Copyright by Megan Catherine Coleman

2016

The Dissertation Committee for Megan Catherine Coleman certifies that this is the approved version of the following dissertation:

Revolutionary Representations in Antebellum Periodicals

Committee:

Martin Kevorkian, Supervisor

Wayne Lesser

Michael Winship

Matthew Cohen

Robert Abzug Revolutionary Representations in Antebellum Periodicals

by

Megan Catherine Coleman, B.A.; M.A.

Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at Austin in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

The University of Texas at Austin August 2016 Revolutionary Representations in Antebellum Periodicals

Megan Catherine Coleman, Ph.D. The University of Texas at Austin, 2016

Supervisor: Martin Kevorkian

“Revolutionary Representations in Antebellum Periodicals” examines invocations of the American Revolutionary War in novels serialized during the mid-nineteenth century. E.D.E.N. Southworth, Harriet Beecher Stowe, William Gilmore Simms, and Herman Melville depicted this foundational conflict and its ideological legacies in periodicals ranging from the antislavery National Era to the sectionalist Southern Literary Gazette, “quality” literary magazines including Putnam’s and the Atlantic Monthly, and the popular women’s and family magazine Godey’s Lady’s Book. The first two chapters consider novels that address the legacy of the American Revolution in the antebellum South. Southworth and Stowe portray voluntary manumission as a means for forestalling national dissolution or insurrection in inter- sectional novels published in the National Era. William Gilmore Simms counters their approaches in historical romances that dismiss the imperative of universal emancipation in favor of an assertion of independence from incursive imperial and, subsequently, federal forces. The latter two chapters examine how Melville and Stowe reconciled the narrative aesthetics and demands of biography and romance while complicating the cultural legacies of the Revolution in fictionalized historical biographies of a northern soldier and minister.

iv Table of Contents

Introduction ...... 1

Chapter One: Intersectional Sentiments in E.D.E.N. Southworth’s Retribution and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin ...... 8 E.D.E.N. Southworth’s Retribution ...... 9 Revolutionary Descent ...... 15 Moral Retribution...... 20 Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin ...... 27 Civil Disobedience and Higher Law ...... 29 St. Clares and Sinclairs ...... 31 Liberation and Emigration ...... 37 Divine Retribution ...... 43 “Dear Little Children”...... 45

Chapter Two: Incursion and Independence in William Gilmore Simms’s Revolutionary Romances ...... 49 Civil Conflict ...... 50 Tories and Scovilites ...... 54 Rebels and Regulators...... 60 Partisan Warfare...... 63 Imperial and Federal Incursion ...... 67 The Issue of Slavery...... 77 Revolution versus Rebellion ...... 85

Chapter Three: Israel Potter and Herman Melville’s Revolutionary Misrepresentations ...... 89 The Life and Remarkable Adventures of Israel R. Potter ...... 91 The Sage and the Shuttlecock ...... 97 Melville’s Historical Liberties ...... 101 Ethan “Ticonderoga” Allen ...... 103 Exile...... 105

v The Soldier of Fortune ...... 110 The Refugee ...... 114

Chapter Four: Romantic Liberalism in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s The Minister’s Wooing ...... 118 “Perfect” Logics of Life: Samuel Hopkins and Aaron Burr ...... 123 Disinterested Benevolence and Slavery ...... 126 The Sermon against Slavery ...... 131 The Statesman ...... 136 Fate and Providence ...... 140 Inclination and Obligation ...... 145 Providential Liberalism ...... 153

Bibliography ...... 155

vi

Introduction

Frank Luther Mott identified the year 1850 as the “beginning of a new era” in

American periodical print culture that was heralded by domestic literary periodicals of “a finer and sounder quality than had been known before.”1 The establishment of Harper’s New Monthly Magazine in June 1850 was “doubtless the most definitely epochal happening of these years.” The editors of Harper’s sought to “place within the reach of the great mass of the American people the unbounded treasures of the Periodical

Literature of the present day” and published a mixture of domestic and foreign content.2

Putnam’s Monthly Magazine followed in January 1853 and was dedicated to the development of a national literature.3 These new “quality” monthlies inspired a trend toward literary publication and serialization in other American periodicals issued at quarterly, monthly, weekly, and daily intervals. Editors sought to increase the interest and prestige of their publications and stimulate (re)subscriptions and single-issue sales by featuring literary contributors and many American authors published short stories and serialized longer fiction in order to reach broader audiences.

All of the novels examined in “Revolutionary Representations” were originally serialized but have since been primarily discussed critically and historically as volume texts. Michael Lund has observed that the “discrete dates, names, and titles” associated

1 Mott, A History of Magazines, 1850-1865, vol. 2 (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1938) 3. 2 “A Word at the Start,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine June 1850:1. 3 See Mott 2:172. Also see Michael Lund, America’s Continuing Story: An Introduction to Serial Fiction, 1850-1900 (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1993) 46-50; Sheila Post-Lauria, “Magazine Practices and Melville’s Israel Potter,” in Periodical Literature in Nineteenth Century America, eds. Kenneth Price and Susan Belasco-Smith (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1995) 127. 1 with authoritative editions of nineteenth-century novels “mask much of the actual experience” of their composition, original publication, and early reception” – elements emphasized throughout the readings in this project.4 Considering the original versions of texts mediated by the context of the periodicals in which they were published raises issues of editorial influence, publication requirements and restrictions, and the political and religious orientations of authors, editors, and publications. In addition to these conditions of composition, serialized texts go hand in hand with social reading practices. Publication schedules modulated releases and enforced interruptions, situating all readers and reviewers “at the same place in the same text at the same moment” – simultaneity which gave rise to a “sense of community” and a “social experience” of reading.5 Although individual issues were more affordable than bound books, customary distinctions between high “literary” and low “popular” culture were not necessarily blurred or effaced in periodical print culture.6 These distinctions were applied to publications and continued to be associated with specific authors. Mott identified Harper’s, Putnam’s, and the Atlantic Monthly (founded in 1857) as “quality” monthlies and Lund observes that publications issued at extended intervals – monthly or quarterly versus daily or weekly – were typically considered more prestigious.

“Revolutionary Representations” considers serials in a wide variety of publications. The first chapter, “Intersectional Sentiments,” examines the debut novels of

4 Lund 13. By ignoring installment breaks and other contexts and contingencies of serialization, editors of contemporary editions of novels which were initially serialized have created the illusion of “continuous” and “uninterrupted” texts. See Lund 90. 5 Linda K. Hughes and Michael Lund define the term “serial” as “a continuing story over an extended time with enforced interruptions.” See Hughes and Lund, The Victorian Serial (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991) 2. Patricia Okker observes that the shared experience of reading and waiting for the next installment linked individuals with larger groups and granted readers the “potential to participate in the process of national enculturation long associated with print culture, especially periodicals.” See Okker, Social Stories: The Magazine Novel in Nineteenth-Century America (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003) 15-17. 6 Lund 24. 2 two of the most popular American authors of the mid-nineteenth century. E.D.E.N. Southworth’s Retribution (1849) and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851- 1852) were both serialized in the National Era, a weekly antislavery newspaper published in Washington D.C. Although Southworth and Stowe approached the concept of revolution in distinctive ways on the basis of their religious and regional backgrounds but both re-presented the ideological legacies of the American Revolution – particularly the imperative of universal emancipation – in inter-sectional contexts and centered their narratives on depictions of voluntary manumission in the South. Both authors juxtaposed their portrayals of the realization of Revolutionary ideals in the United States with the motives and outcomes of subsequent revolutions in Haiti, France, and most recently, Hungary. Southworth and Stowe had completely different conceptions of the nature and meaning of divine retribution, but both of their novels are driven by this force, and they both invoke pertinent historical, political, and religious dimensions of revolutionary ideology in the Era at mid-century. Chapter Two, “Incursion and Independence” focuses on William Gilmore Simms’s core series of romances of the American Revolution written between 1835 and 1852 – devoting particular attention to Katharine Walton (1850), which was serialized in

Godey’s Lady’s Book (Philadelphia) and The Sword and the Distaff (1852) – Simms’s response to Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin – which ran in eighteen semi-monthly supplements to the pro-slavery Southern Literary Gazette (Charleston). I also refer to Simms’s final Revolutionary romance, Joscelyn (1867) which was serialized in The Old Guard – a New York Copperhead journal sympathetic to the plight of the subdued south. Simms’s novels focus exclusively on the Southern theater of the Revolutionary War and reveal the subcultures and categories that shaped the South in the antebellum era even before the Revolutionary War and Simms portrays slavery as an instrumental element of 3 Southern social order throughout his romances. Slaves risk their lives to assist and obey masters fighting for their own liberation from incursive authority regardless of the fact that victory means the indefinite perpetuation of patrician social hierarchies and the institution of slavery. The third chapter, “Israel Potter and Herman Melville’s Revolutionary

Misrepresentations” explores the only full-length novel that Melville serialized in Putnam’s Monthly Magazine from July 1854 through March 1855. Melville intentionally misrepresents an unreliable source – the dictated autobiography of a self-proclaimed

Revolutionary War veteran who had been fabricated into an unrequited patriot – in a largely fictional narrative that contradictorily adheres more closely to the standards for the “purer form” of biography identified the dedication of the first volume edition released to coincide with the final installment than his supposedly factual source text Melville advances a subtle but searing criticism of the significance of individual agency, the pitfalls of patriotism, and federal (un)accountability in a novel disguised as an innocuous historical adventure story for the sake of having a wide market appeal. The fourth and final chapter, “Romantic Liberalism,” considers Stowe’s dramatization of the shift from colonial covenant towards liberal nationalism in The

Minister’s Wooing – a novel serialized in the Atlantic Monthly. Stowe’s novel is set in early republican New England and features the Congregationalist minister and theologian Samuel Hopkins (1721-1803) as the titular minister, but the themes in her novel – abolitionism, the mediation of the extremities of Calvinist doctrine, and allowance for the legitimacy of individual inclination – resonate with the antebellum issues handled more directly in the other novels she published during the 1850s. The editor of the Atlantic

Monthly objected to Stowe’s earlier attempts to represent the south and incorporate antislavery arguments into her fiction, but The Minister’s Wooing is a text that can be 4 read as a historical novel of New England or a novel demonstrating dramatic shifts in American culture predicated in a religious reading of revolutionary ideology. Taken together, all of the serials discussed in “Revolutionary Representations” interact with and revise the core cultural concept of the Revolutionary mythos while partaking of a contextual quality that Mott refers to as “periodicity” – or the effect of currency – in addition to the social influences and broader repercussions for the national imaginary addressed above.7 In Visionary Compacts (1987) Donald Pease described this mythos as a dominant

(albeit distorted and distorting) historical perspective predicated on the “oppositional” model of colonial resistance to imperial power which led to the Revolutionary War and the subsequent articulation of the terms of self-sovereignty.8 The notion of “negative freedom” – which he defined as the “desire merely to be free from a variety of constraints,” whether imposed by European tyrants, constrictive legislation, or, more pervasively, the past itself” – was enshrined in this mythos (6). This oppositional conception of freedom allowed for the possibility of patriotic liberation from any prevailing powers, be they imperial or federal, foreign or “domestic,” and this reactive libertarianism undergirded Southern secessionism. Pease argued that the core group of authors “comprising what we refer to as our American Renaissance” sought to forge alternative “visionary compacts” predicated on “pre-Revolutionary” or otherwise “non- Revolutionary” narratives of national origins located in “legends, romance, and local gossip” (36). Rather than offering “mere opposition” to this historical mythos, these

7 Donald Pease defines a ‘mythos’ as a “dominant structure capable of subsuming every political issue” and argues that the mythos of the Revolutionary War led generations of authors and critics of American culture to translate “political questions into terms compatible with the revolutionary conflict – with an oppressor and an oppressed.” See Pease’s introduction to James Fenimore Cooper, The Deerslayer (New York: Penguin, 1996). 8 Donald E. Pease, Visionary Compacts: American Renaissance Writings in Cultural Context (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987) 9. 5 authors reached beyond the Revolution to restore the nation to “agreed-upon relations” and “a common life all Americans could share” – a coherent national imaginary – by reminding readers of the “hopes, ideals, and purposes they shared with their ancestors” in an effort to create an alternative “living tradition of cultural ideals, begun in the past but demanding realization and renewal by subsequent generations.”9

Sacvan Bercovitch likewise identified “a tyranny not of the majority but a liberal- symbolic system of thought” and argued that American cultural criticism – whether academic or reformist – was “bound” by this “extraordinary ideological hegemony.”10

This body of generalized historical abstractions was capable of subsuming any and all attempts to transform the “national symbol…into a vehicle of moral and political renovation” and rendered “freedom, opportunity, democracy, and radicalism itself part of the American way” (19). Moreover, he maintained that “[n]one of our classic writers conceived of imaginative perspectives radically other than those implicit in the vision of America” (59); in fact, most nineteenth-century American authors “returned obsessively to the theme of Revolution, or of revolution repressed” (169). The Revolutionary mythos and other cultural methods of “harnessing revolution” in American culture were “volatile” and even somewhat “open-ended,” tending “toward subversion even as they drew such tendencies into persistent, deeply conservative patterns of culture”:

In short, the issue was not co-optation or dissent. It was varieties of co-optation, varieties of dissent, and above all varieties of co-optation/dissent...dissent was

9 Visionary x. This language echoes Bercovitch’s description of the functions of the American jeremiad and Pease later observed that Bercovitch believed that the “mythos of the revolution supported [this] cultural form” and that “any oppositional movement is, of necessity, both structured in this revolutionary mythos and dependent upon that mythos for cultural power.” 10 See Sacvan Bercovitch, Rites of Assent: Transformations in the Symbolic Construction of America (New York: Routledge, 1993) 46. 6 demonstrably an appeal to, and through, the rhetoric and values of the dominant culture; and in every case, it issued a fundamental challenge to the system (20).

Bercovitch concluded that “American liberalism” clearly co-opts but also privileges dissent and his doubt of the efficacy of oppositional approaches is bound up in his mis- paraphrasing of Melville’s injunction that “America was bound to carry the Revolution into literature and all the arts” (169). Melville actually observed that Americans are “bound to carry republican progressiveness” – with all of its co-optations and contingencies – into “literature, as well as Life”; an invocation of the discursive possibilities inherent in a democratic republic.11 The serialized novels considered in this study invoke distinct but discursively connected elements of the republican response to the historical mythos of the Revolution. Throughout, I seek to shift the focus of analysis away from polarized conceptions of oppositionalism and consensus, dissent and co-optation, toward a contextualized consideration of antebellum discourses on the Revolutionary origins of national idealism and conceptions of social change. The “Revolutionary Representations” which follow directly engage a chauvinistic mythos on its own terms and draw out both problematic and productive elements by bringing not only “republican progressiveness” but emergent liberal-national and democratic ideologies to bear in the polyphonic forums of periodical print culture.

11 [Herman Melville], “Hawthorne and His Mosses. By a Virginian Spending July in Vermont,” Literary World 17 August 1850: 126. 7

Chapter One: Intersectional Sentiments in E.D.E.N. Southworth’s Retribution and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin

In late 1848 Dr. Gamaliel Bailey Jr., editor and proprietor of the National Era, “a weekly Anti-Slavery newspaper” published in Washington D.C., reflected on the challenge of mingling “literature with politics” so as to “provide entertainment for lovers of the former, without interfering with discussion of the latter.”1 Bailey and corresponding editor John Greenleaf Whittier sought to win the paper “warmer welcome in the literary world as well as in the family circle” by compensating authors including

E.D.E.N. Southworth, Grace Greenwood (Sarah Jane Lippincott) and Harriet Beecher Stowe for contributing “Moral Tales and Sketches” in support of the “presentation and advocacy of the Great Movement in behalf of Human Liberty.”2 Though these “arrangements” were “expensive,” Bailey trusted that the “generous zeal” of subscribers would “extend our circulation so as to secure us against loss in the outlay thus made, for the purpose of investing the Anti-Slavery Press in the Capital of the Nation with a character and an influence somewhat in keeping with the magnitude of the cause to which it is pledged.”3 “Intersectional Sentiments” considers the serialization of the first novels by two of the most popular American authors of the mid-nineteenth century in the Era: E.D.E.N.

1 “Our New Volume – Important Arrangements,” National Era 14 December 1848: 198. The National Era is abbreviated NE in subsequent notes and parenthetical citations. 2 “Prospectus for 1850,” NE 22 November 1849, 186. 3 “Our New Volume” 198. 8 Southworth’s Retribution and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin.4 Both novels are inter-sectional, center on the prospect of voluntary manumission in the South, and depict characters coming to terms with individual accountability for national institutions and the inter-generational workings of justice predicated on conceptions of divine retribution. Retribution is predicated on an inherently dualistic sentimental moral system overlaid with a Christian veneer, whereas Uncle Tom’s Cabin is inherently evangelical, missiological (driven by a missionary outlook), and millennialist in its anticipation of the second coming of Christ and the radical reordering of human affairs associated with the

Last Judgment.

E.D.E.N. SOUTHWORTH’S RETRIBUTION

The first installment of Retribution commences with a distinction between “tangible” and “intangible” crimes or “sins”: tangible crimes or “sins against life, limb, or purse” may be “legally punished” when “well proved,” but “intangible crimes” or “sins against mind, heart, or happiness” are “amenable to no visible law on account of the

“very spirituality of their nature.”5 Intangible infractions bear the “seeds of their own most bitter punishment,” which is “nothing apart from or opposed to the sin, but simply the evil principle itself, in its final stage of development.” Even though “no law” may seem applicable to the guilty party – “no upbraidings of conscience torment him – no visible judgment of Heaven fall upon him” – Southworth maintains that the “punishment”

4 Southworth’s Retribution was serialized over the course of fifteen weekly installments from 4 January through 12 April 1849. Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin appeared in forty-one installments over ten months from 5 June 1851 through 1 April 1852. 5 Southworth, Retribution, NE 4 January 1849: 4. 9 will “be evolved from the sin” as “surely as the plant is produced from the seed.” Retribution applies this moral equation to two young women formatively shaped by episodes of social upheaval. Southworth’s heroine, Hester Gray, is the orphaned daughter of a Revolutionary War veteran who continued to serve the republic as a diplomat in France at the start of the French Revolution. Hester is a sixteen-year-old whose “earnest, ardent, sympathetic nature” and self-declared “‘importunate craving want of sympathy’” repel most of her classmates at a northern boarding school. Although the schoolmistress urges her to cast aside her idealization of interpersonal intimacy in favor of the “safeguard and consolations of religion,” she informs her pupil about her new roommate immediately after reading aloud to her from “a work on Moral Philosophy,” and Hester applies the lesson directly to the dramatic history of Juliette Nozzalina Summers. Juliette is a refugee of the “horrible massacre of St. Domingo” in which her father and siblings “‘perished by the hands of the insurgents’” and she and her mother only escaped on account of the “‘efforts of a faithful slave.’” Mother and daughter obtained passage to America on a ship bound for Alexandria, Virginia where their status as refugees of the Haitian Revolution attracted “‘a great deal of sympathy.’” The wealthy merchant that owned the ship took them in, adopted Juliette after her mother died, and she remained with the Summers family until her guardian died and his heirs discovered that living “‘too much like princes’” had ruined their estate. Juliette has fallen from the master class of Haiti through the planter class of Virginia to the position of a supplicant whom the schoolmistress – a native of Alexandria familiar with the Summers family and their charge – invites her to attend the northern school “‘to prepare her for becoming a governess – her school bills to be paid out of her salary after she shall have obtained employment.’” The schoolmistress sows the seeds of an alternative, and more 10 exploitative, arrangement when she predisposes Hester Gray to sympathize with Juliette Nozzalina Summers. Hester’s inborn idealism has become a “habit of reverie” characterized by a “want of perspective” and she declares her fellow orphan “‘her own sister’” and the lifelong object of her benevolence, sight unseen. She is “somewhat, but not unpleasantly, disappointed” to discover that Juliette lacks the “serious, gentle, unobtrusive” air which she attributed to her conception of a “helpless orphan” and struggles to restrain her “ardent” feelings and “beneficent” intentions lest they alarm the pride or “wound the sensibility…which she ascribed to the young girl.” Southworth’s omniscient narrator exposes Hester’s “prospective protégé” as “a sinister and inviting coquette” – “a beautiful, fascinating, but selfish, unprincipled, intriguing girl to whom the plain, simple- hearted, and generous heroine furnished a most convenient, profitable, and easy dupe.” Although the Haitian refugee indisputably preys on the orphaned descendent of a less sanguinary revolution, the narrator hesitates to dismiss her protagonist’s happiness as a “‘fool’s paradise’”; it is only such “‘if that pure spirit, which, unconscious of and uninfluenced by the outward and surrounding existence of selfishness and guile, forming in itself a Heaven of hope, trust, and love, could be called the creator and denizen of a

‘fool’s paradise.’”6 At the start of the second installment, Ernest Dent Jr., a co-combatant of Hester’s father who is also a native of Virginia, arrives at the northern school to summon Hester to her ancestral plantation where his own father – her legal guardian and regent – is dying. Hester arranges to cover Juliette’s school expenses for another year before summoning her to “share in her home and fortune”; Juliette, in turn, requests that Hester write to her

6 Southworth’s sentimental allowance for the redemptive potential of even false idealism anticipates Stowe’s treatment of romantic ideality a decade later in The Minister’s Wooing (1858-1859). See Chapter Four. 11 weekly; not out of genuine attachment but to prevent her benefactress from forgetting her good intentions.7 The latter half of the second and the entirety of the third and fourth installments of Retribution are presented in epistolary format, but Southworth only provides an incomplete set of letters from Hester to Juliette and does not include any of the responses written by the latter. In doing so, she only develops Hester’s character and attempts to transform the benignly religious character into a sympathetic heroine through her first-hand narration of the emancipation and marriage plots of the novel. Hester’s first letter mentions that she and Ernest Jr. have called on Thomas

Jefferson at Monticello and reports that Ernest had “a most interesting conversation” with the Vice President (1797-1801) regarding the “gradual abolition of slavery.” They invite Jefferson to visit Hester’s ancestral plantation, the Green Vale, which the Dents are converting into an “experiment farm, worked entirely by hired colored laborers.” The Dents have operated the Vale on the conventional plantation model until Hester consented to begin compensating the “most industrious and faithful” slaves with a “fair but fixed per centage of its profits.” These paid laborers must remain enslaved until she attains legal majority at the age of twenty-one – as stipulated in her father’s will – but the Dents calculate that paying the workers wages “from which they support themselves” should increase the profitability of the Vale by a third and their eventual emancipation should cost Hester nothing. Southworth’s heroine retains the idealistic and principled spirit of her late father and readily applies it to the manumission scheme created by Ernest Dent Sr., which will be overseen by Ernest Dent Jr. Ernest Dent Sr. expresses affection for Hester upon her arrival at the Green Vale, but he soon succumbs to a wound received back at the Battle of Yorktown in 1781 and

7 Retribution, NE 11 January 1849: 8. 12 Hester eulogizes the “patriot, philanthropist, and martyr” for the benefit of her correspondent. Ernest Sr. married at eighteen, fathered a son a year later and, by the time they enlisted in the “patriot army,” Ernest Sr. was thirty-seven and Ernest Jr., eighteen. Father and son “fought side by side during the whole war” and “sheathed their victorious swords simultaneously” but both remained “[f]ired with the love of liberty” and “glowing with gratitude to God, who had so lately delivered them from a foreign yoke.” The Dents set about “giving as freely as they had received” and manumitted their slaves before turning their attention toward the cause of universal emancipation. Before long, father and son found themselves “again, in another manner…brothers in arms, and co-laborers in the cause of Liberty” in the Virginia state legislature. Hester portrays the “halls of legislation” in the early years of the American republic as the “very temples of liberty” wherein “no topic was so welcome as that of the Emancipation of the Nations” and the “freedom of the whole human race.” Ernest Sr.’s antislavery convictions were initially “freely admitted and discussed,” but opposition mounted as years passed without significant reform of the domestic institution of slavery. By the turn of the century, “enthusiasm” toward the “cause of general emancipation” had given way to “selfish (miscalled patriotic) plans of national glory and emolument” that overlooked the continuation of slavery in an ostensibly free republic. Just as the Dents realized that political representation was no longer a viable path toward abolishing slavery in the early republic the death of Hester’s father placed them in the “very peculiar” position of acting as legal guardians for an “infant heiress with three hundred negroes, and a large landed estate.” Hester effuses on the “moral and physical benefits” of their emancipation scheme to a survivor of the Haitian Revolution before shifting the subject to romance.

13 Southworth’s heroine confides that she considers Ernest Jr. to be her guardian “and nobody else’s anything” and, after reading these lines over her shoulder, he proposes marriage. When Hester resumes her letter she mentions how Ernest ridiculed her previous “‘asservations’” that she “‘would never marry, at least until [she] had freed all [her] people’” – an admirable resolution which might have amounted in their timely manumission – after she accepted his proposal. Hester describes her wedding in the third installment and a year elapses in the plot before the fourth, in which she announces the birth of her daughter – “little Juliette” – in a letter dated 1 June 1800.8 Hester also mentions having been struck by blindness while Ernest was absent on an “electioneering tour”; her husband remained absent when she gave birth to their daughter, expressed gratitude for this new gift from heaven, and miraculously regained her sight.

Southworth’s heroine interprets these trials as a “dispensation of [her] Father” and rebukes herself for setting her husband before God and disregarding her numerous blessings, including the friendship of her benevolent charge.9 Juliette reviews Hester’s correspondence in the fifth installment (1 February) and particularly considers “‘one of the lost letters’” in which Hester reports that her husband has been elected to the U.S. Senate and anticipates that Juliette will join their family in

Philadelphia for the duration of the last congressional session held in that capital.10

8 Retribution, NE 25 January 1849: 16. 9 Southworth supplements Hester’s retributive plight with several ancestral curses in the first volume edition of Retribution. The “‘curse of blindness’” is only one manifestation of a “Squaw’s Curse” dating back to Hester’s maternal ancestor’s explosive massacre of a tribe. Her family is also liable to the “‘curse of the sonless’” and an assurance that descendants in the accursed line will betrayed by those “‘they most fondly loved and trusted.’” In the serial text Hester admits that she had heard that blindness was a “hereditary, but irregularly appearing calamity” in her family line during her youth, but claims to have “‘totally forgotten’” about it in the north where the “‘circumstance was not known, or…never mentioned.’” Ernest rebukes Hester for her “‘disingenuous’” concealment of this condition prior to their marriage – an accusation carried over into the first volume edition in which Ernest informs Hester about the Squaw’s Curse prior to their marriage. See “The Curse of Leelo-a-Duskaro” in Retribution (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1849) 20-21. 10 Retribution, NE 1 February 1849: 18. 14 Juliette is acutely aware of a need to maximize her “influence” over her “protectors” and is concerned that Ernest Dent’s reputation for moral principle makes him “[d]ecidedly the worst man” Hester could have chosen to suit her own exploitative purposes. After studying Hester’s representations of her husband to discern what Ernest Jr. “‘secretly admires and worships,’” Juliette postulates that his “‘self-confidence’” is the “‘weak point’” in his character – “‘the object that he most admires, in secret, is himself.’” Southworth’s villainess judges the Senator’s character correctly. Although Ernest Jr. has a reputation for being “a man of high honor, of sincere philanthropy, and of fervent piety; the country said it – all men gave credence to it – and [he] believed it most implicitly of all,” in reality, he was the “channel rather than the spring” of the “philanthropic plans” he pursued with his father.

Revolutionary Descent

Ernest Jr.’s valor during the Revolutionary War and early participation in state government were guided by his father’s ideals and principles, but his ambitious rise into national politics is driven by his own ambition. Having attained his claim to Hester’s property – a plantation with paid but enslaved workers – he directs his attention toward his personal ambitions rather than the realization of the manumission scheme. Southworth’s narrator observes that Ernest Jr.’s “high character for virtue” is “rather circumstantial and external, than innate and self-subsistent” and his famed principles falter when he retrieves his wife’s charge from the northern school. Juliette encourages

Ernest to feel benevolently superior and the Senator, who embodies generational

15 declension and the corruption of revolutionary ideals, allows himself to consider the orphan “a very intelligent and a very worthy young lady,” but stops short of admitting what he “so deeply felt” – “that she was a most beautiful woman.” Ernest’s moral shortcomings lead directly to his downfall in accordance with the sentimental moral equation Southworth set forward in the first installment. Meanwhile, Southworth’s villainess swiftly realizes that her benefactress suffers from consumption and is “‘marked for the grave” but withholds this fatal knowledge because she considers Hester’s misfortune to be her own “‘best opportunity’”; she is “‘sure to succeed in winning’”

Ernest if she pursues him as Hester declines. Matters come to a head when the family relocates to Philadelphia for the first congressional session of the nineteenth century – the last to be held in this city – and enter the society of the nation’s capital. The Dents attend a costume ball held at the hotel of the French ambassador in the sixth installment and Southworth loads this episode with sentimental symbolism. Juliette dresses as “Night” and Hester as “Morning” and the guests speculate that the “‘splendid’” woman must be Senator Dent’s wife and mistake the “‘delicate little girl’” for “‘Miss – Miss Wint- no, Summer…a poor relation, or a governess, or something.’”11 Juliette “painfully” conceives of the “difference in consideration bestowed upon a Senator’s lady and a ‘nobody,’”; Ernest is “piqued into a silent wish that Juliette had been Hester, and Hester, Juliette”; and Hester, “who had the most right to be offended, was simply amused at the mistake.” Hester faints as her husband ushers her over to interrupt a conversation between Juliette and one of his peers, but the guests disregard the indisposition of the “‘young girl that came with the Dents’”

11 Retribution, NE 8 February 1849: 24. 16 until a physician in attendance finally diagnoses Hester Gray Dent with “‘a severe hemorrhage of the lungs’” and she becomes a convalescent. Juliette encourages Ernest to privilege his political role over his private obligations by inquiring what he thinks “‘a Roman Senator’” would have done in his position. Ernest is enthralled by her devotion to his ambition and remarks that she has “‘a

Roman spirit’” and “‘should be a Senator’s wife.’” The line between the political and personal blurs and propriety is cast off when Ernest seizes Juliette’s wrists and refuses to relinquish her; she bites his hand and draws blood and he invites her to wound him again.

Only after Juliette declares herself in the American senator’s power and reminds him of her weakness does he allow her to withdraw to her room. Southworth’s villainess pretends weakness in order to exert sentimental power over the object of her own aspirations though she is surprised that her target has “‘no more self-control than a child’” given his reputation for moral soundness. Juliette recognizes that she has intentionally – albeit prematurely – “‘raised a tempest, roused a lion, fired a powder magazine, invoked a demon’” and, by the seventh installment of Retribution, Senator Dent’s soul has become the “‘scene of a civil war’” between “‘wicked passion’” for Juliette and “‘compunctious affection’” toward his wife; he cannot “‘abandon his passion, and won’t abandon his integrity.’”12 Ernest is conscious of “mental conflict” when he reports to the “new seat of Government” in Washington D.C. where he remains until Hester’s twenty-first birthday and, coincidentally, her death. Hester makes an effort in good faith to manumit her slaves on the eve of her birthday. Southworth’s heroine summons an attorney to the Green Vale and informs him that she is only hours shy of attaining legal majority – if she lives – and requests deeds of

12 Retribution, NE 15 February 1849: 28. 17 manumission for all of the slaves at the Green Vale to sign starting at midnight. The attorney reminds her that she has forfeited her individual legal agency as the rightful owner of the Vale through marriage; she can achieve nothing, even upon attaining majority, without the “‘presence and cooperation’” of her husband. Hester argues that Ernest “‘can do nothing at all’” otherwise: he would have to wait sixteen years – until their daughter turns eighteen – to free these slaves.13 Southworth’s heroine fears that the servants they have prepared for manumission will be elderly or dead by that time, or that Ernest might die in the interim and the Vale fall under ownership willing to perpetuate their bondage. The attorney agrees to prepare the deeds and serve as a witness along with Juliette, for whom Hester requests a deed of ten thousand dollars in bank stock. When Ernest returns to his wife’s deathbed he requests that she forgive “‘every injury, injustice, and cruelty’” he has dealt her, but Hester considers any sweeping pardon an admission that she has injuries to forgive. Southworth’s heroine fatefully requests that God deal by Ernest’s “‘soul’” as he has “‘dealt by [her] heart’” – a blessing her husband declares a “‘bitter curse.’” Southworth eulogizes her heroine in the eighth installment as having been “‘[s]inless in the midst of guilt – disinterested by the side of selfishness – faithful and confiding surrounded by perfidy’”; Hester Gray Dent was “‘the loving, but unloved the gentle, yet oppressed; the confiding though deceived.’”14 Ernest rebukes himself for his “‘falsity of heart’” and cannot help but consider that Hester “might now have lived” had he “cherished” her life and health. Yet Southworth’s antihero is also conscious of a “morose satisfaction” in the “idea of his newly acquired freedom. As the

13 Retribution, NE 22 February 1849: 32. 14 Retribution, NE 1 March 1849: 33-34. Helen Waite Papashvily observed that Southworth avoided the “mistake” of killing her heroines in her seventeen subsequent novels because although Hester’s demise leaves Ernest to his corrupt conscience, the endurance of a deserted wife was a more appealing sentimental plot. See Papashvily, All The Happy Endings; A Study of the Domestic Novel in America (New York: Harper, 1956) 115. 18 “petty” lawyer Hester employed on the eve of her birthday (and death) pointed out, her marriage voided her legal agency during life; her husband chooses to disregard her dying wishes on the basis of a legal technicality. Ernest informs the lawyer that Hester had not attained majority when she signed the deeds, “‘or even indeed when she died,’” as he was in camp with her father on December 1782 when he received a letter announcing her birth on the evening of the “‘day upon which peace was proclaimed’” between Britain and the former North American colonies. Ernest specifies Hester’s time of birth in order to argue that she “‘really wanted twenty-two hours of her majority” rather than respecting her last wishes. He declares the deeds “‘good for nothing’” and instructs the lawyer to burn them before he returns to the capital. Juliette remains at a nearby plantation to preserve appearances but is plagued by uncertainties: Hester’s bequest was rendered “null and void” along with the manumission deeds and she fears for Ernest’s “constancy” since he has been “removed from her spell.” Her mind is eased when Ernest visits six weeks later and informs her that he has obtained a diplomatic appointment in France for the “‘very purpose’” of hastening their marriage. Southworth dispassionately describes Ernest’s and Juliette’s wedding at the close of the eleventh installment (15 March). The Era text jumps forward a year in the twelfth (22

March) as she limits her depiction of the months the Dents spend in Napoleon’s court and “amid the splendors of the French capital” within the “circumscribed limits” of the serial text and only hints at the developments leading up to their “tempestuous” homeward voyage.15

15 Retribution, NE 22 March 1849: 48. The first volume edition of Retribution includes a chapter set in France. See Chapter Sixteen of the 1849 Harpers edition, 76-85. This chapter is titled “The First Quarrel” in the second volume edition. See Emma D.E.N. Southworth, Retribution, A Tale of Passion (Philadelphia: T.B. Peterson, 1856) 212-237. 19 Ernest has emerged from the “delirious stage” of his “moral insanity” and become sensible of the “magnitude of the grievous wrong” he had perpetrated against Hester and “his own nature” by the time they return to the United States, though Southworth’s narrator observes that he remains “an egoist, even in his repentance.” Juliette still loves her husband “if, indeed, the selfish, jealous, and exacting passion could be called love,” but the formerly adulterous admirers “had sown treachery” and “must reap suspicion” in accordance with the sentimental moral scheme established in the first installment of the novel.

