The Traveler
David F. Dorr and Inversions of Power
Lucas Holzhausen MA American Studies University of Amsterdam 10987991, holzhausenlucas@gmail.com dr. G.H. Blaustein 26 June, 2020
Abstract
This thesis offers an exegesis of a travelogue from 1858, entitled A Colored Man Round the World: By a Quadroon, written by David F. Dorr. I argue that Dorr mastered many of the dominant discourses of his time, as his text breaks the prevailing conventions of race, class, and literary expression. In order to do so, this thesis is divided into three separate but overlapping close readings of his travelogue.
The first chapter deals with Dorr’s assertion of his literary skill within the context of some of the contemporary literary conventions and expectations that surrounded him. The second chapter focuses on a particular claim he made, in tracing a personal ancestry to ancient Egypt, and how this claim connects to a larger context of debates over heritage, race, and science. The third chapter returns to his overall travelogue, to focus on issues of class, taste, and some of the larger comparisons Dorr made between the Old and New Worlds.
Contents
Introduction – Americans Abroad: Finding Meaning in the Experience of Travel 1
Chapter One – Mastering the Pen 6
Chapter Two – The Black Antiquity of Man 20
Chapter Three – Knowledge Is Power 35
Conclusion – “A Sort of Philosophy of His Own” 45
1
Introduction – Americans Abroad: Finding Meaning in the Experience of Travel
During the antebellum period of American history, travelogues became an increasingly popular form of literature. A particularly meaningful route for American travelers to take, was through journeys that led them back to their ancestral homes, or Old Worlds. As Alfred Bendixen has noted, during the nineteenth century, many Americans “were eager to learn about the lands from which they were now separated by a revolution as well as an ocean. As citizens of the new world they were fascinated with what the old one had to offer.”1
Travelogues then, were not only books through which an increasing number of people could learn about the world around them in a general sense, but it also became a medium through which people could learn more about themselves, in relation to the other, as these forms of literature could take on the form of discussions of national character, the tracing of one’s cultural heritage, or articulations of how the Old World differed from the New.
In the midst of all of this, one travelogue in particular stands out in almost every conceivable way. This is David F. Dorr’s A Colored Man Round the World: By a Quadroon (1858). Dorr was legally enslaved during his travels, and accompanied by his master, a wealthy New Orleans-based merchant named Cornelius Fellowes. Their journey took them through many countries in Europe, parts of the Near East, and North-Africa, and lasted from 1851 until 1853. Upon their return to the United States, Dorr ended up fleeing from Fellowes, settling in Ohio, where he went on to write and publish his travelogue.2 As this thesis will demonstrate, Dorr’s travelogue demands our close attention, but defies any kind of over-simplification. I will be arguing that Dorr mastered many of the dominant discourses of his time. His travelogue breaks the prevailing conventions of race, class, and literary
expression—conventions not just of his time, but also of our own. In relation to his
contemporaries, Dorr’s travelogue became much more than a platform to think about the self in relation to the other, even as he, on occasion, participated in such an exercise of identity formation, as well.
1 Alfred Bendixen, “American travel books about Europe before the Civil War” in The Cambridge Companion
to American Travel Writing, ed. Alfred Bendixen and Judith Hamera (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2009), 103.
2 Malini Johar Schueller’s lengthy introduction to a reprint of Dorr’s work in 1999 provided a lot more context
to Dorr’s life beyond this publication, and a substantial analysis of the racial vocabularies in and around Dorr’s travelogue. She also retraced many of his steps following publishing his travelogue, including his occupation as a clerk in Cleveland, and his eventual enlistment during the Civil War (xi-xii). She also showed how this travelogue was his only literary publication (xvii).
Malini Johar Schueller,“Introduction,” in A Colored Man Round the World (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1999), ix-xliv.
2 Before laying out the structure of this thesis, it is useful to briefly explain what I mean when I refer to the prevailing conventions surrounding Dorr. Perhaps first and foremost, Dorr faced the larger racist conventions of his time which suggested that, as a “colored man,” he was generally deemed an inferior being to his white contemporaries. Beyond that idea, through the mere facts that he had escaped from his master and picked up a pen, there is an expectation that he somehow should have participated in the literary genre of the slave narrative, instead of the genre he chose.3 Dorr was keenly aware of these kinds of expectations, and responded to them on his own terms. One way of doing that, was by emphasizing his literary skill as a travel-author, over focusing on the details behind his former enslavement. In this way, for Dorr, the travelogue also became a way to bypass some of the burdens that overcame people like Frederick Douglass, who were confronted with the fact that the genre of the slave narrative also came with its own internal rules—often
mandated by white abolitionists—and in turn, took away some degrees of literary freedom on the part of African-American authors.4 Another issue attached to these internal conventions of the slave narrative, was that authors like Douglass became tasked with representing, or speaking for, an entire people.5 Dorr rarely focused on his race, allowing him to avoid this burden as well. But when he did address these types of ideas, he often did it in powerful ways. To demonstrate how Dorr mastered so many of these conventions and expectations of his time, his travelogue requires an exegesis, and that is what this thesis will mostly be doing. It needs to be approached, and then re-approached, from different angles. Hence, the
following structure:
Chapter One demonstrates Dorr’s assertion of his authority through his authorship, by elaborating on Dorr’s engagement with the conventions and expectations surrounding his position as slave, traveler, and author, as well as how he confronted the larger idea of race.
3 This was an expectation that carried on into our own time, as Schueller also posed this question in her reading
of Dorr. Schueller, “Introduction,” xvii.
4 John Stauffer partly dealt with Frederick Douglass’s struggle to break away from the confines of the literary
convention within slave narratives, to have the moment of freedom be the conclusion. This teleology of the narrative did not allow people like Douglass to write about their lives as free people, until Douglass published
My Bondage. Douglass actually went on to publish three separate autobiographies throughout his writing career.
See John Stauffer, “Frederick Douglass’s self-fashioning and the making of a Representative American man,” in
The Cambridge Companion to the African American Slave Narrative, ed. Audrey A. Fisch (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2007), 211-212.
5 John Ernest explained how Douglass was often regarded as “the representative of all African Americans”
following the success of his Narrative.
See John Ernest, “Beyond Douglass and Jacobs,” in The Cambridge Companion to the African American Slave
3 One way he did the latter, was through his encounter with what he considered to be his
ancestors, the “Egyptian Kings of Olden Times.” By visiting the pyramids near Cairo, Dorr was instilled with a sense of pride in a particular African heritage to this ancient civilization. Ultimately, Dorr’s claim of the blackness of ancient Egyptians opens up a much larger discussion of history, race, heritage, and science. That context of the larger scientific debates over the black antiquity of man deserves a chapter of its own.
Following this heritage that Dorr found in this ancient African civilization, the third chapter returns to the frame of his travelogue as a whole, but mainly seen through the lens of Dorr’s affiliation with the modern American civilization. This final reading also returns to a focus on how Dorr participated in some of those above noted travelogue-conventions, of comparing and contrasting some of the political and cultural characteristics between the Old and New Worlds. Underneath Dorr’s position as thoughtful travel-author, lies a different kind of assertion of power, beyond literary skill or the assertion of scientific authority. Taken as a whole, I will demonstrate why David F. Dorr’s travelogue deserves our close attention, not only because he subverted so many of the expectations of the people around him, but also our expectations as historians.
