Naomi C. ReedColumbia University

*NOTE: A summary of the novel follows the endnotes*

The Wagers of Whiteness, The Wagers of BlacknessGambling and Race in Pudd’nhead Wilson

In the late 1980s, Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson (PW [1894]) was rediscovered by literary

critics interested in the negotiation of race in American literature. The text poses the question: if a

“black” baby who is phenotypically “white” is raised as a white man, is there a solvency to his blackness

that will make its presence known?1 Critics have seen the novel as a literary harbinger of Plessy v.

Ferguson (1896), the landmark Supreme Court case that found intra-state railroad segregation

constitutional, a line of criticism inaugurated by Eric Sundquist, who argued that the “fanatical adherence

to ‘one-drop’ definitions of negritude” that Plessy relied on also dominates the end of Twain’s novel.2

But while Sundquist’s reading of the novel has an obvious force, it fails to attend to the engine of much of

the novel: Tom Driscoll’s compulsion to gamble, which leaves him at risk of being disinherited by his

uncle, Judge Driscoll, and sends him on a devolving spree of thefts that culminate in his uncle’s murder.

If the gambit of PW is whether or not Tom’s “blackness” will be rendered legible, we must think about

Tom’s “blackness” through Tom’s gambling, for it is the recurrent cycle of debt and theft initiated by his

gambling that leads to the murder and thus to his unmasking as black and as a slave. Gambling thus

provides a means to see PW’s management of racial difference as a question not only of biology but also

of economic behavior, specifically behavior towards property.3

The logic of race based on economic behavior is evident in two lines of legal inquiry at the close

of the nineteenth century. The first line comes out of Plessy. Homer Plessy argued that segregation

deprived him of the property of his reputation of whiteness; the Court denied his claim by scrupulously

guarding a biologically defined whiteness as a property interest. When Plessy is read with its competing

property claims in mind, it can be productively put in the context of the Supreme Court’s turn-of-the-

century interpretation of property rights, spawned by the Fourteenth Amendment. The Court’s protection

of property rights was inextricable from its understanding of the liberty also guaranteed by the equal

protection clause of that Amendment, and in Plessy, the Court narrowly delineated the “liberties” of

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blacks by using the protection of property rights as an alibi. The second line of legal inquiry reveals that

Plessy was not representative of the majority of legal cases regarding segregation on the railroads. Earlier

challenges to railroad segregation rendered segregation as a matter, not of biology, but of behavior. This

broader legal-historical contextualization, along with a reading of the novel focused, not on biological

racial legibility, but on the legibility of race through behavior with property, ultimately paints a portrait of

late nineteenth-century American race relations in which it remained nearly impossible, as Saidiya

Hartman worries, “to unleash freedom from the history of property that secured it.”4

The plot of PW is set in motion when Percy Driscoll’s slave Roxy substitutes her son, Valet de

Chambre (hereafter “Tom”), for her master’s son, Thomas à Becket Driscoll (hereafter “Chambers”). But

Roxy’s substitution begins to unravel upon Tom’s return after two years at Yale, when we find him in an

illicit economic circuit: he repeatedly gambles himself into debt and then steals from his fellow townsfolk

to pay off that debt. Tom’s thefts are inextricable from his gambling; they are the textual manifestation of

Tom’s compulsive habit—his actual acts of gambling take place outside the narrative purview of the text.

To gamble in PW is thus to steal, but if gambling is theft, then Tom’s gambling is a sign of more than his

fiscal turpitude. It becomes a sign of his blackness, for theft in Dawson’s Landing is a racial trait.

On the fourth of September something happened in Percy Driscoll’s household that “profoundly

impressed” his slave Roxy, leading directly to her substitution of the babies (65). After missing a “small

sum” of money, Percy Driscoll determines that he has “a thief in his house” and quickly decides that

“necessarily, the thief must be one of his Negroes” (66). Gathering his slaves, Percy declares the

consequences of this crime: “You have all been warned before. It has done no good. This time I will

teach you a lesson. I will sell the thief. Which of you is the guilty one?” (66). Percy’s solution to the

thefts in his home is to counter theft with exchange (the sale of the slave). Percy’s lesson illustrates the

proper form of property transfer while at the same time driving home to the slaves their own status as

property. The implication of this double message is that, not owning themselves, Percy’s slaves are

necessarily excluded from property ownership and thus are unaware of or unfaithful to its protocols.