Moral Retribution

When Ernest attempts to “atone” for the wrong he did to Hester by caring for their sickly child, Juliette suspects that he is seducing the “beautiful quadroon” nursemaid, Erminie “Minny” Dozier – another Haitian immigrant. An old slave observes Juliette’s interest in Minny and warns the young woman to beware, but naïve innocence is its own best protection in Southworth’s sentimental moral system. Minny recalls this warning while she waits on her master with her customary consideration and Juliette interprets her distress as an indication of guilt. The new mistress orders that Minny be reassigned to the field and the housekeeper intercedes with Ernest on behalf of the innocent slave. At the end of the twelfth instalment Ernest approaches Juliette to seek an explanation and she picks up the pistol he keeps loaded on his dressing table and accuses him of infidelity with the “‘quadroon.’” He makes the nearly fatal mistake of ridiculing the notion that he would be unfaithful with a servant, approaches his “phrensied” wife, and she shoots at

20 him. The thirteenth installment (29 March) opens with the revelation of her near miss and Ernest’s departure to an unspecified location. In the first and subsequent volume editions of Retribution Southworth includes an interlude in which Ernest shields Minny from Juliette’s seemingly irrational cruelty by manumitting her and advising her to go north until, through sentimental serendipity, he encounters Minny’s husband and daughter and reunites the Dozier family.16 Southworth does not meaningfully account for Juliette’s and Minny’s shared geographical origins in any version of the novel even though this context causes the aforementioned incident to take on more than a merely melodramatic cast and suggests a deeper retributive subtext throughout the novel. Unlike Juliette – the supposedly noble Italian orphan – Erminie or “Minny” is the racially-mixed orphan of a wealthy planter who has been sold into slavery by her father’s family prior to the Revolution. Minny was raised an aristocrat and remained unaware that she was a slave until her father died according to backstory provided in a chapter added to the first and subsequent volume editions.17 Juliette, on the other hand, is of noble stock and was raised an aristocrat but violently lost her family and social standing and has only managed to regain them through unscrupulous dealings in the United States. Minny has a beloved husband and child with whom she has lost contact and remains abased on account of her race and legal status – a fact that Hester knew, but which Juliette does not care to. The women’s common background suggests a potentially retributive element of Juliette’s suspicion and hints at some depth behind her otherwise implicit countenancing of slavery. Southworth repeatedly denies Juliette complexity or depth in all versions of the novel in order to cause her actions to conform with sentimental expectations

16 See Chapter Eighteen in Retribution (1849) 89-92; titled “The Dead Alive” in the 1856 edition, 250-259. 17 See “Erminie Dozier’s Story” in Retribution (1849) 36-41; Retribution (1856) 98-113. 21 regarding her immorality. In the serial text, Ernest returns in the midst of an episode of shallow remorse on the part of Juliette and forgives his sinful wife as he hopes to be forgiven. The retributive morality governing Southworth’s novel, and particularly Ernest and Juliette’s relationship, causes his assurance that he will find compassion within his

“own experience of sin and suffering” to reinforce Juliette’s suspicions.18 In both the serial and volume texts, Southworth glosses over “years of domestic wretchedness” spent “united by no tie of mutual affection or esteem” but driven by their own private ambitions. Ernest is re-elected to the Senate and the couple leave Hester’s daughter at the

Green Vale in the care of servants and disappointed slaves. In Washington D.C., Ernest is subjected to all the “toil and anxiety,” the “trials of temper and principle,” and the “wear and tear of body and soul” that afflict “an ambitious man in political life” in a representative democracy. The senator must engage in “a hand- to-hand wrestle with opposition to keep his footing,” but Southworth’s narrator reports that “he did keep it, with great ‘honor to himself,’ whatever might have been the advantage to others.” In the meantime, his wife devotes herself to the “allurements of fashionable society” and becomes the “bright particular star” of the nation’s capital, in which she strives to cultivate a court culture. This “Circe” does not represent the interest or values of her husband’s constituents and she comes to consider “democratic America…too narrow a field, too plain a theatre, for the exercise of her powers” and she wields her influence to procure her husband a second diplomatic appointment abroad. Southworth compares the corrupted democratic nature of her antihero with the aristocratic aspirations of her villainess in the final installments of Retribution. In an unspecified court in her ancestral Italy Juliette encounters Il Signior Ippolyto di Nozzilino

18 Retribution, NE 29 March 1849: 49. 22 – the only descendant of her once-noble line known to her. This “young Narcissus” is reduced to serving as an officer in the Royal Guards in the “suite of Augustus William,

Grand Duke of -----.”19 Juliette confides her resentment of her husband to her “‘cousin’” in the final installment, but he refuses to assist her in killing or leaving Ernest. Before she married Ernest, Juliette had reflected that any individual must either be “‘a faithful servant of God, or a thorough-going ally of the Devil, to get along tolerably well in this world’”; she now scorns Ippolyto as “‘weak,’” like her husband, for both go through life “‘fearing God too much to be true to the devil – loving the devil too well to serve God’” and will “‘neither enjoy this world nor the next.’” Ernest overhears his wife venting her hatred of him when he approaches her seeking sympathy after his “rigid adherence to principle” has prevented him from obtaining the desired results in his diplomatic negotiations and he has been recalled to Washington in disgrace. He seizes Juliette with a “hand of iron,” acknowledges that he has been her “‘dupe and victim,’” and asserts his authority as her “‘judge.’” When she invites the democratic representative to “‘become a tyrant’” and to try to “‘compel’” her to “‘love’” and “‘fear’” him – treatment which smacks more of “‘Barbary’” than “‘Christendom’” – Ernest intimates that she has “‘yet to learn what exquisite torture can be invented…within the limits of the civilized law.’” Southworth’s antihero is never granted an opportunity to demonstrate the darker dimensions of his principles, for Juliette immediately executes a plan to seduce the newly married duke whom Ippolyto serves and depart with his entourage so that she may desert her husband and tyrannize over her relative.

19 Retribution, NE 5 April 1849: 56. 23 Southworth’s villainess explicitly declares fealty to the “‘Arch Fiend,’” unto whom she claims to have “‘given no shrinking, shuddering, divided service, but the whole allegiance of [her] burning soul,” and requests the power to “‘inspire and perpetuate passion, but never, never again to feel it.’” Her request is presumably granted, for Juliette Nozzalina Summers Dent disappears from court within ten days and reemerges as the “powerful and infamous” Baroness Nozzalina whose “stupendous crime and awful doom thrilled with horror the whole heart of the Germanic Confederation.”20 In the meantime, Ernest Dent returns to the Green Vale “old, poor, dishonored, and forsaken” to find the “model farm” – of which the “cheerful willing laborers” were once as “proud…as our patriots are of their model Republic” – reverted back to the “very picture of desolation and desertion.” The prodigal father and statesman is welcomed by a friend who has been elected Senator along with his wife, eleven children, Ernest’s own deserted daughter, and her fiancé. Julie Dent is remarkable for her “fervent devoted piety”; even though she has grown up an orphan (whose father happens to be living), she does not complain of a “want of love,” as her mother did, but conceives of her “whole life” and “full soul” as outgrowths of the “supreme love of the Infinite.” Father and daughter finally discuss the

“long-deferred” – and now “much vexed” – matter of manumission. Although Julie is “determine” to liberate her inherited slaves, she must forfeit the plantation she stood to inherit instead of enacting the zero-cost scheme that the Dents had originally projected. Ernest is surprised that Julie is willing to renounce all the “advantages of wealth, station,

20 In a note to the text Southworth declares that the history of the Baroness Nozzalina is “well known” and refrains from repeating the “loathsome and horrible details” of her fate in any version of Retribution. An anonymous reviewer from La Porte, Indiana remarked in the Era remarked that they were “not quite satisfied” with the conclusion of Juliette’s story: “Were all the readers of the Era as well acquainted with history as Mrs. S., it would be well enough. The hints given awaken curiosity, and leave it unsatisfied.” See “Retribution – Popular Literature – The Era – Its Character and Work,” NE 24 May 1859: 84. 24 attendance, refined society, leisure for the elegant pursuits of literature, the arts, and travel…in short, every good thing that gold can buy, for the favored daughter of fortune” for the sake of religious and republican principle. Julie only remains reluctant to sacrifice her fiancé – whom she insists would never ask her to do so. Her father informs her that after he notified the father of her intended – a local judge – of their “‘purpose in freeing these negroes’” and the “‘great change’” it would make in his daughter’s fortune, he received a letter from the young man explaining that he felt “‘constrained, under the circumstances, to resign all pretentions and claim to the honor of Miss Dent’s hand, and to the distinction of General Dent’s connection.’” Ernest urges his daughter to “‘despise’” her lover as he does and she accepts this slight as divinely ordained. Julie’s faith imparts “‘motive and strength for exertion’” to her father, who vows that “‘Hester’s gentle child’” shall neither struggle nor suffer. Father and daughter manumit three hundred slaves, sell the “impoverished” Vale, and use the proceeds to relocate to an unspecified location in the “West” – an ambiguous zone of national possibility distanced from the ideological axis of northern and southern sectionalism and the snares of the nation’s capital. Ernest revives his “distinguished political talents,” achieves “a high place in State Government,” and is eventually elected “Governor of the

State of -----”; Julie weds a western congressman and her eldest daughter bears her grandmother’s name: Hester Gray. A notice in the 12 April 1849 issue of the Era, in which Retribution concluded, praised the "unusual vigor” of Southworth’s novelistic debut and declared that “no one can overlook the moral lesson conveyed” even though it was strictly causal, not clearly Christian, only antislavery in passing, and predicated on a sentimentally dualistic

25 conception of individual conduct.21 Southworth’s strategic distinctions between “Divine,” “Human,” “Legal,” and “Moral” retribution proved the most controversial passage in the novel among reviewers in the Era.22 The editors of the Era referred to Southworth’s “half-formed purpose” to publish an expanded volume edition including “many parts omitted in the course of its publication in the Era for want of room,” many instances of which were indicated in the serial text.23 The first volume edition of Retribution; or, the Vale of Shadows, A Tale of Passion, published by Harper & Brothers in the fall of 1849 was a pamphlet edition set in two columns and priced at twenty-five cents. A reviewer for Graham’s Magazine criticized this “uncouth” presentation of Retribution and other “meritorious” works of popular American fiction and called on Harpers to issue the novel “in a form which will enable it to take its appropriate place in

American literature.”24 The Era continued serializing novels by Southworth and, in on 8 May 1851, the editors announced that the Era would soon begin publishing a novel by “one of the most gifted and popular of American writers” – Harriet Beecher Stowe – which would “probably be the length of the tale by Mrs. Southworth, entitled Retribution” and encouraged readers to (re)subscribe.25 The serial text of Uncle Tom’s Cabin would ultimately run in forty-one installments over ten months – far longer than Southworth’s

21 “Retribution,” NE 12 April 1849: 58. 22 See “Retribution – Popular Literature – The Era – Its Character and Work,” NE 24 May 1849: 84; “Senior,” “Retribution,” NE 21 June 1849: 97; “Junior,” “Law of Retribution,” NE 12 July 1849: 112. 23 Christopher Looby observes that the texts of Southworth’s novels “are virtually identical in their serial and book forms,” but this is only true of her later works. As this chapter demonstrates, the serial text of Retribution differs significantly from the first and subsequent volume editions. See Looby, “Southworth and Seriality: The Hidden Hand in the New York Ledger,” Nineteenth-Century Literature (September 2004) 183. 24 See Graham’s Magazine (November 1849) 312. The second edition published in T.B. Petersons series of Southworth’s novels during the 1850s features standardized volume formatting, chapter titles, and minor changes in capitalization, punctuation, and paragraphing. See Emma D.E.N. Southworth, Retribution. A Tale of Passion. (Philadelphia: T.B. Peterson, 1856). 25 “New Story by Mrs. Stowe,” NE 8 May 1851: 74. 26 novel. Although Retribution and Uncle Tom’s Cabin are both inter-sectional in scope and center thematically on the subject of voluntary manumission in the Southern United States, Southworth and Stowe had distinctive moral motives. Stowe relies on a missiological (missionary) outlook and couples her representations of inter-sectional accountability and Southern progressivism on the domestic front with a positive portrayal of independent emigration to the West African republic of Liberia. Evangelical Christianity and millennialism are consistent threads running throughout Uncle Tom’s Cabin as opposed to the vaguely Christian veneer layered over Southworth’s moral dualism in Retribution. Southworth juxtaposed the descendants and outcomes of historical revolutions in America and Haiti whereas Stowe’s references to revolution – even these historical revolutions and the Hungarian Revolution of 1848 – are invoked in a religious context and are only political in a secondary sense. Retribution and Uncle Tom’s Cabin offered readers of the Era superficially similar but deeply distinctive narratives of revolutionary social change at mid-century.

HARRIET BEECHER STOWE’S UNCLE TOM’S CABIN

Stowe’s first novel began without preface in the 5 June 1851 issue of the National

Era.26 In the first installment, an indebted Kentucky slaveholder sells the “‘good, steady, sensible, pious fellow’” Tom and the only surviving child of Eliza – his wife’s maid – to the trader Haley. When Eliza discovers that this transaction has taken place, she takes her

26 Stowe added a four page preface to the first (U.S.) volume edition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in which she summarized the religious, sectional, and imperial assumptions undergirding her narrative. See Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Boston: John P. Jewett & Company, 1852) v-viii. 27 son and absconds from the Shelby plantation in the fourth installment (26 June) and Kentucky in the sixth (10 July). After miraculously crossing the partially frozen Ohio River with her son in her arms, she is helped up the bank on the side that is supposedly free by one of the Shelby’s slaveholding neighbors who asks about the reason for their escape and, after hearing that her child has been sold, pronounces Eliza “‘a right brave gal’” who has earned liberty.27 Symmes allows that assisting two valuable fugitives to escape might not be considered “‘the most neighborly thing’” among slaveholders but claims that he “‘don’t see no kind of casion (occasion)…to be hunter and catcher for other folks’” – a civic responsibility stipulated in the Fugitive Slave Act. Stowe’s narrator remarks that this “poor, heathenish Kentuckian” had “not been enlightened on his constitutional relations” and was therefore “betrayed into acting in a sort of Christian manner, which, if he had been better situated and more enlightened, he would not have been left to do.” The passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was one of the primary motivations for the composition of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and she depicts a range of characters –fugitive slaves, slaveholders, and a senator’s wife – willing to dispute or disregard the unlimited legal authority of slaveholders over their slaves. Stowe portrays civil disobedience in favor of adherence to higher law throughout Uncle Tom’s Cabin – an outlook on social order pertinent for the possibility of revolution (in both political and religious senses) in the United States during the mid-nineteenth century.28 Symmes directs Eliza to the Burr household because he rightly assumes that the Christian ethics of the wife of an Ohio senator will incline her to assist these fugitives, regardless of the laws of the land.

27 UTC, NE 10 July 1851: 109. 28 For a thorough examination of rationalizations of higher law in the antislavery movement see George Edward Carter, The Use of the Doctrine of Higher Law in the American Anti-Slavery Crusade, 1830-1850 (Ph.D. Thesis: University of Oregon, 1970). 28

Civil Disobedience and Higher Law

In the eighth installment (24 July 1851) Stowe introduces a fictional Ohio senator named John Burr and his wife, Mary.29 The senator hails from the border city of Cincinnati and is sensible of a need for inter-sectional comity; to this end, he has promoted the Fugitive Slave Act as a means for bridging the ideological and socio- economic divide between North and South. When he returns home, his wife inquires whether he truly believes that political compromise trumps Christian charity and vows to break this “‘shameful, wicked, abominable law’” the “‘first time’” she gets a chance which, coincidentally, occurs moments later when Eliza and Harry arrive seeking assistance.30 Mary Burr justifies civil disobedience through adherence to a higher law which supersedes flawed human jurisprudence; she “‘can read her Bible’” and chooses to follow God’s law. When the senator attempts to dismiss her argument for scriptural primacy as mere “‘private feeling’” that must be “‘put aside’” in service of the “‘great public interests involved,’” Mary appeals to their shared morality.

Amy Schrager Lang has argued that Stowe draws an absolute distinction between

“private feeling and public action” and keeps the “separate spheres of men and women” intact.31 The “moral purity” of the senator’s wife is predicated on her “exclusion from the realm of public affairs” and is “a luxury of dependence: she has no constituency to

29 The Ohio senator’s surname is Burr in the Era text and Bird in the first and subsequent volume editions of Stowe’s novel. 30 UTC, NE 24 July 1851: 118. 31 See Amy Schrager Lang, Prophetic Woman: Anne Hutchinson and the Problem of Dissent in the Literature of New England (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987) 199-201. 29 please, no bread to win.” Lang assumes that the Burr’s “act of private charity…has no effect whatsoever” on the Senator’s public position; yet the moral scheme of Stowe’s novel is predicated on the capacity of the personal and private to influence and guide the public. Stowe’s narrator remarks that when the senator “scouted” the “sentimental weakness” of elected representatives willing to “put the welfare of a few miserable fugitives before great state interests,” his “idea” of a fugitive was limited to the “letters that spell the word or at the most, the image of a little newspaper picture of a man with a stick and bundle with ‘Ran away from the subscriber’ under it.”32 Stowe portrays the flow of influence between the Burrs as ideal; the Shelby’s marriage is dysfunctional by contrast. When the “noble-hearted” man is profoundly persuaded by the “magic of the real presence of distress” in the forms of Eliza and Harry, his private initiative contradicts

– and, in the sentimental moral discourse of Stowe’s novel, corrects – his politicking. Unlike Senator Dent in Southworth’s Retribution, Senator Burr readily complies with his wife’s pious principles and his public stance proves hypocritical – not his private praxis. Stowe’s representative differs from the morally compromised Dent and the “great men” she sarcastically credits with “outdoing themselves in declaiming against the foreign slave trade” and sarcastically begs the world not to consider “entirely destitute of humanity.”33 Stowe’s justification of civil disobedience and her references to revolution in the early installments of Uncle Tom’s Cabin are more religious than political; she anticipates the second coming and last judgment as a radical reordering of human society in accordance with religious precepts. Universal emancipation must be achieved in order to

32 UTC, NE 31 July 1851: 121. 33 UTC, NE 28 August 1851: 137. This quip at the conclusion of the chapter titled “Select Incident of Lawful Trade” condemns the political program of the American Colonization Society. 30 align human affairs with scriptural precepts and herald Christ’s kingdom on earth. Americans must make their practices and laws consistent with its foundational ideals and scripture in order to shield the United States from God’s wrath, manifested in the forms of disunion and insurrection. Stowe’s missiological outlook connects her vision of national reform with a broader conception of global conversion and both enter her narrative through depictions of characters who simultaneously acknowledge social and religious responsibilities. International revolutions and the foundation of new republics like Liberia on the basis of the American model are invoked in later installments, but throughout most of the serial text (and subsequent volume editions) the primary form of revolution referenced by Stowe is promised in the gospel.

St. Clares and Sinclairs

Stowe segues between the Kentucky and New Orleans episodes of Uncle Tom’s Cabin through a second transaction in the fourteenth installment (11 September 1851). Tom encounters Evangeline St. Clare, better known as Eva – the only child of “a young gentleman of fortune and family resident in New Orleans” – as he travels down the

Mississippi River with the trader Haley. The slave solidifies Eva’s assurance that her father can purchase him when he rescues her after she plunges into the river. The majority of the installments between 11 September 1851 and 8 January 1852 portray the effects of slavery upon representative members of a sectionally divided family: the southern St. Clares and northern “Sinclairs.”34 Eva’s father, Augustine St. Clare, has

34 Augustine’s northern cousin Ophelia is introduced as “Ophelia St. Clare” in the fifteenth installment but Stowe mentions that this surname is “commonly contracted” into “Sinclaire” in Vermont. See UTC, NE 18 31 repeatedly bridged the distance between the branches of his family – at least until he experienced love and inter-sectional disillusionment after graduating from a northern college. Augustine has ventured north again with his daughter to visit relatives in Vermont and is returning south with a northern cousin in tow. Ophelia Sinclair cared for Augustine during his displaced youth, taught him the catechism, and their relationship remains remarkably candid. Augustine has persuaded Ophelia, whom Stowe characterizes as “a living impersonation of the New England States” and the “absolute bond-slave of the ‘ought,’” that the “‘path of duty’” leads to New Orleans where she is to care for Eva on account of the constitutional indisposition of her southern mother.35 As the realities of southern life reveal the painful facts of the peculiar institution, Ophelia is impelled to inquire whether her Southern cousin considers slavery to be “‘right or wrong’” and Augustine circumvents her “‘horrid New England directness’” with a lengthy discourse on social inequality.36 He admits that the “‘whole frame-work of society, both in Europe and America,’” is predicated upon the “‘lower class’” being

“‘used up, body, soul, and spirit, for the good of the upper’”37; slavery simply “‘sets the thing before the eyes of the civilized world in a more tangible form.’”38 Slavery in the American South is a “‘more bold and palpable infringement of human rights’” than relationships between the “‘English aristocracy’” and proletariat or “‘capitalists’” and wage-earners in the northern states even though the latter are “‘as much at the will of [their] employer as if [they] were sold to him…the capitalist can starve them to death.’”

September 1851: 149. “Squire Sinclaire” becomes “Squire Sinclair” in the twentieth installment. See UTC, NE 23 October 1851: 169. I use the regional vernacular “Sinclair” in this reading to emphasize Ophelia’s sectional identification, though Stowe customarily refers to her character as “Miss Ophelia.” 35 UTC, NE 18 September 1851: 149-50. 36 UTC, NE 25 September 1851: 154. 37 UTC, NE 9 October 1851: 162. 38 UTC, NE 23 October 1851: 169. 32 In the nineteenth installment (16 October 1851) Augustine finally admits that the “thing itself” – the socio-economic institution of slavery – is the “‘essence of all abuse’” and that the “‘only reason why the land don’t sink under it, like Sodom and Gomorrah, is because it is used in a way infinitely better than it is.’”39 Augustine St. Clare is not a believer in spite of the strong faith of his late mother, his daughter, and his northern cousin. Regardless, Stowe has him echo the millennialist eschatology that courses throughout her novel in a dreadful wish that the “‘whole country would sink, and hide all this injustice and misery from the light’” and confession that he would be willing to “‘sink with it.’”40 In the twenty-first installment (6 November 1851) Augustine checks his northern cousin’s presumptions regarding Southern morality when he acquires a young slave named Topsy for her to educate and elevate. He convinces

Ophelia to take on the task only after explaining that giving the abused slave child “‘a good orthodox New England bringing up’” is her Christian duty and “‘might be a real missionary work.’”41 In the twenty-second installment (13 November), Augustine – a conscientious and unsuccessful slaveholder – debates the morality of slavery with his complacent and successful brother, Alfred. When Alfred’s son, Henrique, strikes his slave, Eva reproves her cousin and her father asks Alfred whether his son’s conduct demonstrates “‘what we may call republican education?’”42 Alfred ridicules the pretext that “‘[a]ll men are born free and equal’” as “‘one of Tom Jefferson’s pieces of French sentiment and humbug’”; “‘we can see plainly enough that all men are not born free, nor born equal, they are born

39 UTC, NE 16 October: 165. 40 Stowe anticipated both revolution and revelation in “Concluding Remarks.” See UTC, NE 1 April 1852: 53. 41 UTC, NE 6 November 1851: 178. 42 UTC, NE 20 November 1851: 185. 33 anything else.’” The patrician St. Clare maintains that only “‘the educated, the intelligent, the wealthy, the refined…ought to have equal rights and not the canaille” and, when Augustine refers to revolutions in France and Haiti, Alfred assures him that if the master class would resist “‘all this educating, elevating talk’” they could forestall upheaval in the United States. Augustine maintains that “‘if there is anything…revealed with the strength of a Divine law in our times, it is that the masses are to rise, and the under class become the upper one’” – eschatology that is simultaneously social and spiritual. Alfred St. Clare defuses his brother’s threat of revolution by quipping that Augustine’s “‘Red Republican humbugs’” could make him “‘a famous stump orator.’” Sarcasm aside, Eva urges her father – whom she knows to be “‘such a good man’” with “‘a way of saying things that is so pleasant’” – to “‘go all round and try to persuade people to do right.’” Augustine is too distraught over her declining health to seriously consider the cause she requests him to represent in her memory and stead. Moreover, he is convinced that “‘[o]ne man can do nothing, against the whole action of a community’” and dismisses his potential for public advocacy and private reform out of hand. Eva defies her father’s dismissal of individual agency by leading an affective and evangelical revolution within her own small sphere. By opening the hearts of the slave Topsy and

Ophelia, among others, to redemptive love, the Southern child demonstrates Stowe’s conviction that affective evangelism is more efficacious than any political initiative. Jane Tompkins has observed that although Stowe’s evangelistic appeals through the character of Eva “may seem saccharine or merely pathetic to us…her language had power to move hundreds of thousands of readers in the nineteenth century because they believed in the spiritual elevation of a simple childlike idiom, in the spiritual efficacy of

34 ‘sudden burst[s] of feeling,’ and in the efficacy of what is spiritual in general.”43 Eva affirms the “potential of every person, man, woman, or child, to live and die as Christ did” and her death enacts

a philosophy, as much political as religious, in which the pure and powerless die

to save the powerful and corrupt, and thereby show themselves more powerful than those they save. They enact, in short, a theory of power in which the ordinary or ‘common sense’ view of what is efficacious and what is not (a view to which

most modern critics are committed) is simply reversed, as the very possibility of social action is made dependent on the action taking place in individual hearts (Tompkins 127-28).

Shortly after Eva dies, Ophelia providentially compels her Southern cousin to give Topsy to her “‘legally’” – at least “‘by a fiction of law’” – so that she will have “‘a right to take her to the free states and give her liberty’” regardless of local contingencies.44 Her resolution reminds him of the “‘good work’” of representation on which his daughter had “‘set her little simple soul’” for himself and, in the twenty-eighth installment (1 January

1852), Augustine resolves to cease being complicit in the institution of slavery. Augustine intends to begin performing his “‘duty’” to his own servants and anticipates that he might someday do “‘something to save [his] country from the disgrace of the false position in which she now stands before all civilized nations’” given the rhetoric of the Revolution and early republic and the realities of slavery.45 He

43 See Tompkins, Sensational Designs: The Cultural Work of American Fiction, 1790-1860 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985) xviii. 44 UTC, NE 25 December 1851: 205. 45 UTC, NE 1 January 1852: 1. 35 optimistically describes the present as “‘a day of great deeds’” when “‘[h]eroism and disinterestedness are rising up, here and there’” and refers to the Hungarian Revolution of 1848. The example of Hungarian nobles liberating “‘millions of serfs at an immense pecuniary loss’” might be emulated by “‘generous spirits’” in the American South “‘who do not estimate honor and justice by dollars and cents.’” His vision for national reform, however, involves extensive inter-sectional exchange, and he remains uncertain whether the Northern states possess sufficient “‘Christian philanthropy’” to educate and uplift freed slaves and former masters. Stowe considers Ophelia Sinclair a representative of the the “‘many good people at the North’” who “‘only need to be taught what their duty is, to do it,’” and she plans to introduce the notion of national responsibility for reparations within her own circle.46 Augustine is fatally wounded when he intervenes in a brawl that very evening and dies without even manumitting his own slaves. Stowe describes the fate of the eponymous Tom in the installments published in early 1852. Tom is sold a third time to Simon Legree, a northern-born autocrat who exploits ever resource on his decrepit but profitable Red River cotton plantation. Legree intends to make Tom a “‘driver or managing chap’” but he resists and manages to evangelize some of his fellow slaves instead, including a quadroon named Cassy whom

Stowe later reveals to be Eliza’s mother.47 Tom sacrifices himself to allow Cassy and another female slave to escape and force Legree to realize that “it was GOD who was standing between him and his victim,’” 48 and his martyrdom has the effect of convincing his former young master George Shelby – who taught Tom to read the Bible – to “‘do

46 A notice in the final installment indicates that Ophelia’s “efficient” and “conscientious endeavor to do her duty” by Topsy won over “that grave, deliberative body whom a New Englander recognizes under the term Our folks.” See UTC, NE 1 April 1852: 53. 47 UTC, NE 22 January 1852: 14. 48 UTC, NE 4 March 1852: 37. 36 what one man can to drive out this curse of slavery from [his] land,’” beginning with the emancipation of all of his slaves.49

Liberation and Emigration

In the penultimate installment of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, George Shelby manages a contained revolution on his own Kentucky plantation. Shelby distributes certificates of freedom, informs the freedpeople that they will be paid wages “‘such as we shall agree on,’” and assumes the responsibility of teaching them how to “‘use the rights’” they gain as free men and women. The cabin occupied by Uncle Tom’s family stands as a

“‘memorial’” to remind all to “‘follow in his steps, and be as honest and faithful and Christian as he was’” under more free circumstances. George Shelby is Stowe’s “Liberator” and he achieves the reforms envisioned by Augustine St. Clare without the mass migration of manumitted slaves out of the South – whether to the Northern United States, Canada, or the supposedly self-sovereign republic of Liberia. In addition to discussing the prospects for uplift within the United States, Stowe also depicts an emphatically Christian and racially nationalist approach to African colonization independent of the white-led American Colonization Society (ACS), which founded the West African colony of Liberia during the 1820s. Liberia had ostensibly become an independent republic during the summer of 1847 with a constitution modelled

49 UTC, NE 18 March 1852: 46. The phrase “what one man can” is italicized in the first and subsequent volume editions. For a nuanced discussion of the misappropriation of Tom’s character in the derisive term “Uncle Tom,” see Wilson Jeremiah Moses, Black Messiahs and Uncle Toms: Social and Literary Manipulation of a Religious Myth (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1982) 1-16, 49-66. 37 on that of the United States. Many critics throughout the late-nineteenth and twentieth century have suggested that Stowe endorsed the colonization agenda of the controversial ACS, but it is impossible to accurately assess the role played by Liberia at the close of Uncle Tom’s Cabin without considering the missiological outlook of the Beechers and Stowes.

