Reforming the World: Social Activism and the Problem of Fiction in Nineteenth-Century America

REFORMING

 the W O R L D

Social Activism & the Problem of Fiction in Nineteenth-Century America María Carla Sánchez

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the World

Social Activism and the Problem of Fiction in Nineteenth-Century America María Carla Sánchez University of Iowa Press Iowa City

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University of Iowa Press, Iowa City 52242 Copyright © 2008 by the University of Iowa Press www.uiowapress.org Printed in the United States of America Design by Richard Hendel No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. All reasonable steps have been taken to contact copyright holders of material used in this book. The publisher would be pleased to make suitable arrangements with any whom it has not been possible to reach. The University of Iowa Press is a member of Green Press Initiative and is committed to preserving natural resources. Printed on acid-free paper ISBN-13: 978-1-58729-694-9 ISBN-10: 1-58729-694-2 LCCN: 2008926068 08 09 10 11 12 C 5 4 3 2 1

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This book is dedicated with much affection and admiration to L. B., Lyddie, Em, “the Man,” and my mom

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After all, this nineteenth century, with all its turmoil and clatter, has some lovely features about it. If evil spreads with unexampled rapidity, good is abroad, too, with miraculous and omnipresent activity. Unless we are struck by the tail of a comet, or swallowed by the sun meanwhile, we certainly shall get the world right side up, by and by. Lydia Maria Child, Letter XXI, Letters from New-York (1842)

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Contents

Acknowledgments xi 1 The Devil and His Angels 1 2 The Panic of 1837 and the Failures of Literary Men 28 3 Sentimentalizing the Fallen Woman 88 4 Making History with Child and Stowe 141 5 Saying Goodbye to Timothy Shay Arthur 174 Notes 187 Bibliography 219 Index 235

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Acknowledgments

Many people deserve thanks for helping me to write this book. At the University of Michigan I’ve been privileged to be part of a vibrant intellectual atmosphere that shaped this project profoundly. The U.S. Literature and Culture Consortium, the Nineteenth-Century Forum, and Tobin Siebers’s First Draft Club responded to early versions of the first three chapters, and were instrumental in enabling me to see what was and was not working. Special thanks are due to my colleagues in nineteenth-century literatures, including Jim McIntosh, Scotti Parrish, Adela Pinch, and Xiomara Santamarina. Jim has read parts of this book more than once, and he particularly deserves thanks here. He has been endlessly generous with his knowledge and counsel, and in doing so, has modeled what “collegiality” means. The Institute for Research on Women and Gender, the Office of the Vice President for Research, and the Department of English all came through with grants that funded trips to the American Antiquarian Society and to Harvard’s Widener and Houghton libraries. I wish to thank the wonderful staff at those institutions, as well as the staff of Michigan’s own amazing Hatcher and Bentley libraries, for all of their help. Joseph Parsons at the University of Iowa Press has been a helpful, attentive, and cheering editor. He also found two equally helpful and challenging readers to respond to the manuscript, which was no mean feat. Because of this, I feel myself lucky to have been taken into the Hawkeye fold. (No disrespect meant to my fellow Wolverines.) At key moments in my writing, John Ernest and Mary Templin offered advice and information for which I am eternally grateful. Gracias also go to the English department for one much appreciated term off from teaching, through a junior faculty nurturance leave. My junior cohort at Michigan merit special thanks for being a supportive and tightknit group. Mil gracias to Sadia Abbas, Julian Levinson, Lisa Makman, Susan Najita, Xiomara Santamarina, Sarita See, and Andrea Zemgulys for being so obliging as to be untenured (mostly) at the same time I was. Y mil gracias también a June Cummins, Amy DeRogatis, Bill Nericcio, and Ryan Schneider for their friendship and support. I miss you dearly every day.

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It’s custom on such occasions to also thank one’s graduate professors and cohort, since first books are assumed to be the grown-up versions of one’s dissertation. I still wish to offer such thanks, even though this book is not my dissertation. I conceived of this project after having become junior faculty; having gotten some teaching under my belt and seeing how students reacted to various nineteenthcentury texts; having figured out how to write a book; and most important, having figured out how not to write a book. So even though these are not the pages that earned me my PhD, there is no doubt in my mind that they grew out of the strong support and rigorous education I received at Harvard University. Lisa Hamilton, Terri Oliver, Linda Schlossberg, and Abby Wolf have my friendship forever, and Kathy Boutry, María DeGuzman, and Carla Mazzio have my eternal thanks for sharing their hard-won knowledge and wisdom as students ahead of me in the program. Muchísimas gracias also go to Lawrence Buell, Leo Damrosch, Henry Louis Gates Jr., and Barbara Johnson. In writing this new book, Larry’s scholarship has been immensely helpful. I hope he will smile at the off-the-cuff allusion to The Morgesons that lurks in these pages; it’s meant as a small thank you for his kindness over the years. Leo taught me a great deal about both British literature and good teaching. Since he wrote a recommendation letter that helped get me into graduate school in the first place, I am very grateful for his mentorship. Barbara smiled frequently, listened carefully, and remained unperturbed by occasional declarations of intent to defect to a different field of study. She also once told me that there was no point in publishing anything until I found my voice, a sentiment I returned to frequently in deciding not to turn the dissertation into a book. This is not to blame her for my own lunacy, but rather to say that she helped me to appreciate a basic truth: at the end of the day, you need to love what you are writing, otherwise you will not write again tomorrow. And Skip made the Department of African and African American Studies a home away from home for many students of color at Harvard. In my own career I have often thought about how he encouraged and mentored students, even through simple gestures like saying “you can do this.” Skip did in fact tell me I could do “this” several times: get through exams, write a proposal, write the dissertation. I am still thankful that he thought to do simple, but needful, things that made graduate school a little easier, and that he did not assume that a “Harvard girl” was beyond the occasional pep talk. xii Acknowledgments

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This book is dedicated to five people, but I’m going to exercise the authorial prerogative of being a little annoying and keep three of them secret. One I will share is Em, the nickname that all of my students know I use for Ralph Waldo Emerson. (I hope it does not sound pretentious to dedicate a book to such a figure. I’m mindful, however, that to not dedicate it out of fear of what people might think, would be very un-Emersonian.) He doesn’t have a large role in the pages that follow. But in a very real way, I fell in love with antebellum literature because I fell in love with Emerson’s words, and the affair has never died down. Some people carry Bibles or the Koran with them; I suffer from both reverence and irreverence, and at difficult times in my life, I have carried around my best copy of Emerson’s essays. I was already toting Em along for inspiration the summer that I was trying to finish this book, when about halfway through the summer, my dad died. Perhaps it does not need saying that I did not finish when I’d planned. But some time later, one of Em’s lines, a short and completely out-ofcontext one, started running through my head: “My book should smell of pines and resound with the hum of insects” (“Self-Reliance”). Your writing should have life in it; ultimately, life is what you must embrace. Which is why the last and most meaningful dedication goes to my biggest fan and constant supporter, my mom.

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Reforming the World

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1

The Devil and His Angels

The story I have to tell you is about a revolution that never quite took place. It had no grandiose or even catchy name; most Americans simply called it “reform.” It did have many scenes, settings, and actors, like all revolutions: slums in New York where prostitutes and the intemperate made their homes; lawyers’ offices where scriveners kept busy charting the downward paths of broken men; the tents for camp meetings where land and souls were “burned over” by the grace of God; farms, maids’ quarters, parlors, churches, and the street. For those who understood reform as a living, breathing fire that could free slaves, rescue fallen women, and redeem men for sober and bearable lives, individual battles in this revolution proved a marked success, a sign of divine blessing or of the inevitable triumph of just thoughts and actions. For those who believed reform necessitated a revolution of the written word, the results were more mixed, though not for any lack of trying. One zealous effort to reform both men and their words can be found in the middle of the century in a small town called Adrian, tucked into the southeastern corner of Michigan. In February of 1850, Adrian is a place of potential: its farms and distance from Detroit give it a bucolic air. But it is also the seat of a rapidly growing county and of the state’s first railroad. In the Episcopal Methodist church, a minister named James V. Watson has just published the third issue of his small-scale monthly the Family Favorite and Temperance Journal, and in doing so, taken sides in a national debate. On page forty-five appears a short article with a questioning title, written by the reverend himself: “Is Fiction Always Sinful?” His answer is a qualified “no,” and at first, as if to demonstrate the strength in numbers, Reverend Watson offers not his own view, but that of a fellow minister:

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The following remarks upon this moot point by Rev. Mr. Hunter of the Pittsburgh Christian Advocate are so much to our mind and to the purpose, that we cannot refrain from quoting them. . . . Mr. H. says, “we confess ourselves of the heterodox number we care not a straw whether it is fiction or it is fact, so that it is a tale with a good moral to it. Fiction has as legitimate a place in the world as poetry and painting. Alas for poetry if you banish fiction. Fiction is word painting: and is good, bad, or indifferent, according to its object and tendencies, just like a poem or a picture.” (45) Thus any reservations seem doubly unwarranted, as not one, but two men of the cloth offer assurance of fiction’s bona fides—or to be more accurate, they offer bona fides for the right kind of fiction. Having quoted his fellow pastor, however, James Watson expresses his personal views in language that more closely adheres to the implications of his article’s title. That titular question, after all, is not whether fiction can be “good, bad, or indifferent,” but whether its very nature is rooted in sin. Reverend Watson’s answer is succinct and blunt: “Our own notion is that fiction is too important an engine to be given up wholly to the devil and his angels” (45). The devil and his angels: the reverend does not specify who these angels are, though presumably his readers can identify Lucifer himself. But the article’s title hints at some confusion when it comes to recognizing Lucifer’s efforts at writing; it evokes a questioning parishioner-subscriber seeking literary guidance. Title and answer also imply that while fiction is not “always sinful,” it sometimes is: its compromised reputation gives rise to the question in the first place. After all, if “fiction has as legitimate a place in the world” as other, putatively unquestionable forms of art, why would this legitimacy require validation? The Reverend Watson’s editorial judgment, appropriately expressed in an authoritative firstperson plural, corroborates scholarly work arguing for the central place of fiction in the antebellum era, both as a cultural and as an economic entity. But this judgment also reveals Watson’s belief that fiction and its characteristic powers of influence and information are embroiled in a battle, what our minister and editor elsewhere describes as a virtual culture war: “the devil and his angels” want fiction for themselves. But so do Watson and his fellow soldiers in “the cold water army” that is the temperance movement. In defending fiction—the right kind of fiction, “with a good moral to it”—Watson and 2 The Devil and His Angels

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his small-town paper entered into the fray of one of antebellum America’s most contentious debates: how to determine the character and social roles of fiction, and how to appropriate it as a weapon in struggles to reform the nation. There is no reason why you, dear reader, should be familiar with the life-work of the Reverend James Watson of Adrian, Michigan. But it is one of the central claims of this book that writings such as his help us to understand the often tense but necessary relationships between the United States’ social reform movements and its literature, and that leaving such work unexplored keeps a crucial segment of American literary history from view. I argue that antebellum social reform writings seized upon fiction as “too important an engine” to be ignored, and in so doing, helped to form connections amongst fiction, truth, and literariness that shaped U.S. literary history. In focusing upon works emerging from the Panic of 1837, moral reform, temperance, and the abolitionist movement, I show how the writing of reform wrestled with the still-tarnished reputation of fiction, creating a provocative body of commentary on and criticism of imaginative literature that remains largely neglected by contemporary scholars. Reforming the World reads social reform writing not only to understand what activists believed about their chosen causes, but more so, to understand what they thought about, feared from, and hoped for a nascent American literature. In the following pages we shall encounter many questions and ideas about fiction, some forgotten and others very familiar: whether it can ever be “truthful” and what a truthful fiction might look like; whether topical, moralistic, didactic, or political fiction can ever be literary or artistic; whether being literary or artistic should even count as concerns for those attempting to create a revolution in their communities, their country, and their world. Thus I also argue that social reform writing played an important role in disseminating ideas about fiction, truth, and literariness that would become institutionally powerful after the Civil War and determine the canon that twentieth-century Americans inherited. Crediting the writing of social reform with such power may seem an extravagant gesture, given that many of the writers who feature in this study are now unknown. There are a few famous names here, such as Lydia Maria Child, Harriet Jacobs, and Harriet Beecher Stowe. They are joined by a handful whose names were once renowned, like Timothy Shay Arthur, and by others, including the The Devil and His Angels 3

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Reverend Watson, whose fame was local, fleeting, and entirely subsumed by the urgency of the cause they espoused. What binds these authors together is a concern for social justice and a desire for truth that consistently questions the written form that their efforts assume. In the antebellum era, reforming society entailed reforming fiction, endeavors that were mutually agreeable and urgently necessary. Reform reveals itself here as a natural subject for literary history. It was a crucial component of nineteenth-century life in the United States: over the course of years, thousands of Americans joined abolitionist societies, swore temperance oaths, subscribed to moral reform newspapers, and collected signatures and dollars for a cause in which they believed. All classes of Americans undertook reform efforts, both in small towns like Adrian and in metropolitan areas. Men and women each participated in large numbers, for reform activism presented “the fair sex” with opportunities to break the confines of propriety and domesticity and thus to exercise a public voice. Some reformers, like Reverend Watson, devoted their lives to their movements, while others were simply reliable signers of petitions. Through its many incarnations, we can see that social reform in the antebellum era represents a veritable culture of its own, an experience of life that continually assumes the need for profound change in one’s world. Lydia Maria Child characterized her era as “the thinking, toiling Age of Reform,” and held that this work “needs must be” (Letters from New-York 11). This needful, “thinking, toiling” activism left behind a vast body of written records: organizational newspapers, gift books and annuals; meeting minutes and committee reports; testimony, such as slave narratives; the personal correspondence and journals of individual members; and of course, fiction written in support of the cause, published in any and all genial venues. I make use of many of these materials in order to reconstruct the story of reform’s would-be literary revolution. My goal is not to compile a comprehensive survey of reform writing, but rather to illuminate the intersections where reform and fiction met and changed each other’s course. Social reform fiction does not always admit to being fiction, as we shall see: some writers attempt to redefine what fiction is, while others work to demarcate the bounds of what is acceptable and useful in imaginative writing. Regardless of their individual approach to the issue, reform writers of the antebellum era, like Child and Reverend Watson, decided that fiction was simply too important to be 4 The Devil and His Angels

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dismissed out of hand. Literary scholars are accustomed to regarding literature as performing “cultural work,” shaping the components of culture as well as being shaped by them. What we see in reform writing is the social work of American literature: explicit attempts to alter the institutions, systems, and processes that order our lives, and to alter them profoundly, in the here and now. For reformers, then, the right kind of fiction must be identified and appropriated as a potent weapon in the fight for justice. Three of the subjects for this study—abolition, temperance, and moral reform—have long been known to historians as significant elements of nineteenth-century social and political life. To literary scholars, though, the last of these is not as familiar as it should be. “Moral reform” names activism with a grand aim: literally, to develop and refine American morality. The methodology behind moral reform was specific and discreetly targeted, however: activists strove to abolish illicit sexual practices, in particular prostitution, that visibly inhabited public spaces. Thus the moral reform writings I discuss in this study all regard “fallen women”; the euphemism typically refers to prostitutes but could include any woman of dubious sexual history. My fourth subject, the Panic of 1837, is of course not a movement, but rather an economic event. The Panic figures in this study, however, for two simple reasons. First, the writing it produced follows the same course as those from traditionally understood reform movements, engaging in a diagnosis of social ills and in exhortations to readers to remedy those ills. Second, panic fiction represents one of the first large-scale bodies of such writing to be marked by anxiety concerning fiction. As an economic event, the Panic was a true crisis: it began as a run on banks and ended as a nationwide depression. Massive job, property, and investment losses followed in its wake, as did an accompanying written record of the devastation. Few of the names authoring that record, however, are now recognizable to scholars, for they have been lost to literary history. That loss encourages us to revisit the Panic. Authors who were popular as well as critically respected in the nineteenth century often lent their narrative skills to reform causes: not only Timothy Shay Arthur, Lydia Maria Child, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, but also Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Lydia Sigourney, and Catharine Sedgwick, to name but a few. But this was not the case during the Panic of 1837; rather, in this moment, self-described amateurs wondered why America’s “literary men” were The Devil and His Angels 5

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silent during this crisis (Jackson, The Victim of Chancery 7). Works from a previous financial panic in 1819 did not ponder the role of fiction in society as did those of 1837; other historical moments and social movements during the pre–Civil War era gained the notice of professional men of letters. I argue that the Panic of 1837 and its writings represent that moment when reform-minded authors recognize that there may be a problem with “the literary” and everything they call by that name. Panic fiction, like other reform fiction, identifies a need for change, names culprits, and argues for the rightness, the truth of its point of view. It also uses terms like “literary,” “fiction,” and “novel” as dirty words. Hence the Panic teaches us how historical events can produce bodies of reform writing, similar in form and function to those of organized social movements. It also highlights how seriously reformers took the written word and its power to communicate and to expose, or conversely, to ignore and to devastate. Even as panic writers inveighed against “literary men,” however, other reformers articulated their concerns about fiction differently. Harriet Beecher Stowe, for example, made clear distinctions between novels written for artistic purposes and those composed with sociopolitical aims, such as Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Dred. The popular organization the Sons of Temperance lauded Timothy Shay Arthur as a champion of “literature, temperance and morals” (Offering for 1850 iv), but the author himself insisted that he was not a literary man. As we shall see, both of these figures, as well as many of the groups with whom they were allied, subjugated discussions of writing’s aesthetic qualities, instead maintaining that a work’s moral message and purpose composed its most important traits. Even the Sons of Temperance’s intriguing link amongst “literature, temperance and morals” makes that first component just that—a component of a larger goal, not a singular entity in and of itself. The introduction for their 1850 Offering makes it quite clear that while the Sons admire Arthur’s prose style, they honor his place “in the department of moral fiction” more highly (iii). I characterize all of these statements as evidence of concern about literariness rather than aesthetics, because ultimately the works I examine do not interest themselves solely in matters of style, craft, or sublime presentation—in fact, they often do not concern themselves with such matters at all. Reformers’ interest in fiction is fundamentally an interest in how the category of literature was changing in the ante6 The Devil and His Angels

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bellum era, metamorphosing before readers’ very eyes. As David D. Hall has explained, in this historical moment “fiction steadily gained on religious and devotional literature as a percentage of total book production. The transition to an age of fiction was complete by the 1850s” (75). And yet 1850 was the same year that Reverend Watson asked if fiction was “always sinful,” and the same year that the Sons of Temperance crowned Timothy Shay Arthur as their literary champion. Even if the novel was gaining ascendancy in society as a whole, its popularity did not prevent many Americans from questioning whether this conquest was an unmitigated good. Panic writers and activists in abolition, temperance, and moral reform made efforts to determine their place in a world where what constituted literature was no longer certain. Their anxieties about literariness, then, reveal unease about the politics involved in determining what counts as literature, politics that might include aesthetic issues but invariably spread into other aspects of cultural production as well. After all, the age of fiction and the age of reform were one and the same age. Reforming the World seeks to illuminate how activists understood this, and attempted to foment revolution both on and off the page.1 In what follows, I sketch the historical and cultural background for the tumultuous story of reform and fiction. First, I describe the reform culture of the era, the atmosphere of both secular and religious striving that shaped the movements studied here. I elaborate on the traits that reformers valued in writing, and why fiction in particular was understood to be a problematic form for the conveyance of their arguments and stories. Comprehending social reform’s anxieties about fiction requires that we revisit the literary history of early America and reconsider our stories of how and why fiction came to dominate literature’s marketplace. I also explain the social work in which reformers believed writing should be engaged, and what men like the Reverend Watson expected the right kind of fiction to accomplish for them. At its core, the story of antebellum social reform and fiction is a story about politics and art, two forces with a venerable tradition of messy relationships in the United States. The histories of panic fiction and abolitionist, temperance, and moral reform writing are no less intriguingly messy, inflected as they are by issues of power, justice, and ethical behavior. To begin telling the story of these movements and their encounters with fiction, though, we need to understand the revolution The Devil and His Angels 7

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in which thousands of Americans felt that they took part, the harnessing of profound and always contradictory powers signified by a simple, two-syllable word: reform.

Reforming the Nation In the nineteenth century, every aspect of social life needed to be fixed, and Americans set out to do the fixing. Both abolition and the temperance movement trace their roots to the eighteenth century, but it was primarily during the four decades preceding the Civil War that “reform culture” came into being. In 1841 Emerson declared that “in the history of the world the doctrine of Reform never had such scope as at the present hour”; as he gave his speech, entitled “Man the Reformer,” to an educational and self-improvement group (the Mechanics’ Apprentices’ Library Association of Boston), it indeed must have seemed that no aspect of American life would be left untouched by reform’s determined grasp (“Man the Reformer” 135).2 Besides abolition, moral reform, and temperance, there were movements to reform asylums and prisons, as well as efforts to establish education for the deaf, the blind, and the masses. There was a peace movement, a vegetarian movement, a Sunday school movement, and a nascent Indian rights movement. Most of this activism did not exist when Emerson was born in 1803, but rather came into being during his young adulthood, quickly transforming the social landscape of the country. Some Americans felt satisfied with subscribing to the abolitionist Liberator; others experimented with living reform twenty-four hours a day, producing utopian endeavors in community living like those of Brook Farm and Fruitlands. A few efforts were slow to build, dwarfed by seemingly more pressing concerns. Thus in the early 1850s, Elizabeth Cady Stanton busied herself writing articles on topics such as education and dress reform for the Lily, a women’s temperance publication. With the help of her friend Susan B. Anthony, Stanton later became elected president of the New York State Woman’s Temperance Society. After Seneca Falls, her efforts to combine suffrage and temperance organizing had stalled, in part because “she had not yet realized the conservatism of women—even those involved in social reform” (Banner 55). So for Stanton and Anthony, at least, temperance flourished while suffrage waited. Other movements never learned to speak to the public at large or to convince others of their necessity. Such would appear to be the case with the 8 The Devil and His Angels

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General Union for Promoting the Observance of the Christian Sabbath, the group behind what came to be called Sabbatarianism. The Reverend Lyman Beecher seemed well placed to spearhead the movement which, true to its name, sought to restore the sanctity of the Sabbath as a day for prayer, not commerce. With the opening of the Erie Canal in 1825, commercial traffic increased exponentially, suddenly requiring everyone from dockworkers to warehouse attendants to store clerks to follow the schedules of the moving ships rather than the commandments. But Sabbatarians could never garner the social or political support they needed to allow—or to make—all Americans honor the Sabbath. Within less than a decade, Sabbatarianism spent itself and ceased to exist. Judging by the involvement of preachers like Lyman Beecher and James Watson, as well as that of their parishioners, antebellum America’s reform culture may initially appear to be a distinctly religious phenomenon. Social reform in the U.S. did indeed come into being alongside the revivals and mass conversions of the Second Great Awakening, and it drew vital inspiration from the religious fervor they created. It was no accident, for example, that New York State’s “burned over” districts (its upstate regions) named a hotbed of both revivalism and of abolition. “The great business of the church . . . is to reform the world—to put away every kind of sin,” declared Charles Grandison Finney, one of the era’s most influential preachers and a man who knew the burned-over districts well.3 Yet many movements operated independently of specific denominational structures. As Steven Mintz explains, “the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries witnessed the first secular efforts in history to improve society through reform” (xiii, emphasis mine). We should regard reform culture in the U.S., then, as an unleashing of movements organized by persons of like mind, but not necessarily of like creed.4 Reform efforts, even within movements and sometimes within individual organizations, represented a variety of philosophies, and could combine a mix of educational backgrounds and class affiliations within their memberships. The largest of the movements—abolition and temperance—absorbed the efforts of black and white citizens both, though rarely without tension. Most important, reform activism represented one of the first venues, and one of the most powerful, in which women could establish a public presence and resist the confines of domesticity. Though usually separated into their own chapters or auxiliary The Devil and His Angels 9

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groups, women and men both participated in reform movements vigorously. Their presence in movements like temperance, moral reform, and abolition reflected their presence in society as a whole: rigidly gendered, but imperfectly divided. With such a variety of voices participating in reform movements, it becomes challenging to understand exactly what Americans thought that reform meant. One of the central tensions of these movements, and hence, of their writings, is the dichotomy present in the meaning of “reform” itself. To reform can be to make something anew, a process of improvement and progress; but it can also signify a return to a prior status or way of being. Or in the words of Raymond Williams, it can “move towards restoration as often as towards innovation” (263). The multiple natures embedded in reform’s very definition can be seen throughout the antebellum era, within movements as well as within individual texts. The writers behind the moral reform newspapers the Advocate and the Friend of Virtue, for example, explicitly argue for the humanity of prostitutes and for altering fallen women’s status as social outcasts. In decrying sexual double standards, these reformers lobby for a transformation of sexual relations and gender propriety, a change that certainly would qualify as innovation. In the process of working toward this transformation, however, moral reformers also endorsed a pastoral vision of American life increasingly at odds with existence in an industrializing nation. On March 1, 1849, the Advocate listed the “Temptations to prefer city to country life” among its descriptions of the “Temptations and Perils of Young Women,” and exhorted readers not to leave rural farms and small towns for, say, the Advocate’s home base of New York City. Likewise, in the Advocate’s April 16 story the same year, “Adeline the Tailoress,” the unnamed author warns readers: “Again, let it be said to young females in the interior, do not come upon any uncertainty to the city. . . . Do not make the change for any imaginary advantages. We would say to you, except under the most favoring circumstances: Stay at home.” The same group, the same paper, and even the same stories, pleaded with readers both to cling to the past and simultaneously to envision a radically different future. In the America imagined by the writers of the Advocate, prostitutes are valued members of the community, rescued from lives of exploitation, abuse, and poverty. But in their ideal America, fewer women become prostitutes in the first place, in part because they never leave a theoretically cherished and 10 The Devil and His Angels

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safe home. Ultimately, a morally reformed America would be the metonymic home for which these women hoped, a place where all women were socially valued and physically safe. Both of these impulses, though—the progressive and the pastoral—are signified by the term “reform.” The word itself was ever-present in nineteenthcentury America, and in this case, appeared as part of the Advocate’s organizational name: the official publication of the New York Female Moral Reform Society.5 So as to honor the contradictions inherent in its usage, I define reform writing here as any work that diagnoses an institution, system, or social practice in need of change, and accordingly incites readers to take actions that will ideally bring about that change. As Dan McKanan notes, this mirrors its usage by nineteenth-century Americans themselves, who used “reform” to label “any attempt to transform the economic, political, and cultural building blocks of society” (46). Such a definition creates a vast body of archival material with which to reckon, though, and some scholars including McKanan and David S. Reynolds argue for categorical distinctions within the world of reform: between what is reformist and what is more profoundly revolutionary, in McKanan’s terms, or between conventional and dark or immoral reform in Reynolds’s view.6 While I follow these scholars’ logic and am persuaded by many of their readings of individual texts, I have chosen not to follow such categorical distinctions. In Reforming the World, such taxonomies would blur an important characteristic of reform: that the concerns about fiction I trace cut across all styles of reform writing, whether seemingly dark, revolutionary, or conventional. Fiction and its potential uses challenged all reformers trying to stage their revolution through the medium of the written word; for them and for their writings, anxiety about fiction is a rare unifying trait. Furthermore, I resist internal categories for reform writing so as to respect the messiness to which I alluded earlier, accepting that a single text can be riddled with contradictory purposes. How would one designate the stories of female moral reformers, for example, and decide whether their progressive or conservative ideas mattered more? The presence within a text of conflicting views should urge readers to consider that intriguing complexities might lie beneath the most seemingly obvious of propagandistic works, like an organizational newspaper or movement novel. I also understand reform to encompass the benevolence work recently restored to literary studies’ The Devil and His Angels 11

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focus by scholars such as Jill Bergman, Debra Bernardi, and Susan Ryan. Reform, though, ultimately represents a wider sphere of activity than does benevolence, with the potential for more profound transformations in society—particularly if reformers could perfect the genre through which they would, in part, stage their revolutions.7 Reformers’ concerns about fiction, however, point to a central irony within the world of activist writing: with their origins in the dominant Protestant culture of the Northeast, most reform movements carried with them a profound belief in the power of the written word to spread truth and transform lives. That belief was evident in Protestantism’s genesis and in its emphasis upon an individual faith, facilitated not by priests but by personal reading of the Bible. David Paul Nord has aptly named this “the special penchant for print” that pervaded U.S. society in the antebellum era (Faith in Reading 8). As Nord has shown, the American Tract Society represented a compelling example of this “penchant” put into practice: its members pursued “a systematic, national effort to place religious tracts and books in the hands of every man, woman, and child in America” (“Religious Reading” 242). Tract Society supporters “argued that reading, even cursory reading, could have powerful, direct, instantaneous, almost magical effects on the reader” (245). Hence Tractarians held out great hopes for “the voice of the press,” comprehending it as an irreplaceable tool for conversion (246). Yet the press also represented the ultimate weapon, and sometimes the last hope, even for reformers whose goals were not religious conversion—at least, not initially. Moral reformer John McDowall, author of Magdalene Facts (1832) and the short-lived McDowall’s Journal (1833–34), conceived of the press as his last resort. A Presbyterian minister assigned to the slums of New York City’s Five Points, McDowall cherished a great dream of establishing a Magdalen Asylum, a safe place in which fallen women might be cared for long enough to learn a trade or find a domestic service position. Such an asylum would offer a useful alternative, in McDowall’s view, to residence in the Bellevue Prison—a site that certainly kept prostitutes away from the general public, but did nothing to prevent their return to sinful ways. The main obstacles, though, were lack of money and sympathetic attention from the larger populace. Reverend McDowall was having trouble rallying New Yorkers to his cause, and thus confided in an article entitled “The Last Hope” that “the press is the only medium through which [I] can reach the 12 The Devil and His Angels

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public mind” (“The Last Hope” 1). Elaborating on the significance of the Journal for him and for moral reform, McDowall wrote: The pulpit and the press are the only sources through which the public mind can be enlightened. I have tried the former to as great an extent as the Providence of God prepared the way for me, and failed to get before the people. On the press, then, hangs my last hope. The providence of God urges me to seize on it, and to ask every man who loves the truth what he will do to circulate this journal. (“The Last Hope” 1) At the top of the left hand column on the front page, just below the masthead bearing the paper’s title, date, and number, McDowall copied a small engraving of an actual printing press, floating above the earth, but disseminating rays of light to it from on high. Once subscriptions increased and brought McDowall more funds, he splurged by enlarging the drawing and its symbolic power: issues for 1834 showed two globes, displaying the continents of the Western and Eastern worlds, with the printing press suspended above them and the open pages of the Holy Bible supporting them from below. Implicit in both engravings’ iconography was the connection between McDowall’s local endeavors and the worldwide march of Christian progress, and in particular, how central a role the press would play in facilitating both. The drawings also make clear the dual nature of the term “press”: not merely indicative of the ephemeral media to which contemporary Americans understand the term to refer, but encompassing print culture as a whole—the legion of words and pictures that could be replicated, circulated, and thus “[got] before the people” through the mechanics of the printing press itself. Most reform movements, then, began with an abiding faith in the power of the written word and of the possibilities of the press. Yet when the products of that press were fiction, reformers’ faith often turned to fear. Their initial instincts might be expressed in the admonition of a Tract Society article: “PUT DOWN THAT NOVEL!” (Nord, Faith in Reading 118).8 Lest it appear that concerns about fiction were primarily the fussiness of beleaguered ministers and their flocks, let us switch milieus and look ahead in time, briefly, in order to look back. In the early 1930s, with most of her literary works behind her, Charlotte Perkins Gilman began writing her autobiography. For Gilman, personal history began The Devil and His Angels 13

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with family history. First she indulged in a bit of embellishment at once fanciful and modest, and claimed an “extremely remote connection with English royalty” (1). But a much more immediate relation dominated Gilman’s retrospective gaze: her Beecher ancestry and the family’s heyday almost a century earlier: As characters broadened with the spread of the growing nation new thinkers appeared, the urge toward heaven was humanized in a widening current of social improvement, making New England a seed-bed of progressive movements, scientific, mechanical, educational, humanitarian as well as religious. Into this moving world the Beechers swung forward, the sons all ministers, the daughters as able. (The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman 3) For Gilman, antebellum America’s “moving world” provided an inspirational model for the equally-unsettled society in which she attempted her own reforms, a pattern both to follow and to dutifully perpetuate. As the great-granddaughter of Lyman, the grandniece of Harriet, Catherine, Isabella, and Henry Ward, and the descendant of many “persons of piety and learning” (2), Gilman saw the pre–Civil War U.S. as a place in which individual striving and desire had encountered fortuitous, large-scale opportunities for change. The inspirational “scope” of which Emerson had spoken a century before is aptly mirrored in her description. Not only had her forbears felt “the urge toward heaven,” in the eyes of their grandniece, they had covered some respectable amount of ground in that direction. They also brought a significant portion of the American populace along with them. The moving world of social activism that Gilman describes is a world happily joined and attained—at least by previous generations, who did not require “point[ing] out how far we have already gone in the path of improvement, and how irresistibly the social forces of to-day are compelling us further” (Women and Economics xxxix).9 It is the world of John McDowall and James Watson and Tractarians and Brook Farm and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and countless men and women whose names did not survive: a world with the possibility of change, betterment, perfection. As she recalls it, Gilman’s Beecher ancestry decisively influences her youth, and in mundane ways, is inextricably intertwined with politics: she learns of Lincoln’s assassination while in the company of Great-Aunt Catharine, and also celebrates Grant’s election “with the 14 The Devil and His Angels

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aunts in Hartford” (Living 16). Of course, one of the Hartford aunts has written a novel that is esteemed within the family and has proven a huge success in the country at large. In fact, “the new big house” that Gilman visits has been paid for “out of the proceeds of ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin”’ (16). The fondness expressed toward Great-Aunt Harriet and the material benefits that Uncle Tom provides for the entire Beecher clan compose an odd background, however, for another reminiscence that Gilman records. The same young girl who stays in the house that Uncle Tom built, watching her famous elder paint watercolors, is growing up with two “prohibitions” from her mother: “to read no novels and to have no intimate friends” (16, 30). One can speculate as to the psychological repercussions of the latter injunction, and indeed, Gilman does so as her narrative proceeds. But that leaves a question with implications not just for understanding Gilman, but for understanding American literary history: how could one family approve of—in fact, produce—Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and yet disdain the book’s genre? Of all things and all people, why would novels be forbidden to the grandniece of Harriet Beecher Stowe?

The Devil and His Angels Any answer that would illuminate the contradictions of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s childhood prohibitions necessitates revisiting our narratives of early American literary history and fiction’s roles in it. As many scholars of American literature have testified, in the early republic and antebellum eras, terms like “fiction,” “novel,” and “literary” enjoyed—and sometimes suffered from—fluctuating meanings. At the dawn of the nineteenth century, “literature” typically signified culturally valued writing of all kinds, including works of history, theology, philosophy, and the sciences. Bestowing the descriptor “literary” upon a work meant imbuing it with connotations of learning and prestige, and placing it within the realm of texts with which educated Americans ought to concern themselves. The realms of “fiction” and “the novel,” however, rarely intersected with the prestigious world of literature. As both Nina Baym and Cathy N. Davidson have shown, many Americans retained old Puritan prejudices against allegedly frivolous pursuits like reading fiction, and “the novel” was associated with risqué, grotesque, or sensationalist topics involving sex and crime.10 (The more things change, the more they stay the same. . . .) Scholars working in the history of the book and the history The Devil and His Angels 15

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of reading report similar findings: widespread condemnation of fiction, and simultaneously, ever-growing numbers of people reading fiction.11 Baym and Davidson, along with Jonathan Arac, Lawrence Buell, and Ronald Zboray, among others, document how these attitudes shifted over time, allowing certain styles of novels to become “literary,” as well as enabling prose fiction to become the dominant form of imaginative writing in the nineteenth-century marketplace.12 The novel, then, can be seen as exercising economic prowess in the antebellum era; for as Baym and Zboray demonstrate, thousands of Americans did buy and read novels. Nonetheless, the “pervasive cultural censure” that met the novel in America guaranteed that “until well into the nineteenth century, virtually every American novel somewhere in its preface or in its plot defended itself against the charge that it was a novel, either by defining itself differently (‘Founded in Truth’) or by redefining the genre tautologically as all those things it was presumed not to be—moral, truthful, educational, and so forth” (Davidson, Revolution and the Word 40). Novels then, might be seen as an early example of American indulgence and denial, a craving simultaneously lamented and surrendered to, a contradictory existence shared with other commodities like alcohol or cigarettes. In fact, American Tract Society writers “compared the power of reading to the intoxicating, addictive power of alcohol” (Nord, Faith in Reading 115). “Do not acknowledged principles in respect to the manufacture and traffic in intoxicating liquors apply with ten-fold emphasis to writing, printing, and vending vicious books?” asked the Tractarians in 1843 (qtd in Nord 115). And in a comic but shrewd moment, the eponymous hero of The Adventures of Harry Franco: A Tale of the Great Panic (1839) locates a source of his misfortunes in a rather haphazard upbringing, caused by his mother’s fondness for “novels and snuff ” (Briggs 2:6). While Harry Franco’s humorous touch might appeal to twenty-first-century scholars, it is important to remember that in the antebellum period, most analogies between fiction and drugs were neither made nor taken lightly. The novel was becoming “the form of the times” (Baym, Novels, Readers, and Reviewers 31), and thus its power and potential uses were examined and debated accordingly. With scholarship of the past two decades affirming the novel’s significant role in pre–Civil War culture, any criticism of the form or of fiction as a whole has taken on a “sour grapes” character, reading variously as the sad revelations of that period’s middle-class oppression, 16 The Devil and His Angels

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cultural prudishness, or at best, “camps” horribly out of touch with the trends of their own historical moment.13 Certainly fiction represented one cultural site, among many, for the exercise and negotiation of social influence and power, and reform writing is no exception to this. But to dismiss anxieties about fiction as simply power plays by a threatened class would make little sense of the texts that will come under analysis here, as well as resulting in the belittlement of significant and very real cultural and historical forces. Much reform writing rests upon religious conviction and is informed by both conservative and radical ideologies, as scholars like Dan McKanan, David Paul Nord, and David Reynolds have demonstrated. But then, religion and conservative social ideologies were powerful forces in daily nineteenth-century life. One did not require seminary training or faded social eminence to be concerned with the decline in “solid reading,” as were the editors of the Colored American: The time was, when if people read at all, they must read solid reading: but that time has passed away, and sadly passed away too. As the world has become more extensively navigated and known—as civilization has extended itself, and the light of Christianity has been commensurate with it . . . in fine, in almost exact proportion as books have increased, the disposition for solid reading has become less and less, until it has almost got to be a name that was. (“Solid Reading”) What the Colored American staff perceive as “solid” includes the Bible and “books illustrating great principles, or detailing great moral events.” That which they find regrettably on the rise is “the fanciful and imaginative,” characterized as “some fairy tale, or some enchanting dream, . . . some Mirror or Knickerbocker (good in their way).” Fancifulness does not and cannot educate and improve, in the editors’ opinion, regardless of whatever defense might be mounted in a novel’s preface. The Knickerbocker staff might appear to be following an opposite course to that of the Colored American: a piece published two years before “Solid Reading” proclaimed “the love of fiction” to have “universal prevalence” (“Dramatic Fictions” 587). Establishing a genealogy beginning with “the fables and tragedies of Greece, the parables of Judea, the romances of chivalry,” and ending with “the fashionable tales and modern novels of our own times,” the Knickerbocker editors The Devil and His Angels 17

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crown fiction as the genre of genres: “Fancy wins the day against Truth” (588). But perhaps the scribblers of these two publications are not so divided as they might seem. For “Dramatic Fictions” marches onward to praise of “moral fictions,” noting that reading “the noble lessons” of Maria Edgeworth is preferable to reading those of Seneca; it tosses off an unsurprising slap at “Mrs. Radcliffe’s foolishly-horrible pages”; and then ends with an analysis of historical fiction, whose practice is chosen against “apocryphal romance” (588). In other words, fancy would win the day against truth only in certain forms and circumstances, with the latter figured alternately as fancy’s “severer sister” and as “a dry recollection of mere names and dates” (588, 589). The Knickerbocker editors throw their support to moralistic and didactic works, like Edgeworth’s, as well as to historical fiction that captures “the genuine spirit of the olden time” (589); their criticism of Ann Radcliffe is simply the proverbial icing on the cake. I have brought together these two pieces and their respective publications for good reason, and not merely that both articles speak so neatly to each other and, in one case, even about the other. The men behind the Colored American and the Knickerbocker wrote for very different purposes: the former intent upon providing “Colored Americans” with a voice of their own within print culture; the latter working explicitly to establish an “original” American literature.14 Yet all involved felt that commenting upon fiction and playing their part to demarcate its place in their world was quite simply a necessary effort. In the 1830s, when both of these articles were penned, fiction was on its way to becoming “the form of the times,” but how Americans of different classes, backgrounds, and political persuasions felt about that was very far from being settled. Indeed, the editors of the Knickerbocker prove not to be so sanguine in the cause of fancy as initial impressions might indicate. Their nod to the moralistic and to historical fiction betrays the distinctions being made behind their bravado, as does the celebratory introduction to the tenth volume of the periodical. That piece announces that “it has been the steady purpose of the publishers and editors . . . to present a magazine thoroughly AMERICAN in its tendencies . . . in which all should find something to interest or instruct, and none any thing [sic] offensive to good taste, or subversive of sound morals, pure patriotism, or true religion” (Introduction, Knickerbocker 2). No wonder the editors of the Colored American considered the Knickerbocker “good in [its] own way.” 18 The Devil and His Angels

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Truth, whether in the guise of “solid reading,” “true religion,” or a “genuine spirit,” is both an omnipresent term and a contested quality in antebellum print culture. Indeed, following Cathy Davidson’s description, social reform writings are permeated with claims of truthfulness and of accurate representations of reality; the majority of the texts I discuss claim to be “true,” even when they are admittedly works of fiction. In the Anglo-American literary tradition, such claims were common and even pro forma for novels throughout the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Scholarship of the last twenty years, like Davidson’s, tends to regard these claims as mere conventions, a quaint relic of the American novel’s early days as an upstart, none-too-respectable literary form. It does not follow, though, that these conventions are thus bereft of meaning, and it is particularly so for the texts under examination in Reforming the World. The writings that emerged from nineteenth-century activism often differ dramatically in style from the bodies of work that gave rise to studies like those of Davidson and Baym, and most important, they differ in purpose. Thus our readings of them needs to be attuned to what we already know about the literary landscape of early America, and at the same time, ready to question what seems easily conventional. Social reform movements depend upon being perceived as truthful: few people will support a cause if they believe that it, or its adherents, are dishonest about the very issue that brings them together. Especially for those who seek to remake the image and the social status of disenfranchised persons—of slaves, say, or prostitutes—being understood to tell the truth is of paramount importance. Failure in this regard means failure, period. The historical and cultural context of these writings lifts their claims out of the realm of easily-dismissed convention; for reformers, truth is an abiding and organizing concern, and we cannot regard it lightly. A case in point: Harriet Beecher Stowe, she whose grandniece was forbidden to read novels. In the first chapter of A Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Stowe stresses her novel’s truthfulness, a quality that the Key is itself intended to establish. The exact language with which Stowe begins to press her claim, however, merits close attention: At different times, doubt has been expressed whether the representations of “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” are a fair representation of slavery as it at present exists. This work, more, perhaps, than any The Devil and His Angels 19

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other work of fiction that ever was written, has been a collection and arrangement of real incidents,—of actions really performed,— of words and expressions really uttered,—grouped together with reference to a general result, in the same manner that the mosaic artist groups his fragments of various stones into one general picture. His is a mosaic of gems,—this is a mosaic of facts. Artistically considered, it might not be best to point out in which quarry and from which region each fragment of the mosaic picture had its origin; and it is equally inartistic to disentangle the glittering web of fiction, and show out of what real warp and woof it is woven, and with what real coloring dyed. But the book had a purpose entirely transcending the artistic one, and accordingly encounters, at the hands of the public, demands not usually made on fictitious works. It is treated as a reality,—sifted, tried and tested, as a reality; and therefore as a reality it may be proper that it should be defended. (5) Given that the Key also was meant to protect Stowe from legal action, her words take on an unlooked-for irony: the work most certainly does have “a purpose entirely transcending the artistic one.”15 Yet this preface offers a hint of Stowe’s profound investment in questions regarding form and artistic purpose, even as she insists that her concerns are far weightier matters. The little lady who made the big war does not reject the label “novel,” nor its parent category of fiction, although she sees an imperfect fit between them and her desire to show what is “real.” The basic defining characteristic of the novel and of fiction as a whole, that they are made up, is effectively corroborated later in the Key, when Stowe titles a chapter of heart-rending slave testimony “Select Incidents of Lawful Trade; Or, Facts Stranger Than Fiction” (151). In 1853, fiction is not the obvious realm of fact, truth, or reality, but rather that of the fanciful and “strange.” Nonetheless, the author states unambiguously that she is writing fiction, and despite what one might think of fiction—what she thinks of fiction— she is nonetheless writing about what is real, and by virtue of this, writing the truth. Thus fiction is what you think it is, except in Stowe’s case. It is a form of art, an exacting form of creativity linked to artisanal practices, and thus at its best, “a mosaic of gems.” Artistic, beautiful, a pleasure. But Stowe’s fiction, originating as it does from a transcendent purpose, “is a mosaic of facts,” a blending of inci20 The Devil and His Angels

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dental art with crucial, pressing need. “The writer has aimed, as far as possible, to say what is true, and only that,” avers Stowe (Key iv). Thus she reassures and agrees with her reader, conspiringly draws the reader to her side to say that in fact, we are both right. Fiction is usually . . . fictitious. But slavery should no longer be a matter of the usual, and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the Key, and Dred are the truth. Fiction sold, and writers like Stowe and the Reverend Watson felt that it could not be left “to the devil and his angels.” Literary studies, then, that give short shrift to the abundant criticism of fiction or dismiss claims to truth as pro forma miss the point about numbers and prevalence: it is precisely because fiction was popular that reformers took it seriously and questioned how to put it to good use. Writings like the Key and Watson’s Family Favorite shed light upon Americans’ attitudes toward fiction: that in fact, its propriety or impropriety as a form continued to be debated until the advent of the Civil War. Thus for thousands of Americans—politically engaged and intellectually curious people—the status of fiction remained unstable and uncertain far longer than previous scholars have imagined. Americans’ questions about fiction intersected with their efforts to reshape society: in the case of Reverend Watson and his readers, the effort to abolish alcohol and destroy addiction to it. Hence I argue that the combination of reservations about fiction and desires to change the nation had as significant an impact upon what terms like “fiction” and “literary” could signify for Americans as did those of antebellum critics and well-connected authors. Work in literary history has already established the importance of looking beyond canonical figures and their texts, taking both noncanonical writers and “ordinary readers— people outside the ranks of paid book reviewers and literary scholars” as subjects in an effort to compose a more accurate and inclusive portrait of literature’s function in nineteenth-century cultures.16 This study joins that endeavor by examining a milieu not intrinsically connected to belletristic interests within the literary and publishing establishments, and buttressing discussion of well-known authors such as Stowe with discussions of rank-and-file reformers equally invested in what fiction could do for them and their causes. The majority of the authors in this study did not enjoy great fame; I have focused upon those primarily or wholly identified with their chosen social movement, persons whom, to borrow from a recent political line, could be seen as “card-carrying members” of a particular activism. The Devil and His Angels 21

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What allies them to my handful of popular names—Stowe, Child, T. S. Arthur—is that deep concern for and interest in reform, literariness, and truth.17 What is the truth espoused in social reform writings? The specific answers vary with the specific movements, but a general answer might go like this: the truth is that America is a very different country from what you think it is. Not that it ought to be different, of course it should, but that it is different: a land with few opportunities, a land where men and women are very unequal, a land where covenant and hope are broken every day. In order to combat this, reformers work to reveal smaller truths about the “real” America. That its prostitutes are sisters and daughters, persons with worth and deserving of courteous, loving treatment; they are not criminals, vixens, whores, or dispensable beings. Its bankrupts are not despicable creatures, men and women reveling in their sinful faults; they are ordinary folk harmed by circumstances out of their control. And its slaves, of course, should not be slaves, either to other men or to the contents of a bottle. Thus social reform writings typically express a truth that counters dominant beliefs about and representations of the disempowered, seeking to reveal the shared humanity between them and their (theoretically) empowered readers. That some might consider the above statements about prostitutes, bankrupts, and slaves to be expressions of opinion rather than of truth is not quite the point; for Stowe, Child, and others, opinion did not enter into the matter. Current philosophical inquiry into the nature of truth rightly cautions that “unswerving allegiance to what you believe isn’t a sign that you care about truth. It is a sign of dogmatism. Caring about truth does not mean never having to admit you are wrong. On the contrary, caring about truth means that you have to be open to the possibility that your own beliefs are mistaken” (Lynch 3).18 In what follows, there will be moments when reform writers can be seen questioning their understanding of truth. Much of what they perceive as truth, however, is the product of Protestant religious faith as well as of the Transcendentalist emphasis upon self-knowledge and self-reliance that pervaded antebellum reform culture: thus having faith, both in one’s God and in one’s self, often meant holding onto a vision of truth, especially when tested. Hence the pursuit of truth, on the page and in everyday life, was a continual balancing act between a selfish obstinacy and the defense of beliefs that one held dear. The writers repre22 The Devil and His Angels

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sented here appeal to truth in a variety of forms: as demonstrative and empirical, able to be proven through the recitation of figures, data, names, and dates; experiential, accessible through sympathetic identification and the sentimental narrative strategies that often enable it; and finally religious, known through the Bible and supporting doctrinal and devotional works. Many of antebellum reformers’ truths about prostitution, debt, alcoholism, and slavery are not controversial today: twenty-first-century public discourse is not marked by adamant justifications of slavery, condemnation of the character of prostitutes or bankrupts, or passionate refutations of such. Indeed, today a person might be bankrupt, for example, but even so, that person is not a bankrupt.19 Such changes in Americans’ perceptions of slavery, alcoholism, indebtedness, and prostitution are due in no small part to the efforts of reformers to spread their visions of truth—to convince more and more of their fellow citizens that such beliefs were not specifically the reformers’ truth, but simply the truth. Given that disseminating the truth about their beloved causes was of ultimate importance to social reform movements, why employ a literary form as subject to marketplace volatility and cultural approbation as the novel? Quite simply, because it possesses powerful “allurements,” as Stowe characterized it—avenues to feeling that could allow one to understand truth (Uncle Tom’s Cabin xiii). Its ability to blur boundaries between self and imagined others creates opportunities for intense sympathy and identification. Sentimental fiction purposefully blurs such boundaries, emphasizing metaphorical characterization that likens slaves, prostitutes, and bankrupts to beloved family and friends; we shall see sentimental narrative strategies often employed by reform authors in the pages that follow. Harriet Beecher Stowe once admitted that composing the passing of her character little Eva constituted an experience “like a death in my own family, and it affected me so deeply that I could not write a word for two weeks after her death” (Life and Letters 163). In this reminiscence Stowe marks her comparison with a simile. The newspaper stories of the New England and New York Female Moral Reform Societies, however, literalize metaphorical resemblance, and repeatedly insist that fallen women are “our mothers, our sisters, our daughters,” with no qualifying “like” or “as.” Indeed, the women of the Philadelphia Magdalen Society refer to the residents of their asylum house as being “in the family.”20 As we shall see, female moral reformers also The Devil and His Angels 23

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frequently adapted stories of fictional fallen women such as Clarissa and Charlotte Temple and combined them with factual accounts of nineteenth-century mothers, sisters, and daughters at risk, suggesting that what these activists considered to be true about fallen women could not be contained by the existing categories of nonfiction, fiction, and the novel. Of course, in the antebellum era these categories were undergoing modification, in no small part because reformer-writers were not the only ones to claim the truth. The representations of fallen women in the novels of George Thompson offer an apt example of what moral reformers wrote against, and serve as a small case study for understanding activists’ obsession with veracity. A prolific author, Thompson published dozens of novels, several of which sport suggestive titles like Fanny Greeley; or, Confessions of a Free-love Sister Written by Herself, and Anna Mowbray; or, Tales of the Harem.21 Thompson, like his sensation novelist peers, specialized in dramatizing the seamier side of antebellum life, and his extant titles typically offer tales of crime, sex, or both. His 1849 novel Venus in Boston: A Romance of City Life opens with the announcement that “Believing as I do that the romance of reality—the details of common, everyday life . . . are endowed with a more powerful and absorbing interest than any extravagant flight of imagination can be, it shall be my aim in the following pages to adhere as closely as possible to truth and reality; and to depict scenes and adventures that have actually occurred” (3). Thompson’s “romance of city life” deals with a variety of fallen women, ranging from a “common” prostitute engagingly named Sow Nance to an adulterous English viscountess, and it draws much of its drama from the repeated sexual assaults threatened against its virtuous heroine Fanny Aubrey. To flesh out his “details of common, everyday life,” Thompson also includes in his tale murder, cross-dressing, interracial sex, lesbianism, descriptions of women’s breasts like “swelling regions of snow,” and men “in the primeval costume of nature” displaying their “physical advantages” (60, 87). Hence Venus in Boston delivers the sensation hinted at in its title, and then some. Its lurid fascination with fallen women is distinguished by a complete lack of the sentimental sympathy encouraged by many in moral reform societies. But although he dispenses with their narrative strategies, Thompson does use striking elements of the reformers’ language; like Harriet Beecher Stowe, he pledges “to adhere as closely 24 The Devil and His Angels

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as possible to truth and reality.” Thus the battle for truth needed to be fought not only as a contest over how fallen women, slaves, drunkards, and bankrupts might live their lives, but also over how those lives would be represented in fiction, and whose accounts of those lives would be accepted as true, despite their fictional status. As such, shaping the relationships among tales, romances, novels, fictions, literature, and truth would become as important a task for reformers as maintaining the Underground Railroad or obtaining new temperance pledges. That task, and the difference in the representations with which authors like Thompson and Stowe backed up their claims to truth, is the subject of this book. In order to follow the story of reformers’ literary endeavors and the revolution they hoped to foment, I begin with a chapter that focuses on the fictions emerging from the Panic of 1837. The Panic was an economic catastrophe that exposed the weaknesses of the young nation’s banking, mercantile, and legal systems, as well as the federal government’s inept management of all three. Fictions of the Panic assign blame to various elements of the public and private sectors, and each promotes its diagnosis of the disaster as true. But along with more obvious villains like greedy speculators and unscrupulous lawyers, “literary men” find themselves the target of panic fiction’s critique. This critique, especially in the works of now-unknown authors like Frederick Jackson (The Victim of Chancery, 1841) and Hannah Lee (Three Experiments of Living and Elinor Fulton, both 1837), suggests that panic fiction writers distrusted the antebellum-era terminology of and concepts behind “literariness” and “novels,” associating them with a divorce from the topical, the political, and to these writers, the necessary and “ordinary occupations of life” (Jackson 8). Why, then, use novels to tell the truth of the Panic? With panic fiction, we can see how and why writers manipulated a form on which they had ostensibly already given up, and established a precedent upon which subsequent reformers would build. The third chapter turns to examining moral reform writing on fallen women, and puts a small twist on the question of truth and reform fiction: how might nonfiction borrow elements of fiction to paradoxically strengthen its claim to truth? In particular, how might reformers working on behalf of actual fallen women deal with fictional reflections of her, like those populating Venus in Boston? This chapter, “Sentimentalizing the Fallen Woman,” follows attempts to The Devil and His Angels 25

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reform the public image of prostitutes through nonfictional works of the time, including Dr. William Sanger’s controversial 1858 governmental report, The History of Prostitution, and the 1830s, ’40s, and ’50s newspapers published by New York- and Boston-area moral reform societies. All of these writings are permeated by the same claims to truth as are other reform fictions: these stories, and only these stories, reformers insist, represent the reality of fallen women’s lives. Yet fictional characters and stories are continuously appropriated in the representation of this reality. Thus moral reform writing broaches questions of the most basic genre distinctions, suggesting that reformers might need to blur the lines between fiction and nonfiction in order to represent the truth as they saw it and in order to get fallen women off the streets. The fourth chapter looks at antislavery fiction by Harriet Beecher Stowe and Lydia Maria Child. As we have seen, Stowe argued eloquently that fiction and truth might occupy the same space, particularly if they arose from “a purpose entirely transcending the artistic one” (Key 5). But Stowe and Child also felt that fiction’s power in representing reality might make it a proper vehicle for history, a discipline in which both were interested for its cultural prestige and associations with truthfulness. In Dred, Stowe proposes the idea that “a good historical romance is generally truer than a dull history; because it gives some sort of conception of the truth; whereas the dull history gives none” (170). Each author’s fictions, which sentimentally lay claim to truth, reveal how they understood tensions between historicity and imagination—and thus among true histories, novels, and romances—to represent pressing issues in furthering reform goals. Both women worked to transform the space of fiction into an unquestionable space of truth; they worked toward someday building Cabins with no need of being buttressed by Keys. In the book’s conclusion I revisit the Reverend Watson, and discuss his fellow temperance sympathizer Timothy Shay Arthur. Arthur’s writing and editorial work on behalf of efforts to defeat “Demon Liquor” won him the estimation of groups such as the Sons of Temperance and the Washingtonians; they also established him as a wellknown and successful writer outside of temperance circles. His popularity in the antebellum era demonstrated that many Americans were interested and invested, as it were, in works representing what the Sons called “the department of moral fiction” (Offering for 1850 26 The Devil and His Angels

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iii). Reading of this kind would point them away from life’s evils, such as alcohol, as well as entertain them. But after the Civil War, as Arthur continued to write into the 1870s, his critical estimation changed. In looking at that change, I argue, we can see the fate of reform literature as well as its role in determining that fate. Toward the end of her life, Lydia Maria Child wrote to her friend and abolitionist compatriot Theodore Weld, recalling that the time during which they fought slavery had felt like one in which “the Holy spirit did actually descend upon men and women in tongues of flame,” allowing them to speak truth to power (Karcher 599). Her characterization of social reform as being both a purpose and a blessing eloquently expresses how deeply such activism shaped her life, as well the lives of thousands of other Americans like her. Child’s biographer Carolyn Karcher laments that in the 1870s the author seemed and felt, sadly, like “a relic,” an unappreciated voice from an “epoch . . . passed forever beyond recall” (599, 605). Without doubt, the historical events and social movements under examination in this book were profoundly transformed after the Civil War: ending, being replayed in yet more economic chaos, or metamorphosing into huge movements that were at times inspiring and at other times frightening in their goals and force. The U.S. of the post-war era was indeed moving toward new identities and new struggles, but it was also moving in large part because of and toward reforms begun before the war. The neglect of Child’s final days is regrettable, but the quickly changing social landscape was not entirely to blame; rather, it could have been predicted. Those events that pulled writers like Child, Weld, Stowe, Watson and others into the work of reform had themselves altered the U.S. before the writers’ very eyes. They changed the nation in ways alternately radiant and wicked, necessitating that a divine spirit—or a determined writer—stop to speak the truth of what she saw, and of the revolution through which she lived, before a newer world appeared to take the old one’s place. But first, to the 1830s: a brief letter, and the difficult days that followed it.

