July 2, 2026 : Wondercab Maxi (116A)

WELCOME

We’ll be taking a short break next week, so in the meantime, a somewhat longer installment than usual this week to help tide you over till we get back. Slotted between the Supreme Court’s dreadful Voting Rights decision a few weeks ago, and the coming celebration, as blighted as it might be, of our nation’s 250th anniversary, this coming July 4th a consideration (by way of Ed Kienholz’s Five Car Stud) of the colonial and Revolutionary era taproots of our nation’s ongoing racial agon.

*

The Main Event

The room—a vast hanger-like space—is gloomy dark, the wall and ceilings painted pitch-black, the floor a thick layer of finely packed beige powder. It takes a few moments for our eyes to adjust, but gradually the scene up ahead begins to take on shape. There is a beat-up pick-up truck over there to the side, its driver’s-side door flung open, a large potbellied man (or rather the plaster cast of such a man) wedged into the opening, a gun cradled by his side as he monitors some sort of fierce activity unfolding over there in the middle of the space immediately before him, though what precisely is going on is still difficult to make out, momentarily blocked from our view by one of four other parked cars, splayed in a starlike configuration, their headlights bearing down on the central action, whatever that might be. Hesitantly, wearily, we venture into the gloom.

The car closest to us, as we approach the pick-up truck, continues to block our view, but it doesn’t really matter as our attention is drawn to the man at the truck door up ahead: his head wrapped in a ghoulish pustulated Halloween mask, we now notice, as he stares ahead, leeringly monitoring the action. Coming up level with the masked figure, we gaze past him into the cab of the pick-up truck, where a plaster-cast woman in the passenger seat is bent over, retching. (The cab has been fashioned with an aching attention to detail, as, we presently realize, has every other aspect of the tableau—a fever dream of specificity: craggy boulders and scraggly tree trunks scattered all about, skeletal branches casting spooky Caligari-like shadows up against the black walls, crushed beer cans littering the ground.) Now finally we turn and take in the central action, glaringly floodlit by the headlights converging from all four sides: five men, all of them swathed in Halloween masks, pulling and straining,

leaning into, smothering and restraining a sixth figure, quartered and prone, spread-eagled face-up across the ground. Actually, though, we still can’t quite make out what’s going on: the straining backs of the Halloween ghouls block a full view. And thus are we drawn further in. Almost despite ourselves, we circle round, till we can make out the head of the prone figure: it is twice as big as the other faces, it bears no mask, it is black, and it is silently screaming.

Grimly abashed, we continue wheeling about the scene, as oxygen itself now seems to leak out of the room. The black figure, we begin to realize, has no torso: or rather, its head and four spread-eagled limbs converge on a black tin tub (the kind you might find in an automotive garage), brim-filled with black water, six benign baby-bathtub-letters floating languorously about the surface: N, I, two G’s, an E and an R (though it is only every now and then that they converge into exactly that configuration: just now they happen to spelling out G-N-G-I-E-R.)

We continue round, and only now do we finally get to see things clear: one of the men, the most ghoulishly masked of all, is leaning intently over the tub torso, a knife gripped in one hand, the other pulling on the screaming black man’s exposed penis.

And thus finally do the pieces all fall into place. The black man and the white woman were presumably out for the evening, sharing a beer in his parked pick-up in this remote trysting spot, when the four other cars came careening onto the scene, screeching to a halt as they blocked any sort of escape, their masked passengers scrambling out, the gun-wielding guy coming up to the driver’s side of the pick-up (and who is he, anyway? her father, brother, husband, friend—just the local enforcer of the prevailing social order?), yanking the black man out and into the hands of the rest of his posse, and they have set upon their work. We gaze up and only now notice that inside one of the cars, that one over there, the one that had been blocking our view as we came hazarding in, a young boy (maybe ten years old), along for the ride, sits gaping out through the windshield at the horrifying scene unfolding before him: and so do we get to be present as the toxic virus gets passed from one generation to the next.

Shocking, utterly shocking: a secret history of the United States, the sort of thing we were never supposed to know about (taking place as it always seemed to in the dead of night in all those remote out-of-the way bayous), the sort of thing we could take comfort in telling ourselves we never knew about, that nobody ever knew about. Except that, gazing back once again, we can’t help but notice the vortex of all those circling footprints pressed into the hard packed dirt—hundreds of them, thousands, salted all about the harrowing scene.

For of course, as the literary critic Richard Halpern once remarked in a different context, “Far from marking the passage from ignorance to knowledge, shock is just a way of disguising from ourselves the fact that we knew all along.”

Later on, back on the street outside at the far end of our day’s museum walk, we may well gaze down upon our powder-dusted shoes and reach down to try to brush the stuff off: not that easy to do, as it turns out.

