MIAMI UNIVERSITY The Graduate School CERTIFICATE FOR APPROVING THE DISSERTATION We hereby approve the Dissertation Of Shevaun Eileen Watson Candidate for the Degree: Doctor of Philosophy Director Susan C. Jarratt Reader Gregg Crane Reader LuMing Mao Graduate School Representative Andrew R. L. Cayton ABSTRACT UNSETTLED CITIES: RHETORIC AND RACE IN THE EARLY REPUBLIC By Shevaun E. Watson This study uses the African churches in Philadelphia in the 1790s and the Denmark Vesey conspiracy trials in Charleston in 1822 as focal points of inquiry into intersections of race and rhetoric in the Early Republic (1783-1828). I invite scholars in rhetoric and composition to reconsider this period as a crucial site of investigation for a field devoted to elaborating its history and understanding the widest array of rhetorical practices. This “extracurricular” history of rhetoric demonstrates that the Early Republic holds insight into rhetorical relations among others than the cultural elite. The vernacular, material rhetorics discussed here illustrate ways that different groups of blacks deployed verbal, written, and bodily language to manage the complex sociopolitical world of postrevolutionary America. Testimony, which I define as the material and embodied performance of truth, links these key events in African American rhetorical history and provides an overarching frame for my analysis. In the first chapter, I outline the historiographical issues undergirding the project. The next one situates testimony as a discursive and rhetorical form within ancient and modern contexts. I identify trials, both spiritual and legal, as loci for rhetorical activity for Philadelphia and Charleston blacks. Chapter Three examines the role of bodily testimony in the conversion experiences and ordinary lives of Philadelphia’s first black Methodists in relation to contemporaneous evidentiary debates about revealed religion. I read two cultural texts, a painting and a pamphlet, as direct evidence of whites’ postrevolutionary anxiety about blacks’ new sociopolitical freedoms, and as indirect evidence of blacks’ effective uses of their bodies in various “rhetorical trials.” The fourth chapter treats the persuasiveness of slave testimony in the trials of alleged slave conspirators. I analyze the way in which a bodily form of testimony, which I call “tortured truth,” or physical coercion intended to make the black body “speak,” created the sense of a real and pervasive threat. The dissertation concludes with a discussion of the role of embodied testimony in David Walker’s 1829 Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, ending at a historical moment where other histories of U.S. rhetoric typically begin. UNSETTLED CITIES: RHETORIC AND RACE IN THE EARLY REPUBLIC A DISSERTATION Submitted to the Faculty of Miami University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English by Shevaun E. Watson Miami University Oxford, Ohio 2004 Dissertation Director: Susan C. Jarratt © Shevaun E. Watson 2004 TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgements iv Chapter One Toward a Revisionist Historiographic Technê: The Case of the Early Republic 1 Chapter Two Rhetorical Trials: Testimony in Historical Context 31 Chapter Three White Witnesses, Black Bodies: The Making of the African Methodists in Philadelphia 51 Chapter Four Habeas Corpus: Bodies of Truth and the Making of Slave Insurrectionists in Charleston 81 Chapter Five Embodied Testimony in the Case against Slavery: The Making of Black Witnesses in David Walker’s Appeal 114 Works Cited 142 iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thanks to the two people who helped me the most with this project: my advisor, Susan C. Jarratt, and history professor, Andrew R. L. Cayton. From both of them, and in very different ways, I learned a great deal about how to approach issues and texts as a rhetorician and as a historian. The interplay between their perspectives was, perhaps, the most valuable aspect of my advanced graduate study. I thank Susan particularly for supporting and staying with this project, even from afar. She helped me at key moments to gain insight and focus, and she generously created a work environment conducive to my completing the project. I am grateful to Drew for our early morning meetings, which kept me writing and thinking. He also provided various forms of significant support for my archival research. I suppose I could have written this dissertation without one or the both of them, but in retrospect, I certainly would not have wanted to. Thank you also to LuMing Mao and Gregg Crane, the other members of my committee, who offered beneficial readings of my work and confidence in the final product well before it materialized. Others at Miami deserve many thanks, as well: Kate