Module 10 - Part 1: Overview

Other parts of this module include:
Index  |  Part 2: Explorations and Exercises  |  Part 3: Texts and Contexts  |  Part 4: Web Resources

Labor, Free and Unfree, in the 18^th and 19^th Centuries

Focus on Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave

"Increasingly often, and in increasing numbers, men and women left their native rural environments to congregate in cities, where opportunities for relatively unskilled workers abounded-and where more and more people lived in congestion, poverty, and misery" (p. 653).

"In the United States civil war raged from 1860 to 1865, its central issue states' rights, a topic that, of course, implicated the morality of slavery-that by-product of agricultural capitalism. Neither the making of money nor the effort to fathom natural law seemed merely reassuring" (p. 655).

" . . . the systematic description of contemporary society . . . and with sympathy for heroes drawn from the middle and lower classes, was a real innovation of the nineteenth century" (p. 1074).

Daumier, The Uprising .
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Historians use the term "unfree labor" to designate the economic status of the vast majority of the human beings who have lived on the earth. When we read ancient and medieval literature, we read mainly about events that engage aristocrats and the relatively privileged servants who attend them. Not until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries does the experience of work become a central preoccupation of artists and authors. European writers increasingly suggest that the jobs we do define our essence; nineteenth-century novels, for instance, tend to document the ways in which the desire or need for money warps relationships and dehumanizes individuals. At the same time, having chosen rather than been destined for their occupations, members of the middle-class who work for a living begin to take their sense of personal identity from their jobs. Typically, characters in classical texts are known primarily by their family connections ("Odysseus, son of Laertes") and in terms of their defining temperaments ("Pious Aeneas"). In the modern world, family and temperament still count, but they find their most telling expression through professional commitments: in Hedda Gabler , Ibsen helps us understand his characters' psychologies by pitting a general's daughter against two historians and a judge, while Tolstoy, in The Death of Ivan Ilych , makes the title figure's mode of practicing the law a key element in the presentation of his personality.

A picture of a slave auction, from the Library of Congress.
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Looking beneath the genuine interest that a happy worker takes in a job well done, however, nineteenth-century literature shows us the relish with which one human controls another and the corollary-the feeling of being trapped by one's employer or master. Thus Tolstoy dissects the soul of his Ivan Ilych, who "never abused his power; he tried on the contrary to soften its expression, but the consciousness of it and of the possibility of softening its effect, supplied the chief interest and attraction of his office" (p. 1429). However, the slave narratives of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries expose the shocking sado-masochistic undertones that can enter into relationships between the powerful and the powerless.

A New Genre: The Slave Narrative

An oil painting thought to be a portrait of Olaudah Equiano, copyright Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter .
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African abolitionists in England

Written in 1759, Candide gives us a glimpse of the horror of slavery when Candide and Cacambo, having left Eldorado, come upon a black slave who has been punished with the loss of a hand and a leg. "This is the price of the sugar you eat in Europe " (Volume D, p. 552), Voltaire's character explains. Within a few decades, similarly brutalized human beings began to explain such experiences in their own voices, thus creating one of the major literary genres of the early modern world, the slave narrative. The best known of the earliest slave narratives, The Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, Written by Himself , was published in England in 1789. Born around 1745 in an Ibo village in what is today modern Nigeria , Equiano describes in his autobiography his childhood and his capture by African raiders who sold him to white slave-traders. Brought to Barbados , he became the property of an English naval officer and spent much of his early life in the Royal Navy. Eventually, he earned enough money to buy his own freedom. He traveled extensively in England , speaking at anti-slavery meetings, and along with Ottobah Cuguano and Ignatius Sancho (whose portrait was painted by Thomas Gainsborough) was one of the most famous and most accomplished Africans in England . Their combined efforts contributed to the struggle to end the English slave trade, which was abolished by Parliament in 1807. Eliminating slavery in the United States , however, where it had struck such deep roots, exacted a much higher cost.

