The Pennsylvania State University The Graduate School College of Arts and Sciences SUBLIME INSOLVENCY: THE AESTHETICS OF FAILURE AND AMERICAN LITERATURE AFTER THE PANIC OF 1837 A Dissertation in English By Joshua M. Tendler © Joshua M. Tendler Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy December 2014 ii The dissertation of Joshua M. Tendler was reviewed and approved* by the following: Christopher Castiglia Professor of English Dissertation Adviser Chair of Committee Hester Blum Associate Professor of English Sean X. Goudie Associate Professor of English Amy S. Greenberg Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of History and Women’s Studies Garrett Sullivan Associate Professor of English Director of the Department of English Graduate Program *Signatures are on file in the Graduate School iii Abstract Although it is often glossed over or mentioned in passing in literary studies, the Panic of 1837 was one of the most important historical moments in the antebellum United States. Among other consequences, it served as a catalyst for a surge in literary and cultural production related to economic crisis, the “credit system,” and individual failure; its impact lasted through the Civil War. In the wreckage left behind by the collapse, American writers, especially those involved in reform movements, struggled to reaffirm faith in the rationality and comprehensibility of the credit-based market and the possibilities for individual self-possession and permanent value. This dissertation explores four such recuperative sites of fantasy that were prevalent in the literature of the post-Panic years: the home, the spirit-world, the temperance meeting, and the post-1848 West. While these discourses attempted to serve as reassurances for the possibilities of success amidst widespread failure, this project analyzes the ways in which for many authors affected by the Panic, working within these very discourses, this fantasy of recuperation was bound to end in failure. From this failure, however, emerge ways of living and relating to others that run against the grain or question the desirability of the values associated with economic success. Exploring writers from Catherine Maria Sedgwick to Theodore Winthrop, I argue that antebellum literature inverted the prevailing definitions of success and failure, making from the latter the means of imagining social ethics through and beyond the credit market. iv Contents Acknowledgments v Dedication vi Introduction 1 1. Financial Panic and the Uncanny Sentimentality of Anna Warner’s Dollars and Cents 19 2. The Spirit-Hand (or Stuffed Glove?) of the Market: Juggling, Animated Objects, and Epes Sargent’s Peculiar 58 3. “Such is Life”: (Ardent) Spirits, The Credit System, and Ruin After the Panic 100 4. “If uncertainty of success is a condition of success, we shall win the race”: Western Life, Straightness, and Theodore Winthrop’s Travel Fiction 139 5. Bibliography 178 v Acknowledgments I would first and foremost like to express my deepest gratitude to my advisor, Dr. Christopher Castiglia, for his guidance, patience, and willingness to devote so much time and effort to aid in the completion of this dissertation. From inspiring me with ideas and broad directions to meticulously editing my writing, you were there every step of the way, and I would never have been able to finish this dissertation without you. I would also like to thank Dr. Hester Blum, Dr. Sean Goudie, and Dr. Amy Greenberg for the many insights, suggestions, and support you all have given me over the last several years. I would like to thank my family for their unqualified support and love. Dad, Carrie, and Barbara, you were there for me through thick and thin, no matter what the circumstances, with a smile and a word of encouragement. I would also like to express my gratitude to my aunt and uncle, Tina and David, for their boundless love and uncanny ability to inspire me. We are, as we always have been, a little family. Finally, I would like to thank my friends and colleagues, especially Kris Lotier, Ethan Mannon, and Jacob Hughes. You were always there cheering me up with good humor, good advice, and good times. Although our times as fellow graduate students might be at an end, I know that no matter where we go our friendships will last a lifetime. vi Dedicated to my mother, Alice. 