‘Comparative Liberty’: John Mitchel’s Jail Journal and Austin Reed’s The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict

Abstract

In Jail Journal (1854), John Mitchel describes receiving a hero’s welcome on his arrival in Brooklyn as an escaped convict on 29 November 1853. That same day, Austin Reed was enjoying one of his rare periods of freedom from New York State penal institutions. Reed’s recently discovered memoir, The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict ( c.1858–9) – the earliest known prison memoir by an African American – uses his experiences of institutional confinement to interrogate the United States’ racialized system of constrained freedoms. By contrast, for Mitchel, freedom means escaping from the metropolitan bustle of the US North to meet fellow slavery advocates in Virginia, an account which is only briefly summarized by the editor of his memoir. Drawing on Orlando Patterson’s tripartite concept of personal, sovereignal and civic freedom, this essay examines the forms of freedom foregrounded in Reed’s and Mitchel’s prison narratives. While Reed focuses on personal freedom, Mitchel is predominantly concerned with sovereignal and civic freedom. By focusing on their common compositional contexts, the essay explores what a comparative approach to institutional confinement can teach us about the concepts of freedom conceptualized in ‘black and green’ zones of cultural contest and interchange (Lloyd and O’Neill 2009).