Remapping the Politics of Space: Antebellum Countergeographies and Print

1 REMAPPING THE POLITICS OF SPACE: ANTEBELLUM COUNTERGEOGRAPHIES AND PRINT A dissertation presented by Jeffrey Cash Cottrell to The Department of English In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the field of English Northeastern University Boston, Massachusetts April, 2016 2 REMAPPING THE POLITICS OF SPACE: ANTEBELLUM COUNTERGEOGRAPHIES AND PRINT by Jeffrey Cash Cottrell ABSTRACT OF DISSERTATION Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the College of Social Sciences and Humanities of Northeastern University April, 2016 3 Abstract This dissertation examines a series of transformative geographic narratives in the first half of the nineteenth century. In this period, the area of what is now considered the territorial borders of the United States was in the process of extensive geopolitical, economic, and scalar negotiation, punctuated by border wars, the changing economic geographies of slavery and colonial enterprise, and the absorption of western spaces through the appropriation of Native American land. However, this process of claiming, occupying, and demarcating what would become U.S. national space was by no means a uniform project and would rely on various political, representational, and rhetorical strategies employed by a variety of writers in order to achieve the narrative coherence often attributed to the development of the nation. Despite the presence of complicated and conflicting histories, the transformation of national space is made to appear homogeneous, indistinct, and free from social hierarchies. While the hemispheric turn in literary studies has led early American literary geographers to examine the supranational material, ideological, and discursive relationships between America and the larger Atlantic world, this project focuses on the internal geographic transformations of the nineteenth century, arguing that texts by disenfranchised groups like African Americans and Native Americans challenged these forms of scalar reconfiguration through print to form countergeographies of belonging and exchange, developing alternative socio-spatial formations beyond the paradigm of the nation state. Thus, this project examines countergeographical discourses to understand the role of uncounted, misrecognized, and displaced groups in resisting the scalar negotiations of empire. 4 Acknowledgements Thanks to Elizabeth Maddock Dillon, Theo Davis, and Ryan Cordell who have guided me throughout the development of this project and the ideas contained within. I am also grateful for having received the Northeastern Provost’s Office Dissertation Completion Fellowship, which provided much-needed support as I finished this project. Also, many thanks to Danielle Skeehan, Anne Gray Fischer, Victoria Papa, Benjamin Doyle, Emily Artiano, Duyen Ngyuen, Elizabeth Polcha and the entire Northeastern Atlantic Studies reading group for all their help. Additional thanks to Marina Leslie, Nicole Aljoe, Melissa Daigle, Amy Greenstadt, Leerom Medovoi, James Capell, Simon Green, Reginald Barnard, and Joseph Fultz for their continued support. I would also like to thank my parents, Randy and Karen, for their never-ending support. Finally, I’d like to dedicate this work to the memories of my grandfather and grandmother Robert “Bob” Sawyer and Neta Sawyer and to Milo. 5 TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract 2 Acknowledgements 4 Table of Contents 5 Introduction: Empty, Flat Spaces and Those Who Inhabit Them 6 Chapter 1: Narrating Space: Historiography and the Production of 31 New England Space Chapter 2: Domestic Geographies: Jane Johnston Schoolcraft and 71 the Refabrication of Native Domestic Space Chapter 3: Geographies of Freedom and Unfreedom: Collectivism, 119 Capital, and Individual Spatial Revolutions in Delany’s Blake and Jacobs’ Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl Chapter 4: Unstable Geographies: History, Representation, and the 175 Spaces of the Dispossessed in John Rollin Ridge’s Joaquín Murieta Bibliography: 217 6 Introduction: Empty, Flat Spaces and Those Who Inhabit Them Figure 1. John F. Smith, "Historical Geography," 1888. Courtesy of the Library of Congress. This 1888 thematic map of the “Historical Geography” of the United States by John F. Smith suggests many stories, or at least a different version of a familiar story. Essentially, it is a historical-revisionary map, tracing the unfolding of American history imagined as two trees to “two colonies:” Plymouth and Jamestown. As the map suggests, these different historical-political genealogies radiate from two textual sources: the Bible and what is identified on the map as “mammon” or “the dollar.” The limbs of each tree extend the respective qualities associated with freedom and