W. B. Gerard
Laurence Sterne is not typically looked upon as an influential figure of the American abolitionist movement of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The author of the innovative fictions The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman (1759–1767) and A Sentimental Journey (1768), Sterne spent most of his adult life as a country vicar outside of York, far from London or even from the seaports that might have exposed him firsthand to enslaved Africans or slave traders. He largely tended his rural flock, traveling the rolling landscape around Stillington and Sutton-on-the-Forest for regular services, as well as administering to local births, marriages, and deaths, occasionally making the trip to York to dabble in local politics, and, in his role as prebendary, to preach in its great cathedral. (Equally remote Coxwold, the location of “Shandy Hall,” would be added to his living much later.)1 Moreover, the subjects of his fictions, a peculiar country family and a clergyman on a quest for feeling, seem unlikely to suggest a role for Sterne as an antislavery advocate.
Yet the voice of the vicar of Sutton resonates through American abolitionist discourse between 1788 and 1831. This presence derives from elements in his sermons, fiction, and correspondence that touch upon the issue briefly but powerfully, using the affective language of sensibility to frame the practice of slavery in emotional terms. Excerpts and key phrases from Sterne occur in abolitionist contexts with some frequency in this period; imitations adopting Sterne’s affective tone and phrasing also appeared. In fact, so widespread is Sterne’s influence on abolitionist discourse in American popular media in this period that it would be impossible to document its many occurrences in the space of an essay; instead, after examining Sterne’s antislavery texts, the focus of this study will be on a single significant passage from one of them and its many iterations within a single database.
Each of the four most prominent passages addressing slavery in Sterne occurs in a different source in his writings. The unlikely role of a rural English parson as an advocate for American abolition most apparently begins in his sermons, his primary exercise in writing from the time of his clerical appointment in 1741 to the composition of Tristram Shandy roughly seventeen years later. One of these, “Job’s account of the shortness and troubles of life, considered,” addresses the issue at some length, relating a story from Plutarch, when the Romans drove “one hundred and fifty thousand unhappy people . . . in one day into captivity, to be sold to the highest bidder to end their days in cruel anguish.——Consider how great a part of our species in all ages down to this, have been trod under the feet of cruel and capricious tyrants, who would neither hear their cries, nor pity their distresses. ——Consider slavery——what it is, ——how bitter a draught, and how many millions have been made to drink of it.”2 Published with fourteen other sermons in 1760 in the wake of the successful first two volumes of Tristram Shandy, “Job’s account” goes on to link the story to a typical vein of anti-Catholicism, “the history of the Romish church and her tyrants, (or rather executioners)” (S, 100). Yet the issue of the enslavement of Africans had been slowly moving to the forefront of cultural discourse in England and America throughout the eighteenth century, and this sermon’s relevance likely was self-apparent to readers of the sermon collection (if perhaps less so to the Sterne’s rural congregations).
The sermon does not lose sight that the enslaved multitudes are “people” who utter “cries” and suffer “distresses” (sentient beings like the sermon’s audience) who are unnoticed by “cruel and capricious tyrants.” The lack of feeling on the part of the “tyrants” presumably forms a contrast with this feeling audience, who are then asked simply to “Consider slavery——what it is, ——how bitter a draught.” As with the unique punctuation in Sterne’s fictions, the long dashes are neither arbitrary nor ornamental symbols,3 and the long pauses they signify urge the sermon’s auditors (and later readers) to ponder the simple and irreducible wrong being set before them.
Sterne’s concept of slavery is here abstract and generalized. Markman Ellis notes that it is uncertain whether “Sterne means slavery in the sense of the system of coerced labour practised in the West Indies, or something else.”4 The mention of slavery indeed does occur in the sermon after a series of historical instances of man’s inhumanity to his fellow man, yet the obvious and outstanding instance of slavery to midcentury Englishmen would have been in the West Indies, where the practice peaked in the period 1740–1780;5 this particular sermon was composed and delivered in the 1740s or 1750s, and the reference would have been more apparent still to the wider audience seeing it in print during following decades. It seems unlikely that Sterne or his audiences could have considered the topic as a mere historical abstract.
References to slavery in Sterne’s fiction were composed in the late 1760s—the last years of the author’s life—and represent more complete and detailed arguments against the practice. In the last volume of Tristram Shandy, Corporal Trim relates the story of his ill-fated brother, Tom, who, courting a Jewish widow, arrives at her sausage shop to find there “a poor negro girl . . . flapping away flies” with “a bunch of white feathers slightly tied to the end of a long cane.” Trim emphasizes that she was “not killing them,” harkening to the earlier story of bighearted Toby catching and then releasing an irritating fly. Upon hearing Trim’s description, Toby in fact immediately finds a kindred spirit in the servant and (interrupting Trim’s story as usual), exclaims: “’Tis a pretty picture! . . . —she had suffered persecution, Trim, and had learnt mercy—.”6
Within the space of a paragraph, the African servant is introduced and identified as one who had been treated unjustly, yet her reaction is of increased compassion. Most important, she is depicted primarily as a sympathetic individual acting on her own beliefs (that is, unwilling to inflict pain when she herself has suffered). Rather than merely serving as an object of pity for feeling readers, she exhibits a similar sensibility to theirs, and in doing so raises herself (and by implication potentially all enslaved Africans) above the status of objecthood to claim emotional equivalency with the readers themselves. The example of live-and-let-live seems to present a moral allegory for Sterne’s readers as well, reiterating the “do unto others” ethic of reciprocity found in his body of sermons, most especially in Sermon 3, “Philanthropy recommended.”7
Trim goes on to affirm that “the story of that poor friendless slut . . . would melt a heart of stone” and, to Trim’s question about whether “a Negro has a soul,” Toby answers, “I suppose, God would not leave him without one, any more than thee or me——.” Trim then asks why “is a black wench to be used worse than a white one” and answers himself—suggesting he has learned Toby’s point—stating, “only . . . because she has no one to stand up for her.”8 Toby leaps in with the final stroke of the moral lesson, stating that “’Tis that very thing . . . which recommends her to protection—and her brethren with her” (TS, 9.6.747–48).
The inclusion of the dehumanizing question as to whether Africans have souls seems to be a specific response to proslavery advocates who attempted to legitimize the trafficking in human beings with an array of biological and spiritual arguments centered on the denial of their humanity.9 The servant’s gesture of “mercy,” as Toby recognizes, subtly refutes this claim, not only for the individual, but also for her race; her behavior, in fact, positions her within the ranks of subscribers to the culture of sensibility, as the parallel with Toby suggests. Thus, she is represented not as a mere object of pity but as an emotional as well as a spiritual equivalent to the readers themselves.
The passage continues in a clearly political vein with Toby’s broader hypothesis about the arbitrary nature of military power. Having established the humanity of the servant (and with her all oppressed Africans), Toby responds with a charitable bravado not unlike the protection he extends over Le Fever, which is not without its didactic implications. Toby’s consideration has a deeper basis still, again rooted in the ethic of reciprocity: “’tis the fortune of war which has put the whip into our hands now—where it may be hereafter, heaven knows!” (TS, 9.6.748). Ellis sees Trim’s “moment of realisation” as a “conventional device of the sentimental,” which leads a “character (and by association, the reader) to the adoption or formation of a sentiment or opinion in a moment of quiet insight” (70). In a sense, here Trim acts as a stand-in for the skeptical contemporary reader, beginning as a casual questioner of the humanity of Africans whose emotions, Sterne hopes, will recruit him as an advocate of the oppressed. The conversation between the two characters may well echo many taking place from midcentury onward, with Toby, who had by this time already garnered a level of literary celebrity,10 taking a clearly abolitionist stand.
