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Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
St Louis, Brett.
Rethinking race, politics, and poetics : C.L.R. James’ critique of modernity / Brett St Louis.
p. cm. — (Routledge studies in cultural history ; 7) Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-415-95772-4 (hardback : alk. paper)
1. James, C. L. R. (Cyril Lionel Robert), 1901—Criticism and interpretation.
2. James, C. L. R. (Cyril Lionel Robert), 1901—Political and social views.
3. Modernism (Literature).I. Title.
PR9272.9.J35Z86 2007
813'.52—dc222007016165
ISBN 0-203-93510-1 Mastere-bookISBN
ISBN10: 0-415-95772-0 (hbk)
ISBN10: 0-203-93510-1 (ebk)
ISBN13: 978-0-415-95772-4 (hbk)
ISBN13: 978-0-203-93510-1 (ebk)
For my grandmother, Mary Lucas
Acknowledgments
This book has been a long time in coming. That I have been able to finish it at all is only due to the help that I have received from numerous people, although I have not necessarily made as much use of it as I might have done. The usual disclaimer certainly applies in my case: the shortcomings of this book are my sole responsibility.
This work began life as a PhD thesis, and for help with that project as well as useful guidance on how to proceed in terms of this book, I would like to thank my supervisor John Solomos, as well as my examiners Clive Harris and John Oldfield. I am also grateful to Chetan Bhatt for his insightful comments and suggestions on my thesis that were invaluable for writing this book. I am also thankful to the Economic and Social Research Council for the Research Studentship that supported that initial PhD project and enabled me to conduct archival research in the United States on which I’ve drawn in this book. Part of Chapter 3 was published as “The Perilous ‘Pleasures of Exile’: C. L. R. James, Bad Faith and the Diasporic Life” in Interventions 1(3), 1999: 345–360.
Being a “work in progress” for so long, this book has been informed by and benefited from a series of conversations over the years. While I was not always able to grasp the significance of these exchanges as they took place, I hope I’ve at least been able to subsequently recognise their importance. In this regard, I thank Paul Gilroy, Barnor Hesse, bell hooks, Hazel Carby, Ato Quayson, Tony Bogues, Denise Ferreira da Silva and Gregor McLennan. I have also benefited greatly from ongoing encouragement and advice from Brian Alleyne and Bill Schwarz. Their interest in C. L. R. James, and acuity in how he might be understood and reassessed, has been an inspiration and a challenge. I am also grateful to Bart Moore-Gilbert for his help in finding my manuscript a “home,” and to Max Novick at Routledge for his support of my project and editorial direction.
A range of unpublished material has been extremely important in helping me develop an understanding of the correspondence between James’s everyday life, social thought, and political interventions. For access to such invaluable documents, I would like to thank the Archives of Labor and Urban Affairs, Wayne State University, and The Institute of Commonwealth
x Acknowledgments
Studies, University of London. I also owe an immense debt of gratitude to The C. L. R. James Institute in New York for its support. I would like to thank the archivist-librarian Ralph Dumain and especially the late director, Jim Murray. I am eternally thankful to Jim for his enthusiasm for my project from day one, and for introducing me to some very special people; I miss Jim a great deal in so many ways.
The love and support of numerous friends and family, in the main at great remove, has also given me the energy to complete this book, especially in those times—of which there were many—it seemed an impossible task: I am especially thankful to Sheila St Louis, Kim St Louis, and Marie St Louis, as well as Andrès Rodriguez, Mick Canavan, and Laurie Dahl. To my grandmother, Mary Lucas, to whom this book is dedicated, I am simply thankful for everything; her spirit still guides me in much that I do. I am also thankful to Isaac St Louis for his joyful presence, rigorous questioning, and permission to work weekends in order to finish this book. And finally, I am grateful beyond words to Nicole King for her boundless generosity, encouragement, and love that has enabled me to write this book, as well as for the life that we share outside and beyond it.
Introduction Modern Epiphanies: C. L. R. James and
the Reimagining of Modernity
“Neither the life of an individual nor the history of a society,” wrote C. Wright Mills in The Sociological Imagination, “can be understood without understanding both.”1 This simple yet incisive observation emphasises the need for social and historical understanding to survey the entire picture of society with an eye for the intricacies of its human brushstrokes. However, in terms of the larger project of understanding Western modernity, such a clarifying project is complicated by the voluntary, coerced, and forced mass migrations across time, continents, and contexts. As a result, the individual and the social cannot be simply accepted as given entities awaiting explanation; rather, the very question of what they are, or indeed, their very existence as coherent, knowable forms, becomes crucial.
This much has been become clear through the proliferation of critiques of the social and the human parading as global concepts and categories, while they are effectively no more than local ciphers for Europe and the European. Furthermore, these penetrative analyses have been at pains to point out the converse of this normative project—the ideational and physical subordination of those subhuman Others enduring an existence somewhat akin to beasts of burden in a pre-social state of nature. The task facing us, then, is easily identified if difficult to accomplish: modernity must be more profitably rethought as a diffuse and ever-expanding web of contact zones, exchanges, and relations that foreground modern human and social formation as produced by physical human traffic as well as a series of material and symbolic flows. And it is from this panoramic view that we might be able to move beyond the limited understanding of simple dichotomous human and social classifications of “them”/”us” and “here”/“there.” Instead, we may better comprehend the deep entanglements of modernity and account for the ways in which human existence and social formation is produced across time and space. In other words, these modern transnational migratory circuits, and their distended social, public, and private realms, necessitate an expanded critical imagination.
But this does not mean that one might simply jettison a notion of the individual and social for analytical and political purposes in favour of ethnographically charting the plurality of lives and histories thatanimate modern
human and social conditions. Indeed, as Chetan Bhatt usefully remarks, the opposition between the social as “the frolic of signification” and the political as reducible to “modes of agonistic subjectivisation” now customary within Euro-American intellectual debates heralds a dangerous moment.2 It signals, for Bhatt, the proliferation of sociological imaginations skilled in crafting cultural representations of the previously marginal, and the uncovering of the opaque sites of hegemonic power that are yet profoundly distanced from hard ethical and political labour.
And so we find ourselves caught between the Scylla of totalising holism and its reductive tendencies, and the Charybdis of a proliferate différance that refuses to remain still for long enough to be brought into the realm of explicit understanding. However, bearing the practical inertia that this dilemma invites in mind alongside Bhatt’s injunction, two key enterprises come into sharp relief: the objectives of analytical understanding and political commitment. The necessity of praxis suggested here provides the point at which the prospect of combining the expansive comparative and historical demands of understanding modernity and the disciplinary tenor of Mills’s project is actually imaginable and coherent. Alongside his typical sociological concern with the anomic impulses of modernity and its enervating human effects, Mills is not simply interested in vocational understanding but also with concrete action and progressive change. Of course, this ideal of socially engaged thought is by no means distinctively or singularly sociological; for example, it might also be perceived as theological inasmuch as clerics (arguably) perform a (quasi-) intellectual social function. Nevertheless, given its non-aligned core social and moral concerns, the sociological enterprise occupies a useful vantage point from which to understand the individual and social, while also summoning enough critical substance to evaluate whether they are what they ought to be and, if necessary, how change might be effected. And, perhaps more importantly, the dangers of restrained thought and political dogma are offset by a sociological tradition of auto-critique that Mills draws on in posing a key self-reflexive question of this imagination: What “quality of mind” can profitably assume such a monumental task?
The life and work of Cyril Lionel Robert James, 1901–1989,3 illustrates many of the pleasures, prerogatives, and pitfalls of understanding the wide-ranging formation of modernity and human and social life while (re)assembling a viable progressive politics. His biographical details are well documented4 and his life and work are generally understood within four stages: 1901–1932, Trinidad; 1932–1938, Britain; 1938–1953, the United States; and 1953–1989, when he travelled extensively between Europe, America, Africa, and the Caribbean. While not sociological in the professional and vocational sense, James’s intellectual interest in the relation between social formation and human action, as well as his political commitment and fundamental concern with human freedom and sociability, encapsulates the expansive imaginative spirit that Mills advocates. In short,
the personal, social, and political odyssey of James’s life afforded him a rich understanding of the opportunities and pressures of modernity and its bittersweet promise of human emancipation, to which he gave unique form and expression.