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Percy Driscoll’s lesson in property is quickly followed by a demand for confession: “‘I give you

one minute’ … ‘If at the end of that time you have not confessed, I will not only sell all four of you, but—

I will sell you DOWN THE RIVER!’” (68). He wants the thief to mark herself as such, to acknowledge

her guilt. Percy Driscoll’s disciplinary philosophy demands not merely that his slaves obey certain rules,

but rather that they internalize those rules, that they become self-disciplining. Percy’s lesson to his slaves,

moreover, is revealed to be a lesson in freedom. Percy sells three of the four slaves he calls together for

an interrogation that day. Only Roxy, who has not stolen from Percy, is not sold and, crucially, is in fact

freed by Percy at his death. Percy’s gesture suggests that Roxy is rewarded with freedom for her

innocence. Percy Driscoll thus renders self-possession—literally possessing oneself through freedom—

inextricable from an ability to form an appropriate relationship to property.

While the slaves have indeed taken money from Percy, a slave stole, the text tells us, “perfectly

sure that in taking this trifle from the man who daily robbed him of an inestimable treasure—his liberty—

he was not committing any sin that God would remember against him” (67-8). This sympathy expressed

for the slaves does not, however, carry over to Tom Driscoll. While Percy Driscoll’s slaves may be

justified because they are enslaved, Tom has no such justification. Tom’s thefts thus become a sign, not

of enslavement, but of blackness. In making thieving a racial trait rather than a product of circumstance,

1 Brook Thomas, “Tragedies of Race, Training, Birth, and Communities of Competent Pudd’nheads,” American Literary History 1 (Winter 1989): 761.

2 Eric J. Sundquist, “Mark Twain and Homer Plessy,” Representations 24 (Fall 1988): 103.

3 Prior to this late 1980s boom, critics of the text had often avoided discussing the racial themes of the novel. In 1970, George M. Spangler summed up earlier Pudd’nhead Wilson criticism: there are those who discuss race as a central theme and those who “argue for the centrality of the theme of environmental determinism and see slavery as a simply a metaphor for Twain’s more general concern with the influence of ‘training’ on the individual” (“Pudd’nhead Wilson: A Parable of Property,” American Literature 42 [March 1970]: 28). Spangler counts himself among the latter group, arguing that slavery in Pudd’nhead Wilson is meant to figure another form of slavery, “slavery to property, to economic motives” (37). In suggesting that chattel slavery functions in the text as merely a figure for greed, Spangler ignores the actual questions of property that set the text into motion. Roxy switches the babies because she does not want her son to grow up as property. See also Michael L. Ross, “Mark Twain’s Pudd’nhead Wilson: Dawson’s Landing and the Ladder of Nobility,” Novel 6 (Spring 1973): 244-56.

4 Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford UP, 1997), 119.

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PW opens up onto debates about race at the end of the nineteenth century, embodied by Plessy, for Plessy

is a property claim, one the Court denied by, in essence, calling Homer Plessy a thief.

The case was the product of Homer Plessy’s deliberate attempt to put a Louisiana law requiring

intra-state railroads to segregate passengers by race to a constitutional test. Homer Plessy boarded a

Louisiana train, sat in the whites-only car, and announced that he was black. The railroad conductor

instructed him to move to the blacks-only car; Plessy refused, and thus the lawsuit was born. The law

criminalized disobeying the conductor’s order to sit in a particular car, not the act of sitting in the wrong

car. Plessy’s attorney, Albion Tourgée, contended that, because race had neither a standard scientific nor

legal definition in Louisiana, the conductor had ordered Plessy into a racially segregated cars based on

nothing more than his opinion about Plessy’s race. How then, asked Tourgée, could it be constitutional

for the State to “declare a man guilty of a misdemeanor and subject to fine and imprisonment, because he

may differ with the officer of a railroad as to ‘the race to which he belongs?’”5

The conductor’s insistence that Plessy leave the whites-only car impinged on his property rights,

which should have been protected by the Fourteenth Amendment’s guarantee of due process:

the reputation of belonging to the dominant race, in this instance the white race, is property, in the same sense that a right of action or of inheritance is property; and that the provisions of the act in question … enables [the conductor] to deprive him … of this property—this reputation which has actual pecuniary value—“without due process.”6

Tourgée argued that the reputation of whiteness, because it had pecuniary value, was a form of property.

