Looking for panelist for French Association of American Studies Congress in Strasbourg - "Human Bondage in the United States and the Pursuit of Happiness, from Colonial Times to 1865" panel
Human Bondage in the United States and the Pursuit of Happiness, from Colonial Times to 1865
In the 1776 Declaration of Independence, American colonists stated that the following truths were self-evident: all men are endowed by the Creator with certain inalienable rights among which are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Although the main author of the declaration, Thomas Jefferson, was inspired by the English philosopher John Locke, he chose to replace the reference to the right to property, which was dear to the philosopher, by a more abstract, philosophical, if not existential notion, namely, that all men were entitled to pursue their happiness. Far from being a stylistic coquetry, or a wish to minimize Locke’s ideological influence, Jefferson’s rephrasing illustrates his will to produce a document which would federate the North American colonies, by taking into account their different political sensibilities, especially in relation to the question of slavery. Indeed, the inalienable rights which are mentioned in the Declaration did not apply to bound laborers and slaves who were, regardless of their race, excluded from the political community, as they were subjected to a master who possessed them— temporarily in the case of indentured servants, or on a perpetual and hereditary basis for slaves. The correlation between the pursuit of happiness and the access to property constituted the basis and the driving force behind the peopling and the economic development of the United States. Yet, this interdependence also planted the seeds that would divide the Union. The fact that masters owned both the production of their bound laborers and their laborers as chattel property, seemed to belie the cardinal tenets which the Declaration of Independence presented as natural human rights. The gradual substitution of indentured servants, who were mostly white, by a black enslaved labor force encouraged proslavery advocates to justify the access to property as being a natural right, while they simultaneously called for the naturalization of a social order based on racial distinctions, through customary or positive law, thus limiting the individual liberty of colored people. As the 1793 Fugitive Slave Law or the defense of the 5th amendment by the 1857 landmark Supreme Court Decision in the Dred Scott case exemplify, slave masters chose to assert, on the national scene, their constitutional right to enjoy their individual liberty and to defend their bound property, all of which they deemed to be inalienable. Abolitionists, who aimed at opposite objectives, castigated the theory which presented slavery as a positive good that contributed to the personal development of slaves and argued that depriving bondsmen of their liberty constituted a violation of their natural rights and a hindrance to their happiness.
This workshop, which builds on a reflection on the status of unfree people in the Atlantic world, aims at examining the interrelatedness between the right to property and the pursuit of happiness, from the colonial times to the abolition of slavery, through the prism of human bondage. How did Southerners instrumentalize the notion of the right to property in order to defend the “peculiar institution”? To what extent did the servile population aspire to the egalitarian ideals which were expressed at the time of the American Revolution, in particular, the natural right of any individual to pursue happiness? Were bound laborers and slaves entitled to the pursuit of happiness? If so, did the forms of happiness the bond population enjoy vary historically and geographically? Was the emancipation of bound laborers, namely the process whereby one (re)gained natural possession of one’s self, the corollary or the prerequisite to other forms of happiness? These are some questions, among many others, that we hope to address.
Please send proposals of no more than 300 words and a brief CV mentioning your institutional affiliation to elodie.peyrol.kleiber@univ-poitiers.fr and lawrence.aje@univ-montp3.fr by January 5th 2017.
Elodie Peyrol-Kleiber
University of Poitiers
elodie.peyrol.kleiber@univ-poitiers.fr