freedom to love, the right to submit sexually to a person of one’s own choosing was a

right that Jacobs chose to seize through sleeping with Sawyer. Jacobs understands that

that her actions may seem unwarranted by many. “I knew what I did, and I did it with

deliberate calculation. But, O, ye happy women, whose purity has been sheltered from

childhood, who have been free to choose the objects of your affection, whose homes are

protected by law, do not judge the poor desolate slave girl too severely!...I tried hard to

preserve my self-respect; but I was struggling alone in the powerful grasp of the demon

Slavery; and the monster proved too strong for me. I felt as if I was forsaken by God and

man; as if all my efforts must be frustrated; and I became reckless in my despair.

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Jacobs, 54-55

” In

this admission Jacobs proves ironically that she is aware of societal proprieties and that

her actions by those standards are crass, yet she is also validated by her inalienable rights

as a human being to do with her sexuality as she wills, and by those standards her actions

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were reasonable because she did not commit adultery. In so doing she challenges not her

morals but those of a society that would place her in the position to make such a choice.

“O virtuous reader! You never knew what it is to be a slave; to be entirely unprotected by

law or custom; to have the laws reduce you to the condition of chattel, entirely subject to

the will of another. You never exhausted your ingenuity in avoiding the snares, and

eluding the power of a hated tyrant; you never shuddered at the sound of his footsteps,

and trembled within hearing of his voice. I know I did wrong. No one can feel it more

sensibly that I do. The painful and humiliating memory will haunt me to my dying day.

Still, in looking back, calmly, on the events of my life, I feel that the slave woman ought

not to be judged by the same standard as others.

169

Her choice in actions had consequences. This is the second time disunity and

third major epoch of Jacob’s life. She bore two children and had ignited an indignant

spite in Dr. Norcom. Feeling directly affronted by Jacobs’ actions, Dr. Norcom became

more determined to bend her to his will. Things however were different now. Jacobs had

more than herself to think about. Her primary concern was no longer avoiding Dr.

Norcom’s advances. She was determined to at the very least free her children and save

them from a life of perpetual servitude at whatever cost to herself. For Dr. Norcom,

selling her was out of the question and he renewed his plan to build a house for her.

When it became apparent that Jacobs would never relent, Dr. Norcom decided to pit her

children against her. He offered her freedom for herself and her children if she just gave

in and lived in a cottage he would get for her. Jacobs knew the price she would have to

pay had she agreed to such an offer. Also, she was well aware that he was under no

” She turns her seemingly immoral act

into a critique of slavery and greater American social propriety

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obligation to fulfill his promise of freeing her and her children. His proposition had an

alternative. If she rejected his offer she would be sent to Norcom’s plantation where she

would have to endure hard labor and her children would eventually share her fate; certain

that his motives where mere trickery, Jacobs decided to take her chances and reject his

offer. “Before the week expired, I heard that young Mr. [Norcom] was about to be

married to a lady of his own stamp. I foresaw the position I should occupy in his

establishment. I had once been sent to the plantation for punishment, and fear of the son

had induced the father to recall me very soon. My mind was made up; I was resolved

that I would foil my master and save my children, or I would perish in the attempt…On

the decisive day the doctor came, and said he hoped I had made a wise choice. ‘I am

ready to go to the plantation, sir,’ I replied…I had my secret hopes; but I must fight my

battle alone. I had a woman’s pride, and a mother’s love for my children; and I resolved

that out of the darkness of this hour a brighter dawn should rise for them. My master had

power and law on his side; I had a determined will. There is might in each

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The next time disunity and epoch of her life consisted in her escape from Dr.

Norcom’s home and eventual holding up in her grandmother’s attic. After contriving her

escape and eluding her would be recaptures, Jacobs managed to find a more permanent

place to hide in a specially designed crawlspace in her grandmother’s attic. While the

physical feat of remaining in that space for seven years was in fact tremendous, Jacobs

was far from just hiding in that space. Ever determined to fulfill her obligation as a

” This

might, eventually led to Jacobs’ endeavoring to escape to freedom. Shortly after working

on the plantation she was notified that her children were to follow her shortly. Rather

than accepting her fate she decided to wield this might into agency.

