Tschachler, Heinz. "'A Sound and Uniform Currency': Edgar Allan Poe's Monetary Utopia." US American Expressions of Utopian and Dystopian Visions. Ed. Saskia Fürst, Yvonne Kaisinger, and Ralph J. Poole. Vienna: LIT Verlag, 2017. 23-41. ISBN 978-3-643-90931-2 (pb). "A Sound and Uniform Currency:" Edgar Allan Poe's Monetary Utopia

Heinz Tschachler

To identify Edgar Allan Poe as a utopian writer may seem preposterous. Poe has traditionally been seen as an alienated outsider, an isolated voice muttering unearthly visions of "Madness and more of Sin, and Horror" (Poelry and Tales 268). Yet, as Jay Hubbell remarked in 1971, Poe is "the most misunderstood [person], and the misunderstanding extends to both the man and his writings" (qtd. in Fisher xii). As if to atone for past misunderstandings, attempts have been made to trace certain utopian longings in Poe's writings. Charles Sanford, writing in the late 1950s, read Poe's relationship to the US American scene as yet another "quest for paradise" (54-66). More recently Terence Whalen, focusing on the economic detern1inants of Poe's career, has identified no less than a "latent utopian impulse" behind the apocalyptic surfaces of many of Poe's writings (Poe and the Masses 268). That impulse, according to Whalen, was spu1Ted by the publishing industry. A similarly utopian impulse, I claim, stems from Poe's observation of and involvement in the world of banking and money. Poe was an obsessive-if not entirely coherent or consistent-student of the acrimonious debates of his time about money, Andrew Jackson's bank war, the panic of I 837 and the ensuing depression, and the nation's inability to resolve the "money question." There are however more than mere echoes of the monetary situation of the time in Poe's writings. Many of them are organized around and enmeshed within theories of monetary value. Thus the tectonic changes in the nation's monetary policy-from Jackson's hard-money policy to William Henry Harrison's advocacy of federal paper money to Lincoln's introduction of a "sound and uni form currency" (164)1 --correspond to strategic changes by Poe who renegotiated the value of writing from satire to utopia and back

1 Lincoln first used "sound and uniform currency" in his "Speech on the Subtreasury," Springfield, Illinois, December 1839; the currency was finally issued in 1862, in the form of the "United States (Legal Tender) Notes." 24 1-1 EINZ TSCI IACI-ILER again. Phrased differently, there are analogies between the fonns American political and intellectual elites thought the nation's money should take and the form Poe thought his writings should take. Yet Poe's utopian impulse plays itself out not just on the level of form and content; there is in addition a psychological level in the fonn of a deep-felt desire for an authority that would guarantee a measure of permanence and continuity also to the currency. Evidently the chief vehicle for tracing the shape of Poe's "latent utopian impulse" is "The Gold-Bug," Poe's famous tale of the recovery of Captain Kidd's treasure by a reclusive amateur naturalist and bankrupt Southerner named William Legrand. Poe's monetary imagination was not however confined to a single tale_ A few years before, he had written "Peter Pendulum," a satire of ruthless egotism and greed that in its revised version, "The Business Man," contains an open attack on "the frauds of the banks" (Poetry and Tales 379), including the suspension of specie payment, which few people understood at the time.2 Just as notewo11hy is "Eldorado," a poem provoked by the California gold rush. This momentous event spawned an elaborate hoax about turning lead into gold, "Von Kempelen and His Discovery." ln an indirect way, the discovery of gold in California is also behind Poe's ridicule of the hullaballoo over the release of the new $1 gold coin in 1849. And there are many more of Poe's writings that, in a direct or indirect way, address the monetary situation of his days.3 For instance the satirical tale published in 1835, "King Pest" (Poetry and Tales 240-52), takes on the hard-money policy of Andrew Jackson

