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<p>A Brief History of American Literature</p><p>A Brief History of American Literature Richard Gray</p><p>© 2011 Richard Gray. ISBN: 978-1-405-19231-6</p><p>A Brief History of American</p><p>Literature</p><p>Richard Gray</p><p>This edition first published 2011</p><p>� 2011 Richard Gray</p><p>Blackwell Publishing was acquired by John Wiley & Sons in February 2007. Blackwell’s publishing</p><p>program has been merged with Wiley’s global Scientific, Technical, and Medical business to form</p><p>Wiley-Blackwell.</p><p>Registered Office</p><p>John Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ,</p><p>United Kingdom</p><p>Editorial Offices</p><p>350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA</p><p>9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK</p><p>The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK</p><p>For details of our global editorial offices, for customer services, and for information about how to apply for</p><p>permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our website at www.wiley.com/wiley-</p><p>blackwell.</p><p>The right of Richard Gray to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with</p><p>the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.</p><p>All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or</p><p>transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise,</p><p>except as permitted by theUKCopyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of</p><p>the publisher.</p><p>Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in printmay not</p><p>be available in electronic books.</p><p>Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand</p><p>names and product names used in this book are trade names, service marks, trademarks or registered</p><p>trademarks of their respective owners. The publisher is not associated with any product or vendor</p><p>mentioned in this book. This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in</p><p>regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold on the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in</p><p>rendering professional services. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a</p><p>competent professional should be sought.</p><p>Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data</p><p>Gray, Richard J.</p><p>A brief history of American literature / Richard Gray.</p><p>p. cm.</p><p>Includes bibliographical references and index.</p><p>ISBN 978-1-4051-9231-6 (alk. paper) — ISBN 978-1-4051-9230-9 (pbk.: alk. paper)</p><p>1. American literature—History and criticism. 2. United States—Literatures—History and criticism.</p><p>I. Title.</p><p>PS88.G726 2011</p><p>810.9–dc22</p><p>2010035339</p><p>A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.</p><p>This book is published in the following electronic formats: ePDFs 978-1-4443-9245-6;</p><p>ePub 978-1-4443-9246-3</p><p>Set in 10/12.5 pt Galiard by Thomson Digital, Noida, India</p><p>1 2011</p><p>To Sheona</p><p>Contents</p><p>Preface and Acknowledgments ix</p><p>1 The First Americans: American Literature During the Colonial</p><p>and Revolutionary Periods 1</p><p>Imagining Eden 1</p><p>Writing of the Colonial and Revolutionary Periods 1</p><p>2 Inventing Americas: The Making of American Literature 1800–1865 47</p><p>Making a Nation 47</p><p>The Making of American Myths 47</p><p>The Making of American Selves 59</p><p>The Making of Many Americas 71</p><p>The Making of an American Fiction and Poetry 90</p><p>3 Reconstructing the Past, Reimagining the Future: The Development</p><p>of American Literature 1865–1900 115</p><p>Rebuilding a Nation 115</p><p>The Development of Literary Regionalisms 115</p><p>The Development of Literary Realism and Naturalism 130</p><p>The Development of Women’s Writing 143</p><p>The Development of Many Americas 148</p><p>4 Making It New: The Emergence of Modern American</p><p>Literature 1900–1945 159</p><p>Changing National Identities 159</p><p>Between Victorianism and Modernism 159</p><p>The Inventions of Modernism 176</p><p>Traditionalism, Politics, and Prophecy 211</p><p>Community and Identity 226</p><p>Mass Culture and the Writer 242</p><p>5 Negotiating the American Century: American Literature</p><p>since 1945 249</p><p>Towards a Transnational Nation 249</p><p>Formalists and Confessionals 249</p><p>Public and Private Histories 263</p><p>Beats, Prophets, and Aesthetes 281</p><p>The Art and Politics of Race 296</p><p>Realism and Its Discontents 314</p><p>Language and Genre 328</p><p>Creating New Americas 345</p><p>Index 373</p><p>viii Contents</p><p>Preface and Acknowledgments</p><p>In this history of American literature, I have tried to be responsive to the immense</p><p>changes that have occurred over the past thirty years in the study of American literature.</p><p>In particular, I have tried to register the plurality of American culture and American</p><p>writing: the continued inventing of communities, and the sustained imagining of</p><p>nations, that constitute the literary history of theUnited States.My aimhere has been to</p><p>provide the reader with a reasonably concise but also coherent narrative that concen-</p><p>trates on significant and symptomaticwriterswhile also registering the range and variety</p><p>of American writing.My focus has necessarily been onmajor authors and the particular</p><p>texts that are generally considered to be their most important or representative work. I</p><p>have also, however, looked at less central or canonical writers whose work demands the</p><p>attention of anyone wanting to understand the full scope of American literature: work</p><p>that illustrates important literary or cultural trends or helps tomeasure themulticultural</p><p>character of American writing. In sum, my aim has been to offer as succinct an account</p><p>as possible of the major achievements in American literature and of American differ-</p><p>ence: what it is that distinguishes the American literary tradition and also what it is that</p><p>makes it extraordinarily, fruitfully diverse.</p><p>I have accumulatedmany debts in the course of working on this book. In particular, I</p><p>would like to thank friends at the British Academy, including Andrew Hook, Jon</p><p>Stallworthy, and Wynn Thomas; colleagues and friends at other universities, among</p><p>them Kasia Boddy, Susan Castillo, Henry Claridge, Richard Ellis, the late Kate Full-</p><p>brook, Mick Gidley, Sharon Monteith, Judie Newman, Helen Taylor, and Nahem</p><p>Yousaf; and colleagues and friends in other parts of Europe and in Asia and the United</p><p>States, especially Saki Bercovitch, Bob Brinkmeyer, the late George Dekker, Jan</p><p>Nordby Gretlund, Lothar Honnighausen, Bob Lee, Marjorie Perloff, and Waldemar</p><p>Zacharasiewicz. Amongmy colleagues in the Department of Literature, I owe a special</p><p>debt of thanks to Herbie Butterfield and Owen Robinson; I also owe special thanks to</p><p>mymany doctoral students who, over the years, have been gainfully employed in trying</p><p>to keep my brain functioning. Sincere thanks are also due to Emma Bennett, the very</p><p>best of editors, at Blackwell for steering this book to completion, to Theo Savvas for</p><p>helping so much and so efficiently with the research and preparation, to Nick Hartley</p><p>for his informed and invaluable advice on illustrations, and to JackMessenger for being</p><p>such an excellent copyeditor. On a more personal note, I would like to thank my older</p><p>daughter, Catharine, for her quick wit, warmth, intelligence, and understanding, and</p><p>for providing me with the very best of son-in-laws, Ricky Baldwin, and two perfect</p><p>grandsons, Izzy and Sam; my older son, Ben, for his thoughtfulness, courage,</p><p>commitment, and good company; my younger daughter, Jessica, for her lively</p><p>intelligence, grace, and kindness, as well as her refusal to take anything I say on trust;</p><p>and my younger son, Jack, who, being without language, constantly reminds me that</p><p>there are other, deeper ways of communicating. Finally, as always, I owe the deepest</p><p>debt of all to my wife, Sheona, for her patience, her good humor, her clarity and</p><p>tenderness of spirit, and for her love and support, for always being there when I need</p><p>her. Without her, this book would never have been completed: which is why, quite</p><p>naturally, it is dedicated to her.</p><p>x Preface and Acknowledgments</p><p>1</p><p>The First Americans</p><p>American</p><p>formofHudibrastic verse – so named after theEnglish poet, SamuelButler’s satire of the</p><p>Puritans,Hudibras – The Sot-weed Factor presents us with a narrator who visits America</p><p>only to be robbed, cheated, stripped of his guide, horse and clothes, and, in general,</p><p>appalled by what he sees as the anarchy and squalor of his new surroundings. The</p><p>rollicking tetrameter lines, odd rhymes and syntax help to paint a carnival portrait of life</p><p>on the frontier and in the backwoods, in small towns and in “Annapolis . . ./A City</p><p>Situate on a Plain.” And, having left “Albion’sRocks” in the opening lines, the narrator</p><p>eagerly returns there at the conclusion some700 lines later. “Embarqu’d andwaiting for</p><p>aWind,/I left this dreadful Curse behind,” he declares, damning America as he departs.</p><p>Finally, he calls onGod tocomplete thedamnationofAmerica. “May WrathDivine then</p><p>lay those regions wast/,” he prays, “Where noMans faithful, nor aWomanChast.” The</p><p>bombastic character of the curses, like the representation of the narrator throughoutThe</p><p>Sot-weed Factor, alerts the reader to what is happening here. The satire apparently</p><p>directed atAmerican vulgarity is, in fact, being leveled atEnglish snobbery, preciousness,</p><p>and self-satisfaction. Cook has taken an English form and turned it to American</p><p>advantage. In the process, he has developed a peculiarly American style of comedy in</p><p>which the contrast between the genteel and the vernacular is negotiated, to the</p><p>advantage of the latter, through a use of language that is fundamentally ironic.</p><p>Richard Lewis was just as prolific a writer as Cook; and, in the time he could spare</p><p>from being a politician in Maryland, he wrote, among other things, forms of the</p><p>pastoral that implied or even asserted the superiority of American nature. “A Journey</p><p>from Patapsko to Annapolis, April 4, 1730” (1732), for instance, begins by acknowl-</p><p>edging its illustrious ancestry, with a quotation from the first pastoral poem, the</p><p>Georgics of Virgil. Lewis then includes, later on in his poetical journey, allusions to</p><p>the Seasons by the Scottish poet James Thomson and John Dryden’s translation of the</p><p>Georgics. But, while deferring in this way to the European model he is using and</p><p>the European masters who have preceded him, Lewis is nevertheless eager to insist on</p><p>the specific advantages and special beauties of the countryside around him. So he dwells</p><p>on the idyllic life lived here by “the Monarch-Swain,” with “His Subject-Flocks” and</p><p>The Colonial and Revolutionary Periods 19</p><p>“well-tilled Lands.” In a way, this is a commonplace of European pastoral too. Lewis,</p><p>however, devotes more attention than his European predecessors tended to do to the</p><p>ideas of patient toil rewarded, the value of self-subsistence and the pleasures of</p><p>abundance. As Lewis turns his attention from a happy farmer and his family to the</p><p>burgeoning countryside around him, he espies a humming-bird, the beauty of whose</p><p>“ever-flutt’ring wings” becomes a paradigm for and measure of the superiority of</p><p>American nature. The phoenix, the bird of classical myth, pales beside the American</p><p>bird, just as the site of pastoral in the Old World pales beside what Lewis now calls the</p><p>“bloomingWilderness” of theNew.Not content to stop there, the poet then asks us to</p><p>behold thewonders of “the out-stretch’dLand” beyondwood andplantation.We turn</p><p>our eyes, in effect, to what so many American poets were to take as the primary fact of</p><p>their land: space, its apparent endlessness. After this, admittedly, the poetical journey</p><p>concludes in conventional fashion, with references to the journey of life and prayers to</p><p>the “great CREATOR.” But Lewis has already staked a claim for difference. He has</p><p>already, earlier on in the poem, broken new ground in the depiction of the American</p><p>landscape and the development of the American pastoral form.</p><p>Although the eighteenth century in America witnessed a growing trend towards</p><p>the secular, it would be wrong to deny the continuing importance and power of</p><p>religious influences and writing. In the Southwest, for example, the century witnessed</p><p>a significant growth of interest in and worship of the Virgin of Guadaloupe. According</p><p>to legend, the Virgin appeared to a poor Indian in 1531 on a sacred site associated with</p><p>an Indian goddess of fertility. She asked for a cathedral to be built to her over the site</p><p>of an Aztec place of worship, which it thenwas. And the first account of this miraculous</p><p>encounter was eventually written down a century later, in 1649, in Nahuatl, the</p><p>language of the Aztecs. The Virgin was and remains a syncretic religious figure. The</p><p>“somewhat dark” face and Indian features attributed to her in the original account, and</p><p>in the numerous paintings and statues of her created ever since, make her a Native</p><p>AmericanVirgin; theword “Guadaloupe” is itselfmost probably a hybrid, derived from</p><p>the Nahuatl word for “snake” and the Spanish word for “crush” and referring to a</p><p>gesture often given to the Virgin Mary in statues, of crushing the snake. During the</p><p>eighteenth century, however, themiscegenation of Spanish and Indian thatmarked the</p><p>original legend became less important than the use of the Virgin of Guadaloupe as an</p><p>emblem of New World hybridity, themestizo. She became a potent religious, cultural,</p><p>and political icon for Mexican Americans. She remains so; and she is a measure of just</p><p>how far removedmany Americans of the timewere from the creed or even the influence</p><p>of the Enlightenment.</p><p>The same is true for some American writers situated further east. In 1755, for</p><p>instance, Some Account of the Fore part of the Life of Elizabeth Ashbridge . . .Written by</p><p>her own Hand many years ago was published. Little is known of its author, other than</p><p>what is contained in her book, but from that it is clear that the central fact of her life was</p><p>her conversion. After emigrating to America as an indentured servant, Elizabeth</p><p>Ashbridge (1713–1755) discovered that her master, whom she had taken for “a very</p><p>religious man” was, in fact, cruel and hypocritical. Buying her own freedom, she</p><p>married a man who, she says, “fell in love with me for my dancing.” But, when she</p><p>embraced theQuaker religion, the dancing stopped; and her husband, in his anger and</p><p>disappointment, began to beat her. The beatings only ended, Ashbridge explains, when</p><p>20 The Colonial and Revolutionary Periods</p><p>her husband died. Then she was able to marry again, this time to someone who shared</p><p>her faith. That faith, and her conversion to it, are described with simple power; just as</p><p>they are in the Journal that another Quaker, John Woolman (1720–1772), kept</p><p>intermittently between 1756 and his death – andwhich was published by the Society of</p><p>Friends in 1774. “I have often felt a motion of love to leave some hints in writing of my</p><p>experience of the goodness of God,” Woolman confesses at the start of the Journal,</p><p>“and now, in the thirty-sixth year ofmy age, I begin thework.”What follows is the story</p><p>of a life lived in the light of faith that is, nevertheless, remarkable for its simplicity and</p><p>humility of tone. Woolman describes how he eventually gave up trade and his</p><p>mercantile interests to devote himself to his family and farm, and to work as a</p><p>missionary. He traveled thousands of miles, Woolman reveals, driven by “a lively</p><p>operative desire for the good of others.” The desire not only prompted him towards</p><p>missionary work but also impelled him to champion the rights of Native Americans and</p><p>to attack slavery, which he described as a “dark gloominess hanging over the land.” Just</p><p>like Ashbridge, Woolman shows how many Americans even in an increasingly secular</p><p>age relied on what Woolman himself termed “the judgements of God” and “the</p><p>infallible standard: Truth” to steer their lives and direct their choices, rather than</p><p>the touchstones of reason and use.</p><p>The case is more complicated, however, with the greatest American embodiment of</p><p>faith in the eighteenth century, Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758). Edwards was born in</p><p>EastWindsor,</p><p>Connecticut. His father and grandfather were both clergymen and, even</p><p>before he went to college, he had decided to follow their example: not least, because, as</p><p>he discloses in hisPersonalNarrative, written some time after 1739, he had felt “a sense</p><p>of the glorious majesty and grace of God.” After that, Edwards explains, “the</p><p>appearance of everything was altered” since “there seemed to be . . . a calm, sweet</p><p>cast, or appearance of divine glory, in almost everything.” He felt compelled to</p><p>meditate; he also felt compelled to review and discipline the conduct of his life. Some</p><p>time in 1722–1723, he composed seventy Resolutions designed to improve himself in</p><p>the light of his faith. “Being sensible that I am unable to do anything without God’s</p><p>help,” hewrote at the start of them, “I dohumbly entreat himbyhis grace, to keep these</p><p>Resolutions, so far as they are agreeable to his will, for Christ’s sake.”What follows very</p><p>much reflects the old New England habit of seeing death as the defining, determining</p><p>event of life. This is a self-help manual of a special kind, shaped by a belief in human</p><p>impotence and a profound sense of mortality. The experience of conversion confirmed</p><p>what Edwards had, in any event, learned from his deeply orthodox religious upbring-</p><p>ing: that God was the ground and center, not only of faith, but of all conduct and</p><p>existence.</p><p>Further confirmation came when Edwards moved to Northampton, Massachusetts</p><p>to become pastor there. In 1734 he preached a number of sermons stressing the</p><p>passivity of the convert before the all-powerful offer of grace from God; and the</p><p>sermons provoked a strong reaction amongmany of his congregation, who appeared to</p><p>experience exactly the kind of radical conversion Edwards was preaching about and had</p><p>himself undergone. Encouraged to prepare an account of this awakening of faith in his</p><p>community, Edwards wrote a pamphlet that then became a book,AFaithfulNarrative</p><p>of the Surprising Work of God, published in 1737. “Some under Great Terrors of</p><p>Conscience have had Impressions on their Imaginations,” Edwards reported; “they</p><p>The Colonial and Revolutionary Periods 21</p><p>have had . . . Ideas of Christ shedding blood for sinners, his blood Running from his</p><p>veins.” But, then, having been convinced of their guilt and damnation, and resigning</p><p>themselves to God’s justice, these same people discovered as Edwards had the power of</p><p>God’s grace. Anticipating the Great Awakening that was to sweep through many parts</p><p>of the American colonies in the next few years, the Northampton congregation, many</p><p>of them, found themselves born again, into a new life grounded in “the beauty and</p><p>excellency of Christ” just as their pastor had been before them.</p><p>Both his own personal experience, then, and the “surprising” conversions among his</p><p>congregation, were enough to convince Edwards of the supreme importance of divine</p><p>grace and human faith. But that did not make him averse to science and systematic</p><p>thinking. On the contrary, he made his own contribution to the philosophical debates</p><p>of the time. In A Treatise Concerning Religious Affections (1746), for instance,</p><p>Edwards attempted to construct a clear theory of the place of emotion in religion,</p><p>so as the better to understand the emotional experience of converts. Just how much</p><p>Edwards wanted to harness reason in the service of faith and, if necessary, to defend</p><p>mystery with logic is nowhere better illustrated than in his arguments – developed in</p><p>such works as The Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin Defended (1758) and Two</p><p>Dissertations (1765) – concerning the total depravity of human nature and the infinite</p><p>grace of God. True virtue, Edwards argued, borrowing his definitions from Enlight-</p><p>enment philosophers like Hutcheson and Shaftesbury, consists in disinterested be-</p><p>nevolence towards humankind in general. It involves pure selflessness. But, Edwards</p><p>then insisted, humanity can never be selfless. All human actions, no matter how</p><p>creditable their effects, are dictated by self-interest. Everything a human being does</p><p>springs from considerations of self because, Edwards went on, now borrowing his</p><p>definitions from an earlier Enlightenment figure, Descartes, he or she can never get</p><p>outside the self. A man, or woman, can never escape from their own senses and</p><p>sense impressions. So, they are incapable of true virtue. Each is imprisoned in his or her</p><p>own nature. Each is corrupt, fallen and evil, and the only thing that can save them is</p><p>something beyond human power to control: that is, the irresistible grace of God. “All</p><p>moral good,” Edwards concluded, “stems from God.” God is the beginning and end,</p><p>the ground and meaning of all moral existence. Edwards’s relation to the prevailing</p><p>rationalism of his times certainly drew him towards complex philosophical argument.</p><p>But it never tempted him to deviate from the straight and narrow path of faith, or</p><p>to surrender a vision of human experience that was rapt and apocalyptic, swinging</p><p>between the extremes of damnation and redemption.</p><p>A sermon like Edwards’s most well-known piece of work, Sinners in the Hands of an</p><p>Angry God, delivered in 1741 and published the same year, describes the alternative of</p><p>damnation. In it, Edwards uses all the rhetorical devices at his disposal, above all vivid</p><p>imagery and incremental repetition, to describe in gruesomedetail the “fearful danger”</p><p>the “sinner” is in. The other alternative, of conversions and salvation, is figured, for</p><p>example, in Edwards’s description in 1723 of the woman who became his wife, Sarah</p><p>Pierrepoint. Like so many of Edwards’s writings – or, for that matter, work by others</p><p>inspired by the Puritan belief that material facts are spiritual signs – it is at once intimate</p><p>and symbolic. This is, at once, his own dear beloved and an emblem of any redeemed</p><p>soul in communion with God. “The Son of God created the world for this very end,”</p><p>Edwards wrote elsewhere, in “Covenant of Redemption: ‘Excellency of Christ,’” “to</p><p>22 The Colonial and Revolutionary Periods</p><p>communicateHimself in an image ofHis own excellency.” “By this wemay discover the</p><p>beauty of many of those metaphors and similes, which to an unphilosophical person do</p><p>seem uncouth,” he infers; since everywhere in nature we may consequently behold</p><p>emblems, “the emanations of the sweet benevolence of Jesus Christ.” That belief in the</p><p>spiritual and symbolic nature of the perceived world animates Edwards’s writing. So</p><p>does his fervent belief that all existence, natural and moral, depends on God, and his</p><p>equally fervent conviction that all human faculties, including reason, must be placed in</p><p>the service of faith in Him.</p><p>Towards the revolution</p><p>It is possible to see Jonathan Edwards as a distillation of one side of the Puritan</p><p>inheritance: that is, the spiritual, even mystical strain in Puritan thought that empha-</p><p>sized the inner life, the pursuit of personal redemption, and the ineffable character of</p><p>God’s grace. In which case, it is equally possible to see Edwards’s great contemporary,</p><p>Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790), as a distillation anddevelopment of another side: that</p><p>tendency in Puritanism that stressed the outer life, hard work and good conduct, and</p><p>the freedom of the individual will. Another way of putting it is to say that Franklin</p><p>embodied the new spirit of America, emerging in part out of Puritanism and in part out</p><p>of theEnlightenment, that was coming to dominate the culture. Andhe knew it. That is</p><p>clear fromhis account of his own life in hismost famouswork, theAutobiography, which</p><p>he worked on at four different times (1771, 1784, 1788, 1788–1789), revised</p><p>extensively but left unfinished at the time of his death; an American edition was</p><p>published in 1818, but the first complete edition of what he had written only appeared</p><p>nearly a hundred years after his death, in 1867. Uncompleted though it is, the</p><p>Autobiography nevertheless has a narrative unity. It is divided into three sections: first,</p><p>Franklin’s youth and early manhood in Boston and Philadelphia;</p><p>second, Franklin’s</p><p>youthful attempts to achieve what he terms “moral perfection”; and third, Franklin’s</p><p>use of the principles discovered in the first section and enumerated in the second to</p><p>enable him to rise to prosperity and success as a scientist, politician, and philanthropist.</p><p>Throughout all three sections, Franklin is keen to present his life as exemplary and</p><p>typical: proof positive that anyone can make it, especially in America, “the Land of</p><p>Labour”where “a general happyMediocrity prevails” – as long as they apply themselves</p><p>to useful toil. Like the good scientist, Franklin the narrator looks at the events of</p><p>Franklin the autobiographical character’s life and tries to draw inferences from them.</p><p>Or he tries to see how his ownmoral hypotheses worked, when he put them to the test</p><p>of action. Thismeans that he ismore than just remembering in hisAutobiography. He is</p><p>also demonstrating those truths, about human nature, human society, and God which,</p><p>as he sees it, should be acknowledged by all reasonable men.</p><p>Just howmuchFranklin presents his story as a prototypical American one ismeasured</p><p>in the first section of theAutobiography. His “first entry” into the city of Philadelphia in</p><p>1723, for instance, is described in detail. Andwhat he emphasizes is his sorry appearance</p><p>and poverty. “I was in my working dress,” he tells the reader, “my best clothes being to</p><p>come round by sea.” “I was dirty from my journey,” he adds, “and I knew no soul nor</p><p>where to look for lodging.” Whatever the truth of this story, Franklin is also clearly</p><p>constructing a myth here, one that was to become familiar in American narratives. This</p><p>The Colonial and Revolutionary Periods 23</p><p>is the self-made man as hero, on his first appearance, poor and unknown and</p><p>unprotected, entering a world that he then proceeds to conquer.</p><p>That Franklin was able to rise to affluence and reputation from these humble</p><p>beginnings was due, he tells the reader, not only to self-help and self-reliance but to</p><p>self-reinvention. In the second section of his Autobiography, he explains how he</p><p>“conceived the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection.” Wanting</p><p>“to live without committing any fault at any time,” he drew up a list of the “moral</p><p>virtues,” such as “temperance,” “silence,” “order,” “resolution,” and “frugality.” And</p><p>he then gave “a week’s attention to each of the virtues successively.” A complicated</p><p>chart was drawn up for the week; and, if ever he committed a least offense against that</p><p>week’s moral virtue, he would mark it on the chart, his obvious aim being to keep it</p><p>“clean of spots.” Since he had enumerated thirteen virtues, he could “go through</p><p>a course complete” in moral re-education in thirteen weeks, and “four courses in</p><p>a year.” Springing from a fundamental belief that the individual could change, improve,</p><p>and even recreate himself, with the help of reason, common sense, and hard work,</p><p>Franklin’s program for himself was one of the first great formulations of the American</p><p>dream.Rather than being born into a life, Franklin is informing his readers, a person can</p><p>make that life for himself. He can be whoever he wants to be. All he needs is</p><p>understanding, energy, and commitment to turn his own best desires about himself</p><p>into a tangible reality.</p><p>And that, as he tells it and indeed lived it, is exactly what Franklin did. By 1748, when</p><p>he was still only forty-two, he had made enough money to retire from active business.</p><p>By this time, he had also become quite famous thanks to his newspaper, The</p><p>Pennsylvania Gazette, and a little book he published annually from 1733, Poor</p><p>Richard’s Almanack. Almanacs were popular in early America, their principal purpose</p><p>being to supply farmers and traders with information about the weather and fluctua-</p><p>tions in the currency. Franklin kept this tradition going, but he changed it by adding</p><p>and gradually expanding a section consisting of proverbs and little essays, a kind of</p><p>advice column that reflected his philosophy of economic and moral individualism.</p><p>Eventually,many of the proverbs were brought together in one book, in 1758, that was</p><p>to become known as The Way to Wealth; this was a nationwide bestseller and was</p><p>reprinted several hundred times. Always, the emphasis here is on the virtues of</p><p>diligence, thrift, and independence. “Diligence is the mother of good luck,” declares</p><p>one proverb. “Plough deep, while sluggards sleep,” says another, “and you shall have</p><p>corn to sell and keep.” As a whole, the proverbs reflect the single-mindedness that had</p><p>helped Franklin himself along the way to wealth. But they also show Franklin’s wit. As</p><p>early as 1722, Franklin had perfected a literary style that combined clarity of expression</p><p>with sharpness and subtlety, and frequently humor of perception, in a series of essays</p><p>called the “Silence Dogood” papers, after the name of the narrator. In these, Franklin</p><p>used a fictitious speaker, the busybody widow Silence Dogood, to satirize follies and</p><p>vices ranging from poor poetry to prostitution. And, throughout his life, Franklin was</p><p>not only an inventor of proverbial wisdom but a masterly essayist, using his skills to</p><p>promote philanthropic and political projects (A Proposal for Promoting Useful Knowl-</p><p>edge (1743); Proposals Relating to the Education of Youth in Pennsylvania (1749)), to</p><p>attack violence against Native Americans or the superstition that led people to accuse</p><p>women of witchcraft (A Narrative of the Late Massacres (1764); “A Witch Trial at</p><p>24 The Colonial and Revolutionary Periods</p><p>MountHolly” (1730)), and to satirize the slave trade and British imperialism (“On the</p><p>Slave Trade” (1790); “An Edict by the King of Prussia” (1773)). Here, he developed</p><p>his persona, “the friend of all goodmen,” and his characteristic argumentative strategy,</p><p>also enshrined in his Autobiography, of weaving seamlessly together the imperatives of</p><p>self-help and altruism, personal need and the claims of society.</p><p>Here, and elsewhere, Franklin also elaborated his belief in America. His homeplace,</p><p>Franklin explained in “Information toThoseWhoWouldRemove toAmerica” (1784),</p><p>was a place where “people do not inquire concerning a Stranger,What is he? But,What</p><p>can he do?” Anyone with “any useful Art” was welcome. And all “Hearty young</p><p>Labouring Men” could “easily establish themselves” there. Not only that, they could</p><p>soon rise to a reasonable fortune. They could increase andmultiply, and they could live</p><p>good lives. “The almost general Mediocrity of Fortune that prevails in America,”</p><p>Franklin explained, obliged all people “to follow some Business for subsistence.” So,</p><p>“those Vices, that arise usually from Idleness, are in a great measure prevented”;</p><p>“Industry and constant Employment” were the “great preservatives of the Morals and</p><p>Virtue” of the NewWorld. For Franklin, America really was the land of opportunity. It</p><p>was also a land of tolerance, common sense, and reason, where people could and should</p><p>be left free to toil usefully for themselves and their community, as he had done.</p><p>Typically, he turned such beliefs into a matter of political practice as well as principle,</p><p>working on behalf of his colonial home, then his country, for most of his life. In 1757</p><p>and1775, for example, hemade two lengthy trips toEngland, to serve as colonial agent.</p><p>After the second trip, he returned toPhiladelphia just in time to serve in theContinental</p><p>Congress and to be chosen as a member of that committee which eventually drafted</p><p>the Declaration of Independence. Then, in 1783, he was one of the three American</p><p>signatories to the treaty that ended the Revolutionary War. Finally, after some years in</p><p>France asAmerican ambassador, he became amember of that conventionwhich drafted</p><p>the Constitution of the United States. Franklin was at the heart of the American</p><p>Revolution from its origins to its conclusions. And he shows, more clearly than any</p><p>other figure of the time does, just howmuch that Revolution owed to the principles of</p><p>the Enlightenment. By his presence and</p><p>comments he also suggests just howmuch the</p><p>founding documents of the American nation were rooted in a project that he himself</p><p>embraced and emblematized, based on the principles of natural rights and reason, self-</p><p>help and self-reinvention.</p><p>“What then is the American, this newman?” asked J. Hector St. Jean de Crevecoeur</p><p>(1735–1813) in his Letters from an American Farmer, published in 1782. Answering</p><p>his own question, Crevecoeur then suggested that “the American is a new man, who</p><p>acts upon new principles; he must therefore entertain new ideas, and form new</p><p>opinions.” That was a common theme in the literature surrounding the American</p><p>Revolution. As the American colonies became a new nation, the United States of</p><p>America, writers and many others applied themselves to the task of announcing</p><p>just what this new nation represented, and what the character and best hopes of the</p><p>American might be. Crevecoeur was especially fascinated because of his mixed back-</p><p>ground: born in France, he spent time in England and Canada before settling as</p><p>a planter in New York State. He was also, during the Revolution, placed in a difficult</p><p>position. As a Tory or Loyalist (that is, someone who continued to claim allegiance to</p><p>Britain), he found himself suspected by the Revolutionaries; as someone with liberal</p><p>The Colonial and Revolutionary Periods 25</p><p>Figure 1.3 First draft of the Declaration of Independence, in the handwriting of Thomas</p><p>Jefferson with alterations and corrections in the handwriting of Jefferson, John Adams, and</p><p>Benjamin Franklin. Fragment (page 3) of Original Rough Draft, June 1776. Thomas Jefferson</p><p>Papers, Manuscript Division. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.</p><p>26 The Colonial and Revolutionary Periods</p><p>sympathies, however, he also fell under suspicion among the other Tories. So in 1780</p><p>he returned to France; and it was in London that Letters was first published. Following</p><p>a form very popular in the eighteenth century, Crevecoueur’s book (which was</p><p>reprinted many times) consists of twelve letters written by a fictional narrator, James,</p><p>a Quaker and a farmer, describing his life on the farm and his travels to places such as</p><p>Charlestown, South Carolina. Letters is an epistolary narrative; it is a travel and</p><p>philosophical journal; and it also inaugurates that peculiarly American habit of mixing</p><p>fiction and thinly disguised autobiography. James shares many of the experiences and</p><p>opinions ofCrevecoeur but, unlike his creator, he is a simple, relatively uneducatedman</p><p>and, of course, a Quaker – which Crevecoeur most certainly was not.</p><p>At the heart of Letters are three animating beliefs that Crevecoeur shared with many</p><p>of his contemporaries, and that were to shape subsequent American thought and</p><p>writing. There is, first, the belief that American nature is superior to European culture:</p><p>at once older than even “the half-ruined amphitheatres” of theOldWorld and, because</p><p>it is subject to perpetual, seasonal renewal, much newer and fresher than, say, “the</p><p>musty ruins of Rome.” Second, there is the belief that America is the place where the</p><p>oppressed of Europe can find freedom and independence as “tillers of the earth.”</p><p>America is “not composed, as in Europe, of great lords who possess everything, and</p><p>a herd of people who have nothing,” the narrator of Letters explains. “We are all</p><p>animated with the spirit of an industry which is unfettered and unrestrained, because</p><p>each person works for himself.” “We are,” the narrator triumphantly declares, “the</p><p>most perfect society now existing in the world.” The “new man” at the center of this</p><p>perfect society reflects the third belief animating this book. The American, as Letters</p><p>describes him, is the product of “the new mode of life he has embraced, the new</p><p>government he obeys, and the new rank he holds.” “Americans are the western</p><p>pilgrims,” the narrator proudly declaims; “here individuals of all nations are melted</p><p>into a new race of men.” And what lies at the end of this journey to a Promised Land,</p><p>what rises out of the melting pot, is a self-reliant individual, whose “labour is founded</p><p>on the basis of nature, self-interest.” The American works for himself and his loved</p><p>ones; he can think for himself; and the contribution he makes to his community and</p><p>society is freely given, without fear or favor.</p><p>There are, certainly, moments of doubt and even despair in Letters. Traveling to</p><p>South Carolina, James is reminded of the obscenity and injustice of slavery: not least,</p><p>when he comes across the grotesque spectacle of a slave suspended in a cage in the</p><p>woods, starving to death, his eyes pecked out by hungry birds. But, despite that –</p><p>despite, even, the suspicion that the presence of slavery makes a mockery of any talk</p><p>of a “perfect society” – the general thrust of the book is towards celebration of both</p><p>the promise and the perfection of America. Crevecoeur’s work is driven by certain</p><p>convictions, about nature and natural rights, a new man and society, that he</p><p>certainly shared with other American writers of the time – and, indeed, with some</p><p>of his Romantic counterparts in Europe. But nowhere are such convictions given</p><p>clearer or more charged expression. Letters begins with the claim that to “record the</p><p>progressive steps” of an “industrious farmer” is a nobler project for a writer than any</p><p>to be found in European literature. That claim is supported, and the project pursued</p><p>with enthusiasm in the ensuing pages, where the hero is, quite simply, “the</p><p>American.”</p><p>The Colonial and Revolutionary Periods 27</p><p>A writer who shared Crevecoeur’s belief in the possibilities of American society was</p><p>Thomas Paine (1737–1809). Unlike Crevecoeur, however, Paine was unambiguously</p><p>enthusiastic about the Revolution. Born in England, Paine arrived in America in 1774.</p><p>He remained for only thirteen years, but his impact on America’s developing vision of</p><p>itself was enormous. In 1776 Paine published Common Sense, which argued for</p><p>American independence and the formation of a republican government. “In the</p><p>following pages I offer nothing more than simple facts, plain arguments, and common</p><p>sense,” Paine declared in the opening pages. That reflected the contemporary belief in</p><p>the power of reason, which Paine shared, and the contemporary shift in political</p><p>commentaries from arguments rooted in religion to more secular ones. It did not,</p><p>however, quite do justice to, or prepare the reader for, the power of Paine’s rhetoric.</p><p>The gift for firing arguments into life, often with the help of an imaginative use of</p><p>maxims, is evenmore in evidence in theCrisis papers.WithWashington defeated and in</p><p>retreat at the end of 1776, Paine tried to rouse the nation to further resistance in the first</p><p>of sixteen papers. “These are the times that try men’s souls,” he began. On this</p><p>memorable opening he then piled a series of equally memorable maxims, clearly</p><p>designed for the nation to take to and carry in its heart: “The summer soldier and</p><p>the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country,” Paine</p><p>declares, “but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.”</p><p>The last of the Crisis papers appeared in 1783, at the end of the Revolution. Only</p><p>four years later, Paine returned to England. There, he wrote The Rights of Man</p><p>(1791–1792), intended as a reply to Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790)</p><p>by Edmund Burke. It was immensely popular but, because Paine argued against</p><p>a hereditary monarchy in The Rights of Man, he was charged with sedition and was</p><p>forced to flee to France. There, his protest against the execution of Louis XVI led to</p><p>imprisonment. He was only released when the American ambassador to Paris, James</p><p>Madison, intervened. Paine returned to America. But the publication of his last major</p><p>work, The Age of Reason (1794–1795), led to further notoriety and unpopularity in his</p><p>adoptive homeplace. InTheAge ofReason, Paine attacks the irrationality of religion and,</p><p>in particular, Christianity. Paine did not deny</p><p>the existence of “one God” and, like</p><p>Franklin, he insisted that, as he put it, “religious duties consist in doing justice, loving</p><p>mercy, and endeavouring tomake our fellow-creatures happy.” But that did not enable</p><p>him to escape the anger of many Americans: he was vilified in papers and on pulpits as</p><p>a threat to both Christian and democratic faiths; and he was condemned to live his last</p><p>few years in obscurity.</p><p>Obscurity was never to be the fate of Thomas Jefferson (1724–1826). A person of</p><p>eclectic interests – and, in that, the inheritor of a tradition previously best illustrated by</p><p>William Byrd of Westover – Jefferson’s very myriad-mindedness has led to quite</p><p>contradictory interpretations of both his aims and his achievement. What is incon-</p><p>testable, however, is the central part he played in the formation of America as a nation.</p><p>HisA Summary View of the Rights of British America, for example, published in 1774,</p><p>was immensely influential. In it, Jefferson argued that Americans had effectively freed</p><p>themselves from British authority by exercising “a right which nature has given to all</p><p>men, of departing from the country in which chance, not choice, has placed them.”</p><p>Such stirring words earned him a place, in 1776, on the committee assigned the task of</p><p>drafting the Declaration of Independence. And, if any one person can be called the</p><p>28 The Colonial and Revolutionary Periods</p><p>author of that Declaration, it is undoubtedly Jefferson. This founding document of the</p><p>American nation enshrines the beliefs that Jefferson shared with so many other major</p><p>figures of the Enlightenment: that “all men are created equal,” that they are endowed</p><p>with certain “inalienable rights” andnotably the right to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of</p><p>happiness”; and that “to secure those rights, governments are instituted amongmen.”</p><p>Like many great American documents, the Declaration of Independence describes an</p><p>idea of the nation, an ideal or possibility against which its actual social practices can and</p><p>must be measured – and, it might well be, found wanting.</p><p>Jefferson relied on the principle of natural rights and the argumentative tool of reason</p><p>to construct a blueprint of the American nation. When it came to filling in the details,</p><p>however, he relied as Crevecoeur and many others did on his belief in the independent</p><p>farmer. “I knowno condition happier than that of aVirginia farmer,” Jeffersonwrote to</p><p>a friend in 1787. “His estate supplies a good table, clothes himself and his family</p><p>with their ordinary apparel, furnishes a small surplus to buy salt, coffee, and a little finery</p><p>for his wife and daughter, . . . and furnishes him pleasing and healthy occupation.”</p><p>“Cultivators of the earth are the most valuable citizens,” he declared in another letter,</p><p>written in 1804. “They are the most vigorous, the most independent, the most</p><p>virtuous, and they are tied to their country, and wedded to its interests, by the most</p><p>lasting bonds.” Fortunately, in his opinion, America would remain an agricultural</p><p>country for the foreseeable future; small farmers would therefore remain “the true</p><p>representatives of the Great American interests” and the progress and prosperity of the</p><p>new republic were consequently assured. “The small landowners are the most precious</p><p>part of a state,” Jefferson confided in a letter to his friend and fellow Virginian James</p><p>Madison in 1772. In amore public vein, hemade the famous assertion that “those who</p><p>labour in the earth are the chosen people of God, . . . whose breasts he has made his</p><p>peculiar deposit for substantial and genuine virtue”: which is, perhaps, the definitive</p><p>statement of a determining American myth.</p><p>That statement comes from the one full-length book Jefferson published, in 1787,</p><p>Notes on the State of Virginia. Written in response to a questionnaire sent to him about</p><p>his home statewhile hewas serving as governor,Notes is at once a scientific treatise and a</p><p>crucial document of cultural formation. Jefferson examines and documents the natural</p><p>and cultural landscape of the NewWorld and, at the same time, considers the promise</p><p>and possibilities of the new nation. One of his several aims in the book is to rebut the</p><p>argument embraced by many leading European naturalists of the time that the animals</p><p>and people of the New World were inherently smaller, less vigorous, and more</p><p>degenerate than their Old World counterparts This gives him the opportunity to write</p><p>in praise of the Native American. Jefferson was willing to accept the idea that Native</p><p>Americans were still a “barbarous people,” lacking such advantages of civilization as</p><p>“letters” and deference towards women. But he insisted on their primitive strength,</p><p>“their bravery and address in war” and “their eminence in oratory.” Rebutting</p><p>European claims of this nature also allowed Jefferson to enumerate white American</p><p>achievements in such fields as “philosophy and war,” government, oratory, painting</p><p>and “the plastic art,” and to express the firm conviction that, in other areas too, America</p><p>would soon have “her full quota of genius.”</p><p>Like Crevecoeur, Jefferson also felt compelled to confront the challenge to his idyllic</p><p>vision of America posed by the indelible fact of slavery. He condemned the peculiar</p><p>The Colonial and Revolutionary Periods 29</p><p>institution in his Notes and argued for emancipation. But emancipation, for him, was</p><p>linked to repatriation: once freed, the slaves should be sent to some other colony,</p><p>Jefferson insisted, where they could become “a free and independent people.”</p><p>Removal was necessary, Jefferson felt, because the “deep rooted prejudices” of the</p><p>whites and a lingering sense of injustice felt by the blacks would make coexistence</p><p>impossible. Not only that, Jefferson was willing to entertain the idea that physical and</p><p>moral differences between the two races further underlined the need for freed blacks</p><p>to go elsewhere. “In general, their existence appears to participate more of sensation</p><p>than reflection,” Jefferson observed of African Americans. Among other things, this</p><p>made them deficient as artists and writers. All the arguments that black people were</p><p>inferior to white “in the endowments both of body and mind” were advanced,</p><p>Jefferson assured the reader “as a suspicion only.” But the general burden of the</p><p>argument in Notes is clearly towards black inferiority. And the belief that, once freed,</p><p>blacks should be “removed beyond the reach of mixture” is stated consistently and</p><p>categorically. So, for that matter, is the belief that, if black people are not freed soon,</p><p>the American republic will reap a terrible harvest. “Indeed, I tremble for my country</p><p>when I reflect that God is just,” Jefferson famously declared inNotes. There might, he</p><p>thought, be “a revolution in the wheel of fortune, an exchange of situation.” But</p><p>then, he added hopefully, there might be a more fortunate turn of events, involving</p><p>gradual emancipation. It was a sign of Jefferson’s intellectual honesty that he wrestled</p><p>with the problem of slavery in the first place. It was also a sign that he was, after all,</p><p>a man of his times imbued with many of its prejudices that he could not disentangle</p><p>the ideal of black freedom from the ideas of separation and removal. His doubts about</p><p>the radical threat to the new republic posed by its clear violation of its own clearly</p><p>stated belief in natural rights were, in the last analysis, subdued by his conviction that</p><p>reason, as he construed it, would prevail. That is the measure of his capacity for</p><p>optimism, and of his belief that, as he put it in Notes, “reason and free inquiry are the</p><p>only effective agents against error.” It is also, perhaps, a measure of a capacity for self-</p><p>delusion that was by no means uniquely his.</p><p>In 1813 Jefferson began a correspondencewith JohnAdams (1735–1826), repairing</p><p>the breach in their friendship that had occurred when Jefferson defeated Adams in the</p><p>presidential elections of 1800; they were published separately and in full in 1959. The</p><p>first vice president</p><p>and the secondpresident, Adamswas a lively intellectual of a skeptical</p><p>turn ofmind and the founder of a family dynasty that would produce another president,</p><p>John Quincy Adams, and the historian, novelist, and autobiographer, Henry Adams.</p><p>Discussing literature, history, and philosophy, Jefferson pitted his idealism against</p><p>Adams’s acid wit and pessimistic turn of mind. To Jefferson’s insistence that “a natural</p><p>aristocracy” of “virtue and talents” would replace “an artificial aristocracy founded on</p><p>wealth and birth,” Adams replied that the distinction would not “help the matter.”</p><p>“Both artificial aristocracy, and Monarchy,” Adams argued, “have grown out of the</p><p>natural Aristocracy of ‘Virtue and Talents.’” Adams’s skepticism and, in particular, his</p><p>sense that in time the purest republic becomes tainted by the hereditary principle or, at</p><p>least, the evolution of a ruling class, led him to think less well of the American future</p><p>than Jefferson did. Part of this stemmed from a patrician distrust of the people.</p><p>Whatever its sources, it prompted Adams to meet Jefferson’s optimism with irony.</p><p>“Many hundred years must roll away before We shall be corrupted,” he declared</p><p>30 The Colonial and Revolutionary Periods</p><p>sarcastically. “Our pure, virtuous, public spirited federative Republick will last for ever,</p><p>govern the Globe and introduce the perfection of Man.”</p><p>Alternative voices of revolution</p><p>The letters between Adams and Jefferson reveal two contrary visions of the new</p><p>American republic and its fate. So, in a different way, do the letters that passed between</p><p>John Adams and his wife Abigail. Inevitably, perhaps, the tone is more intimate, even</p><p>teasing. But Abigail Adams (1744–1818) raises, consistently, the serious issue of</p><p>freedom and equality for women. “I long to hear that you have declared an in-</p><p>dependency,” she wrote to her husband in 1776, “and by the way in the new Code</p><p>of Laws which I suppose it will be necessary for you to make I desire you would</p><p>remember the Ladies.” The tone was playful, but it made adroit and serious use of one</p><p>of the primary beliefs of the leaders of the Revolution: that, as Jefferson put it in his</p><p>Notes, “laws to be just,must give a reciprocation of rights . . .without this, they aremere</p><p>arbitrary rules of conduct, founded on force.” Unfortunately, all Abigail Adams</p><p>received in response was the playful claim from John that he, and all husbands, “have</p><p>only the Name of Masters.” All men, he insisted, were “completely subject” “to the</p><p>Despotism of the Petticoat.”