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mother, Jacobs continued to pursue a permanent state of freedom for her children with

her own hands. In the den, “I was left with my own thoughts- starless as the midnight

darkness around me. My friends feared I should become a cripple for life; and I was so

weary of my long imprisonment that, had it not been for the hope of serving my children,

I should have been thankful to die; but for their sakes, I was willing to bear on.

171

”

Though much is made of whether or not Jacobs could have physically endured such a

stay, the pertinent aspect of this period in her life is characterized by her continued

determination to free her children by her own hand and to retain her self-sovereignty not

only in locomotion but more importantly in the submission of her body to another. “This

continued darkness was oppressive. It seemed horrible to sit or lie in a cramped position

day after day, without one gleam of light. Yet I would have chosen this, rather than my

lot as a slave, though white people considered it an easy one; and it was so compared

with the fate of others. I was never cruelly over-worked; I was never lacerated with the

whip from head to foot; I was never beaten and bruised that I could not turn from one

side to the other; I never had my heel-strings cut to prevent my running away; I was

never chained to a log and forced to drag it about, while I toiled in the fields from

morning till night; I was never branded with iron, or torn by bloodhounds. On the

contrary, I had always been kindly treated, and tenderly cared for, until I came into the

hands of Dr. [Norcom]. I had never wished for freedom till then. But though my life in

slavery was comparatively devoid of hardships, God pity the woman who is compelled to

lead such a life!

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” It is clear that Jacobs likened the specific trials faced by women, the

constant advances and innuendos of men as well as the acting out of those accostings and

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threats, to the more gory and gruesome, yet typical trials faced mostly by men in other

relations of the hardships of slavery. It was Dr. Norcom’s perversion that made Jacobs

wish for freedom as much as any whip or lash could have. Even after enduring the seven

years in the attic and procuring the courage to maneuver openly in public trying to secure

a safe place for her and her children it became apparent that freedom for Jacobs was not

merely being outside of the Norcom household and having the absence of external

hindrances to her activities. The next epoch of her life became characterized by her

brazen determination and cunning in her continued endeavors to gain sustainable freedom

from Dr. Norcom.

“Before us lay the city of strangers. We looked at each other, and the eyes of both

were moistened with tears. We had escaped from slavery, and we supposed ourselves to

be safe from the hunters. But we were alone in the world, and we had left dear ties

behind us; ties cruelly alone by the demon Slavery.

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” Like Bibb, Jacobs was escaped

but not free as evidenced by her claim that “In order to protect my children, it was

necessary that I should own myself. I called myself free, and sometimes felt so; but I

knew I was insecure.

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” Jacobs knew that so long as Dr. Norcom drew breath he would

attempt to reclaim his property. Year after year Dr. Norcom would make renewed

attempts to reclaim Jacobs and her children. These attempts made her nervous because

“though Dr. [Norcom] had received a large sum of money for [her children]. [Jacobs]

knew the law would decide that [she] was his property, and would probably still give his

daughter a claim to [her] children; but [Jacobs] regarded such laws as the regulations of

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robbers, who had no rights that [she] was bound to respect.

175

Sadly Jacobs was mistaken that Dr. Norcom’s death would bring about her

liberation, for he ensured that his poisonous bite would span generations so that he could

fulfill his wishes vicariously through is progeny. “His departure from this world did not

diminish my danger. He had threatened my grandmother that his heirs should hold me in

slavery after he was gone; that I never should be free so long as a child of his

survived…The doctor died in embarrassed circumstances, and had little to will to his

heirs, except such property as he was unable to grasp. I was well aware what I had to

expect from the family of [Norcoms]; and my fears were confirmed by a letter from the

south, warning me to be on my guard, because Mrs. [Norcom] openly declared that her

” This clear denial of Dr.