Therefore, to take away someone’s reputation of whiteness was to steal from him, making railroad

segregation akin to highway robbery. The Court countered by declaring Plessy’s property claim invalid:

5 Olsen, The Thin Disguise, 81. The court did not deny a railroad conductor made racial determinations “at his peril,” but they held that the issue before the court was not, in fact, the constitutionality of the various decisions of railroad conductors but the constitutionality of the statute: “the power to assign to a particular coach obviously implies the power to determine to which race the passenger belongs, as well as the power to determine who, under the laws of the particular State, is to be deemed a white, and who a colored person. This question, though indicated in the brief of the plaintiff in error, does not properly arise upon the record in this case, since the only issue made is as to the unconstitutionality of the act, so far as it requires the railway to provide separate accommodations” (110).

6 Olsen, The Thin Disguise, 83. The limit of Tourgée’s argument was that this form of property was available only to those who could pass for white.

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It is claimed by [Plessy] that … the reputation of belonging to the dominant race, in this instance the white race, is property, in the same sense that a right of action, or of inheritance, is property. Conceding this to be so … we are unable to see how this statute deprives him of, or in any way affects his right to, such property. If he be a white man and assigned to a colored coach, he may have his action for damages against the company for being deprived of his so called property. Upon the other hand, if he be a colored man and be so assigned he has been deprived of no property, since he is not lawfully entitled to the reputation of being a white man.7

In rejecting Tourgée’s argument, the Supreme Court did not hold that a reputation of whiteness was not

property—the Court “conced[ed] this to be so”—it found, rather, that Plessy was “not lawfully entitled”

to the property in question and thus could not be deprived of something he did not legally own.

Many legal and literary scholars, including Sundquist, have argued that the ground for Plessy was

prepared by the 1873 Slaughter-House case, regularly seen as the beginning of a long process of

weakening the Fourteenth Amendment.8 The majority opinion in Slaughter-House limited the scope of

the amendment by articulating state and federal citizenship as entirely separate. Plessy relied on this

severing of state and federal citizenship to uphold intra-state railroad segregation. (The Court had

previously found inter-state railroad segregation unconstitutional; inter-state commerce was one of the

few things that fell under federal jurisdiction.9) But Plessy was in fact out of step with the interpretation of

the amendment that then dominated the court, for the amendment had not been weakened so much as

strengthened, specifically as a protection of property rights. I return to Slaughter-House, therefore, to

open up a different reading of the relationship between Plessy and the Fourteenth Amendment.

The Slaughter-House case involved a Louisiana law giving one company a monopoly on

slaughter-houses in New Orleans. Butchers were required to use this centralized slaughter-house and

were charged fees to do so. The butchers sued under the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments, arguing

that the law established a monopoly and thereby deprived them of both their property and their liberty.

7 Olsen, The Thin Disguise, 110-11. 8 The Slaughter-House Cases were a series of individual cases combined and dealt with as one by the Court.

9 Albion Tourgée had tried to challenge the Louisiana law in 1892 with Daniel F. Desdunes, who, like Plessy, refused to abide by a conductor’s order to move to the blacks-only car. But Desdunes had bought a ticket for a journey from Louisville to Nashville, and so was engaged in inter-state travel. See Otto H. Olsen, ed., The Thin Disguise: Turning Point in Negro History; Plessy v. Ferguson, A Documentary Presentation (1864-1896) (New York: Humanities, 1967), 12-13.

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According to the butchers, the monopoly resulted in a form of “involuntary servitude” forbidden by the

Thirteenth Amendment. This servitude was not just literal enslavement, they argued, but the inability to

use one’s own property, whether that property be tangible (like a slaughter-house) or intangible (like the

right to practice one’s profession). They argued a nearly identical claim about the way the law violated

the Fourteenth Amendment: “the right to labor, the right to one’s self physically and intellectually, and to

the product of one’s own faculties, is past doubt property, and property of a sacred kind.”10 For the

butchers, the definitions of liberty and property collapse into one another: liberty is the freedom to do

what one will with property; property is meaningless without the liberty to do with it as one pleases.

The majority of the Court, however, refused to acknowledge or protect the intangible property of

the butchers’ right to practice their profession by separating state and federal citizenship: states had the

right to regulate businesses for the “comfort, health, and prosperity of the State,” and such exercise of the

state’s police powers did not violate the Fourteenth Amendment.11 The Court in Slaughter-House saw

both the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments as applying narrowly and specifically to the newly freed

slaves they had been passed to protect.12 The Amendments were not, the majority asserted, cause for a

discussion of property and property rights, and they certainly gave no cause, as the butchers thought they

did, to articulate liberty through property rights.

The three justices in the minority, however, believed, like the butchers, that property and liberty

were inextricable and indeed by the 1880s it was the minority justices’ articulation of property and liberty

in and through one another that had come to dominate the Court’s thinking.13 Lower courts and the

10

? Slaughter-House, 38.

