4—
Monuments, Fathers, Slaves:
Configurations of an Ironic History

This is called the "land of the free, and home of the brave"; it is called the "Asylum of the oppressed"; and some have been foolish enough to call it the "Cradle of Liberty." If it is the cradle of liberty," they have rocked the child to death.
—William Wells Brown, lecture delivered before the Female Anti-Slavery Society of Salem at Lyceum Hall, November 14, 1847

The Search for National Literature

Literary nationalists looked across the expanse of the antebellum landscape in hopes of sighting signs of a monumental author who would place American letters on a map of literature still imprinted with the claims of France and England. Herman Melville, taking up the nativist banner of Young America, saw a race of cultural Titans in America's future. "Believe me, my friends, that Shakespeares are this day being born on the banks of the Ohio," he wrote in his review of Hawthorne that simultaneously served as a reflection on the state of American letters. More recently, Lauren Berlant has suggested the interconnections between the desire to forge a homogeneous national space and citizens' impulses to produce art. " 'The American Renaissance,' " explains Berlant, "emerged under widespread pressure to develop a set of symbolic national references whose possession would signify and realize the new political and social order."^[1] Art and politics should be bound in a sympathetic union in which democratic literature would keep pace with democratic institutions. Literature would reach its most sublime moments insofar as it was able to provide a national primer. Americans searching for their nation did not look to the past, but sought literature as a guide to a future promised land, an outline of a New World civilization. Shakespeares, emerging on a frontier horizon already open to settlement, would one day mature as specimens of national genius.

Separating their nation from the Old World, both geographically and politically, American reviewers, editors, and novelists conceived of the nation as a radical break from the previous accumulation of history. In the same breath that nationalists prophesied a Manifest Destiny, they forecast aesthetic originality as the dominant strain of national greatness. American civilization would be independent of Europe, just as its land mass was separate and its government was distinguished from all others by its democracy; it would belong to the future and not the past. John Louis O'Sullivan, the editorialist who coined the phrase "Manifest Destiny," declared cultural independence for the sons of the Revolution: "Our national birth was the beginning of a new history, the formation and progress of an untried political system, which separates us from the past and connects us with the future only.... we may confidently assume, that our country is destined to be the great nation of futurity."^[2]

Melville prophesied the shape and scope of original American literature by turning to the future of the West, by turning to Manifest Destiny. Casting aside the urge to imitate European successes, the American writer would harness the bold power of a spectacular landscape, making his expression match a nation ever expanding its dominions. The "broad prairies are in his soul," wrote Melville of the American writer.^[3] Literary nationalists evoked a literature undoubtedly "American" in spirit and origin, owing allegiance to no foreign model; it would be self-devised, arisen out of a Platonic conception of itself as American. Once imbued with an ineffable Americanness, national literature would act as a democratic medium for the inscription of the narrative defining a homogeneous people, collectively affirming with a single voice cherished traditions of freedom and equality.

Yet compared with the Jacksonian claims of an expanding democracy, burgeoning industrial development, and accumulating territorial possessions, the progress of American letters seemed sorely lagging. The sympathetic union between art and politics had not been realized. Assessing the intellectual climate at midcentury, Theodore Parker confessed his country's literary output was inferior to European productions. Parker identified a national literature by its distinctively embarrassing attributes; surveying the "permanent and instantial literature of America," he pronounced in 1849, the "individuality of the nation is not there, except in the cheap, gaudy

binding of the work. The nationality of America is stamped on the lids, and vulgarly blazoned on the back." American books, laboring under what Melville called "literary flunkeyism," could never imprint individuality or any other national lesson. Armed with the legacies of Washington and Jefferson, democracy seemed unstoppable until it met up with "American Goldsmiths" and "American Miltons"—in Melville's disdainful comparison—whose aesthetic principles carried expression more appropriately suited to stuffy English society. Parker dejectedly characterized the American scene: "Our muse does not come down from an American Parnassus, with a new heaven in her eye.... [Instead] she has a little dwelling in the flat and close pent town, hard by the public street."^[4] Impoverished in an era of unprecedented economic growth and political confidence, American literature partook of nothing sublime or monumental. Even so, within the cultural desert of this adolescent nation, Parker glimpsed a spot of originality. Unfortunately, these expressions of originality hardly enhanced America's cultural or political position among the nations of the world. And besides, he doubted whether this American-bred writing should even be considered literature:

Yet, there is one portion of our permanent literature, if literature it may be called, which is wholly independent and original. The lives of the early martyrs and confessors are purely Christian, so are the legends of saints and other pious men; there was no thing like this in the Hebrew of heathen literature, cause and occasion were alike wanting for it. So we have one series of literary productions that could be written by none but Americans, and only here; I mean the lives of the Fugitive Slaves. But as these are not the work of men of superior culture they hardly help to pay the scholar's debt. Yet all the original romance of Americans is in them, not in the white man's novel.^[5]

Parker's observation is undercut by his consideration that the slave narrative diminishes America's stature in two ways: the very existence of slave narratives indicts the principle of freedom that makes America a political pinnacle among nations of the world, and slave narratives, "not the work of men of superior culture," hardly represent monuments of national triumph for entry on the world literary stage. Narratives that reveal severely compromised democratic principles fail to provide foundations stable or patriotic enough for a

swaggering cultural monumentalism. Instead of signifying a cornucopia of originality—consistent with a limitless landscape or an unparalleled experiment in democracy—the testimony of fugitive slaves demarcates the hollowness of freedom and the failure of white American writers.

To safeguard the purity of national literature, Parker implies that an insuperable gulf lies between the slave narrative and America, but such a demarcation was false. Slavery pervaded nationalism as an ever-present reminder of political sin, a repressed context always threatening to return and rebel against the foundations of a monumental American culture. No matter how resolutely antebellum intellectuals might claim the Negro race and its contributions to be of an inferior culture, not to be integrated in the proud monuments and memories of history, Northern liberals demanded the inclusion of slavery in any articulation of the American nation. Abolitionists cited founding principles in their denunciations of political immorality. Even slaves inscribed radical selves with appeals to the words and actions of original American patriots, therefore assuring that racial politics entered into dialogue with a legacy ironically authorized by American history itself. In short, as Toni Morrison has insisted, "miscegenation" informs, rather than detracts from, a sacred body of American texts. Interpreters of texts, writes Morrison, have "made wonderful work of some wonderful work," finding in the novels of Melville, Twain, and others a pure aesthetic that transcends race, culminating in a monument of "universal" literature. But an awareness of "miscegenation" argues against any conjured purity of literary tradition, reinvesting American literature with "unspeakable things unspoken," suggesting how words, images, metaphors—in short, meaning—derives from an African American presence that has been repressed through the wonders of interpretation.^[6]

Encouraging critics toward a "re-examination of founding literature in the United States," Morrison's strategy seems a not too distant echo of mid-nineteenth-century works whose commitment to republican theorizing reconceived the founding narratives of a nation. In sharp distinction to both abolitionists and proslavery thinkers who equally employed the irony of juxtaposition to lament the present as a degradation of a coherent past, republicans did not seek to explain how an ordered past indicted the present. Republican thinking did not accept the idea of an ordered or consistent past.

