Bonds of Citizenship. Hoang Gia Phan
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ambiguous and inappropriate. The words “held to service and labor,” for instance, does not necessarily imply the relation of “master and slave,” and is rather a description of minors and apprentices, than of slaves.12
Douglass’s use of the infamous fugitive slave clause as exemplary of the ambiguities and equivocations permeating the language of the Constitution is itself a significant decision, raising important questions regarding the conceptualizations of freedom, unfreedom, and citizenship in a slaveholding nation, which I will address in the second part of this introduction, and at greater length in chapter 3. Here I want to note that the point of Douglass’s lesson in constitutional interpretation is not merely that the founding document does not contain the words “slave” or “slavery,” a point made by many critics before and since Douglass’s reading. As Eric Foner has described, it was this absence of direct references to slavery, color, or race in the text that reformers such as Salmon P. Chase, the architect of the moderate political abolitionist strategy, used to argue that the framers’ shared “original intent” was the eventual disappearance of slavery from the Union, its withering away as a political-economic institution.13 The more significant point is that Douglass goes beyond pointing to the absence of the words “slave” and “slavery” to posit two interdependent claims about the words that do appear in the letter of the law.
First, Douglass points out that there exists no necessary relation between the words used in the fugitive rendition clause (“held to service or labor”) and “the thing” those words are “alleged” by Calhoun’s Address to “name” (that is, “the relation of master and slave”). Further, Douglass posits that these very same words of the clause refer instead to a different type of labor bondage and other types of laboring subjects: indentured servitude and apprenticeship (and their subjects, “apprentices and minors”). Douglass’s second, positive claim regarding the true referent of the phrase “held to service or labor” in the frequently cited fugitive rendition clause was in 1849 a counterintuitive one to say the least, running expressly counter to what was widely understood to be (and what Douglass concedes throughout this editorial to be) the “original intent” of the clause.
By 1849, indentured servitude had long declined as a dominant form of labor subjection, replaced by chattel slavery and wage labor, and few readers in 1849 could imagine the term “held to service or labor” in the fugitive rendition clause to be a description of such servitude. Throughout his ruling in the famous 1842 case of Prigg v. Pennsylvania, for example, Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story, maintaining the importance of the “original intent” of the “fugitive slave clause” and taking for granted its historical context, interpreted the term “person held to service or labor” to refer solely to the slave: “Historically, it is well known, that the object of this clause was to secure to the citizens of the slave-holding states the complete right and title of ownership in their slaves, as property, in every state in the Union into which they might escape from the state where they were held in servitude.”14 John Calhoun’s “Southern Address,” to which Douglass’s 1849 editorial in the North Star was a response, began its argument for the rights of slaveholders by citing Justice Story’s majority Opinion in Prigg v. Pennsylvania and its originalist view of slavery as the Constitution’s historical “compromise.” Douglass’s interpretation is thus also counterintuitive because by 1849, indentured servants and apprentices have been erased from the horizon of signification as even implied referents of the phrase “person held to service or labor,” and the “ambiguous” terms of this fugitive rendition clause immediately conjure only the figure of the runaway slave.
Ambiguous Identities and the Forms of Law
Douglass’s counterintuitive construction of the fugitive labor clause provides insight into a broader historical and literary-critical argument, whose implications are developed throughout Bonds of Citizenship: the dominant historical conceptualizations of slavery and slave personhood (in this case, the critical commonplace that the fugitive labor rendition clause was “originally intended” to refer exclusively to fugitive slaves) are contingent, partial truths, whose very intelligibility is circumscribed by what Douglass calls “the forms of law”—and what Karl Marx, writing during the labor struggles of this period, would call their forms of appearance in the law.15
Marx uses “form of appearance” (Erscheinungsform, a term given special emphasis) throughout Capital, from his opening analyses of exchange-value (Capital 1: 127), the commodity-form (Capital 1: 165), and the money-form (Capital 1: 236), to his study of variable capital and simple reproduction (Capital 1: 714). For our present discussion of that repressed referent of the Constitution’s fugitive labor rendition clause made visible by Douglass’s “man from another country,” Marx’s dissection of the mystifications of the wage-form is most pertinent:
The wage-form…extinguishes every trace of the division of the working day into necessary labour and surplus labour, into paid labour and unpaid labour. All labour appears as paid labour.…In slave labour, even the part of the working day in which the slave is only replacing the value of his own means of subsistence, in which he therefore actually works for himself alone, appears as labour for his master. All the labour appears as unpaid labour. In wage-labour, on the contrary, even surplus labour, or unpaid labour, appears as paid. In the one case, the property-relation conceals the slave’s labour for himself; in the other case the money-relation conceals the uncompensated labour of the wage-labourer.…All the notions of justice held by both the worker and the capitalist, all the mystifications of the capitalist mode of production, all capitalism’s illusions about freedom, all the apologetic tricks of vulgar economics, have as their basis [this] form of appearance…which makes the actual relation invisible, and indeed presents to the eye the precise opposite of that relation. (Capital 1: 680)
As with the hermeneutic of Douglass’s “man from another country,” this comparative analysis of slave labor and wage labor was tied directly to Marx’s dialectical critique of “the forms of law” as the codification of economic relations. Against the bourgeois economists’ “crude obsession with the material side [Stoff],” which thus led them to “ignore all differences of form” (682), and made them “unable to separate the form of appearance from the thing which appears within that form” (714), historical materialism distinguishes between those forms of appearance “reproduced directly and spontaneously, as current and usual modes of thought”—that is, through ideology in the narrow sense—and “the essential relation manifested in” (682) these forms.
As Louis Althusser and Etienne Balibar emphasize in Reading Capital, Marx’s method is to “distinguish between the relations of production themselves…and their ‘legal expression,’ which does not belong to the structure of production considered in its relative autonomy.”16 In analyzing the relations of production specific to the capitalist mode of production, therefore, “it is a question of distinguishing between the connection that we have called ‘property’ and the law of property.”17 This method “consists of looking for the relations of production behind the legal forms, or better: behind the secondary unity of production and law, which has to be disentangled. Only by this method will it eventually be possible to trace the theoretical boundary while still taking into account the ambivalent function that Marx assigns to legal forms: they are necessary yet ‘irrational,’ expressing and codifying the ‘economic’ reality which each mode of production defines in its own way, and yet simultaneously masking it.”18
By focusing on the ambivalent function of what he called “the forms of law,” Douglass’s reading of the “fugitive slave clause” recovers its other referents, apprenticeship and indentured servitude, forms of bound labor sharing elements of both enslaved and “free” waged labor. Following Douglass and Marx in their shared focus on legal codifications of property and of labor as ambiguous forms of appearance, Bonds of Citizenship focuses on the laboring subject’s multiple and historically varying forms of appearance, to explore the legal and cultural implications of that founding constitutional moment wherein the bondsman—the “person held to service or labor”—is inscribed as that name for