The Empire of Necessity (49 page)

15
. Davis,
Problem of Slavery
, pp. 558–62. The phrase “existential impasse” comes from Alexandre Kojève,
Introduction to the Reading of Hegel
, ed. Raymond Queneau, Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980, p. 46. See discussion in Davis,
Problem of Slavery
p. 561; G. W. F. Hegel,
The Philosophy of History
, trans. John Sibree, New York: American Home Library Co., 1902, 511.

INTERLUDE: BLACK WILL ALWAYS HAVE SOMETHING MELANCHOLY IN IT

1
. John Freeman,
Herman Melville
, New York: Macmillan, 1926, p. 61; Hugh Hetherington, ed.,
Melville’s Reviewers: British and American, 1846–1891
, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1961, p. 253.

2
. Carl Van Doren, “A Note of Confession,”
Nation
, December 5, 1928; Adam Hochschild,
King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa
, New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998, p. 3.

3
. Many of these opinions are found in John P. Runden, ed.,
Melville’s
Benito Cereno:
A Text for Guided Research
, Boston: Heath, 1965. See also Burkholder, ed.,
Critical Essays
. For their original sources, see Rosalie Feltenstein, “Melville’s ‘Benito Cereno,’”
American Literature
19 (1947): 245–55; Arthur Vogelback, “Shakespeare and Melville’s
Benito Cereno
,”
Modern Language Notes
67 (1952): 113–16; Newton Arvin,
Herman Melville,
1950, New York: Grove, 2002, p. 240; Stanley Williams, “Follow Your Leader: Melville’s
Benito Cereno
,”
Virginia Quarterly
23 (Winter 1947): 65–76; Richard Harter Fogle,
Melville’s Shorter Tales
, Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1960, p. 137; F. O. Matthiessen,
American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman
, New York: Oxford University Press, 1941, p. 508; Yvor Winters,
In Defense of Reason
, Denver: Allan Swallow, 1947, p. 222. Many of these judgments regarding Babo’s moral malignancy were made in the late 1940s, during the transition from World War II to the Cold War. During this period, politics was often presented as metaphysics. That is, the totalitarianism of both the Nazi right and the Stalinist left tended to be understood much as Babo’s actions were understood, as motiveless, driven by a hatred of freedom. Scholarship on
Benito Cereno
, and indeed, much of the scholarship on Melville in general, reflected this drift, with Amasa Delano’s “innocence” taken as a metaphor for an America that only reluctantly confronts evil in the world. A good example is Richard Chase’s 1950 study of Herman Melville, which uses Melville’s skepticism and awareness of evil to criticize Henry Wallace, the Progressive Party, and that section of the New Deal coalition that, after World War II, wanted to return to a focus on remedying economic injustice at home rather on than building up a military to contain the Soviet Union abroad (
Melville: A Critical Study
, New York: Macmillan, 1949). See Clare Spark,
Hunting Captain Ahab: Psychological Warfare and the Melville Revival
, Kent: Kent State University Press, 2001, for the definitive account of Cold War politics and Melville studies. Hershel Parker, in “Melville and Politics: A Scrutiny of the Political Milieux of Herman Melville’s Life and Works,” PhD dissertation, Northwestern University, 1963, p. 222, downplays
Benito Cereno
as a critique of racism: “Melville made no covert attack on American slavery in
Benito Cereno.
”

4
. Sterling Brown,
The Negro in American Fiction
, 1937, Arno Press, 1969, p. 13. Some scholars understood the story to be about slavery yet argued that it upheld, or was trapped in, racial assumptions. See Sidney Kaplan, “Herman Melville and the American National Sin: The Meaning of
‘Benito Cereno,’” Journal of Negro History
57 (1957): 12–27. Andrew Delbanco, “Melville in the ’80s,”
American Literary History
4 (Winter 1992): 709–25, describes post-Vietnam criticism of Melville. See also Marvin Fisher,
Going Under: Melville’s Short Fiction and the American 1850s
, Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977. For Sterling Brown’s influence, see Anthony Appiah, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., eds.
Africana: Arts and Letters: An A–Z Reference of Writers, Musicians and Artists of the African American Experience
, Philadelphia: Running Press, 2004, p. 114; “Sterling A. Brown, 87, Poet and Educator, is Dead,”
New York Times
, January 17, 1989.

