ALIENABLE RIGHTS: NEGATIVE FIGURES OF U.S. CITIZENSHIP, 1787-1868 by CARRIE HYDE A Dissertation submitted to the Graduate School-New Brunswick Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in Literatures in English written under the direction of Professor Michael Warner and approved by ________________________ ________________________ ________________________ ________________________ New Brunswick, New Jersey October 2011 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Alienable Rights: Negative Figures of U.S. Citizenship, 1787-1868 By CARRIE HYDE Dissertation Director: Michael Warner This dissertation examines how the literature of early U.S. citizenship reinvents the terms, sentiments, and limits of political membership. I argue that “negative civic exemplars”—expatriates, slaves, traitors, and dispossessed subjects—dominated the imagination of citizenship from the ratification of the Constitution until the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment. Amid fractious controversies over borders and loyalties, authors such as Washington Irving, Edward Everett Hale, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Frederick Douglass, and Harriet Beecher Stowe set aside the figure of the “body politic,” with its ideal of organic incorporation, to explore the ardent pathos of disenfranchised subjects and alienated citizens. Reading fiction alongside legal debates, political philosophy, and sermons, I suggest that we misunderstand early U.S. citizenship if we take it as either self-evident or reducible to any single legislative act. The uneven development of citizenship requires a hybrid method that attends as much to the discordant fantasies of affiliation as to the empirical conditions within which they arose. Alienable Rights offers an alternative genealogy of citizenship that takes discontinuous modes of allegiance, not geopolitical borders, as the principal measure of ii politics. By considering the formative crises of affiliation in the early republic, the project seeks to recover a more historically nuanced understanding of the politics of literature, while also foregrounding the unstable rhetorical constitution of civic categories that are too often taken as self-evident facts. In the literature I consider, political identities are subject to precipitous reversals and wayward attachments. From Hale’s story of an exiled traitor turned patriot (“The Man Without a Country”) to Hawthorne’s tale of a Loyalist storyteller rendered obsolete by an unwanted Revolution (“Old Esther Dudley”), and from Douglass’s novella of insurrectionary slaves who restage the liberatory drama of the nation they renounce (“The Heroic Slave”) to Stowe’s novel of estranged Christians who await their return to an otherworldly home (Dred)—the dissertation examines characters who reside in a land that is manifestly not their own, and whose affective dissonance placed unresolved claims on republican readers. iii Acknowledgments This project owes a significant debt to the teachers, scholars, and friends, who have offered encouragement and feedback along the way. In Michael Warner, I found an inspiring mentor, whose engaging conversations and insights have animated my inquiry. He set the highest possible standard, a fact for which I will always be grateful. I could not have dreamed up a better director had I tried. Edlie Wong has provided guidance in the fullest sense of the term. She taught me the ins and outs of legal research, and has offered invaluable advice at every turn. In Meredith McGill I found a dynamic reader, who brings an enthusiasm to the profession that is both infectious and instructive. I was also fortunate to find a wonderful outside reader in Nancy Bentley. My dissertation draws on the lessons of earlier coursework with Myra Jehlen, David Kazanjian, John Kucich, Brent Edwards, and David Eng—as well as subsequent conversations with Greg Jackson, Daniel Richter, Matt Brown, Chris Iannini, David Kurnick, and Brad Evans. An informal workgroup with Colleen Rosenfeld, Sarah Kennedy, and Sean Barry offered timely occasions for exchange in the early stages of this process. I would also like to thank Ezra Nielson, Alyssa Montplessant, Paul Conrad, Elena Schneider, Wendy Roberts, and Joe Rezek. Joe has been a generous reader and an extraordinary friend. I am grateful to have had several opportunities to develop and test the contours of this project: in Ann Stoler’s seminar on “The Logos and Pathos of Empire” at the School of Criticism and Theory; in Michael McKeon’s Problems in Historical Interpretation workshop; and in my residence at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies. This iv project has also received support from the Rutgers English Department, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the American Antiquarian Society. A version of the first chapter of this dissertation appeared in the Winter 2010 issue of ELH. I would like to thank my family for their unwavering encouragement and love; this dissertation is dedicated to them. Finally, I owe my most ardent thanks to Jonathan Foltz. His support, dialogue, and intellectual provocations