In The Afterlives of Specimens, literary critic and poet Lindsay Tuggle excavates Whitman’s Civil War writing to animate new readings of mourning and preservation in mid nineteenth-century America. In beautifully dense and multi-layered prose, she attends to the “specimen” (a term used in Darwin’s The Origin of Species in 1859, one year prior to its first appearance in Leaves of Grass) as a compelling category through which Whitman intimately observes death, uniting body with spirit. Tuggle is compelled by “specimen” not only because it is a term that frequents Whitman’s writing but because it “encompass[es] nineteenth-century desires to collect and preserve rare, strange, or revered objects, both human and inhuman.”^[1] In a cultural moment marked by the dismemberment of the nation and its bodies, the “specimen” merges “scientific exploration” with “melancholic attachment.”^[2] Tuggle shows how an attention to body snatching, the human cadaver, and embalming practices reveals the making and unmaking of Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, Memoranda during the War (1875), and Specimen Days, and Collect (1882).

Reviews of The Afterlives of Specimens have praised its interdisciplinary focus, specifically its attempt to place scientific discourse and authorship in conversation. Tuggle also moves effortlessly between psychoanalytic and queer theories—from Sigmund Freud to Judith Butler to Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. Given the focus of this special issue, I believe we can also position Tuggle’s argument within a disability studies framework. From phantom limb syndrome to bodily and psychological traumas, her book offers a comprehensive account of Whitman’s multi-varied relationship to disability. While the term “disability” does not appear in her book’s chapters, Tuggle emphasizes Whitman’s observance of wounds and illness as a volunteer at war hospitals as well as his firsthand experience with “war paralysis” and “hospital fatigue.” While Whitman claims that “[d]uring the war [he] possess’d the perfection of physical health,” he reveals the porosity of the body as the illnesses of his “comrades” reshape his sense of self and larger positioning within the U.S. body politic.^[3]

Tuggle depicts a moment in U.S. history when disability became a fairly unremarkable phenomenon. Disability historian Kim Nielsen remarks that the Civil War “forced a rethinking of disability in the United States,” in part because of the growth in photography, which visually depicted disabled soldiers in newspapers and other print publications.^[4] In addition, the Invalid (or “one-armed”) Corps, established in 1863 under President Lincoln, assigned disabled veterans to new labor tasks and gave even greater national visibility to the disabled veteran. Nielsen continues: “The war and its consequences generated new adaptive devices and medical advances—from the first wheelchair patent in 1869 to improved prostheses—that improved the lives of many, not just disabled veterans.”^[5]

 

 

The war was an event that disabled people, which—in turn—demanded innovation, not just at the level of early assistive technologies but also through literary forms. As the quintessential “poet of the body,” Whitman aimed to depict these changing embodiments in his poems, notebooks, and letters.

While Whitman was intent on ensuring his afterlife with detailed postmortem instructions—regarding his autopsy, for instance—he was equally committed to preserving his own and soldiers’ stories in the form of a book. Drum-Taps (Whitman’s collection of Civil War poems, which would later be stitched into Leaves of Grass) thus becomes a “surrogate tomb” that incorporates now unnamed bodies, giving them space for circulation.^[6] In one of her most virtuosic close readings of these poems, Tuggle shows how they encode nineteenth-century embalming practices—establishing a link between the preservation of bodies and of poems. Tuggle demonstrates how this “preservation compulsion” facilitates scenes of desire across the living and the dead.^[7]

The Afterlives of Specimens compellingly reframes disability not as loss but as presence. From phantom limb syndrome, in which a missing arm or leg haunts its subject, to the preservation of dead bodies in the Army Medical Museum, Tuggle undermines the harsh distinctions established between ability and disability, life and death. Foregrounding the messy overlap between them, she presents impairment as life-affirming. At key moments, her analysis adopts a disability ethics, claiming the “specimen” not as a passive object but as a lively subject. Tuggle writes, “From his earliest war entries, Whitman insists that the body need not be whole, or even alive, in order to be adored.”^[8]  She notes, for instance, that Whitman’s poor health gave rise to Leaves of Grass, what he called his “consummated book.” In the poet’s own words, “I had to give up my health for it—my body—the vitality of my physical self.” While Tuggle’s argument suggests Whitman’s sacrificial offering of his body for his poems, she indicates that authorship is dependent upon disability. For the text to surface—or live beyond the moment of its composition—the body must, in other words, be impaired.

Elsewhere in the book, Tuggle directs readers to Whitman’s paralysis following a series of strokes, which he experienced after leaving his work at the hospitals during the war. Even as Tuggle insists on Whitman’s strength and optimism in the final decades of his paralysis, she distinguishes “regeneration” and “preservation” from the overcoming of disability.^[9]  Early scholarship in disability studies takes issue with so-called “overcoming narratives” because they privilege able bodies over disabled ones (the person who “overcomes” his or her disability is praised). However, as Tuggle notes, Whitman’s insistence on “the afterlives of specimens” gives tribute to disabled people’s experiences in the form of his writing. Rather than emphasize ability, Whitman’s poems address what Robert Leigh Davis calls “partial recovery.” Through the poet’s effort to preserve the traces of men’s impairment (most startlingly through the bloodstains that mark the pages of his hospital notebooks), Whitman is less intent on regenerating one’s health than he is on preserving the presence of disability—or the body’s partiality and halfness. Tuggle thus refutes the notion that disability is equated with loss. Both Whitman’s own impairments and the impairments of those closest to him should not be mourned but given space and even celebrated.

In one of her most significant turns, Tuggle recasts the disabled soldier as an erotic subject. For instance, she argues that Whitman’s Memoranda frames caretaking as a mode of queer desire. Pointing us towards the eroticization of impairment, she deprivileges the objectifying gaze ( “specimen” is derived from the Latin verb conveying voyeurism, specere) to focus on the erotics of touch as an alternative—and more thoughtful—mode of engagement between bodies.

We might liken Tuggle’s investment in the specimen with Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s account of the politics of looking. While disabled bodies have been historically subject to staring as a mode of objectification, pity, and derision, Garland-Thomson makes an argument for recuperating visual recognition as an ethical act. When we foreground the perspective of the “staree” (that is, the individual being stared at) over the able-bodied “starer,” an ethical stare emerges, which—in her words—“is a state of being arrested by and in thrall to the extraordinary.”^[10] In drawing on work by Susan Sontag and Elaine Scarry, Garland-Thomson notes “that staring between humans can be an ethically productive relationship only if the arrested stare transforms into an engaged rather than separated stare. Whether we are viewing human suffering or terrible human beauty, intense looking is a good thing when it promotes attentive identification between viewer and viewed.”^[11] She continues, “We might conclude then that ethical staring is a matter of beholding, of an arrested stare transforming into identification instead of differentiation.”^[12] Similarly, one senses in Tuggle’s investment in the visual valences of the specimen a call “to behold.” Tuggle extends Garland-Thomson’s framework by attending to the relationship between human and object or “specimen and collector.”^[13] The subjugated position of the object, or stare, assumes a place of power when we privilege the specimen alongside its observer.