2 Critics customarily have considered "The Business Man" as Poe's most typical literary reaction to the crisis of 1837 (Whalen "Horrid Laws of Political Economy" 383-5). For general accounts of literary responses to the crisis, see Charvat, and, more recently, Gilmore. Charvat does not have a great deal to say about Poe, except that he was in financial difficulties throughout his life and, erroneously, that "The Business Man" was Poe's only literary reaction to the crisis of 1837 (6 !). Gilmore omits Poe entirely, though at some point he holds out Ihe possibility for future consideration (11-12). 3 The number increases considerably if one includes the narratives of sheer terror that Poe wrote in response to the period's unstable economy. See Tschachler, The Moneta,y imagination, and Anthony. Specifically on Poe's ridicule of the gold dollar, published in the Southern Litera1y Messenger of June 1849, see Tschachler, '" Adoring with Tenfold Devotion'." POE'S MONETARY UTOPIA 25 and of Martin Van Buren, Jackson's handpicked successor, whose platfom1 during the 1836 presidential campaign included opposition to re­ chartering the Bank of the United States.4 Another early tale, "Hans Phaall," constitutes a kind of allegorical parody of the life and times of Jackson, then President of the United States and the leading figure in the acrimonious dispute over a national bank of issue.5 Contemporaries also would have recognized Poe's story "The Devil in the Belfry," first published in Philadelphia's Saturday Chronicle, a weekly newspaper, on May 18, 1839, as a satire of Van Buren and his Democratic pa11y machine, much as they would have been able to make sense of Poe's burlesque misquoting, in July 1838, of a Spanish poem to read "Vanny Buren[ ... ] Pork and pleasure" (Whipple 81; 88-91).6 And, not to forget, there was "The Man Who Was Used Up." First published in Burton's Gentleman's Magazine of August 1839, this tale likely echoes a slogan used in ridicule of Van Buren-"Van, Van, is a used-up man."7 It is simple to expose overt discursive structures; often more revealing is what is "not sayable" at a given time. Attending to the latter means looking into what Michel Foucault has called the "limits and fom1s of the sayable" ("Politics and the Study of Discourse" 59). Such discursive limits or blind spots-the discourse fragments that are somehow absent-

4 "King Pest. A Tale Containing an Allegory" was first published in the Southern literary Messenger in 1835; it was republished in Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque in 1840 and again in the Broadway Journal of 1845. Its title probably recalls a cholera epidemic that raged in Baltimore in September 1831. Whipple argues that Poe, like other commentators at the time, may have linked the epidemic with politics (85). 5 Poe first published "Hans Phaall-A Tale" in the Southern litermy Messenger in June 1835; it was particularly well received and reappeared in 1840 in his Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque as "The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall." See also Greer; on the reception of the tale, see Walker. 6 "Vanny Buren" is from "How to Write a Blackwood Article," The Broadway Journal, July 12, 1845, in Poetry and Tales 278-97, quotation 294. For a different estimation, see Mabbott's editorial commentary in Poe, Collected Works 2:376. 7 William Whipple claims that the used-up man is a satirical portrait of Colonel Richard M. Johnson, the hero of the Battle of the Thames in October 18 I 3, who was Van Buren's running mate in the Presidential elections of 1836 and 1840 (91-4). 26 HEINZ TSCI-LACI-ILER reveal the asymmelTical power structures at play, in this instance the banks with their "frauds," the politicians who were unable or unwilling to deal with the monetary malaise, as well as the publishing industry at whose mercy Poe was throughout his brief life and career as a writer. Circumventing such interdictions and restrictions in order to save his utopian impulse and to disclose his secret self, Poe often was compelled to reve11 to strategies that would extend or narrow down discursive limits, strategies such as relativizations, defamations, allusions, implications, and similar moves or "tricks" (Jager and Maier 47). These strategies point to the general perfunctoriness of the process of subjectivization in anteb@llum America, and they are constitutive for instance in "The Gold­ Bug."

