NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY Piracy and the American Sovereign
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NORTHWESTERN UNIVERSITY Piracy and the American Sovereign Imaginary A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS for the degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Field of Communication Studies By Robert Elliot Mills EVANSTON, ILLINOIS March 2018 2 © Copyright by Robert Elliot Mills 2018 All Rights Reserved 3 Abstract Between 1815 and 1830, the western Atlantic experienced a surge in maritime piracy. The United States was confronted with the ancient specter of hostis humani generis, the enemy of all, which threatened the safety and prosperity of the young maritime nation. Questions emerged: Who was responsible for policing international waters? Where and how ought American law be enforced on the open sea? Should all pirates be condemned to death, or should some be spared? What must be done to prevent piracy around the globe? The answers to such questions given by Americans—from Supreme Court justices to local newspaper editorialists—formed an enduring image in public culture of the nation-state’s functions and limits, which I call the sovereign imaginary. “Piracy and the American Sovereign Imaginary” considers the relationship between piracy and the sovereign imaginary in early nineteenth-century American public culture. Nineteenth-century piracy is not often studied by scholars of maritime history. This study explores how Americans between 1815 and 1830 experienced piracy as part of their everyday lives, and how those experiences were used to articulate different understandings of state power. Furthermore, analyzing the rhetoric of piracy reveals elements of the sovereign imaginary that continue to haunt American politics, law, and policy in the present. Part 1 compares theories of postsovereignty, or the belief that the power of the sovereign nation-state has begun to wane over the past half-century, with the rhetoric of universal jurisdiction in US pirate law in the nineteenth century. I argue that universal jurisdiction, a legal doctrine allowing any state to prosecute any pirate, reveals strains of postsovereign thought in nineteenth-century American culture that challenge the temporality of postsovereignty theories. Part 2 analyzes the ways in which violence and sovereignty are linked in contemporary theories of the sovereign decision, and subsequently compares those theories to nineteenth-century attitudes toward 4 the use of the pardoning power to save criminals from execution. I argue that the use of the pardoning power in early American piracy cases reveals alternative dispositions of the sovereign decision that aim to save lives from state violence. 5 Acknowledgments This dissertation has developed over the many years I have been a graduate student at Northwestern University, and I would like to acknowledge a few of those who have offered guidance, advice, and friendship along the way. First and foremost, I offer my deepest thanks to my advisor Angela G. Ray, who shepherded this project from its first glimmers as a seminar paper to its completed form. I will always be grateful for every second that we have spent working together, because through her example I have discovered the type of scholar I aspire to be. I was fortunate to work with several members of the outstanding Northwestern faculty at various stages of the dissertation process. Dilip Gaonkar and Janice Radway served as members of the dissertation committee, and their insight and generosity improved the project substantially. Jasmine Cobb offered invaluable advice and guidance as a member of the prospectus committee, and her contributions at that crucial stage moved the project forward in important directions. As a member of my qualifying exam committee, Joshua Chambers-Letson’s expertise in sovereignty and biopolitics shaped my understanding of those concepts, and my work is much better for it. In the Rhetoric and Public Culture program at Northwestern, I had the pleasure to be surrounded by a constellation of wonderful colleagues. Robert Hariman listened to multiple iterations of Part 2 of this dissertation in various venues and provided excellent advice toward improving the drafts. His insight, humor, and encouragement made the department a welcoming environment in which to learn and write. Likewise, the friendship, brilliance, and support of my fellow RPC graduate students made my time in Evanston seem all too brief. Thanks especially to Liz Kinsley, Rob Topinka, Dave Molina, Dakota Brown, and Tricia England, for being the best cohort one could have. And thank you to Liam Olson-Mayes and Lauren DeLaCruz for all of the long and thoughtful conversations that kept me sane and in good spirits. 