Slavery and the Culture of Taste

by Gikandi, Simon;

  The larger issue here, however, was not simply the relationship between money and good taste; rather, what Beckford's case highlights are the deep anxieties that were driving the culture of taste against the pressures of slavery. The origin of Beckford's anxieties and inadequacies was colonial slavery. His deep connection to the culture of slavery, though unacknowledged, haunted Beckford's aesthetic desires, and this haunting goes a long way to explain the key shifts in his aesthetic sensibility, especially his transformation from the most elegant collector to a hermit hiding in the bowels of a Gothic cathedral. Like other colonial monuments to art, Beckford's abbey marked the white Creole's troubled relationship to England. The form of Gothic registered a relationship of identity and difference. Indeed, in its monumentality and excessiveness, its prominence and weirdness, Fonthill Abbey sought to affirm the identity of its owner as the “controlling and finalizing energy” behind the aesthetic order and his revenge against it.142

  It is not accidental that Fonthill Abbey seemed constructed as a mausoleum to works of art, a place to hoard and inter the most precious products of European modernity over several centuries and exotic collections from the edges of empire. This interment and hoarding was Beckford's revenge against the ideology of taste, which, as I argued in previous chapters, demanded the public display of beauty. Art had failed to rescue Beckford from the stigma of colonialism, and in this regard he seemed to have rethought its mode of exhibition; instead of being displayed publicly, precious ornaments could be confined in a crypt where they would be adored, like idols, by the sultan in his seraglio. The descriptions that exist of Fonthill Abbey all call attention to Beckford's expansive and expensive collections, but none seem to have attracted interest as works of art; neither pictures nor objects seemed to demand attention to themselves as objects of pleasure; they were either dwarfed by the morbid architecture of Fonthill Abbey or seemed to deepen the gloom of Beckford's later years, when he had been virtually ostracized from society. Once intended to be a mark of arrival into the culture of taste, art had become the colonial baron's revenge against Englishness. By 1817 Beckford was living in a state of solitary confinement, and his rich collection of art and objects could not alleviate his gloom or melancholy. Indeed, objects of taste seemed to act as reminders of his isolation. The only proof that Beckford was a man of taste, noted Hazlitt in his review of the collection at Fonthill Abbey, “is his getting rid of it.”143

  For Beckford, black slavery had enabled the collection of art but apparently also retarded the slave owner's entry into the temple of culture. In 1817 Beckford's various attempts to reenter society collapsed ostensibly because of his bad temperament, but perhaps more so because of financial difficulties: “Affairs in Jamaica” were going “from bad to worse,” he noted.144 By 1822 those affairs might have become extremely worse, because Beckford was forced to sell Fonthill Abbey to an American—“the obscure millionaire Mr. Farquhar.”145 On December 21, 1825, the central tower of Fonthill Abbey “collapsed for the third and final time…damaging much of the building and fueling its legendary status.”146 The ruins of the house would come to stand as a prominent example of Beckford's failure to reconcile art and commerce. In fact, it has been my argument in this chapter that when it is analyzed in a contrapuntal relation to the colonial event, the criteria driving the aesthetic ideology in the eighteenth century—disinterest and virtue, among others—had come to be haunted by slavery. As I will show in the next chapter, this haunting would continue in the American colonies.

  Close Encounters:

  Taste and the Taint of Slavery

  In January 24, 1790, Gouverneur Morris, a New York citizen of the new American republic, wrote a letter to George Washington, then the president of the United States, urging him to “fix the taste” of the new country and to become a model of what we may now call the aesthetic self: “It is…my wish that everything about you should be substantially good and majestically plain, made to endure.”1

  This was an earnest but unusual request for three reasons. First, it was puzzling because on the surface there was no apparent reason why Morris should have been concerned about Washington's ability to be a person of taste and to serve as a model for his citizenry in matters of deportment and style. After all, Washington came from what Louis Wright once called the “agrarian aristocracy” of the antebellum period, a class of landowners who emulated the lives of English country families, using their ownership and attachment to the land to rehearse gentility, civic virtue, and good taste.2 For example, in a painting by Thomas Pritchard Rossiter and Louis Remy Mignot depicting a meeting between the president and the Marquis de Lafayette at Mount Vernon in 1784, Washington was presented as the archetypal country gentleman (fig. 4.1). Second, the request was puzzling because it was not clear why now, in the birth throes of the American republic, Morris, writing to his president, would place the question of fixing taste at the center of the national agenda. Third, the man appealing to Washington to set the standard of taste in the new country was neither an ordinary correspondent nor a cultural debutant detached from the pressing matters of the polity. On the contrary, Morris was at the center of the instrumental process in which the United States was created as a nation.