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2

The Panic of 1837 and the Failures of Literary Men

It seemed to have such a simple beginning: an order issued by a bureaucrat, expressed in dry, governmental prose, concerning the types of payment acceptable for sales of public lands. A directive, only two pages long, with nothing to distinguish it from dozens of others which its author had signed. The language of the order could hardly be said to make the blood rush: Washington July 8, 1836 . . . The complaints which have been made of frauds, speculations, and monopolies, and the use which has been made of Bank credits and drafts drawn upon Banks, and the aid supposed to have been given to speculations and monopolies by the use of Bank laws and Bank facilities, and the general ill effect likely to result to the public interest . . . have induced me to direct that the public lands, from the 15th day of August next, shall be sold for gold and silver only . . . [signed] Andrew Jackson.1 A straightforward, reasonable-sounding regulation. Yet this brief directive would have an astonishing afterlife: when all was said and done, thousands of people lost their jobs; businesses closed, homes and belongings were repossessed; fortunes were lost and dreams interrupted. All for silver and gold. A so-called financial “panic” shape-shifted and settled into a depression, making itself at home. Year after year it stayed, lasting, a thing too heavy to be moved. In the wake of this panic, a former minister named Ralph Waldo Emerson transferred $6400 worth of assets to his only living sibling, William, and for years afterward the two brothers struggled to keep themselves solvent. “Is the world sick?” wondered Emerson in his journal; “The humble bee & the pine warbler seem to me the proper objects of attention in these disastrous times. . . . I am glad it

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is not my duty to preach these few sundays & I would invite the sufferers by this screwing panic to recover peace through these fantastic amusements during the tornado” (163). His Concord neighbor Henry David Thoreau made a rash decision during this “tornado”: he gave up his teaching job rather than punish his students physically, but then could not get another position after the depression cut the town’s finances. In nearby Boston, Charlie Eldredge, the handsome young husband of Sarah Willis, dragged himself through four years of suits, findings, and appeals in chancery court; he finally died, leaving her tens of thousands of dollars in debt. (But years later, when she relived her married life in print as Fanny Fern, she erased the courts, the worry, and the crushing amounts she owed. Instead she lashed out at her brother Nathaniel for his failure to help her. Charlie’s memory she left alone.) During the summer of 1837 a small outfit called the American Stationers’ Company went out of business, halting all sales of its recently-published collection of stories called Twice-Told Tales by a newcomer named Nathaniel Hawthorne. At about that time Calvin and Harriet Beecher Stowe arrived in Ohio to find that the house Calvin’s employers had promised him did not exist. Lane Seminary’s finances were tightened, so the couple and their infant twin daughters squeezed into a small cottage, far less grand than what they expected—and what the other, established professors had. But Harriet’s sister Catharine lost her new school, and sister Mary lost her home and furniture and “beautiful piano,” so the Stowes were lucky by comparison (Hedrick 113–114). Not so lucky was a struggling author named Edgar Allen Poe. He, his wife, and his mother-in-law chose an extraordinarily bad time, February of 1837, to move to New York City. The hard winter inspired rioting that month, as basic goods were already too dearly priced for thousands to afford. Work for Poe was scarce, so the family supplemented his scanty earnings by renting rooms to lodgers. Even his publishers, the prestigious firm of Harper and Brothers, were strapped for cash, and so they waited on a new piece for which Poe had great hopes, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. Only established authors and works already well advanced in the printing process were released by the firm in 1837, and thus by the time Pym appeared, the Harpers had delayed it for an entire year.2 Yet the Poes seemed happy, testified a friend and boarder. After all, the consumptive Virginia was relatively healthy, and the alcoholic Poe was temporarily sober (Meyers 92–93). The Panic of 1837 and the Failures of Literary Men 29

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All of these persons were touched, one way or another, by the Panic of 1837. Not that you would know it. None of them wrote about it.

Years later, Herman Melville and Anna Warner did. Seventeen and nine years old, respectively, at the time of the Panic, the native New Yorkers and their clans represented two of the thousands of families whose fortunes were wrecked by this economic event. It exacted an exile from all they had known: Anna and older sister Susan relocated from Manhattan to Constitution Island, from whence their bankrupted father hoped to recuperate his fortunes. There began what Anna described in her 1852 novel as the sisters’ initiation into “real life,” an existence marked by increasing penury and worrisome tracking of her titular Dollars and Cents (210). Herman Melville, already long orphaned by his bankrupted father and now disappointed by a bankrupted elder brother, set out to sea after unsuccessful stints as a teacher and as the manager of his uncle’s farm—an uncle also in financial straits.3 Their respective meditations on life after the Panic, Redburn (1849) and Dollars and Cents (1852), were published long after its initial chaos had subsided—and only a few years before the next major panic would strike in 1857.4 But two decades earlier, at seventeen and nine, neither was in much of a position to document the toll this disaster took.5 Others whose literary names have lasted—some taking a few hits, but nonetheless, lasting—were old enough, established enough, damaged enough by the Panic to say something about it. Which gives rise to a question that can be simply put—and in fact, was put so at the time—but cannot be simply answered: when the Panic struck, where were America’s “literary men”? This chapter examines the cultural and rhetorical contexts of this question and its answers, illuminating how the reform impulse and competing conceptions of the very meaning of “literary” combined so as to affect American literary history in ways that would last much longer than the Panic or its aftershocks. Between 1837 and 1844, the years during which the initial event and the ensuing economic depression dominated American public discourse, men and women published novels and short stories which took the country’s woes as their subjects. None of these writers were named Emerson, Thoreau, Fern, Hawthorne, Stowe, or Poe; by and large, their names have been lost 30 The Panic of 1837 and the Failures of Literary Men

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to literary scholarship. This should not surprise us. In this chapter I argue that studying panic fiction allows us to see a crucial moment of disjunction in our literary history, when authors of moralistic and determinedly topical works ceded the term “literary”—and any prestige it might entail in the future—to those works that they felt ignored or downplayed the chaos of the present day. In the writings I will discuss here, by authors such as Frederick Jackson, Hannah Lee, Hannah Allen, Lucy Cooper, T. S. Arthur, and others, literariness becomes code for willful ignorance of social conditions, a dangerous disregard for truth, and a puzzling apoliticism in the midst of a country that seemed to be falling apart. Their fictions dramatize how the Panic, “the pressure,” or “the commercial revolution” transformed ordinary, hard-working Americans into bankrupt and povertystricken victims, a status that profoundly contradicted entrenched ideas concerning national identity and its heritage of republican virtue and power. Most of these works are allegories characterized by didactic narration, nostalgic pastoralism, and appeals for sentimental sympathy between readers and victimized subjects.6 But their most compelling trait is their suspicion of, and even hostility toward, literariness as a type of willful falsity, a disregard for reality fundamentally opposed to panic fiction’s own investments in all that seems painfully truthful and real. A profound uncertainty concerning literary categories pervades panic fiction: volumes of prose are described by their authors as narratives, tales, stories, tracts, and general “works,” but almost never as novels or fiction. Volumes bearing these names more often inspire suspicion, or are simply avoided. A telling example of this prejudice could be found in the advertisements run by New York publisher Samuel Colman, whose 1837 series Stories from Real Life: Designed to Teach True Independence and Domestic Economy, was also designed to take advantage of Panic-inspired desperation. The five works that composed the series included three that will figure in this study: Hannah Lee’s Three Experiments of Living, its sequel Elinor Fulton, and the family drama The Harcourts. The last two entries in the series bore the promising titles The Savings’ Bank and Worth a Million. None of these works advertise themselves as fiction, although the last volume especially, Worth a Million, would have tested even the most naïve comprehensions of verisimilitude: it features characters with names like Romanus, Casimir, and Anglebright. Colman’s advertisement for the series, The Panic of 1837 and the Failures of Literary Men 31

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which describes the wide range of genres available at his Fulton Street storefront, pointedly does not name novels among them. And indeed, featured author Hannah Lee would later explicitly reject “fiction” as a label. In The World Before You; or, The Log Cabin (1844), she explained that “the following little work cannot be called a fiction. It is taken from real life” (iii). Fellow panic author Caroline Sawyer engaged in similar distinctions while introducing the stories that comprise her collection The Merchant’s Widow (1841). She admits that the titular piece “is entirely a work of fancy,” but characterizes the following tales as “no fiction” and “literal and unembellished transcript[s]” (7–8). Bearing in mind the warnings of scholars such as Cathy Davidson and Nina Baym concerning fiction’s conventional dismissal of its fictitious state, it seems safe to say this much: as of 1837, practitioners of imaginative prose works had not yet determined what names such works ought to bear. What I respectfully suggest is that reading panic fiction allows us to see how reform-oriented writers came together in an effort to delineate and claim the proper categorical identities for their writings, identities that recognize a problematic relationship amongst fiction, novels, the literary, and truth. With the sole exception of Sawyer, who is the only panic author I have found to happily apply the term fiction to herself, panic writers would attempt to renegotiate those relationships, ultimately shunning literariness. By distancing their works from what they understood as the literary, however, and in instances rejecting or ridiculing the novel and fiction in general, panic writers effectively wrote themselves out of the American literary history taking shape around them. The year 1837 was a moment of great national pain, as panic fiction attests, but it was also a moment of great literary possibility. Twice-Told Tales and Arthur Gordon Pym may have been temporarily stalled, but the works of established women writers were not: Lydia Maria Child, Lydia Sigourney, and Catharine Sedgwick all published new books that year, building upon their reputations as authors who were popular and well-esteemed, and thus eminently “bankable.” (While Harper and Brothers waited on Poe, Sedgwick’s Live and Let Live; or, Domestic Service Illustrated was one of the handful of texts they did release in 1837.) Literary periodicals such as the Knickerbocker, self-billed as the “Original American Magazine,” pressed on despite external pressure on their revenues. In fact that publication, which could boast having “in a single issue of 1839 . . . Irving, Cooper, Bryant, Halleck, Long32 The Panic of 1837 and the Failures of Literary Men

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fellow, Whittier, Street, [and] Cass” had increased its subscription list during the Panic (Miller 13). African American and Native American writers also made great gains in nonfiction during the 1830s, particularly in the area of religious works: Maria W. Stewart, Jarena Lee, Ann Plato, and William Apess, for example, all published conversion narratives or “moral writings” in the late 1830s and early 1840s.7 These are just three small glimpses of literary activity, loosely defined, occurring in the Northeast in the midst of the Panic. But they are moments that reveal white women writers cementing an alreadyestablished marketplace presence; self-identified literati making efforts to nurture home-grown writing; and the ability of sociallymarginalized groups to create venues within print culture that would heed their voices. Understanding panic fiction and its relation to literary history requires us to take the times into account, for with all the aforementioned activity, in 1837 there is little pedigreed literature that is not British, no agreed-upon canon of American literature, and very little sense of the “American Renaissance” putatively beginning to take shape. Everything is up for grabs, especially what is meant by a term such as “literary,” who will claim it, and who will reject it. Yet this chapter does not proffer an argument for an antebellum tradition of social realism, nor does it concern itself with panic fiction’s relation to American romanticism. It is a story about writers concerned with an economic event and its portrayal in fiction, and with what that portrayal—or rather, the lack of it—meant for the possibilities of American fiction as a whole. Panic fiction thus concerns itself with antebellum literary debates surrounding fiction, particularly the questions of fiction’s relation to truth and of its place in a developing national culture. The majority of panic fiction, however, looks in from outside of the era’s belletristic circles, and thus offers us a counterpoint to the well-documented histories of Transcendentalist Boston, for example, or antebellum New York. In these places, the nation’s cultural centers, ambitious and intellectual men like those running the Knickerbocker or the nascent Harpers empire debated America’s literary future. Yet as shown in this book’s introduction, these debates were also of great import to those involved in far different circles, such as those of temperance and abolition. The involvement of panic writers in these debates most often took the form of self-segregation. But this exclusion nonetheless helped distance selfidentified literary works from concerned daily politics. The Panic of 1837 and the Failures of Literary Men 33

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As a means of illuminating the social and cultural background of these debates, I begin by reviewing three main causes of the Panic: the inordinate power and chaotic structure of banking, particularly in the (mis)management of paper money production; the issuance of President Andrew Jackson’s Specie Circular, the executive order quoted earlier which forbade the use of paper money in public land sales; and the practice of speculation, seen by many Americans as sinful gambling. I then trace how a shortage of specie became connected to questions about literariness, by reading Frederick Jackson’s The Victim of Chancery. This story of legal and mercantile deceit forcefully portrays the anxieties over truth and falsehood that fueled both the actual Panic as well as the written testaments to its effects. I then explore how Jackson’s concerns about the literary and its meanings are echoed in the works of other panic fiction peers. Authors such as Hannah Allen, Lucy Cooper, and Timothy Shay Arthur evince similar doubts about fiction’s relation to truth, and create allegorical stories of the Panic’s handiwork. But they also elaborate upon the solutions to be found in embracing republican, pastoral ideals and thus following reform’s restorative impulses. Last I turn to writer Hannah Lee, whose works clearly strive to offer readers survival strategies for hard times. In delineating ways to cope with the Panic, however, Lee also dramatizes the limits of allegory and the pastoral. In Hannah Lee’s America, things not only have gone wrong, they are bound to go wrong, and hence, the question of what things can be reformed becomes impossible to evade. The Panic was not a glorious movement to which any of these writers chose to belong. But the texts through which they memorialized its impact allied them to other reform activism of their moment, for after the Panic, “reform” became the rallying cry of everyone who could pick up a pen.

Men, and Others, Breaking In February of 1837, seven months after Andrew Jackson signed the executive order regarding sales of public lands, there were flour riots in New York City. Inflation had set in and the prices for basic necessities of life—foodstuffs and fuel for fire—had far outstripped the wealth of many a person’s pocketbook. Rumors grew as quickly as costs: there was price-gauging occurring, people said, self-interested enrichment at the expense of the public wellbeing. According to the authors of ’37 and ’57: A Brief Popular Account of All the Financial Panics 34 The Panic of 1837 and the Failures of Literary Men

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and Commercial Revulsions in the United States, from 1690 to 1857 (1857), a mob who had had enough of both rumors and prices broke into the warehouse of flour merchant Eli Hart early that month. What ensued was a combination of comedy, grotesquery, and outrage: Barrels of flour by dozens, fifties and hundreds were tumbled into the street from the doors, and throwen [sic] in rapid succession from the windows. . . . Amidst the falling and bursting of barrels and sacks of wheat, numbers of women were engaged, like the crones who strip the dead in a battle, filling the boxes and baskets with which they were provided, and their aprons with flour, and making off with it. One of the destructives—a boy named James Roach—was seen upon one of the upper window sills, throwing barrel after barrel into the street, and crying out with every throw, ‘here goes flour at eight dollars a barrel!’ (21) Not enough food, not enough fuel, and a winter as harsh as it should be during February in New York—yet barrels of needed flour spilled onto the street wasted, salvageable only by “crones” who had come prepared as if for war. The public’s anger sought any outlet, not necessarily a sensible one. If they were hungry, then at least other men should not get rich from it: a way of being even. It was only seven months after Jackson’s order, and things were actually going to get worse. The Panic of 1837 was a disaster engineered by bankers, provoked by the chief executive of the United States, exacerbated by crop failures and foreign investment losses, and felt throughout the entire country, from Manhattan and Beacon Hill to the unplowed fields of Michigan, Illinois, and Indiana. It bankrupted previously wealthy families and made charity cases of the working poor. It was also preventable. Myriad figures exist which measure the damage caused: a nationwide total of “33,000 [bank and business] failures, involving a loss of $440,000,000”; newly unemployed laborers numbering “a half million nationally”; afterwards, over a one-year period, 41,000 applicants for bankruptcy protection in a single federal district of New York.8 These figures translated to idleness in New Bedford, Massachusetts, for example, where “the streets . . . are now thronged with seamen out of employment. Forty whale ships are lying at the wharves, but nothing doing to fit them out for sea” (McGrane 130– 131). In Philadelphia, thousands demonstrated outside Independence Hall, protesting the “system of fraud and oppression” which they saw The Panic of 1837 and the Failures of Literary Men 35

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in banking; nearly 75 percent of clerks and salesmen in the City of Brotherly Love had been discharged from their jobs (Sellers 355). For the new town of Port Sheldon, Michigan, roads were laid, a lighthouse and hotel built, the charter obtained for a railroad stop. But after the Panic, “the hotel and thirty lots were sold for less than the cost of the glass and the paint . . . the remainder of the land was bought for its hemlock bark.”9 Paper money lost its value, becoming mere “shinplasters.” For thousands of Americans, things fell apart. The causes of the Panic are plural, but certain narratives of its history found more popular appeal in antebellum America than did others. The most resilient of these narratives located perfidy in two distinct figures and one suspicious practice: the banking establishment (a view held by many Democratic supporters of President Andrew Jackson); the bad judgment of the Jackson administration in issuing the Specie Circular (the deeply cherished belief of many Whigs); and the increase in speculation as an accepted business practice, a favorite tale told by Americans of all political backgrounds. All three caused wage earners and their families “to break,” to use the parlance of the time: “Cold April; hard times; men breaking who ought not to break” (Emerson, Journals 161). The verb is an older, now-abandoned form of signifying failure or bankruptcy. But its hard consonant and connotation of injury better fit the sense of recklessness that pervaded and even animated the economic atmosphere of the mid- and late 1830s. Prior to the Panic, regulations concerning state banks were few, weak, and only intermittently enforced. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, no state had a general bank-charter law, and grants of charters doubled as political gifts, following the dominance of whichever party was currently in power. Almost anyone could set up a bank: “turnpike companies, insurance companies, commercial houses . . . exercised banking functions and issued notes” (Shultz and Caine 148). Even after the national economic picture began to deteriorate, individual states were reluctant to create responsible banking structures. “When Michigan enacted a general bank charter law in 1837,” write Shultz and Caine, “the law was a relaxation of earlier standards. Under this act, a bank could be started by ‘any person or persons resident in the State . . . desirous of establishing a bank”’ (203, emphasis mine). Precious few of these state banks possessed the ability of honoring more than a fraction of the notes they issued, and it 36 The Panic of 1837 and the Failures of Literary Men

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was theoretically possible for a bank to have no hard currency backing it. “Bank charters were indefinite and varied widely as to the proportion of specie backing required for bank notes. Moreover, the term ‘specie’ itself was so loosely interpreted that the notes of other banks were commonly acceptable. Frequently, by an exchange of notes, two banks would provide each other with ‘specie’ and never accumulate any reserves of metallic money” (149). Thus excesses became common rather than uncommon, and “some banks had note circulations in excess of half a million covered by a couple of hundred dollars in cash” (149). This was clearly understood at the time: the business publication Niles’ Register had declared in 1836 that “the responsibilities of banks in the United States are six or eight times greater than their means, though all the specie in the land were gathered into their vaults—and there must be a scrabble for it!” (qtd in McGrane 18).10 Banking in the antebellum period was, in effect, an elaborate game of bluff. Yet most banking and economic histories record only public insatiability for more and more banks with fewer regulations. “In many regions anyone who demanded specie in exchange for bank notes was popularly dubbed an ‘extortionist’ and a ‘bloodsucker,’” write Shultz and Caine. “A Boston broker was actually brought before a grand jury in Vermont on the attorney-general’s charge that he was guilty of an indictable offense for demanding the redemption of certain bank notes” (149). In part, public demand for easily accessible banks with flexible standards reflected the crucial role that such institutions played in the nation’s economic and political development. “As late as 1831,” notes James Sharp, “the New York Stock Exchange listed no industrial corporations whatsoever, and by 1835 the list included only ‘eight coal and mining companies, three gas-lighting companies, and four others.’”11 In those early decades, banks represented the largest and most powerful public corporations, helping to create the industries that would eventually overtake them.12 With such laxity characterizing banking concerns, however, it needs little imagination to see how any unusual demand for hard currency could put a strain on several institutions, setting off a domino effect of business failures that would cross states and regions. One powerful bank was run according to more strict and safe business principles, and that was the Second Bank of the United States. The bank began life as a Federalist creation, Alexander Hamilton’s most important contribution to the new nation’s financial infrastructure.13 The Panic of 1837 and the Failures of Literary Men 37

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By the time the Democratic Jackson administration arrived in Washington D.C. in the late 1820s, however, the bank had become associated with big eastern business interests, the Whigs, and a powerful political figure, Nicholas Biddle. A patrician with unsurpassed financial knowledge and talent, Biddle controlled the bank with little interference from either the legislative or executive branches. Before Andrew Jackson assumed the presidency, Biddle had begun to put into effect at the U.S. Bank policies that would shrink and discipline the chaotic banking structures of the individual states. Those policies, however, would also exponentially increase his bank’s wealth and his own national power. For Jackson, a self-styled proponent of states’ rights, the bank represented an unacceptable remnant of old money and old power. In his opinion, even the fact that the bank was housed in the former capitol, Philadelphia, manifested this corrupt nature. (Hence the penchant of Jackson, as well as many others from outside the northeast, for referring to the U.S. Bank as “the Monster.”14) Early in his presidential career, Jackson decided to dissolve the bank; Nicholas Biddle was equally resolved to save both it and his career. The struggle between the two men turned out to be an unfair match, and the bank’s existence as an important instrument of the federal government ended by 1836. But the mess that Biddle had attempted to address remained: rampant land speculation in the West, exacerbated by unregulated loans and paper money production.15 Ironically, Jackson had blamed the bank for its role in facilitating the growth in paper money use, credit purchasing, and speculation, either unaware or unwilling to acknowledge similarities between his and Nicholas Biddle’s views.16 In July of 1836 the President directed the Treasury Department to issue a Specie Circular, ordering “that the public lands . . . shall be sold for gold and silver only.”17 Despite the good intentions stated by the administration—to protect investors and would-be settlers—the order actually made it painfully obvious that the government considered most bank notes worthless. A demand for payment on notes, and thus a run on specie, began in the West and drained the supply in the East. In March, Jackson stepped down, and Martin Van Buren was inaugurated. Two months later, “on May 9, $652,000 in specie was withdrawn from the vaults of [New York City’s] banks; and on the evening of the same day it was learned that the principal deposit banks could not sustain themselves” (McGrane 97). On May 10, New York banks suspended specie payment, with some permanently closing their 38 The Panic of 1837 and the Failures of Literary Men

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doors. The following day the same happened in Philadelphia, Baltimore, Albany, Hartford, New Haven, and Providence; then Mobile and New Orleans, then the District of Columbia, Charleston, and Cincinnati. Louisville and Augusta followed on May 19th, a mere week and a half later, and the pattern would continue. Anyone who had heretofore survived the financial seizures of the Jackson-Biddle wrangling was finally overtaken, resulting in the losses of value and jobs already described.18 Thus go the first two stories of the Panic, emphasizing facts, figures, dates, and the politically powerful. Though the particular facts cited could change, stories of the Panic were continuously concerned with fact itself: with data, results, outcomes, lessons, all the elements of demonstrable truth, what Phillip Barrish has called “the most resistantly there” of social circumstance (3). Politicians, pamphleteers, historians, broadside artists, ministers, and community leaders, as well as the staffs of nearly every newspaper in the country, offered their diagnosis to the public. A lengthy article in the October 1837 issue of the U.S. Democratic Review announced its interpretive goal in its title (“The Moral of the Crisis”), while the June 2, 1837 issue of the National Intelligencer announced that “the melancholy truth, the awful truth, [is] that the administration did nothing to relieve the distress” (qtd in McGrane 147). The Colored American portrayed the issue as one of good versus evil, translated into economic terms: “Our banking system has, for ages, been a system of monopoly and robbery. Rich men have fattened upon it, while poor men, have been kept exceedingly poor. . . . The rich play into each others [sic] hands, and secure to themselves the whole” (“Our Banking System”). Even publications that previously forswore any political interests entered the fray. Halfway through the year the Ladies Companion and Literary Expositor printed stories whose preoccupations with current events were signaled clearly in their titles: “The Broken Merchants: A Tale of the Troubles of 1837,” followed by “The Pressure of the Times: A Commercial Story.” (Both pieces chastise Andrew Jackson and feature Whig characters who speak the truth.19) The magazine’s Literary Reviews section for June expressed concern regarding the effects of “the pressure”: The publishers generally, in consequence of the inauspicious state of the times and the total disinclination on the part of the public to encourage new publications, have shown themselves The Panic of 1837 and the Failures of Literary Men 39

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wanting in that enterprising and persevering spirit which has ever dictated them in their course. We may say, the literary world is now devoid of food, as only five new works have been issued from the New-York press, since the publication of our May number.20 Of course one aspect of these remarks is plainly untrue: the American public could not get enough new publications, especially stories of “the times.” Something had gone terribly wrong, and someone must be held accountable. In this way stories of the Panic began to take on the aspect of testimony: told and retold, over and over, until the truthful identity of the culprit is revealed and the means of reform made evident. For a small segment of the population, this identity and means were perfectly clear, and it all had to with speculation. The increasingly common practice was denounced from the nation’s pulpits as a preeminent sign of national moral decline, the activity that most clearly demonstrated Americans’ abandonment of virtues such as industry and frugality. In Portsmouth, New Hampshire, the Reverend Andrew Peabody urged his parishioners to retrench financially and spiritually: “Brethren, it is meet that we regard the pressure of the times as a dispensation of Providence for our admonition and discipline, as a nation” (15). From St. Paul’s in Philadelphia, the Reverend Nathaniel Bent uttered a similar judgment in fire-and-brimstone terms: “What, then, does a religious philosophy see in these signs of the times? I answer in a word, it sees THE RECORD OF A JUST GOD AGAINST OUR GREAT NATIONAL SIN; his record against the past, his warning for the future” (7). The Reverend Bent reminded his audience that “the Bible prescribes rules of business; the main one this, that it should be entirely subservient to the highest spiritual good” (20–21). “The evil of the times may be comprehended in three words—OVERTRADING—OVERBANKING AND SPECULATION,” declared “a Citizen of Massachusetts,” further suggesting that the country “banish paper money and return to habits of republican plainness and simplicity” (“The Times” 6, 21). For many likeminded citizens, in Massachusetts and elsewhere, the prosperous times that had preceded the Specie Circular and the battles over the U.S. Bank were not evidence of a flourishing economy, a growing populace (and territory), or of God’s grace upon the young nation. Rather, they were signs of excess: overreaching, covetousness, gluttony on an unprecedented scale. Thus another anonymous pamphleteer offered 40 The Panic of 1837 and the Failures of Literary Men

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the public “A Parabolic Phrenological Scheme of National Character,” diagnosing “Self-Esteem, Love of Approbation, Firmness, maintaining him in his ultra notions of his own transcendent greatness, . . . Imitation, which has imported foreign vices, extravagancies and follies; and Acquisitiveness, which in grasping for the means to support Uncle Sam’s forced state, has made him, at this moment, a bankrupt” (“The Pressure and Its Causes” 15). Under the minister’s, pamphleteer’s, or amateur phrenologist’s searching gaze, national character appeared desperately flawed and bleak. In these realms there could be no doubt as to responsibility for the Panic. General Jackson may indeed deserve blame, along with Nicholas Biddle, bank presidents, and everyone promoting the western states. But they were not alone. What “a religious philosophy [saw] in these signs of the times” was a country populated by a million culpable men and women. But for those who had abandoned the Calvinist tendency for selfindictment, guilt and meaning were not clear cut. Thus it is the unnamed authors of ’37 and ’57 who most aptly expressed the obsessions of the moment. Commenting on the causes of the 1837 Panic, the writers claim that the Specie Circular made necessary corrections, since “speculation in land had become a mania. . . . That is to say, millions of acres were sold at prices utterly fictitious, and paid for in values utterly fictitious. There was no longer any reality in the business. The effect of the Specie Circular was to restore it to reality” (17). Fiction and reality, the restoration of truthful meaning and truthful relations: this is the reform with which panic fiction engages. With Whigs blaming Jackson and Jacksonians blaming banks and everybody blaming somebody, the demarcations between the fictitious and the true became ever harder to detect. Every story purported to be true, and every story was true, to someone. And it was pure speculation to someone else. Banks had failed, Jackson had given orders, people lost jobs and went hungry: these things were resistantly there. But to most Americans, the why lurking behind them was not so easy to make out, and it was in understanding why that being able to sort fiction from reality became an urgent enterprise.

The Victim of Chancery In appearing before the public as a writer of story, the author, as in a former publication, disavows all ambition to mingle with the The Panic of 1837 and the Failures of Literary Men 41

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literary world, in which he knows and feels himself to be unqualified to hold a position. . . . Our literary men, who are writers of story (which, unhappily in these days, constitutes the majority of reading,) seem disposed to roam altogether in the fields of fancy, instead of taking up those subjects in which our interest and daily occupations are engaged; and thus by embellishing fact with the liveliness of their fancy, to make their works not only interesting, but productive of real benefit in the ordinary occupations of life; and there are many who believe, that if a greater portion of their talents were thus directed, their efforts would result in a more complete success, if possible, than at present. . . . To treat so grave a subject in the form of a story, (perhaps they will call it a novel,) will undoubtedly meet the censure, and perhaps the contempt of those grave gentlemen, who consider legislative discussion, or newspaper argument, the only legitimate ground to meet it on. (7–8) The preface to Frederick Jackson’s The Victim of Chancery; Or, a Debtor’s Experience elaborates upon two foundational convictions: first, that in the aftermath of the Panic of 1837, the United States finds itself in a profound social crisis; and second, that literature is missingin-action as far as responding to this crisis. Jackson’s story of a family reduced to poverty and debtors’ prison continuously criticizes the moral and institutional failings that permit what he views as unwarranted suffering. As evident in the above quotation, however, the author reveals as much interest in the form that his criticism will take as in its content. By his own admission, Frederick Jackson is not “a literary man,” but he declines to say who is. The Victim of Chancery is “a story,” a form whose cultural dominance Jackson regrets, while simultaneously aiding and abetting it; after all, he is engaged in writing one. He may even be writing a novel, although his phrasing—“perhaps they will call it a novel”—distances him from primary responsibility for that dodgy term. He is not “they,” and “perhaps” lies far away from certainty. So, the reader encounters a narrative that may or may not be a novel, written by someone who is not a literary man, which excoriates the failings of the government, the legal system, the business community, and those who are literary men. Jackson’s preface, then, raises many more questions than it answers, not least among 42 The Panic of 1837 and the Failures of Literary Men

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them how the author understands the meaning of “literary,” and why he refuses to adorn himself with that term. I turn to The Victim of Chancery here as a work that addresses and embodies the major issues that arise from the Panic of 1837, issues that, in panic fiction, have as much to do with the status of imaginative literature in the antebellum era as they do with the parameters of economic experience and of sociopolitical institutional powers. Jackson’s rejection of the label “literary” and his uncertainty regarding his story-perhaps-novel are not anomalous expressions of idiosyncratic fears, but rather, iterations of the fundamental conflict that characterizes antebellum panic writing: how to compose fiction that is not fiction. Or to use our author’s words, how to “embellish” fact with “fancy,” rather than obliterating it. In The Victim of Chancery Jackson offers us a model for this magic act, composing both “a story of truth, from facts, within [Jackson’s] own knowledge, observation, aye, experience” (19–20), and lightly grooming it so as to be “readable by such as look principally to amusement” (9). Such is the description of the majority of panic fiction, foregrounding these texts’ insistence upon the Panic’s importance and the necessity of revealing its truths, and yet—very much as temperance’s Reverend Watson would declare— refusing to give fiction over to the devil and his fanciful angels. In the combination of this insistence and panic fiction’s concern for form, we can see the era’s conflicted attitudes toward imaginative literature as a whole. Lawrence Buell rightly reminds us that “antebellum America inherited from early national aesthetics a polarized view of belles lettres as, on the one hand, trivial . . . and, on the other hand, the crowning glory of national culture” (64). Yet as Buell, Nina Baym and others have shown, the country nevertheless “was a nation of novel readers” in which the ever-increasing popularity of fiction provoked questions regarding its roles, uses, influence, and identity— whether belles lettres could include the novel, for instance, or what social value might accrue by being deemed literary (Baym, Novels 14). Hence the defensiveness palpable in The Victim of Chancery and other panic fictions should not be dismissed as examples of the pro forma maneuvers of self-validation and apology common in early national fictions. For Frederick Jackson is not content to strike a modest pose and admit his “unqualified” status as a writer. Rather, he wishes to know why those who are qualified, who are “literary men,” are “disposed to roam . . . in the fields of fancy,” what is for him a damning The Panic of 1837 and the Failures of Literary Men 43

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combination of personal whim, clichéd activity, and failure to report for duty. The panic fictions I examine in the coming pages, by Jackson and others, certainly do appear to emulate their predecessor texts by proclaiming to be “moral, truthful, educational, and so forth” (Davidson, Revolution 40). But for Jackson, morality and truth are not poses—they are the point, the virtues he aims to restore to an America reeling from an economic and social collapse. Thus his defensive posture is also an attack upon forms of fiction deaf to the claims of the everyday. This is the social work of panic writing: to make narrative attentive to the common man, and ultimately, to the common good. Narrating what had become the mundane, ordinary experience of poverty, indebtedness, and a sense of betrayal thus defines moral and truthful literature for panic writers. The Victim of Chancery dramatizes a metamorphosed America, riven by institutional villainy and public distress that are made manifest through the figures of heartless professionals and “ordinary decent folk,” all of it set against the backdrop of a young and once-promising nation. In this text Jackson tells the tale of the Adams family, examples of the collateral damage of the Panic. Mr. Adams is a respectable New York City merchant; we meet his faithful wife, Mrs. Adams; their teenaged daughter Katherine, whose mettle is tested and proven during the family crisis; and other younger children. When the Panic hits and his import business fails, Mr. Adams does what little he can to satisfy his creditors, dividing his remaining assets equally among them all so as to act as fairly as he can and to disadvantage no one. But two of these creditors, Mr. Heartless and Mr.—, refuse to be satisfied with their portions of Mr. Adams’s payments. Insisting upon the entirety of what they are owed, they find sleazy lawyers Mr. Gammon and Mr. Gouge, sue Mr. Adams, and have him imprisoned for non-payment of debt. Mr. Adams eventually regains his freedom at the end of the narrative. By that time, however, his life and that of his family have been transformed completely: the patriarch is bankrupted and disgraced, his business ruined, and his house and furnishings repossessed. Once freed, he repairs to the western countryside, there to take up farming and to rebuild his life among strangers; thus he also loses his occupation and the very city he has called home. In other words, although he is eventually found innocent of intentional fraud and other shady business practices, Mr. Adams pays a high price. He allegorically stands for the nation itself: honest, beloved, hard-working and content with his labor, God-fearing, and 44 The Panic of 1837 and the Failures of Literary Men

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initially convinced of the ultimate goodness of mankind. As a sign of the profound metamorphosis undergone by both the character and the society he represents, Mr. Adams declares that his sons will not follow in his footsteps: “he preferred his sons should become ‘lords of the soil,’ rather than take their chance of becoming masters of finance” (198). The man and the narrative resort to what is both the old and the new America: the pastoral pristine, ever new by virtue of being ever further westward. In reading The Victim of Chancery, I examine sources of its anxieties, including the instability of meaning and value attending an economic crisis. These anxieties are exacerbated by the seemingly arbitrary and easily manipulated system of chancery, or equity, in U.S. law. In Jackson’s depiction, equity courts sanction unethical behavior, making them incapable of meting out fair decisions. These issues finally converge in the author’s complaints about literary men, privileged figures whose talents and public position place upon them a distinctive responsibility to be a voice for reform.

The story of the Adamses’ misfortunes opens, like much reform literature, with an invocation of revolution: Great revolutions are not always confined to the affairs of government, or controlled by the march of armies. Whatever changes entirely the circumstances, condition or character of a community, a class, or even a family, is as emphatically a revolution, as the assumption of a crown, or dissolving a republic. . . . We have seen a nation change its government, without affecting the peace or prosperity of a single individual, farther than to raise one king to the throne, and drive another from his country; and in this respect, its importance to the happiness and well-being of mankind, was a thing of far less consequence, than the commercial revolution of 1837 was, to the people of this country. (Victim 13–14) Jackson’s argument attempts to persuade his readers of two intimately related things: first, that the recent Panic merits consideration alongside more obviously convulsive political events; and second, that the word “revolution” has shifted its meaning. These lines immediately follow his defiantly non-literary preface, and serve as an early notice of the narrative’s most basic concerns about truth and fiction, The Panic of 1837 and the Failures of Literary Men 45

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for in the wake of the Panic, meaning has become so unstable as to alter our understanding of words we thought we knew. If the Panic was a true revolution, judging from its consequences, and if events commonly called revolutions in fact have little consequence at all, then a revolution is simply not what we think it is. Its definition is wrong, or rather incomplete: anything that “changes entirely . . . the character” of our social building blocks (“a community, a class, . . . a family”) constitutes a revolution, even if no armies march and no blood is shed. In fact, the astonishing equilibrium with which the U.S. now proceeds through “regime changes” is well-entrenched and undeniable: “a nation [may] change its government” without so much as rippling the surface of the social psyche. Indeed, as Jackson writes Victim, a new Van Buren administration rules in Washington, and yet nothing changes. The paradox that gives rise to Jackson’s view— things that should create profound change don’t; things that shouldn’t create such change do—is the same paradox that underlies the narrative’s scathing portrait of thieving merchants, unjust lawyers, and victims of so-called equity courts. Equity constitutes a distinct area of jurisprudence from that based upon case or statutory law. Rather, it is “a system of jurisprudence collateral to, and in some respects independent of, ‘law”’ (Black’s 374). Originating in England as a means of complementing or balancing the administration of common law, chancery courts both there and in the colonies were intended to dispense “justice administered according to fairness” (374). One man’s fairness, however, might be another’s cause for grievance. As historian Bruce Mann notes, the fact that equity proceeded according to guidelines as opposed to case law or statutes often made its actions appear subject to individual caprice. Discussing the steps through which a creditor would proceed in order to collect a debt, Mann writes that “as with every other phase of litigation, one should think of the writs [in a collection process] as the participants did—not as rules that compelled particular results but rather as guidelines that shaped the continuing interactions of debtors and creditors, without necessarily determining them” (29– 30). Continuing interactions, of course, were often the last thing that either creditor or debtor desired. For the difference between “shaping” and “determining” such relationships within bankruptcy is certainty: a knowledge held by both parties that particular decisions will be reached because they have been reached before. The seeming inex46 The Panic of 1837 and the Failures of Literary Men

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actitude of equity was exacerbated by the wavering rules that governed which cases would be referred to such courts; even the exact distinctions between bankruptcy and insolvency varied from state to state and over time.21 (The former was popularly understood to involve public or business debts, while the latter signified monies owed in more personal and private circumstances; thus the blurred nature of the law reflected the often blurred line between public and private.) David Skeel Jr. describes how congressional debates over bankruptcy, insolvency, and the government’s responsibility to legislate their processes would start and stop and backtrack, “with Congress enacting bankruptcy laws in 1800, 1841, and 1867, but repealing each of the laws shortly after its enactment” (3–4). In between fits of congressional activity, the experience of bankruptcy was arranged by piecemeal laws, judicial wisdom, and occasionally legal whim. Imprisonment for most types of debt was outlawed in many states during the antebellum era, including New York, the setting for most of Frederick Jackson’s writings.22 But going to jail remained possible: author Charles Briggs’s father was briefly imprisoned for bankruptcy, while Herman Melville and Anna Warner’s fathers escaped the same fate, essentially, by skipping town.23 Frederick Jackson himself protested that “Our prison doors, thank God, are now shut against the incarceration of a man for debt merely; but without the passage of a bankrupt act, and while the court of chancery exists in its present form and its present rules of practice, it is in the power of malicious men, and heartless creditors, as effectually to imprison a man’s energies, as if his body was inclosed [sic] within the walls of a prison” (Victim 10–11). Finding oneself enmeshed in the chancery system, then, guaranteed incarceration: Jackson’s simile equates literal and figurative loss of freedom as having the same effect. As a system whose charge of ensuring equitable treatment under the law could be, at best, highly ironic, it too often proved to be the salt in the wound of Panic-stricken Americans, a legalized way of kicking a man once he was down. In Jackson’s text, then, one can see the fertile ground for the initial passage of the 1841 legislation. The need for reform, though, not only encompasses necessary governmental specifics, such as “the passage of a bankrupt act”; it includes grandiose and amorphous social goods such as “correct[ing] opinions and abuses” (8). According to Jackson, the times demand action; in the aftermath of the Panic, The Panic of 1837 and the Failures of Literary Men 47

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“sufferings, hardships, and privations” galore afflict a populace unprotected from “the arbitrary exercise of chancery powers, rules and practices . . . and the cruelty, oppression and villainy of lawyers and men of business” (8–9). (“This book is not written for lawyers’ criticism,” states Jackson, to make matters plain [9].) The goals for The Victim of Chancery, then, include large-scale social change as well as precise legislative modification; it is not overstating the case to say that Jackson had individual citizens, the citizenry as entity, and the institutions of the state in mind as he put forth his various charges and protests. For this author, the act of writing functions as the exercise of civic duty, just as it had done for a revolutionary generation previous. It must do so, because in such times, what seemed the remote and likely rare injustice of being imprisoned “for debt merely” becomes an all-too-real threat for a nation of broken men. Thus Mr. Adams’s jailing is meant to provoke outrage on the part of Jackson’s readers. The author slowly takes us through the small actions that led to the moment when “the turnkey threw home the bolt, and [Mr. Adams] was in prison” (97). In Jackson’s view Mr. Adams is very real prey: he describes him as being prepared “for sacrifice,” and having “not one resource left, but to suffer the fire to be kindled around him” (76). But long before Mr. Adams enters the jail, the unholy pact between business and law creates a discursive prison around him, the walls of which inch just a bit closer each day. Gammon and Gouge are crooks in true shyster fashion, sculptors of phrases and documents that transform wealth into poverty, honesty into duplicity, and innocence into guilt. Jackson guides the reader through the progressive steps of their treachery: “But what did they or their client know which they could swear to? Really nothing;—but then the liberality of this court permits a plaintiff to swear to what he believes, or professes to believe, although his belief may be grounded only on suspicion, while the defendant can only swear to what he knows” (88). Such are Gammon and Gouge’s methods: they use their legal powers to testify and submit official documentation and subpoena and delay proceedings, all with an eye toward breaking down Mr. Adams. Jackson spends entire paragraphs and pages reproducing the actions taken by the two; thus we follow them as they “file a creditor’s bill of discovery” (44), or explain how “to gain a hearing on any case, it is necessary in the first place to give notice of the intention to make a motion, and this notice entitles all the parties to a fee” (141). One might be tempted to 48 The Panic of 1837 and the Failures of Literary Men

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dismiss Jackson’s forays into legalistic maneuvers as unwitting proof that, indeed, he is unqualified to be a literary man. But these step-bystep proceedings function as more than chancery court primer; they counter the realities fashioned by Gammon and Gouge with Jackson’s own reality, a battle in which “truth” and “material facts” like “revolutions,” veer away from their seeming definitions. As much as Jackson asserts that his facts are facts and nothing but, his depiction of Gammon and Gouge argues otherwise: fact is what you make it. Hence our author argues both his case and that of the opposing counsel—by portraying his dishonest lawyers’ success in manipulating fact, Jackson demonstrates the mercurial nature of language even as he insists he is doing nothing of the sort. The world of business in The Victim of Chancery also employs language to construct alternate, sordid realities, quite literally—after all, Gammon and Gouge are hired by Mr. Heartless and Mr. ——. Although Jackson’s wicked men of business do not themselves wield language as a weapon, they similarly acquire their villainy through manipulations of what is supposedly real. Mr. —— accepts some of Mr. Adams’s commercial property as security against the loan he has made to him, but then sells the property at a loss so as to further embarrass the unsuspecting merchant. Both Mr. Heartless and Mr. —— declare losses of profits they have not actually suffered, and pretend to resulting hardships they do not have. Jackson describes Mr. —— as one of “a class of wealthy men in New-York, who find their profit in the use of their power, whenever it can be brought to bear in such a way, to produce a disastrous state of business . . . for the sole purpose of taking advantage of the necessities of those whose circumstances may become affected by it” (59). The rationale for his actions is a simple one: “To crush Mr. Adams, and drive him from the city, and from all business” (175). (Mr. —— succeeds with two of his three aims, a rather good rate of return on his investment.) While such a goal is certainly not admirable, it is also not criminal, and hence Jackson’s ire: everything done by Mr. Heartless, Mr. ——, Gammon, and Gouge is wrong, and yet it is all perfectly legal. (Thus the need for both a “bankrupt act” and general moral improvement within society—Jackson covers his bases.) In the logic of panic fiction, there must be something wrong with a world in which realities can be manufactured, moved from column A to column B, filed and stored away; in which prisons can be made of both bricks and words. Simple folk like the Adamses, The Panic of 1837 and the Failures of Literary Men 49

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who take their Bibles with them to jail, understand simple truths, and Jackson declares that he does as well: “That there is existing . . . a demoralised condition of principle, feeling, and practice, pervading the country throughout . . . will not, I believe, be denied by anyone” (Jackson, A Week in Wall Street vi). By anyone but lawyers, that is. Thus the historical and cultural contexts for The Victim of Chancery come clearly into focus: an economic collapse transforms honest men into victims, and allows pure bastards to wreak organized, official, legal havoc. Nothing is what it seems—the amounts of wealth, the value of goods, the actions of men, an honorable name. Frederick Jackson’s concerns for truth, both explicit and implicit, permeate his story. Which leads quite logically to the following question: In such circumstances, why would someone who faults literary men, laments fiction’s popularity, and speaks guardedly of the term “novel,” turn to fiction in order to voice his concerns? Looking briefly at Jackson’s other works provides an answer not only to his personal choice, but to the larger questions of how and why an economic depression unleashed a body of fiction so marked by concerns about being fiction. Almost nothing can be gleaned about Frederick Jackson from typical sources of information on nineteenthcentury writers: he was not a sufficiently illustrious figure to warrant inclusion in anthologies by contemporaries Rufus Griswold or Evert Duyckinck; nor did his books win notice from the leading journals that published reviews, such as the Knickerbocker or the North American Review. Yet in 1841, Frederick Jackson seems to have been determined to leave his mark upon American letters—The Victim of Chancery was one of three books he published that year. The first was the hybrid business primer and exposé A Week in Wall Street, by One Who Knows, which also announces that Jackson “has no claims to literary qualifications, and . . . seeks no reward of literary reputation” (vi). Though it boasts endearingly old-fashioned allegorical touches—characters are named Mr. Broker, Mr. Friendly, Mr. Eavesdropper—A Week in Wall Street is an explanation, albeit a subjective one, of how the financial sector operates in America’s business capitol. After Wall Street and Victim came another story-perhaps-novel, The Effinghams; Or, Home as I Found It, a satirical work that responds to James Fenimore Cooper’s acerbic 1838 novels Homeward Bound and Home as Found. A fourth publication, Riches and Honor; A New England Story Founded on Fact, appeared some years later in 1847. This last offering from Jackson is 50 The Panic of 1837 and the Failures of Literary Men

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addressed to young readers, and aims to instill in them republican values: “The points aimed at, have been, to show, in their true colors, the baneful effects of idleness, and the consequent waste of time and property; the danger of trusting to mere wealth as a security for the future; the necessity of virtue and industry as the foundation of all permanent prosperity; and the certainty of happiness and success which the possession of these always affords” (6). Riches and Honor also informs its readers that “the writer, many years ago, was a boy in New England” and that he is now fifty years old (10, 15). A Week in Wall Street provides such detailed knowledge of that world as to make it a likely surmise that Jackson once worked there; all three 1841 texts are set in New York, the epicenter of the Panic and hence a motherload of information and material for writing about finance, chancery, and broken men. A native New Englander, adult New Yorker, and middle-aged survivor of the Panic: no other biographical details can be discerned about Frederick Jackson. But his qualms concerning all things literary can be easily reconstructed, especially when looking at that one of his texts that seems most explicitly interested in literariness, The Effinghams. The books to which The Effinghams replies, Homeward Bound and its sequel Home as Found, were not among James Fenimore Cooper’s greatest commercial or critical successes. Several years’ residence on the Continent had soured Cooper on American society and the extent to which the nation was failing as an experiment in democratic governance. As novels of manners, though, both Homeward Bound and Home as Found infuriated stateside readers less for any embedded political critique than for their unflattering portraits of the citizenry and their ceaseless small digs at American manners. The family at both stories’ centers, the Effinghams, is composed of an expatriate father, daughter, and cousin; the trio are educated, widely-traveled, and extremely rich. “Edward Effingham possessed a large hereditary property, that brought a good income,” Cooper’s narrator informs us, and cousin “John, much the wealthier of the two, . . . inherited a large commercial fortune” (Homeward 5). Homeward Bound begins with the family’s return from England to the United States with daughter Eve’s French governess and a faithful English servant in tow. Early scenes feature remarks about the degraded condition of American women, the “injurious” nature of the “melee” that is American society (7), and a second chapter in which a kindly but etiquette-challenged American The Panic of 1837 and the Failures of Literary Men 51

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ship’s captain introduces the Effinghams to some of their fellow passengers, without—gasp!—their request or consent. Even the landscape comes in for criticism, as Cooper opens the novel with praise for “the coast of England, [which is] infinitely finer than our own” (1). A careful reading reveals that many of the barbs directed at America come from cousin John, an aloof, bitter, and sharply-spoken character, and hence his words are meant to be taken with a proverbial grain of salt. Picking up where Homeward Bound left off, Home as Found continued both the Effinghams’ story and Cooper’s critique. The second novel also opens without pulling punches, complaining in its preface that the U.S. does not afford “anything interesting in the way of a Roman de Société ” (v). Even the positive sentiments that Cooper can summon are linked to a finding of faults, quite literally joined with a semicolon: “That the American nation is a great nation . . . we hold to be true, and are as ready to maintain as anyone can be; but we are also equally ready to concede, that it is very far behind most polished nations in various essentials” (vi). Cooper’s remarks on the greatness of the mother country read like a grudging admission, however, and did not prevent readers and critics from reacting to his latest with indignation, stripping him of his literary laurels. In January of 1838, the North American Review had taken the publication of his travel volume Gleanings in Europe as an opportunity to treat their readers to a twenty-page long discourse on American literature and Cooper’s well-deserved place in it. But by the time the October issue of the NAR appeared, so had Homeward Bound, and in an about-face, the editors dismissed the novel in a little over a page. “The fact is, Mr. Cooper has no facility in drawing characters,” they announced. He also suddenly seemed lacking in other necessary authorial qualities: “This novel has almost no plot . . . there is no completeness, no conclusion, no plan, to be found in the book. Nothing redeems it from utter and deplorable dullness” (“Cooper’s Homeward Bound” 489). Accused of writing “under no higher inspiration than that of spleen,” Cooper’s sentence is pronounced: “The recent productions of Mr. Cooper have added nothing to his own reputation, or to the stores of American literature” (488). When the sequel Home as Found appeared, the NAR gave it a mere line notice in its January 1839 issue, listing it under “New Publications” as having been written “By the Author of ‘Homeward Bound,’ ‘The Pioneers,’ etc.” From idol to also-ran, in two books and twelve months. 52 The Panic of 1837 and the Failures of Literary Men

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Jackson’s response in The Effinghams is meant to “whip with satire” Cooper and any other author so willing to belittle their homeland, for in his view, the Home novels are a betrayal from within the family (i). By 1841, when Jackson published his work, Cooper had been an internationally recognized “literary man” for nearly two decades. In the words of his peer, anthologizer Rufus Griswold, James Fenimore Cooper “gave an extraordinary impulse to literature in the country. More than any thing that had before occurred, . . . [his work] roused the people from their feeling of intellectual independence” (264).The late model Cooper, however, appears out of touch, if not actually out of talent. Homeward Bound and Home as Found betrayed the promise of his earlier contribution, and in Jackson’s words, the latter represented “the most exceptionable book . . . [in the genre] ever published; particularly as having been written by an American, who cannot find an excuse for misrepresentation, in his ignorance of fact” (Effinghams i). Cooper’s texts, then, skewed the truth about American character. But more important, they provided one more example of literary men failing to do their duty by their homeland. Whether literariness is about ignoring the Panic or belittling the country that suffers from it hardly matters in the end, for Frederick Jackson has already given up on it. The metaphorical national family to which he belongs does not lightly suffer hardcover insolence like Cooper’s. (Indeed, one might imagine that if there were a moment when brusque complaints about American society would be amenable to readers and writers like Jackson, the wake of an economic crisis would not be it.) The message of Jackson’s novels is that literary men have estranged themselves from the national family. Thus one of the great ironies of Jackson’s charges is that the Panic took place during a moment of widely-acknowledged and celebrated relationship between the development of literature and the discharge of “duty”: the heyday of the literary nationalism that has traditionally defined the antebellum period. Jonathan Arac rightly reminds us that the nationalist project began when there was not yet “a fully operative national culture,” and that fiction would play a role along with other types of narrative, thus acting as “part of the process by which the nation was forming itself.”24 In fact Cooper’s novels had done precisely this: in his role as “the American Scott,” Cooper eloquently mapped the topography of early America’s social and geographic worlds. Lydia Maria Child affectionately gave voice to this estimation The Panic of 1837 and the Failures of Literary Men 53

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of her elder, when in the beginning of Hobomok (1824), she described a literary scene in which “Waverly is galloping over hill and dale . . . ‘The Spy’ is lurking in every closet,—the mind is every where supplied with ‘Pioneers’ on land, and is soon likely to be with ‘Pilots’ on the deep” (3). (Of course, the Cooper novels mentioned by Child represent his historical fiction and adventure tales, genres that were respectively critically and commercially popular, not to mention close kin to Sir Walter Scott’s own oeuvre.) As a bona fide literary man, Cooper helped to usher in a veritable golden age of American writing. William Charvat noted long ago that “the great land boom which followed the completion of the Erie Canal in 1825 and lasted for twelve golden years coincided with America’s first great literary boom” (49), and that creative activity had not ceased when the boom went bust. “The depression [of 1837] lasted five years,” wrote Charvat. “The literary boom, on the other hand, not only continued but flourished” (50).25 Emerson, Hawthorne, and Poe all figure in Charvat’s discussion, proof for his contention that the Panic did not matter to antebellum literary men. If we understand those who did write about the Panic, Charvat was right, but for all the wrong reasons. In his fiction, Frederick Jackson gives voice to a “literary nationalism,” but one that is a very different sort from that traditionally understood to characterize his historical moment. Jackson’s nationalism acts as a defense for an imaginative family already perceived as wounded—defending the family honor, as it were. The development of distinctive, authentic, and indigenous belles lettres could not represent a lesser concern in his texts. After 1837, panic fiction associates its “literary” counterpart with the agents of the nation’s pain, all of whom feature in Jackson’s Victim of Chancery: big business, as represented by the powerful banking establishment; speculation and credit, which lure upright citizens into paths of deceit and debt; the law, stereotypically enamored of litigation; and state and federal government, who created a mess they could not clean up. In the third chapter of this book, we shall see how moral reform writing often targets imaginative literature for its allegedly pernicious cultural influences: were lurid novels and other printed blasphemies not to exist, moral reform itself might not be needed. The writing that emerges from the Panic, however, is slightly different: its j’accuse indicts the literary for failing to show up in the first place. 54 The Panic of 1837 and the Failures of Literary Men

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Absence, however, is a charge that cannot be leveled against Frederick Jackson. As the self-identified narrator in The Victim of Chancery, he keeps himself busy and in view: he continuously butts in on the Adamses and on the legal chicanery of Gammon and Gouge, typically to remind readers of his narrative’s truth, or of his own supposed authorial failings. His constant comments concerning his “literary amateur” status tempt readers to diagnose small flaws and inconsistencies as symptoms of that apprenticeship. For instance, Jackson bestows normal names such as Adams and Allen on good characters. Villains, however, either carry allegorical names like Mr. Heartless and Mr. Gouge, or in one case, the name of Mr. —— is simply marked with a dash. Are readers meant to interpret that Mr. —— is so awful that no symbolic name will do? Or could it be that Jackson, as he suggests briefly in his preface, has styled his narrative as a roman à clef, and Mr. —— is meant to recognize himself in the author’s portrayal? The odd inconsistency could be explained by either or neither, and as such, it stands out as just one moment when Jackson’s denials of literary panache seem justified. Then again, the author describes himself as an ordinary Joe, writing because he must, and unfortunately, because he can: “The following pages were written during leisure hours of the last six or eight weeks, of which ‘the times’ have thrown rather too many upon the writer’s hands” (Week v). Ordinary Joes— ordinary unemployed Joes, that is—write about ordinary things, “every-day characters, in the common affairs of life,” which just happen to now include being trampled by government, law, and big business (Victim 16). Jackson has his own business, of course, and it concerns “only” such mundane things: “My business . . . lies only with the dull routine of Merchandise, Commerce, Trade, Law, Lawyers and Merchants, and I am to weave a story of truth, from facts, within my own knowledge, observation, aye, experience; and out of them to mould and polish a mirror, in which men may see themselves—aye, and some of them may read a scrap of their own identical history” (19–20). Of course, the whole point is that this “truth, from facts,” finds expression and reflection nowhere else; dull and routine as it is, Jackson assumes that the truth demands representation. Despite his elaboration of public sphere activities such as commerce and trade, The Panic of 1837 and the Failures of Literary Men 55