*

Thus goes the experience of attending, and tending to, Five Car Stud, arguably the single greatest work by the eminent West Coast assemblagist, the late Ed Kienholz (1927-1994), the culmination of his astonishing decade of the Sixties (for more on which, see my two-part profile of the sly master, my dear old frenemy, back in issues 87 and 87A of this Cabinet).

Ed and his son Noah plaster-casting figure for Five Car Stud, 1970, Los Angeles. (Note how Noah is casting his black friend to stand in for the white child who will be looking on.)

Fashioned from 1969 to 1971 in immediate response to the assassination of Martin Luther King and the riots that followed, Five Car Stud proved so harrowingly unsettling that, once completed, it could not be shown, as scheduled, in Los Angeles, or New York, or London, but went on to prove the most critically acclaimed piece in 1972’s Documenta, in Kassel, Germany, from whence it was sold to a Japanese foundation into whose storage vaults it disappeared, mysteriously, for almost forty years, across which its scandalous reputation persisted as a sort of ghostly rumor, a gnawing absence. Then, in 2009, it was pulled from out of storage, returned to the Kienholz compound in Idaho where it was repaired under the auspices of Kienholz’s widow/collaborator Nancy, and then exhibited for the first time in the US, two years later, as the keystone of the LA County Museum of Art’s participation in the citywide Pacific Standard Time extravaganza, from whence it went on the following summer to the Louisiana Museum in Denmark. It was then supposed to tour for two years after which it was scheduled to be auctioned off; several American museums were actively considering its purchase when suddenly, catastrophically, in one of the most egregious episodes in recent art capitalist history—or so it seemed to me at the time—it was preemptively acquired by the Prada Foundation in Milan. For thus, this quintessentially American work, arguably one of the key American works of the last half century and one with more urgent cause to be seen by Americans than perhaps any other, may never again make it back to the United States, having only ever seen the light of American day for those two months in LA. Aye.

In the immediate aftermath of the LACMA show, I began to start conceiving of a book length response to the piece, with the provisional title of Five Car Stud: Ed Kienholz at the Fraught Crossroads where Race, Class, Sex and Violence Keep Intersecting Across American History, and I even managed to secure a few residencies in which to pursue the project. But the mid-teens being what they were (viz., the Whitney Biennial of 2017 and the Dana Schutz controversy, for my response to which, see here), I found myself continuously being advised, in the strongest possible terms, to abandon the project, for what business, I was repeatedly asked, did a white critic have delving into the work of a white artist on a black lynching, both of them parasitically colonizing black suffering like that? As far as I was concerned, such a characterization was profoundly misguided if for no other reason than Kienholz’s subject (and hence my response to it) was not so much about blackness (only one of the nine figures in the piece was black) as about whiteness. What the hell, the visitor is brought to ask, are those guys doing to that fellow—and why!? My own book intended to burrow toward a sort of answer to that question by way of a historical excavation of the taproots of the catastrophe. But no publisher at the time would touch it, and at length, I decided to abandon the project.

Across the past few weeks, however, somewhere between the Supreme Court’s evisceration of both the Voting Rights Act (and more recently the practice of extending temporary protection to victims of persecution from “s-hole” countries) and President Trump’s wildly inchoate plans for the celebration of our country’s 250th Anniversary this coming Saturday, I went back and looked at the first of the so-called “Rear View Mirror” chapters that were going to constitute the core of that benighted book, and I thought that some of you too might find it of more than passing interest. And so (again with the proviso that we will be off this week, so consider this a sort of double-issue and humor us our prolixity), on to this:

*

The Colonial and Revolutionary Roots
of our Nation’s Racial Agon

As I say, this radioactive history goes way back to the earliest days of English settlement in the Americas—although interestingly, and significantly, not all the way back.

Jamestown was founded in 1607 and for its first half century the vast and highly lucrative Virginian land-grant tobacco plantations, the wellspring of a colonial ruling class (the grandparents and great-grandparents in many instances of our Founding Fathers), had little need or use for slaves. The considerable majority of labor was provided by indentured servants, both white and black (the former poor whites trying to escape their desperate circumstances back in England, the latter freedmen mostly from the Caribbean), and as the distinguished historian Lerone Bennett, Jr. has noted, the two “occupied roughly the same economic category and were treated with equal contempt by the lords of the plantations and the legislatures. Curiously unconcerned about their own color, these people worked together and relaxed together.” (Bennett, Shaping of Black America, Chicago: Johnson 1975, p. 6)

Such indentured servants would put themselves up for bond, working under deplorable conditions until the bond was paid off, at which point, having secured their freedom, they would try to make their way in a still fairly appalling labor market (all the more so because they were now having to compete with other still-indentured servants). But the point is they recognized a common circumstance amongst each other; and indeed, by the 1670s, Virginia was experiencing considerable class and labor strife, culminating in Bacon’s Rebellion of 1676.