Moving fluently across genres and disciplines, James wielded his pen as novelist, playwright, journalist, historian, and social, literary, and cultural critic; and contributed to philosophical, political, historiographical, and sociological debates. Beginning with the novel Minty Alley (1936) that ushered in an era of West Indian social realist fiction featuring “the folk” as central dramatic characters, James’s most notable publications include the masterful The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (1938), a pathbreaking account of the Haitian Revolution; Notes on Dialectics: Hegel, Marx, Lenin (1948), a reading of Hegel’s (lesser) Science of Logic that sought to explain the centrality of the black struggle to the larger socialist movement as well as the limitations of democratic centralism and the vanguard party; Mariners, Renegades and Castaways: Herman Melville and the World We Live In (1953), a study of Melville and Moby Dick as an insightful critique of the emergence of modern totalitarian regimes and the neurotic and apathetic intellectual and managerial classes who, as impotent spectators to their own lives, were unable to resist this barbarism; and the incomparable quasi-autobiography Beyond a Boundary (1963) that seamlessly combines memoir and West Indian social history in a remarkable account of the life of cricket during the summit and fall of the British Empire and the emergent postcolonial future. In addition to these, James wrote and collaborated on many other important books and articles, and remained a committed and tireless public speaker late into his long life.
James’s political interventions actively engaged and informed struggles for radical social transformation in the Caribbean, Europe, the United States, and Africa. He espoused a range of objectives including radical collectivism, racial justice, and individual freedom. A founder member of the International African Friends of Abyssinia (IAFA) and its successor, the International African Service Bureau (IASB) in London during the inter-war years; an organiser of Southern sharecroppers and Midwestern automobile assembly plant workers under the auspices of the Workers’ Party (WP) and Socialist Workers’ Party (SWP) in the United States in the 1940s; and a key figure in Trinidadian nationalist politics, especially the drive for the West Indian Federation during the late 1950s, James’s political engagement was truly diasporic. However, for all this activity, the projects with which James identified and energetically supported were invariably ineffectual. Although the reasons for this are complex and manifold, a key factor is that James was, arguably, an activist-intellectual, equally committed to both sides of this vocational coin. Therefore, while many of his radical and black intellectual peers genuflected towards Moscow and its party apparatus, and the Western Marxist luminaries built an elaborate edifice of ideas, James attempted to live the practical ideal of the “engaged intellectual.” While
this might be taken as either to his credit or the falling between two stools, James appears to have had no choice in the matter: his intellectual formation and political commitment produced this expansive vocation for him where abstractions were only useful insofar as they could be reinserted into the concrete.5
If this portrayal deems James as a sober Marxist oriented towards ideas in the pursuit of political action, the humanistic romantic was never far from the surface. Indeed, James’s sensitivity towards human desire—what people imagined and wanted—is a notable facet of his intellectual approach that compelled him to pay attention to forms of popular culture often considered extraneous to serious intellectual debate and political activism. But his involvement in these disparate spheres was not simply the result of personal predilection. His polymath intellectualism was not a random eclecticism; his political engagement was not rigidly bound to functionalist ends; and his affinity with creative cultures was not an effete aestheticism. Despite various sectarian alignments, James remained a committed ecumenical Marxist, and his distinctive analytical method was as much informed by a formal appreciation of Marxism as were his life experience and allegiance to humanist principles. Therefore, it is as an especial Marxist and humanist that James displayed the qualities of imagination capable of understanding, in Mills’s words, “the intimate realities of ourselves” alongside “larger social realities.”6
This complex diversity makes James’s broad intellectual contribution and legacy difficult to situate. Thinking of his life and work as a series of distinct moments and interventions usefully brings its longevity and scope into focus and breaks it down into digestible portions: the early “literary James,” his “Pan-Africanist period,” the “culturalist years,” and so on. And as with any enduring intellectual figure fortunate enough to produce a substantial body of work, this compartmentalisation is an entirely legitimate enterprise; environments and ideas shift, and the notion of an unchanging, consistent oeuvre is difficult if not impossible to establish.
Another way to approach the conundrum of situating James is to consider him in the various incarnations that constitute his intellectual persona: as theoretician, critic, journalist, activist, historian. Clumsy as it might sound, each of these designations could be legitimately prefaced with the word “Marxist.” While far from establishing the defining feature of his intellectual career, the “Marxist” prefix suggests distinctive methodological approaches and fundamental political concerns that remain relatively continuous throughout James’s substantive shifts in subjects and ideas, genres and practices. But at the same time, the methodological, analytical, and organisational discontinuities within his Marxism pose a different question: what provides the stimulus for such changes? In other words, what acts back dialectically on James’s Marxism and forces him, for example, to reconsider the status of racial oppression within broader class struggles or to develop a critique of the vanguard party?
This issue is crucial because it highlights a delicate balance posed within the challenge of the sociological imagination refracted through James’s Marxism. To adapt Mills, James suggests that neither the intimacies of human life nor the historical laws of social development can be understood in isolation; material forces and human vitality are complimentary productive forces. Although such claims to a concern with qualitative human existence are implicit within Marxist analysis, as long as they do not lapse into utopian sentimentality or romantic idealism,7 James’s assertion has a different feel about it. His concern with moral life and unabashed delight in human creativity, imaginative expression, and emotional fulfilment is far removed from the quotidian life of Marxist preoccupation. With this in mind it is my contention that James’s life and work bear the hallmark of another prefix: that of “humanist.” The dialectical relationship between his humanism and his Marxism shapes the rich contours of his social thought, and informs my understanding of James as a humanist Marxist and provides the analytical foundation of this book.
This dialectic between Marxism and humanism is immensely important to understanding James’s distinctiveness. The preoccupation with immiseration at the foundation of Marxist critique fundamentally relates to the human experience of economic exploitation and its inhumane psychic and social effects, and is (tacitly) dependent on a moral justification. This means that exploitation and alienation are not simply objectively noteworthy as incidental consequences of the capitalist mode and relations of production. Instead, the critique of capital is a subjective evaluation of the contravention of an absolute moral value that accepts exploitation and alienation as wrong without the validating authority of sacred Truths.
Even though Marxism is antipathetic to religiosity, the notion that it is also “the god that failed” testifies to the deified status of its secular morality: for example, Erich Fromm reads Marx as an articulation of a Messianic atheism aiming towards human (social) salvation, and similarly, Leszek Kowlakowski recognises what might be understood as an eschatology within Marxism as trusting “the final judgment of history.”8 On the other hand, it is perhaps unsurprising that much literature presents humanism as a form of secular spiritualism-cum–value system that offers a moral guide or insight into individual and social life.9 Such synergy between Marxism and humanism is not lost on James: John Bracey recalls an occasion when James “cut short a discussion of Marxist humanism by saying that the phrase was redundant. To be a humanist in the twentieth century was to be a Marxist.”10
But this is not to place James among the “Marxist humanists” such as Theodor Adorno and Jean-Paul Sartre, dually characterised as pessimistic critical thinkers, from the pantheon of Western Marxism, or Eastern European Soviet dissenters who positively identified with the ideal of a communist society or later New Left figures.11 Indeed, as his first biographer Paul Buhle argues, James’s optimism distinguishes him from the Western Marxists who had “defeat” etched on their foreheads.12 Furthermore, despite the critique
of capitalism as the undermining of the modern promise of universal human progress, the Euro-American arena provided the human subject and social theatre for Marxist humanism: for example, in a 1961 lecture, Erich Fromm bases the expansion of the category “modern man” to include Asians, Africans, and others from non-industrialised parts of the globe on the basis of their contact with and increasing resemblance to “Western man.”13
Against this evolutionary history of the modern germinating in Europe, writing in 1969 in reference to the 1967 Tanzanian Arusha Declaration and Julius Nyerere’s African socialist Ujamma project, James restates the dialectic between Marxism and humanism with an important clarification that bears repeating at length:
It is sufficient to say that socialist thought has seen nothing like this since the death of Lenin in 1924, and its depth, range and the repercussions which flow from it, go far beyond the Africa which gave it birth. It can fertilize and reawaken the mortuary that is socialist theory and practice in the advanced countries. “Marxism is a humanism” is the exact reverse of the truth. The African builders of a humanist society show that today all humanism finds itself in close harmony with the original conceptions and aims of Marxism.14
This statement crucially asserts the indivisibility of humanism and Marxism and reverses Fromm’s Eurocentric diagnosis of the modern human and social environment for an anticipated humanist renaissance on the basis of objective African political and social conditions instead of an inverted ethnocentrism. But it also offers an even more astounding implication: As a secular morality, the principles of humanism are, for James, distinctively and irrevocably modern. The modern project to dissolve divine providence and realise the non-theistic possibility of human freedom and social equality is a yet-to-be-made radical spirit rather than an already existing essence or latent capacity to be found. As such it is not a question of whether or not the modernist project can be rescued, but rather that it must be reimagined. For James the necessary framework for such an undertaking is both Marxist and humanist, and must entertain a more expansive vision of modernity and its unfulfilled promise that is acutely aware of its wide-ranging formation and the vital contributions offered beyond the discrete borders of its heretofore principal European theatre. Thus two startling insights are established here: the indivisibility of humanist and Marxist principles, and a strident faith in the yet-to-be-realised promise and opportunities of modernity.