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Jackson’s methods and metaphors are purely domestic: weaving, polishing a mirror, finding significance and use even in the smallest “scrap.” For him, truth is domestic in its simplest form, a matter of the unadorned everyday. It is this that guarantees its importance even in the midst of legal wrangling and commercial battle. In the literature of the Panic, the unusual and individual is beside the point: the process that requires combat is that whereby constant wrongs and persistent evils unacceptably become “the dull routine” of things. Both of Jackson’s stories—The Victim of Chancery and the Amateur on the Dole— merit telling precisely because thousands of stories exist that are just like them. As if catering to the unassuming masses, Jackson occasionally includes special gestures to female readers, acknowledging the already-present belief that a sizeable proportion of American readers are (native-born, white, middle-class) women, and that the women appreciate some human emotion mixed in with their chancery tales. The author makes efforts to question them as to what they might feel or how they might act in the places of his female characters. Throughout, he relies on basic sentimental authorial strategy, encouraging identification, explicitly eliciting sympathy, and even mockingly berating his readers’ ghoulish desires for tear-filled scenes and pathos: “We would fain be done with scenes, and let no more tears be wrung from the eyes of our paragons; we love them too well . . . and would gladly hereafter only nourish and cherish them. We fear that we have already caused them to flow too freely, to suit the taste of our heartless readers; but nature will work, and we cannot help it” (Victim 138–39). His characters are “paragons” indeed, of virtue and faith on the one hand, and epitomes of greed and nastiness on the other. Mr. Adams eschews various duplicitous means of avoiding or delaying jail, declaring “I ask no charity of the court . . . I make no compromise with the law or justice” (96). Mrs. Adams makes a long journey alone by coach, steamboat, and train, to obtain evidence that might aid her husband; Jackson acknowledges that while “such experiments are not to be ventured upon without cause, yet a lady of character may travel seven hundred miles alone, without danger of insult or embarrassment” (127). Daughter Katherine equals her mother in strength of character, never evincing fear or resentment when she sees her father taken to jail or when the responsibility of family’s support devolves upon her. The younger children are even better, so well-behaved that 56 The Panic of 1837 and the Failures of Literary Men

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they refrain from intruding upon Jackson’s story, not even to tell us their names or how many they are. In other words, Jackson’s paragons are talkative symbols, bereft of the flesh that would make them memorable characters. Like any questing Christian or ringletted Little Eva, their significance lies in what they stand for and in what happens to them, not in their psyches. (After all, psychology individualizes persons, which is precisely what panic fictions like Victim of Chancery oppose.) The energy and outrage of social reform draws its strength from numbers, from the ordinary and everyday multiplied into frightening common peril. If it can happen to the Adamses today, why not you tomorrow? After all, it happened to too many others, including Frederick Jackson, yesterday, and the day before. Jackson is by far the most interesting and fullyimagined character in his text, and as such, his defiance of the literary raises the stakes for understanding what, for him, “literary” might mean. “We hope never to be admired for our authorship,” writes Jackson, “by introducing these simple truths” (124). If panic fiction demands attention for the needs of completely unremarkable people, and such authorial social work requires no compensation, then the literary becomes corrupt by default. Thus whatever “realities” are expressed by literary men must be manufactured, made-up fancies— just like the true lies of lawyers and businessmen. Falsehood is what literary means for Frederick Jackson, because whether through ignorance or indifference, writing that fails to address the Panic portrays a world no longer recognizable to broken men, an America they do not know. What Jackson asks for in The Victim of Chancery, The Effinghams, and his other works, are stories of now-too-common things happening to common people, written for the common good—no roman de société need apply. In response to the dizzying revolutions the crisis has unleashed—the violent reorganization of meaning, even in the word “revolution” itself—Jackson proposes black and white. The overwhelming cognitive and institutional crush of national disaster is countered with a determined binary simplicity. Thus, the author and his works can be read as being in agreement with the novel’s critics: literature is a vice. And the sooner Americans comprehend the difference between the literary and everything else, they will comprehend the difference between fiction and truth, and thus better come to terms with how they landed in the mess they’re in. The Panic of 1837 and the Failures of Literary Men 57

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Speculation, Truth, and Falsehood Ironically, one of the truths professed by panic fiction as a whole was that Americans individually and as a nation were moving away from the virtue of truthfulness, particularly where money matters were concerned. In the years surrounding the publication of Frederick Jackson’s works, his panic peers came back to this most painful of truisms again and again. Writing in agreement with the era’s sermonizers, journalists, and pamphleteers, panic authors derided the increasingly common practice of speculation. In text after text appearing between 1837 and 1844, speculation represents a dangerous deviation from the country’s inherited moral codes, one that inevitably results in personal and communal tragedy. Along with the extension of credit purchasing, the shift in socioeconomic dominance from rural to urban areas, and the pursuit of fashion, speculation represents a practice of falsehood that must be stamped out. Each of the texts I shall discuss in this section dramatizes a world made “fictitious,” as the authors of ’37 and ’57 put it (17). Rather than pleading for the wide range of reforms endorsed by Frederick Jackson, these panic fictions focus upon individual and national character, reading them as allegorically related. The reforms advocated here are thus more shapeless and simultaneously more ambitious in their aim than those directed at bankruptcy legislation; what the following texts have in mind is a reformation of American character that decidedly leans toward restoration and not innovation. And to achieve this, one must first put an end to highly speculative activities. Hannah Bowen Allen’s Farmer Housten, and the Speculator (1839) pictures the bliss of rural, pastoral life destroyed by risky investments. Farmer Housten and his family live a life marked by “the simplicity, frugality, and religious culture” of New England (5). His “barn yards are well stocked,” and “the interior of [his] house . . . arranged with much neatness” (6, 7). As models of self-reliance, the family weave their own linens and make their own rugs with “simple elements of manufacture” (10). Much of what they consume is also the result of their own labor, including “honey, [and] delicious cakes of the finest wheat, of their own raising, butter, that might vie in color with the golden butter-cups of their own meadows . . . [and] the finest tea . . . with sugar made from their own maples” (18–19). The Houstens are God-fearing and charitable to their neighbors, comfortable but not affluent, and completely free from debt; as if to round out her rural 58 The Panic of 1837 and the Failures of Literary Men

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ideals, Allen also makes her honest farmers voracious readers of Goldsmith, Virgil, and Homer (8). But when a childhood friend of the farmer pays him a visit, luring him into a land-and-lumber scheme with promises of an “enormous profit of at least one hundred thousand dollars,” the family falls prey to “the wonders of this moneymaking business, called ‘Speculation”’ (24, 14). The scheme turns out to be a scam, resulting in the loss of the farm and Housten’s imprisonment for debt. Although their villainous “friend” eventually receives his comeuppance, the Houstens suffer enormously, as do other townspeople who buy into the land deal. Returns on this investment for other characters include impoverishment, exile, and death by cholera. Speculation in Farmer Housten destroys individuals and their families, making no distinction between participants and innocent bystanders. But in panic fiction, it does single out a particular class. Although it affected Americans at all socioeconomic levels, the Panic as it came to be represented in contemporary narrative singled out “ordinary decent folk,” the backbone of the growing middle class, as bearing the brunt of its attack. In many panic fictions, including novels by Hannah Lee, T. S. Arthur, Lucy Hooper, and Frederick Jackson, such ordinary decent folk are figured as members of the rising merchant sector; often from humble backgrounds, they are makers of their own wealth and practitioners of genteel labor. But Hannah Allen’s text champions the farmer, that figure whose mythicized traits symbolize the very essence of Americanness: We are all tillers of the earth. . . . We are a people of cultivators scattered over an immense territory. . . . On a Sunday [one] sees a congregation of respectable farmers and their wives, all clad in neat homespun, well mounted, or riding in their own humble waggons. There is not among them an esquire. . . . There [one] sees a parson as simple as his flock, a farmer who does not riot on the labor of others. We have no princes for whom we toil, starve, and bleed; we are the most perfect society now existing in the world. (67) St. John de Crèvecoeur’s famous third entry from Letters from an American Farmer (1783), “What Is an American?” metonymically utilizes the farmer so as to powerfully combine the Enlightenment era’s most radical and most conservative impulses, synthesizing populist, democratic, and pastoral discourses. As the distilled image of American The Panic of 1837 and the Failures of Literary Men 59

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agrarianism, the farmer plays a vital role in the efforts of eighteenthand early-nineteenth-century writers and statesmen to outline national promise. So long as the country respects its agrarian foundations, it can “maintain its republican institutions,” and thus fulfill its destiny as “a concrete embodiment of what had been in Europe but a utopian dream” of just egalitarianism (H. N. Smith 128, 129).26 When Hannah Allen imagines the nation as an endangered pastoral idyll, then, she accuses speculation of jeopardizing humanity’s best experiment. Striking at the most basic units of societal organization, speculation decimates the country and imperils the covenant into which it entered, chosen, as the New Jerusalem. Farmer Housten fittingly ends with imagery of the American idyll sullied, violated and destroyed: “The land has been bandied about from one to another; bonded, and sold upon credit, till at last a sudden rush was made upon the forest, and you, like swarms of Egyptian locusts, assailed every tree within your reach. All was levelled in your course, and I would ask you, What benefit have you, or your country derived from it? Why! as much as Don Quixote derived from fighting the windmills” (66–67). Far from indulging in clichéd metaphor here, Allen sees both the nature of the evil, and the ramifications of the struggle against it, allegorically and deadly seriously: the country suffers from a veritable Biblical plague. While her innocent farmers may have profitably imbibed the writings of Greek antiquity and the English Augustan age, it is no accident that her final image is that of a classic literary figure spoiled: Don Quixote’s battles not as proof of indomitable human spirit, but redolent only of hopeless, doomed effort. Speculation here is not merely risky, it is a guaranteed destruction. Speculation’s assault on the pastoral ideal also lies at the heart of Living on Other People’s Means, or the History of Simon Silver (1837).27 (The text’s title references Hannah Lee’s Three Experiments of Living, which is divided into sections on “Living Within the Means,” “Living Up to the Means,” and “Living Beyond the Means.”) Here antebellum Americans, like those in Hannah Allen’s story, fail to appreciate the value of what they already have, because they are dazzled by the theoretical wealth promised by speculation and its doppelganger, credit. Set in Massachusetts, this novel’s “citizens are too ambitious and aspiring to content themselves with the primitive occupations of their forefathers”; “The people of the country covet the luxury of the city . . . it is by many looked upon as vulgar to cultivate the soil . . . manual 60 The Panic of 1837 and the Failures of Literary Men

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labor is reckoned a disgrace. Hence it is, that the sons of our farmers desert their homes, where they might remain contented and cheerful with the homespun enjoyments and labors of a country life” (v).28 This novel overtly dramatizes the social anxieties underlying Allen’s Farmer Housten: the urban as evil, luring people away from the paths of righteous husbandry. (And straight into the debauched paths of credit purchasing, theater going, and carousing at oyster bars.) Its title references the loss of republican, agrarian values—only wastrels and cheats would live on other people’s means—and its preface intimates a triumph of manner and appearance over substance. Rural existence is “primitive,” “vulgar,” and “reckoned a disgrace.” Urban life, then, is aptly characterized by speculation: temporary, philosophically lightweight, faddish. Another homage to Lee, Horatio Weld’s Fourth Experiment of Living (1837), similarly bemoans the fashions of falsity overtaking American life. The story of a businessman named Henry Blake, it relates how he “borrow[s] of B to pay A—and so on through every letter of the alphabet” (20). Along the way the author unleashes barbs directed at a variety of American ills, including “literature, like charity, [which] is made to cover a multitude of sins. A literary man may ‘study character’ in places where ‘angels dare not tread,’ and if he studies sensual gratification at the same time, it is only mingling pleasure with business” (50). Proceeding to compare literature with liquor given to children for medicinal purposes—both inevitably harm and corrupt—Weld economically blends speculation, credit and debt, literature, sex, benevolence, alcoholism, and Alexander Pope in a succinct attack on the causes of the nation’s decline. Misplaced values also permeate Hannah Lee’s dramatic saga The Harcourts (1837), in which a desire to keep up with the Joneses undoes the titular family, with the singular exception of a daughter with ties to the countryside. As with her novels Three Experiments and Elinor Fulton, Lee sets her story during “the present deranged state of the times” (v). The Harcourts heroine Sophia has been living in the country, and once relocated to the city “still [has] the bloom . . . from its breezy hills” (14). As the recipient of a “careful education . . . and the advantages of a retired life,” Sophia is mature where her siblings are childish and practical where they are foolish. Thus “having passed that period when her character was forming and her intellect most active, apart from the influence of worldly maxims and customs,” Sophia is paradoxically armed against those same maxims and customs. She The Panic of 1837 and the Failures of Literary Men 61

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“saw every thing through the unclouded atmosphere of truth,” and thus knows that her family is living beyond their means—although the one thing this feminine ideal cannot do is to prevent their fall. Although her father speaks of “the riches of frugality” and “the poverty of ostentation” (60–61), he is no match for his wife, who is “fond of style and of fashion” (16). Lee’s novel is permeated by the language of fashion, both textile and social: families are pronounced “passé” and “has been” (26), they attend “silly Fancy Balls and recently introduced ‘Tableaux Vivans’ ” (126–27), and at such events, the daughters dance with “foplings” (34). The preternaturally sage and thrifty Miss Harcourt allows none of it to impress or sway her, and repeatedly asks for what is plain, affordable, and reasonable. She is not a Crèvecouerian farmer, but she is the republican ideal woman. For ultimately, the novel implies that agrarian values equal agrarian living, even in a metropolitan area. Once financially and morally chastened, though, the entire Harcourt family returns to the safe and sober country, making their newfound metaphorical agrarianism literal once again. What is so wrong with speculation? As a practice, it flouts the ability of things to remain stable, constant, and true. It flirts with the unknown, depends upon uncertainty (that something worth little today may be worth much tomorrow), is unabashed about taking advantage of the unaware, and of course, it sports a discomforting likeness to gambling—a similarity admitted even by its defenders.29 Speculation places little value on traditional moral values, particularly those of industry and frugality associated with republican virtue. The practice was hardly a new arrival on the American economic scene, although the internal migration that fostered western settlements provided ever greater opportunity and scope for those who were not risk-averse. Nor was speculation an unheard-of subject for American fiction. Novels such as Dorval; or the Speculator (1801) and Kelroy (1812) explored the changing economic landscape and its attendant “anxieties, primarily the fear that people would attempt to make money without industry through such means as gambling, speculating, and counterfeiting” (Weyler, “Speculating” 208). The figure of the speculator himself, as in Allen’s Farmer Housten, is an early manifestation of the confidence man, and thus a harbinger of what Karen Halttunen once described as the “crisis of social identity faced by . . . men and women who were on the move both socially and geographically” (xv). Indeed, in The Harcourts, Sophia’s father expresses 62 The Panic of 1837 and the Failures of Literary Men

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his displeasure that “in these days men can build lofty mansions, enter largely into land speculations, and carry on business. . . . And all this can be done . . . by men who a few years ago were selling needles by the paper and tape by the piece” (136). In this aspect, then, panic fiction’s pastoral tendencies make perfect sense: a country boyfriend, a country life, even a country blush to one’s cheek hearkens back to an America unaltered, a country that never grows too large, wagers too much, or gets above itself, straying too far from its allegedly original incarnation. It is reform’s “restoration” impulse writ large. The few scholars who have commented on Panic-era fiction attribute its pastoralism to a simplistic nostalgia—a waning republicanism artlessly staged, and fighting a losing battle with a bigger, stronger, ever more capitalist culture.30 Wall Street historian Steve Fraser describes the fiction as a reaction to “[Americans’] spiritual fitness training in the Protestant work ethic” (63), while in his study of bankruptcy, Edward Balleisen christens the authors of panic fiction “commercial moralists” whose mission is to pen “tales about bankruptcies that reformed the habits of businessmen and their families” (188). Similarly for Scott Sandage, the fiction is about certitude and clarity: “In the 1830s and 1840s, stock fictional characters rose and fell; certain sins meant certain failure. Conventional plots and characters helped to contain failure and reinforce the idea of achieved identity. Didactic narratives understood by all fixed blame and made every dilemma seem crystal clear” (48). Thus according to historians, these novels are simplistic and transparent. At best they are caught up in circumstances that are themselves intensely complex: the testing of the republican value system, on the one hand, and the transformation in conceptualizing identity that proceeded from it. The panic fictions discussed so far do indeed feature stock characters—daughters who are either dutiful or fashionable but never both; sons who are gamblers or rakes, and usually both; wives enchanted by material goods; and husbands lured by professional success and prestige. Elements of the stories are formulaic: villains commit villainy, and their victims are easily identifiable as victims, as they’re the ones who are broke. Some will learn their lesson, and many will perish regardless of what they learn. Which might be “crystal clear” if their allegorical function and pastoral sympathies did not suggest that these stories were concerned with something greater than an empty purse. The Panic of 1837 and the Failures of Literary Men 63

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An example: Ellen Edwards, the heroine of Lucy Hooper’s Scenes from Real Life: An American Tale (1840), remains faithful to a struggling beau living in the country, even as her city-dwelling family becomes wealthy and sophisticated. Hooper does not name speculation as a particular villain, but nonetheless makes it clear that her striving urbanites neglect the Biblical “rules of business” laid down by the Reverend Bent. Ellen’s father pays “close and unremitting attention to business, adding penny to penny, and interest to interest with a zeal and engagedness which can find its parallel only in ‘among the Shylocks of Wall Street’” (6). As Steve Fraser has shown, the reference to Wall Street had already become shorthand for capitalist economic activity by the 1830s. Characterizing Mr. Edwards as a “Shylock” underscores how disturbing Hooper finds the unremitting nature of modern business: not only is his behavior not that of a gentleman, it is not the behavior of a man of his race. Ellen’s mother and elder sister have desires to be fashionable—the latter envies a neighbor’s red damask curtains—but our heroine is sensible, and prefers reading to visiting. By the novel’s end, the conventional story has taken an unconventional turn: the family has acquired wealth that they do not lose. What they still lack, however, is happiness. “This fortune which was to do everything for us,” complains Mr. Edwards, “has made me completely miserable.” One daughter elopes with her Italian music instructor, and takes a younger sister with her to “see a little of the world,” leaving the family patriarch to bemoan that: There’s [my son] William among the Texans, gone off angry with his old father; here’s [another son] James gambling and sporting, and finding fault with me because I will not look on, and see him ruin himself; there’s [my daughter] Adeline going about from party to party with no more reflection than a child, at her age too; there’s your mother never stays at home with me now, and she used to do, and you [Ellen] are the only child I have left. (68) Only Ellen, who eschews fashionable life and stays true to her country lover, ends well, married and content. Agrarian values, after all, signify agrarian life. (Thus the significance of Farmer Housten, which is set in the country. Despite lamentations of the emptiness of the countryside, it is ultimately one’s values, not one’s environment, which dictate the end of the story.) All of the Edwardses except Ellen have speculated, not with their funds but with their souls, and they 64 The Panic of 1837 and the Failures of Literary Men

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have both won and lost: they got their money, but not what they thought the money would represent. They have lost class status as it denotes personal, moral qualities; what Hooper clearly implies by sexualizing the daughters is that the Edwardses might be of the upper-class financially, but they are not “classy” people. Her inclusion of racial stereotypes such as the “Latin Lover” (the Italian music instructor) and the crooked “Shylock” Jew briefly but capably questions her characters’ racial allegiance, and thus their status as “ordinary decent white folk.” Hence it does not matter whether one’s speculations pay off or no: willingness to make the bet is the sign of moral training and ethical priorities gone awry. The Edwardses are rich, and the Edwardses are destroyed just as surely as the bankrupt Houstens, Harcourts, and Simon Silver. Such teachings go beyond “crystal clear” “commercial moralis[m].” How then, does one interpret panic fiction accurately and garner its true lessons? Hooper’s Ellen can be taken as an ideal and a guide here. Her refusal to trade rural simplicity and virtue for urban fads symbolizes an attachment to truthfulness in all its forms, but most particularly in the sense of remaining true. Such was a wise older friend’s counsel: sharing her life story and its lessons with Ellen, the widow Mrs. Singleton notes that “This [story] is not romantic, . . . I admit, but it is a history from life; and the constancy of romance and the constancy of life are not alike” (23). It should be expected that a novel entitled Scenes from Real Life would pointedly mark this distinction by voicing it through an acknowledged adviser, for Ellen is an exemplar, in part, because she learns from example. The allegorical function signaled in the second part of book’s title—An American Tale—reveals just what it is Americans must do in the wake of the Panic: we must learn to read, to distinguish between surface and subtext, “romance” and “life,” a life that is always implicitly “real” for being opposed to fiction. In an ironic twist, panic writers unwittingly reveal one way in which speculation is not opposed to reality and truth, not as fictional as it appears. For paradoxically, speculating is certain, a guaranteed destruction, bound to level American land and American families regardless of what happens to the money. The first lesson which the allegory teaches readers is that all money, even gold, is ultimately a shinplaster, meaningless and worthless. This is because the only meaning that can possibly be stable lies in one’s character, in remaining true. To be able to make such distinctions, especially in a novel that purports to The Panic of 1837 and the Failures of Literary Men 65

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be “real” and yet flirts with theatricality (its titular “scenes”) requires a sophisticated ability to parse the prose documenting the Panic’s wake. The second lesson of panic fiction’s allegory is most likely unintended, for the diagnosis to which novels such as Farmer Housten, Living on Other People’s Means, The Harcourts, and Scenes from Real Life lend themselves is that the rot has already set in. Ideals such as Ellen Edwards or Sophia Harcourt, who can see “every thing through the unclouded atmosphere of truth,” comprehend the value of the oldfashioned virtues associated with America’s agrarian past. But if only ideals possess such powers of discernment, what hope remains for the rest of us? To follow the examples of Ellen and Sophia is to be ideal, and to transform the novels into conduct books. This is surely one of their purposes, just as it is an element of reform writing generally: to point out both the ailment and the cure. The didacticism of these novels buttresses their pastoralism and demonstrates for readers how one can remain true to the republican past. Their advocated reforms are all restorative, an admonition to turn back. And as with Frederick Jackson, concerns about truth ultimately establish a variety of practices on a continuum, from speculating to reading (and believing) romances. But reforming national character is far more difficult than passing a bankruptcy act, and so the past to which panic fictions would return is rendered more endangered and problematic with each passing year of the depression. The challenge the nation faces can be read in the panic’s stories: neither Ellen nor Sophia is initially able to save her family (in fact, Ellen never does), and each girl suffers temporarily with them. In a country where “a demoralised condition of principle, feeling, and practice, pervad[e] . . . throughout” (Jackson, Week vi), even ideal republican women will reap what they did not sow. Neither can reading the teachings of the old guard, Farmer Housten’s Goldsmith, Virgil, and Homer, ultimately help. “We need a reformation,” pleads Lee in The Harcourts (vi). But even for those Americans raised with allegory and skilled in deciphering the Panic’s prose, the challenge for reformation is great indeed. In fact, it is daunting.

If literary men had written about the Panic, what might such fictions look like? Would they move toward markedly different paths of understanding and diagnosis, or would they betray senses of unease 66 The Panic of 1837 and the Failures of Literary Men

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in common with their less famous peers? Frederick Jackson’s complaints notwithstanding, two authors who could be called “literary men” did write about the Panic. Neither Timothy Shay Arthur nor Charles Briggs approached James Fenimore Cooper in stature, although the former would attain fame with his temperance writings in the 1850s. But both men made their livings as professional writers, spending years in editorial work for numerous journals, as well as composing stories and novels. In their own day both had respectable name recognition, Arthur nationally, and Briggs through the wellconnected circle that surrounded the Knickerbocker and its editor Lewis Gaylord Clark. That said, the two men could not be more different. Arthur, whom I discuss at greater length in this study’s conclusion, denied having “literary” pretensions at all. He experienced his first success penning uplifting tales for Godey’s Lady’s Book, and was an ardent supporter of temperance who practiced what he preached, claiming that “the feeling of intoxication . . . is one that he never knew” (T. S. Arthur 10). Briggs, on the other hand, “was thought to be daringly unconventional” by his fellow New Yorkers and magazine peers (Miller 48). Stephanie Browner describes him as “a cultural nationalist” who, in helping to found Putnam’s Magazine in the 1850s, made plain his support for homegrown American writing (397). Yet he also “was wary of jingoistic nationalism” (397), and despite his antislavery sympathies, rejected efforts to recruit him into abolitionist activism by proclaiming the movement to be populated by “philanthropic eunuchs” (Miller 48). Regardless of their differences, the two men spent their lives in the same literary establishment chastised by Frederick Jackson.31 Thus their views of the Panic, its causes and its potential solutions, might reasonably be expected to differ from those already discussed. But to the detriment of fiction’s reputation, they don’t. Temptation, greed, and disdain for the simple life inspire the villains of The Two Merchants; Or, Solvent and Insolvent (1843), one of Timothy Shay Arthur’s contributions to panic fiction. Like his more famous Ten Nights in a Bar-room (1854), The Two Merchants offers moral improvement via illustrated lessons against vice. Its eponymous entrepreneurs represent opposing attitudes toward business practices and business ethics, with the pro speculation merchant, Mr. Lansing, “regard[ing] the legal statute as the boundary within which all his restless desires for the accumulation of property had scope for action” (3). Arthur’s The Panic of 1837 and the Failures of Literary Men 67

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narrator, however, sets the reader straight about such risky behavior, stating that speculation is “one of those desperate mercantile games, which ends in failure ninety-nine times out of a hundred” (8). The antispeculation merchant, Mr. Newberry, echoes these sentiments, confiding that he believes “all such transactions to be injurious to business, and, therefore, as they are prejudicial to the common welfare, ought never to be engaged in” (3). Thus, even though the reversals of fortunes that Arthur portrays directly affect only a small cast of characters, the moral failures underlying those misfortunes have significance for the wider community. In the end of course, Mr. Lansing has come down in the world. He considers himself lucky to be rescued and “offered . . . a place in [Mr. Newberry’s] store, . . . at a small salary, which was gladly accepted” (32). Lansing’s suffering and punishment finally enable him to comprehend the actual relation, not to say conflation, between himself and his neighbors. “Only by feeling,” intones Arthur, “could [Mr. Lansing] see that man owes to man reciprocal duties,” and thus cannot simply pursue personal wealth regardless of the welfare of others (32). The Two Merchants, like those texts by Allen, Hooper, Jackson, and Lee already discussed, encourages readers to embrace a pastoral vision of America. In Arthur’s ideal, cities never grow too large, and everyone still knows his neighbor, just like in a village; moral values trump wealth, and sufficiency wins over unfettered consumerism; and just as the Reverend Bent prescribed, business is always subjugated to the common good. His texts do not reject commercial culture or urban living, but rather, imagine for readers how they might be reformed, and perfected by feeling. Even after the Panic and the consequent depression had ended, T. S. Arthur continued to compose works illustrating the proper relations amongst the nation’s business community, insisting that in an intimate and allegorical world, that community is all of us. In The Debtor’s Daughter; Or, Life and Its Changes (1850), another heartless businessman is allowed to soar high and then brought low, initially incapable of comprehending that there should be no difference between his “duty as a merchant” and his duty “as a man” (14). The narrator of Family Pride; Or, the Palace and the Poor House (1844) faces no such dilemma. He believes that “no one can live in this world without feeling ‘a brother’s woe,”’ and finds those feelings exercised by his work in an almshouse: “Many a heart-ache have I had, and many a tear have I dropped, over the misery of others” (4). In his ability to sym68 The Panic of 1837 and the Failures of Literary Men

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pathize and his steadfast belief in needing to do so, he is joined by Arthur himself, who intones that if his words “awaken in the heart any emotions of human kindness, the writer will not have woven in vain the many-coloured threads of human life into a tissue” (4). Doubtless it is this capacity for feeling that allows him to understand, as he puts it in Debtor and Creditor: A Tale of the Times (1848), that for most men “it is no easy matter to look bankruptcy in the face” (6), and thus a man will “toil on in hope, year after year, though all is really hopeless” (5). Of course, though this man of business might be “a man of right feelings” (as is the sentimental ideal in The Debtor’s Daughter [11]), he is not necessarily a man in his right mind: “We have heard it remarked by men who have themselves been tried in the fire, that, as far as experience and observation enabled them to judge, they were satisfied that men in business, whose affairs had become seriously embarrassed, were, to a certain degree, insane, for in no other way could they account for what they had themselves done, and seen others do, in cases of great extremity” (Debtor and Creditor 6). Arthur continues in this vein, suggesting that what might appear “dishonest” was never meant to be so, and hence was not so, because “the acts were the acts of an insane man—of a man whose mind had lost its clear rational perceptions” (7). Through it all, sympathy and understanding are exhorted from readers, a sentimentalized means of enacting Reverend Bent’s maxim that “the Bible prescribes rules of business; the main one this, that it should be entirely subservient to the highest spiritual good” (7). But as in the novels by Allen, Hooper, and Lee, Arthur’s panic writings offer tales in which the financial reverberations of the crisis actually expose, or create an opportunity of expression for, an evil already in residence. Arthur’s Mr. Lansing is a would-be crook before any “reversals” take place; Bay Staters seem to be getting above themselves in a variety of ways; and even the ideal citizens of Farmer Housten proved to be rather easily tempted by promises of fast cash. Even as these texts lambaste various effects or elements of the Panic, then, they also betray a nagging sense that the nation’s failings extend far beyond it. The rot really has set in. Thus the fundamental difficulty encountered by many panic fictions, not merely as a matter of characterization, but more so as a matter of message: how to tread the line between individuality and divine ordinance, free will and victimization. Allen’s novel especially demonstrates this tension, depicting the Houstens as pitiable, innocent The Panic of 1837 and the Failures of Literary Men 69

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victims who are nonetheless partially responsible for their own fate. “All classes and all sections of the country were guilty of the same offense,” writes Reginald McGrane, “[for] all were impelled by the same craze for speculation. The farmer, the manufacturer, and the merchant, instead of paying their debts, bought land and speculated in land” (43). The historian’s description contains traces of the same seemingly oppositional discourses that mark panic fictions. Everyone is guilty, bears responsibility, should have known better, and yet everyone is affected by this “craze,” forced or coerced, “impelled” by circumstances beyond their control. Commander-in-chief Andrew Jackson characterized the practice as a kind of contagion, complaining to Congress that “each speculation furnished means for another,” and thus posed a veritable national threat (qtd in McGrane 44). Yet Old Hickory himself was guilty of speculating, buying and selling large tracts of land in Tennessee before the territory acquired statehood. In fact, it was in large part through his entrepreneurial activities that Jackson lived out his own American dream, transforming himself from a poor youth, orphaned by the Revolutionary War, into a lawyer, land owner, and slave owner by his mid-twenties.32 After one land deal went sour in the late 1790s, however, bringing him close to bankruptcy and landing one of his business partners in prison, Jackson experienced a proverbial change of heart. In the words of one biographer, “Thereafter he regarded land speculation as an abiding evil; he abhorred debts; and he referred to paper [money] . . . as the instrument of the swindler and the cheat. For [him], hard money— specie—was the only legitimate money; anything else was a fraud to steal from honest men” (Remini, Andrew Jackson and the Bank War 19). Evil, pestilence, hazard, vice: such characterizations of speculation blur the distinctions between individual and nation even further, obfuscating the place where agency abides. In this way, panic fiction makes reform a complex and intimidating effort—how do you reform that over which you have no control? Martin Van Buren in his autobiography recalls once finding Jackson “lying on a couch very pale, almost ghostlike” (qtd in Remini, Andrew Jackson and the Bank War 15). The President tells his friend, “The [U.S.] bank, Mr. Van Buren, is trying to kill me . . . but I will kill it” (16). Jackson’s melodrama ironically illustrates the disintegration of identificatory boundaries in the Panic, the ways in which its ability to remake and undo (turning rich into poor, money into shinplasters) guided interpretation and 70 The Panic of 1837 and the Failures of Literary Men

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narrative strategy at all levels. (After all, there is something decidedly rich, ahem in Jackson’s pobre yo; the triple whammy of the bank war Specie Circular, and Panic were a fiasco of his own making.) Panic fiction, and even panic-related congressional testimony and autobiographical anecdote, insists upon having it both ways with speculation and the Panic itself, retaining, as it were, the free will to be a victim. That issue is both obvious and obviously unresolved in Charles Briggs’s The Adventures of Harry Franco: A Tale of the Great Panic (1839). Long before his entrance into New York’s literary circles, the author had firsthand experience with debt and poverty, his father having been imprisoned briefly for bankruptcy when Briggs was a young boy. His novel poses a great challenge to those readers who would sympathize wholeheartedly with its down-and-out characters. Its humor is a decided change from the unadorned bleakness of other panic fictions. Yet when examined closely, Briggs’s characterization of American misfortune, mores, and mettle exudes strangely familiar ideas concerning the Panic’s causes and cures. Harry Franco’s eponymous hero embodies haplessness and gullibility, continuously making investments, buying goods, and providing “friends” with small loans, all to the detriment of his wallet. A scene that takes place on Wall Street, where “every man’s face wore a keen and anxious expression” (2:14), tempts its foolish hero with typical panic fare: easy wealth through land deals. Harry’s acquaintance Mr. Worhoss asks if the former has “been speculating in fast property”: “Perhaps you would like to make fifteen or twenty thousand dollars by a small investment?” I replied that nothing would be more agreeable to me; upon which [Mr. Worhoss] instantly unrolled the paper which he carried under his arm, and displayed to me a lithographed map of Gowannus City. I had no recollection of ever having heard of such a city; but Mr. Worhoss told me it was one of the most prosperous in the union; and truly it had a very pleasant appearance on paper. . . . Mr. Worhoss offered to sell me a choice of corner lots, in a certain section of the city, at the very moderate price of one thousand dollars each; and he assured me if I kept them only one week, I might sell them again for double that sum. (2:16–17) When Harry explains that presently he lacks the funds to buy any part of the pleasant-looking Gowannus City, his obliging friend The Panic of 1837 and the Failures of Literary Men 71

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comes up with a scheme where the young man might simply put “ten per cent down,” with “the balance . . . remain[ing] on bond and mortgage” (2:17). In this way, he will not miss his chance to “easily clear a hundred thousand dollars” (2:17). Harry is also allowed to observe a land auction, where “after the sale was over, the buyers began to boast of their bargains, and according to their own showing, there was not a man present who had not made at least twenty thousand dollars” (2:18). Pleased by the interest shown in him by his friend (“he was bent upon making a fortune for me for old acquaintance’s sake”), Harry walks away from his Wall Street encounters feeling deliriously lucky and “already worth a fortune” (2:20). A reader might be willing to pardon Harry’s naïveté and feyness, if this scene did not take place in volume two of the novel, hundreds of pages into the story and after more than a handful of miscalculations and misjudgments on the hero’s part. Harry Franco is incapable of learning from his adventures, though, because he is the product and subject of addiction, to the “novels and snuff ” used by his mother. The novels make up the literary portion of his youthful education, and they consume him just as surely as his mother consumes them (1:6). The unfortunate lad believes in “the many wonderful stories [he] had read, of good luck befalling the poor and friendless; of great men having taken a fancy to adventurous boys . . . of their making their fortunes, and returning [home] with their pockets lined with gold” (1:11). Both addictions are pernicious habits, just as the Tractarians believed they were, though it is likely that Briggs is having fun contrasting the very unfeminine snufftaking with the all-too-ladylike penchant for novels. Like his fellow characters in the panic fictions of Allen, Arthur, and Lee, Harry Franco is a victim of speculation and of unethical men. But he also has been victimized by the “fine stories” whose function he fails to comprehend, and whose relation to truth and reality he cannot discern. “I did not then know nor indeed dream,” protests Harry, “that there were men and women in the world wicked enough to invent stories to mislead the minds of the young and simple. They were to me veritable histories, the truth of which it never entered into my head to call into question” (1:11). So woe to Harry, who both does and does not know how to read. Unlike Ellen Edwards in Scenes from Real Life, Harry cannot distinguish between “romance” and “life.” In his interpretational methodology, Charles Briggs locates one genesis of the 72 The Panic of 1837 and the Failures of Literary Men

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country’s troubles. The causes of the Panic are economic, political, moral, and literary.33 Both Arthur and Briggs, the closest that panic fiction can come to “literary men,” utter the same pronouncements as their amateurish peers. The real reforms must be in our characters, and fundamental to that task is learning to properly read, to distinguish between “romance” and “life.” After 1837, the American who can read a fiction and yet discern the truth is armed, prepared for anything. Reformoriented writers, then, had to turn to it: panic fiction is the nation’s best tool for perceiving, for reading, the evil within. If at all possible, it is better to learn the lessons of the Panic through the pages of a text than through the abjection of empty pockets and empty stomachs. But both means will work equally well. Moralism and didacticism, rather than being stylistic drawbacks, are unmasked here as the most necessary of strategies, a way of training Americans to read correctly. These authors, no less than their counterparts in moral reform or abolition, believe that the written word can “have powerful, direct, instantaneous, almost magical effects”—but only if those words tell the truth, in the service of the common good (Nord, “Religious Reading” 245). For panic writers, and hopefully their readers, have accepted a simple and difficult truth: that of all God’s creatures, the least trustworthy are words.

Three Experiments of Living and Elinor Fulton Even as thousands of Americans suffered in 1837, one woman had a very good year, composing not one, but two bestsellers. Before this, no one could have accused Hannah Farnham Sawyer Lee of leading a privileged existence. In 1816 her husband died, leaving her to support their three young daughters on her own. By the time she wrote Three Experiments of Living (1837), Lee had already tried her hand at writing twice. A first novel, Grace Seymour (1830), sold little, largely due to a fire that destroyed almost the entire first print run. A second edition was never ordered. Lee also wrote a brief appreciation for A Memoir of Miss Hannah Adams (1832), a posthumously published autobiography by the early historian, but this hardly presented the single mother with an opportunity for great earnings.34 But with Three Experiments, Hannah Lee entered into the zeitgeist. The novel was composed during the worsening economic period of the mid1830s, and its publication date placed it in bookstores after the The Panic of 1837 and the Failures of Literary Men 73

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issuance of the Specie Circular, but before the actual Panic itself in May. The sequel Elinor Fulton (1837) was quickly printed and disseminated, so that the two texts appeared in the midst of the country’s chaos.35 I discuss the pair here on their own, rather than in conjunction with The Harcourts, not only because they tell a continuing story, but because together they set the pattern for Lee’s subsequent works, for worshipful imitations, and most important, for readers in need of guidance. Both books went through multiple editions, with Lee’s publisher claiming 20,000 copies sold of Three Experiments. Even if such a number is inaccurate, and actual sales only approached one-half or one-quarter of that volume, the book represents an extraordinary commercial success for the 1830s. It inspired obvious imitations, including Living on Other People’s Means and the Fourth Experiment of Living, along with a more raucous pamphlet, “Three Experiments in Drinking.” The blockbuster and its sequel opened publisher Samuel Colman’s “Stories from Real Life” series, and the whole was dubbed an “admirable” contribution to 1837’s parched marketplace by the editors of the Knickerbocker (“Editors’ Table” 92). Sales spelled attention for Lee. As Mary Templin notes, the novel and its sequel garnered “positive reviews from the North American Review, American Monthly Magazine, and Southern Literary Messenger, along with notices from Godey’s, the New York Review, and the Knickerbocker” (12). All in all, the response to Lee’s panic fiction is astounding—no other panic work, not even those by the “literary men” Arthur and Briggs, received such notice and attendant praise. Even so, the bestsellers ultimately shared the same fate as every other text cited in this chapter: they are out of print and relegated to the margins of literary history. But of course, that does not mean that they do not have much to teach us. Lee’s bestselling works reveal the extent to which the reciprocal relationships among the economy, the citizen, the family, and the nation, were refracted through various institutions and practices (speculation, the government), and were understood as pressing social problems whose solution would be reached, in part, through the offices of imaginative literature. Both of Lee’s works are hybrid novels and conduct books that combine financial lessons and social commentary with a tumultuous family saga. Not that the author calls them novels, though; in this point Lee and Frederick Jackson are very much in accordance. A wide variety of categorical terms appear in the preface and early pages of Three Experiments, teasing readers with the question 74 The Panic of 1837 and the Failures of Literary Men

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of how Lee understands the type of writing in which she is engaged. Three Experiments is a “little volume,” a “manuscript,” an “interesting narrative,” a “publication,” and a “work”; it is also “unpretending,” “modest,” “slight,” “natural,” “practical,” “useful,” and intended to “enlighten and instruct” (v–ix). “Tracts” receive particularly intriguing mentions. The title page bears the following epigraph, presumably the work of either Lee or her publisher: “Tracts are written for the poor; but we would ask, if influence and example do not proceed from the rich?” Is Three Experiments of Living intended to be read as a tract, then—albeit one with a self-professed unusual class orientation? Or does it merely bear resemblance to a tract, altered and made novel so as to appeal to “rich” readers? Tracts appear again in the preface: Numerous valuable tracts have been written within a few years past, upon single and detached subjects of morals, connected with the condition of society; and among these, the admirable ‘Temperance Tales,’. . . stand preeminent. It is not using too strong language, to say, that those Tales, unimportant as they may be considered by the mass of readers, who never trouble themselves with the labor of thinking, are, probably, now effecting a revolution in opinions, which have been proof against the heavy artillery of many a royal quarto and imperial octavo. (vi)36 The tract versus the “imperial octavo,” the work of reform against the implied prestige and luxury of the expensive bound tome, or for lack of better terms, low culture versus high culture. Lee’s array of categorizing terms takes the reader in a clear-cut direction, away from privileged associations of the literary and straight into an alliance with temperance, already a growing, energetic movement by the late 1830s. “The heavy artillery,” whose power to work upon readers is paradoxically feeble, alludes to those genres traditionally understood to comprise literature: history, theology, philosophy, the sciences, and belles letters, all dismissed peremptorily. Works in these genres could indeed be bound and sold as “royal quartos” and “imperial octavos”; yet they seemingly have little to recommend them other than reputation and luxurious bindings. Lee’s maneuvers in her novel’s opening are far from clear-cut, however. For in setting aside the literary, and simultaneously avoiding the term “novel,” the author fantastically places lowly fiction and imposing literature on the same side of a cultural chasm, a safe distance away from her own texts. “Novel” and The Panic of 1837 and the Failures of Literary Men 75

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“fiction” are almost the only two available terms that are not employed by Lee here. The only text in which she uses either term is The World Before You (1844), and the word is invoked only to be rejected: “The following little work cannot be called a fiction. It is taken from real life” (iii). As do her panic peers, Lee understands real life as something with which neither fiction nor the literary engage. Thus room is left quite literally for reform, in the guise of novel-length family sagas that flirtatiously call themselves little volumes, manuscripts, interesting narratives, publications, works, and tracts. Our author’s avoidance of the name “novel,” along with her praise for temperance writing, matches her “deep conviction of the duty incumbent upon every individual, to render such aid as may be in his power, in promoting the moral improvement of society” (Three Experiments ix). Hannah Lee’s writing has both purpose and plan, both message and map for its readers. Like Frederick Jackson, Lee may reveal herself as profoundly leery of fiction and its names, as well as contemptuous of what literary works can actually do for their readers. But here resemblances begin to fade, and vibrant disparity emerges. Whereas The Victim of Chancery indicts the “usual suspect” institutions, Lee’s bestselling pair emphasize instruction more heavily: not what was done, but what one should do. There is little lamentation in Hannah Lee, and a matching scarcity of sentiment. Her perspective privileges preparation rather than memorialization, although the resulting shift in temporal orientation does not bespeak a more optimistic view concerning affairs of state. Neither does it separate Lee from the restorative philosophy of much reform writing. Hannah Lee’s novels bluntly assume the social discord that Frederick Jackson laments, and accordingly offer advice for behavior in uncertain times. It is a public service she assumes the literary cannot perform: Three Experiments and Elinor Fulton, quite simply, tell you how to survive a panic.

Proper Conduct The structure of Three Experiments fulfills its title: the work is divided into sections, following the Fulton family through their stages of “Living Within the Means,” “Living Up to the Means,” and finally, “Living Beyond the Means.” In the first section, the reader follows Boston newlyweds Jane Churchwood and Frank Fulton as they embark on his career, her housekeeping, and the raising of their chil76 The Panic of 1837 and the Failures of Literary Men

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dren. Frank’s diligence in his occupation as a doctor, combined with Jane’s model housewifery, initially enable them to live simply but happily. In Jane’s words, they possess “the art of being rich with a very little money” (33). But as their fortunes improve, their social network expands and brings them into contact with wealthier, more fashionable people. At this point Jane and Frank move into a larger house, hire servants, and buy “centre-lamps” and “centre-tables” that they do not really need (63–64). Hence in the middle section of the book they “live up to their means.” Finally, Frank’s and Jane’s characters are profoundly altered. Having adopted the habits and mores of their social circle, the couple depart from all of their early beliefs and practices. Frank gives up medicine first to be a businessman, and second to be an embezzler. On the eve of a ball given to celebrate daughter Elinor’s debut, Frank’s crimes are discovered, and the family is ruined. As their spectacular fall coincides with the national downturn in the economy, the event is referred to as “the crash ball” by the Fultons’ friends and acquaintances. The sequel Elinor Fulton picks up in the aftermath of that crash, which sees Dr. Fulton exiled to western territories in order to repair the family’s finances and escape his scene of infamy. Mrs. Fulton and the children remain in the Boston area, living in shabby gentility while being supported by the piano lessons that Elinor gives. Thus Lee’s novels illustrate the intertwined workings of personal and national economy, placing them in the context of proper moral conduct. The events of Jane’s and Frank’s lives result in lessons learned and modeled for the discerning reader. From the books’ prefaces to their final pages, the gravitas and deeply conservative sociopolitical orientation of their creator are apparent: the texts offer quotations from the likes of Junius and Edmund Burke, for example, and chapter-length dialogues on the practice of charity, or the proper roles of the sexes. Both novels also refute popular trends in belief and behavior, attempting to redirect readers on the path to right living. One such trend is critiqued immediately, when in Three Experiments’ preface, Lee warns against a false conflation of morals and money, self and nation: It had not escaped the notice of so intelligent an observer [the author], that there is, in many persons . . . a constant disposition to make a perverse application, in morals, of certain principles, The Panic of 1837 and the Failures of Literary Men 77

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which were intended for physical subjects alone. They repeat, like parrots, the maxim of the political economists,—‘Laissez-nous faire—let us alone,’—morals will take care of themselves; just as they tell us, to let alone the prices and qualities of the physical subjects of trade, and they will take care of themselves. (vii–viii) Such is not the case, for the novel itself demonstrates that “to keep the community in a sound and healthy moral state, demands the unremitting energies of . . . those individuals who have the ability to enlighten and instruct” (viii). Lee alludes here to the theories of Adam Smith, whose The Wealth of Nations had been published in 1776 and had deeply influenced many of the architects of the new nation. But, for Lee, these prestigious connections provide no stamp of approval for Smith. Rather, his ideas concerning free markets—or, more precisely, the popularized versions of those ideas—are treated with suspicion and contempt for the unthinking “parrots” who mouth them. This is not solely because Smith’s theories are recent and in many ways, untested. For Lee, morals, money, self, and nation are profoundly connected, just as they are for Frederick Jackson and other panic writers. Laissez-faire philosophy, though, scrambles those connections and allows for a dangerous misunderstanding of their correct relations. Money and morals exist in a complex web here. On the one hand, they cannot be managed similarly: what enables one system to function, allows the other to go awry, hence the “perverse” nature of what Lee describes as this mistaken judgment. Nonetheless, the amount of one’s cash and the character of one’s self can be understood an indices of each other, as the very structure of the novel itself makes evident. Frank and Jane Fulton, ironically, have more discretionary income and a more sound financial footing when their socioeconomic status is at its lowest. At this point in their story, they are charitable, cheerful, and devoted family members. Once rich, though, they are haughty, materialistic, and strapped for cash—not to mention that one of them descends to thievery. Donc, quand ils laissent-faire à la moralité, toute tombez en morceaux. Though specifically mentioned only in her preface, laissez-faire is revealed as the philosophical expression of all that Hannah Lee rejects and would reform. Both Three Experiments and Elinor Fulton are paeans to propriety and order. Early in the former text, when Frank begins to make a name for himself as a physician, Lee notes that this is due to “working his way into the more enlight78 The Panic of 1837 and the Failures of Literary Men

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ened orders of society. His day-book and leger [sic] began to be necessary” (28). Just as correct financial and moral behavior can be clearly outlined in three illustrative sections of a novel, it can be lived within the lined spaces of notebooks. For Lee, all order is causally connected, whether of a financial or social breed, and Frank’s “daybook and leger” signify his sociomoral state just as surely as they index his socioeconomic position. Embracing laissez-faire, however, entails a throwing off of the personal responsibility that makes such record-keeping necessary. The philosophy allows for mistakes, untruthful switching and replacing. As Mary Templin notes, “money and credit are interchangeable, . . . but they are not identical,” a misstep all too easily made in such times (3). Persons like Frank and Jane must begin to comprehend this, not just for their family but also for themselves: in Lee’s work, far more than in that of any other panic writer, the individual is the most fundamentally important figure in the money-morals-self-and-family nexus. In part this emphasis results from the author’s marriage of the novel and the conduct book. Publishers may market conduct and etiquette manuals to the masses, but the writers of such texts approach the populace singularly, outlining modes of personal behavior, personal finance, and self-improvement. Lee’s novels also bear resemblance to what Sarah Robbins calls “domestic literacy narratives,” texts that position their female authors and subjects as ideal teachers for a nation of readers (2).37 For Mary Templin as well, the novels serve as important instructional texts for antebellum women, illuminating how the “home is not an isolated haven but in fact the ideal place for resolving economic problems”—an involvement in putatively “public sphere” issues with which women have been discouraged to interfere (11). Thus it should not surprise us that Lee’s focus upon the individual reveals a vision of selfhood intimately tied to notions of responsibility and duty that have national significance. Frank and Jane slide into snobbery and debt individually at first, and in a seemingly blameless way. Having bought a large house for which they do not have enough furniture, they decide to buy that furniture; now with more room and more things, “they soon found that . . . [they] required another domestic” (54). From this they progress smoothly to envying others’ possessions, disdaining old acquaintances, and committing what Lee considers an unforgivable sin: telling the lie of saying one is “not at home” when merely trying to The Panic of 1837 and the Failures of Literary Men 79

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get out of an unwelcome visit (74–75). While the harmony between the two once made them a picture-perfect couple, it now fails to prevent their downfall. Having “reached the magic circle of genteel society,” Frank and Jane gleefully throw off their former selves: “Jane exulted for her children, [Frank] exulted for his profession,” and neither applies the brakes (55). First Frank and Jane, which of course, means the family; their failure will affect their community, and thus imperil the larger whole. Lee’s worldview is allegorical but it is also synecdochal: Frank and Jane are part of that national whole, as is the reader, but Lee never suggests that they are unimportant in and of themselves. This is why a hybrid novel and conduct book can function as social reform writing: in Lee’s panic-affected world, it becomes imperative for the reader to learn, to understand Frank and Jane but not become them, to try to safeguard the American experiment one book buyer at a time. I say “try” because Lee’s novels are suffused with a cynicism regarding the state of American morals that surpasses that of other panic writers. Unlike those peers, Hannah Lee is perfectly willing to admit that the national rot has set in. This state of affairs is due, of course, to the spread of laissez-faire as a way of life. The theory divorces economics from morals (according to Lee, not Smith), and produces ruin on both fronts, “for it is an undeniable truth, that the extravagance of living beyond one’s means . . . has a most corrupting influence upon [one’s] moral sense” (Three Experiments ix–x). This divorce is evidenced in the existence of the term “laissez-faire” itself. Smith never uses it in The Wealth of Nations, and his argument for free markets deals solely and rather dryly with “Restraints upon the Importation of Goods of almost all Kinds” (503). Perhaps it goes without saying that the man who had previously written The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) did not sneak eloquent endorsements of hedonism or embezzlement into its sequel. The philosopher’s arguments for free markets are founded upon their general furtherance of morality, not their destructive potential.38 But of course, poor Adam is beside the point in Lee’s novel. Three Experiments ends with Frank offering a mea culpa from his western exile: I begin to hope that we may all again be gathered into one family, even in this world. . . . I have reasonable expectations of being able . . . to convince my creditors, that, however wide I have travelled from the right course, it is not irrecoverable. . . . I daily thank 80 The Panic of 1837 and the Failures of Literary Men

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God for my domestic relations;—that he has preserved to me my wife and children . . . and taught us all, that real independence consists in living within our means. (142–43) Inspired by the importance of her cause, Lee cannot resist hammering home her point. (The two preceding sections end with similar summations of the Fulton family finances.) Her conclusion is a model of didacticism, with its would-be heroes chastened and more deserving of their narrative roles. Compared with other panic fictions, however, Three Experiments reveals striking absences. Whereas peers such as Hannah Allen, for example, make explicit metaphoric links between the downfall of the characters and the downfall of the nation, Lee allows her erring husband to think of nothing but home. The value of wife and children, and the “real independence” of being able to fulfill his role as provider and protector: these are truths Frank finally comprehends. For Lee to suggest that true happiness lies with a balanced checkbook is both a constrained recipe for contentment— perhaps sadly constrained—as well as a reflection of the “cold hard facts” that social reform deals in. (In Elinor Fulton, Lee pens one of the most incredible sentences to be found anywhere in panic fiction: “Blessings on the Savings Bank!” [105]. As stated before, Lee sets her sights much, much lower than does Frederick Jackson.) The reader is meant to learn from the Fultons’ “experiments,” and thus Lee’s conclusion focuses upon the reader and what that reader can control—herself. This prescribes nothing concerning the fate of laissez-faire, whether or how a reader might work against it. What it tells the reader is that laissez-faire will happen. Money and morals, in the family next door or in the national family, will be “let alone,” and they will fall apart. The moral and economic lessons of Lee’s text aim to help the individual to survive, or even prosper, while neighbors, towns, governments, and countries slip into the red. All you can do is protect yourself. Laissez-faire creates what the authors of ’37 and ’57 called a “fictitious” state, a world with a pretty surface, royal quarto and imperial octavo–like, but empty of meaning inside. Keep to what you know and can see, the money you can count in your hands, the tract that costs little and has no pretensions. Unlike Frederick Jackson, Hannah Lee does not ask for bankruptcy legislation, but in the America whose picture she paints, no legislation could ever prevent disaster. Reforming yourself is all you can do. Such a belief exudes The Panic of 1837 and the Failures of Literary Men 81

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fatalism, a resigned sense of the world’s predestined events, and thus a trace of the Calvinism theoretically beginning to wane in the first half of the century. Or, one might say that there is more than just a hint of Protestant ethic in Hannah Lee’s writing.