made this dissertation what it is. This process would have been unimaginable without him. v Table of Contents Abstract ii Acknowledgements iv List of Illustrations vii Introduction The Involuntary Citizen 1 Chapter One Outcast Patriotism: The Dilemma of Negative Instruction in “The Man Without a Country” 17 ‘The Traitor’s Kiss’ 25 Negative Instruction and the Drift of Sympathy 31 Ungovernable Loyalties 41 Patriotic Slaves and the Pathos of Dispossession 51 Chapter Two The Tragic Citizen: Hawthornian Romance and the Aesthetics of Defection 57 On the Politics of Neutrality 62 The Romance of Expatriation 68 The Treacheries of Romance 74 ‘A Sort of Home-Feeling with the Past’ 84 Chapter Three The Climates of Liberty: Natural Rights in the Creole Case and “The Heroic Slave” 98 Geographies of Agency 104 Fitful Natures 112 Restless Liberties 124 Local Fictions 133 Chapter Four “Citizenship in Heaven”: The Politics of Post-Civic Expectation 139 Idiomatic Revolutions 146 ‘Laws’: The Dialect of the Lord 154 Strange Citizens 163 Tomorrow’s Kingdom 168 Training for Heaven 173 Bibliography 182 Curriculum Vitae 208 vi List of illustrations FIGURES 1. “Secession Exploded” (1861) viii 2. William Nash, “A Hard Case—Vallandigham’s Reception By His Friend Jeff” (1863) 22 vii Figure 1. “Secession Exploded.” http://loc.gov/pictures/resource/cph.3b36109/ viii 1 Introduction The Involuntary Citizen It was some time before he could get into the regular track of gossip, or could be made to comprehend the strange events that had taken place during his torpor. How that there had been a revolutionary war—that the country had thrown off the yoke of old England—and that, instead of being a subject of his Majesty, George III., he was now a free citizen of the United States. Rip, in fact, was no politician; the changes of states and empires made but little impression on him; but there was one species of despotism under which he had long groaned, and that was petticoat government. —Washington Irving, “Rip Van Winkle” (1819) “Rip Van Winkle” is a peculiar allegory of political independence. Rip falls asleep a British subject and wakes up, twenty years later, a U.S. citizen. He plays no part in the Revolution and is indifferent to its effects. Ultimately, only one development matters for Rip: the “tyranny of Dame Van Winkle” has come to an end with her death.1 Rip’s domestic triumph obtains rhetorical force from its kinship with the Revolution, but, narratively speaking, it is the political transformation that proves strangely incidental. “Rip Van Winkle” is the tale of an uneventful Revolution, and one, moreover, bereft of civic voluntarism.2 Rip’s “deep sleep” stands as a comic rejoinder to the fiction of republican consent (SB, 33). A far cry from the mythos of the Lockean social contract, 1 Washington Irving, “Rip Van Winkle,” in The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, and Other Stories; Or, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon. Gent. (New York: The Modern Library, 2001), 39. Hereafter cited parenthetically at SB. 2 The inessential character of the Revolution’s impact is suggestively captured in the sign depicting George Washington, which is but a slightly repainted version of an old sign of King George. Rip “recognized…the ruby face of King George,” but “the red coat was changed for one of blue and buff; a sword was held in the hand instead of a scepter; the head was decorated with a cocked hat, and underneath was printed in large characters GENERAL WASHINGTON” (SB, 35). The name, clothing, and artifacts may have changed, but the face remains the same. 2 Irving’s story portrays an involuntary citizen, who is not the originator of the republic but its unwitting subject.3 In the world of “Rip Van Winkle,” legal history and political experience are conspicuously out of sync. Being a citizen does not translate into feeling like a citizen; political affects lag behind the abstract happenings of the law. We usually think of citizenship as synonymous with civic virtue—and so best modeled in acts of participation, affirmation, and positive emulation. But, as Rip’s story reminds us, becoming a citizen does not preclude alienation; for Rip, it actually precipitates it. Rip’s experiential predicament may be fantastic in its origin and extreme in degree, but it also registers very real ambiguities about the nature of early U.S. citizenship. In a republic founded in revolt, citizenship itself entailed a certain species of disinheritance. It sacrificed tradition for possibility, remembrance for anticipation. In this respect, moments of lapse, belatedness, and political expectation are part and parcel with the problem of citizenship. Citizenship is everywhere idealized and yet, for this very reason, also never fully present. Alienable Rights examines how the literature of early U.S. citizenship reinvents the terms, sentiments, and limits of political membership. It argues that “negative civic exemplars”—expatriates, slaves, traitors, and dispossessed subjects—dominated the imagination of citizenship from the ratification of the Constitution until the passage of the Fourteenth Amendment.