Rather, republicans understood that irony belied the moments of founding, that the meaning of American history was to be found in a legacy riddled with irony and inconsistency. Such thinking evaded the ideological consensus that Sacvan Bercovitch defines as inherent to dissenting jeremiads against the present in American culture. For Bercovitch, the criticism of America upholds the ideals of America; to "denounce American life," he writes, "was to endorse the national dream." Thus, although abolitionist jeremiads scathingly condemned 1850s America, these denunciations nonetheless reaffirmed national foundings by assailing slavery as a political and moral aberration from the principles of 1776. When William Lloyd Garrison prefaced Frederick Douglass's Narrative by reminding his audience that this fugitive slave is exposed to the risk of slavecatchers even "on the soil of the Pilgrim Fathers, among the descendants of revolutionary sires," he more than signals his outrage at current political variance with the past; he also rededicates his listeners to the foundations of the national mission.^[7]

Bercovitch's analysis of how the "ritual of the jeremiad bespeaks an ideological consensus" certainly enables a compelling understanding of the particular resilience of the status quo and authorizing tenets of American culture.^[8] Yet there is a risk that such an understanding can become too compelling, that the perception of ideological consensus can minimize republican acts that challenge the sacred past as well as the immoral present. No doubt Bercovitch is correct in suggesting the grim view of an inescapable American ideology in which citizens and noncitizens evoke national ideals to critique the nation. Ideology, Bercovitch contends, is flexible enough to contain this apparent contradiction. But not all those who decried the abuses of America did so by appealing to a sacred past. For some, that past was never sacred. Republican thinking, unlike the jeremiad, does not become misled in using an unquestionable past to excoriate current conditions; instead, it questions the past that had seemed beyond reproof or censure. William Wells Brown, Herman Melville, and Abraham Lincoln all act as republicans, not by ironically positioning nineteenth-century slavery against the legacy of 1776, but by reading slavery into that legacy. In the same way that Machiavelli in the Discourses writes a republican history by not shrinking from the origins of states stained with bloodshed and deceit, Brown's autobiographies, Melville's tale "The Bell-Tower," and Lincoln's most

famous speeches all acknowledged the impurity and imperfection of American origins. Each reexamines the political traces of race within the foundations of America and discovers a set of national origins irresolvably disfigured by freedom coupled with slavery, by civic virtue cloaking political sin, and by a conception of liberty shot through with rapacity. Their critical approach does not simply bemoan the degeneration of the virtue of the past into the vice of the present; instead, the republican criticism of Brown, Melville, and Lincoln configures America's origins within a radical irony by juxtaposing founding history, not against the corrupt present, but against itself. These American republicans decry national origins that are also the nation's own moral aberration, a history at variance with its own sanctified authority.

The Incongruity of Race in William Wells Brown's History

Before pursuing these thinkers' ironic construction of the grand national past, it is first necessary to observe the racial dimensions, often repressed, of America's monumentalism. So imposing was the political and aesthetic unity of the monumental that the disjunctive element of race became a minor detail, in the same way that artistic representations of diminutive figures of Native Americans at the base of Niagara contribute to the overall splendor of the natural and national scene. This monumental vision enabled one orator to liken Washington's home at Mount Vernon to "the sublime cataract of Niagara," relying on the scale and purity of the natural landscape to uplift the domestic to the level of a national shrine while outstripping the baser associations of commerce and compulsion that were the mainstays of what was euphemistically called the "domestic institution." The monuments and icons of American culture represented a history untarnished by the tyranny, oppression, and serfdom that marred Europe's past. Thus, in the plantation romance Moss-Side (1857), the sons and daughters of the South make a pilgrimage to Niagara Falls to find innocence, if not absolution: "The spray dashed up to us, every now and then; and to our brows it was the baptism of Holy Mother Nature, purifying us for devotion in this, her most wondrous of cathedrals, from which volumes of incense arise unceasingly to heaven." Not even the abolitionist perspective could

interject race into the monumental as an enduring disruption. The 1841 poem "The Fugitive Slave's Apostrophe to Niagara," though contemptuous of the roseate atmosphere of this Southern view of the falls, nonetheless shares the liberal optimism that monumental culture can forever sanctify the political innocence of America. The incongruities of American slavery dissolve before the grand harmony of transcendent nature, and the narrator finds in the "holy drops" of the cataract "the pure baptism of the chainless free."^[9] Despite the disparity between proslavery romance and abolitionist lyric, these texts each adhere to a larger structure that requires affirmations of American exceptionalism and progress. National narrative, as relentless as the torrent of Niagara, permits no deviations of political contradiction or considerations of race that would impede its promised unfolding.

Could a different vantage point on Niagara, a different position in monumental culture, reposition the national horizon so that what once seemed a local discrepancy would metamorphose into a pervasive contradiction that could not be overlooked? When ex-slave Austin Steward stopped at the falls, he experienced, like Jefferson awed by the Natural Bridge, like vacationing Southerners, an inspirational contact with the terriblità of the sublime. Listening to "the ceaseless thundering of the cataract," Steward muses in Twenty-Two Years a Slave (1856), "how tame appear the works of art, and how insignificant the bearing of proud, puny man, compared with the awful grandeur of that natural curiosity." Although the natural power that dwarfs humans paradoxically elevates Steward to a conventional meditation on existence, his narrative reimplants itself in the social world to structure an accusation. Unlike Melville, who made the cataract a sign of literary talent, and unlike other citizens, who glimpsed in Niagara's mist the sublimity of American institutions and history, the noncitizen's thoughts contain no ether of national pride. Steward does not find himself impelled to a transcendental appreciation of republican institutions; instead, he returns to consider humanity in an even more debased manifestation:

There [at Niagara Falls] you will find the idle, swaggering slaveholder blustering about in lordly style; boasting of his wealth; betting and gambling; ready to fight, if his slightest wish is not granted, and lavishing his cash on all who have the least claim upon him. Ah, well can he afford to be liberal,—well can he afford to spend thousands

yearly at our Northern watering places; he has plenty of human chattels at home toiling year after year for his benefit ... and should his extravagance lighten it [his purse] somewhat, he has only to order his brutal overseer to sell—soul and body—some poor creature; perchance a husband, or a wife, or a child, and forward him the proceeds of the sale.

Once slavery entered the big house of monumentalism, a culture's sublime pretensions revealed themselves vulnerable to contradiction and dissemblance. Thus, Samuel Ringgold Ward, in his Autobiography of a Fugitive Negro (1855), witnessed at the country's border a sight that disputed the supremacy of nature's nation: "the leap of a slave from a boat to the Canadian shore ... is far more sublime than the plunge of the Niagara River."^[10] In contrast with Ward's "sublimest sight" of a transcendent bound that literally surpasses the United States, Steward's slaveholder struts across the American ground of the falls, sullying its greatness, leading the citizen, not to a rhapsodic tribute to Washington or the nation, but to a more archaic history that supposedly had been left in the Old World among dissolute aristocrats. Steward's slaveholder shows embarrassing continuity with a tradition of seigneurial dependence that America believed it had escaped forever in 1776.

Concerned with attacking business rivals and the political imbroglios of a settlement of escaped slaves in Canada, Steward does not elaborate his portrait of an American sublime whose magnificent splendor harbors licentious tyranny. Monumentalism met with a much more extended and severe critique in the lectures, memoirs, and fictions of William Wells Brown. The sublime, for Brown, could never transcend slavery. Even though the virgin character of the landscape seemingly invested national history with a similar innocence, Brown saw that both the land and the patriarchal mythos suffered the corruptions of race slavery. Drawing upon that common image of the sublime, Brown asked in an 1848 verse entitled "Jefferson's Daughter":

Can the tide of Niagara wipe out the stain?
No! Jefferson's child has been bartered for gold.

In the same way that Emerson in "The American Scholar" pursues "the sublime presence of the highest spiritual cause lurking" in the "one design [that] unites and animates the farthest pinnacle and the

lowest trench," so, too, Brown conjoins the lofty cataract with a mundane newspaper notice informing that Thomas Jefferson's slave daughter fetched a thousand dollars at a New Orleans auction.^[11] Whereas Emerson uncovers an underlying principle of unity, Brown's conjunction only emphasizes the disjunction within American monumentalism. The "tide of Niagara," though it inspired sublime paintings from the Hudson River School, was ineffectual in returning America to innocence.