11 Slaughter-House, 50.

12 The Court wrote: “To withdraw the mind from the contemplation of this grand yet simple declaration of the personal freedom of all the human race within the jurisdiction of this government---a declaration designed to establish freedom of four millions of slaves—and with a microscopic search endeavor to find in it a reference to servitudes, which may have been attached to property in certain localities, requires an effort, to say the least of it” (61).

13 The Thirteenth Amendment would drop out of this debate as it came to be understood as applicable only to questions of actual servitude or slavery.

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Supreme Court itself had begun to cite Bradley’s minority opinion—not the majority decision—as

precedent. Beginning in the 1880s, the Court thus repeatedly interarticulated property and liberty, and by

the time of Plessy this interarticulation was quite clearly the Court’s dominant interpretation of the scope

of the Fourteenth Amendment.14 For example, ten months after Plessy, in the case of Allgeyer v.

Louisiana (1897), a unanimous court held that:

The liberty mentioned in [the Fourteenth] Amendment means not only the right of the citizen to be free from physical restraint of his person, but the term is deemed to embrace the right of the citizen to be free in the enjoyment of all his faculties; to be free to use them in all lawful ways; to live and work where he will; to earn his livelihood by any lawful calling; to pursue any livelihood or avocation, and for that purpose to enter into all contracts which may be proper, necessary, and essential to his carrying out to a successful conclusion the purposes above mentioned.15

If the Fourteenth Amendment guaranteed liberty, it did so only by also guaranteeing an expansive

definition of property, and property was defined in Allgeyer in precisely the intangible terms the butchers

had argued for: the freedom to enjoy one’s own faculties, the freedom to practice one’s profession. 16

Further, Allgeyer was an opinion self-consciously against Slaughter-House, with Justice Bradley’s dissent

from Slaughter-House cited as precedent. When Plessy is put in a genealogy only with Slaughter-House,

it cannot help but seem the inevitable culmination of a long tradition of eroding the purview of the

Fourteenth Amendment. But a broader history of the Court’s decisions from the 1870s until the end of

the century reveals that the Fourteenth Amendment’s power was regularly buttressed and expanded by the

Court through the gradual interarticulation of the categories of liberty and property. By 1896, Slaughter-

House no longer obtained and Plessy was argued under, not a weak Fourteenth Amendment, but a strong

one. Tourgée’s argument that racial segregation was a violation of property rights should have landed on

14 Cheryl Harris writes that “[p]roperty was a critical dimension of liberty … Liberty was predicated on independence which in turn was predicated on property ownership” (“Finding Sojourner’s Truth: Race, Gender, and the Institution of Property,” Cardozo Law Review 18 [November 1996]: 343).15

? Allgeyer v. Louisiana (165 U.S. 578), 835.16

? In 1908, legal scholar Roscoe Pound complained “The absolute certainty which is one of our legal ideals, an ideal responsible for much that is irritatingly mechanical in our legal system, is demanded chiefly to protect property. And our courts regard the right to contract, not as a phase of liberty—a sort of freedom of mental motion and locomotion—but as a phase of property, to be protected as such” (461).

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sympathetic ears; the Court’s deafness to Plessy’s claim suggests that racial distinctions caused the Court

to contradict its own broad definition of property.

And yet the Court’s decision that Plessy was not “lawfully entitled to the reputation of being a

white man” hints that this decision was made through a defense of property rights, not a willful disregard

for them. We are thus left with the task of accounting for exactly how the Court was able to dismiss

Plessy’s property claim despite its history of protecting property expansively. In finding that if “a colored

man” is assigned to a black-only coach, “he has been deprived of no property, since he is not lawfully

entitled to the reputation of being a white man,” the Court in effect held that even if Plessy could earn the

reputation of being a white man, he would not be entitled to that reputation because he was not actually a

white man. The reputation of whiteness was collapsed into “whiteness,” but whiteness itself amounted to

reputation—the reputation that, because one’s parents were reputedly white, and their parents were

reputedly white, and so on, one was oneself white. The Court’s rejection of the category of reputation

produced the fiction that whiteness was a tangible property upon which the intangible property of

reputation rested, but this was undoubtedly a fiction, as the Court’s refusal to define whiteness evidenced.

