The Climates of Liberty: Natural Rights in theCreoleCase and “The Heroic Slave”

Abstract

Hyde reassesses the relationship between natural and civil rights by tracking the climatological metaphors that shape representations of the 1841 slave revolt aboard the Creole, in which 135 slaves obtained freedom by redirecting a US ship to the British territory of Nassau, Bahamas. Reading Frederick Douglass’s fictional reconstruction of the revolt in “The Heroic Slave” (1853) in conjunction with the diplomatic letters it revises, Hyde shows how the conceit of natural law allowed writers to portray national statutes as mere “local fictions.” Whereas Secretary of State Daniel Webster symptomatically invoked the rhetoric of weather and natural disaster to negate the agency of the slaves on the Creole, Douglass uses natural phenomena to portray emancipation as a force of nature that controverts the geopolitical partitioning of freedom. Douglass’s objective, however, is not ultimately postnational or cosmopolitan, as critics have suggested. Instead, “The Heroic Slave” uses the universalizing rhetoric of natural law to denaturalize exclusionary laws within the United States, even as it attempts to salvage the potential of US democracy. Douglass never forfeits the idea that rights ought to be inalienable by nature, but by recognizing that rights are alienable in practice—not simply that they are often divested and withheld, but that they can be transferred to those who do not already possess them—he narrates the extralegal drama of political legitimation.

Of squalls and mutinies: emergency politics and black democracy in Moby-Dick and ‘The Heroic Slave’

“…This made the ocean a powerful emblem of natural rights in abolitionist discourse, as Carrie Hyde observes: 'Outside of the United States, abolitionists argued, the local fictions of the nation gave way to the laws of nature'. 38 The chastened mate, whose recounting of the mutiny 'in the Marine Coffee-house at Richmond' is the only version of these events that Douglass provides, reinforces this distinction when he defends himself from the opinion of another 'old salt' that 'that whole affair on board of the Creole was miserably and disgracefully managed' (HS 42). The mate responds that '[i]t is one thing to manage a company of slaves on a Virginia plantation, and quite another thing to quell an insurrection on the lonely billows of the Atlantic, where every breeze speaks of courage and liberty' (HS 44).…”

Antebellum Posthuman

“…As Carrie Hyde argues in her brilliant reading of weather in The Heroic Slave, by "depicting nature as the princi ple agent" of antislavery re sis tance, "Douglass is able to suggest that opposition to slavery is more fundamental than the actions of any one individual or group." 101 Indeed, he suggests that opposition to slavery may originate in forces that are not human at all.…”

“…As Carrie Hyde reminds us, on the day of the historical mutiny there had been no storm; instead, Douglass's in ven ted storm seems to derive from Daniel Webster's subsequent effort to establish that the British lacked jurisdiction when they freed the Creole by arguing that the mutineer's "unlawful force" ought to be regarded like the "stresses of weather" (according to maritime law, when foul weather drives a vessel into port, it is exempted from becoming subject to the laws of that country). 110 Hyde suggests that Douglass's squall "strategically reappropriates natu ral meta phors as a figure for natu ral rights," converting Webster's conflation of violent mutinies and violent weather into a "universalizing rhe toric of natu ral law as a model for po litical reform in the United States." 111 I concur with Hyde's analy sis but wish to add that the natu ral law Douglass hereby invokes is conceptually alien to the one to which Madison Washington's forebears appealed, and that the mechanisms of po liti cal change this naturalized natu ral law envisions likewise exceed the deliberative rationality and national self-constitution the found ers' liberal institutions enshrined.…”

“…"I have new and indescribable fancies, and you have not touched the secret of the influence," he wrote of that sunset on Christmas Day. 101 Thus though Brown's legacy will no doubt, as Dimock argues, carry forward via the discursive mechanisms of cultural transmission, in this case, Thoreau's rhe toric refuses to care about the distinction between cultural influence of the sort Dimock cites (whose mechanisms require voluntary human action and consent) and environmental influence (whose mechanisms do not). Brown is now an element of our environment like the light, and that environment has the power to gradually yet radically transform whole populations, whether they wish to be changed or not.…”

“…Either way, Thoreau was committed to this work, adding an average of twenty-four pages of notes per month to his "Indian Books" every year from 1850 through 1861. See Sayre, Thoreau and the American Indians; I have compiled Thoreau's page average from Sayre's table (110), absenting notebook 2, whose dates are unknown. The standard deviation is eleven pages.…”