</p><p>Adams wrote to his wife, adding gentle insult to injury, that he could not choose</p><p>but laugh at her “extraordinary Code of Laws.” “We have been told that our Struggle</p><p>has loosened the bands of Government everywhere,” he explained: “that Children and</p><p>Apprenticeswere disobedient – that schools andColledgeswere grown turbulent – that</p><p>Indians slighted their Guardians andNegroes grew insolent to theirMasters.”Now, he</p><p>added, what shewrote to himmade him aware that “another Tribemore numerous and</p><p>powerfull than all the rest were grown discontented” amid the revolutionary turmoil of</p><p>1776. The remark was clearly intended to put Abigail Adams down, however playfully,</p><p>to dismiss her claims for the natural rights of women by associating women with other,</p><p>supposedly undeserving groups. But, inadvertently, it raised a serious and central point.</p><p>“All men are created equal,” the Declaration of Independence announced. That</p><p>explicitly excluded women. Implicitly, it also excluded “Indians” and “Negroes,”</p><p>sincewhat itmeant, of course,was allwhite men.An idealist like Jeffersonmightwrestle</p><p>conscientiously with such exclusions (while, perhaps, painfully aware that he himself</p><p>was a slaveholder); aman like JohnAdamsmight insist on them, however teasingly. But</p><p>they could not go unnoticed, and especially by those, like Abigail Adams, who were</p><p>excluded. The literature of the revolutionary period includes not only the visionary</p><p>rhetoric and rational arguments of those men by and for whom the laws of the new</p><p>republic were primarily framed, but also the writings of those who felt excluded,</p><p>ignored, or left out. As John Adams, for all his irony, was forced to acknowledge, the</p><p>political and social turmoil of the times was bound to make disadvantaged, margin-</p><p>alized groupsmore acutely aware of their plight. After all, he hadhiswife to remind him.</p><p>Among the leading voices of the American Revolution, there are some who, at least,</p><p>were willing to recognize the rights of women. Notably, Thomas Paine spoke of the</p><p>need for female quality. “If we take a survey of ages and countries,” he wrote in “An</p><p>Occasional Letter on the Female Sex” (1775), “we shall find the women, almost –</p><p>without exception – at all times and in all places, adored and oppressed.” So, at greater</p><p>The Colonial and Revolutionary Periods 31</p><p>length, did the writings of Judith SargentMurray (1751–1820).Murray wrote, among</p><p>other things, two plays and a number of poems; she also wrote two essay series for</p><p>the Massachusetts Magazine from 1792 to 1794. One essay series, The Repository, was</p><p>largely religious in theme. The other, The Gleaner, considered a number of issues,</p><p>including federalism, literary nationalism, and the equality of the sexes. A three-volume</p><p>edition of The Gleaner was published in 1798; and in it is to be found her most</p><p>influential piece, “On the Equality of the Sexes” (1790), which establishes her claim to</p><p>be regarded as one of the first American feminists. Here, Murray argued that the</p><p>capacities of memory and imagination are equal in women andmen and that, if women</p><p>are deficient as far as the two other faculties of the mind, reason and judgment, are</p><p>concerned, it is because of a difference in education. If only women were granted equal</p><p>educational opportunities, Murray insisted, then they would be the equal of men in</p><p>every respect.</p><p>Murraywas inspired asmany of her contemporarieswere by the events and rhetoric of</p><p>the times. Her other works include, for instance, a patriotic poem celebrating the</p><p>“genius” of George Washington and anticipating the moment when the arts and</p><p>sciences would flourish in “blest Columbia” (“Occasional Epilogue to the Contrast;</p><p>a Comedy, Written by Royal Tyler, Esq” (1794)). Unlike most of her contemporaries,</p><p>however, that inspiration led Sargent to consider the anomalous position of her own sex</p><p>and to argue that the anomaly could and should be rectified. Appealing to the principle</p><p>of equality enshrined in the laws of the new republic, to rational justice and Christian</p><p>faith, she helped raise an issue that was to be foregrounded in the next century – not</p><p>least, at the Seneca Falls Women’s Rights Convention. There, at the Convention in</p><p>1848, a “Declaration of Sentiments” was framed that gave succinct expression to</p><p>Sargent’s beliefs bymaking a simple change to the original Declaration. “We hold these</p><p>truths to be self-evident,” it announced, “that all men and women are created equal.”</p><p>“The great men of the United States have their liberty – they begin with new things,</p><p>and now they endeavour to lift us up the Indians from the ground, that wemay stand up</p><p>and walk ourselves.” The words are those of Hendrick Aupaumut (?–1830), aMahican</p><p>Indian educatedbyMoravians. They come fromAShortNarration ofmyLast Journey to</p><p>the Western Country, which was written about 1794 but not published until 1827.</p><p>Aupaumut, as this remark suggests, was intensely loyal to the United States; and he</p><p>clearly believed, or at least hoped, that his peoplewould be afforded the same rights and</p><p>opportunities as “the great men” of the new nation. Because of his loyalty, he served as</p><p>an intermediary between the government and Native Americans in the 1790s. This</p><p>involved traveling among the tribes; and it was evidently after a journey among the</p><p>Delawares, Shawnees, and others that he wrote his book. Often awkward in style, the</p><p>Narration reflects the desperate effort of at least one Native American, working in</p><p>a second language, to record</p><p>the history and customs of his peoples – and to convince</p><p>them, and perhaps himself, that the leaders of the American republic would extend its</p><p>rights and privileges to those who had lived in America long before Columbus landed.</p><p>“I have been endeavouring to domy best in the business of peace,” Aupaumut explains</p><p>in theNarration. That best consisted, fundamentally, of assuring theNative Americans</p><p>he met of the good intentions of the whites. “I told them, the United States will not</p><p>speak wrong,” Aupaumut recalls, “whatever they promise to Indians they will</p><p>perform.” TheNarrative is, in effect, a powerful declaration of faith in the universality</p><p>32 The Colonial and Revolutionary Periods</p><p>of the principle of natural rights, and an equally powerful statement of the belief that</p><p>this principle would now be put into practice. In the light of what happened to Native</p><p>Americans after this it has, of course, acquired a peculiar pathos and irony that</p><p>Aupaumut never for once intended.</p><p>ANative American whowas less convinced that the American Revolutionwas a good</p><p>cause was SamsonOccom (1723–1792). Quite the contrary, during the Revolutionary</p><p>War Occom urged the tribes to remain neutral because that war was, he insisted, the</p><p>work of theDevil. Born aMohegan,Occomwas converted bymissionarieswhenhewas</p><p>sixteen. He then became an itinerant minister, devoting most of his energies to</p><p>preaching and working on behalf of the Indian people. Only two books by him were</p><p>published during his lifetime, but they were immensely successful. The first was</p><p>a sermon written at the request of a fellow Mohegan who had been sentenced to</p><p>death for murder, A Sermon Preached by Samson Occom, Minister of the Gospel, and</p><p>Missionary to the Indians; at the Execution of Moses Paul an Indian (1722). Reflecting</p><p>Occom’s own evangelical convictions, and focusing, in the tradition of all execution</p><p>sermons, on the omnipresence of death and the necessity for immediate, radical</p><p>conversion, it was immensely popular. Its popularity encouraged the publication of</p><p>the second book, Collection of Hymns and Spiritual Songs (1774), which became the</p><p>first Indian bestseller. All Occom’s work is marked by a fervent belief in the power of</p><p>grace, and by his insistence that, as he put it in the execution sermon, “we are all dying</p><p>creatures” who had to seek that grace at once. It is marked, as well, by a fervent</p><p>rhetorical style and an equally fervent belief that all his people, theMohegans and other</p><p>tribes, were in particular need of Christian redemption. Passing through it, however, is</p><p>another current, less openly acknowledged but undeniably there: the suspicion that</p><p>many of the miseries of his life were there “because,” as he expressed it, “I am a poor</p><p>Indian,” that this was true of all other “poor Indians” too, and that the way to deal with</p><p>this was to build a separate community.</p><p>The rage felt by many African Americans, enslaved or freed, at the obvious and</p><p>immense gap between the rhetoric of the Revolution and the reality of their condition</p><p>wasmemorably expressed by LemuelHaynes (1753–1833). As an evangelical minister,</p><p>Haynes, along with Jupiter Hammon and Phillis Wheatley, helped to produce the first</p><p>significant body of African American writing, founded on revivalist rhetoric and</p><p>revolutionary discourse. His address, “Liberty Further Extended: Or Free Thoughts</p><p>on the Illegality of Slave-Keeping” (written early in his career but not published until</p><p>1983), begins by quoting the Declaration of Independence to the effect that “all men</p><p>are created Equal” with “Ceartain unalienable rights.” Haynes then goes on to argue</p><p>that “Liberty, & freedom, is an innate principle, which is unmoveably placed in the</p><p>human Species.” It is a “Jewel,” Haynes declares, “which was handed Down to man</p><p>from the cabinet of heaven, and is Coeval with his Existance.” And, since it “proceeds</p><p>from the Supreme Legislature of the univers, so it is he which hath a sole right to take</p><p>away.” Skillfully using the founding documents of the nation, and quotations from the</p><p>Bible such as the pronouncement that God made “of one blood all nations of men, for to</p><p>dwell upon the face of the earth,” Haynes weaves a trenchant argument against slavery.</p><p>“Liberty is Equally as pre[c]ious to a Black man, as it is to a white one,” he insists. The</p><p>message is rammed home, time and again, that the white people of the new republic</p><p>are in breach of divine law and their own professed allegiance to “natural rights.” And</p><p>The Colonial and Revolutionary Periods 33</p><p>Haynes concludeswith a prayer addressed towhite Americans: “If you have any Love to</p><p>yourselves, or any Love to this Land, if you have any Love to your fellow-man, Break</p><p>these intollerable yoaks.”</p><p>A similar commitment to the idea of brotherhood characterizes the work of Prince</p><p>Hall (1735?–1807).Hallwas amember of theMasonic order.He considered it the duty</p><p>ofMasons, as he put it in “A Charge Delivered to the African Lodge, June 24, 1797, at</p><p>Menotomy” (1797), to show“love to allmankind,” and“to sympathisewith our fellow</p><p>men under their troubles.” The author of numerous petitions on behalf ofMasons and</p><p>free blacks in general, for support of plans for blacks to emigrate to Africa and for public</p><p>education for children of tax-paying black people, he was also a strong opponent of</p><p>slavery. His petition, “To the Honorable Council & House of Representatives for the</p><p>State of Massachusetts-Bay in General Court assembled January 13th 1777” (1788),</p><p>asks for the emancipation of “great number of Negroes who are detained in a state of</p><p>Slavery in the Bowels of a free & Christian Country.” And, in it, like Haynes, Hall uses</p><p>the rhetoric of the Revolution against its authors. Slaves, he points out, “have, in</p><p>common with all other Men, a natural & unalienable right to that freedom, which the</p><p>great Parent of theUniverse hath bestowed equally on allMankind.”Hall was tireless in</p><p>his support of any scheme intended to advance the cause of black freedom and equality.</p><p>Hewas also acutely aware of howdifferent were the futures of the different races in “this</p><p>Land of Liberty.” And he was never reluctant to use republican, as well as biblical,</p><p>rhetoric to point that difference out.</p><p>Haynes was born into freedom. Hall was born into slavery and then freed. Olaudah</p><p>Equiano (1745–1797) was born into freedom in Africa; he was enslaved, transported</p><p>first to Barbados and then to Virginia, bought by a British captain to serve aboard his</p><p>ship, and then finally in 1776 became a free man again. All this became the subject of</p><p>a two-volume autobiography,The InterestingNarrative of the Life ofOlaudahEquiano,</p><p>orGustavusValla, theAfrican,Written byHimself. Published in 1787 and subscribed to</p><p>bymany of the leading abolitionists, it established the formof the slave narrative and so,</p><p>indirectly or otherwise, it has influenced American writing – and African American</p><p>writing in particular – to the present day. “I offer here the history of neither a saint,</p><p>a hero, nor a tyrant,” Equiano announces. “I might say my sufferings were great,” he</p><p>admits, “but when I compare my lot with that of most of my countrymen, I regard</p><p>myself as a particular favorite of heaven, and acknowledge the mercies of Providence in</p><p>every occurrence of my life.” As that remark suggests, Equiano follows the tradition of</p><p>spiritual autobiography derived from St. Augustine and John Bunyan and used by</p><p>American Puritans and Quakers, but he adds to it the new dimension of social protest.</p><p>He also begins by painting an idyllic portrait of life in Africa. Then, as Equiano tells it,</p><p>came the fall. At the age of eleven, he was seized from his family and sold into slavery.</p><p>Taken to the African coast, he was terrified by the sight of white people. He feared he</p><p>would be eaten, Equiano tells the reader, ironically throwing back upon its authors</p><p>a common European myth about other peoples; and, when he is not eaten but “put</p><p>down under the decks” on ship and then transported across the ocean, his distress is</p><p>hardly alleviated. Beaten savagely, chained for most of the time, gradually learning all</p><p>the hardships of capture and the “accursed trade” of slavery, Equiano becomes</p><p>convinced that his new masters are “savages.” Preparing the ground for later slave</p><p>narratives, Equiano memorably traces the major events of his enslavement and the</p><p>34 The Colonial and Revolutionary Periods</p><p>miseries he shared with his slaves: the breaking up of families, the imposition of new</p><p>names, the strangeness and squalor, the fear of the blacks and the brutality of thewhites.</p><p>There are, certainly, moments of relief. Aboard one ship, Equiano befriends a white</p><p>man, “a young lad.” Their close friendship, which is cut short by the whiteman’s death,</p><p>serves as an illustration of the superficiality of racial barriers, indicates the possibility of</p><p>white kindness and a better way for free blacks and, besides, anticipates a powerful</p><p>theme in later American writing – of interracial and often homoerotic intimacy.</p><p>Gradually, too, Equiano manages to rise up from slavery. He learns to read. He</p><p>manages to purchase his freedom. Finally, he experiences a religious vision and, as he</p><p>puts it, is “born again” to becomeone of “God’s children.”But the horror of Equiano’s</p><p>capture and enslavement, the long voyage to America and the even longer voyage to</p><p>escape from the “absolute power” exerted by the whitemaster over his black property –</p><p>that remains indelibly marked on the reader’s memory. The Interesting Narrative of</p><p>Olaudah Equiano is the first in a great tradition of American narratives that juxtapose</p><p>the dream of freedomwith the reality of oppression, the Edenic myth (of Africa here, of</p><p>America usually elsewhere)with a history of fall and redemption – all thewhile telling us</p><p>the story of an apparently ordinary, but actually remarkable, man.</p><p>Writing revolution: Poetry, drama, fiction</p><p>In verse, an important tradition was inaugurated by two African American poets of the</p><p>time, Jupiter Hammon (1711–1806?) and Phillis Wheatley (1753–1784). Lucy Terry</p><p>(1730–1821), an African slave who eventually settled as a free black in Vermont, had</p><p>become known earlier for a poem called “Bars Fight,” which records a battle between</p><p>whites and Indians. ButTerry’s poemwas handeddown in the oral traditionuntil 1855.</p><p>Hammon was the first African American poet to have his work published. Born a slave,</p><p>Hammon published a broadside, Evening Thought: Salvation by Christ, With Peniten-</p><p>tial Cries, a series of twenty-two quatrains, in 1760, and then a prose work, Address to</p><p>the Negroe: In the State of New York, in 1787. The poetry is notable for its piety, the</p><p>prose for its argument that black people must reconcile themselves to the institution of</p><p>slavery. Some ofHammon’s thinking here is registered in his poem to Phillis Wheatley,</p><p>“An Address to Miss Phillis Wheatly, Ethiopian Poetess, in Boston, who came from</p><p>Africa at eight years of age, and soonbecame acquaintedwith the gospel of JesusChrist”</p><p>(1778). “O Come you pious youth: adore/The wisdom of thy God,/” the poem</p><p>begins, “In bringing thee from distant shore,/To learn his holy word.” It then goes on</p><p>to argue that it was “God’s tender mercy” that brought Wheatley in a slave ship across</p><p>the Atlantic to be “a pattern” to the “youth of Boston town.” It is worth emphasizing</p><p>that all Hammon’s publications are prefaced by an acknowledgment to the three</p><p>generations of the white family he served. Anything of his that saw print was, in effect,</p><p>screened by his white masters, and, in writing, was probably shaped by his awareness</p><p>that it would never get published without their approval. That anticipated a common</p><p>pattern in African American writing. Slave narratives, for instance, were commonly</p><p>prefaced by a note or essay from a white notable, mediating the narrative for what was,</p><p>after all, an almost entirely white audience – and giving it a white seal of approval. And it</p><p>has to be borne inmindwhen readingwhatHammonhas to say about slavery: which, in</p><p>essence, takes up a defense of the peculiar institution that was to be used again by</p><p>The Colonial and Revolutionary Periods 35</p><p>Southern apologists in the nineteenth century – that slavery could and should be seen as</p><p>a civilizing influence and a providential instrument of conversion.</p><p>African America writers of the time, and later, were, in effect, in a different position</p><p>from their white counterparts. The growth in readership and printing presses, the</p><p>proliferation of magazines, almanacs, manuals, and many other outlets for writing, all</p><p>meant that the literary culture was changing. A system of literary patronage was being</p><p>replaced by the literary marketplace. Poets like Hammon andWheatley, however, were</p><p>still dependent on their white “friends” and patrons. For Equiano, fortunately, the</p><p>friends, subscribers, and readers were abolitionists. For Hammon, the friends were,</p><p>quite clearly, otherwise. Phillis Wheatley enjoyed the cooperation and patronage of</p><p>Susanne Wheatley, the woman who bought her in a Boston slave market when she was</p><p>seven years old, and the Countess of Huntingdon. It was with their help that her Poems</p><p>on Various Subjects appeared in 1773 in London, the first volume of poetry known to</p><p>have been published by an African American. The poetry reflects the neoclassical norms</p><p>of the time. It also sometimes paints a less than flattering picture of Africa, the land</p><p>from which Wheatley was snatched when she was still a child. “Twas not long since I</p><p>left my native shore/The land of errors, and Egyptian gloom,” she writes in “To the</p><p>University of Cambridge, in New England” (1773), adding, “Father of mercy, ’twas</p><p>thy gracious hand/Brought me in safety from those dark abodes.” Sometimes,</p><p>however, Wheatley leans towards a more Edenic and idyllic image of her birthplace,</p><p>of the kind favored by Equiano. “How my bosom burns!/” she declares in one of her</p><p>poems (“Philis’s [sic] Reply to the Answer in our Last by the Gentleman in the Navy”</p><p>(1774)), “and pleasing Gambia on my soul returns,/With native grace in spring’s</p><p>luxurious reign,/Smiles the gay mead, and Eden blooms again.” A lengthy description</p><p>of “Africa’s blissful plain” then follows, one that transforms it into a version of the</p><p>pastoral: all of which works against Wheatley’s claims made elsewhere (in “On Being</p><p>Brought from Africa to America” (1773) and “To His Excellency General</p><p>Washington” (1776)) that she is grateful to have been taken away from “my Pagan</p><p>land” to “Columbia’s state.”</p><p>Wheatley is, in fact, a far subtler and more complicated poet than is often acknowl-</p><p>edged. The pleas for freedom are sometimes clear enough in her prose as well as her</p><p>poetry. “In every human breast God has implanted a principle, which we call love of</p><p>freedom,” she wrote in her “Letter to Samson Occom” (1774). That is echoed in</p><p>poems like “Liberty andPeace” (1785) and “To theRightHonourableWilliam, Earl of</p><p>Dartmouth, HisMajesty’s Principal Secretary of State for North America, &c” (1770).</p><p>In both of these, she links the longing for freedom felt and expressed by the American</p><p>colonists to her own experience of oppression. On a broader scale, one of her best-</p><p>known poems, “On being Brought from Africa to America,” may well begin by</p><p>suggesting that it was “mercy” that brought her “benighted soul” from Africa to</p><p>experience “redemption” in the NewWorld. But it then goes on to use that experience</p><p>of redemption as a measure of possibility for all African Americans. “Some view our</p><p>sable race with scornful eye,” she admits, but then adds, pointing an admonitory figure</p><p>at her, inevitably white, audience: “RememberChristians,Negros, black asCain,/May</p><p>be refin’d and join th’ angelic train.” That conclusion is a perfect example of how</p><p>Wheatley could develop consciousness of self into an exploration of the black com-</p><p>munity, its experiences and its potential. It is also an illustration of how she could strike</p><p>36 The Colonial and Revolutionary Periods</p><p>a pose, for herself and others of “Afric’ s sable race,”</p><p>that both deferred towhite patrons</p><p>and audience and subtly made a claim for dignity, even equality – that, in short,</p><p>combined Christian humility with a kind of racial pride.</p><p>The difficult position of African American poets in the emerging literary marketplace</p><p>is, perhaps, suggested by Wheatley’s failure to find many readers for her published</p><p>poetry – or, after 1773, to publish any further collections of her work. As late as 1778,</p><p>she could complain about “books that remain unsold”; her Poemswere never reprinted</p><p>during her lifetime; and all her many proposals for publication in Boston were rejected.</p><p>One projected volume that never saw publication was advertised by the printers with</p><p>the remark that they could scarcely credit “ye performances to be by a Negro.” The</p><p>work was evidently too good, or too literate, to suggest such a source to them. That</p><p>measures the extent of the problem poets like Hammon and Wheatley faced. Poetry,</p><p>even perhaps literacy, was seen as the prerogative of white poets, like Philip Freneau</p><p>(1752–1832), Timothy Dwight (1752–1817), and Joel Barlow (1754–1826). Of</p><p>these three poets who set out to explore and celebrate the new republic in verse,</p><p>Freneau was probably the most accomplished. Born in New York City, of a French</p><p>Huguenot father and a Scottish mother, he began his poetic career as a celebrant of</p><p>“Fancy, regent of the mind,” and the power Fancy gave him to roam far to “Britain’s</p><p>fertile land,” then back to “California’s golden shore” (“The Power of Fancy” (1770)).</p><p>Events, however, soon conspired to turn his interests in a more political and less</p><p>Anglophile direction.With college friends,HughBrackenridge and JamesMadison, he</p><p>wrote some Satires Against the Tories (1775); and with Brackenridge he also wrote</p><p>a long poem in celebration ofTheRisingGlory ofAmerica.TheRisingGlory of America,</p><p>Figure 1.4 Title page and frontispiece of Poems on Various Subjects by Phillis Wheatley, 1773.</p><p>Courtesy of the Library of Congress.</p><p>The Colonial and Revolutionary Periods 37</p><p>written in 1771, published a year later, then drastically revised in 1786, marked</p><p>Freneau’s full conversion to the American cause: a cause that he was later to serve</p><p>both as a satirical poet and as a strongly partisan editor and journalist. Yet, for all its</p><p>rhetorical energy, this poem about the emerging splendor of theNewWorld is asmuch</p><p>a tribute to the continuing importance of theOldWorld, at least inmatters cultural and</p><p>intellectual, as anything else. The theme may be new. The form, however, is basically</p><p>imitative. In effect, The Rising Glory of America tends to confirm the power of the</p><p>mother country even while Freneau and Brackenridge struggle to deny it.</p><p>Freneau was, as it happened, acutely aware of this power. A poem like “A Political</p><p>Litany” (1775) is a bitter diatribe against the political domination of Britain, “a</p><p>kingdom that bullies, and hectors, and swears.” More interestingly, a poem such as</p><p>“Literary Importation” (1788) admits to a feeling of cultural domination. “Can we</p><p>never be thought to have learning or grace/,” Freneau asks here, “Unless it be brought</p><p>from that damnable place.” The “damnable place” was, of course, Britain; and Freneau</p><p>must have suspected that his own literary importations of style and manner answered</p><p>him in the negative. He was writing, as he perhaps sensed, in the wrong place and time.</p><p>There was the continuing cultural influence of the Old World. And there was also, as</p><p>Freneau intimates in another poem, “To An Author” (1788), the problem of writing</p><p>poetry at amoment of conflict and in a society dedicated to common sense anduse. “On</p><p>these bleak climes by Fortune thrown,/Where rigidReason reigns alone,” Freneau asks</p><p>the “Author” (who is, almost certainly, himself), “Tell me, what has the muse to do?”</p><p>“An age employed in edging steel/,” he adds bitterly, “Can no poetic raptures feel.”</p><p>Yet, despite that, Freneau continued to indulge in “poetic raptures.” There are poems</p><p>on philosophical issues (“On the Universality and Other Attributes of God in Nature”</p><p>(1815)), on politics (“On theCauses of PoliticalDegeneracy” (1798)), on nature (“On</p><p>Observing a Large Red-Streak Apple” (1827)), and on moral and social issues such as</p><p>his attack on slavery (“To Sir Toby” (1792)). There are also pieces in which Freneau</p><p>makes a genuine attempt to arrive at universal significance in and through a firm sense of</p><p>the local. “The Indian Burying Ground” (1788) is an instance, one of the first attempts</p><p>made by any poet to understand the new country in terms of a people who had</p><p>themselves become an integral part of it – those who are called here “the ancients of the</p><p>lands.” So is “TheWild Honey Suckle” (1788), in which Freneau focuses his attention</p><p>on a detail of the American scene, the “fair flower” of the title, and discovers in that</p><p>detail one possible truth about the American psyche: its fundamental loneliness and</p><p>privacy. As Freneau meditates on this one, small, frail plant, that chooses to “shun the</p><p>vulgar eye” in its “silent, dull retreat,” he also adopts a quieter style, a more attentive</p><p>tone and simpler language. In someof his poetry, at least, Freneauwasworking towards</p><p>a form of literary emancipation, an approach and aesthetic less obviously learned from</p><p>“that damnable place.”</p><p>Thismodest degree of success was not achieved byDwight andBarlow, at least not in</p><p>what they considered their major work. A grandson of Jonathan Edwards, Dwight</p><p>wrote much and variously, including some attacks on slavery in both prose and verse.</p><p>His most ambitious work, however, was a poemwritten in imitation of the pastoral and</p><p>elegiac modes of British writers of the Augustan period like Alexander Pope andOliver</p><p>Goldsmith. TitledGreenfieldHill: A Poem in Seven Parts, it was published in 1794, and</p><p>it offers an idyllic portrait of life in the American countryside. The poem becomes</p><p>38 The Colonial and Revolutionary Periods</p><p>a hymn to an ideal of self-reliance and modest sufficiency that Franklin and Jefferson</p><p>also celebrated. Dwight describes it as “Competence.” But the celebration of this</p><p>particular American dream is vitiated by the fact that it is conducted in such conflicted</p><p>and derivative terms. The poet endorses peace, tranquility but also necessary, some-</p><p>times violent, progress. It speaks approvingly of “Competence,”modest sufficiency but</p><p>also, and with equal approval, of a kind of survival of the fittest. Also, in a familiar</p><p>pattern, it uses old forms to write about the new: this hymn to American virtues and</p><p>uniqueness is sung in a voice that is still definitively European.</p><p>That is just as true of the attempts Joel Barlowmade at anAmerican epic,TheVision of</p><p>Columbus (1787) and The Columbiad (1807). Like Dwight, Barlow was a member of</p><p>a pro-Federalist group known as the “Connecticut Wits.” He traveled and wrote</p><p>extensively. His work includes a number of patriotic poems (“The Prospect of Peace”</p><p>(1778)) and poems attacking themonarchism and imperialism of Europe (“Advice to a</p><p>Raven in Russia: December, 1812” (unpublished until 1938)). His most anthologized</p><p>piece is “The Hasty Pudding: A Poem in Three Cantos” (1793), a work about home</p><p>thoughts from abroad that praises Yankee virtues by celebrating a peculiarly Yankee</p><p>meal.TheColumbiad, hismuch revised and extended version ofTheVision ofColumbus,</p><p>was, however, his stab at a great work. “My object is altogether of a moral and political</p><p>nature,” he announced in the preface to his 1807 epic; “I wish to encourage and</p><p>strengthen, in the rising generation, a sense of the importance of republican institu-</p><p>tions, as being the great foundation of public and private happiness.” Barlow was not</p><p>the first to want to write an American epic. And by his time the idea of announcing the</p><p>new nation in the form traditionally dedicated to such a project was becoming</p><p>a commonplace. Even the congenitally cautious and skeptical John Adams could</p><p>dream of such a thing. But this was the first major attempt made to realize this</p><p>ambition, shared</p><p>by somany, to see something that memorialized the American nation</p><p>in verse just as, say, Rome and its founding had been memorialized in the Aeneid.</p><p>The Columbiad begins in traditional epic fashion: “I sing the Mariner who first</p><p>unfurl’d/An eastern banner o’er thewestern world/And taughtmankindwhere future</p><p>empires lay.”Contrary to the impression given by these opening lines, however, Barlow</p><p>does not go on to sing of the actions of Columbus but rather of the inexorable progress</p><p>of free institutions in the Americas as he anticipates them. To Columbus, in prison,</p><p>comesHesper, the guardian genius of theWestern continent, who leads him to amount</p><p>of vision. The poem then proceeds in a series of visions of the American future,</p><p>extending forward through colonial and revolutionary times to the establishment of</p><p>peace and the arts in a new America. The final vision is of a time when the American</p><p>federal system will extend “over the whole earth.” Here, in the announcement of this</p><p>ultimate vision, and elsewhere, the tone and style tend towards the declamatory, the</p><p>derivative and didactic.What is more, the poem as a whole lacks the essential ingredient</p><p>of epic: a hero, or heroic mind, engaged in heroic action. Columbus cannot be a hero.</p><p>He is from the beginning completely passive. He observes, he is troubled, he hopes for</p><p>the future, andhe is reassured byHesper.He cannot do anything and is, in fact, closer to</p><p>being an ideal type of the reader of an American epic than to being a hero. The</p><p>Columbiad clearly poses the problem of how to write a democratic epic, a heroic poem</p><p>of the commonman or woman, but it comes nowhere near solving it. That would have</p><p>to wait for Walt Whitman and Leaves of Grass.</p><p>The Colonial and Revolutionary Periods 39</p><p>While Joel Barlow was busy trying to write an American epic, Royall Tyler</p><p>(1756–1826) was devoting his energies to establishing an American tradition in</p><p>drama. Tyler wrote seven plays, but his reputation rests on The Contrast, written in</p><p>1787, produced in 1790 and published two years later. The first comedy by someone</p><p>born in America to receive a professional production, it was hailed by one reviewer as</p><p>“proof that these new climes are particularly favorable to the cultivation of arts and</p><p>sciences.” The Contrast was written after Tyler had attended a performance of The</p><p>School for Scandal by Richard Brinsley Sheridan and is clearly influenced by the</p><p>English social comedies of the eighteenth century. It is, however, impeccably</p><p>American in theme, since the contrast of the title is between Bill Dimple, an</p><p>embodiment of European affectation, and Colonel Manly, a representative of</p><p>American straightforwardness and republican honesty. The intensely Anglophile</p><p>Dimple, described by one character as a “flippant, pallid, polite beau,” flirts with</p><p>two women, Letitia and Charlotte, despite the fact that a match has been arranged</p><p>with a third, Maria van Rough, by her father. Manly, a patriot and veteran of the</p><p>RevolutionaryWar, is in lovewithMaria. AndwhenDimple, having gambled away his</p><p>fortune, decides to marry the wealthy Letitia instead, Maria’s father, discovering</p><p>Dimple’s baseness, gives his blessing to Manly’s suit. Dimple is then finally thwarted</p><p>in his ambition to cure his insolvency when Letitia learns of his flirtation with</p><p>Charlotte. And he leaves the scene, ousted but unabashed, underlining the contrast</p><p>between himself and Manly as he does so. “Ladies and gentlemen,” he announces,</p><p>“I take my leave; and you will please to observe in the case of my deportment the</p><p>contrast between a gentleman who has . . . received the polish of Europe and an</p><p>unpolished, untravelled American.”</p><p>Manly himself underlines this contrast, through his simplicity and natural gentility of</p><p>manner and throughhis comments on the times. The aimof the play is clearly to address</p><p>the different possibilities available to the new republic and to promote civic virtue and</p><p>federal high-mindedness. “Oh! That America! Oh that my country, would, in this her</p><p>day, learn the things which belong to peace!” Manly prays. And he shows what those</p><p>“things” are in the impeccable character of his beliefs and behavior. A subplot draws</p><p>a similar lesson, by presenting another contrast in national manners, betweenDimple’s</p><p>servant, the arrogant and duplicitous Jessamy, and Manly’s servant, Jonathan, who is</p><p>a plain, goodhearted, and incorruptible Yankee. In the “Prologue” to The Contrast,</p><p>given to the actor playing Jonathan to recite, the didactic and exemplary purposes of the</p><p>play are emphasized. “Our Author,” the audience is forewarned, has confined himself</p><p>to “native themes” so as to celebrate the “genuine sincerity” and “homespun habits”</p><p>Americans have inherited from their “free-born ancestors.” Tyler cannily used social</p><p>comedy to explore issues that were particularly pressing for his fellow countrymen, with</p><p>the emergence of a new political and social dispensation. In the process, he produced</p><p>a work that answers Crevecoeur’s question, “What is an American?,” in a clear and</p><p>thoroughly earnest way, and with an occasional wit that Crevecoeur himself could</p><p>hardly have imagined.</p><p>The urge to point a moral evident in The Contrast is even more openly at work in</p><p>those books that can lay claim to being the first American novels,The Power of Sympathy</p><p>(1789) by William Hill Brown (1765–1793), Charlotte Temple (1794) by Susanna</p><p>Haswell Rowson (1762–1824), and The Coquette; or, The History of Eliza Wharton</p><p>40 The Colonial and Revolutionary Periods</p><p>(1797) by Hannah Webster Foster (1758–1840). The Power of Sympathy, the first</p><p>American novel, was published anonymously to begin with. It was originally attributed</p><p>to the Boston writer, Sarah Wentworth Morton, because it deals with a contemporary</p><p>scandal of incest and suicide in the Morton family. It was not until 1894 that Brown,</p><p>also from Boston, was recognized as the author. An epistolary romance, its didactic</p><p>purpose is announced in the preface: The Power of Sympathy was written, the reader is</p><p>told, “To Expose the dangerous Consequences of Seduction” and to set forth “the</p><p>Advantages of Female Education.” The main plot deals with a threatened incestuous</p><p>marriage between two characters calledHarrington andHarriet Fawcett. They are both</p><p>children of the elder Harrington, the first by his legitimate marriage and the second by</p><p>his mistress Maria. When the relationship is discovered, Harriet dies of shock and</p><p>sadness and Harrington commits suicide. Hardly distinguished in itself, the book</p><p>nevertheless establishes a currency common to all three of these early American novels:</p><p>a clear basis in fact, actuality (so anticipating and meeting any possible objections to</p><p>fiction, imaginative self-indulgence or daydreaming), an even clearermoral purpose (so</p><p>anticipating and meeting any possible objections from puritans or utilitarians), and</p><p>a narrative that flirts with sensation and indulges in sentiment (so encouraging the</p><p>reader to read on). Even more specifically, The Power of Sympathy shares the same</p><p>currency as the books byRowson andWebster in the sense that it places a youngwoman</p><p>and her fate at the center of the narrative, and addresses other young women as the</p><p>intended recipients of its message. This reflected an economic reality: in the new, vastly</p><p>expanded literary marketplace of America, as in Europe, women constituted the main</p><p>readership for fiction. It also, perhaps, had an ideological dimension: the novel was</p><p>where women, and especially young women, could go to find a dramatic reflection of</p><p>their problems, economic, social and moral – some sense, and appreciation, of the way</p><p>they lived, or had to live, now.</p><p>This further dimension is more noticeable, inevitably perhaps, in novels actually</p><p>written by women. Susanna Haswell Rowson’s Charlotte Temple was published in</p><p>London in1791 and then in theUnited States three years later, where it became the first</p><p>American bestseller. By 1933 it had gone through 161 editions; and it has been</p><p>estimated that</p><p>Literature During the Colonial</p><p>and Revolutionary Periods</p><p>Imagining Eden</p><p>“America is a poem in our eyes: its ample geography dazzles the imagination, and it will</p><p>not wait long formetres.” The words are those of RalphWaldo Emerson, and they sum</p><p>up that desire to turn theNewWorld into words which has seized the imagination of so</p><p>manyAmericans. But “America”was only one of the several names for a dreamdreamed</p><p>in the first instance by Europeans. “He invented America: a very great man,” one</p><p>character observes of Christopher Columbus in aHenry James novel; and so, in a sense,</p><p>he did. Columbus, however, was following a prototype devised long before him and</p><p>surviving long after him, the idea of a new land outside and beyond history: “a Virgin</p><p>Countrey,” to quote one early, English settler, “so preserved by Nature out of a desire</p><p>to show mankinde fallen into the Old Age of Creation, what a brow of fertility and</p><p>beauty she was adorned with when the world was vigorous and youthfull.” For a while,</p><p>this imaginary America obliterated the history of those who had lived American lives</p><p>long before the Europeans came. And, as Emerson’s invocation of “America . . . a</p><p>poem”discloses, it also erasedmuch sense of American literature as anything other than</p><p>the writing into existence of a New Eden.</p><p>Writing of the Colonial and Revolutionary Periods</p><p>Puritan narratives</p><p>There were, of course, those who dissented from this vision of a providential plan,</p><p>stretching back to Eden and forward to its recovery in America. They included those</p><p>Native Americans for whom the arrival of the white man was an announcement of</p><p>the apocalypse. As one of them, an Iriquois chief called Handsome Lake, put it at the</p><p>end of the eighteenth century, “white men came swarming into the country bringing</p><p>with them cards, money, fiddles, whiskey, and blood corruption.” They included</p><p>those countless, uncounted African Americans brought over to America against their</p><p>will, starting with the importation aboard a Dutch vessel of “Twenty Negars” into</p><p>A Brief History of American Literature Richard Gray</p><p>© 2011 Richard Gray. ISBN: 978-1-405-19231-6</p><p>Jamestown, Virginia in 1619. They even included some European settlers, those for</p><p>whom life in America was not the tale of useful toil rewarded that John Smith so</p><p>enthusiastically told. And this was especially the case with settlers of very limitedmeans,</p><p>like those who went over as indentured servants, promising their labor in America as</p><p>payment for their passage there. Dominant that vision was, though, and in its English</p><p>forms, along with the writings of John Smith (1580–1631), it was givenmost powerful</p><p>expression in the work of William Bradford (1590–1657) and John Winthrop</p><p>(1588–1649). Bradford was one of the Puritan Separatists who set sail from Leyden</p><p>in 1620 and disembarked at Plymouth. He became governor in 1621 and remained in</p><p>that position until his death in 1657. In 1630 he wrote the first book of his history,Of</p><p>Plymouth Plantation; working on it sporadically, he brought his account of the colony</p><p>up to 1646, but he never managed to finish it. Nevertheless, it remains a monumental</p><p>achievement. At the very beginning of Of Plymouth Plantation, Bradford announces</p><p>that hewill write in thePuritan “plain style,with singular regard to the simple truth in all</p><p>things,” as far as his “slender judgement” will permit. This assures a tone of humility,</p><p>and a narrative that cleaves to concrete images and facts. But it still allows Bradford to</p><p>unravel the providential plan that he, like other Puritans, saw at work in history. The</p><p>book is not just a plain, unvarnished chronicle of events in the colony year by year. It is</p><p>an attempt to decipher the meaning of those events, God’s design for his “saints,” that</p><p>exclusive, elect group of believers destined for eternal salvation. The “special work of</p><p>God’s providence,” as Bradford calls it, is a subject of constant analysis and meditation</p><p>in Of Plymouth Plantation. Bradford’s account of the arrival of the Pilgrim Fathers in</p><p>the New World is notable, for instance, for the emphasis he puts on the perils of the</p><p>“wilderness.” “For the season was winter,” he points out, “and they that know the</p><p>winters of that country know them to be sharp and violent.”The survival of the Puritans</p><p>during and after the long voyage to theNewWorld is seen as part of the divine plan. For</p><p>Bradford, America was no blessed garden originally, but the civilizing mission of</p><p>himself and his colony was to make it one: to turn it into evidence of their election and</p><p>God’s infinite power and benevolence.</p><p>This inclination or need to see history in providential terms sets up interesting</p><p>tensions and has powerful consequences, in Bradford’s book and similar Puritan</p><p>narratives. Of Plymouth Plantation includes, as it must, many tales of human error</p><p>and wickedness, and Bradford often has immense difficulty in explaining just how they</p><p>form part of God’s design. He can, of course, and does fall back on the primal fact of</p><p>original sin. He can see natural disasters issuing from “the mighty hand of the Lord” as</p><p>a sign of His displeasure and a test for His people; it is notable that the Godly weather</p><p>storms and sickness far better than the Godless do in this book, not least because, as</p><p>Bradford tells it, the Godly have a sense of community and faith in the ultimate</p><p>benevolence of things to sustain them. Nevertheless, Bradford is hard put to it to</p><p>explain to himself and the reader why “sundry notorious sins” break out so often in the</p><p>colony. Is it that “the Devil may carry a greater spite against the churches of Christ and</p><p>theGospel here . . .?” Bradfordwonders. Perhaps, he suggests, it is simply that “here . . .</p><p>is not more evils in this kind” but just clearer perception of them; “they are here more</p><p>discovered and seen and made public by due search, inquisition and due punishment.”</p><p>Bradford admits himself perplexed. And the fact that he does so adds dramatic tension</p><p>to the narrative. Like somany great American stories,OfPlymouthPlantation is a search</p><p>2 The Colonial and Revolutionary Periods</p><p>formeaning. It has a narrator looking forwhatmight lie behind themask of thematerial</p><p>event: groping, in the narrative present, for the possible significance of what happened</p><p>in the past.</p><p>Which suggests another pivotal aspect of Bradford’s book and so much Puritan</p><p>narrative. According to the Puritan idea of providence at work in history, everymaterial</p><p>event does have meaning; and it is up to the recorder of that event to find out what it is.</p><p>At times, that may be difficult. At others, it is easy. Bradford has no problem, for</p><p>example, in explaining the slaughter of four hundred of the Pecquot tribe, and the</p><p>burning of their village, by the English. The battle is seen as one in a long line waged by</p><p>God’s chosen people, part of the providential plan; and Bradford regards it as entirely</p><p>appropriate that, once it is over, the victors should give “the praise thereof toGod, who</p><p>had wrought so wonderfully for them.”Whether difficult or not, however, this habit of</p><p>interpreting events with the help of a providential vocabulary was to have a profound</p><p>impact on American writing – just as, for that matter, the moralizing tendency and the</p><p>preference for fact rather than fiction, “God’s truth” over “men’s lies,” also were.</p><p>Of Plymouth Plantation might emphasize the sometimes mysterious workings of</p><p>providence. That, however, does not lead it to an optimistic, millennial vision of the</p><p>future. On the contrary, as the narrative proceeds, it grows ever more elegiac. Bradford</p><p>notes the passing of what he calls “the Common Course and Condition.” As the</p><p>material progress of the colony languishes, he records, “the Governor” – that is,</p><p>Bradford himself – “gave way that they should set corn every man for his own</p><p>particular”; every family is allowed “a parcel of land, according to the proportion of</p><p>Figure 1.1 Samuel de Champlain’s 1605 map of Plymouth Harbor where the Pilgrim Fathers</p><p>landed.</p><p>it has been read by a quarter to a half million people. In the preface to her</p><p>novel, Rowson explains that the circumstances on which she founded the novel were</p><p>related to her by “an old lady who had personally known Charlotte.” “I have thrown</p><p>over the whole a slight veil of fiction,” she adds, “and substituted names and places</p><p>according tomy own fancy.” And what she has written, she insists, has a fundamentally</p><p>moral purpose. “For the perusal of the young and thoughtless of the fair sex, this Tale of</p><p>Truth is designed,” Rowson declares. The tale that follows this is essentially a simple</p><p>one. Charlotte, a girl of fifteen in a school for young ladies, is seduced by an army officer</p><p>called Montraville. Montraville is aided by an unscrupulous teacher whom Charlotte</p><p>trusts, Mlle La Rue. After considerable hesitation, Charlotte elopes with Montraville</p><p>from England to New York. There, she is deserted by both Montraville and Mlle La</p><p>Rue, gives birth to a daughter, Lucy, and dies in poverty. What adds force, and</p><p>a measure of complexity, to the tale are two things: Rowson’s consistent habit of</p><p>addressing the reader and her subtle pointers to the fact that, while Charlotte thinks she</p><p>is in control of her fate, she fundamentally is not – she is at themercy of male power and</p><p>the machinations of others. Quite apart from establishing the American blueprint for</p><p>The Colonial and Revolutionary Periods 41</p><p>a long line of stories about a young woman affronting her destiny, this is a subtle</p><p>acknowledgment of the conflicted position inwhich youngwomen, rich or poor, found</p><p>themselves in the new republic. A more fluid social position for wealthy women, and</p><p>relatively greater economic opportunities for the poorer ones, might persuade them all</p><p>that they had more control over their destinies. Real control, however, still lay</p><p>elsewhere. Coming to America does not empower or liberate Charlotte; on the</p><p>contrary, as Rowson shows, it simply subjects her to the discovery of “the dangers</p><p>lurking beneath” the surfaces of life. This is melodrama with a purpose. And that</p><p>purpose, conceived within the sentimental constraints of the time and expressed in its</p><p>conventional ethical language, is to give the people for whom it was written, the “dear</p><p>girls” whom the narrator constantly addresses, a way of measuring and meeting their</p><p>condition as women.</p><p>Something similar could be said about a brief novel by Judith Sargent Murray, The</p><p>Story of Margaretta (1798), included in The Gleaner essays, in which, in a manner</p><p>clearly meant to illustrate the author’s beliefs, the heroine Margaretta manages to</p><p>escape the usually dire consequences of seduction, thanks to her superiority of soul and</p><p>education, and is rewarded with a loving husband.More persuasively and interestingly,</p><p>it could also be said of The Coquette, an epistolary novel and a bestseller for which</p><p>Hannah Webster Foster was not given credit until 1866. Until then, the author was</p><p>known simply as “A Lady of Massachusetts.” In a series of seventy-four letters, mainly</p><p>from the heroine Eliza Wharton to her friend Lucy Freeman, another tale of seduction</p><p>and abandonment is told. Eliza is the coquette of the title, but she is also a spirited</p><p>youngwoman.Thoroughly aware of her ownneeds and charms, she is unwilling tobury</p><p>herself in a conventional marriage. She is saved from amatch with an elderly clergyman,</p><p>Mr. Haly, when he dies before her parents can get them both to the altar. Another</p><p>clergyman, theReverendBoyer, courts her; however, she finds himdull. Shewould, she</p><p>protests, gladly enter the kind of marriage enjoyed by her friends the Richmans, but</p><p>such intimacy between equals seems rare to her. “Marriage is the tomb of friendship,”</p><p>she confides to Lucy; “it appears to me a very selfish state.” Longing for adventure, she</p><p>meets the self-confessed “rake” Peter Sanford and is entranced. Boyer, discovering the</p><p>intimacy betweenEliza and Sanford, gives Eliza up. Sanford deserts Eliza for an heiress.