Beyond its contribution to Whitman studies and the history of both science and medicine, Tuggle’s book makes a profound contribution at the intersection of Whitman and disability studies. Rather than relying on contemporary definitions of disability, she offers readers a compelling portrait of what impairment looked like in the mid nineteenth-century U.S., both informed by and apart from medical discourse. In framing disability as a cultural (and not just scientific) phenomenon, she presents the injured and sick body as occasioning varied social experiences, which bring able-bodied and disabled figures into conversation. Given the field’s more recent attempts to historicize disability prior to the Civil Rights Movement, it will behoove scholars of disability to turn to the rich pages of Tuggle’s monograph to rethink and complexify the ways we define disability, both in Whitman’s time and ours.

________________

[1] Tuggle, 1.

[2] Tuggle, 9.

[3] Tuggle, 105.

[4] Kim Nielsen, A Disability History of the United States (Beacon Press, 2013).

[5] Nielsen, 80.

[6] Tuggle, 150.

[7] Tuggle, 133.

[8] Tuggle, 71.

[9] Tuggle, 21, 45, 11.

[10] Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, Staring: How We Look (Oxford, 2009): 189.

[11] Ibid.

[12] Ibid.

[13] Tuggle, 17.

 

www.whitmanbicentennialessays.com

This article originally appeared in issue 19.1 (Spring, 2019).

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About the Author

Clare Mullaney is a visiting assistant professor of English at Hamilton College. She earned her Ph.D. in the Department of English at the University of Pennsylvania.  Her dissertation, “American Imprints: Disability and the Material Text, 1858-1932,” considers how bodily and mental impairments—from eyestrain and word-blindness (the late nineteenth-century term for dyslexia) to war wounds, melancholy, and old age—transformed everyday practices of reading and writing.

Clearcut, tenure, snow
where the reservoir is.
In the hall of photos, each man

alone on his slope,
smiling up from the muddy question.

*

Here the logjam broke in the ’96 flood. Scientists filmed the churning of rock on rock. Tall cedars along the bank ground into shards. When the fragments are a particular size, when they are small enough, they rise to the surface and float out to sea.

*

In the lost and found, a box of notebooks. One asked about fire. One asked about the weight of birds. One asked if all were lost and a record kept.

 

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The first to arrive were the trees. Second, the wood wreck of an Asian fishing boat: 1,700 years ago the slick black prow. 600 years ago a Spanish galleon. Its metal bent into fish hooks, joiners. Its metal all that remains (the placard says) of the tribe who found it.

*

Lewis and Clark survived on what they named arrow-root while building the winter fort. Locked it against what ran wild. If to speak is to call up what lies buried, who can blame Lewis for his silence? In the rain, in the wilderness of his own mind, Lewis named everything. Green green green: these lives bending and dividing. Multiplying.

*

green of fir green of cedar
green of yew green of hemlock
green of the vine green of the air
through moss green scarf waving
from each tree green to the river
green that falls across it
green that everywhere has fallen
green like a fishing net
green our hands upon it

 

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The pristine wilderness, the untouched plains, the thousand thousand buffalo, the countless bears that Lewis and Clark saw: what looked like abundance was actually absence. Decades before the explorers set out, the smallpox virus swept ahead of them, back and forth across the land until many tribes had been reduced to a small band of survivors. The animals they’d hunted roamed free and multiplied, the land grew thick around them, and passing through, you could be forgiven for saying you had found Eden. Were not those survivors now your guides.

*

Copper and salt: the poor winter
I stretch again and again over me.

*

A grid of short trails unfurling. Tiny flags and hoods nearly touching. Within each frame a scattering of metal boxes. Stuck foil. Tape. So your poems, said the British geologist, there are no people in them?

 

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In one part of the forest, cedars, dying, breathe through tubes. I had tried to find the waterfalls, tried to speak to the woman at the country store, tried to watch the light on the river. Where the cedars lay was a carpet. All on the carpet 

was slowly becoming carpet. I was afraid to remain in one place. I walked a thin path around the cedars, past and up a slight hill where there was still only silence. Two cut logs: a desk and a chair. I sat and nothing in the forest moved. 

Even my life vanished.

 

---

 

Last night, reading, I heard the geologist tapping on my window. For your poem, he said. Outside, the moon near full. As my eyes adjusted I saw a faint white circle etched in the sky, so wide the cedars nearly hid it. A hoop for the moon, a saucer. Spill of its yellow milk. Or say it happened

this way instead, without the geologist: I was bringing toilet paper from the car when the night sky lightened. Arms of white, I saw where the moon, like a leashed dog, had paced its dark yard bare.

 

---

 

I walked in the body of the whale, up-curved branches ribbing over me, exhalations of small spores, steam. The river a long way down. All held still and seemed free of other lives. Here a yellow coral, there a charcoal trunk. Nothing rolled down the hill. The river and the sky were equally far and often I mistook spiraling leaves for birds. 

Where the path turned to shale I turned back. For my son I pocketed a green translucent snail-shell, for my daughter a knuckle of cedar. No bones, no bones. Just the careful green lives.

*

I can no longer hold the explorers’ days inside my own. Terrible rain at the center of their November is, this year, just sun. Burn piles. Small brown birds I can’t name, frost-weighted leaves falling like stones. Traps and jugs and flags: the work goes on while the scientists sleep, or while I do. This morning frost silvered our little clearing, and as morning went on our roofs gave off steam. A van of college students studying epiphytes idles in the lot. Later, the kids fill ice trays from the river. Whatever they are called swims.

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NOTE: The stanzagraph form in which this piece was composed cannot be reliably conveyed on a web-based platform due to the variety of browsers with which readers view the site. In print, you can determine the geography of your page, leading to concrete poetry and other shaped, typographically experimental forms. The Web assumes that the same data will be viewed by an unpredictable array of devices—in some cases, not even viewed, but described by devices for speaking aloud. Recognizing that it would be near-impossible to lineate these stanzagraphs into the justified text blocks within which they were composed and in which they appear in the author’s book’s printed form, we instead present them here as loose paragraphs, leaning into the flexibility of the Web rather than struggling against it.

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Poetic Research Statement

 

Lewis and Clark arrived at the Pacific Ocean in November 1805, exhausted, hungry and cold. They spent the winter in Fort Clatsop, a fort they built by hand from giant northwest cedar and hemlock. Their construction was complete on Christmas Day. The password to their fort was “No Chinook,” in reference to one of the Northwest tribal nations who were their neighbors that winter. After they left to return back east, the fort disappeared into this active forest, and successive replicas have burnt down. Our main evidence regarding the location of the fort is based on traces of mercury in the soil, hints of the mercury-laced medicines the explorers carried with them. By all accounts, the explorers had a soggy, unhappy winter here. I was first drawn into researching this winter of theirs out of curiosity about the oddly sad place-names scattered along the northwest coast. Sites like “Dismal Nitch” stood out to me in a landscape that was, to my mind, the opposite of dismal. I was a new mother at the time, and in my newly fragmented, soggy, exhilarating and yet at times dismal days, I approached this research as if it were a rope I could hold onto while venturing into my own new world.