Moderate Expectations Early in The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism (1905), Max Weber reproduces several brief passages of late-eighteenthcentury American writing as a means of illustrating this spirit and “encapsulat[ing] the essence of the matter in almost classical purity” (9). The first passage begins by exhorting readers to “remember, that time is money”; the final one explains the present and future ramifications of a loss of “five shillings” (9, 11). Weber’s quotations, or what he calls “this little sermon,” all come from Benjamin Franklin, the historical figure whom Weber sees as distilling “the capitalist spirit” (9). For Weber, Franklin’s writings and his life history epitomize the Protestant conjoining of calling and capitalism, the way in which notions of duty and virtue become attached to the practice of the accumulation of wealth. Noting how Franklin’s views “in ancient or medieval times . . . would have been denounced as an expression of the most filthy avarice” (14), Weber outlines the shift in signification and the embrace of “the idea of the religious significance of secular everyday labor” that allowed such ideas to become acceptable, laudatory, and even moral (29). His inquiry in The Protestant Ethic spans time and space, following “the rule of Calvinism” as it develops through “the sixteenth century in Geneva and Scotland, . . . the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in large parts of the Netherlands, . . . the seventeenth century in New England, and. . . England” (2). Yet even with the vast materials such breadth provides, Franklin remains for Weber the writer who best expresses “the inner affinity” between Calvinism and capitalism (6). And at no time does Franklin exemplify that ethic better than in his description, in the Autobiography, of his work in founding the Philadelphia Public Library: “My Circumstances . . . grew daily easier: my original Habits of Frugality continuing. And my Father having among his Instructions to me when a Boy, frequently repeated a Proverb of Solomon, ‘Seest thou a man diligent in his Calling, he shall stand before Kings, he shall not stand before mean Men.’ I from thence consider’d Industry as a Means of Obtaining Wealth and Distinction” (88).39 82 The Panic of 1837 and the Failures of Literary Men

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Though he notes Franklin’s spiritual growth away from the strict Calvinism of his father, Weber sees in this passage a seamless philosophical, cultural, and genealogical linking of personal behavior and sacred duty that legitimates commercial endeavor. The amount of one’s cash and the character of one’s self acting as faithful indices of each other: Franklin not only epitomizes the Protestant ethic, but through his dual roles as scribe and “founding father,” fuses that ethic into American literature. What do Franklin and Weber, though, have to do specifically with Hannah Lee and her novels that don’t call themselves novels? They help us to understand the profound suspicion with which the author eyes everything unreal, unreliable, dishonest—everything made up. Fashion, speculation, credit, laissez-faire, the “white lies” of the parlor: these are the practices of falsehood Lee disdains, and all metaphorically relate to fiction, the genre that does not portray “real life.” Franklin’s unfanciful and sobering influence is evident throughout Three Experiments and Elinor Fulton; in essence, the two novels reshape Franklinian philosophy (that is, the Protestant ethic) for a younger generation that has gone astray. Thus while Frank and Jane Fulton still live within their means, Lee makes a short digression in order to demonstrate that orderly, frugal, and therefore honest living has illustrious and almost sacred roots within U.S. culture. She chastises her countrymen and women for “adopting the most frivolous parts of civilized life” and for “our habits and customs, made up of awkward imitations of English and French” (Three Experiments 45). Such was not always the case, and so Lee repeats a description of George Washington’s “first public dinner.” The event is attended by various political luminaries, but nonetheless marked by “simplicity” and a distinct lack of European pomp: The president made his whole dinner on a boiled leg of mutton. It was his usual practice to eat of but one dish. As there was no chaplain present, the President himself said a very short grace as he was sitting down. After the dinner and dessert were finished, one glass of wine was passed around the table, and no toast. The President arose, and all the company . . . and retired to the drawing room, from which the guests departed . . . without ceremony. (46–47) The author closes this section with a “hope this digression will be excused, for the sake of the honest independence of our purpose” (47). The Panic of 1837 and the Failures of Literary Men 83

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A vision of the first president eating nothing but boiled meat for dinner lacks the charm of his childhood tree-chopping antics (be they apocryphal or no), but then charm seems in short supply both at the state dinner and in Lee’s understanding of right conduct. For her, George Washington functions as a saintly, stern exemplar: not merely a brave soldier and respected leader, but an ascetic with little tolerance for “ceremony.” (After all, they also skipped the customary toast.) As he appears in this anecdote, the President, like Lee herself, has few wants, unembellished tastes, and low expectations—yet he is rewarded with reverence and fame. This is the lesson of Lee’s “honest independence”: aim low, be moderate, reap plenty. Washington is the only one of the founding fathers whom Lee mentions by name. Nonetheless, the story of the state dinner epitomizes her view of the statesmen whose careers and lives came to be referenced by that name. In Three Experiments she honors them as “our fathers of the Revolution”: men who fulfilled national promise through their bravery, staunch principles, simple style, and apparently restricted desires (46). Emulation of our revolutionary fathers will result, in Lee’s view, in a restoration of the social politics, as well as the cultural and moral environment, that gave birth to the U.S. as a coherent nation.40 They epitomize the “reformation” for which she pleads in The Harcourts: no fancy, no nonsense, no fiction, no lies. What kind of reform does Hannah Lee ultimately offer her readers? It shares a deep conservatism, a reform-as-restoration quality, with all of the authors discussed in this chapter: the pamphleteers chastising the abandonment of the rural; the newspapers inveighing against paper money and shady speculations; Hooper distinguishing between real life and romance; Jackson lambasting literary men; all of them believing that if things could just be put back, they would be put right. But Lee’s wish for an America reformed to its republican, revolutionary self is finally a desire for a restoration of more divine order: “It is the will of the Creator, that [human beings] should arrange themselves in natural orders. Let us, then, endeavor to find out to which we belong; for in that class alone shall we be respectable and useful. Probably much of the misery of life proceeds from mistaking the natural order for which we are created” (Elinor Fulton 40). This short lecture follows a section in Elinor Fulton wherein the readers see Jane Fulton’s essential mental and moral weakness; unable to quite accustom herself to her newly “narrow sphere,” she 84 The Panic of 1837 and the Failures of Literary Men

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pines for the friends and pastimes of her erstwhile wealth (37). But daughter Elinor possesses traits that her mother does not, and so she reminds the older woman that “[God] has helped us. Has he not given us health, and the capacity of making our small means a sufficiency?” (38). In keeping with the ideal that she portrays, Elinor keeps her expectations in check. She reconciles herself to the “small means” and “sufficiency” of the family’s new station, and to her place in that station. (After all, the circumstances of her family’s ruin have “arranged themselves” without any participation from their oldest daughter.) The author reassures her readers that each of the “natural orders” has its duties toward the other, “a mutual bond between them” based on the fact that “God is the Maker of them all” (68). Readers may detect lingering traces of federalism in Lee’s support for class distinction. But they should reach much further, to John Winthrop on board the Arbella, framing the reason and proof of “A Modell of Christian Charity.” The third part of the sermon notes that “All men being thus (by divine providence) rancked into two sortes, riche and poore, under the first are comprehended all such as are able to live comfortably by theire owne meanes duely improved; and all others are poore according to the former distribution” (83).41 Natural order, acceptance, and resignation: were proper respect shown to these things, a panic might never have occurred. To have a character ask about “speculating in fast property” and whether one “would like to make fifteen or twenty thousand dollars by a small investment,” as occurs in Harry Franco, is nearly unthinkable in one of Hannah Lee’s novels. Charles Briggs could find some comedy in the chaos the Panic unleashed, but for Hannah Lee, all is sobriety. The practices of falsehood she assails are but symptoms of deeper, more perilous dissatisfaction with one’s ordained social fate, and accordingly they conjure into being “the misery of life” that antebellum Americans see all around them. And that misery, as too many readers now know, is no fiction. Thus Lee’s reformulation of Franklin and of the Protestant ethic adopts their marriage of calling and commerce, demonstrating that when her characters work hard and expect little, they prosper. Their pennies saved are pennies earned; diligent in their callings, they shall ultimately stand before kings. As Frank Fulton endures western exile, he works, he accumulates money, he regains his reputation and family. Elinor gives thanks for her health and sufficiency, and so she is repaid at novel’s end by a proposal of marriage from her true love— The Panic of 1837 and the Failures of Literary Men 85

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a man who, in the best novelistic fashion, is not wealthy, but has prospects. It is the one uncertainty, the single potential aspect of life, she allows any of her characters to embrace. Panic authors like Jackson, in emphasizing the victimization of their allegorical figures, press readers to question how a sure reform can be undertaken if the rot has already set in. Lee’s response is both reassuring and deflating, a way of inspiring by bringing her reader down a peg: make no mistake, things will fall apart. All you can do is reform yourself.

The Panic of 1837 cost families their homes, took from breadwinners their livelihoods, and sent those with the least luck out into the streets. In Caroline Sawyer’s The Merchant’s Widow, the Panic is a “fatal pressure,” and reduces its titular heroine to begging “a little charity, for God’s sake! my children are starving!” (26, 9). Bereft of financial support after both her father and husband “break” and then die, Emily Seton is beset by her own helplessness. “Brought up in a part of the country where females are scarcely taught anything that is useful,” she is on a path to becoming yet another victim of the crash (21). Sawyer’s story proceeds to make an argument largely absent from other panic fictions: through her narrator and a cast of kindly, charitable characters, the author contends that women must be afforded better educations than is customary, and trained for honest remunerative work. “Shame! folly!” exclaims the first of Emily’s saviors, lending his voice to Sawyer’s moral, “shame to bring up girls in such a way! Instead of teaching them to become useful and valuable members of society, to make mere dolls and puppets of them! Just as if riches had no wings, and there was no possibility of their ever being obliged to earn their own bread by their own labor!” (21–22). The elderly gentleman who speaks these words is initially approached by Emily; he insists on returning to her house with her, rather than immediately putting money in her hand. Sawyer only hints at what her heroine’s fate could have been, at what the fates of other women must have been once they were forced out onto cold and unfriendly streets. What if a seeming savior’s charity turned out to be not so charitable—what if some kind of payment had been required? Even as Sawyer wrote her singular tale, and Hannah Lee imagined her singularly strict reform, other Americans were keeping track of the women inhabiting the country’s public spaces. For them, hundreds of 86 The Panic of 1837 and the Failures of Literary Men

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stories would imagine and then answer a nagging “what if ?” But unlike Hannah Lee, these reformers possessed vastly different beliefs about the scope of individual and social revolution. They believed they could pick the fallen up, redeem them and restore them, and bring them home to a nation they would lovingly affect and change.

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3

Sentimentalizing the Fallen Woman

It is 1858 and Dr. William Sanger, the head physician at Blackwell’s Island, is conducting a survey of area prostitutes with the aid of the police and at the behest of the New York City government. The survey begins with general questions as to age, birthplace, religious background, literacy level and educational attainment, occupations of parents, and national origin. Interviewers work from a prepared list of queries, such as “What induced you to emigrate to the United States?” and “What trade or calling did you follow before you became a prostitute?” Dr. Sanger faithfully compiles the results, working from two thousand completed surveys in total. One question particularly calls forth his interest: “What was the cause of your becoming a prostitute?” Causes Numbers Inclination 513 Destitution 525 Seduced and abandoned 258 Drink, and the desire to drink 181 Ill-treatment of parents, relatives, or husbands 164 As an easy life 124 Bad company 84 Persuaded by prostitutes 71 Too idle to work 29 Violated 27 Seduced on board emigrant ships 16 [Seduced] in emigrant boarding houses 8 Total 2000 (Sanger 488) “This question is probably the most important of the series,” writes Dr. Sanger, “as the replies lay open to a considerable extent those hidden springs of evil which have hitherto been known only from their

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results” (487–88). It is the root of such evil, its “hidden springs” and catalysts, that Dr. Sanger wants desperately to find and crush. At the charity hospital on Blackwell’s he lives and breathes with the poor, treating venereal disease, the effects of malnutrition, and workplace injuries, maladies left untended for lack of cash. Next door to the hospital stands the prison, the buildings segregated on a slice of land less than two miles long, their proximity the truest indication that indeed, it is a crime to be poor.1 But of all those passing through Blackwell’s, these women, fallen women, have transformed Dr. Sanger into a man with a mission. More than that: these women have turned Dr. Sanger into a writer. The surveys metamorphose as they brush his fingers and palm, and while the doctor’s original purpose remains articulated in a subtitle, “Being an Official Report to the Board of Alms-House Governors of the City of New York,” the main title announces the new grandiosity of his plans: William W. Sanger’s History of Prostitution: Its Extent, Causes, and Effects throughout the World (1858). His fascination with fallen women spurs him to pursue research, to look for “those hidden springs of evil” everywhere from ancient Egypt, Greece, and Rome to gaslit London. Now the results of the doctor’s reading surround Blackwell’s women, making what should have been a succinct document into a six hundred and eighty-five page tome, handsomely bound and published by Harper and Brothers at a price of $3.00.2 Some of the women’s stories are simple, statistical: “C. L.: her inclination was swayed by women already on the town” (489); “J. S.: My husband committed adultery. I caught him with another woman, and then he left” (506). Others resist the confines of the tables and the numbers, and Dr. Sanger politely steps out of their way: During the progress of this investigation in one of the lower wards of the city, attention was drawn to a pale but interestinglooking girl, about seventeen years of age, from whose replies the following narrative is condensed, retaining her own words as nearly as possible. “I have been leading this life from about the middle of last January (1856). It was absolute want that drove me to it. My sister, who was about three years older than I am, lived with me. She was deformed and a cripple from a fall she had while a child, and could not do any hard work. She could do a little sewing, and when we Sentimentalizing the Fallen Woman 89

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both were able to get work we could just make a living. When the heavy snow-storm came our work stopped, and we were in want of food and coals. One very cold morning, . . . the landlord’s agent called for some rent we owed, and told us that, if we could not pay it, we should have to move.” (490) The girl goes on; there is more demand for money and less supply of it. A woman invites the girl into her home, and as the girl sits by the fire, the woman says she could come live there, be warm always, have food always, have money to help her sister. There is so little to it. The girl thinks. When I got home and saw my sister so sick as she was, and wanting many little things that we had no money for, and no friends to help us to, my heart almost broke. . . . I laid awake all night thinking, and in the morning I made up my mind to come [to the brothel]. I told [my sister] what I was going to do, and she begged me not, but my mind was made up. She said it would be sin, and I told her that I should have to answer for that, and that I was forced to do it because there was no other way to keep myself and help her. . . . She tried all she could to persuade me not, but I was determined, and so I came here. I hated the thoughts of such a life, and my only reason for coming was that I might help her. I thought that, if I had been alone, I would sooner have starved, but I could not bear to see her suffering. She only lived a few weeks after I came here. I broke her heart. I do not like the life. I would do almost anything to get out of it; but, now that I have once done wrong, I can not get anyone to give me work, and I must stop here unless I wish to be starved to death. (490–91) Dr. Sanger writes, “This plain and affecting narrative needs no comment. It reveals the history of many an unfortunate woman in this city, and . . . it must appeal to every sensitive heart” (491). His lack of comment, of course, is comment, and he is obviously riveted by this girl, and all the other girls who look and sound just like her. Girls victimized by life. Who wouldn’t be riveted by such a story? Thus when he begins to discuss the causes of prostitution one by one, he seizes upon the ultimate victim’s story: “seduced and abandoned.” Two hundred and fifty-eight women say they have fallen due to being “seduced and abandoned.” They are only half those who claim 90 Sentimentalizing the Fallen Woman

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destitution or inclination, but Dr. Sanger assures his readers that “these numbers give but a faint idea of the actual total that should be recorded under the designation [seduced and abandoned], as many who are included in other classes doubtless should have been returned in this” (492). After speculating on what factors might awaken sexual passion in women (the potential naturalness of which he considers “actually incredible”), the doctor comes to a culturally familiar conclusion: “man is the aggressive animal, so far as sexual desire is involved” (489). If men are “animals” and women victims, does that not make women prey? Yes, it does: “there can be no doubt that, in most cases of seduction, female virtue is trustingly surrendered to the specious arguments and false promises of dishonorable men” (494). Here the doctor finds his best story; enthralled by it, he ruminates on the exalted and highly fragile natures of women. He writes of how “ a woman’s heart longs for a reciprocal affection” (492), “her thoughts revert[ing] only to her lover” (493); yet unbeknownst to her, that lover is a rogue, using “base means” (493), “wrong and outrage” (495), “treachery” and “falsehood” (496). With men revealed as the animals they are, Dr. Sanger reasons that in cases of seduction and abandonment, “a woman does not merit the contempt with which her conduct is visited. She has sinned from weakness, not from vice; she has been made the victim of her own unbounded love, her heart’s richest and purest affections” (493). After all, “willing to sacrifice all to him, she feels implicitly assured that he will protect her from harm” (494). The doctor gets so lost in his story that he loses sight of his subjects, the two thousand very real ones; in this part of the story, he doesn’t mention them at all. But this is a study, an important work, based upon much hard data and his own research. So the doctor returns to one of his seduced and abandoned cases: “A girl, eighteen years of age, born in Louisiana, of highly respectable parents, was induced to elope . . . with a man who accorded with her romantic ideal of a lover. No marriage vows ever passed between them; she trusted him as the heroine of a modern novel would have done, and he deceived her, as all modern rakes deceive their victims” (519). Young girls, pale and poor, rich and respectable, all so deceived by “rakes” and “novels,” rogues and villains. For many pages more Dr. Sanger will continue to tell their tales, making it perfectly clear that it is not only the girl’s “romantic ideal” that is at stake here.

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When William Sanger published his History of Prostitution in 1858, prostitutes or “fallen women” had become one of the most controversial objects of antebellum social reformers, and those who took the fallen under their auspices announced their goal in their name: “moral reformers.” “Prostitutes had long been familiar to New Yorkers,” writes Christine Stansell, “ but between 1830 and 1860 women ‘on the town’ became the subject of sustained social commentary” (171). Sanger’s volume is one of the many written results of this commentary, a bureaucratic report intended for a specific body of local government, offering descriptions, analyses, and possible solutions so that the proper authorities could address a social problem. His compositional method mirrors the text’s multiple goals, making it a provocative hybrid work: part governmental report, part sociological data, part field work summary, part historical research, and last but not least, part personal essay. These aspects speak to the explicit aims of the History, which are to demonstrate and explain the truth about social conditions in the antebellum era. Throughout the volume, William Sanger repeatedly points to a foundation in demonstrable truth that his study possesses. He does so by appealing to his readers’ own sense of public crisis; by continuously offering statistics, as well as quotes from and references to “experts”; by foregrounding the findings of the study he helped to develop and run; and by referring to the study’s support from government officials. Like its predecessors in panic fiction, then, Sanger’s History bases its appeal for reform upon a stated possession of truth and a fair representation of social conditions. Yet in a marked deviation from the categorizing impulses of panic fiction, Sanger’s History does not take steps to differentiate itself from other genres of writing, or even from other works that study prostitution. On the contrary, the History blithely ignores distinctions of genre and style as it follows its fallen women from one scene of victimization to another, offering forgiveness, solidarity, sympathy, and asides about heroines and villains. Thus what would appear to be the most significant difference between the History and panic fiction—that the former is not, in fact, fictional—blurs as William Sanger and other moral reformers work to transform the fallen woman into one thing she has never been, a romantic ideal. Sanger is not an author by profession. He is a medical doctor engaged in a project best understood as a combi92 Sentimentalizing the Fallen Woman

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nation of bureaucratic inquiry, social history, and early sociological research. He is not a novelist. But at times he sounds just like one, primarily because he utilizes sentimental narrative strategies of address, characterization, and theme in composing his governmental report. This chapter examines writings by William Sanger and other moral reformers in order to illuminate just how sentimentality and romantic ideals were put to the work of reform by those involved in antiprostitution activism. Moral reform writing blurs basic generic boundaries between nonfiction and fiction, borrowing elements of the era’s novels even in the process of documenting empirical truth about prostitutes. These works also collapse distinctions among a variety of writings: governmental reports-cum-histories, newspapers and magazines, novels, and slave narratives. Moral reform writing reveals the centrality of sentimental narrative strategies to transforming fallen women’s representation in dominant public discourse, and thus, beginning to transform her place in that public. Despite the taboos concerning discussion of sexuality in “polite” public venues, it is surprising just how present fallen women were in antebellum print culture. Most of these representations both condemned prostitution and voyeuristically exploited the social vulnerabilities that often drove women to it. Throughout the reform writings discussed in this chapter, including William Sanger’s, we shall see an awareness of that dominant discourse and its representations, particularly as they are perpetuated in popular fiction. Moral reformers decried the portrayal of fallen women as evil vixens and the titillating dramatization of “good” girls’ vulnerabilities in novel after novel. But while protesting these fictions—and insisting that they were fictions in every sense of the word—reformers appropriated elements of other fictions, ranging from Pamela, Clarissa and Mary Barton to tales of American “seduced and abandoned” victims like Charlotte Temple and The Coquette. Moral reformers, then, used fiction to fight fiction. Like their peers in panic writing, anti-prostitution activists appealed to models of proper representation—the right kind of fictions—in their efforts to change how Americans dealt with fallen women. And fundamental to that reform was changing how Americans read fallen women, from evil vixen to romantic ideal. In appropriating Sanger’s own term and repositioning it to describe his and other moral reformers’ conceptions of the fallen woman, I hope to seize upon several connotations of “romantic.” I use the term first in its most common, vernacular sense: the Louisiana Sentimentalizing the Fallen Woman 93

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girl fell for “a man who accorded with her romantic ideal of a lover,” and reading through Sanger’s stories of individual prostitutes, it is hard not to suspect that he is falling for them. As Sanger and reformers write about fallen women, they appeal to readers’ most intimate feelings about the female kin for whom they already care—daughters, sisters, mothers, and perhaps wives—and plead for metaphor to do poetic and social work. Their comparisons between, and modifications of, the stories of fictional fallen women and real fallen women also encourage similar sympathetic response. But reformers continuously evince despair about the fates of fallen women, constructing them as victims in need of readerly rescue. In their compulsive equations between “woman” and “victim,” one can also detect the trace of romance descended from what was then its most recent lyrical instantiation: romantic poetry. The elegiac figuring of dying, doomed Lucy in William Wordsworth’s poems is especially familiar here: “She lived unknown / and few could know / When Lucy ceased to be; / But she is in her grave, and, oh, / The difference to me!” (Wordsworth 153). Lucy is always just beyond the devoted (and obsessed) speaker’s reach, and similarly—after countless stories of girls seduced and abandoned, girls abducted and abandoned, girls simply reduced to poverty, abandoned by the world—fallen women begin to seem always just beyond the reader’s rescuing hand. As are Wordsworth’s readers, we are asked to take notice of thousands of forgotten Lucys. But not only do moral reformers exhort their audience to take action in myriad ways, they also, in a manner reminiscent of Harriet Beecher Stowe, push the unconverted to “feel right” first, suggesting that emotional identification is where reform’s revolutionary work begins. And if readers fall just a little in love, feeling for fallen women as they would for their own loved ones—well, so much the better. In this chapter I follow moral reformers as they tell the fallen woman’s story truthfully, sentimentally, and romantically, from the 1830s up until the beginning of the Civil War. First, I contextualize the work of reformers such as William Sanger by looking at the dominant representation of fallen women in the antebellum U.S., particularly in George Foster’s New York by Gas-light (1850). Both Sanger, as head physician for the Blackwell’s Island complex, and Foster, as one of the most successful writers for Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune, witnessed the growth of prostitution in New York City during the 1840s and ’50s. Although both men proclaimed their com94 Sentimentalizing the Fallen Woman

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mitment to social reform, their contrasting narrative styles and opinionated judgments highlight sentimentality’s power to shape approaches both to the fallen woman’s story and to the social policies created in response to it. Next, I turn to fellow travelers of Sanger’s, the staffs of four moral reform newspapers, the Illuminator, McDowall’s Journal, the Advocate of Moral Reform and Female Guardian, and the Friend of Virtue. The first two were founded by visionary men, Joseph Whitmarsh and the Reverend John McDowall, in the 1830s; after their quick demise, the latter papers carried on their work, but did so as the communicatory weapons of all female moral reform societies. These 1830s, ’40s, and ’50s newspaper writings are united in one effort: to narrate the progress of “the great sin,” and document its eradication from American shores. All of these reformers utilize the same sentimental methods as does William Sanger. But, for the female reformers at the Advocate and the Friend of Virtue, an insistence upon addressing and combating differences among women—whether based in class, ethnicity, fact, or fiction—is far more pronounced, and indicative of the high stakes that these women recognized in writing about social causes. Sentimentality informs the female reformers’ writings and provides the language for their social work, work which invariably broaches questions of cultural representations and women’s control of them. The issue of representation binds all of these writers, but particularly pertains to the final section of this chapter, which looks at Harriet Jacobs’s 1861 narrative Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Jacobs’s work is typically categorized as a hybrid slave narrative and sentimental novel. While these traditions certainly inform Incidents, perceived conflicts between them have prevented scholars from recognizing the crucial connections between Jacobs and the work of moral reform; more so, a focus upon a so-called tension between sentimentality and slave narratives obscures antebellum black authors’ highly-charged concerns about slavery’s metaphorical and literal relationships with fallenness. This remains true even as Americanist scholars comprehend that Harriet Jacobs holds what was, for her, a dubious honor: to this date, she is the only antebellum woman known to admit to fallenness in her own text. Unlike Sanger or the white female reformers behind the Advocate and the Friend of Virtue, Jacobs cannot blithely or naïvely dismiss social differences among women. Nevertheless, she shares sentimental strategies and radical social Sentimentalizing the Fallen Woman 95

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goals with her white peers: to transform the fallen woman, and hence turn her(self) into a romantic ideal. For, as is evident from William Sanger’s moving words, women who are romantic ideals are women worth saving. Such metaphorical equations promised a profoundly radical rereading of what made women socially valuable beings. They also positioned victimization as that which would determine proper gender in a morally reformed world: a good woman was either a victim or someone capable of being victimized. Thus moral reform writings demonstrate political complexities on par with the financial fictions of the 1830s. Whether by Sanger or the anonymous staffs of the newspapers, these moral reform writings can inspire and infuriate within the quick space of a single sentence. It may seem strange to devote a chapter of a study of fiction to what would technically be called nonfiction. Indeed, I do categorize as nonfiction many of the works that figure here. Certainly the reformers themselves would have categorized them so, because in another point of resemblance with panic fiction, all of the stories that these activists tell about fallen women are true. But I would suggest that genre categorization, and the meanings through which we strive to categorize, are troubled by the types of work that proliferated in the moral reform movement. Like panic writers, moral reformers expressed great unease concerning what fiction is, or seems to be; and like panic writers, they were just as determined to use it themselves, rather than abandon a potentially potent weapon. At times, it is unclear whether reformers like William Sanger remembered the difference between fictional fallen women and real fallen women—the thousands of women who walked Boston’s streets, sought shelter and comfort in Philadelphia, or found themselves dragged into the cold cells of prisons like Blackwell’s. But this is the point: such blurring reminds us of the power of imaginative writing, and of sentimental narrative’s ability to move readers. Thus, it makes clear fiction’s appeal to reformers. Ultimately, the blurring of reality and fiction, of Blackwell’s girls and imagined girls, tells us that what reformers understood to be true about fallen women could not be contained in neat narrative categories. It could only be expressed in terms of which stories were wrong and which stories got it right.

Vixens and Ideals Unlike William Sanger, most nineteenth-century Americans did not find romantic ideals in the increasingly visible figures of fallen 96 Sentimentalizing the Fallen Woman

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women, considering them, rather, not a product of widespread social decline but a source of it. Along with criminals of other varieties— gangs, con men, drunkards, and the shabby indigent—fallen women populated the debauched urban spaces more commonly known as New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Washington D.C., and so on. Thus they formed part of the upsurge in crime and “specter of social breakdown” that Steven Mintz cites as a major catalyst for reform activities (3). Moral reformers saw prostitution as “the great sin,” a heinous exploitation of those already deemed to be the weaker sex. They also recognized how intimately related prostitution often was to other social ills, such as alcoholism, drug use, robbery, and other criminal activities, as well as the spread of sexually-transmitted diseases, all of which seemed to be similarly flourishing along with urban populations. As L. Mara Dodge notes in her study of female convicts: The bounds of proper femininity were vigilantly policed by family, friends, church, community, local institutions, and the state. . . . [Women’s] behaviors and circumstances that were defined as improper, include[ed] alcoholism, promiscuity, illegitimate births, disorderly living, venereal disease, interracial relationships, homosexuality, and common-law marriages. . . . Above and beyond their legal offenses, and well into the 1960s, it was officials’ estimates of women’s character, particularly their moral and sexual reputations, that often determined their fate within the criminal justice system. (4) Prostitution, then, was inextricably bound with other legal and social offenses, both literally and, more often, through informal assumption. As Dodge’s list suggests, women’s sexual transgressions need not be official or commercially organized in order to brand them as social outcasts. A “fallen woman” could indeed be a prostitute, but she could also be the victim of rape, a partner in an extramarital or premarital affair, a woman behaving in an “overly familiar” manner, or a widow daring to engage in sexual relations. The term did not differentiate between seduced and abandoned teenagers, like those pitied by Sanger, and sex workers with a lifetime’s illegal activity behind them. These types of distinctions were left to alternative, colorful euphemisms such as “women on the town” or “ladies of the night.” Regardless, once women in the nineteenth century had fallen, they stayed fallen; it rarely mattered how they got that way. Sentimentalizing the Fallen Woman 97

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Nineteenth-century estimates of how many women engaged in prostitution vary widely, although reformers tended to suggest frighteningly high numbers while government officials aimed far lower. In The History of Prostitution, Sanger calculated that New York City alone was home to six thousand prostitutes; two decades earlier, moral reformer John McDowall had put the number at ten thousand.3 But regardless of the exact size of the population involved, historians agree on the root causes of an increase in prostitution in this period. The shift from an agrarian economy to an industrialized one, the decline in small household manufacture, the increasing immigrant population, and internal migration from the countryside to the city all altered family structures and women’s means of financial and social support. Reformers in particular recognized the connection between prostitution and the limited types of work available to women. “As servants or milliners,” explains Ruth Rosen, “poor single girls and women encountered a different world outside the family. Both wage discrimination and sexual exploitation shaped their working experiences. At best, most female employment offered subsistence wages” (3). This is a point made repeatedly by moral reformers such as Sanger. In fact, in discussing prostitutes’ answers to questions on their economic and educational backgrounds, Sanger notes that a high proportion of them can neither read nor write, a handicap that further limits their potential earning power. Fathers and mothers who discourage or actively prevent their female children’s education, Sanger writes, are effectively “training their daughters to become prostitutes” (470). Thus the potential ending of Caroline Sawyer’s The Merchant’s Widow, which I discussed in the previous chapter, is manifested in moral reform texts as well as in women’s history generally. In the new urban America, the human detritus of which Sanger saw every day at Blackwell’s, women labored under extraordinary socioeconomic disadvantage in every way possible. Indeed, the Blackwell’s Island complex where William Sanger worked and wrote his History serves as a fitting example of transformational woes both urban and national, as well as of the web of social problems within which reformers located prostitution. New York City purchased the island, complete with an Italianate mansion, from private owners in 1828 for use as a prison. So beautiful was the original estate that the Ladies Companion and Literary Expositor wrote in 1836 that “a building of such noble structure and imposing appearance . . . 98 Sentimentalizing the Fallen Woman

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seems to be too good a habitation for those despicable outcasts, chained to the floor of their cells; it is in every respect a PALACE of human misery and woe.”4 Convict labor was used to add on to the original building and construct new ones, including the nation’s first “Municipal Lunatic Asylum” in 1839. This was the site to which New York World stunt reporter Nellie Bly would get herself committed and write her exposé of insane asylums later in the century. (“The Insane Asylum on Blackwell’s Island is a human rat-trap,” wrote Bly, who was horrified by the treatment to which she and other inmates were subjected.5) By 1860, when the New York Times reported the budget for the Blackwell’s complex, it had expanded beyond the prison and madhouse to encompass an alms house, work house, charity hospital, a “small pox hospital” for victims of contagious diseases, and a “colored orphan asylum.”6 The logic of who became a resident of Blackwell’s is painfully obvious: racial minorities, the poor, the sick, and the criminal were all segregated on 120 acres in the East River. Later called Welfare Island and now Roosevelt Island, Blackwell’s history is inextricably intertwined with that of New York City’s efforts to manage and contain the disorder of its growing populace. The development of “public health” as a governmental charge and an area of public policy, as well as the changing institutional structure of prisons, can be read through the history of Blackwell’s—which is one reason their historical society’s Web site is sponsored by the New York Correction History Society.7 Then as now, women composed a disproportionately high number of America’s poor, and thus of that population most likely to become residents of the alms house, the charity hospital, or the brothel. Again and again, Sanger receives dismaying answers to his questions regarding literacy, financial support from families and husbands, and even the amount of funds with which immigrant prostitutes had embarked for America. (The average sum for the latter was between thirty and forty dollars, or about enough to support a single woman, with no dependents, nor any incident of illness or injury, for three to four months [466–67].8) From Sanger’s point of view, both literally and metaphorically shaped by life at Blackwell’s, the urbanization of America was itself threatening to women’s well-being. “The influences of metropolitan life are not conducive to the advance of female morality,” declared the doctor (465). But as page after page of the History demonstrates, it was not only women’s morality that was imperiled, it was their very ability to simply exist. Sentimentalizing the Fallen Woman 99

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However, in the world of the printed page, fallen women were alive and healthy, seemingly deriving strength from the very social circumstances that moral reformers bemoaned. Fallen women permeated antebellum print culture, assertively and often in the most bewitchingly insolent ways. Complaints about prostitution and its role in a general moral decline faithfully appeared in the cheap penny papers like the New York Herald, the New York Sun, and the New York Tribune, all of which spent a great deal of time—and column space— decrying the great sin. Fallen women also formed a staple of the novella-style pamphlets generated from contemporary trials. The murders of prostitutes Maria Bickford, Helen Jewett, and Mary Rogers all produced dozens of lurid “true stories.”9 (Such pamphlets were singled out by Sanger as dangerous “yellow-covered literature” [522].) For preachers in need of a topic for a Sunday sermon, fallen women were always useful. However, as evidenced by the notorious legal cases involving ministers themselves, and documented in published trial transcripts and more ambitious works such as Catharine Williams’s Fall River (1833), a spiritual relationship was not the only one some men of the cloth sought with their fallen sisters.10 But of course, it was the novel that continuously dallied with fallen women and the terrifying specter of fallenness. Marketed as cautionary tales, early Republic best-sellers Charlotte Temple (1794) and The Coquette (1797) dramatized the perils of young women’s escape from under watchful parental eyes. Ironically, Charlotte Temple’s narrator intones that the fictional era of seduction and abandonment is finished, and hence, no fair reader can claim literary influence as a cause of her downfall: “Oh my dear girls—for to such only am I writing— listen not to the voice of love, unless sanctioned by paternal approbation: be assured, it is now past the days of romance: no woman can be run away with contrary to her own inclination” (Rowson 29). Moral reformers, however, would respectfully disagree. A few decades later, the prolific Ned Buntline (E. Z. C. Judson), sensation novelist extraordinaire of the mid-century, used titillating titles that hinted at fallenness such as the G’hals of New York (1850) and Magdalena, the Outcast (1866). His Agnes, the Beautiful Milliner (n.d.) capitalized on the association between the working poor and fallen women.11 The novel opens with the words, “Help! Help! Oh, help!” and the eponymous heroine being chased by “a well-dressed, handsome-looking young man” marked by “a look of ‘insouciance”’ (Buntline 7).12 Mean100 Sentimentalizing the Fallen Woman

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while, Buntline’s sensation novelist peer George Thompson penned few pages that did not include fallen women. His Venus in Boston (1849) featured the titular temptress and a dizzying array of similarly inclined females housed in a club subtly referred to as “The Chambers of Love.” In City Crimes (1849), a member of “the unfortunate class” describes in detail how her mother slept with the local pastor, her father slept with the family maid, and she herself was prostituted by her first husband (111). Thompson’s narrator occasionally chides his ne’er-do-wells for “reveling in the delights of voluptuousness,” but more often describes fallen women’s voluptuous figures (112). A single quote from City Crimes suffices to illustrate what moral reformers hated about Thompson and his ilk: early in the story, the aforementioned cheating parson whispers to a young parishioner, “My dear, what a delicious bust you have!” (115). Nor was the American reading public content with homegrown literary tawdriness. Imported tales of fallenness like British author Henry Gladwyn Jebb’s Out of the Depths (1859) sold well. In a traditional, yet still cheeky, touch, its ruined heroine describes the “injury” done to her by novel-reading.13 All the while the putatively respectable press sounded an increasingly hysterical note about prostitution’s effect on the body politic. Soon after the publications of both Sanger’s History and Out of the Depths, the New York Times charged that prostitution, “the chief bane of savages, . . . [was] depopulating Christendom,” while the New Englander stated categorically that “the debauching influence of . . . publication[s] which vitiated the public morals” could not be undone by “all the editorials in behalf of virtue . . . in a twelve month.”14 Indeed. But the efforts of Buntline, Thompson, and Jebb to parlay fictional fallen women into literary fortune paled in comparison with the success of a Philadelphia reformer who claimed to be on the side of the seduced and abandoned. George Lippard’s The Quaker City; Or, the Monks of Monk Hall, published in 1845, sold over 100,000 copies during its author’s lifetime.15 Lambasted by some critics as “a disgusting mass of filth” and “the most immoral work of the age,” The Quaker City dramatically weaves together murder, adultery, illegitimate children, criminal activity, pagan cult worship, craven social climbing, drunkenness, opium use, amoral bankers, ministers, and “pillars of the community,” and general misconduct among Philadelphia’s upper class. But the novel’s beginning, and the catalyst for a good portion of the above list, is the planned seduction and abandonment of “the flower Sentimentalizing the Fallen Woman 101

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of one of the first families in the city” (15). In the novel’s preface, Lippard explains that the author himself “was the only Protector of an Orphan Sister,” and that in considering all of the evils to which she might be subject, he “determined to write a book, founded upon the following idea”: “That the seduction of a poor and innocent girl, is a deed altogether as criminal as deliberate murder. It is worse than the murder of the body, for it is the assassination of the soul. If the murderer deserves death by the gallows, then the assassin of chastity and maidenhood is worthy of death by the hands of any man, and in any place” (1–2). He continues: “This was the first idea of the Work. It embodies a sophism, but it is a sophism that errs on the right side” (2). The would-be Lovelace in Lippard’s seduction plot boasts of the fake wedding ceremony with which he will break down his intended’s defenses: “Only a pretended marriage. . . . As for this ‘life interest’ in a woman, it don’t suit my taste. A nice little sham marriage . . . is better than ten real ones” (15). Never one to pull punches, Lippard surely meant for these lines—uttered in an oyster bar during a drunken outing—to convey the shamefully perverse character of the city’s wealthy young lads. After all, the young man cannot “just” seduce his prey; he must make a mockery of the marriage sacrament as well. As a historical figure, Lippard differs from the likes of Buntline and Thompson in an important respect: he possessed bona fide credentials as a reformer, helping to found an early labor organization called the Brotherhood of the Union. The group’s stated purpose was to “espouse the cause of the Masses, and battle the tyrants of the Social System,—against Land Monopolists and against all Monied Oppressors” (qtd in Reynolds, George Lippard 19). But detractors of his most famous novel articulated a perceptive criticism: without background knowledge as to what sort of man George Lippard happened to be, a casual reader of works like The Quaker City and Venus in Boston would be challenged to detect differences of politics or social aim between them. Both revel in the seamy underworld of antebellum America, and both seem to take just as much luxuriating pleasure in surveying that world as in reproving it. The fallen women inhabiting the penny press, yellow press, and the world of the “voluptuous” novel, then, were far different creatures from William Sanger’s fallen women. Depraved and enjoying it, many of these women were sirens, evil seductresses bent on ruining unsus102 Sentimentalizing the Fallen Woman

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pecting men. At best, fallen women were naughty girls hiding novels and lovers from their parents—and enjoying it. Sanger lamented the impact that this wrong kind of fiction could have upon both personal and national morals, and addressed the issue directly several times in the History. Divided into chapters focusing upon individual countries, regions, and time periods, the volume devotes multiple chapters to the world’s most powerful modern nations: Great Britain, France, and New York. (It is an instance of synecdoche that would make any resident of the Big Apple swell with pride.) Literature features in Sanger’s discussion of all three, even appearing in three out of the five chapters on France. And in a move unsurprising to all literate members of the Western world, this emphasis on France reflects their proportionate culpability for unleashing “lewd books and pictures” upon the rest of creation (120). Sanger lambastes the French Revolution, maintaining that “the literature which preceded and accompanied [it] went the whole length of undermining and unsettling every established institution, without building up an effective substitute in place of the structure destroyed” (310). Hence the French not only have a problem with the prostitution of women, they have a problem with the “prostitution of literature”: “the most successful authors of the day, such as Voltaire, handled themes grossly immoral in themselves, and rendered still more offensive by their mode of treatment” (130). After claiming that the “most popular [French] novel of the eighteenth century . . . [was] the narrative of the adventures of a prostitute,” Sanger declares that “Diderot, Mirabeau, Montesquieu, and . . . all the most eminent men of France, prostituted their genius to the composition of erotic works which were widely read by women as well as men” (130). Women, literature, genius: in Sanger’s History, French culture itself is tainted by sexual transgression, and finally defined by it. Gallic immorality is even partly blamed for Great Britain’s prostitution epidemic. In the chapter covering British history from the Commonwealth to present-day London, literature is mentioned twice: first in its seventeenth- and eighteenth-century incarnations, and second through “the influence of French literature” upon British belles lettres (298). (As for the former mention: Sanger is no fan of Restoration comedy.) So strong is French immorality, it inflects the literature of its ancient neighbor and frequent enemy. And what of New York, the only part of the United States to merit inclusion in the History? Sanger assails its education system, which Sentimentalizing the Fallen Woman 103

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allows “so-called classical studies,” in which “courtesans described as goddesses” have slyly “undermined moral principles” (521). Next he moves to “obscene publications,” involving visual images he declines to describe (522). But then, last “but not less dangerous than the directly obscene publications is a class of voluptuous novels which is rapidly circulating” (522). Once again, France deserves partial blame, for “some [of these novels] are translations from the French,” but others are simply native filth (522). Sanger has cast his net wide, from Voltaire to “the cheap pamphlets” that carry “voluptuous” tales. But ultimately, where later Americans would distinguish between high culture and fun trash, Sanger sees literature that serves the same purpose and performs the same corruption. If these works glorify the sexual exploitation (or even merely the sexual exploits) of women, then they tell the wrong story about the already weaker sex. Sanger makes no categorical divisions in discussing literature because, for him, all forms are the same if they tell the same story. They are all the wrong kind of fiction. Most galling to Sanger and to all moral reformers was the extent to which “voluptuous” fiction surveyed all women with an exploitative eye. Hence the adjective, which was ubiquitous in moral reform discussions of fiction. Voluptuous works embodied women, and embodiment was a risky business. It is not only George Thompson’s fallen women who have “delicious bust[s],” for example, but also those whose chastity is in danger. In the work of Thompson and company, purity is never treated as something to safeguard respectfully; rather, it’s just a more tempting come on. Such representations spilled over into all sorts of “city writing,” particularly the combination exposé–travel narrative that sought to introduce America’s new metropolitan spaces to those not yet resident there.16 George Foster’s bestselling New York by Gas-light (1850) provides a compelling example of how forcefully antebellum Americans understood fallen women to embody, as well as contribute to, a variety of urban, industrial, and migratory evils. As a reporter for the New York Tribune, Foster spent years explaining the country’s largest metropolis to the rest of the country, as well as to itself. In reading New York by Gas-light and its predecessor, New York in Slices (1848), it becomes clear that, for Foster, depicting fallen women represents the primary means of conveying New York City’s degraded urban character. Just as the Panic of 1837 encapsulated a variety of social ills for panic writers, the fallen 104 Sentimentalizing the Fallen Woman

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women of city writings symbolize all that is worst in the country’s most controversial spaces. Foster’s brief first chapter of Gas-light repeatedly depicts “women . . . [who] are all of one kind” and prowl Broadway at night, “on the look-out for victims” (73, 70). The fourth chapter, entitled “The Golden Gate of Hell,” admonishes those squeamish readers who might object to continued discussion of prostitution: Let no prudish moralist condemn us because we go boldly and thoroughly through the haunts of vice and dissipation. . . . Such facts, accumulated in no wanton spirit of levity, but carefully gathered and with a faithful desire to do good, amount in the end to great truths. . . . It is such facts that society most needs—facts which show the actual consistence, color and dimensions of the cancer that lies eating at its very vitals. (92) Thus Foster, like his fellow New Yorker Sanger, justifies his writing on fallenness with an appeal to truth and reality. If Gas-light were indeed not only truthful but also accurate, then readers could safely conclude that hardly any women who inhabited New York were not prostitutes. Throughout the book Foster mentions fallen women repeatedly, returning to them frequently while describing varieties of oyster rooms and billiards clubs or the night life of Five Points. Following his recommendation to “prudish moralists” quoted above, Foster notes that fallenness is a pitifully quick process: there is a “brief period of transition between the purity and peace of virtue and the swinish hell of filth and abomination into which the victim hastens to plunge and wallow forever. Yes—truth bids us say that, to all appearance, there is no repentance for the past nor terror for the future, here” (93). Our author admits to the belief that fallen women were “betrayed by the men their young hearts loved, and then abandoned by the world which should have protected them,” a viewpoint he holds in common with William Sanger. But the journalist differs from the doctor in his judgment of what such betrayal amounts to. “Pooh! Talk not to [fallen women] of female purity and human sympathy, and such fine nonsense,” writes Foster. “They know better” (93). Of course, whatever a romantic ideal is, she is never knowing. But Foster’s fallen women emphatically know too much: they cavort with black men, whom they have the temerity to consider “as desirable companions and lovers” (125); they fall in with thieves and gamblers, joining nefarious schemes Sentimentalizing the Fallen Woman 105

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against unsuspecting customers; and if they have been seduced and abandoned, they in turn abandon or murder their unwanted children (130). “After a woman once enters a house of prostitution,” warns the author, “and leads the life of all who dwell there, it is too late” (131). At this stage fallen women are both poisoned and themselves a poison, infected by “a kind of moral insanity” that places them beyond salvation of any stripe (131). Gas-light even offers stories that purport to be from fallen women themselves. But even though each woman tells a tale of woe, she ends by condemning herself as past hope. “I know I am a demon—a she-devil—as are all women who have lost their virtue; and I mean to make the most of it,” admits one (99). Thus Foster’s prostitutes symbolize the real city and speak its realities, embellishing the author’s portrait by conveniently agreeing to their own death sentences. Yet just two years earlier, the great truths that Foster uncovered about prostitution were radically different. Before publishing New York by Gas-light, Foster had served up New York in Slices as a series of sketches for the Tribune in 1848; one of those “slices,” a piece called “The Needlewomen,” explicitly links working women’s low wages to prostitution’s high membership rolls.17 The plight of the needlewomen and other female members of the working poor elicits Foster’s sympathy: “more than half the prostitutes and female criminals in the city came here from the country to earn a living in some honest way, and to gratify an innocent longing for a little female finery, and a passion to ‘see the world”’ (233). These fallen women are kin to Sanger’s brood. Though “prostitutes and . . . criminals,” they began with “honesty” and “innocence”; so modest and unthreatening are their beginnings that even their taste for “finery” is described as “little,” a “longing” rather than greed or covetousness. They remain eponymous “needlewomen,” rather than the brazen “she-devil[s]” who have walked through New York’s “Gate of Hell.” Thus they are archetypal sentimental creatures, constructed and primarily identified through their disenfranchised, victimized status. Because of its sentimental perspective, “The Needlewomen” proposes solutions to the problem of fallenness, including a more just earnings system for the millinery trade, and an entreaty to young women from the countryside to “stay calmly where you are, beneath your own pure skies” (233). “The Golden Gate of Hell” and all of New York by Gas-light, 106 Sentimentalizing the Fallen Woman

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despite protestations of social do-gooding, propose no similar solutions; they merely offer their readers a voyeuristic guided tour. These writings were penned by the same author, collected in volumes bearing nearly the same titles, written only two years apart. Yet their crucial difference—the presence of sentiment in one, and absence of it in the other—places them on opposite sides of the debate over fallenness and the issue of its reform.

Sentimentality, Truth and Victims In U.S. literary studies, there are few terms with more vexed histories than sentimentality. It has been approached as a literary style and as a cultural phenomenon, as an empowering discourse and as one complicit with a racist, imperialist, and class-biased social dominance. I will offer my own comprehension of sentimentality here, while trying to avoid the quagmire of dueling viewpoints just mentioned. In her essay “What Is Sentimentality?” June Howard offers the cautionary remark that scholars “still argue the question of whether the [sentimental] form is complicit with or subversive of dominant ideology; even the plausible suggestion that it might be both is a maneuver within received perspectives” (“What Is Sentimentality?” 64). I concur, though it seems to me that sentimentality can indeed be all of the above, even for the same author or within a single text.18 I am less concerned with passing moral judgment on sentimentality, though, than with understanding how it works in the moral reform narratives under examination in this chapter. Writings such as William Sanger’s History consistently use sentimental narrative strategies, particularly of address, characterization, perspective, and theme, that emphasize fallen women’s victimized status, lament that victimization, and metaphorically imagine fallen women as kin to author or reader. This emphasis on victimization, lamentation, and kinship serves as the crucial difference between the world of moral reform narrative and the worlds of authors like George Foster and George Thompson. All of these strategies are deployed in the service of reform, and in the service of telling the truth about fallen women. In American literary studies of the past thirty years, however, sentimentality has not been seen as a vehicle for truth. When Ann Douglas unwittingly jump-started the study of nineteenth-century sentimental literature in the late 1970s, she charged the vast majority of U.S. women Sentimentalizing the Fallen Woman 107

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writers with having given in to a “sentimental heresy” characterized by falsehood and delusion (11): Sentimentalism is a complex phenomenon. It asserts that the values a society’s activity denies are precisely the ones it cherishes; it attempts to deal with the phenomenon of cultural bifurcation by the manipulation of nostalgia. Sentimentalism provides a way to protest a power to which one has already in part capitulated. It is a form of dragging one’s heels. It always borders on dishonesty but it is a dishonesty for which there is no known substitute in a capitalist country. (12) Hence for Douglas, sentimental literature traffics in lies, even when allied with what she dismisses offhand as “holy causes” and “moral overseeing” (10). Earlier scholars also understood sentimentality to represent a type of mass hallucination on the part of nineteenthcentury scribes, a fantasy world running the gamut from “fervid, fevered, furious, fatuous, fertile, feeling, florid, furbelowed, fighting, [to] funny,” and to summarize it all, “feminine,” in the estimation of Fred Pattee (The Feminine Fifties 3). But even though Douglas’s controversial study is nearly three decades old, the equations amongst sentimentality, delusional fantasy, and falsehood have never lost their currency. The masochism that Marianne Noble traces in sentimental literature is a “‘weird curve’. . . in some sense unnatural, a reaction to the constraints upon women’s lives” that forced them to express manipulated feelings in disturbingly altered, even maimed, forms (4). For Laura Wexler, sentimentality’s role in nineteenth-century U.S. imperialism, as evidenced in the policies and procedures of the boarding schools to which generations of African American and Native American children were subjected, is essentially that of expressing and creating lies, allowing “raw intolerance to be packaged as education” (105). Wexler adopts Ann Douglas’s view of sentimentality’s two-faced nature, refining it thusly: “Ann Douglas was not wrong to link Victorian domestic literary pietism causally to the depredations of mass culture, but she was misguided in her animus against the women as women. The women’s culture of 1820 to 1870 that she derides was dangerous not because it was feminine but because it was racist, just like the culture of the men” (124). Scholars of nineteenth-century writers of color also view sentimentality as tainting or mutilating what would otherwise be more 108 Sentimentalizing the Fallen Woman

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straightforward, blunt, truthful critiques of U.S. society: critics as different as Valerie Smith, Rosaura Sánchez, and Min Hyoung Song lament the sentimentalities of Harriet Jacobs, María Amparo Ruiz de Burton, and Sui Sin Far as obstacles to a harsher, ruder talking back to the man—or woman, as the case may be.19 Even defenders of sentimentality accept many of the charges of its detractors, though they “spin” those charges differently. In Jane Tompkins’s groundbreaking “Sentimental Power” it was contemporary scholars who were guilty of slander, misrepresenting sentimentality in such a way as to “have taught generations of students to equate popularity with debasement, emotionality with ineffectiveness, religiosity with fakery, domesticity with triviality, and all of these, implicitly, with womanly inferiority” (Sensational Designs 123). Nevertheless, in this formulation sentimentality still travels down paths outside of the real, the quotidian, or the concrete. Tompkins’s exemplar of sentimental writing, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, shows how “sentimental novelists elaborated a myth that gave women the central position of power and authority in the culture” (125, emphasis mine). Hence the novel’s “distinguishing features . . . are not those of the realistic novel, but of typological narrative” (135). In chapter 3, we shall see how Harriet Beecher Stowe herself, along with many of her admirers, considered Uncle Tom’s Cabin to be not only “realistic,” but possessed of a divine truth that surpassed “mere” questions of form. Suffice to say that for most of the twentieth century, and so far into the twenty-first, sentimentality is at best a consoling fairy tale, at worst the hypocritical language of a feminine and racist bourgeois culture.20 But such was not always the case. Let us turn for a moment to an early sentimental novel (and one beloved by many moral reformers), Samuel Richardson’s Pamela (1740). Its influence upon generations of British and U.S. writers, alongside the influence of Clarissa (1752), is unquestionable. More important, though, the novel’s origins and Richardson’s expressed goals for its interpretation have much to tell us about sentimentality’s changing relations to notions of truth and reality, particularly experiential truth. The first edition of Pamela followed the pattern of Oroonoko (1688) and Robinson Crusoe (1720) in portraying itself as nonfiction: it did not carry Richardson’s name, “even as editor or printer; Pamela’s letters purport to be real letters” (Eaves and Kimpel 91).21 A prefatory letter written by one of Richardson’s friends “refers to a real story which happened within these Sentimentalizing the Fallen Woman 109

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thirty years past and to the changing of names of persons and places in order to avoid giving offence” (91). The author’s evasions in this first edition would now be dismissed as marketing strategies, but they also reveal a foundational blurring of genre distinctions that abounds in later reform writing. Richardson’s private conceptions of what the book would be and do emphasized a reality-serving utility: [My publishers] . . . had long been urging me to give them a little book . . . of familiar letters on the useful concerns in common life; and, at last, I yielded to their importunity. . . . And, among the rest, I thought of giving one or two as cautions to young folks circumstanced as Pamela was . . . I thought the story, if written in an easy and natural manner, suitably to the simplicity of it, might possibly introduce a new species of writing, that might possibly turn young people into a course of reading different from the pomp and parade of romance-writing, and dismissing the improbable and marvellous, with which novels generally abound, might tend to promote the cause of religion and virtue. . . . And so Pamela became as you see her. (qtd in Eaves and Kimpel 89) The originally planned collection boasted a long title attesting to its conduct book origins: Letters Written to and for Particular Friends, on the Most Important Occasions. Directing Not Only the Requisite Style and Forms to Be Observed in Writing Familiar Letters; But How to Think and Act Justly and Prudently, in the Common Concerns of Human Life. Despite criticisms to the contrary—most famously from Henry Fielding—Richardson intended the story to be the opposite of “improbable and marvellous,” a text speaking to and about common working girls in what he calls “common life.” “Common” here signifies both the average and the servant class, who rarely appeared as the subjects of “the pomp and parade of romance-writing.” Pamela Andrews was meant to be ordinary and unremarkable, the events in her story events that could actually occur in her life—or rather, the lives of girls just like her. Common, and by extension, realistic, even if not actually real: truthful. I labor over Pamela’s unextraordinary status here because of the novel’s place in the Anglo-American tradition and especially because of its role as model for over a century of sentimental writing. In his analysis of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Philip Fisher traces Stowe’s stylistic and thematic origins to Richardson, in whose works “the entire sentimental procedure is already present” (93): “Yet in its earliest stages 110 Sentimentalizing the Fallen Woman

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the development of psychological realism and sentimentality were closely connected, as they are . . . in the works of Richardson, Sterne, and Rousseau. Of even greater importance is the fact that from roughly 1740 to 1860 sentimentality was a crucial tactic of politically radical representation throughout western culture” (92). That radical representation is the extension of humanity to persons from whom it had been withheld historically, or in Fisher’s summary, “the prisoner, the madman, the child, the very old, the animal, and the slave” (99). Nancy Armstrong also views Pamela as having “introduced a whole new vocabulary for social relations, terms that attached precise moral value to certain qualities of mind” (4). That vocabulary rearranges the established relationship between Pamela and Mr. B, comprehending her defiance of him as the legitimate selfdefense of a virtuous woman, rather than the impertinence of a servant “getting above herself.” In fact, Richardson “makes the integrity of the female body, regardless of birth or station, worth more than money and defines that body within a system of values that cannot be translated into economic value per se” (Armstrong 114). (Hence Armstrong’s claim that Pamela and other novels aiding in “the rise of the domestic woman” represent “a major event in political history” [3].) Although Armstrong does not use the term sentimental in her delineation of Pamela’s revolutionary effects, she concentrates on the same elements of characterization and theme as does Fisher: the emphasis on Pamela’s lack of power; her representation of herself as a “girl” and a “good daughter” foremost, a servant only second; and of course, the fact that the majority of the narration is done by Pamela, portraying herself as victim and implying that a mere servant is indeed worthy of being the subject of a two-volume book. Hence sentimentality’s “radical” potential: employing narrative strategies that will turn a servant into a woman, a human creature (presumably) on a par with the reader, and so create a democratization of humanity. Both Fisher and Armstrong acknowledge the ways in which sentimental narratives become stripped of this subversive political potential. (Indeed, that part of sentimentality’s story is fundamental to Armstrong’s discussion of works that follow Pamela, such as Jane Eyre.) But both critics also link sentimentality’s original abilities to that insistence upon commonality—that reader and subject have much in common—and by extension, to a perceived truthfulness. That which we have in common, after all, is that upon which Sentimentalizing the Fallen Woman 111

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we can most faithfully depend. Thus works such as Pamela normalize the privileging of “moral qualities” and personal traits, making values once laughable into the standard, ordinary, and everyday. This congruence of subversive powers—humanizing the lowly, the despicable or untouchable, and making that humanity common and even mundane—is what moral reform narratives of a century later inherit from texts of the 1700s. For if Fisher and Armstrong are right in seeing sentimentality as losing its radical nature in part because of its normalizing potential—and I think that they are—that nature is restored by works like Sanger’s History. A brief comparison is useful here. When William Sanger crafts his narrative over the “pale but interesting-looking girl”—she who has lost her sister and whose story “needs no comment” (491)—several sentimental narrative techniques come into play. First, Sanger does indeed allow the girl to speak for herself, quoting her rather than summarizing her tale, thereby allowing her to court sympathy in first person and “face to face,” as it were. The girl’s identity as sister is emphasized while her identity as prostitute is downplayed—she has become a prostitute because of her desire to care for her sister, making her fallenness noble through its self-sacrificing quality. The siblings’ poverty, the cold, the threat of eviction and starvation, the sister’s deformity, itself the result of an accident: everything from the weather to the landlord to fate victimizes these young women. And in a final cruel stroke, the girls victimize each other: “She only lived a few weeks after I came here. I broke her heart. I do not like the life. I would do almost anything to get out of it; but, now that I have once done wrong, I can not get anyone to give me work” (491). A betrayal leads to an abandonment, a good sister now trapped in a life far less spectacular and titillating than that of George Thompson’s Venus. Joanne Dobson, in characterizing sentimental works of the nineteenth century, pinpoints sentimentality’s “concern for subject matter that privileges affectional ties, and [its] conventions and tropes . . . [that are] designed to convey the primary vision of human connection in a dehumanized world” (268). The “affectional ties” between the two sisters are literal and apparent; those between the fallen sister and the reader are what her sentimental portrayal seeks to forge. Pamela’s letters to her father obviously foreground her familial identity. But that is not the only way, nor are those the only moments, in which Pamela’s status as (metaphorical) kin and literal victim are 112 Sentimentalizing the Fallen Woman

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highlighted. Attempting to persuade her first captors (tenants of Mr. B) of her master’s scheme and her real danger, Pamela unfolds her story: I told them. . . that I was a young creature who had been taken into Mr. B’s family to wait upon his mother . . . and that since her much lamented death, finding I could not live in it with reputation and safety, I was resolved to quit it, and return to my parents . . . but that, when I was in expectation of being carried to them, I had been betrayed, and brought hither, in the way to a worse place, no doubt. That as they had a daughter of their own (who sat by us, and seemed moved by my story . . .) I besought them to take pity of a helpless young maiden, who valued her honor above her life. (Richardson, Pamela 137) Her lack of power, her youth and poverty, her betrayal and her abandonment (by her maternalistic first mistress) make this passage “kin” to that of the fallen sister. And it is an imagined kin relationship with Pamela’s captors, accomplished through the gesture toward the couple’s own daughter, that contains the most profound potential for metaphor: You have a daughter. You wouldn’t let this happen to her. Please don’t let it happen to me. I am (just like) her. In one way, Pamela is proven a good storyteller, both affecting and effective; for the daughter “seem[s] moved by [Pamela’s] story,” and registers her sympathy by tears (140). Of course the story ultimately fails, since only the daughter sympathizes, and she, like Pamela, is “helpless.” According to Stowe’s famous logic from Uncle Tom’s Cabin, one might say that the daughter is in fact doing something, because she “feels right.” But alone in her right feeling, she emerges as a solitary sentimental “reader,” and Pamela is still not free. Her captors cannot see what she and their daughter have in common. Sentimental narrative, though, in the hands of moral reformers, strives to create more readers like that daughter: perceptive, sympathetic, and cognizant of the very real power of metaphorical kinship. Like Philip Fisher, Nancy Armstrong, and Joanne Dobson, Glenn Hendler views “sentimentalism’s reliance on this fantasy of experiential equivalence . . . at the root of its affective and political power” (7). Working from Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments, in which Smith proposes that, “through imagination, ‘we enter as it were into the sufferer’s body and become in some measure the same person Sentimentalizing the Fallen Woman 113

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with him”’ (5), Hendler argues that sentimental “sympathy threatens to negate . . . individuality by confusing the analogy it posits between subjects with a fictional and dangerous coincidence between them” (5). But what Hendler understands as “dangerous” and hence a “threat”— the loss of self—is exactly what allows reform writings to do their narrative social work. For ultimately, sentimentality does not solely offer, or threaten, loss of self. Rather, the loss of boundaries between selves—between fallen and virtuous, worthy and unworthy, fictional and nonfictional—has a purpose, and is meant to benefit a woman in very real need. (To whom, exactly, would such dissolution of boundaries pose a threat?) An example: in The History of Prostitution’s section on the category “Drink, and the desire to drink,” Sanger suddenly offers the reader a quote from a “work of fiction, published some ten years ago, [which] gives the following truthful account of the effects of drunkenness on prostitutes” (542). A pathetic fallen woman’s voice protests in italics that she “must have drink. I can not pass to-night without a dram. I dare not” (543). To recap: our author has two thousand surveys at his disposal, one hundred and eighty-one of which cite alcoholism as the primary cause of a woman’s entrance into prostitution. But for Sanger it ultimately matters little whether he has fiction or survey in his hands—in this case, a copy of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848)—it nevertheless bears the truth.22 “Although this is an imaginary picture,” he states, “its counterpart can be seen at almost any time . . . on Blackwell’s Island” (543). Or in other words, it does not matter whether the example is real or fictional, it is still true. So why not quote Esther, the pathetic and alcoholic prostitute of Mary Barton? Two years earlier, the Friend of Virtue published a similar blurred tale about fallenness. Entitled “Jessie, the Friend of My Youth,” the story purported to be a true account of a beloved and lost confidante. In the story the willful and naïve Jessie runs off with “Colonel B” when her father forbids him the house. (Yes, Richardson faithful: Colonel B.) Afterwards, seduced and abandoned, unmarried and mother to an infant, Jessie dies. “Think not wealth or rank can preserve you,” intones the author, “Jessie had wealth, talent, education, and rank, and would most likely have thought herself the last to fall” (“Jessie”). First it seems that Jessie is a nineteenth-century Pamela, but her sad end evokes Clarissa rather than that eventuallyhappy predecessor. Or is this Charlotte Temple reborn, or Coquette-ish Eliza Wharton, brought back to life only to suffer the same fate? Does 114 Sentimentalizing the Fallen Woman

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it matter, when the story shares the same page with the Visiting Committee’s news and the House of Industry reports, and just like them, presents itself as fact? For moral reformers of the antebellum era, working to end prostitution meant telling stories sentimentally—without boundaries of self, style, or literary form. What could be threatening about the novel in some instances represented a powerful and necessary tool in others: in being able to transport, transcend, and transform, fiction could do profound social work. The Louisiana teenager deceived by her novelistic lover, the “pale but interesting-looking girl,” the doomed Esther from Gaskell’s novel, Jessie, Pamela, and Eliza are all the same. Whatever can be said to be “true” about them is neither located within nor embodied by their individual, personal selves. To reformers they are common, in that word’s best and worst connotations. Note William Sanger’s logic in quoting from Mary Barton: he calls the story both “imaginary” and “truthful.” For many scholars such a protestation would simply betray a basic romantic sense of narrative— the “certain latitude” Nathaniel Hawthorne begs, for example, when in the preface to The House of the Seven Gables, he christens his work a romance because of its commitment to telling “the truth of the human heart” (1). In moral reform literature, though, the insistence that fiction and truth occupy the same narrative space does not hope to capture the marvelous. Rather, it reveals a complex metaphorical endeavor whose goal is to (re)imbue disenfranchised women with social worth. They needn’t be individualized to accomplish this; in fact, they should not be. Saving fallen women necessitates likening them to other women, even if those other women are fictional constructs and fallen themselves. Neither wealth, education, talent, nor rank differentiate them. They are all (like) your mothers, sisters, and daughters, and the only difference between them and the virtuous is that it is the virtuous who have pens in their hands.