Inhabiting the twentieth century and yet, at his admission, formed in the nineteenth, James straddles the high moment of modernity and its contradictions. The political promise of democracy and human freedom compromised by colonial and totalitarian domination; the immense productive power of industrial and technological advancement increasingly reserved for the wealthy few; and the pernicious myths of racial inferiority thatfalsified
evidence of a collective human condition, were all apparent to James. And yet, unlike Adorno and Max Horkheimer’s critique of brutality and inequity as logical corollaries of the core impulses to dominate and master within modern rationality, James retained faith in reason and progress as viable and worthy principles.15 For James, the deployment of progress as an instrument of cruelty and liberation and the link between enlightenment and domination that Adorno and Horkheimer saw as dialectical were material expressions of competition for resources and concomitant ideological effects. Although there are various possible explanations for this difference, including his preference for explanatory tools other than the psychoanalytical, James’s refusal to accept a necessary link between the ideals of democracy and progress and their brutal degradation reflects existential and political instead of philosophical precepts. While the Western Marxists concentrated on modernity in terms of the Euro-American arena, James occupied a different personal and intellectual position that recognised the instrumental deterioration of reason into terror, evident within the Holocaust as previously practised, albeit in different form, during the Atlantic slave trade and formation of plantation societies.16 His commitment to reason and progress is, therefore, a political gesture that enables him to situate resistance: the application of reason enables the black Jacobins to acquire a revolutionary consciousness, and their will to action was not vengeful ire but a progressive attempt to realise a better, more equitable existence.
In its various forms, James’s social and political thought is based on a diagnostic critique of modernity that remains sympathetic towards its humanistic and political principles of freedom and equality. Despite the manifest failings of modern Enlightenment, its egalitarian and progressive ideals remain compelling for James and stand out as indubitable, secular revelations for modern times; they are “modern epiphanies.” This framing of James’s understanding of and relationship to modernity can be usefully fleshed out through Norman Denzin’s discussion of experience and life history through the concept of epiphany as the location of a series of “interactional moments that leave marks on people’s lives,” which potentially generate individual “transformational experiences.”17 Invoking Mills, Denzin expands on this conceptualisation, pointing to epiphanies as incontrovertibly linking the individual and the social by highlighting the relationship between private troubles and public issues. Thus while epiphanies are individual experiences situated within moments of crisis instead of strictly constructive divine revelations, given the significance of individual crisis and profound revelation as formed within broader contextual moments they are at once biographical and structural. This is suggestive of two important issues: first, although epiphanies present themselves as individual crises, they are also symptomatic of larger social pressures; and second, they lead to varied consequences that are neither necessarily coherent nor satisfactorily resolved. In this sense, James’s individual compulsion towards freedom and equality that are also publicly and structurally manifest as modern
epiphanies initiates a profound analytical and political struggle instead of a triumphalist point of resolution.
The precise character of this struggle is transparent within the quintessence of James’s activist-intellectual engagements. In explaining the capacity of the epiphany to combine the personal/biographical with the social/historical, Denzin instructively draws on Sartre’s notion of each individual as a “universal singular” which recognises an individual as irreducibly so and demands that they are understood “as a single instance of more universal social experiences and social processes”18—we are, therefore, distinct and yet similar.19 In terms of the interpretive interactionist model he advances, Denzin foregrounds the relationship between the subject’s life experiences and their historical moments as mutually productive, which is useful for understanding the method and concerns of James’s social and political thought as allied to his personal and intellectual development. In other words, there are simple questions to be asked: How did James arrive at his epiphanies as individual crises? And how are these individual experiences translated into a meaningful and useful method for social and historical analysis? A consideration of the biographical is unavoidable here. The world that James was born into and inhabited presented freedom and equality to him as personal and social paradoxes at almost every turn. And as if the blatant iniquities of crown colony government were not enough, the intellectual personality James developed through its pedagogical principles placed him in that dilemmatic interstitial position occupied by the black Jacobins who were simultaneously included and excluded from modernity. There is another important point of note: James’s modern epiphanies are developed through a principled commitment to Marxism and humanism and subject to a thematic core. As a result, this book is structurally and analytically informed by the triangulation of race, politics, and poetics that I understand as central themes within the Jamesian oeuvre. This is, of course, rather schematic, as James engages more than these three subjects throughout his work. However, it is not my contention that these themes are all with which he engages in a narrow sense. My point is twofold: first, that as broad categories, race, politics, and poetics are recurrent throughout his work, not necessarily all three at once but more often than not any two work in articulation—Beyond a Boundary and American Civilization, for example, might be animated by all three, while James’s anticolonialist and Pan-Africanist writings might be seen as more concerned with race and politics more specifically20; and second, these broad categories each incorporate many different, specific concerns—for example, in the wider sense, James’s historical and social analyses can be understood as political, as his literary and further humanistic concerns such as in Mariners, Renegades and Castaways can be taken as poetic in the Aristotelian sense of a productive human culture for edifying and pleasurable purpose.21 The thematic triumvirate of race, politics, and poetics is a good substantive foil for James’s Marxist and humanist principles and approach; they provide a useful framework for
articulating his concern with the material conditions of social existence, as well as his conceptualisation of moral and emotional life as a holism instead of as discrete facets of the social and human condition.
If, as Primo Levi wrote with Jean Améry in mind, “To argue with a dead man is embarrassing and not very loyal,”22 then Rethinking Race, Politics and Poetics respectfully aims to be a disloyal embarrassment. There is a straightforward reason for this: James is, to my mind, one of the most innovative and significant Marxist intellectuals of the twentieth century but is seldom recognised as such which has had an understandable effect. In light of this oversight, many discussions of James have a restorative rationale and concentrate on asserting his intellectual and political importance as an iconic figure in black, anticolonial, and Third World liberationist struggles. However, this tendency has also incurred some of the regrettable consequences of hagiography. As a result, and inspired by Stuart Hall’s suggestion that James’s “work has never been critically and theoretically engaged as it should be,” this book takes Hall’s assertion that “major intellectual figures are not honoured by simply celebration [but] ... by taking his or her ideas seriously and debating them, extending them, quarrelling with them, and making them live again” as a clarion call and point of departure.23 And although I aim to be sympathetic in this task, such a critical appraisal is unavoidable as this book’s intention of making James’s ideas “live again” presents assiduous critique as a necessary and desirable enterprise.
