SCOTLAND READS AN AMERICAN BOOK: THE INTERNATIONAL CIRCULATION OF VIOLENCE, NATION, AND RACE DURING THE NINETEENTH CENTURY A Dissertation by JEFFREY CHARLES UTZINGER Submitted to the Office of Graduate and Professional Studies of Texas A&M University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Chair of Committee, Ira Dworkin Committee Members, Larry J. Reynolds Angela P. Hudson Lawrence J. Oliver Susan B. Egenolf Head of Department, Maura Ives December 2019 Major Subject: English Copyright 2019 Jeffrey C. Utzinger ABSTRACT Travel abroad in the early nineteenth century, especially to the British Isles, not only shaped North American writers’ worldviews, it also provided many writers with the opportunity to procure additional publishers for their works which, in turn, disseminated these writers’ views across the British Isles. Much scholarship devoted to influences on nineteenth-century literature tends to conflate the British Isles into one coherent nation. This study, however, focuses on Scotland as a distinct region within the British Isles. The works of eighteenth-century Scottish economists, historians, mathematicians, and philosophers gave birth to what became known as the Scottish Enlightenment, a movement that shaped both the British Isles and North America. One of the most influential ideas to emerge from the Scottish Enlightenment was stadial theory, the idea that humans come to being in a rudimentary or savage state and progress over time into civilized people who engage in economies of trade. Stadial theory informed nineteenth-century political and economic policies, which attempted to justify both the enslavement of people of color and the sustained campaigns of removing indigenous people from lands in North America. This study examines works by North American writers who traveled to Scotland during the nineteenth century, wrote about their experiences both home and abroad, and expanded their reading audience by securing publishers outside of the United States. In their own ways, they examined what it meant, in the nineteenth century, to be considered savage or civilized, and the role violence and race played in the (re)formation of nations and narratives. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thank you to my committee chair, Dr. Dworkin, and my committee members, Dr. Reynolds, Dr. Hudson, Dr. Oliver, and Dr. Egenolf, for their guidance and support throughout the course of this research. I also want to thank the administration and my colleagues at Concordia University Texas for their support during this process, especially for the 2018 travel grant that allowed me to travel to Scotland for research. Thank you to the archival staff at the National Library of Scotland, and the staff at the New Register House in Edinburgh. Thanks also to the archival staff at the Library of Congress. Thank you to Wayne and Mary Lou Walther for their encouragement and support, and Monroe Heyden and Mary Brady for being my guides in Boston, and introducing me to the African Meeting House. Finally, to my wife, Christa, and my three children—Emma, Lilli, and Thomas—thank you for your sacrifice, your love, and most of all, for accompanying me on this amazing journey. iii CONTRIBUTORS AND FUNDING SOURCES Contributors This work was supervised by a dissertation committee consisting of Professor Ira Dworkin, advisor, and Professor Larry J. Reynolds, Professor Lawrence J. Oliver, and Professor Susan B. Egenolf of the Department of English, and Professor Angela P. Hudson of the Department of History. Funding Source Travel was made possible by professional development funds from Concordia University Texas. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ABSTRACT ........................................................................................................... ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS .................................................................................. iii CONTRIBUTORS AND FUNDING SOURCES ................................................ iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ...................................................................................... v CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION ....................................................................... 1 Who Read an American Book? ......................................................................... 2 The Scottish Enlightenment ............................................................................... 6 Sir Walter Scott, William Robertson, and King Philip’s War ......................... 12 Chapter Summaries .......................................................................................... 29 CHAPTER II VIOLENT TRAITS OF AN AMERICAN CHARACTER: WASHINGTON IRVING’S SKETCH-BOOK IN SCOTLAND ........................ 42 The House of John Murray .............................................................................. 49 The 1820 Murray Sketch-Book ........................................................................ 52 1817: Notes and A Tour of Scotland ................................................................ 64 Determined to Revise: “Traits of Indian Character” ....................................... 71 Determined to Revise: “Philip of Pokanoket” ................................................. 80 Postproduction and Postmortem Circulations .................................................. 88 CHAPTER III “THE AID OF THE SAVAGE FROM THE FOREST WILDS”: KAHGEGAGAHBOWH PLAYING INDIAN IN THE UNITED KINGDOM .......................................................................................................... 94 “Shrewd Print Coices”: Copway’s Life in London, Edinburgh, and Ireland ............................................................................................................ 101 Charles Gilpin: London ................................................................................. 103 The House of Black: Edinburgh .................................................................... 107 Richard Cobden, Anti-Corn Laws, and the Peace Congress ......................... 109 Recollections of Stadial History .................................................................... 111 Running Commentaries .................................................................................. 127 Running Sketches: Scotland and the Irving House ........................................ 133 Copway’s American Indian ........................................................................... 142 CHAPTER IV “THIS IS MY OWN, MY NATIVE LAND”: JESSE EWING GLASGOW’S BLACK JOHN BROWN NARRATIVE IN SCOTLAND ...................................................................................................... 146 v Black Communities at Home and Abroad ..................................................... 149 The Black Experience Abroad ....................................................................... 153 The House of Myles MacPhail, Thomas Murray & Son, and Simpkin, Marshall, & Co. ............................................................................................. 162 “The Transformative Power of Geographic Shifts” ...................................... 167 A Transnational View of Brown .................................................................... 175 Frederick Douglass’s John Brown Narratives ............................................... 189 CHAPTER V “WHERE THE ANCIENT ‘BLACK DOUGLASS’ ONCE MET HIS FOES”: FREDERICK DOUGLASS’S NAVAGATION OF VIOLENT NARRATIVES ................................................................................ 192 "The Ancient Black Douglass": Douglass, Robert Burns, and Walter Scott ............................................................................................................... 200 The Heroic Slave ............................................................................................ 213 Savages and Civilization ................................................................................ 226 Progress through Unification ......................................................................... 234 CHAPTER VI CONCLUSION .................................................................... 243 WORKS CITED ................................................................................................ 292 vi CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION In 1833, Rufus Choate delivered a lecture in Salem, Massachusetts in which he called for the emergence of an American who would write a series of novels, rooted firmly in American history and based on Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley Novels, historical romances centered around the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745. About this imagined series of Scott/Scottish-inspired American narratives, Choate writes: “They would melt down, as it were, and stamp the heavy bullion into a convenient, universal circulating medium” (337). Choate, an attorney by trade and eventual U.S. Senator, is admittedly an unlikely voice to call upon for a discussion of the establishment of a national American literature but Choate’s image of an historical literature as a coin—a thing created from natural resources, mined, melted, minted, and placed into circulation—serves as a guiding metaphor for this study of violence, nation, and race as ideas about all three circulated between the United States and Scotland in the early part of the nineteenth century. 1 Choate’s vision evokes the inherent violence involved in the melting of raw bullion/disparate narratives (narratives wrought themselves with violence) into one “convenient,” easily commodified, homogenous metanarrative.2 Envisioning a national literature as a gold coin