Lyman Beecher rejected William Lloyd Garrison’s attack on the ACS in the early 1830s and, several years later, in the midst of the abolition-colonization controversy at Lane Seminary in Cincinnati, Ohio – a microcosm of the national debate – Beecher assured the Cincinnati Colonization Society that “God has called us to colonize Africa, as significantly as he called our fathers to colonize at Plymouth” and maintained that the

“trump of God” had not yet “warned us to desist.”50 Beecher claimed that he did not oppose the “emancipation or elevation of the colored race” anywhere in the world, but his millennial and missionary outlooks rendered him reluctant to “abandon Africa” and the “one hundred millions” of souls to be won on that continent. Harriet Beecher’s future husband, Calvin Stowe, endorsed colonization on the basis of his belief that racial distinctions were divinely ordained.51 In Uncle Tom’s Cabin Stowe presented the religious worldview shared by her family from the perspective of a racially-mixed fugitive slave in an effort to banish the specter of white coercion from her depiction of the independent emigration of a family of former slaves, at least two of whom (George and Cassy) remained fugitives – a population the ACS refused to assist.52

50 See Beecher’s 1834 address before the Cincinnati Colonization Society reprinted in the African Repository July 1834: 148-149. This address was previously printed in the Cincinnati Journal on 12 June. For the record of the debates at Lane Seminary kept by the students involved see Henry Brewster Stanton, Debate at Lane Seminary, Cincinnati (Boston: Garrison and Knapp, 1834). 51 See “Professor Stowe on Colonization,” African Repository December 1834: 300-304. 52 The ACS was unwilling to interfere with “property or the rights of property” and only assisted “those who are already free [and] have the right to determine for themselves whether they will or will not go to Africa where they can enjoy social, political, and moral advantages which they can never enjoy in this 38 Eliza and Harry are reunited with George Harris in a Quaker settlement in Ohio in the thirteenth installment (4 September 1851) and the family finally enters Canada in the thirty-seventh (4 March 1852). In the penultimate installment, a year later in the plot, a Canadian missionary reunites the Harrises with three long-lost relatives: Eliza’s mother, Cassy; George’s sister, Madame de Thoux; and the latter’s daughter. Madame de Thoux has inherited an ample fortune from her late West Indian husband that allows George to pursue a university education in France accompanied by his family.53 He studies the “history of [his] people in America” and follows the ongoing “struggle between abolitionist and colonizationist” with “intense interest” until “[p]olitical troubles” in

France drive the family back to Québec.54 Stowe claims that the perspective Harris gains as a “distant spectator” allows him to impartially weigh options “which never could have occurred” to him had he remained a “participator” in the United States but anticipates that his conclusions will align the race he claims “all against him.” Her attempt to represent the “feelings and views” of an “educated” fugitive slave is one of the most painstakingly nuanced passages in Uncle Tom’s Cabin and has proven one of the most controversial.55 The final installment (1 April 1852) opens with a letter ostensibly written by George Harris to a friend in the United States in which he identifies with the “oppressed, enslaved African race” and renounces the land of his nativity. Even though he maintains that, “more than the rights of common men,” blacks in the United States “have the claim

country.” See Thirty-Fourth Annual Report of the American Colonization Society (Washington: C. Alexander, 1851) 35. 53 UTC, NE 25 March 1852: 50. 54 UTC, NE 1 April 1852: 53. Stowe ambiguously writes “this country” in all versions of the novel but it is unlikely that the Harrises would return to the United States where Cassy and George remain fugitives. 55 Martin R. Delany and Frederick Douglass debated the conclusion of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in Frederick Douglass’ Paper (FDP) throughout the spring of 1853. See “Letter from M.R. Delany, FDP 1 April 1853: 2; “Uncle Tom,” FDP 29 April 1853:3; “Mrs. Stowe’s Position,” FDP 6 May 1853: 2; “The Letter of M.R. Delany,” FDP 6 May 1853: 1. This exchange is reprinted in Martin R. Delany: A Documentary Reader, ed. Robert S. Levine (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003) 224-237. 39 of an injured race for reparation,” he does “not want it” and his declaration that he has no desire “to pass for an American or to identify [him]self with them” implicitly defines the United States as a white nation. Like Augustine St. Clare, Harris maintains that he can do nothing “as an individual”; only a “nation has the right to argue, remonstrate, implore, and present, the cause of its race” and “have a voice in the counsels of nations.” He yearns for “‘an African nationality” – “a people that shall have a tangible, separate existence of its own” – and plans to relocate his family to the newly independent republic of Liberia so that they may “form part” of an ethnically defined republic predicated on the foundational principles of the United States. Yet his idealization of racial self- sovereignty is contradictorily predicated on imperial origins. Harris rejects Haiti as having had “nothing to start with” as a “stream cannot rise above its fountain,” but is willing to disregard the controversial methods and motives of the ACS.56 Stowe draws a distinction between Liberia’s “preparatory stage of feebleness” – during which the colonization program “may have subserved all sorts of purposes, by being played off, in the hands of our oppressors, against us” and “[d]oubtless…may have been used, in unjustifiable ways, as a means of retarding our emancipation” – and the independent republic which Stowe considered to be a “‘fixed fact.’”57 Harris asks his

American correspondent to consider whether “a God above all man’s schemes” might not

56 Martin R. Delany identifies this “singular discrepancy” in Stowe’s “interest in the colored race” – namely, her willingness to write off the “only truly free and independent black nation as such, or colored if you please, on the face of the earth” in order to advocate emigration to the “little dependent colonization settlement of Liberia” which, in spite of its supposed independence, he still considered “subservient to white men’s power.” See “Mrs. Stowe’s Position,” FDP 6 May 1853:2. 57 The proceedings of the 1853 annual meeting of the American and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society include a transcription of a (now lost) note from Stowe indicating that she did not sympathize with the ACS but considered Liberia a “‘fixed fact.’” See the Thirteenth Annual Report of the American and Foreign Anti- Slavery Society (New York, 1853) 192-193. Also quoted in Thomas F. Gossett, Uncle Tom’s Cabin and American Culture (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press, 1985, 294. Gossett identifies this note as Stowe’s “retraction” of her conclusion even though it is not inconsistent with the claims made by the character George Harris in the final installment. 40 have “overruled their designs, and founded for us a nation by them?” Harris’s “zeal for self-improvement,” “self-cultivation,” and self-reliance leads him to envision a “republic” formed of “picked men” who have borne witness to the American experiment, converted to Christianity, and “who, by energy and self-educating force, have in many cases, individually, raised themselves above a condition of slavery.” Yet the ambiguous wording of this celebration of selectivity – the republic has been “formed” and colonists “picked,” even if they have “individually” improved themselves – raises the question of whose agency is ultimately sovereign in Liberia.58

Liberia had already become “an acknowledged nation on the face of the earth – acknowledged by both France and England” – although the United States would not formally recognize a colony created by an extralegal association of private citizens, many of whom were public representatives, until 1862. Harris hopes that an internationally recognized declaration of republican self-sovereignty in Africa might persuade “free, enlightened America…to wipe form her escutcheon that bar sinister which disgraces her among nations, and is as truly a curse to her as to the enslaved.” Aside from Harris’s racial nationalism, he desires to see Africa converted to Christianity and republicanism. The character Topsy also emigrates as a missionary after having been converted, educated, and liberated by Ophelia Sinclair. Topsy was the only character to be legally liberated and officially accepted to a missionary program in Stowe’s novel and, as such, she was the only character that the ACS could endorse. The African Repository – the monthly journal of the ACS – reprinted an item from the New York Independent titled “A glance at ‘Topsey’s’ Home” which positively portrayed the missionary dimension of

58 The managers of the American Colonization Society claimed to have the “most satisfactory assurances, that men of improved minds, and estimable for their moral and religious principles, may be selected from the free people of color in the United States who are not only willing but anxious to become the founders of the proposed colony.” See the Third Annual Report of the American Society for Colonizing the Free People of Colour of the United States (Washington: Davis and Force, 1820) 1. 41 African colonization and was one of the Society’s only references to Stowe’s novel in print.59 Stowe attempted to clarify her intentions in representing African emigration on a number of occasions but the spirit of this portion of the novel is clearest in the preface to the first (U.S.) volume edition. Stowe anticipates the emergence of an “enlightened and

Christianized community…on the shores of Africa” with “laws, language, and literature, drawn from among us” in the hopes that they will recollect the United States in the same sense as the “remembrance of Egypt to the Israelite,” with “a motive of thankfulness to

Him who hath redeemed them!” By calling her American audience to act as redeemers of the African race and, by extension, the African continent, she anticipated a novel comprehension of religious and republican responsibility capable of preserving national union and redeeming not only the United States but Africa by reconciling the races in a reparative scheme. Although Stowe indisputably grants George Harris the dubious honor of becoming a “potentially glorious” imperialist, in the words of Elizabeth Ammons, she does not endorse the ACS as Ammons and numerous other critics have argued.60 Stowe’s racialist and religious outlook drew on historically significant distinctions between independent black emigration and white-sponsored colonization.61 Timothy

Powell observes that Harris’s claims resemble the rhetoric of nineteenth-century black nationalists more than that of white colonizationists and proposes a hermeneutic shift

59 See “Egomet,” “A glance at ‘Topsey’s Home,” New York Independent 24 March 1853:1. Reprinted in the African Repository October 1853: 311-312. 60 Ammons, “Freeing the Slaves and Banishing the Blacks: Racism, Empire, and Africa in Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” in Uncle Tom’s Cabin: A Casebook, ed. Elizabeth Ammons (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007) 242. Also see Ammons, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Empire, and Africa” in Approaches to Teaching Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, eds. Elizabeth Ammons and Susan Belasco (New York: Modern Language Association, 2000) 68-76. 61 Floyd J. Miller distinguishes between “colonization” and “emigration” in a historical survey of black nationalist ideologies and argues that the formation of the ACS confronted individuals who had “previously embraced emigration” with a “new symbol of repression.” See The Search for a Black Nationality: Black Emigration and Colonization, 1787-1863 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1975) 54. 42 toward reading the character’s opinions “not simply as a reflection of Stowe’s ideology but as a historical referent” which could be used to resituate Liberia within “‘the

American diaspora.’”62 This is particularly the case given the revolutionary language of Harris’s declaration and the similarities between the foundational statements of rights in the United States and Liberia. Having considered the possibilities posed by liberation in the United States – in Kentucky with George Shelby and in Vermont with Ophelia – as well as the prospect of African emigration, Stowe enforced the urgency of her arguments by invoking millennialist conceptions of the second coming and last judgment.

Divine Retribution

Stowe calls on readers throughout the nation to take responsibility for the persistence of slavery in the United States in her “Concluding Remarks,” but particularly summons Southerners to recognize the evil of “slave law” as a “system” which allows for the exercise of “wholly irresponsible power” on the part of slaveholders, rendering “each individual owner an irresponsible despot” while denying slaves “all legal right of testimony.”63 Each individual American must “see to it that they feel right” and aim to cultivate an “atmosphere of sympathetic influence” that is “in harmony with the sympathies of Christ” rather than “swayed and perverted by the sophistries of worldly policy.” The failure of individual citizens to recognize and fulfill their duty invites divine

62 See Powell, Ruthless Democracy: A Multicultural Interpretation of the American Renaissance (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000) 127. 63 UTC, NE 1 April 1852: 53. 43 vengeance against the nation as a whole and Stowe closes her serial by reflecting on the revolutionary elements of the final judgment. The mid-nineteenth century is “an age of the world when nations are trembling and convulsed” and Stowe attributes this unrest to a “mighty influence…abroad, surging and heaving the world, as with an earthquake” and “rousing in all nations and languages those groanings that cannot be uttered, for man’s freedom and equality.” Every nation bearing “great and unredressed injustice” in its “bosom…has in it the elements of this last convulsion,” and Stowe encourages American Christians to “read the signs of the times” and consider whether this global instability might be the manifestation of the “spirit of HIM whose kingdom is yet to come, and whose will to be done on earth as it is in heaven?” Stowe anticipates that when the savior comes again he “‘shall appear as a swift witness against those that oppress the hireling in his wages, the widow and the fatherless, and that turn aside the stranger in his right: and he shall break in pieces the oppressor.’”64 These “dread words” are intended to persuade Christians that their invocations of the “kingdom of Christ” on earth associate, “in dread fellowship, the day of vengeance with the year of his redeemed.” Stowe closes her “Concluding Remarks” and the text of volume editions of Uncle

Tom’s Cabin with a reminder of the potential for “grace” through the assumption of accountability for slavery and reparations. The “Union” cannot be “saved” by “combining together, to protect injustice and cruelty, and making a common capital of sin…but by repentance, justice and mercy” and Stowe echoes Southworth’s moral determinism when she maintains that the “eternal law by which the millstone sinks in the ocean” is “not surer…than that stronger law, by which injustice and cruelty shall bring on

64 Malachi 3:5.

44 nations the wrath of Almighty God!” These threats of divine retribution coupled with Stowe’s exhortation to individual and inter-sectional accountability distill the most resonant retributive and revolutionary aspects of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

“Dear Little Children”

After the awful prospect of divine retribution and societal upheaval – the rending of the union – Stowe concludes the Era text with a cordial message omitted from the first and most subsequent volume editions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. In taking leave of “a wide circle of friends, whose faces she has never seen, but whose sympathies, coming to her from afar, have stimulated and cheered her in her work,” Stowe invoked images of the

“pleasant family circles that she has been meeting in spirit weekly” and particularly the “dear little children who have followed her story” and “have her warmest love.” After exhorting adults – particularly mothers – to a sense of national accountability, Stowe encourages readers and listeners who “will one day be men and women” to “learn from this story always to remember and pity the poor and oppressed” and do “all you can for them”; “Never, if you can help it, let a colored child be shut out of school, or treated with neglect and contempt, because of his color.” Stowe expressed her hope that the “foolish and unchristian prejudice” against the black race would be “done away with” by the time this generation reached maturity and, to clear the way for this change, she summoned her audience to recall the “sweet example of little Eva.” This closing address modulated the threat of divine vengeance described in “Concluding Remarks” with the possibility of inter-generational reform.

45 As in Southworth’s Retribution, the sentimental resolution of the problem of slavery cannot occur in the generation that presently anticipates its abolition, but in the futurity represented by characters like Ernest and Hester Dent’s pious daughter, the impressionable George Shelby, Little Eva, and the young readers Stowe addresses in her parting message. The sentimental configurations in both novels rely on conceptions of divine retribution – the most controversial distinction drawn by Southworth and the fundamental form of revolution envisioned by Stowe – and generational deferral. In Southworth’s sentimental system the effects of this retribution are individual and familial as her novel focuses on Hester, Ernest Jr., Juliette, and young Julie, but the affairs of the elder generation lead to the arbitrary delay of a manumission scheme affecting hundreds of slaves for sixteen years. Stowe’s broader vision of futurity simultaneously anticipates the second coming of Christ, divine judgment, and an attendant social revolution. The inter-generational resolutions of both Retribution and Uncle Tom’s Cabin are based in small, guided revolutions taking place on plantations in Virginia and Kentucky, though the outcome of the first is entirely uncertain. The slaves who were initially prepared for liberation by being paid wages have not been compensated for a generation and Southworth does not mention their reaction to Julie and Ernest’s initiative, nor does she envision their future geographically or temporally. The Dent’s slaves are liberated and the plantation on which they lived is sold; presumably, if they remained in a state in which manumission was illegal, they would be subject to re-enslavement.65 Although George Shelby’s role as Stowe’s “Liberator” is controversial and critics have objected to the racism implicit in Stowe’s depiction of domestic manumission and uplift, Shelby

65 In 1853 the National Era would serialize another novel by E.D.E.N Southworth with a positive (if ultimately ambiguous) depiction of manumission and African colonization: Mark Sutherland; or, Power and Principle, a novel which was expanded and published in volume format in 1856 by T.B. Peterson in Philadelphia under the title India: The Pearl of Pearl River. 46 leads a contained and controlled revolution on his own plantation as he shifts the legal status of all the laborers from slaves to wage laborers and assumes an instructive role. Unlike the liberated slaves in Retribution or other slave characters in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the Shelby’s servants attain liberty and, if not immediate equality, the training Stowe argues is necessary for them to achieve equality in the United States or – given white

American prejudice – in Africa. In the spring of 1859, while The Minister’s Wooing was being serialized in the Atlantic Monthly, Stowe wrote a letter of introduction for E.D.E.N. Southworth to Lady

Byron. She admitted that her contemporary’s novels had “glaring defects” but observed that they also exhibited regional “genius.”66 To Stowe’s mind, Southworth was “almost the only instance of a really original, creative southern author”; “even her faults and exaggerations [are] characteristic.” Beyond their regional and religious differences, Southworth and Stowe both represented the regions of the United States as sections of a unified nation and voluntary manumission as a path toward national reform, sectional reconciliation, and ideological reunification. Both authors shared a tacit acceptance of the need to formulate progressive strategies for ending slavery and to depict the role played by federal authority, the individual capacity for civil disobedience, and participation in progressive initiatives. As a native of Maryland, resident of Washington D.C., Roman Catholic, and antislavery advocate, Southworth was less representative of Southern authorial identity than William Gilmore Simms – a native of South Carolina who positively and unproblematically portrayed slavery in numerous novels including eight romances focused on different aspects of the Southern theater of the Revolutionary War. Whereas Southworth portrayed the period immediately following the Revolution as a

66 Harriet Beecher Stowe to Lady Byron, 9 April 1859. Quoted in Susan K. Harris, Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Novels: Interpretive Strategies (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990) 22. 47 progressive moment in the Virginia state government, Simms advocated a sectionalist outlook, did not portray sectional reconciliation, embraced slavery as an implicit part of Southern life, and reified traditional social hierarchies in the context of the Revolutionary War.

48

Chapter Two: Incursion and Independence in William Gilmore Simms’s Revolutionary Romances

William Gilmore Simms published eight romances set in the southern theater of the American Revolutionary War between 1835 and 1867, three of which were initially serialized. Simms blended biographical representations of historically significant figures – “names in the nation” which were “familiar as our thoughts” and the “property of our country” – with fictional and fictionalized characters and combined his gleanings from the “various and very copious histories of the time” with regional “tradition” and “local chronicles.”1 This chapter primarily focuses on Simms’s core series of Revolutionary romances set between 1780 and 1782, including The Partisan: A Tale of the Revolution (1835), Mellichampe: A Legend of the Santee (1836), Katharine Walton; or, The Rebel’s Daughter (February-December 1850 in Godey’s Lady’s Book), and The Sword and the Distaff; or, ‘Fair, Fat and Forty’ (February-December 1852 in the Southern Literary Gazette). I also refer to Simms’s final romance of the Revolution, Joscelyn; A Tale of the

Revolution (January-December 1867 in The Old Guard), which takes place at the outbreak of war in 1776. Simms’s Revolutionary romances feature an exclusively sectionalist purview and attempt to establish a historical precedent for Southern institutions including the inherent prominence of the planter class and the perpetuation of slavery.

1 William Gilmore Simms, The Partisan: A Tale of the Revolution, vol. 1 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1835) ix, xi. 49 As a South Carolinian sectionalist, Simms does not acknowledge the imperative of universal emancipation associated with Revolutionary ideology by authors like Southworth and Stowe; rather, the Revolution threatens the order and safety of Southern society as imperial and loyalist forces destroy or seize plantations and abduct slaves from their rightful owners. Simms is chiefly concerned with the assertion of states’ rights and establishing of the ideological underpinnings of sectionalism and expresses skepticism regarding the legitimacy of all forms of external (incursive) power, particularly the supersession of imperial sovereignty with federal authority. Throughout his

Revolutionary War saga Simms consistently represents the Revolutionary War as a civil conflict between “rebels” or patriots and “Tories” or loyalists reinforced by incursive imperial power which foreshadows civil conflict reinforced by the northern nexus of federal government in the antebellum United States.

CIVIL CONFLICT

Simms considers the American Revolution a civil conflict in all of his romances set during this period, but he draws a direct connection from the historical animosity between “Regulators and Scovillites” to patriots and loyalists in the mid-1770s in Joscelyn (1867) – his final revolutionary romance – which is the earliest in point of historical setting.2 Simms identifies the “long and bitter feuds” between these “local

2 W. Gilmore Simms, Esq., “Joscelyn; A Tale of the Revolution,” The Old Guard June 1867: 402; Joscelyn: A Tale of the Revolution (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1975) 118. Henceforth the serial text of Joscelyn is abbreviated OG and the first volume edition, published by the University of South Carolina in their series of Centennial Editions of Simms’s works, is abbreviated J in notes and parenthetical citations. 50 factions” as precursory to divisions during the Revolutionary conflict and, by extension, ongoing disputes over sectional self-assertion and organized resistance to incursive authority in the nineteenth century. In the lengthy final installment of Joscelyn (December 1867), Simms exposes the protagonist – the hapless son of a domineering arch-loyalist – to the ongoing strife between these groups. After being dispatched into the highlands so that he may be introduced to loyalists in the field and removed from rebel influence, Walter Dunbar obtains food and lodging from an old woman who offers assistance and advice regarding the political situation in the region after his horse is stolen. Mrs. Carter identifies the horse-thief as “‘a Scoffilite’” and her son as “‘one of the Regulators…in search of this very gang of horse-stealing Scoffilites.’”3 No fewer than fifty “‘Scoffilites’” have joined up with Tory troops to form an army that call themselves “‘Loyalists,’ and ‘Saracents of the Crown,’ and ‘King’s Men,’ and ‘King George’s Men,’” even though they largely consist of “‘Scoffil’s men, a good chaince of ‘em, and devil’s men too’” and only count a few “‘king’s officers’” among their number. Simms identifies the “Scopholites, or Scovilites, so called after a certain leader,” as a “band of outlaws, refugees from other parts, mostly foreigners, gamesters, plunderers, horse-thieves especially, and altogether a mere banditti in the wild and unsettled regions of the Carolinas” in a note accompanying the serial text.4 The Scovilites

3 OG December 1867: 913; J 273. 4 Wilbur Henry Siebert identifies a “company of loyalists, known as the Scopholites from one of their leaders, Colonel Scophol of the South Carolina militia” which had assembled near the garrison Ninety-Six and were comprised of men “coming from the interior of the province.” See Siebert, Loyalists in East Florida, 1774 to 1785, vol. 1 (DeLand: The Florida State Historical Society, 1929) 54. Simms portrayal of the Scovilites’ affiliation with the loyalists resembles James Fenimore Cooper’s description of the northern “Skinners,” who were affiliated with the patriots. Cooper’s Skinners are “subordinate agents, of extremely irregular habits…whose sole occupation appears to have been relieving their fellow citizens from any little excess of temporal prosperity, they might be thought to enjoy, under the pretense of patriotism, and the love of liberty.” See The Spy; A Tale of the Neutral Ground, vol. 1 (New York: Wiley & Halstead, 1821) 15. 51 proved “so powerful, in the early times of the Colony, and their depredations so atrocious, as to provoke another organization, called the ‘Regulators,’ who, by a sort of wild justice, which was summary enough succeeded at last in putting the outlaws down.” Simms traces the origins of Whigs and Tories “in the same region” to the “debris of these parties…the Regulators generally becoming rebels to the common authority, while the

Scovilites as generally became its adherents” and goes so far as to identify the Scovilites as the “‘loyalists’ of that day” whose “lineal descendants…may be found in this” – meaning either 1776 or the postbellum period when Joscelyn was serialized. Scovillite- loyalists and Regulator-rebels fill sequential roles in a perpetual civil conflict predicated on the opposition between allegiances to incursive or internal authority: the former claiming allegiance to monarchical, imperial, and, subsequently, federal power; the latter insisting upon local representation which was necessarily the responsibility and right of the Southern planter elite. Joseph V. Ridgely observed that Simms emphasized the “Southernness of the true-blue Carolinians” and “their recognition of their difference from all others in the strife” more than the confrontation between American and British forces.5 These “true- blue Carolinians” are either members of the planter class or natives who implicitly honor the authority of this class. Mid-way through Joscelyn, Simms reflects that the “curse of the colony” during the Revolutionary era “lay in the absence of homogeneousness”: in the highlands “a people poor in circumstances and generally ignorant” resented the unequal distribution of means and power between their newer settlements and the established inhabitants of the low-country who “claimed to be a gentry, almost a nobility” and for whom the former reserved the “peculiar sneer” of “gentleman” and referred to the

5 Ridgely, “Woodcraft: Simms’s First Answer to Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” American Literature (January 1960) 424. 52 “opprobriously as ‘nabobs.’”6 The “assumption of superiority” on the part of low-country leaders was “a sufficient argument by which to decide thousands adversely to the movement party” and its aims and effect their conversion into Scovilites.7 The Regulators, like the rebels after them, were interested in local affairs while the “refugees” and “foreigners” among the Scovilites, the true Tories, and the British invaders had foreign interests.8 The alliance between these factions linked loyal subjects of the King with grasping, self-interested, tenuous, and unprincipled agents as opposed to those elites invested in the local good and the society which accepted their authority. Yet these partisan lines proved more complex along the seaboard and particularly in the port city of Charleston. In the first installment (February 1850) of Katharine Walton, Simms’s third

Revolutionary romance and the first full length novel serialized in Godey’s Lady’s Book, he illustrates another crucial distinction between these parties in a scene of children at play within the walls of occupied Charleston – “dozens of sturdy urchins, already divided into parties according to the influence of their parental and other associations”:

These, known as the ‘Bay Boys’ and the ‘Green Boys,’ were playing at soldiers,

well armed with cornstalks…The ‘Bay Boys’ were all loyalists, the ‘Green Boys’ the Whigs, or patriots; and in their respective designations, we have no inadequate suggestion of the influences which operated to divide the factions of their elders in the city. The ‘Bay Boys’ represented the commercial influence, which, being chiefly in the hands of foreigners, acknowledged a more natural sympathy with

6 OG May 1867: 338, J 116. 7 OG June 1867: 401-401, J 118; OG May 1867: 337, J 116 8 OG December 1867: 913; J 273. 53 Britain than the ‘Green Boys,’ or those of the suburban population, most of whom were the agricultural aristocracy of the low country, and with whom the

revolutionary movement in Carolina had its origin”9

In addition to Scovilites in the highlands, Simms identifies parties invested in either the

Atlantic trade or the imperial governance of the colony in as another branch of loyalism. Throughout Katharine Walton Simms allows for the “natural sympathy” of these city- dwellers – many of whom are implicated or have relatives who are implicated in the colonial government. British invaders and true Tories in the city and Scovilites in the country comprise a united front against an “agricultural aristocracy” invested in local self-governance and the perpetuation of their status and the socio-economic institutions on which it depends, including slavery.

Tories and Scovilites

In 1836 and 1867 Simms re-presented the “recorded history of the notorious

Colonel Brown,” who was “one of the most malignant and vindictive among the Southern loyalists” and was “said to have become so solely from the illegal and unjustifiable means which were employed by the patriots” to punish him for differences in opinion and freedom of speech.10 In Mellichampe (1836), Simms’s second Revolutionary romance,

9 “Katharine Walton: or, The Rebel’s Daughter,” Godey’s Lady’s Book February 1850: 112; Simms, Katharine Walton; or, The Rebel of Dorchester (Philadelphia: A. Hart, 1851) 14. Henceforth the serial text of Katharine Walton is abbreviated GLB and the first volume edition is abbreviated KW in notes and parenthetical citations. 10 Simms, Mellichampe: A Legend of the Santee, vol. 1 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1836) iv. Henceforth Mellichampe is abbreviated M in notes and parenthetical citations. 54 the Tory Captain Barsfield relates a fictionalized version of Brown’s experience of public ridicule and torture to the young mistress of the plantation on which his troops are quartered to explain – if not justify – his motives for taking up arms in service of King George III against his countrymen. Barsfield attempts to justify his resentment of the wealthy Mellichampes and his murder of the Colonel Max Mellichampe by recalling the conduct of the patriarch at the outbreak of this “‘cruel and unnatural’” war (M II: 103). Barsfield was a common subject loyal to the king who had “‘taken no part on either side’” of the conflict when the planter Max Mellichampe began to stir up rebel sentiments in the region. He claims that the “‘violence of the whigs…toward all those not thinking with themselves, revolted [his] feelings and [his] pride, if it did not offend [his] principles’”:

‘I was indignant that, while insisting upon the rights of free judgment for themselves, they should at the same time deny a like liberty to others. And yet they raved constantly of liberty. It was, in their mouths, a perpetual word, and with them it signified everything and nothing. It was to give a free charter for any and every practice, and it was to deprive all others of every right, natural and

acquired. I dared to disagree – I dared to think differently, and to speak my opinions aloud, though I lifted no weapon, as yet, to sustain them. Was I then a criminal…Was it toryism to think according to my understanding, and to speak the opinions which I honestly entertained?’

Holding different opinions “‘was presumption in the eyes of a dictatorial, proud man’” like Mellichampe; declaring them “‘loudly…was the error of one so weak, so wanting in public influence and wealth’” as Barsfield (M II: 104). He was severely punished “‘for a 55 crime so monstrous as that of thinking differently’” from the influential rebel and his followers. The Tory captain recalls being awakened at midnight by neighbors who had broken into his dwelling in “‘a small exercise of their newly-gotten liberty’”; dragged into the road “‘amid a crowd of [his] brethren – [his] countrymen – all cheering, and most of them assisting in the work of punishment’”; lashed, tarred, feathered, thrown into the

Santee River, and nearly drowned (M II: 105-6). Barsfield holds the Mellichampes accountable for inciting the abuse of loyal subjects even though he admits that they were not among his torturers. The Tory doubts that “‘wretches…who take their color and their thoughts always from the superior’” would have subjected their neighbors to “‘these tortures, and…others which degrade humanity’” without the prompting and approval of local elites (M II: 107). He has vengefully killed Max Mellichampe and continues to lift his sword “‘unsparingly to the last, against the wretches who taught me…of what nature was that boon of liberty which they promised, and which it was in the power of such monsters to bestow.’” Barsfield maintains that he would have to have been “‘more or less than human’” to come to another conclusion, though he is unsure whether these experiences excuse his subsequent conduct – namely the murder of the Mellichampe patriarch and pursuit of his son and sole heir. In addition to seeking vengeance, Barsfield aims to clear his title to Kaddipah, which was formerly the Mellichampe plantation. Janet Berkeley expresses sympathy for the Tory’s sufferings but she remains devoted to the rebel and rightful gentleman, Ernest Mellichampe. Captain Barsfield’s backstory exemplifies how the “ebuillitions of popular justice, shown in the moments of revolution, are of most terrible effect, and of the most imposing consequence” (M I: iv). Simms suggests that the historical incident on which it was based is “of curious interest, and, if studied, of great public value” for it “shows strikingly the 56 evils to a whole nation, and through successive years, of a single act of popular injustice” (iv). The rendition of Colonel Brown’s story in Mellichampe is more pitiful than Simms’s second dramatization of the historical incident involving “Colonel Browne” thirty years later. In Joscelyn (1867), Simms characterizes the loyalist Thomas Browne as a young man of “Scottish type” who has traded among the indigenous population in “obscure regions of the South” until his countenance and manners have assumed a “savage” cast.11 The fictional Browne will not “‘suffer any speech…to belie and make fool of [his] faith,’” but “‘freely and fearlessly’” expresses his “‘convictions’” and considers himself

“‘a preacher to the people’” even before he is tortured by the rebels (OG 11, J 16-17). Browne attends a rebel rally in the third installment (March 1867) where he objects to William Henry Drayton’s accusations that he and other loyalists are inciting hostility toward local communities among the Native American tribes. After he shouts that the patriot is lying, he is felled by a blow from the rebel Captain Hamilton and evacuated from the area by Martin Joscelyn and other leading rebels who instruct the Tory to leave Augusta at nightfall. The loyalist instead becomes intoxicated and intrudes on a barbecue held after the rally with the intention of inciting contention and violence. After a toast has been made to the Continental Congress (to which Drayton would be sent as a delegate in 1778), Browne declares “‘damnation’” to the Congress and “‘all its friends’” and is evacuated again by rebel leaders including Drayton himself, Joscelyn, and Samuel Hammond, who seek to protect Browne from the “brutal punishments, which

11 OG January 1867: 7, J 11-12. Gary D. Olsen points out that that Brown hailed from England and had come to Georgia in late 1774 to establish a plantation when he was sidetracked by the outbreak of civil conflict. See Gary D. Olsen, “Loyalists and the American Revolution: Thomas Brown and the South Carolina Backcountry, 1775-1776,” The South Carolina Historical Magazine 69 (1968) 44-56. Also see the editorial introduction to the 1975 University of South Carolina edition of Joscelyn xiv-xv. 57 were applied equally to all who willfully came in conflict with the ascendant party, whether Whig or Tory.”12 Rather than respecting the rebels’ orders, the “madman” Browne arms himself and antagonizes Captain Hamilton’s “rough-riders” at a public house, deriding the troopers as “‘scum’” who seek to “‘purge the Commonwealth’” and install their

“‘beggarly bodies on the seats of Kings, Lords and Commons!’” (OG 251, J 75-6) Captain Hamilton beats Browne again, his men restrain him with rope, and the loyalist is evacuated a third time before a posse comprised of Hamilton’s Liberty Boys and the

“‘Peep o’ Day Boys’” – a group of local Regulators “ripe for any mischief” – finally subject Browne to their “‘wild ideas of justice’” by whipping, tarring, and feathering him

“[i]n the name of liberty.’” 13 The fictional Browne interprets his survival of this ordeal as evidence that he is the “appointed agent of the God of vengeance,” but Stephen E. Meats points out that no historical sources suggest that Brown became a religious fanatic who believed himself to be divinely inspired as a result of his sufferings. In the sixth installment of Joscelyn (June 1867) Brown accuses Drayton of sanctioning violence against himself and other loyal subjects of the King while the patriot

12 OG April 1867: 246, J 70. Simms relies heavily on John Drayton’s Memoirs of the American Revolution in which Drayton excerpts a passage from Hugh McCall’s History of Georgia describing Brown’s offensive toasts at a dinner which led to his being tarred, feathered, and “publicly exposed in a cart; to be drawn three miles, or, until he was willing to confess his error, and take an oath, that he would thereafter give his aid and assistance to the cause of freedom.” Quoted in Drayton, Memoirs of the American Revolution from its Commencement to the Year 1776, inclusive; as Relating to the State of South-Carolina, vol. 1 (Charleston: A.E. Miller, 1821) 366. Also see McCall, The History of Georgia, vol. 2 (Savannah: William T. Williams, 1816) 46. Also see Meats’ introduction to J xxi. 13 OG 253, J 82. In the introduction to the 1975 volume edition of Joscelyn Stephen E. Meats references an article from the 1 August 1775 issue of the Georgia Gazette (Augusta) reporting that Browne was charged by the “‘Sons of Liberty,’” also known as the “‘Liberty Boys,’” with speaking against the cause of American independence while making a toast at dinner and subsequently captured, tarred, feathered, and “exhibited” in a cart. On 2 August the Gazette reported that Browne had retracted his statements. Meats points out that Brown’s own account conflicted with that published in the Gazette: he maintained that rebels came to his plantation unprovoked and demanded that he renounce his loyalty to Britain by forcing him to sign an oath of loyalty to the revolutionary cause while burning his feet with torches. See J xiv-xv. 58 is speaking in the highlands. Although Drayton denies that the troopers who tortured Browne had any sanction from the Council of Safety, the loyalist insists that this rebellious counsel “‘have sanctioned – nay, ordered, this performance, in Charleston, in many cases’”; “‘Liberty demands that Terror shall sit beside her as she goes in state, and Brutality shall prepare the way for her march even over crushed bodies and bleeding hearts.”14 Browne accuses Drayton of being the “instigator of all the mischief that now threatens the lives and safety of all good men” with his “accursed smooth speeches, about your scoundrelly congresses, and councils, and committees, that sit in Charleston, and hatch conspiracies against the laws, that [rebels] may ride into power, and rule as the tyrants of the land’” (OG 410, J 130) and his accusations, regardless of their merits, cause tensions to mount.