The discussion of slavery here is both more focused and more developed than its mention in the earlier sermon, possibly the result of Sterne’s increased exposure to the institution through print media and during his six years of fame, his travels, and his occasional residence in London. What begins as a story about Trim’s brother Tom and his unknown fate at the hands of the Inquisition—which, as Ellis points out, represents another tale of freedom and incarceration (68)—shifts its focus rapidly to the single figure of the African servant and eventually the subject of contemporary chattel slavery. The spontaneous discussion between Toby and Trim lightens the potentially heavy-handed preachiness that could accompany the subject, and its illustration through individual example literally puts a human face on the issue.11 Brycchan Carey astutely identifies the story as “an excellent example of a sentimental parable” in which the servant “synecdochically represents the story of a multitude”;12 the idea of didacticism, of course, lies at the heart of a parable. Perhaps overrigorous in their analysis, other critics lament the sympathetic focus on the individual as a type of ownership that undermines the ostensible philanthropic appeal presented by the text. Inflating the idea of benevolence into manipulation, Shirley Samuels identifies a “sentimental gaze” that “appropriates and controls its objects of scrutiny” and that can act selfishly as “a form of social control.”13 Yet the text seems to be arguing the opposite: the perspective in Sterne’s passage is broadened to include “all her brethren,” and the implications of their captivity lead to the wider realization of the inhumanity of the practice, an inhumanity emphasized by the arbitrariness of power. It takes some twisting and emotional frigidity to make the implication of liberation into virtual captivity. As Carey observes, sentimental arguments work “by emotionally subverting the intellect,” and bring us eventually to the “political dimension” of the scene (58), clearly one of sympathetic equality on several levels.
A Sentimental Journey, appearing a year after the last volume of Tristram Shandy, conveys Sterne’s most significant and complex antislavery message. A passage within an agile, typically Sternean chain of associations begins with suspicions about Yorick being a spy and an at-first-acceptable, then repellent, prospect of imprisonment. Spurred by his encounter with the starling, Yorick apostrophizes, “Disguise thyself as thou wilt, still slavery! . . . still thou art a bitter draught; and though thousands in all ages have been made to drink of thee, thou art no less bitter on that account.”14 His imagination fired by the subject, Yorick asserts that he “was going to begin with the millions of my fellow creatures born to no inheritance but slavery; but finding, however affecting the picture was, that I could not bring it near me. . . . I took a single captive and . . . look’d through the twilight of his grated door to take his picture” (ASJ, 97). Creating a parallel temporal reality by focusing on a single individual, Yorick forces himself as well as the reader to confront the captive’s human qualities with careful and deliberate framing. His depiction centers on the character’s physical and psychological distress (a “body half wasted away” and “sickness of the heart”) in addition to his removal from domestic and social comfort (he had not “the voice of friend or kinsman” or “children” to comfort him [ASJ, 97]), revealing him stripped of his happiness and humanity. The narrator’s compassion compels him to describe further the captive’s psychological state, marked by “dismal days and nights,” “a hopeless eye,” and “a deep sigh,” the last of which tellingly precedes Yorick seeing “the iron enter his soul.” The captive, having proven himself to possess the same feelings and domestic attachments as any sensitive reader of the time, becomes all the more tragic in his resignation. On two occasions, Yorick’s vivid imagination carries him too far, preventing him from completing his description, and the second time, he admits, “I could not sustain the picture of confinement which my fancy had drawn” (ASJ, 98), forcing him to conclude his imaginative exercise in compassion, but leaving an aposiopesis where readers are led to complete the picture—and consider its moral implications—themselves.
The text preceding this description, as well as the passage itself, also engages readers, inviting them into a complex play of metaphor, reflexivity, and political positioning. Initially the starling’s pleas of “I can’t get out” displace Yorick’s carefully wrought, logical conclusions about his own possible confinement (he states that “in one moment they overthrew all my systematic reasonings upon the Bastile” [ASJ, 96]) and his “tenderly awakened [affections]” pronounce the condemning apostrophe to Slavery. Here the conceptual yields to the specific, a description punctuated by the narrator’s pauses, which themselves are created by the intensity of his own invocations. Yorick then returns to his personal priority: traveling to Versailles to obtain a passport to keep himself out of jail.
The presentation of the issue of slavery here is complicated both by Sterne’s verbal playfulness (primarily with the mention of “tint” [ASJ, 96] in his apostrophe) and by Yorick’s vulnerability to his own imaging of pathos, inviting critics to question the sincerity of the text. Broadly, the consistent recentering of the narrator over the sentimental subjects of the starling and captive and their subjectivization can be seen as reflecting poorly on Yorick’s show of virtue; some have pointed out that the starling, in the end, is not freed, and the captive’s described agonies are supplanted by Yorick’s upwelling of emotion.
Yet these conclusions cannot displace or deny either the presence of an important issue in Sterne’s time or its highly sympathetic treatment. The caged starling suggests obvious symbolic parallels with enslaved humans. Ellis asserts that it is “made a metonymic emblem of African slavery” (74). More specifically, Paul Moore observes that “when his passion has cooled, he [Yorick] likewise treats it [the starling] simply as a piece of property.”15 This shouldn’t be surprising, though: in the end, the starling is a bird and not a person. Yorick’s sympathetic identification with the starling does not magically make it human, and the emphasis on its repeated cry rather than its actual misery—an actor rather than sufferer—stresses its role as a herald, an awakener of conscience, rather than as a suffering individual. It is a vital point to consider the presentation of the starling as contrasted with the captive, a feeling individual. The starling serves as an emotional prompt on two counts—to remind Yorick of his own possible incarceration and by association of the broader issue of human captivity. Critical attempts to paint the bird as a symbol of slavery in fact are further complicated by Sterne’s gesture to link himself to the starling, through the etymological link to his name, its attachment to his (by way of Yorick’s) family crest, and the parallels between the bird’s passage between patrons and Sterne’s own adventures in English society.16 The differences in the representation of the starling and the captive also explains the strong contrast in Yorick’s responses to them: one is an intuitive and impulsive attraction, the other a poignant meditation.
The sentimentalization of the subject, more evident with the captive than in Sterne’s other antislavery passages, has been a particularly contentious point of discussion. Yorick’s process of envisioning his subject involves “shut[ting] him up in his dungeon” and viewing him “through the twilight of his grated door” (ASJ, 97). This process of visual isolation of the subject—which informs many of Sterne’s character descriptions in his fiction and sermons—is labeled by Lynn Festa as an “oscillation between the sentimental and the ironic.”17 Arthur H. Cash, however, sees it as part of a larger pattern, a sign that Yorick “cannot be affected by abstract considerations and general ideas,” needing instead individual examples (as with the monk) on which to focus his sympathy.18 John Mullan seems to identify a similar quality with his observation that Yorick exercises “a sympathy which is not necessarily narcissistic and indulgent; it confesses itself to be inventive and purposeful: a necessary fiction.”19 This necessity is recognized by Festa as well, who perceptively observes that “one is ostensibly not meant to love this individual, but to love all slaves through him . . . one figure must stand in for another” (86). Finding the text “mawkish,” Mullan nevertheless concedes that it is “progressive on the question of slavery by the standards of Sterne’s culture” (194).
Others find that Yorick’s narrative undermines the issue of abolition, an exercise of self-indulgence at best. Moore views Yorick’s discussion as an act of “veiled sado-masochism” (45). Marcus Wood sees the narrative process in the passage as an “act of imaginative possession” that “exists in a troubled relation to the manner in which a real slave-owner can use the slave’s body at any time, in any way.” Using narrative to control fictional characters is hardly unique to this scene or to Sterne, of course; Dumas’s restriction of the count of Monte Cristo to his cell, for instance, would seem to qualify him, in Wood’s words, as an “authorial tormentor.” 20 Yorick may touch on irony, as Festa notes, but to view the narrative description as exhibiting a “brutal and darkly humorous indifference” (18) as does Wood, a critical tormentor of sorts, exercises excessive determination over the text.