Of course the project of understanding the entirety of James’s corpus demands justification. Martin Glaberman, a longtime comrade of James, has notably remarked that “Everyone produces their own James. People have, over the years, taken from him what they found useful and imputed to him what they felt necessary.”24 Although, unlike Glaberman, I do not claim to have “lost the patent” to James that requires having to “share him with others,”25 I do appreciate the difficulty facing his interlocutors and comrades when confronted with the distanced observations and interpretations such as those offered in the pages below. Nonetheless, I offer two main justifications for this book’s ambition to engage with James in toto. First, as Michel Foucault suggests, the analysis of the author’s oeuvre requires the interpretative operation of (re)constructing it as a coherent unity out of a series of experiential, imaginative, and unconscious fragments that are also shaped by historical forces.26 While this might suggest the identification of James’s corpus or even a Jamesian perspective as inherently problematic, Foucault’s concern is that the unity and meaning of the oeuvre is neither given nor immediate but emerges from the interpretative operation of “transcribing” and “deciphering” what is both manifest and concealed within the text. This informs the hermeneutic approach in this book that attempts to engage with James’s work in its historical and textual specificity, as well as to interpret its meaning and evaluate its implications. Such an interpretative venture is further justified when one attempts to understand the entirety of James’s corpus and is confronted by the variousinconsistencies, weaknesses, and
evasions of an intellectual life made real across decades, continents, and moments that are brought into sharp relief and demand explanation.
In addition to this critical enterprise there are two further important justifications for my interpretative approach. It is important to understand James as a Marxist theoretician and practitioner instead of as a career academic. Many of his statements were developed pragmatically to travel across activist and intellectual contexts instead of as theoretically intricate and impregnable edifices—if the latter is indeed possible. Therefore, in assembling the unity of James’s corpus, I approach the ideas produced through his activistintellectual modality as a form of “catachresis”—“proximate naming”— where meaning shifts in response to situational and relational conditions and its encoding is subject to virtually infinitesimal variations of codes.27 Finally, rather than simply considering this hermeneutic process as the clarification of the “real” meaning of James’s oeuvre, I approach it as an inescapably subjective project oriented towards making James’s ideas “live again.”
To this end I draw on Hans-Georg Gadamer and situate James beyond his specific standpoint “situation” that has a characteristically limited vision by referring to the concept of “horizon” as the expansive vision gained from a propitious location.28 Using the concept of “horizon,” I hope that this book will achieve Gadamer’s aim of enhancing the interaction between reader and text in two senses: first, that we will be able to piece together and grasp James’s corpus across time and contexts; and second, that this process will put us in conversation with James and enhance our understanding of our own present and contemplation on the future.
An important thematic rationale exists in addition to these hermeneutic concerns. As stated above, James’s published work is distributed across a wide variety of disciplines and genres. Consequently, the totality of his work is difficult to summarise and his similarly wide-ranging statements cannot be reconstructed here in their entirety. Nevertheless, while it is tempting to treat these periods and the ideas and work produced within them as discrete, it seems to me that dominant methods, themes and ideas, as well as intellectual shifts and conclusive breaks, can be discerned. Such a holistic view is crucial to an understanding of James. First, his methodological commitment to a totalising conception of history, society, and human activity makes it dangerous to wholly separate thematically connected analytical insights from each other. For example, his analysis of Toussaint L’Ouverture’s leadership in The Black Jacobins and Frank Worrell’s in Beyond a Boundary, although different in moment and context, both demonstrate a central concern with a Socratic and dialogic relationship between leader and led. In each account, leadership is responsive to its popular constituents and seeks to persuade and encourage mass commitment to a set of objectives, instead of promoting a top-down didacticism that also resurfaces in James’s mature critique of the vanguard party in Notes on Dialectics. More generally, as noted above, race, politics, and poetics are consistently employed as key generative categories within James’s modern epiphanies.
It is not simply the existence of this synergy that is significant, but that it is not incidental. Each discrete event helps cohere a totalised conception of politics that is lost if James’s work is dismantled into discrete, “manageable” texts or moments. An obvious example is the distinction made between his political and cultural work that is transparent in how he is read and appropriated. Interest in James’s “cultural” writings such as American Civilization has been seen as an avoidance of his Trotskyist concern with emancipation that reflects the “depoliticized academic interest” rampant within Cultural Studies.29 The other side of the coin is that James’s repudiation of Trotskyism and its limited appreciation of cultural politics in Beyond a Boundary can be used to support an opposing argument that dismisses the significance of his earlier “political” work. This either/or scenario risks committing the grave error of separating political and cultural fields, as well as different humanistic and social scientific approaches, as incommensurate. The lamentable corollary is the serious distortion and misunderstanding of James’s intellectual range. Within this compartmentalisation, his wide-ranging interests can only resonate as idiosyncratic personal and intellectual concerns, leaving the reader to marvel at the assorted (as opposed to mutually relevant) insights, with the aggravated loss of the especial political force of his ideas.
This book proceeds within two broad sections. The first explicates and analyses James’s personal and intellectual development by situating the evolution of his ideas in their various formative contexts and modes of exposition. Chapter One explores James’s understanding of the modern world as produced through the multiple sites and multilateral flows of modernity. I draw attention to his appreciation of the centrality of the New World to the formation and consolidation of modernity through the productive clash of race, politics, and culture, rendered through the figure of the black Jacobin as an exemplary modern personality. Chapter Two focuses on the surfacing of his distinctive intellectual approach as forged through an “elective affinity”—in Goethe’s sense—with race, politics, and poetics as competing and complementary concerns further complicated by his peripatetic life. Combining an assessment of the “young James” with his more mature works, Chapter Three develops a close examination of the intersection of his personal life and intellectual production and their informative impact on each other. I pay special attention to the impact of his itinerant life on his social and political thought through the prism of “bad faith,” not in order to make character assessments but to reconsider the paradigmatic diasporic postcolonial intellectual with which James is so often associated.
The second section focuses on James’s praxis more specifically and extends the analytical insights presented in the first three chapters into a consideration of his political prescriptions. Chapter Four engages with the theme of spontaneity, central to James’s political thought yet seldom explored in detail. I trace the development of his dissatisfaction with the paternal didacticism of the vanguard party, and analyse the merits and failings of his alternative theorisation of organisation as predicated on the spontaneous emergence
Rethinking Race, Politics, and Poetics
of autonomous mass self-activity and workers’ organic radicalism. Chapter Five concentrates on James’s later work and his distinctive approach to cultural politics as a form of radical activity. Drawing largely on his cricket writing and Beyond a Boundary in particular, I suggest that his concern with a popular aesthetic rendered within cricket offers an invaluable critique and extension of Marxist praxis. James’s sensitivity to human emotional and creative needs and desires strongly counters the evasion of the same as esoteric distractions within classical Marxist politics, that strictly equates the amelioration of human alienation and labour exploitation with altered material conditions such as improved relations and conditions of production. The book then concludes with a brief Epilogue that points to the ways in which James’s work remains instructive for us today in relation to contemporary debates on the state of Marxism in relation to post-marxism and anti-humanism as well as reinvigorated concerns within humanism and the imagining of an ethical politics capable of reconciling individual will and democratic sociality.
There is one last thing to be said. All that is physically left of James now is his work—principally ink on paper. For some, there are intimate memories of the person, but the rest of us are left only with his texts. For coming generations, these and these alone will constitute the key resources that might guide us towards a better understanding of the present and future through an appreciation of the past. Some of us, and those yet to come, can only have an imaginative relationship with “Nello”—James’s nickname to his intimates. And “we” will not be able to conjure “Nello,” as in “Nello used to say ...” or “Nello would think/say/do ...” as a means to bypass dialogue and dissent. Without such recourse, we will have to discuss, debate, and disagree in reference, but without deference, to James; we will be able to build authentic alliances through an engagement with his work but not in his name. It is in this sense that we will truly take James’s ideas seriously, extend them, and make them live again.
1 “TheyBroughtThemselves” Modernity
and the Emergence of the Black Jacobins
The distinguishing feature of the slave was not his race but the concentrated impact of his work on the extensive cultivation of the soil, which eventually made possible the transition to an industrial and urban society.
