Fullfilling the Promise: Race and Gender in Ante-Bellum America

It has always seemed strange to me how easily Americans compartmentalize their “morals” and “values” into paradoxical categories. On the one hand, Americans boast of a nation built on the idea that “all men are created equal” as written by Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence. On the other hand, many Americans supported slavery and saw blacks as inferior including Thomas Jefferson who in Notes on the State of Virginia declared “I advance it…that the blacks…are inferior to the whites in the endowments both of body and mind.” So the “men” in the Declaration apparently meant “white” men only. Of course the word “men” also does not include women who suffered a more subtle inequality than blacks, but one that was just as unfair.
After reading works like “David Walker’s Appeal in Four Articles,” Margaret Fuller’s The Great Lawsuit, Frederick Douglas’s “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”, or Elizabeth Drew Stoddards “Lemorre v. Huell,” it seems hard to argue that these African American and women writers are inferior to white men. So where does this blindness to the apparent talents and abilities of both African Americans and women come from? I guess it was easy for white men, who held all governmental offices, ran the countries corporations, and sat on the boards of most universities to assume this status quo existed because they were in some way superior to women and African Americans or in a Social Darwinian sense—the fittest. That argument may seem logical until you think about the fact that they have slaves and they have wives because they cannot seem to figure out how to survive without them. Take away the oppression of African Americans and women; erase history and put them all on a level playing field, and then see how the status quo looks.
Erasing history may be impossible, but there have been steps taken to change the future status quo. The Civil War, the 13th, 14th, 15th, and 19th amendments, the Civil Rights Act, and various other governmental acts have been the most obvious legal steps to equality. The legal reality, however, is still ahead of the cultural reality. American culture has improved dramatically from the days of Thomas Jefferson, Frederick Douglas, Margaret Fuller, and even Martin Luther King Jr., but it is not there yet. These great figures just mentioned would be astounded to know that we now will have for the first time either a woman, Hillary Clinton, or an African American man, Barak Obama, as the democratic presidential nominee. However, the sad fact is that these candidates are so unique for their identities as either female or black. If all were equal, it wouldn’t be such a big deal that Hillary Clinton is a woman, and Barack Obama is a black man. When we get to the day when a woman is just a candidate and a black man is just her opponent, or when a voter doesn’t have to check whether she is female or male or whether she is white or black, then maybe we will truly understand what equality means.

The (Over) Confidence Man

I find myself anything but confident after reading this book, which may have been Melville's goal. I could hardly tell which character was which as the confidence man constantly changed disguises and talked to the other characters, who, for the most part, lacked names. I was overloaded with allusions--classical, biblical, periodical, etc., which thankfully were explained by the Norton critical edition of the text I was reading, but unfortunately so dense themselves that they only confused me more. By repetition, however, I did understand that Melville was toying with American confidence and optimism. As the Norton text suggests, I also could see the confidence man as a devil figure or an Emersonian figure--not to suggest that Emerson is the devil, but merely that both figures use confidence to their advantage. The biblical devil can take on many disguises, quote scripture to his advantage (twist truth), and play to human weakness. In this book, the confidence man uses his understanding of human character to play to the vulnerable spots of his victims, whether it be their gullibility, hubris, optimism, sense of duty, or greed, and trick them into putting confidence in him. Emerson, like the confidence man, is an agent of this false confidence that Melville is condemning. Melville seems to be going back to the Puritans, to the day of the original sin and fallible man, warning America about excessive optimism and confidence similar to Hawthorne's warning about human confidence in stories like "The Birthmark." One of the most striking passages/images in the book (I can't quite bring myself to call it a novel) is when the confidence man is describing his thoughts upon his supposed visit to the world's fair hosted in the Crystal Palace: "As I dwelt upon that shining pageant of arts, and moving concourse of nations, and reflected that here was the pride of the world glorying in a glass house, a sense of the fragility of worldly grandeur profoundly impressed me"(47). In this passage he wonders at the confidence that humanity can have in such a fragile world. In a similar way, Melville wonders at the extreme confidence exuding from the thoughts of the Transcendentalists especially in America—a country so young that it has hardly had time to prove itself. I don’t think that Melville means to imply that confidence in all forms is bad, just over-confidence or blind optimism—everything in moderation, as the saying goes, is not bad advice.