The narrative description of the single captive, in Robert Markley’s perspective, “not only makes him a pitiable victim but also effectively isolates him from his fellow ‘millions,’ from any possibility of concerted and collective political action.”21 Of course, the “action” that needs to take place in Sterne’s text is to rouse readers to an advocacy of abolition through political activity (rather than incite a revolution or uprising), a tested means of attaining change within a democratic system. Focusing on an individual out of a group for argumentative purposes is a widely used and accepted rhetorical technique, as Carey notes above, a device of synecdoche. Many of Sterne’s rhetorical techniques lambasted by Markley and Wood are in fact standard devices of antiquity, and likely were part of Sterne’s early education. Aristotle, for instance, catalogs the “argument by Example” in his Rhetoric, which may employ an “illustrative parallel.”22 For the purpose of arguments, Cicero notes in De Partitione Oratoria, “there is no object so pitiable as the unhappy man who once was happy,”23 a strategy behind the inclusion of the captive’s domestic history that forms a contrast with the emotional desolation of his current condition. Sterne may also have been acquainted with these techniques through homiletic handbooks that emphasized the work of classical rhetoricians, such as the Art of Preaching: In Imitation of Horace’s Art of Poetry of the 1730s. Less essential than a specific source, though, is recognition of the traditional means of persuasion that Sterne artfully brought to bear in presenting the captive; in fact, Sterne’s occasional ambiguities and mastery of language aside, the narrative attention on a single suffering individual as representative of a group in need of philanthropy is recognized even today as an effective approach to induce action from the viewer/reader, as is evinced by countless charity appeal advertisements.24
The validity of this approach, furthermore, was defended in Sterne’s own time. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Adam Smith considers the efficacy of Sterne’s technique eight years before the passage featuring the captive was written. “We have no immediate experience of what other men feel,” he says, except “by conceiving what we ourselves should feel in the like situation.” Therefore “it is by the imagination only that we can form any conception of what are his situations.”25 He continues that “his agonies, when they are thus brought home to ourselves, when we have thus adopted and made them our own, begin at last to affect us, and we then tremble and shudder at the thought of what he feels” (12). Measured by Smith’s standards, Yorick’s description of the captive falls within an even more conventional (and effective) contemporary framework that, despite its emotional flourishes, in tone and structure is utterly typical in a historical literary context.26
The description of the captive, revealed detail by detail, creates a distance between Yorick and his subject, but it also induces readers into his sympathetic imagination slowly, so that they share what he “sees.” In his advice to orators, Quintilian states that “when we desire to awaken pity, we must actually believe our own selves, and must persuade our minds that this is really the case.”27 Yorick’s exercise of the imagination incapacitates him, not because he is frivolous in its exercise, but the opposite—he is overburdened by the gravity of the issue facing him.28 The true horror of a human being enslaved is in many ways beyond words, beyond description, and accordingly Yorick is unable to maintain his narrative, creating an aposiopesis that enhances the moral outrage of the image more than a complete description would, not only in the absence of continuation but in shifting the burden of imagining the captive’s distress to the reader.
In 1766, Ignatius Sancho, the self-described “coal-black jolly African,” wrote to the famous author, complimenting his work. Sancho is himself an engaging figure of the period, and his life would stand as a testimony to the moral obligation to free captive Africans, even if he had never written to Sterne at all. Born into slavery, he served three spinster sisters who derisively named him after the Cervantes character and denied him an education. He went on to become butler to Lord Montagu, who encouraged his interests in reading and writing and whose bequeathal eventually facilitated Sancho’s financial independence. Aside from establishing a shop in London, Sancho would gain wide acquaintance in London cultural circles, writing letters and composing music.29
In his letter to Sterne, Sancho shows a fondness for the author’s style—Sukhev Sandhu credits him with a “studious creolisation of Sterne’s aesthetic”30—particularly the sentimental mode, affectionately claiming, for instance, that he “would walk ten miles to shake hands with” Corporal Trim. He pointedly remarks he had been reading Sterne’s sermons (evidently the first edition of the first volume, published in April 1760) and felt inspired by “Job’s account of the shortness and troubles of life, considered,” particularly the “bitter draught” passage cited above. He relates to Sterne, “I am sure you will applaud me for beseeching you to give one half hour’s attention to slavery, as it is at this day practised in our West Indies.—That subject, handled in your striking manner, would ease the yoke (perhaps) of many.”31
In his response, Sterne observes the “strange coincidence,” as he “had been writing a tender tale of the sorrows of a friendless poor negro-girl, and my eyes had scarse done smarting with it, when your Letter of recommendation in behalf of so many of her brethren and sisters, came to me.” After mentioning his work on the story of the “friendless poor negro-girl” in Tristram Shandy, Sterne’s letter continues in a more philosophical vein:
but why her brethren?—or your’s, Sancho! any more than mine? It is by the finest tints, and most insensible gradations, that nature descends from the fairest face about St James’s, to the sootiest complexion in africa: at which tint of these, is it, that the ties of blood are to cease? and how many shades must we descend lower still in the scale, ’ere Mercy is to vanish with them? . . . for my own part, I never look Westward . . . but I think of the burdens which our Brothers & Sisters are there carrying—& could I ease their shoulders from one ounce of ’em, I declare I would set out this hour upon a pilgrimage to Mecca for their sakes.32
Sterne accedes to Sancho’s request to make an appeal on behalf of enslaved Africans—in fact, he claims to have already taken the issue under consideration—and logically argues against the possibility of delineation of humanity by skin color, reinforcing a Christian and sentimental idea of kinship among men. He also expresses deep sympathy for those laboring in the West Indies—not moving toward the practical abolishment of the practice but instead seizing on a hyperbolic gesture (the Anglican priest making an Islamic pilgrimage) if that would end the practice. He skillfully runs the thread of universal kinship, a sentimental trope, throughout his proclamation; initiated by Sancho, it is a shared value between the two that mirrors and underlies their sympathies.33
Some question exists as to whether Sterne was inspired by Sancho to write the two antislavery passages in his fictions or if he was actually working on them at the time, as he suggests in his response to Sancho.34 For the purposes of this study, however, the source of Sterne’s passages is secondary to the impact of the words themselves on the half century that followed. Cash observes that the letter “reveals how much [Sterne] had thought about the subject of slavery and the distinctions of race.”35 Although he finds an ambivalence in Sterne’s description of “tints” (an odd echo, perhaps, of the reference in the apostrophe to Liberty in ASJ), which reveals “powerful remnants of racial difference,” Ellis acknowledges a “powerful denial” of that difference as well (65). Carol Watts sees in Sterne’s response “an enabling (for him) disavowal, producing an imagined kinship without barriers.”36 This kinship is represented, interestingly, in the equalizing atmosphere of London, where in the eighteenth century a black African man born a slave could become a middle-class shop owner and cultural figure.37
The very act of Sancho’s writing to Sterne about this issue is revealing about the public perception of Sterne at the time. Ian Campbell Ross sees the gesture as “a telling indication of how the writer’s much-criticised work was increasingly regarded by sympathetic contemporaries as a powerful exhortation to moral improvement and even practical social reform” (349–50). Given Sterne’s wide renown from Tristram Shandy in the years before his death, his published sermons, and his amiable public persona—testified to by sales of his books (and of their imitations) as well as evidence of his celebrity, certainly known to the author himself—it is not difficult to imagine Sterne’s public stature in Britain and America.38
Some key historical events are instructive when considering Sterne’s reception in an abolitionist context in America between 1787 and 1831. For instance, in the 1780s, Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, Pennsylvania, Rhode Island, and Vermont had all ended slavery (or initiated its gradual phasing out) and by 1805 New York and New Jersey had joined this list; accordingly, “bitter draught” (and likely antislavery sentiment in general) appears disproportionately in newspapers from these states (Harmer, 22, 51). In 1807, the trade in slaves was legally prohibited in the United States and Britain (Harmer, 52). Two slave uprisings in Louisiana territory required military intervention in 1810, a quiet period for “bitter draught” in the newspapers (Harmer, 22). The years 1819–1820 saw much discussion about the admittance of Missouri into the union as a slave state, and at least eight mentions of “bitter draught” occur in this period (Harmer, 22–23).