Nathaniel Bacon himself was something of a mixed bag (one so wishes one’s democratic heroes came pure and unalloyed, though this is seldom the case, and certainly wasn’t here). The thing is that almost all of the most lucrative land along the coast had been spoken for early on (often in pretty sketchy land grabs), so that later arrivals and newly freed bondsmen kept getting pushed further and further west, where they in turn kept butting up against the already long-settled Native Americans who didn’t particularly relish seeing yet more of their own lands getting stolen. So there was a lot of tension out there on the frontier (raids back and forth), and the small landholder Bacon and his confederates kept agitating for more vigorous persecution of the Indians, while the large landholders on the coast, who completely dominated the legislature, had a greater interest in keeping the peace with their Indian neighbors.

Bacon’s Rebellion and the Burning of Jamestown, 1676-7.

Finally, completely exasperated, Bacon marched east—gathering up a widening throng of disgruntled and variously aggrieved indentured servants, both black and white, as he came—and though the rebellion was eventually scattered and suppressed (with Bacon himself dying of dysentery), this was not before virtually all of Jamestown had been burned to the ground, a circumstance which certainly caught the attention of the local elite, who suddenly recognized the need for a new strategy of domination.

As the historian Michael Goldfield (to whose excellent The Color of Politics: Race and the Mainsprings of American Politics I am thoroughly indebted in much of the historical analysis that follows) has noted, one of the most remarkable pieces of evidence that, prior to Bacon’s Rebellion, Virginia’s leaders had taken the cross-racial solidarity of their subordinate laborers for granted was their very lack of comment on the fact. “No attempt was made to play Black and white laborers against each other,” as he goes on to note. “Divide-and-conquer tactics would almost certainly have been used if the elites thought they would work.”(MG, p. 41)

In fact, the wider point is that the racial categories of Black (and conversely, White) didn’t even exist yet. Europeans had never thought of themselves as “white”; they’d construed themselves as English or Welsh or Flemish or Netherlandish or French or Spanish (or Catholic or Protestant)—and as such often superior or inferior to one another, the English for example regularly imagining their Irish subjects to be congenitally lesser (sometimes even referring to them as “black”). But that would now begin to change precipitously—or rather, be changed (in the same way that Fanon and others used to say that some peoples didn’t just happen to be underdeveloped, they had been actively underdeveloped by other people). The Virginia elites conferred—and the incredible thing is that there is a paper trail for all of this, they consciously thought it through as they were doing it—and they resolved in the future to shift the predominant burden of labor to imported slaves. And not just any slaves. Specifically, not slaves imported from the Caribbean where they might likely have already become politicized (slave revolts were rampant in those insular domains). Indians, likewise, were understood to be useless in this regard (if nothing else because they could escape to their home tribes, when their confederates were not already conducting raids to free them). Rather the colonial elite would henceforth endeavor to bring in slaves fresh from Africa, and preferably from widely scattered areas of Africa, so that they would not share common languages and thereby be all the easier to break and subdue.

In addition, while even the lowliest servant or bondsmen had some rights as subjects of the Crown, slaves were alien, and hence without any rights or recourse to same as property, pure and simple. A further benefit to such a scheme, it was immediately understood (and again articulated as such at the time) was that white indentured servants and other poor whites could be made to identify with their white overlords, since at least they could never be slaves, and thus any gathering lower-class solidarity ought easily be upended.

Ta-nehesi Coates in his widely heralded “Case for Reparations” piece in the June 2014 Atlantic noted how early English visitors to Virginia marveled at the way masters abused their servants (both white and black) “with intolerable oppression and hard usage,” a state of affairs originating out of “a simple fact of the New World—land was boundless but cheap labor was limited.” But in the years after Bacon’s Rebellion, “as life spans increased in the colony, the Virginia planters found in the enslaved Africans an ever more efficient source of cheap labor…. Exempted from the protections of the Crown, they became early America’s indispensible working class—fit for maximum exploitation, capable of only minimal resistance.” (Coates, p. 62)

And then, only a few years after Bacon, in 1688, back in England, the Catholic King James II went and sired himself a male heir, a boy who now threatened to grow into yet another Catholic monarch of that largely Protestant land. Members of the country’s Protestant nobility, already suspecting James’s absolutizing tendencies (along the lines of those of the contemporaneous French Catholic sovereign, the Sun King Louis XIV) now rose up in rebellion, inviting James’s daughter Mary and her Protestant husband, William of Orange, to land an invasion force from the Netherlands, which they did. Whereupon James fled, and William and Mary now ascended to the throne, but not before agreeing to accede—and this is the key point in terms of our evolving story—to a Declaration of Rights, radically circumscribing royal prerogatives and granting more rights to a burgeoning class of entrepreneurs and incipient capitalists.

William III accepting the Declaration of Rights, The Glorious Revolution 1688-9.