In the final installment (December 1867) of this incomplete novel, Walter Dunbar finally arrives in the camp of a troop of Tories and Scovilites led by Browne, who no longer appears a “tared and feathered, matted, squalid, and utterly disfigured savage,” but is outfitted in the “rich uniform of a British Colonel, as fine as feathers and scarlet, gold lace and chapeau bras could make him” so that he may satisfy his vanity and impose on the highlanders.15 The other Tory commanders resent Browne as they believe, “with reason, that they should outrank him” on account of their “local influence” in addition to disputing his style of leadership. When Dunbar resists Browne’s attempt to commandeer the correspondence he carries, the self-declared leader strikes him down with the butt of his pistol. All but one of the Tory captains desert Browne’s camp the night before the rebel’s attack accompanied by a thousand troops, but the Browne remains confident that even a few Tories and Scovilites putting up a “bold front” can cause these “sea-coast

14 OG June 1867: 409, J 129. 15 OG December 1867: 925-926, J 290. 59 nabobs…to show their heels” (OG 931, J 298). The remaining troops are outmanned, Brown is injured and unhorsed, and the Tories are ultimately forced to retreat. Simms consistently portrays loyalists as mercenaries willing to sacrifice themselves and destroy property and prosperity because they perceive a possibility for greater favor or wealth from the King and his unscrupulous colonial representatives.

Rebels and Regulators

Simms portrays elite and exemplary rebels who exert significant influence in their native regions in each of his Revolutionary romances. The most consistent representative of the cause of Southern independence is the young rebel Robert Singleton, who is a major character in The Partisan (1835) and Katharine Walton (1850) and also appears in Mellichampe (1836). Singleton hails from the planter class but Tory depredations have deprived him of his ancestral plantation, The Hills, located on the Santee River. In The Partisan he informs his uncle, Colonel Richard Walton, that his absence from home caused the Tories to suspect his allegiance and steal his valuables; burn his mansion, barn, and other structures; drive his slaves into the swamp; and set about “‘sowing fire’” in his fields.16 Robert’s sickly sister, Emily, sought refuge at The Oaks – the Walton plantation near Dorchester – prior to this rampage and he does not have the heart to tell her of the fate of her home:

16 Simms, The Partisan: A Tale of the Revolution, vol. 1 (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1835) 153. In Katharine Walton Simms recalls that Singleton’s plantation was “harried” and burned by the Tories. See “Katherine Walton: or, The Rebel’s Daughter,” Godey’s Lady’s Book March 1850: 168; Katharine Walton: or, The Rebel of Dorchester (Philadelphia: A. Hart, 1851) 28. Henceforth the serial text of Katharine Walton is abbreviated GLB (Godey’s Lady’s Book) and the first volume edition is abbreviated KW in notes and parenthetical citations. 60

How could he say to the dying girl that her mommer,17 severely beaten by the tories, had fled into the swamp for shelter? that her favourite dog, Frill, had been shot down, as he ran, by the same brutal wretches? that the mansion-house of her parents, her favourite garden, had been devastated by fire, applied by the same

cruel hands? that Luke the gardener, and all the slaves who remained unstolen, had fled for safety into the thick recesses of the Santee?...The ruin which had harrowed his own soul almost to madness, would have been instant death to her”

(149).

Singleton’s losses spur him to consistently support the rebel cause, but Colonel Walton has been cowed into accepting a British “protection” in an effort to shelter his estate (Partisan I:13). Simms’s first Revolutionary romance focuses on the manipulative protections offered to rebels by the British government which supposedly “secured” their “property and persons” on condition of neutrality. Possessors of extensive property and valuables like Walton who fought as rebels in early engagements were assured that a protection would pardon their “late treasonable offenses” and reinstate their “old immunities…requiring nothing in return but that they should remain quietly in their homes” (Partisan I:17). In the wake of the fall of Charleston, this “specious and well- timed indulgence” won the voluntary consent of individuals who “might not have been conquered but with great difficulty” (I:122) like Colonel Walton or Isaac Hayne – the historical figure on which Simms based his character. Simms reflects that British

17 Simms changes this usage to “mauma” in the second edition of The Partisan. See The Partisan: A Romance of The Revolution (New York: Redfield, 1854) 141-2. 61 protection proved “that of the wolf, and not the guardian dog” in the sense that “it destroyed its charge, and not its enemy; and strove to ravage where it promised to secure.” When Sir Henry Clinton, the conqueror of Charleston, rescinded these protections, Walton and other property owners inclined toward local allegiances and, therefore, the rebel cause, discovered that they had succumbed to a “foul deception” (I: 42) intended to extort loyalty and exact military service for the imperial cause. Robert Singleton rejoices that his uncle is finally “‘compelled to fight’” (I: 51) either for the imperial oppressor or the patriotic rebellion that he still supports but Walton and other elites who reject the unstated terms of their protections and refuse to serve as illustrious instances of colonial subjugation become traitors to the King. Those that accepted these terms – like Brigadier-General Andrew Williamson – became traitors to their native land. Simms contrasts the conduct of propertied persons who accepted protections, regardless of their private reservations, with the “deliberate valour” and “unyielding patriotism” of partisan fighters like Singleton, who stoked the “sacred fires of liberty in the thick swamps and dense and gloomy forests of Carolina” (I: 17). In the author’s advertisement to The Partisan Simms suggests that the “very title” of his first Revolutionary romance is intended to “persuade the reader to look rather for a true description of that mode of warfare,” with its multifarious combatants and engagements, “than for any consecutive story comprising the fortunes of a single personage” (Partisan I:x). Simms aims to “give a picture, not only of the form and the pressure of the time itself, but of the thousand scattered events” which comprise a broader conception of the historical moment which saw the “partisan warfare of the

South” after the fall of Charleston and other British advances in 1780. Although Simms does not adhere to the dominant history of the Revolution in these romances and avoids 62 having a consistent protagonist, there are several gentleman-partisans (Singleton, Walton, and Porgy) that appear throughout his core series of romances. Simms also devotes considerable space in The Partisan and Mellichampe to characterizing the partisan leader, the “Swamp Fox” Francis Marion, on whom he had published a biography in 1844.

Partisan Warfare

Simms commences The Partisan by referring to the “discouraging circumstances under which the partisan warfare of the South began” – namely the fall of Charleston and the establishment of British military posts and fortresses throughout the colony (Partisan I: 17). Singleton recruits Walton, as discussed above, in the first volume of the novel; the second describes events leading up to the Battle of Camden, including the juncture at which Singleton’s troops join forces with Francis Marion’s men. Marion is a progenitor of and expert at partisan warfare and Simms maintains that the General’s “moral and military character, alike, form the most perfect models for the young that can be furnished by any individual of any nation” (Partisan II: 158). Considerable attention is given to Marion’s character and methods in The Partisan and Mellichampe.

Marion does not dress in military finery and there is “little in his appearance, to the casual spectator, to mark him out from his compatriots,” unlike the British and Continental Army commanders in Simms’s romances (II: 156). His “[c]ool and unsteady, inflexible, unshrinking” character renders him “best calculated” of “all the brave men engaged in the war of American liberty…for the warfare of the partisan”:

63 His patriotism, wisdom, and fearlessness moved always together, and were alike conspicuous. Never despairing of his cause, he was always cheerful in vicissitude, and elastic under defeat. His mind rose, with renewed vigour, from the press of necessity; and every new form of trial only stimulated him to newer and more successful efforts (II: 157-8).

Marion fights in “a wild region” in which “every acre of ground was in possession either of confirmed enemies, or doubtful friends,” yet he moves “with confidence and without fear,” and spares no precaution (II: 166). When Marion brings his men to Camden to join the Continental Army commanded by General Gates, the soldiers ridicule the partisan fighters and squabbles break out between the armed and outfitted continentals and unarmed and underdressed partisans. General Gates arrives and rejects the assistance of Marion’s men on account of the “uncouth accoutrements…bare feet, and…tattered garments” of the “motley assemblage of men and boys, half armed, which the Swamp Fox had brought with him to do the battles of liberty” (II: 186). Yet the inequality of the commanders and many of the troops actually defies appearances; the “superb scale” of Gates’s person does not compensate for his shortcomings as a commander and Marion’s smallness, lameness, and “hesitating manners” belie his skill. Simms suggests that the “shallow” Gates was incapable of comprehending that the “very poverty, the miserably clad and armed condition” of Marion’s partisans were actually the “best pledges that could be given for their fidelity”: “Why should they fight in rags for a desperate cause, without pay or promise, but that a high sense of honour and of country was the impelling principle?”

Marion maintains that a number of his men represent the “‘very best families’” of the region – “‘homeless now, and robbed of all by their enemies,’” who will not “‘fight 64 less earnestly on that account, nor will their poverty and rags hinder them from striking a good blow, when occasion serves, against the invader to whom they owe them’” (II: 188). Even though the partisans “‘may fight like very devils,’” Gates shortsightedly maintains that “‘nothing can possibly keep the continentals from laughing at them’” and refuses their assistance to prevent “the insubordination which undue merriment, sternly and suddenly checked, would certainly bring about’” among his own troops. He sends the partisans back to the river to capture scouts, disrupt communications, and raid boats – “a service almost nominal” – because they lack arms and uniforms. (II: 188). Even though

Marion’s men do not see combat at Camden, they continue to fight the revolution in their native swamps and woods. In Mellichampe (1836) Simms remarks on the “art and stratagem” involved in the General’s practice of this indigenous mode of warfare:

Marion’s men dwelled in regions “where the citizen must have perished” and moved with an “alacrity which the slower tactics of European warfare could never have conceived of,” all the while converting their “very necessities into sources of knowledge and independence.”18 Simms portrays this lifestyle in the partisans’ camps in each of his Revolutionary romances and, other than Singleton, one of the only other consistent characters is the partisan Lieutenant Porgy – a minor character in The Partisan,

Mellichampe, and Katharine Walton, and the protagonist of The Sword and the Distaff

(1852).19 Porgy is a “Squire” in the 1835 text but becomes a “Lieutenant” in 1854 and Simms clarifies that the gentleman-partisan has been active in combat since the beginning of the conflict in his native region near the Ashepoo River with Colonel William Harden

18 M II: 150-51. See Simms, The Life of Francis Marion (New York: Henry G. Langley, 1844). 19 ). Simms introduces Porgy incidentally in the first edition of The Partisan (1835) but adds significant depth to his character in the second edition issued by Redfield in 1854 after The Sword and the Distaff had been serialized in the Southern Literary Gazette and published in volume format by Walker, Richards & Co. 65 and then-Brigadier General William Moultrie. Porgy contributes cultural elevation in the forms of culinary epicureanism, drama, song, and verse to the partisans’ camps in both editions of The Partisan and continues to play the role of a witty philosopher in the 1836 and 1854 editions of Mellichampe.20 Porgy’s character is developed in the serial and volume texts of Katharine Walton as he repeatedly emphasizes his status as a gentleman while cautioning Singleton about the shameful consequences of being apprehended as a spy and after he is injured in combat defending the supplies that Singleton has obtained in the guise of a loyalist.

Porgy recognizes Singleton as a born and bred gentleman like himself and warns the partisan commander that he runs a considerable risk of degradation by operating undercover. After living the “‘life of a man,’” Porgy insists that his fellow planter should not run the risk of “‘making a bad picture’” perishing “‘by the halter’” instead of in battle.21 This untoward end “‘would be a subject of great humiliation’” to Singleton’s friends and is, Porgy assumes, “‘a subject of painful consideration’” to the Major. Later in the novel, Porgy is a leading fighter in the ambush arranged by Singleton, who has obtained supplies from the British commandant in Charleston disguised as the loyalist Captain Furness, contingent upon his escorting a wagon train into the interior. The large partisan – described in The Partisan (1854) as a “‘perfect mountain of flesh’” encompassing “‘flesh enough for a score of dragoons’” (98) – climbs upon and crushes the British escort and sustains a slit on the ear. At the close of the conflict, once the partisans are victorious, Porgy scolds Meadows because “‘[t]o have one’s ears or nose slit…is, I have always been taught, the

20 Porgy plays a less significant role in the sequel and his concerns are directed toward the sickness of his horse, which is significantly named “Nabob” in the second edition. 21 GLB July 1850: 15, KW 63. 66 greatest indignity that could be inflicted upon a gentleman’” (GLB August 1850: 90, KW 77). When Singleton points out that Porgy has broken Meadows’ teeth and permanently disfigured his face, Porgy justifies his actions by asking Singleton to consider the significance of the injury he believed he had sustained: a severed ear is the “‘brand of a horse thief’” and the “‘mark of the pillory ought to suffice to make any white man desperate’” (KW 78). Throughout Katharine Walton and The Sword and the Distaff Porgy is primarily concerned about maintaining the appearance of a gentleman. In The Sword and the Distaff, Porgy attempts to defend his ancestral plantation against foreclosure proceedings initiated by his creditor, McKewn, a carpetbagger who occupies a nearby plantation, pretends to the status of a gentleman-planter, and whose power over Porgy is enforced by new legal representatives whose authority Porgy refuses to recognize. Simms portrays the emergence of a unified local front capable of overcoming the political divisions of the recent conflict to defend inherited property and traditional social distinctions from representatives of a nascent federal order willing to undermine Southern social conventions. Porgy’s ancestral plantation is saved by the widow of a Tory, Major André Eveleigh, whose family is so entrenched in colonial society that their plantation has not suffered depredations at the hands of rebel troops.

The alliance between the Tory widow and partisan lieutenant is strictly one of shared background and business – not romance – but their bond is capable of subverting the residual power of the empire and bypassing nascent forces of federal authority.

IMPERIAL AND FEDERAL INCURSION

67 Simms depicts the injustice of imperial forces and their willingness to undermine local structures of authority throughout his Revolutionary romances, but the most coherent example of these abuses is the character Colonel Walton, whose career and fate are based on that of the South Carolina state senator Isaac Hayne. At the close of The Partisan, Walton is sentenced to death by the sanguinary British commander Lord

Cornwallis, who seeks to subdue rebel retrenchment in South Carolina through the “terrible example” (II: 222) of a mass execution. Cornwallis selects twenty rebels captured during the Battle of Camden on the basis of their “great popularity” and prominence or “especial malignity” toward the imperial cause and, to render this “example…an imposing one,” Colonel Walton is among this number (II: 220). The Colonel considers himself a mere “‘prisoner of war,’” but, during his “most summary and nominal trial,” Cornwallis informs him that he is considered a “‘subject of the King of Great Britain, found in arms against his offers’” and therefore a “‘traitor’” warranting a death sentence on account of having accepted and subsequently violated his retracted protection. Walton maintains that he does not consider himself a subject and that this “‘contract’” was “‘violated and rendered null’” by Sir Henry Clinton’s proclamation, not his own actions (II: 224). Regardless, the rebel declares that he is “‘ready to die for [his] country at any hour, and by any form of death…and leave it to the ripening time and to the arms of [his] countrymen to avenge [his] wrongs’” (II: 223). Cornwallis is reluctant to execute an elite capable of exerting powerful influence over his fellow colonists, but Walton firmly rejects his repeated offer of a choice appointment in the British army and is finally sentenced to hang in Dorchester – the region where he is “‘most known’” and his “‘loss would be most felt’” – so that his execution will serve as an “‘example’” to the rebels in that region (II: 226). On the day set for his execution, Walton’s nephew, Robert Singleton, and his core band of partisans 68 emerge from the swamps and intervene in the procession to the gallows. Colonel Walton is spared and returned to the swamps to continuing fighting as a free partisan until he is recaptured in Katharine Walton (1850). In doing so, the partisans set several key plot lines in motion that showcase the unscrupulous incursion of the invading forces: Walton’s evasion of British (in)justice; the injustice of the British commanders to their own officer, Major Proctor, the commander of the Dorchester garrison, for his alleged remissness in failing to ensure the fulfillment of Cornwallis’s sentence; and the betrothal of Robert Singleton and Katharine Walton – the foundational sectional romance in

Simms’s Revolutionary series. Colonel Walton remains at large at the start of Katharine Walton when Nesbit Balfour, the acting British commandant at Charleston, and Colonel Cruden, the newly appointed agent for the sequestration of estates, arrive at The Oaks.

British officers in Simms’s revolutionary romances are primarily concerned with exploiting colonial wealth, like their Tory and Scovilite counterparts. Cruden has taken up residence in the Charleston mansion of the “‘premature’” rebel Charles Cotesworth Pinckney, which Balfour considers to be “‘decidedly the finest house in Carolina,’” and the commandant anticipates that Cruden “‘should soon be a millionaire’” through his management of the crown’s acquisitions – at least as long as the state is not reconquered

(GLB February 1850: 110, KW 12). Cruden and Balfour travel from Charleston to the Walton barony near Dorchester in the first installment of Katharine Walton (February 1850). The estate – including lands, structures, furniture, “‘an immense stock of plate,’” “‘several hundred slaves,’” livestock, “‘blooded horses,’” well-aged Madeira, and a crop of rice ready for harvesting (GLB 111-12, KW 13) – will pass into Cruden’s care on account of Walton’s evasion of justice. The British officers are welcomed to The Oaks by the Colonel’s spinster sister, Barbara Walton, and the rebel’s daughter, Katharine Walton.

69 In the second installment (March 1850) Singleton arrives at the plantation disguised as a captain of loyalist rifleman in the interior whom the partisans have captured. Singleton uncouthly discusses the “‘glorious pickings’” on the plantation and others in the region with Balfour and Cruden in the guise of the loyalist Captain Furness and Balfour objects to his speaking “‘as if the officers honored with the commission of his majesty, could possibly stoop to the miserable practice of sharing selfishly the confiscated possessions of these rebels’” (GLB 164, KW 24). “‘[S]elfish motives have no share in the transaction,’” according to the commandant; “‘Appropriations, indeed, are made; but…solely for the equal benefit of the property itself, the service in which we are engaged, and the honor of his majesty’” The false Furness maintains that even if he were to insist upon the nicer words, his fellow loyalists in the highlands would “‘still be mulish enough to swear that they meant the same thing’” and his combination of pointed insight and rural simplicity baffles the British officers who take him at his appearance. Singleton consults with Katharine afterwards, who laments that she is to be “‘dispossessed,’” The Oaks given to “‘a new proprietor,’” and – the “‘worst thought’” – their servants will be “‘scattered…dragged off to the city, and made to work at the fortifications, and finally shipped to the West Indies’” by the British invaders (GLB

March 1850 :167, KW 28). Singleton assures her that she has no cause for concern, but must allow the officers to take her to Charleston under their protection for the “‘same degree of security could attend [her] nowhere else in the South at present.’” The Revolutionary conflict “‘must be a Fabian war – irregular, predatory, and eccentric in regard to the region in which it will prevail’” (GLB 168, KW 28). In the meantime, Balfour and Cruden realize that they have seen no trace of the numerous slaves or vast collection of plate reportedly held by the estate and search the mansion for the missing spoils. The fourth installment (May 1850) resumes later that night when the slave 70 Bacchus, Singleton, and Katharine rendezvous with Colonel Walton who burns the rice crop – thus destroying a significant enticement that had lured Balfour and Cruden to The Oaks. Singleton continues his partisan activities as his own rightful person and in the guise of the loyalist Furness for several installments and Katharine does not arrive in

Charleston until the middle of the seventh installment (August 1850). In the midst of his serial – an abbreviated version of the novel ultimately published in a volume edition by A. Hart in 1851 – Simms profiles the British officers and loyalists in Charleston, representing historical figures and relating local legends as he contrasts the decadence of the loyalist set with the covert determination of the rebel faction within the walls of the occupied city. Although Katharine is a ward of Colonel Cruden, she resides with her relative, Mrs. Thomas Singleton, the aunt of Robert Singleton, who is “firmly devoted to the Revolutionary movement” and whose home is a “favorite point of re-union among the patriots” (GLB August 1850: 92, KW 81). Katharine is “an heiress and a beauty, and consequently a belle” (KW 80) in spite of her family’s rebellion and she receives loyalist visitors, is invited to events held among the other political set, and continues to attract the attention of the commandant Balfour.

Simms compares the “fashionable and frivolous” loyal subjects in Charleston with the “serious” rebels; the brilliant parties and salons of the loyalists with the “gloomy evenings” among the conspiring patriots (GLB September 1850: 168, KW 94). Political matters are “not so much discussed as accepted” among the former, while the latter have a “restless interest, in the cause of liberty” and “long for the overthrow of the existing regime…the return of exiles, well-beloved sons of the soil, dear to their affections, precious to their hopes, the kinsmen of their blood” (GLB 168, KW 95). The rebels’ gatherings are “not given to pleasure” but plants to benefit their cause in the “remote 71 interior” which were “frequently followed by large results” in the forms of intelligence and supplies. Balfour laments that the city is “‘full of traitors’” who have “‘emissaries everywhere, and communicate with the enemy by means of the winds…for there’s no finding out the process exactly” (GLB December 1850: 341, KW 174). In Katharine Walton Simms portrays a colony networked by boats, partisan scouts, and spies that ultimately succeed in overthrowing the oppressive imperial regime. Yet this rebel network was not complete and pertinent communications were sometimes delayed – particularly between partisan regiments.

In the sixth installment (July 1850) of Katharine Walton Robert Singleton meet the turncoat Brigadier-General Andrew Williamson near Charleston in the guise of the loyalist Captain Furness. Williamson was a historical figure who “sacrificed good name, position, and property” but found “nothing compensative in the surrender”; he was offered no “such command as had been given to (Benedict) Arnold” and only became confident that the British were fighting a losing battle. Singleton is pleased by Williamson’s dejection and, when he reveals his true identity, Williamson insists that he – like Walton – was coerced into taking a protection. Unlike Walton, however, Williamson actually supported the British cause. The turncoat wishes to atone for his

“‘temporary weakness and error’” but the partisan requests that he prove his mettle by serving the patriot cause as a double agent in Charleston. The serial text of Katharine Walton features Colonel Walton’s capture and Regulator-style trial of Colonel Williamson in the ninth installment (October 1850), a plot point elaborated in the first and subsequent volume editions of Simms’s novel. Even though Robert Singleton has not yet communicated his agreement with Williamson to

Walton’s band of partisans, the Colonel still holds a just and moderate trial in a ruined plantation and is captured by British officers in the process of staying judgment on 72 Williamson. These proceeds differ considerably from the (in)justice Walton endured in Cornwallis’s tribunal and that which he dreads in Charleston. In the first volume edition of Katharine Walton, the Colonel strives to maintain order in a court filled with passionate partisans as they review the known trajectory of Williamson’s career from his faithful service of the patriot cause through his “supposed unhappy falling off from sworn faith and country” (KW 141). The double agent finds the presence of Major Proctor, who is also a prisoner, albeit one slated for release, to be an unforeseen challenge. He cannot admit the nature of his arrangement in the presence of a British official who has been wronged by his government, but remains loyal. The partisan soldiers insist that Williamson is “‘a proven traitor, and deserves the death of one,’” causing the defendant inquire whether this proceeding is indeed “‘a trial,’” to which the judge replies that the affair is “‘a more formal and regular trial, by far, than Rawdon and Balfour accord to the Whigs’” (142). Major Proctor speaks out against the partisan mob “‘resolute to have this man’s blood’” when the “‘circumstances of the case, and the condition of the country, neither call for, nor will sanction its shedding,’” and entreats Walton, “‘as a man of honor and a Christian,’” to “‘interpose’” and restore order. Colonel Walton grants Williamson the private interview he seeks and is satisfactorily informed of the agent’s new role as British troops arrive, break up the trial, and recapture Walton. Walton’s capture and conviction is a fictionalized rendition of the fate of Colonel Hayne, an elite planter and state senator who was captured while trying the turncoat Andrew Williamson, brought to Charleston, and hung in 1781. Nesbit Balfour’s advances toward Katharine Walton become more aggressive after her father is captured. The commandant is confident that the capture of Colonel Walton and the death sentence standing against him, exacerbated by his evasion of justice, render him the “‘master’” of Katharine’s fate (GLB November 1850: 291, KW 157). When Katharine 73 and Mrs. Singleton finally gain an audience with the intentionally elusive commandant, the rebel’s daughter expresses certainty that her father can be exchanged by Greene or Marion for British or Tory prisoners of equivalent rank. Balfour clarifies that Colonel Walton is “‘regarded as a fugitive from justice – as one under condemnation of a competent tribunal, against whom judgment of death stands on record’” (GLB,

November 1850: 293, KW 159). The commandant hesitates to allow Katharine to visit her father for selfish reasons but pleads the responsibilities of his office until Mrs. Singleton maintains that the severity of Walton’s sentence renders the “‘policy, real or pretended, which should deny her the privilege of consoling him…an outrage to humanity’” (GLB 294, KW 160). The commandant admits that Walton’s conviction would be considered an outrage “‘under a lawful judgment,’” but humanity is “‘outraged daily for the maintenance of right and justice’” under the present circumstances. Colonel Walton is surprised that his daughter is aware of the fact that the British consider him a fugitive, traitor, and spy and suggests that Balfour has only informed her of these charges in order to manipulate her, though he cannot “‘doubt or deny that, if the policy of the British authorities lay in putting [him] on trial for [his] life – nay, putting [him] summarily to death at this moment – there would be sufficient pretext, and no law of right or reason would be respected by them (GLB 294, KW 161). Colonel Walton echoes Ernest Mellichampe’s observation that the imperial government has shifted its policy toward “‘forbearance, toleration, and a mild government,’” as “‘[r]evenge or cruelty would only embitter the public feeling, and arouse a spirit in the country such as they could never hope to allay,’”22 but when Balfour calls on the rebel he informs him that the present policy of British officials with regard to himself is that he need only be

22 See M II: 298-99, 231. 74 identified to be executed. Colonel Walton can only appeal to the “‘arms of his country for the punishment of those who should shed his blood under such a sentence,” as he did during his first trial in The Partisan.23 Balfour interposes himself between the orders of the Crown and the dictates of imperial officials when he suggests that he will spare Walton’s life in exchange for his daughter’s hand in marriage. The rebel is insulted by the notion that he would “‘sell [his] blood to save [his] life’” or place his daughter “‘into bonds’” to break his own (GLB 298, KW 164). He resolves to face death rather than sacrifice Katharine’s freely given consent to wed Robert Singleton – a match that he condoned in the swamp at the close of The Partisan. When Katharine returns to visit, Colonel Walton requests that she swear an oath on a bible belonging to her late mother that she will not consent to wed any other man, “‘no matter what events may happen to make it appear politic’” (GLB December 1850: 332, KW 165) in anticipation of Balfour’s manipulations during his sham trial and eventual execution. Balfour disregards a petition to spare Colonel Walton signed not only by the rebels in Charleston but loyalists of rank and insists that only Katharine can spare her father. Even though Colonel Walton urges Katharine to keep her oath, she wavers in the final moments before his execution. Balfour accepts her submission and dispatches a written order to stay the execution, but a slighted loyalist belle with whom the commandant had relations intercepts this message and substitutes a blank piece of paper. The Colonel is escorted to the gallows accompanied by the doctor and historian David Ramsay and other notable rebels and hung before an audience consisting of these rebel elites and a crowd consisting only of “foreigners” – mainly British and Hessian troops –

23 GLB December 1850: 339, KW 173. Also see Partisan II: 223. 75 as the “natives” of Charleston – regardless of allegiance – remained within their houses (GLB 350, KW 184). Katharine and Balfour hear the sounding of the cannon and realize that the execution has taken place in spite of her submission. The loyalist belle enters and declares that she has “‘saved’” Katharine and punished the commandant by voiding his bargain after he had given his word (GLB 351, KW 185). The actions of this young loyalist allow Katharine to return to the interior and reclaim the Oaks, as Balfour cannot “venture to outrage public decency so far as to deny this permission” (KW 186) to the daughter of the late colonel. Simms draws his core Revolutionary War trilogy to a close by anticipating the marriage of Katharine Walton and Robert Singleton – a foundational sectional romance achieved in the midst of death and destruction. The imperial oppressors abuse colonial liberties and property throughout the war and continue to do so even after hostilities have ended – mere days before their retreat – in The Sword and the Distaff.24 Simms supposes that “British philanthropy” cost the former colony of South Carolina no fewer than twenty-five thousand slaves who were stolen and “transferred from the rice fields of Carolina, to the sugar estates of the West

India Islands.”25 Although the British often enticed slaves with promises of freedom, Simms depicts these exchanges strictly in terms of coercion and theft.

24 The Sword and the Distaff was serialized in eighteen semi-monthly supplements to the Southern Literary Gazette from 28 February through 6 November 1852. The serial text is not known to be extant, with the exception of one supplement for 19 June 1852 which contains chapters thirty-two through thirty-five of the novel (corresponding to pages 177-185 of the first volume edition). See The Letters of William Gilmore Simms, Eds. Mary C. Simms Oliphant, Alfred Taylor Odell, T.C. Duncan Eaves, 6 vols. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1954) 3:185, note 30. James B. Meriwether observes that the standing type from which the serial text was printed was paged and plated for the first volume edition in 1852. This edition is identified as the “second edition” because the “serial text, printed from the same typesetting, was considered the first.” See Meriwether, “The Theme of Freedom in Woodcraft,” in Long Years of Neglect: The Work and Reputation of William Gilmore Simms, Ed. John Caldwell Guilds (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1988) 33. 25 Simms, The Sword and the Distaff; or, ‘Fair, Fat and Forty,’ A Story of the South, At the Close of the Revolution (Charleston: Walker, Richards & Co, 1852) 2. Henceforth The Sword and the Distaff is abbreviated S&D in notes and parenthetical citations. 76

THE ISSUE OF SLAVERY

Slavery is implicit throughout Simms’s Revolutionary romances – historical novels written during the mid-nineteenth century in which he attempted to reify Southern social and economic institutions. The early romances including The Partisan (1835) and Mellichampe (1836) were initially published in volume editions by Harper & Brothers in New York and re-released in 1854 by the Brooklyn publisher J.S. Redfield and Simms profiled several types of slaves for the benefit of northern readers. In The Partisan Simms observes that “[i]n all native Carolina families there are two or more favourite domestic slaves, between whom and their owners there exists a degree of regard which does not fall short in its character and effects of the most endearing relationship” in a note to the text (148). When Robert Singleton arrives at the Walton plantation to visit his dying sister, she requests her “‘old mommer’” – a servant who knows her “‘ways and wishes so much better than anybody else’” (I: 149). Singleton does not have the heart to inform her that this slave has been beaten by the Tories and escaped into the swamps. Simms identifies

“‘mommer’” as a “corruption of mamma” used even by Southerners who have “long since become parents themselves” which, “in the same spirit,” has its counterpart in the male “‘daddy,’” used to refer to the “male negro who teaches young master to ride, and whose common duty it is to attend up on him” (148). Simms concludes that “[p]erhaps it would be perfectly safe to assert, that there are at least two or three negroes in every

Carolina family, between whom and their owners this agreeable relationship exists.”

77 Emily Singleton summons her “mommer” (II: 52) again on her deathbed and requests that her brother treat the slave well and give her all of her possessions along with a handmade dress and a message entrusted to Katharine Walton. By 1854 Simms had revised his usage, narrowed this explanation to “‘mauma’” – an “affectionate term of endearment which the Southern child usually addresses to its negro nurse,” and no longer made broad claims regarding slaveholders’ customs. Simms portrays another “mauma” in The Sword and the Distaff (1852). When Porgy returns to his ancestral plantation he finds the ruined estate abandoned, but the partisans are surprised by the nocturnal return of Porgy’s “‘poor old mauma,’” Sappho, whom they take for a ghost (S&D 351). Sappho is a “mere skeleton” who considers the return of her master a “‘preticklar blessing ob de Lord’” (352) and reveals that eighteen of her relatives have been hiding in the swamp since hearing reports of British and Tory depredations on other plantations. The gentleman-partisan Porgy is immediately concerned with the conditions in which the slaves are living while his unrefined fellow partisan turned overseer, Millhouse, is busy calculating the number of slaves still belonging to the estate. Beyond these domestics, Simms depicts trustworthy servant throughout his romances who play instrumental roles.