"The Gold-Bug:" Poe's Utopia of Trust

Poe wrote "The Gold-Bug" in the period 1841-43, while he was still living in Philadelphia. lt was first published in June 1843 and finally appeared, with Poe's corrections, in Poe/?y and Tales in 1845.8 That the story's theme was popular, Poe knew all along. Reviewing Samuel Warren's novel Ten Thousand a Year in November 184 J he noted that money is a topic "which comes at least as immediately to the bosoms and business of mankind, as any which could be selected" (Essays and Reviews 349). Of course it is possible to say that the appeal of the money theme is "universal." More to the point however the theme speaks to the American 1830s and 1840s, when there was both widespread fascination with and concern about money, banks, and banking. Economic growth then went hand in hand with economic crisis; there was an increasingly bitter conflict over the Bank of the United States, and there was a reawakened controversy over the proper forn1 of money-gold, silver, or paper-and who should issue it.9 A decisive chapter in the farcical story of America's money was opened when President John Tyler in 1841 vetoed two national bank bills

8 This chapter uses the 1984 Library of America edition of Poetry and Tales. 9 Commenting on "the fluctuationsin [America's] currency" and on "the stability of [its] moneyed institutions," Charles Francis Adams noted in 1839: "The subject of money, considered as a science, is acquiring tenfold greater importance in the eyes of the American public, than it has ever heretofore enjoyed" ("The State of the Currency I" 45). POE'S MONETARY UTOPIA 27 and, in 1842, the first TariffBill. Tyler's actions alienated all members of his cabinet (Chitwood 226-44). 10 The business community in New York was particularly outraged. The New York co1Tespondent for the Washington Madisonian, Tyler's official press organ, could not even conceal his disappointment: "Must we ever tumble along," he writes,

with a currency with which a man ca1rnot buy a lodging at night with the par money he sta1ted from home in the morning? I wish the president had indicated more fully a desire to do whatever may be constitutional to remedy this vexatious, ruinous inequality. At this moment the notes of the best New York city banks, which are as solid as the rock of Gibraltar, will not be taken for passage on a New England rail road. How long must we endure this? (qtd. in "The Veto Message" 392)

For how long indeed? As it turned out, Americans had to live with their deranged currency until Lincoln's presidency. Thus the question of America's money was left undecided. It is no surprise therefore that in "The Gold-Bug," Poe's affair of dollars and sense also comes to an end without finishing. The unearthed treasure is brought home, where it is weighed and counted and catalogued, though it is never exchanged for or transfo1med into a circulating currency. About halfway tlu·ough the tale, the central character begins his account of how he cracked the secret code that directed him to the buried treasure. Not a word is lost about what the happy money-finderdoes or intends to do with the treasure.11 Of course we remember Legrand's triumphantly optimistic prophecy that the "bug" was to make his "fortune," which would then "reinstate [him] in his familypossessions" (Poel!y and Tales 568). Neve1theless we

10 Tyler's position on the money question is reflected in an article titled "What ls Money?," which the Washington Madisonian, the official press organ of the Tyler administration, published on December 14, 1841, and which defined money as "metal coined for the purpose of commerce" (qtd. in Whalen, Poe and the Masses 200). For the text of Tyler's veto messages of August I 6 and September 9, 1841, see both entries on Tyler. 11 "When, at length, we had concluded our examination, and the intense excitement of the time had, in some measure, subsided, Legrand, who saw that I was dying with impatience for a solution of this most extraordinary riddle, entered into a full detail of all the circumstances connected with it" (Poet,y and Tales 580). 28 HEINZ TSCHACHLER can only guess how that will be achieved, or wonder whether it will be achieved at all. Seen in this light, the abrupt transition from treasure hunt to cipher solving, from "money" to "mystery," repeats in ideological form the suspension of specie payments. Poe, like many other observers, perceived this piece of financial chicanery as a mere "fraud." Furthermore in this context of negation, the treasure hunt itself, the laborious exchange of the coded message on parchment for gold, repeats in ideological fom1 the real-worldly toils of redeeming paper bills for precious coins.12 Poe explicitly marks American money as an absence in "The Gold­ Bug," even though it is entirely gratuitous to mark what is self-evident. As the coins in the treasure chest are al I "gold of antique date and of great variety," necessarily they are not American. Nor could they ever have been, as the historical Captain Kidd was hanged in 170 I, long before there was any such thing as "American money." The sentence, "[t]here was no American money," thus should be probed for its narrative function. As an index to what is not the case in the contemporary world, the sentence may well allude to the fact that during Poe's time federal gold and silver coins were rarely if ever seen in the channels of commerce.13 And once these coins did come back, they still traded at a premium. 14 Paper bills from another state were considered as foreign money, and area merchants and others who received these issues would sell them at a discount to brokers who then returned them for redemption. 15