The largely bloodless Glorious Revolution, as it came to be known, proved, according to University of Houston professor Gerald Horne in his bracingly revisionist recent history The Counterrevolution of 1776, “the crucial turning point for North America—and arguably the British Empire as a whole,” empowering as it did a rising new class of entrepreneurs “to enter into the lushly lucrative market in enslaved Africans to the detriment of the Royal African Company.” (GH vii-viii) It was there and then, he goes on to note, that

the groundwork was laid for the take-off of capitalism—a trend in which slavery and the slave trade played an indispensable role. The growing influence of merchants in the aftermath of 1688 turbocharged the African Slave Trade, which allowed for spectacular profits growing from investments in the Americas and the forging of a wealthy class there which [increasingly came to] chafe under London’s rule. (GH 5)

Raising the ante yet further, Horne goes on to characterize the year 1688, seen in this light, as “the hinge moment in the creation of what is referred to today as modernity.” (viii)

Granted, Horne’s radically revisionist tract skirts close to heresy. On the other hand, I have long admired the notion advanced by my own master, UCSC’s religious historian Donald Nicholl who used to explain how in the early Christian church, heresies usually consisted in long suppressed aspects of the truth that then got elevated to the level of the Whole Truth and idolatrized as such—their problem hence being not so much one of verity as of proportion. And I am willing to cut Horne a little slack in this regard, since he is pushing against such a massive tide of received and conventional opinion, and especially since he keeps coming up with such fascinating (and, indeed, precisely, long suppressed) evidentiary nuggets along the way.

The fact, for example, that the greatest profits in the slave trade itself were being made in the north, in places like Newport, Rhode Island (where one such fortune provided the basis for the founding of Brown University). (GH 143 & 204) Or the fact that “for much of the 18^th Century, New York City held the largest percentage, and second largest absolute number, of enslaved Africans, of any port town in British North America.” (GH 215)

The eye-opening corrective of his recitation of the high incidence of slave plots and rebellions in the Caribbean includes one plot discovered in 1649 in the Barbados that “called for the planter class to be eliminated and—it was reported—‘their wives to be kept for the chief of the conspirators, their wives and children to be their slaves.’” (GH 24) Repeated uprisings and scares of this sort, particularly on the widely scattered islands where the plantation class was massively outnumbered by slaves and immediate assistance might not necessarily be near at hand, hastened the emigration of many of those whites to the Southern colonies on the British mainland, where they were assured slaves could be more securely maintained. The slave trade, in Horne’s words, gradually became “a terribly addictive drug regularly delivering the mindless euphoria of stupendous profit—while simultaneously threatening the very survival of colonialism.” (GH 121) In passages like this, Horne gets to sounding like those critics of the dead-ender cigarette company health apologists of the mid-twentieth century—not all that surprising since tobacco was at the heart of the story even back then, when, by the mid-eighteenth century even some of the most prodigious slaveholders among the continental plantation class were beginning to have misgivings—people like the high Virginia potentate William Byrd, who began advocating for a curb in the slave trade, since continued “multiplying of these Ethiopians amongst us” could well ignite the “servile war” (elsewhere referred to as the prospect of “intestine rebellion”) always seeming to hover just below the surface. (GH 120) Similarly, James Oglethorpe, the founding governor of the Georgia colony, and several of his allies used to rail against the way that the importation of “more Africans ‘exposed’ them all to ‘Domestick Treachery and Foreign Invasion,’ just to ‘gratify the greedy and ambitious views of a few Negro merchants who sought to become sole owners of the province by introducing their baleful commodity’—with little awareness of the ‘Terror’ this presented to ‘their unadvised Masters.’” (GH 121)

Georgia’s was an especially fascinating case (in particular that note of anxiety about “Foreign Invasion”), and this is where Horne’s revisionism really comes into its own, because he invites us to reconsider the arc of how the eighteenth century transpired, in geopolitical terms, across real time, with three separate empires contending for dominance across North America, the Spanish, the French, and the British: “The colonizing of the Americas was a chaotic process for which teleology is particularly inappropriate: it was not foreordained that the Stars and Stripes would flutter at all, least of all over so much of North America. The colonizing of the Americas was a wild and woolly process.” (GH 3) The French were continually making inroads from the north, and the Spanish from the south—and since neither of them countenanced the holding of Africans as slaves, they could appeal to Africans in the British colonies to escape and gain their freedom by joining their armies. Indeed, this was such a problem in South Carolina, with African slaves tearing off for Spanish Florida, Horne explains, that Georgia was originally conceived as a non-slave buffer. The problem in Georgia, however, as gradually became apparent, was that the absence of Africans [served] to allow class and ethnic tensions among Europeans to fester… Banning Africans [meant] that Europeans [were having] to perform tasks they might not otherwise, while being bossed—perhaps menaced—by other Europeans. Adding enslaved Africans, on the other hand, [would mean] that brute agricultural labor could be assigned to the degraded darker folk, which would boost certain Europeans up the class ladder and enrich others. Yet bringing bonded African labor to Georgia—which is what eventually happened—simply [meant] extending Carolina’s problems closer to St. Augustine [in Spanish Florida]. Except it would be worse than before, for Georgia would be easier to overrun than Carolina, being weaker and closer to Florida. (GH 91)

Such that even though when Oglethorpe first founded Georgia (the last of the Thirteen colonies to be thus founded) as a haven for English debtors in 1732, slavery was outlawed, by 1743, that ban had been lifted.