A tentative picture of Sterne’s influence in the early republic can be sketched from the popularity of his books. While it is difficult to ascertain the number of copies of Sterne’s work that arrived from England, the number of editions of his work that were published in America provides clues to his cultural perception. As on the other side of the Atlantic, A Sentimental Journey was his most popular title, with seven editions produced before 1800, followed closely by six editions of the Beauties of Sterne, all of which included the antislavery passages mentioned earlier. An appetite for specifically sentimental subjects in America is further suggested by two editions of the excerpt The Sorrows of Maria and three editions (including one published in Jamaica) of Letters from Yorick to Eliza. In contrast, before 1815, only three editions of Sterne’s Works were published as well as single editions of his Sermons and Letters; no separate editions of Tristram Shandy were printed in the United States until the mid-nineteenth century.39
Sterne’s antislavery passages were widely reprinted in the early republic, and key phrases found their way into printed discourse in a variety of formats. The sheer quantity of these reprints and shorter quotations prohibits their extensive exploration here; instead, a representation of Sterne’s abolitionist influence will be suggested by an analysis of the appearances of his central statement on the topic, the apostrophe to Slavery and Liberty from A Sentimental Journey, as well as a key phrase from that passage, “bitter draught,” in the context of slavery in America. As chattel slavery increasingly became the focus of public discussion, this passage appears to have gained propagandistic value; Watts acknowledges that it “became a touchstone” for proponents of abolition and women’s rights into the early nineteenth century (176). These references in themselves form a substantial sampling that suggests an even wider sphere of Sterne’s integration into abolitionist discourse. For instance, the apostrophe, sometimes accompanied by the episodes of the starling and the captive, appears in volumes of excerpts from varied works that enjoyed wide popularity in America in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries; the titles of these books, such as The speaker . . . selected . . . with a view to facilitate the improvement of youth, suggest an undisguised didactic intent. Four of these collections incorporate the apostrophe to Slavery and Liberty, including Lessons in Elocution . . . for the improvement of youth in reading and speaking, which ran to fourteen editions over twenty years. Printed without further commentary that might reinforce its relevance to American slavery, the apostrophe could have been included merely as an example of effective writing; on the other hand, its inclusion in these collections might have been the result of not-so-subtle abolitionist intentions.40
The most widespread and creative use of the apostrophe (and the signal term “bitter draught”) is in the pages of American newspapers, more conclusively suggesting its pervasiveness within the culture as a touchstone for rousing feeling against slavery. In newspapers accessible through the Early American Newspapers Series 1 database, the apostrophe, or “bitter draught” in reference to the enslavement of Africans, occurs nearly four dozen times between 1787 and 1831 in newspapers in eleven states and the District of Columbia.41 While not a comprehensive examination of all newspapers of the period, or of all printed media for that matter (pamphlets and magazines are not included), these representative contributions from Sterne to American abolition are nonetheless significant.
The newspaper trade formed an important facet of life in the early United States, and, as Jeffrey L. Pasley observes, although dedicated abolitionist periodicals were not founded until the 1830s,42 newspapers were particularly important in providing a broad venue for emergent abolitionist dialogue. They were especially influential as the only means of mass communication; at the turn of the century it was estimated that there were more than 180 newspapers in the United States (each with a mean circulation of about 600), a number that would swell to more than 680 titles nationwide by 1828.43 While subscriptions were limited to the well-to-do and literate, newspapers were frequently found at public gathering places, where they would be read aloud; Pasley notes that “even a few newspaper subscribers were enough to spread the word to entire neighborhoods” (8).
Newspapers of this period were generally four pages (two sheets) in length, though a few ran to eight pages, printed one to three times weekly. Particularly outside of the larger urban papers, the type and quality of the content could be irregular, dependent on individual editorial priorities; Pasley asserts, for instance, that the “news” was delivered “in a desultory, haphazard fashion, printing letters written or lent to the editor, material from other newspapers, and raw government documents” (2). Thus editors and publishers were free to include items that might seem unorthodox in the twenty-first century, allowing for a broader, more expressive range of possible material.
The apostrophe appears in its entirety in American newspapers eleven times in the period of 1787 to 1831, both with and without the starling and captive passages, in a variety of contexts. It is often situated in a general, or more specifically literary, olio, sometimes occupying a newspaper’s back page. Thus the apostrophe in the National Aegis (1805; a paper that will contain other references to Sterne) occupies the same page as Swift’s “Meditations on a Broomstick” and an item entitled “Latest Parisian Fashions.”44 Sometimes the apostrophe appeared in an even more mixed format: on page 1 of the Litchfield Republican (1822), it coexists with a notice of the proclamation of a state holiday and a “Burlesque on Genealogy,” and is followed on page 2 by the tender poem, “On the Death of an Infant Sister.”45 In the Georgetown Olio (1803), the apostrophe appears on the back page, just before an advertisement for a lost cow.46 While these nonpolitical appearances may seem trivial or literary in their intent, one must recall both the significance of their very appearance in the limited space of newspaper columns and the emotional impact of the passage; even without further elaboration, the apostrophe carries a clear abolitionist message.
The intent of inclusion is more obvious, perhaps, in the New York Washington Republican (1809), where the apostrophe shares page 2 with political commentary, appearing between an antifederalist tract complaining of government money spent on “barren and unprofitable waters” (the Louisiana Purchase) rather than on fortifications and gunships, and an editorial expressing concern about rumors of revolutionary activities in the United States by “French hirelings.”47 This context casts the passage as a strong political statement, a principle embedded in Sterne’s artful—and famous—rhetoric.48
While the use of the phrase “bitter draught” in relation to foul-tasting medicine dates back centuries, the specific application of the term as a metaphor for slavery appears to have originated with Sterne’s writing, first in his sermon, “Job’s account of the shortness and troubles of life, considered,” and later in A Sentimental Journey. Apart from its original reference and as part of the often-reprinted apostrophe, the phrase often appears in a variety of abolitionist items in periodicals, from news reports to editorials and letters. Outside of the full reprints of the apostrophe cited above in this period, “bitter draught” appears in at least thirty-five different newspaper items in many shapes and sizes in abolitionist contexts. The term arises in a lengthy imitation and a brief toast, in news items and in letters, becoming something of a shared touchstone, each appearance functioning as a synecdoche for the apostrophe and, in a larger sense, for the sympathetic philosophy of A Sentimental Journey. Occasionally a few lines of the apostrophe are quoted, and Sterne—or simply “the celebrated writer”—is mentioned. All in all, a wide variety of texts advocating abolition will include this phrase from 1787 to 1831. Many of these texts also utilize rhetorical strategies similar to those in Sterne’s own antislavery writings: the focus on the oppressed individual as well as an appeal to principle, the latter of which forms the core of the apostrophe itself.
The focus on the plight of the individual can vividly extend the sufferings of the subject to the reader; this generally is illustrated by a careful description, as in Sterne’s passages depicting the captive. These portrayals emerge in reference to news items printed in northern newspapers reporting the inhumane punishment of slaves. A piece in the Political Calendar (1804) describes the “vengeance” of Hoffman, a slave owner, for a twelve-year-old slave’s “laddish fault”: hands and legs tied together, the individual was “suspended for two days without either meat or drink” after Hoffman “crammed down the throat of the wretched boy two table spoons full of salt,” after which he whipped his victim and “applied to the boy’s [sic] a mixture of salt and brandy!” The writer turns to the reader, asking “how greatly are we conscience struck . . . when we see it [slavery] thus ‘undisguised,’” building on Sterne’s premise. This item, which appeared on page 2 alongside national and international news, was also printed in the news sections of the Salem Register (1804) and the Hudson, New York, Bee (1805).49
The appeal of the individual is also central to a less visceral news item in the Connecticut Mirror (1830) that features two lines from the apostrophe as an epigraph. The text describes “a circumstance of a painful nature and which has excited much sympathy in the breasts of our citizens,” when a Maryland man “arrived in quest of a fugitive slave.” Some straightforward details of a hearing in which the slave is restored to the master are included, and the piece concludes with the observation that “there is something in the case of this unfortunate man . . . which is calculated to excite feelings of commiseration for his fate”: his literacy, in the form of an intercepted letter, proved to be his undoing. The epigraph and the language of compassion provide an emotional contrast to the matter-of-fact tone of the legal proceedings, strongly suggesting the episode was seen through a Sternean lens of sympathy. The item is included with the news in the Mirror, and was reprinted on page 1 (with public notices and advertising) of the New Bedford Mercury less than a week later.50
Under the heading of “Melioration of Slavery,” an item in the New-Hampshire Gazette (1812) reporting on Africans kidnapped for the purpose of “training for his majesty’s navy” reflects on “the wretched negro, whom unfeeling, accurs’d avarice had doomed to a life of toil!” The writer asks, “Will the lash cut less keen, exercised by the petty tyrant of a ship of war, than by a slave-driver of a West India planter? Ah no!” and adds two lines from the apostrophe in conclusion.51 Again, news reporting provides the platform for an emotional appeal, cemented further with the reference to Sterne.