12 In one instance, Poe writes about "our great 'moneyed institutions'," with a "surface of Parian marble" and interiors "filled with rags" (Essays and Reviews 1300). On the laboriousness of redeeming paper money for specie, see Tschachler, The Mone/C11y Imagination I 06-8 and 71-2. 13 With regard to America, Poe wrote in 1840, "the coins current (are] the sole arms of the aristocracy" (Poetryand Tales 382). 14 In New York in I 837, for instance, it cost $I.IO to $1.11 in bank notes to buy two silver half dollars (Bowers 230). 15 Awareness of this historic curiosity is conveniently captured in Poe's co1Tespondence. On November 22, 1840, John Tomlin, a minor author who helped drum up support for the proposed Penn magazine, wrote to Poe to inquire if "Tennessee money is current in the ordinary business transactions of your city [of Philadelphia]." Tomlin went on to note, "It is possible that I may thro' the Branch of the Union Bank at this place, obtain a check on some one of your POE'S MONETARY UTOPIA 29

Beyond its function as social comment, therefore, Poe's laconic remark about the absence of "American" money reveals a deep-felt need for a circulating currency that would serve as a stable medium of exchange in everyday commercial transactions.16 The predicament of the currency at once leads us back to the question that dominated American political discourse at the time: who should control the currency, the government at any of its levels, or the citizens, and in what form: gold, silver, or paper? These issues were unresolved at the time, and so Poe's play with undecidability reveals a profound paradox about the monetary situation in antebellum America. Although gold and, to an extent, silver were hailed as "real" money, gold and silver coins simply were not available in real life (overvalued, they were usually shipped to London in bulk, to be melted down and sold for a profit there, hence the colloquialism of the American Eagle taking wings and flying away). Paper bills, in contrast, were available in quantity, though they were o�en-and for good reason-derided as "filthy rags."

Bartl<.s. If Virginia, N. Carolina or S. Carolina money is more current in Philadelphia, than Tennessee, I shall certainly obtain the one that you mention, as preferable"(Complete Works 17:61 ). Generally on "foreign" paper money, see Bowers I 38. 16 The country's miserable monetary situation was a result of a Constitutional impasse. Under the Constitution, the states could make only gold and silver, "a legal tender in the payments of debts," and so they were effectively eliminated from the note-issuing business. Conceivably at least, the federal government could issue and control paper money in two different forms, specie-backed money or credit money declared legal tender by an Act of Congress. However each form then seemed prohibited by the Constitution, which had granted the national government only the right to "coin Money." To add to the predicament, lawmakers in Congress were thwarting the introduction of another form of paper money, the so-called Treasury Notes. Treasury Notes were backed by specie deposits and fully redeemable and were receivable in payment for duties; they superseded the necessity of using specie in settling debts with the government. Notes of this type had been issued by the Federal government in 1812 and then again in 1837 and 1838, but in 1844 the House Means and Ways Committee, which then was dominated by Whig Party members, declared that they were in effect bills of credit (that is money in the form of debt) and that Congress, in issuing them, had overstepped its powers. See Hurst 136-7; Kagin 34-49. 30 HEINZ TSCHACHLER