Over the course of my research, my focus narrowed to incidents of scholarly erasure or elision—to moments in the journey, or in the journey’s wake, that could be seen as failures, but that had largely been spun, in historical accounts, as success, or which had been left out of most retellings, such as Lewis’s murder, on his way back east, of the Blackfeet Indian man, and the peace medal he hung around the dead man’s neck, and the fate of the “Indian vocabularies,” several dozen detailed word lists taken by the explorers as they met with indigenous people from different nations along the way—critical linguistic records that for the most part were never published. I understood these failures through the lens of racism and white privilege, and I was also learning to examine my own research and writing through that lens. As a white writer, it felt awkward and potentially embarrassing to try to talk about my racism and privilege. But the alternative—to plow forward in my work without having to speak of such urgent matters, without having to make myself vulnerable—felt like a continued infliction of my privilege. So I resolved to “fail better,” to expand the scope of my poetry, and the research I was doing, in a way that tried to make visible some of these sites of silence, erasure, and failure.  

So much had already been written about the explorers, and about Thomas Jefferson’s intentions in sending them on their journey, that I did not anticipate finding any “new” information in my research. But three years in, during the November after I had composed “At the Experimental Forest,” I traveled to the east coast to visit the archives at the American Philosophical Society, Jefferson’s library at Monticello, the Library of Virginia, and the National Museum of the American Indian. I was trying to gain a clearer understanding of what had happened to the “Indian vocabularies” that the explorers had collected along their route, which according to many scholars had been destroyed by a thief who had stolen them from a riverboat. The sources I read never spent more than a glancing sentence or two on this historical anecdote. At the Library of Virginia, I located as-yet-unpublished court records that offered the identity of the man convicted of the theft and also indicated that the conviction was quick and light on evidence. At the American Philosophical Society, I accessed Jefferson’s late correspondence, in which he admitted that the vocabularies destroyed in the river did not include the ones collected by Lewis and Clark. Wanting to share what I had come across with contemporary indigenous linguists and historians, who might find a fuller history of the vocabularies useful, I published these findings as a separate paper in Wíčazo Ša Review: A Journal of Native American Studies. A version of this paper appears at the close of Wintering.

 

My research placed formal demands on my poetry. The importance of clarity—of, as a white writer, being crystal clear about what I was saying, particularly in regard to indigenous languages and history—led me toward prose. There were things I needed to explain, things that I knew needed to be included within the work, which was quite different from my previous approach as a poet of sitting down to a blank page and letting inspiration, or mental flight, lead me. This contextual demand led me toward sentences and paragraphs, away from the white space and ambiguity that lineated poetry can often brush up against.

At the same time, I’m not a historian, or a scholarly writer, and wasn’t interested in becoming one. I particularly wanted to resist the sort of scholarly tone I often encountered, one that assumed authority and certainty. While I wanted to be clear, I also wanted to avoid overstepping. One day I picked up a copy of Basho’s Narrow Road to the Interior, and in its haibun form found the perfect formal constraint for my work. Haibun is a sort of travelogue, tracking both inner (emotional/mental) and outer (observed) journeys, shuttling between the two. The form avoids imposed conclusions, preferring instead to lean fragments of prose and poetry against each other. My adaptation of the form includes what I call “stanzagraphs,” roughly six lines long, block-justified. I edited the content of each stanzagraph as a whole, paying particular attention to the turns between stanzagraphs. A stanzagraph is meant to read faster than lineated poetry but slower than a paragraph. This fit the demands of my research perfectly.

“At the Experimental Forest” is formally the loosest section of the book, but I think a shadow of the haibun and stanzagraph forms can still be seen. It is the middle section of the book, composed during a two-week residency at the HJ Andrews Experimental Forest, near Eugene, Oregon. With its thick canopy of cedar, fir, and hemlock and its mossy understory of nurse logs, all wrapped in northwest winter fog and rain, this forest is similar in many ways to the forest in which Lewis and Clark wintered. As in the other years of my research, I arrived in November, so that my dates would overlap with theirs.

The HJ Andrews Experimental Forest is one of twenty-six sites in the nation designated by the National Science Foundation for Long-Term Ecological Research. By design, all research projects conducted in the forest span hundreds of years, as generations of scientists record data and insight in logbooks that stretch far beyond any one scientist’s lifetime. Two hundred years is the minimum.

While the majority of the work conducted in the forest is scientific, there are writers and artists there too. Writers in residence compose new work at specific sites within the forest, recording in their creative work aspects of each site’s changes over the years. This program is called Long-Term Ecological Reflections, and is meant as a continuation of the forest’s mission. Over many decades, writers compose site-specific work and record it in open-ended logbooks, in the same fashion that the scientists record their data.

At Andrews the writers also stay in dorms with the scientists. I arrived in November 2011, carrying a box of books on ethnobotany, indigenous American history, translation theory, and the scientific and creative work that was produced in the explorers’ wake. My roommate was a young British geologist, who was very friendly and who gathered his data along a creek bed in the middle of the night—hourly—through raging storms. It sounded miserable, there was a little shack along the shore, but he was perfectly gung-ho. He politely tried to understand what I meant when I talked about the “failures” of both Lewis and Clark’s journey and the historical tales that have spun from it.

My curiosity came to be about the weight of looking on who/what is being observed. Some of the scientists I tried to explain this to heard my question, and my use of their good clear words—weight, who/what—as encroachment, a literary muddying. Uppity, though they did not use that word.

In my mind as I worked on this sequence were the nineteenth-century large-scale western landscape paintings showing that fall at the Seattle Art Museum in an exhibit called Beauty and Bounty in an Age of Exploration. These paintings, with their shimmering promise of beautiful land for the taking, lured more settlers westward.

Meanwhile I could feel my own looking, my own research and the scholarly tunneling I was getting increasingly deft at, weighing down the story I was trying to convey. Delete, delete, delete—I snipped down a lot of this sequence. But to what end?

I wanted to know what the weight of 200 years—the accumulation of time between Lewis and Clark’s arrival and now—felt like. But, like the scientists there focused on their corner of the work, I couldn’t see it. The forest was thick, and run through with very short trails that were built for scientific access, not meditative walks. I took walks there anyway, amid the numerous bits of colored tape and foil and measuring tubes. There was a cedar whose respiratory rate they were trying to measure as it died. And while most of the sites were marked by number, a few had names that referenced earlier use. “Gypsy Camp” was one whose name had been carefully changed.

As I read about translation theory and wilderness theory, I thought about the early American painters facing the problem of people walking through the scenes they were trying to portray as virgin, unpeopled, purely wild. I was trying to pretend that these woods were the same ones Lewis and Clark were in (close enough! a couple hundred miles!), trying to whittle my days into kismet and epiphany. In some ways this experimental forest sequence is about failure, about the privilege, and the cost, of my noodling. But it’s also about trying to undo erasure, to widen the frame to include what is uncomfortable or painful to see. To admit: to let in.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 17.2 (Winter, 2017).

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Megan Snyder-Camp is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Wintering (2016) and The Gunnywolf (2016). She lives in Seattle.