The Court contradicted its expansive protections of property in refusing to recognize Plessy’s

reputation, for indeed reputation, “as an aspect of identity earned through effort,” could be and often was

considered property.17 But with the property status of reputation dismissed, the Court forcefully

reasserted property rights in its vigorous protection of whiteness (however ill-defined) as a property. The

Court transformed Plessy’s claim to have been deprived of property into evidence that Plessy was himself

trying to claim property to which he was not “lawfully entitled.” The Court both contradicted and relied

on its own expansive protections of property in the Plessy decision, and managed this contradiction and

reliance through biological definitions of race. To see in Plessy only or primarily the triumph of

biological definitions of race is therefore to miss the way in which biological definitions of race were

mobilized to articulate and defend racialized property.

17 Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” 282.

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This reading of Plessy as a contest over property rights suggests that Plessy’s claim was denied

on the basis of the strength of the Fourteenth Amendment as it was developed in the 1880s and 1890s,

not, as scholars have contended, its gradual degradation. The decision depicted property as under threat

from blacks and thus juxtaposed the protection of the property/liberty rights guaranteed by the

Amendment to the citizenship rights of blacks, finding the protection of property/liberty to be the more

persuasive claim.18 Further, Plessy suggests that whites and blacks continued to be differentiated by their

relationship to property: while during slavery blacks had been property, Plessy and PW illustrate that at

the turn of the century, blacks were rendered a threat to property, both because they were thought to be

thieves who failed to abide by or understand rights of possession, and because, as I will detail below, they

lacked, more fundamentally, self-possession.

My reading of Plessy depends on the work of critical race theorists, most notably Cheryl Harris,

who has demonstrated the ways in which whiteness has been protected as a form of property. I want,

however, to turn a more critical eye to this formulation. The protection of whiteness as a form of property

comes out of race-based chattel slavery, during which “[w]hiteness became a shield from slavery, a

highly volatile and unstable form of property.”19 Because whiteness protected one from being property, it

came to function as property. But in Harris’s work, whiteness functions as a property interest in much the

same way after slavery as it does during slavery. But blacks’ changing relationship to property was in

fact accompanied by a change in the relationship of whiteness to property. No longer distinguished from

18 In Justice Harlan’s dissent from the Plessy majority, he brokered a bond between blacks and whites as Americans by invoking the “Chinaman:” “There is a race so different from our own that we do not permit those belonging to it to becomes citizens of the United States. Persons belonging to it are, with few exceptions, absolutely excluded from our country. I allude to the Chinese race. But by the statute in question, a Chinaman can ride in the same passenger coach with white citizens of the United States, while citizens of the black race in Louisiana, many of whom, perhaps, risked their lives for the preservation of the Union … are yet declared to be criminals, liable to imprisonment, if they ride in a public coach occupied by citizens of the white race” (Olsen, Thin Disguise, 119). Blacks become imaginable as full citizens in Harlan’s dissent only through the specter of the inassimilable Asian. Harlan’s imagery relies on a logic of property: the Chinaman is given the privilege of riding with the white race, but the black, who has risked his life for the nation, who has been willing to give up his life for the nation, is denied this privilege. The Chinaman is, in essence, a thief, for he, unlike the blacks who were willing literally to give themselves for the Union, takes the privileges of citizenship (here riding in the whites-only car) without giving anything in return.

19 Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” 279.

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blackness through literal relationships of ownership as in slavery, whiteness, at the end of the nineteenth

century, became distinguished from blackness through a particular notion of self-possession: gentility.

To begin to explain the relationship between whiteness and gentility, I return to Tom’s gambling.

Resolving to stop gambling in the hopes of being written back into his uncle’s will, Tom complains:

“[Judge Driscoll] thought it expensive to have to pay two hundred dollars to [my creditors] for me once.

Expensive—that! Why, it cost me the whole of his fortune–but of course he never thought of that; some

people can’t think of any but their own side of a case” (143). Tom’s fanciful causal narrative here

manifests his lack of a basic sense of responsibility for his own actions. As the novel progresses, this

highly suspect causal narrative becomes joined by narratives of no cause at all—narratives of the

gambler’s goddess: luck. In fact, Tom manages his life through luck, ascribing his ethically ambiguous

undertakings to luck rather than to his own personal failings. Tom is thus a gambler par excellence, for

he wants to believe that his life is not the product of a series of intentional acts, but is instead dictated by

the unpredictable, and wholly unintentional, force of luck. Tom’s insistent evacuation of the category of

intent reveals his utter psychic investment in gambling, for gambling makes the notion of intention

irrelevant. Tom feels no responsibility because, to his mind, there is no responsibility, only the vagaries

of luck. Tom’s translation of responsibility into the external phenomenon of luck is, however, utterly at

odds with the ethos of the First Families of Virginia, which is precisely about internalizing a code of

conduct and making oneself absolutely responsible.