If the precariousness of America's money in the aftermath of the panic of 1837 accounts for the absence of American money in "The Gold-Bug," the unearthed treasure is also not an unqualified boon: On a theoretical level, the treasure is only potentially capital-seeking investment; within the logic of the tale, it is merely a "golden burthen" (Poetty and Tales 579). The two-part structure of "The Gold-Bug," which leaves the treasure episode unfinished, thus acquires a special significance: It marks Poe's inability or unwillingness to make potentially divisive statements in his creative writings. More to the point, it marks Poe's failure to be truly utopian in monetary thinking for, had he been so, he would have had to imagine a society in which money-and, alongside it, private property­ has been abolished. 17 There is however a third possibility, not explicitly spelled out in the tale, but rather hinted at in the form of an unspoken desire, of a presentiment, in other words, of a latent utopian impulse. That third possibility assumes the shape of a stable paper currency that would serve not only as a much-needed medium of exchange in everyday commercial transactions but also as a social and cultural arrangement of value resting on the general trust of people both in an institution of power and in one another (Strange 106). It is no surprise then that references to trust abound in "The Gold­ Bug." The central character is directed to the buried treasure, that is, to supposedly "real" money, by the details on a "dirty foolscap" on which he has made a "rough drawing" of the gold bug. Yet he finds the pirates' legacy neither by accident nor by chance, or because of his superior skills in logic and ratiocination; he finds the treasure because he trusts these details, the authenticating marks. ln contrast the na1Tator, to Legrand's great annoyance, is full of suspicions, demanding substantiation: "l must wait until I see the beetle itself' (Poetry and Tales 563). This obvious distrust, Kevin McLaughlin points out, registers "the unwillingness to accept a representation, perhaps a promise, and the insistence that something more substantial be delivered. In financial terms, this is the insistence on gold, hence the appropriateness of the gold bug in the scene" (54; emphasis added). What Poe in his imaginative exploration of paper money seems to suggest then is that in economic exchange people must have mist. If they do not, choosing instead to pursue the elusive

17 Such a vision would have been the fulfillment of, as Frederic Jameson writes in Archaeologies of the Future, "the grandest of all the ruptures effech1ated by the Utopian Imagination" (229). POE'S MONETARY UTOPIA 31 gold humbug, only shows that they are living in the past, in a time when indeed there was "no American money."

"Mellonta Tauta:" The Hard-Money Country as Dystopia

The brighter monetary future, of which Poe provides a glimpse in "The Gold-Bug," would be based on a stable and reliable currency. Such a cun·ency necessarily would be a national one, and it would include paper money, a much-needed medium of exchange and a social and cultural arrangement of value resting upon trust. Yet trust is as much a problem in "The Gold-Bug" as it is absent from the fictional hell of Poe's "Amricca." "Amricca" is the sunken world of "Mellonta Tauta," a satirical tale Poe wrote in alam1ed response to the popular uprisings in Europe during 1848, the culminating year of the "Hungry Fo1iies" there, and the year that brought The Communist Manifesto with its sinister promise, "A spectre is haunting Europe" (Silverman 395-6). 18 Poe presents "Mellonta Tauta" as

a translation, by my friend, Maitin Yan Buren Mavis, (sometimes called the "Toughkeepsie Seer,") of an odd-looking MS, which I found, about a year ago, tightly corked up in a jug floating in the Mare Tenebrarum-a sea well described by the ubian geographer, but seldom visited, now-a-days, except by the transcendentalists and divers forcrotchets. (Poetry and Tales 871 ) 19

The "Toughkeepsie Seer" is a barely disguised aside on the spiritualist author Andrew Jackson Davis of Poughkeepsie, ew York, who by the I 840s was much admired forhis alleged skills in reaching the beyond or,