Moral Reform Papers Two decades before William Sanger began his investigation for the Board of Governors of Alms-Houses, community groups in New England and the mid-Atlantic states were organizing so as to combat the growing problem of prostitution, launching what some of its members called “a crusade . . . in the press” (Northrup 15). Out of this activism came a series of newspapers based in two of the cities most Sentimentalizing the Fallen Woman 115

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troubled by the great sin: the Illuminator and the Friend of Virtue emerged from Boston, while McDowall’s Journal and the Advocate of Moral Reform and Female Guardian called New York their home. Each paper ran news stories, short stories, and editorials documenting the progress of prostitution as well as the fight against it. In this they shared an avowed mission: to employ fact to tell the truth about fallen women, and thus to engage in overt and unapologetic social work. As with William Sanger, these reformers’ factual truths took many different forms in the pages of their newspapers, forms technically both fictional and nonfiction, but in the final analysis, very much the same. The Illuminator and McDowall’s Journal were both short-lived, each lasting about a year. Their demise coincided with the personal and even physical decline of their male originators/editors/guiding lights. As successors to these papers, though, the Advocate and the Friend of Virtue proved far more successful, remaining in print for decades, and in the case of the former, for over a century. The staying power of the second generation papers owes much to the wellorganized and zealous reform groups writing, printing, distributing, and purchasing them. The Advocate and Friend of Virtue broadened the scope of what types of items they published, running the gamut from committee reports to dramatic stories and poetry. At the same time, their focus remained laser-sharp, with issue after issue addressing the fallen woman and her world: how to redeem her, how to transform her, how to prevent her from coming into being. Such focus may help to explain the longevity of the two publications. But that longevity may also be due to the fact that these papers, and the groups behind them, represented an entirely female enterprise: the Advocate and the Friend of Virtue were owned, run by, and marketed to women. I turn to these papers here to illustrate just how skillfully female moral reformers used sentimentality in their activism. Their strategy reveals an appropriation of elements of fiction, even as fiction—particularly the novel—was lambasted in page after page of their publications. Female moral reformers insisted that the figurative might turn literal, any day: that fallen women might not only be like your daughters, sisters, and mothers, but that with one misstep, the allimportant simile could disappear. Thus Americans must be taught to see, and to read, fallen women differently: as women no different than the endless tragic heroines emerging from the right kind of fiction. As we shall see, such a transformation would indeed be radical, a reform 116 Sentimentalizing the Fallen Woman

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of the most revolutionary order, because what these women attempted to do was no less than to rewrite the story of the Fall. This revision—what the women understood as reformation—possessed its faults. For in privileging victimization, reformers established it as the defining characteristic of a proper and socially acceptable femininity. A brief look at the fates of the Illuminator and of McDowall’s Journal will be instructive here, both as a comparison to the women’s publications and also as a means of understanding the volatile environment in which reformers worked. Joseph A. Whitmarsh, the Illuminator’s creator and editor, expressed great concern over prostitution, violations, and seductions. Nonetheless, he took all the sins of the flesh as fair game for his production, as signaled in the paper’s masthead. Each issue of the Illuminator bore two scriptural quotations that provided warnings, or comfort, to the paper’s readers. The first came from 1 Corinthians 6:9–10: “Be not deceived, neither fornicators, nor adulterers, nor effeminate, nor abusers of themselves with mankind, nor thieves, nor covetous, nor drunkards, nor revilers, nor extortioners, shall inherit the kingdom of God.” The second quotation, from Galatians 6:8, “He that soweth to his flesh, shall of the flesh reap corruption,” similarly expressed the obsessions of the paper’s editor. Whitmarsh’s goal was laudably simple: to rid the former Puritan colony of its all-too-human vices. However, his refusal to exercise either discretion or euphemism resulted in challenging entrenched notions of public propriety and the nature of obscenity. Printing front-page articles on “Self-Pollution, the Solitary Vice,” for instance, and informing citizens of exactly where ladies of the night located themselves in the Tremont Theater earned him the ire of local authorities and upstanding citizens. (Probably the third balcony.) Out of business in a year, Whitmarsh retired from public activism, but many of the women who had flocked to his cause did not. They formed the New England Female Moral Reform Society (NEFMRS) and founded the Friend of Virtue. McDowall’s Journal met a similar fate. It was named for its creator and editor, John McDowall, a Presbyterian minister trained at Princeton and assigned to the Five Points neighborhood of New York. In a situation much like that of William Sanger two decades later, McDowall seems to have been genuinely and profoundly affected by the misery he witnessed daily. In January 1833 he confided to readers, “It is crucifying to my feelings to go to the places where [prostitutes] Sentimentalizing the Fallen Woman 117

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now are. Known by hundreds of them, they often stop me in the streets and ask me to aid them. . . . I cannot exhort them to repent, or point them to a Savior, because I know that it is, under present circumstances, on their vices alone that they can live” (“What Can Be Done?” 5). McDowall ran story after story of fallen women, the majority having been seduced and abandoned. But even more than Whitmarsh, McDowall insisted that “the great sin” was so widespread as to constitute an epidemic, and he blamed New York City’s powerful for that crisis. He insisted that 10,000 fallen women lived in the city, and assailed the “opinion excusing men but condemning women” for engaging in prostitution.23 In his first publication, a collection entitled Magdalene Facts, McDowall charged that many ministers’ daughters and widows made up the ranks of the fallen, although—perhaps attempting to mollify his fellow Presbyterians—he did admit that these lost souls came “principally from the Methodist and Romish sects” (26). Once beginning the Journal, the reverend continued to criticize his fellow brethren for their alleged role in prostitution, dismissing: A fastidious taste [that] excludes from the pulpit sermon even a strong remark on the sin of debauchery, while this same fastidious taste craves the ‘Pelham,’ ‘Devereaux,’ and ‘Faulkland’ novels, and other works of a like kind, containing the history of seducers, and debauchees, and rakes, and assignations, and seductions, and illicit amours. Hence licentiousness can flourish. Neither literature nor preaching condemn it. (Magdalene Facts 26–27) Literary villains yet again! But what finally estranged McDowall even from his fellow moral reformers was his allegation of something almost unimaginable under antebellum norms of propriety: that children too were the victims of sexual abuse. After citing instances involving little ones as young as five years old, the minister pleaded, “Let not parents be deceived on this subject . . . they should know how intimately acquainted most children are with the sin of licentiousness.”24 He was soon censured by Presbyterian authorities, abandoned by supporters, and brought before a grand jury to answer questions regarding his claims. McDowall gave up, overwhelmed by the insistent deafness to what he had to say.25 Ultimately a group of women formerly associated with him organized the New York Female Moral Reform Society (NYFMRS), and founded the Advocate. 118 Sentimentalizing the Fallen Woman

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Articles on masturbation and charges of child sexual abuse never appeared within the pages of the Advocate or the Friend of Virtue. The groups behind these papers were run by native-born white women careful of their own reputations, and deeply concerned about the fates of their less fortunate sisters. As reformers, though, the women of the NY and NEFMRS not only differed from Joseph Whitmarsh and John McDowall, they also deviated from their peers in movements like abolition and suffrage, in that they were not primarily from the middle class. Barbara Meil Hobson has shown how a full fifty percent of the group’s leaders (managers and executive committee members for the years 1836–60) were drawn from the ranks of the lower middle class, married to skilled and semi-skilled workers. Some of the women were themselves employed as teachers or domestic laborers such as seamstresses, laundrywomen, and peddlers. Hence a significant percentage of FMRS women came from the socioeconomic ranks vulnerable to the types of catastrophes that could turn honorable wives and matrons out onto the streets. One workplace injury, a chronic illness, or simply the limitations of old age could mean the difference between being on the steering committee of the FMRS and being ministered to by them. For these women, then, the stakes involved in extending sentimental sympathy and metaphorical likeness to fallen women were much, much higher than they would ever be for men like William Sanger, Joseph Whitmarsh, or even John McDowall. Class experience and identity had taught these women the fragility of metaphor: “there but for the grace of God . . .” In another important respect, however, the FMRS were very like their counterparts in abolition and suffrage; exhibiting the same savvy for self-representation and public relations as did their comrades, they justified their public sphere intrusions by claiming religious and even millennial authorization, and consistently portrayed themselves as women solely concerned with helping other women. As explained in a history of the group, its founders were determined to “speak out and take a bold and decided stand against the giant sin,” convinced as they were that prostitution contributed to other social problems like alcoholism, as well as to women’s general sociopolitical disenfranchisement (Northrup 15). Female moral reformers believed that their cause spoke to the fundamental inequity in social organization: men’s abuse of power, and women’s inability to wrest it from them. The enormity of the task and the difficulty of contending Sentimentalizing the Fallen Woman 119

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with a sexual double standard demanded public acts and works widely considered to fall outside of the proper woman’s sphere. From their New York City base, the NYFMRS encouraged the organization and activism of regional groups around the country: their members visited brothels to harass patrons and cajole women to accompany them; created a national circulation for the Advocate; printed the names of male “offenders” when obtainable; housed and found alternative employment for repentant prostitutes; and even pressured the New York state legislature to pass a law criminalizing seduction “for the male participant” (Smith-Rosenberg, Disorderly 118). As explained in a history of the society, its members viewed their purpose with zealous and millennial devotion: Let the attitude of these women . . . be clearly understood. They had been deeply stirred by the revelations of immorality in the city and throughout the land. They believed that if the public, and especially the women of the country, could only learn the facts, there would be such a sentiment created that evil would be swept away and right thinking and right living would prevail; that a double standard of morality would not be tolerated. They had come to feel that to try to reform fallen women was not enough, but that vice should be exposed and the innocent protected from evil and warned of danger before it was too late. There must be a crusade against evil, and that crusade must be in the press. (Northrup 15, emphasis mine) With such a formidable enemy—evil in the form of half the population—women could not afford for mere distinctions of class and background to weaken their efforts. The fallen woman of the reformers’ writings is any and every woman, and both her peril and her salvation imagine a reformation of her original, most influential image: Eve. But in the rewritings of moral reformers, Eve is played by Clarissa Harlowe, by Charlotte Temple, by Elizabeth Gaskell’s Esther, and God forbid, by your own mother, sister, or daughter. She is not a vixen or siren, not the titillating young thing of infinite Ned Buntline novels. What she is is the consummate victim, and her fall was not her fault. Victimization thus created a seamless thematic consistency amongst the papers. “Infamy!” protested the front page of the first edition of the Illuminator: “A young lady of wealthy and respectable 120 Sentimentalizing the Fallen Woman

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parentage” visited “a certain fashionable hotel” in the company of “a demon” who plied her with alcohol and “robbed her of virtue” (“Infamy”). The January 1 edition of the Advocate for 1849 begins the new year with news of an “Attempt at Suicide” (“the victim of a seducer who had abandoned her”) and a “Seduction Case” (in which the young lady was “throw[n] . . . upon the world in a delicate situation”). According to the Advocate, the practice of “night-sitting” (allowing a man to continue visiting a woman in her house after her family retires) leads directly to rape: “She is a member of a virtuous and respectable, but poor family; and once had fair prospects. She is now an outcast from society; and finds it difficult to get opportunities to support, by her daily labor, herself and infant child” (“NightSitting”). If chatting can be dangerous, so can asking for directions: the Advocate’s annual report for 1841 relates the story of “a daughter of a pious widowed mother,” recently moved to New York, who loses her way in the city, is offered assistance by a stranger, and ends up imprisoned in a brothel. “Her deplorable course,” remarks the editor, is “the result of ignorance and misfortune” (“Annual Report for 1841”). “Poor girl!” intones yet another report, from the Advocate’s Visiting Committee to their House of Industry. On this visit the ladies “had an interview . . . with a young woman who had been ensnared by the tempter’s wiles. She was thrown into circumstances of temptation where she least expected it—was intoxicated by flattery, and overcome by professions of attachment—the fatal net was spread, and her ruin was affected” (“Visiting Committee”). Lest it appear that New York dominate the market on seductions and betrayals, the Friend of Virtue in October 1847 announced the “ruin” in Boston of a “deaf daughter of a poor widow”; the story was tantalizingly titled “Facts More Awful Than Fiction.” Two years later the Advocate also reported on “Facts That Are Facts”; in the 1830s, the Illuminator had presented its readers with “Simple Facts, But Awful.” Three different papers, three different stories, three different years; but all very concerned with the facts about fallen women.26 In these papers, reformers democratize both the virtue and the vulnerability of a theoretically unclassed female body. Thus, one might read pieces, such as “The Story of Lizzie: Or, the Virtuous, Unprotected Sufferer,” which dramatize the luxurious world of the beautiful daughter of an English-born Revolutionary War hero. (She succumbs to the “villainy” of her wrongly-chosen beloved.) But Sentimentalizing the Fallen Woman 121

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stories like Lizzie’s shared space with “Adeline, the Tailoress.” Despite its contrasting material environment, “Adeline” not only relates the same story, it is the same story: “Adeline was ruined! Cousin Betsey . . . strove to draw forth the story of her fall, but the only answer was hysteric sobs, or low wailing. ‘Led away—led away!”’ (“Adeline”). Of course, other stories, like the previously-mentioned “Jessie, the Friend of My Youth,” dismissed setting, as well as background, supporting characters, and so on, in their effort to make their point. Immigrants faced even greater risks than the native-born; when William Sanger gathered his statistics in the 1850s, they seemed to bear out the reformers’ claim that “the decaying brothel is recruited from the emigrant ship!”27 But an endless procession of names and sad stories makes these fallen women uncannily alike, ripe for substitution one with another. John McDowall filled his journal with stories of fallen women bearing novelistic titles, often of names or simple gender designations: “Amanda and Elizabeth,” “The Orphan—the Newburgh Girl,” “Amelia Gray,” “The Ruined Sister,” “Lucretia, the Broken Hearted,” “The Minister’s Daughter,” “The Newark Girl,” and for a slight change, “The Unnatural Father.” Other stories touted their morals (“A Sheep in Wolf ’s Clothing”), and some targeted specific occupations (“The Stage Proprietor,” “The Collegian,” “The Reputably-Pious Merchant”). Their defining characteristic was a featured character and an emphatic theme: trusting girl, sex, loss of virtue, loss of a meaningful life. Fallenness. What caused this dizzying procession of fallen women, page after page after page? Reformers assailed many of the social and economic causes already mentioned, but of course, they laid blame at the feet of voluptuous fiction as well. Both the Advocate and the Friend of Virtue acted so as to aid their followers in their (other) reading choices, recommending books in their “Literary Notices.” John McDowall pointed the finger of blame at “literary men” repeatedly, claiming that “vice among literary men” created a “Necessity of Moral Societies in Schools of Learning”: “The prevalence of vice in our schools of literature and science is a fact of extensive notoriety. The causes of it are bad books. . . . Men of the vilest character are in our literary institutions” (“Necessity”). In his article “Licentious Books and Pictures,” McDowall outlined a category of corrupting texts: “police reports, criminal calendars, lives of rogues . . . novels, romances, the classics, etc.” Along with “dances, parties of pleasure, . . . theaters, and similar 122 Sentimentalizing the Fallen Woman

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places,” most novels transported their readers to locales all too likely to encourage “voluptuous” feeling and even embodiment (“The Collegian”). As with French literature, the mere proximity of the wrong kind of fiction could infect and destroy. In “An Object Found,” the story of nineteen-year-old Louisa, a lover woos her and initiates her downfall with “confectionaries, fruit, and trinkets.” But after this, the pace of the seduction is moved up a notch: “a novel was placed on her table, with which she began to beguile the lingering hours of the morning.” Like the “novels and snuff ” that enfeeble Harry Franco’s mother, and through her, him, Louisa’s encounter with candy and fiction fixes her fate and spells her doom. Like Sanger, then, the staffs of moral reform newspapers equated fiction with a cast of sins: gluttony, greed and covetousness, a love of pleasure and indulgence of self. Novels acted as slow but sure poison; begin by simply enjoying a morning’s perusal, and end by being a prostitute in the streets. Yet a sly reference to Mary Barton, or a winking adoption of Mr. B, tells us that obviously some fictions were acceptable, appropriate, and thus duly appropriated. The moral import of these sanctioned novels certainly helped to make them amenable: to hearken to parents and affectionate advisers, remaining under their loving care (Charlotte Temple, Clarissa); to beware of rakes, because you’ll never change him, girls (The Coquette, Clarissa); to avoid “intoxicating” influences like novels or alcohol (Mary Barton); and at all costs, to fight for one’s virtue, on the small chance it might be rewarded (Pamela). Yet all of these novels also dramatize the dangers of being in a female body. In this instance, Pamela tells us what a similar text, George Thompson’s Venus in Boston, cannot. Both Venus’s heroine, Fanny Aubrey, and Pamela are repeatedly threatened with sexual assault. But where Richardson allows us to follow and encourages us to sympathize with the psychic torture this creates for Pamela, Thompson simply moves us along to another scene of cheating wives and felons on the make. Fanny does not speak to the reader and plead like her British predecessor; her terror is told to us, but not shown. Pamela’s reward for her struggle is to be released from perilous physicality, restored to safety via the cloaking mechanism of marriage. Once married to Mr. B, Pamela as an incarnate being largely fades from Richardson’s text. The problem facing reformers, then, when writing of fallen women, was how to treat the body, that which caused their downfall Sentimentalizing the Fallen Woman 123

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in the first place. As becomes clear in Sanger’s History as well as the Advocate and Friend of Virtue, sentimental fallen women are disembodied, bereft of individualizing properties and interchangeable with other novel characters; Richardson and Gaskell heroines are an endless line of beautiful victims, very near kin of dozens of young women who, if only let alone, might have been a cherished wife and mother. Yet prostitutes are emphatically embodied, and some even more than others; hence Sanger’s relative avoidance of those women claiming to have been “violated.” Reformers faced the same dilemma: it is precisely those women who are most embodied that are most at risk. And as cultural historians have shown, nineteenth-century constructions of race prejudicially embodied the American populace, making more difficult the reformers’ task of metaphorically likening, and thus making kin, of all women. Their differing levels of success in this endeavor can be seen in female reformers’ ongoing concerns with two categories of women: servants and slaves. The specter of white slavery loomed large over the pages of each of the women’s newspapers, even as the Civil War metamorphosed from possibility to inevitability. The Boston-based Friend of Virtue, consistent with its locale’s reputation for strong abolitionist sentiments, published arguments against, and horror stories of, chattel slavery in the South. Barbara Meil Hobson’s research has determined that the vast majority of members of the New England FMRS were also members of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society (55). Still, in a piece entitled “Freedom,” the Friend of Virtue urged that there existed no comparison between mere earthly slavery and the eternal tortures of Satan: “this bondage, compared with that of sin, is like the dust of the balance. We are all in bondage by nature” (“Freedom”). When considered as a percentage of the papers’ overall output, however, the Friend of Virtue’s comments about southern slavery are pitifully few: both they and the Advocate published weekly, and over the course of decades, the latter paper barely broached the subject at all. Thus, despite the ever-increasing knowledge of what enslaved black women suffered on the other side of Mason-Dixon, reformers considered white women as being at particular risk of fallenness. Both papers regularly rehearsed the fear of white slavery: girls asking for directions and being imprisoned in a brothel; girls looking for domestic service work and being imprisoned in a brothel; girls being drugged, enticed, cajoled, tricked, overpowered, and ending up 124 Sentimentalizing the Fallen Woman

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imprisoned in a brothel. A story from the Illuminator served as a model for the later publications: Whitmarsh recounts visiting “Taylor’s Factory of Sin” and finding that “A young creature had been left there only the day before, by the cruel author of her ruin. . . . She wished to leave, but was prevented by the keepers” (“Taylor’s”). The drama of white slavery raised the specter of a common female danger to all new highs, as its tactics resorted to new lows. By comparing the possibility of white slavery to actualized black slavery in the South, the reformers sought both salvation and respect for their cause. The bottom-line message achieved literality through metaphor: It could happen to you, because it has happened to women just like you. Such potentiality represents the ultimate in democratic community. Just as all women were made sisters of woe by the first Fall from grace, the nineteenth-century version gendered women as women through their propensity to fall: the victimization of simply being female. If the only common denominator uniting Pamela, Clarissa, Adeline, Jessie, the girls in the House of Industry, and the girls in the House of Infamy was their possession of a female body, then the female body emerges as that which is both at fault and at risk. But in marginalizing discussions of slavery, the reformers betrayed the limitations of metaphorical likeness and sympathy. As female moral reformers wrote and published their papers, enslaved black women suffered what their free white sisters feared. The strengths of metaphor, then, were also its weaknesses. Activists’ seeming inability to imaginatively put black women in a white heroine’s place resulted, for Southern slavery, in a virtual stopping of the presses. The challenge of maintaining a dicey metaphor between prostitution and slavery, however, was met with inventive tactics by reformers. Under the heading “An Intelligence Office for Female Domestics,” the Friend of Virtue announced: “Such are the impositions often practiced upon inexperienced young girls, coming from the country for service in families, that the executive committee of the [New England Female Moral Reform] Society have judged it expedient to open an office, to which females may confidently apply for direction, and heads of families for assistance.”28 Indeed, such “impositions” appeared to be approaching near plague proportions. A single “Visiting Committee’s Report” in the Friend of Virtue for March 15, 1849, tells the stories of a young maid who changed situations and found herself in a brothel; “A Narrow Escape” of another girl seeking a domestic position, Sentimentalizing the Fallen Woman 125

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approached by an apparently respectable couple and warned away from them by a well-wisher claiming “that they kept a house of illrepute”; and of the insult suffered by another young maid, who leaves her house at dusk on an errand and is “accosted by a well-dressed man . . . [who] pursued her, put his hand in his pocket and rattled his money.” In establishing their Intelligence Office, the New England FMRS recognized one component of peril in the cities: that they manufacture both strangers and estrangement, a fact also articulated by the literature that often demonized them (Foster’s New York, Clarissa’s London). Certainly, Sanger’s and the reformers’ own writings suggest that the low wages, low prestige, and nearly nonexistent job stability associated with domestic service often demanded that female domestics supplement their income by other means. But if the servant occasionally passed as the prostitute, the vulnerability of her occupation merely mimicked the vulnerability of her body in a tautological vicious logic. Is she easy because she’s a woman, a maid, or a whore? The rattle of change in a pocket insists that it’s a moot point.

Salvation through Metaphor The safest course, reckoned the reformers, was to bring fallen women into the family. This was where the female moral reformers shone in ways never achieved by Whitmarsh or McDowall. With the singular exception of black female slaves, the women of the Advocate and Friend of Virtue ceaselessly claimed that all fallen women were kin. Their peers in the Philadelphia Magdalen Society, touted as a model organization in McDowall’s Magdalene Facts, matter-of-factly named fallen women as family in the statistics they provided on their work: Magdalens admitted between 1805 and 1830: 350 Magdalens reclaimed, and living reputably in reputable families, some of whom are married: 150 February, 1830, there were in the family: 13 (Magdalene Facts 55) Women who remained with the reformers in their small asylum became adopted by them, signified at that point as being “in the family.” Privileging the kinship connections celebrated in sentimental literature, female reformers insisted that the victimization of the fallen woman doubled as the victimization of families, particularly matriarchal ones. The only fathers present in moral reform literature are 126 Sentimentalizing the Fallen Woman

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deadbeat ones; thus, reformers depict prostitution as productive of a matrilineage of despair. “You have coolly selected your victim in the bosom of some quiet happy family,” began one Advocate accusation. “Your victim. . . but for you might have been the pride of the family. . . . Your course is strewed with the sighs and tears and groans of widowed mothers who regret that their daughters had not died in their infancy” (qtd in Smith-Rosenberg, “Misprisioning” 15). Consonant with the culture’s general idealization of motherhood, the Friend of Virtue in July of 1847 intoned that “a generation of good mothers might do more good than all the philanthropists, the missionaries, the reformers that have lived since the days of the apostles.” But the article promises woe to those with lesser maternal figures: “Whereas bad mothers may do more harm than all the blood-thirsty conquerors, the tyrants, the despots, the cruel persecutors, that have ever cursed a dying world! (“Correspondence”)” The mother and child image holds an iconic status in sentimental literature, bearing the traces of sanctified republican motherhood as well as the urgency of antebellum activism. One need only think of the power of Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s most famous scene, Eliza crossing the ice with Harry in her arms. Thus female reformers pushed the limits of discursive disembodiment and of metaphorical identification, making fallen women into daughters. To this end, the Friend of Virtue’s “Correspondence” column included letters from former “inmates” of the Temporary Home, extolling not only the general virtues of the Society’s work, but its particularly desired and appreciated maternal qualities. Explaining that “those girls who spend a few weeks, or even a few days, at the Home, generally become attached to the Matron . . . [whom] they frequently address by the endearing appellation of mother,” the February 15, 1856 issue included three different letters to “Dear Mother.” “Dear Mother,—I am very lonely, dont go out at all, and have no desire to go anywhere but to my two homes [Temporary Home and original home],” confides the first correspondent. “How many times has my imagination carried me there.” The third correspondent likewise considers the Temporary Home to belie its name: “Dear Mother . . . What I would give to be with you! O how many recollections of the past throng my mind, as I think of the word Home.” The expressed purposes of the Temporary Home and the House of Industry were to provide reforming prostitutes with places of refuge from which they could alter their souls and their occupations. The method Sentimentalizing the Fallen Woman 127

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of reformation, then, consisted of reconstructing the maternal influence perceived as wanting in the women’s lives—the work that “a generation of good mothers might do.” Columns such as “Correspondence” and the Visiting Committee’s Reports represented the few instances in reform literature in which the fallen woman putatively spoke for herself. Such letters as these to the “Dear Mother” Matron, then, attempt to suggest that the familial values of the reformers were shared by the objects of their reform: “Dear Mother,—I am continually thinking of your kindness. Words can but faintly describe the love I have for you. My heart yearns for you as a child for its mother. The sound of your voice sends a thrill of pleasure through my heart that makes me long to throw my arms around your neck, and pillow my head upon your bosom” (“Correspondence,” Friend of Virtue). When the prostitute’s heart learned to feel for the reformer “as a child for its mother,” then such affectional sentiment manifested the success of reform. Once interpolated into the imaginative kinship structures of the reformers, the prostitute assumed an identity imbued with moral value, that of the daughter. Using the fallen woman (as daughter) to appeal to the reader (as mother), moral reformers dramatized potential familial destruction in a specific manner: by appropriating the stock scene of familial separation and break-up from abolitionist literature. The Advocate’s story of the unfortunate daughter of the “pious widowed mother,” who lost her way in New York and wound up imprisoned in a brothel, continues by portraying her mother’s efforts to reclaim her: “With all the eagerness of maternal solicitude, she hastened to the dwelling and demanded her daughter. She was peremptorily refused admittance, and assured by the occupant that she was not there. . . . Again she [the mother] flew to the door, and renewed her suit, but was repulsed with insults, and compelled to turn away oppressed with unutterable anguish” (“Annual Report for 1841”). This pious mother does eventually rescue her daughter from the “slaughter-house of souls,” although the story continues within a slave narrative plot: judging the daughter to still be in danger of being kidnapped by her madam, she is sent out of the city to live elsewhere, moved on to a figurative Canada. The use of such stories emphasizes one of the central tenets of abolitionist propaganda—that what is truly horrific about slavery is not its effect on the individual, 128 Sentimentalizing the Fallen Woman

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but its destruction of families. In this way the moral reformers illuminate how much the various activist movements depended upon one another, both for narrative and political strategies. And once again, they ignored pitiful boundaries of genre or form. But like many of their white abolitionist peers, moral reformers found their greatest challenge in dealing with their black sisters— or more specifically, with the very embodied selves of slaves and of Boston’s and New York’s free black communities. So it was left up to others to speak for “the wretched and miserable daughters of the descendants of fallen Africa,” to follow in the footsteps of reformers like Maria Stewart as she challenged audiences: “It is upon you that woman depends; she can do but little besides using her maternal influence; and it is for her sake and yours that I have come forward and made myself a hissing and a reproach among the people” (“Lecture” 48). Thankfully, Stewart was not alone in daring such hissing and reproach.

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl The figure of the fallen woman obsessed antebellum black writers. Our Nig (1859) begins with the fall of the heroine’s mother, Mag. Clotel (1853), in dramatizing several stories of fallen slave women, laments “that amongst the slave population no safeguard is thrown around virtue, and no inducement held out to slave women to be chaste” (Brown 63). The insurrectionist hero of Blake (1861) encounters a “maiden gang” of slave girls who explain how “so many ole wite plantehs come an’ look at us, like we was show!” (Delany 77). The same planters “been . . . heah lookin’ at us, an’ want to buy us foh house keepehs, an’ we won’t go; we die fus!” (78). The Bondwoman’s Narrative (ca. 1855) addresses the dangers for female house slaves directly; its heroine Hannah would “of course . . . prefer the service of a lady to that of a gentleman, in which [she] probably would be compelled to sacrifise [sic] honor and virtue” (Crafts 153). A Narrative of the Life and Travels of Mrs. Nancy Prince (1853) tells of a sister “deluded away” into prostitution (Prince 12). The first chapter of Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845) ends with Captain Anthony stripping and then taking the whip to Aunt Hester: “Had he been a man of pure morals himself, he might have been thought interested in protecting the innocence of my aunt; but those who knew him well will not suspect him of any such virtue” (Douglass 52). But Douglass implies that Sentimentalizing the Fallen Woman 129

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Aunt Hester has already endured—or will endure in the future— much more from Anthony. Forbidden by him to see her sweetheart, Lloyd’s Ned, Hester is commanded to be available evenings: “Why master was so careful of her, may be safely left to conjecture” (51). When he elaborates upon the scene in My Bondage and My Freedom (1855), Douglass protests that “slavery provides no means for the honorable continuance of the race” (86). (The section heading which he uses for the episode in his table of contents is: “Slavery destroys all Incentives to a Virtuous Life.”) Louisa Picquet corroborates the great orator’s point. In Louisa Picquet: The Octoroon (1861) she describes her initial attempts to preserve her virtue as a slave, as well as her eventual failure (Mattison 19–20). White authors lending their talents to the abolitionist cause gravitated to the same disturbing figure of the fallen woman, and the same knowledge no one really wanted to know. Lydia Maria Child’s caustically titled “Slavery’s Pleasant Homes: A Faithful Sketch” (1843) is a small drama of abuse, infidelity, and sexual assault. Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) makes the used and abused Cassy a literally haunting presence. And in Dred (1856), the eponymous hero’s first taunts to Harry focus upon his inability to either protect or control his wife Lisette: “Don’t fret about your wife! Women always like the master better than the slave! Why shouldn’t they?” (262). Post–Civil War memoirs continue to tell the tale. The Narrative of Bethany Veney, a Slave Woman (1889) figures femaleness as liability: “My dear white lady, in your pleasant home made joyous by the tender love of husband and children all your own, you can never understand the slave mother’s emotions as she clasps her new-born child, . . . and . . . that child is a girl, and from her experience she sees its almost certain doom is to minister to the unbridled lust of the slave-owner” (Veney 26). The point is not to argue that the situation of Nancy Prince’s sister is no different from that of Bethany Veney, or of the female field slaves encountered by Henry Blake. I do not suggest that enslavement entailed certain prostitution for women. But as seems clear even from these few examples, black authors often believed that this was so: the cruel way in which slavery destroyed the potential safety of the private home and of male-guided and guarded families put enslaved black women at inordinate risk. The staff of the Friend of Virtue seized upon domestic service and established their Intelligence Office for the very same reason: a recognition that this particular occupation neces130 Sentimentalizing the Fallen Woman

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sitated potentially dangerous proximity between a socially-inferior class of women—servants—and the male masters for whom they worked. That slavery was not an “occupation” as such in no way mitigated the likeness it bore to domestic servitude and the oft-presumed sexual availability of the servant. The condition was also recognized and admitted to by someone less-than-sympathetic with the abolitionist cause, Mary Boykin Chesnutt: “Under slavery, we live surrounded by prostitutes, yet an abandoned woman is sent out of any decent house. Who thinks any worse of a Negro or mulatto woman for being a thing we can’t name?” (A Diary from Dixie 21). That Chesnutt would make the link between slavery and prostitution testifies to her sense of moral indignation. She continues, “God forgive us, but ours is a monstrous system. . . . Like the patriarchs of old, our men live all in one house with their wives and concubines” (21). Prostitutes, concubines, abandoned women, fallen women: all were interchangeable names for women placed beyond social bounds of propriety. Yet Chesnutt also gives voice to the doubled prejudice that writers as different as Frederick Douglass and Hannah Crafts are at pains to address: when Chesnutt asks “who thinks any worse of a Negro or mulatto woman for being a thing we can’t name?” she speaks to the fallenness that is already there, existent before and despite anything that might happen between any individual master and slave. In the antebellum U.S., black women started out being fallen, something that every one of the aforementioned writers knew very well. However, that doubled fallenness is something that most scholars of abolition have failed to take into account, bypassing the subject as if it were obvious. In one sense, it is: enslaved women’s sexual vulnerability was acknowledged in abolitionist literature early on, sometimes exacerbating its reputation as the ranting of extremist, mentally-unbalanced agitators. Exhaustive exposés such as Theodore Weld’s American Slavery as It Is (1834) and William Goodell’s American Slave Code (1853) both addressed “forced concubinage,” the latter purposefully and provocatively including it in his section on “Uses of Slave Property.”29 However, the seeming obviousness of sexual exploitation has not led scholars to consider the extent to which two reform movements, not just one, are implicated in discussions of enslaved women’s status. Each of the black authors’ texts from which I quote was the product not just of a society debating slavery and abolition, but also of one debating fallenness and the means of combating Sentimentalizing the Fallen Woman 131

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it. This explains the true point of emphasis in the two prefaces to Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: the story’s treatment of its heroine’s sexual history. This is the point upon which, for Jacobs, “it would have been more pleasant to me to remain silent about my own history” (1). But both Jacobs and her editor Lydia Maria Child understood that sexual assault was slavery’s dirty, unspoken secret, acknowledged in private spaces (such as Mary Chesnutt’s diary) yet denied vehemently by slaveowners if ever spoken aloud. Or as Child phrased it, “this peculiar phase of Slavery has generally been kept veiled; but the public ought to be made acquainted with its monstrous features” (4). Incidents, then, is a moral reform tale, an attempt to argue for the humanity of its subject despite her fallenness and in recompense for her victimization. To that end, it utilizes many of the same sentimental strategies employed previously by William Sanger and the women of the Advocate and Friend of Virtue. The major difference between Jacobs and those reformers, though, is that this time the fallen woman will speak for herself. My aim in turning to Incidents here is not to recuperate the sexual stigmas of the nineteenth century, nor to revisit the crass “was she or wasn’t she?” altercations of the 1970s and ’80s.30 Incidents is now an oft-read, oft-taught, and much-loved text, and understandably so: there is something endearingly contemporary in Jacobs’s refusal to allow sexual impropriety to wholly define and devalue her selfrepresentation. Her defiance of unkind judgments on the part of readers, as well as of the stern double standards of racially-coded gender mores, is unusual for women authors of her day—though not entirely without precedent. But to glide past the painstaking preparation and accounting in which Jacobs engages throughout those chapters that relate her sexual history is to misread and to ahistoricize her: Harriet Jacobs was no Victoria Woodhull. Rather, as scholars such as Jean Fagan Yellin and Ann Taves have shown, “[Jacobs’s] inability to conform to the conventional canons of nineteenth-century Protestant morality in the context of slavery was both a powerful weapon in the hands of the abolitionist movement and a continuing source of personal shame” (Taves 212). Jacobs articulates both that shame and an accompanying defiance in chapters such as “A Perilous Passage in the Slave Girl’s Life,” which alternates between lines that beseech and lines that bluntly state justification for her actions. As we shall see in the following pages, Jacobs infuses these alternating stances and self132 Sentimentalizing the Fallen Woman

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representations into a narrative structure that closely resembles those we have seen throughout this chapter. Thus I would argue that her introductory instructions to her audience—“Reader, be assured this narrative is no fiction”—can be understood as a very specific, morallyreformed claim about the kinds of stories that tell fallen women’s tales. Those like Incidents which emphasize familial integrity, individual worth, and the threat of victimization are “no fiction,” but rather, the truth. Those that suggest otherwise (she deserves it, she likes it, it’s only a story) are indeed fiction, in its worst sense: nothing but lies.

Despite the titular indication that Jacobs’s story concerns solely “a slave girl,” Incidents is vitally invested in the story of slave families. It reproduces moral reformers’ simplified familial structure, locating its pathos in the interactions among a victimized daughter (Jacobs), a mother figure (her grandmother, Aunt Marthy), and her would-be seducer (Dr. Flint). Thus the story of the slave girl begins like that of the fallen woman’s, in the bosom of a happy family: “I was born a slave; but I never knew it till six years of happy childhood had passed away” (5). As Valerie Smith notes, Jacobs’s portrait of domestic contentment immediately places the text within a novelistic tradition rather than that of the slave narrative (“Loopholes” 219). In doing so, Jacobs establishes herself as a foremother for later fictional daughters who will have to discover their slave status, most notably Flora and Rosa Royal in Romance of the Republic, and the eponymous Iola Leroy. At the beginning of her story, Jacobs provides herself with a genealogy that quickly classifies her as a beloved daughter, first and foremost; someone not only worth loving (and saving), but someone already loved. By citing her “comfortable home,” her parents’ excellent reputations, her grandmother and first mistress’s status in their community, and most important, all of these persons’ respect for her, Jacobs immediately defines herself in familial terms and in the gendered terms of domesticity. She is the moral reformers’ fallen woman, both literal and figurative kin. Despite the inclusion of other family members in Incidents, however, the Jacobs clan is essentially a matriarchy headed by the formidable Aunt Marthy. And as with other moral reform writing, this narrative shaping of the family is strategic: not only is Aunt Marthy’s importance emphasized in her granddaughter’s text, other family Sentimentalizing the Fallen Woman 133

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members are entirely left out.31 In keeping with the triangular story of the Fall that moral reformers rewrite, Aunt Marthy plays a major physical and psychological role in the dealings between Jacobs and her tormentor Dr. Flint. It is Aunt Marthy to whom Jacobs yearns to divulge the story of her master’s harassment and assault; Aunt Marthy whom she just as emphatically fears telling this story; and it is “the good grandmother” (201) who instills a modicum of restraint in Dr. Flint. Like the ex-inmate of the NEFMRS Temporary Home, longing for “Dear Mother” Matron, Jacobs desires maternal salvation in the form of sympathy: “I would have given the world to have laid my head on my grandmother’s faithful bosom, and told her all my troubles” (28). Hazel Carby observes that “Jacobs’s figure of the grandmother embodied aspects of a true womanhood; she was represented as being pure and pious, a fountainhead of physical and spiritual sustenance for Linda” (57). Ann Taves similarly identifies Aunt Marthy as the central figure through whom Jacobs’s parrying with ideals and reality is filtered (212). Practically and metaphorically a mother to Jacobs (as well as to sundry others in the story), Aunt Marthy is both site and symbol of the matriarchal family imperiled by fallenness. It is she who will react to her granddaughter’s fall “with sighs and tears and groans,” although the totality of that response is infamously more complex than the staff of the Advocate ever imagined. Dr. Flint also fits into the moral reform script, matching the description of the seducing, uncaring male demons who are lust incarnate. In describing his persecution of her, however, Jacobs constructs a character far worse than any inhabiting the pages of the moral reform papers: her tormentor is a fully-fleshed character, a would-be Richardsonian rake, but bereft of any appealing rakishness. (He never fits Jacobs’s “romantic ideal of a lover,” as William Sanger might have put it.) The language that Jacobs employs to portray her persecutor, however, is that deployed by moral reformers: Dr. Flint is “a plague” (29); “crafty,” “a vile monster” (44); engaged in a “mean tyranny” (45); “wily” (126); and “a hoary-headed miscreant” (54). His sexual relations with other slave women make him, “to [Jacobs’s] knowledge, the father of eleven slaves,” a type of serial destroyer and certainly a serial rapist (55). Like his reform villain counterparts, Flint deals in words as weapons. He promises Jacobs “happiness” (50), and suggestively asks her, “Have I ever treated you like a negro?”: “I would cherish you. I would make a lady of you” (56). His 134 Sentimentalizing the Fallen Woman

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verbal sparring recalls that of Pamela’s Mr. B, and of course, reform descriptions of “the tempter’s wiles.” (About the only thing he does not do is to tempt Jacobs with novels and confectionaries, but perhaps these would have outfitted the promised/threatened “small house . . . in a secluded place” [53].) Thus it is no surprise when Jacobs informs readers of the case of another slave woman whom the doctor “promised to treat well” (24), eventually selling her away along with her children when she “let [her] tongue run too far” (24). The various seduced and abandoned girls resident in metropolitan brothels could literally be left somewhere, anywhere, by their former lovers, once they were used and past that “usefulness.” Flint’s power over Jacobs and the other women under his control simply operated in a different directional state: he couldn’t just leave them, but he could just send them anywhere. The story of this other sold-away slave, a seduced and abandoned figure, marks one of those moments when Jacobs most powerfully elaborates upon and also departs from moral reform’s basic story. For moral reformers implicitly and explicitly believed in the power of narrative to act upon readers in positive ways; they believed that to know the story is to escape the story. (Even in the most limited concept of reform, such as that offered by Hannah Lee, knowledge equaled power, at least for a lonely reader.) Moral reform’s “crusade in the press” would win the war at home, for moral reformers conceived of knowledge as pure and unproblematic power: with tempters unmasked, “the innocent [would be] protected from evil and warned of danger before it was too late” (Northrup 15). All of the reform papers maintained that silence on matters sexual protected only the offenders: “If their voice [fallen women’s] could be heard, it would declare that silence on this subject had secured their ruin” (Friend of Virtue, “Address on Moral Reform” 15 Nov. 1844). But Jacobs’s story gives the lie to this belief: knowledge does not equal power for enslaved women. Rather, the slave woman’s environment is one that makes her “prematurely knowing” in the peculiar institution’s sexual relations, but deprives her of almost all recourse. Jacobs’s descriptions of life at the big house combine all the dangers of reformers’ urban spaces with the equally perilous intimacy of the private home: for the slave, the tempter’s wiles respect no division of experience. Hence Jacobs describes the slave’s acquisition of knowledge not as empowering, but rather as indicative of nascent sexual corruption: Sentimentalizing the Fallen Woman 135

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Every where the years bring to all enough of sin and sorrow; but in slavery the very dawn of life is darkened by these shadows. Even the little child, who is accustomed to wait on her mistress and her children, will learn, before she is twelve years old, why it is that her mistress hates such and such a one among the slaves. Perhaps the child’s own mother is among those hated ones. She listens to violent outbreaks and cannot help understanding what is the cause. She will become prematurely knowing in evil things. Soon she will learn to tremble when she hears her master’s footfall. (45) Such corruption originates in the mind, and thus, is all about knowledge: the helpless slave girl “will learn,” and just as women as a whole cannot help falling, slave women “cannot help understanding.” Yet the body does not escape here: learning also leads to “trembl[ing],” a mean instance of the embodiment with which reformers continuously wrestled. Certain types of knowledge, then, are part and parcel of the slave woman’s fall; one precipitates the other. But moral reformers were not entirely mistaken: what Jacobs describes as this “premature knowing” recalls the falls initiated by the wrong kinds of stories, endless Thompson and Buntline tales and the French novels so powerful they could corrupt from oceans away. If reformers attempted to reverse the culpability of the fall, Jacobs nevertheless would figure the big house as a doomed Eden, where even “the very dawn of life” simply awaited its destruction. Fearing for the female body is a narrative activity often shared by slave narratives and moral reform stories; what Jacobs describes here is its necessary antecedent, learning to fear. After all, the last thing the slave girl learns in this scenario is “to tremble when she hears her master’s footfall,” to react physically because she knows what’s coming. Hence this plot for a slave Bildungsroman pictures the omnipresent prostitution which Mary Chesnutt laments, except that in this instance, it is the slaves themselves who are “surrounded.” And knowledge does nothing to help them, or prevent the story from unraveling. But let us say this: that Jacobs’s sad insistence upon the powerlessness of storytelling is both her ultimate difference from and her greatest likeness to her moral reform peers. Because Jacobs, like those peers, is fascinated by the potential of telling the right kinds of stories. It is such potential that underlies her “desire” to speak, and “to add my testimony to that of abler pens to convince the people of the Free 136 Sentimentalizing the Fallen Woman

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States what Slavery really is” (1–2). Two aspects of Incidents point to its essential intertextuality: not only does it contain echoes of Richardson and of endless moral reform tales, but its characters continuously appeal to timeless slave narratives they, and everyone else, already know. First, Jacobs juxtaposes her personal story against others both more and less common. After news of her first pregnancy fails to bring relief from Dr. Flint’s persecution, she confides that “hope die[s] away”: “What was there to save me from the usual fate of slave girls?” (60). If “the usual fate” momentarily appears to be her own, she nonetheless continues to desire and speculate about an alternative: “Why had my lot been so different from my mother’s?” (78). For Jacobs, the essential and timeless slave narrative entails a “usual fate,” an ending that is both oppressive convention and oppressive conclusion. The second moment of intertextual allusion comes in the midst of one of Dr. Flint’s ceaseless badgerings. He poses a rhetorical question to Jacobs: “Have I ever treated you like a negro?” (56). Flint then follows with an elaboration of what, presumably, such “treatment” entails: “I have never allowed you to be punished, not even to please your mistress” (56). What the question refers to, and what the continuation partially unpacks, is that same “usual fate” of which Jacobs spoke: the learning, the knowing, the fearing, the helplessness. There is a way to be “treat[ed] like a negro” in slavery days, and everybody knows it. Jacobs knows it, Flint knows; Aunt Marthy and all of Jacobs’s family know it; Mary Chesnutt and Frederick Douglass know it; though they say almost nothing about it, the women of the Advocate and the Friend of Virtue probably know it, too. And yet nothing changes. The story repeats itself, just as the reform papers repeated themselves, decade after decade, perfectly and finally saved girls, Jessies and Esthers and Harriets, somehow slipping away. Or is it that simple? In referencing her mother’s fate, with her more fortunate “lot,” Jacobs evokes a narrative almost fantastical to her—the almost edenic happiness lost in the first few paragraphs of the book, a story ended before hers even began. What our author must point out is that she, and countless other enslaved women, have “a usual fate” and thus a usual story. But they desperately long for a rewritten tale, a better “lot” like that of her mother’s. A true story— no fiction. Jacobs does manage to create something different and more bearable for herself, and phrases it in appropriate language: “Reader, my story ends with freedom; not in the usual way, with Sentimentalizing the Fallen Woman 137

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marriage. I and my children are now free!” (201). Of course this last “usual” never was usual for her, neither the “usual fate of slave girls” nor even the more fortunate “lot” of her mother. The final “usual” alludes to a different story, a different book altogether, one that those still enslaved cannot yet write. But this is the moment where Jacobs and her moral reform peers meet again. For Jacobs has told her story, in spite of its “hav[ing] been more pleasant to have been silent” (1). “I do earnestly desire to arouse the women of the North to a realizing sense of the condition of two millions of women at the South,” she proclaims (1). “A realizing sense”—in other words, Harriet Jacobs is a reformer in her very heart: she knows what the usual story is, but remains convinced that at some point, in some retelling, a small miracle will occur. The ending will change, and once and for all, the story will stop. Because both moral reform and abolition were reforms with a fervently embraced teleology: they were supposed to have an end.

When Harriet Jacobs was finally ready to tell her story, to put it into print, she sought the help of first one famous author, and when that failed, approached a second. This is itself a well-known tale: how Jacobs consulted Harriet Beecher Stowe, only to be insulted by her; and then found Lydia Maria Child, the writer who would become both a helpful editor and a trusted friend. Stowe had behaved in a manner “not Lady like,” in Jacobs’s view, but Child proved to be “a whole souled Woman” (qtd in Yellin, Harriet Jacobs 121, 140). Some of what occurred in this affair can only be imagined: what Stowe really thought of Jacobs’s appeal; what Child made of Stowe’s response; or even more tantalizing, what Jacobs thought and said but never consigned to paper.32 In her first published work, though, a letter responding to a defense of slavery by former first lady Julia Tyler, Jacobs flatly stated that “the truth can never be told so well through the second or third person as from yourself ” (qtd in Yellin 122). Written shortly after the fiasco with Stowe, the “Letter from a Fugitive Slave” reads retroactively as an indignant retort to the woman with the bestselling novel in the nation. But in her all-toocomprehensible anger at Stowe, Jacobs may not have realized that she and both of her famous correspondents shared a crucial character trait, one common to reformers and to many antebellum writers. 138 Sentimentalizing the Fallen Woman

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Each of these women thought long, thought hard, and thought insistently about how to convey the truth of slavery, a truth that they understood as based primarily and fundamentally in experience. This is what Jacobs called that “realizing sense,” an “aha!” moment of identification, sympathy, feeling. The embrace of experience had led other abolitionists to go farther than did Jacobs in her “Letter,” and to declare the impossibility of representation for their cause. “Slavery has never been represented,” William Wells Brown asserted in 1847, “Slavery never can be represented” (qtd in Ernest 39).33 Yet the attempt must be made, for without narrative, abolition as both an organized cause and a fervent vocation would cease to exist. This did not alter, however, one of Jacobs’s most pressing dilemmas: how could one accomplish the feat of authentically and authoritatively depicting the experience of slavery when that experience would be so alien to so many readers, or when the truth was so fantastic it appeared untrue? Could convention suffice: would readers, “be[ing] assured this narrative is no fiction,” amiably follow their narrator’s lead? (1). Things would be easier if only one’s story could be authoritatively told, and read, as history. After all, the latter was a respected genre, a subject recommended in every book of manners, morals, and selfimprovement (often in close proximity to the exhortations to avoid fiction). Men at the great universities studied history, and—like Harvard graduates George Bancroft, William Prescott, and Francis Parkman—turned around and wrote it. For a country and a people in “the morning of life,” as Prescott once put it, composing history was both a challenge and a necessity (“Charles Brockden Brown” 2). Freed slaves made claims to history every day: every time “Written by Herself ” or “Written by Himself ” was appended to a narrative, its slave author attested not only to the text’s veracity, but to its status as a history of slavery. Both in slave narratives and in more conventional works of history, such as those by William Wells Brown and Henry Highland Garnet, “African American writers worked actively to establish their own professionalism while also contending against a white historical tradition that relegated their collective experiences to a singular and containable story” (Ernest 7).34 But fiction! As Jacobs’s declaration attested, fiction was everything that a slave narrative could not afford to be. It committed every sin that slavery supporters charged to abolitionist writers: exaggeration, misrepresentation, and plain outright making things up. Sentimentalizing the Fallen Woman 139

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In a world full of two-penny paperbacks like Venus in Boston, one understands why Jacobs was concerned. But what if some of her fears, at least, were unfounded? What if these two vehicles for storytelling, fiction and history, were actually much closer than the woman from Edenton might think?

