Imagining Deliberative Democracy in the Early American Republic 9780226311302

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I M AG INING DE L I BE R AT I V E DEM O C R A C Y I N THE E ARLY A ME RICAN R E P UBL IC

IMAGINING DELIBER ATIVE DEMOCR ACY IN THE EARLY AMERICAN REPUBLIC S A N D R A M . G U S TA F S O N

the uni v e r s i t y o f c h i c a g o pr e s s

S chica go a n d lon don

san d r a m . g usta f s o n is associate professor of English and American studies at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of Eloquence Is Power and the coeditor of Cultural Narratives. She is also the editor of the journal Early American Literature. The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2011 by The University of Chicago All rights reserved. Published 2011 Printed in the United States of America 20 19 18 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 12345

isbn-13: 978-0-226-31129-6 (cloth) isbn-10: 0-226-31129-5 (cloth) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Gustafson, Sandra M. Imagining deliberative democracy in the early American republic / Sandra M. Gustafson. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index.

isbn-13: 978-0-226-31129-6 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn-10: 0-226-31129-5 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Deliberative democracy—United States. 2. United States—Politics and government—1815 –1861. 1815 –1861. I. Title. e338.g87 2011 973.5′3 — dc22

3. United States—History—

2010039657 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ansi z39.48-1992.

for Eli, Tobias, a nd Eric, a nd fo r t h e c o m m uni t y at t h e uni v e rsi t y o f c h i c a g o l a b o r at o ry s c ho o l s , w h i c h b ri ng s j o h n d e we y ’s i de a l s t o l i fe e v e ry d ay

CONTENTS

a c k n o w l e d g m e n t s ix i n tro d u c t i o n 1

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D E L I B E R AT I O N : A V E RY B R I E F H I S T O RY

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i. The Idea of Deliberation 13 ii. Deliberation and Democracy in the Early American Republic 21 iii. Whitman, Dewey, and the Place of the Arts 29 iv. Theories of Republicanism and Deliberative Democracy 34

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M O D E R N R E P U B L I C A N I S M I N T H E AT L A N T I C W O R L D

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i. The Eloquence of Modern Republicanism 41 ii. The View from Bunker Hill 52 iii. Writing the Modern Republic 60

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MODELS OF ANCIENT ELOQUENCE

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i. Res Publica Rediviva 71 ii. Eloquent Shakespeare 79 iii. Arguing with the Bible 86

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T H E P O L I T I C S A N D A E S T H E T I C S O F D E L I B E R AT I O N

i. The Rise of Literary Oratory 97 ii. Daniel Webster’s Genuine Word 100 iii. The Frontier Humor of David Crockett 112

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P RO P H E S Y I N G T H E M U LT I R A C I A L R E P U B L I C

i. Democracy and the “Three Races” 125 ii. Beyond the White Christian Republic 133 iii. Reasoning with David Walker 137 iv. Listening to the Wisdom of Babes 142 v. Toward Multiracial Deliberations 146

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D E L I B E R AT I V E F I C T I O N S

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i. Failures of Deliberation 152 ii. Cooper’s Trials 167

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H OW T O R E A D D E L I B E R AT I V E LY

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i. Democratic Hermeneutics 180 ii. The Great American Deliberative Novel 181 iii. Protest at Mashpee 191 iv. Property Matters 198 C O N C L U S I O N : D E L I B E R AT I V E D E M O C R A C Y PAST AND FUTURE

n o tes 221 i n d ex 261

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The seeds of this project were planted long ago. They fell in the mental soil laid down during my childhood in western New York, where the roads radiated out to Tully and Rome, Bolivar and Lafayette, Mohawk, Oneida, and Cooperstown. On family trips we stopped at the Red Jacket Inn in the Allegany Reservation (Uhì•ya) and visited relatives in Cicero. Over the years the seeds planted in that soil have been watered by many friends and colleagues. Cicero scholar Joy Connolly played a particularly formative role when she invited me to participate in seminars where I learned the rudiments of an unfamiliar field. Her work has shaped my understanding of Cicero’s place in modern republican thought and its relationship to deliberative democracy theory. Lawrence Buell, Betsy Erkkilä, Christopher Looby, David S. Shields, Eric Slauter, and Leonard Tennenhouse have given me support and encouragement at crucial moments. Ralph Bauer first suggested that I consider James Fenimore Cooper in a hemispheric context. John L. Brooke generously shared his work with me, and theater historian Odai Johnson reminded me of the Senate scene in Cato with which I begin. The enthusiasm of the participants in a seminar at the McNeil Center for Early American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania helped propel me in the later stages. Present and former colleagues at the University of Notre Dame contributed to the shape of this book. Graham Hammill provoked my early investigations into the transatlantic dimensions of republican thought. The members of the Intellectual History Seminar offered some valuable feedback at a formative moment. Mark Noll untangled the publication history of Lyman Beecher’s and Charles Finney’s sermons as no one else could have, while Brian Krostenko provided expert translations of several passages from Cicero. Gail Bederman, Annie Coleman, Jon Coleman, and Erika Doss were thoughtful critics and good friends. Glenn Hendler introduced me to Iris Marion Young’s work, and David W. Thomas brought Amanda Anderson to campus. John Sitter read an early abstract and encouraged me along the way. The students in my graduate seminars helped

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me refine my understanding of democratic theory and its relationship to nineteenth-century American literature. Alan Thomas has been an invaluable guide in my quest to write a book that would appeal to political theorists and historians, as well as to literary scholars. Elisa Tamarkin, Philip Gould, and the anonymous historian who read the manuscript were generous with their time and their insights. Many years ago I read several of John Dewey’s works for my graduate exams and was attracted to his pragmatic idealism. Since 2002 I have had the pleasure of getting to know how Dewey’s vision is implemented at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, where students, teachers, administrators, and parents contribute to an education in and for democracy. There is nothing like the “morning meeting” of an internationally diverse group of three-year-olds to give a person hope. I have especially admired the inspirational leadership of Beverly Biggs and the creative pedagogy of Nefatiti Rochester. My work has benefited from interactions with other Lab parents, including Julie Henly, who gave me a sociologist’s perspective on my treatment of Dewey, and Jim Sowerby, who talked with me about legal scholarship. Eli Ginsburg and Tobias Ginsburg have filled the years of writing this book with joy. For more than twenty-five years, Eric Ginsburg has given me his love and support. I could not have done this without him.

} I am grateful to the University of Delaware Press for letting me reprint “Eloquent Shakespeare,” which is appearing in Shakespearean Educations: Power, Citizenship, Performance, ed. Coppélia Kahn, Heather Nathans, and Mimi Godfrey (Newark: University of Delaware Press, forthcoming).

I NTRO DUCTIO N

Joseph Addison’s Cato, A Tragedy (1713) ranks with Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) among the most politically significant works of literature ever published. Legend holds that when Abraham Lincoln met Stowe in 1862 he said to her, “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war!” Had they met, George Washington might have similarly credited Addison with inspiring the American Revolution. Washington famously admired Cato, frequently citing the play and even having it performed at Valley Forge despite the Continental Congress’s prohibitions against dramatic presentations. Many of his contemporaries shared his enthusiasm. In British America there were innumerable productions and at least eight editions of Cato published by 1800. This play about the death of the Roman Republic resonated so powerfully because it dramatized republican opposition to oppression and the processes of making the difficult personal and collective decisions that such opposition entails.1 Cato portrays the fortunes of its Stoic hero as he leads the Roman Senate in resistance to Julius Caesar. The second act is set in Utica, where the Senate has fled before Caesar’s advancing forces, and it stages the deliberations over whether to end the war and capitulate to Caesar or to continue to resist despite their grievous losses. Cato opens the discussion by calling on the Senate to determine Rome’s fate, urging them, “Fathers, pronounce your thoughts, are they still fixt / To hold it out, and fight it to the last? / Or are your hearts subdued at length, and wrought / By time and ill success to a submission?” (30 –31). Sempronius responds first, asking his fellow senators how they can spend their time “deliberating in cold debates” (31) while their fellows lie dead on the battlefield. Cato rebukes Sempronius’s impatience and reminds the senators that the lives of those who serve in Rome’s army are at stake. Lucius offers his judgment that the gods are against

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them and they should submit to Caesar without further loss of life. Cato then stakes out a moderate stance: “Let us appear nor rash nor diffident: / Immoderate valour swells into a fault, / And fear, admitted into public councils, / Betrays like treason” (33). In the ensuing scenes Decius arrives on a diplomatic mission from Caesar to ask for Cato’s support, which Cato firmly refuses to give. The Senate then resolves to continue its resistance, with Sempronius expressing his lust for battle and Lucius offering more cautious support. In an earlier scene Sempronius whispered his suspicions about Lucius to Cato, and here he describes him as a “lukewarm patriot” (38). Cato reproaches Sempronius for sowing divisions that weaken their side and distances his cooler stance from Sempronius’s heated one. Addison later reveals Sempronius to be a traitor, underscoring the dangers of resistance rooted in passion and without sufficient attention to its human costs. This scene portraying formal deliberations sets out the importance of moderate, thoughtful consideration of public issues, especially ones that evoke strong feelings and put lives at stake. Jonathan Sewall suggested the weight that this scene held in Revolutionary America when he began A New Epilogue to Cato, Spoken at a Late Performance of That Tragedy (1778) by stressing the role of the Senate-like Continental Congress in authorizing Washington’s command and characterizing Washington as a modern Cato, “Great in Council—glorious in the Field!”2 When James Madison helped draft a constitution that included a Senate designed as the principal deliberative body of the new federal government, he sought to replicate the value of informed judgment that is portrayed in the Senate scene from Cato. Madison shared the distrust of impetuous action that Addison’s Cato expressed and that John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon stated directly in Cato’s Letters (1720 –23). In their letter on eloquence Trenchard and Gordon described reason as “the gradual and deliberate weighing of Things, and the cool comparing of one inward Impulse with another” and warned that a powerful speaker can spark a “Fire” that is hard to put out.3 Like Trenchard and Gordon, Madison feared the orator’s power to interfere with reason and disrupt deliberative processes, and in The Federalist Papers (1787– 88) he warned repeatedly against demagogues. As the principal author of the Constitution, Madison sought to direct the transition from revolutionary activism to state building. The war had mobilized a substantial portion of the populace and given them a stake in the new state and national governments. Frequent elections and high turnover rates in the states contributed to a perception that the laws were too mutable, too subject to the whims of a potentially

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gullible electorate, to foster long-term stability and growth. In 1786 – 87 the western Massachusetts populist movement known as Shays’s Rebellion helped catalyze the effort to create a national system more powerful than the one authorized by the Articles of Confederation. The Senate embodied the stabilizing— or in another view, antidemocratic— features of the new federal government. In Federalist 62 Madison noted that the Senate was composed of older and more established citizens, and was elected indirectly by the state legislatures, in order to avoid “sudden and violent passions” and the “intemperate and pernicious resolutions” fostered by “factious leaders.” Drawing an analogy between an impetuous, unstable individual and a government of similar nature, Madison argued that the Senate would provide the necessary wisdom and stability—the deliberation—to the federal government.4 Madison’s concern with demagoguery and his emphasis on deliberation have sometimes been interpreted as a distrust of democracy. But as Joseph M. Bessette argued in The Mild Voice of Reason: Deliberative Democracy and American National Government (1994), there is nothing inherently undemocratic about deliberation. Since 1980 a thriving field of deliberative democracy theory has grown up around the idea that deliberation can be democratic. Bessette traced its central ideas to Madison and the Constitution, providing a historical anchor point in the United States for today’s deliberative democrats.5 In 2006 Barack Obama, then the junior U.S. senator from Illinois, referred to this history in The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream, in which he laid out the principles for his successful presidential campaign. In the chapter “Our Constitution,” Obama wrote that the Constitution was designed “to force us into a conversation, a ‘deliberative democracy’ in which all citizens are required to engage in a process of testing their ideas against an external reality, persuading others of their point of view, and building shifting alliances of consent.” Obama emphasized both his knowledge of constitutional law and his experience as an African American, and he identified himself with Abraham Lincoln, “who like no man before or since understood both the deliberative function of our democracy and the limits of such deliberation”: “Deliberation alone could not provide the slave his freedom or cleanse America of its original sin. In the end, it was the sword that would sever his chains.” Much like Cato at Utica, Obama concluded that “we should pursue our own absolute truths only if we acknowledge that there may be a terrible price to pay.”6 Between Madison’s defense of the Senate as a deliberative body and twenty-first-century aspirations to deliberative democracy there is a largely

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untold history. One part of this history relates to the recuperation of “democracy” as a political concept in the age of revolution, after a long eclipse following the defeat of Periclean Athens and Plato’s harsh assessment of democratic government in The Republic.7 The story of this recuperation that Sean Wilentz tells in The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (2005) begins with the Democratic-Republican party founded by Madison and Thomas Jefferson and traces its lineage to the party of Andrew Jackson. Jackson looms large in histories of American democracy because he helped catalyze the shift to a political culture that was more egalitarian and participatory, two central democratic values. Jackson rose to power in part because he embodied the aspirations of an expanded electorate built on the new norm of white manhood suffrage. Together with Martin Van Buren he built a party apparatus that created avenues for mass participation and helped establish the two-party system that continues to dominate electoral politics in the United States. At the same time that he stood for the democratic values of equality and participation, Jackson greatly expanded executive power, leading his critics to compare him to Caesar and Napoleon.8 Deliberation is a third democratic value, and the conflicts among these three ideals of democracy pose what James S. Fishkin has called “the trilemma of democratic reform.”9 In Jackson’s day the conflicts between the democratic values of equality and participation on one hand and deliberation on the other took the form of partisan politics, with the leaders of the National Republican and Whig parties—John Quincy Adams, Henry Clay, Edward Everett, and Daniel Webster— defending deliberative values. Michael F. Holt has shown that the Whigs came together to combat Jackson’s centralization of power in the hands of the chief executive and to defend the importance of the legislative and judicial branches, which both feature processes of deliberation.10 Though sometimes dismissed as elitist or aristocratic because of their opposition to Jackson and his party, the Whigs are better understood as contributing to the formulation of deliberative ideals of democracy, which were manifested as well in the proliferating voluntary associations and protest movements of the day. It is my contention that the potential and limits of democratic deliberation were first tested in the early American republic and that current theories of deliberative democracy represent a flourishing of ideas that have roots in the civic rhetoric of that era. Theorists of deliberative democracy commonly trace an intellectual history of deliberation in the works of Aristotle, Madison, and John Stu-

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art Mill. The German philosopher Jürgen Habermas is often cited as the major contemporary formulator of deliberative democracy theory, even as the Kantian ideal of rational-critical debate that is central to his conception of communicative ethics has been widely criticized for privileging a narrow and potentially exclusionary style of public discussion. In the United States deliberative democrats such as Fishkin and Iris Marion Young have developed a broader conception of political discussion that offers important alternatives to the Habermasian model. Young in particular has embraced rhetoric as an essential element in civic life, and in doing so she points toward a recuperation of the Ciceronian tradition that, I will argue, has long animated deliberative ideals in the United States. Fishkin’s experiments with deliberative polling manifest a pragmatist approach that aligns him with John Dewey’s efforts to rethink the town hall meeting in The Public and Its Problems (1927). By expanding the lineage of deliberative democracy to include Cicero and Dewey I offer an alternative history that addresses some important limitations of the Habermasian model. I focus as well on the challenge that biblical prophecy poses to deliberation and examine its potential to make deliberative processes more fully inclusive. In short, the early republic offers an opportunity for the kind of historical thinking about democracy called for by French theorist Pierre Rosanvallon, who combines a Dewey-like understanding of democracy as a set of contingent and emergent practices with a distinctive view of the past as “the active laboratory that created our present and not simply its background.” I look to the history of the early republic to stimulate new understandings of and experiments in democratic deliberation.11

} The years from 1815 through the late 1830s were an age of robust political inventiveness and exploration in the United States and throughout the Atlantic world. In his 1825 Bunker Hill Monument address Daniel Webster rightly observed that politics and government was the master topic of the age, taken up in vigorous transatlantic conversation. Among the most salient developments was the emergence of modern republicanism as an ideology distinct from its classical precursors. The modern republic shared with its classical ancestors a foundational idea of popular sovereignty but differed in size (the extended republic replaced the city-state), economy (commerce and later industry became more important than agriculture), and makeup (movements of people and contests for rights gradually produced a greatly diversified body of citizens).12 The expansion of the suffrage in the United States, the anticolonial revolutions in Haiti

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and Spanish America, the Greek independence movement, and revolution and counterrevolution in Europe all contributed distinctive elements to the modern republic. Representation provided the formal mechanism for expanding classical republican practices of face-to-face deliberation to large territories. Instead of meeting together to discuss and debate, citizens sent their elected officials to deliberate for them. The relationship between a representative government and the deliberations of the broader public from which it drew authority, however, was not well defined. In Democracy in America (1835, 1840) Tocqueville noted that town meetings embodied the local tradition of self-governance that laid the groundwork for the federal republic, while voluntary associations extended that tradition in new directions. Mimicking the forms of state with their constitutions, debates, and parliamentary procedures, voluntary associations were organized to solve social problems through economic development (agricultural societies and working men’s groups), institution building (Bible societies and churches), moral reform and self-culture (temperance, the lyceum movement), and social reform (colonization societies and mission societies). Around 1830, activist groups emerged to denounce Indian removal and call for immediate abolition. These groups brought the two animating principles of republican thought—popular sovereignty and resistance to oppression—into a sharp focus on the processes of public debate, highlighting the effects of white prejudice and protesting the exclusionary nature of official deliberations. Lacking representation in state and federal governments, and subject to an increasingly discriminatory rule of law, communities ranging from the Cherokees of Georgia to the free blacks of Boston employed a republican vocabulary of resistance to oppression to denounce their treatment. Nancy Fraser and Michael Warner have described the emergence of oppositional politics as a process involving “counterpublics” that challenged the mainstream “public” of the day. Rather than opposing mainstream values, however, these movements were products of the republican ideals that constituted that public. They made visible the mounting crisis of deliberation produced by the sharp disparity between those ideals and the political realities of the early American republic, a disparity that was greatly heightened by the expansion of suffrage to white male citizens. The deliberative crisis of the early American republic resulted from the failure of state institutions to address the inadequacies of the representative system by providing more robustly inclusive arenas for deliberation and self-governance.13 Daniel Webster built his public image on a commitment to deliberative ideals, and in an important sense this book began with him. In his own day

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Webster was an iconic figure who stood for republican self-governance within the United States and throughout the Atlantic world. Together with his fellow Bostonian Edward Everett and their associates at the Boston-based North American Review, Webster developed a conception of the modern republic that gave unusual prominence to deliberative bodies, making them a hallmark of American political culture. The considerable overlap between Webster’s ideas and Tocqueville’s analysis of American democracy was no accident, for Tocqueville was deeply influenced by conversations with Review associates including Alexander Hill Everett, Josiah Quincy, and Jared Sparks. Biographer Hugh Brogan observes that Sparks, who edited the Review in the late 1820s and later served as the president of Harvard, was so influential on Tocqueville’s understanding of the town hall meeting that he was almost a coauthor.14 The emphasis on deliberation that Webster shared with the Review circle distinguished his modern republic from the model prescribed for Spanish America by Simón Bolívar or the path laid out for France by General Lafayette. Webster’s national republic differed as well from the republicanism of Webster’s southern colleagues, particularly states’ rights advocates such as John Calhoun and Robert Hayne. In his forensic oratory Webster sought to realize his republican ideal by fostering careful public deliberations that avoided inflammatory, divisive, or misleading speech. He valued compromise as a means to forge a common good and sustain the Union. On the question of slavery Webster’s gradualism and willingness to compromise put him increasingly at odds with the abolitionist movement, which he blamed for polarizing public debate in a manner that prevented a peaceable resolution. Three decades of efforts devoted to preserving the Union while working toward a negotiated end to the slave system culminated in his Seventh of March speech supporting the Compromise Measures of 1850. In his peroration to that address Webster described the American republic as “founded upon principles of equality” and claimed that it had “trodden down no man’s liberty”—a remarkable statement that demonstrates his narrow conception of these principles. This narrowness of view lay behind his support for the compromise, which included the poisonous Fugitive Slave Law. Webster held this law to be a restatement of a constitutional provision and agreed to enforce it as secretary of state. Controversial in his time, these decisions continue to cloud his image today. His willingness to compromise on slavery raises important questions about the limits of deliberation that continue to challenge theorists of deliberative democracy.15 Other figures in my study made different decisions. Lydia Maria Child

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shared Webster’s republican ideals, and for a time she was affiliated with him through the journalistic work of her husband David Child. After 1830 she grew skeptical about a gradual solution to slavery and sided with those calling for immediate abolition. Her writings in this period trace her movement from Webster-like conciliation and consensus building in Hobomok (1824) to a Neoplatonic conception of the republic and a skeptical view of democratic deliberation in Philothea (1836). During the intervening years she committed herself to antislavery activism, making her case for immediate abolition in An Appeal in Favor of Americans Called Africans (1833). In taking this stance she followed a path laid out by David Walker and Maria Stewart, members of Boston’s African American community who together with William Lloyd Garrison were early supporters of the arguments that slavery is an absolute moral wrong and that colonization provided an unacceptable resolution to an unjust system. Walker’s Appeal and Stewart’s “Religion and the Pure Principles of Morality, the Sure Foundation on Which We Must Build” (1831) are jeremiads that call the white community to purge itself of prejudice and eliminate slavery; simultaneously they call upon the black community to resist oppression. Child, Walker, and Stewart all supported a multiracial republic and stressed the need for public forums where African Americans could deliberate together with whites as equals. In “An Indian’s Looking-Glass for the White Man” (1833), Indian Nullification of the Unconstitutional Laws of Massachusetts Relative to the Marshpee Tribe, or The Pretended Riot Explained (1835), and Eulogy on King Philip, as Pronounced at the Odeon, in Federal Street, Boston (1836), William Apess made an overlapping set of arguments calling on whites to eliminate prejudice against Native Americans and respect their deliberative traditions. His work for native rights brought him into the same Boston activist circles as Child, Walker, and Stewart, where the ideal of the multiracial republic had some of its most articulate proponents. Boston produced an especially vigorous discussion about the potential for and limits of deliberation, but the concerns of deliberative democracy resonated well beyond the city lines. In the early 1830s the Tennessee congressman David Crockett forged an alliance with Webster and the Whigs after breaking his ties to the Jacksonian Democrats. Crockett was frustrated by Jackson and other party leaders who favored the wealthy plantation owners of east Tennessee over his poor white and Indian constituents in the western part of the state. In A Narrative of the Life of David Crockett of the State of Tennessee (1834) Crockett portrayed party discipline as a violation of the republican ideal of independent judgment. He wrote the Narrative as an assertion of representational authority, using dialect, narrative,

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and humor to cast himself as a frontier republican. The novels of James Fenimore Cooper provide additional images of frontier republics and contrast American republicanism to its European counterparts. For much of his life Cooper was a sharp critic of New England and the Puritan tradition that Webster espoused and a supporter of Andrew Jackson. Despite these differences, Cooper shared Webster’s belief in well-conducted deliberation as the cornerstone of the modern republic, as he sets forth in his major political works, Notions of the Americans: Picked Up by a Travelling Bachelor (1828) and The American Democrat (1838). His novels serve as laboratories of deliberation, testing and critiquing different legislative and judicial institutions, procedures, and rhetorical styles, considering the possibilities for integrating different traditions of deliberation, and examining how power operates within deliberative bodies. Civic values and political practices are shaped by the imagination. Collectively the works of these seven authors reveal the contours of the deliberative imagination as it developed in the early American republic. The novels of Cooper and Child are filled with scenes of deliberation, ranging from domestic settings to trials to public meetings; the political speeches and writings of Webster and Crockett articulate deliberative ideals; and the jeremiads of Apess, Stewart, and Walker diagnose deliberative crisis and offer a treatment. Engaged by the aesthetic and political possibilities of deliberation, they explored its meaning in novels and autobiographies, histories and political treatises, orations and manifestos. They examined the intersections of style and political substance, ranging from Webster’s contrasting registers of sentimental commemoration and reasoned discussion, to Crockett’s attention to the political dimensions of humor, to Walker’s effort to transform rage into effective antiracist rhetoric. Taking these authors together, I have created a literary version of a deliberative poll by drawing a range of perspectives on the nature of deliberation itself from their writings. By 1839 three of my central figures were dead and one had largely withdrawn from public life. This fact, coupled with the dramatic shift in national climate occasioned by the Panic of 1837 as Jackson’s second term was ending, and considering as well the appearance of the two volumes of Democracy in America in 1835 and 1840, suggested the late 1830s as a natural terminus for the central portion of my study.16 I begin with a chapter that defines deliberation, offers a genealogy of deliberative democracy, explores the overlap between deliberative democracy theory and neorepublicanism, and proposes a hermeneutic approach to literature focused on deliberation. Chapter 2 is devoted to the Atlantic world context of the modern republic and its deliberative values,

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which I examine in three speeches from around 1820 by leading republican thinkers—Simón Bolívar, Gilbert du Motier de Lafayette, and Daniel Webster—whose different articulations of modern republicanism reveal both shared themes and points of conflict. These speeches set out the competing imperatives behind the Spanish American, French, and American republican experiments, which I consider further in an analysis of essays from the North American Review. Chapter 3 examines some of the major sources of deliberative thought in the early American republic, including the works of Cicero, Shakespeare, and the Bible. In chapter 4 I examine the politics and aesthetics of deliberation in Webster’s speeches and Crockett’s Narrative, while chapter 5 considers the jeremiad as a tool of deliberative reform in the works of Walker, Stewart, and Apess. Chapter 6 focuses on scenes of deliberation in the novels of Child and Cooper. And in chapter 7 I offer strategies for deliberative reading, that is, a set of hermeneutic tools intended to stimulate critical awareness of deliberative processes and styles. These tools include a focus on scenes of deliberation and strategies of surrogation as well as the creation of imagined deliberations in which varied perspectives are brought into relation with one another. In The Way We Argue Now (2006) Amanda Anderson advocates an ideal of self-cultivation and collective deliberation based on carefully chosen habits of thought and action, which together foster what she characterizes as an “emergent democratic culture.” Anderson finds that this deliberative ideal is often at odds with the privileged idiom of literary theory and criticism, which she identifies as an ethos based in identity, mood, and “restless and negative critique.”17 In American literary history this ethos has manifested itself in studies of the early republic by Dana D. Nelson, Russ Castronovo, and Christopher Castiglia that portray a closing down of revolutionary energies and a diminished potential for democracy. I share with these scholars a desire to recuperate an enabling history of democracy, yet I find that they fail to provide convincing accounts of the rise of voluntary associations and protest movements, choosing instead to emphasize themes of alienation and dispossession or to focus on fiction as a last resort of an embattled democratic imagination. For instance, Castiglia traces the “loss of public and deliberative association” in the United States to the early republic, arguing that in these decades civic ideals were misdirected toward the management of unruly bodies and minds. On the contrary, I argue, the emphasis on self-making and deliberation that Anderson calls for, and that she finds represented in the works of John Stuart Mill, were central to the culture of the early American republic captured by Tocqueville—who as I have noted drew his interpretation of Ameri-

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can democracy from Boston sources, and who was an important influence on Mill.18 The American Civil War demonstrated the limits of the nation’s deliberative practices and institutions, but it did not kill the ideal of deliberation. Instead the war and its aftermath exposed them to the irony of writers like Henry Adams, whose nostalgia simmers beneath his bitter treatments of postbellum politics, including his portrait of the Websterian senator Silas Ratcliffe in Democracy: An American Novel (1880). In a more constructive vein, Walt Whitman expressed the need to build a cultural basis for democracy in Democratic Vistas (1871), and John Dewey cited Whitman as a model in The Public and Its Problems, in which he restated deliberative ideals while diagnosing the tensions between their existing formulations and the conditions of modern industrial mass society. Since Dewey’s day new communication technologies and the transnational and global pressures on existing political institutions have come to pose fresh problems and opportunities for deliberative democracy. After 1980 the body of scholarship devoted to its theory and practice expanded dramatically, with major contributions from James Bohman, Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, Michael Sandel, and Cass Sunstein, among others, as well as Bessette, Fishkin, and Young. Imagining Deliberative Democracy contributes two things to this body of largely theoretical scholarship: a textured historical study of a moment when deliberative values were clearly articulated yet failed quite spectacularly to resolve social conflicts, and methods of textual analysis intended to enhance the understanding of democratic deliberation and to provide strategies for fostering it.

S One DELIBER ATIO N: A VERY BRIEF HISTO RY

i . t h e ide a of de l ib e r ation Deliberation in a general sense refers to personal reflections and conversations directed at producing well-informed decisions about a course of action. This understanding of deliberation draws on classical political theory, notably the works of Aristotle and Cicero, but it is general enough to include a broad range of practices, including Kwame Anthony Appiah’s conversational ethic in Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (2006). There Appiah argued that as globalization accelerates, “we need to develop habits of coexistence: conversation in its older meaning, of living together, association.” In The Ethics of Identity (2005) he similarly invited his readers “to engage in dialogue with others around the world about the questions great and small that we must solve together, about the many projects in which we can learn from each other.” Appiah’s cosmopolitan ethic of conversation is designed to help bridge cultural divides, promote understanding, reduce conflict, and foster a sense of global responsibility.1 In Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (2006) Amartya Sen made two additional points that intersect with Appiah’s claims for the ethical value of cosmopolitan conversation. “Identities are robustly plural,” Sen observed, and situations frequently arise that call for internal deliberations about personal preferences and goals. Sen argued further that reasoning and choice are universal goods and that virtually all societies possess traditions of group deliberation and decision making. Democracy defined as “government by discussion” has deep roots around the world. The forum of ancient Athens has parallels in the Buddhist councils of ancient India, the Jain philosophers who confronted Alexander the Great, and the public discussions that were prominent features of the ancient Muslim kingdoms centered on Cairo, Baghdad, and Istanbul. Sen concluded that “while modern institutional forms of

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democracy are relatively new everywhere, the history of democracy in the form of public participation and reasoning is spread across the world.” Sen developed these points further in The Idea of Justice (2009), where pluralist deliberative ideals form the backbone of his argument that justice should be understood to arise within a comparative, deliberative framework that values individual choice and accomplishment.2 One remarkable source of evidence to illustrate Sen’s claims about the rich global history of deliberative forms is available in Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy (2005), edited by Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel. The huge and heterogeneous array of images in the volume include a photograph of the Althing in Thingvellir, Iceland, where the world’s first parliament was formed in 930 CE; an engraving of the first meeting of the States General in Versailles in 1789; a series of photographs by Sir Benjamin Stone of British Parliamentary proceedings from the early 1900s; a 1977 photograph of two Achuar Indians from Ecuador engaged in a ritual dialogue; and a photograph of the Palaver Tree in Kabé, Mali, in 1998. Collectively these images suggest the diversity of forums and procedures for group deliberation over time and across space.3 George A. Kennedy provides a different kind of evidence for broadly disseminated practices of government by discussion in his historical and comparative study of rhetoric. Following Aristotle, who defines deliberative rhetoric as speeches designed to persuade an audience to embrace a certain course of action, Kennedy finds it to be a universal genre that occurs in literate and non-literate societies, and in ancient societies from China to Greece to India to Mesopotamia. North American Indian rhetoric provides his most detailed instance of non-Western traditions of deliberative rhetoric, and he benefits from the longstanding interest of European settlers and white creoles in the indigenous deliberative practices of North America. Kennedy makes one major distinction between Greek deliberative rhetoric and the deliberative styles of most other ancient and traditional societies: the Greeks valued agon, while most traditional societies employ deliberation in the service of consensus. The strong emotions and frequent conflicts associated with Greek civic rhetoric shaped its own democracy and those of its political heirs. The distinction that Kennedy draws between deliberation in the service of consensus formation and deliberation as a contest remains an important tension within deliberative democracy theory.4 A second, related tension can be traced to the clash of values between the worldly practices of the Greek agora and the Roman forum and the other-worldly emphasis of Christian contemplation. The disparity be-

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tween these two ways of being in the world became foundational to Christian belief in the epistles of Paul, who rejected the Roman world’s “wisdom of words” and insisted that “my speech and my preaching was not with enticing words of man’s wisdom, but in demonstration of the Spirit, and of power: that your faith should not stand in the wisdom of men, but in the power of God.” Augustine, the rhetorician-turned-Christian, later amplified Paul’s resistance to classical eloquence in The Confessions (ca. 400), where he described how when he became a Christian he rejected the “tricks of rhetoric.” As Paul and Augustine emphasized, Christian conversion is supposed to be the result of divine grace and not of human choice or persuasion; consequently it poses distinctive challenges to deliberative ideals drawn from the pre-Christian classical world, where persuasion is central to the process of decision making.5

} Deliberation is a central component of classical republican thought as developed by Aristotle and Cicero. In the English Commonwealth era James Harrington helped modernize classical republicanism, in part by seeking to reconcile it with Christianity. The works of Aristotle, Cicero, and Harrington in turn influenced republican theorists in the early United States, including James Madison, who identified deliberation as a fundamental principle in the reinvention of the American state; John Adams, who drew extensively on Cicero’s and Harrington’s works in his defense of the United States Constitution; Thomas Jefferson, who studied the history of parliamentary procedures and helped design the rules of order for Congress; and Daniel Webster, who adapted republican deliberation to a society that increasingly embraced democracy as an ideal. Madison, Adams, Jefferson, and Webster contributed to an understanding of deliberation as a personal and civic value that was widely cited and practiced in the early years of the republic. In The Politics Aristotle defined deliberation as “the special business of political understanding” and identified the deliberative element as one essential component of a well-ordered constitution, relating it to the democratic principle that “the multitude ought to be in power.” This principle is itself connected to Aristotle’s ethical view of society, which holds that individual flaws can be corrected in a collective decision-making process: “For the many, of whom each individual is not a good man, when they meet together may be better than the few good, if regarded not individually but collectively, just as a feast to which many contribute is better than a dinner provided out of a single purse.” Aristotle’s treatment of deliberation in On Rhetoric falls into two parts: a description of the function of a

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deliberative branch in a mixed government; and a treatment of deliberative ethics, which includes an account of deliberative oratory focused on the speaker’s success. He emphasized that the constitution of the state shapes the mental and moral constitution of its citizens, and their character in turn influences the style of deliberative argumentation that is most persuasive. The process of decision making, the selection of ends, and the emergence of character are intertwined, for “characters become clear by deliberate choice,” and “deliberate choice is directed to an ‘end.’” In his section on definitions of the good he focused on “things that are deliberately chosen,” noting a wide range of possible goods so long as they are selected with care. Running through these five short chapters on deliberative rhetoric are tensions between the ethical and the efficacious, the universal and the cultural, the personal and the social or governmental that pose the core challenges with which modern deliberative theorists continue to grapple.6 Cicero further elaborated the moral, civil, and political dimensions of deliberation developed by Aristotle. In his moral treatise De officiis (On Duties, 44 BCE) and in De oratore (On the Ideal Orator, 55 BCE), his major statement on the orator’s civic role, Cicero provided overlapping treatments of deliberation as an approach to both ethical choice and political decision making that clarify the connection between personal decisions and debates on public policies. De officiis presents deliberation as the basis of ethical development and treats moral deliberation as a psychological analogue to the political deliberations that he sketched in De oratore. The same processes of analysis and persuasion that produce a morally sound judgment also contribute to a successful political outcome. De officiis presents moral deliberation as the effort to sort through the partly obscured attributes of a given course of action, to place it correctly within a hierarchy of values grounded in nature and assisted by rules of procedure, and to act on that determination. These are intrasubjective deliberations that can be conducted in solitude. By contrast De oratore builds on Aristotle’s Rhetoric to portray deliberative oratory as one of the three major rhetorical genres, which has the goal of winning an audience to the speaker’s position. Between the internal deliberations of De officiis and the public persuasion treated in De oratore there is considerable slippage as the emphasis shifts from making the best decision to winning one’s case or point. The distinction corresponds to a foundational question in Western philosophy and rhetorical theory: what is the relationship between the ethical and the expedient? This gap is addressed in a limited way in the surviving sections of De re publica, Cicero’s main work of political theory, in which he

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described the importance of institutional structures for shaping deliberative practices. Here Cicero observed that while “deliberation” is essential to the longevity of the state, the “deliberative function” operates quite differently in different types of states, some of which are more stable than others. Again following Aristotle, Cicero espoused mixed government that combines the different modes of deliberation suitable to monarchy, aristocracy, and democracy.7 In an extended study of Cicero’s works informed by their relationship to contemporary deliberative democracy theory, Joy Connolly emphasized the defining Ciceronian relationship between ethical self-formation and republican citizenship, which she termed “performative ethics.” Performative ethics combines ethical education and virtuous self-fashioning by means of rhetorical training. “Like moral duty,” Cicero believed that “eloquence resides at the intersection of knowledge and action.” Connolly placed Habermas and other deliberative democrats in a tradition descended from Renaissance humanist interpretations of Cicero. While Cicero wrote his works principally for elite members of the ruling class, Connolly emphasized that decorum understood as a form of freedom is not in any essential way bound to a particular social class or group: “what matters is the performance.” Cicero opened the way for a more inclusive interpretation of performative ethics insofar as he accommodated a variety of individual strengths and behaviors as both natural and desirable. Moreover he acknowledged the importance of embracing heterogeneity as a fact of civic life when he made the capacity to understand the perspectives of others a necessary element of any political discussion and a precursor to any effort to persuade others to embrace one’s own position. Reading Cicero “against the grain” in order “to provoke and to appropriate, and to explore how his views on civility speak to our present,” Connolly emphasized the elements of Cicero’s performative ethics that foster freedom understood in republican terms as nondomination and as self-construction.8 The classical tradition focuses on individual and collective choice; the Bible, by contrast, is preoccupied with receiving and communicating meaning from a transcendent source. These differences present an abiding challenge to deliberative theory. The Bible highlights two weak links in the communicative process: the prophet, who may resist the call to prophesy or do so poorly, distorting the divine message; and the audience, which may be unable to perceive the truth in the prophet’s words. Established institutions (Pharaoh and his advisors in Exodus; the Pharisees in both Jeremiah and John) pose a peculiar threat in these narratives, for they develop into autonomous structures of power that compete with the Lord’s

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immediate authority and prevent the people from recognizing authentic prophets. At the same time the proliferation of prophets and prophecies makes the discernment of divine truth a pressing and intractable problem. The golden calf scene in Exodus is the most prominent story of false prophecy and idolatry among many similar tales in both the Hebrew Bible and the Christian Bible. Rhetoric likewise poses a problem, as both Paul and Augustine emphasized, for the human ability to move other people with words suggests that art and not the revelation of truth accomplishes a change in belief. Conspicuously missing from the major biblical narratives are prominent instances of mutual consultation and opinion formation. The Bible’s depictions of debate focus on the effort to reconcile the (human) self to the (divine) other. Several of the most influential stories in the Bible contrast a divine message of absolute truth with human deliberations. In Exodus the Lord secures the release of the Israelites from their Egyptian bondage through a series of diplomatic exchanges where the negotiations are metaphysically rigged. This happens in two ways. First, Moses resists the Lord’s command that he act as God’s messenger to Pharaoh, saying, “Since I am a poor speaker, why would Pharaoh listen to me?” (Exodus 6:30). The Lord resolves this objection by making Aaron serve as the spokesman for Moses, but then intervenes to prevent Aaron’s eloquence from being effective. By making “fools of the Egyptians” (Exodus 10:1–2) and hardening Pharaoh’s heart, the Lord accomplishes two things: He identifies the Israelites as His chosen people, setting them apart from and above the Egyptians; and He creates a narrative that fosters shared memory and cultural cohesion. The Exodus story resonates through American civic rhetoric from the Puritans to slave churches to contemporary Christian social movements.9 Like Exodus, the Book of Jeremiah has had a profound influence on the civil religion of the United States, instilling a strong element of social critique and dissent into American political debate. The Book of Jeremiah revises central themes and rhetorical strategies found in the Book of Exodus. Called upon to speak for the Lord, the youthful Jeremiah resists the Lord’s call in much the same way that Moses did, claiming that he does not know how to speak. The Lord rebukes him as he did Moses, then, according to Jeremiah, “the Lord put out his hand and touched my mouth,” telling him, “Now I have put my words in your mouth” ( Jer. 1:9). Jeremiah’s mission is to convince the Israelites of God’s wrath at their errant ways so that they will restore themselves to their rightful place as His chosen people. He accuses them of bad faith and idolatry and calls for them to renew their covenant. If they do not embrace his message, existing state and religious

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institutions will offer no recourse: “Courage shall fail the king and the officials; the priests shall be appalled and the prophets astounded” ( Jer. 4:9). Despite Jeremiah’s repeated efforts to convey the Lord’s message, after many years the threats become reality when Nebuchadnezzar destroys the kingdom and the Babylonian captivity begins.10 The prominent themes of dissent, social conflict, punishment, and recommitment in Hebrew scripture are revisited in the Gospels, which focus on the words of a popular prophet and introduce a dynamic of speech and hearing at the center of Christian belief. The Gospel according to John uses a dramatic rhetoric of witnessing and self-disclosure to portray the process of conversion to belief in Jesus as the Messiah. Jesus speaks in a manner that most listeners find confusing and mysterious. The spirit is both the means and the meaning of belief, and only those who have the hermeneutic tools provided by the spirit understand the meaning of Jesus’s words. As John Durham Peters has noted, the Gospel of John “is structured in many ways by dialogic mishaps.” The Jews repeatedly insist that Abraham is their father and therefore they are the Lord’s chosen people, but Jesus refuses to accept this collective redemption. Salvation in the new covenant is personal, not communal; it is above all contingent on the ability to hear and understand his message.11 All of these episodes—Moses and Pharaoh, Jeremiah and the Israelites, Jesus and the Jews—highlight failures of persuasion. The collective effect of these texts is to call into question the possibility that prophets can accurately communicate the Lord’s message and, even when they do, that the message will be heard and understood by its intended audience. A rare moment of communicative optimism is anticipated at the end of John, when Jesus promises his disciples that the Father will send the Holy Spirit to “teach you everything, and remind you of all that I have said to you” (14:26). This Advocate, bearer of a new law, arrives at Pentecost when the tongues of fire rest on the disciples and fill them with the Holy Spirit to preach that Jesus was the Messiah. In a passage that became important to the prophets of the early American republic, Peter describes how “your sons and your daughters shall prophesy. . . . Even upon my slaves, both men and women, in those days I will pour out my Spirit; and they shall prophesy” (Acts 2:17–18). The remainder of Acts describes the Christian missionary project and the growing number of disciples, though it also records persistent opposition to their message. As I have suggested, the Bible overwhelmingly emphasizes prophecy and conversion, but there are hints of a more consultative approach in passages such as Proverbs 11:14: “Where there is no guidance, a nation

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falls, but in an abundance of counselors there is safety,” or Isaiah 1:18, “Come now, and let us reason together.”12 Such passages have been cited by contemporary advocates of religiously grounded political speech such as Glenn Tinder, who argued that “faith is more than compatible with dialogue; it requires it.” Tinder cited Isaiah 1:18 to support his claim that the Old Testament God is “dialogical.” For Tinder, Jean Bethke Elshtain, Richard John Neuhaus, and others, political discussion that lacks a religious grounding is removed from the core sources of value that motivate individual choices.13 Contemporary advocates of political speech informed by religious belief have precursors in a line of thinkers who sought to reconcile the republican tradition of the classical world with Christianity. James Harrington offered an important synthesis of classical and biblical traditions in The Commonwealth of Oceana (1656), in which he asserted that Israel was the world’s first commonwealth, founded by God, and that the Greek and Roman republics later followed God’s “footsteps in nature.” He echoed Aristotle’s metaphor of civic life as a shared meal, and in a striking narrative of the natural origins of balanced government he described how two young girls will divide a cake. “That each of them . . . may have that which is due, ‘Divide,’ says one unto the other, ‘and I will choose; or let me divide, and you shall choose.’” By this means, he observed, “two silly girls” resolve a problem that “great philosophers” have disputed in vain. The “whole mystery” of a commonwealth is “dividing and choosing.”14 From this homely anecdote Harrington developed his discussion of mixed republican government, which follows the model of the Roman republic.15 The senate consists of the wisest members of a civil society who, “discoursing and arguing one with another, show the eminence of their parts,” while the audience for the debate “discover[s] things that they never thought on, or are cleared in divers truths which had formerly perplexed them” (23). The senate deliberates in order to clarify the nature of the choice to be made, and it falls to the popular branch of government to make the choice. “Dividing and choosing, in the language of a commonwealth, is debating and resolving; and whatsoever upon debate of the senate is proposed unto the people, and resolved by them, is enacted auctoritate partum et jussu populi, by the authority of the fathers and the power of the people, which concurring make a law” (24). Harrington here formulated two components of deliberation that were important to the framers of the United States Constitution: the significance of institutional structure; and the role of discourse, debate, and argumentation in refining distinctions and clarifying alternative choices of action.

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The Senate and the House of Representatives, identified as the deliberating body and the popular body, loosely followed Harrington’s conception of a senate that debates and a popular branch that chooses.16 These bodies devised rules of order to guide their proceedings, including the Rules for Conducting Business in the Senate (1790) and Thomas Jefferson’s Manual of Parliamentary Practice (1801). The four brief pages of the 1790 edition of the Rules, adopted by Congress in its first and second sessions, sketch the protocols of a legislative session (there must be a quorum present, the president takes the chair and has the previous day’s journal read, motions must be proposed and seconded, etc.); outline basic rules of debate (members are not to talk to one another or read while debate is being conducted, members must stand and address themselves to the chair and may speak twice in one day on the same topic, and so forth); and describe the process by which bills move between the House and Senate. An expanded edition appeared in 1798; similar rules for the House of Representatives were published several times during the same decade.17 The weightier Manual first appeared in 1801 as Jefferson was taking over the executive office, and it remains part of the Senate rules of order today. The entire volume bears on parliamentary conduct, but the section most directly concerned with deliberative process is Section 17 on the “Order in Debate.” Here Jefferson reproduced several of the Senate rules described above, along with passages drawn from British parliamentary manuals. These include more rigorous constraints on the types of speech permitted. Impertinent speech is forbidden, and so is superfluous or tedious speech. Debaters are not to use indecent language or to directly mention another member. No one may disrupt another’s speech by hissing, coughing, or spitting. The rules also describe procedures for punishing disorderly words and assaults; regulate the order in which members speak; and prohibit the wearing of hats. Jefferson’s volume established the parameters of acceptable behavior in Congress and was a major contribution in what later became a popular genre consulted by civic groups and voluntary associations as well as legislative bodies.18

i i . d e l i b e r atio n a n d de m o cr a cy in t h e e ar l y a m e rica n re p ub l ic In the United States citizens could now expect to hear for themselves the deliberations that produced and interpreted the laws that governed them. Massachusetts had established open galleries in its State House during the Revolution, and Congress opened many of its proceedings soon after it

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was founded. Major congressional debates and arguments before the Supreme Court drew large audiences of women and men, and foreign visitors made a pilgrimage to Capitol Hill to hear the deliberations there. The growth in the numbers and power of deliberative bodies, and the fact that many were publicly accessible for the first time, transformed the chamber floor into a unique type of stage where real-life political dramas were enacted. Anyone could in principle view the deliberations of the United States Congress, and that fact influenced deliberative practice and transformed its symbolic value throughout the Atlantic world.19 After 1800 a system for reporting congressional debates matured as the press became more diverse and accessible, and as the methods of capturing and disseminating speech through the medium of print became increasingly sophisticated. Semiofficial accounts of House and Senate debates appeared in the National Intelligencer (from 1800), the Register of Debates (from 1824), and the Congressional Globe (from 1833), while a variety of newspapers sent their own reporters to cover the proceedings, often in imperfect or highly partisan ways. The speakers themselves sometimes contributed to distortions in the printed records by editing their addresses. While some journalists focused on representing congressional debates, others commented on the proceedings in printed letters. The letter form was also employed in semiprivate settings, with Congressmen and spectators offering descriptions of the debates in manuscripts intended for circulation.20 Deliberative speech in Congress and the courts achieved an unusual prominence on the national scene in these years. Executive speech was muted as the earliest occupants of the White House wrestled with the issue of how presidential power should be exercised in a republic. In the early years of the century the House debates drew more attention because they were livelier and faster paced, but beginning in the 1820s the Senate emerged as the home of celebrity orators including Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, John Calhoun, Thomas Hart Benton, and Edward Everett. The courts provided additional settings for public deliberation, and major cases with celebrity lawyers often attracted large audiences.21 The Boston-based periodical The North American Review was an important vehicle for the assessment of eloquent speech and the promotion of deliberative values. Founded in 1815, the Review was modeled on the great British periodicals including The Edinburgh Review and The Quarterly Review. The North American Review has sometimes been characterized as an elitist organ, and indeed many of the authors who contributed to the journal were or later became prominent educators, diplomats, religious leaders, or politicians. Collectively they shaped the views later identified

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with the Whig party, including resistance to a strong executive branch and a commitment to deliberative processes as the essence of modern republicanism. Supporting a comparative and international view of the modern republic, the journal printed long review essays that introduced American readers to important works on contemporary Atlantic world politics, featuring publications from Latin America, the Caribbean, and Europe to provide detailed accounts of developments in those places.22 Edward Tyrrel Channing’s essay “The Abuses of Political Discussion” appeared in 1817, soon after the journal’s founding. Channing, who two years later was appointed the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory at Harvard where he counted Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Wendell Phillips among his pupils, here proposed that thoughtful, politically informed citizens accustomed to calm reflection offered the most promising conditions for effective public discourse and sound political judgment. In this articulation of deliberative values, Channing observed that the ancient republics had been driven to “madness” by “stormy and troubled eloquence,” and he stressed that modern republicans could be encouraged to avoid such a course and instead “respect deliberation, order, and settled habits.” Yet he went on to note that “there are dangers of false excitement and corrupt eloquence even now.” While maintaining that eloquence in a good cause was a valuable thing, and that political emotions could serve an important purpose, Channing insisted that there was a danger of forming a “habit of excitement” in a community constantly pumped up on extravagant rhetoric and partisanship. Channing observed that a self-governing people must go beyond superficial emotional appeals and embrace the hard work of political understanding, and he concluded that “the safety of a free people is in the principles, taste, and calm habits of thinking, which they acquire when the mind is sober, and looks widely and fairly.” In succeeding years the Review published political essays on a range of controversial topics including Indian removal, slavery, and international relations that were intended to foster the type of political discussion that Channing described through careful presentation of facts and discursive strategies designed to avoid polarization.23 Channing’s reflections on the quality of public debate in the United States formed part of a growing body of work focused on the rhetorical practices and deliberative institutions of the early American republic. European visitors and American observers alike commented extensively on a national penchant for eloquence, and their works typically included a description of the deliberations in Congress. These portraits frequently served an ideological function, either confirming the republican virtues

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that the author expected to find in the United States or reinforcing the author’s skeptical appraisal of American democracy. In her energetically prorepublican travel narrative of 1821, for example, Frances Wright celebrated the “invariably decorous and gentlemanly language” and the “tone . . . worthy of the Roman senate” used in congressional debates and contrasted it with the partisan bickering in the English House of Commons.24 James Fenimore Cooper offered an account of congressional debate that was only slightly less effusive in Notions of the Americans: Picked up by a Travelling Bachelor (1828), a fictionalized narrative of a European nobleman’s travels that General Lafayette persuaded him to write in order to counter disparaging European portraits of the United States. Like Wright, Cooper’s narrator emphasized the decorum of congressional debates and contrasted them with the less restrained proceedings in France and England. Though somewhat critical of the habit that representatives had of making set speeches, he related this practice to an American fondness for argument, which he saw as ultimately productive of good, claiming that “the truth is profusely shaken from its husks in these sharp intellectual encounters.” Emphasizing the egalitarian features of the practice Cooper continued, “It is not surprising that men who have been accustomed all their lives to have a word in what is passing, should carry the desire to speak into a body which is professedly deliberative.” Public devotion to deliberative process was one of the main safeguards of the American system, he concluded. The open and capacious gallery in the Capitol Building allowed anyone to view the proceedings and provided protection against the illicit exercise of authority. Any attempt to “browbeat Congress” would “draw down the indignation of the whole Republick.” “It would be quite as safe to attempt to assassinate a Sovereign, in the midst of his guards,” he observed. “The Members, the army, the Navy, the community, and even the women would rise in support of its privileges.”25 Frances Trollope’s Domestic Manners of the Americans (1832) described congressional deliberations in terms that were far more skeptical than the largely flattering assessments offered by Wright and Cooper. Trollope had little to say about the substance of the debates she witnessed but expressed strong opinions about the etiquette observed in chambers. She noted that the House was “filled with men sitting in the most unseemly attitudes, a large majority with their hats on, and nearly all spitting to an excess that decency forbids me to describe.” Matters in the Senate were a bit better, for the members sat upright and took off their hats; regrettably, Trollope noted, the spitting was much the same. She found the frequently remarked-upon fact that women could attend the proceedings of Congress

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while they were banned from attending sessions of Parliament to be less impressive in practice than in principle, for few women were present during her stay. Trollope observed that when Frances Wright and her sister visited Congress with Lafayette, they drew considerable attention from the members in part because of the novelty of their presence. Trollope had difficulty evaluating the speeches on the floor because the acoustics were bad. When she could hear the deliberations she reacted with amusement and frustration rather than with admiring comparisons to the Roman senate. She described “the rude eloquence of a thorough horseand-alligator orator from Kentucky, who entreated the House repeatedly to ‘go the whole hog,’” and she concluded that every debate she heard was on a single subject: “the entire independence of each individual state with regard to the federal government.” Trollope recalled that “man after man” sprang up to decry the “tyranny” of voting federal money for building roads or canals or otherwise developing his home state. She found this emphasis perverse when compared with the real tyranny of Indian removal, which was debated in Congress during her stay in Washington. Trollope attacked the hypocrisy of American republicans, noting how common it was for them to charge European governments with oppressing the weak and favoring the strong while at the same time maintaining slavery and “removing” the indigenous occupants of the eastern states.26 In the second volume of Democracy in America (1840) Alexis de Tocqueville commented on the weaknesses of parliamentary eloquence in the United States in a more analytic tone than that of Wright, Cooper, and Trollope. Noting that the orators of the American Revolution were widely admired but congressional orators of the 1830s were regarded with less enthusiasm, he traced the differences to two main causes. Revolutionary orators, like the orators of France, spoke about universal truths rather than particular interests. “There is nothing more wonderful or more impressive than a great orator discussing great affairs in a democratic assembly,” Tocqueville wrote. The experience of speaking “to the whole nation, for the whole nation . . . heightens both his thought and his power of expression.” By contrast, routine political debates in Congress suffered from several limiting factors. Public office no longer reliably attracted the most capable and accomplished men, but the less skilled representatives nevertheless found themselves called upon to speak. However much the inexperienced or incapable Congressman might wish to remain silent, his constituents expected that he would defend their interests and take an active role in the proceedings. The resulting speeches tended to present “an examination of all the great affairs of state and a catalog of all their petty

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grievances.” Americans had resigned themselves to the uneven quality of congressional oratory, he concluded, because they viewed it as an inevitable side effect of the Constitution and the party system. “They bear witness to their long experience of parliamentary practice not by refraining from dull speeches but by summoning their courage to listen to them.”27 Deliberation was not just a spectator sport for the masses but increasingly became a popular activity as well. Building on practices traceable to colonial town hall meetings and Revolutionary committees of correspondence, ordinary people debated political issues informally and participated in Bible societies and agricultural societies, lyceums and abolitionist organizations where deliberation was an important dimension of selfgovernment. Members of the proliferating voluntary associations commonly organized themselves through constitutions, gave speeches to one another, held meetings where they conducted debates and discussions, and communicated through newspapers and other print media.28 In his classic discussion of the phenomenon Tocqueville wrote that “as soon as several Americans have conceived a sentiment or an idea that they want to produce before the world . . . they unite. Thenceforth they are no longer isolated individuals, but a power conspicuous from the distance whose actions serve as an example; when it speaks, men listen.” Tocqueville suggested that voluntary associations grew from experience with political associations, where “large numbers see, speak, listen, and stimulate each other to carry out all sorts of undertakings in common. Then they carry these conceptions with them into the affairs of civil life and put them to a thousand uses.”29 Tocqueville was not the first observer to describe the prevalence of deliberative bodies as a chief characteristic of civic life in the United States. In an 1823 speech to the American Philosophical Society that Jared Sparks reviewed in the North American Review, the lawyer and politician Charles Jared Ingersoll noted “innumerable voluntary associations” conducting themselves “under legislative regulations in their proceedings.” Ingersoll went on to observe that “several hundred thousand persons assemble in this country every year, in various spontaneous convocations, to discuss and determine measures according to parliamentary routine,” noting that business was transacted in the same way “from the humblest debating club to Congress in the capitol.” The effect on the members of “self-created associations,” ranging from “bible societies to the lowest handicraft,” was to “sharpen their wits, temper their passions, and cultivate their elocution,” as well as to familiarize a great many people with the legislative process.30 Ingersoll broke no new ground when he identified representation as the

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chief difference between ancient and modern government, or when he asserted that representation and confederation were the characteristic features of American government; however, his interpretation of these terms offered a distinctive emphasis on legislative bodies and deliberative processes. Ingersoll asserted that “legislation in the United States is better ordered, more deliberative, decorous, and dignified, much less tumultuous or arbitrary and more eloquent than in Europe,” and he went on to provide a comparative analysis of the conditions governing legislative debate in the United States, Great Britain, and France. Among the factors that affected the quality of European deliberations were the restrictions on the audience extending at times even to secrecy; their vulnerability to military intervention, for instance when an “obnoxious orator” could be seized and removed; the limited rhetorical skills of the members, particularly in “extemporaneous and useful eloquence”; the physical conditions in the chambers of the legislature; and the freedom of the press, particularly the laws regarding the printing of legislative speeches. Ingersoll stressed the excellence of American oratory and its popularity, and he claimed that “crowds of listeners are continually collected in all parts of this country to hear eloquent speeches and sermons. The legislature, the court house, and the church, are thronged with auditors of both sexes, attracted by that talent which was the intense study and great power of the ancient orators.” Ingersoll connected these scattered scenes of eloquence and deliberation to the larger processes of political representation using a water metaphor: “Thousands of springs, gushing from every quarter, eddy onward the cataract of representative democracy, from primary self-constituted assemblies to the State Legislatures, and the national Congress.” From town hall meetings and associations, to state governments, to the federal government, representative democracy worked through deliberative bodies.31 We find a similar representation of American democracy as an unfolding process of deliberation in Michel Chevalier’s Lettres sur L’Amérique du Nord (1836). In a series of letters written for the liberal French newspaper Journal des Débats, Chevalier described the course of the dispute over President Andrew Jackson’s effort to close down the Second National Bank. Chevalier celebrated the oratorical efforts of the Bank’s defenders, singling out the “Great Triumvirate” of Calhoun, Clay, and Webster as the ablest Senators, and he criticized the rhetoric of the Bank’s detractors for its resemblance to “our republican tirades of 1791 and 1792.” “There is the same declamatory tone, the same swollen style, the same appeal to the popular passions” as in French Revolutionary debates, Chevalier noted, but the allegations against the Bank’s “aristocracy” “are vague, empty, and indefi-

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nite, while with us fifty years ago the grievances were real.” He saw the Senate as the home of “firm and eloquent men” who provided a bulwark against demagoguery. Sometimes the bulwark became an impediment. Chevalier complained about the slow progress of the debate, noting that Missouri’s Senator Thomas Hart Benton spoke for four full sessions over as many days. Ultimately, however, Chevalier defended the process, observing that discussion and debate were defining features of “the American character,” “demanded by the form and spirit of the government, by the institutions and political habits of the country.” He explained, in a letter dated March 1, 1834 from Baltimore: The general discussion in Congress has no other object than to open a full and free public inquiry which enables each and all to have an opinion. It gives rise to a discussion of the question by the innumerable journals in the United States (where there are twelve hundred political newspapers), by the twenty-four legislatures, each composed of two houses, and by the public meetings in the cities and towns. It is an animated exchange of arguments of every caliber and every degree, of contradictory resolutions mixed up with applauses and hisses, of exaggerated eulogies and brutal invectives.

To the stranger, he concluded, this looks like “the primeval or the final chaos,” or at least “the breaking up of the Union.” Eventually, however, the sense of the public emerges from the apparent disorder: “some gleams of light break forth from these thick clouds, from the bosom of this confusion—gleams which the good sense of the people hails with joy and which light up the Congress.” Chevalier’s vague description of this process of public decision making concluded with a paean to the deliberative ideal as realized in American institutions. “We see here the realization of the Forum on an immense scale, the Forum with its tumult, its cries, its pasquinades, but also with its sure instincts, and its flashes of native and untaught genius.” The challenges of the extended republic were overcome, Chevalier suggested, through a variety of outlets including public meetings, state legislatures, the Congress, and the press. Chevalier imagined the Bank War debates unfolding in a large format, multimedia version of the ancient forum, updated for the modern republic. Chevalier’s virtual agora was a space where the entire population of the United States could participate in public deliberations.32 A prominent strain of protest writing and oppositional activism that emerged around 1830 altered the dynamics of Chevalier’s “Forum on an

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immense scale.” As I discuss at length in chapter five, opponents of Indian removal and advocates of immediate abolition highlighted the distortions that prejudice and restrictive citizenship introduced into the nation’s deliberative bodies. The debate over slavery challenged deliberative ideals like no other public issue. Abolitionists rejected the conciliating rhetoric of colonization in favor of the jeremiad, arguing that slavery was a national sin that should be ended swiftly and that African Americans should not be expelled from the republic. Opponents of slavery worked to create a national forum where abolitionist views could be heard, including the perspectives of free blacks and slaves, while its supporters sought to foreclose public discussion by passing gag rules in Congress and attacking antislavery advocates and presses. The slave interest that dominated the federal government launched a war that expanded its territory, while abolitionists formed voluntary associations that held meetings and sponsored newspapers. This pitting of the federal government against a popular movement highlighted the limits of the nation’s institutions. No gleams of light broke through to illuminate the chaos, and the deliberative crisis ended in civil war.33

i i i . w h i t ma n , de we y, a n d the p l ac e of t h e art s Walt Whitman sought to resolve the national crisis of deliberation by producing a body of poetry designed both to promote heterogeneity and to build consensus. Already in 1855, in the first edition of Leaves of Grass, Whitman offered his poetic persona and lyric voice as means to achieve a more perfect union. He continued to reflect on the place of the arts in fostering both diversity and harmony until his death in 1892. Whitman was fascinated by political oratory and sought to enhance its lyrical features and filter out its agonistic elements with the aim of building a common culture that might provide the basis for a less contentious and divisive politics. In the preface to the 1855 Leaves of Grass Whitman described the central role that the poet had to play in American democracy, emphasizing his aspirations to create harmony. “Their Presidents shall not be their common referee so much as their poets shall,” he wrote (8). The poet should exercise judgment and establish proportion, for “he is the arbiter of the diverse. . . . He is the equalizer of his age and land” (9). The “many long dumb voices” that speak “through” the poet are “clarified and transfigured” (50). They do not speak to or deliberate with one another; rather, their conflicts are first absorbed by and then purged from the poet’s unify-

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ing persona. His effort to filter out conflict and achieve symbolic consensus reflects his fears about the future of an American republic that was proving unable to resolve the problem of slavery.34 The failure of his poetry to serve its prescribed function for the nation preoccupied Whitman in “Democratic Vistas,” which he wrote shortly after the end of the Civil War. In this essay inspired by John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty (1859), Whitman developed his most systematic account of the place of poetry and culture in a democratic society. For Whitman, On Liberty raised again the question that had concerned him since he launched his poetic career, namely, how the arts can help to form citizens who are both autonomous, fully realized individuals and participants in a modern democratic republic. Mill suggested that the democratic imperatives of individual self-realization and collective self-governance could be resolved through free discussion and well designed institutions of deliberation. As Nadia Urbinati has shown, he looked to the ancient world for models of democracy as “government by discussion” and embraced a Ciceronian conception of civic eloquence.35 Whitman’s response to Mill in “Democratic Vistas” focused less on his deliberative elements and more on his concern with pluralism. The process of drawing heterogeneous citizens together to form a “grand nationality,” as opposed to a group of warring individuals or groups, was for Whitman the work of the poet rather than the parliamentarian.36 Reflecting on the recently concluded war, and observing the crisis atmosphere during the presidential campaign of 1868 (“The din of disputation rages around me. Acrid the temper of the parties, vital the pending questions”), Whitman insisted that such political conflicts were ephemeral but “the People ever remain” (951). Fearful of political divisions of the sort that had nearly broken the nation, Whitman sought a way to more fully realize the democratic ideals that the United States claimed to represent and at the same time to achieve a greater degree of “harmony and stability” (976). He argued that the nation had previously gone through two stages: the political stage of establishing human rights and constructing republican governments, followed by the stage of material prosperity and technological development. Each of these stages contributed something important to democracy. The third, pending stage required cultural developments to embody “a native expression-spirit” (977) and shape authentic democratic feeling. Whitman believed that literature would imbue the United States with a spiritual dimension, forming a shared basis of meaning that would affect “politics far more than the popular superficial suffrage, with results inside and underneath the elections of Presidents or

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Congresses” (932). Such an encompassing culture would promote the full development of the individual while also providing a basis for reconciling the fundamental tensions between the individual and the state that Whitman identified as a central problem of the modern republic. Fifty years later John Dewey turned to Whitman for a model of effective democratic communication in his debate with Walter Lippmann on the nature of the public. In their exchange Dewey and Lippmann revisited the challenges posed by the modern republic and proposed fresh solutions. By the 1920s it had become clear that the mass media, which an earlier generation had understood as a potential venue for robust public deliberation, instead often distorted the already complex deliberative process of the extended republic created by the Constitution. Lippmann and Dewey confronted the wide gap between the founding ideals of self-governance and the realities of modern mass societies. The Dewey-Lippmann debates returned again to the deliberative ideals drawn from Aristotle, Cicero, and Harrington and questioned whether and how they could be made relevant to the twentieth-century mass republic.37 Lippmann offered a sharply critical account of modern democracy in Public Opinion (1922) and The Phantom Public (1925).38 Tracing the rise of democratic thought in Aristotle and Jefferson, Lippmann had characterized the democratic ideal as one that enabled each individual to “rise to his full stature, freed from man-made limitations” (Public Opinion 172). He further observed that the undefended assumption underlying democracy was the belief that “the art of government” is “a natural endowment” (163). This belief could be justified only in relation to sharply restricted environments such as the town hall meeting, which he believed offered little to modern mass democracy. He quoted Federalist No. 15, where Alexander Hamilton argued that scattered local governments “deliberating at a distance from each other, at different times, and under different impressions” (175) cannot contribute meaningfully to a larger deliberative process. This was the problem that Tocqueville and Chevalier thought had been effectively resolved in the United States. The role of the state had changed substantially since Tocqueville and Chevalier’s time, however. Lippmann identified three major factors that posed potentially insurmountable challenges to democratic self-rule in modern societies: the national state, industrial capitalism, and mass media. The ability to develop appropriate solutions to vast, complex problems was further complicated, Lippmann noted, by the “pseudo-environment” (Public Opinion 10) created by the universal dependence of human communication on “fictions and symbols” (8). This dependence on represen-

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tations was exacerbated still further by new technologies of communication. Lippmann described how partisan differences over the League of Nations were strengthened in the Senate after a 1919 debate that arose because of false news reports. The most selective, most deliberative body of the United States government was thrown into turmoil by misleading information about the war in Europe communicated by telegraph. The story offered Lippmann a telling instance of “the world-wide spectacle of men acting upon their environment, moved by stimuli from their pseudoenvironments” (13). Lippmann’s solution to the complexity of modern society was to accept the governance of technical elites. In addition to advocating for an informational bureaucracy, Lippmann helped to launch an influential approach to the critique of modern democracy focused on the deforming effects of mass media. In Public Opinion Lippmann criticized “the manufacture of consent” (158), which described the process elites used to manipulate public opinion through newspapers and other media outlets (the “pseudo-environment”). In The Phantom Public he called citizens in modern democracies “deaf spectators” (13), noting that they witnessed the unfolding of public life with only limited comprehension. Lippmann’s approach to public life as a spectacle managed by elites continues to resonate, notably in the work of Noam Chomsky who in 1988 adapted one of Lippmann’s key phrases in Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, where Chomsky and his coauthor Edward Herman developed a “propaganda model” of mainstream media. Neil Postman likewise echoed Lippmann’s critique of the spectacle quality of the modern mass media, arguing in Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (1985) that contemporary media train people to consume political information as entertainment rather than consider it thoughtfully as befits informed citizens.39 At the same time deliberative democracy theorists began to offer solutions to the problems posed by social critics such as Chomsky and Postman, finding inspiration in Dewey’s The Public and Its Problems (1927). In that work, his only sustained discussion of political theory, Dewey laid out an alternative history of the rise and decline of American democracy that put the symbolic and communicative powers of language at the center of a revitalized democratic order. Refusing to concede the failure of democratic self-rule, Dewey called for the adaptation of traditional democratic institutions such as the town meeting to modern circumstances. Like Ingersoll, Sparks, and Tocqueville, he understood the history of the United States as a grassroots assemblage. First colonial and then state governments were built up from small, discrete, self-governing communities;

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these in turn federated themselves into a national state. “The imagination of the founders did not travel far beyond what could be accomplished and understood in a congeries of self-governing communities,” he emphasized. Dewey claimed that there were good historical and theoretical reasons for understanding communal self-governance as the basis of democracy. Athenian democracy was a face-to-face society, where the citizens met to deliberate and vote. “It seemed almost self-evident to Plato—as to Rousseau later—that a genuine state could hardly be larger than the number of persons capable of personal acquaintance with one another.”40 Dewey agreed with Lippmann that new technologies, territorial expansion, and immigration had transformed this locally based democracy into something so diffuse as to eclipse the idea of the public on which the theory of democracy was based. Mass society undermined the foundations of traditional local democracy and made the public invisible to itself. Still, Dewey believed that any solution to the problem of modern mass democracy needed to accommodate the nostalgia for traditions like the town hall meeting. He called for a novel set of symbols to bridge between older values and practices and modern circumstances and provide the basis of a “Great Community”: “Our Babel is not one of tongues but of the signs and symbols without which shared experience is impossible” (142). The ability to plan and act politically depends on shared symbols, which in turn facilitate communication and foster collective endeavors. Education and moral cultivation, including the development of democratic civic habits, are important parts of this process. Scholarship that is not rendered sterile by being rigidly separated into fields is another necessity. Art, understood as “a life of free and enriching communion,” also plays a central role in the formation of effective symbols of democracy. Dewey identified Whitman as the seer of a democracy based on “free social inquiry . . . indissolubly wedded to the art of full and moving communication” (184). Dewey turned in his final chapter to specific practical solutions. The first necessity was to improve “the methods and conditions of debate, discussion and persuasion” (208). Breaking from the emphasis that Lippmann placed on expert knowledge, and repeating an argument that we have seen in Aristotle, Cicero, and Harrington, Dewey insisted that experts were useful for discovering and presenting facts, but decisions based on those facts should be left to the judgment of the many. He believed that print, film, radio, and other communications media do not simply distort information; rather, they contribute to the “signs and symbols, language” that “are the means of communication by which a fraternally shared experience is ushered in and sustained” (218). Dewey’s commitment to the

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arts reflects the important role of symbolic thinking in his understanding of democracy. Central to Dewey’s argument was the claim that those symbolic forms can only become the basis for a public if they are fulfilled in dialogue and face-to-face relations. Dewey sought to revive the symbolic and communicative potential of deliberative speech in order to organize local communities from which the Great Community could be built. The competing proposals that Lippmann and Dewey made for enhancing civic life in the United States bore fruit of different kinds. There is now a large government bureaucracy that contributes to political decision making, fulfilling Lippmann’s recommendations.41 Meanwhile Dewey’s greater concern with symbolic communication in The Public and Its Problems has had an intermittent effect on civic discourse. Dewey helped catalyze a shift from an emphasis on debate, which many people blamed for polarizing issues, to a focus on discussion. Speech departments offered courses in discussion based on his ideas, which also influenced the forum movement that sought to adapt the town hall meeting tradition to urban settings. The forum movement peaked in the 1930s, when more than a million people participated in a single year. Soon afterward the Cold War, and especially the activities of the House Un-American Activities Committee, created a political atmosphere that was considerably less friendly to open discussion, and the forum movement died out. By the time that deliberative democracy theory began to emerge around 1980, this earlier moment of deliberative innovation had been largely forgotten.42

i v. t h e o r i es o f re p ub l ica n ism a nd d e l i b e r at i ve de m o cr a cy A body of scholarship focused on classical republican thought connects the deliberative experiments of the Deweyan period to contemporary deliberative democracy theory. In The Human Condition (1958) and On Revolution (1963) Hannah Arendt argued that the classical world provided an understanding of political life and a set of civic practices that deserved to be recuperated. She found classical ideals of the vita activa well represented in American Revolutionary activism and powerfully expressed in the writings of John Adams, the most Ciceronian of the founders. Arendt’s philosophical work helped spark an extended discussion among historians of the Revolution including Gordon Wood, Bernard Bailyn, and J. G. A. Pocock, who assessed the impact of classical republican thought on the founding generation.43 In 1997 Philip Pettit published a major new articulation of republican

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theory in Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government. A political theorist rather than a historian, Pettit was little concerned with the history of republican ideas; instead, he sought to reinterpret them in a manner that would contribute to contemporary civic life. He identified nondomination as the defining principle of republican theory and, citing Cass Sunstein, linked the political enactment of non-domination to deliberative democracy theory. Pettit emphasized that the “republic of reasons” that links classical republicanism to Renaissance humanism and the early American republic has as its central assumption the regulative ideal of deliberative democracy in which “public matters are decided by deliberation on the basis of considerations that have common appeal . . . and agreement serves as a regulative ideal as to how things should be decided.” The “conversational, deliberative” side of politics depends for its success on the language that is available for framing political discussion. A major advantage of republicanism, Pettit contended, is that its emphasis on non-domination fosters citizens’ ablility to articulate grievances and resist efforts to oppress them. Republican thought promotes “contestatory democracy,” which gives a central function to civility (defined in part as civic engagement, including the articulation of shared grievances) and emphasizes the place of deliberation.44 Like Pettit, deliberative democrats pursue the emancipatory project of self-rule by articulating norms and building institutions within civil society to realize those ideals. In an important definition Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson characterized deliberative democracy as involving “free and equal citizens (and their representatives) [who] justify decisions in a process in which they give one another reasons that are mutually acceptable and generally accessible, with the aim of reaching conclusions that are binding in the present on all citizens but open to challenge in the future.” Over the past thirty years proponents of deliberative democracy have explored the conditions best suited to fulfill this goal. Their studies can be divided into two basic types: those concerned with the institutions that will foster collective decision making at the local level, in national politics, and in the global arena; and those focused on the communicative dynamics that are necessary for inclusive and result-oriented deliberation.45 Recent works on the institutional requirements of deliberative democracy have stressed a decentered approach to deliberation that differs from popular sovereignty understood in terms drawn from Jean-Jacques Rousseau as the rule of a unified people whose will can be identified through the deliberations of a representative body and expressed as law. As Iris Marion Young argued in Inclusion and Democracy (2000), the “centered im-

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age of deliberative democracy implicitly thinks of deliberative process as one big meeting at the conclusion of which decisions are made, we hope justly.” A decentered approach offers instead a “norm-guided communicative process of open and public democracy . . . across wide distances and over long times, with diverse social sectors speaking to one another across differences of perspective as well as space and time.” The “centered” image puts great weight on state deliberative bodies such as Congress, while “decentered” deliberation resembles Chevalier’s multimedia forum.46 Young offered a general theory of deliberative democratic practice that operates at local, regional, and global levels as well as national ones; meanwhile other scholars focused on specific institutional expressions of deliberative ideals. Cass Sunstein evaluated how constitutional designs contribute to democratic deliberation. Bruce Ackerman and James S. Fishkin provided a complementary focus on ways to enhance the electoral process, proposing a national “deliberation day” and outlining a system of citizens’ deliberations. Fishkin developed “deliberative polls” and tested them in various contexts around the globe. The Deliberative Democracy Handbook (2005) draws from Europe, Australia, and Brazil as well as the United States to describe a variety of local deliberation-promoting institutions, such as planning cells, Citizens Juries, and town meetings.47 In Democracy across Borders (2007) James Bohman explored the conditions of multiform global public spheres and the development of a “transnational democracy” that extends the ideals and practices of deliberative democracy. He examined the resources that deliberative theory offers to “a new normative and conceptual understanding of democracy and its political geography,” underscoring the influence of what he terms “republican cosmopolitanism,” and considering how “republican principles and arrangements could be applied across borders.” Contending that the most basic human right is the right to initiate deliberation, Bohman argued that the principles and arrangements derived from republican cosmopolitanism should constitute “a reflexive order” where “people deliberate together concerning both their common life and the normative and institutional framework of democracy itself.”48 While these works consider the institutional structures that promote deliberation, others focus on language and communicative dynamics. In Democracy and Disagreement (1996) Gutmann and Thompson approached deliberative democracy as an ideal environment where members of a heterogeneous society can negotiate moral differences. Moral conflict is inevitable and not merely an effect of an unjust social system, they argued, listing four reasons: scarce resources lead to competition, people have a

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limited capacity for generosity, they hold incommensurable values, and they lack full understanding. Contending that conflicts are inevitable, Gutmann and Thompson aspired to create the conditions for civic discussions that would provide a means to achieve generally acceptable resolutions to those conflicts. They outlined three deliberative conditions (reciprocity, publicity, and accountability) and three substantive principles (basic liberty, basic opportunity, and fair opportunity) that foster deliberations meeting their criteria for democracy.49 Reciprocity is a particularly salient feature of their approach to deliberative democracy: “If citizens publicly appeal to reasons that are shared, or could be shared, by their fellow citizens, and if they take into account these same kinds of reasons presented by similarly motivated citizens, then they are already engaged in a process that by its nature aims at a justifiable resolution of disagreement” (25). They claimed that even the most seemingly intractable moral debates, such as conflicts over abortion, lend themselves to a justifiable resolution of disagreement following their approach. Reciprocity can be achieved if citizens cultivate mutual respect in political settings. Such reciprocity requires a certain kind of character based on cultivable moral traits including civic integrity, which is built on consistency in speech, consistency between speech and action, and integrity of principle; and civic magnanimity, which involves a willingness to acknowledge others in speech and a commitment to remain open minded (81– 84). The deliberative character that manifests civic integrity and magnanimity is embodied in individuals “who are morally committed, self-reflective about their commitments, discerning of the difference between respectable and merely tolerable differences of opinion, and open to the possibility of changing their minds or modifying their positions” (79) given sufficient reason. Acknowledging that the attributes that they identify with civic integrity do not develop spontaneously, Gutmann and Thompson suggest that these traits should be learned and valued. Education holds a central place in creating the conditions for democratic deliberation. “Democracy cannot thrive without a well-educated citizenry,” Gutmann and Thompson wrote in Why Deliberative Democracy? (2004), and “the school system in a democracy appropriately aims to prepare children to become free and equal citizens” (35). The specific nature of this education has occasioned some dispute. Russell Bentley has suggested that the civic education that Gutmann and Thompson consider essential to the success of deliberative democracy could be considered invasive, in that it privileges reciprocity as a moral principle that is not itself subject to deliberation. He suggested instead that civic education should

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involve training in rhetoric, asserting that “the best defense against the abuse of power is the wide distribution of power. Since rhetoric is a form of power and since it can be taught, it follows that it should be taught.” By giving people more equal access to the linguistic tools that rhetorical training provides, he suggested, we level the deliberative playing field without demanding specific ethical commitments. As we shall see, this argument recasts arguments offered by proponents of elocutionary training in the early years of the American republic.50 Young included rhetoric along with greeting and narrative in her discussion of inclusive political communication. Addressing Jürgen Habermas’s communicative ethics, she joined a chorus of critics who argue that the norms of rational expression are defined by certain powerful social groups and have the effect of excluding people. These critics commonly stress that emotional expression can contribute valuable insight to political dialogue. Drawing on the work of Emmanuel Levinas, Young found an instance of Gutmann and Thompson’s principle of reciprocity in greeting, which is a verbal form that functions to “assert discursive equality and establish or re-establish the trust necessary for discussion to proceed in good faith” (60). Against Habermas’s Kantian hostility toward rhetoric, Young argued that rhetoric “constitutes the flesh and blood of any political communication” (65). The rhetorical features of language that Young highlighted include its emotional tone; the use of figures of speech and the attitudes or styles that such figures produce, such as humor or irony; nonverbal modes of expression, including visual media like banners or street theater; and attention to audience, which requires that speakers consider the potential response from listeners. Young’s goal in making people aware of the rhetorical aspects of political communication was to encourage more thoughtful choices of expressive style as well as greater self-awareness about one’s response to the styles of others. Narrative, Young’s third form of inclusive language, provides a means to introduce rich forms of knowledge into deliberations. Stories can offer a radically condensed source of moral insight and experience that would not be readily available by other means. Narrative “exhibits the situated knowledge available from various social locations, and the combination of narratives from different perspectives produces a collective social wisdom not available from any one position” (76). Scholars from a variety of fields, including philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum, historian Lynn Hunt, and political theorist Robert E. Goodin, have made similar arguments about the value of narrative for understanding other perspectives and cultivating deliberative democracy. They suggest that literary narrative makes a range

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of perspectives imaginatively present to citizens of mass democracies, creating an internal deliberation that can importantly supplement the public deliberations of civic life. Literary works can contribute to deliberative democracy in other ways, notably by fostering modes of reading that are attentive to the dynamics of deliberation, as I develop in later chapters.51 One important challenge to deliberative democracy theory has come from activists who see resistance and protest as the major vehicles of modern democratic politics, often tracing the roots of such movements to the anti-slavery activism of the early nineteenth century. Young noted two central differences between deliberative and activist models of citizen virtue: activists believe that existing social, economic, and political institutions are so deeply flawed that they cannot be reformed within the existing rules; furthermore, activists are “often propelled by anger or frustration,” particularly with those in power, and refuse to deliberate with individuals or groups that they feel are in some way corrupt. The problem as they see it is not only that meaningful agreement cannot be achieved, but that it should not be achieved under existing institutions. Viewed in this light deliberative democrats appear overly conciliating and willing to compromise, as well as excessively calm and moderate. Dissent and critique, not dialogue and persuasion, are the privileged speech acts of the activist.52 Pettit’s theory of republicanism provides a partial framework for balancing protest and deliberation. “Contestatory democracy will have to be deliberative,” he observed, because if there is to be “a systematically available basis for people to challenge what the government does” (277), it must be built on shared values and concerns. Without such a common framework of values and institutions, contests can become irresolvable conflicts. Pettit’s theory of republicanism addresses questions that emerged with sharp clarity in the two decades that are at the core of my study. What principles for choosing between oppositional and deliberative strategies are available if the ideal of freedom as non-domination is to be achieved? What place do nonnegotiable, transcendent values and jeremiad-like rhetoric have in establishing that freedom? How are such absolute values to be accommodated within a deliberative framework? Modern republicans argue that the rule of law can foster freedom as non-domination, but as the evolution of American slave laws clearly revealed, and as critical legal theorists and critical race theorists continue to argue today, that is often not the case.53 How can a non-dominating system of law be established, implemented, and defended in a setting where domination is clearly present? The modern republic is dynamic and open to “newly emerging or newly clarifying interests and ideas” (Pettit 276). What are the most ef-

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fective means of advancing these new interests and ideas? How do dissent and deliberation function in bringing them forward? The two decades following 1815 that I focus on in the succeeding chapters illuminate the terrain shared by republicanism and deliberative democracy. It was during this period that deliberation began to be imagined as a democratic form of republican self-governance and a defining characteristic of American civil society; yet even as deliberative ideals were being redefined to be more inclusive, the limits of deliberation were exposed and oppositional strategies emerged to challenge them. These were the years when deliberative self-governance was expanded and put to the test, and when the insufficiency of existing institutions, abilities, and attitudes produced a crisis that resulted in civil war. The conditions for this breakdown developed more than two decades before the war began, as the founding generation’s hope that slavery could be ended through deliberation and consensus building crashed against new economic circumstances, old prejudices, and the realities of a political system ill equipped to realize the promises of deliberative democracy. My story of this unfolding begins in the following chapter with Atlantic world debates over the nature of the modern republic that took shape after 1815, when deliberation emerged as a defining feature of the American republic.