Part of this final note relates to some of the scarce material written about him, within travel literature’s historiography. The significance of Dorr’s work, for the most part, has been virtually ignored by most historians. The main exception to this would be Malini Johar Schueller, who divided a lot of attention to the intricacies to be found in his text. As her particular reading was more concerned with understanding his writing-style alongside the two larger groups of African-American, and Anglo-American travel authors respectively, the outcome of her readingended up being that even though Dorr identified as a “colored man,” his genteel travel-writing “appropriated the forms and structures of Anglo-American travel writing so completely that what we have is a superb case of literary doublespeak: the blackest of texts in whiteface.” She further said that what Dorr did throughout his travelogue could be understood as a “deliberate ‘performance,’” as, “Dorr clearly writes of himself as a leisured traveler, a position that was overwhelmingly white.”6
My own reading builds on Schueller’s work in some ways, but also pushes in a different direction. That divergence comes mostly from a point she herself actually made as well, when she noted that Dorr’s work makes us question the very “idea of an accepted ‘type’
4 of ethnic literature.”7 Though I agree with this statement, I would also suggest that part of
acknowledging this, is to refuse attaching labels to him that would somehow insinuate he was talking white in this travelogue, solely based on the type of language that he used
throughout—even if white people happened to make up the bulk of the “leisured tourists” at the time. A scholar who added on to this idea by Schueller, was William W. Stowe, who did a quick reading of Dorr’s text alongside the more famous William Wells Brown in his work Going Abroad (1994). He relegated Dorr’s travelogue to a “stage,” for the mere purposes of enacting “his fabricated self” and asserting “his self-worth.” Stowe based this claim of a fabricated self, on nothing other than his own expectations of Dorr’s voice, as he noted earlier in his reading that “Dorr’s position on racial matters is inconsistent. He sometimes speaks as the ‘colored man’ of the first part of his title, but more often as the white Southern
‘gentleman’ he is trying to imitate.”8 Why Dorr could not have been a “colored” gentleman,
Stowe did not explain.
Outside of Schueller’s work then, most readings of Dorr tended to be very brief, or limited in their approach to his text. Virginia Whatley Smith, for instance, focused mostly on the fact that Dorr was behaving as a “tourist”—while she also very briefly noted that he showed himself to be well-educated.9 As her topic of focus was “African American travel
literature” in its entirety, it makes sense that she would only briefly touch on the significance of Dorr, within that body of literature. Similarly, Alfred Bendixen mentioned Dorr only in passing, within a discussion of antebellum American travelers to Europe, choosing to focus his attention on the “sexually explicit” style to some of Dorr’s writing.10 And then there are examples of quick readings of Dorr that focused less on his position as traveler, but similar to some of my more specific contextual backgrounds, placed him within other contexts. A notable example was Scott Trafton, who in his reading of African-American authors who spoke about Egypt, placed Dorr in the context of “black orientalism.”11
As these examples suggest, many of the historians who took note of Dorr’s travelogue, dealt with his text quickly, as most of their own concerns tended to be with
7 Schueller, “Introduction,” xxxvii.
8 William W. Stowe, Going Abroad: European Travel in Nineteenth-Century American Culture (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1994), 66-67.
9 Virginia Whatley Smith, “African American travel literature,” in The Cambridge Companion to American
Travel Writing, ed. by Alfred Bendixen & Judith Hamera (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009),
211-212.
10 He did not include a specific quote from Dorr to demonstrate this, but generally described Dorr’s behavior in
Istanbul, attempting to buy a local woman. See Bendixen, “American travel books,” 121.
11 Scott Trafton, Egypt Land: Race and Nineteenth-Century American Egyptomania (Durham: Duke University
5 larger-scale historical currents, or dealing with entire bodies of literature. But as this thesis will show, Dorr’s travelogue merits and rewards a robust close reading and contextualization. As the above structure already suggests, I will mainly be doing that through several different close readings of his text—each time from a slightly different, though often overlapping, perspective. Next to my close readings of Dorr, I venture beyond his text, and elaborate different contexts—such as New Orleans, Egyptology, or conventions of literary genres—in order to read between Dorr’s lines.
When it came to my own set of expectations of someone like Dorr, when I first encountered this travelogue, I was often thinking a lot about his position as slave, even when his own words would often point elsewhere. Still, I tried to follow up on leads in his text—or the ones laid out by Schueller—to learn more about his relationship to his master, his life in New Orleans, and things of that nature, and quickly found myself going through old
newspapers of Dorr’s surroundings, attempting to learn more about him as a person.
Occasionally, some of the details I found could be revealing, but often only as supplements to Dorr’s already rich text. As for the contexts around Dorr, much has been built on existing scholarship as well. A lot of information was drawn from several useful Cambridge
Companions to different kinds of literature, as well as some scholarly works that had slightly more specific focuses, such as Scott Trafton’s Egypt Land, Werner Sollors’s work on inter-racial literature, or a collection of essays on New Orleans’ cultural history, edited by Arnold R. Hirsch and Joseph Logsdon.
Taken as a whole, what I will convey in this thesis is that Dorr was not only an
anomaly in his own time, but in many ways, still can stand out as a subject for historians. I do not, in any way, want to suggest that I have somehow found the truth about this man, nor his text, or that every other scholar, up until this moment in time, has missed it. What I will suggest, however, is that through my different close readings, I often found that Dorr’s text is something that deserves to be read again, and read alongside a variety of different historical settings. Along the way, Dorr’s travelogue can work in such a way that it on occasion can reveal more about the lenses that we as historians direct at someone like him, than it might about the man himself.
Chapter One
Mastering the Pen
7 Opening Dorr’s travelogue immediately raises a set of questions, as some of the details on its title page alone, point in different directions. Let’s start with the title itself: A Colored Man Round the World: By a Quadroon. The first thing the reader sees are two separate racial categories that have their own very distinct historical backgrounds and cultural contexts. Further down on the page, the author’s name is nowhere to be found, leaving the reader only with the term Quadroon, creating an anonymity behind this specific racial label. The last thing that this title page does tell its readers, is that this anonymous author had this book privately printed, without the assistance of any publisher. The next page over does reveal David F. Dorr’s name, as it states that he entered this travelogue into “the Clerk’s office of the District Court, for the Northern District of Ohio” in 1858. But to better understand the story behind all of these details, we must begin somewhere else.