Norcom’s legitimate rights leads one to question why Jacobs still did not consider herself

free? I ironically turn to a social contract argument for a state of war. A period of war

consists not in constant battle but in a period where conflict is reasonably anticipated.

Locke likens illegitimate property exchanges, for instance theft, to a state of war. As is

the case in a state of war each side remains in a defensive posture towards one another

until the matter is resolved through the absolution of debt by one side or death. Jacobs is

certain that Dr. Norcom would never acknowledge her freedom so regardless of how

many legitimate legal transactions she makes Dr. Norcom would still consider her and

her children his property so the absolution of debt is not a possibility. To borrow Locke’s

terms, Dr. Norcom has a design upon the life of Jacobs to be intimate with her and is

determined to see it through. The only other was for Jacobs to find peace and be free of

Dr. Norcom’s advances is in his death which does end up happening.

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daughter could not afford to lose so valuable a slave as I was.

176

“My brain reeled as I read these lines. A gentleman near me said, ‘It’s true; I

have seen the bill of sale.’ ‘The bill of sale!’ Those words struck me like a blow.

So I was sold at last! A human being sold in the free city of New York! The bill

of sale is on record, and future generations will learn from it that women were

articles of traffic in New York, late in the nineteenth century of the Christian

religion. It may hereafter prove a useful document to antiquaries, who are

seeking to measure the progress of civilization in the United States. I well know

the value of that bit of paper; but much as I love freedom, I do not like to look

upon it. I am deeply grateful to the generous friends who procured it, but I

despise the miscreant who demanded payment for what never rightfully belonged

to him or his.

” This circumstance

paved the way for Jacobs’ final time disunity and last epoch of her narrative: her eventual

freedom. Proud and stubborn, Jacobs rejected the idea that she was an object that could

be bought and sold. Despite having the good fortune of eventually meeting and

befriending the Willis’ and even better, their willingness to buy Jacobs, she would have

none of it. Recognizing her stubbornness, the Willis’ decided to purchase Jacobs’

freedom and to gain an agreement that her children would likewise be free from

recapture. Mixed emotionally Jacobs was still mortified at the thought of being bought

and sold again.

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”

Despite this lamentation at her being bought, Jacobs still did not consider her mission

achieved. Back when she reared children her motivations had shifted. Freeing herself of

Dr. Norcom’s advances was only one of her goals. Her primary objective was to provide

a home where she and her children could live in freedom. Despite her admission that she

and her children are free, she qualifies that statement with “the dream of my life is not yet

realized. I do not sit with my children in a home of my own. I still long for a hearthstone

of my own, however humble. I wish it for my children’s sake far more than for my own.

But God orders circumstances as to keep me with my friend Mrs. Bruce. Love duty,

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gratitude, also bind me to her side.

178

” No longer obligated to serve those who treat her

as chattel, Jacobs is still not fully matured into the self-sufficient woman she endeavored

to be since slavery reared its ugly head in her life at age twelve. We find that though

Jacobs endured much, her dignity never wavered, nor did her expectation that her power

in her will would lead to her eventual release from Dr. Norcom’s advances and the

construction of a safe, free home for her children which has yet to come to pass.

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CHAPTER EIGHT: A COMPARISON OF THE NARRATIVE CONVENTIONS

FOUND IN THE SLAVE NARRATIVES

The quote by Hegel at the outset of this document underscores the feelings

Europeans and Americans had towards African descended peoples from the 15

century

well into modernity. “Negroes are to be regarded as a race of children who remain

immersed in their state of uninterested naïveté. They are sold, and let themselves be sold,

without any reflection on the rights or wrongs of the matter. The Higher which they feel

they do not hold fast to, it is only a fugitive thought. This Higher they transfer to the first

stone they come across, thus making it their fetish and they throw this fetish away if it

fails to help them…they do not show an inherent striving for culture. In their native

country the most shocking despotism prevails. There they do not attain to the feeling of

human personality, their mentality is quite dormant, remaining sunk within itself and

making no progress, and thus corresponding to the compact, differenceless mass of the