S Two MODERN REPUBLICA NIS M IN T HE ATL ANTIC WO R L D

i . t h e e l oque n ce of m ode rn republic anism The modern republic was still a relatively new and inchoate form in 1825 when Daniel Webster spoke at Bunker Hill about the experiments in self-government that had been the subject of a vigorous transatlantic conversation for some five decades. Webster described how the ideal form of government had first been discussed and debated, then fought over for many years. Drawing on the precedents of Greece and Rome as well as the experience of Great Britain, the Italian city-states, and the Swiss republics, the leaders of the American and French Revolutions had introduced republicanism on a grand scale in Atlantic world politics. Finally a more peaceable era had arrived in which it became possible to evaluate the improvements in human liberty and happiness. Three decades after the fall of the Bastille and the drafting of the United States Constitution, these two experiments in modern republicanism had reached very different outcomes.1 By 1820 the first French republic was regarded as a distant failure, an exercise in terror and reaction that ended with Napoleon’s empire followed by the restoration of the Bourbon monarchy. Not until 1848 would another French government call itself a republic, and only with the Third Republic, established in 1870, would France have a republican government that lasted decades instead of mere years. Though the First Republic had ended in 1804, republican ideals remained alive in France, woven into liberal advocacy for a constitutional monarchy led by General Lafayette. In this same period the republican governments of the United States, both state and federal, had demonstrated considerable resilience. They had survived a second war with Britain, a secessionist movement in New England, and a diplomatic crisis over piracy in North Africa. The recent Missouri Compromise had resolved the first major conflict over

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slavery since the Constitutional Convention, and partisan conflict was at an ebb.2 France and the United States were not the only experiments in modern republicanism during these years. Elsewhere in the Atlantic world Jean Pierre Boyer headed the Haitian Republic, which in 1822 was significantly enlarged when it reunited with the Kingdom of Haiti. Boyer’s predecessor Alexandre Pétion had provided crucial support to the independence movement led by Simón Bolívar, who made abolition an important mandate for the emerging multiracial Spanish American republics. Republicanism was on the move in Europe as well during these years. Spain’s republican forces won concessions from Ferdinand VII, while the Carbonari plotted to resist counterrevolutionary monarchs in a number of European countries, sparking nationalist movements that often contained a republican element. And in 1821 the start of the Greek revolution gave the Atlantic world a popular republican cause that knitted together the history of classical republicanism with modern resistance to counterrevolution and imperialism.3 The contours of modern Atlantic world republicanism as it existed in 1820 can be glimpsed in three orations delivered by Bolívar, Lafayette, and Webster between February 1819 and December 1820. Oratory is the preeminent genre of republicanism, and many of the major formulations of modern republican thought were initially presented in orations like these, which were later circulated in letters, newspaper accounts, and pamphlets reaching national and international audiences.4 The occasions for these three speeches were important to their republican meaning: Bolívar’s speech to the constitutional convention at Angostura and Lafayette’s speech to the French legislature were deliberative addresses, while Webster’s commemorative oration presented the landing at Plymouth and the creation of deliberative bodies as central to the national and global histories of republicanism. Their orations present a spectrum of beliefs and proposals regarding the modern republic that reflects different histories, populations, and institutions. Following the imperative set out by Baron de Montesquieu in The Spirit of the Laws (1748), Bolívar, Lafayette, and Webster each argued that the laws should reflect a society’s distinctive features.5 When in early 1819 Bolívar addressed the delegates who had assembled at Angostura to revise the Venezuelan Constitution of 1811, he proposed measures that would accommodate republican ideals to the needs of the politically inexperienced and racially diverse people of Spanish America. Later that year in Paris Lafayette confronted the rising forces of counterrevolution from

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his seat in the Chamber of Deputies, where in late 1819 and early 1820 he spoke repeatedly against anti-liberal, anti-republican government proposals. His efforts culminated on May 27, 1820 with his speech “Sur le projet de loi relatif aux élections,” which expressed his understanding of popular sovereignty as the republican foundation of a constitutional monarchy. In December 1820 Daniel Webster offered a portrait of New England institutions and practices that contributed to republican governments in the United States. Speaking at Plymouth on the bicentennial of the Puritan landing, Webster suggested that New England might lead the nation and the Atlantic world to more fully embody republican ideals. Read together, these orations offer a deliberation on the nature of modern republicanism in Europe and the Americas.6 This is a deliberation that continues today. The United States and France have long advanced rival claims to authorize the modern republic. The French republican tradition as it has developed since 1789 is anchored in an abstract understanding of the citizen body imagined as homogeneous and egalitarian. Today these values are interpreted to require social and cultural integration, grounded in secularism and a universalistic understanding of civic identity.7 The American democratic liberal republic has often been more open to religious and ethnic diversity and more focused on the individual than the French republic has been. Contests over the scope of state and federal power introduce complications unknown in France. A third republican model was put forth in the 1990s by Venezuela’s President Hugo Chávez as he pursued the “Bolivarian Revolution,” which included renaming his country the República Bolivariana de Venezuela and building alliances with the Islamic Republic of Iran and the Republic of Cuba. These republics emphasize their basis in popular sovereignty, though they understand that concept differently than it is understood in the American and French republican traditions. As we shall see, Bolívar sought to reconcile diversity with unity, balancing the different imperatives of the two major republican models. The historical circumstances and ideological debates surrounding the emergence of modern republicanism in the Atlantic world of 1820 continue to shape present realities.8

} The commemorative oration that Webster delivered at the bicentennial celebration of the landing at Plymouth on December 22, 1820, is a major formulation of modern republicanism. Placing himself in a line of thinkers who considered the nature of republics in a comparative historical framework, Webster described a set of foundational values, related those values to regional and national publics, and framed a tradition based on

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memory and sentiment. John Adams, an admirer of James Harrington and one of Webster’s central influences, was in the audience that December day at Plymouth. Adams had examined a range of historical and contemporary republics in A Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America (1787), categorizing the ancient Greek and Roman and modern Italian and Swiss states as “democratical,” “aristocratical,” and “monarchical republics,” and advocating the modern republicanism of the United States. As the principal author of the Massachusetts Constitution of 1780, and as a member of the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention that was then underway, Adams influenced Webster’s characterization of the modern republic in another way. The Massachusetts convention was one of the many state conventions held during these years to ensure that state constitutions fulfilled article 4, section 4, of the United States Constitution: “The United States shall guarantee to every State in this Union a Republican Form of Government.” This provision of the Constitution articulates the relationship between the state and federal governments in terms of the preservation and development of republican self-governance. Among the major points of interest at the Massachusetts convention were two of particular concern to Adams and Webster: should property requirements for suffrage be loosened? And should the state’s religious establishment be scrapped? Other states were revising their constitutions to broaden the suffrage and separate church and state. As recently as 1818, Connecticut had disestablished its state church, leaving Massachusetts as the sole surviving instance of state-mandated church membership in the United States. Both property qualifications and official religion bore on the nature of the modern republic as Webster described it.9 Webster considered republicanism from the vantage point of colonization and identified the institutions that had fostered republican mores in New England. Comparing Plymouth to Marathon, the scene of the Greek triumph against Persia that ushered in a period of territorial extension and economic and cultural growth under Pericles, Webster described both sites as origin points for social and political developments of worldhistorical importance. Acknowledging that religious rather than political concerns were primary for the Plymouth colonists, he nevertheless insisted that “many of them were republicans in principle” (12) and that Puritanism had influenced their descendants’ concepts of “government, laws, and property” as well as “religion and civil liberty” (14). For Webster the central distinction between the Greek colonies and the colonies of New England was moral and intellectual. The Greek colonists lacked the “spirit and intelligence” to “give a new and important direction to human

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affairs, or a new impulse to the human mind” (16 –17). By contrast, the settlements of British North America represented the convergence of “the settlement of a new continent” with “an age of progressive knowledge and improvement” (17), allowing them to uniquely advance human culture beyond anything accomplished by the Greeks. Webster found fewer parallels with the Roman colonies, which served principally as territories for Romans to exploit. Implying a similarity between Rome and Great Britain, he also noted a difference, observing that “it was not given to Rome to see, either at her zenith or in her decline, a child of her own, distant, indeed, and independent of her control, yet speaking her language and inheriting her blood, springing forward to a competition with her own power, and a comparison with her own great renown” (18). Britain’s West Indian colonies provided a closer analogue to the Roman colonies. They served as a resource for capital investment and the exploitation of slave labor rather than being considered “home” (20). The West Indian colonies consequently suffered from a fluctuating population and a lack of social, cultural, and economic development. The Pilgrims by contrast arrived at Plymouth intending to settle permanently and with their institutions already in place. These institutions extended certain features of English life but were adapted to diasporic circumstances.10 Webster identified widely held property, deliberative and representative government, an educated citizenry, and Christianity as the features of New England life that characterized his ideal of the modern republic. He claimed that the regulation of inheritance was among the central supports of republican government, and, noting the recent reform of property laws in France, he cited Harrington on the importance of distributing property widely as a means to prevent domination by a monarch or aristocracy. Rather than eliminate property requirements for the suffrage, he argued, it was best to base the suffrage on property ownership and make it easy to acquire, for when “the people possess the property” as in New England “they can have no interest to overturn a government which protects that property by equal laws” (39). New England republicanism further combined widespread experience with deliberative self-government and a commitment to a representative system. Sounding a note that Alexis de Tocqueville and John Dewey later echoed, Webster celebrated the local administrations of New England and singled out for particular praise the town hall meetings: “They are so many councils or parliaments, in which common interests are discussed, and useful knowledge acquired and communicated” (40). Webster praised Rome’s representative system while scorning the Grecian republics for

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their direct democracy. He quoted Cicero’s Oratio Pro Flacco on the contrast between the Greeks, who were “governed by the rashness of the assembly while sitting,” while the Roman system allowed for full deliberation “by the different ranks, classes, and ages.”11 Webster nonetheless distinguished modern American republicanism from the ancient Roman variety, noting that Rome’s distribution of power between patrician and plebeian orders produced “a disputatious, an uncertain, an ill-secured liberty” because the orders functioned as “hostile powers, in perpetual conflict.” In the United States, representation was divided into chambers “by difference of age, character, qualification, or mode of election, to establish salutary checks, in governments altogether elective” (41). These differently constituted bodies avoided the fixed oppositions of Roman politics, while a representative system fostered the temperate deliberation that Webster believed was essential to a successful republic. A fourth distinguishing feature of New England republicanism was the central role played by education, which developed the skills necessary for deliberative self-government. Support for free schools and universities fostered literacy and substituted for an extensive penal code “by inspiring a salutary and conservative principle of virtue and of knowledge in an early age” (42). “Moral habits” were further cultivated by “religious principle,” specifically Christianity. “Whatever makes men good Christians, makes them good citizens” (44), Webster averred. While noting room for improvement in each area, Webster concluded that these characteristics of New England life—widely held property, representative government that privileged deliberation, an educated citizenry, and Christianity— defined a model form of the modern republic. Webster advocated for New England as the origin of modern republicanism in competition with the rival southern states, which dominated the federal government in its early years. Southern leaders presented their own model of American Englishness, and it was against their “cavalier” definition in particular that Webster contended. Domination and force played a more accepted role in Southern political culture than in Webster’s New England tradition. Webster has been criticized as an advocate of Anglo-American supremacism, but the major supremacist strain in Webster’s oration is one of region, not of race. His advocacy for New England republicanism as the most promising version of English diasporic identity was based on his analysis of the institutional and social requirements for a successful modern republic, which he believed should be commercial, Christian, and deliberative.12 Some months before Webster spoke at Plymouth, Simón Bolívar of-

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fered his recommendations for a new Venezuelan constitution to the convention at Angostura. In his address he catalogued the differences between Venezuela and the United States and explained why Great Britain provided his principal contemporary model for the modern republics that he sought to found in the southern hemisphere. As Webster did at Plymouth, Bolívar identified the salient features of his society and described a set of institutions that would be both republican, in the sense that they derived legitimacy from the Venezuelan people, and modern, in that they addressed the distinct features of a post-imperial, multiethnic, commercial state. But where Webster traced a continuous evolution of republican institutions from the Puritan colonists to the founding of the United States, Bolívar stressed the absence of a republican inheritance for the former Spanish colonies. He looked to Britain’s constitutional monarchy as a model to be imitated rather than an ancestor to be surpassed. The first Venezuelan Constitution had been based on the Constitution of the United States, and the decentralized government it created quickly crumbled before the onslaught of Spanish imperial forces. Among the features that Bolívar recommended for the new constitution designed to strengthen the state were a hereditary branch of the legislature modeled on the British House of Lords; an appointive executive with a life term that combined features of a president and a monarch; and an institution of moral governance similar to those of Athens, Sparta, and Rome. Bolívar based his proposals on his knowledge of republicanism as a historical theory and practice, choosing elements from ancient and modern republics that he believed best suited Venezuela’s needs for stability and order.13 Bolívar preferred the British constitutional monarchy to the democratic republicanism of the United States in part because Spanish Americans lacked the formative experience of self-government that the British North American colonies had enjoyed. Spanish imperial policy had permitted only peninsular Spaniards to hold offices in the colonial administration. Citing Montesquieu, Bolívar stressed the differences between English America and Spanish America, and he argued further that even people as well prepared for self-government as the citizens of the United States were unlikely to sustain the balance of liberty. Though the “morality of Nature” favored human liberty, no state had maintained it for long. Democracies were short-lived, while aristocracies and monarchies established empires and achieved “power, prosperity, and permanence” (178). Asserting that “the people of North America are a singular model of political virtue and moral rectitude,” and noting further that the “nation was cradled in liberty, reared on freedom, and maintained by liberty alone,” he neverthe-

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less concluded that “so weak and complicated a government as the federal system” was unlikely to survive (179). Bolívar particularly emphasized the challenges of forming a republic out of a population marked by sharp racial and caste distinctions. The differences between Venezuela and the United States in 1820 were substantial. The 1820 United States Census reported a population of roughly 9.5 million that was 81.6 % white and 18.4% black, with 86.8 % of the black population enslaved. By contrast, at the end of the colonial period the Venezuelan population of 800,000 was half mixed race, nearly 9% black, and 15% Indian, with the remaining 26% composed of creole and other groups. Bolívar had experienced the ways that conflicts among racially defined groups had complicated the war for independence from Spain. He approached his proposed changes to the 1811 Constitution through a series of careful racial distinctions: “We are not Europeans; we are not Indians; we are but a mixed species of aborigines and Spaniards. Americans by birth and Europeans by law, we find ourselves engaged in a dual conflict: we are disputing with the natives for titles of ownership, and at the same time we are struggling to maintain ourselves in the country that gave us birth against the opposition of the invaders” (175 –76). Under such challenging circumstances, he concluded, centralizing reform was essential to the success of the Spanish American republics.14 Bolívar emphasized the absence of a Venezuelan national spirit and looked to Great Britain for its ability to foster imperial order in a republican framework. He told the delegates that he embraced only the “republican features” of the British Constitution, then elaborated: “Can a political system be labelled a monarchy when it recognizes popular sovereignty, division and balance of powers, civil liberty, freedom of conscience and of press, and all that is politically sublime? Can there be more liberty in any other type of republic? Can more be asked of any society?” (185). In advancing the British Constitution as a model, Bolívar urged the delegates to incorporate a monarchical element (a life-term, non-hereditary, appointive executive) along with an aristocratic one (a hereditary senate) in their revised constitution, with the aim of producing a more stable balance of power. Bolívar understood stability to be a first aim of the new constitution, indicating that the country was not yet ready for the deliberative self-government that Webster championed. Like Webster, Bolívar stressed the need to provide a moral foundation for republican government, and he understood the absence of strong moral institutions as a central reason for Venezuela’s political failures. The success of any republic depended on “love of country, love of law, and

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respect for magistrates,” he continued. Without them, “society becomes confused, an abyss—an endless conflict of man versus man, group versus group” (191). Drawing on Rousseau, he concluded that “chaos” could be averted only if “we fuse the mass of the people, the government, the legislation, and the national spirit into a single united body” (191).15 Earlier Bolívar had described the strong racial heterogeneity and indeterminacy that marked Venezuela: “It is impossible to determine with any degree of accuracy where we belong in the human family. The greater portion of the native Indians has been annihilated; Spaniards have mixed with Americans and Africans, and Africans with Indians and Spaniards. While we have all been born of the same mother, our fathers, different in origin and in blood, are foreigners, and all differ visibly as to the color of their skin” (181). Now he called for “unity, unity, unity” above all: “The blood of our citizens is varied: let it be mixed for the sake of unity” (191). It is in this context that he calls for popular education, and for secular institutions of “morality and enlightenment” (192) that would function in much the same way that Christian churches did for Webster.16 Official deliberative bodies could only succeed if they were supported by public deliberations. Schools and moral tribunals would be charged with educating youth and promoting “national enlightenment” by denouncing “ingratitude, selfishness, indifferent love of country, and idleness and negligence on the part of the citizens” (192). Bolívar’s recommendations to the Angostura convention largely failed. The delegates had little sympathy for his proposals about a life term presidency and a hereditary senate and ignored his plea for a moral tribunal. In 1826, he pursued his ideas about a strong central authority further in the Bolívarian Constitution that he wrote for Peru and Bolivia, where his ideas were ultimately put to the test. In 1820 the differences between France and the two American nations were even sharper than those between the United States and Venezuela. The United States was a relatively stable postcolonial republic; Venezuela was in the process of securing its independence and establishing a republican form of government. France by contrast had been a republic, then it had been an empire under Napoleon, and in 1820 it was a constitutional monarchy regulated by an ambiguous Charter. The Charter provided central guarantees of civil liberties to the French people, including freedom of the press and individual liberty, and established the laws governing elections. These provisions distinguished the new constitutional monarchy from the older, absolutist Bourbon regime, bringing it into line with republican standards of popular sovereignty. After 1815 Gilbert du Motier de Lafayette reentered French politics as a

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leader of the liberal movement after a long retreat from public life occasioned first by the rise of the Jacobins and then by his opposition to Napoleon.17 Elected to the Chamber of Deputies in 1818, Lafayette used his seat as a platform to advance liberal causes and oppose the counterrevolutionary efforts of the ultra-royalists, who regularly sought to pass measures that would strengthen the French throne at the expense of the Charter. He redoubled his efforts to protect the liberalizing achievements of the French Revolution after the Duc de Berry was assassinated in February 1820, prompting the government to introduce a series of repressive measures. Lafayette contested these measures in a series of important speeches on election law, press censorship, and individual liberties and offered his most comprehensive critique of the Bourbon regime in “Sur le projet de loi relatif aux élections.” Lafayette’s speeches before the Chamber of Deputies were delivered as part of the floor debates; consequently they lack the unity and argumentative development of Webster’s Plymouth oration and Bolívar’s address on the Venezuela Constitution. Resistance to oppression was one prominent theme, and Lafayette invoked Cicero as a republican hero who made his name resisting the encroachments of power (80). Lafayette coupled his allusion to the hero of classical republicanism with references to the storming of the Bastille and the Declaration of the Rights of Man in 1789, symbols of the monarchical republic that he favored over the Jacobin-led republic established in 1792. Like Bolívar, Lafayette characteristically refused to make a sharp distinction between republics and monarchies, noting that “there have been very oppressive republics, and a monarchy perhaps very free” (84). Following the tradition of French republicanism that had Rousseau as one source of inspiration, Lafayette preferred to distinguish a national government that united all citizens from a special or exceptional government that favored one group or social class over another.18 Lafayette’s position as an advocate of constitutional monarchy was complicated by the fact that he defended the Charter of 1814, which had been imposed by the foreign rulers who deposed Napoleon rather than endorsed by the French people, and which left considerable authority in the hands of the king. His emphasis on national government heightened his sensitivity to external influence, and he warned repeatedly of the threat to French autonomy and liberty from the Holy Alliance. In his May 27 speech Lafayette conceded the initial weakness of a Charter imposed by foreign armies but argued that it had been embraced by the French people because it protected them from counterrevolutionary efforts and guaranteed individual liberties. Recent attacks on those liberties had now culminated in

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the government’s plan to revise the system of representation, which Lafayette warned left open the door to despotism. Even as he acknowledged that there were systems of representation he admired more, including that of the United States, he cited popular support for the Charter as a reason to defend it. His effort to resist the government’s proposed reforms was not due to party intrigue, he insisted. Rather he sought to express the disquiet of “the people of the countryside, the cities, and the army,” which he urged the deputies to recognize and act to preserve “the nation and the throne” (83). He insisted on the Charter’s connection to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and argued that it should be used as a bulwark against monarchical authority.19 Lafayette’s speech shares with Webster’s Plymouth oration and Bolívar’s Angostura address an emphasis on youth. But where Webster and Bolívar highlighted the role of education and moral formation in the production of republican citizens, Lafayette saw young people as already “the hope of the fatherland” (84). In the peroration to his speech he invoked “our youth” as the guardians of the sacred principles and eternal truths of sovereign justice. Lafayette’s opponents criticized the educational system, which they believed gave insufficient attention to religion and morals. They saw the student unrest that had greeted the government’s proposals as a sign of domestic disorder and moral decay. Lafayette countered that the reform cause was embodied in the activism of young people who had been brought up to value liberal principles.20 These speeches by Webster, Bolívar, and Lafayette highlight a number of important features of modern republican thought as it had taken shape by 1820. Its contours were developed in a historical and comparative framework, with the Atlantic world as the locus of comparison and selfdefinition. The anti-imperial struggles in the Americas and the counterrevolutionary repressions in Europe tied the hemispheres together in a common political fate. So, too, did slavery and the African slave trade, and resistance to political oppression. Bolívar, Lafayette, and Webster all warned that the Holy Alliance and slavery threatened liberal republican values. They also shared the civic republican focus on the institutions that form active citizens and promote popular sovereignty. For Lafayette, the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the educational reforms of the revolutionary era had nurtured a generation of young people concerned to protect civil liberties. As a deputy he championed a third such institution, the French National Guard, which he helped revive in 1830. Bolívar turned to the ancient world to imagine a moral agency that would promote collective identity and civic mindedness in Venezuela. Webster found such in-

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stitutions already present in the churches, schools, and town halls of New England and believed they should be reproduced throughout the United States. While they shared a great deal, the three also faced strikingly different circumstances and weighed official deliberative bodies differently. The significance of race and class, region and economy, and revolution and counterrevolution varied for these modern republicans and distinguished their methods and goals from one another. Bolívar sought to unite a population deeply divided by race and class and lacking strong public institutions. Lafayette asserted that the French people were unified by their commitment to the rights of man and national autonomy. The main threats to the sovereign people came from the Holy Alliance from without and the forces of counterrevolution from within. In the United States, the threat that slavery posed to the federal union reflected differences over economic systems that related to emergent race and class identities. Webster believed that New England institutions offered the best solution to the puzzles of modern republicanism because they both fostered deliberation among citizens and provided a model for more robust deliberative bodies in the nation-state. He offered them as a model in the hope that the federal republic, whose fragility had been exposed in the slavery crisis of 1819 –20, might consolidate itself through their influence. For Webster, deliberative democracy promised to forge a radically different kind of national union than the type of consensus created by a powerful president, such as Bolívar proposed, or the constitutional monarch championed by Lafayette.

i i . t h e vi e w f ro m b un ke r hil l A few years after this imagined deliberation on the modern republic, the festivities surrounding Lafayette’s American tour and the fiftieth anniversary of the battle of Bunker Hill created real ties between the French revolutionary hero and Bolívar and Webster. Lafayette attended the Bunker Hill Monument dedication where Webster gave the keynote address in June 1825, and he helped Webster to lay the monument’s cornerstone. Shortly before he returned to France that September, Lafayette sent Bolívar a supportive letter together with some relics of George Washington provided by the late president’s grandson. Bolívar responded warmly, and the two men continued their correspondence until Bolívar’s death in 1830. Webster gave an important speech supporting Bolívar’s controversial Congress of Panama in 1826. He then invited the Liberator to join the Bunker Hill Monument society, and Bolívar accepted. These personal ex-

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changes were designed to forge a shared commitment to Atlantic world republicanism.21 In his commemorative address celebrating the battle of Bunker Hill, Webster stressed that the Union was an incomplete work of political imagination pursued in the face of many countervailing pressures. As the major instance of successful republican government at that time, the United States had a special obligation to protect its institutions. Webster brought the pressures of global exemplarity to bear in order to foster national integration and resist the forces of secession. If republican government should fail in the United States, he suggested, the only alternative was civil war in America and renewed tyranny throughout the Atlantic world. Republican unity could be promoted by commemorating those who fought in the Revolution and by surveying the post-revolutionary spread of republican ideals. The social and physical geography of Webster’s address moved simultaneously upward and outward to encompass all ranks from unnamed veterans to the aristocratic General Lafayette, and from regional battle sites to the entire Atlantic world, concluding with accounts of the revolutionary republican movements in Greece and Spanish America.22 Political integration rested on economic transformation. Touting the benefits of development in Europe and Spanish America, Webster celebrated the transformative power of mind to resolve differences and drive commercial growth. “Knowledge has, in our time, triumphed, and is triumphing, over distance, over difference of languages, over diversity of habits, over prejudice, and over bigotry. . . . Mind is the great lever of all things,” and knowledge renders “innumerable minds, variously gifted by nature, competent to be competitors or fellow-workers on the theatre of intellectual operation” (71). The results of this intellectualizing process included general improvement in the quality of food and clothing, more leisure, “more refinement and more self-respect” (71–72), better education, manners, and habits. For Webster, the process that historian Richard Bushman has described as “the refinement of America” was better described as the refinement of “the civilized and Christian world” (71).23 Refinement for Webster had less to do with gentility and nationality than Bushman suggests and was more tied to political transformation. “A real, substantial, and important change has taken place” as a result of revolutionary movements that on the whole have proven “highly favorable . . . to human liberty and human happiness” (72), he observed. He understood modern republicanism as a force for general economic and social improvement, even anticipating that “the growing influence of enlightened sentiment will promote the permanent peace of the world” (74). As the first formal

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battle of the Revolution, Bunker Hill was an important origin point for the political, economic, and social developments that defined the modern republic. Webster’s repeated insistence upon the specifically Christian nature of republican revolution reflected the belief that the French Revolution had spun out of control because of the anti-clerical and atheistic strains in Jacobin thought. He traced the different outcomes of the American and French Revolutions to the fact that “the possession of power did not turn the heads of the American people, for they had long been in the habit of exercising a great deal of self-control.” The “self-control” that the French people implicitly lacked but that Americans seemed to possess referred both to individual “character” (“sober, moral, and religious”) and to experience with “representative bodies and the forms of free government” (73). Webster echoed a theme from his Plymouth address, where he similarly argued that government of the self supported stable popular government. Webster’s interpretation of the limited and controlled nature of Protestant republicanism offered one influential explanation for the different trajectories of France and the United States.24 In addition to explaining past successes and failures, Webster addressed the fate of current republican movements. The Greek war for independence from Ottoman control had, since its beginnings in 1821, become a cause célèbre throughout Europe, and Webster worked to bring the fate of Greece to more prominent attention in the United States, noting the religious face of a conflict in which Christians resisted Muslim domination. He also embraced the cause of the new republics to the south, which were the subject of his Genesis-like story about a “new creation.” “The southern hemisphere emerges from the sea,” he enthused. “Its lofty mountains begin to lift themselves into the light of heaven; its broad and fertile plains stretch out, in beauty, to the eye of civilized man, and at the mighty bidding of the voice of political liberty the waters of darkness retire” (76). Webster invested the United States with aesthetic qualities and imaginative properties that crossed borders and united peoples. Even when complete, he acknowledged, the monument at Bunker Hill would be unequal to the task of representing the ideals of the American Revolution. He closed his address by calling for the country to “become a vast and splendid monument, not of oppression and terror, but of Wisdom, of Peace, and of Liberty, upon which the world may gaze with admiration for ever!” (78). In a passage that echoes the sublime image of textual excess that concludes the Gospel of John, Webster portrayed an influence that exceeds representation: “We know, that if we could cause this structure to

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ascend, not only till it reached the skies, but till it pierced them, its broad surfaces could still contain but part of that which, in an age of knowledge, hath already been spread over the earth, and which history charges itself with making known to all future times” (61). History itself has an agency and sentience here that transcends commemoration. Stone was an insufficiently numinous medium to effectively represent the global impact of the American Revolution, which Webster found to be better captured by metaphors of “energy,” “mind,” and “sentiment” (71). These components combined in the figure of “the electric spark of liberty” (70), a common figure from revolutionary-era political discourse that Webster identified with Lafayette, who had been a vector transporting republican ideals across the Atlantic. The electrical conductor was an apt metaphor for the man whom historian Lloyd Kramer has described as a “cross-cultural mediator” who transmitted news of revolutionary activities and united people in the republican cause.25 Lafayette had anticipated the international tone of Webster’s Bunker Hill Monument address when, in a welcoming ceremony held for him at the battlefield the previous year, he spoke about the impact of the events at Bunker Hill on three continents. The blood spilled on the hills outside Boston “called two American continents to republican independence” and awakened the nations of Europe to the importance of protecting popular rights. Resistance to oppression was not imprudent, as some of the sages of the time had warned, but a signal of the emancipation of humankind.26 Lafayette repeated these sentiments at the commemoration when he followed Webster’s speech and toast with a toast of his own: “Bunker Hill, and the holy resistance to oppression which has already enfranchised the American hemisphere,—the next half Century Jubilee’s toast shall be—to Enfranchised Europe.”27 Through the 1820s and until his death in 1834 Lafayette fulfilled his role as a mediator of republican ideals in part through correspondences with prominent political leaders including Webster; “Président Libérateur Bolívar”; Bernardino Rivadavia, the first president of Argentina; the British abolitionist Thomas Clarkson; Jeremy Bentham, a leading advocate of liberal reform; the presidents of Greece (Comte Capo-D’Istria) and Haiti (Boyer); and former and current U.S. presidents Jefferson, Monroe, and Adams.28 Lafayette took great interest in the constitutions of the emerging Spanish American republics. He was also concerned to see Haiti succeed and to advance the abolitionist cause. His letter to President Boyer in 1830 touches on some of his characteristic themes. There he observed that “the friends of humanity in all countries” were seeking the success of “your re-

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public,” and hoped that black colonists from the United States would find in Haiti “liberty, work, and happiness” (351–52). Lafayette’s tour of the United States in 1824 and 1825 was an occasion for building the formal alliances and symbolic practices of international republicanism. At the ceremonies that punctuated his travels the organizers highlighted the republican leaders and revolutions that they found most compelling. The celebrants at the Suffolk, Virginia, reception in March 1825 offered thirteen toasts, beginning with “Gen. George Washington” and “Gen. Lafayette” and including “Gen. Simon Bolivar—the patriot of South America, and the dauntless friend of civil liberty.” Lafayette responded with his own toast to the citizens of the region: “May they forever enjoy all the blessings of Republican institutions, and prosperous industry.” A few days later at Raleigh, North Carolina, the toasts once again included Washington and Lafayette in that order, followed by toasts to the Greek and South American revolutions as well as to the Spanish patriot Rafael del Riego, a leader of progressive forces in the Spanish Civil War of 1820 –23, and to “our revolutionary ally,” France. A similarly international scope marked the ceremonies in New Orleans in the distinctive greetings offered Lafayette by the French, Spanish, and “colored” communities. Speaking for the “men of Color,” their commander John Mercier assured Lafayette that “the brave men that I command . . . have arms always ready to defend their Country, and hearts devoted to you.” The Spanish delegation expressed its joy at “a sight of a hero, whose conduct, whose words and actions justify their liberal sentiments, and the course they have adopted of leaving a government that persecuted them, condemned them, and abandoned them to the risk of expatriation.” Lafayette sought to reassure these republicans frustrated by recent setbacks in Spain, where the European powers had conspired to restore the monarchy. He reminded them that they nevertheless had much to celebrate, for “already your noble language . . . has become an independent and republican tongue throughout an immense extent of this hemisphere.” Spain, too, would soon experience a return of “Liberty . . . to enlighten and fertilize” its soil.29 Interest in the Spanish and Spanish American revolutions was at a high point during the years of Lafayette’s tour. In 1823 President James Monroe’s State of the Union address expressed a federal policy of support for the newly independent republics of the south, warned the European powers against interference, and sought to cultivate a sense of hemispheric solidarity. In later years the Monroe Doctrine came to be understood as a quasi-imperial assertion of the United States’ efforts to control Latin

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America, but it was not originally promulgated or received in that way. Instead it was conceived initially as an assertion of support and of opposition to intervention by counterrevolutionary European powers. During the 1820s the relative future power and prominence of the American republics were by no means clear. Bolívar expressed skepticism about the long-term survival of the United States and envisioned a leading role for the southern republics as the primary American powers. Writing in 1822 Bolívar promoted a federal union that might rival the United States, and imagined the world-historical impact of a powerful, united America whose leadership was in the south.30 Bolívar planned the international Congress of Panama as a first step toward such hemispheric leadership. From January to April 1826 the U.S. Congress debated whether to fund a delegation to Bolívar’s Congress, and in these protracted and contentious debates the Liberator’s ties to Haiti and abolitionist agenda were of paramount concern to the measure’s opponents, as was the presence of men of color in the leadership of the southern republics. The Panama Congress also had powerful supporters in Congress, including Henry Clay, whose opponents accused him of fostering “South American fever,” and Webster, who embraced the South American revolutions as manifestations of republican ideals.31 Attesting to his “regard and sympathy” for the sister republics in his April 1826 speech to the House of Representatives, Webster celebrated their release from “the grinding bondage of a foreign power” and their ability to “rise from beneath oppression” and “to enjoy the proper happiness of their intelligent nature” (216). He remained silent on the delicate issue of abolition, fostering instead a hemispheric identification based on creole indigenousness by presenting the defeat of Spain as the retribution of native America when he gave voice to “the spirit of Montezuma and of the Incas” (216). Echoing his Bunker Hill Monument address from the previous summer, Webster claimed that “in the progress and the establishment of South American liberty, our own example has been among the most stimulating causes. . . . In the hour of bloody conflict, they have remembered the fields which have been consecrated by the blood of our own fathers; and when they have fallen, they have wished only to be remembered with them, as men who had acted their parts bravely for the cause of liberty in the Western World” (217). A few months later Webster issued his invitation to Bolívar to join the Bunker Hill Monument society. Meanwhile Bolívar and Lafayette continued the correspondence they had begun in 1825. There was an exchange of several letters in late 1826 and early 1827, during the time when Bolívar’s Peruvian Constitution was

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rejected and he temporarily made himself dictator. In a letter of December 16, 1826, before he learned of Bolívar’s actions, Lafayette wrote describing the growing separation in Europe between the increasingly republican public spirit and the kings and nobles who opposed republican sentiments. His subsequent letters registered dismay over Bolívar’s decision to make himself dictator but masked his concern with protestations of confidence in the Liberator’s commitment to republicanism. Lafayette also wrote to praise Bolívar for pronouncements or actions that signaled a return to republican government. Writing for “L’Europe libérale” on March 2, 1827, for example, Lafayette testified to the reestablished confidence that resulted from Bolívar’s “frank and republican declarations” and his appeal to “the sovereign deliberation of the people” (Mémoirs, vol. 6, 240). Lafayette wrote again on June 1, 1830 to reassure Bolívar that he did not impute to him a “vulgar ambition” (365). Making the by then familiar comparison of Bolívar to Napoleon, Lafayette insisted that the Liberator possessed a dedication to the cause of humanity that Napoleon, with his monomaniacal search for power, lacked, and contrasted again “the essentially republican” (365 – 66) American hemisphere with the current state of Europe. Lafayette repeated arguments that Webster and Bolívar had already made about the challenges faced by Spanish America that were unknown to British North America: a population brought up under the influence of despotism, of aristocracy, and of superstition about the mother country. In contrast, the Anglo-American colonies already had all the essential civic habits before they achieved independence, and it was this prior experience that allowed them to form “the very admirable representative system that has ever guaranteed human dignity, liberty, and prosperity” (366). Lafayette attributed the infamously authoritarian tendencies of Bolívar’s Bolivian Constitution to his impatience with anarchy, hypocritical populism, and civic incapacity. He also sympathized with Bolívar as a victim of calumnies, noting that similar rumors had circulated about himself (Mémoirs, vol. 6, 368). Lafayette seems in these letters to want to guide Bolívar toward the precedent of George Washington and away from a Napoleonic role. His efforts to steer his correspondents in a liberal rather than an authoritarian direction were sufficiently observed in his own day that Ralph Waldo Emerson remarked on them in a poem he recited before the Phi Beta Kappa society in 1834. Naming Washington and Bonaparte as the two modern leaders who “might challenge greatness on a Roman page,” Emerson contrasted the “patriot’s” with the “monarch’s heart” and described how both men had turned to Lafayette for support and validation. While

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Lafayette embraced Washington like “father and son,” Napoleon sought out Lafayette’s approval, only to find that he “sued to the great republican in vain.”32 In his deathbed proclamation issued just six months later, on December 10, 1830, Bolívar echoed several of Lafayette’s themes. Addressing the people in the newly established federation of Colombia, the Liberator assessed his achievements and defended himself from false assertions: “You have witnessed my efforts to establish liberty where tyranny once reigned. I have labored unselfishly, sacrificing my fortune and my peace of mind. When I became convinced that you distrusted my motives, I resigned my command. My enemies have played upon your credulity and destroyed what I hold most sacred—my reputation and my love of liberty. I have been the victim of my persecutors, who have brought me to the brink of the grave. I forgive them.”33 As Bolívar lay dying in 1830, across the Atlantic Lafayette was in the process of distancing himself from the government of Louis-Phillipe, whom he had helped to bring to power earlier in the year. Concerned that his presence in the July Monarchy would give the false impression that liberty was safe, he threatened to resign as head of the National Guard unless the king broadened the franchise and appointed new ministers. The king refused, and Lafayette stepped down. His actions allowed him to sustain his liberal reputation and his role as guardian of freedom until his death four years later. This event was marked on the floor of the United States Congress with a speech by former president John Quincy Adams, who celebrated Lafayette’s devotion to “the principle of republican justice and of social equality.”34 Also in 1830, Daniel Webster spoke the words that became his most powerful slogan and shaped the second half of his long political career. In his Second Reply to Hayne, Webster uttered the famous phrase “Liberty and Union, now and for ever, one and inseparable.”35 This speech marked a shift in Webster’s career. As we have seen, he first distinguished himself as a national figure through his engagement with international republican movements and his concern to place the history of the United States in the leading ranks of an Atlantic world transformation. Beginning in 1830, and culminating in his 1850 speech on the Compromise Measures, Webster became increasingly concerned with the vulnerable state of the American republic. The dynamics of modern republicanism were shifting. After Bolívar’s death the promise of the southern republics dimmed. Meanwhile in Europe class conflict emerged as a matter of increasingly pressing urgency. And in the United States the international, expansive

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phase of republicanism faded before a mounting sense of the American republic’s fragility.

i i i . w r i t i ng the m o de rn re p ub l ic As the orations by Bolívar, Lafayette, and Webster and the ties between them demonstrate, modern republicanism is deeply comparative and international. These dimensions of modern republican thought are highlighted in a series of essays on Atlantic world politics that the North American Review published between 1815 and 1835. The emerging political and intellectual elites who wrote for the Review, including Edward Everett and his brother Alexander Hill Everett, Jared Sparks, George Ticknor, and Webster himself, developed a comparative methodology that set American republicanism in a broad network of relations that highlighted its weaknesses as well as its strengths. They looked to the Spanish American republics and to Europe as they charted a course for the United States that fell between the extremes of tyranny and anarchy. The balance of liberty and order that they pursued drew on Greek and Roman examples but increasingly took contemporary republics as points of comparison. Bolívar’s ties to Napoleon resonated with their fears of Andrew Jackson’s imperial presidency, while the factionalism and volatility of the southern republics exacerbated concerns over the nullification movement. They celebrated Lafayette’s moderation, his commitment to end slavery, and his cosmopolitanism. The Review authors typically highlighted two related features of American republicanism that they believed enhanced the chances that the United States would avoid the fate of other modern republics: its English heritage as it had been adapted in New England; and the prominent role of deliberative bodies, which they believed contributed to popular selfgovernance and social stability. These emphases run through an otherwise diverse set of essays that are notable for their well-informed and nuanced approach to Atlantic world politics In July 1822 Webster’s Plymouth address was the subject of a full-length article by Caleb Cushing in an issue of the Review that also included a characteristic mixture of essays on Atlantic world topics such as the life of Rousseau, Europe from an American’s perspective, the journal of Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, and James Fenimore Cooper’s first novel, The Spy. Cushing, in his essay on the Plymouth oration, both praised and extended Webster’s historical analysis. He reinforced Webster’s argument that the distinctive aspects of the United States government derived principally from New England political practices and traditions, and he set that argu-

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ment in the context of Atlantic world politics during the age of exploration and colonization. In the first third of the article he quoted extensively from Webster’s speech, interspersing lengthy passages from the oration with exegesis elaborating such central points as the major features of New England government and the emergence of popular sovereignty in the framing of laws. Cushing shared Webster’s admiration for John Adams and mentioned approvingly Webster’s “ardent denunciation of the slave trade,” observing that it had “an effect on his audience like electricity.”36 The remainder of the article focused on what Cushing terms “antecolonial history,” the relatively neglected period between Columbus’s voyage and the settlement of Plymouth, “embracing the early intercourse of Europeans with our country, their voyages of discovery, commercial enterprises, and unsuccessful attempts to establish colonies in this quarter of the new world” (32). In this lengthy section he situated Webster’s claims for the Puritan origins of the American republic in a longer historical narrative of colonization. He considered the rival claimants to Columbus, including Norwegian and Danish explorers; examined early colonial efforts by France and Holland; discussed the Spanish imperial project and explained why Spain and Portugal never established colonies in New England; described the rise of English interest in American empire; and explained the different governmental forms of the English colonies. This account of the settlement of North America provides a historical frame of reference for many subsequent Review articles on Atlantic world politics. Beginning with the April 1822 issue the Review ran an important series of in-depth essays focused on the anti-imperial revolutions and constitutional experiments in the former Spanish colonies. Based on a range of works in Spanish published by presses based in Bogotá, Lima, London, Paris, and Valencia, these reviews offered a wide survey of the major events and individuals that dominated political life in the emerging southern republics and examined the social issues and political philosophies affecting them. They include essays on the politics of Mexico (1822, 1826, 1830), the politics of South America (1824), the alliance of the southern republics and the constitution of Colombia (both 1826), the insurrection in Colombia led by José Antonio Paez (1827), and two essays on the military career and political trajectory of Simón Bolívar (1829 and 1830). Collectively these essays are notable for their measured approach and for their serious assessment of events in Spanish America. They model the kind of deliberative decision making that the authors believed to be essential to republican success. Nathan Hale opened his 1822 article on Mexico by explaining that at the time of publication the United States had to decide whether to recognize

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the southern republics, which Congress did later that year. This decision required “grave and deliberate discussion,” and so “we shall proceed to lay before our readers a few statistical and economical statements, which may assist them in forming an opinion of its practical importance.” Hale assumed the reader’s general familiarity with the “long series of struggles and revolutions” in the south and drew on the works of Baron von Humboldt and R. H. Bonnycastle to present some less familiar facts about the region, its geography, population, economy, and social organization. One notable contrast between Mexico and the United States emerged in the discussion of the native populations. Mexico’s indigenous community had rebounded from the devastating years of colonization, Hale observed, while in the United States the native population was declining sharply. He attributed this difference to the peaceable values and agricultural occupations of Mexico’s natives, in contrast with the warlike habits and hunting economy of North America’s indigenous people. Noting Mexico’s elaborate system of race and caste distinctions, and the prohibitions against racial intermarriage, Hale emphasized an emergent strategy in the southern republics for addressing social conflicts: the creation of non-race-based forms of citizenship in a system dominated by a constitutional monarch or other strong centralized authority. The short-lived constitutional monarchy established by Agustín de Iturbide in the year that the article appeared made “all the inhabitants of New Spain, without distinction, Africans, Europeans, and Indians . . . citizens of the monarchy.” Hale criticized Iturbide’s unlimited authority, while echoing commonplace views about the south’s political limitations similar to ideas expressed by Bolívar: “We ought not to judge of his conduct by the standard of our republican notions, nor to forget that the people for whom he is called upon to act are not fitted by their education and character, and by the actual exercise of the privileges of freemen, either to govern themselves, or to be governed without the assumption of extensive powers in the chief magistrate.” Hale ended the essay on a note that resounded in Webster’s Bunker Hill Monument oration three years later, observing that Spanish American independence and the dismantling of the imperial system of mercantile economy would open a free trade system likely to benefit the United States.37 In July 1824 Jared Sparks produced a review essay titled “South America” occasioned by the publication of Luis López Méndez’s Observaciones sobres las Leyes de Indias, i sobre la Independencia de América. Sparks amplified a number of the points from Hale’s essay on Mexico while focusing fresh attention on the role of imperial and ecclesiastical law in shaping the south. Quoting long passages from López Méndez’s article on the incon-

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sistencies of the laws and their poor administration, Sparks concluded that they were not lacking in “theoretical wisdom,” but there was a “want of equilibrium between the several parts” and a lack of power to effect their intended objects. “Judicious rules of action” offered to the Spanish American authorities were fundamentally undermined by the investment of these authorities with a degree of power “the very nature of which places them above the law.” The worrisome tendency of the new republics to either seek out a unifying leader unconstrained by legal process, as was the case with Iturbide’s short-lived constitutional monarchy, or to splinter into factions led by local leaders in a system known as caudilloism, was one lasting effect of Spain’s imperial system. Despite this inauspicious legacy Sparks concluded that there was hope for the southern republics. Government by popular “choice and participation” is universally preferable to any form of despotism, which is at war with “human nature and the first principles of every social compact.” Nations may make mistakes but they will ultimately find their way to a viable form of popular government, wiser for their experiences. Sparks found hopeful signs in the fact that the Colombian Congress was emphasizing education, the constitution, and the law, as well as practical administration.38 Several of the other articles in this series assessed the political development of the southern republics. Sparks’s 1826 article “Alliance of the Southern Republics” celebrated the proposal for the Panama Congress as “among the most remarkable events of political history.” Unlike Europe’s counterrevolutionary Holy Alliance of monarchs and emperors, which continued to pose a threat to the Americas, the Panama Congress would be the first league of republics, surpassing its ancient Greek precursor in significance. Sparks compared Bolívar to Aratus, who expanded the Achaean League, which provided an important model of a trade and diplomatic union of states. He quoted from the Liberator’s circular announcement of the Congress describing its functions, namely, “to act as a council to us in our distresses, as a rallying point in our common danger, as a faithful interpreter of our public treaties when difficulties occur, and . . . as a mediator in all our differences.” He stressed the deliberative function of the body, noting that Bolívar invited governments “with the express design of establishing the confederacy, and proceeding in their deliberations, as the instructions and united wisdom of their parties might dictate,” and stating further that “the very essence of the confederacy will be a pledge to conduct their deliberations, and form their decisions, on principles of perfect reciprocity.” Claiming that “any close alliance, or active interference of the United States, would embarrass, rather than facilitate some of

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the most important deliberations of the Congress,” Sparks nevertheless recommended sending representatives who could observe and lend support to the proceedings. One of the delegates to the Panama Congress was the Revolutionary war veteran and minister to Colombia Richard Clough Anderson Jr., who died on the journey south. Earlier that year Anderson had published a Review article comparing the Colombian Constitution to the Constitution of the United States. He noted the Colombian Constitution’s relative strengths on some points, while finding it wanting in other areas.39 Cushing authored a two-part account of Bolívar’s life that appeared in January 1829 and January 1830, in the early months of Andrew Jackson’s presidency, in which he observed that Bolívar was “becoming a topic of deep, of fearful importance”: “Bolivar has been denounced in Buenos Ayres, Chile, and Peru, as an ambitious aspirant after universal power, aiming to terminate his career of victory by the conquest of all the free states of South America.” Noting that the Liberator was routinely compared to both Washington and Napoleon, and also that Bolívar had witnessed Napoleon’s coronation in Paris at an impressionable age, Cushing observed that it was at the moment of his writing uncertain whether the southern leader would ultimately be associated with “the Father of his Country, or with the fallen Conqueror and dethroned Usurper.” The first essay focused on Bolívar’s military career, ending with the attempt on his life in Kingston, Jamaica in 1815. In his second essay, Cushing paid greater attention to Bolívar’s political accomplishments and aspirations, and he cited five works on this subject that were published between 1826 and 1828 in the South American cities of Santiago de Chile, Guayaquil, Lima, and Bogotá, and in “Filadelphia,” the hub of Spanish-language political publication in the United States. Central to this analysis is an account of the 1819 Congress at Angostura and Bolívar’s speech there. Cushing in this speech found the seed of Bolívar’s subsequent political agenda, including his influential Bolivian Constitution, which manifested the paradoxical fact that the Liberator believed in “the dangerous nature of liberty.” This belief reflected not only his distrust of the Venezuelan people, but also his general preference for constitutional monarchy as revealed in his rejection of “a purely republican government” modeled on the United States Constitution and his embrace instead of the British Constitution. The fact that the hereditary legislators were to be called senators rather than peers, and that the powerful, appointed executive was to be referred to as a president rather than a king, were for Cushing distinctions without a difference. “It is impossible to see what should entitle his proposed government to be de-

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nominated a republic,” he observed, noting as well that “the whole scope of the address is to maintain the utter incompetency of the human race to subsist under a pure representative government.”40 Cushing found that these authoritarian principles were elaborated more boldly in the Bolivian Constitution, which passed the Congress of Bolivia in May 1826 without amendment, “as if it had been a charter granted by a sovereign prince to his subjects, instead of a plan of government submitted to a deliberative assembly for their consideration” (45). Bolívar justified his substitution of a “strong arm” for a “deliberative assembly” by arguing that a dictator was necessary to maintain “the tranquility of the state and security of private persons and property” (46). The writing was, so to speak, on the walls of his palace, which were decorated not with the memorials of Washington “transmitted to him with such kindly and respectful feelings”—presumably a reference to Lafayette’s gift—but rather with portraits and busts of Napoleon. Cushing linked the coronation of Napoleon that Bolívar had witnessed as a young man with the “appointed comedy” of Bolívar’s repeated resignations and the ensuing solicitations that he resume power. Cushing posed a stark contrast between such spectaclebased authority and the very different spectacle of the “self-moving deliberations of a free people, disposing of their own rights according to their own will” (49). Even the Congress of Panama, which the Review had greeted with so much hope, proved to be a disappointment. It met just once, on June 22, 1826, and then “vanished from the face of the earth,” its goal of establishing “a purer system of public law” a failure (51). Rumors circulating among Bolívar’s opponents in the south laid the blame at his feet, arguing that it was part of his “grand scheme of ambition . . . for establishing a military empire to embrace the whole of South America, or at least an empire uniting Colombia and the two Perus” (51). The wildest of these rumors described a plan attributed to Bolívar of “subdividing America into four states”: Mexico and Guatemala were to comprise one northern state and the United States a second; Brazil was a third state, and the remainder of the Southern states were to be absorbed into a grand empire headed by Bolívar. Cushing neither embraced nor disclaimed these rumors, but allowed them to add color to a portrait of Bolívar as an aspiring tyrant. By forcing the choice between anarchy and despotism, Cushing argued, Bolívar had helped undermine the idea of a popularly based constitutional order and the rule of law and substituted himself in their place, as in this quotation from one of his letters: “I myself am the rallying point of all who love the national glory and the rights of the people” (57). In 1830 when

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this article appeared, the echoes of debates over the expansion of executive power by President Andrew Jackson would have been apparent to any reader in the United States. During his two terms the former general whose opponents mocked him as “King Andrew” closed down the Second National Bank and superseded the Supreme Court’s rulings restricting Indian removal, basing these controversial actions on popular authority, and prompting fears for the deliberative branches of the Constitution. Much as with Bolívar, critics compared Jackson to Napoleon, warning that he would use his personal popularity to supplant the rule of law and the deliberative process that provided the basis of republican government in the United States. Further parallels between the United States and Spanish American republican experiments furnished a prominent theme in the July 1830 essay “Politics of Mexico,” in which William Bradford Reed focused on the debates over federal and centralized forms of republican government as they shaped events south of the border and implied a comparison to circumstances in the United States, where the nullification controversy that had erupted in 1828 over the tariff continued to rage. Noting that Mexico had undergone three violent changes of administration in the previous three years, as well as a series of local rebellions, Reed expressed the hope “that Mr. Jefferson’s theory of the salutary influence of frequent rebellions and political commotions may be sound.” Stating his fears that the United States would suffer similar social unrest, “civil war and bloodshed,” he urged his audience to “let us, in the true spirit of justice, view all attempts at the subversion of constituted authority with equal detestation.”41 Europe provided a second Atlantic world horizon for the Review. Between 1828 and 1831 the journal published three major essays on European politics, relating events in the Old World to the developments in the Americas. “Politics of Europe” (1828) opens on a grand note. Acknowledging that the period since 1815 had been “a season of tranquility” compared to the preceding quarter century, Alexander Hill Everett emphasized the vital political events that had unfolded. These included “the foundation of a numerous brotherhood of new nations in Spanish and Portuguese America, the establishment of representative governments in various parts of the continent of Europe, the four military revolutions in the Italian and Spanish Peninsulas, and finally the desperate and glorious struggle for national existence in Greece.” The southern republics had experienced “fatal dissensions,” he acknowledged, but he expressed confidence that Spanish America would remain independent and free, and that “this grand consummation will open a new and most auspicious chapter in human

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affairs.” Prospects for liberal government in Europe, by contrast, had suffered major setbacks, particularly in Italy and Spain. Everett focused on the polarized politics of France, where the royalists contended with the liberals, seeing there a bellwether of future developments on the continent. He particularly insisted that “France, if left entirely to herself, would become a republic.” The royalists drew their energy and support not from the people, but from the “the great despotic alliance of the Continent of Europe,” and Everett noted hopefully that Britain had recently retired from the alliance and embraced “the liberal system.” Two years later, in an April 1830 review on the politics of Europe, Everett described France as “a political volcano in a state of permanent eruption,” its fate thought to hold the political future of Europe in the balance.42 “The Prospect of Reform in Europe” appeared in July 1831, one year after the July Revolution of 1830 in France. In his analysis Edward Everett described these “momentous events” as part of an extended drama whose “first scenes were performed on this side of the Atlantic,” while “subsequent acts, with fearful disregard of the unities of time and of place, have been brought out on other continents, in disconnected societies of men, and after the original actors had passed from the stage.” A common human nature provided this fragmented political drama with moral and psychological unity: “Man was born for liberty,” Everett claimed; “he has faculties both of power and will, that fit him for it.” Moreover “civilization is but the growing progress of communities toward liberty, and liberty will triumph.” These shared features of human subjectivity and collective advancement explained why “one of the great elements of modern society is international sympathy.”43 Everett privileged the United States, and especially Boston, as the best exemplars of the popular system, claiming that “a more perfect democracy never existed” (181). At the same time he insisted that the United States was not as exceptional as was sometimes claimed. Regrettably, poverty and ignorance and crime and disorder existed there as elsewhere; “that Utopian equality of condition, assumed to be necessary to a republic, does not exist in town or country in the United States” (181). What distinguished the United States was its inheritance of and improvement upon English institutions and principles. Everett contested the idea that democracy was best exemplified on the frontier where wealth was more equal, noting that while frontier elections could be violent and disruptive such tumult was unheard of in Boston elections. This fact, Everett argued, demonstrated that wealth and democracy were not incompatible, and he argued that such a system could be reproduced in Europe, despite the great dispari-

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ties in wealth that characterized the continent. These conclusions placed a great burden on the United States. “It rests with us to make the popular system attractive and respectable. Our political errors will not only fall heavily upon ourselves, but they will, in the most exaggerated form, be held up to discountenance their imitation in Europe” (190). Behind this cautionary note sounds the dissonance of chaos and authoritarianism that had increasingly come to characterize the other American republics over the previous decade. The essay ends with an exhortation: “Let us show to the world, that blood is not the natural cement of liberal institutions; that the arts of society flourish under their influence, and that man is not the worst enemy of his neighbor or himself ” (190). Within France Lafayette stood for democratic republican principles, and during these years the Review published two articles about the Revolutionary general: one titled simply “Lafayette,” which appeared in 1825 during his tour of the United States; and a second titled “Lafayette in America,” which appeared in January 1830 and was inspired by the publication of Levasseur’s Lafayette en Amérique en 1824 et 1825 in Paris in 1829.44 In the 1825 review George Ticknor summed up Lafayette’s significance. The general demonstrated an unparalleled consistency, taking part in two revolutions in two hemispheres, while manifesting the same values in both. He embodied self-sacrifice, never acting from an impulse to promote himself. He consistently linked freedom with public order in open opposition to the Jacobins, and “Fayettism” came to be synonymous with adherence to the Constitution and the laws rather than support for the reign of clubs. The tricolored cockade that he created became an international symbol of emancipation in Spain, Naples, parts of South America, and Greece. He opposed slavery and supported a proposal to abolish titles of nobility, renouncing his own title of Marquis and adopting “General” as his preferred form of address. Nevertheless he protected the royal family when it was at risk and supported a constitutional monarchy. His “steady and temperate opposition” after the Bourbon restoration evinced his trust in “the progress of general intelligence and political wisdom throughout the nation, which he feels sure will . . . bring his country to the practically free government” (177) that he wanted for it. Ticknor highlighted Lafayette’s introduction of a motion for a convocation of popular representatives: it “was the first time that word was ever used in France, and marks an important step towards a regular, deliberative assembly” (156). Lafayette established the basis for moving France from constitutional monarchy to a republic based on deliberation. The central claims of Ticknor’s essay were repeated in Edward Ever-

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ett’s 1830 review, which similarly described Lafayette as “the calm, rational, ever consistent champion of freedom, a representative of the people in constitutional France” (219). In this and other essays for the Review, Everett analyzed the features of the modern republic, providing an unusually clear focus on its emotional and aesthetic dimensions, which he tied to specific cultural, social, and institutional histories framed by a comparative Atlantic world context. Closely allied with Webster, and a prominent political and cultural leader in his own right, Everett helped shape the aesthetics and politics of the early American republic. Everett compared Lafayette’s tour favorably with a Roman triumph, suggesting a contrast between the ancient imperial spectacle of heterogeneous peoples united by force and the modern spectacle of peoples united in homage to the hero of international republicanism. Lafayette’s visit had served above all to unite the disparate regions and peoples in the expanding United States, including the Catholic population of Louisiana, as well as Spanish patriots, Creek Indians, and a host of others. “There never was a simpler, juster movement of the people” (220) than the seemingly spontaneous preparations to receive the general. The ceremonies were “unpremeditated,” yet “the most rigid deliberation” (220) would not have changed or improved them. Hinting at the direction of French politics, which would erupt in anti-royalist revolution just months later, Everett described Lafayette’s similarly unifying effects on his countrymen and noted that “the feelings of men inspire their actions; public sentiment governs states; and revolutions are the outbreakings of mighty, irrepressible passions” (233).

} In the decades after the Treaty of Ghent and the battle of Waterloo, modern republics were created and recreated in the Americas and Europe. The speeches of Bolívar, Lafayette, and Webster examined here provide a framework of comparison among alternative republican projects on which the political essays in the North American Review elaborate further. This framework includes two central dimensions: constitutional design and the configuration of the state; and the formation of republican citizens through schools, churches, and moral tribunals, as well as considerations of property and racial diversity. Deliberation emerges as a significant feature of a republic but is weighted differently depending on social circumstances. Of the three orators, Bolívar gave deliberative bodies the least emphasis while stressing the need to form a unified body of citizens, in the manner of Rousseau. Lafayette presented the French people as already unified in support of liberal guarantees and republican self-government. He sought to protect these values from a resurgent monarchy while grad-

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ually introducing a larger place for deliberative bodies. Webster and the Review authors devoted the most attention to deliberative processes and institutions. In what were in part normative accounts addressed to national conflicts over sectionalism and executive power, they offered an idealized history of the American republic as an extension of New England traditions of civic discussion. All three speakers invoked the ancient republics, which had figured importantly in the era of the American and French revolutions, and which continued to offer both models and cautionary tales for the modern republics of the Atlantic world. As we will see in the following chapter, even as Bolívar, Lafayette, and Webster were outlining their distinct visions of the modern republic, the ancient Roman republic took on a new importance.

S Three MODELS O F AN CIE NT ELO Q UEN CE

i . res publica rediviva In 1819 news of an astounding discovery began to circulate in the intellectual and literary circles of the Atlantic world. Substantial portions of Cicero’s long-lost De re publica had been uncovered on a palimpsest of Augustine’s Commentary on the Psalms in the Vatican library by the library’s keeper, Angelo Mai. The Roman republic was very much on the minds of political thinkers in 1819. Bolívar cited Roman precedent for his model constitution at Angostura in February of that year, and the next year Lafayette and Webster compared modern republics to Rome in their orations. Mai’s remarkable recovery of Cicero’s principal political treatise fanned the flames of enthusiasm for Cicero in the United States and around the Atlantic world and marked modern republicanism with the Ciceronian stamp that it still bears today. Cicero was a crucial influence on conceptions of the republican subject and on republican aesthetics. His works on ethics and rhetoric, as well as his orations, were central to the tradition of humanistic education in both its classical and vernacular forms. In chapter one I discussed how deliberation provides a common thread connecting Cicero’s moral philosophy to his political theory. Here I want to stress how the early American republic’s aesthetics of deliberation developed in relation to his writings. Cicero served as a source for ideals of harmony, communal wellbeing, and wholeness that were threatened on the one hand by social conflict and disintegration and on the other by usurping authority. Cicero had addressed these twin threats of social fragmentation and an excess of state power in two famous groups of speeches: the orations against Catiline, and the Philippics. The relationship between part and whole likewise structured the textual reception of Cicero. The newly recovered fragments of De re publica were absorbed into an existing technique of read-

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ing Cicero in pieces and projecting a larger whole from the parts. These reading habits were fostered by pedagogical practices such as the use of commonplace books, a longtime mainstay of humanist pedagogy, as well as the more modern use of extracts in the elocution manuals that became widespread after 1800. Students were encouraged to absorb aphorisms and resonant passages, which might serve as a fund of shared knowledge that could be accommodated to their own personal and historical circumstances. As we shall see, Benjamin Franklin modeled a modern form of Ciceronian identity. The elocutionary movement adapted its approach to Cicero to the dramatic works of William Shakespeare, which were transformed into a prominent vernacular model of republican eloquence. By memorizing speeches from Shakespeare’s plays, young people learned the verbal and personal skills that were thought to make them good citizens of the republic: comfortably speaking in public, actively resisting oppression, and managing their own emotional lives while engaging the feelings of others. The Bible was a third major influence on the early republic’s culture of deliberation. The conflict and consensus that were central republican themes became prominent features of Protestant rhetoric as disestablishment spurred the proliferation of sects and sharp critique presented as prophetic speech became a pervasive feature of religious dispute. Leading ministers offered competing hermeneutic strategies and rhetorical theories designed to reconcile appeals to transcendent authority with the new republican voluntarism. These efforts to harmonize prophecy with the republican tradition of persuasion represented by Cicero and Shakespeare took different directions, but they shared a focus on relating individual spiritual experience to a larger community. These negotiations between the individual and the community, the reconciliation of part and whole, are at the center of the early republic’s aesthetics of deliberation.

} De re publica was the last of Cicero’s important works to be printed. Like De Oratore it was one of the three major works that he composed in the early 50s BCE modeled on Plato’s dialogues and offering a Roman response to parallel works by the Greek philosopher. Influential in its own day, De re publica was important for Christian philosophers such as Augustine, who in The City of God drew his important definition of the commonwealth as “‘a concern of the people’ (res populi) based on ‘agreement on law’ (iuris consensus)” from it. It was via Augustine that Cicero’s work continued to influence European political thought after the bulk of his text was lost around the year 600. The possibility that Cicero’s most im-

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portant reflections on republican self-governance had escaped destruction was kept alive through scattered references by John of Salisbury in the twelfth century and Petrarch in the fourteenth century, as well as rumors of copies reported by Roger Ascham, who was Queen Elizabeth’s tutor, and Casper Barth, a seventeenth-century German scholar. But it was not until scholars began inspecting codices rescripti, or rewritten manuscripts, that the archives yielded a wealth of recovered works, including the triumphant recovery of significant portions of De re publica.1 Angelo Mai was a highly successful manuscript sleuth. He developed his technique for uncovering buried texts in the Ambrosian Library at Milan during the 1810s, where he discovered a substantial number of lost classical works, among them several of Cicero’s orations. After his great discovery at the Vatican Library he produced an edition of the recovered and reassembled sections of De re publica, which was published at the Vatican in 1822. A London edition identical to Mai’s appeared the following year, as did a Parisian edition in French and Latin, with commentary by the French scholar and literary orator Abel-Francois Villemain.2 With reason, then, the North American Review treated Cicero as a towering figure of the Atlantic world republic of letters, whose works held new currency and relevance. The recovery of both the orations and the political treatise were noted in the Review, which in the November 1815 issue included a notice that an edition of the orations was being prepared and in July 1823 published a lengthy review essay of the London and Paris editions of De re publica. The reviewer Alexander Hill Everett emphasized the excitement with which the treatise was received, noting that “as fast as the sheets were struck off at Rome they were sent to Paris” (36). He noted further that “the renowned discovery of the long lost and much lamented treatise of Cicero on Government has excited, for a year or two past, a strong sensation in the literary world,” and he promised to receive the recovered work with the enthusiasm usually reserved for “the popular novelist and poet of the day” (33). Everett’s modernizing approach is suggestive for two reasons. It groups Cicero with novelists and poets, rather than with philosophers or political writers, suggesting the literary interest of the work; and it treats Cicero as a contemporary whom one might meet on the streets, in the courts and salons, or at the statehouse in Boston. Ciceronian civic rhetoric remained influential because it seemed fresh and contemporary.3 Beginning with its earliest issues the North American Review featured Cicero’s works as being essential to modern republicanism—and to modern aesthetics. The roughly 170 references to Cicero during the journal’s

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first twenty years of publication include Ciceronian apercus on a variety of topics; biographies that document the influence of Cicero’s works (e.g., the essay on Lafayette in January 1825, or the essay on Petrarch in the January 1835 issue); historical essays such as “Slavery in Rome” (October 1834); reviews of works on and by modern orators such as Patrick Henry (March 1818), Henry Clay (October 1827), and Daniel Webster ( July 1835); and reviews of general works on eloquence ( July 1829).4 Beyond merely citing Cicero, the Review actively promoted his works. William Tudor drew the reader’s attention to the first American edition of Cicero’s Opera Omnia published in Boston in 1815 with notices that appeared in November 1815 and January 1817. Edited by the British classicist William Wells, this edition was just one of several American “firsts” of Cicero in and beyond Boston: the first American edition of Cicero’s selected speeches in English appeared in New York in 1802; in 1814 a Poughkeepsie press brought out the first American edition of De officiis; and a Boston reprinting of Conyers Middleton’s 1741 biography of Cicero appeared in 1818. Like his father, John Quincy Adams was an important force for promoting Ciceronian values and practices. He made Ciceronian civic rhetoric central to his Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory (1810), carried Cicero’s vision of public duty into his presidency, and lived out this ideal on the floor of the House of Representatives, where late in life he became known as the “Old Man Eloquent.”5 The North American Review likewise promoted Cicero as an appropriate role model for modern republicans. William Tudor’s 1815 essay “Latin Classicks” urged all “lovers of freedom and republican governments” to take him as their guide, for “he, of all others, is the model which should be taken, to excite the emulation of talents, patriotism, and virtuous ambition.” Referring to the United States, Tudor observed that for the first time in nearly two millennia a government existed in which someone with a background and abilities similar to those of Cicero could thrive. The “new man” from Arpinum had risen from a well-off but provincial family to the highest positions of authority in the Roman republic, winning posts usually reserved for patricians. Tudor considered Cicero’s career an inspiration to ambitious youths and anticipated that “under our institutions, should the same combination of virtue and talents again appear . . . it may follow the same exalted destiny, from the bar to the senate, from the senate to the chief magistracy”—with, Tudor hoped, a happier conclusion. Cicero’s dramatic end was never far from the minds of modern republicans: upon establishing themselves as the Second Triumvirate, Octavian, Mark Antony, and Lepidus ordered Cicero’s execution and had his head and hands set on the Speakers’ Platform at the Forum as a gruesome sign

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that the old republic was at an end. Cicero’s life story combined the essential elements of republican hope and despair. It symbolized the opportunities for advancement that a republican government opened to ambitious and capable citizens; it also represented the fears of decline and dismemberment that haunted the early American republic.6 Cicero’s political achievements were used to inspire young aspirants to fame and power, and his works offered lessons in self-discipline and civic virtue. Proponents held that Cicero’s works provided a safe outlet for “youth and innocence” which might otherwise be “pervert[ed]” by “wild metaphysics” or “corrupt[ed]” by “licentious sentiments” (130). A brief notice in the January 1817 issue of the Review puffed Wells’s edition, arguing that Cicero provided a salutary alternative to the “trash” offered by booksellers, and thus it was incumbent upon the colleges and “all who minister towards” the “sickly” public taste to support Wells’s effort by purchasing multiple copies and distributing them judiciously. The first American edition of Cicero would have “a solid, permanent value, all over the world,” and thus the purchaser need fear no loss, for the volumes would “always command a certain price.” An international market for Cicero would correct for the lapses in local taste that were evident in the booksellers’ stalls of Boston and Cambridge.7 In his 1823 essay Everett developed the conceit of Cicero as a republican contemporary, stressing the relevance of the rediscovered manuscript fragments as well as their disappointing incompleteness. Reports of the recovery had prompted intense curiosity about the contents of a work devoted to “those momentous questions, which, for the last half-century, have engaged so deeply the attention of reflecting minds, and have, in their practical discussion, convulsed the civilized world to its centre.” Could Cicero’s text, “like a ghost from the grave,” “settle all disputed points, and appease the popular commotions of the present day,” as the author had once calmed “the tumults of the Roman forum” with “his venerable presence and charming eloquence”? (34). Clearly not. With the addition of the recovered sections only around a third of the work was extant, and that portion included the “Dream of Scipio,” which had been preserved when the rest of the manuscript was lost. The surviving bits were suggestive but did not provide a full theory of republican government. Still, the “beautiful fragments” of the reassembled work were more than satisfactory, for they offered “a rich feast to the lover of eloquence.” Cicero’s value derived from his “generous feelings and high poetical enthusiasm” (35)—in short, his style—and not from any particular originality or practical wisdom. The reader could derive the whole meaning of the text from a fragment

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by simply drawing on “familiar truths” or the most famous works of earlier philosophers to flesh out the context. Like a “fine poem of which we know the fable,” “every separate fragment is a chapter in the great book of universal experience commented upon by this illustrious observer” (36). Everett selected two lengthy passages in the original Latin for reprinting as part of his essay. The first passage appears in book I, section 2 and continues, with some text missing, through the end of book I, section 13. It is the first extended intact passage of the work and concerns active civic virtue and responsible citizenship. Refuting Plato in this passage, which I quote in English though it appeared in Latin in the Review, Cicero argued that “virtue is not some kind of knowledge to be possessed without using it.”8 Rather, “virtue consists entirely in its employment,” most importantly “the governance of states and the accomplishment in deeds rather than words of the things that philosophers talk about in their corners” (3). Insisting on the derivative nature of philosophy, he emphasized that piety, justice, courage, modesty, moderation, and other virtues were not produced by philosophers but by civic leaders who cultivated them through education, custom, and law. In a paraphrase of Xenocrates that Webster echoed at Plymouth, Cicero identified the citizen’s highest achievement as the creation of a system of authority and punishment that will constrain people “to do of their own free will what the laws would compel them to do.” The “responsible citizen” contributes to the production of “a state that is well established through public law and customs,” such as the French educational system that Lafayette argued was the best support for republican ideals. Such an ideal state arises from what Cicero considered to be the “spur of nature herself that goads us on” to “increase the resources of the human race” and “make human life safe and better by our plans and efforts” (3). We owe our best efforts to support and defend the country that nurtured us; moreover, if the “good and brave men of great spirit” do not play an active role, they will be subject to “wicked men” (5). It is not enough to remain in private life until a crisis arises and then come to the aid of the state, for statecraft is a complex art and must be learned. “People who admit their incapacity for steering in calm weather” will be useless at the “helm in the greatest storms” (6)—a claim that Bolívar attested to at Angostura when he deplored the lack of political skill in Spanish America. Statesmanship is, moreover, the highest calling. Contrary to the claims of the philosophers like Plato who argued that action is ephemeral and contemplation eternal, Cicero insisted that “there is nothing in which human virtue approaches the divine more closely than in the founding of new states or the preservation of existing ones” (7).