Thus Tom is disinherited a second time, because he proves himself unworthy, not of the Driscoll

estate, but of the Driscoll name. After a fight with Luigi, Tom sues him for assault. 20 Pained that Tom has

not settled his disputes according to the code duello, Judge Driscoll again articulates his disappointment

through property, disinheriting his nephew for a second time. As Judge Driscoll’s shame for Tom attests,

a gentleman does not settle his disputes in a court of law; rather, he is bound by different protocols:

20

? This philopena joke is vestige of the earlier conjoined twins plot. John Carlos Rowe has an intriguing reading of the joke, suggesting that it is itself about property. See Through The Custom-House, 153.

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[t]he F.F.V. was born a gentleman; his highest duty in life was to watch over that great inheritance and keep it unsmirched. He must keep his honour spotless. Those laws were his chart; his course was marked out on it; if he swerved from it by so much as half a point of the compass it meant shipwreck to his honour; that is to say, degradation from his rank as a gentleman. (139)

On a cursory reading of this definition of an F.F.V.—and thus of a Driscoll—Tom’s failure to live up to

his uncle’s expectations would seem to be the result of biology: “The F.F.V. was born a gentleman.” But

being a gentleman does not hinge merely on blood, for Wilson is as much a gentleman as Judge Driscoll,

although he descends from a less than impressive pedigree of “Scotch parentage” (58). If a Driscoll is

born a gentleman, that fact by no means ensures that he will remain one. The F.F.V. receives his “great

inheritance” of being a gentleman only by producing it within himself. He transforms himself into this

great inheritance, and if he is an owner of this great inheritance, it is only because he comes to own

himself. Gentility is thus not simply good manners; otherwise Tom, returning from Yale with a surface

polish of civility, would have no problem living up to the Driscoll name. Rather, gentility becomes a sign

of another relationship, a property relationship to oneself. The self-control of gentility becomes a sign of

self-ownership: the F.F.V. is self-possessed, in both senses of the word.

Tom’s failure to live up to the code of gentility registers as a failure of self-possession, providing

a psychic elaboration on his thefts: just as Tom cannot manage property, he cannot manage himself. This

failure too is quickly racialized; as Roxy explains, it is caused by “de nigger in you, dat’s what it is”

(157). Gentility—and the self-possession it requires and implies—collapses into whiteness, a conflation

that played out on a far larger stage than PW: it was the crux of the large number of legal suits over

railroad segregation before Plessy was ever heard before the Supreme Court. Indeed while Plessy was

effectively the legal final word on segregation (until Brown v. Board of Education [1954]), it was not, in

fact, markedly representative of the way questions of railroad segregation had been argued before 1896.21

Railroads were particularly vexed spaces in the South. Because they were a new feature of Southern life,

there was no accepted code of behavior on the rails. The response to unclear social relationships on the

trains was to establish “proper” gender distinctions by creating a ladies’ car and a smoking car. 22 The

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ladies’ car was always the last car on the train: furthest away from the fumes from the engine, and safest

in the event of an accident, as a result, it “was always a first-class car.”23

These gender and class distinctions provided blacks of both genders an opportunity to articulate a

mode of public interaction that was based not on racial identity but on class identity, but with no

consistency. At times blacks traveled unmolested in first-class cars; other times they were ejected.

Consequently, before racial segregation was a standard doctrine of all railroads, the question of where

blacks would sit on a railroad car that was explicitly separated by gender and class was one that regularly

made its way into the courts. In asserting their right to ride in the first-class car, the black plaintiffs who

sued the railroads were in fact asserting that they adhered to a set of social norms governing public

behavior. Questions of race were thus argued in front of the courts as matters of civility: when the gender

and class identities of blacks were ignored in favor of race-based distinctions, black plaintiffs asserted

their right to sit in first-class accommodations by recourse to their self-comportment.

If blacks asserted their right to ride as first-class passengers by recourse to their civility, the

railroads defended themselves in court by insisting that “freedom could not change the status of a slave.”

