"A Christian Nation Calls for its Wandering Children": Life, Liberty, Liberia

Abstract

Nations mete death. An array of theoretical and historical studies, from those by Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben to those by Orlando Patterson and Russ Castronovo, locate the juridical and punitive power of the nation-state as the singular force of “legitimate” violence in the modern world. By all of these accounts, nations administer death among their own populations, and social markers of population difference (caste, race, and servitude among them) legitimate the modern nation's violence against its own. In the context of such critical attention to death, this essay attempts to recover a corollary account of national life, a historically particular moment of optimism in the power and promise of the nation. This moment comes in the mid-nineteenth century, when social critics in the US were faced with an unacceptable slave economy in the rural South and an undesirable prospect of racial integration in the urban North. Their optimism took the form of the supposition that nations could be made to mete life, not death, if only their populations were adequately homogenous, unmarked by differences like race. For such thinkers, the solution to the twin problems of antebellum slavery and race prejudice was to proliferate the nation as a form or template for all kinds of social aggregation. Drawing examples from bedfellows as unlikely as Sarah J. Hale and Martin R. Delany, this essay argues that through the 1850s, both thinkers imagine that racial difference provides the basis for national affiliation, so that each race ought to have its own nation.1 Rather than proposing a strict liberal nationalism, however, both Hale and Delany also suppose that the nation becomes a basis for affiliation through a particular application of Christian teleology. Their thought accordingly invites a reconsideration of the degree to which the nation form has been a primarily secular entity in American intellectual history. I argue that by conjoining religion with nation, Hale and Delany contribute, indirectly but surely, to the secularization of social and political life in the nineteenth century.