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While this first extended quotation stressed the importance of civic virtue, the second passage tempered the emphasis on active public life by celebrating contemplation and “the truly human arts” (14). Sounding a Platonic note, Cicero asked, “What power, what office, what kingdom can be grander than to look down on all things human and to think of them as less important than wisdom, and to turn over in his mind nothing except what is eternal and divine?” (14). This passage does not so much contradict the public-spiritedness of the first excerpt as provide some needed direction to civic life. The transcendent perspective offered by contemplation allows us to understand the insignificance of our individual lives and prevents us from becoming too attached to material goods. The fortunate man is one who has little regard for wealth: “He alone can truly claim all things as his own, not under the law of the Roman people but under the law of the philosophers; not by civil ownership but by the common law of nature, which forbids anything to belong to anyone except someone who knows how to employ and use it” (13). Fulfillment is not achieved by constant striving for wealth, or power, or blessings, but by moderating our expectations and finding satisfaction in the necessary and attainable. In this passage Cicero argued that contemplation serves civic virtue by keeping ambition in check and directing individual efforts away from selfish pursuits and toward the common good. In addition to presenting these excerpts Everett offered some general observations about the work, including Cicero’s treatment of the origins of society, the comparative advantages of different types of government, and the constitution of the Roman republic (53). He embraced a Ciceronian understanding of society and government as spontaneous products of sociable human nature, and contrasted this approach with the Hobbesian view of the state as a necessary protection against human depravity or Rousseau’s doctrine of the social contract. Everett suggested the relevance of Cicero’s text for a current political problem when he considered the Roman republic as a successful model of the union of church and state: “Religion and government, considered as establishments, are two forms, in which the same sovereign power, to wit, the nation, representing for this purpose the order of providence, declares the same laws under different sanctions” (68). This passage, and the succeeding argument that ministers should be considered state functionaries, offers an oblique defense of the embattled Massachusetts clerical establishment. Cicero supported religious faith in much the same terms as Everett: not on the strength of Roman religion’s truth value (Everett echoed commonplace complaints about the “gross and material” nature of Roman religious rituals [68], a

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view that Cicero was believed to share) but as a source of moral authority and a buttress for civil law.9 Cicero shaped the deliberative imagination of the early American republic beyond the pages of the North American Review. His works continued to be a mainstay of classical language training and were a common source of epigraphs for printed speeches and other texts. Compilers of elocutionary handbooks mined his works for recitation exercises and quoted his sayings. He figured largely in the literary culture of the early American republic, providing an iconic figure to writers debating the direction of the newly established state. Charles Brockden Brown famously featured a bust of Cicero and recitations of his orations in his novel Wieland; or The Transformation (1798), which offers a meditation on the power of speech to deceive and manipulate in a republic. Brown returned to the father of the Roman republic on several occasions, including the “Death of Cicero: A Fragment,” which appeared as an appendix to the 1800 edition of his frontier novel Edgar Huntly. Written in the voice of Tiro, Cicero’s secretary, the fragment portrays the Roman senator’s death in a manner designed to explore the psychological and political conflicts of republicanism’s deliberative culture.10 While Brown contributed to a critical analysis of American Ciceronianism, Benjamin Franklin’s life and writings provided a mechanism for adapting Ciceronian ideals to American popular culture. Among the frequent reprintings of Franklin’s life and works in the early decades of the nineteenth century was an 1809 Philadelphia edition of one of Franklin’s most elegant print jobs, James Logan’s translation of Cicero’s De senectute, retitled Cato Major, or His Discourse of Old Age (1744). In the 1740s Franklin sought out Logan and asked to be allowed to print this work, which he had read in manuscript. In his preface to the resulting large-format volume Franklin observed that Logan’s translation was “equal at least, if not far preferable to any other Translation of the same Piece extant in our Language” and championed the volume as “this first translation of a Classic in this Western World.” The editor of the 1809 edition quoted the latter statement and dropped the attribution to Logan from the preface, presenting the translation as Franklin’s own work. He further identified Franklin with Cicero when he claimed that Franklin’s life enacted the virtues “drawn with so many charms by Cicero,” among them “strict public virtue,” “economy and frugality united with temperance,” “love of utility and wisdom,” and “thirst for knowledge and invincible integrity.” Franklin himself suggested this association when he used a passage on philosophy and the virtuous life from Cicero’s Tusculan Disputations (5.2.5) as one of

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the mottoes for his “little Book” on virtue. His Autobiography offered a modernized version of Ciceronian performative ethics. It included a set of deliberative practices, notably when he described his practice of identifying the shared principles that underlie a heterogeneous set of texts or beliefs, which allowed him to locate the points of agreement; attention to the body and to self-presentation, as when he abstained from drinking beer and became a vegetarian, or when he wheeled home his own paper long after he could afford to hire someone to do it for him; and a discussion of persuasive rhetoric, stressing the need to avoid “polemic Arguments” and to persuade others by effacing the self.11 One principal lesson that Franklin’s life story conveys is that in a modern and increasingly democratic republic the ability to minimize the self is an essential component of self-making. In sharp contrast with Cicero, who earned a lasting reputation for self-promotion, the aspiring new man of the early republic had to disguise his agency while trusting to others to credit his efforts. Franklin’s emphasis on self-effacement was tied to his preferred modes of expression: he criticized the use of classical languages, which he saw as promoting hubris, and he never tried to imitate the eloquence of his Roman predecessor, choosing instead to exercise influence principally through print and conversation. Nevertheless Franklin was a frequent presence in the elocution manuals designed to train young Americans to speak effectively and participate well in civic life. In “The Whistle,” a story that Noah Webster included in several editions of American Lessons in Speaking and Reading, Franklin inculcated lessons of thrift, moderation, and self-respect with a tale whose moral lesson was distilled into the proverb “Don’t pay too much for the whistle.” A compiler identified only as “a teacher” included Franklin’s speech supporting the Constitution at the Federal Convention, his best-known oratorical effort, in an 1807 volume titled The American Orator. In that speech Franklin expressed his reservations about the Constitution while modestly acknowledging his fallibility and calling for the delegates to support the plan for a general government as the best available option. These examples suggest how Franklin modified Ciceronian ideals to accommodate more democratic modes of deliberation, helping to shape a vernacular model of civic speech and inculcating deliberative values of moderation and compromise.12

i i . e l o q ue nt sha ke sp e a re The modern republicanism of the United States required English speaking models such as Franklin as well as the classical inspiration provided by Ci-

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cero.13 While Franklin was an occasional presence in schoolbooks focused on reading and speaking, the elocutionary movement that trained young people in the verbal arts of republican civic life and profoundly shaped American education for over one hundred years found its principal English model in the works of William Shakespeare. Shakespeare’s plays offered instances of republican eloquence that were valued for two reasons. Their dramatic speeches and soliloquies were easy to include in speech manuals; and many of them, especially the Roman plays, examine the nature and history of republicanism. These elements in Shakespeare’s dramatic works reflected concerns that he shared with his contemporaries. During his lifetime a strong current of republican thought circulated in Britain and Europe and culminated in the founding of the Commonwealth three decades after his death.14 A century later Thomas Sheridan helped transform the Bard into the English voice of republican eloquence. Shakespeare figured importantly in British Education: Or, The Source of the Disorders of Great Britain (1756), Sheridan’s first major statement on republican educational reform in what became an extended campaign to establish vernacular education and speech training at the center of the British system.15 The title page of British Education sums up Sheridan’s argument, which he pursued over nearly four hundred pages. There he promised to correct “Immorality, Ignorance, and false Taste” with “a Revival of the Art of Speaking.” Turning to the examples of ancient Athens and Rome, Sheridan concluded that “a Revival of the Art of Speaking, and the Study of our own Language, might contribute, in a great measure, to the Cure of those Evils.” Eloquence is essential to good governance in a constitutional republic, he argued, and it should be a cultivated quality, not left to chance but incorporated into general education. Only then would British society benefit from the talents of its best minds. “If in the multitude of counselors there be safety,” he asked, echoing Proverbs 11:14, “will not the state be in danger, in proportion as their number is reduced” by the lack of rhetorical training (129)? Christian religion suffered as well, Sheridan claimed, since the lack of well-trained preachers had undermined the Anglican Church and fostered an outbreak of enthusiastic religion characterized by wild and unseemly preaching. Formal pulpit eloquence would help restore order to a chaotic religious scene and improve public morality. And Sheridan thought that training in eloquence promised still more. Arguing on his title page that speech was the first and most important art influencing all others, he speculated that “Poetry, Music, Painting, and Sculpture, might arrive at as high a Pitch of Perfection in England, as ever they did in Athens or Rome.” Sheridan

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quickly followed up the general defense of pedagogical reform presented in British Education with works that provided inspiration and means to achieve those reforms, including A Course of Lectures on Elocution (1762), which was reprinted in the United States twice between 1796 and 1803.16 Sheridan further inspired a vogue for dramatic readings with the “Attic Mornings” that he began at Bath in 1763 and later staged in London. Such readings spread throughout the English-speaking Atlantic world, where they continued to draw audiences for over a century. In the colonies and early republic they supplemented and sometimes substituted for full-scale theatrical fare.17 Shakespeare’s works figure significantly in British Education, where he represents an untutored vernacular style that provides the ideal model for English language training. His plays are disparaged as dramatic works but valued for their passages of oratorical excellence.18 Sheridan thought of Shakespeare as principally a talker, noting that “it might be easily shewn, that the great success of his pieces at this day, and the effects which they produce in the representation, have been chiefly owing to his skill in the art of speaking” (351). He “had acquired from the very profession in which he was engaged, an habitual and practical knowledge of the oratorical art, far superior to all theory.” It is this mastery of eloquent speech and his ability to reproduce it that “form a true dramatick style, that happy arrangement and disposition of his words, so perfectly adapted to his subjects, which throw such a luster on his sentiments, and are so admirably suited to the mouth of the speaker” (351–52). Sheridan argued that the speeches in Shakespeare’s plays provide their dramatic structure and “sufficiently make amends for all the irregularities of his drama” (352). The best evidence that Shakespeare was attentive to the arts of speech comes from the plays themselves. Sheridan singled out Hamlet’s speech to the players as an especially insightful account of eloquence. “We can not but wonder how it was possible, that so just and comprehensive a system of rules both for action, and speaking, could have been comprised in so narrow a compass,” he observed (351). It is this eloquent Shakespeare who entered English language education through the ubiquitous courses in elocution and the elocutionary manuals that influenced revolutionary-era political culture and became increasingly standard fare in the schools and universities of the United States after 1800.19 Sheridan was not alone among the early elocutionists in highlighting Shakespeare as a model for aspiring orators. Extracts from Shakespeare were well represented in the major British elocutionary texts, including James Burgh’s The Art of Speaking (1761), William Enfield’s The Speaker

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(1774), and John Walker’s Academic Speaker (1796). In Burgh’s case, as in Sheridan’s, this interest in eloquent speech was joined with republican politics.20 But Sheridan made the connection between vernacular education, republican government, classical civic rhetoric, and Shakespeare strikingly clear. The Irishman imagined no less than the wholesale reformation of British politics and religious life to make it both more participatory and more creative through the power of widely shared eloquence, and Shakespeare played a crucial role in that process. Sheridan believed that training in eloquence would bring more people into active political life by teaching them how to speak well in public settings. He also hoped that it would create an orderly and morally disciplined society, for he understood training in speech as a crucial stage in the formation of civic-minded, Ciceronian citizens. Moreover elocution lessons could reduce the signs of class and regional identities, and thus help to create a more homogeneous society.21 In the early American republic educators embraced Sheridan’s vision of vernacular speech training as the bastion of republican governance, and elocution lessons promoted the ideal of a normative speech community. Shakespeare’s speeches provided a set of core texts that were increasingly taught to young people and that prominent orators such as Daniel Webster used to hone their skills. The impact of Shakespeare’s plays on American education operated at two levels: as a source of model speeches that appeared in the elocution handbooks; and as a set of culturally authoritative texts that were incorporated into the growing body of American oratory and used to contest major ethical and political issues and to define the meaning of modern republicanism. In the decades after independence debates over the legacy left by the political founders of the early American republic were conducted as debates over the meaning of a cultural founder, William Shakespeare.22 A variety of elocutionary handbooks that prominently included speeches from Shakespeare demonstrate the pedagogical purposes to which his works were put. Moral and political lessons were inculcated through the choice and labeling of texts. Cicero was a frequent presence in these books as well, often serving as a point of comparison for modern speakers or offering a lesson in morality or delivery. The books demonstrate some of the techniques for “sampling” Shakespeare’s plays, which included brief excerpts, full speeches or scenes, and speeches marked for delivery. They also reveal some of the debates about Shakespeare’s aesthetic and pedagogical value that accompanied the practice of elocutionary instruction. William Scott’s popular Lessons in Elocution: Or, a Selection of pieces in Prose and Verse, or the Improvement of Youth in Reading and Speaking (1779)

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originated in England and went through several American editions. Scott noted that “elocution has, for some years past, been an object of attention in the most respectable schools in this country. A laudable ambition of instructing youth in the pronunciation and delivery of their native language, has made English speeches a very conspicuous part of those exhibitions of oratory, which do our seminaries of learning so much credit.”23 Scott rejected schoolroom performance of complete plays, observing that the practice raises issues of morality, practicality, and the worthwhile use of time. He concluded that “it is speaking, rather than acting, which school boys should be taught;” more specifically, boys should “be accustomed to speak such speeches, as require a full, open, animated pronunciation; for which purpose they should be confined, chiefly, to orations, odes and such single speeches of plays, as are in the declamatory and vehement style” (21). He provided a substantial number of excerpts from Shakespeare, including speeches from Macbeth, Henry VIII, and Julius Caesar. The largest number appears in the section “Speeches and Soliloquies,” where sixteen out of twenty-five selections are from Shakespeare’s plays, including extracts from Hamlet; Henry IV, Parts I and II; Othello; Henry V; Julius Caesar; Richard III; and As You Like It. The first selection in this section is “Hamlet’s advice to the players,” one of the most commonly cited works in elocutionary texts, and elsewhere Scott paraphrases Hamlet, noting that “the exact adaptation of the action to the word, and the word to the action, as Shakespeare calls it, is the most difficult part of delivery.” Such conformity of word and action is beyond the capacities of children, Scott noted, and advised that they be trained in “a general style of action” that “is not expressive of any particular passion” but rather “shall not be inconsistent with the expression of any passion” (10). Scott’s goal was to educate students in graceful movement, with the passions treated only in a general way. Increase Cooke’s American Orator series was perhaps the first set of elocution manuals originating in the United States to use Shakespeare as a marketing device. Imports and American editions of Scott and other influential elocutionists had already made Shakespeare a common figure in elocutionary education. What distinguished Cooke’s series was his prominent linking of the idea of the American orator with the guiding presence of Shakespeare. The books may have been modeled on the immensely influential Columbian Orator compiled by Caleb Bingham, which first appeared in 1797 and was issued in twenty-three editions over the next half century. Bingham’s early editions included no Shakespeare.24 Cooke’s other main American competitor was Noah Webster, who had begun publishing his

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Grammatical Institutes in 1783, and who included only a small number of selections from Shakespeare’s works, explaining in a preface that he preferred to focus on American authors and topics.25 Cooke soon made his inclusion of the Bard into the signal mark of his series. The American Orator was first published in New Haven in 1811 and reissued several times before 1820. In 1813 Cooke published a Sequel to the American Orator, which portrays a bust of Shakespeare opposite the title page.26 These decisions to highlight the Shakespearean content of the volumes may have been a strategy to distinguish the series from Bingham’s and Webster’s books. They may also have reflected the presence, beginning in the late 1790s, of star English Shakespearean actors on the American stage. Thomas A. Cooper, George Cooke, and later Edmund Kean made Shakespearean heroes newly exciting to American audiences and contributed to the Americanization of Shakespeare.27 The American Orator includes mostly unattributed brief extracts from a variety of works, including several by Shakespeare, with instructions for reading them well. “Hamlet’s Directions to the players” is included in the section titled “Didactic Pieces” (119). The Sequel includes a number of additional Shakespeare extracts. In contrast to the earlier volume these are all clearly labeled. They include “humorous scenes” from A Midsummer Night’s Dream and Henry VI; “serious pieces” including “King John’s Conference with Hubert,” “Orlando and Adam,” an excerpt from Henry IV, Part I, and two excerpts from Henry IV, Part II; and scenes from Richard II, Henry V, and Henry IV, Part I, The Tempest, The Merchant of Venice, and As You Like It in “promiscuous pieces,” a designation referring to the fact that they were varied and lacked thematic unity. A number of additional Shakespeare selections are included in the reading texts of the appendix. Cooke’s Sequel goes beyond his earlier volume, which simply includes some extracts from the plays, in that it offers a substantive pedagogical rationale for emphasizing Shakespeare. He argued that training in the recognition and the representation of the passions was central to learning the orator’s art, and Shakespeare portrayed the passions “in a clearer and more affecting way than in any other Poet,” providing “the best description that could be given of the passions in any language” (iv). Shakespeare offered authoritative support for the art of elocution, which for Cooke prominently included the ability to represent, evoke, and manage the passions, both the student’s own passions and those of others. The republican goals of civic rhetoric are strongly visible in an 1822 compilation by E. G. Welles, published in Philadelphia and called The Orator’s Guide; or Rules for Speaking and Composing; from the best Authorities. Welles

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included an impassioned defense of the civic value of oratory, including its capacity to emancipate “millions from slavery” and redeem “innumerable captives.”28 He chose speeches that thematized the relationship between oratory and liberty. This relatively brief, 100-page manual includes just a dozen selections, among them a speech by “Grenville Sharpe, the negro’s advocate” along with two thematically appropriate speeches from Shakespeare. “Othello’s Apology” is Othello’s self-defense before the Venetian court in which he describes how he wooed Desdemona. “Brutus and Cassius” from Julius Caesar includes Cassius’s announcement that “I had as lief not be, as live to be / In awe of such a thing as I myself ” (81– 82). Welles also included Cassius’s mocking depiction of the supposedly godlike Caesar during an illness when “that tongue of his, that bade the Romans / Mark him, and write his speeches in their books, / Alas it cry’d— Give me some drink, Titinius— / As a sick girl” (82). Welles’s choice of this dialogue, with its relatively sympathetic portrait of the conspirators and its account of Caesar’s diminished speech, is in keeping with the overall pro-republican tone of his volume. A similarly sympathetic portrait of the defenders of the Roman republic is displayed in Jonathan Barber’s 1831 adaptation of Gilbert Austin’s Chironomia, which Barber prepared for his classes on gesture at Harvard University.29 Austin’s gestures were designed for public speaking and dramatic declamation. Barber followed Austin when he included Brutus’s funeral speech for Caesar as one of his three exemplary texts (the others are Gray’s Elegy and Young’s Night Thoughts), rather than the more commonly cited speech by Marc Antony. A preference for Brutus’s less compelling oration reflected republican sympathies. The texts are marked for gesture, with extensive accompanying notes describing just how the body should be positioned in delivery. The volume also includes illustrations taken from Austin of oratorical postures, with some of the figures clad in togas. Increasingly after 1820 elocution manuals included modern exemplars alongside extracts from Cicero, Shakespeare, and other historical figures. Like Barber, Dickinson College professor C. D. Cleveland included Brutus’s funeral oration in his compilation The National Orator (1832), together with Hamlet’s instructions to the players, Othello’s address to the Senate, and roughly a dozen other Shakespeare extracts. The bulk of Cleveland’s volume consists of excerpts from speeches by contemporary American and British orators, with Daniel Webster’s works especially well represented, including short samples from his Plymouth oration, his Greek speech, the reply to Hayne, and an anti-slavery address. Webster was also a major figure in William B. Fowle’s The New Speaker, or Exercises in Rhetoric, which

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appeared in Boston in 1829. Fowle, who was a teacher at the Monitorial School in Boston, included nine Webster selections, more than any other single figure including Edmund Burke (who was represented with seven selections) and Edward Everett (who had eight extracts). In his comparatively small set of Shakespeare passages Fowle chose to include Antony’s funeral oration for Caesar, along with three “dramatic pieces” from Othello, Henry IV, and Henry VI. The juxtaposition of Webster with Shakespeare in the elocutionary texts of the late 1820s and 1830s reveals a central line of influence on the civic rhetoric of the early American republic.30

i i i . ar g u i ng with the b ib l e The Bible was a third major influence on American public discourse, and one that presented some fundamental challenges to deliberative ideals. Benjamin Franklin portrayed some of the tensions between biblical traditions and civic deliberation in “Remarks Concerning the Savages of North America” (1783). In that essay he described Native American governance as deliberative self-rule, with no provisions for coercion. “All their government is by the Counsel or Advice of the Sages,” he wrote; “there is no Force, there are no Prisons, no Officers to compel Obedience, or inflict Punishment.” This idealized consensus-based state ran solely on persuasion. “They generally study Oratory,” he continued, “the best Speaker having the most Influence.” Franklin went on to describe the orderliness and civility of their public councils, which he contrasted favorably with the conflict and confusion that he routinely witnessed in the British House of Commons. Native American approaches to religious difference drew Franklin’s special praise. He related an account of a Swedish minister who preached the Bible to the assembled chiefs of the Susquehanna Indians, telling them about “the principal historical Facts on which our Religion is founded” including “the Fall of our first Parents by Eating an Apple, the Coming of Christ to repair the Mischief, His Miracles and Suffering, &c.” In Franklin’s humorous account the Susquehanna orator responded appreciatively, noting that apples were better for making into cider than eating. He then proceeded to relate a parallel tradition about the origins of corn, beans, and tobacco, the three sacred plants. The missionary was “disgusted” by the equivalence between these two stories, and contrasted the “sacred Truths” of his narrative with the orator’s “Fable, Fiction & Falsehood.” The orator is in his turn offended by the minister’s claim to possess an exclusive truth and berates the missionary for his lack of “common Civility”:

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“You saw that we . . . believed all your Stories,” he asserts, “Why do you refuse to believe ours?” Franklin’s own approach to religious difference in his autobiography shares the openness to multiple traditions that he here attributes to the orator.31 Franklin’s tale suggests two important points about the relationship between deliberative democracy and religious belief. The first point is that religious traditions vary in the degree of exclusiveness that they demand of their practitioners. The Susquehanna orator contrasted native pluralism and syncretism with the exclusive nature of Christian truth claims. Even within a single tradition there can be a range of attitudes toward religious difference. Some interpretations of Christianity emphasize the integrity and distinctiveness of Christian belief, while others permit hybrid religious formations. Historians of the colonial Americas contrast the approach of Catholic missionaries, who tolerated and even encouraged syncretic blendings of indigenous and Christian practices, with the exclusionary tendencies of their Puritan counterparts.32 Franklin’s second point is that religion can be what Richard Rorty has termed a “conversationstopper” if it is used in a dogmatic way. The exchange of stories between the minister and the Susquehanna orator breaks down when the minister refuses the truth claims of his conversation partner. Prophetic rhetoric such as the jeremiad can be even more difficult to absorb into a civil exchange. Jeremiads can be helpful in calling attention to the limits and flaws in deliberation and asserting the urgency of deliberative reform, but they are not readily assimilated into a deliberative process.33 Prophecy and deliberation were set in exceptionally clear tension in the religious debates of the early American republic, leading Protestant Christians to engage freshly with the paradoxes of spiritual persuasion. As deliberation became a signature practice of American government and civil society, many religious leaders recognized a clash in values between republican deliberation on one hand and inherited institutions and systems of belief on the other. This contradiction was tied to changes in the theology and institutional structure of Protestant churches, and its resolution included an expanded role for prophetic rhetoric. The overall effect of these developments was to align American Protestantism with the more egalitarian, voluntarist, and participatory forms of political republicanism, and to foster religiously motivated social reform movements ranging from temperance to the workingmen’s movement to abolitionism. The Second Great Awakening (roughly 1790 –1840) is widely credited with speeding the breakup of Puritan theology and social theory and replacing it with a more individualistic and voluntarist theology, as well as

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promoting a more heterogeneous and often more egalitarian set of institutional and rhetorical forms.34 Traditional Calvinism emphasized predestination and innate depravity, stressed the inability of the sinner to effect her or his own conversion, and invested substantial spiritual power in the minister as God’s agent. The Puritan sermon, with its text, doctrine, reasons, and uses, highlighted the minister’s knowledge of scripture and authority over its interpretation and application. Conversion narratives commonly described the hearing of sermons as instrumental to the sinner’s salvation; narratives that relied predominantly on Bible reading and omitted the sermon experience from the description of conversion drew accusations of antinomianism. For traditional Calvinists the central paradox of conversion required that sinners strive to achieve it while acknowledging their inability to effect reconciliation with God unaided by the Spirit as it was communicated through sermons.35 The Second Great Awakening challenged the underlying assumptions of Puritan theology, extending and deepening trends that had long been present in American Protestantism. Preachers relied more on extempore delivery, developed more flexible sermon structures, and increasingly employed stylistic features such as narrative, direct address, and colloquial language. These features were tied to changes in American civic life. The relationship between sacred oratory and its political cousin was considered in the 1820 essay “Pulpit Eloquence” in the North American Review in which the preacher’s task was compared to an invented scenario in which Cicero tried to persuade the Romans that it was dangerous to put Julius Caesar at the head of their armies. In contrast to the immediate danger posed by Catiline, against whom Cicero spoke to great effect, the threat posed by Caesar was abstract in the way that the afterlife is abstract to people at a church service. An 1824 review of Henry Ware’s Hints on Extemporaneous Preaching made a different connection between classical and Christian rhetoric, citing Cicero as a model for moving and heartfelt sermons that foster a sense of the common good. Pulpit orators could address questions of moral value and longer-term social goals more readily than their secular counterparts.36 This emphasis on shared values ran against a countervailing development within American Protestantism. The increasingly Arminian focus on each person’s moral ability to accept God and transform her or his life, and even aspire to moral perfection, placed the individual squarely at the center of religious experience. This individualist ethos was sometimes expressed in the mass phenomenon of the revival meeting, where the focus was on achieving personal salvation. Meanwhile more egalitarian and

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communal forms of organization drew large, involved church memberships, while the prominence of itinerant evangelists often reduced or complicated the authority of the established minister.37 In addition to the reconfiguration of authority and the development of new models of church community, the years of the Second Great Awakening also saw the rise of liberal Protestantism in the Unitarian and Universalist churches. These religious movements broke more vigorously with the Puritan tradition than did new style Calvinists, developing emphatically rationalist approaches to Christian belief. As their names suggest, Unitarians stressed the unity of God and rejected the trinity as both mystifying and unsupported by scripture, while Universalists believed in a universal reconciliation between God and humankind.38 In the 1820s and early 1830s Boston was the epicenter of the struggles that were redefining American Protestantism. The historic city on a hill of the Puritan fathers had emerged as the bastion of liberal Protestantism. From its founding in 1811 the Divinity School at Harvard had served as the nursery of Unitarianism, and in 1821 Boston became the base for the new Unitarian periodical The Christian Register. Four years later, in 1825, Boston witnessed the gathering of ministers that formed the American Unitarian Association, whose creation signaled the inevitable separation of the Unitarian churches from their Congregationalist associates. Unitarianism’s chief spokesman was William Ellery Channing, since 1803 the minister of the Federal Street Church and the inspiration for a generation of literary aspirants, most famously including Ralph Waldo Emerson, who himself for a time served as a Unitarian minister.39 The Boston liberals did not go unchallenged. In 1826 Presbyterian Lyman Beecher, a leading architect of the “benevolent empire” of Protestant moral reform and father of novelist Harriet Beecher Stowe and celebrity preacher Henry Ward Beecher, moved from his Litchfield, Connecticut pulpit to Boston’s Hanover Street church, where he remained until moving west to Cincinnati in 1832. Beecher brought to the dominant “Presbygational” Protestantism of the early republic an energetic organizational imagination, a strong emphasis on moral reform as the fruit of conversion and the basis of civic life, and a commitment to the revival as the means of stirring the dry bones of the spiritually complacent and energizing reform efforts such as temperance and abolitionism. He promoted strong and effective churches, with well-paid, fulltime ministers; Sunday schools, Bible societies, and periodicals to promote religious instruction and information; and charitable and reform activities such as temperance. His vision was ecumenically Protestant, and he often stressed the importance

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of churches working together to promote social justice and support republican values. Beecher’s differences with Channing were theological (unlike Channing, he remained a Calvinist, though of a modified sort), institutional (Beecher placed more confidence in group endeavor, being an influential advocate of voluntary associations), and social (Beecher was the son of a blacksmith, while Channing was named for his ancestor William Ellery, a signer of the Declaration of Independence). For six years from his Boston pulpit Beecher challenged Channing and the Unitarian movement, offering a defense of Puritanism designed to counter the Unitarian critique and preserve key elements of Calvinist theology and social theory while reforming it to better align with republican values.40 At the same time from this Boston base he negotiated differences with his fellow revivalist and theological modernizer Charles Grandison Finney, the third major figure in the transformation of American Protestantism. Converted in 1821, Finney rapidly developed into one of the most influential figures in American religious history. The extraordinary series of revivals that he led in the “burned-over district” of western New York captured national attention. Beecher helped to negotiate the fractious relationship between Finney and more theologically and socially conservative Presbyterians during his years in Boston, and for a time Beecher and Finney were allied in support of revivals. In Boston, where he had come in 1831 at Beecher’s invitation, Finney delivered “Sinners Bound to Change Their Own Hearts,” his most famous statement of his methods and the theory behind them.41 Channing, Beecher, and Finney represent three distinct positions on theology, church institutions, and the philosophy of religious persuasion that were broadly characteristic of the major debates among American Protestants in these years. These debates unfolded partly in competing theories of religious rhetoric. In his 1819 sermon “Unitarian Christianity,” which offered an unusually forceful articulation of Unitarian beliefs and prompted an extended theological controversy, Channing put forth a reason-based approach to the Bible as the distinguishing feature of Unitarianism. “Our leading principle in interpreting Scripture is this, that the Bible is a book written for men, in the language of men, and that its meaning is to be sought in the same manner as that of other books.” In short, when God addresses humankind he conforms “to the established rules of speaking and writing,” and those rules “require in the reader or hearer the constant exercise of reason.” The Bible offers a peculiar set of challenges and requires a more vigorous use of the rational powers than any other work, for three reasons: “its language is singularly glowing, bold, and figu-

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rative, demanding more frequent departures from the literal sense than that of our own age and country, and consequently demanding more continual exercise of judgment”; the texts refer to their historical era rather than offering general truths and so demand vigilance to prevent local matters from being treated as universals; and each of the biblical authors employed a distinctive style. Unitarians approached the Bible as a pile of grain to be winnowed, with the reader giving what Channing described as “deliberate attention” to the text and using reason to separate the wheat of transcendent truth from the chaff of distracting images, local customs, and authorial idiosyncrasies. “We reason about the Bible precisely as civilians do about the constitution,” Channing continued. This reasoning process involved using one provision to limit others and fixing its meaning by inquiring into the “general spirit” of the text as well as “the intentions of its authors” and “the prevalent feelings, impressions, and circumstances of the time when it was framed.”42 Channing’s comparison of scriptural interpretation to constitutional law suggests the role that republicanism played in the reshaping of Protestantism.43 In his lecture “The Republican Elements of the Old Testament,” Beecher went further toward merging Christianity with republican theory than Channing, tracing the origins of republicanism to ancient Israel.44 He rejected the claims of those who treated the Old Testament as “unfriendly to the liberty and equality of man” and the product of a “dark, superstitious, and barbarous age of the world” (176). On the contrary, Beecher urged, “our own republic, in its constitution and laws, is of heavenly origin” (189), drawn from the Bible rather than borrowed from Greece and Rome. Making an argument that James Harrington developed in The Commonwealth of Oceana, Beecher contended that the Old Testament offered “the first pattern that ever existed of national liberty and equality,” initiated by Moses, the “lawgiver and captain” of the ancient Israelites, and established in their institutions (176 –77). These republican institutions included a legal code and courts, a popularly ratified constitution, and a broad distribution of land. Claiming that “the simple, elementary, free, and primitive government of the patriarchs” (183) offered strong parallels to the government of the United States, Beecher insisted that “we are not now more republican than they were, though we have the gathered experience and light of all ages before us” (188). Beecher’s desire to see the forms of modern republicanism anticipated in Hebrew Scripture reflected a broader pattern in his influential career. Republicanism elevated persuasion over coercion, and Beecher led the effort to adapt American Protestantism to this new reality. His signal ac-

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complishment was to turn the devastating prospect of church disestablishment into the triumph of voluntarism. In an influential, much-reprinted sermon of 1814, Beecher took as his text Isaiah 61:4, which calls for the rebuilding of the places laid waste during the Babylonian captivity.45 Religion was declining in the early republic, he warned, noting especially that “the vital principle of our system, that every man shall pay according to his property, somewhere, for the support of religious instruction, as a public civil benefit, and for the preservation of morals, and good order, in the state, is gone” (12). Disestablishment was devastating to society, for it resulted in “the multiplication of feeble societies and waste places” as the “malicious and the irreligious” broke up existing churches and made the garden once again into the “desolate wilderness” (12). Without the churches, law and government would fall into decline, and civil happiness, unity, and strength would fail as partisan “demagogues” destroyed the place of “the unity of our councils and the vigor of our government” (25). Like James Madison, Beecher feared that in a republic “the business of legislation would become a scene of intrigue and competition of religious and political ambition, of temporizing compromise, and bargain and sale” (25). Madison’s solution was to introduce deliberative processes into the legislative branch. Beecher’s Protestant republic rested on deliberation as it operated in and through the moral and cultural authority of churches. He sought to retain Puritanism’s essence rather than cling to its forms, and he understood that essence as the creation of an all-encompassing worldview that would promote civic virtue and personal godliness. Deliberation played a role in the creation of the Protestant republic at both the individual and institutional levels: converts were invited to deliberate with the minister about the nature of their religious experiences; and church activities were coordinated in meetings where members met to strategize and plan. Beecher set about developing a program to bolster existing churches, build new ones, and extend their influence through voluntary associations to promote moral reform—all using persuasion rather than state power. Underlying Beecher’s theory of church institutions was his understanding of how language could work to persuade and unite people, or to alienate and divide them. Warning that “evil communications corrupt good manners” (24), he criticized the “Babel” of “many tongues” that he believed marked civil society, including among the corrupting forces the words of “the universalist,” the “political empiric,” and “the sectarian” (24). Beecher particularly objected to the unlearned, extemporized sermons of his theological competitors, including the Baptists and Methodists whose zealous preaching style marked a notable contrast with the Presbyterian

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tradition of learned, written sermons in which Beecher was trained. His approach to the egalitarianism and contentiousness of the new religious rhetoric is instructive of the complexities involved in the democratization of American Christianity. Beecher was no leveler. He believed strongly in the leadership of the patriarchs and worked to shore up the authority of established ministers. Neither was he a fan of improvised sermons. Yet while he did criticize the frequent sloppiness of populist preaching—as well as sloppy written sermons, which he noted could be even harder to listen to than the extemporized sort—Beecher was willing to adapt to the new style. Educated in Hugh Blair’s Rhetoric and other Common Sense philosophy works on aesthetics and language, he embraced some of the major innovations of populist sermons, including the reliance on storytelling to illustrate moral points and the use of a more flexible structure.46 Beecher’s main objection to sectarian preaching was that it disrupted the prospects for Protestant hegemony by its abusive tone and divisive approach. Even more than their manner of preparing and delivering sermons, Beecher criticized the tendency of those he termed sectarians to mock and criticize other ministers. Such practices made the overlapping consensus essential to ecumenical institution building impossible. The lack of civility that Beecher found in sectarian sermons was tied to another feature of revivalist Protestantism that he believed undermined deliberative values: the emphasis on instant conversion. Beecher’s commitment to the spread of revivals as the best means to refresh and rebuild American Protestantism, coupled with the high value that he placed on an orderly society, led him to retain some central distinctions that Jonathan Edwards refined in his writings on the first Great Awakening. Seeking to rein in the more dramatic displays that accompanied those early revivals, Edwards warned that the heightened emotions that a revival inspires can lead to false conversions and cautioned that the only true test of salvation was a moral life. Beecher accommodated Edwards’s insight to his own modernized, semivoluntarist adaptation of Calvinism by stressing the need for a convert to undergo a prolonged period of reflection and a conscious act of choice. He relied on inquiry meetings that were held separately from the main revival assemblies to nurture newly awakened faith. At these inquiry meetings ministers helped prospective converts assess their religious experience, which, Beecher believed, should combine rational commitment as well as emotional response. His emphasis on a period of waiting and reflection after an initial spiritual awakening was designed to foster self-scrutiny and a commitment to moral transformation among the converted.47

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Not all revivalists were so scrupulous, for reasons that could reflect different theologies, philosophies of mind, and theories of rhetoric. All these differences marked the revival practice of Finney, who posed a populist challenge to Beecher’s views of a Protestant republic. Finney embraced the ethos embodied in Andrew Jackson, and like Jackson, Finney was sometimes criticized for using coercive, dictatorial methods and for promoting parties or factions. Before his conversion Finney practiced law, and he joined Channing and Beecher in adapting legal and political concepts to religious life. While Channing understood these parallels principally in hermeneutic terms, Finney and Beecher saw more extended analogies. Beecher worked to build religious institutions that would mirror state institutions and provide their moral underpinnings. Revivals expanded and strengthened the Protestant republic, which as we have seen Beecher imagined on the patriarchal model of ancient Israel. Finney’s vision of the Protestant republic was modeled instead on modern political institutions, including the constitution, elections, and the developing party system. “The world is divided into two great political parties,” he observed in “Sinners Bound to Change Their Own Hearts.” Conversion involves “the choice of jehovah as the supreme ruler” rather than the selfish pleasures that are “the law of Satan’s empire.” No “constitutional alteration” is needed to move from one regime to the other. Just as when “a man change sides in politics” he chooses new political friends and enemies, and works “to elect the candidate which he has now chosen,” it is the same “with a sinner; if his heart is changed, you will see that Christians become his friends— Christ his candidate.”48 As leading architects of revivalism and supporters of the Protestant republic, Finney and Beecher differed primarily in two areas, which both involve the processes of religious persuasion: their choice of language and tone, and their approach to conversion. In his Autobiography Beecher noted Finney’s early reputation for “boldness and severity,” which some observers felt verged on “rashness and denunciation”; complained of his ad hominem attacks on other ministers; and noted that “agonizing earnestness in prayer” over individual sinners could become indistinguishable from “irreverent familiarity.” Finney was also criticized for allowing women to pray before mixed audiences, using pressure tactics to manufacture conversions, and disrupting established ministries.49 In his influential Lectures on Revivals of Religion Finney explained the theory behind his controversial practice.50 People are spiritually “sluggish” and distractible, he noted, and for that reason religious faith is subject to decline. It is the preacher’s duty at such times of spiritual slackness

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to “raise an excitement” to overcome the distractions of everyday life and return the church to its true object, promoting “the glory of God.” Steady, uniform, consistent action has been tried, he noted, but it has failed “to bring the church to act steadily for God, without these periodical excitements” (9 –10). While Beecher shared Finney’s belief in the need for “periodical excitements,” Finney had more confidence than Beecher in the impulses behind the initial conversion. For Beecher, reason should temper emotion to ensure that the religious impulse was a movement of the spirit; for Finney, emotion was more reliably a sign of spiritual transformation. Finney explained his psychology of persuasion in his sermon “How to Change Your Heart.” Here he described the difference between actually feeling emotions of love, repentance, and faith, and trying to feel those emotions. “Emotions can never be brought into existence by a direct effort to feel,” he insisted. They depend upon thought, which is directed by the will. “We can direct our attention and meditations to any subject, and the corresponding emotions will spontaneously arise in the mind,” or in other words, “our feelings are only indirectly under the control of the will.” In this gap between thought and feeling, Finney placed the Holy Spirit. He illustrated the role of the Spirit most clearly in a passage in “Sinners Bound to Change Their Own Hearts.” The scene is Niagara Falls, where a man “lost in deep reverie” approaches the cliff, evidently unaware of his danger. Finney described the unfolding events to his audience: “At this moment you lift your warning voice above the roar of the foaming waters, and cry out, Stop. The voice pierces his ear, and breaks the charm that binds him; he turns instantly upon his heel, all pale and aghast he retires, quivering, from the verge of death.” While the saved man at first attributes his salvation to the one who called out to him to stop, when he is questioned further he ascribes the saving power to the word “Stop!” itself. Pressed still further he reflects that if he had not turned when called to stop he would have died, and he attributes this decision to God’s mercy. Finney applies the parable to the preacher and the sinner: “Not only does the preacher cry Stop, but, through the living voice of the preacher, the Spirit cries Stop.” It is the Spirit, operating through the preacher, that ultimately causes the sinner to turn. Finney compared this to a moment of political persuasion or persuasion in the law courts. In this situation “it is perfectly proper to say, that the Spirit turned him, just as you would say of a man, who had persuaded another to change his mind on the subject of politics, that he had converted him, and brought him over. It is also proper to say that the truth converted him; as in a case when the political sentiments of a man were changed by a certain argument, we should

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say, that argument brought him over.” And similarly, the case resembles that of “a lawyer who had prevailed in his argument with a jury.” Finney understood political and legal persuasion as forms of conversion. Where Beecher stressed the need for reflection and deliberation in civic and religious life, Finney offered a spontaneous, immediate approach that could also be highly polarizing and partisan, dividing the world more sharply into saints and sinners than was the case with Beecher’s more gradual consensus-building approach.51 Channing, Beecher, and Finney all granted substantial power to human agency exercised in and through language. For Channing that power resided principally in the individual’s interpretation of scripture, a rational hermeneutic practice that he compared to the analysis of the constitution. For Finney the preacher’s ability to move people depended on the intervention of the Holy Spirit. He defended his provocative tactics by arguing that they were necessary to stir people out of complacency, and they would not succeed unless God wanted them to. Beecher stressed the role of institutions and processes for uniting people in a common, divine cause. In his description of his 1823 Boston revival, Beecher described his successes as “commanding deep attention” and attracting interest across denominational boundaries, notably from Unitarians.52 The unifying possibilities of language were also on display at the 1827 conference in New Lebanon, New York, where Finney demonstrated his ability to conduct himself well in a debate and to achieve a measure of consensus with Beecher and the other ministers. The conference proved to Beecher’s satisfaction that Finney’s oppositional tactics could be reconciled with his own deliberative methods, paving the way for his invitation a few years later to lead a revival from his Hanover Street pulpit. This proved to be a short-lived accord, and Beecher and Finney eventually parted ways. Religious dissent was not to be so easily contained within the structures of republican deliberation, with consequences that resonated widely in the early American republic.53

S Four T HE PO LITICS AND AES THETICS O F DELIBER ATIO N i . t h e rise o f l ite r a ry or at ory By the 1820s, as we have seen, deliberation held a prominent place in the republicanism of the United States. The emergence of the second party system toward the end of the decade transformed deliberative politics into a partisan stance, which was associated with the National Republicans, and later the Whigs, in opposition to the Jacksonian Democrats. For the first time since the election of 1800 the United States had a strong two-party system and, after 1828, a president who sought to expand executive power. In the years between the elections of Jefferson and Jackson, there were important developments in the legislative branch. During that time Henry Clay had contributed to the evolution of Congress by building up the post of House Speaker, a signal accomplishment that was of a piece with his interpretation of the presidency and his theory of republicanism.1 Clay’s causes included resistance to the formation of parties; commitment to “the extension of republican freedom,” notably in Spanish America; the American System, an economic development policy designed to foster national growth and integration; and distrust of the military.2 This framing of Clay’s goals in the biographical introduction to an 1827 volume of his speeches sets up Clay in a thinly veiled contrast to Jackson, who embraced partisanship, sought to shrink the federal government, celebrated the liberating power of the free market, and expanded the American empire through military force. During his two terms as president Jackson posed a strong executive challenge to the powers of the legislative branch that Clay had spent much of his career helping to nurture. In a series of vetoes, executive orders, and speeches, Jackson claimed popular authority for the executive branch. Those claims did not go undisputed, as Clay and his allies

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developed a stronger defense of deliberative self-rule and made it the basis of their party identity. The aesthetics of deliberation evolved in tandem with its politics. Clay’s associate Edward Everett was a leading analyst of deliberative eloquence and an influential advocate for literary oratory. He laid out the criteria for aesthetically compelling parliamentary rhetoric in an 1827 North American Review article on the collection of Clay’s speeches.3 Despite his sympathy with Clay’s political aims and ideals, Everett’s focus was on his ally’s aesthetic deficiencies. While noting Clay’s prominence and emphasizing that “the immediate source of his popularity has been his eminence as a public speaker” (447), Everett stressed that the apparently unrevised speeches collected principally from The National Intelligencer lacked polish and offered few quotable passages, specimens of style, or extracts suitable for declamation such as might have appeared in elocution manuals alongside passages from Cicero and Shakespeare. In sum, Everett concluded that “in point of literary execution and rhetorical finish, they are not to be considered as models” (444). Noting that the published works of British parliamentary orators Charles Fox and William Pitt showed similar literary defects, Everett suggested that the weaknesses stemmed from the aesthetic challenges posed by truly deliberative oratory, that is, speeches prompted by the immediate context of debate and not written out in advance. French legislators composed their addresses ahead of time, which both disqualified them from being truly deliberative and, for Everett, reflected the precarious state of political liberty in France. In his effort to assess the factors that might contribute to more aesthetically satisfying deliberative eloquence, Everett brought to bear a comparative perspective that crossed historical periods and national boundaries and took into account governmental institutions, social conditions, and media development. He was concerned with tracing the dynamic relationship between modern parliamentary speech and the forms of its production and dissemination, and he made the interplay of written and printed forms with oral forms a focus of the essay. Repeatedly emphasizing the connections between parliamentary deliberations and the public sentiment that they were designed to represent, he concluded that it was in the activities of “deliberative assemblies” that statecraft was elevated beyond “the dead letter of form and official routine” (427). He attributed “the sudden and extraordinary growth of parliamentary eloquence” in modern times to the rise of contemporaneous newspaper coverage, comparing its effects on deliberative speech to the invention of alphabetic writing, paper, and printing. He described the experience of attending the British

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Parliament and then on the following day reading the newspaper accounts of the same debates as an unrivalled “spectacle of intellectual, political, and mechanical power combined” (429). For Everett the transformation of deliberative proceedings from closed-door to publicly accessible events disseminated in print had brought about a revolution in popular sovereignty. In an extended comparison of Parliament and Congress, Everett noted several major differences between the proceedings. These included representational practices that made American Congressmen more likely than their British counterparts to feel pressured to take the floor in order to “speak to the ear of the constituent” (432); differences in geography, with the city of London exerting on debates a powerful shaping force that was not matched by the raw and sparsely populated District of Columbia; the lesser role played in the United States by party discipline on one hand and wealth and rank on the other; the greater press of business in Parliament, which constrained debate; and the tendency of unsettled constitutional questions to prolong deliberations in Congress. Everett noted as well that more Congressmen were lawyers trained in public speaking, and that in the U.S. there was less of a gap between “the speaking leaders and the silent mass of a party” (436) than in Britain. He further compared the dimensions, acoustical qualities, and furnishings of the two deliberative chambers, finding that the smaller size, superior auditory features, and absence of desks for note taking all conspired to make the speeches in Parliament more focused and easier to hear and understand. He also noted the transformative impact of Edmund Burke, who had elevated parliamentary eloquence to a higher standard of substance and aesthetic appeal. Despite having a clear preference for British speeches, Everett refused to give them his unqualified approval, noting that in many respects the superior quality of the eloquence could be traced to political abuses that limited participation. Everett concluded his essay by observing the general relevance of public speaking in the United States. “The representative system is peculiarly adapted to bring the talent of public speaking into exercise, at every stage of its operation,” he observed, writing that “the primary inofficial meetings of the citizens, in the municipal assemblies (those miniature republics, whose organization lies at the basis of our well ordered commonwealths), our state legislatures, and lastly the councils of the nation, are so many tribunals where the people, as sovereign, seem to sit in audience to hear and judge of the reasons of what is proposed in the public service” (447). Emphasizing the parallels between the United States and Rome, and citing

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Cicero as a model, he ended with a plea for more attention to training in the arts of written and spoken communication.4

i i . d a n i e l w e b ste r’s g e n uin e word In a passage on literary history in “The Progress of Culture,” Ralph Waldo Emerson argued that “every book is written with a constant secret reference to the few intelligent persons whom the writer believes to exist in the million.” The theorist hopes that his ideals will speak to writers who can realize them, as Henry David Thoreau and Walt Whitman in their different ways realized the literary implications of Emerson’s transcendentalism. In the case of literary oratory, Emerson observed, “Everett dreamed of Webster.”5 Emerson had studied with Everett at Harvard, and his insight into his former teacher’s aesthetic values is borne out by Everett’s 1835 review of an anthology of Webster’s speeches. Early in his essay Everett asserted that if the volumes of Webster’s speeches had been found “among the cinders of the charred papyri of Herculaneum” they would have been hailed as “masterpieces” of “forensic and parliamentary eloquence.”6 He surveyed the different oratorical forms represented in the volume, giving particular attention to the popular genre of the patriotic commemorative oration, whose classical precedents he cited while emphasizing that the genre had achieved unusual prominence and popularity in the early American republic. Everett singled out the Bunker Hill Monument oration for extended analysis and, describing the interplay of written and extemporized elements, he compared Webster’s impromptu address to Warren with Saul’s address to the spirit of Samuel in the Bible.7 In closing, he returned to his opening claims for the aesthetic merits of Webster’s speeches and asked readers to engage them in a nonpartisan spirit that would allow their true value to emerge. Everett ended the review with a series of rhetorical questions that tied together considerations of aesthetic value, nonpartisanship, and patriotism: “Shall nothing but time teach the lessons of wisdom and kind feeling? Shall the tomb be the only temple from which the voice of patriotism shall speak with full effect? Is it impossible, before the last end, to tame the rage of detraction—to do justice to contemporary worth?” (251). In these lines Everett related the capacity of readers to appreciate Webster’s eloquence to the future prospects of the federal union. Around this time Emerson wrote two poems that express the ideals that Webster had come to represent. Written in the years following Webster’s resounding statement of unionism in his Second Reply to Hayne,

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Emerson’s poems reflect a longing for monumental republican leaders who exercised power on behalf of the common good through eloquent speech. In a brief lyric from 1831 Emerson suggested that Webster was a living embodiment of republican values and described “Webster’s lofty face” as a “beacon” and “radiant sign” for “Freedom’s race.” And in his Phi Beta Kappa poem of 1834 Emerson portrayed Webster as “a form which nature cast in the heroic mould / Of them who rescued liberty of old.” In the 1834 poem Emerson further emphasized Webster’s deliberative skills, noting that “when the rising storm of party roared” he “brought his great forehead to the council board” and, with great calm, contributed “common sense” to the “common good.” Believing that “the eloquent was aye the true,” Webster “launched the genuine word” which “shook or captivated all who heard. . . . And burned in noble hearts proverb & prophecy.” For Emerson at this moment, Webster’s deliberative eloquence united the ethical with the efficacious. “God-like Daniel” spoke a language of the common good that achieved the status of prophecy.8 Webster had worked to develop his rhetorical talents, which he understood to be central to his professional and political success. In his review Everett noted that the rhetorical and literary skills that Webster cultivated at Dartmouth College helped propel him from his modest upbringing on the New Hampshire frontier to national and international prominence. Everett also emphasized that educational institutions are “the most republican” of institutions, elevating “sons of poverty to the same level with sons of wealth” and breaking down “the inglorious domination of mere monied influence” (239 – 40). The value that Webster attached to eloquent speech is suggested in a manuscript autobiography that he wrote in the late 1820s, in which he described how he asserted himself against his father, who wanted him to accept a position as a court clerk. “I meant to use my tongue, in the Courts, not my pen;” Webster remembered himself saying, “to be an actor, not a register of other men’s actions.” The autobiographical fragment highlights his rhetorical education, in which Cicero figured largely. Shakespeare was another early influence, and references to his works found a place in some of Webster’s most famous speeches, including his Second Reply to Hayne and his speech on the Compromise Measures in 1850. After he was elected to Congress Webster paid frequent visits to the Senate to listen to the floor debates, which he described and evaluated in letters that sometimes included copies of printed speeches for the recipient to circulate. This rhetorical apprenticeship shows that Webster shared John Quincy Adams’s conviction that “eloquence is power” and set out to acquire it for himself. He used print to craft and disseminate

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aesthetically compelling works of verbal art, revising his speeches for publication and circulating the printed texts to friends and colleagues, with the double aim of promoting his positions and sharing his creations. His speeches appeared in newspapers and the journals of Congress, as separates, and in elocution manuals and anthologies. Finally in 1851, in a move that was perhaps unprecedented for a living orator, he brought out a sixvolume edition of his collected works with a lengthy biographical introduction by Everett.9 In the legislature and in the courts Webster crafted a rhetorical style that combined broad knowledge with an elegant vernacular idiom, sentiment with clear, accessible argument. Critics converged on certain traits in describing Webster’s oratory. Emerson described his forensic speeches as “thoroughly simple and wise,” stressing his strong grasp of both content and style. E. L. Magoon emphasized Webster’s skill at framing issues when he described Webster as “the logician” in Living Orators in America (1849), with other prominent speakers of the day described as “the rhetorician” (Everett), “the politician” (Clay), and “the metaphysician” ( John Calhoun). Edward G. Parker noted in a similar vein that “Webster was, emphatically, the orator of the understanding.” The logical qualities of Webster’s eloquence featured importantly as well in the analysis offered by Edwin P. Whipple, who compared Webster to Cicero and Burke and noted that Webster’s knack for clear argument meant that his speeches could be readily comprehended “by every intelligent farmer or mechanic who had a thoughtful interest in the affairs of the country.”10 Webster’s long-lived reputation as the preeminent aesthetician of modern republican eloquence was forged in the period between 1815 and 1835, when in a series of well-received speeches he celebrated the deliberative institutions and practices of the modern republic and sought to encourage their spread throughout the Atlantic world. These speeches included his commemorative orations at Plymouth (1820) and Bunker Hill (1825), his eulogy for Presidents Adams and Jefferson (1826), and his deliberative orations on the Greek Revolution (1824) and the Congress of Panama (1826). Even as Webster worked to promote republican movements elsewhere, he sought to build a consensus that would resist the centripetal forces of nullification threatening the early American republic, an effort that his contemporaries identified as the signal achievement of the Second Reply to Hayne (1830). In his own eyes and the eyes of many of his contemporaries, Webster was the Defender of the Constitution, the modern Cicero who protected the republic from destruction.11 Webster’s posture as defender of the republic is sometimes interpreted

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as a cynical ploy to advance sectional or class interests; alternatively it is interpreted as a throwback to the more naive or less politically mature era of classical republicanism, when partisanship was regarded as disloyalty.12 Neither purely cynical nor naive, Webster sought rather to foster a style of public discourse that focused on shared interests and concrete goals and avoided unnecessarily polarizing conflicts. His approach was pragmatic, in the sense that he valued government as a source of solutions to common problems. It was statist in that he understood the government as having a constructive role to play in advancing collective wellbeing. For the state to function in this way, he believed, certain procedures and norms of debate needed to be observed. Webster espoused a model of deliberative discourse that privileged civility and process and avoided rhetorical excess. Legislators should embrace these ideals, he believed, because they fostered good legislation and helped build consensus. From early in his political career Webster worked to make the conditions of deliberation a subject of reflection and self-monitoring, often commenting on rhetorical extravagance that he believed interfered with a mutually respectful exchange of views. At the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention of 1820 he demonstrated how he thought about constitutions as deliberative instruments, evaluating the convention itself and the document that they were charged with revising. The legislature is “the most powerful department” of the government, he claimed, and insisted upon measures to “insure deliberation and caution in its measures.” In addition to laying out the structural requirements of legislative deliberation, he also gave his fellow delegates a lesson in its proper conduct. Responding to a delegate who defended the right of town corporations to legislative representation, Webster first disputed the content of the argument and then took issue with its style. His opponent had argued that “this system of representation is an outrage, and declare[d] that we are forging chains and fetters for the people of Massachusetts.” With mounting irony Webster repeated the phrase “Chains and fetters!” three times, explaining why the delegates could not reasonably be imagined to be putting the people of the state in bondage. Webster concluded by exclaiming that “there are some things too extravagant for the ornament and decoration of oratory; some things too excessive, even for the fictions of poetry” and called upon the “honorable member” to exercise “a little reflection” and consider that “when he speaks of this assembly as committing outrages on the rights of the people, and as forging chains and fetters for their subjugation, he does as great injustice to his own character as a correct and manly debater, as he does to the motives and the intelligence of this body.”13

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Marking the boundaries of a well-conducted deliberation, Webster established two types of conditions. One involved an accurate appraisal of deliberative institutions and processes. A temporary elective body composed of “men of all professions and all parties, of different ages, habits, and associations” charged by the electorate with the job of recommending revisions for the voters to consider is not in a likely position “to fetter and enslave itself and its constituents!” (23). The second condition involves language that is not “extravagant” or “excessive.” In much the same terms as those later used by Frances Trollope and Michel Chevalier, Webster suggested that a tendency toward rhetorical excess and a dangerously loose use of metaphor threatened to undermine republican deliberation. Trollope noted that Congressmen sprang up to decry the “tyranny” of voting federal money for roads and canals even as the truly tyrannous policy of Indian removal was being implemented, while Chevalier observed in a similar vein that the “same declamatory tone, the same swollen style, the same appeal to the popular passions” were employed in arguments against the National Bank as had been used in revolutionary France against the aristocracy.14 Webster similarly warned against using inflammatory rhetoric in ways that exaggerate the circumstances and misdirect attention away from real tyranny. He suggested, with no great precision, that there are boundaries that must not be crossed if one does not wish to be considered “extravagant,” which in this case referred to the rhetoric of political slavery. This common trope of Revolutionary discourse, he implied, was out of place in discussions of the Massachusetts Constitution. By marking the boundaries of acceptable deliberative discourse in a way that excluded metaphors of political enslavement, Webster reminded his audience that the process of calling the constitutional convention and the conduct of the deliberations there followed established protocols. Ultimately the proposed revisions would be submitted to the voters, who had approved the convention, elected the representatives, and would have the final say over any amendments. It was misleading to construe this process as enslavement. And more subtly, he called attention to the fact that slavery was not merely a dead political metaphor. Many of the convention members attended his commemorative speech at Plymouth the following week, and in that address Webster dramatically portrayed the forging of real chains and fetters: “I hear the sound of the hammer, I see the smoke of the furnaces where manacles and fetters are still forged for human limbs. I see the visages of those who by stealth and at midnight labor in this work of hell, foul and dark, as may become the artificers of such instruments of misery and torture.” Slavery had been abolished in the New England

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states by 1804 and the United States Constitution prohibited the slave trade after 1808, but the illegal slave trade was a persistent temptation for New England merchants, who also engaged in a legal trade in persons with the West Indies and Cuba. Webster called upon justices, ministers, and merchants to suppress “this inhuman and accursed traffic” and appealed particularly to the “fair merchant” for whom the ocean represents “a field of grateful toil,” asking him to imagine that same ocean as it appears to “the victim of this oppression.” Employing potent symbols and developing their contradictions—the ocean as a vehicle for civilizing commerce and for the slave trade, the idea of political slavery and the brute fact of chattel slavery—Webster built a deliberative element into his commemorative address, inviting audience members to identify with an enslaved person’s view of the slave trade and the political system that supported it.15 In the same speech Webster described the bad influence of Christian missions, whose “almost imperceptible progress in the communication of knowledge” in Africa stood in sharp contrast to “the transmission of the vices and bad passions which the subjects of Christian states carry to the land” (46). The promise of the “civilizing mission” was failing utterly, he claimed, instead “making savage wars more savage and more frequent, and adding new and fierce passions to the contests of barbarians” (47). Webster understood barbarism as an uncivil state, not a racial characteristic. In this he followed Cicero, who considered civilitas to be “an internationalizing concept in so far as it was consciously related to qualities regarded as essentially human.”16 In the absence of the conditions of civilitas anyone could be a barbarian. Without state-funded schools and churches, Webster observed in “Basis of the Senate,” the poor man’s children would lapse into “ignorance, barbarism, and vice” (18). Republican society was an achievement that required sustained effort and the support of wellfunctioning public institutions; it was not a hereditary condition, nor were the institutions of civil society to be taken for granted. Partisan political conflict threatened to lead to a new barbarism. In his argument before the U.S. Supreme Court in the Dartmouth College case (1818) that first brought him wide acclaim, Webster warned that allowing the legislature to overturn the college charter would politicize higher learning, with devastating effects: “Colleges and halls will be deserted by all better spirits, and become a theatre for the contentions of politics. Party and faction will be cherished in the places consecrated to piety and learning.”17 Webster applied his Ciceronian construction of civil society as the opposite of barbarism both to the American republic, which he repeatedly warned could easily deteriorate into unproductive conflict and

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even violence, and to republican states that he supported, ranging from the Cherokee nation to Greece to the post-colonial republics of the south. Webster promoted the manifestations of civil society and republican selfgovernment where he found them, without linking them to ascriptive forms of identity such as race.18 The potential for republican governments to emerge around the Atlantic world was the subject of two speeches that Webster gave in Congress in the mid-1820s. In his maiden speech before the House of Representatives as congressman from Massachusetts in 1824, Webster defended his resolution to grant funding for an agent or commissioner to Greece. This resolution was designed to elevate the United States to a leadership position supporting Atlantic world republican movements. As he stood in the new Capitol building, calling attention to the fact that the House chamber was modeled on a Greek theater and supported by columns topped by Corinthian capitals, Webster identified ancient Greece as the ancestor of Congress itself. “This free form of government, this popular assembly, the common council held for the common good—where have we contemplated its earliest models?” he asked. “This practice of free debate and public discussion, the contest of mind with mind, and that popular eloquence, which if it were now here, on a subject like this, would move the stones of the Capitol—whose was the language in which all these were first exhibited?” Modern Greece no longer enjoyed the deliberative self-rule that its ancestors had invented. Revolutionaries were fighting to overthrow the oppressive control of the Ottoman Empire, and the Holy Alliance had threatened to help suppress the resistance. Contrasting the republican values of the United States with the monarchical authority asserted by the Alliance, Webster raised three central distinctions: the United States supported popular sovereignty organized along national lines, while the Alliance asserted sovereign authority without regard to national distinctions; the Allied powers violated “the public law of the world,” but the United States supported the international rule of law; and while the Allies issued doctrines supporting hereditary power and employed force to defend it, the United States relied on peaceable moral influences to spread republican values. The Greeks had manifested their readiness to return to their ancient republican traditions of deliberative self-rule by building up the institutions of civil society, including schools, colleges, libraries and the press, and by resisting Turkish domination. Webster singled out Greek appreciation for letters and their “improved state of knowledge” as a major source of their resistance movement.19 Rhetorical appropriateness emerged as a salient theme in Webster’s

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1826 speech supporting Bolívar’s Panama Congress. Deriding the skepticism of his opponents, he defended the efforts at self-governance in the “sister republics” of the United States. He conceded that the Spanish American republics had experienced a greater weight of “political despotism” and “religious intolerance” than the former British colonies, but he insisted that they had become “pupils in the school” of “popular liberty” and were now real “republican nations” governed by “free and popular institutions.” These terms were not merely rhetorical excesses, he stressed, but referred to established facts that the Senate should act upon by voting to fund ambassadors to Bolívar’s Congress. The speech included an instance of criticism directed at both the tone of the discussion and the impact that the expectation of print circulation had on the deliberations. In a tense moment during the protracted and contentious debate, Webster refused to respond to his opponent’s claims about President John Quincy Adams’s intentions regarding the Congress. Commenting on the fact that the spoken exchange was a prelude to its appearance in print, Webster noted that if he were to engage in “verbal criticisms” by quoting Adams extensively to establish the president’s meaning, the “printed discourse” would “bristle . . . in every line with inverted commas.” The abrupt shift from the aural register to the visual field here captures the rebarbative nature of the exchange. The prospect of bristling quotation marks calls public attention to the nitpicking and the lack of broad principles informing the debate. Webster sought through this image to moderate the intensely partisan and sectional conflict in order to achieve some resolution to the question of representation at the Congress in Panama.20 Webster summarized his views on the modern republic and bridged sectional divides in the peroration of the “Discourse in Commemoration of the Lives and Services of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson” (1826), in which he described how these two men, one from New England and the other from Virginia, had jointly shaped the revolutionary movement and contributed to the postrevolutionary state. In this address he identified the “new era” initiated through the efforts of Adams and Jefferson with free representative government, religious liberty, “improved systems of national intercourse,” a spirit of free inquiry, and “a diffusion of knowledge through the community, such as has been before altogether unknown and unheard of.” Webster ignored the well-known frictions between the two former presidents, emphasizing instead the collaborative work that united North and South in support of the Revolutionary cause and the principles of the Declaration.21 The centerpiece of Webster’s speech was an account of the Continental

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Congress, where Adams and Jefferson first worked together. Already before entering Congress Adams and Jefferson had separately demonstrated their ability to support the cause of resistance using all available media, including “printed addresses, public speeches, extensive correspondence” (117) and any other means they could find to promote the cause. The Continental Congress provided them with an arena where they could multiply their influence. Echoing Lord Chatham’s effusive praise of the Congress, Webster celebrated the proceedings as the perfect blend of philosophy and action, where the “deliberations” included “every thing which political philosophy, the love of liberty, and the spirit of free inquiry” had produced, wedded to “new and striking views,” and the whole applied “with irresistible force, in support of the cause which had drawn them together” (123 –24). The main narrative section of the address includes an account of how Jefferson came to draft the Declaration of Independence and a recreation of Adams’s speech supporting it. Adams provided the living voice that animated Jefferson’s written word and persuaded the Congress to formally separate from Britain. In the absence of records of the proceedings Webster was free to speculate about the qualities that made Adams effective and, more generally, to theorize about the nature of “true eloquence.” Eloquence, he concluded, “must exist in the man, in the subject, and in the occasion”; it arises at the moment when “words have lost their power, rhetoric is vain, and all elaborate oratory contemptible.” True eloquence goes beyond logic and urges speaker and audience toward “action, noble, sublime, godlike action” (131–32). Adams’s signal achievement on this occasion was not in any particular thing that he said, but rather in his success at persuading Congress to act by declaring independence from Great Britain. Webster’s effort to make civic discourse more deliberative is nowhere more apparent than in the Second Reply to Hayne. The Webster-Hayne debates in the Senate involved competing regional alliances, economic programs, and interpretations of the federal system. Both sides of the debate claimed to be perpetuating the values of the nation’s founders. As a proponent of Clay’s American System, Webster argued that the public lands should be administered for the good of the nation and not for specific local interests. He described how in 1816 he had studied the Constitution and the laws and determined that they supported national development projects. Since then he had remained consistent in his beliefs. He advanced the federal government’s role in promoting internal improvements and advocated the apportionment of public lands for roads,

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canals, and schools, things he believed essential for the common good. South Carolina should support national funding for a canal in Ohio even if it did not immediately profit from it. He criticized Hayne and, by implication, Hayne’s fellow South Carolinian Vice President John Calhoun, the major exponent of nullification, for putting local needs and priorities over national ones. Like Calhoun, Hayne argued for a loose and soluble federal system that gave priority to discrete local concerns, such as the protection and expansion of slavery, and did not attempt to manufacture a vision of the good of the whole.22 Webster put particular emphasis in his address on the deteriorating conditions of debate generated by the nullification movement. Over the previous two days, Webster charged, Hayne had touched on “every topic in the wide range of our public affairs, whether past or present— every thing, general or local, whether belonging to national politics or party politics” with the single exception of the public lands, to which he had “not paid even the cold respect of a passing glance.” Not only had Hayne been disrespectful to the Senate by ignoring the subject of the resolution; he had been rude to Webster personally, refusing his northern colleague’s request to delay the debate because Hayne had “something rankling” in his heart and because “he had a shot . . . to return, and he wished to discharge it” (271). Webster mocked the violence of Hayne’s image, observing that “if nobody is found, after all, either killed or wounded, it is not the first time, in the history of human affairs, that the vigor and success of the war have not quite come up to the lofty and sounding phrase of the manifesto” (271). He then contrasted Hayne’s emotional disquiet and animus toward himself with his own even temper and respectful treatment of his colleague. Webster reproached Hayne for his hostile and disunifying tone. He commented on his opponent’s “air of taunt and disparagement” and his “loftiness of asserted superiority,” complaining that they manifested “extraordinary language, and an extraordinary tone, for the discussion of this body” (274). The Senate, Webster continued with a rising emphasis, is “a Senate of equals, of men of individual honor and personal character, and of absolute independence. We know no masters, we acknowledge no dictators.” The floor of the Senate was not the arena for rhetorical contests and the “exhibition of champions”; rather it was “a hall for mutual consultation and discussion” (274). Throughout the lengthy address he repeatedly criticized Hayne for fostering partisanship and for claiming that the Democratic Party to which he belonged was “the true Pure, the only honest, patriotic party, derived by regular descent, from father to

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son, from the time of the virtuous Romans!” (312). Emphasizing his own commitment to a states-rights solution to slavery, Webster argued that the slavery issue was a red herring to keep northern men from taking the lead in the republic. The real aim of Hayne and other southern politicians was to retain the control of the federal government that they had held since its founding. Webster further contested Hayne’s interpretation of the Constitution, in which state legislatures could declare federal laws unconstitutional. In this view, the federal government was based upon a compact and thus was not a national state in the full sense of the term. Webster insisted that the sovereign people, and not the states, authorize the federal government. In a famous passage that Abraham Lincoln later echoed in the Gettysburg Address, Webster insisted that “it is, Sir, the people’s Constitution, the people’s government, made for the people, made by the people, and answerable to the people” (321). Nullification theory destroyed the Constitution, undermining the government until it became merely “a collection of topics for everlasting controversy; heads of debate for a disputatious people.” In these circumstances, Webster continued, “It would not be adequate to any practical good or fit for any country to live under” (336). Under the wrong circumstances, “we the people” turn “disputatious” and the Constitution becomes a source of “everlasting controversy” rather than a source of the common good. Webster explained the nullifiers’ capacity to reduce the federal government to powerlessness as a function of the way the human mind is constituted. In a controversy, Webster stated, both sides of the argument appear “very clear, and very palpable, to those who respectively espouse them; and both sides usually grow clearer as the controversy advances” (330).23 Webster warned that extreme polarization of the sort fostered by Hayne’s militarist rhetoric would lead to real violence, such as would erupt in the near-fatal beating of abolitionist Senator Charles Sumner on the floor of the Senate in 1856. Webster stressed further the role of the federal government in developing areas of shared interest among the states and, in the case of the Supreme Court, adjudicating differences of interpretation. Acknowledging that conflicting interests would inevitably arise, he offered Massachusetts’s response to the embargo law of 1807 as a model for challenging oppressive federal measures within a deliberative framework. In that earlier crisis, the northern state had “remonstrated,” “memorialized,” and “addressed herself to the general government . . . with her own strong sense, and the energy of sober conviction” (328). At the same time, the state government acknowledged that ultimate authority lay in the federal

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government, a position that Webster encouraged advocates of nullification to accept. Webster cleverly used an inept reference by Hayne to a passage from Macbeth to establish his interpretive authority and to assert the moral superiority of his unionist ideology.24 The reproduction of political authority is central to Shakespeare’s play, and the ability to interpret foundational texts—whether Shakespeare or the Constitution—was at the heart of the Senate dispute. Challenging Hayne’s political and literary competence, Webster launched into a long and mocking rebuttal focused on a passage from Macbeth: “The gentleman asks, if I were led or frighted into this debate by the spectre of the Coalition. ‘Was it the ghost of the murdered Coalition,’ he exclaims, ‘which haunted the member from Massachusetts; and which, like the ghost of Banquo, would never down?’ ” (275). Webster reproached Hayne for the slur and went on to impugn Hayne’s literary judgment by revealing his mistaken application of the Shakespeare passage: “It was not, I think, the friends, but the enemies of the murdered Banquo, at whose bidding his spirit would not down” (276). Webster then played out the scene in substantial and vivid detail, incorporating additional passages from the play and concluding with Macbeth’s paraphrase of the witches’ prophetic words regarding his own fate, but substituting a plural pronoun for the first person singular of the original: “a barren scepter in their gripe, / Thence to be wrenched with an unlineal hand, / No son of theirs succeeding” (277). By aligning Hayne and his associates with the childless regicide Macbeth, Webster suggested that the southern states’ rights and nullification movement had no future. Yet the movement could still wreak considerable havoc on the country, as Macbeth had done on Scotland. Asserting interpretive authority over Shakespeare’s play and linking it to authority over the United States Constitution, Webster turned Hayne’s allusion against him, recasting Macbeth in a manner that made nullification a regicidal threat to the sovereignty of the union. The English writer Harriet Martineau observed Webster’s practice of rarely speaking in the Senate, except on constitutional issues, when “he has the glorious satisfaction of knowing that he is listened to as an oracle by an assemblage of the first men in the country.”25 His choice of subject matter permitted a higher tone, more elevated diction, and greater dignity in the delivery. Martineau described the transformation that accompanied such performances, when Webster became intensely focused and even abstracted, as if “under the true inspiration of seeing the invisible and grasping the impalpable” (173). She contrasted this elevated Webster with the sociable man known for his drawing-room jokes and stories, as well as for

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his undemocratic “love of ease and luxury” and lack of “republican simplicity” (172). Martineau rightly speculated that Webster’s tastes and habits would prevent him from achieving his greatest ambition, the office of the presidency, and later critics, Emerson among them, echoed Martineau’s description of Webster’s moral limitations. These criticisms emphasized Webster’s reluctance to embrace the cause of immediate abolition and his willingness to seek “the good opinion of those who surround him.” The alternative, as Martineau saw it, was for him to fully exert his power in the antislavery cause. If he had done so, she speculated, “he would long ago have carried all before him, and been the virtual monarch of the United States” (172). Martineau’s ethical critique, and the many similar criticisms that followed Webster’s support for the Compromise of 1850, cast as a moral failing what Webster understood as a republican commitment to deliberative self-rule. Webster sought to build a national consensus while working within existing institutions. Through his sociability and humor he sought to foster the good will from which consensus could be forged; as such, it sprang from the same source as his opposition to the idea of anyone becoming “the virtual monarch of the United States.” Even as his willingness to compromise on slavery raised crucial questions that continue to engage moral philosophers, Webster’s celebrated eloquence imbued deliberation and compromise with a lasting aesthetic appeal.26

i i i . t h e f r on tie r hum o r o f dav id c roc k ett Beginning in the late 1820s, while Webster occupied the nation’s most prominent platforms and filled the pages of newspapers and journals, speech anthologies, and elocution manuals, David Crockett’s public image as frontiersman-turned-Congressman took shape through public appearances, newspaper accounts, printed speeches both authentic and invented, theatrical presentations, biographies and autobiographies, popular songs, and almanacs. Their public images differed in scope and tone. Webster’s national mythology traced the origins of a republican tradition in the history and institutions of New England. Crockett represented the republican as the frontiersman, voicing popular sovereignty in a more populist idiom than Webster’s. Webster blended sociability and sentiment with rational argument in a middling plain style. Crockett’s low, folk style was based on humor that was both gently self-mocking and carnivalesque; his selfdeprecation took the edge off his challenge to social hierarchies and helped him foster good feeling in his audiences. While Webster provided a sweep-

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ing geographic and temporal perspective on the struggles for republican government in the Americas and Europe, Crockett treated republican selfgovernance at the micro-level, promoting its emergence in frontier communities and on the borderlands.27 Despite these differences they shared an aversion to the partisan politics of Andrew Jackson and the Democratic Party, which both men regarded as antithetical to modern republican ideals. They also shared specific goals and values. The animating concerns of Crockett’s career were to disseminate property widely and to provide education for the neediest and least privileged, which paralleled the ideals of modern republicanism as Webster expressed them in his Plymouth oration of 1820. Crockett’s opposition to Indian removal and his belief that the federal government should sponsor development projects were other stances that he shared with Webster. Crockett and Webster shared as well the experience of a rural frontier upbringing and an unexpected rise to national prominence. In their different ways, moreover, Webster and Crockett both contributed to the development of deliberative democracy. While Webster employed sentimental rhetoric to foster consensus and monitored the language and conditions of debate to avoid divisiveness, Crockett used humor to undermine hierarchies and establish new types of social bonds with the goal of creating a more inclusive process of deliberation. In his classic autobiography A Narrative of the Life of David Crockett of the State of Tennessee, written for his 1834 congressional reelection campaign, Crockett offered a benign figure of the trickster politician who, as a “creative idiot” or “wise fool,” had the capacity to “uncover and disrupt the very things that cultures are based on.”28 The transgressive aspects of Crockett’s persona often challenged superficial gentility with a higher form of civility: he used incivility to reform civil society by addressing the needs of those on the lower rungs of the social ladder. His most significant violations were those of class and party structure. He openly challenged wealthier, more highly educated opponents, and he made resistance to Democratic Party discipline a centerpiece of his Narrative, where he portrayed himself as an independent representative responsible to his constituents but not bound by party affiliation. Humor, trickery, and dialect speech were prominent features of civic life in the early republic, which was marked by an interest in burlesques, hoaxes, stories, and jokes as well as in the regional inflections of common speech.29 Crockett’s emergence as a public figure coincided with the rise of Major Jack Downing, the imaginary Jackson associate from Maine created by Seba Smith whose dialect letters about the inner workings of the

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administration appeared in newspapers around the country. Downing is a naive but none-too-scrupulous Yankee yokel who makes his way into Jackson’s inner circle. From his privileged vantage point he comments on what he sees with the unintentional irony of the outsider on the make. Crockett and Downing were linked in the public mind. They appeared in one another’s publications. They each speculated about possible runs for the presidency. In late 1833 Crockett reportedly told John Quincy Adams that he “had taken for lodgings two rooms on the first floor of a boarding-house, where he expected to pass the winter, and to have for a fellow-lodger Major Jack Downing, the only person in whom he had any confidence for information of what the Government was doing.”30 Nathaniel Hawthorne explored the aggressive face of political humor in “My Kinsman, Major Molineaux” (1832), a tale about the experiences of Robin, a young man from the country who seeks out the patronage of a wealthy kinsman in town. Confronted with the spectacle of Major Molineaux, who has suffered the pain and humiliation of tarring and feathering, Robin bursts out in a laugh that echoes the mockery of the crowd leader responsible for his kinsman’s suffering. Hawthorne suggests that his outburst stems from a primal anti-authoritarian impulse and, through the figure of the crowd leader with a “parti-colored” painted face, links that impulse to the partisan politics of the Jackson era. Hawthorne suggests further that the laugh is an act of revolutionary aggression by the young against the old, the frontier against the east, the poor against the wealthy. It rends the threads of family, completing the rupture of the social fabric. At the story’s close voluntary social relationships fill in for broken family ties when an unnamed stranger offers to help Robin and encourages him to stay in town. Crockett’s humor blends elements of these different types of political laughter: the ironic but tolerant laugh at human frailty invited by Smith and the antihierarchical laugh that unites people in a new order that Hawthorne portrayed.31 Crockett’s political career has often been a source of puzzlement to his interpreters, not least because of his decision to ally himself with Webster and the Whigs. The nature of Crockett’s political convictions has been further clouded by the ambiguous authorship of the books bearing his name and the popular culture that grew up around him during his lifetime and thrived after his death at the Alamo. There are two largely distinct lines in the Crockett scholarship: biographical works devoted to establishing the facts of Crockett’s life and assessing his historical legacy; and cultural analysis of the Crockett myth. While interpretations of the mythic Crockett have characterized his transgressions as a form of infantile aggression and

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linked him to the imperialist politics of Manifest Destiny, the biographical scholarship presents a Crockett whose fierce political independence, dedication to his constituents, support for government-sponsored development, and commitment to republican ideals make clear that his decision to break with the Democrats and join the Whigs was one of principle.32 Already in 1823 Crockett had voted as a member of the Tennessee legislature to oppose Andrew Jackson’s election to the Senate. Nevertheless, when he came to run for Congress he did so as a Democrat. His permanent break with Jackson and the Democrats came about largely due to differences over two issues: the Indian Removal Act, which Crockett voted to oppose; and the party’s vacant land policy, particularly as it affected school funding and the rights of squatters. Jackson, James K. Polk, and other leading Tennessee Democrats were plantation owners from the eastern part of the state who wanted to retain control over the public lands in the west. Crockett represented the most westerly, least developed, and poorest region of Tennessee, including homesteaders who lacked legal title to their property. The split became open in 1829, when Speaker of the House Polk blocked Crockett’s legislative efforts to amend the Vacant Land Bill in ways that he believed would benefit his constituents. In later years Crockett’s liberal approach to land grants was realized in the Homestead Act of 1862.33 Crockett had been a successful local and state official before coming to Washington, but in part because of opposition from Polk and Jackson he failed to accomplish much as a national legislator. The difference in the local culture as well as the nature of the House rules posed unfamiliar challenges that he never surmounted. In a letter to Clay written shortly after Crockett’s election to Congress in 1827, James Erwin described the newly elected congressman as “the most illiterate Man, that you have ever met in Congress Hall,” and noted that “he is rough and uncouth, talks much and loudly, and is by far, more in his proper place, when hunting a Bear, in a Cane Break, then he will be in the Capital.” Crockett in his turn complained about the slow pace of action in Congress, which he attributed to a “desposition here to Show Eloquence,” remarking that “There’s too much talk,” endless talk “about nothing.” In the printed version of his Vacant Land Act speech, he described how “speech elicited speech, until the House became utterly exhausted with the subject” and his amendment was “spoken to death.”34 As recorded in the Register of Debates, the speeches on the House floor in the 1829 debates over the land bill reveal some of the weaknesses of congressional eloquence, confirming Crockett’s views as well as those of

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other observers, including Everett and Tocqueville. Several members began their remarks by noting that their constituents expected them to speak on the question, and many of these speeches were repetitious or not well informed, while some verged on incoherence. Some members responded to points in excessive detail, reflecting the negative consequences of note taking that Everett deplored. At several points Polk and other members of the Tennessee delegation took umbrage at some implied criticism and threatened reprisals if the insult was not retracted. Polk took the floor on several occasions, during which he spoke at length to correct errors and to guide the debate toward what he believed were the core issues, and Crockett responded by contesting the way the issues were framed.35 Crockett emerged from this debate with an entrenched hostility to the Democratic Party, and his hostility extended as well to congressional rules and protocols that he found to impede productive deliberation. His frustration with the federal legislative process probably contributed to his frequent absences from Congress, including one notable occasion when he spent three weeks touring the eastern states to promote his Narrative during the 1834 congressional debate on appropriations. While on tour he delivered the speech against Jackson’s Bank War that he had intended to give in the House. He had not been able to deliver the address because, as he told a Philadelphia audience, he was “cut out of [his] speech in Congress, by the ‘previous question.’ ” He went on to explain that this procedure, which Clay had developed as Speaker, meant “leaving the question under debate, and jirking a fellow up to vote on he don’t know what, or leave to say why or wherefore, pro nor con, but keep your eye on the fugleman”—a reference to a party or military leader who sets the agenda. Crockett’s story illustrated how the parliamentary rules and procedures designed to foster deliberation could also be used to disrupt it.36 Frustrated by the failure of his causes, Crockett turned to the press to explain his political positions. In 1829 the anti-Jackson editors of the National Intelligencer Gales and Seaton published separates of the speech on the land bill amendment included in the Register under Crockett’s name; and in 1830 a second speech attributed to Crockett, which supported the construction of the National Road that Jackson had vetoed, was published by Duff Green.37 The printed speeches attributed to Crockett certainly differed from the ones that he delivered on the floor of the House, and his level of involvement in their preparation is uncertain. What seems clear is that he was glad to claim them as his own and distributed copies to his constituents. (Indeed, he was accused of using franking privileges to mail political materials.)

