AM 214: THE ENLIGHTENMENT

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AM 214 THE ENLIGHTENMENT
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Plan of Lecture

• Thomas Thistlewood and the Enlightenment
• Birth of scientific racism
• Major philosophical ideas
• Abolition
• American Revolution
• Did slaves have an enlightenment?

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• On 16 December 1786 the Cornwall Chronicle in
  western Jamaica published the following obituary
• Deaths in Westmoreland Thomas Thistlewood,
  Esq., a gentleman whose social qualities, during
  a residence of upwards of 30 years in that
  parish, had greatly endeared him to the whole
  circle of his neighbours and acquaintances, and
  whose attainments, in many branches of natural
  knowledge, in which he was peculiarly
  communicative, rendered him a most desirable
  companion to men of science.

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Thomas Thistlewood and the Enlightenment

• Michael Chenoweth, The Eighteenth Century Climate
  of Jamaica
• A violent and sadistic man Derbys dose
• But also a keen participant in Enlightenment
  discourse

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A Planter and His Mistress
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The Contradictions of the Enlightenment

• Is there a contradiction between modernity and
  violence?
• Violence customary towards dependents and in the
  army
• Explosion in hanging- 1770-1830 7,000 hangings
  England and Wales
• Antislavery sentiment non-existent until ca. 1750

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Definitions of the Enlightenment

• Mark Goldie The Enlightenment was not a crusade
  but a tone of voice, a sensibility.
• Roy Porter the Enlightenment was primarily the
  expression of new mental and moral values, new
  canons of taste, styles of sociability and views
  of human nature.

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Thistlewood as man of sensibility

• Sympathy a key concept (David Hume)
• Adam Smith

How selfish soever man may be supposed, there
are evidently some principles in his nature,
which interest him in the fortune of others Of
this kind is pity or compassion, the emotion
which we feel for the misery of others, when we
see it, or are made to conceive it in a very
lively matter.
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Thistlewood and slaves

• Indifference to death of Cambridge
• No questioning of right of white dominance
• Edward Long Africans void of genius without a
  system of morality
• Colour consciousness as principal barrier to
  sympathetic identification

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The Enlightenment, Slavery and Racism

• Racism endemic among the most revered figures of
  the European Enlightenment (e.g. David Hume,
  Voltaire, Immanuel Kant)

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Hume, Voltaire, Kant
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• I am apt to suspect the Negroes, and in general
  all other species of man to be naturally inferior
  to the whites. There never was any civilized
  nation of any other complection than white, nor
  even any individual eminent either in action or
  speculation. No ingenious manufactures among
  them, no arts, no science. On the other hand, the
  most rude and barbarous of the whites, such as
  the ancient Germans, the present Tartars, have
  still something eminent about them, in their
  valour, form of government, or some other
  particular. Such a uniform and constant
  difference could not happen, in so many countries
  and ages, if nature had not made an original
  distinction between breeds of men. In Jamaica
  indeed they talk of one negroe as a man of parts
  and learning but tis likely he is admired for
  very slender accomplishments, like a parrot, who
  speaks a few words plainly.

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Voltaire

• Their round eyes, their flat nose, their lips
  which are always thick, their differently shaped
  ears, the wool on their head, the measure even of
  their intelligence establishes between them and
  other species of men prodigious differences.

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Immanuel Kant

• The Negroes of Africa have received from nature
  no intelligence that rises above the foolish. The
  difference between the two races is thus a
  substantial one it appears to be just as great
  in respect to the faculties of the mind as in
  colour.

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• Growth of idea of Great Chain of Being
• George Frederickson the scientific thought of
  the Enlightenment was a precondition for the
  growth of a modern racism based on physical
  typology.
• Carl Linnaeus and taxonomies of classification
• Dr James Hunt, 1865

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Ideas of the Enlightenment

• Scripturalism refined into rational belief
• Science gained a new prestige, under Isaac Newton
• Questioning of prescriptive dogmas

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John Locke 1632-1704
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Lockean Philosophy

• Defenses of toleration and political liberty
• Joseph Addison and The Spectator
• Model of the mind maturing through experience
  from ignorance to knowledge
• Empiricism and the senses

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The Enlightenment and Abolition

• Apart from Jean Bodin, no philospoher, even
  Locke, willing to condemn slavery
• First real attack, Montesquieu, The Spirit of the
  Laws (1748) and Francis Hutchinson (1738)
• Edmund Burke and the Great Map of Mankind
• Thomas Day Slavery is a monstrous crime
• The African came to represent innocent nature

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David Brion Davis

• The Problem of Slavery in Western Culture
• By the 1770s, a large number of moralists,
  poets, intellectuals and reformers had come to
  see American slavery as an unmitigated evil.

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The American Revolution an Abolition

• Christopher Brown, Moral Capital
• Argues that American Revolution made Britons
  think about slavery in new, politically charged,
  way
• Grudging and gradual emancipation in America
• Greater intellectual impact in Europe

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William Pulteney, 1778

• In principle they pretend to be the most zealous
  champions of freedom in practice they are the
  severest of tyrants. The rights of life,
  liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, they hold
  to be inalienable yet they have, in various
  instances, violated these unalienable rights
  without even a pretence to urge in excuse for
  their unjust and despotic conduct. They assert
  that all men are created equal, yet they
  shamefully make a property of their fellow
  creatures, whom they purchase for gold, condemn
  to the most servile and laborious employments,
  and render completely miserable by inflicting
  upon them the most unjust and severe torments
  that ingenious cruelty can invent or unrelenting
  tyranny can practice.

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William Pulteney, Earl of Bath
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Did Slaves Have an Enlightenment?

• Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World

Events in Haiti were the most concrete
expression of the idea that the rights proclaimed
in Frances 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man
were indeed universal. They could not be
quarantined in Europe or prevented from landing
in the ports of the colonies, as many had argued
they should be. The slave insurrection of Saint
Domingue led to the expansion of citizenship
beyond racial barriers, despite the massive
political and economic investment in the slave
system at the time. Thus he concludes, If we
live in a world in which democracy is meant to
exclude no one, it is in no small part because of
the actions of those slaves in Saint Domingue who
insisted that human rights were theirs too.