6 The research for this dissertation received support from several places: the Northwestern University Presidential Fellowship, a Kate B. and Hall J. Peterson Fellowship from the American Antiquarian Society, the Alice Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, the Department of Communication Studies, the Northwestern Center for Global Culture and Communication, and the School of Communication. The intellectual communities fostered by these organizations are models of what interdisciplinary scholarship can achieve. Before my time at Northwestern, I had the pleasure to work with Mary Stuckey and Stephen Heidt at Georgia State University. They are brilliant scholars and even better dinner companions, and I owe more to them than they know. Ross Andre, Chris Sun, and Matt and Sasha Lasky have been my best friends and distractions during graduate school, and I thank them immensely for that. My parents, Chris and Pat Mills, and my sister and her husband, Jennifer and Stephen Blume, have been understanding, supportive, interested, and most importantly, loving. This project could not have been realized without them. 7 Contents Abstract 3 Acknowledgments 5 Introduction 8 Part One: Imagining International Sovereignty 1 The Postsovereign Imaginary 34 2 The Rhetoric of Universal Jurisdiction: Pirates, Privateers, and the Origins of the Postsovereign Imaginary 64 Part Two: Imagining Domestic Sovereignty 3 The Structure of a Sovereign Decision 126 4 Suspended Between Life and Law: Disposition and the Sovereign Decision 151 Conclusion: The Uses of a Sovereign Imaginary 217 Works Cited 245 Appendix A: The Debate over the Reprieve of the Plattsburgh Pirates 266 8 Introduction In 1837, Charles Ellms published The Pirates Own Book, a thick volume detailing the “lives, exploits, and executions of the most celebrated sea robbers.” Through what book historian Michael Winship describes as “cut-and-paste and borrowing,” Ellms told a diverse set of pirate tales, covering multiple historical periods and places around the globe.1 There is no discernible logic governing the book’s organization, but the first story is one of the oldest, describing the “Danish and Norman Pirates” of the fifth century who helped to found Ireland. Chapter titles promise salacious tales from the so-called Golden Age of Piracy (roughly 1650–1730), such as the “Life, Atrocities, and Bloody Death of Black Beard,” while others are more muted, such as two chapters about women pirates, “Life and Exploits of Anne Bonney” or “Adventures and Heroism of Mary Read.” Ellms included an early account of “Mistress Ching,” today better known as Ching Shih, a Chinese pirate distinguished not only by the fleet under her command—reportedly the largest in history, with a crew of 70,000 hands—but also because she was one of the few great pirates to retire, rather than die at sea or at the gallows.2 Bound in brown leather, its spine embossed with a golden skull and anchor, and its pages littered with detailed and beautiful illustrations, the physical book was as striking as the stories it contained. Praising its material quality and the style of its illustrations, one reviewer in the Boston Courier wrote in July 1837 that The Pirates Own Book “is of a character to excite and perhaps gratify curiosity.”3 An understatement is there ever was one. 1 Michael Winship, “Pirates, Shipwrecks, and Comic Almanacs: Charles Ellms Packages Books in Nineteenth-Century America,” Printing History, n.s. 9 (2011): 9. 2 Charles Ellms, The Pirates Own Book; or, Authentic Narratives of the Lives, Exploits, and Executions of the Most Celebrated Sea Robbers [. .] (Boston: Thomas Groom, 1837). For additional information on Ching Shih, see Yung-lun Yüan, Ching hai-fen chi: History of the Pirates Who Infested the China Sea from 1807 to 1810, trans. Charles Friederich Neumann (London: Oriental Translation Fund, 1831). 3 Boston Courier, July 6, 1837, Readex America’s Historical Newspapers (hereinafter AHN). 9 In many ways, Ellms’s anthology is an updated version of the urtext of modern pirate history and literature: A General History of the Robberies and Murders of the Most Notorious Pyrates, the first volume of which was published in 1724 London under the pseudonym Captain Charles Johnson.4 The General History, as it is known among pirate scholars, is significant for its overwhelming influence on later texts and because many of the piracies it describes occurred only a few years before the book was published. Not only did it introduce readers across the anglophone world to pirates they had not known of before, but it also expanded the histories of many freebooters whose lives had graced the pages of metropolitan newspapers throughout the early eighteenth century.5 Ellms copied, with some updated language and minor editing, many of his Golden Age stories directly from the General History.6 He also mimicked the book’s concern with