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Crockett’s most unpopular position with his constituents was his opposition to Jackson’s Indian removal policy, and he voted against the Indian Removal Act because he believed it would harm the dislocated Indians without helping white settlers. The antiremoval activist Jeremiah Evarts attributed one of the Speeches on the Passage of the Bill for the Removal of the Indians (1830) to Crockett, and the speech was reprinted under his name in The Cherokee Phoenix that July, though the Register of Debates does not include it. The printed speech paraphrases Crockett as saying that “he had always viewed the native Indian tribes of this country as a sovereign people” and that their removal would be “oppression with a vengeance.” The text quotes Red Jacket and asserts Crockett’s familiarity with the Chickasaw communities near his district, as well as his personal knowledge that “a part of the tribe of the Cherokees were unwilling to go.”38 By 1830 two versions of Crockett were taking shape in print: the plainspoken, uneducated, but principled and capable Crockett of the speeches; and the outrageous folk hero who appeared in the newspapers. At first the two Crocketts seemed compatible. In 1831 the image of the “half-horse, half-alligator” Crockett gained prominence with the appearance of James Kirk Paulding’s Lion of the West, which portrayed him as high spirited and colorful but fundamentally decent.39 Two years later Matthew St. Clair Clarke drew on material that Crockett gave him in his Life and Adventures of Colonel David Crockett of West Tennessee, which was quickly republished with the less dignified title Sketches and Eccentricities of Colonel David Crockett. Alongside the stories he had heard from Crockett, Clarke included a satirical pamphlet by Adam Huntsman, a Jacksonian lawyer from west Tennessee who went on to defeat Crockett in the 1835 election. Using the pseudonym “Blackhawk,” a reference to the defeated Sauk leader of that name who had recently been put on tour by the United States government, Huntsman wrote a pseudobiblical narrative called “Book of Chronicles, West of Tennessee and East of the Mississippi Rivers” in which he parodied the republican features of Crockett’s public image and alleged a conspiracy between Crockett and Webster to defeat Jackson and his party.40 Writing in the tradition of biblical republicanism derived from James Harrington and developed by Lyman Beecher, and merging it with a strain of republicanism identified with Native Americans, Huntsman portrayed “David” as “chief of the hosts of the Forked Deer, and Obion, and round about the Hatchee, and the Mississippi rivers,” “a man wise in council, smooth in speech, valiant in war, and of fair countenance and goodly stature” who is chosen by his people to go “to the grand Sanhedrim” in Washington “to consult on the welfare of Columbia and her twenty-four

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tribes.” Huntsman then summarized the January 1829 congressional debates over Crockett’s proposed amendment to the land bill, presenting them as a conflict between David’s political ambitions, which he founded on a promise to give his constituents “lands flowing with milk and honey,” and the rest of the Sanhedrim, who insisted that the lands must be distributed by the “tribe of Tennessee.” The actual debates that Huntsman parodied included concerns about state and federal authority, legal precedent regarding land distribution, disputes about the amount and quality of land involved, concerns about warrant holders, and differences over the proper focus of land revenue targeted at education. Huntsman concisely portrayed most of these conflicts, then brought in the villains of the piece: the “sons of Belial,” including “the Everettites” (that is, Edward Everett and his associates), and particularly “Daniel, whose surname was Webster, and who was a prophet of the order of Balaam” who recruits Crockett by promising to support his amendment if he will join with Clay’s supporters at the next election. David agrees, citing his wish to be the river people’s “wise man and chief ruler forever.” The final sections of the poem describe Crockett advising an associate on how to represent—and sometimes misrepresent—his beliefs so that he will win the election, but in the end the voters unite against him and elect his opponent William Fitzgerald, thereby remaining loyal to “Andrew, who hath brought us out of British bondage.” Despite Huntsman’s prediction Crockett won his 1833 campaign to return to Congress, but he lost his next campaign to Huntsman himself.41 By 1834 when he wrote the Narrative Crockett had become increasingly sensitive to the role of the partisan press in shaping his public image. In his preface he describes how he wrote his own life story in order to reclaim his reputation and links authentic self-representation to effective representation of his constituents’ interests. “The whole book is my own,” he insisted, “and every sentiment and sentence in it” (9). Crockett turned for a model of self-making and political virtue to Benjamin Franklin’s Autobiography.42 Earlier I argued that Franklin adapted Ciceronian ideals to the modern republic. Crockett in his turn absorbed and reinvented a number of those ideals. One central Ciceronian theme in Crockett’s narrative focuses on the natural origins of law and society. Cicero’s arguments that well-framed statutory law accords with the laws of nature, and that reason can be used to discover natural law, famously influenced the natural law theory of John Locke and his American adapters. Crockett tailored the image of the illiterate natural legislator to the

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emerging figure of the legislator from the borderlands. The autobiography is punctuated by alternating apologies for his lack of polish and defenses of his autobiographical style as a “plain, honest, homespun account of my state in life” (6), one perhaps marred rather than improved by the associates who edited it for him. (“I despise this way of spelling contrary to nature” (9), he insists of the editorial alterations.) He embraced the persona of the unlearned lawman, writing that “it will be a source of astonishment to many, who reflect that I am now a member of the American Congress—the most enlightened body of men in the world—that at so advanced an age, the age of fifteen, I did not know the first letter of a book” (43). Recently Andrew Jackson had accepted an honorary law degree from Harvard University, and his conspicuous lack of formal legal training or knowledge of Latin had caused a public stir. John Quincy Adams deplored Harvard’s decision to honor the “illiterate” Jackson, and Seba Smith treated the event in one of his Major Jack Downing letters.43 By asserting his lack of even basic literacy, Crockett painted himself as more authentically natural and common than the wealthy president.44 He resolved the apparent anomaly of a legislator without formal knowledge of the law by tracing the stages of his political education on the frontier. In the newly settled Shoal Creek area, where he moved in 1817 despite the fact that “no order had been established there” because “I thought I could get along without order as well as any body else” (133), Crockett participated in a Ciceronian process of social formation. After two or three peaceful years without a legal code or institutions, “bad characters” began to cause trouble, and “we found it necessary to set up a . . . temporary government of our own” (133). The resulting corporation appointed magistrates and constables but established no legal code, leaving it to the designated officials to “fix the laws” (133). Crockett gained his first legal experience as a corporation magistrate and was later appointed to the magistracy by the state legislature. This new role stretched his abilities, for the spoken rulings that he had previously used as warrants now had to be produced in “real writing, and signed” (134). Crockett described how he relied on his constable to perform these tasks until “by care and attention I improved my handwriting” (135). He insisted that the literary and textual aspects of his political education were secondary, even potentially counterproductive to natural law and justice: “I gave my decisions on the principles of common justice and honesty between man and man, and relied on natural born sense, and not on law learning to guide me; for I had never read a page in a law book in all my life” (135). While Cicero distinguished

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just from unjust laws by treating just laws as products of deliberations that are consonant with natural law, Crockett based his judicial and legislative work on strong social relationships and “natural born sense.” Crockett’s emphasis on sociability is a second Ciceronian theme in his narrative. As Alexander Hill Everett noted in the North American Review, Cicero was a primary source for the defense of natural sociability. Fellow feeling, not fear (Hobbes) or formal contract (Locke), draws people into civic life and political order. Crockett represented a model of frontier civility that adapted Ciceronian ideals to a world far from ancient Rome or contemporary Boston. He built his political reputation on an even, sunny temperament and a friendly rapport with his audience, traits that distinguished him from Jackson, who was famous for his bad temper. Shortly before Thomas Jefferson died he reportedly told Webster that Jackson’s “passions are terrible. When I was president of the senate, he was a senator, and he could never speak on account of the rashness of his feelings. I have seen him attempt it repeatedly, and as often choke with rage.” Some opponents took Jackson’s temper to signal a lack of the self-control required of a chief executive and tied his alleged lack of moderation to the party system that exacerbated political conflicts and threatened the republic’s future. Crockett emphasized that he not only maintained a good humor himself, he sought to elicit it from others. He translated his frequently remarked-upon personal characteristics of gentleness and good nature into an influential political style that challenged opponents without violence, constituting new social bonds to replace the oppressive ones he sought to overturn.45 In the Narrative he described his successful political campaigns as prolonged exchanges of wit and one-upmanship against wealthier, higherstatus opponents that typically ended with him stealing the election, trickster fashion. His political performances relied heavily on situational humor (putting his opponent in an awkward position) and verbal humor (wit and storytelling). He continued as well the time-honored tradition of distributing alcohol to prospective voters, jollifying the electoral process, loosening inhibitions, unbridling tongues—and resisting bourgeois moral reforms such as temperance. In his Narrative Crockett promised that his campaign style would leave the voter “in a first-rate good humor” (169). As one campaign confrontation unfolded, his elite opponent stood “like he was both amused and astonished,” while the crowd “was in a roar of laughter” (170). The audience’s laugh was also, for Crockett, a sign of recognition and authentication. “Just read for yourself,” he concluded the preface to his Narrative, “and my ears for a heel tap, if before you get

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through you don’t say, with many a good-natured smile and hearty laugh, ‘This is truly the very thing itself—the exact image of its Author’ ” (10 –11). In his campaigns, as in his Narrative, audience laughter was the sign of his successful self-projection and the new social bonds forming around him. Crockett’s performative ethics emphasized putting others in good spirits with a swig of whiskey, a plug of tobacco, a good story, and a laugh. Such methods were not sufficient to sustain a republic, Crockett made clear, but they established the sociability that grounded his relationship with his constituents. The association of speech with social formation is another of Crockett’s Ciceronian themes. Describing his first campaign, Crockett notes that speechmaking “was a business I was as ignorant of as an outlandish negro” (140). The phrase echoes his complaint earlier in the Narrative that an unauthorized biographer “puts into my mouth such language as would disgrace even an outlandish African” (4). When he later compares himself to an “outlandish negro” to describe his lack of rhetorical skill, he identifies comprehensible speech with the boundaries of civil society. Crockett, who himself owned slaves, here contributed to the practice of using African American speech to mark the limits of intelligible language that could be incorporated in the civic space of the United States. Variants of American English came increasingly to represent democracy in Crockett’s day, but African American dialects were stigmatized as too foreign or incommensurate to be embraced as part of the American idiom. Linguistic exclusion reinforced civic and political exclusion.46 Beginning from this “outlandish” space of inarticulateness and exclusion from the civic realm, Crockett set out to create a new form of political expression adequate to the reality he represented. He describes how, unable to avoid speaking at a campaign event, “I determined just to go ahead, and leave it to chance what I should say” (141). After raising “a mighty laugh” (142), Crockett continued with amusing anecdotes and concluded by taking the audience over to the liquor barrel before his opponent had a chance to speak. Eventually he learned to supplement wit and storytelling with more substantive points, which he absorbed from the speeches of his better-informed competitors. His mastery of the institutions and processes of government signaled his movement from an “outlandish” place into the space of appearance where the public realm is constituted and power is produced.47 Crockett made no effort to portray his legislative work in the Narrative, focusing instead in alternating scenes on his campaign exploits and his hunting successes. This striking omission may reflect the challenges of

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representing congressional deliberations, particularly for Crockett’s target audience of frontier voters; his failure to have much effect may also have been a factor in his narrative choices. Instead he analogized political situations to scenes from hunting and warfare, perhaps to make them more concrete to his constituents. He described Jackson’s failures as a commander during the war against the Creeks, comparing the Bank Wars to an 1813 conflict over bad leadership and inadequate supplies between the militia and Jackson’s government forces. He compared the mutinous militiamen whose terms of service had expired to “Clay, and Webster, and myself ” who were resisting “the officeholders” and fixing “bank matters”: “the ‘government’ regulars and the people’s volunteers have all been setting their political triggers” against one another, he wrote, rather than “getting along to the help of the country and the people” (94 –95). Crockett accused the Democrats of being an old-style personal faction focused on Andrew Jackson, and he cast his alienation from the Democrats in highly personal terms: “I was to bow to the name Andrew Jackson, and follow him in all his motions, and mindings, and turnings, even at the expense of my conscience and judgment” (205).48 He referred to Jackson caustically as “the government,” and described him in idolatrous terms as a “molten image.”49 Crockett’s most visually striking and memorable rejection of Jackson’s authority appeared at the end of his Narrative. Here he emphasized that he remained free from “the yoke of any party” and had no “driver at my heels, with his whip in hand,” while urging his constituents to “Look at my arms, you will find no party hand-cuff on them” (210 – 11)! Neither slave nor criminal, Crockett concluded his catalog of political outcasts with a phrase that became one of his trademark slogans: “Look at my neck, you will not find there any collar, with the engraving MY DOG. Andrew Jackson. (172)

This image identifies party affiliation as a form of dehumanization and loss of self-possession. Crockett’s resistance to the oppressive features of partisan politics was an even more prominent theme in his account of his northeast tour. “Gentlemen, what kind of republicanism do you call this?” he asked repeatedly. “I had always thought that the true republicanism was, for every man in this boasted land of liberty to vote for whom he pleased, and no man had a right to censure his motives.”50 Similar sentiments were attributed to Crockett in The Life of Martin Van Buren (1835), in which Van Buren’s candi-

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dacy was described as the equivalent of one president’s appointing his successor, a power that the “democratic republicans” of France had granted to Napoleon. “Crockett” fulminated that “the good of this joke is, these same people call themselves democratic republicans. Republicans! unable to choose for themselves, and consenting to give that right to a single individual. What think you of that?” Crockett and his imitators identified parties with personal factions and saw them as violations of republican values.51 The clash over sovereignty and land ownership and the insistence on personal and political independence that were persistent themes in Crockett’s career resounded even more loudly in his final, fatal cause: the secession of Texas from Mexico. This war for independence, which united settlers from the United States and Tejanos against a centralizing Mexican government, was a struggle for land on a national border. For Crockett this was above all a local republican movement and not an effort to absorb Texas into the United States. Crockett insisted on inserting the word “republican” into the loyalty oath that he swore to the Texas government, apparently as a dig at Jackson. He sought substantive autonomy for the Texas republic and resisted Jackson’s efforts to bring it into the federal government’s sphere of influence. After he lost his congressional seat to Huntsman in 1835, Crockett had reportedly told his constituents, “You may all go to hell, and I will go to Texas.” His decision to move there reflected his commitment to the republican ideals of popular rule and freedom from oppression, including the oppression of “King Andrew” and his partisan politics. In the end Crockett was unable to realize his ideal community either through statesmanship (in Washington) or warfare (in Texas). His ability to exercise even a modest amount of control over his public image ended with his death at the Alamo, and the surge of almanacs and other works featuring his “half-horse, half-alligator” persona threatened to overwhelm the image of the frontier republican that he had worked to project during his lifetime. But his Narrative lived on as a classic of American autobiography, portraying the good-tempered, humor-loving natural lawgiver who uses language to weave the bonds that unite self-governing egalitarian communities.

} The republican aesthetics of deliberation that Webster and Crockett helped to fashion took different forms. Webster’s style was noted for being direct, clear, and accessible. He leavened his reasoned arguments with appeals to sentiment that were designed to forge a consensus and avoid extreme or polarizing rhetoric. He understood civility, moderation, and willingness to compromise as civic virtues that he urged upon his col-

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leagues and modeled for his constituents. These political skills were part of the New England heritage that Webster advanced as a national ideal. By contrast Crockett’s frontier eloquence highlighted a colorful vernacular idiom that challenged class hierarchies and party structures. Crockett treated campaigns as occasions when he could use wit and one-upmanship to defeat higher status opponents and forge new social bonds. Yet this celebrity of Jacksonian democracy rejected Democratic Party discipline as a form of oppression. Crockett shared with Webster a distrust of partisanship and an emphasis on sociability and good nature, as well as a view of the federal government as a potential source of common goods, notably including property and education. These were the core ideas that linked their interpretations of republicanism.

S Five P RO PHESYIN G THE MULTIR ACIAL REPU B L IC

i . d e m o cr a cy a n d the “ three r ac es” In the same years that Webster promoted the democratic republican values of accessible, civil deliberation, and Crockett used carnivalesque good humor to overturn hierarchies and create a democratic republican community, William Apess, Maria Stewart, and David Walker employed prophetic rhetoric to advance a multiracial ideal of the modern republic based on full citizenship rights, equality before the law, and inclusive deliberations. These antiracist leaders were active in and around Boston for a handful of years around 1830, during which time they published speeches, manifestoes, autobiographies, and histories in which modern republicanism was both the object and tool of critique. In their political writings they interrogated the way racialist thought related to republican ideals and highlighted the contradictions between republicanism and race-based nationalism. Their works examine a national crisis in deliberation produced by the increasingly pointed exclusion of people of color from mainstream civic life in the United States, particularly after the presidential election of 1828 when a prominent slave owner and leading proponent of Indian removal won the executive office. Apess, Stewart, and Walker transformed the jeremiad, a traditional genre of social critique, into a tool of deliberative reform, calling on their audiences to examine their prejudices and embrace more racially inclusive institutions and more fully democratic practices of deliberation. People on every side of the debate about the future of the American republic identified racial prejudice as a major obstacle inhibiting a peaceable and just resolution to the colonial legacy of conquest and slavery. Tocqueville called this the “three races” problem and addressed it in a supplement to the first volume of Democracy in America. Treating the topic as both outside the subject matter of democracy proper and intimately tied to it,

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Tocqueville linked race to the question of “the permanence of republican forms in the New World.” He concluded that Indians were destined to die out but warned that slavery posed a serious threat to the future of the republic. For Tocqueville as for many contemporaries, the differences between the three races were the effects of distinct histories and opportunities; these differences were amplified by prejudice based on skin color.1 Several contested questions informed debates about the implications of racial heterogeneity in the early republic. Should communities of color choose integration and assimilation with white America, or should they prefer segregation and cultural autonomy? Was a multiracial republic that endowed all its members with full citizenship rights a plausible goal? What might be lost politically and culturally due to the effects of white prejudice and the consequences of integration? Could whites overcome their biases and accept people of color as their social and political equals? These questions framed the alternatives that emerged to address the nature of the modern republic after 1815. While the issues facing African Americans and indigenous Americans differed in important ways, they also overlapped on many fronts, and in the debates about racial identity and modern republicanism that unfolded over the 1820s and 1830s they were often closely connected. These debates were further sharpened by colonization projects and republican alternatives to the United States in Africa, Europe, Haiti, and Spanish America.2 In its early formulations, modern republican thought was influenced by indigenous modes of self-governance. The Iroquois League inspired the founding generation through such works as Cadwallader Colden’s History of the Five Indian Nations (1727), which stressed the well-developed processes for collective decision making embodied in the Iroquois League and celebrated their Greek- and Roman-like eloquence.3 Thomas Jefferson acknowledged the significance of native republics in Notes on the State of Virginia (1787), and his advocacy for Native American citizenship extended into his presidency.4 By 1817 when the eastern Cherokees explicitly embraced the republic as a political form, the lines of influence had shifted. The Cherokee nation developed republican institutions based on the Constitution of the United States, testing whether the ideals of modern republicanism could provide a means to resolve conflicts with neighboring whites over land, religion, and culture. Confronted with the defeat of their Creek neighbors and the determined efforts by the victorious General Jackson to remove them from their homeland, threatened as well by white settlers who often bore prejudicial views and felt entitled to their land, and challenged by the state of Georgia, which aggressively denied

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their sovereignty, the Cherokee community pursued a strategy that they hoped would give them a measure of autonomy and allow them to preserve features of their traditional culture. In a memorial presented to Jackson and his fellow government commissioners in July 1817, Cherokee leaders emphasized the community’s existence as a free and distinct nation. During the next decade a segment of the community advocated a strategy of selective acculturation that included a mixture of private and communal property; adaptation of white educational and farming practices, including slavery; the pursuit of economic modernization and its attendant values of individualism and acquisition of wealth; and the acceptance of Christianity. Even as they moved culturally closer to their white neighbors, these advocates of acculturation emphasized the need to retain a distinctive identity and a separate government. Elias Boudinot, the editor of the Cherokee Phoenix, held that sovereignty remained crucial if the Cherokees were ever to achieve full equality with white Americans, rather than being relegated to second-class citizenship. Boudinot and his allies saw the independent Cherokee republic as analogous to territories that would eventually become states. Cherokee efforts to reframe their traditional political and social structure into a modern republican state reached a high point in 1827, when a constitutional convention met on July 4 and adopted the new Cherokee Constitution, which differed from the U.S. Constitution principally in its emphasis on territorial integrity and national sovereignty. Jackson’s election to the presidency the following year precipitated the swift unraveling of Cherokee efforts to resist removal. In defiance of the Supreme Court and public opposition, Jackson refused to respect Cherokee claims to their historic territory and their assertion of political autonomy. In 1830 he pushed through the Indian Removal Act and began implementing measures that culminated in the Trail of Tears of 1838. Within the Cherokee community the experiment in republicanism prompted internal conflicts that set Christians and modernizers against traditionalists, mixed bloods against full bloods, moderates against purists. Perhaps the ultimate symbol and consequence of these conflicts took place in 1839 when Boudinot and two other signers of the Treaty of New Echota were privately executed. Boudinot had come to believe that the move to Oklahoma was the only means to preserve some measure of independence for the eastern Cherokees, who he feared would otherwise be overrun and swallowed up by whites once Georgia removed the legal boundaries around Cherokee territory. His opponents rejected the compromise that the treaty represented, believing it to be a betrayal.5

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Similar conflicts over the best response to escalating pressures from white settlers and the United States government shaped Iroquois politics in the 1820s. In 1827 the prominent traditionalist chief Sagoyewatha (or Red Jacket), who had for decades fought to preserve Seneca territory and resist Christian conversion and other forms of acculturation, was deposed by a group of Christian Senecas. He was reinstated in the following year after a government inquiry. During the negotiations over land sales that precipitated Sagoyewatha’s deposition, white land agents repeatedly used the example of the Cherokees to threaten him and his allies, insinuating that if the Senecas refused to sell their land, they too would be “removed.” Despite such threats, Sagoyewatha continued his fight for Seneca land and cultural autonomy until his death in 1830.6 Proposals to remove African Americans from the United States had a set of motives and results similar in complexity to those of Indian removal. The idea of creating republics for free blacks from the Americas and Europe had been associated with the transatlantic abolitionist movement since the late eighteenth century and was bolstered by the creation of the Haitian Republic. After 1816 the American Colonization Society gave a new impetus to the idea that free African Americans would thrive best in independent black republics, rather than integrated into a multiracial United States. Henry Clay presided at the founding meeting of the ACS, and its constitution was drafted soon afterward in the hall of the House of Representatives. The organization was supported by an array of elected representatives and other prominent men from both the North and the South, including slave owners (Clay himself was one; Andrew Jackson was another) as well as opponents of slavery, including Webster. Colonization proved popular among political leaders because it allowed them to agree on the removal of free blacks without reference to the future of American slavery. Slavery opponents argued that independent republics were the best means by which an oppressed population could be enabled to escape the baleful effects of white prejudice and govern themselves; many also embraced the idea that colonies of Christian blacks from the United States would be effective missionaries to Africans. Supporters of slavery viewed colonization as a way to eradicate a free black population that posed a threat to the peaceful operation of the slave system. Many advocates on both sides argued that colonization would encourage emancipation. The ACS garnered substantial support among whites and with some prominent blacks until the early 1830s, when William Lloyd Garrison worked with anticolonization black leaders to catalyze antislavery sentiment against colonization and in favor of immediate emancipation.

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Garrison and his allies challenged the views of religiously minded advocates of colonization who saw the mission to Africa as a central feature of the ACS’s work, arguing that a true interpretation of Christianity supported an end to racial prejudice and the creation of an egalitarian multiracial republic.7 Cherokee sovereignty and African colonization were linked in public discussions of the place of racial diversity in the republic. Articles promoting the ACS ran in the pages of the Cherokee Phoenix, an indication of the perceived parallels between the two removal projects.8 The initially mixed response among free blacks to removing to Africa, Central America, or Haiti reflected many of the same concerns that influenced the debates about removal in the Cherokee community. Paul Cuffee, Richard Allen, and Martin Delaney espoused the view that white prejudice would prevent African Americans from attaining full citizenship rights in the United States and gave their (in some cases intermittent) support to colonization plans. Others held that colonization was at root a racist and proslavery movement and insisted on the right of free blacks to remain in the communities where they lived and to demand full equality and social integration. When William Lloyd Garrison sought to catalyze opposition to African colonization, he gave a prominent place to African American objections. The second part of his Thoughts on African Colonization (1832) contains a digest of the “sentiments of the people of color” against colonization and in favor of a multiracial republic. Garrison linked Removal and colonization, observing that in his many conversations with blacks on the subject of colonization he had found them “as unanimously opposed to a removal to Africa, as the Cherokees from the council-fires and graves of their fathers.” He repeatedly blasted the colonization movement as both antirepublican and un-Christian.9 Garrison founded The Liberator in Boston in 1831, and in his opening statement he blended prophetic language—“I desire to thank God, that he enables me to disregard ‘the fear of man, which bringeth a snare,’ and to speak his truth in its simplicity and power”—with republican avowals to resist oppression. He observed further, “I am aware, that many object to the severity of my language; but is there not cause for severity? I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or speak, or write, with moderation.”10 The contrast with the moderate tone and deliberate approach of the North American Review could not have been sharper. The first sustained discussion of the African Colonization Society in the

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Review appeared in the January 1824 issue, when Jared Sparks authored a lengthy essay on the history and politics of colonization.11 Sparks, later a source for Tocqueville, noted that public opinion served both as a moral force and as the source of racial prejudice in the United States. Citing Terence and Epictetus as examples of slaves who went on to distinguished careers after emancipation, Sparks made the common argument that color prejudice would prevent African Americans from similar achievements. He offered a detailed description of the palavers where ACS representatives negotiated for land with African headmen, noting that the African leaders received ACS negotiators “civilly” (44) while also emphasizing that they refused to “deliberate on affairs” (45) without presents and rum. Sparks later concluded that the example of a colony of former slaves would reform the African habit of engaging in the slave trade and encourage Africans to “think and deliberate” (76) about their means of living. Sparks presented colonization as a mechanism to civilize and Christianize Africa, as well as to open new commercial markets. The implications for the United States were equally weighty. Sparks concurred with ACS claims that colonization was the only means to end slavery in the United States, and he held further that it offered African Americans their best opportunity to achieve “freedom and self government” (61). He cited the example of Colombia’s 1821 manumission law in order to argue that the United States could similarly tax estates with the proceeds going to a colonization fund. And he suggested a parallel between African colonization and Indian removal when he noted that a traveler could reach Liberia faster than the Mandan villages on the Missouri River. In a shorter essay on “Emigration to Africa and Hayti” the following year, Sparks repeated several of his arguments for colonization, emphasizing that he preferred an African colony because he believed it would help end the slave trade but that he supported colonization to Haiti where, despite the need for some constitutional reforms, there was a hopeful indicator of future success in the strong emphasis on education and the wellconducted “deliberations” (210) of the Haitian congress.12 In 1832 Benjamin Bussey Thatcher, another Boston-based intellectual, returned to the questions that Sparks had raised, restating the arguments in favor of colonization at a time when the abolitionist movement was gathering strength. Thatcher traced the history of colonizationist thought, noted that Lafayette was a founding vice president of the ACS, and observed the strong support for colonization among ecclesiastical bodies. He emphasized that the ACS held slavery to be both evil and Constitutional, and argued that colonization was in the best interest of the entire country,

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uniting North and South, slaveholding and free states, states that excluded freed people and those that did not. Even as he acknowledged black opposition to colonization, Thatcher stressed that individual happiness should be subordinated to the common good: “it is not right that men should be free, when their liberty will prove injurious to themselves and others.” The only way to accomplish emancipation, he reiterated, was through colonization. Thatcher’s 1835 review of Life of Jehudi Ashmun, Late Colonial Agent in Liberia reveals considerably more ambivalence about the costs and prospects of colonization and the “Christian empire” that was its goal. Even as he praised Ashmun’s leadership and celebrated the rapid building of a school, market, and library in the colony, he dwelt at considerable length on the early suffering and warfare that led to illness and loss of life, including Ashmun’s own. Thatcher concluded his review with a call for a slower pace of colonization and a more careful plan, comparing Liberia’s short history to the founding era in Pennsylvania and Maryland.13 Responding to the rise of abolitionist activism, Emory Washburn challenged the view that American slavery was a uniquely oppressive labor practice in an 1835 review essay titled simply “Slavery” that he wrote in response to Lydia Maria Child’s Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans (1833). Washburn asserted the “absurdity” of slavery while warning that there was a danger that “feeling will degenerate into passion, and action be dictated by impulse not judgment.” He suggested that there was a conflict between abolitionism and the republican values espoused by the Review, for activist protest violated republican deliberative norms and threatened the republic itself with dissolution. In order to help avert a violent outcome, he set about correcting some facts and putting others in perspective. Slavery had a history as long as human records, he argued, and American racial slavery was one variant of these ancient labor practices. Its abolition would be another step “in the progress of the liberty of the working classes,” whose conditions he considered in the next issue of the Review in his essay “The Laboring Classes in Europe.” Where Child joined Jared Sparks and David Walker in arguing that slavery in the United States was more brutal and oppressive than in other slave systems, Washburn disagreed, citing a range of Greek, Roman, and European slave laws and customs as evidence. He also claimed that opposition to slavery was widespread in the North and had strong support in the South as well. Washburn’s stated goal in the review was to begin to correct errors so that the public “can act deliberately” to fashion a solution.14 There was more diversity in the opinions expressed by Review authors on the topic of Indian removal. Writers differed on whether indigenous

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Americans were “oppressed” by white conquest or were simply losing a contest between barbarism and civilization, as Edward Everett argued in 1823. Lewis Cass, the long-serving governor of the Michigan territory who in 1831 became Jackson’s Secretary of War, developed a position akin to Everett’s, arguing that laments over the vanishing Indian revealed elements of misplaced sentimentality and British hypocrisy. Realism and self-interest, not humanitarian feeling, should motivate Indian policy, he claimed. The British military had established native alliances to fight the United States during the Revolution and the War of 1812, and so the attacks on American Indian policy that peppered English accounts expressed an interested position in an ongoing conflict with a former colony. Everett and Cass both argued that native and white customs were incompatible, particularly stressing the conflicting concepts of property that they found to undergird irreconcilable modes of life. Neither writer held out much hope for a humane resolution to this pressing issue, while both saw merit in projects to colonize eastern tribes in the West. Noting the divisions within the Cherokee community and the limited success of the Cherokee republic, Cass wondered in 1830 “whether there is, upon the face of the globe, a more wretched race than the Cherokees” and criticized the “exaggerated representations” of their adaptation of Christianity and republicanism.15 Later that year Jeremiah Evarts expressed a different view in an essay that called into question the Marshall court’s rulings on the right of preemption, which was based on the idea that European concepts of private property held legal precedence over indigenous models of communal property. For Evarts the defining feature of legitimate colonization involved active consent by the indigenous population. Americans wanted to deal justly with the Indians, Evarts asserted, and consequently all territorial acquisition had to be conducted through morally defensible negotiations over land sales. He claimed that such practices had been the norm until recently, when the state of Georgia began asserting its rights against longstanding federal treaties, and in a striking “what if ” scenario he recast relations between Georgia and the Cherokees as a counterfactual history involving Massachusetts and the Mohegans. “The whole human family is interested in securing the faithful observance of engagements between nations,” he wrote, and he emphasized the central place of “persuasion and argument” in achieving such engagements. If the eastern Cherokees were to remove they should do so voluntarily, with full information, and after careful consideration. He further stressed the need for better advocacy on behalf of native communities, noting that their own orators had been important advocates but lacked the power to achieve a lasting resolution.16

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Evarts led the opposition to Indian removal, editing the 1830 volume of antiremoval speeches that included Crockett’s speech and was the occasion for Evarts’s essay, and authoring a volume titled Essays on the Present Crisis in the Condition of the American Indians. He also served the Bostonbased American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, and this conjunction makes him an instructive figure on the complexities of Indian removal and colonization. His organizational work in opposition to removal helped catalyze the Boston-based activism that fuelled the rise of immediate abolition as a powerful alternative to the colonization movement. Evarts supported colonization however, believing it was the best way to Christianize Africa. While for Garrison colonization and removal were parallel forms of oppression that should both be resisted, for Evarts the seemingly contradictory decisions to oppose removal and support colonization were guided by his missionary goals of spreading Christianity.

i i . b e y o n d the white christia n republic Even as Evarts called in his Review essay for better advocacy on behalf of oppressed communities, Boston was becoming a locus of activity for African American and Native American activists concerned to address issues of race and prejudice in American civic culture. The works of activist leaders such as Apess, Stewart, and Walker demonstrate the same confluence of dissenting Protestantism with republican values of non-domination, ethical self-formation, and civic engagement that informed other efforts to model the Christian republic. Their works are distinguished by their shared emphasis on the ways that prejudice closed down avenues of communication, and for their development of evangelical Christian strategies of social reform to address that bias. While supporters of removal and colonization projects argued that white prejudices could never be overcome, these authors shared an emphasis on the reforms that could achieve the inclusive deliberations essential to a well-functioning republic. The multiracial republican ideals set forth in the works of these three writers were a product of religious segregation and the rise of independent black and Native American churches. The histories of these segregated churches were distinct but overlapped in significant ways; in each case they related to the challenges that race prejudice posed to ideals of equality. As African Americans converted to dissenting forms of Protestantism in increasing numbers, they often found that white ministers who celebrated spiritual equality in order to convert them did not grant them equal status within the church. Leaders of independent black churches argued that

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such separate institutions were necessary to promote full spiritual equality and to advance an antiracist theology. Furthermore they provided the nucleus for a range of voluntary associations aimed at fostering the wellbeing of African Americans and nurturing civic projects.17 Like Philadelphia and other northern cities, Boston was home to an active free black community. By the late 1820s the community that had formed around Boston’s First African Baptist Church (founded in 1805) and the African Meeting House (completed in 1806) was supporting anticolonization, abolitionist, and antiracist activism. After growing up in North Carolina and traveling the country, David Walker chose this community as his home. There he published his Appeal, in Four Articles; together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in particular, and very expressly, to those of The United States of America (1829), which helped inspire Garrison’s activism. Maria Stewart picked up Walker’s prophetic mantle after he died in 1830, becoming the first African American woman to give a series of public lectures, and promoting Walker’s themes of radical abolitionism and black self-determination to Boston’s black community.18 There were related developments at the Mashpee church on nearby Cape Cod, where Native American Protestants faced many of the same issues confronting Boston’s African American community. The Puritan minister John Eliot had established Mashpee as a “praying town” for Mashpee Wampanoags in 1660, and a meetinghouse was built there in 1684. By 1833 that meetinghouse had become a source of contention with the Harvard-appointed white minister Phineas Fish, who used it to preach to a predominantly white congregation. Meanwhile many Mashpee residents sought spiritual leadership from the Baptist minister Joseph Amos, who was himself a Mashpee Indian. William Apess, a Methodist minister and Pequot Indian, helped to organize Mashpee resistance to white control in what became known as the “Mashpee revolt” of 1833 –34. He later defended the cause of native self-determination to Boston audiences, most notably in his Eulogy on King Philip (1836).19 The multiracial synthesis that Apess, Stewart, and Walker sought between republicanism and Christianity was not a new project in the 1820s. Since the 1760s preachers and patriots including Samson Occom, Hendrick Aupaumut, Lemuel Haynes, and Richard Allen had worked to reconcile republican and Christian egalitarian ideals by exposing the discriminatory practices of American state and church institutions. Occom and Aupaumut aspired to integrate native communities spiritually and politically into predominantly white churches and polities. When those efforts to achieve equality failed, they sought out territory that would allow them to main-

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tain their communities as independent entities, in Brothertown where Occom ministered until his death in 1792, or in the Wisconsin Stockbridge community, where Aupaumut ended his days in 1830.20 African American leaders followed a similar pattern of attempted integration followed by separation. Haynes had fought on the patriot side in the Revolutionary War, and in later years he served as minister to a number of racially integrated churches. In “Liberty, Further Extended” (composed in the mid 1770s) Haynes offered a pointed critique of slavery using the language of Christian republicanism.21 Allen took a different tack. After serving as a minister within the Methodist Church, Allen became convinced of the need for a separate black denomination and in 1816 was ordained as the first bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. In the introduction to The Doctrines and Discipline of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (1817), Allen and his coauthors Daniel Coker and James Champion described the acts of discrimination and attempts at domination that led them to form the AME church. These included the marginalization of black Methodists and attempts to force white ministers on black congregations. Supported by the law courts, they were able to resist these impositions, escape “spiritual despotism,” and “fulfil the law of Christ.”22 Allen’s belief in the value of autonomous black institutions, supported where possible by white legal authorities, led him to embrace the American Colonization Society until opposition in the black community persuaded him to shift his position. Still, he did not wholly reject colonization projects, and in 1824 he supported the Haitian Emigration Society. By contrast Haynes, who retained his commitment to an integrated republic, opposed the ACS from the beginning. Even as Allen emphasized black autonomy, however, he stressed the need for “interracial harmony and black civic participation,” envisioning himself as a “moral mediator” and calling on white statesmen to embrace abolitionism to promote the “greater good of society.”23 Allen and Haynes helped to define distinctive strategies in what became a long-running debate about the best means for African Americans to achieve full citizenship rights, with a special relevance for understanding how these positions related to theories of republicanism and the role of Christian churches.24 For both men the republican state achieved legitimacy only to the extent that its laws aligned with Christian law. Whereas Lyman Beecher found biblical republicanism in the patriarchal polities of the Israelites, Allen and Haynes located it in the “liberty” of the Gospels, identifying Christian liberty with civil and human rights. In Doctrines and Discipline Allen and his coauthors described the support they had from

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the legal system in their fight with church authorities who sought to impose a white minister. The description of the founding of the AME church portrayed an alignment of American law with “the law of Christ.” Their assessment was hardly a naive celebration of the rule of law, which in the United States was at best an intermittent mechanism for defending and spreading liberty and was often a tool of oppression, as Allen came to know. Around 1800 he helped lead Philadelphia’s black community in a petition to the federal government to end slavery and the slave trade and to repeal the Fugitive Slave Act of 1793; six years later Allen himself was temporarily seized as a fugitive slave. Despite his experience of legal oppression, Allen retained a degree of optimism that human law could be brought into line with divine law and that blacks and whites could work together to achieve racial justice.25 A notable shift in tone distinguishes the works of Allen’s and Hayne’s generation from the writings of Apess, Stewart, and Walker, in which we find a complicated and often conflict-ridden relationship between the legal system and spiritual law. Much of the anger and frustration that characterizes their writings reflects their sense that the gentler, less confrontational efforts of the generation born before the Revolution had not borne sufficient fruit. Excluded from the legislatures that framed the laws affecting them, Native Americans and African Americans were becoming more vulnerable, more subject to prejudice and discriminatory laws. These facts invested their efforts with a sense of urgency.26 In their speeches and writings Apess, Stewart, and Walker brought the conditions of public discourse into sharp focus. Working within the rhetorical tradition of the jeremiad, they sought to redefine the relationships between speaker, audience, and the larger culture.27 Their works particularly highlighted the way that racist attitudes foreclosed the interracial deliberations that would have better fulfilled republican objectives including self-government and resistance to oppression. They also drew on the experiences of other republics (Haiti for Stewart and Walker; the Cherokee nation for Apess), as well as the Atlantic world history of modern republicanism, to promote deliberative reform that would allow minority communities to resist oppression and achieve self-definition as well as full participation and equality within the early American republic. While they shared basic themes and rhetorical strategies, their works had different audiences and specific objectives. Walker used the jeremiad to unite the “coloured citizens of the world” against white supremacists, while alternately appealing to white readers and threatening them with the Lord’s vengeance; Apess sought to coalesce reform-minded people across groups;

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and Stewart pursued a multi-layered jeremiad, launching a gender-based critique directed at men of all races while also criticizing white racism and calling for black development and unity. Their jeremiads all exposed the racist assumptions of a white supremacist society and challenged the early American republic to be transformed or be destroyed.28

i i i . r e a s o n in g with dav id wa l ke r Walker’s Appeal initially appeared as a series of four articles in Freedom’s Journal, the first African American owned and edited newspaper, founded in New York City in 1827 by Samuel Cornish and John B. Russwurm. Walker was the principal agent in Boston for Freedom’s Journal, which published his 1828 address to the Massachusetts General Colored Association.29 In the editorial statement that appeared in the first issue of the Journal, Cornish and Russwurm advanced many of the republican themes that Walker would express more emphatically in his address and longer manifesto. They stressed the need for blacks to “plead our own cause” in order to avoid false representation, urged a stronger commitment to education and frugality while citing Benjamin Franklin’s maxims as a model, promised to advance civil rights and confront oppression, and called upon enfranchised blacks to make use of their vote without becoming the “tools of party.” They anticipated that the journal would become a means to unite blacks across state and national boundaries and foster dialogues on issues important to the community. And they underscored that they saw this endeavor as part of an Atlantic world movement that included Africa, Haiti, and South America. In particular, they noted that the new republics of Spanish America offered a model in which “despotism has given way to free governments” and “many of our brethren” had come to occupy “important civil and military stations.” Freedom’s Journal initially took a firm stand against colonization, but Russwurm soon despaired of the likelihood that the United States would embrace Bolívar’s multiracial republic. In 1829 he emigrated to Liberia, where he founded a newspaper and worked to help the colony achieve the status of an independent republic, which it did in 1847.30 Rather than leave the United States, Walker sought to change the conditions of American civic life. In his preface to the Appeal he merged the tradition of the jeremiad with an account of failed republics that attributed their collapse to their oppressive practices and the fact that God is “a God of justice to all his creatures.” A common argument drawn from the experience of republican Rome held that “political usurpers, tyrants, op-

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pressors, &c” caused the downfall of republics. Walker argued instead that because the Romans were slaveholders, the republic experienced almost constant instability until it was uprooted and replaced by emperors, who ultimately suffered defeat by the Turks. Biblical slavery provided a crucial supplement to accounts of Greece and Rome that allowed Walker to make his argument about the divine origins of political instability.31 In a single extended sentence that sums up the history of republican dysfunction, Walker knitted together Israelite and Roman history as one sustained tale of political conflict from the destruction of the Egyptian army in the Red Sea, to Sparta where the Helots were enslaved, on to Rome under Sylla’s dictatorship, the Catilinarian conspiracy, the murder of Julius Caesar and the rise of Antony, Octavius, and Lepidus, the deaths of Brutus and Cassius at Phillipi, the tyranny of Tiberius, and ending with the overthrow of Constantinople by the Turkish Sultan, Mahomed II (6). Declining to dwell on this tumultuous history, except to argue that in each case the Lord had “an oppressed and suffering people” and would not “let the oppressors rest comfortably and happy,” Walker turned to the recent history of “that Christian nation, the Spaniards” (6). The chaos unleashed on the Spanish peninsula by the French occupation of 1808 had created circumstances that favored Bolívar’s movement for independence. The metropolitan liberalization begun under the Cortes of Cadiz had ended with the restoration of Ferdinand VII in 1814, and the counterrevolutionary wars in Spanish America raged on for years to come.32 While Cornish and Russwurm emphasized the achievements of abolition and partial racial integration in the southern republics, Walker stressed instead the persistence of racial conflict and social instability. Walker explained the crises in Spain and Spanish America as evidence of “the judgments of God among the Spaniards,” for which “SLAVERY is the principal cause” (7). In any nation where slavery is present, God will “cause them to rise up one against another, to be split and divided, and to oppress each other, and sometimes to open hostilities with sword in hand” (5). The implications for the United States were clear. Rather than congratulate themselves on their superior republican virtue, Americans should take the example of the ancient classical republics and the modern Spanish American republics to heart. Early in the Appeal Walker explained that his purpose in writing was to “awaken in the breasts of my afflicted, degraded and slumbering brethren, a spirit of inquiry and investigation respecting our miseries and wretchedness in this Republican Land of Liberty!!!!!!” (5). In Walker’s theory of history, the American republic would be destroyed if it failed to end slavery, prejudice, and other forms of oppression. Only

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the elimination of oppression would prevent the divine punishment that Walker foresaw unless racial equality was established in the United States. With its preamble and four articles, the Appeal alluded to the U.S. Constitution and to the proliferating constitutions of the era including the newly revised state constitutions and the constitutions of France, Haiti, the Cherokee republic, and the Latin American republics. As a genre constitutions typically communicate impersonality, universal accessibility, and permanence. They create institutional sites of deliberation, such as the Senate, but they exclude the deliberative process that produced them.33 Beginning with his title page Walker disrupted his constitutional model when he identified himself as author (“Walker’s Appeal”) and then specified an audience (“the coloured citizens of the world”) and a place and date of composition (“Boston, State of Massachusetts, September 28, 1829”). He opened his preamble addressing “My dearly beloved Brethren and Fellow Citizens” (3), and each article began with a similar preacher-like appeal. The tensions between natural law, divine law, and positive law that were endemic to the legal culture of the early United States emerge here as problems of literary form. In this text designed to create the physical and vocal effects of speech through typography, the preacher’s voice breaks open the Constitution that authorized slavery and excluded African Americans from full citizenship. The textual “voice” signifies the spirit that smashes the dead letter of the law; the constitutional form is shattered by the spiritual meaning that it fails to contain. The 1805 Haitian Constitution anchored its authority in “the Supreme Being, before whom all mankind are equal,” and Walker similarly based his claims for human equality on transcendent authority. Opposing positive law to divine and natural law, Walker unraveled the equivalence established in the Declaration of Independence between “the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God” and the social contract later formulated in the United States Constitution.34 Even as he posed a sharp challenge to the constitutional order, Walker insisted that political representation was an important step in the creation of a multiracial republic, and he pointedly observed the absence of black legislators, lawyers, and jurors in the United States. Even in relatively free Massachusetts, where blacks could in theory serve on juries or vote on equal terms with whites, their ability to fulfill these civic roles was limited by white prejudice. Moreover there were restrictions on legal testimony and office holding. Walker stressed that neither full legal equality nor the end of discrimination had been achieved nearly fifty years after the end of legal slavery in Massachusetts. Elsewhere the situation was even worse,

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and as a result of this lack of representation a growing body of discriminatory law was making life harder for American blacks.35 Walker saw divine justice working through this oppressive legislation, particularly in the antiliteracy laws that limited black access to scripture. God made the law manifest the anti-Christian practices of slavery, and by implicating state representatives in their creation, “God has . . . taken of[f ] the fig-leaf covering, and made them expose themselves on the house top” (56). Walker’s signifying play with the scriptural tales of Adam and Eve and Noah in this passage suggests that the white man’s manifestly unjust laws became God’s way of revealing that slavery violates divine law. Black legislators were necessary to correct oppressive laws, bringing statutory law in line with the moral law in the multiracial republic. In Beecher’s Christian republic the preacher is a leader who, like the Israelite patriarchs, promotes moral values that embody the spiritual law and guide the framing and execution of statutory law. Walker implicitly shared Beecher’s ideals but denied that the Protestant clergy of the United States embodied them. He devoted Article III of the Appeal to an explanation of “our wretchedness in consequence of the preachers of the religion of Jesus Christ,” observing acidly that church segregation occurred “even here in Boston” (42). Walker may well have had Beecher in mind when he wrote that “the preachers and people of the United States form societies against Free Masonry and Intemperance, and write against Sabbath breaking, Sabbath mails, Infidelity, &c. &c.” while ignoring “the fountain head” (43) of social disorder in slavery and oppression, even receiving substantial financial support from proslavery elements. At their best the clergy had their priorities wrong, he suggested, putting their organizational energies into temperance movements and missionary efforts rather than working to promote true Christian equality through abolitionist and antiracist work. At their worst they actively contributed to the oppression of African Americans, supporting the suppression of Christian worship, preaching the duty of obeying one’s master to slaves, and creating segregated spaces within churches. Walker concluded Article III by challenging American ministers to honestly examine their beliefs. “Can the American preachers appeal unto God . . . that they make no distinction on account of men’s colour?” And to those ministers who supported racial distinctions, he responded by questioning their ideas about God. “What can the American preachers and people take God to be? Do they believe his words? If they do, do they believe that he will be mocked? Or do they believe, because they are whites and we blacks, that God will have respect to them?” (44 – 45). In one of his

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characteristic strings of rhetorical questions, Walker articulated the underlying beliefs about race and slavery of American ministers and offered a rebuttal based on scriptures that stress human equality before God, citing in particular “Go ye, therefore, and teach all nations” (Matt. 28:18 –20). Walker did not seek to open a public discussion of his agenda, which he assumed to be true: slavery and racial prejudice were the most pressing social-justice issues of the day. Like Charles Finney, his purpose was to convert to the truth, not to debate the severity of the slave system.36 He appealed to the portion of his white audience that was capable of hearing and responding to his message, repeatedly alluding to Isaiah’s invitation to “let us reason,” and warning that if they did not rid themselves of “fears and prejudices” and promote black education and Christian conversion then God’s “crushing arm of power” (72 –73) would intervene to liberate African Americans from white oppression. As in Isaiah 1:18, where the invitation to “reason” leads directly to the demand that the audience embrace the speaker’s position, the jeremiad form shifted the content of Walker’s message away from deliberative exchange, instead seeking to inspire fear as he warned Americans that “your destruction is at hand . . . unless you REPENT” (45).37 The Appeal engaged the deliberative practices of Walker’s contemporaries while putting forward a position that embodied metaphysical truth claims that challenged deliberative ideals. Black and white Americans needed to engage in critical self-analysis and social reform if they were to achieve the Christian equality whose accomplishment alone would prevent divine retribution. If white Americans refused to reform, Walker called on blacks to unite in their resistance to oppression, promising that God would be with them in a just cause. Walker imagined multiple overlapping audiences for his work, and the presence of these diverse readers and auditors, often registered in shifting pronouns or passages of direct address, produced an instability that was central to the deliberative dynamics that Walker sought to negotiate and the reform that he hoped to achieve. In Article III Walker included an account of a sermon that he heard at a South Carolina camp meeting, when “to my no ordinary astonishment, our Reverend gentleman got up and told us (coloured people) that slaves must be obedient to their masters—must do their duty to their masters or be whipped—the whip was made for the backs of fools, &c.” Walker went on to describe his own moment of reflection and to invite his audience to think through its larger implications: “Here I pause for a moment, to give the world time to consider what was my surprise, to hear such preaching from a minister of my Master, whose very gospel is that of peace and not of blood and whips, as this pretended

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preacher tried to make us believe.” He went on to contrast this invitation to imagine his response with his own inability to fathom “what the American preachers can think of us” (41). Religious periodicals failed to discuss slavery, and this inattentiveness on the part of spiritual leaders would have dire consequences. The ministers who Walker believed should have been fostering shared values and caring for the oppressed were instead ignoring their needs. Walker reflected on the problems of creating an appropriately emphatic style in which to make his points, noting with some irony that “this language, perhaps is too harsh for the American’s delicate ears,” but then immediately winding up to the highest pitch of prophetic rage: “But Oh Americans! Americans!! I warn you in the name of the Lord, (whether you will hear, or forbear,) to repent and reform, or you are ruined!!” (42). The atmosphere of deliberative crisis, of Walker’s despair of being heard, is palpable in this passage. Some of the most elaborate deliberative moments in the text occur in Appeal IV, “Our Wretchedness in Consequence of the Colonizing Plan.” Here Walker quoted extensively from the printed speeches of political leaders who favored colonization, including Henry Clay and John Randolph, in order to refute their arguments. He included lengthy passages from Clay’s speech at the ACS’s inaugural meeting, intercutting them with his own queries and rebuttals in a manner intended to create a textual deliberation to supplement the actual events reported. The exchange stages a confrontation in print between discursive communities that were talking about one another rather than to one another. This separation anticipates the divine judgment that Walker goes on to say “will, before long, separate the innocent from the guilty” (48). Walker ties this outcome to the organization’s refusal to, as Clay put it, “deliberate upon or consider at all, any question of emancipation, or that which was connected with the abolition of slavery” (49). For Walker this closing down of discussion by political and religious leaders eliminated the possibility of a just resolution and negated the ideals of the multiracial republic.

i v. l i s t e ni ng to the wisdom of babes Maria Stewart shared a number of themes and rhetorical strategies with Walker, but her approach differed in two crucial ways: she made women central to the republican project; and she split the jeremiad form, directing its components of reform and punishment at different audiences. While Walker stressed the breakdown in deliberation between whites and blacks, Stewart emphasized the divisions within Boston’s African Ameri-

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can community that contributed to the deliberative crisis over slavery. “The general cry among the people is, ‘Our own color are our greatest opposers,’ ” she observed, “and even the whites say that we are greater enemies towards each other, than they are towards us.” Exhorting the African American men of Boston to greater activism in the antislavery cause, Stewart observed in 1831 that “this is the land of freedom. The press is at liberty. Every man has a right to express his opinion.” In such circumstances, “shall Afric’s sons be silent any longer?” “Come let us plead our cause before the whites,” she told an audience at Franklin Hall in 1832, urging the black community to unite in an effort to solicit white support for abolition.38 In her early tract “Religion and the Pure Principles of Morality, The Sure Foundation on Which We Must Build” (1831) Stewart laid out a nuanced argument about the multiracial Christian republic whose subtleties she worked to clarify or resolve in her later addresses.39 Like Walker and Apess, Stewart sought to unite Christian and republican principles and bring them to fruition. “All the nations of the earth are crying out for liberty and equality” (29) promoted by the “great and mighty men of America” (39), who supported republican movements in places like Poland, Greece, Ireland and France. Indeed, Americans “have acknowledged all the nations of the earth, except Hayti” (39), she observed, implying a racial cause for this distinction. Stewart contested this rationale, emphasizing that “it is not the color of the skin that makes the man, but it is the principles formed within the soul” (29). She went on to outline a course of action that resembled Beecher’s project for a Christian republic focused on moral reform, education, and economic development, but directed specifically to the black community. The targets of her proposed reforms were familiar figures in contemporary social critiques. Permissive mothers, vain daughters, ignorant and unambitious fathers and husbands, and extravagant households were commonly diagnosed ills in the early republic. Like Walker she devoted considerable attention to the need for better education, but she focused proportionally more attention on the moral reform of Boston’s black community and less on the sources of white oppression. She expressly distanced herself from Walker’s more inflammatory passages, urging her “brethren” to “sheathe your swords, and calm your angry passions” (40) and rejecting the path of republican revolution. For Stewart the “daughters of Africa” (30) played a central role in the forming of principles that would allow African Americans to achieve full citizenship. Republican wives and mothers should raise virtuous children

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and inspire men with “a holy zeal for freedom’s cause” (31). A daughter should be raised to “blush at vulgarity,” and a son trained to “thirst for knowledge,” rise “above trifles,” and focus on the future “when he shall redress the wrongs of his father and plead the cause of his brethren” (31). In addition to emphasizing the importance of their work as mothers, Stewart called on women to “excel in good housewifery” (37) and use the profits of their domestic economy to contribute to civic projects. United in knowledge and love, the black community could rise up from its oppression and “the chains of slavery and ignorance would melt like wax before the flames” (31). By linking the ills of slavery and oppression to the choices of black individuals and communities, Stewart sought to inspire her audience to take steps that she believed could improve their lives. Her most specific proposal was directed to African American women, whom she invited to establish a fund that could be used to build a high school. Stewart saw education as the avenue to individual and collective improvement in a modern republic, and women were central to that endeavor.40 In her addresses Stewart performed the work of critical self-analysis and reform that she called on her audience to pursue so that they could act together to resist oppression. Her efforts to defend her right to speak, and her role as the reluctant prophet, resemble the rhetorical strategies of Jarena Lee, the first woman to be approved as a traveling exhorter for the African Methodist Episcopal church and the author of a conversion narrative contemporaneous with Stewart’s period of activism in Boston. In her narrative Lee described Richard Allen’s initial reluctance to allow her to preach and the persistent hostility that she faced even after she had his endorsement.41 Like Lee, Stewart observed that the major challenges she faced as an activist leader were within the African American community, and also within herself. In her 1833 “Farewell Address to Her Friends in the City of Boston” she defended her public lectures and related them to her faith. “What if I am a woman; is not the God of ancient times the God of these modern days?” she asked, citing Deborah, Esther, Mary Magdelene, and the woman of Samaria as precursors, and dismissing Paul’s authority on the matter of women speaking in public. She returned to her opening question at the end of the paragraph: “Again; why the Almighty hath imparted unto me the power of speaking thus, I cannot tell.” She closed this section with Jesus’s prayer in defense of the authority of the lowly in Luke 10:21: “thou hast hid these things from the wise and prudent, and has revealed them unto babes” (68). Stewart rested on biblical authority as she defined an inclusive realm of deliberation— one that recognizes “babes” as well as “the wise and prudent.”

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Elsewhere she reflected on the repressive social expectations that she had overcome with the aid of divine authority. In this passage she staged an imagined dialogue that portrayed her willingness to speak as submission to the Spirit: “Methinks I heard a spiritual interrogation—‘Who shall go forward, and take off the reproach that is cast upon the people of color? Shall it be a woman?’ And my heart made this reply—‘If it is thy will, be it even so, Lord Jesus!?’ ” (45). Her acceptance of God’s call modeled the response she hoped her listeners would embrace as they accepted her authority to address them. Stewart made eloquent speech and responsive listening central to the process of reform and emancipation: “Come, let us incline our ears to wisdom, and apply our hearts to understanding; promote her, and she will exalt thee; she shall bring thee honor when thou dost embrace her” (36). She emphasized her limitations “as a dying mortal [speaking] to dying mortals” (30) and anticipated the day when advocates would arise “who will more powerfully and eloquently plead the cause of virtue and the pure principles of morality than I am able to do” (31). She took up the mantle of Jeremiah only because she felt compelled to make proposals to the black community that she hoped might lead to their liberation. Stewart knew that she risked alienating them with her criticisms, and near the end she buffered her remarks with a shift in tone and audience, focusing attention on the sins of American whites. The transition occurred with a powerful attack on “America” for depriving blacks of their “equal rights and privileges” (39) and promised action: “WE CLAIM OUR RIGHTS” (40). The best way to stake this claim, Stewart continued with a concluding shift in audience, was for black Americans to leave vengeance to God and “turn your attention to knowledge and improvement” (41). The traditional jeremiad incited a particular audience to reform or be punished, but Stewart split cause and effect when she called upon the black community to pursue moral and spiritual reform while warning white America of God’s impending vengeance for slavery and racism. If the black community refused her call to reform, it would continue to suffer white oppression. But if African Americans pursued a “thorough reformation” (36) and united in a common effort at self-making, aspiring in the manner of “the American people” to “excel in political, moral and religious improvement” (34), then one of two things would happen. Either white Americans would recognize the piety, morality, and virtue of the people they had abused, developing a critical self-awareness and a rejection of racial prejudice; or God would punish America and liberate blacks from oppression. She urged her audience to pursue education, industry, and piety,

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“and in God’s own time, and his time is certainly the best, he will surely deliver you with a mighty hand and with an outstretched arm” (41). In Productions of Mrs. Maria W. Stewart (1835), the culminating publication of Stewart’s Boston period, which appeared from Garrison’s press, Meditation VI begins with the passage from Isaiah also cited by Walker: “Come, now, saith the Lord, and let us reason together.” Like her mentor, she followed this invitation with a warning that “this people have sinned a great sin.” True to the original scripture, Stewart offered to deliberate but on terms that she presented as divinely ordained.42 The conclusion of her early work “Religion and the Pure Principles of Morality” offered a vivid image of Stewart isolated and embattled, in the manner of Jeremiah before the Pharisees: “I stand alone in your midst, exposed to the fiery darts of the devil, and to the assaults of wicked men. But though all the powers of earth and hell were to combine against me, though all nature should sink into decay, still I would trust in the Lord, and joy in the God of my salvation” (41). This posture of the isolated prophet, which anticipated Stewart’s actual stance two years later when she bid farewell to Boston, contrasts with Walker’s concluding focus on uniting the colored citizens of the world against their white oppressors. Stewart’s isolation emerges in her 1832 address to Boston’s newly formed Afric-American Female Intelligence Society of America, in which she portrayed an, at best, cool relationship with the group. She quoted a “lady of high distinction” who told her “that I might never expect your homage” (54) and reproached the society’s members for their cruelty to her. Lacking supporters and an institutional base, Stewart seems to have experienced her prophet-like isolation and alienation with unusual intensity. Her frustration that she had not had more effect is palpable in her “Farewell Address,” in which she observed, “I have made myself contemptible in the eyes of many, that I might win some” and, “Thus far has my life been almost a life of complete disappointment” (73). Her final address at Boston offered a poignant analysis of the conditions that constrained her as she struggled to create a style that would reform race and gender prejudices and build a more inclusive culture of deliberation.

v. t o wa r d m ul tir a cia l de l ib e r ations William Apess further explored the problem of deliberative failure that Walker and Stewart found to be a central obstacle to the multiracial republic. And like Walker and Stewart, he turned to the jeremiad as a means to critique white prejudice and call for reform. The jeremiadic features of his

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work distinguish it from the progressive Cherokee nationalism and rational Christianity of “An Address to the Whites” (1826), which Elias Boudinot delivered as part of a tour that included Boston; they distinguished it as well from Red Jacket’s emphasis in his speeches, petitions, and other works on a non-Christian native tradition.43 Apess’s most pointed use of the jeremiad is in “An Indian’s Looking-Glass for the White Man” (1833), which appeared at the end of The Experiences of Five Christian Indians of the Pequot Tribe, a series of conversion narratives drawn from Apess’s successful mission to the Pequots in 1831 that stress both native piety and the hypocritical racism of white Christians.44 The resemblances between “Indian’s Looking-Glass” and Walker’s Appeal suggest that Apess may have known Walker’s work or participated in overlapping activist and religious circles during his stays in Boston. Like Walker, Apess used ironic reversals, threats, and rhetorical questions to make his point that racial prejudice was “a most unrighteous, unbecoming, and impure black principle,” both “corrupt and unholy” (156). Using language similar to Walker’s description of “the coloured people of these United States” as “the most degraded, wretched, and abject set of beings that ever lived since the world began,” Apess portrayed the inhabitants of New England reservations as “the most mean, abject, miserable race of beings in the world.”45 Like Walker, he began by addressing the civil and political status of natives and decried the “corrupt principles” of men “in the halls of legislation” who deny “our unalienable and lawful rights” (156). Observing that “this is a confused world,” and “I am not seeking for office” (157), Apess quickly moved from a worldly to a transcendent frame of reference to launch his defense of human equality: “If black or red skins or any other skin of color is disgraceful to God,” he insisted, “it appears that he has disgraced himself a great deal” for there are “fifteen colored people to one white.” In a striking version of the Last Judgment modeled on indigenous writing practices, he imagined an assembly of skins of all colors with their “national crimes” written on them, and concluded that the white skin would have the most extensive and heinous list, including “robbing a nation almost of their whole continent, and murdering their women and children, and then depriving the remainder of their lawful rights,” as well as “rob[bing] another nation to till their grounds and welter out their days under the lash with hunger and fatigue under the scorching rays of the burning sun” (157). Like Walker he contrasted biblical passages that promote equality with American laws and institutions that violated it, including prohibitions against intermarriage and missionary efforts that subordinated native peoples. He argued further that Jesus was a Jew and a person of color who would be

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“shut out of doors by many, very quickly,” even by those “who profess religion” (160).46 Apess ended on a more conciliating note than Walker, however, reflecting their different imagined audiences: Walker addressed “the coloured citizens of the world,” while Apess spoke to the “white man.” Apess offered his sharpest criticism of white prejudice at the opening of his Last Judgment scenario, where he wrote: “Now let me ask you, white man, if it is a disgrace for to eat, drink, and sleep with the image of God, or sit, or walk and talk with them” (157). In his conclusion, however, Apess tied his argument in the “Looking-Glass” to the efforts of a multiracial network of supporters. One prominent target for his message was the activist audience that had arisen in opposition to Indian removal, which included the first national women’s petitioning campaign in United States history during the years from 1829 to 1831.47 He specifically praised political and opinion leaders such as “a Webster, an Everett, and a Wirt . . . who advocate our cause daily.” “They well know,” he wrote, “that man was made for society, and not for hissing-stocks and outcasts” (160). Apess could have found this Ciceronian argument about innate human sociality in the pages of the North American Review. He concluded with a brief, pathetic appeal to “noble-hearted” white readers, asking them to bind up the “wounds” of the “poor Indians” (160). In the same year that he published “Indian’s Looking-Glass” Apess became involved in the Mashpee Revolt, which led him to take a more oppositional stance focused on native sovereignty and autonomy. As we shall see in chapter seven, that effort led him as well to a more sustained negotiation between scripture-based claims to human equality, indigenous traditions of deliberation, and the republican values of American civil and state institutions. In his last published work, the Eulogy on King Philip (1836), Apess offered a counterhistory to the encomiastic “pilgrim-republican” history exemplified in Webster’s Plymouth oration and in Everett’s speeches, and he examined the alternative strategies of deliberation suggested by that counterhistory. Rather than celebrate the Pilgrim landing at Plymouth, he described it as the beginning of colonial oppression of indigenous Americans.48 Philip led the first major resistance to that oppression, thereby earning a place in the pantheon of republican heroes alongside George Washington. Apess called on patriots who celebrated Washington to “respect the rude yet all-accomplished son of the forest” (277). Apess used the figure of Philip to make three points: that native people are patient, generous, and charitable, but not without limit; that the virtues of this “man of natural abilities” (308) exceeded those of the nominally Christian

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Puritans, whose prejudicial attitudes were the source of all the unjust laws that afflicted native peoples; and that without some change of attitude and behavior from white America Philip’s prophecy of oppression would continue to be fulfilled. The exclusion of native Christians from full church membership and civil status was portrayed at several moments throughout the Eulogy. Apess envisioned a more expansive Christianity that brought with it admission to civil society and the rights of citizenship. In his peroration Apess invited his audience, which he presumed to be white, to ask themselves “‘What do they, the Indians, want?’” and concluded, “you have only to look at the unjust laws made for them and say, ‘They want what I want,’ in order to make men of them, good and wholesome citizens”—not simply “Christians,” as he claimed was the focus of the missionaries, but “men” (310). As in similar passages in Walker’s Appeal and Stewart’s addresses, this scene is focused on the need for deliberative reform. Apess urged his audience to engage in some self-analysis, to overcome prejudice and assume common humanity with the natives. Speaking to the Boston community where the deliberative concept of republicanism was nurtured and celebrated, Apess put his finger on a central challenge to the modern multiracial republic: universal claims about self-governance were made in relation to a specific Western tradition of societas civilis deriving from Cicero and bearing the imprint of European Christianity. While in principle this tradition could accommodate other cultures, in practice this rarely happened. Webster demonstrated this problem in his Plymouth address, in which he described the continent’s indigenous inhabitants as “barbarians” and ignored their complex traditions of self-governance. A similar perspective shaped the description of Apess in an 1835 North American Review essay in which he was presented as a person of “unmixed Indian blood” who was “born of aboriginal parents” but whose “tastes, feelings, and train of ideas, were derived from the whites,” making him in essence a “civilized man.”49 The implication that Apess was fully acculturated ignored his efforts to preserve indigenous traditions and native autonomy. In his later works Apess demonstrated the importance to the modern multiracial republic of integrating the deliberative traditions handed down from Aristotle and Cicero with non-Western styles of deliberation.50 This concern is evident in the section of the eulogy dealing with land sales and Philip’s negotiations with Pilgrim leaders. Apess weighs the relative responsibility of the two sides for contributing to the emerging conflict, noting the repeated failure of the colonists to respect native practices

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regarding property, punishment, and collective decision making. He cites with considerable irony a list of charges that the colonists made against Philip, including their assertion that “he had not been quite so civil as they wished him to be” (293). The need to create a deliberative framework that could mediate cultural differences emerges with special clarity in the scene in which Philip speaks to his “chiefs, counselors, and warriors,” his words echoing Apess’s broad themes of dispossession and deracination. Philip’s remarks on native deliberative traditions are particularly salient here. He echoes the popular genre of native oratory when he complains that “all our ancient customs are disregarded; the treaties made by our fathers and us are broken, and all of us insulted; our council fires disregarded, and all the ancient customs of our fathers.”51 Apess sets the stage for these remarks in a poem: Now around the council fires they met, The young nobles for to greet; Their tales of woe and sorrows to relate, About the Pilgrims, their wretched foes. And while their fires were blazing high, Their king and Emperor to greet; His voice like lightning fires their hearts, To stand the test or die.