 

 

 

In Abolitionist Geographies Martha Schoolman challenges the dominant maps of nineteenth-century American literary studies. These maps often register along two axes—a North-South axis of slavery and an East-West axis of U.S. expansionism and manifest destiny—but Schoolman’s book challenges the common landmarks and roadways that often characterize these two mappings, arguing that neither adequately depicts antebellum thinkers’ understandings of abolitionism or the project of U.S. empire. Instead, she insists that writers such as Harriet Beecher Stowe, Martin Delany, William Wells Brown, and Ralph Waldo Emerson imagined cartographies of power and resistance that registered “ground-level contingency” more often than they did hardened lines of sectional difference (15). Schoolman concentrates on abolitionist geographies’ simultaneous negotiation of the local, the national, and the transnational. To put it another way, the writers in her study imagined abolitionist projects that were locally specific and part of a broader hemispheric struggle, including the 1834 emancipation of the British West Indies, which provoked markedly different responses to its potential impact on antislavery tactics in the U.S. Of particular interest to her project is how antislavery writers acknowledged their own complicity with an economy of violence, even as they experienced differing proximities to the U.S. and hemispheric South. In making such an argument, Schoolman does not jettison previous scholarly mappings of antislavery and U.S. empire; rather, she invites a multiscalar reading that places ideology and embodied experience on an equal footing.

Ohio becomes the microcosm that allows Stowe to stage broader national debates about colonization and emancipation, referencing the states’ legal debates about emancipation and citizenship to reveal the relevance of regional discussion to federal policy.

In her first chapter, Schoolman argues that nineteenth-century abolitionist projects throughout the hemisphere were in conversation with one another, but not always in tactical or theoretical agreement. She characterizes these hemispheric affinities as marked both by “temporal dislocations” and “spatial repetitions” in that they demonstrate consistency across various hemispheric antislavery efforts but also a localized unevenness in their struggles. Focusing on Ralph Waldo Emerson’s embodied notion of illness as a way to understand the physical and psychic effects of slave economies, Schoolman unpacks New England responses to 1834 abolition in the British Caribbean and its effect on antislavery discussions in the U.S. (21). For Schoolman, Emerson’s pathbreaking book Nature (1836) was, in many ways, an extended rumination on health and place. Nature was published shortly after both Emerson and his brother Edward embarked on rest cures—while Ralph Waldo visited England in 1833, Edward spent time in the British Caribbean. In their travels, the brothers physically circulated through key hubs of Britain’s slave economy at precisely the moment Parliament debated abolition. Schoolman argues that for Emerson, “health was indeed a location as well as a status,” informing both his philosophical ideals and antislavery politics (26). Paradoxically, while it was illness that pulled Emerson into hemispheric reform debates, he advocated most fervently for the act of staying put in Nature. In other words, Emerson grounded his theory on the benefits of stasis, a stasis Schoolman connects both to the body and to the nation in his writings. By physically distancing oneself from the practice of slavery through what Schoolman terms “spatial dissent,” New Englanders such as Emerson, William Lloyd Garrison, and William Ellery Channing argued for a particular brand of reform that strategically deployed a sense of hemispheric alliance (25). She describes this reform as one of “disunion” by which the hemispheric is imagined as one tactic to weaken a U.S. North-South bond forged through federalism, replacing a sense of national unity with hemispheric affinity. Disunion functions as a politics of “refusal,” to use one of Schoolman’s terms, attempting to free the individual from the transnational constellation of labor and commodity that tethered antislavery New Englanders to a slave economy via “luxury consumption” and “consumptives like the Emerson brothers” who sought health cures (25).

 

In chapter 2 Schoolman turns to August First celebrations to map hemispheric responses to West Indian emancipation and its aftermath. August First celebrations commemorated the abolition of British slavery, but they were not uniform; rather, they manifested themselves in complex socio-spatial ways throughout the U.S. She argues that Northern abolitionists did not simply distance themselves from British emancipation or avoid engaging its impact on the hemisphere. To the contrary, the material events in the West Indies became reworked in conceptual terms. As such, the logistical details of emancipation became overshadowed by its symbolic import—that is, the actual quotidian details were superseded by a narrative of moral epiphany through which British subjects realized slavery was untenable and immoral. Schoolman turns again to the writings of William Ellery Channing and Ralph Waldo Emerson in this chapter to demonstrate the “symbolic performance of disunion,” her term for Northern abolitionists’ belief that political nonparticipation was, itself, a form of radical activism bettering the abolitionist cause. She then demonstrates how both men discursively endorsed a logic by which white New Englanders aligned themselves with British emancipation and slave resistance and productively distanced themselves from proslavery sympathizers as a form of political (in)action (79).

While Emerson argued for the necessity of the bodily and the local, according to Abolitionist Geographies, William Wells Brown embraced cosmopolitanism and the promise offered African Americans by traveling abroad, away from the nation’s racially rigid social structures. In her third chapter, Schoolman describes Brown’s second autobiography, Three Years in Europe: Places I Have Seen and People I Have Met (1852), in which he recounts his travels across Europe. While Brown’s text begins as a celebration of cosmopolitanism, it becomes ambivalent about the actual emancipatory power of mobility for global Black subjects. His travel, Schoolman explains, led him to a “critical cosmopolitanism.” He was unwilling to give up on the radical potential of cosmopolitanism as a way to escape institutional and national forms of oppression, but he likewise realized that such possibility was not viable in the European present (102).

Schoolman frames the final two chapters of Abolitionist Geographies with a discussion of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s two best-known novels, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and Dred (1856). In her fourth chapter, Schoolman overturns readings of Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) that argue for the novel as a geographically expansive text pushing toward the edges of U.S. empire. Instead, she reads Stowe’s novel as one of “spatial conservatism,” very much situated in the local and regional of Cincinnati, Ohio (132). More importantly, it is a regionalism that challenges sectional divides, embracing Cincinnati’s spatial position as a river town lipping the border between North and South, slave and free. Ohio becomes the microcosm that allows Stowe to stage broader national debates about colonization and emancipation, referencing the states’ legal debates about emancipation and citizenship to reveal the relevance of regional discussion to federal policy. It is in her later novel Dred that Stowe turns to the national as a scale for imagined radical political transformation. Schoolman argues that the potential for intranational resistance is symbolically rendered by Stowe’s Dred, a maroon who lives in the Great Dismal Swamp and therefore challenges Southern slavocracy from within. Stowe’s novel embraces the swamp as a space for the active refusal of slavery and for interracial organizing, one where white abolitionist radicalism and marronage can discursively meet. Schoolman argues that this literary trope of swamp-as-spatial-resistance connects seemingly disparate strains of antislavery activism and imagines a geographic locale wherein white Northern abolitionists and African American Southern resistance can spatially convene. Using this logic, she traces the unlikely connections between Stowe’s novel, James Redpath’s travel writings, and Thomas Wentworth Higginson’s memoir to explain how marronage became a way for white radicals to imagine more extreme antislavery tactics, ones that include greater advocacy of black violence.

Abolitionist Geographies journeys across many familiar landscapes of nineteenth-century intellectual thought, overturning prevailing analyses of antislavery movements in the Americas, but perhaps its most compelling contribution is its claims about temporality and abolitionist spatial thinking. Schoolman’s abolitionist map argues for new abolitionist spatialities, but also highlights how various radical antislavery projects functioned out of sync temporally with one another, even when temporally contemporaneous or geographically contiguous. Schoolman’s abolitionist geographies are not just about the maps people make, but about how maps and people move through time. These maps both imagine radical futures and demonstrate strategically synchronic and diachronic understandings of social change. Thus, they demonstrate how both provincial time and ahistorical affinities between peoples, spaces, or sociocultural objectives influenced antislavery spatialities and disrupted teleologies of social progress. There is great generative potential in such a model, challenging other prominent assumptions about space and time in the field. For example, while the West, U.S. colonialism, and Indigenous Peoples are largely absent from Schoolman’s project, one can imagine how this dialectic method of understanding both space and time might be further deployed to rework logics of U.S. imperial expansion and settler colonialism. What Schoolman’s text does depict, however, is a nuanced topography that highlights the contradictory, the quotidian, and the contextual strategies ever present in nineteenth-century abolitionist geographies.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 16.2 (Winter, 2016).