Brown's insistence that the monumental cannot wipe out discordant stains has profound effects for historical imaginings of America. His refocusing of the icons of national transcendence skews perspectives so that the disparate details that prefigure transcendence stand out, defiant of aesthetic incorporation or political assimilation. In this recalibrated vision that looks at rumors of the sexual and at mundane business transactions—"Jefferson's child"—and is unmoved by myths of the national—"the tide of Niagara"—a different story, one possessing no self-assured coherence or conclusion, one contradictorily rife with "unspeakable things unspoken," emerges. Rejecting the distant national horizon to concentrate on bodies overlooked by such an expansive vista, Brown's narrative dissolves harmonious ideological unity. The docile slave who sits sandwiched between Columbia, Washington's tomb, and Niagara Falls in the engraving America (see Figure 5) may now serve other, unforeseen functions. His own potentially disruptive presence is no longer subjugated to a sublime economy of unity. Within Brown's methodology of looking at the sublime, the slave in this engraving is not merely placed among foundational icons, but is himself a founding figure whose presence throws into question the generative processes of nationalism so aptly symbolized by Columbia as mythic mother and Washington as historical father. As prominent figures restored to the family portrait, "Jefferson's Daughter" and the slave of America instigate a genealogy speaking in tones other than the regularities of filiopietism.

Like Steward, Brown fled North to freedom, and when the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law threatened to return him to bondage, he traveled to England. The irony of the journey was not lost on Brown: the imperial power that had resisted American independence seventy years before now offered a freedom that the United States denied. Both in oratory and writing, Brown argued against slavery

and racial prejudice, not by appealing to religious tenets as many white abolitionists and slave narrators did, but by manipulating the discourses of American politics and history. His slave narrative and memoirs rival Douglass's classic autobiography, recalling how he bribed white schoolboys with candy to teach him to read, thus linking, as did Douglass, literacy and freedom. Finding his name prohibited when his master's nephew, also named William, joined the family, and refusing to accept the surname of the white master who fathered him, Brown writes of his flight to the North: "So I was not only hunting for my liberty, but also hunting for a name." Brown continued to improve his literacy, producing histories of blacks' cultural contributions, and with the publication of Clotel; or, The President's Daughter (1853), he became the first African American novelist. Soon after his escape from slavery, Brown emerged as a powerful and articulate spokesman for black emancipation, suggesting that just as white revolutionaries fought for liberty in 1776, so, too, would black patriots demand theirs. Hesitant to cater to the complacent pacifism of many Northern whites, Brown played upon American founding principles to advocate violent overthrow of the slave power. In St. Domingo: Its Revolutions and its Patriots (1855), he no doubt alternately thrilled and shocked audiences with graphic scenes of Haitian blacks killing so many whites that "the waters [were] dyed with the blood of the slain." He concluded the work by forecasting a similar scene south of the Mason-Dixon line:

Who knows but that a Toussaint ... may some day appear in the Southern States of this Union? That they are there, no one will doubt. That their souls are thirsting for liberty, all will admit. The spirit that caused the blacks to take up arms, and to shed their blood in the American revolutionary war, is still amongst the slaves of the south; and, if we are not mistaken, the day is not far distant when the revolution of St. Domingo will be reenacted in South Carolina and Louisiana.^[12]

While these not so subtle whisperings of slave rebellion assailed the present by exploiting recurrent white fears of Babo-like patriots armed with cunning and razors, Brown also staged an insurrection against the monumental past. He pledged himself to civic religion, but without paralyzing himself with docile enactments of ideological consensus. He understood the lesson also inscribed in Melville's

Israel Potter , that a citizen had to interrogate actively America's monumental legacy if civic ideals of participation and independence were to be preserved. Yet, unlike Israel, who took up arms in the name of American independence and had a memory of his actions on a battlefield sanctified by the Bunker Hill Monument, Brown had no legacy of the founding fathers within his constitution. The fact that his father "was a white man, a relative of my master, and connected with some of the first families of Kentucky," circulates only as rumor, as a spurious form of history.^[13] Genealogy, for the slave, conferred little more than an illegitimate legacy. Denied his birthright of history, Brown nevertheless authorized himself as a historical subject able to comment upon the history of the nation that denied him history from the outset.

Brown's autobiographical prefaces to Clotel and The Black Man: His Antecedents, His Genius, and His Achievements (1863) accord him a personal history, authorizing him to construct fiction and history about slavery and the position of blacks in the United States. Although nineteenth-century literary conventions demanded narratives adhere to the truth, a concern that led to doubts about the veracity and authenticity of slave narratives, Brown's autobiographical sketches serve a greater function than merely answering a readership's demands for accuracy. In constructing his own past, Brown figures national history as a construction as well, perceiving how shibboleths of monumentalism validate racial injustice. Details vary in Brown's memoirs of slavery and his escape to freedom; for instance, he records three different birthrates and gives varying accounts of his family genealogy, one claiming his mother was Daniel Boone's daughter.^[14] The various narratives highlight different scenes from Brown's life in slavery and afterward. The Narrative of William W. Brown records the author's quest for freedom and a name; the autobiographical preface to Clotel shifts the drama to focus on a fugitive slave bribing children to teach him how to read; the memoir of the author introducing The Black Man documents the slave's ingenuity to survive and his greater ingenuity to escape. These diverse autobiographical accounts do not so much constitute a complete life, inviolable in the authority of its own experiences, as they subtly deconstitute history, implying its mutable and selective aspects.

Having formulated an autobiographical narrative from privileged instances of memory, Brown intimates that a similar logic of con-

struction permeates narratives of American history. The Black Man devotes a chapter to Crispus Attucks, "the first martyr to American liberty," who ignited a crowd and emboldened resistance to British soldiers in a riot memorialized as the Boston Massacre. This episode, remembering a different national past, concludes by censuring the present, whose faculty of memory is impaired by an ethic of historical construction that resists incorporation of nonwhite elements:

No monument has yet been erected to him. An effort was made in the legislature of Massachusetts a few years since, but without success. Five generations of accumulated prejudice against the negro had excluded from the American mind all inclination to do justice to one of her bravest sons. When negro slavery shall be abolished in our land, then we may hope to see a monument raised to commemorate the heroism of Crispus Attucks.^[15]

Brown practices a strategy that pits monumental history against itself, disrupting the narratives it tells. That monumental history touches up or omits segments of the past Brown was not the first to discover. Nor is his perception that such alterations follow a color-blind logic particularly revolutionary. Rather, the comments of this fugitive slave are critically republican, articulating a counternarrative to historical monumentalism from within. Even as he issues what may seem a typical jeremiad that rails against contemporary antebellum society, Brown's criticism also evades the trap of ideological consensus: his comments push beyond denunciation of the present to evaluate the underpinnings of national history.

A sly addition from the mouth of a fugitive slave can dispel the sublime sanctity of tradition. While Brown complains of Crispus Attucks's omission from monumental history, he elsewhere refills the American heroic tradition with instructive touches of irony:

Some years since, while standing under the shade of the monument erected to the memory of the brave Americans who fell at the storming of Fort Griswold, Connecticut, I felt a degree of pride as I beheld the names of two Africans who had fallen in the fight, yet I was grieved but not surprised to find their names colonized off, and a line drawn between them and the whites. This was in keeping with American historical injustice to its colored heroes.^[16]

Brown repeats his criticism of a legacy that denigrates blacks either by exclusion, as in the case of Crispus Attucks, or here, by

grudging inclusion. Still more significantly, this passage unearths the ideological foundations of America's projects to fabricate a monumental history. Brown's use of the word "colonized" reveals how a consideration of race wrests America's monumental history from its nativist innocence and situates it within another, unacknowledged and destabilizing past. Two different connotations reside within "colonized," echoing the oppositions that constitute the monument as well as monumental history. On the one hand, within the context of Revolutionary remembrance, "colonized" elicits the colonies' struggle for independence. On the other hand, in the antebellum period, to "colonize" meant not simply to settle a new land in quest of greater freedom, but to separate, and was applied to the "Negro question" when discussing plans to transport emancipated blacks to Africa.^[17] Brown mocks the staggering mass of the monument, pointing to subtle fractures that threaten the coherent narrative it encodes. In Brown's representation, the monument's double meanings—its promise of inclusive freedom and its practice of exclusive injustice—bear a mutinous relation to the narrative it presents. Foundational origins, in the hands of the fugitive slave, suffer the insurrection of rhetorical civil war.