The poem proceeds, not with an account of heroic action, but with renewed complaint: All gratitude that poor Indian do know, Is, we are robbed of all our rights. (295)

The poem, and the entire passage, focus on the articulation of grievances and highlight the absence of an appropriate arena where those grievances could be addressed. Apess echoed this passage in his closing description of himself as an “unworthy speaker” and “a poor Indian,” giving thanks “for every favor” provided to natives, and disclaiming any intent to charge anyone for their fathers’ crimes. Presenting himself as the heir of Philip’s rhetoric of complaint, he suggested continuity between the scene at the council fires and the scene at Boston’s Odeon lecture hall. But where Philip spoke to the “young nobles” of his tribe, Apess spoke to the citizens of Boston. The difference in audience led to a shift in the projected outcome:

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war for Philip, deliberative reform for Apess. Philip lost the war, and the subsequent history of native resistance had not been encouraging. Apess called for the creation of a rhetorical space informed by native as well as European traditions where words could substitute for arms. In his Eulogy and other works, Apess began to think through the difficulties that students of civil society continue to face today as they seek to develop more comprehensive, less Western-focused frameworks of deliberative democracy.52

} These works by Walker, Stewart, and Apess present a range of ways that the jeremiad can function in deliberative settings. It can polarize communities in order to promote group cohesion (Walker); it can present a radical critique that cuts across groups, but at the risk of isolating the speaker (Stewart); or it can create consensus among groups who support a reform effort (Apess). Each author shaped a distinctive version of the jeremiad to address specific activist communities: Walker wrote as a member of a developing and predominantly male transnational black public sphere; Stewart sought to engage and reform the civil society of black Boston, with the ultimate aim of ending white oppression; and Apess contributed to a multiracial opposition effort that supported the Cherokee republic and focused on native rights. Collectively these classics of American protest writing make visible the deliberative crisis produced by racial prejudice and legal exclusion that needed to be remedied if the ideals of the multiracial republic were to be realized.

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Fiction offered the writers of the early republic a textual laboratory where they could sketch the potential and limits of deliberative democracy. All novelists depict deliberation in its broadest sense, for decision making and choice drive plots. The novels of Lydia Maria Child and James Fenimore Cooper are distinguished by their sustained treatments of modern republicanism, which they develop in elaborate scenes focused on the deliberative process. Their choice of genre allowed Child and Cooper to experiment with different assumptions about deliberation and explore how the dynamics of power and resistance affect it. Their novels identify some fundamental challenges of the modern republic as they examine the place of dissent, the nature of the rule of law, and the dangers posed by demagogues. Dissent can be unnecessarily divisive and distracting, but it can also express the need to reform an oppressive system. Selfish, overblown, or misleading rhetoric (a.k.a. “demagoguery”) can distort public debate and derail established procedures, but distinguishing demagoguery from dissent is often not a simple matter. The rule of law can reflect evolving popular concepts of justice; it can also support institutions of domination, including some that are based on the will of the majority. In their novels Child and Cooper portrayed the unresolved challenges of the early American republic as it headed for full-blown deliberative crisis. Deliberative concerns informed Child’s first novel, Hobomok (1824), in which she examined religious dissent as a force obstructing familial and civil concord. Written during the most intense period of doctrinal controversy in North America since the 1740s, Hobomok speaks to the legacy of Puritan disputatiousness with an eye to present circumstances. Already in 1824 when Child wrote her novel Boston’s religious waters had long been roiled by the

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controversies over Unitarianism and evangelicalism that were then reaching a high point. Hobomok reflects on these debates, presenting the Puritan fathers as the founders of a religious community in a perpetual and selfdestructive state of conflict. Child portrayed Salem in 1629 as a vulnerable settlement, threatened by disease and contests with the region’s native inhabitants. Rather than address those pressing circumstances, Salem’s leaders engage in distracting theological disputes that undermine the happiness and threaten the wellbeing of the colonists. Controversy is a defining feature of social, spiritual, and government relations in Salem during the summer of 1629. The constant “wild war of words” among the patriarchs concerns the opposition between justification by faith and works, and includes a defense of the “light-within” by a disputant who later becomes a celebrated Familist (57).1 Theological debate first emerges as a central theme in the novel in the scene where two newly arrived ministers engage in controversy with the Plymouth elders regarding church discipline. Only after “their jarring opinions” have been “carefully balanced” can they be ordained as the teacher and pastor of the church (62). The Reverend Mr. Higginson takes the occasion of his ordination sermon as an opportunity to warn the congregation about the dangers of excessive disputatiousness. “There must be no halt, between christians among us,” he tells the assembled church. “Look unto thine heart, set a watch over thy tongue, beware of wildfire in thy zeal. There is much need of this caution in these days, when tongue is sharpened against tongue, and pen poisoned against pen, and pamphlets come out with more teeth to bite, than arguments to convince” (64). Higginson gives a peculiar twist to this seemingly wholesome advice. Even as he instructs the congregation to “leave hidden matters with God, and difficult texts of scripture with the elders of the church” (65), he criticizes the Anglican Charles Brown for being “violent and impatient in matters of religion” and attacks Thomas Morton for conducting Maypole ceremonies. Higginson’s goal, it seems, is to eliminate controversy by establishing a single standard of righteousness. He encourages his new congregation to “commune with your own heart, and be still’” (65) while himself singling out Morton and Brown for criticism. If Higginson has his way, church elders and not the full congregation will determine the boundaries of acceptable theology. Higginson’s public criticism prompts Brown to an act of resistance. He organizes a well-attended Anglican service the following week and is immediately summoned before an assembly of elders. Led by Governor Endicott, the patriarchs must first establish their authority over the pro-

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ceedings by silencing Roger Conant’s scurrilous attack on Brown, who in his turn manifests what Endicott describes as a “haughty spirit.” Brown is a lawyer as well as an Anglican, and he demonstrates his professional capacity for contention when he describes the ministers Higginson and Skelton as “a parcel of separatists and anabapists, covering their sins with the cloak of religion, and concealing their own factious and turbulent spirit therewith.” The church leaders deny that they are “factious men” or “schismatics” but insist rather that they are nonconformists in search of a “place of liberty.” They characterize their approach to religious difference as an effort to speak “the truth” and to do so “in all humility” (72). Yet the only way they can find to ameliorate controversy is to banish outspoken opponents such as Brown and attempt to silence contentious laypeople like Conant. Child understood language to be the root source of religious heterogeneity, and the interpretation of scripture generates the most dangerous conflicts in the novel. These conflicts extend beyond the boundaries of the settlement into the surrounding native communities. The eloquent chief Corbitant, who leads the attack on Salem, and the intolerant Roger Conant, whose fierce Puritanism draws on a sense of grievance and wounded pride similar to Corbitant’s, are bound together by an act of scriptural interpretation. In the opening scene Conant quotes Psalms 76:2 –3: “In Salem is his tabernacle, and his dwelling-place in Zion. Here he will break the arrows of the bow, the shield, the sword, and the battle” (16 –17). Corbitant understands the reference to broken arrows to be a threat, construing it “into a defiance of the neighboring tribes” (41), and in response he plans his attack on the Conant home. Corbitant’s interpretation both is and is not mistaken. He wrongly concludes that the English colonists are planning a literal attack; he correctly senses that Conant’s words contain a threat, for by renaming Naumkeag as Salem he asserts a permanent claim over native territory. In this episode Child focused on two levels of hermeneutic difficulty that William Ellery Channing had identified as characteristic of scriptural interpretation in “Unitarian Christianity”: the prominence of richly figurative language in the Bible; and the historical differences that make adapting scripture to contemporary circumstances particularly challenging. In her portrait of Mary Conant, Child offered an alternative religious standard focused on rituals and material objects rather than words. Mary’s aesthetic sense, first cultivated during a stay with her maternal grandfather in England, draws her to both of the men that she eventually marries. She respects Hobomok’s spiritual rites at Manitto Asseinah and is attracted

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by his “brief, figurative, and poetic” language (121); she likewise admires the richly bound Anglican prayer book that her grandfather sends her— though not as much as the miniature of Charles Brown that accompanies it. Considered as rites and artifacts, Child suggested, religion offers a source of shared solace and hope. By contrast language injects the grounds for irresolvable disagreements based on metaphysical truth claims. At the end of the novel the domestic relations of British Americans are reformed to accommodate religious and cultural differences, though at the price of expelling the Native American hero. Charles Brown returns to displace Hobomok as Mary’s husband and stepfather to her child, and the new family reconciles with Roger Conant and builds a home near his. Conant’s mixed feelings of guilt, affection, and compassion draw him to his halfIndian grandson, and Brown’s “forebearance” (149) allows him to resolve religious disputes with his father-in-law in an amicable way. The one-time adversaries make these adjustments without verbalizing them, and consensus emerges quietly from strife and division. Suffering has moderated their passions, and they have developed habits of belief and behavior that allow them to focus on their points of agreement rather than their differences and thus to live peaceably together. In Hobomok Child portrayed the negative effects of a dissenting spirit on the vulnerable settler and indigenous communities, which suffer internal conflict and warfare that disrupt the potential for harmonious coexistence. Her next novel, The Rebels (1825), focused on the early years of the independence movement. Inspired by the celebrations at Bunker Hill earlier that year, including Governor Levi Lincoln’s reception where she met General Lafayette, the novel highlights two central republican preoccupations: the relationship between dissent and popular government, and the rule of law. Child’s preface to The Rebels draws a connection between the theme of her first novel and the topic of her second, seeing in the Reformation spirit of liberty a precursor to the Revolutionary movement. “Nothing is more delightful to the human mind than to ascend from important results to their primitive causes;” she notes here, “and surely the Reformation alone has produced as extensive and important effects as the American Revolution: yet how few understand the springs which set that tremendous machine in motion.” The Rebels takes up Puritan dissent and resistance to oppression and examines their place in the American Revolution. It braids together narratives of patriot consensus formation and female selfmaking in which the regulation of impulse and the channeling of energy and eloquence are shared themes.2 Set in Boston in the years framed by the Stamp Act protests (1765) and

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the Boston Massacre (1770), the novel focuses on the period prior to the outbreak of formal hostilities. The title highlights the historical process of interpreting the sources of the Revolution: the men who later came to be celebrated as patriot heroes are here “rebels.” Through her choice of title Child reopened a conceptual space between rebels and patriots that had been closed by the success of the independence movement and the creation of a patriot mythology. This space would soon be occupied by other writers and speakers who sought to redefine a variety of “rebellions” or “wars” as acts of patriotic heroism. These writers and speakers included William Apess, who in his Eulogy on King Philip (1836) compared Philip to George Washington; and Henry Highland Garnet and Frederick Douglass, who cited Patrick Henry as a model for leaders of slave resistance movements in their abolitionist writings. In her novel Child pursued a number of questions raised by this conceptual gap. Where did resistance to British imperial governance originate? Were crowd actions at the root of the early conflicts? And if so, did the crowd act at the behest of the movement’s leaders or in opposition to them? In short, did agitators stir up an otherwise contented people? At stake is her distinction between what she understood as the moderate, controlled revolution in the United States and the violent, excessive French Revolution. She developed these themes using images of light and fire. In the preface she described the rise of Revolutionary politics as a process in which “the spirits of men were stirred within them, and their lips touched by a living coal from the altar of freedom” (iv), and this convergence of fire, eloquence, piety, and patriotism runs through the work. Several of the novel’s key scenes involve moments of eloquence, including speeches by James Otis, Samuel Adams, and George Whitefield.3 Yet fire also has destructive powers, as Child suggests in the opening where a bonfire burns on Fort Hill: “at each succeeding burst of flame, the loud shouts of the rabble were heard with dreadful distinctness” (1). Child’s evident uneasiness with “the rabble” establishes the central debate of the novel’s early chapters: who is responsible for the crowd’s destruction of two houses? Thomas Hutchinson blames the patriot leadership in general and James Otis in particular, insinuating that Otis has used the crowd to accomplish an act of personal revenge. “The rabble would have been excusable, sir;” Hutchinson insists, “but these things are excited by men who would honor a nobler cause. This is the price I pay for being chief justice at the expense of the elder Otis.” Dr. Willard indignantly denies that Otis and his associates were behind the riots. “Our confusions do not originate in the arts of demagogues, but in the tyranny of rulers,” he

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insists. Henry Osborne supports Willard, arguing that the “men above the common mass” who were seen “among the crowd of rioters” were there not to instigate violence but rather “to regulate and control the populace.” When Dr. Mather Byles insists that the opposition can be controlled only “by cutting off such men as Hancock and Adams,” Willard replies that “public indignation is not to be mistaken for the personal interest, or the factious zeal, of a few” (50 –52). As this exchange makes clear, Child viewed the American Revolution as a movement essentially conservative of English liberties and led by patriots who guided popular opposition to British oppression, not demagogues who exploited the volatile masses.4 A transformative moment in this process occurs at a public meeting held in Faneuil Hall, where the Boston public has assembled to compensate Hutchinson and Oliver for the losses they have suffered. James Otis rises “with a face of flame” in order to rebut administration assertions that the riots were “suggested and aided by [Boston’s] best and most influential citizens” (42). He opens his speech with expressions of regret for “the insults offered [Hutchinson’s] person, and the injury done to his property” and defends the compensatory measures that the meeting has passed as instances of “public virtue.” Otis interprets the destruction of the governor’s mansion as a sign of the times: “Let him who dares to say we have not spirit sufficient to resist oppression look at the fallen cupola, the prostrate pillars, the tattered hangings, and the ruined walls . . . !” (42 – 43). These fragments make manifest the “flame of liberty” that “is extinguished in Greece and Rome” but “is still bright and strong on the shores of America” (45). Child stages a primal scene of political order in the public meeting at Faneuil Hall. The decision of the townspeople assembled there to compensate Hutchinson for his loss of property and to patrol the streets to prevent future crowd action demonstrates the emergence of twin features of republican governance: popular sovereignty and rule of law. The presence of the lawyer Henry Osborne at this meeting is crucial to her theme. Osborne stands for the shifting of political power and cultural capital from the ministry, represented by his father, to the legal profession. At a delicate moment in Otis’s speech Osborne touches the orator’s arm, fearing that he will expose himself to violent reprisals if his treasonous words are not brought under control. Otis rebukes his friend but nevertheless “instantly calm[s] his irritation” (44). Osborne’s touch symbolizes the regulating impulse of the law, much as he later regulates the impulsive Lucretia. Through his figure Child portrays popular self-governance that can control the “flame of liberty.”

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Child introduces the figure of Cicero to focus attention on personal and civic deliberation, returning to several of the themes that Charles Brockden Brown had developed in Wieland a quarter of a century earlier. But where in Brown’s hands Cicero is associated with the delusiveness of republican ideals, Child promotes a Ciceronian approach to performative ethics, with a particular emphasis on its importance for women.5 Cicero’s guiding spirit is invoked early in the novel, as Osborne and the British officer Frederick Somerville are rushing to warn Hutchinson that an unfriendly crowd is headed toward his mansion. These men of conflicting political convictions agree that the governor should be alerted to the danger; their shared opposition to violence against life and property underscores Child’s disapproval of the crowd action. Despite the urgency of the moment, when they arrive at the mansion they pause to contemplate “the uncommon beauty, and almost fearful stillness” of the sculpture-filled entryway, where light streams on “the soul-beaming countenance of Cicero.” The narrator observes that Cicero’s double identity as father and orator, captured in the diminutive “Tulliola,” “blends intellectual vigor with the best affections of the heart.” Just then the “aerial little figure” of Henry’s sister Grace, “pale and unearthly” as a Guido Madonna, enters the chamber where she makes a striking contrast to the bust of the ancient orator: “In the living figure [of Grace], the soul was shrouded in its loveliest and most transparent veil; in the marble [sculpture of Cicero], its glowing fires seemed gleaming through the shrine they were consuming” (6 –7). Affection and intellect, soul and body, fire and marble, Madonna and Cicero: the iconic forms of femininity and masculinity play off one another in this passage in a manner that suggests their near alliance. The more ethereal, living Grace embodies Christian piety, while Cicero’s sculptured bust represents the tradition of pagan virtue to which Christianity was traditionally thought to be heir. By the end of the novel both of these iconic forms are broken and reinvented in a new model of femininity. The bust of Cicero is smashed a few days later when a second crowd destroys the mansion during the Stamp Act protests. Grace survives longer than the bust, but eventually her ethereal nature proves too unworldly, too fragile, her personality too inflexible to negotiate the demands that the Revolution places on her. The qualities that appear spiritual in the opening scene ultimately prove to be signs of a stubborn infantilism when, betrayed by the duplicitous Tory Somerville, Grace falls into a long decline and dies. Despite the urgings of her minister-father she cannot redirect her affections to the worthy patriot Dr. Willard, who later sacrifices himself on the battlefield with the “valued

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relic” of Grace’s picture coated in “his heart’s blood” (259). The reason for Grace’s seemingly inexplicable course of action appears in a discussion of her spiritual life. Grace is drawn to a “delightful state of internal resignation”: “Young as she was, experience had taught her that nothing else could exalt every feeling into the region of pure, ethereal tranquility, and leave no void in the heart” (79). Over the course of the novel Grace’s pleasure in self-resignation evolves into a suicidal impulse similar to that of Richardson’s Clarissa or the young female converts in Jonathan Edwards’s Faithful Narrative, a popular work of Child’s era.6 In a sharp contrast with Grace, her friend and rival Lucretia experiences moral, intellectual, and emotional growth, and it is she who ultimately embodies Child’s ideal of modern republican womanhood. Lucretia has been raised by the quirky and temperamental spinster Miss Sandford. Lacking stable, mature influences, Lucretia develops qualities of assertiveness and impetuosity that distinguish her from the self-effacing Grace. Her “freedom of thought” and “boldness of investigation” (79) signal her intellectual vibrancy; they also make her vulnerable to religious skepticism and other beliefs and feelings that the novel portrays as moral errors, including her love for Somerville. Remarkable for her “unaffected eloquence” and “majesty of mind” (86) as well as for her plain appearance, Lucretia possesses “great purity and rectitude of purpose” but has never learned “selfcontrol” (138 –39). Child presents the production of Lucretia’s character as a sculptural process, with material metaphors symbolizing the crafting of mental qualities: “The materials for a delightful and highly-finished character were rich and ample—but want of judgment in the artist had marred the original design; and the mind that might have been a noble Corinthian pillar now only displayed a few beautiful specimens, which, like the Elgin marbles, served to betray the perfection of the column” (139). Just as the Elgin marbles suggest a lost integrity and beauty, so does Lucretia’s mind reveal an ideal plan that has been imperfectly realized due to “want of judgment,” a phrase that evokes deliberative ideals. The identity of the fumbling artist is left ambiguous in this passage, but the most likely candidates are Miss Sandford and Lucretia herself. The fragments of beauty that symbolize Lucretia’s imperfectly formed mind resemble the remnants of the Hutchinson library after the attack, when “the beautiful, swan-like neck of Mary Stuart was all that remained of the proud line of busts” (48). The Hutchinson mansion is rebuilt, and so is Lucretia’s character.7 By the end of the novel the artistic metaphor of self-making has shifted from sculpture to painting, and Lucretia is now a well finished work: “Her mind

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was now like a fine old painting, the dazzling brilliancy of which had become delightfully mellowed by the touch of time” (282). The source of this transformation? “Affliction”—the death of her dear friend Grace and the collapse of her planned marriage to Somerville—has brought together “the confused materials of grandeur” and formed them “into one beautiful and harmonious whole” (282 – 83). In this finished form she is a fit mate for the patriot lawyer Henry Osborne, who has long admired her even as he recognized (and frequently criticized) her limitations. In contrast to Somerville, who dislikes “a character formed at all” and prefers “nature, bold, impetuous, and unrestrained,” Osborne appreciates a character that “is solid silver, taken from the mine, and skillfully fashioned into useful forms.” He attributes his approach to character development to a conversation he had with Benjamin Franklin about the art of virtue (143 – 44). Child frequently recommended Franklin’s project of self-formation as a model for modern republicans, and in The Rebels a Franklinian process of self-making produces Lucretia, the republican woman who combines the public spiritedness and eloquence of Cicero with the feminine and Christian virtues of Grace. Child concludes The Rebels with a description of Osborne’s contributions to the independence effort, noting that “during the whole of the bloody period . . . he rendered important services in the senate and the field,” and he receives his father’s blessing for his work. The father and son communicate legal and spiritual authority to the new nation, and Henry’s marriage to Lucretia completes the republican household.8 In Philothea (1836) Child returned to many of the same themes and concerns that she explored in Hobomok and The Rebels but developed them in the setting of Periclean Athens. Philothea marks a notable shift in Child’s approach to democratic consensus building. Where in Hobomok she noted the dangers of Puritan controversialism, and in The Rebels she envisioned a process of patriot social formation, in Philothea she portrayed the corruption of democracy by demagoguery and materialism. In this novel Child proposed a Platonic ideal of transcendent truth as a corrective for the dangerous weaknesses of Athenian democracy. The dramatic shift in her assessment of republican self-governance followed her intensifying engagement with the anti-Indian removal and abolitionist movements. We can begin to trace the sources and implications of this shift by considering the reception of Child’s antislavery works in the North American Review. Child had longstanding ties to the journal. Her brother Convers had introduced her to members of the Review circle after she moved into his home when she was nineteen, and her connections to Review authors probably contributed to her decision to become a writer. Beginning with Hobomok the

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Review carried prompt and generally positive reviews of her work. This support from a prominent journal was an extraordinary boon to an aspiring author and helped shape her writing career. In an 1833 essay devoted to a survey of her works, Grenville Mellen celebrated Child as “the first woman in the republic” and singled out for particular praise her popular domestic manual The Frugal Housewife (1829), which he described as having earned universal, transatlantic popularity and a place beside the works of Scott and Irving.9 By contrast her later abolitionist manifestoes and appeals for native rights undermined her support at the Review and compromised her popularity. An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans, Child’s first substantial antislavery work and indeed the abolitionist movement’s “first full-scale analysis of the slavery question,” caused a furor when it appeared in 1833. The Appeal is a sweeping and detailed indictment of all forms of slavery, and American race-based slavery in particular. In it Child analyzed the effects of slavery on slaveholders and the enslaved, compared the advantages and disadvantages of free labor and slave labor, considered the consequences of emancipation, examined the way that slavery influenced the politics of the United States, defended abolitionism as a solution over colonization, quoted a large number of works testifying to the intellect and moral capacities of enslaved blacks and cataloguing the harmful effects of enslavement, and concluded with a statement of “our duties in relation to this subject.” She brought to bear a wide-ranging historical and comparative perspective, which included specific information about abolitionist measures and their outcomes in the Spanish American republics. Her stated goal in this concise yet substantial work was to provide a calm examination based on justice and humanity that would substitute for partisan and sectional argument.10 Child found evidence of such sectional partisanship in the watershed debates of 1830 between Webster and Hayne, in which Hayne’s remarks helped to persuade her that southerners were not sincere in their claims to wish to end slavery. Even as she noted how regional competition infiltrated the debates and expressed some northern pride herself, she claimed to attack “the system, not the men” and urged that “if we were willing to forget ourselves, and could like true republicans, prefer the common good to all other considerations” (31), then slavery would end within fifty years. Lafayette figures importantly here as an example of how a prominent individual worked to emancipate slaves (97) and as an enthusiastic foreign supporter of the United States who nevertheless could not speak about American slavery “without regret and shame” (126). Child compared the

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situation in the United States to the republican movements in Greece and Haiti, and warned that if slavery was not eliminated in the United States a historian might one day write “The Decay and Dissolution of the North American Republic” (212). It was in response to this work that Emory Washburn wrote his 1835 Review essay on slavery. In the essay, he expressed regret that Child had become involved in “a cause so dangerous to the Union, domestic peace, and civil liberty” as the abolitionist movement and opined that Child had unhelpfully contributed to a “high state of excitement” about slavery in England and the United States. Washburn suggested that there was a conflict between abolitionism and the republican values espoused by the Review: abolitionist activism violated republican deliberative norms and threatened the republic itself with dissolution. Child believed that her abolitionist work was an extension of republican values as she resisted oppression. The “unbridled licentiousness and despotic control” of southerners, as well as the exclusion of free and enslaved blacks from meaningful roles in the public discussion, made a deliberative solution to slavery unlikely. Under these circumstances, she suggested, the injustice of slavery demanded that republicans stop deliberating within flawed institutions and actively fight an oppressive system, as the patriot leaders had done in the Revolution.11 The disagreement between Washburn and Child over the value of deliberation is rendered especially salient by the fact that the style and method of the Appeal are clearly influenced by the Review. In addition to referring to Review heroes and associates (Lafayette, Webster), Child adopted a similarly careful approach to the presentation and analysis of a major political problem, supporting her case with a wide range of references and substantial quotations, and situating American slavery in a historical and global framework. She even quoted a work by Review editor Alexander Hill Everett, who had defended black ability and achievement in America; Or, a General Survey of the Political Situation of the Several Powers of the Western Continent With Conjectures on Their Future Prospects (1827).12 There are some significant differences in substance as well as many resemblances. Haiti finds a place in Child’s work, but Washburn claimed he was limited by space constraints and could not include a discussion of the first black republic. The effect in Washburn’s essay is to substantially reduce black agency and to highlight the role of white elites in addressing slavery. Child’s Appeal likewise shares certain features with David Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (1829), and it is these features that distinguish her emphasis on protest from the Review’s commitment to de-

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liberation. Child may have read Walker’s Appeal herself or read about it in The Liberator, and some have speculated that it influenced her choice of title.13 If, as seems likely, she read Walker’s work, she found there an Atlantic world history of republicanism similar to what she found in the pages of the Review, but expressed in an urgent personal voice and concluding with a fiery jeremiad. In her first abolitionist work Child occupied a midpoint between the Review’s deliberative approach and Walker’s prophetic warnings of the need for deliberative reform. When two years later she brought out the Anti-Slavery Catechism she moved a step closer to Walker, assuming a prophetic voice and arguing from higher law against the compromises and constraints of the established political process. Child adopted the catechism to the antislavery cause in order to reform the conditions of public debate. The catechism is a summary or exposition of doctrine in a question-and-answer format addressed by an authority in possession of official knowledge to a child, convert, or other less knowledgeable person who is expected to commit the correct responses to memory. The Westminster Catechism famously begins, “What is the chief end of man?” to which the correct answer is “Man’s chief end is to glorify God, and to enjoy him forever.” Historically associated with Christianity, the catechism has also been adopted to secular contexts. Catechizing someone differs from persuading them with an oration or deliberating with them to reach consensus. The catechist asks the questions to which the person catechized must respond correctly. Child revised the standard format of the catechism into something closer to an interview, with a friendly but ignorant questioner posing queries to the knowledgeable abolitionist. Nevertheless her intentions were clear: to instruct the public in the truths of the antislavery cause and reform the conditions of debate so that abolition could succeed. Child explained that the purpose of abolitionist activism was neither to incite slave insurrections nor to interfere in the legislation of the southern states. Rather, abolitionists “wish to induce the Southerners to legislate for themselves; and they hope to do this by the universal dissemination of facts and arguments, calculated to promote a correct public sentiment on the subject of slavery” (34). Child offered several reasons that misinformation and hostility were distorting a free and fair public debate. “All our books, newspapers, almanacs and periodicals, have combined to represent the colored race as an inferior and degraded class, who never could be made good and useful citizens” (35), she observed, further relating this fact to the legal and social restrictions on the speech of slaves. There existed no official national forum, no series of congressional hearings or other statesanctioned arena, where those who had experienced slavery firsthand

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could speak to the American public. If such a forum were to exist, the receptivity of the audience would be crucial: “I should like to have you hear them talk as I have heard runaway slaves talk, when they knew they had a friend to listen to them” (26). In the present system such a circumstance was unlikely. Child observed that many northerners had interests in maintaining slavery, while some southerners were conscientious and well meaning but misinformed over the threat that a liberated slave population would pose to them. Ultimately, however, she blamed the persistence of slavery on its corrupting effects: “Human nature is willing to endure much, rather than relinquish unbridled licentiousness and despotic control” (35). Child’s essentially republican understanding of human nature identified a will to dominate that could be countered with a commitment to resist oppression. Though she promoted deliberative reform, Child clearly doubted that slavery could be abolished peacefully through public dialogue and the political process. To the question “do you believe the Southerners can ever be persuaded?” she responded indirectly, focusing on the prophetic imperative driving the abolitionists: “At all events it is our duty to try. ‘Thus saith the Lord God, Thou shalt speak my words unto them, whether they will hear, or whether they will forbear; neither be afraid of their words, though briers and thorns be with thee, and thou dost dwell among scorpions’ ” (34). Child sounded another jeremiad-like note when she quoted Jesus in Matthew 10:34, describing how “when principles of truth are sent out in the midst of a perverse generation, they always come ‘not to bring peace, but a sword’ “ (36). Finally, she suggested that the best solution was to get rid of the problem as quickly as possible in order to avert war: “The abolitionists would fain convince the whole country that it is best to cast away this apple of discord” (36)—an allusion to the origins of the Trojan War, as well as the fall of Adam and Eve. Like Walker, she suggested that the only way to resolve the conflict over slavery was to end the practice immediately. In Philothea Child explored the problem that absolute truth claims such as those of the abolitionists posed to deliberative consensus-formation. She took democratic Athens as her setting, which allowed her to question the values of her own society without attacking it directly. The novel focuses on the conflict between the democratic practices of participation and persuasion represented by Pericles and the republican ideals of the common good, which she identifies with Platonic idealism. Child made the connection to her own moment explicit, writing that Pericles, “like modern politicians, deemed honesty excellent in theory, and policy

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safe in practice.”14 The conflict between honesty and policy— or between the ideal and the material, as it is frequently presented in the novel—is laid out more fully in a conversation between the politician Pericles and the philosophers Plato and Anaxagoras at the apartments of Pericles’s wife Aspasia.15 Aspasia is charged throughout the novel with corrupting Athens. She has decorated the room where the gathering takes place with a statue representing the goddesses of Love and Persuasion, and in the course of the evening both values are shown to have been twisted and distorted in ways that bode ill for the Athenian republic. Pericles asserts that Athens is in her glory, and that “the story of Athens, enthroned in her beauty and power, will thrill through generous hearts, long after other nations are forgotten.” Anaxagoras disagrees vigorously, observing that “idle demagogues control the revenues” and complaining that “it is a pyramid with the base uppermost.” Pericles asks incredulously if he dislikes the policy of giving poor people the vote, and Anaxagoras responds by defending a property requirement. Plato then enters the conversation, asking “can the safety of the state be secured by merely excluding the vicious poor?” The philosophers quickly agree that many of the rich are vicious and can cause even more trouble than the poor. Pericles then challenges what he understands to be the underlying assumption of their position: they distrust “the love of change, inherent and active in the human mind” which he embraces, holding that it is the state’s job to reflect that basic fact.16 This changeableness, which is elsewhere further found to be a deficiency in Athenian religion, is tied to the rhetorical arts. Philaemon relates how a sophist speaking in the agora described rhetoric as “the noblest of the arts” (108) because it allows ignorant people to appear knowledgeable. He goes on to describe how another sophist has advertised “that he can teach any young man how to prove that right is wrong, or wrong is right” (109). Anaxagoras finds in these stories further evidence that the Athenians have refused to submit to the “unchangeable principle of truth” (109), and Plato argues that philosophy should guide the state, insisting that “the principle of a republic is none the less true, because mortals make themselves unworthy to receive it” (155). Any doctrine, even the doctrine of republicanism, is subject to corruption. Earlier, Philaemon insisted that the Athens that could sell five thousand citizens into slavery “is not a republic” (114). Child suggested that true republicanism is realized only when people subject their outward nature to the inner light of conscience. Pericles himself suffers from the instability of the Athenians when Anaxagoras, Phidias, and Aspasia are tried for impiety before an Assembly of the people. A series of more or less trumped-up charges are brought

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against the three, and the Assembly initially issues death sentences for the men and exile for Aspasia. Pericles uses his influence to persuade the Assembly to consult an oracle, and ultimately the sentences for the philosopher and the sculptor are reduced to exile. Pericles then lifts Aspasia’s veil in the Assembly and displays her beauty to the “volatile and ardent people,” who reverse their earlier verdict and allow her to remain in Athens, “triumphant over the laws of religion and morality” (138). In contrast to Hobomok, in which aesthetic values smooth over cultural and religious differences, here physical and rhetorical beauty corrupt popular sovereignty and the rule of law. Pericles’s reliance on rhetorical and visual stimulants to achieve his ends and his faith in change have tragic consequences later in the novel, when he removes his invalid son Paralus from a tranquil environment and takes him to the Hippodrome in the hopes that he might benefit from “a sudden excitement” (206). The effect is quite the opposite: Paralus is dazzled and overwhelmed, and he dies in his father’s arms. The fates of the two heroines further illustrate the implications of Plato’s theory of the republic. Philothea, whose name means “lover of God,” who is preternaturally calm and self-effacing, and who tells Plato that she once heard the music of the spheres, dies in a “perfect stillness of resignation” (224). Like Paralus, she cannot survive in the tumultuous world of Periclean Athens. Later, Philothea’s slave and companion, the volatile Eudora, escapes Alcibiades’s control and discovers that she is a Persian heiress. Eudora marries her longtime lover Philaemon, with whom she has shared subjection to oppressive Athenian laws against foreigners. Though the laws have since been repealed, the couple has had enough of the “troubled and unsettled state” (283) of Athens, and together they settle in Pasagarda, preferring the stability and cosmopolitanism of the Persian monarchy to the prejudice-filled, tumultuous, democratic Greek state. In a striking contrast to the end of The Rebels, in which Henry and Lucretia Osborne carry forward the values of the Revolution, Philothea concludes by suggesting the inability of the democratic republic to reproduce itself. In The Rebels Child proposed that the law, embodied in the figure of Henry Osborne, could moderate the stimulating effects of rhetoric and exercise a regulating influence on the crowd. In Philothea, the law of democratic Athens is shown to be wholly subject to demagoguery and thus to lack an essential element of stability that would help assure its justice. Lacking consistency and disconnected from moral values, law becomes a tool of domination. Periclean Athens is no longer a republic—and such is also the case, Child clearly implies, in Jacksonian America. The novel provides a philosophical explanation of her turn to prophetic rhetoric in her

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abolitionist works. Child embraced the scriptural and Platonic higher law as a republican corrective to what she saw as the failings of American democracy. On this point, at least, the North American Review could agree.17

i i . c o o p e r ’s tria l s Like Lydia Maria Child, James Fenimore Cooper explored the republican culture of deliberation in his fiction. His interest in deliberative practices developed in his youth, when he helped organize and run several voluntary associations, even drafting a constitution for one group. After he had launched his career as a novelist Cooper extended these associational efforts in a cultural direction. In 1823 he founded New York’s Bread and Cheese Club, also known as the Lunch, a gathering of writers, artists, journalists, lawyers, doctors, and other opinion leaders, including visitors such as Daniel Webster, who constituted what Cooper’s biographer Wayne Franklin described as “a large, loosely constructed social body that represented the aspirations of the city for a greater share in the nation’s intellectual and cultural life.” The tone of the Lunch was convivial, and Cooper described the group as a place for “free . . . communion.” In a similar spirit to Boston’s Anthology Club, which was affiliated with the North American Review, in which Cooper’s works were regularly and for the most part approvingly reviewed, the Lunch engaged the ongoing challenges of establishing cultural independence from Great Britain. Cooper shared the Review’s admiration for Lafayette, and in the same year that he founded the Lunch he participated in a tribute to his childhood hero when he helped to dedicate a fort in his name. The following year Cooper met Lafayette at the beginning of his American tour, initiating a relationship that would have important consequences for Cooper’s future literary career after he moved to France in 1826. These otherwise disparate events— Cooper’s literary career, his associational activities, and his affiliation with Lafayette—relate to his role as a shaper of modern republicanism.18 Cooper shared Child’s concern with the rule of law as an essential but vulnerable feature of the modern republic. Trial scenes from The Pioneers (1823), The Prairie (1827), and The Bravo (1831) illustrate his deliberative themes. Out of the many trials in Cooper’s fiction, I have chosen these three because they illustrate the different ways that Cooper portrayed the relationship between the deliberative process of the trial and the community affected by it. In The Trial in American Life (2007) Robert Ferguson described courtroom trials as “central ceremonies in the American republic of laws.” Public trials invite “communal vigilance”: “a rule of law requires

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that the governed know how to observe and sometimes answer those who govern.” One central feature of trials is to “reduce conflict to reason, anger to cooperation, and argument to decision making.” This process does not always go smoothly, with the result that conflict proliferates outside the courtroom rather than being resolved within it. The trial scenes I will discuss address these issues in different places and times and in different types of bodies: a frontier court in The Pioneers; a tribal council in The Prairie; and Venice’s secretive Council of Three in The Bravo.19 Each of these scenes presents a democratic hero being tried for an act of transgression, either against the law, against his enemies, or against the state. They illustrate different formations of the relationship between the law and the citizens of a state and probe tensions within the concept of the rule of law. Each scene depicts a process that is flawed or vulnerable in some way, and in each of them the hero resists some form of oppression. The frontier courtroom in The Pioneers demonstrates the clash between the common law and natural law, a demagogue controls the Sioux council, and the secretive and manipulative Venetian Council of Three masks its injustice toward the poor beneath a defense of state power. But while escape is possible from the injustices of the American courts, the Venetian state crushes its opponents—which, Cooper suggests, is a crucial difference between New World republics and the republics of the Old World. In The Pioneers the relationships between language, speaker, and process take center stage, while personal feeling and established social relationships are shown to conflict with the putatively impersonal rule of law. Natty Bumppo greets every odd and unfamiliar feature of courtroom procedure with his trademark silent laugh. His language and demeanor resist the formal codes of speech and process, which became increasingly professionalized over Cooper’s lifetime.20 After the testimony of Natty’s accusers, the jury deliberates briefly—though as is conventional in representations of trials, the deliberations are not described. The judge directs the jury, which represents the Templeton community, and the jury applies the law according to the judge’s directives. The most important exchange in the trial takes place between Natty and Judge Marmaduke Temple, whose family has been protected and served by Natty over the years, including a recent episode in which the woodsman saved the Judge’s daughter, Elizabeth, from being mauled by a panther. Convicted of resisting the execution of a search warrant, Natty is sentenced to pay a fine and to spend an hour in the stocks and a month in prison to illustrate, as the Judge emphasizes, that the law has arrived on the frontier.21 Natty’s crime is freighted with symbolism. Aversion to state authority

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as vested in a written implement of the law, which had formed the Revolutionary theme of James Otis’s Writs of Assistance address, and which David Crockett described in his Narrative, figures importantly in American popular and civic culture. Natty challenges his sentence with a plea for equity based at first on his incapacity to pay and on his advanced age. When Judge Temple insists “I must be governed by the law,” Natty cuts in to remind the judge that his daughter owes Leatherstocking her life, which the judge instantly rejects as an appeal to “my private feelings.” For Natty, however, this response constitutes a false reliance on legalism, and he goes on to tell of his longstanding ties to the Judge and his family. Natty aligns feeling and reason against law; the judge, committed to the authority of law, finds it opposed to private feeling. The procedures of the court mediate between feeling and law, providing their own logic that is not identical to Natty’s understanding of “reason.” Finally the Sheriff calls for silence, and the Judge, “struggling to overcome his feelings,” pronounces the final word: “There must be an end to this. . . . What stands next on the calendar?” (376 –78). His reliance on process in the resolution is unsatisfying to everyone, but the court must move on. In the succeeding scene, in which Natty is set in the stocks and then imprisoned, Cooper portrays the manner in which the common law comes to be better aligned with the natural law through shifts in public attitudes. The crowd assembled to watch Leatherstocking’s punishment manifests “attentive subordination” (379), neither offering open pity nor mocking him but demonstrating their acceptance of the law. One of the observers, the seaman Benny Pump, chooses to protest Natty’s treatment by sharing his punishment. The “looks of sobriety, and occasionally of commiseration” from the assembled townspeople encourage Pump in this intention, and he “very deliberately” puts himself in the stocks (380). Benny’s internal deliberation is supported by the silent deliberations of the people, pursued not through words but through expressions and demeanor. Cooper suggests that such responses portend the process by which common-law punishments such as the stocks and the whipping post were later “supplanted by the more merciful expedients of the public prisons” (379). Penal reform proceeds from adjustments in public opinion like those occasioned by Natty’s punishment. Later Elizabeth Temple reproaches her father for his strict application of the law, and Oliver Edwards rescues Natty, further contributing to a process of reform in a community that respects the law while also recognizing its flaws. Meanwhile Natty flees to the frontier, where he can be ruled by natural law alone. The Prairie shows that the frontier has its own forms of civil law, how-

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ever, for it contains a scene of native justice that recasts important elements of the confrontation between Judge Temple and Natty. The Prairie picks up the story where The Pioneers left off, with Natty seeking justice in the open landscapes of the Midwest; it also replays elements from the second Leatherstocking tale, The Last of the Mohicans.22 The courtroom scene in The Pioneers centers on the confrontation between Natty as the voice of natural law and equity and Judge Temple as the proponent of the rule of law and procedure; as we shall see in greater detail in the next chapter, the debate over Uncas’s fate in The Last of the Mohicans focuses on Magua as a demagogue. The trial of Hard-Heart in The Prairie combines the procedural emphasis in the first Leatherstocking tale with the depiction of demagoguery from the second. This novel fills in the portrait of the native demagogue in ways that relate him to the political history of France, where Cooper was living when he wrote the larger part of it.23 Cooper’s portrait of Sioux deliberations offers one of his most complex depictions of a political caucus, including an informal but crucial role for women, a strong sense of procedure, a diffuse organizational structure run by tribal elders, and a demagogue who dominates through “flattery” (1229) and “eloquence” (1228) as well as a willingness to exercise power more boldly than his fellow chiefs. The demagogue of The Prairie is the Sioux leader Mahtoree, a Jacobin-like figure, whose “simple and republican . . . form of living” (1203) is an act of political theater intended to impress his people, and who employs religious symbols to manipulate his followers though he himself is a skeptic. Mahtoree can manipulate the Sioux and disrupt the established procedures of their Council, but he cannot fully control its outcome. His power must be wielded indirectly, through persuasion, “by constant appeals to the opinions of his inferiors” (1221). When he takes his place in the Council organized to debate the fate of the Pawnee “Partizan” Hard-Heart, Mahtoree initially manifests “the studied simplicity of the demagogue” (1221). His tyrannizing glance indicates his real temper, which reveals itself when he cuts off another speaker, disrupting the “grave deliberation” (1220) and committing a “deep offence against the sacred courtesy of debate” (1223). Prior to Mahtoree’s intervention the process of deciding Hard-Heart’s fate has gone through several stages. In its preliminary phase the old women visit the lodges, stoking the anger of the community against their enemy. Meanwhile the chiefs caucus in the hope of achieving unanimity and then assemble around the post to which Hard-Heart is tied for the formal Council meeting. The members smoke a pipe and then fall silent as an elder rises and, speaking in highly metaphoric language about his

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age and the ancient antipathy between the Sioux and the Pawnee, calls for vengeance on the enemy. Another silence ensues, in which “all might duly deliberate on their wisdom, before another chief took on himself the office of refutation” (1222). This chief proceeds to caution against actions that might provoke white retaliation. It is at this point that Mahtoree violates the deliberative code governing the Council meeting and calls for “the Evil Spirit of the Pale faces,” impersonated by the absurdly costumed naturalist Obed Battius, to be led into the Council circle. Mahtoree’s goal seems to be to engage religious superstitions in favor of his position. When he rises to address the group he does so with “hauteur and confidence,” asserting his superiority over his tribe. He then proceeds to speak, “varying his tones to suit the changing character of his images and his eloquence” (1228), and calling for Hard-Heart’s execution. Just as he seems about to accomplish his objective, however, he is himself interrupted by his aged compatriot Le Balafré, whose French name (which means “the scarred one”) reflects his experience and status in the community. Le Balafré proposes to adopt Hard-Heart, and Mahtoree does not dare intervene in “a resolution that was strictly in conformity to the usages of the Nation,” though the “procedure” (1232) would likely rob him of his chief victim and establish a deadly rivalry within the tribe. When Hard-Heart is offered the chance to “make his election” (1234), however, he rejects the offer that would save his life. Speaking of himself in the third person, Cooper’s most Roman-like Indian insists upon his consistency: “Every where he is the same. There is no change. He is in all things a Pawnee” (1234). Moreover, he has chosen another father, Natty Bumppo, who had earlier taken him as an adoptive son. Hard-Heart’s rejection of Le Balafré’s offer appears to seal his fate, but just as Mahtoree turns to execute him he escapes to join the Pawnee band that has come to his rescue. Like Natty, he is able to elude an unjust punishment. In subsequent scenes Hard-Heart is shown to be a just and noble republican leader, providing a model for the two white characters, Duncan Uncas Middleton and Paul Hover, who go on to serve in the state and federal governments of the United States. The Prairie is notable both for its suggestion of the connection between native and white republics and, in its repeated references to Mahtoree and Hard-Heart as partisan leaders, for its depiction of partisanship as a prominent feature of republican politics.24 The Bravo is Cooper’s most ideological novel, as well as his most explicit fictional treatment of republicanism. Set in eighteenth-century Venice, it is a tale of a sham republic in which Cooper portrays the misery that afflicts members of all classes when republican values are corrupted, from the

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aristocratic Violetta to the lowly fisherman Antonio. In his preface to the novel Cooper described the work to his countrymen as a picture of one of the “soi-disant republics of the other hemisphere.” Distinguishing between nations in which the subject “has extorted immunity after immunity” in order to accumulate a degree of “liberty” and those where “concessions of natural rights” are “made by the people to the state, for the benefits of social protection,” Cooper identified a true republic as one where power “is derived from the nation, with a constant responsibility of the agents of the public to the people.” The republican ideal was better fulfilled “on a large than on a small scale,” he claimed, since “a people of diversified interests and extended territorial possessions, are much less likely to be the subjects of sinister passions than the inhabitants of a single town or country.” Madison was right to defend the extended republic. The United States was a true republic; the European nations that identified themselves as republics were in fact “theoretically despotisms.” Writing in the aftermath of the July Revolution, and with an eye to both European and American circumstances, Cooper set out to articulate the differences between a democratic republic and an aristocratic one. The novel focuses on the secrecy and conspiracy that characterize the Venetian republic and its lack of public deliberations as defining differences. The Bravo illustrates the difficulties that result when citizens must struggle to assert their rights and the state resists.25 These difficulties are shown to have roots in Venice’s legal procedures in the scene in which the fisherman Antonio Vecchio, a Venetian Natty Bumppo, is brought before the Council of Three. The Council is a secret body (Cooper calls it “a soulless corporation” and distinguishes it from “elective representation” [132]) that holds the real power in Cooper’s Venice. It includes a representative from the doge, who is otherwise shown to be largely a figurehead, and two members who are selected by lot from the Council of Ten, itself a body chosen by lot from the Senate. Their identities concealed by masks and flowing robes, the Council of Three meets in a gloomy and heavily curtained room whose apertures are concealed. The overwhelming effect is one of darkness, confinement, and secrecy, in striking contrast to the public courtroom in Templeton and the open-air deliberations of the Sioux. From the beginning Cooper shows the process to be flawed, notably when the documents used in the initial charge wrongly identify the young man in question as Antonio’s son rather than his grandson. In striking contrast to the direct exchange between Judge Temple and Natty Bumppo, the interrogations proceed indirectly through a secretary, with periodic interruptions from the judges. The regulation of

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Antonio’s speech is at the center of the proceedings. The old fisherman explains to the Councilors that his urgent wish to rescue his grandson from military service to the republic is not based on a selfish desire for the boy’s company; rather, it flows from his desire to “speak good council” (137) to the lad, who Antonio fears will be corrupted in the galleys. Once the boy has reached maturity and is capable of thoughtful decision making, his grandfather promises to release him willingly. The Venetian state has disrupted the process of private council devoted to moral formation, forcing Antonio to acts of speech that violate state protocols. These include his appeal to the doge and his subsequent address to a crowd of fishermen, which the Council labels sedition. Antonio speaks with an energy, simplicity, and directness that the Council finds strange and unfamiliar. Responding to their repeated demands that he speak truthfully, Antonio observes that direct speech is the norm where he comes from: “We of the Lagunes are not afraid to say what we have seen and done” (138). Like Natty and Hard-Heart, he displays a singleness of purpose and a self-consistency that distinguish him from his judges. And like Natty in The Pioneers, he asserts the power of feeling against the power of the state. But where Natty engages Judge Temple in direct debate, Antonio’s judges deflect his efforts to establish a rapport with them. The most serious charge against him is that he incited the crowd. A judge passes a note to the secretary, who reads the judge’s question: “Thou didst address thy fellows, and spoke openly of thy fancied wrongs; thou didst comment on the laws which require the services of the citizen, when the republic is compelled to send forth a fleet against its enemies,” to which Antonio replies, “It is not easy to be silent, Signore, when the heart is full” (140). This freedom of speech leads to his undoing. At the conclusion of the official proceedings a judge cautions Antonio to keep silence and await the “inevitable justice of St. Mark” (142). Instead he asks for the chance to speak about his grandson and is granted permission to “give free vent” (142) to his griefs and desires. His harangue proceeds in four stages, the first devoted to his family’s service to the republic and his demand that his grandson be returned to him; the second addressed to the oppression of his class and a plea for humane treatment; and the third expressing his feelings “as becomes a father” (144). The court attempts to prevent him from sedition, but Antonio repeatedly resists their efforts to redirect him, until finally a judge urges him to continue his self-incriminating speech and bare his soul. In the concluding section of his speech he addresses the men beneath the robes and masks, calling upon them as fathers to acknowledge the justice of his plea and charging them to recognize their unjust exer-

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cise of power. At this point Jacopo the Bravo puts his hand over Antonio’s mouth to silence him, but it is too late. The judges have heard enough, and after releasing the fisherman they order his assassination. Only later does the reader learn that one of the Councilors is Senator Alessandro Gradenigo, the most powerful and the most corrupt figure in the novel, who is Antonio’s foster brother, and who has hypocritically used his authority to keep his own dissolute son out of the galleys. The reader of The Bravo has been introduced to Senator Gradenigo in chapters five and six. The epigraphs from Antony and Cleopatra that begin these chapters offer rich examples of how Cooper engaged with Shakespeare as a republican thinker; more specifically, they invite the reader to develop a comparison between the Council and the Second Triumvirate of Rome, which began as a power-sharing arrangement and rapidly deteriorated into warring factions, helping to bring the Roman Republic to an end. The play culminates in Cleopatra’s death and ends with Octavian on the verge of taking power, preparatory to his final overthrow of the republic.26 The epigraph to chapter five of The Bravo comes from the end of Antony and Cleopatra, in which Cleopatra speaks to Octavian’s messenger Proculeius, who has come to prevent her from the “mortal stroke” (5.1.64) that Caesar rightly fears she will inflict upon herself when she learns of Antony’s suicide. Octavian wants to bring her alive to Rome, for, he gloats in anticipation, “her life in Rome / Would be eternal in our triumph” (5.1.66). The future emperor is willing to make concessions in order to ensnare the Egyptian queen and force her to participate as a vanquished opponent in his triumph. Proculeius arrives at the monument where Cleopatra has gone with her maidservants to end her life to avoid just such a fate as Octavian imagines for her. The messenger tries to reassure her by asking her to “study on what fair demands / Thou mean’st to have [Caesar] grant thee” (5.2.10 –11). She replies in the words that Cooper used to introduce his chapter: If your master Would have a queen his beggar, you must tell him That majesty, to keep decorum, must No less beg than a kingdom. (5.2.15 –18)

The parallels between the play and the novel are indirect. In the chapter introduced by this epigraph Cooper portrays scenes in which two powerless people appeal to a powerful man who, like Caesar in the play, masks the fact that he is serving himself by using the rhetoric of service to others.

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The opening passage from Antony and Cleopatra mirrors the imbalances of power and the capacity of dependents to elude the will of the powerful that characterize Senator Gradenigo’s relationships with his two petitioners, Violetta Tiepolo and Antonio Vecchio. The situation of Violetta, the senator’s wealthy and beautiful young ward, parallels Cleopatra’s circumstances most closely. Violetta has something that Gradenigo wants—he covets her wealth and status and plans to marry his son to her—and like Cleopatra she plans to evade his efforts to dominate her. She has no more intention of being paraded as a prized possession by her guardian than Cleopatra has of being displayed on the streets of Rome. Violetta has gone to Gradenigo’s palace at a late hour to beg him to help Don Camillo Monforte, the man who saved her life and whom she will later marry, win his ancestral Venetian lands and a place in the Senate. The scene opens with a complex negotiation of power between the guardian and his ward focused on the conditions of speech. Gradenigo opens the interview by speculating about the reason that “this persuasive girl” (52), as he calls her, has paid him a visit. Perhaps because he knows she is persuasive, the senator is reluctant to let her speak. Rather than simply ask her business, he proceeds to guess why she is there. Violetta calmly refutes each of his suppositions about the nature of her “little request” (53). She has not come to have someone released from a military obligation, nor to get employment for her nurse’s relative, nor to ask for money, nor to intervene on behalf of one accused of indiscreet speech, but for what she describes as an errand “of nobler quality” (54). At last her guardian urges her to “speak without riddle” (54), and after some hesitation she regains her self-possession and lays out her request that Monforte be rewarded for his role in saving her from drowning after a boating accident. Once again thinking that he understands the nature of her request, Gradenigo accuses her of reading “among the light works of her late father’s library” (55)—presumably romance fictions— only to be faced down by a dignified Violetta who explains that her purpose is not to marry Monforte but to help him reclaim his rights to his Venetian lands and rank. The scene is notable for Cooper’s portrayal of a young woman confronting a domineering male authority figure and asserting her own will by demonstrating her capacity to speak for herself. The Merchant of Venice is an underlying influence throughout The Bravo, and Violetta is here cast as a Portia figure. Gradenigo remarks unhappily on her familiarity “with the doctors of Padua” (55) and describes her as “a persuasive advocate” (56). The discussion of Don Camillo concludes with a telling exchange about the metaphor of blind justice. Gradenigo promises that

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Monforte’s claims will be “examined with that blindness which is said to be the failing of justice,” and Violetta replies, “I have understood the metaphor to mean blind to favor, but not insensible to the right” (56). Their conflicting interpretations condense their competing views of justice in a republic. Gradenigo values power and influence, while Violetta insists upon impartiality and fairness. Violetta is paired in this chapter with a second supplicant: Antonio Vecchio, whose mother was the senator’s wet nurse. Here the difference in status is of class rather than age and gender, but the dynamics of the interviews are similar. Again Gradenigo tries to guess the reason for the visit. Does Antonio want money or food? Impatient with the delay, even as he does little to make Antonio’s revelation easier, the senator criticizes his petitioner for overreaching in blunter terms than he used with Violetta: “Thou art accustomed to comment on measures and interests that are beyond thy limited reason. . . . The ignorant and the low are, to the state, as children, whose duty it is to obey and not to cavil” (59). He warns Antonio against airing his complaints publicly and accuses him of disaffection from the state. When the senator at last allows his foster brother to make his petition, Antonio for the first time in the novel begs that his teenaged grandson be released from service in the galleys before he is killed or, even worse in Antonio’s view, morally corrupted—a petition that he later repeats to the doge and the Council of Three, where Gradenigo hears it a second time while wearing the mask of authority. As in the later instance the senator here declines to assist Antonio, claiming that it is beyond his influence though, as Antonio remarks, Gradenigo’s son Giacomo has escaped military service. Justice is not blind in the republic of Venice. The succeeding chapter contains three more interviews that Gradenigo conducts later that same night. These meetings—with Jacopo the Bravo, Don Camillo Monforte, and the Jewish moneylender Hosea—further illustrate the inner workings of Venetian power. Just as the epigraph for chapter five anticipates crucial dynamics of the scenes to follow, so too does the epigraph for chapter six establish an interpretive context. The lines “Caesar himself has work, and our oppression / Exceeds what we expected” (4.7.2 –3) are spoken by Agrippa, an officer in Octavius Caesar’s army, as he leads the retreat before Antony’s forces. This battle occurs after Caesar refuses to meet Antony in hand-to-hand combat, and its loss is an unexpected plot twist. The statement that “Caesar himself has work” implies that his followers resent his evasion of combat, while the description of unexpected “oppression” suggests an unwarranted defeat. These themes shape the portrayal of Gradenigo’s political machina-

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tions. In contrast to the two extraordinary interviews with Violetta and Antonio, these three interviews form part of the senator’s political routine. His meeting with Jacopo focuses on the dangers of “seditious discontent” (65), which he fears is a Venetian propensity shared by Antonio. He instructs Jacopo to “repress that fisherman’s speech” (64) to prevent him from planting discontent among the lower orders and urges him further to circulate the story of an accommodation with Genoa recently reached by the tribunals in order to promulgate the republic’s reputation for justice, explaining to Jacopo that the story will “quicken the dormant seeds of virtue in the public mind” (66). Next Violetta’s rescuer, Don Monforte, arrives somewhat late for their scheduled interview, which concerns two political objects: Monforte’s intervention with his Spanish kinsman to reach an accommodation with Venice; and his own efforts to get his rights to his lands and title recognized. Gradenigo lectures him on the importance of treating the senators with “the courtesies due to their rank and yours” (70) and rebukes him for wishing to communicate directly with the councils, an impossible request, he explains, for they remain secret in order “that their majesty may not be tarnished by communication with vulgar interests.” These bodies “rule like the unseen influence of mind over matter” and form “the soul of the state” (71). Hosea the moneylender, the third visitor in this chapter, is an informant and an agent of the state. He shows Gradenigo a signet ring that has been brought to him from the council for identification and extorts a promise of money if he can trace its owner. The themes of secrecy and compartmentalization that organize the chapter are reinforced and acted out when Gradenigo concludes the evening by checking the locks of the secret drawers on his cabinet. Cooper concludes this Shakespearean diptych, which offers the novel’s most fully developed portrayal of the powerful senator, with reflections on Gradenigo’s “political ethics” (76). “Born with all the sympathies and natural kindliness of other men,” his training in “the institutions of the self-styled republic” had corrupted the instincts that remain pure in his lowborn foster brother, Antonio. Gradenigo has become “the creature of a conventional policy,” and like the head of a corporation he is “an agent of [the state’s] collective measures, removed from the responsibilities of the man.” He speaks the republican language of “character, and honor, and virtue, and religion, and the rights of persons,” while at the same time he acts to protect his own vested interests, not out of open hypocrisy, but out of a mistaken understanding of republican theory. He is at heart “an aristocrat” who “persuaded himself into the belief of all the dogmas that were favorable to his caste” (76). Public power and personal interest are masked

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and distributed to the point where they become indistinguishable. The epigraph from Antony and Cleopatra suggests that when “Caesar himself has work” that he delegates to others, preferring to act indirectly rather than risk his own safety and wellbeing, the result is “oppression.” The forces that led to the collapse of the Roman Republic have had the same effects in modern republics like Venice, Cooper suggested—and threatened to do so as well in France and the United States. Cooper’s varied representations of modern republics reflect his increasingly cosmopolitan frame of reference after he moved his family to Europe in 1826. Once in France he quickly reestablished contact with Lafayette and remained part of his political circle until returning to the United States in 1833. After completing The Prairie he took up Lafayette’s suggestion that he write a book to correct European misapprehensions about the United States. The General’s American tour figured prominently in the resulting work, Notions of the Americans (1828). As Cooper’s initial irritation with European condescension evolved into active involvement with Lafayette and the July Revolution, he turned his hand to more openly political writings. These included the 1830 pamphlet Letter to General Lafayette, in which Cooper defended the superior cost-effectiveness of the United States government, and to a series of explicitly political novels set in Europe, with The Bravo followed quickly by The Heidenmauer (1832) and The Headsman (1833). Both the pamphlets and the novels juxtaposed American republican values with European institutions. Intended as an incitement to reform in Europe, they also served to warn Cooper’s countryman against the threats to the republican heritage of the United States. As a republican partisan Cooper met with support and opposition on both sides of the Atlantic. Upon returning to the United States he published A Letter to His Countrymen in 1834, the year of Lafayette’s death. There Cooper warned of the deterioration of American republican values; praised Jackson for his stand against the National Bank and its allies in the mercantile elite who, Cooper believed, formed a new oligarchy; and threatened to stop writing in order to silence the abuse directed at him in the press. Cooper also undertook to sue several critics for slander. Even as he entered into these controversies in defense of American republican values, Cooper found that the United States had changed during his seven-year absence. While Cooper continued to support Jackson he found a newly prominent populist strain to be a less attractive feature of Democratic Party politics. His writings of the late 1830s often celebrated the rootedness and cultural maturity of European societies, for instance in the lavish descriptions of the gardens and vineyards that punctuate the five

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volumes of Gleanings in Europe (1836 –38). The United States, by contrast, looked raw and undeveloped. Cooper reflected on the transformation in his country in The American Democrat (1838), his last major piece of nonfiction political prose, which he intended as a rival to Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. Cooper particularly singled out the strong partisanship that he found polarizing the nation upon his return, noting that the majority party pushed its ideas to extremes while the minority party went along with the current “with the hope that this current will lead, in the end, to radical changes.” This partisan atmosphere smothered the voice of “simple, honest, and what, in a country like this ought to be fearless, truth.” In this most direct testament to his political ideals, Cooper sought to reorient public discussion about American politics in three ways that echoed themes from his novels. He emphasized the need to reconnect words, especially “aristocrat” and “democrat,” to their appropriate meanings. He identified the demagogue as a characteristic deformity of American civic life. And he sought to reestablish true republicanism as the basis of political self-understanding by making American democracy more fully and freely deliberative.27

} In their novels and political writings Cooper and Child explored the potential virtues as well as the existing flaws of deliberative democracy. Their works of the 1820s take a generally positive stance toward the place of deliberation in American history and society and suggest an opportunity to use deliberative means to reform existing ills, notably the oppression of African Americans and Native Americans. As the 1830s progressed both writers became more skeptical about that potential. In their works of the late 1830s, especially Philothea and The American Democrat, Child and Cooper turned a hostile eye toward the partisanship and populism that had come to characterize Jacksonian democracy, which they found to be fundamentally compromising the deliberations that both authors understood as the foundation of a republic.

S Seven HOW TO READ DELIBER ATIVELY

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In chapter one I proposed that literary works can be read to highlight their deliberative content, and that such reading practices promote the values of deliberative democracy. In this chapter I offer models of such deliberative reading in discussions of James Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans (1826) and William Apess’s Indian Nullification of the Unconstitutional Laws of Massachusetts Relative to the Marshpee Tribe; or, The Pretended Riot Explained (1835), and in an invented deliberation about property that draws from the works of my seven core figures and relates their ideas to current debates. By highlighting the imaginative and aesthetic contributions that deliberation makes to civic life, I hope to suggest how literary works can be used to enhance deliberative democracy. A deliberative reading highlights the processes of debate, discussion, and decision making that a text portrays in relation to the form of subjectivity that it hopes to produce in the reader. My treatments of The Last of the Mohicans and Indian Nullification highlight two kinds of deliberative content: scenes of deliberation and surrogation. An interpretive focus on scenes of deliberation concentrates on their verbal and physical elements, their procedural components, and their intersubjective and social dimensions, including power relations that can introduce inequalities into the process. Surrogation refers to a performance during which one person or group takes on the role of another person or group, and the new performers change the role to suit the novel circumstances. Following Joseph Roach’s development of the concept in Cities of the Dead, I consider the intrasubjective reflection and pragmatic demands of such a substitution within the specific conditions of Atlantic world history. These readings also focus on how an act of surrogation alters the role itself and shifts the dynamics of public deliberation.1

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In their otherwise very different works Cooper and Apess explore a question that they have in common. What conditions, they ask, produce deliberations that satisfy the participants in circumstances of radical heterogeneity and unequal power relations where sovereignty and selfdetermination are at issue? The Last of the Mohicans portrays a wide variety of deliberative processes ranging from dialogues to small group decision making to formal councils to mass meetings. In each of these scenes Cooper focuses on how characters interact, what traditions or rules govern their interactions, how identities shape and are shaped by the process, and what consequences follow in contests for territory or bodies. Indian Nullification is a hybrid text that combines the strategies of compilation with the aims of a manifesto to support Cape Cod’s Mashpee community in its assertions of sovereignty over its lands and resistance to state oppression. The assembled documents and the supporting narrative of the conflict highlight the deliberations conducted at Mashpee and the difficult process of getting the Massachusetts government to recognize their validity and their basis in native sovereignty. Apess demonstrated that native traditions of deliberation overlapped with practices that his white readers would find familiar; therefore, he attested, the Mashpee people deserved to have their sovereignty recognized. These works by Cooper and Apess offer insight into a project that James Bohman has called “republican cosmopolitanism”: the development of deliberative processes that identify and move toward a common good through collective decision making and selfgovernment in a multicultural, multistate context.2 From these readings I turn in my final section to an imagined deliberation on the meaning of property that emphasizes how deliberative readings of historic texts can illuminate current challenges. My approach here differs from the “dialogue” model advanced by R. W. B. Lewis in his classic work The American Adam, in which he breaks down the cultural conversation in the United States from 1820 – 60 into three “parties,” of hope, memory, and irony. In contrast with this party-based model, I set out the main ideas of my seven figures individually while suggesting points of overlap and difference among them, as well as relating them to contemporary economic thought. The value of this approach is that it allows each perspective full resonance, without constraining it within the limits of a “party.”3

i i . t h e g r e at a m e rica n de l ib e r ative novel The Last of the Mohicans is the great American deliberative novel. This assertion will surprise readers who see the novel as a frontier action tale,

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and it will equally surprise those who share Richard Slotkin’s view that the novel is principally about race and, ultimately, Indian removal, Manifest Destiny, and white supremacy. Neither the plot devices of the action tale nor the theme of racial dominance suggest a concern with deliberative democracy.4 The reading that I will develop here differs most fully from D. H. Lawrence’s account of the Leatherstocking Tales in Studies in Classic American Literature (1923), in which Lawrence argued that Cooper was “a gentleman” who “hated democracy.” (Lawrence ignored Cooper’s longstanding affiliations with the Democratic Party and his admiration for Andrew Jackson.) Because Cooper “hated democracy” he “evaded it, and had a nice dream of something beyond democracy. But he belonged to democracy all the while.” Cooper’s evasions produced “the nucleus of a new society”: “a new human relationship” that he created between Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook. Lawrence described this relationship as deeper than other kinds of physical, legal, and moral bonds— deeper than sex, property, fatherhood, marriage, and love. It is also deeper than language itself, and this is its most defining quality. The bonds between Natty Bumppo and Chingachgook form a “stark, loveless, wordless unison of two men who have come to the bottom of themselves.”5 The problem with Lawrence’s reading of the Leatherstocking Tales is that the novels portray Natty’s friendship with Chingachgook through repeated scenes of conversation and consultation. Mark Twain more accurately described the verbosity of Cooper and his characters, and though his criticism in “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses” (1895) focuses on the later tales, he might well have applied his insights to The Last of the Mohicans. There are conversations, debates, narratives, and orations, including frequent exchanges between Hawk-eye (as he is known in this novel) and Chingachgook. Even battle cannot silence the flow of discussion and debate, as in the scene where Natty chides his less experienced companions that in frontier warfare “nothing speaks but the rifle” only to launch a short while later into a detailed description of the battle they are fighting. When the conflict is hottest he seeks out Duncan Heyward to exchange “useful reflections” on “the philosophy of an Indian fight” and the relative merits of European and American styles of combat. When Heyward admonishes him that “this is a subject that might better be discussed another time” and urges him “shall we charge?”, Hawk-eye defends his timing: “I see no contradictions to the gifts of any man, in passing his breathing spells in useful reflections. . . . As to a rush, I little relish such a measure, for a scalp or two must be thrown away in the attempt. And yet,” he concedes, “if we are to be of use to Uncas, these knaves in our front must be

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gotten rid of!” Natty always enjoys a good discussion, particularly one that involves a comparison of traditions and their merits, and as this passage shows he rarely uses one word where he can use two or three.6 Cooper calls his hero “the deliberate woodsman” (770) and emphasizes his thorough planning and consideration of problems from many angles. Deliberate action by itself is no guarantee that the action will be good, however. At different points in the novel Cooper describes both Magua and Uncas as acting deliberately. What distinguishes Magua’s actions from those of Uncas and Natty is that Magua is motivated by his response to white oppression (or in the terms of the novel, a spirit of “revenge”) that leads to further conflict and struggles for dominance, while Uncas and Natty make most of their crucial decisions in a multiracial deliberative setting that produces well-informed choices with the potential to avert conflict and domination. Hawk-eye has learned to deliberate from Uncas’s father. When we first meet Hawk-eye and Chingachgook they are lingering on the bank of a stream, engaged in a leisurely discussion of the history of Delaware and European conquest and the relative merits of the rifle and the bow and arrow. Wearing black and white war paint and scalping tuft, Chingachgook is seated “in a posture that permitted him to heighten the effect of his earnest language, by the calm but expressive gestures of an Indian, engaged in debate” (500). Natty speaks in Chingachgook’s language which, in Cooper’s conceit, the narrator translates into English. We hear first from Natty: “Even your traditions make the case in my favour, Chingachgook” (501). These opening words establish several things about the discussion that the reader is invited to eavesdrop upon. It has been going on for some time, long enough for the principals to stake out their positions and to have an initial exchange of opinions. It is probably based on long familiarity, for Natty claims some command of Chingachgook’s traditions. Natty emerges here as a reasonably confident and sophisticated debater who knows the value of using his opponent’s assumptions and turning them to his favor. We soon learn that the subject of the debate nearly resembles one that continues today: did European conquest of the Americas mirror earlier conquests of native empires by one another? Or was it a distinctively different form of domination? Natty takes up the first position: “Your fathers came from the setting sun, crossed the big river, fought the people of the country, and took over the land; and mine came from the red sky of the morning, over the salt lake, and did their work much after the fashion that had been set them by yours; then let God judge the matter between us,

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and friends spare their words!” This appeal to divine judgment does not silence the dispute as Natty hopes, for Chingachgook quickly refutes the equivalence by contrasting “the stone-headed arrow of the warrior” with “the leaden bullet with which you kill.” Natty responds with a backhanded testament to the possibility for interracial dialogue: “There is reason in an Indian,” he observes, “though nature has made him with a red skin!” (501). Later he remarks that Chingachgook is “a just man for an Indian” and that he must be descended from “wise men at the council fire” (504). Chingachgook never responds to these unselfconscious jibes but seems determined to assert his version of history in a manner that will penetrate Hawk-eye’s prejudices. The debate evolves into an exchange of traditional histories prompted first by Chingachgook. “What say your old men?” he asks. “Do they tell the young warriors, that the pale-faces met the redmen, painted for war and armed with the stone hatchet or wooden gun?” Natty reciprocates, insisting that “I am not a prejudiced man,” and noting that “every story has its two sides; so I ask you, Chingachgook, what passed, according to the traditions of the red men, when our fathers first met?” (502). Natty listens as his friend describes how the Delawares migrated east across the Mississippi, conquering the Alligewi and the Maquas and claiming a vast stretch of territory. “Then, Hawk-eye, we were one people, and we were happy” (504), Chingachgook observes. This golden age ended with the arrival of the Dutch who introduced them to alcohol and persuaded them to part with their land. Chingachgook describes the loss of Delaware land and the decimation of his family branch, leaving only himself and his son to continue the line. His final words give the novel its title: “My boy is the last of the Mohicans” (505). The conversation concludes there with Chingachgook having instructed Hawk-eye in the consequences of European colonization from a native perspective.7 In his eleven Indian-themed novels Cooper portrayed Native American deliberative traditions with considerable respect, presenting them as complex processes vulnerable like all political practices to distortion and manipulation, but finally as valuable contributions to republican thought. Wayne Franklin has claimed that Cooper knew more about Native American history and culture than any contemporary writer except Henry David Thoreau. Throughout Cooper’s lifetime Indian delegations conducted diplomacy in the nation’s capitals, and accounts of native eloquence were common offerings in the print media. Cooper had some familiarity with the native communities that surrounded his upstate New York home, which included the Oneida branch of the Iroquois, as well as the mixed

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communities at New Stockbridge and the Brotherton community founded by Samson Occom.8 The Reverend John Heckewelder’s An Account of the History, Manners, and Customs of the Indian Nations, Who Once Inhabited Pennsylvania and the Neighboring States (1818) provided Cooper’s background for his depictions of Delaware councils. In the absence of a code of laws, Heckewelder observed, chiefs relied on “experienced counsellors; men who study the welfare of the nation, and are equally interested with themselves in its prosperity. On them the people rely entirely, believing that what they do, or determine upon, must be right and for the public good.” Heckewelder claimed that these counselors held the implicit trust of the community, who were “proud of seeing such able men conduct the affairs of their nation” and were “little troubled about what they were doing, knowing that the result of their deliberations will be made public in due time, and sure that it will receive their approbation.” A member of Congress might well envy the trust and uncritical acceptance that Heckewelder described. In a later chapter titled “Political Maneuvers” he noted the fondness for diplomatic proceedings that “invigorate the mind” and observed that “Indian politicians work and manage matters against each other without newspaper wrangles, abuse of character, personal quarrels, or open insults.” Like Benjamin Franklin in “Remarks Concerning the Savages of North America,” Heckewelder stressed the comparative civility, generosity, and judiciousness that characterized native political life, as well as offering an idealized portrait of government by the wise similar to James Madison’s defense of the deliberative branches of the United States Constitution in The Federalist.9 Delaware deliberative style predominates in the conversation between Chingachgook and Hawk-eye, and it stands in sharp contrast to the action of the previous chapter, consisting almost entirely of deliberation and decision making among the white characters. Here we are introduced to Duncan Heyward, Alice Monro, and Cora Monro as they make a number of critical decisions that launch the plot. These include whether to trust Magua as their guide, whether they are safer traveling an obscure forest path or accompanying the army, and whether to allow David Gamut to join them. In all three cases the deliberations are conducted in a cursory, abrupt manner. Cooper offers the reader a contrast between the rush to judgment by Duncan, Cora, and Alice and the careful debates conducted by Natty, Chingachgook, and Uncas in order to suggest how AngloAmericans might learn better and more democratic habits of deliberation from Native Americans.

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Heyward and Cora dominate the decision-making process, while Alice is shown to have certain instincts that put her at odds with the other characters. She argues against trusting Magua, whose “sullen fierceness” (487) is his most visible trait; prefers to stay with the army rather than follow Magua into the woods; and welcomes Gamut into their group. In the two most critical decisions she is unable to persuade her older, more authoritative companions, who refuse to weigh her objections seriously. Her initial distrust of Magua is amplified when Heyward tells her of an incident in which Major Monro treated Magua harshly, but Heyward dismisses her concerns about their guide out of hand as an offense to his own judgment and experience. Meanwhile Cora accuses Alice of prejudice: “Should we distrust the man, because his manners are not our manners, and that his skin is dark!” Cora’s reprimand, which hints at her own racially mixed background, has the effect of shutting down Alice’s reasonable objections, which are based on Magua’s demeanor and his history of trouble with her father and not his skin color. As with Heyward, however, pride prevents Cora from taking Alice’s concerns seriously. Stung by Cora’s implication of prejudice, Alice abandons the argument and accedes to their plan. Meanwhile Heyward adduces a number of additional reasons to suspect Magua and cautions Alice to “manifest no distrust, or you may invite the danger you appear to apprehend” (491). Such a fragile alliance hardly seems worthy of the name, but Heyward is convinced of his own superior knowledge regarding Indians and insists that they will be in greater danger if they remain with the army. Ignoring the particular features of the situation, he makes a decision based on general observations about native practices and leads Alice and Cora directly into life-threatening peril. Heyward must be educated in the protocols of wilderness deliberation, which include a set of social relationships and processes developed to produce good decisions in a volatile environment. He soon has the opportunity to learn from the masters when they stumble upon Hawk-eye, Chingachgook, and Uncas and ask for their guidance. Natty’s contentious streak quickly surfaces, and Heyward tries to keep it in check in much the same way that he silenced Alice: by shutting down discussion, in this instance by offering to pay Natty for guiding the group to the fort. Hawk-eye refuses to let Heyward foreclose his concerns as Alice did, and it is only after considerable discussion that they make an alliance and formulate a plan to capture Magua. “Whoever comes into the woods to deal with the natives, must use Indian fashions, if he would wish to prosper in his undertakings” (514), the scout tells the major. Heyward’s education in wilderness deliberation has begun.

