The Pennsylvania State University The Graduate School Department of English IMAGINED CITIZENS: ETHNIC NATIONALISMS AND CRISES OF CULTURE IN THE UNITED STATES, 1816-1856 A Dissertation in English by Rochelle Raineri Zuck 2008 Rochelle Raineri Zuck Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy May 2008 ii The dissertation of Rochelle Raineri Zuck was reviewed and approved* by the following: Carla Mulford Associate Professor of English Thesis Advisor Chair of Committee Robert Burkholder Associate Professor of English Hester Blum Assistant Professor of English Stephen Browne Professor of Communication Arts and Sciences Robert R. Edwards Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of English and Comparative Literature Director of Graduate Studies *Signatures are on file in the Graduate School iii ABSTRACT This project focuses on the formation of ethnic and racial nationalisms in nineteenth-century America. I argue that a specific rhetoric of imperium in imperio (frequently translated as “nation within a nation”) was used by disparate peoples to describe the collective identities of African Americans, American Indians, and certain immigrant groups. For white Americans, this rhetorical construction functioned during the antebellum period as a way to project sectional tensions onto the presence of a racial or ethnic “other” nation and to bring these groups more fully under U.S. jurisdiction. People of color and several immigrant groups engaged discourses of imperium in imperio to exert pressure on the political hegemony of the United States nation by expressing alternative ethnic and racial nationalities. Taking up moments that I call “crises of culture,” my dissertation examines several major political and cultural crises of the nineteenth century: African Colonization (1816-1817), Cherokee Removal (1831), and the Kansas-Nebraska Act and Dred Scott Decision (1854 and 1856). iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ..................................................................................... vi Chapter 1 Introduction............................................................................................ 1 Transnationalisms and Internationalisms: The Future of American Studies ...... 6 Civic, Territorial, and Ethnic Nations: Group Identity and the Formation of the Modern Nation..................................................................................... 13 The Rhetorical Formation of Ethnic and Racial Nationhood in America ........... 18 Conclusion ....................................................................................................... 22 Chapter 2 America’s Two-Headed Monster: Imperium in Imperio and the Problem of Sovereignty ........................................................................................... 24 Race, Ethnicity, and Nation: Competing Visions of Community in Nineteenth-Century America ..................................................................... 25 Civic, Territorial, and Ethnic Nations in Nineteenth-Century America.............. 31 Imperium in Imperio......................................................................................... 49 Conclusion ....................................................................................................... 55 Chapter 3 “And Ethiopia Shall Stretch Forth Her Hands:” Racial Nationhood, Religious Dicourse, and the Formation of a Transnational People..................... 56 “The Boisterous Sea of Liberty:” National Disunion and the Creation of the African Colonization Society .................................................................... 60 Race, Nation, and Discussions of African American Collectivity...................... 65 “A Chosen People Within a Chosen People:” African American Jeremiads and the Formation of Transnational Citizenship ......................................... 74 Conclusion ....................................................................................................... 87 Chapter 4 “In the Heart of So Powerful a Nation:” Cherokee Nationhood, Sectional Tensions, and the Regulation of American National Space ................ 89 “Our Lamentable Fate:” A Brief History of the Cherokee in Georgia................ 93 “An Interesting Commonwealth:” Competing Visions of Cherokee Nationhood................................................................................................ 101 v “To Save the Nation:” Appropriation, Resistance, and the Presentation of Cherokee Nationhood ................................................................................ 122 Conclusion ....................................................................................................... 129 Chapter 5 “A Space for Action:” Ethnic Nationalism and Transnational Citizenship in 1850s America .................................................................................. 132 Crimes Against Citizenship: White Americans and African American Mobility..................................................................................................... 136 African American Nationalism in 1850s America ............................................. 149 Contested Citizenships: Americans By Birth or Africans By Race ................... 158 Conclusion ....................................................................................................... 173 Conclusion .............................................................................................................. 176 Epilogue: Dred Scott, Divided Sovereignty, and Divided Citizenship ...................... 179 Notes .................................................................................................................... 185 Bibliography............................................................................................................ 224 vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I would like to thank my dissertation director, Prof. Carla Mulford, for her mentorship throughout my graduate program. It has been a privilege to have Carla as my advisor and she has my profound respect and admiration. Thank you also to the members of my dissertation committee—Profs. Robert Burkholder, Hester Blum, and Stephen Browne— for their helpful feedback and encouragement. The support of the Penn State English Department, the Institute of Arts and Humanities, and the Graduate School has been extremely beneficial to my research and has made my experience at Penn State a very positive one. To the members of my writing group, Jill Treftz, Rosalyn Collings Eves, Pia Dias, Stacey Sheriff, and Prof. Cheryl Glenn, our Friday afternoon meetings were invaluable to both my writing and my state of mind. My time at Penn State was filled with many people to whom I owe my appreciation for their friendship and support. Lindsey Jones, my first graduate school friend, this is only the beginning. Heather Murray, Robert Bleil, Carissa Turner Smith, Steve Bertolino, Lisa Shiffano Dunick, Nicole Jacobs, Verna Kale, Niamh O’Leary, Steven Thomas, Brant Torres, Brian Neff, and Kristin Shimmin have been exceptional colleagues and friends. To Abram, my most faithful reader, critic, and tech guru, I would like to express my sincerest thanks. And most of all, I would like to thank my parents, Sam and Joey, vii who offered unwavering love and support at every step along the way. This dissertation is dedicated to you. 1 Chapter 1 Introduction “If what Jean-François Lyotard has called the postmodern condition entailed the dismantling of the Enlightenment's grand narratives, the nation, as the surface on which those master narratives were inscribed, also names the space in which that condition has become pervasive. The metanarratives nations fashioned out of them constituted the historically effective mechanisms whereby the Enlightenment's ideals of freedom and equality were transmuted into universal "rights" rather than local demands. But in the era of postcolonialism and globalization, the once hegemonic narrative of the nation has been unseated. These asymmetrical but interdependent socio-economic formations share responsibility for the demotion of the nation-state to the status of a residual unit of economic exchange in the global economy. Once believed crucial for membership in the world system, the nation-state has been recast as a tolerated anachronism in a global economy requiring a borderless world for its effective operation.” Donald Pease, “National Narratives, Postnational Narration” (1997) American literary studies can be characterized in recent years by an increasing attention to the transnational or the postnational.1 In an era marked by postcolonialism and globalization, the idea of the nation-state is seen by some as an increasingly obsolete way of understanding the political and economic situations in which people are living. While this scholarship seems a valuable way to describe our own historical moment, there are dangers in forgetting about the importance of the nation as a key component of how many nineteenth-century Americans thought about themselves and their relation to others. Also it is important to remember that thinking “transnationally” does not necessarily require looking outside of the putative borders of the United States nation. We might instead look to Indian Country or to the various ethnic and racial nations that 2 existed during the nineteenth century (many of which continue to be a presence in American culture.2 Rather than thinking “beyond the nation,” many writers of the antebellum period, particularly those who were positioned outside