Just as Brown's search for freedom caused him to flee for England, so, too, his search for a foundational history that would be not blindly monumental, but critical, sent him abroad. In London, Brown visited Nelson's column, which represents a heroic black man at the admiral's side, and reflects: "How different, thought I, was the position assigned to the colored man on similar monuments in the United States." That a comparison to English public monuments prompted his analysis was especially damaging to America's intentional efforts to remember a national history unconnected and superior to the traditions of the Old World. The irony inadvertently inscribed within the Fort Griswold monument discredits the historical narrative and reinforces the provincial state of national culture that Theodore Parker and Young America sought to amend. Placed in the context of a European past, American historical consciousness remains a colonial production as well as a "colonized" narrative. In fact, for Brown, a consideration of the narratives encoded on ancient Roman monuments further illustrates the irony of American historical construction: "I once stood upon the walls of an English city, built by enslaved Britons when Julius Caesar was their master. The image of

the ancestors of President Lincoln and Montgomery Blair, as represented in Britain, was carved upon monuments of Rome, where they may still be seen in their chains. Ancestry is something the white American should not speak of, unless with his lips to the dust." Brown prefaces these conclusions with an ironic apology: "I am sorry that Mr. Lincoln came from such a low origin.^[18] Such conclusions effectively question nationalist exceptionalism, which basked in declarations of America as the stage of a new historical era, a novus ordo seclorum . The history of the fugitive slave here denies that any rupture has ever occurred, and within the restored continuity Brown uncovers a foundational history of an older republic, Rome. His archaeological endeavor overturns the myopic American construction of history by resituating national origins within a larger historical context that reveals the American citizen to be descended from slaves.

Brown thus challenges not the past that America remembers, but the ways in which it remembers that past. Like Nietzsche, he sees that forgetfulness inevitably accompanies the monument's admonition to remember. He resists this amnesiac tendency, not by recovering lost episodes of the Revolutionary past, but by supplying his own autobiographical history as a postscript to national history. Near the close of his 1848 autobiography, he reflects: "While the people of the United States boast of their freedom, they at the same time keep three millions of their own citizens in chains; and while I am seated here in sight of Bunker Hill Monument, writing this narrative, I am a slave, and no law, not even in Massachusetts, can protect me from the slave-holder."^[19] Here, The Narrative of William W. Brown rebels against the narrative of American history. The series of clauses following the statement "I am seated here in sight of Bunker Hill Monument" imply syntactically the fugitive slave's attitude toward monumental history: each clause qualifies the original statement, throwing the reader back to the contradiction that structures not simply the sentence, but the fugitive slave's tenuous hold upon freedom. At first glance, "writing this narrative" further defines the position of the "I" relative to that icon of freedom, the Bunker Hill Monument; yet his act of "writing this narrative" is also an act of historical remembering sharply opposed to the mode of history embodied by the monument. Though he can see Bunker Hill, clauses and reservations keep Brown colonized off from the securities that

the memorial symbolically promises. Refusing simply to deplore his segregation from monumental history, Brown makes his segregation part of the American narrative; he divisively integrates his autobiography into the legacy encoded by the Bunker Hill Monument, Melville's "Great Biographer" of American history. Inscribing his separation into the architecture of the past, Brown makes inequality and ironic contradiction part of America's monumental history. National narratives rise up triumphantly, only to be discredited by an unmasking of the chain of inconsistencies and exclusionary clauses feebly supporting the structure.

Reverberations of Racial Incongruity

Although Brown critically evaluated how racial politics fractured monumentalism's configuration of history, not all post-Revolutionary sons were perceptive—or ideologically motivated—enough to note the fissures in the past. While Brown juxtaposed American foundations with his own slave history and artifacts from classical antiquity, George Lippard published a lengthy, patriotic volume, The Legends of the American Revolution, 1776; or, Washington and His Generals (1847). As Brown did repeatedly throughout his career, Lippard briefly inscribed a black figure into the Revolutionary past. He tells the story of Black Sampson, who comes upon "that hideous object among the embers," the burned body of his master, and swears vengeance against the British regimentals who committed the murder. Further incensed by the rape of his young mistress, Sampson takes up his scythe, calls his faithful dog, and wreaks havoc among the British lines at Brandywine: "The British soldiers saw him come—his broad black chest gleaming in the sun—his strange weapon glittering overhead—his white dog yelling by his side, and as they looked they felt their hearts grow cold, and turned from his path with fear."^[20]

Lippard understood that the inclusion of a black figure into the sacred history of the Revolution might have appeared inappropriate and shocking to his audience. He advises the reader: "Start not when I tell you, that this hero was—a Negro!" Although Black Sampson fights for the memory of white patriarchy and the honor of white womanhood, the narrator fears the miscegenation of a slave within

a tradition of freedom might blemish the patriotic legacy and call attention to the political contradictions of the present. Nor does the invocation of racist physiology making Black Sampson a "white Negro" descended from African kings allay these fears of historical anarchy: "A Negro, without the peculiar conformation which marks whole tribes of his race. Neither thick lips, flat nose, receding chin or forehead are his." A direct and lengthy address from the author dispelling any unintentional lingerings of subversive connotations is needed:

Do not mistake me. I am no factionist, vowed to the madness of treason, under the sounding name of—Humanity. I have no sympathy—no scorn—nothing but pity for those miserable deluded men, who in order to free the African race, would lay unholy hands upon the American Union.

That American Union is a holy thing to me. It was baptized some seventy years ago, in a river of sacred blood. No one can count the tears, the prayers, the lives that have sanctified this American Union, making it an eternal bond of brotherhood for innumerable millions, an altar forever sacred to the Rights of Man. For seventy years and more, the Smile of God has beamed upon it. The man that for any pretence, would lay a finger upon one of its pillars, not only blasphemes the memory of the dead, but invokes upon his name the Curse of all ages yet to come....

So the American Union may be the object of honest differences of opinion; it may be liable to misinterpretation, or be darkened by the smoke of conflicting creeds; yes it may shelter black slavery in the South, and white slavery in the north. Would you therefore destroy it?^[21]

This authorial intrusion seeks to guard against a racial fracturing of America's monumental narrative by colonizing off with a series of apologies and explanations any trace of blackness within the Revolutionary legacy. Sensing that his introduction of Black Sampson into the "sacred" and "sanctified" Union may inadvertently perpetrate a subversive irony, Lippard fortifies his narration by appealing to the Union as a transcendental entity. Convinced that race slavery is unjust, his narrator nevertheless refuses to urge its abolition and jeopardize the "baptized" body politic. The memory of the fathers in the legend of Black Sampson narrates a foundational structure stable enough to contain sectional crisis. Yet this same span of temporal continuity between 1776 and the 1850s degenerates into an

unbridgeable gap of temporal alienation. What Lippard omits is that the "seventy years and more" that linked a people to its legacy also acted to divide a people from its legacy.

Although Lippard convinced himself this address to the reader had warded off the specter of "feverish philanthropy," making it safe to proceed with the narrative of Black Sampson, he nevertheless calls attention to the fractures he has covered with rhetoric and patriotic zeal. In the background of his denunciation against those who would repeat "the leprosy of Arnold's Treason," is the voice of more militant proponents of abolition who held the patriotic legacy as a mere shibboleth. In 1844, William Lloyd Garrison pronounced a sentiment that must have sounded as blasphemy in Lippard's ears:

If the American Union cannot be maintained, except by immolating human freedom upon the altar of tyranny, then let the American Union be consumed by a living thunderbolt, and no tear be shed over its ashes. If the Republic must be blotted out from the roll of nations, by proclaiming liberty to the captives, then let the Republic sink beneath the waves of oblivion, and a shout of joy, louder than the voice of many waters, fill the universe at its extinction.