Isolating the first half of nineteenth century with regards to Dorr’s birthplace, New Orleans, can reveal a lot about the type of environment he grew up in, and how this environment might have influenced his text as well. During that time period, one of the central currents that engulfed this city was the larger process of Americanization, after Louisiana had been sold off by Napoleon to the United States in 1803. By then, New Orleans already had a quite rich and complex social and cultural history, tracing back to the
circumstances of early French colonialism, with one of the most significant outcomes of this French period being the formation of Louisiana’s distinct ethnic group; the creoles. Even though this group of people would start to lose considerable political and economic power in New Orleans due to the large numbers of newly arriving Americans in those first fifty years following the Louisiana Purchase, they often were able to retain some degree of cultural influence in the city.12 Taking the nineteenth century story of New Orleans as a whole, Arnold R. Hirsch and Joseph Logdson marked it by its “curious coexistence of a three-tiered Caribbean racial structure alongside its two-tiered American counterpart in an ethnically divided city.”13 That ethnic division of the city, which formally lasted from 1836 until 1852,
would put in place distinct municipal zones for groups like Americans and creoles to continue living separately as their larger competition for overall political and economic influence
12 As Arnold R. Hirsch and Joseph Logsdon have noted, some of the creoles’ key cultural traditions—from the
“well-rooted Catholic Church,” down to certain “habits of cuisine and festivity”—still were firmly in place in the city by the 1860s, even as other traditions, such as the predominance of the French language, slowly faded away due to this larger process of ‘Americanization.’
Arnold R. Hirsch and Joseph Logsdon, ed., Creole New Orleans: Race and Americanization (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1992), 96-97.
8 persisted. And those years also happened to be the ones during which Dorr spent his
adolescence and young adulthood, before embarking on his long journey abroad.
Although he would never specifically refer to New Orleans’ creoles in his travelogue, nor explicitly consider himself part of this group of people, the influence of the city’s
“curious coexistence” of two distinct ways of ordering race did have a clear influence on him, as the title of his work demonstrates, through which he could be seen doubly identifying as a Colored Man and a Quadroon. The latter term, as explained by Werner Sollors, had its origins in Spanish and French colonial societies, where, through their racial system of mestizaje, mixed-race people were defined by the specific “calculus of color” pertaining to their particular racial ancestry. So, within this system, which also prevailed in Louisiana for quite some time, a “quadroon”—deriving from the French “quarterón”—referred to a person’s ancestry amounting to 1
4 of non-white blood.
14 By contrast, the more dually
structured racial tradition found in the United States, often tried to deny the possibility of miscegenation as much as possible, including any of these categories that insinuated a break from their much starker line between the white and black races. And according to the well-known one-drop-rule, whether Dorr was deemed a quadroon by local creole custom, or could “readily pass any where as a white man” (according to one of his reviewers in 1858
Cleveland), he still would be considered a “colored man,” in the American context.15 As this framing of a period of Americanization already suggests, the “curious coexistence” of competing racial structures did not last forever, and those creole racial customs, that allowed for distinct racial categories in between black and white, were eventually eclipsed by the more rigid American color line. Along the way, free people of color, who for a long time held a peculiar position in New Orleans under French rule, were especially slighted. When Americans first arrived in the city following the Louisiana
Purchase, they were appalled at the level of “unusual rights and powers” enjoyed by the local free people of color, as well as by their “assertiveness and self-confidence.” Many of those people were armed, and militarily trained during the French period, as well as having attained considerable financial wealth and experience in skilled occupations. They generally
complicated the American understanding of a strict correlation between blackness and
14 Werner Sollors, Neither Black Nor White Yet Both: Thematic Explorations of Interracial Literature (New
York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 125.
15 Schueller found that one of the reviews of Dorr’s travelogue, which ran in the Cleveland Plain Dealer
(September 20, 1858, p. 3), stated that “the author is a Quadroon but would readily pass any where as a white man.” Schueller, “Introduction,” xxxviii.
9 servility, as they also held tight relationships with people of color still in bondage. When they stepped to these new Americans in charge, to request their expected civil rights, as being members of this new country, those new leaders “showed no desire to perpetuate, much less extend, the rights of black Louisianans.” In fact, over the following decades, those rights would be stripped back gradually, leading into the complete abandonment of any such rights or privileges during the 1850s. As a result, during that decade in particular, many African-Americans, free and slave, fled New Orleans and Louisiana—including Dorr.16
That being said, in Dorr’s text itself, references to the possible linkages between his hometown and the world he encountered abroad (aside from a few exceptions), often bypass the topic of New Orleans’s racial climate. Instead, Dorr would refer back to the city in other ways throughout his work, often relating more to the specific kind of environment that he appeared accustomed to; the aristocratic, upper-class world surrounding his master.
Cornelius Fellowes was born in Kentucky in 1801 or 1802, and essentially became one of those Americans who migrated to New Orleans in the period that followed the merger of Louisiana with the rest of the United States. He arrived in the city somewhere during the 1840s, setting up his merchant’s firm alongside his brother, William Fellowes, and their enterprise became quite successful over the following years.17 Dorr was a teenager by the
time of Fellowes’s arrival to the city, as later records indicate that he was born in New Orleans in 1827 or 1828.18 We can assume that Dorr was born into slavery, and then came
into the possession of Fellowes somewhere during the 1840s, as the dedication to Dorr’s mother on the very first pages of the travelogue showed that she was still enslaved, somewhere in Louisiana, when he eventually published his travelogue. Dorr’s name also started appearing on the “List of Letters” of some of the city’s prominent local newspapers— including the New Orleans Picayune—around 1849, and then in the subsequent years, leading up to his escape to freedom in 1854.19
The only information available about the circumstances of Dorr’s escape, and one of
16 Joseph Logsdon and Caryn Cossé Bell, “The Americanization of Black New Orleans, 1850—1900,” in Creole
New Orleans: Race and Americanization ed. Arnold R. Hirsch and Joseph Logsdon (Baton Rouge: Louisiana
State University Press, 1992), 204-205 & 215.
17 Fellowes’ obituary, from the New Orleans Republican (p. 1) of December 15, 1871, states most of this
information, including that he moved to New Orleans from Kentucky “about thirty years ago.” It also notes how his firm, alongside his brother, was “successful from the start.”
18 Schueller, “Introduction,” xxxviii. She found that Dorr listed his age at 43, on an application in 1871, putting
his year of birth at 1828. An earlier entry placed his date of birth at 1827, but the former mention was something Dorr had entered himself.
19 The New Orleans Crescent from December 28, 1849, 3, listed a “Dorr, David F.” on the “Gentlemen’s”
section of its “List of Letters.”
10 those exceptions were he did refer to the racial climate of his time, appeared in the
travelogue’s preface. Before looking into that information, it might be useful to first pause on that preface’s opening sentences:
The Author of this book, though a quadroon, is pleased to announce himself the “Colored man around the world.” Not because he may look at a colored man’s position as an honorable one at this age of the world, he is too smart for that, but because he has the satisfaction of looking with his own eyes and reason at the ruins of the ancestors of which he is the posterity. If the ruins of the Author’s ancestors were not a living language of their scientific majesty, this book could receive no such appellation with pride. Luxor, Carnack, the Memnonian and the Pyramids make us exclaim, “What monuments of pride can surpass these?”20
Following these words, the unquestionable genius of the ancient Egyptians is elaborated a bit further, ending with the following question to the reader: “Well, who were the Egyptians? Ask Homer if their lips were not thick, their hair curly, their feet flat and their skin black.” This topic would eventually make a few returns later in the book, with more mentions of classical authors like Homer and such studies as Egyptology as authorities to prove this position (134, 168-70). But clear enough from this opening paragraph is that “the Author” was able to trace a personal lineage to ancient Egyptians as the ancestors to the people being oppressed and enslaved in the modern world, including people like himself. Despite this current situation, Dorr viewed his encounter with the pyramids as a source of pride.