African continent.” Correspondingly, “it is [thought that] in the Caucasian race that mind

first attains to absolute unity with itself. Here for the first time mind enters into complete

opposition to the life of Nature, apprehends itself in its absolute self-dependence, wrests

itself free from the fluctuation between one extreme and the other, achieves self-

determination, self-development, and in doing so creates world history.” African

warlords as a source of material exchange traded an almost incalculable amount of slaves

to European traders voyaging to the continent in search of everything from spices to gold.

Different from their capitalistic brethren, the members of the African Diaspora that found

their residence in the Americas were reduced to chattel and stripped of their status as

human beings. Because Europeans thought themselves to be quintessentially human and

thus rational, they had the legitimate right to determine that African descended peoples

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could be used as chattel as evidenced in both the Papal Bulls Dum Diversas and the

Romanus Pontifex. Ever reliant on opulence and convenience, the European descendants

in the Americas grew ever dependant on the resources produced by the free labor of these

non-humans and as a result compiled justification upon justification for the continuing of

the use of African slaves as a primary means of social and individual wealth.

Recognizing that liberation could and would not come through Nat Turner like

demonstrations of force, or through some overt demonstration of benevolence and the

renouncing of the opulence slavery provided, abolitionists turned to former slaves in

hopes that the chronicling of their tales and experiences would strike an emotional or

rational chord in their readers and eventually build a groundswell of support for the

eventual abolishment of slavery. Slave narratives were tools for abolitionists first, and

accounts of experiences second. Because resources were scarce and the possibility for

extreme punishment, banishment, or both very real, publishers of slave narratives aided

ex-slaves, some of whom were masterful writers, others not so much, in the construction

of narratives that would both effectively relate their unique experiences, while

simultaneously serve the greater good of working towards the abolition of slavery. Aside

from the obvious similarities, that all three narratives take place at least in part, in the

U.S. plantation south, that all three take place in the 19

century, that all three authors are

ex slaves who found their way to eventual freedom in the north, the narratives also have a

shared intended purpose. As a result of the shared desire for abolition, African American

slave narratives share a great many literary conventions and rhetorical strategies which

were proven to be effective in the achieving the goal of the eradication of slavery. These

conventions and rhetorical claims are deployed through the highlighting or omitting

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certain aspects of the experiences authors lived experiences. In so doing, the narratives

become calculated arguments intended to rhetorically leave the reader with very specific

questions and thoughts all aimed at hopefully converting them into an eventual

sympathizer for abolition. Of the shared conventions and rhetorical strategies deployed,

three stick out as especially pertinent both to the immediate desire for abolition, and the

more conceptual argument that the authors desired specific rights and liberties they

should have been afforded as human beings: the case for Christian hypocrisy, slavery as a

descent rather than a natural condition, and the requisite of the willingness to die in the

attaining of one’s liberty.

Due in part to the circumstances under which America was formed, as well as the

history of the people who eventually populated it, the United States grew into a nation

that was, and remains, a self-professed Christian nation. Though the U.S. is officially a

space of religious toleration, the Christian population of the United States has enjoyed a

democratic majority in all social and political spaces since its inception. During the 19

century, the U.S. was almost exclusively Christian; discounting the non-recognized

religions of the Asian and African slaves and indentured servants. As a slave in the

plantation south, many were converted to Christianity whether by rhetoric or by force. In

a short period of time, hundreds of thousands of slaves were converted to Christianity.