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Kathryn Walkiewicz is an assistant professor of English and American Studies at Kennesaw State University. She is a coeditor of the anthology The People Who Stayed: Southeastern Indian Writing After Removal (2010).

Richard Nixon’s removal of the U.S. dollar from the gold standard in August 1971 has not been front-page news for some time, yet the recent economic downturn has brought so-called goldbugs and their fellow devotees of specie out of the woodwork yet again. Whenever the U.S. economy hits the skids, one can rely on a chorus of voices advocating a withdrawal from the vaporous promises of financial instruments that exist only on paper (or, as is more often the case, in the ether of electronic trading systems) and a return to precious metals as the only true standard of value. These critics often hearken back to America’s past as an exemplar, where people knew the value of a dollar because those dollars were made out of silver or gold. These claims persist in the face of an increasing body of scholarship that shows that the early American economy was, if anything, reliant on just as many enabling financial fictions as we are.

Money is seemingly everywhere in early American studies these days. Not real money, of course (as many readers of Common-place likely know all too well). Rather, the vexed question of money in the early American republic—its many forms, its instability, its scarcity, its centrality as a political issue—is the focus of a new wave of scholarship in the field. Ranging from Scott Sandage’s Born Losers: A History of Failure in America (2006) to Stephen Mihm’s A Nation of Counterfeiters: Capitalists, Con Men, and the Making of the United States (2007) to Jane Kamensky’s The Exchange Artist: A Tale of High-Flying Speculation and America’s First Banking Collapse (2008) to Wendy Woloson’s In Hock: Pawning in America from Independence through the Great Depression (2010), historians have taken a renewed interest in the fraught transition from specie to paper currency in the early republic and the varied ways in which citizens of the new nation sought to make their way in a rapidly changing economy.

But scholars of early American literature have been relatively slow to join this trend, with the exception of Jennifer Baker’s Securing the Commonwealth: Debt, Speculation, and Writing in the Making of Early America (2005). David Anthony’s new book Paper Money Men: Commerce, Manhood, and the Sensational Public Sphere in Antebellum America is a welcome addition to this emerging field of inquiry, addressing the challenges to masculinity that were posed by the shift from an early American economy grounded in specie transactions to the antebellum economic free-for-all, where hundreds of banks issued their own (often worthless) paper money, and the Panic of 1837 in particular cast some of the nation’s most prominent merchants and bankers into bankruptcy. Focusing on a concise set of texts, some canonical and some less familiar, Anthony aims to outline “the inequity between hard money and the speculatory economy that drives much of antebellum sensationalism, and the form of manhood it so often depicts” (3). In his readings of texts ranging from Washington Irving’s “Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and American versions of “Jack and the Beanstalk” to George Lippard’s The Quaker City; or, the Monks of Monk-Hall and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables, Anthony charts the trajectory of what he labels “paper money manhood,” a mode of being adopted by “professional” men in order to cope with anxieties regarding challenges posed to established gender categories by the increasingly unstable paper economy. (It should be noted that, in addition to readings of literary texts, Paper Money Men includes apt readings of twenty-two well chosen figures. These rare archival images are far more than mere illustrations; they are treated as texts in their own right, and serve to illuminate Anthony’s argument.)

Paper Money Men is a somewhat oddly shaped book. Of relatively compact length (186 pages of text), over 20 percent of the book—40 pages—is dedicated to an introduction that lays the theoretical and methodological groundwork for what follows. Of the five chapters that make up the rest of the book, portions of four have previously appeared as articles; the main points of interest for readers already familiar with this scholarship will be the introduction and Chapter 5, which primarily deals with race and The House of the Seven Gables, although it also includes a provocative reading of John Beauchamp Jones’ 1851 novel The City Merchant; or, The Mysterious Failure, an understudied novel that would have benefited from more attention here.

Anthony’s introduction situates the texts he examines in what he refers to as “the sensational public sphere,” a representational space made up of texts ranging from penny newspapers to cheap city-mysteries novels to political cartoons to theatrical melodramas. This sensational public sphere “offered a space in which an emergent professional class of men was able to see itself reflected in a whole range of narratives, virtually all of which were located at the fraught moment of transition … from an older form of mercantile capitalism to the new and much less stable world of the emergent paper economy” (21). Suggesting that the sensational public sphere is the antithesis to the bourgeois, rational-critical public sphere as described by Jürgen Habermas, Anthony identifies it as an alternative space for articulating the concerns of the white, professional male—precisely the subject that is supposed to be engaged in disinterested, rational political discussion in the Habermasian framework.

Anthony pinpoints the origin of the sensational public sphere in 1836, with the surge in penny press newspaper sales in New York City in the wake of the murder of Helen Jewett, a prostitute who was killed with a hatchet and then partially burned in a high-class brothel in lower Manhattan. The newspaper coverage of the murder trial, according to Anthony, sparked the widespread adoption of a “titillating and affecting mix of gothic horror and sentimentality,” while also modeling an “obsessive interest in the career of the professional male” (Jewett’s accused murderer, Richard Robinson, was one of New York’s ever growing army of mercantile clerks) (26). The central claim of the book—one that is played out in the five chapters of close readings that follow the introduction—is that the texts that constituted the sensational public sphere were popular because they offered a “kind of psychic trade-off, wherein the absence of American gold … is countered with other, compensatory forms of currency and value” that provide a “fantasy redress for the failed or imperiled manhood of the new paper economy” (27).

Anthony’s readings, then, focus on texts where professional male figures (although “professional” is interpreted sufficiently loosely to include everyone from Ichabod Crane to Lippard’s urban con man Algernon Fitz-Cowles to Hawthorne’s daguerreotypist Holgrave) seek some form of psychological compensation for the threats to their manhood posed by the potential for financial instability. Anthony’s first chapter focuses on Washington Irving and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow,” gothic masculinity, and the Panic of 1819, taking Irving’s writing in The Sketch Book as a “crucial barometer for understanding the increasingly ‘nervous’ and ‘anxious’ form of masculinity” that was emerging in the period surrounding the panic (42). Viewing Ichabod Crane as the embodiment of modern, paper-based commerce, Anthony situates Crane at the beginning of a long lineage of sensational, anxiety-ridden characters through antebellum literature, although the Headless Horseman is also invoked as the “embodiment of the period’s speculative economy” (61), and his threat of masculine (and sexual) humiliation is linked to Ichabod’s (and Irving’s) parlous financial circumstances.