But this preface also revealed some of the other rhetorical devices at Dorr’s disposal. Consider how “The Author” is discussed from a third-person perspective in the opening sentences. Eventually Dorr revealed himself to be writing these words all along, by suddenly dropping the third-person perspective altogether, as he reflected on the logistics behind his journey, the fact that he was legally enslaved during it, and what happened between him and Fellowes, upon their return to America:
I called on this original man to consummate a two-fold promise he made me, in different parts of the world, because I wanted to make a connection, that I considered myself more than equaled in dignity and means, but as he refused me on old bachelor principles, I fled from him and his princely promises, westward, where the “star of empire takes its way,” reflecting on the moral liberties of the legal freedom of England, France and our New England States, with the determination to write this book of “overlooked things” in the four quarters of the globe, seen by “a colored man round the world.”
THE AUTHOR. (12)
These words are important to quote at length, for several reasons. One, I want to stress focusing on this preface by Dorr, because it can actually provide a twist to the larger context of prefacing texts, when written by African-Americans, at the time. Schueller has already
11 partly reflected on this context, by showing how Dorr was writing at a time (and a place) when a predominantly white readership often required someone of their own race, to vouch for the sincerity behind a African-American author—even when the whole point of those texts was to stress the humanity of the author involved, such as in slave narratives, or other abolitionist texts.21 Those texts often even included subtitles—something along the lines of “Written by Himself” or “Herself”—that were meant to force contemporary readers to
consider the act of writing on the part of former slaves.22 Dorr also partly joined that tradition through adding his own subtitle that showed his travelogue was written By a Quadroon, but the way in which he chose to write and structure his preface showed a further self-awareness of the contemporary issue of white abolitionists being expected to vouch for
African-American authors. Dorr, from the very opening of his travelogue, interrogated all of these conventions, by starting his preface from a third-person perspective, only to seamlessly reveal later on that he was actually speaking for himself.
He thus rubbed shoulders with some of the conventions surrounding the popular slave narratives of his time, while simultaneously subverting those conventions. The preface repeated this dynamic in another way as well. This relied heavily on the fact that Dorr never would engage in a similar manner with the context behind his travels, as he did in this preface. He never offered any further explicit reflection on such things as his position as a slave, the circumstances behind traveling while enslaved, or any other detail about his own life in the United States, to name a few examples. In fact, a great deal of the book ended up separating from this contextual background to such a degree, that the reader is often left to wonder many things about Dorr that were never revealed. Instead of continuing this kind of reflection as in the preface then, he proceeded to describe all of his travels from the
perspective of a leisured tourist, who ended up mentioning Fellowes merely as an
unimportant traveling companion. In this sense, he was also going against the conventions of abolitionist texts of his time that tended to shower their readers with different types of
“documentary evidence,” often meant to serve as proof to expose the evils of slavery, in order to convince anyone reading these texts—who were not already convinced—of the necessity of abolitionism.23 Dorr then, took no part in that tradition, dealing with these issues in other ways.
21 Schueller, “Introduction,” xxxviii.
22 Ernest, “Beyond Douglass and Jacobs,” 227.
23 Philip Gould, “The rise, development, and circulation of the slave narrative,” in The Cambridge Companion
to the African American Slave Narrative, ed. Audrey A. Fisch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007),
12 Before arriving there, the little information he did provide about his position as slave, and his relationship with his master, currently does require our consideration, because it will help to further understand other elements of Dorr’s writing that I will discuss later on. According to Dorr, until their eventual falling out over his manumission, Fellowes had always treated him “as a son.” Fellowes always appeared able to “look on me as as free a man as walks the earth. But if local law has power over man, instead of man’s effects, I was legally a slave, and would be to-day, like my mother, were I on Louisiana’s soil instead of Ohio’s” (12). Despite this legal status of enslavement, Dorr also stressed the fact that he had always considered himself “more than equaled in dignity and means” to people like Fellowes, and this is something that becomes more apparent as one reads deeper into his travelogue, and takes note of the frequent references to the elite world of New Orleans, and that of the Old World he was visiting. This also can help to explain how Dorr, who had escaped from slavery only a few years prior, had the means to privately publish this travelogue in 1858.
One way of demonstrating his familiarity with those kinds of upper-class
environments, was through his actual travel-writing itself, which was often done in a highly descriptive manner. Because of this, his style of writing was praised at the time by local Cleveland reviewers for being to-the-point, and even unpretentious at that.24 But in hindsight,
one might liken Dorr’s descriptions of his travels to many of the literary clichés that Mark Twain would end up making fun of in his famous mock-travelogue, The Innocents Abroad (1869). By the time of Twain’s travels to Europe and the Holy Land, and his eventual publication, such clichés ranged from the highly similar itineraries most American tourists were sticking to, down to the over-saturated descriptions of the popular points of interest that most of them came across while traveling. Dorr and Twain, then, also shared a similar itinerary, with one of the exceptions being that Dorr traveled through Germany and the Netherlands, whereas Twain skipped those destinations. Highlighting those places as Dorr saw them can become useful here, because they illustrate what a typical description by him looked like:
Having passed over the borders of Switzerland and Germany, and through the first German town, called Friedsburg, I will linger a while at Strasborg. It was once the Capitol of many provinces. In times gone by, many centuries ago, it was called the Roman’s “Argentoratum,” and experienced more than a few of the miseries of war. The tallest piece of monumental art the world ever had recorded on the pages of its Chronology, not even the Tower of Babel excepted, is here in this city of over two thousand years old. Its name is the Munster, and ought to have been Monster. It is a Church, and was three hundred years in process of
13
erection. It is 474 feet from the earth, and to give a clearer perception of its height, it is 24 feet higher than the Pyramids of Egypt (49).
This paragraph alone anticipates several of the things that Twain turned into running jokes about the conventions to travel-writing a decade later—sight-seeing as phenomenon; the passing on of dry facts to readers, including a quick history lesson to state some sort of significance behind these places; and even size comparisons.25 Dorr described almost every place he visited in this manner, but to stick with his travels through Germany, he ended up going to a casino in Baden Baden in the same chapter, and this was where he used another reoccurring theme throughout his travelogue; being amongst upper-class figures, partaking in highbrow cultural activities, as he witnessed the Prince of Prussia break the bank in a local casino (50). Dorr’s emphasis on his position as an upper-class leisured tourist effectively became one way he was able to live out his earlier mentioned position of equality. The “colored man around the world” was able to share many moments with the aristocrats of Europe and beyond, and he made this a continuous theme throughout his travelogue. Several of those moments occurred during his visit to the Netherlands as well, such as in the
following passage:
The gayest time of Amsterdam is dead winter. Then the Zuyder Zee and all its canals are frozen over, when ladies and gentlemen are skating night and day. Vessels sail charmingly on the ice, but their bottoms are made for the ice instead of water. Balls and pic-nic parties are numerous in winter. The Amsterdam ladies are all healthy looking. I saw half a dozen ladies yesterday shooting snipe, when I rode out to Saandam. (…) At Saandam I registered my name in the little “book of names,” in the house of Peter the Great, Emperor of Russia” (59-60).