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Each stage of the plot hinges on such discussions, which carry different degrees of representational weight and are portrayed in varying degrees of detail. One crucial debate concerns Magua’s proposal to release Heyward and Alice if Cora will agree to be his wife. Forced to choose between this marriage and death for herself and her companions, Cora begs them to “aid my weak reason with your counsel” (595). Heyward responds with characteristic forcefulness and immediacy, but Alice must struggle with the question before conceding to his view: death for all is preferable to life at the price of Cora’s virtual enslavement. Alice’s hesitation invites readers to question the sources of Cora’s repugnance and to deliberate about the moral calculus involved in this decision. Would Cora’s life as Magua’s wife be so horrible that three people should die to avert this fate? Cooper may well have thought so, though the evidence in his other novels is mixed. He frequently repeated the belief that the wives of Indian men lived hard, debasing lives, but he also portrayed loving relationships, including one between the white captive Narra-Mattah and Canonchet in The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish (1829). Cora would be vulnerable to Magua’s revenge for her father’s actions, and so her fears for herself seem justified. But do they merit the sacrifice of three lives? By portraying Alice’s moment of indecision without allowing the reader access to her thought process, Cooper slows down the plot just enough to allow the reader to question the choice that Alice ultimately makes: “No, no, no; better that we die, as we have lived, together!” (596). Here as in the opening scenes Alice concedes to Heyward and Cora to sustain the consensus, even though the outcome might be better if she stood her ground and forced a more sustained consideration of the decision. Heyward’s chronic precipitancy again clashes with Hawk-eye’s more measured response to a crisis after the massacre at William Henry and the recapture of Cora and Alice. Heyward urges immediate pursuit, but Hawk-eye insists on following native custom. “An Indian never starts on such an expedition without smoking over his council fire; and though a man of white blood, I honour their customs in this particular, seeing that they are deliberate and wise” (688). The focus in this scene is on the respectful, thoughtful manner in which the three longtime allies proceed as the dispute heats up. The older men notably accord Uncas the same respect and attention that they grant one another. If Heyward and Cora had shown similar respect for Alice’s views, the entire set of crises that constitute the central plot of the novel might have been avoided. Cooper bluntly observes that “the most decorous christian assembly,” even a collection of “reverend ministers,” “might have learned a

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wholesome lesson of moderation from the forbearance and courtesy of the disputants” (700). Gesture is crucial to wilderness deliberation. Once Hawk-eye adopts the “natural language” of gesture practiced by his companions, the faces of his listeners quickly come to mirror the sentiments of the speaker, and eventually they embrace his views.10 The father and son abandon “their own previously expressed opinions, with a liberality and candour, that, had they been the representatives of some great and civilized people, would have infallibly worked their political ruin, by destroying, for ever, their reputation for consistency” (701). True consistency resides not in remaining impervious to persuasion, Cooper suggests, but in engaging in thoughtful decision making. Internal reflection is as important as intersubjective dynamics, and the deliberators pause after each speech to digest and consider what has been said. Once a decision is reached the conflict is put aside. Agon is quickly extinguished in wilderness debate, where the life-and-death stakes invest verbal conflicts with a sense of immediate consequences that parliamentary debates typically lack.11 By contrast with Chingachgook and Uncas, Magua is a demagogue whose actions help clarify some further distinctions between deliberative success and failure. He has been the victim of Major Monro’s precipitancy and bad judgment, and thus the distortions that he introduces at the Huron council meeting are in a sense a product of Monro’s earlier deliberative failure. The novel suggests how one crisis in deliberation can have a cascade effect, with tragic results. Years earlier Monro issued an illconsidered law regarding native alcohol use. Magua views alcohol as a tool of conquest and denies both the justice of Monro’s law and its implementation. “Is it justice to make evil, and then punish for it,” he demands of Cora, whose ensuing silence reveals her inability to “palliate” her father’s “imprudent severity” (588) when he whipped Magua before his white soldiers for violating the law. Cora and Magua debate the ethical responsibility for Magua’s drinking habit—Are the whites to blame? Or is Magua himself at fault?—but nothing in that discussion redeems Monro’s harsh act. His failure of judgment in this situation anticipates his later decisions that contribute to the massacre at William Henry. While many characters speak well in this novel, Magua is a uniquely eloquent orator who is able to muster his Indian audiences to his cause at every turn. Cooper provides lavish descriptions of Magua’s speeches, which follow a consistent pattern. He typically starts out “calm and deliberative” (591) but rapidly shifts styles, relying on flattery, narrative,

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and emotional appeal to move his audience to take up arms in his cause. Magua’s addresses do not invite critical reflection or generate further debate. He consistently shuts down discussion by producing a dangerous homogeneity in his listeners, who sometimes respond “as one man” by “giving utterance to their rage in the most frantic cries” (592) and plunging precipitously into an attack; alternatively they lapse into a “grave and meditative silence” (762). Readers have rightly identified his character as a flattering demagogue who manipulates popular emotions to achieve his personal end: revenge on Monro. Some have concluded, less persuasively, that Magua embodies Cooper’s fear of democracy. It would be more accurate to say that he embodies Cooper’s fear of a nondeliberative democracy.12 Like other figures of the demagogue in the early American republic, Magua represents one pole in the Atlantic world debate over democracy: he stands for a Jacobin democracy that unifies the body politic and eliminates its internal distinctions.13 The differences between political and verbal forms that Cooper draws in The Last of the Mohicans are not simple ones. He values multiplicity as a creative force and also recognizes the dangers of extreme pluralism in the absence of mechanisms for reconciling conflict or channeling aggression. He celebrates consensus when it is achieved through thoughtful discussion but deplores unity that is the product of emotional manipulation or assertions of authority. These problems come into sharp focus in the sections of the novel devoted to the European presence in North America. In his opening chapter Cooper describes his Lake George setting as “the bloody arena, in which most of the battles for the mastery of the colonies were contested” and calls it a “scene of strife and bloodshed” where “the arts of peace were unknown” (480 – 81). These circumstances are both mirrored in and fostered by “the utter confusion that pervades the names” of peoples and places (469). Magua scoffs at the multiplicity of European tongues, complaining that “they have two words for each thing, while a red skin will make the sound of his voice speak for him” (575). His ability to move his audience through voice and gesture is one of his most signal characteristics. Between the babel of the colonized wilderness and the irresistibly unifying language of Magua, Cooper introduces a third category: the language of the council house and its keepers, the Delaware, which Natty has learned from Chingachgook. (Natty’s hostility toward the Iroquois and Hurons, and his tendency to polarize Indian communities into “good” and “bad” ones, is connected to his ignorance of languages other than Delaware and his fa-

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miliarity with Delaware customs.) Late in the novel the Delaware council calls “a solemn and formal assemblage of the nation” amounting to over “a thousand souls” who come together in “as grave, as attentive, and as deeply interested a multitude” as has ever been gathered. Cooper stresses the strong sense of hierarchy that governs this assembly, which waits calmly during the “deliberative pause” (809) that precedes Tamenund’s speech. But the political power of the broader Delaware community that Tamenund represents has been fatally circumscribed by being subordinated to the Iroquois and severed from military power—with the exception of Chingachgook, who as we have seen appears in war paint in his opening debate with Natty. The European forces likewise fail to integrate political skill with military force, but their fault lies in their lack of diplomacy. The massacre at William Henry unfolds because Montcalm has not secured the allegiance of his native allies. Without a firm alliance Magua’s “fatal and artful eloquence” (671) can open wellsprings of rage that have no adequate means of articulation and no mechanisms for peaceful resolution. Magua succeeds because his conflict with Monro evokes experiences so widely shared that they need only the barest mention to awaken powerful feelings: a baleful and seemingly inescapable European presence has transformed the indigenous world, imposed its rules, and provided no recourse against injustice. Like Apess’s King Philip, Cooper’s Magua invokes native suffering so pervasive that it needs no elaboration. The tragic consequences affect everyone in the novel. In The Last of the Mohicans and in his other works, Cooper offered some hints of how native political skill might be embodied in new deliberative institutions. The wilderness deliberations of Natty, Chingachgook, and Uncas manifest these ideals, and by the end of the novel Heyward has absorbed some of their lessons, speaking to Tamenund in “the figurative language of the natives” (819).14 In The Prairie, which Cooper began immediately upon completing this novel, Heyward’s grandson Duncan Uncas Middleton learns additional lessons in indigenous republicanism among the Plains Indians. As I discussed earlier, The Prairie ends with Middleton and his companion Paul Hover adopting the political skills that they have acquired in their dealings with the natives to service in state and federal governments. Cooper’s Indian novels, and especially The Last of the Mohicans, portray a fundamental ongoing challenge of deliberative politics: the need to develop practices and institutions capable of framing multilingual, transcultural deliberations that are inclusive and just. The deaths of Uncas and Cora prevent the social reproduction of Delaware deliberative values through the creation of a mixed-race community. A deliberative reading

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of The Last of the Mohicans introduces readers to those values, reproducing them textually rather than biologically and culturally.

i i i . pr o t e s t at m a shp e e What might The Last of the Mohicans look like from Magua’s perspective? The late works of William Apess provide an answer of sorts. In the concluding paragraph of Indian Nullification of the Unconstitutional Laws of Massachusetts Relative to the Marshpee Tribe, or The Pretended Riot Explained, which tells the story of Mashpee efforts to protect their property and remove their Harvard-appointed minister, Apess defended himself against the “slanders” that made him out to be a Magua-like demagogue and led to his arrest. “I have been assailed by the vilest calumnies, represented as an exciter of sedition, a hypocrite, and a gambler,” Apess wrote. One central task of Indian Nullification was to defend its author from charges of sedition and to explain the principles that guided his actions and those of the other movement leaders.15 Indian Nullification opens with two testimonials that defend Apess against the charge of demagoguery, the first signed by three Mashpee selectmen, Israel Amos, Isaac Coombs, and Ezra Attaquin, and the second by their white counsel, Benjamin Hallet. Addressing “the pale men who came across the big waters to seek among them a refuge from tyranny and persecution,” the Mashpee leaders defended Apess from charges that he was “an impostor.” “Many of our white brethren hate him, and revile him, and say all manner of evil of him,” but they believed he had been sent by “the Great Spirit” to expose white deception and fraud. Apess had suffered a prophet’s fate of calumny and opposition, and Amos, Coombs, and Attaquin wanted to help correct the situation by testifying that they knew him to be “a devout Christian, of sound mind, of firm purpose, and worthy to be trusted by reason of his truth” (166). Hallet’s testimonial reported the Mashpee community’s longstanding grievances with the Massachusetts government, which dated back nearly to the town’s founding by John Eliot in 1660; attributed the current impulse to assert their rights to the Mashpee native Daniel Amos; and drew a comparison to the American Revolution. Apess did not provoke an otherwise contented community into resistance, Hallet suggested; rather, he arrived at the right moment and had the organizing skills that the community needed to achieve their goals. Hallet compared the “riot,” which involved unloading a cart that white neighbors had illegally filled with Mashpee wood, to the Boston Tea Party (195). He wrote that he had long believed that the Mashpee were

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“grievously oppressed by the whites and borne down by laws which made them poor and enriched other men upon their property,” and he expressed satisfaction that they were able to convince the Massachusetts legislature to “do partial justice toward this long oppressed race” (167). One goal of Indian Nullification, then, was to exhaustively document the Mashpee Revolt of 1833 –34 in order to justify Apess and the Mashpee leaders to the reading public. Another aim was to suggest some basic principles of native political and spiritual autonomy. Apess set out to demonstrate that he had involved himself in Mashpee affairs with the goal of “making citizens of them.” He contrasted his own aims with those of white missionaries whose method involved what Apess described metaphorically as seating “the Indians between two stools, in order that they might fall to the ground.” The missionaries failed to benefit the native communities that they claimed to serve because they set about “breaking up their government and forms of society, without giving them any others in their place.” The result of this deracinating process was commonly “anarchy and confusion” (230). Apess sought rather to model a process of social and political reconstitution that recuperated native precedents and merged them with civic practices familiar to white Americans. Indian Nullification provides a record of native efforts to assert sovereignty by braiding together indigenous traditions with the institutions of the modern republic. It is divided into two main sections. The first and longest section is titled “Indian Nullification, etc.” (169 –249) and includes narrative passages by Apess describing the conflict over wood that prompted the “riot” and analysis of native-white relations; official documents produced by the newly created Mashpee government; reports, letters, and editorials printed in regional newspapers that included both supportive and critical views of the actions at Mashpee; descriptions of the addresses that Apess and the Mashpee leaders made to the Boston public and the state legislature; an account of the legislative proceedings; the document that Hallet presented to the legislature stating the Mashpee case; and descriptions of the suits for slander that Apess pressed against his more extreme critics, along with additional testimonials supporting him. The second section offers “An Inquiry into the Education and Religious Instruction of the Marshpee Indians” (249 –73), which calls for better funding for Indian education, asserts native rights to religious freedom, and reproduces Hallet’s legal opinion on the history of Mashpee property rights. A deliberative reading of this eclectic work highlights scenes of deliberation and strategies of surrogation. Apess documented three categories of deliberation: the deliberations of the Mashpee residents themselves; the

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deliberations about the Mashpee in the Massachusetts legislature and the courtroom proceedings involving Apess; and the newspaper deliberations about the events at Mashpee.16 These scenes of deliberation are framed by the narrative and expository sections where Apess appears as a surrogate, blending the roles of republican statesman, Christian minister, and heroic Indian leader. The text shows this persona to be the result of Apess’s internal deliberations about his relationship to mainstream American society and his participation in the public deliberations concerning Mashpee. In his opening narrative Apess described his initial experiences with Mashpee civil society and the first steps to form a government and assert Mashpee sovereignty. This process began with a church meeting and led to a constitutional convention. He worked with the Baptist minister Joseph Amos and with members of the community including Daniel Amos, Israel Amos, and Ebenezer Attaquin who possessed the skills and experience necessary to occupy the new offices of president and secretary. He learned the history of their unhappy relationship with the Harvard trustees and the state government, which included several past challenges to the unjust laws governing them and a brief period of colonial-era self-rule that began in 1763 and ended after the Revolution, when despite Mashpee service to the patriot cause Massachusetts reinstated the guardian system.17 Apess’s main role was to guide the community in its efforts to assert their sovereignty. One important step in this process involved developing deliberative practices that combined traditional native styles with evangelical rhetoric and republican procedures. These included oratory, conversation, diplomatic protocols, and voting, as well as the drafting of petitions, a constitution, Apess’s adoption papers, and other documents. These procedures took shape in a series of meetings that form the backbone of Apess’s opening narrative. He described how he first learned of the troubles at Mashpee while on a lecture tour of eastern Massachusetts speaking on “the civil and religious rights of the Indians” (169). Apess had several false starts at Mashpee before he came to a version of the facts that satisfied him. He first agreed to preach for Fish and was astonished to discover that most of the parishioners were of the “hue of death” (170). Fish explained that his audience was overwhelmingly white because the Indians preferred Amos’s preaching. Apess then arranged to speak to the Mashpees about temperance and education, delivering what from his own account seems to have been a patronizing lecture based on Fish’s claims that “it was their general disposition to be idle, not to hoe the cornfields they had planted, to take no care of their hay after mowing it, and to lie drunken under fences” (171). Fish reacted negatively when Apess followed

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up these remarks with a prayer asking God to “relieve them from the oppressions under which they labored” (172). He warned Apess not to talk about oppression because it might make his audience “discontented.” Apess gave Fish some tips about how he might better serve the temporal and spiritual interests of the Mashpee community and prepared to leave. First, however, Apess arranged for another meeting, this time apparently without Fish present. At this meeting he read from a pamphlet about the history of the Indians of New England.18 Something in the text sparked a response in the audience, and one listener called out “Truth, truth!” This exclamation led to “a general conversation” in which Apess learned “what my kindred people had suffered at the hands of the whites” (172). Apess then arranged with the Mashpee leaders to hold a council meeting on May 21, 1833, which opened with an emotional speech by Ebenezer Attaquin, who shed tears as he related “the tale of their distresses.” The group then discussed their previous efforts to petition the governor and council, which failed because of interference by the white agents. At this point Apess offered to work with them to get the laws changed and their overseers replaced, but he warned them that he would be dismissed as an outside agitator and proposed that they adopt him into the tribe to lend legitimacy to his leadership. The meeting then produced three documents: a petition to the governor and the Council resolving that “we, as a tribe, will rule ourselves, and have the right to do so; for all men are born free and equal, says the Constitution of the country” (175); a petition to Harvard asking them to discharge the Reverend Fish; and a statement of Apess’s adoption into the tribe, which was attached to the petitions. Apess and Amos then traveled to Boston and delivered the petitions to the lieutenant governor, who promised that they would be submitted to the Council at the next session. The Mashpees did not wait for the Council to meet but proceeded to form a government at a convention on June 25, where the members framed a constitutional government “suited to the spirit and capacity of freeborn sons of the forest, after the pattern set us by our white brethren,” with the notable difference that it provided that “all who dwelt in our precincts were to be held free and equal, in truth, as well as in letter” (179). The new National Assembly of the Marshpee Tribe then dismissed the government-appointed overseers and the Harvard minister, claiming that the laws concerning them were “founded on wrong and misconception” (180) and explicitly asserting their right to make their own laws. Apess detailed the ensuing conflict over a load of wood that some neighboring whites tried to remove from Mashpee land but were prevented in an assertion of Mashpee sovereignty.

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With this conflict over property, the focus of the text then shifts abruptly from the deliberations and resolutions at Mashpee to the response to those events elsewhere in Massachusetts, notably at the seat of state government in Boston. This shift from face-to-face deliberation and self-determination within the local native community to the long-distance efforts of the Harvard trustees and state officials to supervise and regulate events at Mashpee highlighted a number of sources of distortion and conflict. One of these was the misrepresentation of the proceedings that Gideon Hawley, the unpopular overseer at Mashpee, provided to the governor. In Apess’s account, Hawley described the community as in a state of “open rebellion” and warned that “death and destruction, and all the horrors of a savage war, were impending” (180 – 81). Governor Levi Lincoln concluded that an Indian version of Shays’s Rebellion had broken out at Mashpee and threatened to ride at the head of a militia force to suppress it, as George Washington had done to suppress the earlier movement. Apess mocked Lincoln’s grandiose fantasies of military leadership and suggested that they distorted his judgment. The circulation of inflammatory rumors was one source of misunderstanding; another was the difficulty that the Mashpees had gaining direct access to official channels of state government as well as the efforts to suppress debate in the legislature. A third source of conflict was the suspicion with which the state regarded Apess, treating him as an outside agitator and putting him on trial for riot, assault, and trespass (184). The local and national news media contributed to the problems as well. The compilation includes newspaper articles, principally by white authors, including some that favor the Mashpee movement and some that criticize it. The text moves from the orderly scenes of deliberation that produced the Mashpee Constitution to the deliberative crisis that unfolded outside the town in response to the actions at Mashpee. Apess included conflicting newspaper accounts of the public meetings that he held with Isaac Coombs and Daniel Amos at Boylston Hall and the Tremont Theater to make the Mashpee case to the Boston public, and of their testimony to the Massachusetts legislature. The Liberator ran a detailed and sympathetic editorial that described the speeches of the three Mashpee representatives, emphasized the distorting influence of prejudice on previous legislation, and supported Mashpee capacity for self-government. The Barnstable Patriot ran a letter signed “The True Friends of the Indians” that described the same events at second hand using reports from the Boston papers. The main purpose of the letter was to attack Apess, whom the author described variously as a “riotous and mischief-making Indian,” a “talented,

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educated, wily, unprincipled Indian,” a “pious interloper,” a “hypocritical missionary,” and an “impostor” (227–28). These conflicting responses in the newspapers set the stage for Apess’s account of the committee hearing where the Mashpee delegation presented its case and was countered by representatives for Fish and the Harvard overseers, the Governor’s Council, two dissenting Mashpees, and several white opponents from the Mashpee area, including Judge Marston, who testified that he thought “Indians an inferior race” and “incapable of managing their own affairs” (229). Despite the prejudiced testimony, the committee ruled favorably to the Mashpees, and the legislature passed an act to incorporate the Mashpee District. Apess presents this favorable outcome as the result of the deliberative skill exercised by his side, while noting the persistent animosity directed at him as opponents continued to paint him as a demagogue. Apess’s alleged demagoguery consisted of leading the Mashpees in a successful act of surrogation involving intertwined native, Puritan, and republican “scripts.” One means that Apess used to integrate arguments for native autonomy with Christian and republican themes was through the figure of the lost tribes of Israel. He adopted a hermeneutic technique that the Puritans had employed in the founding of the New England colonies when they treated scripture as a sacred play script to be absorbed and reenacted in novel circumstances.19 In the narrative portions of Indian Nullification Apess quietly incorporated references to scenes from Jesus’s life, subtly drawing on the loaves and fishes story; alluding to the story of Jesus’s birth in the account of his family’s arrival at Barnstable, where they are told there is no room in the house and sent to sleep in the stable; acknowledging the central biblical model of resistance to oppression when he described the Mashpee as “a tribe of Israelites suffering under the rod of despotic pharaohs” who met “in our synagogue” to frame a constitution; and noting that the newly established Mashpee government had twelve officers, evoking the twelve tribes of Israel as well as the twelve apostles (179). In Apess’s hands the typological readings drawn from Puritan texts that often worked to consolidate an exclusionary model of American identity, instead provided tools to legitimate Mashpee sovereignty. Apess understood Christian universals to be made manifest in diverse cultural forms and individual experiences. The Mashpee Revolt unfolded as Massachusetts became the last state to break the tie between church and state by altering a key provision in the state constitution that had favored Congregational churches.20 In Indian Nullification Apess described his efforts to fight sectarianism among the Mashpees, specifically their rejection of Fish’s Congregationalist worship.

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His goal, he insisted, was not to advance the cause of any one faction or sect but, similar to Lyman Beecher, he sought to build a broad coalition around shared core beliefs. Throughout his works Apess treated Christianity broadly interpreted as an essential element in overcoming the prejudices and injustices of the dominant white society, and he applied the same principle to Mashpee prejudices against Congregationalism. Many scholars have noted that The Eulogy on King Philip exposed the racist underpinnings contained in the myth of the Puritan founders that Daniel Webster influentially presented in his Plymouth oration. In the Eulogy Apess traced the roots of modern racial prejudice to Puritan separatist thought and criticized the persistent habit of treating the indigenous inhabitants of New England as barbarians based on their putative lack of civil institutions including property and government. While the differences between Apess and Webster have been well studied, the affinities between them have gone largely unremarked. Apess promoted the same institutions and values—property, Christianity, education, and deliberative self-government—that Webster had identified as central to the Puritan tradition in his Plymouth address. Sylvannus Phinney reported in the Barnstable Patriot that Apess told the Mashpees “that they ought to govern themselves, throw off their guardianship imposed upon them by the State, manage and dispose of their own property as they please.” Phinney described Apess urging his audience “that if they will shake off the yoke, many of them may become as great as ‘their brother,’ Daniel Webster.”21 Perhaps Apess was familiar with the ambiguities surrounding Webster’s ethnic identity, for “Black Dan” was sometimes suggested to be part Native American or African American.22 Certainly he viewed Webster as an advocate for native rights, listing him as a supporter in “An Indian’s Looking-Glass for the White Man” along with Edward Everett and William Wirt, the lawyer for the Cherokee nation in its battles against the state of Georgia (160). In Indian Nullification he also cited Alexander Everett, another member of the North American Review circle and the chairman of the Massachusetts School Committee, as a supporter of the Cherokees and an ally in the effort to fully fund Mashpee schools. As we have seen, in the 1820s and 1830s Massachusetts provided a chief locus of support for the Cherokee nation’s efforts to protect its sovereignty against the state of Georgia and President Andrew Jackson, and regional opposition to Cherokee removal provided an essential context framing the deliberations about Mashpee. Many commentators on the Mashpee protest observed that there had been widespread opposition around the state to the oppressive measures taken toward the Cherokees, and they challenged the residents

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and elected officials of Massachusetts to apply their principles in a case close to home, where they were directly affected. The parallel was strongest where property rights were concerned: Georgia residents wanted Cherokee gold; Massachusetts residents wanted Mashpee wood, which was a valuable source of fuel on Cape Cod. Apess invited the citizens of Massachusetts to recognize the same potential in the Mashpee community as they did in the Cherokee republic and to change their own prejudicial habits and oppressive laws. Apess further considered Mashpee experience in light of the Ciceronian societas civilis that Webster and his associates at the Review found embodied in New England traditions. He drew connections between property, civil society, and the state similar to the ones that Webster had drawn at the 1820 Massachusetts Constitutional Convention, while noting the absence of the institutions of civil society at Mashpee: the lack of available schools (“If the white man desired the welfare of his red brethren,” he asks, “why did he not give them schools?”); the “unjust laws” that gave the board of overseers control over the property of anyone living at Mashpee; the inability of the community to choose its own minister and exercise control over their church buildings and worship services; and the “oppressive” laws that take away “the rights and privileges of citizens in toto,” preventing Mashpee men from “govern[ing] our own property, wives, and children” (211–12). As a surrogate Daniel Webster, inhabiting and transforming his persona, William Apess dislodged the Puritans from their place of honor in the modern republic and blended indigenous traditions with Ciceronian values in the service of the multiracial republic.

i v. pr o p e rt y m atte rs In addition to the deliberative hermeneutics that focus on scenes of deliberation and performances of surrogation, a third type of deliberative reading orchestrates an imagined deliberation on a topic that is central and disputed in a group of works. For the writers in this study the nature and function of property was one such topic. Property rights were widely understood to be the spark that set off the American Revolution and the founding principle of the early American republic. Even as the importance of property rights was generally accepted, there was an uncommonly high level of disagreement about what counted as property. This plurality of approaches was reflected in the economic theories of the time, which Joseph Dorfman catalogued in The Economic Mind in American Civilization, 1606 – 1865 (1946). Dorfman’s comprehensive survey includes various forms of

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laissez-faire thought, the statist American system, labor theories of value, Christian socialism, Fourierism, and anarchism. His work suggests the larger conversation that Apess, Child, Cooper, Crockett, Stewart, Walker, and Webster joined. Their works show that debates over property were not the limited province of specialists and academics but were fundamental to conceptions of the modern republic.23 In Commodity and Propriety: Competing Visions of Property in American Legal Thought, 1776 –1970 (1997) Gregory Alexander identified two mainstream concepts of property drawn from John Locke and James Harrington that have informed United States property law since the Revolution. These include the familiar Lockean understanding of property as commodity and the less well-known Harrington-inspired approach to property as “propriety,” or “the private basis for the public good.” Alexander stresses the persistent dialectical relationship between these two approaches in American legal thought. William J. Novak has similarly argued that the early republic was not the golden age of the free market; rather, state regulation played a prominent role in fostering “public economy” and creating a “well-ordered market.” Concepts of property both expanded and contracted in these years. Even as its meaning shifted toward what Morton Horwitz characterized as “a dynamic, instrumental and more abstract view of property that emphasized the newly paramount virtues of productive use and development,” abolitionists worked to demolish the legal basis for property in human beings. Contradictions and points of overlap proliferated. For instance, the republican proprietarian concept of property as connected to the common good overlapped with native collectivist practices. The Cherokees and the Mashpees found support among the Whigs in part because they held similar beliefs about property as a source of shared goods and values. Each of the seven writers at the core of this study advanced a distinctive understanding of property, and a deliberative reading that puts their ideas in dialogue with one another can illuminate present day concerns.24

} Daniel Webster championed commerce as the basis of the modern republic and supported an understanding of property-as-propriety that had a transformative principle of value at its core. It was this proprietary understanding of property that he offered in his Bunker Hill Monument oration, in which he praised the spread of knowledge and the improvements in the quality of life that came with it. Webster explicitly built on Harrington’s theory of republicanism when he defended property rights as the foundation of the republic, but he distinguished his understanding

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of property from Harrington’s land-based economy when he advocated legal novelties, such as access rights and intellectual property, that supported emerging commercial and industrial economies. In a series of influential Supreme Court cases that included the Dartmouth College case (1818), which sharply limited state intervention in private corporations; McCulloch v. Maryland (1819), which defended the constitutionality of the Bank of the United States and articulated a nationalist conception of the Union; and Gibbons v. Ogden (1824), which resulted in a major interpretation of the Constitution’s commerce clause, Webster shaped the laws governing American commerce. His arguments in these cases informed the decisions of Chief Justice John Marshall, who at times followed Webster’s analysis closely. The Marshall court’s decisions in turn were the basis for Webster’s legislative agenda in Congress, and they provided the legal underpinnings of the global commercial utopia that Webster portrayed at Bunker Hill.25 Webster’s argument in Gibbons v. Ogden most directly supported his view of the United States as a modern commercial republic. The central question of the case concerned whether the New York state legislature could confer monopoly rights on a steamboat company engaged in interstate commerce.26 Acknowledging that the grant of the monopoly to Ogden was “an exercise of sovereign political power” by New York (17), Webster nevertheless argued that the United States Constitution gave Congress authority over interstate commerce. The Constitution was above all designed to regulate commerce and create a federal government that would supersede state regulations that threatened to disrupt “the general intercourse of the community” (4). Webster contended that “the power of Congress to regulate commerce is complete and entire,” as well as “exclusive” (8). Its aims were to establish a “uniform and steady system” (10) that was also creative; it both regulated and liberated. Webster noted, among other things, the Constitution’s provisions giving “Congress power to promote the progress of science and the useful arts” (23) through its regulation of intellectual property. His central and largely successful aim was to define congressional power over commerce broadly, and in doing so to give the legislative branch control over national development. “Nothing is more complex than commerce;” he observed, “and in such an age as this, no words embrace a wider field than commercial regulation. Almost all the business and intercourse of life may be connected incidentally . . . with commercial regulations” (8). Webster believed that the deliberative branch of the federal government should have a shaping hand in commercial development, and he helped form the law that to a notable extent

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gave it that power. This nationalist, state-sponsored approach to property creation in the modern republic was embodied in the American System supported by Webster, Henry Clay, and John Quincy Adams, and its descendents include large-scale legislative programs such as the New Deal and the Great Society.27 Lydia Maria Child’s domestic writings focused on the creation of wealth on a much smaller scale. The household is the source and conserver of value in The Frugal Housewife (1829), in which women play a determining role in national prosperity.28 Invoking the example of Benjamin Franklin, Child called for an ethic of frugality and a return to “the good old home habits of our ancestors” (99) to restore the republic from its “fever of extravagance” (110) to virtue and solvency. “We make a great deal of talk about being republicans” she observed; “if we are so in reality, we shall stay at home, to mind our business, and educate our children, so long as one or the other need our attention, or can suffer by our neglect” (103). Child believed that republican values were threatened by some of the very development projects—such as steamboats, stages, and canals—that Webster promoted as essential to the modern commercial republic. She linked physical mobility to such dissipating entertainments as the theater and the tavern, as well as to the threat of confidence men.29 By contrast she regarded farmers as “the strongest hold of republican simplicity, industry and virtue” (102). This Jeffersonian agrarian ethic is not the focus of her work, however, which instead emphasizes the role of women, and in particular women with limited economic means, in sustaining a healthy domestic and national economy. Like today’s microfinance programs, which often target loans to women because they more reliably devote their energies to the support of their families, Child’s domestic economies are run by women but serve the entire family and, by doing so, help the nation.30 “The situation and prospects of a country may be justly estimated by the character of its women” (91), she observed, and this dictum was especially true of the United States, where every household was vulnerable to an economic downturn. In the United States anyone could become poor, for unlike in Europe, where large estates were protected by inheritance laws, in America laws tended to divide inherited wealth. Property was also rendered “precarious” by “our frequent changes of policy” (89), leaving all Americans exposed to financial instability. In these circumstances, the household economy was the one area where individuals could exercise a measure of control, and women were central to this economy.31 Child promoted a model of value based in usefulness, which she equated with happiness, and which she believed would in turn advance

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the national welfare. The root of national extravagance, she argued, was an exaggerated sense of individual importance and a false understanding of the sources of pleasure and meaning. Anyone can be useful, in Child’s sense of being self-denying, generous, and productive, and anything can be turned to a use. She advised parents to train their children from an early age to “turn their faculties to some account” (1) and to “save everything . . . for some use” (6). In sum, Child described “the true economy of housekeeping” as “simply the art of gathering up all the fragments, so that nothing be lost.” One section of the book is called “Odd Scraps for the Economical” and includes ways to employ bits of food, cloth, and other domestic objects. Virtually any bit of matter has use value, Child suggested, and the same is true of “fragments of time” (1). She makes a similar point in The Mother’s Book (1831), in which she urged caretakers to “teach children to be very economical—never to cut up good pieces of calico, or paper, for no purpose—never to tear old picture-books, destroy old playthings, burn twine, or spend every cent they receive for cake and sugar-plums.” Bits of knowledge, fragments of time, scraps of fabric, paper, twine, old toys, and small coins all have value.32 Use value provides Child with an alternative to wealth and rank as a means of ordering society, and in The Mother’s Book she expressly equates “true value” with “usefulness” (18). In The Rebels Child described Lucretia’s development using artistic metaphors, but here she adapts the language of business and capital, as when she writes that “the business of parents is to develope [sic] each individual character so as to produce the greatest amount of usefulness and happiness” (155), or when she later observes that “it should be the business of each to strengthen the bonds of domestic union” (156). A “well regulated” (146) and “well informed mind” promised to produce the “solid capital” (141) of happiness regardless of the shifting status and unpredictable circumstances that characterized her mobile society. “Our business,” she wrote, “is with our own hearts, and our own motives” (139). Child warned her readers not to “brood over the external distinctions of society” (128) and advised them that “we should industriously cultivate and exert our abilities, as a means of usefulness, without feeling anxious about wealth or reputation” (74). The components of usefulness that she highlighted include self-control, concern for others, religious devotion, and a fund of knowledge. In a volatile economy, with so many circumstances beyond any individual’s control, her best solution was to redefine property in a way that detached it from physical wealth and made it contingent instead on the habits of self-management that mothers could teach their children. David Crockett’s attention to the production of value on small fron-

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tier landholdings shared elements of both Webster’s nationalist model of economic development and Child’s domestic model of use value. In his speech on the Tennessee Vacant Land Bill, in which he defended constituents who had settled on “scraps and refuse fragments of the soil” after the better quality land was taken up by others, Crockett located value in wasteland that had been developed by people who lacked formal legal title. He argued that they should be given the first opportunity to purchase that land at prices they could afford and not be forced to compete with deep-pocketed speculators for their homes. Crockett’s approach to land ownership combines commodity and proprietarian elements. He followed Locke when he emphasized the ways that his constituents had labored to improve the soil, “mingl[ing] the sweat of their brows with the soil they occupied,” and at the same time he stressed the importance of laws that would foster a wide distribution of property as the basis of civic autonomy. He emphasized that the east Tennessee squatters were often hard-working, capable people who had few resources but, if left alone on their land, could make decent lives for themselves. Moreover they were “of inestimable value in a free Republic,” “its strength and its bulwark.” Yet they were vulnerable because they lacked property documents that would grant state protection to their investments of labor and time and reduce their risk of dispossession. As we have already seen, his efforts to shape the Vacant Land Bill focused on granting title to extralegal inhabitants and on revising the education provisions to favor the needy children of west Tennessee. Crockett’s advocacy for small land holders extended to support for the claim of three Cherokee Indians who had been dispossessed of their lands by white men and were entitled to a land settlement.33 Crockett was part of a broader grassroots political movement that culminated in the Homestead Act of 1862. In 2000 Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto embraced this grassroots approach to property in The Mystery of Capital, in which he described squatting as “an early American tradition” (113). In much the same manner as Crockett defended his constituents, De Soto asserted that the “extralegal settlers” living in shantytowns and squatter settlements in major metropolitan areas throughout the less-developed world “share the desire of civil society to lead peaceful, productive lives” (89). He argued that these extralegal property claims should be given formal legal status so that the people living on them can leverage the value represented by their property to improve their lives. De Soto takes his central precedent for such legalization from the United States frontier during the years when Crockett helped to advance a similar approach to formalizing property claims.34

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Crockett’s squatter constituents shared certain concerns with the Mashpee Indians as represented in Indian Nullification. In much the same way that Crockett resisted the appropriation of frontier lands to build colleges in the east, Apess objected that property was taken from the Mashpee community to fund schools for whites. He wrote that “in New England, especially, it can be proved that Indian lands have been taken to support schools for the whites and the preaching of the Gospel to them. Had the property so taken been applied to the benefit of its true owners, they would not and could not have been so ignorant and degraded a race as they now are, only forty-four of whom, out of four or five hundred, can write their names” (213). The appropriation of nearly “six millions” of revenue from the sale of Indian lands (following Revolutionary precedent, Apess called it a “tax”) to serve white needs constituted “one continued system of robbery” (213 –14). Apess imagined a counterfactual situation whereby the Massachusetts government subjected “our white neighbors in Barnstable County” to the circumstances at Mashpee and anticipated that the results would be the same: “I think there will soon be a declension of morals and population. We shall see if they will be able to build up a town in such circumstances” (212). “Human nature is the same under skins of all colors,” he insisted. “Degradation is degradation, all the world over” (212). The Mashpee community should be accorded the same rights of self-determination as the white communities of Massachusetts. Control over property was central among those rights, for Mashpee land supplied the resources to support Mashpee institutions of civil society and self-government. As in Apess’s day, the ongoing legal effort to establish American Indian sovereignty on firmer and more consistent grounds has as one object the establishment of full individual and tribal property rights.35 The property rights of Crockett’s east Tennessee constituents and the Mashpee Indians were constrained by two decisions of the Marshall court from the early 1820s: Green v. Biddle (1821; reargued 1823) and Johnson and Graham’s Lessee v. M’Intosh (1823).36 Both cases asserted federal jurisdiction over lands whose occupants claimed ownership without standard legal forms of property title. Native occupants and extralegal occupants posed related challenges to Anglo-American property law, promoting occupancy rights over formal title. Cooper’s novels often focus on the social and political consequences of changing property arrangements, and in The Pioneers (1823) he examined the implications of both kinds of nontitled ownership. Late in the novel Oliver Edwards is revealed to be Edward Oliver Effingham, an English heir and not the person of mixed race that his dress and demeanor have suggested. At the same time Judge Temple,

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who has been the largely sympathetic hero of Cooper’s settlement plot, is revealed to be, in effect, a squatter. Temple has been holding in trust the land that the Delawares granted to Effingham’s ancestor, with no security and no evidence of the trust, meanwhile making great investments in the property. By the time Edwards reveals his identity the value of the estate has been multiplied, the Judge tells him, “by the times and my industry, a hundred fold.” The Judge later shows Edwards his will, which established a trust dividing the estate equally between his daughter and Major Effingham and his heirs. The marriage of Edwards to the Judge’s daughter, Elizabeth, prevents this plot twist from developing into a full-scale conflict over the judge’s rights to the profits from the improvements he has made, an issue that was at the heart of the Green v. Biddle case.37 Cooper examined the problem of property as a central focus of social conflict and a major determinant of political, religious, and cultural change in The Heidenmauer, or The Benedictines (1832).38 Set in sixteenth-century Bavaria at the moment when Martin Luther’s influence was beginning to be widely felt, The Heidenmauer examines society “in the act of passing from the influence of one set of governing principles to that of another” (377). Property rights were widely recognized as a central mechanism of conservation and change in Cooper’s day, and contests over property are at the core of his novel. The “wilderness” of sixteenth-century Bavaria resembles that of the nineteenth-century United States, except that property markers signal that the region already is “subject to all the divisions, and restraints, and vexations, which, in peopled regions, accompany the rights of property” (2). The Heidenmauer describes the events triggered by a property dispute between Father Bonifacius, the abbot of Limburg, and his neighbor Count Emich Leininger, who enlists the aid of Heinrich Frey, the Burgomaster of Deurckheim. Frey is the populist demagogue of the novel, disguising greed beneath a rhetoric of equality. The count and the burgomaster represent the advancing powers of the state and the merchant, while Bonifacius stands for the corrupt and beleaguered Roman Catholic Church. Cooper has the count and the abbot engage in a drinking match to resolve their dispute over ownership of a vineyard, suggesting the extremely rudimentary, and even counterproductive, mechanisms for resolving differences. Ultimately the conflict is settled through force rather than negotiation when the count leads his peasant army and the town’s citizen soldiery in an attack on the abbey, which they later term “the revolution of Limburg” (397). At a meeting the following day, the town council agrees to pay reparations to the abbey and to perform penance but refuses to al-

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low the abbey to be rebuilt. Thus, Cooper suggests, does history unfold— not through the triumph of better ideas, but through a mixture of good and bad motives and dubious alliances. The novel takes its title from the Pagan’s Wall, which demarcates a “common,” a jointly held space where major historical forces are put in opposition to one another, with results that can be unpredictable. Cooper’s sense of change as both inevitable and ambiguous informs his resolution of the dilemmas posed by the novel. The youthful hero Berchthold Hintermayer receives a generous trusteeship that allows him to abandon his life as a forester and huntsman, marry the burgomaster’s daughter, and move into Rittenstein Castle. This conclusion seals the region’s future as Protestant, mercantile, and state centered. It is also notably contingent on unsettled property rights. Like Judge Temple, Berchthold thrives on the property that he holds in trust for its permanently absent owner, Odo von Rittenstein. In The Heidenmauer Cooper makes the general point that the earth is held in trust, and that ownership is always imperfect and contested. Cooper’s approach to the subject of property in persons was generally consistent with his treatment of nonhuman property, which he showed to have a complex history governed by a variety of competing laws and conventions. His female characters often chafe at being property in the marriage market, as is the case with Ulricke Frey, the wife of Burgomaster Frey, who plays an important civic role, seeking to preserve and reconcile where the male characters tear down. Cooper might have had Ulricke in mind when in The American Democrat (1838) he justified excluding women “from the strife of parties, and the fierce struggles of political controversies” because, untainted by politics, they could exert a broadly ameliorating influence on society.39 Amelioration was the best solution to slavery, Cooper believed. In Notions of the Americans he treated it in a historical and comparative framework, setting the situation of American slaves against that of European peasants and serfs.40 He described American slavery in The American Democrat as slavery “of the most unqualified kind, considering the slave as a chattel, that is transferable at will, and in full property” (175). The effects of this legal distinction were exacerbated by racial distinctions that made amalgamation far more difficult than in other slavebased systems. Cooper asserted that American slavery must come to an end and anticipated that its aftereffects would be long lasting, not unlike the aftereffects of the Protestant reformation whose origins he portrayed in The Heidenmauer. Maria Stewart and David Walker drew sharp lines between slavery and

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other forms of property, and at the same time they stressed that enslaved people created enormous wealth for their owners. Like Apess, Stewart and Walker told a counterhistory of colonization and property accumulation focusing on dispossession and exploitation.41 Stewart presented one version of this history in her 1833 address at the African Masonic Hall: “The unfriendly whites first drove the native American from his much loved home. Then they stole our fathers from their peaceful and quiet dwellings, and brought them hither, and made bond-men and bond-women of them and their little ones,” where “we have enriched their soil, and filled their coffers” (63 – 64). Walker emphasized further that an African American who acquired legal title to property could not hold it in safety, describing a situation that Stewart knew well from personal experience: “Will not some white man try to get it from him, even if it is in a mud hole?” (12). Walker later described the colonization movement as an organized version of such theft, masquerading as benevolence: “The greatest riches in all America have arisen from our blood and tears:—and will they drive us from our property and homes, which we have earned with our blood?” (67). Walker solved the conundrum of human property by giving everyone a divine owner: “God Almighty is the sole proprietor or master of the whole human family” (7). He summed up the outrage of slavery as the theft of divine property: “They keep us in the most death-like ignorance by keeping us from all source of information, and call us, who are free men and next to the Angels of God, their property!!!!!!” (68). The solution to slavery was for everyone to acknowledge God as the true source of human worth and the Holy Ghost as “our rightful owner” (74). Should whites refuse to acknowledge his ownership, “God Almighty . . . will break their strong band” (74). Compared to Walker, Stewart gave more prominence to several intermediary concepts of value. She called on her listeners to “possess the spirit of independence” (38), for instance by coming together to build their own stores and patronize one another. Commercial activity could give free blacks additional resources to improve their conditions, advance their citizenship claims, and contest slavery. She exhorted her audience to embrace temperance, stop spending money on drink, and use it to build schools. Like Apess, she argued that if African Americans had “received one-half the early advantages the whites have received, I would defy the government of these United States to deprive us any longer of our rights” (61). Yet like Child, she preferred “moral worth and excellence of character to the wealth of the Indies, or the gold of Peru” (44). This emphasis

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on commerce, education, and morality rested on an alternative history of colonization to the one noted above, a surrogate history that echoed rather than challenged Webster’s Plymouth oration. Calling on her listeners at Franklin Hall to “possess a spirit of virtuous emulation,” she invited them to imagine the Pilgrims upon first landing, asking, did they “quietly compose themselves and say, ‘The Britons have all the money and all the power, and we must continue their servants forever?’ Did they sluggishly sigh and say, ‘Our lot is hard, the Indians own the soil, and we cannot cultivate it?’ “ (49). Rather than present European colonization as usurpation and oppression, she described it in this address as laudable ambition that African Americans should emulate. “They first made powerful efforts to raise themselves,” she concludes, “and then God raised up those illustrious patriots, WASHINGTON AND LAFAYETTE, to assist and defend them” (49). Here Stewart suggested that economic self-improvement would establish the conditions for full citizenship rights for African Americans, and she urged her listeners to become surrogate Pilgrims, working to “raise themselves” so that God would raise up leaders to win their rights. Stewart’s two histories of colonization—the narrative of oppression and the narrative of uplift—were based on alternative theories of value. In the first narrative wealth is produced by the appropriation of labor and resources. In the second narrative wealth is the product of individual and communal endeavor. Both histories reveal truths about property in the early American republic, and Stewart is notable for her attention to both of them in her analysis of black oppression. She called upon her audience to shift the conditions of economic development away from exploitation and toward personal and collective creation of value. A critical step toward that goal was the abolition of slavery in the United States. Today the global abolitionist movement continues this effort.42

} Writing in the face of a global economic crisis in 2009, Amartya Sen called for “an economic system that is not monolithic, draws on a variety of institutions chosen pragmatically, and is based on social values that we can defend ethically.” Arguing that economies today are not as narrowly based on free market capitalism as is sometimes claimed but contain important nonmarket features, and demonstrating that the limits of the profit motive and market economies were already apparent to Adam Smith, Sen outlined a more nuanced approach to how “different institutions actually work, and . . . how a variety of organizations—from the market to the institutions of the state— can go beyond short-term solutions and contribute to producing a more decent economic world.”43 In his

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earlier work Development as Freedom (1999) Sen related economic to verbal exchange, arguing that trade in words, goods, and gifts is a basic component of human social existence. He further compared economic and interpersonal exchange, noting that “to be generically against markets would be almost as odd as being generically against conversations between people (even though some conversations are clearly foul and cause problems for others— or even for the conversationalists themselves).”44 On the whole, markets and conversations produce social value and contribute to human freedom, though any specific instance may not, and though they are necessary but not sufficient means to achieve that freedom. Sen’s approach to development as freedom highlighted governments and civic and educational institutions in addition to markets and “opportunities of open dialogue and debate” (9), while emphasizing an ethical orientation that attends to social values. The imperatives that Sen set forth for the future in Development as Freedom resonate with the debates over the nature of economic development in the early American republic. There were many different ideas about the sources of value and the best way to structure and regulate markets in this era, and commodity and propriety were both important aspects. By staging an imagined deliberation on the nature of property among Apess, Child, Cooper, Crockett, Stewart, Walker, and Webster, I want to suggest the pervasiveness and variety of economic thinking in the period and to uncover points of overlap as well as difference. These seven authors shared elements of a republican proprietarian understanding of economy focused on an ethical concept of property as the basis for the public good. Apess demanded respect for the property rights of native individuals and communities that the Marshall court’s decisions undermined. Walker challenged the laws supporting chattel slavery by identifying God as the owner of all people, while Stewart highlighted with unusual clarity the tension between exploitation and freedom in theories of economic development. Child found the basis of value in small units of domestic property. Crockett similarly found value in scraps of frontier land, and he echoed Webster when he argued for federal land and Indian policies that distributed property widely. Cooper saw property claims as hopelessly tangled, productive of conflict, and ultimately contingent; he believed that large proprietors were better conservators of shared resources than small landholders, but emphasized that all property owners are temporary caretakers of a shared heritage. Collectively their works illuminate the complex legacy of the early American republic to economic thinking today.

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In 1851, just a year before his own death, Daniel Webster presided over a memorial service organized by James Fenimore Cooper’s friends to commemorate the novelist’s contributions to American letters. Webster joined Washington Irving, William Cullen Bryant, and other prominent authors and public figures in praising Cooper’s achievement. Noting Cooper’s national and international fame, Webster singled out the moral influence and nationalist vision of his works for particular praise. He attributed to Cooper the sentiments contained in a passage from Cicero’s third Catilinarian oration, in which the hero of republican Rome asked for “no other monument” to his achievements than their preservation “in your breasts alone.” Webster also compared Cooper’s accomplishments favorably with those of Julius Caesar, quoting the passage from Mark Antony’s funeral oration where he reveals Caesar’s legacy of money and land to the Roman people, and concluding that a “spotless character” and the “productions of mind” such as those handed down by Cooper are worth more than Caesar’s “lawless” and “perishable” possessions acquired through war and extortion. Like Cicero before him, Webster warned that political accomplishment is often overshadowed by the glamour of conflict and violence. In what may have seemed a testament as much to himself as to his literary friend, Webster celebrated the civilizing influences of politics and letters over the achievements of the battlefield.1 When Webster spoke at Cooper’s memorial service he was in the final and most difficult stage of a long political career. First elected to national office in 1812, for the next forty years Webster served almost continuously, first as a member of the House of Representatives, then in the Senate where he joined Henry Clay and John Calhoun in the “Great Triumvirate.” He twice served as Secretary of State and ran unsuccessfully for president in 1836.

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When he spoke at Cooper’s memorial service Webster had recently agreed to lead the State department for the second time following the passage of the 1850 Compromise Measures, which were precipitated by the United States’ acquisition of new territories in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. Webster had passionately opposed the Mexican-American War on the Senate floor, accusing the hawkish President James K. Polk of Caesar-like aggression and empire building. His predictions that the war with Mexico would lead to renewed sectional conflict over the extension of slavery, and perhaps civil war, were proven to be justified, and Webster was forced to set priorities between two related and closely held political principles: republicanism and opposition to slavery. Opening his much-anticipated speech on the compromise measures with a quotation from Brutus’s funeral oration in Julius Caesar—“ ‘Hear me for my cause’ ”—Webster accepted slavery, at least temporarily, as a condition for the survival of the republic. He suggested that like Brutus he was compelled to choose between two things that he loved, and he chose the republic. The controversy over Webster’s support for the compromise measures produced one of the most enduring debates over the value of politics in the history of the United States. As we have seen, Webster embodied for many of his contemporaries the figure of the heroic statesman, the eloquent, principled man of action. For a time, New England intellectuals saw in Webster a particular kind of eloquence and high-mindedness that they associated with republican deliberative ideals. After he came out in favor of the compromise measures, which implicated the North directly in the institution that many loathed, Webster became a lightning rod for his angry and highly articulate constituents. He was accused of advancing his personal financial and political ambitions, as well as promoting the interests of his wealthy supporters, at the expense of moral values. Quaker abolitionist poet John Greenleaf Whittier labeled Webster an “Ichabod,” who in the Bible is associated with the Israelites’ loss of the Ark of the Covenant, and whose name alludes to the loss of a glorious heritage. Emerson reconsidered his admiring poetic tributes to Webster from the 1830s, writing a terse dismissal of the man he had once considered godlike, whom he now criticized for valuing property over humanity: “Why did all manly gifts in Webster fail? / He wrote on Nature’s grandest brow, For Sale.”2 In two addresses on the Fugitive Slave Law in 1851 and 1854, Emerson sharply criticized Webster for violating natural law and the consciences of his constituents and stressed that his moral failings fatally compromised his eloquence. Theodore Parker, Horace Mann, and James Russell Lowell likewise expressed their disappointment, and William Cul-

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len Bryant voiced a common view when he implied that Webster’s support for the compromise originated in a “sordid motive,” a criticism arising from the senator’s reputation for seeking out financial support from his wealthy constituents. Bryant was a featured speaker at the Cooper memorial service where Webster testified to the enduring power of language and indirectly defended himself against his critics. Perhaps Webster hoped to replicate Cooper’s ability to recover lost status. The novelist’s reputation had survived the controversy of the 1830s over his involvement with European politics and criticisms of American democracy, and he had gone on to consolidate his reputation as the leading American author of his day.3 Webster did not live long enough to see himself rehabilitated—he died in office in 1852 —and his public memory is still strongly associated with the compromise measures that temporarily averted civil war at the cost of preserving slavery. The heroic image of Webster also survived, first in numerous biographies and anthologies that sought to champion his accomplishments, and later in Stephen Vincent Benét’s short story “The Devil and Daniel Webster” (1937), which offers a New Deal– era celebration of Webster’s nationalism. In his adaptation of the Faust legend, Benét featured Webster’s eloquent defense of a New Hampshire farmer who falls on hard times and sells his soul to the devil. Confronted with Mr. Scratch, a clear contract, and a jury of the damned, Webster wins his client’s case by arguing that the United States, for all its many flaws and failings, nevertheless represents an ideal of liberty. The jury is persuaded by Webster’s celebration of American ideals and releases the farmer from his contract. In a concluding scene Scratch foresees the compromise measures and the damage to Webster’s reputation. He also anticipates the Civil War but offers the reassurance that the United States will survive, which Webster concludes makes his sacrifices worthwhile. Benét quickly made his popular tale into a folk opera and, in 1941, it was adapted to film. This heroic nationalist image of Webster influenced Frank Capra, who assigned Jefferson Smith to Webster’s chair in the Senate in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (1939). Smith is inspired by his predecessor to put his career in jeopardy when he filibusters to prevent the senior senator from his state from passing a corrupt law.4 In the 1950s John F. Kennedy led a more concerted effort to rehabilitate Webster as an iconic statesman. He headed a 1957 Senate committee that named Webster one of the Senate’s five greatest predecessors; the previous year Kennedy had included Webster among his Profiles in Courage (1956). Noting Webster’s personal deficiencies (his extravagance, his inappropri-

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ately close ties to business interests), Kennedy nevertheless praised Webster’s willingness to sacrifice his political future by taking an unpopular position that he felt to be right. Kennedy summarized the arguments of historians about the ultimate effects of the compromise measures, noting that some scholars believed that the compromise prolonged slavery unnecessarily while others claimed that by delaying war until the North was stronger the measures contributed to the survival of the United States. He concluded his sketch with a Ciceronian passage from Webster’s writings: “‘No man can suffer too much, and no man can fall too soon, if he suffer or if he fall in defense of the liberties and Constitution of his country’” (74). Earlier in Profiles Kennedy had captured the complex web of personal interest, moral principle, contingency, and uncertainty that factor into political decision making. Noting the peculiar challenges that face elected officials, who are routinely called upon to make difficult moral decisions in a highly public way, Kennedy observed how established procedures shape and constrain deliberations. A senator “may want more time for his decision—he may believe there is something to be said for both sides— he may feel that a slight amendment could remove all difficulties—but when that roll is called he cannot hide, he cannot equivocate, he cannot delay—and he senses that his constituency, like the Raven in Poe’s poem, is perched there on his Senate desk, croaking ‘Nevermore’ as he casts the vote that stakes his political future” (7). Kennedy suggested that a willingness to accept these constraints, to be part of a process whose outcome may be personally offensive and politically fatal, is a condition of service in a deliberative body. In The Audacity of Hope Barack Obama quoted this passage from Profiles in Courage as a good description of the compromises that legislators face.5 It was precisely such conditions of action that Henry David Thoreau singled out for criticism in his analysis of political life and the compromises it entails. “Resistance to Civil Government” appeared in 1849, the year before Webster came out in favor of the compromise measures, and in his essay Thoreau praised Webster as the best embodiment of a conservative view of the Constitution. On the subject of slavery, he noted, Webster spoke “almost the only sensible and valuable words” and was always “strong, original, and, above all, practical.” Nevertheless as the Defender of the Constitution, the senator shared the weakness of all traditional politicians who stand “within the institution” and so “never distinctly and nakedly behold it.” “His quality is not wisdom, but prudence,” Thoreau observed, and went on to complain of the “wordy wit of legislators” who use “eloquence for its own sake” rather than in the service of truths derived

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from the highest source, above the Bible and the Constitution. “There are orators, politicians, and eloquent men, by the thousand; but the speaker has not yet opened his mouth to speak who is capable of settling the muchvexed questions of the day,” Thoreau noted, contrasting the babel of many speakers with the single voice of truth. There are two things to note about Thoreau’s treatment of Webster. One is that he implies that Webster’s adherence to the Constitution was reactionary, or “prudent,” rather than a conscious decision to promote and protect republican self-governance. Another is that Thoreau looked for a single leader to reform the nation through the power of his speech, which he presents in prophetic terms. Even as he called for a prophet to resolve the nation’s conflicts, Thoreau was skeptical that such an ideal speaker could exist, and in closing he asserted instead the right of the individual to opt out of the deliberative process and resist the authority of the state. Unjust laws should be transgressed immediately, he argued, not reformed gradually. If everyone who sees the injustice of a law proceeds to violate it then it will be impossible to enforce. This principle helped shape the modern nonviolent political movements that Thoreau influenced, including the independence movement in India and the civil rights and antiabortion movements in the United States. It is likewise a feature of the “global rebellion” of contemporary religious movements against state authority.6 Beginning in the 1960s the theorists of black liberation theology, womanist theology, and Native American nationalist movements found inspiration in the works of David Walker, Maria Stewart, and William Apess, who like Thoreau sought for a major transformation in the civic culture of the United States. The clarity with which Walker, Stewart, and Apess articulated America’s failure to live up to its democratic republican ideals, their use of the prophetic voice to excoriate mainstream American Christianity, and their confrontational style resonated with the Black Power and Red Power movements. James H. Cone, a founder of black liberation theology, helped create a radical style that shares affinities with Walker’s work. In a 1999 reassessment of trends in the contemporary black church, Cone noted the appeal that Walker’s radical spirit had for young African Americans. Walker figured prominently in Gayraud S. Wilmore’s influential Black Religion and Black Radicalism: An Interpretation of the Religious History of Afro-American People (first published in 1973), where he appeared as a precursor to black liberation theology. Comparing Walker to Martin Luther, Wilmore noted that both the early Protestant reformer and the black abolitionist and theorist of radical Christianity addressed “their own oppressed and beleaguered people out of a last-ditch, desperate situation

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that called for the most basic alteration of the religious and civil order” and “believed that God had commanded them to pronounce judgment against powers that seemed almost as indestructible as they were corrupt.” Wilmore noted further that Walker expressed an ambivalence common among black religious leaders in the antebellum era, who “vacillated back and forth between violence and nonviolence as a solution to slavery.” In Down, Up, and Over: Slave Religion and Black Theology (2000) Dwight N. Hopkins offered a number of specific contributions that Walker made to black theology. Prominent among them is Walker’s interpretation of “the sovereign rule of God” to mean “God being for the oppressed” and his “affirmation of the divine nature of blackness . . . to promote racial equality for all.” Hopkins summed up Walker’s vision of divine sovereignty as an instrument of radical equality: “For Walker, both the oppressed and the oppressor must surrender obedience to one master who is the bearer of good news for the forlorn and enchained. . . . The revolutionary implications of one overarching lord and master subverts the hierarchy of demonic structures and levels the social relations between the haves and the have-nots.”7 Maria Stewart fills a similar place in womanist theology. Black feminist theologians such as Kelly Delaine Brown-Douglass find in Stewart a model of a “spirituality of survival” focused on building self-esteem and confronting prejudice within the black community as well as outside of it. We find a related celebration of William Apess in the work of Robert Warrior, who treats Apess as an intellectual forefather and model for contemporary native rights activists. Warrior has compared Apess to Walker and Stewart and noted his affiliation with the Protestant Methodists, the “republican wing of the church” which “sought to incorporate religious and political identity by trying to change structures in American society that were unjust.”8 Black liberation theology was unexpectedly thrust into the spotlight during the 2008 presidential campaign in the United States when Barack Obama was called upon to explain his membership in Trinity United Church of Christ. Trinity’s longtime pastor, the Reverend Jeremiah Wright, espoused a version of black liberation theology, and a videotape of Wright preaching “God damn America” circulated on the Internet and on television news. Obama was forced to explain his close association with his minister and spiritual advisor, whose words had provided the title for The Audacity of Hope. The senator sought to highlight Wright’s longtime commitment to social justice work in his church, and in “A More Perfect Union,” a speech on race relations in America, he cited “the old truism that the most segregated hour in American life occurs on Sunday morning.”

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Obama emphasized the differences between the theologies and rhetorical styles in black and white churches. When he finally resigned his membership in Trinity Church, the episode was treated by the news media as a sign of a generational passing of the torch. The legacy of 1960s-style black radicalism was being supplanted by the “post-racial” Obama generation.9 More tellingly for my purposes, the episode demonstrates the difficulty of reconciling prophetic speech with deliberative practices.10 When the Reverend Wright damned America, he invoked the tradition of Jeremiah as well as David Walker. In 2003 Wright coedited an essay collection that bears the subtitle of “global vision and action for the twenty-first century black church,” a project that shares Walker’s emphases on a diasporic black identity and religious affiliation. Wright’s focus on the transnational black church and his critique of the secular state as an instrument of oppression did not necessarily contradict Obama’s reform program of bringing grassroots participation and deliberation more fully into national politics, but his prophetic style did raise serious rhetorical obstacles to his former parishioner’s national consensus-building project. Wright’s combative presence in public forums at this time was distinguished in both tone and substance from Obama’s moderate tone, deliberate approach, and uplifting, unifying rhetoric.11 Obama’s differences with his pastor further reflected two rhetorical and philosophical traditions within African American life. While Wright’s style and vision resonated with Walker’s Appeal, where the prophetic voice breaks open the structures of authority summoned up in its constitution-like organization, Obama’s approach more nearly resembled that of Frederick Douglass, who reinterpreted the United States Constitution as an antislavery document. Douglass shared Walker’s critical view of mainstream American Christianity because of the support for slavery in the ranks of ministers, and he was for a time persuaded by Walker’s ally William Lloyd Garrison, who argued that the Constitution was fatally flawed because it permitted slavery. Eventually Douglass broke with Garrison and emphasized the liberating potential within the Constitution. Obama cited Douglass as an inspiration, and in “A More Perfect Union” he mirrored Douglass’s progressive approach to constitutional interpretation and state reform. Wright’s and Obama’s distinctive positions can be traced to the early republic, when the possibilities and limitations of democratic deliberation were first being explored. The episode vividly embodies the tension between prophetic rhetoric and transcendent moral positions on the one hand and deliberative ideals and state-oriented reform on the other. It is this tension that deliberative democrats and neorepublicans seek to re-

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solve by embracing resistance to oppression as an element in their theories of political action.12 Abraham Lincoln is the iconic figure that Americans turn to when they examine the relationship between moral absolutes and political contingencies. It was Lincoln that Obama invoked in Audacity of Hope in his discussion of the need to recognize both the deliberative nature of American democracy and the limits of deliberation. Yet Lincoln’s legacy offers no clear map for resolving moral conflicts within the framework of the state. Two interpretations of that legacy illustrate the point. In a 1986 essay on “Political Culture and American Political Development,” J. David Greenstone developed a comparison between Stephen Douglas, Daniel Webster, and Abraham Lincoln that drew on Isaiah Berlin’s concepts of negative and positive liberty. Greenstone argued that Douglas embraced a negative, static concept of individual liberty, while Webster and Lincoln espoused a positive and progressive understanding of liberty. In a second set of distinctions Greenstone found that Douglas and Webster overlapped in their commitment to the political process, while Lincoln developed a Kantian ethic according to which he interpreted the union itself as a progressive moral project. Like Thoreau, Greenstone found that Webster’s commitment to deliberative processes lacked a moral dimension and that he stood too much “within the institution” to see it clearly.13 In A Constitution of Many Minds: Why the Founding Document Doesn’t Mean What It Meant Before (2009), Cass R. Sunstein developed an understanding of Lincoln that puts him closer to Webster than in Greenstone’s interpretation. Sunstein cited and substantially endorsed Alexander Bickel’s view of Lincoln as a committed opponent of slavery who, as late as 1854, espoused the view that immediate abolition was impossible because of white opposition. Sunstein summed up Lincoln’s views: “Even if a moral commitment is right, and wrongly rejected, it cannot be ‘safely’ imposed on a nation that rejects it.” Social change can backfire if people are not brought along with sufficient care, if prejudices are not first corrected and interests accommodated. Writing with an eye to the extended political conflict unleashed by the Supreme Court’s decision on abortion rights in Roe v. Wade (1973), Sunstein insisted on the place of political compromise and gradualism in achieving a “more perfect union.”14 Lincoln himself recognized an affinity with Webster when in the Gettysburg Address he adapted Webster’s famous aphorism from the Second Reply to Hayne: “It is, Sir, the people’s Constitution, the people’s government, made for the people, made by the people, and answerable to the people.” The closing words of the Gettysburg Address recast Webster’s

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phrase slightly to celebrate “government of the people, by the people, for the people.” In this short text, Garry Wills has argued, Lincoln rhetorically reconciled the egalitarian ideals of the Declaration of Independence with the state-building purposes of the United States Constitution.15 The specific means to achieve this reconciliation through procedures, rhetorical styles, civic groups, and institutions is a task that theorists of deliberative democracy continue to pursue. Chief among the challenges will be to negotiate the place of religious discourse within the deliberations of a democracy. In June 2006 Obama addressed this concern in a major speech before the Call to Renewal conference, an ecumenical progressive Christian group focused on poverty and social justice. The senator told the story of how in the race leading up to his election two years earlier, his opponent Alan Keyes had asserted that “Jesus Christ would not vote for Barack Obama,” and he summed up the statement’s underlying significance: Keyes had “claimed knowledge of certain truths.” The story of Keyes’s assertion of absolute knowledge opened up two issues: the place of religion in American civic culture and the challenge of reconciling assertions of religious truths with democratic deliberation. Obama emphasized the historical importance of faith as the basis of progressive values as instanced in Lincoln’s second inaugural address and Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech, and he called for a discussion of the place of faith in a modern, pluralistic democracy. The Christian republic of Lyman Beecher has become “no longer just a Christian nation” but also “a Jewish nation, a Muslim nation, a Buddhist nation, a Hindu nation, and a nation of nonbelievers.” Religion should have a place in civic discourse, helping to ground points of agreement or “overlap,” but “democracy demands that the religiously motivated translate their concerns into universal, rather than religion-specific, values. It requires that their proposals be subject to argument, and amenable to reason.” Obama offered abortion—the issue that prompted the Roman Catholic Keyes to assert that Jesus would not vote for him, and the instance that Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson took as a test case for deliberative democracy—as his prime example of a polarizing topic that might be better addressed in this way. In the first major controversy of his presidency, Obama’s speech at the May 2009 commencement ceremony of the University of Notre Dame was opposed by antiabortion activists and many American Catholic bishops. Both his speech and the speech of Notre Dame president John Jenkins echoed prominent themes in deliberative democracy theory, stressing the importance of thoughtful dialogue and the need to avoid demonizing others over moral differences.16

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In June 2009 Obama employed similar themes and rhetorical strategies to those in his Call to Renewal and Notre Dame commencement speeches in an address at Cairo University in which he called on Christians and Muslims around the world to reject violence; to recognize that their faiths “overlap, and share common principles—principles of justice and progress; tolerance and the dignity of all human beings”; and to “turn dialogue into interfaith service.” He stressed his support for democratic movements that represent the popular will, while emphasizing that such governments should not be imposed by other nations.17 Six months later, in his speech accepting the Nobel Peace Prize, Obama returned to the challenge that religious differences pose to peace as a result of the human capacity for prejudice and hatred. Even as he agreed with Martin Luther King Jr.’s statement that “violence never brings permanent peace” in his own speech accepting the Nobel Prize for peace, Obama held that nonviolent movements such as King’s and Gandhi’s were insufficient to address all crises, including present religiously motivated antagonisms. In an effort to balance aspirations for peace with the need for force, he stated that “evil does exist in the world,” and he quoted John Kennedy on the need to build global institutions: “ ‘Let us focus,’ [Kennedy] said, ‘on a more practical, more attainable peace, based not on a sudden revolution in human nature but on a gradual evolution in human institutions.’ ” Obama echoed the last phrase, “a gradual evolution of human institutions,” and emphasized that such an evolution would require “the continued expansion of our moral imagination; an insistence that there’s something irreducible that we all share,” which he linked to a perfectionist strain that he found at the heart of religious belief, urging his audience to “reach for the world that ought to be—that spark of the divine that still stirs within each of our souls.”18 Daniel Webster’s Bunker Hill Monument oration lies behind the words of John Kennedy that Obama quoted at Oslo on the need to build institutions of peace. Noting that the heroic days of the Revolution were gone, Webster called his audience to a new kind of heroism: “Let our age be the age of improvement. In a day of peace, let us advance the arts of peace and the works of peace. Let us develop the resources of our land, call forth its powers, build up its institutions, promote all its great interests, and see whether we also, in our day and generation, may not perform something worthy to be remembered. Let us cultivate a true spirit of union and harmony.”19 Webster’s vision differed importantly from Obama’s, for the republic that he sought to strengthen was white and Christian. The path from Webster’s white Christian republic to Obama’s multiracial, multifaith republic is the road of modernity. The rhetorical and intellectual tradition

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linking Webster to Obama includes Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln, Walt Whitman and John Dewey, John Kennedy and Martin Luther King. The proponents of this tradition emphasize the political power of language and advance a commitment to dialogue and persuasion as the best means to resolve conflicts and forge a progressive consensus. It is this tradition that informs theories of deliberative democracy, which I have argued is rooted in the civic rhetoric of the early American republic, and which I hope the deliberative hermeneutics that I have developed here will help to foster.

NOTES

introduction 1. Joan D. Hedrick, Harriet Beecher Stowe: A Life (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), vii. Forrest McDonald, foreword to Joseph Addison, Cato: A Tragedy, and Selected Essays, ed. Christine Dunn Henderson and Mark E. Yellin (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2004), vii–x. Evidence suggests that the performance at Valley Forge was not open to the public, as previously supposed, but exclusive and genteel, as Mark Evans Bryan shows in “ ‘Slideing into Monarchical extravagance’: Cato at Valley Forge and the Testimony of William Bradford Jr.,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd ser., 67 ( January 2010): 123 – 44. Julie Ellison focuses on the ways that Addison’s Cato helped shape the place of emotion in civic life on both sides of the Atlantic in Cato’s Tears and the Making of Anglo-American Emotion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999). 2. [ Jonathan Mitchell Sewall], “A new Epilogue to Cato, spoken at a late performance of that Tragedy” (Portsmouth, NH: Daniel Fowle, 1778). Sewall celebrated Benedict Arnold as a new Hannibal whose perseverance and daring on the battlefield supplemented Washington’s celebrated “serenity,” anticipating that military heroism like Arnold’s would protect the patriot cause from the fate of the Roman Republic. Sewall identified Benjamin Church with the traitorous Sempronius; Arnold’s defection to the British occurred later. When Sewall reprinted the Epilogue in 1801, he kept the lines celebrating Arnold but removed Arnold’s full name, referring to him as A**. J. M. Sewall, Miscellaneous Poems, with Several Specimens from the Author’s Manuscript Version of the Poems of Ossian (Portsmouth, NH: William Treadwell, 1801), 109 –10. In Rome Reborn on Western Shores: Historical Imagination and the Creation of the American Republic (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2009), Eran Shalev stresses the optimism and egalitarianism of Sewall’s new ending, which treats America as “a fulfillment, and improved incarnation of classical politics” (103), notably by asserting the general possession of classical virtues. 3. John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, Cato’s Letters, vol. 3 (London: W. Wilkins, T. Woodward, J. Walthoe, and J. Peele, 1724), 275. 4. Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, The Federalist with Letters of “Brutus,” ed. Terence Ball (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 302. I discuss the events leading up to the framing of the Constitution and its implementation in “Forms of State,” in Eloquence Is Power: Oratory and Performance in Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2000), chap. 6. There is a long-running debate about the motives that led to the framing of the Constitution. Woody Holton’s Unruly Americans and the Origins of the Constitution (New York: Hill and Wang, 2007) is a recent account that assesses the argument that the Constitution was intended to restrain “democracy,” with a focus on Madison.

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5. Joseph M. Bessette, The Mild Voice of Reason: Deliberative Democracy and American National Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), chaps. 1–2. Bessette appears to have coined the phrase “deliberative democracy” in “Deliberative Democracy: The Majority Principle in Republican Government,” in How Democratic Is the Constitution? ed. Robert A. Goldwin and William A. Schambra (Washington, DC: American Enterprise Institute, 1980). On Madison and demagoguery, see 18, 21, and 238. See also Lance Banning, The Sacred Fire of Liberty: James Madison and the Founding of the Federal Republic (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1998). 6. Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (New York: Crown, 2006), 92, 97, 96, 98. Obama thanked Cass Sunstein, who had been his colleague at the University of Chicago Law School, in his acknowledgments (364), and later appointed him to a position in his administration. Sunstein has been a prominent contributor to neorepublicanism and deliberative democracy. His most pertinent work is Designing Democracy: What Constitutions Do (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). Deliberative democracy is sometimes linked to moderation in politics, though the topics are distinct. For a treatment of moderation, see Robert McCluer Calhoon, Political Moderation in America’s First Two Centuries (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009). 7. John Dunn, Democracy: A History (New York: Atlantic Monthly Press, 2005); Jennifer Tolbert Roberts, Athens on Trial: The Antidemocratic Tradition in Western Thought (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994). 8. Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005). Wilentz expressly builds on Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Age of Jackson (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1945). I discuss the historiography of Jacksonian democracy in greater detail in “Histories of Democracy and Empire,” American Quarterly 59 (March 2007): 107–33. 9. James S. Fishkin, When the People Speak: Deliberative Democracy and Public Consultation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), chap. 2. 10. Michael F. Holt, The Rise and Fall of the American Whig Party: Jacksonian Politics and the Onset of the Civil War (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999). 11. In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989; orig. 1962), Jürgen Habermas provided a cultural and political history that has been widely influential. Michael Warner adapted Habermas’s conception of the public sphere to the revolutionary United States in The Letters of the Republic: Publication and the Public Sphere in Eighteenth-Century America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990). I discuss Warner’s approach and my differences with it in “American Literature and the Public Sphere,” American Literary History 20 (Summer 2008): 465 –78. Iris Marion Young expanded the Habermasian model to include greeting, rhetoric, and narrative in Inclusion and Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), chap. 2. Fishkin’s concept of deliberation includes high degrees of information, substantive balance, diversity, conscientiousness, and equal consideration, and he seeks to realize these ideals in his deliberative polls (When the People Speak, 33 –34). Pierre Rosanvallon, Democracy Past and Future, trans. Samuel Moyn (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 39. 12. Daniel Webster, “The Bunker Hill Monument,” in The Works of Daniel Webster (Boston: Little, Brown, 1851), 1:55 –78. I have used this edition of Webster’s speeches throughout because it reflects his final editorial choices. I have also consulted the comprehensive modern edition of The Papers of Daniel Webster, edited by Charles M.