Hoping to benefit from the commandments to obey one’s master and to respect authority,

slave masters conditioned their slaves into the Christian religion in droves. Attracted by

the escapist themes of Christianity, slaves held fast to its promises. Heaven, strength,

deliverance, and in times of struggle, patience, perseverance, and hope are all hallmarks

of the religion that provided its attraction to African American slaves. Christianity

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commands that in order to attain the strength and power over suffering Christ can provide

one must seek earnestly in all things to be Christ-like. Slave masters consistently touted

their possession of wealth and decadence as evidence of their good favor with God. They

saw themselves as living Christ-like lives through providing for the meager subsistence

of what they considered lower life forms. Through acts of benevolence like using a soft

leather whip instead of the cow-hide, giving their table scraps and pot scrapings to the

field slaves for their dinner on special occasions, or smacking a child servant rather than

punching them, the masters demonstrated their kind hearts and the love of Christ. They

ministered to their slaves that their favor came from their adherence to the principles and

ideas contained in “The Good Book,” otherwise known as The Holy Bible. Seeking at

minimal, the strength to carry on, slaves became enamored with the Bible. Little by little

slaves learned, both on their own with what little literacy they had, or through the good

will of those who could with a clearer conscience could call themselves Christians, more

about the scriptures. Slaves’ knowledge of the Bible grew beyond 2 Peter 2:18-24, “

Servants, be subject to your masters with all fear; not only to the good and gentle, but

also to the froward.

For this is thankworthy, if a man for conscience toward God

endure grief, suffering wrongfully.

For what glory is it, if, when ye be buffeted for your

faults , ye shall take it patiently ? but if, when ye do well , and suffer for it, ye take it

patiently , this is acceptable with God.

For even hereunto were ye called : because

Christ also suffered for us, leaving us an example, that ye should follow his steps:

Who

did no sin, neither was guile found in his mouth:

Who, when he was reviled , reviled

not again ; when he suffered , he threatened not; but committed himself to him that

judgeth righteously:

Who his own self bare our sins in his own body on the tree, that

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we , being dead to sins, should live unto righteousness: by whose stripes ye were healed.”

As the slaves read they discovered many contradictions to the actions of their masters.

Though the slaves and their masters could have continued on in a proverbial game of cat

and mouse, quoting and misquoting scriptures, each accusing the other of being heretics,

slaves eventually came across sections of the Bible like the gospel according to James.

“

Blessed is the man that endureth temptation: for when he is tried , he shall

receive the crown of life, which the Lord hath promised to them that love him.

Let no man say when he is tempted , I am tempted of God: for God cannot be

tempted with evil, neither tempteth he any man:

But every man is tempted ,

when he is drawn away of his own lust, and enticed .

Then when lust hath

conceived , it bringeth forth sin: and sin, when it is finished , bringeth forth

death.

Do not err , my beloved brethren.

Every good gift and every perfect

gift is from above, and cometh down from the Father of lights, with whom is no

variableness, neither shadow of turning.

Of his own will begat he us with the

word of truth, that we should be a kind of firstfruits of his creatures.

Wherefore, my beloved brethren, let every man be swift to hear , slow to speak ,

slow to wrath:

For the wrath of man worketh not the righteousness of God.

Wherefore lay apart all filthiness and superfluity of naughtiness, and receive with

meekness the engrafted word, which is able to save your souls.

But be ye doers

of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving your own selves.

For if any be a

hearer of the word, and not a doer, he is like unto a man beholding his natural

face in a

glass:

For he beholdeth himself, and goeth his way , and straightway

forgetteth what manner of man he was .

But whoso looketh into the perfect law

of liberty, and continueth therein, he being not a forgetful hearer, but a doer of

the work, this man shall be blessed in his deed.

If any man among you seem to

be religious, and bridleth not his tongue, but deceiveth his own heart, this man's

religion is vain.

Pure religion and undefiled before God and the Father is this,

To visit the fatherless and widows in their affliction, and to keep himself

unspotted from the world.

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”

It had became evident to the slave population that their masters where hypocrites.

Despite their knowledge of the word and their seemingly endless amounts of good works

in their respective churches, the idea that God admonishes Christians was new for slaves.