  Born into a wealthy landowning family of Welsh and Huguenot descent in Westchester County, New York, Morris was educated at King's College, the predecessor to Columbia University, where he obtained an education that was heavily steeped in the ideals of the Enlightenment. Later he represented Pennsylvania at the convention in Philadelphia in 1787 and is generally considered to be the author of the United States Constitution, the document that put the issue of liberty at the center of debates about subjects and their relation to their governments.3 In other words, Morris was not a cultural debutant; on the contrary, he is perhaps the closest one finds of a natural-born aristocrat in the United States in the eighteenth century.

  4.1 Thomas Pritchard Rossiter and Louis Remy Mignot, Washington and Lafayette at Mount Vernon. 1859.

  Why, then, did a man who was so attuned to the whole panorama of colonial life consider issues of taste to be central to American self-fashioning? What was the lack that he was asking Washington to fill? Why would he want to bother General Washington with matters of deportment and self-presentation, in that winter of 1790, as the general contemplated the future of the United States? Why would Morris, a gentleman of the new American republic be anxious about the public behavior of the new nation's aristocracy and its conduct in matters of taste in the first place?

  Morris's anxieties probably came from two directions. First, he might have been worried that the colonial American aristocracy was belated, connected to an agrarian tradition that was out of place in the culture of modernity and its social imaginary. Second, and perhaps more importantly, Morris must have been aware, as were many intellectuals of his age, that all questions about freedom and taste in the United States were haunted by the question of slavery. In the culture of slavery there was no guarantee that the natural deportment of the landed gentry or the men of taste could withstand the pressures of the peculiar institution. There is certainly evidence to suggest that slavery was a major issue at the 1787 Constitutional Convention, where Morris had been a major player. We know that he took a middle position between Southern states, eager to continue with the traffic in black bodies, and Northern states, which considered slavery abhorrent to the doctrine of freedom. As John Madison put it aptly in his notes, “Mr. Gouverneur Morris wished the whole subject to be committed including the clauses relating to taxes on exports & to a navigation act. These things may form a bargain among the Northern & Southern States.”4

  Considering the question of slavery essentially one about tariffs and duties rather than morals and rights, Morris may perhaps not have fully understood how the existence of slaves in the heartland of the republic haunted the ideals of deportment and tastes that he wanted Washington to uphold. But Southern gentlemen like Washington could never escape the shadow of slavery and its
powerful effect on the self-fashioning of the subject of freedom. Even when the presence of the slave seemed marginal to national debates about American character and destiny, discussions about taste and manners in the antebellum South could not move beyond the institution of slavery and the lived experiences of the enslaved.

  Turning to the question of manners at the end of his Notes on the State of Virginia, for example, Thomas Jefferson worried loudly about what he called the “unhappy influence on the manners of our people produced by the existence of slavery among us”; he associated slavery with “a perpetual exercise of the most boisterous passions, the most unremitting despotism on the one part, and degrading submissions on the other.”5 Jefferson constantly worried that American children were being brought up in a culture in which the management of slavery demanded intemperance rather than restraint, a major precondition for a modern identity, and he often reflected on how slavery worked against the ordering of the passions that were essential to a culture of taste:

  If a parent could find no motive either in his philanthropy or his self-love for restraining the intemperance of passion towards his slave, it should always be a sufficient one that his child is present. But generally it is not sufficient. The parent storms, the child looks on, catches the lineaments of wrath, puts on the same airs in the circle of smaller slaves, gives a loose to his worst of passions, and thus nursed, educated, and daily exercised in tyranny, cannot but be stamped by it with odious peculiarities. The man must be a prodigy who can retain his manners and morals undepraved by such circumstances. And with what execration should the statesman be loaded, who permitting one half the citizens thus to trample on the rights of the other, transforms those into despots, and these into enemies, destroys the morals of the one part, and the amor patriae of the other.6

  Jefferson had a keen sense of how slavery challenged the tenets of the age of taste: it excited passions where constraint was required; it succored despotism where liberty was needed; it corrupted the manners and morals of white masters, transforming them into victims of despotic practices at odds with the tenets of a rational culture.

  And yet in spite of these concerns, Jefferson couldn't imagine a way out of the cauldron of slavery; he seemed to have concluded that it was both the bedrock of the American polity and its curse. How, Jefferson wondered, could the liberties of a nation be considered sacrosanct when they were removed—or displaced—from the raison d'étre of nation building, namely “a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God?”7 In his reflections on such questions, Jefferson was acutely aware of the specific ways slavery haunted and undermined the sense of American self-being:

  Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just; that his justice cannot sleep forever: that considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation, is among possible events: that it may become probable by supernatural interference! The Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a contest.—But it is impossible to be temperate and to pursue this subject through the various considerations of policy, of morals, of history, natural and civil. We must be contented to hope they will force their way into every one's mind. I think a change already perceptible, since the origin of the present revolution. The spirit of the master is abating, that of the slave rising from the dust, his condition mollifying, the way I hope preparing, under the auspices of heaven, for a total emancipation, and that this is disposed, in the order of events, to he with the consent of the masters, rather than by their extirpation.8