</p><p>Still attracted, Eliza has an affair with Sanford; becoming pregnant, she leaves home and</p><p>friends, and dies in childbirth; and Sanford, now finally admitting that Eliza was “the</p><p>darling of my soul,” leaves his wife and flees the country. The customary claim that the</p><p>entire story was “founded on fact” is made by the author – and naturally so, since it was</p><p>based on the experiences of a distant cousin. So is the customary invocation of moral</p><p>purpose. What stays in the reader’s mind, however, is the adventurous spirit of the</p><p>heroine, despite its tragic, or rather melodramatic, consequences. “From the melan-</p><p>choly story of ElizaWarton,” the novel concludes, “let the American fair learn to reject</p><p>with disdain every insinuation derogatory to their true dignity and honor . . . To</p><p>associate is to approve; to approve is to be betrayed!” That may be one thematic level</p><p>of The Coquette. But another, slyly subverting it, is Eliza’s quest for freedom; her</p><p>clearsighted recognition of what marriage entails for most women, given the laws and</p><p>customs of the day, and her ardent longing for what she calls “opportunity, unbiassed</p><p>by opinion, to gratify my disposition.” On this level, The Coquette charts the difference</p><p>between what women want and what they are likely to get. In the process, it poses</p><p>42 The Colonial and Revolutionary Periods</p><p>a question to be explored more openly and fundamentally in many later American</p><p>narratives: is it possible for an individual to remain free in society or to survive outside it?</p><p>Social questions about the new American republic were at the center of another</p><p>significant prose narrative of this period, Modern Chivalry by Hugh Henry</p><p>Brackenridge (1746–1816). Published in instalments between 1792 and 1815,</p><p>Modern Chivalrywas later described byHenry Adams as “amore thoroughly American</p><p>book than any written before 1833.” Its American character does not spring from its</p><p>narrative structure, however, which is picaresque and clearly borrowed from the</p><p>Spanish author Cervantes, but from its location and themes. The book is set in rural</p><p>Pennsylvania and offers the first extended portrait of backwoods life in American</p><p>fiction. Its two central characters are Captain John Farrago and his Irish servant Teague</p><p>O’Regan, American versions of Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. And, as they travel</p><p>around, their adventures provide an occasion for satirizing the manners of post-</p><p>Revolutionary America. Farrago is a rather stuffy, aristocratic landowner, but narrative</p><p>sympathy tends to be with him, or at least with his politics, since he is presented as an</p><p>intelligent democrat, part Jeffersonian and part independent, inclining to the ideas of</p><p>Thomas Paine. O’Regan, on the other hand, is portrayed as a knave and a fool, whose</p><p>extraordinary self-assurance stems from his ignorance. At every stage of their journey,</p><p>the two men meet some foolish group that admires O’Regan and offers him oppor-</p><p>tunities – as preacher, Indian treatymaker, potential husband for a genteel young lady –</p><p>for which he is totally unequipped. The captain then has to invent excuses to stop such</p><p>honors being bestowed on his servant; and each adventure is followed by a chapter of</p><p>reflection on the uses and abuses of democracy. The satirical edge ofModern Chivalry</p><p>anticipates the later Southwestern humorists. The disquisitions on democracy, in turn,</p><p>reflect debates occurring at the time over the possible direction of the American</p><p>republic. Anotable contribution to these debateswere the series of essays nowcalled the</p><p>Federalist papers (1787–1788)written byAlexanderHamilton (1757–1804), John Jay</p><p>(1745–1829), and James Madison (1751–1836). The authors of these essays argued</p><p>that, since people were “ambitious, vindictive, and rapacious,” a strong central</p><p>government was required to control “factions and convulsions.” Furthermore,</p><p>Madison (who was, in fact, a friend of Brackenridge) insisted that, in order to control</p><p>faction without forfeiting liberty, it was necessary to elect men “whose wisdom,” as</p><p>Madison put it, “may best discern the true interests of their country.”Modern Chivalry</p><p>tends towards similar conclusions. The portrait of Teague O’Regan, after all, betrays</p><p>the same distrust as the Federalist papers do of whatHamilton and his colleagues called</p><p>“theoretic politicians” who believed that faction could be cured by “reducingmankind</p><p>to a perfect equality in their political rights.” In the novel, and in the papers, there is the</p><p>same suspicionof populism, of ordinary people denied the guidance and control of their</p><p>natural leaders, and a similar need to emphasize whatMadison chose to term “the great</p><p>points of difference between a Democracy and a Republic.”</p><p>Brackenridge was not a professional author (he earned his living as a lawyer); neither</p><p>were William Hill Brown, Rowson, and Foster. The person who has earned the title of</p><p>first in this category inAmerica is Charles BrockdenBrown (1771–1810), although it is</p><p>now fairly clear that Brown was one among several men and women who labored</p><p>between 1776 and 1810 to earn their income from their writings. Under the influence</p><p>of the English writerWilliamGodwin, Brownwrote and publishedAlcuin: ADialogue</p><p>The Colonial and Revolutionary Periods 43</p><p>(1798), a treatise on the rights of women. Then, further stimulated by Godwin’s novel</p><p>Caleb Williams and his own critical ideas about fiction, he wrote his four best novels in</p><p>just two years:Wieland; or, The Transformation (1798),ArthurMervyn; or, Memoirs of</p><p>theYear 1793 (1799–1800),Ormond; or, The SecretWitness (1799), andEdgarHuntly;</p><p>or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker (1799). All four reveal a confluence of influences: to the</p><p>moral and social purpose of Godwin was added the sentimentalism and interest in</p><p>personal psychology of the English novelist Samuel Richardson and, above all perhaps,</p><p>the horrors and aberrations of the Gothic school of fiction. To this was added Brown’s</p><p>own sense of critical mission. He believed in writing novels that would be both</p><p>intellectual and popular: that would stimulate debate among the thoughtful, while</p><p>their exciting plots and often bizarre or romantic characters would attract a larger</p><p>audience. Brown was also strongly committed to using distinctively American materi-</p><p>als: in the preface to Edgar Huntly, for example, he talks about rejecting “superstitious</p><p>and exploded manners, Gothic castles and chimeras” in favor of “incidents of Indian</p><p>hostility and perils of the Western Wilderness.” The result of these ambitions and</p><p>influences is a series of books that translate theGothic into anAmerican idiom, and that</p><p>combine sensational elements such as murder, insanity, sexual aggression, and pre-</p><p>ternatural events with brooding explorations of social, political, and philosophical</p><p>questions. These books also make art out of the indeterminate: the reader is left at the</p><p>end with the queer feeling that there is little, perhaps nothing, a person can trust – least</p><p>of all, the evidence of their senses.</p><p>Brown’s first novel,Wieland, is a case in point. The olderWieland, a Germanmystic,</p><p>emigrates to Pennsylvania, erects a mysterious temple on his estate, and dies there one</p><p>night of spontaneous combustion. His wife dies soon afterwards, and their children</p><p>Clara and the younger Wieland become friends with Catharine Pleyel and her brother</p><p>Henry.Wielandmarries Catharine, andClara falls in love withHenry, who has a fianc�ee</p><p>in Germany. A mysterious stranger called Carwin then enters the circle of friends; and,</p><p>shortly after, a series of warnings are heard from unearthly voices. Circumstances, or</p><p>perhaps the voices, persuadeHenry that Clara andCarwin are involvedwith each other;</p><p>he returns to his fianc�ee and marries her. And Wieland, inheriting the fanaticism of his</p><p>father, is evidently driven mad by the voices and murders his wife and children. Carwin</p><p>then confesses to Clara that he produced the voices by the “art” of biloquium, a form of</p><p>ventriloquism that enables him to mimic the voices of others and project them over</p><p>some distance. He was “without malignant intentions,” he claims, and was simply</p><p>carried away by his curiosity and his “passion for mystery.” Wieland, escaping from an</p><p>asylum, is about to murder Clara when Carwin, using his “art” for the last time,</p><p>successfully orders him to stop. The unhappy madman then commits suicide, Carwin</p><p>departs for a remote area of Pennsylvania, andClaramarriesHenry Pleyel after the death</p><p>of his first wife. These are the bare bones of the story, but what gives those bones flesh is</p><p>the sense that the characters, and for thatmatter the reader, can never be quite surewhat</p><p>is the truth andwhat is not. Brown, for instance, was one of the first Americanwriters to</p><p>discover the uses of the unreliable narrator. Carwin professes the innocence of his</p><p>intentions, but he also talks about being driven by a “mischievous daemon.” More to</p><p>the point, the entire novel is cast in the form of a letter from Clara, the last surviving</p><p>member of the Wieland family, to an unnamed friend. And Clara does not hesitate to</p><p>warn the reader that she is not necessarily to be trusted as a reporter of events.</p><p>44 The Colonial and Revolutionary Periods</p><p>The indeterminacy goes further. “Ideas exist in our minds that can be accounted for</p><p>by no established laws,” Clara observes. And it is never quite clear, not only whether or</p><p>not she and Carwin are telling the truth, but how complicit Henry Pleyel and the</p><p>younger Wieland are with the voices they hear. In his portraits of Henry and Wieland,</p><p>Brown is exploring the two prevailing systems of thought in early America: respectively,</p><p>the rationalism of the Enlightenment and the mysticism of Christianity. He is also</p><p>casting both into doubt. Like other authors of the time, Brown liked to emphasize that</p><p>his fictions were based on fact. He pointed out, in his prefatory “Advertisement” for his</p><p>first novel, that there had recently been “an authentic case, remarkably similar to</p><p>Wieland.” Similarly, in bothOrmond andArthurMervyn, hemade use of anoutbreakof</p><p>yellow fever that had actually occurred in Philadelphia in 1793; and inEdgarHuntly he</p><p>relied, not only on familiar settings, but on the contemporary interest in such diverse</p><p>topics as Indians and somnambulism. What Brown built on this base, however, was</p><p>unique: stories that were calculated tomelt down the barrier between fact and fiction by</p><p>suggesting that every narrative, experience, or judgment is always and inevitably</p><p>founded on quite uncertain premises and assumptions.</p><p>Brown was read eagerly by a number of other distinguished writers of the time,</p><p>among them Sir Walter Scott, John Keats, and Percy Bysshe Shelley. But he never</p><p>achieved the wider popularity he desired. He wrote two other novels, Clara Howard</p><p>(1801) and Jane Talbot (1801), in an apparent attempt to exploit the growing market</p><p>for sentimental fiction. These were similarly unsuccessful. So, more and more, he</p><p>turned to journalism to earn a living. In 1799 he founded The Monthly Magazine and</p><p>AmericanReview, which collapsedwithin a year.He then editedThe LiteraryMagazine</p><p>and American Register from 1803 until 1807, which was more successful.Memoirs of</p><p>Carwin, a sequel toWieland, began to appear in this periodical, but the story remained</p><p>unfinished at the time of his death. In the last years of his life, his interest turnedmore to</p><p>politics and history, a shift marked by his starting the semiannualAmericanRegister, or</p><p>General Repository of History, Politics, and Science. Deprived of the popularity and</p><p>income that he craved for during his lifetime, Brown has continued to receive less than</p><p>his due share of attention. This is remarkable, not least because he anticipates so much</p><p>of what was to happen in American fiction in the nineteenth century. His fascination</p><p>with aberrant psychology, deviations in human thought and behavior, foreshadows</p><p>the work of Edgar Allan Poe; so, for that matter, does his use of slippery narrators.</p><p>His use of symbolism, and his transformation of Gothic into a strange, surreal</p><p>mix of</p><p>the extraordinary and the everyday, prepares the way for the fiction of Nathaniel</p><p>Hawthorne and Herman Melville. Even his relocation of incidents of peril and</p><p>adventure to what was then the Western wilderness clears a path for the romances</p><p>of James Fenimore Cooper.Written at the turn of the century, the four major novels of</p><p>Brown look back to the founding beliefs of the early republic and the founding patterns</p><p>of the early novel. They also look forward to a more uncertain age, when writers were</p><p>forced to negotiate a whole series of crises, including the profound moral, social, and</p><p>political crisis thatwas to eventuate in civil war. The subtitle of the first novel Brownever</p><p>wrote, but never published, was “The Man Unknown to Himself.” That captures the</p><p>indeterminism at the heart of his work. It also intimates a need that was to animate so</p><p>much later American writing: as it engaged, and still does, in a quest for identity,</p><p>personal and national – a way of making the unknown known.</p><p>The Colonial and Revolutionary Periods 45</p><p>2</p><p>Inventing Americas</p><p>The Making of American Literature 1800–1865</p><p>Making a Nation</p><p>During the first half of the nineteenth century, theUnited States was transformed from</p><p>an infant republic into a large, self-confident nation, albeit a nation divided and</p><p>eventually torn apart, as Thomas Jefferson had feared, by the burning issue of slavery.</p><p>The population more than trebled, from nine to thirty-one million. The rapid</p><p>expansion of the railroad and manufacturing industry began shifting the national</p><p>economic basis and the population from country to town. The United States itself</p><p>expanded from its eastern seaboard base of sixteen states to assume continental</p><p>dimensions. As the nation grew, so did the opportunities for writers. The lecture</p><p>circuit generated huge audiences across the country. Newspapers and magazines</p><p>proliferated. And one of the most literate populations in the world, eager for enter-</p><p>tainment and information, opened up the possibility of writing as a means of making a</p><p>living. Many pursued that possibility. Some – like Susan Warren (1839–1885), author</p><p>of The Wide, Wide World (1850), the first American novel to sell more than a million</p><p>copies – even succeeded.</p><p>The Making of American Myths</p><p>Myths of an emerging nation</p><p>One of the first writers to take advantage of the greater opportunities for publication</p><p>that were opening up, and in the process become one of the first American writers to</p><p>achieve international fame,wasWashington Irving (1783–1859). Irving established his</p><p>reputation with Salmagundi; or, The Whim-Whams and Opinions of Launcelot Lang-</p><p>staff Esq., andOthers (1807–1808), a series of satiricalmiscellanies concernedwithNew</p><p>York society that ran to twenty numbers. The leading essays were written by Irving, his</p><p>brothers, and JamesKirke Paulding (1778–1860), allmembers of a group known as the</p><p>“Nine Worthies” or “Lads of Kilkenny” of “Cockloft Hall.” Federalist in politics,</p><p>conservative in social principles, and comic in tone, they included one piece by Irving,</p><p>“Of the Chronicles of the Renowned and Antient City of Gotham” that supplied</p><p>New York City with its enduring nickname of Gotham.</p><p>A Brief History of American Literature Richard Gray</p><p>© 2011 Richard Gray. ISBN: 978-1-405-19231-6</p><p>Irving was now famous as an author, wit, and man of society, and to consolidate his</p><p>reputation he published A History of New York from the Beginning of the World to the</p><p>End of the Dutch Dynasty (1809) under the pen name of Diedrich Knickerbocker.</p><p>Often regarded as the first important work of comic literature written by an</p><p>American, it initiated the term “Knickerbocker School” for authors like Irving</p><p>himself, Paulding, Fitz-Greene Hallek (1790–1867), and Joseph Rodman Drake</p><p>(1795–1820), who wrote about “little old New York” in the years before the Civil</p><p>War. Then, in 1820, he published his most enduring work, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey</p><p>Crayon, Gent., a collection of essays and sketches that was enormously successful in</p><p>both England and the United States. The Sketch Book contains two small masterpieces</p><p>that initiated the great tradition of the American short story, “Rip Van Winkle” and</p><p>“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” Four other sketches are also set in America, but</p><p>most of the other pieces are descriptive and thoughtful essays on England, where</p><p>Irving was still living. Both “Rip Van Winkle” and “Sleepy Hollow” have origins in</p><p>German folklore. Irving admits as much in a “Note” to the first tale. Both also owe a</p><p>debt, in terms of stylistic influence, to Sir Walter Scott. Nevertheless, both exploit</p><p>their specifically American settings and create American myths: they explore the social</p><p>and cultural transformations occurring in America at the time in terms that are at</p><p>once gently whimsical and perfectly serious. In “Rip Van Winkle,” the lazy, hen-</p><p>pecked hero of the story ventures into the Catskill Mountains of New York State to</p><p>discover there some little men in Dutch costume bowling at ninepins. Taking many</p><p>draughts of some strange beverage they have brewed, he falls into a deep sleep. When</p><p>he returns to his village, after waking up, he eventually realizes that twenty years have</p><p>passed, the Revolution has been and gone, and that, “instead of being a subject of his</p><p>Majesty George the Third, he was now a free citizen of the United States.” The news</p><p>naturally takes a long time to sink in; and, at first, when he is surrounded in his</p><p>homeplace by people whom he does not recognize and who do not recognize him,</p><p>he begins to doubt his own identity. His dilemma is a gently comic response to</p><p>traumatic change; and it offers a genial reflection in miniature of the sudden,</p><p>disconcerting process of alteration – and possible reactions to it – experienced by</p><p>the nation as a whole. A similar transposition of American history into American</p><p>legend occurs in “Sleepy Hollow.” This story of how the superstitious hero, Ichabod</p><p>Crane, was bested by the headless horseman of Brom Bones, an extrovert Dutchman</p><p>and Crane’s rival in love, allows Irving to parody several forms of narrative, among</p><p>them tall tales, ghost stories, and the epic. But it also permits him, once again, to</p><p>reflect on change and to present a vanishing America, which is the setting for this</p><p>story, as an endangered pastoral ideal. The tendency towards a more lyrical, romantic</p><p>strain suggested by Irving’s evocation of the sleepy hollow where Ichabod Crane</p><p>lived became a characteristic of his later work. Irving’s subsequent career was erratic,</p><p>and he never recovered the wit and fluency of his early style. Nevertheless, in his best</p><p>work, he was a creator of significant American myths: narratives that gave dramatic</p><p>substance to the radical changes of the time, and the nervousness and nostalgia those</p><p>changes often engendered. Perhaps he was so effective in fashioning those myths</p><p>because the nervousness about the new America, and nostalgia for the old – and,</p><p>beyond that, for Europe – were something that he himself felt intensely. He was</p><p>writing himself, and the feelings he typified, into legend.</p><p>48 Inventing Americas: 1800–1865</p><p>The making of Western myth</p><p>Legend of a very different kind was the work of James Fenimore Cooper (1789–1851).</p><p>If any single person was the creator of the myth of the American West, and all its</p><p>spellbinding contradictions, then Cooper was. But he was far more than that. He was</p><p>the founding father of the American historical novel, exploring the conflicts of</p><p>American society in a time of profound change. He also helped to develop and</p><p>popularize such widely diverse literary forms as the sea novel, the novel of manners,</p><p>political satire and allegory, and the dynastic novel in which over several generations</p><p>American social practices and principles are subjected to rigorous dramatic analysis.</p><p>And Cooper did not begin writing and publishing until his thirties. Before that, he had</p><p>served at sea, then left tomarry and settle as a country gentleman inNewYork</p><p>State.His</p><p>first novel, Precaution (1820), was in fact written after his wife challenged his claim that</p><p>he could write a better book than the English novel he was reading to her. A</p><p>conventional novel of manners set in genteel English society, this was followed by a</p><p>far better work, The Spy: A Tale of the Neutral Ground (1821). Set in Revolutionary</p><p>New York State, on the “neutral ground” of Westchester County, its hero is Harvey</p><p>Birch, who is supposed to be a Loyalist spy but is secretly in the service of General</p><p>Washington. Birch is faithful to the Revolutionary cause but a convoluted plot reveals</p><p>his emotional ties to some of the Loyalists. What the reader is presented with here, in</p><p>short, is a character prototype that Cooper had learned fromSirWalter Scott andwas to</p><p>use in later fiction, most notably in his portrait of Natty Bumppo, the hero of the</p><p>Leatherstocking novels. Thehero is himself a “neutral ground” to the extent that he, his</p><p>actions and allegiances, provide an opportunity for opposing social forces to be brought</p><p>into a human relationship with one another. The moral landscape he negotiates is a</p><p>place of crisis and collision; and that crisis and collision are expressed in personal as well</p><p>as social terms, as a function of character as well as event. The Spy was an immediate</p><p>success. One reviewer hailed Cooper as “the first who has deserved the appellation of a</p><p>distinguished American novel writer.” And it was followed, just two years later, by the</p><p>first of the five Leatherstocking Tales, The Pioneers (1823).</p><p>Set in 1793 in Otsego County in the recently settled region of New York State, The</p><p>Pioneers introduces the reader to the ageing figure of Natty Bumppo, known here as</p><p>Leatherstocking. The reader also meets Chingachgook, the friend and comrade of</p><p>Natty from the Mohican tribe; and, in the course of the story, Chingachgook dies</p><p>despite Natty’s efforts to save him. The other four Leatherstocking Tales came over the</p><p>next eighteen years. The Last of the Mohicans (1826) presents Bumppo, here called</p><p>Hawkeye, in his maturity and is set in 1757 during the Seven Years’ War between the</p><p>French and the British. In The Prairie (1827), Bumppo, known simply as the trapper,</p><p>has joined thewestwardmovement; he is now inhis eighties and, at the endof the novel,</p><p>he dies. The Pathfinder (1840) is set soon after The Last of the Mohicans, in the same</p><p>conflict between the French and Indians and the British colonials. Here, Bumppo is</p><p>tempted to think of marriage. But, when he learns that the woman in question loves</p><p>another, he nobly accepts that he cannot have her. Like the many Western heroes for</p><p>which he was later to serve as prototype, he recognizes that, as he puts it, it is not</p><p>according to his “gifts” to love and tomarry. The last novel to bewritten,TheDeerslayer</p><p>(1841), is, in fact, the first novel in chronological order of events. It takes the reader</p><p>Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 49</p><p>back to upstate New York in the 1740s. A young man here, Natty Bumppo begins the</p><p>action known as Deerslayer. In the course of the story, though, he kills an Indian in a</p><p>fight that approaches the status of ritual; and, before he dies, theman he has killed gives</p><p>him a new name, Hawkeye. So the series ends with the initiation of its hero into</p><p>manhood. It does not quite begin with his death; nevertheless, there is clearly a</p><p>regressive tendency at work here. The Leatherstocking Tales, as a whole, move back in</p><p>time, back further into the American past and the youth and innocence of the hero. As</p><p>they do so, they move ever further away from civilization, in terms of setting and</p><p>subject, and ever further away from social realism, in terms of approach.Atwork here, in</p><p>short, is an Edenic impulse common in American writing that drives the imagination</p><p>out of the literal and into romance andmyth – and out of a worldwhere the individual is</p><p>defined in relation to society and into one where he or she is more likely to be situated</p><p>outside it. As the conception of him alters over the course of the five Leatherstocking</p><p>Tales, Natty Bumppo gravitates more and more towards the condition of an American</p><p>Adam: in his comradeship with another man, his virginity, as much as in his reliance on</p><p>action and instinct rather than thought and reasoning – and in his indebtedness, too,</p><p>not to education or convention but to natural wisdom and natural morality.</p><p>Natty Bumppo is more than just an American Adam, however, as his recollection of</p><p>earlier figures set on “neutral ground” suggests, as well as his anticipation of later</p><p>Western heroes. And the Leatherstocking Tales are farmore than types of the American</p><p>pastoral, resituating Eden somewhere in the mythic past of the country. They are</p><p>densely textured historical narratives using contrasts and conflicts both within and</p><p>between characters to explore the national destiny. The Prairie illustrates this. The</p><p>characteristically convoluted plot involves a series of daring adventures, raids, and</p><p>rescues, during the course of which Bumppo saves his companions from both a prairie</p><p>fire and a buffalo stampede. Woven through that plot is a close examination of human</p><p>nature and its implications for human society. The original inhabitants of America, for</p><p>example, are taken as instances of natural man but, the reader soon discovers, the</p><p>instances are ambiguous. On the one hand, there are the Pawnees, who are “strikingly</p><p>noble,” their “fine stature and admirable proportions” being an outward and visible</p><p>sign of their possession of such “Roman” virtues as dignity, decorum, and courage. On</p><p>the other, there are the Sioux, a race who resemble “demons rather than men” and</p><p>whose frightening appearance is matched only by their treachery and savagery. Nature,</p><p>in turn, is represented variously, as benevolent, the source of Natty’s natural wisdom</p><p>(“Tis an eddication!” he is wont to declare, while gazing at his surroundings), and the</p><p>scene of a desperate internecine battle that reinforces the account of Indians as both</p><p>Rousseauistic noble savages and imps of the devil. The issue of whether human beings</p><p>are good, originally innocent, or evil, steeped in original sin, is sounded here. So is the</p><p>issue of whether America is an Eden or a wilderness. And both those issues, Cooper</p><p>realized and intimates, feed into the question of what kind of society was needed,</p><p>particularly in the NewWorld. This was a question fundamental to the infant republic,</p><p>and The Prairie offers a fascinatingly ambivalent answer.</p><p>At his best, as in The Prairie, Cooper explores the basic tensions at work in American</p><p>culture and history in a way that allows free play to the opposing forces. At the same</p><p>time, he creates mythic figures, of whomNatty Bumppo is easily themost notable, who</p><p>offer a focus for debates about the character of American democracy – and also possess</p><p>50 Inventing Americas: 1800–1865</p><p>the simplicity and stature required of any great epic hero. The first time we see Bumppo</p><p>in The Prairie is typical. He appears to a group of travelers, and the reader, standing in</p><p>the distance on the great plains with the sun going down behind him. “The figure was</p><p>colossal, the attitude musing and melancholy,” the narrator observes, and “embedded</p><p>as it was in its setting of garish light, it was impossible to distinguish its just proportions</p><p>or true character.” Larger than life, romantic and mysterious, Natty Bumppo here</p><p>anticipates a whole series of Western and American heroes. And a similarly heroic</p><p>closure is given to the story of our hero. At the end of The Prairie, Natty dies with his</p><p>gaze “fastened on the clouds which hung around the western horizon, reflecting the</p><p>bright colours and giving form to the glorious tints of an American sunset.” With that</p><p>grand, ultimate entry into nature, Cooper may be suggesting the passing of the</p><p>democratic possibilities Natty Bumppo represents. The Prairie certainly has an</p><p>autumnal mood: it is set firmly in the past, and there are constant references to the</p><p>way immigration</p><p>and cultivation, the destruction of thewilderness and the scattering of</p><p>the Indians have changed the West – and, quite possibly, America – between then and</p><p>the time of writing. Perhaps; and, if so, the novel is as much a new Western as a</p><p>traditional one, mapping out the destructive tendencies of the westward movement as</p><p>well as its place in a heroic tale of national expansion. One further layer of complexity is</p><p>then added to a narrative that is, in any event, a debate and a mythic drama, a great</p><p>historical novel and an American epic in prose, that explores the different routes a</p><p>democratic republicmight take, the conflict between law and freedom, the clearing and</p><p>the wilderness, communal ethics and the creed of self-reliance.</p><p>Over the three decades when the Leatherstocking series was written, many other</p><p>attempts were made to translate experience in theWest into literature. Notable among</p><p>these were two novels, Logan: A Family History (1822) and Nick of the Woods; or,</p><p>The Jibbenainesay (1837), and an autobiographical narrative first serialized in The</p><p>KnickerbockerMagazine in 1847 and then published in 1849,TheOregon Trail.Logan:</p><p>A Family History was one of the several novels and many publications of John Neal</p><p>(1793–1876). It is an essentially romantic account of a noble savage, the Indian chief</p><p>whogives thebook its title.The reverse side of the coin is suggestedbyNick of theWoods.</p><p>An immensely popular tale in its day and also RobertM. Bird’s (1806–1854) best work,</p><p>it has a complicated plot involving Indian raids andmassacres, a romantic heroine taken</p><p>into captivity but eventually rescued, and an eponymous central character who is bent</p><p>on revenge against the Indians for the slaughter of his family. Throughout all the plot</p><p>convolutions, however, what remains starkly simple is the portrait of the Indians. As</p><p>Bird depicts them, they are violent, superstitious, and treacherous. Theymay be savages</p><p>but they are very far from being noble.</p><p>The Oregon Trail is another matter. For a start, it was written by someone, Francis</p><p>Parkman (1823–1893), who went on from writing it to become one of the most</p><p>distinguished historians of the period. Parkman was one of a generation of American</p><p>historians who combined devotion to research with a romantic sweep of imagination,</p><p>and a scholarly interest in the history of America or democratic institutions or bothwith</p><p>dramatic flair and a novelistic eye for detail. Apart from Parkman himself, the most</p><p>notable of these romantic historians were John LothropMotley (1814–1877), George</p><p>Bancroft (1800–1891), and William Hinckling Prescott (1796–1859). Published</p><p>before his histories, The Oregon Trail is an account of a journey Parkman took along</p><p>Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 51</p><p>the trail of the title in 1846. His purpose in taking the trip was twofold: to improve his</p><p>frail health and study Indian life. Skilled in woodcraft and a decent shot, he survived the</p><p>hardship of the trek, but only just: the strain of traveling eventually led to a complete</p><p>breakdown in his health, rather than the recovery for which he had hoped. Incapable of</p><p>writing, he was forced to dictate his story to a cousin and traveling companion. The</p><p>result has been described as the first account of a literarywhitemanwho actually lived by</p><p>choice for a while amongNative Americans.What emerges from this account is, like the</p><p>other work of Parkman and the romantic historians, an intriguing mix of fact and</p><p>fiction. It is also, and equally intriguingly, double-edged. As the narrator ofThe Oregon</p><p>Trail, a Harvard graduate and amember of a prominent Boston family, encounters the</p><p>landscape and peoples of the West, his tone tends to hover sometimes between</p><p>condescension and disgust, the style verges on the mandarin.</p><p>Yet, for all that, Parkman remembers that he foundmuch to admire, or even cherish,</p><p>in the West. The two scouts who accompanied him are portrayed in frankly romantic</p><p>terms. One has the rough charm of the prairie, and an indefatigable “cheerfulness and</p><p>gayety,” the other a “natural refinement and delicacy of mind”; the both of them, in</p><p>their different ways, are true knights of the wild. Native American life, too, is celebrated</p><p>for its color and occasionally chivalric touches. “If there be anything that deserves to be</p><p>called romantic in the Indian character,” Parkman explains, “it is to be sought in . . .</p><p>friendships . . . common among many of the prairie tribe.” Parkman himself, he</p><p>discloses, enjoyed just such an intimacy, becoming “excellent friends” with an Indian</p><p>he calls “the Panther”: “a noble-looking fellow,” with a “stately and graceful figure”</p><p>and “the very model of a wild prairie-rider.” This is the homoerotic romance across the</p><p>line betweenwhite and Indian thatCooper imagined, replayed here in howevermuted a</p><p>key. Parkman is framing his recollections within a literary tradition that includes the</p><p>author of the Leatherstocking Tales and, before him, Sir Walter Scott. Parkman is</p><p>drawn to the romance of the West, what he sees as its primitive beauty, its bold colors</p><p>and simple chivalry, even while he is also repelled by its rawness, its lack of refinement.</p><p>So he ends up decidedly at odds with himself, when he eventually returns from the trail.</p><p>“Many and powerful as were the attractions of the settlements,” Parkman concludes,</p><p>“we looked back regretfully to the wilderness behind us.” That was a broken, uncertain</p><p>note to be sounded in many later stories about going West, negotiating what the</p><p>traveler sees as the borderline between civilization and savagery. Parkman was playing</p><p>his part, in The Oregon Trail, in inaugurating the frontier as a site of imaginative</p><p>adventure: with the West perceived as it was precisely because it was seen through the</p><p>eyes of the East – as a place destructively, but also seductively, other.</p><p>A year after the publication ofThe Last of theMohicans, in 1827, a very different story</p><p>about the relationship between white people and Native Americans appeared, and</p><p>one different in turn from the accounts of Neal, Bird, and Parkman: Hope Leslie by</p><p>Catharine Marie Sedgwick (1789–1867). Sedgwick had already produced two best-</p><p>sellers,ANew England Tale: Sketches of New-England Character and Manners (1822)</p><p>andRedwood (1824). She was to go on to publish many other books. The main figures</p><p>in her novels tend to be women, and often women of independence and courage.Hope</p><p>Leslie, too, focuses on the destiny of women, but in even more interesting ways than</p><p>Sedgwick’s other novels. There is a white heroine, whose name gives the book its title.</p><p>There is also a Pequod woman, Magawisca, who saves a white man, Everell Fletcher,</p><p>52 Inventing Americas: 1800–1865</p><p>from execution at the hands of her father, the chief, in the manner of Pocahontas. Her</p><p>act involves considerable physical, as well as emotional, courage, since she offers her</p><p>body to the weapon aimed at Everell’s neck and, as a result, loses her arm. Hope Leslie</p><p>herself shows similar heroism when, on not one but two occasions, she frees Indian</p><p>women from what she considers unjust imprisonment. And Magawisca resumes her</p><p>status as an evidently “superior being” towards the end of the narrative, when she is</p><p>captured by the whites. At her trial for “brewing conspiracy . . . among the Indian</p><p>tribes,” she is defended by the historical figure of John Eliot, whom Sedgwick identifies</p><p>as the “first Protestant missionary to the Indians.”Magawisca, however, insists that she</p><p>needs no defense, since the tribunal has no authority over her. Clearly, their heroism</p><p>makes Magawisca and Hope Leslie doubles. Their primary allegiance is to conscience:</p><p>what Magawisca calls “the Great Spirit” that “hath written his laws on the hearts of his</p><p>original children.” Obeying those laws, they defy those set in power in their respective</p><p>societies, who are determinately male:Magawisca defies her father, of course, and both</p><p>she and her white double Hope defy the authority of the Puritan fathers.</p><p>What is equally notable about this rewriting</p><p>of Western tropes is the intimacy</p><p>that evidently exists inHopeLesliebetweenwhite and Indian characters.UnlikeCooper,</p><p>Sedgwick is perfectly willing to contemplate marriage between the two races. Faith</p><p>Leslie, the sister of Hope, is carried into captivity while still a child; she marries</p><p>Oneco, the brother of Magawisca; and she then refuses the chance offered her to</p><p>return to the Puritan community. Sedgwick is also willing to countenance signs of</p><p>kinship betweenwomen of the two races. In one narrative sequence,Hope Leslie resists</p><p>the prejudices of the age and the conventions of female behavior by liberating an Indian</p><p>woman called Nelena from prison. Nelena has been condemned as a witch, after she</p><p>cured a snakebitewith the help of herbalmedicine; and she repays the debt by arranging</p><p>for Magawisca to meet Hope with news of Faith. The two women, Hope and</p><p>Magawisca, meet secretly in a cemetery where both their mothers are buried, and</p><p>plot a way for Hope tomeet her sister even though this would violate colonial law. The</p><p>entire scene subtly interweaves intimations of debt and intimacy. The graves of the</p><p>mothers of the two women lie side by side, the women recall how Magawisca rescued</p><p>Everell Fletcher and Hope saved Nelena as they talk about the marriage between the</p><p>brother of one and the sister of the other. It is a celebration of a sisterhood of the spirit</p><p>and the blood.</p><p>Aword of caution is perhaps necessary here. Sedgwick did not question the prevailing</p><p>contemporary belief in the manifest destiny of the white race. For that matter, she did</p><p>not seek to challenge the conventional notion that marriage was a woman’s proper aim</p><p>and reward. Within these constraints, however, Sedgwick did find a place for female</p><p>integrity and for intimacy between the races; and one need only compare Hope Leslie</p><p>with theLeatherstockingTales tomeasure the difference. It is partly amatter of reversal:</p><p>male transgression and bonding are replaced by, yet reflected in, their female equiva-</p><p>lents. It is partly a matter of rewriting, radical revision: here, the connections between</p><p>the races are what matter rather than the conflicts – and, whatever else may be present,</p><p>there is an intensely felt sense of community and continuity. Cooper was a powerful</p><p>creator of frontiermyths but hewas not, by anymeans, the only one: the legends figured</p><p>in Hope Leslie also had a significant impact on how later Americans imagined the</p><p>movement of their nation west.</p><p>Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 53</p><p>The making of Southern myth</p><p>Howevermuch they differ, though,writers likeCooper andSedgwick dohave common</p><p>interests and ideas, derived from the basic currency of Western myth: a belief in</p><p>mobility, a concern with the future, a conviction that, whatever problems it may have,</p><p>America is still a land of possibility. The counter myth to this is the myth of the South:</p><p>preoccupied with place and confinement rather than space and movement, obsessed</p><p>with the guilt and burden of the past, riddled with doubt, unease, and the sense that, at</p><p>their best, humanbeings are radically limited and, at theirworst, tortured, grotesque, or</p><p>evil. And if Cooper was the founding father of the Western myth in literature, even</p><p>though he never actually saw the prairie, then, even more queerly, Edgar Allan Poe</p><p>(1809–1849)was the founding father of Southernmyth, although hewas actually born</p><p>inBoston andhardly ever usedSouthern settings in his fiction orhis poetry.Whatmakes</p><p>Poe a founder of Southernmyth, typically of him, is not somuch amatter of the literal as</p><p>of the imaginative. “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) is set in an anonymous</p><p>landscape, or rather dreamscape, but it has all the elements that were later to</p><p>characterize Southern Gothic: a great house and family falling into decay and ruin,</p><p>a feverish, introspective hero half in love with death, a pale, ethereal heroine who seems</p><p>and then is more dead than alive, rumors of incest and guilt – and, above all, the sense</p><p>that the past haunts the present and that there is evil in the world and it is strong.</p><p>Figure 2.1 Portrait of Edgar Allan Poe. Photo: akg-images.</p><p>54 Inventing Americas: 1800–1865</p><p>Publisher's Note:</p><p>Image not available</p><p>in the electronic edition</p><p>Poe began his literary career with a volume of poetry, Tamerlane and Other Poems</p><p>(1827). Published anonymously and at his own expense, it went unnoticed. But it</p><p>clearly announced his poetic intentions: aims and ambitions that were later to be</p><p>articulated in such seminal essays as “The Philosophy of Composition” (1846) and</p><p>“The Poetic Principle” (1850) and further put into practice in the later volumes, Poems</p><p>by E A Poe (1831) and The Raven and Other Poems (1845). The poet, Poe wrote in his</p><p>essays, should be concerned, first and last, with the “circumscribed Eden” of his own</p><p>dreams. “It is the desire of themoth for the star,” Poe says of the poetic impulse in “The</p><p>Poetic Principle.” According to his prescription, the poet’s task is to weave a tapestry of</p><p>talismanic signs and sounds in order to draw, or rather subdue, the reader into sharing</p><p>the world beyond phenomenal experience. Poems make nothing happen in any</p><p>practical, immediate sense, Poe suggests. On the contrary, the ideal poem becomes</p><p>one in which the words efface themselves, disappear as they are read, leaving only a</p><p>feeling of significant absence, of no-thing.</p><p>Just how Poe turned these poetic ideas into practice is briefly suggested in one of his</p><p>poems, “Dreamland,” where the narrator tells us that he has reached a strange new land</p><p>“out of SPACE – out of TIME.” That is the land all Poe’s art occupies or longs for: a</p><p>fundamentally elusive reality, the reverse of all that our senses can receive or our reason</p><p>can encompass – something that lies beyond life that we can discover only in sleep,</p><p>madness or trance, in death especially, and, if we are lucky, in a poem or story. Certain</p><p>poetic scenes and subjects are favorites with Poe precisely because they reinforce his</p><p>ultimately visionary aims. Unsurprisingly, life after death is a favorite topic, in poems</p><p>like “Annabel Lee” and “The Sleeper.” So, too, is the theme of a strange, shadowy</p><p>region beyond the borders of normal consciousness: places such as those described in</p><p>“The City in the Sea” or “Eldorado” which are, in effect, elaborate figures for death.</p><p>Whatever the apparent subject, the movement is always away from the ordinary,</p><p>phenomenal world in and down to some other, subterranean level of consciousness</p><p>and experience. The sights and sounds of a realizable reality may be there in a poem like</p><p>“To Helen,” but their presence is only fleeting, ephemeral. Poe’s scenes are always</p><p>shadowy and insubstantial, the colors dim, the lighting dusky. In the final instance, the</p><p>things of the real world are there only to be discarded</p><p>Disengagement was not, however, something that Poe could pursue as a practical</p><p>measure. He had to earn his living. He worked as an editor for various journals,</p><p>including Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine andGraham’s Magazine; he was associated</p><p>with other journals, and he was an indefatigable essayist and reviewer. What the</p><p>magazines wanted, in particular, were stories; and in 1835 Poe attracted attention</p><p>with one of his first short stories, “MS Found in a Bottle,” which won first prize in a</p><p>contest judged by John PendletonKennedy (1795–1870) – himself a writer and author</p><p>of one of the first idyllic fictional accounts of life on the old plantation, SwallowBarn; or,</p><p>A Sojourn in the Old Dominion (1832). This short story was followed by more and</p><p>more tales appealing to the contemporary taste for violent humor and macabre</p><p>incident. His first collection of stories, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, was</p><p>published in 1840; it included “Ligeia,” “Berenice,” and “The Assignation.” In 1845</p><p>Tales appeared, a book that reprinted previous work. This later collection contained</p><p>“The Pit and the Pendulum” and “The Tell-Tale Heart,” among other notable pieces.</p><p>In the earlier, in turn, Poe made his attentions</p><p>as a short story writer clear in a brief</p><p>Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 55</p><p>preface. It was true, Poe admitted, that many of his stories were Gothic because they</p><p>had terror as their “thesis.” But that terror, he went on, was not of the conventional</p><p>kind, since it had little to dowith the usualGothic paraphernalia; it was, instead, a terror</p><p>“of the soul.”</p><p>Whatever else he might have been, Poe was an unusually perceptive (if often also</p><p>malicious) critic. And he was especially perceptive about his own work. Poe did not</p><p>invent theGothic tale, anymore than he invented the detective story, science fiction, or</p><p>absurd humor. To each of these genres or approaches, however, he did – as he realized</p><p>and, in some instances, boasted – make his own vital contribution. In a detective story</p><p>like “TheMurders in theRueMorgue,” for example, Poe created the detective story as a</p><p>tale of ratiocination, a mystery that is gradually unraveled and solved. He also created</p><p>the character of the brilliant amateurwho solves a crime that seemsbeyond the talents of</p><p>the professionals. And in his Gothic stories, he first destabilizes the reader by using</p><p>unreliable narrators:madmen and liars, initially rationalmenwhohave their rationalism</p><p>thoroughly subverted, men who should by all commonsensical standards be dead. And</p><p>he then locates the terror within, as something that springs from and bears down upon</p><p>the inner life. In Poe’s stories, the source of mystery and anxiety is something that</p><p>remains inexplicable. It is the urge to self-betrayal that haunts the narrator of “TheTell-</p><p>Tale Heart,” or the cruel and indomitable will of the narrator of “Ligeia” which finally</p><p>transforms reality into fantasy, his living wife into a dead one. It is the impulse towards</p><p>self-destruction, and the capacity for sinking into nightmareworlds of his own creation,</p><p>that the protagonist and narrator of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838)</p><p>reveals at so many moments of his life. Poe tears the Gothic tale out of the rationalist</p><p>framework it previously inhabited, and he makes it a medium for exploring the</p><p>irrational, even flirting with the anti-rational. As such, he makes it as central and vital</p><p>to the Romantic tradition as, say, the lyric poem or the dream play.</p><p>“The Fall of the House of Usher” shows how Poe makes a fictional art out of</p><p>inwardness and instability. The narrator, an initially commonsensical man, is confused</p><p>by his feelingswhenhe first arrives at the homeof his childhood friend, RoderickUsher.</p><p>But he is inclined to dismiss such feelings as “superstition,” and even when he is</p><p>reunited with Usher, his response is “half of awe,” suggesting a suspicion that his host</p><p>might know things hidden to him, and “half of pity,” suggesting the superiority of the</p><p>rational man. Gradually, the narrator comes to speak only of “awe.” He even admits</p><p>that he feels “the wild influences” of Usher’s “fantastic yet impressive superstitions”</p><p>“creeping upon” him. The scene is set for the final moment, when Roderick’s sister</p><p>Madeline arises from her grave to be reunited with him in death, and the House of</p><p>Usher sinks into a “deep and dank tarn.” At this precise moment, Usher turns to the</p><p>narrator and speaks to him, for the last time, addressing himas “Madman.”The reversal</p><p>is now complete: either because the narrator has succumbed to the “superstition” of his</p><p>host, or because his continued rationality argues for his essential insanity, his failure to</p><p>comprehend a truth that lies beyond reason.Nothing is certain as the tale closes, except</p><p>that what we have witnessed is an urgent, insistent movement inward: from daylight</p><p>reality towards darker, ever more subterranean levels, in the house and in the mind of</p><p>the hero.And as the narratormoves ever further inward, into “Usher” the house,we the</p><p>readers move ever further inward into “Usher” the fiction. The structures of the two</p><p>journeys correspond. So, for that matter, do the arts of the hero and author: Roderick</p><p>56 Inventing Americas: 1800–1865</p><p>Usher uses his to transformhis guests’minds and expectations, so also does Poewith his</p><p>imaginative guests. And at themoment of revelation at the end – when the full measure</p><p>of the solipsistic vision is revealed – both “Usher” the house and “Usher” the tale</p><p>disintegrate, disappear, leaving narrator and reader alone with their thoughts and</p><p>surmises. In short, the house of Usher is a house of mirrors. Every feature of the story is</p><p>at once destabilizing and self-reflexive, referring us back to the actual process of creative</p><p>production, by its author, and re-production, by its readers. Like somany other tales by</p><p>Poe, “TheFall of theHouseofUsher” stands at thebeginningof a long line of Southern</p><p>narratives that incline toward narcissism and nostalgia, the movement inward and the</p><p>movement back. And it stands at the beginning, also, of an even longer line of fiction,</p><p>American and European, that disconcerts the reader by jettisoning the mundane in</p><p>favor of the magical and turning the literal world into a kind of shadow play.</p><p>Legends of the Old Southwest</p><p>Straddling the borders between the myth of the West and the myth of the South are</p><p>those heroes and writers who are associated with the humor and legends of the Old</p><p>Southwest. As for heroes, the notable figures here areDavy Crockett (1786–1836) and</p><p>Mike Fink (1770?–1823?). Crockett spent a shiftless youth until his political career</p><p>began when he was thirty. Serving in Congress from 1827 to 1831, and from 1833 to</p><p>1835, he was quickly adopted byWhig politicians, opposing the populist hero Andrew</p><p>Jackson, who saw in Crockett a useful tool for associating their party with backwoods</p><p>democracy. Davy, who boasted that he relied on “natural-born sense instead of law</p><p>learning,”was soon turned by skillful politicians into a frontier hero, whose picturesque</p><p>eccentricities, country humor, tall tales, shrewd native wit, and rowdy pioneer spirit</p><p>were all magnified and celebrated. With the help of a ghost writer, Crockett wrote</p><p>ANarrative of the Life of David Crockett, of the State of Tennessee (1834): a book clearly</p><p>designed to help him gain or retain political popularity. But soon after that, tales of the</p><p>legendary frontiersman had begun to spread, by word of mouth, songs and poems,</p><p>almanacs (known as Crockett Almanacs), and by such publications as The Lion of the</p><p>West by James Kirke Paulding, Sketches and Eccentricities of Colonel David Crockett</p><p>ofWest Tennessee (1833) byMathew StClaire Clarke (1798–1842?), andAnAccount of</p><p>Colonel Crockett’ s Tour to the North and Down East (1835). In some of these</p><p>publications, Crockett may have had a hand; in many, he did not. And when he died</p><p>at the Alamo in 1836, even more life was given to the legend.