After shortly describing why it came to be that Peter the Great owned a house here in the first place, he proceeded to tell of a more personal encounter with local royalty:
26th of September, and I am at the capitol of Holland, The Hague. The King lives here, about a quarter of a mile from my hotel, the “Bellevue.” But I just dined with a King. The Father of the Queen is the old King of Wurtemburg, and he is putting up here, and we have a guard of honor at our door. He is going out—he bows to me (60).
As these passages begin to show, it becomes possible to think of the travelogue as a tool for interrogating some of the larger expectations surrounding his race, and position as slave. For one, Dorr continuously showed his readers that he was well-educated, by including long passages demonstrating his knowledge of the places he visited, for example by drawing out their local customs and histories. Beyond that, these passages serve as examples of Dorr’s fascination with the Old World’s upper-class, and how he stood in relation to them as an
25 Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad, or The New Pilgrims’ Progress (Hartford, Conn: American Publishing
14 American tourist. Or, better yet, how the Kings of Europe bowed to him. A final key trait to Dorr’s writing that is important to take note of, is how he emphasized his own agency while traveling, as he was the one doing all of these things. The letter “I” came up so many times in his travelogue overall, that one is often led to believe that Dorr was traveling alone. But as one of the sole reminders to his actual condition, still while in the Netherlands, Dorr began to describe his master.
This lengthy description actually happened during a chapter solely dedicated to Fellowes, but Dorr never called him his master in it, and ultimately, the whole chapter is meant to mock Fellowes. That mockery mostly appeared at the end of a long story he told of himself, Fellowes, and a separate English traveling companion going to the North Sea, to see “the Dutch fisheries” (66). While they were on the beach, they became swarmed by local beggars—mostly children—and as Fellowes was initially enjoying throwing money at them, almost like a sport, they ended up swarming him to such a degree that he lost all of his money, and was left in a dilemma. Along the way, Dorr disclosed some useful information worth considering, regarding the particularly aristocratic environment Dorr seemed to be accustomed to back in New Orleans. In order to arrive at this dilemma for Fellowes, Dorr found it necessary to first point out how wealthy, and how generally “haughty” he always had been, back home:
He is so proud, or haughty, or perhaps I had better say, naturally aristocratic, that he can descend from his sphere to vulgar without knowing it, and joke, and laugh, and even offer some of his drink, but if you forget yourself, he will recollect himself. He can treat a free colored man as polite as he can a poor white one, and a class that are below them must be in his estimation what, they are.
He is a man with no enemies; I don’t believe he has one, and he himself hates no man, and in fact is always happy, jovial, and scarcely ever disappointed with his calculations of things and people (62).
The rest of this lengthy description of Fellowes’s life and characteristics which Dorr
included, revolved around how well he always got along with his business associates, such as other Southern slaveholders and planters, how the “balance sheet of the firm of Messrs. Fellowes and Co., foots per annum about $140,000 to $170,000 profit,” and how he
frequented the city’s elite clubs, operas and theaters, or what he summed up as “the gaieties of Orleans” (63-65). And so, by extension, Dorr was accustomed to these surroundings as well, as he had noted that he always considered himself “equaled in dignity and means” to people like Fellowes, which also led to their eventual disagreement over Dorr’s freedom.
15 part of Fellowes, but before all of that, Dorr already mocked him in a different way, in the opening of the chapter:
I must now introduce the reader to an American “merchant Prince,” better known by his associates as the “Prince of Good Fellows.” This is Cornelius Fellowes, of the respectable firm of Messrs. Fellowes & Co., of New Orleans, La. He is rather more than a medium size man, and straight as an exclamation point, with handsome limbs. He cannot be justly termed handsome, without adding man. His face was the color of a last year’s red apple all free from decay; his hair light for black, and not very thick on top, and he is aged 48 years (61).
As Schueller has also pointed out, Dorr was essentially inverting the master-slave
relationship here by describing Fellowes’s features as if he was the one on the auction block, especially as she focused on the physical description of Fellowes, “more than a medium size man, and straight as an exclamation point, with handsome limbs.”26 A particularly strong
inversion to make, especially when considering the significance of the slave auction as a site in his hometown environment. New Orleans was one of largest slave markets in the world at the time, and especially during the period between 1811 and 1862, the city as a whole had slave auctions occurring just about anywhere; from public parks, to ships on the Mississippi, down to the insides of people’s homes.27 Though we do not know if Dorr came into
Fellowes’s possession in this way, he surely was constantly surrounded by these sites, and by invoking the language of the slave auction, to mock Fellowes, this otherwise brief moment in the text was a powerful inversion of authority itself.
In addition to this inversion of power, Dorr’s lengthy description of Fellowes also opens up a discussion about characterization. As will become clear through other descriptions Dorr would make of particular figures he encountered while abroad, he essentially aligned himself with contemporary authors like Charles Dickens, through using the mode of character introductions as a tool to determine how his readers viewed them, and what position each character was allowed to hold within his overall story Dorr was building of his travels. In the case of Dickens, consider the following example of how he usually introduced characters in his novels, however minor their eventual role in the overall narrative structure:
He was not old, but his hair was white; his body was bent, or bowed as if by the weight of some great trouble: and there were deep lines in his worn and melancholy face. The fire of his eyes, the expression of his features, the very voice in which he spoke, were all subdued and quenched, as if the spirit within him lay in ashes. (Dombey and Son, 135–36).28
26 Schueller, “Introduction,” xxxii.
27 “New Orleans, Slave Market of the South,” Purchased Lives, The Historic New Orleans Collection, accessed
June 21, 2020, https://www.hnoc.org/virtual/purchased-lives/new-orleans-slave-market-south.
28 This is a “typical example” of Dickens’s minor character introductions, according to Alex Woloch, whose
16 Viewing this Dickensian character introduction alongside Dorr’s way of describing Fellowes, we can see how Dorr built on Dickens’s mode of using a highly-detailed writing style to set up a certain character, even if that character was there for the solitary function of being placed on the auction block. Again, aside from this chapter on Fellowes, Dorr simply ignored him for the large majority of the rest of the text, treating him as an unimportant gentleman who just happened to be along for the ride.
The correlation between Dorr and Dickens regarding this literary mode of
characterization takes on an added layer, when we consider Dickens’s own travelogue, based on his visit of the United States during the early 1840s. In the final chapter of these American Notes, Dickens addressed America’s institution of slavery and the predominance of racial terror throughout the country. Within that chapter, he used about seven pages for the sole purpose of showing his readers what American newspapers ran as advertisements on a daily basis, of which the following quote is only a fraction:
“Ran away, a negro woman and two children; a few days before she went off, I burnt her with a hot iron, on the left side of her face. I tried to make the letter M.”
“Ran away, a negro man named Henry; his left eye out, some scars from a dirk on and under his left arm, and much scarred with the whip.”
“One hundred dollars reward, for a negro fellow, Pompey, 40 years old. He is branded on the left jaw.”