In contrast to Lippard, Garrison could not proceed with the narrative of American Union. Whereas God told Lippard to honor the creation of thy fathers at all costs and contradictions, Garrison received the word to slay the unfaithful. The range between these two passages alarmingly illustrates how God, like William Wells Brown, could also speak with an irony inimical to historical continuity. While some Americans like Lippard ritually reaffirmed the Puritan promise of a blessed community, others, perhaps not all as extreme as Garrison in his call for heavenly retribution, looked at the present and doubted the future the American legacy had promised. Or, as Lincoln looked at America in 1861, he saw an "almost chosen people."^[22]

The Parenthetical Configuration of History

The divine narrative of America, born to conquer a New Canaan, now ironically promised to unravel. One response was to make the antebellum present seem an exception, a political and moral aberration. In terms of rhetoric, we can understand this aberration within

the national narrative by the trope of parenthesis.^[23] Finding its promises tainted by its sinful ways, and unwilling to deem its whole history corrupt, American narrative placed the contaminated elements in the quarantine of parenthesis, thereby insulating the purity of the founding origins and divine future. In The Estrangement of the Past , Anthony Kemp describes parenthesis as a temporal consciousness in which the immediate past is placed as an abyss between the distant past and the present. Examining Protestant foundations, Kemp shows how Luther, and later, Puritan historian John Foxe, cordoned off the innovations of the Catholic Church in order to overleap its corruptions and return to the purity of the primitive Church. Characteristics of this historical consciousness emigrated to America in the Puritan conviction that the preceding centuries of European history formed a moral aberration in the eschatological journey from Canaan to New Canaan that deservedly fell into the brackets of parenthesis. In the Puritan settlement, growing evidence that interpretation of the social world might not readily reveal a divine plan reflected political schisms uninterpretable within the system of divine typology. In John Winthrop's words, "God no longer gives the interpretation." Kemp argues that the increasing difficulty of applying a secure typology to the interpretation of the world produced for the Puritans a sense of temporal estrangement. Rather than leading toward a promised land, human history, removed from the irrevocable pastness of God's acts, initiated a dynamic of supercession as generation replaced generation with no sense of spiritual advancement.^[24] Although the seventeenth-century theocracy of Boston had passed, 1850s America still lingered in the shadow of Puritan culture, as studies from Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter to Bercovitch's American Jeremiad show, and its national narratives retained spiritual overtones promising a pure, originary tradition. The structure of parenthesis thus also describes the political logic of American historical narrative. Skipping over the aristocratic dissolution of the recent European past, a community could unite with the republican foundation of Rome. Washington became the American Cincinattus, refusing, like the fabled Roman general, the temptation of dictatorship, wishing only to return his plow. Representations of Washington draped in a toga allowed America to place Europe within parenthesis and remember itself as the inheritor of a classical

republican tradition. America styled itself as the novus ordo seclorum , the new Rome described by Virgil.

1776 became the pure, originary past, allowing America to remain in continual temporal and ideological harmony with its own genesis. Throughout much of the antebellum period, this continuum seemed visible and intact. During his presidency, James Monroe used to appear on ceremonial occasions dressed in his Revolutionary War uniform, even though the heroic days of 1776 had been past for nearly a half century.^[25] So close was that unassailable past, a citizen could count with certainty back to the moment of founding, as Lincoln did at Gettysburg: "Fourscore and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty." Yet in the context of increasing talk of disunion, unity with the past of 1776 seemed illusory; 1776 ceased to form part of the recent past, retreating into an era as mythically pure and remote as the foundations of Rome or the genesis of the primitive Church. The past preserved itself as sacrosanct, in contrast to the splintering, impure present. It was not 1776 that belonged in parenthesis; on the contrary, parenthesis encircled the present as though it was a historical epoch as corrupt as the profligate era of the Catholic Church or as politically profane as the European centuries of aristocratic privilege. Parenthesis cordoned off the factional, slaveholding present, ensuring that the contaminated 1850s did not infect either the past or the future of America. "Fourscore and seven years ago" indicated a connection with the past, but it also marked the dimensions of the temporal abyss.

Parenthesis asserts that the origins remain pure because it places the present in an ideological and temporal quarantine. Parenthesis deems the past virtuous and the present politically impure; America supposes itself a political virgin, refusing to see that its origins had spawned an ignoble present. Despite this assumption that the unalloyed past bears no genealogical connection to the present, the fractious antebellum present really does originate in that past; unruly post-Revolutionary sons were not the product of spontaneous generation, but descended from fathers who trafficked in political sin and inconsistency. Parenthesis masks these affiliations by writing a narrative in which past and present splinter into dissimilar historical epochs lacking the genealogical resemblances usually evident

between a generation and its descendants. Post-Revolutionary sons confessed their own political shortcomings; even so, they knew nothing incriminating about their fathers, pillars of virtue and egalitarian faith that they were. Here, parenthesis resonates with a classical connotation of irony, that is, as ignorance purposefully affected. Bred with careful regard for their legacy, social reformers decried the incongruity of a nation at odds with its own foundings.

Few critics, however, evaluated how scorn and outrage over present practices acted as an ideological buffer insulating the founding ideals from censure. The present absorbed all of the abolitionists' contempt; the present became a scapegoat in order to preserve the unsullied reputation of 1776. In this sense, then, criticism of the present merely reinforced the foundations of America; or, as Bercovitch has written, dissent actually acted as consent. Yet Brown, Melville, and Lincoln, as critical republicans, dissent from the foundings, not simply from the present. Their acts of dissent evade the containment of the dissent/consent relation that Bercovitch finds so pervasive. Brown's Clotel as its premise a situation explicitly linked to 1776 in order to reestablish the genealogical affiliations that parenthesis seeks to deny: "Thus closed a negro sale, at which two daughters of Thomas Jefferson, the writer of the Declaration of American Independence and one of the presidents of the great republic, were disposed of to the highest bidder!"^[26] And both Melville and Lincoln not only perceive how proclaiming a disjunction between past and present safeguard the past, they also make their way beyond an ideological dissemblance that centers all dissent on the present, engaging instead in an interrogation of American foundings.

In their return to patriarchal and national origins, fugitive slave, novelist, and statesman question the governing framework of American narrative. Certainly, Brown, Melville, and Lincoln challenge the content of national narrative as they vilify slavery in varying degrees. As Bercovitch argues, however, such opposition is subsumed by a controlling orthodoxy of American liberalism that privileges moments of dissent as confirmations of national reform and progress. The underlying structures authorizing American society have been the same, for those who consent as well as for those who contest social institutions and practices. Though abolition assailed an America that condoned slavery, as a type of responsible, liberal social activism, abolition worked to "confirm the sanctity both of law in

general and the Constitution in particular." Or, in the case of Hester Prynne, the wearer of the scarlet A signifies at once a transgressor of the law and a citizen brought back within the letter of the law. According to Bercovitch, literary production of the American Renaissance operates within this structure of containment and even in its most vehement moments of dissent upholds America.^[27] But Brown, Lincoln, and Melville do more than criticize the slaveholding content of America: they also question the form, the narrative strategies, that the antebellum generation used to construct an affirmative national history.

Melville's "The Bell-Tower" and Incongruous History

While Brown's sketches of American monumentalism critique the present's remembering of the past and not the past itself, Melville's short story "The Bell-Tower" resolutely examines the origins from which monumentalism erected itself. Just as Brown implies that the colonizing off of black patriots on a revolutionary battle monument is inconsistent with the ideals they died for, Melville begins his story within a disjunction between pretensions of monumental grandeur and their frequently-narrated sequel: "In the south of Europe, nigh a once-frescoed capital, now with a dank mould cankering its bloom, central in a plain, stands what, at a distance, seems the black mossed stump of some immeasurable pine, fallen, in forgotten days, with Anak and the Titan."^[28] In addition to its content, depicting decline and ruin, the structure of the sentence parallels the image of the crumbling tower. The sentence falls from "once" to "now," with an empty, poisonous gulf separating the two eras. Lincoln repeatedly adopts this structure in his address before the Young Men's Lyceum of January 27, 1838 to forecast the imminent erosion of America's political foundation. He tells his audience that the foundational principles "are a legacy bequeathed us, by a once hardy, brave, and patriotic, but now lamented and departed race of ancestors."^[29] The echoes of Titanic greatness on the Italian plain that Melville imagines dwindle to a castrated stump, and for Lincoln, a vigorous patriotic presence lapses into absence. In each instance, the parenthesis of the present forms a vacuum of incongruity and intervenes between the "once" and the "now."