18 Given the difficulty of determining Poe's political allegiances, it is interesting to note that America's major political parties responded rather differently to the revolutions in Europe. The Democrats, by invoking the principle of the sovereignty of the people, were able to welcome the emergence of new nations on the ruins of Old World despotism. The Whig Party in contrast displayed ambivalence, wavering between sympathy for humanitarian reformers in Europe and attachment to legal order and dismay over mob rule. See Howe 793-4. 19 The "Nubian geographer" is the mysterious Ptolemy Hephestion aka Al-ldrisi, whom Poe also used in "Descent into the Maelstrom" and Eureka, as well as in "Eleonora" and "Berenice" (Poelly and Tales 1394). 32 HEINZ TSCI-IACHLER as Poe contemptuously phrases it, the Sea of Darkness (the "Mare Tenebrarum" of the tale)_ Of course the "Andrew Jackson" in Davis's name could not have failed to attract the attention of politically savvy readers, especially since it comes coupled with a reference to "Martin Van Buren." The historic Van Buren, as Poe must have remembered only too well, not only was President Jackson's handpicked successor but had also been utterly unable to cope with the economic depression in the aftermathof the Panic of 1837. The money discourse of Poe's America resurfaces again in an oblique reference to Missouri senator Thomas Hart Benton, who in the story appears as "the great Amriccan poet Benton," though the line "solitary and alone" (Poetry and Tales 884) identifies him as the hard-money man and staunch suppo1ter of Andrew Jackson.20 Tellingly Poe represents "Amricca" as a hard-money country: Among the relics that antiquarians salvage from the ruins left by a disastrous earthquake is "a leaden box filled with various coins" (Poetry and Tales 883). At the end of the tale, the narrator, busily stuffing her repo1i into a bottle as the balloon is about to hurl them all into the sea, declares, "from a hasty inspection of the fac­ similes of newspapers[ ... ] I find that the great men in those days among the Amriccans, were one John, a smith, and one Zacchary, a tailor" (Poetry and Tales 885; emphasis in original).

20 Benton's "solitary and alone" refers to Ihe condemnation, by the Senate, of President Jackson for his insistence on removing federal depositsfrom the Bank of the United States. Jackson had sent a formal protest on April 17, 1834. The Senate fonnally refused to receive this, and it was not until almost three years later that Benton found it possible to defeat the "bank ruffians," as he called the supporters of a national bank of issue. His speech in the Senate concludes thus: "Solitary and alone, and amidst the jeers and taunts of my opponents, I put this ball in motion ... I [now) demand the expurgation of that sentence [from the journal of the Senate)" (Poetry and Tales 1397; Pollin 630). Benton's hard­ money policies became enshrined in terms like "Benton yellow jackets," "Benton mint drops," or "Bentonian currency"-all applied to the $2.50 and $5 gold coins that were minted, beginning August I, 1834. Although the coins were of a lighter standard weight than earlier issues, they neve11heless sold at a premium over paper money; as in earlier times many of them disappeared from circulation. POE'S MONETARY UTOPIA 33

There is no need to discuss "John, a smith."21 "Zacchary, a tailor," however, is of interest. The name obviously refers to Zachary Taylor, who was the last Whig to win a presidential election when in November 1848 he defeated Lewis Cass, the Democratic candidate, and Van Buren, who then ran for the Free Soil Party. Taylor had been born into the Virginia plantation gentry and tried in the recent war with Mexico. In 1848, he aligned himself with the Whig Party, though he disagreed with most of the party's policies-such as protective tariffs and costly internal developments in manufacturing and large-scale agriculture. Only in one instance did Taylor walk the party line-in the Whigs's efforts towards implementing a strong and sound banking system for the country. He even declared that, in 1836, President Jackson had will fully and impudently destroyed the Bank of the United States. Taylor was, however, realistic enough to concede that, thanks largely to California gold, the idea of a national bank issuing paper bills "is dead, & will not be revived in my time" (qtd. in Bixby 133). The statement, together with his declaration that he would never be "the slave of a party instead of the chief magistrate of the nation" (qtd. in Bixby 134), did not make him many friends with Whig leaders in Congress, though each might have resonated with Poe, who seems to have taken it lightly that the excitement attending Taylor's election thwarted his plans for a possible lecture in Lowell, Massachusetts (Collected Lellers 2:7 I 7n.).22

Battling for Harrison: Poe's Psychological Utopia

Affinities between "Zacchary, a tailor" and President Taylor certainly are more than incidental, though as so often in Poe's writings, there is no absolute certainty. It is impossible to overlook the fact that in a letter to