  Jefferson's agonizing on the status of liberty in a culture of slavery, as much as Morris's injunctive to Washington, provides a precise preface to the questions I want to discuss in this chapter: Could a culture of taste take root in the geography of slavery? And if so, how could it explain itself in the court of public opinion, since here in the Americas one could simply not repress or disavow the reality of enslavement? And why did violence become an important concordance to taste in different regions of the Americas?9 To answer these questions, however, one must consider the peculiarity of American slavery in relation to the institutions of culture, conduct, and taste discussed in earlier chapters. In effect, one must start with a simple but foundational question: what makes American slavery in the modern period different from other institutions of bondage?

  2

  In the previous chapter, I suggested that the institutions of high culture in the English eighteenth century were enabled by money made in West Indian plantations. I argued that there was an important, though often unspoken, dialectic between the men of taste in London coffeehouses—and art galleries—and the West Indian planter at home. Men of taste, like Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, were directly or indirectly patronized by wealthy planters like Christopher Codrington, the heir to a Barbadian fortune. Cultural institutions benefited from the largesse of closeted colonial barons like William Beckford, who were able to commission artists, architects, and musicians to fulfill their ambition to become subjects of taste. It was the largesse of the planters that enabled the cultivation of polite conduct and the growth in consumption that was essential to the emergence of the culture of taste.

  I further argued that West Indian planters derived cultural capital from their association with the men of taste. For example, it was through his sponsorship of cultural activities, ranging from plays on stage to conversational pieces, that Christopher Codrington entered English high society, endowed All Souls College, Oxford, and became an established figure in London cultural circles. Through their patronage of art and taste, the slave-owning plantocracy, like Indian nabobs, laundered its ill-gotten money and refashioned its identity. In even more extreme cases (my case study in the last chapter was William Beckford), living an aesthetic life, even an eccentric one, transformed one from being the son of a crass Jamaican planter to a person of taste. And as men of taste, West Indian planters could deploy a kind of repressive mechanism in which the power of art and good taste would transform them into a cultural aristocracy, far removed from the primal scene of slavery that was their inheritance and duty. In these circumstances, the purity and cleanliness of art would counter the danger and excreta of slavery.10

  But the West Indian men of culture I discussed in the last chapter cannot be considered representative examples of how art and good taste could be used to laud unsavory social and commercial practices and turn them into acceptable modes of behavior. Indeed, one could argue that the reason why both Beckford and Codrington were able to contemplate purely aesthetic lives, existences ostensibly untouched by the dangers of the slaves that they owned in great numbers, was because they had managed to separate themselves physically from the regimen of the slave plantation. As absentee landlords, these West Indian planters could immerse themselves into the culture of taste, oblivious to the lived experience of slavery, which could be strictly quarantined from their consciousness and everyday existence. Could the person of taste who lived in close proximity to slaves separate his existence as a planter and slave master from his identity as a gentleman? Could the men of taste who presided over the slave plantations of Virginia and the Carolinas be able to sustain an aesthetic culture that was transcendental of slavery and its taint?11

  A glance at the surviving images of the quintessential American gentleman, such as Washington, might suggest that there was no obvious contradiction between the pose of taste and the presence of the slave, that repression or disavowal of the kind discussed in the last chapter was unnecessary. As he undertook the voyage that was to usher in the American republic, a journey that began at the military academy at West Point, New York, and ultimately led to Mount Vernon, Virginia, Washington's constant companion was his slave William Lee, whom he had purchased in 1768. Since almost all antebellum gentlemen owned slaves, Washington's ownership of Lee is not a point of contention or dispute; what is intriguing is the presence of the enslaved in the portraits of his master. The figure of
Lee is present in two of the most important surviving portraits of Washington, including John Trumbull's portrait of the young officer at West Point (fig. 4.2) and Edward Savage's portrait of the retired general at home in Mount Vernon (fig. 4.3).

  Commenting on the marginal yet visible presence of Lee in these two paintings, Sidney Kaplan and Emma Nogrady Kaplan have argued that the representation of the slave in the imaginary world of the white master went well beyond conventional generic paintings of the period, suggesting that it “perhaps conceals the deep feeling that Washington had for his revolutionary comrade.”12 But this rather romantic view of race relations in the era of the American Revolution ignores the precarious location and status of the slave in the works of art from this period. Lee was, of course, one of Washington's slaves, not a comrade. He was bonded by law to serve the general from the moment of his birth until he was manumitted posthumously. At the same time, however, especially within the internal symbolism of the painting, there is no doubt that Lee was needed to add aura to the self-imagination of the American hero, aristocrat, and patriarch. His existence on the margins of the picture is an example of the presence/absence discussed in earlier chapters.