</p><p>As an actual historical figure, less is known of Mike Fink than of Crockett. He was a</p><p>keelboatman on theOhio andMississippi. Before that, he had worked as Crockett had,</p><p>as an Indian scout; and, when he left the river, he moved west to become a trapper. It</p><p>was on the river, however, that his violence, humor, and energymade him a legend. He</p><p>evidently helped to foster that legend by telling tales about himself, but it was others</p><p>who wrote the tales down, among them newspapermen Thomas Bangs Thorpe</p><p>(1810–1856) and Joseph M. Field (1815–1878). The stories about Fink appeared in</p><p>books, the earliest of whichwasThe Last of the Boatmen byMorganNeville published in</p><p>1829. They also appeared in magazines and newspapers, like the Spirit of the Times,</p><p>which specialized in tales of the frontier and sporting sketches, and in almanacs – among</p><p>them, theCrockettAlmanacs, which did not confine themselves to the exploits ofDavy.</p><p>Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 57</p><p>Crockett and Fink inhabit an interesting borderland between “popular” and “high”</p><p>culture, the political and the legendary, oral folk tradition and published literature. The</p><p>first writer to make the legends and humor of the Old Southwest part of the literary</p><p>tradition was Augustus Baldwin Longstreet (1790–1870). A Georgia</p><p>lawyer and</p><p>academic, Longstreet published Georgia Scenes: Characters, Incidents &c, in the First</p><p>Half-Century of theRepublic in 1835. In a series of sketches varying from the descriptive</p><p>to the dramatic, Longstreet presented his readers with illustrations of life in the remoter</p><p>parts of the state. The sketches were linked by the appearance in nearly all of them of a</p><p>narrator bearing a suspicious resemblance to the author himself – a kindly, generous but</p><p>occasionally pompous and patronizing man who tended to treat his subjects as if they</p><p>were specimens of some strange formof life, with amixture of curiosity and amusement.</p><p>A healthy distance was maintained from characters who were presented not so much as</p><p>individuals as in terms of their common behavioral patterns; and the combined effect of</p><p>the detachment, the condescension, and the generalizing tendency was to create an</p><p>effect somewhere between folktale and caricature, legend and cartoon.</p><p>Longstreet’s probablemotives for writing in this way were ones he shared withmany</p><p>other Southwestern humorists: among them, Joseph Glover Baldwin (1815–1864),</p><p>author of The Flush Times of Alabama and Mississippi (1853), Johnson Jones Hooper</p><p>(1815–1862), who wrote Some Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs, Late of the</p><p>Tallapoosa Volunteers (1845), and Thomas Bangs Thorpe, whose stories about what</p><p>he called “a hardy and indomitable race” of frontier people were collected in The</p><p>Big Bear of Arkansas; and Other Sketches Illustrative of Character and Incidents in the</p><p>South-West (1845). As a professional gentleman and aWhig, Longstreet was inclined to</p><p>nervousness about the crude habits of frontier life. Violent, rowdy, and anarchic, it</p><p>frightened anyone used to a more stable culture with habits of deference and respect.</p><p>So, in an eminently understandableway, Longstreet and other Southwestern humorists</p><p>attempted to distance their frontier surroundings, to place them in a framework that</p><p>would make themmanageable and known. They tried, in effect, to enclose and encode</p><p>them. One way of this was via the humor: by its means, violence was transformed</p><p>into play. And another way of doing it was via legend: they also tried to identify the</p><p>rough, rude world they saw around them with a familiar rural type – the plain farmer,</p><p>with his straightforward approach to things, his raw integrity and earthy language, and</p><p>above all his muscular self-reliance. By this means, violence could be interpreted as an</p><p>excess of high spirits andhonest energy; and the disruptionof established social patterns</p><p>could be regarded as a crucial step on the road to the recovery of a deeply traditional</p><p>democratic ideal.</p><p>As time passed, though, the narrative enclosure in which Longstreet, Baldwin, and</p><p>other Southwestern humorists chose to pen their frontier subjects tended to dissolve.</p><p>And with dramatic results: the work that certainly represents the culmination of</p><p>Southwestern humor, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, shows that. Even before</p><p>that, the abolition of the conventional narrative framewas a notable feature of the comic</p><p>stories and tall tales of George Washington Harris (1814–1869). Harris began writing</p><p>about his backwoods hero, Sut Lovingood, as early as 1843, in pieces published in the</p><p>Spirit of the Times. But it was not until after the Civil War, in 1867, that a full-length</p><p>volume appeared, Sut Lovingood: Yarns Spun by a “Nat’ral BornDurn’d Fool. Warped</p><p>and Wove For Public Wear. Sut tells his own tales. And all those tales are guided by his</p><p>58 Inventing Americas: 1800–1865</p><p>belief that, as he puts it, “Manwasmade a-pupus just to eat, drink, an’ fur stayin’ awake</p><p>in the yearly part of the nites.” A native of rural Tennessee, Sut is a primitive or natural</p><p>man: a man who stands on the periphery of conventional society and yet still offers</p><p>significant comments on it. His life, circumscribed by the animal functions, is a</p><p>continual drag on our own pretensions, about the nature of our personalities and the</p><p>efficacy or security of the society we have organized for ourselves. At one point in his</p><p>narrative, Sut admits that he has “nara a soul, nuffin but a whisky proof gizzard”; and</p><p>Harris’s habitual strategy, of making us, the readers, share Sut’s life and experience the</p><p>connection between what he is and how he lives, leads us to suspect that in similar</p><p>conditionswemight be forced to say exactly the same. In effect, SutLovingood is oneof</p><p>the first in a long line of American vernacular heroes: who compel the reader to attend</p><p>because, the sense is, nomatter how poor or peripheral theymay appear to be, they and</p><p>what they have to say deserve attention – not least, because they seem to offer us a</p><p>freakish mirror image of ourselves.</p><p>The Making of American Selves</p><p>The Transcendentalists</p><p>“Our age is retrospective,” wrote Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) at the begin-</p><p>ning of perhaps his most famous work,Nature (1836). “It builds the sepulchres of the</p><p>fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism,” he continued. “The foregoing</p><p>generations beheldGod and nature face to face, through their eyes.Why should we not</p><p>also enjoy an original relation to the universe?” An original relation to the universe, one</p><p>founded on self-reliance and self-respect, is the key to the thought and work of</p><p>Emerson. It also inspired a number of other writers at the time who saw the liberation</p><p>of the self as the American imperative. For Emerson, everything served to confirm a</p><p>belief in the supreme importance of the individual, the superiority of intuition to</p><p>intellect (or, as hewas to put it, of “Reason” to “Understanding”), and the presence of a</p><p>spiritual power in both nature and the individual human being. “If we live truly,”</p><p>Emersonwas to write in “Self-Reliance” (1841), “we shall see truly.” And he dedicated</p><p>himself to living and writing the truth as he saw it. He had been keeping a journal since</p><p>hewas a student atHarvard, inwhich he recordedhis daily experiences and impressions,</p><p>the facts of his life. He was to continue this practice until he died; and the facts he</p><p>recorded there became the source of the truths he endeavored to develop in his essays</p><p>and poems. From these were to be drawn pieces such as the “Divinity School Address”</p><p>(1838) and “The Over-Soul” (1841), in which he rejected institutional forms of</p><p>religion in favor of his belief that “God incarnates himself in man.”</p><p>Emerson began to lecture regularly on the lyceum circuit, to spread his ideas aswell as</p><p>to make a living. He settled in Concord, Massachusetts in 1835, where he became</p><p>intimate friends with other writers like Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau,</p><p>Bronson Alcott, and Margaret Fuller. It was here that the movement known as</p><p>Transcendentalism, gathered around his ideas, took shape; and it was here also, at</p><p>Emerson’s home, and elsewhere that meetings of the Transcendental Club were to be</p><p>held during the seven or eight years following 1836 – a group, known among its own</p><p>Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 59</p><p>members as the Symposium or the Hedge Club, that met together occasionally and</p><p>informally to discuss philosophy, theology, and literature. Emerson himself was to</p><p>become involved in the publication of the Transcendentalist quarterly magazine, The</p><p>Dial, in 1840, assuming the post of editor in 1842, but it was in his lectures and essays</p><p>that his creed of self-help and self-emancipation was most fully developed and most</p><p>widely disseminated. Many volumes of essays and poems were to be published by him</p><p>during the course of his life. The core of his beliefs, and of the Transcendentalist</p><p>creed can, however, be found in a half dozen pieces: “The American Scholar” (1837),</p><p>“Divinity School Address,” “Self-Reliance,” “The Over-Soul,” “The Poet” (1844) –</p><p>and, above all, Nature.</p><p>At the heart ofNature is an intense commitment to the power and wonder of nature</p><p>and the individual and to the indelible, intimate character of the connection between</p><p>the two.The self-reliance that Emerson embracedwas not selfishness:</p><p>since, as he saw it,</p><p>to be true to the true self was to be true to the self, the spirit present in all human beings,</p><p>all nature. To obey the promptings of the soul was to obey those of the Over-Soul.</p><p>“Every real man must be a nonconformist,” Emerson insisted, but nonconformity</p><p>meant going against the superficial dictates of society, not pursuing the grosser</p><p>forms of self-interest and egotism. For Emerson here, as for William Blake inAmerica,</p><p>A Prophecy (1793), “everything that lives is holy, life delights in life”; and to be in</p><p>communionwith oneself, at the deepest level, is to be in touchwithwhat Emerson goes</p><p>on to call the “uncontained and immortal beauty” that runs through the veins of</p><p>everything around us. Not that Emerson neglects the material life in all this. On the</p><p>contrary, in Nature he begins with commodity before turning to spirit: in the first</p><p>instance, whatEmerson considers in the relationshipbetweenhumannature andnature</p><p>is the circumstantial dimension, the uses and practical conquest of our surroundings.</p><p>This is the element in Emersonian thought, particularly, that some of his contemporar-</p><p>ies and subsequent generations were to distrust. But, for Emerson, use did not mean</p><p>exploitation. And, while he admitted that practical use was “the only use of nature that</p><p>all men apprehend,” he was careful to point out that it was easily the least important.</p><p>The more important service to the soul offered by nature was, as Emerson saw it,</p><p>aesthetic, intellectual, and, above all, moral. “Universe is the externization of the soul,”</p><p>he insisted. Nature is a product and emblem of the spirit, theOver-Soul; the true self or</p><p>soul of each individual is divinely connected to it, operating according to the same</p><p>rhythms and laws; so each individual, in beholding andmeditating on nature, can intuit</p><p>those rhythms and learn those laws. “Every natural process is a version of a moral</p><p>sentence,” Emerson tells the reader in Nature. “The moral law lies at the centre of</p><p>nature and radiates to the circumference. It is the pith and marrow of every substance,</p><p>every relation, and every process. All things with which we deal preach to us.” The style</p><p>here is characteristic. There is no visible logic to the argument.What Emerson does is to</p><p>try to possess the idea by attacking it from different directions, to locate the heart or</p><p>kernel of thematter by inserting various intellectual and verbal probes into its shell. The</p><p>result is a series of gnomic statements, a rhetorical pattern of repetition with variation.</p><p>Emerson himself distinguished between what he called the Party of Hope and the</p><p>Party of Memory among his contemporaries: the one committed to the possibilities of</p><p>the future, the other wedded to the imperfections and failures of the past. And it is quite</p><p>clear that Emerson sawhimself as amember of theParty ofHope.This hadquestionable</p><p>60 Inventing Americas: 1800–1865</p><p>aspects for those, like Hawthorne and Melville, of a darker, more skeptical frame of</p><p>mind. But it also had more unambiguously positive ones. In “The American Scholar,”</p><p>for instance, which Oliver Wendell Holmes called “Our intellectual Declaration of</p><p>Independence,” Emerson exhorted his audience to turn from imitation to originality.</p><p>“We have listened too long to the courtly muses of Europe,” he insists. And what the</p><p>American scholar must do is become “Man Thinking” in the present, pushing beyond</p><p>convention and institutions to learn, not from books, but directly from life. “Life is our</p><p>dictionary,” Emerson declares, offering the scholar direct rather than mediated access</p><p>to the real. From this, it follows that everything in life is a source of knowledge, even the</p><p>humblest, everyday subject or event. From this, it also follows that everyone can be a</p><p>gatherer of knowledge, a scholar. The sources of knowledge are everywhere and are</p><p>accessible to anyonewho cares to attend. Americans can all be American scholars. There</p><p>can be a genuine democracy, ofmen thinking, corresponding to the democracy of facts.</p><p>Emerson’s belief in individuality led naturally, not only to a commitment to</p><p>democratic equality, but to a conviction that life was process. “Nature is not fixed</p><p>but fluid,” he said. Change is at the root of existence, change in human beings as well as</p><p>nature; and so, “a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.” This had vital</p><p>consequences for Emerson’s poetry. “It is not metres, but a metre-making argument</p><p>thatmakes a poem,” he insisted in “The Poet,” “a thought so passionate and alive, that,</p><p>like the spirit of a plant or an animal, it has an architecture of its own, and adorns nature</p><p>with a new thing.” For Emerson, poetry had to be as “free, peremptory, and clear” as its</p><p>subject and creator, it had to be original and organic rather than imitative; it had, in</p><p>short, to dramatize the liberated self. As the supreme creative power, illuminating and</p><p>transforming all that comes in its orbit, the self is placed at the center of Emerson’s</p><p>poems. The stylistic result is something often close to free verse. As poet, Emerson</p><p>does accept the preliminary discipline of a particular rhyme and rhythm scheme, but he</p><p>allows himself to vary lines andmeters at will; irregularity and disruption are permitted,</p><p>as long as the basic sense of rhythmic speech – a speech coming directly from the</p><p>primitive and oracular self – is retained.</p><p>More notable still is the effect of the ethic of self-reliance on the actual, material and</p><p>moral, landscapes Emerson describes. In poem after poem, the self is shown recreating</p><p>the world, transforming it into something freshly seen and fully discovered. In</p><p>“The Snow-Storm” (1847), for instance, the poetic vision reshapes the scene just as</p><p>“the frolic architecture of the snow” is described refashioning familiar objects into fresh</p><p>and unfamiliar shapes. And in poems like “Uriel” (1847) and “Merlin” (1847), the</p><p>poet is translated into an incarnation of God, whose acts of seeing and naming</p><p>correspond with His original act of making the world. In effect, Emerson puts into</p><p>practice here the belief he expressed in Nature and elsewhere that the poet does in</p><p>words what everyone can do in action: that is, remake and reorder their surroundings.</p><p>Emerson never ceased to believe in what he called the “infinitude of the private.”</p><p>Although, in his later work, there is a growing emphasis on the difficulties of</p><p>knowledge, the limitations imposed by “fate” and the intimidating vastness of nature,</p><p>he remained firmly convinced of the authority of the individual. He stayed loyal to the</p><p>idea that every person had the power to shape and change things: which is one reason</p><p>why, in the 1850s, he became involved in themovement to abolish slavery. As Emerson</p><p>saw it, the permanent principles of the spiritual life were incarnated in the flux and</p><p>Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 61</p><p>processes of nature and the constantly changing life of the individual. To live according</p><p>to those laws was to live in the present, with respect for others but without timidity or</p><p>apology, in the knowledge that the final judge of any person resided in the self.</p><p>Those who pursued the Transcendentalist creed included Theodore Parker</p><p>(1810–1860), who managed to remain a Unitarian minister while active in the</p><p>Transcendental Club, and Bronson Alcott (1799–1888), who tried to establish a</p><p>cooperative community based on Transcendentalist principles at “Fruitlands,” at</p><p>Harvard – it failed after only sevenmonths. Emersondid not approve of this cooperative</p><p>venture. Nor did he like another, more famous communal enterprise that lasted rather</p><p>longer, from 1841 to 1847. This was Brook Farm, the cooperative community set up</p><p>underGeorgeRipley (1802–1880) ninemiles outside Boston. Among those interested</p><p>in the venture wereNathanielHawthorne, Orestes Brownson (1803–1876), Elizabeth</p><p>Peabody (1804–1894), Alcott and Parker, and the person who, apart from Thoreau</p><p>and Emerson himself, is now the most famous and remembered member of the</p><p>Transcendental Club,</p><p>Margaret Fuller (1810–1850). The work for which Fuller is</p><p>now chiefly remembered is Woman in the Nineteenth Century (1845). The book is</p><p>written in a rhetorical style similar to that of Emerson and draws its inspiration from the</p><p>Emersonian and Transcendentalist belief in self-reliance and self-emancipation. What</p><p>gives it its originality and impact is that Fuller, insisting that individualism and liberty</p><p>are indivisible, applies the idea of self-development to “the woman question.” The law</p><p>of freedom, she argues, “cannot fail of universal recognition.” Linking the cause of</p><p>female emancipation to the abolition of slavery, she attacks all those who would try to</p><p>reduce people to property, black or female, or insist that they have to be limited to a</p><p>particular “sphere.” It is “the champions of the enslaved African,” Fuller points out,</p><p>who have made “the warmest appeal in behalf of Women.” This is partly because many</p><p>abolitionists are, in fact, women, she explains, and see in the plight of the people whose</p><p>cause they embrace a reflection of their ownplight andproblem.But it is also because, at</p><p>the moment, neither is allowed the power and prerogatives of an adult. “Now there is</p><p>no woman,” Fuller remarks bitterly, “only an overgrown child.”</p><p>The imperative of education is one that Fuller sees as primary. She also sees it as one</p><p>that women will have to pursue for themselves. Men, she argues, have habitually kept</p><p>women weak and circumscribed; it is hardly to be expected that they will now see the</p><p>error of their ways and work to make women strong and free. “I wish Woman to live,</p><p>first for God’s sake,” Fuller insists. “Then she will not make an imperfect man her god,</p><p>and thus sink into idolatry.” If she develops properly, finding her true vocation,</p><p>whatever that may be, then “she will know how to love, and be worthy of being</p><p>loved.”What Fuller anticipates, eventually, is a partnership of equals, a time “whenMan</p><p>andWomanmay regard one another as brother and sister.” In an earlier book, Summer</p><p>on the Lakes (1844), Fuller writes of how, when contemplating the vastness of the</p><p>Midwest, she felt elated and proud. “I think,” she reveals, “I had never felt so happy that</p><p>I was born in America.”Now, inWoman in theNineteenth Century, a similarly patriotic</p><p>feeling inspires her as she contemplates the possibility of a new dispensation, a new and</p><p>better relation between the sexes, in the New World. “I have believed and intimated</p><p>that this hope” for an equal partnership “would receive an ampler fruition, than ever</p><p>before, in our own land,” she informs the reader. In later life, Fuller did not confine</p><p>herself to the woman question. Nor did she restrict herself to the rights of Americans.</p><p>62 Inventing Americas: 1800–1865</p><p>Nevertheless, it is for her passionate commitment to the liberation of women that she is</p><p>remembered today, and for her belief that the opportunities for such a liberation were</p><p>greatest in the country of her birth.</p><p>“I knowof nomore encouraging fact,”wroteHenryDavidThoreau (1817–1862) in</p><p>Walden, or Life in theWoods (1854), “than the unquestionable ability ofman to elevate</p><p>his life by a conscious endeavour.” That was not only the creed that Thoreau preached</p><p>in his writings, along with Emerson, Fuller, and the other Transcendentalists. It was</p><p>also the creed that he embraced, and tried to follow, in his life. Elsewhere in Walden,</p><p>Thoreau makes the distinction between “professors of philosophy” and</p><p>“philosophers.” “To be a philosopher,” Thoreau suggests, “is not merely to have</p><p>subtle thoughts, nor even to found a school, but so to love wisdom as to live according</p><p>to its dictates, a life of simplicity, independence, magnanimity, and trust.” It might</p><p>seem unfair to claim that Thoreau is measuring here the difference between Emerson</p><p>and himself. Nevertheless, Thoreau did try to live according to the dictates of</p><p>Transcendentalism to an extent and with an intensity that Emerson never managed.</p><p>Far more than his teacher, Thoreau wanted to know how it felt to live and see truly: to</p><p>experience that knowledge in the body, the senses, as well as understand it in the mind.</p><p>He also wanted the reader to go with him on what he called his excursions into nature,</p><p>and into himself. He does not simply instruct, as Emerson does, he makes us share the</p><p>experience; while we read his books, vicariously, imaginatively, we join in his life.</p><p>Thoreau pursued a pattern of alternating entry and withdrawal in relation to society.</p><p>After graduating, he taught school for a time with his brother John, following the</p><p>principles of Bronson Alcott. And it was with John that, in 1839, he made a trip on the</p><p>Concord and Merrimack Rivers. Later, while residing at Walden, he used the journals</p><p>he had kept during the trip to produce his first book, A Week on the Concord and</p><p>Merrimack Rivers (1849). In it, Thoreau appears for the first time as a living realization</p><p>of Emerson’s American Scholar: in his characteristic role, that is, of “ManThinking” on</p><p>the move. The book also introduces the reader to Thoreau’s characteristic style, which</p><p>is essentially a rhythmic flow of description and apparent digression: a dramatic</p><p>articulation of what appears to be spontaneous thought and intimate talk. “I require</p><p>of everywriter,”Thoreauwas to say inWalden, “a simple and sincere account of his own</p><p>life”; and simplicity and sincerity were certainly his touchstones. But that should not</p><p>blind us to the lyricism, the wit and panache of his writings. Like the great Romantics,</p><p>Thoreau worked hard, and often artfully, to catch the casual rhythms of a mind in</p><p>process – a mind that is process – and the moments of illumination to which its chancy,</p><p>volatile movements lead.</p><p>Whenhis brother John became fatally ill, in 1841, the schoolHenry had runwith him</p><p>was closed.Henry then livedwithEmerson for ten years, serving as a general handyman.</p><p>During this time, he became an intimate of the members of the Transcendental Club,</p><p>and contributedwork toTheDial; he also developedhis skills as a surveyor andbotanist.</p><p>A periodworking as a tutor on Staten Islandwas followed by a return toConcord; and it</p><p>was on his return there that he went to live at nearbyWalden Pond from July 4, 1845 to</p><p>September 6, 1847. Other Transcendentalists sought a communal life, at Fruitlands or</p><p>Brook Farm, if they tried to live according to their principles. Characteristically,</p><p>Thoreau chose to live alone, in a hut he built for himself. It was this sojourn in the</p><p>woods that, several years later, Thoreau was to recreate in Walden, using the journals</p><p>Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 63</p><p>that, as a matter of habit now, he kept while he was there. Robert Frost was to call</p><p>Walden his “favourite poem.” Many other descriptions or generic titles have been</p><p>applied to it: it has been called, among other things, an autobiography, a philosophical</p><p>narrative, an ecological journal, a spiritual diary. It is, in a way, sui generis; it creates its</p><p>own genre; it is unique. It is also typically American in its intense focus on the first</p><p>person singular, the “I” of the narrator and author (and, in fact, its elision of narrator</p><p>and author); its blend of fact and fiction, personal experience and broader reflection;</p><p>and its intimacy and immediacy, the sense of a confessional raised to the level of art.</p><p>Walden, in short, is one of the many great American books to which Walt Whitman’s</p><p>remark, “Who touches this book, touches a man,” could act as an epigraph: because,</p><p>like them, it is the utterly unrepeatable expression of the author, in a particular place and</p><p>at a particular point in time. Its uniqueness, in the American context, is its typicality. It</p><p>is, in other words, the expression of a culture committed to the idea that every person is</p><p>being truly representative in being truly singular. And it belongs to a tradition of</p><p>experiment, the pursuit of the personally unique and new: a tradition for which the</p><p>cardinal sin is to sound like others – to imitate rather than innovate, and embrace</p><p>The Granger Collection/Topfoto.</p><p>The Colonial and Revolutionary Periods 3</p><p>Publisher's Note:</p><p>Image not available</p><p>in the electronic edition</p><p>their number.” The communal nature of the project is correspondingly diluted. The</p><p>communitarian spirit of the first generation of immigrants, those like Bradford himself</p><p>whom he calls “Pilgrims,” slowly vanishes. The next generation moves off in search of</p><p>better land and further prosperity; “and thus,” Bradford laments, “was this poor church</p><p>left, like an ancient mother grown old and forsaken of her children.” The passing of the</p><p>first generation and the passage of the second generation to other places and greater</p><p>wealth inspires Bradford to that sense of elegy that was to become characteristic of</p><p>narratives dramatizing the pursuit of dreams in America. It also pushes Of Plymouth</p><p>Plantation towards a revelation of the central paradox in the literature of immigration –</p><p>to be revealed again and again inAmerican books – thatmaterial success leads somehow</p><p>to spiritual failure.</p><p>Ten years after Bradford and his fellow Pilgrims landed at Plymouth, JohnWinthrop</p><p>left for New England with nearly four hundred other Congregationalist Puritans. The</p><p>Massachusetts Bay Company had been granted the right by charter to settle there and,</p><p>prior to sailing, Winthrop had been elected Governor of the Colony, a post he was to</p><p>hold for twelve of the nineteen remaining years of his life. As early as 1622, Winthrop</p><p>had called England “this sinfull land”; and, playing variations on the by now common</p><p>themes of poverty and unemployment, declared that “this Land grows weary of her</p><p>Inhabitants.” Now, in 1630, aboard theArbella bound for the NewWorld, Winthrop</p><p>took the opportunity to preach a lay sermon, AModell of Christian Charity, about the</p><p>good society he and his fellow voyagers were about to build. As Winthrop saw it, they</p><p>had an enormous responsibility. They had entered into a contract withGod of the same</p><p>kindHe had once had with the Israelites, according to whichHewould protect them if</p><p>they followed His word. Not only the eyes of God but “the eyes of all people are upon</p><p>us,” Winthrop declared. They were a special few, chosen for an errand into the</p><p>wilderness. That made their responsibility all the greater; the divine punishment was</p><p>inevitably worse for the chosen people than for the unbelievers.</p><p>Written as a series of questions, answers, and objections that reflect Winthrop’s legal</p><p>training, A Modell of Christian Charity is, in effect, a plea for a community in which</p><p>“the care of the public must oversway all private respects.” It is fired with a sense of</p><p>mission and visionary example. “Wee shall finde that the God of Israell is among us,</p><p>when tenn of us shall be able to resist a thousand of our enemies,”Winthrop explained;</p><p>“wee must Consider that wee shall be as a Citty upon a Hill.” To achieve this divinely</p><p>sanctioned utopia, he pointed out to all those aboard theArbella, “weemust delight in</p><p>each other, make others Condicions our owne . . . allwayes having before our eyes our</p><p>Commission and Community in the worke, our Community as members of the same</p><p>body.” This utopia would represent a translation of the ideal into the real, a fulfillment</p><p>of the prophecies of the past, “a story and a by-word through the world” in the present,</p><p>and abeacon for the future. Itwould not exclude social difference anddistinction. But it</p><p>would be united as the various organs of the human body were.</p><p>Along with the sense of providence and special mission, Winthrop shared with</p><p>Bradford the aim of decoding the divine purpose, searching for the spiritual meanings</p><p>behind material facts. He was also capable of a similar humility. His spiritual autobi-</p><p>ography, for instance, John Winthrop’s Christian Experience – which was written in</p><p>1637 and recounts his childhood and earlymanhood –makes no secret of his belief that</p><p>he was inclined to “all kind of wickednesse” in his youth, then was allowed to come “to</p><p>4 The Colonial and Revolutionary Periods</p><p>some peace and comfort in God” through no merit of his own. But there was a greater</p><p>argumentativeness in Winthrop, more of an inclination towards analysis and debate.</p><p>This comes out in his journal, which he began aboard the Arbella, and in some of his</p><p>public utterances. In both a journal entry for 1645, for instance, and a speech delivered</p><p>in the same year, Winthrop developed his contention that true community did not</p><p>exclude social difference and required authority. This he did by distinguishing between</p><p>what he called natural and civil liberty. Natural liberty he defined in his journal as</p><p>something “common to man with beasts and other creatures.” This liberty, he wrote,</p><p>was “incompatible and inconsistent with authority and cannot endure the least</p><p>restraint.” Civil liberty, however, was “maintained and exercised in a way of subjection</p><p>to authority”; it was the liberty to do what was “good, just, and honest.” It was “the</p><p>same kind of liberty wherewith Christ hath made us free,” Winthrop argued. “Such is</p><p>the liberty of the church under the authority of Christ,” and also of the “true wife”</p><p>under the authority of her husband.” Like the true church or true wife, the colonist</p><p>should choose this liberty, even rejoice in it, and sofind aperfect freedom in true service.</p><p>Challenges to the Puritan oligarchy</p><p>John Winthrop found good reason for his belief in authority, and further demands on</p><p>his capacity for argument, when faced with the challenge of Anne Hutchinson</p><p>(1591–1643). A woman whom Winthrop himself described in his journal as being</p><p>“of ready wit and bold spirit,” Hutchinson insisted that good works were no sign of</p><p>God’s blessing. Since the elect were guaranteed salvation, she argued, the mediating</p><p>role of the church between God and man became obsolete. This represented a serious</p><p>challenge to the power of the Puritan oligarchy, which of course had Winthrop at its</p><p>head. It could hardly be countenanced by them and so, eventually, Hutchinson was</p><p>banished. Along with banishment went argument: Winthrop clearly believed that he</p><p>had to meet the challenge posed by Hutchinson in other ways, and his responses in his</p><p>work were several. In his spiritual autobiography, for instance, he pointedly dwells on</p><p>how, as he puts it, “it pleased the Lord in my family exercise to manifest unto mee the</p><p>difference between the Covenant of Grace and the Covenant of workes.” This was</p><p>because, as he saw it, Hutchinson’s heresy was based on a misinterpretation of the</p><p>Covenant of Grace.He also dwells on his own personal experience of the importance of</p><p>doing good. In a different vein, but for a similar purpose, in one entry in his journal for</p><p>1638, Winthrop reports a story that, while traveling to Providence after banishment,</p><p>Hutchinson “was delivered of a monstrous birth” consisting of “twenty-seven</p><p>several lumps of man’s seed, without any alteration or mixture of anything from the</p><p>woman.”This,Winthropnotes,was interpreted at the time as a sign of possible “error.”</p><p>Rumor and argument, personal experience and forensic expertise are all deployed in</p><p>Winthrop’s writings tomeet the challenges he saw to his ideal community of the “Citty</p><p>upon aHill.” The threat to the dominant theme of civilizing andChristianizingmission</p><p>is, in effect, there, not only in Bradford’s elegies for a communitarian ideal abandoned,</p><p>but also inWinthrop’s urgent attempts tomeet and counter that threat by any rhetorical</p><p>means necessary.</p><p>William Bradford also had to face challenges, threats to the purity and integrity of his</p><p>colony; and Anne Hutchinson was not the only, or even perhaps the most serious,</p><p>The Colonial and Revolutionary Periods 5</p><p>challenge to the project announced on board the Arbella. The settlement Bradford</p><p>headed for so long saw a threat in the shape of ThomasMorton (1579?–1642?); and the</p><p>colony governed by Winthrop had to face what Winthrop himself described as the</p><p>“divers new and dangerous opinions” of RogerWilliams (1603?–1683). BothMorton</p><p>and Williams</p><p>conventional forms.</p><p>A dramatic imperative is at work in the overall structure, as well as the verbal texture,</p><p>ofWalden. Thoreau spent over two years atWalden Pond. InWalden, the sojourn lasts</p><p>from one Spring to the next, the seasonal transit corresponding to the spiritual growth</p><p>and rebirth of the hero. The first Spring is associated with youth and innocence, a</p><p>spiritual equivalent of “the heroic ages.” There is clearly beauty and good in this</p><p>condition, as Thoreau perceives it, but there is also radical limitation. In this stage, in</p><p>which “the animalman” is “chiefly developed,” “the intellect andwhat is called spiritual</p><p>man” is left “slumbering,”Thoreau tells us, “as in an infant.” It is necessary to develop a</p><p>spiritual nature as well; and this Thoreau does through a gradual process of intro-</p><p>spection that is associated with the seasons of Autumn and Winter. “I withdrew yet</p><p>farther intomy shell,” Thoreau recalls of theWinter, “and endeavoured to keep a bright</p><p>fire bothwithinmy house andwithinmy breast.”He drew in on himself, just as he drew</p><p>in on the house and fire he built for himself; and just as the entirety of nature drew in on</p><p>itself during the cold season. Thoreau deploys a complex web of natural imagery</p><p>throughout Walden to enact the various stages in his self-emancipation. And his</p><p>withdrawal into his shell is compared to the condition of a grub, or chrysalis; out of that</p><p>comes eventually, in the second Spring, the butterfly, a “beautiful and winged life” that</p><p>embodies the idea of resurrection, renewal. But the central imageof nature, the element</p><p>in the physical landscape that most fully and vividly corresponds to the spiritual</p><p>landscape of Thoreau, is the pond itself. The correspondence, Thoreau points</p><p>out intermittently throughout Walden, is intimate and extensive: making Walden</p><p>Pond a type of his own spirit, or soul. Negotiating the depth ofWalden Pond, Thoreau</p><p>is negotiating his own possible deepnesses; contemplating its mysteries, he is also</p><p>contemplating the mystery of his own individual soul. Walden is Thoreau, in the</p><p>sense that, as he hoped when he “went to the woods,” in discovering and fronting</p><p>its essential facts he discovers and confronts his own – he learns of himself in learning</p><p>about nature.</p><p>Since nature and human nature are coextensive inWalden, it is evidently appropriate</p><p>that the spiritual rebirth of the hero should be announced by the coming of the second</p><p>64 Inventing Americas: 1800–1865</p><p>Spring. The ice thawing and breaking on Walden Pond is the first movement in the</p><p>great drama of rebirth that concludes the book in triumph. “Walden was dead,”</p><p>Thoreau declares, “and is alive again.” The annual resurrection of nature figures the</p><p>possible resurrection of human nature, his and ours. It is not just a figure, however: the</p><p>rhythms of seasonal renewal ground the rhythms of spiritual renewal, they supply a</p><p>resource and correspondence for the soul. “Wildness is the preservation of the world,”</p><p>Thoreau insisted in a lecture titled “Walking, or the Woods” delivered in 1851. More</p><p>privately, in a journal entry for the same year, he revealed: “My profession is always to be</p><p>on the alert to find God in nature – to know his lurking places.” Both remarks spring</p><p>from the same insight and impulse as the ones enacted throughoutWalden: a root belief</p><p>in nature as a material and mystical presence, requiring our respectful attention and</p><p>conscientious stewardship. To conserve nature, as Thoreau saw it and explains it</p><p>throughout his writings, is to preserve human nature; to save it is to save ourselves.</p><p>Figure 2.2 Title page of the first edition of Walden by Henry David Thoreau, with an</p><p>illustration by Sophia Thoreau, 1854. � Corbis.</p><p>Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 65</p><p>“The greater part of what my neighbors call good I believe to be bad,” Thoreau</p><p>declares defiantly right at the beginning of Walden. The defiance found practical</p><p>expression during his residence at Walden Pond. Refusing to pay poll tax to a</p><p>government that supported the Mexican War – a war he considered merely a land-</p><p>grabbing scheme for Southern slaveholders – he was imprisoned for a day. The</p><p>imprisonment briefly interrupted his sojourn in the woods. More importantly, it</p><p>inspired him to write “On the Duty of Civil Disobedience” (1849). For Thoreau,</p><p>there was a higher law which the individual had to obey even when the government of</p><p>the day violated it. If that meant breaking the laws of the day, then so be it: “under a</p><p>government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also in</p><p>prison.” The doctrine of passive resistance was a natural consequence of Thoreau’s</p><p>belief in the ultimate authority of the self. It was to exercise a profound influence, in the</p><p>next century, on Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King. And, as Thoreau became</p><p>increasingly involved in the antislavery movement in his later years, he became less</p><p>convinced that resistance had always to be passive.</p><p>During the period 1849–1853, Thoreaumade several brief trips, which supplied the</p><p>material for his posthumously published books, Excursions (1863), The Maine Woods</p><p>(1864),Cape Cod (1865), andAYankee in Canada (1866). During his final years, he</p><p>made further journeys to Cape Cod and Maine, then to the Great Lakes, but his</p><p>increasingly failing health meant that he spent more and more time in and around</p><p>Concord.Not that heminded this: his reading carried him far andwide, so that he could</p><p>declare, “I have travelled a good deal in Concord.” And study and writing kept him</p><p>busy. He worked on a long ethnological study of the Indians, which was never</p><p>completed. He continued his journal, indefatigably: by his death, he had written more</p><p>than two million words, the basis of all his books. And he developed his interest in</p><p>botanical science, carrying a botanical guide with him and collecting specimens</p><p>wherever he went on his walks in the vicinity of Concord. That interest formed the</p><p>basis of a great but unfinished project: manuscripts that were published as Faith in a</p><p>Seed: The Dispersion and Other Late Natural History Writings (1993) andWild Fruits:</p><p>Thoreau’s Rediscovered LastManuscript (2000). The two books resurrect the voice and</p><p>vision of Thoreau: reminding readers of why his is a central and living presence in</p><p>American writing and offering again the simple lesson all Thoreau’s work teaches: that,</p><p>as Walden has it, heaven is “under our feet as well as over our heads.” In lively detail,</p><p>Thoreau discloses the vital thread connecting all forms of life and shows how</p><p>coexistence is imperative. By unlocking the miraculous in the commonplace, here and</p><p>elsewhere in his writings, he reveals its redemptive potential. Or, as he tersely puts it, at</p><p>the end of Wild Fruits, “Nature is another name for health.”</p><p>Voices of African American identity</p><p>Fuller linked the emancipation of women to the emancipation of slaves; Emerson and</p><p>Thoreau found their commitment to self-emancipation leading them into support of</p><p>the abolitionist movement and, in Thoreau’s case, of abolition by anymeans necessary.</p><p>Those who spoke out most powerfully against slavery, however, and the violation of</p><p>selfhood it involved, were the slaves themselves. Frederick Douglass (1817–1895) was</p><p>born into slavery on a plantation inMaryland.Of his birth,Douglasswas later to say that</p><p>66 Inventing Americas: 1800–1865</p><p>he had “no accurate knowledge” as to the exact date: slaves were not regarded as</p><p>important enough as individuals towarrant the recording of such details.Worse still, all</p><p>he knew of his father was that he was a white man – although he had a shrewd suspicion</p><p>that it was his “master.” And although he knewwho hismotherwas, he saw little of her.</p><p>Douglass knew that, as a slave, hewas not truly a self, an individual, hewas property. If</p><p>he ever had any doubts about this, they were abolishedwhen, as happened from time to</p><p>time, he was shifted from one master to another, or witnessed the several members of</p><p>his family being sold off or simply transferred.</p><p>When his master died, for instance,</p><p>Douglass was sent for, “to be valued with the other property,” as Douglass sardonically</p><p>put it. “We were all ranked together at the valuation,” he recalled. “Men, women, old</p><p>and young, married and single, were ranked with horses, sheep and swine.” Douglass,</p><p>when recollecting his life as a slave, was particularly fierce in his criticism of those</p><p>arguments in defense of slavery that saw the slave plantation as an extended family, or</p><p>feudal system,where the slaveswere cared for by their “father,” the plantation patriarch.</p><p>As property, Douglass pointed out, slaves were denied their rights not only as</p><p>individuals but as members of a family. At an auction or valuation, “a single word</p><p>from the white man was enough . . . to sunder forever the dearest friends, dearest</p><p>kindred, and strongest ties known to human beings.”</p><p>Douglass learned to write in a Baltimore shipyard, to which he was hired out and</p><p>where he learned the trade of caulking.With that, the preliminary education that he saw</p><p>as “the pathway from slavery” was complete.He found time to teach his fellow slaves to</p><p>read andwrite.With someof them, he planned an escape that proved abortivewhenone</p><p>of their own betrayed them. Then finally, in 1838, he escaped to pursue his vision of</p><p>freedom in the North. Shortly after arriving in the North, he renamed himself: his</p><p>mother’s slave name was Bailey, now he was called Douglass, after a character in The</p><p>Lady of the Lake by Sir Walter Scott. He also began reading the radical abolitionist</p><p>newspaper, The Liberator, published by William Lloyd Garrison. This was his first step</p><p>towards becoming an abolitionist leader himself and, by 1841, he had begun a career as</p><p>a black leader and lecturer dedicated to the “great work” of black liberation. Encour-</p><p>aged by his success on the antislavery circuit,Douglass published an account of his life as</p><p>a slave, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave (1845). It was</p><p>circulated widely, translated into several languages, and quickly helped to establish</p><p>Douglass as one of the leading spokespeople for his cause. Like other slave narratives, it</p><p>was primarily addressed to a white audience in the first instance; and it was mediated by</p><p>white writers – William Lloyd Garrison supplied a preface and another white aboli-</p><p>tionist, Wendell Phillips, provided an introductory letter. Like them, too, but also like</p><p>Walden, it presents itself as at once a representative autobiography and a testament to</p><p>the creed of self-emancipation. It shows how its protagonist, who is also its author and</p><p>narrator, is at once extraordinary and typical – and how he found, or rather made, the</p><p>means to become himself.</p><p>Among the slaveholders whom Douglass encountered was a man called Edward</p><p>Covey, a notorious “Negro breaker” to whom he was hired out at the age of sixteen. It</p><p>was while working for Covey, we learn, that Douglass found the basic means necessary</p><p>to be himself. The discovery forms a central moment in theNarrative. Covey kept his</p><p>slaves under constant surveillance: by adopting the habit of creeping up on them</p><p>unexpectedly, he made them feel that he was “ever present,” that they were ever</p><p>Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 67</p><p>watched.He submitted everyone to an unremitting regimeof “work,work,work” in all</p><p>weathers, starving them always and beating them whenever he thought necessary.</p><p>Under the brutal hand of Covey, Douglass remembers, “I was broken in body, soul,</p><p>and spirit”; “the dark night of slavery closed in uponme, and behold aman transformed</p><p>into a brute!” But then came the turning point, introduced by a memorable rhetorical</p><p>strategy. “You have seen how amanwasmade a slave,”Douglass confides to the reader.</p><p>“You shall see how a slave was made a man.”</p><p>HowDouglass is “made aman” is simple.He stands up for himself.WhenCovey tries</p><p>to beat him, he resists; they fight an epic fight “for nearly two hours”; Covey gets</p><p>“entirely the worst end of the bargain” and never tries to beat Douglass again. As in</p><p>Walden, the recovery of selfhood is described as a rebirth. “It was a glorious resur-</p><p>rection from the tomb of slavery,” Douglass recalls, “to the heaven of freedom.” And</p><p>just as Thoreau, after his spiritual rebirth, talks about the return of the heroic ages, so</p><p>Douglass equates his own spiritual rebirth with the restoration of heroism. His</p><p>emergence as an individual, capable of mental and emotional freedom now and literal</p><p>freedom not long after, is the consequence of a fight worthy of one of the heroes of</p><p>ancient legend. And it coincides precisely with his emergence as aman.Douglass was to</p><p>spend a further four years in slavery after this. And, in describing those years, he still has</p><p>plenty to tell the reader about the brutality and hypocrisy of the slave system – and,</p><p>above all, about how that systemdehumanizes not only the slave but also themaster.He</p><p>also has plenty to say about how, nevertheless, slaves make a human space for</p><p>themselves, through loyalty and love, bravery and friendship. But Douglass is right</p><p>to present thismoment as central: since it was themomentwhen hewas ready to express</p><p>his selfhood, his sense of his own worth and dignity, at the expense of his own life if</p><p>necessary. It is also the moment that expresses perfectly a belief held in common with</p><p>the Transcendentalists – although, of course, Douglass was never a Transcendentalist</p><p>himself: that aman could raise himself by conscious endeavor, that he could and should</p><p>struggle to live freely and truly.</p><p>After the publication of the Narrative, Douglass spent two years promoting the</p><p>antislavery cause in Britain. He returned to the United States, where he purchased his</p><p>freedom; and then, in 1847, established an antislavery journal, first called The North</p><p>Star and later retitled Frederick Douglass’ Paper. A second journal,Douglass’ Monthly,</p><p>began in 1858. Douglass contributed a large number of editorial essays to both these</p><p>publications. An enlarged autobiography, My Bondage and My Freedom, appeared in</p><p>1855, and a third autobiographical work, The Life and Times of Frederck Douglass, in</p><p>1881. In his later life, Douglass was an influential public figure. But it is for his three</p><p>autobiographical books that he is a major presence in American literature. They are</p><p>central texts in the linked traditionsof slave narrative andAmerican autobiography.And</p><p>much of the power and popularity of theNarrative, in particular, stems from the way it</p><p>appropriates the language and symbolism of a white, middle-class tradition while</p><p>denouncing the evils of slavery and racism and while exploring the trials of Douglass’s</p><p>life.Douglass talks of spiritual death and resurrection, of being reborn.He also talks of a</p><p>happy coincidence of divine and human purpose that both recalls the histories of the</p><p>early, white settlers and anticipates many other, later American success stories: the</p><p>fortunate moments in his early life, Douglass intimates, were all due to “that kind</p><p>providence which has ever since attendedme” – and to his own efforts, his readiness to</p><p>68 Inventing Americas: 1800–1865</p><p>work and fight on his own behalf. Above all, perhaps, he talks of the American ideals of</p><p>self-help and self-realization, anduses the rhetoric of theAmericandream todistinguish</p><p>between false and true Americans: between those who would destroy the dream, like</p><p>the slaveholders, and those who want not only to affirm it but to live it. To that extent,</p><p>theNarrative is a testament to the plurality of America. It is not, in other words, just a</p><p>central text in this or that particular tradition; it is also an instance of how many great</p><p>American texts exist at the confluence of cultures – and of how those cultures talk to</p><p>each other and themselves.