The slave Scipio owned by the Berkeley family in Mellichampe (1836) is “one of those trusted slaves to be found in almost every native southern family, who, having grown up with the children of their owners, have acquired a certain correspondence of feeling with them”(M I: 114) In such cases, Simms suggests that “personal attachment…strengthen[s] the bonds which necessity imposed” and maintains that it is “quite as much a principle” for Scipio to “fight and die for his owners as to work for them” (114-15). The servant acts as a courier between his young mistress, Janet Berkeley, and Ernest Mellichampe, delivering “billets and messages of love” throughout their 78 “unsophisticated courtship” leading up to the present crisis – the quartering of Tory troops at Piney Grove, the Berkeley plantation. When Ernest dares to visit, he relies on Scipio’s assistance in making his escape. Even after Captain Barsfield’s men capture, restrain, and string up Scipio, the slave does not reveal Mellichampe’s whereabouts. Although the Tory is inclined to trust in the slave’s “simplicity,” he is also aware the Scipio is “remarkable for his fidelity,” which gives him cause for doubt (M I: 112). Barsfield orders his officers to relax the rope and leads Scipio in pursuit of the rebel instead of hanging him, but the slave continues to rely on his “natural cunning” and “integrity” and leads the Tories away from Ernest’s hiding place and probable path. Scipio plays a more consequential role in the second volume of Mellichampe when he is summoned by Janet to help rescue Ernest from the battlefield after he has been struck down by Barsfield. The slave and his young mistress witness the Tory captain almost deal the prostrate rebel a death blow and as Janet pleads for Barsfield to spare Mellichampe’s life, Scipio assures his mistress that she need “‘only say de wud’” and he will “‘hammer dis poor buckrah till he hab noting leff but de white ob he eye,’” regardless of the fact that the Tory is armed with a sword and he has no weapon (II: 29). Barsfield strikes Scipio down simply to demonstrate “how little commiseration” Janet can expect from the enemy of her lover (II:30). After Ernest becomes a prisoner of the Tories held at Piney Grove and nursed by Janet and Banastre Tarleton’s own surgeon in anticipation of his trial in Charleston, Scipio relays messages to the partisans camped in the woods and Simms effuses that the slave is “a negro among a thousand; one of those adroit agents who quickly understand and readily meet emergencies; one who could never be thrown from his guard by any surprise, and who, in the practice of the utmost dissimulation, yet wore upon his countenance all the expression of candor and simplicity” (II: 147). As the date for 79 Ernest’s trial and escape approaches, Scipio carries pistols to the prisoner along with an assurance of partisan support in making his escape. In the final struggle in the novel, Ernest Mellichampe’s friend, former overseer, and fellow partisan John “Jack” Wetherspoon, called Thumbscrew, and Barsfield both exact loyalty from Scipio. The Tory captain has been shot in the leg by Mellichampe, with whom he wrestles, while the partisan has been fatally shot and fallen nearby. Thumbscrew urges Scipio to strike the Tory on the head and save Mellichampe while Barsfield alternately threatens the slave with hanging and entices him with promises of freedom and gold.

Scipio remains loyal to the interests of the Berkeleys and so he takes up a heavy knot of wood and deals the Tory captain a fatal blow. The slave is “stupefied” by this sanctioned violence and races back to Piney Grove “crying aloud…in tones like those of a maniac, and in words that indicated the intoxicating effect of his new born experience upon him”: “‘Ho! ho! I kill um…I hit um on he head…I mash he brains…I kill buckrah. I’s nigger…You tink for hang me – you mistake. Mass Wedderspoon say de wud – Mass Arnest no say ‘no.’ I kill ‘em. He dead!’” (II: 224-25) The partisans are victorious, the Tory troops are driven out of the destructed Berkeley plantation, and Mellichampe evades the biased trial and execution awaiting him in Charleston due to Scipio’s loyality.

Simms’s protagonist is united with Janet Berkeley and the title to his ancestral plantation, Kaddipah, is theoretically clear. Scipio plays a more significant role in Mellichampe than the Walton’s slave, Bacchus, in Katharine Walton or the waiting-maid, Flora, in Joscelyn, but all of these servants fill essential roles in the personal lives and political affairs of their masters. Throughout Simms’s Revolutionary romances slaves risk their lives to obediently support a cause which only stands to reinforce the slave system by preserving the possessions and position of the planter elite. Simms’s most complex and protracted treatment of the 80 significance of slavery as a Southern institution emerges in his development of the relationship between the partisan lieutenant Porgy and his cook, Tom, throughout his core series of revolutionary romances.26 Simms portrays Porgy preparing for dinner in the partisan camp with Tom in the first editions of The Partisan and Mellichape. In the first edition of The Partisan, Porgy returns from a hunt and encourages the “negro cook” (I:116), who is not introduced as belonging specifically to him but as being in the service of the partisan camp, to prepare dinner. In the second volume, Singleton enters the camp to find Porgy “hurrying the evening meal” (II:23) and the epicurean boasts that Tom “‘broils ham the best of any negro in the southern country,’” that his hoe-cake is “‘absolutely perfection,’” and that he exhibits “‘a dexterity that is remarkable’” in the use of the griddle (II:24). Porgy resumes his terrapin hunt later in the novel and, when he summons the sleeping Tom to help him prepare his catch, the slave lectures the Squire (or Lieutenant, in the second edition) about disturbing him, but is lectured, in turn, about the excellence of the stew. Simms develops a friendly antagonism between Porgy and Tom but also portrays a mutual devotion between master and slave. Porgy hears Tom’s “pitiful howling” when the partisans are stationed near the river outside of Camden and rushes to keep the slave from being beaten. The partisan seizes the soldier assaulting Tom and insists that the slave is “‘too valuable for blows; – boils the best rice in the southern country, and hasn’t his match, with my counsel, at terrapin in all Dorchester’” (II: 168). Porgy does not realize that the soldier has bloodied Tom’s nose until the culprit has departed but claims that he “‘should have confounded’”

26 Tom’s roles in The Partisan and Mellichampe are expanded in the second volume edition of these novels published by J.S. Redfield in 1854, two years after The Sword and the Distaff was serialized and released in a volume edition by Walker, Richards & Co. Tom is never mentioned in the serial text of Katharine Walton, but in the first (1851) and second (1854) volume editions Porgy reflects that Tom will “‘possibly’” be the only person who will mourn for him after he dies. See KW 151; second edition (1854) 378. 81 (170) the man for injuring this skillful slave. Simms fleshes out the characters of Porgy and Tom in the second edition of The Partisan published by J.S. Redfield in 1854. Tom is clearly identified as belonging to Porgy, who has “‘ate and drank and talked everything away…but his horse, his nigger servant, and his broadsword’” (Partisan 1854 98-9). Tom is specifically a “negro body servant” – “one of that class of faithful, half-spoiled negroes, who will never suffer any liberties with his master, except such as he takes himself’” (110-11). In addition to being a “famous cook, after the fashion of the southern planters, who could win his way to your affections through his soups, and need no other argument,” Tom has “humours almost as keep and lively” as those of his master. Tom prepares meals for the partisans in Mellichampe (1836) and counsels his master on the care of a sickly horse, for Porgy maintains that Tom, as a “‘good cook…ought to know what’s good for the stomach even of a horse’” (M I:167). In the second (1854) edition, Porgy’s horse is significantly named “Nabob” and, after the horse dies, Tom skins the animal so that he and Nabob may “‘sleep togedder a’fter this, for ebber and ebbermore’” – an excuse Porgy supposes the slave would provide for skinning his master as well (Mellichampe 173). Slavery is a more significant subject in its own right in The Sword and the Distaff, which takes place after hostilities have ended. As mentioned above, Simms’s fourth Revolutionary romance commences with the theft of slaves from the plantations of the widow of a Tory Major and her partisan neighbor, Porgy. Porgy initially believes that Tom – who is finally described as “a native African…a fellow of flat head and tried fidelity…famous as a cook” and possessing “genius for stews that commended him quite as much as any other of his virtues to the confidence and regards of his master” (S&D 53) – is the only slave he has managed to retain. Porgy laments that his plantation is mortgaged to “‘a d----d shark of a Scotchman; 82 and, even if it were not, it would be worth nothing without the slaves.’” Porgy arrives in the region in time to assist the widow in protecting the slaves she has reclaimed from the British after she is ambushed by their proxies on the road. As he does, he recognizes the voices of some of his own slaves and the “familiar features” of these servants, combined with their “affectionate assurance of love, touched the soul of the sensual and selfish soldier, who was not wholly made of clay” (147). Porgy blesses his slaves and is grateful that the “tories hav’nt quite eaten [them] all” in his absence. As his struggle to retain possession of his ancestral plantation progresses, Tom assists his master in defending his inherited property against the incursions of the carpetbagging creditor, McKewn, who is backed by new legal officials whom Porgy refuses to recognize as legitimate because they defy Southern social conventions. When the sheriff sends his deputy – aptly named Absalom Crooks – to serve Porgy a lien, the partisans challenge the authority of this civil authority by disrespecting his person; Tom shaves off Crooks’s beard and the partisans compel him to eat his “‘vile heathen documents’” (513). As Porgy struggles to retain his property, he recommends that Tom kill himself rather than being sold to another master or stolen. Tom insists that he is more useful alive, but Porgy insists that it is impossible that his slave “‘could wish to live’” were he separated from his master and maintains that they will never part ways: “‘You shall be my cook, after death, in future worlds, even as you are here. Should you suffer yourself to survive me…I will haunt you at meal time always’” (S&D 206). When Porgy is finally in a position to offer Tom freedom at the close of the novel, the slave rejects the boon because he considers servitude a condition characterized by mutual or reciprocal accountability – at least in this world: “‘Ef I doesn’t b’long to you, you b’longs to me...You b’longs to me Tom, jes’ as much as me Tom b’long to you; and you nebber guine get you free paper from me as long as you lib’” (581). By having Porgy 83 declare his eternal love for Tom, who “‘is virtually a free man’” (124), and Tom maintain his lifelong adherence to Porgy, Simms sought to counter Harriet Beecher Stowe’s depictions of the mistreatment of slaves in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. It is uncertain whether Simms read Stowe’s novel in serial format, for he was not likely to subscribe to the National Era, but his “explicit and implicit” response in kind commenced in supplements to the pro-slavery Southern Literary Gazette a little more than a month before the release of the final installment and first volume edition of Stowe’s novel.27 Simms certainly read Uncle Tom’s Cabin, for a lengthy and detailed anonymous review of Stowe’s supplementary Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin which referred to the novel as well was published in the July 1853 issue of the Southern Quarterly Review – a journal Simms edited. The review primarily took exception to the claims of “truth” and “factual authority” surrounding Stowe’s narrative.28 The Sword and the Distaff – better known as Woodcraft; or, Hawks About the Dovecote (1854) – directly countered the inter-sectional antislavery fiction of authors like E.D.E.N. Southworth and Stowe, but paternalism prevails throughout Simms’s Revolutionary romances. Simms’s fictional slaves are invested in the traditional structure of Southern society, in which their place remains stable and unchanging. His servants do not wish to escape from their owners, none of whom are portrayed as being abusive, or even obtain their freedom. Tom, Scipio, and the other slaves in these romances assist and obey masters who are seeking liberty from incursive forces that seek to disrupt Southern social order. In Simms’s fiction, slavery is linked to social order rather than disorder; the institution does

27 See Ridgely, “Woodcraft,” 422, 431. Also see Charles S. Watson, “Simms’s Answer to ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’: Criticism of the South in ‘Woodcraft,’” The Southern Literary Journal (Fall 1976) 78-90. 28 See [William Gilmore Simms], “Stowe’s Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” Southern Quarterly Review (July 1853) 214-254. According to the title page of the Key, Stowe purported to offer “original facts and documents upon which the story is founded together with corroborative statements verifying the truth of the work.” See Stowe, A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Boston: John P. Jewett & Co, 1853). 84 not threaten to internally undermine Southern society like the incursion of the British or, subsequently, the Union. Simms’s desire to establish and preserve sectional stability by maintaining socio-economic and racial hierarchies led him to initially support unionism during the nullification crisis of the late 1820s and early 1830s and, later, secession from an incursive federal order which sought to introduce and enforce social change.

REVOLUTION VERSUS REBELLION

During the summer of 1865 James Chaplin Beecher visited Woodlands – the Simms plantation – in order to investigate the conditions in which approximately forty- five freedpersons lived and worked. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s step-brother had commanded the 35th United States Colored Troops and subsequently served as sub- assistant commissioner of the Freedmen’s Bureau in the Barnwell and Colleton districts of South Carolina. Beecher dismissed repeated attempts by the Simms family to commander a portion of the crop cultivated on their land and declared that the entire harvest rightfully belonged to the freedpeople. William Gilmore Simms Sr. and his children resented the federal functionary who asserted the rights of their former slaves;

James Beecher, the “barefaced imposition” of the Simms family.29 Beecher claimed that he was “not given to making sensation [sic] reports or believing them” but could “personally” vouch that “an organized band of ‘regulators’” visited Woodlands and surrounding plantations and “threatened the hands,” “perpetuated sundry violences,” and

29 James C. Beecher to Stewart M. Taylor, 23 September 1865. See transcription in Robert R. Singleton, “William Gilmore Simms, Woodlands, and the Freedmen’s Bureau,” Mississippi Quarterly (Winter 1996- 1997) 28-9. 85 were accused of a “score of rascalities.”30 These “‘regulators’” were evidently led by Captain Whetstone – a neighbor whom Simms paid one hundred dollars during the summer of 1865 for unspecified services.31 Beecher reported that “[a]ll parties, white & black, agree that a U.S. officer or soldier” bearing “written instructions to kill any freedman found drilling or with arms” led this twenty-man posse, though he doubted that these instructions extended to the

“tying up & stripping & whipping of women.”32 He was confident that a freedmen’s defense, in defiance of these instructions, “would soon stop the amusement of the so called ‘regulators’” and claimed that he would pursue the band himself if he did not suspect that they were based out of Springtown (about ten miles away), as his federally mandated “command” did not “extend to that locality”; “if it did, I should be spared the necessity of this long report.” These “so called ‘regulators’” are the ideological inheritors of a rebel tradition in the South that Simms portrays as predating the Revolutionary War and, in this case, they do not reinforce the new federal regime but attempt to reinstate traditional Southern practices. Simms referred to the “old idea of regulation” in The Sword and the Distaff because, at the close of the Revolutionary War, this approach to individual agency was

as much the necessity of the region, as it had been in the early stages of society when the practice originated. The woods were filled with outlaws and offenders; and, to await the slow processes of the courts of law, at such a period…was to sacrifice all the securities of the better sort of people. Society, in such cases,

30 Beecher to O.D. Kinsman, 7 October 1865. See Singleton 32-5. 31 See Simms, Letters, IV: 520. 32 Beecher to Kinsman, 7 October 1865. See Singleton 34. 86 always resorts to the necessary means for sustaining law; and the morals of law

always will, and should, sustain what are the obvious necessities of society.33

Unstable conditions provided “full justification” for the “code of regulation…which is, no doubt, sometimes subject to abuse, as is the case with law itself, but which is rarely allowed to exist in practice a day longer than is absolutely essential to the common weal.” Porgy acts in accordance with this code when he subjects an outlaw “to the tender mercies of an extemporé code of justice” but his resistance to incursions into his property rights by authorities he refuses to recognize as legitimate resembles the “so called ‘regulator’” activity Simms appears to have encouraged at Woodlands in the wake of the Civil War.

Porgy presciently explains to his youngest co-combatant that in times of “‘difficulty or danger’” it is the partisan’s “‘first policy…always to know the worst’” and to determine “‘exactly what is to be done and what is to be endured’” so that one may determine whether their “policy” will be to “‘fight, or fly, or submit.’” This “necessity” carried over into peacetime as “[p]eace is only a name for civil war. Life itself is civil war; and our enemies are more or less strong and numerous, according to circumstances”

(S&D 120). The necessity, as Colin Pearce puts it, lies in “adopting the right stance toward history.”34 Simms privileged this sectional identification along with the oppositional strand of the Revolutionary mythos – an outlook predicated on the preservation of personal and regional freedom from intrusions of external (albeit now

33 S&D 162. 34Colin D. Pearce, “The Metaphysical Federalism of William Gilmore Simms,” Studies in the Literary Imagination (Spring 2009) 126. Charles Watson has pointed out that Simms willfully disregarded disparities in “population and industrial might” that made the North “a closer, more determined opponent” in the 1860s than Great Britain had been back in the 1770s. Charles S. Watson, “Simms and the Civil War: The Revolutionary Analogy,” The Southern Literary Journal (Spring 1992) 89. 87 domestic) authority – in 1852 and his continued reliance on regulator activity in 1865 indicates that the defeat of the Confederacy in the Civil War did not significantly alter his outlook. From Simms’s perspective, the inter-sectional reach of novels like Uncle Tom’s Cabin undermined sectional integrity and the romantic ideal of a society structured on paternalistic planter values and sustained by perceptions of reciprocal responsibility and a

(supposedly) mutual love between masters and slaves.

88 Chapter Three: Israel Potter and Herman Melville’s Revolutionary Misrepresentations

Herman Melville dispatched the early chapters of a novel intended for serialization to Harper’s New Monthly Magazine on 25 May 1854. His short story “Cock- A-Doodle-Doo! Or, the Crowing of the Noble Cock Beneventano” had been published in the December 1835 of this magazine and the paired sketches “Poor Man’s Pudding and Rich Man’s Crumbs” were slated for June, but the magazine’s editors evidently neglected to respond to his query. Melville forwarded the same “sixty odd pages” of manuscript to Putnam’s Monthly Magazine on 7 June 1854 – the only material he is known to have submitted to both publishers. Putnam’s had recently rejected “The Two Temples” out of concern that the unflattering comparison of Christian character in New York and London would offend the “religious sensibilities of the public” – particularly the powerful members of Manhattan’s Grace Church.1 George Palmer Putnam had personally encouraged Melville to submit “some of [his] good things” and, less than a month later, Melville presented the early chapters of Israel Potter as a historical adventure containing

“nothing of any sort to shock the fastidious” and assured Putnam’s editors that there would be “very little reflective writing in it; nothing weighty.”2

1 Charles F. Briggs to Herman Melville, 12 May 1854, in Melville, Correspondence, ed. Lynn Horth (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library, 1993) 636. 2 George Palmer Putnam to Melville, 13 May 1854, in Correspondence 637. Melville to Putnams, 7 June 1854, in Correspondence 265. Putnam’s had also published Melville’s novella “Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street” in November and December 1853 and would subsequently serialize “Benito Cereno” in three installments from October through December 1855 – both of which initially garnered a mixed reception. 89 Melville sought to write popular fiction – a feat that he had not achieved since Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847) – in the wake of the critical and commercial failures of Mardi (1849), Moby-Dick (1851) and, most notoriously, Pierre (1852). Moreover, Sheila Post-Lauria has suggested that Melville “reconceived” subsequent installments of Israel

Potter to suit the “liberal philosophy” and “rigorously analytical” tone of Putnam’s.3 In spite of Melville’s promotion of the serial as a straightforward historical adventure, Israel Potter raises significant questions regarding biographical, personal, and historical veracity. The serial text lacks the significant context Melville provided in his dedication of the first and subsequent volume editions “To His Highness the Bunker Hill Monument” and, as a result, readers of Putnam’s who were unfamiliar with the 1824 chapbook Life and Remarkable Adventures of Israel R. Potter had no indication that he retold a supposedly historical account and made significant revisions including altering the birthplace of the protagonist – the subject of the first chapter – from Cranston, Rhode Island to the Berkshires. Putnam’s readers necessarily lacked Melville’s meditations on the ambiguities of patriotism and history and the significance of biography in a dedication dated 17 June 1854, several weeks before the serial commenced, but which was not published until the release of the first volume to coincide with the final installment in March 1855. The earliest installments of the serial text of Israel Potter appear deceptively simple with the unproblematized subtitle “A Fourth of July Story”; Melville only raised latent questions of trust and mistrust with regard to his protagonist and the motives of biographers in later installments and the dedication to the volume edition. Although Henry Trumbull, the author and editor of Potter’s dictated autobiography, and Melville

3 Post-Lauria observes that Putnam’s was intended to offer “critical commentary on the times” in “direct contrast to the political conservatism and sentimentalism” of Harper’s. See Correspondent Colorings: Melville in the Marketplace (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1996) 165-66. 90 had different biographical motives, both subjected Israel Potter’s narrative to what Russ Castronovo calls the “elixir of democratic biography” in their attempts to (re)incorporate their subject into the historical mythos of the American Revolution.4 In “Melville’s Revolutionary Representations” I reframe Israel Potter in the context of its intertextual origins and initial serialization, arguing that Melville’s fictionalized version of Potter’s story is more “pure,” according to the biographical standards set forth in the dedication to the first volume edition, than Trumbull’s transcription of Potter’s own claims – particularly in the Putnam’s text.5 Potter’s autobiographical distortions combine with

Trumbull’s and Melville’s modes of biographical representation to render the figure of Israel Potter a Revolutionary-era confidence man rather than a common colonial soldier with the uncommonly ill fortune to have been swept overseas to endure prolonged subjecthood.

THE LIFE AND REMARKABLE ADVENTURES OF ISRAEL R. POTTER

In 1823 the historical Israel Potter dictated an account of varied adventures, patriotic sacrifices, and unavoidable exile to Henry Trumbull – an unscrupulous

Providence, Rhode Island publisher – after his application for a veteran’s pension was denied.6 Trumbull transcribed, edited, and published the Life and Remarkable Adventures

4 Castronovo, Fathering the Nation: American Genealogies of Slavery and Freedom (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1995) 142. 5 See dedication to Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile (New York: G.P. Putnam & Co, 1855) 3. Henceforth the first volume edition of Israel Potter is abbreviated IP in notes and parenthetical citations. 6 Trumbull inherited and bankrupted the Connecticut Sentinel, formerly the Norwich Packet; co-edited The Idiot; or Invisible Rambler, a Boston “tattler” or gossip paper from late 1817 until early 1819; and published edition after edition of the popular but notoriously inaccurate History of the Discovery of 91 of Israel R. Potter in early 1824 in an effort to substantiate Potter’s claims of military service as he prepared to directly petition Congress for his pension while turning a profit. Trumbull introduced Potter “To the Public” as “one of the few survivors who fought and bled for American independence” still alive in the 1820s and conjectured that there was “not probably another now living who took an equally active part in the Revolutionary war, whose life has been marked with more extraordinary events, and who has drank deeper from the cup of adversity” than this self-proclaimed veteran.7 Having recently ventured back to the United States in a “state of penury and want” after fifty years of exile in England, Trumbull’s subject sought the “enjoyment of a few of the blessings produced by American valour, in her memorable conflict with the mother country” in which he claimed to have taken a “distinguished” part (L&RA 3-4).

Potter and Trumbull attempted to fill in the gap between the former’s self-proclaimed patriotism during the Revolutionary War and his indisputable absence from the early republic. Ann Fabian has considered the historical Potter as a representative of many aggrieved citizens who appealed to the sympathies of a “democratic readership” they hoped would “right the wrong they had suffered by buying and believing in their stories.”8 Potter strategically asserted his “national identity” in order to “avoid questions about [his] ambiguous personal identity” and his account assumed the saleable form of a comparative expose of the horrors of English poverty and federal neglect in the United States.

America in addition to captivity narratives and biographical treatments of subjects ranging from Daniel Boone to fugitive slave hermits and pauper patriots. 7 Henry Trumbull and Israel Potter, “To The Public,” in Life and Remarkable Adventures of Israel R. Potter, (A Native of Cranston, Rhode Island.) Who Was a Soldier in the American Revolution (Providence: Henry Trumbull, 1824) 3. Henceforth the Life and Remarkable Adventures is abbreviated L&RA in notes and parenthetical citations. 8 Fabian, the Unvarnished Truth: Personal Narratives in Nineteenth-Century America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2000) 41-2. 92 Trumbull glosses over Potter’s minority, which was supposedly spent “in the full enjoyment of parental affection and indulgence,” and skips ahead to his recollection of his parents’ “unreasonable and oppressive” conduct after he had reached the age of eighteen on the first page of the Life and Remarkable Adventures.9 Potter’s “respectable parents” forbade him to marry the daughter of a neighbor when he considered himself “of suitable age” to contract a union with whomever he chose. The historical and fictional Potters leave home in righteous rebellion “while the family were at meeting” (L&RA 6), a congregation Melville situates in “a farm-house church.”10 Melville’s narrator suggests that Potter “emancipated himself from his sire” on ground “equally excusable” as the

“just principles” on the basis of which he cast off the “yoke of his king.”11 He goes on to summarize the same Remarkable Adventures described by Potter and Trumbull:

“wandering through the wilderness and wandering upon the waters…felling trees; and hunting; and shipwreck; and fighting with whales.”12 Although the fictional Potter vows “rather to plough, than be ploughed,” Melville’s narrator declares that his varied (and prevaricated) adventures inevitably prepare him for the “Bunker hill rifle” (P 70, IP

22).13

9 L&RA 5. 10 P July 1854: 68, IP 17. The historical Israel Potter was Israel Ralph, born out of wedlock to Amey Ralph in 1754 – ten years after he claimed – and placed with his paternal grandparents by the Cranston town council. The historical Potter neglected to explicitly mention that his “parents” or grandparents were Quaker elders, but David Chacko and Alexander Kulcsar point out that Trumbull’s “simple mistranslation” or transcription of Potter’s repeated references to the Friends merely as “friends” makes a “radical difference” in Potter’s background. Potter’s “parents” and “[F]riends” likely objected to his intention to marry outside the fold. See Chacko and Kulcsar, “Israel Potter: Genesis of a Legend,” William and Mary Quarterly (July 1984): 369; Beggarman, Spy (Cedarsburg: Foremost Press, 2010) 23-4. 11 P 68, IP 16. 12 P 69-70; IP 23. See L&RA 6-12. The duration of Potter’s whaling voyages and the destinations he claimed are improbable – irregularities that Melville likely observed. Chacko and Kulscar suggest that the “chronology” of his adventures, “or lack of one,” overlaps with records of Potter’s imprisonment off the shore of Britain and places him in the South Seas when he was already “footloose on the continent of Europe.” See “Genesis of a Legend” 372. 13 Trumbull and Melville both invoke popular representations of General Israel Putnam (1718-1790) in describing the patriotism of their common protagonist. See L&RA 13, P 70, IP 24. 93 Melville’s protagonist joins the Berkshire County Minutemen, a regiment which enlisted in the Continental Army on 15 June 1775 and fought in this notable battle two days later. The historical Potter, however, enlisted in the Coventry militia – a regiment that did not see combat at the Battle of Bunker Hill. Potter did not claim to have fought in this notable battle in his initial application for a pension, but claimed to have been wounded in the Life and Remarkable Adventures and his subsequent petition to

Congress.14 The historical and fictional Potters sustain the same injuries – a “cut on the right arm…long slit across the chest; a musket ball buried in his hip, and another mangling him near the ankle of the same leg” – and are supposedly hospitalized at Cambridge until volunteering for a mission intercepting British supply ships on board the

American brigantine Washington.15 Historical records support Potter’s claim that the ten- gun Washington was captured by the twenty-gun British ship Foy, on which Potter and the rest of the crew were imprisoned and returned to Boston harbor before being transferred to the British frigate Tartar bound for Portsmouth on the southern coast of England. Potter’s allegiance, however, proves more ambiguous. Potter claimed to have “projected” a mutiny on board the Tartar with the support of his fellow American captives which failed when a “renegade” English sailor identified him as the “principle actor in the plot” and Melville relies on this account (L&RA 19). On the basis of ships’ logs and sailors’ testimonies, Chacko and Kulcsar identify Potter as the lead mutineer on the Washington – an American as opposed to a British ship – and the “renegade” as an English turncoat who denounced Potter in Boston rather than

Portsmouth.16 Melville adheres to the Life and Remarkable Adventures in representing

14 Chacko and Kulcsar suggest that Trumbull likely compiled an account of the battle from several sources. See “Genesis of a Legend” 374; Beggarman, Spy 44, 47. 15 L&RA 16-18, P 71, IP 26-7. 16 Beggarman, Spy 132-134. 94 Potter’s experiences as a prisoner of war at sea and in England, where the historical Potter claimed to have feared that he “might possibly remain confined until America should obtain her independence,” or the “differences between Great-Britain and her American provinces were adjusted,” should he permit any opportunity for escape to “pass unimproved” (L&RA 24). Sailors were perpetually being captured, recaptured, enlisted, impressed, and exchanged in the transatlantic theater of the Revolutionary War and most of Potter’s fellow captives were impressed into the British navy but returned home after peace was declared, adjusted their accounts from impressment to imprisonment, and claimed pensions. Potter’s desire for immediate liberty ironically led to his spending the majority of his life in exile. Melville characterizes the same clandestine English supporters of the colonial cause named in the Life and Remarkable Adventures and re-presents the encounter between Potter and King George III described in that account. One of Potter’s sympathetic associates recommends that the fugitive take employment in the royal gardens at Kew – the “very den of the British lion” – where he recalls being

“unexpectedly accosted” by the King.17 According to Trumbull, Potter admitted to the monarch that he was “‘an American born…brought to this country a prisoner’” and the

King acknowledged the stubbornness of Americans and extended his personal protection which lasted for a season, until the garden required less labor (L&RA 44-5). Although Melville’s patriotic protagonist is initially conscious of “dim impulses” toward regicide when he glimpses the monarch “unguarded,” he is capable of “thrusting Satan behind him” and vanquishing “all such temptations.”

17 P August 1854: 138, IP 50. This peculiar choice of a hiding place resonates with the decrees of Melville’s “Lightning-Rod Man” regarding safety in a short story published by Putnam’s in the pages preceding this installment of Israel Potter. See P 131-35. 95 The historical Potter recalls an opinion he had “frequently heard…represented in America, that uninfluenced by such of his ministers, as unwisely disregarded the reiterated complains of the American people,” the King “would have been foremost to have redressed their grievances, of which they so justly complained” (L&RA 45). The fictional Potter recalls the opposite opinion, which imputed the war “more to the self-will of the King than to the willingness of parliament or the nation” (P August 1854: 138, IP 51). The “peculiar disinterested fidelity” of his “patriotism” allows him to distinguish between the figure of the King and the man who was king and he comes to believe the

“precise contrary” of his perception of the “popular prejudice” of New England: it “could not be the warm heart of the king, but the cold heads of his lords in council, that persuaded him so tyrannically to persecute America.” Melville’s protagonist ceases to represent colonial opinion as his sentiments come to align with those expressed by the historical Potter. Melville’s Potter proves his loyalty, at least as far as the narrator is concerned, when he rejects the King’s personal appeal to enlist in the British army and Squire

Woodcock, “Horne Tooke,”18 and James Bridges likewise infer that Potter “‘must be a Yankee of the true blue stamp’” from the rumors following him across England. These

“Secret Friends” dispatch the historical and fictional Potters to transmit an “important message” to Benjamin Franklin – the American agent recently arrived in Paris.

