Rights Without Power: Utopian Visioning in the Era of Slavery

• In Event: Times of Crisis, Places of Utopia: The Technoscientific Making of United States Futures

Abstract

While scholars have long understood the system of plantation capitalism as a national dystopia, the long crisis from which we still have not awoken, it is necessary to remember that utopian visions were interwoven in the slave state. This presentation explores two examples of “utopian plantations” in the antebellum period: Nashoba (1825-1828) and Davis Bend (1824-1863). I examine how, within these plantations, slaveholders deployed utopian discourses, and how these utopian ‘reforms’ enacted upon the slaves living there new modes of oppression and new liberatory potentialities.

Historians have recently reexamined slavery as an essential part of the development of ‘free’ labor society and capitalism (Johnson 2013, Beckert 2016, Baptist 2014). In particular, historians of Capitalism have sought to articulate the ways that the slave South adapted and appropriated capitalist modes of discipline. This presentation thus examines the reception and implementation of potentially liberatory socialist ideals on the antebellum plantation. In both the Nashoba and Davis cases, utopian schemes, though arguably earnest in their aspiration to benevolence, created new modes of racial capital that simply transformed the subjugation under which slaves toiled.

As a plantation owner and slave “master,” Joseph Davis, brother of the Confederate president Jefferson Davis, often boasted that “the less people are governed, the more submissive they will be to control.” In 1825, Davis met the Scottish utopian reformer Robert Owen. He was much taken with the socialist ideals of Owen, and decided to bring these theories back to his plantation, Davis Bend, south of Vicksburg. There, slaves were able to sell produce and handiworks to the rivermen who passed on their way to New Orleans. They were entitled to a trial by a jury of their peers, and often slaves on Davis Bend brought grievances against overseers.. However, when the Civil War came Davis sent envoys to rally what he presumed were his loyal subject. None returned.

Frances Wright opened a plantation that would reconcile the momentum of the South’s slave-holding economy and society with growing calls for the abolition of slavery. Viewing the condition of enslaved people as a travesty, the young woman from Scotland employed the socialist ideas of Robert Owen and the ideas of the American Colonization Society to construct a plantation on which slaves could pursue their emancipation by working off their ‘debts.’ But Wright’s project soon fell into disrepute and disrepair. No slaves were able to fulfill her program before the abandonment of Nashoba in 1828.

I argue that the fact that a discourse of rights, socialism, and utopia existed within a system of slavery evidences a fracture between rights and power, as slaves were in these cases participants in a social contract founded on their subjecthood while also remaining in bondage. Moreover, I explore how the productive interplay of utopia and dystopia at the core of these plantations calls into question the tenets of progressivism. These slaveholding utopias demonstrate not only how progressive ideals may exist alongside systems of oppression but engage in generative interactions with them creating new modes of subjugation.

Author

• Jeremiah Smith, Delta State / Rosedale Freedom Project