</p><p>Harriet Jacobs (1813–1897) also wrote at the confluence of cultures, but for her</p><p>those cultures were different. “I was born a slave,” Jacobs announces at the beginning</p><p>of her own book, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself (1861). That</p><p>is the classic opening of slave narrative. Jacobs continues, however, in a different vein:</p><p>“but I never knew it till six years of happy childhood had passed away.”Her father was a</p><p>skilled man, a carpenter, Jacobs recalls; and, on condition of paying his mistress 200</p><p>dollars a year, and supporting himself, he was allowed to manage his own trade and</p><p>affairs. He and she, and her mother and brother, “lived together in a comfortable</p><p>home”; and, although they were all slaves, “I was so fondly shielded,” Jacobs tells her</p><p>readers, that, to begin with, “I never dreamed that I was a piece ofmerchandise, trusted</p><p>to them for safe keeping, and liable to be demanded of them at any moment.” The</p><p>revelation that shewas, indeed, a slave camewhen shewas six.Hermother died; and she</p><p>learned from the talk around her that this was her condition. The strongest wish of her</p><p>father had been to purchase the freedom of his children. But he, too, died a year later</p><p>with his wish unrealized. Aside from her brother, Jacobs’s closest relative was now her</p><p>grandmother, Molly Horniblow, an extraordinary woman whose history had been one</p><p>of betrayal.</p><p>Betrayal of different kinds lies at the heart of Incidents. It was an experience her</p><p>grandmother had had repeatedly, Jacobs reveals; and it was an experience that then</p><p>happened to her. Her mistress died when she was twelve. She had promised Jacobs’s</p><p>dying mother “that her children should never suffer for anything”; and, from many</p><p>“proofs of attachment” the mistress had shown to Jacobs herself, she could not help</p><p>“having some hope” that she would be left free in the will. She was not; she was simply</p><p>bequeathed to another member of the family. So far, Incidents is a familiar if powerful</p><p>tale: not that different from theNarrative of Douglass. And yet there are differences of</p><p>tenor and tone that perhaps alert the reader to what is coming next. There is, first, more</p><p>of an emphasis on family ties, blood relationships within the black community, than</p><p>there is in the Douglass story. In addressing the reader, there is more of an appeal to</p><p>sentiment, to his or her sympathy, than there is to abstract principles or emotions of</p><p>anger.Men are a shadowy presence here; even the carpenter father is mentioned only in</p><p>passing. It is the women who matter: heroic women like Jacobs’s mother, great-</p><p>grandmother and, above all, her grandmother, and evil women who betray promises,</p><p>borrow money without returning it, and deny the truth of the Bible. This is a tale, in</p><p>short, that concentrates on the female experience of slavery and, in doing so, appro-</p><p>priates the techniques of the sentimental novel as well as using those of the slave</p><p>narrative. And at the center of it is that familiar protagonist of sentimental fiction:</p><p>the young woman affronting her destiny – and, in due time, faced with a dangerous</p><p>seducer – the female orphan making her way in the world.</p><p>Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 69</p><p>One point that has not been made about Incidents is now worth making. The</p><p>central character in the narrative is not called Harriet Jacobs but Linda Brent. The</p><p>reasons for this become obvious when Jacobs begins to describe the new household</p><p>that, as an adolescent slave, she moved into. She became the object of relentless sexual</p><p>pursuit by her whitemaster, to escape which she became the lover of another whiteman</p><p>and bore him two children. By creating Linda Brent as an alter ego, Jacobs could tell her</p><p>own story as a sexual victim, move the narrative beyond the limits prescribed by</p><p>nineteenth-century gentility, and yet remain safely anonymous. Here, especially,</p><p>Incidents becomes a captivating generic mix: a slave narrative still, a sentimental story</p><p>of female endeavor, a tale of sexual pursuit, attempted seduction and betrayal, and the</p><p>first-person confession of a “fallen woman.” “O, what days and nights of fear and</p><p>sorrow that man causedme!” Jacobs confides, as she recalls how hermaster, here called</p><p>Dr. Flint (his actual name was Dr. Norcom), tried to make her submit to him. The</p><p>Figure 2.3 Reward poster for the return of escaped slave Harriet Jacobs, author of Incidents in</p><p>the Life of a Slave Girl. Advertisement from The American Beacon, July 4, 1835. Courtesy of the</p><p>North Carolina Office of Archives and History, Raleigh, North Carolina.</p><p>70 Inventing Americas: 1800–1865</p><p>power, and the pathos, of this episode in Incidents springs from the direct address to the</p><p>reader, so common in sentimental fiction, inviting us to participate in the sufferings of</p><p>the heroine. Even more, it springs from Jacobs’s insistence, here and throughout the</p><p>book, that what she is telling is the truth – and the truth, not just for herself, but for all</p><p>her “sisters.”</p><p>When it comes to describing Jacobs’s escape from slavery, Incidents again differs</p><p>radically from the Narrative of Douglass. Jacobs did not flee northwards. Instead, as</p><p>she discloses to the reader, she hid in a tiny attic in her grandmother’s house for seven</p><p>years. This was what she called her “loophole of retreat.” “The air was stifling there,”</p><p>she remembers, “the darkness total” to begin with: “but I was not comfortless. I heard</p><p>the voices ofmy children.” There were, eventually, evenmore comforts. She succeeded</p><p>in making a hole “about an inch long and an inch broad” through which she could see</p><p>the daylight. Evenmore important, she could now see the “two sweet little faces” of her</p><p>children, and more clearly hear their talk. Occasionally, she could talk to relatives and</p><p>overhear conversations; regularly, from day to day, she could watch her son and</p><p>daughter growing up. For Jacobs, liberation comes not in heroic battle, the recovery of</p><p>manhood, and solitary flight, but in being still with her family, even if apart from them.</p><p>It would be wrong to exaggerate the difference between Jacobs andDouglass here; it is</p><p>certainly not absolute. Douglass, after all, spoke of being “linked and interlinked” with</p><p>his fellow slaves. After seven years in hiding, Jacobs eventually fled north –where, in due</p><p>course, she was reunited with her children and all had their freedom bought. But a</p><p>difference there is, between these two great slave narratives.</p><p>The Making of Many Americas</p><p>“Reader, my story ends with freedom; not, in the usual way, with marriage.” That</p><p>conclusion to Incidents, playing on a conventional ending to sentimental fiction,</p><p>modestly summarizes the drama of the self that inspired and intrigued so many</p><p>American writers at this time: that urge towards self-emancipation that the writings</p><p>of the Transcendentalists and slave narratives certainly shared. But, as Douglass and</p><p>Jacobs clearly illustrate, the self could take on quite different shapes and colorations –</p><p>and emancipation was far more difficult, far more of a challenge, for some. America was</p><p>becoming even more of a mosaic of different cultures, colliding interests, and con-</p><p>flicting voices: among them, themany whowrote in and from theNative American and</p><p>Mexican American communities, those who engaged in the great debate over slavery,</p><p>and those who wrote about the condition of women.</p><p>Native American writing</p><p>Within the Native American tribes, so far as they were able or managed to survive, the</p><p>oral traditions of folktale, legend, and poetry persisted. Some white writers like Henry</p><p>Wadsworth Longfellow chose to appropriate them. Others, like William Channing,</p><p>writing in the North American Review in 1815, even went so far as to claim that the</p><p>“oral literature of the aborigines” was the only truly national literature, blessed with a</p><p>common speech that was “the very language of poetry.” But writing in English by</p><p>Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 71</p><p>NativeAmericans inevitably reflected acculturation and the consequences, in particular,</p><p>of removal and various assimilationist policies. Most of this writing, in fact, came from</p><p>those whose tribes had been displaced in the East or forced to move to the West. That</p><p>meant, mainly, the Cherokees in the South, who had acculturated rapidly, and the</p><p>Six</p><p>Nations and Ojibwas in the Northeast and around the Great Lakes. Such writing</p><p>necessarily explored Native American interests and settings, and addressed issues of</p><p>particular, often pressing importance to the tribes. But it was also likely to be written</p><p>according to the conventions of the dominant, white culture of the time and, very</p><p>often, reflected its tastes and habits of mind.</p><p>Nowhere is the shaping influence of white culture more evident here than in the</p><p>poetry written in English by Native Americans. John Rollin Ridge (1827–1867), for</p><p>instance, was a Cherokee. He was actively involved in Indian issues. But his published</p><p>work is notable, not only for Ridge’s insistence that his people had to become</p><p>“civilized” – that is, assimilated into white society – in order to survive, but also for</p><p>his wholesale adoption of white literary forms. In 1845 he published Life and</p><p>Adventures of Joaquin Murieta, the Celebrated California Bandit. The claim made</p><p>here that it is a true story is simply a bow to one of the literary conventions of the day: it</p><p>is, in fact, a fairly standard popular romance.As for thepoemsRidge produced at various</p><p>stages in his life, they are all marked by a debt to English and American Romantic</p><p>poetry. Some of these are nature poems, others are autobiographical, still others take as</p><p>their subject some notable public event. All of them, however, are notable for their</p><p>scrupulously exact use of traditional verse forms, and their celebration of the prevailing</p><p>beliefs of white American society at the time – notably, Progress andManifest Destiny.</p><p>Not all the work produced by Native Americans at this time conformed to white</p><p>standards. On the contrary, some tried to register what was different about their people</p><p>by trying to record their tales and folklore. Notable among these was Jane Johnston</p><p>Schoolcraft (1800–1841). Born Jane Johnston, to an Ojibwa mother and an Irish</p><p>trader father, shewas educated inOjibwa lore by the one and inEnglish literature by the</p><p>other. In 1823 she married the scholar and explorer Henry Rowe Schoolcraft</p><p>(1793–1864), whose main interest was the American Indian. And from then until</p><p>her death she remained his informant, guide, and assistant: interpreting native sources</p><p>for him and helping him to study the Ojibwa language. Together, the Schoolcrafts</p><p>began The Literary Voyager or Muzzenyegun in 1826, a magazine containing examples</p><p>of Ojibwa folklore as well as original poems and essays, many of them by Jane</p><p>Schoolcraft under assumed names. What is remarkable about the best of this work</p><p>is how, in the versions ofOjibwa folklore, Jane Schoolcraft deploys her skills in English,</p><p>her knowledge of English literary techniques and forms, to recreate tales in a way that</p><p>encourages the (presumably, white) reader’s interest and sympathy without denying</p><p>cultural difference, the intrinsic characteristics of the source.</p><p>While some writers worked towards making the folklore of Native Americans</p><p>available and accessible to an English speaking audience, others tried to make that</p><p>audience more aware of Native American history, their rights and, often, how badly</p><p>they had been treated by the white majority. Among these was the earliest significant</p><p>Indian writer of the nineteenth century, William Apess (1798–?), whose paternal</p><p>grandmother was a full-blooded Pequot and who claimed descent from Metacomet,</p><p>the chief known as King Philip among the English. Converted to Methodism when he</p><p>72 Inventing Americas: 1800–1865</p><p>was fifteen, Apess became a lay preacher. Then, in 1829, his book A Son of the Forest</p><p>appeared, the first autobiography written by a Native American to be published. Apess</p><p>was raised mainly by whites, and the book is, unsurprisingly, a cultural mix. It is in the</p><p>tradition of white spiritual autobiography favored by, say, Jonathan Edwards and John</p><p>Woolman, but it emphasizes Apess’s Indian origins and the basic humanity of the</p><p>Indian people. To add to themix, it also insists on the potential of the Indian people for</p><p>adapting to white culture. This was followed by three further books: The Experiences of</p><p>Five Christian Indians of the Pecquod Tribe, a shorter life history published in 1833 but</p><p>probably written before A Son of the Forest, and two more historical works, Indian</p><p>Nullification of the Unconstitutional Laws of Massachusetts, Relative to the Marshpee</p><p>[Mashpee] Tribe (1835) and Eulogy on King Philip (1836). These three books reveal a</p><p>more openly critical attitude towards whites and, in particular, a fierce critique of what</p><p>Apess sees as the brutality and hypocrisy of their general behavior towards the Indian</p><p>peoples. Nevertheless, Apess writes more in hope still than in sorrow or anger. His</p><p>essential belief, expressed in all his books, is that, with education, the Indian can still</p><p>rise; with proper observance of Christian principles, the white man can still help him;</p><p>“themantle of prejudice”will be “torn fromevery heart,” Apess hopes – and “then shall</p><p>peace pervade the Union.”</p><p>An even more popular Indian autobiography than A Son of the Forest was The Life,</p><p>History and Travels of Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh (George Copway), a Young Indian Chief of</p><p>the Ojibwa Nation. This was published in 1847, republished as The Life, Letters and</p><p>Speeches of Kah-ge-ga-gah-bowh, or G. Copway in 1850 inNewYork, and asRecollections</p><p>of a Forest Life; or, The Life and Travels of Kah-ge-ga-gha-bowh, or George Copway in</p><p>London in the same year. In its different versions, this book had a widespread</p><p>readership. And it encouraged the author, George Copway (1818–1869), in his new</p><p>career as a writer and lecturer on Indian matters; prior to that, he had served as a</p><p>Methodist missionary among the Indians. The book is divided into four sections. The</p><p>first is an account of the Ojibwa culture into which he was born; the second rehearses</p><p>how his parents were converted to Christianity in 1827 and he himself similarly</p><p>converted three years later; the third describes his role as a mediator between Indians</p><p>and whites; and the fourth records the recent history of relations between whites and</p><p>Ojibwas. “The Christian will no doubt feel for my poor people, when he hears the story</p><p>of one brought from that unfortunate race called the Indians,” Copway begins. What</p><p>follows is nothing if not conflicted, in ways that are a consequence of the process of</p><p>acculturation Copway himself had experienced. He celebrates the blessings of white</p><p>civilization but also describes how the whites robbed the Indians of their land. He</p><p>rejoices in his conversion, and the conversion of others to Christianity, but he also</p><p>portrays his early life with the Ojibwa, prior to conversion, as a pastoral idyll. Invoking</p><p>the familiar idea of the Indian as a noble savage, Copway also taps that vein of romantic</p><p>nationalism that sees American nature as superior to European culture. That does not</p><p>stop him, however, from insisting on the adaptability of the Indian towhat the opening</p><p>of his book refers to as “the blessings of life”: that is, the culture, brought to America</p><p>from Europe, that he elsewhere chooses to scorn.</p><p>The autobiography of Copway, in short, is a rich mosaic of inconsistencies, precisely</p><p>because Copway himself, not unusually, was trying to reconcile different cultures. He</p><p>was also trying to make his way in a literary world the rules for which were largely</p><p>Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 73</p><p>dictated by whites. Influential white scholars supplied him with encouragement and</p><p>support for his later publishing projects. The Traditional History and Characteristic</p><p>Sketches of the Ojibway Nation appeared in England in 1850 and in the United States in</p><p>1851, and was far more critical of whites than his autobiography had been. This was</p><p>followed by Running Sketches of Men and Places, in England, France, Germany,</p><p>Belgium, and Scotland later in 1851, one of the first travel accounts written by an</p><p>Indian. But gradually white interest and encouragement waned. He was adopted by a</p><p>group calling themselves “native</p><p>Americans” for a while. But, for them, the defining</p><p>features of the “native American” were that he or she was not an immigrant nor Roman</p><p>Catholic: Copway was simply a convenient tool for their purposes. Gradually, Copway</p><p>dropped out of literary and political circles, and into obscurity.</p><p>The first recorded use of the term “Native American” as we understand it today, not</p><p>as the group that briefly adopted Copway interpreted it, was by a Mohican, John</p><p>WannuauconQuinney (1797–1855). In a speech to Congress in 1852,Quinney called</p><p>himself “a true Native American”; and the speech as a whole reflects his passionate</p><p>awareness of theMohican presence in American history.When he delivered this speech,</p><p>on IndependenceDay, he was coming to the end of a long career as amediator between</p><p>his tribe and thewhites, a lobbyist and a political leader. AndQuinney used the occasion</p><p>to contrast American promise and performance. The purpose of the speech was, in fact,</p><p>threefold. It was, first, to emphasize the total dispossession of his people. Second, it was</p><p>to redress the balance a little by beginning to tell that story. The third purpose was to</p><p>encourage a more substantial redress. Acculturation was necessary, Quinney believed,</p><p>in response to white American expansionism but, for Indians to achieve this, white</p><p>Americans had to be willing to accept them as equals. Even the plight of the slave,</p><p>Quinney suggested, was not as bad as that of the Indian. Like many other Native</p><p>American writers writing at this time, Quinneymixed pride in a tribal past with belief in</p><p>a new American future, defined by the linked blessings of white civilization and</p><p>Christian conversion. It was not for nothing that he was referred to, among many</p><p>of his contemporaries, as “the Last of the Mohicans.”</p><p>“Shall red men live, or shall they be swept from the earth?” another Indian writer of</p><p>the time, Elias Boudinot (1802–1839), asked in Address to the Whites, delivered and</p><p>published in 1826. And for Boudinot, just as for Apess, Conway, and Quinney, to live</p><p>meant for the “red man” to accommodate to and be accepted by the white. Like them,</p><p>too, his own story was a testament to accommodation. Born a Cherokee, he was sent to</p><p>aMoravianmission schoolwhere hewas educated intowhite values andpractices. It was</p><p>while traveling to solicit donations for a national academy and printing equipment for</p><p>the Cherokee Nation that Boudinot delivered hisAddress. More even than the address</p><p>of Quinney or the autobiography of Conway, it is a testament to the belief in a future in</p><p>which Indians assume what Boudinot, at one point, calls “the mantle of civilization.”</p><p>Boudinot was specifically asking for support to accelerate the process of acculturation</p><p>when he gave hisAddress. Thatmay be one reasonwhy it is, on thewhole, a hymn to the</p><p>values of white culture. It is worth making two further points, however. One is that</p><p>Boudinot anticipated communication between his people and the whites as a two-way</p><p>process: the whites would teach the Indians about their cultural practices, and the</p><p>Indians, in turn, would tell whites about their “intellectual efforts, . . . their eloquence,</p><p>. . . their moral, civil, and physical advancement.” The second, more important point</p><p>74 Inventing Americas: 1800–1865</p><p>follows from the first. Acculturation, for Boudinot and those like him, did not mean</p><p>absorption. The Cherokees would become “civilized” but separate: “not a great, but a</p><p>faithful ally of the United States.” Following his Address, Boudinot was to become</p><p>editor of the Cherokee Phoenix, the first newspaper produced by American Indians. It</p><p>served a dual function: to inform local readers about events taking place in their society,</p><p>and to inform whites elsewhere of the strides towards civilization being made by the</p><p>CherokeeNation.Hewas also to become a translator of Englishworks intoCherokee: a</p><p>perfect illustration of his hope that his people would acquire the blessings of white</p><p>culture butmaintain their own separate but equal integrity. Boudinot’s hopes proved to</p><p>be without foundation. The Cherokee Nation was forced to remove less than ten years</p><p>after the Address was delivered, along the Trail of Tears; the consequences were little</p><p>short of genocide. Ironically, Boudinot was one of those Cherokees who signed the</p><p>treaty with the federal government, ceding Cherokee land in the East for Indian</p><p>Territory in the West. He did so in the belief that removal was now the only way the</p><p>Cherokee Nation could survive. It was a mistaken belief, and he paid for it with his life:</p><p>he was killed in Indian Territory by members of his tribe, who felt that he had betrayed</p><p>them by signing the treaty.</p><p>Oral culture of the Hispanic Southwest</p><p>Storytelling was not a monopoly of the Native Americans whose tales the Schoolcrafts</p><p>helped to record. Apart from those who told tales of Mike Fink, Davy Crockett, and</p><p>other frontier heroes or fools, there was a whole oral culture in the greater Southwest</p><p>and California, those Mexican lands that prior to 1845 stretched from the Rio Grande</p><p>northward as far as lower Oregon andWyoming. This area, known amongMexicans as</p><p>Mexico de Afuera, or Mexico abroad, was until quite recently the site of a vital</p><p>storytelling culture. Cuentos, or folktales, were usually told at the end of the day as</p><p>a kind of intimate performance with all the appropriate dramatic gestures, pauses, and</p><p>intonation. And they could take the form of morality tales, tales of magic and</p><p>enchantment, or tales in which animals speak or the dead come alive.</p><p>What is especially powerful about these tales from the Hispanic Southwest is what</p><p>tends to mark out all folktales transmitted via an oral tradition: poetic repetition,</p><p>narrative spontaneity and fluency, a startling generic mix, and the sense that this tale</p><p>and tale teller formpart of a continuity, a vital chain of narrative andhuman connection.</p><p>In a story called “La Llorona, Malinche, and the Unfaithful Maria,” for instance, the</p><p>audience is quickly told the story of three womenwho killed their children. The first, La</p><p>Llorona, died; her ring was taken from her dead hand and then passed on to a girl who</p><p>“later became known as Malinche.” After drowning all three of her children, she also</p><p>died, although“even after she had died, shewould cry out, ‘Ohhhhh,my chilren,where</p><p>are they?’” And the ring was then taken from her finger by a woman “later known as</p><p>Unfaithful Maria.” Obeying the instructions of an evil spirit, she killed her three</p><p>children too. But her fate, we are told, was rather different from that of her</p><p>predecessors. “Her head turned into that of a horse”; and, in addition, “one of her</p><p>feet was that of a horse, and one was that of a chicken.” After this suddenmove into the</p><p>grotesque, the tale is brought into the present. “This started back in 1800,” we learn,</p><p>“and is still going on today inMexico.” “My grandparents told me this story. Thenmy</p><p>Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 75</p><p>stepfather,” the anonymous narrator explains. “Then my grandmother, my father’s</p><p>mother, told me this story of La Llorona who was the first. My mother told me the</p><p>second story ofMalinche.My stepfather toldme about the third.”Not only that, we are</p><p>assured, the stepfather had actually seen Unfaithful Maria. One story shades into</p><p>another here: somuch so that, by the end,UnfaithfulMaria is actually referred to as “La</p><p>Llorona.” And one storytelling shades into another as well, as earlier versions, earlier</p><p>moments of tale telling are invoked. This insistent rhythm of repetition, accumulation,</p><p>is accompanied by a narrative approach that constantly surprises: for all that one episode</p><p>melts into the next, via the device of the ring, we never quite know where the story will</p><p>go next or what the exact tone will be. Magic and melodrama, the sentimental and the</p><p>gothic, morality and bizarre humor are mixed together to create a mood of enchant-</p><p>ment. And, while the audience is reminded ofmany other occasions of storytelling, and</p><p>other storytellers, they</p><p>are intimately involved with this particular one. This, in short</p><p>and in every respect, is a tale of community.</p><p>African American polemic and poetry</p><p>The community that arousedmost debate in the first half of the nineteenth century was</p><p>neither the Native American nor theMexican American one, but the African American</p><p>community of slaves. And crucial to that debate were not only the slave narratives of</p><p>writers like Douglass and Jacobs but also the polemic of such African Americans as</p><p>David Walker (1785–1830) and Henry Highland Garnet (1815–1882). Walker was</p><p>born in North Carolina. His father was a slave but his mother was a free black woman;</p><p>and so, according to the slave laws of that time, which stipulated that a child would</p><p>follow the condition of theirmother,Walkerwas born free. In 1827hebecame an agent</p><p>for the newly establishedFreedom’s Journal. Two years later, he published thework that</p><p>made him famous, and put a price on his head in the South:David Walker’ s Appeal in</p><p>Four Articles; Together with a Preamble, to the Colored Citizens of the World, but in</p><p>Particular and Very Expressly, to those of the United States of America. The elaborately</p><p>formal title reflected Walker’s aim of patterning the structure of his Appeal on the</p><p>Constitution. But, while invoking American political precedent for his argument – and</p><p>taking time to denounce Thomas Jefferson for suggesting that black people were</p><p>inferior to whites – Walker also identified himself with the biblical tradition of the</p><p>prophet in the wilderness, attacking the hypocrisy of contemporary religious practice</p><p>and summoning up divine punishment “in behalf of the oppressed.” Beginning by</p><p>pointing out that “we (the colored people of these United States) are the most</p><p>degraded, wretched, and abject set of beings that ever lived since the world began,”</p><p>Walker rejects the moderate approach of moral persuasion or an appeal to the religious</p><p>sentiments of a white audience. Instead, hemocks the hypocrisy of white liberals and of</p><p>white Christianity, then devotes his energies to making his black audience angry and</p><p>proud. This militant document is, in effect, the first printed declaration of black</p><p>nationalism in the United States.</p><p>Walker described himself as a “restless disturber of the peace,” and his Appeal</p><p>certainly created a disturbance. It went into three editions in the last two years of his life,</p><p>each edition increasingly urgent in its denunciation of racial injustice – and increasingly</p><p>insistent that black people shouldunite to take action, andbe ready to kill or be killed for</p><p>76 Inventing Americas: 1800–1865</p><p>the cause of freedom. Walker was not thoughtlessly militant. He argued for a program</p><p>of African American educational, spiritual, and political renewal so that constructive</p><p>social change would follow black liberation. Nevertheless, he not only struck fear into</p><p>the hearts of white Southerners, he also perturbed some white Northern abolitionists,</p><p>who found the Appeal “injudicious.” And, given the prevailing political climate of</p><p>the time, it is easy to see why. Walker affirmed black citizenship in the republic at a</p><p>time when many white abolitionists were arguing for the return of emancipated slaves</p><p>to Africa. He insisted on black unity when many others were talking in terms of</p><p>assimilation. And hemade no attempt to bemoderate or placatory in tone or gradualist</p><p>in approach. The white South tried to suppress circulation of the Appeal. It may</p><p>have had a hand in its author’s death, since he died in suspicious circumstances; it</p><p>certainly wanted him dead. But, even after Walker’s sudden death, the Appeal</p><p>continued to be reprinted and to circulate widely. Like earlier, white Americans,</p><p>Walker asked to be given liberty or death – and he wanted others of his community</p><p>to ask exactly the same.</p><p>Henry Highland Garnet wrote “A Brief Sketch of the Life and Character of</p><p>David Walker.” In 1848, with the financial aid of the militant white abolitionist John</p><p>Brown, he combined his “Call to Rebellion” speech as it was known, with Walker’s</p><p>Appeal in one pamphlet. That suggests the degree of the connection between the two</p><p>men, and the sense Garnet in particular had of sharing beliefs and commitments with</p><p>Walker. Garnet was born a slave in Maryland, but escaped with his family in 1825. He</p><p>became a Presbyterian minister and, in 1843, he attended the National Negro</p><p>Convention in Buffalo, New York. There, he delivered his Address to the Slaves of the</p><p>United States of America: his “Call to Rebellion” speech which, as the popular title</p><p>indicated, argued for violent resistance if necessary in the slaves’ dealings with their</p><p>masters. Taking upWalker’s argument that slaves should be ready to “kill or be killed”</p><p>to achieve freedom, Garnet insisted that the condition of slavery made it impossible for</p><p>slaves to obey the Ten Commandments. What Garnet added to the argument and</p><p>language of the Appeal – along with pointing out, fiercely, that no Commandment</p><p>required a slave to suffer “diabolical injustice” – was a perspective at once international</p><p>and peculiarly American. Garnet was a traveled man: he had journeyed in America</p><p>before giving his “Call to Rebellion” speech and, later, he was to journey as Consul</p><p>General to Liberia, where he died. He was also widely read and informed. And he used</p><p>the revolutionary ferment in Europe to support the cause of slave liberation. “The</p><p>nations of the oldworld aremoving in the great cause of universal freedom,” he pointed</p><p>out. Now it was time for African Americans to move in obedience to a similar impulse.</p><p>They owed it to themselves,Garnet added, not only as a peculiarly oppressed people but</p><p>as Americans. Garnet’s peculiarly effective tactic here was to turn the white dream of</p><p>American promise against white America, by claiming that it could and should be a</p><p>black dream as well – and one to be realized, if necessary, by “resistance, resistance!</p><p>resistance!” When Garnet gave his speech in 1843, it was denounced by Frederick</p><p>Douglass, who at that time was an advocate of non-violent “moral suasion.” And it fell</p><p>short, if only by one vote, of being approved as an official resolution of the Convention.</p><p>But by the 1850s, Douglass had moved towards agreement with Garnet that freedom</p><p>was to be seized by any means necessary. By 1863, both men were involved in raising</p><p>troops for theUnion army. Even before that, in 1847, theNational Negro Convention</p><p>Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 77</p><p>endorsed Garnet’s militant stand. These were measures of how far, and how quickly,</p><p>things changed.</p><p>BothWalker andGarnet addressed a black audience.On thewhole, the authors of the</p><p>slave narratives addressed a white one; and so did the poet George Moses Horton</p><p>(1797?–1883?). That was one reason why his comments on slavery tended to be more</p><p>sporadic and muted. Another, far more crucial, is that he lived for most of his life, and</p><p>for all of his significant career as a poet, as a slave in the South. Born in North Carolina,</p><p>Horton published his first volume of poetry, The Hope of Liberty, in 1829. It was</p><p>published in North Carolina, with white support and financial aid; it was the first book</p><p>of poetry by an African American for more than half a century, and the first book of any</p><p>kind authored by a black Southerner. Most of the twenty-one poems in the volume are</p><p>conventional variations on the themes of love, death, and religion. But three tentatively</p><p>negotiate the issue of slavery, most notably one entitled “OnHearing of the Intention</p><p>of a Gentleman to Purchase the Poet’s Freedom.” In this poem, Horton scarcely</p><p>disguises the confession that he had been “on the dusky verge of despair” until the</p><p>chance “to break the slavish bar” had been opened up to him. Horton was never freed</p><p>before the CivilWar, but hismaster did allow him to hire his time as a professional poet,</p><p>waiter, and handyman, and to publish his work in such abolitionist periodicals as</p><p>The Liberator andTheNorth Star. Then, in 1845,Horton published his second volume,</p><p>The</p><p>Poetical Works of George Horton, The Colored Bard of North Carolina. Again, the</p><p>poet did not risk offending his white patrons and public by openly attacking slavery.</p><p>But, again, he did allow himself to comment on the sometimes bitter consequences of</p><p>being a slave.</p><p>A poem called “Division of an Estate,” for example, is remarkable for the sympathy it</p><p>inspires for its subjects: slaves being sold at auction after the death of theirmaster. There</p><p>is irony here. The slaves, as property, are rhetorically linked to other property. And there</p><p>is also pathos, as the poet asks the reader to behold “the dark suspense in which poor</p><p>vassals stand” on the auction block. Themind of each, he points out, “upon the spine of</p><p>chance hangs fluctuant,” knowing that “the day of separation is at hand.” Presumably,</p><p>in this case, the distinction that many white Southerners were willing to make between</p><p>slavery and the slave trade allowed Horton to emphasize the pathos. It was, at best, a</p><p>false distinction, since slavery could not have existed without the slave trade, but it gave</p><p>the poet some room for rhetorical maneuver. Horton was freed towards the end of the</p><p>Civil War, and published a third and final volume calledNaked Genius just after the fall</p><p>of the Confederacy. This collection of 133 poems, most of them previously unpub-</p><p>lished, continues the themes of his earlier work. In the poems on slavery, however,</p><p>Horton does move from complaining about the pains and sadness the peculiar</p><p>institution involves to attacking its fundamental injustice. And in one remarkable</p><p>piece, “George Moses Horton, Myself,” he offers a fragment of autobiography that</p><p>explores the difficulties of being both a black slave and a poet. “My genius from a boy,/</p><p>Has fluttered like a bird within my heart,” he tells the reader, “But could not thus</p><p>confined her powers employ,/Impatient to depart.” It is an apt summary of the</p><p>torment he had suffered, both as a man and a poet: a torment that he hardly ever</p><p>dared openly to confess. And it announces a problem, of being a black writer</p><p>imprisoned in a predominantly white culture and language, that many later African</p><p>American poets were to explore.</p><p>78 Inventing Americas: 1800–1865</p><p>Abolitionist and pro-slavery writing</p><p>Among the white writers who were noted abolitionists were Wendell Phillips</p><p>(1811–1884) and William Lloyd Garrison (1805–1879). Garrison worked with</p><p>Benjamin Lundy on a periodical titled The Genius of Universal Emancipation for</p><p>several years. But he brokewith Lundy and the paper over the position Lundy held, that</p><p>slaves should be emancipated gradually and removed to Africa. He began to argue for</p><p>immediate emancipation, without colonization of the freed or compensation for their</p><p>former masters, and to argue his case he founded The Liberator at the beginning of</p><p>1831. Inspired by the beliefs of the Great Awakening, Garrison was convinced that the</p><p>Kingdom of God could be created on earth by men and women actively committed to</p><p>eradicating evil and injustice. That led him to support the temperance movement,</p><p>women’s rights, and, in particular, the abolition of slavery: only by abolition, he argued,</p><p>could “the ‘self-evident truth’” maintained in the American Declaration of Indepen-</p><p>dence, “that all men are created equal,” be realized in practice. That was why, he</p><p>recollected inWilliam Lloyd Garrison: The Story of His Life (1885), “I determined . . .</p><p>to lift up the standard of emancipation in the eyes of the nation, within sight of Bunker</p><p>Hill and in the birthplace of liberty.” Garrison was fervent in his language. He was,</p><p>however, in favor ofmoral persuasion rather than coercion. There was, in fact, a curious</p><p>gap between the violence of his words and the creed of non-violence he embraced. The</p><p>violent terms in which he often expressed himself offended some, Garrison admitted.</p><p>For others, though, like Frederick Douglass, who eventually broke with him over the</p><p>issue, it was the belief that non-violence could defeat the power of slavery that was the</p><p>problem.</p><p>The editorials and journalistic work of Garrison often possess the rhetorical power of</p><p>great speeches. In the case ofWendell Phillips, it was his power as awriter and performer</p><p>of public speeches that secured his place in the abolitionist movement. For twenty-five</p><p>years, Phillips toured the lyceum circuit. His lectures included diverse topics but the</p><p>ones for which he became and remained famous were on the subject of slavery. In his</p><p>speech, “Toussaint L’Ouverture,” for instance, eventually published in Speeches,</p><p>Lectures, and Letters (1863), Phillips celebrated the black leader of the revolution</p><p>against the French in Haiti. In what numerous contemporary audiences found a</p><p>spellbinding account, Phillips described the courageous life and tragic death of</p><p>Toussaint. “I am about to tell you the story of a Negro who has left hardly one</p><p>written line,” Phillips customarily beganhis oration. “All thematerials for his biography</p><p>are from the lips of his enemies.” Phillips’s aims were immediate: to arouse his audience</p><p>to support for the abolitionist cause and the possible necessity of direct action – the</p><p>oration closed, in fact, with the name of John Brown being invoked directly before</p><p>that of Toussaint L’Ouverture. But in pointing out that he was unearthing a secret</p><p>history, one that rarely if ever was allowed into white history books, he was curiously</p><p>anticipating what was to become a resonant theme in much later, African American</p><p>writing.</p><p>If Garrison was the journalist of the white abolitionist movement and Phillips the</p><p>orator, then John Greenleaf Whittier (1807–1892) was its poet. Whittier had no vast</p><p>ambitions. All hewanted to dowas to denounce those whose preoccupations with their</p><p>own selfishneedsmade themoblivious to the needsof others.Thatmeant, above all, the</p><p>Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 79</p><p>slaveowners: he once said that he placed a “higher value” on his name appearing on the</p><p>Anti-Slavery Declaration than on the title page of any book. Beyond that, he also</p><p>wanted to offer as an imaginative alternative to such selfishness the kind of small</p><p>and tightly knit community of interests he describes in “First-Day Thoughts” (1857)</p><p>and, perhaps his most famous poem, Snow-Bound (1866). Whittier was born in</p><p>Massachusetts to poor Quaker parents, and the Quaker experience remained funda-</p><p>mental to him throughout his life. It was this, in fact, which supplied himwith his ideal:</p><p>of a group of people held together by common values and by the belief that each</p><p>member of the group is possessed of a certain “inner light.”</p><p>Snow-Boundwas not, of course, published until after the end of the Civil War. But it</p><p>was from the experiential basis it describes, a sense of genuine contact and community,</p><p>thatWhittier’s poetic assault on slavery was launched. And it was an assault from several</p><p>directions. “TheHunters ofMen” (1835), for instance, takes the path of bitter humor:</p><p>a parodic hunting song, it mocks in jaunty rhyme those “hunters of men” who go</p><p>“Right merrily hunting the black man, whose sin/Is the curl of his hair and the hue of</p><p>his skin.” “The Farewell of a Virginia Slave Mother to Her Daughters Sold into</p><p>Southern Bondage” (1838) takes, as its title indicates, the path of melodrama and</p><p>sentiment: as themother of the title laments the loss of her daughters. “The Slave Ship”</p><p>(1846), describing the jettisoning of slaveswho, havingbeenblindedby sickness, are no</p><p>longer saleable, takes the direction of Gothic horror. And in “Massachusetts to</p><p>Virginia” (1843)Whittier opts for declamation, as he denounces any attempt to return</p><p>escaped slaves to the slave states. What Whittier sought in all such poems was to</p><p>persuade the reader: heusedwhatever poeticmeans lay at his disposal to drawhimorher</p><p>into examining their conscience.Out of that, hehoped,woulddevelop a clearer sense of</p><p>personal and communal purpose. To that extent, his antislavery pieces express, just as</p><p>firmly as theQuaker poems do, his belief that poetry should be nomore</p><p>than ameans to</p><p>a higher, spiritual end.</p><p>At the same time as Whittier and his colleagues were arguing for the abolition of</p><p>slavery, another group in the Southwere arguingquite the contrary: that slaverywas not</p><p>only an economic necessity but a positive good. As these Southerners saw or claimed to</p><p>see it, slavery was an integral part of the established, agrarianmode of life enjoyed by all</p><p>the states below theMason-Dixon line. These defenders of slavery, and by extension of</p><p>the social system of the South, included the writer and social philosopher George</p><p>Fitzhugh (1806–1881), the novelist William Gilmore Simms (1806–1870), the poet</p><p>William J. Grayson (1788–1863), the lawyer and writer Henry Hughes (1829–1862),</p><p>the scientific agriculturist and fanatical secessionist Edmund Ruffin (1794–1865), a</p><p>professor of political philosophy Thomas Dew (1802–46), and the politician James</p><p>Henry Hammond (1807–1864). Some of the arguments these defenders of slavery</p><p>used were drawn from the Bible, purporting to find a theological warrant for the slave</p><p>system.Others involved supposedly scientific theories concerning the separate, inferior</p><p>origins of the “Negro race.” Central to their defense, however, was the contention that</p><p>Frederick Douglass, among many others, found so offensive – that the South was a</p><p>feudal society, an extended family in which the master acted as patriarchal head.</p><p>Everyone, black and white, had their part to play in this family. And to the slave was</p><p>given the role of child, dependant. Incapable of looking after himself, the slave</p><p>depended on the plantation patriarch – and, to a lesser extent, themistress or matriarch</p><p>80 Inventing Americas: 1800–1865</p><p>of the house – for support and guidance: the security of work and a home, a basic moral</p><p>education, and care in infancy, sickness, and old age.</p><p>Two women writers who offer intriguing variations on this idea of the pre-Civil War</p><p>South as amodel of paternalism areCaroline LeeHentz (1800–1856) andMaryBoykin</p><p>Chesnut (1823–1886). Hentz was born in the North; however, she moved South, to</p><p>North Carolina, then later Kentucky, Alabama, and Florida. She wrote many novels to</p><p>support herself and her husband: “I am compelled to turn my brains to gold and to sell</p><p>them to the highest bidder,” she complained once. But the novel for which she remains</p><p>best known is The Planter’ s Northern Bride (1854). The interest of the novel lies in the</p><p>way, in painting an idyllic portrait of life on the old plantation, it replicates the pro-</p><p>slavery argument in fictional form. In this, it is typical in someways of plantation novels</p><p>from The Valley of Shenandoah (1824) by George Tucker (1775–1861) and Swallow</p><p>Barn by John Pendleton Kennedy, through to many of the romances of William</p><p>Gilmore Simms, such as The Sword and the Distaff or, as it was later known,Woodcraft</p><p>(1852). It is typical, too, in otherways, of stories announcing the special status and even</p><p>manifest destiny of the South, like The Partisan Leader (1836) by Nathaniel Beverley</p><p>Tucker (1784–1851) and The Cavaliers of Virginia (1834–1835) and The Knights of</p><p>the GoldenHorseshoe (1845) byWilliam A. Caruthers (1802–1846). Above all, though,</p><p>it is typical of the legion of novels written in response toUncle Tom’s Cabin by Harriet</p><p>Beecher Stowe. Of Stowe, Hentz once said, “slavery, as she describes it, is an entirely</p><p>new institution to us.” She felt she knew the institution far better than the author of</p><p>Uncle Tom’s Cabin, having lived in the South; and she was determined to show her</p><p>readers how. The story contains the usual retinue of characters attending the plantation</p><p>romance: including young men full of “magnanimity and chivalry,” “pure and high-</p><p>toned” young women, and interfering abolitionists who are determined to free the</p><p>slaves even though they do not want to be freed. But what supplies the argumentative</p><p>core of the book is the hero, a Southern planter called Mr. Moreland, and his faithful</p><p>personal “servant,” Albert, “a young mulatto.” Moreland is described as “intelligent</p><p>and liberal”; Albert is “a handsome, golden-skinned youth,” “accustomed to wait on</p><p>his master and listen to the conversation of refined gentlemen.” As a result of such</p><p>service, the reader is told, Albert “had very little of the dialect of the negro.” This</p><p>relieves Hentz of the burden of writing such dialect herself for a relatively important</p><p>character with much to say. But it has the further advantage of supplying one small but</p><p>crucial illustration of the benefits of slavery. The slave system, its defenders were</p><p>inclined to argue, not only supported and protected the slaves, it helped to educate and</p><p>refine them; and Albert’s distinctive manner of speech supposedly shows just that. An</p><p>alternating rhythm of action and reflection, conversation and polemic, is characteristic,</p><p>not only of The Planter’ s Northern Bride as a whole, but also of other plantation and</p><p>pro-slavery romances of this kind. The narrative illustrates the pro-slavery thesis; the</p><p>thesis informs and shapes the narrative. And the thesis is simple: that, thanks to the</p><p>paternalism of the South, “the enslaved children of Africa” are “the happiest subservient</p><p>race . . . on the face of the globe.”</p><p>That, however, was not how Mary Boykin Chesnut saw it. Born in South Carolina,</p><p>shemarried into the wealthy Chesnut family. Her husband was an influential politician,</p><p>with close connections to Jefferson Davis, the President of the Confederacy during the</p><p>Civil War. And, like many at the time, Chesnut kept a diary in which she recorded</p><p>Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 81</p><p>meetings with national figures, news of the progress of the war, and her everyday</p><p>experiences and opinions. She then created a book out of the diary and hermemories of</p><p>the past, but died before it could be published. This composite work did not appear</p><p>until 1905, then in a 1949 edition titled A Diary from Dixie; and the original, more</p><p>highly personal diary was not published until 1984. There are many remarkable aspects</p><p>to the diary, but what perhaps is most remarkable is Chesnut’s commentary on slavery.</p><p>“I wonder if it be a sin to think slavery a curse to my land,” she muses in an entry for</p><p>March 8, 1861. “Men and women are punished when their masters and mistresses are</p><p>brutes and notwhen they dowrong – and thenwe are surrounded by prostitutes.” That</p><p>last remark picks up a recurrent theme in the diary. Chesnut was acutely aware of the</p><p>brutal, ironic fact that, while the ruling white patriarchs in the Southern states insisted</p><p>on their separation from, and even difference as a species to, their black slaves, they did</p><p>not hesitate to have sexual contact with them. While they drew an absolute boundary</p><p>between whites and blacks, they crossed the boundary constantly; and the conse-</p><p>quences of that were large numbers of children neither “white” nor “black” but both.</p><p>Themost vivid example, perhaps, of slavery as a violationof humanitywas offered by the</p><p>white, and usually male, sexual use of their “property.”</p><p>“I hate slavery,” Chesnut confessed. What she hated about it, especially, was the fact</p><p>that, as she put it, “our men live all in one house with their wives and concubines, and</p><p>the mulattoes one sees in every family exactly resemble the white children.” That</p><p>inspired her sympathy for white women forced to bear daily witness to the infidelity and</p><p>hypocrisy of their male kin but forced never to say anything, but it did not inspire her to</p><p>any sympathy for black women who were, after all, the main victims here, subject to</p><p>constant sexual coercion. As she saw it, the slave system was to blame for all this</p><p>“nastiness,” but so were “facile black women.” Ironically, Chesnut could see through</p><p>the Southern myth of the extended family far enough to notice that the white “father”</p><p>was constantly violating his black “daughters”: but not far enough to absolve those</p><p>“daughters” of blame. She was too deeply implicated in myths about black sexuality,</p><p>and the supposed animalism of the black race, for</p><p>that. This is all to say that the diaries of</p><p>Chesnut offer as much a symptom as a diagnosis of the moral and material brutality of</p><p>slavery. What she saw was limited, as well as illuminated, by her condition as an</p><p>intelligent white woman of the privileged class.</p><p>Abolitionism and feminism</p><p>The diaries of Mary Boykin Chesnut are her one contribution to American literature,</p><p>but a substantial one. They illustrate just how much forms of writing often considered</p><p>to be outside the parameters of literature – among them, the sermon and lecture, the</p><p>diary and journal – form an integral, in fact central, part of the American tradition with</p><p>its emphasis on the regulation and realization of the self. Another writer who became</p><p>interested in the condition of slaves and the condition of women, Lydia Maria Child</p><p>(1802–1880), was, by contrast with Chesnut, prolific in her output. And her interests</p><p>led her to become an abolitionist and, for a while, attract public censure. Child first</p><p>made her mark with a historical novel, Hobomok (1824), which dealt with the</p><p>relationship between a Puritan woman and a Native American man. It offers a vision</p><p>of interracial union that is closer to Catharine Maria Sedgwick, in its suggestion that</p><p>82 Inventing Americas: 1800–1865</p><p>such unions are eminently possible, than it is to James Fenimore Cooper. She founded</p><p>and edited the first magazine for children in theUnited States, Juvenile Miscellany. She</p><p>published a second novel in 1825,TheRebels; or, BostonBefore theRevolution, about the</p><p>agitation over the StampTax.Then, in 1828, shemarriedDavidLeeChild, a prominent</p><p>abolitionist but also an impracticalman,whomhiswife had very often to support. Partly</p><p>for financial reasons, Lydia Maria Child began writing practical advice books for</p><p>women, such as The Mother’ s Book (1831) and The American Frugal Housewife</p><p>(1831). “Books of this kind have usually been written for the wealthy,” Child wrote</p><p>in the opening chapter of The American Frugal Housewife; “I have written for the</p><p>poor.” Along with general maxims on health and housekeeping, and an emphasis on</p><p>thrift and economy that Benjamin Franklin would have admired, the book strongly</p><p>advises its women readers to give their daughters a good general education.