Aesthetic Materialism by Gilmore Paul;

Author:Gilmore, Paul;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2011-07-25T16:00:00+00:00

Here, as in other commentary, the telegraph promotes the “civilization of the world” by encouraging the free exchange of thought and by unifying human “consciousness” “under the dominion of one science and one art.” This passage indicates, however, that the telegraph’s “civilization of the world” will include the dismantling of the “prejudices and hostilities” which have separated “race from race.”23 H. L. Wayland made an even more specific case for how the telegraph would lead to “the peaceful termination of slavery.”24 While “the horrors of slavery chiefly exist. . . on remote and unvisited plantations,” the telegraph’s “extension of the means of rapid and universal communication gives every man who is injured an appeal to the tribunal of the whole civilized world” (798–799). Rather than having to call on God for salvation, Uncle Tom, Wayland seems to imply, will now be able to wire for help. For Wayland, the telegraph forwards the anti-slavery cause not only by linking the slave to the “civilized world,” but also by encouraging men of different nations “to palliate the faults and to appreciate the virtues of each other” (802). Where spiritual and sentimental electricity imagined a world joined through a common spirituality fostered through the feelings conjured up by reading about the experiences of others, Wayland and similar commentators echo the techno-utopian discourse discussed in chapter one by suggesting that the telegraph would end slavery both by disclosing hidden crimes and by uniting the interests of all humankind.

Most of Douglass’s allusions to the telegraph or other forms of technology follow this line of thought.25 In an 1849 North Star article on international affairs, for example, he opined that “The power of international opinion is just beginning to be understood and appreciated. Steam-navigation, railroads and electric telegraphs are bearing on their flashing wings the power of intelligence to quarters hitherto insensible to the world about them. We live at a period which may be regarded as the dawn of that day when ‘the pen shall supercede the sword,’ and when mind shall be directed by intelligence, and not crushed and cramped by the iron hoofs of war and slavery.”26 New technologies, especially the telegraph, foster the accession of the pen, of thought and reason, to the throne of power, by spreading intelligence (in the form of flashes) throughout the world. Douglass similarly concludes the January, 1855, lecture in which he speaks of the “flash” from Stowe’s intellect by linking progress, nature, and abolitionism: “The growth of intelligence, the influence of commerce, steam, wind, and lightning, are our allies. It would be easy to amplify this summary, and to swell the vast conglomeration of our material forces; but there is a deeper and truer method of measuring the power of our cause. . . . The slave is bound to mankind, by the powerful and inextricable net-work of human brotherhood” (Life and Works 2:357). That network is both spiritual and material. It is spiritual in “the affinities recognized and established by the Almighty” (Life and Works 2:357) and exemplified by the universal desire for freedom.

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