Another means of humanizing a subject dehumanized by slavery is stressing broken domestic attachments, a rhetorical strategy briefly used by Sterne in the description of the captive: “in thirty years the western breeze had not once fann’d his blood . . . nor had the voice of friend or kinsman breathed through his lattice . . . —his children—” (ASJ, 97). A formal commentary in the Baltimore Patriot (1821) observes, “what can be said in extenuation of the Kidnapper, of the cold-blooded villain, who insidiously steals in the darkness of the night, to the lonely hut, the unprotected hut of the colored man, where slumber in fancied security, his wife and his children . . . he then seizes upon his defenceless victims, and drags them bound and manacled to his den, from thence they are quickly transferred to some negro vessel.”52 The victims’ lack of defense renders their family unity both more precious and more fragile, further demonizing the “cold-blooded villain”—by extension anyone who tolerates the institution of slavery. The tone and pacing of this passage are familiarly Sternean, almost as if the scene could precede the tale of the captive itself.
The most effective use of this technique, which gained some currency in this period, underlines the humanity of the enslaved, not only evoking their familial attachments but also reminding the reader of parallels to his (or her) own family. The previous item in the Baltimore Patriot (1821) exclaims, “their hearts are torn . . . by as violent grief, when a child, a brother, or a sister, is kidnapped from them, as ours would be.”53 The Concord Observer (1819) includes a second-person appeal: “Reader, were you torn by ruthless hands from your country . . . never more to visit the dwelling of your parents—never to afford a momentary alleviation to a grief-worn father, a disconsolate mother, by informing them that their son yet lives; would you think yourself free . . . ?”54
An essay entitled “The Traveller” from the Pennsylvania Village Record (1818) is more confrontational: “Let the slave-master not refuse to read and reflect upon what I have and what I shall advance. . . . I ask him to take [this] home with him, and read it whilst surrounded by his family . . . and when the partner of his life soothes his sorrows and his cares, let him think of the connubial happiness that he has marred—and when his children climb about his knees, and twine their arms around his neck; let him think of those children whom, prompted by sordid avarice, he has dragged from the embraces of parents equally affectionate with himself.”55 Here the sentimentalized and personalized illustration of family clashes with a harsh reality, creating a vivid emotional contrast that is as difficult to reconcile as the practice of slavery itself. So powerful is this approach that it was also pressed into action for antiabolitonist commentary in the City of Washington Gazette (1820): “the sale of human flesh . . . rend[s] asunder forever the ties of parents and children, brothers and sisters, husband and wife,” the author insists, yet is a lesser evil when compared to the prospect of slaves “turned loose to steal, rob and murder, the certain consequence of emancipation.”56 This text performs a high-wire act, recognizing the strength of the argument of domestic sentiment in regard to abolition (that in turn acknowledges the intrinsic humanity of its subject), while simultaneously attempting to negate its weight; in the end, it more than anything else seems to validate the strength of the domestic appeal against abolition.
Using the apostrophe and the term “bitter draught” to pursue Sterne’s influence on American abolitionism leads to evidence of another rhetorical strategy in newspaper texts: the focus on principle, or abstract value, rather than on the specific human traits of the individual subject. Simplest of all, perhaps, is the recording in the Worchester, Massachusetts, National Aegis (1820) of a toast made during an annual Fourth of July public banquet; a round of toasts in this time typically advertised political candidates and notable issues. One line of the apostrophe is followed by, “Thy principles are repugnant to the spirit of Republicanism. May the dealers in human flesh in consciousness of their own wrongs, turn from their impious traffick, and become the friends of oppressed humanity.” (Other toasts on the occasion were addressed to Andrew Jackson and “The Patriots of South America.”)57 The passage from a fifty-year-old book was well known enough to identify broader sentiments about the increasingly vexing issue of slavery on the occasion. Other writings using “bitter draught” to build a moral argument against slavery include a letter to George Washington (reprinted from a Liverpool paper) in the New York Time Piece (1797); a response to an item in the Virginia Farmer’s Repository (1819) accusing a writer of being “one of those gentry who had an interest in the captivity of those unfortunate Africans”; and a note in the Cherry-Valley Gazette (1818) lamenting “bloody minded” bounty hunters.58
As a single phrase, “bitter draught” appears profusely in American newspapers (at least six original pieces) between 1819 and 1820, when the term, rather than merely performing the role of an epigraph, is often integrated into the debate over Missouri’s status as a free or slaveholding state before its admittance to the union. These opinion pieces, almost entirely from northern newspapers, use principles foremost in their disparaging of slavery. “Slavery alone, in whatever shape it exists, is indeed a ‘bitter draught,’” a piece in the Connecticut Mirror (1819) intones, “but the bitterness of the draught is infinitely increased in all slave holding states.”59 An item under the heading of “Miscellany” in the Providence Gazette (1820) asserts, “But were they treated ever so humanely, they are still slaves, and slavery, however disguised, is ‘a bitter draught.’ It is a state from which the human heart instinctively recoils.”60 Arguing against “the rights of the States,” Poulson’s Daily Advertiser of Philadelphia (1820) exclaims, “Still Slavery! thou wilt remain to be a bitter draught, and furnish a standing jest to the revilers of our free and equal government!”61 Time and again, the phrase is seamlessly integrated into abolitionist discourse, reinforcing its role as a touchstone idea, at the same time possibly diminishing its Sternean origin.62
In pointing to Sterne’s apostrophe, all of the mentions of “bitter draught” echo the more complete appeal of the apostrophe to Slavery and Liberty, and beyond that to the value assigned to the ideas of freedom and liberty in the early republic. By itself the term acts to provoke the individual conscience. The apostrophe is unambiguous in its consideration of the “thousands in all ages” who had been enslaved, a reflection that in itself is set into motion due to the repetition of the starling’s phrase, “I can’t get out.” In a sense, the printed repetition of “bitter draught” shown in these examples mimics the starling’s repeated complaint—it rouses its audience to a larger purpose.
The term was also utilized by proslavery advocates. An opinion piece in the Connecticut Mirror (1831) begins, “‘Disguise slavery as you will,’ says Sterne, ‘it is a bitter draught.’ This is equally true of both master and slave, at the present time, in our Southern states. Fear broods over the helpless inhabitants of Virginia, and South Carolina.”63 An item in the Newport Mercury (1828) follows a line of the apostrophe with the explanation that slaves “spend the night in revelry and feasting, while the master is stretched on a sleepless couch.”64 By appropriating the term, these writers seem to concede the influence and weight that Sterne’s phrase carried, validating its influence in the contemporary slavery debate, and perhaps even attempting to dull its value by blurring the subject between slave and master. In addition, the term was versatile enough to be applied to a broad range of subjects: slavery at the Cape of Good Hope, the captivity of American sailors by Algerian pirates, indentured servants, and even marriage and taxation—all essentially leveraging the renown of Yorick’s apostrophe.65
“Bitter draught” perhaps is most suitably situated in writings that effectively extend Sterne’s philosophy of benevolence in creative expressions against slavery in this period. For example, a well-wrought imitation entitled “Prosperity and Humanity” reprinted from the London Courier that appeared at least twice in U.S. newspapers presses the familiar inhabitants of the Shandy parlor into service for the abolitionist cause. Walter’s observations on ancient history lead to a discussion of English commerce, which in turn brings up the subject of the slave trade (via Dr. Slop, “with a sneer”), a notion that “touch[es] on the tenderest string in Yorick’s soul.” Slop tries to justify the practice, asking Yorick whether it is “the fulfilling of the Divine command” to enslave a “marked” race. “But what that mark was we are not informed” responds Yorick, “might it not have been a particular prominence of belly?” He continues in a serious tone: “we should not forget, that although their complexion is different to our own—their feelings are not. . . . I would more willingly become one of these children of affliction—be lashed like them—faint like them . . . wake to disappointment like them . . . than even speak to justify such dealing.” Slop weakly counters that “they are happier than our poor,” but Yorick then decisively declares that “whatever our poverty—there is something cheering in the faintest smile of freedom;—such is the structure of our mind.”66 Credibly borrowing Sterne’s characters, the anonymous author refutes contemporary arguments in favor of slavery using the sentimental and principled voice of Yorick, also echoing the tone of Sterne’s letter to Sancho; the masterful casting of Slop as a villainous proslavery agent, as unsympathetic as ever, further strengthens the link to Shandy Hall and Sterne’s work.