</p><p>By 1833, Child had become actively involved in the abolitionist movement. It was</p><p>that year she publishedAnAppeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans.</p><p>Later, in 1839, she published her Anti-Slavery Catechism, a pamphlet written in the</p><p>form of questions and answers. What both documents reveal is that Child was a</p><p>moderate abolitionist, just as she was a moderate feminist, anxious to correct the</p><p>impression that as an activist, with strong social concerns, she might therefore be an</p><p>irresponsible and vituperative agitator. Her aim was to persuade what she termed “our</p><p>brethren of the South” to reform themselves, to reconstruct the slave system from</p><p>within. This enabled her to admit that the North did not hold a monopoly on virtue.</p><p>Child tried to reassure her Southern readers that, as she put it, “the abolitionists have</p><p>never . . . endeavoured to connect amalgamation with the subject of abolition.” But her</p><p>low-keyed, conversational tone, and her presentation of herself as a sensible, humane</p><p>reformer was just as obnoxious to Southerners bent on strengthening the slave system</p><p>as the more openly radical approaches of Walker and Garrison were. In her later years,</p><p>after she had resigned from the Standard, Child continued to pursue a variety of</p><p>different careers as awriter and topromote several social causes. A short story, “Slavery’s</p><p>Pleasant Homes” (1843), explores miscegenation and its brutal consequences in terms</p><p>that anticipate Mark Twain and William Faulkner. Her last novel, A Romance of the</p><p>Republic (1867), returns to the theme of interracial marriage. Her Letters from New</p><p>Yorkwere published in two series, in 1843 and1845.HerAppeal for the Indians (1868)</p><p>expressed her continuing concern for the people who had been the subject of her first</p><p>long fiction. And she sustained her commitment to African Americans even after the</p><p>end of slavery: The Freedman’s Book (1865), for instance, a collection of pieces by and</p><p>about black people, was printed and distributed at her expense. For Child, the cause of</p><p>liberty was an all-embracing one. In particular, she saw a seamless connection between</p><p>her activism as an abolitionist and her interest in the condition of women. Much the</p><p>same could be said of many reformers of the time, including the Grimke sisters,</p><p>Angelina GrimkeWeld (1805–1879) and SarahMoore Grimke (1792–1873). Born in</p><p>South Carolina to a slaveholding family, the sisters shocked their fellow Southerners</p><p>and relatives by identifying themselves with the abolitionist movement. It was while</p><p>bothwere living in Philadelphia that Angelina wroteAnAppeal to the ChristianWomen</p><p>of the South (1836). “I am going to tell you unwelcome truths,” she told her intended</p><p>Southern white women readers, “but I mean to speak those truths in love.” Despite the</p><p>evidently modest, even apologetic beginning, the message of the Appeal was radical.</p><p>Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 83</p><p>Southern white women, Angelina argued, should read about slavery, pray for the truth</p><p>about slavery to be known, and not only speak out against slavery but also act to</p><p>eradicate it by freeing their own slaves. In this Appeal, the cause of abolition and the</p><p>cause of feminism were linked, not least because white Southern women were offered</p><p>the possibility of affirming their womanhood, and their capacity for significant political</p><p>action, in and through working towards the end of slavery.</p><p>Angelina Grimke also wrote more directly about the feminist cause only a year after</p><p>theAppeal, in herLetters toCatharine Beecher.Here, in response toBeecher’s argument</p><p>that women should restrict themselves to the domestic sphere, she insisted that there</p><p>were no specifically masculine and feminine rights, no such thing as “men’s rights and</p><p>women’s rights” but only “human rights.” Humanity was indivisible, the doctrines of</p><p>liberty and equality had a universal application; and woman should be regarded “as a</p><p>companion, a co-worker, an equal” of man not “a mere appendage of his being, an</p><p>instrument of his convenience andpleasure.” SarahMooreGrimkewas lecturing for the</p><p>antislavery movement with her sister at this time; and, while Angelina was writing her</p><p>Letters to Catharine Beecher, Sarah in her turn was preparing her Letters on the Equality</p><p>of the Sexes, and the Condition of Women (1837–1838). The Letters on the Equality of</p><p>the Sexes are just as resistant as the Letters to Catharine Beecher are to the idea that a</p><p>woman’s place is necessarily in the home. For too long, Sarah insisted, womenhad been</p><p>educated “to regard themselves as inferior creatures.” Like so many others concerned</p><p>with the condition of American women in the nineteenth century, Sarah saw her</p><p>“sisters” as fundamentally powerless and education as a vital source of empowerment.</p><p>Like some of them, too, including her own sister, she saw that impotence at its most</p><p>extreme in the female slaves of the South. For Sarah, as for Angelina Grimke, then,</p><p>female emancipation and the abolition of slavery were intimately connected. And, in</p><p>Sarah’s case, that was especially so, since she saw the condition of the female slave as a</p><p>paradigm, an extreme instance of the condition of all women, the subjection they all</p><p>shared as the “property” of white men.</p><p>The connection between abolitionism and feminism in the nineteenth century was</p><p>not, however, always seamless. In 1840 a World Anti-Slavery Convention was held in</p><p>England, and those present decided on the first day not to seat women delegates.</p><p>Outraged, William Lloyd Garrison joined female delegates in the gallery. And, in the</p><p>same year, the American Anti-Slavery Society split mainly because the followers of</p><p>Garrison insisted that women could not be excluded from full participation in the work</p><p>of abolition. Among</p><p>those sitting withGarrison in the gallery at theWorld Anti-Slavery</p><p>Convention was Elizabeth Cady Stanton (1815–1902). She was similarly angered by</p><p>the treatment of female delegates and decided to organize a convention, as soon as she</p><p>returned to the United States, wholly devoted to the rights of women. This was the</p><p>Seneca Falls Convention, which did not, in fact, take place until eight years later, when</p><p>Stanton and her family moved to Seneca Falls, New York. About three hundred people</p><p>attended, and a hundred of them – two thirds of them women – signed a “Declaration</p><p>of Sentiments,” one of the seminal documents of the century on the condition of</p><p>women. Modeled, as was observed earlier, on the Declaration of Independence, and</p><p>beginning by insisting that “all men and women are created equal,” the document was</p><p>characteristic of its time, in its mix of republican and Christian sentiment. It made no</p><p>concessions at all, however, to the notion of separate spheres formen andwomen, or to</p><p>84 Inventing Americas: 1800–1865</p><p>the usual domestic pieties. And its demands were simple and radical. Women, the</p><p>“Declaration” insisted, should have “immediate admission to all the rights and</p><p>privileges which belong to them as citizens of the United States.”</p><p>If Stanton, along with Margaret Fuller, was the philosopher of the feminist move-</p><p>ment in America during the nineteenth century, then Fanny Fern was one of those who</p><p>translated feminist principles into an enormously successful writing career. Fanny Fern</p><p>was the pen name of Sara Payson Willis (1811–1872). Her first collection of articles,</p><p>Fern Leaves from Fanny’s Portfolio, appeared in 1853 and rapidly became a bestseller.</p><p>Little Ferns from Fanny’s Little Friends, a collection of essays for children, followed in</p><p>the same year; next year, the second series of Fern Leaves from Fanny’s Portfolio was</p><p>published. Over the following twenty years, her essays, articles, and other writing for</p><p>various journals, and collections such asFresh Leaves (1857), Folly as It Flies (1868), and</p><p>Ginger Snaps (1870) were to establish her as one of the most famous women writers in</p><p>the nation. The essays and articles written under the name of Fanny Fern are generally</p><p>marked by a lively, gossipy style, full of exclamations and rapid asides. There is plenty of</p><p>sentiment, but there is also plenty of wit. There are also articles that deal in a more</p><p>openly serious way with the plight of women. “The Working-Girls of New York”</p><p>(1868), for instance, makes no concessions to humor as Fern describes what she calls</p><p>“the contrast between squalor and splendor” in New York City: with “the care-worn</p><p>working girl” and “the dainty fashionist” “jostling on the same pavement.” Fern</p><p>maintains a tactful balance here, between her recognition of the immense difference</p><p>between these two female types, as far as their social and economic situations are</p><p>concerned, and her belief that, as women, their conditions are nevertheless linked. “A</p><p>great book is yet unwritten about women,” Fern confides to the reader: one, presum-</p><p>ably, that discloses both the differences and the links between rich and poor women she</p><p>alludes to here.</p><p>Fern herself tried her hand at writing, if not a great, then a useful book aboutwomen:</p><p>Ruth Hall: A Domestic Tale of the Present Time (1855). “I present you with my first</p><p>continuous story,” Fern wrote in her “Preface: To the Reader.” “I do not dignify it by</p><p>the nameof ‘ANovel.’ I am aware that it is entirely at variancewith all set rules for novel-</p><p>writing.” There was, as always, truth in what she said. Fern drew heavily on her own</p><p>experiences in the book. Ruth Hall is not an autobiography, however. Neither is it a</p><p>romantic or sentimental novel. Reversing the conventional pattern, the book begins</p><p>withmarriage (to amanwho then dies leavingRuth awidow) and endswith the heroine</p><p>as a successful career woman. It focuses, not on the domestic scene, but on the literary</p><p>marketplace in which Ruth must make her way. And the narrative consists, as Fern</p><p>herself points out in her “Preface,” not of the “long introductions and descriptions” of</p><p>the traditional nineteenth-century novel but, rather, of a series of brief episodes and</p><p>vignettes.There is only limited narrative exposition, character analysis, and develop-</p><p>ment. What the reader is offered is a succession of brief scenes, snatches of overheard</p><p>conversation, something remarkably close in many ways to the clipped, disjunctive</p><p>patterns of the modern novel.Ruth Hall is not a modern novel, of course, and there is</p><p>plenty to remind us of that. There are some remarkable plot coincidences, some</p><p>Dickensian comic characters, and no less than three big deathbed scenes. Nevertheless,</p><p>what Fern describes as her “primitive mode” of writing does set her at odds with</p><p>contemporary convention: in tone and narrative rhythm, this is very unlike the standard</p><p>Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 85</p><p>“domestic tale of the present time.” By the end of the novel, Ruth hasmade something</p><p>of herself, and found that marriage and widowhood is not all life has for her.</p><p>Of Sojourner Truth (1793?–1883), someone wrote in 1881 that she “combined in</p><p>herself, as an individual, the two most hated elements of humanity. She was black and</p><p>she was a woman.” For Truth, both elements were a matter of profound pride, and she</p><p>devoted her life to proclaiming her belief that both were the source of her dignity, her</p><p>worth as a human being. Much of what is known about Truth is drawn from</p><p>transcriptions of her speeches, records of her public appearances, and her autobiog-</p><p>raphy, the Narrative of Sojourner Truth (1850). She never learned to read or write.</p><p>What we have are the accounts of her and her orations by others; while theNarrative, a</p><p>contribution to both the slave narrative and the female spiritual autobiography</p><p>traditions of African American literature, was dictated by Truth to Olive Gilbert, a</p><p>sympathetic white woman. In 1875 the Narrative was reprinted with a supplement</p><p>called the Book of Life, containing personal correspondence, newspaper accounts of her</p><p>activities, and tributes from her friends. This enlarged edition of the autobiography was</p><p>reprinted several times, in 1878, 1881, and 1884 under the title Sojourner Truth: A</p><p>Bondswoman of Olden Time, with a History of Her Labors and Correspondence Drawn</p><p>fromHer “Book of Life.” From all this, the reader learns Truth had an “almost Amazon</p><p>form, which stood nearly six feet high, head erect, and eyes piercing the upper hair like</p><p>one in a dream.” Shewas born into slavery inNewYork State, as Isabella Baumfree, sold</p><p>three times before shewas twelve, and raped by one of hermasters. She had five children</p><p>fromher unionwith another slave, saw one of her children sold away fromher, then fled</p><p>with another of her children in 1826, so seizing her freedom one year before she was</p><p>formally emancipated under aNewYork law passed in 1827. In 1843 she received what</p><p>she termed a summons fromGod, commanding her to go out and preach. She changed</p><p>her name to reflect her new identity, as a traveler dedicated to telling peoplewhat is true,</p><p>and she took to the road. By the late 1850s, she had come to embody a commitment to</p><p>freedom that both contrasted with and complemented that of Douglass. With Dou-</p><p>glass, the cause expressed itself as masculine, individualist, mythic, and literary; with</p><p>Sojourner Truth it was something quite different but equally valuable – female,</p><p>communal, part of an oral, vernacular tradition.</p><p>Themost famous speech given by SojournerTruth expresses this difference. In 1851,</p><p>during a woman’s rights convention in Ohio, she spoke on behalf of the dignity of</p><p>women in response to attacks from a group of ministers. Her spontaneous oration was</p><p>reported in theAnti-Slavery Bugle. Then, in 1878, a second andmore elaborate version</p><p>of the speech appeared in the Book of Life section of the Narrative; this was how the</p><p>president of the convention, Frances Gage, recollected it. The rhetorical question that</p><p>Gage remembered</p><p>wrote about the beliefs that brought them into conflict with the Puritan</p><p>establishment; and, in doing so, theymeasured the sheer diversity of opinion and vision</p><p>amongEnglish colonists, even inNewEngland.ThomasMorton set himself up in 1626</p><p>as head of a trading post at Passonagessit which he renamed “Ma-reMount.” There, he</p><p>soon offended his Puritan neighbors at Plymouth by erecting a maypole, reveling with</p><p>the Indians and, at least according toBradford (who indicated his disapproval by calling</p><p>the place where Morton lived “Merry-mount”), selling the “barbarous savages” guns.</p><p>To stop what Bradford called Morton’s “riotous prodigality and excess,” the Puritans</p><p>led by Miles Standish arrested him and sent him back to England in 1628. He was to</p><p>return twice, the first time to be rearrested and returned to England again and the</p><p>second to be imprisoned for slander. Before returning the second time, though, he</p><p>wrote his only literary work,New English Canaan, a satirical attack on Puritanism and</p><p>the Separatists in particular, which was published in 1637.</p><p>In New English Canaan, Morton provides a secular, alternative version of how he</p><p>came to set up “Ma-reMount,” howhewas arrested and then banished. It offers a sharp</p><p>contrast to the account of those same events given in Of Plymouth Plantation. As</p><p>Bradford describes it, Morton became “Lord of Misrule” at “Merry-mount,” and</p><p>“maintained (as it were) a School of Atheism.” Inviting “the Indian women for their</p><p>consorts” and then dancing around themaypole,Morton and his companions cavorted</p><p>“like somany fairies, or furies, rather.”Worse still, Bradford reports, “this wickedman”</p><p>Morton sold “evil instruments” of war to the Indians: “O, the horribleness of this</p><p>villainy!” Morton makes no mention of this charge. What he does do, however, is</p><p>describe how he and his fellows set up a maypole “after the old English custom” and</p><p>then, “with the help of Salvages, that came thether of purpose to see the manner of our</p><p>Revels,” indulge in some “harmelesmirth.” A sense of shared values is clearly suggested</p><p>between the Anglicanism of Morton and his colleagues and the natural religion of the</p><p>Native Americans. There is a core of common humanity here, a respect for ordinary</p><p>pleasures, for custom, traditional authority and, not least, for the laws of hospitality</p><p>that, according to Morton, the Puritans lack. The Puritans are said to fear natural</p><p>pleasure, they are treacherous and inhospitable: Morton describes them, for instance,</p><p>killing their Indian guests, having invited them to a feast. Respecting neither their</p><p>divinely appointed leader, the king, nor the authority of church tradition, they live only</p><p>forwhat they claim is the “spirit” butMortonbelieves ismaterial gain, the accumulation</p><p>of power and property.</p><p>NewEnglishCanaan, as its title implies, is a promotional tract aswell as a satire. It sets</p><p>out to show that New England is indeed a Canaan or Promised Land, a naturally</p><p>abundant world inhabited by friendly and even noble savages. Deserving British</p><p>colonization, all that hampers its proper development, Morton argues, is the religious</p><p>fanaticism of the Separatists and other Puritans. Morton divides his book in three. A</p><p>celebration of what he calls “the happy life of the Salvages,” and their natural wisdom,</p><p>occupies the first section, while the second is devoted to the natural wealth of the</p><p>region. The satire is concentrated in the third section of what is not somuch a history as</p><p>6 The Colonial and Revolutionary Periods</p><p>a series of loosely related anecdotes. Here,Morton describes the general inhumanity of</p><p>the Puritans and then uses the mock-heroic mode to dramatize his own personal</p><p>conflicts with the Separatists. Morton himself is ironically referred to as “the Great</p><p>Monster” and Miles Standish, his principal opponent and captor, “Captain Shrimp.”</p><p>And, true to the conventions of mock-heroic, the mock-hero Shrimp emerges as the</p><p>real villain, while the mock-villain becomes the actual hero, a defender of traditional</p><p>NativeAmerican andEnglish customs aswell as a victimof Puritan zeal and bigotry. But</p><p>that humor can scarcely concealMorton’s bitterness. Confined on an island, just before</p><p>his removal to England,Morton reveals, he was brought “bottles of strong liquor” and</p><p>other comforts by “Salvages”; by such gifts, they showed just how much they were</p><p>willing to “unite themselves in a league of brotherhoodwith him.” “So full of humanity</p><p>are these infidels before those Christians,” he remarks acidly. At such moments,</p><p>Morton appears to sense just how far removed his vision of English settlement is from</p><p>the dominant one. Between him and the Native Americans, as he sees it, runs a current</p><p>of empathy; while between him and most of his fellow colonists there is only enmity –</p><p>and, on the Puritan side at least, fear and envy.</p><p>That William Bradford feared and hatedMorton is pretty evident. It is also clear that</p><p>he had some grudging respect for Roger Williams, describing him as “godly and</p><p>zealous” but “very unsettled in judgement” and holding “strange opinions.” The</p><p>strange opinions Williams held led to him being sentenced to deportation back to</p><p>England in 1635. To avoid this, he fled into the wilderness to a Native American</p><p>settlement. Purchasing land from the Nassagansetts, he founded Providence, Rhode</p><p>Island, as a haven of dissent to which Anne Hutchinson came with many other</p><p>runaways, religious exiles, and dissenters. Williams believed, and argued for his belief,</p><p>that the Puritans should become Separatists. This clearly threatened the charter under</p><p>which the Massachusetts Bay colonists had come over in 1630, including Williams</p><p>himself, since it denied the royal prerogative. He also insisted that the Massachusetts</p><p>Bay Company charter itself was invalid because a Christian king had no right over</p><p>heathen lands. That he had no right, according to Williams, sprang from Williams’s</p><p>seminal belief, and the one that got him into most trouble: the separation of church</p><p>and state and, more generally, of spiritual frommaterial matters. Christianity had to be</p><p>free from secular interests, Williams declared, and from the “foul embrace” of civil</p><p>authority. The elect had to be free from civil constraints in their search for divine truth;</p><p>and the civil magistrates had no power to adjudicate over matters of belief and</p><p>conscience. All this Williams argued in his most famous work, The Bloody Tenent of</p><p>Persecution, published in 1644. Here, in a dialogue between Truth and Peace, he pled</p><p>for liberty of conscience as a natural right. He also contended that, since government is</p><p>given power by the people, most of whom are unregenerate, it could not intervene in</p><p>religious matters because the unregenerate had no authority to do so. But religious</p><p>freedom did not mean civil anarchy. On the contrary, as he wrote in his letter “To the</p><p>Townof Providence” in 1655, liberty of conscience and civil obedience should go hand</p><p>in hand.Williamsused the analogy of the ocean voyage. “There goesmany a Ship to Sea,</p><p>with many aHundred Souls in One Ship,” he observed. They could include all kinds of</p><p>faiths. “Notwithstanding this liberty,” Williams pointed out, “the Commander of this</p><p>Ship ought to command the Ship’s Course. This was “a true Picture of a Common-</p><p>Wealth, or an human Combination, or Society.”</p><p>The Colonial and Revolutionary Periods 7</p><p>LikeThomasMorton,Williamswas also drawn to theNativeAmericans: thosewhom</p><p>writers like Bradford and Winthrop tended to dismiss as “savage barbarians.” His first</p><p>work, A Key into the Language of America, published in 1643, actually focuses</p><p>attention on them. “I present you with a key,” Williams tells his readers in the preface;</p><p>“this key, respects the Native Language of it, and happily may unlocke some Rarities</p><p>concerning theNatives themselves, not yet discovered.”Each chapter ofWilliams’sKey</p><p>beginswith an “ImplicitDialogue,” a list of words associatedwith a particular topic, the</p><p>Nassagansett words on the left and their English equivalents</p><p>Sojourner Truth asking again and again in the speechwas, “and a’n’t</p><p>I a woman?” That became the accepted title of the piece. It also vividly expressed</p><p>Truth’s commitment to the related causes of black and female liberation, black and</p><p>female pride, that she saw as crucial determinants of her identity and that her admirers,</p><p>similarly, saw embodied in her. Douglass enshrined his account of how “a slave was</p><p>made aman” in a form that was personal, carefully articulated, and (in the sense of being</p><p>written down by him) final. Truth asked the question, “a’n’t I a woman?” in a forum</p><p>that was communal and in a form that was spontaneous, unpremeditated, and (to the</p><p>extent that it was open to the recollections and revisions of others) fluid. Both are</p><p>86 Inventing Americas: 1800–1865</p><p>equally memorable; and they share a basic impetus, a commitment to human dignity</p><p>and natural equality, along with their differences. And both have a crucial place in the</p><p>traditions of African American and American literature.</p><p>African American writing</p><p>By contrast to Sojourner Truth, who never wrote down a single one of the speeches for</p><p>which she is remembered, Frances E. W. Harper (1825–1911) was one of the most</p><p>prolific, as well as popular, AfricanAmericanwriters of the nineteenth century.Over the</p><p>course of her life, she produced four novels, several collections of poetry, and numerous</p><p>stories, essays, and letters; she also found time to lecture widely on a whole range of</p><p>reform issues, especially temperance, slavery, and racism, and the rights of women. The</p><p>publicationofherpoem“ElizaHarris” in1853broughthertonationalattention.Oneof</p><p>hermany responses toUncle Tom’sCabinbyHarriet Beecher Stowe, it described a slave</p><p>woman escaping across a river covered with ice, carrying “the child of her love” to</p><p>“Liberty’s plains.” And it reflected her growing involvement with the antislavery</p><p>movement. That involvement became even more marked a year later, when she</p><p>inauguratedhercareerasapublic speakerwithaspeechon“TheEducationandElevation</p><p>of the Colored Race.” The lecture tour she then embarked on was grueling. But she</p><p>managed to produce more poems, and essays, and to publish Poems on Miscellaneous</p><p>Subjects(1854),whicheffectivelybeganthetraditionofAfricanAmericanprotestpoetry.</p><p>In 1859 Harper published her first significant fiction, the short stories “The Two</p><p>Offers” and “OurGreatestWant.” “The TwoOffers,” the first short story published by</p><p>a black person in the United States, is concerned with the condition of women. It tells</p><p>the tale of two cousins, one of whom suffers an unhappy marriage, and the other of</p><p>whom, learning from her cousin’s fate, decides to remain unmarried. Turning from</p><p>marriage, as one of only several options available to a woman, the second cousin</p><p>dedicates herself to “universal love and truth” – in other words, abolitionism and other</p><p>reformmovements. “OurGreatestWant”deals inmore detail with the question of race:</p><p>suggesting that, while the acquisition of wealth is necessary for AfricanAmericans, their</p><p>development as “true men and true women” is more important. Both stories are</p><p>characteristic, in that they are elaborately artificial in tone and sternly moral in tenor;</p><p>and, together, they reflect the overriding commitments of Harper’s life and work: to</p><p>racial and sexual equality.</p><p>Among Harper’s many other published works were a free verse narrative, Moses: A</p><p>Story of the Nile (1869), two novels dealing with temperance (Sowing and Reaping: A</p><p>Temperance Story (1876) and Trial and Triumph (1888–1889)), and a newspaper</p><p>column, first called Fancy Etchings and then Fancy Sketches, in which she explored</p><p>contemporary issues and moral dilemmas through the conversations and activities of</p><p>variousregularcharacters.Hertwomost important laterworks,however,wereSketchesof</p><p>SouthernLife (1872) and IolaLeroy; or, ShadowsUplifted (1892). At the heart of Sketches</p><p>is a seriesofpoemsnarratedbyanAuntChloe.Sixtyyearsold,AuntChloe tells the reader</p><p>how she learned to read, take an active interest in politics although she cannot vote, and</p><p>try tomake sure that themen are “voting clean.”Unlikemost ofHarper’s other poetry,</p><p>these poems exploit African American oral traditions, as they tell the story of a woman</p><p>who worked to gain a cabin for herself and her family and to help build schools and</p><p>Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 87</p><p>churches for the community. They are at once the autobiography of a former slave and a</p><p>vernacular history of slavery, emancipation, and reconstruction. Iola Leroy is a novel</p><p>with a complex plot. The earlier part of it, set in the antebellum period and during the</p><p>CivilWar,assaultsthepro-slaverymythoftheOldSouth,bydescribingthefiercedesireof</p><p>the slaves for freedom, then celebrates the bravery of black troops. The later part</p><p>concentrates on the search of Iola Leroy and her brother for their mother, and the</p><p>decision of Iola, a very light-skinned African American, not to marry a white man.</p><p>Instead, sheaccepts theproposalofanAfricanAmericananddedicatesherself tobuilding</p><p>uptheblackcommunity.IolaLeroy ineffect reverses thecharacter stereotypeof the tragic</p><p>mulattaandthetraditionalnarrativedeviceofablackperson“passing”forwhite. Iola is in</p><p>no sense a victim, and she actively refuses to take on the role of a supposedly “white”</p><p>womanmarried to awhiteman. It alsodramatically negotiates a rangeof issues thatwere</p><p>toengage laterAfricanAmericanwomenwriters inparticular: theseparationandlonging</p><p>ofmotheranddaughter, therelationshipbetweenthesexesasacooperative,coequalone,</p><p>the search for the right kind of work, role, and life for a woman.</p><p>Harper made an important contribution to African American writing; she was not,</p><p>however, the first African American to publish a novel or longer fiction. In March,</p><p>1853, Frederick Douglass published his novella, The Heroic Slave, in his paper The</p><p>North Star. And, in the same year,WilliamWells Brown (1814?–1884) published a full-</p><p>length novel,Clotel; or, The President’ s Daughter. Like Douglass,WilliamWells Brown</p><p>was born a slave, inKentucky.His fatherwas awhiteman, hismother a slavewoman.He</p><p>escaped from slavery in 1834, and took the name Wells Brown from a Quaker couple</p><p>who assisted him in the course of his flight. Moving to Boston, he wrote his</p><p>autobiography, Narrative of William W. Brown, an American Slave. Published in</p><p>1847, it was exceeded only in popularity as a slave narrative by the Narrative of</p><p>Douglass, and it established Brown’s reputation. Brown traveled to Europe, remaining</p><p>there until 1854. In1852hepublishedThreeYears inEurope, the first AfricanAmerican</p><p>travel book, consisting mainly of letters the author had written to friends and news-</p><p>papers in America. And in 1853 he publishedClotel.Hewas later to revise the novel and</p><p>republish it several times: once in serial form as “Miralda; or, the BeautifulQuadroon: A</p><p>Romance of Slavery, Founded on Fact” (1860–1861) and twice in novel form, as</p><p>Clotelle: A Tale of the Southern States (1864) and Clotelle; or, The Colored Heroine – A</p><p>Tale of the Southern States (1867). In 1848Brown hadwritten a piece for a compilation,</p><p>The Antislavery Harp, entitled “Jefferson’s Daughter,” based on the well-established</p><p>rumor that Thomas Jefferson had had a mulatto daughter by his housekeeper, an</p><p>African American, whowas then sold at aNewOrleans slave auction. This was evidently</p><p>the inspiration for Clotel, although in none of the different versions is Jefferson ever</p><p>mentioned by name. What is notable about the novel is how openly, for its day, it</p><p>explores the related themes of black concubinage, miscegenation, and the link between</p><p>sexual and racial oppression. “With the growing population in the Southern states, the</p><p>increase of mulattoes has been very great,” the story begins. Claiming that “the real, or</p><p>clear black, does not amount to more than one in four of the slave population,” the</p><p>narrator then goes on to consider the tragic consequences of this racially and sexually</p><p>charged situation.Through several generations, blackwomenare</p><p>shown at themercyof</p><p>the arbitrary power and the sexual whims of white men and the jealousy of white</p><p>women. Daughters are sold at slave auction; a black concubine is sent off to a</p><p>88 Inventing Americas: 1800–1865</p><p>slave trader at the insistence of a jealous white wife; one black woman kills herself rather</p><p>than suffer further enslavement; another woman is put up for auction with her</p><p>daughter, on the death of her husband, when it is discovered that, legally, she is black</p><p>and still a slave.</p><p>To an extent,Clotel is a symptom of the racial blindness it diagnoses. The heroines in</p><p>this story all tend to be fair-skinned,while the comic characters, the fools, tricksters, and</p><p>villainous collaborators withwhite oppression all tend to be black. But this is something</p><p>that Brownmay have sensed himself. In its original version, the beloved of the heroine,</p><p>Clotel, is of lighter complexion just like her. In the revised versions, however, he is</p><p>described as “perfectly black.” Clotel is reunited with her white father at the end of the</p><p>novel; and, “having all the prejudices against color which characterizes his white fellow-</p><p>countrymen,” the father at first expresses his “dislike” of his son-in-law’s complexion.</p><p>Clotel’s reply is forthright and sums up the main intended message of the book. “I</p><p>married him because I loved him,” she tells her father. “Why should the white man be</p><p>esteemed as better than the black? I find no difference in men on account of their</p><p>complexion.” Clotel is a romantic novel but it is also a powerful assault on the slave</p><p>system and, in particular, the fundamental betrayal it represented of humanity and the</p><p>Americandream.ItwasBrown’sonly longworkoffiction,butherehemappedoutmuch</p><p>of thegeographyof the laterAfricanAmericannarrative–theflight to freedom,thebitter</p><p>fate of denied and mixed identities – and, in the portrait of Clotel, he created a heroine</p><p>who was not just a victimized tragic mulatta but a combative spokesperson for her race.</p><p>Two other novels by African Americans to appear before theCivilWarwereBlake; or,</p><p>TheHuts ofAmerica (partly serialized in 1859, fully serialized in 1861–1862, and issued</p><p>as a book in 1870) andOurNig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, in a Two-Story</p><p>White House, North. Showing that Slavery’ s Shadows Fall Even There (1859). Blake was</p><p>the work of Martin Delany (1812–1885), a free black born in what is now West</p><p>Virginia. In 1852Delany publishedThe Condition, Elevation, Emigration, andDestiny</p><p>of the Colored People of the United States, which argued for the emigration of blacks to a</p><p>state of their own creation. Blake continued that argument. The hero, Henry Blake,</p><p>possesses many of the qualities Delany liked to identify with himself. He is “a black – a</p><p>pure negro – handsome, manly, and intelligent” and “a man of good literary</p><p>attainments.” Born in Cuba, Blake is decoyed into slavery in Mississippi. There, he</p><p>marries another slave; and,whenhiswife is sold and sent away fromhim, he runs away to</p><p>begin organizing slave insurrections, first in the South and then in Cuba. “If you want</p><p>white man to love you, you must fight im!” an Indian whom he meets in the course of</p><p>his wanderings tells Blake. And, although Blake does not want the white man to love</p><p>him, he certainly wants to fight him. The message of Blake is, in fact, at once</p><p>revolutionary and deeply conventional, in the American grain. “I am for war – war</p><p>against whites,” the hero tells his allies, while insisting that they should resist amal-</p><p>gamation, reject life in the United States, and return to their African homeland. But</p><p>Blake also advises them, “Withmoney youmay effect your escape at almost any time . . .</p><p>Money alone will carry you . . . to liberty”; and money, he points out, is the reward of</p><p>enterprise. Delany was a father of black nationalism who did not reject the American</p><p>way but, rather, hoped to see it pursued by African Americans in Africa. The violence he</p><p>embraced, and dramatized in his novel, was founded on a simultaneous alienation from</p><p>and attachment to the land where he was born.</p><p>Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 89</p><p>OurNig is very different. The first published novel by anAfricanAmerican woman, it</p><p>is also the first in black American literature to examine the life of an ordinary black</p><p>person in detail. It was originally thought to be the work of a white, and perhaps even</p><p>male, writer. And it was only recently established that Harriet E.Wilson (1808?–1870)</p><p>was the author, drawing in part on personal experience. The central character, Frado</p><p>(short for Alfrado and also called “Our Nig”) is deserted by her white mother after the</p><p>death of her African American father. She is abandoned in the home of the Bellmonts,</p><p>where she becomes an indentured servant and is treated cruelly by her white mistress,</p><p>Mrs. Bellmont, who beats her, and her daughter Mary Bellmont. The white male</p><p>members of the household try to protect Frado, but they are mostly ineffectual, and</p><p>Frado has to learn to protect herself. Coming of age at eighteen, she then leaves the</p><p>Bellmonts andmarries an African American who claims to be a runaway slave. She has a</p><p>child by him, is then deserted and discovers his claim is false, experiences poverty and</p><p>bad health, the result of years of abuse, and is forcibly separated from her child. As the</p><p>story of Frado unfolds, some narrative attention is given to events in the Bellmont</p><p>family, and to the adventures of the Bellmont children as they grow up and marry. In</p><p>conventional fashion, the subsequent lives of various Bellmonts are even summarized in</p><p>the closing paragraph of the novel. But the emotional center throughout is the poor</p><p>black girl whose nickname – given to her, of course, by whites – provides the book with</p><p>its main title. And, at the end of the story, the pathos of her plight is empahsized.</p><p>“Reposing on God, she has thus far journeyed securely,” the narrator advises us. “Still</p><p>an invalid, she asks your sympathy, gentle reader.”</p><p>OurNig is a fascinating hybrid. Not only a sentimental novel, it is also a realist one. It</p><p>focuses not so much on moments of particular brutality (although there are certainly</p><p>some of them), as on the bitter daily burden of black toil and white indifference and</p><p>spite. Wilson’s book is many generic forms, and it is more than the sum of them: as it</p><p>charts the journey of her heroine towards survival rather than satisfaction, let alone</p><p>success. And, in being so, it illustrates the problem so many African American writers</p><p>have faced, of trying to find a workable genre in which to express and explore</p><p>themselves: a form that gives them a chance of narrating, properly, their identity. The</p><p>author’s identification of herself as simply “Our Nig,” in the first edition of the book,</p><p>was, of course, ironic; and it underlined the difficulty of finding a name for herself in</p><p>a culture that tried to do that work for her – to give her, not so much a name, as a</p><p>demeaning label. It is an additional irony that she was to remain unnamed, for over a</p><p>hundred years, as the author, the maker of her own work: invisibility, the namelessness</p><p>that is perhaps the central theme inAfricanAmericanwriting, was to be the story ofOur</p><p>Nig, for a long time, as well as the story in it.</p><p>The Making of an American Fiction and Poetry</p><p>The emergence of American narratives</p><p>Our Nig had almost no impact when it was published. The reverse was true of Uncle</p><p>Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly by Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811–1896).Uncle</p><p>Tom’s Cabin started out, according to Stowe’s intention, as a series of sketches,</p><p>90 Inventing Americas: 1800–1865</p><p>published in theNational Era, an antislavery magazine, in 1851. Her aim, she told the</p><p>editor of themagazine, was “to hold up in themost lifelike and graphicmanner possible</p><p>Slavery.” When the book was published in 1852, it sold 10,000 copies in a few days,</p><p>300,000 copies in the first year, and became an international bestseller. No other book</p><p>had ever sold so well, apart from the Bible. The main story is simple.</p><p>Uncle Tom, a</p><p>faithful and saintly slave, is sold by his owners, the Shelby family, when they find</p><p>themselves in financial difficulties. Separated from his wife and children, he is taken</p><p>South by a slave trader; aboard ship on theMississippi, he saves the life of Eva St. Clare,</p><p>known as little Eva, and is bought by her father, Angel St.Clare, out of gratitude.Tom is</p><p>happy at the St. Clare plantation, growing close to Eva and her black playmate Topsy.</p><p>But, after two years, Eva dies and then so does St. Clare. Tom is sold to the villainous</p><p>Simon Legree, a cruel and debauched Yankee. The patience and courage of Tom,</p><p>despite all the brutal treatment meted out to him, bewilder Legree. Two female slaves</p><p>take advantage of Legree’s state ofmind, and pretend to escape; and, whenTom refuses</p><p>to reveal their whereabouts, a furious Legree has himflogged todeath.AsTom is dying,</p><p>“Mas’r George” Shelby, the son of Tom’s original master, arrives, to fulfill his pledge</p><p>made right at the beginning of the novel, that he would one day redeem the old slave. It</p><p>is too late for Tom; however, Shelby vows to fight for abolition and, as a first step, he</p><p>frees the slaves on his own plantation, telling them that they can continue to work for</p><p>him as “freemen and freewomen.”Woven in and around thismain plot are a number of</p><p>subsidiary episodes, involving a host of characters. The most important of these</p><p>episodes concern Eliza Harris, a beautiful “mixed race” woman, her husband George,</p><p>who lives as a slave on another plantation, and their son Harry. George is the son of a</p><p>slave mother and a white father “from one of the proudest families in Kentucky.” He is</p><p>said to have inherited “a set of European features, and a high indomitable spirit” from</p><p>his father; he has, we are told, “only a slightmulatto tinge” – and he preaches resistance,</p><p>defiance. At one point, for instance, he makes what is called “his declaration of</p><p>independence”: he is “a free man” by natural right, he insists, and, as such, he has</p><p>the right to defend his freedom, by violence if necessary. In the course of the story,</p><p>George and Eliza escape. They stay at a Quaker settlement for a while, with their son</p><p>Harry. Eventually, they set sail from America. On board ship, both are miraculously</p><p>reunitedwith their long-lost mothers. They settle first in France, whereGeorge attends</p><p>university for four years, and then inAfrica. “The desire and yearning ofmy soul is for an</p><p>African nationality,” George declares. “I want a people that shall have a tangible,</p><p>separate existence of its own.” The final gesture of one George, Shelby, in freeing his</p><p>slaves, is in effect counterpointed by the final gesture of another George, Harris, in</p><p>seeking to establish what he calls “a republic formed of picked men, who . . . have, . . .</p><p>individually raised themselves above a condition of slavery.”Both appear to be founders</p><p>of a new order.</p><p>“God wrote the book,” Stowe once said of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, “I took His</p><p>dictation.” Stowe was helped not only by divine intervention, though, or her sense</p><p>of it, but by her reading. There are various forms of discourse at work in the novel that</p><p>reflect its author’s active and informed engagement with the debate over slavery. Stowe</p><p>was, for example, well aware of the arguments for and against slavery. At onemoment in</p><p>the St. Clare episode, she comprehensively rebuts every facet of the pro-slavery</p><p>argument; and, at another point, she has a family discuss the Fugitive Slave Law. The</p><p>Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 91</p><p>story of the flight ofGeorge andElizaHarris clearly recalls slave narratives; the novel as a</p><p>whole opens with a central situation in plantation fiction, the threatened loss of the old</p><p>plantation due to debt; and, true to the conventions of sentimental fiction, there are</p><p>miraculous coincidences, interminable deathbed scenes (notably, the death of little</p><p>Eva), and the customary address to the gentle reader. Characters out of tall tales and</p><p>frontier humor are introduced, like a comic black duo called Sam and Andy; two rough</p><p>slaveholders called Tom Luker and Marks recall the rogues of Southwestern humor;</p><p>various moments, such as when we are invited to enter Uncle Tom’s Cabin for the</p><p>first time, remind us of Stowe’s participation in the local color tradition; and, along</p><p>with scenes from provincial life, there are moments of pastoral and anti-pastoral –</p><p>respectively, the idyllic portrait of the St. Clare plantation and detailed description of</p><p>the dilapidated estate that Simon Legree owns. But Stowe does not simply imitate, she</p><p>innovates. So, this planatation novel centers, as its subtitle indicates, not on the wealthy</p><p>plantation owners but on “life among the lowly.” Its hero is not some impoverished</p><p>patriarch but a slavewho gradually assumes the stature of aChrist figure. And the object</p><p>of this sentimental fiction is, as Stowe declares in her “Preface,” specifically moral and</p><p>political: “to awaken sympathy and feeling for the African race, as they exist among us.”</p><p>Those whose sympathy Stowe especially hoped to awaken were women: the narrator</p><p>constantly appeals to the possible experiences of the reader as a wife andmother. To an</p><p>extent, in fact, Uncle Tom’s Cabin is a document testifying to female power as well as</p><p>black possibility: the condition of women as well as that of slaves. Females are</p><p>consistently better managers than men, in the novel. It is the females who offer the</p><p>most fully realized vision of a redemptive society: in the Quaker settlement where</p><p>George and Eliza Harris shelter – where everything runs “so sociably, so quietly, so</p><p>harmoniously” thanks to the women, who run it on matriarchal and communal lines.</p><p>And it is the principles identified with the feminine in the novel that we are invited to</p><p>admire: the organic, creative, supportive, sympathetic impulses associated with Eva</p><p>St. Clare and her “misty, dreamy” father, Angel (who is said to be more like his mother</p><p>than his father). The principles identified as masculine are, by contrast, shown to be</p><p>mechanized, destructive, oppressive: associated with Angel’s twin brother Alfred St.</p><p>Clare (who, like his father, believes in “the right of the strongest”) and, even more, the</p><p>brutal Simon Legree. Here, the contrast between Uncle Tom and George Harris is</p><p>relevant. George resists, invoking the Declaration of Independence, and he is certainly</p><p>admired for doing so. He is not, however, the emotional center of the novel. That is</p><p>supplied by “the hero of our story,” the gentle, unresistant, and feminizedUncle Tom:</p><p>who invokes the Bible and only resists doing wrong – refusing to whip a fellow slave, to</p><p>betray thewhereabouts of two other slaves, and refusing even the chance offered him to</p><p>kill SimonLegree.George is a political exemplar of a kind, but Tom is a saint, compared</p><p>eventually to Christ: ready to be killed, but not to kill. Conversion not revolution is the</p><p>principal subject and aim of Uncle Tom’s Cabin; and that project is consistently</p><p>associated with the feminine.</p><p>The counsel of patience embodied in its hero has earned Stowe’s novel opprobrium</p><p>inmany quarters: “Uncle Tom,” after all, has become a term of abuse, a dismissive label</p><p>stuck on any African American seen to be too servile, and there is no doubt thatUncle</p><p>Tom’s Cabin often resorts to racial stereotypes. Still, the force of the attack on slavery in</p><p>Uncle Tom’s Cabin remains. And, looking at both its form and approach, it is easy to see</p><p>92 Inventing Americas: 1800–1865</p><p>why it made such an enormous impact on contemporary readers. Stowe took the</p><p>aesthetic weaponry of several popular genres – the plantation romance, sentimental</p><p>fiction, the slave narrative – and she then used them to show how the slave system</p><p>violated the most sacred beliefs of her culture – the sanctity of the family and the</p><p>individual soul. Stowe drew on the wealth of feeling she herself had, concerning the</p><p>home and family, Christian womanhood and the Christian soul; she then appealed to</p><p>that same wealth of feeling</p><p>in her readers. In the process, she wrote what is, by any</p><p>standards, one of the most important American books. For a while after Uncle Tom’s</p><p>Cabin, Stowe continued towrite about slavery. In 1853 shewroteAKey toUncle Tom’s</p><p>Cabin, designed to defend the accuracy of her 1852 novel. Then, in 1856, she</p><p>published Dred: A Tale of the Dismal Swamp. This, her second story of slave society,</p><p>takes a different approach from the first. It tends to concentrate on the demoralizing</p><p>effects of slavery on whites. And this time the character who gives the novel its title is a</p><p>fugitive and a revolutionary.</p><p>After Dred, Stowe steered away from the subject of slavery. The Minister’ s Wooing</p><p>(1859), set in New England, uses a romantic plot to explore the limitations of the</p><p>“gloomy”doctrine ofCalvinism andpromotebelief in a redemptiveChrist and aGodof</p><p>love and mercy. Similar themes, together with an emphasis on the power of female</p><p>purity, are at work in Agnes of Sorrento (1862), set in the Catholic Italy of Savanarola,</p><p>and The Pearl of Orr’ s Island (1862), another book set in New England which Sarah</p><p>Orne Jewett creditedwith inspiring her own career. The local color element, which had</p><p>always been there in Stowe’s work, grew stronger in her later fiction. Oldtown Folks</p><p>(1869), for instance, is set in New England in the post-Revolutionary period and has a</p><p>narrator modeled on Stowe’s own husband. Several of her novels resemble novels of</p><p>manners more than anything else, including one called Pink and White Tyranny</p><p>(1871). Even here, however, she was keen to announce her intention to instruct and</p><p>uplift. That fierce didactic intention has meant that Stowe has often been granted less</p><p>than her due as a writer. She is a didactic writer, certainly, but she is also a writer capable</p><p>of combining adroit use of popular literary models with raw emotional power.</p><p>Consistently, in much of her fiction and many of her sketches, she is a very good</p><p>writer indeed; at her best she is surely a great one.</p><p>“Only this is such a strange and incomprehensible world!” a character called</p><p>Holgrave declares in The House of the Seven Gables (1851), the second full-length</p><p>fiction of Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804–1864). “The more I look at it, the more it</p><p>puzzles me; and I begin to suspect that a man’s bewilderment is the measure of his</p><p>wisdom!”Hawthornewas notoriouslymistrustful of all speculative schools of thought,</p><p>or of anyone or anymovement that claimed to have solved themystery and resolved the</p><p>contradictions of life. That included the two major historical movements associated</p><p>with his native New England of which he had intimate experience: Puritanism and</p><p>Transcendentalism.Hewas someonewhomanaged tomake great art, not somuch out</p><p>of bewilderment, as out of of ambiguity, irresolution – a refusal to close off debate or the</p><p>search for truth. Hawthorne was undoubtedly a moralist, concerned in particular with</p><p>the moral errors of egotism and pride, separation from what he called “the magnetic</p><p>chain of humanity.” But he was a moralist who was acutely aware of just how complex</p><p>the human character and human relations are, just how subtle and nicely adjusted to the</p><p>particulars of the case moral judgments consequently have to be – and how moral</p><p>Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 93</p><p>judgment does not preclude imaginative understanding, even sympathy. He was also</p><p>someone who had inherited from his Puritan ancestors what he termed his “inveterate</p><p>love of allegory.”But his alertness to the dualities of experiencemeant that, in his hands,</p><p>allegory passed into symbolism: an object or event assumed multiple possible</p><p>significances, rather than correspondence with one, divinely ordained idea. Finally,</p><p>Hawthorne was, he confessed in the “Preface” to The House of the Seven Gables, an</p><p>author of romances rather than novels. But, for Hawthorne, greater imaginative</p><p>freedom was a means, not an end. His aim, and achievement, was to maneuver the</p><p>romance form so as to unravel the secrets of personality and history: “the truth of</p><p>the human heart,” as Hawthorne himself put it, and the puzzling question of whether</p><p>the present is an echo or repetition of the past, a separate world “disjoined by time,” or</p><p>a mixture somehow of both.