But the problem of slavelessness of Spanish and French colonial projects and their resultant ability to recruit Blacks (and to a lesser extent Indian allies as well) into their militaries, thereby placing themselves at a relative advantage to the British (especially at a time when Catholic Irish and Scots were so unreliable), did not recede, and was increasingly noted in London. Even though the British were able to achieve certain military victories against the French and the Spanish during the 1760s, it was by no means clear how lasting those successes would prove (indeed the French and Spanish were both to come roaring back during the years of the Revolutionary War), with the strategic problem of not being able to recruit black sailors and soldiers to defend a slave order as vexing as ever, especially at a time when British interests were increasingly turning toward India. In this regard, alongside many others, the interests of the Crown in London and those of its ruling class subjects in America were now tending to delaminate further and further with each passing year. And though most conventional histories of this period emphasize colonial resentments over “taxation without representation” and the general upsurge of a Lockean passion for self-governance as the principal engine behind developments, Horne casts his eye elsewhere, and in particular on a series of crucial developments, one hot on the next, during the first half of the 1770s.

Lord Mansfield presiding at the Somerset vs Stewart case, London, 1772.

Back in London, abolitionist sentiment was gradually rising in any case (it perhaps being easier to see the appalling cruelty of slavery for what it was when one wasn’t benefiting directly from its exercise close at hand), and in February 1772, the case of an African slave named James Somerset who’d been purchased in Boston and brought to London by his master but then escaped, been recaptured, and was now suing for his freedom, came before the Court of the King’s Bench, the Chief Justice Lord Mansfield presiding. The hearings lasted several months, across which time, consternation back in the colonies grew ever more acute (and in many places, Virginia among them, arguably more acute than concerns about other matters). Who were judges back in London, elite planters demanded to know, to tell the colonists what they could and could not do with their own property? Meanwhile, as the case wended toward its climax, on June 10, up in Rhode Island, a customs schooner named the HMS Gaspee ran aground, was boarded by colonists, looted and torched, and as the local representatives of the Crown began to investigate the affair, Committees of Correspondence formed among rebellious colonists from Boston to the Carolinas to consult on the swelling crisis. Just a few days after that, on June 22 back in London, Lord Mansfield delivered his decision to the effect that the state of slavery was of such an “odious” nature that “nothing could be suffered to support it, but positive law,” which is to say actual statutes, of which there were none in Britain, hence “the black must be discharged.” The long-term implications of this ruling for the colonies were still ambiguous, but it nevertheless fell like a thunderclap, causing “more ferment than the Stamp Act,” according to Horne, among colonists who railed against this “unwarranted judicial activism” (GH 215) (a formulation which would of course cast a long shadow, over precisely these sorts of issues, for centuries to come and indeed right down to the present day).

By March 1775, an increasingly agitated Patrick Henry, himself the owner of over seventy slaves, rose to the pulpit of St John’s Church in Richmond, Virginia, to deliver the famous speech which we all remember from its rousing final line, “Give me Liberty or Give me Death,” though few recall the phrases which immediately preceded that. Noting how, what with developments up and down the colonies, the tide of war was already upon them, he’d insisted that, even if his listeners wanted to, “it is now too late to retire from the contest. There is no retreat but in submission and slavery. Our chains are forged! Their clanking can be heard on the plains of Boston! The war is inevitable, and let it come!” A few phrases later, he was demanding to know, “Why stand we here idle? What is it that gentlemen wish? What would they have? Is life so dear, or peace so sweet, as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery? Forbid it, Almighty God! I know not what course others may take; but as for me” and so forth.

In May 1775, at the first Continental Congress in Philadelphia, John Hancock, the biggest slaveholder in Boston, alongside his Southern colleagues, denounced London’s alleged attempts to “convert” colonists “from freemen into slaves.” (GH 233)

In August 1775, with slaveholder anxieties now soaring exponentially, a free black man in Charleston, South Carolina, named Thomas Jeremiah was alleged (on extremely flimsy evidence) to have claimed that were the King to send troops he would join them, and thereby accused of having incited slaves to rebellion. This is another one of those problematic hero stories since Jeremiah was likely the wealthiest self-made freedman in the country at the time and himself the owner of several slaves, a circumstance that rendered the accusation all the more improbable. But notwithstanding his freedman status, Jeremiah was now tried in a slave court under rules prescribed in the Negro Act of 1740 wherein the defendant was considered guilty until proven innocent, and was quickly convicted and sentenced to death as such. The royal governor on the scene decried the impending execution as a case of “judicial murder,” but the settlers bluntly informed him that “if he offered to stay the execution, they would erect the gallows on his door and make him the executioner of the negro,” and thereupon, notwithstanding the Governor’s hesitations, the crowd went ahead and hung the man anyway (in another pre-Revolutionary instance casting a long, long shadow up ahead) (GH 226).

