'Comparative Liberties': John Mitchel's Jail Journal and Austin Reed's Life and Adventures of a Haunted Convict
Abstrakt
In Jail Journal (1854), John Mitchel describes receiving a hero’s welcome on his arrival in New York as an escaped convict on 29 November 1853. That same day, Austin Reed was enjoying one of his rare periods of freedom from the same state’s penal system.
Reed’s recently discovered memoir, The Life and the Adventures of a Haunted Convict (completed c. 1858; published 2016)—the earliest known prison memoir by an African American—uses his experiences of incarceration to interrogate the United States’ colour-coded system of constrained freedoms. By contrast, for Mitchel, freedom means escaping from the metropolitan bustle of New York to meet fellow slavery advocates in Virginia, an account which is deleted and only briefly summarised by the editor of his memoir, creating an important ‘textual scar’ in his narrative (Van Hulle 2014).