Railroads regularly marshaled the fact that plaintiffs in these cases had been slaves before Emancipation

as evidence of the falsity of the plaintiffs’ claims: slaves, the logic went, were incapable of civility, and

thus anyone who had been a slave had no claim on a first-class passage. The juries seemed to follow the

logic perfectly, for whenever the railroads proved the plaintiff had been a slave, the railroad won the

case.24 While black plaintiffs forcefully asserted that gentility was as much the characteristic of blacks as

21 Many thanks to Carol M. Rose, who directed me to this new work on railroad litigation.22

? Mack 381; 382

23 Barbara Y. Welke, “When All the Women Were White, and All the Blacks Were Men: Gender, Class, Race, and the Road to Plessy, 1855-1914,” Law and History Review 13 (Fall 1995): 270. Welke notes “while on most roads the cost of riding in the smoker was the same as that for riding in the ladies’ car, some roads did offer cheaper second-class and even third-class emigrant cars. On other roads, railroads assigned passengers desiring second-class rates, both men and women, to the smoker” (270). There was no standardization among common carriers, and so some charged differently for the smoker or the ladies car. Mississippi and Florida prohibited blacks from riding in the first-class car; other states made no such racial distinctions. 24

? Welke, Recasting, 291; 292.

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of whites, the railroads, and indeed many white passengers, just as forcefully disagreed. As their

courtroom strategy regularly suggested, the railroads relied on a belief that there was a necessary

disjunction between being genteel and having been a slave.

If former slaves—precisely because they had been slaves—could have no purchase on gentility,

there must be an implicit relationship between one’s status as property and one’s ability to claim gentility.

The logic at work in these railroad cases, like the code of the F.F.V.s in PW, renders gentility contingent

on a particular property relationship to oneself. Though slavery had been abolished, these railroad cases

illustrate that blacks remained haunted by their history as property. If “freedom could not change the

status of a slave,” then these cases articulated slavery, not as a legal relationship of subjugation, but as a

problem of the self that no emancipatory law would be able to remedy. Though the property relationship

between blacks and whites established through chattel slavery may have been formally abolished, it did

not disappear but instead mutated. Whites no longer owned blacks because blacks now owned

themselves, but the quality or completeness of that self-ownership would be made perpetually suspect

through the transformation of self-ownership into gentility, into self-possession, a transformation that

once again constituted whites as privileged property owners.

Thus in PW, the central question of the novel is not simply whether Tom can live free, but rather

whether Tom can “pass” as Thomas à Becket Driscoll, descendent of the First Families of Virginia and

heir to the Driscoll fortune. Tom’s freedom is possible only if he lives up to the standards of white

gentility, and Tom’s freedom in the novel is therefore synonymous with white gentility. Tom can be free

only insofar as he is also genteel. Tom’s gambling thus produces two forms of racial definition: his

thefts, and the failure to adhere to the protocols of property that they imply, signal his blackness, while his

belief in luck and his consequent lack of responsibility, which mark him as unable to adhere to the

gentleman’s code of self-possession, reveal his inability to inhabit whiteness. Together, these two racial

markers reinscribe freedom as the exclusive preserve of “whites.”

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The logics of race and property that the reader has seen at work in PW are revealed to the

residents of Dawson’s Landing through a final testament to property found on the dagger Tom uses to kill

his uncle: the fingerprint. Wilson uses his hobby of fingerprinting to reveal Tom’s “true” identity, for

a man’s fingerprints are his signature, his physiological autograph … and this autograph cannot be counterfeited, nor can he disguise it or hide it away, nor can it become illegible by the wear and the mutations of time. … [W]hereas this signature is each man’s very own—there is no duplicate of it among the swarming populations of the globe! (216)

The fingerprint is the one physical consistency of the body and as such is the only way of marking a body

as a self-same body across any difference of time or space. Wilson characterizes this self-sameness as a

property relationship: the fingerprint is “each man’s very own.” The self is here rendered at its most basic

as an owning self—one’s very own fingerprint guarantees that one is oneself, that one remains oneself

over time. Because the fingerprints reveal that we are ourselves, that we own ourselves, they reveal that

Valet de Chambre, all appearances to the contrary, is not substitutable for Thomas à Becket Driscoll.25

Though Tom has been raised as Thomas à Becket Driscoll, descendant of the F.F.V. and heir to the

Driscoll fortune, his fingerprints ultimately accord a saliency to his identity as Valet de Chambre. Indeed

they attest that the substitution of Tom for Chambers is not a substitution at all, but rather a theft.