Another imitation featured in the Concord Herald (1792), entitled “The Metabasist,” begins with two lines from the apostrophe, followed by the narrator’s uncle exclaiming, “There are no slaves in heaven!” A note reveals that this uncle “was reading Sterne’s works” and smokes a tobacco pipe; his pattern of feeling-driven statements closely parallel those made by Uncle Toby, and serves as an emotional counterpoint in a conversation about slavery, arguing against an unnamed character who attempts to justify the institution through custom or scripture. The uncle’s tone hits home on the subject; he exclaims, “as to your doctrine, that the Negroes are incapable of taking care of themselves, I cannot believe it to be true; I believe we had better let them try to take care of themselves, before we undertake to take care for them.” The narrator departs, repeating to himself “There are no slaves in heaven” as he walks home, a simple but pithy thought that the writer seems to have intended to leave with the reader as well.67 In a period when there were concerns about emancipation leading to widespread chaos, both these abolitionist pieces, extending Sterne’s tone and philosophy of benevolence, express an optimism about humanity in general not discordant with the ideas behind the founding of the republic.68
Time and again, Sterne’s texts utilize sentimental tropes that aimed, as Festa describes it, to “restore the humanity of the slave by emphasizing those aspects of the human that are inalienable, that have no equivalents” (153). In restoring this humanity, then, they fostered a sympathetic audience, furthering the cause of eradication of slavery in the United States. The popular applications of Sterne’s texts and ideas to American abolition, and their pervasiveness, both argue for an understanding of the author in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries as not only an advocate for the abolition of slavery, but an effective one at that. This conclusion is at odds with critics who view Sterne’s works as largely egocentric and ineffective, such as Markley’s claim that sentimentality is strictly “a form of moral self-promotion” (219) that “can neither interrogate nor change the socioeconomic injustices that its ‘virtues’ promote” (230). Stephen Ahern finds a similar lack of pragmatism in A Sentimental Journey, asserting that “Yorick persistently maintains a certain distance from the object of his gaze . . . in a strategy designed more to maximize pleasurable aesthetic response than to actually alleviate the misery at hand.”69 Yet the contemporary reception of Sterne’s text in reference to abolition clearly contradicts this position; the appropriation of his sympathetic perspective into American abolitionist discourse, an example of a phenomenon labeled by Festa as a “migrat[-ion] across generic boundaries” (153), was as widespread as it was for a reason. Notwithstanding recent anachronistic analyses, the influence of Sterne’s texts in the realm of actual (as opposed to theoretical) politics attests to their efficacy as emotional appeals in the real world.
A last example of Sterne’s influence on U.S. abolition is found in the 1792 commonplace book of Anna Coale, the fourteen-year-old daughter of a Baltimore slaveholding family. Prominent on its first page, Coale wrote out the passage from A Sentimental Journey from Yorick’s discovery of the starling to his description of the captive, and her transcription ends in midsentence, followed by a gap of four pages ripped out from the book. While we will never know the content of those missing pages, Coale was so affected by Sterne’s words that she included them in a place of honor; as Catherine Kerrison notes, “something about them struck a chord within her, so she extracted them, carefully and deliberately copying them into a book she would read over and over again.”70 With Coale’s inclusion of these words—and it is interesting to note that her father would include manumission of the family’s slaves in his will—we can see a parallel to other instances of Sterne’s abolitionist influences in America: readers appropriated Sterne’s expressions of slavery, it seems clear, so as to feel the condition more acutely themselves. The historian Winthrop D. Jordan observes the “equalitarian” nature of sentimentality in abolitionist discourse that “assumed and played upon a sense of human sameness in feeling.”71 The bond of shared emotions is an undeniable part of the human condition; neither the callousness of the institution of slavery nor of determined literary critics can reduce the idea of sympathy to a sterile, purely political function. Abolitionist literature recognized the power of sentimental description—here distilled into Sterne’s metonym “bitter draught”—and used it to build an effective sympathetic bridge between subject and reader, escalating a gradual political change toward the elimination of slavery.
Notes
1. Sterne’s biographers have presented different portraits of the writer in some respects, but are united in their view of his essentially provincial life before 1760. See Arthur H. Cash, Laurence Sterne: The Early and Middle Years (London: Methuen, 1975), and Ian Campbell Ross, Laurence Sterne: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 29–196. The living of Coxwold was added to Sterne’s income in 1760 (Cash, 257).
2. Laurence Sterne, The Sermons of Laurence Sterne: The Text, ed. Melvyn New, vol. 4 of the Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence Sterne (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996), 99; hereafter cited in the text as S followed by the page number. The second edition of the Sermons (also published in 1760) omitted this passage. This more emotionally charged version (cited as inspirational by Ignatius Sancho) found its way into at least one American collection of The Beauties of Sterne (Philadelphia: William Spotswood, 1789), which ran to ten editions. Melvyn New notes that both versions may have been derived “from William Wollaston, The Religion of Nature Delineated, 2nd ed. (1724)” (The Sermons of Laurence Sterne: The Notes, vol. 5 of the Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence Sterne [Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1996], 140n89.18–30).
3. For more on the implications of Sterne’s unique punctuation in the narrative voice, see Anne Bandry, “Tristram Shandy ou le plaisir du tiret,” Études Anglaises: Grande-Bretagne, États-Unis 41, no. 2 (Apr.–June 1988): 143–54, and Roger B. Moss, “Sterne’s Punctuation,” Eighteenth-Century Studies 15, no. 2 (Winter 1981–1982): 179–200.
4. Markman Ellis, The Politics of Sensibility: Race, Gender and Commerce in the Sentimental Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 56; hereafter cited in the text.
5. Harry Harmer, The Longman Companion to Slavery, Emancipation and Civil Rights (Harlow, Essex, UK: Pearson Educational, 2001), 9; hereafter cited in the text.
6. Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, ed. Melvyn New and Joan New, vol. 2 of the Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence Sterne (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1984), 9.6.747; hereafter cited as TS followed by volume, chapter, and page number in the text.
7. It is worth noting that the ethic of reciprocity (also called the Golden Rule) appears in many sermons of the period, which, in tandem with the sympathetic portrayal of the enslaved, may be seen as preparing audiences for more specific abolitionist arguments. For more on sentiment and Sterne’s sermons, see Melvyn New, “The Odd Couple: Laurence Sterne and John Norris of Bemerton,” Philological Quarterly 75, no. 3 (Summer 1996): 361–85.
8. Though the words “wench” and “slut” may carry strong negative connotations in the early twenty-first century, they had more neutral, or even affectionate, meanings in Sterne’s era. The OED defines “wench” at the time as “a girl, maid, young woman” or “a female servant”; “slut” was more a term of disapproval, though the OED allows a “playful use, without the imputation of bad qualities.”
9. As Ellis notes, “Trim’s initial line of enquiry . . . refers to the contemporary debate about the status of Africans—both religiously and biologically” (70). J. R. Oldfield, in Popular Politics and British Anti-Slavery (Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 1998), attributes this growing awareness to several factors: a combination of increased literacy, the growth of newspapers, and sympathetic textual portrayals of slaves, including those in children’s readers (9–40).
10. Some aspects of Sterne’s texts drew criticism in his time, but the character of Uncle Toby was admired widely, and would go on to become a cult figure of sorts in the nineteenth century. See Sterne: The Critical Heritage, ed. Alan B. Howes (Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1974), 60, 76, and 140; W. G. Day, “Charles Robert Leslie’s ‘My Uncle Toby and the Widow Wadman,’” Shandean 9 (1997): 83–108; and W. B. Gerard, Laurence Sterne and the Visual Imagination (Burlington: Ashgate, 2006), 168.
11. An earlier passage in Tristram Shandy treats the subject of chattel slavery indirectly, suggesting more than is immediately revealed. At the end of volume 4, Tristram asks, “now that you have just got to the end of these four volumes——one thing I have to ask is, how you feel your heads?” and then launches into the health benefits of “True Shandeism,” which “makes the wheel of life run long and chearfully round” (TS, 4.32.401). He then considers, “Was I left like Sancho Pança, to chuse my kingdom, it should not be maritime—or a kingdom of blacks to make a penny of—no, it should be a kingdom of hearty laughing subjects” (TS, 4.32.402). The allusion, of course, is to Don Quixote, specifically (as per the Florida editors) the passage where Sancho considers means of exploiting his master’s realms; if the territory includes the “Land of the Negroes,” he would generate profit through slavery. See Melvyn New with Richard A. Davies and W. G. Day, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman: The Notes, vol. 3 of the Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence Sterne (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1984), 334n402.1–4. The reference is from Cervantes, 2.27–28. Tristram’s stated priorities here are of a whole with the rest of his work, which stresses the heart over the head (or the pocketbook, for that matter), and this statement, at the conclusion of a two-volume installment, carries particular weight.