This incongruity, however, performs an instructive political function as an admonition to recuperate a vanishing past. Lincoln hoped to rededicate his audience to his ancestor's republican faith; for example, consideration of Washington's greatness could lead to the act of monere , of reminding the present generation not to backslide into civic forgetfulness. Although not designated as a monument, the bell tower of Melville's story similarly returns the narrator from the present state of decay to the resplendent acme of a small Italian republic's history. Imbued with an air of magical realism and anchored by political allusions to Melville's America, the story promises to deliver a satirical allegory reminiscent of Mardi. Just as Mardi's narrator Taji witnesses the severe contradictions of the liberty-loving nation Vivenza that enslaves the tribe of Hamo, "The Bell-Tower" transmits a critique of a republic that authorizes the erection of an overtopping edifice adorned with a mechanical slave named Haman.^[30] But rather than shuttling between past principles and the present monumental project, Melville keeps his attention focused upon the moments of foundings, refusing to sidetrack his interrogation of the past with a denunciation of the present. That is, Melville does not succumb to the dissembling nature of parenthesis; he does not adopt a purposefully affected ignorance about the foundings as a means to conserve the sanctity of their legacy.

First published in August 1855, Melville's story narrates the prideful demise of the architect Bannadonna. Commissioned to construct "the noblest Bell-Tower in Italy," Bannadonna watches the edifice rise, resolving to "surpass all that had gone before" (819, 821). He devises a mechanical figure representing a manacled slave to advance along a track and strike the bell every hour. On the consecration day of the tower, absorbed in some final adjustments to the bell, Bannadonna forgets the time, and at one o'clock, when the slave advances to strike the hour, he smites and kills the artist-creator instead. This homicide echoes an earlier murder in the narrative of the monument. As further proof of his ingenuity, Bannadonna creates a "great state-bell" destined for the top of the tower; the narrator thus designates him a "founder," accenting his dual role as one who establishes the foundation of the republic's tower and as one who melts the metals and casts the bell (820).^[31] Yet at the moment of founding, a murderous taint infects the design: "The unleashed metals bayed like hounds. The workmen shrunk. Through their fright, fatal harm to the bell was

dreaded. Fearless as Shadrach, Bannadonna, rushing through the glow, smote the chief culprit with his ponderous ladle. From the smitten part, a splinter was dashed into the seething mass, and at once was melted in" (821). From this original sin, a host of other offenses against the spirit of republicanism emerge. Not wishing to compromise the glory the great bell will bring to the republic, the magistrates and citizens ignore the homicide. Once the bell is finished, the civil authorities grow anxious, pressing Bannadonna to determine the day when the republic can baptize the tower in a public ceremony. The magistrate tells the architect the city officials are "anxious to be assured of your success. The people, too,—why, they are shouting now. Say the exact hour when you will be ready." (824) The republic shares in the guilt of the founder's crime as well as in the glory of his creation. It forgets the scandal of the past to triumph in the rituals of the present. Caught up in a narrative of denial, the republic ineluctably continues to erase the flaws within its history; it accords the murderer-founder a state funeral, while under the cover of night, it hustles the rebellious mechanical slave out of its dominions and sinks it in the depths of the ocean. The republic, intent upon conserving noble foundations that were never noble, effaces the blemishes in its representation of the past. Indeed it literally re-presents the past, altering its composition and structure, exiling unpleasant memories to the realm of amnesia by repairing the ruined tower and recasting the defective bell.

Melville's story acts against the body politic and records the genealogy of sin that the American populace sought to deny through specious historical constructions. Wishing to overleap Bannadonna's crimes as well as its own complicity, the public casts off uncomfortable memories into the abyss of purposeful amnesia; it declares it knows nothing about any crimes in order to fabricate an unadulterated legacy. Yet the narrator counteracts the community's irony of dissembling and exposes the bad faith of feigned amnesia. While the republic pretends ignorance about the past, the narrative manipulates the incongruity to sketch a repressed connection between the "once" and the "now," illuminating how the republican pomp of the city-state stems from the "cankering" bloom of Bannadonna's tyrannical license. Restored to its problematic integrity, history ruptures, as an incongruity imposed by the narrator reveals his readers" dissemblance, laying bare how they, like the magistrates and citizens

in the story, have placed the sins of their own history in the parenthesis of forgetfulness to deny a temporal continuity that would indict their state.

The community's fraudulent representation of history coincides with Bannadonna's fraud to conceal a defect in the composition of the bell. The fragment from the murderous ladle thrown into the molten mass spawns a hardly noticeable but defective inconsistency in the bell's composition: "Next day a portion of the work was heedfully uncovered. All seemed right. ... At length, like some old Theban king, the whole cooled casting was disinterred. All was fair except in one strange spot. But as he [Bannadonna] suffered no one to attend him in these inspections, he concealed the blemish by some preparation which none knew better to devise" (821). Bannadonna certainly acts in his own self-interest, and at the same time, he performs a civic duty by insulating the community from any memory of the homicide they have condoned. Using "some unknown compound," the architect smooths over his defective founding, forging a monumental history whose key element is forgetfulness (833). Standing on the Florentine plain, the tower promises to acquire symbolic prominence, to serve as an icon of republican openness. This promise, however, is as false as Bannadonna's bell is imperfect. Although the great state bell perched atop the campanile could serve as a monument and recall the past laced with the flaw of the slain artisan, Bannadonna forestalls the act of monere . The republic sees no reminder of breached justice in the bell, but only confirmation of its own affluence. The narrator works against Bannadonna's and the republic's construction and again insists on temporal continuity, even though that continuity jeopardizes ideological cohesion. A legacy of violence resonates within a tradition of republican glory. Although Melville asserts continuity, linking the splintering of the bell with the homicidal splintering of the ladle, the community resolves to place history in an alembic and refine away any impurities. Soon the campanile requires repair, but rather than follow Bannadonna and dissemble the defect, the republic improves upon his methods and refounds the bell as though nothing—not the artisan's murder, the architect's "accidental death," or the mechanical slave's revolt—had taken place: "The remolten metal soon reässumed its place in the tower's repaired superstructure" (833).

We can better understand the significance of "The Bell-Tower" for the American republic if we restore the story's contiguity to the antebellum era and trace its allusive import. The defective bell evokes the memorial icon of public freedom, the Liberty Bell.^[32] Like Bannadonna's creation, the state-house bell in Philadelphia cracked during its founding, was recast, and then, according to tradition, irreparably fractured as it tolled on Washington's birthday, February 22, 1846.^[33] Even though the crack in the bell could suggest on some metaphoric level the distance between the founding father's generation and its descendants, for much of antebellum America the bell served as a relic of a patriotic legacy, clasping together the fathers and sons in a paternal embrace. The same volume containing the story of Black Sampson, Lippard's Legends of the American Revolution , initiates a sacramental status for the Liberty Bell by narrating a story that would be construed as fact by thousands of Americans.^[34] Lippard's most famous legend begins when on July 4, 1776 an old bell ringer tries to make out the inscription on the bell of the Philadelphia State House. His tired eyes fail him, so he calls "Come here, my boy; you are a rich man's child. You can read. Spell me those words, and I'll bless ye, my good child!" Reading the chiseled verse from Leviticus, "Proclaim liberty to all the land and the inhabitants thereof," the boy invokes a democratic spirit that levels the class distinctions between himself and his elder. The bell ringer requests another favor from the youth, asking him to wait in the street and listen for the decision of the congress debating the resolution for independence. As though he were part of the expectant citizen mob described in Bannadonna's republic, the old man waits anxiously, doubting that the boy has remembered his promise: "Moments passed, yet still he came not. The crowds gathered more darkly along the pavement and over the lawn, yet still the boy came not. 'Ah!' groaned the old man, 'he has forgotten me! These old limbs will have to totter down the State House stairs, and climb up again, all on account of that child.' " Like Lincoln in his speech to the Young Men's Lyceum, the bell ringer distrusts the sons, suspecting a weakness in their civil faith that would cause them to become distracted by the present and ignore the obligations to the past. The stakes of this legend are enormous; the communication of liberty would be jeopardized if gaps were to arise between generations. As Lincoln put it in 1838, if America were to

forget the "task of gratitude to our fathers, justice to ourselves, duty to posterity," then the national fabric of founding principles could well unravel.^[35]