Tom’s gambling is thus revealed as the material sign of what Wilson shows to have been true all

along: Tom is a thief who does not own himself. If the novel begins because Tom does not look like a

negro and a slave, it ends because, as a gambler, he acts like a negro and a slave, demonstrating that he

has in fact remained a negro and a slave despite Roxy’s substitution. As Percy Driscoll’s creditors

explain: “they rightly claimed that ‘Tom’ was lawfully their property and had been so for eight years”

(225). The emergence of the creditors at the end of the novel makes literal the question of Tom’s self-

possession: during the entire span of the novel Tom had never owned himself at all. Wilson therefore

25Wilson articulates the identities of A and B through a zero-sum logic: for one baby to be “white and free,” the other must be “a negro and a slave.” Tom’s opportunity is only possible because Chambers lives the life of Valet de Chambre, a negro and a slave. The very substitution of Tom and Chambers structures race and freedom as property: if baby A has whiteness and freedom, then baby B necessarily does not, just as if I own a piece of land, someone else necessarily does not, for property includes “exclusive rights of possession, use, and dispossession.” This logic holds even for things that are jointly owned, for even in joint ownership, ownership is imagined as a zero-sum relationship: I jointly own something with someone only because, for example, I own fifty percent and the other person also owns fifty percent. (Harris, “Whiteness,” 281).

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culminates his courtroom performance by calling out, not Tom Driscoll, but Valet de Chambre: “Valet de

Chambre, negro and slave—falsely called Thomas à Becket Driscoll—make upon the window the finger-

prints that will hang you!” (222) Tom has not only stolen someone else’s identity, he has stolen an

identity altogether: Valet de Chambre is unfit for the last name of Driscoll, and, indeed, is unfit for any

last name at all.26 We should thus not be surprised at the end of PW, for we have known the structure of

justice at work in Dawson’s Landing from the beginning of the novel: those who steal will be sold

DOWN THE RIVER!

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Notes

26 He is also not fit for a first name. His name Valet de Chambre is no more than a mark of his enslavement: he is merely a valet de chambre.

SUMMARY OF NOVELfrom Sparknotes.com

The Tragedy of Pudd'nhead Wilson juggles three plot lines, which all come together in a murder trial at the novel's end. Pudd’nhead Wilson is a Northerner who comes to the small Missouri town of Dawson's Landing to build a career as a lawyer. Immediately upon his arrival he alienates the townspeople, who don't understand his wit. They give him the nickname "Pudd'nhead" and refuse to give him their legal work. He scrapes by on odd work and spends most of his time dabbling in scientific hobbies, most notably, fingerprinting.

Roxana, or Roxy, is a beautiful slave who can pass for white, though she is one-sixteenth black. To save her infant son from ever being sold away from her, she switches him with the child of her white master, who looks just like her son and was born on the same day. Her son Chambers, now called "Tom," grows up as a white man and heir to an estate. Her master's child, Tom, now called "Chambers", grows up a slave. "Tom" grows into a cruel, cowardly man. His gambling debts lead him, under Roxy's guidance, to rob houses, sell the now-freed Roxy as a slave, and finally to murder his uncle, Judge Driscoll, in a botched robbery attempt.

Luigi and Angelo are former sideshow performers. Good-looking and charming, they claim to be Italian twins, heirs of a deposed nobleman. They arrive in Dawson's Landing to rent a room in Widow Cooper’s house, claiming they are tired of the bustle of the world. Luigi confesses to Pudd'nhead Wilson, who has read his palm, that he once killed a man who tried to steal a fabulous Indian knife from the brothers. This knife is stolen by "Tom" and used to kill Judge Driscoll. Luigi gets into an argument with "Tom," who has him arrested. The judge is mortified that "Tom" has compromised the family honor by doing that, and he instead challenges Luigi to a duel. No one is killed, but "Tom," to save his own reputation, tells his uncle that Luigi is a confessed assassin and therefore not an honorable man to duel. The twins, initially popular in the town, lose their reputation through the judge's claims against them, and lose in an election for city offices in which Pudd'nhead Wilson is elected mayor. Shortly after the election, "Tom," badly in debt and needing money to pay off the man to whom he has fraudulently sold Roxy, murders the judge with the twins' knife while he is robbing him.

"Tom" escapes disguised as a woman after killing his uncle. The twins, out for a walk, hear the judge's cries and rush to help. They are found standing over the body and their bloody knife is on the floor. They are brought to trial for the murder. Pudd'nhead Wilson, who is their attorney, through his fingerprint collection and a few lucky accidents, discovers that "Tom" is the murderer and that he is not the real Tom but Chambers. The twins are redeemed and freed, but soon leave for Europe. "Tom" is thrown in jail and then, since it is now known he is a slave, sold "down the river" to pay debts from the estate of the real Tom's father. "Chambers," revealed to be Tom, is given back his place as a white man and heir, but, raised as a black man and marked by his black speech patterns, he now fits into society nowhere. Pudd’nhead is mayor of Dawson's Landing and finally a success as a lawyer, but none of

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his old friends are around anymore to enjoy his success with him.

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