Freneau and Guilt

Philip Freneau’s “To Sir Toby” and “The Indian Burying Ground” may represent an encouraging shift in views of race within the American tradition, but they also raise questions about the ways in which pity for the oppressed can compound the problem of oppression. I am confident that readers of these two poems will immediately recognize examples of Freneau’s sympathy for slaves and admiration for Natives, so my purpose here is to push some of these ideas a bit further by pointing out the ways in which both poems redefine racial hierarchy rather than eliminating it.

The slaves on Sir Toby’s plantation are in hell–that much is clear. They are “driven by a devil, whom men call overseer” and chafe under “the monster’s reign” (lines 34, 17). In the final two stanzas, Freneau associates the arrival of slaves in America with the arrival of the damned in Hades, a powerful redefinition of national identity designed to remind readers, and rightly so, that independence from Britain was merely a baby step toward freedom. Well and good.

However, the “black herd” (line 14) that Freneau describes (unfortunately reinforcing the association of minorities with animals) seems powerless to save itself, and if the slaves are in hell, then they are ostensibly in need of saviors. White abolitionists could thus take on the role of messiahs come to overthrow the diabolical slaveowner. The danger of metaphor is evident here in the ways that Freneau’s metaphor of hell suggests that slaves either serve the Christ-like master or the Satanic one, rather than saving themselves. Some readers may object that this is holding Freneau to an unfair standard of social justice, and such readers would likely consider our time to be more advanced than the era described in the poem. So it is. Yet, Freneau’s distorted vision remains with us.

Guilt allows us to overlook the annoying complexities of the race problem, because it encourages pity, and pity gives rise to the Messiah complex. A friend of mine repeated this pattern frequently in relationships. He sought out women who had baggage of some sort from a previous marriage or from emotional distress of some sort, and it gave him great pleasure to become a kind of caregiver. This, however, is a poor basis for love, because part of what he enjoyed was the sense of superiority that accompanied his position as caregiver. In every case, he would eventually grow frustrated by his inability to respect his partner, and the entire liaison would crumble.

Freneau’s hell metaphor is dangerous precisely for these reasons. The ghetto may well be a hell, a present-day version of the cotton field, but guilt and pity will not make it disappear. The oppressed must become their own saviors, and those more fortunate can facilitate this liberation without perpetuating the condescension implicit in Freneau’s otherwise well-meaning lines.

Much of “The Indian Burying Ground” similarly seeks to assuage guilt, only instead of pity Freneau relies on nostalgia, which is also a dangerous way of evading the root of the race problem. Freneau begins the poem by imagining the Indian released from life and “seated with his friends” in the spirit world, where he “shares again the joyous feast” (lines 6, 8). Native culture is conveniently celebrated in the present tense only in the afterlife, where the “fancies of a ruder race” live on (line 24). While the “hunter still the deer pursues,” they do not do so in the flesh and blood, but as “a shade,” or as “shadows and delusions” (lines 35, 36, 40). The lovely language in the poem paints a seductive picture, but the enticements of this romanticized view of Native tradition are significantly corrupted when one remembers that Native culture was still thriving on the Great Plains and in the American West when the poem was written. Freneau thus assuages his guilt by sighing over the relics of a lost culture that is, in fact, not lost at all and whose demise need not have been an inevitable outcome of western expansion.

It is thoroughly refreshing to read a counterpoint to Rowlandson’s caricature of the Narragansetts as “hell-hounds,” but the end result is ultimately the same. Scarcely ten years after “The Indian Burying Ground” was published, Lewis and Clark wrote their first journal entries on the long trek into the West, a journey that was touted as the same sort of discovery mission that the conquistadores of seventeenth-century Spain had undertaken. It would not be long before the U.S. Cavalry was sweeping across present-day Nebraska and South Dakota, working its way toward Little Bighorn, where Custer died as a result (surprise!) of his vision of conquest, as if America had learned nothing at all about the race problem since 1492.