1 Introduction “There must be a recuperative principle in this great country to restore things some time or another, but I shall not live to see it.” -Philip Hone, New York, 1842 The expansion of print culture, as Michael Warner famously argued drawing from Benedict Anderson, worked to create a shared sense of affiliation and the “imagined community” of the nation in the late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century United States. What was equally, and arguably more problematically, drawing distant individuals together into a community during this period was the rapid expansion of the credit-based economy. Due to such factors as a lack of “hard money,” or specie, as well as geographical distance, Colonial and post-Revolutionary America had always relied heavily on forms of credit to facilitate commercial enterprise and market exchange. According to historian Bray Hammond, the lack of hard cash caused colonial and post- colonial Americans to “invent, improvise, covenant, and pretend” in order to provide entrepreneurial endeavors with funding.1 By the middle of the nineteenth century, this dense web of relations, often between distant actors, and predicated on narrow windows of timeliness, had become astonishingly complex. “Manufacturers and urban importers 1 Bray Hammond, Banks and Politics in America: From the Revolution to the Civil War (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1957, 1991), 4. See also: Jennifer J. Baker, Securing the Commonwealth: Debt, Speculation, and Writing in the Making of Early America (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005). 2 depended on the remittances of wholesalers,” writes Edward Balleisen: “wholesalers on timely collections from retailers and artisans; retailers and artisans on eventual payment from consumers; discounting banks and note brokers on disbursements by drawers of promissory notes and acceptors of bills of exchange; and endorsers on the pecuniary fidelity of friends or relatives.”2 The pervasiveness of intricate webs of credit, he reports, meant both that most individuals in the period would carry debt and also that the fortunes of proprietors and laborers alike would be “inextricably bound up with one another.”3 According to one contributor on the “Moral of the Crisis” in The United States Magazine, and Democratic Review, the credit system had become monstrous, a “morbidly overgrown” beast “swallowing up” everyone, from the merchant and clerk to the mechanic, laborer, and everyday consumer.4 Especially after the end of federal funding for the United States Bank in the early 1830s, the financial environment was just as complicated. Many states allowed anyone to open banks without any requirements of initial capital. Thousands of banks operated in a confederation that, with relative degrees of capital and solvency, circulated hundreds, if not thousands, of different bank notes. Although financial periodicals calculated, as best as they could, exchange rates and price indices for as many of these notes as possible, the length and complexity of such tables as one might find in Hunt’s Merchant’s Magazine might have caused a businessman to despair, head in hands. There was also a lag in the circulation of information, and so almost all information on banks, 2 Edward Balleisen, Navigating Failure: Bankruptcy and Commercial Society in Antebellum America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 31. 3 Ibid. 4 “Moral of the Crisis” The United States Magazine, and Democratic Review (Oct. 1, 1837), 111. 3 rates, specie-to-notes ratios, bankruptcies, and so on were always to be integrated into the financial planner cautiously. Checks and bills of exchange added to the entanglements of the economic environment, as was their usual course of circulation, as assets, through a variety of hands, sold at a variety of discounts by brokers along a chain that was often extended internationally, from Liverpool to Illinois and everywhere in between. A high degree of turnover in elections required a vigilant eye for the passage and overturning of new laws related to commercial enterprise, banks, credit-debtor relations, bankruptcy, and so on. Asa Greene’s 1834 The Perils of Pearl Street, Including a Taste of the Dangers of Wall Street is penned at wit’s end over the “miseries of trade.” “A man,” he reports, “may be continually handling the cash, without a sixpence ever sticking to his fingers.”5 Such were some of the perplexities financial conditions in the 1830s. And then there was speculation—speculation in stocks, in state bonds, in public works, in railroads, in waterways, in towns (which might prove real or imaginary) and real estate, in various goods and commodities. Such assets of potentially questionable value—they might, after all, be worthless paper—could, in turn, be made, often quite easily, into security to further extend credit. No event drew attention to the ever-more tumultuous sea of credit, with its incumbent anxieties and perplexities at the individual level, than did the Panic of 1837, one of the most important, and in literary studies often overlooked, events in nineteenth- century United States history. Explanations for its cause at the time varied wildly, although irresponsible speculation, especially in land, over the course of the 1820s was 5 Ibid, 7. Almost no one succeeds to wealth, he proceeds to note, and nine out of ten will go bankrupt and lose credit and character. And Asa Greene was writing during a “boom time” in the nation’s economy! 4 an almost unanimous culprit. Whig publications blamed Jackson both for the removal of funds from the Bank of the United States and for his Specie Circular of 1836, his attempt—perhaps poorly timed—to curb the rampant speculation on credit by allowing only government land to be bought with hard currency.