Since Lippard was more fortunate than Lincoln and could rely upon the convention of narrative closure to dispel the threat of amnesia, the rich man's son, of course, dutifully awaits the outcome of the congress's deliberations. Hearing the acceptance of the Declaration of Independence, the boy, "swelling his little chest ... raised himself on tip-toe, and shouted a single word—'RING !' " Only a reverential civic memory can realize the verse inscribed upon the Liberty Bell. Later versions of Lippard's tale, which after discovering a blood relation between the boy and the old man culminate in the cry "Ring! Grandpa, ring!" stress the importance of genealogical continuity for antebellum America. The boy's shout disproves Lincoln's admonition "that the scenes of the revolution ... [are] like every thing else, they must fade upon the memory of the world, and grow more and more dim by the lapse of time." As the old man translates the boy's "RING !" into the "terrible poetry in the sound of the State House Bell," his body is rejuvenated with the honest Yankee resilience of independence.^[36] Liberty does not fall into the abyss of forgetfulness, but is rescued by a tenacious link between the bell ringer and the boy, between the fathers and the post-Revolutionary sons. Liberty is renewed, made eternal, forever young as the fathers were in their heroic youth:

Do you see that old man's eye fire? Do you see that arm so suddenly bared to the shoulder, do you see that withered hand, grasping the Iron Tongue of the Bell? The old man is young again; his veins are filled with new life. Backward and forward, with sturdy strokes, he swings the Tongue. The bell speaks out! The crowd in the street hear it, and burst forth in one long shout!^[37]

In contrast, "The Bell-Tower" hardly acquiesces to the tone of republican renewal ensured by the genealogical continuity that Lippard's legend evokes. Although the republic refurbishes the tower and remelts the bell, the renewal lasts only until the first anniversary of the tower's completion, when an earthquake reduces the edifice to an impotent stump. The campanile does not resonate with the lusty sounds of liberty that echo through the Philadelphia State House; instead, Bannadonna's death muffles the peal, emitting only

"a dull, mangled sound—naught ringing in it; scarcely audible, indeed, to the outer circles of the people—that dull sound dropped heavily from the belfry" (827). The orchestrated ritual to inaugurate the bell tower merely renews the cycle of violence begun out of Bannadonna's "esthetic passion" that took the life of the workman (821). It is not the slave who deadens the sound; he faithfully performs his office. The founder, Bannadonna, impedes with his own skull the ringing of the bell he has forged. The monumental history of the fathers slays itself in its own contradictions. Absorbed in concealing the murderous flaw in the bell of liberty, the founder forgets to watch his back, and looks up to see his slave bludgeon him. Intimations of slave insurrection dropped by Brown reappear in Melville's tale; and, yet, the rebellion staged is not simply one of slave against master, but of founder against himself. Melville adopts the logic of the fugitive slave: like Brown's use of ironic contradictions to subvert the battle monument's narrative at Fort Griswold, "The Bell-Tower" discloses the fissures that belie monumental representations of republican foundings. In the hands of the narrator, the trope of parenthesis no longer protects the past. The infectious present is not bracketed off from the past, nor does the decayed state of the narrator's current surroundings lead to idylls of a once glorious founding. Instead, "The Bell-Tower" insists on the continuity of political history even if that historical view uncovers atrocities within sacred origins. The fissures, canker, and ruin that mark the present state of the tower are nothing new; murder, fraud, and contradiction disfigure the very inception of the republic's self-representation. Melville's skeptical reexamination of the past removes national origins from their dignified and unassailable foundation and regrounds the noble republic in foundations continually undercut by ironies of deception and forgery. Such ironic historiography cripples monumental narrative, for a generation cannot inherit a coherent legacy if that legacy was never coherent in its origin.

"A New Birth" of Incongruous History

Within a culture erected upon incongruous foundations, only forgetting can fashion a narrative stable or coherent enough to support the accumulated layers of history stretching from the origins to the

present. The citizens of "The Bell-Tower" contract to remember the past, but—desirous of erecting a monumental body politic—they also contract to forget the past. In the Second Treatise of Government , John Locke acknowledges the necessity of political memory: citizens "begin to look after the history of their founders and search into their original, when they have outlived the memory of it." Lincoln echoes this stance in his speech to the Young Men's Lyceum, registering how America sat befuddled at the historical crossroads of memory and forgetting. Whereas the previous generation once embodied "a living history " in the memories of those patriots who stood as a "forest of giant oaks" and witnessed the triumphs of the Revolution, the post-Revolutionary sons now were finding their historic forebears dead and gone and the exemplary "forest" destroyed by time, "the all-resistless hurricane has swept over them, and left only, here and there, a lonely trunk, despoiled of its verdure, shorn of its foliage; unshading and unshaded, to murmur in a few more gentle breezes, and to combat with its mutilated limbs, a few more ruder storms, then to sink, and be no more."^[38] Memory replaces "living history," but it may be only a paltry substitute. Memory cannot resurrect the fathers; it can only cherish their legacy. Yet as Lincoln looks around antebellum America, he notices mob violence and racial bigotry, indications that memory failed to adhere to the revolutionary legacy. Lincoln hopes to stave off an apocalypse called forth by this amnesia, imploring the current generation to restore its weakening legacy with sober reverence for the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution designed to protect it.

After describing the search for origins, Locke issues a caution deflating any enthusiasm about the search he has just outlined: citizens "would do well not to search too much into the original of governments" or else they might exhume a foundation whose secrets and instabilities would little authorize their current political legitimacy.^[39] But unlike Locke, Lincoln does not include a measure of amnesia in his political faith. Lincoln insists on remembering the foundations of liberty even if uncovered ironies make that liberty appear contradictory and incongruous; he does not defer to a strategy of bad faith in which the citizens of a republic can overlook the flaws in the founding just so they can proceed to erect a bell tower or state that will "surpass all that had gone before." Objecting to the small print of Locke's contract that sanctions amnesia within the

project of memory, Lincoln resembles the narrator of "The Bell-Tower," retelling the history of a republic, including events and rumors the magistrates and citizens would rather sink in the sea with the rebellious slave. Each renounces a parenthetical version of republican memory that would forget the political sins of the past by concentrating on the "dank mould" of the present. While many opposed to slavery decried America's prodigal disregard for its sacred origins, both Lincoln and the narrator of "The Bell-Tower" unflinchingly question the sacredness of the past. Surveying the history of the ruined capital, the narrator does not shrink from representing a founding contaminated by murder, fraud, and slavery, but undertakes a genealogical investigation bearing him back to the origins. And Lincoln, examining the history of a prosperous republic, steadfastly confronts the principles of the founding fathers. Acknowledging that the origins of American republicanism contain sanctified principles, Lincoln nevertheless understands that many of these principles, despite their unassailable status, were, in fact, flawed. Imperfection resides within the tradition of liberty begun in 1776; a genealogy of sinful discontinuity, not political virtue, links the "once" and the "now."