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4

Making History with Child and Stowe

In 1835, the British abolitionist George Thompson arrived in the U.S. to give a series of antislavery lectures sponsored by his friends in the New York and American Anti-Slavery Societies. New Yorkers who were not members of the local abolitionist group, however, showed themselves to be less than pleased by Thompson’s presence. Along with her husband, Lydia Maria Child helped first to hide the visiting speaker and then to spirit him away to Connecticut. A few days later she wrote him there, reporting on a sign found hanging on a public building the day after his departure. The placard read: To the people of the City and County of N. York, greetings: Know ye that information hath this day reached me that George Thompson, the Envoy Extraordinary and Minister Plenipotentiary, duly sent out by the old women of Scotland, to lecture the Americans on the subject of slavery, is now in this city, at the house of Lewis Tappan, 40 Rose St. . . . I therefore command you, my trusty and well-beloved, that you take his body forthwith and bring him before me, at the Merchants’ Exchange, in said city, to be dealt with according to my code of laws. “Judge Lynch” (Child, Selected Letters 35) The proclamation followed tense days which Child described as “like the times of the French Revolution, when no man dared trust his neighbor. Private assassins from N. Orleans are lurking at the corners of the streets . . . and very large sums are offered for any one who will convey Mr. Thompson into the slave states” (31). In her letter Child expressed relief that her friend was safe, and called the sign “a pitiful ebullition of spleen” (35). She was daunted, but also energized and angered: “Alas poor fools! They are building up the very cause they seek to destroy” (31). But her fellow activist Lewis Tappan continued to receive death

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threats, as did William Lloyd Garrison, the comrade who “got hold of the strings of my conscience, and pulled me into Reforms” (qtd in Karcher 175). David Walker was already dead, and in two years, Elijah Lovejoy would be, too. So Child also wrote to her elder brother Convers, and assured him that she would “be prudent” (39).1 I open this chapter with Child’s letter, and the chillingly creative message left for abolitionists on a New York street, as a means of broaching a less-than-glorious strain in the history of antislavery specifically, and of reform generally. Reform movements often overlapped, sharing participants, trading strategies, and appropriating discourses. Child herself can be seen as a very model for reform as a way of life, a profound ideological orientation: at her death, she left behind a body of writing spanning half a century, and addressing abolition, Indian rights, women’s suffrage, African American suffrage, and peace; along the way, she also expressed support for temperance, public education, and religious tolerance. Had she lived during certain moments in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, she almost certainly would have been dubbed a “bleeding heart liberal” by this country’s mainstream press. But the prices that Americans paid in order to support their beloved reforms, socially and otherwise, could differ dramatically. Moral reformers, particularly female reformers, faced a pariah status: the taboo of sexual transgression and the strength of guilt-by-association guaranteed that only “true believers” would willingly associate with prostitutes. Temperance offered a means of activism that courted respectability; this was the case, again, especially for women. The temperate qualities connoted by its name and its laudable goals mollified many who might otherwise fear public exposure— such as the women whom Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony could convince to join the New York State Woman’s Temperance Society, but could not attract to a women’s rights organization. (Who could argue against temperance on its own terms—insist that Americans should be miserable addicts? Opposition to temperance, as I explain in the next chapter, typically deployed arguments concerning individual rights or freedom of commerce and trade. It did not and could not argue that Americans were biologically fitted or divinely chosen to be drunkards.) But abolitionists were, in the words of Timothy McCarthy and John Stauffer, “disturbers of the status quo” (xiii), and the transformations that they advocated variously threatened the entwined economies of North and South, the social structure of an 142 Making History with Child and Stowe

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entire region, the comprehension of biblical sanction, the maintenance of legal precedent and political power, the status of scientific inquiry, and last but not least, intimately held ideas of racial identity that were themselves upheld by institutions of the state. People could be shunned for supporting moral reform; pledging allegiance to the Cold Water Army might lose them friends or, at most, prevent a man from being “one of the guys.” But though the changes for which these activists yearned did indeed posses the potential to create a radically different world. Like suffragists in this era, they mostly waited, even their most zealous members aware (sometimes amiably and sometimes resentfully) of a stronger presence in the room. Abolition was quite simply the reform; being an abolitionist could cost you a job, divide you from your family, provoke physical attack, or even get you killed, and in the face of an angry mob, no lightness of skin would offer salvation. (And as for the blackness of blackness? God help you . . .) Neither would women necessarily be treated more respectfully than men; women’s antislavery meetings were also broken up and their attendants threatened during this period.2 Opposition to abolition, and the deep veins of prejudice and hatred that ran beneath it, blithely dismissed normative privileges of race and gender when necessary or desirable—as any “high yellow” or female slave could attest. Hence the stakes of antislavery fiction only become clear when we remember that these texts document an America peopled not only by masters and slaves, Northerners and Southerners, Jacobs and Child, but inhabited also by “Judge Lynch” and the men very eager to do his bidding, all too many of them, faceless and waiting. Such men incarnated the “strange incongruity” of which Jacobs wrote when, toward the end of Incidents, she observed that because of the 1850 Fugitive Slave Act, she was “a slave in New York, as subject to slave laws as I had been in a Slave State” (193). Bills of sale respected no state lines, and so Jacobs could marvel, in wonder and in horror, at the legal and textual terms of her freedom when it finally came (200). At any time a message from Judge Lynch could be hung from a building, its slightness taking the place of the man that its authors would willingly hang in its stead. Such signs and slips of paper helped to form the documentation of the nation’s true sociopolitical state, no less important than those housed and guarded in Philadelphia and Washington D.C. What Isabelle Lehuu has characterized as the carnivalesque “exuberance” of antebellum print culture, Making History with Child and Stowe 143

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its “disruptive” and kinetic “turmoil,” ensured that its myriad messages could travel effortlessly, transporting the sentiments, policies, and de facto police of any Southern town into the putatively “free” states.3 Thus abolitionists attempted to record the print culture of slavery and force it to testify against itself: via bills of sale and signs, newspapers, letters, pamphlets, sermons, and the recollections of those who lived through it. (Building upon the legal analogy connoted by “testimony,” Theodore Weld’s American Slavery as It Is: Testimony of a Thousand Witnesses [1839] opens with the following direction: “Reader, you are empanelled as a juror to try a plain case and bring in an honest verdict” [7].) This was the history of slavery undertaken by Weld, William C. Nell, Martin Delany, William Goodell, Lydia Maria Child, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, as well as by countless survivors like Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglass. As John Ernest has described it, the project of history in this era, for African Americans and for like-minded white activists, would be expansive in its goals: “It would have to include an account of slavery. . . . [It] would need to account for the considerable illusions of white Americans. . . . [It] would need to support the sort of social activism capable of responding to the degrading influences of racial prejudice” (40). For many in this moment, writes Ernest, “whether and how one [understood] slavery was . . . a test of historical understanding” (41, emphasis mine). The results encompassed everything from ambitious and expansive projects like Delany’s Condition, Elevation, Emigration, and Destiny of the Colored People of the United States (1852) and Weld’s American Slavery as It Is, as well as Child’s primer The Freedmen’s Book (1865) and Stowe’s defensive Key (1853). All of these works attempted to harness print large and small in an attempt to counter the silences of complacency. “The antislavery movement . . . provided an institutional base for the documentation and reinterpretation of alternate histories,” including the truthful history of the peculiar institution, as Ernest has aptly put it (123). It could all start with a threat, a sign, and a letter. But where does fiction in? For all of these abolitionist historians began with a simple goal akin to Harriet Beecher Stowe’s in the Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin: “to say what is true, and only that” (iv). A small digression, by way of illustration: once she returned from England—and most likely, had completely forgotten the request of an escaped slave who shared her first name—Stowe set about writing 144 Making History with Child and Stowe

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another antislavery novel. This effort would respond to some of the complaints concerning Uncle Tom’s Cabin, particularly those focusing upon Tom himself, and his adamant credo of submission and nonviolence.4 It would move our author, both metaphorically and literally, from cabin to swamp in five hundred pages and a few short years. Yet for all its serious purpose, Dred (1857) features a plainly curious conversation approximately two hundred pages into its text. It is a provocative exchange about the close relationship of romance and history—the former often used synonymously with “fiction” by Stowe.5 In this conversation, heroine Nina Gordon dismisses historical reading matter by huffily complaining, “What is it to me what all these old empires have been, a hundred years ago? It is as much as I can do to attend to what is going on now” (121). To her great surprise and “inexpressible relief,” her suitor Edward Clayton expresses sympathy for her point of view (121). “It would have been a good thing for many of our historians,” asserts Clayton, “if they had been obliged to have shaped their histories so that they would interest a lively school-girl”: “We literary men, then, would have found less sleepy reading. There is no reason why a young lady, who would sit up all night reading a novel, should not be made to sit up all night with a history. I’ll venture to say there’s no romance can come up to the gorgeousness and splendor, and the dramatic power, of things that really have happened. All that’s wanting is to have it set before us with an air of reality.” “But, then,” said Nina, “you’d have to make the history into a romance.” “Well, a good historical romance is generally truer than a dull history; because it gives some sort of conception of the truth; whereas the dull history gives none.” (121–22) Stowe’s assertions concerning the “truthfulness” of fiction, conveyed through Clayton (one of the novel’s voices of reason), read ostensibly as contradictory and confused. The conversation opposes “a lively school-girl” against an implicitly adult scholar, daring to suggest that the latter’s compositional style should speak to potential students rather than educated peers. But while the imagined scholar remains imagined, inchoate and unclear, the school girl does not: Nina is in fact recently home from school, and gives this judgmental figure an endearing, if occasionally maddening, personality. It is “just such Making History with Child and Stowe 145

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dancing, glittering, fluttering little assortments of curls, pendants, streamers, eyes, cheeks, and dimples” who not only “ma[ke] fools of ” men (7), but more important for Stowe’s point, need persuading that history is as necessary as “what is going on now” (121). In other words, Nina is precisely the sort of sweet-natured but slightly selfish and thoughtless young woman whose personal energies could be harnessed for righteous causes if only one knew how to make them sympathize, empathize, feel. Karen Sánchez-Eppler has described Nina as “the ideal reader of all sentimental fiction,” responding correctly (by “feeling right”) to “antislavery tales” as well as to other types of affectional stories (Touching Liberty 28). I would argue, however, that Nina becomes an ideal reader in Stowe’s novel: her education in proper literacy is accomplished in Dred ’s own pages, and is due in no small part to Stowe’s insistence upon blending historical “truthfulness” with “romance.” Our author strengthens her argument regarding history by providing Nina and other school girls with an ally in their complaints: “literary men,” who include the vaunted genre in their repertoire as a matter of course, but would still prefer “less sleepy reading.” (Stowe’s “literary men,” unlike Frederick Jackson’s, perform their duty, but seemingly do so without much enthusiasm.) As a difficult audience, then, the Ninas of the world must be courted, rather than lectured; wooed, rather than talked down to; convinced that things that happened “a hundred years ago” can have the same sense of urgency as that which makes up the present day.6 They can become ideal readers, ideal listeners, and historical actors, if one can just figure out how to reach them. I begin this section with Dred ’s “history versus fiction” commentary, set against the backdrop of antislavery’s history and Judge Lynch’s message, for a simple reason: for all of Harriet Jacobs’s wellfounded anxieties concerning how her story would be read, there were figures in abolition who were attempting to harness history’s generic prestige for fiction, thereby adding one more potent weapon to the movement’s arsenal. Such a transformation would alter how readers understood fiction as both name and genre, lessening the damage it could perform when lobbed at writers of nonfiction or of novels. These figures were the two women, or “Sattellites . . . of great magnitude,” as Jacobs called them, to whom the beginning author had written for help in telling her story (qtd in Yellin, Harriet Jacobs 140). Child and Stowe were deeply interested in history and its relation to 146 Making History with Child and Stowe

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fiction, both as an intimate and conscious endeavor in which they took active part, and as a set of larger processes that might usher in what Child saw as “the regeneration of the world” (Selected Letters 39). The two women also enjoyed the seemingly contradictory position of being prolific authors of fiction who harbored reservations about fiction—or to be more precise, the wrong kind of fiction. Child wrote fiction, but also explicitly recommended constraining the novel’s social role. Stowe attempted to finesse what kind of fiction her novels were understood to be, making claims in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the Key, and Dred that her fiction was—surprise!—the truth. Both women were convinced that the right kind of fiction could indeed further reform, especially if that fiction took on the educational and enlightening work of history in its guise as a narrative genre. Indeed, when Child elaborated on her reasons for writing A Romance of the Republic (1867), she explained that “in these days of novel-reading, I thought a Romance would take more hold of the public mind, than the most elaborate arguments” (qtd in Nelson, Word 79). Yet as Carolyn Karcher, Bruce Mills, Dana D. Nelson, Eve Allegra Raimon, and other scholars have shown, Romance is no less steeped in history for being “romantic.” Rather, much of its plot weaves together examples taken from Child’s earlier documentary compilation, The Patriarchal Institution, as Described By Its Own Family (1860). Child’s work, read alongside Stowe’s commentary in Dred, begins to offer readers a realignment of the social and cultural merit popularly assumed to attach to the genres in question. Certainly if works of history read more like novels, they would make their audience “less sleepy,” as Edward Clayton wistfully desires. But if novels read like history, then fiction might be capable of deploying its characteristic imaginative power within history’s framework of authoritative truth without suffering the reputed consequences of it. To encourage Americans to read Dred—or Uncle Tom’s Cabin or any of Child’s antislavery fiction—as doing the work of history is clearly Stowe’s aim in introducing her “history versus fiction” sequence. Nina and Edward’s conversation makes explicit a reform goal shared by abolitionists, moral reformers, and panic writers: to change the world, and thus to change history. What Stowe and Child would accomplish is to collapse the distance between “all these old empires” and “what is going on now,” convincing the Ninas of the country that both deserve their attention. After all, it takes but a nighttime and a sunrise to make Making History with Child and Stowe 147

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“what is going on now” into the past. And if conventional histories cannot picture for Americans that which will make them feel and then act, then fiction must step in “to take more hold of the public mind” and of its conscience. My purpose here is not to introduce an unexamined term, but rather, to include history in this conversation about reform and fiction as a similarly contested category, one often involved in conversations concerning truthful stories and fiction’s ability to relate them. Over the course of the following pages, history will figure in different settings (as biography, as literary development, and as a larger social record) and will be alternately described as being very like fiction, or not nearly enough alike. As a category of narrative, history benefited from its status as an institutionalized academic discipline; the great history writers of the period, like William Prescott and Francis Parkman, had at one time been history students. But they also conceived of history as did many Americans of the antebellum era: as a branch of literature, not a wholly separate vein of writing. Fiction is still the more vexed term, one altering before our eyes and over the course of very short time periods; what is anathema to Panic survivors in the 1830s seems perfectly palatable to Stowe and Child in the 1840s and ’50s, albeit with certain qualifications. But both fiction and history are vitally important to these authors, and to the work of reform as a whole. For as readers may have discerned by now, all of the writers included in this work are trying to change history: to prevent its repetition, perfect its path, make it bearable for the short moments in time when it is lived as the present. Why Child and Stowe? As “Sattellites,” they differ dramatically from any writer so far discussed. The first woman in the republic and the little lady who made the big war now come to any scholarly study with immense historical baggage of their own: as subjects of biographies, books, and countless essays; fixed names on course syllabi; luminaries of a recuperated tradition of women’s writing; and, in Stowe’s case, a lightning rod in continuing discussions about the construction of race and gender in this country. In their work scholars find a bevy of cultural trends and social formations expressed, reflected, supported, and questioned; from imperialism to religious salvation, from the onslaught of commercial capitalism to the embrace of Transcendentalism, the country and its century are encompassed in these women’s texts. They now seem to have existed 148 Making History with Child and Stowe

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in a different world from that of, say, the Reverend James Watson; but this is the mutated perception of time. This chapter looks at the stakes of Child’s and Stowe’s historical efforts in a reform context, approaching the women as figures in a movement who happened also to be dedicated authors, rather than dedicated authors with an incidental interest in slavery. This is not to belittle their authorial ambitions, which will play a role here. Rather, I seek to establish the thread of relation that ties Child and Stowe together with the Panic survivors, moral reformers, and small town temperance ministers already discussed. The two women were definitively shaped by antislavery activism: the publications of the Appeal on Behalf of that Class of Americans Called Africans (1833) and Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) altered their lives permanently, making it impossible for either to dissociate her name from that of abolition. Harriet Jacobs’s figuring of them as “Sattellites” speaks not of their reputations as “just” authors, but of their status as authors of a distinct cultural orientation. Or in other words, reform continuously and crucially shaped the writing in which these women engaged. Child’s The Rebels and Stowe’s Mayflower stories were good in their own right, but neither was likely to get its author both praised and vilified, lose her a job and friends (Child), win her fame and friends (Stowe), result in financial windfalls, influence politicians, make her the subject of countless charitable appeals, or inspire an industry of poetic homage, pictorial souvenirs, theatrical adaptations, and commercial goods such as those that made up “Uncle Tom Mania.”7 In this book’s introduction I described Charlotte Perkins Gilman visiting her great-aunt at “the house Uncle Tom built” (Gilman 19). That great-aunt was the woman Uncle Tom made: in the antebellum era, both Stowe and Child derived inspiration and fundamental identity as authors from their commitment to reform. These two women did not travel the same paths to reform and the social work they would have it do. Despite Child’s glowing description of William Lloyd Garrison as the savior who “got hold of the strings of [her] conscience,” the author was already firmly convinced of slavery’s abhorrent nature years before meeting the charismatic leader (qtd in Karcher 175). Her father “prided himself on being the son of ‘a liberty man,”’ and equated the colonists’ battle for freedom with that being fought by the colonists’ slaves: “the sound of the old Revolution . . . was still in his ears, and he detested slavery, with all its apologists and in all its forms” (qtd in Karcher 7). Stowe’s youthful Making History with Child and Stowe 149

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influences were less impressive: her father Lyman Beecher “considered himself both an abolitionist and a colonizationist,” and throughout most of his life attempted to tread a cautious path “that mirrored the murkiness of his own consciousness” (Hedrick 103, 102).8 But his daughter Hattie was made of different material, and the publication of the controversial Uncle Tom’s Cabin forced a commitment previously discernible only within its pages. In the words of Sarah Meer, “UTC had made Stowe an antislavery activist in her readers’ imaginations; to a certain extent, she was required to become a real one in its aftermath” (226). And so she did, learning and carefully navigating the “minefield” that was antislavery politics (Hedrick 235). But of course neither woman was a saint, and there are saddening limitations to their written work: “the paternalistic ethics” that Gregg Crane finds informing Stowe’s expressions of “higher law” constitutionalism (65); the problematic racial reasoning behind Child’s several “tragic mulatta” figures, analyzed by Carolyn Karcher, Dana Nelson, Eve Raimon, and Karen Sánchez-Eppler; the constraints that Susan Ryan outlines in Stowe’s portraits of a “benevolent citizenship” (161–62). I would argue that these faults invariably result from each author’s entrenched racial and cultural prejudices, working in conjunction with their “good intentions” (to borrow Ryan’s terminology), each informing and undercutting the other. But this dualism is endemic to reform: to restore and to innovate, to go forward and to go back, to be breathtakingly transgressive and radical in one sentence and astonishingly reactionary in the next. In this sense no reform effort is ever truly “single-minded,” either in the nineteenth century or now. In what follows, I begin by discussing Stowe and the implications of Dred ’s commentary, reading them against writings about fiction and history from William Prescott. As the author of histories of Ferdinand and Isabella (1837), the Conquest of Mexico (1843), and the Conquest of Peru (1847), Prescott parlayed the era’s literary nationalism into a fascination with the creation of the Americas, not just the creation of the U.S. But his writings also reveal him to be just as interested in fiction as Stowe was in history; intriguingly, we find that he also was not opposed to the genres’ mixing. I then turn to Child, whom I read here as no less invested in the topics of the day, but also as a product of her own difficult and often conflicting personal history. As a fervent activist who dedicated her literary talents to social causes over the course of her entire career, Child was as profoundly shaped by reform 150 Making History with Child and Stowe

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as was her slightly younger (and more commercially successful) peer Stowe. But she was also a writer who had a career from an early age, a professional pen who supported herself (and often her husband) on what her writing could earn. In 1846 she made the following announcement to a friend: “I mean to devote the rest of my life to the attainment of literary excellence” (Selected Letters 209). The results of this dedication include a volume of short stories including “The Quadroons” and “The Black Saxons” (Fact and Fiction, 1846); a children’s miscellany (Flowers for Children, also 1846); and in subsequent years, The Progress of Religious Ideas (1855), a biography of Isaac Hopper, an abolitionist and supporter of prison reform (1853), the editing of Jacobs’s Incidents (1861), The Freedmen’s Book (1865), An Appeal for the Indians (1868), and her last novel, A Romance of the Republic (1867). What Child understood “literary excellence” to signify, then, cannot be determined from a simple survey of the work that followed her statement, nor can it be interpreted as an uncritical endorsement of any genre. In her life as a professional writer, Child often dealt with critics, editors, printers, and fellow authors completely removed from her guiding social and religious beliefs—exactly the sort of persons she would convert if possible. She represents, then, a person with both reform and professional vocations, something to which Stowe would not admit, nor would any other writer featured in this study.9 Thus, Child’s effort to finesse the place of fiction in American culture—to make “literary excellence” do the work of reform and thus change the world—suggests that the contradictions understood to exist amongst fiction, truth, and literariness had been neither solved (for Stowe) nor clarified (for Child) by decades of panic, moral reform, temperance, or other abolitionist writing. History thus emerges as one more term and one more category of narrative that must be figured into these equations and reckoned with. If history was the subject of earnest battles, claimed by men of letters as well as men formerly in chains, it was because its cachet seemed to resolve the problems of truthfulness to which fiction was susceptible. Its reputation was an asset of no mean cultural value, something “literary women” like Child and Stowe knew well. Harriet Jacobs, so worried about her story being taken for fiction, knew it too, and very likely sensed that her “whole souled” editor sympathized. It is one of those sad stories, those gray moments of history, that she and her first “Sattellite” never came to the same understanding. Making History with Child and Stowe 151

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Dred’s History and Fiction What Stowe’s Dred characters find lacking in history as a genre is as vitally important as what they see present in it. Indeed, Edward Clayton states quite clearly that the events of the past do possess an urgency, characterized as they are by a “gorgeousness and splendor” (121). History’s Achilles’ heel has nothing to do with content, but rather, everything to do with style: its inability to unleash “the dramatic power, of things that really have happened” (121). The historian’s weakness lies in his way with words, or lack thereof; he fails to conjure the “air of reality” that ought to exhale from his subjects of study (121). Or, phrased differently, the problem with the historian is that he does not “make [his] history into a romance,” and so does not write like a novelist (122). (If only historians would read the moral reformers!) This uncomplimentary judgment upon the scholars of the past is slyly buttressed by Stowe, who permits Nina’s Aunt Nesbit to interject herself into the conversation at intervals. That good lady dutifully objects to novels, and notes that she has been “reading Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire” (120). (The school girls of the world are allowed to score an ironic point at Aunt Nesbit’s expense here. Concerning her guardian’s reading of Gibbon, Nina very quickly remarks, “yes . . . aunt’s been busy about that ever since I can remember” [120].) But Aunt Nesbit fails to comprehend the “infidel principle” permeating Gibbon’s monumental work (120), and in a related and painfully obvious manner, is incapable of following Clayton’s reasoning.10 She merely repeats an anti-novel mantra ad nauseum, and is duly ignored by her niece—just like the equally dull historians who that young lady cannot stand. Pity the poor historian, then, for a small but influential number of their band in the antebellum era did conceive of the genre as having much in common with the maligned novel. William Prescott, for example, went so far as to include “the dramatic power” which Edward Clayton recommended in his own description of the qualities of “a perfect historian” (82): He must be strictly impartial; a lover of truth under all circumstances, and ready to declare it at all hazards; he must be deeply conversant with whatever may bring into relief the character of the people he is depicting, not merely with their laws, constitution, general resources, and all the other more visible parts of the 152 Making History with Child and Stowe

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machinery of government, but with the nicer social and moral relations, the informing spirit which gives life to the whole, . . . If he has to do with other ages and nations, he must transport himself into them, expatriating himself, as it were, in order to get the very form and pressure of the times he is delineating. . . . He must display the various powers of the novelist or dramatist, throwing his characters into suitable lights and shades, disposing his scenes so as to awaken and maintain an unflagging interest, and diffusing over the whole that finished style without which his work will only become a magazine of materials for the more elegant edifices of subsequent writers. (“Irving’s Conquest of Granada” 82–83, emphasis mine) Prescott admits that his summary of the perfect historian describes “a monster [that] never did and never will exist” (83). Nonetheless, his own sense of what would constitute history writing at its best emphasizes precisely those qualities that Stowe’s characters find missing from it: a commitment to bringing other worlds to life by attempting to capture “the informing spirit” that makes them unique and compelling. This is the “air of reality” found wanting in Dred (121), and attributed to historians’ inability to harness the peculiar talents of “a novelist or dramatist” (Prescott 82). In Prescott’s perfected history, personae become “characters,” events become “scenes,” and the historian himself becomes a storyteller. Thus Prescott and Stowe seem in complete agreement in their views of what narrative tasks history ought to perform, and how they ought to be performed. Indeed, the historian’s background reveals that he and the country’s most famous novelist share an abiding interest in all things literary, loosely put. “Irving’s Conquest of Granada,” the review essay in which Prescott’s “perfect historian” portrait is found, also covers the historians of Greek and Roman antiquity whose desire to convey “an elegant and interesting narrative” establishes an emphatically dramatic model for nineteenth-century practitioners (83). The chronicler of Spanish imperialism in the New World firmly believes that present-day history is a “science” (83), undertaken by men with a great respect for “method” (87) and “a regular system” of research and inquiry (89). But this commitment to a profession, undergoing social modifications that will increasingly professionalize it, does not preclude attention to what may seem external matters. The review of Irving is just one of many originally published in the Making History with Child and Stowe 153

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North American Review, one of the periodical publications most insistently, and consistently, calling for an authentic, indigenous literature to announce itself. Later reprinted in a collection entitled Biographical and Critical Miscellanies (1845), the Irving piece took its place alongside articles on Miguel de Cervantes, Sir Walter Scott, Molière, “Italian Narrative Poetry,” and “Charles Brockden Brown, the American Novelist,” to name but a few. The scope of the essays demonstrates the elite learning possessed by NAR writers and assumed by them as a quality shared with their readers: about half of the Miscellanies’ entries take European literature as their focus, and a few, like that on Cervantes, make casual reference to Harvard College lectures on the essays’ subjects. Certainly this speaks to the social context from which the NAR sprang, as well as to its first sphere of circulation: in the pre–Civil War era, the journal was largely staffed by Harvard men. But more important, the essays make plain Prescott’s understanding that history was in fact an integral part of literature, and that its well-educated, aiming-for-perfection students would of course be schooled and interested in all of literature’s branches. Hence Prescott and his NAR peers conceive of literature in its broadest, early republic sense: a family of narrative that includes the sciences and the belles lettres, religion, philosophy, and history. Thus historians could borrow what dramatic power they needed from fiction, as long as they adhered to the rules of their own science. Certainly this was what Prescott himself attempted in his writing, and it was one of the central accomplishments he admired in the History of Granada composed by Washington Irving, the author of “Rip Van Winkle.” Stowe’s pointed comments concerning history in Dred, then, would be unlikely to rouse historians’ ire, for they too conceived of their work as an attempt to meld the best of fiction with that of their own subjects. This remains one of the most important lessons of David Levin’s History as Romantic Art (1959): that “behind all the histories of George Bancroft, William Prescott, John Motley, and Francis Parkman lies the conviction that the historian is a man of letters” (3). Levin’s analysis of these men’s works highlights their commitment to truth, a quality that they understood as accessed through methodical, disciplinary means, but whose effect they felt would create that elusive “air of reality” that could transport a reader to Ferdinand and Isabella’s Spain or to the already-vanishing America of the colonial period. This effect was termed “experience,” that sense of sympathizing, empathizing, feeling 154 Making History with Child and Stowe

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with, for, or like those beings resurrected on the surfaces of paper. “To a group of men,” writes Levin, “whose literary experience . . . hammered so consistently on the theme of experiencing, of the observer’s responses to objects and ideas, no history could be valuable unless it brought the Past to life upon the printed page” (8). The emphasis on “experience” makes Prescott and company, for Levin, “romantic [men] of letters,” in a recognizable though unacknowledged kinship with the Transcendentalists of their age.11 It also makes them surprising kin to reformers like Stowe and Child, whose overriding goal was to enable readers to experience some change of mind and heart when engrossed in their pages. The experience of slavery is precisely what William Wells Brown and Harriet Jacobs protest cannot be distilled and represented. It is also precisely what each of them, and other abolitionists, attempted to document anyway. As if seizing opportunities to have her own say about fiction and history, Stowe disperses commentary on them throughout her most famous antislavery texts. “The air of reality” so longed for in Dred, and echoed by Prescott’s “informing spirit,” is figured in Uncle Tom’s Cabin as “a living dramatic reality,” the descriptor for the novel upon which she settles in its final chapter (383). This reality, whether “living” or “informing,” surpasses “mere cold art”; the latter, when “unquickened by sympathy with the spirit of the age, is nothing” (Dred 4). An “air of reality” is encouraged by Stowe’s pervasive narrative commentary throughout her texts, framing her characters’ dialogue and actions with her own questions to readers. Especially in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Stowe’s use of direct address asks the reader to join with her characters in moments of pathos. As Gregg Crane has put it, her “dramatic interactions . . . are designed to trigger in the reader an intuition of slavery’s moral and legal invalidity” (60). “Intuition” here is particularly apt and suggestive, for it speaks to the “intensely bodily” nature that Karen Sánchez-Eppler finds in sentimental fiction as a whole (Touching Liberty 26). “Sentiment and feeling,” she writes, “refer at once to emotion and to physical sensation” (26), and that sense of an idea or reaction emerging from and residing within one’s self similarly characterizes intuition and instinct. Indeed, Stowe’s own language conjures related notions of naturalness and corporeality: art is “cold,” implicitly lifeless, when “unquickened by the spirit of the age” (emphasis mine). To follow upon the author’s imagery, the conception of a “living dramatic reality” allows the birth of a socially reformed Making History with Child and Stowe 155

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reader. That reader’s correct response to any of Stowe’s texts, symbolized by tears, “feeling right,” or better yet, disobeying the Fugitive Slave Act, would corroborate the “air of reality” invoked, and do so in ways overt, sensitive, and at times even sensual. Thus Stowe warned her readers in the Key that the volume “has been written with no pleasure, and with much pain”: “In fictitious writing,” she asserted, “it is possible to find refuge from the hard and the terrible, by inventing scenes and characters of a more pleasing nature. No such resource is open in a work of fact” (iii). Given that the Key is intended to defend and supplement Uncle Tom’s Cabin, however, it becomes difficult to determine which text Stowe truly means here in claiming both “pain” and “fact.” What the author figures in the Key preface as both physical and unavoidable speaks to her fiction’s “air of reality.” Her comments about little Eva mentioned in this book’s introduction speak to a similar “air”: writing that character’s demise felt “like a death in my own family, and it affected me so deeply that I could not write a word for two weeks after her death” (Life and Letters 163). Sánchez-Eppler eloquently elaborates the “troubling relation between personhood and corporeality that underlies the projects of both abolition and feminism” (32), a problematic evoked here by Stowe’s language, her purposes, and the actual enslaved women and men who needed no narrative to animate them. The relation between history and fiction, thankfully, is less troubling. Nina and Clayton’s conversation, together with Stowe’s claims for her own texts, serve as a potent reminder of the erstwhile closeness of these two disciplines. They also demonstrate for us the status of fiction even amongst writers of fiction: in the late 1850s, social reform authors would find it necessary to carve out and claim a median space between fanciful “trash,” and the “mere cold art” they felt would not meet their purposes.12 As an attempt to literally rewrite the faults of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Dred undercuts many of that predecessor text’s certainties: of race relations, of proper resistant politics, and even of moral strictures. But one of its most crucial revisions is its greater foundation in historical fact. As Gregg Crane, Joan Hedrick, and Robert Levine have shown, that most desired “air of reality” turns out to be uncannily substantial in Dred: the novel incorporates both current and past events, borrowing from newspaper headlines as well as historical works such as William C. Nell’s Colored Patriots of the American Revolution (1855).13 Stowe worked on the novel while the Kansas-Nebraska Bill was being 156 Making History with Child and Stowe

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debated and then enacted (1854); during the following dark days when abolitionist settlers were attacked in Kansas, only to be avenged by John Brown and his sons (1855–56); and she was still engaged with it when Charles Sumner was assaulted on the floor of the U.S. Senate for an antislavery speech he had delivered (1856). Much of this—her education, her reading, her awareness—is appropriated and transposed into the text, as if to guarantee that no second Key will be necessary. And yet this foundation forms only part of what Stowe has in mind when she echoes William Prescott, and attempts to “bring into relief the character of the people [she] is depicting, not merely with their laws, constitution, general resources, and all the other more visible parts of the machinery of government, but with the nicer social and moral relations, the informing spirit which gives life to the whole” (“Irving” 82). For our author, that which would make her story “less sleepy reading” is not its rendition of Sumner’s attack, but rather the moment behind it: the thoughts and the emotions that would cause one man to beat another with a cane in full view of his friends and peers. Or the thoughts and the emotions that would cause one man to hang up a sign advertising a lynching, a runaway, a sale of slaves. Thus a pensive, late-in-the-novel turn from Dred ’s narrator both corroborates Stowe’s authorial strategy and permits a glimpse into the thought behind it: There is no study in human nature more interesting than the aspects of the same subject seen in the points of view of different characters. One might almost imagine that there were no such thing as absolute truth, since a change of situation or temperament is capable of changing the whole force of an argument. We have been accustomed, even those of us who feel most, to look on the arguments for and against the system of slavery with the eyes of those who are at ease. We do not even know how fair is freedom, for we were always free. We shall never have all the materials for absolute truth on this subject, till we take into account, with our own views and reasonings, the views and reasonings of those who have bowed down to the yoke, and felt the iron enter into their souls. We all console ourselves too easily for the sorrows of others. (445) These sentences open a chapter entitled “The Desert,” in which the reader visits with Dred, Harry, Lisette, and other refugees in the Dismal Swamp. Stowe’s oppressed, including would-be insurrectionists Making History with Child and Stowe 157

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and ecstatic converts, have undergone great changes by this point in the novel: Harry and Lisette are self-described “outcasts” from society, while Dred’s religious transformation has inspired some to designate him “a prophet” (452). The chapter, its title, and its opening paragraph all speak to radical change, fallible perception, and attendant doubt. The swamp is a desert and the desert a swamp, both environments presenting great challenge for human habitation and survival. But of course, the titular desert doubles as biblical allusion to times of loss, wandering, and waiting for God’s chosen people; this chapter comes shortly after another called “The Flight into Egypt.” A wry wisdom abides in the paragraph’s tone, present in its mixture between assertive, declarative sentences (“There is no study . . .”), and vague, intoned generalizations (“One might almost imagine . . .”). Stowe corrects the hedging tone and subjunctive in that same line by following it with another clear statement (“a change of situation . . . is capable of changing the whole force . . .”). Possibility and certitude trade positions, as if Stowe were structurally mimicking her argument: points of view are never static. What appears most obvious is intricately linked to what is dimmed—a series of four lines, all beginning with “we,” confirms the camaraderie of Stowe and her reader as they journey through the novel. But each of those four sentences also speaks to the blind spots of narrator and reader: their biases, their preconceptions, and the shared work they must still do in understanding “the views and reasonings of ” the enslaved. The last of these lines offers a simple statement of human inadequacy: “We all console ourselves too easily for the sorrows of others.” Stowe’s first person plural does not include American slaves. Rather, it is an explicit address to those who “were always free,” and amongst them, “those . . . who feel most.” Even for the most adept of readers, Stowe asserts, the work of feeling is just that—a job, an undertaking, a concerted effort to “take into account, with our own views and reasonings, the views and reasonings of ” slaves. Stowe does not reject “absolute truth,” cushioning the very suggestion of it with a generic “one,” a hedging “might almost imagine,” and a neatly subjunctive “were.” But she does insist that perceiving absolute truth is the result of arduous psychic and emotional labor—endeavors to not console oneself too easily. Refusing to let her reader off the hook, Stowe then ends the paragraph with two imperatives: “we must add . . . to our estimate, the feelings and reasonings of the slave; and . . . the reader must follow us 158 Making History with Child and Stowe

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again to the fastness in the Dismal Swamp” (445). This last is both a lyrical touch and a none-too-subtle metaphor: the slave system is a literal and figurative morass. I read Stowe’s paragraph in some detail here because it speaks eloquently to the twin processes of reading and feeling that Stowe would have her reader undertake, a microcosmic description of what the novel as a whole would accomplish. The paragraph comes with just over one hundred pages of the story remaining, as if to make sure readers approach the novel’s end with the right mindset. It also opens a chapter in which Dred’s status as prophet and abolition’s divine sanction are made overt and even manifest: the titular hero quotes scripture from the Books of Revelation, Isaiah, and Zechariah, while holding Denmark Vesey’s Bible in his hands (446). Indeed, Stowe pointedly asks her reader “who shall say that, in this world, where all things are symbolic, bound together by mystical resemblances, and where one event is the archetype of thousands, that there is not an eternal significance in these prophecies?” (451). Old Testament prophets are linked through time to the insurrectionist Vesey and to Dred himself: words and symbols, harbingers and omens of times to come, the past alive in the present. Or as David Levin phrased it, “the Past [come] to life upon the printed page” (8). But more important than all of this, I would argue, is the chapter’s opening paragraph’s invocation of humility. Implicit in the listing of what “we” lack—the sense of a manacle’s “iron enter[ing] into [our] souls”—is a quiet exhortation, a reminder that reading and feeling too often fall short. We cannot know what a slave knows or feel exactly what a slave feels; William Wells Brown and Harriet Jacobs were right. And yet we must try, and go down to the swamp and see. It is decreed that we must do so: Stowe conscripts biblical authority for our efforts, and in fact, begins the novel itself by figuring abolition as an ordained task. Dred ’s preface intones that “if ever a nation was raised up by Divine Providence, and led forth upon a conspicuous stage, as if for the express purpose of solving a great moral problem in the sight of all mankind, it is this nation” (3). But at the beginning of “The Desert,” Providence has stepped aside. The nation’s most effective voice for reading and “feeling right” takes a moment to admit to limitations, even in a text supported by historical data and suffused with “an air of reality.” Dred needed no Key. But just as William Prescott confided that his “perfect historian” was “a monster [that] never did and never Making History with Child and Stowe 159

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will exist,” Stowe explains here that we have work to do, still—work in reading, feeling, and reforming. And down to the swamp we go. We should read Stowe’s second antislavery novel, then, as attempting to right the wrongs of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, as well as to write the wrongs of slavery. Furthermore, we should read it as a shrewd assessment of what the merging of history and fiction can and cannot do. Reform efforts must assess their goals and their limitations. Dred sold well by almost any standards, except those set by its predecessor, and it did not earn what Stowe had expected (Hedrick 263). While traveling in England, she wrote to her husband that the new publication was “very bitterly attacked, both from a literary and a religious point of view” (Life and Letters 222). Robert Levine has suggested that Dred be understood as revelatory of its creator’s “obsessions and anxieties—the very passions that inspired and informed [her] writings,” and hence that it merits a place next to “Herman Meville’s Pierre . . . and Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Marble Faun” (x). This triumvirate tellingly reveals just how challenging Dred is and was. As fiction doing the work of history, and history doing the work of fiction, it encourages readers to rethink the binary simplicities of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. And it does so in ways that encouraged readers to consider carefully how they viewed slavery, in the nineteenth century, but also how contemporary Americans view it now.

Child’s History Lydia Maria Child’s personal history is inextricably intertwined with that of nineteenth-century social reform. In Letters from New-York she professed herself inspired by events around her: “I gratefully acknowledge my own age and country as pre-eminently marked by activity and progress. Brave spirits are everywhere at work for freedom, peace, temperance, and education. Everywhere the walls of caste and sect are melting before them; everywhere dawns the golden twilight of universal love!” (Letters from New-York 82). The volume is permeated with similar pronouncements of assurance and trust in the ultimate triumph of all righteous causes. (For Child, at least, the antiabolitionists who threatened George Thompson nearly a decade before had indeed been “building up the very cause they [sought] to destroy” [Selected Letters 31].) Yet abolition and other social reform movements did not wholly make up Lydia Maria Child’s world; they were not the only histories in which she would intervene. In between hiding antislavery 160 Making History with Child and Stowe

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speakers and taking Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl to the printers, Child received a letter reminding her, as it were, of an alternate universe. The communication came from Rufus Griswold, the former Graham’s Magazine editor who was now devoting himself to anthologizing the progress of American literature. Having already collected the Poets and Poetry of America (1845), Griswold planned a companion volume dedicated to prose. More open-minded than some of his peers, he intended to include women writers in his book, and wrote to Child asking for a complete list of her publications. She responded, quickly recounting her own editorial work and manuals such as The Frugal Housewife (1829). But just as quickly she dismissed many of these early works, writing, “but these, I think, had better not be on the list” (Selected Letters 231–32). The catalog that Child provided, inset from the main body of her letter and complete with publication dates, finally reduced twenty-five years’ work to eight books: Hobomok, The Rebels, The Mother’s Book, Appeal on Behalf of That Class of Americans Called Africans, Philothea, Letters from New-York volumes I and II, and Flowers for Children. Or, three novels, one childrearing manual and one collection for children, one abolitionist treatise, and two volumes of inspired journalism. Then Child proceeded to criticize even some of these chosen few, including the Revolutionary War tale once so close to her heart: “The Rebels was not as good as Hobomok. With my present views of war, I regret very much that I ever wrote it, and I hope it will never be republished” (232). The logic of what Child chose to highlight, as opposed to what she did not (The Frugal Housewife, The Girl’s Own Book, Lives of Famous Women) remains muddled. It reflects very little of what Child’s correspondence documents of her own opinions on her work. Rather, her choices appear to try to craft a “representative sample” for Griswold. Perhaps such a strategy was appropriate; after all, Griswold was himself a representative of the literary establishment with whom Child had experienced what would best be termed an on-again, offagain relationship. But Griswold intended to do for American prose what he had done for American poetry: to condense one strain of the country’s literary history, extract its best examples, and compile them in one place, so as to record and testify to our cultural coming-of-age. Though his subject matter differed, Griswold’s aims likened him to Prescott, Bancroft, and Parkman; his comprehension of literature closely adheres to that of the historians, and understands certain kinds of fiction as prestigious work. (No one like George Thompson or Ned Making History with Child and Stowe 161

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Buntline appears in Prose Writers.) For Child to merit inclusion in his volume was indeed an honor, as well as proof that her unbending abolitionist principles had not burned all of her bridges. Still, after thanking Griswold for his interest and regard, Child uttered a solemn judgment on the entire oeuvre: “To myself, my productions seems so fragmentary and imperfect, that I believe I should never take pen in hand again, if it were not for the necessity of earning my bread” (233). She then added a simple farewell and signed her name, L. Maria Child. Rufus Griswold, contacting Child in 1847, did not reach out to her at an auspicious moment in her life. Years of poverty and personal unrest had worn Child down and left her dispirited, disillusioned, and disappointed. She and husband David Lee moved constantly, frequently boarding with friends and family as a means of saving precious funds. For this reason they were often apart, and at that moment in 1847, were deeply estranged. As a result of her work with abolition, the publication of the 1833 Appeal, and her editorship of the National Anti-Slavery Standard, Child had lost friendships and professional contacts. And to top it all off, she was having trouble finding a publisher for her latest work, a collection of stories intriguingly titled Fact and Fiction. Thus she wrote to a friend that she suffered from “a more than usual tendency to low-spirits,” and that “at present, seclusion seems to be an absolute necessity of my being. I feel the discords of the present condition of society, without seeing clearly how they can be harmonized” (Selected Letters 228). Griswold’s inquiry, and the still-existent estimation it implied, should have been pleasing to Child. She had made history once and—even if only in a small way— she was about to make it again. That history was being crowned “first woman in the republic” not once, but twice: first by William Lloyd Garrison in the Genius of Universal Emancipation, and then again four years later by the editorial staff of the North American Review. The 1840s literary establishment, it was the latter commendation that truly garnered attention. Even as a commodity that never experienced high demand—a critical quarterly— the NAR had miraculously outlasted more popular publications and had been in uninterrupted existence since 1814. Its editors’ kudos were a testament to Child’s then-high-flying career. Conducting a lengthy account of Child’s work, past and present, the 1833 review began with Hobomok (1822), which it noted had been well-received in its time and still commanded the editors’ approbation. (This despite their self162 Making History with Child and Stowe

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declaration as “stern unbelievers in Indian tales” [“Works of Mrs. Child” 139].) The Frugal Housewife also received high praise along with personification: “It laid itself down cosily by Walter Scott and Master Irving, deeming itself, as well it might, fit company for either” (142). Finally the texts then recently published, and occasioning the review, were discussed at great length: Child’s biographies of famous women such as Madame de Staël, along with lesser-known “Good Wives,” were released as part of the Ladies’ Library. Taken as a whole, Child’s oeuvre prompted the staff of the NAR to pronounce her “useful,—we mean useful in the most direct and simple forms of usefulness. It is not one person in a generation, though endowed with all the talent to do it, who will undertake to perform the service to society which has been done by this lady” (143–44). Hence the bestowal of the title, first woman in the republic.14 Granted, the NAR was an organ of intellectual elitism whose circulation never approached that of the cheap storypapers or the sensationalist penny press, even though Prescott named it “the most considerable [journal] in the United States” (Biographical and Critical Miscellanies vi). Articles struck a serious tone (like Prescott’s), utilized a college graduate’s vocabulary, and covered a wide range of artistic, political, religious, scientific, and philosophical topics. In early issues from the 1810s, pieces on “foreign” topics even boasted titles in the appropriate language: French, German, Spanish, Italian. When Catharine Sedgwick named the NAR, then, in her satirical story “Cacoethes Scribendi” (1830), noting that her decidedly middlebrow main character read it from cover to cover, her point was clear: perusing the NAR was one thing, but few antebellum Americans possessed the educational background to understand it. Nonetheless, the journal had something that no storypaper ever would: intellectual prestige. The NAR may not have mattered to most Americans, but it mattered to men like Rufus Griswold—the kind of ambitious men who undertook defining projects like anthologies of a nation still less than one hundred years old. Hence the journal’s unabashed approval of Lydia Maria Child, even though it had taken place more than a decade previous, most likely prompted Griswold to include her in his work. Like the republican mothers of her parents’ and grandparents’ generations, Child contributed her part to the cause of bringing the nation into being. Outside abolitionist circles she had once mattered, and the anthologist would pay tribute to that judgment. Making History with Child and Stowe 163

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When the results of his labors appeared under the title The Prose Writers of America (1847), Griswold emphasized his own favorites among Child’s writings, in particular Philothea, set in ancient Greece and, in his estimation, “the most beautiful of her works” (426). He also strove for a neutral tone regarding her abolitionist writing, matterof-factly noting that “in 1841 Mr. and Mrs. Child . . . conducted . . . The National Anti-Slavery Standard, a weekly gazette of which the title indicated the object and general character” (427). The editor excerpted part of Philothea, bits and pieces from Letters from NewYork, and the new story “The Beloved Tune” from Fact and Fiction. Finally he listed them all under “Lydia M. Child,” blatantly ignoring Child’s own practice in her signature and her preference for being called Maria. But she had made Griswold’s cut, just one of five women in total to do so. Catharine Sedgwick, Eliza Leslie, Caroline Kirkland, and Margaret Fuller made up the other four, although several more peers were listed in a brief paragraph praising the overall efforts of American women. “In fifty years [woman] has done more in the domains of intellect than she had done before for five centuries,” boasted Griswold (44). Thus five representatives seemed a generous showing, given that only fifty years’ worth of writing was eligible for consideration, and that the candidates were apparently beginning with a large handicap. The men Griswold chose to include as helping to create a “National Literature and National Art” stretched back to Jonathan Edwards and forward to contemporaries like Charles Fenno Hoffman and N. P. Willis. Why does it matter how Rufus Griswold dealt with Lydia Maria Child and her fellow women writers? The episode reminds us that for antebellum Americans literary history was always in the process of being made, whether in unlooked-for pronouncements like the NAR ’s on Child, or in deliberate and conscious endeavors like Griswold’s anthologies and Prescott’s histories. Similarly, Americans lived in the midst of that process, with an ever-present sense of the potential momentousness of their actions and words. The literary history in which Child and Griswold took part was forged in the service of literary nationalism, the effort to establish a “National Literature and National Art” that would help prove the just nature of the American experiment. For Child and her female peers in Prose Writers, that literary history also served the cause of women’s history, for better and for worse. Griswold’s remarks concerning women writers’ 164 Making History with Child and Stowe

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achievements honor the women’s work while arrogantly dismissing that of countless generations before them. In happier times, Child characterized her writing as playing a crucial part of a grander life’s work, one which purposefully had not only a great nation, but a changing nation, in its sights. A decade earlier she had declared to her elder brother Convers, “I believe the world will be brought into a state of order through manifold revolutions. Sometimes we may be tempted to think that it would have been better for us not to have been cast on these evil times; but this is a selfish consideration; we ought rather to rejoice that we have much to do as mediums in the regeneration of the world” (Selected Letters 39). Child’s thoughts evoke the immense social work later named in Letters from New-York as forming “the thinking, toiling Age of Reform” (11). In that same letter, Child spoke to the possibility of wishing for simpler, kinder times, characterizing that unnamed past as “the Age of the Troubadour” (11). But reform, and its role in making history, was not a duty that one could shirk. For Child, reform and writing walked hand in hand: both could literally make history, by bringing about the “manifold revolutions” and resulting “order” that she envisioned. But women like Child were uncommon; few successfully crossed social boundaries, and thus social histories, as she did. Hence for Child and Stowe, and Prescott and Griswold, Americans were unquestionably involved in world-altering stories larger than themselves. Both George Fredrickson and Steven Mintz relate this belief, particularly strong in reformers such as Child, to their generational status.15 As the grandchildren of those who lived through the Revolutionary War, reformers like Child grew up convinced that of course, one could change the world for the better, and thus change it profoundly; after all, their own families had accomplished this very feat. “My own appropriate mission,” wrote Child, “is obviously that of a writer; and I am convinced that I can do more good to my race by working in that way; infusing, as I must necessarily do, principles in favor of peace, universal freedom, &c into all I write” (Selected Letters 228). Like the nation that they represented, Americans writers lived under a spotlight: in the heyday of literary nationalism, all authors either served the national “cause,” or fell into the endless depths of what the NAR dismissed as “the lighter departments” of literature (“Works of Mrs. Child” 139). Lydia Maria Child understood the demands of nationalism well; after all, she had half-jokingly opened Making History with Child and Stowe 165

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her first novel Hobomok with remarks concerning “the proud summit” attained, and figuratively colonized, by Sir Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper (3). Hobomok, her remarks implied, could not possibly make history, not when that history had already been made— and remade, and reprinted, and lauded a thousand times, so that “minds of humbler mould are compelled to bow down and worship” (3). But the novel’s levity actually pointed to the stakes involved in writing in the 1820s and for more than a few years afterward. In a country always on the lookout for another Cooper, another “American Scott,” few would enjoy the relative comforts of “just” being a writer; rather, everyone would be judged as either making history or failing it. Lydia Maria Child, for all her modesty in dealing with Griswold, did not wish to fail, for in her estimation, too much was at stake. For Rufus Griswold, there was no question that imaginative literature played a crucial role in shaping the culture of the country. Like his counterparts at the NAR, the Knickerbocker, or his predecessor at Graham’s, Edgar Allan Poe, Griswold believed in “the necessity of Literature and Art to a people’s glory and happiness. History with all her voices joins in one judgment upon this subject” (Prose Writers 13). Men like Griswold did not scour the pages of moral reform or temperance newspapers for literary judgments, however, and so in all likelihood they worked in blissful ignorance of the fact that the devil and his angels had their sights set on American fiction. Child, though, was far less blithe or certain in her own views of fiction. Despite the condensed representation she gave to Griswold, Child had devoted the majority of her career to writing nonfiction, especially history. There were the conduct books, including The Frugal Housewife, The Mother’s Book, and The Family Nurse (1837); the Ladies’ Library, composed of famous Lives such as those of Madame de Staël as well as the History of the Condition of Women; the controversial Appeal; the Anti-Slavery Catechism; and her work for the National Anti-Slavery Standard, of which the Letters from New-York represented only a small part. Even her major fiction to date had been historical fiction, set in her grandparents’ era (The Rebels), colonial times (Hobomok), or in classical antiquity (Philothea). In The Mother’s Book, Child explicitly recommended putting fiction in its place, as it were. Her comments are worth quoting in full: Yet I believe that a real love of reading is not common among women. I know that the new novels are very generally read; but 166 Making History with Child and Stowe

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this springs from the same love of pleasing excitement, which leads people to the theatre; it does not proceed from a thirst for information. For this reason, it has a bad effect to encourage an early love for works of fiction; particularly such as contain romantic incidents. To be sure, works of this kind have of late years assumed so elevated a character, that there is very much less danger from them than formerly. We now have true pictures of life in all its forms, instead of the sentimental, lovesick effusions, which turned the heads of girls, fifty years ago. But even the best of novels should form the recreation rather than the employment of the mind; they should only be read now and then. They are a sort of literary confectionary; and, though they may be very perfect and beautiful, if eaten too plentifully, they do tend to destroy our appetite for more solid and nourishing food. . . . To prevent an exclusive and injurious taste for fiction, it is well to encourage in [children] a love of History, Voyages, Travels, Biography, &c. (86–87) Both Carolyn Karcher and Bruce Mills have noted that Child’s advice reflects the republican values of the early century: an emphasis upon the instructive and improving, and admonitions to avoid excess. Yet her advice does not imply a condemnation of fiction or the powers of the imagination that it harnesses, and to which it appeals. “She believe[d] that the imagination [was] God-given and meant ‘to be cultivated in a fair proportion to the other powers of the mind,’ ” writes Bruce Mills, quoting another maxim from the volume (8). To make her position plain, Child added the following explanation in the 1844 edition of The Mother’s Book: “The love of fiction . . . is founded in a universal instinct; and all universal instincts of human nature should be wisely employed, rather than forcibly repressed” (94). Her remarks recall those of the Knickerbocker editors who proclaimed “the love of fiction” to have “universal prevalence,” but whose views of truly worthy (and thus “loveable”) imaginative writing proved to be delimited by similar devotions to “sound morals, pure patriotism, or true religion.”16 Nonetheless, Child’s recommendations in both editions of The Mother’s Book emphasize the tenets of republican behavior: the imagination “should be wisely employed,” “cultivated in a fair proportion,” and thus exercised with caution and guidance, as it were (emphases mine). Similarly, her food metaphor warns against excess: the same sort of Making History with Child and Stowe 167

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“excitement” and “effusions” make the consumption of sweets and of novels potentially dangerous.17 Even Child’s repetition of the word “love” indicates a foundational investment in prudence, temperance, and reason. She distinguishes between “a real love of reading,” characterized by “a thirst for information,” and other, implicitly incorrect loves attached to fiction-reading and theater-going. (In fact, older fiction is characterized by “lovesick effusions,” unhealthy and wrong.) Child would make room for fiction and for the imaginative power it both represents and inspires. But true to her sense of writing as a “mission” (Selected Letters 228) and to the NAR’s incisive pronouncement of her work as “useful” (“Works of Mrs. Child” 143), Child would have one reading accomplish something, serve a purpose: teach, uplift, reveal a truth. Such reading within reason and, by implication, writing within reason, accords with her high regard for history, the first item on her recommended list. And indeed, it accords with the general regard for history held by members of her generation. In particular, though, that regard surrounded women’s reading and writing of history. Child’s remarks on fiction begin, after all, with the judgment that “a real love of reading is not common among women.” Opening a series of recommendations that ends with what children should read, and contained in a Mother’s Book, Child’s advice concerns not just the child, but the grown woman that child will someday become. Even though women’s reading and writing must occur within limits, those limits still create space for the exercise of women’s talents and desires. As Nina Baym notes in American Women Writers and the Work of History, women writing historical works “were demolishing whatever imaginative and intellectual boundaries their culture may have been trying to maintain between domestic and public worlds” (1). Women’s engagement with history was in some sense necessary: It is easy to see how history could be thought of as a source, even the best source, for the kind of knowledge women needed for their duties in the public sphere so defined. Moreover, the putative lesson of history—that never before in history had women been given such opportunities to affect public life—was imagined to be capable of producing women themselves as patriotically attached to the state as a matter of enlightened self-interest, guaranteeing that they would use their unprecedented historical power in the service of the polity. (6–7) 168 Making History with Child and Stowe

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Thus writing history was work “unarguably public in its nature” (5), even though its critique of the very systems that had allegedly created women’s power tempered its reformative potential. Baym suggests, “If women’s historical writing frequently advanced political views, it seldom offered a radical revision of the historical narrative it depended on. In the main an affiliative, not an alienated, activity, historical writing involved a sense of opportunity and potential that made it at most reformist, not radical, where its own subject matter was concerned” (8). Likewise, the “domestic” and “public,” even as they were transformed into imagined oppositional spheres, remained conjoined in certain aspects. For “the home was where the most important national product—the citizen—was manufactured; the domestic sphere was thus a work site fully participant in public life” (12). Thus we can see that “this public sense of domestic slides into the meaning that it still carries in phrases such as domestic policy”—the concept of home not as singular and private edifice, but rather as synonymous with the nation (12). Such connections help to illuminate the great success of The Mother’s Book and other early conduct literature. Raising children who read properly produces citizens who read—and implicitly, behave—properly. No wonder Child was deemed so “useful.” Thus, “throughout the antebellum years, although with diminishing force, the value of history study for women figured in rhetorical contrast to the evils of novel reading” (Baym, American 14). Reading the writing of social reform throws into question just how “diminishing” such condemnations were. Reformers of all kinds condemned novel reading for the reasons already discussed: its pernicious effect on morals and an unleashing of imaginative faculty. But there were also economic implications to consider. “Not only was the reading of novels an idle activity,” comments Baym, but “the content of novels saturated women’s imagination with depictions of frivolous people. Novels were thus associated with idleness, waste, and—dread word in the republican lexicon—luxury” (17). The term, and all it connoted, was definitely dreadful to Child. Born into the lower ranks of the merchant class (her father Convers Francis was a baker) and struggling with poverty throughout her married life, Child harbored an intense distrust and dislike of what she called “aristocracy,” and saw herself as allied with those persons named in her 1829 article “Hints to People of Moderate Fortune.” For these Americans as well as those whose fortunes were not Making History with Child and Stowe 169

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even moderate, novels certainly were a “literary confectionary”: an indulgence, not always affordable and best contemplated only rarely. How ironic, then, that Griswold, for all his discrimination and discernment, did not excerpt the new Child story that spoke most pointedly to the literary and cultural demands of the day. “The Black Saxons” appeared in Fact and Fiction, Child’s collection that appeared only months before Prose Writers of America. It contained stories that Child had been publishing over the course of the decade, many of them in the annual published by the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, the Liberty Bell. As befitted an author who proscribed limits for the consumption of fiction, Fact and Fiction made efforts to guide its readers as to which stories fell into its respective categories. Four of the stories explicitly claim to be “a true story”: “The Youthful Immigrant,” “The Irish Heart,” “Elizabeth Wilson,” and “The Black Saxons.” Another uses language suggestive of reality or factualness—“The Beloved Tune: Fragments of a Life, in Small Pictures.” The place of others in the fictional category can be easily determined: “The Children of Mount Ida,” for example, retells the classical story of Paris and Oenone, and “Hilda Silfverling” bears the subtitle “A Fantasy.” Even years after the initial publication of The Mother’s Book, then, Child continued to instruct and offer advice to her readers—in this case, pointing them toward a basic interpretation of fiction and nonfiction. In her discussion of the volume, Carolyn Karcher describes the stories as “differ[ing] markedly from the historical fiction [Child] was writing in the 1820s,” showcasing an “intellectual maturation and mastery of her craft” (332). In her reading, “The Quadroons” and “Slavery’s Pleasant Homes”—a Liberty Bell story actually left out of Fact and Fiction— most particularly speak to Child’s greatest concerns, abolition and the oppression of women (333). Child would revisit these twinned issues throughout the rest of the antebellum era, even in the technically post– Civil War Romance of the Republic (1867). But while these stories effectively dramatize the sexual degradation of female slaves and gendered oppression of women generally, none engage with history as does her short tale “The Black Saxons.” In this story history is a narrative form, an intimate experience, part of a larger, world-altering process, and indeed, even part of another history: William C. Nell reprinted the story in his Colored Patriots of the American Revolution (1855). The story, then, nominally bounces back and forth between genre categories: from “fact and fiction” to history, and back again.18 170 Making History with Child and Stowe

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“The Black Saxons” begins with its main character, Mr. Duncan, sitting in the parlor of his Charleston home and reading a work that would most certainly win approval according to The Mother’s Book: “Before him lay an open volume, Thierry’s History of the Norman Conquest” (190). His reading makes a great impression upon him, for the story is set during the onset of hostilities between American colonists and the British. As Mr. Duncan goes through his volume, “quietly read[ing] of the oppressed Saxons,” his slaves request passes to go to a prayer meeting; the “proverbially indulgent master” grants them all, and only later realizes that every single one of his slaves has left to attend the meeting (192, 191). Finally suspicious—it is the second time in a week the slaves have gone to “a Methodist meeting”— Mr. Duncan sets about investigating the true state of affairs with his slaves. Accordingly he follows them to the next meeting, disguised as a fellow slave; there he learns of a planned insurrection, and of the slaves’ debate over their masters’ fates. Inspired by the potent combination of his reading and of the slaves’ arguments that he overhears, Mr. Duncan decides not to report them. The story ends not with emancipation, but with a small moment of mercy. That moment, however, reveals the great power of proper historical reading and the controlled imagination that accompanies it. The role of reading in “The Black Saxons” is consistently characterized as crucial to both a civil society and the reform of its uncivil flaws. As Child’s opening scenario makes clear, reading forms one of the primary leisure activities of a gentleman, especially one who, like Mr. Duncan, has a “natural kindliness of . . . character” (190). It implicitly provides the foundation for the “democratic theories deeply imbibed in [his] childhood,” and thus compels him to sympathize with the downtrodden Saxon subjects of his book. Attesting to reading’s ability to create thinking and feeling citizens is, ironically, a slave: one of the would-be insurrectionists protests that what the slave masters have, and the slaves most desperately need, is knowledge. In a passage reminiscent of Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life (1845), Child’s unnamed slave recounts how he learned secretly to read, and thus was enabled to discover that the “British [were] going to land!” (202). Reading, suggests Child, takes part in all just causes, whether labeled “revolutions” or “insurrections.” More than this, however, reading history particularly endows us with the ability to think and feel in a sympathetic yet reasoned manner. Making History with Child and Stowe 171

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Child describes Mr. Duncan as completely engrossed in his reading of the Saxon history: he imagines “minstrels . . . singing of their exploits in spirit-stirring tones, to hearts burning with a sense of wrong” (191). The story inspires in him “a spontaneous sympathy for Saxon serfs,” one which is “arrested by a voice within” as well as by an “awakened conscience” as Mr. Duncan reluctantly begins to connect his reading with his own “serfs” (193). Responding to the text in front of him, the slaveowner muses that something of the Saxon history must remain unwritten, and thus, unknown; “for Troubadours rarely sing of the defeated, and conquerors write their own History” (191). Through her increasingly perceptive main character, then, Child suggests that proper reading can instruct us in a variety of ways: adding to our store of knowledge, and also pointing out what we are yet missing. It is “a historical revelation,” in John Ernest’s words, a means of setting one on the road to reform (150). Mr. Duncan is not the only character interested in books, however; the reader is shown that the oppressed slaves also comprehend the power of reading. When he attends the alleged prayer meeting, Mr. Duncan hears a variety of judgments concerning what the slaves should do upon the arrival of the British. Two slaves speak adamantly of retribution, urging physical violence: “Who talks of mercy to our masters?” (197). Another slave, “aged” and “tottering,” does speak of “mercy,” singing a verse of a hymn and exhorting his fellow conspirators to “love our enemies” (197). But the slave whose words most decisively sway the audience preaches neither violence nor peace, but rather, smarts. Described as “a man of middle age, short of stature, with a quick roguish eye, and a spirit of knowing drollery,” the last slave to speak is unnamed (200). But his words recall a very famous name: Frederick Douglass. Recounting how he learned to read by stealth and wits, tricking a “young massa” into teaching the alphabet, Child’s unnamed slave informs his comrades of what they most need: “Knowledge! ” (201). This, he declares, is what allows the “white man [to] always git his foot on de black man” (201). But it is also what has allowed him to “read de newspaper. And what you tink I find dere? I read British going to land!” (202). Laughing and obviously enjoying his successful maneuvers, Child’s final speaker convinces his audience not only of the immediate and material value of reading, but of its role as an alternative to dissatisfactory violence or submission. 172 Making History with Child and Stowe

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The effect on Mr. Duncan is equally immediate and material. Now actively conjoining his Saxon history with the words of the slaves around him, the slaveowner understands “a new significance” in the story he has read. That significance is “unwelcome,” but also “emphatic”: “Was the place I saw to-night . . . like the haunts of the Saxon Robin Hoods? Was not the spirit that gleamed forth as bright as theirs? And who shall calculate what even such hopeless endeavors may do for the future freedom of this down-trodden race?” (204). The rhetorical questions he poses have answers, however, and Child implies that it is Mr. Duncan’s reading that has enabled him to know what they are. She does not compose a dramatic ending for her story by having the slaveowner free his slaves, a “denouement” that Carolyn Karcher suggests would be “unrealistic” (334). Rather, Child’s conclusion imagines that Duncan’s reading within reason leads to an equally measured response: he refrains from informing on the plotters, an act “which would have brought hundreds to an immediate and violent death” (204). It is a beginning, a baby step, but one literally unimaginable until the slaveowner’s imagination is itself unfettered, with guides. This is the small revolution which historical reading is capable of inspiring, and as Child says, who knows what it “may do for the future freedom of . . . [the] race?” Although she did not give her story a subtitle that, like those of others in the collection, would lay claim to veracity, Child did pen a final paragraph for “The Black Saxons” that argues for its factualness. She allows that she has indulged in “some filling up by imagination, some additional garniture of language, and the adoption of fictitious names” (204). But the basic story itself was told to a friend by Mr. Duncan’s real-life counterpart, and then circulated until it reached Child herself, who “told it truly” (204). Or in other words, Child insists that she and her character have acted in the same way: heard, or read, a true story; performed “some filling up by imagination”; and then allowed it to shape their future. In this way, Child’s fiction does the same work as history—a dual utility that should have made such a “useful” woman very happy.