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Wiltse, which provides the textual history of the speeches. J. G. A. Pocock, Virtue, Commerce, and History: Essays on Political Thought and History, Chiefly in the Eighteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985); Biancamaria Fontana, ed., The Invention of the Modern Republic (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 13. Nancy Fraser, “Rethinking the Public Sphere: A Contribution to the Critique of Actually Existing Democracy,” in Justice Interruptus: Critical Reflections on the “Postsocialist” Condition (New York: Routledge, 1997), 69 –98; and Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2005), 65 –124. In Republicanism Pettit emphasizes deliberation and resistance to oppression as central republican values. 14. Hugh Brogan, Alexis de Tocqeville: A Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 181– 84. Leo Damrosch stresses Sparks’s influence on Tocqueville’s understanding of the republican nature of New England towns in Tocqueville’s Discovery of America (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2010), 100 –106. 15. “The Constitution and the Union,” in The Works of Daniel Webster (Boston: Little, Brown, 1851), 5:325 – 66; quoted passage on 365 – 66. In On Compromise and Rotten Compromises (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), the moral philosopher Avishai Margalit advocates for compromise while also distinguishing circumstances where it is inappropriate. Margalit argues that the compromise over slavery that produced the U.S. Constitution was rotten. 16. Walker died in 1830, Crockett in 1836, and Apess in 1839. Additionally two of the three figures featured in chapter 1 had died: Simón Bolívar in 1830 and General Lafayette in 1834. Stewart left Boston in 1833, and after William Lloyd Garrison published Productions of Mrs. Maria W. Stewart in 1835, there is a gap in her public record until 1860. For details see chapter 5 n34. Songho Ha argues that the Panic of 1837 brought the era of the American system to an end in The Rise and Fall of the American System: Nationalism and the Development of the American Economy, 1790 –1837 (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2009). 17. Amanda Anderson, The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Cultures of Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006), 152, 145. Anderson highlights the work of Jürgen Habermas and mentions William James and John Dewey. She does not cite the deliberative democracy theorists whose studies have informed my work, but the goals she lays out overlap with theirs. 18. Christopher Castiglia, Interior States: Institutional Consciousness and the Inner Life of Democracy in the Antebellum United States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 1. For related readings of the early republic, see Dana D. Nelson, National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), and Russ Castronovo, Necro Citizenship: Death, Eroticism, and the Public Sphere in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001). A parallel focus on the imperfect realization of democracy in the postrevolutionary period informs the readings of historian Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, This Violent Empire: The Birth of an American National Identity (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2010), and political theorist Jason Frank, Constituent Moments: Enacting the People in Postrevolutionary America (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). Nadia Urbinati discusses the influence of Tocqueville’s Democracy in America on Mill, and relates Mill’s ideas to deliberative democracy theory, in Mill on Democracy:

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From the Athenian Polis to Representative Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). Anderson’s field is Victorian studies, and she cites Mill at several points in The Way We Argue Now.

chapter one 1. Kwame Anthony Appiah, Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers (London: Penguin, 2006), xix. Appiah began to develop his ethic of cosmopolitan conversation in The Ethics of Identity (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 267–72; quoted passage on 271. 2. Amartya Sen, Identity and Violence: The Illusion of Destiny (New York: Norton, 2006), 19, 53 –55; The Idea of Justice (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2009). 3. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, eds., Making Things Public: Atmospheres of Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT University Press, 2005), 19, 755, 143 –54, 54 –55, 32 –33. 4. George A. Kennedy, Comparative Rhetoric: An Historical and Cross-Cultural Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 197–99. 5. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958). The Bible passages are 1 Cor. 1:17 and 1 Cor. 2:4 –5. I discuss them in the appendix to Eloquence Is Power: Oratory and Performance in Early America (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2000), 274. St. Augustine’s Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 53. Brian Vickers discusses the anti-rhetorical tradition in In Defense of Rhetoric (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989). 6. Aristotle, The Politics and the Constitution of Athens, ed. Stephen Everson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 97, 76; On Rhetoric: A Theory of Civic Discourse, trans. George A. Kennedy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991), 77, 65. Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson write that “Aristotle was the first major theorist to defend the value of a process in which citizens publicly discuss and justify their laws to one another.” Why Deliberative Democracy? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 8. Bernie Yack provides an integrative account of Aristotle’s treatments of deliberative rhetoric in “Rhetoric and Public Reasoning: An Aristotelian Understanding of Political Deliberation,” Political Theory 34 (2006): 417–38. 7. Cicero, On Duties, ed. M. T. Griffin and E. M. Atkins (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Cicero, On the Ideal Orator, trans. James M. May and Jakob Wisse (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). Re publica is variously translated as “republic” or “commonwealth.” I am using the translation of James E. G. Zetzel in Cicero, On the Commonwealth and On the Laws (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 18. 8. Joy Connolly, The State of Speech: Rhetoric and Political Thought in Ancient Rome (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 267, 268, 272. In “Cicero and the Ethics of Deliberative Rhetoric,” Talking Democracy: Historical Perspectives on Rhetoric and Democracy (University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004), 135 – 61, Gary Remer similarly concluded that “‘Ciceronian deliberation’ is not an oxymoron,” as critics of rhetoric such as Habermas sometimes argue (160). 9. J. P. Fokkelman observed that Exodus “provides a foundation for the whole Bible,” and that its major themes and events recur in later books. See “Exodus” in The Literary Guide to the Bible, ed. Robert Alter and Frank Kermode (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987), 56 – 65, quotation on 56. David S. Gutterman discussed the importance of the Exodus story in Puritan and founding-era

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narratives of American identity and its continued prominent role in modern Christian social movements in Prophetic Politics: Christian Social Movements and American Democracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2005). Eddie S. Glaude Jr. focused on its role in the formation of the early black church in Exodus!: Religion, Race, and Nation in Early Nineteenth-Century Black America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000); see also Lawrence W. Levine, Black Culture and Black Consciousness: Afro-American Folk Thought from Slavery to Freedom (New York: Oxford University Press, 1978), chap. 1 and passim. On Moses as an inarticulate orator, see Eloquence Is Power, 272 and Sandra M. Gustafson “Performing the Word,” Ph.D. diss. (University of California at Berkeley, 1993), 38 – 40. 10. Catherine Albanese, Sons of the Fathers: The Civil Religion of the American Revolution (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1976). In The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978), Sacvan Bercovitch argued that the New England Puritans transformed the jeremiad tradition into an instrument of social cohesion and consensus. Joel Rosenberg observed the strong sense of voice in Jeremiah and stressed the interplay of prophecy and traditionary memory in “Jeremiah and Ezekiel,” The Literary Guide to the Bible, 184 –206. 11. John Durham Peters, Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 66. Frank Kermode discussed the distinctive qualities of John’s Gospel in The Literary Guide to the Bible, 440 – 66. 12. I quote the familiar translation of Isaiah from the King James version of the Bible. Elsewhere I have relied on The New Oxford Annotated Bible with the Apocryphal/ Deuterocanonical Books, ed. Bruce M. Metzger and Roland E. Murphy (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). A similar sentiment about the need for many counselors is expressed in Proverbs 15:22. Some translations employ the phrase “multitude of counselors,” which Thomas Sheridan echoed in his works on elocution, as we shall see in chapter three. 13. Glenn Tinder, “Faith, Doubt and Public Dialogue,” 223 – 41; quoted passage on 229; and Jean Bethke Elshtain, “How Should We Talk,” 163 –75, both in A Nation under God? Essays on the Future of Religion in American Public Life, ed. R. Bruce Douglass and Joshua Mitchell (Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 2000). Richard John Neuhaus’s The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1984) is often cited as the initiator of current discussions about the place of religion in public debate. “Come now, and let us reason together” has served as an inspiration for evangelical Christians and political progressives to seek common ground. See the Third Way website: http://www.thirdway .org/press/release/49. Accessed March 11, 2010. James Darsey argued for the place of prophetic rhetoric against the Ciceronian tradition of civility in The Prophetic Tradition and Radical Rhetoric in America (New York: New York University Press, 1997). 14. James Harrington, Harrington: “The Commonwealth of Oceana” and “A System of Politics,” ed. J. G. A. Pocock (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 8, 22. Mark Goldie, “The Civil Religion of James Harrington” in The Languages of Political Theory in Early-Modern Europe, ed. Anthony Pagden (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), 197–222; Eric Nelson, The Hebrew Republic: Jewish Sources and the Transformation of European Political Thought (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). 15. See Connolly, The State of Speech, 32. 16. Joseph M. Bessette discusses the deliberative role of the Senate in The Mild Voice of Reason: Deliberative Democracy and American National Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), chaps. 1 and 2. In consultation with Thomas Jefferson, James

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Madison included Harrington’s works on a list of 307 books for Congress to purchase in 1783, though the project did not come to immediate fruition. Ralph Louis Ketcham, James Madison: A Biography (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1990; orig. pub. 1971), 140. John Adams was a particularly careful reader of Harrington, covering his copy of Oceana with “admiring marginalia” ( Joseph J. Ellis, Passionate Sage: The Character and Legacy of John Adams [New York: W. W. Norton, 2001], 132). 17. United States Congress, The Rules for Conducting Business in the Senate (New York: s.n., 1790). 18. Jefferson’s Parliamentary Writings: Parliamentary “Pocket Book” and a Manual of Parliamentary Practice, The Papers of Thomas Jefferson Second Ser., ed. Wilbur Samuel Howell (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1988), esp. Sec. 17, “Order in Debate,” 373 –77; quoted passages on 375, 376. Jefferson’s longstanding interest in parliamentary procedure is described in the introductory chronology, esp. 3 –9. The number of manuals of parliamentary procedure expanded significantly in the second half of the nineteenth century. See the list of “Parliamentary Books (Pre-1925 American)” at http://www.jimslaughter.com/oldbooks.htm. Accessed April 11, 2010. 19. I discuss the opening of statehouse galleries in Eloquence Is Power, 150; more generally, see chapter four. Women were present at congressional debates as early as 1790; see Jan Lewis, “Politics and the Ambivalence of the Private Sphere: Women in Early Washington, D.C.,” A Republic for the Ages: The United States Capitol and the Political Culture of the Early Republic, ed. Donald R. Kennon (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press for the United States Capitol Historical Society, 1999), 122 –51. 20. Donald Ritchie, Press Gallery: Congress and the Washington Correspondents (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1991), chap. 1, esp. 24 –25, 16 –17, 20 –23, 26 – 32. “Reporters of Debate and the Congressional Record,” http://www.senate.gov/ artandhistory/history/common/briefing/Reporters_Debate_Congressional_Record .htm. Accessed March 11, 2010. One notable writer of semipublic letters was Margaret Bayard Smith, whose work can be sampled in The First Forty Years of Washington Society in the Family Letters of Margaret Bayard Smith, ed. Gaillard Hunt (New York: Unwin, 1906). Bayard Smith’s role in Washington politics is discussed in Fredrika Teute, “Roman Matron on the Banks of Tiber Creek: Margaret Bayard Smith and the Politicization of Spheres in the Nation’s Capital,” A Republic for the Ages, 89 –121. 21. Caroline Eastman, “The Indian Censures the White Man: ‘Indian Eloquence’ and American Reading Audiences in the Early Republic,” WMQ, 3rd ser., 65 ( July 2008): 535 – 64; 542. I discuss the relationship between oratory and executive power in Eloquence Is Power, chap. 6. Robert A. Ferguson stressed the nonspecialist nature of courtroom argument in Law and Letters in American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984); see esp. chap. 8 on Webster. 22. Van Wyck Brooks, The Flowering of New England 1815 –1865 (n.p.: E. P. Dutton, 1936), chap. 6; Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines 1850 –1865, vol. 2 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1938), 219 – 61; Lawrence Buell, New England Literary Culture: From Revolution through Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 31 and passim; Marshall Foletta, Coming to Terms with Democracy: Federalist Intellectuals and the Shaping of an American Culture (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2001), chap. 1 and passim. 23. [Edward Tyrrel Channing], “The Abuses of Political Discussion,” North American Review 4 ( January 1817): 193 –201; quoted passages on 197 and 201. 24. Jacqueline Den Hartog discussed reports of speeches in epistolary travel texts in “A ‘Wild and Ambiguous Medium’: Letters and Epistolary Fictions in Early Amer-

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ica, 1780 –1830” (Ph.D. diss., University of Notre Dame, 2006), chap. 3. Frances Wright, Views of Society and Manners in America: In a Series of Letters from that Country to a Friend in England, During the Years 1818, 1819, and 1820 (London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1821), 413 –14. Wright was closely associated with General Lafayette during these years. Lloyd Kramer, Lafayette in Two Worlds: Public Cultures and Personal Identities in an Age of Revolutions (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), 154 –71. 25. James Fenimore Cooper, Notions of the Americans: Picked Up by a Travelling Bachelor (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1991), 297, 299. 26. Frances Milton Trollope, Domestic Manners of the Americans (London: Whitaker, Treacher, and Co., 1832; Repr., New York for the booksellers, 1832), 183 – 85, 180. 27. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, ed. J. P. Mayer, trans. George Lawrence (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), vol. 2, part 1, chap. 21, esp. 499 –500. 28. Michael Schudson, The Good Citizen: A History of American Civic Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), chap. 3; John L. Brooke, “Ancient Lodges and Self-Created Societies: Voluntary Association and the Public Sphere in the Early Republic” in Launching the “Extended Republic”: The Federalist Era, ed. Ronald Hoffman and Peter J. Albert (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press for the United States Capitol Historical Society, 1996), 273 –377; Brooke, “Reason and Passion in the Public Sphere: Habermas and the Cultural Historians,” Journal of Interdisciplinary History (Summer 1998), 43 – 67; Brooke, “Consent, Civil Society, and the Public Sphere in the Age of Revolution and the Early American Republic” in Beyond the Founders: New Approaches to the Political History of the Early American Republic, ed. Jeffrey L. Pasley, Andrew W. Robertson, and David Waldstreicher (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), 207–50; Albrecht Koschnik, “Let a Common Interest Bind Us Together”: Associations, Partisanship, and Culture in Philadelphia, 1775 –1840 (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007); Johann N. Neem, Creating a Nation of Joiners: Democracy and Civil Society in Early National Massachusetts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008); Carolyn Eastman, A Nation of Speechifiers: Making an American Public after the Revolution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 29. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America, 516, 524. William J. Novak challenged Tocqueville’s view of voluntary associations as separate from and supervisory over the American state, finding rather that the state was actively involved in shaping associative civic culture, in “The American Law of Association: The Legal-Political Construction of Civil Society,” Studies in American Political Development 15 (Fall 2001): 163 – 88. 30. Ingersoll’s reference to “self-created associations” alludes to the “self-created societies” that George Washington opposed in his Farewell Address of 1796. Unlike Washington, Ingersoll clearly felt the groups were benign and often beneficial. 31. C. J. Ingersoll, A Discourse Concerning the Influence of America on the Mind; Being the Annual Oration Delivered Before the American Philosophical Society, at the University of Pennsylvania, on the 18th October, 1823, By Their Appointment, and Published by their Order (Philadelphia: Abraham Small, 1823); quoted passages on 30 –35. Ingersoll praised the North American Review on 19, and Sparks reviewed Ingersoll’s speech in the January 1824 issue of the journal. Tocqueville consulted with Ingersoll on the subject of conventions during his American tour. See the journal entry at http://www.tocqueville .org/pa.htm. Accessed May 27, 2010. 32. Michel Chevalier, Society, Manners, and Politics in the United States, ed. John William Ward (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1961), 52, 185, 61– 62. 33. William Lee Miller, Arguing about Slavery: John Quincy Adams and the Great Battle

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in the United States Congress (New York: Vintage Press, 1998); Ronald P. Formisano, “State Development in the Early Republic: Substance and Structure, 1780 –1840” in Contesting Democracy: Substance and Structure in American Political History 1775 –2000 (Lawrence: University of Kansas Press, 2001), 7–35. 34. Whitman: Complete Poetry and Collected Prose (New York: Library of America, 1982), 8, 9, 50. 35. Nadia Urbinati, Mill on Democracy: From the Athenian Polis to Representative Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 9, 85 – 87. 36. Whitman: Complete Poetry and Collected Prose, 929. 37. On the Dewey-Lippmann debates, I have consulted Robert B. Westbrook, John Dewey and American Democracy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991), chap. 9 and Slavko Splichal, Public Opinion: Developments and Controversies in the Twentieth Century (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999), chap. 4. Westbrook and James T. Kloppenberg consider Dewey’s relationship to deliberative democracy in their contributions to the collection The Revival of Pragmatism: New Essays on Social Thought, Law, and Culture, ed. Morris Dickstein (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998). Melvin L. Rogers considers the place of religion in Dewey’s moral thought and relates it to deliberation in The Undiscovered Dewey: Religion, Morality, and the Ethos of Democracy (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009), chaps. 3 and 4. The Dewey-Lippmann debate paralleled several concerns that later emerged in the works of Frankfurt School theorists Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno and Jürgen Habermas, and that have been influential in the development of deliberative democracy theory. Dewey’s emphasis on the symbolic capacity of language marks a major difference from Habermas. See Mitchell Aboulafia, Myra Orbach Bookman, and Cathy Kemp, eds., Habermas and Pragmatism (London: Routledge, 2002). This volume contains several essays that compare the works of Dewey and Habermas and concludes with Habermas’s own reflections on Dewey. 38. Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion (New York: Macmillan, 1922, 1949); Lippmann, The Phantom Public (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1925). 39. Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York: Pantheon, 1988), 2. Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business (New York: Viking, 1985). Postman cited the Lincoln-Douglas debates as a highlight of American civic engagement in an earlier era. 40. John Dewey, The Public and Its Problems (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1927, 1954), 111, 114. Bessette observed that John Adams celebrated the New England town hall meeting and Thomas Jefferson planned for ward governments, offering two instances of the underlying structure of local governance that supported the representational forms of the federated national government (Mild Voice of Reason, 41– 42). 41. Bessette, Mild Voice of Reason, 50. 42. John Gastil and Peter Levine, eds., The Deliberative Democracy Handbooks: Strategies for Effective Civic Engagement in the Twenty-First Century (San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2005), 9 –14. 43. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition; Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking Press, 1963). The major texts on classical republicanism in the American Revolution are Bernard Bailyn, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1967); Gordon S. Wood, The Creation of the

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American Republic, 1776 –1787 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1969); and J. G. A. Pocock, The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003; orig. pub. 1975). Wood influentially concluded that liberal democracy came to dominate the United States after 1800 in The Radicalism of the American Revolution (New York: Vintage, 1991). Around the same time, Daniel T. Rodgers argued that republicanism had been overextended in “Republicanism: The Career of a Concept,” Journal of American History 79 ( June 1992), 11–38. A few historians remained interested in the debate, notably Daniel Walker Howe in Making the American Self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997) and Mark A. Noll, America’s God: From Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). A “hybrid” approach identifying the overlap of liberal and republican values is represented by James T. Kloppenberg’s “The Virtues of Liberalism: Christianity, Republicanism, and Ethics in Early American Political Discourse,” Journal of American History 74 ( June 1987), 9 –33; reprinted in The Virtues of Liberalism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). 44. Philip Pettit, Republicanism: A Theory of Freedom and Government (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 188 – 89 (citing Sunstein); 130; 277. 45. Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, Why Deliberative Democracy? (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 7. A third concern in these debates is the role of new media in shaping democratic deliberation. See Henry Jenkins and David Thorburn, eds., Democracy and New Media (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003); and Cass Sunstein, republic.com (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001). 46. Iris Marion Young, Inclusion and Democracy (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 46. 47. Cass R. Sunstein, Designing Democracy: What Constitutions Do (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001); Bruce Ackerman and James S. Fishkin, Deliberation Day (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2004); James S. Fishkin, When the People Speak: Deliberative Democracy and Public Consultation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Gastil and Levine, The Deliberative Democracy Handbook. 48. James Bohman, Democracy across Borders: From Dêmos to Dêmoi (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 2, 3 – 4, 8, 5. 49. Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996). Stephen Macedo, ed., Deliberative Politics: Essays on Democracy and Disagreement (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999) presents a series of essays that explore and critique Gutmann and Thompson’s book. Several of the essays focus on the gap between ideals and implementation in deliberative democracy theory. 50. Gutmann also discussed these issues in Democratic Education (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1987), citing Dewey as an influence (13 and passim). Russell Bentley, “Rhetorical Democracy,” in Talking Democracy: Historical Perspectives on Rhetoric and Democracy, ed. Benedetto Fontana, Cary J. Nederman, and Gary Remer (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2004), 115 –34; quoted passages on 133. 51. Martha C. Nussbaum, Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life (Boston: Beacon Press, 1995), 6 –7; Lynn Hunt, Inventing Human Rights: A History (New York: Norton, 2007), chap. 1; Robert E. Goodin, “Democratic Deliberation Within” in Debating Deliberative Democracy, ed. James S. Fishkin and Peter Laslett (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003), 54 –79, quoted passages on 55. David Wayne Thomas offers a strategy

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of Habermasian reading focused on the communicative unconscious of literary works in “Liberal Legitimation and Communicative Action in British India: Reading Flora Annie Steele’s On the Face of the Waters,” ELH: English Literary History 76 (Spring 2009): 153 – 87. 52. Iris Marion Young, “Activist Challenges to Deliberative Democracy,” in Debating Deliberative Democracy, ed. Fishkin and Laslett, 102 –20. Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe find the “rapid diffusion of social conflictuality” and the emergence of new social movements to be the central feature of neo-Marxian radical democracy in Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a Radical Democratic Politics, 2nd ed. (London: Verso Press, 2001), chap. 4, quote on 159. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri offer an account of contestatory democracy in Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004), citing Dewey as an influence on 198 –99. 53. Roberto Mangabeira Unger, “The Critical Legal Studies Movement,” Harvard Law Review 96 ( January 1983): 561– 675; Kimberlé Crenshaw, Neil Gotanda, Gary Peller, and Kendall Thomas, Critical Race Theory: The Key Writings That Formed the Movement (New York: New Press, 1996).

chapter two 1. Daniel Webster, “The Bunker Hill Monument,” in The Works of Daniel Webster (Boston: Little, Brown, 1851), 1:59 –78. The most comprehensive study of republican thought is Paul A. Rahe’s three-volume Republics Ancient and Modern (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1992). 2. Francois Furet and Pierre Rosanvallon discuss French republicanism in their contributions to The Invention of the Modern Republic, ed. Biancamaria Fontana (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 173 –91 and 192 –205. Rosanvallon discusses republican influences in The Demands of Liberty: Civil Society in France since the Revolution, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). Richard Wolin traces the history of French neorepublicanism in “The Republican Revival: Reflections on French Singularity” in The Frankfurt School Revisited and Other Essays on Politics and Society (New York: Routledge, 2006), 185 –209. Four histories of the United States that have influenced my analysis of this period are Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815 – 1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007); Merrill D. Peterson, The Great Triumvirate: Webster, Clay, and Calhoun (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987); Charles Sellars, The Market Revolution: Jacksonian America, 1815 –1846 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); and Sean Wilentz, The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005). 3. The history of the revolutions in Haiti and Spanish America is treated in J. H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492 –1830 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006) and Lester D. Langley, The Americas in the Age of Revolution 1750 –1850 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996). Literary and political ties in the hemisphere are explored by Anna Brickhouse in Transamerican Literary Relations and the Nineteenth-Century Public Sphere (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); Rodrigo Lazo, Writing to Cuba: Filibustering and Cuban Exiles in the United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); and Nicolás Kanellos, “José Alvarez de Toledo y Dubois and the Origins of Hispanic Publishing in the Early American Republic,” Early American Literature 43 (2008): 83 –100. The broader Atlantic world context was the subject of the conference at the American Antiquarian Society organized by David S. Shields and the volume of the same

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name, Liberty! Égalité! ¡Independencia!: Print Culture, Enlightenment, and Revolution in the Americas, 1776 –1838 (Worcester, MA: American Antiquarian Society, 2007). Wim Klooster addresses this geography in Revolutions in the Atlantic World: A Comparative History (New York: New York University Press, 2009). Jane G. Landers portrays the intersection of Atlantic world revolution and African diaspora in Atlantic Creoles in the Age of Revolutions (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2010). E. J. Hobsbawm’s The Age of Revolution 1789 –1848 (New York: Mentor, 1962) offers a general European history focused on politics. 4. I discuss the importance of oratory in American republicanism in Eloquence Is Power: Oratory and Performance in Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2000). Chapters 3, 4, and 7 are particularly relevant. 5. Montesquieu’s claim that “the government most conformable to nature is that which best agrees with the humor and disposition of the people in whose favor it is established” was a commonplace assumption in modern republican theorizing. Charles de Secondat, Baron de Montesquieu, The Spirit of the Laws (Amherst, NY: Prometheus Books, 2002), 6. 6. Simón Bolívar, “Address Delivered at the Inauguration of the Second National Congress of Venezuela in Angostura,” in Selected Writings of Bolivar, 2nd ed., comp. Vicente Lecuna, ed. Harold A. Bierck Jr., trans. Lewis Bertrand (New York: Colonial Press, 1951), 1:173 –97; Gilbert du Motier de Lafayette, “Sur le projet de loi relatif aux élections,” Mémoires, correspondance et manuscrits du Général Lafayette, publiés par sa famille (Paris: H. Fournier Ainé, 1838), 6:75 – 85; Daniel Webster, “First Settlement of New England,” in The Works of Daniel Webster (Boston: Little, Brown, 1851), 1:5 –50. 7. Daniel Béland, “Identity Politics and French Republicanism,” Society ( July/ August 2003): 66 –71; Pierre Rosanvallon, The Demands of Liberty, 4 – 6; Olivier Roy, Secularism Confronts Islam, trans. George Holoch (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). Iseult Honohan and Jeremy Jennings offer a brief comparison of the American and French republican traditions in their introduction to Republicanism in Theory and Practice (New York: Routledge, 2006), 8 –9. 8. Chávez has been a polarizing figure. John Lynch sees him as another instance of a Latin American authoritarian populist styling himself as the heir of Bolívar, which he suggests is a distortion of Bolívar’s views. Tariq Ali finds a genuine legacy of Bolívar in Chávez’s projects of continental unity, opposition to empire, and style of popular address. See Lynch, Simón Bolívar: A Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 304 and Ali, Pirates of the Caribbean: Axis of Hope (London: Verso, 2006), 137. Gabriel García Márquez offers a portrait of Bolívar that takes up these issues in The General in His Labyrinth (New York: Vintage Books, 2003; orig. pub. 1989). 9. John Adams, A Defence of the Constitutions of the Government of the United States of America (Aalen: Scientia Verlag, 1979); repr. of 3rd edition (Philadelphia, 1797). The Massachusetts Constitutional Convention and the Plymouth Oration are treated in all major biographies of Webster, including Irving H. Bartlett, Daniel Webster (New York: Norton, 1978), 81– 85; Maurice G. Baxter, One and Inseparable: Daniel Webster and the Union (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1984), 79 – 81; and Robert V. Remini, Daniel Webster: The Man and His Time (New York: Norton, 1997), 172 – 87. Wilentz discusses the revisions to state constitutions in The Rise of American Democracy, chap. 6. 10. Leonard Tennenhouse’s discussion of English colonial identity as a diasporic phenomenon is helpful here. See The Importance of Feeling English: American Literature

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and the British Diaspora, 1750 –1850 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), esp. 8, 13, 17. 11. Webster cited Cicero in Latin. My translation is from http://www.uah.edu/ society/texts/latin/classical/cicero/proflacco.html (accessed March 30, 2009). 12. See for example Reginald Horsman, Race and Manifest Destiny: The Origins of American Racial Anglo-Saxonism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 226 –27. The expansionist sentiments that Horsman quotes are at odds with Webster’s opposition a few years later to the Mexican-American War and the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which he opposed principally because he feared the expansion of slavery. As William R. Taylor shows in Cavalier and Yankee: The Old South and American National Character (New York: Oxford University Press, 1957, 1961; repr. 1993), the language of “race” referred to sectional identities. Anglo-Saxonism referred to the legacy of the Puritans; white Southerners were thought to be descendants of the Normans (15). Taylor finds his central opposition embodied in the contest between Webster and Robert Hayne in their 1830 Senate debate: “Hayne cast himself as a passionate Cavalier and slipped frequently into a military terminology of defense and attack. Webster was the transcendent Yankee, peaceable, cool and deliberate” (110). Other relevant accounts of sectional rivalries include Anne Norton, Alternative Americas: A Reading of Antebellum Political Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986) and Harlow W. Sheidley, Sectional Nationalism: Massachusetts Conservative Leaders and the Transformation of America 1815 –1836 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998). 13. John Lynch discusses the Angostura Address in Simón Bolívar, 119 –22. For a related discussion, see my “Histories of Democracy and Empire,” American Quarterly 59 (March 2007), 107–33, esp. 122 –24. 14. For the United States census statistics, see http://www.census.gov/population/ www/documentation/twps0056/tab01.xls. (Accessed March 30, 2009). Statistics on American Indian and Asian populations were first collected in the 1860 census. On Venezuela, see Lynch, Simón Bolívar, 10. Bolívar treated the theme of racial heterogeneity in similar terms in the Jamaica Letter of 1815. “Reply of a South American to a Gentleman of this Island,” Selected Writings of Bolívar, vol. 1, 103 –22. 15. Lynch cites Bolívar’s devotion to Rousseau, while also marking some key distinctions. See Simón Bolívar, 28, 33 –35. 16. Lynch discusses Bolívar’s distrust of the Roman Catholic Church on 32. 17. Sylvia Neely, Lafayette and the Liberal Ideal 1814 –1824: Politics and Conspiracy in an Age of Reaction (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1991); Lloyd Kramer, Lafayette in Two Worlds: Public Cultures and Personal Identities in an Age of Revolutions (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996). 18. Lafayette followed his liberal ally Antoine Destutt de Tracy in making this distinction between national and special governments, which Destutt de Tracy developed in his Commentaire sur Montesquieu (1807–9). See Kramer, Lafayette in Two Worlds, 58 – 60, 292n28. Thomas Jefferson translated the Commentaire in 1811. 19. On the Charter, see Neely, Lafayette and the Liberal Ideal, 17; Kramer, Lafayette in Two Worlds, 71. 20. Neely discusses Lafayette’s support for student activism in Lafayette and the Liberal Ideal, 110 –11. 21. Enrique Piñeyro included Webster as the sole North American along with Bolívar and other prominent Spanish American republican leaders in Biografías Americanas (Paris: Garnier Hermanos, [1906]). The exchange between Webster and Bolívar is tracked in the calendar of Webster’s correspondence on pages 467 and 475 of The Papers

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of Daniel Webster: Correspondence: Volume 2, 1825 –1829, ed. Charles M. Wiltse (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College for the University Press of New England, 1976). Webster wrote to Bolívar on September 11, 1826, and Bolívar responded the following January. Lafayette’s secretary recorded the gift and letter to Bolívar in A. Levasseur, Lafayette in America in 1824 and 1825; or, Journal of a Voyage to the United States, trans. John D. Godman, M.D. (Philadelphia: Carey and Lea, 1829), 247. The relevant correspondence between Lafayette and Bolívar can be found in Mémoires, 6: 212 –13; Letter to General Antonio José de Sucre, Selected Writings of Bolivar, vol. 2, 565; and Letter to General [The Marques of ] Lafayette, Selected Writings of Bolivar, vol. 2, 579. The Bolívar papers describe Lafayette’s gift as “a medallion of Washington, which today is preserved in the Casa Natal in Caracas” (Selected Writings of Bolivar, vol. 2, 565); Bolívar described it as “the image of Washington, some of his mementos, and one of the monuments of his glory” (579). 22. The ceremony at Bunker Hill and Webster’s speech are described in James Fenimore Cooper’s Notions of the Americans: Picked up by a Travelling Bachelor (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 510. 23. Richard Lyman Bushman, The Refinement of America: Persons, Houses, Cities (New York: Knopf, 1992). 24. Daniel Walker Howe explores the connection between government of the self and political self-government in The Making of the American Self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997). 25. James Delbourgo discusses Revolutionary uses of electrical imagery in A Most Amazing Scene of Wonders: Electricity and Enlightenment in Early America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). I relate Webster’s adaptations of this imagery to mesmeric theory and the telegraph in “The Emerging Media of Early America,” James Russell Wiggins Lecture in the History of the Book in American Culture, Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society 115 (2005): 205 –50. Kramer, Lafayette in Two Worlds, 8 –9. 26. The earlier celebration was held on August 27, 1824. Lafayette’s “discourse” is in Mémoires, correspondance et manuscrits du Général Lafayette, publiés par sa famille (Paris: H. Fournier Ainé, 1837), 6:168. 27. Boston Commercial Gazette, June 20, 1825, 2. 28. Lafayette’s correspondence with Webster is documented in The Papers of Daniel Webster: Correspondence, vols. 2 and 3, Charles M. Wiltse, ed. (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College for the University Press of New England, 1976, 1977). Excerpts from his letters to other Atlantic world leaders are collected in Mémoires, correspondance et manuscrits du Général Lafayette. 29. A Pilgrimage of Liberty: A Contemporary Account of the Triumphal Tour of General Lafayette through the Southern and Western States in 1825, as Reported by the Local Newspapers, comp. and ed. Edgar Ewing Brandon (Athens, OH: Lawhead Press, 1944), 17–18, 28, 176 –79. Other contemporary accounts of the tour include Levasseur’s Lafayette in America in 1824 and 1825; and An Officer in the Late Army, A Complete History of the Marquis de Lafayette, Major General in the Army of the United States of America, in the War of the Revolution; Embracing an Account of His Late Tour through the United States, to the Time of His Departure, September, 1825 (Hartford, CT: S. Andrus, 1846). Kramer describes the tour in chapter 6 of Lafayette in Two Worlds. Andrew Burstein emphasizes the American nationalist functions of the tour in the account in America’s Jubilee: How in 1826 a Generation Remembered Fifty Years of Independence (New York: Knopf, 2001), chap. 1. 30. Gretchen Murphy, Hemispheric Imaginings: The Monroe Doctrine and Narratives

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of U.S. Empire (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), intro. and chap. 1. Selected Writings of Bolivar, vol. 1, 289. 31. Daniel Webster, “The Panama Mission,” in The Works of Daniel Webster (Boston: Little, Brown, 1851), 3: 178 –217, quoted phrase on 214. 32. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Poem, Spoken Before the Phi Beta Kappa Society, August, 1834,” Collected Poems and Translations (New York: Library of America, 1994), 348 –56, quoted passages on 353. 33. Selected Writings of Bolivar, vol. 2, 765. 34. Kramer, Lafayette in Two Worlds, 244 –51. John Quincy Adams, “Lafayette,” in American Patriotism: Speeches, Letters, and Other Papers Which Illustrate the Foundation, the Development, the Preservation of the United States of America, comp. Selim H. Peabody (New York: John B. Alden, 1886), 309. 35. Daniel Webster, “Second Speech On Foot’s Resolution,” in The Works of Daniel Webster (Boston: Little, Brown, 1851), 3:270 –342, quotation on 342. 36. [Caleb Cushing], “Mr. Webster’s Discourse—Ante-colonial History of New England,” North American Review 15 ( July 1822), 21–51, quotation on 31. Cushing was from a prominent Boston family and went on to have a long career in state and federal legislatures. 37. [Nathan Hale], “Mexico,” NAR 14, (April 1822): 420 – 46, quoted passages on 420, 439, and 445. Hale was a Unitarian lawyer and journalist. He helped found the Review. 38. [ Jared Sparks], “South America,” NAR 19 ( July 1824): 158 –208, 170, 208. Sparks’s varied career included a period as a Unitarian minister, several years editing the Review, and a term as president of Harvard University. He was a major source for Alexis de Tocqueville’s Democracy in America. 39. [ Jared Sparks], “Alliance of the Southern Republics,” NAR 22 ( January 1826): 162 –76, 162, 167, 165, 172, 174. [Richard Clough Anderson Jr.], “Constitution of Colombia,” NAR 23 (October 1826): 314 – 49. 40. [Caleb Cushing], “Simon Bolivar,” NAR 28 ( January 1829): 203 –26 with quoted passages on 204 and 205; and “Bolivar and the Bolivian Constitution,” NAR 30 ( January 1830): 26 – 61, quotations from 30 and 31. 41. [William Bradford Reed], “Politics of Mexico,” 31 ( July 1830): 110 –54, 111, 147. Reed was an educator, journalist and politician who spent time in Mexico in the mid-1820s. 42. [Alexander Hill Everett], “Politics of Europe,” NAR 27 ( July 1828): 215 – 68, passages on 215, 249, 219; [Everett], “Politics of Europe,” NAR 30 (April 1830): 399 – 454, passage on 444. Alexander Hill Everett was a diplomat and politician as well as a man of letters. His most important posts included a term as ambassador to Spain in the late 1820s, and on his return he served as editor of the North American Review. 43. [Edward Everett], “The Prospect of Reform in Europe,” NAR 33 ( July 1831): 154 –90, passages on 154, 178, 175. In his long public career, Edward Everett held numerous prominent political and diplomatic posts. As a young man he taught at Harvard University, where his pupils included Ralph Waldo Emerson. He later served as the president of Harvard. 44. [George Ticknor], “Lafayette,” NAR 20 ( January 1825): 147– 80. At the time Ticknor was emerging as a prominent figure in the publishing world. [Edward Everett], “Lafayette in America,” NAR 30 ( January 1830): 216 –37.

chapter three 1. [Alexander H. Everett], “Cicero’s Republic,” North American Review 17 ( July 1823), 33 – 69. Cicero, On the Commonwealth and On the Laws, ed. James E. G. Zetzel

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(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), xx. After 600 one substantial portion known as the Dream of Scipio was preserved and a few other passages survived in paraphrases by other writers. 2. Mai recovered several of Cicero’s orations in 1814 and works by other authors in subsequent years. He later began serial publication of his discoveries, including “Scriptorum veterum nova collectio,” 10 vols. (1825 –38); “Classici auctores,” 10 vols. (1825 –38); “Spicilegium Romanum,” 10 vols. (1839 – 44); “Novum Patrum bibliotheca,” 7 vols. (1852 –54). “Angelo Mai,” Catholic Encyclopedia http://www.newadvent.org/ cathen/09538a.htm. Accessed 28 May 2008. 3. The Paris edition of De re publica was reviewed by this journal a second time in 1838. The Ciceronianism of the Review supports Gregory Clark and S. Michael Halloran’s contention that the culture outside the college walls “during the early years of the nineteenth century was not ‘literary’ in our sense of that term, but oratorical” (“Introduction: Transformations of Public Discourse in Nineteenth-Century America,” in Oratorical Culture in Nineteenth-Century America: Transformations in the Theory and Practice of Rhetoric [Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1993], 1–26, quotation on 3). They discuss the era’s neoclassicism in general and Ciceronianism in particular on 6 –7. Additional treatments of Cicero’s nineteenth-century influence include Van Wyck Brooks, The Flowering of New England, 1815 –1865 (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1936), chap. 2; Lyon Rathbun, “The Ciceronian Rhetoric of John Quincy Adams,” Rhetorica 18 (Spring 2000): 175 –215; and Mary Rosner, “Reflections on Cicero in NineteenthCentury England and America,” Rhetorica 4 (Spring 1986), 153 – 82. 4. My list of examples is taken from a search of the electronic archive The Making of America on February 22, 2010. The search turned up a total of 352 references to Cicero through 1835. A similar search on Demosthenes showed 129 references in the same period, including John Chipman Gray’s essay on “Demosthenes” in NAR 22 ( January 1826): 27–34. Gray suggests the reason for Cicero’s greater popularity when he notes that Cicero was standard fare in schools. While Latin was commonly taught, Greek was not, and the works of Demosthenes were harder to find. Moreover, Cicero’s philosophical works gave him a range that the Greek orator did not have. For these reasons, Cicero remained an important figure in the United States, even as the rise of democracy brought new attention to Demosthenes. 5. Van Wyck Brooks, Flowering of New England, 32. Brooks stressed the pervasive influence of Cicero in the Boston and Cambridge of 1815. See chap. 2, passim. William Wells, the editor and pedagogue, appears also to be the Wells of Wells & Lilly, the press that published the NAR from 1815 –1816. Frank Luther Mott, A History of American Magazines 1850 –1865 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1938), 219. Lyon Rathbun, “The Ciceronian Rhetoric of John Quincy Adams,” 175 –215. 6. [W. Tudor], “Latin Classicks,” NAR 2 (November 1815), 129 –30, quotations on 130. Tudor was a founder and the first editor of the Review. He wrote a biography of James Otis and later served as a diplomat. Anthony Everitt, Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome’s Greatest Politician (New York: Random House, 2001). 7. “M. Tullii Ciceronis Opera Omnia,” NAR 4 ( January 1817), 269 –70, quotations on 270. 8. The passages from Cicero are quoted from the Cambridge edition of On the Commonwealth cited above. The passage here is on 3. 9. Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815 –1848 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 165. In The Progress of Religious

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Ideas, through Successive Ages (New York: Charles S. Francis, 1869), 1:365 – 66, Lydia Maria Child summed up the common view of Cicero’s attitude toward Roman religion when she identified him as a follower of Plato who believed in a Supreme Deity but mocked the stories that the poets told of the subordinate gods. 10. Jay Fliegelman, introduction to Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland, or The Transformation (New York: Penguin, 1991), vii–xlii; Christopher Looby, Voicing America: Language, Literary Form, and the Origins of the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), chap. 3, esp. 158 – 65. Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleepwalker, to which is annexed The Death of Cicero, a Fragment vol. 3 (Philadelphia: H. Maxwell, 1800). Brown published two shorter works on Cicero around this time, “On the Merits of Cicero” in The Literary Magazine and American Register 3 (May 1805) and “Ciceronians” in The Literary Magazine and American Register 3 ( June 1805). All three pieces are reprinted in Charles Brockden Brown, Wieland or The Transformation: An American Tale with Related Texts, eds. Stephen Shapiro and Philip Barnard (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing, 2009). 11. J. A. Leo Lemay, The Life of Benjamin Franklin, vol. 2, Printer and Publisher, 1730 –1747 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2005), 286, 393. M .T. Cicero’s Cato Major, or His Discourse of Old-Age, trans. James Logan (Philadelphia: B. Franklin, 1744), iv–v. Marcus Tullius Cicero’s Cato Major, or A discourse on old age addressed to Titus Pomponius Atticus with explanatory notes by Benjamin Franklin (Philadelphia: W. Duane, 1809). James N. Green and David D. Hall discuss Franklin’s edition of Logan’s translation and the subsequent attribution of the translation to Franklin himself in A History of the Book in America, Vol. 1: The Colonial Book in the Atlantic World, eds. Hugh Amory and David D. Hall (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 268 – 69, 428. On Franklin’s rejection of polemic divinity, see Jesse M. Lander, “Franklin’s ‘Disputatious Turn’: Reading Conversions, Rhetoric, and the Transatlantic Rise of Politeness,” unpublished essay, presented June 10, 2005 at the Histories of Print, Manuscript, and Performance in America conference, American Antiquarian Society, Worcester, Mass. 12. Kenneth Cmiel, Democratic Eloquence: The Fight over Popular Speech in NineteenthCentury America (New York: William Morrow, 1990). “The Whistle” can be found in Noah Webster, An American Selection of Lessons in Reading and Speaking (New York: G. and R. Waite, for C. Davis, 1801), 93 –95. “A Teacher,” in The American Orator (Lexington, KY: Joseph Charless, 1807), 253 –55. Eric Slauter discusses the aesthetic and political issues surrounding Franklin’s speech, including its relation to the question of consensus at the Convention, in The State as a Work of Art: The Cultural Origins of the Constitution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 1– 8. 13. Leonard Tennenhouse rightly stresses the importance of education and eloquence in the diasporic adaptation of English culture that shaped the early American republic. See The Importance of Feeling English: American Literature and the British Diaspora, 1750 –1850 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), esp. chap. 2. 14. The nature of Shakespeare’s interest in and commitment to early modern republicanism has been the subject of substantial scholarly analysis. Anthony Di Matteo offered an overview in “Was Shakespeare a Republican? A Review Essay,” College Literature 34 (2007): 196 –212. Andrew Hadfield provided the most sustained republican treatment of Shakespeare in his Shakespeare and Republicanism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). Hadfield discussed the pervasive influence of Cicero in early modern culture and analyzed Shakespeare’s representation of Cicero in Julius Caesar, in which he is portrayed as “one of the central figures of the republic, whose goal

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was a culture of deliberative oratory.” He also discussed the influence of De Officiis on Shakespeare’s thought. See 168 –73. 15. Thomas Sheridan, British Education: Or, the Source of the Disorders of Great Britain (New York: Garland Pub., 1970; facsimile ed. of Dublin: George Faulkner, 1756). 16. Before 1800, the Course of Lectures on Elocution had been reprinted three times in Dublin and four times in London. There were two American imprints of this text, the first of which appeared in Providence in 1796 –97; a second edition was published in Troy, New York, in 1803. This was the final reprinting of the lectures until they were brought out in a facsimile edition from the Scolar Press in 1968. 17. W. Benzie, The Dublin Orator: Thomas Sheridan’s Influence on Eighteenth-Century Rhetoric and Belles Lettres (Menston, UK: University of Leeds Press, 1972), 56 – 63. 18. Marvin Carlson describes the literary context that led to controversies over Shakespeare’s skills as a dramatist in Theories of the Theatre: A Historical and Critical Survey, from the Greeks to the Present (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), chap. 9. 19. Before Shakespeare’s works entered the language curriculum they were already popular in British North America. See Kenneth Silverman’s A Cultural History of the American Revolution (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987) and Jason Shaffer, Performing Patriotism: National Identity in the Colonial and Revolutionary American Theater (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). 20. Paul C. Edwards noted that Shakespeare provides the model text in thirteen out of eighty-one examples in James Burgh’s The Art of Speaking; in one-third of Enfield’s 142 examples; and in one-half the passages included in Walker’s Academic Speaker. See “Elocution and Shakespeare: An Episode in Literary Taste,” Shakespeare Quarterly 35 (Autumn 1984), 314. Burgh’s Art of Speaking was reprinted in Philadelphia in 1775, the year after Burgh published his republican-themed Political Disquisitions, which sided with the colonies against the British monarchy. Fliegelman discussed the elocutionary revolution in Declaring Independence. He mentioned Burgh on 31. 21. Lord Wedderburn, Benjamin Franklin’s opponent in the “Cockpit,” studied with Sheridan to tame his Scottish brogue. He was just one of many aspiring individuals from the British periphery who took speech lessons in order to soften an uncouth accent. Benzie, Dublin Orator, 24. 22. In “Elocution and Shakespeare” Paul C. Edwards claims that the British elocutionists’ interest in Shakespeare shifted from an early emphasis on oratory to, by the later eighteenth century, a concern with literary taste and an interest in communicating the passions. In the United States oratory, and in particular civic rhetoric, remained central to the elocutionary use of Shakespeare through much of the nineteenth century. 23. William Scott, Lessons in Elocution: Or, a Selection of Pieces in Prose and Verse, or the Improvement of Youth in Reading and Speaking, 4th ed. (Boston: Isaiah Thomas, 1814), 9. 24. I have spot-checked several editions of Bingham without finding any Shakespeare passages. 25. Noah Webster, An American Selection of Lessons in Reading and Speaking (Philadelphia: Young and M’Culloch, 1787), 5 – 6. This was a reprinting of the third volume of Webster’s Grammatical Institute, repackaged and with a new preface to emphasize its American contents. 26. Increase Cooke, Sequel to the American Orator, or, Dialogues for Schools (New Haven, CT: Increase Cooke, 1813). The Folger library’s copy of the 1818 edition of The

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American Orator includes this image as well. Increase Cooke, The American Orator, or Elegant Extracts in Prose and Poetry (New Haven, CT: Sidney’s Press, 1818). The same edition in the American Antiquarian Society’s collection has a portrait of George Washington in this spot. Other editions have no illustration there. 27. Don B. Wilmeth and Tice Miller, Cambridge Guide to American Theatre (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 346. On Shakespeare as a popular icon in the early nineteenth-century United States, see Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow/Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988); Kim C. Sturgess, Shakespeare and the American Nation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); and Marvin McAllister, White People Do Not Know How To Behave at Entertainments Designed for Ladies and Gentlemen of Color: William Brown’s African and American Theater (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2003). 28. E. G. Welles, A. M., comp., The Orator’s Guide, or Rules for Speaking and Composing, from the Best Authorities (Philadelphia: G. L. Austin, 1822), 3 – 4. 29. Jonathan Barber, Member of the Royal College of Surgeons, London, A Practical Treatise on Gesture, Chiefly Abstracted from Austin’s Chironomia; Adapted to the Use of Students, and Arranged According to the Method of Instruction in Harvard University (Cambridge, MA: Hilliard and Brown, Booksellers to the University, 1831). 30. For a longer discussion of the ties between Shakespeare and republican culture in the United States, see my “Eloquent Shakespeare” in Shakespearean Educations: Power, Citizenship, Performance, ed. Coppélia Kahn, Heather Nathans, and Mimi Godfrey (forthcoming from the University of Delaware Press). On African American uses of Shakespeare see Michael Warner et al., “A Soliloquy ‘Lately Spoken at the African Theatre’: Race and the Public Sphere in New York City, 1821” in Warner, Publics and Counterpublics (New York: Zone Books, 2002), 225 – 68; Sturgess, Shakespeare and the American Nation, esp. 154 on Douglass; and McAllister, White People Do Not Know How To Behave. Stephen Greenblatt, “Shakespeare & the Uses of Power,” NYRB (April 12, 2007), 75 –77, 81– 82. The Folger Shakespeare Library’s website “Shakespeare in American Life” includes a page titled “Shakespeare and the Politicians” and links to remarks by prominent public figures (Walter Mondale, Janet Reno, and Alan Simpson) about their interest in Shakespeare. http://www.shakespeareinamericanlife.org/identity/ politicians/index.cfm. Accessed March 31, 2009. 31. Benjamin Franklin, “Remarks concerning the Savages of North-America” (1783), in Franklin, Writings (New York: Library of America, 1987), 969 –74; Pierre Clastres, Society against the State: The Leader as Servant and the Humane Uses of Power among the Indians of the Americas (New York: Urizen Books, 1977); Sandra M. Gustafson, Eloquence Is Power: Oratory and Performance in Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2000), chap. 3. 32. James Axtell, The Invasion Within: The Contest of Cultures in Colonial North America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). 33. Richard Rorty, “Religion as Conversation-Stopper,” Philosophy and Social Hope (London: Penguin Books, 1999), 168 –74. Rorty responded to arguments by Richard John Neuhaus, The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America, 2nd ed. (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1986); and Stephen L. Carter, The Culture of Disbelief: How American Law and Politics Trivialize Religious Devotion (New York: Basic Books, 1993). Garry Wills discussed the roles of secularity and faith in the 1988 U.S. presidential campaign in Under God: Religion and American Politics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1990). Frank Lambert, Religion in American Politics: A Short History (Prince-

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ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), traced the national debate to the founding era. In Democracy and Disagreement (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996), Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson made the problem of religious belief central to their definition of deliberative democracy in their examination of the abortion debate in the United States. See, for example, pages 3 and 5. 34. The two major works are Donald G. Mathews, “The Second Great Awakening as an Organizing Process, 1780 –1830: An Hypothesis,” American Quarterly 21 (1969): 23 – 43 and Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989). 35. Sandra M. Gustafson, Eloquence Is Power, 12 –33. 36. [ John Gorham Palfrey], “Pulpit Eloquence,” NAR 10 ( January 1820): 204 –18; [Thomas Cogswell Upham], “Extemporaneous Preaching,” NAR 19 (October 1824): 297–303. 37. Nathan O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity; Susan Juster, Doomsayers: Anglo-American Prophecy in the Age of Revolution (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2003); David S. Reynolds, Faith in Fiction: The Emergence of Religious Literature in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981); Dawn Coleman, “The Unsentimental Woman Preacher of Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” American Literature 80 ( June 2008): 265 –92. 38. Sydney E. Ahlstrom, A Religious History of the American People (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1974), pt. 4. 39. George Willis Cooke, Unitarianism in America: A History of Its Origins and Development (Boston: American Unitarian Association, 1910), 114, 124ff. 40. James W. Fraser, Pedagogue for God’s Kingdom: Lyman Beecher and the Second Great Awakening (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1985); Vincent Harding, A Certain Magnificence: Lyman Beecher and the Transformation of American Protestantism, 1775 –1863 (New York: Carlson, 1991). The founding of Yale Divinity School in 1822 and the development of the New Haven theology led by Nathaniel Taylor were central features of the retooling of Calvinism to meet the Unitarian challenge. William R. Sutton discussed Beecher’s role in promoting the New Haven theology, with its “rationalist and democratic melioration of Calvinist revivalism,” in “Benevolent Calvinism and the Moral Government of God: The Influence of Nathaniel W. Taylor on Revivalism in the Second Great Awakening,” Religion and American Culture 2 (Winter 1992): 23 – 47; quotation on 23. He addressed the importance of republican thought on 26. 41. Charles E. Hambrick-Stowe, Charles G. Finney and the Spirit of American Evangelicalism (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdmans, 1996). 42. William Ellery Channing, “The Unitarian Controversy,” in The Unitarian Controversy 1819 –1823, ed. Bruce Kuklick (New York: Garland, 1987), 1:3 – 47, quoted passages on 5 –9. 43. Conrad Cherry provided a valuable discussion of this question in “Nature and the Republic: The New Haven Theology,” New England Quarterly 51 (December 1978): 509 –26. 44. Lyman Beecher, “The Republican Elements of the Old Testament,” in Works (Boston: John P. Jewett, 1852), 1:176 –90. This sermon seems to have been part of the series “Lectures on Political Atheism” that he began at Park Street Church in Boston on Nov. 27, 1829, and that were later given in Cincinnati before being published. The Autobiography of Lyman Beecher, ed. Barbara M. Cross (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1961), 1:158. Thanks to Mark Noll for help identifying this source. 45. Lyman Beecher, On the Importance of Assisting Young Men of Piety and Talents in

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Obtaining an Education for the Gospel Ministry (Andover, MA: Printed for the New England Tract Society by Flagg and Gould, 1815). 46. Modern rhetorical texts emphasized the blending of reason and emotion, and Hugh Blair based aesthetics on natural taste “assisted by reason.” On Blair, see The Autobiography of Lyman Beecher, ed. Barbara M. Cross, 1:31, 398. 47. James W. Fraser, Pedagogue for God’s Kingdom, 53 –54. 48. Charles G. Finney, Sermons on Important Subjects (New York: John S. Taylor, 1836), 3 – 42. Quoted passages are on 10, 15. 49. Autobiography of Lyman Beecher, 2:67. 50. Charles G. Finney, Lectures on Religion, ed. William G. McLoughlin (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1960; orig. 1835). This work is widely credited with shaping modern American Protestantism. 51. Both sermons are in Charles G. Finney, Sermons on Important Subjects (New York: John S. Taylor, 1836). Quoted passages are on 45, 20 –21, and 21–22. In a private communication, Mark Noll explained the textual history of these sermons: “Evidentally Finney preached a two-part sermon called ‘Sinners Bound to Change Their Own Hearts’ or sometimes ‘How to Change Your Heart,’ from late Aug. 1831 to late April 1832 (from David B. Chesebrough, Charles G. Finney: Revivalistic Rhetoric, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2002, p. 162, in section entitled ‘Chronology of Selected Sermons,’ pp. 161–166). Asa Rand published ‘Depravity and Regeneration,’ in The Volunteer 1 (Dec. 1831): 136 –50, which included an abstract of a Finney sermon from Ezekiel 18:31, evidently one of the two above-mentioned sermons, and a refutation. Finney was distressed at the garbled versions of the sermons that were getting about, and so he wrote a new version of ‘Sinners Bound to Change Their Own Hearts,’ which was published separately in December 1834 by John S. Taylor of New York; this is the sermon that was put first in the book called Doctrinal Sermons of 1835, which in turn was often reprinted under the title, Sermons on Various Subjects. This information is from notes 91 to 93 on p. 350 of The Memoirs of Charles G. Finney: The Complete Restored Text, ed. Garth M. Rosell and Richard A. G. Dupuis (Grand Rapids, MI: Zondervan, 1989).” 52. Autobiography of Lyman Beecher, 1:386. 53. In Pedagogue for God’s Kingdom, James W. Fraser described Beecher’s ideal as the New England town meeting writ large (41). Fraser discussed the New Lebanon conference on 66. In his introduction to Charles Grandison Finney, Lectures on Revivals of Religion, William G. McLoughlin noted that there was little difference theologically speaking between Beecher and Finney, described their alliance, and dated their break as taking place sometime after 1835. See xvii–xxi.

chapter four 1. James Sterling Young, The Washington Community 1800 –1828 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1966). Robert V. Remini provides an overview of Clay’s innovations in Henry Clay: Statesman for the Union (New York: Norton, 1993), 81– 82. Historians differ over the degree of success that Clay achieved. Remini credits Clay with immense skill at producing majorities to pass legislation. For a skeptical view, see Young, 131–35. 2. “Biographical Sketch of Henry Clay” in The Speeches of Henry Clay (Philadelphia: H. C. Carey, 1827), vii–xx, esp. xix–xx. The authorship of this sketch is unclear. According to Merrill D. Peterson, the volume was compiled by a Lexington journalist (The Great Triumvirate: Webster, Clay, and Calhoun [New York: Oxford University Press, 1987], 148).

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3. [Edward Everett], “Speeches of Henry Clay,” North American Review 25 (October 1827): 425 –51. As early as 1821 Everett had begun to analyze deliberative bodies in a review of the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention focused on the arguments of Joseph Story and Daniel Webster. The essay includes an invented dialogue between Montesquieu and Franklin. [Edward Everett], “The Speeches of Mr. Justice Story and of Mr. Webster,” North American Review 12 (April 1821): 340 –75. Perry Miller described “voluminous” evidence of Everett’s influence on young Bostonians in the 1820s. See The Transcendentalists: An Anthology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1950), 20. Everett is best remembered today as Emerson’s teacher and as the headline orator at Gettysburg whose prolix, classicizing commemorative oration was quickly overshadowed by the concise, elegant, and truly classic dedication by President Abraham Lincoln. Garry Wills both credits Everett for creating the cultural conditions that made Lincoln’s speech possible and dismisses the oratorical tradition that Everett represented in Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words That Remade America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992). Wills overstates the shift from Roman to Greek models, as does Caroline Winterer in The Culture of Classicism: Ancient Greece and Rome in American Intellectual Life 1780 –1910 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002). 4. James Perrin Warren notes Everett’s importance to the antebellum “culture of eloquence” and the criticism directed at him by reformers such as Wendell Phillips in Culture of Eloquence: Oratory and Reform in Antebellum America (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1999), chap.1, esp. 5 –7. 5. Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Letters and Social Aims (Boston: Houghton, Mifflin, [1903 –1904]), 8:220. 6. Edward Everett, “Webster’s Speeches,” NAR 41 ( July 1835): 231–51, quoted passages on 231–32. 7. 1 Sam. 28. 8. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Collected Poems and Translations (New York: Library of America, 1994), 332; “Poem, Spoken Before the Phi Beta Kappa Society, August, 1834,” 348 –56, 355. 9. Webster’s autobiographical fragment appears in Charles M. Wiltse, ed., The Papers of Daniel Webster: Correspondence (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England for Dartmouth College, 1974), with the quoted passage on 1:21. Four collections of Webster’s speeches appeared during his lifetime, beginning with Speeches and Forensic Arguments in 1830, with subsequent versions in 1835 and 1843. Edward Everett edited the authorized version, The Works of Daniel Webster, 6 vols. (Boston: Little, Brown, 1851). See Craig R. Smith, Daniel Webster and the Oratory of Civil Religion (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005), 276. 10. Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Complete Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson: Letters and Social Aims, 8:85. E. L. Magoon, Living Orators in America (New York: Baker and Scribner, 1849); Edward G. Parker, The Golden Age of American Oratory (Boston: Whittemore, Niles, and Hall, 1857), 55; Edwin P. Whipple, “Daniel Webster as a Master of English Style,” in The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster (Boston: Little, Brown, 1879), xiv. This line of appreciation for Webster’s oratory was carried into the twentieth century by literary historian Julian Willis Abernethy in American Literature (New York: Maynard, Merill, 1902) and by Senator Henry Cabot Lodge in The Cambridge History of English and American Literature: An Encyclopedia in Eighteen Volumes, ed. A.W. Ward, A.R. Waller, W. P. Trent, J. Erskine, S. P. Sherman, and C. Van Doren, vol. 16 (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1918).

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More recently, Edwin Black emphasized Webster’s sentimentalism in Rhetorical Questions: Studies of Public Discourse (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), chap. 4. Other works that have informed my interpretation of Webster’s style include Robert A. Ferguson, Law and Letters in American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), chap. 8; Paul D. Erickson, The Poetry of Events: Daniel Webster’s Rhetoric of the Constitution and the Union (New York: New York University Press, 1986); Lawrence Buell, New England Literary Culture: From Revolution through Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), chap. 6; and Craig R. Smith, Daniel Webster and the Oratory of Civil Religion (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005). 11. Sandra M. Gustafson, “Daniel Webster and the Making of Modern Liberty in the Atlantic World” in Liberty! Égalité! ¡Independencia!: Print Culture, Enlightenment, and Revolution in the Americas, 1776 –1838 (Worcester, MA: American Antiquarian Society, 2007); Gustafson, “Histories of Democracy and Empire,” American Quarterly 59 (March 2007): 107–33, esp. 118 –22. 12. In Sectional Nationalism: Massachusetts Conservative Leaders and the Transformation of America 1815 –1836 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1998), Harlowe Sheidley argued that in the Hayne debates Webster and his conservative New England allies “exploited a national crisis in a bid for national power, positioning their own sectional agenda as American nationalism” (168). 13. Daniel Webster, “Basis of the Senate,” in Works of Daniel Webster, 3:8 –25, 11, 23. 14. See my discussion of Trollope and Chevalier in Chapter 1. 15. Daniel Webster, “First Settlement of New England,” in Works of Daniel Webster, 1:5 –50, quoted passage on 45 – 46. 16. Antony Black, “Concepts of Civil Society in Pre-Modern Europe,” in Civil Society: History and Possibilities, ed. Sudipta Kaviraj and Sunil Khilnani (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 33 –38, quotation on 36. Black’s emphasis contradicts Eric Cheyfitz’s contention in The Poetics of Imperialism: Translation and Colonization from “The Tempest” to “Tarzan” (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997) that rhetoric and civility served principally as tools of imperial domination. 17. Daniel Webster, “The Dartmouth College Case,” in Works of Daniel Webster, 5:462 –501, quotation on 500. Chief Justice Marshall agreed with Webster’s analysis of the case, and the effect of Marshall’s decision was to foster an “elite public sphere” of cultural stewardship apart from state control and thus buffered from partisan politics. Johann N. Neem, Creating a Nation of Joiners: Democracy and Civil Society in Early National Massachusetts (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 74 –75, 117. 18. As I have noted, Webster publicly supported the Greek and Spanish American independence movements. Robert V. Remini described Webster’s efforts to support Cherokee autonomy in Daniel Webster: The Man and His Time (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997), 447. 19. Remini, Daniel Webster, 212; “The Revolution in Greece,” in Works of Daniel Webster, 3:60 –93, quotations on 61, 74, 85. 20. “The Panama Mission,” in Works of Daniel Webster, 3:178 –217, quoted passages on 215 –16, 200. 21. “Discourse in Commemoration of the Lives and Services of John Adams and Thomas Jefferson,” in Works of Daniel Webster, 1:113 –50, quoted passage on 148. 22. “Second Speech on Foot’s Resolution,” in Works of Daniel Webster, 3:270 –342. I have used the familiar title “The Second Reply to Hayne.” In Daniel Webster and the Oratory of Civil Religion, 118, Craig R. Smith estimates that over 100,000 copies of the speech were printed. The best accounts of the debate are in Maurice G. Baxter, One and In-

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separable: Daniel Webster and the Union (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1984), chap. 11, and in Peterson, The Great Triumvirate, chap. 4. 23. The effect that Webster describes here is one that Cass R. Sunstein analyzed in his discussion of “group polarization” in Designing Democracy: What Constitutions Do (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 22 –27 and passim. 24. One observer claimed that on this occasion Webster spoke with the vigor, clarity, and effect of Shakespeare, which he contrasted with Hayne’s “headlongness.” Peterson, The Great Triumvirate, 175. 25. Harriet Martineau, Retrospect of Western Travel (London: Saunders and Otley, 1838), 1:173. 26. In On Compromise and Rotten Compromises (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), Avishai Margalit identifies the violation of human rights as the hallmark of a rotten compromise. By this standard, the Compromise of 1850 would clearly qualify as one. In a letter written shortly before his speech on the Compromise Measures, Webster described slavery as “a continued and permanent violation of human rights.” He went on to argue for its gradual eradication fostered by the slow spread of Christianity. In a letter written a few days earlier he struck a similar note and quoted Hamlet on the inscrutable and inexorable ends of providence. The Papers of Daniel Webster: Correspondence, ed. Charles M. Wiltse and Michael J. Birkner (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England for Dartmouth College, 1986), 7:10 –12. Webster maintained with considerable consistency that slavery was evil and should be eradicated; that the Atlantic world slave trade should be abolished; that slavery should not be allowed in new territories; and that the Constitution allowed it to exist in the original states, and consequently it could only be terminated in those states by the state governments. 27. The standard scholarly biography is James Atkins Shackford, David Crockett: The Man and the Legend (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1956). Additional biographical information is in Stanley J. Folmsbee and Anna Grace Catron, “The Early Career of David Crockett,” The East Tennessee Historical Society’s Publications 28 (1956): 58 – 85, and Folmsbee and Catron, “David Crockett: Congressman,” The East Tennessee Historical Society’s Publications 29 (1957), 40 –78. The far more numerous works on Crockett’s popular image include Constance Rourke, Davy Crockett (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1934); Walter Blair, Davy Crockett: Frontier Hero (New York: Coward-McCann, 1955); Catherine L. Albanese, “Savage, Sinner, and Saved: Davy Crockett, Camp Meetings, and the Wild Frontier,” American Quarterly 33 (Winter 1981): 482 –501; Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “Davy Crockett as Trickster: Pornography, Liminality, and Symbolic Inversion in Victorian America,” in Disorderly Conduct: Visions of Gender in Victorian America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 90 –108; Michael A. Lofaro, ed., Davy Crockett: The Man, the Legend, the Legacy, 1786 –1986 (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1985); Michael A. Lofaro and Joe Cummings, ed., Crockett at Two Hundred: New Perspectives on the Man and the Myth (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1989); Paul Andrew Hutton, “ ‘Going to Congress and making allmynacks is my trade’: Davy Crockett, His Almanacs, and the Evolution of a Frontier Legend,” Journal of the Old West 37 (April 1998): 10 –22. 28. David Crockett, A Narrative of the Life of David Crockett of the State of Tennessee (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1973). Lewis Hyde, Trickster Makes This World: Mischief, Myth, and Art (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998), 7, 9. 29. Timothy R. Mahoney, “ ‘A Common Band of Brotherhood’: Male Subcultures, the Booster Ethos, and the Origins of Urban Social Order in the Midwest of the 1840s,”

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Journal of Urban History 25 ( July 1999): 619 – 46, esp. 629. Rowland Berthoff, “ ‘A Little Nonsense Now and Then’: Conventional Humor in Indiana, 1850,” Indiana Magazine of History 90 ( June 1994): 109 –26. Walter Blair, “Burlesques in Nineteenth-Century American Humor” and “Popularity of Nineteenth-Century Humorists,” both in On Humor: The Best from American Literature, ed. Louis J. Budd and Edwin H. Cady (Durham: Duke University Press, 1992), 1–12, 13 –32. Neil Harris, Humbug: The Art of P. T. Barnum (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). On more recent developments see Don L. F. Nilsen, “The Social Functions of Political Humor,” Journal of Popular Culture 24 (Winter 1990): 35 – 47. 30. Milton Rickels and Patricia Rickels, Seba Smith (Boston: Twayne, 1977). John Quincy Adams, The Diaries of John Quincy Adams: A Digital Collection, Diary 39, entry dated November 26, 1833, pages 189 –90. http://www.masshist.org/jqadiaries/doc .cfm?id=jqad39_189. Accessed March 9, 2010. 31. Nathaniel Hawthorne, Tales and Sketches (New York: Library of America, 1996), 68 – 87, 78. 32. Thomas E. Scruggs refuted the view offered by Shackford and Vernon Parrington that Crockett allowed himself to become a pawn of the Whigs, arguing rather that Crockett’s political commitments led him into the Whig alliance. See “Davy Crockett and the Thieves of Jericho: An Analysis of the Shackford-Parrington Conspiracy Theory,” Journal of the Early Republic 19 (Fall 1999), 481–98. 33. James Atkins Shackford described Crockett’s clash with Polk over his amendment to the Vacant Land Bill in David Crockett: The Man and the Legend, 99 –104. See also Stanley Folmsbee and Anna Catron, “David Crockett: Congressman,” 45 – 60; and Paul Andrew Hutton, “Mr. Crockett Goes to Washington,” 21–28. 34. Stanley Folmsbee and Anna Catron, “David Crockett, Congressman,” 45; Paul Andrew Hutton, “Mr. Crockett Goes to Washington,” 26 –27; Address of Mr. Crockett, to the Voters of the Ninth Congressional District of the State of Tennessee; Together with His Remarks in the House of Representatives, January 5, 1829 (Washington: Gales and Seaton, 1829), 12 –13. 35. House of Representatives, Register of Debates, 20 Cong., 2 sess., 161– 67, 203 –11. The much briefer accounts in the House Journal are on 121–23 and 155 –56 of the volume for this session. 36. David Crockett, An Account of Col. Crockett’s Tour to the North and Down East (Philadelphia: Carey and Hart, 1835), 24. 37. The land bill speech is cited in n22 above. David Crockett, Speech of Mr. Crockett, of Tennessee, on the Bill Proposing to Construct a National Road from Buffalo to New Orleans (Washington: Duff Green, 1830). 38. A Sketch of the Remarks of the Hon. David Crockett,” in [ Jeremiah Evarts, ed.], Speeches on the Passage of the Bill for the Removal of the Indians, Delivered in the Congress of the United States, April and May, 1830 (Boston: Perkins and Marvin, 1830), 251–53. The volume also includes a speech by Edward Everett. 39. James Kirke Paulding, The Lion of the West Retitled The Kentuckian, or A Trip to New York, rev. John Augustus Stone and William Bayle Bernard, ed. James N. Tidwell (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1954). Nimrod Wildfire, Paulding’s frontiersman who quickly came to be associated with Crockett, engages in a good-natured though misguided romantic pursuit of “Mrs. Wollope,” a thinly veiled caricature of Frances Trollope. Crockett attended a performance of The Lion of the West at the Park Theater in New York in April 1831. 40. [Matthew St. Clair Clarke], Sketches and Eccentricities of Colonel David Crockett of

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West Tennessee (New York: J. and J. Harper, 1833). The “Chronicle” is printed on pages 129 –36. I have not been able to find a separate publication of Huntsman’s tale, which Clarke appears to have included in its entirety. 41. The absence of references to Crockett in Webster’s papers suggests that the alliance between Crockett and Webster that Huntsman portrayed was largely fictive, but the two did meet and sometimes shared a platform, as they did in an 1834 Fourth of July celebration in Philadelphia. The newspaper account of the festivities includes toasts to Lafayette, to Clay, to democracy, to republican institutions, and to Major Jack Downing. Webster was toasted as a pillar of republicanism and an opponent of despotism. Crockett was toasted as a “democrat of the Jefferson school” and responded with a toast to the Whigs. “National Jubilee. Democratic Whig Festival at the Hermitage—First Congressional District,” Philadelphia Inquirer 11 ( July 12, 1834), 2. Crockett described the event, including his speech, in Tour to the North and Down East, 129 – 40. 42. Crockett was born in the short-lived state of Franklin, and he owned a copy of the 1825 edition of the Autobiography which bears his signature. Richard Boyd Hauck described Franklin’s influence on Crockett in Crockett: A Bio-Bibliography (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1982), 5 – 6. Hutton notes that Crockett’s autobiography was “clearly influenced by Benjamin Franklin’s classic autobiography” in “ ‘Going to Congress and making allmynacks is my trade,’” 12. 43. John William Ward, Andrew Jackson: Symbol for an Age (London: Oxford University Press, 1953, 1955), 83 – 84. John Quincy Adams tried to derail the conferral of the degree, only to be told by Harvard president Josiah Quincy, “ ‘as the people have twice decided that this man knows law enough to be their ruler, it is not for Harvard College to maintain that they are mistaken’” (quoted on 83). Jackson’s reaction to the traditional Latin address that he could not understand was the source of much humorous and outraged comment. 44. Michael P. Zuckert, The Natural Rights Republic (South Bend, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1996). Sandra M. Gustafson, Eloquence Is Power: Oratory and Performance in Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2000), 161– 63. The ignorant frontier legislator who can barely read or write has been a stock type in fictions of American politics at least since Aphra Behn offered a contemptuous portrait of ignorant Virginia justices of the peace in The Widow Ranter (1689). 45. Daniel Webster, Fletcher Webster, and Edwin David Sanborn, The Private Correspondence of Daniel Webster (Boston: Little, Brown, 1857), 1:371. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. contested the accuracy of this story and of Jackson’s reputation in The Age of Jackson (Boston: Little, Brown, 1945), 37–38. On Crockett’s personal qualities, see Shackford, David Crockett, 238. 46. Kenneth Cmiel, “ ‘A Broad Fluid Language of Democracy’: Discovering the American Idiom,” Journal of American History 79 (December 1992): 913 –36; on the exclusion of African American dialects, see 928 –29. Cmiel noted that Whitman was “absolutely alone” in identifying the importance of what he called the “nigger dialect,” whose “outré words” enriched the common speech (933); it was not until the 1970s that linguists identified African contributions to American English. 47. “The space of appearance comes into being wherever men are together in the manner of speech and action” and is kept together by the power generated through the reciprocal relation of word and deed. Hannah Arendt, “Power and the Space of Appearance,” in The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 199 –207, esp. 199 –200.

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48. Hamlin Garland’s edition of the Narrative gives “windings” for what appears here as “minding.” See The Autobiography of David Crockett (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1923), 132. 49. David Crockett, Narrative, 7. David Crockett, Account of Col. Crockett’s Tour, 13. Richard Hofstadter observed that party loyalty superseded principle and ideology as a guiding focus of political action in The Idea of a Party System: The Rise of Legitimate Opposition in the United States, 1780 –1840 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1969), 246 – 47. 50. David Crockett, Account of Col. Crockett’s Tour, 27. 51. David Crockett, The Life of Martin Van Buren, Heir-Apparent to the ‘Government,’ and the Appointed Successor to General Andrew Jackson (Philadelphia: Robert Wright, 1835), 4. Crockett’s authorship is questionable.

chapter five 1. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America and Two Essays, ed. J. P. Mayer, trans. Gerald Lawrence (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), 316. 2. Nicholas Guyatt offers a valuable discussion of “benevolent colonization” in relation to slavery and Indian removal in “ ‘The Outskirts of Our Happiness’: Race and the Lure of Colonization in the Early Republic,” Journal of American History 95 (March 2009): 986 –1011. Guyatt distinguishes benevolent colonization from the biologically based racism that emerged after 1840. He opens his article with Webster’s description of colonies and the progress of civilization in the Plymouth oration. 3. Sandra M. Gustafson, Eloquence Is Power: Oratory and Performance in Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2000), chap. 3 and esp. 114 –18. There is a longstanding controversy over whether, how, and to what extent the Iroquois Confederacy influenced the U.S. Constitution. Prominent advocates for Iroquois influence today include Bruce Johansen, Donald Grinde, and Vine Deloria. 4. In the first appendix to Notes on the State of Virginia, Jefferson included Charles Thomson’s rebuttal to the Count de Buffon’s assertion that indigenous Americans lacked “republique,” that is society and government, by asking, “Can they be said to have no ‘republique,’ who conduct all their affairs in national councils, who pride themselves in their national character, who consider an insult or injury done to an individual by a stranger as done to the whole, and resent it accordingly?” Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. William Peden (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1954, 1982), 202. Stephen G. Bragaw, “Thomas Jefferson and the American Indian Nations: Native American Sovereignty and the Marshall Court,” Journal of Supreme Court History 31 (2006): 155 – 80. 5. William G. McLoughlin, Cherokee Renascence in the New Republic (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), from chap. 14 to the end; Theda Perdue, ed., Cherokee Editor: The Writings of Elias Boudinot (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1983), 3 –38. Perdue discusses the shift in power from the clan to the council, which put decisions that had traditionally been made by Cherokee women into the hands of Cherokee men, in “Clan and Court: Another Look at the Early Cherokee Republic,” American Indian Quarterly 24 (2000): 562 – 69. In this case the council was an accommodation to European styles of governance. 6. Granville Ganter, ed., The Collected Speeches of Sagoyewatha, or Red Jacket (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2006), 250 –71. 7. P. J. Staudenraus, The African Colonization Movement 1816 –1865 (New York: Co-

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lumbia University Press, 1961); William Lloyd Garrison, Thoughts on African Colonization (New York: Arno Press and the New York Times, 1968), which includes William Loren Katz’s “Earliest Responses of American Negroes and Whites to African Colonization,” i–xi. Philip S. Foner and George E. Walker tell the history of the black state conventions that arose to resist the colonization movement and reprint the convention proceedings in Proceedings of the Black State Conventions, 2 vols. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1979). 8. Guyatt, “ ‘The Outskirts of Our Happiness,’ ” 1003. 9. Garrison, Thoughts on African Colonization, Part 2, 5. 10. William Lloyd Garrison, “To the Public,” The Liberator ( January 1, 1831), 1. 11. [ Jared Sparks], “Colonization Society,” North American Review 18 ( January 1824): 40 –90. 12. [ Jared Sparks], “Emigration to Africa and Hayti,” NAR 20 ( January 1825): 191– 210, quoted passage on 210. 13. [B. B. Thatcher], “American Colonization Society,” NAR 35 ( July 1832): 118 – 65, passage on 142. Thatcher, “Gurley’s Life of Ashmun,” 41 (Oct. 1835): 265 – 87, quotation on 281. Thatcher’s other publications from this period include a memoir of Phillis Wheatley and two books on American Indians. 14. [Emory Washburn], “Slavery,” NAR 41 ( July 1835): 170 –93; quotations on 171, 177, and 193; “The Laboring Classes in Europe,” NAR 41 (October 1835): 348 – 66. 15. [Edward Everett], “On the State of the Indians,” NAR 16 ( January 1823): 30 – 45; [Lewis Cass], “Indians of North America,” NAR 22 ( January 1826): 53 –119; Cass, “Service of Indians in Civilized Warfare,” 24 (April 1827): 365 – 442; Cass, “Removal of the Indians,” NAR 30 ( January 1830): 62 –121, passage on 71–72. 16. [ Jeremiah Evarts], “Removal of the Indians,” NAR 31 (October 1830): 396 – 442, passages on 421, 428. 17. There is a large body of scholarship devoted to the rise of black Protestant churches. Eddie S. Glaude Jr. offers a discussion that is especially pertinent to my argument in Exodus!: Religion, Race, and Nation in Early Nineteenth-Century Black America. He surveys the history of these churches on 24 –27. Sydney Ahlstrom situates this history in A Religious History of the American People (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1972), 698 –715. 18. James Oliver Horton and Lois E. Horton, Black Bostonians: Family Life and Community Struggle in the Antebellum North, rev. ed. (New York: Holmes and Meier, 1979, 1999), 42 – 43 and passim. 19. Lisa Brooks discussed the history of the Mashpee church in The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), chap. 4. Robert Warrior examined Apess’s contributions to Native American intellectual history in The People and the Word: Reading Native Nonfiction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), chap. 1. 20. I discuss Occom and Aupaumut in Eloquence Is Power, 90 –101, 257– 65. Joanna Brooks stresses the separatist strain in Occom’s thought in American Lazarus: Religion and the Rise of African-American and Native American Literatures (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), chap. 2. 21. John Saillant, Black Puritan, Black Republican: The Life and Thought of Lemuel Haynes, 1753 –1833 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003). 22. Richard Allen, Daniel Coker, and James Champion, The Doctrines and Discipline of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (Philadelphia: Allen and Tapsico; printed by Cunningham, 1817), 9.