18 The cleric and lawyer John Horne did not assume the surname Tooke until 1782 but the historical Potter anachronistically refers to him as “Horne Tooke” while describing events that took place as early as 1776. See James E. Thorald Rogers, Historical Gleanings: A Series of Sketches, Second Series (London: Macmillan and Co., 1870) 205. 96 The Sage and the Shuttlecock

After the historical Potter delivered a grammatically flawed missive19 to Franklin, he claimed that the great man conversed with him

for nearly an hour…in the most agreeable and instructive manner, and listened to the tale of my sufferings with much apparent interest, and seemed disposed to encourage me with the assurance that if the Americans should succeed in their grand object, and firmly establish their independence, they would not fail to remunerate their soldiers for their services – but, alas! as regards myself, these assurances have not as yet been verified! (L&RA 50-1)

Trumbull turns this remarkable recollection into a powerful appeal to readers’ sympathies. Were “that great and good man (whose humanity and generosity have been the theme of infinitely abler pens than mine)” still living, Trumbull had Potter insist that he “should not have petitioned my country in vain for a momentary enjoyment of that provision, which has been extended to so great a portion of my fellow soldiers…whose hardships and deprivations, in the cause of their country, could not I am sure have been half so great as mine!”20 The historical record – including the message Potter delivered in

19 The historical Potter’s claim to have met Franklin is borne out by his papers. Franklin noted the name and purpose of the messenger who delivered a grammatically flawed and misspelled missive: “Israel Potters, pretended Letter from some Gentm. in England.” The letter Potter delivered indicated that he “Hath a Searvant with him” and Franklin’s records indicate that he traveled with a man named Edward Griffis who is not mentioned in the Life & Remarkable Adventures. See William B. Wilcox, ed. The Papers of Benjamin Franklin. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983) XXII: 333-334. The letter Potter delivered is reprinted in its entirety in Chacko and Kulcsar, “Genesis of a Legend” 379-380. A standardized version appears in Beggarman, Spy 58-59. 20 Melville relies on the historical Potter’s claim that Franklin only made deferred offers of assistance – namely, to aid him in returning to America only after he returned to Paris a second time after delivering a response to the Secret Friends in Brentford. Entries in the historical Franklin’s Waste Book indicate 97 Franklin’s papers – suggests that there is some truth to Potter’s recollections regarding Franklin, but Melville’s rendition of Potter’s encounter with Franklin is as fictional as the rest of Israel Potter. The brief but “pleasing” exchange described in the Life and Remarkable Adventures is embellished and expanded into a series of conversations taking place over the course of three days in Israel Potter. Melville’s narrator reaches beyond the limited perspective of his simple subject to situate Franklin in his French milieu and depict him as a “Sage” whose “sapience” flows from the past into the present and who “speaks of the future as well as the past” (P 143, IP 67) – a transatlantic historical agent implicated in the shaping of nations. The narrator suggests that the “sage” necessarily appeared in the popular guise of Poor Richard – “thrifty, domestic, dietarian, and, it may be, didactically waggish” – in the “less exalted habitudes” of a supposedly “simple narrative” of Potter’s adventures.21 Franklin initially charms his charge with “condescending affability” as he attempts to protect his countryman from himself, but Potter soon begins to “surmise the mild superiority of successful strategy” beneath the sage’s “highly ingratiating air” and his suspicions are fed by the edifying reading Franklin gives him to occupy his time (P 280, IP 87).

otherwise. Franklin advanced 120 livres to this “American prisoner escap’d from England to help him home” on 18 February 1777 followed by another 120 livres on 25 February to bear the expenses of Potter and his “Searvant” Edward Griffis, who is never mentioned in L&RA, to Nantes where Franklin’s nephew Jonathan Williams was instructed to secure Potter and Griffis passage back to America. On 18 April 1777 Williams informed Franklin that “Potter and his companion never appeared – evidence that Chacko and Kulcsar rely on in drawing the conclusion that Potter misappropriated Franklin’s funds and that his travels were likely not in the service of colonial independence. See Waste Book, December 3, 1776-March 10, 1779. Franklin Papers. American Philosophical Society. Also William B. Wilcox, ed. The Papers of Benjamin Franklin (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983) XXII: 333-34, XXIII, note 333, 572-3; “Genesis of a Legend” 381; Beggarman, Spy 64-5. 21 P September 1854: 278, IP 82. The subtitle A Fourth of July Story was dropped from this installment onward. 98 Melville’s Potter is literate, unlike his historical counterpart,22 and he opens the final edition of Poor Richard’s Almanac from 1758 at random and (mis)reads Father Abraham’s exhortation on individual agency in “The Way to Wealth”:

‘So what signifies waiting and hoping for better times? We may make these times

better, if we bestir ourselves. Industry need not wish, and he that lives upon hope will die fasting, as Poor Richard says. There are no gains, without pains. Then

help hands, for I have no lands, as Poor Richard says.’23

Poor Richard’s sentiments resonate with the fictional Potter’s early intention to “plough rather than be ploughed” but his phrasing confounds Melville’s protagonist. He declares that it is “‘sort of insulting to talk wisdom to a man like me’” and supplies his own proverb, “‘It’s wisdom that’s cheap, and it’s fortune that’s dear,’” which he assumes “‘ain’t in Poor Richard; but it ought to be’” (P 281, IP 90). Potter voices his suspicion of Franklin’s “‘wild slyness’” in the Putnam’s text and first volume edition, wording which Melville altered to “mild” in his corrections to the third impression of the volume edition.24 Yet the sage’s diagnosis of his “‘indiscriminate distrust of human nature’” leads

22 No evidence indicates that the historical Israel Potter could read. He was nearly blind when he signed his pension application with an ‘X,’ but his lack of knowledge about the missives he carried suggests that he was a discreet agent, in part, because he was unlettered. See Chacko and Kulcsar, “Genesis of a Legend” 388. 23 P September 1854: 280, IP 90. Melville adds the self-referential phrase, “as Poor Richard says,” which appears elsewhere in the introduction to the Almanack, changes “wishing and hoping” to “waiting and hoping,” and makes a minor alteration between “lives upon hopes” to “lives upon hope.” The final recursive attribution takes the place of a quip about the burdens of wealth: “then help, hands, for I have no lands; or, if I have, they are smartly taxed.” See prose accompanying data for February 1758 in Richard Saunders [Benjamin Franklin], Poor Richard improved: being an almanac and ephemeris…for the year of our Lord 1758 (Philadelphia: B. Franklin, and D. Hall, 1757). 24 See “Treatment of Substantives” in Melville, Israel Potter: His Fifty Years of Exile, Harrison Hayford, G. Thomas Tanselle, Hershel Parker, eds. (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and The Newberry Library, 1982) 247. Also see “Discussion of Adopted Readings” 260. 99 him to suspect his own suspicion, for he is aware that he misunderstands “‘a vast deal of sense’” spoken by Franklin, not to mention “‘a world more’” that remains unspoken. Melville’s protagonist ponders whether Paris lies on his own “Way to Wealth” and whether he is actually an “‘ambassador’” or a “‘prisoner’” in the capital; if it is, and he is an “ambassador,” then he is “‘on the road,’” but he senses that this adventure is likely “‘a parting-of-the-ways’” (IP 91). His reading and this awareness fail to lead him to any definitive conclusions regarding his fate. (Auto)biographies of articulate, literate, and socially-connected figures like

Franklin – however fictional – center their subjects within narratives of historical events. Trumbull attempted to do so for Potter, but Melville observes that his protagonist resembles a cork “shuttle-cock of an original scientific construction” whittled by the fictional Franklin. The historical Potter claimed to have completed two round trips between the Secret Friends of America in Brentford and Franklin in Paris. When he attempted a third crossing to avail himself of Franklin’s assistance in returning to America, he discovers that “all intercourse” between England and France was “prohibited” a mere three hours before he reached Dover “as if fate had selected [him] as a victim to endure the miseries and privations” he experienced thereafter (L&RA 52). The historical Potter claimed to have contacted the Secret Friends who advised him to work discreetly as a “labourer” in London for they thought that there would be “little probability of [his] being suspected as an American” in the capital. Melville’s Potter, on the other hand, is either deserted or rejected by all of his Secret Friends and left to cynically reflect on what “‘a true patriot gets for serving his country!’” (P October 1854 376, IP 135)

When the fictional Potter finds himself at an impasse – incapable of returning to France and thence to America – he falls back on Franklin’s sayings. The sage leaves 100 Potter with “the word,” which, as John Samson points out, “is all that poor Israel (and

America) has.”25 These sagacious maxims fail to prevent Melville’s Potter from being lured into a “house of rather secret entertainment” and finally impressed into the naval service of that “magnanimous old gentleman of Kew Gardens,” King George III.26 Melville veers away from the Life and Remarkable Adventures in the fifth installment

(November 1854) of Israel Potter and the fortunes of his protagonist proceed to be “planted, torn up, transplanted, and dropped again, hither and thither, according as the Supreme Disposer of sailors and soldiers saw fit to appoint,” leaving the fictional Potter to ponder why a “patriot, leaping for the chance again to attack the oppressor, as at Bunker Hill,” should now be “kidnapped to fight that oppressor’s battles on the endless drifts of the Bunker Hills of the billows?” (P 378, IP 140)

MELVILLE’S HISTORICAL LIBERTIES

As the historical Potter enjoys a moment of comparative prosperity followed by decades of penury in England, Melville’s protagonist is engaged as a foretopman on board the British ship “‘Unprincipled,’” bound for East Indian waters. Through a series of fateful and purely fictional encounters he finds himself “congenially to war against England instead of on her behalf” on board the Ranger under the command of a self- described “‘democratic sort of sea-king’” – John Paul Jones.27 When Franklin introduced Potter to Jones in the preceding installment, the heart of the American “swell[s] with the

25 John Samson, White Lies: Melville’s Narratives of Facts (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989) 205. 26 P October 1854: 377, IP 139. 27 P November 1854: 474, IP 150. 101 thought of being privy to the consultations of two such men…having ultimate reference to such momentous affairs as the freeing of nations.”28 Potter and Jones bonded over “The Way to Wealth” when they were ushered into Potter’s chamber so that Franklin could engage in negotiations with French nobles and Jones particularly admired the “‘clincher’” of a saying, “‘God helps them who help themselves.’” Jones succeeds in translating Franklin’s wisdom into historic action and he and Potter sail together in several fictional renditions of naval engagements including the attack on Whitehaven and the “snarled” battle centered around the Serapis and Bon Homme Richard.29

This “first signal collision on the sea between the Englishman and the American” proved so “equal” that the outcome remained ambiguous even as the British surrendered on board the Serapis as the Bon Homme Richard sunk. The fate of the ship did not decide the fate of the battle which suggests, in the context of Melville’s narrative, that Franklin’s words could prove charmed. The fictional Potter’s exile seems to be drawing to a close in the seventh installment (January 1855) when Jones sets out for America until the captain picks a “strange quarrel…in the middle of the ocean” with a merchantman displaying English colors and Potter “instinctively” boards the enemy at the sounding of the call to take possession.30 His daring feat is not witnessed and when he discovers the ships have become divided, he tosses his jacket – the only garment bearing “any distinguishing badge” – overboard (P 66-7, IP 218-19). Melville’s protagonist proceeds to be rejected from every “social circle” or “club” of privateers “[j]ealous with the spirit of class” on board the “letter of marque” (P 67, IP 222), but has become passable enough at

28 P September 1854: 283, IP 100. 29 P December 1854: 598-99, IP 197. Potter and Trumbull mention John Paul Jones’s attack on Whitehaven in L&RA 60. Melville provides a fictional account of the naming of the Bon Homme Richard to “‘honor the saying that ‘God helps them that help themselves,’ as Poor Richard says.’” See P 597, IP 190-91. 30 P January 1855: 66, IP 217. 102 dissembling to confound the captain. The master-at-arms leads Potter aimlessly around the ship until, at length, he is “set at liberty” and his skill and sociability earn him a position on the maintop where he “‘seem[s] to belong.’”31 He obtains shore leave when the ship lands at Falmouth and observes a crowd of sightseers watching a captive “of Patagonian stature” being escorted into Pendennis Castle jail. Melville’s narrator profiles

Ethan “Ticonderoga” Allen, the third representative patriot in Israel Potter – excluding his protagonist – in a biographical interlude in the eighth installment (February 1855) of the serial text. Robert Zaller remarked that if Franklin embodies the “cunning of the

Revolution” and John Paul Jones “its will,” Allen represents “its defiance” in Melville’s novel.32

Ethan “Ticonderoga” Allen

Melville represents Ethan Allen as a proto-national type whose “peculiar Americanism” exhibited “no trace” of the regional character of his native New England, but was “essentially western” – a spirit that “will yet (for no other part is, or can be) the true American one.”33 Potter obtains permission to view the prisoner from within the castle walls and watches the larger-than-life patriot outrage his captors and win the respect of onlookers by proclaiming his hatred for the realm, defending his own Christian character, and generally acting wrongfully aggrieved. He considers “materially

31 P January 1855: 71, IP 233. 32 Potter, however, remains the “Everyman of revolution who can never attain repose, an exile in his father’s land, a stranger in his own.” Zaller, “Melville and the Myth of Revolution,” Studies in Romanticism (Fall 1976) 619. 33 P February 1855: 179, IP 244. 103 befriending” his giant countryman but Melville allows sentimental coincidence to intervene when the fictional Potter is sighted by a certain Sergeant Singles – “the man who, upon our hero’s return from his last Cape Horn voyage, he had found wedded to his mountain Jenny,” the woman who sparked Potter’s initial rebellion from familial authority – and identified as an American.34 Potter evades arrest by maintaining that he is

“‘no Yankee rebel, thank Heaven, but a true man to his king, in short, an honest Englishman, born in Kent, and now serving his country’” on board the letter of marque in port. Although Singles recognizes the “useless peril” he has “thoughtlessly caused…a countryman, no doubt as unfortunate as himself,” Potter rules out the prospect of remaining in Falmouth and attempting to affiliate himself with Allen. Melville’s narrator compares Potter’s evasive course with Allen’s and declares the bold strategy and “wild spirit” of the legendary patriot to be “right”; Allen was “honorably included in a regular exchange of prisoners” while Potter remained in exile for nearly half a century (P 180, IP 247-49). Neither the “German Forest, nor Tasso’s enchanted one,” nor the heights of the Catskill Mountains above Rip Van Winkle’s Hudson Valley home contain “more things of horror than eventually were revealed in the secret clefts, gulfs, caves and dens of London.”35 In Washington Irving’s story, a henpecked husband retreats into the Catskill Mountains because his wife has undermined his domestic liberties and intruded into the “perpetual club of the sages, philosophers, and other idle personages” who hold court outside of an inn “designated by a rubicund

34 P 180-81, IP 248-49. Melville draws on the historical Potter’s recollection of encountering his “old friend seargent [sic] Singles, with whom [he] had been intimately acquainted in America,” in a London jail while he is in the employ of the Secret Friends of America. Potter maintains that Singles “certainly mistook me (a Lincolnshire farmer) for another person, and by a wink…gave him to understand that a renewal of our acquaintance or an exchange of civilities would be more agreeable to me at any other time.” See L&RA 54-5. 35 Melville refers to “Rip Van Winkle,” the final story in the first of seven paperbound installments of The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. published simultaneously in New York, Boston, Baltimore, and Philadelphia by Cornelius S. Van Winkle. 104 portrait of His Majesty George the Third.” Van Winkle awakens twenty years later in a new nation among a new generation and assumes his rightful position as namesake, patriarch, widower, and delegate to the “perpetual club” holding congress outside the inn, then designated by a portrait of George Washington. Potter’s exile is painfully conscious and more than twice as long as Van Winkle’s rest. Melville refuses any “delusive mitigation”36 and only offers “artistic recompense of poetical justice” that accords with the “allotment of Providence” (IP 4) in his fictionalized biography. In so doing, he relies on a spiritual narrative structure to transcend Potter’s suffering and forestall the inevitability of his infirm poverty in England long after the American colonies achieved independence.

Exile

Melville condenses and transcends – as he cannot transmute – his subject’s suffering in the last two installments of Israel Potter. His narrator contracts the duration and expands on the substance of the historical Potter’s recollection of engaging in the

“business of brick making…in the summer seasons almost exclusively for five years”

(L&RA 56) and his protagonist become a “true brick-yard philosopher” within the space of “thirteen weary weeks.”37 The fictional Potter amalgamates the material and spiritual when he considers that God serves man as “man serves bricks…building him up by billions into the edifices of his purposes” but “[m]an attains not to the nobility of a brick, unless taken in the aggregate” like bricks stacked in kilns for firing or the granite blocks

36 P March 1855: 289, IP 262. 37 P March 1855: 288, IP 256. The dash between “brick-yard” is dropped in the first volume edition of IP. 105 out of which the Bunker Hill monument would be built. Melville’s protagonist concludes that “brick is no bad name for any son of Adam; Eden was but a brick-yard” at the end of the penultimate installment.38 Potter extends his contemplations to society at the start of the final installment when he observes that only the “midmost” bricks fired in kilns prove “sound, square, and perfect”; those nearest the fire are “burnt to useless scrolls, black as charcoal, and twisted into shapes the most grotesque” with those just above being “a little less withered, but hardly fit for service.”39 The quality of the bricks also deteriorates “in the opposite direction, upward,” with the “topmost” being “inferior to the best” in the middle, but still better than the furnace bricks. Once flamed, the kilns are taken down in a “tumbled ruin,” loaded into carts bound for London, and the next round of “temporary temples” are set up by workers “little less transient than the kilns” (IP 256). Potter’s participation in this revolutionary cycle leads him to contemplate the most “enigmatic” aspect of his fate. He is a self-proclaimed American patriot obliged to serve “as a slave” in England and is driven “half mad” by the realization that he is “helping, with all his strength, to extend the walls of the Thebes of the oppressor” rather than dismantling the empire (P 288-89, IP 256). Melville’s narrator considers Israel “well-named” for his fate as a “bondsman in the English Egypt.” After thirteen weeks Potter continues on to London, which Melville figures as the “City of Dis” in his spiritual narrative (P 289, IP 257). A revolution who once entertained regicide in Kew Gardens enters the capital on 5 November, Guy Fawkes’ Day, and reunites with the “hereditary crowd” – a “gulf- stream of humanity” from which his own ancestors diverged (P 290, IP 160). Potter is immediately aware that “felicity could never be his lot” in England and Melville

38 P February 1855: 182, IP 254. 39 P March 1855: 288, IP 255. 106 condenses forty years of exile into the twenty-sixth chapter of Israel Potter because he deems it best not to enlarge upon his protagonist’s “necessarily squalid” experiences out of regard for his reader’s sympathies (IP 262). In resolving to “cross over and skim events to the end” and omit the “particulars” – “not because these events were untrue, but because they were unromantic” (IP 263) – Melville avoids the primary substance of his source text. Trumbull considered Potter’s detailed recollections of British poverty useful for stirring the sympathies of American readers but Melville maintains that just as “extreme suffering, without hope, is intolerable to the victim, so to others, is its depiction, without some corresponding delusive mitigation,” which his biographical philosophy, set forth in the final installment and the dedication to the volume edition released the same month, does not permit him to offer.

Melville’s ideals of biographical purity led him to consider his alterations and condensations of the historical Potter’s experiences a more aesthetic and moral approach that did not stray significantly from the general trajectory of his account. In the final installment he suggests that

[t]he gloomiest and truthfulest dramatist seldom chooses for his theme the

calamities, however extraordinary, of inferior and private persons; least of all, the pauper’s; admonished by the fact, that to the craped palace of the king lying in state, thousands of starers shall throng; but few feel enticed to the shanty, where,

like a pealed knuckle-bone, grins the unupholstered corpse of the beggar.40

40 P 289, IP 262-63. Adam Smith identified this “disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition” as the “great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments.” See Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 1759, D.D. Raphael and A.L. Macfie, eds. (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1982) 61. 107 In order to render his protagonist’s plight more sympathetic, Melville anticipated several purely fictional (or fictionalized) incidents “not belonging to the beginning of his career.” The historical Potter worked in brickyards and gardens in London and was comparatively prosperous while the fictional Potter sailed with John Paul Jones. In 1781, however, the former made a reasoned decision to wed an Englishwoman because he despaired of “a favorable opportunity to return to America, until the conclusion of peace” and considered the “prospects of a continuation of the war…as great then (by what I could learn) as at any period from its commencement” (L&RA 58). Melville, however, considers a debilitating injury a more sympathetic justification for Potter’s “rash embarkation in wedlock” in enemy territory.41 At some point – either before or after his wedding – a “crazy hovel, in phosphoric rottenness, fell sparkling on him one pitchy midnight” and the narrator suggests that his subject’s “faculties” are not “unaffected” by this purely fictional incident which serves as “added cause” for his “prolongation of exile” and helps to justify his choices and fate. Regardless of when the fictional Potter sustained this injury, Melville mentions his impairment immediately before reporting that his protagonist “lavished” the money he had saved to return to America on a wedding. The historical and fictional Potters refuse an opportunity to go to the United

States which they could “only embrace…by deserting a wife and child; wedded and born in the enemy’s land,” and both proceed to be perplexed by the increase of their family in a precarious labor market. In peacetime, London is flooded with “hordes of disbanded soldiers” willing to “work for a pittance, as to bring down the wages of all the laboring classes” or resort to banditry and prevarication in order to survive. Melville’s Potter differentiates himself from this “crafty aristocracy” that “reaped no insignificant share,

41 P March 1855: 290-91, IP 263. 108 both of the glory and profit of the bloody battles they claimed.”42 Because Potter is principled, he slides from practicing the “village art of chair-bottoming” – the occupation in which he is portrayed on the frontispieces of the first three volume editions of the Life and Remarkable Adventures – to “match-making” and eventually “collecting old rags, bits of paper, nails, and broken glass” (IP 265), making him a rag-picker not unlike the one from whom Melville claimed to have “rescued” (IP 4) his narrative. The narrator flatly acknowledges the births of eleven children “in certain sixpenny garrets in Moorfields,” all but one of whom perish along with Potter’s wife.43

Potter’s tragedy casts him back on idealistic recollections of his early life in colonial America. The stories that the historical and fictional Potters tell to their only surviving son portray the yeoman lifestyle of their youth as trans-historically American. Potter’s utopia (no place) is a nation of family farms surrounded by cheap frontier lands from fifty years prior; a land out of time where freeholders are insulated from precarious imperial markets by productive property and individual agency.44 The historical Potter reflects that “[n]othing could have been better calculated to excite animation in the mind of the poor child, than an account of so flattering a country which had given birth to his father.” In Melville’s words, these alluring descriptions encourage the “poor enslaved boy of

Moorfields” to attempt to escape his “entailed misery” by engaging in “persevering efforts…against every obstacle” to obtain “credit in the right quarter” for the “extraordinary statements” repeated by his father and the American consul in London

42 P 293, IP 269. The historical Potter did not mention any deceptive claims of service made by former soldiers; this detail is added by Melville. There is no middle ground between violent criminals and the “honest poor” who are starving. See L&RA 69. 43 L&RA 67, P 291, IP 264. The historical Potter claimed to have ten children and that all but one of them died. See L&RA 79-80. 44 See L&RA 94-95, P March 1855: 293, IP 270. 109 “charitably” stretches a “technical point” so that the federal government will sponsor the

Potters’ voyage to the United States.45 Melville initially conceived of Israel Potter as “the Revolutionary narrative of the beggar”46 but points out in the final installment, “as a fact nationally characteristic, that however desperately reduced at times, even to the sewers, Israel, the American, never sunk below the mud, to actual beggary.”47 Regardless of Melville’s protagonist’s supposedly innate resistance to “beggary,” Potter evidently had more in common with the “crafty aristocracy” of British pretenders mentioned in Israel Potter – but not the Life and

Remarkable Adventures – and the “Soldier of Fortune” in Melville’s final novel, The Confidence-Man (1857).

The Soldier of Fortune

The Confidence-Man is a metafictional and transactional narrative consisting of sketches in which appeals are made to mutual “confidence” – trust in trade or interpersonal exchanges more generally – on board a ship of fools traveling down the

Mississippi River. Although this novel was suited for serialization and Melville evidently

45 See L&RA 96-100. This “technical point” might pertain to Potter’s absence from the United States when pension laws pertaining to veterans of the Revolutionary War passed in 1818 and 1820 or to the emigration of his English son. See Beggarman, Spy 208-9. 46 In December 1849 Melville acquired a 1766 map of London “to use in case I serve up the Revolutionary narrative of the beggar.” See entry for 18 December 1849 in Melville, Journal of a Visit to London and the Continent, 1849-1850, ed. Eleanor Melville Metcalf (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1948, 75. 47 The historical Potter recalls being “driven to the necessity of making application to the Overseers of the poor” in London but “never with any success” on account of his American birth. See L&RA 86-7. Melville had recently reflected on the “peculiar social sensibilities” of the American poor that made them averse to “charity” in “Poor Man’s Pudding and Rich Man’s Crumbs,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine June 1854: 98. 110 proposed publishing it in Putnam’s,48 he was out of the country on a journey to the Levant by way of Europe and so his brother, Allan, oversaw the publication of this under- promoted novel in volume edition by Dix, Edwards & Company on April Fools’ Day (1 April) 1857. In the nineteenth chapter, an herb-doctor confronts a “singular character” wearing

“a grimy old regimental coat” whom he assumes must be “‘some battered hero from the Mexican battle-fields’” and inquires where, rather than how, he sustained his injuries –

“‘Mexico? Molino del Rey? Resaca de la Palma?’”49 The soldier offers the “rather dubious reply”: “‘Resaca de la Tombs!’” The herb-doctor expresses curiosity about his story and suggests that he might be cured and, when his interlocutor expresses doubt, the herb-doctor deplores his “destitution, not of cash, but of confidence” and urges him to relate his woes for the “‘private good’” of his listener (145). Thomas Fry claims to have been born in New York City where he resided as a “‘steady, hard-working man, a cooper by trade,’” known as “‘Happy Tom,’” until his fate took an unhappy turn when he attended a political meeting in Battery Park (146). Fry has the misfortune to witness a drunk gentleman stab a pavior – a laborer who places pavement stones – for the offense of chewing tobacco. The herb-doctor is amazed that a man of a proverbially strong trade could be bested by an effete opponent and maintains that the mortally wounded pavior only “‘tried to maintain his rights,’” but Fry repeats that “‘the pavior undertook something above his strength’” (147). The gentleman is arrested along with Fry and other witnesses, all of whom post bail and are released. In spite of Fry’s reputation as “‘Happy Tom’” he has “‘no friends’” to free him – a “‘worse

48 See Historical Note to The Confidence-Man, Harrison Hayford, G. Thomas Tanselle, Hershel Parker, eds. (Evanston and Chicago: Northwestern University Press and the Newberry Library, 1984) 278, 316-17. 49 Herman Melville, The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade (New York: Dix, Edwards & Co., 1857) 143. 111 crime than murder’” in the eyes of the punitive state (148). Even after the pavior perishes, the gentleman remains at large because he has “‘too many friends.’” Meanwhile, Fry remains “‘locked up in pickle’” in a “‘wet cell’” until the trial where he gives the unambiguous testimony that he “‘saw the steel go in, and saw it sticking out,’” but his eyewitness report has no repercussions for the guilty gentleman. The latter is presented with a gold watch and chain by his “‘friends’” at a meeting held at the park following his acquittal. For three years Fry remains consensually confined at the Corporation Hospital on

Blackwell’s Island until he could no longer bear “‘lying in a grated iron bed alongside of groaning thieves and mouldering burglars’” (149) and accepts an offer of crutches, five silver dollars, and his liberty. He begs more money to visit his brother in Indiana but arrives to find his brother’s grave and thus finds himself “‘drifting down stream’” on board the Fidèle “‘like any other bit of wreck’” dressed as a disabled soldier. The supposed soldier’s legs are “interwoven,” “paralyzed,” and “stiff as icicles,” and thus he is more visibly maimed than Israel Potter – even after the historical Potter “languished” for four months in a “horrid prison” in London on charges of debt and was “a mere skeleton” when liberated (L&RA 71), a part of his account that Melville did not fictionalize. The herb-doctor cannot believe Fry’s (supposedly) true story because he can comprehend it only “‘in the light of commentary’” on what he believe to be “‘the system of things’” and he requests Fry’s pardon for doubting his unsettling account because it “‘so jars with’” and is “‘so incompatible with all’” of the stated principles of American institutions (149-50). Fry allows that “‘[h]ardly anybody believes my story, and so to most I tell a different one.’”

Tom Fry and Israel Potter both sell false narratives of patriotic sacrifice rather than revealing ambiguous accounts of social alienation. Fry represents himself alternately 112 as “‘Happy Tom, who fought at Buena Vista’” and “‘General Scott’s soldier, crippled in both pins at glorious Contreras’” and a “prim-looking stranger” who overheard his full account indignantly remarks on the disparity between his stories. The herb-doctor replies that Fry “‘lies not out of wantonness’” and justifies the self-proclaimed soldier’s impersonations as the tactics of

‘[a] ripe philosopher, turned out of the great Sorbonne of hard times, [who] thinks that woes, when told to strangers for money, are best sugared. Though the

inglorious lock-jaw of his knee-pans in a wet dungeon is a far more pitiable ill than to have been crippled at glorious Contreras, yet he is of opinion tha this lighter and false ill shall attract, while the heavier and real one might repel’ (150-

51).

Although the stranger still wishes to expose Fry as belonging to the “‘Devil’s regiment’” (151), something in the herb-doctor’s manner dissuades them; perhaps a silent sign that he also numbers among this regiment.50 Fry returns with his gains and declares that the herb-doctor now knows “‘what sort of soldier’” he is and his interlocutor replies, “‘[a]ye, one that fight not the stupid Mexican, but a foe worthy of your tactics – Fortune!’” The herb-doctor is the only person on board the Fidèle to whom Fry intentionally offers his supposedly true account; in turn, the herb-doctor or “Natural Bone-setter” (128) offers Fry liniment as a gift with the

50 In the third chapter of The Confidence-Man, Black Guinea, another manifestation of the confidence-man, offers a list of “‘every so many good, kind, honest ge’mmen more aboard what knows me and will speak for me’” including both “‘a yarb-doctor…and a ge’mman as is a sodjer’” and there are no other soldiers in the novel. The herb-doctor and Soldier of Fortune could therefore be simultaneous manifestations of the confidence-man on board the Fidèle in keeping with Melville’s meta-fictional claims regarding the (in)consistency of characters. See The Confidence-Man 17. 113 suggestion that he should try it, for it could possibly do him good. These interlocutors exchange confidence and, at Fry’s own insistence, some of the proceeds of his begging. Like the historical Potter, Fry feels wronged by his country and he throws out “[u]nhandsome notions…about ‘free Americky’” which the herb-doctor considers “‘unwarrantable’” (151). This manifestation of the confidence-man encourages Fry to set aside the fact that his case “‘looks something piteous’” and recognize his liberty – an asset he can only truly reclaim “‘after receiving the benefits’” of the herb-doctor’s, or, in Potter’s case, the biographer’s art.

THE REFUGEE

The historical Potter arrived in New York in 1823 and made his way back to Rhode Island where he had left his (grand)father “possessed of very considerable property” of which he still considered himself “entitled” to an “equal” share (L&RA 104). He found no relatives, but a “distant connexion” informed him that his relatives had apportioned the estate in his absence and left him out because they “credited a rumour in circulation” about his death. Potter finds himself “doomed” to endure poverty among his

“own countrymen,” for whose “liberties” he claimed to have “fought and bled” (104-5). Melville’s protagonist returns to Boston in 1826 and is nearly run down by a “patriotic triumphal car” proclaiming glory to the “HEROES” who fought at the Battle of Bunker

Hill.51 The monument on Breed’s Hill to which Melville dedicated the volume edition would have been “incipient” and “hard to see” but the fictional Potter sits on a mound in

51 P March 1855: 293, IP 273. 114 the graveyard on Copp’s Hill – a “true ‘Potters’ field” – gazing at the site of the battle where he supposedly received the first wound on his chest. Melville bisects this scar with another fictional wound sustained on board the Serapis, rendering his protagonist the “bescarred bearer of a cross” as physical evidence of his ambiguous experience of British imperialism.

Melville’s Potter and his son rely on the contents of a “voluntary purse” (P 294, IP 273) in making their way to the Berkshires and the line between beggary and charity proves as vague as Potter’s national identification. There, he discovers that the “last known survivor of his family,” who was “a bachelor,” followed the “example of three- fourths of his neighbors,” sold his isolated and mountainous property, and relocated to “a distant country in the west; where exactly, none could say.” Potter’s homestead succumbed to fire, every feature of the surrounding landscape has shifted in his absence, and he identifies most with “a half-cord of stout hemlock…chopped and stacked up…against sledging time” in a “foregoing generation” which has, “by subsequent oversight,” been “abandoned to oblivious decay” (IP 274). Whereas the fictional Franklin maintained that “men must provide knowledge before it is wanted, just as our countrymen in New England get in their winter’s fuel one season, to serve them the next,”52 the fictional Potter identifies with this symbolic “type” of “for ever arrested intentions, and a long life still rotting in early mishap.”53 Melville’s narrator determines that his novel, like Potter’s life, is best concluded “by hurrying…to a close” and reports that the historical Potter fell victim to “certain caprices of the law” (IP 276) and that his appeal to Congress for a pension which the Life and Remarkable Adventures was intended to support was rejected.

52 P August 1854: 146, IP 77. 53 P March 1855: 294, IP 274. 115 In the dedication to the first volume edition Melville maintains that Potter “well merits” the “tribute” of the novel on account of having ostensibly been “a private of Bunker Hill” who was “promoted to a still deeper privacy under the ground, with a posthumous pension, in default of any during life, annually paid him in the spring by the ever-new mosses and sward” (IP 3). Melville went on to articulate monumental ideals for biographical representation regardless of the fact that he altered substantial portions of Potter’s account and the tone of his narrative. The “purer form” of biography, meaning that “confined to the ended lives of the true and brave, may be held the fairest meed of human virtue – one given and received in entire disinterestedness – since neither can the biographer hope for acknowledgment from the subject, nor the subject at all avail himself of the biographical distinction conferred.” The historical Potter was alive when he dictated his account to Trumbull in 1824 and both parties were interested in the text – Trumbull sought to earn a profit from the unusual account of his elderly, disenfranchised and impoverished subject and Potter aimed to finally avail himself of a pension. According to these standards, Melville’s novel – with all of his adjustments and fictitious expansions – is “purer” than Potter and Trumbull’s account.54 The novel is certainly not strictly pure – if such an ideal is possible – as Melville still sought commercial success with a supposedly innocuous work of historical fiction. Melville’s representation of Potter had an unauthorized afterlife in the wake of the Civil War. Eight years after The Confidence-Man (1857), the Philadelphia firm T.B. Peterson & Brothers, which dealt in popular works, advertised a new novel by Herman

Melville titled The Refugee.55 This unauthorized reprint of Israel Potter from plates

54 A reviewer of the first volume edition in the May 1855 issue of Putnam’s Monthly Magazine pointed out that, for all his lofty claims in the dedication, Melville departed “considerably from his original”: “How far he is justified in the historical liberties he has taken, would be a curious case of literary casuistry.” See P May 1855: 548. 55 See Melville, The Refugee (Philadelphia: T.B. Peterson & Brothers, 1865). 116 Putnam sold to Peterson for $218.66 during the panic of 1857 was promoted in the New

York Daily News, Times, and Tribune.56 The advertising copy, which was reproduced on the title page, omitted all of Melville’s novels after Typee (1846) and Omoo (1847) and attributed works to him which he did not write including “The Two Captains” and “The

Man of the World.”57 These specious attributions were accompanied by reviews of The

Refugee that Hershel Parker has observed were evidently new and “possibly genuine” praising the “life-like power,” “food for laughter and sterling information,” and “pleasant off-hand style” of Melville’s narrative.58 This edition did not include Melville’s dedication and therefore resembled the serial text more than the first volume edition. Melville’s wife, Elizabeth, clipped the Tribune notice and labeled it “Fraud” and Melville sent a letter of remonstrance to Peterson & Brothers but the publisher continued advertising and selling The Refugee at the standard price of $1.75 in cloth with a choice of two bindings or $1.50 in paper with Melville seeing no profit. Israel Potter was a timely offering at the end of the Civil War and the novel stands purely on its own in this decontextualized and unauthorized format for a readership grappling with the shifting significance of collective memory, national identity, federal accountability, and the personal costs of patriotic sacrifice.

