The Power to Die by Terri L. Snyder

Author:Terri L. Snyder [Snyder, Terri L.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, United States, Colonial Period (1600-1775), Social Science, Ethnic Studies, American, African American & Black Studies
ISBN: 9780226280738
Google: 6hBDCgAAQBAJ
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2015-08-28T03:12:51+00:00

6.1. Songs were written using The Dying Negro as their title. The lyrics elided references to suicide or self-destruction and described death as a welcome friend. Source: Music Collections, The British Library Board, London. The Dying Negro: A Much Admired New Song, By Mr. Hook. Published by Him at his Musical Circulating Library (Dublin, 1800).

The Dying Negro used the guise of an autobiographical epistle, but its protagonist did not, of course, compose the poem. Yet like later eighteenth-century slave narratives, most notably the account of Olaudah Equiano, The Dying Negro recounts the protagonist’s African origins and his capture by Europeans before describing the cruelty of separation from his homeland and the brutality of labor regimes in the Americas.43 After suffering these hardships, however, he sees a chance for liberty when he travels with his owner to London, where, once on British soil, as he believes is his right, he runs away to claim his freedom. According a contemporaneous issue of the Virginia Gazette, the belief that there was no slavery in England was “prevalent” among American slaves.44 In order to allow readers to understand the protagonist’s choice of death over slavery, the first chord The Dying Negro strikes is the denial of natural rights: the unnamed slave has the right to chose death over the tyranny of slavery. As he explains, slavery is an erasure of personhood: slavery is like “becoming a thing without a name” in a traffic directed by those who lust for gold. He has a natural right to refuse the tyranny constituted by that erasure.45 According to Brycchan Carey, this was “probably the first time many people had come across” a natural rights argument against slavery.46

In addition to the political currency of natural rights philosophy, The Dying Negro struck a note with a religious readership as well. The poem treats the protagonist’s suicide as a moral response to the sinfulness of slavery.47 Civilized readers were to fear God’s “dreadful mercy”; and yet the unnamed slave’s power to die was depicted as divinely sanctioned. “Flashing lightning” is a “dreadful sign” that God approves of the suicide. In the last stanza, the slave notes that it was at God’s “great call” that he has “spilt” his being.48 The idea that God approved of suicide was a radical one in terms of Anglo-American law and religion. In this sense, the writers framed the slave as a religious martyr who died in the service of a greater good. How this played with an Anglo-American audience, however, is less than clear. In England, where the poem was first published, the traditional penalties for suicide—forfeiture, profane burial, postmortem desecration—persisted longer than elsewhere in Europe, well into the nineteenth century, despite escalating arguments for decriminalization.49 Criminal suicide remained on the books in some North American jurisdictions until after the American Revolution.50

At the same time, some phrases in the poem echoed the traditional religious condemnation of suicide. Portions of the poem, for instance, have double meanings that reveal tensions between longstanding beliefs that suicide

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