In the thirty-five years before the Civil War, it became
increasingly difficult for Americans outside the world of politics
to have frank and open discussions about the institution of
slavery, as divisive sectionalism and heated ideological rhetoric
circumscribed public debate. To talk about slavery was to
explore-or deny-its obvious shortcomings, its inhumanity, its
contradictions. To celebrate it required explaining away the
nation's proclaimed belief in equality and its public promise of
rights for all, while to condemn it was to insult people who might
be related by ties of blood, friendship, or business, and perhaps
even to threaten the very economy and political stability of the
nation. For this reason, Paul D. Naish argues, Americans displaced
their most provocative criticisms and darkest fears about the
institution onto Latin America. Naish bolsters this seemingly
counterintuitive argument with a compelling focus on realms of
public expression that have drawn sparse attention in previous
scholarship on this era. In novels, diaries, correspondence, and
scientific writings, he contends, the heat and bluster of the
political arena was muted, and discussions of slavery staged in
these venues often turned their attention south of the Rio Grande.
At once familiar and foreign, Cuba, Brazil, Haiti, and the
independent republics of Spanish America provided rhetorical
landscapes about which everyday citizens could speak, through both
outright comparisons or implicit metaphors, what might otherwise be
unsayable when talking about slavery at home. At a time of ominous
sectional fracture, Americans of many persuasions-Northerners and
Southerners, Whigs and Democrats, scholars secure in their
libraries and settlers vulnerable on the Mexican frontier-found
unity in their disparagement of Latin America. This displacement of
anxiety helped create a superficial feeling of nationalism as the
country careened toward disunity of the most violent, politically
charged, and consequential sort.
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