5
. D. H. Lawrence,
Studies in Classic American Literature
, 1923, New York: Penguin, 1990, p. 153. For a description of the fleshy, squint-eyed “whiteness” on display in Delano’s portrait, see Max Putzel, “The Source and the Symbols of Melville’s ‘Benito Cereno,’”
American Literature
34 (May 1962): 196.

6
. Lewis Mumford,
Herman Melville: A Study of His Life and Vision
, New York: Harcourt, 1962 [1929]; p. 162; Percy Holmes Boynton,
More Contemporary Americans
, 1926, Freeport: Books for Libraries Press, 1967, p. 42.

7
.
Moby-Dick
, pp. 993–1001.

8
. According to Merton M. Sealts,
Melville’s Reading
, Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, p. 160, Melville consulted the following volume, now found in Harvard’s Houghton Library: Edmund Burke,
A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, with an Introductory Discourse concerning Taste, and Several Other Additions
, Philadelphia, printed for D. Johnson, Portland, by J. Watts, 1806. Quotations are found on pp. 219, 221, 223, 227–28.

9. THE SKIN TRADE

  
1
. Andrews,
Afro-Argentines
, p. 29; Archivo General de la Nación,
Acuerdos del Extinguido Cabildo de Buenos Aires
, Buenos Aires: Kraft, 1925, p. 212.

  
2
. For the
Susan
and
Louisiana
, see AGN (Buenos Aires) Sala IX “Comercio y padrones de esclavos, 1777–1808.”

  
3
. For examples of branding marks, see Olga Portuondo Zúñiga,
Entre esclvos y libres de Cuba colonial
, Santiago, Cuba: Editorial Oriente, 2003, pp. 35–43. For the decree, see Salmoral,
Regulación
, part 1, p. 147. For ongoing use of the brand, see Johnson,
Workshop of Revolution
, p. 38.

  
4
. AGN (Lima), notary record, Emeterio Andrés Valenciano, no. 72b, f. 689; AGN (Lima), notary record, Francisco Munarris, no. 449, f. 29. See also the discussion in Kris E. Lane,
Quito 1599: City and Colony in Transition
, Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2002, p. 65; Alejandro de la Fuente,
Havana and the Atlantic in the Sixteenth Century
, Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008, p. 149.

  
5
. AGN (Buenos Aires), notary record, registro 6, 1803 (Inocencio Agrelo), ff. 244–46;
Documentos del archivo de Belgrano
, vol. 2, Buenos Aires: Coni Hermanos, 1913, p. 334.

  
6
. Dirección General de Estadística,
Registro estadístico de la Provincia de Buenos Aires
, vol. 11, Buenos Aires: Dirección General de Estadística, 1867, p. 6; Studer,
La trata
, p. 202. Federico Gualberto Garrell,
La Gduana: Su origin, su evolución
, Buenos Aires: Editorial I. A. R. A., 1967, p. 121.

  
7
. John Horace Parry,
The Spanish Seaborne Empire
, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990, p. 308, writes that the “first large-scale
saladeros
, salting beef for export, were established at Buenos Aires about 1776.”

  
8
.
Household Words: A Weekly Journal
, January 25, 1851.

  
9
. See Francisco de Solano,
Esclavitud y derechos humanos: La lucha por la libertad del negro en el siglo XIX
, ed. Agustín Guimerá Ravina, Madrid: CSIC, 1990, p. 629; José Pedro Barrán and Benjamín Nahum,
Historia rural del Uruguay moderno: 1851–1885
, 2 vols., Montevideo: Ediciones de la Banda Oriental, 1967; Alex Borucki, Karla Chagas, and Natalia Stalla,
Esclavitud y trabajo: Un estudio sobre los afrodescendientes en la frontera uruguaya (1835–1855)
, Montevideo: Pulmón Ediciones, 2004, pp. 18–22; Andrews,
Afro-Argentines
, p. 31; Alfredo Montoya,
Historia de los saladeros argentinos
, Buenos Aires: Editorial Raigal, 1956, p. 22. For a firsthand description of how slavery spurred the growth of meat salting in Río de la Plata, see the lengthy testimony of the slave trader José Ramón Milá de la Roca, who claimed to have “perfected” the salting process; AGI (Seville), Buenos Aires, 483 (“Testimonio de Ramón Milá de la Roca,” May 29, 1807).