56 See “Historical Note” in the Northwestern-Newberry edition of Israel Potter 224. 57 The sources of these titles are uncertain, but “Napoleon; or, the Man of the World” was a section in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Representative Men (1850). 58 See Hershel Parker, Herman Melville: 1851-1891 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002) 587. 117

Chapter Four: Romantic Liberalism in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s The Minister’s Wooing

Harriet Beecher Stowe depicts the Congregational minister and theologian Samuel Hopkins (1721-1803) as a historical figure who facilitated the transition between colonial conceptions of covenant and liberal notions of contractualism in her third novel, the second to be serialized, and the first set in New England. Over the course of thirteen issues of the Atlantic Monthly, from December 1858 through December 1859, Stowe anachronistically re-presented a private incident that occurred in the 1740s in order to dramatize the interaction between republican, religious, and romantic idealism in the early republic.1 The historical Hopkins formed a “matrimonial engagement” which was called off when his fiancée informed him that, “however much she respected and esteemed him, she could not fulfil [sic] her engagement to him from the heart” because her former lover had returned.2 Although Hopkins married for the first time in 1848 at the age of twenty-six, the fictional minister has “delayed” matrimony to “late bachelorhood” on account of “straitened circumstances, and the unsettled times of the Revolution, in

1 The Atlantic Monthly was founded in 1857 as a “journal of literature, politics, science, and the arts.” James Russell Lowell served as the first editor (1857-1861) and the magazine was published by Phillips, Sampson and Company until the firm failed in late 1859 and the magazine was acquired by Ticknor and Fields. See Michael Winship, American Literary Publishing in the Mid-Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995) 20-1. Also see Susan Goodman, Republic of Words: The Atlantic Monthly and Its Writers, 1857-1925 (Lebanon, NH: University Press of New England, 2011) and Ellery Sedgwick, A History of the Atlantic Monthly, 1857-1909: Yankee Humanism at High Tide and Ebb (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994). 2 See William Patten, D.D., Reminiscences of the Late Rev. Samuel Hopkins, D.D. (Providence: Isaac H. Cady, 1843) 31. Edwards Amasa Park references Patten’s account in his memoir of Hopkins. See Samuel Hopkins, The Works of Samuel Hopkins, D.D., ed. Edwards Amasa Park (Boston: Doctrinal Tract and Book Society, 1852) 55. 118 which he had taken an earnest and zealous part.”3 Stowe’s Hopkins experiences the aforementioned disappointment in the 1790s when he is supposedly only forty, and in the “very season of ripeness, – the very meridian of manly lustre and splendor” – rather than a septuagenarian.4 The drama of The Minister’s Wooing centers on this incident, but Stowe incorporates a positive depiction of Hopkins’s progressive social views and corrective criticism of his theology for readers wondering “whether this history is going to prove anything but a love-story, after all.”5 The titular minister – whom she refers to as “Dr. H.” in the serial text and “Hopkins” in the first English and American volume editions – preaches against slavery and interprets republican ideals more universally than the political founding fathers on the basis of covenant or “federal” theology.6 The term

‘covenant’ originates in the Hebrew b’rit, signifying a perpetual “voluntary partnership…between people or parties having independent, though not necessarily equal, status.”7 The English word ‘federal’ is derived from the Latin foedus, signifying a treaty or agreement between allied states or parties. Stowe implicates the fictional minister in several obligatory and overlapping covenants including religious belief

3 Harriet Beecher Stowe, “The Minister’s Wooing,” Atlantic Monthly February 1859: 219; TMW 86. Henceforth the serial text of The Minister’s Wooing is abbreviated AM in notes and parenthetical citations. 4 Harriet Beecher Stowe, “The Minister’s Wooing,” Atlantic Monthly May 1859: 621; The Minister’s Wooing (New York: Derby and Jackson, 1859) 182. Henceforth the serial text of The Minister’s Wooing is abbreviated AM and the first American volume edition is abbreviated TMW in notes and parenthetical citations. 5 AM March 1859: 377, TMW 123. 6 The first volume edition of The Minister’s Wooing was published in London in an effort to secure British and European royalties given the unsettled status of international copyright laws in the mid-nineteenth century. The British edition includes a unique introduction dated 25 August 1859. See H. Beecher Stowe, The Minister’s Wooing (London: Sampson, Low, Son, & Co., 1859). The first American edition does not include an introduction. 7 This conception of covenant supports “joint action or obligation to achieve defined ends (limited or comprehensive) under conditions of mutual respect which protect the individual integrates of all the partners.” See introduction to The Covenant Connection: From Federal Theology to Modern Federalism, eds. Daniel J. Elazar and John Kincaid (Lanham, Maryland: Lexington Books, 2000) 5-9. 119 structured by the dictates of New Divinity theology; a conviction that the American Revolution was endorsed by providence and must have its imperatives and ideals realized; the ministry of the First Congregational Church of Newport, Rhode Island; and his residence with two of his congregants, a widow and her daughter. Stowe presents Hopkinsian or New Divinity theology as a stringent style of

Calvinism predicated on the belief that that there was “nothing meritorious” short of “absolute self-negation” and unconditional surrender to the infinite” and that unregenerate persons could not possibly act in ways that were pleasing to God.8 Hopkins sought to actualize the ethical abstractions of his mentor, Jonathan Edwards, by articulating the doctrine of disinterested benevolence – a divine attitude theoretically attainable by humankind through the absolute abstraction of self-interest from social considerations.9 As a result, the First Church was less popular during Hopkins’s tenure than the ministries of more charismatic evangelists in a state with a legacy of religious liberty.10 He draws a “small” salary as the minister of a congregation which convenes in a “dilapidated and forlorn” edifice that had been “damaged during the Revolutionary struggle,” and had not yet been repaired or rebuilt. The fixtures of the fictional First Church congregation are a “select circle” including “shrewd, hard thinkers who delighted in metaphysical subtleties,” like the ship-owner and slaveholder Simeon Brown; “deep-

8 AM February 1859: 220, TMW 87-8. 9 Perry Miller observed that although Jonathan Edwards called himself a “Calvinist,” he could not “retrieve the original positions of John Calvin” in the eighteenth century and therefore “brushed aside the (by his day) rusty mechanism of the covenant to forge a fresh statement of the central Protestant definition of man’s plight in a universe which God created.” See Miller, Errand into the Wilderness, 1956 (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1984) 49-50. Stowe represents Hopkins as continuing this work. 10 The Royal Charter of the Colony of Rhode Island (1663) insured that colonists could “freely and fully have and enjoy their own judgments and consciences, in matters of religious concernment.” The historical Hopkins claimed that he “never wondered” why his ministry was “attended with so little apparent good effect” and that “few persons appeared to have been awakened or converted” by his “poor, low, and miserable” homiletics which he admitted were “so deficient in every day.” See Hopkins, Sketches of the Life of the Late Rev. Samuel Hopkins D.D., ed. Stephen West (Hartford: Hudson and Goodwin, 1805) 88. 120 hearted, devoted natures, who sympathized with the unworldly purity of [Hopkins’s] life, his active philanthropy, and untiring benevolence,” like the slave Candace and the spinster Miss Prissy; and “courageous men, who admired [the minister’s] independence of thought and freedom in breasting received opinion,” like the representative New

Englander Zebidee Marvyn and the late George Scudder.11 Stowe finds “something affecting” in Hopkins’s “pertinacity” in “saying his say to his discouraging minority of hearers,” publishing his stringent theology, and calling for the reconciliation of religious and republican ideality in pamphlets and newspaper essays.12

In addition to portraying Hopkins’s relationship with his congregation, Stowe depicts a fictional domestic arrangement in which the minister is an object of maternal aspiration and filial devotion. Stowe’s Hopkins is a bachelor who boards with George

Scudder’s widow and her sole surviving daughter – women who lack historical, if not scriptural, precedents. Katy Scudder is an antitype of the “Scriptural Martha,”13 a practical and materially-minded believer devoted to the memory of her deceased husband, the salvation and social station of her daughter, and the continued service of their minister. She considers Hopkins “a superior being possessed by a holy helplessness in all things material and temporal” and voluntarily assumes the responsibility of

11 AM 220, TMW 89. 12 TMW 90. Hopkins’s publications included theological treatises and his System of Doctrines (1793) as well as antislavery pamphlets and newspaper essays. Hopkins’s 1776 “Dialogue Concerning the Slavery of the Africans Shewing it to be the Duty and Interest of the American Colonies to Emancipate all their African Slaves” was dedicated to the Continental Congress and called for the realization of republican ideality through universal emancipation. Edwards Amasa Park, the editor of Hopkins’s posthumous Works, reflected that there was “a poetic grandeur in the very thought, that an indigent and often invalid pastor, after having been reproached and persecuted for half a century, should waver not a hair’s breadth from his obnoxious faith; and in his extreme age should publish it.” See Hopkins, Works, I: 208. 13 AM April 1859: 510. In Luke 10:38-42 Martha is described as a woman “cumbered about much serving.” Jesus rebukes her when she complains that her sister, Mary, has left her to “serve alone”: “Martha, Martha, thou art careful and troubled about many things: but one thing is needful: and Mary hath chosen that good part, which shall not be taken away from her.” All biblical references are to the Authorized King James Version, Eds. Robert Carroll and Stephen Prickett (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997). 121 prevising the earthly and material aspects of his affairs.”14 Even though the external signifiers of his ministerial authority appear imposing rather than comically “unsuited to clerical dignity…entirely owing to Mrs. Katy Scudder,” the fictional minister fails to acknowledge the extent of the widow’s talents and “insist[s] on the duty of heavenly abstractedness” exemplified by her only surviving daughter, Mary.15

Stowe’s heroine is an innate believer “nurtured” by the “abstract and positive theologies” of her native New England. Mary Scudder has “read and pondered treatises on the Will, and listened in rapt attention, while her spiritual guide, the venerated Dr.

Hopkins, unfolded to her the theories of the great [Jonathan] Edwards on the nature of true virtue” while her mother remains caught up in worldly notions and works. She is capable of innately comprehending doctrine that her minister has “laboriously and heavily reasoned out” and Stowe’s Hopkins “often seemed to follow” his young catechumen and congregant “as Dante followed Beatrice through the ascending circle of the celestial spheres.” The fictional minister is unaware of the extent of his affection for Mary but Katy anticipates that her daughter’s “dutiful reverence” for their minister might “easily” be “changed into a warmer sentiment, when she should find out that so great a man could descend from his lofty thoughts to think of her” as a helpmeet.16

In the widow’s mind, Hopkins still “united…all those ideas of superior position and cultivation with which the theocratic system of the New England community had invested him” and satisfied her “notions of social rank” and prerequisite of religious belief (TMW 96). Her highest aspiration is to “place her daughter on the throne of such preeminence” (TMW 97). Although Hopkins is “not popular…as a preacher,” he was “a

14 AM March 1859: 384, TMW 146. 15AM April 1859: 510, TMW 168. 16 AM February 1859: 223, TMW 97-8. 122 noted man in his age,” and Katy still recalls his grandeur when he marched through Newport “side by side with General Washington” and, “in the majesty of his gown, bands, cocked hat, and full flowing wig, was thought by many to be the more majestic and personable figure of the two.” The “Martha-like” mother does not realize that she pits her practical powers against the revealed will of God by orchestrating the minister’s wooing. Katy’s determination to wed her daughter to their minister allows Stowe to contrast antiquated conceptions of authority with a providential endorsement of personal inclination, which I refer to as romantic liberalism.

Stowe portrays Calvinist theology as abstracted and stringent and covenant or federal theology as unnecessarily restrictive, but maintained that she did not seek to “imply the truth or falsehood” of Hopkinsian New Divinity or any of the other “systems of philosophical theology which seem for many years to have been the principle outlet for the proclivities of the New England mind”; rather, she emphasizes their “intense interest” as “psychological developments” and juxtaposes Hopkinsian theology with the secular, self-interested political ambitions of Aaron Burr – the infamous grandson of Jonathan Edwards – in order to examine how Calvinist beliefs and the remnants of covenantalism interacted with the novel tensions of liberal nationalism.

“PERFECT” LOGICS OF LIFE: SAMUEL HOPKINS AND AARON BURR

Stowe’s Hopkins is “a philosopher, a metaphysician, a philanthropist, and in the highest and most earnest sense a minister of good on earth.”17 “Strong in a single hearted

17 AM February 1859: 219, TMW 85. Martin Kevorkian refers to Stowe’s representation of Hopkins as an exemplary instance of “writing after the minister,” both in point of time and with respect to cultural 123 humility, a perfect unconsciousness of self, and an honest and sincere absorption in high and holy themes and objects,” he manifested “what we so seldom see, – a perfect logic of life” in which “his minutest deeds were the true results of his sublimest principles.”18 Hopkins “took an active part as a patriot in the Revolution,” but Stowe maintains that his “system” could only have originated in “a soul…trained from its earliest years in the habits of thought engendered by monarchical institutions.”19 Hopkinsian theology required a “spirit of loyalty and unquestioning subjugation” toward “an invisible Sovereign” and the minister “regarded himself as devoted to the King Eternal, ready in

His hands to be used to illustrate or build up an Eternal Commonwealth.” Even though the minister was “brought up under the shadow of a throne” and could not entirely “ravel out the stitches in which early days have knit him,” he interpreted the American

Revolution as providentially ordained. According to Stowe, the “only mistake made by the good man was that of supposing that the elaboration of theology was preaching the gospel.”20 Many critics consider the image of the “rungless ladder” in the third installment

(February 1859) as the crux of Stowe’s criticism of Calvinism.21 Stowe represents religious virtue as a “ladder to heaven” based in “human affections, tender instincts, transitions in the nineteenth-century United States. See Kevorkian, Writing Beyond Prophecy: Emerson, Hawthorne, and Melville after the American Renaissance (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2013) 4.] 18 AM May 1859: 621-22, TMW 184. 19 AM December 1858, 883, TMW 23-4. 20 AM February 1859: 221, TMW 90. David S. Lovejoy suggested that Hopkins may have “learned a good deal of finespun theology from [Jonathan] Edwards but the magic of the New Light preaching, so characteristic of Whitefield and Tennent, never rubbed off on him.” See Lovejoy, “Samuel Hopkins: Religion, Slavery, and the Revolution,” New England Quarterly (June 1967) 230. 21 Charles Howell Foster derived the title of his classic study from this illustration. See The Rungless Ladder: Harriet Beecher Stowe and New England Puritanism (Durham: Duke University Press, 1954). More recently, Kimberly VanEsveld Adams has pointed out that Foster incorrectly “reads the novelist as an Edwardsean Calvinist.” See VanEsveld Adams, “Family Influences on ‘The Minister’s Wooing’ and ‘Oldtown Folks’: Henry Ward Beecher and Calvin Stowe,” Religion & Literature (Winter 2006) 53, note 20. 124 symbolic feelings, [and] sacraments of love” leading up to the “threshold of paradise…where the soul knows self no more, having learned, through a long experience of devotion, how blest it is to lose herself in that eternal Love and Beauty of which all earthly fairness and grandeur are but the dim type, the distant shadow.”22 Hopkins fixated exclusively on the “highest step” – a “saintly elevation, which but few selectest spirits even on earth attain” or the “Ultima Thule of virtue” – as the “all of religion”; “He knocked out every rung of the ladder but the highest, and then, pointing to its hopeless splendor, said to the world, ‘Go up thither and be saved!’” (TMW 88) To the minister’s mind, there was “nothing meritorious” short of “absolute self-negation” and “unconditional surrender to the infinite.” James Russell Lowell, the editor of the Atlantic Monthly, wrote to Stowe on 4

February 1859 to complement her novel in-progress. He considered the “February number about the ladder up to heaven…grand preaching and in the right way” and encouraged her to let her “moral take care of itself” as “an author’s writing-desk is something infinitely higher than a pulpit.”23 Stowe began addressing Hopkins’s abolitionism at the close of the next installment (March 1855) and Lowell clarified the significance of this assurance several months later in an anonymous review of The

Minister’s Wooing in the New-York Daily Tribune in which he admitted his distaste for the antislavery themes in her previous inter-sectional novels.

22 AM 220, TMW 87-8. In Genesis 28:12 Jacob dreams of a ladder “set up on the earth,” the top of which “reached to heaven” and beholds the “angels of God ascending and descending upon it.” Christ stands in for the Old Testament apparatus in John 1:51: “Hereafter ye shall see heaven poen,a nd the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of man.” 23 James Russell Lowell to Harriet Beecher Stowe, 4 February 1859. See transcription in Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Charles Edward Stowe, ed. (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1889) 333. 125 Disinterested Benevolence and Slavery

The historical Samuel Hopkins began preaching and writing against slavery in the 1770s, but the fictional minister does not develop this sense of duty until two decades later. Stowe characterizes the minister as a “sort of friend and patron of the negro race” devoted to their “interests” with a “zeal unusual in those days” who spent his “hours of leisure” in the “lowliest visitations” – “hearing their stories, consoling their sorrows, advising and directing their plans, teaching them reading and writing” and “often drew hard on his slender salary to assist them in their emergencies and distresses.”24 Hopkins catechizes slaves, assists some of them in obtaining their freedom, and his “unusual condescension” is “repaid” by “all the warmth of their race”; according to Stowe, the

First Church counted more African American congregants than any other in Newport. In The Minister’s Wooing the fictional minister finally recognizes the “‘rights which every human creature hath before God’” and declares himself “‘humbled’” before God for his (fictitious) neglect and “‘resolved now, by His grace, to leave no stone unturned till this iniquity be purged away from our Zion.’”25 The historical and fictional ministers assert that if the American colonists were “‘right in out war for liberty’” – a cause evidently favored by divine providence – then citizens of the new republic must be “‘wrong in making slaves or keeping them’”26 Stowe’s Hopkins unites republican and religious precepts when he reasons that slavery is “‘a clear violation of the great law which commands us to love our neighbors as ourselves’” and a “‘dishonor upon the Christian religion’” which is particularly egregious for a people “‘whom the Lord hath so marvellously [sic] protected, in our recent struggle

24 AM March 1859: 382, TMW 138. 25 AM April 1859: 507, TMW 159-60. 26 AM March 1859: 384, TMW 144. 126 for our own liberty.’”27 The widow Scudder is a practical believer who cannot help but consider that the wealthiest and most influential congregants in the First Church profit from this “‘thriving and reputable business’” and are likely to be offended by the minister’s anti-commercial scruples.28 Katy maintains that securing the subscriptions necessary to cover the considerable costs of publishing Hopkins’s System and thereby getting “‘right views of the gospel before the world’” is more important than adopting stances on social issues, particularly if an unpopular position might “‘do more harm than good,’” but the minister is willing to sacrifice his System in order to perform his duty.

Hopkins administers a “Test of Theology” to the wealthy ship-owner and slaveholder Simeon Brown in the fifth installment (April 1859).29 Brown’s adeptness at assimilating difficult theological concepts does not prepare him to meet the minister on high moral ground; even after hearing Hopkins’s arguments, he remains uncertain that the slave trade is an evil. Brown attempts to defend slavery as a providential institution that brings “‘poor creatures…to a Christian land’” where they may “‘hear the gospel and have some chance of salvation’” but Hopkins argues that dispatching “‘whole ship-loads of missionaries’” to Africa would prove more effective.30 The minister still deigns to describe the “‘special providence’” available to slaveholders in the First Church – an

“‘opportunity…to testify to the reality of disinterested benevolence’’ by voluntarily “‘sacrificing [their] worldly living and business’” – in spite of Brown’s resistance, but

27 AM April 1859: 507, TMW 158-9. 28 AM March 1859: 384, TMW 146. 29 Simeon Brown is a fictional member of the Brown family – prominent ship-owners and slave traders who endowed the College of Rhode Island. Moses Brown (1738-1836) converted to Quakerism, freed all of his slaves, played a role in founding the Providence Society for Abolishing the Slave Trade, and supported the 1787 state law against the trade. His older brother John Brown (1736-1836) was tried and convicted in violation of the Slave Trade Act of 1794. See Lorenzo Johnson Greene, The Negro in Colonial New England, 1620-1776 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1942) 58-9. 30 Hopkins advanced this claim in a pamphlet titled “A Dialogue Concerning the Slavery of the Africans” (1776). See Hopkins, “A Dialogue Concerning the Slavery of the Africans” (Norwich, CT: Judah P. Spooner, 1776) 12-14. 127 when benevolent duty calls for the “immediate giving-up of his slave ships and a transfer of business,” Brown foresees “confusion and loss” and “felt…too much to see clearly.” 31 His resistance betrays his doubt of ministerial authority and the strong sway of his selfish will. Hopkins points out that the trader has avoided the “‘very point’” of his argument: that slavery is “‘a sin against God’” (AM 509, TMW 165). Brown cancels twenty subscriptions to Hopkins’s System and withdraws his person and financial support from the First Congregation in favor of the Second, as Katy Scudder feared.32 When the widow discerns that Hopkins is “rather depressed” by Brown’s failure of his “Test of Theology,” she ushers him to the Marvyn residence where her relative, Zebidee Marvyn, proves amenable to disinterested reason. Zebidee is “a representative man of the times” and a “sample of individuality so purely the result of New England society and education” that he has filled almost every “office of public trust” from church deacon to school-committee chairman, justice of the peace, and “representative in the

State legislature.”33 His wife, Ellen, maintains the “same thrift and order” within the Marvyn household as Zebidee does without, but she also reads extensively and undertakes “mathematical” and “metaphysical” studies (AM 225-26, TMW 102, 107). Hopkins heralds the Marvyn’s domestic servant, Candace, as the “‘Queen of Ethiopia’” earlier in The Minister’s Wooing and she personally inspires him to finally denounce the fact that American Christians “‘should openly practise and countenance this enslaving of Africans’” as a “‘shame…scandal and disgrace to the Protestant religion’” and vow to

31 AM April 1859: 507-8, TMW 161-2. 32 Stowe identifies Ezra Stiles as the pastor of the Second Congregational Church in The Minister’s Wooing but Stiles led this congregation from 1755 until 1776 when he fled the British occupation of Newport. Stowe also exaggerates Stiles’s opposition to Hopkins and his support of slavery. See Edmund S. Morgan, The Gentle Puritan: A Life of Ezra Stiles, 1727-1795 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1962). Also see Ezra Stiles and Samuel Hopkins, “To The Public. There has been a design formed…to send the Gospel to Guinea” (Newport: Solomon Southwick, 10 April 1776). 33 AM February 1859: 224, TMW 99. 128 preach on the issue.34 The representative qualities of the Marvyn family combine with the minister’s personal interest in and influence on Candace to make her the subject of his “Practical Test.” When the Scudders arrive with Hopkins, Zebidee Marvyn is moderating a dispute between church members over the settling of accounts and they overhear him reference

Deuteronomy 24 – “Thou shalt not oppress a hired servant that is poor and needy, whether he be of thy brethren or of the strangers that are in thy land within thy gates” – in his counsel. Long after the disputants have departed and Katy and Zebidee have discussed current affairs ranging from the “relative prospects of corn, flax, and buckwheat” to the “doings of Congress,” the “last proclamation of General Washington,” and the “prospects of the Federal party,” the minister refers back to Deuteronomy and admits that his “‘mind labors with this subject of the enslaving of the Africans.’” America had “‘just been declaring to the world that all men are born with an inalienable right to liberty,’” divine providence had favored the cause of colonial independence, and Hopkins inquires whether Zebidee believes that that republic can possibly stand righteously before God “‘with our foot upon our brother’s neck?’” (AM 511, TMW 171- 73) Stowe’s narrator observes that Zebidee’s “generous, upright nature” is “more sensitive to blame” than Simeon Brown’s “in proportion to the amount of [his] reverence for good” and he admits that his wife has recently read one of Thomas Clarkson’s

34 AM March 1859: 384, TMW 144. Harriet Beecher Stowe recalled the Beecher family’s washerwoman Candace in one of her contributions to her father’s Autobiography. The historical Candace “scarcely spoke a word,” unlike her fictional counterpart, but “sometimes expressed” her sentiments “in a manner that was really touching. After the death of Roxana Foote Beecher, Candace drew the youngest Beecher children aside and reminded them of their mother’s “saintly virtues” with “tears in her eyes.” Stowe recalled that Candace held her, kissed her hand, and let her fears fall upon it – “something about her feeling…struck me with awe.” See Beecher, Autobiography, I: 305. Stowe biographer Joan Hedrick observes that Candace’s “direct physical expression of her feelings” had a more significant impact on young Harriet Beecher than the substance of her eulogy. See Joan D. Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994) 18. 129 pamphlets against the slave trade and informed him that she “‘did not see but that argument extended equally to holding slaves.’”35 Zebidee’s only reservation originates in scripture – namely the “‘express permission given to Israel to buy and hold slaves of old’” – which Hopkins interprets as being a strictly “‘local and temporary’’ dispensation.36

Stowe’s representative New Englander assures his minister that he does not seek to rely on scripture to defend sinful and unjust practices but is “‘quite sure’” that his own servants – Candace and her husband, Cato – “‘do not desire liberty, and would not take it, if it were offered’” (TMW 174). Stowe’s minister challenges Zebidee to offer them this option.37 The minister asks whether Candace believes it is “‘right’” that the “‘black race should be slaves to the white’” and, after her mistress encourages her to tell him the

“‘exact truth,’” she responds:

‘No – I neber did tink ‘twas right. When Gineral Washington was here, I hearn ‘em read de Declaration ob Independence and Bill o’ Rights; an’ I tole Cato den…’Ef dat ar’ true, you an’ I are as free as any body.’ It stands to reason. Why, look at me, – I a’n’t a critter. I’s neider huffs nor horns. I’s a reasonable bein’, – a

35 Presumably either Thomas Clarkson’s Summary View of the Slave Trade and of the Probable Consequences of Its Abolition (1787) or his more recent Essay on the Impolicy of the African Slave Trade (1788). 36 TMW 173-74. Stowe refers to an argument advanced in several of Hopkins’s publications that, should this dispensation be universal, the “‘Turks might quote the Bible for making slaves of us, if they could, – and the Algerines have the Scripture all on their side, – and our own blacks, at some future time, if they can get the power, might justify themselves in making slaves of us.’” See Hopkins, “Dialogue,” 20-26, 33-6, 47-8; “Address to the Owners,” 61-2; “Crito,” Providence Gazette (13 October 1787) 1. 37 In Hopkins’s 1776 “Dialogue,” Interlocutor ‘B’ maintains that owners should “offer freedom to their servants; and give them opportunity to choose for themselves, without being under the most distant constraint. And if they deliberately choose to continue their slaves, the matter will be fairly decided, and they may continue to possess them with a good conscience.” See “Dialogue 42-3. 130 woman, – as much as anybody…and Cato, – he’s a man, born free an’ equal, ef

dar’s any truth in what you read – dat’s all.’38

Candace identifies disparities between the idealistic language of these foundational documents and the social and economic practices tolerated among supposedly “‘free’’ and “‘equal’” Americans. When Zebidee offers her “‘liberty’’ she immediately accepts, not because she desires to “‘go off’” or to “‘shirk work’” but because she wishes “‘to feel free’”; “‘[d]em dat isn’t free has nuffin to gib to nobody; – dey can’t show would dey would do’” (TMW 176). After effecting the manumission of Candace and Cato, Stowe’s Hopkins finally preaches against slavery.

The Sermon against Slavery

An anonymous review of “Mrs. Stowe’s New Novel” in the 13 June 1859 issue of the New-York Daily Tribune written by James Russell Lowell argued that the “anti- slavery element” in her two preceding novels – Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1851-1852) and

Dred; A Tale of the Great Dismal Swamp (1856) – “stood in the way of a full appreciation of her remarkable genius, at least in her own country.”39 Lowell attributed

38 AM April 1859: 512, TMW 176. Interlocutor ‘B’ in Hopkins’ dialogue insists that slaves look on and hear “what an aversion we have to slavery, and how much liberty is prized… hearing it declared publicly and in private, as the voice of all, that slavery is more to be dreaded than death, and we are resolved to live free or die” and are “shocked” by the “glaring inconsistence” between Revolutionary and early republican rhetoric and social practices. See “Dialogue” 30. 39 [James Russell Lowell], “Mrs. Stowe’s New Novel,” New-York Daily Tribune 13 June 1859: 5. Charles E. Stowe remarked on Lowell’s “appreciative words” in the 1889 edition of the Life of Harriet Beecher Stowe (Boston and New York: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1889) 355. In the 1911 edition, however, Charles E. Stowe and Lyman Beecher Stowe expressed surprise that “so acute a critic” as Lowell could discount the significance of her treatments of slavery. See Charles E. Stowe and Lyman Beecher Stowe, 131 the “unexampled popularity” of Uncle Tom’s Cabin” to “a cheap sympathy with sentimental philanthropy” and observed that

[a]s people began to recover from the first enchantment, they also began to resent it, and to complain that a dose of that insane Garrison-root which takes the reason

prisoner had been palmed upon them without their knowing it, and that their ordinary water-gruel of fiction, thinned with sentiment and thickened with moral, had been hocussed with the bewildering basheesh [sic] of Abolition.

Only Stowe’s “creative faculty” and “genius” – which went “right to the organic elements of human nature, whether under a white skin or a black” – surmounted the problematic features of these “[w]orks of imagination written with an aim at immediate impression.” Lowell faulted Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Dred less for their “temporary” antislavery themes than Stowe’s attempt to depict “a form of society alien to her sympathies and too remote for exact study or the acquirement of local truth” in her representations of Kentucky, Louisiana, and North Carolina. He expressed “great satisfaction” with her decision to retreat to the “mirror of familiar scenes…of a society in which she was bred, of which she has seen so many varieties” in The Minister’s Wooing; anticipating that her first “New England” novel would “prove…the most characteristic” of her works and “that on which her fame will chiefly rest with posterity.”40 The first

Harriet Beecher Stowe: The Story of Her Life (Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1911) 242. 40 A number of critics since have identified The Minister’s Wooing as more of a “New England” novel than an antislavery text. Nearly a century after Lowell’s review, Vernon Louis Parrington differentiated between Stowe’s two Utopian enthusiasms, her interest in Abolition and her affection for the ways of old New England.” See Parrington, Main Currents in American Thought: The Romantic Revolution in America, 1800-1860. 1954. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1987) 375. 132 seven installments had already indicated promise of an interest as unhackneyed as it will be intense” and granted Stowe sufficient “scope” for her characteristic “humor, pathos, clear moral sense, and quick eye for the scenery of life.” Although Stowe shifted her setting to early republican New England, she did not change her subject from these supposedly “temporary” themes, but looked backward in time to reveal their lengthy history. In spite of her historical focus, she still aimed at “immediate impression” in her representation of Hopkins’s antislavery initiatives and homiletics in the installments published during the spring and summer of 1859.

In the eighth installment (July 1859), Stowe’s Hopkins finally rises in the pulpit of his “ruinous old meeting-house” to address a congregation that has never before been “so radiant with station and gentility” on the subject of slavery. Stowe derived the substance of his sermon directly from the “published works” of his historical counterpart, namely Hopkins’s “Crito” essay originally serialized in the Providence Gazette on 6 and

13 October 1787 and reprinted in the 1852 edition of Hopkins’s Works.41 The minister reminds his audience of the claims of human equality on which the republic is covenanted and anticipates “‘terrible consequences’” for “‘all who have had any hand in this iniquitous business, whether directly or indirectly, or have used their influence to promote it, or have consented to it, or even connived at it, or have not opposed it by all proper exertions of which they are capable.’”42 Not only “‘merchants,’” “‘captains,’” and “‘slave-holders of every description,’” but “‘all the legislatures who have authorized, encouraged, or even neglected to suppress it to the utmost of their power,’” as well as “‘all the individuals in private stations who have in any way aided in this business,

41 AM June 1859: 758, TMW 242. See “The Slave Trade and Slavery” in Hopkins, Works, 613-624. 42 TMW 241-42. See “Crito,” Providence Gazette 6 October 1787: 1. 133 consented to it, or have not opposed it to the utmost of their ability’” are culpable.43 He summons the inhabitants of Newport, Rhode Island – a “‘State and town’” which have had “‘a distinguished share in this unrighteous and bloody commerce’” – as well as all Americans “‘whose hands are defiled’” with “‘blood’” to recognize that their conduct undermines the spirit of the “‘national declaration so lately made, that all men are born equally free and independent and have natural and inalienable rights to liberty’” (AM 759, TMW 243-44). The minister considers a range of social phenomena as “‘signs of national disaster’” which forebode the “‘wrath of heaven’” including

‘the increase of public and private debts, the spirit of murmuring and jealousy of

rulers among the people, divisions and contentions and bitter party alienations, the jealous irritation of England constantly endeavoring to hamper our trade, the Indians making war on the frontiers, [and] the Algerines taking captive our ships

and making slaves of our citizens.’44

Stowe’s Hopkins invokes these “‘evident tokens of the displeasure and impending judgment of an offended justice’” in order to frighten his auditors into a sense of moral responsibility and succeeds in casting the “shadow of his own awful sense of God’s almighty justice” over all present during his sermon; after he has finished, the “respectables” in attendance reassure themselves that “after all they were the first

43 TMW 242-43. Stowe had advanced a similar argument in the twelfth chapter of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, “Select Incident of Lawful Trade.” See National Era, 26 August 1851: 1; Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly, 2 vols. (Boston: John P. Jewett & Company, 1852) 194. 44 TMW 244. Hopkins enumerated these social woes in his 1776 “Dialogue” and the second installment of “Crito,” Providence Gazette 13 October 1787: 1. 134 families, and going on the way the world had always gone, and that the Doctor, of course, was a radical and a fanatic” (TMW 244-45). The only person in attendance who anxiously associates herself with the minister is Stowe’s heroine, Mary Scudder. One of the notable attendees of the fictional minister’s sermon is Aaron Burr, a veteran of the Continental Army then serving as a senator from New York, who smirks at

Hopkins’s willingness to alienate his audience by advocating an unpopular cause on the basis of his principles.45 According to Stowe, “no name in the New Republic” was associated with more “prestige of popularity and success” than that of Burr.46 The revolutionary turned lawyer and statesman sprang from a line “distinguished for intellectual ability” and “united…the quickest perceptions and keenest delicacy of fibre with the most diamond hardness and unflinching steadiness of purpose; – apt, subtle, adroit, dazzling, no man in his time ever began life with fairer chances of success and fame.” Stowe considers Burr and Hopkins two figures “so singularly in juxtaposition” because each has “a perfect logic” by which they “guided themselves with an inflexible rigidity”: Hopkins sought the “great object” of existence in “a life altogether beyond self” and considered “sacrifice as the summum bonum” while Burr prioritized “individual pleasure,” “rejected all sacrifice,” and “watched against his better nature” as Hopkins did

“against his worse.”47 The narrator of The Minister’s Wooing maintains that it is “but fair” to consider the lives of the minister and the statesman as the “practical workings of their respective ethical creeds.” Stowe’s representation of Burr contributes a civil, secular counterpart to an otherwise spiritual romance and allows her to explore the tensions

45 Aaron Burr served as a U.S. Senator from New York from 1791 through 1797. He was previously elected to the state assembly in 1784-1785 and subsequently served from 1798-1799 and as state Attorney General from 1789 through 1791. Burr later served as the third Vice President under Thomas Jefferson from 1801 until his resignation in 1805. 46 AM June 1859: 749, TMW 213. 47 AM November 1859: 553-54, TMW 482. 135 between Christian ethics and commercialism, covenant and contractualism, and disinterest and self-interest.