slavery over different national-regional spaces. The Tree of Liberty, not accidentally stemming to San Francisco (the Western hub of commerce during the Reconstruction era), spreads 7 “justice,” “industry,” and “equal rights” across the nation to those free states on the Western edge of the frontier. Conversely, the twisted, gnarled Tree of Slavery snarls the Southern states, entwining “lust,” “treason,” and “rebellion” within political-economic policies such as the Missouri Compromise and the Fugitive Slave Act until, it seems, the Emancipation Proclamation, figured as an axe, cuts the tree down. Here the map traces an axis across both time and space that not only looks backward to these two founding moments, but that also attempts to trace their unfolding as two separate processes contributing (in different ways) to the nineteenth-century project of Manifest Destiny. Thus, despite its noble polemic against the historical processes of slavery, the map nonetheless functions as an imperial cartography, handily imagining the manifesting nation through an organic, arboreal metaphor of growth where the negative qualities associated with this process, tied solely to Southern slavery and avarice, are conveniently constrained to the American South. As with any map, several stories are missing or glossed over here. In divorcing the processes of national spatial production into two, ethically distinct genealogical spatial heritages, Smith can “cleanse” the developing nation of the problematic aspects of national-territorial advancement—namely those processes associated with consumption, acquisition, and the exploitation of both land and labor. Of course, these activities are not confined to the South; they are part and parcel of the nation as a whole. For example, the branches of the Liberty Tree extending toward San Francisco don’t reflect the processes of conquest and divestment following the Mexican-American War that allowed California to come into being, or the obscene racial conflicts involving whites, Mexican- Americans, different Native American tribes, and Chinese laborers as part of “liberty’s” 8 extension, let alone the longer, bloody history of European settler colonialism. In imagining something like these qualities as distinctly Southern phenomena, the map exonerates the federally issued mandate of territorial expansion and its own destructive consequences reaching its apotheosis in Smith’s time.1 Hence, the map promotes what David Harvey has called a “spatial-fix” concerning the processes of expansion, war, and the disenfranchisement of diverse minority groups in the antebellum period.2 These fixes are, of course, merely palliative, capable only of keeping more complex diagnoses for both formal and informal patterns of inequality, oppression, dispossession, etc. from coming into view.3 In this way, the historical conditions for the natural increase of what Jefferson some fifty years earlier described as the “empire of liberty” are regulated through a sort of split regional consciousness, taken up again during Smith’s time and forcibly resuscitated after the Civil War.4 Despite the traditional representation of state territory in the map’s background, the figurative additions included in Smith’s map imbue those spaces with an additional historical and political meaning that is concretized in the two- dimensional map form, generating a convenient Reconstruction-era narrative of spatial difference. 1 Beyond the problematic processes of Reconstruction and the “modernization” of the South, the series of 2 Specifically, see David Harvey, Spaces of Capital: Towards a Critical Geography (New York: Routledge, 2001). Harvey develops the term across his works referring to how capital uses space to mitigate its crises of production, flow, and consumption. 3 According to Andrew Herod, Harvey understands these fixes as “constitut(ing) the very basis for the uneven development of the geography of capitalism.” Labor Geographies: Workers and the Landscapes of Capitalism (New York: Guilford, 2001), 10. This tautological formulation reproduces the conditions for the endless cycle of capital. 4 Thomas Jefferson, Letter to George Rogers Clark, Dec 25, 1780, in George Rogers Clark Papers, ed. James Alton James (New York: AMS, 1972), 490. 9 In addition to the deep regional schisms leading to the War and persisting, arguably, to this day, the process of national expansion and the transformation of the “wilderness” into State territory (cheerfully celebrated in Smith’s map by the growing Tree of Liberty) genrated new spaces of political instability, social conflict, and the breakdown of a clear and coherent social-symbolic order. These transformations, arising from territorial conflicts, overlapping claims to spaces, the

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