Constituent Characters: Representing the Electorate in the Early United States
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Constituent Characters: Representing the Electorate in the Early United States By Leila Alexandra Mansouri A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Samuel Otter, Chair Professor Elisa Tamarkin Professor David Lieberman Summer 2017 Copyright Leila Alexandra Mansouri 2017 Abstract Constituent Characters: Representing the Electorate in the Early United States by Leila Alexandra Mansouri Doctor of Philosophy in English University of California, Berkeley Professor Samuel Otter, Chair In the early United States, literary culture was inextricably enmeshed with electoral politics. This dissertation explores the influence of the character sketch on that politicized literary culture, in which literary magazines held strong partisan affiliations, novelists moonlit as campaign biographers, and elected officials aspired to literary fame. The character sketch was a popular eighteenth-century genre whose depictions of individuals and social types generated aesthetic debates about how, exactly, written “strokes” and “outlines” could most clearly distill a character’s essence, as well as how a set of characters could collectively represent the polity as a whole. Constituent Characters traces how the character sketch was adopted by and adapted within early American campaign materials and shows that the aesthetic discourse surrounding the character sketch permeated how Americans discussed and imagined electoral representation from the Constitutional Debates through the 1840s. In doing so, the project reveals the surprisingly literary history of how Americans thought through questions like, What size legislature best represents the people? and What distinguished legitimate from illegitimate electoral district boundaries? It also points to the need for both scholars and writers to attend to how political and literary representation evolved together in the United States through an iterative process in which writers and readers continually renegotiated which character types the polity would collectively recognize, as well as the aesthetic terms on which it would do so. 1 CONSTITUENT CHARACTERS: REPRESENTING THE ELECTORATE IN THE EARLY UNITED STATES List of Illustrations ii Acknowledgments iv Introduction v Part I: Representing Self-Determination 1 Chapter 1: Public Signs and the Limits of Self-Determination 4 Chapter 2: Virtue, Franklin’s Virtual Representation, and Self-Determination at a Distance 24 Part II: Caricature and the Gerry-Mander 41 Chapter 3: Caricature, Electoral “Combinations,” and Self-Evidently Unnatural Representation 45 Chapter 4: The Gerry-Mander and the Mapping of Character 64 Part III: Constituent Parts and Democratic Wholes 86 Chapter 5: E Pluribus Washington 89 Chapter 6: Sheppard Lee’s Electoral Politics and the Properties of Character 104 Bibliography 121 i List of Illustrations Figure 1 Engraving of Benjamin Franklin in a pine marten hat by H. G. Wright, c. 1850. After a drawing by Charles-Nicolas Cochin, c. 1777. Courtesy, Library Company of Philadelphia. 25 Figure 2 “The Gerry-Mander. A New Species of Monster Which Appeared in the District Essex South.” Boston: s.n., 1812. Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society. 42 Figure 3 “By George,” from “To the people at York, and all those who are acquainted with the character of George Spangler.” York, PA: s.n., 1803. Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society. 50 Figure 4 William Hogarth. Characters and Caricaturas. Etching, 1743. 53 Figure 5 Engraving of “Relation of the Human Face to that of the Eagle,” c. 1806. After the 1671 drawing by Charles Le Brun. 55 Figure 6 Engraving illustrating Petrus Camper’s theory of facial angles, c. 1790. After the canvases presented by Camper during his 1770 lectures to the Amsterdam Drawing Academy. 56 Figure 7 Gradation de la tête de grenouille jusqu'au profil d'Apollon, d'après les idées du célébre Lavater, c.1804/10 Etching, engraving and aquatint. After that in Johann Casper Lavater’s Essays on Physiognomy, 1789–98. 57 Figure 8 Map prepared by John Hartley, c. 1784. Based on Thomas Jefferson’s Land Ordinance of 1784. 67 Figure 9 “The Eagle Map of the United States,” by J. Churchman. From Rudiments of national knowledge, presented to the youth of the United States. Philadelphia: E. L. Carey & A. Hart, 1833. 69 Figure 10 Gerry-mander image from “The Gerry-Mander. A New Species of Monster Which Appeared in the District Essex South.” Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society. 72 Figure 11 “Natural and Political History of the Gerry-mander! In Two Chapters … With Cuts.” Boston: s.n., c. 1812. Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society. 