“Committed to jail, a negro man. He has no toes on the left foot.”
“Ran away, a negro woman named Rachel. Has lost all her toes except the large one.” “Ran away, Sam. He was shot a short time since through the hand, and has several shots in his left arm and side.”
“Ran away, my negro man Dennis. Said negro has been shot in the left arm between the shoulders and elbow, which has paralysed the left hand.”29
Dickens used these examples, in one way, to argue against some of the absurd defenses he had heard of slavery while touring America, mainly on the part of Southerners, that claimed the overall slave-system was somehow a humane, paternalistic social order, which had no valid incentive to be abolished. But these newspaper-clippings also said something about characterization, once we pay attention to how these people were being described. All running for their lives, of course, but also essentially treated as dead objects on the page. If this was the environment Dorr was surrounded by, and something he would escape from himself, then the eventual description of his own master in a Dickensian mode of first
mostly of novels.
Alex Woloch, The One vs. the Many: Minor Characters and the Space of the Protagonist in the Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 24.
29 Charles Dickens, American Notes for General Circulation: Volume 2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
17 impressions, only to place him on the auction block, was not only a powerful inversion of the master-slave relationship, but yet another example that highlights Dorr’s mastery of the pen.
Imagining his master on the auction block, can also lead into the many other ways in which Dorr actively engaged the concepts of imagination, dreams, and their relationship to his traveling story. The moment where he played with these concepts most explicitly, and perhaps one of the most bizarre chapters of this entire travelogue is entitled “The Secrets of a Paris Life, and Who Knows Them,” which opened by addressing his readers directly, and asking them the following question:
Reader, can a man dream with his eyes open? or can a man see with them shut? Before you say no, bear in mind that man is the shadow of his maker; and life, a dream. As to the latter part of the query, the answer may be emphatically no! Then let me dream of what I saw (87).
The dream he went on to describe is as vague and muddy as most dreams can get, but it in the very least had some semblance of cohesion through becoming another version of him
showing his fluency in highbrow culture, but now with a specific eye toward Parisian customs and habits. He wandered in and out of local cafes and restaurants, wined and dined with French women, and followed one local woman in particular, for quite some time, before suddenly realizing all of this was his “imagination. Thus ends the dream with open eyes” (91). Yet, even out of this dream-state, he continued discussing Parisian secrets, such as local etiquette, and the best establishments to get certain kinds of food. He then addressed the reader again: “Now reader, don’t accuse me of trying to become conspicuous by asserting more than others, for you know nothing about it, and I do” (93). He then continued his discussion of the “Secrets of Paris Life” even further, ending the chapter with the description of the following event:
There is an amusement in Paris, which language is inadequate to express the vulgarity of. (…) It changes its location every night in fear of the police. Its supporters are merely curious young men, who wish to see as strange a sight as the mind of woman can picture. Their performance commences with a dozen beautiful women habited like Eve before she devised the fig leaf covering. They first appear in the form of a wreath, with each one’s head between another’s legs; the rest must be imagined. Au revoir (95).
However this sexually suggestive “amusement” continued, was thus left up to the
imagination of the reader. But this particular chapter as a whole, with all of its other kinds of suggestions, regarding dreams, imaginations, and the relationship between readers and Dorr as the author, is one more example of him using his travelogue as a platform to show his self-awareness, and his awareness of some of people’s expectations going into a travelogue written by someone in his position. Similar to the inversion of the master-slave relationship, found in his description of Fellowes, Dorr used this particularly odd chapter to emphasize his
18 authority regarding all of these Parisian habits. He was the one who did the traveling, saw the sights, learned about local customs and “secrets,” and his readers were simply supposed to take him at his word now. Also, by forcing his readers to consider these concepts of dreams and imaginations—whether they were his, or belonged to those readers themselves—allowed him to walk the blurry line of fact and fiction in this chapter. A line which also could be related back to the earlier noted literary conventions surrounding things like the slave narrative’s obsession with evidence, and the frequent subversion of such evidence found in Dorr’s travelogue. In fact, one of the added effects of the travelogue’s popularity by the time of Dorr’s writing, was that there were so many of these types of books in circulation, that some authors wrote them without ever having stepped a foot abroad. As Alfred Bendixen also noted, those kinds of fake travelogues already appeared early into the nineteenth century, and Dorr’s choice to address his readers in these ways becomes yet another way in which he showed his mastery of the literary conventions that surrounded him.30
He also elaborated on all of this in his eventual conclusion, of which the opening paragraph contained another direct message to his readers, that tied back into the concepts of imagination, and this interplay between fact and fiction:
The reader that only believes what he can see, through a limited source of facts, is always losing time and money, to read another man’s knowledge; but the one who is always seeking to add to the stock of knowledge which he already has, is sure to gain time and knowledge in the stride of life (189).
The subsequent words contained some description of his final stops, and his voyage back to the United States, but he also offered some more hints as to how he envisioned his role as an author. Here he mainly reflected on his descriptive manner of writing, based on his
eyewitness accounts, outweighing those authors who simply extracted their knowledge from other books, thereby distinguishing his own writing experience from authors that he
categorized as “imitators” (191). His position as author was then connected back to his earlier position on racial equality, in some of his final words: “When you hear can’t, laugh at it; when they tell you not in your time, pity them; and when they tell you surrounding circumstances alter cases, in manliness scorn them as sleeping sluggards, unworthy of a social brotherhood” (191-192). Writing in the wake of the Fugitive Slave Act, Dorr, as an escaped slave himself, used his position as a travel-author to show signs of his position as “equaled” tourist, and highly self-aware author, who was bowed to by European royalty, and was instilled with a sense of pride by seeing the constructions by an ancient civilization of
19 which he, as “a colored man,” was a descendant.
So, even though Dorr’s highly descriptive writing-style, at the surface at least, anticipated much of Mark Twain’s famous satire which turned the literary conventions behind the travelogue into the butt of a joke a decade later, Dorr’s publication remains a reminder to the other kinds of profound uses of the travelogue as a form of literature. In other words, the same literary tools that were perhaps becoming cliché by the time of Twain’s satire, in Dorr’s case constituted some of the available avenues for conveying his ideas and experiences to his readers. Certainly, despite all of his jokes, Twain’s own conclusion to his satire acknowledged one powerful aspect to the traveling experience that was somehow beneficial to everyone involved in this increasingly popular phenomenon, whether this was also done in joking fashion, or not: “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and
narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things can not be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.”31
Chapter Two
21 During September of 1956, James Baldwin attended a Pan-African conference in Paris, under the title Le Congrès des Ecrivains et Artistes Noirs. From its very opening, the main goal of this conference was put forth as providing a platform for a variety of speakers from the African continent and diaspora to assess “the riches and the promise of their cultures” in the face of Western colonialism.32 Although Baldwin never spoke in front of the crowd himself, he did record his thoughts on the conference’s proceedings rather closely. For instance, as he was observing the frequent debate surrounding the definition of the term culture, he began to ponder the idea of whether something like a unifying African culture even existed. His own conclusion ended up being that a central element shared amongst Africans and members of the diaspora, “was their precarious, their unutterably painful relation to the white world. What they held in common was the necessity to remake the world in their own image, to impose this image on the world, and no longer be controlled by the vision of the world” (28-29). But a few days further into the conference, a slightly different basis for African unity was
articulated by Senegalese historian Cheikh Anta Diop, who had by the moment of his speech, already published several works on this exact topic.33 Baldwin described Diop’s words as follows:
The evening session began with a film, which I missed, and was followed by a speech from Cheik Anta Diop, which, in sum, claimed the ancient Egyptian empire as part of the Negro past. I can only say that this question has never greatly exercised my mind, nor did M. Diop succeed in doing so—at least not in the direction he intended. He quite refused to remain within the twenty-minute limit and, while his claims of the deliberate dishonesty of all Egyptian scholars may be quite well founded for all I know, I cannot say that he convinced me. He was, however, a great success in the hall (43).