In November, with the situation deteriorating and war indeed drawing nigh, the royal governor of Virginia, Lord Dunmore, issued a decree wherein he offered freedom to those slaves who would abandon their masters and join the gathering British forces, thereby confirming the worst fears of the planter classes, who decried the edict as “a damned, infernal, diabolical proclamation.” (GH 231)

Dunmore in Virginia, Johnson in London, 1770s.

Back in London, the manifest contradictions in colonial rhetoric did not go unnoticed. “How is it,” asked Samuel Johnson, “that we hear the loudest yelps for freedom from the drivers of Negroes?” Others proposed to trump Dunmore’s gambit, suggesting the mainlanders be further “reduced by declaring the general enfranchisement of their slaves, with jury trials as a first step” (GH 232), truly radical measures which Horne dryly notes most Black Americans would not come to enjoy for generations. Meanwhile, when the North Carolina governor John Martin began to echo Dunmore’s sentiments, John Adams in Boston, of all people, “bluntly informed the Crown that the settlers ‘won’t be their [London’s] Negroes.’” (GH 239)

*

At the outset of the fateful year 1776, it has been estimated that at least twenty percent of the population of the colonies was Black, the vast majority of those slaves. Black slaves formed the majority of the population of South Carolina, and at least 40% of the population of Virginia (though its Royal governor Dunmore believed the colony featured twice as many blacks as whites GH 225).

And it was against such a backdrop that the rebel colonial elite gathered together that summer in Philadelphia for the Second Continental Congress and moved to ratify their famous Declaration of Independence, taking off from its stirring Locke-infused premise: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed,” and so forth.

One third of those who signed onto the document (including two of the three who had specifically drafted it) were themselves slaveholders. Not that every colonial rebel was deaf to the stark contradictions inherent in the exercise. (John Adams’s own wife Abigail had earlier written her husband, how “It always appeared a most iniquitous scheme—to fight ourselves for what we are daily robbing and plundering from those who have as good a right to freedom as we have.”) But most were—or were willing to stifle any misgivings in the fervor of the moment, and Locke himself, the intellectual wellspring from whom the entire document had flowed (as Jefferson repeatedly averred), would likely have harbored few compunctions.

For across the very years, over a century earlier, during the 1670s, when John Locke had been composing the Two Treatises of Government which Jefferson so particularly lauded (and which indeed had so powerfully sketched out an at-that-time quite radical “liberal” and “enlightened” conception of governance, emphasizing the importance of tolerance and the consent of the governed and a regime of rights and so forth), Locke was also actively participating in the drafting of a South Carolina constitution which prescribed that “Every freeman shall have absolute power and authority over his negro slaves” (and also laid out property requirements for suffrage generally, thereby decisively undercutting the status of the majority of colonists who were of the lower social orders); he was “one of just half a dozen men who created and supervised both the colonies and their iniquitous systems of servitude” (Martin Cohen, Philosophical Tales, Blackwell, p. 101); on top of which, he was a major investor in the slave-trading activities of the Royal African Company.

Locke, Jefferson, Hegel.

Much academic ink has been spilled trying to reconcile all of this with the eloquence of his anatomization of the iniquities of “Slavery” in the fourth chapter of his Second Treatise (“Freedom from absolute, arbitrary power, is so necessary to, and closely joined with a man’s preservation, that he cannot part with it, but by what forfeits his preservation and life together: for a man, not having the power of his own life, cannot, by compact, or his own consent, enslave himself to any one, nor put himself under the absolute, arbitrary power of another,” and so forth). It has been suggested that, as a man of his time, Locke just didn’t think of black slaves as fellow humans and subject to the same rules he was expounding for everyone else; or that when he is discussing slavery, he is doing so in the context of proscribing the claims of absolute monarchs and tyrants to lord it over their subjects and in so doing treating them as slaves (such rhetoric foreshadowing the sort of thing that, as we have seen, would come to the fore a century later, and then over and over again thereafter across American history). As such, as Susan Buck Morse has pointed out in her book on Hegel, Locke was hardly unusual, since even though virtually all of the Enlightenment philosophers spent a good deal of time railing against slavery in that sense (the right or lack thereof of sovereigns to treat their subjects like slaves), hardly any—that is until Hegel with his discussion of the Master/Slave relationship in his Phenomenology of Spirit in 1807—spent any time concerning themselves with the actual conditions being experienced by the actual slaves in their contemporary midsts. Beyond that, Locke put enormous stock in the right to property—and the liberty to do with one’s own property whatever one wanted as long as it didn’t interfere with the liberties of others—as central to his notion of right governance. And in that context, for him, negro slaves would first and foremost have constituted other people’s property—people who self-evidently had, as Thomas Jefferson would presently claim, consciously channeling Locke, “the unalienable right to Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” The Liberty, that is, to the happy and unhindered enjoyment of owning slaves.