A photograph of the young Frederick Douglass.
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The Exemplary Life of Frederick Douglass

Title page, The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass .
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Driving hard bargains

Hundreds of African Americans told the stories of their lives in print. The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself , most memorably shows a young man's remarkable insight into both the moral failures and the economic motives of slavery. Throughout his narrative, he displays an entrepreneurial grasp of his opportunities. Bred in a system that evaluated persons as transferable property, Douglass learns early how to make value work for him. As a child, he trades bread with hungry street boys who unwittingly teach him letters in return. As an adolescent, he convinces Hugh Auld to let him hire himself out as a ship caulker. Battered but resolute, he summons all his powers to defeat the slave breaker Edward Covey in the crisis of his life. Wondering back on Covey's capitulation, he realizes that Covey puts a higher value on his reputation than he does on getting revenge. Although Covey got "entirely the worst end of the bargain" (p. 955) in his epic battle with Douglass, he chose not to report his unruly charge to the constable, lest he publicize his failure to discipline one of the slaves whom wealthy owners regularly sent him to be broken. Douglass's Narrative teaches that great American lesson: the power of the market.

"Slave with Iron Muzzle," 1839, by Jacques Etienne Victor Araugo, from the PBS Web site, "Africans in America ."
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"I looked like a man who had escaped a den of wild beasts" (p. 953)

As the existence of a device like the Iron Muzzle testifies, slaves were treated like animals. Douglass makes this explicit when he describes the way the children on the Great House Farm were fed mush from a trough (pp. 935-36) and in his summary of his struggles with Mr. Covey: "the dark night of slavery closed in upon him; and behold a man transformed into a brute!" (p. 951). Degraded though his treatment has been, he is a man, a man who has taught himself the tools he needs to survive-to write, to calculate, to deceive. With enormous strength of character, Douglass retains the sense of human dignity that gives the lie to any effort to wrest it from him. To protect others, he obscures the means by which he finally escapes from slavery. Only at the end of his story do we hear of Anna Murray, a free black woman who was to marry Frederick Bailey when he reached New York . In the Narrative , he never explains that Anna provided the money for the railroad ticket that took him from Baltimore to Philadelphia . Douglass's story concentrates on the making of a man; other slave narratives focus on the ways in which slavery debauched women.

Harriet Jacobs.
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Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl : Subterfuge and Disguise

Both Equiano and Douglass both add to the title of their stories a proud subscription proclaiming their authorship. Few female slaves found the means to educate themselves in a system that forbade teaching slaves to write, and although the best-known woman's slave narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl , bears the subtitle, Written by Herself , Jacobs used a pseudonym (Linda Brent) and seems to have had considerable editorial assistance in composing her narrative from Lydia Maria Childs, a well-known abolitionist leader. Jacobs takes pains from the very start, however, to insist on the document's authenticity: "Reader, be assured this narrative is no fiction." Like Frederick Douglass, who disguised himself in the uniform of a sailor in order to make his way to the north, Harriet Jacobs had to cover the truth to salvage her identity and self-respect. In her early teens, she fell in love with a fellow slave but had no hope of entering into a normal marriage with him. Instead, to resist the advances of her master, whom she calls Dr. Flint (a name that has as much resonance as those of the slave owners catalogued by Douglass, like Mr. Severe or Mr. Freeland), she allowed herself to be seduced by a Mr. Sands, to whom she bore two children. Addressing herself to the white women of the north, she pleads for understanding:

I wanted to keep myself pure; and under the most adverse circumstances, I tried hard to preserve my self-respect; but I was struggling alone in the powerful grasp of the demon Slavery; and the master proved too strong for me. . . .

It seems less degrading to give one's self, than to submit 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.

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Pity me, and pardon me, O virtuous reader! You never knew what it is to be a slave. . . . ( Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl [ New York : Norton, 2001], pp. 46-7

Jacobs tells her virtuous readers of the obscene pleasure that masters take in the pain they inflict on those over whom they rule. Her revelations, couched in the most circumspect language, continue to challenge her more knowing readers today.