C. L. R. James, “The Atlantic Slave Trade and Slavery”
From our twenty-first century vantage point, it seems rather obvious to state that the dominant cartography of modernity is a largely Europe-centred enterprise. The respective philosophical, political, and economic events of the Enlightenment and the French and industrial revolutions taken to signal the emergence, consolidation, and development of modernity are exclusively and distinctively European events. Even exemplary contemporary perspectives on the emergence and constitution of modernity, supposedly acclimated to an intellectual environment that questions and problematises the foundation and production of knowledge within narrow geographical contexts, have not fully escaped this constricting focus. Anthony Giddens’s outline of the birth of the modern reflexive subject and social institutions, Marshall Berman’s tour of European urban centres with Goethe, Marx, and Baudelaire as guides, and Jürgen Habermas’s recognition of the (unfinished) generative impulse provided by nineteenth-century aesthetic modernism, all demonstrate the tacit Europe-centred frame of normative modernity.1 While the emergence of modes and relations of mass industrial production, social institutions, and novel cultural forms within Europe are undoubtedly indelible markers of what we consider as the dawn of the modern era, they received vital stimulation from imperial voyages of discovery, the Atlantic slave trade, colonial settlement, and the expropriation of raw materials and profit from colony to metropole.
When contributory factors in the emergence of modernity are found outside Europe, they often chart unidirectional flows from the Old World to the New. The “discovery” of “new” regions, materials, and resources; the growth of mercantilism and international markets; the encounters with indigenous populations; and the voluntary, coerced, and forced migrants that populated modernity are taken as the result of European ingenuity and
activity. Again, to say this is not to say anything new. Scholarship on the formation of modernity as forged beyond, as well as within, European shores is plentiful to the extent that if not capable of issuing a new normative modernity, it at least represents a counter-canon.2 It is thus tempting to understand this interdisciplinary counter-canon incorporating philosophical, sociological, and historical perspectives, among many others, as effectively rewriting modernity in a more expansive frame as the distinctive product of a post-colonial intellectualism armed with critical deconstructive techniques. However, while this counter-canon has its own distinctive features, I would suggest that it is made possible by and written out of a critical terrain that bears significant traces of James’s intellectual hallmark. During the 1930s James recognised that slavery and the Atlantic slave trade was crucial in the emergence of modernity, not only in the customary terms of industrial and social development and capital accumulation, but also in that the plantation slave personified a novel, modern, proto-proletarian consciousness.
James’s corrective of the partial history of modernity is based on two fundamental insights: the multidirectional flows between the Old and New Worlds, and the slaves’ durable embodiment of the spirit of modernity that resisted the iniquitous destiny of individual estrangement and social subjugation. His recognition of the extent to which metropolitan capital accumulation and industrial, social, and cultural development was facilitated by the Atlantic slave trade, colonial expansion, and the productivity of plantation slave societies, expands the customary boundaries of modernity beyond Europe. His expansive vision also questions the birth of the newly reflexive subject freed from pre-modern localised ties that populated (European) modernity and constituted it as a decisive historical rupture with the traditional “past.” He recognises the creation of a distinctive, creolised “New World culture” forged by slaves through their physical and imaginative journey across the middle passage into the Americas, which provides a significant counter to the notion of modernity as synonymous with what Benedict Anderson recognises as the development of a “national imagination” located within a “fixed sociological landscape.”3 This culture not only disrupts ideas of the development of modernity within static national boundaries, but also conceptualises a diasporic spatiality that acts as a catalyst for the production of syncretic cultures as emergent and hybrid forms that surpass the fearful insularity of Old World cultures.
In addition to questioning the dominant perception of unidirectional economic, social, and cultural flows, James, as Stuart Hall incisively points out, constructs a history of modernity that challenges orthodox imperial and Marxist historiography. In its place, James asserts the significant role of the black diaspora at the inception of modernity and dismantles the metropolisperiphery and traditional-modern binaries.4 His unorthodox interpretation of Marxism also leads him to reassess the analysis of modern capitalist relations of production and the desired existential ends of the modern subject. James’s understanding of the impact of New World slavery on theconstitution of
modernity then provides the basis for a broader exploration of the emergence of the modern individual and their social condition that confronts the pervasive melancholic equation of modernity to the individual and social frustrations of alienation and industrialisation. Demonstrating the hallmark of his humanistic concern with the impact of individual creative agency on the formation and development of social relations and structures, James illustrates how the modern themes of alienated existence and constraining social orders emerge and are resisted within New World plantation societies.
The insurgent originality of James’s expansive geopolitical and humanistic understanding of modernity is perhaps most evident in his dialectical attempt to wrest an exemplar of the universal progressive potentiality of human will from a terrifying example of particularistic suffering and resistance. In his understanding of the San Domingo Revolution as a social uprising striving towards securing human freedom instead of an asinine frenzy of destruction and violent racial revenge, James’s black Jacobins raise arms alongside their French revolutionary cousins to realise the annulled modern promise of freedom and equality.5 For James, this communality signifies the struggle to rescue the inviolate modern universalisms of enlightenment and progress from their debasement, reiterating Aimé Césaire’s declaration that there is room for all at the rendezvous of victory.6 Therefore, James not only writes African slaves and plantation societies into the history of modernity, but also recognises the attempt of the former to realise the radical democratic promise of modernity as an inclusive human enterprise instead of the particular outcome of a distinctive racial experience.
James’s insight into the formation of modernity, its sites and social structures, relations, and actors, might appear rather obvious to us now, but it is difficult to overestimate its significance. It demonstrates the intellectual foundations of his humanist Marxism—the entangled concerns of social formation and individual activity—and the existential complexities of the interminable world that he recognised and entered. It also provides the point of departure and orientation for this chapter. I want to suggest that this articulation of the social and the humanistic forms the basis of his understanding of the formation of modernity through the experience of capitalism and colonialism and the social constructions of race, class, culture, and nation. I propose to explore this development through his delineation of the social emergence of the black Jacobins, the travails of their journey from deracination and acculturation to political consciousness, and the imaginative resourcefulness that encapsulates their irresistible humanity.
SLAVERY,BIO-POWER,ANDTHE“DARK SIDESOFMODERNITY”
The classical sociological framework for understanding modernity that draws attention to its contradictions, principally the opposition ofprogressive
and degenerative change, asks whether the latter constitutes a purposive consequence or incidental effect. For many charged with addressing this question, the manifestation of this latent contradiction is often seen as a contemporary event. Giddens’s understanding of the exponential growth of the industrial-military complex in the twentieth century is an example of this inherent opposition that is supplemented by the periodic environmental and economic crises that destabilise financial systems and ecosystems.7 This perspective on the emergence and development of modernity, what Giddens recognises as the result of the “double-edged character of modernity” and its “dark sides,” betrays a particularly presentist train of sociological thought. Put simply, the early-modern fears of the sociological founding fathers may be intellectually penetrative and portentous, but retain a somewhat quaint quality given the hitherto unimaginable capacity for the management of social orders and relations within contemporary technologically advanced societies.
It is simply not the case, however, that this presentism understates the incisive quality of traditional sociological critiques and their enduring relevance. It also obscures and marginalises a crucial historical aspect of modernity’s dark side; namely, the Atlantic slave trade, colonial expansion, and the formation of plantation slave societies. The emergence of state militarism and extensive social surveillance that Giddens rightly understands as significantly developed and refined during the twentieth century are, in James’s formulation, evident in nascent forms at the inception of modernity within the organisation of plantation society. James’s analysis of the Atlantic slave trade demonstrates the development of militarism and attempts at totalised social control through various tactics including systematic terror and surveillance as essential to the emergent industrial-military complex of colonial slave societies and modern capitalism.
James begins the preface to the first edition of The Black Jacobins by stating the profound economic and geopolitical importance of San Domingo for France, and the significance of the slave trade to the entire enterprise:
In 1789 the French West Indian colony of San Domingo supplied twothirds of the overseas trade of France and was the greatest individual market for the European slave-trade. It was an integral part of the economic life of the age, the greatest colony in the world, the pride of France, and the envy of every other imperialist nation. The whole structure rested on the labour of half-a-million slaves.8
The economic and political importance of San Domingo to France leads James to detail the systematic logic underpinning the critical role of the slave trade and strategies of colonial governance within plantation society. As capital resources crucial to the creation of exchange and surplus value, the slaves were collected as “property” and transported from Africa as human cargo. The significance of this contention as a Marxist analysis
Brought Themselves 17 of the Atlantic slave trade, predicated primarily on profit-oriented material exchange instead of racial or racist motivation, has long been recognised and developed, perhaps most notably by Eric Williams in Capitalism and Slavery. 9 However, even at this early stage in his intellectual odyssey, James demonstrates a discomfort with the facile explanation offered by an intractably economistic analytical model. Instead, he sets himself the target of illustrating the synergy between the ideal and the material as providing the formative impulse for the management of the Atlantic slave trade and plantation societies. Given his assertion that the physical value of the slaves was enhanced by their mental capacities—for example, their ability to grasp technical procedures—James recognises that the functioning and maintenance of the plantation economy and society meant that the slaves had to be controlled intellectually as well as physically. And although the supply of slaves was in a sense limitless, the costs of transportation and the human losses incurred en route, coupled with the process of seasoning and the low reproductive rates in the Americas, meant that the slaves were not a totally expendable capital resource.