12. Brycchan Carey, British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility (Basingstoke, Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 58; hereafter cited in the text.
13. Shirley Samuels, introduction to The Culture of Sentiment: Race, Gender, and Sentimentality in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992), 5.
14. Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy and Continuation of the Bramine’s Journal, ed. Melvyn New and W. G. Day, vol. 6 of the Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence Sterne (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2002), 96; hereafter cited in the text as ASJ followed by page number.
15. Paul Moore, “Sterne, Tristram, Yorick, Birds, and Beasts,” British Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 10.1 (Oct. 2008): 45; hereafter cited in the text.
16. For more on these parallels, see A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy, ed. Gardner D. Stout, Jr. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 205–6n37–40.
17. Lynn Festa, Sentimental Figures of Empire in Eighteenth-Century Britain and France (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006), 31; hereafter cited in the text.
18. Arthur Hill Cash, Sterne’s Comedy of Moral Sentiments: The Ethical Dimensions of the “Journey” (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1966), 82.
19. John Mullan, Sentiment and Sociability (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), 194; hereafter cited in the text.
20. Marcus Wood, Slavery, Empathy, and Pornography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 16–17; hereafter cited in the text. Wood and other critics who pursue similar strategies also habitually label the servant a “slave” even though the term is not used in the text (indeed, she may be free), perhaps subconsciously employing a strategy to denigrate the character’s dignity through rhetoric.
21. Robert Markley, “Sentimentality as Performance: Shaftesbury, Sterne, and the Theatrics of Virtue,” The New 18th Century: Theory, Politics, English Literature, ed. Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown (1987; New York: Routledge, 1991), 226.
22. Aristotle, The Rhetoric and Poetics of Aristotle, trans. W. Rhys Roberts and Ingram Bywater (New York: Modern Library, 1954), 133.1393a.25, 133.1393a.29.
23. Cicero, De Oratore Book III, De Fato, Paradoxa Stoicorum, De Partitione Oratoria, trans. H. Rackham, Loeb Classical Library (1948; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), 355.17.57–59.
24. See Marshall Myers, “The Use of Pathos in Charity Letters: Some Notes Toward a Theory and Analysis,” Technical Writing and Communication 37.1 (2007): 8.
25. Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, ed. Knud Haakonssen (2002; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 11; hereafter cited in the text. Tim [J. T.] Parnell notes this passage from Smith in his edition of A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1968; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 237n61.
26. That Sterne was a writer of antislavery passages in the sentimental mode in his time, of course, is neither surprising nor unique. Novels like Sara Scott’s The History of Sir George Ellison and poems like Thomas Day’s “The Dying Negro” would appear in the 1760s and 1770s, creating highly sympathetic portrayals of enslaved Africans and arguing both explicitly and implicitly for the abolishment of slavery. Carey examines the techniques of these and similar texts in detail, identifying an emphasis on “ideas of common feeling and mutual sympathy” (38). While Sterne certainly represents this sympathetic bond in his texts, what distinguishes him from these writers (the quality of his prose aside) is his fame, which lent credence and familiarity to his abolitionist message. The effectiveness of the description of the captive is heightened by biblical allusions, especially for readers familiar with the original references. Stout suggests that Yorick’s “choice of an imprisoned captive to exemplify slavery” is connected with Matthew 25:36–40, which begins, “I was in prison, and ye came unto me”; he further observes that part of this passage is “cited and paraphrased” in Sermon 3, “Philanthropy recommended” (201n9–10). Melvyn New points out another possible biblical reference, Hebrews 13:3: “Remember them that are in bonds, as bound with them; and them which suffer adversity, as being yourselves also in the body” (ASJ, 329–30n97.11ff). Additional likely biblical connections suggested by Tim Parnell include Proverbs 13:12 (“Hope deferred maketh the heart sick”) and Psalm 105:18 in the Book of Common Prayer (“the iron enter into his soul”) (237n61). These reminders of Sterne’s occupational immersion in scripture inevitably add a dimension to Sterne’s abolitionist ideas: that compassion in the eighteenth century is fundamentally and immediately identified with Christianity. This often-overlooked link, as a foundation to sentimental philosophy, adds an element of indelible genuineness to Sterne’s passage.
27. Quintillian, The Institutio Oratoria, trans. H. E. Butler, Loeb Classical Library (1920; Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), 437.6.2.34–37.
28. While as a consequence Tristram or Yorick did not immediately lobby Parliament for cessation of the slave trade or board a ship to intervene in the slave trade, Yorick does carefully catalog elements of the captive’s humanity in the passage, clearly implying the injustice of the character’s imprisonment. As in the case of the African servant, an essential attribute of the captive is his equality as reflected in his ability to feel, a quality demonstrated by his affections for friends and family as well as his personal dejection under the circumstances; this in turn establishes a sense of equivalence between the character (another synecdoche) and the reader, which argues on behalf of all those enslaved.
29. See James Walvin, “Ignatius Sancho: The Man and His Times,” 94–113, and Jane Girdham, “Black Musicians in England: Ignatius Sancho and His Contemporaries,” 116–25, both in Ignatius Sancho: An African Man of Letters (London: National Portrait Gallery, 1997). Ellis records an 1889 Notes and Queries mention of Sancho that relates that “Sancho’s trade card celebrates his own brand of tobacco, and depicts two African boys” (John Pickford, “Ignatius Sancho,” Notes and Queries, 7th ser., viii [1889]: 33). The tobacco itself is, of course, a product of slavery: as Ellis sees it, Sancho is “selling the produce of his enslaved compatriots to their enslavers” (58). Political ambiguity abounded, then as now.
30. Sukhev Sandhu, “An African Man of Letters,” in Ignatius Sancho: An African Man of Letters, 53.
31. Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, An African, ed. Vincent Carretta (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1998), 73–74; hereafter cited in the text. Sancho’s Letters, first published posthumously in 1782, might be seen as influential on the American abolition movement as well. Interestingly, it was not published in the United States (though copies from England undoubtedly were imported), though the antislavery letter quoted above was included in the 1775 edition of Sterne’s Letters, which was reprinted in America. Sandhu points out that “relatively few of [the] . . . letters deal with slavery or what might be called ‘black issues’” (10) and that he was “by no means a slavish parrot of Sterne that he has often been cast as by critics” (“Sterne and the Coal-Black Jolly African,” Shandean 12 [2001]: 20). At the same time, Sterne clearly had his impact on Sancho: Madeleine Descargues observes, “there is no need indeed for Momus’s glass to see the omnipresence of Sterne in Sancho’s heart” (“Ignatius Sancho’s Letters,” Shandean 3 [1991]: 162). In England at least the connection between volume 9 of Tristram Shandy and Sancho caused an upwelling of sympathy; as Wilbur L. Cross relates, the fashionable “courted the sentimental Negro” and would extend their delicacy of feeling to gently discouraging, rather than killing, flies (The Life and Times of Laurence Sterne [1925; New Haven: Yale University Press, 1929], 413–14).
32. Laurence Sterne: The Letters, ed. Melvyn New and Peter de Voogd, vols. 7 and 8 of the Florida Edition of the Works of Laurence Sterne (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2009), 8:504–5.