Making History with Child and Stowe 173

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5

Saying Goodbye to Timothy Shay Arthur

Let us end where we began, with the Reverend James V. Watson, he who wondered eloquently whether “fiction is always sinful.” In 1857, the preacher’s sphere has altered since we left him. He has taken on editorial duties for the Northwestern Christian Advocate, an influential Methodist weekly with a greater circulation than our good friend is used to.1 But it still advertises its proud temperance sympathies, just like the Family Favorite and Temperance Journal before it. The author can now also claim a collected volume to his credit, entitled Tales and Takings, Sketches and Incidents, from the Itinerant and Editorial Budget of Rev. J. V. Watson, D. D. It contains several short pieces designed to supplement and sustain its readers’ moral diet: there are three tales of men in the same line of work as the author (“The Young Preacher,” “The Unwelcome Preacher,” and “The Eloquent Negro Preacher”); there are stories illustrating virtue (“Charity Envieth Not” and “The Unmeant Rebuke”); miscellaneous “Incidents in Itinerancy”; and an explanation of “The Hope of Cities Illustrated: A Plea for Sabbath Schools.” A distinction is put forth in the collection’s preface that by now should be very familiar: “If fiction plays any part in the ‘Tales,’ it will be found here in a form wholly unexceptionable, even to the most fastidious. So far as regards the Author’s ‘Incidents,’ these are facts” (6). Likewise, our detailed and precise storyteller has a few thoughts for those who might be interested in the book’s putatively artistic merit: Age and gravity will be here amused, if not instructed, while the Sabbath-school scholar and the little miss that would while away an hour in the parlor, will here find something equally adapted to their taste and capacity. It possesses the attractions of some bad books which we hope it may supplant, while it possesses the merit of being, the author hopes, a good book. The author makes no lit-

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erary claims in its behalf. The attacks of the critic upon it, therefore, will be without challenge and without rejoinder. (7) In the minister’s introduction to the volume, one can discern continuous threads pulling a life’s written work together: fiction must be qualified, guarded even, and constantly pointed out as separate from fact. Some fiction is still evil, even if only implicitly so in this preface; those “bad books,” for example, which the author aims to “supplant,” are unlikely to be copies of Baxter’s Saints’ Rest.2 And as for “critics” and their obsessions with “literary” qualities? Begone with them: like Harriet Beecher Stowe, like Frederick Jackson, like the moral reformers, the reverend’s concerns are of a much higher form. Even, we might say, a “transcendent” one. One more thread, subterranean and strong: an unspoken recognition that the space between fiction and fact, fancy and truth, sin and virtue, may not be as distinct as a reformer might like. This underlying suspicion emerges in the oddest of sentences: that Tales and Takings “possesses the attractions of some bad books which we hope it may supplant, while it possesses the merit of being . . . a good book.” The reverend’s phrasing leaves no doubt about it: he does not say that his book’s distinctive “merit” is wholly different from that of “bad books,” but rather, that it shares their allure. The writings of an ordained Methodist minister are “possess[ed]” of the same “attractions” as tainted, corrupting works, which seems another way of saying that they are simply “possessed.” In the absence of greater elaboration from the good reverend, one can only speculate as to what these specific “attractions” might be. Watson’s extraordinary self-description speaks to the “at once culturally subversive and culturally conservative” nature that Karen SánchezEppler finds characteristic of temperance fiction (“Temperance” 61). Indeed, Reverend Watson seems unabashed about noting the similarities between his own work and the writing he deplores, suggesting that at least some of what may be “culturally subversive” about his work can be detected and acknowledged without much difficulty. What is doubly puzzling about the minister’s words, however, is the complete absence of any recognition that they are extraordinary. After all, this is the same man who only a few years since had declared that fiction could not “be given up wholly to the devil and his angels” (“Is Fiction Always Sinful?” 45). His short article was composed of both virtue and polite belligerence, a battle position staked out from the Saying Goodbye to Timothy Shay Arthur 175

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midst of midwestern fields. I would argue that the reverend’s words speak to a belief that is not lingering, but rather firmly resident within his psyche: that at some level fiction cannot be got back from the devil, because he has already won. Fiction is and always will be fiction, and its “attractions” are the same regardless of intent—escape from one’s reality, forgetfulness of self, imaginative immersion in the life of something, somewhere, someone else. Its greatest potential for good is also its greatest potential for ill; this is a paradox others before have grasped. Perhaps the preacher is simply more honest than other reformers, and therefore willing to admit that fiction can be shaped, polished, imbued, targeted, deployed, but not essentially altered. Not in 1857, at least, and not by zealous, faithful men and women who believe in essence, and whose most fundamental creed involves basic binary distinctions: true and false, right and wrong, good and evil. When this is the philosophical ground upon which your tent is pitched, stories will always be either made up or not made up, period. And so you’ll make them up and apologize and explain and try to use them all the same. This leads us to just one reason why reform’s written work was never done, and why debates about its “literary” or “artistic” qualities seemed to miss its point. Social reformers were caught up in one narrative battle they had already conceded. No wonder the fate of the drunkard, the prostitute, the destitute, and the slave seemed to them to be part of a “transcendent” war. These were the revolutions they might actually win. Or maybe this is not how the reverend thought about it at all. What we can say for certain is that, for both author and critics, “literary” concerns would have to wait. At the end of Tales and Takings’ preface, a development is announced. Depending upon one’s point of view, the Reverend Watson’s social sphere has suddenly become either much smaller, or infinitely bigger. Near the bottom of the preface’s last page is a short note in smaller type, informing readers “that the lamented author of this volume . . . died just before the work was sent to press” (8). And so the work of temperance, of reform writing, and of bringing together “age and gravity,” “Sabbath-school scholar,” and “little miss” under the sheltering wing of the right kind of fiction, will pass on to someone else. Adieu Reverend Watson, or perhaps au revoir. I begin this ending with another ending because of the paradoxes brought forth by it, paradoxes that I would argue had consequences for more than just one preacher’s legacy. James V. Watson, of course, was not a preeminent national voice of the temperance movement. That 176 Saying Goodbye to Timothy Shay Arthur

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honor belonged to men like John Gough, himself a reformed alcoholic, popular speaker for the Washingtonian temperance organization, and the acclaimed “poet of the d.t.’s”; later in the century, it belonged to women like Frances Willard, president of the powerful Women’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU), and to Timothy Shay Arthur, author of dozens of temperance stories as well as the bestselling Ten Nights in a Bar-room (1854). It is Arthur’s own literary history that reveals the fortunes of so much reform writing. Assessing the author’s oeuvre in 1873, an unnamed biographer exulted that “the world is the better for his having lived” and devoted his talents to social causes (T. S. Arthur 32). But he also admitted that “men of literary pretensions take pride in sneering at Mr. Arthur’s writings, and declaring that they never read them”; his works, even in the opinion of “One Who Knows Him,” suffered from “a lack of individuality” (20). By the end of his life in 1885, Arthur and the reform world he represented had become completely divorced from “men of literary pretensions”—although as we have seen, the relationship was never particularly close. Like other writers whom we have met in this study, Arthur shoved aside questions of his work that privileged style and cultural prestige over message: “I have never had any literary ambitions,” he proclaims in a biographical piece. “I am a literary man only through the force of circumstances” (qtd in T. S. Arthur 21). (Once again, “literariness” and its connotations of elitism, lack of utility, and social ignorance are defiantly rejected.) It is one of the supreme ironies of U.S. history that even as this divorce of temperance and literature settled into a routine and mutual disdain, temperance metamorphosed from an energetic cause overshadowed by abolition and slavery into one of the largest and most politically savvy social movements of the Progressive Era. Temperance and moral reform, joined by women’s suffrage, did indeed usher in a new twentieth-century world, one that would have been nearly unrecognizable to the women and men of the 1830s, ’40s and ’50s. But the writing of temperance and its sister movements became relegated to the dustbin of literary history, curiosities for scholars, and more often, mere “propaganda.” Reverend Watson did not live to see it, but Timothy Shay Arthur did, and he can tell us why.

In 1850, when the organization the Sons of Temperance invited Arthur to edit their gift book Offering, the author was a household Saying Goodbye to Timothy Shay Arthur 177

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name and already closely identified with the fight against “King Alcohol.” His fame prior to Ten Nights rested largely upon his prolific work as a magazinist: Arthur wrote for, edited, and even owned dozens of periodicals over the course of his career, including Godey’s Lady’s Book, Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, Graham’s Magazine, and the Saturday Evening Post.3 According to Donald Koch, “every issue of Godey’s Lady’s Book that appeared between 1842 and 1850 contained at least one tale or sketch by Arthur” (Introduction to Ten Nights in a Barroom xxxiv). Indeed, the writer once owned a rival publication, the Ladies’ Magazine of Literature, Fashion, and the Fine Arts, that he sold to Godey for consolidation with the Lady’s Book (xxxviii). Given Godey’s status as the preeminent women’s periodical, Arthur’s work for this publication alone propelled him into antebellum fame. The Godey’s stamp also marked the clear moral bent of Arthur’s work: his writing typically announced its social and uplifting purpose. Or as a Harper’s New Monthly book review phrased it, the author’s work was distinguished by its “chaste and elevated tone,” as well as an “uncommon skill in describing the scenes of real life” (“Literary Notices” 140). Thus short fiction by Arthur was very often reprinted by other periodical media. Reverend Watson’s Family Favorite, for example, carried “outside” works (neither by Watson nor by parishioners) from only three well-known writers, Catharine Sedgwick, Lydia Sigourney, and Arthur.4 This was cultural cachet, but of a specifically moralistic, reform-oriented species: Timothy Shay Arthur’s name branded any text that bore it as very likely to be amenable to the social activists of his era, as well as to the myriad numbers of readers quietly sympathetic to their views. The Sons of Temperance pronounced themselves delighted with this state of affairs, and with Arthur’s editorship: “His character, well known and established in public estimation, has inspired such wide-spread confidence, that a parent or guardian or friend may present an Annual, edited by him, to a wife, a daughter or a most cherished friend, without previously reading or examining it; because he knows there will be nothing in it to offend the most fastidious sense” (Offering for 1850 iii–iv). The “wide-spread confidence” that the Sons express was attached to Arthur’s name, a shorthand for a world view; as the Sons themselves put it, reading the actual work was not even necessary.5 From the time of his first Godey’s publications in 1840 to his final work four decades later, Arthur’s name said simply that he would not hurt his 178 Saying Goodbye to Timothy Shay Arthur

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readers. He would not corrupt them, would not tempt them, would not lead them astray. Or in other words, his fiction would not do what fiction had been assumed to do. More than any other author of the nineteenth century, Timothy Shay Arthur successfully transformed the meaning of fiction for thousands of Americans. His work was the right kind of fiction, and it “deservedly made him a household favorite with a large class of readers” (“Literary Notices” 140). What was Timothy Shay Arthur writing that garnered him such adulatory praise, even before penning Ten Nights in a Bar-room? There were, of course, the countless Godey’s and Harper’s pieces, short tales focusing upon the lessons to be learned from “the scenes of real life.” In the wake of the Panic and beyond, Arthur wrote stories of the mercantile world, both as it was and, more important, as it could and should be. His temperance work began with chronicling the astonishing rise of the Washingtonians, the temperance organization that helped to institutionalize the processes of confession and group therapy now so central to self-help movements. But all of this, whether focused upon the businessman or drunkard or young mother, had one simple aim: to illustrate how Americans did, might, and ought to act in the mundane situations of their everyday lives. Hence stories followed stages of life, like Fanny Dale, or, the First Year After Marriage (1843); the Beautiful Widow (1847); and the Divorced Wife (1850). They focused upon humble figures, as in Family Pride; Or, the Palace and the Poor House (1844) and All for the Best; Or, the Old Peppermint Man, a Moral Tale (1850). There were occasional testaments to the cultural trends of the times, such as Agnes; Or, the Possessed, a Revelation of Mesmerism (1848). Other texts certainly verged upon an obsession with personal conduct, particularly for the female sex: Cecilia Howard; Or, the Young Lady Who Had Finished Her Education (1844) and Anna Milnor, the Young Lady Who Was Not Punctual (1845) took didacticism to its hyperbolic finish. Regardless of the subject, Arthur pledged to his readers a common reform creed: that many of his works were “an American story of real life.”6 As a body of work, his writings surely fed a reading public’s appetite for quiet reassurance, an elaboration of both Christian faith and of the basic goodness of mankind— words that might help make life in a slave-holding, binge-drinking, sex-selling, occasionally bankrupt empire-on-the-rise endurable. Thus one entry in Arthur’s 1850 collection Golden Grains from Life’s Harvest Field is simply titled “How to Be Happy”: Saying Goodbye to Timothy Shay Arthur 179

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If, then, we would be happy, we must seek to make others happy. In no other way can this great blessing be obtained. If we try to keep our pleasures for ourselves alone, they will lose their virtue, and turn to discontent; but, if we let our delight flow forth to others, the Lord will send into our hearts a purer joy. And when this, too, flows forth, a still deeper and purer delight will come in and take its place. And thus will it ever be, until we rise into the ineffable joy of the angels. (173) “How to Be Happy” is a veritable morality tale, biblical virtue illustrated (“do unto others . . .”) and Christian doctrine reinforced. T. S. Arthur’s writing imagines a pastoral and sentimental America where business remains small and everybody knows everybody else; in this America, towns prosper but never lose their shape. Occasionally they suffer from headline-catching evils, like panics, speculation, and drink. But once men and women realize the true way to be happy, and comprehend that “no one can live in this world without feeling ‘a brother’s woe,”’ all of life’s matters can be set right (Family Pride 4). This is the structural belief running throughout Ten Nights in a Bar-room: when Simon Slade gives up his “useful calling of a miller” in order to open a saloon, the effect is not contained within the Slade household, but rather, unnerves the metonymic home that is Cedarville (31). Those who understand the familial nature of the town (and its allegorical relation to the country) are able to save themselves from the alcoholic rot, sooner or later. Those who do not, die. But Arthur’s prescriptions for change, whether regarding temperance or how to have better manners, offer readers solutions that are easy, and it depends upon the individual reader whether that ease is in its best or worst sense. For Arthur, like his contemporary Stowe, contends that the key is inside you: the first thing you can and must do is to “feel right.”7 It is the inevitable starting point, though hopefully not also the end. Whether feeling right is the only thing you do is ultimately beyond any author’s control. But many of Arthur’s readers, admirers, and fellow travelers in reform did not stop with personal sentiment. Before the Civil War, temperance was a movement with large numbers of organized supporters, a surprising amount of both social approbation and determined opposition, and the ability to create political chaos. Its origins lay with middle- and upper-class established Protestant communities, “mostly prosperous men, members of the Congregational or Unitar180 Saying Goodbye to Timothy Shay Arthur

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ian churches, and overwhelmingly Federalist in their political convictions” (Pegram 15). Early supporters included Dr. Benjamin Rush, a prominent Philadelphia physician, signer of the Declaration of Independence, and author of An Inquiry into the Effects of Spirituous Liquors (1784); the Reverend Lyman Beecher, who gave a series of temperance lectures in 1825 that were later published in pamphlet form (Six Sermons on Intemperance [1827]), and which declared “intemperance [to be] a national sin”; and the members of the American Temperance Society, founded in 1826 and inspired by the evangelical fervor of the Second Great Awakening as well as by interaction with other organized reformers. (According to Thomas Pegram, “fourteen of sixteen ATS directors were members of the American Tract Society” [20].) But in 1840, with the founding of the Washingtonians, the face of temperance organizing changed. Early proponents of temperance were rarely “survivors” of Demon Rum’s grip; rather, they were citizens concerned about the effects of alcoholism in their neighborhoods, particularly as regarded the presence of bars and saloons and the seeming prevalence of binge drinking. Their attitudes toward drunkards themselves were sometimes lacking in a certain sentimental feeling. But the Washingtonians had all been there: the group was organized by artisans in Baltimore who specifically reached out to fellow members of the working class, with whom they shared not only affiliations of socioeconomic status but also the experience of drinking heavily. As with many of the women involved in moral reform, the new influx of working class men into the temperance movement resulted in a different understanding of alcoholism’s potential costs. For families just scraping by, every coin expended in a tavern was money that did not pay rent, buy food, or send for a doctor. Thus both the Washingtonians and the Martha Washingtonians, the ladies’ auxiliary group, stressed the need to provide social services to struggling drunkards and their families, affording “food, clothing, shelter, and even jobs” when necessary and possible (Pegram 28). The sense of camaraderie among these new temperance recruits resulted in drastic changes in how alcoholics were treated, both on and off the page. At Washingtonian meetings, members were encouraged to share their stories of battling the bottle, leading to dramatic orations of personal and familial pain. Ritualizing and normalizing the process of public confession and sympathy formed an enduring legacy for how alcoholism and a host of other ills would be treated. Washingtonians Saying Goodbye to Timothy Shay Arthur 181

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were the first to provide “safe” spaces where alcoholics could admit to their ordeals and receive personal support, material aid, and perhaps most important, forgiveness.8 Beginning in the 1840s, then—precisely the moment when Timothy Shay Arthur’s literary output went into high gear—temperance as a movement became characterized by appeals to sympathetic, sentimental feeling. Washingtonians referred to their meetings as “experience meetings,” the name explicitly stating what their time together was meant to explore, reproduce, and utilize as means of encouragement and support. As Glenn Hendler notes, at these meetings “each man [would repeat] the same story—that of the seemingly irredeemable drunkard restored to respectable manhood through the medium of a voluntary association” (30). The stories had a recognizable narrative style, one promulgating “affective politics, in which the sentimental experience of sympathy is both personally and socially transformative” (30). As with panic writers, moral reformers, and abolitionists before them, temperance writers’ aim was to save the alcoholic by putting listeners and readers in his shoes, to heighten that listener or reader’s sense of shared, common peril, emphasizing that next time it could be a brother, a son, a husband. The process foregrounded experience, and gave temperance stories the “air of reality” so desperately sought by those who would remake history.9 A speech from the early 1840s succinctly gives voice to the central role of narrative in the movement, opening with the plaintive line, “alcohol is my text” (Berry, “Temperance Address” 3). Hendler attests that “tropes from the temperance narrative pervade fiction . . . of the antebellum era, especially literature of reform movements” (31). As we have seen, however, the dependence upon sentimental narrative strategies and devotion to the truth of one’s experience do not “come from” temperance, as it were. They characterize reform discourse across various groups and movements, and as such, are the narrative tools for those attempting to change their world one story at a time. Thus temperance narratives, like their reform kin, are “national in scope” (50); the story of an individual alcoholic is never truly the story of an individual alcoholic. Or as the editors of the Temperance Recorder put it: Our object—is to dry up every fountain of intemperance—to wipe away every tear caused by this vice—to render comparatively unnecessary, alms-houses, and hospitals, and jails, and peniten182 Saying Goodbye to Timothy Shay Arthur

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tiaries, and state prisons—to drive vice, and the misery consequent upon vice, from our land—to perpetuate and hand down to those who shall come after us, the blessings our fathers bought with their blood, and to make our country, even america, the loveliest and the happiest upon which the sun hath ever shone—to make it worthy of being the birth place of freemen and the home of americans. (Aug. 1832) The work of temperance was the work of patriots, of those who understood this battle as a battle, not as a singular war unto itself. It should not be surprising then, that temperance writers often referenced abolition, and abolitionists often referenced the temperance movement. The same Temperance Recorder staff who saw their struggle as very traditionally “revolutionary” insisted that success was inevitable, just like the abolition of the slave trade in England (July 1832). (British anti-slavery activists William Wilberforce and Thomas Clarkson are mentioned by name.) Some two decades later William Goodell was making similar equations in the Radical Abolitionist, albeit with less assurance about necessary outcomes.10 Hence “the cause,” for many temperance supporters, was merely one instance of a larger human fight for freedom (from alcohol, slave owners, the British crown), dependent upon any and all efficacious means to make clear the very high stakes involved. To the Sons of Temperance, this comprehension of temperance not only as a cause, but as part of the cause, made Timothy Shay Arthur the right man for the job, and the right man for literature, period: [Arthur’s] name is known throughout the literary world by his able advocacy of the cause of temperance as well as by his popular and useful works in the department of moral fiction. . . . His aim is always to elevate the moral sentiments of his countrymen, and to furnish new motives and excitements to unswerving moral rectitude in the conduct of life. . . . With such an editor for this ‘Offering,’ the [Sons of Temperance] come before the Order—and all friendly to the cause of literature, temperance, and morals, with a feeling of entire confidence, that their efforts to produce a good book has [sic] been entirely successful. (Offering for 1850 iii–iv) As seen by the Nina Gordons of the world—or, in Frederick Jackson’s words, by those “as look principally to amusement” (Victim 9)— Saying Goodbye to Timothy Shay Arthur 183

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the promise of “unswerving moral rectitude” might not bode well for a night’s reading. But in the Sons’ point of view, any such misgivings would be mistaken, for they “have aimed to give to [the Offering] the highest features of excellence, both literary and artistic” (iii). To them, Arthur is an exceptional writer in every sense—a claim that we have seen made by no other reform organization on behalf of any other writer. “The department of moral fiction” is still a department of good fiction: good for you and well written, a literariness that is not conventionally (and lamentably) literary. Granted, this praise comes in a preface to a gift book written by men now unidentifiable except as members of a reform group. But we should heed the Sons’ words, for they innocently and beautifully summarize the cherished beliefs driving all of the writers in this study: that “the cause of literature, temperance, and morals”—or literature, abolition, and morals, or whatever pushing force to which you might be devoted—indeed represented one cause, not two or three. One cause, one struggle, indivisible. To disregard the Sons’ words (and their obvious celebration in retaining Arthur’s services) is to say that because their cultural cachet is not ours, it does not matter—an ahistorical presumptuousness of the most craven kind. Not that readers in the latter half of the century did not begin committing exactly such sins. Some tastes were changing, and even to an admirer like “One Who Knows Him,” the unnamed author of the biographical essay T. S. Arthur, His Life and Works (1873), the man whose very name was a commendation suddenly looked far less formidable. “One Who Knows Him” asserts that “T. S. Arthur has been a power in this country. He has appealed directly to the people, and has stood in no need of the services of literary middlemen” (20). Like the Reverend Watson, Arthur is a writer for readers, not for critics; our author’s image of Arthur “appealing directly to the people” constructs him as a print culture populist. But while this anti-literariness poses an allure in one line, it is transformed into a failing in the next. “One Who Knows Him” proceeds to compare Arthur with a peculiarly ironic choice of writers from across the pond: Dickens gave us Pickwicks, Pecksniffs, Quilps, Mark Tapleys, Micawbers and Mr. and Mrs. Boffins, all types of character more or less common perhaps in the world, but still of individualized and exceptional types. Arthur brings to our notice Browns, Gra184 Saying Goodbye to Timothy Shay Arthur

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hams, Dalys, Grants and Armstrongs—that is to say, commonplace, every-day people, like our neighbors and ourselves. And these people are introduced to us, not in the grand crises of their lives, but busy in their daily affairs. It is for the reason, perhaps, that there are no intricacies of plot the unraveling of which must be watched, no riddles of character to be divined—for the reason that the story comes directly down to the common and the trivial— that each reader recognizes himself or herself, and accepts the lesson that is inculcated. (21) What so animated the Sons of Temperance twenty years earlier is completely missing from the memoir of “One Who Knows Him”: a sense of literature and social movements being joined together in needful social work. In fact, Arthur’s populism is just that—his, unshared by the putative friend who later terms his life work “writing of and for mediocrity” (25). If “each reader recognizes himself or herself,” this spells a “com[ing] directly down to the common and the trivial”—a stooping. The elaboration of Dickens’s and Arthur’s characters puts forth a peculiarly detailed critique: so “individualized and exceptional” are the British author’s creations that even their names are better. The possibility that being “individualized and exceptional” might not be the point, might not further the sentimental and allegorical interpretation that Arthur so surely hopes to inspire, never occurs to his biographer. By his own hand, Arthur dismissed the type of cultural prestige on the rise in the late century; prestige, as theorized and claimed by a younger generation, centered upon a deep and abiding concern for the literary as distinctive, uncommon, artistic. As Nancy Glazener has shown, that generation painstakingly laid “claim to literary stature” through such publications as the Atlantic Monthly and Harper’s Bazaar, basing their own superiority and quality upon the assumed inferiority of other styles and print venues (Glazener 9). It would be easy here to blame the waning of Arthur’s popularity and his disappearance from literary history upon straw Atlantic and Harper’s men—especially if those men bore names like Henry James and William Dean Howells. But to do so would be to ignore Arthur’s own words: “I have never had any literary ambitions. . . . I am a literary man only through the force of circumstances” (qtd in T. S. Arthur 21). Writers like Arthur and the others featured in this study understood “literariness” in a different way than did those who came after Saying Goodbye to Timothy Shay Arthur 185

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them, and to claim it would have been to claim everything they understood as wrong with their world: a lack of experience, a lack of feeling, a lack of caring. In the 1880s, the prestige to which Arthur did aspire—speaking to the all-too-mundane hardships of “commonplace, every-day people, like our neighbors and ourselves”—no longer amounted to any sort of prestige at all. This could be easily detected in Harper’s New Monthly itself, which thirty years before had printed dozens of Arthur stories and praised him to the skies. In May 1885 their obituary section carried several notices, including the following: “March 6—In Philadelphia, T. S. Arthur, aged seventy-six years.” No mention even that Arthur had been a Harper’s contributor. One line, and then on to the next death. In 1885, Frances Willard and the WCTU were engaged in state “dry campaigns,” efforts to organize, raise funds, and pressure individual legislatures, which would eventually yield the results of their dreams; Woman and Temperance, or the Work and Workers of the WCTU had been published only two years before. The U.S. was shaking, shuddering, changing. But from the May issue of Harper’s, at least, you would never know it. But we should remember that in this literary history, prestige as it came to be understood never really mattered—it was never the point. Prestige never urged Arthur, or Stowe, or Frederick Jackson, or the women of the Advocate and the Friend of Virtue to pick up their pens. They wrote regardless of what “would have been more pleasant to” them, like Harriet Jacobs (Incidents 6). They wrote for the reasons expressed by Lydia Maria Child: that they might in fact accomplish what they felt was “the regeneration of the world,” and in doing so, they might feel as if “the Holy Spirit did actually descend upon men and women in tongues of flame” (qtd in Karcher 599). Come down, come down. For these men and women, this was a revolution worth writing for.

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Notes

1. The Devil and His Angels 1 Readers may notice that throughout much of this introduction, I use “fiction” and “novel” interchangeably. I intend no sloppiness, and will explicitly point out moments in this study where a particular form (such as the novel or the short story) is necessary to recognize. My usage here is meant to mirror that of many of the writers represented in Reforming the World, who often used the terms synonymously, and did not always stop to signal differences amongst what we would now distinguish as novels, novellas, and short stories. As I hope this work makes clear, the concerns voiced by these writers focus upon the role and social uses of fiction, not upon the compositional differences between a Knickerbocker story, for example, and a chunky volume of an E.D.E.N. Southworth novel. 2 I recognize that some readers may see a possible irony in using Emerson here, although scholars of his work such as Len Gougeon have carefully documented his grappling with abolition and women’s rights. As T. Gregory Garvey notes in Creating the Culture of Reform in Antebellum America, Emerson had evolving, sometimes conflicting ideas concerning reformers, their activism, and their impact upon society. He “tended to admire reform discourse over political discourse,” writes Garvey, because “despite its sensationalism, it was direct, sincere, and honest” (8). But at the same time, “he was deeply ambivalent about the activist movements that had become prominent in New England. The problem, in Emerson’s view, was that the reformers too often used their worthy causes as surrogates for authentic moral or critical self-reflection” (161). See especially chapter 4 of that book, “Emerson’s Self-Reliance as a Theory of Community.” Gougeon’s edited volume with Joel Myerson, Emerson’s Antislavery Writings, by Ralph Waldo Emerson, as well as his study Virtue’s Hero, illuminate the development of his thought on slavery and abolition. Lawrence Buell and Robert Richardson also examine Emerson and abolition: see especially chapter 6, “Social Thought and Reform,” in Buell’s Emerson, along with Richardson’s Emerson: The Mind on Fire. 3 See Finney on “The Pernicious Attitude of the Church on the Reforms of the Age,” quoted in Mintz, Moralists and Modernizers, p.32.

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4 In fact, some of the most committed reformers found it necessary to reject institutional religious authority altogether. A good example involves many of the men and women who identified themselves as radical abolitionists; their insistence upon immediate and total emancipation was accompanied by a refusal to tolerate calls for moderation or accommodation by any church or denomination. William Goodell, editor of the New York–based paper Radical Abolitionist, published a pamphlet in 1845 entitled Come-Outerism: The Duty of Secession from a Corrupt Church. The text outlines the scriptural justification and necessity for leaving any church that condones slavery, including allowing the membership of pro-slavery parishioners. 5 Susan Ryan describes a similar “ubiquity” in nineteenth-century print culture for the term “benevolence,” arguing that “antebellum Americans so often wrote about benevolence because they were engaged in ongoing and at times vitriolic conflicts over its meaning” (9, 10). I shall say more about the connection between reform and benevolence shortly. See Ryan, The Grammar of Good Intentions. 6 See McKanan, Identifying the Image of God, and Reynolds, Beneath the American Renaissance. 7 I take Ryan’s point that benevolence should be understood as referring to a wider range of antebellum activities and political viewpoints than the term has come to signify for contemporary Americans. As part of her attempt to analyze how “white benevolence [worked] as a compulsion” in this era, “one arising from and understood by means of a collective racial guilt” (2), Ryan contends that benevolence did not then, and should not now, be associated solely with “conservative, quietistic efforts to spread Christianity or to alleviate suffering on a small scale” (9). When it comes to how scholars and Americans in general comprehend the term now, Ryan may face an uphill battle: Bergman and Bernardi’s more recent essay collection Our Sisters’ Keepers: Nineteenth-Century Benevolence Literature by American Women, announces its focus on “poverty relief ” in the first sentence of its introduction (1). The battle against poverty is neither small nor unambitious, but the link between it and the term benevolence certainly returns the latter to a more strict definition than that which Ryan employs. I use “reform” as a type of umbrella term, incorporating benevolence but not restricted to it. 8 Nord ascribes a particularly acute and anxious “faith in reading” to those of a devout background, writing that “people involved in reli188 Notes to Pages 9–13

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gious book and tract work in the nineteenth century seem to have had no doubt that reading alone could save lives and souls—or destroy them” (Faith in Reading 114). I would argue that such conviction was also held by many reformers operating outside of specifically religious publishing like that of the American Tract Society. The Living of Charlotte Perkins Gilman repeatedly demonstrates both the inspirational character of the author’s Beecher ancestry and the daunting legacy it posed. Although Gilman singles out the Beechers as “the immediate line [of family] I am really proud of,” she also must note that her direct line of descent is less than glorious. She writes that “Mary Beecher, my grandmother, [was] the only daughter not doing public work” (3). And unfortunately, it is Mary’s son Frederick, Gilman’s father, who abandons his family while Gilman is still young: “my childhood had no father,” writes Gilman plaintively (5). Although she declares that “by heredity I owe him much,” Gilman makes it clear that the two Beechers closest to her failed to uphold the family reputation (6). See The Living, chapter 1. See Davidson, Revolution and the Word, and Baym, Novels, Readers, and Reviewers, especially the chapter “The Triumph of the Novel.” See for example Elisabeth B. Nichols’s subjects in “Blunted Hearts”: the late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth-century women whose journals she studies reveal shifting attitudes toward fiction. They express disapproval of novel reading, and then at times admit to such reading and resolve not to do it again; others distinguish between acceptable fiction and “the wrong sort.” See “Blunted Hearts,” in Reading Acts. David Paul Nord finds evidence of similar attitudes in his work on the American Tract Society. He notes, however, that most Tractarians conceived of fiction as an unmitigated evil, emitting “‘a great torrent of wickedness and infidelity’ ” (250). See Nord, “Religious Reading.” See Arac, The Emergence of American Literary Narrative; Lawrence Buell, New England Literary Culture; and Ronald Zboray, A Fictive People. Davidson’s Revolution and the Word includes censure of fiction from “pillars of the community” such as ministers, educators, and government officials in its discussion of the gendered ideologies informing early republic debates about genre; Baym’s Novels, Readers, and Reviewers focuses upon that cohort named in its title, the critics working in antebellum periodical literature; Isabelle Lehuu’s Carnival on the Page devotes a chapter to the “middle-class custodians of culture” whose criticism reveals their position “against popular books and the reading Notes to Pages 14–17 189

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practices they encouraged” (127). My point is not to chastise any of these individual works or others like them, and readers will certainly be able to detect that Reforming the World is indebted to these studies. Rather, my argument is that the accidental result of this scholarship, taken in the aggregate, can provide the impression that only the socially powerful (and nervous), or the laughably out of touch, would evince unease about fiction. (I also recognize that two of these studies are now two decades old. My hope is that this book will contribute to, and help to move forward, the discussion whose terms were very admirably set by earlier scholars.) I borrow the term “camps” from Karen Weyler, who describes “figures of cultural authority—the clergy in particular . . . fighting a losing battle against the cultural legitimacy of fiction, a battle which was ultimately conceded by the 1820s” (Intricate Relations 7). In Weyler’s words, “it seems clear that . . . the novel itself met with considerable hostility from some camps” (7). Such a characterization makes perfect sense in the context of Weyler’s work, which focuses upon an earlier period than my own. I would respectfully submit, however, that the thousands of Americans who took part in social reform movements constitute an entity more substantial than “some camps.” The chapters that follow this one will illustrate why my own conclusions differ from hers. The Knickerbocker billed itself as “An Original American Magazine.” After the publication of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852, the minister Joel Parker accused Stowe of slander for her reference to him as the source of a quote in chapter 12, “A Select Incident of Lawful Trade.” The quote characterizes slavery as a legal institution, a status with which Stowe and many abolitionists disagreed. For discussion of the threatened lawsuit, see Joan Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, pp.225–230. I borrow this description of “ordinary readers” from Barbara Ryan and Amy Thomas’s introduction to Reading Acts: U.S. Readers’ Interactions with Literature, 1800–1950, p.ix. A few more words about choices in the subjects studied here may be helpful. I’ll address various authors’ relations to moral reform, abolition, and temperance in those respective chapters. With the Panic of 1837, choices had to be made differently, since there was not exactly a membership roll for the event. Historians consider the Panic as having begun to take shape in 1836, and as ending in 1844, by which time the effects of the depression it caused had dissipated. Thus I worked with a simple rule: texts must be set during the Panic, engage with its issues

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(like debt and speculation) in a substantive way, and must have been published between 1836 and 1844, thereby effectively composing a response to the event. (That timely response compliments the “cardcarrying membership” I privilege elsewhere.) Both Mary Templin and David Zimmerman include later works in their examinations of panic fiction. However, Zimmerman’s study is entirely concerned with Gilded Age works; similarly, Templin’s foci of domestic ideology and its interrogation by female authors encourage her to adopt a somewhat looser time frame. See Templin, “Panic Fiction,” and Zimmerman, Panic! Last, for those readers who may be too young to remember: my use of “card-carrying membership” is meant as an allusion to President George H. W. Bush’s successful tarring of opponent Michael Dukakis during the 1988 presidential campaign. Bush characterized Dukakis as “a card-carrying member of the ACLU,” a description the latter proved unable to defend admirably. Lynch’s passionately argued True to Life: Why Truth Matters opens with a problem taken from current headlines: the justifications made by President George W. Bush for beginning the invasion of Iraq in 2003, in particular, his claim that Saddam Hussein’s regime was attempting to purchase material for building nuclear weaponry (1). Thus Lynch immediately places the question of truth’s importance within a compelling, controversial context that bears resemblance to similar attempts discussed in this book. The recent publication of Simon Blackburn’s Truth: A Guide also points to the topic’s continued health and pertinence in philosophical circles. This despite the contention by Stanley Fish that, given the impossibility of obtaining objective truth, “worrying about the nature of [it] . . . is a waste of time” (Lynch 2). Ironically, this change in the usage of the term “bankrupt” runs counter to an earlier change in the term “failure.” Historian Scott Sandage traces how that term, which specifically referenced a business loss in the early nineteenth century, altered so as to become a descriptor of identity, and hence something someone could him or herself be. See Sandage, Born Losers. New York Female Moral Reform Society, The Advocate of Moral Reform, quoted in Ruth Rosen, The Lost Sisterhood, p.8. Neither novel has a publication date, though Thompson appears to have been most active in the 1850s. As David S. Reynolds notes in his introduction for Venus in Boston, “the majority of Thompson’s fiction Notes to Pages 22–24 191

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appeared in pamphlets . . . a number of the novels were also serialized in newspapers. Many of the works soon vanished because they were published in these ephemeral forms” (xi–xii). See Reynolds, Introduction to Thompson’s Venus in Boston.

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2. The Panic of 1837 and The Failures of Literary Men Presidential Executive Order 12–13, July 8, 1836. President Andrew Jackson to Levi Woodbury, Secretary of the Treasury. CIS Index to Presidential Executive Orders and Proclamations, Part I. Eugene Exman’s history The Brothers Harper contains a chapter devoted to the “Depression Years,” in which he details the firm’s efforts to remain solvent during “what financial writers called ‘the pressure”’ (95). Exman also notes other eminent authors whose works were delayed or turned down by Harpers during this time period, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Hyperion being one example. In doing so, he illuminates how serious a challenge the Panic posed to the pursuit of normal business even for successful and well-established companies. See Exman, The Brothers Harper. See Hershel Parker, chapter 6 of Herman Melville: A Biography, especially pp.114–19. A quick note concerning the logic behind uppercase and lowercase spellings of “panic”: when referring to the Panic of 1837 specifically, I capitalize the term. Lowercase spellings refer to other similar economic events or are used adjectivally, as in “panic fiction.” I have found it necessary in a few places to quote scholars whose spellings do not adhere to mine. However, I hope that clear context will enable readers to make out my meaning, as well as that of the quotations. Hershel Parker discusses Melville’s juvenile writings, some of which predate the Panic. These writings, however, consist primarily of short satiric pieces for the Albany Microscope, “a scurrilous . . . newspaper designed for young men about town” (Parker 110). Hence these pieces do not approach the substantive storytelling of Melville’s mature work. In these ways 1837 panic fiction differs dramatically from that of the Gilded Age, which provides the subjects for David Zimmerman’s Panic! Identifying a “fiction boomlet” similar to that of 1837, Zimmerman works with examples from “two dozen economic novels appear[ing] in the months after the Panic of 1893,” as well as “the hundred or so novels . . . published during the ensuing depression” (9). These novels do relate a “sense of disorientation [that] Americans felt

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during the corporate restructuring” that characterized the turn of the century (21), and a similar sense of shock pervades 1837 panic fiction. But the passage of almost sixty years provides for two crucial differences between the antebellum and end-of-the-century fictional texts. Among the authors Zimmerman examines are included several who “had already established themselves as novelists [and] journalists,” such as Frank Norris, Upton Sinclair, and Theodore Dreiser (10). And perhaps more important, in 1893 “most panic novelists saw themselves as participants in the ideological and intellectual construction of financial modernity” (12). This self-perception and understanding of one’s relation to larger business and state structures is not only years away from 1837 texts, it is effectively worlds away. As we shall see, most 1837 authors understand themselves and their fellow citizens as victims, not willing or able “participants.” Similarly, their embrace of pastoralism and what I call a “restorative” mode of reform make theirs a distinctive body of work from their late-century kin. See the introduction to Zimmerman, Panic! Productions of Mrs. Maria W. Stewart, which included Stewart’s most famous essay, “Religion and the Pure Principles of Morality,” was published in Boston in 1835; The Life and Religious Experience of Jarena Lee, a Coloured Lady, was published in Philadelphia in 1836; Ann Plato’s Essays appeared in 1841, published in Hartford; and William Apess’s writings, appearing between 1829 and 1836, were all published in Boston or New York. These figures are taken from Reginald McGrane, The Panic of 1837, p.141; Charles Sellers, The Market Revolution, p.355; Edward Balleisen, Navigating Failure, p.2. McGrane, The Panic of 1837, p.55. The town does not seem to have ever realized its pre-Panic promise: its web site reveals a modest locale that is home to 4,500 residents, overshadowed by greater tourist attractions both to its south and north along Lake Michigan. See http://www.portsheldontwp.org. Niles’ Register, April 16, 1836, quoted in Reginald McGrane. The historian recounts similar situations in Pennsylvania, where “several of the banks acknowledged, in 1837, that they were issuing ten paper dollars for every silver dollar they possessed; some of them fourteen to one; some twenty to one, and one of them thirty to one” (Panic of 1837 16). Sharp, The Jacksonians Versus the Banks, p.25. Steve Fraser further underscores the singular status of banks in the first few decades of the Notes to Pages 33–37 193

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nineteenth century, noting that “it would be nearly another century before industrial corporations raised capital on the stock exchange. The only major exception would be the railroads.” See Every Man a Speculator, p.34. The relative power of the banks, based upon their hold on national wealth, altered quickly and dramatically over the course of the next two decades. Sharp notes that by mid-century, “banks were to become overshadowed by the rise of giant industrial, transportation, and insurance companies. A century later the largest bank in the country would have only half the assets of the largest utility” (26). Thus the stock exchange tracked the nation’s course through the amassing of funds and the building of the infrastructure which would lay the foundation for rapid industrial growth. See Sharp, The Jacksonians Versus the Banks. The structure and function of the Bank are marked by Hamilton’s federalist preferences for centralized governmental power. It was modeled after the Bank of England, and represented a crucial element of Hamilton’s plans for organizing the new country’s finances—a task that fell to him as the first Secretary of the Treasury. The United States Bank first existed from 1791 to 1811. The Second U.S. Bank was chartered in 1816, in part to address the financial turmoil following the War of 1812. See Margaret Myers, A Financial History of the United States, chapter 3. “The Bank of the United States, snorted President Andrew Jackson, was a ‘monster,’ a ‘hydra-headed’ monster, a monster equipped with horns, hoofs, and tail and so dangerous that it impaired ‘the morals of our people,’ corrupted ‘our statesmen,’ and threatened ‘our liberty.’ It bought up ‘members of Congress by the Dozzen,’ he ranted, subverted the ‘electoral process,’ and sought ‘to destroy our republican institutions”’ (Remini, Andrew Jackson and the Bank War 15). Amongst the many problems with the explosion of land sales was that buyers were too often buying sight unseen. Once again, Panic historian Reginald McGrane provides a compelling illustrative example “in the case of Marion City, Missouri. . . . Many of the lots in the city were sold in the East . . . from $200 to $1,000. When some of the investors sought the location, they found Marion City was just six feet out of water” (Panic of 1837 56). Although Andrew Jackson has been a controversial figure ever since his service in the War of 1812, contemporary historians generally agree on the President’s failings concerning the Panic: Jackson failed

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to grasp the consequences of his decisions regarding the U.S. Bank and related fiscal policy. There is also agreement that he failed to heed warnings, from cabinet members and from Vice President Van Buren, that his actions could have profoundly disastrous consequences. (There is, however, disagreement concerning why Jackson ignored these warnings.) Among historians sympathetic to Jackson, the Panic is depicted as the unfortunate result of Jackson’s regrettable (but not immoral or criminal) personal faults. Robert Remini, author of several works on Jackson and his legacy, outlines many of the critical mistakes the President made during the bank affair and says simply, “The President did everything wrong” (104). See Remini, Andrew Jackson and the Course of American Democracy. H. W. Brands’s more recent biography, Andrew Jackson: His Life and Times, does not devote much discussion to the Panic, since technically it occurred after Martin Van Buren had taken power. After noting that the conclusion of the bank war did not offer a conclusion to the country’s fiscal problems, Brands writes that the issuance of the Specie Circular “burst the land bubble at once, and as the air blew out it chilled the broader economy. Not till 1837, after Jackson had left office, would the full effects be felt, but the lesson was clear or should have been: that in matters monetary, there were no easy answers, and perhaps never would be” (503). Panic-era fictions, however, are notably lacking in such sympathetic interpretations of both Jackson and Van Buren’s actions. Presidential Executive Order 12-13, July 8, 1836. President Andrew Jackson to Levi Woodbury, Secretary of the Treasury. CIS Index to Presidential Executive Orders and Proclamations, Part I. I should note here that historians are divided, and have been for some time, about the question of statistical interpretation when dealing with the antebellum era. The scarcity of what might be considered reliable empirical data creates its own set of problems for studies of economic and business history. As in other chapters, I offer data here to provide a context for the stories under examination; it is those stories, and not the numerical figures, that are most important. See Hughes and Rosenberg, “The United States Business Cycle Before 1860: Some Problems of Interpretation.” “The Broken Merchants,” Ladies Companion and Literary Expositor, June 1837; “The Pressure of the Times,” Ladies Companion, July 1837. Book review and publishing notices seem to have been an opportunity for editors to comment upon the effect of the Panic on their industry. Notes to Pages 38–40 195

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In the July 1837 issue of the Knickerbocker, readers received thanks for not deserting the magazine “in this season of general depression, when retrenchment is the order of the day” (96). See “Editors’ Table,” Knickerbocker. The best source for information on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century magazines remains Frank Mott’s three volume History of American Magazines, even though it dates from the 1930s. Like many of the writers and publishers he discusses, Mott assumes that women’s magazines eschew political topics. (In his section on Godey’s Lady’s Book, for example, he writes, “But where are the articles on current problems, on politics, on social and economic questions? They are not to be found in Godey’s: they are not suitable for the female mind” [589].) But the Ladies Companion—with whom Godey’s shared many contributors, as Mott notes—makes it clear that this view depends upon your idea of what it means for an article to be “on current problems.” The fictional stories which the Companion printed bluntly characterize the country’s troubles as the result of the President’s personal malfeasance, the general greed of the citizenry, and unnecessary Democratic “experiments.” “The Broken Merchants” even allows a woman to be its voice of Whig common sense; a gentleman who disagrees with her, stating that he “never talk[s] politics with a female,” gets his comeuppance by going bankrupt (59). Other marks of current social and economic concerns can be easily found: earlier issues from 1837 ran features on life in the new western states (“Sketches of Incidents During a Residence in Michigan” and “A Ball at the Far-West,” about frontier society in Michigan were both published in the May issue), promoting the same territory in which so many easterners had lost money investing. “A Chapter on New-York” (May 1837) described the inhabitants of Broadway and Wall and Pearl Streets, as well as their occupations and strict gender divisions. A year earlier in January 1836, the magazine published an engraving of Wall Street. The engravings were a much-touted feature of the Ladies Companion, and while some were of nature scenes like the Catskills, other engravings of Wall Street, Blackwell’s Island, and Russian peasants clearly referred to issues circulating in antebellum society—the growth of the financial sector, the downside of urbanization, and events overseas. 21 Scott Sandage writes that “common law traditions treated bankruptcy as a crime (fraudulent nonpayment), whereas insolvency signaled ‘mere inability’ to pay” (30). See “Going Bust in the Age of Go-Ahead,” in Born Losers. 196 Notes to Page 47

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22 In his study of bankruptcy, Bruce Mann writes that public agitation concerning reform of bankruptcy laws and the abolition of debtors’ prisons reached back to the eighteenth century. However, the case against imprisonment took decades to gain widespread support: Antiimprisonment “arguments took a long time to prevail, as arguments for reform generally do. New York did not abolish imprisonment for most debtors until 1831; Pennsylvania not until eleven years later” (106). See Republic of Debtors. 23 Melville’s mother and older brother fled to Albany in 1831 “with [their] furniture,” after it became clear that Allan Melville could not repay more than $10,000 in loans nor sustain a failing business (Parker 49). The Warners left Manhattan for Constitution Island in 1837 under similar circumstances. See Parker, Herman Melville, and Anna Warner’s biography of her sister, Susan Warner. 24 Arac, The Emergence of American Literary Narrative, 1820–1860, p.3. Arac is particularly concerned here with distinguishing different types of narrative which he describes as “national,” “local,” “personal,” and “literary.” While I mostly agree with Arac’s descriptions of the traits of these different types of narrative, I have not adopted his categories, as I am more concerned here with following the distinctions made, explicitly and implicitly, within panic fiction. However, his comments on the cultural background of literary nationalism are pertinent to this discussion, as both Arac and I agree that the historical moment of the Panic is one in which more things are possible than are settled. 25 Charvat cites many events as evidence of the Panic’s lack of effect on major authors and the development of Transcendentalism, including the publication of Twice-Told Tales, “The American Scholar,” and works by Longfellow and Poe. For him, the continued production of literary works constituted the strongest proof that the Panic exerted little lasting influence on American literature; he does not, however, mention any of the financial setbacks, such as the bankruptcy of Hawthorne’s publishers, which I referenced earlier and which demonstrate private or personal effect. I do not disagree with Charvat on the extent to which the Panic may or may not have affected these writers; I also realize that the reasons the Panic may not have provided inspiration for my beginning grouping of authors (Emerson, Thoreau, Fern, Hawthorne, Stowe, and Poe) differ greatly from one to another. My object here is a very different one: to determine what bound together the several authors who did write about the Panic, and over Notes to Pages 47–54 197

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the course of this study, to understand what common traits explain the disappearance of such writing from literary history. 26 In his chapter on “The Garden of the World and American Agrarianism,” Henry Nash Smith eloquently examines the origins of agrarian social discourse, carefully noting distinctions among Crevecoeur and his contemporaries Franklin and Jefferson, for instance. In particular, Smith is careful to distinguish between the revolutionary potential of republican thought, and the more conservative tendencies of the pastoral mode. I combine republicanism and pastoral here because I see them as already blurred in Crevecoeur’s text, and more important, because their radical and conservative impulses are similarly blurred in writings like those of Hannah Allen and Hannah Lee. See Smith, Virgin Land. 27 Authorship of Living on Other People’s Means is attributed to Hannah Lee, but it is doubtful that she wrote the novel. It is an explicit response to Three Experiments of Living, and the most superficial of comparisons between the two reveals differences in phrasing, paragraph structure, and even punctuation patterns. The National Union Catalog lists dozens of texts under Lee’s name, with a suspiciously high number having been published in 1837, by different companies and in various cities along the eastern seaboard. However, several entries listed in Online Computer Library Center including for Living on Other People’s Means and two other texts mentioned earlier (Worth a Million and the Savings’ Bank) have notations reading “attributed to Lee.” As Mary Templin explains in her essay “Panic Fiction,” Lee’s success with Three Experiments spawned a number of imitations that hoped to ride her book’s coattails and take advantage of Panic-inspired reading. Living on Other People’s Means is very likely one of those texts. See Templin, “Panic Fiction,” p.12. 28 The belief that an agrarian way of life was being abandoned for less respectable endeavors appears to have been a popular one amongst Massachusetts writers. Pamphlets addressing the Panic cite “one great cause of the pressure . . . [which] is the almost universal contempt into which industry in producing has fallen. The agricultural States— those, we mean, which produce the direct necessaries of life, are not half cultivated” (“The Pressure and Its Causes” 19–20). In “The Times,” the anonymous Boston author links speculation, internal migration, and urban temptations all together: Upon the New England and Atlantic States, the fever of western emigration has fallen like a withering curse. It has bereft them of 198 Notes to Pages 60–61