This meant that the slaves had to be managed in a highly calculated manner. Not in the respective proto-Fordist or -Taylorist senses of productive efficiency and maximisation, but rather in the ordering and management of the entirety of their existence. In The Black Jacobins, James details how recreation, communal gatherings, and procreation among other mundane activities were assiduously regulated so as to ensure the continued economic and social operation of the plantation as well as the safety of the plantation owners and managers. This impression of totalised human management fleshes out Michel Foucault’s conceptual paradigm of “bio-power” as “without question an indispensable element in the development of capitalism.”10 Just as Foucauldian bio-power recognises that capitalism “would not have been possible without the controlled insertion of bodies into the machinery of production and the adjustment of the phenomena of population to economic processes,” James’s analysis of the processes of colonial management alongside the slave trade and the development of New World slave societies demonstrates the emergence of novel modes of social formation and control.11 For him, these new forms of social order within plantation economies cannot be easily explained away as examples of pathological irrationality. Rather, the systems of control within slave societies are the direct and purposeful outcome of capitalist industrial modes of production within a colonial plantocracy.
By identifying the coercive and non-coercive forms of power exercised within the maintenance of plantation society, James conceptualises the distinctively modern modes of controlling a social population in a more expansive geopolitical frame. His understanding of the maintenance of slavery and plantation society in the face of the numerical disadvantage of those exercising power shares the bio-political concern with “the field of political practices and economic observation, of the problems of birth-rate, longevity,
public health, housing and migration.”12 In a sense, James’s attention to the political practices and economic imperatives central to the formation and maintenance of New World slave societies and plantation economies points to a conspicuous absence of the racialized discourses and effects of slavery and colonialism within Foucault’s account of bio-power.13 This is not to dismiss Foucault’s understanding of modernity as based on an imperceptive and ethnocentric discursive matrix that ought to be replaced by an alternative paradigm that restores historical accuracy through a concentration on the experiential and epistemic primacy of enslaved and colonised peoples. Rather, it reiterates James’s establishment of a broader geopolitical frame of modernity. He recognises the coercive and non-coercive functions of the industrial-military complex of slave societies as producing the regimes of bodily discipline, the management of (reproductive) health, and the deployment of surveillance techniques in the production and organisation of social space and ideas. This is the case in capitalist social systems within both Europe and New World slave societies.
A series of examples develops this expanded bio-political framework. For James, the apparently brutal treatment of slaves in transportation, at the point of sale and during their new employment, was informed by a series of rational judgements predicated largely on economic imperatives. Slaves were transported in the most confined conditions in order to maximise the available space; the intimate and degrading examinations on the auction block served to allow the purchaser to determine the quality of their prospective goods; the marking of flesh denoted possession, not punishment; the exacting work regimes were determined by the precise requirements of mass sugar production; and, apart from sleep, the allocated periods of rest were apportioned so that slaves could cultivate provisions that might sustain them during periods of scarcity when epidemics broke out and thousands died. Additionally, the slave masters’ disciplinary techniques were not the “unusual spectacle of property-owners apparently careless of preserving their property,” but were rather the means by which they would “ensure their own safety.”14 This “unusual spectacle” represents one of James’s most influential analyses of slavery: although he usefully documents the vicious bloodshed fundamental to plantation slavery, he was at pains to demonstrate that it was not gratuitously brutal, but that its techniques of repression and violence were the most sophisticated expression of capitalist discipline available at that precise historical moment.15
In pointing out that the torture of slaves was a series of systematically ordered events instead of random incidents, James articulates the production of legitimate ideas and forms of social conduct and the “regime of calculated brutality and terrorism”16 central to plantation and colonial management. Therefore, the physical techniques of brutality and punishment enacted on slaves are not solely isolated as normalised acts within the practical context of slavery, but are also a result of ingenious instrumentality. Starting with the practices of torture, James notes that punishments were notindiscriminate
They Brought Themselves 19 occurrences that merely embodied the physical practising of power, but were refined in a series of specialised variations and even given their own titles to denote that they were carefully considered and assiduously developed practices. For example, the “four-post”—where the arms and legs of the slave were tied to posts set into the earth—was adapted for the pregnant woman by a hole dug in the ground to accommodate her stomach.17 This preparedness transgresses ideals of feminine frailty (of course inapplicable to slaves) and taboos around the sanctity of life in utero that might ordinarily have been accepted as reserved for God’s will. We can also imagine that the disciplinary effects of this sadistic ingenuity would have provided the unnerving signal that all customary moral standards of compassion and pity had been suspended.
The practice of torture as a form of punishment and discipline instead of gratuitous violence represents a profound shift in the mechanisms of power. James recognises the reason of the “unusual spectacle” of owners’ brutality towards their slaves as peculiar to the rational demands of modern capital accumulation and growth of commercial markets and industrialisation. This novel form of social control through calculated and routine violence is suggestive of Foucault’s analysis of the transformed exercise of social power from the ancient to the pre-modern. In contrast with its absolute ancient form, where a sovereign power held and exercised the right to dispose of life that transgressed or contravened its authority or will, Foucault points out that the right of life became “dissymmetrical” in its relative and limited modern manifestation:
The sovereign exercised his right of life only by exercising his right to kill, or by refraining from killing; he evidenced his power over life only through the death he was capable of requiring. The right which was formulated as the “power of life and death” was in reality the right to take life or let live.18
Power, therefore, becomes a “right of seizure” and is concentrated within the regulations attached to allowing life as well as the taking of life. The regulatory aspects of conferring life are constituted as a means to exercise social control with the emphasis on the productive, as opposed to the destructive, capacity of power. This reformation of power seeking to “incite, reinforce, control, monitor, optimise and organise the forces under it”19 is evident within James’s understanding of slavery. The treatment of slaves then serves alongside the interests of capital as an example of the Foucaldian notion of “a power bent on generating forces, making them grow, and ordering them, rather than one dedicated to impeding them, making them submit, or destroying them.”20
Similarly, the power exercised by the slave owners is precisely oriented towards economic and social productivity; the promotion of a requisite social order is of paramount importance to the protection andadvancement
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which of all others she least seeks at the present time; and that it is only necessary to let her see distinctly that one with Spain is on the point of taking place, and will be owing altogether to her support of her pretensions, to induce France to change her policy and tone in the points depending here.”
Pursuing this train of reasoning, Monroe tested its correctness by challenging a direct issue of courage. His letter, thus inspired, reached Paris in due time, and its ideas were pressed by Armstrong on members of the French government. Their answer was prompt and final; it was instantly reported by Armstrong to Monroe in a letter[20] so pregnant with meaning that two of its sentences may be said to have decided the fate of Jefferson’s second administration:
“On the subject of indemnity for the suspended right of deposit (professing to know nothing of the ground on which the interruption had been given) they would offer no opinion. On that of reparation for spoliations committed on our commerce by Frenchmen within the territory of his Catholic Majesty, they were equally prompt and decisive, declaring that our claim, having nothing of solidity in it, must be abandoned.
“With regard to boundary, we have, they said, already given an opinion, and see no cause to change it. To the question, What would be the course of this government in the event of a rupture between us and Spain? they answered, We can neither doubt nor hesitate,—we must take part with Spain; and our note of the 30th Frimaire [Dec. 21, 1804] was intended to communicate and impress this idea.”
