Slaves as Securitized Assets

Charles Johnstone’s Chrysal, or the Adventures of a Guinea, is an “it-narrative” about the transatlantic circulation of a coin, so it is only appropriate that it appealed to readers in colonial America due to their transactions in people, currency, and objects. By studying how this book circulated in Charleston, South Carolina—the port made most wealthy by slave trading—and in the other colonies, this chapter asks questions about the separation of objects and objectified people like slaves in the period, exploring how the colonial reception of “it-narratives” helped produce a distinction between them for anti-slavery purposes. By centering its analysis on the social network of enslavers constitutive of the Charleston Library Society, the consumption of novels such as Samuel Richardson’s Pamela by Eliza Lucas Pinckney and others can now be seen as slavery-enabled reading. It shows an extreme example of investment of slavery money into tasteful imports like books.

Buying Oroonoko in Salem

This chapter maps the reception of John Hawkesworth’s theatrical adaptation of Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko in Salem, Massachusetts, in the 1760s, explaining how the literary representation of what Ramesh Mallipeddi calls the enslaved person’s “spectacular suffering” shaped both anti-slavery sentiment and the appropriation of that sentiment by Anglo-American patriots complaining of being enslaved by Britain. It situates this contextualization within the central space of reading in the city, the Salem Social Library, a proprietary subscription library founded by men made wealthy by the slave trade and related enterprises like fish, sugar, molasses, and rum distilling. The reading habits of these men are mapped by reference to the library’s surviving 1760s circulation ledger. Methodologically, it argues that sequential borrowings of volumes of a title, and the velocity of their circulation to members, should count as evidence of the reception of works. It also discusses Massachusetts patriot and abolitionist activity in the 1760s.

“See Benezet’s Account of Africa Throughout”

Olaudah Equiano is arguably the founder of the slave narrative, in his case one in which he explores his capture in Africa as a boy, his different masters, his conversion to evangelical Protestantism, his entrepreneurship, and his service in the navy—all requisites to being considered fully “British” at the time. This chapter explores his footnote in his Interesting Narrative acknowledging how Philadelphia Quaker abolitionist Anthony Benezet’s anthropology of West Africa informed his story, and how Benezet—who had never been to Africa—relied on the slavery-funded Library Company of Philadelphia, for books of travels to Africa for that anthropology. In doing so, it provides archival evidence of how Philadelphians exchanged their grain and other products for slaves and Caribbean slave plantation products. It also provides the first ever analysis of the library’s 1794–1812 circulation receipt book, showing the circulation of all the genres encapsulated in both men’s accounts.

They Were Prodigals and Enslavers

This chapter examines the founding of the New York Society Library as part of the trend of merchants made wealthy by slavery and related commerce establishing philanthropic and civil society institutions in the mid- and late eighteenth century. By mapping the reading network around Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe in this library, it establishes that almost all of its readers from 1789–90 supported Defoe’s pro-slavery views as articulated by Crusoe’s choice to go to sea to engage in the Africa trade, and how most American editions of the novel advocated young men doing the same. The library’s City Readers database also makes it easy to inventory the other books that readers of Crusoe were reading in order to gauge the level of pro-slavery versus Manumission Society sentiment. In doing so, it provides a portrait of New York society as one in which whites of every background benefited from the slave trade.

“Whatever Is, Is Right”

Beginning with an analysis of a painting of the slaveholding founder of the Redwood Library of Newport, Rhode Island, that shows him holding a copy of Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man, this chapter documents the reading of Alexander Pope’s works in colonial America in relation to the Atlantic slavery economy. In doing so, it provides a theory that portraiture featuring books should count as evidence of the reception of them. It shows how slavery philanthropy fueled the Rhode Island book trade and endowed its libraries, and how patriot thought and activity emerged from these libraries. In examining the fragmentary remaining circulation receipt books of the Redwood, it shows patterns of reading that suggest that members of the library were more concerned about their own political “slavery” to Britain than with the condition of the Africans they were enslaving. It also investigates Rhode Island abolitionism in figures like Samuel Hopkins.

Introduction

This Introduction shows how this book contributes to the emerging field of postcolonial book history and cultural historiography. By demonstrating its relevance to the capitalism and slavery thesis, it shows how books, too, were industrial goods capitalized by slave labor. It explains that early American proprietary subscription libraries were centers for revolutionary leadership development, and one location where colonials imbibed British political thought. In challenging the civic republicanism thesis of Caroline Robbins, J. G. A. Pocock, and Bernard Bailyn it argues that ownership of slaves was the proprietorship formative of the virtue of the republican citizen and that C. B. MacPherson’s theory of possessive individualism more accurately describes their citizenship. It maps the networks through which colonials purchased books, and gives a history of early American reading. The most popular genres among early Americans are documented, and anti-slavery is shown to be both a product of revolutionary thinking and an inspiration for it.

Conclusion Philanthropy Recommended

Revisiting both the Preface and Chapter 1, this Conclusion makes the case for questioning the eighteenth century as a theme park upon which political neo-conservatives and economic neo-liberals project their fantasies about the founders’ supposed intentions about small government and the provision of human needs by private charities instead of taxpayer-funded public programs. Arguing instead that slavery philanthropy was the origin of these ideas, and of the “charitable industrial complex” that we have today, it explains that nineteenth- and twentieth-century reformers were aware of that, and proceeded to found more progressive public cultural, educational, medical, and other kinds of institutions. The lesson we can learn from the story of slavery-funded private libraries is that we need that kind of reform again now.