“Could the kind reader have been quietly riding along the main road to or from Easton, that morning, his eyes would have met a painful sight.” Midway throughMy Bondage and My Freedom, Frederick Douglass longs for an impossible spectator: a witness to the daily abominations of slavery who is in no way implicated by them.¹ A writer more keenly attuned than almost any of his contemporaries to the ethical complexities that such “painful sights” entail, Douglass pauses to imagine such a spectator more than once—one who is both present and not present, capable of standing witness to atrocities...

In a long footnote appended toDemocracy in America’s most famous chapter, “Tyranny of the Majority,” Tocqueville offers two anecdotes whose relationship to each other appears, at first, to lie in the illustration of his claim that democratic government in the United States is by no means too weak, “as many Europeans make out,” because the authority and operation of government are not necessarily limited to the state. In the first, “a striking example of the excess to which despotism of the majority may lead,” an enraged Baltimore mob quashes the freedom of the press, seeking out the editors of...

If Tocqueville struggled to name the new thing that haunted him about U.S. political and social life, it would seem that his traveling companion had no such trouble. Gustave de Beaumont’s novel,Marie; or, Slavery in the United States, opens with the frank admission that “a single idea dominates the work and forms the central point around which all the developments are arranged.” He continues, “The reader is aware that there are still slaves in the United States; their number has grown to almost two million. Surely it is a strange thing that there is so much bondage amid so...

In an 18 August 1842 column written for theNational Anti-Slavery Standardduring her two-year tenure as the paper’s editor, Lydia Maria Child recalled the anti-abolitionist riots of the 1830s as a specter that had haunted the antislavery movement for nearly a decade. Child’s reminiscences of the 1830s had been triggered, she explained, not by any signs of renewed violence against abolitionists, but by the sound of a katydid as she wandered one evening in Brooklyn: “Instantly it flashed upon my recollection, under what impressive circumstances I, for the first time in my life, heard the singular note of that...

Pursued by a “deep sadness” from Blackwell’s Island to Barnum’s Museum—from prison to theater, as it were—Lydia Maria Child offers one of her era’s more haunting accounts of democracy’s melancholy. As she dissects the affective consequences of participating in public enactments of exception, Child exposes the continuity of punishment and entertainment in antebellum public life, locating a basic violence in what Saidiya Hartman has ironically termed the era’s “innocent amusements.” Hartman argues specifically that “antebellum formations of pleasure, even those of the North, need to be considered in relation to the affective dimensions of chattel slavery.” For Hartman,...

In an unpublished manuscript fragment composed sometime in 1856, which may or may not have been intended as a chapter forThe Confidence-Man, Melville offers a brief sketch of a shifting, discontinuous, and very strange subject that, whatever the fragment’s original relationship to the larger work, almost literally maps out the text’s basic concern with the multiplicity and inconsistency of character.¹ At the top of the fragment, one title, “The Mississippi,” has been scribbled over and replaced with another, “The River,” already hinting at the difficulties of identification and the obfuscations of naming that follow. The piece begins as an...