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23. Richard S. Newman, Freedom’s Prophet: Bishop Richard Allen, the AME Church, and the Black Founding Fathers (New York: New York University Press, 2008), 128 –29. 24. E. Brooks Holifield discussed the origins of black theology in Theology in America: Christian Thought from the Age of the Puritans to the Civil War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003), chap. 15. 25. Richard S. Newman, Freedom’s Prophet, 281. 26. Haynes, Allen, Occom, and Aupaumut were born before the Revolutionary War; Walker, Apess, and Stewart were born after it. Their dates are as follows: Occom, 1723 –92; Haynes, 1753 –1833; Aupaumut, 1757–1830; Allen, 1760 –1831; Walker, 1796?–1830; Apess, 1798 –1839; Stewart, 1803 –79. 27. Wilson J. Moses discussed Walker’s Appeal as a jeremiad in Black Messiahs and Uncle Toms: Social and Literary Manipulations of a Religious Myth (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993, rev. ed.). Werner Sollors described the role of the jeremiad in “typological ethnogenesis,” that is, the emergence of American ethnic identities, in Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986), chap. 2. Sollors demonstrated that the jeremiad could be used to “forge divergent and dissenting ethnic groupings (49), modifying Sacvan Bercovitch’s argument in The American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978) that the genre is a tool for forging consensus. 28. In The Colonizing Trick: National Culture and Imperial Citizenship in Early America (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), David Kazanjian developed a Foucauldian reading of Walker and Stewart, arguing that they posed a challenge to an Enlightenment legacy of “white governmentality” (138) identified with Thomas Jefferson and formulated as “a restricted, formal, and abstract” (5) ideal of democratic citizenship. He found in Walker an emphasis on mutual recognition and material difference (132) and argued that Stewart supported a “popular, nongovernmental articulation of race and equality” (136). This “counterarticulation of Enlightenment discourse” (135) emerges through three principal rhetorical features: active silences, rhetorical questions, and an appositional concept of enlightenment. My analysis here interprets their engagement with these issues as a reformulation of the modern republicanism of the Atlantic world and the Christian republicanism of Boston. 29. Walker was at the center of an emerging black public culture of voluntary associations and activist organizations supported by print publication and social networks. Peter P. Hinks, To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren: David Walker and the Problem of Antebellum Slave Resistance (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997), stressed the complementary strategies of print and oral circulation for Walker’s work. Print-focused readings include Robert S. Levine, “Circulating the Nation: David Walker, the Missouri Compromise and the Rise of the Black Press” in The Black Press: New Literary and Historical Essays, ed. Todd Vogel (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 17–36; Timothy Patrick McCarthy, “ ‘To Plead Our Own Cause’: Black Print Culture and the Origins of American Abolitionism” in Prophets of Protest: Reconsidering the History of American Abolitionism, eds. Timothy Patrick McCarthy and John Stauffer (New York: The New Press, 2006), 114 – 44; and Marcy J. Dinius, “ ‘Look!! look!!! at this!!!!’: The Radical Typography of David Walker’s Appeal” (forthcoming article). The Appeal has frequently been read as an early expression of black nationalist thought, notably by Sterling Stuckey in The Ideological Origins of Black Nationalism (Boston: Beacon Press, 1972) and Slave Culture: Black Nationalist Theory and Foundations of

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Black America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972). Thabiti Asukile reviewed the debates over Walker’s black nationalism in “The All-Embracing Black Nationalist Theories of David Walker’s Appeal,” Black Scholar 29 (1999): 16 –24. 30. Peter P. Hinks, To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren, 92, 102 –3. Samuel Cornish and John B. Russwurm, “To Our Patrons,” Freedom’s Journal 1 (March 16, 1827), 1. Jacqueline Bacon, Freedom’s Journal: The First African-American Newspaper (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007). 31. Peter P. Hinks, ed., David Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 7, 5 – 6. Drawing on John Dewey’s theory of the public, Eddie S. Glaude Jr. argued that Walker’s attention to black suffering and use of Jeremiah-like rhetoric were designed to instill a critical intelligence that would remake habits of white oppression and black subordination. “Radical rage would lead to a transvaluation of values.” See Exodus!: Religion, Race, and Nation in Early Nineteenth-Century Black America, 34 – 43, quotation on 40. Ian Finseth interpreted the “crucial ambiguity” between “a universal human nature” and “divergent racial natures” in Walker’s thought as an ambiguity about the roles of nature and history. “David Walker, Nature’s Nation, and Early African-American Separatism,” Mississippi Quarterly 54 (2001): 337– 62, 355. J. Jorge Klor de Alva discussed the political implications of Christian universalism in “Is Affirmative Action a Christian Heresy?” Representations 55 (1996): 59 –73. 32. J. H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain in America 1492 –1830 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 383 –91. 33. The proceedings of the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia were held in secret, and Madison’s notes on the debates were famously suppressed for fifty years. They were published in 1840. Eric Slauter discusses the aesthetics of the United States Constitution in The State as a Work of Art: The Cultural Origins of the Constitution (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009). 34. Perry Miller, The Life of the Mind in America from the Revolution to the Civil War (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1965), bk. 2. “The 1805 Constitution of Haiti,” http://www .webster.edu/~corbetre/haiti/history/earlyhaiti/1805-const.htm. Accessed March 11, 2010. 35. Peter Hinks, To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren, 204. 36. Peter Hinks compares Walker to Finney in To Awaken My Afflicted Brethren, 229 –30. 37. The King James version of the Bible renders Isaiah 1:18: “Come now, and let us reason together, saith the LORD: though your sins be as scarlet, they shall be as white as snow; though they be red like crimson, they shall be as wool.” 38. Maria W. Stewart, Maria W. Stewart, America’s First Black Woman Political Writer: Essays and Speeches, ed. Marilyn Richardson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 53, 29, 45. Richardson’s introductory biography of Stewart should be supplemented with Eric Gardner’s introduction to “Two Texts on Children and Christian Education,” PMLA 123 ( January 2008): 156 –59. These recovered texts from 1860 – 61 reveal lost details of Stewart’s life after she left Boston in 1833. Gardner remarks that in these later works Stewart “had to temper her criticism of black men” in order to “continue to offer a jeremiad-style critique of free black culture” (157) as an expression of evangelical nationalism associated with the AME church. Major readings of Stewart’s work that have informed my analysis are Lora Romero, Home Fronts: Domesticity and Its Critics in Antebellum America (Durham, NC: Duke Uni-

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versity Press, 1997), chap. 3; Carla Peterson, Doers of the Word: African-American Speakers and Writings in the North (1830 –1880) (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998), chap. 3; and Joycelyn Moody, Sentimental Confessions: Spiritual Narratives of Nineteenth-Century African American Women (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2001), chap. 1. 39. “Religion and the Pure Principles of Morality, The Sure Foundation on Which We Must Build” in Maria W. Stewart, America’s First Black Woman Political Writer, 28 – 42. The pamphlet was offered for sale at the offices of The Liberator in the October 8, 1831, issue of that journal (28). 40. In Doers of the Word, Carla Peterson found that for Walker the movement of the jeremiad from sin to redemption was achieved through violent action associated with men while women symbolized disunity and a falling away from the divine mission. By contrast Stewart believed that “women’s work and women’s culture” (66) would complete the redemptive arc set out in the jeremiad. 41. The Life and Religious Experience of Jarena Lee, a Coloured Lady, Giving an Account of Her Call to Preach the Gospel (1836) is reprinted by William L. Andrews, ed., Sisters of the Spirit: Three Black Women’s Autobiographies of the Nineteenth Century (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986), 25 – 48. Carla Peterson discusses Lee and Stewart in Doers of the Word, chap. 3 42. Productions of Mrs. Maria W. Stewart, Presented to the First African Baptist Church and Society, of the City of Boston (Boston: Published by the Friends of Freedom and Virtue, 1835). “Meditations” is modeled on the Book of Lamentations, which is attributed to the prophet Jeremiah. Moody, Sentimental Confessions, 40. In Doers of the Word Peterson remarked that Stewart’s writings focus on “her soul’s inner struggles” (63), and this psychomachia seems to point to a lack of strong social support. 43. Claudio Saunt discusses the strategic use of traditional Cherokee history (or “myth”) and Western historical conventions by Cherokee leaders in “Telling Stories: The Political Uses of Myth and History in the Cherokee and Creek Nations,” Journal of American History 93 (2006): 673 –97. Saunt notes that Boudinot was a founder of the Moral and Literary Society of the Cherokee Nation in 1824. In his speech on the Greek revolution in January of that year, Daniel Webster identified literary societies as components of civil society that fostered republican values. 44. William Apess, “An Indian’s Looking-Glass for the White Man,” in On Our Own Ground: The Complete Writings of William Apess, a Pequot, ed. Barry O’Connell (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), 155 – 61. 45. Appeal, 3. “Indian’s Looking-Glass,” in On Our Own Ground, 155 46. Maureen Konkle emphasized the overlapping concerns of antiremoval and abolitionist activists and noted Apess’s involvement with Boston’s antislavery movement and the similarities between “Indian’s Looking-Glass” and the Appeal in Writing Indian Nations: Native Intellectuals and the Politics of Historiography, 1827 –1863 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press), 114 –16. I discuss Apess’s interest in the Ten Lost Tribes theory and his model of Israelite identity in “Nations of Israelites: Prophecy and Cultural Autonomy in the Writings of William Apess,” Religion and Literature 26 (Spring 1994): 31–53. Mark Miller, “ ‘Mouth for God’: Temperate Labor, Race, and Methodist Reform in William Apess’s A Son of the Forest,” Journal of the Early Republic 30 (Summer 2010): 225 –51. 47. Alisse Portnoy, Their Right to Speak: Women’s Activism in the Indian and Slave Debates (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). 48. William Apess, Eulogy on King Philip in On Our Own Ground, 275 –310, esp. 280,

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286. In his introduction to the volume O’Connell argued that the Eulogy was a response to Webster’s Plymouth oration and other commemorative addresses of the 1820s (xx– xxi). In Writing Indian Nations Konkle observed that there is no firm proof that Apess read Webster’s Plymouth speech, and she interpreted the Eulogy as a response to more recent speeches on Indian relations by Edward Everett, who had close personal, political, and literary ties to Webster, and who had earlier shared a stage with Apess to support Cherokee rights. See 132 –33. Konkle uses the phrase “pilgrim-republican narrative” on 135 to describe the historiography that Webster helped to foster. 49. Apess was described in these terms in [W. J. Snelling], “Life of Black Hawk,” NAR 40 ( January 1835): 68 – 87, quotation on 68. 50. Eric Cheyfitz described Ciceronian eloquence as a tool of domination in The Poetics of Imperialism: Translation and Colonization from “The Tempest” to “Tarzan,” expanded ed. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1997), 23. Konkle identified the “pilgrim-republican narrative” with racial dominance but acknowledged that Boston’s intellectual classes generally opposed Indian removal (Writing Indian Nations, 135). 51. Eulogy, 295. Caroline Eastman, “The Indian Censures the White Man: ‘Indian Eloquence’ and American Reading Audiences in the Early Republic,” WMQ, 3rd ser., 65 ( July 2008): 535 – 64. 52. Jack Goody, “Civil Society in an Extra-European Perspective,” Civil Society: History and Possibilities, ed. Sudipta Kaviraj and Sunil Khilnani (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 149 – 64; George A. Kennedy, Comparative Rhetoric: An Historical and Cross-Cultural Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998).

chapter six 1. Lydia Maria Child, Hobomok and Other Writings on Indians, ed. Carolyn L. Karcher (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1986), 57. Jesse M. Lander traced the emergence of polemic in Inventing Polemic: Religion, Print, and Literary Culture in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 2. Carolyn L. Karcher, The First Woman in the Republic: A Cultural Biography of Lydia Maria Child (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994), 40. Lydia Maria Child, The Rebels, or Boston Before the Revolution (Boston: Phillips, Sampson and Company, 1850), iii. 3. In The First Woman in the Republic Karcher mentions that these invented speeches were later reprinted in elocution manuals (41). 4. I discuss the debates over Revolutionary crowd actions and the relationship between Otis and Hutchinson in Eloquence Is Power: Oratory and Performance in Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2000), chapter 4. 5. The classic treatments of republican womanhood are Linda K. Kerber, Women of the Republic: Intellect and Ideology in Revolutionary America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institution of Early American History and Culture, 1980), and Jan Lewis in “The Republican Wife: Virtue and Seduction in the Early Republic,” WMQ, 3rd ser., 44 (1987), 689 –721. 6. I discuss Edwards’s A Faithful Narrative of the Surprising Work of God in the Conversion of Many Hundred Souls in Northampton and its influence on nineteenth-century novelists in “Jonathan Edwards and the Reconstruction of ‘Feminine’ Speech,” American Literary History 6 (Summer 1994): 185 –212. 7. Child had likely seen the Hutchinson mansion, which stood until 1833 when

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it was torn down to widen the street. http://www.kellscraft.com/RamblesBoston/ ramblesboston03.html (accessed March 11, 2010). 8. Daniel Walker Howe discusses Franklin and self-making in Making the American Self: Jonathan Edwards to Abraham Lincoln (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1997), chap. 2. Partway through The Rebels “Lucretia” is renamed “Gertrude,” which is the name used in the concluding scene. 9. Karcher, The First Woman in the Republic, 15 and passim. [G. Mellen], “Works of Mrs. Child,” North American Review 37 ( July 1833): 138 – 65; see especially 138 and 142. Mellen mentions English and French editions of Frugal Housewife, including several Parisian imprints. 10. Karcher, The First Woman in the Republic, 183. Karcher notes that “so comprehensive was [the Appeal’s] scope that no other antislavery writer ever attempted to duplicate Child’s achievement” (183). L[ydia] Maria Child, An Appeal in Favor of Americans Called Africans (New York: Arno Press and the New York Times, 1968), 209ff. Child’s work combines a modern approach to political knowledge with rhetorical elements drawn from the jeremiad. A comparison with Siddharth Kara’s Sex Trafficking: Inside the Business of Modern Slavery (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009) reveals many similarities in approach as well as some illuminating differences. Kara is a former investment banker and executive who employed theoretical economics and business analysis to present measures that could help to wipe out sexual slavery. In making his economic argument, Kara could assume widely shared agreement about the immorality of slavery, as well as a code of human rights law and a structure of international institutions to support it. None of these were available to Child. Child’s antislavery activism is discussed in Jean Fagan Yellin, Women and Sisters: The Antislavery Feminists in American Culture (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1989) and Alisse Portnoy, Their Right to Speak: Women’s Activism in the Indian and Slave Debates (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005). 11. [Emory Washburn], “Slavery,” NAR 41 ( July 1835): 170 –93; quotations on 193 and 170. Mrs. [Lydia Maria Francis] Child, Anti-Slavery Catechism, 2nd ed. (Newburyport, MA: Charles Whipple, 1839; orig. 1835), 35. 12. Child quoted Everett on 176. Everett wrote America, or A General Survey of the Political Situation of the Several Powers of the Western Continent With Conjectures on Their Future Prospects (1827) while serving as the U.S. ambassador to Spain. Everett was principally concerned with relations within the hemisphere as they affected Atlantic world politics. He included a chapter on the relations of the “two Americas” and the Congress of Panama, and another on the fiftieth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and the deaths of Adams and Jefferson. His brother Edward Everett preceded him as editor of the Review. Rufus Wilmot Griswold, The Prose Writers of America (Philadelphia: Carey and Hart, 1849), 284 – 86. 13. Karcher, The First Woman of the Republic, 177. 14. Lydia Maria (Francis) Child, Philothea: A Romance (Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1969; orig. 1836), 19. 15. Child included a substantial number of authenticating details about her setting, but she also manipulated certain facts, most notably by having Pericles and Plato converse with one another when the historical Plato was not born until the year Pericles died. 16. Philothea, 52 –53. 17. [C. C. Felton], “Mrs. Child’s Philothea,” NAR 44 ( January 1837): 77–90. Robert V.

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Streeter noted the overlapping circles of the NAR and the Transcendental Club, among whose founding members was Child’s brother Convers Francis, in “Mrs. Child’s ‘Philothea’: A Transcendentalist Novel?,” New England Quarterly 16 (December 1943): 648 – 54, 651. 18. Wayne Franklin discusses Cooper’s involvement in the American Bible Society and local agricultural societies in James Fenimore Cooper: The Early Years (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 67, 203, 241– 42. On the Bread and Cheese Club see 367– 69. On Lafayette see 370. 19. Robert A. Ferguson, The Trial in American Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 1, 4, 68. My readings of the themes of law and republicanism in Cooper’s novels have been informed by John P. McWilliams, Political Justice in a Republic: James Fenimore Cooper’s America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972); Brook Thomas, Cross-Examinations of Law and Literature: Cooper, Hawthorne, Stowe, and Melville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), chap. 1; Robert S. Levine, Conspiracy and Romance: Studies in Brockden Brown, Cooper, Hawthorne, and Melville (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), chap. 2, and Charles Hansford Adams, “The Guardian of the Law”: Authority and Identity in James Fenimore Cooper (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1990). 20. Robert A. Ferguson, Law and Letters in American Culture (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984), chap. 10. 21. James Fenimore Cooper, The Leatherstocking Tales: Volume 1 (New York: Library of America, 1985). Natty’s silent laugh during the trial is described on 367, 368, 372. 22. I discuss The Last of the Mohicans in chapter seven below. 23. Franklin speculated that Cooper completed the first eleven chapters of The Prairie before leaving for Europe, a conclusion based on his shift to French paper at that point in the manuscript. Wayne Franklin, James Fenimore Cooper, 518, 678 n74. For a sustained discussion of The Prairie in the context of Atlantic world politics, see my essay “Natty in the 1820s: Creole Subjects and Democratic Aesthetics in the Early Leatherstocking Tales,” Creole Subjects in the Colonial Americas: Empires, Texts, Identities, eds. Ralph Bauer and José Antonio Mazzotti (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2009), 465 –90. 24. A French edition of The Prairie included a map with “Pawnies Republicains” labeled centrally. It is reproduced in Orm Överland, The Making and Meaning of an American Classic: James Fenimore Cooper’s “The Prairie” (New York: Humanities Press, 1973), 73. 25. James Fenimore Cooper, The Bravo: A Tale (New York: Worthington, n.d.), 3 – 4. For additional discussion of The Bravo as a republican novel, see my “Histories of Democracy and Empire,” American Quarterly (March 2007): 107–33, esp. 124 –28. 26. The Roman triumvirates were part of the political vocabulary of the day. In 1832 the “Great Triumvirate” of Daniel Webster, Henry Clay, and John Calhoun entered the Senate together for the first time, forming a power block in opposition to President Andrew Jackson. On the naming of the group, see Merrill D. Peterson, The Great Triumvirate: Webster, Clay, and Calhoun (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 5. According to Edward P. Vandiver Jr., Cooper’s extensive use of Shakespeare for chapter epigraphs includes passages from thirty-six plays as well as Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece. He quoted The Merchant of Venice more than any other work by Shakespeare and drew on the trial scene twelve times. See “James Fenimore Cooper and

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Shakspere,” Shakespeare Association Bulletin 15 (1940): 110 –17. In “Cooper’s Indebtedness to Shakespeare,” PMLA, 67 (1952): 716 –31, W. B. Gates notes that in addition to drawing more than 40 percent of his epigraphs from Shakespeare, Cooper included over a hundred verbal allusions or quotations, as well as drawing plot elements and characters from the plays. Susan Cooper described her father’s small set of Shakespeare as “his constant traveling companions” during their years in Europe (quoted in Robert E. Spiller, Fenimore Cooper: Critic of His Times [New York: Russell and Russell, 1963], 144). Spiller notes that after Cooper moved to New York City in 1822 he had ready access to Shakespearean performances by Kean, Matthews, and Macready at the Park and Lafayette theaters (77). 27. James Fenimore Cooper, The American Democrat: Hints on the Social and Civic Relations of the United States of America (Cooperstown: H. and E. Phinney, 1838).Quoted passages on 6.

chapter seven 1. Joseph Roach, Cities of the Dead: Circum-Atlantic Performance (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 2 –3. 2. James Bohman, Democracy across Borders: From Dêmos to Dêmoi (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 45 –55. 3. R. W. B. Lewis, The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1955), prologue. 4. Richard Slotkin, introduction to James Fenimore Cooper, The Last of the Mohicans (Harmondsworth, UK: Penguin, 1986), ix–xxvii. 5. D. H. Lawrence, Studies in Classic American Literature, ed. Ezra Greenspan, Lindeth Vasey, and John Worthen (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 57–58. Readings that overlap with mine are in Ivy Schweitzer, Perfecting Friendship: Politics and Affiliation in Early American Literature (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2006), chap. 4; and Dana D. Nelson, “Cooper’s Leatherstocking Conversations: Identity, Friendship, and Democracy in the New Nation” in A Historical Guide to James Fenimore Cooper, ed. Leland S. Person (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 123 –54. Granville Ganter argued that The Last of the Mohicans portrayed “the painful fusion of . . . cultures in debate” that reflected “the unsettled language of race relations in the 1820’s” in “Voices of Instruction: Oratory and Discipline in Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans and The Redskins” in James Fenimore Cooper and His Art: Papers from the 1997 Cooper Seminar (No. 11), ed. Hugh C. MacDougall (Oneonta: State University of New York Press, 1997), 47–52, quotations on 47. 6. James Fenimore Cooper, The Leatherstocking Tales (New York: Library of America, 1985), 1:851, 855. 7. This scene manifests the role of narrative in deliberative democracy as Iris Marion Young described it in Inclusion and Democracy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 70 –77. 8. Sandra M. Gustafson, “Cooper and the Idea of the Indian,” in Cambridge History of the American Novel, (forthcoming). Wayne Franklin, James Fenimore Cooper: The Early Years (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 11, 466 – 82; Caroline Eastman, “The Indian Censures the White Man: ‘Indian Eloquence’ and American Reading Audiences in the Early Republic,” WMQ, 3rd ser., 65 ( July 2008): 535 – 64. Ganter suggests several sources for Magua’s speeches in “Voices of Instruction,” 48 – 49. 9. Reverend John Heckewelder, An Account of the History, Manners, and Customs of the Indian Nations, Who Once Inhabited Pennsylvania and the Neighboring States, rev. ed. (Philadelphia: Historical Society of Pennsylvania, 1876; orig. 1819), 107, 150, 153.

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10. Jay Fliegelman described the ideal of a natural, gesture-based language in Declaring Independence: Jefferson, Natural Language, and the Culture of Performance (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 2. 11. George A. Kennedy contrasts the agonistic tradition derived from ancient Greece with the consensus-oriented deliberative rhetorics of traditional societies in Comparative Rhetoric: An Historical and Cross-Cultural Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 197–99. 12. Ganter, “Voices of Instruction,” 47; Nancy Ruttenberg, Democratic Personality: Popular Voice and the Trial of American Authorship (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), 321–24; Joseph Alkana, The Social Self: Hawthorne, Howells, William James, and Nineteenth-Century Psychology (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1996), 14. 13. Pierre Rosanvallon rearticulated the Jacobin ideal as a “political culture of generality” focused on the eradication of intermediary bodies and the construction of a “polarized” system of private individuals and the general public in The Demands of Liberty: Civil Society in France Since the Revolution, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 2 – 6. His discussion of “union-fusion” accomplished by political festivals is also relevant (21–23). 14. Philip J. Deloria discussed Tamenund’s relation to Tammany in Playing Indian (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), 12 –13 and passim. 15. William Apess, Indian Nullification of the Unconstitutional Laws of Massachusetts Relative to the Marshpee Tribe; or The Pretended Riot Explained in On Our Own Ground: The Complete Writings of William Apess, a Pequot, ed. Barry O’Connell (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1992), 163 –274, quotation 274. 16. In “Dialogue and Public Discourse in William Apess’s Indian Nullification,” American Transcendentalist Quarterly 15 (December 2001): 275 –92, Theresa Strouth Gaul argued that Apess sought to create a textual model for the process of open debate that he believed should characterize the American public sphere. Drawing on Michael Warner’s Letters of the Republic (1990), she made print central to this project. While I agree with Gaul’s general point about Apess’s effort to model toleration and open dialogue, I differ in my account of his specific goals. I also disagree with her account of the role of print, which I find contributing importantly to the deliberative crisis that Apess portrayed. 17. Lisa Brooks, The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2008), 172 –73. 18. In Writing Indian Nations: Native Intellectuals and the Politics of Historiography, 1827 –1863 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004), Maureen Konkle identified this pamphlet as The Experiences of Five Christian Indians (119); Brooks said it was probably a draft of his Eulogy on King Philip on 177 of The Common Pot and cites O’Connell for support. 19. Sandra Gustafson, “Nations of Israelites: Prophecy and Cultural Autonomy in the Writings of William Apess,” Religion and Literature 26 (Spring 1994): 31–53; Theodore Dwight Bozeman, To Live Ancient Lives: The Primitivist Dimension in Puritanism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 1988), chap. 1. Maureen Konkle noted the competing interpretations of Puritan history in Boston during the 1820s and 1830s in Writing Indian Nations, 135. 20. See Article XI under “Articles of Amendment,” Constitution of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, http://www.mass.gov/legis/const.htm. Accessed March 11, 2010.

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21. “Trouble in the Wigwarm,” Barnstable Patriot ( July 10, 1833), 2. Konkle identifies Sylvanus Phinney as the author of this article in Writing Indian Nations, 125. 22. Webster’s dark coloring earned him the nickname “Black Dan.” In his journal Emerson wrote that Webster “brought the strength of a savage into the height of culture,” and some contemporaries speculated that he had native ancestry. William Wells Brown played on Webster’s dark complexion to suggest racial confusion and criticize racial categories and race-based discrimination in his novel Clotel, or The President’s Daughter (1853). For the Emerson passage, which was written shortly after Webster’s death, see Joel Porte, ed., Emerson in His Journals (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1984), 439. 23. James W. Ely Jr., The Guardian of Every Other Right: A Constitutional History of Property Rights (New York: Oxford University Press, 1992). Joseph Dorfman, The Economic Mind in American Civilization, 1606 –1865, vol. 2 (New York: Viking Press, 1946). Howard Horwitz examined the relationship between concepts of nature and ideas of property in By the Law of Nature: Form and Value in Nineteenth-Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991). 24. Gregory S. Alexander, Commodity and Propriety: Competing Visions of Property in American Legal Thought, 1776 –1970 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997), 1, 3, 5. William J. Novak identified proprietarian economic philosophy as an aspect of early republican ideas about the well-regulated society in The People’s Welfare: Law and Regulation in Nineteenth-Century America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996), chap. 3. Morton J. Horwitz, The Transformation of American Law, 1780 –1860 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977), 31. Jedediah Purdy examined contests over native land and slavery in the early American republic as they relate to pluralistic conceptions of property today in The Meaning of Property: Freedom, Community, and the Legal Imagination (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010). 25. See Maurice G. Baxter’s intellectual biography One and Inseparable: Daniel Webster and the Union (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1984) and Baxter’s introduction to “Daniel Webster: The Lawyer” in Daniel Webster: “The Completest Man,” ed. Kenneth E. Shewmaker (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1990), 138 –52. In Daniel Webster as an Economist (New York: AMS Press, 1966; orig., 1929), Robert Lincoln Carey observed that after 1828 Webster shifted away from an emphasis on agriculture and commerce and toward support for industrial development (205). 26. Daniel Webster, “The Case of Gibbons and Ogden,” in Works of Daniel Webster, ed. Edward Everett (Boston: Little, Brown, 1858), 6:3 –23. 27. Maurice G. Baxter, One and Inseparable, 175 –78; James W. Ely Jr., The Guardian of Every Other Right, 72 –73, 128 –30. By contrast, during his two terms as president Andrew Jackson deliberately weakened the central government and reduced its role in economic life. Richard R. John, “Affairs of Office: The Executive Departments, The Election of 1828, and the Making of the Democratic Party” in The Democratic Experiment, ed. Meg Jacobs, William J. Novak, and Julian E. Zelizer (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2003), chap. 3. 28. L. M. Child, The American Frugal Housewife, Dedicated to Those Who Are Not Ashamed of Economy, 22nd ed. (New York: Samuel S. and William Wood, 1838; orig. 1829), 91. 29. Karen Haltunnen analyzed concerns with social mobility in Confidence Men and Painted Women: A Study of Middle-Class Culture in America, 1830 –1870 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986).

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30. Women are often the targets of microfinance because they are more likely to work hard to lift themselves and their families out of poverty, as Nobel-winning Bangladeshi economist Muhammad Yunus explained in Banker to the Poor: Micro-Lending and the Battle Against World Poverty (New York: Public Affairs, 2003), 72. Martha C. Nussbaum emphasized the importance of property holding and access to credit for the poorest women in Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 156 –57, 281– 82. In Benjamin Franklin and the Invention of Microfinance (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2010), Bruce Yenawine discusses the codicil in Franklin’s will bequeathing money to the cities of Boston and Philadelphia as an early form of microfinance. Child, who frequently cited Franklin’s influence, may well have been familiar with this legacy. 31. On women’s exclusion from traditional forms of property ownership, see Marylynn Salmon, Women and the Law of Property in Early America (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1986), xv–xvii. Laurel Thatcher Ulrich discussed the memorialization of New England’s female-centered production system in The Age of Homespun: Objects and Stories in the Creation of an American Myth (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001), prologue and introduction. 32. Mrs. Child, The Mother’s Book, 2nd ed. (New York: Arno Press and the New York Times, 1972; orig. 1831), 41. 33. “Address of Mr. Crockett, to the Voters of the Ninth Congressional District of the State of Tennessee; Together with His Remarks in the House of Representatives, January 5, 1829” (Washington, DC: Gales and Seaton, 1829), 7, 8. 34. Hernando de Soto, The Mystery of Capital: Why Capitalism Triumphs in the West and Fails Everywhere Else (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 113, 89. 35. David Eugene Wilkins, American Indian Sovereignty and the U.S. Supreme Court: The Masking of Justice (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997), 31 and passim. 36. On Johnson, see Wilkins in the previous note. DeSoto discusses the Green case in The Mystery of Capital, 131–34. 37. I build here on Eric Cheyfitz, “Savage Law: The Plot Against American Indians in Johnson and Graham’s Lessee v. M’Intosh and The Pioneers,” Cultures of United States Imperialism, eds. Amy Kaplan and Donald E. Pease (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993), 109 –28. The Pioneers is in The Leatherstocking Tales, vol. 1, with quoted passages on 447 and 448. 38. James Fenimore Cooper, The Heidenmauer or The Benedictines (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1896). Critics have typically read The Heidenmauer as a critical reflection on European politics, e.g. John P. McWilliams, Political Justice in a Republic: James Fenimore Cooper’s America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1972), 166 –73. In “Cooper’s Europe and His Quarrel with America,” J. Gerald Kennedy focused on Gleanings in Europe to document how Cooper’s European travels provided him with a “critical, transnational perspective” on the United States, and it is this angle on The Heidenmauer that I emphasize here. Kennedy’s essay appears in A Historical Guide to James Fenimore Cooper, 91–122, quotation on 91. 39. James Fenimore Cooper, The American Democrat, or Hints on the Social and Civic Relations of the United States of America (Cooperstown: H. and E. Phinney, 1838), 44. In Notions of the Americans: Picked up by a Travelling Bachelor (Albany: State University Press of New York, 1991), Cooper grouped women and girls with paupers, minors, idiots, and priests as groups that the state of Connecticut excluded from full citizenship rights (see 474). In “ ‘More Than a Woman’s Enterprise’: Cooper’s Revolutionary Heroines and the

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Source of Liberty” John P. McWilliams argues that the heroines of Cooper’s novels of the American Revolution express an instinctive republican commitment to liberty. This “unsourced . . . faith in freedom” is muted after they marry, marking the limits of their political power. In Ulricke Frey, Cooper created a female character who retained much of her power after marriage, even as she learned to exercise that power within the constraints of her position. McWilliams’s essay is in A Historical Guide to James Fenimore Cooper, 61–90; quotation on 88. 40. Cooper, Notions of the Americans, 467– 82. 41. Maria W. Stewart, Maria W. Stewart, America’s First Black Woman Political Writer, ed. Marilyn Richardson (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987); David Walker, David Walker’s Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World, ed. Peter P. Hinks (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000). 42. Kevin Bales, Ending Slavery: How We Free Today’s Slaves (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). 43. Amartya Sen, “Capitalism Beyond the Crisis,” New York Review of Books 56 (March 26, 2009), http://www.nybooks.com/articles/22490. Accessed March 11, 2010. 44. Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (New York: Random House, 1999), 6.

conclusion 1. Memorial of James Fenimore Cooper (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1852), 26, 93. The translation of the passage from the Third Catilinarian oration is from Cicero: The Orations Translated by Duncan, The Offices by Cockman, and the Cato and Laelius by Melmoth (New York: J. and J. Harper, 1833), 1:199. 2. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Webster,” in Collected Poems and Translations (New York: Library of America, 1994), 424. 3. The Bryant quotation is in John F. Kennedy, Profiles in Courage (New York: HarperPerennial, 1955, 1956), 70. 4. These Roosevelt-era recuperations of Webster continue to resonate. The folk opera that Benét based on his tale is still performed in regional theaters, and in 2004 the story was remade as the film Shortcut to Happiness. Both the 1941 and 2004 films have been released under different titles. 5. Barack Obama, The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream (New York: Crown, 2006), 129. Kennedy’s complicated relationship to Civil Rights legislation offers an important example of the conflicting motives and agendas involved in political decision making. Taylor Branch tells the story in Parting the Waters: America in the King Years, 1954 –1963 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989). 6. Henry David Thoreau, Collected Essays and Poems (New York: Library of America, 2001), 222 –23. Michael Walzer offered a more recent critique of the limits of deliberation in “Deliberation, and What Else?,” Thinking Politically: Essays in Political Theory, ed. David Miller (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007), 134 – 46. Mark Juergensmeyer, Global Rebellion: Religious Challenges to the Secular State, from Christian Militias to Al Qaeda (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008). 7. James H. Cone, Risks of Faith: The Emergence of a Black Theology of Liberation, 1968 –1998 (Boston: Beacon Press, 1999), 45; Gayraud S. Wilmore, Black Religion and Black Radicalism: An Interpretation of the Religious History of Afro-American People, 2nd ed. (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1986), 38, 44; Dwight N. Hopkins, Down, Up, and Over: Slave Religion and Black Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2000), 165, 204, 224. 8. Kelly Delaine Brown-Douglass, “Womanist Theology: What Is Its Relationship

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to Black Theology?” in James H. Cone and Gayraud S. Wilmore, eds., Black Theology: A Documentary History (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993), 2:290 –99, quotation from 298; Robert Warrior, The People and the Word: Reading Native Nonfiction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), 25. 9. T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, ed., The Speech: Race and Barack Obama’s “A More Perfect Union” (New York: Bloomsbury, 2009). The volume includes Obama’s speech, with the quoted passage on 245, along with essays offering a variety of perspectives on its implications for racial politics in and beyond the United States, including one by Dominic Thomas on its reception in France with the title “L’Effet Obama: Diversity and ‘A More Perfect Republic.’ ” Thomas J. Sugrue considers Obama’s negotiation of racial politics in Not Even Past: Barack Obama and the Burden of Race (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010). In the epilogue to We Ain’t What We Ought To Be: The Black Freedom Struggle from Emancipation to Obama (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010), Stephen Tuck describes Obama’s relationship to the civil rights movement. 10. The contrast between prophecy and the compromises that form a central element in politic life is a major theme in David Remnick’s The Bridge: The Life and Rise of Barack Obama (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010). Remnick also illuminates Obama’s connections to other concerns explored here, including the influence of Shakespearean eloquence and an indirect relationship to John Dewey by way of his mother’s graduate advisor, Alice Dewey, John’s granddaughter. 11. Iva E. Carruthers, Frederick D. Haynes III, and Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., eds., Blow the Trumpet in Zion!: Global Vision and Action for the 21st Century Black Church (Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress Publishers, 2005). Several of the essays in the volume concern prophecy, including one on false prophets. Kelefa Sanneh discussed the influence of black liberation theology on Wright in “Project Trinity: The Perilous Mission of Obama’s Church,” The New Yorker (April 7, 2008), 30 –36. He mentioned the influence of Walker’s Appeal on 32. 12. Obama’s interest in Frederick Douglass is discussed in Jodi Kantor, “Teaching Law, Testing Ideas, Obama Stood Slightly Apart,” New York Times ( July 30, 2008), A1, 14. Douglass presented his theory of constitutional hermeneutics in “The Meaning of July Fourth for the Negro,” The Life and Writings of Frederick Douglass, ed. Philip S. Foner (New York: International Publishers, 1950), 2:181–204. 13. J. David Greenstone, “Political Culture and American Political Development: Liberty, Union, and the Liberal Bipolarity,” Studies in American Political Development 1 (1986): 1– 49. 14. Cass R. Sunstein, A Constitution of Many Minds: Why the Founding Document Doesn’t Mean What It Meant Before (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009), 128 –29, 182 – 83. The quoted passage is on 129. Ronald Dworkin criticized Sunstein from a rights-based perspective in “Looking for Cass Sunstein,” New York Review of Books 56 (April 30, 2009), 29 –32. 15. “Second Speech on Foot’s Resolution,” The Works of Daniel Webster (Boston: Little, Brown, 1851), 3:270 –342, quotation on 321. Craig R. Smith discussed Webster’s influence on Lincoln in Daniel Webster and the Oratory of Civil Religion (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005), 115, 267– 68. Abraham Lincoln, “Address at Gettysburg,” Speeches and Writings 1859 –1865 (New York: Library of America, 1989), 2:536. Garry Wills, Lincoln at Gettysburg: The Words that Remade America (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992).

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16. Obama’s Call to Renewal speech is available at http://www.barackobama .com/2006/06/28/call_to_renewal_keynote_address.php and his speech at Notre Dame can be found at http://www.whitehouse.gov/the_press_office/Remarks-by-thePresident-at-Notre-Dame-Commencement/ (both accessed March 4, 2010). Jenkins’s speech was temporarily available at http://commencement.nd.edu/commencementweekend/commencement-videos-recorded/charge/ (accessed May 19, 2009). On abortion politics, see Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996), 3 and passim. James Fallows praised Obama’s Notre Dame commencement speech for what he regarded as its true eloquence, comparing it to works by Shakespeare and Lincoln in “On Eloquence vs. Prettiness,” The Atlantic, http://jamesfallows.theatlantic.com/ archives/2009/05/on_eloquence_vs_prettiness.php (accessed March 4, 2010). In addition to the works on religion and politics cited in chapter three, see Michael Walzer’s “Drawing the Line: Religion and Politics,” in Thinking Politically, 147– 67. Walzer noted that “all the major religions have traditions of argument that can be adapted to democratic use” (152). Olivier Roy discussed challenges to French laïcité in Secularism Confronts Islam, trans. George Holoch (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007; orig. 2005). As Roy made clear, the French state’s secularism emerged out of a century-long battle with the Roman Catholic Church. John T. McGreevy described the conflicted relationship between republicanism and Catholicism in Catholicism and American Freedom: A History (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003). 17. “Remarks by the President on a New Beginning,” http://www.whitehouse .gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-cairo-university-6-04-09 (accessed March 4, 2010). 18. “Remarks by the President at the Acceptance of the Nobel Peace Prize,” http://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/remarks-president-acceptance-nobelpeace-prize (accessed March 4, 2010). Martha C. Nussbaum considers the complex place of religion as it affects the status of women in Women and Human Development: The Capabilities Approach (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), chap. 3. James T. Kloppenberg examined Obama’s relationship to philosophical pragmatism, civic republicanism, and deliberative democracy in Reading Obama: Dreams, Hope, and the American Political Tradition (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011). 19. Daniel Webster, “The Bunker Hill Monument,” in The Works of Daniel Webster (Boston: Little, Brown, 1851), 1:59 –78, quoted passage on 78.

INDEX

abolition, 8, 30, 104, 105, 112, 130, 131, 138, 139, 162 – 64, 199, 207, 208 Academic Speaker (Walker), 82 Account of the History, Manners, and Customs of the Indian Nations, Who Once Inhabited Pennsylvania and the Neighboring States, An (Heckewelder), 185 Ackerman, Bruce, 36 Deliberation Day, 229n47 Adams, Henry Democracy: An American Novel, 11 Adams, John, 15, 34, 107, 108 Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, A, 44 Adams, John Quincy, 4, 107, 114, 119, 245n43 Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory, 74 Adams, Samuel, 156 Addison, Joseph, Cato, A Tragedy, 1, 2 Afric-American Female Intelligence Society of America, 146 African Americans, 8, 29 Boston, in, 142, 143 Christianity and, 133 –35, 140 – 42, 214 –16 integration, 126 language, 121, 245n46 prejudice against, 6, 121, 134 –36 removal, 128, 129, 137, 142 African Colonization Society, 129 African Methodist Episcopal Church, 135, 136, 144 Alexander, Gregory Commodity and Property, 199 Allen, Richard, 129, 134, 136, 144 Doctrines and Discipline of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, The, 135 Althing, 14 American Adam, The (Lewis), 181 American Colonization Society, 128 –30, 135, 142 American Democrat, The (Cooper), 9, 179 American Indians. See Native Americans

American Lessons in Speaking and Reading (Webster), 79 American Orator (Cooke), 83, 84 Amos, Daniel, 193 –95 Amos, Israel, 191, 193 Amos, Joseph, 134, 193 Amusing Ourselves to Death (Postman), 32 Anderson, Amanda Way We Argue Now, The, 10, 223n17 Anderson, Richard Clough, 64 Angostura, 42, 43, 46 – 49 Anthology Club, 167 Anti-Slavery Catechism (Child), 163 Antony and Cleopatra (Shakespeare), 174, 175, 176, 178 Apess, William Christianity, 133, 134, 143, 147, 149, 191, 194, 196, 197, 215 Eulogy on King Philip, as Pronounced at the Odeon, in Franklin Street Boston, 8, 134, 148, 149 –51, 156, 197, 250n48 Experiences of Five Christian Indians of the Pequot Tribe, The, 147 Indian Nullification of the Unconstitutional Laws of Massachusetts Relative to the Marshpee Tribe, or The Pretended Riot Explained, 8, 180, 181, 191–98, 204 “Indian’s Looking-Glass for the White Man, An,” 8, 147, 148, 197, 250n46 multiracial deliberation, 9, 10, 125, 134, 148 –51, 181 native rights activism, 134, 136, 147– 49, 191–97, 250n48 prejudice and, 8, 133, 136, 146 – 49, 197, 198 Walker and, 147, 250n46 Webster and, 147, 250n46 Appeal, in Four Articles; together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in particular, and very expressly, to those of The United States of America (Walker), 134, 137– 42, 149, 162

262

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Appeal in Favor of Americans Called Africans, An (Child), 8, 130, 161– 64 Appiah, Kwame Anthony Cosmopolitanism, 13, 224n1 Ethics of Identity, The, 13, 224n1 Arendt, Hannah Human Condition, The, 34 On Revolution, 34 Aristotle Cicero and, 17 deliberation and, 4, 14 –16, 31 government, 17, 20, 33, 224n6 On Rhetoric, 15, 16 Politics, The, 15 Art of Speaking, The (Burgh), 81 Athens, 4, 13, 47, 80 Attaquin, Ebenezer, 193, 194 Attaquin, Ezra, 191 Audacity of Hope, The (Obama), 3, 213, 215, 217 Aupaumut, Hendrick, 134, 135 Austin, Gilbert Chironomia, 85 Autobiography (Beecher), 94 Autobiography (Franklin), 79, 118 Bailyn, Bernard, 34 Barber, Jonathan, 85 Barnstable Patriot, 195, 197 Beecher, Henry Ward, 89 Beecher, Lyman, 89, 90 –96, 117, 135, 218 Autobiography, 94 Benét, Stephen Vincent “Devil and Daniel Webster, The,” 212, 258n4 Bentham, Jeremy, 55 Bentley, Russell, 37, 38 Benton, Thomas Hart, 28 Berlin, Isaiah, 217 Bessette, Joseph M., 11 Mild Voice of Reason, The, 3 Bible, 17–20, 72 deliberation and, 86 –96 Bickel, Alexander, 217 Bingham, Caleb Columbian Orator, 83 black liberation theology, 214 –16 Black Religion and Black Radicalism (Wilmore), 214 Blair, Hugh Rhetoric, 92 Blow the Trumpet in Zion! (Carruthers, Haynes, and Wright, eds.), 259n11 Bohman, James, 11, 181 Democracy Across Borders, 36

Bolívar, Simón Angostura address, 42, 43, 46 – 49 Congress of Panama and, 57, 63 – 65 Lafayette and, 52, 57, 58 Napoleon and, 58 – 60, 64, 65 Webster and, 52 Bolivia, 65 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 49, 58 – 60, 64, 65, 123 Bonnycastle, R. H., 62 “Book of Chronicles, West of Tennessee and East of the Mississippi Rivers” (Huntsman), 117, 118, 245n41, 245n42 Boston, 6, 8, 67, 89, 133, 142, 143 Boudinot, Elias, 127, 250n43 Boyer, Jean Pierre, 42, 55 Bravo, The (Cooper), 167, 171–74 Bread and Cheese Club, 167 British Education (Sheridan), 80 – 82 Brogan, Hugh, 7 Brown, Charles Brockden Edgar Huntly, 78 Wieland; or The Transformation, 78, 158 Brown-Douglass, Kelly Delaine, 215 Bryant, William Cullen, 210, 211, 212 Bunker Hill Monument address (Webster), 5, 41, 52 –55, 57, 62, 100, 102, 219 Burgh, James Art of Speaking, The, 81 Burke, Edmund, 86, 99, 102 Bushman, Richard, 53 Cairo University, 219 Calhoun, John, 7, 210 Calvinism, 88, 90, 93, 239n40 Capra, Frank Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, 212 Cass, Lewis, 132 Castiglia, Christopher, 10 Castronovo, Russ, 10 Cato, A Tragedy (Addison), 1, 2, 221n1 Cato Major; or His Discourse of Old Age, 78 (Cicero), 78 Cato’s Letters (Trenchard and Gordon), 2 Champion, James Doctrines and Discipline of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, The, 135 Channing, Edward Tyrrel, 23 Channing, William Ellery, 89, 90, 91, 96, 154 Chávez, Hugo, 43, 231n8 Cherokee Phoenix, The, 117, 127 Cherokees Crockett and, 117 property, 199 removal, 126, 197

index republican development, 6, 126, 132, 246n5 Webster and, 106 Chevalier, Michel, 36, 104 Lettres sur l’Amérique du Nord, 27–29 Chickasaws, 117 Child, David, 8 Child, Lydia Maria abolitionism, 7, 160 – 64, 252n10 anti-removal activism, 161 Anti-Slavery Catechism, 163 Appeal in Favor of Americans Called Africans, An, 8, 130, 161– 64 Christianity, 154, 155 deliberation, 8, 9, 152, 162, 164, 179 Frugal Housewife, The, 201 Hobomok, 8, 152, 153 –55, 160, 166 influence, 252n10 Lafayette and, 161 Mother’s Book, The, 202 North American Review and, 160 – 63, 167, 252n12 Philothea, 8, 158, 164 – 66, 179, 252n15 property, 199, 201, 202, 209 Rebels, The, 155 – 60, 166, 199 republicanism, 152, 160, 162, 165, 166, 179 Walker and, 162, 163 Webster and, 7, 8, 147 Chironomia (Austin), 85 Chomsky, Noam Manufacturing Consent, 32 Christianity, 14, 15, 18 –20, 54 African Americans and, 133 –35, 140 – 42, 214 –16 Apess and, 133, 134, 143, 147, 149, 191, 194, 196, 197, 215 Child and, 154, 155 democracy and, 87–96, 133, 134, 143 – 46 disestablishment, 44, 72, 92, 196 missionaries, 105 Native Americans and, 87, 127, 132 –34, 147, 149 North American Review, The, and, 88 republicanism and, 45, 46, 87–96, 133, 134, 143 – 46 Stewart and, 133, 214 –16 Walker and, 133, 214 –16 Christian Register, The, 89 Cicero Cato Major, or His Discourse of Old Age, 78 deliberation and, 15, 16 De officiis, 16, 74 De oratore, 16 De re publica, 16, 17, 71, 72 De senectute, 78

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education and, 82 North American Review and, 73 –78, 120, 148 rediscovery, 70 –73 republicanism and, 73 –78 sociability, 120 Tusculan Disputations, 78 Cities of the Dead (Roach), 180 City of God (Augustine), 72 Civilitas, 105 Civil War, United States, 11 Clarke, Matthew St. Clair Life and Adventures of Colonel David Crockett of West Tennessee, 117 Clarkson, Thomas, 55 Clay, Henry, 4, 57, 97, 98, 142, 210 Cleveland, C. D. National Orator, The, 85 Coker, Daniel Doctrines and Discipline of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, The, 135 Colden, Cadwallader History of the Five Indian Nations, 126 Colombia, 59, 61, 64, 65, 130 Columbian Orator (Bingham), 83 Commodity and Property (Alexander), 199 Commonwealth of Oceana, The (Harrington), 20, 91 Comparative Rhetoric (Kennedy), 224n4, 251n52, 255n11 Compromise of 1850, 7, 59, 101, 112, 211–13, 243n26 Cone, James H., 214 Risks of Faith, 258n7 Congress, 21, 22 debate, quality 23 –29 debate, reports of, 22 –25, 27, 28, 115 Congressional Globe, 22 Congress of Panama, 52, 57, 63 – 65, 102, 107, 252n12 Connolly, Joy, 17 State of Speech, The, 224n8 Constitution, United States commerce clause, 200 deliberative nature, 2, 3, 20, 31, 185 Franklin and, 79 slavery, 105, 130, 139, 216, 217, 223n15, 243n26 sources, 91, 221n4, 246n3 states’ power under, 44, 66, 108, 110, 111 success, 41, 42, 68, 110 Webster and, 213, 214, 217 Constitutional monarchy, 41, 43, 47, 49, 50, 62 – 64, 68

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Constitution of Many Minds, A (Sunstein), 217 constitutions Bolivia, 58, 64, 65 Cherokee, 127, 139 Colombia, 61– 64 France, 49, 50, 139 Great Britain, 47, 48, 64 Haiti, 130, 139 Mashpee, 193 –96, 198 Massachusetts, 44, 104, 196 Peru, 49, 57 Rome, 77 United States. See Constitution, United States Venezuela, 42, 47– 49, 64 Cooke, Increase American Orator, 83, 84 Sequel to the American Orator, 84 Coombs, Isaac, 191 Cooper, James Fenimore, 9, 10, 167–79, 209 –12, 253n26 American Democrat, The, 9, 179, 206 Bravo, The, 167, 171–74 Congress and, 24 Gleanings in Europe, 179 Headsman, The, 178 Heidenmauer, or The Benedictines, The (Cooper), 178, 205, 206 Jackson and, 182 Last of the Mohicans, The, 170, 180 –91 Leatherstocking Tales, 181 Letter to General Lafayette, 178 Letter to His Countrymen, A, 178 Notions of the Americans, 9, 24, 178, 206 Pioneers, The, 167– 69, 204, 205 Prairie, The, 167, 169 –71, 190, 253n23 property, 204 – 6 reputation, 212 Spy, The, 60 Wept of Wish-ton-Wish, The, 187 Cornish, Samuel, 137, 138 Cosmopolitanism (Appiah), 13, 224n1 Course of Lectures in Elocution, A (Sheridan), 81 Creation of the American Republic, 1776 –1787, The (Wood), 228n43 Creeks, 126 Crockett, David, 112 –23, 243n27, 244n32 Franklin and, 118, 245n42 humor, 9, 112 –14, 120, 121, 123 –25 Indian Removal Act, 113, 115, 117, 133 Life of Martin Van Buren, The, 122, 123, 246n51 Narrative of the Life of David Crockett of the

State of Tennessee, A, 8, 9, 113, 118, 120, 121, 246n48 property, 202 – 4, 209 sociability, 119 –21, 124, 169 Vacant Land Bill, 115, 116, 118, 204, 244n33 Webster and, 8, 9, 112 –15, 120, 245n41 Cuffee, Paul, 129 Cushing, Caleb, 60, 61, 64, 65 Dartmouth College case, 105, 200, 242n17 Defence of the Constitutions of Government of the United States of America, A (Adams), 44 Delaney, Martin, 129 Delawares, 185 deliberation ancient world, 14 –19 Bible, 86 –96 definition, 13, 14 democratic value, 2, 3, ethics and, 16, 17 Native Americans, 14, 86, 87, 126, 170, 171, 184, 185, 192 –95 North American Review, 7, 23, 26 Deliberation Day (Ackerman and Fishkin), 229n47 Deliberative Democracy Handbook (Gastil and Levine, eds.), 36 deliberative democracy theory, 4, 5, 14, 34 – 40 deliberative reading, 180 democracy definition, 13 religion and, 87–96 Democracy (Adams), 11 Democracy across Borders (Bohman), 36 Democracy and Disagreement (Gutmann and Thompson), 36, 37 Democracy in America (Tocqueville), 6, 9, 25, 125, 179, 223n18, 227n29 Democratic Party, 8, 109, 113, 115, 116, 122, 124, 182 Democratic-Republican Party, 4 Democratic Vistas (Whitman), 11, 39 De officiis (Cicero), 16, 74 De oratore (Cicero), 16 De re publica (Cicero), 16, 17, 71, 72 De senectute (Cicero), 78 Development as Freedom (Sen), 209 “Devil and Daniel Webster, The” (Benét), 212, 258n4 Dewey, John, 220, 228n37 Public and Its Problems, The, 5, 11, 32 –34

index Doctrines and Discipline of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, The (Allen, Champion, Coker), 135 Domestic Manners of the Americans (Trollope), 24, 25 Dorfman, Joseph Economic Mind in American Civilization, 1606 –1865, The, 198, 199 Douglas, Stephen, 217 Douglass, Frederick, 156, 216, 220, 259n12 Down, Up, and Over (Hopkins), 215 Downing, Major Jack, 113, 114, 119 Economic Mind in American Civilization, 1606 –1865, The (Dorfman), 198, 199 Edgar Huntly (Brown), 78 Edinburgh Review, 22 education, 33, 37, 38, 76 eloquence, 80 – 86 republicanism and, 46, 49, 51, 53, 76 rhetorical, 101 Edwards, Jonathan, 93 Eliot, John, 134, 191 eloquence American, 23 –25, 27, 79, 88, 98 biblical, 18 Child and, 155, 156, 160 classical, 15, 17, 23, 72 –75 Crockett and, 115, 124 education in, 80 – 86 Native American, 14, 86, 87, 126, 170, 171, 184 Shakespearean, 80 – 86 value, 23, 80 – 82 Webster and, 100 –102, 108, 112, 211, 213 Elshtain, Jean Bethke, 20 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 58, 89, 100 –102, 211 Enfield, William Speaker, The, 81, 82 England. See Great Britain equality, 4 Erwin, James, 115 Essays on the Present Crisis in the Condition of the American Indians (Evarts), 133 Ethics of Identity, The (Appiah), 13 Eulogy on King Philip, as Pronounced at the Odeon, in Franklin Street Boston (Apess), 8, 134, 148, 149 –51, 156, 197, 250n48 Evarts, Jeremiah, 132 Essays on the Present Crisis in the Condition of the American Indians, 133 Speeches on the Passage of the Bill for the Removal of the Indians, 117

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Everett, Alexander Hill, 7, 60, 66 – 68, 73, 75 –78, 120, 197, 234n42, 252n12 Everett, Edward, 4, 7, 60, 68, 69, 86 Native Americans and, 132, 197 oratory and, 98, 99, 116, 241n3 Webster and, 100 –102 Exodus, Book of, 18 Experiences of Five Christian Indians of the Pequot Tribe, The (Apess), 147 Federalist Papers, The, 2, 3, 31 “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses” (Twain), 182 Ferguson, Robert Trial in American Life, The, 167, 168 fiction, 152 Finney, Charles Grandison, 90, 94 –96, 141, 240n51 Lectures on Revivals of Religion, 94, 95 Fish, Phineas, 134, 193, 194, 196 Fishkin, James S., 4, 5, 11 Deliberation Day, 229n47 When the People Speak, 222n11, 229n47 forum movement, 28, 34 Fowle, William New Speaker, or Exercises in Rhetoric, The, 85, 86 Fox, Charles James, 98 France, 41, 49 –51, 67, 68 Chamber of Deputies, 43, 50 constitution, 49, 50, 139 debate in, 24, 25, 27 property laws, 45 republicanism in, 43, 61, 67– 69, 98, 178 Republics, 41, 49 Revolution, 54 Franklin, Benjamin, 78, 160, 201, 236n11 Autobiography, 79, 118 Crockett and, 118, 245n42 deliberation and biblical tradition, 86, 87 Franklin, Wayne James Fenimore Cooper, 167, 184, 253n18, 253n23 Fraser, Nancy, 6 Freedom’s Journal, 138 Frugal Housewife, The (Child), 201 Fugitive Slave Law, 7, 136, 211 Garnet, Henry Highland, 156 Garrison, William Lloyd, 8, 128, 216 Thoughts on African Colonization, 129 Gaul, Theresa Strouth, 255n16

266

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Gettysburg Address, 217, 218 Gibbons v. Ogden, 200 Gleanings in Europe (Cooper), 179 Goodin, Robert E., 38 Gordon, Thomas Cato’s Letters, 2 Grammatical Institutes (Webster), 84 Great Britain Bolívar and, 47, 48 debate in, 24 education, 80 – 82 republicanism, 41, 45 Great Society, 201 Greece ancient, 14, 41, 106, 138 independence movement, 53, 54, 66, 68, 106, 143, 162 Green, Duff, 116 Greenstone, J. David, 217 Green v. Biddle, 204, 205 Gurley, Ralph Randolph Life of Jehudi Ashmun, Late Colonial Agent in Liberia, 131 Gutmann, Amy, 11, 35, 218 Democracy and Disagreement, 36, 37 Why Deliberative Democracy?, 37 Habermas, Jürgen, 5, 17, 222n11 Haiti, 42 Haitian Emigration Society, 135 Hale, Nathan, 61, 62 Hallet, Benjamin, 191 Hamilton, Alexander, 31 Harrington, James, 15, 45, 117, 199 Commonwealth of Oceana, The, 20, 91 Harvard, 119 Divinity School, 89, 239n40 Mashpee and, 134, 191, 193, 194, 196 Hayne, Robert, 7, 161 Haynes, Lemuel, 134, 135 Hawley, Gideon, 195 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 114 Headsman, The (Cooper), 178 Heckewelder, John Account of the History, Manners, and Customs of the Indian Nations, Who Once Inhabited Pennsylvania and the Neighboring States, An, 185 Heidenmauer, or The Benedictines, The (Cooper), 178, 205, 206 Henry, Patrick, 156 Herman, Edward Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media, 32

Hints on Extemporaneous Preaching (Ware), 88 History of the Five Indian Nations (Colden), 126 Hobomok (Child), 8, 152, 153 –55, 160, 166 Holy Alliance, 50, 51, 52 Homestead Act, 203 Hopkins, Dwight N. Down, Up, and Over, 215 Horwitz, Morton Transformation of American Law, 1780 –1860, The, 199, 256n24 House of Representatives, United States, 21, 106 debate in, 21–25, 115 Speaker, 97 Human Condition, The (Arendt), 34 Humboldt, Baron von, 62 humor, 38 Crockett and, 9, 112 –14, 120, 121, 123 –25 Hunt, Lynn, 38 Huntsman, Adam “Book of Chronicles, West of Tennessee and East of the Mississippi Rivers,” 117, 118, 245n41, 245n42 Idea of Justice, The (Sen), 14 Identity and Violence (Sen), 13 Inclusion and Democracy (Young), 35, 36 Indian Nullification of the Unconstitutional Laws of Massachusetts Relative to the Marshpee Tribe, or The Pretended Riot Explained (Apess), 8, 180, 181, 191–98, 204 Indian Removal Act, 117, 127 Crockett and, 113, 115, 117, 133 “Indian’s Looking-Glass for the White Man, An” (Apess), 8, 147, 148, 197, 250n46 Ingersoll, Charles Jared, 26, 27 Iroquois, 127, 184 Iroquois League, 126 Islam, 54, 218, 219, 231n7, 260n16 Iturbide, Augustín, 62 Jackson, Andrew, 4, 66, 256n27 Cooper and, 182 criticism of, 92, 119, 120, 245n43 executive power and, 97 Indian removal, 126, 127, 197 partisanship, 113, 115, 116 James Fenimore Cooper (Franklin), 167, 184, 253n18, 253n23 Jefferson, Thomas deliberation and, 15, 21 Manual of Parliamentary Practice, 21, 226n18

index Notes on the State of Virginia, 126, 246n4 Webster and, 107, 108 Jenkins, John, 218 jeremiad, 8, 10, 29, 39, 87, 125, 136, 137, 145 – 47, 151, 225, 248, 250 Jeremiah, Book of, 18, 19 Johnson and Graham’s Lessee v. M’Intosh, 204 Kennedy, George, 14 Comparative Rhetoric, 224n4, 251n52, 255n11 Kennedy, John F., 219, 220, 258n5 Profiles in Courage, 212, 213 Keyes, Alan, 218 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 218 –20 King Philip, 148 –51 Kramer, Lloyd, 55 Lafayette in Two Worlds, 227n24, 233n29 Lafayette, Gilbert du Motier de American tour, 52, 56, 68, 69, 155, 233n29 Bolívar and, 52, 57, 58 Cooper and, 24, 176 correspondence, 55, 57, 58 legislative speeches, 42, 43, 49 –52 Lafayette in Two Worlds (Kramer), 227n24, 233n29 Last of the Mohicans, The (Cooper), 170, 180 –91 Latour, Bruno Making Things Public, 14 Lawrence, D. H. Studies in Classic American Literature, 182 Leatherstocking Tales (Cooper), 181 Leaves of Grass (Whitman), 29 Lectures on Revivals of Religion (Finney), 94, 95 Lectures on Rhetoric and Oratory (Adams), 74 Lee, Jarena, 144 Life and Religious Experience of Jarena Lee, a Coloured Lady, Giving an Account of Her Call to Preach the Gospel, The, 250n41 Lessons in Elocution (Scott), 82, 83 Letter to General Lafayette (Cooper), 178 Letter to His Countrymen, A (Cooper), 178 Lettres sur L’Amérique du Nord (Chevalier), 27–29 Levinas, Emmanuel, 38 Lewis, R. W. B. American Adam, The, 181 Liberator, The, 129, 163, 195 Liberia, 131, 137 Life and Adventures of Colonel David Crockett of West Tennessee (Clarke), 117 Life and Religious Experience of Jarena Lee, a Coloured Lady, Giving an Account of Her

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Call to Preach the Gospel, The (Lee), 250n41 Life of Jehudi Ashmun, Late Colonial Agent in Liberia (Gurley), 131 Life of Martin Van Buren, The (Crockett), 122, 123, 246n51 Lima, 61, 64 Lincoln, Abraham, 217, 218, 220 Lincoln, Levi, 155, 195 Lion of the West (Paulding), 117, 244n39 Lippmann, Walter, 31–34, 228n37 Phantom Public, The, 31, 32 Public Opinion, 31, 32 Living Orators in America (Magoon), 102 Locke, John, 118, 199, 203 Logan, James, 78 Cato Major; or His Discourse of Old Age, 78, 236n11 London, 61, 81, 99 Lowell, James Russell, 211 Lunch, the, 167 Luther, Martin, 214 Macbeth (Shakespeare), 111 Machiavellian Moment, The (Pocock), 228n43 Madison, James, 4 Constitution and, 2, 3, 185, 221n4, 249n33 deliberation and, 4, 15, 92 Federalist Papers and, 2, 3, 185, 221n4 Magoon, E. L. Living Orators in America, 102 Mai, Angelo, 71, 72 Making Things Public (Latour and Weibel, eds.), 14 Manifest Destiny, 115 Mann, Horace, 211 Manual of Parliamentary Practice ( Jefferson), 21 Manufacturing Consent (Chomsky and Herman), 32 Marathon, 44 Marshall, John, 200 Marston, Judge, 196 Martineau, Harriet, 111, 112 Mashpee, 134 Harvard and, 134, 191, 193, 194, 196 property, 199, 204 Revolt, 191–98 McCulloch v. Maryland, 200 media, mass, 31–34 Mellen, Grenville, 161 Méndez, Luis López Observaciones sobres las Leyes de Indias, i sobre la Independencia de América, 62 Merchant of Venice, The, 175

268

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Mexican-American War, 211 Mexico, 61, 66 Mild Voice of Reason, The (Bessette), 3 Mill, John Stuart, 5, 10, 11, 223n18 On Liberty, 30 Mill on Democracy (Urbinati), 223n18 monarchy, constitutional, 41, 43, 47, 49, 50, 62 – 64, 68 Monroe, James, 56 Monroe Doctrine, 56, 57 Montesquieu, Baron de, 47, 231n5 Spirit of the Laws, The, 42, 231 Mother’s Book, The (Child), 202 Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (Capra), 212 Mystery of Capital, The (Soto), 203 Napoleon. See Bonaparte, Napoleon narrative, 38, 39 Narrative of the Life of David Crockett of the State of Tennessee, A (Crockett), 8, 9, 113, 118, 120, 121, 169 National Intelligencer, 22, 98, 116 National Orator, The (Cleveland), 85 Native Americans, 8. See also individual tribes Christianity and, 87, 127, 132 –34, 147, 149 citizenship, 126 deliberation, 14, 86, 87, 126, 170, 171, 184, 192 –95, 246n4 nationalist movements, 214 removal, 25, 117, 131–33, 182, 197 Nelson, Dana D., 10 Neuhaus, Richard John, 20, 225n13 New Deal, 201 New Epilogue to Cato, Spoken at a Late Performance of That Tragedy, A (Sewell), 2 New Speaker, or Exercises in Rhetoric, The (Fowle), 85, 86 North American Review, The, 22 Child and, 160 – 63, 167, 252n12 Christianity and, 88 Cicero and, 73 –78, 120, 148 deliberation and, 7, 23, 26 Europe and, 10, 60, 66 – 69 republicanism and, 10, 60 – 69 Spanish America and, 10, 61– 66 tone, 129 Notes on the State of Virginia ( Jefferson), 126 Notions of the Americans (Cooper), 9, 24, 176 Novak, William J., 199 People’s Welfare, The, 256n24 nullification, 109 –11 Nussbaum, Martha C., 38 Poetic Justice, 229n51

Women and Human Development, 257n30, 260n18 Obama, Barack, 216, 218 –20, 259n10, 260n16 Audacity of Hope, The, 3, 213, 215, 217 Observaciones sobres las Leyes de Indias, i sobre la Independencia de América (Méndez), 62, 63 Occom, Samson, 134, 135, 185 Oneidas, 184 On Revolution (Arendt), 34 On Rhetoric (Aristotle), 15, 16 opposition, 39, 40 Orator’s Guide; or Rules for Speaking and Composing; from the best Authorities, The (Welles), 84, 85 Otis, James, 156, 169 Ottoman Empire, 54, 106 Paez, José Antonio, 61 palaver, 14, 130 Panic of 1837, 9 Paris, 61, 64, 68 Parker, Edward G., 102 Parker, Theodore, 211 Parliament, 14, 15, 21, 25, 98, 99 Paulding, James Kirk Lion of the West, 117, 244n39 People’s Welfare (Novak), 256n24 Pequots, 147 Peters, John Durham, 19 Speaking into the Air, 225n11 Pettit, Philip, 39 Republicanism, 34, 35 Phantom Public, The (Lippmann), 31, 32 Philothea (Child), 8, 158, 164 – 66, 179, 252n15 Phinney, Sylvannus, 197 Pioneers, The (Cooper), 167– 69, 204, 205 Pitt, William, 98 Plymouth oration (Webster), 42 – 46, 60, 61, 102, 104, 197 Pocock, J. G. A., 34 Machiavellian Moment, The, 228n43 Virtue, Commerce, and History, 223n12 Poetic Justice (Nussbaum), 229n51 Politics, The (Aristotle), 15 Polk, James K., 115, 116, 211 Postman, Neil Amusing Ourselves to Death, 32 Prairie, The (Cooper), 167, 169 –71, 190, 253n23 Productions of Mrs. Maria W. Stewart (Stewart), 146 Profiles in Courage (Kennedy), 212, 213

index property, 198 –209 protest, 39 Protestantism and republicanism, 30, 87–96, 133, 215 Public and Its Problems, The (Dewey), 5, 11, 32 –34 Public Opinion (Lippmann), 31, 32 Quarterly Review, 22 Quincy, Josiah, 7 racial prejudice, 6, 8, 121, 125, 129, 134 –36, 141, 147, 148, 197, 246n4 Randolph, John, 142 Rebels, The (Child), 155 – 60, 166, 202 reciprocity, 37 Red Jacket (Sagoyewatha), 117, 128 Reed, William Bradford, 66 Register of Debates, 22, 115, 117 republicanism Adams and, 44 Atlantic, 41– 43 Cherokees, 126, 132, 246n5 Child and, 152, 160, 162, 165, 166, 179 Christianity and, 45, 46, 87–96, 133, 134, 143 – 46 Cicero and, 73 –78 deliberation and, 34, 35 education and, 46, 49, 51, 53, 76 fiction and, 152 France, 43, 61, 67– 69, 98, 178 New England, 45, 46 North American Review and, 10, 60 – 69 Protestantism and, 87–96 rise of, 5,6 Rome, 41, 45, 46, 99, 137, 210 Shakespeare and, 80, 82, 231n30, 236n14 Spanish America, 7, 10, 42, 47, 48, 53, 55, 58, 60, 61, 66, 126, 137 Venezuela, 42, 43, 47–51, 64 women and, 142, 251n5 Republicanism (Pettit), 34, 35 rhetoric early American, 23, 24 European, 25 Native American, 14, 86, 87 Rhetoric (Blair), 92 Rise of American Democracy, The (Wilentz), 4 Risks of Faith (Cone), 258n7 Rivadavia, Bernardino, 55 Roach, Joseph Cities of the Dead, 180 Rome, 41, 45, 46, 80, 99, 137, 138, 174, 210

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Rosanvallon, Pierre, 5, 230n2, 255n13 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 35 Rules for Conducting Business in the Senate, 21 Russworm, John B., 137, 138 Sagoyewatha (Red Jacket), 117, 128 Sandel, Michael, 11 Scott, William Lessons in Elocution, 82, 83 Second Great Awakening, 87, 88 Sen, Amartya, 208 Development as Freedom, 209 Idea of Justice, The, 14 Identity and Violence, 13 Senate, United States debate in, 20 –25, 32, 110 purpose, 2, 3, 28 Webster in, 108, 109, 111, 210, 212 Senecas, 128 Sequel to the American Orator (Cooke), 84 Sewall, Jonathan New Epilogue to Cato, Spoken at a Late Performance of That Tragedy, A, 11 Shakespeare, William Antony and Cleopatra, 174, 175, 176, 178 eloquence and influence, 72, 80 – 86, 237n19, 237n20, 237n22 Macbeth, 111 Merchant of Venice, The, 175 republicanism, 80, 82, 213n30, 236n14 Shays’s Rebellion, 3 Sheridan, Thomas British Education, 80 – 82 Course of Lectures in Elocution, A, 81 Sketches and Eccentricities of Colonel David Crockett (Clarke), 117 slavery abolition, 8, 30, 51, 104, 105, 130, 131, 138, 139, 199, 207, 208 congressional debate, 30 Webster and, 7, 104, 112, 211–14, 243n26 Smith, Seba, 113, 114, 119 sociability, 120, 148 Crockett and, 119 –21, 124, 169 Soto, Hernando de Mystery of Capital, The, 203 Spain, 42, 48, 57, 61, 63, 67, 68, 138 Spanish America, 42, 47, 48, 53, 55, 58, 60, 126, 137 North American Review and, 10, 61– 66 Spanish Civil War, 56 Sparks, Jared, 7, 24, 60, 62 – 64, 130, 131 Speaker, The (Enfield), 81, 82

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Speaking into the Air (Peters), 225n11 Speeches on the Passage of the Bill for the Removal of the Indians (Evarts), 117 Spirit of the Laws, The (Montesquieu), 42, 231n5 Spy, The (Cooper), 60 State of Speech, The (Connolly), 224n8 St. Augustine, 15, 18 City of God, 72 Stewart, Maria, 223n16, 249n38 Christianity, 133, 250n40 deliberation, 125 Productions of Mrs. Maria W. Stewart, 146 property, 199, 206 –9 slavery, 8, 136 – 46, 206, 207 speeches, 134, 145, 146, 207, 208 tone, 136, 145 Walker and, 134, 206, 207 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 1, 89 Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 89 St. Paul, 15, 18 St. Peter, 19 Studies in Classic American Literature (Lawrence), 182 suffrage, 4 – 6, 44, 45 Sumner, Charles, 110 Sunstein, Cass, 11, 35, 36, 222n6 Constitution of Many Minds, A, 217 surrogation, 180, 192, 196, 198 Texas, secession from Mexico, 123 Thatcher, Benjamin Bussey, 130, 131 theology black liberation, 214 –16 womanist, 215 Thompson, Dennis, 11, 35, 218 Democracy and Disagreement, 36, 37 Why Deliberative Democracy?, 37 Thoreau, Henry David, 100, 184, 213, 214 Thoughts on African Colonization (Garrison), 129 Ticknor, George, 60, 68 Tinder, Glenn, 20 Tocqueville, Alexis de Congress, on, 25 deliberation and, 26 Democracy in America, 6, 9, 25, 125, 179, 223n18, 227n29 North American Review and, 7, 227n31 race and, 125 town hall meetings, 5, 7, 31, 36, 45 Trail of Tears (1838), 127 Transcendental Club, 252n17

Transformation of American Law, 1780 –1860, The (Horwitz), 199, 256n24 Treaty of Ghent, 69 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, 211 Treaty of New Echota, 127 Trenchard, John Cato’s Letters, 2 Trial in American Life, The (Ferguson), 167, 168 Trollope, Frances, 104, 244n39 Domestic Manners of the Americans, 24, 25 Tudor, William, 74 Tusculan Disputations (Cicero), 78 Twain, Mark “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses,” 182 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), 89 Unitarian and Universalist churches, 89, 239n40 University of Notre Dame, 218, 219 Urbinati, Nadia, 30 Mill on Democracy, 223n18 use value, 201–3 Vacant Land Bill, 115, 116, 118, 204, 244n33 Venezuela Bolívar and, 51, 64 Constitution of 1811, 42, 47– 49, 64 independence movement, 47– 49 Views of Society and Manners in America (Wright), 24, 25, 227n24 Villemain, Abel-Francois, 73 Virtue, Commerce, and History (Pocock), 223n12 Walker, David Apess and, 147, 250n46 Appeal, in Four Articles; together with a Preamble, to the Coloured Citizens of the World, but in particular, and very expressly, to those of The United States of America, 134, 137– 42, 149, 162 Child and, 147 Christianity, 133, 214 –16 influence, 214, 248n29, 259n11 property, 199, 206, 207, 209 rhetoric, 125, 147, 148, 163, 249n31 slavery, 1, 8, 9, 131, 134, 206, 207 Stewart and, 134, 206, 207 tone, 136 Walker, John Academic Speaker, 82

index Ware, Henry Hints on Extemporaneous Preaching, 88 Warner, Michael, 6 Warrior, Robert, 215 Washburn, Emory, 131, 162 Washington, George, 1, 2, 221n1 Waterloo, 69 Way We Argue Now, The (Anderson), 10, 223n17 Webster, Daniel Apess and, 147, 250n46 Bolívar and, 52 Bunker Hill Monument address, 5, 41, 52 –55, 57, 62, 100, 102, 219 Cherokee and, 106 Child and, 7, 8, 147 Cooper memorial, 210, 211 Crockett and, 8, 9, 112 –15, 120, 245n41 Dartmouth College case, 105, 200, 242n17 deliberation and, 6, 7, 9, 103 –5 Everett and, 100 –102 Gibbons v. Ogden, 200 government, importance of, 5 Greek independence, 106 influence, 85, 86 Plymouth oration, 42 – 46, 60, 61, 102, 197 property, 199 –201, 209 race, 106, 197 reputation, 212 Second Reply to Hayne, 59, 101, 102, 108, 109 –11, 181, 217, 242n22 Senate in, 108, 109, 111, 210, 212 slavery, 7, 104, 112, 211–14, 243n26 on South America, 57 style, 101– 4, 241n10 Webster, Noah, 83 American Lessons in Speaking and Reading, 79 Grammatical Institutes, 84 Weibel, Peter Making Things Public, 14

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Welles, E. G. Orator’s Guide; or Rules for Speaking and Composing; from the best Authorities, The, 84, 85 Wells, William, 73 Wept of Wish-ton-Wish, The (Cooper), 187 Westminster Catechism, 163 When the People Speak (Fishkin), 222n11, 229n47 Whig party, 4, 8, 23, 97, 114, 115, 199 Whipple, Edwin P., 102 Whitefield, George, 156 Whitman, Walt, 29 –31, 100, 220, 246n2 Democratic Vistas, 11, 30 Leaves of Grass, 29 Whittier, John Greenleaf, 211 Why Deliberative Democracy? (Gutmann and Thompson), 37 Wieland; or The Transformation (Brown), 78, 158 Wilentz, Sean Rise of American Democracy, The, 4 Wills, Garry, 218 Wilmore, Gayraud S. Black Religion and Black Radicalism, 214 Wirt, William, 197 women domesticity, 201 republicanism and, 142, 251n5 Women and Human Development (Nussbaum), 257n30, 260n18 Wood, Gordon S., 34 Creation of the American Republic, 1776 –1787, The, 228n43 Wright, Frances Views of Society and Manners in America, 24, 25, 227n24 Wright, Jeremiah, 215, 216 Blow the Trumpet in Zion!, 259n11 Young, Iris Marion, 5, 11, 38, 39 Inclusion and Democracy, 35, 36