Although Baldwin remained unconvinced by Diop’s points, the crowd’s enthusiasm might have been a reflection of a sense of pride that became possible through what Diop was essentially doing here. For he was making the case for a particular African heritage to a
civilization that was often regarded as the cradle to every great civilization that would emerge throughout the rest of human history, including the Western one. As my previous chapter has already shown, a similar claim of ancestry found in ancient Egypt had also been articulated by David F. Dorr at the very opening of his travelogue, published nearly a century before this
32 James Baldwin, “Princes and Powers,” in Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (New York:
The Dial Press, 1961), 16. Hereafter cited parenthetically.
33 Beginning in the 1940s, Diop was instrumental in challenging the racist and colonial notions that “Africa had
no history,” when he began publishing histories of Africa that placed a specifically black ancient Egypt at its center.
For more information on Cheikh Anta Diop, see Hakim Adi and Marika Sherwood, Pan-African History:
22 event in Paris. This meant that Diop’s eventual efforts to rewrite pre-colonial histories of Africa—often including a crucial chapter on Egypt—were part of a much longer history of discussions surrounding ancient Egypt’s blackness, and Dorr was right in the middle of it. In this chapter then, as I return to the context of the nineteenth century, I will be taking a step away from discussing Dorr’s overall journey, to stick around in Egypt for a moment.
Remaining stationary in this location allows us to delve a bit deeper into Dorr’s encounter with his ancestors, by focusing on how he elaborated on the earlier mentioned claim of ancient Egypt’s blackness, and ultimately, how he was able to use that claim for his larger argument for a shift in mindset around him: a need to start thinking towards human equality, in the face of American slavery, and all of the theories that sought to support that system. As I will closely be focusing on the kinds of arguments Dorr made, and how he made them, I will also move into the wider contexts of several emerging sciences of the nineteenth century. These include the fields of Egyptology, pyramidology, but also a range of scientific disciplines that contributed to what is now understood as scientific racism.
As historian Scott Trafton has shown, by the middle of the nineteenth century, and especially in the American context, the emergence of both professional Egyptology and racialized science were intimately linked, as Egypt became “a primary place of legitimation for both secular and theological accounts of the history of ‘man’ and a primary place of legitimation for both secular and theological accounts of the history of races. American Egyptology was founded on the anxiety about human origin.”34 My goal in this chapter then
will not be to re-invent this larger point made by Trafton, but rather to illustrate what Dorr’s particular spin was on this scientific debate, as well as highlighting some of the details behind the larger wave of popular fascination with ancient Egypt around him. I also want to illustrate how one element that most of these emerging sciences shared, was that they were still very much in the process of becoming established at this point in history, creating a contest for knowledge and authority. And Dorr made himself an active participant in that contest, especially through his own words on ancient Egypt.
A good place to start then, is Dorr’s chapter on “Egyptian Kings of Olden Times.” This would prove to be one of the most important momentsin his overall travelogue, especially when considering the personal lineage and ancestry that he had linked to ancient Egypt earlier in the book. Yet, as Dorr started this particular chapter, it quickly took the form
34 Scott Trafton, Egypt Land: Race and Nineteenth-Century American Egyptomania (Durham: Duke University
23 of another straightforward history lesson for his readers, while he also included some
information regarding the politics and economics surrounding the contemporary Ottoman ruled Egypt. For example, after Dorr had described the modern city of Cairo, but then returned to his history lesson, he noted that this city was
the Memphis of old. Here it was that Pharaoh dwelt when he marched in pursuit of Moses, when the cloud stood between them; here it is he is, to day, a mummy if he was not embalmed in the Red Sea, but distinguished not; here it is the famine raged furiously and men sold themselves for food to Joseph; here it was that Moses had the power to turn ashes into dust, that flew over the land with the rapidity of a lighting flash, and infested the body of man with boils, and still the king loved the spot too well to give up one single foot of his powerful sway. Here it was that Greece and Italy were schooled in all that they excelled; here it was that Moses obtained his fundamental rules of governing nations of people, for he was “learned in all the learning of the Egyptians” (168).
At first glance, at least stylistically speaking, this description might appear rather similar in nature to most of the other descriptions by Dorr that could be found throughout the
travelogue, as he often tended to draw on history, to bring up the significance behind these different places he was visiting. But this history lesson in particular included the added layer of containing quite a bit of personal significance for Dorr himself. Firstly because Egypt, as the noted land of his ancestors, was the same place where these famous biblical narratives surrounding the figures of Moses and Joseph took place.35 Additionally, and from a more secular perspective, Dorr mentioned Egypt’s importance through it being an ancient source of knowledge to the civilizations that would go on to succeed it, including those of ancient Greece and Rome.
Following those points about ancient knowledge, he jumped ahead to his own moment in time to mention the emerging fields of Egyptology and pyramidology, through which none of the modern “Savans” appeared able to match the knowledge of these Egyptians of olden times. To make that claim, Dorr pointed to the pyramids. “I was there to day, and gazed upward 470 odd feet in the air at its top. I say it because it is only necessary to see one to be confounded and awe struck. (…) What the great kings of Egypt had such a tremendous mass of stone so systematically put together for, is a mystery to all the learning of our time, and
35 As Hilton Obenzinger has demonstrated, the increasing American readership of travelogues during the
nineteenth century often had a particular fascination with the act of “biblical archeology” on the part of travel-authors. This essentially meant that many American travelers sought out the Holy Land, but also places like Egypt, in order to get a glimpse of the landscapes that matched the bible stories of their imaginations and which so many Americans were raised with at the time. Dorr then, was also participating in this tradition through his description above.
For a further explanation of this phenomenon of biblical archeology, see Hilton Obenzinger, “Americans in the Holy Land, Israel and Palestine,” in The Cambridge Companion to American Travel Writing, ed. Alfred Bendixen & Judith Hamera (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), 147.
24 still we know it must have been for no ordinary freak of talent, intelligence of power, such a structure was reared.” Instead of speculating on the reasons as to why these monuments were built, Dorr did take a shot at how they were built, drawing on the evidence of “old
historians,” who had noted that a pyramid’s construction lasted approximately twenty years, “with a force of 100,000 hands.” Those multitudes of laborers were then replaced every three months by another set of 100,000 people, and the massive stones were “hewn from the mountains in the desert. It took ten years to make a causeway on which to bring these immense stones to the building. Each stone was originally adorned with engravings of animals, but now there is no vestige of them. The two largest in Egypt, and perhaps in the world, are these two here before Cairo” (169).