Thomas Jefferson, the principal drafter of the Declaration, was famously his own special ball of contradictions when it came to the question of slavery. I don’t propose to rehearse at any particular length here the way that, the self-evidence of all men having been created equal notwithstanding, Jefferson himself owned over two hundred slaves, and how though he opposed the slave trade and famously worried that slavery could well be corrosive to both the owner and the slave, he nonetheless opposed owners freeing their own slaves (on the grounds that this could inspire rebellion) and only freed two of his own across his entire lifetime; he was perfectly capable of breaking up slave families as punishment for insubordination; as president he refused to recognize the Haitian slave republic after its rebellion; and so forth. One’s not quite sure on which side of the ledger to put his relationship, following his wife Mary’s death, with her half-sister Sally Hemings (the slave girl sired by Mary’s father on one of his slaves) and the at least one and probably five children he subsequently had with her (I mean, a slaveowner bedding his slavegirl is hardly any proof of magnanimity, on the contrary of course; on the other hand, five children may well testify to something more devoted and nuanced than mere lordly dominion. On the third hand—well, one could go on, and many have, but for the purposes of this survey, let’s leave things there.)

Setting that whole debate aside, however, the part of Jefferson’s legacy that may prove the most unsettling (and here I hold with and draw on Brooklyn College professor of political science Corey Robin), were his gentleman-scientific and oh-so-“enlightened” attempts in Query XIV of his Notes on the State of Virginia of 1791 to document the fact of African inferiority as a race. “Writing long before these theories of racial difference were fully formulated,” Robin notes,

Thomas Jefferson offered a glimpse of what it means to think of blacks as a race, as the race, and whites as individuals. Blacks are brave, he says, but this is due to “want of forethought.” The black man is “ardent,” but this is lust, not love. “In general,” he says, “their existence appears to participate more of sensation than reflection.” In “imagination they are dull, tasteless, and anomalous.” One can see their brute incapacity for historical transcendence and moral or political freedom in the color of their skin. While whites sport “fine mixtures of red and white,” reflecting the diverse range of passions and sensibilities at their disposal, blacks suffer from the “eternal monotony” of blackness, that “immovable veil” that makes any subtlety or nuance, any gradation of feeling, any distinctiveness or idiosyncrasy of character and personality, impossible.

In this sense, Jefferson was a “racist” before there were racists as such, people who subscribed to a systematic theory of racial difference (nor would he have taken that characterization as a criticism, he might well have considered it synonymous with being a scientist, that being one of the sorts of scientist he aspired to be). And indeed, as Robin goes on to argue, “this dual portrait of whites as individuals and blacks as a race was the perfect counterrevolutionary argument. It ascribed to whites all the virtues of a ruling class—capable of action, freedom, politics itself—and to blacks all the deficits of a class to be ruled.” Hence Jefferson’s seemingly melancholy conclusion—if only it weren’t so!—that “This unfortunate difference of color, and perhaps of faculty, is a powerful obstacle to the emancipation of these people.”

(That same year, 1791, a remarkable black freedman astronomer and mathematician named Benjamin Banneker, sent then-Secretary of State Jefferson a copy of an almanac he had created along with an amazing 1400-word letter, in which, among other things, he begged to suppose “that your Sentiments are concurrent with mine, which are that one universal Father hath given being to us all, and that he hath not only made us all of one flesh, but that he hath also without partiality afforded us all the same Sensations, and endued us all with the same faculties, and that however variable we may be in Society or religion, however diversified in Situation or colour, we are all of the Same Family, and Stand in the Same relation to him.” Jefferson’s single page reply was courteous—“Nobody wishes more than I do to see such proofs as you exhibit, that nature has given to our black brethren, talents equal to those of the other colors of men, and that the appearance of a want of them is owing merely to the degraded condition of their existence, both in Africa & America; I can add with truth, that nobody wishes more ardently to see a good system commended for raising the condition both of their body & mind to what it ought to be, as fast as the imbecility of their present existence, and other circumstances which cannot be neglected, will admit”—but non-committal. And to friends, Jefferson subsequently expressed his opinion that Benneker must have had white help with his almanac.)

As Robin concludes, Racism of the sort Jefferson was busy gestating up there on his Mountain “was tailor-made to the counterrevolutionary task of combating abolition and reconciling the Declaration of Independence with the reality of chattel slavery. It combined ideas of equality and inequality, and fused the radical’s vision of political plasticity with the conservative’s notion of the stubbornness of history. It proved an ideology of extraordinary and protean—extraordinary because protean—resilience, precisely because it had something for everyone, save of course for the slaves themselves.”