Even as a figure invested in the workings of the American political system, much more so than Brown or Melville, Lincoln maintained a critical ambivalence toward national genealogy that often led him to distrust the patriarchal metaphors governing the crucial debates of his culture. He often phrased his filial dissent cautiously, as if to belie its radical, parricidal import. In a speech at the Cooper Institute in 1860, as he ritualistically invoked "our fathers that framed the Constitution" in the conviction that their wisdom would resolve the crisis over slavery, Lincoln admitted the possibility, if not the necessity, of filial disobedience: "I do not mean to say we are bound to follow implicitly in whatever our fathers did."^[40] Any understanding of Lincoln as a republican or critical genealogist, however, first needs to remember that Lincoln himself would soon occupy a prominent niche in the national genealogy. If Washington was the father of his country, Lincoln became, in the words of one historian, "everybody's grandfather." Not "everybody" assented to this atavism; Frederick Douglass detected a difference that thwarted this legacy of inclusive patriarchy and suggested that African Americans bear a much more attenuated relation to Lincoln: "You are the children of Abraham

Lincoln. We are at best only his step-children, children by adoption, children by force of circumstances and necessity." Douglass emphasizes this lack of a blood connection as well as the gulf between "you" and "we" to signal his own distance from the prevailing mythos of 1876 America that monumentalized Lincoln—Douglass was speaking at the dedication of the Freedmen's Monument—in an uncomplicated tradition as the "great emancipator." His aloofness springs from his memory of Lincoln as "the white man's President"—an epithet that challenges a more universal and unprejudiced designation, preserving the profound contradictions and vacillations that marked Lincoln's course in restoring the Union and destroying slavery.^[41]

The inconsistencies Lincoln noted in the foundings would reappear in his own administration. Just as the fathers' freedom remained tarnished by slavery, the emancipation Lincoln secured was subverted by his support of colonization, hesitation to insist upon political and social equality for ex-slaves, and commitment to the Union above all else. Nowhere does this undercutting appear more deeply than in the document that Lincoln called "the greatest event of the nineteenth century"—the Emancipation Proclamation. The greatest irony surrounded this "greatest event": as a document of freedom, it did not free a single slave. The people Lincoln declared "thence-forward, and forever free" included only those slaves held by rebel states; all others, slaves in regions controlled by the Union army and slaves who had fled across Confederate lines, were legally unaffected by the resolution. As Benjamin Quarles writes, "In the South the only areas in which the proclamation could be publicly celebrated were those to which it did not apply—those under the federal flag."^[42] This inconsistency nevertheless formed a key element of the union Lincoln was waging war to preserve. The edict of January 1, 1863 announced itself as a stratagem to suppress the "rebellion against the United States"; the desire for an undivided national union, not freedom, was the source of the proclamation. This ascendancy of union over freedom—little different than the compromises initiated by the fathers Lincoln found it necessary to revise—again inscribed freedom as contested, always frustrated, within the national narrative.

Amid his own ambiguous decrees, Lincoln articulated some of the most significant commentaries on the originary fractures within the American political tradition. Speaking in Baltimore on April 18, 1864,

Lincoln praised the soldiers passing through the city and observed "that three years ago, the same soldiers could not so much as pass through Baltimore." Lincoln's words connote a structure of parenthesis in which the immediate past of Union military debacles is colonized off from both the present and the distant days of antebellum harmony. Parenthesis would render the war a bad memory, a hiatus better forgotten in a temporal quarantine protecting the purity of the past. Lincoln, however, undercuts this parenthesis by subtly betraying America's complicity with its past: "But we can see the past, though we may not claim to have directed it." Despite the present republic's predilection for affecting innocence about the cultural chaos that once transpired, Lincoln's ironic remark exposes the desire to deny temporal continuity (and thus ideological responsibility). Foreclosing the possibility of a reassuring parenthesis, he discourages a reverential view of an untouchable past and announces his findings even though they unsettle hallowed foundations. His representation of the past discovers a founding like Bannadonna's, inherently fractured in its origins:

The world has never had a good definition of the word liberty, and the American people, just now, are much in want of one. We all declare for liberty; but in using the same word we do not all mean the same thing . With some the word liberty may mean for each man to do as he pleases with himself, and the product of his labor; while with others the same word may mean for some men to do as they please with other men, and the product of other men's labor. Here are two, not only different, but incompatible things, called by the same name—liberty.^[43]

Never, even within its origins, has America been able to wield a seamless definition of liberty. Authorizing the domination of men over men, liberty always has been divided against itself, engendering an inconsistent narrative that nevertheless has lapsed into forgetfulness in order to guarantee a smooth, coherent telos for the nation. In the same way that "The Bell-Tower" erects a history ruptured by the incongruities and dissembling ironies it houses, Lincoln's America rests upon a cornerstone marked with lines of fracture. Though heralded as a sacred new order with a unified ideological foundation, America, as Lincoln reveals, is always politically schizophrenic, always marked by an element of the "incompatible," always in debate about its fundamental, authorizing principles.

Acknowledging the inconsistencies of founding narratives can radically alter the conception of national history. Lincoln opens the Gettysburg Address by remembering the birth of the American republic: "a new nation, conceived in liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal." The origins seem whole, immaculately conceived in a liberty that Lincoln does not mark as inherently fractured or prone to contradiction. Still, Lincoln does not call for a rebirth of this liberty; instead, he resolves that America "shall have a new birth of freedom." Though subtle, the difference between a rebirth and a "new birth" implies that citizens should not strive to replicate the past. Nor is the project to restore and refurbish the past as the citizens of "The Bell-Tower" do, devising a strategy even more effective at concealing the murderous crack in the bell. A "new birth" would not establish itself as pure and uncontaminated or invent ways to forget and recast imperfection as perfection; it would devote itself to its own memory, even though that memory may record division and contradiction. This strain of antifoundational thinking aligns Lincoln with Douglass, who more than a decade earlier had proclaimed that he was "for starting afresh under a new and higher light than our piratical fathers saw."^[44] For each speaker, the past is no longer an infallible standard, but is as tainted and as perfectible as any human creation, whether those humans are patriot forefathers or pirates. It is perhaps in this uneasy commonality, which links the political theorizing of president and ex-slave, that freedom can be imagined outside of tired precepts and faded men.

Without memory, any founding has as little legitimate authority as Bannadonna's design for a mechanical slave, which, upon prescribed command, kills its creator at the precise moment of public affirmation. Without memory, any conception of liberty will accrue as much suspicion as the liberty achieved by Babo in "Benito Cereno." Murder infects Bannadonna's founding as much as a history of bloodshed stains the liberty formulated by Babo aboard the San Dominick . The political message encoded within each story shows that once authority effaces its past, it can only be ironic, subject to the debilitating mistrust of all citizens, even ones as obtuse as Amasa Delano or as blindly patriotic as the populace of "The Bell-Tower." Like the situation in the foundry of the Italian republic or on the deceptive decks of the San Dominick , the "new birth" of liberty at Gettysburg emerged from the violent origins of a Civil War battle-

field that claimed close to fifty thousand killed or wounded. Lincoln articulated this "new birth" at a cemetery, a grisly site of memory, ensuring that the liberty engendered engaged in none of the historical evasions and cover-ups characteristic of the Italian republic or Babo. A "new birth" of liberty could have none of the parenthetical bad faith that would characterize a rebirth of liberty. Melville could not conceive of a "new birth" of liberty; he could see only monstrous rebirths in which the recessive traits of violence became more dominant with each generation. Political hope for a severely tested republicanism did appear in Lincoln's understanding of the solemn moments of Gettysburg. From a memory of cultural conflict and "incompatible" ideologies, he brought forth a sketch of civic faith committed to a narrative of foundations that, ironically, may be inconsistent, incongruous, even bloody. Such a narrative remembers the founder George Washington alongside the founder Bannadonna. and acknowledges the blood of the father in the face of the son, even if the son is a slave, even if that blood stains the parricidal son's hands.