</p><p>In 1828Hawthorne published his first novel, Fanshawe: A Tale, anonymously and at</p><p>his own expense. An autobiographical work, it went unnoticed. But it did attract the</p><p>attention of its publisher, Samuel Goodrich, who then publishedmany ofHawthorne’s</p><p>short stories in his periodical, The Token. Eventually, these were reprinted in a volume,</p><p>Twice-ToldTales, in 1837, then in a larger version in1842. In a characteristicallymodest</p><p>and self-critical preface, Hawthorne referred to his tales as having “the pale tint of</p><p>flowers blossomed in too retired a shade.” They do, however, include some of his best</p><p>pieces, such as “The Maypole of Merrymount,” “Endicott and the Red Cross,” and</p><p>“The Grey Champion.” And, collectively, they explore the issues that obsessed him:</p><p>guilt and secrecy, intellectual and moral pride, the convoluted impact of the Puritan</p><p>past on the New England present. For the next five years, Hawthorne worked as an</p><p>editor for Goodrich, then became involved briefly in the experiment in communal</p><p>living at Brook Farm. Used to solitude, however, he found communal living uncon-</p><p>genial: its only positive result for him was the novel he published in 1852 based on his</p><p>Brook Farm experience, The Blithedale Romance. Married now, to Sophia Peabody, he</p><p>and his wifemoved toConcord, where they lived in theOldManse, the former home of</p><p>RalphWaldo Emerson. There was time for neighborly visits to Emerson, Henry David</p><p>Thoreau, and Margaret Fuller, for the family – three children were born to Sophia and</p><p>Nathaniel between1844 and1851– and forwriting: in 1846,Mosses fromanOldManse</p><p>appeared, containing such famous stories as “Young Goodman Brown,” “Rappacini’s</p><p>Daughter,” and “Roger Malvin’s Burial.” There was also time, after Hawthorne left a</p><p>post he had held for three years as customs surveyor, to concentrate on a longer fiction,</p><p>what would turn out to be his most important work.</p><p>The germof this work,whatwas to becomeThe Scarlet Letter (1850), can be found as</p><p>far back as 1837. In the story “Endicott and the Red Cross,” the narrator describes a</p><p>young woman, “with no mean share of beauty,” wearing the letter A on her breast, in</p><p>token of her adultery. Already, the character of Hester Prynne, the heroine of The</p><p>Scarlet Letter, was there in embryo. And gradually, over the years between 1837 and</p><p>1849, other hints and anticipations appear in the journals Hawthorne kept. “A man</p><p>who does penance,” he wrote in one journal entry, in an idea for a story, “in whatmight</p><p>appear to lookers-on the most glorious and triumphal circumstances of his life.” That</p><p>was tobecome theReverendArthurDimmesdale,Hester’s secret lover and the father of</p><p>her illegitimate child, preaching the Election Day Sermon. “A story of the effects of</p><p>revenge, in diabolising himwho indulges it,” he wrote in another entry. That was to be</p><p>94 Inventing Americas: 1800–1865</p><p>Roger Chillingworth, Hester’s husband and Dimmesdale’s persecutor. Ideas for the</p><p>portrait of Pearl, the daughter of Hester and Dimmesdale, often sprang from</p><p>Hawthorne’s observation of his own daughter, Una. As he wrote the novel, over the</p><p>course of 1849 and 1850, Hawthorne was simultaneously exhilarated and wary. “The</p><p>Scarlet Letter is positively a hell-fired story,” he wrote to his publisher, when he had</p><p>completed it; “it will weary very many people and disgust some.”</p><p>The major tensions that Hawthorne searches out in The Scarlet Letter are related to</p><p>his own ambivalent relationship to Puritanism, and his own Puritan ancestors in</p><p>particular. As he intimates in the introductory essay to his story, he felt haunted by</p><p>his ancestors yet different from them.He could experience what he calls there “a sort of</p><p>home-feeling with the past,” but he also suspected that his Puritan founding father</p><p>might find it “quite</p><p>a sufficient retribution for his sins” that one of his descendants had</p><p>become a writer, “an idler” and a dabbler in fancy. The Scarlet Letter rehearses the</p><p>central debate in nineteenth-century American literature: between the demands of</p><p>society and the needs of the individual, communal obligation and self-reliance. The</p><p>Puritan settlement in which the story is set is a powerful instance of community. Hester</p><p>Prynne, in turn, is a supreme individualist: “Whatwe did had a consecration of its own,”</p><p>she tells her lover. The conflict between the two is also a conflict between the symbolic</p><p>territories that occur in so many American texts: the clearing and the wilderness, life</p><p>conducted inside the social domain and life pursued outside it. And the main</p><p>characteristic of Hawthorne’s portrait of this conflict is its doubleness: quite simply,</p><p>he is tentative, equivocal, drawing out the arguments for and against both law and</p><p>freedom. As a result, the symbolic territories of The Scarlet Letter become complex</p><p>centers of gravity: clustering around them are all kinds of often conflicting moral</p><p>implications. The forest, for example, may be a site of freedom, the only place where</p><p>Hester and Dimmesdale feel at liberty to acknowledge each other. But it is also a moral</p><p>wilderness,where characters go to indulge in their darkest fantasies – or, as they see it, to</p><p>commune with the Devil. The settlement may be a place of security, but it is also one of</p><p>constriction, even repression, its moral boundaries marked out by the prison and the</p><p>scaffold. Simple allegory becomes rich and puzzling symbol, not only in themapping of</p><p>the opposing territories of forest and settlement, clearing and wilderness, but in such</p><p>crucial, figurative presences as the scarlet letter “A” that gives the book its title. To the</p><p>Puritans who forceHester to wear the scarlet letter, it may be an allegorical emblem. In</p><p>the course of the story, however, it accumulatesmanymeanings other than “adultress.”</p><p>It might mean that, of course, and so act as a severe judgment on Hester’s individ-</p><p>ualism; then again, as the narrator indicates, it might signify “able,” “admirable,” or</p><p>even “angel.”</p><p>Themajor characters ofThe Scarlet Letter, too, become centers of conflict, the debate</p><p>become flesh, turned into complex imaginative action. Hester, for example, may be a</p><p>rebel, modeled on the historical figure of Anne Hutchinson as well as the mythical</p><p>figure of Eve. But she cannot live outside of society altogether. She is a conflicted figure,</p><p>unable to find complete satisfaction in either the clearing or the wilderness; and her</p><p>eventual home, a house on the edge of the forest, in a kind of border territory between</p><p>the two, is a powerful illustration of this. Dimmesdale is conflicted too, but in a more</p><p>spiritually corrosive way. Torn between the image he offers to others and the one he</p><p>presents to himself, his public role as a revered minister and his private one as Hester’s</p><p>Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 95</p><p>lover and Pearl’s father, Dimmesdale is fatally weakened for much of the action. In his</p><p>case, the central conflict of the story finds its issue in severe emotional disjunction. And</p><p>Chillingworth is there to feed on that weakness, becoming Dimmesdale’s “leech” in</p><p>more ways than one – apparently his doctor but actually drawing sustenance from</p><p>Dimmesdale’s guilt and his own secret satisfying of the need for revenge. Roger</p><p>Chillingworth, in turn, ismore than just a figure of retribution and a possible projection</p><p>ofHawthorne’s ownuneasy feeling that, as awriter, hewas just a parasite, an observer of</p><p>life. “It is a curious observation and inquiry, whether hatred and love be not the same at</p><p>bottom,” the narrator comments, after describing how Chillingworth declined once</p><p>Dimmesdale died. The link is passion. “The passionate lover” and “the no less</p><p>passionate hater” each sups voraciously on “the food of his affection”; and the hater,</p><p>rather more than the lover, reminds us that laws may well be required to curb the</p><p>individual appetite.Hawthornewas enough of a sonof his Puritan forefathers to believe</p><p>that, as he put it in his journals, “there is evil lurking in every human heart.” Knowledge</p><p>of evil, after all, and of her origins, is the means by which Pearl eventually ceases to be a</p><p>child – a creature of thewilderness, associatedwith its streams, plants, and animals – and</p><p>starts to become an adult, a woman in the world. And knowledge of evil renders each of</p><p>the major characters even more vacillating and conflicted: ensuring that the debate</p><p>between self and society that The Scarlet Letter rehearses remains open, for the narrator</p><p>and for us, his readers.</p><p>This, perhaps, is the secret of the mysterious power of Hawthorne’s major novel: it is</p><p>an open text. The story explores many issues. They include, along with the central</p><p>problem of law and freedom, what the narrator calls the “dark question” of woman-</p><p>hood. Among many other things, The Scarlet Letter considers the condition of woman</p><p>in and through the story of its heroine, speculating that “the whole system of society”</p><p>may have “to be torn down and built up anew” andwoman herself reconstructed, freed</p><p>from a “long hereditary habit” – behavior instilled by social separation and subjection –</p><p>before women like Hester can assume “a fair and suitable position.” On none of these</p><p>issues, however, and least of all on the central one, does the narrator claim to be</p><p>authoritative or the narrative move towards closure. The subtle maneuvering of</p><p>character, the equivocal commentary and symbolism, ensure that meaning is not</p><p>imposed on the reader.On the contrary, the reader has to collaborate with the narrator,</p><p>in the construction of possiblemeanings, every time the book is read. To this extent, for</p><p>all Hawthorne’s profound debt to Puritanism, The Scarlet Letter is an extraordinarily</p><p>modern book: expressing a relativist sense of experience in a form that is more fluid</p><p>process than finished product.What it offers is not, in themanner of a traditional classic</p><p>text, an answer issuing out of a belief in some absolute, unalterable truth, but something</p><p>more like a modern classic – a shifting, disconcerting, and almost endless series of</p><p>questions.</p><p>The Scarlet Letter ushered in the most productive period of Hawthorne’s life. In the</p><p>next three years, he was to publish, not only the two further novels, The House of the</p><p>Seven Gables and The Blithedale Romance, but another collection of stories, The Snow</p><p>Image and Other Tales (1851), and two volumes of stories for children,AWonder Book</p><p>(1852) and Tanglewood Tales (1853). He lived in England for a while, as United States</p><p>Consul, and then inRome, returning toAmerica in 1860. The years in Europe supplied</p><p>him with the material for a novel set in Rome and dealing with the international theme</p><p>96 Inventing Americas: 1800–1865</p><p>thatHenry Jameswas tomake his own,TheMarble Faun (1860). They also resulted in a</p><p>series of shrewd essays drawn from his observations in England, called Our Old Home</p><p>(1863). But, back in the United States, he found it increasingly difficult to write. The</p><p>writer who had once been inspired by the multiplicity of possible meanings that lay</p><p>beneath the surface of things was stuck, frustrated by an apparent absence of meaning,</p><p>his evident inability to strike through the surface. The “cat-like faculty of seeing in the</p><p>dark” thatHenry Jameswas later to attribute to himhad,Hawthorne felt, nowdeserted</p><p>him. It was a sad ending for a great writer. But, of course, it in no way diminishes his</p><p>achievement. Even the later, unfinishedwork is farmore intriguing thanHawthorne, in</p><p>his dejection, supposed. And his earlier work, above all themajor stories andThe Scarlet</p><p>Letter, form an indispensable contribution to American literature.</p><p>“He can neither believe, nor be comfortable in his unbelief,” Hawthorne once</p><p>observed of HermanMelville (1819–1891), “and he is too honest and courageous not</p><p>to try to do one or the other.” ForMelville, human experience</p><p>was ruled by contraries.</p><p>“There is no quality in this world that is not what it is merely by contraries,” Ishmael</p><p>declares inMoby-Dick (1851). “Nothing exists in itself.” And those contraries were no</p><p>more evident, he felt, than within each human being, as he or she struggled to find a</p><p>basis for truth and faith, something that would really make life worth living. Melville</p><p>could not resign himself to doubt, or a placid acceptance of the surfaces of things. He</p><p>wanted to probe the visible objects of the world, to discover their animating structure,</p><p>their significance. But he also sensed that the visible might be all there was – and that</p><p>that, too, was a masquerade, a trick of the light and human vision. “The head rejects,”</p><p>the reader is told in Melville’s long poem, Clarel (1876), “so much more/The heart</p><p>embraces.” That could stand as an epigraph to allMelville’s work because it exists in the</p><p>tension between meaning and nothingness. It bears constant and eloquent testimony</p><p>to the impulse most people feel at one time or another: the impulse to believe, that is,</p><p>even if only in the possibility of belief, however perversely and despite all the evidence.</p><p>Melville did not begin with the ambition to become a writer. Nor did he have an</p><p>extensive schooling. His father died when he was only twelve; and, at the age of fifteen,</p><p>Melville left school to support his family. Working first as a bank clerk, a teacher, and a</p><p>farm laborer, he then, when hewas nineteen, sailed on amerchant ship to Liverpool as a</p><p>cabin boy: the voyage, later to be described in his fourth novel, Redburn (1849), was</p><p>both romantic and grueling and gave him a profound love for the sea. Several other</p><p>voyages followed, including an eighteen-month voyage on the whaler Acushnet in the</p><p>South Seas. Ishmael, in Moby-Dick, insists that the whale-ship was the only Yale and</p><p>Harvard he ever had; and much the same could be said of his creator, who in 1844</p><p>returned to land, where he was encouraged to write about some of his more exotic</p><p>experiences at sea. Melville accordingly produced Typee (1846) andOmoo, a Narrative</p><p>of Adventures in the South Seas (1847), novels that deal, respectively, with his</p><p>experiences on the Marquesas and in Tahiti. They were romantic seafaring tales and,</p><p>as such, proved immensely popular. But, even here, there are anticipations of the later</p><p>Melville: most notably, in a narrative tendency to negotiate between contraries – youth</p><p>and maturity, the primitive and the civilized, the land and the sea.</p><p>In his next novel, Mardi: And A Voyage Thither (1849), Melville grew more</p><p>ambitious. Based in part on the author’s experiences in the Marquesas, Mardi is</p><p>an elaborate allegorical and philosophical narrative. The two novels following this</p><p>Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 97</p><p>concentrated on action: first,Redburn: His First Voyage, and thenWhite-Jacket; or, The</p><p>World in a Man-of-War (1850) based, like Redburn, on Melville’s own experience. It</p><p>was after completing these that Melville turned to the work that was to be his</p><p>masterpiece, Moby-Dick, dedicated, in “Admiration for His Genius,” to the man who</p><p>had become his friend and neighbor, Nathaniel Hawthorne.Melville took to rereading</p><p>Shakespearean tragedy at the time of preparing the story of Captain Ahab’s pursuit of</p><p>the great white whale; and he drew on that experience in a number of ways. There are</p><p>local resemblances. Ahab addresses the skeletonof awhale, for instance, in a fashion that</p><p>recallsHamlet’s famousmeditation over the skull of Yorick the jester. There are stylistic</p><p>resemblances. And there is, above all, the conceptual, structural resemblance. “All</p><p>mortal greatness is but disease,” Ishmael observes early on in the narrative. That</p><p>observation, as it happens, is borrowed from an essay by Samuel Taylor Coleridge on</p><p>Shakespearean tragic heroes. Even without the help of such borrowings, however, it is</p><p>possible to see that the conceptionofCaptainAhab is fundamentally tragic. Ahabmakes</p><p>a choice that challenges – the gods, or fate, or human limits, the given conditions of</p><p>thought and existence. That choice and challenge provoke our fear and pity, alarm and</p><p>sympathy. And that leads, it seems inevitably, to a catastrophe that compels similarly</p><p>complex, contradictory emotions: the suffering and death of many, including a hero</p><p>who appears to exist somehow both above and below ordinary humanity.</p><p>The contradictions inherent in the portrait of Ahab spring from the dualism of</p><p>Melville’s own vision. Together, the narrator and the hero ofMoby-Dick, Ishmael and</p><p>Ahab, flesh out that dualism. So does the structural opposition of land and sea, which</p><p>rehearses in characteristically Melvillean terms a familiar American conflict between</p><p>clearing andwilderness. The land is the sphere of “safety, comfort, hearthstone, supper,</p><p>warm blankets, friends, all that’s kind to our mortalities”; the sea, in turn, is the sphere</p><p>of adventure, action, struggle. The one maps out security, and mediocrity; the other</p><p>carries intimations of heroism but also the pride, the potential madness involved in</p><p>striking out from the known. The one inscribes reliance on the community, the other a</p><p>respect for the self. A densely woven network of reference establishes the difference</p><p>between these two territories; it also suggests the difficulty, perhaps the impossibility, of</p><p>either choosing between them or finding an appropriate border area. The opposition</p><p>between land and sea ismade all the rawer byMelville’s portrait of the ship, thePecquod,</p><p>on which Ahab, Ishmael, and their companions voyage. The crew are together and</p><p>alone, knit into one, shared purpose yet utterly divided in terms of motive and desire.</p><p>Caught each of them between the land and the sea, the social contract and isolation,</p><p>they remind us that this is a ship of life, certainly, burdened by a common human</p><p>problem. But it is also, and more particularly, the ship of America: embarked on an</p><p>enterprise that is a curious mixture of the mercantile and the moral, imperial conquest</p><p>and (ir)religious crusade – and precariously balanced between the notions of commu-</p><p>nity and freedom.</p><p>All the tensions and irresolutions of Moby-Dick circulate, as they do in The</p><p>Scarlet Letter, around what gives the book its title: in this case, the mysterious white</p><p>whale to which all attention and all the action is eventually drawn. The reason for</p><p>the mystery of the whale is simple. It “is” reality. That is, it becomes both the axis and</p><p>the circumference of experience, and our understanding of it, in the novel. It is</p><p>nature, and physics, a state of being and of knowing. Each character measures his</p><p>98 Inventing Americas: 1800–1865</p><p>understanding of the real in the process of trying to understand and explain thewhale; it</p><p>becomes the mirror of his beliefs, like the doubloon that Ahab nails to the mast as a</p><p>reward for the first man who sights the white whale, to be valued differently by the</p><p>different crew members. It is both alphabet and message, both the seeming surface of</p><p>things and what may, or may not, lie beneath them. So, like the scarlet letter “A” in</p><p>Hawthorne’s story, its determining characteristic is its indeterminacy. How it is seen,</p><p>what it is seen as being and meaning, depend entirely on who is seeing it. Three</p><p>characters, in particular, are given the chance to explain what they see at some length.</p><p>One offers his explanation early on in the novel, even before the voyage in quest of the</p><p>white whale begins: Father Mapple, whose sermon delivered to a congregation that</p><p>includes Ishmael in the Whaleman’s Chapel – and forming the substance of the ninth</p><p>chapter – is a declaration of faith, trust in a fundamental benevolence. It is a vision</p><p>allowed a powerful imaginative apotheosis in amuch later chapter entitled “The Grand</p><p>Armada.” However, this is not a vision in which much narrative time or imaginative</p><p>energy is invested. The visions that matter here, the explanations – or, rather, possible</p><p>explanations – that count, rehearse the fundamental</p><p>division aroundwhich allMelville’s</p><p>work circulates; and they belong to the twomain human figures in the tale, its hero and</p><p>its teller, Ahab and Ishmael.</p><p>ForAhab,Moby-Dick represents everything that represses anddenies. Believing only</p><p>in a fundamental malevolence, he feels towards the white whale something of “the</p><p>general rage and hate felt by the whole race from Adam down.” Having lost his leg in a</p><p>previous encounter with his enemy, he also desires vengeance, not just on the “dumb</p><p>brute” that injured him but on the conditions that created that brute, which for him</p><p>that brute symbolizes – the human circumstances that would frustrate him, deny him</p><p>his ambitions and desires. Ahab is a complex figure. A tragic hero, carrying themarks of</p><p>his mortality, the human limitation he would deny, he is also a type of the artist, or any</p><p>visionary intent on the essence of things. An artist, he is also an American: a rebel like</p><p>Hester Prynne, an enormous egotist like RalphWaldoEmerson in the sense that he sees</p><p>the universe as an externalization of his soul, and an imperialist whose belief in his own</p><p>manifest destiny compels him to use all other men like tools and claim dominion over</p><p>nature. “A grand ungodly, god-like man,” Ahab projects his overpowering belief in</p><p>himself, his will to power, on to Moby-Dick, seeing in the great white whale all that</p><p>prevents a man from becoming a god. And the key to Melville’s portrait of him is its</p><p>dualism: it is as if the author were summoning up his, and possibly our, dark twin.</p><p>“Is it by its indefiniteness,” Ishmael asks of “the whiteness of the whale,” “it shadows</p><p>forth the heartless voids and immensities of the universe . . .?” It is Ishmael who</p><p>describes white as “a colorless all-color.” For the narrator ofMoby-Dick, the great white</p><p>whale unveils the probability that what is disclosed when we peer intently at our</p><p>circumstances is neither benevolence nor malevolence but something as appallingly</p><p>vacant as it is vast, a fundamental indifference. That, though, is not all there is to</p><p>Ishmael. In the course of the story, he also undergoes a sentimental education.</p><p>Beginning with a misanthropy so thoroughgoing and dryly ironic that he even mocks</p><p>his misanthropic behavior, he ends by accepting and embracing his kinship with the</p><p>human folly andweakness he sees all aroundhim. Specifically, he embracesQueequeg, a</p><p>Polynesian harpooneer, whom initially he finds, even more than most of humanity,</p><p>repellent. It is this, Ishmael’s return to a specifically human sphere – expressed, in a</p><p>Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 99</p><p>characteristically American way, in the bonding of two people of the same sex but from</p><p>different races – that enables him, quite literally, to survive. When all other crew</p><p>members of the Pecquod are lost, and the ship itself sunk, after three days of struggle</p><p>with Moby-Dick; when Ahab is destroyed by becoming one with that which he would</p><p>destroy, tied by his own ropes to the great white whale; then, Ishmael floats free in what</p><p>is, in effect, a reproduction of Queequeg’s body – a coffin Queequeg has made, and on</p><p>to which he has copied “the twisting tattooing” on his own skin. It is survival, not</p><p>triumph. “Another orphan” of the world, Ishmael lives on because he has resigned</p><p>himself to the limitations of the sensible, the everyday, the ordinary: to all that is</p><p>identified, for good and ill, with the land. The difference between his own quietly ironic</p><p>idiom and the romantic rhetoric of Ahab measures the gap between them: one has</p><p>opted for a safety that shades into surrender, the other has pursued success only tomeet</p><p>with a kind of suicide. That difference also registers the division Melville felt within</p><p>himself.Moby-Dick negotiates its way between the contraries experienced by its author</p><p>and by his culture: between head and heart, resignation and rebellion, the sanctions of</p><p>society and the will of the individual. And, like so many great American books, it</p><p>remains open, “the draught of a draught” as its narrator puts it, because it is in active</p><p>search of what it defines as impossible: resolution, firm belief or comfortable unbelief –</p><p>in short, nothing less than the truth.</p><p>Moby-Dick was not a success when it was first published; and Melville felt himself</p><p>under some pressure to produce something that would, as he put it, pay “the bill of the</p><p>baker.” That, anyway, was his explanation for his next novel,Pierre; or, The Ambiguities</p><p>(1852). In the first year of publication, it sold less than three hundred copies. Israel</p><p>Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile (1855), a weak historical romance set during the</p><p>Revolution, was similarly unsuccessful. The Piazza Tales (1856) was far more accom-</p><p>plished, containing Melville’s major achievements in short fiction, “Bartleby the</p><p>Scrivener” and “Benito Cereno,” but it attracted little attention. Melville did, after</p><p>this, explore the issues that obsessed him in two other works of prose fiction. The</p><p>Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (1857) offers complex multiple versions of the</p><p>mythical figure of the trickster; it is at once a bleak portrait of the “Masquerade” of</p><p>life, and a biting satire on the material and moral trickery of American society. Billy</p><p>Budd, written in the five years beforeMelville’s death and not published until 1924, in</p><p>turn, reworks the traditional tale of the Handsome Sailor, so as to consider the uses of</p><p>idealism, heroism, and innocence in a fallenworld.However, to support himself and his</p><p>family, Melville was increasingly forced to turn to other, non-writing work. And to</p><p>express himself, he turnedmore andmore to poetry.Clarel: A Poem and Pilgrimage in</p><p>the Holy Land, based on a tour to the Holy Land the author himself had taken, was</p><p>privately financed for publication; so were the poetry collections, John Marr and Other</p><p>Sailors (1888) and Timoleon (1891). In his shorter poems, published here and in</p><p>Battlepieces and Aspects of the War (1866), Melville is concerned, just as he is in his</p><p>novels, with the tragic discords of experience. In “ThePortent” (1886), for instance, he</p><p>presents the militant abolitionist John Brown, the subject of the poem, as an alien and</p><p>“weird” Christ figure. The poem, for all its ironic use of the Christ comparison, is not</p><p>cynical; it does not deny Brown greatness of ambition and courage. As in Moby-Dick,</p><p>though, admiration for such courage is set in tension with the imperative of survival: in</p><p>100 Inventing Americas: 1800–1865</p><p>its own small way, this poem rehearses again the issue that haunted its creator – the</p><p>necessity and the absurdity of heroic faith.</p><p>Women writers and storytellers</p><p>Thedeath ofMelvillewent largely unnoticedby awider public. Even thosewhodid take</p><p>note were hardly complimentary. It was not until the 1920s that his work began to be</p><p>appreciated, and his stature as a major American writer was finally confirmed. Con-</p><p>versely, as Melville’s star began to wax, the stars of other writers waned. This was</p><p>notably true of those many women novelists and storytellers of the period whose work</p><p>had enjoyed a wide contemporary readership. In their case, it is only in the last thirty</p><p>years that reputations have been rehabilitated. Their writing has now been recognized</p><p>for the pivotal cultural work it performed: the way it enabled Americans, and in</p><p>particular American women, to assess their position in society and engage in debates</p><p>about its prevailing character and possible development. Apart from Stowe, Fern, and</p><p>Harper, those womenwriters whose reputations suffered for a while in this way include</p><p>Caroline Kirkland (1801–1864), Elizabeth Stoddard (1823–1902), and Rebecca</p><p>Harding Davis (1831–1902). Spanning the century in their lives, their work measures</p><p>the range, diversity, and quality of thosewhomHawthorne quite unjustly dismissed as a</p><p>“damned mob of scribbling women.”</p><p>Caroline Kirkland was one of the first settlers of Pinckney, Michigan, accompanying</p><p>her husband there after he had acquired some land. Her ideas of the West, formed by</p><p>such romantic</p><p>works as Atala (1801) by Vicomte François-Ren�e de Chateaubriand,</p><p>were radically altered by the experience. And in 1839 she published a novel, a series of</p><p>scenes from provincial life on the frontier,ANewHome –WhoWill Follow? or, Glimpses</p><p>of Western Life under the pseudonym of “Mrs. Mary Clavers, An Actual Settler.” The</p><p>book offers a version of theWest that eschews romanticism, sensationalism, or even the</p><p>kind of realism that emphasizes the masculine adventure and challenge of the frontier.</p><p>Aiming atwhat she called “anhonest portraiture of rural life in a new country,”Kirkland</p><p>begins by admitting that she has “never seen a cougar – nor been bitten by a</p><p>rattlesnake.” The reader must expect no more, she says, than “a meandering recital</p><p>of common-place occurrences – mere gossip about everyday people.” What follows is</p><p>more calculated than that, however, and subtler: a portrait of “home on the outskirts of</p><p>civilization” that focuses on the experience of women as they struggle to make do, and</p><p>make something out of their daily lives. The majority of women in the book have to</p><p>negotiate the enormity of the gapbetweenhow they and their husbands see land and life</p><p>in the West. For them, the land is a place to settle, life there should be communal; for</p><p>their men, however, the land is a source of status and power and life in the West is</p><p>competition. For Kirkland, there is a touch of what she calls “madness” in this male</p><p>attitude, but there is nothing the females can do about it. All they can do is try, as best</p><p>they can, to put up with the hidden emotional costs.</p><p>Elizabeth Stoddard, born ElizabethDrew Barstow in a smallMassachusetts sea coast</p><p>town, was a more unconventional person than Kirkland. In letters written in 1850, she</p><p>described herself as being different from other women: someone who sawmarriage as a</p><p>struggle for power and motherhood as a distraction from the destiny she planned for</p><p>Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 101</p><p>herself. She did getmarried, however, to aminor poet calledRichard Stoddard. And she</p><p>began to write as well: poetry, short fiction, and, from 1854 to 1858, a regular column</p><p>for theDaily Alta California. The short fiction tends to fall into one of two categories:</p><p>formalized sketches like “Collected by a Valetudinarian” (1870) and tales blending</p><p>realism and romance such as “Lemorne Versus Huell” (1863). The columns, in turn,</p><p>reveal Stoddard’s resistance to the received wisdom of the day. Stoddardmocked belief</p><p>in manifest destiny, established religion, and the notion of a separate domestic sphere</p><p>for women. She also poked satirical fun at the sentimental novel, with its “eternal</p><p>preachment about self-denial.” It was the 1860s, however, that were to witness her</p><p>finest work. In 1862 she published her first novel, The Morgesons. It impressed</p><p>Nathaniel Hawthorne, to whom Stoddard sent a copy, and many critics and reviewers</p><p>including William Dean Howells. But it failed to secure her a reading public. Her two</p><p>other novels, Two Men (1865) and Temple House (1867), suffered a similar fate. In the</p><p>later two books, unlike The Morgesons, Stoddard adopted a male protagonist’s point of</p><p>view. All three, though, are characterized by an elliptical narrative style, carried along by</p><p>rapid transitions of scene, conversations stripped to an explanatory minimum, and a</p><p>dramatic, aphoristic, densely imagistic idiom. All three, also, reveal a world where social</p><p>institutions are both repressive and in decay and religious belief is difficult, even</p><p>impossible; and they also show the family as a site of struggle rather than a source</p><p>of security, full of strangeness and secrecy, where passion is thwarted.</p><p>The Morgesons is exemplary in this respect. Its central character and narrator,</p><p>Cassandra Morgeson, is clearly modeled on Stoddard herself; and what the book</p><p>charts is a female quest for empowerment. Described as headstrong, even arrogant, by</p><p>many of her acquaintances, Cassandra seeks personal autonomy. Born in a small seaport</p><p>town, between land and sea, she is drawn as her great-grandfather LockeMorgesonwas</p><p>to “the influence of the sea”: to escape, adventure, breaking away from convention</p><p>and the commonplace. “The rest of the tribe” of Morgesons, Cassandra caustically</p><p>observes, “inherited the character of the landscape.” The Morgesons imitates the</p><p>structure of the domestic novel, to the extent that it shows a youngwoman undergoing</p><p>a sentimental education that ends in marriage, but it imitates it only to subvert it.</p><p>Cassandra remains bold and willful, and an outsider, throughout the novel. She</p><p>nurtures a dangerous attachment to a married man; she falls in love, later, with a dark,</p><p>handsome stranger, called Desmond Somers, whom she eventually marries; but she</p><p>always remains in control, her own woman. The Morgesons anticipates later fiction in its</p><p>ellipses, its disjunctive, allusive idiom. It rehearses and reinvents both the gothic and</p><p>sentimental fiction of its own time, in its curious, subtle mix of romance and realism.</p><p>And it enters vigorously into the contemporary debate about whether there should or</p><p>should not be separate spheres for women andmen. But it is, above all, a book that is far</p><p>more than the sum of these or any other connections: a novel that, in the spirit of those</p><p>writers Stoddard most admired like the Bront€es and Hawthorne, captures both the</p><p>mundane and the ineffable – the materiality and the mystery of life.</p><p>Rebecca Harding Davis declared that it was her purpose “to dig into the common-</p><p>place, this vulgar American life, and see what is in it.” That purpose was clear enough in</p><p>her first published work, “Life in the Iron Mills,” which appeared in the Atlantic</p><p>Monthly in 1861. The story was immediately recognized as an important, innovative</p><p>work, introducing a new subject to American literature: the bleak lives of industrial</p><p>102 Inventing Americas: 1800–1865</p><p>workers in the mills and factories of the nation. “Not many even of the inhabitants of a</p><p>manufacturing town know the vast machinery of system by which the bodies of</p><p>workmen are governed,” the narrator of the story declares near its beginning. And</p><p>a major aim of Davis, in “Life in the Iron Mills,” was, quite simply, to end that</p><p>ignorance: tomake readers aware of the oppression and the essential humanity of those</p><p>workmen. Anticipating one of the major strategies of the Naturalists at the end of the</p><p>nineteenth century,Davis emphasizes the typicality of herworking-class characters, and</p><p>the way they may be driven into crime by a system that appears to deny them any other</p><p>possible avenue of escape. The tale “Life in the Iron Mills” tells is a simple one. At its</p><p>center is a character called Hugh Wolfe, whose activities and fate encapsulate the</p><p>aspirations and bitter reality of working people. The statue of a woman he has fashioned</p><p>in his few spare moments expresses his longing for a better life, some possible source of</p><p>fulfillment: “She be hungry,” he says of the statue, “Not hungry for meat.” The prison</p><p>where he ends up, andwhere he kills himself, measures the cruel limitations that are his.</p><p>“Was it not his right to live . . . a pure life, a good, true-hearted life, full of beauty and</p><p>kind words?” he asks himself. The answer here is that it may be his right but it is not his</p><p>destiny. Davis went on to write many more fictions that pursue a similarly reformist</p><p>agenda.Waiting for the Verdict (1868), for instance, deals with the needs of the newly</p><p>emancipated slaves, while John Andross (1874) investigates political corruption. None</p><p>of her later work, however, had the impact or possesses the imaginative power of her</p><p>first short story, which made her reputation and marks a turning point in American</p><p>writing. In “Life in the Iron Mills,” Davis’s hope, as her narrator intimates, is to look</p><p>“deeper into the heart of things” in a newly industrializing America. And her triumph is</p><p>that she manages to do just that.</p><p>Spirituals and folk songs</p><p>Davis was writing about oppression from a position of some privilege.</p><p>Among those</p><p>many writers who spoke, or rather sang, from within their own oppressed condition</p><p>were those slaves who handed down spirituals from generation to generation. First</p><p>collected into a book by a black church leader in 1801, spirituals incorporated the</p><p>secular as well as the divine and were sung not just at times of worship but throughout</p><p>the day. They offered those who sang them the possibility of restitution from a life of</p><p>pain: the longing to “Lay dis body down” is a constant theme. But they also offered</p><p>release from the deathly definitions of their humanity forged by the slaveholders, and</p><p>the possibility of resistance to and release from their enslavement. Many spirituals have</p><p>call and response patterns, with lead singers setting out a line or phrase and the group</p><p>responding by repeating or playing variations on it. So, the leader might call out,</p><p>“Swing low, sweet chariot,” and the group singerswould respond, “Comin’ for to carry</p><p>me home.” But not all do; and there are, in any event, wide variations of pace and tone.</p><p>Some spirituals are dirges, lamentations, like “City Called Heaven,” which begins, “I</p><p>am a poor pilgrim of sorrow./I’m in this wideworld alone,” or “Were YouThereWhen</p><p>They Crucified My Lord?” Other spirituals are more driving and rapt, like “God’s</p><p>A-Gonna Trouble the Water,” which repeats the title phrase seven times in five short</p><p>stanzas and the phrase, “Wade in the water, children,” no less than nine times. And</p><p>some are jubilant, even ecstatic, like “That Great Gittin’ Up Morning!,” a vision of</p><p>Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 103</p><p>Judgment Day that was perhaps delivered as a ring shout, with the possessed wor-</p><p>shippers moving their bodies in time to its percussive rhythms.</p><p>Using such rhythms, repetitions, and imagery that anchors the mysteries of religion</p><p>in themundane realities of slave life, many of these spirituals express the dream of flying</p><p>away, leaving the work and worries of the world behind. Some look to Christ and to</p><p>heaven for relief and ease.Most of the spirituals are not about an easeful Jesus, however,</p><p>but about the God of the Old Testament, His heroes and prophets; and many of them</p><p>work towards a vision of redemption, even revenge, in this life here on earth. Songs like</p><p>“NobodyKnows the Trouble I’veHad” tend to elide spiritual troublewith the terrible,</p><p>troublesome suffering of the slave; while songs such as “DeepRiver” and “Roll, Jordan,</p><p>Roll” make an only slightly veiled connection between the journey into the Promised</p><p>Land, made by the Chosen People, and the deliverance of slaves into their own</p><p>promised land of freedom, in the Northern states or Canada. Other spirituals are even</p><p>more open in expressing their dreams of liberation. “GoDown,Moses”was sufficiently</p><p>frank in its demand for freedomtobebannedonmost slave plantations. It usually had to</p><p>be sung out of earshot of the slaveholder.</p><p>As oral performances, of anonymous authorship and designed to be sung by various</p><p>communities and generations, spirituals exist in many different versions. The same is</p><p>true of the white folk songs of the period. “Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie,” for</p><p>instance, originated as a lament about burial at sea, probably in the 1840s. It was then</p><p>carried westward and, with the vastness of the open ranges of the West substituted for</p><p>the vastness of the ocean, became one of the most popular early cowboy songs. The</p><p>differences between spirituals and white folk songs are at least as important as the</p><p>connections, however. Spirituals describe dreams of flight and the reality of “slavery</p><p>chains forlorn.”White songs, by contrast, are often aboutwandering in searchofwealth</p><p>or work.Other songs also tell of crossing the American continent in search of a fortune,</p><p>only to give it up. And still other songs tell simply of those who travel and work: as</p><p>migratory laborers, hired hands, or on the railroad.</p><p>Sometimes thewanderers of these songs find love.One of themost famouswhite folk</p><p>songs of the period, “Shenandoah,” concerns awanderingwhite traderwho falls in love</p><p>with the daughter of an Indian chief. Sometimes, as in the equally famous song about</p><p>the daughter of “aminer, forty-niner,” “Clementine,” the subject is death. The tone of</p><p>such songs can be elegiac, lyrical, as in “Shenandoah”: “Oh, Shenandoah, I long to hear</p><p>you –/Away, you rolling river.” Alternatively, it can be sardonic, even brutal: Clem-</p><p>entine, once dead, for instance, is said to have “fertilized” the many “roses and other</p><p>posies” that grow above her grave. What most songs have in common, however, is an</p><p>idiomatic language, images drawn from a common stock of experience available to the</p><p>community, and simple compulsive rhythms, insistent repetition guaranteed to catch</p><p>attention and remain stored in the memory. The songs designed for dance as well as</p><p>singing are, naturally, even more captivating in their rhythms and repetitions. A “play-</p><p>party song” such as “Cindy,” for instance, was meant to be danced to without musical</p><p>accompaniment. In turn, what were known as “answering-back songs” were meant to</p><p>be sung and danced to in a call and responsemanner by youngmen and women. In one</p><p>of the most famous, “Paper of Pins,” for example, each of the many verses sung by the</p><p>boys plays variations on the theme of offering something by way of a marriage gift.</p><p>Songs like these depend more even than most on performance. Only rarely, in any</p><p>104 Inventing Americas: 1800–1865</p><p>event, did white folk song pass over from the process of popular transmission to the</p><p>status of self-conscious, literary product. On one famous occasion it did, though.</p><p>Hearing a band ofUnion troops singing a popular song in praise of the hero ofHarper’s</p><p>Ferry, “John Brown’s Body,” the writer and lecturer Julia Ward Howe (1819–1910)</p><p>rewrote the song, using its melody, rhythms, chorus, and fundamental drive, and then</p><p>had it published. The result was “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” (1862).</p><p>American poetic voices</p><p>Another woman poet who achieved at least as much fame during her lifetime as Howe</p><p>did with “The Battle Hymn of the Republic” was Lydia Howard Huntley Sigourney</p><p>(1791–1865). Her work encompassed thousands of periodical publications and more</p><p>than fifty books of poetry, autobiography, children’s literature, advice writing,</p><p>sketches, history, and travel. And her poetry addressed a variety of issues, many of</p><p>them public ones such as slavery, the treatment of Indians, and current events, from a</p><p>standpoint of compassionate Christianity and devout republicanism. Her most widely</p><p>anthologized poem, “Death of an Infant” (1827), is characteristic in its use of familiar</p><p>language and conventional imagery to offer a consoling portrait of a tragic event. The</p><p>smile perceived on the face of the dead infant offers the consolatory assurance, to the</p><p>believer, that even the power of death is circumscribed by faith. Other poems by</p><p>Sigourney deal with more public issues but always, as in “Death of an Infant,” in a way</p><p>that consolidates faith and reassures. Any gentle interrogation of individual tragedies,</p><p>or acts of injustice, is invariably framed within a fundamental acceptance of conven-</p><p>tional Christian piety and the benevolence, the rightness of the American way, the</p><p>domestic and the familial. She attacked individual acts of cruelty, against women, for</p><p>instance (“The Suttee” (1827)), but she remained a firm believer in a separate sphere</p><p>where women could act as guardian angels. And she expressed that belief in forms that</p><p>her female audience, in particular, brought up on the popular domestic writing of the</p><p>day, could readily digest and accommodate.</p><p>Two other poets of the period who explored different possibilities of expression for</p><p>women were Frances Sargent Osgood (1811–1850) and Lucy Larcom (1820–1893).</p><p>Osgood, a friend and quite possibly a lover of Edgar Allan Poe, was best known during</p><p>her lifetime for sentimental pieces such as “The Lily’s Delusion” (1846) or for more</p><p>didactic works like “A Flight of Fancy” (1846). In work</p><p>that remained unpublished</p><p>until long after her death, however (in fact, until 1997), Osgood revealed a much</p><p>bolder spirit, and a much more acid tongue, in writing of the vagaries of love. “The</p><p>Lady’s Mistake,” for instance, deals sardonically with both the falsity of man and the</p><p>flippancy of women, sometimes, in matters of the heart. In “Won’t you die & be a</p><p>spirit,” the narrator caustically suggests that the best way to keep her lover faithful is to</p><p>have him die. These are poems that actively jettison the image of woman as the angel of</p><p>the house. The speaker here is a smart, knowing, world-weary but passionate creature.</p><p>Domesticity is introduced here only to be scorned, turned into an acidulous joke.</p><p>Lucy Larcom was one of those who contributed work to The Lowell Offering, a</p><p>journal containing the writings of textile mill operators working in Lowell, Massachu-</p><p>setts. From a middle-class background, Larcom became a “Lowell mill girl” after the</p><p>death of her father. Her poems in the Offering soon attracted attention, and she</p><p>Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 105</p><p>established a career as a popular poet; a collection, The Poetical Works of Lucy Larcom,</p><p>was eventually published in 1884. Larcom assumed a variety of voices and explored a</p><p>number of subjects: there are poems on such diverse topics as the seasons (“March”),</p><p>the city (“The City Lights”), young women (“A Little Old Girl”), and old ones</p><p>(“Flowers of the Fallow”). “Weaving” shows what she could do at her best. Here, she</p><p>uses a complex stanzaic form to explore the plight of a white girl working in a textile</p><p>mill. Making a passionate connection between herself and her black sisters, the girl</p><p>recognizes that, by these extreme standards at least, she enjoys a condition of relative</p><p>privilege. The black women of the South suffer in ways that, according to the “web of</p><p>destiny,” can only terminate in “the hideous tapestry” of war. “Weaving” dramatizes</p><p>the continuities and differences of oppression in a gently mellifluous, intricately</p><p>patterned but nevertheless tough way. Using the activity announced in the title both</p><p>literally and as a figure, it links the fate of an individual to the general, the historical. It</p><p>not only intimates, it insists on interdependence, the fact that all, whitewomenworkers,</p><p>black women, readers, are part of one web; and it invites sympathy, certainly, but it also</p><p>contemplates, even demands, action.</p><p>For many contemporary readers, the leading American poet of the earlier half of the</p><p>nineteenth century was William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878). In fact, some of his</p><p>contemporaries went so far as to honor him as the founding father of American poetry.</p><p>Certainly, thehonorwas justified as far as the subjects ofBryant’s poetic landscapeswere</p><p>concerned. Although he was born and raised in Massachusetts and spent most of his</p><p>adult life as a newspaper editor in New York City, a poem like “The Prairies” (1834) is</p><p>sufficient proof of his awareness of the great lands to the West. As its opening lines</p><p>indicate, it is also evidence of Bryant’s realization that all the new regions of America</p><p>might require the development of new tools of expression. “These are the gardens of</p><p>the Desert,” “The Prairies” begins; “these/The unshorn fields, boundless and beau-</p><p>tiful,/For which the speech of England has no name.” But whatever the native loyalties</p><p>involved in his choice of subject, andwhateverBryantmight say about the irrelevance to</p><p>that subject of “the speech of England,” when it came to writing rather than talking</p><p>about poetry, Bryant preferred to imitate English models. Within these limitations,</p><p>Bryant was undoubtedly skillful. In “To aWaterfowl” (1821), for instance, Bryant uses</p><p>an alternating pattern of long and short lines to capture the hovering movement of the</p><p>bird’s flight. Even here, however, the poet cannot or will not resist the conventional.</p><p>Most of Bryant’s best poetry, like “To a Waterfowl,” was written by the time he was</p><p>forty, and published in two volumes, titled simply Poems, appearing in 1821 and 1832.</p><p>He continued as an activewriter and translator, though, right upuntil the endof his life.</p><p>Notable among his many later volumes are his translations of the Iliad (1870) and the</p><p>Odyssey (1871–1872), since they show Bryant’s skill with the blank verse line and his</p><p>ability to assume a simple, epic nobility of tone and style.</p><p>A poet who eventually outdistanced even Bryant in terms of popularity among his</p><p>contemporaries was Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882). Born in Maine,</p><p>Longfellow published his first prose work, Outre-Mer: A Pilgrimage Beyond the Sea in</p><p>1833–1835. A series of travel sketches reminiscent of Irving’s Sketch Book, this was</p><p>followed by Hyperion (1839), a semi-autobiographical romance, Voices of the Night</p><p>(1839), his first book of poetry, Ballads and Other Poems (1841), and Poems on Slavery</p><p>(1842). His fame increased with the publication of a poetic drama,The Spanish Student</p><p>106 Inventing Americas: 1800–1865</p><p>(1843), The Belfry of Bruges and Other Poems (1845), and Kavanagh (1849), a semi-</p><p>autobiographical prose tale. Three long poems published at about this time also show</p><p>Longfellow’s ambition to create anAmerican epic poetry by choosing domestic legends</p><p>and casting them in classical forms. Evangeline (1847) tells the tragic story of the</p><p>heroine’s search for her lover. It is set in Acadie, a province of Canada roughly</p><p>corresponding to present-day Nova Scotia. The Courtship of Miles Standish (1856) is</p><p>a legend of early New England. And The Song of Hiawatha (1855) tells the story of a</p><p>Native American hero. For all his interest in American themes and legends, however,</p><p>and his dedication to the idea of an American epic, Longfellow relied on European</p><p>literary forms and conventions. He did so quite deliberately, because he believed in the</p><p>value, the centrality of the European-American community and its tradition. There is</p><p>also a peculiar sense of self-assurance inmost of his poetry: a feeling that everything that</p><p>really matters, and has been found by earlier writers to matter, occurs within the</p><p>compass of the respectable fireside. So, in “The Village Blacksmith” (1842), a figure</p><p>actually outside the sphere of Longfellow’s society and sympathy is made acceptable –</p><p>to the narrator of the poem, that is, and the genteel reader – by being transformed into a</p><p>rustic gentleman. There are, certainly, more poised and subtler pieces than these. “The</p><p>Jewish Cemetery at Newport” (1852) uses the setting announced in the title for a</p><p>mature, sympatheticmeditation on the ancient Jewish experience of suffering and exile;</p><p>“Aftermath” (1873) is a quiet reflection on the mixed “harvesting” of old age. But the</p><p>tendency towards sermonizing remains even in these poems, as do the simply sweet</p><p>idioms and rhythms and the deference to older, European forms.