Which in turn wends us back to the climactic events of that summer in Philadelphia, bringing to a head as they did what Horne, in his revisionist passion, convincingly demonstrates to have been (at very least in large part), in the words of his title, The Counterrevolution of 1776. Though in the end Jefferson and his fellow drafters decided to strike from their text any complaints about royal interference in the slave trade as perhaps a grievance too far, was Lord Hutchinson, the exiled last royal governor of Massachusetts, nonetheless that far off when he characterized the final Declaration as “the epitome of casuistry”? (Horne quotes a stupefied Bristol merchant back in England as commenting, after reading the Declaration, “One would imagine that the Parliament of Great Britain had treated the rebels with as great cruelty and as much injustice as they treat their Negro slaves.” {GH 238} ) Or were the leaders of the Confederacy in the years to come, or Ian Smith as he declared white Rhodesia’s independence from decolonizing Britain in 1965, or for that matter the Southern anti-integrationists of the 1950s and their heirs in today’s Tea Party, that far wrong when they all claimed for themselves the mantle of true heirs to the signers of that 1776 Declaration of Independence?

Late in his book, Horne quotes a recent letter to the editor of the Financial Times from one David Paul of Bromley, Kent, to the effect that, “The real flaws of the US founding fathers were inherent in their motivation for the revolt against British rule. They objected to a government that sought to protect peaceful Indians from the theft of their land and feared a court system that had started to have grave doubts about enforcing slavery. They therefore had to create a devolved structure that would stop central government interfering with local courts’ endorsement of land grabs or enforcement of slavery.” (FT, July 22, 2011) Horne himself goes on to insist that “It is much too generous to conclude the former slaveholding republic has suffered from a tragic flaw: it is more accurate to aver that this polity has suffered from a design flaw.” (GH 249)

Coates for his part argues that “America begins in black plunder and white democracy, two features that are not contradictory but complementary,” going on to quote the great historian Edmund S Morgan:

The men who came together to found the independent United States, dedicated to freedom and equality, either held slaves or were willing to join hands with those who did. None of them felt entirely comfortable about the fact, but neither did they feel responsible for it. Most of them had inherited both their slaves and their attachment to freedom from an earlier generation, and they knew the two were not unconnected. (Coates 62)

Which seems about right to me. And all of which is another way of saying that the taproots of what’s happening there in Kienholz’s Five Car Stud does in fact burrow a long way, indeed almost all the way back to the very fundaments of the whole American project.

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Commonplace Book

Who wrote this paragraph in 1786?

What a stupendous, what an incomprehensible machine is man! Who can endure toil, famine, stripes [whippings], imprisonment or death itself in vindication of his own liberty, and the next moment be deaf to all those motives whose power supported him thro’ his trial, and inflict on his fellow men a bondage, one hour of which is fraught with more misery than ages of that which he rose in rebellion to oppose. But we must await with patience the workings of an overruling providence, and hope that that is preparing the deliverance of these our suffering brethren. When the measure of their tears shall be full, when their groans shall have involved heaven itself in darkness, doubtless a god of justice will awaken to their distress, and by diffusing light and liberality among their oppressors, or at length by his exterminating thunder, manifest his attention to the things of this world, and that they are not left to the guidance of a blind fatality.

Yup, that would be our old friend, Ambassador Thomas Jefferson, writing from Paris to the French politician Jean Nicolas Démeunier, as quoted by Annette Gordon Reed in the NYRB (12/18/25).

The same Jefferson who around the same time, and somewhat more famously, noted in his Notes on the State of Virginia, how

This is also true, that of the proprietors of slaves a very small proportion indeed are ever seen to labour. And can the liberties of a nation be thought secure when we have removed their only firm basis, a conviction in the minds of the people that these liberties are of the gift of God? That they are not to be violated but with his wrath? Indeed, I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just: that his justice cannot sleep forever: that considering numbers, nature and natural means only, a revolution of the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation, is among possible events: that it may become probable by supernatural interference! The Almighty has no attribute which can take side with us in such a contest.

Not that he himself would do anything about it, fifteen years later, upon assuming the presidency of the United States.

Sometimes I find myself wondering whether the wrath of God, his punishment for our failure as a nation yet to have come to terms with this dreadful more than 250-year history, or at least one of those punishments, might not itself be, well, this:

The “America250 Commemorative Patriot Passport.”

And then, for that matter, there’s this Convergence:

DeAndre Harris, bottom, is assaulted in a parking garage in Charlottesville, Va., during the “You Will Not Replace Us” demonstrations, August 12, 2017 (Z. Roberts)

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SO: SEE YOU AGAIN IN TWO WEEKS!