Theory of Slavery | Hamilton

Prologue

TODAY, on the morning of my death, just after sunrise, and before my spirit departs, I will think of him for the very last time. While recalling our first meeting now, I would even ascribe it to some sort of presentiment. It was fate. One does not fix appointments with fate. If over the years, and passing through the realities of life, the memory of him dies, It shall stay intact on the pages of this memoir, the salt of remembrance. One can always count on a convicted murderer for a fancy prose style.

I've been ill for quite some time now. I'm starting to forget things, which is why I decided to write everything down, three hundred and sixty four days ago, in this well-heated, albeit tombal, seclusion. But I am too various to be trusted anyway. If this were not so I would not be alone in this cell tonight. I would not be about to perish, sometime between this morning and this afternoon, on the gallows. And still, just so long as the blood throbs through my writing hand, I will continue recalling my lover's face, old and sick and repulsive. My lighthearted dream of controlling him through his passion for me was all wrong; I had toadied to him when he was my darling, my awesome patron, and a groveling something still persisted in my attitude toward him even when he revealed himself as beast. The only ace I held was his ignorance of my monstrous love for him. Did he have a precursor? He did, of course he did. In point of fact, there might have been no man at all that I had not loved, in the summer, or in the fall, a myriad of initial, old, cruel men of principle.

Oh, you cannot imagine what these men of principle are! He never noticed the falsity of all his everyday conventions and rules of behavior, and drugs, and books, and his love for a person he fancied (not me), but would distinguish at once a false intonation in anything I might say with a view to change him. He always pointed it out with a diabolical accuracy of judgment, and, turning as pale as a shirt, slowly replied: "But I do love you, John."

This then is my story. I have reread it. It has bits of cloth sticking to it, and blood, and locks of frizzy hair. The following decision I make with all the legal impact, if there is to be one: I wish this memoir to be published only when I am no longer alive.

Thus, neither of us is alive when the reader opens this book.

***

I was arrested on the 5th of July, 1920. There had been little difficulty in my trial. I adhered exactly, clearly to my statement, and did not confuse nor misrepresent the facts, nor soften them in my own interest. This fell in with the most recent fashionable 'Slave theory' (which I shall describe in its proper place), so often applied in our days in criminal cases. Finally the court admitted that I belonged in a loony bin, and that the crime could only have been committed by a slavish instinct.

On September 1st of that same year I was sentenced to death, on condition of the fact that the penalty would be carried out only after a year; the mentally disturbed get an extra year to be sold before they can be executed.

Now it was August 31st, 1921.

My heart was beating violently, and my brain was in a turmoil. The monthly auction took place on the main square of Charleston. The heat that day was stifling, and there was a sickening smell of fresh paint and stale oil from the newly painted planks. I stood on the edge of the wooden podium, next to a crowd of ill-smelling consumptive women. One of them—a tall dark girl of about my age–was evidently in the very last stage of syphilis. Through the yellow coloring of her thin neck showed a white speckled rash, like stars in the sky. She was in fact a mere skeleton, and still—had it not been for the mask of chalk and red with which her face was covered—traces of a former beauty might still have been discerned in her. To my great amazement, I saw in her lashless eyes a look of dignity and a sense of her own importance. Bored and indifferent, she blinked occasionally as she watched a group of men below.