That one could speak the word, preach the word, act in discord with the word and be held

liable was not preached to slaves. They were only fed the sections of the Bible that

commanded reverence for earthly masters and reinforced the idea that God created

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hierarchies in the world which ought to be retained, for example, man’s lordship and

dominion over beasts. Jacobs wrote, “There is a great difference between Christianity

and religion at the south. If a man goes to the communion table, and pays money into the

treasury of the church, no matter if it be the price of blood, he is called religious. If a

pastor has offspring by a woman not his wife, the church dismiss him, if she is a white

woman; but if she is colored, it does not hinder his continuing to be their good

shepherd…The conversion of the doctor [to the Episcopal Church], the day after he had

been confirmed, certainly gave me no indication that he had ‘renounced the devil and all

his works.’…[He told me] ‘You would do well to join the church, too, Linda.’ ‘There are

sinners enough in it already,’ rejoined I. ‘If I could be allowed to live like a Christian, I

should be glad.

180

’ ‘You can do what I require; and if you are faithful to me, you will be

as virtuous as my wife,’ he replied. I answered the Bible didn’t say so. His voice

became hoarse with rage. ‘How dare you preach to me about you infernal Bible!’ he

exclaimed. ‘What right have you, who are my negro, to talk to me about what you like,

and what you wouldn’t like? I am your master, and you shall obey me.’ No wonder the

saves sing,- ‘Ole Satan’s church is here below’ Up to God’s free church I hope to go.

181

To be doers of the word and not just hearers of the word had further reaching

implications than just designating the slave masters as hypocrites. The narratives were

written not to slave masters of the south in hopes they would change their ways. The

audience of the slave narratives was the liberals of the north; those who knew of the

atrocities in the south but were able to still sleep at night comfortable that they were not a

part of the suffering of others. Those who willingly ignored the pangs of their conscience

”

180

Jacobs is referring to the Doctor’s continuous adulterous advances towards her to which the Doctor

ironically replies with one such innuendo.

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yet still considered themselves both moral and holy. James chapter one was especially

effective on these individuals. Though there exists a profound disjunction in character

where one could pray to Jesus Christ, and save souls on Sunday morning, then have tea

with the pastor at noon, then whip a defenseless teenager half to death before dinner,

Bibb points out that in the scripture sin is regarded as having no gradations and those in

the north who sit idle while these atrocities occur in God’s eyes are every bit as liable.

Bibb ends his text with an petition to Christians everywhere, yet in context primarily

those in the north, “Having thus tried to show the best side of slavery that I can conceive

of, the reader can exercise his own judgment in deciding whether a man can be a Bible

Christian, and yet hold his Christian brethren as property, so that they may be sold at any

time in market, as sheep or oxen, to pay his debts…Is this Christianity? Is it honest or

right? Is it doing as we would be done by? Is it in accordance with the principles of

humanity or justice? I believe slaveholding to be a sin against God and man under all

circumstances. I have no sympathy with the person or persons who tolerate and support

the system willingly and knowingly, morally, religiously, or politically.

182

Bibb, 203-204

” It is literarily

apparent that this plea is to the north because slave culture in the south was so pervasive

that it would be strange that one could live there and not be knowledgeable about such

things as Bibb and other slave narratives illuminate. The question is what exactly is Bibb

pleading for? It would be rhetorically moot to merely get the citizens of the north to

admit slavery was wrong for their mere admission of slavery as a vile practice does not

help the slaves in the least, for the northern freemen have no rule over the slave owners in

the south that could force them to relinquish their rights to their own property at the whim

of the northern freemen. The plea is made at the very end where Bibb states bluntly, “I

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have no sympathy with the person or persons who tolerate and support the system

willingly and knowingly, morally, religiously, or politically.