The second chapter focuses on the Shylock figure in antebellum literature, arguing that Jewish money men are frequently depicted as responsible for the “theft of enjoyment” of Gentile characters (and, by extension, the theft of the gold bullion that was thought to have gone missing from the Bank of the United States, thus destabilizing the U.S. economy). The book offers a convincing reading of a variety of sensational texts in which the grasping merchant Jew serves as a constantly present specter of excessive capitalist desire. In describing what he calls the “Jessica complex”—a focus on the romantic life of the Shylock character’s daughter—Anthony convincingly argues that marriage to the daughter of the Jewish merchant can serve as a form of compensation in these narratives for the financial humiliations imposed by indebtedness to the Jew, and his mortifying demands for a pound of flesh. Readers of this chapter will be able to draw productive comparisons with Wendy Woloson’s examination of the development and persistence of anti-Semitic stereotypes associated with pawnbrokers in the nineteenth century in her book mentioned above.

Paper Money Men’s third chapter addresses “debt and male submission” in the more sensational realm of urban gothic literature, offering readings of the popular literature surrounding the 1849 murder of the Harvard professor George Parkman by his colleague John Webster and of Lippard’s phenomenally successful exposé of corruption in Philadelphia, The Quaker City. Positing a gender formation that he calls “debtor masculinity”—characterized by “excessive affective states of panic and hysteria and by postures of humiliation and submission” (106)—Anthony posits that, paradoxically, it is through the loss of bodily and affective control brought about by indebtedness that professional men are able to achieve self-possession, arguing that displays of affect (as in Webster’s confession, or in the mercantile clerk Luke Harvey’s forgiveness of his former lover Dora Livingstone in The Quaker City) become a form of capital that stand in for a vanished sense of financial security.

The fourth chapter deals with James Gordon Bennett’s coverage in the New York Herald of the 1836 murder of Helen Jewett, arguing that Bennett’s hostile response to Jewett’s sexual empowerment and seemingly elevated class status was a form of compensation for his own financial insecurity and the emasculating humiliation he suffered as a result of several public beatings at the hands of rival newspaper editors William Leggett and James Watson Webb (Anthony writes that Jewett, “by virtue of her cultural capital,” posed a particular threat to Bennett, and that Bennett saw in her “the very corruption and capriciousness that he saw in the credit economy itself” [142-43]). While Anthony’s larger point—that Bennett’s mode of covering the Jewett murder offered something different in the realm of cultural production that initiated what he refers to as the sensational public sphere—is compellingly argued, this analysis of the specifics of Bennett’s coverage of the Jewett case is less convincing. Anthony glosses over the fact that Bennett performed a 180-degree turnabout in his stance toward the case, first strenuously defending the accused clerk, Richard Robinson, then later turning on him (this shift is outlined well in Andie Tucher’s Froth and Scum [1994]). It is also not at all clear that Bennett suffered from any form of financial insecurity, whether real or perceived. Indeed, at the time of the Jewett affair, he was already a reasonably affluent man, and the explosion of penny press readership that the case would spark led to his becoming one of the most successful newspapermen of the nineteenth century. Unless he possessed a remarkable degree of clairvoyance and knew that the Panic of 1837 was around the corner, there would have been little reason for Bennett to suffer from any level of fiscal anxiety. It is more likely that Bennett’s lavish but variable coverage of the Jewett murder (much like his perhaps exaggerated descriptions of his physical confrontations with rival editors) were the product of a mind profoundly gifted at calculating what the public would be willing to pay to read.

As mentioned above, Chapter 5 uses J.B. Jones’ The City Merchant and Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven Gables to address the role that race plays in the compensatory fictions of antebellum sensationalism. Arguing that “narratives about race and racial purity act as a kind of fantasy bribe,” whereby anxieties about financial instability are displaced onto fears of the blurring of racial categories, Anthony traverses ground covered in different ways by David Roediger, Alexander Saxton, and Eric Lott in his discussion of the ways in which blackness serves as a means of negotiating white manhood in the nineteenth century. Showing how, in The House of the Seven Gables, market transactions often carry the taint of racial mixture, Anthony argues that Holgrave’s marriage to Phoebe Pyncheon demonstrates the suppression of racial difference in favor of middle-class financial stability.

The writing in Paper Money Men is admirably free of jargon. However, some readers may find themselves distracted by the book’s too-frequent explicit invocation of the tools of Freudian criticism: there are “primal scenes” of men with gold/excrement, castration is an omnipresent anxiety, and the repressed returns, repeatedly. This theoretical orientation perhaps does not allow space for an analysis of these texts that might pay closer attention to their stance regarding class, but that is simply an opportunity for another scholar. There are also some questions of chronology. Anthony quite plausibly argues that the Panics of 1819 and 1837 produced severe anxieties in the minds of men of somewhat uncertain professional status (particularly acutely felt by authors and editors) regarding their financial stability. Yet, in the cases of the two figures whose biographies he relies on most heavily for evidence—Washington Irving and James Gordon Bennett—both are found to be expressing concerns about their fiscal standing several years before the respective panics. If Irving is writing to his friend Henry Brevoort in 1816 comparing his hopes for financial security to “the dream of fairy-land” (60), how much of the mindset encompassed in the term “paper money manhood” is the product of specific economic upheavals, and how much might be due instead to much longer processes of historical and economic transformation? After all, paper currency had been in circulation long before the texts addressed here were written, and it has long been unclear how much specie the average person in North America ever came in contact with over the course of an economic life. Nevertheless, Paper Money Men offers a provocative set of readings of some key texts of antebellum literature, both canonical and popular, and represents a welcome example of the impact that instability in the antebellum economy had on America’s literary as well as commercial production.

Nancy Isenberg and Andrew Burstein on Washington Irving, Aaron Burr, and the lost political and literary world of early New York City

Professors Isenberg and Burstein sat down for a dialogue about the convergence of their research in one of the early republic’s least-understood political corners.

How does one speak of Aaron Burr and Washington Irving in the same breath?

Burstein: First of all, they shared the island of Manhattan for a good many years. Washington Irving was the youngest in a large family of merchants with both literary and political ambitions. The brother with whom he was closest, Peter, ran as a Burrite for the New York Assembly and was the editor of the Burrite newspaper, the Morning Chronicle. The oldest Irving brother, William, served two terms in the House of Representatives as a Republican. John Irving, a lawyer and later a judge, hung out his shingle at the Wall Street address that Burr had recently occupied. Washington Irving, trained in the law, briefly worked there, too. Just before his first voyage to Europe, in 1803, twenty-year-old Washington had breakfast with Burr and absorbed his advice on how to profit from his time abroad.

Isenberg: Burr’s appeal to the Irvings was the same as his appeal to other young New Yorkers looking to rise in society by attaching themselves to a politician sympathetic to their ambitions. Burr was a patron of the arts—the patron, for instance, of the well-known artist John Vanderlyn; Washington Irving was an incurable theatergoer and theater critic in his New York years and would pal around with painters and poets all his life. His brother William, the congressman, belonged to a literary society and wrote doggerel poems that formed companion pieces to his soon-to-be-famous brother’s occasional pieces. In a letter to his daughter Theodosia, who was Irving’s age, Burr, when vice president, eagerly praised the young writer’s satirical essays about Manhattan society.

How did Burr figure in Irving’s writing?

