Bonds of Citizenship is a bold attempt to upend received contours of antebellum constitutional and legal history, and interpretive practice, by braiding legal studies with literary criticism and labor history. There is much here to admire and from which to learn.
To cut to the core: Phan argues that although the founders were pro-slavery, the document they produced sustains antislavery readings; that the fiercest proponent of the possibility of an antislavery Constitution was not the proclaimed father of political abolitionism, Salmon P. Chase, but Frederick Douglass in his post-1849, post-Garrisonian moral abolitionist, phase; and that, unlike Chase, Douglass founded the possibility of an antislavery Constitution not on any attributed antislavery intent of the founders, but on his reading of the text. Throughout, this is a book that reads texts rather than seeks to divine the intentionality that supposedly lurks beneath their surfaces and dictates their meanings. Hence, the epigraph, from Douglass, that crowns Phan's introduction: “What will the people of America a hundred years hence care about the intentions of the scriveners who wrote the Constitution?” (p. 1).
The unfortunate answer to Douglass's question, as we all know, is that whether or not “the people” care, legal elites (of all political stripes) profess to care a lot, to the point that the Constitution—the people's document—is firmly in hock to their endless musings about its scriveners' intentions. American legal and constitutional historians need to understand their own role in this state of affairs: Although one of the signal achievements of the revisionist constitutional history of the last decade (see, e.g., Reference Van CleveVan Cleve 2010; Reference WaldstreicherWaldstreicher 2009) has been to establish beyond doubt that the Constitution was intentionally a pro-slavery document, that very achievement tends to push to the margin attempts (like Douglass's) to read it without privileging historical intentionality; although legal historians have demonstrated that legal meanings change as their context changes (see, e.g., Reference GordonGordon 2012: 200), their contextualizing method—“historicism”—binds the meaning of the text synchronically to the moment and circumstances of its origin (or subsequent reinterpretation) in historical time.
Douglass knew perfectly well that “ ‘the original intent and meaning’ of the Constitution was to sanction and safeguard slavery” (p. 1). But his dismissal of the scriveners was a dismissal of original intent and meaning from any weight in the reading practice of “the ever-present now” (p. 16). This was not to produce, relativistically, a new meaning for a new moment. It was to engage in a radically antihistoricist decontextualization of the Constitution that enabled Douglass to read the text strictly, on its surface, and to discover in it, as would a “ ‘man from another country’,” (p. 3) silence on slavery: a fugitive clause whose language derived from institutions of bondage (apprenticeship, indentured servitude) other than slavery; and a three-fifths clause that counted bondsmen-for-years among the free, and acknowledged all others simply as “other persons.”
Phan successfully loosens historical, and literary, interpretation from the clasp (whether affirmative or critical) of context. The bonds of his title instead invoke the “vanishing mediator” (p. 9) of the bondsman—the ambiguously mixed, bound-yet-free, figure which is the closest the text of the Constitution ever gets to identifying a slave (the gap is bridged by our imagination). The role of the vanishing mediator is to enable “ ‘an exchange of [historical] energies between two otherwise mutually-exclusive terms’ ” (p. 10, quoting Reference Jameson and JamesonJameson 1988: 25). Persuasive readings of texts, from Benjamin Franklin, Hector St. John Crèvecoeur, Olaudah Equiano, Charles Brockden Brown, and Douglass, puts flesh on the mediator's bones: each invokes the trope of apprenticeship to illustrate how passage from one species of economic and civic identity (or nonidentity) to another may occur. In these texts not dictates of context but diachronic fore- and after-histories are on display. The displacement of historicism is grounded on invocation of a distinct philosophy of history—historical materialism—which serves Phan both in narrating the material realities of different antebellum labor forms, and their tendency to blur into one another, and in understanding not just the slippage between realities and appearances (no one here, after all, is objectively doubting slavery was a material reality of antebellum America) but the advantages to be found in interrogating the appearances closely rather than assuming we know what they stand for.
Phan is not successful in fully integrating the components of his study. This is more a collection of essays than a book: provocative and intelligent, but also repetitive and sometimes disjointed. Chapters focused on Douglass provide most of the continuity (and simultaneously most of the repetition); those on Brown's Arthur Mervyn and Melville's Moby-Dick speak only broadly to Phan's key themes. The questions they raise—of character and credit in a market revolution, of the multiple implications of “bond” and “union”—float, tantalizingly, within the book's orbit but beyond its gravitational center. Still, if not sheeted home by the author, the connections are there to be made by the reader, and the intellectual fruits of doing so are well worth the effort.