183

Unifying themes found in Jacobs’ hostility towards the unbridled hypocrisy of

southern slave owners with Bibb’s rhetorical plea, Douglass concludes his narrative

doing both tasks simultaneously. Douglass draws a distinction between Christianity and

religion (as do Bibb and Jacobs do as well in other places in their narratives). To

Christianity Douglass lavishes praise and sincerity. American Christianity, mostly in the

south, however is tainted with religion where people “play church” and do not live up to

the same principles they preach. In the distinction Douglass is rhetorically careful to not

say all American Christians or that hypocrisy only resides in the south. Douglass’

rhetorical masterstroke comes from his inclusion of a poem. The poem, though great, is

” This statement is

rhetorically masterful. The reader is now rendered morally culpable for the suffering of

the slaves in the south through their mere completion of the text whether they want to be

or not. The key word is “tolerate”. As James 1 states, the tenants of the Bible require

action. One cannot merely know what is right and not act upon in. To be aware of the

suffering of others and to remain neutral when one has the means to alleviate the

suffering makes the neutral party complicit in the transgression against the suffering

party; even Locke would attest to this. To be clear Bibb is sure to specify that the

Christians must mobilize morally in their own actions, religiously in the church, and

politically in congress. These three areas of apathy are where those who are morally

culpable must become active. Without claiming it outright Bibb is saying to northern

free Christians that you cannot consider yourself a saved Christian if you are not acting

on behalf of your enslaved brethren through soliciting change in social morals and laws.

183

Bibb, 203-204

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less important than its author; “I conclude these remarks by copying the following

portrait of the religion of the south, which I soberly affirm is ‘true to life,’ and without

caricature or the slightest exaggeration. It is said to have been drawn, several years

before the present anti-slavery agitation began, by a northern Methodist preacher, who,

while residing at the south, and an opportunity to see slaveholding morals, manners, and

piety, with his own eyes. ‘Shall I not visit for these things?’ saith the Lord. Shall not my

soul be avenged on such a nation as this?

184

The second similarity to all three narratives was the claim that, contrary to

arguments of the time, slavery was not a natural condition for Blacks. Though Eugenics

by the 19

century had moved from arguments of the non-human status of Africans and

” This quote does several things for Douglass.

First it reestablishes the north-south piety split where the bulk of the heathens and

hypocrites are seen as residing in the south, necessary for northern freemen to not feel

offended. Second, it gives a paradigmatic example of what slave narrative authors hope

to have happen; an “agitation” against slavery led by northern freemen who are endowed

with rights and power that slaves and free Blacks do not possess. Third, it legitimates

Douglass and other slave narrative author’s assessment of the south by an individual

rhetorically constructed as “objective.” And lastly, it incorporates a “fire and brimstone”

warning against those who would choose to remain apathetic. Douglass, like Bibb and

Jacobs, did more than merely demonstrate the manner in which the slave masters were

not acting in accordance with the moral principles of their professed religion. They

utilized religion and the hypocrisy of the southern masters as a means to further promote

their abolitionist goals through spurring northern freemen into abolitionist action with

good old fashioned guilt.

184

Douglass, 329

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African descended peoples to claims of their sub-human status, there still existed a

fervent belief that even if African descended peoples, Blacks in the United States, were to

be considered human, they were still inferior intellectually and morally thereby suited

only for menial physical labor, and other base physical needs like sex and child rearing.

Arguments for the sub-human status of Blacks were almost too numerous to mention of

which claims against the rationality of Blacks were most damaging. Due mostly to the

enlightenment, reason had been philosophically positioned as the yardstick of civility.