Isenberg: During Burr’s 1807 treason trial, Irving traveled to Richmond, ostensibly to aid in Burr’s legal defense (though Irving had little confidence in his legal skills and no experience trying cases). He was really in Richmond to observe and report back to Burr’s New York crowd; Sam Swartwout, Burr’s companion who was threatened with prosecution, had been Washington Irving’s staunch friend for years. Present in the courtroom, Irving wrote deliciously about how Burr watched his accuser, the notoriously self-important deceiver General James Wilkinson, enter the chamber: “He stood for a moment swelling like a turkey cock, and bracing himself for the encounter with Burr’s eye.” Burr, in complete control of the moment, briefly took in the whole girth of the man and then with perfect poise returned to the conversation he was having with his counsel—it was thoroughgoing contempt without a hint of concern, and for Irving it encapsulated the entire injudicious trial. Irving’s description of Burr is that of a man of audacity, poise, meticulous self-control—the height of masculinity in this period and the same qualities modern Americans came to admire in Humphrey Bogart and Clint Eastwood.

Burstein: In 1809, the work that established Irving’s national reputation, his History of New York (also known as Knickerbocker’s History) featured a demeaning portrait of President Jefferson (“William the Testy”) as an inept dreamer, whose embargo was toothless and who believed that frothy proclamations could replace the defense establishment; it also included a brilliant send-up of the pompous Wilkinson, “William the Testy’s” favorite commander, whom Irving named Jacobus Von Poffenburgh in the mock-history. Irving appreciated Burr’s political skills and wrote feelingly about the scandalized vice president’s confinement in a dank cell during one part of the trial. The writer was incensed that the government had put Burr in an “abode of Thieves—Cut throats & incendiaries” simply to “save the United States a couple of hundred dollars.” Irving’s short story about an unfairly ostracized stranger, “The Little Man in Black,” published shortly after the trial, also reflected the treatment of Burr by those who had turned on him. Short in stature, he was familiarly known as “Little Burr.”

How did Burr’s rise in New York politics establish him as a possible candidate for national office? 

Isenberg: Burr established his own faction, which offered a different message than that espoused by the other factions in New York politics—the Schuylers (Hamilton’s supporters, who were also associated with his father-in-law, Philip Schuyler), Livingstons, and Clintons. Rather than Jeffersonian agrarianism, he promoted commercial republicanism. After Burr served in the U.S. Senate in the 1790s, he returned to New York and ran for the state assembly at the end of that decade. Here he established an important network of supporters and advanced legislation promoting his brand of republicanism. In 1799, he backed internal improvements and fairer taxes, protested against the Alien Acts, backed debt reform, and sought to enact more democratic suffrage laws. He also created the Manhattan Company, forerunner to the Chase Manhattan Bank. The Manhattan Company, which was initially controversial, was the first New York bank to give banking privileges to the middling and even lower classes. Burr’s reforms were progressive and drew merchants and mechanics into the Jeffersonian party. One Virginian wrote James Madison that the very existence of this bank would serve to make Jefferson president.

 

What makes the folk tale “Rip Van Winkle” political?

Burstein: The story, so popular that it was translated for the stage and performed across the country from 1829 until the end of the century, addressed matters of nostalgia and identity, personal and collective. While Rip starts out ignorant of the larger world as an inattentive subject of the king, at the end of his time-bending journey he gets to enjoy life as “a free citizen of the United States.” His shrewish wife, who dies shortly before his return from the mountains, can be seen to symbolize the persecution of Britannia; his daughter, who rediscovers him after his twenty-year sleep and compassionately takes him in, is a symbol of the American republic at peace. Rip, a good-for-nothing before the Revolution, is transformed into a popular village storyteller, making eyes light up when he invokes the magic of a dreamlike past; similarly, Americans of the 1820s (the decade following the 1819 publication of “Rip Van Winkle”) write storied pieces in their newspapers, celebrating democracy’s universal appeal. Steeped in nostalgia for the Revolution, they are full of praise for dying veterans and dying founders, as they near the jubilee commemoration of the Declaration of Independence. They cast the American past in comfortable terms, progressive terms, even terms of moral perfectibility. Irving’s writings from this point forward, like those of his fellow New Yorker James Fenimore Cooper, chart historical progress by heralding the courtesy and affability of the nature-taming characters who best symbolize the republic.

How does Burr challenge the “founders chic” tradition?

Isenberg: Many who write books about the founders focus on mythic “character” rather than the real political environment, the nasty manner of politics. Much of what has been written about Burr has been taken from unreliable sources, which include accounts fabricated by his political enemies. Few scholars have scrutinized the sources they use when they portray Burr as a villain. As the Judas of the founding generation, he has been reduced to a two-dimensional character, a foil, in contrast to his supposedly more virtuous peers. I discovered that his reputation cannot be adequately explained in terms of character—history is never that simple. Remarkably, many have accepted Hamilton’s views of Burr, ignoring the fact that Burr was his principal rival in New York politics. “Founders chic” tends to ignore the viciousness of partisan activities. For example, the role played by anonymous newspaper editors, such as James Cheetham of the American Citizen, has been completely ignored: Cheetham spent three years filling the pages of his newspaper with personal attacks against Burr. Sexual slurs were his favorite weapon. He compared Burr to a libertine, and his young male followers were called “strolling players”—a euphemism for male prostitutes. He accused Burr of having sex parties in his home to lure black male voters to his ticket and compared Burr’s home to a bordello, with mirrors on the ceiling, for lavish orgies. Cheetham had first supported Burr and later switched sides, giving his support to Burr’s rival within the Republican Party, DeWitt Clinton. Clinton wanted to be governor of New York (and eventually was), while maneuvering to have his uncle, George Clinton, elevated to the vice presidency (which he eventually was, as well).

Burstein: It is worth noting that DeWitt Clinton, lauded in history for his promotion of the Erie Canal, was also small-minded and petty. He published a pamphlet, a self-serving tirade, in the wake of Washington Irving’s success with Knickerbocker’s History, in which he sneered at the modest origins of Irving’s upstart literary set and called Irving’s satirical masterpiece “intolerable.” He wrote of his own literary abilities in the third person: “Mr. Clinton, amidst his other great qualifications, is distinguished for a marked devotion to science—few men have read more.” Irving, he wrote, “cannot read any of the classics in their original language…I find him barren in conversation.” What this proves, at bare minimum, is the stinging effect and enduring power of political satire.

 

What do your biographies of Burr and Irving add to our understanding of the conduct of politics in early America?

Isenberg: Burr demonstrates that you can’t understand the founders unless you understand state politics. The founders were not national figures who transcended state politics; rather they were attached to their states, and their rise to power came through the support they received in their states. Politics was never just about high-minded ideas but was also about newspapers, where harsh battles were waged on a daily basis. Mudslinging in the newspapers exceeded what we experience in today’s media. Democratic politics from the very beginning relied on scandal. Newspaper editors like Cheetham brought the Grub Street tradition of scandalmongering over from Great Britain, and it quickly adapted to the American party system.

Burr’s story also reminds us of the importance of rivalries within parties. Early American politics was not simply a contest among a handful of “great men”: Washington, Adams, Hamilton, Jefferson, and Madison. Nor was it only a partisan struggle. The election of 1800—in which Jefferson and Burr received the same number of votes, creating a tie and havoc in Washington—revealed a deeper tension. A profound sectional divide existed between Jeffersonian Republicans in New York and Virginia; each group, with jealous determination, sought to defend and broaden its power. The New Yorkers did not trust the Virginians, and vice versa; their alliance was precarious and tentative.