33. For a comprehensive discussion of the exchange, see Madeleine Descargues, “Ignatius Sancho’s Letters,” 145–66.
34. See Ellis, Politics of Sensibility, 62. This gesture has often been painted as particularly opportunistic (see below), although Sterne was likely revising with readability and audience in mind. Sterne felt these letters important enough for inclusion in the letter book, which was almost certainly based on the significance of the subject matter, with an eye to publication. The letter Sterne wrote to Sancho is important to consider in a reception context for the purposes of gauging its influence; in the eighteenth century the published correspondence of a man of letters was read alongside his other work; in this case, Sterne’s letters ran to many editions. Sancho, too, undoubtedly influenced by Sterne, was a prolific man of letters, and his correspondence made its way into print; in the case of the correspondence with Sterne, both sides were included. Thus Sterne’s letter, published in 1775 in Sancho’s volume as well as the new collection of letters compiled by his daughter Lydia, carried its own weight as an abolitionist text. With its feel of active history and mix of celebrity, Sancho’s letter and Sterne’s response represent an enticing combination to literary critics, an exchange addressing a political issue between contemporaries, both of whom had forged distinct and complex identities. Sterne, a self-confessed appropriator of texts (one recalls the passage on plagiarism in Tristram Shandy [TS, 5.1.408] copied from Burton’s Anatomy), has been suspected of opportunism in this exchange; did he use Sancho’s letter as inspiration for his two antislavery passages in his fictions (and slyly misrepresent this to Sancho)? While Sancho merely had been considered imitative of Sterne (and his style indeed may owe something to him), more recently critics like Ellis have argued for Sancho as Sterne’s source for the captive passage (70–71ff). Carey sees that “an emerging consensus now suggests that Sancho’s intervention was both an original and a radical gesture that strongly influenced Sterne” (57). Short of the discovery of additional documentation, it may be impossible to determine whether Sterne was spurred by Sancho to include the mention of slavery in one, or perhaps two, or his fictions, or whether he was in truth working on these antislavery statements when he received Sancho’s letter.
35. Arthur H. Cash, Laurence Sterne: The Later Years (1986; London: Routledge, 1992), 254.
36. Carol Watts, The Cultural Work of Empire: The Seven Years’ War and the Imagining of the Shandean State (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 176; hereafter cited in the text.
37. Sancho’s letters had an impact of their own, being reprinted four times in England. Ellis notes that Sancho’s book was “read by many for its testimony to the writer’s extraordinary biography” (59). Carey argues that the book “was constructed and deployed, both by Sancho himself and his editor, in the form of an epistolary novel of sentiment illustrating the immorality of slavery” (“‘The Hellish Means of Killing and Kidnapping’: Ignatius Sancho and the Campaign against the ‘Abominable Traffic for Slaves,’” from Discourses of Slavery and Abolition: Britain and its Colonies, 1760–1838, ed. Brycchan Carey, Markman Ellis, and Sara Salih [Basingstoke, Hampshire, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004], 82).
38. A study of Sterne’s popular influence on the issue likely would be at least the length of a volume. Its reach is suggested by Sancho’s comment, “You, who are universally read, and as universally admired” (73) as well as the English abolitionist Thomas Clarkson’s remark that “in his account of the Negro girl . . . [Sterne] took decidedly the part of the oppressed Africans. . . . [and] procured a certain portion of feeling in their favour” (cited in Ellis, Politics of Sensibility, 69.)
39. These data were aggregated through the combined catalogs of the British Library and Yale University searched during November 2008 and are intended to provide an approximate rather than a comprehensive bibliography of American editions. See also Lodwick Hartley, “American Editions of Laurence Sterne to 1800: A Checklist,” from The Winged Skull: Papers from the Laurence Sterne Bicentenary Conference, ed. Arthur H. Cash and John M. Stedmond (Kent, OH: Kent State University Press, 1971), 311–12.
40. These examples were located through the Early American Imprints (I and II) database; it is very likely additional titles including the apostrophe were published in this period.
41. The Early American Newspapers Series 1 database was formed around Clarence Brigham’s authoritative bibliography, History and Bibliography of American Newspapers, 1690–1820, 2 vols. (Worchester, MA: American Antiquarian Society, 1947), and additional bibliographies. It includes more than one thousand newspapers published from 1690 to 1922. While it clearly is not a comprehensive record of American newspapers published within the chronological scope of this study, it provides a very useful sampling. It should be noted that numerous references to other antislavery passages from Sterne’s work, such as the tale of the African servant, were apparent in this period, as well. The searches in this study were conducted in November 2008 and confirmed in March 2009.
42. Jeffrey L. Pasley, “The Tyranny of Printers”: Newspaper Politics in the Early American Republic (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2001), 10; hereafter cited in the text.
43. Clarence Brigham, Journals and Journeymen: A Contribution to the History of Early American Newspapers (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1950), 3–11.
44. “Liberty and Slavery,” National Aegis, 23 October 1805.
45. “Liberty and Slavery,” Litchfield Republican, 13 March 1822.
46. “Liberty and Slavery,” Olio, 19 May 1803.
47. “Liberty and Slavery,” Washington Republican, 16 September 1809.
48. Other appearances of the apostrophe in full, with and without the starling and captive episodes, include “The Starling,” Vermont Gazette, 2 May 1791; “From Sterne,” National Intelligencer (Washington, D.C.), 3 December 1800; “Liberty and Slavery,” Olio (Georgetown, Washington D.C.), 19 May 1803; “The Starling,” Hive (Northhampton, Massachusetts), 17 January 1804; “Liberty and Slavery,” National Aegis, 23 October 1805; “Liberty and Slavery,” Newburyport Herald, 29 October 1805; “Liberty and Slavery,” National Aegis, 28 September 1808; “Miscellany: The Captive; From Sterne,” Republican Messenger (Sherburne, New York), 4 December 1810; and “Liberty,” Providence Patriot, 20 October 1827.
49. “Slavery,” Political Calendar, 31 December 1804; Salem Register, 31 December 1804; and Bee, 8 January 1805.
50. “Disguise Thyself as Thou Will [sic], Still Slavery Thou Art a Bitter Draught,” Connecticut Mirror, 22 May 1830, and “Disguise Thyself as Thou Will [sic], Still Slavery Thou Art a Bitter Draught,” New Bedford Mercury, 28 May 1830. Both cite the Kinderhook Herald as their source, further evidence of the limited scope of the Early American Newspapers Series 1 database.
51. “Melioration of Slavery,” New-Hampshire Gazette, 14 January 1812.
52. Baltimore Patriot, 19 November 1821.
53. Ibid.
54. “For the Observer,” Concord Observer, 1 March 1819.
55. “The Traveller,” Village Record, 24 June 1818.
56. “Missouri Question,” City of Washington Gazette, 28 April 1820.
57. “Republican Celebration—at Dudley,” National Aegis, 12 July 1820.
58. Edward Rushton, “Expostulatory Letter to George Washington . . . on his continuing to be a Proprietor of slaves,” Time Piece, and Literary Companion, 26 May 1797, repr. pamphlet, Liverpool 1797; Farmers Repository, 18 August 1819; and Cherry Valley Gazette, 26 November 1818.
59. “Slavery,” Connecticut Mirror, 16 August 1819.
60. “Miscellany,” Providence Gazette, 31 July 1820.
61. “Slavery Versus the Constitution,” Poulson’s American Daily Advertiser, 24 January 1820.
62. An example of this diminishment is seen in a letter in the 8 December 1820 American Farmer that uses the phrase in context of “heavy clogs of several inches thick” worn by slaves in the field.
63. “Slavery,” Connecticut Mirror, 17 December 1831.
64. “Miscellany,” Newport Mercury, 2 February 1828.
65. “The Slaves. From Walks and Sketches at the Cape of Good Hope,” Reporter (Brattleboro, VT) 5 May 1804; “Benevolence,” Boston Gazette, 8 December 1794; “White Slavery,” Washington City Weekly Gazette, 21 June 1817; “Disguise Thyself as Their Wife, Still Slavery thou Art a Bitter Draught,” Providence Gazette, 31 January 1820; and “Anecdote,” New-York Journal, 30 June 1774.
66. “Prosperity and Humanity,” Philadelphia Gazette, 19 May 1797, and Mercantile Advertiser (New York), 7 October 1799; both repr. from London Courier, n.d.
67. “The Metabasist.—No. VII,” Concord Herald, 8 February 1792.
68. See Andrew Burstein, Sentimental Democracy: The Evolution of America’s Romantic Self-Image (New York: Hill and Wang, 1999).
69. Stephen Ahern, Affected Sensibilities: Romantic Excess and the Genealogy of the Novel, 1680–1810 (Brooklyn, NY: AMS, 2007), 95.
70. Catherine Kerrison, Claiming the Pen: Women and Intellectual Life in the Early American South (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2006), 176.
71. Winthrop D. Jordan, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550–1812 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1968), 369.