From Montesquieu to Kant, those who demonstrate reason also demonstrate their rights

to be considered moral and thus to also have their rights as human beings respected. On

this front Eugenicists worked overtime to demonstrate the lack of reason Blacks

possessed which would supposedly justify their treatment as not possessing the hallmarks

of human beings: freedom, equality, and self-sovereignty. The specifics of exactly how

and why Blacks were not fully human were less important than their social construction

as being such. Despite their academic designation, in the U.S. south, Blacks were

absolutely non-human, in rare cases sub-human, at best unworthy of any inalienable

rights and reduced, not by man but by nature, to the status of slavery and servitude for

which they should feel fortunate. Otherwise they would be left on their own. Eerily the

Roman claim that all roads led to Rome and that to suffer slavery in Rome was better

than to be free elsewhere is recanted, this time by Americans. Douglass, Bibb, and

Jacobs each contradict this belief that they are by nature un-free and ignorant of their

natural rights. Each narrative begins with a period of ignorance, not of their humanity,

but of the cruelties of slavery to which they are eventually initiated.

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“I was born a slave; but I never knew it till six years of happy childhood had

passed away…When I was six years old, my mother died; and then, for the first time, I

learned, by the talk around me, that I was a slave. My mother’s mistress was the daughter

of my grandmother’s mistress…One her death-bed [she] promised that [my mother’s]

children should never suffer for anything; and during her lifetime she kept her word…I

was told that my home was now to be with [my mother’s] mistress; and I found it a happy

one. No toilsome or disagreeable duties were imposed upon me. My mistress was so

kind to me that I was always glad to do her bidding, and proud to labor for her as much as

my young years would permit. I would sit by her side for hours, sewing diligently with a

heart as free from care as that of any free-born white child. When she thought I was

tired, she would send me out to run and jump; and away I bounded, to gather berries or

flowers to decorate her room. Those were happy days- to happy to last. The slave child

had no thought for the morrow; but there came that blight, which too surely waits on

every human being born to be a chattel.

185

Jacobs, 5-7

” Jacobs clearly states that she did not know

she was a slave until her mother died. Before then she regarded her life as a happy one.

Free and equal to other children, Jacobs before her mother died was like any other child.

Even after she was made cognizant of her status as a slave she still did not regard herself

as chattel. This admission beautifully demonstrates the stages of U.S. slavery. To be

restrained and owned is but an aspect of American slavery. Chattel slavery is made

complete when the soul of the captive is broken into submission. This phase for Jacobs

never came though it was first attempted when she was eventually bequeathed into the

Norcom household. Jacobs was besieged upon by the Doctor though she managed to

hold on to her dignity and self-worth which eventually enabled her to escape. The idea

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that Blacks were human endowed with a natural sense of their own freedom and equality

was conceptually unacceptable because it would not allow slave masters and

sympathizers to justify their actions while simultaneously touting their own virtues. For

emphasis Jacobs makes it clear that she was a “human being born to be a chattel.” She

establishes her ontological status as human and her secondary quality as chattel. A slave

is what she is socially constructed as, not what she is.

Bibb follows the same paradigm; “The first time I was separated from my mother,

I was young and small. I knew nothing of my condition than as a slave. I was living with

Mr. White whose wife died and left him a widower with one little girl, who was said to

be the legitimate owner of my mother, and all her children. This girl was also my

playmate when we were children. I was taken away from my mother, and hired out to

labor for various persons, eight or ten years in succession; and all my wages were

expended for the education of Harriet White, my playmate. It was then my sorrows and

sufferings commenced. It was then I first commenced seeing and feeling that I was a

wretched slave, compelled to work under the lash without wages, and often without

clothes enough to hide my nakedness.

186

Bibb, 14-15

” Bibb, like Jacobs admits to being ignorant, not

of his inalienable rights as a human being, but of his status as a slave. Also, like Jacobs,

his knowledge was in two parts. First he understood that he had a master and must not be

like other children. Second, the gross injustice that his inalienable rights would not be

respected demonstrated his worth to those around him. The first stage, the reduction to

servitude, for Jacobs and Bibb was tolerable; it was the second stage, the reduction to

chattel, which was insufferable.

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Douglass, unlike Jacobs and Bibb, made no admissions of happiness or of his

clear state in which he was unaware of his status as chattel. He does however suggest

this fact negatively;