Burr’s success was owing to his role as a mediator. In 1799, he united the squabbling Republican factions in New York to support the Manhattan Bank and then again to secure the election of Jefferson. President Jefferson realized he could secretly align with George and DeWitt Clinton, to play off the New York factions against each other. Burr was expendable, and his mediating role was no longer necessary. By 1802, Jefferson was already thinking about preparing his trusted political lieutenant, fellow Virginian James Madison, to be his successor. Jefferson kept control of the Republican Party and kept the presidency in the hands of the Virginia dynasty for twenty-four years, while New Yorkers fought among themselves. Though Dewitt Clinton set up his uncle to run against Madison in 1808, the maneuver failed—it did, however, demonstrate the continuing sectional rivalry within the party.

Neither George nor Dewitt Clinton possessed the political finesse to unite New York Democratic Republicans, let alone build a winning northern coalition. Clinton lacked Burr’s qualities. Burr had a national reputation and strong support in New England, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and the western states—he was the only serious candidate who might have challenged Madison. Jefferson’s break with Burr cannot be explained by character or merely personal distrust—it had to do with sectional politics.

Recovering Burr’s role in politics also forces us to concede that the founders lived in a larger social world. Virtually every one of them engaged in risky speculative ventures—even Abigail Adams was a bond speculator. George Washington made much of his wealth as a land jobber, Madison speculated in lands in New York, and Monroe invested in land in France after the French Revolution. Hamilton’s close friend, William Duer, whom he appointed as assistant secretary of the treasury, concocted a grand speculative scheme in government securities—only to be carted off to debtor’s prison in 1792. Though Burr’s bad investments have been reduced to a character flaw, the truth was that he was minor player compared to Duer and others.

For fairly obvious reasons, filibustering and land speculation went hand-in-hand. In 1805, Burr began thinking about the possibility of organizing a filibuster into Spanish territory. A filibuster was a private army without government sanction. Burr and many of his supporters, including several prominent senators and ex-senators like Andrew Jackson, avidly endorsed toppling the Spanish “Dons” and claiming the land for the United States. Burr was not alone in this dream. In 1798, Hamilton thought of leading an army into Mexico as part of Venezuelan Francisco de Miranda’s filibuster. As secretary of state, Jefferson did nothing to stop his friend George Rogers Clark from mounting a filibuster in Louisiana in the early 1790s. President Madison looked the other way when Americans invaded western Florida during the War of 1812. Monroe, as secretary of war, believed the United States should invade Canada and Florida during the War of 1812. Lest we forget, Texas independence in 1836 was also the result of a filibuster.

 

Burr’s activities are treated as anomalous, his so-called conspiracy a mystery to be solved rather than a reflection of the nation’s ongoing struggle with European powers in North America. From the Revolution forward, America had Canada in its sights and used the language of liberty (freeing oppressed colonized people) to justify conquest. Expansionist aims within a global perspective are missing from portraits of the founders.

Burstein: Politics was the most alluring forum for literature in the postrevolutionary era. Irving exemplifies the type who made his name by writing his way out of obscurity. His clever newspaper essays in the Morning Chronicle, under the invented pseudonym of Jonathan Oldstyle, were succeeded by the social satire of Will Wizard and Anthony Evergreen in the serialized Salmagundi and then, in 1809, the renowned Dutch pseudo-historian Diedrich Knickerbocker. Pseudonyms were used routinely in political writing: Greek and Latin names were meant to suggest grandeur and credibility on the part of the ostensibly unknown author.

What the brash young Irving did was to attach a comic name to an absurd perspective and show how democracy was becoming unruly and America’s political leaders, hypocritical panderers. “An election is the grand trial of strength,” he wrote in a Salmagundi essay, in which candidates come out in force, bringing along their army of “tatterdemalians, buffoons, dependents, parasites, toad-eaters, scrubs, vagrants, mumpers, ragamuffins, bravoes, and beggars.” Buffeted by these and “puffed up by his bellows-blowing slang-whangers,” the candidate “waves gallantly the banners of faction, and presses forward TO OFFICE AND IMMORTALITY!”

Though his older brothers were Burrites and then Jeffersonians, Irving was a moderate Federalist in his critical commentary, until joining his brothers in support of Madison and a new nationalism when the War of 1812 began. Irving went on to become an unofficial aide to Andrew Jackson, much in the way other former Federalists did—even Alexander Hamilton’s son, who was a neighbor of Irving’s on the banks of the Hudson, and whose son was a favorite of Irving’s and his top aide when Irving was America’s ambassador to Spain in the 1840s. As a Jacksonian Democrat, Irving promoted a Jacksonian vision of the West; in A Tour on the Prairies (1835) and The Adventures of Captain Bonneville (1837), he painted chivalric portraits of earthy army rangers and fur trappers, and in a slight twist from Horace Greeley’s more quotable “Go west, young man,” Irving asserted that young American men should turn away from the European grand tour and mark their passage to manhood on the western prairies.

Refusing drafts to serve as New York City mayor or run for Congress (“I would have to run mad first”), Irving ended his writing career in the 1850s with a worshipful five-volume biography of George Washington and a final return to the moderate Federalism of his young adulthood. He is only remembered as the genial author of romantic short stories, which is why I decided to incorporate into my biography of him the curious, winding political path he traveled.

 

This article originally appeared in issue 9.1 (October, 2008).

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Nancy Isenberg and Andrew Burstein—former coholders of the Mary Frances Barnard Chair in Nineteenth-Century U.S. History at the University of Tulsa and now professor of history and Manship Professor of History, respectively, at Louisiana State University—are presently coauthoring a book on Madison, Jefferson, and the conduct of politics in postrevolutionary America. Individually, they recently completed biographies of historical actors from further north whose reputations have been badly distorted by historians and political enemies alike. Isenberg’s Fallen Founder: The Life of Aaron Burr (2007) demonstrates how Burr’s historical reputation has been shaped by his political enemies without consideration of his Enlightenment political ideas and open-mindedness, which appealed to a host of New Yorkers and others. Burstein’s The Original Knickerbocker: The Life of Washington Irving (2007), the first substantial biography of the New York author since 1935 and the first by a historian, situates Irving in Burr-era politics and shows that he achieved his height as a writer not in the way most believe, as a benign romantic, but as a political satirist, lampooning Thomas Jefferson.

The struggle for freedom was a perilous one for enslaved Virginians. Once gained, freedom was precarious, both for newly freed people and for their families. Beginning in 1645, Emanuel Driggus began a forty-year journey to free himself, his six natural children, and two foster daughters. Driggus was adept at courting the patronage of great planters and at negotiating deals with them to protect himself and his family. Driggus arranged fixed-term indentures for some of his dependents and outright purchased the freedom of others. He gained his own freedom in 1652. Driggus’s strategy revolved around his growing livestock operation; he raised horses, sheep, cattle, hogs, and chickens, and he used the courts to ensure that his neighbors, white and black, recognized his ownership of his stock. By the 1660s, Driggus was married to an English woman named Elizabeth and had leased a plantation where he bred horses and grew tobacco. Though some of his children remained enslaved, Driggus’s future looked bright. He continued his efforts to secure the freedom of his remaining enslaved progeny.