This stern message left Monroe helpless. To escape from Madrid without suffering some personal mortification was his best hope; and fortunately Godoy took no pleasure in personalities. The Spaniard was willing to let Monroe escape as soon as his defeat should be fairly recorded. The month of March had nearly passed before Monroe received Armstrong’s letter; meanwhile Cevallos consumed the time in discussing the West Florida boundary. At the end of the month Monroe, fully aware at last of his situation, attempted to force an issue. March 30 he wrote to Cevallos that he was weary of delay: [21]
“It neither comports with the object of the present mission nor its duties to continue the negotiation longer than it furnishes a well-
founded expectation that the just and friendly policy which produced it, on the part of the United States, is cherished with the same views by his Catholic Majesty.”
Unfortunately he had no excuse for breaking abruptly a negotiation which he had himself invited; and Cevallos meant to give him at that stage no such excuse, for the important question of the Texan boundary remained to be discussed, and Talleyrand’s instructions on that point must be placed on record by Spain.
Monroe wrote to Cevallos, April 9, that he considered “the negotiation as essentially terminated by what has already occurred. [22] ... Should his Majesty’s government think proper to invite another issue, on it will the responsibility rest for the consequences. The United States are not unprepared for, or unequal to, any crisis which may occur.” Three days later he repeated the wish to “withdraw from a situation which, while it compromits the character of our government, cannot be agreeable to ourselves.”[23] Cevallos took no notice of the threats, and contented himself with repelling the idea that the blame of breaking off the negotiation should rest upon him. Nevertheless he hastened to record the opinion of his Government in regard to the last claim of the United States,—the Texan boundary.
Here again Cevallos followed the guidance of Talleyrand. The dividing-line between Louisiana and Texas, he said, ought to be decided by the line between the French and Spanish settlements. The French post of Natchitoches, on the Red River, was distant seven leagues from the Spanish post of Nuestra Señora de los Adaes; and therefore the boundary of Louisiana should run between these two points southward, along the watershed, until it reached the Gulf of Mexico between the Marmentou and the Calcasieu,—a boundary which deprived the United States not only of Texas, but of an important territory afterward included in the State of Louisiana. [24]
Eager as Monroe was to close the negotiation, he could not leave this note without reply; and accordingly he consumed another week in preparing more complaints of Cevallos’ dilatory conduct, and in
proving that Texas was included in the grant made by Louis XIV. to Anthony Crozat in 1712. After disposing of that subject, he again begged for a conclusion. “As every point has been thus fully discussed, we flatter ourselves that we shall now be honored with your Excellency’s propositions for the arrangement of the whole business.”[25] He flattered himself in vain; ten days passed without an answer. May 1, at a private interview, he tried to obtain some promise of action, without better result than the usual obliging Spanish expressions; a week afterward he made another attempt, with the same reply, followed on Monroe’s part by an offer to concede even the point of dignity. “Would Señor Cevallos listen to a new and more advantageous offer on the part of the United States?” Cevallos replied that such a step would be premature, as the discussion was not yet ended.[26] Monroe had no choice but to break through the diplomatic net in which he had wound himself; and at length, May 12, 1805, he sent a general ultimatum to the Spanish government: If Spain would cede the Floridas, ratify the claims convention of August, 1802, and accept the Colorado as the Texan boundary, the United States would establish a neutral territory a hundred miles wide on the eastern bank of the Colorado, from the Gulf to the northern boundary of Louisiana; would assume the French spoliation claims, abandon the entrepôt claims, and accept the cession of West Florida from the King, thereby abandoning the claim that it was a part of Louisiana.[27]
To this note Cevallos replied three days afterward by a courteous but decided letter, objecting in various respects to Monroe’s offers, and summing up his objections in the comment that this scheme required Spain to concede everything and receive nothing; she must give up both the Floridas, half of Texas, and the claims convention, while she obtained as an equivalent for these concessions only an abandonment of claims which she did not acknowledge:[28]—
“The justice of the American government will not permit it to insist on propositions so totally to the disadvantage of Spain; and however anxious his Majesty may be to please the United States, he cannot on
his part assent to them, nor can he do less than consider them as little conformable to the rights of his Crown.”
Three days later Monroe demanded his passports. For once, Cevallos showed as much promptness as Monroe could have desired. Without expressing a regret, or showing so much as a complimentary wish to continue the negotiation, Cevallos sent the passports, appointed the very next day for Monroe’s audience of leave, and bowed the American envoy out of Spain with an alacrity which contrasted strongly with the delays that had hitherto wasted five months of time most precious to the American minister at the Court of St. James. In truth, the Prince of Peace had no longer an object to gain by detaining Monroe; he had won every advantage which could be wrung from the situation, except that of proving the defeat of the United States by publishing it to the world. For this, he could trust Monroe.
After writing an angry letter to the French ambassador at Madrid, Monroe went his way, May 26, leaving Pinckney to maintain the forms of diplomatic relations with the Spanish government. Pinckney had still more to suffer before escaping from the scene of his diplomatic trials. The Spaniards began to plunder American commerce; the spoliations of 1798 were renewed; the garrisons in West Florida and Texas were reinforced; Cevallos paid no attention to complaints or threats. In October Pinckney took leave and returned to America, and George W. Erving was sent from London to take charge of the legation at Madrid. Erving made an excellent representative within the narrow field of action open to him as a mere chargéd’affaires; but he could do little to stem the current of Spanish desperation. The Prince of Peace, driven by France, England, and America nearer and nearer to the precipice that yawned for the destruction of Spain, was willing to see the world embroiled, in the hope of finding some last chance in his favor. When Erving in December, five months after Monroe’s departure, went to remonstrate against seizures of American ships in flagrant violation of the treaty of 1795, Godoy received him with the goodnatured courtesy which marked his manners. “How go our affairs?”
he asked; “are we to have peace or war?” Erving called his attention to the late seizures. The Prince replied that it was impossible for Spain to allow American vessels to carry English property. “But we have a treaty which secures us that right,” replied Erving. “Certainly, I know you have a treaty, for I made it with Mr. Pinckney,” rejoined Godoy; and he went on with entire frankness to announce that the “free-goods” provision of that treaty would no longer be respected. Then he continued, with laughable coolness,—
“You may choose either peace or war. ’Tis the same thing to me. I will tell you candidly, that if you will go to war this certainly is the moment, and you may take our possessions from us. I advise you to go to war now, if you think that is best for you; and then the peace which will be made in Europe will leave us two at war.”[29]
Defiance could go no further. Elsewhere the Prince openly said that the United States had brought things to such a point as to leave Spain indifferent to the consequences. In war the President could only seize Florida; and Florida was the price he asked for remaining at peace. Mexico and Cuba were beyond his reach. Meanwhile Spain not only saved the money due for the old claims, but plundered American commerce, and still preserved her title to the Floridas and Texas,—a title which, at least as concerned the Floridas, the Americans must sooner or later extinguish.
Such was the result of the President’s diplomacy in respect to Spain. War was its only natural outcome,—war with Spain; war with Napoleon, who must make common cause with King Charles; coalition with England; general recurrence to the ideas and precedents of the last Administration. Jefferson had exasperated Spain and irritated France. He must next decide whether this policy should be pursued to its natural result.
Meanwhile Monroe returned to Paris, where he passed six weeks with Armstrong and with his French acquaintances in conference on the proper course to be pursued. Talleyrand was absent in Italy with the Emperor, who May 26 received at Milan the iron crown of the Lombard kings. That Napoleon was the real element of danger was
clear to both envoys. A policy which should force France to interfere on behalf of the United States was their object; and on this, as on many points, Armstrong’s ideas were more definite than those of Monroe, Madison, or Jefferson. Even before Monroe left Madrid, he received a letter from Armstrong in which the outline of a decisive plan was sketched:—
“It is simply to take a strong and prompt possession of the northern bank of the Rio Bravo, leaving the eastern limit in statu quo. A stroke of this kind would at once bring Spain to reason, and France to her rescue, and without giving either room to quarrel. You might then negotiate, and shape the bargain pretty much as you pleased.”[30]
Evidently the seizure of Texas, leaving West Florida untouched, was the only step which the President could properly take; for Texas had been bought and paid for, whereas West Florida beyond doubt had never been bought at all. Armstrong saw the weak point of Napoleon’s position, and wished to attack it. He had no trouble in bringing Monroe to the same conclusion, although in yielding to his arguments Monroe tacitly abandoned the ground he had been persuaded by Livingston to take two years before, that West Florida belonged to Louisiana.
