| My dissertation traces the intersecting discourses of slavery and technology, first, in the founding years of the Republic and, then, in their literary configurations in the late-antebellum era. I begin with an analysis of Thomas Jefferson, focusing on his management of a Southern plantation and his corpus of writings. The persistence of Southern slavery and the prevailing forces of industrial capitalism beset Jefferson. My inquiry reveals that, despite his poetic esteem for the virtues of an agrarian lifestyle, as President, Jefferson paved the way for the onrush of free-market capitalism; moreover, at Monticello, he embraced the industrial precept of mechanization and founded several manufactories there. Thus, he begins to investigate a deeply enduring American conflict that eventually helps to provoke civil war: the tension between the society's investment in slavery and its investment in manufactures. In subsequent chapters, I examine the ways this founding contradiction re-emerges during the 1850s, arguing for a largely unexamined yet vital intellectual continuum between Jefferson and certain key antebellum literary figures who, as a means for comprehending their nation's build up to the Civil War, critically engage the philosophy and mythology of Jefferson. For late-antebellum society, the embedded Jeffersonian paradox expresses itself most powerfully in the oppositional ideologies of slave and free labor and in a national hysteria over miscegenation. Through these issues, I examine how Jefferson's legacy haunts the texts of the ex-slaves William Wells Brown and Harriet Jacobs, who directly confront slavery and expose the pervasiveness of miscegenation. Rebecca Harding Davis' "Life in the Iron-Mills," published the same year as Jacobs' narrative, delivers perhaps the era's most vivid critique of American industrial practices, demonstrating the affinity between slavery and industry. No author, however, engages the rhetoric and mythology of Jefferson or more penetratingly interrogates the interconnections between human chattel and machines than Herman Melville. For each of these authors, wrestling with the ghost of Jefferson means confronting a number of fundamental issues left unresolved since the nation's founding, most especially the power of self-sovereignty, the promise of democracy, the horror of slavery, the seduction of technology, and, ultimately, the shameful disavowal of miscegenation. |