William Blake: Hard Labor and the Loss of Innocence

William Blake, The Chimney Sweeper .
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William Blake, The Chimney Sweeper .
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As in most of his remarkably prescient poems, in Songs of Innocence and of Experience Blake insists on uncovering the deceptions that allow a complacent Establishment to ignore the suffering of the unfree laborers who support the comforts of English society. In his paired poems about The Chimney Sweeper and The Little Black Boy , for example, he forces readers to examine the superficial pieties that mask the exploitation of the young and innocent. In both sets of lyrics, Blake questions the meanings of white and black , invoking the image of the black slave and the enormous profits that the work and sale of African laborers brought to England 's upper classes. Working within a Christian tradition that worships whiteness and fears blackness, Blake probes the psychological as well as the economic distortions permitted by an unthinking adoption of this iconography. Contemplating the little black boy's efforts to validate his own existence in terms that effectively deny it remains as painful today as it must have been in the early 1790s when Blake wrote these lines:

My mother bore me in the southern wild,
And I am black, but O! my soul is white;
White as an angel is the English child:
But I am black as though bereaved of light.
( The Little Black Boy , ll. 1-4)

The determinedly cheerful speaker of the Chimney Sweeper poem in Songs of Innocence , reassuring Tom Dacre of the virtue of being shorn of his white lamb-like hair and dreaming of "coffins of black" (l. 12), and his less buoyant presence in the companion piece in Songs of Experience , "a little black thing among the snow" (l. 1) whose parents consign him to cruel labor, equates blackness with annihilation as he wears "the clothes of death" (l. 7).

In his Narrative , Douglass obliquely addresses the problem created by fundamental Christian symbols, and the inversion of white and black implicit in the slaveholding religion, with an apt citation from the Gospel According to Saint Matthew: "Woe unto you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For ye are like unto whited sepulchers, which indeed appear beautiful outward, but are within full of dead men's bones" (p. 977). Nevertheless, it seems clear that white remains the color of sanctity and as such imposed an extra burden on the psyche of the slaves who were born black and laborers who were blackened in the inhuman work that they were forced to perform.

Persistent Forms of Unfree Labor

Russia 's serfs

The particular horror of enslaving Africans and transporting them to alien environments is described in Equiano's narrative in harrowing detail. For millennia, of course, peasants had endured as slaves in their native countries. Gradually, with the rise of market economies across Europe, poor people lost their connection with the land and moved to cities, like the benighted denizens of Blake's London . In Czarist Russia, however, census records shows that as late as 1859, two years before the nominal emancipation of the serfs, about two thirds of the population still lived on the land as serfs ruled by private individuals or as virtual slaves in factories or in Siberian prison camps.

A photograph of three figures of serfs under the Romanoffs, created by the artist George Stuart for the Gallery of Historical Figures.
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Servility was so deeply ingrained in this population that even after Czar Alexander II liberated the serfs, many continued to live as they had before. After he came into his inheritance in the 1850s, Tolstoy tried with little success to ameliorate the lot of the serfs on his inherited property. Like Gerasim, the noble servant in The Death of Ivan Ilych , and Firs, the eighty-seven-year-old retainer in The Cherry Orchard , Tolstoy and Chekhov themselves display a certain ambivalence toward the meaning of these laborers' self-abnegating attachment to their masters. A trace of nostalgia for a simpler way of life seems to linger in these works; for Tolstoy, in particular, who wrote his novella in 1886 after embracing a stringent Christianity of his own invention, Gerasim embodies a spiritual purity that elevates him above the striving and ambitious world that Ivan Ilych painfully departs.