One aspect to these monuments that was of clear importance to Dorr, was the great deal of power that these Egyptians rulers must have had, especially considering that they were able to carry out projects of this magnitude. Following his attempt to go inside one of these pyramids, in order to observe its wonders, but failing to do so due to the sheer amount of bats inside, Dorr finished this chapter by reflecting on how the modern day rulers of Egypt were often being
reverenced here according to their wealth. (…) No king, perhaps, of the earth is so absolute in will over his people as the present Pacha of the Turkish empire. The kings of old time, no doubt, were more powerful in their absolute sway. When Thebes had one hundred gates undecayed, she could send to war, two millions of men. Such were Egyptian kings of olden time, though black (170).
By returning to this point of ancient Egypt’s blackness, Dorr had at this moment in the text added several different layers to that point. Not only were these people black, they were, as the records that he had been drawing on demonstrated, perhaps the most powerful and knowledgeable civilization ever to exist. Such an idea by itself might have been able to encourage a reconsideration of the justifications behind racial hierarchies in contemporary America, but Dorr added yet another layer on top of this as well. Namely, this idea that Egyptians were considered the forebears to all other great civilizations that eventually followed them—especially regarding the passing on of their knowledge—politically, as well as intellectually. If Egypt was the first great civilization within this grand narrative, the modern civilization of the United States could be considered to be one of the latest versions of such successors. And Dorr was actually able to take pride in a personal connection to both of these civilizations, as these words from his preface demonstrated:
But the Author of this book, though a colored man, hopes to die believing that this federated government is destined to be the noblest fabric ever germinated in the brain of men or the
25
tides of Time. Though a colored man, he believes that he has the right to say that, in his opinion, the American people are to be the Medes and Persians of the 19th century (11-12).
These Medes and Persians, at least as they related to ancient Egyptians, were mostly able to attain their status as great civilizations through the act of invading Egypt, as Trafton has pointed out.36 And this was something Dorr was connecting back to the modern imperial—
though great—American civilization here as well. A final set of references to Egypt’s
greatness that is worth considering, and that also dealt with invasion and succession, came up as Dorr was visiting Athens:
When Rome had a Caesar and a Cicero, and a Cassius with a Brutus, Athens dictated the arts and sciences for her. Though she cannot claim the originality of them, she can the perfection of beautifying. The conquest of Alexander the Great, in Egypt, among the Africans, was considered the greatest triumph of conquest ever made by man, because it enabled the warlike people of Greece, to adorn their triumphs with the spoils of the vanquished. Egypt was a higher sphere of artistical science than any other nation on the earth. This will naturally convey an idea to the world that the black man was the first skillful animal on the earth, because Homer describes the Egyptians as men with wooly hair, thick lips, flat fleet, and black, and we have no better authority than Homer. We know not the exact epoch of his time, but we know it was before any other authentic chronicler, save the sacred book of Moses, by the fact he voyaged on the Nile before the pyramids were built, which we can trace three thousand years.
On the 29th of May, 1852, as the sun was going down the blue arch of the western sky, I reached the top of Mars Hill, in Athens, and seated myself in the seat where St. Paul rested from his display of power over a bigoted people, when he said, “I perceive that in all things you are too superstitious” (134-135).
As this long passage helps to demonstrate, within Dorr’s discussions of great civilizations, Egypt was continuously positioned as the first to do it. And by repeatedly reminding his readers that these originators were black, Dorr was able to strengthen his eventual argument for a better understanding of racial equality in the modern world even further. To those doubting the validity of his claims, he simply pointed them to the classical figure of Homer, who Dorr claimed had mentioned the appearances of ancient Egyptians, while being
considered one of the first literary sources in Western history.37 Adding to this mention of the
36 Trafton, Egypt Land, 22.
37 Dorr is likely to have mis-quoted Homer here, and mistaken him for the figure of Herodotus. Homer did
actually discuss several groups of people living on the “edge of the earth,” which to him essentially was Africa. Such peoples included Egyptians and Ethiopians, of whom the latter group of people were considered to be dark-skinned, through the Greek term “aithiops (aitho- ‘burnt’ + ops ‘face’).” Homer’s descriptions of Egyptians then, did not actually include those details that Dorr was quoting him on, but some of those exact details did appear in the work of another classical source, Herodotus. He was the author who, in 2.104 of The
Histories, described ancient Egyptians as being “dark skinned and woolly-haired.” So, the point here remains
that Dorr was drawing on a classical Greek source who in some shape or form pointed to the blackness of ancient Egyptians—even if he mistakenly referenced the wrong source to do so.
For more information on Homer’s words on Africa, see Prudence J. Jones, “1. Early Greek Contact with Africa,” Africa: Greek and Roman Perspectives from Homer to Apuleius, Center for Hellenic Studies, Harvard
26 possible doubts, and thus the beliefs among his readers, Dorr also stepped back into play here once again, just like he did in other moments of his travelogue. In this particular case, this was done by seating himself on the same location as this figure of St. Paul, who had also looked over a people who were being “too superstitious.” Finally, by pointing those readers to a time when the pyramids were not even constructed, and then following that up
immediately with the exact date of his own visit to Athens, Dorr was also directly tying himself into this grand narrative of great civilizations, while reminding his readers that he himself served as evidence for his larger argument against the supposed racial inferiority of Africans and their descendants.
But the way in which Dorr emphasized the authority of Homer here once again to make all of these points can by itself open up a much larger discussion surrounding the emerging scientific fields of his time. This is not only a discussion of the way Dorr was writing history in this travelogue, as all of the words above can be related back to several other scientific disciplines as well. The first of these is Egyptology, the second would be the slightly more specific pyramidology, and thirdly and finally, what is summed up in hindsight as scientific racism. As I intend to make clear, within nearly all of these emerging scientific fields, it was often this exact issue of “authority,” that Dorr can be seen to have emphasized above, that was very much contested.
To begin a discussion on the emergence of Egyptology—but also the accompanying wave of popular fascination with ancient Egypt, called Egyptomania—one usually starts the clock with Napoleon’s military invasion of Egypt that lasted from 1798 until 1801. Aside from the contexts of the contemporary power struggles that motivated this expedition, it was momentous for the scientific field of Egyptology because it led to the publication of a vast volume entitled Description de l’Egypte (1809—1829), which was assembled by many different French scholars employed by Napoleon (or the “Savans,” from Dorr’s account), and something that historian Darrell Dykstra pointed out was the “beginning of ‘scientific’ publication on Egypt.”38 It also ended up constituting the first out of many peaks in Western
fascination with ancient Egypt over the course of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—another notable peak occurring after the translation of the hieroglyphics on the Rosetta Stone in 1822 by Jean-François Champollion, and a final one following Howard
University, accessed May 17, 2020, https://chs.harvard.edu/CHS/article/display/6537.1-early-greek-contact-with-africa.
38 Darrell Dykstra, “The French occupation of Egypt, 1798-1801,” in The Cambridge History of Egypt, ed. M.