74 ii Figure 12 Shading in the Gerry-mander image. From “The Gerry-Mander. A New Species of Monster Which Appeared in the District Essex South.” Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society. 75 Figure 13 Simeon De Witt. “A Map of the State of New York.” Albany: Engraved by G. Fairman, 1802. 81 Figure 14 Portion of the Gerry-mander image rumored to be a caricature of Governor Eldridge Gerry. From “The Gerry-Mander. A New Species of Monster Which Appeared in the District Essex South.” Courtesy, American Antiquarian Society. 84 Figure 15 “The Next Statue of Washington. An Effect of the ‘Muscular Development’ Regime Upon Art.” The Daily Momus. May 2, 1860. 119 iii Acknowledgements I could not have completed this dissertation without the support of a great many people and institutions. Fellowships from the University of California, Berkeley, the American Antiquarian Society, and the Library Company of Philadelphia were instrumental in facilitating archival research for and enabling the writing of this manuscript. I am also greatly indebted to NOVEL: a Forum on Fiction, which published an earlier draft of Chapter 6 as “The Properties of Sheppard Lee” in 2016, and to Nancy Armstrong for her editorial comments. Material from that article is reprinted here with the permission of Duke University Press. Among the faculty at Berkeley, I would first at foremost like to thank my dissertation chair, Sam Otter, for his tremendously thoughtful and patient mentorship throughout my sprawling research and writing process. I am also immensely grateful for the guidance and support of committee members Elisa Tamarkin and David Lieberman. Beyond my committee, Dorri Beam, Lyn Hejinian, Scott Saul, and Janet Sorensen all lent assistance and encouragement at key moments in my development as a writer and a scholar. Without the generosity of these and many others at Berkeley, this project would not be where it is today. Finally, I would like to thank my peers, within and beyond Berkeley, whose intelligence and kindness have inspired and sustained me during graduate school. I am enormously grateful to these friends and conversation partners, especially Stephanie Bahr, Michelle Chihara, Daniel Clinton, Jessica Ling, Ryan McWilliams, and Wendy Xin. And, in particular, I want to thank Brandon Gordon for his unwavering support and his boundless willingness to talk through this project’s ins and outs. He has given – to this dissertation and to me – more than I can ever hope to put into words. iv Introduction In the early United States, literature was enmeshed with electoral politics. During the years immediately following the American Revolution, many of the United States’ most prominent literary figures also held elected office. Benjamin Franklin, for instance, wrote significant portions of his Memoirs – including those that detail his election in 1763 to Pennsylvania’s colonial Assembly – while serving as governor of the new State of Pennsylvania. And, as President, Thomas Jefferson found his writings, especially the Declaration of Independence, alternately embraced by Republicans campaigning on his behalf and attacked by Federalist editors, who framed the stylistic failings of his prose as inextricably intertwined with his party’s political treachery. In subsequent decades, these intersections between American literature and electoral politics only deepened as novelists moonlighted as campaign biographers, literary magazines claimed party affiliations, and writers sought patronage appointments – or even ran for office themselves. Despite these material links between United States writers and their electoral system, literary scholars have rarely attended to the junctions between literary and electoral representation. Instead, literary scholarship has often presumed, as Dominic Mastrioanni put it in Politics and Skepticism in Antebellum American Literature (2014), that “the political and ethical significance” of literature in the early United States “lies only partially, and often weakly, in its most overt engagement with political issues.”1 Implicit in such arguments, which share an extended and august critical genealogy, is the conviction that “overt” politics is only ever a vulgar realm of partisan grandstanding, hackneyed rhetoric, social violence, and self-interested duplicitousness.2 As such, 1 Dominic Mastroianni, Politics and Skepticism in Antebellum American Literature (New York: Cambridge 2 Mastrioanni identifies Stanley Cavell as the key node in this genealogy. Cavell’s work at the intersection of philosophy and literature understood the politics of antebellum literature as closely linked to aesthetics and community-making but largely divorced from electoral or institutional structures (Mastroianni, Politics and Skepticism, 2-26). Also crucial to this genealogy was the