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]