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their young men—their pride and beauty—yes, their jewels—the mainspring of enterprise and all on which depend their hopes for the future. Thousands upon thousands have abandoned home and kindred, and all that makes life dear to man, to mingle in the tide of adventurers, and seek a home amidst uncultivated wilds. In their native states they were flourishing, and being content with moderate riches, were happy.—But the interested speculator returned among them. He could tell of treasures heaped together in a day—of towns and cities springing up as if by enchantment. . . . He made the old dissatisfied with their condition—and to the young he held out prospects too tempting for youthful ardor to resist. He fills the minds of all with hopes never to be realized, and inspires a thirst for daring adventures. He makes the pursuits of their lives appear flat and insipid—tells them that a Sabbath stillness reigns in their villages. (10) 29 Steve Fraser quotes Alexander Hamilton in an admission to George Washington, “that speculation and stockjobbing ‘. . . fosters a spirit of gambling, and diverts a certain number of individuals from other pursuits’” (Every Man a Speculator 15). 30 Mary Templin’s work on panic fiction represents a singular exception to these characterizations. It is worth noting, however, that the difference between Templin’s reading of panic fiction and those of these other scholars may be largely attributable to the differing disciplinary backgrounds and emphases that literary scholars and historians bring to bear on their texts. 31 Arthur’s and Briggs’s writings, juxtaposed with Frederick Jackson’s complaints, obviously broach questions about how antebellum Americans understood being “a literary man” in its professional connotation. There are not only vast differences of self-conceptions and work between Arthur and Briggs, but a veritable chasm exists between them and a genteel amateur like James Fenimore Cooper. I do not dwell on these differences because, as I hope will become even more clear in the forthcoming discussion of Hannah Lee, panic writers harbor suspicion of fictitiousness as a quality (and hence fiction as a genre). Thus it is difficult to imagine that a writer like Jackson would distinguish between a privileged figure like Cooper and a magazinist like Briggs, since both represented elite and self-identified literary culture. It is worth noting, however, that Cooper and Briggs, as well as Arthur, were professional men of letters in the most basic sense: it Notes to Pages 62–67 199

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was the main profession they practiced. Whether Jackson knew of either Arthur or Briggs is impossible to tell; neither enjoyed the kind of fame in the 1830s that would argue definitively one way or the other. But to outsiders like Jackson, and I would argue Hannah Lee as well, a wealthy expatriate might look no different from a Godey’s moralist or hardscrabble “cultural nationalist,” if all were perceived to be ignoring the Panic. Andrew Burstein elaborates on the ways in which Jackson’s business deals and the family connections of his wife, Rachel, helped him to establish himself, given that he was “the first U.S. president to have sprung from a modest space, from outside the social elite” (5). “By 1798 he would own more than fifty thousand acres in middle and west Tennessee, some of it already worth ten times what Jackson paid for it” (27). See Burstein, The Passions of Andrew Jackson. Briggs also composed the first entry in a proposed series of panic fictions he titled Bankrupt Stories, but after its publication, never completed another installment. The story introduces us to “a company of broken merchants and speculators,” all devastated by “our humane bankrupt law [which] makes no distinctions in its victims, but strips them all alike” (3). Bankrupt Stories features the tantalizing suggestion that the group will take up fiction, and “write their histories and publish them together for the profit of the whole,” thereby furnishing the collection that Briggs presents (6). Whether he lost interest in the series or, unlike his characters, saw it as unprofitable, remains unclear. Hannah Adams was an American historian working in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Her subjects included the early United States (A Summary History of New England [1799]), as well as a study of world faiths (A View of Religions [1791]). Further information about Adams can be found in Nina Baym, American Women Writers and the Work of History. Both texts were published in 1837. The preface for each, however, is dated: for Three Experiments, the date given is December 24, 1836, and for Elinor Fulton, the date is March 1, 1837. Hence both works would have been available to the public during the crucial post-Circular, prePanic period I have described. According to a Knickerbocker review, Lee’s Harcourts, the third installment in the “Stories from Real Life” series, was available by July of the same year. I have been unable to determine exactly what temperance volume Lee refers to here. Although several Timothy Shay Arthur works bear

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similar titles, including Six Nights with the Washingtonians, and Other Temperance Tales, all date from the 1840s, several years after Three Experiments. Indeed, Robbins explains that domestic literacy narratives “often participated simultaneously in several related literary modes (including sentimentalism, advice literature, and protest writing such as abolitionist texts),” a complex series of relations that has “submerged” its history in American writing (11). Mary Templin’s view that Lee’s novels “participate[d] in the creation of what we have come to call domestic ideology” accords with Robbins’s work, and her essay “Panic Fiction” skillfully outlines the novels’ particular relevance for instructing women on their potential role in both national and social economies. See Robbins, Managing Literacy, and Templin, “Panic Fiction.” See for example, Smith’s remarks concerning merchants who enjoy monopolies on certain goods, and their support for “unnatural” trade restrictions; or the mutual jealousy of French and British traders and its deleterious effect upon both countries. The Wealth of Nations pp.527, 530. The quotation comes from Proverbs 22:29. Franklin continues in a chatty fashion, remarking that he “did not think that I should ever literally stand before Kings, which however has since happened.—for I have stood before five, & even had the honor of sitting down with one, the King of Denmark, to Dinner” (Autobiography 88). This may be an instance of what Weber has in mind when he writes of “the rare honesty of [Franklin’s] autobiography” (Protestant Ethic 12). It is worthwhile noting here that Lee’s earlier contribution to A Memoir of Miss Hannah Adams provides many clues to her sociopolitical beliefs. In A Summary History of New England, Adams had called the Revolutionary War “one of the most extraordinary revolutions in history, replete with the most important consequences to mankind” (qtd in Baym 96). She was also an early proponent of the view of New England as the center of the cultural genesis of the United States and its exceptional world position. In short, the two Hannahs, Adams and Lee, shared very similar understandings of American historical significance. See Baym, American Women Writers and the Work of History, especially chapter 6. Regarding the accuracy of Lee’s perceptions of the founding fathers: the recent explosion in biographies of Franklin, Washington, and their comrades has illuminated just how different these men were from one Notes to Pages 79–84 201

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another, and often from their public personae. Franklin’s deism and worldliness, in particular, are strikingly incongruous with the expressed philosophies of Three Experiments and Elinor Fulton. However, I am less concerned here with the actual perceptiveness of Lee’s views of these men than with the significance of those views for her texts. In transforming Franklin and others into secular, nationalist saints, Lee, Hannah Adams and others seized upon the elements of their life stories that best fitted the uses of a post–Revolutionary War generation. 41 Orderly relations amongst the classes have a crucial place in “the cause betweene God and us, wee are entered into Covenant with him for this worke” (Winthrop, 90). In their introduction to “A Modell of Christian Charity” in The Puritans in America, Alan Heimert and Andrew Delbanco characterize Winthrop’s sermon “as ‘restorationist,’ that is, as envisioning a social order in New England that would recapture the serenity of a recollected (or imagined) English past of well-defined place for all, and of clearly understood and easily fulfilled obligations within the social hierarchy.” See Heimert and Delbanco, p.81. 3. Sentimentalizing the Fallen Woman 1 Blackwell’s is now called Roosevelt Island, located between Manhattan and Long Island in the East River. Although it housed correctional and medical facilities for over a hundred years, the island is no longer used for those purposes. See the Web site for the Roosevelt Island Historical Society, http://www.correctionhistory.org/rooseveltisland. 2 Neither Sanger nor the History appear in the two foremost accounts of the Harper Brothers’ empire, Eugene Exman’s The Brothers Harper or J. Henry Harper’s own The House of Harper. However, J. Henry does comment on his elders’ choices for publication in the years immediately preceding the Civil War, noting that “at this period the business of the House had become widely extended. The firm was engaged in the publication of many important works, as well as in the conduct of their two periodicals” (173). J. Henry refers here to Harper’s Monthly Magazine and Harper’s Weekly, which “hesitated to take a political stand. The journal was for family reading . . . and like the Magazine, was generally kept free of political discussion” (177). Harper specifies slavery and the impending war at this point in his account. However, one might argue that in its choice of a title such as The History of Prostitution, the firm implicitly took political stances with its book publication list that the periodicals avoided. See The House of Harper. Also, 202 Notes to Pages 85–89

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June Howard discusses the early content of the periodicals in chapter 2 of Publishing the Family. Marilynn Wood Hill discusses the varying nineteenth-century statistics, the difficulty in sorting through the disparate estimates, and their historical relation to developing social policy in New York City. See Their Sisters’ Keepers, pp.26–33. See “Blackwell’s Island,” Ladies Companion and Literary Expositor, January 1836. See Mignon Rittenhouse, The Amazing Nellie Bly, p.105. The exposé style which Bly and other reporters perfected for publications like the World often presented itself as serving social reform causes. Joseph Pulitzer had made the newspaper successful “by combining a taste for the lurid and grisly sensations of the day, captured in provocative headlines, with top-notch reporting of all the day’s news, strong use of illustrations, crusades and contests, and an editorial page renowned for its excellence” (Kroeger 79–80). The World used many of these techniques to push the issue of asylum conditions to the forefront of public consciousness in the months preceding Bly’s undercover stay at Blackwell’s; as Bly biographer Brooke Kroeger puts it, “thanks to the World ’s revival of the shocking as daily newspaper fare, the subject of ill-treated lunatics was a natural” (87). See Kroeger, Nellie Bly, especially chapter 4. New York Times, “The Alms-House Governors Appropriations for 1860,” December 1, 1860. See http://www.correctionhistory.org/rooseveltisland. The Web site is maintained by the Roosevelt Island Historical Society, but is a main link for the New York Correction History Society. Their home page offers a link to an article from Correction News entitled, “Before Riker’s, Blackwell’s was . . . [the Department of Corrections’] Island Home.” See http://www.correctionhistory.org/html/chronicl/nycdoc/html/ blakwell.html. I base my estimate on figures provided by Edgar Martin in The Standard of Living in 1860. The price of board per week, for women, averaged between $1.50 and $3.00 depending upon location (429). Factor in costs for extra meals, transportation, unforeseen need for clothing, toiletries, or additional fuel, and it becomes sadly apparent how vulnerable most female immigrants were. The penny press and pamphlet industry’s fascination with fallen women is skillfully discussed by those scholars studying the murders Notes to Pages 98–100 203

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of Helen Jewett and Mary Rogers, in particular. For Jewett, see David Anthony, “The Helen Jewett Panic”; Patricia Cline Cohen, “The Helen Jewett Murder” and also The Murder of Helen Jewett. For Rogers, see Amy Gilman Srebnick, The Mysterious Death of Mary Rogers. Srebnick also devotes an entire chapter to an especially well-known work of fiction concerning Mary Rogers: Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Mystery of Marie Roget.” In a more general vein, Barbara Meil Hobson discusses a sampling of antebellum fallen women literature in Uneasy Virtue; Sally Mitchell, in The Fallen Angel, describes the British market of tabloid papers and novels, which bears some striking similarities to the U.S. context. 10 The Massachusetts affairs of Methodist minister Ephraim Avery and Lowell factory girl Sarah Cornell, as well as that of the Reverend Barnabas Phinney and his parishioner Aurelia Chalker, both resulted in public scandal and found their way to court. (The former affair ended in Cornell’s death and Avery’s trial for murder.) For Avery and Cornell, see Williams, Fall River: An Authentic Narrative (1833). On Phinney and Chalker, see “Statement of the Case of Reverend Barnabas Phinney, who is accused of the crime of adultery with, and seduction of Aurelia Chalker” (1836). In discussing the Fall River murder, Kristin Boudreau notes that the prosecution handled discussion of Cornell’s virtue, or rather lack thereof, as a delicate subject. Catharine Williams herself, as well as other supporters, made efforts to rehabilitate Cornell’s character, and portray her as virtuous but gullible, and led astray. In this way Williams’s writing bears some resemblance to the moral reform discourse beginning to circulate in the 1830s. See Boudreau, The Spectacle of Death, especially pp.46–50. 11 Like George Thompson, author of Venus in Boston, many of Ned Buntline’s novels were published cheaply in pamphlet form, and thus niceties such as publication years could sometimes be forgotten. Buntline was active in the mid-century, however, so a date of sometime in the 1850s is likely. 12 In American Sensations, Shelley Streeby examines how Buntline’s “muckracking urban gothic novels” form part of a body of work that participates in discourses concerning U.S. empire (4). Analyzing his fictions set in Florida and parts of Latin America, Streeby uncovers how Buntline, along with other peers in the popular press, possesses “a double vision of Northeastern cities divided by battles over class, race, national origin, and religion, on the one hand, and on the other 204 Notes to Page 100

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to scenes of U.S. nation- and empire-building in Mexico, Cuba, and throughout the Americas” (5). As we shall see with The History of Prostitution, William Sanger, like Buntline and many others concerned with fallenness, harbored ideas about American exceptionalism and Western, Northern European, or Anglo-Saxon cultural superiority that fundamentally shaped his views of fallen women and what actually constitutes “fallenness.” See Streeby, American Sensations. 13 Jebb’s main character and narrator, Mary Smith, recalls how while working as a lady’s maid, “I first read a novel”: “I soon procured others for myself, which I carefully concealed from my mother’s eyes; for I had an instinct that she would disapprove of such books, though I had never so much as heard of a novel till then. . . . I can see now that there was no character more certain to derive injury from novel-reading than mine . . . and the trash I devoured did its baneful work” (Out of the Depths 11–12). So harmful are novels that Mary Smith is turned into her own procurer. Out of the Depths received a lengthy review from the Atlantic Monthly, who lamented that they “hoped to find the whole truth in [it]; but finding only a part of it, we can greet it with only a partial welcome.” Unfortunately, the reviewer neglects to say which part he finds truthful. See “Reviews and Literary Notices,” Atlantic Monthly, November 1859: 648–50. 14 Ironically, both quotes come from reviews of Sanger’s History which are themselves lengthy and attention-grabbing: the Times review fills a full eight columns of text, while the New Englander’s piece, titled “Unchastity,” is nineteen pages long. (It also includes commentary on infamous divorce cases and adultery-related murders of the day.) Hence the same illogic that provoked panic fiction’s self-consciousness—using fiction to tell truth, then worrying about it—is at work in moral reform’s urge to fight fallenness by constantly and compulsively describing it. 15 In his introduction for the most recent edition of The Quaker City, David S. Reynolds cites sales figures of “60,000 copies in [the novel’s] first year and 10,000 copies annually during the next decade” (vii). He also notes that the initial figure comes from the book’s publishers, which means that it should be treated with skepticism. However, from the furor the book caused and the number of imitators it inspired (both domestic and foreign), it seems clear that the novel must have sold in fantastic numbers. See Reynolds, introduction to The Quaker City. Notes to Page 101 205

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16 In referring to “city writing,” I mean to account broadly for those texts that offered an introduction to urban life, whether the “lurid . . . city mysteries” novels that David Reynolds discusses in Beneath the American Renaissance (82); cultural commentary such as Lydia Maria Child’s Letters from New-York series (1841–43); or more stolid fare like Joseph Willson’s Sketches of the Higher Classes of Colored Society in Philadelphia (1841). Whether written firmly in the Buntline/Thompson vein or attempting more objective overviews like Child and Willson, city writings of the antebellum era seized upon controversial figures as means through which to distill and represent the negative aspects of newly urbanized life. As we shall see with George Foster, the figure to whom such writers increasingly turned was the fallen woman. 17 See Foster, “The Needlewomen,” New York by Gas-light and Other Urban Sketches, p.233. 18 I have elsewhere elaborated on sentimentality’s contradictory effects, in women’s texts of the nineteenth century (see “Re-Possessing Individualism in Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall ”). The continuing impulse to characterize sentimentality either positively or negatively seems to me to be less a matter of what sentimentality actually was, or is, than a consequence of its close connections and conflations with women’s history in the U.S. Especially because sentimentality has been so often understood as the premier trait of early women’s writing, praise or condemnation of it has been understood as praise or condemnation of women themselves. Besides being an ultimately unwinnable game—as June Howard intimates—it reveals how scholars have yet to fully consider sentimentality as a literary and cultural phenomenon, rather than as a women’s phenomenon expressed in those forms. It is highly unlikely that scholars would ever feel themselves bound to define modernism, for example, as solely a literary or a cultural discourse, as something either facilitating the righteous furor of A Room of One’s Own, or the fascism of Ezra Pound’s late writings. 19 See Smith’s foundational essay on Jacobs, “Loopholes of Retreat”; Rosaura Sánchez and Beatrice Pita’s introductions for both Who Would Have Thought It? and The Squatter and the Don; Min Hyoung Song, “Sentimentalism and Sui Sin Far.” This is a partial list; however, the recent publication of Hannah Crafts’s The Bondwoman’s Narrative and of a collection of essays on that novel (Gates, In Search of Hannah Crafts) illustrates that the view of sentimentality as distorting or precluding somehow more accurate or truthful indictments of racism is still per206 Notes to Pages 104–109

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vasive. Several of the scholars examining Crafts’s text express conflicted views about her likeness to white women writers such as Stowe; few, however, have any problem with Crafts’s near plagiarism of Charles Dickens and Bleak House. Another of June Howard’s shrewd admonitions concerning attempts to define sentimentality regards the need for critics to “make a systematic distinction between sentiment and nineteenth-century domestic ideology, and reconstruct the history of their imbrication” (Publishing the Family 217).Many of the quotes from Ann Douglas and others that I include in this section refer specifically to women writers or women’s culture. This is not meant to signify my own conflation of sentiment with female. I do agree with Jane Tompkins and other scholars, however, about the ways in which the imbrication noted by Howard has had a lasting resonance in U.S. society. As used in the contemporary American vernacular, “sentimental” is a pejorative term, and often simply “a code word for female subject and woman’s point of view” (Fetterley 25). For example, the first lines of Oroonoko, or the Royal Slave: A True History, are as follows: I do not pretend, in giving you the History of this Royal Slave, to entertain my Reader with the Adventures of a feign’d Hero, . . . nor in relating the Truth, design to adorn it with any Accidents but such as arriv’d in earnest to him: and it shall come simply into the World, recommended by its own proper Merits, and natural Intrigues; there being enough of Reality to support it, and to render it diverting, without the Addition of Invention. See Aphra Behn, Oroonoko, p.8. William Sanger’s identification with and sympathy for the character of Esther is further revealed by his emphasis on this part of her speech, where she pleads for a drink. Although italicized in the History, it is unmarked and undistinguished in any way by Gaskell herself in the novel. See Gaskell, Mary Barton. McDowall’s Journal, February 1833. McDowall’s Journal, June 1834. McDowall himself does not state what the exact legal charges against him were, although it is clear that copies of both Magdalene Facts and McDowall’s Journal were confiscated by public officials on the grounds of obscenity. In the former publication, McDowall does mention an “Anti-Magdalen Meeting in Tammany Hall,” reporting that moral Notes to Pages 109–118 207

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reformers were there labeled “traitors to the country, calumniators, and libelers” (67). See “Facts More Awful Than Fiction,” Friend of Virtue, October 19, 1847; “Facts That Are Facts,” Advocate, March 1, 1849; and “Simple Facts, But Awful,” Illuminator, October 14, 1835. The Friend of Virtue, March 15, 1849. I have been unable to determine exactly when the NEFMRS established this service, but the notices in its journal suggest that it was in early 1847. See Goodell, American Slave Code, p.85. This section follows a section on the forced “breeding” of slave women. The author summarizes the two subjects by stating that “such facts, in their almost interminable varieties, corroborate the preceding, and illustrate the almost innumerable USES of slave property! ” (86). I refer here to critical disagreements over Jacobs’s candor in telling the story of her life in the Norcom household, particularly in regard to whether she was or was not raped by her master James Norcom. Elizabeth Fox-Genovese’s Within the Plantation Household, for example, ends with a reading of Incidents in which the historian flatly discounts Jacobs’s account of this period in her life. “Neither well-intentioned slaveholding women nor determined slave men could withstand the power of the master,” writes Fox-Genovese, reasoning that neither could any threatened slave woman: “Virtue would have to come later” (396). This provoked a heated response from Frances Smith Foster, who countered that: Virtue might be the foundation upon which Jacobs chose to rest her self-image, but, having decided that [she] could not have prevailed over her master, Fox-Genovese terms this a “fabrication,” and then dismisses it as “no matter.”. . . In this example, a reader will grant that a woman could live six years in virtual solitary confinement, but cannot grant that such a strong-willed individual could fend off an old lecher even if she did have the help and protection of her family, her community, and a U.S. congressman. (95–96) With the hindsight of time, one might respectfully suggest that both scholars underestimate elements of Jacobs’s story, at least in the fury of the moment. Virtue and fallenness were indeed important to Jacobs, as well as to other antebellum authors, and consideration of authors’ understanding of those topics should not “come later.” Likewise, while Jacobs’s support system is well documented, James Norcom’s power in

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his home and community should not be blithely set aside; he was something more than “an old lecher.” Comprehending nineteenth-century sexual standards and moral reform philosophy should help us to see that the “was she or wasn’t she?” argument revolves around a moot point. For thousands of antebellum Americans, Harriet Jacobs was a fallen woman from the day she was born, simply by virtue of being born a slave. Her admitted affair with Samuel Tredwell Sawyer only corroborates this. Thus Incidents shares a goal with other moral reform writings: to convince readers that the answer to “was she or wasn’t she?” does not matter, because all women deserve better, regardless. See Fox-Genovese, Within the Plantation Household and Foster, “Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents.” 31 Jacobs’s brother, aunt, and uncles are featured in Incidents, but it is Aunt Marthy who both begins and ends the text through Jacobs’s “tender memories” of her (201). Furthermore, in the 1990s Jean Fagan Yellin uncovered evidence of a second marriage on the part of Jacobs’s father, and a new family, all of which is unacknowledged in the text. In first publishing this discovery, Yellin wrote that it “raised a new series of questions about Harriet Jacobs” and “underscore[d] the necessity of reading her slave narrative as a carefully constructed autobiography,” a point with which I wholeheartedly agree. See Yellin, “Family History,” p.766. 32 Joan Hedrick, in her biography of Stowe; Jean Fagan Yellin, in her biography of Jacobs; and Carolyn Karcher, in her biography of Child, discuss the backstory to Incidents’ appearance in print. Much of what we know about the sequence of events comes from Jacobs’s correspondence, and accordingly reveals little of the logic behind Stowe’s actions. What does seem clear is that Stowe was an exceedingly busy woman dealing with newfound notoriety when Jacobs approached her. She was engaged in compiling the Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, into which she infamously offered to absorb Jacobs’s story; was preparing to leave the country for a widely advertised tour of England; and had successfully incorporated other former slaves’ tales into the Key, such as Solomon Northrup’s Twelve Years a Slave (1853)—which actually billed itself as “another Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin” (Ernest 180). Whatever else Stowe may have thought of Jacobs—or more likely, whatever else she did not think—remains unrecorded. 33 As John Ernest makes clear in his discussion of Brown’s many works, his anxiety concerning slavery’s resistance to representation did not Notes to Pages 134–139 209

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stop him from attempting the very task he considered so daunting. See chapter 1, Liberation Historiography. 34 I am thinking here of Brown’s works such as The Black Man, His Antecedents, His Genius, and His Achievements (1865) and The Negro in the American Rebellion (1867), as well as Garnet’s The Past and the Present Condition, and the Destiny, of the Colored Race (1848). John Ernest discusses these works, as well as many others by lesser-known figures, in Liberation Historiography. See chapter 1 for information on both Brown and Garnet; the former is also the focus of the study’s epilogue. 4. Making History with Child and Stowe 1 Lewis Tappan and his brother Arthur were wealthy and socially prominent supporters of abolition and moral reform; Lewis would be instrumental in pursuing the Amistad case a few years later. Because the Tappans were New Yorkers, their safety was a particular concern during the time surrounding Thompson’s visit. Both friends and enemies knew where they lived, and Lewis’s house had already been trashed by a proslavery mob the previous year. See Child, Selected Letters, pp.31–37. David Walker, author of Walker’s Appeal, died mysteriously in 1830, apparently of poisoning. While Boston police never determined an official cause of death, Walker had received numerous death threats after the publication of the Appeal. Elijah Lovejoy ran a small abolitionist newspaper in southern Illinois, and was shot to death by a proslavery mob in 1837. In abolitionist literature he was frequently referred to as “the martyr Lovejoy.” While the repercussions of abolitionist activism for black Americans could be brutal and swift, being white was not a protection in and of itself in volatile circumstances, as evidenced by the experiences of the Tappans, Garrison, Thompson, and of course, Lovejoy. 2 Ruth Bogin and Jean Fagan Yellin recount incidents of violence against and intimidation of antislavery women from the same years which saw attacks on Thompson, Tappan, and Garrison. Mobs descended on meetings of the Boston Female Anti-Slavery Society, as well as on a moral reform meeting and “women holding a fair at Armory Hall” (2). Bogin and Yellin suggest that the “spillover violence” may have been inspired by the BFASS women, “ma[king] all women’s public activity seem threatening” (2); after all, moral reform meetings and charity fairs normally did not provoke such actions. See the editors’ introduction, The Abolitionist Sisterhood. 210 Notes to Pages 139–143

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3 Lehuu employs the work of Mikhail Bakhtin on the carnivalesque, discourses and cultural practices that can undercut entrenched institutional powers, in her analysis of the development of print culture in the antebellum era. Lehuu focuses upon the ways in which the carnivalesque nature of the period opened up libratory venues of expression for marginalized voices. My point here is simply that in a print culture with few social controls, “libratory” could be a slippery quality, working both for and against the disenfranchised. See Carnival on the Page, especially chapter 1. 4 See for instance William Lloyd Garrison’s review of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which praises the emotional power of the novel but bluntly questions its racial politics as embodied by Tom. “We are curious to know,” wrote Garrison, “whether Mrs. Stowe is a believer in the duty of nonresistance for the white man, under all possible outrage and peril, as well as for the black man” (129). See Garrison, “Review of Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” the Liberator, March 26, 1852; collected in Cain, William Lloyd Garrison. 5 I take note here that Stowe did occasionally use the term “romance” purposefully. Monika Elbert’s elegant reading of “Nature, Magic, and History in Stowe and Scott” argues that Stowe crafted The Pearl of Orr’s Island (1861) in such a way that testifies to the lasting influence of the older writer. For Elbert, Stowe’s novel “is a romance in the broader sense of Scott’s definition . . . partaking of the marvelous” (48). While I find Elbert’s reading of the novel persuasive, in tracing how Stowe generally uses terms like “romance,” as well as “fiction” and “novel,” we see that like many Americans and like some of the authors in this study, she often used the terms interchangeably. At least as regards Stowe, Nina Baym’s observation about antebellum terminology still holds: Nathaniel Hawthorne’s insistent and clear-cut distinction between the novel and romance was not typical of his era. See Elbert in Transatlantic Stowe, and Baym, “Concepts of the Romance in Hawthorne’s America.” 6 It is interesting that one of Stowe’s former pupils grew up to put similar sentiments into print, only a few years before her instructor did. Despite being only a month apart in age, Sarah Willis—the future Fanny Fern—found herself in Stowe’s class while the latter served as an instructor at older sister Catharine’s Hartford Female Seminary. In Stowe’s recollections, Willis certainly appears to have been a “lively school girl” of the Nina Gordon type, even once leading a “pie Notes to Pages 144–146 211

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rebellion” in the home where she boarded (Hedrick 56). When Willis became Fern and wrote her roman á clef Ruth Hall (1855), she levied complaints against scholars and their texts that should sound familiar. After Ruth attains fame through her writing, she receives a piece of nasty “fan mail” from one “William Stearns, Prof. of Greek, Hebrew, and Mathematics . . . and author of ‘History of the Dark Ages”’ (Ruth Hall 166). Stearns’s letter proclaims that “the female mind is incapable of producing anything which may be strictly termed literature” (166). As many Fern scholars have noted, the letter represents a defiance of official learning as well as of the gendered nature of dominant genre conventions. Perhaps women do not write “anything which may be strictly termed literature” (a belief that Fern also attacked in her newspaper writings), but at least they do not reside intellectually in “the Dark Ages.” For discussion of Stowe and Willis/Fern’s days at Hartford, see Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe, especially pp.55–57. Joyce W. Warren also devotes an entire chapter to Hartford in her biography Fanny Fern. 7 I allude here to Sarah Meer’s study which bears this title, as well as to the phenomenon that forms its subject: the multiple and culturally complex reincarnations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, as a “story that was . . . rewritten, turned into songs, plays, sketches, and even new novels . . . [and] its imagery . . . transferred to paintings, puzzles, cards, board games, plates, spoons, china figurines, bronze ornaments, dolls, and wallpaper” (Uncle Tom Mania 1–2). 8 Hedrick’s latter comment specifically refers to Beecher’s position during the “Lane Debates,” a nearly three-week-long series organized by the students at Lane Seminary, where Beecher served as president. Foremost amongst the organizers was a young man named Theodore Weld, later to write American Slavery as It Is. The debates revealed students at Lane to be far more progressive than their teachers and administrators: they “voted overwhelmingly against colonization and in favor of ‘immediate abolition”’ (102). Even though the description of Beecher is meant to suggest his views at this time, I consider it a faithful portrait of the man throughout most of his adult life. See Hedrick, chapter 10. 9 In this aspect I follow Mary Kelley’s characterization of Stowe as a “literary domestic,” one of several successful female authors of the antebellum era who negotiated perceived public and private sphere conflicts by crafting properly feminine, home-and-family-centered 212 Notes to Pages 149–151

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authorial identities. Both Joan Hedrick and Sarah Robbins have built upon and enhanced our understanding of this process: Hedrick in her numerous descriptions of how Stowe “used modesty” in her public life (240); and Robbins in her elaboration of the author’s constructions of herself as a maternalistic, caring “instructor,” a figure with no claims upon “high art” (123). See Kelley, Private Woman, Public Stage; Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe; and Robbins, Managing Literacy. 10 As Robert Levine notes in his edition of Dred, “Gibbon strongly opposed the American Revolution and was criticized by clerics for the historical criticism of Christianity in his famous History” (599). Aunt Nesbit’s defense of the work, which she views as “very pious,” allies her with the imagined dull historian. In combination with Nina’s sarcastic observation on just how long it is taking the older woman to get through Gibbon’s masterpiece, we can see a damning assessment of (some) historians emerging from Stowe’s novel. To put it in contemporary lingo: like Aunt Nesbit, historians just don’t get it. 11 Levin makes clear the contempt that Prescott, Motley, and Parkman in particular felt for “the she-philosophers” of Transcendentalism (the epithet is Motley’s); however, he also carefully excavates the very real shared influences amongst many of these figures (26). This included a deep respect for romantic thought emerging from Germany; a shared Protestant background, with varying degrees of devotion to Unitarian doctrine; a “basic assumption” in the inevitability of “human progress,” as manifested through social and political developments like the American Revolutionary War (27); and an acceptance of a body of ideas promoting singularity and destiny that we would now term American “exceptionalism.” I do not take on the specific legacy of romanticism here, not only because Levin’s research lays out this groundwork exceptionally well, but also because the larger concerns in my study—fiction, truth, and the writing of reform—crisscross these generic boundaries. Levin’s argument for reading the work of early historians as a fundamental component of American romanticism remains persuasive. But the writers who provide the focus for my study, Child and Stowe, have themselves been dubbed romantic and have been credited with being early realists; critics have detected tinges of modernism in their work, and James Baldwin, at least, found Stowe’s religious and social mindset to be “medieval” in “Everybody’s Protest Novel.” The investment shared by Child, Stowe, Prescott, and other historians in creating a history that would illuminate experiential truths ultimately Notes to Pages 152–155 213

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connects them to the other writers and reformers in this study. It is a connection and also a devotion that cannot be contained by one genre category, even as it is informed by the tradition that genre names. See Levin, History as Romantic Art, especially chapters 1 and 2. For those unfamiliar with Baldwin’s pronouncement, see “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” p.13. The epithet is Lyman Beecher’s, quoted by Joan Hedrick: “He considered novels ‘trash’ and did not allow them in the house” (19). The first exception to his rule, and one that “became a Beecher family institution” (20), should surprise no one: through the family of first wife Roxana Foote, the Beecher children and then the Beecher patriarch came to love Sir Walter Scott. It is also worth noting that in Dred ’s preface, Stowe uses the word “art” twice, and both times puts it in its place. The other instance comes when she speaks of, and dismisses for herself, “a merely artistic point of view” (3). Taken in conjunction with the Key’s announcement of “a purpose entirely transcending the artistic one,” we begin to understand what Stowe viewed as the faults of “mere art” in the decade after the Fugitive Slave Act. Stowe contributed an introduction for Nell’s text, one of many she studied in the aftermath of Uncle Tom’s Cabin publication and her immersion into antislavery work. See Levine, Introduction to Dred, p.xxi. Carolyn Karcher writes that both Garrison and the NAR editors recognized Child’s immense talent and wished to utilize it for their own social causes. (In the case of Garrison, such utilization was to be literal.) Suggests Karcher: “It was as if rival camps—one representing social dominance, the other radical egalitarianism . . . vied for the privilege of offering her leadership” (183). See First Woman in the Republic. See Mintz, introduction to Moralists and Modernizers, as well as Fredrickson, part 1 of The Inner Civil War. These quotations come from “Dramatic Fictions,” p.587, and introduction to volume 10, p.2, Knickerbocker. During the first half of the nineteenth century confectionary shops were often named as sources of temptation for children and adolescents. A short column in the October 7th, 1835, edition of the moral reform paper Illuminator, for example, bore the title “Confectionary Shops Sinks of Iniquity.” Nina Baym comments on other lines from The Mother’s Book that feature such “appetitive metaphors,” finding in

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them a “faith in or fear of the power of print over the body” (18). While I concur with Baym concerning the potency of this fear, I disagree that this reveals “a nascent Victorianism . . . [in] Child’s republican ideals,” one that fantasizes that “ingesting historical materials might magically liberate women from corporeality altogether” (18). See Baym, American Women Writers and the Work of History, chapter 2. 18 Child claims to have heard the story and to be offering it to the reader as a tale “told . . . truly” (204). As John Ernest points out, however, the story “at best, [comes from] the shadowy outskirts of history” (150), given that it features truly remarkable coincidences. Nonetheless, if in fact based upon a story Child once heard, it may have originated as “a part of oral culture before it became a part of written history” (Ernest 148). 5. Saying Goodbye to Timothy Shay Arthur 1 The Northwestern Christian Advocate (1853–1929) was one of several church publications active during the antebellum era, and had its main offices in Chicago. As Frank Mott explains, “the Methodist weeklies, of which there were some thirty in this period, usually employed the name Christian Advocate, with a praenomen indicating the place of publication or the region in which it was circulated” (66). The main paper was based in New York City, with the Western Christian Advocate “be[ing] established by the General Conference [of the church] . . . at Cincinnati in 1834; and in 1852 a third official paper was set up in Chicago,” that being the Reverend Watson’s (66). This indicates that as small as Adrian, Michigan might have been, the Family Favorite had gained the notice of the denomination’s writers and editors. See Mott, History of American Magazines, volume 2. 2 The text Elizabeth Stoddard calls Baxter’s Saints’ Rest is named in her novel The Morgesons (1862), and represents the sort of religious and proper reading that the heroine Cassandra cannot bear—and which her mother encourages her to take up. As Lawrence Buell and Sandra Zagarell explain in their edition of the novel, “The Saint’s Everlasting Rest (1650), by English Puritan divine Richard Baxter . . . [was] a classic of Protestant devotional literature, [and] well-known in early nineteenth-century Congregationalist circles” (255). I am obviously fudging on the matter of reading choices for Congregationalists versus Methodists, but doing so in order to make a point. When Stoddard mentions the work in her novel, Cassandra is making a pest of herself in the family parlor, while her mother and aunt talk, sew, and bemoan the Notes to Pages 170–175 215

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younger generation’s appalling lack of moral gravity. Thus my reference to it is meant to be ironic: the Reverend Watson might indeed hope that “the little miss . . . in the parlor” will be drawn to his work, as opposed to corrupting themselves with “bad books.” Many little misses would be. But others like Cassandra and, very likely, like Cassandra’s creator, would always resist that which was allegedly good for them. Thus subjects for reform’s most basic social work, whether they be wayward children or unconvinced adults, would never be in short supply. 3 Arthur’s own periodicals, of which there were several, covered a wide range from fiction and poetry, to juvenilia, to the Workingman, designed “to furnish good reading for mechanics and their families” (xlii). All are detailed by Koch in his introduction to Ten Nights. See especially pp.xxxiii–xliii. 4 While Sedgwick characteristically declined to ally herself with social causes, Sigourney did not; the “Sweet Singer” was well-known as an ardent temperance supporter. By the early 1830s, Sigourney was placing articles in publications like the New York–based Temperance Recorder. One of her contributions, a front-page piece entitled “Thoughts on Temperance, Addressed to Females, by a Lady” (6 Nov. 1832), exhorts women to consider anti-alcohol training as part of their God-given maternal duties. The article is simply signed “L. H. S., Hartford, Conn.” But even if this signature left doubts, the ending of the article could not. The author reminds women of what they cannot affect: “not the brother, whose conduct you might not have been able to influence; not the husband, whom it was not your province to control.” What does lie firmly in women’s province is the fate of their children: “the child whom you brought into life, and love more than life; the child, for the first pencillings upon whose soul you were accountable, because it was entrusted to you as soft and unsullied wax, that you might stamp it with the seal of Heaven.” The lines echo her famous poem “Death of an Infant,” wherein “the spoiler set / The seal of silence. But there beamed a smile, / So fixed, so holy, from that cherub brow, / Death gazed, and left it there. He dared not steal / The signet ring of Heaven.” The entirety of Sigourney’s poem can be found in American Women Poets of the Nineteenth Century, ed. Cheryl Walker, Rutgers UP, 1995. 5 In their preface, the Sons of Temperance give voice to another familiar belief concerning literature: that its peculiar powers affect women most strongly, and thus women must be guided in their reading even 216 Notes to Page 178

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more than their male peers. In this way, Godey’s also acts as a brand for Arthur, and for the many other authors it published over several decades’ existence. Its reputation for spotless morality was equal to Arthur’s own, and hence the Godey’s name guaranteed acceptable reading for women. 6 This phrase is the subtitle for Belle Martin; Or, the Heiress (1843). However, several Arthur works have subtitles that are variations on the theme, such as Family Pride (“A Romance of Real Life”). 7 Historians Norman Clark and Thomas Pegram have noted the similarities between Ten Nights in a Bar-room and Uncle Tom’s Cabin, the fictional apexes, as it were, of their respective movements. In Pegram’s words, Arthur’s novel “emphasized that the drink trade was as unnaturally cruel and destructive to family life as slavery had been portrayed in” Stowe’s work (55). 8 Even with such profound changes in the image of the drunkard, opposition to temperance remained, promising difficult choices for decades of politicians. Both the earlier, “higher class” organizations and the later working class counterparts were composed largely of native-born white men and women. But the influx of immigrants from countries with different traditions of drinking, varying conceptions of the place of taverns in communal life, and suspicions of the motives of social reformers created tension within individual towns and cities, as well as within political parties. German and Irish immigrants in the 1840s and ’50s rightly sensed that many temperance activists objected to more than just the newcomers’ tastes in ale; refugees from southern and eastern Europe later in the century detected similarly contemptuous attitudes in their interactions with a wide variety of reformers. Before the Civil War, parties largely followed their constituents’ social identities and leanings, with Whigs tending to favor temperance and Democrats casting the movement as arguing for “an infringement of individual rights” (Pegram 37). After the Civil War, many groups explicitly endorsed utilizing legislation as a means of combating the role of alcohol in U.S. society. Such efforts had been intermittent in previous decades, with measures like the Maine Laws (a stringent curtailing of alcohol’s availability, though not a total ban of it) coming only occasionally and not always proving successful. But by the time the WCTU became powerful during the 1870s and ’80s, many temperance advocates had come to endorse the use of force rather than moral suasion. See Pegram, chapter 2. Notes to Pages 179–182 217

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9 As John Crowley notes in his introduction to the collection of temperance stories The Drunkard’s Progress, the majority of temperance narratives, whether nonfictional or fictional, feature male protagonists; stories focusing upon women are very rare. Alcoholism was understood by most Americans to be “a man’s dilemma,” perhaps only affecting “women of dubious class and virtue” (69). Crowley claims that “The Female Inebriate,” included in his volume, is alone in its subject matter, and its author almost certainly one Isaac Shepard. See The Drunkard’s Progress, pp.69–79. 10 See for example “A Practical Aim Wanting,” which responds point-bypoint to many pro-slavery, colonization, and gradual emancipation arguments. At different points Goodell compares these arguments to those of naysayers as well as of “the moderate drinking Society advocates,” implicitly linking the two causes not only ideologically, but also in terms of organizational strategy and history. See Radical Abolitionist, September 1855. Glenn Hendler also briefly discusses links between temperance and abolition in his chapter on the Washingtonians in Public Sentiments.

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Index

abolition, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 9, 10, 27, 33, 67, 73, 119, 124, 128–29, 130, 132, 138, 139, 141–44, 146–51, 156–57, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 170–73, 177, 182, 183 The Advocate of Moral Reform and Family Guardian, 10–11, 95, 116, 118–29, 132, 134, 137, 186 alcoholism, 23, 61, 97, 114, 119, 181–82, 218n9 Allen, Hannah Bowen, 31, 34, 58– 60, 61, 62, 68, 69, 72, 81 American Tract Society, 12–13, 14, 16, 72, 181 Anthony, David, 204n9 Anthony, Susan B., 8 Apess, William, 33, 193n7 Arac, Jonathan, 16, 53, 189n13 Armstrong, Nancy, 111–12, 113 Arthur, Timothy Shay, 3, 5, 22, 26–27, 31, 34, 59, 177, 182, 186; Debtor and Creditor, 69; The Debtor’s Daughter, 68–69; as editor for the Sons of Temperance, 6–7, 177–79, 183– 84, 185; Family Pride, 68, 180; Golden Grains from Life’s Harvest Field, 179–80; Ten Nights in a Bar-room, 67, 177, 178, 179, 180; Timothy Shay Arthur, His Life and Works, 184– 85; The Two Merchants, 67–68 Atlantic Monthly, 185, 205n13 Balleisen, Edward, 63, 193n8 banking, 35–39 bankruptcy, 35, 36, 46–47, 57, 63, 66, 69, 70, 71, 81 Banner, Lois, 8

Barrish, Phillip, 39 Baym, Nina, 15, 16, 19, 32, 43, 168–69, 211n5, 214n17 Beecher, Lyman, 9, 14, 149, 214n12 Bent, Nathaniel (Reverend), 40, 64, 68, 69 Bergman, Jill, 11, 188n7 Bernardi, Debra, 11, 188n7 Biddle, Nicholas, 38 “The Black Saxons,” 170–73 Blackwell’s Island, 88–89, 98–99, 114 Bly, Nellie, 99, 203n5 Bogin, Ruth, 210n2 Briggs, Charles Frederick, 47, 67, 71–73, 85 “The Broken Merchants,” 39 Brown, William Wells, 129, 139, 159 Buell, Lawrence, 16, 43, 187n2, 189n12 Buntline, Ned, 100–1 Carby, Hazel, 133 chancery, 29, 45, 46–47, 51 Charlotte Temple, 93, 100, 114, 120, 123 Charvat, William, 54 Chesnutt, Mary Boykin, 131 Child, Lydia Maria, 3, 4, 5, 22, 26, 27, 32, 54, 141–42, 144, 146–51, 160–73; “The Black Saxons,” 170–73; Fact and Fiction, 151, 170; and Harriet Jacobs, 132, 138–39; Letters from New-York, 160, 164; The Mother’s Book, 166–69; Romance of the Republic, 147, 151, 170; and Rufus

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Child, Lydia Maria (continued) Griswold, 161–66; “Slavery’s Pleasant Homes,” 130; and William Lloyd Garrison, 142, 162 The Colored American, 17–18, 39 Cooper, James Fenimore, 32, 50, 51–53 The Coquette, 93, 100, 114, 123 Crafts, Hannah, 129 Crane, Gregg D., 150, 155, 156 Crevecoeur, Hector St. John de, 59–60 Davidson, Cathy N., 15, 16, 19, 32 Debtor and Creditor, 69 The Debtor’s Daughter, 68–69 Delany, Martin, 129, 144 Delbanco, Andrew, 202n41 Dobson, Joanne, 112, 113 Dodge, L. Mara, 97 Douglas, Ann, 107–8, 207n20 Douglass, Frederick, 129–30, 131, 137, 144, 171, 172 Dred, 6, 21, 26, 144–46, 147, 152– 60, 213n10, 214n12 Eaves, T. C. Duncan, 109–10 Edgeworth, Maria, 18 Elbert, Monica, 211n5 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 5, 8, 14, 28–29, 30, 36, 54, 197n24 equity. See chancery Ernest, John, 139, 144, 172 Exman, Eugene, 192n2, 202n2 Fact and Fiction, 151, 170 fallen women, 1, 5, 10–11, 12–13, 24–26, 86–87, 88–138. See also prostitution The Family Favorite and Temperance Journal, 1–3, 21, 174, 178 Family Pride, 68, 180 236 Index

Farmer Housten and the Speculator, 58–61, 62, 64, 66, 69 Fern, Fanny, 29, 30, 211–12n6 Fetterley, Judith, 207n20 Finney, Charles Grandison, 9, 187n3 Fisher, Philip, 110–12, 113 Foster, Frances Smith, 208–9n30 Foster, George, 94, 104–9, 126, 206n16, 206n17 Foster, Hannah Webster. See The Coquette Fourth Experiment of Living, 61 Fox-Genovese, Elizabeth, 208– 9n30 Franklin, Benjamin, 82–83, 85 Fraser, Steve, 63–64, 193–94n11, 199n29 Fredrickson, George M., 165, 214n15 The Friend of Virtue, 10, 95, 115– 29, 130, 132, 186 Garvey, T. Gregory, 187n2 Gaskell, Elizabeth, 114, 120, 123, 207n22 Gilman, Charlotte Perkins, 13–15, 189n9 Glazener, Nancy, 185 Godey’s Lady’s Book, 74; Timothy Shay Arthur in, 67, 178–79, 196n20, 216–17n5 Golden Grains from Life’s Harvest Field, 179–80 Goodell, William, 131, 144, 183, 188n4, 208n29, 218n10 Gougeon, Len, 187n2 Griswold, Rufus, 50, 53, 161–66 Hall, David D., 7 Haltunnen, Karen, 62 Hamilton, Alexander, 37, 194n13, 199n29 Harper and Brothers, 29, 32, 33, 89, 192n2, 202–3n2

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Harper’s Bazaar, 186 Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, 178–79, 186 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 29, 30, 54, 115, 160, 197–98n25, 211n4 Hedrick, Joan, 29, 150, 156, 160, 190n15, 209n32, 211–12n6, 212n8, 212–13n9, 214n12 Heimert, Alan, 202n41 Hendler, Glenn, 113–14 Hill, Marilynnn Wood, 203n3 The History of Prostitution, 26, 88– 96, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102–4, 107, 112, 114–15, 124, 202–3n2, 204–5n12, 205n14, 207n22 Hobson, Barbara Meil, 119, 124, 203–4n9 Hooper, Lucy, 59, 64–66, 68, 69, 84 Howard, June, 107, 202–3n2, 206n18, 207n20 Hughes, J. R. T., 195n18 The Illuminator, 95, 115–29, 214– 15n17 Jackson, Andrew, 28, 34, 36, 38– 39, 70–71, 192n1, 194n14, 194–95n16, 195n17, 195– 96n20, 200n32 Jackson, Frederick, 5–6, 25, 31, 34, 41–57, 58, 66, 67, 68, 74, 76, 78, 81, 84, 86, 146, 175, 186, 199–200n31; The Effinghams, 50–53; Riches and Honor, 50–51; The Victim of Chancery, 41–50, 54–57, 183; A Week in Wall Street, 50–51 Jacobs, Harriet, 3, 95–96, 109, 129–40, 143–44, 146, 149, 151, 155, 159, 186, 208–9n30, 209n31, 209n32 Jebb, Henry Gladwyn, 101, 205n13 Judson, E. Z. C. See Buntline, Ned

Karcher, Carolyn L., 27, 142, 147, 150, 167, 170, 173, 186, 209n32, 214n14 Kelley, Mary, 212–13n9 The Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 19– 21, 26, 144, 156, 157, 159, 209n32 The Knickerbocker, 17–18, 32, 33, 50, 67, 74, 166, 167, 187n1, 190n14, 195–96n20, 200n35, 214n16 Kroeger, Brooke, 203n5 Ladies’ Companion and Literary Expositor, 39, 99, 195n19, 195– 96n20, 204n4 laissez faire philosophy, 78–82, 83 Lee, Hannah Farnham Sawyer, 25, 31–32, 34, 59, 60, 61–63, 66, 68, 69, 72, 73–87, 135; Elinor Fulton, 73–86; The Harcourts, 61–63; Three Experiments of Living, 73–86; The World before You, 32, 76 Lee, Jarena, 33, 193n7 Lehuu, Isabelle, 143–44, 189– 90n13, 211n3 Letters from New-York, 160, 164 Levin, David, 154–55, 159 The Liberator, 8, 211n4 Lippard, George, 101–2 Living on Other People’s Means, 60– 61 Louisa Picquet: The Octoroon, 130 Lynch, Michael P., 22, 191n18 Magdalene Facts, 115–29 Mann, Bruce, 46, 197n22 Martin, Edgar, 203n8 Mattison, Hiram, 130 McCarthy, Timothy Patrick, 142 McDowall, John, 12–13, 14, 95, 98, 115–29, 207n23, 207n24, 207–8n25; Magdalene Facts, Index 237

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McDowall, John (continued) 115–29; McDowall’s Journal, 115–29 McGrane, Reginald, 35–39, 70, 193n8, 193n9, 193n10, 194n15 McKanan, Dan, 11, 17, 188n6 Meer, Sarah, 150, 212n7 Melville, Herman, 30, 47, 192n3, 192n5, 197n23 The Merchant’s Widow, 32, 86–87, 98 Meyers, Jeffrey, 29 Mills, Bruce, 147, 167 Mintz, Steven, 9, 165, 187n3, 214n15 moral reform, 3, 4, 5, 7, 8, 10–11, 12–13, 23–25, 73, 88–138, 142, 147, 149, 151, 152, 166, 175, 177, 181, 182, 190–91n17, 204n10, 205n14, 207–8n25, 208–9n30, 210n1, 210n2, 214– 15n17 The Mother’s Book, 166–69 Mott, Frank, 195–96n20 Myers, Margaret, 194n13 Myerson, Joel, 187n2 New England Female Moral Reform Society (NEFMRS), 23–24, 117–20, 124, 125–26 New York Female Moral Reform Society (NYFMRS), 23–24, 117–20 New York State Woman’s Temperance Society, 8, 142 Nichols, Elisabeth B., 189n11 Noble, Marianne, 108 Nord, David Paul, 12–13, 16, 17, 73, 188–89n8, 189n11 North American Review, 50, 52, 74, 154, 162–63 Northrup, Flora L., 115, 120, 135 panic fiction, 5–6, 7, 25, 28–87, 92, 96, 190–91n17, 205n14 238 Index

Panic of 1837, 3, 5–6, 25, 28–87, 104, 190–91n17 Parker, Hershel, 192n3, 192n5, 197n23 Pattee, Fred Lewis, 108 Peabody, Andrew (Reverend), 40 Philadelphia Magdalen Society, 23–24, 126 Poe, Edgar Allen, 29, 30 Prescott, William, 139, 148, 150, 152–55, 157, 159–60, 161, 163, 164, 165, 213–14n11 “The Pressure and Its Causes,” 40–41 “The Pressure of the Times,” 39, 195n19 Prince, Nancy, 129, 130 prostitution, 5, 23, 25–26, 89, 90, 92–93, 94, 97–107, 115–29. See also fallen women and moral reform Radcliffe, Ann, 18 Raimon, Eve Allegra, 147, 150 Remini, Robert V., 70, 194n14, 194–95n16 Reynolds, David S., 11, 17, 188n6, 191–92n21 Richardson, Robert D., 187n2 Richardson, Samuel, 109–15, 123– 24, 134, 137 Rittenhouse, Mignon, 203n5 Robbins, Sarah, 79, 201n37, 212– 13n9 Romance of the Republic, 147, 151, 170 Rosen, Ruth, 98 Rosenberg, Nathan, 195n18 Rowson, Susanna. See Charlotte Temple Ryan, Barbara, 190n16 Ryan, Susan M., 11, 150, 188n5, 188n7 Sánchez, Rosaura, 109, 206–7n19

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Sánchez-Eppler, Karen, 146, 150, 155, 175 Sandage, Scott, 63, 191n19, 196n21 Sanger, William, 26, 88–96, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102–4, 105, 106, 107, 112, 114–15, 116, 117, 119, 122, 123, 124, 126, 132, 134, 202–3n2, 204–5n12, 205n14, 207n22 The Savings’ Bank, 31 Sawyer, Caroline, 32, 86–87, 98 Scott, Walter, 53–54, 154, 163, 166, 211n5, 214n12 Second Bank of the United States, 37–39. See also U.S. Bank Sedgwick, Catharine Maria, 5, 32 Sellers, Charles, 36, 193n8 sentimentality, 23, 24, 25–26, 31, 56, 69, 88–140, 146, 155–56, 167, 180, 181–82, 185, 201n37 Sharp, James Roger, 37, 193– 94n11, 194n12 Shultz, William J., 36–37 Sigourney, Lydia, 5, 32, 178, 216n4 Skeel, David, Jr., 47 slavery, 19, 23, 26, 27, 95–96, 124–26, 128–39, 141–51, 155– 60, 164, 166, 170–73, 177, 183, 187n2, 188n4, 190n15, 202n2, 209–19n33, 212n8, 214n13, 217n7, 218n10 “Slavery’s Pleasant Homes,” 130, 170 Smith, Adam, 78–80, 201n38 Smith, Henry Nash, 60, 198n26 Smith, Valerie, 109, 206–7n19 Smith-Rosenberg, Carroll, 120, 127 Song, Min Hyoung, 109, 206– 7n19 Sons of Temperance, 6–7, 26, 177–79, 183–84, 185, 216–17n5

specie circular, 28, 34, 36, 38, 40, 41, 71, 74, 194–95n16, 200n35 speculation, 28, 34, 36–39, 40–41, 54, 58–73, 74, 83, 84, 180, 190– 91n17, 198–99n28 Srebnick, Amy, 203–4n9 Stansell, Christine, 192 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady, 142 Stauffer, John, 142 Stewart, Maria W., 33, 129, 193n7 Stories from Real Life, 31–32 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 3, 5, 6, 14–15, 19–21, 22, 23, 24–25, 26, 29, 30, 94, 109, 110, 113, 138– 39, 144–60, 165, 175, 180, 186, 190n15, 209n32, 211n4, 211n5, 211–12n6, 212–13n9, 213n10, 213–14n11, 214n12, 214n13; Dred, 6, 21, 26, 144–46, 147, 152–60, 213n10, 214n12; The Key to Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 19–21, 26, 144, 156, 157, 159, 209n32; Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 6, 21, 23, 109, 110, 113, 147, 149, 150, 155–56, 159, 190n15, 211n4 Streeby, Shelley, 204–5n12 Tales and Takings, 174–76 Taves, Ann, 132, 134 temperance, 1–3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 25, 26–27, 33, 43, 67, 75, 76, 142, 149, 151, 160, 166, 174–86, 200–1n36, 216n4, 216–17n5, 217n8, 218n9, 218n10 Templin, Mary, 74, 79, 198n27, 199n30, 201n37 Ten Nights in a Bar-room, 67, 177, 178, 179, 180 ’37 and ’57, 35, 41, 58, 82 Thomas, Amy, 190n16 Thompson, George, 24–25, 101, 102, 104, 107, 112, 123, 136, 191–92n21, 204n11, 206n16 Thoreau, Henry David, 29 “The Times,” 40–41 Index 239

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Timothy Shay Arthur, His Life and Works, 184–85 Tompkins, Jane, 109, 207n20 The Two Merchants, 67–68 Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 6, 21, 23, 109, 110, 113, 147, 149, 150, 155–56, 159, 190n15, 211n4 U.S. Bank, 37–39. See also Second Bank of the United States Van Buren, Martin, 38, 46, 70, 194–95n16 Veney, Bethany, 130 Venus in Boston, 24–25, 101 The Victim of Chancery, 41–50, 54– 57, 183 Warner, Anna and Susan, 30, 47, 197n23 Washington, George, 83–84, 201– 2n40 Washingtonians, 179, 181–82, 200–1n36, 218n10 Watson, James V., 1–3, 4, 7, 9, 14, 21, 26, 43, 149, 176–77, 178, 184, 215n1, 215–16n2; The

240 Index

Family Favorite and Temperance Journal, 1–3, 21, 174, 178; Tales and Takings, 174–76 Weber, Max, 82–83, 201n39 A Week in Wall Street, 50–51 Weld, Horatio, 61 Weld, Theodore, 27, 212n8 Wexler, Laura, 108 Weyler, Karen, 62, 189–90n13 Whitmarsh, Joseph, 95, 117, 118, 119, 125, 126 Williams, Catharine, 100, 204n10 Williams, Raymond, 10 Willis, Sarah. See Fern, Fanny Winthrop, John, 85, 202n41 Wordsworth, William, 94 The World before You, 32, 76 Worth a Million, 31 Yellin, Jean Fagan, 132, 138, 146, 209n31, 209n32, 210n2 Zagarell, Sandra, 215–16n2 Zboray, Ronald, 16, 189n12 Zimmerman, David, 190–91n17, 192–93n6