A woodcut by Kathe Kollwitz, inspired by Gerhart Hauptmann's 1892 play, The Weavers , based on the uprising of the Silesian Weavers in 1844.
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Rebellions in the ranks

Labor protests

In England and Central Europe , any such sentimentalizing of the poor yielded to blistering criticism of the abuse of workers in industrialized workplaces. In the Manifesto of the Communist Party (1848), Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels articulated a powerful argument that has fueled international political and economic discourse ever since: "The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles" (Section I, "Bourgeois and Proletarians," as translated by Marx's daughter and Engels in 1888; see Web Resources). This social analysis reflected the growing outrage that greeted the maltreatment of laborers in factories and mines. Workers in the textile mills of Manchester , closely observed by Engels, and of Silesia , gave a human face to those victimized by heartless business and government policies. Writing in the English periodical The Northern Star , Engels reported firsthand on the riots in Silesia in June 1844, in which soldiers fired on the workers who had been goaded into rebelling against the advent of the power loom that would put them out of their jobs. However abysmal those jobs were, they needed them:

The causes of these affrays were the incredible sufferings of these poor weavers, produced by low wages, machinery, and the avarice and greediness of the manufacturers. . . . they were all in debt . . . and the manufacturers gladly advanced them small sums, which the men could never pay, but which were sufficient to give the masters and absolute sovereignty over them, and to make them slaves. . . . (See selection from The Northern Star , No. 346, June 29, 1844 in Web Resources.)

Heinrich Heine enshrined these workers for all time in the history of labor relations in his famous poem The Silesian Weavers :

"The shuttle flies, the loom creaks loud,
Night and day we weave your shroud-
Old Germany , at your shroud we sit,
We're weaving a threefold curse in it,
We're weaving, we're weaving!" (p. 846)

As the footnote in the Anthology points out, "Heine's poem is prophetic: in 1848 the king . . . was forced by revolution to grant a constitution to Prussia."

Careers Make the Man

The masthead of The Northern Star , the Chartist newspaper for which both Marx and Engels wrote.
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Journalism and protest

Half a year after the events in Silesia , Engels quotes Heine's poem in its entirety in another progressive newspaper, The New Moral World . Frederick Douglass became professionally engaged in a similar intermingling of protest and literature, and in 1847 he founded his own newspaper and named it The North Star ; by 1851, his fame was such that it was retitled Frederick Douglass's Paper . A decade earlier in 1837, in Leeds, England, a labor activist had founded a weekly called The Northern Star , to catalogue the debates about the rights of oppressed workers like the handloom weavers of northern England. The symbolism in both newspapers' titles links the northern location of labor protest with the heavenly guidance of the pole star, capturing the idealism behind these parallel crusades for social justice.

A warship of the sort that Billy Budd sailed on.
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The military option

Early navigators, like nineteenth-century radicals, looked to the North Star to chart their way, but to get their ships to move on the waters, masters have relied on the power provided by coerced labor. Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literature offers various accounts of the sufferings of impressed soldiers and sailors, none more memorable than the complex moral universe of Herman Melville's Billy Budd, Sailor . The Anthology 's headnote comments on the bibliographical evolution of Melville's novella, and in listing the different versions in which the work has appeared, brings to our attention the importance of the last word in the title. Two earlier versions, one called Billy Budd, Foretopman , the other omitting the adjective, have yielded to a definitive text with the simple addition of sailor . As Melville conceives his characters, their natures cannot be extricated from their callings. "And what could Billy know of man except of man as a mere sailor? . . . his life afloat is externally ruled for him" (p. 1021). On the foretop, Billy functions like the god Hyperion (p. 1022). On the lower decks, however, Claggart plots against him. Forces beyond their control will destroy them both, for, like Billy, Claggart has found the job that perfectly encapsulates his spiritual being: punitive, envious, diabolical.

As you examine the depictions of unfree laborers in Volume E, notice whether the author, like Melville or Tolstoy, emphasizes the spiritual elevation associated with the most positive connotations of service or, like Douglass, instead dwells on the exploitation of one human being by another. Personal experience obviously colors one's point of view. As Ignatius Sancho wrote in a letter dated 1778, "The grand object of English navigators-indeed of all Christian navigators-is money-money-money. . . . ( The Letters of Ignatius Sancho , Paul Edwards, Ed. [London: 1969], pp. 149-50).