21 Presumably "Jolrn, a smith" is a reference lo John Smith, a nephew of Joseph Smith, Jr., the founder of the Mom1on Church and the author of The Book of Mormon. In 1848, Smith, along with Heber C. Kimball, reached Salt Lake City, Utah, to join Brigham Young, who had become the leader of the largest Mormon group, the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Many magazines at the time, the Dollar New�paper included, carried pictures and sensational repo,ts of the doings of Smith and his faithful, so a reference to Smith is not a real surprise. See Allen 537. 22 On the issue of a national bank, see Holt 272; on Taylor's platform, see Taylor; on Taylor's role in the War with Mexico, see Howe 734-43, 771-8. 34 HEINZ TSCHACHLER

Thomas H. Chivers of September 27, 1842, Poe had disavowed partisan politics altogether, declaring that his "political views" had "reference to no one of the present patties" (Collected Letters I :363).23 On the one hand, this may simply be a diplomatic disclaimer, as Poe only very rarely wrote about current political affairs. On the other hand, Poe had declared in 1841 that his "political principles" were with the existing Whig administration. He even claimed that he had "battled with right good will" for presidential candidate William Henry Harrison (Collected Letters I :287). Critics have found no evidence that Poe participated in any way in the campaign of I 840. His claim may refer at best to his various political satires. At worst Poe's assertion may have been a blatant lie, placed strategically in order to land a governmentjob (Whipple 91-4; Campbell 207). Yet what if in this instance professed and real conditions of existence converged in a deep felt desire? In such a case, Poe's claim would be a clear instance of a latent utopian impulse, spurred by the prospect that, if President Harrison had not died after less than a month in office, there would have been a national bank of issue. Harrison himself rarely revealed his views, though he did make a significant admission at Dayton, Ohio during the election campaign: "Methinks I hear a soft voice asking, Are you in favor of paper money? I AM" (5). Harrison's words excited shouts of applause among the "acres of Whigs" present at the convention. Professing to be a "democrat," Harrison also admitted, again to great applause and tremendous cheering, that he had no hopes for the countTy to prosper under a hard-money currency. Such a currency "but makes the poor poorer, and the rich richer. A properly devised banking system alone, possesses the capability of bringing the poor to a level with the rich" (5). The message, which Harrison repeated almost verbatim in his inaugural address, must have rung sweetly in Poe's ears, given his chronic pove1ty. More importantly perhaps a paper currency coming from a national bank and regulated by a strong central government also would have been the fulfillment of one of this poor-devil writer's much deeper desires, a desire for permanence and continuity, what the German

23 At the time of his correspondence with Poe, Chivers was a doctor living in Oak Grove, Georgia, but making frequent visits to the North. He also wrote poetry, to some reputation, and he even claimed that Poe had borrowed ideas and metrical effects from him. POE'S MONETARY UTOPIA 35

philosopher Arnold Gehlen called "dauer." Permanence and continuity may be seen as Poe's life theme and his condition of existence. "I have no father-nor mother," Poe is quoted as saying as early as 1829 (qtd. in Walker 68). Six years later, Poe writes to Beverley Tucker, bemoaning the fact that he has never known parental love: "I [ ... ] never knew [my mother]-and never knew the affection of a father" (Collected Lellers I: I 16).24 There can be no doubt that both the early death of his mother and the absence of a father left traces in Poe's psyche, much as they impacted his writings. There are for instance no fathers in Poe's major works; nor are there mothers. Such figures are conspicuously absent, expunged, perhaps even denied. It is tempting therefore to construe the central character's name in "The Gold-Bug," William Legrand, as an echo, perhaps even an oblique homage to General William Henry Harrison. The pro-slavery governor of the Indiana Territory negotiated the Treaty of Fort Wayne in 1809 and in 1840 would be elected President of the United States-thus: "William Henry Harrison le Grand," meaning "the Great."