</p><p>Like Longfellow, Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809–1894) chose to identify with a</p><p>particular group. More modest and pragmatic in his aims and intentions, however, he</p><p>defined anddelimited that groupquite closely: to themen andwomenof sense and taste</p><p>with whom he came into contact as a distinguishedmember of Boston society. Holmes</p><p>is to be seen at his best in his most famous work, The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table.</p><p>First published in The Atlantic Monthly in 1857–1858 and in book form in 1858, this</p><p>consists of essays, poems, and occasional pieces in the form of table talk in a Boston</p><p>boarding house. The wit, good sense, and moral rigor that characterizes this and later</p><p>volumes such asThe Professor at the Breakfast Table (1860) andThe Poet at the Breakfast</p><p>Table (1872) is also to be found, in miniature, in poems like “The Chambered</p><p>Nautilus” (1858), with its famous concluding instruction to the poet’s soul to “build</p><p>thee more stately mansions.”</p><p>WhereasHolmes opted for a community consisting ofmen of sense, however small it</p><p>might have to be, a contemporary and neighbor of his chose a spiritual isolation which</p><p>some of his acquaintances interpreted as madness.</p><p>on the right. This is</p><p>followed by an “Observation” on the topic; and the topics in these chapters range from</p><p>food, clothing, marriage, trade, and war to beliefs about nature, dreams, and religion.</p><p>A “generall Observation” is then drawn, with cultural inferences and moral lessons</p><p>being offered throughmeditation and analogy. Finally, there is a conclusion in the form</p><p>of a poem that contrasts Indian and “English-man.” These poems, in particular, show</p><p>Williams torn between his admiration for the natural virtues of Native Americans, and</p><p>their harmony with nature, and his belief that the “Natives” are, after all, pagans and so</p><p>consigned to damnation. Implicit here, in fact, and elsewhere in the Key is an irony at</p><p>work in a great deal of writing about the “noble savage.” His natural nobility is</p><p>conceded, even celebrated; but the need for him to be civilized and converted has to be</p><p>acknowledged too. Civilized, however, he would invariably lose those native virtues</p><p>that make him an object of admiration in the first place. And he could not then be used</p><p>as Williams frequently uses him here, as a handy tool for attacking the degenerate</p><p>habits of society. Williams’s Key is an immense and imaginative project, founded on</p><p>a recognition many later writers were to follow that the right tool for unlocking</p><p>the secrets of America is a language actually forged there. But it remains divided</p><p>between the natural and the civilized, the native and the colonist, the “false” and the</p><p>“true.”Which is not at all to its disadvantage: quite the opposite, that is the source of its</p><p>interest – the measure of its dramatic tension and the mark of its authenticity.</p><p>Some colonial poetry</p><p>While Puritans were willing to concede the usefulness of history of the kind Bradford</p><p>wrote or of sermons and rhetorical stratagems of the sort Winthrop favored, they were</p><p>often less enthusiastic about poetry. “Be not so set upon poetry, as to be always poring</p><p>on the passionate andmeasure pages,” theNewEngland cleric CottonMather warned;</p><p>“beware of a boundless and sickly appetite for the reading of . . . poems . . . and let not</p><p>the Circean cup intoxicate you.” Of the verse that survives from this period, however,</p><p>most of the finest and most popular among contemporaries inclines to the theological.</p><p>The most popular is represented by The Day of Doom, a resounding epic about</p><p>Judgment Day written by Michael Wigglesworth (1631–1705), The Bay Psalm Book</p><p>(1640), andTheNewEngland Primer (1683?).TheDay ofDoomwas the biggest selling</p><p>poem in colonial America. In 224 stanzas in ballad meter, Wigglesworth presents the</p><p>principal Puritan beliefs, mostly through a debate between sinners andChrist. A simple</p><p>diction, driving rhythms, and constant marginal references to biblical sources are all</p><p>part of Wigglesworth’s didactic purpose. This is poetry intended to drive home its</p><p>message, to convert some and to restore the religious enthusiasm of others. Many</p><p>Puritan readers committed portions of the poem tomemory; still more read it aloud to</p><p>8 The Colonial and Revolutionary Periods</p><p>their families. The sheer simplicity and fervor of its messagemade it an ideal instrument</p><p>for communicating and confirming faith. So it is, perhaps, hardly surprising thatCotton</p><p>Mather could put aside his distrust of poetry when it came to a work like The Day of</p><p>Doom. At Wigglesworth’s death, in fact, Mather confessed his admiration for the poet:</p><p>who, Mather said, had written for “the Edification of such Readers, as are for Truth’s</p><p>dressed up in Plaine Meeter.”</p><p>Evenmore popular thanTheDay ofDoom, however,wereTheBayPsalmBook andThe</p><p>NewEnglandPrimer.Only theBiblewasmorewidely owned in colonialNewEngland.</p><p>The Bay Psalm Book was the first publishing project of the Massachusetts Bay Colony,</p><p>and offered the psalms of David translated into idiomatic English and adapted to the</p><p>basic hymn stanza form of four lines with eight beats in each line and regular rhymes.</p><p>The work was a collaborative one, produced by twelve New England divines. And</p><p>one of them, John Cotton, explained in the preface that what they had in mind was</p><p>“Conscience rather than Elegance, fidelity rather than poetry.” “We have . . . done our</p><p>endeavour to make a plain and familiar translation,” Cotton wrote. “If therefore the</p><p>verses are not always so smoothe and elegant as some may desire . . ., let them consider</p><p>that God’s Altar need not our polishings.” What was needed, Cotton insisted, was “a</p><p>plain translation.” And, if the constraints imposed by the hymn stanza form led</p><p>sometimes to a tortured syntax, then neither the translators nor the audience appear</p><p>to haveminded. The psalms were intended to be sung both in church and at home, and</p><p>they were. The Bay Psalm Book was meant to popularize and promote faith, and it did.</p><p>Printed in England and Scotland as well as the colonies, it went throughmore than fifty</p><p>editions over the century following its first appearance. It perfectly illustrated the</p><p>Puritan belief in an indelible, divinely ordained connection between the mundane and</p><p>the miraculous, the language and habits of everyday and the apprehension of eternity.</p><p>And it enabled vast numbers of people, as Cotton put it, to “sing the Lord’s songs . . . in</p><p>our English tongue.”</p><p>The New England Primer had a similar purpose and success. Here, the aim was to</p><p>give every child “and apprentice” the chance to read the catechism and digest</p><p>improving moral precepts. With the help of an illustrated alphabet, poems, moral</p><p>statements, and a formal catechism, the young reader was to learn how to read and</p><p>how to live according to the tenets of Puritan faith. So, for instance, the alphabet was</p><p>introduced through a series of rhymes designed to offer moral and religious instruc-</p><p>tion. The letter “A,” for example, was introduced through the rhyme, “In Adams</p><p>Fall/We sinned all.” Clearly, the Primer sprang from a belief in the value of</p><p>widespread literacy as a means of achieving public order and personal salvation.</p><p>Equally clearly, as time passed and the Primer went through numerous revisions, the</p><p>revised versions reflected altering priorities. The 1758 revision, for instance, declares</p><p>a preference for “more grand noble Words” rather than “diminutive Terms”; a 1770</p><p>version describes literacy as more a means of advancement than a route to salvation;</p><p>and an 1800 edition opts for milder versified illustrations of the alphabet (“A was an</p><p>apple pie”). But this tendency to change in response to changing times was a reason</p><p>for the durability and immense popularity of the Primer: between 1683 and 1830, in</p><p>fact, it sold over five million copies. And, at its inception at least, it was further</p><p>testament to the Puritan belief that man’s word, even in verse, could be used as</p><p>a vehicle for God’s truth.</p><p>The Colonial and Revolutionary Periods 9</p><p>That belief was not contested by the two finest poets of the colonial period, Anne</p><p>Bradstreet (1612?–1672) and Edward Taylor (1642?–1729). It was, however, set in</p><p>tensionwith other impulses and needs that helpedmake their poetry exceptionally vivid</p><p>and dramatic. With Bradstreet, many of the impulses, and the tensions they generated,</p><p>sprang from the simple fact that she was a woman. Bradstreet camewith her husband to</p><p>Massachusetts in 1630, in the group led by JohnWinthrop.Many years later, she wrote</p><p>to her children that at first her “heart rose” when she “came into this country” and</p><p>“found a newworld and newmanners.” “But,” she added, “after I was convinced it was</p><p>the way of God, I submitted to it and joined the church in Boston.” What she had to</p><p>submit to was the orthodoxies of faith and behavior prescribed by the Puritan fathers.</p><p>Along with this submission to patriarchal authority, both civil and religious, went</p><p>acknowledgment of – or, at least, lip service to – the notion that, as a woman, her</p><p>Figure 1.2 Title page of The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America by Anne Bradstreet,</p><p>Boston, 1678. � The British Library Board. C.39.b.48(1).</p><p>10 The Colonial and Revolutionary Periods</p><p>Jones Very (1813–1880) was a lay</p><p>preacher given to mystical experiences. As a youth, he had been forced to withdraw</p><p>from Harvard after experiencing a religious frenzy; and throughout his life he had</p><p>visions which convinced him that his will and God’s will were one. The conviction</p><p>might have turned him into a fanatic or a bigot. Instead, it enabled him to write poetry</p><p>which, though neglected during his lifetime, some later critics were to call great. It is,</p><p>certainly, unique. The means of expression is traditional – Very rarely used anything</p><p>other than the sonnet form – but this belies a poetic stance that is profoundly</p><p>individualistic. In one of his poems, for instance, ordinary people in the street are</p><p>transformed into “The Dead” (1839), whose grotesque and lurid shapes are an</p><p>Inventing Americas: 1800–1865 107</p><p>outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual poverty. Very in effect adopts the</p><p>innocent and often savage eye of the outsider, ignoring the masks people may use to</p><p>evade self-knowledge. He has no connection with the world he observes and exposes,</p><p>and in a sense no audience either. For as the poem “Yourself” (1839) makes clear, Very</p><p>did not expect his revelations of his inner being and his secret pact with God to be</p><p>properly understood by those around him.</p><p>Holmes addressing his companions at the breakfast table and Very watching the</p><p>antics of the “strangers” surrounding him is a contrast played out in a different key by</p><p>two other New England poets: James Russell Lowell (1819–1891) and Frederick</p><p>Goddard Tuckerman (1821–1873). A member of one of the foremost families in</p><p>Boston, Lowell succeeded Longfellow as professor of French and Spanish as Harvard.</p><p>With Holmes, he cofounded The Atlantic Monthly, editing it from 1857 to 1861; with</p><p>Charles Eliot Norton (1827–1898), an eminent scholar and translator, he later edited</p><p>The North American Review. His first volume of poetry, A Year’s Life, appeared in</p><p>1841, his second, Poems, three years later. Then, in a single year, 1848, he published</p><p>Poems: Second Series,A Fable for Critics, The Vision of Sir Launfal, and the first series of</p><p>TheBiglowPapers.TheVision is a verse poemderived from the legends of theHolyGrail.</p><p>A Fable for Critics is a verse satire containing shrewd assessments of the contemporary</p><p>literary scene and its more notable figures. Biglow Papers, in turn, offers a series of</p><p>satirical attacks on the slaveholders of the South and their political representatives.</p><p>Adopting the mask of Hosea Biglow, a crude but honest Yankee farmer, Lowell</p><p>attempted to fashion an authentically American voice – and to use that voice to direct</p><p>people into right ways of thinking. Like Holmes, Lowell had a clear sense of his</p><p>audience. Unlike Holmes, he saw this audience as a potentially large one, which he</p><p>could instruct and educate. The mission of creating an audience and educating it was</p><p>sustained in the second series of Biglow Papers. If the first series had been written in</p><p>opposition to the Mexican War – seen by many as simply a means for the South to</p><p>expand slavery into new territories – then the second was produced in support of the</p><p>North during the Civil War. Both series were influential and immensely popular.</p><p>By contrast, Tuckerman never really attempted to cater to or create an audience and</p><p>never achieved any public honors or recognition. Educated at Harvard, where Jones</p><p>Verywas his tutor, hewithdrewbefore his courses were completed.He returned to take</p><p>a law degree, was admitted to the bar but never practiced. Instead, he devoted most of</p><p>his adult life to the study of botany and the writing of poetry. He also placed a great</p><p>emotional investment in his domestic life, until the death of his wife in childbirth in</p><p>1857. This loss inspired a series of sonnet sequences, written in the period 1854–1860</p><p>and 1860–1872 and partly published in a privately financed edition in 1860. The full</p><p>series of sonnet sequences was not published until the twentieth century; his long</p><p>poem, The Cricket, did not appear in print until 1950; and The Complete Poems was</p><p>only published in 1965. His poems are not, as Tuckerman explains in Sonnet I of the</p><p>first sequence, addressed to anyone. They are, rather, an attempt to give objective life to</p><p>a subjective complex of emotions. The result is, to some extent, like later poetry,</p><p>Imagist poetry for instance, in which a sequence of sense impressions is presented as the</p><p>equivalent of a sequence of emotions.Only to some extent, however: the poetic voice of</p><p>Tuckerman also bears comparison with the voices of contemporaries, like the later</p><p>Hawthorne andMelville. It is the voice of a man who feels alienated from nature, from</p><p>108 Inventing Americas: 1800–1865</p><p>other men, and from God: who senses that there might possibly exist “signs” in his</p><p>environment that could lead him away fromdoubt and into philosophical certainty, but</p><p>who also suspects that those signs are beyond his deciphering. For his fellow New</p><p>Englander Emerson, the self, the ego, was an assertive presence. For Tuckerman,</p><p>however, the self was very much on the defense and trying to make what it could of its</p><p>own defensiveness – its condition of captivity.</p><p>“He is America,” Ezra PoundobservedofWaltWhitman (1819–1892). “His crudity</p><p>is an exceeding great stench, but it isAmerica.” Never frightened of being called crude,</p><p>Whitman would probably have appreciated the comment. And he would have liked</p><p>being identified with America because that was his aim: to speak as a representative</p><p>American and turn theNewWorld intowords.Whitman certainly had this aim after the</p><p>day in 1842 when he attended a lecture given by Emerson, in which Emerson</p><p>prophesied the imminent arrival of an American Homer to celebrate “the barbarism</p><p>andmaterialism of the times.”Whitman saw himself as the fullfilment of that prophecy.</p><p>Hewas theman, he felt, with the courage needed to capture the ample geography of the</p><p>country in lines as bold and wild as its landscape. And in the preface to the first, 1855</p><p>edition of his Leaves of Grass he deliberately echoed Emerson. “The United States</p><p>themselves are essentially the greatest poem,” he wrote, thereby alerting the reader to</p><p>what hewas trying to do: to invent a poetic form founded on raw experiment, and a line</p><p>that swung as freely as the individual voice. There were many influences that helped</p><p>Whitman to create this form and line. They ranged from Italian opera to the insistent</p><p>repetitions of the King James Bible, from his interest in the spatial vastnesses of</p><p>astronomy to his love of American landscape painting with its dedication to and</p><p>delineation of another kind of space. But the crucial factor was Whitman’s sense of</p><p>himself and the potentials of his craft: for him, poetry was a passionate gesture of</p><p>identification with his native land.</p><p>Likemany otherAmericanwriters, especially of this period,Whitmanwas largely self-</p><p>educated. He left school at the age of eleven and learned his trade in the print shop,</p><p>becoming editor of theAurora in 1842 and then later of the BrooklynDaily Eagle. It is</p><p>in his earliest notebook, written in 1847, that Whitman breaks into something like his</p><p>characteristic free verse line. Appropriately, for the poet who was to see himself as the</p><p>bard of American individualism and liberty, this occurs on the subject of slavery. And,</p><p>after Leaves of Grass was published, and enthusiastically welcomed by Emerson,</p><p>Whitman was to devote his poetic life to its revision and expansion. For Whitman,</p><p>poetry, the American nation, life itself were all a matter of process, energized by rhythm</p><p>and change. And Leaves of Grass became a process too, responsive to the continuing</p><p>story of personal and national identity, the poet and his democratic community. A</p><p>second edition, with several new poems, appeared in 1856. While he was planning a</p><p>third edition of what he called his “newBible” of democracy,Whitman had an unhappy</p><p>liaisonwith anotherman,whichbecame the subject of several poems to be incorporated</p><p>into that</p><p>Publisher's Note:</p><p>Image not available</p><p>in the electronic edition</p><p>primary duties were to her family, as housekeeper, wife, and mother. Bradstreet raised</p><p>eight children. Despite this, she found time to write poetry that was eventually</p><p>published in London in 1650 as The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America.</p><p>Publication was arranged by Bradstreet’s brother-in-law, who added a preface in which</p><p>he felt obliged to point out that the poetry had not beenwritten to the neglect of family</p><p>duties.</p><p>Writing in a climate of expectations such as this, Bradstreet made deft poetic use of</p><p>what many readers of the time would have seen as her oxymoronic title of woman poet.</p><p>One of her strategieswas deference. In “ThePrologue” toTheTenthMuse, for instance,</p><p>Bradstreet admitted that “To sing of wars, captains, and of kings,/Of cities founded,</p><p>commonwealths begun,” was the province of men. Her “mean pen,” she assured the</p><p>reader, would deal with other matters; her “lowly lines” would concern themselves</p><p>with humbler subjects. The deference, however, was partly assumed. It was, or became,</p><p>a rhetorical device; a confession of humility could and did frequently lead on to the</p><p>claim that her voice had its own song to sing in the great chorus. “I heard the merry</p><p>grasshopper . . . sing,/” she wrote in “Contemplations,” “The black-clad cricket bear</p><p>a second part.” “Shall creatures abject thus their voices raise/,” she asked, “And in their</p><p>kind resound their Maker’s praise,/Whilst I, as mute, can warble forth higher lays?”</p><p>Playing upon what her readers, and to a certain extent what she herself, expected of</p><p>a female, she also aligned her creativity as a woman with her creativity as a writer. So, in</p><p>“The Author to her Book” (apparently written in 1666 when a second edition of her</p><p>work was being considered), her poems became the “ill-form’d offspring” of her</p><p>“feeble brain,” of whom she was proud despite their evident weaknesses. “If for thy</p><p>father asked,” she tells her poems, “say thou had’st none:/And for thy mother, she</p><p>alas is poor,/Which caus’d her thus to send thee out of door.” Identifying herself as</p><p>a singular and single mother here, Bradstreet plays gently but ironically with Puritan</p><p>sensibilities, including her own. This is a gesture of at once humility and pride, since it</p><p>remains unclear whether Bradstreet’s “ill-form’d offspring” have no father in law or in</p><p>fact. They might be illegitimate or miraculous. Perhaps they are both.</p><p>An edition of the poems of Bradstreet was published in Boston six years after her</p><p>death, with a lot of new material, as Several Poems Compiled with Great Variety of Wit</p><p>and Learning. It contains most of her finest work. It is here, in particular, that</p><p>the several tensions in her writing emerge: between conventional subject matter</p><p>and personal experience, submission to and rebellion against her lot as a woman in</p><p>a patriarchal society, preparation for the afterlife and the pleasures of this world, and</p><p>between simple humility and pride. The focus switches from the public to the private, as</p><p>she writes about childbirth (“Before the Birth of One of Her Children”), married love</p><p>(“To My Dear and Loving Husband”), her family growing up (“In reference to Her</p><p>Children, 23 June, 1659”), about personal loss and disaster (“Upon the Burning of</p><p>Our House, July 10th, 1666”) and, in particular, about bereavement (“In memory of</p><p>My Dear Grandchild Elizabeth Bradstreet, WhoDeceased August, 1665, Being a Year</p><p>and Half Old”). What is especially effective and memorable about, say, the poems of</p><p>married love is their unabashed intimacy. “If ever twowere one, then surely we./If ever</p><p>man were loved by wife then thee,” she writes in “ToMy Dear and Loving Husband.”</p><p>And, in “A Letter to Her Husband, Absent Upon Public Employment,” she consoles</p><p>herself while her beloved is gone by looking at their children: “true living pictures of</p><p>The Colonial and Revolutionary Periods 11</p><p>their father’s face,” as she calls them, “fruits which through thy heat I bore.” There is</p><p>ample time to dwell here on what Bradstreet calls her “magazine of earthly store,” and</p><p>to reflect that, evenwhen she is “ta’en awayunto eternity,” testimony to the pleasures of</p><p>the things and thoughts of time will survive – in the “dear remains” of her “little babes”</p><p>and her verse. And the one dear remain will find delight and instruction in the other.</p><p>“This book by any yet unread,/I leave for you when I am dead,/” she writes in a poem</p><p>addressed “To My Dear Children,” “That being gone, here you may find/What was</p><p>your living mother’s mind.”</p><p>A similar sense of intimacy and engagement is one of the secrets of the work of</p><p>Edward Taylor, which was virtually unpublished during his lifetime – a collected</p><p>edition, The Poetical Works of Edward Taylor, did not appear, in fact, until 1939. Like</p><p>Bradstreet, Taylor was born in England; he then left to join the Massachusetts Bay</p><p>Colony in 1668. After studying atHarvard, he settled into the profession ofminister for</p><p>the rest of his life.Marrying twice, he fathered fourteen children,many of whomdied in</p><p>infancy.He began writing poetry even before he joined his small, frontier congregation</p><p>in Westfield, but his earliest work tended towards the public and conventional. It was</p><p>not until 1674 that, experimenting with different forms and styles, he started over</p><p>the next eight or nine years towrite in amore personal andmemorable vein: love poems</p><p>to his wife-to-be (“Were but my Muse an Huswife Good”), spiritual meditations on</p><p>natural events or as Taylor called them “occurants” (“The Ebb & Flow”), and</p><p>emblematic, allegorical accounts of the smaller creatures of nature and domestic</p><p>objects (“Huswifery”). These poems already manifest some of Taylor’s characteristic</p><p>poetic habits. “Upon A Spider Catching a Fly,” for instance, written around</p><p>1680–1682, begins with the kind of minute particularization of nature that was to</p><p>become typical of later New England poets like Emily Dickinson and Robert Frost:</p><p>“Thou Sorrow, venom elfe/Is this thy ploy,/To spin a web out of thyselfe/To catch</p><p>a Fly?/For Why?” Gradually, the intimate tone of address is switched to God, who is</p><p>asked to “break the Cord” with which “Hells Spider,” the Devil, would “tangle Adams</p><p>race.” What is memorable about the poem is how closely Taylor attends to both</p><p>the material facts of the spider and the spiritual truth it is chosen to emblematize:</p><p>symbolic meaning is not developed at the expense of concrete event. Andwhat is just as</p><p>memorable is the way Taylor uses an elaborate conceit and intricate stanzaic form as</p><p>both a discipline to his meditations and a means of channeling, then relaxing emotion.</p><p>So, in the final stanza, the poet anticipates eventually singing to the glory ofGod, “when</p><p>pearcht onhigh” – “And thankfully,/”he concludes, “For joy.”And that short last line,</p><p>consisting of just twowords, at once acts as a counterpoint to the conclusion of the first</p><p>stanza (“For why?”) and allows Taylor to end his poem on a moment of pure, spiritual</p><p>elation.</p><p>The experience of faith was, in fact, central to Taylor’s life and his work. About 1647,</p><p>he began writing metrical paraphrases of the Psalms. Recalling the Bay Psalm Book, it is</p><p>nevertheless in these poems thatTaylor’s distinctivelymeditative voice starts to be given</p><p>freer rein. More important, he also began to bring together his vision of the history of</p><p>salvation to produce his first major work, Gods Determinations touching his Elect. A</p><p>collection of thirty-five poems, this traces the “Glorious Handywork” of creation,</p><p>dramatizes a debate between Justice andMercy over the fate ofmankind, then describes</p><p>the combat betweenChrist and Satan for human souls. Some years after beginningGods</p><p>12 The Colonial and Revolutionary Periods</p><p>Determinations, in 1682, Taylor turned to what is his finest longer work, Preparatory</p><p>Meditations before My Approach to the Lords Supper. Usually composed after he had</p><p>prepared a sermon or preaching notes, the 217 poems comprising this sequence are</p><p>personal</p><p>meditations “Chiefly upon the Doctrine preached upon the Day of admin-</p><p>istration.” In them, Taylor tries to learn lessons gathered from the Sacrament day’s</p><p>biblical text, which also acts as the poem’s title. They are at once a form of spiritual</p><p>discipline, with the poet subjecting himself to rigorous self-examination; petitions to</p><p>God to prepare him for the immediate task of preaching and administering the Lord’s</p><p>Supper; and a private diary or confession of faith. And, as in so many of his poems,</p><p>Taylor uses an intricate verse form, elaborate word-play and imagery to organize his</p><p>meditations and release his emotions.</p><p>Taylor belongs in a great tradition of meditative writing, one that includes the</p><p>English poets George Herbert and John Donne, and an equally great tradition of New</p><p>England writing: one in which the imaginative anticipation of dying becomes a means</p><p>of understanding how to live. So it is perhaps not surprising that, after suffering a severe</p><p>illness in 1720, he wrote three versions of “A Valediction to all the World preparatory</p><p>for Death 3d of the 11th 1720” and two versions of “A Fig for thee Oh! Death.”What</p><p>perhaps is surprising, andmoving, is how these poems acknowledge the loveliness of the</p><p>world while bidding it farewell. The strength of his feeling for the things of the earth,</p><p>and even more for family and vocation, becomes here a measure of the strength of</p><p>his faith. It is only faith, evidently, and the firm conviction that (as he puts it in one of</p><p>the Preparatory Meditations) his heart “loaded with love” will “ascend/Up to . . . its</p><p>bridegroom, bright, & Friend” that makes him content to give up all that he has</p><p>not only come to know but also to cherish. In Taylor’s poems, we find not so much</p><p>conflict as continuity; not tension but a resolution founded on tough reasoning and</p><p>vigorous emotion, patient attention to the ordinary and passionate meditation on the</p><p>mysterious – above all, on a firmly grounded, fervently sustained faith. He loves the</p><p>world, in short, but he loves God more.</p><p>Enemies within and without</p><p>The Puritan faith that Edward Taylor expressed and represented so vividly found itself</p><p>challenged, very often, by enemies within and without. As for the enemies outside the</p><p>Puritan community, they included above all the people the settlers had displaced, the</p><p>Native Americans. And the challenge posed by what one Puritan called “this barbarous</p><p>Enemy” was most eloquently expressed by those who had come under the enemy’s</p><p>power, however briefly. In February, 1676, a woman namedMary White Rowlandson</p><p>(1637?–1711) was captured by a group of Narragansett Indians, along with her</p><p>children. Many of her neighbors and relatives were also captured or killed, one of her</p><p>children died soon after being captured, and the other two became separated from her.</p><p>Rowlandson herself was finally released and returned to her husband in the following</p><p>May; and the release of her two surviving children was effected several weeks later. Six</p><p>years after this, she published an account of her experience, the full title of which gives</p><p>some flavor of its approach and a clue to its purpose: The Sovereignty and Goodness of</p><p>GOD, TogetherWith the Faithfulness of His Promises Displayed: Being aNarrative of the</p><p>Captivity and Restauration of Mrs Mary Rowlandson. The book was immensely</p><p>The Colonial and Revolutionary Periods 13</p><p>popular, and remained so on into the nineteenth century; and it helped to inaugurate</p><p>a peculiarly American literary form, the captivity narrative. There had been captivity</p><p>narratives since the earliest period of European exploration, but Rowlandson’s account</p><p>established both the appeal of such narratives and the form they would usually take:</p><p>combining, as it does, a vivid portrait of her sufferings and losses with an emphatic</p><p>interpretation of their meaning. The moral framework of the Narrative is, in fact,</p><p>clearly and instructively dualistic: on the one side are the “Pagans” and on the other the</p><p>Christians. The Native Americans are, variously, “ravenous Beasts,” “Wolves,” “black</p><p>creatures” resembling the Devil in their cruelty, savagery, and capacity for lying.</p><p>Christians like Rowlandson who suffer at their hands are upheld only by “the</p><p>wonderfull mercy of God” and the “remarkable passages of providence” that enable</p><p>them to survive and sustain their faith.</p><p>As for the enemies within, nothing illustrated the Puritan fear of themmore than the</p><p>notorious witch trials that took place in Salem, Massachusetts in 1692, during the</p><p>course of which 19 people were hanged, one was pressed to death, 55 were frightened</p><p>or tortured into confessions of guilt, 150 were imprisoned, and more than 200 were</p><p>named as deserving arrest. What brought those trials about, the sense of a special</p><p>mission now threatened and the search for a conspiracy, an enemy to blame and purge</p><p>from the commonwealth, is revealed in a work first published in 1693, The Wonders of</p><p>the Invisible World by Cotton Mather (1663–1728). Mather, the grandson of two</p><p>important religious leaders of the first generation of Puritan immigrants (including</p><p>JohnCotton, after whomhewas named), wrote his book at the instigation of the Salem</p><p>judges. “TheNewEnglanders are a people ofGod settled in those, whichwere once the</p><p>devil’s territories,” Mather announces. For Mather, the people, mostly women, tried</p><p>and convicted at Salem represent a “terrible plague of evil angels.” They form part of</p><p>“an horrible plot against the country” which “if it were not seasonably discovered,</p><p>would probably blow up, and pull down all the churches.” A feeling of immediate crisis</p><p>and longer-term decline is explained as the result of a conspiracy, the work of enemy</p><p>insiders who need to be discovered and despatched if the community is to recover, then</p><p>realize its earlier utopian promise. It is the dark side of the American dream, the search</p><p>for someone or something to blame when that dream appears to be failing. Mather was</p><p>sounding a sinister chord here that was to be echoed by many later Americans, and</p><p>opening up a vein of reasoning and belief that subsequent American writers were to</p><p>subject to intense, imaginative analysis.</p><p>But Cotton Mather was more than just the author of one of the first American</p><p>versions of the conspiracy theory. He produced over 400 publications during his</p><p>lifetime. Among them were influential scientific works, like The Christian Philosopher</p><p>(1720), and works promoting “reforming societies” such as Bonifacius; or, Essays to Do</p><p>Good (1710), a book that had an important impact on Benjamin Franklin. He also</p><p>encouraged missionary work among African American slaves, in The Negro Christian-</p><p>ized (1706), and among Native Americans, in India Christiana (1721). But here, too,</p><p>in his encouragement of Christian missions to those outside the true faith a darker side</p><p>of Puritanism, or at least of the CottonMather strain, is evident. Mather’s belief in the</p><p>supreme importance of conversion led him, after all, to claim that a slave taught the true</p><p>faith was far better off than a free black; and it sprang, in the first place, from a low</p><p>opinionof bothAfrican andNativeAmericans, borderingon contempt. For example, in</p><p>14 The Colonial and Revolutionary Periods</p><p>his life of JohnEliot, “the apostle of the Indians”whomNathanielHawthornewas later</p><p>to praise, Mather made no secret of his belief that “the natives of the country now</p><p>possessed by New Englanders” had been “forlorn and wretched” ever since “their first</p><p>herding here.” They were “miserable savages,” “stupid and senseless,” Mather de-</p><p>clared. They had “no arts,” “except just so far as to maintain their brutish con-</p><p>versation,” “little, if any, tradition . . . worthy of . . . notice.” Such were “the miserable</p><p>people” Eliot set out to save and, in view of their condition, he had “a double work</p><p>incumbent on him.” He had, Mather concluded, “to make men” of the Native</p><p>Americans “ere he could hope to see them saints”; they had to be “civilized ere they</p><p>could be Christianized.”</p><p>Mather’s account of Eliot’s work among the Indians shows just howmuch for him, as</p><p>for other early European settlers, the projects of civilization and conversion, creating</p><p>wealth and doing good, went hand in hand. It comes from his longest and arguably</p><p>most interesting work, Magnalia Christi Americana; or, the Ecclesiastical History of</p><p>New England, published in 1702. This book is an immensely detailed history of New</p><p>England and a series of eminent lives, and it reflectsMather’s belief that the past should</p><p>be used to instruct the present and guide the future. Each hero chosen for description</p><p>and eulogy, like Eliot, is made to fit a common saintly pattern, from the portrait of his</p><p>conversion to his deathbed scene. Yet each is given his own distinctive characteristics,</p><p>often expressive of Mather’s own reforming interests and always illustrating his</p><p>fundamental conviction that, as he puts it, “ The First Age was the Golden Age.” This</p><p>is exemplary history, then. It is also an American epic, one of the very first, in which the</p><p>author sets about capturing in words what he sees as the promise of the nation. “I</p><p>WRITE the Wonders of the CHRISTIAN RELIGION,” Mather announces in “A</p><p>General Introduction” toMagnalia Christi Americana, “flying from theDepravations</p><p>of Europe, to the American Strand.” The echo of the Aeneid is an intimation of what</p><p>Mather is after.He is hoping to link the story of his people to earlier epic migrations. As</p><p>later references to the “American Desart” testify, he is also suggesting a direct analogy</p><p>with the journey of God’s chosen people to the Promised Land. His subject is a matter</p><p>of both history and belief: like somany later writers of American epic, in otherwords, he</p><p>is intent on describing both an actual and a possible America.</p><p>Not everyone involved in the Salem witchcraft trials remained convinced that they</p><p>were justified by the need to expose a dangerous enemywithin. Among thosewho came</p><p>to see them as a serious error of judgment, and morality, was one of the judges at</p><p>the trials, Samuel Sewall (1652–1730). An intensely thoughtful man, Sewall wrote</p><p>a journal from 1673 to 1728, which was eventually published as The Diary of Samuel</p><p>Sewall in 1973. It offers an insight into the intimate thoughts, the trials and private</p><p>tribulations of someone living at a timewhen Puritanismno longer exerted the power it</p><p>once did over either the civil or religious life ofNewEngland. Sewall notes how in 1697</p><p>he felt compelled to make a public retraction of his actions as one of the Salem judges,</p><p>“asking pardon of man” for his part in the proceedings against supposed witches, and,</p><p>he adds, “especially desiring prayers that God, who has anUnlimited Authority, would</p><p>pardon that Sin” he had committed. He also records how eventually, following the</p><p>dictates of his conscience, he felt “call’d” to write something against “the Trade</p><p>fetching Negroes from Guinea.” “I had a strong inclination to Write something about</p><p>it,” he relates in an entry for June 19, 1700, “but it wore off.” Only five days after this,</p><p>The Colonial and Revolutionary Periods 15</p><p>however, a work authored by Sewall attacking the entire practice of slavery, The Selling</p><p>of Joseph:AMemorial, was published inBoston. In it, he attacked slavery as a violation of</p><p>biblical precept and practice, against natural justice since “all men, as they are the Sons</p><p>of Adam, are Coheirs; and have equal Right unto Liberty,” and destructive of the</p><p>morals of both slaves andmasters.” Sewall was a man eager to seek divine counsel on all</p><p>matters before acting. This was the case whether the matter was a great public one, like</p><p>the issues ofwitchcraft and the slave trade, or amore private one, such as the question of</p><p>his marrying for a third time. His journals reveal the more private side of Puritanism:</p><p>a daily search for the right path to follow in order tomake the individual journey part of</p><p>the divine plan. They also reveal a habit of meditation, a scrupulously detailed mapping</p><p>of personal experiences, even the most intimate, that was to remain ingrained in</p><p>American writing long after the Puritan hegemony had vanished.</p><p>Trends towards the secular and resistance</p><p>The travel journals of two other writers, Sarah Kemble Knight (1666–1727) and</p><p>William Byrd of Westover (1674–1744), suggest the increasingly secular tendencies of</p><p>this period. Both Knight and Byrd wrote accounts of their journeys through parts of</p><p>America that tend to concentrate on the social, the curious people and manners they</p><p>encountered along theway. There is relatively little concern, of the kind shown in earlier</p><p>European accounts of travels in the NewWorld, with the abundance of nature, seen as</p><p>either Eden or Wilderness. Nor is there any sense at all of being steered by providence:</p><p>God may be mentioned in these journals, but rarely as a protective guide. Knight</p><p>composed her journal as a description of a trip she took from Boston to New York and</p><p>then back again in 1704–1705. It did not reach printed form until the next century,</p><p>when it appeared as The Journals of Madam Knight (1825): but it was “published” in</p><p>the way many manuscripts were at the time, by being circulated among friends. Her</p><p>writings reveal a lively, humorous, gossipy woman alert to the comedy and occasional</p><p>beauty of life in early America – and aware, too, of the slightly comic figure she herself</p><p>sometimes cuts, “sitting Stedy,” as she puts it, “on my Nagg.” She describes in detail</p><p>how she is kept awake at night in a local inn by the drunken arguments of “some of the</p><p>Town tope-ers in [the] next Room.” She records, with a mixture of disbelief and</p><p>amused disgust, meeting a family that is “the picture of poverty” living in a “littleHutt”</p><p>that was “one of thewretchedest I ever saw.” Sometimes, Knight is struck by the beauty</p><p>of the landscape she passes through. She recalls, for instance, howmoved shewas by the</p><p>sight of the woods lit up by the moon – or, as she has it, by “Cynthia,” “the kind</p><p>Conductress of the night.” Even here, however, the terms in which she expresses her</p><p>excitement are a sign of her true allegiances. “The Tall and thick trees at a distance,” she</p><p>explains, “when the moon glar’d through the branches, fill’d my Imagination with the</p><p>pleasant delusion of a Sumpteous citty, fill’d with famous Buildings and churches.”</p><p>Nature is most beautiful, evidently, when it evokes thoughts of culture; “the dolesome</p><p>woods,” as she calls them elsewhere in her journal, are at their best when they excite</p><p>memories of, or better still lead to, town.</p><p>The situation is more complicated with William Byrd of Westover. Born the heir of</p><p>a large estate in Virginia, Byrd was educated in England and only made Viriginia his</p><p>permanent home in 1726. Byrd claimed, in one of his letters (published eventually in</p><p>16 The Colonial and Revolutionary Periods</p><p>1977 in The Correspondence of the Three William Byrds), that in America he lived “like</p><p>. . . the patriarchs.” And, to the extent that this was possible in a new country, he</p><p>certainly did. For he was one of the leadingmembers of what eventually became known</p><p>as the “first families of Virginia,” those people who formed the ruling class by the end of</p><p>the eighteenth century – in the colony of Virginia and, arguably, elsewhere in the</p><p>South. The “first families” claimed to be of noble English origin. Some of them no</p><p>doubt were. But it is likely that the majority of them were, as one contemporary writer</p><p>Robert Beverley II (1673–1722) put it in The History and Present State of Virginia</p><p>(1722), “of low Circumstances . . . such as were willing to seek their Fortunes in a</p><p>Foreign Country.”Whatever their origins, they had to work hard since as one of them,</p><p>William Fitzhugh (1651–1701), pointed out in a letter written in 1691, “without a</p><p>constant care and diligent Eye, a well-made plantation will run to Ruin.” “‘Tis no small</p><p>satisfaction to me,” another great landowner, Robert “King” Carter (1663–1732),</p><p>wrote in 1720, “to have a pennyworth for my penny”; and to this</p><p>end he, and other</p><p>Virginia gentlemen like him, were painstaking in the supervision of their landholdings.</p><p>Nevertheless, they were keen to use their painstakingly acquired wealth to assume the</p><p>manners and prerogatives of an aristocracy, among which was the appearance of a kind</p><p>of aristocratic indolence – what one writer of the time, Hugh Jones (1670–1760),</p><p>described in The Present State of Virginia (1724) as the gentleman’s “easy way of</p><p>living.”</p><p>Byrd, of course, did not have to struggle to acquire wealth, he inherited it. Once he</p><p>had done so, however, he worked hard to sustain that wealth and even acquire more.</p><p>He personally supervised his properties, once he settled in Virginia, arranging for the</p><p>planting of crops, orchards, and gardens; he also attended to his duties within his own</p><p>community and in the county and the colony. And he was just as intent as his wealthy</p><p>neighbors were on assuming the appearance of idle nobility. When writing back to</p><p>friends inEngland, for instance, he tended to turnhis life inVirginia into a versionof the</p><p>pastoral. As his small hymns to the garden of the South in his letters suggest, the desire</p><p>to paint plantation life as a kind of idyll sprang from two, related things, for Byrd and</p><p>others like him: a feeling of exile from the centers of cultural activity and a desire to</p><p>distance the specters of provincialism and money-grubbing. Exiled from the “polite</p><p>pleasures” of the mother country, in a place that he once described as the “great</p><p>wilderness” of America, Byrd was prompted to describe his plantation home as a place</p><p>of natural abundance, ripe simplicity, and indolence. Describing it in this way, he also</p><p>separated himself from the work ethic that prevailed further north. A clear dividing line</p><p>was being drawnbetweenhim– and the life he andhis social equals inVirginia led – and,</p><p>on the one hand, England, and on the other, New England. In the process, Byrd was</p><p>dreaming and articulatingwhatwas surely to become the dominant image of the South.</p><p>Byrd ismainly remembered now forTheHistory of theDividing Line betwixt Virginia</p><p>andNorth Carolina, the account of his participation in the 1728 survey of the southern</p><p>border of Virginia. In this travel journal, written in 1729 and first published in 1841,</p><p>Byrd considers a number of divisions quite apart from the one announced in the title.</p><p>He talks, for instance, about the difference or division between the “Frugal and</p><p>Industrious” settlers of the northern colonies and the less energetic settlers to the</p><p>south. “For this reason,” he explains, “New England improved much faster than</p><p>Virginia.”He talks about the division between Indians andwhites, particularly the early</p><p>The Colonial and Revolutionary Periods 17</p><p>European explorers. The Indians, Byrd reflects, “are healthy & Strong, with Con-</p><p>stitutions untainted by Lewdness.” “I cannot think,” he adds, “the Indians were much</p><p>greaterHeathens than the first Adventurers.”He talks about the divisions betweenmen</p><p>andwomen. “The distemper of laziness seizes themen,” in the backwoods, he suggests,</p><p>“much oftener than the women.” And he talks about the differences, the division</p><p>between his homeplace andNorthCarolina. For him,NorthCarolina is “Lubberland.”</p><p>“Plenty and a warm sun,” Byrd avers, confirm all North Carolinians, and especially the</p><p>men, “in their disposition to laziness for their whole lives”; “they loiter away their lives,</p><p>like Solomon’s sluggard, with their arms across, and at the winding up of the year</p><p>scarcely have bread to eat.”</p><p>Byrd’s comic description of the inhabitants of North Carolina anticipates the</p><p>Southwestern humorists of the nineteenth century, and all those other American</p><p>storytellers who havemade fun of life off the beaten track. It is also sparked off by one of</p><p>a series of divisions in The History of the Dividing Line that are determined by the</p><p>difference between sloth and industry: perhaps reflecting Byrd’s suspicion that his own</p><p>life, the contrast between its surfaces and its reality, measures a similar gap. Quite apart</p><p>from such dividing lines, Byrd’s account of his journey is as frank and lively as Knight’s</p><p>is. And the tone is even franker and livelier in The Secret History of the Dividing Line, an</p><p>account of the same expedition as the one The History of the Dividing Line covers, first</p><p>published in 1929. In The Secret History, as its title implies, what Byrd dwells on is the</p><p>private exploits of the surveyors: their drinking, gambling, joking, squabbling and their</p><p>encounters withmore than one “dark angel” or “tallow-facedwench.” Throughout his</p><p>adventures, “Steddy,” as Byrd calls himself in both histories, keeps his course and</p><p>maintains his balance: negotiating his journey through divisions with the appearance of</p><p>consummate ease.</p><p>Of course, the ease was very often just that, a matter of appearance, here in the</p><p>histories of the dividing line and elsewhere. Or, if not that simply, it was a matter of</p><p>conscious, calculated choice. As an alternative to the ruminative Puritan or the</p><p>industrious Northerner, Byrd and others like him modeled themselves on the idea</p><p>of the indolent, elegant aristocrat: just as, as an alternative to the noise and bustle of</p><p>London, they modeled their accounts of their homeplace in imitation of the pastoral</p><p>ideal. The divisions and accommodations they were forced into, or on occasion chose,</p><p>were the product of the conflict between their origins and aspirations. They were also</p><p>a consequence of the differences they perceived between theworld they weremaking in</p><p>their part of the American colonies and the ones being made in other parts. And they</p><p>were also, and not least, a probable response to their own sense that the blood of others</p><p>was on their hands. Anticipating the later Southern argument in defense of slavery, they</p><p>turned their slaves, rhetorically, into “children” who positively needed the feudal</p><p>institution of an extended family, with a benevolent patriarch at its head, for guidance,</p><p>support, and protection. In the process, they had an enormous impact on how writers</p><p>write and many others talk about one vital part of the American nation.</p><p>The trend towards the secular in the work of Knight and Byrd is also noticeable in the</p><p>poetry of the period. Cotton Mather had attacked poetry as the food of “a boundless</p><p>and sickly appetite,” for its fictive origins and sensual appeal. Benjamin Franklin, the</p><p>presiding genius of the American Enlightenment, was inclined to dismiss it because it</p><p>was not immediately useful, functional. However, to this charge that poetry makes</p><p>18 The Colonial and Revolutionary Periods</p><p>nothing happen, others replied to the contrary: that it did clear the ground and break</p><p>new wood – in short, that it helped in the making of Americans. The full force of that</p><p>reply had to wait until the Revolution, when writers and critics began to insist that the</p><p>newAmerican nation needed anAmerican literature, andmore specifically anAmerican</p><p>poetry, in order to announce and understand itself. But, even before that, there were</p><p>poets in the colonies who were trying to turn the old European forms to new American</p><p>uses. EvenCottonMather, after all, tried to identify and celebrate the “Wonders” of the</p><p>New World and so wrote a proto-epic, Magnalia Christi Americana. Another writer,</p><p>Joel Barlow,was tomake his own attempt, towards the endof the eighteenth century, at</p><p>a more specifically poetic epic in Vision of Columbus. And two notable writers, well</p><p>before that, tried their hands at producing American versions of the two other most</p><p>common forms of early eighteenth-century poetry besides the epic, both of them also</p><p>derived from neoclassical models, the satire and the pastoral. The two writers were</p><p>Ebenezer Cook (1667–1733) and Richard Lewis (1700?–1734).</p><p>Cookdividedhis time betweenLondon andMaryland.Hewas a prolificwriter, aswell</p><p>as a planter and tobacco merchant, but his claim to fame rests on a satirical poem</p><p>he published in 1708, The Sot-weed Factor; or, a Voyage to Maryland&c. Written in the</p>