10
. Jonathan Brown,
A Brief History of Argentina
, New York: Facts on File, 2003, p. 111.

11
. Benjamín Vicuña Mackenna,
La Argentina en el año 1855
, Buenos Aires: Americana, 1936, p. 131.

12
. Lin Widmann,
Twigs of a Tree: A Family Tale
, Bloomington: AuthorHouse, 2012, p. 79.

13
. AGI, Buenos Aires, 588, Expedientes de Consulados y Comercio, 1804–06 (“Carta del virrey del Río de la Plata a su Majestad”); AGI, Gobierno, Indiferente 2826, ff. 776–89; Lucía Sala de Tourón, Nelson de la Torre, and Julio C. Rodríguez,
Estructura económico-social de la colonia
, Montevideo: Ediciones Pueblos Unidos, 1967, p. 30. See the “slavery collection” of the New-York Historical Society for Rhode Island slavers doing such business: letter from Thomas White to Messrs. Gardner and Dean, March 17, 1806, series II: Gardner and Dean; letter from Samuel Chase to Messrs. Vernon and Gardner, August 4, 1798, series I: Samuel and William Vernon; unsigned, undated account record of trade, Slavery Collection, [1798?], series I: Samuel and William Vernon; Messrs. Vernon Gardner & Co. owners of ship
Ascensión
in account current with Samuel Chace, November 17, 1798, series I: Samuel and William Vernon; and Account of Sales of the
Ascensión
’s Cargo of Slaves…, March 24, 1798, series I: Samuel and William Vernon.

14
. For Milá de la Roca’s failure as a slaver, see AGI (Seville), Buenos Aires, 483, “Testimonio José Ramón Milá de la Roca”; Arturo Ariel Bentancur,
El Puerto Colonial de Montevideo: Guerras y apertura comercial
, Montevideo: Universidad de la Republica, 1997, pp. 255–60. For Romero’s success, see AGI (Seville), Buenos Aires, 592, “Expedientos sobre permiso para la introducción de negros, 1798–1805”; AGN (Buenos Aires), División Colonia, Sección Gobierno, Tribunales, legajo 94, expediente 17, IX-36-7-3 (“Autos sobre la participación de Tomás Antonio Romero en el contrabando”);
La revista de Buenos Aires
18 (1869): 177; AGI (Seville), Gobierno, Indiferente 2826, ff. 369–423; AGN (Buenos Aires), Navíos, Topografía, 10-4-7 (“Valor de los frutos extraídas de cuenta de don Tomás Antonio Romero como producto de esclavatura”); Borucki, “Slave Trade,” p. 99; Jeremy Adelman,
Republic of Capital: Buenos Aires and the Legal Transformation of the Atlantic World
, Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999, pp. 44, 74; Eduardo R. Saguier,
Genealogía de la Tragedia Argentina (1600–1900)
, vol. 1, “La cultura como espacio de lucha,” available at
http://www.er-saguier.org/obras/gta/indice.php
accessed July 26, 2011; Germán O. E. Tjarks,
El Consulado de Buenos Aires y sus proyecciones en la historia del Río de la Plata
, vol. 2, Buenos Aires: Universidad de Buenos Aires, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, 1962, p. 569; Susan Migden Socolow,
The Bureaucrats of Buenos Aires, 1769–1810: Amor al Real Servicio
, Durham: Duke University Press, 1987, pp. 236–41; Sigfrido Augusto Radaelli,
Memorias de los Virreyes del Río de la Plata
, Buenos Aires: Editorial Bajel, 1945, p. 393; Studer,
La trata
, p. 288; AGI (Seville), Buenos Aires, 592, 1798 (“Testimonio de expediente promovido por Don Tomás Antonio Romero”); Berenice Jacobs, “The
Mary Ann
, an Illicit Adventure,”
Hispanic American Historical Review
37 (May 1957): 200–12; John Brown Carter Library, Brown and Ives Papers, Sub-Series L: Schooner
Eliza
, and Sub-Series FF: Ship
Mary Ann
. For shortage of currency, see David Rock,
Argentina, 1516–1987
, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985, p. 71.