“There is no shade of difference in our opinions,” wrote Armstrong to Madison after Monroe’s arrival at Paris,[31] “and so little in the course to be pursued with regard to Spain that it is scarcely worth noticing. The whole may be reduced to this: that instead of assailing the Spanish posts in West Florida, or even indicating an intention to do so, I would (from motives growing more particularly out of the character of the Emperor) restrict the operations to such as may have been established in Louisiana. This, with some degree of demonstration that we meditate an embargo on our commercial intercourse with Spain and her colonies, would compel this government to interpose promptly and efficiently, and with dispositions to prevent the quarrel from going further.”
Throughout these Spanish negotiations ran a mysterious note of corruption which probably came not from Cevallos, Godoy, or King Charles; for Spain was always the party to suffer, and France was
always the party to profit by Spanish sacrifices. That the jobbery had its origin in Napoleon was improbable, for he too suffered from it. Neither Napoleon nor Godoy was open to bribery in such a sense; they were so high in power that small pecuniary motives had no influence on their acts. Yet the Treasuries both of France and Spain were in trouble, and were seeking resources. That Talleyrand had private motives for conniving in their expedients cannot be proved; but in 1805, as in 1798, every attempt to turn negotiation into a job came from Talleyrand’s intimate circle, the subordinates of the French Foreign Office.[32] In June, Monroe found at Paris the same hints at the influence of money which had irritated him in the preceding autumn; and he wrote to Madison in a tone which showed that he gave them weight.
“I have conferred much,” he said,[33] “with the gentleman alluded to in my letter from Bordeaux of December 16, and from what I can gather am led to believe that France has withheld her opinion on the western limits [Texas], to favor our pretensions when she thinks proper to take a part in it; that she does not think it proper so to do in the present stage, or until our Government acts so as to make Spain apply to her. He thinks she will then act; and settling the Spanish spoliation business as by the treaty of 1802, and getting all that can be got for Florida (he says eight millions of dollars are expected), promote an adjustment.”
If Jefferson’s administration cared to commit an error of colossal proportions, it had but to follow the hints of these irresponsible agents of Marbois and Talleyrand, who presumed to say in advance what motives would decide the mind of Napoleon. No man in France —neither Talleyrand nor Berthier, nor even Duroc—knew the scope of the Emperor’s ambition, or could foretell the expedients he would use or reject. Monroe’s friend was ill-informed, or deceived him. France had not withheld her opinion on the western limits; on the contrary, her opinion had been exactly followed by Spain. Not Talleyrand, much less Napoleon, but Cevallos himself had withheld that opinion from Monroe’s knowledge, doubtless because he wished to keep a weapon in reserve for use at close quarters if his antagonist should come so near. Had Monroe not been discomfited
before Cevallos exhausted his arsenal, this weapon would certainly have been used for a final blow. Cevallos still held it in reserve.
Leaving the Spanish affair embroiled beyond disentanglement, Monroe recrossed the Channel, and July 23 found himself again in London. During a century of American diplomatic history a minister of the United States has seldom if ever within six months suffered, at two great Courts, such contemptuous treatment as had then fallen to Monroe’s lot. That he should have been mortified and anxious for escape was natural. He returned to England, meaning to sail as quickly as possible for America. “It was very much my wish,” he wrote.[34] Hoping to sail at latest by November 1, he selected his ship, and gave notice to the British Foreign Office. In his own interests no step could have been wiser, but it was taken too late; the time lost in Spain and at Paris had been fatal to his plan, and he could no longer avoid another defeat more serious, and even more public, than the two which had already disturbed his temper.
That the American minister in London at any time should for six months leave his post, even in obedience to instructions, was surprising; but that he should have done this in 1804, after Pitt’s return to power, was matter of amazement. Monroe expected an unfriendly change of policy in the British government. As early as June, 1804, he wrote to Madison: “My most earnest advice is to look to the possibility of such a change.”[35] Four months later, although the attitude of the British ministry had become more threatening, Monroe started for Madrid, leaving Pitt in peace, unwatched, to take his measures and to fix beyond recall his change of policy. July 23, 1805, when the American minister at last returned from his Spanish journey and arrived in London, after some weeks lost at Paris, he found a state of affairs such as might have alarmed the most phlegmatic of men.
Pitt had made good use of Monroe’s absence. During the winter of 1804–1805 Parliament passed several Acts tending to draw all the West Indian commerce into British hands. Throughout the West Indies free ports were thrown open to the enemy’s vessels, which
were encouraged to bring there the produce of their colonies, receiving British merchandise in return, while the Act further provided for the importation of this enemy’s produce into Great Britain in British ships. Other Acts and Orders extended the system of licenses, by which British subjects were allowed to trade with their enemies in neutral vessels, and concluded by requiring that all their trade with the French islands should be carried on through the free ports alone.[36]
These measures were intended to force the trade of the French and Spanish colonies into a British channel; but all were secondary to a direct attack on American commerce. While Parliament and Council devised the legislation and rules necessary for taking charge of the commerce of Cuba, Martinique, and the other hostile colonies, the Lords of Appeals were engaged in providing the law necessary for depriving America of the same trade. July 23, 1805, Sir William Scott pronounced judgment in the case of the “Essex.” Setting aside his ruling in the case of the “Polly,”[37] he held that the neutral cargo which came from Martinique to Charleston, and thence to London, was good prize unless the neutral owner could prove, by something more than the evidence of a custom-house entry, that his original intention had been to terminate the voyage in an American port. In consequence of this decision, within a few weeks American ships by scores were seized without warning; neutral insurance was doubled; and the British merchantmen vied with the royal navy in applauding the energy of William Pitt.
Of the decision as a matter of morality something might be said. That Pitt should have planned such a scheme was not surprising, for his moral sense had been blunted by the desperation of his political struggle; but the same excuse did not apply to Sir William Scott. The quarrel between law and history is old, and its source lies deep. Perhaps no good historian was ever a good lawyer: whether any good lawyer could be a good historian might be equally doubted. The lawyer is required to give facts the mould of a theory; the historian need only state facts in their sequence. In law Sir William
Scott was considered as one of the greatest judges that ever sat on the English bench, a man of the highest personal honor, sensitive to any imputation on his judicial independence,—a lawyer in whom the whole profession took pride. In history he made himself and his court a secret instrument for carrying out an act of piracy. The law defends him by throwing responsibility upon the political chiefs who were bound to make compensation to the plundered merchants if compensation was due. The judge’s duty began and ended by declaring what was law. Experience had proved that the evidence previously required to convince the court of a certain fact was insufficient. The judge said this, and no more. History replies that whatever may be the strictly professional aspect of this famous judgment, in its nature it was a political act, and was known by the judge to be such. As a political measure its character was equivalent to a declaration of war, and did not materially differ from the more violent seizure of the Spanish treasure-ships by Pitt’s order in the previous October. The lawyers justified that seizure also; the King’s Advocate defended it in the House of Commons by the simple explanation that England was not in the habit of declaring war, but usually began hostilities by some act of force.[38] Lord Grenville, whom Pitt had entreated, only a few months before, to join the new ministry, and who was certainly considered as, next to Pitt himself, the highest political authority in England, was not deterred by this reasoning from denouncing the seizure of the Spanish galleons as an atrocious act of barbarity, contrary to all the law of nations, which stamped indelible infamy on the English name. Lord Grey, another high authority, stigmatized it as combining violence, injustice, and bad faith. The seizure of the American ships was an act different in its nature only in so far as Sir William Scott condescended to throw over it in advance the ermine that he wore.
Monroe reached London on the very day when Sir William Scott pronounced his fatal decision in the case of the “Essex.” Lord Harrowby no longer presided over the Foreign Office; he had taken another position, making way for Lord Mulgrave. The new Foreign Secretary was, like most of Pitt’s ministers in 1805, a Tory gentleman
