Kilgore - Mania for Freedom

Mania for Freedom

Mania for Freedom

American Literatures of Enthusiasm from the Revolution to the Civil War

John Mac Kilgore

The University of North Carolina Press CHAPEL HILL

This book was published with the assistance of the College of Arts and Sciences at Florida State University.

2016 The University of North Carolina Press

All rights reserved

Manufactured in the United States of America

Set in Espinosa Nova by Westchester Publishing Services

The University of North Carolina Press has been a member of the Green Press Initiative since 2003.

Cover illustration: Raising the Liberty Pole, 1776 (ca. 1875); painted by F. A. Chapman; engraved by John C. McRae; courtesy of the Library of Congress, LC-DIG-pga-02159.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Kilgore, John Mac, author.

Title: Mania for freedom : American literatures of enthusiasm from the Revolution to the Civil War / John Mac Kilgore.

Description: Chapel Hill : University of North Carolina Press, [2016] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2016008741 | ISBN 9781469629711 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469629728 (pbk : alk. paper) | ISBN 9781469629735 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH : Enthusiasm in literature. | Protest literature, AmericanHistory and criticism. | American literatureRevolutionary period, 17751783History and criticism. | American literature17831850History and criticism. | American literature19th centuryHistory and criticism.

Classification: LCC PS 195. E 57 K 55 2016 | DDC 810.9/003dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016008741

Chapter 2 was previously published as The Rise of Dissent: Literatures of Enthusiasm and the American Revolution, Early American Literature 48 (2013), 36798. Chapter 5 was previously published as The Free State of Whitman, ESQ : A Journal of the American Renaissance 58 ( 2015 by the Board of Regents of Washington State University), 52964. Both are reprinted in revised form with permission.

There is no coming at a thorow-pacd enthusiast. He is proof against every method of dealing with him.

CHARLES CHAUNCY

Awakenings and Revivals are not peculiar to Religion. Philosophy and Policy at times are capable of taking the Infection.

JOHN ADAMS

The best we get from history is that it rouses our enthusiasm.

GOETHE

Contents

Enthusiasm, Event, Literature

What Is Enthusiasm?

Literatures of Enthusiasm and the American Revolution

The War of 1812 and Native American Enthusiasms

Conjure, Slave Insurrection, and the Novel of Enthusiasm

John Brown, the Civil War, and the Dis-memberment of Enthusiasm in the 1860 Leaves of Grass

The Tramp and Strike Question: Terminal Enthusiasms

Figures

Acknowledgments

First and foremost, I want to thank the Department of English at UC-Davis and the Council on Research and Creativity at Florida State University for the fellowship and grant funding that supported this project.

I am infinitely grateful to David Simpson, Elizabeth Freeman, and Hsuan Hsu for their brilliant feedback and bracing criticism, to say nothing of their spirited encouragement, in the early drafting and development of this manuscript. You are each the Apollo to this studys Dionysus. My thanks to Michael Ziser, Nathan Brown, and Kari Lokke for the energizing conversations which convinced me that enthusiasm was a worthwhile topic to pursue. As this study moved toward publication, many other kind friends and colleagues offered helpful advice and assistance on this or that issue, including Barry Faulk, Robin Goodman, Christian Weber, and Anick Boyd. One individual shared and affirmed my commitment to this books ideas to such a degree that I can no longer separate her from them: Andrea Actis.

I wish to profusely thank Mark Simpson-Vos at the University of North Carolina Press for first taking interest in this project, my incredible editor at the Press, Lucas Church, for smoothly guiding my manuscript to publication, and my anonymous readers through the Press for their patient, careful reading of this book and invaluable suggestions for revision.

Shorter, less mature versions of chapter 2 and chapter 5 first appeared in Early American Literature 48.2 (2013) and ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 58.4 (2012), respectively, and are reprinted here with permission. One paragraph in chapter 1 (where I introduce dictionary definitions of enthusiasm) was previously published in PMLA 130.5 (2015). I owe a great debt to the editors (and affiliated readers) of those journals for helping me to sharpen my ideas on enthusiasm. On that point, Sandra Gustafson deserves special thanks.

Finally, much love to my parents, Johnny and Pat; my sister, Lee Beth; and my comrade, John Harkey: your moral support has kept me afloat all these years.

Mania for Freedom

Introduction

Enthusiasm, Event, Literature

Nothing but insubordination, eleutheromania, confused unlimited opposition in their heads.

THOMAS CARLYLE, 1837

I

Mania for Freedom is a study of political enthusiasm in American literature and culture from the Revolution to the Civil War. That enthusiasm now generically denotes strong excitement, passionate engagement, or all-absorbing interest obscures its long historical usage, from the seventeenth to the mid-nineteenth century, as a term linked variously to the revolutionary or utopian passions, divine or artistic inspiration, and a wildly ecstatic or delusional state of mind. I tell a story, though, about the formation and development of the early U.S. national period that highlights cultures of enthusiasm and their close association with a politics of emancipation. At this historical moment, the concept of enthusiasm was often deployed to describepositively or negativelya strong democratic fervor, what Thomas Carlyle called eleutheromania (a mad zeal or mania for freedom); and it was most often attached to personscommoners, slaves, Native Americans, women, abolitionistswho activated dissent against institutional tyranny and forged transnational, counternational, or antinationalistic political affiliations in the process. In privileging such affiliations, I depict the early U.S. nation-state as an embattled terrain that defined itself through and against the experimental, often illegal, actions for political justice enacted by enthusiasts. Accordingly, I argue that, opposite a political and literary culture of sentimental nationalism, a distinct but overlooked tradition and category of American literature (literatures of enthusiasm) flourished from the American Revolution through the Civil War era. As a discursive form of enthusiastic publicity, literatures of enthusiasm are those texts that transform writing into a species or inciter of democratic revival and revolt.

Despite the fact that the politics of enthusiasm played a key role in the evolution of the United States, as an academic subject it has by and large remained a curiosity and minor topic in studies of Protestant religious culture and British literary history up through the eighteenth century. Only a small body of critical literature exists on the topic,

I wish to unravel the mystery behind the intellectual and historical elision of U.S. political enthusiasm. Toward that end, the legacy of both the English Civil War and the French Revolution as exemplary specimens of political enthusiasm ought to clue us in to what sort of cultural associations were tethered to the term, what kind of debates define its terrain, and why many critics would find it so problematic. I will have occasion to demonstrate, however, the importance of both the English and French Revolutions (as well as many other political events) to liberation movements in the United States, movements which have, like the French Revolution, been at once acknowledged and disavowed, registered and elided, in a perpetual syncopation between originary inscription and subsequent transcription, translation, or re-edition. a sentiment that equally applies to the United States own troubled relationship to its revolutionary histories.