Ronald, Carolyn Haynes, Brenda Helmbrecht, Meredith Love, Connie Kendall, Jen Cellio, and Steve Lansky—for intellectual and social sustenance. This dissertation was supported in part with a fellowship and Dissertation Research Grant from the Graduate School of Miami University. Such assistance allowed me to travel to various archives to gather the primary materials which form the foundation of this study. I am also grateful for the immense help I received from archivists at the Library Company, the Pennsylvania Historical Society, the South Carolina Department of Archives and History, and especially, the South Carolina Historical Society. I am deeply grateful for the friendship of Dara and James O’Loughlin, who kindly shared their homes, friends, and families with me, making my graduate school years incredibly enjoyable and memorable. I offer a warm welcome to the world to Emmett, who seemed to have been with us all along, and a special thank you to the Pultorak clan. I owe the biggest debt of gratitude to my family—for you, with love and admiration. iv Chapter One Toward a Revisionist Historiographic Technê: The Case of the Early Republic African American Rhetoric after the Revolution Philadelphia 1786. Free black women and men establish the country’s first black mutual aid organization, known as the Free African Society. Jane Ann Murray. Sarah Dougherty. Sarah Bass. Phebe Pemberton. Richard Allen. Absalom Jones. Dorus Jennings. These are only some of the active rhetors in Philadelphia’s growing black community at the close of the eighteenth century. Masters of persuasive discourse, they canvassed the community, forged alliances, taught reading and writing, raised money, distributed charitable funds, organized praying bands, formed committees, wrote petitions, exhorted on streets and in homes, and regularly testified to the power of God in their lives. “With pen and voice,” as Shirley Wilson Logan would say, these women and men helped found Philadelphia’s first black societies, churches, and schools, all key sites of African American rhetoric in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Charleston 1822. Free black man Denmark Vesey is accused of raising a massive slave insurrection, the largest ever to threaten South Carolina. Vesey was a notable black man in town: a relatively wealthy carpenter, he was the first African American in Charleston to own a house. He was also believed to be a skilled seducer of malcontent blacks. Many slaves, some who were tortured and others who feared such reprisal, testified against Vesey, bearing witness to his rhetorical prowess and radical ethic. Unfortunately, Vesey’s appearance in the trials and his role in the alleged conspiracy remain shrouded in his own silence and layers of representation by others. There is not one extant word from Vesey’s own lips, yet there survives copious testimony from slave suspects who bore the burden of proof of conspiratorial rhetoric. Their testimony resulted in thirty-five hangings and, some would argue, a state of slaveowners that moved inexorably toward nullification, secession, and civil war. Why are these rhetors and these rhetorical actions excluded from our disciplinary histories and occluded from our view? These instances strongly suggest that histories of early American rhetorics need to be recast in light of different archives and interpretive strategies. How might the inclusion of early African American rhetors change the perception of an era that 1 is typically associated with university rhetoric and political oratory of elite white men? How might discussions of coerced slave speech and Vesey’s silence reshape understandings of nineteenth-century African American rhetoric and complicate notions of silence and voice in contemporary rhetorical theories? How might the treatment of early sociopolitical crises centering around race usefully answer insistent calls from scholars to investigate heterogeneous rhetorics? Indeed, what alternative historiographical approaches are necessary for the rhetorician who seeks to answer these questions? It is this last issue that is taken up in this introductory chapter so that the other questions may be usefully addressed in the following ones. I invite scholars in rhetoric and composition to consider the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries again, to reconsider of the Early Republic—the period between the end of the Revolutionary War and the presidency of Andrew Jackson (1783-1828)—as not only an era defined by neoclassicism and belletrism but also as a crucial site of inquiry for a field devoted to elaborating its history and understanding the widest array of rhetorical practices. Using the African churches in Philadelphia and the Vesey affair in Charleston as focal points for rhetorical inquiry,