Epilogue: Utopia at Last? Of course to posit President Harrison as a kind of "key signifier," the one signifier that holds the whole argument together and functions as the basis of the reading process is not without its dangers, and I can easily foresee a possible objection. For in Poe's writings, a supposed "key signifier" often returns, in uncanny or unpleasant fashion, as the reader's own reading (Elmer 182). Yet it cannot be denied that the Jacksonian monetary discourse that worked on Poe compelled him to decipher himself in relation to what was not sayable. While he often cited and reiterated Jacksonian discursive norms in his writings, they did not win him over in his heart. Thus Poe's representations of the world of banking and money constitute genuine acts of resistance in more than one sense. For one thing, they mark the formation of a new subject position in relation to monetary practices; for another, they can be conceived in terms of "technologies of the self' that permitted Poe to transform

24 One should also mention Poe's poem "Alone." Written in 1829, the poem begins, "From childhood's hour I have not been I As others were - I have not seen/ As others saw[ ... ]" (Poet,y and Tales 60). 36 HEINZ TSCI-IACHLER himself "in order to attain a certain state of happiness" (Foucault, "Technologies of the Self' 18). imaginative literature does not usually have any tangible effect outside itself. Seen in this light, it does not really matter whether Poe really "battled" for Harrison or not. ln the political arena, there was one man who certainly did-Abraham Lincoln. As a Whig state legislator in Illinois, Lincoln, though he was an admirer of Henry Clay, backed Harrison before the pa1ty convention. Tellingly Lincoln tied his support to the question of a national bank of issue. He had demanded such a bank already in a speech he made in 1832 while campaigning for office himself. He remained an active and loyal Whig until the newly organized Republican Party absorbed most northern Whigs in the 1850s. The "Illinois System" (Boritt 25-39) may have failed, yet it initiated a nationalizing trend that would bear fruit in 1861 when the economy became a central element in Lincoln's patriotic nationalism. As regards a new Bank of the United States, Lincoln's private notes of March 1848 indicate that, were he president, he would "not urge it's [sic!] reagitation upon Congress," though should Congress see fit to establish such an institution, he certainly would "not arrest it by veto" (Collected Works I :454; emphases added). And Lincoln did not. Wielding his "power of regulation," Lincoln, at one time a dedicated reader of Poe's tales and sketches but today of course revered rather as America's greatest president, finally furnished the "sound and uniform currency" that Poe in his writings could only name and rehearse.25 When the first greenbacks came off the printing presses, Ward Hill Lamon, Lincoln's close friend, foundthe president "in high spirits ... and [he] seemed to feel happier than I had seen him for a long time" (215).26 It comes as no surprise that President Lincoln was feeling that way. For the first time in American history, a unifom1 currency was available, a currency, as George Wood had envisioned it in I 841, that would "enable a person to travel, either for business or pleasure, fromone end of the Union to the other, with funds which can be easily carried, and will pass current at par wherever he goes" (329).

25 For "sound and uniform currency," see Lincoln (Collected Works 1:164); for "power of regulation," see Adams ("The State of the CuITency II" 506); on Lincoln as a reader of Poe, see Howells 3 1-2. 26 For the myth that Lincoln had originated the greenbacks, see Boritt 346n35. POE'S MONETARY UTOPIA 37

Wood's vision faithfully registers the monetary uncertainty that plagued the entire antebellum period. And so, I contend, do many of Poe's writings, which also register the deep malaise that had gripped America by the 1840s, though it was not politically practicable to face it. Because of the refusal to deal with the malady, let alone to confront it, "omens of public bankruptcy," to borrow from James Madison (302-10), accompanied America's financial and monetary history until the introduction of federal paper money in the first years of the Civil War. The transition frompaper money issued by commercial banks to a federal paper money based on a more reliable authority certainly constituted an immediate resolution to the problem that Poe, following a latent utopian impulse, had named and rehearsed in his writings. Yet the author of that resolution was the "Yankee Leviathan," as the victorious North came to be called,27 and so it is anybody's guess whether Poe would have applauded it or not.

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27 The term "Yankee Leviathan" belongs to Richard Bense!. It essentially describes the capture of the state by the Republican Party, though the riR lines went beyond the division between North and South. Politically they separated the Republicans, for whom the emerging nation-state represented a guarantor of liberty for all men, against the Democrats, who feared that the growing power of the same state would jeopardize the freedoms of white men. On this issue, see Lawson 66-93. 38 HEINZ TSCI-IACHLER

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