The Statesman

Stowe introduces her heroine to Aaron Burr at a wedding party in the sixth and seventh installments (May and June 1859) of The Minister’s Wooing. The late George Scudder was related to a family of “wealthy planters” and his widow, daughter, and minister are invited to a wedding at Wilcox Manor. Stowe introduces a gentleman who is

“peculiarly graceful in form and moulding, with that indescribable air of high breeding which marks the polished man of the world” and “an almost mesmeric power of attraction” to Mary Scudder at the close of the sixth installment. Although Mary feels “a little of the flutter natural to a modest young person unexpectedly honored with the notices of one of the great ones of the earth, whom it is seldom the lot of humble individuals to know, except by distant report,” she is not overcome by Burr’s charm.48 When the statesman asks whether she attends many “‘brilliant’” and “‘court-like’” events, she replies that she should not see [her] way clear to be often in such scenes,’” for they might lead her to “‘forget the great object of life’” (TMW 216-17). Burr is intrigued and inquires which “‘great object’” Mary has in mind and Stowe’s heroine “reverently” replies in “words familiar from infancy to every puritan child,” including Burr: “‘To

48 AM June 1859: 749, TMW 214. 136 glorify God, and enjoy him forever.’”49 Once Burr realizes that faith is the “key-note” of Mary’s character, he considers her a “beautiful instrument” on which he is “well pleased to play” (AM 749, TMW 217). Stowe’s heroine fantasizes about being a divine instrument tasked with Burr’s redemption rather than his beloved. Mary’s mind reaches for sentimental narratives of salvation – “instances of striking and wonderful conversions from words dropped by children and women” (TMW 224) – instead of the “only novel which the stricter people in those days allowed for the reading of their daughters,” Samuel Richardson’s History of

Sir Charles Grandison (1753).50 Burr allows that religious belief is the natural realm of “‘pure and artless souls’” incapable of fathoming the temptations faced by “‘those who are called to the real battle of life in a world like this’”; strictly interprets the doctrine of the “‘worthlessness of unregenerate doings,’” which holds that the “‘prayers of souls given up to worldliness and ambition effect little’”; and requests that Mary “‘intercede’” for him (AM 751, TMW 219-220). Mary “fervently” agrees to pray for the statesman even though she assumes that there must be a “‘covenant blessing’” for Burr, “‘if for anyone,’” as he is the “‘son of a holy ancestry’” (TMW 220). Stowe’s Burr believes that he has “logically met and demonstrated, to his own satisfaction, the nullity of the religious dogmas on which New England faith was based” and, as such, he embodies a challenge to the doctrine of election.51 If the “‘covenant blessing’” invoked by Mary and Hopkins actually holds then Burr stands to be saved regardless of his immoral and self-serving conduct.

49 TMW 217. This is the answer to the first question in the Westminster Shorter Catechism: “Q.1.What is the chief end of man? A. Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.” See The Shorter Catechism Agreed upon by the Reverend Assembly at Westminster (Cambridge, MA: Samuel Green, 1682). 50 AM December 1858: 885, TMW 29. 51 AM July 1859: 112, TMW 266. 137 After the Wilcox wedding, the dressmaker Miss Prissy reports that Burr is “‘struck dead in love with our Mary’” and warns the young woman that she “‘must be careful if she doesn’t want to be carried off; for they do say that there can’t any woman resist him, that sees enough of him” (AM 110, TMW 257). As the local representative of the cultural type of “Miss Clippers” – women who trade in finery and gossip and are invited into homes and private chambers to stitch the seams of feminine and ritual community – Prissy informs the Scudders that the statesman is a widower whom it is rumored will “‘get to be the next President.’” She goes on to repeat rumors regarding the inappropriate affection between Burr and Virginie de Frontignac, the wife of his business partner. Mary resists the notion that a woman could violate her marriage covenant and fall “‘head over ears in love’” with someone other than her husband and Katy regards

Prissy “reprovingly” for introducing this sinful notion to her daughter’s mind (TMW 258). In subsequent installments Stowe interjects her Puritan heroine into the midst of this potentially sinful intercourse between a reverent Catholic and an illustrious infidel. Burr calls on Hopkins and the Scudders and assumes “all the grace of a young neophyte come to sit at the feet of superior truth,” drawing on his abortive training for the ministry with Joseph Bellamy in addressing “points of difference and agreement in theology” with “suavity and deference,” posing “suggestive questions” and setting up “objections” for Hopkins to “knock down” (AM 110-12, TMW 259-64). Mary discerns his “covert and subtle irony” and “utter want of faith or sympathy” begins to have “fine, instinctive perceptions” of Burr’s “real character.” In addition to his rejection of religion, Stowe portrays Burr’s “life-long habit” of trying his “power” over women as “one of those forms of refined self-indulgence which he pursued, thoughtless and reckless of consequences” (AM 751, TMW 219). The antihero of The Minister’s Wooing is “not a man of gross passions or coarse indulgence” but, “in the most consummate and refined 138 sense, a man of gallantry”; “[t]his, then, is the descriptive name which polite society has invented” to describe men who approach the “very height of impious sacrilege” by destroying women’s souls through their “noblest and purest affections” (AM 755, TMW 233). Burr returns to the Scudder cottage with the de Frontignacs because Virginie is curious about the girl who has “powerfully affected” Burr. Mary has “never seen anything so splendid” as the Frenchwoman attired to assess and impress and Virginie, in turn, heightens Burr’s perception of Mary’s “‘flesh and blood.’”52 The infidel supposes that “‘a few French ideas’” could not possibly harm the Puritan maiden, but Stowe suggests that influence initially flows in the opposite direction (AM 199-200, TMW 296, 300). As Virginie stays with the Scudders and participates in their “quiet pursuits,” her exotic airs “melt away…with the pliability peculiar to her nation,” and she develops a “passionate” attachment to the “fair and sympathizing” Mary (AM 201, TMW 304). Virginie was eighteen when she wed the forty-five year old Colonel Henri de Frontignac, a veteran of Lafayette’s forces. She does not love her husband and had not experienced the “great awakening of her being” until Burr ignited her romantic idealism and gave rise to “a new power of self-devotion and self-sacrifice, a trance of hero-worship, [and] a cloud of high ideal images.”53 The statesman has led Virginie on “for an experiment, because he felt an artistic pleasure in the beautiful light and heat, and cared not, though it burned a soul away.” Virginie is a convent-educated Catholic but she is not a heretic; Stowe stresses that her “religious sentiment, though vague, was strong” and remarks that she “always reproved” Burr’s “sneers” at religion (AM 202, TMW 305). Her innate faith

52 AM August 1859: 199-200, TMW 296, 300. 53 AM June 1859: 754, TMW 230. 139 renders her capable of being redeemed by (and ultimately redeeming) Mary, regardless of creed.54

FATE AND PROVIDENCE

The Marvyn’s youngest son, James, is a sailor whose travels have granted him “those other eyes for received opinions and established things which so often shock established prejudices”; the stricter religious circles” in the First Church congregation consider him “little better than an infidel and a castaway.”55 James Marvyn is the first character in The Minister’s Wooing to criticize Hopkinsian theology on the ground that the minister “‘has got what they call a system…so many bricks put together just so; but it is too narrow.’”56 James scorns pious Calvinists’ “‘way of drawing up…and leaving us sinners to ourselves,’” but Mary reminds him of the Hopkinsian doctrine of disinterested benevolence: believers must be “‘willing to give up even our own salvation, if necessary for the good of others.’”57 Stowe’s heroine expresses her willingness to give James her own “‘hopes of heaven’” and he is touched by her genuine sympathy. Stowe’s narrator suggests that “‘one subtile [sic] ray of feeling’” reveals Mary’s role as his spiritual ideal

(AM 888, TMW 35-6). Mary represents “‘a sphere higher and holier’” than James has ever experienced and he considers her lived example of the “‘beauty of holiness’” far

54 Neil Meyer observes that Stowe does not associate Catholicism with “incorrect beliefs or a need for conversion” – the one exception being Katy Scudder’s hope that Hopkins might “convert” Virginie as she stays with them. See Meyer, “‘One Language in Prayer’”: Evangelicalism, Anti-Catholicism, and Harriet Beecher Stowe’s The Minister’s Wooing,” New England Quarterly (September 2012) 486. Also see AM October 1859: 429, TMW 400. 55 AM December 1858: 884, TMW 26. 56 AM January 1859: 107, TMW 72 57 AM December 1858: 887, TMW 38 140 more compelling than when Hopkins “‘cut, and pared, and peeled, and sliced, and told us what it wasn’t and what was like it and wasn’t’” as he “‘built up an exact definition, and fortified and bricked it up all around.’”58 Although James admits that “‘there’s nothing surer to hook a woman than trying to save a fellow’s soul,’” he earnestly solicits Mary’s bible and prayers in the hope that they can help him to achieve his ideals: Mary herself and, perhaps, salvation.59 Katy Scudder can only comprehend Mary’s disinterested idealism with regard to James as romantic self-sacrifice, but she allows that “‘God is a Sovereign and hath mercy on whom he will.’”60 It is “‘right’” for her daughter to pray for her relative but she reminds Mary that “‘nothing is a saving change, except what is wrought in them by sovereign grace’” (TMW 82) and that faith remains a requirement for marriage. When Mary pointedly questions her mother regarding the role of personal inclination in providential design – “‘does not God use the love we have to each other as a means of doing us good?’” – Katy must grant that the “‘Lord appoints all our goings” and leave her daughter in “‘His’” hands, even though she still interprets James’s extended absence as an “encouraging” sign of providence. Katy has reconciled herself to the “dilatory movement of her cherished hopes” for uniting her daughter with their minister after

Hopkins’s “unpopular warfare with reigning sins” causes his worldly standing to suffer, but reports of James’s demise alter her perspective.61 Miss Prissy calls on the Scudders in the ninth installment (August 1850) to inform them of the recent report of the sinking of the Monsoon and that James is presumed to have perished at sea. Mary doubts the accuracy of this distant report, but her mother

58 AM January 1859: 107, TMW 71. 59 AM December 1858: 888, TMW 38. 60 AM January 1859: 110, TMW 81. 61 AM August 1859: 204, TMW 311. 141 characteristically takes the news at face value and the minister thinks only of his

“‘spiritual state,’” regarding which all remain uncertain.62 In the wake of this crisis, James’s mother, Ellen Marvyn, passionately criticizes the want of consolation offered by Hopkinsian theology and the freedwoman Candace mediate the harshness of Calvinist doctrine by directing the grieving mother toward the New Testament. While Candace claims to have “‘no ‘bjection’” to theological abstractions “‘in fair weather,’” when the Marvyns are reeling from the report of James’s death “‘dar jest a’n’t but one ting to come to, an’ dat ar’s Jesus.’”63

Candace assures her employers that James is “‘one o’ de ‘lect’” and that Jesus “‘loved him and died for him’”; “‘Jesus didn’t die for nothin, – all that love a’n’t gwine to be wasted’” (TMW 349). Her redemptive faith palliates the grieving mother’s despair and Ellen resolves to “‘try Candace’s way’” (AM 314, TMW 357), leaving Mary – whose innate comprehension of Hopkinsian doctrine renders her less receptive to the freedwoman’s intervention – to reconcile faith and fate on her own terms. A number of critics have identified Candace’s intervention as Stowe’s most trenchant criticism of Calvinist theology. George Frederickson suggested that Candace “speaks for a sentimental Christianity that answers the needs of the human heart better than

Calvinism.”64 Susan Harris identifies Candace as “spokeswoman for the new and psychologically far more benign vision of salvation” that Stowe herself had come to

62 AM August 1859: 206, TMW 317. In 1857 Stowe’s son, Henry, drowned in the Connecticut River and her grief was exacerbated by religious doubt because her faith was uncertain. Stowe drew on this affliction in a short story published in the first issue of the Atlantic Monthly. See “The Mourning Veil,” AM (November 1857) 63-70. Stowe’s sister Catharine also experienced grief and spiritual anguish over the death of her fiancé, Alexander Metcalf Fisher, off the coast of Ireland in 1822. Correspondence between Lyman and Catharine Beecher dating from this crisis was gathered and published in Beecher’s Autobiography I: 478-494. 63 AM September 1859: 312, TMW 348. 64 Frederickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 1817-1914 (New York: Harper & Row, 1971) 113. 142 espouse and this scene as the “pivotal point” at which she demonstrated the shift of American Protestantism from “a sect cathected on the Father to one cathected on the

Son.”65 More recently, Michael Pierson has pointed out that this intervention – which is “[p]erhaps the most shocking scene in the novel” – marks Stowe’s “public break with the

Calvinism of her father.”66 This scene is also one in which Candace emerges as an agent of providence capable of cutting across the trappings of Calvinist dogma. Earlier in The Minister’s Wooing Stowe suggests that Hopkins’s early efforts to catechize Candace were less than “eminently successful” because she contemplated religion “so peculiarly from her own point of view” that it was difficult for the minister to obtain her “subscription to a received opinion.”67 Moreover, she has no fear of “differing” in opinion from “a great and good man” even regarding fundamental doctrines like original sin and total depravity. The finer points of Hopkinsian theology – “potential presence, and representative presence, and representative identity, and federal headship” – are incomprehensible to an innate believer like Candace.68 Yet, after James shipped out on his maiden voyage without notifying his parents, the slave interceded with Zebidee Marvyn on his behalf and assured her master that that his youngest son had the “‘makin’ o’ ten or’nary men in him’” and that the “‘angels has der hooks in sich, and when de Lord wants him dey’ll haul him in safe and sound’” (AM 229, TMW 114-15). Although Zebidee is “not displeased” with this defense of his son’s soul and reflects that he is “often astonished” by Candace’s “shrewdness” and “penetration.” Candace’s guidance and prophecies in the final installments all align with the revelations of divine

65 Harris, “The Female Imaginary in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s The Minister’s Wooing,” New England Quarterly (June 1993) 190; Stowe, The Minister’s Wooing, ed. Susan Harris (New York: Penguin, 1999) xi. 66 Pierson, “Antislavery Politics,” 6. 67 AM March 1859: 382, TMW 139. 68 AM February 1859: 228-29, TMW 112, 115. 143 providence, as does the more secular advice offered by Stowe’s representative Catholic, Virginie de Frontignac. Virginie returns to Newport in the wake of this tragedy seeking protection from Burr and repeats her warning to Mary against consenting to an arranged marriage with the minister. This advice was previously coupled with the insistence that Mary wait for

“‘her true love’” to return, but Virginie reiterates her warning for Mary’s own sake.69 Her reminder proves timely – even though Mary disregards it; she remains a guest of the Scudders when Katy passes on Hopkins’s inquiry whether Mary “‘would be willing to be his wife?’”70 Although Mary is uncertain whether spiritual love is sufficient for marriage, she is concerned that refusing this offer would cause the minister “‘great pain’” and disappoint her mother, who considers their union “‘the hope of [her] life’” (AM 432,

TMW 408). When Katy joyfully informs Hopkins that Mary “‘has accepted,’” the minister assures her that he will dutifully promote her daughter’s happiness (AM 433, TMW 414). Virginie is not alone in objecting to the union of Mary and Hopkins. Back in the sixth installment (May 1859) Stowe reported objections supposedly expressed by representative readers of the Atlantic Monthly:

Will our little Mary really fall in love with the Doctor? – The question reaches us in anxious tones from all the circle of our readers; and what especially shocks us is, that grave doctors of divinity, and serious, stocking-knitting matrons seem to be the class who are particularly set against the success of our excellent orthodox hero, and bent on reminding us of the claims of that unregenerate James, whom

69 AM August 1859: 202, TMW 306. 70 AM October 1859: 430, TMW 404. 144 we have sent to sea on purpose that our heroine may recover herself of that foolish partiality for him which all the Christian world seems bent on

perpetuating.71

On this occasion, Stowe pointed out that these readers’ romantic preferences contradicted their own choices, remarked on a feminine weakness “toward veneration,” and argued that Hopkins was “a very proper and probable” hero for a romance of the early republic. Yet the characters who act as agents of providence – namely Candace, Prissy, and

Virginie – concur with these representative readers regarding the undesirability of Hopkins as a romantic hero and combine their efforts to avert this arranged match by insisting on a more providential plan.

INCLINATION AND OBLIGATION

When Aaron Burr returns to Newport after James’s reported demise, Mary has grieved, passed through an intense “mental crisis,” and permitted her mother and minister to determine her duty.72 In addition to having been brought up with a strict conception of covenant, Mary has the “true Puritan seed of heroism” at heart; her “essentially Hebrew education” predisposes her to rhetorical “exultation” mounting to the “heights of the religious sublime, in which the impulse of self-devotion and protection took a form essentially commanding.” Mary’s native abilities and circumstances endow her with the spiritual authority necessary to intervene in the illicit relationship between Burr and Virginie de Frontignac and assert the validity of the latter’s marriage covenant. In the

71 AM May 1859: 620, TMW 181. 72 AM November 1859: 550, TMW 473. 145 penultimate installment Mary addresses the libertine statesman “‘as one immortal soul should…another, without any of those false glosses and deceits which men call ceremony and good manners’” (AM 552, TMW 476-77) and accuses him of a want of moral reciprocity. Burr has expropriated Virginie’s affective resources and misdirected her idealism even though he knew that he could never “‘give her anything in return without endangering her purity and her soul.’”73 Mary anticipates that Virginie will “‘always be interceding with her own heart and with God’” on Burr’s behalf because she has invested her love – which Stowe considers a limited resource – in Burr rather than her husband. Should the statesman’s “‘popularity and prosperity’” ever desert him and “‘all who now flatter…curse and despise’” him, or should he perish “‘unreconciled to the God of [his] fathers,’” the Catholic woman would willingly “‘offer up her soul’” in exchange for his. Stowe’s heroine claims authority on this matter because she has “‘felt it in [her] own heart!’” Mary’s admission of her own affective investment in James (rather than the minister) exerts a powerful influence on Burr; when she collapses in an “agony of uncontrolled sobbing,” the statesman’s “diviner part” also sheds tears, “silently, unchecked by the cold, hard, pride which was the evil demon of his life” (TMW 478-79). Marianne Noble suggests that Burr “experiences a contact deeper than mere empathic identification” once Mary has “directly confronted” and “vigorously chastised” him regarding his conduct, and she closes this genuine connection with religious reproof. Stowe’s heroine senses that Burr has “‘wholly renounced’” the “‘faith of [his] fathers’”

73 TMW 477-478. Marianne Noble points out that Mary challenges Burr to actually “sympathize” with women and “feel with them without projecting onto them his own assumptions and designs.” See Noble, “The Courage to Speak and Hear the Truth: Sympathy and Genuine Human Contact in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s The Minister’s Wooing,” New England Quarterly (December 2008) 683. 146 and seeks to build his life upon “‘quite another foundation’” and she enjoins him to “‘examine and reconsider’” his course. Stowe’s narrator flashes forward to 1805, after Burr had become an “object of peculiar political bitterness and obloquy” by engaging in the antiquated aristocratic practice of avenging personal honor through a dual in the context of a modern republic.74

The audience gathered to witness Burr’s resignation of the Vice Presidency had “made up their minds that he was an utterly faithless, unprincipled man,” but his address on this occasion “melted the whole assembly into tears” and “charmed” even his “most embittered adversaries…into a momentary enthusiasm of admiration.” Stowe allows that “no man could ever have been so passionately and enduring loved and revered by both men and women as he was, without a beautiful and loveable nature.”75 Aaron Burr appears in the midst and at the very end of Stowe’s romantic reconciliation of liberal and religious idealism because his character “forcibly” demonstrates the “truth” that “it is not a man’s natural constitution, but the use he makes of it which stamps him as good or vile.” Mary does not dispute Burr’s rejection of religion on the basis that “‘our intellectual beliefs are not subject to the control of our will’” because he is faithless but objects to Virginie’s claim that “‘[l]ove is not in our power’” because she is reverent (AM

553, TMW 484). The Puritan maiden spares the Catholic wife from grave sin by

74 Stowe’s father preached his most popular early sermon on the subject of dueling after Burr’s fatal encounter with Hamilton in which he maintained that the “honour of a duelling [sic] legislator does not restrain him in the least from innumerable crimes, which affect most sensibly the peace of society.” See The Remedy for Duelling, 1806, (New York: J. Seymour, 1809) 7. For a succinct discussion of the cultural relevance of this sermon see Abzug, Cosmos Crumbling: American Reform and the Religious Imagination (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994) 42-44. 75 AM 552, TMW 479. A critical review of James Parton’s anecdotal, erroneous, and sympathetic biography, The Life and Times of Aaron Burr, was published in the Atlantic Monthly the spring preceding the start of The Minister’s Wooing. See AM March 1858: 597-614. Dorothy Z. Baker suggests that Stowe’s somewhat sympathetic representation of Burr is consistent with James Parton’s “unorthodox depiction” of the controversial statesman in Life and Times of Aaron Burr. See Baker, “Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Conversation with the Atlantic Monthly: The Construction of The Minister’s Wooing,” Studies in American Fiction (Spring 2000) 31. 147 encouraging her to supplant her illicit inclination toward Burr with abstracted spiritual ideality and a willed adherence to her marriage covenant. Virginie, in turn, makes a case for individual inclination in order to spare Mary from an arranged marriage predicated on an overly stringent sense of religious duty rather than romantic love endorsed by providence.

In the penultimate installment (November 1859) Stowe readies her agents of providence – the freedwoman Candace, the dressmaker Prissy, and Virginie de Frontignac – to intervene in Hopkins’s and Mary’s betrothal and assert a more liberal conception of individual inclination. Candace confesses to Prissy that she “‘ha’n’t neber felt it in [her] bones dat Mass’r James is r’ally dead’” and describes prophetic dreams of James sinking in the water, stretching out his hands, and being rescued by the “‘Lord

Jesus come a-walking on the water.’”76 Prissy allows that these feelings and dreams “‘may have reference to the state of his soul,’” but Candace maintains that “‘as nigh as [she] could judge, that boy’s soul was in his body’” (AM 543, TMW 450). She has withheld these prophecies only because the minister “‘says people must not mind nothing about their dreams’” for they “‘belong to the old ‘spensation’” Candace’s prophecy is borne out when Mary walks beside the shore several days before her wedding and falls into “one of those reveries which she had thought she had forever forbidden to herself” in which she marries James instead of Hopkins.77 Her inclinations align with the unveiling of providence and she turns to look into the “very eyes” she had been led to believe were forever lost. Stowe’s heroine embraces James and, for a time, the lovers speak “of love mightier than death, which many waters cannot quench…of yearnings, each for the other,

76 AM November 1859: 542, TMW 447. 77 AM December 1859: 666, TMW 506-7. 148 – of longing prayers, – of hopes deferred, – and then of this great joy.” Mary abruptly awakens to the “great battle of duty” and informs her lover that his miraculous return has occurred “‘too late’” – her “‘word is pledged,’” she has “‘suffered a good man to place his whole faith upon it,’” and “‘cannot retract it’” (AM 667, TMW 508). She considers her spoken consent to wed the minister a binding vow and the revelations of providence a threat to this covenant. Mary considers doing her duty, as determined by her mother and minister, doing “‘right’” and fears that James will “‘tempt’” her to do a “‘mean, dishonorable thing’” and “‘be false to her [her] word deliberately given.’” Stowe’s narrator assumes that readers will consider Mary’s embrace of difficult duty to be “unnatural” and stresses the regional and religious provenance of her morality:

Self-denial and self-sacrifice had been the daily bread of her life. Every prayer, hymn, and sermon from her childhood had warned her to distrust her inclinations and regard her feelings as traitors. In particular, she had been brought up to regard the sacredness of a promise with a superstitious tenacity; and in this case the promise involved so deeply the happiness of a friend whom she had loved and revered all her life, that she never thought of any way of escape from it (AM 668,

TMW 511).

Having been brought up to value duty performed in adherence to covenant more highly than mere “inclinations” or “feelings,” Mary identifies her natural affection for James as an obstacle to be “‘overcome’” as she must have done had she already married the minister. James could not have asked Mary to break her marriage vows and she inquires why she should “‘break a solemn vow deliberately made before God?’” (TMW 534) Even after Virginie and James insist that she stands to do wrong by valuing her spoken consent 149 more than her affection, Mary remains reluctant to sacrifice a “‘friend’” who has been “‘so considerate, so kind, so self-sacrificing and disinterested’” (TMW 533) in favor of a young man whom she perceives as thinking only of himself. Stowe’s heroine derives this inflexible conception of covenant from her mother, whose antiquated aspirations defy providential occurrences, the desires of all the characters except herself (and Hopkins), and the wishes of Stowe’s representative readers. The narrator hopes that readers “will do Mrs. Scudder justice” and reminds them that the widow is

an Old Testament woman, brought up with that scrupulous exactitude of fidelity in relation to promises which would naturally come from familiarity with a book

in which covenant-keeping is represented as one of the highest attributes of Deity, and covenant-breaking as one of the vilest sins of humanity. To break the word that had gone forth out of one’s mouth was to lose self-respect, and all claim to the respect of others, and to sin against eternal rectitude (TMW 536).

Moreover, Katy’s desire for her daughter to wed their “poor” and “often unpopular” minister does not originate in “vulgar” or “mercenary ambition”; she reveres Hopkins with the “most implicit faith” as the man embodying her “highest ideas of the good” and is therefore “willing to resign her child” to be his wife (AM 676). Providential and liberal forces more potent than Katy’s aspirations ultimately shape the resolution of Stowe’s romance. Virginie, Candace, Miss Prissy, and James complicate Mary’s strict interpretation of covenantal accountability by insisting upon the legitimacy of individual inclination. In exchange for Mary’s assistance in adhering to her own marriage covenant, Virginie 150 challenges Mary’s proscriptive conception of covenant. The Catholic wife assures the Puritan maiden that the “‘priest’” has the “‘church for his bride’” and remarks that any “‘good priest’” in the “‘true Church’” would “‘dispense’” her from her promise. Virginie inquires whether Congregationalists have “‘any sort of people…that can unbind you from promises’” but Mary responds by citing Psalm 15 – which identifies the “just man” as

“‘he that sweareth to his own hurt, and changeth not.’” 78 Stowe’s heroine refuses to credit “‘any earthly power’” with the capacity to “‘dispense us from solemn obligations which we have assumed before God’” – an apt illustration of the fundamental disparity between Catholic and Protestant conceptions of individual accountability and fallibility. Virginie asserts the legitimacy of personal inclination along with a more liberal comprehension of contractualism when she urges Mary to tell the minister the “‘whole truth’” (TMW 529) about her feelings, but Mary recalls her mother’s certainty that the path of duty leads to the minister. James reinforces these arguments by advancing a reciprocal claim predicated on empathy: were he in Hopkins’s position, thinking he had “‘married a wife with a whole heart’” only to discover that the “‘greater part of it had been before that given to another,’” he would think the “‘deepest possible wrong’” done him in the name of dutiful resolve (AM 675, TMW 534). In the meantime, Candace arrives at the conclusion that Hopkins “‘oughter be told on’t’” and encourages Miss Prissy to inform the minister about Mary’s feelings if she has “‘any notions o’ dat kind,’” for they “‘mus’ come from de good Lord’” and, in light of recent circumstances, be indicative of the workings of providence (AM 678, TMW 544). Prissy feels almost “‘wicked’” when she considers the necessity of disappointing the “‘most blessedest man,’” but Candace assures her that even the “‘blessedest man in

78 AM 672-73, TMW 526-27. 151 the world ought fur to know the truth.’” When the dressmaker informs Hopkins that Mary and James “‘always did love each other ever since they were children,’” the spiritually- minded divine assures her that he does not seek to “‘interfere’” with “‘so very natural and innocent a sentiment’” as familial affection (AM 679, TMW 547). Prissy must clarify that they “‘wanted to marry,’” although they were never formally engaged, and that Mary would never have consented to marry him had she known James was still alive – a “‘promise that she means to keep, if her heart breaks, and his too’” (TMW 547-48) – before the minister comprehends. Stowe subjects the figure of the minister to the forces she most desired that his theology meet in the final installment of The Minister’s Wooing. An intense bout of emotional and spiritual anguish reveals Hopkins’s shortcomings with regard to his own exacting doctrine: the minister’s self-interest is not

“wholly subdued” in spite of “years of sacrifice” and “constant, unsleeping, self- vigilance” and his selfish desires threaten to undermine the logical system he believed had established him in an “invincible submission to God’s will that nothing could shake” (TMW 552). With difficulty, his disinterest overcomes his desires and he relinquishes Mary Scudder to James Marvyn. When Mary is spared an arranged marriage through the agency of women (Candace, Prissy, and Virginie) only to be given to James by Hopkins,

Stowe begins to reconcile what Susan Harris refers to as the “androcentric” and

“gynocentric” plots of The Minister’s Wooing.79 After the minister’s wooing concludes mid-way through the final installment, Stowe continues on to create sentimental resolution among the forces and representatives of liberalism and providence granted their proper sway over characters emancipated from inflexible comprehensions of covenant.

79 See Harris, “Female Imaginary,” 180, 196. 152

PROVIDENTIAL LIBERALISM

After surviving the wreck of the Monsoon and experiencing conversion, James nursed a principle partner in a Chinese merchant-house through a long fever and has been tasked with attending to the firm’s interests in New England. Miss Prissy gossips that James has become “‘twice as rich and generous as that old Simeon Brown’” (AM 684, TMW 565) and Stowe suggests that his wealth is merited by his oversight of international commerce which is neither predicated on nor implicated in Atlantic slave trade. Although the conclusion of The Minister’s Wooing challenges Katy’s conception of covenant,

James ultimately satisfies all of her spiritual and occupational requirements and material aspirations for her daughter’s spouse. James builds a “fair and stately mansion” in which Stowe situates her “fair poetic maiden, the seeress, the saint” – a prosperous rendition of “that appointed shrine for women, more holy than cloister, more saintly and pure than church or altar, – a Christian home” (AM 685, TMW 567). Through Mary’s influence and the workings of providence, he becomes “one of the most energetic and fearless supporters” of Hopkins’s “life-long warfare” against the “inhumanity” of slavery, which

“at last fell” before the “force of conscience and moral appeal” (TMW 568) – at least in New England. Although the historical Hopkins only lived for about ten years after the publication of his System of Doctrines in 1793, Stowe’s younger rendition of the minister remains the “same steady, undiscouraged worker, the same calm witness against popular sins and proclaimer of unpopular truths, ever saying and doing what he saw to be

153 eternally right, without the slightest consultation with worldly expediency or earthly gain” to the “last of a very long life” (AM 686, TMW 570). In the final lines of The Minister’s Wooing Stowe refers back to Aaron Burr – “one of the most celebrated men of the time…whose peculiar history yet lives not only in our national records, but in the private annals of many an American family”80 – and relates a fictional anecdote involving the placement of a “plain granite slab” on his unmarked gravesite by “some friendly unknown hand.” A “porte-monnaie” containing a scrap of paper with the address for a Henri de Frontignac was discovered nearby and, in the midst of Stowe’s sentimental resolution, Virginie notifies Mary that her first-born son is named Henri – the given name of her husband and his ancestors “‘for many generations back’” (AM 687, TMW 575). The inclusion of this inter-generational tribute to the morally ambiguous figure who threatened the continuity of this family line reconciles Stowe’s “androcentric” and “gynocentric” plots. Stowe relies on Hopkins’s forbearance and two generations of masculine forgiveness to resolve tensions that persisted through her reconciliation of religious and romantic idealism. She also quotes select language from the Reverend William Patten’s recollection of the historical Hopkins’s reaction to his failed wooing in the 1740s: the ordeal “‘was a trial…a very great trial,’” but “‘as she did not deceive me, I shall never lose my friendship for her.’”81 Patten, however, went on to observe that Hopkins considered his former fiancée, “with regard to himself, as dead.” Stowe’s fictionalized representation of Hopkins’s disinterested renunciation of his titular wooing and officiation of this early republican romance allowed her to turn romantic idealism toward liberal – and living – ends.

80 AM May 1859: 630, TMW 211. The Beecher family associated with Aaron Burr’s sister Sarah Burr Reeve in Litchfield and “The Remedy for Duelling” [sic], preached in response to Burr’s fatal encounter with Alexander Hamilton, was one of Lyman Beecher’s most popular sermons. 81 See Patten, Reminiscences 32. 154 Bibliography

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